Month: December 2020

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design

Monopolies that may not matter

I came across this blog post that cites Peter Thiel’s thesis of monopoly power in his book Zero to One as one of the root causes of the dominance of Big Tech:

Thiel made the case for monopoly as the ultimate goal of capitalism. Indeed, “monopoly is the condition of every successful business,” he asserted. With it, you’re free to set your own prices, think long-term, innovate, and pursue goals other than mere survival. Without it, you’re replaceable, and your profits will eventually converge on zero.

… it’s not hard to imagine how Thiel’s outlook [on monopoly] has helped to justify behavior by tech titans that routinely crosses the line from aggressive to anticompetitive, including Facebook’s policy of cutting off access to its platform from any company it deems a direct competitor. Like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street proclaiming that “greed … is good,” Thiel’s full-throated defense of monopoly gave tech leaders such as Zuckerberg philosophical cover to ruthlessly pursue their own self-interest while patting themselves on the back for it.

I think the writer misses an important point: the definition of a market that a business looks to monopolise. With sharp positioning, brands divide a market into a number of micro-markets that they look to dominate. See this good explanation of what great positioning looks like:

Harley-Davidson publicly shared their positioning statement:
The only motorcycle manufacturer
That makes big, loud motorcycles
For macho guys (and “macho wannabes”)
Mostly in the United States
Who want to join a gang of cowboys
In an era of decreasing personal freedom.

In tech, the barriers to entry in most spaces have trended downwards. Funding has, in general, been plentiful, including during a year as unusual as 2020. Every creator wants to be monopolist for their increasingly narrowly defined market.

Facebook, the target of an antitrust case as of this writing, understands this well. Facebook leadership understands that people tomorrow may look to something completely different to stay ‘open and connected’. It could be visual – hence their acquisition of Instagram. It could be text-oriented, group and chat based – see Whatsapp. Could be VR – Oculus. Could be audio or even video, hence their description of Tiktok as an existential thread and their building of stories into every product, including Whatsapp statuses. But it could also be something that looks like Slack or Discord. It could be something built on top of boring old email, unrecognisable from today’s traditional email clients. But more than anything it could be all of them. It could be – and is likely to be – multiple startups of each such type optimised for different narrow audiences.

Everyone may still have a Facebook account, they may still be tracked all over the web, and it wouldn’t matter because they’re no longer logging into Facebook that often to be served ads.

To come full circle on the issue of monopolies – one could imagine a future in which Facebook could technically be a monopoly: they could be the number one social network by far. Their MAUs could be in the billions. But their Big Tent positioning would also be irrelevant in a world where tens of thousands of brands have successfully created microniches such that not a single one of them holds a candle to Facebook’s numbers but taken together they have taken away all of the attention that Facebook used to capture.

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

Commitment to principles

I wish that I could buy hardware as well made as Apple’s from anyone else, for any amount of money. To be clear, I don’t mean “brushed aluminum” or “sub-micron tolerances” or “retina screens are made of love”, though those are all nice enough; I mean “committed.” To a set of values, of principles, an aesthetic. To something. Apple’s hardware is extraordinarily well-executed design-in-depth in service of a set of principles I fundamentally disagree with and a vision I don’t share. But I don’t know of anyone else making hardware who is that committed to level of execution, to understanding their own values and expressing them through the design and function of their products. I don’t care about “thin” or “light” at all, but far as I can tell I can’t buy hardware built with a comparable commitment to resilience, maintainability or experimentation from anyone, anywhere. 

– Mike Hoye, The Setup, 2019
Categories
Real-World Crypto

What is the price of bitcoin? Maybe we don’t have to have an answer

I find this WSJ article on bitcoin data very interesting:

The discrepancies in the bitcoin data reflect the nature of the industry itself. Bitcoin and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies trade on independent exchanges around the world. Every exchange manages its own data feed, comprising millions of trades. Some are regulated and transparent; others are notorious for unreliable volume numbers and fraudulent trading.

In traditional capital markets, exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange andNasdaq Stock Market provide troves of data that help investors value the underlying assets in mutual, index and exchange-traded funds. That doesn’t exist in the crypto market.

