Remains of the Day
NOTE: I’d been working on this piece on and off for a few weeks while trying to move to NYC and settle into my new apartment, and just as I was about to publish it, Elon rate-limited Twitter and so, sensing a moment of weakness, Meta pulled up its launch date for Threads to yesterday. This piece doesn’t cover Threads directly, nor does it talk about the rate-limiting fiasco. It’s focused on why I think Twitter got so much worse over the past year. I thought about holding off and reworking it entirely to incorporate all that happened this week, but in the end I decided that it was cleaner to publish this one as is. If Twitter hadn’t botched so much over this past year, Threads wouldn’t matter. Still, like past pieces I’ve written on topics related to Twitter, you can apply a lot of the ideas in this piece to analyzing Threads’ prospects. And I’ll push a follow-up piece with my specific reactions to and predictions for Threads soon-ish. Follow me on Substack to get a note when that drops. “I shall be writing about how cities work in real life, because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices and principles will deaden these attributes.” — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Today, I come to bury Twitter, not to appraise him. Oh, who am I kidding, I’m mostly here to appraise how it blew up. For years, I thought Twitter would persist like a cockroach because: At its core, it’s a niche experience that alienates most but strongly appeals to a few Those few who love Twitter comprise an influential intellectual and cultural cohort, and at internet scale, even niches can be substantial in size I’ve written before in Status as a Service or The Network’s the Thing about how Twitter hit upon some narrow product-market fit despite itself. It has never seemed to understand why it worked for some people or what it wanted to be, and how those two were related, if at all. But in a twist of fate that is often more of a factor in finding product-market fit than most like to admit, Twitter's indecisiveness protected it from itself. Social alchemy at some scale can be a mysterious thing. When you’re uncertain which knot is securing your body to the face of a mountain, it’s best not to start undoing any of them willy-nilly. Especially if, as I think was the case for Twitter, the knots were tied by someone else (in this case, the users of Twitter themselves). But Elon Musk is not one to trust someone else’s knots. He’s made his fortune by disregarding other people’s work and rethinking things from first principles. To his credit, he’s worked miracles in categories most entrepreneurs would never dream of tackling, from electric cars to rockets to satellite internet service. There may be only a handful of people who could’ve pulled off Tesla and SpaceX, and maybe only one who could’ve done both. When the game is man versus nature, he’s an obvious choice. When it comes to man versus human nature, on the other hand… This past year, for the first time, I could see the end of the road for Twitter. Not in an abstract way; I felt its decline. Don’t misunderstand me; Twitter will persist in a deteriorated state, perhaps indefinitely. However, it's already a pale shadow of what it was at its peak. The cool kids are no longer sitting over in bottle service knocking out banger tweets. Instead, the timeline is filled with more and more strangers the bouncer let in to shill their tweetstorms, many of them Twitter Verified accounts who paid the grand fee of $8 a month for the privilege. In the past year, so many random meetings I have with one-time Twitter junkies begin with a long sigh and then a question that is more lamentation than anything else: “How did Twitter get so bad?” It’s sad, but it’s also a fascinating case study. The internet is still so young that it’s still momentous to see a social network of some scale and lifespan suddenly lose its vitality. The regime change to Elon and his brain trust and the drastic changes they’ve made constitute a natural experiment we don’t see often. Usually, social networks are killed off by something exogenous, usually another, newer social network. Twitter went out and bought Chekhov’s gun in the first act and use it to shoot itself in the foot in the third act. Zuckerberg can now extend his quip about Twitter being a clown car that fell into a gold mine. In The Rise and Decline of Nations, Mancur Olson builds on his previous book The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups to discuss how and why groups form. What are the incentives that guide their behavior? One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson. However, inertia works both before and after product-market fit. Once a group has formed, it tends to persist even after the collective good it came together to provide is no longer needed. The same is true of social networks. As anyone who has tried to start one knows, it’s not easy to jump-start a social graph. But if you manage by some miracle to conjure one from the void, and if you provide that group with a reasonable set of ways for everyone to hang out, network effects can keep the party going long after last call. The group inertia that is your enemy before you’ve coalesced a community is your friend after it’s formed. Anyone who’s ever hosted a party and provided booze knows it’s often hard to get the last stragglers to leave. We are a social species. No social network epitomizes this more than Twitter. It’s not that Twitter was a group of users that assembled for the explicit goal of producing some collective good. Its rise was too emergent to fit into any such directed narrative. But the early years of inertial drag (for years it was literally inert, inertia and inert sharing the same etymological root) followed by later years of inertial momentum fit the broad arc of Olson’s group theory. I revisit Olson and Twitter’s history because the specifics of how Twitter found product-market fit are critical to understanding its current dissolution. Social networks are path dependent. This is especially true in the West where social networks are largely ad-subsidized and where they’re almost all built around a singular dominant architecture of an infinite scrolling feed optimized for serving ads on a mobile phone. The path each network took to product-market fit selected for a specific user base. As with any community, but especially ones forced to cluster in close proximity in a singular feed, as is common in the West, the people making up the community go a long way towards determining its tenor and values. Its vibes. The composition of its users then determines how conducive that network is to what types of advertising and at what scale. Finally, closing the circle of life, those ad dynamics then influence the network’s middle age evolution as a service. Money may not begin the conversation, that starts with the users, but money gets the final word. Of all the social networks that achieved some level of scale in this first era of social media, perhaps no other was tried and abandoned by as many users as Twitter. Except for the extremely online community in which I’m deeply embedded (and that I suspect many of my readers are a part of), most normal, well-adjusted humans churned out of Twitter long ago.One of the trickiest things about projecting off of early growth rates for startups in tech is that even fads can generate massive absolute numbers early on if marketed broadly to a global audience. Without looking at early retention and churn rates, you may extrapolate a much larger terminal user base size than will actually stick around. Think about eBay or Groupon, for example. This same caution needs to be applied to Threads; one of the central questions is whether Twitter reached all the people who enjoy microblogging or whether Meta has some magic formula that will allow it to scale to a much larger population. That’s not ideal from a business perspective, but the upside is that those who made it through that great filter selected hard into Twitter’s unique experience. Most sane people don’t enjoy seeing a bunch of random bursts of text from strangers one after the other, but those that do really really love it. And, despite Twitter’s notoriously slow rate of shipping new features over the years, it eventually offered just enough knobs and dials for its users to wrestle their timelines into a fever dream of cacophonous public discourse that hasn’t been replicated elsewhere. More than any other social network, Twitter was one its users seized control of and crafted into something workable for themselves. To its heaviest and most loyal users, it felt at times like a co-op. Recent events remind us it isn’t. Out of a petri dish that was lifeless for years emerged a culture of creatives, trolls, humorists, politicians, and other public intellectuals screaming at each other in 140 and later 280-character bursts, with even more users quietly gawking from the sideline. This so-called new town square was a 24/7 nightclub for real-world introverts but textual extroverts. My tribe. This was as entertaining a spectacle as it was shaky a business. Twitter ads have always been hilariously random, and it’s to the credit of the desirable demographics of many of its users that advertisers continued to stick around to have their brands paraded between sometimes questionable, often horrifyingly offensive tweets. But its poor economics as a business shielded it from direct competition. Even if you could recreate its nerdy gladiatorial vibe, why would you? For years it seemed Twitter might persist in this delicate equilibrium, a Galapagos tortoise sunning on an island all to itself, surrounded by ocean as far as the eye could see. Back to Olson: “Selective incentives make indefinite survival feasible. Thus those organizations for collective action, at least for large groups, that can emerge often take a long time to emerge, but once established they usually survive until there is a social upheaval or some other form of violence or instability.” Well, “violence and instability” finally came to Twitter in the form of Elon Musk’s ownership. In almost every way, his stewardship has been the polar opposite of the previous regime’s. Politically, to be sure. But more notably, whereas Twitter was previously known as a company that rarely shipped any substantial changes, new Twitter seemed for months to ship things before having thought them through or even QA’ing them. Random bugs seem to pop up in the app all the time, and changes were pushed out and then reversed within the day. Many a day this past year, Twitter has been the main character of the types of drama it used to serve as the forum to discuss. In classic Twitter fashion, the irony is that it now seems to be in decline not from doing too little but from doing too much. It turns out the way to overcome Olson’s group inertia is to run in swinging a machete, cutting wires, firing people, unplugging computers, flipping switches, tweaking parameters, anything to upset an ecosystem hanging on by a delicate balance. It was, if nothing else, a fascinating natural experiment in how to nudge a network out of longstanding homeostasis. Given that Musk ended up having to overpay for Twitter by upwards of 4X, thanks to Delaware Chancery Court, it’s not at all surprising he and his new brain trust might choose to take an active hand in trying to salvage as much of his purchase price as possible. But this heavy-handed top-down management approach runs counter to how Twitter achieved its stable equilibrium. In this way, Musk’s reign at Twitter resembles one of James Scott’s authoritarian high modernist failures. Twitter may have seemed like an underachieving mess before, but its structure, built up piece by piece by users following, unfollowing, liking, muting, and blocking over years and years in a continuous dialogue with the feed algorithm? That structure had a deceptive but delicate stability. Twitter and its users had assembled a complex but functional community, Jane Jacobs style. Every piece of duct tape and every shim put there by a user had a purpose. It may have been Frankensteinian in its construction, but it was our little monster. This democratic evolution has long been part of Twitter’s history. Many of Twitter’s primary innovations like hashtags, much of its terminology like the word tweets, seemed to come bottom-up from the community of users and developers. This may have capped its scalability; a lot of its syntax has always seemed obtuse (who can forget how you had to put a period before a username if it opened a tweet so that the network wouldn’t treat it as a reply and hide it in the timeline). But, conversely, the service seemed to mold itself around the users who stuck with its peculiar vernacular. After all, they were often the ones who came up with it. Olson again: Stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time. What established the boundaries of Twitter? Two things primarily. The topology of its graph, and the timeline algorithm. The two are so entwined you could consider them to be a single item. The algorithm determines how the nodes of that graph interact. The machine learning algorithms have been crucial to scaling our largest social media feeds. They are among the most enormous social institutions in human history, but we don't often think of them that way. It's often remarked upon that Facebook is larger than any country or government, but it should be remarked upon more? I think it's so shocking and horrifying to so many people that they prefer to block it out of their mind. In a literal sense, Twitter has always just been whose tweets show up in your timeline and in what order. In the modern world, machine learning algorithms that mediate who interacts with whom and how in social media feeds are, in essence, social institutions. When you change those algorithms you might as well be reconfiguring a city around a user while they sleep. And so, if you were to take control of such a community, with years of information accumulated inside its black box of an algorithm, the one thing you might recommend is not punching a hole in the side of that black box and inserting a grenade. So of course that seems to have been what the new management team did. By pushing everyone towards paid subscriptions and kneecapping distribution for accounts who don’t pay, by switching a TikTok style algorithm, new Twitter has redrawn the once stable “borders” of Twitter’s communities. This new pay-to-play scheme may not have altered the lattice of the Twitter graph, but it has changed how the graph is interpreted. There’s little difference. My For You feed shows me less from people I follow, so my effective Twitter graph is diverging further and further from my literal graph. Each of us sits at the center of our Twitter graph like a spider in its web built out of follows and likes, with some empty space made of blocks and mutes. We can sense when the algorithm changes. Something changed. The web feels deadened. I’ve never cared much about the presence or not of a blue check by a user’s name, but I do notice when tweets from people I follow make up a smaller and smaller percentage of my feed. It’s as if neighbors of years moved out from my block overnight, replaced by strangers who all came knocking on my front door carrying not a casserole but a tweetstorm about how to tune my ChatGPT and MidJourney prompts. I tried switching to the Following from the For You feed, but it seems the Following feed is strictly reverse chronological. This is a serious regression to the early days of Twitter when you had to check your feed frequently to hope to catch a good tweet from any single person you followed. We tried this before; it was terrible then, it’s terrible now. This weakening of the follow works in the other direction, too. Many people who follow me tell me they don’t see as many of my tweets as they used to. All my followers are accumulated social capital that seem to have been rendered near worthless by algorithmic deflation. With every social network, one of the most important questions is how much information the structure of the graph itself contains. Because Twitter allows one-way following, its graph has always skewed towards expressing at least something about the interests of its users. Unlike on Facebook, I didn’t blindly follow people I knew on Twitter. The Twitter graph, more than most, is an interest graph assembled from a bunch of social graphs standing on each other’s shoulders wearing an interest graph costume. Not perfect, but not nothing. The new Twitter algorithm tossed that out. If you’re going to devalue the Twitter graph’s core primitive, the act of following someone, you’d better replace it with something great. The name of the new algorithmic feed hints at what they tried: For You. It’s nomenclature borrowed from TikTok, the entertainment sensation of the past few years. I’ve written tens of thousands of words on TikTok in recent years (my three essays on TikTok are here, here, and here), and I won’t rehash it all here. What prompted my fascination with the app was that it attacked the Western social media incumbents at an oblique angle. In TikTok and the Sorting Hat, I wrote: The idea of using a social graph to build out an interest-based network has always been a sort of approximation, a hack. You follow some people in an app, and it serves you some subset of the content from those people under the assumption that you’ll find much of what they post of interest to you. It worked in college for Facebook because a bunch of hormonal college students are really interested in each other. It worked in Twitter, eventually, though it took a while. Twitter's unidirectional follow graph allowed people to pick and choose who to follow with more flexibility than Facebook's initial bi-directional friend model, but Twitter didn't provide enough feedback mechanisms early on to help train its users on what to tweet. The early days were filled with a lot of status updates of the variety people cite when criticizing social media: "nobody cares what you ate for lunch." But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it? The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale. Take a social network like Twitter: the one-way follow graph structure is well-suited to interest graph construction, but the problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow. You may enjoy Gruber’s thoughts on Apple but not his Yankees tweets. Or my tweets on tech but not on film. And so on. You can try to use Twitter Lists, or mute or block certain people or topics, but it’s all a big hassle that few have the energy or will to tackle. This is more commonly accepted now, but back in 2020 when I wrote this piece, TikTok’s success was still viewed with a lot of skepticism and puzzlement. Since then, we’ve seen Instagram and Twitter both try emulating TikTok’s strategy. Both Instagram and Twitter now serve much less content from people you follow and more posts selected by machine learning algorithms trying to guess your interests. Instagram has been more successful in part because it has formats like Stories that keep content from one’s follows prominent in the interface. There’s social capital of value embodied in the follow graph, and arguably it’s easier for Instagram to preserve much of that while copying TikTok than it is for TikTok to build a social graph like Instagram. But that’s a topic for another day. Twitter is the app on trial today. And of all Twitter’s recent missteps, I think this was the most serious unforced error. For a variety of design reasons, Twitter will likely never be as accurate an interest graph as, say, TikTok is an entertainment network. As I’ve written about before in Seeing Like An Algorithm, Twitter’s interface doesn’t capture sentiment, both positive and negative, as cleanly, as TikTok. Let’s start with positive sentiment. On this front, Twitter is…fine? It’s not for lack of usage. I’ve used Twitter a ton over more than a decade now, I’ve followed and unfollowed thousands of accounts, liked even more tweets, and posted plenty of tweets and links. I suspect one issue is that many tweets don’t contain enough context to be accurately classified automatically. How would you classify a tweet by Dril? But perhaps even more damning for Twitter is its inability to see negative sentiment. Allowing users to pay for better tweet distribution leaves the network vulnerable to adverse selection. That’s why the ability to capture negative sentiment, especially passive negative sentiment, is so important to preserving a floor of quality for the Timeline. Unfortunately, capturing that passive disapproval is something Twitter has never done well. In Seeing Like an Algorithm, I wrote about how critical it was for a service’s design to help machine learning algorithms “see” the necessary feedback from users, both positive and negative. That essay’s title was inspired by Scott’s Seeing Like a State which described how high modernist governments depended on systems of imposed legibility for a particular authoritarian style of governance. Modern social networks lean heavily on machine learning algorithms to achieve sufficient signal-to-noise in feeds. To manually manage complex adaptive systems at the scale of modern social media networks would be impossible otherwise. One of the critiques of authoritarian technocracies is that they quickly lose touch with the people they rule over. It's no surprise that such governments have also looked at machine learning algorithms paired with the surveillance breadth of the internet as a potential silver bullet to allow them to scale their governance. The two entities that most epitomize each of these both come out of China: Bytedance and the CCP. The latter, in particular, has long been obsessed with cybernetics, despite having followed it down a disastrous policy rabbit hole before. But these cybernetic systems, in the Norbert Wiener sense, only work well if their algorithms see enough user sentiment and see it accurately. Just as Scott felt high modernism failed again and again because those systems overly simplified complex realities, Twitter’s algorithm operates with serious blind spots. Since every output is an input in a cybernetic system, failure to capture all necessary inputs leads to noise in the timeline. Twitter doesn’t see a lot of passive negative sentiment; it’s a structural blind spot. In a continuous scrolling interface with multiple tweets on screen at any one time, it’s hard to tell disapproval from apathy or even mild approval because the user will just scroll past a tweet for any number of reasons. This leads to a For You page that feels like it’s missing my friends and awkwardly misinterpreting my interests. Would you like yet another tweetstorm on AI and how it can change your life? No, well too bad, have another. And another. For someone who claims to be worried about the dangers of AI, Elon’s new platform sure seems to be pushing us to play with it. In the rush to copy TikTok, many Western social networks have misread how easy it is to apply lessons of a very particular short video experience to social feeds built around other formats. If you’re Instagram Reels and your format and interface are a near carbon copy, then sure, applying the lessons of my three TikTok essays is straightforward. But if you’re Twitter, a continuous scrolling feed of short textual content, you’re dealing with a different beast entirely. Even TikTok sometimes seems to misunderstand that its strength is its purity of function as an interest/entertainment graph. Its attempts to graft a social graph onto that have struggled because social networking is a different problem space entirely. Pushing me to follow my friends on TikTok muddies what is otherwise a very clear product proposition. Social networking is a complex global maximum to solve for. In contrast, entertaining millions of people with an individual channel personalized to each of them is an agglomeration of millions of local maximums. TikTok’s interface paired with ByteDance’s machine learning algorithms are perfect for solving the latter but much less well-suited towards social networking. Here’s another way to think about it. The difference between Twitter and an algorithmic entertainment network like TikTok is that you could fairly quickly reconstitute TikTok even without its current graph because its graph is a much less critical input to its algorithm than the user reactions to any random sequence of videos they’re served. If Twitter had to start over without its graph, on the other hand, it would be dead (which speaks to why Twitter clones like BlueSky which are just Twitter minus the graph and with the same clunky onboarding process seem destined for failure). The new For You feed gives us a partial taste of what that might look like, and it's not pretty. I ran a report recently on all the accounts I follow on Twitter. I hadn’t realized how many of them had been dormant for months now. Many were people whose tweets used to draw me to the timeline regularly. I hesitate to unfollow them; perhaps they’ll return? But I’m fooling myself. They won’t. Inertia again. A user at rest tends to stay at rest, and a user that flees tends to be gone for good. Even worse, many accounts I follow look to have continued to tweet regularly over the past year. I just don’t see their tweets anymore. The changes to the Twitter algorithm bulldozed over a decade’s worth of Chesterton fences in a few months. The other prominent mistake of the Elon era is more commonly cited, and I tend to think it’s overrated, but it certainly didn’t help. It’s the type of mistake only a prominent and polarizing figure running a social network could stumble into: his own participation on the platform he owns. The temptation is understandable. If you overpaid for a social network by tens of billions of dollars, why shouldn’t you be able to use it as you please? Why not boost your own tweets and use it as a personal megaphone? Why buy a McLaren if you take it for a spin and total it? He declared that one of his reasons for purchasing Twitter was to restore it to being a free speech platform, so why not speak his mind? More than any tech CEO, he’s become a purity test for one’s technological optimism. His acolytes will follow him, perhaps even literally, to Mars, while his critics consider him the epitome of amoral Silicon Valley hubris. That he is discussed in such simplistic, binary terms is ironic; it exemplifies the nature of discourse on Twitter. It’s no surprise that many Twitter alternatives market themselves simply as Twitter minus Elon (though I suspect most people just want, like me, a Twitter with the same graph but minus the new For You algorithm). But there’s a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of social in play here. Every tweet of his alters the fabric of Twitter so drastically that it’s almost impossible for some users to coexist on Twitter alongside him. He singlehandedly brought some users back to Twitter and sent others fleeing for the exits. There are no neutral platforms, as many have noted, but Musk’s gravitational field has warped Twitter’s entire conversational orbit and brand trajectory. Leaving Twitter, or simply refusing to pay for verification, is now treated as an act of resistance. It’s debatable whether that’s fair, but reality doesn’t give a damn. Some users might have stuck around had Musk used his Twitter account solely for business pronouncements, but that wouldn’t be any fun now would it? He’s always enjoyed trolling his most vocal critics on Twitter, but it hits different when he’s the owner of said platform used by millions of cultural elites the world over. Earlier this year, it appeared that Musk had comped Twitter Verified blue checkmarks to prominent public figures like Stephen King, some of whom had repeatedly criticized him. This led to the absurd and prolonged spectacle of dozens of famous people asserting over and over that they had absolutely not paid the meager sum of $8 a month for the scarlet, err, baby blue checkmark that now adorned their profiles, not to be confused with the blue checkmark that formerly appeared in the same spot that they hadn’t paid for. This made the blue checkmark a sort of Veblen good; more people seemed to want one when you couldn’t buy one, when it was literally priceless.The price is an odd one. $8 a month is not expensive enough to be a wealth signal, but it’s enough to feel like an insult to users who feel like they subsidized the popularity of Twitter over the years with their pro bono wit. I believe it was Groucho Marx who once said something to the effect of not wanting to belong to any club that would accept him as a member for the tidy sum of $8 a month. This culminated in one weekend when Musk engaged in a protracted back and forth with Twitter celebrity shitposter Dril, pinning a Twitter Blue badge on his profile over and over only to have Dril remove it by changing his profile description. This went on for hours, and some of us followed along, like kids on the playground watching a schoolboy chase a girl holding a frog. This was bad juju and everyone knew it. I’ll miss old Twitter. Even now, in its diminished state, there isn’t any real substitute for the experience of Twitter at its peak. Compared to its larger peers in the social media space, Twitter always reminded me of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s late-night speech as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, delivered over the phone to the Cameron Crowe stand-in William Miller, warning him about having gotten seduced by Stillwater, the band Miller was profiling for The Rolling Stone: Oh man, you made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong. Because they make you feel cool, and hey, I met you. You are not cool. We are uncool. Women will always be a problem for guys like us, most of the great art in the world is about that very problem. Good-looking people they got no spine, their art never lasts. They get the girls but we’re smarter. Great art is about guilt and longing. Love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love. Let’s face it, you got a big head start. I’m always home, I’m uncool. The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool. My advice to you: I know you think these guys are your friends. You want to be a true friend to them? Be honest and unmerciful. In the world of Almost Famous, Instagram would be the social network for the Stillwaters, the Russell Hammonds, the Penny Lanes. Beautiful people, cool people. Twitter was for the uncool, the geeks, the wonks, the wits, the misfits. Twitter was honest and unmerciful, sometimes cruelly so, but at its best it felt like a true friend. It was striking how many of Elon’s early tweets about Twitter’s issues seemed to pin Twitter’s underperformance on engineering problems. Response times, things of that nature. But Twitter’s appeal was never a pure feat of engineering, nor were its problems solely the fault of engineering malpractice. They were human in nature. Twitter isn’t, as many have noted, rocket science, making it a particularly tricky domain for a CEO of, among other things, a rocket company. Ironically, Norbert Wiener, often credited as the father of cybernetics, a field which has lots of relevance to analyzing social networks, worked on anti-aircraft weapons during World War II. So if you really want to nitpick, your vast conspiracy board might somehow connect running a social network to rocket science. You can test unmanned rockets, and if they blow up on take-off or re-entry, you’ve learned something, no harm done. But running the same test on a social media service is like testing rockets with your users as passengers. Crash a rocket and those users aren’t going to be around for the next test flight. It’s not clear there will ever be a Twitter replacement. If there is one, it won’t be the same. It may look the same, but it will be something else. The internet is different now, and the conditions that allowed Twitter to emerge in the first place no longer exist. The Twitter diaspora has scattered to all sorts of subscale clones or alternatives, with no signs of agreeing on where to settle. As noted social analyst Taylor Swift said, “We are never ever getting back together.” For this reason, Twitter won’t ever fully vanish unless management pulls the plug. None of the contenders to replace Twitter has come close to replicating its vibe of professional and amateur intellectuals and jesters engaged in verbal jousting in a public global tavern, even as most have lifted its interface almost verbatim. Social networks aren’t just the interface, or the algorithm, they’re also about the people in them. When I wrote “The Network’s the Thing” I meant it; the graph is inextricable from the identity of a social media service. Change the inputs of such a system and you change the system itself. Thus Twitter will drift along, some portion of its remaining users hanging out of misguided hope, others bending the knee to the whims of the new algorithm. But peak Twitter? That’s an artifact of history now. That golden era of Twitter will always be this collective hallucination we look back on with increasing nostalgia, like alumni of some cult. With the benefit of time, we’ll appreciate how unique it was while forgetting its most toxic dynamics. Twitter was the closest we’ve come to bottling oral culture in written form. Media theorist Harold Innis distinguished between time-biased and space-biased media: The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time are those durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. The conquest of Egypt by Rome gave access to supplies of papyrus, which became the basis of a large administrative empire. Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character. Twitter always intrigued me because it has elements of both. It always felt like it compressed space—the timeline felt like a single lunch room hosting a series of conversations we were all participating in or eavesdropping on—and time—every tweet seemed to be uttered to us in the moment, and so much of it was about things occurring in the world at that moment (one of the challenges of machine learning applied to news and Tweets both is how much of it has such a short half-life versus the more evergreen nature of TikToks, YouTube videos, movies, and music. A lot of Twitter was textual, but the character limit and the ease of replying lent much of it an oral texture. It felt like a live, singular conversation. When reviewing a draft of this piece, my friend Tianyu wrote the following comment, which I’ll just cite verbatim, it’s so good: Twitter feels like a perfect example of what James W. Carey calls the "ritual view of communication" (see Communication as Culture). Its virality doesn't come from transmission alone, but rather the quasi-religiosity of it; scrolling Twitter while sitting on the toilet is like attending a mass every Sunday morning. Like religions, Twitter formulates participatory rituals that come with a public culture of commonality and communitarianism. These rituals are then taken for granted—they become how people on the internet consume information and interact with one another by default. Religious rituals rise and fall. Today all major religions have, at some point, become a global mimesis through missionary work, political power, and imperial expansions. Musk's regime is basically saying, 'oh well, Christianity isn't expanding fast enough. What we need to do is to rewrite the Bible and abolish the clergy. That'll do the work.' Carey often notes that communication shares the same roots as words like common, community, and communion. Combine the ritualistic nature of Twitter with its sense of compressing space and time and you understand why its experience was such a convincing illusion of a single global conversation. I suspect Carey would argue that the simulacrum of such a conversation effectively created and maintained a community. Even the vocabulary used to describe Twitter reinforced its ritualistic nature. Who would be today’s main character, we’d ask, as if that day’s Twitter drama was a single narrative we were all reading. We’d go to see the list of Trending Topics for the day as if looking to see who was being tarred and feathered in the Twitter town square that day. There was always a mob to join if you wanted to cast a stone, or a meme template of the day to borrow. Friends would forward me tweets, and at some point I stopped replying “Oh yeah I saw that one already” because we had all seen all of them already. Twitter was small, but more importantly, it felt small. Users often write about how Twitter felt worse once they exceeded some number of followers, and while there are obvious structural reasons why mass distribution can be unpleasant, one underrated drawback of a mass following was the loss of that sense of speaking to a group of people you mostly knew, if not personally, then through their tweets. In a way, Twitter’s core problem is so different than that of something like TikTok, which, as I noted earlier, is a challenge of creating a local maximum for each user. Twitter at its best felt, like Tianyu described it to me, a global optimum. In reality, it’s never so binary. Even in a world of deep personalization, we want shared entertainment and grand myths, and vice versa. TikTok has its globally popular trends and Twitter its micro-communities. But a TikTok-like algorithm was always going to be particularly susceptible to ruining the cozy, communal feel of a scaled niche like Twitter. I’ve met more friends in the internet era through Twitter than any other social media app. Some of my closest friends today first entered my life by sliding into my DM’s, and it saddens me to see the place emptying out. All of this past year, as a slow but steady flow of Twitter’s more interesting users has made their way to the exits, unwilling to fight to be heard anymore, or just stopped tweeting, I’ve still opened the app daily out of habit, and to research for pieces like this. But the vibes are all off. I haven’t churned yet, but at the very least, I’ve asked the bartender to close out my tab. If Twitter’s journey epitomizes the sentimental truism that the real treasure was the friends we made along the way, then the story of its demise will begin the moment we could no longer find those friends on that darkened timeline. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Thanks to my friends Li and Tianyu for reading drafts of this piece at various stages and offering such rapid feedback. Considering the length of my pieces, that's no small thing. Their encouragement and useful notes and questions helped me refine and clarify my thinking. Also, if it wasn’t for Twitter, I probably wouldn’t know either of them today. Inspiration for the title of this post comes from this which is based on this. As my own Twitter usage fades, I plan to ramp back up writing on my website. If you're interested in keeping up, follow my Substack which I plan to spin back up to keep folks updated on my latest writing and where I’ll drop, among other things, a follow-up to this piece with my thoughts on Threads.
A second year of the pandemic passed in which I didn’t attend any film festivals in person. I miss it. My viewing output of is lower than usual but still much much higher than that of the median filmgoer. Film is one category of media in which human recommendations still feel superior to algorithmic ones. It is notable that none of my favorite Netflix movies this year came via their recommendations. Some I might have never heard of had some critic or friend not written about them. Film remains a difficult category for machine learning to crack. Most people only watch movies once. In a category like music, people listen to their favorite tracks repeatedly. Films are very long while music tracks only last a few minutes. As a result, the frequency of feedback is much higher for music than film. Viewers generally provide a single point of feedback on a film, if they even choose to sample it: they either finish the movie or they don’t. In music, you not only gather many more data points per hour because of the short duration of each track, but you gather feedback within each piece. People hit skip, or rewind, or repeat. People add songs to playlists or ask their streaming service to generate radio stations off of that track. As I’ve written before about TikTok, one of its most critical design choices was to full-screen videos, allowing it to gather really accurate signal from the viewer on each video. TikTok videos are even shorter than music tracks, but they often contain snippets of music tracks. In many ways a TikTok is about as short a piece of media as could be designed that can be said to still tell a narrative (though maybe a dating app profile photo is even more concise). The ways that music tracks resemble each other feel easier to see with math. This makes it easier to generate a playlist of similar tracks even before gathering listener feedback. Machine learning algorithms have learned to write music that often sounds like specific composer and musicians. I’ve yet to see an algorithm that can just spit out a Wes Anderson-like movie. It’s no surprise to me that Netflix seems largely to have given up on much of the work that came out of the Netflix Prize and instead focuses on using the massive funnel of its above-the-fold home screen real estate to push its latest original production. I didn’t like Red Notice, but I can understand what types of metrics would lead Netflix to just splash it across every subscriber’s eyeballs. Film is also a category in which we still haven’t fully understood the variation in people’s aesthetic preferences. Even people I consider to share many of my movie tastes will disagree with me vociferously on particular movies. I doubt anyone will agree with all my movie choices below. Rather than a bug, this variance in taste is to be treasured. I’m not interested in terse recommendations like “this film is good” or “this film was terrible.” Given the individuality of aesthetic preferences, there’s little signal in a binary expression of one person’s preferences. Instead, give me a review which can articulate why someone enjoyed a film or not. Some of my favorite reviews are pans of movies I loved, or vice versa. It’s a rare gift for someone to be able to express just how a film works on them given the subconscious and emotional nature of the medium. Moving images are pre-verbal. Something is almost always lost in translation to text. It’s even rarer for someone to be able to tie that to film craft given how visually illiterate our educational systems have left us. This doesn’t mean I rely exclusively on professional film critics. More and more, I’ve come to rely on the film buffs of Letterboxd to guide my film choices. Unlike Rotten Tomatoes or MetacriticThe way those two sites compress the quality of film into a single numeric score has always been reductive. That's by design, but my aesthetic response to a film can't be mapped that way. Some of my favorite restaurants and books don't rate highly on Yelp or Amazon. Similarly, often it's the movie that's divisive that I find most compelling. Sometimes what you want is a work that attracts you with equal force as it repels others., you can curate your own panel of people to follow and filter film reviews by their tastes. Since many of the members are not professional critics, they don’t feel a need to conform to some standard review template. Many reviews are just humorous quips. Many are just a line or two. But taken as a group, they simulate that feeling of standing outside on the sidewalk after a festival screening, debating the movie with other film buffs. Pauline Kael made famous a particular type of deeply subjective film criticism. Along with Susan Sontag, she treated as legitimate her very personal aesthetic response to art. The logical successor to that is not any single film critic today but the pluralistic critical response of the public via the Internet. Sometimes it can be toxic and suffocating as in the angrier strains of franchise fandom. Other times, it can feel like a warm fellowship, trying to tease out why some films work for some of us and not others, the nature of the medium's alchemy. That’s a community I’ve missed these past two years. The pandemic accelerated many trends, and the decline in theater-going is one of them. Studios adapted by pushing even more movies day-and-date. I’ll always prefer to see a movie in theaters, but more than that I just appreciate being able to see movies. Bemoan the death of the mid-budget adult drama all you want, but complaining is not a strategy. I’ve worked too long in the technology industry to know how this plays out. The world changes, and you either change with it or get left behind. These forces sweeping Hollywood are exogenous to its world and will sweep it along regardless of what it does. For example, the traditional release model for prestige films has always been festival to limited release in NY and LA and then much later to wider release. The pandemic brought some films to VOD more quickly, even day-and-date at times, but in 2021 most prestige indies are still next to impossible to watch unless you live in NYC or LA. It’s long past the time when this model should be updated. I often hear buzz out of festivals for movies like The Worst Person in the World or Licorice Pizza but then realize I won’t be able to see them until months later, sometimes not until the following year. That type of delayed anticipation is fine for a blockbuster like Batman, but for indie films it is questionable at best. Sometimes I don’t realize that a movie released in theaters until it has already come and gone. That used to never happen in the era before the Big Bang of Content. In a previous era, this staged build-up of anticipation worked for indie films. Now, it actively hurts them. When the public is bombarded with what is effectively an infinite number of contenders for their attention, movies need publicity and availability to crest together. Furthermore, the idea of a movie moving through a period of unavailability because of a gap in release windows is just absurd in an age of abundance. Once a movie has left theaters, it should always be available somewhere for people who want to seek it out. Windowing worked great in a content scarce world where people would wait patiently for some piece of media to hit the market, but nowadays, it just means an audience whose attention will get diverted elsewhere. I’m still amazed by how many movies I can’t find streaming anywhere even though they’ve left their theatrical run. This hurts a specific type of movie more than others, and it’s not the Spider-Man: No Way Home’s of the world. In his new book The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman chronicles how the rise of a the video rental store like Blockbuster spawned a new and specific type of cinephile. Never before had so many movies been available to watch on near demand, and people from Kevin Smith to Quentin Tarantino had their film tastes broadened by exposure to movies from around the world, in all sorts of genres. The combination of the VCR and video stores enabled an explosion of cinephilia. I was one of those freshly minted film buffs, birthed in dimly lit aisles housing one box cover after another of films I'd never heard of.It began for me in grade school when my father would rent films from the library, then Hollywood and Blockbuster video, and would reach full bloom when I moved to Seattle to work at Amazon and discovered Scarecrow Video. It was there that I'd rent Criterion edition Laserdiscs of movies and a Laserdisc player to play them on. I have such fond memories of putting down deposits of a few hundred dollars in case I somehow absconded with the the Criterion Edition Laserdisc of John Woo's The Killer or something like that. We now have, via the internet, the ability to make every film available on demand at all times. We've already seen what Netflix licensing and streaming content from all over the world has done for people's exposure to international film and television. Studios need to ensure that it's as easy as possible to fall into a lifelong romance with the medium. This is an aesthetic abundance strategy for an industry which spent its entire history built around scarcity-based business models. It's not that I don't love the occasional screening of a rare 70mm print of some film. It's that withholding things in an age of abundance is more likely to make the public forget it entirely than to seek it out. My last memory from this past year is the escalation in what’s commonly referred to as the Discourse (capital D because it’s a very specific, modern form I’m referencing). It’s not just the world of film that’s been prey to this as it’s an output of the structure of Western social media. Any film lover on social media will be familiar with some forms of it. The most prominent was the Scorsese versus MCU debate. Then it was the debate over The Oscars, and this past week it's arguments over whether Steven Spielberg should direct a remake of BullittEven if you aren't a fan of Spielberg's sentimentality, he is an S-Tier mover of the camera. The way some people worship the linguistic stylings of certain writers, I know few film buffs who don't stand in awe of how Spielberg chooses to cover a scene. We need an 80 hour documentary that consists solely of Spielberg and his DP's discussing how and why they choose to move the camera a specific way in every scene of every movie he ever directed. Purity tests are especially useful when roaming a threat-filled landscape, to separate friend from foe. It just so happens that Western social media is just such a post-apocalyptic desert of tribal warfare. The Scorsese-MCU debate is an ideal purity test because the MCU movies are the most watched films in the world now. Almost anyone has at least heard of if not seen at least one MCU movie. That means even a casual filmgoer can be tossed in the water like a witch to see if they float. Spoiler alert: everyone floats. As with a mistaken mass bcc: email incident, the only way to make the Discourse stop is to ignore it. But given enough participants, it can't be helped. Someone always presses reply all to request to be removed from the distribution, which leads to people asking to be removed, which leads to other people telling them to stop replying all. This same snowball effect propels arguments like the Scorsese-MCU debate. Like Neil McCauley headed to freedom near the end of Heat, with Eady in the passenger seat next to him, we should just drive on. But it’s irresistible to weigh in, and so we yank the steering wheel to the right, cut through three lanes of traffic to the exit, just so we can hunt down Waingro to let him know that Scorsese possesses more talent in his pinkie than every MCU director put together, or that Spider-Man: No Way Home deserves the Best Picture Oscar, or whatever. This type of exhausting Discourse is a headless, distributed phenomenon. It’s a monster we animate, and it only lives because we keep feeding it our own anger. Even complaining about the Discourse is part of the Discourse. It changes nothing except to punish and exhaust the participants. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard writes of "the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory...it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map." Today the Discourse begins as an illusory shadow online and then assumes corporeal form. This is the reflexive loop between the internet and the world at large: we put the ghost into the machine, then we pull it out of the machine with a look of surprise. I beg of you, don’t feed the Discourse. We’re all better than that. I confront enough tribal debate in every other aspect of my online life, I just want to preserve movies as a peaceful corner of civilized dialogue. The worst type of prisoner’s dilemma is one which the two prisoners construct themselves, where they defect against each other when there are no prison guards or police to enforce any judgment. We're playing ourselves. Movies I Enjoyed This Year In no particular order... The Power of the Dog I love Westerns, one of the most storied of Western film genres, and this year added a new entry to the syllabus. The Power of the Dog’s violence is of the psychological variety. If your ideal Western consists of six-shooters at high noon, just know that much of the conflict in this movie is waged via banjos, pianos, the occasional venomous quip, and leather weaving. I mean, one of this movie’s main characters is present only via his old saddle hanging in a barn. Some people won't consider this much of a Western at all. But the power of this genre is its ability to speak to so much of the human condition. The West has always represented the frontier in the American imagination, a place where one goes to try to escape structure, the place of maximal freedom, but it also represents a site where society can be built anew. That tug and pull is core to the genre. Campion explores this tension in a new way. Many of the characters in this film, from Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons' Phil and George Burbank to Kirsten Dunst's Rose Gordon to Kodi Smit-McPhee's Peter Gordon, are in search of the both the freedom and the community promised by the West. But each runs into invisible structures imposed by society and culture, and each tries to cope in their own way. Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting style often feels overly theatrical. In many movies it’s a distraction. Here, it’s perfect. His Phil Burbank’s cruelty is itself a conscious pose, for reasons we learn by movie’s endThe least believable thing in the movie is that Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons could be biological brothers. Someone check a photo of the Pony Express delivery guy.. Cumberbatch menaces every frame of this movie; he is Chekhov’s gun, or so we’re meant to believe. Campion is a master of visual iconography that lends her films a psychoanalytic portent. Who can forget Holly Hunter underwater, tied to the anchor of her titular piano? In The Power of the Dog, a character stumbles upon a tunnel in the woods near town. To enter it and traverse to the other side is to crawl back through a birth canal into a mother’s womb, to a place of psychic security and unconditional love. I won’t ruin who built the tunnel or where it leads, but the movie is full of imagery that burrows into your subconscious. Even the title is cryptic, forebodingIt comes from Psalm 22:20. “Deliver my soul from the sword; my precious life from the power of the dog.”. In the Bible it references Jesus on the cross, his is the precious life. In the case of Campion's film, there is more than one person who could be the precious life, and more than one person or force who could be the power of the dog. To say more would be a spoiler; the fun is in working it out for yourself by movie's end.. The end of the movie is a bit of a shock, but walk the movie back in your head and the clues were there all along. The Lost Daughter I don’t know that Netflix has to continue to fund arthouse films in an effort to win a Best Picture Oscar, but I understand the impulse. Despite the precipitous decline in the ratings of the Oscars, almost every one I know would lose their minds just to attend the ceremony. Hollywood’s ability to manufacture its own cultural prestige will live long past the decline of the mid-budget adult drama. The Lost Daughter is an example of a book adaptation that honors the tone of the source material while recognizing the unavoidable differences in film as a medium. The book is told in the first person, but absent a voice-over, movies have to externalize that type of subjectivity. Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her directorial debut, succeeds in doing so through shot choices and the sheer acting chops of Olivia Colman. Much of the text of the movie consists of long, wordless, tight closeups of Colman’s face. A latent dread haunts Ferrante’s novels. The Lost Daughter honors that. All the mothers out there who’ve been trapped at home with young children going on some two years now will look upon Colman and think, I understand. Damn it momma, I understand. The Worst Person in the World They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders. What they hold dear are family life, local activism, national parks, penny loafers and mountain bikes. They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix. This appeared in Time Magazine in July, 1990Quentin Tarantino is clearly Gen X by this definition. His Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the most anti-hippie movies I've ever seen. At movie's end, Brad Pitt and Leonardo Dicaprio take comically violent revenge on the hippies for ruining Hollywood. It takes the place of Dirty Harry, my previous benchmark for most anti-hippie film. . It was pointed at twenty-somethings at that time, or, as we know them today, Generation XI'm a member of one of the later cohorts of Generation X. I recently read Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties and he makes the point that Generation X is the least annoying of those yet living because we are the smallest in population, exceeded in size by both the Boomers and the Millenials that sandwich us. Since this is a positive rather than descriptive statement, I declare it indisputable. (BANGS GAVEL). A common description of The Worst Person in the World, the final chapter of Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, is that it’s about millennial late-twenties, early-thirties indecision. What should I do with my life? Who should I settle down with? When should I have kids, if at all? But as the Time excerpt shows, most of the same critiques of millennials were directed at the previous generation. This type of pre-midlife-crisis of indecision is more and more common in any post-modern Western society. Think of it as a type of post-industrial paradox of choice. Free of religious, societal, institutional, and cultural guide rails as to how to lead our lives, we find ourselves, like this movie’s protagonist Julie (Renata Reinsve), wandering a maze of options at the age of 30 in a haze of existential bewilderment. The decline of power structures can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, many of them were coercive. In another era, Julie’s career options would have been curtailed even more by sexual discrimination or societal notions of what a woman could be. Back then, even those who earned a taste of freedom had to wait until after their kids had left the nest. Today, for many, the mid-life crisis has been pulled up by two decades. Absent tradition and authority, told we can be anything we want to be, we are trapped by our freedom. The neoliberal marketplace tells us to follow our own desires while assailing us with imagery of what we should covet. The internet has turned this dynamic collective. Social media cocoons us in the never-ending hall of mirrors of other people’s lives. It has never been easier to visualize the opportunity costs of our own choices, so much so that we gave it an explicit name: FOMO. In the moment, we feel a momentary fear of missing out, but over time, we’re even more haunted by a persistent fear of having missed out for good. It turns out that the promise of unfettered pleasure and choice of the postmodern age was a mirage for many. Marriage, a stable job, children, all the things Julie foregoes as she explores her freedom are structures that organize the span of one’s life. They are anchor points in one’s timeline. Without them, one’s life can flow any which way. That is both blessing and a curse, as you can feel unmoored, destabilized. The fact that the movie is structured into twelve chapters and an epilogue, with specific titles, is ironic. That the movie is able to impose an artificial structure to what is otherwise a life of spontaneity is only because it is a work of art, created from an explicit artist’s mind. It is less certain whether Julie herself can find a coherent arc in herself. The description of Liquid Love by Zygmunt Bauman reads: This book is about the central figure of our contemporary, ‘liquid modern’ times – the man or woman with no bonds, and particularly with none of the fixed or durable bonds that would allow the effort of self-definition and self-assertion to come to a rest. Having no permanent bonds, the denizen of our liquid modern society must tie whatever bonds they can to engage with others, using their own wits, skill and dedication. But none of these bonds are guaranteed to last. Moreover, they must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change – as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again. Within, Bauman writes: The principal hero of this book is human relationship. This book’s central characters are men and women, our contemporaries, despairing at being abandoned to their own wits and feeling easily disposable, yearning for the security of togetherness and for a helping hand to count on in a moment of trouble, and so desperate to ‘relate’; yet wary of the state of ‘being related’ and particularly of being related ‘for good’, not to mention forever – since they fear that such a state may bring burdens and cause strains they neither feel able nor are willing to bear, and so may severely limit the freedom they need – yes, your guess is right – to relate… He references a laboratory study which epitomizes this tension: In their famous experiment, Miller and Dollard saw their laboratory rats ascending the peak of excitement and agitation when ‘the adiance equalled the abiance’ – that is, when the threat of electric shock and the promise of tasty food were finely balanced… No wonder that ‘relationships’ are one of the main engines of the present-day ‘counselling boom’. The complexity is too dense, too stubborn and too difficult to unpack or unravel for individuals to do the job unassisted. The agitation of Miller and Dollard’s rats all too often collapsed into a paralysis of action. An inability to choose between attraction and repulsion, between hopes and fears, rebounded as an incapacity to act. Julie seems to be one of Bauman’s liquid loversSpeaking of our modern liquid times, what could epitomize that more than dating apps? With one swipe, another option appears at our fingertips on our phone screen. Apps like Tinder and Hinge not only represent the postmodern allure of infinite choice but also the triumph of neoliberalism. It's not a coincidence that we use the term dating economy when referring to modern courtship. The market is our solution to everything. It's the same with gaming, where we refer to virtual economies. Baudrillard would surely be both delighted and horrified that so many modern games center around repetitive work. We complain about our actual jobs but embrace virtual work in grind games like Farmville. Any decision that forecloses future options both attracts and repulses in equal measure. Julie dives in and then flees for another life again and again. In his review of the film in The American Conservative, Matthew Schmitz notes: Julie knows the risks of intimacy. Love causes suffering. It brings with it the shadow of death, and not just because we injure others and are injured by them. Love requires us to die to self, a foretaste of the death all experience. Schmitz points at millennial precarity as a subject of the film: The middle-class life that was the classic setting of the mid-life crisis has become less attainable for millennials, a fact reflected in Julie’s transition from the financially independent Aksel to the hourly worker Eivind. Soon the majority of my fellow millennials will have turned 35, the age Julie is approaching at the end of the film. The oldest millennials are already in their forties. Social scientists have painstakingly described our low rates of marriage, childbearing, and homeownership. Trier gets at something that is harder to capture: the ambivalent experience of people who came of age in these years. It seemed that we could do what we wanted, except form lasting relationships; go where we liked, unless it was home. For no other generation have the possibilities been so limitless and the reality so limited. The Supreme Court proclaimed that anyone could marry, even as marriage became unattainable for the poor. AirBnB opened up houses across the world, even as houses became something that fewer could afford. I’m less certain that’s the primary preoccupation of The Worst Person in the World given Norway’s renowned social safety net. Instead, Julie’s story embodies one of the popular critiques of 60’s and 70’s postmodernism which urged a rejection of elite authorities in favor of following our desires. What was promised was a liberation and authenticity. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote of desire: It is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence – desire, not left-wing holidays! – and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised. Earlier, they wrote: Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things. Follow your desires instead of the herd, don’t be a sheep, be your authentic self. A few decades later, similar slogans permeate corporate culture slogans and self-help paeans. Anti-Oedipal theories promised to throw off our shackles. What we ended up with is more ambivalent. Freud wrote: ...we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. Two images are shared most often from The Worst Person in the World. One is the opening shot, of Julie in profile, wearing a black dress, standing alone on a balcony, a cityscape behind her. She holds a cigarette in one hand and her cell phone in the other, and she seems bored. After a few beats, she swipes open her cell phone and starts tapping away. If the film were in black and white she could be one of Antonioni’s post-modern heroines, wandering vast cities alone, disinterested but free of burdens, smothered by a vague sense of alienation. This is no coincidence. Julie is a spiritaul descendant of Antonioni’s figures of anomie from his Trilogy of DecadenceThe three films in this trilogy were L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse, shot one a year from 1960-2. Quite a three year run. For my money, though, his greatest postmodern classic is The Passenger. I'm waiting for someone to direct an update called The Influencer, a masterpice capturing the fluid identity construction of the 2010's and 2020's., updated for a more precarious and distraction-filled age. At the briefest sense of boredom, today’s Westerner turns to her cell phone for relief. The other image, the one on the movie poster, is of Julie running with a smile on her face. In that magical realist scene, she is running from one life to another through a world frozen around her. It’s a way of capturing that sense of breaking off from the world when in the early throes of love. But her smile is also that of the joy of leaving a life behind. Julie is reveling in that sense of freedom, the power of being able to hit the shuffle button on life and skip to a new track. At that moment, mid-film, the opportunity costs of her freedom, and the specter of mortality, have yet to bubble up. They will. The epilogue is a bit tidy and blunt. It’s the only chapter that feels forced. Julie is confronted with a coincidental and convenient Sliding Doors-style vision of what her life could have been if she settled down and had kids. By that point, Reinsve has long since let made it clear she’s conscious of the trade-offs in her life, if not at peace with them. A lot of people I know found the movie’s title off-putting. It sounds like a Buzzfeed article. While there were more understated alternatives, it captures an important sense of societal judgment that envelops women who embrace their freedom to its fullest and choose more unconventional life paths. At least some of Julie’s regret arises from the general fog of impatience of those around her, from her boyfriend to her friends to her parents. It’s not nearly as glum or didactic as it sounds. Its vibe is a sweet melancholy, and occasionally, like one particular meet-cute, it sparkles. Give Reinsve a lot of credit for that. Director Joachim Trier said he wrote the movie with her in mind, and it shows. Her face is incapable of emotional dishonesty. She’s the friend you can’t help rooting for even as she stacks one uncertain life choice atop the next. She deserved a Best Actress nomination. Alas. Neon holding the movie back from wide release until this weekend didn’t help. At least she’ll always have her Cannes Best Actress win. She shouldn’t have to wait long for her next role. I love all three of Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, the two previous entries being Reprise and Oslo, August 31. Very few directors of his age can channel the crippling weight of twenty-something identity crises with such empathy. But this entry is particularly apt for this moment. Film has, to date, tended to focus on the traditional notion of hedonic marriage in genres like the romantic comedy. We need more movies, like this one, that contemplate the actual lives many young people are choosing in post-industrial societies. Drive My Car Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy The 2020 winner of the pandemic’s honorary “Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague” productivity award was Taylor Swift for Folklore and Evermore. 2021’s winner is Ryusuke Hamagachi for directing two critically-acclaimed movies. I once thought that Haruki Murakami’s novels and short stories were ill-suited to film, but after seeing Drive My Car and Burning, I’ve done a one-eighty. More of his work should be adapted. Drive My Car (coming to HBO Max in a few days on Mar 2) feels like a dialogue between the sometimes whimsical urban alienation of Murakami and the disillusionment of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Like the Murakami short story on which it’s based, this movie is the duck gliding placidly across the surface of a pond while subtext churns furiously beneath the surface. At 3 hours long, it will be too slow for many audiences. For those struggling with the now two years of pandemic life, however, it maps one cathartic path out of stasis and tragedy. I’ve always loved Sonya’s speech from Uncle Vanya, but I never thought I’d see a new rendition as moving as the one in the film, performed via Korean Sign Language. For me, it was the most rapturous moment in cinema all year. And when our final hour comes, we shall meet it humbly, and there beyond the grave, we shall say that we have known suffering and tears, that our life was bitter. And God will pity us. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a triptych of short films, is not an adaptation of Murakami short stories, but it feels as if it could be. The middle short of the three, “Door Wide Open,” is more interesting on cancel culture than the usual squabbles online. If you’re tired of the all-too predictable Joe Rogan-Spotify arguments, watch this as a palate cleanser. The closing short “Once Again” concerns a coincidence at a high school reunion. I won’t ruin the plot, but it is wise to how much easier it is to help others with their problems than it is to solve our own. It’s a great argument for therapy. Dune If you’ve never read the book, I can understand why this Part One might feel slow. Having read the book multiple times, the first time as a high school freshman during my formative years as a science fiction reader, I carried the anticipation and context of the book’s back story to every scene. Whereas the novel has multiple long appendices and even a glossary, for me the entire novel was the appendix to the movie. Fans of Dune the novel any time any iconic character or scene is referenced in the movie. If you hadn’t read the novel, you might have found the movie lacking in action. I don’t blame you, but I was the annoying Leo pointing meme throughout, and I apologize for nothing. I’ve long thought Dune should be adapted as a miniseries instead of a film. There’s just so much ground to cover, especially in world building. Much of what bring me back to the book again and again is the journey its hero Paul traverses, to synthesize the divergent teachings of his Father and Mother and the two hemispheres of his brain, to achieve hyper consciousness and through it a form of transcendent mastery of his own mind and emotions. In decisive moments, when the stakes couldn’t be higher, Paul enters a flow state that connects him to the world. Though it’s referred to as a sci-fi novel, Dune’s beating heart is mystical, spiritual. At the preview screening I attended, I had no idea the movie only covered the first 60% or so of the book. Near 3 hours in, with my bladder about to explode, I was never so relieved to see a To Be Continued appear on screen. News of an HBO prequel series built around the women of Dune is good news, though Dune as IP really drops off quickly in appeal after that. I never made it past the third book in the series as a kid, and it’s not clear it’s even worth adapting the second book. What Denis Villeneuve channels best from the novel is a sense of pervasive political intrigue built up over centuries of jockeying between noble houses. When House Atreides is granted control of Arrakis, Duke Leto just assumes it’s a plot against him. This is how deep the rot goes. This is when you live life at the efficient frontier of the prisoner’s dilemma, defecting over and over, as the game theory predicts, because you know your opponent already has. Of all the major narrative feature films I’ve seen, Dune features more IMAX footage than any I’ve seen. It’s a different film in IMAX in so many ways. Director of Photography Greg Fraser tried something new to me. He shot digitally, processed it, filmed it out to film stock, then scanned it back to digital to do the final color grade. It’s a sort of variant of scanning analog film grain and then overlaying it on digital images so they aren’t quite so clean. I only saw Dune in IMAX once, and to my eye the results were striking. To date, I continue to prefer the output from shooting digitally on location to shooting film against green screen.Some inematography buffs found the single light source setup of lots of Dune to be a flaw. Crafts people love to recognize higher degrees of difficulty like certain shots in West Side Story, for example. I was less bothered. The heavy shadows work in the traditional film noir way to visualize the political threats from every direction. And you're in the desert, where often there is just one light source, the sun, and it is relentless. The French Dispatch Richard Brody of The New Yorker named this the best movie of the year, which, as it’s a movie inspired by The New Yorker, feels like a mild conflict of interest. But damn if Wes Anderson didn’t make a movie that captures the feeling of The New Yorker’s house style, its meandering, understated rhetorical authority. Anderson’s signature visual tropes, the perpendicular camera angles and symmetrical framing, the muted line readings, are both a signature of his individual style and a way of producing a sort of neutrality. The same could be said of The New Yorker’s plain house style. The fidelity of this aesthetic homage was so pleasing to me as a longtime New Yorker reader that it functioned as a sort of ASMR. This is what a New Yorker article looks and sounds like. My sister fell asleep watching the movie. The New Yorker doesn't use exclamation points. These things are correlated. Wrath of Man Jason Statham’s still, focused intensity is the oak tree that all the other twitchy, male violence wraps itself around in this slow-burn thriller. He never seems nonplussed; this is because he is badder than the other people around him and he knows it. This gives him the zen-like calm of a monk; his gleaming bald head is appropriate. Also, for once, a Guy Ritchie film without some oddball speaking in an indecipherable accent. Instead, just a thrilling meditation on the corrosive nature of greed. Every scene constricts the suspense one notch tighter. If you have a subwoofer it will get a workout, like someone sounding the horns of hell. The spatial geometry of the climactic set piece could be cleaner, but otherwise this is a tonal territory I’d love to see Ritchie revisit. Scott Eastwood was meant to play a dirtbag. Bergman Island The Souvenir: Part II You don’t need to be an Ingmar Bergman fan to enjoy Bergman Island (though it’s recommended on its own terms). More useful might be knowing that director Mia Hansen-Love was once a partner to director Olivier Assayas, for whom she acted before she became a director, and that this movie is based loosely on and haunted by the dissolution of their relationship. On the other hand, I would recommend you watch The Souvenir before watching The Souvenir Part II. Both are films about filmmaking, but more than that, about how artists make sense of their lives through their work. It’s often said that creatives draw inspiration from their lives, but the creative process isn’t just a form of transcription. Often, the act of creation is how the artist makes sense of life. ABBA has my favorite musical cue of the year in Bergman Island, and I can never get enough of Vicky Krieps and Mia Wasikowska. Bergman Island understands this paradox of love, that we can be haunted by the one who got away and why they never loved us while also being puzzled by how we ever loved the person we ended up with. The Souvenir: Part II had me both laughing and convulsing in horror at its dead accurate depiction of the insufferable drama on film school sets. But while those scenes seemed lifted from my days on film school sets, they also reminded me of so many heated tech company meetings. A director struggling to articulate their artistic vision to her cast and crew is like a CEO or VP of Product who can’t articulate product vision to engineering and design. In my favorite moment in the movie, the protagonist Julie runs into an older director named Patrick for whom she has been crewing on a studio project. He is pretentious, a tyrant, and because of that the studio has cut him out of post-production. Chastened, and in a self-reflective mood, he offers her some much needed perspective. “Did you resist the urge to be obvious?” he asks about her just completed student thesis. All during her tumultuous shoot, her cast and crew pestered her to clarify what her movie was about. What Patrick recognizes, and what she has come to peace with, is how to preserve an individuality of expression in what is a collaborative creative process. The Novice Whiplash but if the J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller characters were one person. A tactile film about that particular type of obsession in which we hurtle ourselves against the limits of our bodies. But also, perhaps more than that, about how obsessive ambition is viewed as treachery in a zero-sum environment. Any type-A high-achiever will recognize some of themselves in Alex. She’s a freshman who walks on to her college crew team and sets her sights on making the rare first-year leap to varsity. Through much of life, you can compete on all sorts of achievement ladders to surpass those around you, but true transcendence and grace comes when your ambitions are those you’d pursue when no one is watching. Except you. In The Novice, Isabelle Fuhrman confronts us with the question of what you call it if you Tiger Mom yourself A Hero Not my favorite Farhadi, but as with many of his movies, an X-ray one how financial and social capital interact within Iranian society and institutions. His movies have a Chekhovian soul. The lesson here is as timeless as it is difficult for us to accept. One’s reputation is contextual, relative. It is defined, in large part, by others. Our character is absolute. Our integrity is all we can grasp in full. TV Shows I Enjoyed This Year Okay, I lied, this post isn’t just about 2021 movies I enjoyed. What qualifies as TV instead of film? It matters less than it once did. Here are a handful of episodic works I enjoyed. Can’t Get You Out of My Head (All six parts of this series are on YouTube. Not sure if they are there legally, but they haven’t been pulled, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Here’s Part 1, for example.) Adam Curtis dances in that shared territory between stark raving mad conspiracy theory and sweeping grand history narrative. One thing that separates him from other charismatic intellectuals seeking to connect the dots in history is his access to copious archival video footage and music and his willingness to wade through it. You think writing an essay is hard, try creating one in film. A lot of this six episode history feels like a film yarn-and-headshot conspiracy wall, but damn if that signature Adam Curtis montage style isn’t a real vibe. At times, when Curtis’ signature voiceover drops out and all we see is grainy footage from various eras of history spliced together one after the other while “Song for Zula” by Phosphorescent plays in the background, what lingers in the memory is not airtight logic but the kind of associative implication that seems especially profound when in a pot-induced haze. Curtis’s coherence is an aesthetic one. In our increasingly multimedia saturated discourse online, it’s not surprising to see memes come to dominate. But underrated is a style of argumentation built on vibes. TikTok is just the latest platform that enables this type of hyper-emotive rhetoric at scale. In every era, but especially this one, underestimate the emotional high ground at your peril. I don’t doubt that if you asked Curtis to write an essay on these same ideas, with copious footnotes, his arguments would feel more convincing in some ways and diminished in others. The medium is the message, as they say. Imagine what types of video essayists we’d unlock if we made it easier to access and use archival footage. When Musical.ly which then became TikTok licensed music tracks from the labels for its users to deploy in their videos, they subsidized millions of creatives with one of the most powerful elements of film, commercial music for the soundtrack. In the same way that the video store birthed a new form of cinephilia, unlocking or shared film and television corpus for easier sampling would unlock a new level of visual discourse. Get Back The year’s best series about the upside of in-person work. A movie like The Lighthouse hinted at the same but by depicting the negative; it gave us one hellish vision of the effects of the prolonged isolation of remote work. Get Back is also a testament to the power of editing since much of the same event was assembled into a movie with a much different valence decades earlier. And to think, they plan to remove editing from this year's live Oscars broadcast. I’ve long yearned for more slow cinema about craftsmanship. Instead of a puff piece of an hour-and-a-half documentary with dozens of talking heads praising some master of their craft, just show me 20 hours of unedited footage of them actually working. This documentary, to me, is some proof that this genre would act as am ambient boost to societal productivity. I’m not a Beatles-phile by any stretch, so much of the narrative drama is lost to me. But even minus that context, the frissons and frictions of their creative process mesmerized me.Ian Leslie's "The Banality of Genius" is a great long read from someone much more well-versed in the Beatles history and mythology. When people ask writers “how did you write this?” it can feel as if you’re being asked to describe a color to someone who can’t see. But Get Back may be as close an answer to “how did you make this album” as anything we’ve seen yet. Succession In this age of streaming on demand, there is a nostalgic comfort in Sunday night prestige television that some critical mass of urban elites (I plead guilty) keep as appointment viewing. Succession was one of the only candidates in 2021. Thank goodness it was an operatic banger. This season attracted some grumbling about the show’s circularity. Third seasons can be that way. But in many ways, this is the show’s theme, that the hell of the wealthy really just is an endless death match for Daddy’s love, or better yet, the keys to his kingdom. In this respect, the rich are like us; they too crave status. What they don’t struggle with are material needs. From episode to episode this season they hop helicopters and private jets from one exotic locale to the next. When more and more TV is shot against green screen, and while I was stuck at home waiting out the pandemic, Succession's world-hopping felt like a treat. In many ways, the distinguishing feature of the elites of society is the amount of time they spend in limousines, helicopters, private jets, and yachts traveling from one meeting to the next. How bodies move through space will become an even more scarce status signal in this post-pandemic age. Already Zoom is beginning to feel like the low budget metaversal compromise for the masses. As to that fantastic Jeremy Strong profile in The New Yorker, it’s the rare celebrity profile that enhanced my enjoyment of the show. That Strong is hardcore method on set, to the likely annoyance of his fellow cast-mates, is some bizarro parallel to the way Kendall drives the rest of the Roy clan insane. When I picture Strong hearing the news that Al Pacino has absconded with the chalice for the made-up award they used to entice Pacino to Yale, what I picture is Kendall Roy’s hangdog face. The series also feels like a critique of postmodern irony. Logan is old-school, crass, but virile, direct, the canonical lion. He’s the decisive man of action who constantly cuts deliberation short. His children, in contrast, especially Roman, crack quips and snide remarks, reveling in each other’s hypocrisy and faults. But when push comes to shove, none of them seem to have any strong beliefs. In key business strategy sessions, they constantly waffle and hedge. A lifetime of Logan withholding his love has left them with a sort of PTSD. They’re the hectoring foxes, nipping at Logan’s lion until he swats them away. Logan senses his children’s impotence and deploys it against them. Kendall becomes some social justice activist against Waystar RoyCo not because he believes in the cause but as a way of acting out. But both of them know the sword of Damocles hovering over Kendall’s head: it’s Daddy who bailed him out of his personal Chappaquiddick. Shiv acts like a girlboss except when in the presence of her father, who alternately flatters and debases her. She hangs on to the emotional yo-yo for dear life. Her only means of avoiding spiraling in shame is to take her frustrations out on her husband Tom. In his spineless bureaucrat’s nature she is confronted with her own weakness and it disgusts her. By demeaning him she finds some relative high ground from which to avoid wading through her own humiliation. Roman is the purest postmodern ironist. His soul seems corroded beyond repair. A lifetime of paternal abuse has left him unable to speak to his siblings except in the rhetoric of contempt. This also manifests in his odd sexual proclivities, especially in his Oedipal, S&M relationship to Gerri. She is the nurturing parent he never had as a child, but what he wants from her is a variant of what his father has always given him: humiliation. He could have a surrogate mother, but he wants a dominatrix. Roman is the living embodiment of the “men will literally X instead of going to therapy” meme. If Kendall is oddly sympathetic, it’s because he’s the only one of the Roy clan who occasionally buckles under the weight of self-awareness. At times, he sees himself for who he really is, and it crushes him. Near season’s end, he was in such a spiral of despair that viewers spent a week debating whether he’d killed himself. Everyone finds some emotional vindication in the series. By season’s end, it’s never been more evident that mommy and daddy don’t love their kids. It’s the Ok Boomer vibe on an operatic scale for this generation of kids who feel betrayed by their parents. The Roys are all wealthy, but technically the Roy children are also part of this first U.S. generation that is less well off than their parents. For the Boomers, the Roy children seem like the purest distillation of the entitled millennial archetype. For those of lesser means, it’s reassurance that the rich may have finer linens but burn in a hell of their own making. It’s as acidic a show as I can remember, devoid of love. Few shows capture the feeling of Western culture at this moment better. It reminds me of Twitter.
