Building bicycles for our minds
Technology has a hole in it, I can feel it. Something isn’t right and while the current era of technology platforms feels like it has reached its zenith, there is something missing from the way many people are talking about the future.
Technology has a hole in it
We have 2.5 billion smartphone users today — each of whom has access to all the knowledge of the world — yet these devices often aren’t working for them nor consistently making their lives better. And rather than a flourishing of creativity and cultural energy, we are seeing people drift in a haze of information overload, likes/social anxiety, and sometimes depression. Rather than technology spreading the freedom we enjoy, we are seeing technology weaken our democracy. The tools we have built are used by enemies of our way of life and culture to sow seeds of fear and chaos. People feel unmoored … I have no idea how to pronounce the word “zerrissenheit”, but its definition, “torn-to-pieces-hood”, describes how I feel at times.
The future, today, has a hole in it.
After a ten year run, the technology platforms of today are atrophying, cracks are showing, and a new era of technology is starting to emerge. I want to discuss a framework for thinking about what’s next. But first, a bit on those cracks, each of which could be an individual post. Here is a short summary:
Why am I using this?
The social platforms of web 2.0 are broken. On the path to mass scale and attention-based monetization, they compromised much of their usefulness to users. I think back to the early days of the social web and how much interesting stuff I would find each day and how connected it made me feel. Today fake accounts and fake posts dominate platforms, and my use has been reduced mostly to consumption and maintenance. I bet you are thinking about Facebook and Twitter, but this summer I worked through a trolling issue on Instagram — these social platforms, even the ones that are designed for entertainment, are brittle and the tools of manipulation are scaling and feeding modified media, marketing, and spam. Today’s platforms have prioritized their ability to behaviourally target and gamify the experience to keep users hooked, over enhancing peer-to-peer connections. The consequence is that today I wake up many a day and ask myself why am I bothering to use this?
The promise of a single, connected society, one that enables its citizens to reach their full potential hasn’t been realized.
The technology boom that started in the mid-nineties with the advent of the Internet was based on the assumption that we are creating a more connected world and that democratizing creation by pushing publishing and editing to the edge and this would inevitably be good for people, enabling individuals to benefit more equally of the commons and achieve their potential. Facebook took the web’s promise to its logical extreme — with centralized identity, it massively scaled social media, reaching today over two billion people. For many of these people, Facebook is the internet. Yet, ask someone living in Cairo today about how effective Facebook is at social change; rather than creating a connected and more open society, technology is more often than not reinforcing tribalism. The world order today is defined by borders and tribalism. Like it or not, accept it or not, we are in a balkanized, geo-political world, where borders and nationalism are on the rise and the technology that was meant to break down barriers is creating them.
These new borders and tribalism are changing technology. From technological standards to regulatory standards, the standardized infrastructure that provides so much fuel to these cloud-based networks is fragmenting. China has taken a fork in its development of AI and deep learning. With GDPR, Europe is going in a different direction, the US in another. Chinese firms are backing off from making US investments in cloud services; similarly, Apple is investing in domestic Chinese cloud infrastructure. The era of single standards, where we had a more or less global regulatory framework for technology, has peaked.
And while the promise of a connected more civil society has not been fulfilled, the growth imperative of these companies and networks has. The scale and reach today of Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, and Tencent (FAAMAAT) is remarkable. Take Indonesia, Nigeria, and Myanmar — a combined population of 500M people: in these countries, the internet is Facebook and FAAMAAT has more data and information control over the population than their governments do. And yet the governance of these companies is as opaque as corporate governance has always been. An example to make this very real: the Sri Lankan minister for telecommunication, Harin Fernando, told the Guardian the government ordered Facebook and other social media services to be shut down at the height of the violence, saying: “this whole country could have been burning in hours.”
Something is profoundly wrong when the answer to how to keep a country functioning is turning off the network.
