Paul Krugman, back in 1998, was pretty sure he had this Internet thing figured out:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law” — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s. (View Highlight)
There have been a thousand stories about what the GameStop saga has been about: a genuine belief in GameStop, a planned-out short squeeze, populist anger against Wall Street, boredom and quarantine, greed, hedge fund pile-ons, you name it there is an article arguing it. I suspect that most everyone is right, much as the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant are all accurate in their descriptions, even though they are completely different. What seems clear is that the elephant is the Internet. (View Highlight)
Note: I haven’t heard the story of the proverbial blind man. Lesson - something is so big that multiple perspectives can be correct without fully explaining the big thing.
This is my second mistake: it turns out the Internet isn’t a cheap printing press; it’s a photocopier, albeit one that is prone to distorting every nth copy.
Go back to the time before the printing press: while a limited number of texts were laboriously preserved by monks copying by hand, the vast majority of information transfer was verbal; this left room for information to evolve over time, but that evolution and its impact was limited by just how long it took to spread. The printing press, on the other hand, by necessity froze information so that it could be captured and conveyed.
This is obviously a gross simplification, but it is a simplification that was reflected in civilization in Europe in particular: local evolution and low conveyance of knowledge with overarching truths aligns to a world of city-states governed by the Catholic Church; printing books, meanwhile, gives an economic impetus to both unifying languages and a new kind of gatekeeper, aligning to a world of nation-states governed by the nobility.
The Internet, meanwhile, isn’t just about demand — my first mistake — nor is it just about supply — my second mistake. It’s about both happening at the same time, and feeding off of each other. It turns out that the literal meaning of “going viral” was, in fact, more accurate than its initial meaning of having an article or image or video spread far-and-wide. An actual virus mutates as it spreads, much as how over time the initial article or image or video that goes viral becomes nearly unrecognizable; it is now a meme. (View Highlight)
Note: Oral Stories mutate but are slow to spread
Books are static and Europe locked into overacting truths.
The internet can spread quickly and change.
I wrote about this process in 2016 in The Voters Decide; it turned out that Party power was rooted in the power of the media over the spread of information. Once the media lost its gatekeeper status, however, the parties lost their mechanisms of control:
There is no one dominant force when it comes to the dispersal of political information, and that includes the parties described in the previous section. Remember, in a Facebook world, information suppliers are modularized and commoditized as most people get their news from their feed. This has two implications:
All news sources are competing on an equal footing; those controlled or bought by a party are not inherently privileged
The likelihood any particular message will “break out” is based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it. The power has shifted from the supply side to the demand side (View Highlight)
Note: Political parties get power through media. Media lost power as it became decentralized because of the internet. Everyone has a equal voice.
Counter-point - the social media algorithms can decide which voices to surface.
Wired described quantum computing like this:
Instead of bits, quantum computers use qubits. Rather than just being on or off, qubits can also be in what’s called ‘superposition’ — where they’re both on and off at the same time, or somewhere on a spectrum between the two.
Take a coin. If you flip it, it can either be heads or tails. But if you spin it — it’s got a chance of landing on heads, and a chance of landing on tails. Until you measure it, by stopping the coin, it can be either. Superposition is like a spinning coin, and it’s one of the things that makes quantum computers so powerful. A qubit allows for uncertainty.
That sounds a lot like how I have described memes, which means to master memes is to stop the coin on your terms, (View Highlight)
Note: Memes are a superposition - a spinning coin.
