We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

Ultimately this is an era largely of the conglomerate, it doesn’t matter who you are unless you’re one of the big fishes. Media, Advertising, etc. Its no longer small shops that are creating interesting and useful things, at least not at the rate they were. It’s more likely to be an expansion out of a big company into a marketplace trying to sip an audience than it is a disruptor changing any of the game. The disrupters that exist must get and stay large as fast as possible as well.

I’m looking for things that don’t scale. I think we’ve basically poured all societies money into anything that might scale. We’ve found we have run out of those things. And all the problems we have left are things like education, homelessness, lack of meaning, healthcare, etc. All problems so entrenched I’m willing to say at this point they can’t scale, and therefore won’t be solved. Maybe the next technological revolution will be a social dynamic. Who knows.

It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich.

I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting out already had apps. Literally the only thing Uber had going for it was masses of money to undercut the market and advertise to younger millennials - basically their excess money allowed them to get better distribution and cheat the market.

I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.

Adding software got easy because development evolved, and supply exceeded demand. The "Internet of Trash" is my go-to example. Modern engineering got so good, and we're surrounded by so much efficient, durable technology that manufacturers ran out of ways to add value. So they started figuring out how to:

1) add internet connectivity whether it's wanted or not

2) control and break things using software

3) extract profitable data from users

All of these just kick the can down the road toward more solutionism without really innovating in the original engineering domain.

I think sometimes it is also the case of knowingly what to Google for, and being able to pick out the correct answer.

For example, recently I was involved in a cache issue for an android phone. One of the answers on Google was to download some sort of cache cleaning program. Of course, I knew that this was likely to be a security risk, but others would have downloaded it.

People are naturally wary about this thing, so sometimes I don't mind if they'd prefer not to Google and implement a solution themselves.