Our Internet
Protocols, Artificial Creativity, and Tiny Internets
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
A native internet protocol for social media:
The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets) [..] we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society.
@jack | 6 minutes
AI and I: The Age of Artificial Creativity:
AI tools are improving fast. In the near future, a lot of the work we consider today as intrinsically manual will feel cumbersome. The same way we look back at the tedious processes our predecessors had to endure, future creators and knowledge workers will ask themselves: “Did they really use to do that manually?”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff—Ness Labs | 14 minutes
[TI-01] our internet:
[W]e need to be able to shape [the internet] like a place we want to inhabit, control our belongings (like our digital identities), and have communal say in public, shared places (our social parks and local cafe blogs). Partially because of the limitless nature and partially because making homes is not profitable, the internet is hard to cultivate into a flourishing, thriving community. In most internet spaces, we’re told to stay in our boxes, made to inhabit spaces we can’t change.
Spencer Chang—spencer's paradoxes | 5 minutes
🎧 Listening
R&D & Industrial Research Labs:
The number of big inventions that we expected to get in half a century—at the pace at which things were pilling up before 1870—we get them in a decade after 1870, and then they keep coming [..] So I have a shift in the way the worlds works; I look around and say: "what institutional things changed then?"; and the obvious thing is the modern corporation to develop, deploy and diffuse new technologies; is the industrial research lab.
Noah Smith, Brad DeLong—Hexapodia | minutes
No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A:
In the tech industry, this relatively small acquisition of a relatively small company in what looks like a peripheral space might give you dominance in the Whole New Thing, which is obviously what happened when Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp [..] In tech, the New Thing that is a completely different thing, yet is your fundamental competitive threat, happens every 10 years.
Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 38 minutes
ChatGPT (at normal speed):
AI, then, would be to content production what the Internet was to consumption; there was a big shift where anyone could publish, and then there was a switch to zero, where the actual publishing itself is free. It costs money right now, but you see the trap that we're going on right now, and what does it mean when content production is basically infinite?
Ben Thompson, James Allworth—Exponent | 65 minutes