It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the profile photos and usernames, all those signature design tropes of this Palaeozoic era of social. But just as there are reasons why these design patterns won out, we shouldn't let survivor bias blind us to their inherent tradeoffs. The next wave of social startups should learn from the weaknesses of some of these choices of our current social incumbentsIt's easy to point out where our incumbent social networks went wrong. Of course, to be where they are today, they had to do a hell of a lot right, too. A lot of mistakes are understandable in hindsight given that online networks of this scale hadn't been built in history before. Still, it's easier to learn from where they went wrong if we're to head towards greener pastures.. It's never smart to tackle powerful incumbents head on anyway. The converged surface area in the design of all these apps suggest oblique vectors of attack. While many of these flaws have already been pointed out and discussed in various places, one critical design mistake keeps rearing its head in many of the social media Testflights sent my way. I've mentioned it in various passing conversations online before. I refer to this as the problem of graph design: When designing an app that shapes its user experience off of a social graph, how do you ensure the user ends up with the optimal graph to get the most value out of your product/service? The fundamental attribution error has always been one of my cautionary mental models. The social media version of this is over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature and under-attributing it to the social context the app places them in. Perhaps the single most important contextual influence in social media is one's social graph. Who they follow and who follows them. Just as some sharks that stop moving dieSome sharks rely on ram ventilation must swim in order to push water over their gills to breathe. But many shark species do not. Maybe we should refer to social apps that rely on a graph to work as "graph ventilated.", most Western social media apps must build a graph or die. This is because most of the most well-known Western social apps chose to interlace two things: the social graph and the content feed. That is, the most social media apps serve up an infinite vertical scrolling feed populated by content posted by the accounts the user follows. In my essay series on TikTok (in order, they are TikTok and the Sorting Hat, Seeing Like an Algorithm, and American Idle), I refer to this as approximating an interest graph using a social graph. You can see this time-tested design, for example, in Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is particularly suited to mobile phones, which dominate internet usage today, and which offer a vertical viewport when held in portrait orientation, as they most often are. We'll return, in a second, to whether this choice makes sense. For now, just note that this architecture behooves these apps to prioritize scaling of the social graph. It's imperative to get users to follow people from the jump. Otherwise, by definition, their feeds will be empty. This is the classic social media chicken-and-egg cold start problem. Every Silicon Valley PM has likely heard the stories about how Twitter and Facebook's critical keystone metrics were similar: get a user to follow some minimum number of accounts. Achieve that and those users turn into WAUs, or even better, DAUs. Users failing to follow enough accounts were the most likely to churn. Many legendary growth teams built their entire reputations inducing tens or hundreds of millions users to follow as many other users as possible. But, again, this obligation derives entirely from the choice to build the feed directly off of the social graph. In TikTok and the Sorting Hat, I wrote: But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it? The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale. Take a social network like Twitter: the one-way follow graph structure is well-suited to interest graph construction, but the problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow. You may enjoy Gruber’s thoughts on Apple but not his Yankees tweets. Or my tweets on tech but not on film. And so on. You can try to use Twitter Lists, or mute or block certain people or topics, but it’s all a big hassle that few have the energy or will to tackle. Almost all feeds end up vying with each other in the zero sum attention landscape, and as such, they all end up getting pulled into competing on the same axis of interest or entertainment. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri recently announced a series of priorities for the app in the coming year, one of them being an increased focus on video. “People are looking to Instagram to be entertained, there’s stiff competition and there’s more to do,” Mosseri said. “We have to embrace that, and that means change.” In my post Status as a Service, I noted that social networks tend to compete on three axes: social capital, entertainment, and utility. Focusing just on entertainment, the problem with building a content feed off of a person's social graph is that, to be blunt, we don't always find the people we know to be that entertaining. I love my friends and family. That doesn't mean I want to see them dancing the nae nae. Or vice versaEDITOR'S NOTE: It's not just people who know him. No one wants to see Eugene dance the nae nae.. Who we follow has a disproportionate effect on the relevance and quality of what we see on much of Western social media because the apps were designed that way. At the same time, who follows us may be just as consequential. We tend to neglect that in our discussions of social experiences, perhaps because it's a decision over which users have even less control than who they choose to follow. Yet it shouldn't come as a surprise that what we are willing to post on social media depends a lot on who we believe might see it. Our followers are our implied audience. To take the most famous example, the root of Facebook's churn issues began when their graph burgeoned to encompass everyone in one's life. As noted above, just because we are friends with someone doesn't mean we want to see everything they post about in our News Feed. In the other direction, having many more people from all spheres of our lives follow us created a massive context collapse. It wasn't just that everyone and their mother had joined Facebook, it was specifically that everyone's mother had joined Facebook.There's some generalizable form of Groucho's Marx quip about not refusing to join any club that would have him as a member. Namely, that most people don't want to belong to a club where they're the highest status member. Because, by definition, the median status of a member of the club is lowering their own. That's not to say it can't be a stable configuration. Networks based more around utility, like WeChat, aren't driven as much by status dynamics. Not surprisingly, they are less focused on a singular feed. It's difficult, when you're starting out on a social network, to imagine that having more followers could be a bad thing. Yet many Twitter users complain after they surpass 20K, then 50K, then 100K followers or more. Suddenly, a lot of your hot takes attract equally hot pushback. Suddenly, it isn't so fun yeeting your ideas out into the ether. I know. Boo hoo on the smallest violin. But regardless of whether you think this is a first world problem, it's indicative of how phase shifts in the experience of social media are difficult to detect until long after they've occurred. To put it even stronger, graph design problems are particularly dangerous to social companies because they fall into that class of mistakes that are difficult to reverse. Jeff Bezos wrote, in his 1997 Amazon letters to shareholders, about two types of decisions. Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups. Graph design problems are one-way mistakes in large part because users make them so. Most social media users don't unfollow people after following them. Much of this comes down to social conformity. It's awkward and uncomfortable to do so, especially if you'll run into them. Anytime I unfollow someone I might run into, I imagine them cornering me like Larry David at the water cooler, eyebrows raised, with that signature tone of voice he mastered on Curb Your Enthusiasm, an equal mix of indignation at being slighted and glee at having caught you in an act of hypocrisy. "So, Eugene, I notice you unfollowed me. Pret-tay, pret-tay interesting." If people tend to add to their social graphs more than they prune them, the social graph you help your users design should be treated as a one-way decision. And as Bezos noted, one-way decisions should be treated with care.Once Twitter started posting tweets to my timeline simply because people I followed had liked them, even if they were tweets from people I didn't follow myself, I started getting very confused. If you're angry I don't follow you, it may be that I think I already follow you. Many social apps, because of how they're configured, undergo phase shifts as the graph scales. The user experience at the start, when you have few friends and followers, changes as those figures rise. At first, it's more lively with more people. Now the party's getting started. But beyond some scale, negative network effects creep in. And if you don't change how you handle it, before you know it, you find yourself pronouncing that you're taking a break from social media for your mental health. Not only do users not notice it happening, like the proverbial slow boiling frog, the people operating the apps may be oblivious to the phase shifts until it's too late. Social graphs are path dependent. A classic example, though I don't know if this still persists, is how Pinterest skewed heavily towards female users at launch, losing lots of potential male users in the process. This was a function of building their feed off of each user's social graph. Men would see a flood of pins from the females in their network as women were some of the strongest earlier adopters of pinning. This created a reflexive loop in which Pinterest was perceived as a female-centric social app, which chased off some male users, thus becoming self-fulfilling stereotype. An alternate content selection heuristic for the feed could have corrected for this skew. But again, this is a problem unique to Western social media design. In conflating the social graph and the interest graph, we've introduced a content matching problem that needn't exist. I don't get upset that my friends don't follow me on TikTok or Reddit or what I think of as purer interest and/or entertainment networks. It's very clear in those products that each person should follow their own interests. The way China has built out its social infrastructure is, in at least this respect, more logical. WeChat owns the dominant social graph, and it acts as an underlying social infrastructure to the rest of the Chinese internetThough not always a reliable one. If you're a WeChat competitor in any category, they may block links to your apps, as they've done with Douyin and Taobao in the past. This is always the danger of a private company owning the dominant social graph, and where regulators need to step in.. Rather than duplicate the social graph of everyone, which WeChat owns, other apps can focus on what they do best, which might or might not require an alternate graph. Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue. The lifeblood of their income statement is traffic to the feed. This means feed relevance is paramount. Anywhere one's social graph drifts from one's interests, boring content invades the feed. The signal to noise ratio shifts the wrong direction. Instead of pruning and tuning their social graphs to fix their feeds, most users do the next easiest thing: they churn. As a product manager or designer on social app, you might object. The user chooses who to follow, and other users choose to follow them. It's out of your control. But this ignores all the ways in which apps put their hands on the scale to nudge each user towards a specific type of graph. Take initial user sign-up flows. Every week, I seem to encounter this modal dialog on a new social app Testflight: What I look for is where this request appears and how the app frames it. Most times, users are asked to grant access to their contact book and to follow any matching users (or even worse, to spam their contact list with invites) before they have any idea of what the app is even about. In pushing people to duplicate their contact book, these apps are explicitly choosing to build off of people's real-world social graphs. It's not surprising that social apps prioritize this permission as a critical one in the sign-up flow. The iOS contact book is now the only "open-source" social graph that a new app can work from to jumpstart their own. In The Network's the Thing, I argued that the network itself provides the lion's share of the value for a social network, that arguments about what types of content to allow in feeds, how those were formatted, were of much less importance. For a brief window, massive social graphs like Facebook or Twitter allowed third-party apps to tap into those graphs, even to duplicate them wholesale. Instagram famously got a nice head start on building out their own social graph by siphoning off of Twitter's. It didn't take long for those companies to realize that they were arming their future competition. They clamped down on graph access hard. You can still offer Facebook or Twitter auth as an option for your app, but if you want a social graph of your own, the mobile contact book is the easiest to tap into nowadays. Another way apps really influence the shape of their social graph is with suggested follow lists. These often appear in the first-time user walkthrough, interspersed in the feed, and sometimes alongside the feed. Early Twitter users fortunate enough to be on the first versions of Twitter's suggested follow list today have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers because they were paraded in front of every new user. It was a massive social capital subsidy, but I find a lot of selections on that list puzzling. A few years ago, a friend set up a Twitter account for the first time and showed me the list of accounts Twitter suggested to them during sign up. It included Donald Trump. Which, regardless of your political leanings, is a dubious choice. Let's just shove every new user in the direction of politics Twitter (I'd be skeptical of a suggestion of Biden, too), one of the worst Twitters there is. Cool, cool. For some people, like those who frequent fight clubs on weekends, politics Twitter might be the perfect dopamine fix, but when a user is signing up for the first time and Twitter knows nothing about them, that's a bizarre gamble to take. For years, people marveled at Facebook's Suggested Friends widget. Wow, how did they know that I knew that person, yes, of course I'll friend them. And yet, as noted earlier, that may have been a graph design mistake given the way the News Feed was being constructed. In the other direction, it's also important to help a users acquire the right types of followers. Cults are held together by a bi-directional influence. Cult leaders use their charisma to grow a following, then those followers shape the cult leader in return. It's a symbiotic feedback loop, not always a healthy one. Besides being one-way mistakes, graph design errors are also pernicious because the tend to manifest only after an app has achieved some level of product-market fit. By that point, not only is it difficult to undo the social graph that has crystallized, to do so would violate the expectations of the users who've embraced the app as it is. It's a double bind, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Apps that achieve some level of product-market fit, even if it's a local maximum, require real courage to revert. This doesn't stop social apps from trying to fix the problem. Reduced traffic to the feed is existential for many social apps. Instead of fixing the root problem of the graph design, however, most apps opt instead to patch the problem. The most popular method is to switch to an algorithmic, rather than chronological, feed. The algorithm is tasked with filtering the content from the accounts you've chosen to follow. It tries to restore signal over noise. To determine what to keep and what to toss, feed algorithms look at a variety of signals, but at a basic level they are all trying to guess what will engage you. Still, this is a band-aid on an upstream error. Look at Facebook oscillating every few years between news content and more personal content from people you know. Until they acknowledge that the root problem lies in sourcing stories for News Feed from their monolithic social graph, they'll never truly solve their churn. And yet, to walk away from this fundamental architecture of their News Feed would be the boldest decision they've made in their long historyIronically, shifting to the News Feed itself was perhaps their previous boldest decision.. Not just because almost all their revenue comes from News Feed as it works now, but also since assembling a monolithic graph might be their strongest architectural defense against government antitrust action. Twitter, unlike Facebook with its predominant two-way friending, is built on a graph assembled from one-way follows. In theory, this should reduce its exposure to graph design problems. However, it suffers from the same flaw that any interest graph has when built on a social graph. You may be interested in some of a person's interests but not their others. Twitter favors pure play Twitter accounts that focus on one niche. But most people don't opt to operate multiple Twitter accounts to cleanly separate the topics they like to tweet about. One of my favorite heuristics for spotting flaws in a system is to look at those trying to break it. Advanced social media users have long tried to hack their away around graph design problems. Users who create finsta's or alt Twitter accounts are doing so, in part, to create alternative graphs more suited to particular purposes. One can imagine alternative social architectures that wouldn't require users to create multiple accounts to implement these tactics. But in this world where each social media account can only be associated with one identity, users are locked into a single graph per account. One clever way an app might help solve the graph design problem is by removing the burden of unfollowing accounts that no longer interest users. Just as our social graphs change throughout our lives, so could our online social graphs. Our set of friends in kindergarten tend not to be the same friends we have in grade school, high school, college, and beyond. A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns. Imagine Twitter or Instagram just silently unfollowing accounts you haven't engaged with in a while, accounts that have gone dormant, and so on. Twitter and Facebook offer methods like muting to reduce what we see from people without unfriending or unfollowing, but it's a lot of work, and frankly I feel like a coward using any of those. Messaging apps, by virtue of focusing on direct communication between two people or among groups, naturally achieve this by pushing the threads with the latest messages to the top of their application windows. People who fall out of our lives just fall off the bottom of the screen. LIFO has always been a reasonably effective general purpose relevance heuristic. Another possible solution to the graph design problem is to decouple a users content feed from their social graph. In my three pieces on TikTok, I wrote about how that app's architecture is fundamentally different from that of most Western social media. TikTok doesn't need you to follow any accounts to construct a relevant feed for you. Instead, it does two things. First, it tries to understand what interests you by observing how you react to everything it shows you. It tries to learn your taste, and it does a damn good job of it. TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph. Secondly, TikTok runs every candidate video through a two-stage screening process. First, it runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users.Okay, yes, that's not quite right. Anyone can be on this test audience for a video. It just happens, however, that TikTok's user base skews younger, so most of the people on that panel will be Gen Z. Also, it's a known fact that a pack of Gen Z users muttering "OK Boomer" is the most terrifying pack hunter in the animal kingdom after hyenas and murder hornets. If those test viewers don't show any interest, the video is yeeted into the dustbin of TikTok, never to be seen again except if someone seeks it out directly on someone's profile. Secondly, it then uses its algorithm to decide whether that video would interest each user based on their taste profile. Even if you don't follow the creator of a video, if TikTok's algorithm thinks you'll enjoy it, you'll see it in your For You Page. Recently, Instagram announced it would start showing its users posts from accounts they don't follow. In many ways, this is as close to a concession as we'll see from Instagram to the superiority of TikTok's architecture for pure entertainment. Some apps use some sort of topic or content picker. Tell us what music or film genres you like. What news topics interest you. Then they try to use machine learning and signals from their entire user base to serve you a relevant feed. The effectiveness of this approach varies widely. Why does a playlist generated off a single song on Spotify work so well and yet its podcast recommendations feel generic? Why, after spending years and millions of dollars on research, including the fabled Netflix prize, do Netflix's recommendations still feel generic, and why doesn't it really matter? Why are book recommendations on Amazon solid while article recommendations on news sites feel random? It would take an entire separate piece just to dig into why some content recommendations work so much better than others, so complex is the topic. In this piece focused on graph design, what matters is that things like content pickers explicitly veer away from the social graph. Twitter allowing you to follow topics in addition to accounts can be seen as one attempt to move a half step towards being a pure interest graph. It's not that apps can't be more fun when social, or that people don't share some overlapping interests with people they know. We all care both our interests and the people in our lives. When they overlap, even better. It's just that after more than a decade of living with our current social apps, we have ample case studies illustrating the downsides of assuming they are perfectly correlated. A secondary consideration is what type of interaction an application is building towards in the long run. Is is about one-to-one interactions or broadcasting to large audiences? What percentage of your users do you want creating as opposed to just consuming? Is your app best served by a graph of people who know each other in real life or by a graph that connects strangers who share common interests? Or some mix of both? Is your app for people from the same company or organization? Will the interactions cut across cultures and national borders, or is it best if various geographies are segregated into their own graphs? The next generation of social product teams can and should be more proactive about thinking through what type of social graph will offer the best user experience in the long run. I'm not certain, but it doesn't feel, based on the histories I've heard, that many social networks built their graphs with a particular design in mind. This makes graph design an exercise with more open questions than answers. In some ways, Facebook being built for just Harvard students in the beginning may have imposed some helpful graph design constraints by chance. Unlike some types of design, graph design doesn't lend itself easily to prototyping. Social networks are at least in part complex adaptive systems, making it difficult to prototype what types of interactions will occur if and when the graph achieves scale. But whereas traditional complex adaptive systems are so complex that predictions are futile, social networks are different in two ways. One is that human nature is consistent. The second is that we have numerous super scaled social networks to study. They're massive real world test cases for what happens when you make certain choices in graph design. They also exist in multiple markets around the world. This makes it possible to study distinct path dependencies, especially when comparing across cultures and market conditions as unique as China versus the U.S. Despite all the variations in context, issues like trolling seem universal, suggesting that some potent underlying mechanisms are at work. Once you tug on the threads surrounding graph design, you can burrow deep down many rabbit holes. If the people connected are going to be complete strangers, how will you establish sufficient trust (e.g. through a reputation system)? If the trunk of the app is a content feed, does that feed have to draw exclusively from stories posted by accounts followed by the user? Does it have to pluck candidates from those accounts at all? Is a feed even the right architecture for healthy interactions among your users? Whose job is it to consider the problem of graph design? And when? To take one example, growth team strategies should be informed by your graph design. Growth shouldn't be treated as a rogue team whose only job is to extend the graph in every possible direction. They need to know what both good and harmful graph growth looks like so they can craft strategies more aligned with the long term vision. Recently, TikTok started pushing me to connect more with people I know IRL. I've gotten prompts asking me to follow people I may know, and now when I share videos with people, I often get a notification telling me they've watched the video I've shared. Often these notifications are the only way I know they even have a TikTok account and what their username is. To date, I've enjoyed TikTok without really following any people I know IRL. Perhaps TikTok is trying to make sharing of its videos endogenous to the app itself. But by this point in my piece, it should be obvious that I consider any changes to the graph of any social product to be moves that should be treated with greater caution. Most people I know don't make any TikToks (I know, I know, this is how you can tell I'm old), so following them won't impact my FYP much. For a younger cohort, where users make TikToks at a much higher rate, following each other may make more sense. On the other hand, any app with a default public graph structure plays into the innate human impulse to judge. Wait, this person I know follows which accounts on TikTok?! Tsk tsk. The answer to whether TikTok should push its users to replicate their real world social graphs isn't cut and dried. I bring it up only to illustrate that graph design is a discipline that requires deeper consideration. It could use, as its name implies, some design. The term "follow" is fitting. Who we follow can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. First you build your graph, then your graph builds you. Plenty of research shows that humans tend to oscillate at the same frequency as the people they spend the most time with. Silicon Valley sage Naval Ravikant popularized the 5 Chimp Theory from zoology, which says you can deduce the mood and behavior of any single chimp by observing by which five chimps they hang out with the most. The social media version of this is that we can predict how any user will behave on an app by the people they follow, the people who follow them, and the "space" they're forced to interact with those people in, be it a Facebook News Feed or Twitter Timeline or other architecture. We all know people who are the worst versions of themselves on social media. The fundamental attribution error predicts we'll think they're terrible by nature when they may just be responding to their environment and incentives. Humans aren't chimps, we tend to juggle membership in dozens of different social groups at a time. Reed's Law predicts that the utility of networks scales exponentially because not only can each person in a network connect with every other node, but the number of possible subgroups is 2^N-N-1 where N is the number of people in that network. But whether a social app allows such subgroups to form easily is a design problem. Monolithic feeds tend to force people into larger subgroups than is optimal for healthy interaction. While every user sees a different Twitter Timeline or Facebook News Feed, the illusion is still of a large public commons. Because anyone might see something you post, you should operate as if everyone will. Messaging apps, in contrast, tend to allow users themselves to form the subgroups most relevant to them. Facebook Groups is a more flexible architecture than News Feed. Humans contain multitudes, and social apps should flex to their various communication privacy needs. It's no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members. Slack's public channels act as public squares within companies, exposing more employees to each other's thoughts. This can lead to an employee finding others who share what they thought were minority opinions, like reservations about specific company policies. We're only now seeing how many companies operated in relative peace in the past in large part because of the privacy inherent in e-mail as a communications technology. In many ways, graph design was always bound to be more important in Western social media now, in the year 2021, than in the early days of social media. In the early days of the internet, the public social graph was sparse to non-existent. For the most part, our graphs were limited to the email addresses we knew and the occasional username of someone in our favorite news groups. It's hard to explain to a generation that grew up with the internet what a secret thrill every new connection online was in the early days of the internet. How hard it was to track down someone online if all you knew was their name. Today, we have more than enough ways to connect to just about anybody in the world. Adding someone to my address book feels almost unnecessary when I can likely reach any person with a smartphone and internet access any of a dozen ways. In a world where finding someone online is a commodityOne sign that it is a commodity is that messaging apps, while massive, are for the most part lousy businesses that generate little in revenue. That's the financial profile you'd expect of a commodity business., the niftier trick is connecting to the right people in the right context. I have over a dozen messaging apps installed on my phone, they all look roughly the same. While I've discussed graph design largely defensively here—how to avoid mistakes in graph design—the positive view is to use graph design offensively. How do you craft a unique graph whose very structure encodes valuable, and more importantly, unique intelligence? LinkedIn may be the social app Silicon Valley product people like to grouse about the most, but while many of the complaints are valid, its sizable market cap is testament to the value of its graph. It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a lot of money to traverse it. For all the debate over whether our current social networks are good for society, I prefer to focus on the potential we've yet to realize. We have the miracle of Wikipedia, yes, but aren't there more types of mass scale collaboration to be enabled? Every other week or so, I am introduced to someone amazing, or an account I've never heard of before that blows me away. That social networks themselves aren't facilitating these introductions leaves me less sad than hopeful. In a decade, today's social graphs will look like blunt instruments, so primitive were their configurations. We'll also look back over that decade, see how many more amazing people we finally met at the right time and the right context, and realize that indeed, the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.
I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity. And this is that, in part. But it discusses a bunch of other topics, some only tangentially related to TikTok. All the points I wanted to cover seem hyperlinked in a sprawling loose tangle. This could easily have been several standalone posts. I've been stuck on how to structure it. Some people find my posts too long. I’m sympathetic to the modern plague of shortened attention spans, but I also don’t want lazy readers. At the same time, this piece felt like it was missing a through line that would help pull a reader through. And then I had a minor epiphany, or perhaps it was a moment of delusion. Either way, it provided an organizing conceit: I decided to write this piece in the style of the TikTok FYP feed. That is, a series of short bits, laid out vertically in a long scrolling feed. This piece is long, but if you get bored in any one section, you can just scroll on the next one; they're separated by horizontal rules for easy visual scanning. You can also read them out of order. There are lots of cross-references, though, so if you skip some of the segments, others may not make complete sense. However, it’s ultimately not a big deal. If I had more time, I might have built this essay as a series of full-screen cards that you could swipe from one to the next. Or perhaps tap from one to the next, like Robin Sloan’s tap essay (I wish there a way to export this piece into a form like that, if someone built that already let me know). And if I were even more ambitious, I would've used some Anki-like spaced repetition algorithm to randomize the order in which the following text chunks are presented to you, shuffling it each time a reader jumped in.The most meta way for me to ship this essay would have been as a series of TikTok videos. It would have been the Snowfall of TikTok essays. That would have also taken a year of my life (which, being locked inside because of a pandemic might be the time to attempt something like that?). Also, I am camera shy. But as it is, this is what you get. By network effects of creativity, I mean that every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative. This exists in a weak form on every social network and on the internet at large. The connected age means we are exposed to so much from so many more people than at any point in human history. That can't help but compound creativity. Various memes and trends pass around on networks like Instagram and Twitter. But there, you still have to create your own version of a meme from scratch, even if, on Twitter, it's as simple as copying and pasting. But TikTok has a strong form of this type of network effect. They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content. In their app, they have a wealth of features that make it dead simple to grab any element from another TikTok and incorporate it into a new TikTok. The barrier to entry in editing video is really high as anyone who has used a non-linear editor like Premiere or compositing software like After Effects can attest. TikTok abstracted a lot of formerly complex video editing processes into effects and filters that even an amateur can use. Instagram launched one-click photo filters (after Hipstamatic, of course, though Hipstamatic lacked the feed which is like the spine of modern social apps), and later Instagram added additional features for editing Stories, and even some separate apps like Boomerang that were later re-incorporated back into Instagram as features. Snapchat has a gazillion video filters, too, though many are what I think of as simple facial cosmetic FX. YouTube has launched almost no creator tools of note ever. WTF. TikTok launches seemingly a new video effect or filter every week. I regularly log in and see creators using some filter I've never heard of, and some of them are just flat out bonkers. What creators can accomplish with some of these filters I can't even fathom how I'd replicate in something like the Adobe Creative Suite. Kili So Silly (@kili.so.silly) has created a short video on TikTok with music original sound. | #stitch with @xxelacxx #TimeWarpScan #fyp #foryou JeremyLynch (@jeremylynch) has created a short video on TikTok with music Despicable Me (From "Despicable Me"). | This freaks me out watching it back 😅 #timewarp #timewarpchallenge TikTok’s Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and allow for emergent creativity. It only takes a handful of innovators to unleash a meme tsunami. A longstanding economics debate is why we haven't seen the effects of the internet in our productivity figures. I won't rehash every side of every argument there. But I know this: to take someone else's video and insert a reaction video of my own playing alongside it on the same screen is not easy in a traditional NLE. I'm not saying it's the moon landing, but it's not trivial. On TikTok, you can just press the Duet button and start talking into your phone, and soon you have a side-by-side of the original video and your reaction video (you can choose from any number of their preset layouts for reactions). That's an explicit productivity boost; I can measure it in time saved for the same output. You won't see that show up in GDP per capita figures, but it's real. Remember 2 Girls, 1 Cup? If you've seen it, how could you not? What interested me was less the video, which just horrified me, but the reaction videos of people watching it. Because 2 Girls, 1 Cup was a short video, I think it was a minute or two long, you could simply watch the face of someone watching the video and sync every reaction to every horrific beat of the video now forever haunting your memory, even though the original video wasn't visible on screen. The fun of the 2 Girls 1 Cup reaction video, but reaction videos in general, is that shared context. Until TikTok came along, there wasn't an easy way to do reaction videos to other videos and have them make sense unless the original video had so much distribution that it was common knowledge. Or you could put the reaction video alongside or on top of or beneath the original video, but that required skill in using a non-linear video editor to lay those out and synchronize their timelines. With TikTok's Duet feature, you can instantly record a side-by-side reaction video to anyone else's video. Duet is the quote tweet of TikTok. Or you don't have to do a reaction video at all. The Duet feature is designed simply to allow you to record a video that will play back alongside another video. It can be used for reaction videos, sure, but also to just provide a running commentary on other videos, and there are entire accounts built around both concepts. But again, the Duet feature is built at such a low level that you can treat the feature as a primitive to replicate any number of other editing tools. One such tool is to use the Duet feature as a dynamic matte. Since you know where your video will be placed in relation to the original poster's video, you can build a video mosaic. Another is to use the Duet feature to, well, literally record duets. But if you allow Duets to stack, well, eventually, one Wellerman can bring the whole chorus to your yard. Someone truly ambitious could adjust the playback speed of various levels of Inception from the film Inception and stack them and synchronize them in TikTok using the Duet feature. If I had more time I'd do this myself, but the time has come for some time-rich kid out there to take this on. Knowing that others can Duet your video means you can post any number of videos as prompts. For example, you can read one side of the dialogue in a two-hander. sara (@saraecheagaray) has created a short video on TikTok with music 人生のメリーゴーランド (Jazzical Lounge ver.) [『ハウルの動く城』より]. | #duet with @thechrisbarnett NOW I can say my accent sucks #fyp #foryou #acting Knowing that TikTok has a Stitch feature, you can also post a question in a video and expect that some number of people will use Stitch an answer to your question and distribute that as a new video. A popular prompt is "Tell me you're X without telling me you're X" or any number of its variants like "Show me you're X without showing me you're X." Stitch wasn't necessarily designed to be used in this way, but as a primitive it's well-suited to any number of uses, including making TikTok a sort of video Quora. Video prompts can come from not only other TikTok videos but commenters. Some TikTok videos are made in response to requests posted in the comments. The comment is excerpted and published as an on screen text overlay at the beginning of the response video. This is another of the nested feedback loops within the global feedback loop that is the FYP talent show. Once one example of this went viral, then the entire community adopted this as one of the norms of the community. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was a show almost entirely built around the reaction video. Stewart would play some clip of a politician being a hypocrite, or some Fox News anchor spouting their usual performative indignation, and then the camera would cut back to Stewart, his face frozen in some emoji mask of shock: eyes wide, mouth agape. Social networks, and entertainment networks like TikTok, have completed the work of democratizing reactions. Yes, there's no reason you need to react to everything. But it's human nature. This is the social contract of the social media era. If you dare to shout your opinion or publish your work to the masses, the masses can choose to shout back. Gossip litigates and fleshes out the boundaries of acceptable behavior within groups. Whereas gossip used to be contained, social networks now give it global distribution. This is one reason of many we've seen in-group and out-group boundaries drawn in bolder weight in this era. For every wide-eyed look of horror by Jon Stewart, you had the furrowed brow of disbelief that is Tucker Carlson's signature look, like someone in his elevator car passed gas. Now extend that to clapbacks on the internet and you have a world in which back-channel gossip, a useful release valve and distribution channel for information about our peers, has become an open dialogue. The grapevine became the public feed, and every day, kangaroo court is in session. TikTok's Duet feature belongs in the social media hall of fame of primitives alongside features like Follow and the Like button. What feature better epitomizes the remix, react culture of the internet? Paul Ford once wrote that "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" is the fundamental question of the web. By then, social networks were well on their way to taking over from the web, and in the process, installing the plumbing by which the masses could finally directly opine to the masses, who could, in return, directly consult back. The "reply guy" is the consultant class of the internet, and mansplaining is its verb. Yes, there are quote tweets and replies, but the TikTok Duet is the video analog, so simple and elegant in its design that you wonder why YouTube didn't launch it ten years ago, and then you remember that YouTube hasn't launched any creator tools of note since...ever. What the Duet feature does, as described by how it would be done in a traditional non-linear editing program like Adobe Premiere, is the following: Copies the original file Inserts a new video track and a new audio track on top of the originals Allows you to lay down a new video on those new tracks Performs a whole series of steps to arrange the videos side-by-side on screen TikTok abstracts a bunch of steps into a single function. Yes, yes, some of these features in TikTok came from Musical.ly. But that's just a meta form of the theme of this piece! TikTok sampled from Musical.ly and improved upon it. They remixed a remix app. But also, isn't this how innovation happens? We stand on the shoulder of giants and all that? Good artists copy, great artists steal? TikTok enables, for video and audio, the type of combinatorial evolution that Brian Arthur describes as the underlying mechanism of the tech industry's innovation. How many truly original ideas are there in Silicon Valley? Very few. Most have been tried umpteenth times in the past. Much of finding product-market fit in tech is context and timing. And people always underestimate the market side of product-market fit. When something fails, people tend to blame the product, but we should blame the market more often. The pull of the market is usually as important, if not more so, than the push from a product. One day, the conditions are finally right, and an idea that has failed ten times before suddenly breaks out. Sometimes it's a tweak in execution, maybe it's an advance in complementary or enabling technology, sometimes it's a cultural shift. Most of the best ideas in tech first appeared in science fiction books in the 1960s, and many of those are still waiting for their time to come. This is why rejecting companies that are trying something that's been tried before is so dangerous. It's lazy pattern-matching. I do like Jeff Bezos' principle on when he decides to finally give up on an idea: "When the last smart person in the room gives up on the idea." But it also implies that you should bring some ideas back when a new smart person, or maybe a naive overconfident one, enters the room and champions the idea. Given we know innovation compounds as more ideas from more people collide, it's stunning how many tech firms, even ones that ostensibly tout the value of openness, have launched services that do a better job of letting their users exchange ideas than any internal tool does for their own employees’ ideas. How many employees join a firm and then spend a week in orientation learning where to get lunch, how to file expense reports, mundane trivialities like that. How many sessions are led by random trainers who don't even work at the company? If you think of a company as an organism, and new employees as new brain cells, it's staggering how many join the company and begin from an absolute cold start. It's as if the company has chronic amnesia. What has the company learned from its past, what is its culture? When employees take months or even years to get up to speed at a company, companies should be embarrassed. Instead, it's treated as normal. The free flow of ideas outside a company shouldn't, or in apps like TikTok, shouldn't exceed the rate at which knowledge flows inside a company, but I see it happen time and again. The toughest job for any creative is the cold start. The blinking cursor on the blank page in a new document. Granted, writing a tweet, or even shooting an Instagram photo, isn't like composing the great American novel. But we tend to underrate the extent to which new users often churn without having ever posted anything to a social network because we only focus on those who do. Now imagine trying to make a TikTok from scratch if you're older than, say, 19. The creative bar is high, you don't know how to dance, you're not up on the latest memes or popular music. Even if you're a teen, it's not easy to come up with a 0 to 1 TikTok. But the beauty of TikTok's FYP algorithm and the Discover page is that you don't have to create a TikTok from scratch. The vast majority of TikToks are riffs on memes and trends that other users originate. It's no shame to be a 1 to n TikToker. Many on the platform achieve their first viral hit riffing on an existing meme. Charli didn't invent the Renegade dance, Jalaiah Harmon did, but Charli made it famous. A lot of Charli and Addison's most popular TikToks are their interpretation of dances other people choreographed to songs other people composed.The ongoing debate on cultural appropriation seems to have no end in sight, but at least on TikTok there is a chance, with time stamps and some of the literal links the app creates between videos, to trace the origin of memes more easily. Richard Dawkins introduced the term meme in his classic The Selfish Gene, defining it as a unit of information that spreads via imitation. He noted that memes evolve via natural selection just as in evolution. This memetic evolution happens via the same mechanisms as biological evolution, via variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance. The internet writ large has always been fertile ground for the accelerated breeding of memes (cue toothless old prospector: "Back in my day sonny boy we had to spread memes via email chain letters"). But the TikTok app is perhaps the most evolved meme ecosystem to date. Assisted evolution occurs when humans intervene to accelerate the pace of natural evolution. TikTok is a form of assisted evolution in which humans and machine learning algorithms accelerate memetic evolution. The FYP algorithm is TikTok's version of selection pressure, but it's aided by the feedback of test audiences for new TikToks. Memes can start from almost anything on TikTok. It can be the lyrics of a song, or just the vibe of a track, or both. A user can post a question or a challenge. In a single session on TikTok, you'll find videos of all types, most being riffs on existing memes (the variation). Regardless of the provenance, any video, once loaded into TikTok, is subject to the assisted evolutionary forces in the app. Software tools like the Duet or Stitch feature and all of TikTok's other video editing tools assist in mutation and inheritance, and each remix of a source video becomes a source video for others to remix, generating further variation. Meanwhile, the competition on the FYP feed is fierce, and the survivors of that extreme selection pressure are memes of uncommon fitness. In this assisted evolutionary ecosystem that is TikTok, and with an...umm...assist from the pandemic that kept hundreds of millions of people locked inside scrolling their phones, we've seen a marked contraction in the half-life of memes. Memes used to dominate TikTok for what felt like weeks, and now it seems the memetic zeitgeist on TikTok shifts every few days, if not nightly. If I don't check back on TikTok every day, I find myself scrambling to catch up to the meta when I finally do open the app. Of course, people grab TikToks and share them on YouTube or Twitter or as Reels on Instagram, but those apps receive flattened video files and can’t break them into component parts to be remixed the way you can on TikTok. Those other services are fine endpoints for distribution, but the creativity happens on TikTok. Don't get me started on apps like Triller (which feels like a Ponzi scheme). People will litigate Instagram copying Snapchat's Stories feature until the end of time, but the fact is that format wasn't ever going to be some defensible moat. Ephemerality is a clever new dimension on which to vary social media, but it's easily copiable. This is why TikTok's network effects of creativity matter. To clone TikTok, you can't just copy any single feature. It's all of that, and not just the features, but how users deploy them and how the resultant videos interact with each other on the FYP feed. It's replicating all the feedback loops that are built into TikTok's ecosystem, all of which are interconnected. Maybe you can copy some of the atoms, but the magic lives at the molecular level. TikTok has a a series of flywheels that interconnect, and there isn't any single feature you can copy to recreate the ecosystem. Meanwhile, Reels has to try to compete while being one of like a half dozen things jammed into the Instagram app. Markets in the internet and technology age are conducive to winner-take-all effects thanks to preferential attachment. This means that if you are first to stumble upon some flywheelMany like my friend Kevin use the term loops. I use flywheel merely to indicate I'm referring to positive feedback loops since loops can also be negative feedback. Also, I had to make that damn Amazon flywheel diagram for way too many presentations back in the day, it's mounted on a wall in my brain. in your business, the returns are even greater and accumulate more quickly than they would've in any other era in history. Building a flywheel, though, often requires connecting a series of features at once. When I advise various companies, big and small, I often run into objections to my recommendations because of the popularity of agile or other incremental development philosophies. We end up at loggerheads on the V of MVP (minimum viable product), V having always been contextually determined. If a flywheel requires three or four or even more things to connect in your app, it takes more work to ship all of them at once, and that feels like a riskier expenditure of your team's time. But, I'd counter: 1) often, testing a flywheel by definition means you have to build multiple features that work together 2) the returns of achieving a flywheel are often so high as to be worth the risk and 3) if you don't achieve any flywheels you are, as investor updates are so fond of saying, default dead. Instagram famously has never had its version of resharing (e.g. retweeting). This reduced the velocity of photos and later videos on the service, a sort of brake on spam and misinformation and other possible such downsides. But after using TikTok, it does feel odd to go through Instagram and not be able to grab anyone's photo to remix. Imagine you could grab someone's photo and apply your own filters, or grab just one element of the photo and use it in your photo. Once we all live in the metaverse, this type of infinite replication and remixability will be something we take for granted, but even now, we're starting to see an early version of it on TikTok. This type of native remixability feels like it will be table stakes in future creative networks. Fanfic is one text version of sampling and remixing. It doesn't require much more than your imagination. It's always been really expensive, in both time and legal costs, to sample and remix film and television. TikTok has, with its short video format and tools, made remixing of premium video easier and safer. In Harry Potter TikTok, and its sub-genus Draco Malfoy TikTok, creators pull from the repository of the Harry Potter film universe as if it were on GitHub and merge themselves into branching storylines in which, well, creators become students at Hogwarts and catch the romantic interests of one Draco Malfoy. The Discover page acts as the Fed in the central economy of memes on TikTok, while the FYP algorithm is the interest rate on meme distribution. The Discover Page features hashtags. By the very act of featuring a hashtag, they signal to creators that if they create using that hashtag, they will get the distribution boost of that hashtag being featured on the Discover Page. Which raises the age-old conundrum, which came first, the Discover Page hashtag placement, or the hashtag's trending? The answer is yes. It's circular, an ouroboros of virality. TikTok also posts the number of collective views on videos with that hashtag, helping creators gauge the potential distribution value of climbing aboard that trend. TikTok is a mix of a centrally planned economy and a free market, much like many multiplayer video games where the game publisher manages the price and availability of various assets like weapons and armor while the players put them to use in the virtual economy. The Discover Page is also where TikTok will feature corporate challenges. Yes, it's a paid placement, but the creative output is collective and distributed. Because the most popular memes get super-distribution via the FYP algorithm, you can assume common knowledge of the meme among your viewers and just cut to the punchline. You don't need a bunch of what would be the video equivalent of exposition upfront. This keeps the majority of videos on TikTok compact, critical to the high cadence of the FYP feed. TikTok feels fast. Almost manic. It also gives viewers that hit of in-group dopamine when they already know the references in your video. If you don't understand a TikTok video and its references, you can trace the provenance from within the app in any number of ways. You can follow the hashtags in the caption or tap the sound icon and see all the other videos which have been made in that meme branch. Often that's enough to derive the context. Or you can just read the comments. You'll find you usually aren't alone, someone will almost always have posted a comment like "In here before the smart people arrive" and then below that will be comments that explain the video to everyone else. The internet, and the assumption of the internet, allowed for more complex and long linear narratives in television, shows like Lost and Game of Thrones. The assumption of Know Your Meme, or just knowledgeable commenters in the TikTok comments, allows for less expository and more compact, obscure TikToks. TikTok comments are a form of distributed annotation. This technique of offloading the setup for a joke to the internet allows TikTok's, or even Tweets or Instagram posts to take on a form of what I call compressed narrative. The old format of a joke, with a setup—A man walks into the doctor's office wearing only underwear made of Saran wrap—and then the punchline—and the doctor said "I can clearly see your nuts."—is dead. The internet killed the "joke." Instead, the internet is mostly punchline, with the barest of setup, if any. It's on you to know the context. Go Google it. And if you still don't get it, you weren't meant to. An example is the "I ain't ever seen two pretty best friends" meme that went around on TikTok for a hot minute and has since just become a base trope of the TikTok creative universe. Videos started taking more and more circuitous routes to end with that punchline, throwing all sorts of sleight of hands before dropping it, out of nowhere, like an M. Night Shyamalan film twist. If you hadn't heard of the meme or didn't know the reference, these videos would be complete mysteries. Even now, if you don't know what I'm talking about, this section will make no sense. Nor will comments like "We found the two pretty best friends" on various videos. One of the better pieces I read last year was this on the death of political humor in the age of Trump. My favorite turn of phrase from the piece is that "Irony in politics, meanwhile, has reversed its polarity." David Foster Wallace predicted the death of irony, of cynicism, after an initial boom when the internet was coming of age. The lament of the humorist is that figures like Trump are beyond the reach of irony because they are already satires of themselves.I often lament when I refer to as fortune cookie Twitter, and to combat this, I think Twitter should set up a GPT-3 bot that constantly trains on each account, and the moment most of your followers can no longer distinguish between the GPT-3 spoof of your account and your actual account, you should be forced to vacate your account and allow the GPT-3 bot to replace you. You will have literally become a parody of yourself. Also, if for some reason I ever hacked my way into a famous person's account, my goal would not to be to request BTC or post something offensive. Instead, my goal would be to post a tweet that so resembles their voice that no one, not even the person who owned that account, could tell. They'd just think, wow, that's strange, I don't remember posting that, but it is something I'd post, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯ To me, humor has always depended on creating a gap and then helping your audience to hurdle it. In a traditional joke, the gap is the space between the setup and the punchline. When the audience's mind comprehends the joke, they soar across that gap, and the exhilaration is released as laughter. You don't want to carry them across, you want to do just enough to let them take that last leap themselves. A comedian like Chris Rock will take something from real life and just point out the hidden social truth beneath it, and your mind gets that dopamine hit of acknowledging a social fiction that you'd otherwise observe without question. Like Moses, comedians part the sea of taboo and let you stroll through, laughing all the way at being able to get away with it. Pre-cancellation Louis C.K. also lived in this space, exposing something of your nature that you were embarrassed to acknowledge. Either he'd absolve you of your shame by absorbing it all himself in a performance of self-loathing, or he'd just forgive you that fault by making it seem universal. Comedians let you look at yourself from outside yourself, creating a gap between you and your own nature. Trump killed humor by closing that gap entirely, becoming such a parody of himself that shows like Veep seemed less dark satire than some form of fatuous cosplay even though they came first. But humor is not so easily killed. You just need new ways to restore the comedic gap. Much of TikTok humor is oblique in form, making references that flatter you if you understand them and puzzle you if you don't. But for the latter, you then must set off on a journey to traverse that gap. And when you've completed that journey, you get the delayed satisfaction of getting the joke but also the pleasure of now being in the in-group. But more sophisticated creators can also play with that expectation, setting off on what seems like a familiar meme, then subverting audience expectations. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, from the same parent company Bytedance, provides an interesting contrast in the styles of humor between China and America. A lot of comedic videos in China use a laugh track sound effect. I can't remember the last time I heard a laugh track in a TikTok. I want to draw some conclusion here, but I don't feel confident enough. Someone more familiar with the cultural differences in Chinese and American humor might clarify this for me. Netflix brings international programs to the U.S. TikTok brings some Chinese programming to the States also. TikToker @funcolle makes a sort of hyper-compressed episodic detective series that is filmed in China and spoken in Mandarin, but it works on U.S. TikTok thanks to onscreen subtitles. The sound she uses is, by now, as memorable to me as the theme song to any number of popular TV series like Game of Thrones. If you can't solve these really short single TikTok video mysteries, you can turn to the comments section to get help from all the other viewers who've pored over the videos in detail and raced to post the solution. One measure of a platform's power is the number of things people make with it that you had never been made before. Every week, I find videos on TikTok that I can't imagine having been made on any other app. Funcolle (@funcolle) has created a short video on TikTok with music original sound. | Anything wrong with this room? Come on, my detectives!#foryou On TikTok, the comments have become creative terrain in their own right. Somewhere along the line, riffing on someone else's TikTok no longer required you to make a TikTok. Instead, you can just go into the comments and tack on a punchline to the punchline of the video and rack up hundreds of thousands of likes. Writing the most clever comment on a TikTok video has become its own art form. I can't remember the last time I watched a good TikTok video without then opening up the comments to see what the peanut gallery came up with. Sometimes I read the comments before even finishing the video. TikTok's method of ranking comments almost always surfaces the best and most relevant comments to the top. However you feel about a video, it's uncanny how often one of the top five comments encapsulates it perfectly. It's difficult in a video to feel the presence of other viewers in a tangible, meaningful way. The Twitch comment bar gives you a visible if somewhat bewildering waterfall of text as evidence of their presence, and the hearts on something like an Instagram Live or the bullet comments on Bilibili videos do the same. TikTok comments, though, feel ike they extend the canvas of the video. Just as talent shows like The Voice require both contestants and voices to work, more and more it feels as if the TikTok experience is about watching the performers and then listening to the judges (all of us viewers) render their opinions via the comments. There isn't one Simon Cowell on TikTok, but in any comments section of any TikTok video, someone will play that role. Never read the comments. Unless you're on TikTok, in which case, always read the comments. Reading the comments on TikTok serves a communal function. It's like hearing the laughter of the crowd at a comedy show. One of the existential challenges of life is truly connecting with other people's thoughts. Who can ever know that series of emotions and thoughts and dreams we call our consciousness? True human connection seems always out of grasp. The pandemic exacerbates that sense of isolation. When most of our interactions are with flat faces on video screens, it feels either like we're living in a simulation or some solipsistic nightmare. Before I check the comments on a TikTok I've just watched, I almost always have a strong reaction to that video. That's why opening the comments and finding that one of the first few comments perfectly encapsulates your reaction, then seeing it already has tens or hundreds of thousands of likes, is so comforting. This confirmation of a shared response creates, asynchronously, a passing score on a form of the Voight-Kampff test. It's a checksum on your humanity. Many comments have begun using the inclusive second person singular, literally speaking for the rest of the viewers. These comments often begin with "POV:" as in "POV: You're lying bed at 2am scrolling TikTok." It's presumptive, and yet the best TikToks evoke such a consistent multiple-choice checklist of responses that it's rare the times I can think of an original comment that isn't already posted above the fold. The sense of collective response in TikTok comments and the publicly visible view and like counts have been around long enough that users now assume enough others have encountered enough of the same memes despite everyone's FYP algorithm being tailored to their individual tastes. Many a comment on a viral TikTok will read like "Oh we're back here again." Though I have said that TikTok isn't a social network—I don't know most people on the app, I don't have to follow anyone to have a good experience—the algorithm does create, through its efficient sorting, a sense of traveling through subcultural neighborhoods as you scroll down one TikTok at a time. Users have adopted spatial or geographic language to describe this sense of shared viewing spaces. Various subcultures are described by appending -tok or TikTok behind a descriptor. Someone commenting on a particularly high-quality video might say "I've finally gotten Premium TikTok." People share weird niches they're on by saying things like "I'm deep into carpet cleaning tok" or "I don't know how but I've found music theory tok." Sometimes it's just one word, like "Sportstok or Liberaltok." Tok has almost come to be a suffix meaning "neighborhood" or "community," almost like Disney uses -land to describe themed areas in its parks like Frontierland or Tomorrowland. Of course, we're all just in our FYP feeds, which just scrolls up endlessly, so it isn't an actual space. But we trust the visible view counts as evidence FYP is doing its job getting many of us with the same tastes in front of the same videos, and so this evidence of common knowledge creates a liminal third place that exists [waves hands at the air in front of me] out there. I’ve tended to think of social networks as being built by people assembling a graph of people bottoms up, but perhaps I’ve been too narrow-minded. TikTok might not qualify by that definition, but it feels social, with FYP as village matchmaker. There's been a lot written on Warner Media's decision to move some films from theatrical only windows to having a concurrent release on HBO Max. A lot of conclusions were drawn about theatrical's future based on Wonder Woman 84’s Christmas premiere in theaters and on HBO Max day-and-date. A lot of it is the usual knee jerk extrapolation that the internet is famous for, despite confounding circumstances like a pandemic, and despite Wonder Woman 84 being a single data point. But one thing I'm confident of is that something is lost in not having the audible feedback of a hundred or more humans around you when you watch something, especially from genres that are built to elicit frequent emotional feedback, like comedies and horror films. At some point, perhaps we'll crack the nut on social viewing and how to make it more, umm, social, but for now, pre-VR metaverse, it's a shoddy facsimile of a crowd. Look, I've streamed my share of concerts during this past year, and I don't miss standing for an hour between sets in a crowded club or bar, nursing a $9 beer in a plastic cup, waiting for my band of choice to get on stage. And yet, I miss standing in that bar, my shoes sticking to the beer-soaked floor, trying to look at ease in my own skin while gawking at other humans. In a year where we've been trapped inside for nearly a year now, there's something about the chaotic collectivist media art form that is TikTok that felt most joyful and genuine. Thumbing through the FYP feed one portrait-oriented rectangle at a time felt like swiping from one bedroom window to the next on a tall skyscraper, peering into one user's bedroom after another (literally, as the bedroom is the most common space in which teens do their creative work). It's like a Chris Ware comic strip, with its architectural design, navigated one window pane at a time. Because it's full screen, it can feel like my phone screen is literally a rectangular porthole. As if one user after another is hijacking my rear-facing camera and turning it into their rear or front-facing camera. There's something about media like TikTok or ChatRoulette or Omegle, where so much of what you see is a creator directly addressing the camera, breaking the fourth wall from the start, that is immediately intimate. One thing I wish TikTok would do is make it easier to trace multi-part videos from creators. Nothing drives me crazier than videos that end with "Stay tuned for Part 2" or "Like for Part 2" and then you spend like ten minutes browsing their profile trying to find the second part. I understand that it's a sort of view count hack on the part of creators, but some videos do need to be broken up across installments. TikTok needs to add some sort of concept of a pointer or link to make it easier to jump directly to the next installment in a series. Perhaps it could be done via a playlist feature. For now, the best way to trace linked videos is to visually scan the thumbnails on a person's profile and search for onscreen text reading "Part #" or just click on every video with the same visual grammar, the user in the same outfit in the same room with the same lighting. (Since I wrote the note above, the app has added a way to highlight, on a creator's profile page, the video you just watched, and since videos are sorted reverse chronologically by creation date on the profile, often part II can be found next to the video you just watched, which is handy). In another example of the community coming up with creative solutions, commenters on the first in a multi-part video series where the next part has yet to be published will now leave a comment saying that they'll promise to tag people who like their comment once the next installment is posted. In other words, users are serving as Mechanical Turk notification bots. Another feature I wish TikTok would add is the ability to sort by descending popularity on any grid of videos, like on sound or profile pages. Please. TikTok's needs to improve its search ranking algorithm. Trying to find popular TikTok's I remembered seeing back in the day was much harder than it should have been using TikTok's native search. A couple that I wanted to use I just couldn't locate, and even Google and YouTube didn't turn them up (a thing you realize after trying to do it more than once is how hard it is to create a comprehensible search query for certain TikTok's). Network effects are powerful, but there are so many distinct types. It's important to understand exactly what type of network effect you have because they all scale and operate differently. For example, Dunbar's number is just one form of limit on a very specific type of network effect. But there are dozens and dozens of network effects, all with their distinct quirks. Someone could make a lot of money just making a reference book of the taxonomy of network effect varietals in the world. TikTok is an extreme experiment in not only making creative network effects endogenous to its app but to the medium of video. Like some video Minecraft, almost everything in the app is a replicable chunk of bits that you can combine into a larger configuration of bits, and the resulting creation becomes, itself, a chunk that anyone can take and splice or mutate or combine however they want. This is anathema to old media, most of whom have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lock up their content behind copyright law, DRM, and any number of other mechanisms meant to slow the rate of reproduction and iteration of their work. It has the effect of slowing the evolutionary feedback loops on all of that work. TikTok's "OODA loop" is collective and distributed, and it spins thousands of times faster than that of big media. When I first joined the Amazon Web Services team in 2003, it was still a small Jeff Bezos-sponsored project. There were only some 15 people or so on the team at the time under the leadership of now Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. A book Jeff had us read, one which he said should serve as an inspiration for how we'd design AWS, was Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand. It's a book about programming artificial life, but the core principle that Jeff wanted us to take from it was the idea that complex things like life forms are built from very simple building blocks or primitives. It's the same thesis as that in Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. The key implication for AWS from the book was about how to design the first AWS primitives. Jeff urged us to include only what was necessary and nothing more. If you were designing a storage service, like S3, you'd need functions like get, write, delete, but you wouldn't want to layer in things that weren't part of storage, like security. That should be a separate primitive. The reason to design your primitives with the utmost elegance is to maximize combinatorial optionality. This is one of the most elegant things about TikTok's design. It includes a ton of primitives, and they are almost all ones you can combine or link. More than that, every element in a TikTok is a building block you can replicate and use in your own TikTok. The most important of these is the soundtrack or sound of your TikTok. Be careful of taking this idea of building primitives too far. In many ways, choosing what level of abstraction to stake your ground on is one of the most important questions any company must answer. The answer is contextual. Abstract at too high a level and someone can come in beneath you, with something like AWS. In some ways this is a form of disruption. Build at too low a level, however, and often someone will abstract at a level above you and siphon all the value of that market above your product. Many of TikTok’s filters are abstractions of a lot of things, almost like Lightroom Presets. As many of us learned early in this pandemic, maybe paying a few bucks for a loaf of bread is preferable to having to spend hours of our free time mastering baking. When I think about modern remix culture and apps like TikTok, I often think back to Mixel, an app designer Khoi Vinh launched years ago. It was an iPad collage app. In his blog post introducing Mixel, Vinh wrote: Because of the componentized nature of collage, we can add new social dimensions that aren’t currently possible in any other network, art-based or not. Mixel keeps track of every piece of every collage, regardless of who uses it or how it’s been cropped. That means, in a sense, that the image pieces within Mixel have a social life of their own. Anyone can borrow or re-use any other piece; you’re free to peruse all the collages (we call them “mixels”) and pick up literally any piece and use it in your own mixel. If you don’t like the crop, the full, unedited original is stored on the server, so you can open it back up in an instant and cut out just the parts you like. Mixel can even show you everywhere else a particular image has been used, so you can follow it throughout the network to see how other people have cropped it and combined it with other elements. The thread view turns collaging into a visual conversation, where anyone can remix anyone else’s work. Though Mixel is no longer around, what he describes presages modern meme culture and TikTok. Inherent to digital culture is the remix. In Mark Ronson's TED Talk on How Sampling Transformed Music, he says: That's what the past 30 years of music has been. That's the major thread. See, 30 years ago, you had the first digital samplers, and they changed everything overnight. All of a sudden, artists could sample from anything and everything that came before them, from a snare drum from the Funky Meters, to a Ron Carter bassline, the theme to "The Price Is Right." Albums like De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising" and the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" looted from decades of recorded music to create these sonic, layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day. And they weren't sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music. They weren't sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff. To be honest, it was all about sampling really obscure things, except for a few obvious exceptions like Vanilla Ice and "doo doo doo da da doo doo" that we know about. But the thing is, they were sampling those records because they heard something in that music that spoke to them that they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music. They heard it, they wanted to be a part of it, and all of a sudden they found themselves in possession of the technology to do so, not much unlike the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton, and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day. You know, in music we take something that we love and we build on it. One of the most revolutionary aspects of TikTok is how effortless it makes it to sample or interpolate any other TikTok video. Anyone who's used a non-linear editor like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or Avid Media Composer knows the standard multi-pane interface. And any editor knows that editing begins with importing all the media, the shots from dailies, the temp music, and so on, into your media bin. From there, you drag elements onto the timeline to compose the edit. Much of the pain of creating memes is gathering all the components, like images, from the web. In the modern networked age, though, the media bin should really just be the entirety of the internet. Anything you want should just be a short search away. We're starting to get closer, though the library of material is still sparse, and many pieces, especially video, still require chasing down. Someday, any sort of remix will just be a GPT-3 like interface away from composing. You'll just be able to write "This is Fine cartoon but the dog's face is Donald Trump" and it will just spit it out for you. If you're building this, please let me know, I'll write you a seed check. The Verge interviewed a TikTok beatmaker named Ricky Desktop. What makes a great TikTok beat? You need concrete, sonic elements that dancers can visually engage with on a person-by-person basis. I know that sounds super scientific, but that is how I think about it. If you’re trying to make a viral beat, it’s got to correspond with the viral dance. In order to lock in on that, you need elements of the music to hit. So for example, I have this beat called “The Dice Beat.” I added a flute sound, which in my head was like, “Okay, people will pretend to play the flute.” And then there’s the dice sound, where they’ll roll the dice. It was super calculated. I would create the music with the dance in mind. I developed this little pattern. I pioneered the “triple woah” thing where in all the beats there’s three kicks — bum-bum-bum. So typically, when the bass drop hits, the dancers will do the woah (ed: an accentuated arm and elbow movement popular in TikTok dances) to emphasize the bass drop. Usually, the beat will keep going after that. But what I did, I would add three more bass hits, super calculated, so that dancers could do the woah three times or do three concrete dance accents. The woah inspired Ricky Desktop to develop a score for the triple woah which then actually inspired dancers to choreograph and perform an actual triple woah. Can you program human movement with music? It turns out you can. You use an API called TikTok. That's delightful. TikTok beatmaker Ricky Desktop pictured, in his head, dancers performing some movement. Then he wrote a piece of music that included a musical cue intended to elicit that exact movement. Then, later, some dancers on TikTok performed the movement he had pictured, exactly at the moment he had inserted the musical prompt. It's not just that he choreographed the human body via music, but how he did it. Ricky Desktop is a marionettist manipulating human bodies not via strings but music. Ricky Desktop: So I would post my beat and say, “Anyone trying to help me make this beat go viral?” Or I would say, “Who’s gonna create a dance to this new banger?” I’m giving an action item to whoever’s watching. And that’s important because it gives the person watching something to do. The message is in the medium. That is, Ricky Desktop issues these to-dos inside of the video he uses to release his various sounds. Ricky Desktop: What makes a great TikTok beat? You need concrete, sonic elements that dancers can visually engage with on a person-by-person basis. I know that sounds super scientific, but that is how I think about it. If you’re trying to make a viral beat, it’s got to correspond with the viral dance. In order to lock in on that, you need elements of the music to hit. So for example, I have this beat called “The Dice Beat.” I added a flute sound, which in my head was like, “Okay, people will pretend to play the flute.” And then there’s the dice sound, where they’ll roll the dice. It was super calculated. I would create the music with the dance in mind. In filmmaking, when you want a score for your film, you bring the latest cut of your film to a composer's studio, and they start riffing based on what they see on screen, incorporating some of the themes you're trying to evoke in that scene. What Ricky Desktop talks about above is a different process in which he scores to visuals that only exist in his imagination, generic dance tropes like "pretend to play the flute". This is a form of "inverted scoring." Or, if you prefer to go from the other direction, what TikTok dancers do with sounds is "visualizing." The program WinAmp used to do software visualizations of music. TikTok is like Mechanical Turk for visualizing music. If you've watched any amount of TikTok, you've doubtless seen someone answering questions by dancing and pointing to floating text overlays. Now, they could easily just speak the questions and answer them verbally. There's no reason to have to dance to music while answering the questions. To which I say, no one knows what it means, but it's provocative, it gets the people going! Kylie Jenner (@kyliejenner) has created a short video on TikTok with music original sound. | i'm still a supermodel on the inside | INSTAGRAM MODEL | SUPERMODEL | DADS FAV MOMS FAV | ... This is one of many TikTok survey or poll formats, all devised by the users. On one hand, there are simpler ways to share this information. On the other hand, this is much more entertaining than a Twitter poll. On the other hand, maybe all this choreographed dancing is something more of us should be doing to make our messages land. A teacher went viral on TikTok this year for filming herself trying to teach her class remotely over Zoom. Seeing her precise and broad gestures paired with her sharply articulated speech, you couldn't help but feel empathy for what a burden we've placed on our teachers, trying to make remote classes engaging over Zoom. But perhaps we just lose some of our childlike exuberance and joy expressiveness as we age? Perhaps if we were more animated in our delivery, more people would remember what we said. One of the most common weaknesses among managers and leaders is the illusion of transparency, though it is a problem for most people. It is the tendency to overestimate how much people know what you're thinking. It can ruin marriages or relationships, and it leads to a healthy market for therapy. Young children have the a strong form of this illusion which is why in early childhood they are so frustrated when you don't understand why they're upset (and parents are likewise just as exasperated that their children can't verbalize why they're freaking out). Until later in life, children think you should know exactly what they're feeling, and it takes a bit of coaxing to tease out their inner emotional state. Ironically, despite their illusion of transparency, kids tend to be much more emotionally transparent and thus expressive. It's when they finally realize that no one can see into their heads that they learn to lie. It's then that you wish they still had the illusion of transparency. When they become teenagers, the battle over transparency into their lives becomes literal: parents yell at their teenagers to keep their bedroom doors open, and those same doors slam shut after heated arguments. Their bedrooms become, like their thoughts, spaces they wish to protect from prying eyes. This is all a roundabout way to say that a CEO communicating a company's top goal for the coming year in a TikTok dance, pointing to on-screen captions, isn't the worst idea in the world? Maybe this is the new Amazon 6-page memo. TikTok is like MTV back in the day in its power to plant music tracks in my brain almost Inception-style. Earworm distribution at scale. (If you use the app regularly will know all these song clips) pic.twitter.com/wiN5iVkpJy — Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) August 13, 2020 Study any high-level memory competitor and they'll all say the same thing. Humans' visual memories are far superior to their memories for abstractions. It's one of the core lessons from the great book Moonwalking with Einstein. It's the reason people who have to try to memorize a thousand digits of pi or the order of a deck of cards turn numbers and letters into images which they place spatially in memory palaces. In its heyday, which coincided with my childhood, MTV was dominated by music videos, and each of those was essentially a visualization of a musical track. To this day, I can't hear a song like A-Ha's "Take on Me" without picturing its music video. I haven't seen it in decades, but its cartoon sketches come to life are forever how I "see" the song. Likewise, I can't hear Michael Jackson's Thriller without conjuring its epic music video of nearly 14 minutes. It doesn't even have to be a music video. A song incorporated in a film can permanently bond with the moving images on the screen. For example, I can't hear three tracks, one each by Huey Lewis, Genesis, and Whitney Houston, respectively, without picturing Christian Bale and quoting Patrick Bateman, and then being filled with a sense of self-loathing for having been indicted as someone who turns to the appreciation of cultural artifacts as a substitute for personality. If I mention Celine Dion's song "My Heart Will Go On," what do you see in your mind's eye? TikTok is the modern MTV because (1) it increases consumption of music tracks that go viral on its platform as sounds and (2) any number of songs will forever summon the accompanying meme and visual choreography from my memory. When Charli and other TikTokers formed the Hype House in Los Angeles, they were experimenting with IRL creative network effects. They created what was efffectively a commune to produce the D'Amelio TikTok Universe with Charli at the center as, I don't know, Tony Stark or something. They started guest-starring in each other's TikTok's, some of them started dating and hooking up, and soon, to follow the entire extended narrative, you had to follow each other's accounts. Studios have tried to push out fictional versions of such networked series, but Charli et al just created it bottoms up, with TikTok as the distributor. The Kardashian-Jenner clan are the clear predecessors who ran this type of crossover mindshare grab, but they're family. This new generation of influencers often aren't related, their common bond is just that they're young and famous in the age of social media and so they already all live together in a virtual universe held together by the gravity of popularity. In Status as a Service, I wrote about how social networks require some proof of work to gain status. A lot of TikTok's have the caption "I spent way too long on this" as a sort of plea for likes, but that wouldn't land if the proof of work wasn't visible on the screen. It is, and even non-creators can see it. Some TikToks seem like they took days to produce. Have you tried using the in-app TikTok video editor? In some ways, it's loaded with really first-rate filters and effects, but in many ways, its user interface is inscrutable. I went to editing school and have used a variety of non-linear editors (NLEs) like FCP, Premiere, and Avid to edit video in a previous life, and I still tear my hair out trying to use TikTok's native editor. The easiest videos to make are just ones where you film yourself live and apply a filter, but if you want to bring in pre-recorded video and mix them with other graphical elements, like text boxes, it is very painful to assemble them properly. My kingdom for a persistent timeline with a scrubber in the TikTok editor. In one sense, it's staggering to ponder how many more videos TikTok would have if its video editor were more usable. On the other hand, every video that does make it onto the app feels like a miracle. The proof of work is in the pain. If you're a movie star like Will Smith and you get a VFX studio to produce some whiz-bang TikTok for you, it will feel off, like driving a Ferrari down the street in Omaha. Authenticity or at least the sheen of one's own sweat equity is part of the TikTok aesthetic, and the canonical backdrop for any TikTok video is always some teenager's somewhat messy bedroom, just as it was in the heyday of the YouTube vlog. On Instagram, you can get away with proof of wealth, but the TikTok aesthetic is proof of creative labor. The verdict is a bit more mixed on proof of hotness, though. I still think Instagram is a more welcoming home for pure thirst trap content than TikTok, where, if you want to honeytrap the simps, you're going to have to dance for it. Something about a feed that can hit you with such a variety of styles and moods in such quick succession makes TikTok feel like the most modern of media channels. One second you're watching a dog communicate with their owner using a language mat, the next second some high school girl is roasting one of her classmates, the next you see a teen making an earnest confessional deprecating their own looks (only to have thousands of commenters offering affirmation), and then you might see a boat chase that you later realize is some drug cartel member filming a TikTok as police boats give chase (even Narcos be chasing them likes). At times it feels as if the FYP feed is a pastiche generator. It is equal parts ironic and earnest, having long since surpassed its label as the cringey social network. Whereas Instagram is performative, TikTok is performative and self-aware. It’s not that any single creator is self-aware, but that the Greek chorus in the comments will descend on anyone with the slightest bit of hubris like a pack of harpies. In this rectangular proscenium that is TikTok, the fickle god of Zeus is played, of course, by the FYP algorithm. Everyone offers up their sacrifices of time and labor in the hopes of being graced by its favor, but its whims remain just capricious enough to keep everyone grinding. If your FYP feed is dialed in to your tastes, you start to pre-react to videos purely based on the like count visible on the right hand side of the screen. If a video has a high like count, even if it starts slowly I'll tend to give it the benefit of the doubt and stick around to the end, simply because this statistic has proved, in my experience, reliable evidence of a worthwhile payoff. The larger the figure, the more I anticipate a strong punchline or close. I'm like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, already having seen the precog verdict printed on that ball. Conversely, when I'm the test audience for a little-seen video (a dead giveaway is it has almost no likes yet), I tend to be merciless in skipping ahead if it doesn't hold my attention after a few seconds. This creates a ruthless rich-get-richer dynamic, but that's by design. Bytedance as a company has built its products around pitiless algorithms enforcing a high Gini coefficient economy of entertainment. It's a marketplace in which the supply side—the TikTok videos from creators—can be shown to an unlimited number of viewers. Much of the content is evergreen, so there is almost no end to the leverage TikTok can get off any single good video. Imagine if YouTube's key metric was to show every good video in its entire catalog to every viewer that would enjoy it. If you view the TikTok mission that way, even if no one submitted another new video for the next year, its FYP algorithm would still have an almost infinite supply of short videos to show to hundreds of millions of users for that entire dry spell. Because sounds become the genesis of particular memes, when you start watching a TikTok video and hear a familiar sound, you anticipate the moment of that sound when the punchline will happen. It's Pavlovian. The kismet shoe transition, for example, causes you to anticipate the pleasure of that exact moment when the performer will go from looking plain to looking EXPENSIVE. There are only so many plots in Hollywood, but we go see genre films precisely for the story beats we know are coming. On TikTok, sounds and memes are almost inseparable. The sound is the meme is the sound. TikTok sounds are often the most pleasing snippets from pop songs, and listening to one catchy loop after another is like listening to a pop radio channel that doesn't play entire songs, only plays bass drops and choruses. The time between anticipation and payoff is so short that scrolling the feed can feel like pressing the button on some sonic IV drip over and over. Just inject it into my ears. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace describes a film called Infinite Jest which is so entertaining people lose all will to do anything except watch it until they die. He had often written about the addictiveness of television and may have been extrapolating to the future, projecting the entertainment value of entertainment increasing until it surpassed some threshold where you'd lose all will to do anything except consume. In that way, he predicted binge watching. But the earliest form of entertainment that conjured the addictive properties of his fictional film (referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment") was video games. I read stories about players who died after playing games for so long without eating and, recalling some game binge sessions from my youth, could imagine myself trapped in a similar dark loop. TikTok is the second form of entertainment that brings DFW's fictional entertainment to mind. In hindsight, it seems obvious that a personalized feed of video, tailored to your tastes, would be the addictive end state of entertainment. And, considering the rise of social media and the smartphone, it would make sense that the videos might all be short, like pellets of rain, sliding comfortably into every spare pocket of time in our day, of which we have so many. One of my favorite paragraphs of recent years was one describing the miracle that are Cheetos: To get a better feel for their work, I called on Steven Witherly, a food scientist who wrote a fascinating guide for industry insiders titled, “Why Humans Like Junk Food.” I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.” TikTok is entertainment Cheetos. Each video requires so little cognitive exertion and reaches its climax so quickly that it feels like we could keep watching forever, each punch line scored to the most satisfying bass drop or stanza from every pop song. TikTok delivers dopamine hits with a metronomic rhythm, and as soon as we swipe up the previous one melts in our memory. It's always been the case, but especially in this networked age, that every piece of entertainment is its own social network. The network effects of a story arise from shared consumption. The more people watch Star Wars, the more people I can talk to about particular scenes or compare costumes with at a convention. The more people that watch Game of Thrones, the more my Game of Thrones memes will land. TikTok is personalized, yet through its algorithm it creates shared stories of real scale. Some of these shared stories occur on the creative side in duets and trims that connect creators to each other literally and metaphorically. The FYP algorithm also aggregates large communities of viewers for the hottest TikTok videos. It's not uncommon now for me to send a TikTok to a friend who's already seen it, or vice versa. Not always, but enough that the audience now assumes enough common knowledge to foster that sense of shared experience. Despite having what must be a gazillion videos in its catalog, watch TikTok enough and you'll be able to refer to something like Sea Shanty TikTok and feel reasonably confident other TikTok addicts get the reference. In contrast, people regularly send me YouTube videos with like millions of views that I've never even heard of. It is algorithms that may be tearing us apart. But maybe it's also algorithms that reassemble us, albeit in smaller unit sizes. 330M Americans feel like too large an optimal governance size if we're going to let social media algorithms just run amok, but I find some comfort sometimes when I find some TikTok that feels so catered to my tastes that it must be a micro-niche and then see it has millions of likes. The term binge-watching typically refers to watching multiple episodes of a series in one sitting, but perhaps the act of watching dozens of TikTok videos in a row is the purest form of this type of entertainment gluttony. Other types of social media like Instagram and Twitter are also series of really compact units of media. When I scroll Twitter or Instagram, I often feel like an elephant, standing there placidly, as various people toss individual packing peanuts at my forehead (let’s call these people the peanut gallery?). TikTok videos are, for the most part, a bit longer. Their compressed narratives are still, nevertheless, complete, with some full story arc to traverse. In its rhythm, binge-watching TikTok reminds me of watching a standup comedy set, but instead of watching one comedian, I’m watching a whole series of them, each on stage just long enough to tell one joke. And if they bore me, I can press a button and, like a Looney Tunes cartoon, a cane whisks them off the stage and a new comedian pops out from the floor to take their place and start right into their joke. Someone told me that if you watch TikTok for over an hour it posts a warning asking you to consider taking a break. I'm not sure if that's the case, but I'm glad I've never encountered it yet. TikTok can only match you with videos it has, and for some people, there may not be enough relevant content in the TikTok catalog to sustain a feed. But that pool of videos has grown by an astonishing amount in a short amount of time. I'm an easy mark for the sort of wry, sometimes savage humor of TikTok, especially when it skews almost post-modern in its awareness of its own form. It's both a community that constantly tries to legislate its own social norms of decency—any video of someone making fun of how they look using a supposed beauty filter will be flooded with comments like "You're a queen", the comments section being sort of a rolling floor vote on what the acceptable response is—and also a bloodbath of Gen Z violence. The kids will be alright, but that's in part because they're savage. Every generation learns it has to fend for itself. During a pandemic when most of social media feels even more nakedly performative than usual, as we sit inside day after day for month after month, my occasional sessions on TikTok have been one of the only pastimes to reliably make me laugh, and it's not particularly close. Twitter has reached a crest of fortune cookie thinkboi bait when it's not subsumed in petty high school lunchroom culture war fistfights. Seemingly every day, a playground brawl breaks out and we all form a circle to gawk, but at the back of our minds is always the threat that we'll be the next to be sucker-punched and forced to throw down. Outrage porn is exhausting and also not that fun? When viewed from the eye of a global pandemic, Instagram feels like a horrifying Truman Show of idyllic capitalist showboating. Life must go on, influencers gotta influence, but I'm also not weeping any tears when people get chastised for renting private islands and posting photos of themselves partying during a pandemic. Andrew Niccol, the screenwriter of The Truman Show, once said, "When you know there is a camera, there is no reality.” The most absurd but popular tag on visual social media is #nofilter, a hashtag that aspires to a pretense of truth when there is almost nothing on an app like Instagram that isn’t production-designed within an inch of its life. TikTok, by virtue of its high bar to even produce a video that anyone will see (FYP algo is like "That's a no for me dawg" on almost every video), is upfront about what it is: a global talent show to entertain the masses. In a pandemic where much of the U.S. lives in eternal lockdown, TikTok is the 24/7 channel where the American Idle entertain each other from their bedrooms. I laughed, and then I laughed some more.
In my previous post on TikTok I discussed why its For You Page algorithm is the connective tissue that makes TikTok work. It is the bus on its motherboard that connects and closes all its feedback loops. But in the breathless rush to understand why companies might want to acquire TikTok, should ByteDance be forced to divest itself of the popular short video app, the hype around its algorithm has taken on a bit of exoticization that often characterizes Western analysis of the Chinese tech scene these days.I kept holding off on publishing this piece because every day seemed to bring some new development in the possible ban of TikTok in the U.S. And instead of writing any introduction that would become instantly outdated, I'll just leave this sidenote here to say that as of publishing this entry, it seems Oracle will take over the TikTok cloud computing deal while also joining Wal-Mart and some VCs in assuming some ownership stake in TikTok Global. But it won't surprise me one bit if we find out even more bizarre details over the next week. This is the type of deal that I would have thought could only happen in Succession, but even in that satire it would seem hyperbolic. The 2020 Writer's Room is undefeated. In this post, I want to discuss exactly how the design of TikTok helps its algorithm work as well as it does. Last time I discussed why the FYP algorithm is at the heart of TikTok’s flywheel, but if the algorithm wasn’t effective then the whole feedback loop would collapse. Understanding how the algorithm achieves its accuracy matters even if you’re not interested in TikTok or the short video space because more and more, companies in all industries will be running up against a competitor whose advantage centers around a machine learning algorithm. What I want to discuss is how TikTok’s design helps its algorithm “see.” Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is one of those books that turns you into one of those Silicon Valley types that use (abuse?) the term legibility. I first heard about it after reading Venkatesh Rao’s summary of its main themes, and that piece remains a good tldr primer on the book if you don’t plan to read the text (Scott Alexander's review of the book is also good though is long enough that it could almost justify its own tldr). However, I recommend that you do. The subtitle of Scott’s book is “How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.” In particular, Scott dissects a failure state that recurs across a number of domains, in which a governing body like the nation-state turns to what Scott terms high modernism in an effort to increase legibility of whatever it is they are trying to exert control over, whether for the purposes of taxation or conscription or any number of goals. In doing so, they impose a false sense of order on a reality more complex than they can imagine.It would really be fascinating to hear from Scott on the case of modern China, under CCP rule, with modern technology for surveillance, and whether he thinks they will prove or violate his thesis in the fullness of time. It’s a book that raises one’s awareness of all sorts of examples of unintended consequences in day-to-day life. We all could use a healthier does of humility when we are too flush with great man hubris. The world is richer and more complicated than we give it credit for. As an example, much of what Scott discusses has relevance to some of the hubris of our modern social networking giants. These dominant apps are designed to increase legibility of their user bases for, among other things, driving engagement, preventing churn, and ultimately, serving targeted advertisements. That, in turn, has led their parent companies into a thicket of problems which they’re grappling with constantly now. But that is a topic for another post, another day. Whereas Scott focuses in on how the nation-state uses simplifying abstractions to “see” its citizens at a synoptic level, I want to discuss how TikTok’s application design allows its algorithm to “see” all the detail it needs to perform its matchmaking job efficiently and accurately. If Seeing Like a State is about a common failure state, this post is about a new model for getting the most leverage from machine learning algorithms in the design of applications and services.I’m aware of the irony that the controversy around TikTok was the potential of user data being accessed by the CCP, or being “seen by that state.” Or that one of the sticking points of this new Cold War is the Chinese Firewall, which selects what the citizens of China “see.” And which most U.S. tech companies sit outside of, looking in. In recent years, one of the realizations in machine learning, at least to an outsider to the subject like myself, is just how much progress was possible just by increasing the volume of training data by several orders of magnitude. That is, even if the algorithms themselves aren’t that different than they were a few years ago, just by training them on a much larger datasets, AI researchers have achieved breakthroughs like GPT-3 (which temporarily gave tech Twitter a tantric orgasm). When people say that TikTok’s algorithms are key to its success, many picture some magical block of code as being the secret sauce of the company. The contemporary postmodernist Russian writer Viktor Pelevin has said that the protagonist of all modern cinema is a briefcase full of money. From the briefcase of radioactive material (I think that’s what it was?) in Kiss Me Deadly to the briefcase of similarly glowing who knows what (Marcellus Wallace’s soul?) in Pulp Fiction, from the Genesis equation in The Formula to the secret financial process in David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, we’ve long been obsessed in cinema with the magical McGuffin. In recent weeks, discussion of TikTok’s algorithm has elevated it into something similar, akin to one of those mystical archaeological artifacts in one of the Indiana Jones films, like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, or the lingam Shivling. But most experts in the field doubt that TikTok has made some hitherto unknown advance in machine learning recommendations algorithms. In fact, most of them would say that TikTok is likely building off of the same standard approaches to the problem that others are. But recall that the effectiveness of a machine learning algorithm isn’t a function of the algorithm alone but of the algorithm after trained on some dataset. GPT-3 may not be novel, but trained on an enormous volume of data, and with a massive number of parameters, its output is often astonishing. Likewise, the TikTok FYP algorithm, trained on its dataset, is remarkably accurate and efficient at matching videos with those who will find them entertaining (and, just as importantly, at suppressing the distribution of videos to those who won’t find them entertaining). For some domains, like text, good training data is readily available in large volumes. For example, to train an AI model like GPT-3, you can turn to the vast corpus of text already available on the internet, in books, and so on. If you want to train a visual AI, you can turn to the vast supply of photos online and in various databases. The training is still expensive, but at least copious training data is readily at hand. But for TikTok (or Douyin, its Chinese clone), who needed an algorithm that would excel at recommending short videos to viewers, no such massive publicly available training dataset existed. Where could you find short videos of memes, kids dancing and lip synching, pets looking adorable, influencers pushing brands, soldiers running through obstacle courses, kids impersonating brands, and on and on? Even if you had such videos, where could you find comparable data on how the general population felt about such videos? Outside of Musical.ly’s dataset, which consisted mostly of teen girls in the U.S. lip synching to each other, such data didn’t exist. In a unique sort of chicken and egg problem, the very types of video that TikTok’s algorithm needed to train on weren’t easy to create without the app’s camera tools and filters, licensed music clips, etc. This, then, is the magic of the design of TikTok: it is a closed loop of feedback which inspires and enables the creation and viewing of videos on which its algorithm can be trained. For its algorithm to become as effective as it has, TikTok became its own source of training data. To understand how TikTok’s created such a potent flywheel of learning, we need to delve into its design. The dominant school of thought when it comes to UI design in tech, at least that I’ve grown up with the past two decades, has centered around removing friction for users in accomplishing whatever it is they’re trying to do while delighting them in the process. The goal has been design that is elegant, in every sense of the word: intuitive, ingenious, even stylish. Perhaps no company has more embodied this school of design than Apple. At its best, Apple makes hardware and software that is pleasingly elegant—“it just works”—but also sexy in a way that makes its users feel tasteful. Apple’s infamous controlling style—no replaceable batteries for its phones and laptops, the current debate over its App Store rules—put the company squarely in the camp of what Scott in Seeing Like a State refers to as high modernism. Is there any reason to show a video of how the new MacBook Pro body is crafted from one solid block of aluminum (besides the fact that Jony Ive cooing “a-loo-MIN-eee-um” is ASMR to Apple fans) when unveiling it at an Apple keynote? How about because it’s sexy AF to see industrial lasers carving that unibody out of a solid chunk of aluminum? And later, when you’re cranking out an email at a coffee shop on said laptop, some residual memory of that video in your unconscious will give you just the slightest hit of dopamine? There’s a reason this user-centric design model has been so dominant for so long, especially in consumer tech. First, it works. Apple’s market cap was, at last check, over 2 trillion dollars. Remember when fake Sean Parker said a billion dollars was cool? That was just a decade ago and a billion dollars is no longer S-Tier. The wealth meta moves fast. Furthermore, we live in the era of massive network effects, where tech giants who apply Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory and acquire a massive base of users can exert unbelievable leverage on the markets they participate in. One of the best ways to do that is to design products and services that do what users want better than your competitors. This school of design has been so dominant for so long that I’ve almost managed to forget some of the brutal software design that used to the norm in a bygone era.Not to be confused with brutalist design, which can be quite beautiful in its own respect, like its architectural cousins. But what if the key to serving your users best depends in large part upon training a machine learning algorithm? What if that ML algorithm needs a massive training dataset? In an age when machine learning is in its ascendancy, this is increasingly a critical design objective. More and more, when considering how to design an app, you have to consider how best to help an algorithm “see.” To serve your users best, first serve the algorithm. TikTok fascinates me because it is an example of a modern app whose design, whether by accident or, uhh, design, is optimized to feed its algorithm as much useful signal as possible. It is an exemplar of what I call algorithm-friendly design.I thought about calling it algorithm-centric design but felt it went too far. Ultimately, a design that helps an algorithm see is still doing so in service of providing the user with the best possible experience. This might still be considered just a variant of user-centric design, but for those teams working on products with a heavy machine learning algorithm component, it may be useful to acknowledge explicitly. After all, when a product manager, designer, and engineer meet to design an app, the algorithm isn't in attendance. Yet its training needs must be represented. James Scott speaks of “seeing like a state,” of massive shifts in fields like urban design that made quantities like plots of land and their respective owners “legible” to tax collectors. TikTok’s design makes its videos, users, and user preferences legible to its For You Page algorithm. The app design fulfills one of its primary responsibilities: “seeing like an algorithm.” Let’s take a closer look. TikTok opens into the For You Page and goes right into a video. This is what it looks like. This is, as of right now, the most popular TikTok ever. By the time I publish this post, its 34.1M likes will likely be outdated. You can read the story of how this TikTok even came to be and it will still feel like a cultural conundrum wrapped in a riddle stuffed in a paradox, and you love to see it. I showed this to my niece, we looped it a few dozen times, then we started chanting “M to the B, M to the B” and laughing our asses off and it was one of the only times in this pandemic I’ve truly felt anything other than despair. The entire screen is filled with one video. Just one. It is displayed fullscreen, in vertical orientation. This is not a scrolling feed. It’s paginated, effectively. The video autoplays almost immediately (and the next few videos are loaded in the background so that they, too, can play quickly when it’s their turn on stage). This design puts the user to an immediate question: how do you feel about this short video and this short video alone? Everything you do from the moment the video begins playing is signal as to your sentiment towards that video. Do you swipe up to the next video before it has even finished playing? An implicit (though borderline explicit) signal of disinterest. Did you watch it more than once, letting it loop a few times? Seems that something about it appealed to you. Did you share the video through the built-in share pane? Another strong indicator of positive sentiment. If you tap the bottom right spinning LP icon and watch more videos with that same soundtrack, that is additional signal as to your tastes. Often the music cue is synonymous with a meme, and now TikTok has another axis on which to recommend videos for you. Did you tap into the video creator’s profile page? Did you watch other videos of theirs, and did you then follow them? In addition to enjoying the video, perhaps you appreciate them in particular. But let’s step back even earlier, before you’re even watching the video, and understand how the TikTok algorithm “sees” the video itself. Before the video is even sent down to your phone by the FYP algorithm, some human on TikTok’s operations team has already watched the video and added lots of relevant tags or labels. Is the video about dancing? Lip synching? Video games? A kitten? A chipmunk? Is it comedic? Is the subject a male or female? What age, roughly? Is it a group video? Where is it set? What filters or visual effects are used? If there’s food involved, what kind? And so on. All of these labels become features that the algorithm can now see. Vision AI also does a pass on the video, and to the extent it can, contributes what it sees. Some of TikTok’s camera filters are designed to track human faces or hands or gestures so vision AI is often invoked even earlier, at the point of creation. The algorithm can also see what TikTok already knows about you. What types of videos have you enjoyed in the past? What demographic or psychographic information is known about you? Where are you watching the video? What type of device do you have? And so on. Beyond that, what other users are similar to you? Let's jump back to the moment you watch that video on your phone in TikTok. The FYP algorithm can now close all the feedback loops. It takes every one of the actions you take on the video and can guess how you, with all your tastes, feels about this video, with all its attributes. None of these individual steps sounds like rocket science, especially to anyone who works on any algorithmic social feed today.In my previous piece I noted that TikTok doesn’t really have a strong social graph. One of the reasons the app is as effective as it is is that it doesn’t try to pretend to be what it isn’t. That is, people already have a gazillion other social graphs and ways to share with people they know. Rather than force people to do so within the TikTok app, they make it dead simple to download videos or share them through those external channels. What TikTok keeps, however, is the signal that you chose to share that video. That data feeds their algorithm and their algorithm alone. Since the videos are watermarked, they also get a nice hit of free publicity from the share. In fact, TikTok has published a blog post describing essentially how their FYP algorithm works, and I doubt anyone in tech will find the description anything but obvious. But contrast what TikTok's FYP algorithm sees with what a comparable recommendation algorithm sees on most other social networking feeds. The default UI of our largest social networks today is the infinite vertically scrolling feed (I could have easily used a screenshot of Facebook above, for example). Instead of serving you one story at a time, these apps display multiple items on screen at once. As you scroll up and past many stories, the algorithm can’t “see” which story your eyes rest on. Even if it could, if the user doesn’t press any of the feedback buttons like the Like button, is their sentiment towards that story positive or negative? The signal of user sentiment isn’t clean. If you subscribe to the idea that UI's should remove friction, the infinite scrolling feed is ideal. It offers a sense of uninhibited control of the pace of consumption. The simulated physics that result from flicking a feed with your thumb and seeing it scroll up like the drum of the Big Wheel from the Price is Right Showcase Showdown with the exact rotational velocity implied by the speed of your initial gesture, seeing that software wheel gradually slow down exactly as it would if encountering constant physical friction, it’s one of the most delightful user interactions of the touchscreen era. You can scroll past a half dozen tweets or Facebook feed items in no time. Wheeeeeeee! A paginated design, in which you could only see one story at a time, where each flick of the finger would only advance the feed one item at a time, would be a literal and metaphoric drag. On the other hand, maybe you wouldn’t mind reading one tweet at a time if they were better targeted, and maybe they would be better targeted if Twitter knew more about which types of tweets really interest you. And maybe Twitter would know more about what really interested you if you had to give explicit and implicit positive or negative signals on every tweet. Even on a story a user does engage with, judging sentiment is a challenge. Most apps only have positive feedback mechanisms, most typically some form of a like button. Since apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built around social graphs, it’s obvious why they might opt not to offer dislike buttons. But, as Stephen King wrote in On Writing, "If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway." By relying on a long scrolling feed with mostly explicit positive feedback mechanisms, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have made a tradeoff in favor of lower friction scanning for users at the expense of a more accurate read on negative signal.You see another variant of this tradeoff at longstanding companies with the same founding CEO. That person tends to surround themselves with a C-Suite that follows their lead, works well with them. The danger of being surrounded by yes-men is not having anyone to challenge the blindspots in your thinking. It's always worth asking who the people are who are powerful enough to actually change the minds of people like Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg, Musk. Often the answer is no one, so their blindspots become the blindspots of the company. Networks that are built around interest graphs, like Reddit, do tend to incorporate down voting mechanisms because their prime directive to keep users from churning is to serve them the most interesting content. That means weeding out uninteresting content as much as it does surfacing appealing content. TikTok doesn’t have an explicit downvote button, but by serving you just one video at a time, they can infer your lack of interest in any single video based on whether you churn out of that video quickly A quick swipe up before a video has completed is like swiping left on Tinder. The best TikTokers have an intuitive sense of the narrative pace that is appropriate for that platform. How long can you drag out the punching or payoff without losing the viewer, how do you have a set up that keeps the user involved. Using a music cue that has already been co-opted into a meme helps because the bass drop or musical payoff foreshadows when the punchline of the video will drop; a viewer knows how much longer before they reach the payoff. Also viewers may stick around just for the pleasure of hearing that musical resolution. and by which positive actions you don’t take. If you click into a text post by someone on Facebook but don’t comment or like the post, how can Facebook judge your sentiment toward that post? Maybe you thought about disagreeing violently in comments, but the person is a coworker or friend of a friend and you decided the better of it. That negative sentiment is difficult to capture; the algorithm can’t “see” your feelings.Most social networks have explicit reporting features for reporting offensive and/or abusive content, but those features are buried and most users don’t resort to them. By the time someone does use a feature like that, you’ve usually already made a grave mistake far upstream and it’s too late to salvage most of the damage that’s been done. It’s the content that’s boring or causes mild displeasure that is the slow killer. In my previous post, I noted that content derived from a social graph can drift away from a user’s true interests because of the mismatch between your own interests and those of people you know. The switch from a chronological to algorithmic feed is often the default defensive move against such drift. But if the algorithm isn’t "seeing" signals of a user’s growing disinterest, if only positive engagement is visible, some amount of divergence is unavoidable. You might see that a user is slowly losing interest, not liking as many items, not opening your app as often, but precisely which stories are driving them away may be unclear. By the time they're starting to exhibit those signs of churn, it's often too late to reverse the bleeding. Algorithm-friendly design need not be user-hostile. It simply takes a different approach as to how to best serve the user’s interests. Pagination may insert some level of friction to the user, but in doing so, it may provide the algorithm with cleaner signal that safeguards the quality of the feed in the long run. Minimizing friction is merely one means to a great user experience. The goal of any design is not to minimize friction, it’s to help the user achieve some end. Reducing friction is often consistent with that end, but not always. You might say that the quote tweet reduces the friction of manually copying someone else’s tweet, but reducing friction to organizing a mob to pile on someone might not be a core mechanic you want to encourage if your goal is civil public discourse. Some forms of friction are good. You'll hear many power Twitter users counseling others to make use of muting and blocking early and often.Some users even make liberal use of soft blocking to surreptitiously remove followers. Users proudly tweet screenshots of words they've muted as a sign of their displeasure with some popular topic of discussion (or their intellectual superiority to said topic). Non sports fans tweet about "sportsball," others tweet "I'll bite, what's X?" where X is something everyone is discussing. Some people have gone so far as to unfollow everyone and start their following from scratch again.At some point, and likely because it A/B tested well, Twitter started showing users tweets that people they followed had liked, even from people that user didn't follow themselves. This does occasionally show me tweets of interest, but what it also does is increase, on an absolute basis, the number of tweets I have no interest in and have to scroll past. I'm a broken record on this: no two people have the exact same interests. The launch of this feature has me really considering unfollowing everyone and starting from scratch, but I also worry about hurting people's feelings, because I'm a softie. If Twitter were structured differently this wouldn't be an issue. I sometimes think about adopting some or all of these strategies myself, but for Twitter, the necessity of these is itself a failure of the service. If the algorithm were smarter about what interested you, it should take care of muting topics or blocking people on your behalf, without you having to do that work yourself. As I wrote last time, that you have to follow people at all on Twitter to get interesting content is, one could argue, a design flaw for what could be a powerful interest graph. Not only does TikTok capture very clean signals of sentiment from its users, it also gathers a tremendous volume of them per session. Videos on TikTok are so short that even in a brief session, TikTok can gather a lot of feedback on your tastes. The process is relatively painless, too. At worst, a few videos might bore you, but swiping them away makes for relatively painless work, and since the algorithm listens closely to your feedback, you may even enjoy dismissing videos knowing that the app will register your displeasure and act on it.Short video happens to be a category quite suited to this type of machine learning-driven recommendation. By no means would I imply that it would work for every type of category. Music works well. It is short in duration so the sampling cost is low, and the repeat consumption value is high. Musical similarities tend to be mathematically detectable. My Spotify Radio recommendations are solid. On the other hand, algorithmic movie recommendations have never really felt magical to me. Movies are very long, the sampling cost is very high. The corpus is small, and only something like 500 or so movies come out each year, of which most people only see a handful. This entire subject is worth a separate post. By the way, TikTok isn’t the only app with an interface that is optimized for the task of matching, with an interface that shows you one entity at a time so as to be more clear on how you feel. Before TikTok, we had a whole category in which the one-item-at-a-time audition-style UI was dominant. There’s a reason swipe right and swipe left have become shorthand slang for signaling approval and disapproval, generally. Tinder came up with what feels like a design primitive on a touchscreen UI for binary voting. In this software era, true competitive advantages, or moats, are increasingly illusory. Most software features or UI designs can be copied easily by an incumbent or competitor overnight. All you will have done is test the impact of the design for them.On one of my trips to China, I was at a dinner with a large group of Chinese entrepreneurs, and I mentioned the hubbub over Instagram copying Stories from Snapchat. One of the chief product officers of one of China’s top companies laughed and remarked, “In China, if your competitor doesn’t copy one of your successful features inside of two weeks, they must be incompetent.” In many ways, the Chinese tech scene is the true Darwinian marketplace of ideas that Silicon Valley thinks of itself as. This bodes poorly for the relative output of Silicon Valley because the rate of idea spread and mutation occurs more quickly in China. Silicon Valley is often said to have taken over as the geographic center of technology innovation from Boston’s Route 128 in part because Silicon Valley’s more open labor markets allowed ideas to move freely among companies. China has taken that playbook and pushed it even further. Surviving the competitive landscape of the Chinese tech scene is like trying to climb out of that pit in The Dark Knight Rises. Terrifying. But if you can create a flywheel, like TikTok’s, it becomes much harder for a competitor like Reels or Triller to catch up. Triller may pay some influencers from TikTok to come over and make videos there, Reels might try to draft off of existing Instagram traffic, but what makes TikTok work is the entire positive feedback loop connecting creators, videos, and viewers via the FYP algorithm. In tech, an industry that epitomizes Brian Arthur’s Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy perhaps more than any other, the first competitor to achieve product-market fit can run away from the pack. If more and more markets feel like they are winner-take-all, or winners-take-all, that is because in an increasingly interconnected world, they are. Bytedance is often described as the algorithm company, and TikTok has been described over the past few weeks as powered by just such algorithmic black magic. Many have gone so far as to say that TikTok wouldn’t be worth purchasing if the algorithm weren’t included. That’s a mistake, in my opinion. Yes, retraining the FYP recommendations algorithm might take so long that some users would churn. I don’t mean to trivialize that task. But the actual magic is how every element of TikTok's design and processes connect with each other to create a dataset with which the algorithm trains itself into peak performance. No single step in that loop is beyond the capabilities of any of the many U.S. suitors. All that’s needed is an understanding of how the flywheel works and a commitment to keep every element and process in it functioning. All around me, I encounter products or services that seem to have hit a ceiling in the quality of their algorithmic recommendations: Yelp, OpenTable, Amazon, Google, Netflix, and on and on. Don't get me wrong, some of them are at rest in a good place. But I can't help but feel there is another leap to be made in some of these, and that perhaps more algorithm-friendly design might be one of the possible solutions. To recap, in part one of my series on TikTok, I discussed how the algorithm acts as an matching mechanism that makes TikTok such a scalable entertainment network. In comparison, social networks have to approximate an interest graph using a social graph, with all the problems that come with that. In this second piece on TikTok, I’ve focused on how its design helps its machine learning FYP algorithm “see” what it needs to see to do its job so effectively. An algorithm-friendly design ethos may become a model of how other companies in other verticals might achieve an edge in the age of machine learning. But there’s one final reason I find TikTok such a fascinating and anomalous case study. It has to do less with software and algorithms and more with something that the cultural determinist in me will never tire of studying: the network effects of creativity. That will be the subject of my third and final part of this series on TikTok.
I often describe myself as a cultural determinist, more as a way to differentiate myself from people with other dominant worldviews, though I am not a strict adherent. It’s more that in many situations when people ascribe causal power to something other than culture, I’m immediately suspicious. The 2010’s were a fascinating time to follow the consumer tech industry in China. Though I left Hulu in 2011, I still kept in touch with a lot of the team from our satellite Hulu Beijing office, many of whom scattered out to various Chinese tech companies throughout the past decade. On my last visit to the Hulu Beijing office in 2011, I was skeptical any of the new tech companies out of China would ever crack the U.S. market. It wasn’t just that the U.S. had strong incumbents, or that the Chinese tech companies were still in their infancy. My default hypothesis was that what I call the veil of cultural ignorance was too impenetrable a barrier. That companies from non-WEIRD countries (Joseph Henrich shorthand for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) would struggle to ship into WEIRD cultures. I was even skeptical of the reverse, of U.S. companies competing in China or India. The further the cultural distance between two countries, the more challenging it would be for companies in one to compete in the other. The path towards overcoming that seemed to lie in hiring a local leadership team, or sending someone over from the U.S. who understood the culture of that country inside-out. For the most part, that has held true. China has struggled, for the most part, to make real inroads in the U.S. WeChat tried to make inroads in the U.S. but only really managed to capture Chinese-Americans who used the app to communicate with friends, family, and business colleagues in China. In the other direction, the U.S. hasn’t made a huge dent in China. Obviously, the Great Firewall played a huge role in keeping a lot of U.S. companies out of the Chinese market, but in the few cases where a U.S. company got a crack at the Chinese market, like Uber China, the results were mixed. For this reason, I’ve been fascinated with TikTok. Here in 2020, TikTok is, for many, including myself, the most entertaining short video app going. The U.S. government is considering banning the app as a national security risk, and while that’s the topic du jour for just about everyone right now, I’m much more interested in tracing how it got a foothold in markets outside of China, especially the U.S. with its powerful incumbents. They say you learn the most from failure, and in the same way I learn the most about my mental models from the exceptions. How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built? The answer, I believe, has significant implications for the future of cross-border tech competition, as well as for understanding how product developers achieve product-market-fit. The rise of TikTok updated my thinking. It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted. TikTok's story begins in 2014, in Shanghai. Alex Zhu and Luyu “Louis” Yang had launched an educational short-form video app that hadn’t gotten any traction. They decided to pivot to lip-synch music videos, launching Musical.ly in the U.S. and China. Ironically, the app got more traction across the Pacific Ocean, so they killed their efforts in their home country of China and focused their efforts on their American market. The early user base consisted mostly of American teenage girls. Finally, an app offered users the chance to lip synch to the official version of popular songs and have those videos distributed to an audience for social feedback. That the app got any traction at all was progress. However, it presented Alex, Louis, and their team with a problem. American teen girls were not exactly an audience Alex and Louis really understood.To be fair, most American parents would argue they don't understand their teenage daughters either. During this era where China and the U.S. tech scenes have overlapped, the Chinese market has been largely impenetrable to the U.S. tech companies because of the Great Firewall, both the software instance and the outright bans from the CCP. But in the reverse direction, America has been almost as impenetrable to Chinese companies because of what might be thought of as America’s cultural firewall. Outside of DJI in dronesI'd argue one reason DJI had success in America was that drone control interfaces borrow heavily from standard flight control interfaces and are not culturally specific. Thus DJI could lean on its hardware prowess which was formidable., I can’t think of any Chinese app making real inroads in the U.S. prior to Musical.ly. To build on its early traction, Musical.ly would have to overcome this cultural barrier. It’s been said that if you ask your customers what they want, they’ll ask for a faster horse (attributed to Henry Ford, though that may not be true). Frankly, that’s always been half horses***, and not just because horses are involved. First of all, what if your customers are horse jockeys? Secondly, while you can’t listen to your customers exclusively, paying attention to them is a dependable way to build a solid SaaS business, and even in the consumer space it provides useful signal. As I’ve written about before, customers may tell you they want a faster horse, and what you should hear is not that you should be injecting your horses with steroids but that your customers find their current mode of transportation, the aforementioned horse, to be too slow a means of getting around. Alex and Louis listened to Musical.ly’s early adopters. The app made feedback channels easy to find, and the American teenage girls using the app every day were more than willing to speak up about what they wanted to ease their video creation. They sent a ton of product requests, helping to inform a product roadmap for the Musical.ly team. That, combined with some clever growth hacks, like allowing watermarked videos to easily be downloaded and distributed via other networks like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, helped them achieve hockey-stick inflection among their target market. Still, Musical.ly ran into its invisible asymptote eventually. There are only so many teenage girls in the U.S. When they saturated that market, usage and growth flatlined. It was then that a suitor they had rebuffed previously, the Chinese technology company Bytedance, suddenly looked more attractive, like Professor Bhaer to Jo March at the end of Little Women. In a bit of dramatic irony, Bytedance had cloned Musical.ly in China with an app called Douyin, one that had taken off in China, and now Bytedance was buying the app that inspired it, Musical.ly, an app conceived and built in China but that had failed in China and instead gotten traction in the U.S. After the purchase, Bytedance rebranded Musical.ly as TikTok. Still, if that’s all they had done, it’s not clear why the app would’ve broken out of its stalled growth to the stunning extent it has under its new owner. After all, Bytedance paid just $1B for an app that’s rumored to sell now, if the U.S. government approves the transaction, for anywhere from $30 to $70B. Bytedance did two things in particular to jumpstart TikTok’s growth. First, it opened up its wallet and started spending on user acquisition in the U.S. the way wealthy Chinese used to spend on American real estate (no, I’m not still bitter at all the Chinese all-cash offers that trounced me repeatedly when condo-hunting six years ago). TikTok was rumored to have been spending a staggering eight or nine figures a month on advertising. The ubiquity of TikTok ads lent the theory credence. I saw TikTok ads everywhere, on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and in mobile gamesTikTok ads are bizarre. The video ads I see for the app in mobile games convey nothing about what the app is or does. One ad I've seen dozens of times has an old lady doing lunges in her living room, another has a kid blow drying his hair, and as he does, his hair changes colors. I feel like the ads could do a better job of selling the app, but what do I know?. If Bytedance could have purchased ads on the back of my eyelids at sub $20 CPMs I don’t doubt they would have done so. It didn’t look like a wise investment at first. Rumors abounded that the 30-day retention of all those new users poured into the top of its funnel was sub 10%. They seemed to be lighting ad dollars on fire. Ultimately, the ROI on that spend would turn the corner, but only because of the second element of their assault on the US market, the most important piece of technology Bytedance introduced to TikTok: the updated For You Page feed algorithm. Bytedance has an absurd proportion of their software engineers focused on their algorithms, more than half at last check. It is known as the algorithm company, first for its breakout algorithmic “news” app Toutiao, then for its Musical.ly clone Douyin, and now for TikTok. Prior to TikTok, I would’ve said YouTube had the strongest exploit algorithm in video,The exploit versus explore conundrum is sort of a classic of algorithmic design, usually mentioned in relation to the multi-armed bandit problem. For the purposes of this discussion, think of it simply as the problem of choosing which videos to show you. An exploit algorithm will give you more of what you like, while an explore algorithm tries to broaden your exposure to more than just what you’ve shown you like. YouTube is often described as an exploit algorithm because it tends to really push more of what you like, and then before you know it, you’re looking at some alt-right video that’s trying to redpill you. but in comparison to TikTok, YouTube’s algorithm feels primitive (the top creators on YouTube have long ago figured out how to game YouTube’s algorithm’s heavy dependence on click-through rates and watch time, one reason so many YouTube videos are lengthening over time, much to my dismay). Before Bytedance bought Musical.ly and rebranded it TikTok, its Musical.ly clone called Douyin was already a sensation in the Chinese market thanks in large part to its effective algorithm. A few years ago, on a visit to Beijing, I caught up with a bunch of former colleagues from Hulu Beijing, and all of them showed me their Douyin feeds. They described the app as frighteningly addictive and the algorithm as eerily perceptive. More than one of them said they had to delete the app off their phone for months at a time because they were losing an hour or two every night just lying in bed watching videos. That same trip, I had coffee with an ex-Hulu developer who now was now a senior exec in the Bytedance engineering organization. Of course, he was tight-lipped about how their algorithm worked, but the scale of their infrastructure dedicated to their algorithms was clear. On my way in and out of this office, just one of several Bytedance spaces all across the city, I gawked at hundreds of workers sitting side by side in row after row in the open floorplan. It resembled what I’d seen at tech giants like Facebook in the U.S., but even denser.The mood was giddy. I could tell he was doing well. He took me and my friends to a Luckin Coffee in their office basement and told us to order drinks off an app on his phone. I reached in my pocket for some RMB to pay for the drinks and he put his hand on my arm to stop me. “Don’t worry, I can afford this,” he said, laughing. He didn’t mean it in a boasting manner, he seemed almost sheepish about how well they were doing. Afterwards, as we waited outside the office in their parking lot, he walked past and asked me if I needed a ride. No, I said, I’d be taking the subway. A Tesla Model X pulled up, the valet hopped out, and he jumped in and drove off. It’s rumored that Bytedance examines more features of videos than other companies. If you like a video featuring video game captures, that is noted. If you like videos featuring puppies, that is noted. Every Douyin feed I examined was distinctive. My friends all noted that after spending only a short amount of time in the app, it had locked onto their palate. That, more than anything else, was the critical upgrade Bytedance applied to Musical.ly to turn it into TikTok. Friends at Bytedance claimed, with some pride, that after they plugged Musical.ly, now TikTok, into Bytedance’s back-end algorithm, they doubled the time spent in the app. I was skeptical until I asked some friends who had some data on the before and after. The step change in the graph was anything but subtle. At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens at the time described TikTok as “cringey,” usually a kiss of death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they are about what’s cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school. Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainment staple. That’s where the one-two combination of Bytedance’s enormous marketing spend and the power of TikTok’s algorithm came to the rescue. To help a network break out from its early adopter group, you need both to bring lots of new people/subcultures into the app—that’s where the massive marketing spend helps—but also ways to help these disparate groups to 1) find each other quickly and 2) branch off into their own spaces. More than any other feed algorithm I can recall, Bytedance’s short video algorithm fulfilled these two requirements. It is a rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker. Merely by watching some videos, and without having to follow or friend anyone, you can quickly train TikTok on what you like. In the two sided entertainment network that is TikTok, the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph. Just as importantly, by personalizing everyone’s FYP feeds, TikTok helped to keep these distinct subcultures, with their different tastes, separated. One person’s cringe is another person’s pleasure, but figuring out which is which is no small feat. TikTok’s algorithm is the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter universe. Just as that magical hat sorts students at Hogwarts into the Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin houses, TikTok’s algorithm sorts its users into dozens and dozens of subculturesThe Sorting Hat is perhaps the most curious plot device from the Harry Potter universe. Is it a metaphor for genetic determinism? Did Draco have any hope of not being a Slytherin? By sorting Draco into that house, did it shape his destiny? Is the hat a metaphor for the U.S. college admissions system, with all its known biases? Is Harry Potter, sorted into Gryffindor, a legacy admit?. Not two FYP feeds are alike. For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars. Until they have some real substantial ideas and incentives to take on the costly task of mediating between strangers who disagree with each other, they’re better off sorting those people apart. The only types of people who enjoy being thrown into a gladiatorial online arena together with those they disagree with seem to be trolls, who benefit asymmetrically from the resultant violence. Consider Twitter's content moderation problems. How much of that results from throwing liberals and conservatives together in a timeline together? Twitter employees speak often about wanting to improve public discourse, but they’d be much better off (and society, too) keeping the Slytherins and Gryffindors apart until they have some real substantive ideas to solve the problem of low trust conversation.The same can be said of NextDoor and their problem of racist reporting of minorities just walking down the sidewalk. They’d be better off just removing that feature. At some point, NextDoor needs to face the fact that they aren’t going to solve racism. Tweak that feature all you want, put up all the hoops for users to jump through to file such a report, but adverse selection ensures that those most motivated to jump through them are the racist ones. After some time, new subcultures did indeed emerge on TikTok. No longer was it just teenage girls lip-synching. There are so many subcultures on TikTok I can barely track them because I only ever see a portion of them in my personalized FYP. This broadened TikTok’s appeal and total addressable market. Douyin had followed that path in China, so Bytedance at least had some precedent for committing to such an expensive bet, but I wasn’t certain if it would work in the U.S., a much more competitive media and entertainment market. Within a larger social network, even subcultures need some minimum viable scale, and though Bytedance paid dearly to fill the top of the funnel, its algorithm eventually helped assemble many subcultures surpassing that minimum viable scale. More notably, it did so with amazing speed. Think of how most other social networks have scaled. The usual path is organic. Users are encouraged to follow and friend each other to assemble their own graph one connection at a time. The challenge with that is that it’s almost always a really slow build, and you have to provide some reason for people to hang around and build that graph, often encapsulated by the aphorism “come for the tool, stay for the network.” Today, it’s not as easy to build the “tool” part when so much of that landscape has already been mined and when scaled networks have learned to copy any tool achieving any level of traction.In the West, Facebook is the master of the fast follow. They struggle to launch new social graphs of their own invention, but if they spot any competing social network achieve any level of traction, they will lock down and ship a clone with blinding speed. Good artists borrow, great artists steal, the best artists steal the most quickly? Facebook as a competitor reminds me of that class of zombies in movies that stagger around drunk most of the time, but the moment they spot a target, they sprint at it like a pack of cheetahs. The type you see in 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Terrifying. Some people still think that a new social network will be built around a new content format, but it’s almost impossible to think of a format that couldn’t be copied in two to three months by a compact Facebook team put in lockdown with catered dinners. Yes, a new content format might create a new proof of work, as I wrote about in Status as a Service, but just as critical is building the right structures to distribute such content to the right audience to close the social feedback loop. What’s the last new social network to achieve scale in recent years? You probably can’t think of any, and that’s because there really aren’t any. Even Facebook hasn’t been able to launch any really new successful social products, and a lot of that is because they also seem fixated on building these things around some content format gimmick. Recall the three purposes which I used to distinguish among networks in Status as a Service: social capital (status), entertainment, and utility. In another post soon I promise to explain why I classify networks along these three axes, but for now, just know that while almost all networks serve some mix of the three, most lean heavily towards one of those three purposes. A network like Venmo or Uber, for example, is mostly about utility: I need to pay someone money, or I need to travel from here to there. A network like YouTube is more about entertainment. Amuse me. And some networks, what most people refer to when they use the generic term “social network,” are more focused on social capital. Soho House, for example. TikTok is less a pure social network, the type focused on social capital, than an entertainment network. I don’t socialize with people on TikTok, I barely know any of them. It consists of a network of people connected to each other, but they are connected for a distinct reason, for creators to reach viewers with their short videos.Bytedance hasn't been successful in building out a social network to compete with WeChat, though it's not for lack of trying. I think they have a variety of options for doing so, but as with many companies that didn't begin as social first, it's not in their DNA. Facebook is underrated for its ability to build functional social plumbing at scale, that is a rare design skill. Companies as diverse as Amazon and Netflix have tried building social features and then later abandoned them. I suspect they tried when they didn't have enough users to create breakaway social scale, but it's difficult to imagine them pulling that off without more social DNA. But having a social-first DNA also means that Facebook isn't great at building non-social offerings. Their video or watch tab remains a bizarre and unfocused mess. One can debate the semantics of what constitutes a social network forever, but what matters here is realizing that another way to describe an entertainment network is as an interest network. TikTok takes content from one group of people and match it to other people who would enjoy that content. It is trying to figure out what hundreds of millions of viewers around the world are interested in. When you frame TikTok's algorithm that way, its enormous unrealized potential snaps into focus. The idea of using a social graph to build out an interest-based network has always been a sort of approximation, a hack. You follow some people in an app, and it serves you some subset of the content from those people under the assumption that you’ll find much of what they post of interest to you. It worked in college for Facebook because a bunch of hormonal college students are really interested in each other. It worked in Twitter, eventually, though it took a while. Twitter's unidirectional follow graph allowed people to pick and choose who to follow with more flexibility than Facebook's initial bi-directional friend model, but Twitter didn't provide enough feedback mechanisms early on to help train its users on what to tweet. The early days were filled with a lot of status updates of the variety people cite when criticizing social media: "nobody cares what you ate for lunch."I talk about Twitter's slow path to product market fit in Status as a Service But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it? The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale. Take a social network like Twitter: the one-way follow graph structure is well-suited to interest graph construction, but the problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow. You may enjoy Gruber’s thoughts on Apple but not his Yankees tweets. Or my tweets on tech but not on film. And so on. You can try to use Twitter Lists, or mute or block certain people or topics, but it’s all a big hassle that few have the energy or will to tackle. Think of what happened to Facebook when it’s users went from having their classmates as friends to hundreds and often thousands of people as friends, including coworkers, parents, and that random person you met at the open bar at a wedding reception and felt obligated to accept a friend request from even though their jokes didn’t seem as funny the next morning in the cold light of sobriety. Some have termed it context collapse, but by any name, it’s an annoyance everyone understands. It manifests itself in the declining visit and posting frequency on Facebook across many cohorts. Think of Snapchat’s struggles to differentiate between its utility— as a way to communicate among friends—and its entertainment function as a place famous people broadcast content to their fans. In a controversial redesign, Snapchat cleaved the broadcast content from influencers into the righthand Discover tab, leaving your conversations with friends in the left Chat pane. Look, the redesign seemed to say, Kylie Jenner is not your friend. TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is passive personalization, learning through consumption. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high. Because the videos are entertaining, this training process feels effortless, even enjoyable, for the user. I like to say that “when you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.” Think of all the countless hours product managers, designers and engineers have dedicated to growth-hacking social onboarding—goading people into adding friends and following people, urging them to grant access to their phone contact lists—all in an attempt to carry them past the dead zone to the minimum viable graph size necessary to provide them with a healthy, robust feed. (sidenote: Every social product manager has heard the story of Facebook and Twitter’s keystone metrics for minimum viable friend or follow graph size countless times.) Think of how many damn interest bubble UI’s you’ve had to sit through before you could start using some new social product: what subjects interest you? who are your favorite musicians? what types of movies do you enjoy?The last time I tried to use Twitter’s new user onboarding flow, it recommended I follow, among other accounts, that of Donald Trump. There are countless ways they could onboard people more efficiently to provide them with a great experience immediately, but that is not one of them. TikTok came along and bypassed all of that. In a two-sided entertainment marketplace, they provide creators on one side with unmatched video creation tools coupled with potential super-scaled distribution, and viewers on the other side with an endless stream of entertainment that gets more personalized with time. In doing so, TikTok, with a product team and infrastructure mostly located in China, came out of left field and became a player in the attention marketplace on the same playing fields around the world as giants like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Netflix. Not quite a Cinderella story...maybe a Mulan story? TikTok didn't just break out in America. It became unbelievably popular in India and in the Middle East, more countries whose cultures and language were foreign to the Chinese Bytedance product teams. Imagine an algorithm so clever it enables its builders to treat another market and culture as a complete black box. What do people in that country like? No, even better, what does each individual person in each of those foreign countries like? You don't have to figure it out. The algorithm will handle that. The algorithm knows. I don’t think the Chinese product teams I’ve met in recent years in China are much further ahead than the ones I met in 2011 when it comes to understanding foreign cultures like America. But what the Bytedance algorithm did was it abstracted that problem away.One of the concerns about CCP ties with Bytedance is that they might use it as a propaganda tool against the U.S. I tend to think that problem is overrated because my sense is that many in China still don't understand the nuances of American culture, just as America doesn't understand theirs (though I speak Mandarin, some of the memes on Douyin fly way over my head). However, perhaps an algorithm that abstracts culture into a series of stimuli responses makes it more dangerous? Now imagine that level of hyper efficient interest matching applied to other opportunities and markets. Personalized TV of the future? Check. Education? I already find a lot of education videos in my TikTok feed, on everything from cooking to magic to iPhone hacks. Scale that up and Alex and Louis might finally realize their dream of a short video education app that they set out to build before Musical.ly. Shopping? A slam dunk, Douyin and Toutiao already enable a ton of commerce in China. Job marketplace? A bit of a stretch, but not impossible. If Microsoft buys TikTok, I’d certainly give the TikTok team a crack at improving my LinkedIn feed, which, to be clear, is horrifying. What about personalized reading, from books to newsletters to blogs? Music? Podcasts? Yes, yes, yes please. Dating? The world could absolutely use an alternative to the high GINI co-efficient, high inequality dating marketplace that is Tinder. Douyin already visualizes much of this future for us with its much broader diversity of videos and revenue models. In China, video e-commerce is light years ahead of where it is in the U.S. (for a variety of reasons, but none that aren’t surmountable; a topic, again, for another piece). Whereas TikTok can still feel, to me, like a pure entertainment time-killer, Douyin, which I track on a separate phone I keep just to run Chinese apps for research purposes, feels like much more than that. It feels like a realization of short video as a broad use case platform. There’s a reason that many people in the U.S. today describe social media as work. And why many, like me, have come to find TikTok a much more fun app to spend time in. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built on social graphs, and as such, they amplify the scale, ubiquity, and reach of our performative social burden. They struggle to separate their social functions from their entertainment and utility functions, injecting an aspect of social artifice where it never used to exist. Facebook has struggled with its transition to utility, which would’ve offered it a path towards becoming more of a societal operating system the way WeChat is in China. To be fair, the competition for many of those functions is much stiffer in the U.S. In payments, for example, Facebook must compete with credit cards, which work fine and which most people default to in the U.S., whereas in China AliPay and WeChat Pay were competing with a cash-dominant culture. Still, in the U.S., Facebook has yet to make any real inroads in significant utility use cases like commerce.I speak so often about how much video as a medium is underrated by tech elites. In an alternate history of Facebook, they would've made a harder shift to becoming a video-only app, moving up the ladder from text to photos to videos, and maybe they would've become TikTok before TikTok. If they had, I think their time spent figures would be even higher today. For as quickly as Facebook moved to disrupt itself in the past, there's a limit to how far they're willing to go. I plan to compare the Chinese and U.S. tech ecosystems in a future post, and one of the broadest and most important takeaways is that China leapfrogged the U.S. in the shift to video, among many other things. This doesn't mean the U.S. won't then leapfrog China the next time around, but for now, the U.S. is the trailing frog in several categories. Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps. Twitter has never seemed to know what it is. Ask ten different Twitter employees, you’ll hear ten different answers. Perhaps that’s why the dominant product philosophy of the company seems to be a sort of constant paralysis broken up by the occasional crisis mitigation. One reason I’ve long wished Twitter had just become a open protocol and let the developer community go to town is that Twitter moves. At. A. Snail's. Pace. The shame of it is that Twitter had a head start on an interest graph, largely through the work of its users, who gave signal on what they cared about through the graphs they assembled. That could have been a foundation to all sorts of new markets for them. They could’ve even been an interest-based social network, but instead users have mostly extracted that value themselves by pinging each other through the woefully neglected DM product.Of course, Twitter also once purchased Vine and then let it wither on the, uh vine. Of all the tech companies that could purchase TikTok, maybe Twitter is the one that least deserves it. At a minimum, they should be required to submit a book report showing they understand what it is they're buying. A few other tech companies are worth mentioning here. YouTube is a massive video network, but honestly they may have shipped even less than Twitter over the years. That they don’t have any video creation tools of note (do they have any?!) and allowed TikTok to come in and steal the short video space is both shocking and not. Amazon launched a short video commerce app some time ago. It came and went so quickly I didn’t even have time to try it. Though Amazon is good at many things, they just don’t have the DNA to build something like TikTok. That they have failed to realize the short video commerce vision that China led the way on is a shocking miss on their part. Apple owns the actual camera that so many of these videos are shot on, but they've never understood social.iMessages could be a social networking colossus if Apple had the social DNA, but every day other messaging apps pull further away in functionality and design. But I guess they're finally adding threading in iMessages with the next iOS release? Haha. At least they'll continue to improve the camera hardware with every successive iPhone release. None of this is to say TikTok is anywhere near the market value of any of these aforementioned American tech giants. If you still think of it as a novelty meme short video app, you're not far from the truth.Are there flaws with TikTok? Of course. It’s far from perfect. The algorithm can be too clingy. Sometimes I like one video from some meme and the next day TikTok serves me too many follow-up videos from the same meme. But the great thing about a hyper-responsive algorithm is that you can tune it quickly, almost like priming GPT-3 to get the results you want. Often all it takes to inject some new subculture into your TikTok feed is to find some video from it (you can easily find them on YouTube or via friends whose feeds are different from your own) and like it. Another problem for TikTok is that a lot of other use cases are being jammed into what was designed to be a portrait mode lip synch video app. Vertical video is good for the human figure, for dance and makeup videos, but not ideal for other types of communication and storytelling (I still hate when basketball and football highlight clips can’t show more of the horizontal playing field, and that goes for both IG and TikTok; in many highlights of Steph Curry hitting a long 3 you can’t see him, or the basket, only one of the two, lol). Stepping up a level, the list of opportunities Bytedance and TikTok have yet to capitalize on in the U.S. is long, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they miss many of them even if they stave off a ban from the U.S. government. Much of it would require new form factors, and it’s unclear how strong the TikTok product team would be, especially if divested out of Bytedance. Under Microsoft, a company with a fairly shaky history in the consumer market, it's unclear that their full potential would be realized. Still, none of that product work is rocket science. Much of it seems clear in my head. More importantly, TikTok, if armed with the Bytedance algorithm as part of a divestment, has a generalized interest-matching algorithm that can allow it to tackle U.S. tech giants not head on but from an oblique angle. To see it as merely a novelty meme video app for kids is to miss what its much greater disruptive potential. That an app launched out of China could come to the U.S. and sprint into cultural relevance in this attention marketplace should be a wake-up call to complacent U.S. tech companies. Given how many of those companies rely on intuiting user interests to sell them things or to show them ads, a company like TikTok which found a shortcut to assembling such an interest graph should raise all sorts of alarm bells. It surprises me that more U.S. tech companies aren’t taking a harder run at trying to acquire TikTok if the rumored CFIUS hammer stops short of an outright ban. I can’t think of any of them that shouldn’t be bidding for what is a once-in-a-generation forced fire sale asset. I’ve seen prices like $30B tossed around online. If that’s true, it’s an absolute bargain. I’d easily pay twice that without a second thought. I could cycle through my long list of nits, but ultimately they are all easily solvable with the right product vision and execution. TikTok has figured out the hardest piece, the algorithm. With it, a massive team made up mostly by people who’ve never left China, and many who never will, grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets they’d never experienced firsthand. To a cultural determinist like myself, that feels like black magic. On that same trip to China in 2018 when I visited Bytedance, an ex-colleague of mine from Hulu organized a visit for me to Newsdog. It was a news app for the Indian market built by a startup headquartered in Beijing. As I exited the elevator into their lobby, I was greeted by a giant mural of Jeff Bezos’ famous saying “It’s Always Day One” on the opposite wall. A friend of a friend was the CEO there, and he sat me down in a conference room to walk me through their app. They had raised $50M from Tencent just a few months earlier that year, and they were the number one news app in India at the time. He opened the app on his phone and handed it to me. Similar to Toutiao in China, there were different topic areas in a scrollbar across the top, with a vertical feed of stories beneath each. All of these were stories selected algorithmically, as is the style of Toutiao and so many apps in China. I looked through the stories, all in Hindi (and yes, one feed that contained the thirst trap photos of attractive Indian girls in rather suggestive outfits standing under things like waterfalls; some parts of culture are universal). Then I looked up from the app and through the glass walls of the conference room at an office filled with about 40 Chinese engineers, mostly male, tapping away on their computers. Then I looked back down at page after page of Hindi stories in the app. “Wait,” I asked. “Do you have people in this office or at the company who know how to read Hindi?” He looked at me with a smile. “No,” he said. “None of us can read any of it.” NEXT POST: Part II of my thoughts on TikTok, on how the app design is informed by its algorithm and vice versa in a virtuous circle.
