It's 2010. You just bought a brand-new iPad and the first app you download is Facebook. Manufacturers keep dropping new Android phones. Radio stations won't stop playing Kesha and The Social Network is premiering at the New York Film Festival. You use the WIRED iPad app to open the September issue—the cover of which declares "The Web is dead"—to a point-counterpoint feature written by WIRED editor in chief Chris Anderson and magazine writer and dotcom founder Michael Wolff. They claim that apps and platforms have taken over the internet and the web no longer holds the promise it once did.
Today, the piece serves as a time capsule from a different era of the internet. At the time, APIs and the smartphone were the latest innovations, the most recent products of the marriage between the internet and capitalism. Anderson and Wolff lamented that the net was no longer dominated by the open flow of information on the World Wide Web but rather a few closed platforms like Facebook and Google—apps that are streamlined and easier to use, and on which information is tightly controlled. Anderson blames this shift on us, the consumers, and our love affair with convenience, while Wolff says giants like Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Yuri Milner—those pursuing what he calls the "single entrepreneur-mogul-visionary model"—are at fault. The writers make two different arguments but say the same thing: The cycle of capitalism relies on both producer and consumer, one influencing the other in a feedback loop that leaves little room for smaller players and almost always leads to extreme market concentration. The web, they claim, is just its latest victim. In their telling, a groundbreaking innovation—the internet in this case—is like a fruitful wilderness where anything goes, only to be tamed and paved over, inevitably, by those who have the power and capital to build parking lots where there were once fertile plains.
Anderson noted that the process is as old as capitalism itself. "A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others, he said. "It happens every time." Just as we saw the free-for-all of the early internet transformed into something cleaner and lesser, we've now seen the advent of crypto and watched the Wild West of decentralization impaired by megalomania. To be sure, these shifts have brought with them greater accessibility and (marginally) safer online spaces. Anderson and Wolff, however, are more focused on how they have completely closed out competition. We are now in the AI revolution, probably the next greatest invention after the internet. AI has already sown thousands of seeds, reaping millions of blooms. Ideas and firms and innovators sprout like so many flowers. But we can guess what comes next: closed systems controlled by frontier companies. A race to the bottom. What do you think? What happens when AI is subject to the whims of capitalism? What does the future of its producer-consumer relationship look like? And if (or when) control lands in the hands of the privileged few, what comes next? Leave a comment under the story or send me an email.
Until next week!
Sam
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