Does every generation hope for the novel change taking place in their lifetime to give them an opportunity to stake their claim to the future? Are all paradigmatically novel changes in society created equal? The internet expanded the surface area on which commercial value could be created more so than any previous. More so than the doctrine of underwriting? More than the plough? The internet also allowed a level of financialisation we'd never seen before... dragging hypothetical value from the future into the present as actual value in cash and cars and equities. The printing press can't hold a candle to that.
I do think every generation hopes that novel change will give them an opportunity to stake their claim to the future. I think we need to believe our moment matters uniquely (obviously how we express that belief is wide-ranging), but I think its almost psychologically critical for many of us to rationalize the effort - otherwise, what's the point?
No, I don't think the type of changes you're referring to are created equal. To oversimplify: some are additive (the plow = grow more food), other are substitutive (cars replacing horses), but a few are multiplicative in the way they change the rules of change itself.
I agree that the internet expanded the commercial value surface area you mention more than any previous because it created (or at least systematized) an entirely new category of extracting value from organizing and monetizing other people's value creation. I engaged Claude on this topic and Claude put it this way: "It's the difference between making bread and owning the concept of hunger." (I'm sure some could poke holes in that, but ... whoa.) Claude used Pets.com example of how they paid something like $11m in advertising in 1999, but only had revenue of ~$600k. Again, Claude put it like this: "the performance of value temporarily became more valuable than value itself."
Perhaps the more important/interesting point is how the promise of the development of AI mirrors the promise in development of the internet -- they both are becoming more commercialized under a veil of utopian democratized access: eg: information for everyone; intelligence for everyone. But, the internet quickly discovered the most profitable application wasn't democratization but aggregation: eg: gathering everyone's attention (Google), or everyone's social connections (Facebook), or everyone's data (all of them.)
Again, I engaged Claude on this point and this is what it said:
"Perhaps every generation doesn't just hope to stake their claim to the future—perhaps they're doomed to build that future in the image of their deepest anxieties and most grandiose delusions. The internet, in this light, becomes less a tool than a mirror, reflecting our species' peculiar talent for convincing ourselves that our latest clever trick will finally, permanently, change everything.
The barbarians, it turns out, weren't at the gates after all. They were in the server farms, monetizing the very conversations about whether they existed."
Love this - i wonder if you could have gone more into about the tension people felt with these new changes? I was too young to know this, but I imagine there was a tension/excitement with the new century and what would it look like?
Does every generation hope for the novel change taking place in their lifetime to give them an opportunity to stake their claim to the future? Are all paradigmatically novel changes in society created equal? The internet expanded the surface area on which commercial value could be created more so than any previous. More so than the doctrine of underwriting? More than the plough? The internet also allowed a level of financialisation we'd never seen before... dragging hypothetical value from the future into the present as actual value in cash and cars and equities. The printing press can't hold a candle to that.
I do think every generation hopes that novel change will give them an opportunity to stake their claim to the future. I think we need to believe our moment matters uniquely (obviously how we express that belief is wide-ranging), but I think its almost psychologically critical for many of us to rationalize the effort - otherwise, what's the point?
No, I don't think the type of changes you're referring to are created equal. To oversimplify: some are additive (the plow = grow more food), other are substitutive (cars replacing horses), but a few are multiplicative in the way they change the rules of change itself.
I agree that the internet expanded the commercial value surface area you mention more than any previous because it created (or at least systematized) an entirely new category of extracting value from organizing and monetizing other people's value creation. I engaged Claude on this topic and Claude put it this way: "It's the difference between making bread and owning the concept of hunger." (I'm sure some could poke holes in that, but ... whoa.) Claude used Pets.com example of how they paid something like $11m in advertising in 1999, but only had revenue of ~$600k. Again, Claude put it like this: "the performance of value temporarily became more valuable than value itself."
Perhaps the more important/interesting point is how the promise of the development of AI mirrors the promise in development of the internet -- they both are becoming more commercialized under a veil of utopian democratized access: eg: information for everyone; intelligence for everyone. But, the internet quickly discovered the most profitable application wasn't democratization but aggregation: eg: gathering everyone's attention (Google), or everyone's social connections (Facebook), or everyone's data (all of them.)
Again, I engaged Claude on this point and this is what it said:
"Perhaps every generation doesn't just hope to stake their claim to the future—perhaps they're doomed to build that future in the image of their deepest anxieties and most grandiose delusions. The internet, in this light, becomes less a tool than a mirror, reflecting our species' peculiar talent for convincing ourselves that our latest clever trick will finally, permanently, change everything.
The barbarians, it turns out, weren't at the gates after all. They were in the server farms, monetizing the very conversations about whether they existed."
Again....whoa.
Love this - i wonder if you could have gone more into about the tension people felt with these new changes? I was too young to know this, but I imagine there was a tension/excitement with the new century and what would it look like?
Great thought/point, Ved!