The First Quarter: A few scattered thoughts
Lift-off for a little project.
Last week, I spoke about a project that I wanted to do this year - a collection of essays documenting / reviewing / pontificating about tech in the 21st century. I detailed the idea out here, so won’t take time in this edition repeating it.
Suffice it to say that I have no idea where it will go. At the minimum, it’ll be 25 essays I share with you, which itself is not a bad outcome. Anyway, I wanted to share five ideas I had, and will look to refine them as the year goes by.
How all-pervasive the internet has become
At first blush, this seems like obvious and not something you need a pompous digital marketing newsletter writer to tell you. Of course the internet is now everywhere. But what I wanted to do was dig deeper, and see how it has changed things structurally, and not just surface level-ly.
Let’s take politics as a space. On the surface, of course more poilitical parties and politicians have come online, that’s the medium of the day. Some are authentic (not necessarily in a good way), some are bland, treating the medium like a press release. But as time and elections pass, and it’s clear what the algorithm ends up favouring, more politicians move towards what works on the platform. Whether that’s Trump doing his incendiary sh*t, or Harris making dancing Reels, or India’s most powerful political party doing… this.
To me, this is what’s interesting about the all-pervasive nature of the internet - how it forces everything from culture to business to change, depending on what works in this constantly-connected paradigm.
How music has evolved (or devolved, depending on your point of view)
Art has always changed with technology, and that’s a pet topic of mine. It just fascinates me how much of what we consider sacred was less a fealty to a True Elevated Art Form, and more restrictions of technology of the era.
Albums, considered the most revered form of music consumption by purists, was really just a way for music corporations to squeeze songs together. That some progressive artists saw it as a way to weave a narrative together is less a function of the medium, and more about their own creativity. What I’m saying is - if The Beatles were in the streaming era, they’d have found a way to make it work, but a strange medley of songs about a fictional band meant to be listened cover to cover would not be among their plans.
Similarly, the Roland TR808 changed popular music in the 80s - and pretty much paving the way for hip-hop and modern electronica.
Chart-toppers in the 70s sounded the way they did because the music was most likely listened to communaly, in loud boomboxes. In the 21st century, that gave way to headphones and more intimate music. Led Zeppelin and Billie Eilish sound the way they do, partially because of the delivery mechanism of the era.
While business tends to follow incentives / profits predictably… Art’s scene is a little more complicated because it’s supposed to be above all that. But as any band asked to play for exposure knows, vibez don’t pay the rent. So studying how art - especially musiuc - changes with technology and business - is something I find fascinating.
The parallels between internet and electricity
Spoiler: just read Tom Goodwin’s excellent Digital Darwinism.
Both took a while to get established. Both were ignored (or tried to be) by those that had invested in the old paradigm - factories with manual labour, and offline stores respectively. Both were force multipliers - which is to say the initial applications (lightbulb, a fan website) were hardly representative of the change that was to come.
Both ended up transforming everything. And the history of electricity, its adoption, and the devices it spawned a 100 years ago (just!) might provide us a peek as to how things will go with the internet.
Indeed, the internet couldn’t have existed without electricity. Could it be fair to say that the internet will be to AI what electricity was to it? Merely a starting point, merely picks and shovels?
The moment we saw true lift-off
I think the most seminal moment in consumer tech this century was Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone in January 2007 (18 years ago!). Smartphones existed before that, mobile internet existed before that, and even gorgeous Apple devices existed before that. But something about the combination just worked - supercharged with the app economy coming a few years later.
Improvements in tech and mobile internet infra pretty much led to everything in the coming two decades - the creator economy. The rise of unicorn apps. Sprained necks. Shortening attention spans. An expectation of instant responses. The iPhone changed everything in a way that few consumer devices have.
It’s staggering that it has the market share that it does, at the margins that it does - an outlier in business history.
These are some very raw thoughts. In the 30 minutes of writing this, I ended up getting some more nuance, and some more things to write about. This is how this series is going to be. I promise not to dump a stream of consciousness onto you, but once in a while I will get thoughts like this out in a more polished format.
I’m writing this on the 6th, but by the time you read this, I should have ended my Mumbai-Goa cycling thing. I’ll be taking a break to recover from my break (:D) and regular programming will resume in March.
Thank you for being a subscriber to Things of Internet, and giving me the confidence to pursue foolish ideas like writing about tech in the last 25 years.
Chuck