There’s something almost endearing about old laptops, laptops that work well even after years of daily use. Laptops that seem clunky and awkward when placed alongside their most recent generation, but serve your needs just as well as the newer ones might.

As I’ve written before on the site, I have a few of these. A 13″ Macbook Air mid 2011 that I am writing this on. A 12″ Macbook Pro mid 2012, the last one before the Retina generation, which I’ve been using for work for the past week. The first Retina machine, the 15″ Macbook Pro mid 2012. And a 13″ Macbook Air early 2014. All but one of these (the 2011 Air) have been bought second-hand or are hand-me-downs.

Because my main work machine (another retina Macbook Pro) is in the office under lockdown, I spent the first four weeks working full-time on my 2018 12.9″ iPad Pro, which was surprisingly productive.

Last week I took these laptops out of storage to charge and verify that they’re still in working condition, as I do about once a quarter. On a lark, I’ve begun to use them for everyday work. They all have replaced batteries, SSDs (I replaced the non-retina Pro’s HDD with one), 8 GB RAM (the 2011 Air has 4), run Mac OS High Sierra (although two of them can be updated to Catalina), and run perfectly well.

These machines appeal to me because they’re such a terrific example of sustainability. Apple may release new laptops and revisions every year but you don’t have to buy them that often. In fact you can go five years, even ten depending on what you use your computer for. The relatively high price you pay up-front translates to many years of trouble-free use. The ‘cost per wear‘ equivalent of Apple’s laptops is extremely low.

So it’s not just ‘old stuff’ that I find interesting, but specifically tools that have held up over time and are still usable today. It means they’re well designed, solidly constructed and are a pleasure to use.

And using well-constructed hand-me-downs has also forced me to become at least somewhat proficient at repair and maintenance, meaning I get to know these things better, which in turn teaches me what about them makes them great in the first place.

Finally, adopting a mindset of being okay using such tools has over time helped me get better at identifying new items that are likely to last long, perpetuating the cycle.

Endnote. I have found the Progress Is Fine blog an enjoyable place to discover enduring vehicles, appliances, furniture and tools from decades ago. As they say, “We like things that remain useful long after the companies and people that made them are gone.”

A screen-recording posted on the CryptoCurrency subreddit shows what appears to be Reedit implementing a blockchain-based points system that is closely related to its existing ‘karma’ rewards system (which is centralised).

While there are clearly some details that need to be thought out – for instance there is a blank section titled ‘tipping and transfers’, there is enough in the video to sketch an outline of how the system works:

Earning points

• Points are earned in the same way karma is. While karma is universal, points are only available in subreddits that support them. It’s unclear if points = karma or are earned differently (the screengrab only mentions ‘through contributions’). Banned users to not earn points. 
• Curiously, according to the section ‘how is this different from karma’, points ‘represent ownership in a community’
• Reddit periodically asks members of a points-enabled subreddit to vote on the accuracy of points earned per member and then asks members to claim those points. Reddit will then deposit points into members’ wallets. It’s unclear how members will be able to independently verify accuracy of earned points – probably by an audit of the smart contract that describes how points are awarded. 
• Points that are not claimed ‘expire’, by which I take to mean they are never distributed.
• The document in the screengrab also states that “[moderators] get a 10% share for their administrative contributions to the community, Reddit gets 20% of points, and another 20% will be reserved for the broader Reddit community”. This sounds like a 50% tax. Does this mean each member eventually only gets half of the points they have earned? Additionally, how will the points reserved for community be used? Who decides this? How does Reddit plan to encode transparency?

Buying points

• Points are ‘standard ERC-20 tokens’, live in a wallet, and – even though the ‘transfers’ section is empty, may be ‘traded freely’. It’s unclear if this means only between Reddit account holders or in general. While Reddit generates the wallet’s public address and private key, there is no mention of not being allowed to manage them via another ERC-20 compatible wallet

Using/redeeming points

• Points can be used for voting, to buy ‘special memberships’ via which users can – based on examples – display statuses and post GIFs/graphics. These are the two explicit examples in the screengab; it also states that they may ‘be used for any number of purposes within the community’
• It’s notable each of these use cases is fleshed out erasonably well:
• For instance, voting can either be one-vote-per-member or weighted votes. The weight is the minimum of the current balance and the number of points the member has ever earned. Since points are tradeable and can be bought, making a distinction between current balance and the number of points earned, not accumulated, is to mitigate the buying of influence.
• The points with which memberships are bought don’t add to Reddit’s store; they’re burned, reducing the total points in circulation and increasing every other member’s % holding proportionately. I understand the intent, but it’s unclear to me how this is relevant as long as Reddit itself is not allowed to use the size of its holdings to influence, say, voting outcomes.

