BC TECH
Saved by @zmbnski

Observing the public conversation around FB, and the private ones happening among techies and ex-FBers, I think the mutual misunderstanding is worse than when I set out two years (and 500 pages) ago to (in a small way) bridge that gulf.

We're basically fucked.

 The tech world has gotten so huge, self-reinforcing, and insulated from reality they can no longer even vaguely look at themselves (and their actions) as others do. They just live on a different planet than most people.
Conversely, the average tech consumer doesn't understand the technology that has slowly taken over their lives, and their designated emissaries to figure it out--politicians, pundits, regulators, journalists--understand it barely better than they do, and have their own agendas.
To say more than generalities for a moment, here's what I think is likely the core problem.

Techies take weird, improbable visions, and make them realities: some BS pitch deck to a VC, mixed with money and people, really does turn into some novel thing.
Most people work inside a legacy industry that's evolved that way over time (usually for good reasons), and they think about the future via some analogy with their present (which is a function of a long-ago past). The interruption that tech will introduce is often hard to grasp.
We have techies who are technically skilled and motivated, but who (and I'd be the first to admit it) often have narrow educations that don't let them see a bigger picture. And we have people who live in the world who don't understand technological implications. That's our mess.
Let's take a concrete example of how this shakes out. Not sure why I'm doing this, as I'm done with screaming into the FB media tornado, but I'll just go ahead:
Disinformation is not a solvable problem. It is here to stay, forever. Every election in the foreseeable future will feature massive amounts of user-generated disinformation. The only hope is to culturally adapt, as we did to other weird aspects of social media.
Why do I say that?

Facebook & Co. can take on the most egregious disinformation examples, or efforts undertaken by identifiable state actors (maybe), but it will never be able to shut it down entirely.
Assuming some semblance of free speech, ubiquitous online identity, and some amount of engagement-optimized distribution (even if crude and self-selected, like on WhatsApp), and global reach, we will always have it, full stop.
No techie I've spoken to--I'm talking people who've spent years inside FB or TWTR--think it's solvable at scale, and anyone who says so is blowing smoke up your ass.

Why do I feel confident in this assertion (that I'm sure will get trolled)?
Remember privacy? Remember how that was the biggest angle on the FB story, and how many rivers of electrons were spilled in talking about it?

Where'd that end up? Nowhere. We got GDPR, which is pointless, and if anything solidified FB/GOOG's position in Europe. Ditto CCPA.
Privacy didn't get 'solved', we merely shifted culturally to accommodate new notions of it, and now we don't think about it much (even the Privacy Industrial Complex that made a career out of this has pivoted to being a new Disinformation Industrial Complex).
Think I'm being glib and dismissive? Let's take a historical perspective.

If you sat down to a meal in the 80s, and took out a camera and took a photo of your food, while telling everyone you were sending copies to your friends, you'd have been locked up in an insane asylum.
And yet now 'Stories' (which FB ripped from Snap) is basically that, and one of its most popular features.

The Beacon scandal that blew up FB in the late aughts now seems like a joke. People got worked up over that?

We'll read the current disinformation coverage the same way.
You can see the shift in polling by generation cohort. Those raised in a world where smartphones and ubiquitous sharing are just givens think about it very differently.

It's the bridge generation (looks in mirror) that's mostly freaking out about it.

https://t.co/LqB2xNe7Cw
Note, I'm not dismissing disinfo complaints. It's clearly a real problem that's produced human suffering in places like India or Brazil. I'm questioning our ability to do anything about it at scale, while still maintaining the technology that is (i.e. forget Butlerian Jihads).
Nor am I saying there's *nothing* anyone can do about it. FB policing (or trying to anyhow) political advertisers much more severely *is* a solvable problem, and one they should undertake (and be taken to task if they slip). But that gets back to my earlier point....
Which is it's hard for anyone to discern what's worth worrying about with this immense gulf. The techies don't see the bigger picture, the public doesn't see the disruptive vision, and the chattering classes are wrapped up in exploiting the very spectacle they claim to deride.
So, we'll muddle through, as we've always done. It'll get worse before it gets better. Mistakes will be made, and then doubled-down on, again and again.
We as a species are dumb. We don't learn anything, and only technical and scientific knowledge is cumulative.
Doubt me? Compare the conversations on this service with one of Socrates' dialogues. Are we smarter now? More respectful in dialogue, more clever in our conclusions? I don't think so. We (or some us) just know how to make things like smartphones now. Best of luck. We'll need it.

More from Antonio García Martínez

Antonio Garc\xeda Mart\xednez
Antonio García Martínez
@antoniogm
Some math on SF's Prop C:

Current SF spending on homelessness: $380M
Projected revenue from Prop C: $300M
Number of SF homeless: 7,500

Post-C, that means SF will be spending $90k/homeless person.

That's $30K per year *more* than the median SF teacher salary.

I don't get SF.

Note that despite that massive spending, SF has one of the lowest 'sheltered rate' among big US cities. SF homeless isn't particularly high, per capita, but more of them are on the street than elsewhere (which is why the problem looks bad).