What mainly exists currently, he said, are market-data feeds that average prices across a number of exchanges. That makes it difficult to come up with an acceptable definition of fair-market value.

– What Is Bitcoin Worth? There Is Little Consensus in Fragmented Market

If paying with bitcoin had really caught on, transactions themselves would be denominated in bitcoin, goods would be priced in bitcoin, and one bitcoin would be worth, well, one bitcoin. But payments never caught on, and this decade has ended with bitcoin gaining popularity as a security, albeit a purely speculative one.

Now traditional securities, are made traceable by listing them on exchanges, where price discovery happens centrally. Peloton stock is listed on the NASDAQ, which knows what the matching buy and sell prices are at any time, which is the current price of the stock.

But bitcoin is not a traditional security – not only was it not designed to ever be a security, but it’s decentralised. There’s no Bitcoin Co that lists Bitcoin on a chosen exchange. Literally anyone can buy and sell bitcoin without any intermediary. A bitcoin exchange at its core is merely someone putting up a booth on the internet announcing that buyers and sellers can meet here to find each other more easily. Any number of people can put up any number of booths that do the same thing, no permission needed. The “independent exchanges” that the writer refers to is tautological – all crypto exchanges are independent.

I think the presence of multiple exchanges and the difference in prices on each one of them is a good thing, and attempting to legislate a standard price for bitcoin, for instance by forcing some centralisation, would be a tragedy. Bitcoin as a speculative asset and the exchanges that it trades on is a great free market experiment. There will be exchanges that optimise for different things – including swindling customers out of their money. But there will be others that relentlessly optimise for low price. Still others for transparency. Yet more for access. There will be multiple winners, not all necessarily competing with each other, each reporting different prices for bitcoin. That price will be reflective of their audience: exchanges in India have higher prices for bitcoin. That’s just the premium that Indians are willing to pay for access to bitcoin – prices across exchanges in India are quite close to each other. You could have a hypothetical exchange in, say, Germany that became known for manipulating buy and sell pools. As long as it offered something else – say, an exceptionally large humber of trading pairs – customers may well still trade on it. That price will be determined by the buyers’ balancing of apprehensions about manipulation on the one hand and the availability of trading pairs on the other. There is no parallel to this in highly regulated, centralised capital markets.

A single, indubitable price – until now a core tenet of any reliable security – may well be something we leave behind in the case of bitcoin.

Categories
Life Design Wellness when Always-On

The confidence of no

I’m becoming more conscious about my attention on a day-to-day basis. Several times during the day I myself evaluating whether what I am engaged in at that moment is worth my attention.

It’s often most relevant to when I find myself skimming through quote-unquote content, or watching TV on the iPad, but also when I’m having phone or chat conversations at or outside of work: have we reached diminishing returns on this conversation? Is this important enough to hold my attention? There’s an awareness of the temptation of multi-tasking.

Contrastingly, when I find myself thinking through or dwelling on an idea, I ask whether I should continue to indulge it or make a note and get on with my day.

Today I came across this article titled “How to find focus“. The writer says that they have found focus by saying “no to obligations or opportunities that I would have easily accepted before”, but it’s what follows that’s more interesting:

The most significant change in my thinking has been that I have a lot of conviction now that the few things I’m spending my time on – university, writing, side projects – are right for me.

Bingo. It’s hard to answer the questions above if you don’t have some level of confidence in what’s important to you and what isn’t. In the absence of conviction, you’ll yo-yo between giving in to stimulus temptation – of which there’s no shortage in our information-suffused lives – or forcing yourself to focus on stuff that someone else wants you to: a friend, your manager.

But if you have a good enough awareness of what is worth your attention, then combined with awareness, you’ll have a much easier time deciding what to say yes or no to – that calendar invite, that new personal project, that new Twitter subscription or Netflix recommendation, that conversation segue.

Categories
Life Design

Removing negatives

{"colorSpace":"kCGColorSpaceDisplayP3","cameraType":"Wide","macroEnabled":true,"qualityMode":2,"deviceTilt":-0.14735163270452567,"customExposureMode":1,"extendedExposure":false,"whiteBalanceProgram":0,"cameraPosition":1,"focusMode":1}

[the question I ask myself before a purchase is] Is this removing a negative in my life? Because it’s pretty well studied that happiness is not very much affected by adding positives to your life, it’s mostly… especially in a rich world/environment like we live… mostly accomplished by removing things that are a strong negative to everyday.