Points supply

• 50 million points will be initially distributed, “based on karma in the subreddit to date”
• According to the document, there will be a total supply of 250 million points – because of the way the earlier point is worded, does this mean 250 million points per subreddit? Otherwise the document could have said “based on karma across all subreddits”
• Anyway. The first year’s supply is another 50 million, and then successively smaller amounts until the supply approaches 250 million
• Burned points will also be re-introduced, with “half of the burned points” reintroduced each month. This adds to each month’s supply. These should count towards the lifetime supply, since these points were also minted/distributed once.

Even if none of this pans out – Reddit released a no-statement statement – it’s interesting to think the rewards system design through, imagine what it would look like if everything about Reddit – not just the rewards system – were to be decentralised, and finally, how is a system that lives entirely on the blockchain fundamentally different? That’s part 2 and onwards.

The US retailer Costco is well known for selling goods at extremely low margins, which results in a reputation for low prices, which creates demand, which gives it leverage over its suppliers, creating a virtuous cycle. Membership fees, which make up 2% of sales, make up a little over 100% of their profit. It’s essentially a subscription business. One way to look at it is that the entire company runs on the margins it makes from the sale of goods. The subscriptions are straight profit. [1]

Amazon’s Prime Membership programme is similar, and very well known. Prime membership fees also contribute over 100% of its profit (the way this works is different from Costco) [2]. This means just like Costco, Amazon would be unprofitable were it not for Prime. Put another way, Amazon can operate on extremely thin margins because of Prime memberships.

This came up while thinking about a membership programme for the wealth service. We had two ways of thinking about the pricing:

1. Costco-like:

– Membership revenue is main customer lifetime value (CLTV)
– Members get rewards that are equivalent to the revenue the company makes off their (increased) investments

1. Amazon-like:

– Commissions on (increased) investments is the main CLTV
– Members get their membership fee back in the form of rewards

It’s interesting that two similar business models result in two very different ways of thinking about our own membership programme.

Endnote: The next step was to model to see under what scenarios – of membership fees and increased investment (and commissions) due to membership rewards – one model is more favourable than the other. Obviously, the results are not public.

[1] Read this Twitter thread for a 1-minute overview, and this presentation (also linked in the thread) for more in-depth coverage

[2] This Fool article shows how Prime Memberships drive profit.

A writer’s personal experience with land she owns:

Despite doing everything they could to modernize, Tree and her husband Charles Burrell realized that they could no longer make a living as farmers. As they looked out at their exhausted farm, laboriously fortified from sticky Sussex clay, they discerned that they needed to pause…

As an experiment, she and Burrell decided not only to let their land lie fallow, but to strategically steward it toward a deeper, more layered wildness, introducing species and practices that might nourish its soil. Some of this was simply allowing the old oaks on the land to die, or drop limbs, allowing dead things to rot where they fell. Some of it was reintroducing deer and Exmoor ponies (they resemble cave paintings at Lascaux) to aerate and nourish the grasses. Some of it was simply not planting at all, and watching waves of bracken succeed each other, each copse making a niche for some new animal…

Within two decades their formerly exhausted dairy farm has become a haven for species otherwise in decline across Europe and the world. The cuckoo, the skylark, the raven — creatures of deep lore and literary imagination — have begun to live in their woods and fields again.

– The book that gave me hope at harvest time

Brett Terpstra, creator of the magical nvALT:

I’ve learned to reframe “procrastination” as “marination.” I used to feel guilty about putting off large tasks, but the fact is that I’m constantly thinking about and examining those tasks while I avoid working on them. Deadline pressure helps me focus, and by the time I’m ready to start working on it, I find I’ve already planned it out, mostly subconsciously, during my marination time. Again, that might not work for anyone but me, but seeing it that way has saved me a lot of guilt. I actually feel good about the time I spend planning and brainstorming in the back of my mind while I do something I enjoy.

– Working from home can be magical

This reminded me of what Marc Andreessen of A16Z wrote thirteen years ago:

The gist of Structured Procrastination is that you should never fight the tendency to procrastinate — instead, you should use it to your advantage in order to get other things done… Generally in the course of a day, there is something you have to do that you are not doing because you are procrastinating… While you’re procrastinating, just do lots of other stuff instead.

– the Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity

He quotes John Perry of Stanford, who came up with the term:

“The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”

Gmail revolutionised email in 2004. One GB of storage when Hotmail and Yahoo! had a few MB. Conversation grouping. Search. Labels. Autocomplete addresses. The feel of a desktop app but in a browser. And it had rules, POP/IMAP access and other features regular email services had.

