It is to laugh. Watch this journo attempt to play gumshoe on the question of whether @JTLonsdale cofounded Palantir.
There is zero value-add to these old media middlemen.

Talking to them is often just explaining basic stuff to people who don’t know anything, except that they hate you.

Just go direct and get your message out without their distortion, as Joe did here.
If there is only one media principle every founder in 2021 should know: never, ever let a tech journo “tell your story”.

Put your valuable content out on your own channels, or give it to a diverse influencer.

No need to subsidize media corporations that hate you.
This is the key point.

We do not need them for distribution anymore. They do not understand this, and are playing as if it’s 2010.

But decentralized media is quickly ascending — we’re all just building our own outlets now, and cutting out distortionary & disaligned middlemen.
Their normal pattern is:

1) open hatred on Twitter in their own voice

2) faux neutrality in emails

3) then open hatred again in their writing, but this time in the passive voice

This guy messed up. The insult is supposed to come AFTER they trick people into talking to them.
Janet Malcom’s classic shows that this has been their thing for decades. It’s just more obvious now.

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More from @balajis

9 Nov
The 140 second portrait-mode open source free film is still in its early stages as an art form.
It flips every aspect of the Hollywood model of the 20th century.

Big screen → small screen
Landscape → portrait
120 mins → 140 seconds
Big budget → zero budget
Scarce distribution → free distribution
US-centric → global
View with crowd → view solo
Many have commented on this, and I’ve written about this before, but the full displacement of Hollywood by TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, and co is not yet complete.

Even Netflix and Amazon Studios may be seen as transitional forms, as we move to AI-generated video and VR everything.
Read 4 tweets
4 Nov
Woke Capital incarnate.
From thread by AGM.

I think he’s too optimistic though. The century is still young. And the Gods of the Copybook Headings may return.
The pseudonymous economy is preferable to ritualistic announcements of immutable characteristics. It would be more accessible for the disabled as well.

It’s not everyone’s ideal outcome, but it’s far better than this.
Read 6 tweets
4 Nov
The thesis of the Sovereign Individual holds up well. But there are three major countertrends.

The Individual Sovereign, and Xi Jinping in particular.

The Sovereign Collective, the leverage of nomadic groups.

The Autonomous Robot, as drones also change the logic of violence.
The Individual Sovereign

Technology matters - but so do founders. A sufficiently motivated founder can change the direction of technology. And Xi Jinping has refounded the Chinese state as a formidable, centralized, militaristic surveillance machine.
reuters.com/investigates/s…
The Individual Sovereign is a problem for the Sovereign Individual. A single man at the helm of a total surveillance state is just a different thing than the US establishment. The latter may well *want* to crush free speech & free markets, but lacks the state capacity to do so.
Read 13 tweets
3 Nov
China is on track to bring back the Henry Adams Curve, the exponential increase in energy production that tapered off around 1970.
See the @rootsofprogress review of “Where’s My Flying Car” for more on the Henry Adams Curve, and the modern tendency to assume that even clean energy production is somehow bad.
China cope is the idea that the country will somehow crash into a ditch.

China hope is the belief that an unchecked CCP will be a benevolent hegemon, or that today’s US can stop it.

China nope is the concept that we should respect their execution, but build something better.
Read 6 tweets
2 Nov
God, State, Network.
Theism, Statism, Numism.

Numism, or the study of coins, puts a third Leviathan at the center of it all. The most powerful force in the world is considered to be neither god, nor the US military, but encryption.
sotonye.substack.com/p/if-einstein-…
This is another cut on what @RichardHanania has observed.

There’s a pre-literate group focused on video, on the real world.

There’s a literate group focused on words, on an imagined world.

And then there’s a computer literate group focused on code, a constructed world.
You can cut these as past, present, and future respectively. People who pay at least lip service to God, people who worship the State, and people who focus on the Network.

Breaking out that third category may be key — as it’s global, and differs in key ways from the others.
Read 4 tweets
2 Nov
Yes, the future of law is smart contracts.

This is obvious if you have ever negotiated an international deal, and compared it to the on-chain variety.
International corporate law is much fuzzier than we think.

If a company in Brazil tries to buy one in Bangladesh, just getting the list of obligations on both sides is nontrivial. The deal may go through a US or PRC intermediate, a hub that has relations with both sides.
That is, there may not be that many legal precedents for Brazil/Bangladesh acquisitions, but there will be some for Brazil/US & US/Bangladesh. Or perhaps Brazil/PRC & PRC/Bangladesh.

So you go through that hub. It’s the lowest risk strategy. Till ETH and smart contract chains…
Read 5 tweets

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