The Kingmaker: May 28, 2017 Snippets
“Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault.”
What a great line. It was the very first line of Walt Mossberg’s first column writing about consumer technology for the Wall Street Journal back in 1991 (I was two years old), and it has been quite fitting ever since. In his career as columnist, critic and ultimately Kingmaker of consumer technology, Walt presided over a remarkable three-decade story arc: the birth, rise, maturation, and the coming invisibility of personal computing. Walt’s final weekly column in The Verge, The Disappearing Computer, gives us one last great shot of Walt’s gift for getting right to the core of the collective zeitgeist, and expressing our delight and angst in words that regular people can understand. Walt recounts the journey of our computers, describes the coming age of “ambient computing” where our devices exist essentially everywhere and largely in the background, and finishes by articulating a great worry we’ve been harbouring. He asks:
“Some of you who’ve gotten this far are already recoiling at the idea of ambient computing. You’ve focused on the prospects for invasion of privacy, for monetizing even more of your life, for government snooping and for even worse hacking than exists today. If the FBI can threaten a huge company like Apple over an iPhone passcode, what are your odds of protecting your future tech-dependent environment from government intrusion? If British hospitals have to shut down due to a ransomware attack, can online crooks lock you out of your house, office or car?
Good questions.
My bet is that, if we are really going to turn over our homes, our cars, our health and more to private tech companies, on a scale never imagined, we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist. Especially in the US., it’s time to stop dancing around the privacy and security issues and pass real, binding laws.”
It’s quite fitting, and poetically appropriate, that a career arc which began with “Computers are too hard, and it’s not your fault” is ending with essentially, “Computers are good now. But the safety and security of fully participating in technology’s future is just too hard to deal with, and it’s not your fault.” Walt is quite right: the complexity we’ve created is here to stay, and it’s too hard for individual people to navigate. Private companies will play a disproportionate role in what’s to come, at a level we haven’t experienced before. And yet his parting piece illustrated another truth: we’re truly moving on from a device-centric time entirely, and into a newer, stranger one where the old perspectives aren’t quite correct anymore. The complexity experienced by a user has moved; in fact, it never really goes away — just changes form. Walt’s call for better regulation as a solution to the complexity we’ve created is a surprisingly legacy-like approach to the problem. A real solution to this complexity and hazard isn’t likely to come from the old; it will have to come from the new.
And it is. Great progress is meanwhile being made on exactly this problem of identity, privacy and security — and it’s being made with essentially the opposite approach to passing laws. Most notably this week, the bitcoin and greater blockchain ecosystem — hot off a ripping start to 2017 in the cryptocurrency markets — had a true breakout week at Consensus 2017 and Token Summit over the past few days. A large group of stakeholders finally agreed to a key Bitcoin network scaling upgrade on Tuesday; consumer companies like Kik have announced real scaffolding on top of Ethereum such as “Mozilla for the mobile era, but with payments built in” via ICOs; and traditional enterprises are reaching the tipping point for critical mass buy-in to trusting distributed ledgers with their customers’ assets and data. The very foundations of our future ambient technology — and towards a new 40-year arc where computing is truly everywhere, and the world becomes increasingly built out of distributed and decentralized computing functions — could end up being built in part on the developments and radical transparency being established right now. It’s exciting, but to most people, it remains murky and confusing. Is this really the critical next step we’ve been waiting for? Do regular people even understand the problem that the blockchain ecosystem is trying to solve?
All of this leads to a question: who will collect, distill, and explain what is happening to the rest of us? Who will explain this ecosystem of giant potential but baffling complexity to the normal user? If this is truly solving a problem we have, how will the rest of us find out? The blockchain community is finding critical lift, but it hasn’t found its Walt Mossberg yet. Congratulations to Walt on a tremendous career; your columns will be missed. Let’s hope the heir to the Kingmaker’s throne, for a new generation of decentralized computing and problem-solving, is coming soon.
Energy markets and their perception:
US Wind adopts a ‘new attitude’ to confront a looming downturn | Julia Pyper, GreenTechMedia
Web Wars:
Reflections on Chrome winning the browser wars | Andreas Gal
The trouble with news bundles | Tony Haile, The Information
Retail and its challenges:
Macy’s is no longer a retailer | Kaz Nejatian
Investing in the future:
We’ll live to 100 — how can we afford it? | World Economic Forum
The good, the bad and the ugly of Consensus 2017 | Daniel Jeffries
The bright side of AWS’s slowing revenue growth | Eugene Kim, The Information
Other reading from around the Internet:
Opendoor and the rise of the fat startup | Farhad Manjoo, NYT
Walking through design in Tokyo | Colby Sato
Ethics, quants and cold-calling | Matt Levine, Bloomberg View
Google plans to track credit card spending | BBC News
How two teens 3D printed a fidget spinner empire out of their own high school | Taylor Lorenz
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family:
Wealthfront has been on a roll for the past few months, launching several new products we’ve mentioned in Snippets past — and this week they’ve got one more for us. Building on top of the Path personal financial planning tool, Wealthfront has now added a new feature to help you save for your kids’ college education, while making sure you can take advantage of all the tax savings for which you’re eligible. Path now lets users with kids easily set up a 529 investment account, and easily contribute to it on an ongoing basis: when the time comes, you can make tax-free withdrawals for education-related expenses like tuition, books and other fees. It also gives you a breakdown of anticipated cost for you to budget for in the years ahead of time, so you can get a sense for how much you’ll have to save, the impact of financial aid, and more.
The Path to College | Wealthfront Team
Wealthfront now helps users save up for their kids’ college tuition | Ryan Lawler, TechCrunch
You can keep up with all of the ways Wealthfront would like to help on their Blog, including other new products like their Portfolio Line of Credit. If you’d like to join the Wealthfront team, or know someone who might, they’re hiring for many career positions in Redwood City, including in design, engineering, marketing, research, and client services.
And finally, you may have heard on Friday that Sprig — our favorite food delivery business and a part of the Social Capital family since 2015 — is shutting down their app. Food is a very hard and important business: balancing nutrition, convenience and sustainable access is an evergreen problem to tackle, but also one with challenging realities. As Sprig and their food delivery peers have lived through first hand, on-demand dining can be a great product but a really tough business. Gagan Biyani, Sprig’s CEO, wrote a heartfelt memo announcing the shutdown, which you can find here:
San Francisco food delivery startup Sprig is shutting down | Biz Carson, Business Insider
Gagan writes: “No question, I’m sad that the Sprig model did not work out — but the food delivery space on the whole is growing. The demand for Sprig’s convenient, high-quality food was always incredibly high, but the complexity of owning meal production through delivery at scale was a challenge. After spending four years as a food-tech industry insider, I’m amazed at what the space has become. Food is one of the foundations of society and I believe strongly that it must become more sustainable and ethical. I’m hopeful that the food delivery companies that are succeeding will make this a priority. Please continue to help us inspire change: encourage sustainable food systems, better treatment of workers and more awareness of nutrition. These are serious issues and they cannot have enough attention.”
If you have any interest in hiring members of the Sprig team, please email them at jobs@sprig.com. And a heartfelt thank you goes out to Gagan and everyone at Sprig for all of the work you’ve done, and all of the delicious meals with which you’ve fed us. On to the next adventure!
Have a great Memorial Day weekend,
Alex & the team at Social Capital
