Multiplayer
Marc Andreessen, plus the Multiplayer Game, and its future rules
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer:
I think we should make a practice of revisiting the founding ideas of the technology industry—certainly the 1990s of John Perry Barlowand Tim May— but also the 1950’s and 1960’s of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, the 1920’s of David Sarnoff and Philo Farnsworth, the 1890’s of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, even the 1500’s of Leonardo da Vinci. I think we should view the unrealized ideas from all those eras as not lost but not yet found.
💪 Building from the shoulders of giants—Noah Smith
When Multiplayer Went Mainstream:
Online, we enjoy a collective illusion that we are beholden only to the worlds we’ve chosen to join, the tribes we’ve chosen to defend, the games we’ve chosen to play. It is this half-illusion of choice that defines the success of so many of the technologies above. [..] As the technology gives us greater access and mobility, it upends a network of physical relationships and contingencies for the poorest and the rich—who often find themselves irrevocably tied to a fallen order.
🧐 The inverse relation between virtual and physical distances—David Phelps
Regulating technology:
‘Tech’, of course, has all of this complexity, but we’re having to work this out a lot more quickly. It took 75 years for seatbelts to become compulsory, but tech has gone from interesting to crucial only in the last five to ten years. That speed means we have to form opinions about things we didn’t grow up with and don’t always understand quite so well as, say, supermarkets.
👩💼 The rules of the game (but what is the game, exactly?)—Benedict Evans
🎧 Listening
The Complexity Economics Revolution:
We live in a world of increasing complexity. Things are changing. They're evolving all the time. That's inherently hard to model because it's a moving target and we don't know where it's going [..] And meanwhile, our technology for modeling it is also increasing rapidly. And the question is, do we have a parity in that arms race? Are we able to model the world well enough to keep up with the accelerating complexity of the world?
J. Doyne Farmer—Complexity
Conflicted:
Our biases are only flaws if you look at the individual. Once you accept that thinking is essentially a collaborative activity, you see that our biases can actually contribute to the intelligence of the group [..] The weak arguments will get weeded out quickly and the strong ones, the most robust ones, will survive. In that sense, confirmation bias is a bug if you think on your own, but a feature if you think as part of the group.
Ian Leslie—EconTalk
Leading for Impact and Rethinking Education:
If you think about Star Trek from an economics point of view (which few people do): everyone in that reality is an explorer, a researcher, an artist, a scientist becasue everything has been automated. Well, to do that there's gonna be certain things we need to do about education to make sure that everyone can operate at the top of the labour pyramid.
Sal Khan—Creative Confidence
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️Our Work
A personal journey of overcomplicating the platform economy narrative, and an invite to start crafting a much simpler narrative of authenticity, uniqueness, and multiplayer success—July 1, The NTWK
📬 Suggestions?
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