2026-01-02
Lecture Friday: A Post-American, Enshittification-resistant Internet
A great successor talk roughly 15 years in the making. I've linked before to his talk, The Coming War On General Computation. You don't need to watch that talk before this one. It's just there in case you want to go back and understand the history.
The thing I think that's really helped the concept being explained in all those years, is being able to now list decades of concrete examples as he does. Everyone complains about having too many texting apps. When you explain that there's no good technical reason the Discord app can't send messages to WhatApp or WeChat users (we used to text SMS back and forth between dozens of phone manufacturers just fine), I've found some people start to get it. People live and die by stories. Explaining concepts leaves too much to the imagination. If you explained any of these now real things to people as hypotheticals, you're labeled an alarmist since it doesn't align their their existing worldview. Surely such a thing could never happen because…
Well it did. And it continues to. Worse, it's accelerating.