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How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

New York Times, December 31, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/business/media/Snapchat-Plans-a-Global-View-of-New-Years-Festivities.html Webster, Andrew. “Snapchat’s Geofilters Are Now Open to Everyone.” Verge, December 2, 2014. https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/2/7319317/snapchat-geofilters-community Chapter Twenty-Two: “We Need to Make Money” “Advertising on Snapchat.” Snapchat, October 17, 2014. https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/advertising-on-snapchat/. Carr, Austin. “Inside Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel’s Entertainment Empire.” Fast Company, October 19, 2015. https://www.fastcompany.com/3051612/media-tech-and-advertising-to-snapchat-i-aint-afraid-of-no-ghost Chemi, Eric.

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Instagram warned users not to use “links asking you to add someone on another service.” This behavior attempted to slow Snapchat’s growth and served to continue the pissing contest Snapchat and Facebook had been having for years; early on after Snapchat released geofilters, they had placed a geofilter over Facebook’s campus featuring the Snapchat ghost pointing and laughing. As for Twitter, Snapchat didn’t even bother fighting back, as Snapchat passed Twitter in daily active users (150 million to 140 million) in June 2016. In August 2016, Instagram released Instagram Stories, a new feature essentially copying Snapchat Stories that let users post photo and video slideshows that disappeared after twenty-four hours.

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Memories’s permanence was antithetical to Snapchat’s core ethos, but it was released late enough that users’ behaviors and norms were already well established. Had Snapchat released Memories in 2012, it may have been a disaster that cut into Snapchat’s real-time, fleeting nature. But because Snapchat already had hundreds of millions of users snapping for years before it released Memories, it was able to add to the product without changing core behaviors. Memories makes Snapchat’s camera even more useful, as it lets users store photos, videos, their own Snapchat stories in their entirety—indeed, their memories—all on Snapchat’s servers rather than taking up space on their phone. It is another step toward making Snapchat people’s default camera.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

Colao, “Snapchat: The Biggest No-Revenue Mobile App Since Instagram,” Forbes, November 27, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/11/27/snapchat-the-biggest-no-revenue-mobile-app-since-instagram/#6ef95f0a7200. By November 2012, Snapchat: Colao, “Snapchat.” “Thanks :) would be happy… Bay Area,”: Alyson Shontell, “How Snapchat’s CEO Got Mark Zuckerberg to Fly to LA for Private Meeting,” Business Insider, January 6, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/evan-spiegel-and-mark-zuckerbergs-emails-2014-1?IR=T. He spent the meeting insinuating: J. J. Colao, “The Inside Story of Snapchat: The World’s Hottest App or a $3 Billion Disappearing Act?

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Warr would ask the research subjects. “Probably Snapchat,” they responded. * * * In all of its Snapchat copycatting, Facebook was forced to learn, over and over, that just because it had made one world-changing product didn’t mean it could succeed with another, even when that product was a replica of something already popular. Snapchat, meanwhile, learned that it could ignore Facebook’s repeated attacks. In fact, Facebook was so apparently unthreatening during this period that a Snapchat executive proposed trying something crazy: being friends. Snapchat’s best asset and biggest problem was Evan Spiegel himself.

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,” Forbes, January 20, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2014/01/06/the-inside-story-of-snapchat-the-worlds-hottest-app-or-a-3-billion-disappearing-act/. And then, starting the next day: Seth Fiegerman, “Facebook Poke Falls Out of Top 25 Apps as Snapchat Hits Top 5,” Mashable, December 26, 2012, https://mashable.com/2012/12/26/facebook-poke-app-ranking/. Snapchat’s downloads climbed: Fiegerman, “Facebook Poke Falls Out of Top 25 Apps.” In June 2013, Spiegel raised: Mike Isaac, “Snapchat Closes $60 Million Round Led by IVP, Now at 200 Million Daily Snaps,” All Things D, June 24, 2013, http://allthingsd.com/20130624/snapchat-closes-60-million-round-led-by-ivp-now-at-200-million-daily-snaps/.

Crushing It! EPB by Gary Vaynerchuk

augmented reality, driverless car, fear of failure, follow your passion, imposter syndrome, Mark Zuckerberg, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk

Less than a year later, 40 percent of American teenagers were using Snapchat daily. I learned an important lesson from that bad call on Snapchat: a devoted, sticky fan base is willing to be patient as you experiment your way to the next iteration. The next big launch, Discover, saw Snapchat graduate into a bona fide media platform by offering a page where users would find a slew of brands like National Geographic, T-Mobile, and ESPN. Snapchat now had access to advertising revenue, and that meant so did anyone who could crack the Snapchat code. The man who did that is named DJ Khaled, but before I introduce him, we’re going to reminisce about Ashton Kutcher.

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Same with Kerry and Jayde Robinson’s salon talk. That means that to be a Snapchat influencer, you need to be strong on the other platforms as well. The content you produce for Snapchat has to be powerful enough to draw views on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The way to get discovered on Snapchat is not much different from the way television stations try to get people to tune in to their programs, which is to market in all the other places where people who might be interested in you are already going. That’s what I did. I was never concerned by the lack of discoverability on Snapchat, because I could see that all I had to do was draw awareness to it through my base on Twitter, YouTube, and my website.

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If there’s one thing Shaun had learned from his jewelry-boutique experiment, it’s that he was good at creating safe online communities where people could come together to engage and have fun. “The greatest challenge was trying to grow on a platform that did not cater to growth. Snapchat was a communication platform, like text messaging, so I had to make it into a content-creating platform. Eventually, Snapchat made updates, which helped with that, but I had to get creative at first.” There’s a reason Shaun’s content got so much attention when so many others on Snapchat did not: he treated Snapchat like a business. Many people start pumping out cool content onto a platform and just hope they’ll get noticed and grow their audience enough that brands will come calling.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

, article on GIGAOM.com, 29 April 2013, gigaom.com/2013/04/29/chat-apps-have-overtaken-sms-by-message-volume/. 22 Interview with Jan Koum, 20 January 2014, op. cit. 23 J. J. Colao, ‘Snapchat: The Biggest No-Revenue Mobile App Since Instagram’, article on Forbes.com, 27 November 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/11/27/snapchat-the-biggest-no-revenue-mobile-app-since-instagram/. 24 Evelyn M. Rusli and Douglas MacMillan, 13 November 2013, op. cit. 25 Mike Isaac, ‘Snapchat Closes $60 Million Round Led by IVP, Now at 200 Million Daily Snaps’, article on AllThingsD.com, 24 June 2013, allthingsd.com/20130624/snapchat-closes-60-million-round-led-by-ivp-now-at-200-million-daily-snaps/. 26 ‘Recent Additions to Team Snapchat’, blog post on Snapchat.com, 24 June 2013, blog.snapchat.com/post/53763657196/recent-additions-to-team-snapchat. 27 Mike Isaac, ‘Snapchat Now Boasts More Than 150 Million Photos Taken Daily’, article on AllThingsD.com, 16 April 2013, allthingsd.com/20130416/snapchat-now-boasts-more-than-150-million-photos-taken-daily/. 28 Justin Lafferty, ‘Facebook Photo Storage Is No Easy Task’, article on AllFacebook.com, 16 January 2013, allfacebook.com/facebook-photo-storage-open-compute_b108640.

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Google VP Explains How to Go Big’, article on VentureBeat.com, 19 April 2012, venturebeat.com/2012/04/19/want-to-get-acquired-by-google-google-vp-explains-howto-go-big/. 5 Mike Isaac, ‘Facebook Acquisition Talks With Waze Fall Apart’, article for AllThingsD.com, 29 May 2013, allthingsd.com/20130529/facebook-acquisition-talks-with-waze-fall-apart/. 6 Simone Wilson, ‘Billion-dollar Waze’, article on JewishJournal.com, 19 June 2013, www.jewishjournal.com/cover_story/article/billion_dollar_waze. 7 Ibid. 8 For details of the merger see www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000010/form8k_2192014.htm. 9 Gerry Shih and Sarah McBride, ‘Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $19 Billion in Deal Shocker’, article on Reuters.com, 20 February 2014, www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/20/us-whatsapp-facebook-idUSBR EA1I26B20140220. 10 ‘Facebook to Acquire WhatsApp’, press release on FB.com, 19 February 2014, newsroom.fb.com/News/805/Facebook-to-Acquire-WhatsApp. 11 Justin Lafferty, ‘Facebook Revenue Hits $2B in Q3, Now Has 507m Mobile DAUs’, article on InsideFacebook.com, 30 October 2013, www.insidefacebook.com/2013/10/30/facebook-revenue-hits-2b-in-q3-now-has-507m-mobile-daus/. 12 So WhatsApp seems to be processing more messages than all SMS in the world. 13 ‘Facebook to Acquire WhatsApp’, 19 February 2014, op. cit. 14 Adario Strange, ‘Facebook Reportedly Offered $1 Billion to Acquire Snapchat’, article on Mashable.com, mashable.com/2013/10/26/facebook-snapchat/. 15 Evelyn M. Rusli and Douglas MacMillan, ‘Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisitions Offer from Facebook’, blog post on WSJ.com, 13 November 2013, blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13/snapchat-spurned-3-billion-acquisition-offer-from-facebook/. 16 Cheryl Conner, ‘Facebook’s Reality Check: Death by a Thousand Snapchats?’, article on Forbes.com, 8 July 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2013/06/08/facebooks-reality-check-death-by-a-thousand-snapchats/. 17 Kara Swisher, ‘Yahoo Tumblrs for Cool: Board Approves $1.1 Billion Deal as Expected’, article on AllThingsD.com, 19 May 2013, allthingsd.com/20130519/yahoo-tumblrs-for-cool-board-approves-1-1-billion-deal/. 18 Todd Wasserman, ‘Tumblr’s Mobile Traffic May Overtake Desktop Traffic This Year’, article on Mashable.com, 21 February 2013, mashable.com/2013/02/21/tumblr-mobile-traffic/. 19 Ibid. 20 Marc Andreessen, ‘Why Software Is Eating the World’, article on WSJ.com, 20 August 2011, online.wsj.com/news/articles/ SB10001424053111903480 904576512250915629460. 21 Leena Rao, ‘As Software Eats the World, Non-Tech Corporations Are Eating Startups’, article on TechCrunch.com, 14 December 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/12/14/as-software-eats-the-world-non-tech-corporations-are-eating-startups/. 22 Alexia Tsotsis, ‘Monsanto Buys Weather Big Data Company Climate Corporation for Around $1.1B’, article on TechCrunch.com, 2 October 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/10/02/monsanto-acquires-weather-big-data-company-climate-corporation-for-930m/. 23 Leena Rao, 14 December 2013, op. cit. 24 Ibid. 25 Pitchbook, US, ‘VC Valuations and Trends’, 2014 annual report. 26 ‘Yesterday’s Big Payday for the IRS: 1600 Twitter Employees Now Millionaires’, research on PrivCo.com, 8 November 2013, www.privco.com/the-twitter-mafia-and-yesterdays-big-irs-payday. 27 Sven Grundberg, ‘“Candy Crush Saga” Maker Files for an IPO’, article on WSJ.com, 18 February 2014, online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304675504579390580161044024. 28 ‘UK Mobile Games Maker King Delays IPO Due to Candy Crush Surge’, article on VCPost.com, 9 December 2013, www.vcpost.com/articles/19437/20131209/uk-mobile-games-maker-king-delays-ipo-due-candy-crush.htm. 29 Phillipa Leighton-Jones, ‘Why Candy Crush Is a Success That’s Hard to Copy’, blog post on WSJ.com, 18 February 2014, blogs.wsj.com/money-beat/2014/02/18/why-candy-crush-is-a-success-that-cannot-be-copied/. 30 Mark Berniker and Josh Lipton, ‘Uber CEO Kalanick: No Plans To Go Public Right Now’, article on CNBC.com, 6 November 2013, www.cnbc.com/id/101175342.

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Chapter 23: Revenue-Engine Mechanics 1 David Skok, ‘Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquisitions’, article on forEntrepreneurs.com, 22 December 2009, www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/. 2 Eliana Dockterman, ‘Candy Crush Saga: The Science Behind Our Addiction’, article on Time.com, 15 November 2013, business.time.com/2013/11/15/candy-crush-saga-the-science-behind-our-addiction/. 3 Mia Shanley, ‘How Candy Crush Makes So Much Money’, article on BusinessInsider.com, 8 October 2013, www.BusinessInsider.com/how-candy-crush-makes-so-much-money-2013-10. 4 Dave McClure, ‘Startup Metrics for Pirates’, presented to Wildfire Interactive, May 2012, slide 73, www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-4-pirates-wildfire-interactive-may-2012. 5 Mike Isaac, ‘Snapchat Closes $60 Million Round Led by IVP, Now at 200 Million Daily Snaps’, article on AllThingsD.com, 24 June 2013, allthingsd.com/20130624/snapchat-closes-60-million-round-led-byivp-now-at-200-million-daily-snaps/. 6 Mike Isaac, ‘Snapchat Now Boasts More Than 150 Million Photos Taken Daily’, article on AllThingsD.com, 16 April 2013, allthingsd.com/20130416/snapchat-now-boasts-more-than-150-million-photos-taken-daily/. 7 Liz Gannes, ‘Popular Photo Message App Snapchat Adds Video’, article on AllThingsD.com, 14 December 2012, allthingsd.com/20121214/popular-photo-message-app-snapchat-adds-video/. 8 David Skok, ‘The Science Behind Viral Marketing’, article on forEntrepreneurs.com, 15 September 2011, www.forentrepreneurs.com/the-science-behind-viral-marketing/.

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

And then, one Saturday night in October 2015, I was on my phone, scrolling through Yik Yak and not reading a book, when I heard about something which even blasé Yik Yakkers were finding shocking. “Oh my God, Syracusesnap.” “LMFAO Syracusesnap.” “What’s Syracusesnap?” people asked. Everybody wanted to know. Everybody had to know. Syracusesnap was a Snapchat Story, a series of pictures or videos on Snapchat which stay viewable for twenty-four hours rather than the usual one to ten seconds per Snap. On Snapchat, famously launched in 2011 by three fraternity brothers from Stanford, Stories have become the most popular feature, with more than a billion viewed daily, according to the company. But few go viral. Within hours of its creation, Syracusesnap was being followed by college students and teenagers across the country.

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There was a picture of a boy holding two girls’ bodies on his shoulders, their behinds, in identical black thongs, facing the camera, his dumbstruck face encased with butt cheeks. “Snap whore,” said a picture of a girl Snapchatting, her cleavage prominently showing. There had been scandalous college Snapchat Stories before; in fact, such accounts can be found at colleges across the country. They’re a sort of rebellious parody of Snapchat’s Campus Stories, another feature on the app which many schools sponsor and monitor, and which typically shows students in their fun-filled and inspiring moments—looking joyful in the stands at winning football games, attending lectures.

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UCLAyak, named in homage to Yik Yak, had sexually explicit photos and videos cycling “every few seconds,” according to the Daily Bruin, the University of California–Los Angeles paper. The anonymous psychobiology student who created the account told the Bruin he wasn’t surprised at the nudity: “It was just a matter of time. That’s what Snapchat is for.” He said he suspected that some of the videos on other rogue campus accounts were staged, created to shock. Snapchat’s Community Guidelines prohibit sexually explicit content, and the company routinely deletes Snapchat Stories that violate its policies, but as soon as they’re banned, they often just reappear with a different handle. So what made Syracusesnap go viral? As the Saturday night wore on and more kids were alerting one another to its scandalous appeal, the Story became more hard-core.

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost by Donna Freitas

4chan, fear of failure, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, Year of Magical Thinking

But for the college students I spoke with, this is an impoverished and limited understanding of Snapchat’s true delights. College students can be silly on Snapchat. They can be ridiculous. They can say dumb things. They can take goofy, ugly, unbecoming photographs and show them to other people. They can be sad, they can be negative, they can be angry, they can even be mean. They can be as emotional as they really feel. They can be honest. And it’s true, on Snapchat college students feel they can be sexy. But most of all, they play on Snapchat and they engage in all kinds of foolishness. And that’s why they love it. On Snapchat college students feel they can do all the things they’ve learned they’re not allowed to do on Facebook or any other platform that is more “permanent” and attached to their names.

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And then I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I look nice today.’ ” Jackson likes using the selfie camera like a mirror, he tells me. But when he does take a selfie, he has to decide where it goes: Snapchat? Instagram? Facebook? “I really don’t care what I put on Snapchat,” Jackson says. I could wake up one morning, upload that selfie, and I wouldn’t put that on Instagram compared to my Snapchat, because [the morning selfie] is really more personal.” The same goes for “sleek photos,” which go up on Jackson’s Instagram but not Snapchat. On Facebook or Instagram, Jackson also posts selfies of him doing positive things. Jackson works as a tutor, and this is something he wants to share with people in a more permanent way.

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Matthew tried to explain the difference between Facebook and Snapchat to me, and why Snapchat is much more fun. Like many students, Matthew goes onto Facebook a lot, but not to post—posting is too time-consuming and too much work, because every post has become so high-stakes. Mostly, Matthew just scrolls through the feed and lurks, checking out other people’s updates and photos. But Matthew loves Snapchat and goes on it all the time, and unlike with Facebook, on Matthew actually participates. “When I’m bored,” Matthew says, “I’ll snap a picture of something random, send it to, like, five people and wait for somebody to respond. [Snapchat] is really simple and fast, and it’s a way I can see what all my friends are up to, especially all my friends back home, all over the state and stuff.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

The flip side of digital technology accelerating opportunities for differentiation and niche competition was that it could be equally easy for incumbents to copy. Mark Zuckerberg almost immediately recognized Snapchat as a potential threat to Facebook. Given Facebook’s size and scale, he logically tried to buy Snap for $3 billion in cash before the company went public. When Spiegel turned him down, Zuckerberg ordered Instagram to copy Snapchat’s most compelling features and turn Instagram into a Snapchat killer.35 Especially after introducing Instagram Stories, Instagram zoomed past Snapchat, with over 700 million users. Although Snapchat was hardly dead (its market value had fallen dramatically but was still close to $6 billion in late 2018), Facebook’s attack had taken a serious toll.

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Instead, they can access the external supply of creativity and software engineering skills available worldwide. But sometimes adding the second platform is more an act of desperation. Snapchat, for example, has struggled with competition from Facebook’s Instagram. In 2018 it opened up its APIs to encourage third parties to build complementary innovations in the hope that some new apps would make Snapchat a more compelling experience for users and a better draw for advertisers.35 Besides Facebook and Snapchat, a less obvious transaction-to-innovation hybrid example was Expedia, the travel services platform. When Expedia established an affiliate program under the banner of “Your Business.

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Google executives have made this argument, citing the ease of multi-homing to defray criticism of their dominant position in Internet search, since competitors are merely “one click away.”30 As we discussed earlier with the Facebook example, Mark Zuckerberg may have created the world’s largest social network. However, it is easy for Facebook users to spend time on Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, and other platforms, even if they may not take the trouble to adopt another social network for most of their activities. To control some of the revenues associated with multi-homing was at least one reason why Zuckerberg acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion (considered a large sum at the time) and later used it to compete with Snapchat.31 Zuckerberg’s much more costly purchase of WhatsApp in 2014 for what amounted to $19 billion plus another $3 billion in Facebook stock was another defensive move against multi-homing for messaging as well as an offensive move to acquire more users and a potentially new revenue source.32 At the same time, clever use of data and sophisticated AI tools can discourage multi-homing because of better services.

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

In eight months, our launch of Instagram Stories surpassed Snapchat’s number of users. By 2018, Instagram Stories had more than twice as many users as Snapchat. Today, over half a billion people use Instagram Stories every single day. IG Stories launched before Snapchat went public, but by the time it did, in March 2017, Snapchat had lost 56 percent of its value. It was widely reported in tech media that this was a direct result of Instagram Stories. A lot of Facebookers felt pretty cocky about that. But I thought we should be grateful for what Snapchat had taught us—which was that we weren’t the source of all creativity and innovation, nor did we have to be.

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* * * — Lifestage wasn’t the only project I was working on. At long last, Facebook had decided to get serious about competing with Snapchat—particularly Snapchat Stories, collections of snaps that lived for twenty-four hours. So I was now helping to implement our own version of Stories for WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. I’d been yelling about the Snapchat threat ever since I’d given my first Teen Talk in 2014, and the executives had finally started to listen, including me in meetings and cc’ing me on memos about anything Snapchat related. I was brought in to review designs and meet with engineers and executive leadership to strategize about the company’s overall goals for the product.

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A few teams invited me to join them in my early weeks, but I dragged my feet on accepting an offer because I wasn’t excited about the projects they were working on. Thanks to my internship, it was fresh in my mind that I shouldn’t say yes when my gut said no. My gut was telling me to hold out for a team that was working on the problem I’d been noticing since my internship: the Snapchat threat. In 2014, Snapchat was just becoming really popular, and everyone I knew loved it. But while Snapchat had every teenager in America in its thrall, Facebook was a non-player in most kids’ social media lives. Sure, we used it for school meetups and other adult-sanctioned activities, but it wasn’t where we went to hang out and be ourselves. Facebookers had to be panicking about this, didn’t they?

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

So in 2011, Facebook bought Foursquare’s main independent competitor, Gowalla. Spiegel and Murphy felt that Poke was a pale imitation of Snapchat, and laughed it off. Perhaps they felt a little queasy when immediately after launch, Poke reached number one in Apple’s App Store. But they felt a lot better when Poke did a nosedive in the ratings over the next few days. Not only was Poke a failure for Facebook, but it was a boon for Snapchat. It had legitimized Snapchat’s product vision. Snapchat kept growing, making it even more attractive to Zuckerberg. In 2013, he resumed his hunt, visiting Snapchat’s Venice Beach headquarters with his chief dealmaker, Amid Zoufonoun, in tow.

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a review from the FTC: Josh Kosman, “Facebook Boasted of Buying Instagram to Kill the Competition: Sources,” New York Post, February 26, 2019. Snapchat: In addition to interviews, I drew on Billy Gallagher’s definitive book, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Also valuable was Sarah Frier and Max Chafkin, “How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March 17, 2016; J. J. Coloa, “The Inside Story of Snapchat: World’s Hottest App or a $3 Billion Disappearing Act?” Forbes, January 6, 2014; and Sarah Frier, “Nobody Trusts Facebook, Twitter Is a Hot Mess, What Is Snapchat Doing?” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 22, 2018. “When Snapchat started out”: Brad Stone and Sarah Frier, “Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 16, 2015.

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In May 2013, Zuckerberg wrote an email outlining all the great things that would happen if Snapchat joined the Facebook family. If Snapchat sold to Facebook, he said, Facebook had a playbook to raise the user base to a billion people. There were private APIs that Facebook didn’t share with developers. What’s more, Zuckerberg wooed Spiegel personally with promises that the younger entrepreneur not only would run Snapchat with some degree of autonomy but would have an opportunity to make an impact on Facebook itself. So even though you’ll spend your time on Snapchat it would be fun to work together closely to figure out how Facebook should evolve as well.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

As time went on, Sayman watched his fellow teens sharing less on Facebook’s family of apps and more on Snapchat. He turned his focus to Snapchat Stories, which he believed Facebook should build into its products. “I wanted the company to feel like Snapchat was an existential threat,” he said. “I wanted Facebook to panic.” Sayman brought his concerns to Zuckerberg, who had heard from others who came to similar conclusions. As a teenager, Sayman was invaluable. He could help Zuckerberg learn Snapchat’s culture. “He would point us to, ‘Here’s the media that I follow,’ or ‘Here are the people I think are influential, who are cool,’” Zuckerberg said.

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And that type of sharing was starting to gravitate elsewhere. “The Most Chinese Company in Silicon Valley” At around the same time Facebook was working out its News Feed issues, an upstart messaging app called Snapchat—led by the brash Stanford graduate Evan Spiegel—built a feature called Stories, which let people share photos and videos with friends that disappeared in a day. Snapchat’s users loved how Stories gave them a carefree way to post (in contrast with Facebook, where your posts would go to everyone and stick around forever), and the app’s usage exploded. Spiegel, who once spurned a $3 billion acquisition offer from Zuckerberg, was now hitting him where it hurt.

