The deeper point is that India doesn’t need to look up to Harvard. Indians are CEOs of trillion dollar companies, soon-to-be VPs, and of course (real) professors at Harvard.
We can build a wholly digital replacement. Declining US institutions aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
In the same way China ascended from a mezzanine level of skill to becoming the factory of the world, India can ascend from providing a shadow academia on YouTube to producing genuinely world class digital learning institutions.
It’s capable of building digital alternatives to Harvard, Hollywood, and the New York Times. Indeed the people in these institutions often hail from India.
The v2 would lean on modern technology: online learning, AI video, cryptographic truth.
Many people underestimated China. Thought they’d always make cheap plastic stuff for Walmart.
Similarly, today many underestimate India. They think Indian media will always be just Bollywood, or the animation backend for Hollywood.
India has the talent to become a media superpower. It just needs ambition. Stop admiring declining US institutions like Harvard. Stop thinking of Bollywood as a ceiling.
Indian tech has already made this leap: now #3 in unicorns and globally competitive. Indian media can be too.
This doesn’t mean *existing* Indian media and academia will make this leap. Some may. My bet is on startups.
But a key concept is that India’s emergence won’t exactly mirror China’s.
China is a tech and manufacturing superpower. But India becomes a tech *and media* superpower.
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1) There were 272M international emigrants in 2019. The vast majority of those people were not rich.
2) Emigration reduces inequality as people move away from ultra-wealthy cities like SF/NY to the rest of the country and the world. un.org/development/de…
Indeed, it's the wealthy landed aristocracy — like the NIMBYs of California — who have the most control over local politics and the least need to move.
Let's remember that the right to emigrate is an absolutely foundational human right, part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by people from all over the world, translated into every language.
In a remote world, talent is mobile. Mayors no longer need to run for higher office — they can level up just by recruiting talent to their city. On the other hand, they can also *lose* talent if the city doesn’t perform.
More upside and downside than before.
The acceleration of remote has changed the world in more ways than people realize.
Politicians must deliver results, or else an instant vote of no confidence is called as people emigrate out. More like a parliamentary system, except you choose between cities rather than parties.
No legislation was passed, but remote will change the job of every politician just as much as social media did. The best ones like @FrancisSuarez have already recognized this.
The medium-term consequence is the rise of competitive government. Deliver results or lose citizens.
This article is making the rounds. It’s well-written and makes a good case. And I should say up front that I have zero info about whether Tether really has 100% backing of every USDT.
First, the crypto ecosystem has survived Silk Road, Mt Gox, the DAO hack, the Bitcoin civil war, the Chinese crypto crackdown of 2017, and countless BTC obituaries.
Second, the tech is real. Look at defipulse.com, epns.io, Zcash, starkware.com, ens.domains, NFTs, Uniswap, rollups, and all the new L1 chains just to start. There is genuine computer science here.
If we zoom out of current events or Russia/US for a second, think about the run-up to the Iraq War. Are we sure the US wouldn't invent a narrative about some foreign leader, technologically deplatform them, invade the country, and then say "mistakes were made" a few years later?
That's the kind of not-too-unlikely scenario that has other sovereigns concerned about US tech companies. After Tonkin Gulf, babies-in-incubators, and Iraq WMD, quite a few wars were started by false narratives. Now imagine a national leader couldn't even rebut these.
If you buy (say) iron ore from a country, that's "decentralized". The vendor can't hit a key to melt the iron after they've sold it to you.
Software is very different. US tech companies retain root access and can kill-switch your communications grid if USG tells them to.
Expect many more national bans on American tech companies in the weeks and months to come.
Market caps will crater when deprived of markets. And we will see a complete inversion as states gradually begin favoring crypto protocols over American companies. theguardian.com/world/2021/jan…
The Regulatory Flippening
In the 1990s, the US government fought encryption. Now it mandates it.
Similarly, once regulators realize that crypto protocols exercise *less power* over their countries than foreign corporations, they’ll adopt a protocol-first approach.
Many governments already encourage the use of open source over proprietary code when available.
They will eventually prefer crypto APIs over corporate APIs for the same reason. Crypto is what comes after open source: it’s also open state & open execution. brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…
Thesis: the crypto version of any product ends up being far more valuable than the original.
Bitcoin is already more valuable than PayPal and will eventually be more valuable than gold.
And the various defi apps on Ethereum will be more valuable than their fintech cognates.
I had this thesis long ago. It's still in the early stages of playing out, but here's why it should be true.
1) far better developer experience with open APIs 2) far better reach for a true protocol than a corporate product 3) far more token hodlers than traditional shareholders
If you can make decentralized gold, wires, lending, borrowing, interest, derivatives, cap tables, or the like work...why would you *ever* use the corporate version?
It'd be like using Oracle over Postgres. You'd always pick the open version, if you can.