But what really set it apart for me was its spam filtering.

Back in 2004, I used desktop email clients, and even today rarely use webmail. Storage was not an issue. Good desktop clients then had reasonable search, and I used folders with rules instead of labels.

But spam was a big problem. It’s hard to imagine it now, but I often spent 15 minutes or more at the beginning of every day weeding out spam. At the beginning I tried creating rules that blocked email addresses but it was impossible. Spam-filtering via say spamassassin was doable but quite hard. (In retrospect, I should have powered through the complexity and set it up on my laptop – it would have paid off in a few weeks and I would have learnt something new).

Gmail changed everything. It set the bar for spam filtering, and it firmly made that feature table-stakes.

I’m thinking of this because of spam on all the other messaging channels that we use now, and how they all do a much poorer job than Gmail sixteen years ago.

SMS spam is well-known. While Google’s Android now has spam protection built into the messaging app, iOS does a remarkably poor job: not only is there no system level spam protection, you can’t even block what are called ‘short codes’ in India, where the sender is a set of alphanumeric characters instead of a ten digit number.

LinkedIn is too often used shamelessly as a lead-generation mechanism. The sale starts right after you accept an invite and doesn’t end until you report/block or remove the connection. Of course, there is no active spam protection.

Whatsapp has the same problem. You can keep blocking numbers but it’s unpleasant work, the app doesn’t learn, and doesn’t proactively filter for you.

It’s going to be the same for tomorrow’s new hot messaging service. That is because everything we use now is closed and proprietary. There is no way for anyone other than Whatsapp’s own engineering team to develop a spam filter for Whatsapp.

Email is an open system. Gmail could build its own spam filtering engine on top. But an email client like Thunderbird on the desktop or Airmail on the mobile could, if they like, develop their own independent spam filters that work just as well for gmail and other email accounts (note: Thunderbird does, Airmail does not yet). In any case, they are not tied to the email provider you use.

We could have had a different messaging future with XMPP an open messaging standard which was in fact what Google’s old Google Talk chat service used to be based on. You could use any Jabber/XMPP app to plug into Google Talk. I used Pidgin on the Linux system on my laptop. Any of these XMPP client could have implemented a spam filter, even collaborated on spam filtering while remaining independent and competitive.

Open data and standards are a better bit than closed. It’s just not apparent in the moment.

Who we choose to add to our network on LinkedIn, who we choose to follow on Twitter, and similarly on other social networks, has a disproportionate impact on our subsequent experience of the service. I have zero experience on Facebook, but I am certain this is true of it too.

This may seem obvious – and it is – but I think it is worth mentioning because of how sensitive your experience is to your network.

Social networking platforms optimise aggressively for engagement. Their algorithms are optimised to get you to add ever more people to your network (or in case of Twitter, follow more people) and to optimise your home ‘feed’ for maximal engagement (and therefore maximal opportunity to consume advertising). This means the people that LinkedIn suggests to you are directly tied to the people whose invitations you accept. Ditto for the posts you see on the main feed.

In other words, your decision to accept/reject an invitation on say LinkedIn has magnified consequences to your subsequent experience. This builds on itself quickly. Your acceptance of sub-optimal contacts means you are now on the networks of people who are irrelevant to you. Your profile gets recommended to people who are less and less irrelevant to you. And therefore your invitations queue is filled with low-quality profiles. This situation can get pretty bad pretty quickly.

The same thing happens on Twitter when you follow people not necessarily relevant to your interests (whether professional or not). It determines which accounts’ ‘who to follow’ you show up on, and that determines the quality and makeup of your followers. That determines the engagement you see on Twitters in terms of conversations you have.

Algorithms also seem to be weighted in favour of recency, so even if you’ve been careful in the past, slipping up now could undo much of the quality you’e built up.

It’s much harder to correct this than it is to prevent it in the first place. Tools to control your experience, such as block, mute and report, address the symptom not the problem. Social networks are almost exclusively optimised for growth, to reduce friction in adding to your network, not managing it. Bulk edit capabilities are few. It’s also hard to gauge at a glance which accounts to weed out, because you see limited information against individual profiles in any ‘Edit your network’ view.

I’m not sure if there’s a way around this other than just being deliberate. I’ve found that on Twitter, simply adding people to (private) lists of interests that I create has an effect on my topics and people suggestions pretty rapidly. LinkedIn doesn’t even have a lists equivalent. You could create multiple accounts – on Reddit, Twitter and other such networks but they are cumbersome to manage. Creating multiple accounts is even harder on networks that insist on verifying real-world identity.