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In the zero-sum game of social media, where time spent on one platform is time not spent on another, Spiegel had the energy, the sharing, and was driving his company toward a hot IPO. As Snapchat took off, an eighteen-year-old developer named Michael Sayman joined Facebook. Sayman had built a game that caught Zuckerberg’s eye, and the company hired him as a full-time engineer in 2015. Sitting through orientation, Sayman heard speeches about how Facebook’s leaders would listen to anyone’s ideas, and took the message to heart. “I believed it,” he told me. Before orientation was over, he spun up a presentation about how teens, already drifting to Snapchat, were using technology, and how Facebook might want to build for them.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

In August 2018, Apple announced that Onavo violated its privacy standards, so Facebook withdrew it from the App Store. One of the competitors Facebook has reportedly tracked with Onavo is Snapchat. There is bad blood between the two companies that began after Snapchat rejected an acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013. Facebook started copying Snapchat’s key features in Instagram, undermining Snapchat’s competitive position. While Snapchat managed to go public and continues to operate as an independent company, the pressure from Facebook continues unchecked and has taken a toll. Under a traditional antitrust regime, Snapchat would almost certainly have a case against Facebook for anticompetitive behavior.

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Thanks to photo tagging, users have built a giant database of photos for Facebook, complete with all the information necessary to monetize it effectively. Other platforms play this game, too, but not at Facebook’s scale. For example, Snapchat offers Streaks, a feature that tracks the number of consecutive days a user has traded messages with each person in his or her contacts list. As they build and the number of them grows, Streaks take on a life of their own. For the teens who dominate Snapchat’s user base, Streaks can soon come to embody the essence of a relationship, substituting a Streak number for the elements of true friendship. Another emotional trigger is fear of missing out (FOMO), which drives users to check their smartphone every free moment, as well as at times when they have no business doing so, such as while driving.

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Eventually that would create problems it could not resolve with an apology and a promise to do better. 4 The Children of Fogg It’s not because anyone is evil or has bad intentions. It’s because the game is getting attention at all costs. —TRISTAN HARRIS On April 9, 2017, onetime Google design ethicist Tristan Harris appeared on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper to discuss the techniques that internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat use to prey on the emotions of their users. He talked about the battle for attention among media, how smartphones transformed that battle, and how internet platforms profit from that transformation at the expense of their users. The platforms prey on weaknesses in human psychology, using ideas from propaganda, public relations, and slot machines to create habits, then addiction.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

The social networking giant entered 2010 with more than half a billion monthly active users, but has failed to subsume any of the hit social media platforms which emerged in the decade. Snapchat launched in 2011, with Facebook launching its own Snapchat-like app (or “clone”) in 2013, called “Poke,” which was shuttered a year later. In 2016, Facebook launched “Lifestage,” its second Snapchat clone, with was also closed after 12 months. That same year, Facebook’s Instagram app also copied Snapchat’s signature “Stories” format, with Facebook’s main app adding the feature the following year. Then in 2019, Instagram launched its own dedicated Snapchat-like app, “Threads from Instagram,” though almost no one noticed. Facebook Gaming, the company’s Twitch competitor, launched in 2018, as did Facebook’s TikTok competitor, Lasso.

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There is a reason why every social network has shifted over time to original programming, revenue guarantees, and creator funds. Unfortunately, the dynamics that apply to “2D” content networks don’t easily carry over to IVWP. Most of the content made on YouTube or Snapchat isn’t produced using those platforms’ tools. Instead, it’s produced with independent applications, such as Apple’s Camera app, or Adobe’s Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Even when content is made on a social platform, such as a Snapchat Story, which uses Snap’s filters, the content is typically easy to export (and to use again on Insta­gram) because it is just a photo. Conversely, the content made for an IVWP is mostly made in that IVWP.

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Conversely, the content made for an IVWP is mostly made in that IVWP. It cannot be easily exported, or repurposed—and there are no available “hacks” similar to using an iPhone’s “screenshot” function to grab a Snapchat Story. As such, content made on Roblox is essentially Roblox-only. And unlike a YouTube video or Snapchat Story, Roblox content is not ephemeral (like a live stream), nor is it ever intended to be catalogued (as is the case with a YouTuber’s vlogs). Instead, it is intended to be continuously updated. The consequences of these differences are profound. If a developer wants to operate across multiple IVWPs, they must rebuild nearly every part of their experiences—an investment that produces no value to users and wastes time and money.

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Generation Z’s actions on their mobile devices center around WhatsApp (ironically, now part of Facebook), Snapchat (not Facebook), and Instagram and Instagram Stories (also Facebook). All these apps are visual in that they allow you to post photos and videos or primarily feature photos or videos taken by others. Instagram, a photo-and video-sharing app, is Facebook for a younger audience. It allows follows, likes, and chats between members. Instagram has terms of service and appears to be responsive to take-down requests by members and copyright holders. Snapchat, perhaps because it is not owned by Facebook, is perhaps the creepiest of the bunch. Snapchat advertises that it allows you to send a self-destructing photo to someone.

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In the United Kingdom, a fourteen-year-old boy sent a naked picture of himself to a girl at his school via Snapchat, again thinking the image would disappear after a few seconds. The girl, however, took a screenshot and… you know the rest of the story. According to the BBC, the boy—and the girl—will be listed in a UK database for sex crimes even though they are too young to be prosecuted.22 Like WhatsApp, with its inconsistent image-blurring capabilities, Snapchat, despite the app’s promises, does not really delete images. In fact Snapchat agreed in 2014 to a Federal Trade Commission settlement over charges that the company had deceived users about the disappearing nature of its messages, which the federal agency alleged could be saved or retrieved at a later time.23 Snapchat’s privacy policy also says that it does not ask for, track, or access any location-specific information from your device at any time, but the FTC found those claims to be false as well.24 It is a requirement of all online services that individuals be thirteen years of age or older to subscribe.

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Robert Vamosi, When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of Our Infatuation with New Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 9. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/08/01/how-face-recognition-can-be-used-to-get-your-social-security-number/. 10. https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/13/yes-google-photos-can-still-sync-your-photos-after-you-delete-the-app/. 11. https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms. 12. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/how-to-beat-facebook-s-biggest-privacy-risk/index.htm. 13. http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/05/28/facebook-security-checkup/. 14. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/06/facebook-your-privacy/index.htm. 15. http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-will-the-real-kevin-mitnick-please-stand-up/. 16. http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/social_network/training_course.pdf. 17. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/pearson-under-fire-for-monitoring-students-twitter-posts/. 18. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/14/pearson-monitoring-social-media-for-security-breaches-during-parcc-testing/. 19. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0513/Is-student-privacy-erased-as-classrooms-turn-digital. 20. https://motherboard.vice.com/blog/so-were-sharing-our-social-security-numbers-on-social-media-now. 21. http://pix11.com/2013/03/14/snapchat-sexting-scandal-at-nj-high-school-could-result-in-child-porn-charges/. 22. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34136388. 23. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/05/snapchat-settles-ftc-charges-promises-disappearing-messages-were. 24. http://www.informationweek.com/software/social/5-ways-snapchat-violated-your-privacy-security/d/d-id/1251175. 25. http://fusion.net/story/192877/teens-face-criminal-charges-for-taking-keeping-naked-photos-of-themselves/. 26. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150206-biggest-myth-about-phone-privacy. 27. http://fusion.net/story/141446/a-little-known-yelp-setting-tells-businesses-your-gender-age-and-hometown/?

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

As the platform grew, this group became outright celebrities, in some part due to their creativity, persistence, and hard work, in most part due to the invisible hand of the Shanghai content operations team tilting the attention game heavily in their favor. Younger than Snapchat Once the platform had grown large enough to garner mainstream media attention, the first thing reporters picked up on was the users’ age. “This is no question the youngest social network we’ve ever seen,” exclaimed online marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk in an article profiling the platform. 158 “Snapchat and Instagram skew a little bit young… but with Musical.ly, you’re talking about first, second, third grade.” Above: A snapshot of the top 10 most popular Musical.ly accounts in late 2016 with numbers of followers and the ages of the creators at the time.

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Musical.ly had built a meaningful brand that resonated strongly with American and European teens. ByteDance, Facebook, Tencent, Snapchat, 250 and Kuaishou, had all expressed interest at various times and engaged in talks with the founders. Sometimes referred to as the “Berkshire Hathaway of tech,” Tencent was a prolific investor in other internet companies. Pulling out of talks with Musical.ly and having missed the opportunity to acquire WhatsApp in 2014, Tencent instead opted to gain a foothold in Western social networking via a $2 billion stake in Snapchat. Kevin Systrom, the then CEO of Instagram, had met in person with Musical.ly’s founders in Shanghai and later persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to consider a deal.

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As users themselves generated all content, fewer older users meant there was little content suitable for them being produced. Why produce content if there’s no audience? This meant that when older users did join, they quickly left. The solution was to broaden the types of content offerings and slowly age up the user base. “We realized while Instagram and Snapchat are social graph led, the fact that Musical.ly was content & creative led was an opportunity, NOT an obstacle. It would be mobile TV for the smartphone generation, and in order to age up, we needed to broaden the content offering and tell that story to the world,” explained product strategist James Veraldi in a later presentation.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Spiegel checks this box by abandoning Stanford University only a few credits short of graduation to pursue his Snapchat dream. He then shifts neatly into chapter 3—a legal brouhaha with his co-founders—falling out with Brown, the guy who first had the idea. Brown sues him. Our story hits its climax in chapter 4, when Spiegel gets approached by his entrepreneur-hero, Mark Zuckerberg, who offers to buy Snapchat for $3 billion. But will Spiegel believe enough in his idea to reject his hero and risk it all? Hell yes. You know what happened next. Snapchat grows wildly, Spiegel thrives. The company goes public at a $24 billion valuation.

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“trophy case”: Lorenzo Ligato, “Here’s How to Unlock All of the New Snapchat Trophies,” Huffington Post, October 20, 2015. The online service TINYpulse: TINYpulse, July 2017. www.tinypulse.com. It has been adopted: Ibid. “The Founders Generation”: David Sims, “All Hail ‘The Founders,’ ” The Atlantic, December 2, 2015. Our story hits its climax: Jeff Bercovici, “Facebook Tried to Buy Snapchat for $3B in Cash. Here’s Why,” Forbes, November 13, 2013. The company goes public: Portia Crowe, “Snap Is Going Public at a $24 Billion Valuation,” Business Insider, March 1, 2017. “He just wants”: Austin Carr, “What Snapchat’s High-Profile Exec Departures Really Tell Us About CEO Evan Spiegel,” Fast Company, October 20, 2015.

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Often the most extensible ideas feel imperfect and incomplete; if the idea feels “untouchable” or overly polished, it is very hard for others to feel they can take the reins and make it their own. An award-winning example of an extensible idea comes from Taco Bell, which for Cinco de Mayo in 2016 created a special lens on Snapchat that allowed people to turn their heads into giant taco shells and have hot sauce poured over the top. It won the title of most popular lens in Snapchat history by scoring 224 million views in one day. Many will scoff, but contrast this engagement to the dynamics of taking a traditional ad slot during prime-time TV programming. The guy on his couch, eating potato chips, may or may not pay attention to the message blaring out of the TV at him and everyone else in that cable district as he waits impatiently for his favorite show to start up again.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

So on Instagram you see these photos three days later. On Snapchat, you see Snaps the moment they are created.” Martin Sorrell decided in 2016 to ride the Snapchat horse as a rival worth betting on. He decided to sweeten the ad dollars WPP earmarked for Snapchat. “It does become a threatening alternative to Facebook,” he told CNBC, “and I think that’s the big opportunity for them. . . . I think Facebook is concerned about the potential opposition.” Not that concerned. Sorrell’s threat was pure bluster. Although WPP would over time double the ad dollars it steered to Snapchat, from $90 million in 2016 to $200 million in 2017, it was akin to throwing pebbles in the ocean: WPP’s ad spending on Google rose five times as fast in 2016, totaling $5 billion; WPP purchased $1.7 billion of ads on Facebook in 2016.

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By late 2015, many agencies and clients hoped two digital competitors might bust out: AOL, which was armed with new financial resources when Verizon decided it was too risky to be a dumb pipe and acquired AOL in May 2015, or Snapchat, an emerging social network Facebook competitor. With AOL and the Huffington Post providing content and Verizon providing the pipe and data on its 135 million telephone customers, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong boldly proclaimed to an Advertising Week audience in September 2015 that the new entity “has dreams of being the largest mobile media company in the world.” The competitive target, he said, was Google and Facebook. The cofounder and CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, openly aspires to disrupt Facebook, which he mocked as passé.

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Although WPP would over time double the ad dollars it steered to Snapchat, from $90 million in 2016 to $200 million in 2017, it was akin to throwing pebbles in the ocean: WPP’s ad spending on Google rose five times as fast in 2016, totaling $5 billion; WPP purchased $1.7 billion of ads on Facebook in 2016. While Snapchat’s revenues jumped seven times faster in 2016, they only reached $404.5 million. By contrast, Facebook’s ad revenues totaled $27 billion that year. The looming threat to Facebook and Google, which would prompt Sorrell and the agencies and their clients—as well as Facebook and Google—to quake, would not come from Snapchat. It would come from Amazon. 8. THE RISE OF MEDIA AGENCIES “We always had the view that the less a media owner knows about what our objectives are and what our needs are, the more leverage we have in a negotiation.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

,” TechCrunch, June 15, 2011, techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/keen-on-eli-pariser-have-progressives-lost-faith-in-the-internet-tctv. 42 Claire Carter, “Global Village of Technology a Myth as Study Shows Most Online Communication Limited to 100-Mile Radius,” BBC, December 18, 2013; Claire Cain Miller, “How Social Media Silences Debate,” New York Times, August 26, 2014. 43 Josh Constine, “The Data Factory—How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap.” 44 Derek Thompson, “Google’s CEO: ‘The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists,’” Atlantic, October 1, 2010. 45 James Surowiecki, “Gross Domestic Freebie,” New Yorker, November 25, 2013. 46 Monica Anderson, “At Newspapers, Photographers Feel the Brunt of Job Cuts,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2013. 47 Robert Reich, “Robert Reich: WhatsApp Is Everything Wrong with the U.S. Economy,” Slate, February 22, 2014. 48 Alyson Shontell, “Meet the 20 Employees Behind Snapchat,” Business Insider, November 15, 2013, businessinsider.com/snapchat-early-and-first-employees-2013-11?op=1. 49 Douglas Macmillan, Juro Osawa, and Telis Demos, “Alibaba in Talks to Invest in Snapchat,” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2014. 50 Mike Isaac, “We Still Don’t Know Snapchat’s Magic User Number,” All Things D, November 24, 2013. 51 Josh Constine, “The Data Factory—How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap,” TechCrunch. 52 Alice E.

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There’s also Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and the rest of a seemingly endless mirrored hall of social networks, apps, and platforms stoking our selfie-centered delusions. Indeed, in an economy driven by innovator’s disasters, new social apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Snapchat—a photo-sharing site that, in November 2013, turned down an all-cash acquisition offer of more than $3 billion from Facebook—are already challenging Instagram’s dominance.22 And by the time you read this, there will, no doubt, be even more destructive new products and companies undermining 2014 disruptors like Snapchat, WhatsApp, and WeChat. For us, however, Instagram—whether or not it remains the “second plotline” of the networked generation—is a useful symbol of everything that has gone wrong with our digital culture over the last quarter of a century.

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They wanted us—our labor, our productivity, our network, our supposed creativity. It’s the same reason Yahoo acquired the microblogging network Tumblr, with its 300 million users and just 178 employees, for $1.1 billion in May 2013, or why in November 2013 Facebook made its $3 billion cash offering for the photography-sharing app Snapchat with its mere twenty employees.48 And that’s why Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s twenty-three-year-old, Stanford-educated CEO, turned down Facebook’s $3 billion offer for his twenty-person startup. Yes, that’s right—he actually turned down $3 billion in cash for his two-year-old startup. But, you see, Spiegel’s minuscule app company—which, six months after rejecting Facebook’s $3 billion deal, was negotiating a new round of financing with the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba at a rumored $10 billion valuation49—isn’t really as tiny as it seems.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Meanwhile, Facebook tugs on the heartstrings by displaying photos of friends who will ‘miss you’ – leveraging its control over uploaded content for commercial purposes. There is evidence that the existing platforms are reaching their peak. Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat have all seen declining user numbers, especially during 2018. Ironically, Snapchat’s fall may have been precipitated by its dependence on celebrity, as a single tweet from Kylie Jenner announcing to her 25 million followers that she didn’t ‘open Snapchat anymore’ instantly wiped $1.3 billion off the company’s value.72 But the trend is universal. Facebook’s announcement that it had lost a million users across Europe in one year has cost it $120 billion worth of value, as teens drop out.

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On the fate of these websites and Facebook’s painstaking measures to prevent disconnections, see Tero Karppi, Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds, University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, MN, 2018; and also Tero Karppi, ‘Disconnect.Me: User Engagement and Facebook’, University of Turku: Turku, 2014. 72. Ironically, Snapchat’s fall . . . ‘Kylie Jenner “sooo over” Snapchat – and shares tumble’, BBC News, 23 February 2018; Mark Sweeney, ‘Peak social media? Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat fail to make new friends’, Guardian, 10 August 2018; Rupert Neate, ‘Over $119bn wiped off Facebook’s market cap after growth shock’, Guardian, 26 July 2018. 73. Yet, 40 per cent of the world’s entire population . . .

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Some of the repetitive banality of selfies can be blamed on the conventions of selfie-taking. Some of it can be blamed on the pursuit of ‘likes’ which incentivizes the repetition of popular images. But the platforms, from Snapchat to Instagram, and apps like Meitu, also offer a form of memetic enchantment. Selfies are worked through a limited range of reality-enhancers, called filters. Snapchat filters make us look cartoonish, with cute puppy ears and noses, while Instagram filters were at first notoriously nostalgic, casting a spell of mal du pays. Filters soften the features and flaws of the face, making us appear polished, perfect, almost mythical.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

The more swipes, the more potential matches are made; naturally, each match sends notifications to both interested parties. 3. Snapchat As of June 2013, Snapchat, a popular photo-sharing app, boasted of 5 million daily active users collectively sending over 200 million photos and videos daily.12 This tremendous engagement means an average Snapchat user sends forty photos every day! Why are users so in love with Snapchat? Its success can largely be attributed to the fact that users load the next trigger every time they use the service. Snapchat is more than a way to share images. It is a means of communication akin to sending a text message—with the added bonus of a built-in timer that can, based on the sender’s instructions, cause the message to self-destruct after viewing.

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Peter Farago, “App Engagement: The Matrix Reloaded,” Flurry (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://blog.flurry.com/bid/90743/App-Engagement-The-Matrix-Reloaded. 11. Anthony Ha, “Tinder’s Sean Rad Hints at a Future Beyond Dating, Says the App Sees 350M Swipes a Day,” TechCrunch (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/29/sean-rad-disrupt. 12. Stuart Dredge, “Snapchat: Self-destructing Messaging App Raises $60M in Funding,” Guardian (June 25, 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/jun/25/snapchat-app-self-destructing-messaging. 13. Kara Swisher and Liz Gannes, “Pinterest Does Another Massive Funding—$225 Million at $3.8 Billion Valuation (Confirmed),” All Things Digital (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://allthingsd.com/20131023/pinterest-does-another-massive-funding-225-million-at-3-8-billion-valuation/.

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“On Fifth Anniversary of Apple iTunes Store, YouVersion Bible App Reaches 100 Million Downloads: First-Ever Survey Shows How App Is Truly Changing Bible Engagement,” PRWeb (July 8, 2013), http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/7/prweb10905595.htm. 2. Alexia Tsotsis,“Snapchat Snaps Up a $80M Series B Led by IVP at an $800M Valuation,” TechCrunch (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/22/source-snapchat-snaps-up-80m-from-ivp-at-a-800m-valuation. 3. YouVersion infographics (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://blog.youversion.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/themobilebible1.jpg. 4. Henry Alford, “If I Do Humblebrag So Myself,” New York Times (Nov. 30, 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/bah-humblebrag-the-unfortunate-rise-of-false-humility.html. 5.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

November 27, 2012. “Snapchat: The Biggest No-Revenue Mobile App Since Instagram.” Forbes. www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/11/27/snapchat-the-biggest-no-revenue-mobile-app-since-instagram/#1499ff0e7200. like Instagram and Snapchat: Somini Sengupta, Nicole Perlroth, and Jenna Wortham. April 13, 2012. “Behind Instagram’s Success, Networking the Old Way.” The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-founders-were-helped-by-bay-area-connections.html. a new format for posts: Robinson Meyer. August 3, 2016. “Why Instagram ‘Borrowed’ Stories from Snapchat.” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/cameras-with-constraints/494291/.

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Awareness that your friends were in the library or watching a movie didn’t explain why people spent an average of fifty minutes per day on Facebook in 2016, up from forty minutes per day in 2014. Moreover, as connectivity became ever easier and more mobile, it was no longer necessary to explain why you were away from the computer: you weren’t. Yet social media posts got more popular, rather than less, joined by mobile-first platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, which required that posts include an image or short video. Snapchat and later Instagram even brought us a new format for posts: the story which vanishes after twenty-four hours, a window into the fun, non-computery things you’ve been doing. A “normal” profile page gradually changed from being a list of static facts about you to a list of things you’ve posted recently.

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“From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11. International Communication Association. pp. 67–701. Ben Rosen. February 8, 2016. “My Little Sister Taught Me How to ‘Snapchat Like the Teens.’” BuzzFeed. www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens. Mary H.K. Choi. August 25, 2016. “Like. Flirt. Ghost. A Journey into the Social Media Lives of Teens.” Wired. www.wired.com/2016/08/how-teens-use-social-media/. Andrew Watts. January 3, 2015. “A Teenager’s View on Social Media.” Wired. backchannel.com/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df945c09ac6.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

We absorb imagery sixty thousand times faster than words.24 So, images make a beeline for the heart. And if Snapchat is threatening to hive off a meaningful chunk of that market, or even climb into the lead, that threat must be quashed. To do this, Facebook is developing a new camera-first interface in Ireland. It’s a clone of Snapchat. In a 2016 earnings call, Zuckerberg said, and this may sound oddly similar: “We believe that a camera will be the way that we share.” Facebook has already appropriated (that is, stolen) other Snapchat ideas, including Quick Updates, Stories, selfie filters, and one-hour messages. The trend will only continue—unless the government gets in the way.

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April 12, 2017. http://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/technology/2017/04/10/many-48-million-twitter-accounts-arent-people-says-study/. 21. L2 Analysis of LinkedIn Data. 22. Novet, Jordan. “Snapchat by the numbers: 161 million daily users in Q4 2016, users visit 18 times a day.” VentureBeat. February 2, 2017. https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/02/snapchat-by-the-numbers-161-million-daily-users-in-q4-2016-users-visit-18-times-a-day/. 23. Balakrishnan, Anita. “Snap closes up 44% after rollicking IPO.” CNBC. March 2, 2017. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/snapchat-snap-open-trading-price-stock-ipo-first-day.html. 24. Pant, Ritu. “Visual Marketing: A Picture’s Worth 60,000 Words.”

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Finally, Snap appeals to teens, a notoriously difficult and influential segment. Snapchat has added lots of features in the months since its founding. It has even pushed into TV, launching a mobile video channel. In 2017, the company is gaining fast on Twitter, and had 161 million daily users when it filed for an IPO.22 It IPO’d with a value of $33 billion.23 We’ll see. Facebook already is positioning itself to crush the young company. Imran Khan, the company’s chief strategy officer, claimed: “Snapchat is a camera company. It is not a social company.” I don’t know if it’s the scorn the Zuck feels after Evan rejected his overtures about acquisition, or a warranted response to a threat.

So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y'all Don't Even Know by Retta

centre right, Downton Abbey, lock screen, McMansion, messenger bag, pink-collar, retail therapy, Skype, Snapchat

Let it go, girl, I thought. It’s not that serious! Now I want to send my friend a formal letter of apology and present her with a $1,000 Starbucks gift card. I get it. I’m her. I’m every woman and man who loves coffee and wants to shout it out loud and proud from the rooftops to their Snapchat story! And I do. My Snapchat followers know that every morning, I post a video of my first cup of coffee, as I gleefully sing, “Dark Maaagiiic!” Can’t stop, won’t stop. So much so that since starting my coffee routine, my once relatively pearly whites ain’t so white no mo’. At my last dentist appointment, the hygienist looked in my mouth and frowned.

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The jobless spend the most time on Snapchat.   2. Astronauts can tweet from space but I can’t get my Wi-Fi to reach my bedroom.   3. I experience anxiety when I haven’t updated my Bitmoji’s outfit to be season-appropriate.   4. I don’t care how “advanced” we’re supposed to be. I’ll give you my cordless landline when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.   5. When I get an alert that a friend has JUST joined Instagram: .   6. How do we not have voice-activated search on TiVo? So much button pressing. What are we, animals??   7. No one cares about ur Snapchat concert vids. We get it. You’re THERE, we’re not.

