No people I know who understand security would allow a surveillance speaker like Alexa or Google Voice in their house.
Long complicated privacy policies that users don’t understand.
Record you and send audio off to random 3rd-parties to “improve the system.”
Advertising-based business models where the incentive is always to surveil more.
Apple at least has a mostly hardware-based business model and has very publicly made privacy the focus. And we are probably stuck with the iPhone. So keep your iPhone but get rid of the rest.
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Mary Meeker used to have a great metric she tracked called the “attention gap” — the gap between where people spent time and where advertisers spent dollars.
Believe it or not, back in the 2000s a popular argument was that although the internet was popular, internet businesses wouldn’t be financially successful.
Business Insider ran an op-ed as recently as 2010 arguing that Facebook and Twitter couldn’t succeed as for-profit businesses.
This clip is making the rounds of David Letterman and Bill Gates back in 1995 discussing the internet. Here is @jason discussing it. It's worth watching.
It’s easy to laugh at Letterman but in fact he was just expressing the consensus view at the time. In 1995, the best use cases that someone as smart as Gates could come up with were things you could already do with radios and tape recorders.
Of course what Gates understood was that the internet would rapidly improve and eventually unlock the internet-native experiences that we enjoy today.
Hundreds of billion dollar businesses have been built on SMTP (and of course HTTP).
“What about spam and other bad things?”
As with SMTP and HTTP, we have legal system, plus providers (gmail etc) can filter (but are constrained from turning evil because the user switching costs are low).
Blockchains are virtual computers that run on top of a network of physical computers that trade off performance (overhead of consensus mechanism) for the novel property that you can make credible long-term commitments to users and developers.
Therefore it is correct but not interesting to say blockchains are less performant that an individual computer controlled by, say Google or Facebook.
If you want to trust your business or you personal life to a computer owned by Google or Facebook, that’s great.
I wouldn’t. Many of us would like to opt out and try a different model.
There is a widespread view that the internet and software industry is now mature, that the historical pattern of disruptive revolutions every 10-15 years is now over. 🧵
In my experience, this view is tacitly held by most of the establishment: institutional investors, tech execs, policymakers, media, etc. It affects valuations, corporate behavior, media coverage, and policy making.