Wherever you go in the world, New Zealand, Scotland, Austin Texas, Raleigh North Carolina, Hyderabad, Shenzhen …. pretty much anywhere, you will find there are tech centers. Tech centers that often adopt ’Silicon’ or ‘Valley’ or variations on such in their names, but there are many more. The local government will often declare they are investing and building a tech center of excellence to ‘rival’ Silicon Valley. Except they aren’t. Let me explain.
Category: Technology
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The Attention Economy
It’s funny how 'xx is the new oil' keeps cropping up … this one is kind of related - but focussed not specifically on data - but rather, The ‘Attention Economy’ ….
"For the better part of the past century, the most important commodity has been oil. Wars have been fought over it — Pearl Harbor was a preemptive strike to secure Japanese access to Indonesian oil — and it elevated desert tribes to the ranks of the wealthiest cohorts in history. But the sun has passed midday on oil’s supremacy. We’ve moved from an oil economy to an attention economy.
We used to refer to an information economy. But economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value), and in an age of information abundance, what’s scarce? A: Attention. The scale of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention."
Some other phrasing that caught my eye and mind …
"If Facebook is Exxon and Netflix Shell, TikTok is fracking king Chesapeake Energy, the rule-breaking insurgent armed with novel extraction methods that threaten the established order.”
"everyone is trying to outTik the Tok”
"MrBeast … most popular video (is) a real-life reenactment of Squid Game, which cost $3.5 million to produce (the cost of an episode of Mad Men). It received 300 million views."
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In Sync
No - not the 🎶 pop group - they were 'NSYNC' ... just an acknowledgement of how nice it is to find like minded travelers on the journey.
The quote below found here
“We need to resist the narratives that are frequently served to us by corporations that sell these technologies, that these models of the future are dependent upon the particular technologies that they’re selling, that it’s always some future that is just around the corner that we have to buy into, when in fact the future is already here.”
Featured Photo Credit: Gabriel Gusmao on Unsplash
There are a group of companies springing up that are doing for the written word what Dall-E, MidJourney and Craiyon are doing for images, which is to say - enter some core text and let an AI generate the output.
My mind explodes when I see the 'image' results.
I think ‘meh’ - so far - when I see the 'written' results.
I am pretty sure that the engines are as sophisticated as each other, so I wonder if my reaction is more to do with my own abilities - as in I have NO artistic ability when it come to creating images, but I can - and do write - so my bar is higher?
For more background, you might enjoy this from The Verge;
How independent writers are turning to AI
Note - all of the words you read on peoplefirst.business are not created - or even suggested - but any AI tool. (Can you tell?). 😂
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What Is Web5
Good question.
Putting aside Molly White’s tweet from a few weeks ago, though she does raise a very good point ...
I did want to share a podcast I just listened to It's Mike Brock of Block (seriously, filed in the 'can't make this up' bucket) - and no I don’t think he is Dave Brock's son talking with Tech Dirt's Michael Masnick.
"Web5 is a new evolution of the Web that enables decentralized apps and protocols.”
Count me in the camp (though I am still with Molly) that this makes far more sense that anything I have heard describing the Web3 world - except isn't that how they described Web3?
Well yes - but that isn't what is going on. Of course whether Mike et al can make it happen remains to be seen - but at least when he talks he makes sense - and also clearly separates himswlf from the 'get rich quick / stay rich libertarian world that we keep reading about.
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Linking Your Thinking
I have been tracking Nick Milo and his wonderful work around Obsidian for a while. Recently he announced LYT Kit v5 and this is his overview.
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Web 3 – Whatever That Is!
To understand what I mean - you might want to check out this earlier post. Meanwhile, on my personal thoughts microblog, I have been collecting a series of links - you can find them here.
Meanwhile, I was thinking that it probably makes more sense to include them on this blog. Thus we have a new living post, starting with that list and expanding - as I find then - below.
Probably the most important blog that relates to this post is
Web3 Is Going Just Great
Added March 11th
World’s ‘First NFT Vending Machine’ Didn’t Work And Neither Did The NFTs
Original Links
Why Web3 matters - by John Henderson - The Idea Exchange
Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs - YouTube
So … what the hell is Web3? With the Chernin Group’s Jarrod Dicker - Recode Media
The New Get-Rich-Faster Job in Silicon Valley: Crypto Startups
The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content - by Li Jin
Web3's Instant Rush to Centralization
Matt Birchler summarizing Moxie’s piece
Via Doc Searls ...
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Two Posts – Many Coins
This post, by Dave Rosenthal caught my eye this morning. It's long, it’s deep and is written with authority and knowledge.
Who is David Rosenthal? In his words
I worked with James Gosling on CMU's Andrew project in the early 80s. I was a DE with him at Sun later in the 80s working on window systems including X, and file systems. I quit to be employee #4 at Nvidia where Curtis Priem and I did the basic I/O architecture, then was an early employee at Vitria, the second company of founders of Tibco. Before I start talking about cryptocurrencies, I should stress that I hold no long or short positions in cryptocurrencies, their derivatives or related companies.
David Rosenthal
It obviously also caught Cory Doctorow's eyes, because he went on to write a post as well. To many Cory's will be more readable - I guess helped by him being a professional writer and Dave's original post actually being a summary of notes and slides he presented at Stanford's EE380 Whether you read Dave’s or Cory’s - if not both, the conclusion is the same ...
The Links
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/14/externalities/#dshrhttps://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html
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