Globalism hasn’t lived up to its promise:
Globalism, the political ideology that was paired with the technological vision of a connected society, has also failed in that it has not resulted in greater prosperity for many — the mass of technological wealth hasn’t spread or lifted the middle class in the US.
Where is that next great thing?
These platforms are holding back innovation. A decade ago, computing platforms had a simple definition: they provided a surface area for developers to build upon. As Bill Gates said, the definition of a computing platform was when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it.
Conversely, today platforms are designed for aggregation with corresponding business models oriented around advertising and/or commerce. Personalizing those experiences leads to more usage, hence the importance of tracking user behavior both on and off platform. Facebook and Google have no interest in fostering developer ecosystems — they harvest startup data, just as they do users, to predict and copy new behaviors and add features to their platforms.
Found any good new apps lately?
Coupled with this stemming of developer space for innovation, the place for startups to “ship” things and users to find new things — the app store — has atrophied. Maybe we have reached a natural apex for innovation on the UX of this device, or maybe discovery was badly implemented. Regardless, as the chart below illustrates, getting a new app launched and into the top 100 on the app store has become harder and harder year over year.
Outside of the open web, email, and text, there isn’t a scaled D2C channel that is not controlled by a major platform. So the primary way that startups have to reach customers today is via paid acquisition. That’s why the question an investor asks today to a startup that is scaling is: where are you buying audience and what are your customer acquisition costs? The internet was created to democratize creation, publishing, editing … and yet when you launch something new onto the web or into the app store today, what you invariably hear is the sound of silence.
When I look out to the horizon today, I see frustration … this is not the internet we dreamt of creating. And I see tremendous talent wasting time within these atrophying platforms. At the birth of the internet twenty years ago, we aimed to give everyone access to all the world’s information, to create the information superhighway, and to let people publish from the edge. We inadvertently gave birth to data monopolies and placed ourselves, in essence, into data serfdom. We have unwittingly given over control of our time, data, and attention — our most important assets as humans. The decisions we made early on in the web sowed the seeds of today’s data oligopolies. FAAMAAT are operating and executing in their interest, based on architectural decisions that were made a while ago and on the choices we made as users, supporting the attention-based business models. Free isn’t turning out to be without costs.
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We need to step back and ask what is the future we want to create. As we dive headfirst towards greater automation, how can we enhance the attributes that make us human, instead of mincing our machines? And what do we want from an advanced economy? How do we dignify human existence instead of subsidizing it? I’m interested in these questions and in the fundamental change that I see coming.
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Change takes time and it usually happens fitfully — nothing, slowly, nothing, slowly, nothing, nothing, and then boom: Change. If there was an emoji formula for change, it would be: Δ =….💧..💧..💧.💧💧💧..💦 ..🌊
Within networks, change can happen fast. Change in networks happens both through the network and inside the topology of the network since the structure of the networks we have place is controlled by software, not hardware. As different endpoints (i.e. new devices) are introduced to the network, it tends to swing over time from client to server, from decentralized to centralized, from open to closed. Today we have reached or surpassed a peak in closed centralization.
The next wave of innovation is going to decentralize the network; however, that change doesn’t address many of the societal issues above. What we need is a vision, a compass for the future we want for the new software we want to build.
Vision, please
Twenty-five years ago, the web represented a vision and a metaphor for a future. The web would connect us all, literally and metaphorically, and everybody would have access to every idea humankind had. Creation and publishing would be pushed to the edge, available to all. We would be able to edit anything and everything. We would become global citizens — we called ourselves netizens — and we would build a new world with a single, united, connected, global class. Innovation and entrepreneurship would be the means for this vision to flourish, and it would be predicated on the spread of globalism and liberal, democratic, western values. Yes, the web was made up of technological standards, networks, and software — yet it was the vision and promise of the web that permeated all of our society. Some of this vision was realized, but a lot wasn’t, and somewhere along the way to this connected world, we stumbled into the walled garden we live in today of gated platforms that control our connected experiences.
