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In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote about the implications for society when the dominant medium shifted from the printed word to TV.
That's why the most fascinating slide from Meeker's Internet Trends report was this one. This was the year of the next shift.
That's why the most fascinating slide from Meeker's Internet Trends report was this one. This was the year of the next shift.
Yes, a lot of time on mobile is, like TV, just video. However, the number of publishers is exponentially larger. The topology of information movement in the world is no longer a small number of hub-and-spokes but a many-to-many mesh. We still have some hubs, just a lot more.
We need another Amusing Ourselves to Death to cover the implications of this massive change from TV to mobile. We've already seen some of them. For those caught unaware, the world feels unstable and weird.
In parallel to the rise of AWS, another distributed tech stack arose. Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. This is a stack for distributing "code" to other people's brains and running it. It's a platform for programming society.
Some people realized this earlier and are now accumulating adherents, winning elections, becoming the new gurus.
Others, slower on the draw, are still trying to regain their balance. We tell startups that distribution is destiny, but that's true outside of tech.
Others, slower on the draw, are still trying to regain their balance. We tell startups that distribution is destiny, but that's true outside of tech.
It's not surprising to me that the two countries that most capitalized on this shift were two with a history of understanding the sheer power of propaganda: Russia and China. One used it to tamper abroad, the other saw the threat to themselves and clamped down hard.
What would Postman title a book about this era? Amusing Each Other to Death? There's still a lot of amusing, but much of it is at the expense of each other. We're probably past the complete Wild West but still in a somewhat lawless, dangerous phase.
There's a reason people describe so many parts of the online world as a hellscape. Because, as with the Wild West, it's still way more dangerous than many of us are accustomed to in meatspace. Where are the norms of decorum?
This is why I read the John Wick universe as an allegory for online life and cancel culture. Complete strangers glance at their phones, get notified of the bounty on Wick, and suddenly attack him from all sides. This is just a metaphor for online mobs on social media.