Now that everyone is spending many of their waking hours in Zoom, a lot of people are laughing at, and then asking me about, my Zoom setup. It’s actually not all that elaborate. I know many people with much more elaborate setups. Still, for a simple upgrade to the mic and camera that come with your laptop, here are the two pieces of gear I use. For a microphone, I use a Blue Yeti USB mic. I bought mine years and years ago now, during one of Amazon's Black Friday deals, or maybe it was a Prime Day sale, some window where they were discounted heavily (they retail now for $130). I had grand visions of using at the time, but then I put it on a shelf and didn't even remember I owned one until I did Ben Thompson's Stratechery Daily Podcast last week. From a setup perspective, the mic is nearly plug-and-play as it comes with a USB-A cable (you'll need an adapter if your laptop only has USB-C ports, like my Macbook Pro). After you've plugged it in, on a Mac you need to go into System Preferences and then Sound and select it in the dropdown box in the Input tab. If you want to plug headphones into your mic, as I do, to listen to your Zoom call, go into the Output menu also to select the mic. Audio quality is one of those subtle things that makes a world of difference to the quality of a video chat. If you'll be doing a lot of Zooms moving forward, this is a sound investment (pun intended, obvi). There is such a thing as audio fatigue, at least for me; the better the audio, the more pleasant a Zoom is, and the longer I can tolerate it. The Blue Yeti looks vintage and professional and feels hefty; you'll fancy yourself a radio DJ. Every time I'm planted in front of it, I'm tempted to read a dedication: "This is The Glory of Love by Peter Cetera, and it goes out to Shannon in Ridgewood. Shannon, Tyler wants you to know that even in this pandemic when you two are apart, he scrolls through your photos on his phone to remind himself of the glory of your love." It has a hardware mute button which I use quite often. For large group Zooms I recommend everyone mute themselves and press the spacebar when they want to talk. This keeps background chatter to a minimum. However, if you don't want to fuss with the spacebar, a mute button on the mic comes in handy. The next upgrade I recommend, though I'd still rank it behind a microphone upgrade, is to spring for a separate webcam. Most laptop cameras, especially those on Mac laptops, aren't that high quality. The one I use is the Logitech C920S HD Pro Webcam. On Amazon you have to press the Privacy Model option button to get the C920S; the original model is the C920. Either works; the privacy model comes with a clip-on plastic cover, but if can only find the C920 right now you can easily rig up a makeshift shutter cover. I don't find the upgrade as stark as the improvement in sound quality from the microphone upgrade, but it's definitely noticeable, especially in more varied lighting conditions. Since it can stand on its own or clip to another surface like your laptop cover, you can position it for the most flattering camera angle on your face (a camera that looks down on your face is generally more flattering than a camera that looks up on your face and accentuates your chin(s)). As I'm writing this, the C920S is out of stock on Amazon. I assume a lot of people snagged one as they realized how many Zoom calls they'd be on during shelter in place. Other stores likely have faster shipping times now anyway given that Amazon is prioritizing essential shipments during this pandemic surge in their order volume. Out of curiosity, I checked Wirecutter, and the Blue Yeti USB Mic and Logitech 920S happen to be their recommendations for USB microphone and webcam also.
NOTE: I'm going to start cross-posting individual stories sent out in my newsletter over here on my blog. The versions here may contain additional side notes, and often as I bring them over I'll do some light word-smithing or additional copy-editing because I can never stop editing my own copy. If you want to be the first to read things I publish, your best bet is to sign up for my newsletter, but if you're more about reading the most finished form of what I write, it will always be here. In economics, a Veblen good is one for whom demand increases as the price increases. Luxury goods like Birkin bags are often cited as examples of these exceptional goods that violate the conventional relationship between price and demand. Social media has created what I think of as Veblen values. That is, values we tend to clutch more tightly and defend more vigorously the more expensive they are to hold. This isn’t odd in itself; we tend to think of those values we pay for dearly as among the most precious we hold. Freedom. Equality. And so on. However, social media has opened an exploit on this concept. Others can cause us to rate some values more highly than we might otherwise just by raising the cost to us of holding them. A troll might mock you as a snowflake on social media for something you posted, and the next thing you know you’re in an online back alley engaged in a knife fight to defend a view that, before the fracas, you cared about but not that passionately. Perhaps trolling is just a condition in which there are asymmetric emotional costs to engaging in a debate. Since it’s relatively cheap for a troll to push buttons while the emotional cost to the one whose buttons are pushed is high, the incentive and all the positive optionality is in favor of the attacker. Sometimes these are values we do hold dearly. The trick, then, is to match your emotional energy expenditures to the strength of your values prior to factoring in the costs from all the trolls attacking you for it. Easier said than done, especially in the West where major social networks have tended to be fairly lax in moderation, and where, not surprisingly, many describe time online as exhausting and precarious. Part of this is the performative structure of social media, as I’ve written about before, but some of it is just the emotional attrition of endless border skirmishes. As with email, I recommend applying aggressive personal spam filters on social media. That saying that one should “feed a cold, starve a fever”? There’s a reason we say “don’t feed the trolls.” One person's filter bubble is another person's emotional quarantine.
“Si vis pacem para bellum” translated “If you want peace, prepare for war” I hadn’t planned on seeing John Wick 3 - Parabellum, but out for a walk in Stockholm in May, I got caught in a sudden downpour without an umbrella. I was in Sweden for the first time thanks to an invitation from the Spotify product team and had decided to spend some of my downtime seeing the city. Sweden, by the way, is the country with the second highest unicorns per capita. Fascinating, and a topic for another day. I sprinted out of the rain and into the nearest building, which happened to be a movie theater. Checking Dark Sky on my phone, the rain didn’t look to let up for another hour or two, so I scanned the theater listings and found a film in English. John Wick 3: Parabellum it was. Like many I enjoyed the first John Wick movie for its lean and elegant plot and balletic fight choreography. Keanu Reeves was inspired casting given his unfussy acting style. However, I thought the sequel was unnecessary. I wasn’t expecting much from yet another entry, the third, but I rarely regret spending two hours in a darkened theater. Watching an American film in the company of a Swedish audience also promised to be a form of cultural field work, and on that front, I felt fortunate the house was packed with locals. John Wick 3 - Parabellum begins directly after the events of the previous film, and at first, all seemed familiar. But after having spent two films worth of time in this universe already, sometime midway through the third film, it dawned on me. The rules of this film franchise mapped with uncanny precision to something that everyone had been complaining about to me for years now: cancel culture. With that, the films took on heightened resonance. Here I present my theory of John Wick Universe as an allegory of cancel culture. [SPOILER ALERT: Here is where I must warn people who haven’t seen the films that I will reveal key plot points to the three Wick films below. I don’t feel like the charms of this film series lie in the plot details—what happens isn’t surprising in the least to even the most casual of action film fans—but I disagree with those who say spoiler culture has ruined film criticism. Instead I’m happy to let my readers choose their own acceptable quota of narrative novelty. If you prefer not to learn the plots of the John Wick films, stop reading here.] Wick’s character motivation can be described thus: my name is John Wick. You stole my car. You killed my dog. Prepare to die. Reeves plays Wick from cinema’s storied tradition of zen-like hit men, almost placid in their mastery of their craft, which, in his case, is the violent dispatch of other humans from the realm of the living. This is Alain Delon in Le Samourai, Robert De Niro in Heat, Jean Reno as Victor "The Cleaner" in La Femme Nikita. Less sexual than Bond, not quite as overtly cruel as Matz and Jacamon’s Killer. These hit men have a heart, but their highest order bit is the code by which they live. Whether personal or business, there's little difference, the job is killing. And kill he does. In John Wick 3: Parabellum the signature choreography of death remains, a style which can only be described as baroque. Not John Wick for a single gunshot to the head when he can first maim with a few amuse bouche bullets to the torso and limbs. Why engage in a simple fist fight when one can hold a confrontation in a store filled with display cases lined with all manner of knives (in case of emergency, break glass with the skull of your combatant). Why simply perforate assailants with automatic weapons when they can be simultaneously be relieved of their genitals by an attack dog? It wasn’t until Michael Bay’s terrible 6 Underground on Netflix that I saw a film with more cartoonish violence this year. For some, this is entertainment enough. I’ll never hesitate to offer my opinions on any piece of entertainment, but I do not begrudge anyone their pleasures. Certainly, the crowd of Swedes who laughed and cheered at the escalating violence seemed more than entertained. For me, however, films are even more compelling when they speak to the world outside the edges of the screen. I'm nothing if not a sucker for subtext. What fascinated me about John Wick was how its absurdist universe acted as a wry commentary on cancel culture. Do I think this subtext was intentional? Doubtful. Some filmmakers reward subtextual readings more than others. Still, the advantage of making a film with such a lean universe design is its semiotic flexibility. John Wick’s real name, we learn, is Jardani Jovonovich, a Belarussian gypsy raised as an assassin. Wick is nicknamed Baba Yaga, the Boogeyman, for he is the master of assassination. Who are most gifted in using social media to sow chaos and division in the world, especially the United States, than the Russians? Having lost the Cold War they’ve come back in a more fluid and confounding form. When the first film begins, Wick has left that world of violence behind for a peaceful domestic life with his wife Helen. But she dies from an illness, though not before leaving him a beagle to keep him company. The dog, along with Wick’s car, a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1, are recognizable to anyone as the two iconic totems of an American’s most sacred values. When a group of Russian gangsters try to buy his car and Wick refuses, they break into his home, steal the car, and kill the dog. In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta complains to Eric Stoltz that some vandals keyed his car. Stoltz commiserates. “They should be fuckin’ killed, man. No trial, no jury, straight to execution,” he says. “What’s more chicken-shit than fuckin’ with a man’s automobile?” says Travolta. “Don’t fuck with another man’s vehicle.” “You don’t do it,” agrees Stoltz. In America, the car is the symbol of a man’s property and an expression of his individual freedom. The dog is the symbol of unconditional loyalty, man’s faithful companion as he rules over his domain. The two totems of American sacred values In a social media context, we can think of Wick’s dog and his car as representing those beliefs we hold sacred. When Wick loses his car and his dog, he is every one of us who sees one of the values we consider intrinsic to our personal identity impugned by some stranger on social media. That the perpetrators are Russian is nothing if not reminiscent of Russian agents sowing discord in American society in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election. It turns out John used to work for the father of the leader of the gangsters who stole his car and killed his dog. That father, Viggo, upon learning what his son Iosef has done, calls Wick and begs him to let it go. Don’t feed the trolls, we are told time and again. But we, like Wick, cannot. His permanent sabbatical from assassination has come to an end. As on social media, violence begets violence. Since Wick refuses to let the matter go, Viggo, to protect his son, sends a preemptive hit squad to assassinate Wick at his home. We never fight a single target on social media because the public broadcast nature of social media always rallies others to the cause. The first John Wick film proceeds from there as a series of attacks and counterattacks until Wick emerges, alive, bloodied, with a new dog, a pit bull he frees from an animal clinic. Viggo, Iosef, and what seems like a hundred or so henchmen are dead. The new dog symbolizes a brief moment of peace for Wick, just as we sometimes emerge from our skirmishes online feeling as if we have the moral high ground, our honor once again intact. John Wick 2 begins with him retrieving his car from a chop shop owned by Viggo's brother, which requires Wick to kill not only Viggo’s brother but his fellow goons. The car takes serious damage in the firefight, much like the beating we take defending ourselves online, but Wick eventually emerges with his car and new dog and then returns home to bury his weapons cache. He thinks he is out of the game once again. As anyone who has participated in culture wars knows, any victory is temporary and pyrrhic. Out of the blue, Santino D’Antonio visits Wick at his home and calls in a marker, represented in the films by a medallion with a drop of blood from the debtor. Santino needs Wick to become an assassin again, just as various friends online call on us to take their side in various online battles. John refuses. He wants out. The marker is the marker, though. If you won’t defend your values, then can you say you really have any? Santino reminds John of this in a not-so-subtle way: he blows up Wick’s house with a grenade launcher. This brings us to The Continental, the unique hotel chain at the heart of the John Wick universe. Their Manhattan branch is run by Winston (Ian McShane) and staffed by the always courteous and professional concierge Charon (Lance Reddick). Now homeless, Wick retreats to the Continental for refuge. The entire Continental hotel chain lives under the aegis of the High Table, like one of the W Hotels in the former Starwood and now Marriott network. The Continental hotel chain stands in for our social media platforms. Like them, The Continental claims neutrality—no killing is allowed on Continental grounds—yet they happily arm assassins with all manners of weapons, like Twitter arming people with the quote tweet, the AK-47 of social media. They even employ a weapons sommelier. The Continental sets all sorts of very specific policies that seem to be in conflict with each other; do they want civility or violence? Visitors to the Continental, like Wick, vacillate between wanting them to enforce rules and wondering who put them in charge in the first place. In other words, a mirror of the tension between users and the social networks that dominate the modern internet. At any rate, Winston reminds Wick he must honor the marker from Santino, because them’s the rules. These markers are like metaphors for engagement, the debt we pay social networks for the privilege of their services and distribution. Social media platforms do not want violence on their grounds, yet they live through user engagement. The only way to not have any markers on your ledger is to never accrue a debt in the first place, but Wick was raised in the golden age of social networks, where it was near impossible to avoid being active on them. Bowing to the marker, Wick accedes to Santino’s request to assassinate his sister so Santino can assume her spot on the High Table council. Wick carries out the mission, with great reluctance, only to have Santino turn around and put a $7 million contract on Wick for murdering his sister. This is akin to battling your enemies on social media platforms, creating the engagement that platforms thrive off of, only to have them turn around and lock your account for having done so. Many a person I know has complained about just such a betrayal. Pour one out for David Simon and his periodic bans on Twitter for eviscerating his opponents in a blaze of profanity. Wick, as is his style, comes after Santino, who retreats to the safety of the Continental, where no violence is allowed. But Wick has been betrayed, and personal values now take precedence over the platform rules of The Continental. He pursues Santino onto hotel grounds and guns him down in front of Winston. As penalty for conducting assassin business on Continental grounds, the High Table doubles the bounty on Wick to $14 million and broadcasts it globally. As the second film ends, Winston informs Wick of the bounty and gives him an hour head start to run. He sets off with his pit bull through Central Park as cell phones start ringing throughout the park. Wick has been true to his beliefs, as symbolized by the dog by his side, but the outrage mob is about to be set loose on him. John Wick 3: Parabellum picks up from there. Wick is on the run through the rain of Manhattan, glancing at his watch as the seconds tick down to the global bounty becoming official. In the Wick universe, official High Table business is processed through a central office by dozens of men and women dressed like old school phone switch operators, all of whom go about their jobs with an almost cheerful professionalism. Anyone who has ever received an impassive automatic reply from a social media customer service department after reporting some vicious attack can empathize with the almost comical formality of the Kafkaesque institution in the face of what feels like emotional terrorism. That the bounty is put out by the High Table feels appropriate. It’s because of the algorithmic distribution of social media platforms that the asymmetric attack of the bloodthirsty mob achieves modern levels of scale and precision. The High Table seems elusive, at times arbitrary, just like the moderation policies of social networks. Winston at time seems friendly to John, yet he also stands by as the mob prepares to set upon Wick. Many users of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and so on can relate to this love-hate relationship with those platforms. As soon as Wick’s bounty goes global, seemingly every next person on the street comes sets upon him with the nearest weapon at hand. Anyone who has been attacked by an online mob, or even mildly harassed, is familiar with this uniquely modern sensation of being set upon by complete strangers. The Wick films give online mobs physical form. These random assassins are the Twitter eggs with usernames like pepe298174. Even more perfect, strangers attack John Wick only after glancing at their phones and receiving word of the bounty. How do outrage mobs coalesce in the online world? From people staring at social media on their phones and locating the next target to be cancelled. The High Table’s bounty system, with its mobile notifications, is nothing less than a formalization of the mechanisms by which social networks enable cancel culture. Wick dispatches one attacker after the other with every weapon at hand, whether axe or handgun or, in the first case, a hardcover book (when you absolutely, positively, have to snap a man’s neck using a book lodged in his jaw, a flimsy paperback or e-book just will not do). I’ve talked to liberals who’ve been set upon by the alt-right. Women who’ve been attacked by gamers. Creatives who are set upon by outraged fans. Conservatives who feel swarmed by SJW’s. Everyone feels unjustly attacked by faceless mobs, everyone is aggrieved. Everyone feels they are standing up for their truth and their principles, like John Wick, while mindless strangers attack from all sides. John Wick is the avatar of the modern social media user, the "righteous man beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men." Just before the bounty goes live, Wick stops by one of those doctors in the movies that caters to assassins and mobsters, the ones with fantastic service, always willing to provide bullet removal surgery on demand to walk-ins. Wick is bleeding from a shoulder wound inflicted by an overzealous assassin who tried to take John out before the bounty went official. Wick begs the doctor to patch him up, and he does, even pointing John to some medicine for the pain. But before Wick leaves, the doctor asks John to shoot him twice, to make it seem as if Wick coerced him into helping him. The doctor knows it is near impossible to stay neutral in the culture wars; if you’re not on one side you’re on the other. Ask Maggie Haberman. John calls in a marker from a woman known as the Director (Anjelica Huston). She runs a ballet theater called the Ruska Roma that doubles as some sort of training ground for assassins; it’s implied that Wick learned his trade there. Once again, the blind loyalty to this marker system perpetuates a cycle of violence. Huston would rather not be involved, admonishing Wick, “You honor me by bringing death to my front door.” Wick retorts in Russian, “I am a child of the Belarus. An orphan of your tribe. You are bound to help me.” He explicitly evokes the tribalism inherent in humans, the us vs. them impulse that social media amplifies. And then, in English, “You are bound, and I am owed.” The particular power of tribalism is the near impossibility of being neutral; to not pick any side is to be against everyone. The Director succumbs. The face you make when your friend tags you into his or her online battle and you just want to watch YouTube You were at my wedding Denise As she walks him through the backstage training area of the theater, where other young assassins are in training, she says, “You know when my pupils first come here, they wish for one thing. A life free of suffering. I try to dissuade them from these childish notions but as you know, art is pain. Life is suffering.” As she says this, a ballerina pulls a toenail off. Social media is suffering, she is saying, but Wick is already in too deep. She walks him past a bunch of men wrestling on the ground, future John Wicks in training. She continues, “Somehow, you managed to get out. But here you are, back where you began. All of this, for what? For a dog?” “It wasn’t just a dog,” he replies. “The High Table wants your life. How can you fight the wind? How can you smash the mountains? How can you bury the ocean? How can you escape from the light? Of course you can go to the dark. But they’re in the dark, too.” Huston is saying that the only way to avoid the darkness of social media is to avoid it, but, as he says, it wasn’t just a dog. She points him to the path out of the outrage cycle, nothing that it’s not a game you can win (How can you fight the wind? That is, there’s always another faceless troll.), but for Wick it’s a matter of honor. She cashes in his marker, acceding to his request for safe passage to Casablanca. Enter Taylor Mason. Err, sorry, the Adjudicator, played by Asia Kate Dillon. Employed by the High Table, she informs both Winston of the NY Continental and another character nicknamed the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) that they must abdicate their positions in seven days for having aided Wick in killing Santino (in John Wick 2). If you’re a liberal, the Adjudicator is like the conservative government officials who’ve continually accused social media platforms of an anti-conservative bias, or the both-sides-ism of the media. If you’re a conservative, the Adjudicator is some metaphor for the liberal media, punishing social media platforms for anything other than absolute conformity to liberal narratives. Sometimes, when Twitter works itself into a rage at another NYTimes headline that isn’t tough enough on Trump, I think of the Adjudicator as the public, holding the newspaper to account for its failure to answer to the collective public High Table. In Casablanca, Wick calls on another friend, Sofia (the ageless Halle Berry making a nice pair with the ageless Keanu), with whom he cashes in yet another marker. She, like The Director earlier, is not happy to be pulled into Wick’s personal battles. Sofia runs another branch of the Continental, so essentially Wick has fled one tech platform for another that feels obligated to shelter him. He may be excommunicado from the NY Continental, but he once came to Sofia’s aid, and she owes him. “You do realize that I’m management now, right? I’m not service anymore, John, so I don’t go around shooting people in the head,” Sofia notes. She’s essentially a tech platform executive now, trying to avoid getting pulled into social media battles. “Look, I made a deal when I agreed to run this hotel, and that deal said I had to follow the rules of the High Table,” she says. “If I make one mistake, one enemy, maybe somebody goes looking for my daughter.” Sofia faces the risk of being doxxed and having some nutjobs go after her children. Years ago, John helped get Sofia’s daughter out of this dangerous world, and Sofia doesn’t know where she’s been shepherded. She doesn’t want to know because she knows it would put her daughter back in harm’s way. “Because sometimes you have to kill what you love.” Sofia speaks for all those who keep their opinions to themselves online because the cost of being cancelled just isn’t worth the cost of being attacked by the mob. If she stays in the game, she will be pulled into vicious battles she wishes no part of. But in removing herself from social media, she loses out on some of the benefits they offer, like the chance to communicate with family and friends, in her case her daughter. Long ago she chose exit. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, the Adjudicator visits a sushi stand and calls on the chef and his crew to help enforce penalties against Wick and all who aided him. The chef, named Zero, agrees. He is, like seemingly everyone in this world, an assassin, just as social media turned all of us into soldiers in the culture wars. Zero and his team seem willing to serve the High Table no matter what they demand; like most people, the lure of participating in an online mob is a form of universal human bloodlust. They can also stand in for platform moderators, trying to implement social network speech policies as best as they can. First they visit the Director at the Ruska Roma. The Adjudicator confronts her over helping Wick despite his excommunication. Huston defends herself. “He had a ticket.” The Adjudicator will hear nothing of it. “But a ticket does not stand above the Table.” Zero runs a blade through the Director's clasped hands as penalty. Time and again, the John Wick mythology points to the seeming futility of the defending one’s values on social media. The price of picking a side is always to suffer egregious violence from the other side with seemingly no real winners, or to be have one's hands slapped by the platforms (or in this case, pierced with a sword). Sofia takes Wick to meet her former boss Berrada, as he requests. Berrada runs a mint to manufacture the gold coins and markers that the assassin world operate on. “Now this coin, of course, it does not represent monetary value. It represents the commerce of relationships, a social contract in which you agree to partake. Order and rules. You have broken the rules. The High Table has marked you for death.” Berrada describes both the way in which platforms turned our relationships into business arrangements (“commerce” and “contract”), the artificiality of their power—the order and rules are ones the platforms made up—and their power to deplatform or ban anyone who sign the user agreements. Berrada asks Wick if he knows the etymology of the word assassin. Berrada explains: “But others contend it comes from asasiyyun. Meaning ‘men who are faithful and who abide by their beliefs.’” The Wick Universe, populated with assassins murdering each other in an endless cycle of retribution, is a proxy for the users on social media who cannot stand by idly while others infringe upon their beliefs. Wick asks Berrada how to find the Elder, the one who sits above the High Table. Berrada directs him to wander into the desert and hope that the Elder finds him. Before Sofia and John can leave, however, Berrada demands something from Sofia in exchange for the favor. In face, he says he will keep one of Sofia’s two dogs, who accompany her everywhere. Again, the dog symbolizes a person’s most sacred values. On social media, we are always being forced by tribal battles to give up some of our values in order to stay out of harm’s way. This time, Sofia refuses. Berrada shoots one of the dogs, but it is wearing a bulletproof vest (hey yo social media wars are vicious you can never be too cautious). Sofia huddles over her dog, then draws a handgun hidden under its vest. John sees what she is doing and urges her, “No.” But it’s too late. The thing about social media is that it takes just one savage troll to put us on tilt. Sofia shoots Berrada in the leg, and just like that she’s back in the culture wars. After she and her dogs and John kill off Berrada’s nearby henchmen, she walks over to Berrada and considers shooting him in the head. “Sofia, don’t,” urges John. She shoots him in the knee instead. “He shot my dog.” “I get it,” he replies, in the funniest line in the film. Anyone who has dealt with an online mob empathizes with friends when they fall under attack and go berserk in response. When you know you should just mute and block and walk away, but damn, that SOB shot your dog Sofia, John, and the dogs fight their way out of the facility, killing several dozen men along the way in the most elaborately violent ways possible, evoking the almost casual cruelty of online warfare. They steal a car and drive out to the desert where Sofia abandons John to his search for the Elder. He wanders through the desert in his suit, without any water, a user de-platformed. Damn, I got booted off Twitter and Facebook In Manhattan, the Adjudicator and her sushi chef moderators visit the Bowery King and make him pay penance for the seven bullets he gave John Wick with seven knife cuts to the chest. In the desert, John collapses from exhaustion but is saved and brought to the Elder. John asks him for a chance to reverse his excommunication. The Elder offers him a deal: Wick must assassinate Winston, head of the Manhattan Continental hotel, and then serve the rest of his days under the High Table doing what he does best, assassinating people. This is the Faustian bargain for being on these social media platforms. Drive engagement for them and play by their rules, whatever those are, or be excommunicated from them. John either stays an assassin, suffering a lifetime of fighting other people on social media, or he can remove himself from the platforms entirely. “I will serve. I will be of service,” John says. To prove his fealty, he cuts off his wedding ring finger. We’ve all seen people lash back at trolls only to be banned themselves. The loss of Wick’s ring finger represents those values we compromise when playing by social media platform’s arbitrary moderation rules. Who among us hasn’t emerged from some online tussle feeling like we lost a finger ourselves, gave up some part of our humanity? Oh boy, here come’s dat online mob! Back in Manhattan, John has to fight his way past Zero and his henchmen to reach the Continental. Just as Zero is about to kill him, John puts his hand on the front steps of the Continental. Charon appears and tells Zero to lower his weapon. Again, the platform rules are the rules: no assassination on hotel grounds. Inside, John and Zero sit in the lobby together and have a chat. Zero fanboys over having met the legendary John Wick, even while noting he’s more of a cat person. Nothing epitomizes the often arbitrary tribal battles online better than the fight between cat and dog people. You like dogs? I guess we have to kill each other. Many people have described the feeling of meeting someone in real life who they despise online and finding they get along better than they would’ve imagined. While it’s not always the case, the disembodied world of social media tends to amplify divisions. The John Wick films portray this multiple times; in every film, John has a moment where he and someone trying to assassinate him stop to share a cordial drink on Continental grounds before resuming their fight to the death a short while later. If only we’d met offline rather than on Twitter, we might be friends! Isn’t screaming at each other online productive? Wick gets his meeting with Winston, who tells John that killing him will not honor his wife’s memory but simply return him to a state of subservience to the High Table. The Adjudicator joins them and asks if Winston will step down (reminiscent of the calls for CEOs like Zuckerberg and Dorsey to step down from their posts) and whether John will kill Winston. Both of them refuse, so the Adjudicator calls the home office and has the Manhattan branch of the Continental deconsecrated. Blame me all you want for running this platform, but it’s just human nature John. I can’t fix that! Of course, this now means that assassination can be carried out on hotel grounds, but also that John can now partake in hotel services, namely a visit to the gun sommelier. “Let’s see, I’m going to need the ability to tag some mofos, and also to quote tweet their asses” What ensues is what film critics love to refer to as an “orgy of violence,” (has there every been an “orgy of peace”?) though in this case, as the carnage is accompanied by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, perhaps a symphony of violence is more fitting (again, why never a “concerto of violence”?). Charon, hotel staff, and John move about the hotel fighting off an army of High Table forces clad in such heavy armor that they seem impervious to bullets, almost like an army of online bots swarming their target. The whole time, Winston hides in a secure vault, sipping a martini, emblematic, in many people's minds, of social media execs working from their cushy offices while users rip each other to shreds on their platforms. Wow, Trump just declared war on Twitter! Oh well! John survives, as usual, dispatching everyone who comes after him. The Adjudicator calls Winston and asks for a parley on the rooftop of the Continental, where John eventually arrives. Winston asks the Adjudicator for forgiveness and offers his ongoing loyalty to the High Table. The Adjudicator agrees to reconsecrate the Continental and restore Winston as manager, but then she turns to John and asks Winston what is to be done of the titular assassin. Winston replies by shooting Wick repeatedly in the chest and knocking him off the roof of the Continental, where he falls several stories to the alley below, bouncing off a few fire escape railings and awnings in the process. Ah, those platforms, they're always liable to turn on you. Wick is not dead, as you’d expect. The Adjudicator, on the way out of the hotel, peeks in the alley, where Wick’s body is nowhere to be found. He has, we discover, been brought to the Bowery King, now maimed by all those knife wounds ordered by the Adjudicator. What outlook does John Wick offer us on the state of the online discourse moving forward? Is there any hope for relief? The end of the film isn’t optimistic. Laurence Fishburne says to Wick, lying there in a bloody heap on the ground: “So, let me ask you John, how do you feel? Because I am really pissed off. You pissed, John? Hmm? Are you?” John Wick strains to lift his bloodied head off the ground to look Fishburne in the eyes. “Yeah.”
I believe mass entertainment suffers from a bit of format rigidity due to the natural inertia from structural ossification in the music, film, and publishing businesses, to name the most prominent. One of the ways this manifests is in the one-way broadcast nature of much of our entertainment despite the fact that several billion people own internet-connected smartphones now, and even though they consume an increasingly large share of that entertainment on such devices equipped with all sorts of input options and sensors. Whenever I say this, however, people seem to want to leap to choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, and the most cited example is Netflix’s Bandersnatch. In its earnings report for 2018, Netflix famously declared “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.” I happen to agree with them that the threat of gaming looms larger than any other in the future, and it’s not surprising to me that they’ve spun up a group to experiment with interactive stories like Bandersnatch and Bear Grylls’ You vs. Wild. However, stories like Bandersnatch fall into an uncanny valley of interactivity. That is, compared to regular movies, they repeatedly force you to do a bit of annoying work that breaks the suspension of disbelief and the flow of the story: the first choice you’re offered in Bandersnatch is to choose which cereal to eat for breakfast. If you’re in the mindset for lean-back entertainment, you can let the story choose an answer for you on its own after some amount of time, but the distracting question prompt is still displayed on the screen. On the other hand, if you want real interactivity, something like Bandersnatch feels like a busted low-res knockoff of the continuous interactivity of video games, a step function compared to the smooth curves of video game calculus. Why play a game with such crude branching when so many great games, many of them multiplayer and synchronous, offer a truly unpredictable and immersive form of user controllable storytelling? This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy branching stories in concept. One of my favorite movie and television genres is what I refer to as the recursive escape room genre. You’re likely familiar with it from its most famous examples. Groundhog Day (in fact TVTropes refers to this genre as the Groundhog Day Loop). Edge of Tomorrow. Russian Doll. A Christmas Carol. “Phil, maybe we should just Google a playthrough video on YouTube.” In these stories, the protagonist keeps reliving the same set of events in what feels like an endless loop in time. As they realize their conundrum, they start to experiment and iterate until they eventually come to an epiphany as to why they’re trapped. Then, and only then, can they break out of the loop. In a way, these are the film version of a really popular form of YouTube video: the video game playthrough. Watching these films reminds me of how I’d read Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child. Every time I came to a choice in the story, I’d dog-ear that page, then eventually revisit it to take the other path, until I’d read every possible branch of the story. However, works like Groundhog Day reduce the effort required of the viewer by simply playing all the branches in a linear fashion, offering both a lean-back viewing experience and the sensation of narrative progression as the protagonist moves closer and closer to breaking out of the loop. Bandersnatch offers the ability to jump back to any decision you made previously and change it through a sort of decision history carousel, but that still requires work on the part of the viewer. I feel like the author of “You Are A Shark” didn’t really have his heart in it The appeal of recursive escape room movies and TV shows, I theorize, lies in its echo of something many people feel, that they are trapped in some runaway routine in their lives. Wake up, go to work, come home, scrounge up dinner, unwind a bit, then back at it the next day. These recursive escape room stories offer up the possibility that we can puzzle our way out of these Moebius prisons which keep depositing us back to the same starting point. Maybe if I stop eating carbs. Or meditate in the morning instead of checking social media. Or start working out before the morning commute. Maybe if I’m more assertive and ask for a raise, or a promotion, which I richly deserve. With every test, I close off one branch but converge a little more on a solution. I’d guess that the easiest way to predict how any person’s day will go is to look at the previous day. It’s quite plausible that most lived days on Earth feel like a barely modified replay of the previous day. We all run, for the most part, a standard script of life routines. The appeal of self-help gurus and podcasts about the habits of successful people is that they resemble those escape room chaperones who offer occasional hints to groups who get stuck on one particular puzzle. These secrets to success from modern gurus feel like video game tips for specific levels, except for real life. Sleep more. Eat keto. Lift weights. Delete social media apps. Walk 10,000 steps a day. That sense of progressive mastery is a hell of a drug. That’s why, while I’m bearish on choose-your-own-adventure films like Bandersnatch, I’m bullish on the right types of light interactivity when it makes sense. If you were designing a game show today, for example, it would likely look much more like HQTrivia (RIP) than, say, Wheel of Fortune. Gamification Someone, I can't remember who, recently described golf as the gamification of walking, and I'll never be able to shake that from my mind.has gotten a bit of a bad rap in recent years, and some of the implementations out of Silicon Valley can feel scammy, to be sure. Still, when I look at the progressive mastery tactics of something like Candy Crush, I can’t help but find them more fun and effective, in some ways, than the Suzuki method of teaching violin playing, or Mr. Miyagi’s “wax on, wax off” school of teaching Daniel Larusso karate. The more I read about the power of habit in human behavior, the more I think of self-help genre as a series of macros one downloads to try to upgrade one's day-to-day regimen. Pair that with the educational power of failure and I've come think of recursive escape room stories as a way to accelerate the improvement of our life productivity.
HBO’s Watchmen is fantastic, as many have noted. It may be one of the most polished first drafts of fan fiction to ever appear on the silver, errr, OLED screen. DC may lag behind the Marvel Universe in box office and audience acclaim, but it feels like DC is starting to find its footing with a different approach. Rather than having its directors conform to the ultimate vision of Kevin Feige, as Marvel does, DC seems to be allowing its directors a bit more creative freedom to put their own spin on various characters and franchises. Whether you liked The Joker or not, it was a very Todd Phillips-esque take, and it’s not even meant to be part of the rest of the DC Universe. It’s a stand-alone vision of The Joker. The trailer for Birds of Prey, for example, feels like an attempt to take Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and create a new franchise around that character. The Joker in Suicide Squad, and thus the one that’s implied to be in that branch of the DC Universe, isn’t the same one as in the Phillips’ Joker film. But Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan has stated that they removed the Jared Leto Joker character from their film so they could distance (read: quarantine) themselves from that failed film, creating yet another distinct franchise within the DC universe. Not for nothing is the parenthetical in the title "The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn."After Birds of Prey came out, I saw it. Sad to say I didn't love it, but the critical and fan reception in my network was reasonably positive. Whereas all the Marvel films exist in a single comic universe, DC seems to be sprouting all sorts of independent branches. Perhaps we should think of the DC Universe as the MCU but with social distancing. Watchmen capitalizes on this creative freedom. Alan Moore, the writer of the original Watchmen graphic novel, isn’t involved. I’m not sure if he would have given his blessing to Lindelof’s revisions to Watchmen loreHahahahaha let's be real he would've never given his blessing., but it wouldn’t have mattered. HBO and Warner Bros. and the DC folks gave Lindelof free rein to fork the Watchmen mythology for this new series. Lindelof’s public breakthrough was as co-creator of Lost. To this day, it remains one of my favorite examples of what I call narrative debt. That is, when you’re building out a story, you tease plot lines and characters and conflicts that you have to resolve at a later point in the script. You accumulate narrative debt. The implicit promise to the audience, the debt holders, is that you’ll pay out the disbelief they've suspended on your behalf. For a whole variety of reasons, Lost was saddled with so much narrative debt that at some point it was effectively insolvent. Pair that with an obsessive fan base poring over every frame for clues like auditors examining the narrative balance sheet and you had a recipe for a write-down of WeWork proportions. The showrunners couldn’t declare narrative bankruptcy as the show’s ratings were still solid, but they tried to prepare the fans for disappointment via public statements. Ultimately, they whipsawed fans through a series of dramatic story pivots until they were forced to crash land the story in the finale in a way that took the story full circle. The viewers at the end were like Jack and the other survivors on that beach in the series premiere, dazed and bloodied, wondering what the hell had happened. Chekhov’s gun is the most famous instantiation of the principle of conservation of narrative. Some people want the ledger of stories to balance perfectly. Every first act gun must go off in act three. All non-essential plot elements should be dropped. Not surprisingly, Chekhov was a master of the short story, a form which demands concision. I’m less of a stickler for obsessively manicured stories than some, though I can nitpick plot structure with the worst of those YouTube critics. I tend to do so only if a film or show is marketed as having been assembled with the delicacy of an expensive wristwatch (Watchmen reference!). There is a certain elegance to a plot in which every last element connects, but as the years go by I find that type of clinical precision can leave a show or film feeling a bit stifled and lifeless.In the original Watchmen, Adrian Veidt can be thought of as a director trying to pull off a massive fork of the global narrative. A la Fincher's The Game, he does it in the real world. Of course, his is a Shyamalan-like effort that hinges entirely on a last minute plot twist, and as we've seen from Shyamalan's later works, often the narrative debt load is too heavy to recover from. Lindelof seems to be at his best riffing off of something less open-ended. The confines of an existing piece of intellectual property seem to provide guardrails within which his creative forks seem to flourish. The Leftovers had Tom Perrotta’s novel to establish the inciting incident, and he and Lindelof expanded that into one of my favorite television shows, a moving meditation on how humans grapple with loss and grief and faith. Watchmen from HBO has Moore’s classic graphic novel as a narrative precedent, but Lindelof has remixed it as a story about white supremacy and the racial sin at the heart of America’s origin. I often think of TikTok as a logical modern outgrowth of remix and sampling culture, but the television world conjuring a remix of Watchmen is one of the most pleasant surprises of 2019. As large media conglomerates focus more and more on franchises, I’d love to see some of the more progressive leaders at those companies contemplate whether a limited open source strategy on their premium intellectual properties might not be the most defensible, modern approach. Over a decade ago, Marc Andreessen defined a platform as “a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.” Even longer ago, in 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons released a twelve-issue comic book series titled Watchmen. Decades later, an outside writer named Damon Lindelof read a piece titled “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic and learned about the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921, remixed it with Moore and Gibbon’s original creation Watchmen, and produced an unexpected new take on the franchise which I don’t think anyone saw coming when the series was first announced. Watchmen is a platform.