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Second, I check my notifications on Facebook. I rarely ever look at my feed. Truth be told, I only keep my Facebook account out of respect for the platform … aaaand in the hopes that my former crushes find my page and see the cute pics of myself that I’ve posted. It’s flawed but it’s honest. Third comes Snapchat. At first, I was against Snapchat. I didn’t get it. But once my friend Brian Mahoney (li’l shout-out for @mahone_alone) taught me how to work it, I was hooked. It’s where I document my coffee making and #NoPants life. It’s like my own reality show produced by me! I also enjoy receiving Snaps from like-minded people.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In many cases, the entrepreneurs of smaller companies feel that if they do not let themselves be acquired, the giant suitor will develop its own competing application and drive them out of business. That is what happened to Snapchat. The company reportedly turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook. So Facebook added popular Snapchat-like offerings to its own messaging applications—such as new camera filters and a sharing feature called Stories.63 Snapchat still managed to go public in 2017 at $17 per share, at a market cap of about $20 billion.64 But since that time its stock has struggled, and there are many concerns about how the company will fare over the long term in the platform wars.

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shareToken=st4499b289902f491a99df8d891ecb83ef&reflink=article_email_share&mg=prod/accounts-wsj (accessed June 27, 2019). 16. Amber Murakami-Fester, “What Are Peer-to-Peer Payments?,” NerdWallet.com, May 31, 2019, https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/p2p-payment-systems/. 17. Snapchat Support, SnapChat Corporation, https://support.snapchat.com/en-US/a/snapcash-guidelines (accessed June 27, 2019). 18. PopMoney home page, https://www.popmoney.com/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 19. “Ally Bank Review: Everything You Need to Know,” The Balance, https://www.thebalance.com/ally-bank-review-315132. 20. “Why Fintech Won’t Kill Banks,” The Economist, June 17, 2015, https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/06/economist-explains-12 (accessed June 27, 2019). 21.

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John Cook, “John Grisham, Stephen King and More Than 900 Other Authors Press Amazon to Solve Hachette Dispute in NYT Ad,” GeekWire, August 8, 2014, https://www.geekwire.com/2014/john-grisham-stephen-king-900-authors-press-amazon-solve-hachette-dispute/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 63. Queenie Wong, “Facebook vs. Snapchat: Competition Heats Up Between Social Media Firms,” San Jose Mercury News, March 28, 2017, https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/28/facebook-vs-snapchat-competition-heats-up-between-social-media-firms/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 64. Anita Balakrishnan, “Snap Closes Up 44% After Rollicking IPO,” CNBC, March 2, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/snapchat-snap-open-trading-price-stock-ipo-first-day.html (accessed June 27, 2019). 65. Nicholas Carlson, “Was $1 Billion Too Little to Ask for Instagram?

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

In other words: maps, videos, and a whole lot of talking. If you think the download counts are skewed, try the independent surveys. According to a 2014 Niche study, the most common mobile uses for teenagers are texting, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Pandora, Twitter, and phone calls. Six of the eight (texting, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and the old-fashioned telephone) are just different tools for self-expression—visual, textual, and voice. These social networks really work only when they’re big.46 There is an idea called Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the number of its users squared.

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But, like Disney, it is like a promiscuous vine that can live and grow in any climate. In 2016, 80 percent of BuzzFeed’s audience discovered its content somewhere other than its website—on social networks like Facebook and Snapchat, publishing partners like Apple News and Yahoo, and messaging apps like WeChat. For some consumers, BuzzFeed is a digital newspaper. For others, who find it on Snapchat, it is more like a TV company programming content for different cable networks. Content flows out and information flows in. BuzzFeed uses its distribution channels to collect information on what audiences read, watch, and share and turns those lessons into content for some other channel.

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As communication choices abounded, modes of talking became fashionable—and then anachronistic. Corded and cordless phones connected teenagers in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, online chatting was the norm. Then centuries flipped, and the social media revolution erupted, with Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Whatsapp in 2009, Instagram in 2010, and Snapchat in 2011. These platforms were joined by other inventions, like Vine and Yik Yak, and modern twists on pre-alphabet pictograms like emojis, GIF keyboards, and stickers. Each of these apps and features are fundamentally pictures and words in boxes. But they all have a distinct patois and cultural context, and each represents a fashionable improvement or purposeful divergence from the previous dominant technology.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

And differing approaches to feedback lie behind two of the most successful startups in recent history: Instagram and Snapchat. Instagram came first, in 2010. The app initially just let you share photos and see the photos of friends to whom you were linked. Soon after it launched came the commonsense policy, popularized by Facebook, of letting your friends like your posts (and, of course, seeing how many likes your friends’ posts had gotten). That was the simple act of affirmation that the app revolved around. How many likes had you gotten? How many had your friends? Snapchat was built differently. It, too, was meant as a basic photo-sharing app.

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If you were Instagram, that was a mechanism that could end your business altogether. And so Instagram ruthlessly adopted Snapchat’s feedback philosophy, inserting a strip of “stories” at the top of the app, which let users share photos without the possibility of getting likes, and with the only way of replying being to send a direct message. It worked. Instagram Stories was wildly successful, used by 400 million people a day within a year of launch, helping Instagram nudge its average user time ever upward. You could talk about Snapchat and Instagram as the story of two billion-dollar apps that gave people new ways to entertain themselves, and one another.

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In the user-friendly era, in which it is assumed that new products and apps shouldn’t require much instruction, Autopilot conveyed a muddy sense of what it could and could not do—with sometimes fatal consequences. 2016: INSTAGRAM STORIES In 2016, after noticing that users were becoming more self-conscious about posting to Instagram, the company copied the disappearing-messages feature of Snapchat, to spectacular success. Just a few years before, the iPod click wheel had proved that a user-experience innovation could ignite widespread adoption; Snapchat did the same. But in an era of digital products, those innovations are nearly impossible to defend from copycats for long. 2016: GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION, European Union EU decision makers opened up a new frontier in user-friendly design by enacting a set of laws intended to give users control over their personal data.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

If so, you should consider taking the same tactic yourself. In 2016 and 2017, Instagram infamously copied Snapchat’s tactics over and over again. Both apps were playing in the same field, and Instagram used what Snapchat learned to get ahead of it in its own game. Instagram implemented Snapchat’s “stories” and augmented-reality features, like facial overlays, because these tactics were directly aligned with its strategy: to host the media friends share with one another. Instagram was getting ideas from Snapchat, but these tactics advanced their strategy rather than diverted it. Sometimes the thing you admire most in your competitor isn’t smart or scalable.

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The only time you should force new behaviors or terminology is when they enable a unique and important value in your product. For example, Snapchat was the first social network that would open on the camera view when you clicked on the app instead of other competitive products like Instagram and Facebook that open on a feed of others’ content. This behavior struck new users as foreign, but it retrained users for an entirely different kind of social experience. Snapchat aspired to be more of a camera than an app, and launching the product in camera mode sent a strong and differentiating message to its users that helped distinguish Snapchat from other social apps—as well as the kind of content created with it.

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Empathy for those suffering the problem must come before your passion for the solution. Consider the rise of the popular camera and messaging app Snapchat. There were a lot of start-ups trying to help people share photos and hoping to compete with Facebook. But founder Evan Spiegel recognized the unique insecurities and preferences of its first users: teenagers. At the time of its founding in 2011, teenagers were especially sensitive to leaving a trail of data online that their parents and teachers could see. The idea of ephemeral content that would quickly disappear relieved the anxieties of these teenage users. Snapchat was also empathetic to the fact that many of these teenagers had hand-me-down smartphones with limited storage and cracked screens.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Siri’s responses to a series of queries in March 2016. (Sara Wachter-Boettcher) Or in August 2016, when Snapchat launched a new face-morphing filter—one it said was “inspired by anime.” In reality, the effect had a lot more in common with Mickey Rooney playing I. Y. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s than a character from Akira. The filter morphed users’ selfies into bucktoothed, squinty-eyed caricatures—the hallmarks of “yellowface,” the term for white people donning makeup and masquerading as Asian stereotypes. Snapchat said that this particular filter wouldn’t be coming back, but insisted it hadn’t done anything wrong—even as Asian users mounted a campaign to delete the app.

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As Adrienne LaFrance, writing in the Atlantic, put it, “The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles” 9 (just think about who you picture when you hear the term “secretary”). Or let’s look once more at Snapchat. In addition to the so-called “anime-inspired” filter we saw earlier, the app is known for releasing filters that purport to make you prettier, like the popular “beauty” and “flower crown” features. These filters smooth your skin, contour your face so your cheekbones pop, and . . . make you whiter.10 Why is whiter the default standard for beauty? Well, that’s a complex cultural question—but I doubt it’s one that the three white guys from Stanford who founded Snapchat ever thought about. These might seem like small things, but default settings can add up to be a big deal—both for an individual user like Messer, and for the culture at large.

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Adrienne LaFrance, “Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?” Atlantic, March 30, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/why-do-so-many-digital-assistants-have-feminine-names/475884. 10. For a whole ton of examples, see Neha Prakash, “Snapchat Faces an Outcry against ‘Whitewashing’ Filters,” Mashable, May 16, 2016, http://mashable.com/2016/05/16/snapchat-whitewashing/#pLqUZA7KJuqs. 11. Jessica Nordell, “Stop Giving Digital Assistants Female Voices,” New Republic, June 23, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/134560/stop-giving-digital-assistants-female-voices. 12. Todd Rose, The End of Average: How to Succeed in a World That Values Sameness (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). 13.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

As a result, “the network effects insulating digital platforms from competitive pressure will be mitigated….Individuals could switch between platforms based on their tastes and preferences as well as the innovations devised by different platforms….The point is that the ability to earn money from a user’s attention will become more contestable as a result of identity portability.” Second, social media services differ from phone calls. Text and voice exchanges are standardized and therefore easier to make interoperable. But messages on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Snapchat are harder to seamlessly exchange across the different networks. Messages on Snapchat disappear, while messages on Facebook persist. Messages on Twitter are public and limited to 240 characters, while messages on WhatsApp are private and unlimited in length. While protocols for distinct message types could be developed, the complexity of interoperability in this context certainly exceeds that of the exchange of voice calls and text messages on mobile phones.

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The Hype Machine Every minute of every day, our planet now pulses with trillions of digital social signals, bombarding us with streams of status updates, news stories, tweets, pokes, posts, referrals, advertisements, notifications, shares, check-ins, and ratings from peers in our social networks, news media, advertisers, and the crowd. These signals are delivered to our always-on mobile devices through platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, and they are routed through the human social network by algorithms designed to optimize our connections, accelerate our interactions, and maximize our engagement with tailored streams of content. But at the same time, these signals are much more transformative—they are hypersocializing our society, scaling mass persuasion, and creating a tyranny of trends.

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I was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that The Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). I have worked directly with senior executives at Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WeChat, Spotify, Airbnb, SAP, Microsoft, Walmart, and The New York Times. Along with my longtime friend Paul Falzone, I’m a founding partner at Manifest Capital, an investment firm that helps young companies grow into the Hype Machine. From this perch, I evaluate hundreds of companies a year and get to look around the corner at what’s next.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

As a reporter at *The Verge,* I interviewed Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel before the launch of the company’s video chat and texting features. Spiegel said something that really stuck out to me: “The biggest constraint of the next 100 years of computing is the idea of metaphors,” he said. “For Snapchat, the closer we can get to ‘I want to talk to you’—that emotion of wanting to see you and then seeing you — the better and better our product and our view of the world will be.” Instead of allowing you to ring friends for a video chat, as with FaceTime or Skype, Snapchat forces both users to be present inside a chat window before video can begin.

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Instead of allowing you to ring friends for a video chat, as with FaceTime or Skype, Snapchat forces both users to be present inside a chat window before video can begin. So, instead of texting someone to set up a FaceTime call, you can simply chat them on Snapchat, and if they log on, you can start a video chat when you’re both in the same conversation. The “Hey, want to chat?” text replaces the ring entirely. You might have thought that Snapchat’s mission was to bring “ephemeral,” disappearing messages to the masses, when it was only one facet of a bigger idea that Spiegel had been stewing over. He had been thinking about digitally replicating the ways we talk in real life — ephemerality just happened to be one means of doing so.

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People are inherently drawn to new ideas and not old, derivative ones. People are drawn to hope for better solutions, even if they manifest themselves in tiny, seemingly insignificant ways. *Ring, ring.* Ellis Hamburger was a reporter for the technology news and culture website The Verge from 2012–2015. Now he’s working in marketing at Snapchat. Contents Welcome 1 Introduction Why did you buy this book? Um, why did you buy this book again? 2 Screen-based Thinking Let’s make an app! Tackle a global issue? Improve our lives? No, no. When smart people get together in Silicon Valley they often brainstorm, “What app can we make?”

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

While writing this, I heard a reporter for the BBC talking about the prospects for Snapchat, the messaging app popular with teens and young adults, and stating that “158 million people use the app every day.” There are two very different ways to hear that same short set of words. One is that Snapchat has a hugely loyal base: there is a distinct group of 158 million people who use the app every single day. But there’s another perfectly possible understanding of those same words: that on any given day, 158 million people use Snapchat, but tomorrow’s 158 million will be a different subset of the global population.

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I read three other news reports with similarly ambiguous statements, before reading Snapchat’s original wording: “on average, 158 million people use Snapchat daily.” The “on average” closes the case for the second reading: not a dedicated must-use-daily base of 158 million people, but daily figures of all users that average to 158 million. The ambiguity would never have sent me to Google – would never have been possible – in Lojban. Cowan dutifully translates the possibilities for me. The first is: pa mu bi ki’o ki’o prenu cu pilno la .snaptcat. ca’o ro djedi one five eight thousand thousand person (cu) use (la) Snapchat during each day Or, roughly, “each of the same set of 158 million persons use Snapshot each day.”

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The first is: pa mu bi ki’o ki’o prenu cu pilno la .snaptcat. ca’o ro djedi one five eight thousand thousand person (cu) use (la) Snapchat during each day Or, roughly, “each of the same set of 158 million persons use Snapshot each day.” The second is: ca’o ro djedi pa mu bi ki’o ki’o prenu cu pilno la .snaptcat. during each day one five eight thousand thousand person (cu) use (la) Snapchat. during each day, 158MM [million] persons (not necessarily the same ones) use Snapchat. Should the BBC switch to Lojban? Unlike English, it is exactly the kind of language that sticklers (including many journalists) think people should speak. It makes you communicate information precisely, after working out exactly what you want to say in your own mind. Many sticklers assume a lay version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis themselves: that thought itself depends on language.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

“Nobody said, ‘No, that’s a bad idea,’” he said. “Nobody necessarily said, ‘That’s a great idea!’ but if you don’t get a no, you take it as a yes.” Dylan described the rest of his process as “so not professionally done.” He uploaded the picture to Snapchat on his phone and typed in his reply caption: “We’ll control our own lives, thank you.” He saved the Snapchat, dumped it into the Photoshop Express app on his phone, and then added the March for Our Lives logo. That failed to save, since it’s a premium option and he was using the free version of Photoshop Express. So he took a screenshot, cropped his phone’s border clutter, and discovered that the image now looked too blurry.

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“Well, we’re not taking you,” his dad finally said. David hopped on his bike, and pedaled furiously back. Twenty years. The pace has changed. So has kids’ connection to media. In the Columbine age, teachers sought to make their students wiser media consumers. The members of David’s generation spent much of their waking lives on Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube—they were already amateur media creators. David was semipro. David got his B-roll and approached the news vans. At 10:05 p.m., he was live with Laura Ingraham on her prime-time Fox News show, with Ash Wednesday ashes on her forehead. For seven minutes, David dutifully answered her questions, highly composed, but looking a bit nervous, head nodding rhythmically through some extended questions.

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Everybody was spreading rumors,” Cameron would post on Facebook when he got home. “I heard at least three names dropped as to who the shooter was. We were all so distracted looking at our phones that we forgot somebody was shooting up our school.” Then kids started posting video. “People being shot. People bleeding. Dead bodies. All over Snapchat.” Kids were crying, texting their parents. “You could smell the anxiety. . . . We just wanted to hear that the shooter was gone. We didn’t want to be shot. We had no idea what that even entailed. We’re young. We don’t know real pain.” That went on interminably, then someone smashed the glass out of the door.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Such was the case with the highly popular “social photo booth” app known as Snapchat. Snapchat is a service that allows users to send “selfie” photographs (often involving nudity) that purportedly disappear in just a few seconds after arriving on the recipient’s phone. More than one billion photographs have been sent via the service, and in late 2013 Facebook unsuccessfully tried to buy the company for $3 billion. In early 2014, it was revealed that Snapchat contained a security flaw that exposed millions of iPhone users to denial-of-service attacks. The vulnerability meant that hackers could target your phone specifically by sending a thousand Snapchat messages in just five seconds, thereby crashing your phone and making it unavailable for your use until you performed a hard reboot of the device.

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The vulnerability meant that hackers could target your phone specifically by sending a thousand Snapchat messages in just five seconds, thereby crashing your phone and making it unavailable for your use until you performed a hard reboot of the device. Moreover, hackers were also able to compromise nearly five million Snapchat user accounts and published a database of user names and phone numbers on a hacker Web site. Worse, it was revealed that Snapchat’s foremost feature—the ability to send naked photographs that would self-destruct in ten seconds or less—was also flawed. The images did not self-destruct as promised and could still be retrieved both on the recipient device and on Snapchat’s own computer servers. As a result, tens of thousands of Snapchat photographs thought to have been deleted have shown up across the Internet, reposted on Instagram and on numerous revenge-porn sites.

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Vaughan-Nichols, “First Case of Android Trojan Spreading via Mobile Botnets Discovered,” ZDNet, Sept. 5, 2013. 26 As such, criminals: “Gartner Says Worldwide PC, Tablet, and Mobile Phone Shipments to Grow 5.9 Percent in 2013 as Anytime-Anywhere-Computing Drives Buyer Behavior,” Gartner Newsroom, June 24, 2013. 27 The vulnerability meant: Salvador Rodriguez, “Hackers Can Use Snapchat to Disable iPhones, Researcher Says,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 7, 2014. 28 Moreover, hackers were also: Selena Larson, “Snapchat Responds to Massive Hack,” ReadWrite, Jan. 3, 2014. 29 Worse, it was revealed: Kashmir Hill, “Snapchats Don’t Disappear: Forensics Firm Has Pulled Dozens of Supposedly Deleted Photos from Android Phones,” Forbes, May 9, 2013. 30 As a result, tens of thousands: Tyler Kingkade, “Ohio University Student Accused of Using Nude Snapchat Photos to Extort Sex,” Huffington Post, Dec. 30, 2013. 31 Today 89 percent of employees: Juniper Networks, “Trusted Mobility Index,” May 2012. 32 For just a few hundred dollars: Brian Montopoli, “For Criminals, Smartphones Becoming Prime Targets,” CBS News, Aug. 7, 2013; Dan Nosowitz, “A Hacked Mobile Antenna in a Backpack Could Spy on Cell Phone Conversations,” Popular Science, July 16, 2013. 33 In Kenya, for example: “Why Does Kenya Lead the World in Mobile Money?

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

I also was consistently among the earlier adopters of services and products like Gmail, Netflix streaming, Facebook, Twitter, the Kindle, Alexa devices, Google Glass, Snapchat Spectacles, the Amazon Fire Phone, Stitch Fix, Oculus Virtual Reality headsets, and Uber, partly out of a fun fascination with new services and products and partly out of a need to stay on top of my sector. Later, my four sons came to generate (not always consciously) some of my best insights into the newest social networks, like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Analysts do a lot of odd things. Like looking for correlations in unusual places. Here’s one. My oldest son, Noah, was born on March 12, 2000, just two days after the NASDAQ peak of 5,048.

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I’m just making the advice more graphic, more memorable, and, frankly, more actionable, because I know how strong the demand is for these short-term quarter trades. I’ve got the call logs to prove it. THE EXPECTATIONS GAME . . . OR WHEN A BEAT IS NOT ENOUGH—SNAPCHAT The March quarter 2019 earnings results of Snap (first known as Snapchat) provide a great example of how playing a quarter would have meant missing a great investment opportunity. On April 23, 2019, Snap reported its March quarter results, posting revenue of $320 million that was $14 million or 5% above Street expectations. Revenue growth also accelerated, from 36% year-over-year in the December quarter to 39% in the March quarter.

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By the way, Snap ended 2020 at $50, for another 198% return. Now, one reason you might have played Snap for the 2019 March quarter was because you saw one Street analyst upgrade the shares of Snap to Outperform on April 5, about three weeks before the quarter print. That analyst was me. But first let me tell you the story of Snapchat. Snapchat was founded in 2011 by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. In 2016, the company renamed itself Snap. Also that year, Snap launched smart glasses known as Spectacles, which had very limited functionality but added to the innovative allure of the company. Along the way, Snap reportedly turned down acquisition offers from Facebook (in 2013 for $3 billion) and Google (in 2016 for $30 billion).

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

In exchange for the free land rental, McFarland promised to “furnish thousands of guests for both weekends of the festival, creating a unique opportunity for Roker Point Estates to capture a relevant demographic who might be interested in purchasing land on Great Exuma or directly know qualified purchasers” and to “make commercially reasonable efforts to introduce the Roker Point Estates to Snapchat who will be running a global story during the festival. If Roker Point Estates chooses to buy media on Snapchat, they may expect millions of impressions.” McFarland did, at least, deliver on that last promise. Still, somehow, McFarland had a deal. Around the same time, Brown resigned abruptly from the festival, sending along with his termination an invoice for $68,106 for services rendered by his company, Institute.

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Documentary Film. 120.Emma Brockes, "It’s Not Just the Fyre Festival—This is the Golden Age of the Social Media Con | Emma Brockes," The Guardian, January 17, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/17/fyre-festival-social-media-con-documentaries. 121.Kaya Yurieff, "Snapchat Stock Loses $1.3 Billion after Kylie Jenner Tweet," CNNMoney, February 23, 2018, https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technology/snapchat-update-kylie-jenner/index.html. 122.Brian Feldman, BNet.Substack.com. 123.Alexandra Sternlicht, "Instagram Influencer Danielle Bernstein (WeWoreWhat) Launches Tech Suite For Influencers," Forbes, October 2, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2019/10/02/instagram-influencer-danielle-bernstein-weworewhat-launches-tech-suite-for-influencers/. 124.Rachel Strugatz, "How WeWoreWhat’s Danielle Bernstein Sold Nearly $2 Million in Swimwear in 12 Hours," The Business of Fashion, May 3, 2019, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/retail/how-weworewhats-danielle-bernstein-sold-nearly-2-million-in-swimwear-in-12-hours. 125.Tanya Chen, "A Poshmark Reseller Somehow Got Her Hands on a Major Fashion Influencer’s Unreleased Clothing.

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Still, it’s a low-stakes game for most brands and the influencers they rely on, exchanging samples, gifts, and direct deposits for tags, links, and favorable reviews. For most of the companies involved, the worst that can happen is that an influencer will fail to advertise the goods on their page. (Given the contractual nature of these agreements, it also gives companies an easy recourse, like the time Snapchat sued the actor Luka Sabbat for “failing to influence” by reneging on a $45,000 deal to do a series of swipe-up stories modeling the company’s line of camera sunglasses called Specs.20) But in general, these companies tend to be pretty chill about the deals, because just like the Audis and Van Cleefs who advertised with Duchovny’s fake family, these brands aren’t necessarily looking for clicks—they’re looking for credibility.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

In 2015, the top three members of Forbes’s list of most valuable brands were platform companies, as were eleven of the top twenty.15 All of the companies at the heart of the social media boom were also platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In fact, most of today’s biggest IPOs and acquisitions are platforms, as are almost all of the most successful startups. The list includes Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Waze, Uber, Lyft, Handy, Airbnb, Pinterest, Square, Social Finance, Kickstarter, and more. (See Figure 1.4 for examples of platform startups and their latest valuations.) The growth of platforms isn’t isolated to the United States either; platform companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Rakuten have taken over China and much of Asia.

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To encourage this, Apple provides a cheap software development kit and many developer application program interfaces (APIs) that allow developers to tap into the core functionality provided by the device. A big part of the value that iOS provides to developers is that it allows them to easily access and combine the phone’s many capabilities to create new experiences, from Candy Crush to Snapchat to Tinder. The developers of all of these apps used iOS as a platform to create something new. Remember Apple’s old slogan: “There’s an app for that.” Apple knew early on that a large part of the value of the iPhone wasn’t just in the phone itself but rather in the new experiences that it enabled developers to build for users.