The entity will be reader-funded, whether via pay-per-news or subscriptions. The questions are: Will people pay? And Will it be easy?

A large customer-funded information business outside of the financial news domain has not yet been built. Even within finance, the Financial Times only makes 55% of its revenue from subscriptions and news-stand sales and is therefore still an ad-supported company. There are a few independent paid news sites: The Information is the best-known but extremely niche. Paid email newsletters have been around for years – Substack is the most recent one getting traction – but they are far from mass adoption. This means 21st Century Media will be a pioneer. 

I am confident that people across income and interest segments will pay for something truly useful: ten years ago, I led the team that created a paid ‘iTunes store for SMS subscriptions’ under the MyToday brand, that included a variety of news, entertainment and sports ‘channels’ delivered via SMS. MyToday was the first application of a ‘digital services operator’ that the internet entrepreneur Rajesh Jain had conceived of. In an age before smartphones, cheap data and reliable payment gateways, we created a combination of online and offline payment methods for subscriptions priced aslow as INR 10 a month (then ~USD 0.2). The most motivated of our customers made sure their money reached us. Along with online payments we even received money orders, even cash, sent via post to our Bombay office. Scaling this was a problem and the board eventually shut it down, but there are many lessons to learn in 2020.

So intent is not an issue. In addition today, things have changed. Micropayments are now possible, at least in India and many other mobile-first societies with prepaid digital wallets and payment systems like UPI. In the West, with its credit-card-heavy systems, pay-per-view is a challenge and perhaps 21st Century Media will offer only subscriptions. 

In the intermediate future, transaction costs for small-ticket-size cryptocurrency transfers will become possible. The Brave project with its combination of ad-blocking browser and payments token BAT is an early example of what could be. With payments in cryptocurrency, customer payments are natively written to a (public) blockchain. 

We end as we began.

We live in an era of abundance of information and a glut of means to consume it. We also live in an era of great economic, political, environmental and social change brought on by technology, creating issues that are hard to understand but important to deal with. There have never been more demands made of our attention. In this era, news is critically important to provide data, help us convert it to information and add to our knowledge and judgement so we can not just respond to change but also thrive. 

We have seen how the ecosystem of news in its current form cannot live up to these challenges – its interests are simply not aligned with its readers and viewers. Therefore, transforming news is not a matter of people or money or technology – it is one of new incentives and new systems. We need an entirely different news entity, born in technology and supported by its readers. This series has given us an idea of what 21st Century Media can and should look like.

(ends)

21st Century Media is an entity that bears fiduciary responsibility for our attention and that is directly supported by readers. At success, its scale will be akin to existing media empires, but it will truly be a reader-fed, reader-supported, reader-consumed resource.

However the media is delivered – whether as TV-like video streams or a web-page-oriented site – it will be organised by issues, not by event. Each issue will have a history and will be updated as events occur, setting those events in context – context and perspective being what today’s news lacks.

It will not be neutral, and it will also not be ‘both-sides‘. Both sides implies that there are only two interpretations of an issue, internally homogenous, framed either as for or against, an adversarial view of everything that has catalysed the polarised world we live in. Reality is messy. It is a continuum of positions with pros and cons, and 21st Century Media will highlight and present that.

It need not start with producing original writing.  Great content is already being written. Text, video, even audio via podcasts. But search engines and other discovery and editorial mechanisms are not incentivised to surface this. 21st Century Media will aggregate and present the best writing and conversations from across the Internet.

The algorithms for surfacing the ‘right’ content are dependent on first defining what this content is, and for that we need humans to train them, like the human curators in Neal Stephenson’s science-tech-fiction book Fall. 21st Century Media needs to get a head-start over the sort of polluted internet Stephenson imagines

“[A] Few people were rich enough to literally employ a person whose sole job was to filter incoming and outgoing information.”_

“Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gazing at stuff that the AIs had been unable to classify. They were the informational equivalent of the wretches who clambered around mountainous garbage dumps in Delhi or Manila looking for rags. Anything that made it past them—any rag that they pulled out of the garbage pile—began working its way up the editorial hierarchy and, in rare cases, actually got looked at by the kinds of editors—or more likely their junior associates — who worked for people like Sophia. Consequently, Sophia almost never had to look at outright garbage.”

Human editor aggregation and filtering will be augmented with reader submissions. Readers – more a community – will be rewarded for these submissions. The rewards resemble Bitcoin’s Proof of Work, except that the work is not computing power but their judgement. Specifically they will be a share of profits from micropayments for that content. 