“When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role that he’s going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you’re standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you’re not responding to them as personalities, you’re responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.” Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers' The Power of Myth When I think of Netflix's originals taking the leap to that level of professional craftsmanship that put them in that tier considered "premium video," for however long that term endures, the show that leaps to mind is The Crown, one of my favorite of their homegrown series. House of Cards came earlier, and landing that Fincher production with that cast was a massive coup, but The Crown, with its focus on the English monarchy, carries that air of gentrified prestige that seems apt in a discussion of what qualifies as professional film and television. The Crown is comfort food for those who prize a level of tightly structured scripts, lavish production design that likely broke out a line item for brocade, precise diction from the school of classical acting that could wouldn’t feel out of place on the stage at the Old Vic, upper lips as stiff as the creases in the tailored English suits on display, long glances freighted with import...in other words, all the trappings of aristocratic melodrama. The portentous theme song by Hans Zimmer is one that, like the theme to Game of Thrones, I won't skip, just so I can wrap it around me like a gravity blanket in anticipation for the theatrics to come. The entire affect of the show dances on that fine line between spectacle and farce; rarely has a program treated a group of people who do so little with such gravitas. But, and I cannot stress this enough, that is the point. Why do we treat the Royal Family with such reverence? Because ceremony demands it. Sometimes status is a closed circle, and if you trace it you end up where you started. The very act of walking in that circle, though, closes it. The Royal Family has whatever power the people grant them. The very existence of The Crown, the white velvet gloves with which the show handles its subject, enacts, in televisual form, the act of veneration upon which the Royal Family depends for its status. The show bends the knee, and so do we. No episode better reflects the way in which our construction of royalty and celebrity rhyme than season 1, episode 5 of The Crown, titled "Smoke and Mirrors." This episode is about the covenant between the famous and those who grant them that fame. It's figuratively, and sometimes literally, smoke and mirrors which turn a plain English woman into a queen. In an age where the internet has once again reshaped the distribution topology of moving images, and given that the Crown returns for its third season this Sunday, it seemed the right time to do a walkthrough of this, an episodes of TV I’ve seen many times and which never ceases to move me. Episode SPOILERS ahead, obviously, though this is one of those programs where spoilers don't mean much. The journey of watching this show is the experience. I encourage you to grab your remote, fire up Netflix, and follow along. Honestly, if you haven't watched episodes 1 through 4 of season one, it's still fine, but if you want, binge those and then follow along here. I haven’t done an episode walkthrough on my blog before, and honestly this would be better as a video essay, but good luck with that given all the legal hurdles. As it is, Netflix makes it so difficult to grab screenshots of their content that I could only grab so many before losing patience, but I'll drop in some relevant shots from time to time to help you follow along (Netflix, make it easier to grab and share screenshots of your stuff, your whole competitive advantage is economies of scale, you want to overwhelm the competition with your digital footprint in the cultural conversation). *** The episode begins with a flashback to May 11, 1937. Young Elizabeth is summoned, by her father, on the cusp of becoming King George VI, played by the always magisterial Jared Harris. He'd like her to play the role of Archbishop as he prepares for his own coronation. As she reads over the script of the coronation oath, her father explains the significance of the words. She stumbles over a word she doesn't recognize. Her father pronounces it for her. "Inviolably. It means, to make a promise you can never break. A very sacred promise indeed." He is instilling in her a sense of the heavy obligations transferred in this ceremony, ones which form the foundation of the power of the throne. They're interrupted by Private Secretary Tommy Lascelles telling George it's time to go try on the crown. George asks for a bit more time with Elizabeth. "We haven't even reached the anointing!" George turns to his daughter. "You have to anoint me, otherwise I can't be King. Do you understand? When the holy oil touches me, I am transformed. Brought into direct contact with the divine. Forever changed. Bound to god. It is the most important part of the entire ceremony." George refers both to the ceremony by which he becomes King but also the power of film itself. We as the audience anoint movie stars, musicians, and athletes, and by our adulation, they are forever changed. Fame and status are a covenant between gods and their disciples, just as brands exist in the covenant between companies and their customers. Elizabeth follow her father to the fitting for the crown. As George lifts the crown over, he notes, "Goodness, it's very heavy indeed." "Five pounds," says the attendant. "Not to mention the symbolic weight, hmm?" replies George. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, in every sense. He looks at himself in the mirror, then turns to look at his daughter, who gazes back. He returns her gaze. Match cut to the present day, where 25 year old Elizabeth places the crown on her head (she is played to perfection by Claire Foy, whose massive shoes Olivia Colman will have to fill in season three). The now grown Elizabeth is standing in the exact spot where she once stood and watched her father don the crown, such that her eyeline matches that of her father's in the past. They cut back to George in the past one last time, giving a wry smile to his daughter across 17 years. Soon she will shared the burden of the titular crown. "It's not as easy as it looks," says Elizabeth, trying to balance the crown on her head. "That's exactly what the King said," replies the very same attendant who had been at that shared moment in the past, bridging another generation of royalty. "I remember," says Elizabeth. It's the type of meticulously composed shot sequence typical of the series, and this scene always gives me all the feels upon rewatch. That evening, Elizabeth approaches her husband Philip (played with smarmy charisma by Matt Smith; seriously, this entire cast knocks it out of the park) as they dress in their finest for the ballet. She announces that she'd like him to take over as chairman of her coronation committee. "I want to make a public declaration of my trust in you," she says to her husband. Everything they do has symbolic value, and she understands the importance of her every act in the eyes of the public. "There's no need to matronize me," he retorts, using the feminist form of the more common "patronize." An ongoing storyline the first two seasons is Philip's discomfort with standing behind his more powerful wife. Behind every great woman is a jealous man yearning for a return of the patriarchy? At the ballet, Philip, having mulled it over, gives in. However, he has a request. "Total control or nothing at all. Those are my terms." "All right. But don't go mad," says Elizabeth. "What does that mean?" he asks. "It means just don't go mad. It's a coronation. A service that goes back a thousand years. Some things can't be changed," she says. The immutability and consistency of tradition and ritual reflects but also reinforces power. As Stewart Brand once wrote of government buildings, there's a reason they are constructed of marble and stone, often in the style of ancient Greek or Roman architecture. The unchanging nature of the building is meant to convey the durability of the institution. "Yes, yes, all right," says Philip, but his sentiments will soon change. Now we cut to Paris, where the ingenious construction of this episode begins to reveal itself. Not only is this episode about the very act of television and its ability as a medium to grant power, but the writer embeds a commentary on the coronation within the episode itself. Or commentator, to be precise, and his name is Edward, Duke of Windsor, or David. He was forced to abdicate the throne in 1936 for marrying Wallis Simpson, an American woman twice divorced, and his eviction still stings. Throughout this episode, David Windsor serves as a proxy for how non-royalty view the coronation. Asked by the royal family to not attend the ceremony given what they perceive as his shameful abdication, he will be forced to watch from a viewing party he hosts from his home of exile in Paris. David and his wife Wallis sit for a magazine profile, posing in a variety of foppish outfits. They may not be tip top royalty anymore, but they're not paupers. Still, as status is relative, and he since he once reached the footstep to the throne, he struggles to find contentment in his current lot in life. The episode traces the very specific nature of his jealousy and resentment, but the general contour of his longing matches that of status-seekers everywhere. David and Wallis lead the reporter to a private attic room where he keeps mementos of his past glory. "Goodness. Bagpipes, too," says the reporter, glancing at all the memorabilia filling the room. "Yes, I play," says David. "When he gets homesick," adds his wife. "And all these photographs of you as King," asks the reporter. "There are none with the crown. Why is that?" "I never made it that far. I never had a coronation." This isn't fear of missing out; he just plain missed out. Back in England, Elizabeth announces to her staff that she has decided her husband will be chairman of her coronation committee. Her Private Secretary Tommy says that's impossible as it's the job of the Duke of Norfolk, the chief butler of England. "Running the coronation, that's what the Norfolks do," says Tommy. That's why we call it tradition, girlie. Elizabeth cuts the debate short. "The chairmanship with full autonomy is what he wants. Therefore it is what I want. Norfolk can be vice-chair." You want zee duck? You cannot have zee duck. You can have zee chicken. David returns to London to visit his ailing mother Mary, and while there Private Secretary Tommy and the Archbishop deliver the bad news: the Duke of Windsor and his wife aren't welcome at the coronation. David goes on an extended diatribe, calling the Archbishop "Auld Lang Swine," and he quips, in a letter to his wife, that his mother, who passes away while he is England, had blood that ran as "icy cold when she was alive as it does now she's dead." No one bitch slaps as poetically as the English. In the same letter, as we see a shot of David talking to Elizabeth, we hear him refer to the incoming Queen as "Shirley Temple" and his other family members as "desiccated hyenas." This club was dead anyway, says the guy turned away at the door, through his tears. At Mary's funeral service, Philip notes to Elizabeth that this ceremony is exactly like her father's funeral service. Tradition is so rigid in English corridors of power that nothing changes. He vows her coronation will be different, to reflect her, a young woman, and the "fast-changing, modern world." At his first coronation committee meeting, Philip presents his thoughts. "The eyes of the world will be on us. Britain will be on show, and we must put our best foot forward. In such circumstances, the temptation is to roll out the red carpet and follow the precedent set by the grand and successful coronations of the past. But looking to the past for our inspiration would be a mistake in my view." Philip recognizes that when it comes to the power of his wife’s throne, ritual and reality are in many ways inseparable, and the only way to alter the nature of her power is to adapt the ceremonies that construct it. He continues. "Make it less ostentatious, more egalitarian, show more respect and sensitivity to the real world. We have a new sovereign, young, and a woman. Let us give her a coronation that is befitting of the wind of change that she represents, modern and forward-looking at a moment in time where exciting technological developments are making things possible we never dreamt of which brings me to my next point..." And what, pray tell, is that technology? Television. Of course, we are watching him talk about this on a television series streamed through an application called Netflix that is itself an adaptation of television itself, and you’re reading about my discussion of this episode through the internet. Also, later David Windsor will describe the coronation ceremony to an audience viewing the coronation on a television at his house in Paris. This episode is thematic Inception and I am here for it, every bit. The committee is horrified by Philip’s plan. At Westminster Abbey, where preparations are underway, one committee member examines a television camera with apprehension and disgust and asks Philip, "No close-ups, huh? Zoom lenses?" In the aristocracy’s classical conception of power, physical distance is how status gaps are both constructed and measured. Normal people aren't allowed in to see the coronation because they are meant to feel every bit of the expanse between them and the throne. Coronation committee members gaze through a TV camera at Westminster Abbey during preparations for the ceremony. Meanwhile we look at them through the gaze of a camera that was pointed at them on set. But film is its own medium, with its own peculiar powers, and one of those is its ability to alter our spatial reality. When the close-up was invented in film, it unlocked a unique advantage of cinema over theater, the ability to bring us closer to a person than we'd be even in real life. If you were to put your face up against someone so that their face filled your field-of-view as much as a film close-up, you'd be arrested for assaulting their personal space. But in film, we can be simultaneously abstracted from the characters on screen yet halfway up their nostrils. The craft of acting changed with the advent of the close-up. No longer was it necessary to act in so broad a style ("Why I oughta smack you in the kisser!" overacts the old black and white film cowboy). Now, the most subtle of facial expressions, the tiniest crease of one's brow, could register several feet high on the silver screen. But more than that, the close-up, in closing distances, offered an alternative to spatially remote constructions of power in favor of a new relationship between star and audience, that of emotional intimacy. The Crown is emblematic of this quality of the film and television medium, spending its long story arc humanizing the Queen of England, transforming her from a remote caricature into a three-dimensional human with a rich and legible inner life. Prior to seeing The Crown, my regard for the Royal Family was, at best, dismissive. They still are. However, my feelings towards the fictional character Elizabeth from The Crown, the one played by Claire Foy, is one of deep sympathy. It's not that film can't do shock and awe but that other mediums struggle to match the moving picture for emotional intimacy. In a way, the hidebound coronation committee is right to be concerned over Philip’s plan. Television as a medium did reconfigure the modern world, and it continues to hold the power to topple established power structures. Winston Churchill (John Lithgow) brings the concerns of the committee to Elizabeth. "What is the purpose of the Crown? What is the purpose of the monarchy? Does the crown bend to the will of the people to be audited and accountable? Or should it remain above temporal matters?" When the dominant medium of an age shifts, the nature of power shifts with it. Churchill is asking Elizabeth, but also asking himself, whether the advent of television means the two of them must change the means by which they relate to the people they govern. Ultimately, he leaves the decision in her hands. She visits Philip at the Abbey where they debate his proposed changes. She confronts him, "Trade unionists and businessmen? In the Abbey?" "If you want to stay on the throne, yes," he replies. "In a trimmed-down televised coronation?" "If you want to avoid a revolution, yes. You forget, I have seen first-hand what it is like for a royal family to be overthrown because they were out of step with the people. I left Greece in an orange crate. My father would have been killed. My grandfather was. I'm just trying to protect you." "From whom? The British people? You have no idea who they are or what they want." She continues, "If the people are hungry, they want something that lifts them up." "And how do you propose lifting them if they cannot see it?" he fires back. "The people look to the monarchy for something bigger than themselves. An inspiration. A higher ideal. If you put it in their homes, allow them to watch it with their dinner on their laps..." "It will democratize it, make them feel hat they share in it. Understand it." Rewatching this episode today, I can’t help but think of AOC live streaming on Instagram Stories from Washington DC, explaining arcane Congressional procedures in the newest of mediums. Elizabeth sees the determination in Philip's face, and she caves. She agrees to televising the coronation. But then she turns the tables on him. He's not the only one who understands the significance of the coronation ceremony and she has a change in mind as well. She has heard of one of his proposed changes to the ceremony that she is not budging on. "But on one condition," she explains. "That you kneel." Eat your heart out Danaerys, you weren't the first TV queen to ask her man to bend the knee. Now it's Philip's turn to protest. "I merely asked the question whether in this day and age it was right that the Queen's consort, her husband, should kneel to her rather than stand beside her," he explains. "You won't be kneeling to me," she replies. "It will feel like a eunuch, an amoeba, is kneeling before his wife." "You'll be kneeling before God and the Crown as we all do." "I don't see you kneeling before anyone," snaps Philip. "I'm not kneeling because I'm already flattened under the weight of this thing." The duel of words continues. Philip accuses her of becoming entitled and power-hungry. She says he's acting weak and insecure. "I want to be married to my wife," he says, trying another tack. "I am both and a strong man would be able to kneel to both." Oh snap. "I will not kneel before my wife." "Your wife is not asking you to." "But my Queen commands me?" "Yes." Oh you gonna bend that knee Philip. Nothing but respect for my Queen. On the day of the coronation, David Windsor is back at home in Paris, providing a running commentary on the ceremony to the audience gathered in front of the television at his viewing party in Paris. He mocks the uncomfortable Gold Coach carrying the Queen to Westminster Abbey, but we see him seated in the front row of his gathering, leaning in to catch every detail of the ceremony he yearns to attend. David Windsor and his wife Wallis Simpson seated front and center at their coronation viewing party at their home in Paris. At Westminster Abbey, the television producer constructs the telecast, choosing from a series of camera angles projected on a bank of televisions in the production area. This is the new choreography of power, the assembly of moving images. We see the procession on small black and white television screens, first in the home of David Windsor, then in video village where the television producer is calling out shot. The ceremony seems inconsequential, almost squalid, seen on such poor monitors, but the power of the medium lies in the millions of people watching it for the first time in homes around England and across the globe. David Windsor’s television set. Probably lavish for its time, but I’m guessing some of his guests complained about not being able to see anything like we all complained about that super dark battle scene in Game of Thrones that final season. The new masters of the grand narrative, deciding what series of moving images would define the coronation for millions of viewers David Windsor fields questions at his party, describing each stage of a coronation ceremony he knows by heart. The golden canopy being carried over Elizabeth so prying eyes won’t see the anointing. Then, just as Elizabeth prepares to be anointed, the television broadcast cuts away to a static shot. Viewers at home weren’t allowed to view the anointing, instead hearing just the audio running over this static shot. "Where'd she go?" asks a guest at the party. "And now we come to the anointing," explains David. "The single most holy, most solemn, most sacred moment of the entire service." "So how come we don't get to see it?" asks that same guest. "Because we are mortals," replies David. “So let's set the world on fire…we can burn brighter…than the suuuuuuuun” But at that moment, the TV show The Crown cuts to a shot from the interior of Westminster Abbey, the camera dollies in towards Elizabeth under the golden canopy held over her head. We, the viewers of The Crown, do get to see the anointing. A TV camera will take us there. Because we are modern TV viewers, and we are not mortals, we are now gods. The actual broadcast, in 1953 (still available on YouTube), preserved the sacred nature of the anointing, shielding it from mortal eyes. The Crown, a television show in the 21st century, has a different goal. The Archbishop begins the oath. "Will you maintain and preserve..." He pauses, tripping on on his memory. He did not stumble during the actual coronation, but showrunner Peter Morgan adds this moment in order to tie the episode back to the opening of the episode when a young Elizabeth rehearsed the ceremony with her father. It's a bit of dramatic license that pays for itself with the emotional round-trip. Elizabeth realizes the Archbishop's predicament and steps in to complete the Oath for him. "Inviolably?" she says. Her father taught her the meaning of the word when they rehearsed the oath some 17 years prior, and in reciting it once again, she has now finally internalized the weight of the office, as her father did before her. She bonds across time with her deceased father, one more time. "I will," she proceeds, completing the oath. Next we see product-commercial-grade closeups of the holy oil, backlit as if it were the nectar of the gods, and effectively it is. Water into wine, wine into blood. The Archbishop anoints her hands, her breast, and finally her head with the oil. Morgan leaves the next part of the oath unchanged, and why not? The words are majestic even today. "As Kings, priests, and prophets were anointed, and as Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed, and consecrated Queen over the peoples whom the Lord they God hath given thee to rule and govern, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen." But also, we, as viewers, in this moment, and all the episodes before and after, anoint Claire Foy, actress, with our full adoration. She is our Queen Elizabeth in this television series. It's the same covenant we make with Robert Downey Jr. when we anoint him our Iron Man, or Chris Evans our Captain America, or Mark Hamill our Luke Skywalker. The Archbishop anoints Elizabeth Queen with oil and oaths and incantations, while the entire cast and crew of The Crown transform Claire Foy into the fictional Queen Elizabeth through the act of filmmaking, transmitted to us through the medium of television, so that we the audience may crown her. In Paris, David Windsor soaks in the moment. He is our guide to the alchemic power of the coronation, but also to that of television. He stands in for the people of England, and television audiences everywhere. "Oils and oaths. Orbs and scepters. Symbol upon symbol. An unfathomable web of arcane mystery and liturgy. Blurring so many lines no clergyman or historian or lawyer could ever untangle any of it." He stops just short of tossing in the title of the episode, "smoke and mirrors." "It's crazy," says that same talkative house guest. "Smoke and mirrors" are commonly used as a term of derision. As viewers of this episode, we're watching a bunch of actors in makeup play-acting. Crazy indeed. But Windsor understands the mythic power of the ritual, and we, in our emotional absorption in this moment, feel the power of the medium of television. Whereas earlier Windsor mocked his family, dismissed the Queen, and punctured the pomp with sarcastic quips, now he can't help but be spellbound by the symbolic force of it all. In a beautiful shot, we see his face, full of yearning, reflected in his TV screen, his niece, now his Queen, on screen. Almost King, now gazing at his niece, now his Queen, through a TV screen. David corrects his guest. "On the contrary. it's perfectly sane. Who wants transparency when you can have magic. Who wants prose when you can have poetry? Pull away the veil and what are you left with? An ordinary young woman of modest ability and little imagination. But wrap her up like this anoint her with oil, and hey, presto, what do you have? " He pauses. "A goddess." I sometimes watch videos of YouTube vloggers greeting throngs of young fans at conferences around the world. Like that guest at David Windsor's viewing party, many see this and dismiss it as crazy. To do so is to misunderstand the nature of adulation and how a new generation of celebrity use new mediums like YouTube to their full effect, to create their own covenants with their own band of pilgrims. Back at Westminster Abbey, one step remains. Philip, time to bend the knee bitch! With great reluctance, he shuffles to the throne, removes his crown, and drops to one knee before his wife, and his Queen. Bend the knee old chap The expressions Matt Smith and Claire Foy trade tell us all we need to follow the inner struggle in their hearts, and again, we register all these micro-expressions through the magic of the close-up, the liturgy of film. Shot, reverse shot, shot, reverse shot. A wordless conversation of images. The episode concludes back in Paris, with David Windsor. As the sun sets, he pulls out his bagpipes and plays in his yard. As his wife noted earlier in the episode, he plays when he's homesick (there is barely a single line in this episode that doesn't come back to pay off like Chekhov's gun, the script is that tightly wound). The camera pulls back and up into the sky behind him, framing a beautiful lens flare the color of holy oil, as if Elizabeth's royal presence is shining down on him from above England itself. We end on a shot from the other direction, a medium shot of Windsor from head-on. HIs eyes are filled with tears. Oh, to be King, if only for a day
Sorry for the long hiatus. I've been doing some formal advisory work and a bit of angel investing these past months, and so more of my writing has been private. More than that, though, the Internet, with all the status games and incentives I wrote about in my last post, began to feel like an obligation that started whispering in my ear from a permanent porch on my shoulder. I needed a break from reading all the takes, most of all from the ones I felt myself forming in response to every next event, of which there is no end. The internet can cajole you into feeling as if you only exist through the act of posting. Jia Tolentino writes in her great essay collection Trick Mirror: As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist. ... The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. ... As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. ... To try to write online, more specifically, is to operate on a set of assumptions that are already dubious when limited to writers and even more questionable when turned into a categorical imperative for everyone on the internet: the assumption that speech has an impact, that it’s something like action; the assumption that it’s fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think. I tweet, therefore I am? Internet participation can feel like being on tour in perpetuity, and the feedback loops can feel like a noose, one that you tighten yourself. The rhetorical style of any Twitter account that continues to gain followers converges on that of a fortune cookie. — Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) May 21, 2018 At what level of compression of thought on Twitter does any bit of specific wisdom get squeezed out of a thought? Sometimes I wonder if the natural asymptote of an increasingly popular Twitter account is a parody of that same account. Could we train a GAN on some of the more prolific and consistent Twitter accounts to create Westworld-like clones, indistinguishable from the original? Could we create a parallel Twitter where these simulations of iconic accounts would live on in perpetuity, dispensing compressed nuggets of advice that straddle the line between profundity and banality, interacting with each other, believing that they and all of their peers were humans? Maybe we are all destined to become bots. A long hiatus is a good test of what you truly miss, however, and I do miss the masochistic act of hammering a piece into some usable shape, and I miss the give-and-take with my readers. Thoughtful discourse hasn’t left the internet, it just isn’t happening in the public squares, for a variety of reasons I’ll dive into this month. After my last post on Status as a Service, I received a lot of thought-provoking email, and in the ensuing months I’ve chatted for many hours with all sorts of people from operators to investors. I plan to spend some of my next few posts to respond to the most common points and questions my readers raised. A lot of these ideas have been renting a sofa in my head these past few months, and I need to Marie Kondo my brain cache. Before doing that, a few updates. I appeared on Peter Kafka's Recode Media podcast earlier this year to discuss Status as a Service. Peter has long been one of the journalists I follow on media/tech news, and podcasting has allowed him to be even more prolific and discursive on the topic; we all benefit. And while I love that podcasters can just show up with minimal equipment and start recording, it's always fun to go into the Vox studios, into a noise-proof room, don headphones, and speak into a high-end microphone. Rarely do I feel as, dare I say it, high status. Check out our conversation for a sense of how I've been updating my views on status as it relates to the tech sector. My second update is that this is the first of my posts to be sent via Substack instead of Mailchimp. I grew out of the free tier of Mailchimp a while ago and the monthly bills were adding up even though I hadn't sent anything in months. I switched over to Substack even before they announced that A16Z would lead their latest round of funding, but I'd like to think the sequencing was causal (just kidding, it was not, and congrats to the Substack team who were friendly and helpful in getting me switched over smoothly). Substack will allow me to selectively choose when to email my blog posts out, allowing my mailing list and blog to be separate entities. I'll still distribute or link to most of my posts via my mailing list, but on occasion, I may post something that's more blog-related housekeeping that won't be of interest to my email list, and, conversely, something may feel best suited for my mailing list but not my blog. I hesitate to consider myself in the newsletter business—I know, I know, another newsletter to clog your inbox, on top of the countless podcasts you already can’t keep up with—but if you're interested in reading all of my work, sign up for my Substack. If you're already on my mailing list, the backend has changed from Mailchimp to Substack, but otherwise you shouldn't notice any difference. *** I titled this column Status Update because it was another of the titles I considered for my previous post. I always found it apt that Facebook referred to its posts as "statuses." That so many people use their posts to try to "update" their status—usually to try and raise it—made the term "status update" just too wonderfully loaded. If you think of social networks as programmable interfaces, then each post on the network updates the contributor's status in a way that makes the nature of status on that network self-describing. You can even think of the impossibly long feeds and databases of all these social networks as one massive blockchain that all users are furiously writing to, trying to establish consensus around their relative status in the community. My two principles of status were inspired, in part, by the two axioms of cosmic sociology from the science-fiction novel The Dark Forest, the second in Liu Cixin's epic Three-Body Trilogy. Those two axioms: First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. I've always appreciated how the entire trilogy of novels derives, in part, from just those two axioms, though it takes some time for the reader to understand just how. In part, Status as a Service (StaaS) was an attempt to see how far I could extrapolate from just two axioms. On to reader feedback. One point I heard from quite a few people was, “I don't use [insert social network of choice] for status.” Of course, not everyone uses every social network purely for status, and as I noted in my piece, there are two other axes on which a social media services can construct a healthy business, utility and entertainment (I'll cover those axes in future posts as there are specific reasons I settled on those three in particular). Just as I would never claim that everything people do is in pursuit of status, no social network operates entirely on that dimension. And, of course, not everyone needs status from a network. Beyoncé doesn't need social media to earn status, she merely uses social media to harvest her already prodigious social capital. Your mileage, as compared to Beyoncé, may vary. On the other hand, when I hear people claim they aren’t status-seeking, my initial thought is, “Okay boomer.” Well, perhaps that’s not quite right, but something along those lines. What it reveals is just how negative a valence the word "status" and the adjective "status-seeking" have today. Perhaps because we've long thought of status as a relative standing, and status competition as a zero-sum game, we find "status-seeking" personally threatening and distasteful all at once. However, when I talk about seeking a sense of self-worth, a feeling of belonging and achievement, people have only positive reactions. Are those behaviors so easily titrated apart? I'm skeptical. But to all of you offended by being called "status-seeking," I apologize and applaud your lack of ego. I'm not saying that because I mean to raise your status, but...ah never mind. The most common question I heard in response to Status as a Service was what spurred the piece. While it’s often difficult with fiction to pinpoint the origin of things, with an essay it’s easier to retrace the journey, or at least to point at specific ingredients. One of the itches that spurred the piece was that my previous essay Invisible Asymptotes had me puzzling over why various social networks had collided with the shoulder of the S-curve after some prolonged period of hockey stick growth. Metcalfe's Law and the basic network effects theories that dominate discussion of networks would predict otherwise. While I offered some light exploration of the asymptotes for various social networks in that piece, it felt as if a giant variable was missing in the equation. The concept that best solved the equation in my mental backtests was status. I also focused on status because, since it was my missing variable, it felt like the least understood aspect of social networks. I suppose that is tautological in structure, but it’s also endemic to mining for a new explanation for some phenomenon. There's always a risk in conjuring a single variable to make any equation work, but for argument's sake, I held the other variables constant and used status to the fullest extent possible, in search of its limitations. What seems clear and almost obvious in hindsight is that not all nodes on a social network are equal and that different configurations of those nodes also matter. The quantity of nodes and connections isn’t sufficient to measure the value of a network alone. Two networks of similar size in nodes and connections may differ widely in stability and potential and kinetic energy. Status differences can be thought of as differences in the size of nodes and the configuration of them. One of the critical forms of pattern recognition for anyone studying, investing in, or running these networks is learning which arrangements of what types of nodes are stable and which are inherently brittle or even volatile. That requires understanding a network’s status dynamics. Much of my work advising companies recently has been helping them to understand which type of network configuration makes the most sense for the business they are in. While the past can be full of patterns that are about to implode, there's much to glean from studying previous network collapses because status dynamics remain, like much of human nature, fairly consistent across time. Digital anthropology is underrated. For example, long ago, night clubs and dating apps understood that a successful marketplace equilibrium almost always begins with women as the supply side, not men. That's why if you're a guy you have wait in line for a long time just for the privilege of paying a cover charge at many clubs; meanwhile, groups of women are ushered in for free. How do you bypass the line as a group of men? By paying for bottle service, contributing to a very particular stable social equilibrium inside the club (not to mention a profitable one; witness the surge in % of floor space devoted to bottle service booths in Las Vegas clubs this past decade). Any multi-sided marketplace veteran or observer now understands much more about how to sequence their efforts, and whether to focus on the supply or demand side first and why. Bill Gurley appeared on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best podcast and spoke to the differences between monogamous marketplaces, where two parties match exclusively for a long-term relationship (for example, finding a nanny for your children) and marketplaces where people just match up for a single transaction (Uber, for example). Li Jin and D'Arcy Coolican of A16Z have written several pieces about network effects that continue to fill in the nuance between the platitudes. Despite all that, the industry still has a ways to go in incorporating status into its operations. One of the clearest ways this manifests is in the metrics most social networks monitor and report on. Almost all of them aggregate a lot of individual user behavior into aggregate stats. However, just as it's very dangerous to munge cohorts into one lump, failing to understand subgroup status dynamics and configurations among a giant social network disguises a lot of what's actually going on. The trends of the group can diverge from the actual dynamics of various subgroups. Your stats could be growing, they could be declining, and yet you have no idea why. Some competitor comes along and starts stealing market share, and yet on the surface they look like a smaller, subpar version of your network. The topic of how social companies should analyze their networks is a topic worth a book in itself, and it's clear that we're very early in that journey. Many social networks continue to have no idea when they are about to hit a wall, with less visibility into the future than a club owner who comes in night after night and notices, gazing across the dance floor, realizes one night that the joint has lost its heat. When people refer to Facebook as a boomer ghetto, they're referring first to a decline in social capital, which precedes the loss of human capital More on this soon, but for the remainder of this update, I want to look back at the 21st century to date and marvel at one of the greatest changes in civilization, one wrought by first the internet and second by the rise of massive social networks. *** One way to understand the impact of these public social networks on humanity is to think of this as the era in which humans took their personal thoughts and lives public at scale. Billions of humans IPO'd, whether we were ready for it or not, explaining why the concept of a personal "brand" became such a pervasive metaphor. In another era, most of us lived in social circles of limited scope. Family, school, coworkers, neighbors. We were, for the most part, private entities. Social media companies quickly hit on the ideal configuration for rapid network growth: take the interaction between any two people and make it public. Conversation and information-sharing became a democratic form of performance art. One reason social networks quickly converged on this as the optimal strategy and configuration is that the majority of people on any social network merely lurk. By making the conversations of the more extroverted, productive nodes public, you sustain the interest of that silent majority of observers with what is effectively crowd-sourced (read: free) content. The concept of 1/9/90 is that a stable equilibrium can be achieved in a large network if the shouting class, the minority which entertains the much larger but silent majority, is given enough quantifiable doses of affirmation (likes) to keep the content spigot flowing. As these large public social networks grew, even many who were previously modest began taking the stage on social media to karaoke to the crowd. Live fast, die young, and leave a viral post. Just as there are many advantages to being a public company, becoming a public figure carries all sorts of upside. Once your ideas and your self are traded publicly, anyone can invest and drive the value of those goods higher. If you’ve ever written a viral blog post or tweetstorm and gained thousands of followers, if you’ve had a YouTube video picked up by traditional media and found yourselves interviewed on the local news, you’ve felt that rush of being a soaring stock. Social networks not only provide public liquidity for anything you care to share on them, but they also continued to tweak their algorithms to accelerate the virality quotient of their feeds. In a previous generation, Warhol quipped the duration of sudden fame was 15 minutes, but social media has made that the time it takes to become famous. The problem is that, like many private companies who find the scrutiny of public markets overly stringent, many of us were ill-equipped for "going public" with what were once private conversations and thought. It's not just those who made enormous public gaffes and got "canceled." Most people by now have experienced the random attack from a troll, the distributed judgment of the public at large, and have realized the cost of living our lives in public. Most celebrities learn this lesson very early on, most companies put their public-facing executives through PR training, but most humans never grew up under the watchful gaze of hundreds of millions of eyes of Sauron. That dread we feel when our thoughts and selves are traded as public goods is the unease that comes from rendering the personal transactional. Public companies are restricted in what they can say publicly. The same is true for people who take their selves public. The markets punish companies that stumble, and the judgment of the masses is no less harsh for individuals who do their thinking out loud on social media. This new form of public backlash has even earned its own moniker: cancel culture. One of the most famous and iconic incidents of cancel culture was the tweet that "blew up Justine Sacco's Life." As soon as I mention it, almost any student of Internet culture knows the tweet. Before boarding the last leg of a flight from New York to Cape Town, Sacco wrote to her 170 Twitter followers at the time: "Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!" By the time her flight landed, she had what might be the closest experience to traveling to an alternate universe on a plane since the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 on the TV series Lost. When Sacco's flight landed and she emerged from the runway into the airport, her phone reaching out to handshake with the network, she stepped into a timeline in which she was an international villain. Justine Sacco must have felt like Jack on that beach in the pilot of Lost, wondering where she’d landed and what the hell had happened. In fact, in hindsight, perhaps Lost is more compelling as the story of a bunch of people who’d been canceled, all stranded in some social media purgatory to try to atone for their sins. Nowadays, it's a common occurrence to see someone inadvertently place a tracer on themselves online and summon the collective brimstone and fury of a global mob on themselves. But, if you're old enough to remember the pre-internet, pre-social-media era, try to fathom how a single relatively unknown citizen of the world like Sacco could write or utter any sentence of just sixty-four characters and ignite anything remotely comparable to the fury of millions of total strangers from across the globe. I'd argue that such a feat was impossible in a previous era. The only way someone like Sacco could even reach that many people back then would have been to broadcast such a message through a mainstream media channel like a newspaper or television network, all of which were under the control of a select group of gatekeepers who would've never broadcast her joke in the first place (remember, I'm talking about even the pre-Fox News era). We've had no shortage of dystopic futures that warned of mass surveillance, but not many of them described a future in which you could destroy your own life with your own words. The Twitter "What's happening" prompt box is like a command line with the power to, among other things, obliterate your life. Such is the power of a megaphone that can reach most of the civilized world. Who's up for global open mic night? What could go wrong? Wheeeeeeeeee! After I read the Three-Body Trilogy, the first metaphor that leapt off the page was the idea of Twitter as The Dark Forest. Many public figures had already gone radio silent online, the downside was so severe. Yancey Strickler recently wrote about this idea of the internet as Dark Forest, and if you're not worried about having that metaphor spoiled, click over and give it a read. Just as the SEC regulates what public companies say, social norms regulate what a person can say on social media. PR training today begins for all of us once we get our hands on our first smartphone. It's little surprise that just as many companies now stay private for longer, many people have retreated to private messaging groups, taking their thoughts back into the shadows, while those who stay public learn to code messages in memes or language so opaque and Straussian that even political dissidents would be impressed. If your feeling on all this is, good, these people got what they deserved, I understand. Some people who’ve been canceled have written some truly abhorrent things, some of it even illegal, and sometimes it can feel like we live in an age of hyperefficient social Darwinism, a hyperactive white blood cell army patrolling the alleyways of the internet in that distributed swarm style the internet made its own. But the exact definition of “cancel culture” matters. The closer the social mob is to enforcing the values you believe in, the more just it feels. The more divergent the values of the mob, the more you feel attacked by an army of trolls. I’m not opposed to new forms of social capital regulation enabled by the internet, but social mob behavior can be a mass of unthinking, blind, rage. Like a real-life mob, just bigger, and faster moving. That’s a frightening phenomenon. As we approach the year 2020, and we look back on two decades where billions of people went public, I’m equal parts astonished and horrified. I imagine a time traveler appearing to a citizen of the pre-internet era in a new age Monkey’s Paw fable, and asking that person, “I can grant you one wish, what do you desire?” And that person would look at the world around them, all the people going about their business, strolling past and paying them no heed, and they’d say, “Make me famous.”
Editor's Note 1: I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2: I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one. My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series of shorter posts. I put section titles below, so skip any that don’t interest you. My short takes are on Twitter. All that said, I apologize for nothing. Editor's Note 3: I lied, I apologize for one thing, and that is my long writing hiatus. Without a work computer, I had to resort to using my 7 year old 13" Macbook Pro as my main computer, and sometime last year my carpal tunnel syndrome returned with a vengeance and left my wrists debilitated with pain. I believe all of you who say your main computer is a laptop or, shudder, an iPad, but goodness gracious I cannot type on a compact keyboard for long periods of time without having my hands turn into useless stumps. It was only the return to typing almost exclusively on my old friend the Kinesis Advantage 2 ergo keyboard that put me back in the game. Editor’s Note 4: I was recently on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's podcast Invest Like the Best, and near the end of that discussion, I mentioned a new essay I'd been working on about the similarities between social networks and ICO's. This is that piece. Status-Seeking Monkeys "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of little fortune, must be in want of more social capital." So wrote Jane Austen, or she would have, I think, if she were chronicling our current age (instead we have Taylor Lorenz, and thank goodness for that). Let's begin with two principles: People are status-seeking monkeys* People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital * Status-Seeking Monkeys will also be the name of my indie band, if I ever learn to play the guitar and start a band I begin with these two observations of human nature because few would dispute them, yet I seldom see social networks, some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the history of the world, analyzed on the dimension of status or social capital. It’s in part a measurement issue. Numbers lend an air of legitimacy and credibility. We have longstanding ways to denominate and measure financial capital and its flows. Entire websites, sections of newspapers, and a ton of institutions report with precision on the prices and movements of money. We have no such methods for measuring the values and movement of social capital, at least not with anywhere near the accuracy or precision. The body of research feels both broad and yet meager. If we had better measures besides user counts, this piece and many others would be full of charts and graphs that added a sense of intellectual heft to the analysis. There would be some annual presentation called the State of Social akin to Meeker's Internet Trends Report, or perhaps it would be a fifty page sub-section of her annual report. Despite this, most of the social media networks we study generate much more social capital than actual financial capital, especially in their early stages; almost all such companies have internalized one of the popular truisms of Silicon Valley, that in the early days, companies should postpone revenue generation in favor of rapid network scaling. Social capital has much to say about why social networks lose heat, stall out, and sometimes disappear altogether. And, while we may not be able to quantify social capital, as highly attuned social creatures, we can feel it. Social capital is, in many ways, a leading indicator of financial capital, and so its nature bears greater scrutiny. Not only is it good investment or business practice, but analyzing social capital dynamics can help to explain all sorts of online behavior that would otherwise seem irrational. In the past few years, much progress has been made analyzing Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses. Not as much has been made on social networks. Analysis of social networks still strikes me as being like economic growth theory long before Paul Romer's paper on endogenous technological change. However, we can start to demystify social networks if we also think of them as SaaS businesses, but instead of software, they provide status. This post is a deep dive into what I refer to as Status as a Service (StaaS) businesses. Think of this essay as a series of strongly held hypotheses; without access to the types of data which i’m not even sure exists, it’s difficult to be definitive. As ever, my wise readers will add or push back as they always do. Traditional Network Effects Model of Social Networks One of the fundamental lessons of successful social networks is that they must first appeal to people when they have few users. Typically this is done through some form of single-user utility. This is the classic cold start problem of social. The answer to the traditional chicken-and-egg question is actually answerable: what comes first is a single chicken, and then another chicken, and then another chicken, and so on. The harder version of the question is why the first chicken came and stayed when no other chickens were around, and why the others followed. The second fundamental lessons is that social networks must have strong network effects so that as more and more users come aboard, the network enters a positive flywheel of growth, a compounding value from positive network effects that leads to hockey stick growth that puts dollar signs in the eyes of investors and employees alike. "Come for the tool, stay for the network" wrote Chris Dixon, in perhaps the most memorable maxim for how this works. Even before social networks, we had Metcalfe's Law on telecommunications networks: The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n^2) This ported over to social networks cleanly. It is intuitive, and it includes that tantalizing math formula that explains why growth curves for social networks bends up sharply at the ankle of the classic growth S-curve. But dig deeper and many many questions remain. Why do some large social networks suddenly fade away, or lose out to new tiny networks? Why do some new social networks with great single-player tools fail to transform into networks, while others with seemingly frivolous purposes make the leap? Why do some networks sometimes lose value when they add more users? What determines why different networks stall out at different user base sizes? Why do some networks cross international borders easily while others stay locked within specific countries? Why, if Metcalfe's Law holds, do many of Facebook's clones of other social network features fail, while some succeed, like Instagram Stories? What ties many of these explanations together is social capital theory, and how we analyze social networks should include a study of a social network's accumulation of social capital assets and the nature and structure of its status games. In other words, how do such companies capitalize, either consciously or not, on the fact that people are status-seeking monkeys, always trying to seek more of it in the most efficient way possible? To paraphrase Nicki Minaj, “If I'm fake I ain't notice cause my followers ain't.” [Editor’s note: sometimes the followers actually are fake.] Utility vs. Social Capital Framework Classic network effects theory still holds, I’m not discarding it. Instead, let's append some social capital theory. Together, those form the two axes on which I like to analyze social network health. Actually, I tend to use three axes to dissect social networks. The three axes on which I evaluate social network strength For this post, though, I'm only going to look at two of them, utility and social capital, as the entertainment axis adds a whole lot of complexity which I'll perhaps explain another time. The basic two axis framework guiding much of the social network analysis in this piece Utility doesn't require much explanation, though we often use the term very loosely and categorize too many things as utility when they aren't that useful (we generally confuse circuses for bread and not the reverse; Fox News, for example, is more entertainment than utility, as is common of many news outlets). A social network like Facebook allows me to reach lots of people I would otherwise have a harder time tracking down, and that is useful. A messaging app like WhatsApp allows me to communicate with people all over the world without paying texting or incremental data fees, which is useful. Quora and Reddit and Discord and most every social network offer some forms of utility. The other axis is, for a lack of a more precise term, the social capital axis, or the status axis. Can I use the social network to accumulate social capital? What forms? How is it measured? And how do I earn that status? There are several different paths to success for social networks, but those which compete on the social capital axis are often more mysterious than pure utilities. Competition on raw utility tends to be Darwinian, ruthless, and highly legible. This is the world, for example, of communication services like messaging and video conferencing. Investing in this space also tends to be a bit more straightforward: how useful is your app or service, can you get distribution, etc. When investors send me decks on things in this category, I am happy to offer an opinion, but I enjoy puzzling over the world of artificial prestige even more. The creation of a successful status game is so mysterious that it often smacks of alchemy. For that reason, entrepreneurs who succeed in this space are thought of us a sort of shaman, perhaps because most investors are middle-aged white men who are already so high status they haven't the first idea why people would seek virtual status (more on that later). With the rise of Instagram, with its focus on photos and filters, and Snapchat, with its ephemeral messaging, and Vine, with its 6-second video limit, for a while there was a thought that new social networks would be built on some new modality of communications. That's a piece of it, but it's not the complete picture, and not for the reasons many people think, which is why we have seen a whole bunch of strange failed experiments in just about every odd combinations of features and filters and artificial constraints in how we communicate with each other through our phones. Remember Facebook's Snapchat competitor Slingshot, in which you had to unlock any messages you received by responding with a message? It felt like product design by mad libs. When modeling how successful social networks create a status game worth playing, a useful metaphor is one of the trendiest technologies: cryptocurrency. Social Networks as ICO's How is a new social network analogous to an ICO? Each new social network issues a new form of social capital, a token. You must show proof of work to earn the token. Over time it becomes harder and harder to mine new tokens on each social network, creating built-in scarcity. Many people, especially older folks, scoff at both social networks and cryptocurrencies. ["Why does anyone care what you ate for lunch?" is the canonical retort about any social network, though it’s fading with time. Both social networks and ICO's tend to drive skeptics crazy because they seem to manufacture value out of nothing. The shifting nature of scarcity will always leave a wake of skepticism and disbelief.] Years ago, I stayed at the house of a friend whose high school daughter was home upstairs with a classmates. As we adults drank wine in the kitchen downstairs while waiting for dinner to finish in the oven, we heard lots of music and stomping and giggling coming from upstairs. When we finally called them down for dinner, I asked them what all the ruckus had been. My friend's daughter proudly held up her phone to show me a recording they'd posted to an app called Musical.ly. It was a lip synch and dance routine replete with their own choreography. They'd rehearsed the piece more times than they could count. It showed. Their faces were shiny with sweat, and they were still breathing hard from the exertion. Proof of work indeed. I spent the rest of the dinner scrolling through the app, fascinated, interviewing the girls about what they liked about the app, why they were on it, what share of their free time it had captured. I can't tell if parents are offended or glad when I spend much of the time visiting them interviewing their sons and daughters instead, but in the absence of good enough metrics with which to analyze this space, I subscribe to the Jane Goodall theory of how to study your subject. Besides, status games of adults are already well covered by the existing media, from literature to film. Children's status games, once familiar to us, begin to fade from our memory as time passes, and its modern forms have been drastically altered by social media. Other examples abound. Perhaps you've read a long and thoughtful response by a random person on Quora or Reddit, or watched YouTube vloggers publishing night after night, or heard about popular Vine stars living in houses together, helping each other shoot and edit 6-second videos. While you can outsource Bitcoin mining to a computer, people still mine for social capital on social networks largely through their own blood, sweat, and tears. [Aside: if you yourself are not an aspiring social network star, living with one is...not recommended.] Perhaps, if you've spent time around today's youth, you've watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as a teen snaps dozens of selfies before publishing the most flattering one to Instagram, only to pull it down if it doesn't accumulate enough likes within the first hour. It’s another example of proof of work, or at least vigorous market research. Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you. [An aside about exogenous social capital: you might complain that your tweets are more interesting and grammatical than those of, say, Donald Trump (you're probably right!). Or that your photos are better composed and more interesting at a deep level of photographic craft than those of Kim Kardashian. The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms. Generalized fame is one of them. More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily: you might follow Paul Krugman on Twitter, for example, but not have any interest in his Instagram account. I don't know if he has one, but I probably wouldn't follow it if he did, sorry Paul, it’s nothing personal.] If you've ever joined one of these social networks early enough, you know that, on a relative basis, getting ahead of others in terms of social capital (followers, likes, etc.) is easier in the early days. Some people who were featured on recommended follower lists in the early days of Twitter have follower counts in the 7-figures, just as early masters of Musical.ly and Vine were accumulated massive and compounding follower counts. The more people who follow you, the more followers you gain because of leaderboards and recommended follower algorithms and other such common discovery mechanisms. It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning. Everyone has more of an understanding of how the game works so the competition is stiffer. Why Proof of Work Matters Why does proof of work matter for a social network? If people want to maximize social capital, why not make that as easy as possible? As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn't be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it. It's not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can't be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans. Recall our first tenet: humans are status-seeking monkeys. Status is a relative ladder. By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy. Musical.ly created a hurdle for gaining followers and status that wasn't easily cleared by many people. However, for some, especially teens, and especially girls, it was a status game at which they were particularly suited to win. And so they flocked there, because, according to my second tenet, people look for the most efficient ways to accumulate the most social capital. Recall Twitter in the early days, when it was somewhat of a harmless but somewhat inert status update service. I went back to look at my first few tweets on the service from some 12 years ago and my first two, spaced about a year apart, were both about doing my taxes. Looking back at them, I bore even myself. Early Twitter consisted mostly of harmless but dull life status updates, a lot of “is this thing on?” tapping on the virtual microphone. I guess I am in the camp of not caring about what you had for lunch after all. Get off my lawn, err, phone screen! What changed Twitter, for me, was the launch of Favstar and Favrd (both now defunct, ruthlessly murdered by Twitter), these global leaderboards that suddenly turned the service into a competition to compose the most globally popular tweets. Recall, the Twitter graph was not as dense then as it was now, nor did distribution accelerants like one-click retweeting and Moments exist yet. What Favstar and Favrd did was surface really great tweets and rank them on a scoreboard, and that, to me, launched the performative revolution in Twitter. It added needed feedback to the feedback loop, birthing a new type of comedian, the master of the 140 character or less punchline (the internet has killed the joke, humor is all punchline now that the setup of the joke is assumed to be common knowledge thanks to Google). The launch of these global tweet scoreboards reminds me of the moment in the now classic film** Battle Royale when Beat Takeshi Kitano informs a bunch of troublemaking school kids that they’ve been deported to an island are to fight to the death, last student standing wins, and that those who try to sneak out of designated battle zones will be killed by explosive collars. I'm not saying that Twitter is a life-or-death struggle, but you need only time travel back to pre-product-market-fit Twitter to see the vast difference in tone. **Now classic because Battle Royale has subsequently been ripped off, err, paid tribute to by The Hunger Games, Fortnite, Maze Runner, and just about every YA franchise out there because who understands barbarous status games better than teenagers? Favstar.fm screenshot. Just seeing some of those old but familiar avatars makes me sentimental, perhaps like how early Burning Man devotees think back on its early years, before the moneyed class came in and ruined that utopia of drugs, nudity, and art. Chasing down old Favrd screenshots, I still laugh at the tweets surfaced. One more Favrd screenshot just for old time’s sake It's critical that not everyone can quip with such skill. This gave Twitter its own proof of work, and over time the overall quality of tweets improved as that feedback loop spun and tightened. The strategies that gained the most likes were fed in increasing volume into people's timelines as everyone learned from and competed with each other. Read Twitter today and hardly any of the tweets are the mundane life updates of its awkward pre-puberty years. We are now in late-stage performative Twitter, where nearly every tweet is hungry as hell for favorites and retweets, and everyone is a trained pundit or comedian. It's hot takes and cool proverbs all the way down. The harmless status update Twitter was a less thirsty scene but also not much of a business. Still, sometimes I miss the halcyon days when not every tweet was a thirst trap. I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye, the always rude Kanye, spaz in the news Kanye, I miss the sweet Kanye, chop up the beats Kanye. Thirst for status is potential energy. It is the lifeblood of a Status as a Service business. To succeed at carving out unique space in the market, social networks offer their own unique form of status token, earned through some distinctive proof of work. Conversely, let's look at something like Prisma, a photo filter app which tried to pivot to become a social network. Prisma surged in popularity upon launch by making it trivial to turn one of your photos into a fine art painting with one of its many neural-network-powered filters. It worked well. Too well. Since almost any photo could, with one-click, be turned into a gorgeous painting, no single photo really stands out. The star is the filter, not the user, and so it didn't really make sense to follow any one person over any other person. Without that element of skill, no framework for a status game or skill-based network existed. It was a utility that failed at becoming a Status as a Service business. In contrast, while Instagram filters, in its earliest days, improved upon the somewhat limited quality of smartphone photos at the time, the quality of those photos still depended for the most part on the photographer. The composition, the selection of subject matter, these still derived from the photographer’s craft, and no filter could elevate a poor photo into a masterpiece. So, to answer an earlier question about how a new social network takes hold, let’s add this: a new Status as a Service business must devise some proof of work that depends on some actual skill to differentiate among users. If it does, then it creates, like an ICO, some new form of social capital currency of value to those users. This is not the only way a social network can achieve success. As noted before, you can build a network based around utility or entertainment. However, the addition of status helps us to explain why some networks which seemingly offer little in the way of meaningful utility (is a service that forces you to make only a six second video useful?) still achieve traction. Facebook's Original Proof of Work You might wonder, how did Facebook differentiate itself from MySpace? It started out as mostly a bunch of text status updates, nothing necessarily that innovative. In fact, Facebook launched with one of the most famous proof of work hurdles in the world: you had to be a student at Harvard. By requiring a harvard.edu email address, Facebook drafted off of one of the most elite cultural filters in the world. It's hard to think of many more powerful slingshots of elitism. By rolling out, first to Ivy League schools, then to colleges in general, Facebook scaled while maintaining a narrow age dispersion and exclusivity based around educational credentials. Layer that on top of the broader social status game of stalking attractive members of the other sex that animates much of college life and Facebook was a service that tapped into reserves of some of the most heated social capital competitions in the world. Social Capital ROI If a person posts something interesting to a platform, how quickly do they gain likes and comments and reactions and followers? The second tenet is that people seek out the most efficient path to maximize their social capital. To do so, they must have a sense for how different strategies vary in effectiveness. Most humans seem to excel at this. Young people, with their much higher usage rate on social media, are the most sensitive and attuned demographic to the payback period and ROI on their social media labor. So, for example, young people tend not to like Twitter but do enjoy Instagram. It's not that Twitter doesn't dole out the occasional viral supernova; every so often someone composes a tweet that goes over 1K and then 10K likes or retweets (Twitter should allow people to buy a framed print of said tweet with a silver or gold 1K club or 10K club designation to supplement its monetization). But it’s not common, and most tweets are barely seen by anyone at all. Pair that with the fact that young people's bias towards and skill advantage in visual mediums over textual ones and it's not surprising Instagram is their social battleground of preference (video games might be the most lucrative battleground for the young if you broaden your definition of social networks, and that's entirely reasonable, though that arena skews male). Instagram, despite not having any official reshare option, allows near unlimited hashtag spamming, and that allows for more deterministic, self-generated distribution. Twitter also isn't as great for spreading visual memes because of its stubborn attachment to cropping photos to maintain a certain level of tweet density per phone screen. The gradient of your network's social capital ROI can often govern your market share among different demographics. Young girls flocked to Musical.ly in its early days because they were uniquely good at the lip synch dance routine videos that were its bread and butter. In this age of neverending notifications, heavy social media users are hyper aware of differing status ROI among the apps they use. I can still remember posting the same photos to Flickr and Instagram for a while and seeing how quickly the latter passed the former in feedback. If I were an investor or even an employee, I might have something like a representative basket of content that I'd post from various test accounts on different social media networks just to track social capital interest rates and liquidity among the various services. Some features can increase the reach of content on any network. A reshare option like the retweet button is a massive accelerant of virality on apps where the social graph determines what makes it into the feed. In an effort to increase engagement, Twitter has, over the years, become more and more aggressive to increase the liquidity of tweets. It now displays tweets that were liked by people you follow, even if they didn't retweet them, and it has populated its search tab with Moments, which, like Instagram's Discover Tab, guesses at other content you might like and provides an endless scroll filled with it. TikTok is an interesting new player in social media because its default feed, For You, relies on a machine learning algorithm to determine what each user sees; the feed of content from by creators you follow, in contrast, is hidden one pane over. If you are new to TikTok and have just uploaded a great video, the selection algorithm promises to distribute your post much more quickly than if you were on sharing it on a network that relies on the size of your following, which most people have to build up over a long period of time. Conversely, if you come up with one great video but the rest of your work is mediocre, you can't count on continued distribution on TikTok since your followers live mostly in a feed driven by the TikTok algorithm, not their follow graph. The result is a feedback loop that is much more tightly wound that that of other social networks, both in the positive and negative direction. Theoretically, if the algorithm is accurate, the content in your feed should correlate most closely to quality of the work and its alignment with your personal interests rather than the drawing from the work of accounts you follow. At a time when Bytedance is spending tens (hundreds?) of millions of marketing dollars in a bid to acquire users in international markets, the rapid ROI on new creators' work is a helpful quality in ensuring they stick around. This development is interesting for another reason: graph-based social capital allocation mechanisms can suffer from runaway winner-take-all effects. In essence, some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they've earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game. One of the striking things about Silicon Valley as a region versus East Coast power corridors like Manhattan is its dearth of old money. There are exceptions, but most of the fortunes in the Bay Area are not just new money but freshly minted new money from this current generation of tech. You have some old VC or semiconductor industry fortunes, but most of those people are still alive. It's in NYC that you run into multi-generational old money hanging around on the Upper East or West sides of Manhattan, or encounter old wealth being showered around town by young socialites whose source of wealth is simply a fortuitous last name. Trickle down economics works, but often just down the veins of family trees. It's not that the existence of old money or old social capital dooms a social network to inevitable stagnation, but a social network should continue to prioritize distribution for the best content, whatever the definition of quality, regardless of the vintage of user producing it. Otherwise a form of social capital inequality sets in, and in the virtual world, where exit costs are much lower than in the real world, new users can easily leave for a new network where their work is more properly rewarded and where status mobility is higher. It may be that Silicon Valley never comes to be dominated by old money, and I'd consider that a net positive for the region. I'd rather the most productive new work be rewarded consistently by the marketplace than a bunch of stagnant quasi-monopolies hang on to wealth as they reach bloated scales that aren't conducive to innovation. The same applies to social networks and multi-player video games. As a newbie, how quickly, if you put in the work, are you "in the game"? Proof of work should define its own meritocracy. The same way many social networks track keystone metrics like time to X followers, they should track the ROI on posts for new users. It's likely a leading metric that governs retention or churn. It’s useful as an investor, or even as a curious onlooker to test a social networks by posting varied content from test accounts to gauge the efficiency and fairness of the distribution algorithm. Whatever the mechanisms, social networks must devote a lot of resources to market making between content and the right audience for that content so that users feel sufficient return on their work. Distribution is king, even when, or especially when it allocates social capital. Why copying proof of work is lousy strategy for status-driven networks We often see a new social network copy a successful incumbent but with a minor twist thrown in. In the wake of Facebook’s recent issues, we may see some privacy-first social networks, but we have an endless supply of actual knockoffs to study. App.net and then Mastodon were two prominent Twitter clones that promised some differentiation but which built themselves on the same general open messaging framework. Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it. This isn't to say you can't copy an existing proof of work and succeed. After all, Facebook replaced social networks like MySpace and Friendster that came before it, and in the real world, new money sometimes becomes the new old money. You can build a better status game or create a more valuable form of status. Usually when such displacement occurs, though, it does so along the other dimension of pure utility. For example, we have multiple messaging apps that became viable companies just by capturing a particular geographic market through localized network effects. We don't have one messaging app to rule them all in the world, but instead a bunch that have won in particular geographies. After all, the best messaging app in most countries or continents is the one most other people are already using there. But in the same market? Copying a proof of work there is a tough road. The first mover advantage is also such that the leader with the dominant graph and the social capital of most value can look at any new features that fast followers launch and pull a reverse copy, grafting them into their more extensive and dominant incumbent graph. In China, Tencent is desperate to cool off Bytedance's momentum in the short video space; Douyin is enemy number one. Tencent launched a clone but added a feature which allowed viewers to record a side-by-side video reaction in response to any video. It took about half a second for Bytedance to incorporate that into Douyin, and now it's a popular feature in TikTok the world over. If you can't change the proof of work competition as a challenger, copy and throttle is an effective strategy for the incumbent. Not to mention that a wholesale ripoff of another app tends to be frowned upon as poor form. Even in China, with its reputation as the land of loose IP protection, users will tend to post dismissive reviews of blatant copycat apps in app stores. Chinese users may not be as aware of American apps that are knocked off in China, but within China, users don't just jump ship to out-and-out copycat apps. There has to be an incentive to overcome the switching costs, and that applies in China as it does elsewhere. A few specifics of note here. I once wrote about social networks that the network's the thing; that is, the composition of the graph once a social network reaches scale is its most unique quality. I would update that today to say that it’s the unique combination of a feature and a specific graph that is any network’s most critical competitive advantage. Copying some network's feature often isn’t sufficient if you can’t also copy its graph, but if you can apply the feature to some unique graph that you earned some other way, it can be a defensible advantage. Nothing illustrates this better than Facebook's attempts to win back the young from Snapchat by copying some of the network's ephemeral messaging features, or Facebook's attempt to copy TikTok with Lasso, or, well Facebook's attempt to duplicate just about every social app with any traction anywhere. The problem with copying Snapchat is that, well, the reason young people left Facebook for Snapchat was in large part because their parents had invaded Facebook. You don't leave a party with your classmates to go back to one your parents are throwing just because your dad brings in a keg and offer to play beer pong. The pairing of Facebook's gigantic graph with just about almost any proof of work from another app changes the very nature of that status game, sometimes in undesirable ways. Do you really want your coworkers and business colleagues and family and friends watching you lip synch to "It's Getting Hot in Here" by Nelly on Lasso? Facebook was rumored to be contemplating a special memes tab to try to woo back the young, which, again, completely misunderstands how the young play the meme status game. At last check that plan had been shelved. Of course, the canonical Facebook feature grab that pundits often cite as having worked is Instagram's copy of Snapchat's Stories format. As I've written before, I think the Stories format is a genuine innovation on the social modesty problem of social networks. That is, all but the most egregious showoffs feel squeamish about publishing too much to their followers. Stories, by putting the onus on the viewer to pull that content, allows everyone to publish away guilt-free, without regard for the craft that regular posts demand in the ever escalating game that is life publishing. In a world where algorithmic feeds break up your sequence of posts, Stories also allow gifted creators to create sequential narratives. Thus Stories is inherently about lowering the publishing hurdle for users and about a new method of storytelling, and any multi-sided network seeing declining growth will try grafting it on their own network at some point just to see if it solves supply-side social modesty. Ironically, as services add more and more filters and capabilities into their story functionality, we see the proof of work game in Stories escalating. Many of the Instagram Stories today are more elaborate and time-consuming to publish than regular posts; the variety of filters and stickers and GIFs and other tools in the Stories composer dwarfs the limited filters available for regular Instagram posts. What began as a lighter weight posting format is now a more sophisticated and complex one. You can take the monkey out of the status-seeking game, but you can't take the status-seeking out of the monkey. The Greatest Social Capital Creation Event in Tech History In the annals of tech, and perhaps the world, the event that created the greatest social capital boom in history was the launch of Facebook's News Feed. Before News Feed, if you were on, say MySpace, or even on a Facebook before News Feed launched, you had to browse around to find all the activity in your network. Only a demographic of a particular age will recall having to click from one profile to another on MySpace while stalking one’s friends. It almost seems comical in hindsight, that we'd impose such a heavy UI burden on social media users. Can you imagine if, to see all the new photos posted in your Instagram network, you had to click through each profile one by one to see if they’d posted any new photos? I feel like my parents talking about how they had to walk miles to grade school through winter snow wearing moccasins of tree bark when I complain about the undue burden of social media browsing before the News Feed, but it truly was a monumental pain in the ass. By merging all updates from all the accounts you followed into a single continuous surface and having that serve as the default screen, Facebook News Feed simultaneously increased the efficiency of distribution of new posts and pitted all such posts against each other in what was effectively a single giant attention arena, complete with live updating scoreboards on each post. It was as if the panopticon inverted itself overnight, as if a giant spotlight turned on and suddenly all of us performing on Facebook for approval realized we were all in the same auditorium, on one large, connected infinite stage, singing karaoke to the same audience at the same time. It's difficult to overstate what a momentous sea change it was for hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of humans who had grown up competing for status in small tribes, to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against EVERY PERSON THEY HAD EVER MET. Predictably, everything exploded. The number of posts increased. The engagement with said posts increased. This is the scene in a movie in which, having launched something, a bunch of people stand in a large open war room waiting, and suddenly a geek staring at a computer goes wide-eyed, exclaiming, "Oh my god." And then the senior ranking officer in the room (probably played by a scowling Ed Harris or Kyle Chandler) walks over to look at the screen, where some visible counter is incrementing so rapidly that the absolute number of digits starts is incrementing in real time as you look at it, because films have to make a plot development like this brain dead obvious to the audience. And then the room erupts in cheers while different people hug and clap each others on the back, and one random extra sprints across the screen in the background, shaking a bottle of champagne that explodes and ejaculates a stream of frothy bubbly through the air like some capitalist money shot that inspires, later, a 2,000 word essay from Žižek. Of course, users complained about News Feed at first, but their behavior belied their words, something that would come to haunt Facebook later when it took it as proof that users would always just cry wolf and that similar changes in the future would be the right move regardless of public objections. Back in those more halcyon times, though, News Feed unleashed a gold rush for social capital accumulation. Wow, that post over there has ten times the likes that my latest does! Okay, what can I learn from it to use in my next post? Which of my content is driving the most likes? We talk about the miracles of machine learning in the modern age, but as social creatures, humans are no less remarkable in their ability to decipher and internalize what plays well to the peanut gallery. Stories of teens A/B testing Instagram posts, yanking those which don't earn enough likes in the first hour, are almost beyond satire; a show like Black Mirror often just resorts to episodes that show things that have already happened in reality. The key component of the 10,000 hour rule of expertise is the idea of deliberate practice, the type that provides immediate feedback. Social media may not be literally real-time in its feedback, but it's close enough, and the scope of reach is magnitudes of order beyond that of any social performance arena in history. We have a generation now that has been trained through hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of social media reps on what engages people on which platforms. In our own way, we are all Buzzfeed. We are all Kardashians. The tighter the feedback loop, the quicker the adaptation. Compare early Twitter to modern Twitter; it's like going from listening to your coworkers at a karaoke bar to watching Beyonce play Coachella. I wrote once that any Twitter account that gained enough followers would end up sounding like a fortune cookie, but I underestimated how quickly everyone would arrive at that end state. The rhetorical style of any Twitter account that continues to gain followers converges on that of a fortune cookie. — Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) May 21, 2018 As people start following more and more accounts on a social network, they reach a point where the number of candidate stories exceeds their capacity to see them all. Even before that point, the sheer signal-to-noise ratio may decline to the point that it affects engagement. Almost any network that hits this inflection point turns to the same solution: an algorithmic feed. Remember, status derives value from some type of scarcity. What is the one fundamental scarcity in the age of abundance? User attention. The launch of an algorithmic feed raises the stakes of the social media game. Even if someone follows you, they might no longer see every one of your posts. As DiCaprio said in Django Unchained, “You had my curiosity, but now, under the algorithmic feed, you have to earn my attention.” As humans, we intuitively understand that some galling percentage of our happiness with our own status is relative. What matters is less our absolute status than how are we doing compared to those around us. By taking the scope of our status competitions virtual, we scaled them up in a way that we weren't entirely prepared for. Is it any surprise that seeing other people signaling so hard about how wonderful their lives are decreases our happiness? As evidence of how anomalous a change this has been for humanity, witness how many celebrities continue to be caught with a history of offensive social media posts that should obviously have been taken down long ago given shifting sensibilities? Kevin Hart, baseball players like Josh Hader, Trea Turner, and Sean Newcomb, and a litany of other public figures and their management teams didn't think to go back and scrub some of their earlier social media posts despite nothing but downside optionality. Could social networks have chosen to keep likes and other such metrics about posts private, visible only to the recipient? Could we have kept this social capital arms race from escalating? Some tech CEO's now look back and, like Alan Greenspan, bemoan the irrational exuberance that led us to where we are now, but let's be honest, the incentives to lower interest rates on social capital in all these networks, given their goals and those of their investors, were just too great. If one company hadn’t flooded the market with status, others would have filled the void many times over. A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Path did indeed succeed in becoming the anti-Facebook: a network without enough users. Some businesses work best at scale, and if you believe that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, putting a bound on how much they can earn is a challenging business model, as dark as that may be. Why Social Capital Accumulation Skews Young I'd love to see a graph of social capital assets under management by user demographic. I'd wager that we'd see that young people, especially those from their teens, when kids seem to be given their first cell phones, through early 20's, are those who dominate the game. My nephew can post a photo of his elbow on Instagram and accumulate a couple hundred likes; I could share a photo of myself in a conga line with Barack Obama and Beyonce while Jennifer Lawrence sits on my shoulders pouring Cristal over my head and still only muster a fraction of the likes my nephew does posting a photo of his elbow. It's a young person's game, and the Livejournal/Blogger/Flickr/Friendster/MySpace era in which I came of age feels like the precambrian era of social in comparison. While we're all status-seeking monkeys, young people tend to be the tip of the spear when it comes to catapulting new Status as a Service businesses, and may always will be. A brief aside here on why this tends to hold. One is that older people tend to have built up more stores of social capital. A job title, a spouse, maybe children, often a house or some piece of real estate, maybe a car, furniture that doesn't require you to assemble it on your own, a curriculum vitae, one or more college degrees, and so on. [This differs by culture, of course. In the U.S., where I grew up, one’s job is the single most important status carrier which is why so many conversations there begin with “What do you do?”] Young people are generally social capital poor unless they've lucked into a fat inheritance. They have no job title, they may not have finished college, they own few assets like homes and cars, and often if they've finished college they're saddled with substantial school debt. For them, the fastest and most efficient path to gaining social capital, while they wait to level up enough to win at more grown-up games like office politics, is to ply their trade on social media (or video games, but that’s a topic for another day). Secondly, because of their previously accumulated social capital, adults tend to have more efficient means of accumulating even more status than playing around online. Maintenance of existing social capital stores is often a more efficient use of time than fighting to earn more on a new social network given the ease of just earning interest on your sizeable status reserves. That's just math, especially once you factor in loss aversion. Young people look at so many of the status games of older folks—what brand of car is parked in your garage, what neighborhood can you afford to live in, how many levels below CEO are you in your org—and then look at apps like Vine and Musical.ly, and they choose the only real viable and thus optimal path before them. Remember the second tenet: people maximize their social capital the most efficient way possible. Both the young and old pursue optimal strategies. That so much social capital for the young comes in the form of followers, likes, and comments from peers and strangers shouldn't lessen its value. Think back to your teen years and try to recall any real social capital that you could accumulate on such a scale. In your youth, the approval of peers and others in your demographic tend to matter more than just about anything, and social media has extended the reach of the youth status game in just about every direction possible. Furthermore, old people tend to be hesitant about mastering new skills in general, including new status games, especially if they involve bewildering new technology. There are many reasons, including having to worry about raising children and other such adult responsibilities and just plain old decay in neural malleability. Perhaps old dogs don't learn new tricks because they are closer to death, and the period to earn a positive return on that investment is shorter. At some point, it's not worth learning any new tricks at all, and we all turn into the brusque old lady in every TV show, e.g. Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, dropping withering quips about the follies of humanity all about us. I look forward to this period of my life when, through the unavoidable spectre of mortality, I will naturally settle into my DGAF phase of courageous truth-telling. Lastly, young people have a surplus of something which most adults always complain they have too little of: time. The hurdle rate on the time of the young is low, and so they can afford to spend some of that surplus exploring new social networks, mining them to see if the social capital returns are attractive, whereas most adults can afford to wait until a network has runaway product-market fit to jump in. The young respond to all the status games of the world with a consistent refrain: "If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Among those are the dexterity and coordination to lip synch to songs while dancing Blocboy JB's Shoot in my bedroom, and the time to do it over and over again until I nail it" (I wrote this long before recent events in which Liam Neeson lit much of his social capital on fire, vacating the “wronged and vengeful father with incredible combat and firearms skills” role to the next aging male star). These modern forms of social capital are like new money. Not surprisingly, then, older folks, who are worse at accumulating these new badges than the young, often scoff at those kids wasting time on those apps, just as old money from the Upper West and Upper East Sides of New York look down their noses at those hoodie-wearing new money billionaire philistines of Silicon Valley. The exception might be those who grew up in this first golden age of social media. For some of this generation’s younger NBA players, who were on Instagram from the time they got their first phone, posting may be second nature, a force of habit they bring with them into the league. Witness how many young NBA stars track their own appearances on House of Highlights the way stars of old hoped looked for themselves on Sportscenter. If this generational divide on social media between the old and the young was simply a one-time anomaly given the recent birth of social networks, and if future generations will be virtual status-seeking experts for womb to tomb, then capturing users in their formative social media years becomes even more critical for social networks. “I contain multitudes” (said the youngblood) Incidentally, teens and twenty-somethings, more so than the middle-aged and elderly, tend to juggle more identities. In middle and high school, kids have to maintain an identity among classmates at school, then another identity at home with family. Twenty-somethings craft one identity among coworkers during the day, then another among their friends outside of work. Often those spheres have differing status games, and there is some penalty to merging those identities. Anyone who has ever sent a text meant for their schoolmates to their parents, or emailed a boss or coworker something meant for their happy hour crew knows the treacherous nature of context collapse. Add to that this younger generation's preference for and facility with visual communication and it's clearly why the preferred social network of the young is Instagram and the preferred messenger Snapchat, both preferable to Facebook. Instagram because of the ease of creating multiple accounts to match one's portfolio of identities, Snapchat for its best in class ease of visual messaging privately to particular recipients. The expiration of content, whether explicitly executed on Instagram (you can easily kill off a meme account after you've outgrown it, for example), or automatically handled on a service like Snapchat, is a must-have feature for those for whom multiple identity management is a fact of life. Facebook, with its explicit attachment to the real world graph and its enforcement of a single public identity, is just a poor structural fit for the more complex social capital requirements of the young. Common Social Network Arcs It's useful to look at some of the common paths that social networks traverse over time using our two axis model. Not all of them took the same paths to prominence. Doing so also helps illuminate the most productive strategies for each to pursue future growth. First utility, then social capital Come for the tool, stay for the network This is the well-known “come for the tool, stay for the network” path. Instagram is a good example here given its growth from filter-driven utility to social photo sharing behemoth. Today, I can't remember the last time I used an Instagram filter. In the end, I think most social networks, if they've made this journey, need to make a return to utility to be truly durable. Commerce is just one area where Instagram can add more utility for its users. First social capital, then utility Lots of the internet’s great resources were built off people seeking a hit of fame and recognition Come for the fame, stay for the tool? Foursquare was this for me. In the beginning, I checked in to try to win mayorships at random places. These days, Foursquare is trying to become more of a utility, with information on places around you, rather than just a quirky distributed social capital game. Heavier users may have thoughts on how successful that has been, but in just compiling a database of locations that other apps can build off of, they have built up a store of utility. IMDb, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Quora are more prominent examples here. Users come for the status, and help to build a tool for the commons. Utility, but no social capital Plenty of huge social apps are almost entirely utilitarian, but it’s a brutally competitive quadrant Some companies manage to create utility for a network but never succeed at building any real social capital of note (or don’t even bother to try). Most messaging apps fall into this category. They help me to reach people I already know, but they don't introduce me to too many new people, and they aren't really status games with likes and follows. Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, Viber, and Marco Polo are examples of video chat apps that fit this category as well. While some messaging apps are trying to add features like Stories that start to veer into the more performative realm of traditional social media, I’m skeptical they’ll ever see traction doing so when compared to apps that are more pure Status as a Service apps like Instagram. This bottom right quadrant is home to some businesses with over a billion users, but in minimizing social capital and competing purely on utility-derived network effects, this tends to be a brutally competitive battleground where even the slimmest moat is fought for with blood and sweat, especially in the digital world where useful features are trivial to copy. Social capital, but little utility When a social network loses heat before it has built utility, the fall can come as quickly as the rise One could argue Foursquare actually lands here, but the most interesting company to debate in this quadrant is clearly Facebook. I'm not arguing that Facebook doesn't have utility, because clearly it does in some obvious ways. In some markets, it is the internet. Messenger is clearly a useful messaging utility for a over a billion people. However, the U.S. is a critical market for Facebook, especially when it comes to monetization, and so it's worth wondering how things might differ for Facebook today if it had succeeded in pushing further out on the utility axis. Many people I know have just dropped Facebook from their lives this past year with little impact on their day-to-day lives. Among the obvious and largest utility categories, like commerce or payments, Facebook isn't a top tier player in any except advertising. This comparison is especially stark if we compare it to the social network to which it's most often contrasted. Both social capital and utility simultaneously The holy grail for social networks is to generate so much social capital and utility that it ends up in that desirable upper right quadrant of the 2x2 matrix. Most social networks will offer some mix of both, but none more so than WeChat. While I hear of people abandoning Facebook and never looking back, I can't think of anyone in China who has just gone cold turkey on WeChat. It's testament to how much of an embedded utility WeChat has become that to delete it would be a massive inconvenience for most citizens. Just look at the list of services in the WeChat or WePay or AliPay menu for the typical Chinese user and consider that Facebook isn’t a payment option for any of them. Of course, the competitive context matters. Facebook faced much stiffer competition in these categories than WeChat did; for Facebook to build a better mousetrap in any of these, the requirements were much higher than for WeChat. Take payments for example. The Chinese largely skipped credit cards, for a whole host of reasons. In part it was due to a cultural aversion to debt, in part because Visa, Mastercard, and American Express weren’t allowed into China where they would certainly have marketed their cards as aggressively as they always do. That meant Alipay and WePay launched competing primarily with cash and all its familiar inconveniences. Compare that to, say, Apple Pay trying to displace the habit of pulling out a credit card in the U.S., especially given how so many people are addicted to credit card points and miles (airline frequent flier programs being another testament to the power of status to influence people’s decision-making). Making a real dent in new categories like commerce and payments will require a long-term mindset and a ton of resources on the part of Facebook and its subsidiaries like WhatsApp and Instagram. Past efforts to, for example, improve Facebook search, position Facebook as payment option, and introduce virtual assistants on Messenger seem to have been abandoned. Will new efforts like Facebook's cryptocurrency effort or Instagram's push into commerce be given a sufficiently long leash? Social Network Asymptote 1: Proof of Work How do you tell when a Status as a Service business will stop growing? What causes networks to suddenly hit that dreaded upper shoulder in the S-curve if, according to Metcalfe's Law, the value of a network grows in proportion to the square of its users? What are the missing variables that explain why networks don’t keep growing until they’ve captured everyone? The reasons are numerous, let’s focus on social capital theory. To return to our cryptocurrency analogy, the choice of your proof of work is by definition an asymptote because the skills it selects for are not evenly distributed. To take a specific example, since it's the app du jour, let's look at the app formerly known as Musical.ly, TikTok. You've probably watched a TikTok video, but have you tried to make one? My guess is that many of you have not and never will (but if you have, please send me a link). This is no judgment, I haven’t either. You may possess, in your estimation, too much self-dignity to wallow in cringe. Your arthritic joints may not be capable of executing Orange Justice. Whatever the reason, TikTok's creator community is ultimately capped by the nature of its proof of work, no matter how ingenious its creative tools. The same is true of Twitter: the number of people who enjoy crafting witty 140 and now 280-character info nuggets is finite. Every network has some ceiling on its ultimate number of contributors, and it is often a direct function of its proof of work. Of course, the value and total user size of a network is not just a direct function of its contributor count. Whether you believe in the 1/9/90 rule of social networks or not, it’s directionally true that any network has value to people besides its creators. In fact, for almost every network, the number of lurkers far exceeds the number of active participants. Life may not be a spectator sport, but a lot of social media is. This isn’t to say that proof of work is bad. In fact, coming up with a constraint that unlocks the creativity of so many people is exactly how Status as a Service businesses achieve product-market fit. Constraints force the type of compression that often begets artistic elegance, and forcing creatives to grapple with a constraint can foster the type of focused exertion that totally unconstrained exploration fails to inspire. Still, a ceiling is a ceiling. If you want to know the terminal value of a network, the type of proof of work is a key variable to consider. If you want to know why Musical.ly stopped growing and sold to Bytedance, why Douyin will hit a ceiling of users in China (if it hasn’t already), or what the cap of active users is for any social network, first ask yourself how many people have the skill and interest to compete in that arena. Social Network Asymptote 2: Social Capital Inflation and Devaluation More terrifying to investors and employees than an asymptote is collapse. Recall the cautionary myth of the fall of Myspace, named after the little known Greek god of vanity Myspakos (Editor’s note: I made that up, it’s actually Narcissus). Why do some social networks, given Metcalfe's Law and its related network effects theories, not only stop growing but even worse, contract and wither away? To understand the inherent fragility in Status as a Service businesses, we need to understand the volatility of status. Social Capital Interest Rate Hikes One of the common traps is the winner's curse for social media. If a social network achieves enough success, it grows to a size that requires the imposition of an algorithmic feed in order to maintain high signal-to-noise for most of its users. It's akin to the Fed trying to manage inflation by raising interest rates. The problem, of course, is that this now diminishes the distribution of any single post from any single user. One of the most controversial of such decisions was Facebook's change to dampen how much content from Pages would be distributed into the News Feed. Many institutions, especially news outlets, had turned to Facebook to access some sweet sweet eyeball inventory in News Feeds. They devised all sorts of giveaways and promotions to entice people to follow their Facebook Pages. After gaining followers, a media company had a free license to publish and publish often into their News Feeds, an attractive proposition considering users were opening Facebook multiples times per day. For media companies, who were already struggling to grapple with all the chaos the internet had unleashed on their business models, this felt like upgrading from waving stories at passersby on the street to stapling stories to the inside of eyelids the world over, several times a day. Deterministic, guaranteed eyeballs. Then, one day, Facebook snapped its fingers like Thanos and much of that dependable reach evaporated into ash. No longer would every one of your Page followers see every one of your posts. Facebook did what central banks do to combat inflation and raised interest rates on borrowing attention from the News Feed. Was such a move inevitable? Not necessarily, but it was always likely. That’s because there is one scarce resource which is a natural limit on every social network and media company today, and that is user attention. That a social network shares some of that attention with its partners will always be secondary to accumulating and retaining that attention in the first place. Facebook, for example, must always guard against the tragedy of the commons when it comes to News Feed. Saving media institutions is a secondary consideration, if that. Social Capital Deflation: Scarcity Precarity or the Groucho Marx Conundrum Another existential risk that is somewhat unique to social networks is this: network effects are powerful, but ones which are social in nature have the unfortunate quality of being just as ferocious in reverse. In High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil, Marc Andreessen notes: I think network effects are great, but in a sense they’re a little overrated. The problem with network effects is they unwind just as fast. And so they’re great while they last, but when they reverse, they reverse viciously. Go ask the MySpace guys how their network effect is going. Network effects can create a very strong position, for obvious reasons. But in another sense, it’s a very weak position to be in. Because if it cracks, you just unravel. I always worry when a company thinks the answer is just network effects. How durable are they? Why do social network effects reverse? Utility, the other axis by which I judge social networks, tends to be uncapped in value. It's rare to describe a product or service as having become too useful. That is, it's hard to over-serve on utility. The more people that accept a form of payment, the more useful it is, like Visa or Mastercard or Alipay. People don’t stop using a service because it’s too useful. Social network effects are different. If you've lived in New York City, you've likely seen, over and over, night clubs which are so hot for months suddenly go out of business just a short while later. Many types of social capital have qualities which render them fragile. Status relies on coordinated consensus to define the scarcity that determines its value. Consensus can shift in an instant. Recall the friend in Swingers, who, at every crowded LA party, quips, "This place is dead anyway." Or recall the wise words of noted sociologist Groucho Marx: "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." The Groucho Marx effect doesn't take effect immediately. In the beginning, a status hierarchy requires lower status people to join so that the higher status people have a sense of just how far above the masses they reside. It's silly to order bottle service at Hakkasan in Las Vegas if no one is sitting on the opposite side of the velvet ropes; a leaderboard with just a single high score is meaningless. However, there is some tipping point of popularity beyond which a restaurant, club, or social network can lose its cool. When Malcolm Gladwell inserted the term "tipping point" into popular vernacular, he didn't specify which way things were tipping. We tend to glamorize the tipping into rapid diffusion, the toe of the S-curve, but in status games like fashion the arc of popularity traces not an S-curve but a bell curve. At the top of that bell curve, you reach the less glamorous tipping point, the one before the plummet. When the definition of status is distributed, often one minority has disproportionate sway. If that group, the cool kids, pulls the ripcord, everyone tends to follow them to the exits. In fact, it’s usually the most high status or desirable people who leave first, the evaporative cooling effect of social networks. At that point, that product or service better have moved as far out as possible on the utility axis or the velocity of churn can cause a nose bleed. [Mimetic desire is a cruel mistress. Girard would've had a field day with the Fyre Festival. Congratulations Billy McFarland, you are the ritual sacrifice with which we cleanse ourselves of the sin of coveting thy influencer’s bounty.] Fashion is one of the most interesting industries for having understood this recurring boom and bust pattern in network effects and taken ownership of its own status devaluation cycles. Some strange cabal of magazine editors and fashion designers decide each season to declare arbitrarily new styles the fashion of the moment, retiring previous recommendations before they grow stale. There is usually no real utility change at all; functionally, the shirt you buy this season doesn’t do anything the shirt you bought last season still can’t do equally well. The industry as a whole is simply pulling the frontier of scarcity forward like a wave we're all trying to surf. This season, the color of the moment might be saffron. Why? Because someone cooler than me said so. Tech tends to prioritize growth at all costs given the non-rival, zero marginal cost qualities of digital information. In a world of abundance, that makes sense. However, technology still has much to learn from industries like fashion about how to proactively manage scarcity, which is important when goods are rivalrous. Since many types of status are relative, it is, by definition, rivalrous. There is some equivalent of crop rotation theory which applies to social networks, but it's not part of the standard tech playbook yet. A variant of this type of status devaluation cascade can be triggered when a particular group joins up. This is because the stability of a status lattice depends just as much on the composition of the network as its total size. A canonical example in tech was the youth migration out of Facebook when their parents signed on in force. Because of the incredible efficiency of News Feed distribution, Facebook became a de facto surveillance apparatus for the young: Mommy and Daddy are watching, as well as future universities and employers and dates who will time travel back and scour your profile someday. As Facebook became less attractive as a platform for the young, many of them flocked to Snapchat as their new messaging solution, its ephemeral nature offering built-in security and its UX opacity acting as a gate against clueless seniors. I've written before about Snapchat's famously opaque Easter Egg UI as a sort of tamper-proof lid for parents, but if we combine social network utility theory with my post on selfies as a second language, it's also clear that Snapchat is a suboptimal messaging platform for older people whose preferred medium of communication remains text. Snapchat opens to a camera. If you want to text someone, it's extra work to swipe to the left pane to reach the text messaging screen. I would be shocked if Facebook did not, at one point, contemplate a version of its app that opened to the camera first, instead of the News Feed, considering how many odd clones of other apps it’s considered in the past. If so, it’s good they never shipped it, because for young people, publishing to a graph that still contained their parents would've still been prohibitive, while for old folks who aren't as biased towards visual mediums, such a UI would've been suboptimal. It would've been a disastrous lose-lose for Facebook. On network effect traps: https://t.co/l66ruYps7e pic.twitter.com/kDADIBOwcU — Patrick Collison (@patrickc) February 16, 2019 Patrick Collison linked to an interesting paper (PDF) on network effects traps in the physical world. They exist in the virtual world as well, and Status as a Service businesses are particularly fraught with them. Another instance is path dependent user composition. A fervent early adopter group can define who a new social network seems to be for, merely by flooding the service with content they love. Before concerted efforts to personalize the front page more quickly, Pinterest seemed like a service targeted mostly towards women even though its basic toolset are useful to many men as well. Because a new user’s front page usually drew upon pins from their friends already on the service, the earliest cohorts, which leaned female, dominated most new user’s feeds. My earliest Pinterest homepage was an endless collage of makeup, women’s clothing, and home decor because those happened to be some of the things my friends were pinning for a variety of projects. Groucho Marx was ahead of his time as a social capital philosopher, but we can build upon his work. To his famous aphorism we should add some variants. When it comes to evaporative cooling, two come to mind: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will have those people as a member” and “I don’t want to belong to any club that those people don’t want to be a member of.” Mitigating Social Capital Devaluation Risk, and the Snapchat Strategy In a leaked memo late last year, Evan Spiegel wrote about how one of the core values of Snapchat is to make it the fastest way to communicate. The most durable way for us to grow is by relentlessly focusing on being the fastest way to communicate. Recently I had the opportunity to use Snapchat v5.0 on an iPhone 4. It had much of Bobby's original code in many of my original graphics. It was way faster than the current version of Snapchat running on my iPhone X. In our excitement to innovate and bring many new products into the world, we have lost the core of what made Snapchat the fastest way to communicate. In 2019, we will refocus our company on making Snapchat the fastest way to communicate so that we can unlock the core value of our service for the billions of people who have not yet learned how to use Snapchat. If we aren't able to unlock the core value of Snapchat, we won't ever be able to unlock the full power of our camera. This will require us to change the way that we work and put our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate at the forefront of everything we do at Snap. It might require us to change our products for different markets where some of our value-add features detract from our core product value. This clarifies Snapchat's strategy on the 3 axes of my social media framework: Snapchat intends to push out further on the utility axis at the expense of the social capital axis which, as we’ve noted before, is volatile ground to build a long-term business on. Many will say, especially Snapchat itself, that it has been the anti-Facebook all along. Because it has no likes, it liberates people from destructive status games. To believe that is to underestimate the ingenuity of humanity in its ability to weaponize any network for status games. Anyone who has studied kids using Snapchat know that it's just as integral a part of high school status and FOMO wars as Facebook, and arguably more so now that those kids largely don’t use Facebook. The only other social media app that is as sharp a stick is Instagram which has, it’s true, more overt social capital accumulation mechanisms. Still, the idea that kids use Snapchat like some pure messaging utility is laughable and makes me wonder if people have forgotten what teenage school life was like. Whether you see people attend a party that you’re not invited to on Instagram or on someone’s Snap, you still feel terrible. Remember Snapchat's original Best Friends list? I'm going to guess many of my readers don't, because, as noted earlier, old people probably didn't play that status game, if they'd even figured out how to use Snapchat by that point. This was just about as pure a status game feature as could be engineered for teens. Not only did it show the top three people you Snapped with most frequently, you could look at who the top three best friends were for any of your contacts. Essentially, it made the hierarchy of everyone's “friendships” public, making the popularity scoreboard explicit. I’m glad this didn’t exist when I was in high school, I really didn’t need metrics on how much of a loser I was You don’t want to know what the proof of work is to achieve Super BFF-dom As with aggregate follower counts and likes, the Best Friends list was a mechanism for people to accumulate a very specific form of social capital. From a platform perspective, however, there's a big problem with this feature: each user could only have one best friend. It put an artificial ceiling on the amount of social capital one could compete for and accumulate. In a clever move to unbound social capital accumulation and to turn a zero-sum game into a positive sum game, broadening the number of users working hard or engaging, Snapchat deprecated the very popular Best Friends list and replaced it with streaks. If you’ve never seen those numbers and emojis on the right of your Snapchat contacts list, no one loves you. Just kidding, it just means you’re old. If you and a friend Snap back and forth for consecutive days, you build up a streak which is tracked in your friends list. Young people quickly threw their heart and souls into building and maintaining streaks with their friends. This was literally proof of work as proof of friendship, quantified and tracked. Streaks, of course, have the wonderful quality of being unbounded. You can maintain as many streaks as you like. If you don't think social capital has value, you've never seen, as I have, a young person sobbing over having to go on vacation without their phone, or to somewhere without cell or wifi access, only to see all their streaks broken. Some kids have resorted, when forced to go abroad on a vacation, to leaving their phone with a friend who helps to keep all the streaks alive, like some sort of social capital babysitter or surrogate. What's hilarious is how efficiently young people maintain streaks. It's a daily ritual that often consists of just quickly running down your friend list and snapping something random, anything, just to increment the streak count. My nephew often didn’t even bother framing the camera up, most his streak-maintenance snaps were blurry pics of the side of his elbow, half his shoulder, things like that. Of course, as evidence of the fragility of social capital structures, streaks have started to lose heat. Many younger users of Snapchat no longer bother with them. Maintaining social capital games is always going to be a volatile game, prone to sudden and massive deflationary events, but while they work, they’re a hell of a drug. They also can be useful; for someone Snapping frequently, like all teens do, having a best friends list sorted to the top of your distribution list is a huge time-saver. Social capital and utility often can’t be separated cleanly. Still, given the precarious nature of status, and given the existence of Instagram which has always been a more unabashed social capital accumulation service, it’s not a bad strategy for Snapchat to push out towards increased utility in messaging instead. The challenge, as anyone competing in the messaging space knows, is that creating any durable utility advantage is brutally hard. In the game theory of tech competition, it's best to assume that any feature that can be copied will. And messaging may never be, from a profit perspective, the most lucrative of businesses. As a footnote, Snapchat is also playing on the entertainment axis with its Discover pane. Almost all social networks of some scale will play with some mix of social capital, utility, and entertainment, but each chooses how much to emphasize each dimension. Lengthening the Half-life of Status Games The danger of having a proof of work burden that doesn't change is that eventually, everyone who wants to mine for that social currency will have done so, and most of it will be depleted. At that point, the amount of status-driven potential energy left in the social network flattens. If, at that inflection, the service hasn't made headway in adding a lot of utility, the network can go stale. One way to combat this, which the largest social networks tend to do better than others, is add new forms of proof of work which effectively create a new reserve of potential social capital for users to chase. Instagram began with square photos and filters; it's since removed the aspect ratio constraint, added video, lengthened video limits, and added formats like Boomerang and Stories. Its parent company, Facebook, arguably has broadened the most of any social network in the world, going from a text-based status update tool for a bunch of Harvard students to a social network with so many formats and options that I can’t keep track of them all. These new hurdles are like downloadable content in video games, new levels to spice up a familiar game. Doing so is a delicate balance, because it’s quite possible that Facebook is so many things to so many people that it isn't really anything to anyone anymore. It is hard to be a club that admits everyone but still wants to offer a coherent status ladder. You can argue Facebook doesn't want to be in the status game, but if so, it had better add a lot more utility. Video games illuminate the proof of work cycle better than almost any category, it is the drosophila of this type of analysis given its rapid life cycle and overt skill-versus-reward tradeoffs. Why is it, for example, that big hit games tend to have a life cycle of about 18 months? A new game offers a whole new set of levels and challenges, and players jump into the status competition with gusto. But, eventually, skill differentiation tends to sort the player base cleanly. Players rise to the level of their mastery and plateau. Simultaneously, players become overly familiar with the game's challenges; the dopamine hit of accomplishment dissipates. A franchise like, say, Call of Duty, learns to manage this cycle by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to issue a new version of the game regularly. Each game offers familiarity but a new set of levels and challenges and environments. It's the circle of life. Some games can lengthen the cycle. For example, casino games in Vegas pay real money to set an attractive floor on the ROI of playing. Some MMORPGs offer other benefits to players, like a sense of community, which last longer than the pure skill challenge of playing the game. Looking at some of the longer lasting video game franchises like World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Fortnite reveal a lot about how a parallel industry has succeeded in lengthening the productive middle age of its top properties. I suspect the frontier of social network strategy will draw more and more upon deep study of these adjacent and much older social capital games. Fashion, video games, religion, and society itself are some of the original Status as a Service businesses. Why Some Companies Will Always Struggle with Social Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests. Have I met a few people in my life who are seemingly above all status games? Yes, but they are so few as to be something akin to miracles, and damn them for making the rest of us feel lousy over our vanity. The number of people who claim to be above status games exceeds those who actually are. I believe their professed distaste to be genuine, but even if it isn't, the danger of their indignation is that they actually become blind to how their product functions in some ways as Status as a Service business. Many of our tech giants, in fact, are probably always going to be weak at social absent executive turnover or smart acquisitions. Take Apple, which has actually tried before at building out social features. They built one in music, but it died off quickly. They've tried to add some social features to the photo album on iOS, though every time I've tried them out I end up more bewildered than anything else. iMessages, Apple fans might proclaim! Hundreds of millions of users, a ton of usage among teens, isn't that proof that Apple can do social? Well, in a sense, but mostly one of utility. Apple's social efforts tend to be social capital barren. Since Apple positions itself as the leading advocate for user privacy, it will always be constrained on building out social features since many of them trade off against privacy. Not all of them do, and it’s possible a social network based entirely on privacy can be successful, but 1) it would be challenging and 2) it's not clear many people mind trading off some privacy for showing off their best lives online. This is, of course, exactly why many people love and choose Apple, and they have more cash than they can spend. No one need feel sorry for Apple, and as is often the case, a company’s strengths and weaknesses stem from the same quality in their nature. I’d rather Apple continue to focus on building the best computers in the world. Still, it’s a false tradeoff to regard Apple’s emphasis on privacy as an excuse for awkward interactions like photo sharing on iOS. The same inherent social myopia applies to Google which famously took a crack at building a social network of its own with Google+. Like Apple, the team in Mountain View has always seemed more suited to building out networks of utility rather than social capital. Google is often spoken of as a company where software engineers have the most power. Engineers, in my experience, are driven by logic, and status-centered products are distasteful or mysterious to them, often both. Google will probably always be weak at social, but as with Apple, they compensate with unique strengths. Oddly enough, despite controlling one of the two dominant mobile platforms, they have yet to be able to launch a successful messaging app. That’s about as utility-driven a social application as there is, akin to email where Google does have sizeable market share with GMail. It's a shame as Google could probably use social as an added layer of utility in many of their products, especially in Google Maps. Amazon and Netflix both launched social efforts though they’ve largely been forgotten. It's likely the attempts were premature, pushed out into the world before either company had sufficient scale to enable positive flywheel effects. It’s hard enough launching a new social network, but it’s even harder to launch social features built around behaviors like shopping or renting DVD’s through the mail which occur infrequently. Neither company’s social efforts were the most elegantly designed, either (Facebook is underrated for its ability to launch a social product that scaled to billions of users, its design team has a mastery of maintaining ease of use for users of all cultures and ages). Given the industrialization of fake reviews, and given how many people have Prime accounts, Amazon could build a social service simply to facilitate product recommendations and reviews from people you know and trust; I increasingly turn a skeptical eye to both extremely positive and negative reviews on Amazon, even if they are listed as coming from verified purchasers. The key value of a feature like this would be utility, but the status boost from being a product expert would be the energy turning the flywheel. The thing is, Amazon actually has a track record of harnessing social dynamics in service of its retail business with features like reviewer rankings and global sales rank (both are discussed a bit further down). As for Netflix, I actually think social isn’t as useful as many would think in generating video recommendations (that’s a discussion for another day, but suffice it to say there is some narcissism of small differences when it comes to film taste). However, as an amplifier of Netflix as the modern water cooler, as a way to encourage herd behavior, social activity can serve as an added layer of buzz that for now is largely opaque to users inside Netflix apps. It's a strategy that is only viable if you can achieve the size of subscriber base that a Netflix has, and thus it is a form of secondary scale advantage that they could leverage more. However, there's another reason that senior execs at most companies, even social networks, are ill-suited to designing and leveraging social features. It’s a variant of winner's curse. Let Them Eat Cake You'll hear it again and again, the easiest way to empathize with your users is to be the canonical user yourself. I tend to subscribe to this idea, which is unfortunate because it means I have hundreds of apps installed on my phone at any point in time, just trying to keep up with the product zeitgeist. With social networks, one of the problems with seeing your own service through your users’ eyes is that every person has a different experience given who they follow and what the service's algorithm feeds them. When you have hundreds of millions or even billions of users, across different cultures, how do you accurately monitor what's going on? Your metrics may tell you that engagement is high and growing, but what is the composition of that activity, and who is exposed to what parts? Until we have metrics that distinguish between healthy and unhealthy activity, social network execs largely have to steer by anecdote, by licking a finger and sticking it in the air to ascertain the direction of the wind. Some may find it hard to believe when execs plead ignorance when alerted of the scope of problems on their services, but I don't. When it comes to running a community, the thickest veil of ignorance is the tidy metrics dashboard that munges hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of cohorts into just a handful. To really get the sense of a health of a social network, one must understand the topology of the network, and the volume and nature of connections and interactions among hundreds of millions or even billions of users. It’s impossible to process them all, but just as difficult today to summarize them without losing all sorts of critical detail. But perhaps even more confounding is that executives at successful social networks are some of the highest status people in the world. Forget first world problems, they have .1% or .001% problems. On a day-to-day basis, they hardly face a single issue that their core users grapple with constantly. Engagement goals may drive them towards building services that are optimized as social capital games, but they themselves are hardly in need of more status, except of a type they won't find on their own networks. [The one exception may be Jack Dorsey, as any tweet he posts now attracts an endless stream of angry replies. It’s hard to argue he doesn’t understand firsthand the downside risk of a public messaging protocol. Maybe, for victims of harassment on Twitter, we need a Jack that is less thick-skinned and stoic, not more.] The Social Capital - Financial Capital Exchange [If you fully believe in the existence and value of social capital, you can skip this section, though it may be of interest in understanding some ways to estimate its value.] That some of the largest, most valuable companies in history have been built so quickly in part on creating status games should be enough to convince you of the existence and value of social capital. Since we live in the age of social media, we live in perhaps the peak of social capital assets in the history of civilization. However, as noted earlier, one of the challenges of studying it is that we don't have agreed-upon definitions of how to measure it and thus to track its flows. I haven't found a clean definition of social capital but think of it as capital that derives from networks of people. If you want to explore the concept further, this page has a long list of definitions from literature. The fact is, I have deep faith in all my readers when it comes to social capital that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said about pornography, you "know it when you see it." But more than that, the dark matter that is social capital can be detected through those exchanges in which it converts into more familiar stores of value. If you've ever borrowed a cup of milk from your neighbor, or relied on them to watch your children for an afternoon, you know the value of social capital. If you lived in an early stage of human history, when people wandered in small nomadic tribes and regularly clubbed people of other tribes to death with sticks and stones, you also know the value of social capital through the protective cocoon of its presence and the sudden violence in its absence. Perhaps the easiest way to spot social capital is to look at places where people trade it for financial capital. With the maturing of social networks, we've seen the infrastructure to facilitate these exchanges come a long way. These trades allow us to assign a tangible value to social capital the way one might understand the value of an intangible assets like leveled-up World of Warcraft characters when they are sold on the open market. Perhaps the most oft-cited example of a social-to-financial-capital exchange is the type pulled off by influencers on Instagram and YouTube. I've met models who, in another life, might be mugging outside an Abercrombie and Fitch or working the front door at some high end restaurant in Los Angeles, but instead now pull down over 7 figures a year for posting photos of themselves luxuriating in specific resorts, wearing and using products from specific sponsors. When Jake or Logan Paul post a video of themselves preening in front of their new Lamborghini in the driveway of the mansion they bought using money stemming from their YouTube streaming, we know some exchange of social capital for financial capital has occurred upstream. Reshape distribution and you reshape the world. Similarly, we see flows the other direction. People buying hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter is one of the cleanest examples of trading financial capital for social capital. Later, that social capital can be converted back into financial capital any number of ways, including charging sponsors for posts. Depending on the relative value in both directions there can be arbitrage. [Klout, a much-mocked company online, attempted to more precisely track social capital valuations of people online, but, just as the truly wealthy mock the nouveau riche as gauche, many found the explicit measurement attempts unseemly. Most of these same people, however, compete hard for social capital online, so ¯\(ツ)/¯. The designation of which status games are acceptable is itself a status game.] Asia, where monetization models differ for a variety of cultural and contextual reasons, provides an even cleaner valuation of social capital. There, many social networks allow you to directly turn your social capital into financial capital, without leaving the network. For example, on live-streaming sites like YY, you can earn digital gifts from your viewers which cost actual money, the value of which you split with the platform. In the early days, a lot of YY consisted of cute girls singing pop songs. These days, as seen in the fascinating documentary People’s Republic of Desire, it has evolved into much more. Agencies have sprung up in China to develop and manage influencers, almost like farm systems in baseball with player development and coaches. The speed at which social capital can be converted into your own branded product lines is accelerating by leaps and bounds, and nowhere more so than in China. Meanwhile, on Twitter, if one of your tweets somehow goes massively viral, you still have to attach a follow-up tweet with a link to your GoFundMe page, a vulgar monetization hack in comparison. It’s China, not the U.S., that is the bleeding edge of influencer industrialization. I'm skeptical that all of Asia's monetization schemes will export to the culture in America, but for this post, the important thing is that social capital has real financial value, and networks differ along the spectrum of how easily that exchange can be made. Social Capital Accumulation and Storage As with cryptocurrency, it's no use accumulating social capital if you can't take ownership of it and store it safely. Almost all successful social networks are adept at providing both accumulation and storage mechanisms. It may sound obvious now, but consider the many apps and services that failed to provide something like this and saw all their value leak to other social networks. Hipstamatic came before Instagram and was the first photo filter app of note that I used on mobile. But, unlike Instagram, it charged for its filters and had no profile pages, social network, or feed. I used Hipstamatic filters to modify my iPhone photos and then posted them to other social networks like Facebook. Hipstamatic provided utility but captured none of the social capital that came from the use of its filters. Contrast this with a company like Musical.ly, which I mentioned above. They came up with a unique proof of work burden, but unlike Hipstamatic, they wanted to capture the value of the social capital that its users would mine by creating their musical skits. They didn't want these skits to just be uploaded to Instagram or Facebook or other networks. Therefore, they created a feed within the app, to give its best users distribution for their work. By doing so, Musical.ly owned that social capital it helped generate. If your service is free, the best alternative to capturing the value you create is to own the marketplace where that value is realized and exchanged. Musical.ly founder Alex Zhu likens starting a new social network to founding a new country and trying to attract citizens from established countries. It's a fun analogy, though I prefer the cryptocurrency metaphor because most users are citizens of multiple social networks in the tech world, managing their social capital assets across all of those networks as a sort of diversified portfolio of status. For the individual user, we've standardized on a few basic social capital accumulation mechanisms. There is the profile, to which your metrics attach, most notably your follower count and list. Followers or friends are the atomic unit of many social networks, and the advantage of followers as a measure is it generally tends to only grow over time. It also makes for an easy global ranking metric. Local scoring of social capital at the atomic level usually exists in the form of likes of some sort, one of the universal primitives of just about every social network. These are more ephemeral in nature given the nature of feeds, which tend to prioritize distribution of more recent activity, but most social networks have some version of this since followers tend to accumulate more slowly. Likes correlate more strongly with your activity volume and serve as a source of continual short-term social capital injections, even if each like is, in the long-run, less valuable than a follower or a friend. Some networks allow for accelerated distribution of posts through resharing, like retweeting (with many unintended consequences, but that's a discussion for another day). Some also allow comments, and there are other network-specific variants, but most of these are some form of social capital that can attach to posts. Again, this isn't earth-shattering to most users of social networks. However, where it’s instructive is in examining those social networks which make such social capital accumulation difficult. A good example is the anonymous social network, like Whisper or Secret. The premise of such social networks was that anonymity would enable users to share information and opinions they would otherwise be hesitant to be associated with. But, as is often the case, that strength turned out to be a weakness, because users couldn't really claim any of the social capital they'd created there. Many of the things written on these networks were so toxic that to claim ownership of them would be social capital negative in the aggregate. A network like Reddit solved this through its implementation of karma, but it's fair to say that it's also been a long struggle for Reddit to suppress the dark asymmetric incentives unlocked by detaching social capital from real-life identity and reputation. [Balaji Srinivasan once mentioned that someday the cryptocurrencies might allow someone to extract the value from an anonymous social network without revealing their identity publicly, but for now, at least, a lot of this status on social networks isn’t monetary in nature. A lot of it’s just for the lulz.] For any single user, the stickiness of a social network often correlates strongly with the volume of social capital they've amassed on that network. People sometimes will wholesale abandon social networks, but it's rare unless the status earned there has undergone severe deflation. Social capital does tend to be non-fungible which also tends to make it easier to abandon ship. If your Twitter followers aren't worth anything on another network, it's less painful to just walk away from the account if it isn't worth the trouble anymore. It's strange to think that social networks like Twitter and Facebook once allowed users to just wholesale export their graphs to other networks since it allowed competing networks to jumpstart their social capital assets in a massive way, but that only goes to show how even some of the largest social networks at the time underestimated the massive value of their social capital assets. Facebook also, at one point, seemed to overestimate the value of inbound social capital that they'd capture by allowing third party services and apps to build on top of their graph. The restrictions on porting graphs is a positive from the perspective of the incumbent social networks, but from a user point-of-view, it's frustrating. Given the difficulty of grappling with social networks given the consumer welfare standard for antitrust, an option for curbing the power of massive network effects businesses is to require that users be allowed to take their graph with them to other networks (as many have suggested). This would blunt the power of social networks along the social capital axis and force them to compete more on utility and entertainment axes. Social Capital Arbitrage Because social networks often attract different audiences, and because the configuration of graphs even when there are overlapping users often differ, opportunities exist to arbitrage social capital across apps. A prominent user of this tactic was @thefatjewish, the popular Instagram account (his real name was Josh Ostrovsky). He accumulated millions of followers on Instagram in large part by taking other people's jokes from Twitter and other social networks and then posting them as his own on Instagram. Not only did he rack up followers and likes by the millions, he even got signed with CAA! When he got called on it, he claimed it wasn't what he was about. He said, "Again, Instagram is just part of a larger thing I do. I have an army of interns working out of the back of a nail salon in Queens. We have so much stuff going on: I'm writing a book, I've got rosé. I need them to bathe me. I've got so many other things that I need them to do. It just didn't seem like something that was extremely dire." Which is really a long, bizarre way of saying, you caught me. Let he who does not have an army of interns bathing them throw the first stone. Since then, similar joke aggregator accounts on Instagram have continued to proliferate, but some of them now follow the post-fatjewish-scandal social norm of including the proper attribution for each joke in the photo (for example including the Twitter username and profile pic within the photo of the “borrowed” tweet). But many do not, and even for those who do, the most prominent can trigger a backlash. The hashtag #fuckfuckjerry is an emergent protest against the popular Instagram account @fuckjerry which, like @fatjewish, curates the best jokes from others and daytraded that into a small media company, one that featured in the Fyre Festival debacle. As long as we have multiple social networks that don't quite work the same way, there will continue to be these social media arbitragers copying work from one network and to a different network to accumulate social capital on closing the distribution gap. Before the internet, men resorted to quoting movies or Mitch Hedberg jokes in conversation, to steal a bit of personality and wit from a more gifted comedian. This is the modern form of that, supercharged with internet-scale reach. At some level, a huge swath of social media posts are just attempts to build status off of someone else's work. The two tenets at the start of this article predict that this type of arbitrage will always be with us. Consider someone linking to an article from Twitter or Facebook, or posting a screenshot of a paragraph from someone else's book. The valence of the reaction from the original creators seems to vary according to how the spoils of resharing are divvied up. The backlash to Instagram accounts like @thefatjewish and @fuckjerry may stem from the fact that they don't really share value from those whose jokes they redistribute, whereas posting an excerpt from a book on Twitter, for example, generates welcome publicity for the author. Social Capital Games as Temporary Energy Sources Structured properly, social capital incentive structures can serve as an invaluable incentive. For example, curation of good content across the internet remains an never-ending problem in this age of infinite content, so offering rewards for surfacing interesting things remains one of the oldest and most reliable marketplaces of the internet. A canonical example is Reddit, where users bring interesting links, among other content, in exchange for a currency literally named karma. Accumulate enough karma and you'll unlock other benefits, like the ability to create your own subreddit, or to join certain private subreddits. Twitter is another social network where people tend to bring interesting content in the hopes of amassing more followers and likes. If you follow enough of the right accounts, Twitter becomes an interestingness pellet dispenser. Some companies which aren't typically thought of as social networks still turn to social capital games to solve a particular problem. On one Christmas vacation, I stumbled downstairs for a midnight snack and found my friend, a father of three, still up, typing on his laptop. What, I asked, was he doing still up when he had to get up in a few hours to take care of his kids? He was, he admitted sheepishly, banging out a litany of reviews to try to maintain his Yelp Elite status. To this day, some of my friends still speak wistfully about some of the Yelp Elite parties they attended back in the day. Think of how many reviews Yelp accumulate in the early days just by throwing a few parties? It was, no doubt, well worth it, and at the point when it isn't (what's the marginal value of writing the, at last count, 9655th review of Ippudo in New York City?), it's something easily dialed back or deprecated. Amazon isn't typically thought of as a company that understands social, but in its earliest days, before even Yelp, it employed a similar tactic to boost its volume of user reviews. Amazon Top Reviewers was a globally ranked list of every reviewer on all of Amazon. You could boost your standing by accumulating more useful review votes from shoppers for your reviews. I'll always remember Harriet Klausner, who dominated that list for years, reviewing seemingly every book in print. Amazon still maintains a top customer reviewer list, but it has been devalued over time as volume of reviews is no longer a real problem for Amazon. Another example of a status game that Amazon employed to great effect, and which doesn't exist anymore, was Global Sales Rank. For a period, every product on Amazon got ranked against every other product in a dynamic sales rank leaderboard, and the figure would be displayed prominently near the top of each product detail page. Book authors pointed customers to Amazon to buy their books in the hope of goosing their sales rank the same way authors today often commit to buy some volume of their own book when it releases in the hopes of landing on the NYTimes bestseller list the week it releases. IMDb and Wikipedia are two companies which built up entire valuable databases almost entirely by building mechanisms to harness the equal mix of status-seeking and altruism of domain experts. As with Reddit, accumulating a certain amount of reputation on these services unlocked additional abilities, and both companies built massive databases of information with very low production and editorial costs. You can think of social capital accumulation incentives like these as ways to transform the potential energy of status into whatever form of kinetic energy your venture needs. Why Most Celebrity Apps Fail For a while, a trend among celebrities was to launch their own app. The Kardashian app is perhaps the most prominent example, but there are others. From a social capital perspective, these create little value because they simply draw down upon the celebrity's own status. Almost every person who joins just wants content from the eponymous celebrity. The volume of interaction between the users of the app themselves, the fans, is minimal to non-existent. Essentially these apps are self-owned distribution channels for the stars, and as such, they tend to be vanity projects rather than durable assets. One can imagine such apps trying to foster more interaction among the users, but that is a really complex effort, and most such efforts have neither the skills to take this on nor the will or capital necessary to see it through. Another way to think of all these celebrity ventures is to measure the social capital and utility of the product or service if you remove all the social capital from the celebrity in question. A lot minus a lot equals zero. Conclusion: Everybody Wants to Rule the World In the immortal words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Status is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." That many of the largest tech companies are, in part, status as a service businesses, is not often discussed. Most people don't like to admit to being motivated by status, and few CEO's are going to admit that the job to be done for their company is stroking people’s egos. From a user perspective, people are starting to talk more and more about the soul-withering effects of playing an always-on status game through the social apps on their always connected phones. You could easily replace Status as a Service with FOMO as a Service. It’s one reason you can still meet so many outrageously wealthy people in Manhattan or Silicon Valley who are still miserable. This piece is not my contribution to the well-trod genre of Medium thinkpieces counseling stoicism and Buddhism or transcendental meditation or deleting apps off of your phone to find inner peace. There is wisdom in all of those, but if I have anything to offer on that front, it’s this: if you want control of your own happiness, don’t tie it to someone else’s scoreboard. Recall the wisdom of Neil McCauley in the great film Heat. To get off the hedonic treadmill, heed the words of Robert DeNiro’s Neil McCauley in that classic film about status, Heat, “Don't let yourself get attached to any social capital you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” At the end of Heat, he fails to follow his own advice, and look what happened to him. Yet, I come not to bury Caesar, but also not to praise him. Rather, as Emily Wilson says at the start of her brilliant new translation of The Odyssey, “tell me about a complicated man.” So much of the entire internet was built on a foundation of social capital, of intangible incentives like reputation. Before the tech giants of today, I combed through newsgroups, blogs, massive FAQs, and countless other resources built by people who felt, in part, a jolt of dopamine from the recognition that comes from contributing to the world at large. At Amazon, someone coined a term for this type of motivational currency: egoboo (short for, you guessed it, egoboost). Something like Wikipedia, built in large part on egoboo, is a damned miracle. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t think we have to lose that. Of course, like the Force, status is equally potent as fuel for the darkest, cruelest parts of human nature. If you look at the respective mission statements of Twitter and Facebook—"to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" and “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”—what is striking is the assumption that these are fundamentally positive outcomes. There’s no questioning of what the downsides of connecting everyone and enabling instant sharing of information among anyone might be. Of course, both companies, and many others, have now had to grapple with the often unbounded downside risk of just wiring together billions of people with few guardrails. Reading the Senate Intelligence Committee reports on Russian infiltration of social networks in the 2016 election, what emerges is unsettling: in so many ways the Russians had a more accurate understanding of the users of these services than the product teams running them. In either case, much of the cost has been born not by the companies themselves but society. Companies benefit from the limitless upside of their models, so it’s not unreasonable to expect them to bear the costs, just as we expect corporations to bear the cost of polluting rivers with their factories. If we did, as Hunter Walk has noted, profit margins would be lower, but society and discourse might be healthier. Contrary to some popular Twitter counsel, the problem is not that the leaders of these companies don’t have humanities degrees. But the solution also doesn’t lie in ignoring that humans are wired to pursue social capital. In fact, overlooking this fundamental aspect of human nature arguably landed us here, at the end of this first age of social network goliaths, wondering where it all went haywire. If we think of these networks as marketplaces trading only in information, and not in status, then we're only seeing part of the machine. The menacing phone call has been coming from inside the house all along. Ben Thompson refers to this naivete from tech executives as the pollyannish assumption. Having worked on multiple products in my career, I’m sympathetic to the fact that no product survives engagement with humans intact, But this first era of Status as a Service businesses is closing, and pleading ignorance won’t work moving forward. To do so is to come off like Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca.