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As we saw when Nokia and BlackBerry lost out to Apple and Google, any features that their phones could offer were far less valuable than the value a consumer received from a large community of app developers. Network effects are “the strongest economic moat of all,” Bill Gurley, of venture capital firm Benchmark, has said.7 Talking heads have been speculating about Facebook’s decline for years, especially with the rise of new social media companies like Twitter and Snapchat and the shift on smartphones from social networks to messaging platforms. Yet as of this writing, Facebook has beaten Wall Street projections in eleven of the last twelve quarters, and its Facebook Messenger platform has taken off, acquiring more than 500 million users within a couple years’ time.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Although WhatsApp claimed it was “built . . . around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible,” a company blog post following WhatsApp’s $19 billion acquisition by Facebook admitted that its logbook of customer phone numbers would become connected with Facebook’s systems, an admission that led to a European Commission fine for Facebook and a string of legal challenges.26 WhatsApp’s own terms now make clear that users are likely to yield up their entire mobile address book when they use the service, and there is evidence that WhatsApp also stores metadata on the time, duration, and location of every communication.27 Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been mimicked by Instagram, also now part of Facebook, and the US Federal Trade Commission has challenged Snapchat on whether sent images really disappear.28 Meanwhile, the growing popularity of ad blocking29 may simply incentivize marketers to find smarter ways of tracking people so that they can be reached with ads. As the CEO of PageFair, a company specializing in such tactics, noted, “Tamper-proof ad serving technology has matured to the point where publishers can serve ads on the blocked web.”30 Whatever the local resistances and derogations, extracting data from a “naturally connected” world has become basic to the very nature of brands: “Understanding that customers are always connected and consuming . . . allows marketers to think of both their digital and offline touchpoints as one fluid and integrated brand presence.”31 This vision of an economy enhanced by the data-gathering possibilities created by “connection” is shared by both market capitalism and state-led capitalism.

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I wonder in hindsight if maybe we didn’t build a movement, but rather we built a social media presence that privileged individuals over community, virtual validation over empathy, leadership without accountability and responsibility.”3 Consider now a third starting point—the question that Irish novelist Sally Rooney, dubbed “the J. D. Salinger of the Snapchat generation,” recently asked herself: “Why wasn’t I drinking enough water?”4 Following a series of fainting spells, doctors advised her to increase her hydration because, like many busy people, she sometimes forgets to take a water break. Fortunately, as the cliché goes, there’s an app for that. The makers of Water Minder offer a program to bypass the part of the brain that regulates thirst, reminding you to drink regularly to meet predefined quotas while tracking your progress.

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Apple’s subsequent Privacy Policy states that collected data “will not be associated with [a user’s] IP address,”24 yet iPhone features still support the surveillance needs of marketers. Both the iBeacon service and the iPhone’s built-in Wallet app enable push notifications from marketers.25 Responsiveness to surveillance concerns is a selling point for other players too, at least outside China. WhatsApp distinguishes itself by its end-to-end message encryption, while Snapchat has its posted messages disappear, at least from the users’ view, after a short period. But the actual position is more complex. Although WhatsApp claimed it was “built . . . around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible,” a company blog post following WhatsApp’s $19 billion acquisition by Facebook admitted that its logbook of customer phone numbers would become connected with Facebook’s systems, an admission that led to a European Commission fine for Facebook and a string of legal challenges.26 WhatsApp’s own terms now make clear that users are likely to yield up their entire mobile address book when they use the service, and there is evidence that WhatsApp also stores metadata on the time, duration, and location of every communication.27 Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been mimicked by Instagram, also now part of Facebook, and the US Federal Trade Commission has challenged Snapchat on whether sent images really disappear.28 Meanwhile, the growing popularity of ad blocking29 may simply incentivize marketers to find smarter ways of tracking people so that they can be reached with ads.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

Sacca estimates his decision to not invest in Dropbox cost him “hundreds of millions of dollars.”13 At close to a $10 billion valuation, Dropbox is one of the biggest misses of Sacca's career. Chris Sacca spoke to Bill Simmons about another miss – passing on Snap, the parent company of Snapchat. At the time, Snapchat was widely considered to be an app ideal for sending photos that are not safe for work. Images sent on Snapchat (called Snaps) automatically disappear seconds after they are viewed. Snap continued developing new functionality, so today users can create Stories, a series of photos that don't disappear. Sacca couldn't see Snap's potential and passed.14 Now, Snapchat functions like a full social media or messaging app, and it has a huge user base, especially among Generation Z.

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., 67 Netflix, 139–140 Net working capital, 5 term, usage, 4 New Century Financial, 134 Newton, Isaac, 37 New York Institute of Finance, 4 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 4 listed stock trading, 135 opening, 147 shares, trading level (1934), 6–7 New York Vaporizing Co. (Twain investment), 28 No Bull (Steinhardt), 58, 60 Nocera, Joe, 90 Not safe for work (NSFW), Snapchat categorization, 151 Nudge (Thaler), 126 One‐decision stocks, 50 Options, usage, 131 Oreos, comparison, 91 Oregon Transcontinental Railroad, Twain share purchase, 29 O'Reilly Automotive, Sequoia holding, 111 Overconfidence, impact, 61, 75–76, 82 Overtrading, 159 Paige Compositor Manufacturing Company, 31 Paige, James, 30 Paine Webber, Livermore exit, 16 Palmolive, comparison, 91 Paulson & Co., founding, 132 Paulson, John, 3, 129, 131–132 merger/arbitrage, 133 Pearson, Mike, 113 Buffett, contrast, 114 Pellegrini, Paolo, 132–133 Penn Dixie Cement, shares (purchase), 58 Pershing Square Capital Management, 89 Pittsburgh National Bank, 101 Plasmon (Twain investment), 28 Polaroid, trading level, 70 Poppe, David, 114 Portfolio turnover, 69 Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain (PIIGS), 158 Post‐go‐go years meltdown, 147 Post III, William, 131 Price, Teddy, 19–20 Princeton University, 47–48 Private/public investing, history, 149 Profit sharing, 68 Prospect Theory (Kahneman/Tversky), 126 Pyramid schemes, 93 Qualcomm, gains, 57 Quantitative easing program, 134–135 Quantum Fund, 100, 103 Ramirez, Alberto/Rosa, 132 Rational thinking, suspension, 27 Recession, odds (calculation), 38 Renaissance Technologies, 135 Return on equity, term (usage), 4 Reverse crash, 100 Risk, arrival, 32 Risk management, 23 Roaring Twenties, bull market cycle, 7 Robertson, Julian, 58 Roche, Cullen, 99 Rockefeller, John, 30 Rogers, Henry (“Hell Hound”), 30–32 Rooney, Frank, 80, 81 Rosenfeld, Eric, 39, 41 Ruane, Bill, 4, 109, 112 Ruane & Cunniff, 112 Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb, 110–111 Russell 3000, 135 Russia, Quantum Fund loss, 103–104 Sacca, Chris, 145, 149–150 Salomon Brothers, 39 Buffett investment, 79 Samuelson, Paul (remarks), 51 San Francisco Call, 31 Schloss, Walter, 4 Schmidt, Eric, 150 Scholes, Myron, 39 Nobel Prize in Economics, 40–41 Schroeder, Alice, 80 Schwager, Jack, 159 Sears, Ackman targeting, 90 Sears Holdings, 109 Securities and Exchange Act, 7 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 13D registration, 90 creation, 22 Security Analysis (Graham), 3–5 See's Candy Berkshire Hathaway purchase, 78 purchase, 142 Self‐esteem, satisfaction (impact), 75–76 Sequoia Fund, 107 operation, 110–111 Shiller, Robert, 75–76, 87 Short squeeze, 93 Silvan, Jon, 94 Simmons, Bill, 151 Simons, Jim, 135 Slack, Sacca investment, 149 Smith, Adam, 68, 121 Snapchat, 151 Snap, going public, 151 Snowball, The, (Schroeder), 80 Social activities, engagement, 87–88 Soros Fund Management, losses, 105 Soros, George, 58, 60, 100, 103 interaction, 102 reform, 121 South Sea Company shares, 37 Speculation, 15 avoidance, 28 SPY, 62 Stagecoach Corporate Stock Fund, 52 Stamp revenues, trading, 141–142 Standard Oil, 30 Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P500) ETF, 62 gains, 112, 114 performance, comparison, 119 shorting, 163 Valeant performance, comparison, 113 Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Company, opening, 58 Steinhardt, Michael, 55, 58 performance record, 59–60 Steinhardt Overseas Fund, 60 Stoker, Bram, 30 Stock market, choices, 114–115 Stocks crashing/reverse crashing, 100 return, 99 stock‐picking ability, 88 Stock trader, training, 18 Strategic Aggressive Investing Fund, 102 Sunk cost, 110 Sun Valley Conference, 57 “Superinvestors of Graham‐and‐Doddsville, The,” 111–112 Taleb, Nassim, 42 Target, Ackman targeting, 90 TDP&L, 50 Tech bubble, inflation, 57 Technivest, 50 Thaler, Richard H., 75, 126 Thinking, Fast and Slow, (Kahneman), 15 Thorndike, Dorain, Paine & Lewis, Inc., 48 Time horizons, 120 Time Warner, AOL merger, 49 Tim Ferriss Show, The, (podcast), 150 Tim Hortons, spinoff, 89 Tract on Monetary Reform, A, (Keynes), 125–126 Trader (Jones), 119 Trustees Equity Fund, decline, 50 Tsai, Jerry, 65, 68 stocks, trading, 69 ten good games, 71 Tsai Management Research, sale, 70 Tversky, Amos, 81 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 25, 27, 75 bankruptcy filings, 32 money, losses, 27–32 public opinion, hypersensitivity, 31 Twilio, Sacca investment, 149 Twitter, Sacca investment, 149–150 Uber, Sacca investment, 149 Undervalued issues, selection, 10 Union Pacific, shares (sale), 18 United Copper, cornering, 19 United States housing bubble, 132 University Computing, trading level, 70 US bonds international bonds, spreads, 41 value, decline, 61 U.S. housing bubble, impact, 132 U.S.

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., founding, 132 Paulson, John, 3, 129, 131–132 merger/arbitrage, 133 Pearson, Mike, 113 Buffett, contrast, 114 Pellegrini, Paolo, 132–133 Penn Dixie Cement, shares (purchase), 58 Pershing Square Capital Management, 89 Pittsburgh National Bank, 101 Plasmon (Twain investment), 28 Polaroid, trading level, 70 Poppe, David, 114 Portfolio turnover, 69 Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain (PIIGS), 158 Post‐go‐go years meltdown, 147 Post III, William, 131 Price, Teddy, 19–20 Princeton University, 47–48 Private/public investing, history, 149 Profit sharing, 68 Prospect Theory (Kahneman/Tversky), 126 Pyramid schemes, 93 Qualcomm, gains, 57 Quantitative easing program, 134–135 Quantum Fund, 100, 103 Ramirez, Alberto/Rosa, 132 Rational thinking, suspension, 27 Recession, odds (calculation), 38 Renaissance Technologies, 135 Return on equity, term (usage), 4 Reverse crash, 100 Risk, arrival, 32 Risk management, 23 Roaring Twenties, bull market cycle, 7 Robertson, Julian, 58 Roche, Cullen, 99 Rockefeller, John, 30 Rogers, Henry (“Hell Hound”), 30–32 Rooney, Frank, 80, 81 Rosenfeld, Eric, 39, 41 Ruane, Bill, 4, 109, 112 Ruane & Cunniff, 112 Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb, 110–111 Russell 3000, 135 Russia, Quantum Fund loss, 103–104 Sacca, Chris, 145, 149–150 Salomon Brothers, 39 Buffett investment, 79 Samuelson, Paul (remarks), 51 San Francisco Call, 31 Schloss, Walter, 4 Schmidt, Eric, 150 Scholes, Myron, 39 Nobel Prize in Economics, 40–41 Schroeder, Alice, 80 Schwager, Jack, 159 Sears, Ackman targeting, 90 Sears Holdings, 109 Securities and Exchange Act, 7 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 13D registration, 90 creation, 22 Security Analysis (Graham), 3–5 See's Candy Berkshire Hathaway purchase, 78 purchase, 142 Self‐esteem, satisfaction (impact), 75–76 Sequoia Fund, 107 operation, 110–111 Shiller, Robert, 75–76, 87 Short squeeze, 93 Silvan, Jon, 94 Simmons, Bill, 151 Simons, Jim, 135 Slack, Sacca investment, 149 Smith, Adam, 68, 121 Snapchat, 151 Snap, going public, 151 Snowball, The, (Schroeder), 80 Social activities, engagement, 87–88 Soros Fund Management, losses, 105 Soros, George, 58, 60, 100, 103 interaction, 102 reform, 121 South Sea Company shares, 37 Speculation, 15 avoidance, 28 SPY, 62 Stagecoach Corporate Stock Fund, 52 Stamp revenues, trading, 141–142 Standard Oil, 30 Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P500) ETF, 62 gains, 112, 114 performance, comparison, 119 shorting, 163 Valeant performance, comparison, 113 Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Company, opening, 58 Steinhardt, Michael, 55, 58 performance record, 59–60 Steinhardt Overseas Fund, 60 Stoker, Bram, 30 Stock market, choices, 114–115 Stocks crashing/reverse crashing, 100 return, 99 stock‐picking ability, 88 Stock trader, training, 18 Strategic Aggressive Investing Fund, 102 Sunk cost, 110 Sun Valley Conference, 57 “Superinvestors of Graham‐and‐Doddsville, The,” 111–112 Taleb, Nassim, 42 Target, Ackman targeting, 90 TDP&L, 50 Tech bubble, inflation, 57 Technivest, 50 Thaler, Richard H., 75, 126 Thinking, Fast and Slow, (Kahneman), 15 Thorndike, Dorain, Paine & Lewis, Inc., 48 Time horizons, 120 Time Warner, AOL merger, 49 Tim Ferriss Show, The, (podcast), 150 Tim Hortons, spinoff, 89 Tract on Monetary Reform, A, (Keynes), 125–126 Trader (Jones), 119 Trustees Equity Fund, decline, 50 Tsai, Jerry, 65, 68 stocks, trading, 69 ten good games, 71 Tsai Management Research, sale, 70 Tversky, Amos, 81 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 25, 27, 75 bankruptcy filings, 32 money, losses, 27–32 public opinion, hypersensitivity, 31 Twilio, Sacca investment, 149 Twitter, Sacca investment, 149–150 Uber, Sacca investment, 149 Undervalued issues, selection, 10 Union Pacific, shares (sale), 18 United Copper, cornering, 19 United States housing bubble, 132 University Computing, trading level, 70 US bonds international bonds, spreads, 41 value, decline, 61 U.S. housing bubble, impact, 132 U.S.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Chapter 8: PAS DE DEUX 72 Roughly one third: Artturi Tarjanne, “Why VC’s Seek 10x Returns,” Activist VC Blog (blog), Nexit Adventures, January 12, 2018, http://www.nexitventures.com/blog/vcs-seek-10x-returns/. 74 Kalanick frequently compared: Amir Efrati, “Uber Group’s Visit to Seoul Escort Bar Sparked HR Complaint,” The Information, March 24, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-groups-visit-to-seoul-escort-bar-sparked-hr-complaint. 75 “Software is eating the world”: Andreessen Horowitz, Software Is Eating the World, https://a16z.com/. 75 deals increased by 73 percent: Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway, “How the Geography of Startups and Innovation Is Changing,” Harvard Business Review, November 27, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-the-geography-of-startups-and-innovation-is-changing. 75 billions invested post-2010: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City,” Startup Revolution, http://startupsusa.org/global-startup-cities/. 75 emerged as the world’s epicenter: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City.” 76 “to organize the world’s information”: “From the Garage to the Googleplex,” About, Google, https://www.google.com/about/our-story/. 76 controversial financial instrument: “The Effects of Dual-Class Ownership on Ordinary Shareholders,” Knowledge@Wharton, June 30, 2004, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-effects-of-dual-class-ownership-on-ordinary-shareholders/. 77 “An Owner’s Manual For Google Investors”: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “2004 Founders’ IPO Letter,” Alphabet Investor Relations, https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.html. 77 $3.5-billion acquisition: “Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook,” Digits (blog), Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13/snapchat-spurned-3-billion-acquisition-offer-from-facebook/. Chapter 9: CHAMPION’S MINDSET 82 Kalanick once said onstage: Liz Gannes, “Travis Kalanick: Uber Is Raising More Money to Fight Lyft and the ‘Asshole’ Taxi Industry,” Recode, May 28, 2014, https://www.recode.net/2014/5/28/11627354/travis-kalanick-uber-is-raising-more-money-to-fight-lyft-and-the. 82 “There’s been so much corruption”: Andy Kessler, “Travis Kalanick: The Transportation Trustbuster,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324235104578244231122376480. 83 “we’re crushing it”: Alexia Tsotsis, “Spotted!

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A tech bro’s greatest worry was whether or not he was working at that year’s hottest “unicorn”—a noun coined in 2013 by a venture capitalist who used it to describe companies valued at more than $1 billion. By the fall of 2015, Uber was the unicorn to end all unicorns; every tech bro had to be there. Uber wasn’t alone as a haven for tech bros. Snapchat, once a darling in the Valley for its innovative approach to social networking, was under fire for emails its founder had sent to fraternity brothers during his college days at Stanford. (“Fuck Bitches Get Leid,” [sic] one read.) A group of Dropbox and Airbnb employees were filmed trying to kick a group of San Francisco kids off a soccer field to make room for their corporate league game.

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Fast-rising rents pushed wage earners out of San Francisco, while landlords flipped those former apartments to new, wealthier tenants. The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer. With the rise of Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Snapchat, venture capitalists looked everywhere to fund the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Evan Spiegel—the newest brilliant mind who sought, in the words of Steve Jobs, to “make a dent in the universe.” And as more money flowed into the Valley from outside investors—from hedge funds and private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and Hollywood celebrities—the balance of power shifted from those who held the purse strings to the founders who brought the bright ideas and willingness to execute them.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

In 2011, VC firms raised $24 billion from investors, nearly double their haul of 2009. This outpouring of money resulted in a burst of startups that would go on to reshape the Silicon Valley landscape and become household names in Americans’ daily lives. Between 2009 and 2012, VCs wrote early checks to startups like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Square. Suddenly you couldn’t walk into a coffee shop in Silicon Valley without hearing talk of the next industry ripe to be “disrupted” by a startup. Amid all the optimism, there was a noticeable change in venture capital strategy that would set apart this generation of startups from their prerecession forebearers.

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Just six months after the T. Rowe Price deal had valued WeWork at $5 billion, Fidelity’s investment valued WeWork at $10 billion. The company was vaulted into a whole new category. Suddenly WeWork was the seventh most valuable startup in the country. Now it would be mentioned in the same breath as Airbnb, Uber, and Snapchat; it was worth more than the $9 billion blood-testing company Theranos and more than all but a handful of publicly traded office landlords. Even the nation’s largest publicly traded office owner, Boston Properties, was now within reach, at $20 billion. WeWork was by far the most valuable startup in New York City.

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Dunlevie tried to paint a dark picture for Neumann of what could come if he spurned any guardrails. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he told him, parroting British historian John Dalberg-Acton’s famous quote. Neumann responded by pointing out what he saw as Benchmark’s hypocrisy. Benchmark backed both Snapchat and Uber, two companies in which the CEOs had enhanced voting power that gave them a firm grip on their companies. Amid the influx of money from mutual funds and others, the balance of power had shifted in Silicon Valley. Founders who looked and acted the part—decisive leadership, expansive vision—had plenty of sway over investors eager to place bets on the next Steve Jobs.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

THE SEARCHERS ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS AI MAX LEVCHIN HAS PLANS FOR US EVGENY’S LITTLE PROBLEM THE SHORTEST CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO POINTS HOME AWAY FROM HOME CHARCOAL, SHALE, COTTON, TANGERINE, SKY SLUMMING WITH BUDDHA THE QUANTIFIED SELF AT WORK MY COMPUTER, MY DOPPELTWEETER UNDERWEARABLES THE BUS THE MYTH OF THE ENDLESS LADDER THE LOOM OF THE SELF TECHNOLOGY BELOW AND BEYOND OUTSOURCING DAD TAKING MEASUREMENT’S MEASURE SMARTPHONES ARE HOT DESPERATE SCRAPBOOKERS OUT OF CONTROL OUR ALGORITHMS, OURSELVES TWILIGHT OF THE IDYLLS THE ILLUSION OF KNOWLEDGE WIND-FUCKING THE SECONDS ARE JUST PACKED MUSIC IS THE UNIVERSAL LUBRICANT TOWARD A UNIFIED THEORY OF LOVE <3S AND MINDS IN THE KINGDOM OF THE BORED, THE ONE-ARMED BANDIT IS KING THESES IN TWEETFORM THE EUNUCH’S CHILDREN: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS FLAME AND FILAMENT IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID? SCREAMING FOR QUIET THE DREAMS OF READERS LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF PRIVACY HOOKED MOTHER GOOGLE THE LIBRARY OF UTOPIA THE BOYS OF MOUNTAIN VIEW THE EUNUCH’S CHILDREN PAST-TENSE POP THE LOVE THAT LAYS THE SWALE IN ROWS THE SNAPCHAT CANDIDATE WHY ROBOTS WILL ALWAYS NEED US LOST IN THE CLOUD THE DAEDALUS MISSION Acknowledgments Index UTOPIA IS CREEPY Introduction SILICON VALLEY DAYS IT WAS A SCENE out of an Ambien nightmare: A jackal with the face of Mark Zuckerberg stood over a freshly killed zebra, gnawing at the animal’s innards.

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By extending the collection of data to once private spheres of personal activity and then centralizing the storage and processing of that data, the net is shifting the balance back toward the control function. MY COMPUTER, MY DOPPELTWEETER November 22, 2013 NOW THAT WE’RE ALL microcelebrities, we all need micropublicists. No mortal can keep up with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Snapchat, ad nauseam, all by herself. There’s just not enough real time in the day. The ever solicitous Google is rushing to our aid. It’s developing a software program that will will take over the hard work of maintaining one’s social media presence. The company was this week granted a patent for “automated generation of suggestions for personalized reactions in a social network.”

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Every time a network gets quicker, we get antsier. “Every millisecond matters,” says a Google engineer. As we experience faster flows of information online, we become, in other words, less patient people. But impatience is not just a network effect. The phenomenon is amplified by the constant buzz of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, texting, and social networking in general. Society’s “activity rhythm” has never been so harried. Impatience is a contagion spread from gadget to gadget. All of this has obvious importance to anyone involved in producing online media or running data centers. But it also has implications for how all of us think, socialize, and in general live.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Of course, the major social media sites are purportedly just for teens and adults, so you might think their biases or record of choosing profit over truth or accuracy would have no effect on younger children. Yet, tweens and even younger children have been using sites like YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook for years.27 Just as adults do, kids turn to social media for information about the world.28 And also as adults do, kids use social media to represent themselves to the world, including posting curated selfies and other pictures. But the “self” they present isn’t necessarily really what they really look like. That Instagram and Snapchat, among others, provide tools enabling users to “beautify” themselves is problematic on so many levels. For young girls, already self-conscious about their appearance, these tools send the message that their looks aren’t acceptable.

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It provides for an independent outside audit of sites targeting kids, requires tech companies to consider the wellbeing of children into their design, empowers States Attorney General and the FTC to hold tech companies responsible for actions that harm children, and requires that all default settings for children be set at the most protective.23 Another proposed bill, the Kids Internet Design and Safety Act, known as the KIDS Act,24 addresses unscrupulous tech marketing techniques that target children and teens under the age of sixteen—not just on platforms overtly aimed at kids but also on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat that ignore the fact that they are heavily used by children.25 If passed, the KIDS Act will protect children and young teens from techniques designed to keep them online indefinitely by banning autoplay, push notifications, endless scrolling, and those streaks on Snapchat that can keep kids up all night. It will also protect them from sneaky, insidious marketing that disguises itself as content by banning influencer marketing, like unboxing videos such as Ryan’s ToysReview.

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In combination, these two phenomena drive a societal embrace of commercialism that powerfully affects children, both directly and indirectly. One major direct influence, for instance, is the huge popularity of social networking sites, which transform us and our children simultaneously into our own brands and into marketers for corporate brands. The selfies we post on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram can easily be digitally altered to erase physical flaws, real and imagined, just like marketers enhance photos and videos of the objects they sell. What we and our kids choose to post or not post online shapes our personal “brand.” As I write, one of the most popular online activities around the world for young children is watching other kids open boxes of toys on YouTube, Google’s popular social media platform.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Cornell University’s Social Media Lab found that its students preferred Snapchat to its forerunners Facebook and Twitter because of the platform’s “ephemerality”—their messages were temporary, not permanent, for all to see. Young college students can lower their inhibitions on Snapchat without worrying about their content being dumped in the open for public consumption. One student, Chang, noted, “The network is a lot smaller, and a lot closer. . . . On larger platforms, you have this large diverse group of friends. On Snapchat, it’s very few and it’s very selected. It would be your closest friends rather than a larger network of professors and other students that you met once in a class.”20 The younger generation’s addiction might be worse, but they’ve learned from their parents about what can happen when you post something on Facebook or Twitter that you grow to regret.