Perverse incentives to submit clickbait content do not exist because everything goes through a filter: first human, then eventually human + algo. The 1% rule of the Internet makes this very likely to be financially viable: “…in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.” – there are nearly two orders of magnitude more people paying than being paid. In fact, this will be done at a scale that approaches Wikipedia more than any news organization.

21st Century Media will nail trust by placing reader recommendations, publishing, edits and subscription payments on a public blockchain. The smart contract and its integration with whatever CMS is used will be publicly auditable. While recommendations and payments will be pseudonymous, publishing and edits will be identifiable. This will be critically important when the team and the reader base scales.

All this brings us, finally, to supporting and sustaining 21st Century Media (part 5).

When the incentives of the news ecosystem participants are to hoard your attention, they distort news itself. Here’s how:

There is disproportionate attention to politics, not policy making – see the front page of any physical or online newspaper. In general, there is not enough focus on the stuff that really matters. This directly affects what people think is important: as Steven Pinker argues in the Guardian (yes, itself a newspaper):

The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind…

Plane crashes always make the news, but car crashes, which kill far more people, almost never do. Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about 50 Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than 4,000 Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television…

Similarly, there is disproportionate coverage of what’s wrong and less on what’s being done to fix it – this is required to produce the sort of adversarial content that keeps readers and viewers hooked. Again, Pinker:

Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum: a recent literature review cited “misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitization, and in some cases, … complete avoidance of the news.” And they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” or “I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.”

News is also driven entirely by events (witness the continuous ‘Breaking News’ on TV and large-font headlines on websites). There is little issue-based coverage. As Rob Wijnberg of the slow-news site Unbreaking News argues, this prevents us from understanding true causality because we no longer view our world actively as a set of systems, merely as as passive objects of a set of events that ‘happen’ to us.

… news also makes us blind to the influential that is not exceptional at all. That’s why we often don’t hear about major developments until something highly improbable happens (events the Lebanese-American philosopher Nassim Taleb dubbed “black swans”).

The 2008 financial crisis, for example, didn’t become huge news until the Lehman Brothers investment bank filed for bankruptcy — a highly unusual event. But the lead up to this event — banks that kept piling risk on top of risk, little by little, day by day — never made it to the front page because of the fundamental mismatch between what was happening (gradual risk increase) and the way news commonly signals what is happening (event-driven sensationalism).

Therefore, in the relentless rolling news-cycle, context is lost:

Almost everything that’s news must be something that has just now taken place. But the most recent thing isn’t by definition the most influential one. Everything in the world has a history. And that history determines in large part why something happens. Because the news usually keeps its eye trained on today, it blinds us to the longer term, both past and future.

As entertainment, news is now delivered to us in premasticated,easy-to-digest chunks, no thinking or reasoning required. Matt Taibbi, in his letter to his audience about going independent, cites this as one of things wrong with journalism:

…journalists in the Trump era are trained to narrativize everything, with the consequence that we’ve drifted away from complex issues and toward saleable, simplistic, sports-like controversies. Heading into the Covid-19 disaster, we argued about Bernie Bros, Lev Parnas, Russian Facebook ads, and a host of other things that don’t seem all that important now… The media business as constructed is expert at mass-generating binary streams of hot takes and talking points, and selling ads to a public engaged by them.

Starved of critical reasoning, readers and viewers of news act how Taibbi described in his book Insane Clown President:

“Trained for decades to be little more than good consumers, we had become a nation of reality shoppers, mixing and matching news items to fit our own self-created identities. We rejoiced in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves”

All of these – negative, politics-centric, event-driven, context-less hot-takes – reward bad actors. As we have written previously,

The most obvious symptom of that is clickbait online, but more broadly, topics that shock and outrage receive coverage disproportionate to their impact on society.

At some point – we are probably past it – this behaviour becomes self-fulfilling, and personalities that are the most skilled at shocking and causing outrage end up being the ones most imbued with power.

To state the obvious, the epitome of this is the presidency of Donald Trump and how it utterly dominates coverage online and the TV and serves his ends. This has a profound effect on society (Rob Wijnberg)

…our news addiction — is to make us afraid of other people, skeptical of the future, and cynical about our own ability to affect it. Day in, day out, the news confirms our most stubborn prejudices and our greatest fears. It makes us pessimistic and suspicious. It even makes us unhappy.

and is harmful to democracy itself (Pinker)

…they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” or “I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.”

An important note: we are not even focused in this series on the impact of the large-scale or pirate ownership of most news media and the influence of advertising on editorial, although these are equally important problems. This article from the non-profit American media watchdog FAIR is a good summary of the matter.

It’s abundantly clear how broken the existing news ecosystem is. It’s time to visualise what an alternative one could look like in the 21st Century (part 4).