Leonard Cohen once said democracy was the last great religion — he was wrong; technology is. And blinkered adherence to technology as the solution to society ills — be it the web, blockchain, or CRISPR — has become a problem. As the primary driver of global change, software is eating the world. However, what will the world look like after “software has consumed it”? We need a map or a compass for the future we want … while maps are hard to come by as they tend to be ephemeral, a compass is more useful … and it turns out that a pretty good compass was articulated all the way back in 1980.
I want to ride my bicycle …
In 1980, Steve Jobs was discussing computing and used a simple yet powerful metaphor for how computers can be bicycles for the mind. Technology amplifies our capabilities — and computing can now do the same thing for our minds. Here are two versions of the same talk by Jobs — one in 1980 and another ten years later, both around a minute long and both worth watching. We are tool builders — as developers, creators, inventors, and investors we can build bicycles for the mind.
When you are on a bicycle, you feel like your body has been extended. While the technology seems simple, it’s designed to extend the human body. You jump on the bike and boom, the connection to the ground is made. It’s as if your body and attention extend through the wheels to the surface of the road. The bicycle almost disappears — it becomes an extension of self. This is how technology should work: starting with a human need, and a purpose, technology should extend outwards with the intent of expanding the human, not confining or reducing.
We need to shift the control levers and assume agency over our technology. And we need to start developing frameworks and guideposts to help us understand when we are extending ourselves and when we are restricting ourselves. As we move beyond today’s platforms and beyond the phone to new interfaces for computing — the next big things that should be bicycles for the mind — the compass is simple. It’s a question: does this have the potential to be a bicycle for the mind … and can this be designed as a bicycle for the mind?
End-to-end design …
Design isn’t just a nice word, it’s central to making a shift like this. When I was young, I had the good fortune of doing a startup with the architect William McDonough. Bill taught me a lot about design. He believed that design isn’t just about the surface of a building or the pixels or an interface — rather it’s about the end-to-end experience of a building or a product, and its about its purpose. Design is the first signal of intent that a founder brings to an idea. Intent is important to consider as a builder. Think about what you intend to create here and write that down. And think about how you can create it in a way that extends our humanity rather than restricting it.
It’s just our experiment
As I think about this, I come back to a video of the Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki and his response to students showing him how machine learning and synthetic media can be used. After a demonstration of the new software and animation it created, Miyazaki says, “I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting, whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever … I’m utterly disgusted.”
The student replies: “This is just our experiment.”
The response to Miyazaki is exactly what we have been saying in tech for too long,“it’s just an experiment”. From startup founders to Mark Zuckerberg, this needs to change — — it’s about the culture we have built in and around startups where we don’t talk about the broader implications of what we build. The process that we have perfected over the last twenty years is one of rapid and agile experimentation. We tell entrepreneurs to find a need, test, and trial until they find a solution to that need, move fast, and break things. Yes, betas work; our method is a process of induction, right out of the playbook of the scientific method. Yet we need to insert a framework of intentionality into that process so that at the end of our experiments, we have a perspective on how this technology extends our species. What is the purpose of this technology? Can this be a bicycle for the mind or not?
As we create a new distributed layer to the web, build tools and hardware that transforms our cities, and recreate how we work, live, and die, we need to consider purpose. A new era of technology is emerging with all the promise that we will learn from the mistakes of web one and two and that we can create bicycles for our minds. The way up is the way down.
Thanks to the betaworks team for inspiration and editing. And to Roger McNamee for conversations and inspiration.
Since publishing this post I published the second post about the new areas of tech we are focussed on at betaworks. I also found a few key related posts to this one. First this one on Tech’s Two Philosophies by Ben Thompson, I cant believe I missed this one, very relevant. And this post on designs lost generation by Mike Monteiro, in particular his emphasis on agency and why everyone who influences the products you use is a designer.