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Jason Horowitz, “In Italian Schools, Reading, Writing and Recognizing Fake News,” The New York Times (October 18, 2017). https://www.ny times.com/2017/10/18/world/europe/italy-fake-news.html. 20. Katherine Quinn, “Cornell Researchers Study Snapchat’s Appeal,” Cornell Daily Sun (March 15, 2016). http://cornellsun.com/2016/03/15/cornell-researchers-study-snapchats-appeal. 21. Kayla Webley, “How the Nixon-Kennedy Debate Changed the World,” Time (September 23, 2010). http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2021078,00.html. EPILOGUE 1. Zack Beauchamp, “Trump’s Republican Party, explained in one photo.”

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By sharing information, experiences, and opinions, social media was supposed to support free societies by connecting users who could collaboratively work through their differences—or so we were told. Initially, we laud each of these new platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, Instagram, Snapchat. Over time, though, each of these applications ultimately introduces unimagined negative outcomes. Not long after many across the world applauded Facebook for toppling dictators during the Arab Spring revolutions of 2010 and 2011, it proved to be a propaganda platform and operational communications network for the largest terrorist mobilization in world history, bringing tens of thousands of foreign fighters under the Islamic State’s banner in Syria and Iraq.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It was an internal “early bird” warning system that alerted the company to start-ups that were doing well, while giving Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users were doing on those systems.4 In essence, Onavo represented a legal form of corporate spying, one that produced intel that Facebook used to both undermine existing competitors and cut untold numbers of new ventures off at the pass. In 2016, for example, Facebook began paying closer attention to Snapchat, the rival that had grown wildly popular among the younger set. Snapchat’s most distinguishing features were impermanence (instead of being immortalized on a “wall” until the end of time, messages sent via Snapchat would automatically disappear soon after being read) and its animated filters (a user could overlay a photo of themselves with, say, cat ears and whiskers). Coincidentally (or not) it was right at this time that Facebook’s own company Instagram launched a feature called Stories, with similar features.

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There is no question about it: Our devices and the things we do on them are just as addictive as nicotine, food, drugs, or alcohol, and there is a trove of research that proves it. According to a Goldman Sachs report looking at this effect, the average user spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook, 30 minutes on Snapchat, and 21 minutes on Instagram. Add that up, and think about the effects on productivity and human relationships. Of course, for Facebook—and the apps it hosts on its platform—this is no happy accident. It has all been carefully strategized and executed. The attention merchants want us to remain plugged in, so that they can collect more data about us and our online habits.

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And Cook is being somewhat hypocritical when he criticizes his competitors for “keeping people online for as long as possible,” given that Apple tries, with some exceptions, to do that, too, particularly via its promotion of the “freemium” gaming that hooked my son. But in this particular area, it’s true that other companies—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google—have the deeper problems. That’s because their core business fundamentally depends on data mining by manipulating behavior, using an odd mix of Las Vegas–style techniques and opaque algorithms to keep users hooked.7 These companies truly are attention merchants. We as consumers perceive their services to be free, but in reality, we are paying—unwittingly—not only with our attention but our data, which they go to great lengths to capture and then monetize.8 What is even more alarming, however, is how vulnerable their complex and opaque digital advertising systems are to exploitation, no matter how many people they put on the problem.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

Additionally, some of the results such as the UK rock band Black Girls lack any relationship to Black women and girls. This is an interesting co-optation of identity, and because of the band’s fan following as well as possible search engine optimization strategies, the band is able to find strong placement for its fan site on the front page of the Google search. Figure 2.4. Snapchat faced intense media scrutiny in 2016 for its “Bob Marley” and “yellowface” filters that were decried as racist stereotyping. Published text on the web can have a plethora of meanings, so in my analysis of all of these results, I have focused on the implicit and explicit messages about Black women and girls in both the texts of results or hits and the paid ads that accompany them.

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By comparing these to broader social narratives about Black women and girls in dominant U.S. popular culture, we can see the ways in which search engine technology replicates and instantiates these notions. This is no surprise when Black women are not employed in any significant numbers at Google. Not only are African Americans underemployed at Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and other popular technology companies as computer programmers, but jobs that could employ the expertise of people who understand the ramifications of racist and sexist stereotyping and misrepresentation and that require undergraduate and advanced degrees in ethnic, Black / African American, women and gender, American Indian, or Asian American studies are nonexistent.

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With all of the aberrations and challenges that tech companies face in charges of data discrimination, the possibility of hiring recent graduates and advanced-degree holders in Black studies, ethnic studies, American Indian studies, gender and women’s studies, and Asian American studies with deep knowledge of history and critical theory could be a massive boon to working through the kinds of complex challenges facing society, if this is indeed the goal of the technocracy. From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people from its platform34 to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes35 to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia36 and Snapchat’s racist filters,37 there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering nationwide.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

These companies are mobile-centric for today’s always-on young generation, leverage the latest technologies in AI and data analytics, and set the pace in innovation and scale. Their business models and features are often ahead of the West and sometimes are copied. Toutiao uses machine learning to distribute personalized streams of aggregated content to online readers, a BuzzFeed with brains. TikTok spins out 15-second music video clips, akin to Snapchat’s Lens Challenges launched two years after the Chinese app. Meituan is a one-stop superapp that rolls in Uber Eats, Kayak, Yelp, and Groupon in a range of services including food delivery, travel bookings, and movie tickets. The Uber of China, ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, actually beat Uber in China.

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YY helped to invent the livestreaming business model of making money by taking a chunk of revenue from promotional agencies and from fans virtual gifts to performers. BYTEDANCE: The New “B” In today’s fast-moving and intense digital markets, a new, shorter form of livestreaming—15-second music video selfies—has popped up. It’s popularized by Chinese upstart ByteDance, the most valuable startup in the world and a new challenger to Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat, and Tencent, as well as YY. ByteDance founder and serial entrepreneur Zhang Yiming has a knack for anticipating content trends and leveraging artificial intelligence to bring news and entertainment to an entirely new level. His apps leverage machine learning to find out what viewers and readers prefer and personalizes a feed or stream to them that gets more precise with each use.

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In China, where Facebook is blocked, users spend well more than one hour daily on the app, more than the average user of Facebook or Tencent’s WeChat and Weibo. There’s also an English version, TopBuzz, with 36 million monthly users. Its short-video platform, TikTok, has surpassed 500 million monthly active users globally.10 And TikTok is ranked as one of the world’s top downloaded iPhone apps, in the top 20 league with YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Messenger.11 TikTok got a boost internationally when its parent company bought and then merged in Musical.ly, a Chinese social video app with a large following outside China. ByteDance founder Zhang, 36, grew up in the southern province of Fujian and graduated as a software engineer from Nankai University in Tianjin.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Eliminating the competition feels like a natural goal; it means you’ve won. That’s why Intel attempted to eliminate Advanced Micro Devices, for which it was fined by the European Union.9 That is why Facebook is using its deep pockets and huge user base to empower its Instagram subsidiary to “kneecap” its rival Snapchat by copying Snapchat’s core product.10 Managers feel more secure when their customers have no alternative to the product or service they produce. Given that American monopolists from Rockefeller to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have become among the richest men in history, the appeal of establishing a monopoly is understandable.

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Switching to an alternative can be painful and annoying. And there are, of course, the much discussed network effects in the modern economy. It makes lots of sense to use Facebook for your social networking, because everybody else with whom you would like to network is on Facebook, or to pick Instagram over Snapchat, because Instagram is integrated with its giant social-media owner, Facebook. These network effects are not just found in the online world. There is a benefit to you of buying the leading brand in categories like beer, laundry detergents, and athletic shoes, because the leading brand is most likely to be in stock at whatever retailers you visit (whether physical or online).

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They can take Uber sometimes, Lyft others, and taxis still others. They can get some of their news through their Facebook feed and still subscribe to their local newspaper. They can use Facebook for some things but rather than use Facebook subsidiary Instagram for their photo sharing, use Insta gram rival Snapchat. They can buy some things from Amazon Prime and others from their local retailer. The natural tendency is the opposite—and that is why we are seeing so many distributions tending toward Pareto. The effect (using Uber or Facebook or Amazon) becomes the cause of more of the effect (using Uber or Facebook or Amazon even more).

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

“Can you believe these companies pay all this money for the shit we do?” he was overheard saying in a Brooklyn bar. Smith’s sense of timing in building the business had been uncanny. He had been at the forefront of distribution on every visual platform: first YouTube, then Snapchat, which began as an app for sending promiscuous pictures that disappeared once seen. Vice was one of the first media companies given a privileged placement on Snapchat’s platform. After that, it had colonized Pinterest, another social network platform, which was popular with women and where users posted pleasing images. On top of the advertising revenue, these deals gave licensing fees to Vice for its content, from all over the world.

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She looked perfectly cast for her role as digital innovation czar, and she had the technical chops for the job. She was excited when veteran political reporter Dan Balz decided to give Snapchat a taste of the campaigns he covered. I first met Balz in the late 1980s when he was strictly a pen-and-notepad guy, in the pre-internet era. He was a superb reporter dedicated to conveying the substance and importance of national politics. When I had coffee with Haik I couldn’t help but think what Helen Dewar, a Post lifer who had covered the Senate for decades and looked down on anything faddish, would make of Haik or Balz on Snapchat. Haik earned some measure of respect because she had come from the Seattle Times, where she had been the editor of the website.

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For one, she was young: “Meet the Post’s Mobile Leadership, a Q&A with Cory Haik and Julia Beizer,” WashPostPR Blog, Washington Post, October 21, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2014/10/21/meet-the-posts-mobile-leadership-a-qa-with-cory-haik-and-julia-beizer/?utm_term=.19a01fbbcfc6. She was excited when veteran: Benjamin Mullin, “Washington Post Campaign Reporter Dan Balz Brings Viewers on the Trail with Snapchat,” Poynter, July 17, 2015, https://www.poynter.org/news/washington-post-campaign-reporter-dan-balz-brings-viewers-trail-snapchat. She developed her own data collector: “@MentionMachine Tracks the 2012 Candidates: Who’s Up, Who’s Down on Twitter?,” Washington Post, January 4, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/mentionmachine-tracks-the-2012-candidates-whos-up-whos-down-on-twitter/2011/12/20/gIQAPY8r7O_blog.html?

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

Airbnb, content marketing, Firefox, Hacker News, if you build it, they will come, jimmy wales, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Salesforce, side project, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, software as a service, TechCrunch disrupt, the long tail, the payments system, Uber for X, Virgin Galactic, web application, working poor, Y Combinator

We interviewed Andrew Chen, founder of Muzy (an app with more than 25 million users) and one of the experts in the viral marketing world. According to Andrew, this traction channel is becoming increasingly important as Facebook, email, and app stores have emerged as “super-platforms” with billions of active users each. As a result, companies can go viral faster than ever before. Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest are great examples: they all leveraged virality through these super-platforms to acquire tens of millions of users in just a few years. VIRAL MARKETING STRATEGY Viral marketing strategy begins and ends with viral loops. A viral loop in its most basic form is a three-step process: A customer is exposed to your product or service.

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Word of mouth drove Facebook’s early growth among college students, before they started building in more explicit viral hooks (email invites, adding your friends via address books, etc.). Word of mouth also causes many movies, books, diets, and TV shows to take off. Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers. For example, if your friends don’t have Skype, the application is worthless. Apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp also fall into this category. This type of virality comes with the advantage of “network effects,” where the value of the network increases as more people get on it. That is, the more people who are on Skype, the more valuable it becomes. Other products grow by encouraging collaboration.

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CHAPTER TWENTY Existing Platforms Existing platforms are Web sites, apps, or networks with huge numbers of users—sometimes in the hundreds of millions—that you can potentially leverage to get traction. Major platforms include the Apple and Android app stores, Mozilla and Chrome browser extensions, social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, as well as newer platforms that are growing rapidly (Tumblr, Snapchat, etc.). When mobile video-sharing app Socialcam launched, it suggested users sign up with Facebook or Twitter, promoted user videos on both platforms, and encouraged people to invite their friends from each site. It went on to hit 60 million users within twelve months—that type of growth just isn’t possible through many other channels.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

NYC Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation, ‘Preparing for the Internet of Everything’ (undated) <https://www1.nyc.gov/site/ forward/innovations/iot.page> (accessed 6 December 2017). Mat Smith, ‘Ralph Lauren Made a Great Fitness Shirt that Also Happens to Be “Smart”’, Engadget, 18 March 2016 <https://www. engadget.com/2016/03/18/ralph-lauren-polotech-review/> (accessed 6 December 2017). Casey Newton, ‘Here’s How Snapchat’s New Spectacles Will Work’, The Verge, 24 September 2016 <http://www.theverge.com/2016/ 9/24/13042640/snapchat-spectacles-how-to-use> (accessed 28 November 2017). Katherine Bourzac, ‘A Health-Monitoring Sticker Powered by Your Cell Phone’, MIT Technology Review, 3 August 2016 <https://www. technologyreview.com/s/602067/a-health-monitoring-stickerpowered-by-your-cell-phone/?

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‘Why Not Smart Guns in this High-Tech Era?’ Editorial, 26 Nov. 2016. <http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/ sunday/why-not-smart-guns-in-this-high-tech-era.html?smid=twnytopinion&smtyp=cur&referer=> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017). Newton, Casey. ‘Here’s How Snapchat’s New Spectacles Will Work’. The Verge, 24 Sep. 2016 <http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/24/13042640/ snapchat-spectacles-how-to-use> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017). Nichols, John. ‘If Trump’s FCC Repeals Net Neutrality, Elites Will Rule the Internet—and the Future’. Nation, 24 Nov. 2017 <https://www. thenation.com/article/if-trumps-fcc-repeals-net-neutrality-eliteswill-rule-the-internet-and-the-future/> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017).

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Your house might be protected by ‘smart locks’ that use biometric information like handprint, face, and retina scans, to control entry and exit.10 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 44 FUTURE POLITICS Although they’re not to everyone’s taste, apparently nearly half of consumers plan to buy wearable technologies by 2019.11 Pull on a Ralph Lauren ‘PoloTech’ shirt and it will monitor your steps, heart rate, and breathing intensity—providing you with personalized performance feedback.12 Snapchat Spectacles and similar early accoutrements, already on the market, can capture what you see in shareable ten-second clips.13 In the future, more sophisticated products will supersede the first generation of Nike Fuelbands, Jawbone fitness trackers, Fitbit wristbands, and Apple watches. ‘Epidermal electronics’—small stretchy patches worn on the skin—will be able to record your sun exposure, heart rate, and blood oxygenation.14 Meanwhile, when you toss a ball around the garden, the pigskin itself will record the distance, velocity, spin rate, spiral, and catch rate for post-game analysis.15 In public, smart waste bins will know when they are full, highways will know when they are cracked, and supermarket shelves will know when they are empty.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

I find that Europeans tend to be far more sensitive about privacy issues, perhaps in part because they recall how personal privacy was utterly shattered by dictators of the previous century. Yes, millions of people are increasingly comfortable sharing personal information with their friends—but that doesn’t mean they’re comfortable sharing it with the world. It’s fascinating to see how the messaging service Snapchat, created by a twenty-three-year-old, has exploded in popularity thanks to its ingenious value proposition: Snapchat lets you share a photograph with friends knowing that the photograph will disappear from the Internet after twenty-four hours. If that’s not a new standard for shielding personal privacy, I don’t know what is. It’s an illustration of the kind of innovative, empathetic thinking we need from leaders in technology, government, and society at large to develop systems and rules that will serve to enhance and enlarge the zone of safety, security, and trust rather than eroding it.

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See also specific products Seattle Children’s Hospital, 8, 41–42 Seattle Seahawks, 4 security, 169–80, 191–94, 202, 205, 224, 227–28, 238 senior leadership team (SLT), 2–6, 10–11, 81–82 sensors, 13, 79, 147–48, 150 September 11, 2001 attacks, 172 Serling, Rod, 159 server and tools business (STB), 53–59 servers, 2, 45, 139 edge of cloud and, 89 private vs. cloud-based, 57 privacy and security and, 173, 176 service sector, 240 Shaikh, Saqib, 200 Snapchat Spectacles, 145 Shaw, Frank, 98, 99 Shenzhen, 229 Shin, Jong-Kyon (J.K.), 133 Shum, Harry, 3, 51–52, 82 Sikhs, 19 silicon photonics, 228 Silicon Valley, 12, 21, 24, 26–27 silos, 57, 102 Sinclair ZX Spectrum kit, 21 Siri, 201 Sirosh, Joseph, 59 skills development, 226–27, 240 Skype, 64, 121, 155, 164, 171 Skype Translator, 59 small firms, 217 smartphones, 45, 66, 73, 132–34. See also mobile phones; and specific products Smith, Brad, 3, 131, 170–71, 173, 189 SMS, 216 Snapchat, 193 Snapdeal, 33 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 143 Snowden, Edward, 172–73, 179–80 Social Connector, 137 social contract, 239 socioeconomic change, 12–13 software design, 27, 49 software engineering, 74 solar, wind, and tidal power, 43, 228 Sony, 28 Sony Pictures Entertainment, 169–70, 177, 179, 189 Soul of a New Machine, The (Kidder), 68 South Zone, 37, 115 sovereignty, 170 space exploration, 145–46 Spain, 215 spam filters, 158 speech recognition, 76, 89, 142, 150–51, 164 Spencer, Phil, 106–7 sports franchises, 15 spreadsheets, 143 SQL (structured query language), 26 SQL Server, 53, 55 Stallone, Sylvester, 44 Stanford University, 64 One Hundred Year Study, 208 Start-up of You, The (Hoffman), 233 Station Q, 162–63, 166 Stephenson, Neal, 143 string theory, 164 Studio D, 65–66 success leadership, 120 Sun Microsystems, 26–29, 54 Super Bowl, 4 supercomputers, 161 superconducting, 162–65 supply-chain operations, 103 Surface, 2, 129 Surface Hub, 89, 137 Surface Pro 3, 85 Surface Studio, 137 Svore, Krysta, 164–65 Sway, 121 Sweden, 44 Swisher, Kara, 138 Sydney Opera House, 98 symbiotic intelligence, 204 Synopsys, 25 Syria, 218 tablets, 45, 85, 134, 141.

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Companies are taking different approaches with head-mounted computers. Virtual reality, as provided by our Windows 10 MR devices or Facebook’s Oculus Rift, largely blocks out the real world, immersing the user in a completely digital world. Google Glass, for example, projects information onto your eyeglasses. Snapchat Spectacles let you augment what you see with relevant content and filters. HoloLens provides access to mixed reality in which the users can navigate both their current location—interact with people in the same room—and a remote environment while also manipulating holograms and other digital objects.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Trotsky makes it clear that he’s going to change the way they do things, and that, unlike Zack, he has real authority and is not afraid of them. One change has to do with e-books. The blog writers are supposed to coordinate their efforts with the e-book writers. If the e-book team creates a book about, say, how to use Snapchat to sell pet food, the blog should generate articles about Snapchat and pet food, and use those posts to promote the e-book. Instead, Marcia and Jan do whatever they want. They might write articles about Snapchat and pet food, or they might not. Some of it comes down to whether they like the person who wrote the e-book. Some of it hinges on whether they feel the e-book people were polite enough to them or gave them sufficient notice.

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I pore through their website, which talks about something called inbound marketing, which I’ve also never heard of. All I can tell is that they make software used by marketing departments. I call around to friends who work in venture capital, who tell me that HubSpot is the real deal. The company is a bit of a sleeper. It’s not as well known as companies like Snapchat or Instagram, but it is run by a bunch of guys from MIT and headed for an IPO. Over the past seven years HubSpot has raised $100 million in venture capital, and its investors include some of the best firms in the business. Its business is booming. “Those guys,” one of my VC buddies says, “are going to make a shit ton of money.”

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“The big secret is that nobody knows what they’re doing. When it comes to management, it’s amateur hour. They just make it up as they go along.” Examples abound of tech start-ups trying to bring in more experienced people who end up leaving, sometimes citing a lack of “culture fit.” Evan Spiegel, the twenty-five-year-old founder of Snapchat, a photo sharing application, raised $1 billion in venture funding and realized, or was told by his investors, that he needed to hire people who could run a business and make money. Spiegel brought in veterans from Facebook and Google, then lost eight top executives in less than a year, with some people lasting only six months, according to Business Insider.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

The founding myth for social media is that they are the heirs to the ‘hacker culture’ – Facebook’s HQ address is 1, Hacker Way – which ties them to rule-breakers like 1980s phone phreaker Kevin Mitnick, the bureaucracy-hating computer lovers of the Homebrew Club scene and further back to maths geniuses like Alan Turing or Ada Lovelace. But Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest have long ceased to be simply tech firms. They are also advertising companies. Around 90 per cent of Facebook and Google’s revenue comes from selling adverts. The basis of practically the entire business of social media is the provision of free services in exchange for data, which the companies can then use to target us with adverts.* This suggests a very different, and far less glamorous, lineage: a decades-long struggle by suited ad men and psychologists to uncover the mysteries of human decision-making and locate the ‘buy!’

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In the 2017 UK general election, the Labour Party took a different approach, although the overall aim – to change the information environment – was the same.16 Rather than sponsored ads, Jeremy Corbyn’s fans produced huge volumes of ‘organic’ content themselves and shared it in tightly networked groups, meaning their messages – real things written by real people – reached far more people and were more believable than they would otherwise have been. There was also an ecosystem of left-wing ‘alternative news’ outlets that churned out widely shared and hyper-partisan pro-Corbyn stories. Corbyn Snapchatted during a brunch with the rapper Jme – it seems unlikely that this was an idea that he came up with himself. One of Labour’s videos, ‘Daddy, why do you hate me?’ was a fictional conversation between a little girl and her dad set in 2030, about why he had voted for Theresa May. It was emotive, misleading, mawkish and potentially offensive – and viewed millions of times in two days.

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Finally to Catrin, without whom the project would still be thrashing around in the back of my mind somewhere, and who supported me every moment, from start to finish. * In 2017 $95 billion of Google’s total revenue of $111 billion was from advertising, and it’s a similar proportion for Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. We sort of signed up to this of course, through the exchange: my data for your free service. You let people spy on you, and they give you an incredible service for free. But this exchange is a bit one-sided. Hardly anyone ever reads the terms and conditions they tick, because they’re long and only comprehensible to a contract lawyer with a background in software engineering and one day a week to spare.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

Moore, “Chatroulette Is 89 Percent Male, 47 Percent American, and 13 Percent Perverts,” TechCrunch, accessed January 7, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/16/chatroulette-stats-male-perverts/. Youths send homemade porn to one another: “Snapchat’s Expired Snaps Are Not Deleted, Just Hidden,” The Guardian, accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-infosecurity/snapchat-photos-not-deleted-hidden. Surveys conducted in 1980: Eli J. Finkel et al., “Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13, no. 1 (2012): 3–66.

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These forums may be tawdry and voyeuristic, but even innocuous connections made on Facebook often belie a sexual pursuit (its progenitor, Facemash, was a game in which Harvard students rated their classmates as “hot” or “not”).20 Explicitly or otherwise, mainstream technologies are now integral to the game. Youths send homemade porn to one another via their phones, while apps like Snapchat encourage risqué photo sharing because they promise to automatically delete images (although, naturally, this turned out to be untrue). This is not a question of simply transferring offline behavior—meeting via newspaper classifieds, for instance, or picking up a stranger in a bar—onto the Internet.

