smgit

I think its to recognize the role of Middle Men. With the tech (and globalization), Middle Men have been getting real fat.

Lina Khan types need solid support and fire power to make a dent.

Have you heard of Karl Marx? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmcUcHZciFM

I don't think this is the future or anyone is boxed in.

Trump & Co are by no measure the sharpest tools in the shed. In Trumps own words they have been up against some really inept people, who have all lost credibility.

Therefore the counter-reaction, which is building, will come, and it won't look like what Trump & Co are used to dealing with in the past. I think that's what interesting about where the story goes next. Whose is going to lead? What are they going to stand for? How are they going to organize? Its an opportunity for the best in America to shine.

Its the environment that compounds the complexity. Go down the list of Largest companies by revenue in the US and 8 in top 20 are related to "health" - are they running hospitals? are they pharma companies? No.

They run pharmacy benefits management, health insurance and drug distribution.

The estimate is 4-5 Trillion flows throw these firms. Which is larger than the GDP of India. So this gigantic structure has emerged that doesn't really make too much profit btw (very similar to Amazon Platform Economics) but is layer upon layer upon layer of cash flow passing through middlemen.

Drastic change requires new ideas about what do we do about all these middlemen who shape the environment on top of which everything exists.

Its like expecting farm animals to keep track of how the farm works, as the farm gets more and more sophisticated in animal domestication and exploitation. The individual action argument was weak 10 years ago and its worthless today.

The is a Systemic problem. Doesn't matter what the individuals do.

Its the McDonaldization problem[1] that sociologists used to talk about when McDonalds was conquering the world.

And then they stopped talking about it, cause no one has come up with a model that not just survives side by side, but replaces the McDonalds model.

Everyone just ends up copying that model, cause it did produce results no one had seen before. Laws and regulations evolve to help that model out. Investing more and more in that model becomes automatic.

Restaurant count kept multiplying, franchises were willing to spend more and more on the best real estate with highest foot traffic UPFRONT. Costs of running things kept falling, thanks to all these accumulating network effect/economies of scale. Price stays low. All fantastic right? To the point people started asking why can't the McDonalds model feed the world? And naturally anyone who was very happy with their profits and fries would start assuming it could.

Only once you start digging into that question, do you start seeing how their success at optimizing for a few specific variables really well, comes at the cost of all the other things they don't optimize for. Their success is not possible without rising external costs.

As a reaction there are nows lots of restaurants that survive with alternative models that optimize for other things. But no one has taken down the McDonalds model yet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvL6XDq0BQ

He has to announce some bullshit every day to Capture Attention or someone else is going to get the Attention. And that puts pressure on him to keep announcing things, more than anything else.

Given how the Attention Economy works Content keeps exploding, but eyeballs and time to consume it all don't grow at the same rate, so post frequency and absurdity of the posts shall grow with time. Keep count.

Product is usually a risky cash sink if your experience is services. You haven't mentioned how big your business is, but if its small split the costs of the experiment with larger firms. Pitch your plan to them. If you can raise 3-6 months of funding for a team then go for it.

Not really. See what Claude Shannon has to say about channel capacity of what your brain can digest if Grok finds 8 million things that are happening currently that might be interesting to you.

You can also thank the arrival of social media for amplifying delusions - "You think I am wrong or stupid?? Then how did I get so many Likes/Views/Followers"

With that population scale delusion amp working 24x7, we get the most over ambitious attention craving people rising up the food chain faster than they usually could. But speed is useless in ecosystem evolution. Anything moving faster than the rest of the system will run into issues faster too.

He was in a different location initially. He eventually got access to the sim. So every process requiring sms verification became a roadblock.

I have an Indian colleague whose dad was in some kind of coma for few months after an accident. He had a real crazy time keeping the house running. His dad's number was attached to all kinds of bills - electricity, gas, milk, water, internet, cable, newspapers etc. Most of the services would send a verification sms to his dad's phone for any kind of interaction. No one knew the password. And it turned into a major nightmare. It wasn't just a question of paying the bills. Lot of these services had to be shutdown or have settings changed temporarily. And each one had a different set of documents/processes required to prove he was a relative.

Don't have to hope - https://sociology.plus/glossary/circulation-of-elites/

This is all pretty crazy cause Americans don't buy Ads on American platforms to influence Americans or anyone else. It's really deep stuff as always on Rogan.

Whats educational here is to look into how Howard Hughes unraveled. Its not just a story about Howard Hughes, but how all the people around him who were mesmerized by him just went along for the ride.

The only difference is Howard Hughes was an introvert.

While Elon is an extrovert and in lives in the age of social media where likes/follower count amplify self delusion of the entire herd.

Read some history of the Gilded Age.

What happened to Rockefeller, Carnegie and JP Morgan? It wasn't the plebs and their jabbering (see muckrakers) that directly took them down, though that jabbering did help give an unusual dude from the NY aristocracy named Teddy(who couldn't stand the muckrakers) political cover to move against them.

Also worth reading about the 2 elections preceding Teddy's fascinating rise to power, where the oligarchy bought the Presidency.

People are a protected species. Everyone has limitations in solving every problem in the universe that lands in their lap. And those limited ways of solving problems tend to create new problems. Therefore people are constantly protected like a cattle herd whether they realize it or not.

How protected you will only begin to understand if you study the history of Institutions.

Pick any Institution (Central Bank, FDIC, EPA, FDA, NTSB, FEC etc etc) and specifically look at what triggers prompted their emergence in history.

Meta has an operating margin of 54%.

For comparison, the average tech company runs on far slimmer margins. How does Meta manage such an edge?

The answer lies in their own Annual Report—specifically, the litigation section. They’re facing accusations of regulatory arbitrage, avoiding compliance costs, tracking users outside their platform, over-extracting personal data, inflating ad prices, manipulating ad auctions, under-investing in human moderators, shifting blame to contractors and gig workers, and aggressive tax avoidance.