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle." - Sun Tzu My first job at Amazon was as the first analyst in strategic planning, the forward-looking counterpart to accounting, which records what already happened. We maintained several time horizons for our forward forecasts, from granular monthly forecasts to quarterly and annual forecasts to even five and ten year forecasts for the purposes of fund-raising and, well, strategic planning. One of the most difficult things to forecast was our adoption rate. We were a public company, though, and while Jeff would say, publicly, that "in the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, in the long run, it's a scale," that doesn't provide any air cover for strategic planning. It's your job to know what's going to happen in the future as best as possible, and every CFO of a public company will tell you that they take the forward guidance portion of their job seriously. Because of information asymmetry, analysts who cover your company depend quite a bit on guidance on quarterly earnings calls to shape their forecasts and coverage for their clients. It's not just that giving the wrong guidance might lead to a correction in your stock price but that it might indicate that you really have no idea where your business is headed, a far more damaging long-run reveal. It didn't take long for me to see that our visibility out a few months, quarters, and even a year was really accurate (and precise!). What was more of a puzzle, though, was the long-term outlook. Every successful business goes through the famous S-curve, and most companies, and their investors, spend a lot of time looking for that inflection point towards hockey-stick growth. But just as important, and perhaps less well studied, is that unhappy point later in the S-curve, when you hit a shoulder and experience a flattening of growth. One of the huge advantages for us at Amazon was that we always had a fairly good proxy for our total addressable market (TAM). It was easy to pull the statistics for the size of the global book market. Just as a rule of thumb, one could say that if we took 10% of the global book market it would mean our annual revenues would be X. One could be really optimistic and say that we might even expand the TAM, but finance tends to be the conservative group in the company by nature (only the paranoid survive and all that). When I joined Amazon I was thrown almost immediately into working with a bunch of MBA's on business plans for music, video, packaged software, magazines, and international. I came to think of our long-term TAM as a straightforward layer cake of different retail markets. Still, the gradient of adoption was somewhat of a mystery. I could, in my model, understand that one side of it was just exposure. That is, we could not obtain customers until they'd heard of us, and I could segment all of those paths of exposure into fairly reliable buckets: referrals from affiliate sites (we called them Associates), referrals from portals (AOL, Excite, Yahoo, etc.), and word-of-mouth (this was pre-social networking but post-email so the velocity of word-of-mouth was slower than it is today). Awareness is also readily trackable through any number of well-tested market research methodologies. Still, for every customer who heard of Amazon, how could I forecast whether they'd make a purchase or not? Why would some people use the service while others decided to pass? For so many startups and even larger tech incumbents, the point at which they hit the shoulder in the S-curve is a mystery, and I suspect the failure to see it occurs much earlier. The good thing is that identifying the enemy sooner allows you to address it. We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit. For me, in strategic planning, the question in building my forecast was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It's an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or, as I was back then, a planner in finance. Amazon's invisible asymptote Fortunately for Amazon, and perhaps critical to much of its growth over the years, perhaps the single most important asymptote was one we identified very early on. Where our growth would flatten if we did not change our path was, in large part, due to this single factor. We had two ways we were able to flush out this enemy. For people who did shop with us, we had, for some time, a pop-up survey that would appear right after you'd placed your order, at the end of the shopping cart process. It was a single question, asking why you didn't purchase more often from Amazon. For people who'd never shopped with Amazon, we had a third party firm conduct a market research survey where we'd ask those people why they did not shop from Amazon. Both converged, without any ambiguity, on one factor. You don't even need to rewind to that time to remember what that factor is because I suspect it's the same asymptote governing e-commerce and many other related businesses today. Shipping fees. People hate paying for shipping. They despise it. It may sound banal, even self-evident, but understanding that was, I'm convinced, so critical to much of how we unlocked growth at Amazon over the years. People don't just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree. We know this because our first attempt to address this was to show, in the shopping cart and checkout process, that even after paying shipping, customers were saving money over driving to their local bookstore to buy a book because, at the time, most Amazon customers did not have to pay sales tax. That wasn't even factoring in the cost of getting to the store, the depreciation costs on the car, and the value of their time. People didn't care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one's time is so detached from the event of spending one's time. Most time we spend isn't like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback. Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment. You can't imagine what a relief it is to have a single overarching obstacle to focus on as a product person. It's the same for anyone trying to solve a problem. Half the comfort of diets that promise huge weight loss in exchange for cutting out sugar or carbs or whatever is feeling like there's a really simple solution or answer to a hitherto intractable, multi-dimensional problem. Solving people's distaste for paying shipping fees became a multi-year effort at Amazon. Our next crack at this was Super Saver Shipping: if you placed an order of $25 or more of qualified items, which included mostly products in stock at Amazon, you'd receive free standard shipping. The problem with this program, of course, was that it caused customers to reduce their order frequency, waiting until their orders qualified for the free shipping. In select cases, forcing customers to minimize consumption of your product-service is the right long-term strategy, but this wasn't one of those. That brings us to Amazon Prime. This is a good time to point out that shipping physical goods isn't free. Again, self-evident, but it meant that modeling Amazon Prime could lead to widely diverging financial outcomes depending on what you thought it would do to the demand curve and average order composition. To his credit, Jeff decided to forego testing and just go for it. It's not so uncommon in technology to focus on growth to the exclusion of all other things and then solve for monetization in the long run, but it's easier to do so for a social network than a retail business with real unit economics. The more you sell, the more you lose is not and has never been a sustainable business model (people confuse this for Amazon's business model all the time, and still do, which ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). The rest, of course, is history. Or at least near-term history. It turns out that you can have people pre-pay for shipping through a program like Prime and they're incredibly happy to make the trade. And yes, on some orders, and for some customers, the financial trade may be a lossy one for the business, but on net, the dramatic shift in the demand curve is stunning and game-changing. And, as Jeff always noted, you can make micro-adjustments in the long run to tweak the profit leaks. For some really large, heavy items, you can tack on shipping surcharges or just remove them from qualifying for Prime. These days, some items in Amazon are marked as "Add-on items" and you can only order them in conjunction with enough other items such that they can be shipped with those items rather than in isolation. [Jeff counseled the same "fix it later" strategy in the early days when we didn't have good returns tracking. For a window of time in the early days of Amazon, if you shipped us a box of books for returns, we couldn't easily tell if you'd purchase them at Amazon and so we'd credit you for them, no questions asked. One woman took advantage of this loophole and shipped us boxes and boxes of books. Given our limited software resources, Jeff said to just ignore the lady and build a way to solve for that later. It was really painful, though, so eventually customer service representatives all shared, amongst themselves, the woman's name so they could look out for it in return requests even before such systems were built. Like a mugshot pinned to every monitor saying "Beware this customer." A tip of the hat to you, maam, wherever you are, for your enterprising spirit in exploiting that loophole!] Prime is a type of scale moat for Amazon because it isn't easy for other retailers to match from a sheer economic and logistical standpoint. As noted before, shipping isn't actually free when you have to deliver physical goods. The really challenging unit economics of delivery businesses like Postmates, when paired with people's aversion for paying for shipping, makes for tough sledding, at least until the cost of delivering such goods can be lowered drastically, perhaps by self-driving cars or drones or some such technology shift. Furthermore, very few customers shop enough with retailers other than Amazon to make a pre-pay program like Prime worthwhile to them. Even if they did, it's very likely Amazon's economies of scale in shipping and deep knowledge of how to distribute their inventory optimally means their unit economics on delivery are likely superior. The net of it is that long before Amazon hit what would've been an invisible asymptote on its e-commerce growth it had already erased it. Know thine enemy. Invisible asymptotes are...invisible An obvious problem for many companies, however, is that they are creating new types of businesses and services that don't lend themselves to easily identifying such invisible asymptotes. Many are not like Amazon where there are readily tracked metrics like the size of the global book market with which to peg their TAM. Take social networks, for example. What's the shoulder of the curve for something like Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Snapchat? Some of the limits to their growth are easier to spot than others. For messaging and some more general social networking apps, for example, in many cases network effects are geographical. Since these apps build on top of real-world social graphs, and many of those are geographically clustered, there are winner-take-all dynamics such that in many countries one messaging app dominates, like Kakao in Korea or Line in Taiwan. There can be geo-political considerations, too, that help ensure that that WeChat will dominate in China to the exclusion of all competitors, for example. For others, though, it takes a bit more product insight, and some might say intuition, to see the ceiling before you bump into it. For both employees and investors, understanding product-market unfit follows very closely on identifying product-market fit as an existential challenge. Without direct access to internal metrics and research, it's difficult to use much other than public information and my own product intuition to analyze potential asymptotes for many companies, but let's take a quick survey of several more prominent companies and consider some of their critical asymptotes (these companies are large enough that they likely have many, but I'll focus on the macro). You can apply this to startups, too, but there are some differences between achieving initial product market fit and avoiding the shoulder in the S-curve after already having found it. Twitter Let's start with Twitter, for many in tech the most frustrating product from the perspective of the gap between the actual and the potential. Its user growth has been flat for quite some time, and so it can be said to have already run full speed into an invisible asymptote. In quarterly earnings calls, it's apparent management often have no idea if or when or how that might shift because their guidance is often a collective shrug. One popular early school of thought on Twitter, a common pattern with most social networks, is that more users need to experience what the power users or early adopters are experiencing and they'll turn into active users. Many a story of social networks who've continued to grow point to certain keystone metrics as pivotal to unlocking product-market fit. For example, once you've friended 30 people on Facebook, you're hooked. For Twitter, an equivalent may be following enough people to generate an interesting feed. Pattern-matching moves more quickly through Silicon Valley than almost any other place I've lived, so stories like that are passed around through employees and Board meetings and other places where the rich and famous tech elite hobnob, and so it's not surprising that this theory is raised for every social network that hits the shoulder in their S-curve. There's more than a whiff of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm in this idea, some sense that moving from early adopters to the mainstream involves convincing more users to use the same product/service as early adopters do. In the case of Twitter, I think the theory is wrong. Given the current configuration of the product, I don't think any more meaningful user growth is possible, and tweaking the product as it is now won't unlock any more growth. The longer they don't acknowledge this, the longer they'll be stuck in a Red Queen loop of their own making. Sometimes, the product-market fit with early adopters is only that. The product won't go mainstream because other people don't want or need that product. In these cases, the key to unlocking growth is usually customer segmentation, creating different products for different users. Mistaking one type of business for the other can be a deadly mistake because the strategies for addressing them are so different. A common symptom of this mistake is not seeing the shoulder in the S-curve coming at all, not understanding the nature of your product-market unfit. I believe the core experience of Twitter has reached most everyone in the world who likes it. Let's examine the core attributes of Twitter the product (which I treat as distinct from Twitter the service, the public messaging protocol). It is heavily text-based, with 140 and now 280 character limit snippets of text from people you've followed presented in a vertical scrolling feed in some algorithmic order, which, for the purposes of this exercise, I'll just consider roughly chronological. For fans, most of whom are infovores, the nature of product-market fit is, as with many of our tech products today, one of addiction. Because the chunks of text are short, if one tweet is of no interest, you can quickly scan and scroll to another with little effort. Discovering tweets of interest in what appears to be a largely random order rewards the user with dopamine hits on that time-tested Skinner box variable frequency. Instead of rats hitting levers for pellets of food, power Twitter user push or pull on their phone screens for the next tasty pellet of text. For infovores, text, in contrast to photos or videos or music, is the medium of choice from a velocity standpoint. There is deep satisfaction in quickly decoding the textual information, the scan rate is self-governed on the part of the reader, unlike other mediums which unfold at their own pace (this is especially the case with video, which infovores hate for its low scannability). Over time, this loop tightens and accelerates through the interaction of all the users on Twitter. Likes and retweets and other forms of feedback guide people composing tweets to create more of the type that receive positive feedback. The ideal tweet (which I mean one that will receive maximum positive feedback) combines some number of the following attributes: Is pithy. Sounds like a fortune cookie. The character limit encourages this type of compression. Is slightly surprising. This can be a contrarian idea or just a cliche encoded in a semi-novel way. Rewards some set of readers' priors, injecting a pleasing dose of confirmation bias directly into the bloodstream. Blasts someone that some set of people dislike intensely. This is closely related to the previous point. Is composed by someone famous, preferably someone a lot of people like but don't consider to be a full-time Tweeter, like Chrissy Teigen or Kanye West. Is on a topic that most people think they understand or on which they have an opinion. Of course, the set of ideal qualities varies by subgroup on Twitter. Black Twitter differs from rationalist Twitter which differs from NBA Twitter. The meta point is that the flywheel spins more and more quickly over time within each group. The problem is that for those who don't use Twitter, almost all of its ideal attributes among the early adopter cohort are those which other people find bewildering and unattractive. Many people find the text-heavy nature of Twitter to be a turn-off. The majority of people, actually. The naturally random sort order of ideas that comes from the structure of Twitter, one which pings the pleasure centers of the current heavy user cohort when they find an interesting tweet, is utterly perplexing to those who don't get the service. Why should they hunt and peck for something of interest? Why are conversations so difficult to follow (actually, this is a challenge even for those who enjoy Twitter)? Why do people have to work so hard to parse the context of tweets? Falling into the trap of thinking other users will be like you is especially pernicious because the people building the product are usually among that early adopter cohort. The easiest north star for a product person is their own intuition. But if they're working on a product that requires customer segmentation, being in the early adopter cohort means one's instincts will keep guiding you towards the wrong North star and the company will just keep bumping into the invisible asymptote without any idea why. This points to an important qualifier to the "crossing the chasm" idea of technology diffusion. If the chasm is large enough, the same product can't cross it. Instead, on the other side of the gaping chasm is just a different country altogether, with different constituents with different needs. I use Twitter a lot (I recently received a notification I'd passed my 11-year anniversary of joining the service) but almost everyone in my family, from my parents to my siblings to my girlfriend to my nieces and nephews has tried and given up on Twitter. It doesn't fulfill any deep-seated need for any of them. It's not surprising to me that Twitter is populated heavily by journalists and a certain cohort of techies and intellectuals who all, to me, are part of a broader species of infovore. For them, opening Twitter must feel as if they've donned Cerebro and have global contact with thousands of brains all over the world, as if the fabric of their brain had been flattened and stretched out wide and laid on top of that of millions of others brains all over the world. Quiet, I am reading the tweets. Mastering Twitter is already something this group of people do all the time in their lives and jobs, only Twitter accelerates it, like a bicycle for intellectual conversation and preening. Twitter, at its best, can provide a feeling of near real-time communal knowledge sharing that satisfies some of the same needs as something like SoulCycle or Peloton. A feeling of communion that also feels like it's productive. If my instincts are right, then all the iterating around the margins on Twitter won't do much of anything to change the growth curve of the service. It might improve the experience for the current cohort of users and increase usage (for example, curbing abuse and trolls is an immediate and obvious win for those who experience all sorts of terrible harassment on the service), but it doesn't change the fact that this core Twitter product isn't for all the people who left the club long ago, soon after they walked in and realized it was just a bunch of nerds who'd ordered La Croix bottle service and were sitting around talking about Bitcoin and stoicism and transcendental meditation. The good news is that the Twitter service, that public messaging protocol with a one-way follow model, could be the basis for lots of products that might appeal to other people in the world. Knowing the enemy can prevent wasting time chasing the wrong strategy. Unfortunately, one of the main paths towards coming up with new products built on top of that protocol was the third party developer program, and, well, Twitter has treated its third party developers like unwanted stepchildren for a long time. For whatever reason, it's difficult to speculate without having been there, Twitter's rate of product development internally has been glacial. A vibrant third party-developer program could have helped by massively increasing the vectors of development on Twitter's very elegant public messaging protocol and datasets. [Note, however, that I'm sympathetic to tech companies that restrict building clones of their service using their API's. No company owes it to others to allow people to build direct competitors to their own product. Most people don't remember, but Amazon's first web services offering was for affiliates to build sites to sell things. Some sites started building massive Amazon clones and so Amazon's web services evolved into other forms, eventually settling on what most people know it as today.] In addition, I've long wondered if the shutting out of third party developers on Twitter was an attempt to aggregate and own all their own ad inventory. Both these problems could've been solved by tweaking the Twitter third party development program. Developers could be offered two paths. One option is that for every X number of tweets a developer pulled, they'd have to carry and display a Twitter-inserted ad unit. This would make it possible for Twitter to support third-party clients like Tweetbot that compete somewhat with Twitter's own clients. Maybe one of these developers would come up with improvements on top of Twitter's own client apps, but in doing so they'd increase Twitter's ad inventory. The second option would be to pay some fixed fee for every X tweets pulled. That would force the developer to come up with some monetization scheme on their own to cover their usage, but at least the option would exist. I don't doubt that some enterprising developers might come up with some way to monetize a particular use case, for example for business research. Twitter the product/app has hit its invisible asymptote. Twitter the protocol still has untapped potential. Snapchat Snapchat is another example of a company that's hit a shoulder in its growth curve. Unlike Twitter, though, I suspect its invisible asymptote is less an issue of its feature set and more one of a generational divide. That's not to say that making the interface less inscrutable earlier on wouldn't have helped a bit, but I suspect only at the margins. In fact, the opaque nature of the interface probably served Snapchat incredibly well when the product came along, regardless of whether or not it was intended that way. Snapchat came along at a moment when kids' parents were joining Facebook, and when Facebook had been around long enough for the paper trail of its early, younger users to come back and bite some of them. Along comes a service that not only wipes out content by default after a short period of time but is inscrutable to the very parents who might crash the party. In fact, there's an entire class of products for which I believe an Easter Egg-like interface is actually preferable to an elegant, self-describing interface, long seen as the apex of UI design (more on that another day). I've written before about selfies as a second language. At the root of that phenomenon is the idea that a generation of kids raised with smartphones with a camera front and back have found the most efficient way to communicate is with the camera, not the keyboard. That's not the case for an older cohort of users who almost never send selfies as a first resort. The very default of Snapchat to the camera screen is such a bold choice that it will probably never be the messaging app of choice for old folks, no matter how Snapchat moves around and re-arranges its other panes. More than that, I suspect every generation needs spaces of its own, places to try on and leave behind identities at low cost and on short, finite time horizons. That applies to social virtual spaces as much as it does to physical spaces. Look at how old people use Snapchat and you'll see lots of use of Stories. Watch a young person use Snapchat and it's predominantly one-to-one messaging using the camera (yes, I know some of the messages I receive on Snap are the same ones that person is sending to everyone one-to-one, but the hidden nature of that behavior allows me to indulge an egocentric rather than Copernican model of the universe). Now, it's possible for one app to serve multiple audiences that way, but it will either have to compromise all or some of its user experience to do so. At a deeper level, I think a person's need for ephemeral content varies across one's lifetime. It's of much higher value when one is young, especially in formative years. As one ages, and time's counter starts to run low, one turns nostalgic, and the value of permanent content, especially from long bygone days, increases, serving as beautifully aged relics of another era. One also tends to be more adept at managing one's public image the more time passes, lessening the need for ephemerality. All this is to say that I don't think making the interface of Snapchat easier to use is going to move it off of the shoulder on its S-curve. That's addressing a different underlying cause than the one that lies behind its invisible asymptote. The good news for Snapchat is that I don't think Facebook is going to be able to attract the youngsters. I don't care if Facebook copies Snapchat's exact app one for one, it's not going to happen. The bad news for Snapchat is that it probably isn't going to attract the oldies either. The most interesting question is whether Snapchat's cohort stays with it for life, and the next interesting question is who attracts the next generation of kids to get their first smartphones. Will they, like every generation of youth before them, demand a social network of their own? Sometimes I think they will just to claim a namespace that isn't already spoken for. Who wants to be joesmith43213 when you can be joesmith on some new sexy social network? As a competitor, however, Instagram is more worrisome than Facebook. It came along after Facebook, as Snapchat did, and so it had the opportunity to be a social network that a younger generation could roam as pioneers, mining so much social capital yet to be claimed. It is also largely an audio-visual network which is appealing to a more visually literate generation. When Messenger incorporated Stories into its app, it felt like a middle-aged couple dressing in cowboy chic and attending Coachella. When Instagram cribbed Stories, though, it addressed a real supply-side content creation issue for the same young'uns who used Snapchat. That is, people were being too precious about what they shared on Instagram, decreasing usage frequency. By adding Stories, they created a mechanism that wouldn't force content into the feed and whose ephemerality encouraged more liberal capture and sharing without the associated guilt. This is a general pattern among social networks and products in general: to broaden their appeal they tend to broaden their use cases. It's rare to see a product adhere strictly to its early specificity and still avoid hitting a shoulder in their adoption S-curve. Look at Facebook today compared to Facebook in its early days. Look at Amazon's product selection now compared to when it first launched. It takes internal fortitude for a product team to make such concessions (I would say courage but we need to sprinkle that term around less liberally in tech). The stronger the initial product market fit, the more vociferously your early adopters will protest when you make any changes. Like a band that is accused of selling out, there is an inevitable sense that a certain sharpness of flavor, of choice, has seeped out as more and more people join up and as a service loosens up and accommodates more more use cases. I remember seeing so many normally level-headed people on Twitter threaten to abandon the service when they announced they were increasing the character limit from 140 to 280. The irony, of course, was that the character-limit increase likely improved the service for its current users while doing nothing to attract people who didn't use the service, even though the move was addressed mostly to heathen. Back to Snapchat. I wrote a long time ago that the power of social networks lies in their graph. That means many things, and in Snapchat's case it holds a particularly fiendish double bind. That Snapchat is the social network claimed by the young is both a blessing and a curse. Were a bunch of old folks to suddenly flock to Snapchat, it might induce a case of Groucho Marx's, "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Facebook On the dimension of utility, Facebook's network effects continue to be pure and unbounded. The more people that are on Facebook, the more it's useful for certain things for which a global directory is useful. Even though many folks don't use Facebook a lot, it's rare I can't find them on Messenger if I don't have their email address or phone number. The complexity of analyzing Facebook is that it serves different needs in different countries and markets, social network having strong path dependency in their usage patterns. In many countries, Facebook is the internet; it's odd as an American to travel to countries where businesses' only presence online is a Facebook page, so accustomed I am to searching for American businesses on the web or Yelp first. When it comes to the "social" aspect of social networking, the picture is less clear-cut. Here I'll focus on the U.S. market since it's the one I'm most familiar with. Because Facebook is the largest social network in history, it may be encountering scaling challenges few other entities have ever seen. The power of a social network lies in its graph, and that is a conundrum in many ways. One is that a massive graph is a blessing until it's a curse. For social creatures like humans who've long lived in smaller networks and tribes, a graph that conflates everyone you know is intimidating to broadcast to, except for those who have no compulsion about performing no matter the audience size: famous people, marketers, and those monstrous people who share everything about their lives. You know who you are. This is one of the diseconomies of scale for social networks that Facebook is first to run into because of its unprecedented size. Imagine you're in a room with all your family, friends, coworkers, casual acquaintances, and a lot of people you met just once but felt guilty about rejecting a friend request from. It's hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. What would you say to them? We know people maintain multiple identities for different audiences in their lives. Very few of us have to cultivate an identity for that entire blob of everyone we know. It's a situation one might encounter in the real world only a few times in life, perhaps at one's wedding, and later one's funeral. Online, though? It happens to be the default mode on Facebook's News Feed. It's no coincidence that public figures, those who have the most practice at having to deal with this problem, are so guarded. As your audience grows larger, the chance that you'll offend someone deeply with something you say approaches 1. When I scan my Facebook feed, I see fewer and fewer people I know sharing anything at all. Map one's sharing frequency with the size of one's friend list on Facebook and I highly suspect it looks like this: Again, not everyone is like this, some psychopaths who are comfortable sharing their thoughts no matter the size of the audience, but these people are often annoying, the type who dive right into politics at Thanksgiving before you've even spooned gravy over your turkey. This leads to a form of adverse selection where a few over-sharers take over your News Feed. [Not everything one shares gets distributed to one's entire friend graph given the algorithmic feed. But you as the one sharing something have no idea who will see it so you have to assume that any and every person in your graph will see it. The chilling effect is the same.] Another form of diseconomy of scale is behind the flight to Snapchat among the young, as outlined earlier. A sure way to empty a club or a dance floor is to have the parents show up; few things are more traumatic then seeing your Dad pretend-grind on your Mom when "Yeah" by Usher comes on. Having your parents in your graph on Facebook means you have to assume they're listening, and there isn't some way to turn on the radio very loudly or run the water as in a spy movie when you're trying to pass secrets to someone in a room that's bugged. The best you can do is communicate in code to which your parents don't own the decryption key; usually this takes the form of memes. Or you take the communication over to Snapchat. Another diseconomy of scale is the increasing returns to trolling. Facebook is more immune to this thanks to its bi-directional friending model than, say, Twitter, with its one-way follow model and public messaging framework. On Facebook, those wishing to sow dissension need to be a bit more devious, and as revelations from the last election showed, there are means to a person's heart, to reach them directly or indirectly, through confirmation bias and flattery. The Iago playbook from Othello. On Twitter, there's no need for such scheming, you can just nuke people from your keyboard without their consent. All of this is to say I suspect many of Facebook's more fruitful vectors for rekindling their value for socializing lie in breaking up the surface area of their service. News Feed is so monolithic a surface as to be subject to all the diseconomies of scale of social networking, even as it makes it such an attractive advertising landscape. The most obvious path to this is Groups, which can subdivide large graphs into ones more unified in purpose or ideology. Google+ was onto something with Circles, but since they hadn't actually achieved any scale they were solving a problem they didn't have yet. Instagram Where is Instagram's invisible asymptote? This is one of the trickier ones to contemplate as it continues to grow without any obvious end in sight. One of the advantages to Instagram is that it came about when Facebook was broadening its acceptable media types from text to photos and video. Instagram began with just square photos with a simple caption, no links allowed, no resharing. This had a couple of advantages. One is that it's harder to troll or be insufferable in photos than it is in text. Photos tend to soften the edge of boasts and provocations. More people are more skilled at being hurtful in text than photos. Instagram has tended to be more aggressive than other networks at policing the emotional tenor of its network, especially in contrast to, say Twitter, turning its attention most recently to addressing trolls in the comment sections. Of course photos are not immune to this phenomenon. The "look at my perfect life" boasting of Instagram is many people's chief complaint about the app and likely the primary driver of people feeling lousy after looking through their feed there. Still, outright antagonism with Instagram, given it isn't an open public graph like Twitter, is harder. The one direct vector is comments and Instagram is working on that issue. In being a pure audio-visual network at a time when Facebook and most other networks were mixed-media, Instagram siphoned off many people for whom the best part of Facebook was just the photos and videos; again, we often, as with Twitter, over-estimate the product-market fit and TAM of text. If Facebook just showed photos and videos for a week I suspect their usage would grow, but since they own Instagram... As with other social networks that grow, Instagram broadened its formats early on to head off several format-based asymptotes. Non-square photos and videos with gradually lengthening time limits have broadened the use cases and, more importantly, removed some level of production friction. The move to copy Snapchat's Stories format was the next giant asymptote avoided. The precious nature of sharing on Instagram was a drag on posting frequency. Stories solves the supply-side issue for content several ways. One is that since it requires you to explicitly tap into viewing it from the home feed screen, it shifts the onus for viewing the content entirely to the audience. This frees the content creator from much of the guilt of polluting someone else's feed. The expiring nature of the content further removes another of a publisher's inhibitions about littering the digital landscape. It unlocked so much content that I now regularly fail to make it through more than a tiny fraction of Stories on Instagram. Even friends who don't publish a lot now often put their content in Stories rather than posting to the main feed. The very format of Stories, with its full-screen vertical orientation, cues the user that this format is meant for the native way we hold our devices as smartphone photographers, rather than accommodating the more natural landscape way that audiences view the world, with eyes side-by-side in one's head. Stories includes accoutrements like gaudy stickers and text overlays and face filters that aren't in the toolset for Instagram's main feed photo/video composer, perhaps to preserve some aesthetic separation between the main feed and Stories. There is a purity about Instagram which makes even its ads perfectly native: everything on the service is an audio-visual advertisement. I see people complain about the ad load in Instagram, but if you really look at your feed, it's always had an ad load of 100%. I just opened my feed and looked through the first twenty posts, and I'd classify them all as ads: about how great my meal was, for beautiful travel destinations, for the exquisite craft of various photographers and cinematographers, for an actor's upcoming film, for Rihanna's new lingerie line or makeup drop, for an elaborate dish a friend cooked, for a current concert tour, for how funny someone is, for someone's gorgeous new headshot, and for a few sporting events and teams. And yes, a few of them were official Instagram ads. I don't mean this in a negative way. One might lobby this accusation at all social networks, but the visual nature of Instagram absorbs the signaling function of social media in the most elegant and unified way. For example, messaging apps consist of a lot of communication that isn't advertising. But that's exactly why a messaging app like Messenger isn't as lucrative an ad platform as Instagram is and will be. If ads weren't marked explicitly, and if they weren't so obviously from accounts I don't follow, it's not clear to me that they'd be so jarringly different in nature than all the other content in the feed. The irony is that, as Facebook broadened its use cases and supported media types to continue to expand, the purity of Instagram may have made it more scalable a network in some ways. Of course, every product or service has some natural ceiling. To take one example, messaging with other folks is still somewhat clunky on Instagram, it feels tacked on. Considering how much young people use Snapchat as a messaging app of choice, there's likely attractive headroom for Instagram here. Rumors Instagram is contemplating a separate messaging app make sense. It would be ironic if Instagram separated out the more broadcast nature of its core app from the messaging use case in two different apps before Snapchat did. As noted earlier, it feels as if Snapchat is constantly fighting to balance the messaging parts of its app with the more broadcast elements like Stories and Discover, and separate apps might be one way to solve that more effectively. As with all social networks which are mobile-phone dominant, there are limits to what can be optimized for in a single app, when all you have to work with is a single rectangular phone screen. The mobile phone revolution forced a focus in design which created billions of dollars in value, but Instagram, like all phone apps, will run into the asymptote that is the limits of how much you can jam into one app. Instagram has already had some experience in dealing with this conundrum, creating separate apps like Boomerang or Hyperlapse that keep a lid on the complexity of the Instagram app itself and which bring additional composition techniques to the top level of one's phone. I often hear people counsel against launching separate apps because of the difficulty of getting adoption of even a single app, but that doesn't mean that separate apps aren't sometimes the most elegant way to deal with the spatial design constraints of mobile. On Instagram, content is still largely short in nature so longer narratives aren't common or well-supported. The very structure, oriented around a main feed algorithmically compiling a variety of content from all the account you follow, isn't optimized towards a deep dive into a particular subject matter or narrative like, say, a television or a streaming video app. The closest to long-form on Instagram is Live, but most of what I see of that is only loosely narrative, resembling more an extended selfie than a considered narrative. Rather than pursue long-form narrative, it may be that a more on-brand way to tackle the challenge of lengthening usage of the app is better stringing together of existing content, similar to how Snapchat can aggregate content from one location into a feed of sorts. That can be useful for things like concerts and sporting events and breaking news events like natural disasters, protests, and marches. In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge. However, I suspect we've moved into an age where the upper bound on vanity fatigue has shifted much higher in a way that an older generation might find unseemly. Just as we've moved into a post-scarcity age of information, I believe we've moved into a post-scarcity age of identity as well. And in this world, it's more acceptable to be yourself and leverage social media for maximal distribution of yourself in a way that ties to the fundamental way in which the topology of culture has shifted from a series of massive centralized hub and spokes to a more uniform mesh. A last possible asymptote relates to my general sense that massive networks like Facebook and Instagram will, at some point, require more structured interactions and content units (for example, a list is a structured content unit, as is a check-in) to continue scaling. Doing so always imposes some additional friction on the content creator, but the benefit is breaking one monolithic feed into more distinct units, allowing users the ability to shift gears mentally by seeing and anticipating the structure, much like how a magazine is organized. To fill gaps in a person's free time, an endless feed is like an endless jar of liquid, able to be poured into any crevice in one's schedule and flow of attention. To demand a person's time, on the other hand, is a higher order task, and more structured content seems to do better on that front. People set aside dedicated time to play games like Fortnite or to watch Netflix, but less so to browse feeds. The latter happens on the fly. But ambition in software-driven Silicon Valley is endless and so at some point every tech company tries to obtain the full complement of Infinity Stones, whether by building them or buying them, like Facebook did with Instagram and Whatsapp. Amazon's next invisible asymptote? I started with Amazon, but it is worth revisiting as it is hardly done with its own ambitions. After having made such massive progress on the shipping fee asymptote, what other barriers to growth might remain? On that same topic of shipping, the next natural barrier is shipping speed. Yes, it's great that I don't have to pay for shipping, but in time customer expectations inflate. Per Jeff's latest annual letter to shareholders: One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it. Why only two-day shipping for free? What if I want my package tomorrow, or today, or right now? Amazon has already been working on this problem for over a decade, building out a higher density network of smaller distribution centers over its previous strategy of fewer, gargantuan distribution hubs. Drone delivery may have sounded like a joke when first announced on an episode of 60 Minutes, but it addresses the same problem, as does a strategy like Amazon lockers in local retail stores. Another asymptote may be that while Amazon is great at being the site of first resort to fulfill customer demands for products, it is less capable when it comes to generating desire ex nihilo, the kind of persuasion typically associated more with a tech company like Apple or any number of luxury retailers. At Amazon we referred to the dominant style of shopping on the service as spear-fishing. People come in, type a search for the thing they want, and 1-click it. In contrast, if you've ever gone to a mall with someone who loves shopping for shopping's sake, a clotheshorse for example, you'll see a method of shopping more akin to the gathering half of hunting and gathering. Many outfits are picked off the rack and gazed at, held up against oneself in a mirror, turned around and around in the hand for contemplation. Hands brush across racks of clothing, fingers feeling fabric in search of something unknown even to the shopper. This is browsing, and Amazon's interface has only solved some aspects of this mode of shopping. If you have some idea what you want, similarities carousels can guide one in some comparison shopping, and customer reviews serve as a voice on the shoulder, but it still feels somewhat utilitarian. Amazon's first attempts at physical stores reflect this bias in its retail style. I visited an Amazon physical bookstore in University Village the last time I was in Seattle, and it struck me as the website turned into 3-dimensional space, just with a lot less inventory. Amazon Go sounds more interesting, and I can't wait to try it out, but again, its primary selling point is the self-serve, low-friction aspect of the experience. When I think of creating desire, I think of my last and only visit to Milan, when a woman at an Italian luxury brand store talked me into buying a sportcoat I had no idea I wanted when I walked into the store. In fact, it wasn't even on display, so minimal was the inventory when I walked in. She looked at me, asked me some questions, then went to the back and walked back out with a single option. She talked me into trying it on, then flattered me with how it made me look, as well as pointing out some of its most distinctive qualities. Slowly, I began to nod in agreement, and eventually I knew I had to be the man this sportcoat would turn me into when it sat on my shoulders. This challenge isn't unique to Amazon. Tech companies in general have been mining the scalable ROI of machine learning and algorithms for many years now. More data, better recommendations, better matching of customer to goods, or so the story goes. But what I appreciate about luxury retail, or even Hollywood, is its skill for making you believe that something is the right thing for you, absent previous data. Seduction is a gift, and most people in technology vastly overestimate how much of customer happiness is solvable by data-driven algorithms while underestimating the ROI of seduction. Netflix spent $1 million on a prize to improve its recommendation algorithms, and yet it's a daily ritual that millions of people stare at their Netflix home screen, scrolling around for a long time, trying to decide what to watch. It's not just Netflix, open any streaming app. The AppleTV, a media viewing device, is most often praised for its screensaver! That's like admitting you couldn't find anything to eat on a restaurant menu but the typeface was pleasing to the eye. It's not that data can't guide a user towards the right general neighborhood, but more than one tech company will find the gradient of return on good old seduction to be much steeper than they might realize. Still, for Amazon, this may not be as dangerous a weakness as it would be for another retailer. Much of what Amazon sells is commodities, and desire generation can be offloaded to other channels who then see customers leak to Amazon for fulfillment. Amazon's logistical and customer service supremacy is a devastatingly powerful advantage because it directly precedes and follows the act of payment in the shopping value chain, allowing it to capture almost all the financial return of commodity retail. And, as Jeff's annual letter to shareholders has emphasized from the very first instance, Amazon's mission is to be the world's most customer-centric company. One way to continue to find vectors for growth is to stay attached at the hip to the fickle nature of customer unhappiness, which they're always quite happy to share under the right circumstances, one happy consequence of this age of outrage. There is such a thing as a price umbrella, but there's also one for customer happiness. How to identify your invisible asymptotes One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers. As I noted at the start of this piece, at Amazon we honed in on how shipping fees were a brake on our business by simply asking customers and non-customers. Here's where the oft-cited quote from Henry Ford is brought up as an objection: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses," he is reputed to have said. Like most truisms in business, it is snappy and lossy all at once. True, it's often difficult for customers to articulate what they want. But what's missed is that they're often much better at pinpointing what they don't want or like. What you should hear when customers say they want a faster horse is not the literal but instead that they find travel by horse to be too slow. The savvy product person can generalize that to the broader need of traveling more quickly, and that problem can be solved any number of ways that don't involve cloning Secretariat or shooting their current horse up with steroids. This isn't a foolproof strategy. Sometimes customers lie about what they don't like, and sometimes they can't even articulate their discontent with any clarity, but if you match their feedback with good analysis of customer behavior data and even some well-designed tests, you can usually land on a more accurate picture of the actual problem to solve. A popular sentiment in Silicon Valley is that B2C businesses are more difficult product challenges than B2B because products and services for the business customer can be specified merely by talking to the customer while the consumer market is inarticulate about its needs, per the Henry Ford quote. Again, that's only partially true, and so many consumer companies I've been advising recently haven't pushed enough yet on understanding or empathizing with the objections of its non-adopters. We speak often of the economics concept of the demand curve, but in product there is another form of demand curve, and that is the contour of the customers' demands of your product or service. How comforting it would be if it were flat, but as Bezos noted in his annual letter to shareholders, the arc of customer demands is long, but it bends ever upwards. It's the job of each company, especially its product team, to continue to be in tune with the topology of this "demand curve." I see many companies spend time analyzing funnels and seeing who emerges out the bottom. As a company grows, though, and from the start, it's just as important to look at those who never make it through the funnel, or who jump out of it at the very top. If the product market fit gradient likely differs for each of your current and potential customer segments, and understanding how and why is a never-ending job. When companies run focus groups on their products, they often show me the positive feedback. I'm almost invariably more interested in the folks who've registered negative feedback, though I sense many product teams find watching that material to be stomach-churning. Sometimes the feedback isn't useful in the moment; perhaps you have such strong product-market fit with a different cohort that it isn't useful. Still, it's never not a bit of a prick to the ego. However, all honest negative feedback forms the basis of some asymptote in some customer segment, even if the constraint isn't constricting yet. Even if companies I meet with don't yet have an idea of how to deal with a problem, I'm always curious to see if they have a good explanation for what that problem is. One important sidenote on this topic is that I'm often invited to give product feedback, more than I can find time for these days. When I'm doing so in person, some product teams can't help but jump in as soon as I raise any concerns, just to show they've already anticipated my objections. I advise just listening all the way through the first time, to hear the why of someone's feedback, before cutting them off. You'll never be there in person with each customer to talk them out of their reasoning, your product or service has to do that work. The batting average of product people who try to explain to their customers why they're wrong is...not good. It's a sure way to put them off of giving you feedback in the future, too. Even absent external feedback, it's possible to train yourself to spot the limits to your product. One approach I've taken when talking to companies who are trying to achieve initial or new product-market fit is to ask them why every person in the world doesn't use their product or service. If you ask yourself that, you'll come up with all sorts of clear answers, and if you keep walking that road you'll find the borders of your TAM taking on greater and greater definition. [It's true that you also need the flip side, an almost irrational positivity, to be able to survive the difficult task of product development, or to be an entrepreneur, but selection bias is such that most such people start with a surplus of optimism.] Lastly, though I hesitate to share this, it is possible to avoid invisible asymptotes through sheer genius of product intuition. I balk for the same reason I cringe when I meet CEO's in the valley who idolize Steve Jobs. In many ways, a product intuition that is consistently accurate across time is, like Steve Jobs, a unicorn. It's so rare an ability that to lean entirely on it is far more dangerous and high risk than blending it with a whole suite of more accessible strategies. It's difficult for product people to hear this because there's something romantic and heroic about the Steve Jobs mythology of creation, brilliant ideas springing from the mind of the mad genius and inventor. However, just to read a biography of Jobs is to understand how rare a set of life experiences and choices shaped him into who he was. Despite that, we've spawned a whole bunch of CEO's who wear the same outfit every day and drive their design teams crazy with nitpick design feedback as if the outward trappings of the man were the essence of his skill. We vastly underestimate the path dependence of his particular style of product intuition. Jobs' gift is so rare that it's likely even Apple hasn't been able to replace it. It's not a coincidence that the Apple products that frustrate me the most right now are all the ones with "Pro" in the name. The MacBook Pro, with its flawed keyboard and bizarre Touch Bar (I'm still using the old 13" MacBook Pro with the old keyboard, hoping beyond hope that Apple will come to its senses before it becomes obsolete). The Mac Pro, which took on the unfortunately apropos shape of a trash can in its last incarnation and whose replacement hasn't shipped in years (I'm still typing this at home on an ancient cheese grater Mac Pro tower and ended up building a PC tower to run VR and to do photo and video editing). Final Cut Pro, which I learned on in film editing school, and which got zapped in favor of Final Cut X just when FCP was starting to steal meaningful share in Hollywood from Avid. The iMac Pro, which isn't easily upgradable but great if you're a gazillionaire. Pro customers are typically ones with the most clearly specified needs and workflows. Thus, their products are ones for whom listening to them articulate what they want is a reliable path to establishing and maintaining product-market fit. But that's not something Apple seems to enjoy doing, and so the mis-steps they've made on these lines are exactly the types of mistakes you'd expect of them. [I was overjoyed to read that Apple's next Mac Pro is being built using extensive feedback from media professionals. It's disappointing that it won't arrive until 2019 now but at least Apple has descended from the ivory tower to talk to the actual future users. It's some of the best news out of Apple I've heard in forever.] Live by intuition, die by it. It's not surprising that Snapchat, another company that lives by the product intuition of one person, stumbled with a recent redesign. That a company's strengths are its weaknesses is simply the result of tight adherence to methodology. Apple and Snapchat's deus ex machina style of handing down products also rid us of CD-ROM drives and produced the iPhone, AirPods, the camera-first messaging app, and the Story format, among many other breakthroughs which a product person could hang a career on. Because products and services live in an increasingly dynamic world, especially those targeted at consumers, they aren't governed by the immutable, timeless truths of a field like mathematics. The reason I recommend a healthy mix of intuition informed by data and feedback is that most product people I know have a product view that is slower moving than the world itself. If they've achieved any measure of success, it's often because their view of some consumer need was the right one at the right time. Product-market fit as tautology. Selection bias in looking at these people might confuse some measure of luck with some enduring product intuition. However, just as a VC might have gotten lucky once with some investment and be seen as a genius for life (and the returns to a single buff of a VC brand name is shockingly durable), just because a given person's product intuition might hit on the right moment at the right point in history to create a smash hit, it's rare that a single person's frame will move in lock step with that of the world. How many creatives are relevant for a lifetime? This is one reason sustained competitive advantage is so difficult. In the long run, endogenous variance in the quality of product leadership in a company always seems to be in the negative direction. But perhaps we are too focused on management quality and not focused enough on exogenous factors. In "Divine Discontent: Disruption’s Antidote," Ben Thompson writes: Bezos’s letter, though, reveals another advantage of focusing on customers: it makes it impossible to overshoot. When I wrote that piece five years ago, I was thinking of the opportunity provided by a focus on the user experience as if it were an asymptote: one could get ever closer to the ultimate user experience, but never achieve it: In fact, though, consumer expectations are not static: they are, as Bezos’ memorably states, “divinely discontent”. What is amazing today is table stakes tomorrow, and, perhaps surprisingly, that makes for a tremendous business opportunity: if your company is predicated on delivering the best possible experience for consumers, then your company will never achieve its goal. In the case of Amazon, that this unattainable and ever-changing objective is embedded in the company’s culture is, in conjunction with the company’s demonstrated ability to spin up new businesses on the profits of established ones, a sort of perpetual motion machine; I’m not sure that Amazon will beat Apple to $1 trillion, but they surely have the best shot at two. Pattern recognition is the default operation mode of much of Silicon Valley and other fields, but it is almost always, by its very nature, backwards-looking. One can hardly blame most people for resorting to it because it's a way of minimizing blame, and the economic returns of the Valley are so amplified by the structural advantages of winners that even matching market beta makes for a comfortable living. However, if consumer desires are shifting, it's always just a matter of time before pattern recognition leads to an invisible asymptote. One reason startups are often the tip of the spear for innovation in technology is that they can't rely on market beta to just roll along. Achieving product-market fit for them is an existential challenge, and they have no backup plans. Imagine an investor who has to achieve alpha to even survive. Companies can stay nimble by turning over its product leaders, but as a product professional, staying relevant to the marketplace is a never-ending job, even if your own life is irreversible and linear. I find the best way to unmoor myself from my most strongly held product beliefs is to increase my inputs. Besides, the older I get, the more I've grown to enjoy that strange dance with the customer. Leading a partner in a dance may give you a feeling of control, but it's a world of difference from dancing by yourself. One of my favorite Ben Thompson posts is "What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong" in which he built on Christensen's theory of disruption to note that low end disruption can be avoided if you can differentiate on user experience. It is difficult and perhaps even impossible to over-serve on that axis. Tesla came into the electric car market with a car that was way more expensive than internal combustion engine cars (this definitely wasn't low-end disruption), had shorter range, and required really slow charging at a time when very few public chargers existed yet. However, Tesla got an interesting foothold because on another axis it really delivered. Yes, the range allowed for more commuting without having to charge twice a day, but more importantly, for the wealthy, it was a way to signal one's environmental consciousness in a package that was much, much sexier than the Prius, the previous electric car of choice of celebrities in LA. It will be hard for Tesla to continue to rely on that in the long run as the most critical dimension of user experience will likely evolve, but it's a good reminder that "user experience" is broad enough to encompass many things, some less measurable than others. You can't overserve on user experience, Thompson argues; as a product person, I'd argue, in parallel, that it is difficult and likely impossible to understand your customer too deeply. Amazon's mission to the be the world's most customer-centric company is inherently a long-term strategy because it is a one with an infinite time scale and no asymptote to its slope. In my experience, the most successful people I know are much more conscious of their own personal asymptotes at a much earlier age than others. They ruthlessly and expediently flush them out. One successful person I know determined in grade school that she'd never be a world-class tennis player or pianist. Another mentioned to me how, in their freshman year of college, they realized they'd never be the best mathematician in their own dorm, let alone in the world. Another knew a year into a job that he wouldn't be the best programmer at his company and so he switched over into management; he rose to become CEO. By discovering their own limitations early, they are also quicker to discover vectors on which they're personally unbounded. Product development will always be a multi-dimensional problem, often frustratingly so, but the value of reducing that dimensionality often costs so little that it should be more widely employed. This isn't to say a person needs to aspire to be the best at everything they do. I'm at peace with the fact that I'll likely always be a middling cook, that I won't win the Tour de France, and that I'm destined to be behind a camera and not in front of it. When it comes to business, however, and surviving in the ruthless Hobbesian jungle, where much more is winner-take-all than it once was, the idea that you can be whatever you want to be, or build whatever you want to build, is a sure path to a short, unhappy existence.
I was in Taipei the past few weeks working on a documentary with friends. Because of a busy schedule, it wasn't like my usual travels abroad for fun, it felt more like a work trip. Still, even if I'd been there purely for vacation, I would've wanted to try a different mode of travel, one less focused on eating at nice restaurants or visiting notable tourist destinations and ticking them off the list like some big game hunter hoping to stuff and mount my quarry on Instagram. Instead, inspired by my last visit to Italy, in which I spent many weeks wandering cities with knowledgeable locals, listening to them discuss their views on the past, present, and future of their country, culture, and institutions, I've been contemplating how to evolve my travel approach to gather more than just photos and memories. I didn't have time to really put this fully into practice this trip. However, insight comes in odd ways. While filming in a cram school district of Taipei, I posted this photo of an alley to Instagram, wondering in my caption why American alleys did not contain such a density of food stalls and stands and restaurants. In the comments on my photo, a friend asked me where all the trash in Taipei went? Indeed, I didn't see trash piled up on the sidewalks, or anywhere in public. In fact, much of the trip I couldn't even find a public trash can in which to throw out empty boba tea cups or the plastic wrap around whatever snack from 7-11 I'd just inhaled during a break in shooting. Why were there so few trash cans, and where was all the trash? That mystery led me down a rabbit hole. I happened to interview some government officials for the documentary, and after those would wind down, or during breaks, I asked some of them to talk about trash collection in Taipei. They gave me an overview, the details of which I filled in online. Like New York City, Taiwan once had trash piled up on sidewalks awaiting collection. As anyone who's ever wandered through New York City in the summer, huge heaps of trash on sidewalks, baking in the humid summer heat, are one of the city's least attractive features. It's not just the stench or the reduced sidewalk surface for pedestrians but the occasional rat nearly scurrying over one's feet that can induce regular surges of revulsion and horror. New York City doesn't have many alleys. In contrast, if you've ever been to Chicago, you'll encounter many alleys between city buildings, and rather than pile trash on sidewalks, residents and businesses stash it in trash bins sitting in those alleys. How is it that Chicago has alleys and New York does not? According to Michael Martin, alley expert and professor of landscape architecture at Iowa State University, the “why alleys” question is easy to answer. You just have to go back to the late 1700s, decades before Chicago was founded. America was young, and had hardly touched any of its newest territories to the west. “There's one thing you can do without having to explore all of it,” says Martin. “Lay a grid over that giant swath of land, and divide it up in ways that you can then take that land and you can sell it, you can deed it over to people.” The federal government’s National Land Ordinance of 1785 imposed a massive grid over everything west of the Ohio River, dividing uncharted territory into square townships, each 36 square miles in size. Those townships were then sliced into progressively smaller sections, all the way down to the city block. “As you think about finer and finer scales of design, what's happening is those squares are being infilled and infilled,” says Martin. “The big grid was always the framework within which people developed things, and that leads to towns having square blocks, and ultimately the alley inside of that block.” Path dependence of development has a time dimension that impacts many aspects of the world, one of the things travel is good at teasing out. New York City was built earlier than Chicago. By the time it was time to develop Chicago, the grid design style had become prevalent. The particulars came into play with the Illinois & Michigan Canal. In the 1820s, the U.S. Congress had granted the state of Illinois enough land to dig a canal to connect Lake Michigan and the Illinois River. The state planned to finance the construction by establishing towns along the canal and selling the land to developers. The I&M Canal Commission hired surveyor James Thompson to lay out Chicago at the eastern end of the canal in 1830. To attract prospective land buyers, the General Assembly ordered that the new town of Chicago be “subdivided into town lots, streets, and alleys, as in their best judgment will best promote the interest of the said canal fund.” In the American consciousness and pop culture, the alley is a place of danger and grime. It's where Bruce Wayne's parents were shot and Batman birthed, a place of drug deals, prostitution, gang fights, and dumpsters. This squalid reputation may trace back to the functional roots of the alley in America. The city [Chicago] was a filthy, stinky, disease-ridden place in those days. Rear service lanes were essential for collecting trash, delivering coal, and stowing human waste — basically, keeping anything unpleasant away from living quarters. “This was one of the reason why alleys have this dark and nasty reputation,” says Martin. “They were very much the grimy service part of daily life. It wasn't expected that this would be a well-maintained landscape; it was kind of a landscape of raw utility.” Despite that, alleys do offer Chicago a place to stow trash that in NYC would pile up on sidewalks. However, Taipei has alleys that don't house trash dumpsters and are an improvement, to my mind, over Chicago alleys in their contribution to civic life. How does Taipei manage it? Once, like New York City, Taipei had trash piled up in public, the stench of trash stewing in the tropical weather permeating the city and attracting rats. In an effort to remove this highly visible trapping of third world status, the government made a concerted effort starting in the mid-80's to overhaul their trash collection policies. “Für Elise” is one of the world’s most widely-recognized pieces of music. The Beethoven melody has been played by pianists the world over, and its near-universal recognition has been used to attract customers for companies as big as McDonald’s and as small as your local ice-cream truck. But if you hear the song playing on the streets of Taiwan, accompanied by the low grumble of an engine, the only ice-cream you’ll find if you follow the tune will be the soupy remains of a neighbor’s Häagen-Dazs. In Taiwan, “Für Elise” means it is time to take out your trash. Directly out to the truck. Yourself. In the capital city of Taipei, trucks play two different songs along their garbage-routes (the other one is “A Maiden’s Prayer” by composer Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska). Five nights a week, Taipei residents head to out to designated street corners, where the yellow garbage trucks will stop for a few minutes (and turn off their music), so that people toss their bags of trash in themselves. Having shot a documentary outdoors for almost two weeks in Taipei, I'm by now well-acquainted with these garbage trucks. It's a nightmare for sound recording as the musical chimes from the trucks makes it very difficult to edit around footage in post. However, seeing citizens lining the sidewalks, official government required blue trash bags in hand, was a remarkable vision of civic cooperation. The idea that trash collection would occur multiple times a day, five or six times a week, is stunning to this American. In effect, Taiwan moved to a just-in-time trash collection system. As noted in this article: This ‘trash-doesn’t-touch-the-ground’ system makes each person responsible for his or her personal consumption. Every plastic fork, every bottled beverage, and every food scrap needs to be accounted for by its consumer. The implementation of a few clever policies encourages this new relationship with trash. It’s compulsory for the people of Taiwan to use a special blue ‘City of Taipei’ garbage bag to dispose of general waste. They’re available at most corner stores and come in different sizes, ranging from 3 to 120 liters. On the other hand, recycling is free and can be brought to the truck in any kind of bag. This encourages people to recycle more and produce less trash. What did this have to do with the paucity of public trash receptacles which also forced me to carry plastic wrappers and bottles in my pocket as we wandered around the city? City officials discovered that citizens had been skirting recycling mandates by dumping things in public trash bins. To increase recycling compliance, the government removed public trash receptacles, conducted occasional audits of trash and recycling when the trucks came by, and started posting videos of and fining violators. All together, these policies have been remarkably effective. [Taiwan was] producing 3,296 tonnes per day and recycling only 5% of it. Today, they have reduced that number by more than 2/3, of which they recycle an impressive 55%. The difference in philosophy and ownership of trash collection between the United States and Taiwan is striking. The difference between Taiwan and other nations is the way waste management sits in the public’s consciousness. In the US, waste management is run by private companies. Companies place the emphasis on quality of service, aiming to reduce the burden on the consumer. People don’t have to think about the amount of trash they produce – once it’s in the can, it’s no longer their responsibility. Garbage trucks come in the dead hour of the night or during office hours, to be as inconspicuous as possible. For some problems, achieving a breakthrough requires a holistic solution, with interlinked policies as Taiwan implemented to avoid any Cobra effects. It depresses me to think of San Francisco's reactionary, incrementalist governance in comparison. The MTA recently voted unanimously to cap the number of total electric scooters in the city to 1,250 for the first year of testing. That's among five different rental companies. I don't mind that government agencies implement codes and regulations; some policies save lives, like earthquake and fire building codes. But the incrementalist approach likely dooms the city to a series of local maximums at best, and at worst locks out all the dynamic improvements that characterize the most vibrant systems. Electric scooters might be a wonderful addition to the city's transportation options, but it's something that needs to be tested at scale because it's a solution that depends on scale for a good customer experience. I've tried to take electric scooters a few times, and either the nearest one is too far away, or the one I walk up to has a dead battery. If you limit the number of scooters during a test you might as well just ban them. A much more vibrant and livable San Francisco likely involves something like 25-50% fewer cars, sidewalks 50% wider, buildings 50% taller, twice the population density, and 25X the number of electric scooters, just to throw out some back of the envelope guesses of enough magnitude to alter one's conception of the city in a significant way. But no incrementalist approach will get the city there.
In a conversation with Matt Levine, Tyler Cowen asks: COWEN: Like you, I’m mostly an efficient markets guy, but when I look at initial public offerings I’m very baffled because investment banks take such a huge cut. If you needed to argue, “Well, they need the cut because they talk up the security, and in the absence of their efforts, no one would be interested, and it’s worth it,” maybe that argument works. But it seems somewhat to stand in tension with an efficient markets hypothesis, which suggests the thing will find its appropriate level without any particular investor having to talk it up. Furthermore, attempts to get around the current mainstream system of IPOs have not always been successful. Auctions have been tried. Israel has tried other methods. Spotify is giving it a go. We’ll get further data, but they’re not obviously doing better. How do you reconcile IPOs in their current form continuing, the investment banks taking such a huge cut, and some version of efficient markets hypothesis actually making sense? Do you see what I’m asking? I wasn't at Amazon for its IPO, but I did work on a huge convertible debt offering there. At the time it was the largest ever done. After the transaction had cleared, I received a box at work from Morgan Stanley, who'd been our banker on the deal. Inside was a Tumi carry-on bag, personalized with Amazon and Morgan Stanley logos. Everyone on our side who worked on the deal received one. My guess was the bag retailed for $500 or so without the personalization. It's always an ambivalent feeling, receiving such a pricey gift from a business partner after a deal. I've received similar customized luggage from law firms after their assistance on something. It feels as if you bought yourself something you didn't want. I generally believe in efficient markets, but I believe even more strongly that law firms and bankers don't do anything out of affectionate generosity. Call it the efficient business transaction hypothesis, in which you always pay for every bit of service rendered. There's a reason you don't receive a Tumi bag from your dry cleaner after laundering a big batch of shirts. So, as with Cowen, I've long puzzled at the exorbitant take on the part of bankers in deals, regardless of the volume of work done. Levine answers: LEVINE: How do I reconcile? One version of efficient markets is that, in the absence of news, the price yesterday is going to be the price today, or whatever. There’s some sort of continuity of prices. The IPO is a huge discontinuity. You don’t have a price and then you have a price. If your notion of efficient markets is a straight line of the price not moving very much or of the price instantly incorporating information, it’s not unintuitive that you’d have a big squiggle at the start, that you wouldn’t really know what the price is for three days, and then you would. I don’t think it’s unusual that the first trade of a stock would not be the price that it settles to in a week, but then, the second week would be pretty close to the first week. A good answer, but the word "discontinuity" hints at another aspect of this type of transaction which hints at why an IPO may not exhibit aspects of an efficient market. I long wondered the same of the real estate market, another space in which real estate agents have been able to maintain their 6% rake despite the advent of the internet. It's a bit of a puzzle considering how many other markets the internet has turned so efficient that almost all the profits went out of them. There's a class of transactions which retain abnormally large margins which share several qualities. They are rare, or infrequent transactions for one side, usually the buyer. Many people may only conduct one of these in their lifetime. They are really large relative to most transactions in a person's lifetime, anomalously so. They don't have well-known price anchors, often because the service is good is unique, making exact comps squishy. They are transactions which have some symbolic or mystical value which can justify overspending because how do you put a price on magic? They are time sensitive. Let's take those in order. The low frequency of such transactions weighs in favor of the seller, not the buyer, because the buyer has no experience. IPOs, housing purchases, weddings. The experience asymmetry is really information asymmetry. One should always be skeptical of playing any game where your opponent has to explain all the rules to you. The three card monte and other cons always begin with the con man explaining the game to you, no? The anomalous size of the transaction works against you in several ways. One, when so much money is involved, one tends to experience inflation on all fronts. If you're buying a condo that costs a million dollars, or, in the case of San Francisco, a lot more than that, what's another couple hundred dollars in fees here, a few thousand there? In the scheme of things, 6% to your agent doesn't even cross the mind after you've been beaten out on several dream condos in a row by a suitcase of cash from a Chinese buyer who never even showed up. Relative to the transaction size, it's nothing. Human cognitive deficiencies on this front are well-studied. The lack of price anchors doesn't help. What should a wedding dress cost? You can ask your friends, but, to crib from the Marines, "This is my wedding dress. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life." Buying cars is also a rare transaction, but it's unlikely you're buying a car model that's never been purchased before. As soon as the internet revealed dealer pricing, it was easy to just call a string of dealers around town and offer to pay $500 over that, nothing more. The special nature of such transactions supports a "je ne sais quoi" premium. Are you really going to skimp on your IPO, or pinch pennies when it comes to your wedding? I know brides who would sooner cut dinner from the wedding festivities than skimp on their wedding dress. If the event has symbolic value, then almost any price can be justified to oneself. Different cultures support different such mystical price premiums. In the United States, people will spend to no end on their dogs, for example. It's the same for babies or children in many cultures. Are you really going to try to save a hundred dollars or so on a stroller which will transport your precious child for several of their formative years, or not pay the $25,000 tuition for your potentially genius of a child to attend the coveted private school every one is trying to get into? The time-bounded nature of such transactions just prevents you, as the buyer, from using a long time horizon for leverage. Sellers, of course, will use the time bound as a cudgel in every way possible. If you don't nibble they have many more transactions to come, but you as the buyer have no such luck. The wedding invites have been sent, your investors are eagerly awaiting your IPO, you need to secure housing before your current lease runs out. The internet has, in many ways, ushered in an age in which old axioms of supply and demand economics aren't always applicable, or which make edge cases commonplace. Infinite supply, zero marginal transaction costs (especially in production and distribution), these are suddenly prevalent. It's almost nostalgic, therefore, to ponder the economics of infrequent transactions, or of markets where supply is fixed (the limited edition sneaker market, for example, or the Bay Area housing market). The high margins prevalent in large, infrequent transactions suggest that businesses might create some moats simply by replicating some of the qualities of such transactions, even if the underlying businesses don't consist of those. What is subscription pricing but a way of grouping many, frequent transactions into many infrequent transactions where it's difficult to determine the unit cost of all the components of the bundle? I suspect half the reason for the phenomenon in which tech oscillates between bundling and unbundling is to find the efficient size of the bundle that the consumer will bear. We won't all have dozens of Patreon accounts that we support in the future, but neither will we pay $300 a month for some mega video streaming bundle that includes everything under the sun. Every transaction is a moment for a buyer to reconsider whether it's all worthwhile. At some point, I expect many newspaper will band together to offer some bundled subscriptions. Magazines already have tried this but the very concept of a magazine, and the typical frequency of issues (monthly) is difficult to construct a high value bundle around as compared to newspapers. I also suspect that the ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft will continue to experiment with some sort of monthly fee with unlimited rides within reason (perhaps with mileage overage payments). Uber has already experimented with offering pre-payments for a bundle of fixed price rides for a month, and I expect that's just the first step towards some sort of lock-in car-as-a-service subscription pricing. It's exhausting to duke it out with competitors one ride at a time, and it trains buyers to shop for the best price on each ride, something that's easier than ever given that both services' apps allow you to enter your destination to see the price ahead of booking a car. The re-bundling begins. https://t.co/CJxkHwuOVl I’m surprised we haven’t seen more offers like this, e.g. Headspace+Strava/Runkeeper, NYTimes/WashPo, or LeaguePass/MLB.tv — Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) April 14, 2018 Let's suppose that consumers do possess some limit to the number of transactions they're willing to put up, some finite cognitive load for payments. If so, then any seller must consider the number of other subscriptions in the marketplace when understanding how well their own bundle will do. And in that case, we should start to see more bundles of bundles. In the tweet above I suggest a few, there are likely many others. The problem with creating bundles of bundles is divvying up the credit. It's unlikely all components of the bundle contribute equally, so the highest value component is typically hesitant to join in. However, in the digital age, assigning credit is much simpler. So, just as ESPN earns much higher carriage fees in the cable bundle than, say, Comedy Central, can be done with exact usage figures in real time. The funniest example of the efficiency of bundling (well, it is to me since I don't have kids) is the division of childcare. When I'm around parents, it's somewhat striking how much of a constant low-level tension arises from splitting up such duties. Whose turn is it to change a diaper, or to go hold a crying baby? With the exception of the wealthy who can afford full-time childcare help, such tasks are among the most frequently occurring transactions in adult life. Each is a moment of negotiation, and thus an opportunity for friction. Thus, parents come up with long-term divisions that reduce the number of such transactions. Sometimes it's an agreement that the dad handles all dishes and diaper changes while the mom does all the feeding and crying. Parents also will come up with bundles which they trade, to reduce the overall number of negotiations. The husband get to go on a guys golf trip for a week, but later that year, the mother gets a girls trip to Palm Springs. Sometimes efficiency is just household equilibrium, and you can't put a price on that type of harmony.