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(Capek), 56–57 Russell, Bertrand, 195 Sabinus, Calvisius, 143–45 Sas, Corina, 156 Science, 142 Scoville, William Beecher, 138 search engines, 142–43, 146 Second Life, 104 Seed, 105 Seife, Charles, 145, 146 Sejong, 12n self-documentation, 68–71 selfies, 68 Seneca, 118, 143–44, 203–4 senses, 161, 179, 205 synesthesia and, 62–63 Sergeant Star, 59–60 Sesame Street, 1–2, 3 sex, 104, 164–77 pornography, 83, 88, 168, 169, 174 Shallows, The (Carr), 38, 86 Shaw, George Bernard, 57 Shelley, Mary, 56 Skinner, B. F., 114 Skype, 106 Sloth Club, 204 Slowness (Kundera), 184 Small, Gary, 10–11, 37–38 smartphones, see phones Smith, Gordon, 186 “smupid” thinking, 185–86 Snapchat, 168 social media, 19, 48, 55, 106, 150–51, 175 Socrates, 32–33, 40 solitude, 8, 14, 39, 46, 48, 188, 193, 195, 197, 199 Songza, 90–91, 125 Space Weather, 107 Squarciafico, Hieronimo, 33, 35 Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), 94 Stanford University, 94–97 Statistics Canada, 174 sticklebacks, 124 Stone, Linda, 10, 169 Storr, Anthony, 203 stress hormones, 10 Study in Scarlet, A (Doyle), 147–48 suicide, 53–54, 63, 67 of Clementi, 63, 67 of Todd, 50–52, 67 sun, 107–9 surveillance, 66n synesthesia, 62–63 Tamagotchis, 29–30 technologies, 7, 18, 20, 21, 99, 179, 188, 192, 200, 203, 205, 206 evolution of, 43 Luddites and, 208 penetration rates of, 31 technology-based memes (temes), 42–44 Technopoly (Postman), 98 television, 7, 17, 27, 31, 69, 120 attention problems and, 121 temes (technology-based memes), 42–44 text messaging, 28, 30–31, 35–36, 100, 169, 192–94 Thamus, King, 32–33, 35, 98, 141, 145 Thatcher, Margaret, 74 theater reviews, 81–84, 88–89 Thompson, Clive, 141–42, 144–45 Thoreau, Henry David, 22, 113, 197–200, 202, 204 Thrun, Sebastian, 97 Thurston, Baratunde, 191 Time, 154 Timehop, 148–51, 160 Tinbergen, Niko, 124 Todd, Amanda, 49–53, 55, 62, 67, 70–72 Todd, Carol, 51–52, 71–72 Tolle, Eckhart, 102 Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, 125–26 War and Peace, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122–26, 128–29, 131–33, 135, 136 To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov), 55 touch-sensitive displays, 27 train travel, 200–202 Transcendental Meditation (TM), 76–78 TripAdvisor, 92 Trollope, Anthony, 47–48 Trussler, Terry, 172 Turing, Alan, 60, 61, 67, 68, 186, 190 Turing test, 60–61 Turkle, Sherry, 30, 55–56, 103–4 Twain, Mark, 73 Twitch.tv, 104 Twitter, 9, 31, 46, 63, 149 Udacity, 97 Uhls, Yalda T., 69 Unbound Publishing, 88 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 14 University of Guelph, 53 Valmont, Sebastian, 166 Vancouver, 3–4 Vancouver, 8–11, 15 Vaughn, Vince, 89 Vespasiano da Bisticci, 33 video games, 32, 104 Virtual Self, The (Young), 68, 71 Voltaire, 83 Walden (Thoreau), 113, 198–200 Wales, Jimmy, 77 Walker, C.

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

Through the torrents of suffering, he authored several brilliant books and one unvarnished masterpiece. He inspires us all.” After the interview, HRH went to a board meeting at the Venice Beach offices of Snapchat. Snapchat was a smartphone app that had achieved a long-standing dream of corporate America: cornering the ever elusive market of child pornography. Following a tip received at an orgy full of unattractive men and female sex workers, all of whom were in the thrall of MDMA, HRH had gotten in on the Series A funding of Snapchat. Snapchat was a late-period capitalist innovation: a corporation either worth nothing or everything, and one with such a complex relationship to money that it was impossible to judge the company’s failure or success.

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Snapchat was a late-period capitalist innovation: a corporation either worth nothing or everything, and one with such a complex relationship to money that it was impossible to judge the company’s failure or success. The Series A funding had earned HRH a seat on the board. HRH arrived wearing a suit that’d been tailored in London by Gieves & Hawkes. By the end of the board meeting, the suit was so stained that HRH had to borrow clothes from an employee of Snapchat. “There is a curious lacuna in Abigail, and one that is never revealed through the stylized vocals of King Diamond,” said HRH to Celia. “Speak not of the ludicrous sequel. We are not barbarians, madame. We consider texts unburdened by a priori knowledge. As King Diamond sings, we meet the ghost of Count de LaFey, and also his unfaithful wife, and their descendant Jonathan and his wife Miriam.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The global architecture of production and trade is designed for the benefit of multinational corporations and wealthy countries, making struggles by workers to improve conditions and wages extremely difficult.33 Yet, the men and women and children who do the dirty, dangerous jobs that make our smartphone reality possible—the miners, the assemblers and dis-assemblers—are not who come to mind when we think about the connection between people and smartphones.34 As literary critic Frederic Jameson observes, “The truth of metropolitan existence is not visible in the daily life of the metropolis itself.” We can’t see the global divides that make the consumption patterns of wealthy countries possible.35 Instead we imagine the smartphone user, the consumer who can endlessly and effortlessly stream movies, Snapchat friends, shop the web, find the museum. The divide between those who make smartphones and those who consume them, particularly Western consumers, is just one element of what experts call the “digital divide.”36 As socioeconomic infrastructure becomes more and more dependent on digital connections the gulf between those who have easy access to high-speed internet and those who don’t appears starker than ever.

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Environmental activists use the term “greenwashing” to describe how companies use superficial tricks and PR spin to hide environmentally destructive behavior and present a green, responsible image.57 Tech companies engage in “appwashing,” using slick apps and fuzzy stories to hide the reality of the low-paid, stressful jobs they create and depend on for their profits. Amazon’s 2017 holiday commercial is a perfect example of appwashing. It shows a woman on a bus getting a goofy Snapchat from (presumably) her niece. Inspired, she instantly taps her phone app to send the little girl a gift, brought to life as an adorable Amazon box singing Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit.” The happy box makes an epic journey, singing all the way, through a maze of conveyer belts, under stamping machines, on trucks and planes, before finally being handed to a smiling child thousands of miles away.

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Throw in venture capital and private equity firms (GV, Capital G), a tech incubator (Jigsaw), broadband and balloon internet providers (Google Fiber and Loon), an urban innovation organization (Sidewalk Labs), and a “semisecret” research and development facility called X Development, and one gets a sense of the growing reach of the behemoth that started with a search engine. Facebook, too, has made big-ticket purchases such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, and when it can’t buy what it wants, as in the case of Snapchat, it has implemented similar features on its own platform. Just as Google is the world’s search engine, Facebook wants to be the world’s social media platform. To overcome the hurdles of poor populations with little or no access to the internet, Facebook created Free Basics (now called Internet.org), a program to provide subscribers who can’t afford either a broadband connection or a smartphone data plan with a free, bare-bones version of the internet.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

That means shoppers can see the products they are ordering as well as their shopping lists, TV shows, music lyrics, feeds from security cameras, and photos from that vacation in Montana, all without pushing any buttons or manipulating a computer mouse. The rise of vision recognition technology—voice recognition’s AI sibling, long used for matching faces of criminals in a crowd—will make shopping on these devices even more convenient. In late 2018, Amazon announced it was testing with Snapchat an app that enables shoppers to take a picture of a product or a bar code with Snapchat’s camera, and then see an Amazon product page on the screen. It’s not hard to imagine that the next step for shoppers will be to use the camera embedded in the Echo Show or in their smartphone to snap a picture of something they’d like to buy and then see on-screen the same or similar items along with prices, ratings, and eligibility for Prime shipping.

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As the magazine Collier’s Weekly noted: Ibid., 65. As he wrote in 1901: Ibid., 30. By 1903, Roosevelt had persuaded: Ibid., 206. Facebook and Alphabet together control nearly 60 percent: Molla Rani, “Google’s and Facebook’s Share of the U.S. Ad Market Could Decline for the First Time, Thanks to Amazon and Snapchat,” Recode, March 19, 2018. Netflix has penetrated 75 percent of the homes: Sarah Perez, “Netflix Reaches 75% of US Streaming Service Viewers, But Youtube Is Catching Up,” TechCrunch, April 4, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/10/netflix-reaches-75-of-u-s-streaming-service-viewers-but-youtube-is-catching-up/.

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See also online shopping addiction to, 18–19 addictive nature of Prime use for, 98–99 Alexa use for, 115–16 Amazon.com versus Walmart.com for, 15 Bezos’s disruptive technologies in, 116 Echo Show device in, 116, 117 free delivery and psychology of, 97 integrating in-store and online experiences in, 193, 194–95, 197–98, 205, 213, 270 shift from brick-and-mortar stores to online, 24, 33 showrooming and, 204 Snapchat pictures in, 116–17 vision recognition in, 116–17 showrooming, 204 Sibay, Cem, 96–97, 99, 100, 101 Siegel, Adam, 224 Simon, Bill, 257 Siri voice assistant app, Apple, 108 Sivasubramanian, Swami, 112, 218 six-pager memos, 44–51 Alexa creation example of, 48–50 Bezos’s reliance on, 44, 45–46, 50–51 customer focus of, 44 managers’ positive and negative reactions to using, 46–47 process of developing over the life of a project, 44–45, 47–48 revisions of, after product release, 49–50 60 Minutes (TV show), 178 Slack, 94 small businesses, 145–61.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Instagram: Mansoor Iqbal, “Instagram Revenue and Usage Statistics (2021),” Business of Apps, updated Jan. 28, 2021. YouTube: Mansoor Iqbal, “YouTube Revenue and Usage Statistics (2020),” Business of Apps, updated Nov. 17, 2020. Twitter: Mansoor Iqbal, “Twitter Revenue and Usage Statistics (2020),” Business of Apps, updated Dec. 5, 2021. Snapchat: Mansoor Iqbal, “Snapchat Revenue and Usage Statistics (2020),” Business of Apps, updated Feb. 12, 2021. TikTok: Mansoor Iqbal, “TikTok Revenue and Usage Statistics (2021),” Business of Apps, updated Feb. 10, 2021. CHAPTER 22: THE RETURN OF FACTS At the beginning of my presidential campaign “Democratic Fundraiser in Iowa,” C-SPAN, Oct. 14, 2018.

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* * * — IN THE SPRING of 2018, in the midst of our flailing attempts at fundraising, my campaign manager, Zach Graumann, sat me down and said, “We’ve been inventorying different social media platforms. We think you need to become good at Twitter because it drives different forms of engagement, particularly the media. Every journalist uses it. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat we can manage through the team. But you need to get your Twitter game up.” Plus, he added, social media was free. I said, “Okay, I guess I will get good at Twitter.” From my studying the rise of other politicians, it seemed like a great resource and powerful tool: Twitter had fueled the rise of Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on either end of the political spectrum.

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You don’t get anything that will get you fired.” A friend who works in politics put it this way: “No one knows how we’ll reach voters in twenty years when TV ads no longer work.” They will be replaced by a patchwork of podcasts and tens of thousands of ads and influencer posts through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Clubhouse, and their successors. As people get their information and news in different ways, our politics are likely to evolve in new ways as well. When the gatekeepers go away, does that free up more oxygen in the media ecosystem for candidates like me, who don’t fit so easily into the old guard’s preconceived notions?

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

Online appendix can be retrieved from http://www.jeantwenge.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/igen-appendix.pdf 31. Arata, E. (2016, August 1). The unexpected reason Snapchat’s “pretty” filters hurt your self-esteem. Elite Daily. Retrieved from https://www.elitedaily.com/wellness/snapchat-filters-self-esteem/1570236 32. Jowett, V. (2017, July 10). Inside the Snapchat filter surgery boom. Cosmopolitan. Retrieved from http://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/beauty-hair/a9617028/celebrity-cosmetic-surgery-snapchat-filter-boom 33. Crick & Grotpeter (1995). 34. For example: Thielking, M. (2017, February 8). Surging demand for mental health care jams college services.

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But Facebook and other social media platforms didn’t really draw many middle school students until after the iPhone was introduced (in 2007) and was widely adopted over the next few years. It’s best, then, to think about the entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 as a brief span in which the social life of the average American teen changed substantially. Social media platforms proliferated, and adolescents began using Twitter (founded in 2006), Tumblr (2007), Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), and a variety of others. Over time, these companies became ever more skilled at grabbing and holding “eyeballs,” as they say in the industry. Social media grew more and more addictive. In a chilling 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, explained those early years like this: The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

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For girls, the percentage jumped from 27 to 40.30 Another consequence of social media curation is that girls are bombarded with images of girls and women whose beauty is artificially enhanced, making girls ever more insecure about their own appearance. It’s not just fashion models whose images are altered nowadays; platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram provide “filters” that girls use to enhance the selfies they pose for and edit, so even their friends now seem to be more beautiful. These filters make noses smaller, lips bigger, and skin smoother.31 This has led to a new phenomenon: some young women now want plastic surgery to make themselves look like they do in their enhanced selfies.32 The second reason that social media may be harder on girls is that girls and boys are aggressive in different ways.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The 3M One-Piece GPS Offender Tracking System allows police to “efficiently track offenders virtually anywhere, anytime, at varying levels of intensity through a single, compact, body-worn unit.” •  1-800-Flowers for medicinal marijuana? Eaze, backed by Peter Thiel, offers “easy, quick, professional marijuana delivery” on demand. •  Snapchat for adult dancers? It’s called Snapchat. •  Foursquare for attractive people? Instagram. •  Social game for social outcasts? Foursquare. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. * * * I cursed my rotten luck as I walked along Market Street past the fortresses of the fortunate. As I neared Uber’s headquarters, a motorcycle peloton rolled past.

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The most amazing thing about Silicon Valley in the heady days of 2015 was that most people did not laugh in my face when I told them I planned to make billions of dollars in short order with a startup literally no one had ever heard of. In that particular time and place, such miracles were commonplace, at least if you believed the press. Look at Uber! It came from nowhere. Snapchat! Instagram! Facebook! Every story seemed to confirm our national mythos that pluck and progress deliver milk and honey. But that’s bullshit. The only way 99.99999 percent of us are going to become billionaires is through some Weimaresque economic cataclysm that leaves us pushing wheelbarrows full of high-denomination bills to barren grocery stores, where we can wait in long lines to buy stale bread and muesli cut with sawdust.

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The internet came through again. I quickly found a half dozen startup idea generators. My favorite was ItsThisForThat.com. Every time you clicked the refresh button, it spat out a new idea. •  Neural Network for Pets! •  Wearable Computer for Ex-Convicts! •  1-800-Flowers for Medicinal Marijuana! •  Snapchat for Adult Dancers! •  Foursquare for Attractive People! •  Social Game for Social Outcasts! The site delivered pitchable ideas in minutes. There was a problem, however: these ideas, absurd though they seemed, had already been done. To wit: •  Neural network for pets? No More Woof is “an electronic device that promises to analyze dogs’ brain waves and translate a few of their thoughts into rudimentary English

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

Wanstrath’s lack of a degree never got in the way of GitHub’s success, and especially not its acquisition: Microsoft’s co-founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, were college dropouts too. The trope of the prodigious college dropout is well known. James Park, the founder of Fitbit, dropped out of Harvard. Michael Dell left the University of Texas at Austin after his freshman year, and he went on to found Dell Technologies. Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), Evan Spiegel (of Snapchat), and Jan Koum (of WhatsApp) are also dropouts. Looking at the data, however, most founders of billion-dollar companies were not school dropouts. It’s most common for founders of billion-dollar companies to hold a bachelor’s degree (36 percent) or a bachelor’s and an MBA (22 percent). About one-third have other advanced degrees, like a master’s, medical degree, law degree, or PhD.

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Let’s zoom in to look more closely at what these billion-dollar companies are making. Based on data extracted from PitchBook Data (the data has not been reviewed by PitchBook analysts), the largest subsectors were business productivity software (like Slack), social/consumer and application software (like Snapchat), and e-commerce (like Wish, a shopping app featuring ultra-cheap items from wholesalers). Those subsectors were followed by network-management software (like Palo Alto Networks, which creates firewalls for networks, among other products), database management (like MongoDB, a document-oriented database company), automation/workflow software (like UiPath, a company automating manual tasks for enterprise clients), automotive (like Cruise, a self-driving car company acquired by General Motors), and biotechnology (like Indigo Ag, an agriculture company that works with plant microbes, aiming to improve yields).

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Founders are regularly told to build a product that addresses a real need. The problem is, no founder has ever thought that their product isn’t solving a real need. All startups position their product as a solution to a problem, and many founders would rather believe that the problem they’re solving is in need of a painkiller. So how were products like Snapchat and TikTok, arguably vitamin pills, so successful? Let’s first understand the differences in these approaches. One strategy is to go after well-defined and deeply annoying pain points felt by customers. Another is to improve on the way something is done, giving customers better value, efficiency, entertainment, or joy.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But I will also spend a lot of time on social media, which requires some definitional work. Speaking of pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote, “I know it when I see it.” Do we know social media when we see it? Any particular examples will become dated, but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat certainly count. According to a helpful definition, social media are “Internet-based platforms that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content, usually using either mobile or web-based technologies.”15 Wikipedia fits that definition, because people use it to produce content. YouTube must be included, because people share content there; Flickr and Vine are also examples.

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It should be clear that we are dealing with a highly protean category, and its content changes rapidly over time. In 2006, blogs and the blogosphere were all the rage; while blogs exist and remain important, they have far less centrality (and the very word “blogosphere” seems to be a relic, a bit like “rotary phone” or “groovy”). Twitter was launched in 2006, Tumbler and WhatsApp in 2010, and Snapchat in 2011. Social media often have nothing at all to do with politics or democracy (indeed, they are a kind of vacation from it), and to that extent, they do not trigger my principal concerns here. But even if they are wholly apolitical, they might create niches, and niches produce fragmentation. A WORD ON BASELINES Any assessment of the world of the Internet, and any claims about what’s wrong with it, must ask one question: Compared to what?

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Properly understood, the case for deliberating enclaves is that they will improve social deliberation, democratic and otherwise, precisely because enclave deliberation is often required for incubating new ideas and perspectives that will add a great deal to public debate. Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, can be exemplary here. But for these improvements to take place, members must not insulate themselves from competing positions. At the very least, any such attempt at insulation must not be a prolonged affair. The phenomenon of group polarization suggests that with respect to communications, consumer sovereignty might well produce serious problems for individuals and society at large—and these problems will occur by a kind of iron logic of social interaction.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Here is a representative but not exhaustive list of the social media platforms I think about, and that will be central to my concern in this book: social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Hi5, Ning, NextDoor, and Foursquare; blogging and microblogging providers like Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, and Livejournal; photo- and image-sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket, DeviantArt, and Snapchat; video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion; discussion, opinion, and gossip tools like Reddit, Digg, Secret, and Whisper; dating and hookup apps like OK Cupid, Tinder, and Grindr; collaborative knowledge tools like Wikipedia, Ask, and Quora; app stores like iTunes and Google Play; live broadcasting apps like Facebook Live and Periscope.62 To those I would add a second set that, while they do not neatly fit the definition of platform, grapple with many of the same challenges of content moderation in platformlike ways: recommendation and rating sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor; exchange platforms that help share goods, services, funds, or labor, like Etsy, Kickstarter, Craigslist, Airbnb, and Uber; video game worlds like League of Legends, Second Life, and Minecraft; search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

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It is our belief that censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression. However, in order to uphold these values, we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages. As a result, there are some boundaries on the type of content that can be hosted with Blogger.” Dreamwidth, Medium, Quora, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Twitter adopt similar positions. Users are declared to be largely responsible for what they say, read, or watch; the rules are reluctantly imposed, and only to the degree necessary. The understanding of users and platforms here is an individualistic, mechanistic, and liberal one: the platform must excise the bad, and the good will flourish.

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Don’t let a personal issue strain the rest of the community.”20 Trolls often look to game the platform itself: misusing complaint mechanisms, and wreaking havoc with machine learning algorithms behind recommendation systems and chatbots.21 Unfortunately, platforms must also address behavior that goes well beyond spirited debate gone overboard or the empty cruelty of trolls: directed and ongoing harassment of an individual over time, including intimidation, stalking, and direct threats of violence. This is where the prohibitions often get firm: “Never threaten to harm a person, group of people, or property” (Snapchat). Many sites point to the law as justification for their prohibitions against threats and stalking: “We remove content, disable accounts, and work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety” (Facebook). Identifying and discerning the credibility of such threats is of course extremely difficult.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/skinner-marketing-were-the-rats-and-facebook-likes-are-the-reward/276613/; Davidow, W. (2012). Overconnected: The promise and threat of the internet. Delphinium Books. One case … is Snapchat: Berthon et al. Addictive de-vices. The app’s promotion of “streaks”: Sattelberg, W. (2020, March 14). Longest Snapchat streak. Retrieved from https://www.techjunkie.com/longest-snapchat-streak/ Referred to in social psychology as a Zeigarnik effect: Berthon et al. Addictive de-vices; Montag, C., Lachmann, B., Herrlich, M., & Zweig, K. (2019). Addictive features of social media/messenger platforms and freemium games against the background of psychological and economic theories.

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At their core, social media are vehicles for the relentless collection and monetization of the personal data of their users. Social media are so overwhelming and omnipresent in our lives, it may feel like they have been with us forever. Some of you reading this may have grown up entirely within the universe of Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and TikTok and not know what it’s like to live without them. I’m among those living generations that have experienced life before and after social media. I remember standing in a long line with nothing to do but think. Not everything is social media, but social media influence everything else, so prominent and influential is the business model at their core.

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As the author of the book Overconnected, William Davidow, similarly put it, “Thanks to Skinner’s work, brain MRIs, and more recent research by psychologists, neuro-scientists, and behavioral economists, we now know how to design cue, activity, and reward systems to more effectively leverage our brain chemistry and program human behavior.”123 One case where these dynamics are clearly illustrated is Snapchat, the popular app in which users post and view “disappearing” images and videos.124 The fleeting nature of the content, combined with the app’s promotion of “streaks,” in which users review each other’s feeds obsessively, encourages compulsive checks of the platform amongst its users to the point where many do so for thousands of days on end.125 Similarly, many social media feeds encourage obsessive scrolling, as a result of the feeds having no defined endpoint; the apps are “designed to maximize anticipation, rather than reward,” a dynamic that is referred to in social psychology as a Zeigarnik effect.126 As with other products where addiction is a factor (e.g., tobacco, casinos), the behavioural modification parts of the story are only dimly understood by consumers, but they are studied intensively by the people who run the platforms and by the social media analytics companies, marketing firms, and PR consultants that orbit around them.127 As New York University professor Tamsin Shaw put it, “The findings of social psychology and behavioural economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and the human networks, online and in real life, of which we are a part.”128 Indeed, psychological experiments on consumers are essential to refining just about all social media and related digital applications.129 It’s not just the platforms alone that zero in on these mechanisms of addiction and compulsion; huge numbers of marketers and PR firms do so as well.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

As he raped her in a bathroom at a house party in Fayetteville, she said, his four friends, a group of soldiers from Fort Bragg, stood outside and put camera phones under the door to film the attack. When Palmer tried to collect evidence for a criminal suit—Tinder messages showing the men bragging about the photos and the video they had posted on Snapchat—it had all been deleted. When she then contacted Tinder and Snapchat to assist her in retrieving this evidence from their servers, she said, the companies did not help her. In 2020, Palmer filed a civil suit against the five men named in the attack, as well as Match Group and Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, Inc. Her case is among the first to go after dating app companies for their failure to help sexual assault victims in collecting evidence to press charges against their attackers.

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NPR, January 9, 2018. www.npr.org/2018/01/09/575352051/least-desirable-how-racial-discrimination-plays-out-in-online-dating. Brown, Helen Gurley. Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Barricade Books, 1962. Brown, Joel. “Raleigh Rape Survivor Speaks Out After Filing Suit Against Tinder, Snapchat.” ABC11 Eyewitness News, January 10, 2020. https://abc11.com/snapchat-tinder-lawsuit-aaliyah-palmer/5836719/. Brown, Myles. “Why Lisa Ann Prefers Having Sex with NBA Players.” GQ, February 14, 2015. www.gq.com/story/sex-athletes-nba-porn-star. Bruni, Frank. “We’re Not Wired to Be This Alone.” New York Times, April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-lockdown-loneliness.html.

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“I think objectification got worse with dating apps,” Abigail said, “because you were already posting hot pictures of yourself online in case some guy would check you out. And then everybody was on dating apps, which were specifically for hot pictures—and then dating apps got linked to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat. “So now any time you post anything,” she went on, “you have to be thinking some guy might be checking you out off of Tinder or Bumble or wherever. The male gaze is constant. But that’s all of social media,” she added. “I’ve had guys I don’t even know slide into my DMs like, ‘Hey, girl, I like that ass.’

