> In 1997, Ken Olson declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.’
a) Ken Olsen, b) 1977.
The internet is already over
41–50 of 74 posts
Re: The internet is already over
#42> $150 billion, mostly from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which it’s poured into Uber and DoorDash and WeWork and Klarna and Slack. It provides the money that effectively subsidises your autistic digital life.
While I wasn't interested in following the writer down his garden path, this stood out and made me wonder whether over a large enough portfolio, later stage investments that increase the velocity of money can be recouped by investing in the emergent earlier stages of the growth they create. It's a bit of an inflationary and trickle-bubble argument, but from a tech venture perspective, even if Uber and WeWork were subsidized, they changed how a generation moved and worked and created knock on growth.
Softbank's moneybomb investments created a lot of wealth for people who worked for them, but also launched hundreds if not thousands of more companies. The loss of tens of millions here or there also goes on to produce new seed and A round opportunities within a 5-7 year horizon. It suggests that large later stage rounds from giant funds should index on whether the company is increasing the velocity of money enough that it is likely to yield a certain number of new companies, and its talent is risk taking enough to join more startups, and then find a way to get exposure and participation in those through the earlier stage VCs that focus on them as a hedge. Like a $150m investment in a D round for some tech company whose massive growth is behind it should be hedged with $10m+ of participation in VC funds doing seed and A rounds in that company's market where all their talent is going to leave for now that the $150m company has gone corporate.
Re: The internet is already over
#43It’s as if the author put my thoughts into words, and then put all other thoughts into words, and it resulted in many, many words, without much thought put into it.
Re: The internet is already over
#44The author makes a lot of witty, erudite References – a method that has annoyingly become popular and is often mistaken as "good writing" – but I think he has missed a simple and obvious truth: culture is determined by fashion. Not fashion as in clothing, but fashion as in ideas and things that are trendy for a time then fade away, replaced by the next thing. The next thing is often an indirect reaction to the previo…
> The author makes a lot of witty, erudite References – a method that has annoyingly become popular and is often mistaken as "good writing" – but I think he has missed a simple and obvious truth: culture is determined by fashion. If culture is determined by fashion, and our fashion is that lots of witty, erudite References is considered good writing, then does it not follow that our culture is that lots of witty, eru…
No, because our culture holds that truth is not held by the culture, but by the individual's instinct for rightness. Clothes may be a cultural construct, but no amount of collective lying can cover the emperor's nudity.
Re: The internet is already over
#45As long as clickbait drivel like this is upvoted, and advertising is legal, there will be internet. And after that, when we return to the primordial ooze of AOLs and Prodigys and CompuServes, and even before that to UseNet and BBSes, when there is barely a commercial entity left, but there is still a wire to shove weird binary non-euclydian poetry into, there will be internet. And even after, when illicit shortwave m…
...let there be light.
Re: The internet is already over
#46As long as clickbait drivel like this is upvoted, and advertising is legal, there will be internet. And after that, when we return to the primordial ooze of AOLs and Prodigys and CompuServes, and even before that to UseNet and BBSes, when there is barely a commercial entity left, but there is still a wire to shove weird binary non-euclydian poetry into, there will be internet. And even after, when illicit shortwave m…
Beautiful prose-etry.
I see the internet as an extension of the telephone before it, then before it the telegraph, then before that flags on ships and messenger pigeons with like a color tied to their feet depending on who won the Battle of Actium. Blue meant it was Augustus, pretty efficient for that time.
Re: The internet is already over
#47No post body was provided.
Re: The internet is already over
#48The author makes a lot of witty, erudite References – a method that has annoyingly become popular and is often mistaken as "good writing" – but I think he has missed a simple and obvious truth: culture is determined by fashion. Not fashion as in clothing, but fashion as in ideas and things that are trendy for a time then fade away, replaced by the next thing. The next thing is often an indirect reaction to the previo…
The vast majority of this article might as well be GPT-3 puke. Some interesting bits can be found at "When I say the internet is running dry,", afterwards it's right back to GPT-3 level drivel and I stopped reading. Was this really written by a human?
That's the sad part--like I'm human but get accused of being a mentally ill bot of some kind--the sad part is there's a lot of folks that don't write that much better in most respects than GPT-3. Well and if they read a lot of GPT-3, it reinforces. I for one don't have a problem communicating with machines, they have a message that message might have worth. Just needs a little bit of collateral to look at it in the first place.
Re: The internet is already over
#49As long as clickbait drivel like this is upvoted, and advertising is legal, there will be internet. And after that, when we return to the primordial ooze of AOLs and Prodigys and CompuServes, and even before that to UseNet and BBSes, when there is barely a commercial entity left, but there is still a wire to shove weird binary non-euclydian poetry into, there will be internet. And even after, when illicit shortwave m…
Thank you. Too many commentators equate them being bored or disillusioned with something as meaning that thing is dead. Meanwhile umpteen millions of people carry on as usual. I’ve lost track of how many times newsletters, blogs, whatever have been declared dead. Whereas in reality all of these are still growing strongly in both number and user engagement. It’s lazy mindless valueless trend worshiping masquerading as analysis.