Some thinking on what I write about on this blog. It isn’t centered around one single theme or topic. Nor it is a dump of all my interests. But there’s an intuitive sense of what is appropriate to write here versus on Twitter, or on my Tumblr, or restrict to 1:1/group conversations.
To articulate this for myself, I looked back at the last ~6 months of posts and attempted to categorise them. After spending some time with the categorisation, it turns out what I’m interested in are five ‘mega-trends’ and five ‘big questions’:
Mega-trends
- The Next Computer: the inevitable move to iPad, iOS, apps and new interaction models
- Wellness when Always-On: the growing awareness of the effects of the onslaught of information and endless entertainment on our mental health, changing norms, responses to it
- Audience as Capital: those who have a large following online are disproportionately more advantaged than those that don’t, and this gap is likely to grow
- The Dark Forest of the Internet: the inexorable polarisation of discourse on the internet along with norms like cancel culture is driving more and more conversation to private networks, changing equations of value capture and creating new cultures (the term is from here)
- Real World Crypto: distributed ledger technology, or ‘cryptocurrency’ is finding real-world use-cases beyond speculative trading and use as payment in ‘dark web’ transactions. There will be consumer use cases such as those being built by Blockstack, there will be other B2B use cases such as in settlements, with the merging of movement of information and movement of money
Big Questions
- Digital Custody: as basically all our personal information moves ‘online’, from our calendar to our health data to our memories, which parties will we entrust it with for the short term, for our lifetimes, and to hand over to our children?
- Discovery and Curation: with an unimaginable abundance of content online, but also increased polarisation, a bias towards sensationalism, how will people create their own model of the world around them?
- Making Money Online: for the last two decades, advertising has been the primary revenue model, leading to a vast data-gathering industry. That is changing with subscriptions, but such costs add up. Micro-payments have always been just over the horizon. Will there exist multiple business models online? Additionally, what room for open source and just plain altruism, which may be the core spirit of the internet?
- Privacy and Anonymity: the increasingly centralised internet and the dominance of ad-supported models have led to a general decline in privacy and the perceived value of anonymity. With increasing awareness of the value of one’s personal information and alternatives to pure ad-based models, what future norms around privacy will evolve?
- Decentralisation and Neutrality: unlike the early days of the internet, just a few large companies have captured most of the attention, information and money on the internet. The imbalance of power between the average person online and these internet giants is immense. Governments and telecoms alike have immense power over what parts of the internet are accessible, to whom, and how well. Will this imbalance get worse or correct itself?
Obviously, there are other megatrends evolving. There are other big questions people are finding answers to. Even just in ‘tech’. But these are the ones that I find interesting, and what ultimately define what you will find on this website.
(Part 2)