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Three Millennial students at Stanford decided they had an app for that: Snapchat, where pictures shared with friends disappear after a few seconds. “After hearing hilarious stories about emergency de-tagging of Facebook photos before job interviews and photoshopping blemishes out of candid shots before they hit the Internet (because your world would crumble if anyone found out you had a pimple on the 38th day of 9th grade), [I decided] there had to be a better solution,” wrote Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel (b. 1990). Snapchat launched in September 2011, and by 2015 it had 75 million users. Millennials are the original social media masters, using the platforms to stay in touch with friends, start businesses, organize political movements, read about current events, watch videos, and argue with people they don’t know.

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Gen Z will likely be the last generation where any one racial group is in the majority in the United States. Gen Z is also bringing an unprecedented amount of attention to diversity in gender identity and sexual orientation. Like many young generations before them, they have confounded older generations by using technologies (TikTok, Snapchat) and language (enby, pansexual) their parents barely understand—not to mention tinting their hair every color of the rainbow. In the 2020s, Gen Z is coming into its own. For one thing, they clearly have Millennials’ number. Gen Z’ers have a running riff on Twitter asking, “Why do Millennials…,” such as “Why do Millennials insist on adding ‘eigh’ to the end of their child’s name?”

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There’s another reason why digital media is the most likely culprit for the rise in depression: It changed day-to-day life in a fundamental way. While getting together in person or talking on the phone were the only communication choices for Boomers and most Gen X’ers when they were young, digital communication became the norm for Gen Z. Instead of going to the movies or meeting up at parties, Gen Z was using Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. By early 2020, nearly half of 8th graders spent 3 hours a day or more using social media. The average teen spent more than 8 and a half hours a day with screen media in total in 2021, according to Common Sense Media. As digital communication took over, in-person gatherings waned.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Martin Hirt and Paul Willmott, “Strategic principles for competing in the digital age,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2014. 54. Amit Chowdhry, “WhatsApp hits 500 million users,” Forbes.com, April 22, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/04/22/whatsapp-hits-500-million-users. 55. Darrell Etherington, “Snapchat accounts for more photo shares than Instagram as pic sharing set to double in 2013,” TechCrunch, May 29, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/snapchat-accounts-for-more-photo-shares-than-instagram-as-pic-sharing-set-to-double-in-2013. 56. Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and James Manyika, “Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead,” McKinsey on Business Technology 33, spring 2014; Panzarino, “Leaked Uber numbers”; Rodriguez, “Lyft surpasses 1 million rides.” 57.

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Kiva, the world’s largest online platform for peer-to-peer microlending, has facilitated loans worth more than $630 million, mostly in the emerging world.51 Kickstarter, a crowd-funding platform that connects entrepreneurs to individuals interested in funding creative projects, has facilitated pledges of more than $1.4 billion to fund 70,000 creative projects since 2009.52 Small or individual registered investment advisors are the fastest-growing segment of the investment advisory business in the United States; they purchase turnkey back-end systems from companies like Fidelity and Charles Schwab to get all the capabilities they need in order to provide direct advice to consumers.53 In markets such as search, e-commerce, social media, and the sharing economy, the low marginal costs of digital infrastructure allow upstarts to build business models with near-limitless scale. WhatsApp, the mobile messaging platform that Facebook recently snapped up for $19 billion, reached 500 million monthly active users within five years of its launch.54 Snapchat surpassed the photo-sharing activity on both Facebook and Instagram with 400 million users only two years after its foundation.55 Sharing economy start-ups are growing at breathtaking speed. In 2013, some 450,000 active users were launching the Uber app every week, and more than a million Lyft users had requested a ride with the tap of a button.56 Traditional players have also benefited from changes in marginal cost economics to enter new markets, grow rapidly, or optimize processes and cost structures.

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But Expedia and its peers now face disruption from a new type of business model represented by Airbnb, the peer-to-peer hospitality site. Airbnb’s millions of customers can research, reserve, pay for, and review lodging at hundreds of thousands of locations without needing to interact with Expedia’s platform. Technology giants such as Facebook and Google must also be aware of new entrants. Snapchat, a photo-messaging app that enables senders to set a time limit for how long receivers can view their “snaps” (pictures), was started in 2011. By 2014, its users had proved more prolific snappers than those on Facebook and Instagram, with four hundred million pictures shared every day.24 WhatsApp reached five hundred million active users and handled over ten billion messages per day in 2014, prompting a $19 billion acquisition by Facebook, a move that was as much defensive as it was a strategic expansion.25 BLURRING LINES Technology has long blurred the boundaries between physical and online consumption, shifting value from books to Kindles and from CDs to iTunes to Spotify, where users can stream music without ever formally taking ownership of it.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

“Whether there’s a notification or not, it doesn’t really feel that good,” Pearlman said about the experience of checking social media feedback. “Whatever we’re hoping to see, it never quite meets that bar.” A similar drive to regulate social approval helps explain the current obsession among teenagers to maintain Snapchat “streaks” with their friends, as a long unbroken streak of daily communication is a satisfying confirmation that the relationship is strong. It also explains the universal urge to immediately answer an incoming text, even in the most inappropriate or dangerous conditions (think: behind the wheel).

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The technology industry has become adept at exploiting this instinct for approval. Social media, in particular, is now carefully tuned to offer you a rich stream of information about how much (or how little) your friends are thinking about you at the moment. Tristan Harris highlights the example of tagging people in photos on services like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. When you post a photo using these services, you can “tag” the other users who also appear in the photo. This tagging process sends the target of the tag a notification. As Harris explains, these services now make this process near automatic by using cutting-edge image recognition algorithms to figure out who is in your photos and offer you the ability to tag them with just a single click—an offer usually made in the form of a quick yes/no question (“do you want to tag . . . ?”)

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Barksdale, 110 media: news, 45–46, 78–79, 222, 233, 238–42 newspapers, 79, 215, 241 Slow Media, 236–42 see also social media Mehl, Matthias, 138 Mennonite Church, 54–57 mental health and psychological well-being, xi–xii, 104–9, 136–41 mentalizing, 135 messaging tools, 147 anxiety and, 105 digital declutter and, 65 email, see email Snapchat, 22–23 text, see text messaging time spent on, 6 metal welding, 194–95 Millennial generation, 106, 218n Miller, William Lee, 87 minimalism, xv, 57 digital, see digital minimalism missing out and losing access to information, 29, 30, 75, 201, 202, 218n, 252 Moment, 102–3 Montgomery bus boycott, 94–95 Montgomery Improvement Association, 94 mood, xi–xii Morse, Samuel, 249–51, 254 Mouse Book Club, 190–92 movie theaters, 112–13 Mr.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

trio of coworkers: Laura Fitzpatrick, “Brief History of YouTube,” Time, May 31, 2010, accessed August 18, 2018, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1990787,00.html. one person, Bobby Murphy: Alex Hern, “Snapchat Boss Evan Spiegel on the App That Made Him One of the World’s Youngest Billionaires,” Guardian, December 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/05/snapchat-boss-evan-spiegel-on-the-app-that-made-him-one-of-the-worlds-youngest-billionaires. the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto”: Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-Currency,” New Yorker, October 10, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency.

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“I check and I feel bad,” as Pearlman said. “Whether there’s a notification or not, it doesn’t really feel that good. Whatever we’re hoping to see, it never quite meets that bar.” Rosenstein, too, decided he needed to decouple from the distractions of social media. As he told the Guardian, he blocked sites like Reddit, stopped using Snapchat, and even set up parental controls to keep himself from downloading new apps on his phone. His assistant has the password. It turns out there’s some use, after all, in techniques for slowing things down. < Chapter 6 > 10X, Rock Stars, and the Myth of Meritocracy In the annals of coding, Max Levchin is considered something of a colossus.

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The first version of Photoshop was created by two brothers; the version of BASIC that launched Microsoft in 1975 was hacked together in weeks by a young Bill Gates, his former schoolmate Paul Allen, and a Harvard freshman Monte Davidoff. An early and influential blogging tool, LiveJournal, was written by Brad Fitzpatrick. The breakthrough search algorithm that led to Google was a product of two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; YouTube was a trio of coworkers; Snapchat a trio (or, the level of the code, one person, Bobby Murphy). BitTorrent was entirely a creation of Bram Cohen, and Bitcoin was reputedly the work of a lone coder, the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” John Carmack created the 3-D-graphics engines that helped usher in the multi-billion-dollar industry of first-person shooter video games.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

As illustrated in Figure 2.5, many of them exhibit strong platform characteristics.15 For example, Didi Chuxing (formerly Didi Kuaidi), headquartered in China, and Lyft, in the US, are platforms matching drivers and passengers 16 The meteoric rise of platform businesses Figure 2.5 Private value of platform-powered unicorn start-ups (US$ billions) Source: CB Insights, 1 August 2016, Launchworks analysis like Uber, and both have raised significant private investments. Snapchat is a well-known and fast-growing communications platform that famously turned down a multibillion-dollar offer from Facebook in 2014. Stripe is a fastgrowing payment platform for e-commerce merchants. Platforms power the sharing economy movement Lastly, platforms are at the heart of the emerging ‘sharing economy’ since many enable the redistribution, sharing and/or reuse of excess capacity in goods and services.

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We mentioned above Eventbrite’s viral loop of event organizers inviting attendees to their events. After attendees buy tickets, they discover that they can also use the platform to organize their own events. Acquisition of new users through existing users. Product features such as viral invite loops are a great way to tap into existing users’ networks to acquire new users. For example, Snapchat and WhatsApp ask users to invite their friends by importing their contact books. Acquisition of new producers through existing producers. Finally, existing producers can help acquire new ones. In addition to the techniques mentioned above, new content generated by producers can help acquire new producers and users.

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Index Accor Group 3, 201, 211 add-on platforms 77, 88–9, 92, 102, 105 advertising 37, 43, 45, 67–8, 93, 97, 99–100, 142, 144, 183 AdWords (Google) 67, 69, 183, 184 Airbnb 1–2, 3, 4, 15, 24, 168, 188; brand 51–2, 153, 169–70; business model 45; credibility 158–9, 163; feedback 35, 52, 160, 179–80; insurance 164; market sizing 79; match 47, 52, 83; value propositions 83, 95, 123 Alibaba 1, 15, 28, 34, 123, 124, 132, 208 Amazon 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 125; business model 48, 59, 63; conflict resolution 163; ecosystem 28, 57–8, 59–61, 62, 70; feedback 35, 160; home automation 212 Amazon FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) 58, 61–2 Amazon Marketplace 26–7, 48, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61–2, 84, 111 Amazon Prime 58, 61, 62 Amazon Web Services (AWS) 58 analytics 50–1, 52, 110, 123, 162, 187, 208, 213; see also data capture Android operating system (Google) 58, 67, 185–6 anticompetitive behaviour 173, 182, 186 APIs (application programming interfaces) 52, 183, 197 Apple 5, 8, 13, 14, 28, 193; App Store 32, 38, 63, 64–6; business model 54, 63, 66; ecosystem 63–6, 70, 132; iPhone 63, 65, 123; iTunes 63, 65 application programming interfaces see APIs Ariba 96 Artfire 143 attract 6, 15, 24, 47, 167; ignition 75, 91–6; maturity 75, 121–2, 131; pre-launch 74; scaling-up 75, 105, 107, 110–14, 117 audience builders 24 AWS see Amazon Web Services balance 48, 50, 106, 111–12, 114, 117, 124, 144–7, 150 Bezos, J. 57, 58 big bang launch strategy see event strategy BlaBlaCar 7, 154, 157, 158, 159; insurance 164; pricing strategies 147, 150, 156; scaling-up 112, 115 BorrowMyDoggy 99 bottlenecks 51, 73, 75–6, 86, 98, 99, 100, 101, 108, 112, 116 bowling pin strategy 54, 95, 109 brand 14–15, 51, 76, 118, 153–70 bundling strategies 61, 131, 182 business architecture 22, 66, 74, 80, 91 business models 6–7, 11, 22, 27, 59, 62, 63, 68, 132; platform businesses 6–7, 11, 22, 23, 27–8, 41–54, 70, 87, 138, 146, 177, 199, 200, 212; traditional businesses 62, 73, 91, 193, 211 card platforms 6, 23, 80, 126 catalyst businesses 23–4 Chesky, B. 1, 2, 169 218 Index Choudary, S. 25 communications platforms see Snapchat; WeChat; WhatsApp communities 44–5, 51, 78, 94, 112, 118, 125, 170 compensation strategy see dollar strategy competing platforms 131, 140, 149 competition 22, 25, 121, 130–2, 140, 173, 193 competition authorities 122, 131, 173-5, 186, 197 complements 31, 38, 130, 131 conflict resolution 126, 163, 167 connect 4, 45–6, 62; ignition 98; maturity 97; pre-launch 85; scaling-up 115, 117 consistency 159–60, 203 contributions 78, 82-3, 94, 118 control 52, 53, 123, 140–1, 162 core transactions 49, 52, 85–6, 98–101, 125, 168 correction activities 162 Craigslist 34, 95, 167 credibility 156, 158–9, 195 critical mass 31, 35–6, 37, 46, 73, 80, 121 cultural meme 97 customer acquisition 93, 107, 127; see also platform participants customer experience 36, 48, 53; maturity 108, 111; pricing strategies 139, 140–1; scaling-up 162 data capture 187; see also analytics dating platforms 13, 36, 48, 50, 95, 166, 176 delay strategy 195 Deliveroo 95, 111, 133, 170, 208 demand coordinators 24–5 denial strategy 194 denigrate strategy 194 deter strategy 194–5 Didi Chuxing 15, 132 digital platforms 4, 5, 12, 17, 73, 157, 167 direct network effects 34–5 direct platforms 80 disintermediation 126, 147–8 dispute resolution see conflict resolution dollar strategy 196 dynamic capabilities 196, 199, 200, 201 eBay 4, 15, 22, 48, 49, 53–4; brand 169, 170; business model 21, 27; connect 4, 85; feedback 159, 160; ignition 54; network effects 33, 34; pricing strategies 129, 140, 144, 146; scaling-up 108, 112, 115, 208; value propositions 83, 112 economic value 4, 14, 197 economies of scale 31, 32–33 ecosystems 6, 13, 17, 26–8, 180–1, 186, 207, 211; Amazon 26–7, 57–8, 59–61, 62, 70; Apple 63–6, 70, 132; Facebook 28, 70; Google 66–7, 68–9, 70, 132, 180–1, 185–6; Microsoft 70, 130, 132 enablers 51, 52, 87; ignition 101; maturity 128; pre-launch 87; scaling-up 118 Etsy 84, 87, 94, 110, 132, 146, 210 Evans, P. 14, 24, 25 event strategy 96 ex ante regulation 173, 188 ex post regulation 173 externalities 31–3, 65, 175, 180 Facebook 8, 13, 14, 52, 124, 131, 163, 168; ecosystem 28, 70; ignition 95, 96; network effects 35; pricing strategies 149; scaling-up 107, 166; search results 124 fast follower strategy 199 fear barriers 168–9 feedback 32, 34–6, 47, 77, 98, 100, 101, 108, 110, 111, 125, 160, 165, 188 Fulfilment by Amazon see Amazon FBA gaming platforms 35, 69, 97, 145 Gawer, A. 14, 25 Gebbia, J. 1, 169 Google 7, 13, 14, 67, 163, 180–6; AdWords 67; Android operating system 67, 185; brand 169; business model 50–1, 68; ecosystem 66–7, 68–9, 70, 132, 180–1, 186; home automation 212; search results 125; YouTube 67, 69, 131, 182 Google+ 69, 182 Index governance 51, 76, 140, 165, 167; prelaunch 87; trust framework 155, 157, 162, 164–70 Gumtree 132, 143 Hailo (MyTaxi) 93, 185 HiGear 163 home automation 212 Honda 27 hotels 1, 3, 7, 79, 179–80 IBM 14, 26, 194 ignition 73, 74, 91–102; eBay 53–4; Facebook 95, 96 indirect network effects 34–5 indirect platforms 80–1 innovation 140, 170, 174; maturity 127, 128; regulation 174, 186, 199 Instagram 70, 99, 107, 110, 133 insurance 164 intervention 175 intimacy 156 IT infrastructure 52 key enablers 51, 52 Kickstarter 78, 109, 210 La Belle Asiette 93–4, 99 labour laws 177 Launchworks 21, 157, 206, 208 leakage 49, 126, 147–8 leverage 61, 62, 70, 88, 124–5 linear businesses 6, 12, 41–2, 44, 52 LinkedIn 49, 70, 100, 107, 143, 150, 159 liquidity 33, 52, 143; ignition 99, 101; scaling-up 117 listing fees 144 Lyft 15, 132, 174, 176, 202 management principles 6, 7, 207 management rules 7, 17 market failures 167, 175–6, 187 market makers 24–5 marketplace platforms 12, 15, 48, 26, 59, 61, 85 marketplaces 6, 26, 64, 49, 59, 84, 85, 208 219 market power 37, 173–6, 180–3, 186, 197 market sizing 79–80 Mastercard 5, 23, 26, 80, 134 match 75; ignition 97–101, 115; maturity 124; platform participants 47–8, 52, 84–5, 95; pre-launch 86; scaling-up 114–15 maturity 73, 75–6, 121–2, 127–8 media companies 25 membership fees 139, 143–4 meshed communities 94–5 Microsoft 13–14, 23, 28, 63, 65, 70, 125, 143; ecosystem 70, 130, 132; home automation 212 minimum viable product see MVP monetization 50, 67, 86, 100, 116, 142, 147 MSP (multisided platforms) 25, 46 multihoming 36–7, 149, 176, 177 multisided markets 5, 23–4, 46 multisided platforms see MSP MVP (minimum viable product) 91, 100–1 MyTaxi 93 negative externalities 32, 180 Netflix 26, 197 network effects 33–5, 35, 48, 52, 68, 99, 133, 176; positive 48, 115, 126, 133, 142, 149 networks 31, 33–5 North Star metric 86, 100, 119 on-boarding processes 107–8, 168 Onefinestay 200–1 online platforms 11, 50, 51, 162 OpenTable 93 operating systems 5, 6, 25, 34; Android 58, 67, 185–6 optimize 50, 76; ignition 100, 101; maturity 128, 130; pre-launch 74, 86; scaling-up 116 over-regulation 174 Parker, G. 23, 25–6 partners 45, 79, 128 payment platforms 6, 24, 48 PayPal 95, 131, 187 performance metrics 100, 117, 127 220 Index personalization 124 piggybacking 95 platform balance 111, 117, 128, 144–6 platform businesses 4, 5–7, 11–14, 205, 207, 212, 214; definitions 21, 24–8 platform business models 4–7, 21–2, 27, 45–7, 146, 199, 205, 207, 212, 214 platform development 73, 77, 88; ignition 73, 75–6, 91–101; maturity 73, 75–6, 122, 125, 126, 128, 130; pre-launch 50, 73, 74, 75–6, 77–8, 82–7, 87, 169; scaling-up 73, 75–6, 91, 105–18, 169, 176 platform disruption 193–9, 201–3, 210–11; traditional businesses 132, 193–4, 206, 198–201 platform ecosystems see ecosystems platform fit 75–6, 91, 92, 100, 105, 169 platform management 6–7, 17, 161, 168 platform owners 79, 84, 95, 100, 105 platform participants 35, 47, 48, 51, 78–80, 113, 142, 165; connect 98; ignition 91, 101; match 35, 84, 97; maturity 121–2; pre-launch 78–9, 86; trust framework 51, 158, 160–1 platforms 11–12 Pokémon Go 97 Porter, M. 6, 42–3 positive externalities 31, 32, 65 positive network effects: match 48; maturity 111, 114; pricing strategies 126, 142, 149; scaling-up 117 pre-launch 73, 74, 75–6, 77–8 premium services 142–3 price discrimination 137–8, 143 price elasticity 37, 137 pricing 50, 81, 116, 126–8, 137, 150 pricing friction 141–4 pricing models 139, 141–4, 146 pricing strategies 23, 138–9, 140, 145–50 producer acquisition 108–9 producer retention 108, 121 producers 78, 107–8 Quora 110, 159 Reddit 49, 78, 84, 94, 209, 210, 213 regulation 167, 173–9, 186–9 reliability 156 retention 47, 107–8, 111, 122 risk management 163 Rochet, J. 23–4 rocket model 46, 51, 73, 82, 116; ignition 73, 74, 91; maturity 73, 122; pre-launch 73, 74; scaling-up 73, 162 Ruby Lane 143, 166 SAP 123 scaling-up 73, 105–6, 116 Schmalensee, R. 24 search results 48, 50, 52, 67, 98, 114, 124, 180–1 self-driving cars 67, 211–12 sharing economy 8, 16, 164, 208–11 single homing 36–7 Snapchat 16, 110 Spotify 123 stakeholders 74, 79, 82, 210 start-ups 15 Stootie 98 strategic enablers 51, 101, 118 substitutes 38 talent platforms 205–6 Taobao 124–5 TaskRabbit 108, 148 taxi market 7, 24, 80, 93, 131, 174, 176, 178, 196 Tesco 27 Tinder 13, 96, 166 tipping point 36 Tirole, J. 7, 23–4 traditional businesses 4, 11, 13, 25, 41, 46, 79, 82, 137, 176; platform disruption 38, 193, 198 traditional business models 33 41, 53, 62, 132, 193, 211; ignition 91; maturity 132, 193 transactional platforms 85, 111 transaction fees 139, 143–4, 146 transaction metrics 111, 115, 116 Transport for London (TfL) 177–8 travel platforms 3, 11; see also Airbnb; Lyft; Uber Index trust 45, 49, 51, 84, 87, 99, 106, 115, 121, 130, 147, 153 trust framework 153, 155, 157, 165, 188 Twitter 69, 96, 159, 163 tying strategies 182–3 Uber 11, 15, 22, 52, 108, 177; business model 24, 79; price strategies 81, 140; regulation 140, 162, 167, 174, 177 UberEATS 133 under-regulation 174 unfair competition 3, 174, 180–1, 186 unicorns 15–16 Upwork 47, 88, 126, 159, 169, 206 user acquisition 93, 97, 107–10, 122; see also platform participants user retention 107–8, 111, 122 221 value chains 6, 42–3, 52–3, 202–3 value creation 11, 50, 78, 139, 174, 193, 211 value propositions 57, 63, 82, 112, 196, 197; maturity 112; pre-launch 82; scaling-up 112, 133, 142 Van Alstyne, M. 23, 25–6 VIP strategy 96 viral loops 110 Visa 5, 14, 23, 26, 80–1, 134 WeChat 6, 97, 132 WhatsApp 70, 110 YouTube (Google) 67–9, 131, 182, 183, 186 Zalando 12, 102, 200

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Ingrid is without makeup, so her “skin can breathe,” wearing, she tells us, a cozy Brandy Melville turtleneck and Target slippers, padding around her home. She must grocery shop. She places her phone behind the steering wheel, camera rolling, en route to Whole Foods. “All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.” Back home she unpacks her haul. We cook together. We see glimpses of her BF Chris, but he’s not a YouTuber, though he’s into Snapchat. As usual Ingrid has gifts to give, body lotion: we need to visit her Instagram to win them. She signs off, “I will see you guys tomorrow!” Ingrid Nilsen had created Vlogmas, a holiday vlogging challenge, in 2011. She was good at it. She loved it, at first. Each year more vloggers joined in, testing their endurance during Vlogust, Vlogtober, Vlogmas in July, VEDA (vlog every day in April).

…

Inside the company, staff often discussed the two paths to creator success: the SNL model, where performers used YouTube as a springboard into movies and TV, and the Oprah model, where creators built an empire of loyal audiences right on YouTube. The summit was full of mini-Oprahs. The summit also reminded YouTube of the growing competition in its rearview mirror. Nearly every YouTuber there pulled out their phones at some point to snap a selfie for Instagram. This was the hot moment for social apps: Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine, a service for six-second video loops. People only needed their phones to post on those apps, not the cameras and editing software YouTube demanded. Ambitious creators felt compelled to be on all the apps, all the time. Those apps didn’t pay creators yet, minimizing YouTube’s fears, but Vessel, a new video service from Hulu’s founder, did and it had signed up marquee YouTubers like Nilsen to produce exclusive material.

…

After each VidCon, he invited YouTubers to come enjoy drinks and panoramic views, free from crowds, cameras, and the pressing need to upload. Perhaps Kay could have kept going on this treadmill if it were only twenty YouTube videos a week. But all the social apps, eager for slices of YouTube’s business, began calling. Kay lost it with one call about Snapchat. The messaging app had invented a format, Stories, that let people share fleeting photos or videos. A brand representative asked Kay if she could shoot five of them for a sponsored deal, ten seconds each. They would pay $7,000. A pretty good offer, and yet her hands shook as she considered it.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Talking about these events to anyone on the outside, she said, is “seen as the ultimate betrayal.” Men show up only if directly invited by the host, and they can bring as many women as they want, but guys can’t come along as plus ones (that would upset the preferred gender ratio). Invitations are shared via word of mouth, Facebook, Snapchat (perfect, because messages soon disappear), or even basic Paperless Post. Nothing in the wording screams “sex party” or “cuddle puddle,” just in case the invitation gets forwarded or someone takes a screen shot. No need to spell things out, anyway; the guests on the list understand just what kind of party this is.