Within that context, Prop C is a vote to spend even more, to the point the city is paying (per homeless person) just under what Google pays (in cash) to new college hires. And yet these people are on the street somehow.

I don't claim to understand the dizzyingly complex urban policy issues around homelessness. But neither do most SF taxpayers, and I think they'd like to know just how we got here.

For some coverage on Prop C (where I got the spend numbers
Antonio Garc\xeda Mart\xednez
Antonio García Martínez
@antoniogm
This essay about the stripping of our once-broad civic identities down to purely political ones engaged in existential combat...is getting shredded because readers can only perceive it as a political statement from the tribe they're in existential combat with.


This isn't a novel idea, and in fact more than one commenter has made some version of this point recently, without (apparently) this level of scorn.

This is a reaction to the author's politics, which ironically lends credence to the original argument.

Another negative reaction is: You're a senator. Do something!

And another point of the essay is that we can't rely on a political system to forge our communities or sense of belonging for us. That can only come from an engaged citizenry.

Thus, another very ironic reaction.

This critique is more self-aware. It's also a trendy post-modern deconstruction of the argument: everything is power relations, 'all politics is identity politics', etc.


In brief: Apolitical identity is impossible, and we're cursed to debate the meaning of small-town football games...forever.

Not the same ironic backhanded endorsement of the argument, but what a future that implies.
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ashkan soltani
ashkan soltani
@ashk4n
BREAKING: @CommonsCMS @DamianCollins just released previously sealed #Six4Three @Facebook documents:

Some random interesting tidbits:

1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition


2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:

Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.


3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.

4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.

https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x
TECH
John Horton
John Horton
@johnjhorton
What happens when a skill you have becomes obsolete? No, this isn't a R vs. Stata thread---it's a thread about a working paper w/ @sonnytambe!
https://t.co/w6nLf1tnST


The skill we look at is Adobe Flash, which @apple decided to no longer support back in 2010, which in turn caused demand/interest to plummet, as measured on @StackOverflow and in online labor markets, one of which is our empirical context


Despite the big fall-off in Flash jobs posted, very little else appeared to change in the market for Flash skills: wages for Flash jobs didn't fall, jobs didn't become easier to fill & openings weren't inundated with out-of-work Flash programmers


What happened was that (a) new entrants stopped specializing in Flash and (b) at least some existing Flash specialists started moving to other skills. In short, the demand shock quickly became a supply shock


At the level of the individual Flash worker, using a matched sample, we find (a) no fall-off in their wages, (b) some decline on-platform hours-worked. The most-focused on Flash workers had substantial increases in application intensity and a movement towards new skills
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Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen
@andrewchen
1/ new essay: What's next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that's what. Co-authored with @ljin18 https://t.co/fgKbrHTnH5. A short thread 👇

2/ Marketplace startups have done incredibly well over the first few decades of the internet, reinventing the way we shop for goods, but have been less successful services. It's bc services are complex, subjective, fragmented, and often in real life. Makes it hard

3/ There's been 4 major eras at making the service economy work online. The Listings Era, the unbundled Craiglist era, the Uber for X era, and the Managed Marketplace era


4/ Each era has added more value than the last, and utilized technology innovations, from internet to social / "read/write web" to mobile. The "Unbundling Craigslist" era was particularly epic at generating startup ideas


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Michael Dearing
Michael Dearing
@mcgd
An irony of facebook's situation.

Sheryl got her MBA at Harvard. One of the most famous cases (Extra Strength Tylenol) in one of the most famous classes (Business History) she took: in 1982, someone put cyanide in Extra Strength Tylenol capsules and killed 7 people in Chicago.

What do you do when someone turns your product into a weapon? When they use the system you built to harm? James Burke, CEO of J&J, was shockingly open with the public, he pulled the product and made significant packaging changes to make product safer (but not tamper-proof).

He over-shared every step along the way re investigation, redesign, stood up as both CEO and human. The reintroduction of new Extra Strength Tylenol succeeded. Burke saved the brand.

But four years later it happened again. A killer put cyanide in the capsules, this time a woman in Yonkers died. Same CEO, Burke, pulled the product again, completely changed the form factor from capsule to caplet and relaunched *again*. It worked *again*. How'd they do that?

Burke (CEO) tapped J&Js goodwill bank account w/ the public. Two big withdrawals from that bank account in four years + 8 dead bodies! But his honesty, openness, humanity (choked up about the deaths more than once), humility kept the goodwill bank balance positive the whole time.
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foone
foone
@Foone
An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.


These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)


and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.


They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!


They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
FUN
Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen
@andrewchen
👇Thread.

Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!


This was a deck that I created on my (longish) interview process with @a16z. It was a long path, starting with meeting folks at the firm 10 years ago. But the purpose of the deck was to explain how I would use my superpower in an investing context

Here's what I explain in the deck. As investors (whether angel or VC) we're often confronted with an up-and-to-the-right graph. Is it going to go up? Or down?


One solution to forecast these growth curves is the Growth Accounting Framework, where you add up New+Reactivated and subtract churned users. In each time period that gives you the difference in monthly actives.


The problem with this is that it's a lagging metric, not a leading one. We need to go one level deeper and look at the underlying loops that drive these numbers, to understand the quality.
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