It has been some time since I posted here. Outside of lots of meetings around the country and some trips with family and friends, a few creative projects have stolen the lion's share of my free time. While I won't publish some Medium screed on how spending less time on social media transformed my life, it is an unavoidable truth that one's free time is a zero sum game. For infovores, Twitter is a bit like heroin, and for all the other gaps in one's time, other social media apps are like some Cerebro-like viscous membrane that gives off a mild contact high from the vibrations of ambient social intimacy. As presently constructed, though, all these apps are certainly well into the point of diminishing returns for me, and so less time spent there, redirected offline, has been good for my general productivity and well-being. I'm not certain, but it seems that's it not a question of mix as it is of finding the optimal frequency for all the various activities in my life. To take one example, almost certainly I see huge returns to shifting conversations with folks on Twitter offline. Some of that time has been spent continuing to wend my way through Emily Wilson's brilliant new translation of The Odyssey. What's fascinating is how it remains resonant with modern times, speaking to its universality. Ironically, what it reminded me of, perhaps because the topic was still top of mind, was social media. Take the famous episode in which Odysseus and his men sail past the Sirens and then between Scylla and Charybdis. What surprised me was how short the entire episode is, only occupying a few pages in Book 12, titled "Difficult Choices." The goddess Circe gives Odysseus a preview of what he and his men are about to encounter. First you will reach the Sirens, who bewitch all passersby. If anyone goes near them in ignorance, and listens to their voices, that man will never travel to his home, and never make his wife and children happy to have him back with them again. "If anyone goes near them in ignorance, and listens to their voices..." But this is what happens on social media all the time! Never have we dilettantes in just about every subject had such a forum to lord our "expertise" over others. Circe warned us long ago what would happen, how insufferable we'd all be to our loved ones. The song of the Sirens is irresistible, and Circe knows it, so she advises Odysseus thus: ...Around about them lie great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones, their skin all shriveled up. Use wax to plug your sailors’ ears as you row past, so they are deaf to them. But if you wish to hear them, your men must fasten you to your ship’s mast by hand and foot, straight upright, with tight ropes. So bound, you can enjoy the Sirens’ song. It's as if Circe is speaking to my irresistible urge to open and read Twitter at the slightest hint of boredom, warning me of the great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones, who'd done so before me. As for her firm guidance that Odysseus be bound to a mast? That's just the antecedent to today's "Never tweet." Thus, in my moments of weakness, I open Twitter but bind myself to a metaphoric ship's mast so I cannot reply to the trolls, as tempting as it is to join the chorus of people letting their outrage loose. Some days it feels to me that half my timeline is just people posting witty and savage rejoinders to Tomi Lahren or Trump or Dana Loesch and so on. Twitter should just move all of that to a separate tab, it has become a sort of performance art. Alexis Madrigal wrote of how he turned off retweets in his Twitter timeline and it improved for him. Retweets make up more than a quarter of all tweets. When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. Less breathlessness. And more of what the people I follow were actually thinking about, reading, and doing. It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better. Farhad Manjoo wrote that for two months he got his news only from print. It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins. Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father. Is this much different than Circe urging Odysseus to plug his mens' ears with wax? Homer got there first. I am weak so I have not gone full cold turkey on social media. Instead, I am still occasionally there, tied to the mast, flailing against self-administered bonds, listening to the Siren song. May the gods help me. [Wilson herself recently posted a series of tweets observing something else intriguing about the Sirens, the idea that they were some sexy seductresses. Reading Wilson's translation, you realize there is no mention of the Sirens' appearances. The seduction is all in their song, and that makes them an even more appropriate metaphor for social media.] After the Sirens, Odysseus and his men meet even more formidable adversaries. Circe foretells of an inescapable passage between Scylla and Charybdis, the original rock and a hard place. There, she says, it's best to pick the lesser of two evils and to sail closer to Scylla, a twelve-legged six-headed monster who will eat six of his men. It sounds terrible, but the alternative is allowing Charybdis to swallow his entire ship. For my money, it's the most famous leadership parable about minimizing one's losses. Odysseus, upon hearing this, pleads to no avail. I answered, ‘Goddess, please, tell me the truth: is there no other way? Or can I somehow circumvent Charybdis and stop that Scylla when she tries to kill my men?’ The goddess answered, ‘No, you fool! Your mind is still obsessed with deeds of war. But now you must surrender to the gods. She is not mortal. She is deathless evil, terrible, wild and cruel. You cannot fight her. The best solution and the only way is flight. Is Circe the best life coach, or the best life coach? She's the original Tony Robbins. Can you read social media and emerge with your senses and emotional well-being intact? "No you fool!" We may not be able to avoid it, but at least we can heed Circe's words. "The best solution and the only way is flight." Odysseus and his men proceed as Circe warns, and, tied to the mast, our titular hero hears the song of the Sirens. ‘Odysseus! Come here! You are well-known from many stories! Glory of the Greeks! Now stop your ship and listen to our voices. All those who pass this way hear honeyed song, poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy, and they go on their way with greater knowledge, since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered in Troy, by gods’ will; and we know whatever happens anywhere on earth.’ Their song was so melodious, I longed to listen more. I told my men to free me. I scowled at them, but they kept rowing on. What is this but the siren song of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all the other addictive apps on our phones, luring us with the comforting and self-affirming dopamine hits of likes and followers and readers. "...they go on their way with great knowledge since we know everything...and we know whatever happens anywhere on earth" is nothing if not the tagline for Twitter written in another age (copyright Homer). "Their song was so melodious, I longed to listen more." My Siren is my iPhone, always within arms reach, always with the promise of "greater knowledge." Have I been disciplined and avoided its call? Not always. And like Odysseus, who does end up losing six men to Scylla, I've lost a few chunks of flesh along the way. I do have a few long posts incubating, however, which I hope to finish soon. In the meantime, a bit of catch up. *** I was lucky enough to be invited onto two podcasts, both of which were recorded in person during my recent trip to New York City for meetings and to visit family. The first was Khe Hy's Rad Awakenings podcast. The second was the Internet History Podcast hosted by Brian McCullough. I didn't have a book or anything to promote, so they're both a bit free-ranging, as I am here. Check them out if you're interested and let me know what you think. It's fascinating to watch the explosion in podcasts, and it's somewhat apparent when you see how easy it is to record one with just a computer and two small microphones. Given the economics of text are so lousy, and given how challenging it is to produce compelling video, the most lucrative vector for media companies is not a pivot to video but a pivot to podcasting. Every day it seems a media company is releasing a new daily news podcast recap. In time, the marginal return will decline, but perhaps not before we see a second wave of growth in podcasting's total addressable market (TAM) from improved discovery (the first explosion in podcasting TAM was, of course, the rise of the smartphone, which opened up a ton of podcast surface area in one's daily schedule, most notably in commutes). *** I kid not, one of the most fascinating videos I've watched since I last posted here was this episode of Trashcast discussing Logan Paul. For some reason the original version of this video was pulled by YouTube so as of right now, this newly uploaded version has all of...63 views. It taught me more about the Logan Paul phenomenon than anything else I've read or watched, and its presentation is of a style that is extremely meta, like a young person's Vox explainer. The temptation, when something like the Logan Paul scandal drops, is to post "Who the f*** is [Logan Paul]?" on Twitter or Facebook. I saw probably a dozen or more such posts, and while I resisted the urge, I myself had no idea who Logan Paul was until he was the latest person to take his turn in the public pillory. I'm less interested in Logan Paul than I am in all the superstar vloggers who can turn out audiences of tens of thousands young kids everywhere they go. Their particular pull to children of that age, the visual grammar of their content, the syntax of their speech, their distribution frequency, it's all quite instructive. One can read near-future sci-fi, or one can just spend some time with some of today's youth, who already live in the near-future. The latter is much more vivid. I spent several hours watching my nephews play Fortnite and message on Snapchat and surf on Instagram while in NYC recently, and it was as if I'd crossed over through some alien border into a cultural Shimmer. As with Natalie Portman, every one of my visits there leaves me altered in some inexorable ways. *** One of my recent (okay, not so recent) posts was on the shift in entertainment from the shift to infinite content supply. I opened with a brief discussion of Will Smith. A few readers sent me a link to this excerpt from Ben Fritz's new book The Big Picture: The Fight For the Future of Movies. The excerpt is about the rise and fall of the A-List movie stars Will Smith and Adam Sandler during Sony's motion picture heyday in the 2000's. Of Sony's top 50 movies from 2000 to 2016, more than two-thirds were "star vehicles," in which the talent involved was as big as or bigger than the movie title or the franchise. More than one-third came from just two people: Will Smith and Adam Sandler. Movies they starred in or produced grossed $3.7 billion from 2000 to 2015, generating 20 percent of Sony Pictures' domestic gross and 23 percent of its profits. No other studio was as reliant on just two actors. Their rise and fall illustrate what has happened to movie stars in Hollywood. ... Sony paid both stars handsomely for their consistent success: $20 million against 20 percent of the gross receipts, whichever was higher, was their standard. They also received as much as $5 million against 5 percent for their production companies, where they employed family and friends. Sony also provided Overbrook and Sandler's Happy Madison with a generous overhead to cover expenses — worth about $4 million per year. To top it off, Sandler and Smith enjoyed the perks of the luxe studio life. Flights on a corporate jet were common. On occasion, Smith's entourage necessitated the use of two jets for travel to premieres. Knowing that Sandler was a huge sports fan, Sony regularly sent him and his pals to the Super Bowl to do publicity. Back at the Sony lot, the basketball court was renamed Happy Madison Square Garden in the star's honor. When anybody questioned the endless indulgence given to Sandler and Smith, Sony executives had a standard answer: "Will and Adam bought our houses." I wrote: I'm wary of all conclusions drawn about media in the scarcity age, including the idea that people went to see movies because of movie stars. It's not that Will Smith isn't charismatic. He is. But I suspect Will Smith was in a lot of hits in the age of scarcity in large part because there weren't a lot of other entertainment options vying for people's attention when Independence Day or something of its ilk came out, like clockwork, to launch the summer blockbuster season. The same goes for the general idea that any one star was ever the chief engine for a film's box office. If the idea that people go see a movie just to see any one star was never actually true, we can stop holding the modern generation of movie stars to an impossible standard. Of course, this is a counterfactual, so hard to establish conclusively. Perhaps, in the age of scarcity, A-List stars really did exist. Regardless, that age has passed, and banking on its continued viability is a shaky proposition at best. A further thought, which I first made in a presentation at a Greylock Product Summit a few years back, is that the rising supply of content means that exceeding the noise floor favors a different type of film or television property. In the heyday of the three and eventually four major networks, the golden age of broadcast television, the dream show was one with broad appeal. The economics of television were heavily dependent on advertising revenue, and the larger the audience, the larger the revenue. A show like The Cosby Show or The Beverly Hillbillies, that attracted a broad audience through a sort of non-offensive if somewhat bland sensibility was the dream. Again, though, it's important to recall how scarce entertainment options were in that age relative to today's cornucopia. It isn't just the economics of carriage fees and pay TV that helped drive the rise of much more distinctive and niche appeal shows like Mad Men; it's what you'd expect when the overall information noise floor rises. The risk of trying to make a broad appeal show is that it is mildly appealing to many people but not strongly appealing to any audience segment, and that is a losing strategy if the noise floor is so high that only high appeal shows can poke their head above it. Is it any surprise that two of the most successful showrunners in recent history are Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy? Watch any of their programs and, whether you like them or not, you won't fault them for pulling their punches. Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, American Horror Story, Nip/Tuck, Glee, The People Vs. O.J. Simpson, these are programs that are engineered to mash people's buttons. Two of the bigger hits of recent memory that aren't from either of those two showrunners are Empire and This is Us. The former was, like many of Rhimes and Murphy's shows, crazy. Double crosses, murders, affairs, all of it. Cray cray. As for This is Us, I watched two episodes with my sister-in-law while in NYC, and while it might seem to fit the template of a more classic, broad appeal broadcast network show, it is bonkers in its own way. Its genre is melodrama, and the episode design is a tear-jerker in every episode. Every one. No exceptions. If you are a writer on that show and your episode doesn't the audience cry they fire you and then everyone has a good cry over it. In a world of infinite content, the ideal bundle, then, isn't a basket of broadly appealing programs, something that may be impossible to engineer anymore. Instead, it's a bundle of shows with very strong niche appeal to particular but different audience segments. This, as many of you will note, is not some new concept. The conditions have just made it a more critical one. In the Hollywood Reporter, Marc Bernardin observes the success of films like Wonder Woman, Get Out, Black Panther, and Coco, and notes: No, the reason we're in the midst of a halcyon age of representational storytelling that's resonating on a historic scale is that a far more diverse pool of storytellers — black filmmakers, female filmmakers, Asian filmmakers — are getting empowered to tell their stories their way with all the resources usually reserved for white, male creatives. Black Panther isn't just the story of a handsome prince taking the throne of a fictional, advanced African nation, it's also the story of a filmmaker reckoning with the disconnect that lives in the hyphen between "African" and "American." It's about a man who grew up around women of strength and grace and power who didn't think twice about populating both his art and his set with those same kinds of women. It's about a kid from Oakland dreaming dreams that the world told him he couldn't. Similarly, Thor: Ragnarok would never have been both a balls-out buddy comedy with a perfectly timed anus joke and a trenchant examination of the paved-over sins of colonial expansion without the half-Maori New Zealander Taika Waititi at the helm. And we have proof positive of how Jenkins' centering of Diana in Wonder Woman is different from Zack Snyder's treatment of the same character in Justice League: More openness, innocence and resolve … fewer gratuitous shots of Gal Gadot's ass. And there's no one who could've conceived of Get Out but Peele, who spent years exploring the ways race and genre collide on TV's Key & Peele, is a student of horror and has definitely found himself navigating the frothy waters of meeting a white girlfriend's parents for the first time. The way forward isn't simply to decide to greenlight stories about diverse people. It's to cultivate a generation of writers, directors and producers who see the world through their own unique lens and then bring that perspective to bear. If Marvel didn't have someone like Nate Moore in its producer ranks, someone who knew who T'Challa was and what he could mean, you'd never get a Black Panther. If Pixar didn't elevate story artist Adrian Molina to co-director and co-writer, Coco might've seemed more like a Day of the Dead theme park ride than a haunting, heartbreaking exaltation of Dia de los Muertos. What audiences are responding to, in every movie that's popped in the past year, is a sense of truth. Just as we can tell, somehow, when CG is spackled on a little too heavily, we can sense when something feels inauthentic. We can tell the difference between 12 Years a Slave and Amistad, between The Joy Luck Club and The Last Samurai, between Selma and Mississippi Burning. One of them feels true — and truth, ultimately, is what makes something universal. I believe in the power of film as a medium, and so it's no surprise that I believe in the underrated power of representation. It's not underrated by those of us who've never seen ourselves on screen, but I recall talking to some white men about Wonder Woman, and they remarked how they didn't see what the fuss was about. I couldn't help but think of the group of women I saw Wonder Woman with; half of them left the theater in tears, the experience of watching a woman on screen was so viscerally moving. I think of the Mexican family seated next to me at a screening of Coco, who spent half the film sobbing audibly. The only Asian men, let alone Chinese men, I saw on screen growing up were Mickey Rooney's bucktoothed caricature of a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles. If you've ever wondered why Bruce Lee is a near deity to Chinese men, it's simply that he was the only powerful representation of themselves they ever saw in American entertainment. The archetype of almost every hero and leader I saw growing up was a white man, and it continues today, where the leadership team of almost every company in Silicon Valley is dominated by white men. Someone asked me once whether I could name a single Chinese CEO of a tech company who had been promoted into the role, rather than having founded the company. I couldn't think of one. It's a blessing to me, then, that the age of infinite content has made culturally specific and truthful representation good business practice for Hollywood. I'd prefer we arrived by some more progressive route, but, as Russian writer Viktor Pelevin has noted, the chief protagonist of pop culture today is a briefcase of money. We've seen many a film with a whitewashed cast bomb recently, and it doesn't strike me as a coincidence. When we have an near infinite supply of content at our disposal, no one needs to settle for the bland, the milquetoast, the emotionally false. *** In that same post about the shifting dynamics of entertainment in the age of abundance, I wrote about the Instagram account House of Highlights. Fast Company cited it in an article about House of Highlights. The past week, I've been watching carefully to see which outlet picks up March Madness buzzer-beaters the quickest, and it is, more often than not, House of Highlights on which I see the first video replay. Social networks go through several phases of evolution on their path to maturity. First, they need to get people to use it even when the graph is sparse. This is the single-player value problem. If they solve that, then the next efficient evolution is some sort of feed, usually populated by all content from people you follow. It's the easiest way to increase the surface area for each user, and it's the easiest way to amplify your service's network effects. The only way to increase a user's frequency of usage is to increase the volume of content to serve them, and aggregating content from all the people you follow is a simple way to personalize the feed, to create value for the lurkers who want to watch but not post, and to send addictive feedback signals to the creators of that content. It's the tried and true social network positive feedback loop. Then, at some point, if the network is successful enough, the problem becomes one of too much content. This is typically when networks move from a chronological, exhaustive feed to an algorithmic feed on some relevance dimension. It's typically when some segment of early adopters complains about the loss of said chronological feed. The algorithmic feed is social networks' counterpart to Inbox Zero. Social networks realized that an "inbox zero" solution to social network overload would never work; too few people would do the necessary work. Arguably, Inbox Zero has about the same adoption issue with regards to email. GMail has a version of the algorithmic email inbox, it's the Important email box, and various other programs have tried to filter out unimportant emails from the inbox using a variety of strategies, but I'd be interested to see software go even a step further and prescribe more drastic measures for solving the signal-to-noise problem of that medium. If you're rich and powerful that solution is a stern administrative assistant but we've yet to scale that with AI. The closest I've come is my GMail's spam filter. I went in there recently and found a bunch of email I had actually subscribed to, but while the false positives were mildly annoying, I couldn't argue my life was harmed in any meaningful way. If you're waiting to hear from me, you're probably in my GMail spam folder, for some reason it's become increasingly aggressive. Content services tend to try their own filtering solutions, tailored to their medium. Video streaming services use some mix of personalized and generic categorical recommendations to populate their interfaces, while news sites lean towards some matrix of chronology and importance overlaid with light categorization. Common to all of these is an acknowledgment that users don't tend to browse sideways through interfaces when exploring through the limited screen real estate of the smartphone screen, so maximizing relevance on a single infinitely scrolling interface window is the most profitable vector. Is it any surprise every video service seems to have autoplay turned on by default now? This is all a roundabout way to say that House of Highlights will someday soon hit bump against the the limitations of the single news feed, despite all of that interface's advantages in aggregating eyeballs for content consumption and advertising on a smartphone screen. Like all providers, House of Highlights depends on the algorithm to push its content to people at the right time, and for those users to pull the content. I suspect that the next frontier for all these large and mature social networks is additional levels of in-feed structure. We've already seen glimpses. The idea of stories, which made its first appearance in Instagram, solve the supply-side problem of social media. That is, in an exhaustive chronological feed, many users are shy about flooding the feed. This caps content supply. Stories, by putting the onus on the viewer to pull the story, unlocks a flood of content. Post frequently, guilt-free! I'd guess that the demand on that content is limited, but paired with the regular algorithmic or chronological feed, you essentially create two marketplaces of content in one interface. Instagram now allows multiple photos per post, another example of added structure. But for now, the algorithms largely restrict themselves to either choosing to display a piece of content or not. It's all candidate selection. I suspect the next breakthrough for all our most used mobile apps, all of whom have achieved massive scale, from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter to YouTube to Snapchat and so on, will be an evolution of the algorithm beyond pure content selection, and an evolution of the presentation of said content from into a broader array of templates. It's a topic for another post. *** Justin Fox of Bloomberg posted a piece related to my post and its discussion of brittle narratives. He notes that some folks have tried to address the problem of brittle narratives when it comes to sports. As an example, he links a video from Ben Falk's Cleaning the Glass, a popular new subscription service for basketball junkies from a former NBA front office staffer. Writes Fox: As with my experience in reading about and then watching UVA's Pack Line, it is also a reminder that there are narratives to sports events that go deeper than what can be plausibly condensed into standard highlight reels, and that casual viewers can be taught to appreciate them. I really am not much of a basketball fan, but Falk's explainer makes me want to observe James in action over extended periods to see if I can detect other such episodes of quiet brilliance. I probably won't; I've got way too many other things going on to add regular watching of the Cleveland Cavaliers to my schedule. But I am at least thinking about it. In soccer, the sport I watch most on TV except in years when the Oakland A's are good, the highlight moments are so rare that you really can't appreciate the games unless you have some understanding (mine is admittedly pretty rudimentary and inarticulate) of the dramas playing out on the field between the scores and near-misses. In other sports, there have always been a few announcers who capably weave these background narratives into their work. I know Tim McCarver was driving most viewers crazy by the time he retired from calling baseball games in 2013, but I can remember him adding layer after layer to the game-watching experience in earlier years. From what I hear (I really don't watch much football), former Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo did that in his first go-round as an NFL analyst for CBS last season. Right now, basketball seems to be generating the most such explanation, though. Maybe that's just because it's basketball season! But I also think there's a happy convergence of the sport's usually-in-motion nature; the emergence of a group of expert, articulate superfans that probably began with the rise of Bill Simmons; the NBA's willingness to accommodate superfans who know how to splice video; and the presence of stars who are not only very smart about the game (I imagine most basketball stars have always been that) but also willing and able to explain how it's played with startling clarity (a friend pointed me to Simmons's series of interviews with the Warriors' Kevin Durant, and what I've heard so far is pretty amazing). 1 If sports are in fact in a battle with narrative brittleness, this is how you fight it. He hits on something important. All the sports leagues have to deal with an onboarding problem with their televised content, and that is the learning curve of appreciation. If you haven't grown up watching and/or playing a sport, it's difficult to appreciate a lot of the moment to moment skill on display in any sporting event. I did not grow up playing soccer, so I find so much of it boring to watch outside of the occasional spectacular goal. The ability of a team to keep possession, the skill of a single player like Messi to evade a gauntlet of defenders, so much of that skill is lost on me. The same goes for hockey, or cricket, or so many sports I didn't grow up with. On the other hand, while many find baseball unbelievably boring, I played growing up, and so even a pitch that isn't swung is seen, by me, as one in a fascinating game theory exchange between pitcher and batter. One of the most exciting plays of the 2016 World Series to me was when Kyle Schwarber laid off a tantalizing slider from Andrew Miller because I knew what a great pitch it was and how much skill it took to not offer at it. For most viewers, it was just another ball, another twenty seconds of inconsequential activity. The Olympics face this problem in spades because they include so many niche sports, but luckily for them, many of the events are short in nature, and the nature of the contest easily explained. When it isn't, the networks lean heavily on personal narrative, something that almost all viewers understand. We can debate until eternity whether Alina Zagitova or Evgenia Medvedeva deserved the gold medal in the women's figure skating final, but it didn't take an expert on figure skating to feel the tension backstage as each skater tried to get in each other's heads. More forward-thinking sports leagues should consider, in the future, making it easier for analysts of all sorts to provide alternative broadcast commentary for their broadcasts. I'd be shocked if it didn't happen in my lifetime. Viewing your sports as broadcast platform with API's allowing for such diversity of integrated analysis would broaden the appeal to different audiences. As it is, some audiences cobble together such alternate peanut gallery chatter from Twitter, Periscope, Facebook, and other social media. I predict leagues will start integrating this content; it makes much more sense than Twitter licensing those video rights to try to facilitate such water coolers. The water cooler is heavy, it's plugged into the wall, and it's expensive; easier to go walk over there to chat than to try to carry the water cooler over to the discussion. Exceeding this learning curve of appreciation isn't sufficient, however. Beyond that, there still exists the problem of rendering your content more culturally relevant, at this moment, than anything else on a person's phone. Anyone who's sat across from someone, only to see that their companion turn their attention to a smartphone, understands this modern conundrum. This isn't just a problem for sports. In an age where Netflix is producing some 700 original series next year, not to mention all the ones from HBO and Amazon and Hulu and FX and on and on, every content provider has to become more thoughtful and creative about how to manufacture desire on the part of the viewer. The temptation, in tech, is to use some recommendations and machine learning to pick content to present to any one viewer, but that is going to be wholly insufficient. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, they say. When what you possess is lots of software engineers gifted at crunching large data sets, everything can look like an ML problem. That leaves huge swaths of human psychology on the table. There are still so many opportunities for so many services to render their content more relevant to a larger audience, a scary proposition to those who already find so many of their apps addictive. Again, different categories of content tend to resort to the same narrow band of strategies as their competitors, but when we live in an age where almost all content across all mediums act as substitute goods for each other, companies and creatives should be widening their net to learn from outside their category. The competition won't wrestle on your terms, the battle is asymmetric. A full list of such strategies is a topic for another day, but I'd argue every company should be looking at everything from House of Highlights to infomercials to Buzzfeed to Disneyland theme parks to high fashion to Costco to Beyonce and Rihanna to the fine art world to YouTube vloggers like Logan Paul to the design of Fortnite to just about everything about Las Vegas to pop-up restaurants to limited edition sneaker drops to folks like Tyler Cowen and Ben Thompson. If we, as consumers, are fighting to resist the Siren song, then on the flip side is a pitched battle to spin the Siren song that will rise above the din. Now stop your ship and listen to our voices. All those who pass this way hear honeyed song, poured from our mouths.
I don't know that I'm aware of enough entries in this category to even consider it one, but I'm a sucker for the union of political and film satire as embodied in alternate film commentaries. I was reminded of it when seeing The People's History of Tattooine which was first one of those spontaneous, emergent forms of Twitter humor that always brightens that otherwise dystopic landscape. JACOB HARRIS What if Mos Eisley wasn’t really that wretched and it was just Obi Wan being racist again? TIM CARMODY What do you mean, “these blaster marks are too precise to be made by Sand People?” Who talks like that? JACOB HARRIS also Sand People is not the preferred nomenclature. TIM CARMODY They have a rich cultural history that’s led them to survive and thrive under spectacularly awful conditions. JACOB HARRIS Mos Eisley may not look like much but it’s a a bedroom community with decent schools and affordable housing. TIM CARMODY You can just imagine Obi-Wan after years of being a Jedi on Coruscant being stuck in this place and just getting madder and madder. JACOB HARRIS yeah nobody cares that the blue milk is so much more artisanal on Coruscant TIM CARMODY Obi-Wan only goes to Mos Eisley once every three months to get drunk and he basically becomes like Byron. Years ago, I laughed at UNUSED AUDIO COMMENTARY BY HOWARD ZINN AND NOAM CHOMSKY, RECORDED SUMMER 2002 FOR THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (PLATINUM SERIES EXTENDED EDITION) DVD, PART ONE (here is part 2, and here are all four of the parts of their commentary for Return of the King). CHOMSKY: And here comes Bilbo Baggins. Now, this is, to my mind, where the story begins to reveal its deeper truths. In the books we learn that Saruman was spying on Gandalf for years. And he wondered why Gandalf was traveling so incessantly to the Shire. As Tolkien later establishes, the Shire’s surfeit of pipe-weed is one of the major reasons for Gandalf’s continued visits. ZINN: You view the conflict as being primarily about pipe-weed, do you not? CHOMSKY: Well, what we see here, in Hobbiton, farmers tilling crops. The thing to remember is that the crop they are tilling is, in fact, pipe-weed, an addictive drug transported and sold throughout Middle Earth for great profit. ZINN: This is absolutely established in the books. Pipe-weed is something all the Hobbits abuse. Gandalf is smoking it constantly. You are correct when you point out that Middle Earth depends on pipe-weed in some crucial sense, but I think you may be overstating its importance. Clearly the war is not based only on the Shire’s pipe-weed. Rohan and Gondor’s unceasing hunger for war is a larger culprit, I would say. CHOMSKY: But without the pipe-weed, Middle Earth would fall apart. Saruman is trying to break up Gandalf’s pipe-weed ring. He’s trying to divert it. ZINN: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf’s interest to keep Middle Earth hooked. CHOMSKY: How do you think these wizards build gigantic towers and mighty fortresses? Where do they get the money? Keep in mind that I do not especially regard anyone, Saruman included, as an agent for progressivism. But obviously the pipe-weed operation that exists is the dominant influence in Middle Earth. It’s not some ludicrous magical ring. A bit more, because I can't help myself: ZINN: Right. And here we receive our first glimpse of the supposedly dreadful Mordor, which actually looks like a fairly functioning place. CHOMSKY: This type of city is most likely the best the Orcs can do if all they have are cliffs to grow on. It’s very impressive, in that sense. ZINN: Especially considering the economic sanctions no doubt faced by Mordor. They must be dreadful. We see now that the Black Riders have been released, and they’re going after Frodo. The Black Riders. Of course they’re black. Everything evil is always black. And later Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White. Have you noticed that? CHOMSKY: The most simplistic color symbolism. ZINN: And the writing on the ring, we learn here, is Orcish — the so-called “black speech.” Orcish is evidently some spoliation of the language spoken in Rohan. This is what Tolkien says. Somewhat related is this, The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel. Christ, shackled to a stone, is being scourged by Roman soldiers. Blood runs down his gory back. His pain is palpable. Jesus: [writhes in pain, hands shaking] [Cell phone rings.] Jesus: [hands shake furiously] [Cell phone rings. Caviezel looks up, sheepish.] Roman soldier: Jim? That you? Jesus: Yeah. [Cell phone rings.] Soldier: Want me to get it? Jesus: Yeah. [Roman soldier gingerly reaches into Caviezel’s blood-soaked loincloth, pulls out phone and opens it, then holds the phone to Caviezel’s ear.] Off Camera: [laughter] Jesus: Hey, Mom. Are there more in this genre? If so, please share!
It is hard for us humans to separate information from meaning because we cannot help interpreting messages. We infuse messages with meaning automatically, fooling ourselves to believe that the meaning of a message is carried in the message. But it is not. This is only an illusion. Meaning is derived from context and prior knowledge. Meaning is the interpretation that a knowledge agent, such as a human, gives to a message, but it is different from the physical order that carries the message, and different from the message itself. Meaning emerges when a message reaches a life-form or a machine with the ability to process information; it is not carried in the blots of ink, sound waves, beams of light, or electric pulses that transmit information. From the book Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo. I read this book a long ways back in 2017, but it's of no less interest now. And it is the arrow of complexity—the growth of information—that marks the history of our universe and species. Billions of years ago, soon after the Big Bang, our universe did not have the capacity to generate the order that made Boltzmann marvel and which we all take for granted. Since then, our universe has been marching toward disorder, as Boltzmann predicted, but it has also been busy producing pockets that concentrate enormous quantities of physical order, or information. Our planet is a chief example of such a pocket. When one first encounters the second law of thermodynamics, it's easy to tumble into despair at the pointlessness of everything. With the universe fated to collapse into heat death eventually, what is the point of it all? In this existential void, the presence of pockets of information and order can feel like symbols of rebellion, a raised fist spray painted on a fragment of wall that remains from a bombed-out building. In manifestations of order we see intent, in intent we interpret meaning, and in meaning we find comfort. Information, when understood in its broad meaning as physical order, is what our economy produces. It is the only thing we produce, whether we are biological cells or manufacturing plants. This is because information is not restricted to messages. It is inherent in all the physical objects we produce: bicycles, buildings, streetlamps, blenders, hair dryers, shoes, chandeliers, harvesting machines, and underwear are all made of information. This is not because they are made of ideas but because they embody physical order. Our world is pregnant with information. It is not an amorphous soup of atoms, but a neatly organized collection of structures, shapes, colors, and correlations. Such ordered structures are the manifestations of information, even when these chunks of physical order lack any meaning. There are plenty of books on information theory, and viewing the universe through the lens of information and computation is increasingly popular, but Hidalgo's book is more readable than most. To battle disorder and allow information to grow, our universe has a few tricks up its sleeve. These tricks involve out-of-equilibrium systems, the accumulation of information in solids, and the ability of matter to compute. It is the growth of information that unifies the emergence of life with the growth of economies, and the emergence of complexity with the origins of wealth. In twenty-six minutes Iris traveled from the ancientness of her mother’s womb to the modernity of twenty-first-century society. Birth is, in essence, time travel. Birth as time travel is one of those metaphors that, once heard, lodges in your mind like something you always knew. When Arnold Schwarzenegger time travels back from the future to the modern day in The Terminator, he arrives naked, like a newborn. [It is unclear why a cyborg from the future speaks with a thick Austrian accent, one of the only mysteries I have always hoped would be explained in some throwaway expository joke. My guess is that the voice was a marketing Easter Egg, like celebrity voices in Waze, and someone forgot to flip the Terminator back to its factory default voice before sending it back in time.] Humans are special animals when it comes to information, because unlike other species, we have developed an enormous ability to encode large volumes of information outside our bodies. Naively, we can think of this information as the information we encode in books, sheet music, audio recordings, and video. Yet for longer than we have been able to write we have been embodying information in artifacts or objects, from arrows to microwave ovens, from stone axes to the physical Internet. So our ability to produce chairs, computers, tablecloths, and wineglasses is a simple answer to the eternal question: what is the difference between us, humans, and all other species? The answer is that we are able to create physical instantiations of the objects we imagine, while other species are stuck with nature’s inventory. Another reason humans wouldn't evolve on a gaseous planet like Jupiter, besides the fact that we'd just burn up, is that without any solids we'd have no way of encoding information to pass on to future generations. Therefore, any advanced civilization in the universe would, it would seem, live in physical conditions that allow for the formation of solids, but not solids that are too rigid. The temperature band matters. We need solids that are malleable to encode richer sets of information. Add to that the ability to compute, which we see in all forms in our world, down to the cellular level, and suddenly you have life. There is logic to why we look for specific conditions in the universe as precursors for life, and it can be defined more broadly than just looking for water, which is a downstream condition. Further upstream we just want a planet with solids, in a particular band of temperatures. Such conditions allow living creatures to record and pass along information to the next generation. When humans finally were able to do so, they in effect conquered time. No longer did the knowledge of one generation evaporate into the sinkhole of mortality. The car’s dollar value evaporated in the crash not because the crash destroyed the atoms that made up the Bugatti but because the crash changed the way in which these were arranged. As the parts that made the Bugatti were pulled apart and twisted, the information that was embodied in the Bugatti was largely destroyed. This is another way of saying that the $2.5 million worth of value was stored not in the car’s atoms but in the way those atoms were arranged. That arrangement is information. ... So the value of the Bugatti is connected to physical order, which is information, even though people still debate what information is. According to Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, information is a measure of the minimum volume of communication required to uniquely specify a message. That is, it’s the number of bits we need to communicate an arrangement, like the arrangement of atoms that made the Bugatti. ... The group of Bugattis in perfect shape, however, is relatively small, meaning that in the set of all possible rearrangement of atoms—like people moving in a stadium—very few of these involve a Bugatti in perfect condition. The group of Bugatti wrecks, on the other hand, is a configuration with a higher multiplicity of states (higher entropy), and hence a configuration that embodies less information (even though each of these states requires more bits to be communicated). Yet the largest group of all, the one that is equivalent to people sitting randomly in the stadium, is the one describing Bugattis in their “natural” state. This is the state where iron is a mineral ore and aluminum is embedded in bauxite. The destruction of the Bugatti, therefore, is the destruction of information. The creation of the Bugatti, on the other hand, is the embodiment of information. One can separate out the intrinsic value of an item, defined above as the rarity of the state of the configuration of that item, from the external value of an item, as defined by qualities such as symbolic or emotional ones, like nostalgia. In Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis risks life and limb to recover a watch given to him by his father. There's no evidence it's a particularly rare watch, he could likely buy another just like it, but its symbolic value to him is extrinsic to the item yet tethered to it the way a genie is trapped in a magic lantern (and that special meaning is conveyed in the now immortal speech by Christopher Walken). Even the most rational people I know own something that's not physically rare but emotionally rich, a talisman or totem that they use to summon whatever power it holds, whether it be nostalgia or regret or some other enchantment known only to themselves. What Shannon teaches us is that the amount of information that is embodied in a tweet is equal to the minimum number of yes-or-no questions that Brian needs to ask to guess Abby’s tweet with 100 percent accuracy. But how many questions is that? Shannon’s theory tells us that we need 700 bits, or yes-or-no questions, to communicate a tweet written using a thirty-two-character alphabet. Shannon’s theory is also the basis of modern communication systems. One mathematical reason for the rising usage of emoji in Twitter and other forms of online communication may be that it increases the amount of information that can be encoded in 140 (and now 280) characters. You'll recall from earlier that the third of the three conditions that allow information to grow is the ability of matter to compute. To illustrate the prebiotic nature of the ability of matter to process information, we need to consider a more fundamental system. Here is where the chemical systems that fascinated Prigogine come in handy. Consider a set of chemical reactions that takes a set of compounds {I} and transforms them into a set of outputs {O} via a set of intermediate compounds {M}. Now consider feeding this system with a steady flow of {I}. If the flow of {I} is small, then the system will settle into a steady state where the intermediate inputs {M} will be produced and consumed in such a way that their numbers do not fluctuate much. The system will reach a state of equilibrium. In most chemical systems, however, once we crank up the flow of {I} this equilibrium will become unstable, meaning that the steady state of the system will be replaced by two or more stable steady states that are different from the original state of equilibrium.13 When these new steady states emerge, the system will need to “choose” among them, meaning that it will have to move to one or the other, breaking the symmetry of the system and developing a history that is marked by those choices. If we crank up the inflow of the input compounds {I} even further, these new steady states will become unstable and additional new steady states will emerge. This multiplication of steady states can lead these chemical reactions to highly organized states, such as those exhibited by molecular clocks, which are chemical oscillators, compounds that change periodically from one type to another. But does such a simple chemical system have the ability to process information? Now consider that we can push the system to one of these steady states by changing the concentration of inputs {I}. Such a system will be “computing,” since it will be generating outputs that are conditional on the inputs it is ingesting. It would be a chemical transistor. In an awfully crude way this chemical system models a primitive metabolism. In an even cruder way, it is a model of a cell differentiating from one cell type to another—the cell types can be viewed abstractly as the dynamic steady states of these systems, as the complex systems biologist Stuart Kauffman suggested decades ago. Highly interacting out-of-equilibrium systems, whether they are trees reacting to the change of seasons or chemical systems processing information about the inputs they receive, teach us that matter can compute. These systems tell us that computation precedes the origins of life just as much as information does. The chemical changes encoded by these systems are modifying the information encoded in these chemical compounds, and therefore they represent a fundamental form of computation. Life is a consequence of the ability of matter to compute. What's lovely about all of these conditions that allow information to grow is their seeming relevance to individuals and groups of individuals, like corporations or societies or markets. Humans are concentrated bundles of information with compute power, and when we push ourselves out of equilibrium, we accumulate information. When we crank up our inputs and force ourselves out of our own equilibrium, as we do when we become students, we grow as we restore ourselves to steady state. Whenever anyone complains that they're in a rut, I always counsel them to force themselves out of equilibrium. *** That covers much of the first half of the book, all fascinating. However, the part of the book that's of broader interest to a business audience is Hidalgo's discussion of the economy as a creator of information. It's easiest to understand the information creation capacity of an economy by examining its outputs, and the simplest outputs to understand are physical products. Thinking about products as crystals of imagination tells us that products do not just embody information but also imagination. This is information that we have generated through mental computations and then disembodied by creating an object that mimics the one we had in our head. Edible apples existed before we had a name for them, a price for them, or a market for them. They were present in the world. As a concept, apples were simply imported into our minds. On the other hand, iPhones and iPads are mental exports rather than imports, since they are products that were begotten in our minds before they became part of our world. So the main difference between apples and Apples resides in the source of their physical order rather than in their embodiment of physical order. Both products are packets of information, but only one of them is a crystal of imagination. Like many navel gazers in the tech industry, I'm guilty of stereotyping companies. Apple's strength is integrated hardware and software, Google is the king of machine learning and crunching large data sets, Facebook is the social network to end all social networks, and Amazon is the everything platform. However, if you haven't worked or been inside any of those companies, it's fairest to judge them as black boxes into which inputs disappear and come out as various outputs, usually products and services like gadgets or websites or applications. Everything else is a mild form of fan fiction. By analyzing a company's outputs, one can deduce a great deal about its capabilities. Hidalgo does the same but at the country level. The idea of crystallized imagination tells us that a country’s export structure carries information about more than just its abundance of capital and labor. A country’s export structure is a fingerprint that tells us about the ability of people in that country to create tangible instantiations of imaginary objects, such as automobiles, espresso machines, subway cars, and motorcycles, and of course about the myriad of specific factors that are needed to create these sophisticated products. In fact, the composition of a country’s exports informs us about the knowledge and knowhow that are embodied in that country’s population. A country that can export a product like an iPhone generally has greater generative power than one that can only export raw materials like bananas. The telltale clues to the economic potential of a country lie not in its imports but its exports. So what has any of this to do with Chile? The only connection between Chile and the history of electricity comes from the fact that the Atacama Desert is full of copper atoms, which, just like most Chileans, were utterly unaware of the electric dreams that powered the passion of Faraday and Tesla. As the inventions that made these atoms valuable were created, Chile retained the right to hold many of these atoms hostage. Now Chile can make a living out of them. This brings us back to the narrative of exploitation we described earlier. The idea of crystallized imagination should make it clear that Chile is the one exploiting the imagination of Faraday, Tesla, and others, since it was the inventors’ imagination that endowed copper atoms with economic value. But Chile is not the only country that exploits foreign creativity this way. Oil producers like Venezuela and Russia exploit the imagination of Henry Ford, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, Nicolas Carnot, James Watt, and James Joule by being involved in the commerce of a dark gelatinous goo that was virtually useless until combustion engines were invented. Making a strong distinction between the generation of value and the appropriation of monetary compensation helps us understand the difference between wealth and economic development. In fact, the world has many countries that are rich but still have underdeveloped economies. This is a distinction that we will explore in detail in Part IV. But making this distinction, which comes directly from the idea of crystallized imagination, helps us see that economic development is based not on the ability of a pocket of the economy to consume but on the ability of people to turn their dreams into reality. Economic development is not the ability to buy but the ability to make. At a corporate level, I can recall an age when Sony was the king of consumer electronics the world over. I first coveted a Walkman, then later a Discman. Our family spent its formative years huddled around a giant (at the time) Sony Trinitron TV, and we were the envy of all my friends for owning one. I looked forward to any trip to Japan for a chance to walk the electronics districts to purchase the coolest gadgets on the planet, and for years I owned a Minidisc player model that you couldn't find in the U.S. And then the world shifted, and the gadget which subsumed all other gadgets was the computer, and as it shrank in size while growing in computational power, the way we interacted with such devices increasingly became software-based. In that competition, the vector which mattered more than anything became software design, a skill Sony had not mastered. The company that understood both software and hardware design better than any company in the world happened to be located in Silicon Valley, not Japan, and, after a long Wintel interregnum, caused by a number of business factors covered comprehensively elsewhere, Apple's unique skills found themselves in a universe they could really dent. And dent they did. Thanks especially to the market opportunity created by the smartphone, which it seized with the iPhone, Apple not only surpassed Sony and moved the balance of power in consumer technology across the Pacific Ocean to American shores but became the most valuable company in the entire world. *** Not all information is easily embodied. For example, for a while I puzzled over what I'll call the Din Tai Fung Paradox. Din Tai Fung is a restaurant chain, and I visited the original outlet in Taipei decades ago with my mother. They're known for their Shanghainese soup dumplings, made with a very delicate wrap that somehow never breaks and dumps its precious cargo of pork broth until the moment at which you prod it with your chopsticks just so. Some will argue whether Ding Tai Fung is all that and a bucket of chicken, but at a minimum I find the menu to be satisfying comfort food done consistently, in a setting that is usually cleaner and more well-kept than your average chain restaurant outlet. You'll find superior deals from a street vendor and more elaborate preparation at a higher-end restaurant, but Din Tai Fung industrializes and scales a Chinese staple. We don't pay enough attention to scale. The mystery is why Din Tai Fung has opened so few outlets; they've only dropped locations in a handful of cities in about ten countries in the world, and every Din Tai Fung is packed solid from open to close with the type of ever-present line of humans snaked outside the front door that you so rarely see at any restaurant, let alone a chain. For a few months, a new outlet was rumored to be opening in San Francisco soon, and among my friends it was as momentous a rumor as if a new Star Wars teaser trailer had dropped. Ultimately, one opened in the Bay Area, but in Santa Clara instead of San Francisco. Which leads to a further mystery: why haven't any competing chains opened up to make the same items to fill the market void? I would never open a restaurant, but my family knows I'd make an exception if I were granted the opportunity to open a branch of Din Tai Fung anywhere. I bring it up every family gathering, when there's a lull in the conversation. Forget cryptocurrency, I want to mint me some Din Tai Fung coin. At every Din Tai Fung I've been to, they have a glass window so you can look into the kitchen to see the soup dumplings being wrapped, always by kitchen staff wearing white uniforms, almost like lab assistants, an impression magnified by the branches that require face masks. It's rumored that the branches in Asia try to hire the tallest, most attractive men to man the soup dumpling assembly line, but it sounds about as true as a lot of things my aunts and uncles tell me, which is to say it's more credible than I'd care to admit. The hermetic vibe behind the glass is as far from the vendor selling goods from a street cart as possible; some find street food charming but if you're taking this food to a global audience it needs to be sanitized or sterilized, the same way movies for the Chinese market strip out any storylines that might offend. It's not just the front of the house that's immaculate, the show behind the glass display says they have nothing to hide. It's the equivalent of the blackjack dealer at a casino clapping and turning their hands one way and the other before moving to the next table. More interesting to me was that Din Tai Fung even doesn't even bother to hide the process behind its staple dish, the evidence is on thousands of smart phones by this point, everyone seems to stop to take a photo or video of the assembly line while waiting for their table. And yet any Chinese food fan knows it's notoriously hard to find a good soup dumpling. In this age where recipes for almost anything are available online for free, why can't you find a good soup dumpling in most major cities in the world? Or, for that matter, a good burrito, or any dish you love? Why are these crystals of imagination so unevenly distributed when the recipes for making them so broadly available? The answer, as any home chef who has tried to make a dish from some highfalutin cookbook knows, is simple: you can have the most precise ingredient list and directions and still struggle to make anything approaching what you ate, whether it came from a $400 tasting menu or a mainstream cookbook. Cooking is not nearly as deterministic as the term recipe implies. Slight variations in environment, weather, ingredients, and cookware can lead to massive differences in the final product. Your oven may say 400 degrees, but the actual temperature inside, at the precise spot where you've placed your baking dish, may be different. That celery you use for your mirepoix today may not be as fresh as the celery you used last week. The air pressure where you're cooking on a particular day may differ from that where you live, the bacteria in the air may also vary. Great chefs appear on Top Chef and flail making dishes they've made hundreds of times in their own restaurant kitchen because every bit of environmental variation matters. We may glamorize the image of the genius, heroic chef, working magic to create a delicious and beautifully plated dish that a waiter places before us with a balletic flourish, but the true value creation in a restaurant comes from translating that moment of genius into a rote, repeatable cycle. The popularity of sous vide as a cooking technique, even at high end restaurants, comes down its repeatable precision and accuracy. Ask any chef and they'll tell you the value of a line chef who can cook dozens of proteins to the right level of doneness every time given the high cost of fish and meat. In addition to all those conditionals, much of cooking skill comes down to learned muscle memory and pattern recognition that can only be encoded in a human being through repeated trial and error. I tried to learn some of my favorite of my mother and grandmother's dishes by writing down recipes they dictated to me, but much was lost in translation. Like so much maternal magic, it could only be learned, truly, at their side, with an apron on, watching, imitating, botching one dish after another, until some of it seeped into my bones. In a memorable segment from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, apprentice Daisuke Nakazawa is assigned the job of making egg sushi, or tamago. He believes it will be simple, but again and again, Jiro rejects his work. Nakazawa ends up making over 200 rejected samples until finally, one day, Jiro approves. Nakazawa cries in relief and joy. *** Hardware and software are not like cooking. When knowledge and instructions can be encoded in bits, a level of precision is possible that is effectively, for the purposes of this discussion, deterministic. Manufacturing a hundred million iPhones is like food production, but not the type done in high end or home kitchens. Instead, it is more like producing a hundred million Oreos. There is one country in the world where that many iPhones can be manufactured for the cost that allows Apple to reap its insane profits: China. I can't think of any other country in the world, not India or Mexico or the United States, or all of Europe together that can make that many iPhones for that price to meet the market demand year after year. Some countries have the labor but not the skills, others have the skills but not enough labor, and others just can't do the work as cheaply as China can. Recall that the potential of an economy can be judged by the complexity of its exports. Based on that, it's difficult to imagine an economy outside of the U.S. with more potential than China. Some of the most complex products in the world, and the iPhone deserves to be on that list, are made in China. I've backed many a Kickstarter hardware project, and without fail, every one has been made in China, usually Shenzhen. Inevitably, when the products are delayed, the project's creators will send an update with some photos of a few of them in China, at some plant, examining some part that will get the project back on track, or with their arms around a few Chinese plant managers giving a thumbs up sign. Kickstarter often feels like an industrial and software design and marketing operation layer grafted on top of the manufacturing capabilities of Shenzhen. It is an early warning indicator of China's economic potential, and the gap that remains to realizing it. Here is another. Foxconn assembles iPhones for Apple, and for their efforts they make anywhere from $8 to $30 per iPhone, depending on what article you believe. Whatever the figure, we know it is not far off from that. Apple, in contrast, makes hundreds of dollars per iPhone. They earn that premium, many multiples what Foxconn earns, by virtue of being the ones who designed every aspect of the phone, from the software to the hardware. China can supply labor and even sometimes components, but the crystal of imagination that is the iPhone, perhaps the most valuable such crystal in the history of the world, comes almost entirely from the imagination of employees of Apple. Foxconn is one cog in a long supply chain, and that link isn't the one made of gold. However, to even have the capability of making an iPhone for less than the cost of a lunch in San Francisco is a skill, one China has shown again and again. Many another country wishes it had such a demonstrated skill. Were China ever able to gain some of the software and industrial design skills of a company like Apple, they would be even more of an economic powerhouse than they are now. That's a massive conditional. It's not something that can be learned by mere handwaving or even sheer industriousness. After all, Sony could return to its former glory, or Samsung be even more dominant globally, if software design skills were so easily learned. Someone someday will write a book of the history of software design and how it came to be that Apple built up that capability more than any other technology company, and I'll be among its most eager readers because it's an untold story that holds the key to one of the greatest value creation stories in the history of business. ...our world is one in which knowledge and knowhow are “heavier” than the atoms we use to embody their practical uses. Information can be moved around easily in the products that contain it, whether these are objects, books, or webpages, but knowledge and knowhow are trapped in the bodies of people and the networks that these people form. Knowledge and knowhow are so “heavy” that when it comes to a simple product such as a cellphone battery, it is infinitely easier to bring the lithium atoms that lie dormant in the Atacama Desert to Korea than to bring the knowledge of lithium batteries that resides in Korean scientists to the bodies of the miners who populate the Atacaman cities of Antofagasta and Calama. Our world is marked by great international differences in countries’ ability to crystallize imagination. These differences emerge because countries differ in the knowledge and knowhow that are embodied in their populations, and because accumulating knowledge and knowhow in people is difficult. But why is it hard for us to accumulate the knowledge and knowhow we need to transform our dreams into reality? If knowledge were so easy to transfer, I'd be a three-star Michelin Chef because someone gifted me a copy of the Eleven Madison Park cookbook. Getting knowledge inside a human’s nervous system is not easy because learning is both experiential and social.5 To say that learning is social means that people learn from people: children learn from their parents and employees learn from their coworkers (I hope). The social nature of learning makes the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow geographically biased. People learn from people, and it is easier for people to learn from others who are experienced in the tasks they want to learn than from people with no relevant experience in that task. For instance, it is difficult to become an air traffic controller without learning the trade from other air traffic controllers, just as it is difficult to become a surgeon without having ever been an intern or a resident at a hospital. By the same token, it is hard to accumulate the knowhow needed to manufacture rubber tires or an electric circuit without interacting with people who have made tires or circuits.6 Ultimately, the experiential and social nature of learning not only limits the knowledge and knowhow that individuals can achieve but also biases the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow toward what is already available in the places where these individuals reside. This implies that the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow is geographically biased. What governs the information production capacity of a country? Hidalgo coins two terms to analyze this problem. One is the personbyte. We can simplify this discussion by defining the maximum amount of knowledge and knowhow that a human nervous system can accumulate as a fundamental unit of measurement. We call this unit a personbyte, and define it as the maximum knowledge and knowhow carrying capacity of a human. The other term is firmbyte. The limited proliferation of megafactories like the Rouge implies that there must be mechanisms that limit the size of the networks we call firms and make it preferable to disaggregate production into networks of firms. This also suggests the existence of a second quantization limit, which we will call the firmbyte. It is analogous to the personbyte, but instead of requiring the distribution of knowledge and knowhow among people, it requires them to be distributed among a network of firms. Hidalgo then delves a bit into Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm. Traditionally, Coase's theory is used as a way to explain why firms are fundamentally limited in their size, the idea being that at some size, external transactions become cheaper than internal coordination costs and so it's more efficient to just transact externally rather than produce internally. I'm not interested in examining that topic now. Instead, let's assume that firms all do have some asymptote in size beyond which Coase's anchor becomes too heavy. The interesting implication is that given the existence of a ceiling on the size of the firmbyte, if some chunk of knowledge exceeds that capacity then it can only be carried by a network of firms. It's long been said that the center of the technology universe shifted from Boston's route 128 to Silicon Valley because California banned non-competes (here's one study). Hidalgo's theory of the finite compute ability of a network of humans and firms explains how this works. The free movement of employees in Silicon Valley allows the region's knowledge-carrying capacity to increase at the expense of any single firm's benefit. Per Coase, the cost of information movement in Silicon Valley, as embodied by an employee carrying a personbyte from one firm to the next, is lower than it was in the route 128 corridor. Let's telescope back out to the country level. What applies at the regional or industry level holds at the country level. A country's knowledge carrying capacity, and thus its information production power, is influenced in part by the size of networks it can form. In his 1995 book Trust, he [Francis Fukuyama] argues that the ability of a society to form large networks is largely a reflection of that society’s level of trust. Fukuyama makes a strong distinction between what he calls “familial” societies, like those of southern Europe and Latin America, and “high-trust” societies, like those of Germany, the United States, and Japan. Familial societies are societies where people don’t trust strangers but do trust deeply the individuals in their own families (the Italian Mafia being a cartoon example of a familial society). In familial societies family networks are the dominant form of social organization where economic activity is embedded, and are therefore societies where businesses are more likely to be ventures among relatives. By contrast, in high-trust societies people don’t have a strong preference for trusting their kin and are more likely to develop firms that are professionally run. Familial societies and high-trust societies differ not only in the composition of the networks they form—as in kin and non-kin—but also in the size of the networks they can form. This is because the professionally run businesses that evolve in high-trust societies are more likely to result in networks of all sizes, including large ones. In contrast, familial societies are characterized by a large number of small businesses and a few dominant families controlling a few large conglomerates. Yet, as we have argued before, the size of networks matters, since it helps determine the economic activities that take place in a location. Larger networks are needed to produce products of higher complexity and, in turn, for societies to achieve higher levels of prosperity. So according to Fukuyama, the presence of industries of different sizes indicates the presence of trust. In his own words: “Industrial structure tells an intriguing story about a country’s culture. Societies that have very strong families but relatively weak bonds of trust among people unrelated to one another will tend to be dominated by small, family-owned and managed business. On the other hand, countries that have vigorous private nonprofit organizations like schools, hospitals, churches, and charities, are also likely to develop strong private economic institutions that go beyond the family.” In Tyler Cowen's conversation with economist Luigi Zingales, the latter hints at the limitations of familial economies in humorous fashion: One friend of mine was saying that the demise of the Italian firm family structure is the demise of the Italian family. In essence, when you used to have seven kids, one out of seven in the family was smart. You could find him. You could transfer the business within the family with a little bit of meritocracy and selection. When you’re down to one or two kids, the chance that one is an idiot is pretty large. The result is that you can’t really transfer the business within the family. The biggest problem of Italy is actually fertility, in my view, because we don’t have enough kids. If you don’t have enough kids, you don’t have enough people to transfer. You don’t have enough young people to be dynamic. The Italian culture has a lot of defects, but the entrepreneurship culture was there, has been there, and it still is there, but we don’t have enough young people. Low fertility's impact on economies is an issue globally, for example in Japan, but low trust outside of family is an even broader constraint on the knowledge carrying capacity of an economy. If you can't form as large a firm as another country, you can't compete in some businesses and the information producing capability of your economy has a lower ceiling. If you run a company, you're no doubt familiar with the efficiency gains that arise when different employees and departments operate with high trust. Links form easily given an assumption of low risk, and knowledge moves more quickly, fluidly. Networks then facilitate trust in a virtuous cycle, an example being the military as an integrating institution in a multi-ethnic society. Trust based on family has its own advantages, but for now I'm focused on an economy's ceiling, and networks that throw off the shackles of family-based firms can scale more. China not only has the population to supply a workforce that can assemble 100 million iPhones in a year, it has an economy that has moved beyond any roots in family-based trust. Hidalgo's theory also explains why we don't see geographic leakage in industry know-how. Why aren't there Silicon Valleys everywhere? The personbyte theory can also help us explain why large chunks of knowledge and knowhow are hard to accumulate and transfer, and why knowledge and knowhow are organized in the hierarchical pattern that is expressed in the nestedness of the industry-location data. This is because large chunks of knowledge and knowhow need large networks of people to be embodied in, and transferring or duplicating large networks is not as easy as transferring a small group of people. As a result, industry-location networks are nested, and countries move to products that are close by in the product space. When the knowledge required to create something like an iPhone or a Hollywood film require the interaction of multiple people, with all their accumulated knowledge, seizing it for yourself isn't as easy as poaching one employee or sprinting off with a burning branch to give fire to mankind like Prometheus. Thus we understand why, besides its weather, LA has such a grip on filmmaking for the global market, why any handset manufacturers can't just reverse engineer an iPhone, and why, despite having hundreds of millions of users for iMessages, Apple isn't a credible threat in social networking. When I study the Chinese tech market, I see an incredibly high ceiling. In fact, the Chinese consumer market in tech is more dynamic now than its counterpart in Silicon Valley. Once, China was belittled for simply copying all the US tech companies. It's true, there is a Chinese Bizarro instance of all successful U.S. tech companies, a Chinese Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. Thanks to that complex interaction of culture and technology, however, China now creates companies with no real American equivalents, and that extends beyond WeChat. China also has more dense cities than America, and density creates its own unique consumer technology opportunities. You'll run out of fingers and toes before you come to a Chinese city as small as New York City, and that matters when many social products piggyback and rely on metropolitan densities as dry kindling. The competition between tech companies in the U.S. draws scandalized chatter from the peanut gallery, but the pace at which something like Snapchat Stories was copied in the U.S. would be seen as laughably slow in China. Not only are features of competitors routinely copied within a week or two in China, employees are poached all the time in what is closer to a true approximation of a free labor market than even Silicon Valley. Knowledge moves quickly, freely. Three things, in my observation, hold Chinese companies back from capturing more share in the international market, outside Chinese borders. Two are related, and those are an internationally appealing industrial and software design aesthetic. It's true, people who find many Chinese software UI's to be busy and crowded can't read Chinese and thus don't understand their localized appeal to the Chinese market. As eye-tracking studies have shown (example), Chinese users scan pages differently, and why shouldn't they considering the fundamental differences between an alphabetic language like English and a pictographic one like Chinese? Still, most of the international market can't read Chinese. In my past work with UI designers in China, I find it takes more prompting to arrive at something more broadly intuitive for, say, an American market. The same goes for industrial design, where, akin to the denser informational aesthetic of Chinese software, a somewhat more maximalist impulse takes hold. It's still quite common to walk into an Asian electronics superstore and see display signage that lists dozens of bullet points of features in selling a product. Contrast that to the almost non-existent signage in an Apple store for the extreme opposite. A more tangible example is something like the user interface of everyone's favorite cooking gadget, the Instant Pot. I received one as a gift last year, and no doubt, I think it's a real value at $80 or so for the base model. For how harried we all feel, a pressure cooker is way more useful a kitchen gadget than most. However, this is the instrument panel on the front of the Instant Pot. In practice, it's even more confusing than it appears on first glance. I won't delve into it here, but given a simple design pass, the entire UI could be made much less intimidating, much more intuitive. Given the functionality of any pressure cooker, the functionality can be reduced to a much simpler instrumentation. These two skill gaps in software and industrial design allow for a continued Kickstarter arbitrage opportunity that slaps a more internationally appealing software and industrial design, along with the more internationally appealing marketing, on top of Shenzhen's manufacturing capabilities. The last thing holding back more Chinese startups, in my experience, is a shortage in the professional management class. I know, I know, MBA's get a bad rap in the domestic market, but having many CEO's with engineering background at so many Chinese tech companies comes with its own drawbacks. This management gap may be related to the style of org structure and management which others have mentioned to me as less conducive to certain types of innovation, though it's harder for me to assess without having worked inside a Chinese company. None of this needs to matter since the Chinese market is so massive. Chinese startups can succeed wildly without ever making a peep outside their home territory. Besides, how a design aesthetic and process can seep into a country's soul remains a mystery to me, but my guess is it's about as slow-moving as trying to produce a high quality soup dumpling in a new market. Still, I love to muse on the potential of China. In fact, there is one Chinese company that best exemplifies the potential of the country's tech market on the international stage. Last summer, a friend of mine who had worked at this company heard I was in the market for a drone and referred me to a friend who was selling an extra, lightly used Mavic Pro which he'd purchased after he thought he'd lost his original. I don't know the first thing about flying drones, but it took me all of fifteen minutes or so to get the thing up and flying around in the air, capturing 4K video. It is an fantastic feat of engineering, probably still the single drone I'd recommend to anyone looking to get into drone photography (though I recommend getting a bundle with some extra batteries and a carrying case). DJI had a few advantages in surging to its undisputed leadership position in the global drone market. First, this is a product category where how well the product actually works is more complex a task than in others. Many drones just don't fly that well. Being an engineering-led company is a strength here, and as long as the industrial design is optimized for flight, it doesn't really matter if your product isn't the sleekest. You won't care what it looks like when it's several hundred feet up in the air. Second, from a software design perspective, drone UI design can piggyback on flight UI templates that have been worked out over the years. One reason I was up and running so quickly with my Mavic Pro is that the flight sticks imitate video game flight controls. The UI isn't quite as simple as I'd like, but I was fluent much more quickly than the hefty page count of the instruction manual implied. Estimates of DJI's market share vary, but they are all well north of 50%, and most of its competitors have either left the market entirely or are struggling to stay aloft, so to speak. Here is a vertically integrated Chinese company that most definitely makes more than the cost of cheap SF lunch that Foxconn makes for each iPhone it assembles. Now, making drones and building smartphones or writing apps are not the same skills. Drones, as exciting as they are, still aren't the type of thing I'd recommend except to photography enthusiasts. And China is a long way from dominating the consumer electronics market internationally with a massive portfolio of products from domestic, vertically integrated companies. But the ceiling at least exists. it's not theoretical. It's more than any other country outside the U.S. can say, and how China answers it is one of the questions which will determine the relative economic power of China versus the United States in this century. *** That China can export drones more easily than it can import, say, the software and industrial design know-how of a company like Apple is, at a higher level, a fundamental question of how we can pass along knowledge of any sort. Why are we not better at transferring know-how to industrial workers who are out of a job, why hasn't the internet produced a global leveling of industrial know-how at the country level? Hidalgo notes: At a finer scale, economies still lack the intimate connection between knowhow and information that is embodied in DNA and which allows biological organisms to pack knowhow so tightly. A book on engineering, art, or music can help develop an engineer, artist, or musician, but it can hardly do so with the elegance, grace, and efficiency with which a giraffe embryo unpacks its DNA to build a giraffe. The ability of economies to pack and unpack knowhow by physically embodying instructions and templates as written information is much more limited than the equivalent ability in biological organisms. We are nowhere near our maximum throughput for passing on our knowledge to our fellow man, let alone across the membrane between companies and economies. In The Matrix, with a few seconds of fluttering eyelids, Keanu Reeves downloads an entire martial art into his self. Give a man a kung-fu, you making him Neo. Teach a man to kung-fu, you make him John Wick. That is the dream. Asky any parent who is in the midst of trying to get a three-year-old to eat their dinner without throwing half of it on the ground and they'll nod in agreement. What is our version of nature's DNA and cell school of knowledge compression and decompression? One of the reality TV shows which I wish existed would be one in which a variety of masters in their field compete to take absolute novices from a standing start as far as possible in a finite period of time. Instead of Top Chef, in which contestants are all successful chefs already, I want three master chefs to have to each train a handful of complete cooking dunces over a several month process, and the teacher and winning student share the pot. Each season could have variant skills. In another, maybe the world's top three piano teachers have to train people who've never played the piano in their lives to sight-reading Chopin. Bill Belichick and Nick Saban coach two youth league football teams to see which wins a season finale scrimmage. I'm sure some of you will write me to tell me some version of a show like this exists already, but I've seen some that come close, but almost all the ones I've seen spend much too little time on the actual instruction methodology and process, and that's where all the mystery and interest lies. In future posts, I'll delve into some of the limitations I've observed in how we pass information among people, companies, and economies, and from one generation to the next. For now, I recommend picking up Hidalgo's book, and I hope to hear from you about some of the ways you've found to help grow information around you in more efficient ways.
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