– Peter Adeney aka Mr. Money Mustache on the Tim Ferriss blog, in 2017
Categories
Life Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Screening relationships

via Shweta.

Maintaining an extended simulacrum of reality is hard when mediated through today’s state of the art video-conferencing technology:

Even some people whose values still align with those of their friends have found their relationships suffering during the pandemic.

The reason for their drift is not rooted in ideological differences, but rather distance.

While video calls over Zoom or Facetime have helped, many have said that after spending most of the year staring at a screen, they’ve had enough.

– The pandemic has destroyed friendships and divided families

Amidst the talk of work forever being altered by the pandemic and of the dawn of the remote work age, it’s worth acknowledging that the relationships built in the real world are going to be tough to maintain through screens and phone calls. That the relationships formed in the remote world are likely to be different – not necessarily better or worse, but different – from those in the real world.

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Writing

Own your content, December reminder

and

Within 24 hours. The case for owning your own content gets stronger by the week.

Previously:

July 2020: Platform censorship and the Malpani incident

November 2020: A problem with Amazon Web Services caused several appliances to go offline 

Categories
Life Design Wellness when Always-On

Signalling quantity

… how do I show that “in the office” when I’m far away, and two time zones behind the vast majority of my team? By dropping links to articles (to show that I’m reading); by commenting on other people’s links (to show that I’m reading Slack); by participating in conversations (to show that I’m engaged). Evidencing that I’m doing work instead of, well, doing work.

You can LARP [Live Action Role Play] your job in person (holding lots of meetings, staying late and getting there early as a show of ‘presentism’) and digitally (sending lots of emails, spending a lot of time on Slack, or whatever group chat platform your organization uses).

– LARPing your job

But at the same time, with the new flexibility with people relocating wherever they’ve wanted to, working on “knowledge work”

Sometimes I’m far more productive if I’m on a hike, without my phone or Slack, but just hanging out in my own mind; sometimes I’m more productive after goofing off on Twitter. When you’re working remotely, how do you “show” that you’re reading? That you’re thinking?

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Joshua Ness/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Today, presence is democratised but discovery is centralised

Demonization of Facebook is now mainstream. And because readers of this site are privacy-conscious, we have previously discussed – without judgement – both the data that Facebook collects and how to minimise that data collection. Today, I read this:

Niche products and publications… can build sustainable businesses with customers across the entire world who have nothing in common except a shared interest in the product or publication in question; or, to put it another way, customers who “lookalike”. That’s the thing about Facebook and other digital advertising companies: they are just as essential a part of growing the GDP of the Internet as are Stripe and Shopify and other companies with universal approval ratings. It is no good to be capable of serving anyone anywhere if they can’t find you.

– Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences, Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The post itself is in the context of Apple’s requirement of privacy labels for iOS Apps. But it makes the following point: while those who are conscious of their privacy and their attention may be careful of their use of social media and may avoid Facebook, it is perhaps the most important distribution channel that small businesses have. It is their very data collection that makes (ostensibly) precise targeting possible. If one takes that away, then the business with the biggest advertising budget wins.

The same holds true with regard to Google and discovery through search:

This post from First Round Capital makes the case that a small direct-to-consumer business only really has three ways to sustainably achieve scale: performance marketing, content marketing/SEO, and referrals/virality. While Facebook and Instagram, along with Google’s AdWords, draw the bulk of performance advertising budgets, Google dominates discovery through its search engine. And has done so for nearly twenty years now.

Just like with Facebook, it is because of the vast amounts of data that Google collects about you that a business can reach you precisely through search results on a browser or via Google Assistant or in its personalised news feed in your Google app.

Presence of all sorts – content, commerce, community – has been democratised on the Internet, but discovery of all that is today highly centralised.

Categories
Life Design RG.org Writing

One year streak

Today is one year since I began publishing daily on the site. When I completed three hundred days in early October, I had written a Twitter thread about this practice means to me and what it’s done for me. I was surprised I had not linked to it here. Here goes:

All of this is still true. I intend to keep publishing – and there is something else, complementary, in the works. Soon!