If you’re going to teach people about what’s possible—like the broken window parable—it's crucial to show the full picture. Otherwise, they remain blind to the choices being made to sustain their narrative.

Platform Economics is very different from how firms worked in the past. People are still waking up to it.

Their signature feature is they are able to squeeze both the buyer and the seller. To whatever extent they want. Thats the key point. No one else has a say.

It only works once you become large enough where both buyer and seller have no other great options. At that stage, you basically control what in traditional economics is called the money supply (ie who owns the printers and decisions on how much will be printed).

Just like large enough Banks historically could exploit both the depositor and borrower. Until they all got regulated after causing never ending chaos.

So the goal becomes - be the largest.

And to be the largest you have to kill competition. To kill competition you have to control the price(undercut every one - make things free), control labor pool (jack up salaries/perks of the best), govts policy (lobbying budget), influence what customers want (marketing spend/bid out the competition in ad auctions etc).

The capex is all about signalling to everyone we are ready to grab land on this new continent. Join our army or get fucked.

Have you checked the Balance sheet? These companies are basically money printers.

Money printers have special status in economics, they don't have to worry about printing cause its always someone else who pays the price for any unintended consequences.

Google - Platform Economy externalities.

They know it enables money laundering. They don't care because their goal is enriching themselves any which way possible.

This is standard practice where they re-frame the issue to find the largest number of cows (customers, investors, employees) to milk.

Like with social media they spent years claiming they were defenders of Freedom of Speech. With 2008 Subprime mortgages it was about how they are going to provide housing for everyone.

These are extremely ambitious, have too much energy but are basically stupid people. Its a bad combo and society gives them too much space to exist.

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"

Platforms have realized this long ago, that as info explodes people pay attention to the easiest things to pay attention too not the hardest, so they move resources to designing things like reels and shorts and tweets etc etc. Every earnings call they gloat about how shorter form content is exploding and how thrilled they are about it.

The long form stuff only holds attention of the majority if you keep throwing Novelty on the table every two sentences.

Platforms are basically running an animal domestication program, where people have been rewarded with high rep and status for extremely low cognitive work.

So that entire group that has benefited doesn't see any need for nuance and depth in anything. "Cause look how many likes, clicks, views and followers I have accumulated without it"

Santiago Boys is a decent podcast about that whole experiment. And a good lesson in why economic, social and political issues can't be solved through purely technical or financial means.

They specifically talk about Dark Tech. So if you have a friend in an important position within a telco you can get certain things done irrespective of what the law or the govt or anyone else says. Replace telco with bank, port, govt dept etc.

So anyone can come up with a tech solution but if there is someone sitting in a telco/bank/military/intel agency/industry body/political party/religious org/foreign govt who doesn't like you they can screw with the plan. They don't even have to coordinate. All the counter reactions across all those spaces, to whatever you try to do will create an ever growing obstacle.

And therefore the lesson is you can't really pull anything major unless you have made friends everywhere.

And history is full of technologists and financial engineers who get carried away by they own individual success, and start hallucinating about how many friends they actually have.

Some one has to pay for those Ads.

That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem.

So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble.

Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.

"original defining primitive" of the web makes no sense and has diminishing value as info explodes while the 3 inch chimp brain everyone has does not.

Nazi's required hyperinflation to get the plebs on their side. This is a bit different in the sense bread prices aren't jumping by a million bucks every week. And Nazi Germany of 1930s was a much smaller country with nascent democracy (purging few hundred important people) much more complex today.

Its more like when Ergdogan, Modi etc initially came to power.

They too entered with lot of thunder and lightning but it didnt do any magic, cause at the end of the day these are massive dynamic complex systems and any radical change has unpredictable costs and consequences that only show up with time.

Give these decision a month or two to play out. Don't just sit and keep refreshing your feed and expect any reaction that is effective to take shape instantly. Its a stupid expectation

They can only make "discoveries" in 2-10 days time frames. Cuz if it requires 2 years to figure something out, what are they supposed to talk about on X or on the podcast circuit? This shithead is so stupid I can't even imagine what kind of circus animals he has working for him.

Don't worry people will "cool" on him too.

Its the inevitable end state when you give anyone a mic and allow them to broadcast to the entire chimp troupe forever.

As Michael Goldhaber reminded us at the dawn of the Internet - people have limited Attention to pay to anything but unlimited capacity to receive Attention.

So he will keep talking. Less people will pay attention. And the more the algos promote his content the more the backlash will build.

The design principles of Who gets the Mic in a broadcast(1 to All) environment, who we pay attention too, and for how long are still a work in progress and have a long way to go.

The privacy aspect while important given the Uganda example, feels like its really part of a much larger ecosystem.

The Platforms store, buy, sell, trade, exchange personal data for Attention Capture which is then traded for cash or reputation/status in the real economy. There are people who think the Attention economy might just replace the real economy if your rep on a platform gets you more stuff than someone who has a whole lot of cash in the bank.

Right now the platforms through their algos (feeding on personal data) mediate what people pay Attention too and how global human Attention is distributed.

Everyone needs some base level of attention/love/desire/intimacy etc which is tied to their self esteem. If people don't get that base level in healthy ways, or aren't taught properly how to get it they start acting up. Platforms have supplanted normal human ways people get this stuff by drip feeding them likes, follower, click counts, karma pts etc

And then there are people like Trump and Elon who don't have base level need but a limitless need for Attention/love/respect. And the platforms again supply these kind of people too. Cause they get free user generated content in return which is used for further attention capture.

Encryption and privacy are not going to solve anything until we have better theories about Attention. Its hard to fall in love with anyone if their Attention is under constant assault.