…

Alcohol lubricates the conversation until, after the final course, the designer drugs roll out. Some form of MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy or Molly, known for transforming relative strangers into extremely affectionate friends, is de rigueur, including Molly tablets that have been molded into the logos of some of the hottest tech companies such as Tesla and Snapchat. Some refer to these parties as “E-parties.” “People ingest Molly like candy during these events,” says a woman who has partaken. Sometimes guests will mix the bitter powder with a fruity drink or stir it into a coconut. MDMA is a powerful and long-lasting drug whose one-two punch of euphoria and manic energy can keep you rolling for three or four hours.

…

“We have more cachet than a random rich dude because we make products that touch a lot of people,” says Founder X. “You make a movie, and people watch it for a weekend. You make a product, and it touches people’s lives for years. If I’m Miranda Kerr [the very successful lingerie model], I’d think Evan Spiegel [the co-founder of Snapchat who is now Kerr’s husband] is a much more durable bet than Orlando Bloom [the actor who’s now Kerr’s ex-husband].” Bloom is only a handsome, highly paid actor, Founder X points out. That can hardly compare with Spiegel: “He’s a billionaire, and he’s got an empire.” At least on the financial level, Founder X has a point.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

“That’s frickin’ frightening,” Kahle, who was with Cerf and Berners-Lee a founding inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame, warns about this unaccountable online surveillance. “It shouldn’t be a security decision every time you click on a link.” Part of the problem is that Silicon Valley’s dominant business model—essentially the commercial appropriation of users’ data—is profoundly flawed. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and most of the other dominant internet businesses give away their products at no charge and then make all their money by selling increasingly personalized and intelligent advertising around these free products. Of the $89.46 billion in Google’s 2016 annual revenue, for example, $79.38 billion was generated by advertising revenue.

…

Instead of throwing billions of dollars into quixotic ventures that will supposedly let us live forever, Mark Zuckerberg would be better off trying to confront the global problem of technological behavioral addiction—the “Facebook hook” and “Instagram hook” that the New York University psychologist Adam Alter argues are shrinking our attention span to less than that of a goldfish. Zuckerberg might, for example, invest some of his time and resources in Tristan Harris’s nonprofit movement Time Well Spent, with its commitment to introducing a new Hippocratic Oath for software developers against the invention of addictive apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. In July 2017, Reid Hoffman and his friend Mark Pincus, the cofounder of the online game developer Zynga, introduced a new group to hack the Democratic Party called Win the Future (WTF). Their goal, according to the online tech website Recode, is “to force Democrats to rewire their philosophical core, from their agenda to the way they choose candidates in elections.”20 But WTF puts the cart before the horse.

…

And a few days after these European boycotts made news, a number of major American advertisers, including Starbucks, AT&T, Walmart, Verizon, and Johnson & Johnson, joined the defection, announcing an end to their ad spending on Google until the system is made more accountable.9 These actions have the implicit support of Sir Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP, the world’s largest marketing company, who remarked that Google and Facebook have “the same responsibilities as any media companies” and could not “masquerade” as mere technology platforms.10 Sorrell, with whom I’ve spoken at great length over the years about this problem of responsibility and accountability, is absolutely right. The fundamental problem about not just Google and YouTube, but also Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and many other Silicon Valley companies, is their unwillingness to grow up and assume the complex responsibilities of media companies. This means not only ensuring that the content on their networks isn’t stolen or hateful, but also guaranteeing that advertisers don’t find their messages attached to offensive or illegal content that tarnishes their brands.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Facebook’s above $500 billion: Matt Egan, “Facebook and Amazon Hit $500 Billion Milestone,” CNN, July 27, 2017. See: https://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/investing/facebook-amazon-500-billion-bezos-zuckerberg/index.html. The Spatial Web A partnership between Snapchat and Amazon: Josh Constine, “Snapchat Lets You Take a Photo of an Object to Buy It on Amazon,” TechCrunch, September 24, 2018. See: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/24/snapchat-amazon-visual-search/. Pinterest, meanwhile, has a multitude of visual search tools: See Pinterest’s original announcement: https://newsroom.pinterest.com/en/post/introducing-the-next-wave-of-visual-search-and-shopping.

…

It’s a new form of advertising, either an extension of frictionless shopping, or a novel type of spam, depending on your perspective. The early version of this reality is already here. Known as “visual search,” the feature is currently available from an assortment of companies. A partnership between Snapchat and Amazon, for example, allows you to point their app-camera at an object, then get a link showing either the product itself or something similar, available for purchase. Pinterest, meanwhile, has a multitude of visual search tools, such as Shop the Look, which dots every object in a photo. Like the couch?

…

Sears Watch Company, 96 Ryan ToysReview (YouTube program), 129 Sacks, David, 17 Sagan, Carl, 212 Samsung, 51 Samumed, 90, 176–77 Sanford, Glenn, 196–97 Sasson, Steven, 43 satellite communications, 152 network connections and, 40 saved time, 15, 70–72 Scharf, Caleb, 215 Scheherazade (gaming technology), 130, 131 Schumpeter, Joseph, 239 Science, 65 Scientific American, 215 screens, new technologies for, 139–40 sea level rise, 232, 241–42 search engines, 71 Sears, 21, 95–98 Sears, Richard Warren, 95–96 Seasteading Institute, 200 Second Life, 86, 248 Sedol, Lee, 36 Sehgal, Suren, 174–75 self-education, computer-aided, 144–47 senolytic therapies, 90, 175–76 senses, content and, 134–35 sensors, 41–44, 72, 136 insurance rates and, 188 smartphones and, 43 Sentry System, 233 Sequoia Capital, 128 serotonin, 247 service economy, AI and, 34–35 severe combined immunodeficiency (Bubble Boy disease), 65, 66 sex, VR and, 248–49 shipping industry, 182 shopping: AI and, 100–106 AI assistants and, 123–24 bricks-and-mortar stores in, 97–98 cashierless, 104–5 discount pricing and, 96, 98 e-commerce revolution in, 98–100 frictionless, 100, 101, 103, 105 “Internet of Things” and, 104–6 rise of mail order in, 95 robots and, 106–8 3–D body-scanning and, 114 3–D printing and, 108–11 VR and, 113–14 Sidewalk Labs, 235 Sikorsky, Igor, 9 Singularity, 76 Singularity University, xii, 8, 264, 266 Siri, 100, 132 Sirius XM, 152 “Six Ds of Exponentials,” 31 Skirball Cultural Center, 3 Skysource, 214 sleep: disease and, 41 sensors and, 41–42 Slingshot, 213–14 smart cities, 235, 245 smart dust, 44 Smart Finance Group, 194–95 smart grids, water scarcity and, 214–15 smartness economy, 85 smart objects, 59–60 smartphones, 100–101 demonetization and, 78 sensors and, 43 smart shelf technology, 105–6 Snapchat, 119 Snapshot (TripSense), 188 Social Glass, 235 Softbank, 14, 40, 46, 107 Solar Cities, 252 solar energy, 10, 63, 78, 214, 215–18 solid state batteries, 222 Son, Masayoshi, 76–77 Song, Dong, 82 Soul Machines, 103 sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), 76 Soviet Union, space race and, 73 space, colonization of, 249–53 space race, 73 Bezos vs.

Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone

Albert Einstein, benefit corporation, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, fear of failure, job-hopping, Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, white picket fence

Or they’re glued to one of so many made-up sagas about cops solving crimes or battles in imaginary kingdoms. Turn those off, and you live in a world where there are more mobile devices than human beings. We are being blasted by 24-7 Internet jabber, Twitter feeds in the hundreds of billions, eight billion daily Snapchat and YouTube videos, trillions of useless posts every day, and now streaming video where everyone can be a broadcaster puking mindless content. Not to mention we’re constantly being spammed with pornography, celebrity fascinations, and bouncing cats. With this much distraction coming at you nonstop, the chance for success is slight.

…

Most will not take the challenge—this is not for everyone. But it is for me and I expect it is for you. Hit me up on your favorite social media platform with the message “I am obsessed and refuse to have an average life. #BeObsessed,” and I will know you have read my book. On Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and LinkedIn I am @GrantCardone (or just search for “Grant Cardone”). Come and join the Obsessed movement. If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to reach out to a member of my team. We’d love the privilege of coaching and serving you, whether it’s using our training materials, delivering a live keynote to your organization, working with your kids’ school or college, speaking at your church, or delivering a virtual seminar to your people, and if I can answer any of your questions, I’m here for you.

…

It offers Grant Cardone’s most extensive sales training curriculum on the web today. With over thirty years of real-world sales experience, Grant Cardone provides a dynamic sales training tool for use in almost any sales situation for teams and individuals alike. FOR FREE SALES TIPS AND MOTIVATION, FOLLOW GRANT! Twitter: @GrantCardone Facebook: /GrantCardoneFan Snapchat: /GrantCardone GRANTCARDONETV.COM Grant Cardone TV provides programming made especially for entrepreneurs, business owners, go-getters, start-ups, sales organizations, and success-minded people who want to control where they get their news and their solutions. This channel is for those who refuse to be spectators and demand to be in control of the content they receive, understanding that the outcomes of life are literally the thoughts that you consume.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

Social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and especially Instagram play an outsize role in this transformation. They speak directly to the anxieties of young and old adults alike. We’ve long understood that movies, magazines, and television can shape self-image and enforce social ideals, but social media has now become our most toxic cultural mirror. According to an extensive survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health, visual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat allow young adults to compare themselves to one another and earn approval based on appearances. The study found Snapchat to be the social media platform most likely associated with high levels of anxiety, depression, and bullying.

…

In technology, whiz kid Palmer Luckey, the twenty-year-old founder of Oculus VR (acquired by Facebook for $2 billion), became a face of virtual reality, while fourteen-year-old Robert Nay cleared over $2 million in just two weeks with his mobile game Bubble Ball. At twenty-six, Evan Spiegel was worth $5.4 billion when Snapchat issued public stock in 2017. But Spiegel has miles to go to catch up with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, now an elder statesman at thirty-four, who with $60 billion is one of the five richest people in the world. Even in the stodgy world of chess, Norwegian Magnus Carlsen was a three-time world champion by twenty-five.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Twitter had a new product called “Conversational Ads,” which showed drop-down lists of suggested hashtags that, once clicked on, automatically retweeted the ad alongside the hashtag, ensuring that the Trump campaign’s tweets trended over Hillary’s. Snapchat also ramped up the innovation with “WebView Ads,” which featured a data-capture component asking users to sign up as campaign supporters, allowing the campaign to keep harvesting data and adding to its target audience. Snapchat employees introduced the CA team to a new, inexpensive product it called “Direct Response,” which targeted young people who spent all their time online. If you swiped upward on a photo, it led you to a screen where you could add your email address; the terms and conditions gave all sorts of new data as well. And Snapchat’s WebView Ads and filters (such as selfies you could take that put you behind bars with Hillary) had also been big winners.

…

., asking survey questions to targeted individuals who had seen the ad) that they could achieve an 11.3 percent favorability for Trump with an online audience of 147,000 people, and an 8.3 percent increase among them in intention to vote for Trump, not to mention an increase of 18.1 percent in online searches by those same people on issues that had been brought up in the videos. Again, those leading the companywide videocast reiterated to us the value of having Facebook, Snapchat, Google, Twitter, and others as part of the team. A new Facebook product had allowed the team to embed multiple videos in one ad. From one such ad in particular there had been as much as a 3.9 percent increase in intention to vote for Trump, and as much as a 4.9 percent decrease in intention to vote for Hillary.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

I’m still here. I’m alive. *** For most of my twenties, I was what you might call Very Online—constantly plugged in and logged on. Still, among my peers, the volume of my social media output felt pretty average, sometimes even below average. I mostly stopped using Facebook in my midtwenties, quit Snapchat (a platform for images and videos that supposedly vanish within twenty-four hours, so a lot of people use it to share nudes) shortly after signing up, and totally failed at Tumblr (even my abiding love of sad lyrics wasn’t enough to help me navigate the microblogging site). But even with these gaps, there were few windows in my twenties where I let more than twenty-four hours go completely undocumented online.

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(Actually, I take that back. Somehow, over the course of writing this book, we all decided some TikToks are pretty funny.) But I continue to tweet most days, and the pink circle alerting users that there’s content on my Instagram story—where temporary photos and videos are stored for twenty-four hours, so basically it’s Snapchat but embedded in your Instagram—is generally active, pointing the way to videos of Tuna stretching and screenshots of what I’m listening to on Spotify. (Just the cool stuff, of course. Relient K, the Christian pop-punk band I loved as a teenager and still secretly listen to, doesn’t make the story.)

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During a particularly challenging lesson in which the teacher gave a large assignment and then refused to budge when students protested, I went to the back of the room, emptied out a box of tissues, wrote COMMENT BOX on it, and passed it around the room so that we could each share our “feedback” on how our teacher was doing. While some of my peers had cell phones at that point, there was no such thing as Snapchat or Instagram. So the incident wasn’t documented, wasn’t posted on Instagram or broadcast live. For a long time, only those who had been in the room or who had been told about it knew the story. It didn’t follow me around; it wasn’t attached to my name. Until, in 2012, I published my first book, which contained a passing reference to it near the end: I’ve still got a mean streak.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

In 2013, the company raised a $258 million round of funding led by Google’s investment arm, Google Ventures—an amount that Gawker’s tech blog called “stupefying.”3 The $258 million investment seemed remarkable partly because Uber had so little in common with the hot apps of the time, those for sharing photos, turning phones into walkie- talkies, or making social connections on the street. Though some of these “potential breakout apps” sound trivial or silly in retrospect, they all had the potential to become quickly and massively profitable—Instagram and Snapchat both emerged from this period—which isn’t the case for most companies. By the time Facebook bought Instagram, the most successful of my “2011 breakout apps,” for $1 billion in 2012, the photo-sharing service had 30 million users but only 13 employees, including its cofounders. That’s more than $75 million of value per person.

…

October 2016. 13   From https://gigster.com; since changed. 14   Kalil, Tom, and Farnamn Jahanian. Computer Science Is for Everyone! Obama White House Archives. December 11, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/12/11/computer-science-everyone. 15   Kessler, Sarah. Tech Interns at Facebook and Snapchat Make Significantly More Than Almost All Americans. Quartz. December 5, 2016. https://qz.com/851945/how-much-interns-at-tech-companies-get-paid/. 16   Though Gigster in 2016 announced it would offer freelance workers a way to earn equity in some of the startups they collectively did work for, Curtis never heard anything about how to participate.

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See also Davenport, Terrence; Foster, Gary; Green, Shakira; Logan, Kristen Samasource Schneider, Nathan Scholz, Trebor Schwartz, Emma (Managed by Q employee) Schwarzenegger, Arnold Screen Actors Guild self-driving cars Shea, Katie Shieber, Jon Shyp (shipping service) sick days Silberman, Six Snapchat So Lo Mo (social, local, mobile) Social Security SpaceX Sprig (restaurant delivery service) Starbucks Stern, Andy Stocksy (stock photo cooperative) subcontractors Arise and earnings Managed by Q and Silicon Valley and Sundararajan, Arun Sweet, Julie SXSW (South by Southwest) Taft-Hartley Act Take Wonolo (staffing agency) Target TaskRabbit (odd job marketplace) taxi industry EU regulation and New York Taxi Workers Alliance tips and Uber and US statistics See also Lyft; ride-hailing services; Uber TechCrunch (blog) TechCrunch Disrupt temp workers and agencies early history of earnings freelancers versus injury rate Kelly Services (“Kelly Girls”) Manpower permanent employees versus Silicon Valley and “temp worker” as a category US statistics work satisfaction Teran, Dan Tischen (labor marketplace) Ton, Zeynep Trader Joe’s trucking industry Trudeau, Kevin Trump, Donald Try Caviar (food delivery service) Turker Nation (online forum) Turkopticon Twitch (live streaming video platform) Twitter Uber (ride-hailing service) 180 days of change affiliate marketing program driver-led activism and protests Drivers’ Guild and FTC charges of exaggerated earnings funding growth of guaranteed fares history of independent contractor model lawsuits and legal issues “No shifts.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Now that every smartphone comes complete with a digital camera as good as any point-and-shoot most of us had a few years ago, there is little reason not to photograph something. Into the camera roll it goes, so that later you can perform the ritual triage: Filter or no filter? Tumblr, Instagram, or Snapchat? The ubiquity of digital photography, along with image-heavy (or image-only) social networks such as Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Imgur, Snapchat, and Facebook, has changed what it means to take and collect photos. No longer do we shoot, develop, and then curate them in frames or albums in the privacy of our homes. If we organize them into albums at all, it’s on Facebook or Flickr—that is, on someone else’s platform—and leave them there to be commented upon and circulated through the network.

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The relative decline of Facebook usage among young people may be attributed, at least in part, to this growing feeling of stasis. (The influx of older Facebook users, who render the network uncool and easily monitored by parents and other authority figures, also doesn’t help.) Private and ephemeral messaging apps such as Snapchat, Kik, and WhatsApp offer young people—who are already used to cleverly managing their privacy when dealing with prying parents at home—an opportunity to communicate creatively with less fear of repercussion. Like e-mail, these apps aren’t immune to eavesdropping, but they help return communication to a more protected space.

…

Privacy becomes networked, as each context may have local standards, controls, and practices, but the information itself—the stuff which privacy dictates we have control over—slops over the sides of the vessel, spreading and multiplying. This can happen in many ways. People share things in other environments: a private message is read aloud; a tweet is posted on Facebook; a screenshot or photograph is taken of a supposedly ephemeral Snapchat. Requests to keep information private go ignored. A friend tags you in a photo without thinking about whether you want to be identified in it. Some people don’t know better—they don’t think how their sharing of some information may violate someone’s privacy, particularly as sharing becomes its own kind of sociocultural value.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

He knew he liked to build things, and on the weekends he liked to hang out with his friends from back in the Y Combinator days, spending afternoons in large groups lounging at biergartens or in backyards, or nights at dive bars or karaoke. All alcohol-fueled, all a blast. Anonymity wasn’t always easy: His friends, such as Justin Kan, Snapchatted and Instagrammed frequently, and given their success, they lived lives at times filled with conspicuous consumption. Kan, along with Emmett Shear and Michael Seibel, sold Twitch, which started way back when as Justin.tv in the Crystal Towers apartments, to Amazon in 2014 for almost $1 billion. That same summer, Huffman and his friends all flew to Ibiza for Seibel’s bachelor party.

…

As further verification, or perhaps just to be adorable, she attached a cartoon of herself and Ohanian that he’d drawn of them, with red Snoo eyes and little alien antennae. She may not have posted it herself, but Williams—who likes writing in her spare time—said she wrote it herself. In part inspired by Miranda Kerr and Evan Spiegel’s engagement announcement via the platform he’d created, Snapchat, Williams says she floated to Ohanian the possibility of letting the world in on their engagement on Reddit. She’d been wanting to make an effort to be more involved with her fiancé’s work, so one day she said, of their engagement: “Wouldn’t it be really cool to do a blog on Reddit?” Ohanian told her it would be amazing.

…

A handful of U.S. companies by this time had employees whose full- or part-time job was to manage their Reddit presence, though Jandali was already looking forward to the day when advertisers or their agencies trained up on doing this themselves. He was prepared for third-party ad vendors to pop up to design and sell Reddit ads, the way several had emerged to specialize in selling Snapchat ads and creating product placements there. If Jandali was the calm and steady leader inside Reddit, all dark-rimmed glasses and cashmere sweaters, Ohanian, in flashy sneakers and T-shirts, had begun to serve as a jet-setting hype man. After Huffman shut down Ohanian’s pet project, Upvoted, he helped shift Ohanian’s priorities to include meeting with potential corporate clients.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

You can look up what trackers are used by different sites yourself by downloading a browser add-on called ‘Ghostery’, which can both identify and block such trackers. Nine of the nytimes.com trackers – ‘Amazon associates’, ‘BlueKai’, ‘Google AdWords Conversion’, ‘DoubleClick Floodlight’, ‘Twitter advertising’, ‘Facebook custom audience’, ‘Google Publisher Tags’, ‘Yahoo DOT tag’ and ‘Snapchat For Business’ – are marked as directly relating to advertising. A trip to CNN loads twenty-eight trackers, fifteen of them advertising. Thesun.co.uk loads up thirty-five, including fourteen ad trackers. And the tech site wired.com fired up no fewer than forty-four trackers, eighteen of them advertising.6 The number of trackers on each site varies depending on how many ad networks they work with, how much data they collect and how their own site is built.

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The fear comes from what telecoms and cable companies do on other networks, where they’re not barred from discriminating between different kinds of traffic – charging extra for any kind of premium service. If your cable company can identify which traffic coming to your device is HD video content, it could offer you a ‘premium package’, allowing you to have internet plus HD streaming for just £5.99 a month extra. If it detects your traffic is from Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, it could offer you a ‘social package’ with unlimited social networking for just an extra £2.99. This could go further. Let’s imagine your telecoms provider is also the company which provides your internet. Would it really want to let you use services like Skype or Facetime, rather than using your minutes, or paying as you go?

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., here routers, here, here Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), here, here Rubenstein, Michael, here Rusbridger, Alan, here Russia, here, here, here, here Sainsbury’s/Asda merger, here Schneidermann, Eric, here secure operations centres (SOCs), here sensitive compartmented information facilities (SCIFs), here Shaw, Mona, here Silicon Valley, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sinclair Broadcast Group, here Skype, here, here, here, here Snapchat, here, here Snowden, Edward, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘social credit’, here Soundcloud, here South Korea, here sovereign immunity, here Spotify, here Stanford Research Institute (SRI), here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stripe, here Sun, The, here Sun Microsystems, here surveillance, here, here, here, here resistance to, here Symantec, here, here, here Syria, here, here Taboola, here, here TCP/IP, here, here Telefonica, here Telegram, here telephone networks, here, here, here Tempora, here, here TenCent, here, here terror plots, foiled, here Texas A&M, here Thatcher, Margaret, here Thiel, Peter, here, here Tibet, here Time Warner, here, here Times, The, here Tishgart, Barry, here Topolski, Robb, here traceroute, here, here tracking, see cookies trade unions, here, here, here trademark law, here transatlantic cables, here Tribune newspaper group, here Trump, Donald, here, here, here, here Tuchman, Barbara, here Tumblr, here, here Turkey, bans Wikipedia, here Tweetdeck, here Twitter, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Uber, here Ukraine, here Union Square Ventures (USV), here Universal Declaration of Human Rights, here Universal Studios, here University College, London, here University of California, Los Angeles UCLA, here, here, here, here University of Maryland Law School, here US Congress, here US Constitution, here, here US culture, and internet regulation, here US Department of Commerce, here, here US Department of Defense, here, here, here, here, here, here, here US Department of Energy, here US internet infrastructure, here, here US Supreme Court, here venture capital, here, here, here, here funding phases, here funding series, here, here Verizon, here, here Wales, Jimmy, here WannaCry attack, here Washington Post, here, here, here, here, here web addresses (URLs), here, here, here top-level domains (TLDs), here and WannaCry attack, here WeChat, here Wenger, Albert, here, here, here, here, here WhatsApp, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Wheeler, Tom, here, here, here WikiLeaks, here, here, here Wikipedia, here, here Williams, Evan, here Windows, vulnerability in, here wired.com, here wireless internet, here, here wiretapping, here Woodward, Bob, here World Economic Forum, here World Wide Web, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Wu, Tim, here Yahoo, here, here, here YouTube, here, here, here, here, here, here Zittrain, Jonathan, here Zuckerberg, Mark, here, here, here, here, here, here Zynga, here BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1b 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This electronic edition published 2020 Copyright © James Ball, 2020 James Ball has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work All rights reserved.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

The value in any such site would rest in the quality of its user reviews, and as a newcomer, Google didn’t have any of those. It solved the problem by simply purloining Yelp’s reviews and putting them on its site, making Yelp essentially redundant, and also harvesting the proceeds of its many years of work.* Meanwhile, Facebook cloned so many of its rival Snapchat’s features that it began to seem like a running joke. Amazon has a track record of cloning products that succeed so it can help itself to the margins. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with firms copying to learn from each other; that’s how innovation can happen. But there is a line where copying and exclusion becomes anti-competitive, where the goal becomes the maintenance of monopoly as opposed to real improvement.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar