Early Indications August 2021: What comes after maturity?

Back in the early 2000s when I attended a lot of tech conferences, there was a common and usually regretful discussion: is tech now a mature industry? Even though Facebook, YouTube, the iPhone, Uber, and Bitcoin were all in the future, there was already concern that the “old” insurgent Silicon Valley was somehow lost, and that the startup ethos — often romanticized — was giving way to regularized processes, HR departments, and boring stuff like earnings calls and firm shipping deadlines. If people were sad in 2002, what must they make of today’s environment? We see big funding for food delivery and other gig work companies, the many consequences of ad-funded software, and no U.S. tech companies of wide impact started in more than a decade (Uber launched in 2009).

Many major tech companies, I’m arguing, are now past mature, but finding a name for the state of play is less clear-cut. The biggest change is that tech is now a major aspect of geopolitics, with a raft of consequences starting to flow from that status. There are other signals as well. Let’s skim over a few of these before getting to the main theme.

1) No tech company with work to do wants to buy back stocks with its spare cash: engineering the share price rather than investing in growth worries me and a lot of other people a great deal. I can’t remember which business professor said it (probably several), but the paraphrase was that “buying back your stock tells me you’ve run out of fresh ideas.” At the same time, when you have the cash pile Apple does, there’s money for lots of things, including acquisitions, buybacks, and new product launches.

2) Any firm that tries to protect its business model primarily by lobbying sends a bad signal. We like the status quo, it seems to say, and we want to protect it with favorable legislation rather than having to compete and win in the market.

3) Buying big corporate headquarters sends more negative signals. Salesforce and Apple both make statements here. Amazon’s bake-off approach to “HQ2” created negative optics. To their credit, Microsoft is downsizing its physical office space and eschewing the “edifice complex.” Netflix spent big on movie production facilities, but that’s essentially a factory in their industry.

By far the biggest marker of post-mature status is geopolitical activity. The Trump administration took action in this domain (aimed at TikTok and Huawei) while the Biden administration is making noises about Amazon and Facebook. Beyond US presidential initiatives, several tech companies have had major geopolitical episodes in the past five years:

-Facebook proved to be a decisive “threat vector” for foreign influence in the 2016 elections
-Twitter became a key tool of the Trump presidency
-Google left China
-YouTube is used by extremist groups that post misinformation and violent content for recruiting purposes.

The most recent and farthest reaching actor in the geopolitical entanglement with the tech sector is the Chinese government. Alibaba’s Jack Ma (worth a reported $50 billion) actually disappeared for three months last November on the eve of his Ant Group's IPO; a company executive said he is now focusing on hobbies. Didi (a Chinese ride-hailing app company) went public in the US only to have its home-market operating status reined in soon thereafter, dropping its equity value substantially. TikTok parent ByteDance did not go public as many expected; instead, the Chinese government took a board seat on a ByteDance operating company, complicating the US app’s promises that stateside user data is not shared with the core team in China.

But blocking big gains in personal wealth, while ideologically coherent, is not the only thrust of current efforts. Last week the CAC (Cyberspace Administration of China) posted a draft of regulations designed to apply to “Internet Information Service Algorithms” and there is a _lot_ in the document. My first thought upon reading it: how will western governments respond to a regime widely characterized as authoritarian ostensibly taking the lead on protecting citizens from algorithmic abuses?

Here’s the document: http://www.cac.gov.cn/2021-08/27/c_1631652502874117.htm#. I’m relying on Google Translate and will gladly correct any readings that I get wrong given my reliance on an imperfect tool. All bold-face emphasis is mine.

The document gets very granular very quickly: article 2 states that “The application algorithm recommendation technology mentioned in the preceding paragraph refers to the application of algorithmic technologies such as generating synthesis class, personalized push class, sorting selection class, retrieval filter class, scheduling decision class and so on to provide users with information content.” This looks like it could be extended to include not only adtech but social media, ride hailing, meal delivery, discussion threads, and tutoring (another recent point of emphasis).

Article 6 paints with a very broad brush: I’m sure phrases like “mainstream value orientation,” “positive energy,” and “economic and social order” are carefully chosen and carry great weight. The paragraphs also appear to imply censorship of a wide range of content.  

“Algorithm recommendation service providers shall adhere to the mainstream value orientation, optimize the algorithm recommendation service mechanism, actively disseminate positive energy, and promote the upward improvement of algorithm application.
Algorithm recommendation service providers shall not use algorithm recommendation service to engage in activities prohibited by laws and administrative regulations, such as endangering national security, disrupting economic and social order, and infringing on the legitimate rights and interests of others, and shall not use algorithm recommendation services to disseminate information prohibited by laws and administrative regulations.”

Article 8 seemingly prohibits the dopamine-pump model that currently powers Facebook and TikTok: “Algorithm recommendation service providers shall regularly review, evaluate and verify the algorithm mechanism mechanism, model, data and application results, etc., and shall not set up algorithm models that induce users to indulge or consume in high amounts that violate public order and good customs.”

Article 14 appears to call for algorithmic transparency. “The provider of algorithm recommendation service shall inform the user of the situation of providing algorithm recommendation service in a significant way, and publicize the basic principle, purpose intention and operation mechanism of algorithm recommendation service in an appropriate way.”

Article 15 seems to endorse an opt-in rather than the dominant and delimited opt-out model.
“Algorithm recommendation service providers shall provide users with options that are not specific to their personal characteristics, or provide users with convenient options to close algorithm recommendation services. If the user chooses to close the algorithm recommendation service, the algorithm recommendation service provider shall immediately stop providing the relevant service.

The algorithm recommendation service provider shall provide users with the function of selecting, modifying or deleting user tags used for algorithm recommendation services.

Users who believe that the application of the algorithm of the algorithm recommendation service provider has a significant impact on their rights and interests have the right to require the algorithm recommendation service provider to explain and take corresponding improvements or remedial measures.”
Might that include an EU-like right to be forgotten?

Article 17 sounds like it is directed at rideshare and meal delivery.
“Where algorithm recommendation service providers provide work scheduling services to workers, they shall establish and improve platform order allocation, remuneration composition and payment, working hours, rewards and punishments and other related algorithms, and fulfill the obligations of protecting workers' rights and interests.”

Article 18 would seem to limit differential pricing of consumer goods, especially when it is based on user behavior (US airlines, take note):
“If an algorithm recommends that a service provider sells commodities or provides services to consumers, it shall protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers, and shall not use algorithms to carry out unreasonable differential treatment in trading conditions such as transaction prices and other illegal acts according to the preferences, trading habits and other characteristics of consumers.”

Does article 20 mandate state oversight of the actual code base?
“Algorithm recommendation service providers with public opinion attributes or social mobilization ability shall fill in the name, service form, application field, algorithm type, algorithm self-evaluation report, content to be announced, etc. through the Internet information service algorithm record system within 10 working days from the date of service delivery.”

For all the breadth of these proposed measures, the financial consequences are light: fines range from 5000 yuan to 30,000 yuan ($773 to $4639). At the same time, even the EU has not proposed, much less implemented, any sort of public algorithmic oversight, an opt-in model for collection of user data, or prohibitions on hooking kids on apps while they are young: providers “shall not use algorithmic recommendation services to induce minors to indulge in the Internet.” Just this week, according to Reuters, "China has forbidden under-18s from playing [online] video games for more than three hours a week, a stringent social intervention that it said was needed to pull the plug on a growing addiction to what it once described as 'spiritual opium'."

I’m not a professional China-watcher by any stretch but I do know that the government strictly surveils the citizenry, in part via social media trace data. How do consumer protections relate to the ability of government to collect user data from Internet companies? How do these regulations relate to the Chinese government’s efforts to build its non-consumer tech sector: chip-making, autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing, and others?

In answer to the question posed by the newsletter’s title — “what comes after maturity?” — the answer most certainly is “regulation.” The next few years will be most interesting as the tech sector on most every continent will face state scrutiny, litigation, legislation, and taxation. That idealized garage startup is a distant memory.

Early Indications July 2021: Amazon Effects

As so often happens, three disconnected observations turned out to have a common theme. In order, I’ll connect the Twitch game-streaming platform, local real estate, and the reported decline of corporate R&D to the firm that has remade multiple landscapes. It turns out this is a timely discussion. As Congress and the executive branch debate whether and how to regulate the tech sector, they need to think deeply. What we are seeing is fundamentally new, and thus requires careful attention to the details of governmental oversight. Merely saying “Jeff Bezos is too rich,” or “Amazon is too big and therefore bad” may be politically popular, but it’s intellectually and economically sloppy. We need to develop new tools of analyzing social good and social costs, and new language to weigh the ratio of one to the other. In this age of hot takes and polarized discourse, that’s probably an impossible ask. Call me an idealist and I won’t disagree.

Twitch

Alongside Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, Amazon’s purchase of the Twitch gaming platform was one of the smartest pieces of M&A I’ve ever seen. (Pop quiz: what is the _worst_ acquisition ever? My nominees will appear below.) The MIT professor T. L. Taylor makes an extremely important point about game streaming: TV used to be something people watched. Game streaming -- and I’m arguing, online video more broadly considered -- has transformed that relationship. Twitch is something people can watch, in a variety of ways, but more important, it’s something they _do_. Game commentary is arguably the most profitable category on YouTube, and Twitch has become a powerful niche site where gamers can watch, play, comment, interact with both gamers and watchers, or opine on non-game issues. Game designers are building to the platform, integrating the gamer community in both development and competitive aspects of their products. Communicating with others as they watch gameplay dates back to the hangers-on around arcade games, and the scale of the audiences in this virtual arcade are staggering: according to Twitchstats.net, at peak load about 140,000 channels (streams) are reaching 3.8 million viewers.

As a student of mine pointed out, meanwhile, Amazon won broadcast rights to Thursday NFL games in the league’s most recent media auction. He speculated that Twitch will be a facet of the Amazon streaming of the games. This could involve fantasy sports, snarky in-group commentary, and/or actual wagering at some point. It’s getting tough to track all of Amazon’s forays: pharmacy, grocery, drones and logistics, the MGM acquisition, the fast-growing ad business, cloud computing. Michael Porter's 1980s business school concept of an industry really doesn’t apply any more.

Urban archeology

I was strolling through downtown Syracuse earlier this week. A massive space used to house the flagship Dey Brothers department store from 1894 until 1992. Like many other downtown buildings, it hasn’t found its 21st century purpose yet: an art center seems to be at least one tenant, but the bricked-over windows and giant rusting awning over the main entrance highlight the contrast between the structure’s past vibrancy and today’s urban uncertainty.

In the 1950s -- sources disagree on the exact year -- Dey Brothers joined its main competitor Addis as early tenants in the Shoppingtown mall in the adjoining suburban town of DeWitt. Shoppingtown was originally an open-air mall but not surprisingly (given the Syracuse climate) converted to an enclosed space that celebrated a grand opening in 1975. In 1974, meanwhile, a 75-store mall opened about 3 miles further east of Syracuse in Fayetteville. It featured a carousel built in Europe, and Addis and Dey (they’d merged) opened a $7 million store in the 1990 expansion. That didn’t last long. Yet another mall, then named Carousel, opened to the west, closer to Syracuse proper.

By 1993 all Dey Brothers-related stores had closed. Fayetteville Town Centre was partially demolished and converted into an open-air mall. Shoppingtown currently sits empty, though a multi-use redevelopment plan was just announced this week. Carousel, by now the largest mall in the state of New York, was renamed Destiny USA by its developer Pyramid Companies, a huge mall operator in the Northeast US. Its $285 million in bonds were downgraded to junk status last month.

What does Syracuse real estate tell us about the future of retail? Amazon just opened two facilities here: one is a 3.8 million square foot distribution center in Clay (a northern suburb). If that number sounds big, it is: the only larger industrial structures, apart from similar Amazon buildings, are Tesla’s Nevada battery plant at 13.6 million, and the Boeing facility in Everett, WA where they used to build 747s. The other local Amazon facility is a 112,000 sq ft “delivery station” in DeWitt, the same town that boasts a currently empty Shoppingtown mall. That building will host a fleet of local delivery vehicles, standing as one of more than 500 such Amazon sites, according to one consulting firm’s estimate. It’s a neat inversion: Shoppingtown was built for cars to converge on the mall, whereas a delivery station is designed for [mostly electric] delivery vehicles to disperse into the community.

The decline of corporate R&D?

A colleague forwarded me a paper out of Duke’s Fuqua school of business. Entitled “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth," the paper analyzes the decline of corporate R&D as measured by PhDs hired, patents, publications, and other measures. There's a decided lack of appetite among corporate shareholders and managers for maintaining modern-day successors of GE Research, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, or IBM Research. (A high-profile example: under pressure from an activist investor, DuPont shut its R&D lab in 2016, despite a distinguished history of publication and even a Nobel Prize.) Universities were theorized as taking up the slack, but the paper casts doubt on the efficacy of this approach.

Although Google gets considerable attention in the article and Microsoft's commitment to publication is highlighted, Amazon is barely mentioned. Given global competition, neither publications nor patents are obvious activities for a company making serious gains in data center management, algorithmic efficiency, machine vision, codebase maintenance, and many other areas. That is, I think private-sector R&D is delivering concrete innovations but they aren't being announced or shared in traditional channels. Google's Tensor Processing Unit chips, optimized for machine-learning tasks, come to mind. Amazon has developed its Graviton, designed for data-center efficiency, in the same custom silicon space. Both chips are proprietary.

Cloud computing hardware has evolved to the point where racks of specialized devices, not general-purpose servers, are the unit of analysis. While much of this material is open-sourced, it is not included in the article's critique of corporate R&D. (See ocp.org) Finally, huge advances in algorithmic science have been achieved, often by academics hired by Facebook, Google, Amazon, and elsewhere, but they aren't always made public.

This migration of academic talent into industry is fascinating for many reasons. Money is obviously a factor: Uber hired away essentially an entire Carnegie Mellon autonomous vehicle lab -- 40 people -- in 2015. But resources are also a draw: instead of spending weeks or months writing grants to get data sets, computing time, or post-docs, researchers inside the big platform companies have access to effectively infinite computing power, no teaching expectations, no committee work, and no career-dependent need to publish in journals with acceptance rates in the low single digits. The Duke paper quotes an astonishing yet representative statistic: inside Google, researchers use the JFT-300M dataset (300 million images, 375 million labels). Academic researchers aspire to use data sets similar to Stanford's Imagenet, which had at last report about a million images. Which setting will generate big-data insights more readily?

While I think the Duke authors are onto an important question, the differences between software and hardware or chemicals are not sufficiently addressed, I don't think. Facebook can roll out an algorithmic refinement tonight; Bell Labs or IBM faced a 3-5-year lag, at least, between lab insight and commercialization. Similarly, when China's "Big 3" of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (soon to be joined by ByteDance) operate under a different set of financial, subsidy, regulatory, and ideological assumptions, global competition plays out differently than GM vs Volkswagen or Dow vs BASF did back in the day. National patents don't make the competitive sense thy once did.

*******

Given the many facets of just one company, talking about "Big Tech" as some kind of homogeneous oligopoly doesn't make sense. Just addressing advertising (and therefore privacy) alone, Amazon, Apple (yes Apple), Facebook, and Google are all intense competitors, operating in a "Wild West" environment due for some rules of the road. Comcast, Verizon, and another dozen companies deserve scrutiny in that same discussion. Moving to logistics, Amazon competes head to head with FedEx, UPS, USPS, and others. Have that discussion too, on its own particular merits, possibly asking pointed questions about universal service, subsidies, etc. Then do cloud computing, maybe addressing data portability, with Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft in the room. If private-label retailing is a concern, of course Amazon is involved, but so is every major grocery chain, many apparel companies, and Target and Wal-Mart. The point is simple: address corporate competitive issues in specific terms rather than with cheap and empty posturing.

(My personal, completely unscientific hall of shame of bad acquisitions: GE/Alstom, Microsoft/Nokia, eBay/Skype.)  

Early Indications June 2021: Making sense of short-form online video

As I edit what started as a book about YouTube into a book about online video more broadly, I join many others in trying to figure out TikTok. Given that the videos max out at one minute, you can watch a lot of them in a few hours. It’s worth noting that I cannot watch them natively: given that TikTok is heavily app-centric (there is a web version, but it’s a secondary channel compared to smartphone/tablet installs), I don’t trust the company with my personal and behavioral data. Just this week CNBC quoted former employees that ByteDance (the Chinese parent company) and the US TikTok operation worked very closely, sharing user data back and forth. I don’t have a “burner” smartphone to load the app onto, so can’t experience the addictiveness of the For You Page, the machine-learning-powered customization algorithm.

That said, what does one find in clips that run 15-60 seconds apiece? Fast cuts are the norm, as are clever visual effects: creating videos in the app gives the author access to a substantial palette of dissolves, filters, and other tools. Some other video apps even advise creators to edit in TikTok before uploading elsewhere. Catchy music (or music that is thought to be catchy for the target audience, which is rarely people like me) is often a potent part of the experience, which I noticed quickly. Even among “best of” complications, stereotypes abounded: pets and babies are cute, old people are clueless, boldly fluids and sounds are thought to be funny. For some reason, shots of people singing or dancing on escalators draw huge viewership. Men often perform in drag (consisting of wearing a towel or cloth napkin as a shawl): racial and gender stereotypes are a common theme from many angles. There’s still a lot of lip-synching and dancing, which were the original focus of the service.

Genuinely original content does percolate up. Rube Goldberg machines can be impressive and fit the medium perfectly. How-to videos can teach something interesting and useful in 60 seconds, including home-made bath bombs and drinking glasses made from empty wine bottles.Gender reveals (some that thankfully involve no pyrotechnics) show up, as do letter-openings: one Black person was captured as she got the DNA results that gave her an ancestral homeland as opposed to the centuries-old name of a slaveowner. One woman crocheted plastic shopping bags and shipping materials into blankets for the homeless.

These appear to be the exception. Millions of people apparently like to puppeteer their pets into dance-along videos. Teenage topics predominate: the dumb things teachers say and do, makeup tips or complaints, drunken antics that look less hilarious in the morning. Pranks and pratfalls show up a lot, as do dad jokes and moms who are good sports and/or wanting into their children’s world. Much of it was frighteningly stupid and often cringe-worthy.

Where did this wave of content come from? TikTok’s timing was perfect, launching as it did in 2017 just as Twitter’s Vine service was shutting down after four years. What then was Vine? Like TikTok, Vine insisted on short videos: six seconds apiece. The fit with Twitter (which bought rather than built the service) makes logical sense, with one exception: six seconds makes it impossible to affix ads to the short-form efforts. Absent a revenue stream for the service and monetization for the creators, Vine never overcame poor economics.

What Vine did do, however, was teach both creators and viewers a new visual and experiential vocabulary. It was called a generation’s inside joke, and many prominent Vine personalities went on to replicate their success on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere. This vocabulary was seized upon, and built upon, by TikTok creators who studied what had worked in a six-second world. For all the questions about TikTok’s data practices, the fact that Snapchat, Vine, nor TikTok was owned by the Zuckerberg empire made them popular among those who entered their teen years after Facebook had reached the over-45 demographic: sharing your latest stunts or jokes with your aunt or grandmother lacked any semblance of a “cool” factor. 

What could people do with those six seconds? Again, much of the environment has to be viewed through the lens of a 13-20-year-old. Very few of the people seemed to live in a 40-hour work world; schools, malls, parks, cars, and apartments are familiar settings. Pop songs are familiar soundtracks, although the action could be anything from a cartoon to a puppeteered animal to someone lip-synching in an incongruous location or context. One key was facial expression: something visually stunning followed by a shot of raised eyebrows, sidelong glances, or millennial ennui fit the medium well. As on YouTube, pranks gone wrong and deliberate pratfalls show up often. Road signs and display advertising with letters covered over can easily fill six seconds. 

Why does this matter? At 6 or 60 seconds, short-form videos are perfect time-fillers while waiting on hold, in line, or at a bus stop. Memes, a key currency for this demographic, can travel extremely quickly in such an environment. For the creators, the time limitations and editing suites heighten certain forms of talent: just as black-and-white still photography or iambic pentameter force artists to master a delimited medium, short-form video exposes those who can set up and deliver a joke, or create a visual impression, or set a mood with no time for throat-clearing. At the same time, the big money for creators still lies on YouTube, from what I’m told and have read: I’ve seen TikTok used as a lead stream to drive traffic to the youTube page of the same creator.

Look at the last 20 years: AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace, Facebook (Farmville), Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Every new crop of adolescents needs to find its method of rebellion and differentiation, so as the TikTok demographic ages, and kids outgrow Roblox, expect to see some new form of app-powered expression within the next 2 or 3 years. Both Facebook and Google are launching TikTok copycats. Some candidate components: environmental sustainability, post-Covid shared nostalgia and PTSD, maybe a Disney effort that takes hold. I can’t see a subscription model succeeding with people who lack credit cards, so ads will have to pay for it in the short term. Maybe there will be a geospatial layer (remember Pokemon Go?), and I guarantee it will be snarky. That’s one constant among people this age and I can’t imagine it changing any time soon.

Early Indications May 2021: A New Kind of Television

After spending much of the past two and a half years researching and writing a book about online video (YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, et al), my attention recently turned to streaming TV in a recreational capacity. After burning through iTunes’ offerings, I resubscribed to Netflix after a long hiatus, and there I encountered “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.” As a chapter in media history, it’s a brilliant success story, albeit a complicated one. The more I watched, the more I researched, and the more surprises I discovered.

The show is currently running in season 3, focused on the Covid-shortened 2020 racing season. So even though Netflix began filming in 2018, the story begins two years prior. That’s when Liberty Media, John Malone’s US-based holding company, began the process of buying the Formula 1 series for $4 billion. Like Major League Baseball, F1 racing fans were aging out and not being replaced at younger demographics. Like the NFL, Malone’s team saw media exposure as a winning strategy: recall that there was a Nickelodeon play-by-play simulcast of an NFL game last year, and note that the new NFL media deal gives Amazon exclusive rights to game inventory that will likely involve cross-promotion on its Twitch game-streaming network. The power of long-form sports documentaries is well proven: last year’s Michael Jordan 10-hour marathon on ESPN was a cultural touchstone during the early months of lockdown.

So media exposure helps F1 reach new audiences. What’s in it for Netflix? Despite a content creation budget in the $15 billion range, satisfying global audiences is not simple. It’s hard to know how many US shows have historically found footholds overseas (and both “Masterpiece Theater” and “The Great British Baking Show” crossed the Atlantic from the other direction), but the politics of culture now dictate that Netflix can’t endlessly run “Orange is the New Black” in Indonesia (and elsewhere), and stand-up comedy is far from universal. Merely rebroadcasting US shows to the globe was going to be problematic, and the appetite for nature documentaries is finite. No national broadcaster could take Netflix’s global perspective on F1, and few events can attract such diverse viewership. It’s truly a perfect fit, one impossible to conceive even ten years ago.

Formula 1 racing is truly a global phenomenon, with races everywhere from Australia to Azerbaijan and Brazil to Bahrain. Although the car manufacturers (“constructors”) are overwhelmingly European, most headquartered in England, the drivers come from farther afield: England, the Netherlands, France, Mexico, and Spain are represented. As a result, Netflix gets content that plays well in much of the globe and F1 gets exposure for its member teams. Although it’s no surprise that some drivers have emerged as media stars (Daniel Ricciardo, an Aussie of Italian descent, likes the camera and vice versa), several of the team principals have emerged from general anonymity and contribute personality, intense competitiveness, and cut-throat politicking to the mix. Mercedes’ Toto Wolff is an investor who owns a 1/3 stake in the team, stands 6’ 4,” and is worth about $800 million. At Red Bull, Christian Horner has won 4 F1 constructor championships, is married to former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, and lives on a massive English estate. Aston Martin’s Otmar Szafnauer was born in Romania, educated in Detroit, and worked for both Ford and Honda. All of them, and their peers, contribute to the episodes’ realism with relatively frank on-camera talk. 

The series has achieved its objective of explaining the sport to new fans, pulling them into the various rivalries and dramas, and creating story lines from pre-shot footage. I can’t imagine how many hours of video mush have been culled down to the ~10 hours per season. Backstory upon backstory was documented (Finn Valtteri Bottas was shot naked in his sauna months before winning a race), and races invariably deliver ample surprises that must be accommodated. Two British motorsports journalists provide exposition when necessary: why is team X filing a technical challenge against team Y, why does driver A hold a grudge against team-owner B, why does driver C have a particularly good record racing in the rain, etc, Although purists grumble that the season isn’t really documented (a standard year includes ~20 races) because each event doesn’t get a recap, crashes like last year’s terrifying fire that Haas driver Romain Grosjean survived through incredible luck and strength of will cannot be ignored. Thus the scripting of the Netflix shoots can only go so far: reality will dictate some percentage of the final product.

What makes for such gripping yet universal television? It’s a long list:

1) Tech

F1 is essentially the overlay of aerospace onto automotive. Exotic materials, massive data telemetry feeds, incomprehensible horsepower:weight ratios, and minuscule competitive differences are underplayed in this viewer’s opinion. The design of a brake duct, of all things, was found (and not found: F1 is nothing if not political) to have created unfair advantage likely measured in tenths of a second per lap. One thing I’d love to see explained better: the steering wheel is a digital control surface, each custom made and costing up to $150,000. Drivers get radio traffic from the spotting/analysis team, but all manipulations of wing surfaces, front-to-rear braking ratios, battery regeneration (the cars have hybrid engines), and engine management are under driver control via dozens of knobs and switches operated mostly by thumbs on the wheel’s front; paddle shifters are on the rear.

2) Tires

For all the cars’ titanium and carbon fiber, tires are incredibly important, though the series doesn’t really teach the point very well. Part of the reason is that all teams use rubber supplied by Pirelli, and only certain compounds and structures (dry slicks vs grooved rain surfaces) are made available on a given race weekend. One thing you’ll never see is a refueling: cars must run an entire race on the initial tank. This adds considerable weight to the freakishly light vehicles, increasing tire wear early in the race, so determining when to run hard, durable-but-slippery tires versus soft, faster ones (you can tell by the color of the print which is which) is a huge aspect of race strategy.

3) Demographics

The current crop of up-and-coming drivers is incredibly young, and most of them grew up together starting in karting. Current points leader Max Verstappen is 23 years old with 124 F1 starts and 47 top-3 finishes to his credit, and five of the top 10 points leaders are under 25.

4) Money

F1 team budgets will be constrained next year amidst a massive set of rules changes governing everything from gearboxes to aerodynamics (a team’s wind tunnel costs can be a material item, for example), but for now, the Mercedes and Ferrari factory teams have budgets estimated at north of $300 million. Just moving the cars, garages, and other structures around the globe is a massive enterprise. The luxury lifestyle associated with such venues as Monte Carlo and Singapore shows up in the Netflix series as well: watches and fashion eyewear are prominent, and the sometimes-too-young-to-drink drivers have insane vehicles for off-track use. (Hilariously, one McLaren driver is shown going to the grocery in an orange hypercar only to find out there is no place to stow 2 bags of food.) In another episode, a young driver is told by his personal manager that endorsing after-shave gel is a more promising avenue than razors, given the weak facial-hair game that he and many other drivers bring. For now, oil-company logos are prominent, having replaced alcohol and tobacco at the forefront. How that changes with vehicle electrification will be fascinating. The IT world has plenty of representation: HP, Dell, SAP, several antivirus firms, Cognizant, Microsoft, and Cisco all show up. 

5) Team dynamics

Each of 10 constructor teams has two drivers. Many have noted that the most intense rivalries on the track can come as two drivers in theoretically identical cars fight to keep their place (about 20% of seats turn over annually) in a brutal results-driven business. Teams wrangle with other teams, poaching drivers, protesting tactics or tech, and strategically outspending in some domain or another. On non-factory teams, drivers that come with funding have an edge, so Red Bull gets some help from Sergio Perez’s long business association with Carlos Slim, and Aston Martin driver Lance Stroll happens to be the son of the team owner. Cash-strapped Haas, the only US-based team, has a similar deal with driver Nikita Mazepin, whose father is a Russian oligarch.

6) Adrenalin

The executive producer of Drive to Survive, James Gay-Rees, produced the notable documentary of racing legend Ayrton Senna in 2010 (the same year he also put out “Exit through the Gift Shop”) so he knows how to handle racing sequences. At this level of skill, wheel-to-wheel footage can be gripping, and Drive to Survive offers glimpses of straightaway acceleration, spinouts, and just plain racing that make for great viewing. 

It would be nice to have more. At the same time, Gay-Rees is balancing multiple forces: 

1) The Netflix series is a partnership with F1, now newly media-savvy, so it’s not going to expose anything too incriminating.

2) The series has to hold viewers in multiple markets across the world, so somebody’s cultural/aesthetic norms are likely to be irritated at every turn.

3) The outcome is not known before the race, so even though it would make for great narrative if Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc were to win in his hometown race at Monte Carlo, that’s not how things worked out. I have no doubt hours of off-season interviews and other footage were shot to set up that story line, so I’ll be watching next spring to see if that’s how the producers frame that episode.

4) The objective was to broaden the sport’s appeal. While that mission has been achieved, longtime fans and some of the subjects grumble about the portrayal of heroes and villains, fixtures and interlopers, winners and stragglers. 

In the end, the fact that viewers are sufficiently invested to protest everything from perceived oversights to inaccurate engine sounds shows how effectively the series achieved its multiple objectives. I can’t wait to see what next March brings when season four drops, and I'm now sufficiently engaged to be able to tell you the top 5 points leaders among the F1 drivers. Mission accomplished, indeed.

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Early Indications May 2021: Lessons from Germany?

The premise for this newsletter isn’t original: there are numerous books, podcasts, and movies that point to various places in the world that organize things in different ways than we do in the US. Here, I’m not going for cheap laughs (comparing French school lunches to US fare) or easy moralizing (parental leave in the Nordic countries). Instead, I’ll point to four areas where we in the US might learn from the Germans, but in each case, there’s an asterisk: the German model is vulnerable in some way, so none of these is presented as a silver bullet. There is precedent: the German state retirement system, with its retirement age of 65, was a key influence on Franklin Roosevelt at the dawn of Social Security. What else is there to learn from?

1) German cars

Germany’s auto industry, dating back to Karl Benz’s 1886 patent, predates everyone else’s, and its leading brands still set the standard for a particular combination of precision, luxury, performance, and social prestige. Whether in profit margins, motorsports results, or resale value, German automakers have set the standard for well over a century. Some of this leadership appears to be uniquely German: when Daimler Benz owned Chrysler and the latter built vehicles designed by the former, the aforementioned qualities did not translate. Get into a Mercedes blindfolded then into a Lexus or Cadillac, and there are numerous cues that cannot be copied: the seat cushioning, the sound of the door closing, the interior noise level all give the imitators away. The same used to be true of the often-imitated BMW 3-Series: it was the driver-focused benchmark that everyone from GM to Nissan to Audi tried to copy. And it always defied imitation; it appears that only internal marketing-driven design changes could knock the 3-Series off its engineering-earned podium.

Given that every automaker in the world has been studying German automakers under various microscopes, it seems unlikely that anyone could challenge their leadership, but the age of internal combustion is coming to an end. Electric vehicles are under development by everyone in the industry, and the success criteria for those are still unclear. It does appear that every automaker outside of Tesla has underestimated the role of software (whether for user experience, battery management, or driver automation), the Germans included. Perhaps more of a threat comes from the bicycle, and specifically the e-bike, as a more sensible solution to urban mobility. At the 150th birthday of Benz’s invention, there is no guarantee German automobiles will still be the world standard - especially if dashboard menus still look as though they were designed by SAP.

2) Sports team ownership

I just learned this in the last week: German football teams are partially owned by clubs — essentially by local fans — in a unique structure. 50% of shares plus 1 share are held by the club, preventing wealthy owners from running the clubs in ways that conflict with fans’ interests. Profit is not the main priority, and the result is that German football is characterized by high-quality play, reasonable ticket prices, and organizational stability. (Germany also has four World Cup wins, second only to Brazil’s five, three of which included Pele.) US-based sport franchise owners and Russian billionaires have bought clubs in England, which has no such rule, and fans are revolting. In the US, only one professional sports club is owned by the fans (answer below), and league rules expressly forbid this structure from ever being replicated.

As the short-lived attempt to form a European Super League illustrated however, the German model may not be sustainable (it was only implemented in 1998). For one thing, German player salaries are lower than what clubs in other countries can pay. Secondly, investment in the health of the club often requires outside investment, so if a partial owner sustains involvement in the club for 20 years, they can be allowed to acquire a controlling interest. This clause is beginning to take effect at several clubs.  Either way, the 50% + 1 model may not survive the next decade. (Trivia answer: the Green Bay Packers)

3) Beer

In 1516, Duke Wilhelm IV decreed that all beer brewed in the state of Bavaria must contain only three ingredients: water, barley, and hops (yeast hadn’t been discovered yet). It remained codified in German law until 1987, when it had to be modified as part of membership in the European Union. A new German law took effect in 1993, but many brewers still adhere to the Reinheitsgebot. The decree doesn’t have the effect one might think it does: such staples as wheat beer and most darks can’t be brewed in strict accordance with the law.

The 1980s were a time of major change in beer brewing worldwide: Jimmy Carter deregulated home brewing in 1979, then the three west-coast US states all allowed brewpubs in 1982 and 1983. Lots of brewpubs were launched by some of those home brewers, and 2/3 of the 1500 US breweries as of 2010 launched as brewpubs. Craft beers have established a substantial foothold in Germany, bringing the westward migration of German, Czech, and Belgian beer-loving immigrants full circle as a US trend is now reshaping alcohol consumption in Europe.

Part of the German appeal of craft brewing is the same rebellion against mass-produced characterless beer that has taken hold in the US, where craft is approaching 20% of the market. In Germany, the #2 brewer is Anheuser-Busch InBev: Beck’s, Franziskaner, Hasseröder, Löwenbräu, and Spaten are owned by the Belgian-based multinational. The #1 German beer maker, Radeberger Gruppe, exports very little to the US. As we will see in bullet 4), global consolidation is challenging many tenets of German economics and culture.

4) Mittelstand

Germany’s heavy reliance on mid-sized firms is well known even though the term and its definition are unclear. According to an Economics Minister who helped nurture the sector, the concept is “much more of an ethos and a fundamental disposition of how one acts and behaves in society" than a statistical or legal designation. These mid-sized firms can rightfully be called the backbone of the German economy, employing 60% of the workforce and contributing heavily to the nation’s favorable trade balance by exporting everything from orthopedic devices (Otto Bock) to electronic transducers (Sennheiser). Given such a powerful auto industry, it’s not surprising that Germany’s machine-tool sector is the best in the world.

But the Mittelstand is under siege from several directions. Bureaucracies, regulations, and passivity (especially in later generations of a family-run company) can contribute to a lack of innovation. The quest for global scale means that increasing productive output, entering more and more geographic markets, and reinventing the market offering take on more urgency. AKG, a mid-sized Austrian headphone/microphone company, is now owned by Samsung, for example: the “tweeners” markets, never easy, get more pressure applied by global giants every year. Finally, according to at least one investment bank, German mid-sized companies have been slow to embrace digital transformation. One reason for this may be a shortage of skilled labor, a common complaint in most economies. All of these factors should temper any excessive optimism about some magical properties of mid-sized companies.

The US used to have a similar sector: Magnavox made TVs, Schwinn made bicycles, and Bass made shoes, all on native soil. The advent of container shipping, a strong dollar, incredible inflation in health-care costs, and a handful of other factors drove much of the US manufacturing base offshore. Remnants remain: upholstered furniture, metal fabrication (think trailers and RVs), bookbinding. Otherwise, most US manufacturing relates to cars, high technology, aerospace/defense, and chemicals and refining. All of these tend to be capital-intensive, increasingly high-skilled, and rich in intellectual property. Each of these factors makes it difficult for a mid-sized firm to thrive while staying mid-sized. Germany is different, for certain, but the Mittelstand cannot be immune from global competitive forces in perpetuity.

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Where does all this leave us? As President Biden attempts to drive foundational change in the social and economic fabric, there is much to learn from countries where inheritance taxes, universal pre-kindergarten, and wide environmental responsibility are already in place. With any policy at any level, there will always be unexpected consequences and the more we learn from countries like Germany — about what to emulate and what to avoid — the better those new policy outcomes can be.

Early Indications March 2021: What is infrastructure?

As I write, President Biden has announced a few more details of what is being called an “infrastructure bill” to be considered by Congress. While many important details remain to be clarified, the spending priorities are disappointing both for what is overemphasized and what is absent. It’s also telling that the announced $2 trillion price tag includes many billions for investments that have nothing to do with the nation’s physical plant.

Here are the top 10 priorities, ranked by estimated price tag. In the absence of a detailed proposal, I’m using CNN’s reporting as my source.

1) Home care, including allowing home health aides to unionize  $400 billion

2) ~2 million housing units built/retrofitted                                      $213 billion

3) Electric vehicle incentives and investments                               $174 billion

4) Roads/bridges                                                                            $135 billion

5) Water mains and pipes                                                               $111 billion

6) Remediate/repair school buildings                                             $100 billion

7) Broadband, including urban and rural connectivity                    $100 billion 

8) Workforce development                                                             $100 billion

9) Mass transit                                                                                  $85 billion

10) Amtrak                                                                                        $80 billion

Airports are far down the list, at $25 billion, near “inland waterways” at $17 billion.

In a traditional reading of “infrastructure” as shared underpinnings for public transit, connectivity, and commerce, only items 4, 5, 7, 9, and 10 really qualify. (Schools are traditionally a local phenomenon, funded by property and other taxes, possibly with an assist from the state.) These traditional infrastructure items, were they isolated, would cost about a quarter of what is being proposed, at $511 billion.

Many items are clearly part of a commitment to righting historic inequalities: improving housing options for low- and moderate-income families is a policy goal, but how do these housing units count as infrastructure? Similarly, raising the wages and ideally the skills of home-health aides improves their lot in life, but what’s in it for the cared-for? Finally, workforce development is a perennial budget item but what exactly does this mean? Note that Google has recently launched an online certification program to equip people for jobs at one of more than 150 participating companies — no college degree required. Is job reskilling best considered as a federal priority, or maybe it’s better addressed at the state level, where job losses and employment needs can be viewed more specifically and with less overhead. In short, economic justice initiatives are important enough to debate on their merits on a case-by-case basis, not be smuggled in under false labeling.

How widely shared are the benefits of these investments? 2 million housing units will certainly improve life for maybe 8-10 million individuals, and there will be some spillover effects as nearby property values should benefit from the investment. Even assuming a 2-for-1 neighbors:residents multiplier, that still only gets us to about 25-30 million beneficiaries, or less than 10% of the US population. Air travel is an expensive purchase, meanwhile, and I couldn’t find statistics for what percent of U.S. citizens took a flight in 2019, but 811 million flight-seats were occupied by U.S. citizens in that year. If we know that the average U.S. adult flew 2.5 times in 2017, and that kids represent a minority of air travelers, that puts the direct beneficiaries of a robust airline network in the 40% range of the population. Yet housing (by definition, not shared) is slated to receive about 9x the funding allocated to airports (a classic infrastructure play, albeit not a green one).

Let’s look at the heavy commitment to electric vehicles. At one level, this feels close to the failed federal investment in the Solyndra solar-panel startup. How much will Washington once again attempt to pick winners? Depending on the day, Elon Musk might be the richest person in the world: private markets are investing heavily in electric vehicles, last I saw. Counting federal purchasing mandates, which are already underway in the new USPS delivery vehicle (which has both urban/electric and rural/internal combustion variants), the Biden plan allocates $220 billion to electric vehicles. Is there any doubt the market will swing that way? Reinstating the fuel-economy standards previously relaxed by the Trump administration would be more stick than carrot, and cost less. Meanwhile, the version of the proposal that I saw, that seeks 500,000 charging stations by 2030, made no mention of the electric grid. Both the proposed charging stations and the electric utilities’ role in western wildfires focus attention on the nation’s electrical infrastructure, which, like the water supply, desperately needs both modernization and hardening against terrorist attacks.

Let’s turn from means to ends. Concepts of micro mobility (bikes and e-bikes), “15-minute cities” including Paris and Ottawa, and civic commitments to outdoor recreation in places like Asheville and Duluth all reflect a vision of urban life as something very different from car-dependent sprawl. Given that the global pace of urban migration continues to accelerate, a serious infrastructure bill should be building the foundations of the city of tomorrow, not yesterday. Sure electric cars have a better carbon footprint than internal combustion vehicles — assuming the electric car isn’t charged by a coal-fired facility. But still better are far fewer cars, and reliable mass transit: cars don't scale, nor do they give a city the life and texture cafes and strolling do. Many malls are dying: what can be done with all those millions of square feet at the same time that we revitalize central cities?

Look at the Washington, DC region, the beneficiary of heavy federal transit funding. The Metro is falling apart or flaming out while not keeping pace with population growth, at the same time that the endless highway construction has done little to reduce commute times. Where are bike lanes? (These have the double benefit of also improving health.) Where is reliable mass transit? Where is a cost-effective way to travel from Dulles airport to downtown? The Amtrak funding, meanwhile, will largely be spent in the Boston-DC corridor, which means it’s unlikely that the US will have a true high-speed rail line by 2040. Japan, meanwhile, was running 130-mph trains at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and France’s TGV service launched in 1981: that network’s trains regularly operate at 200 mph. 

In short, the infrastructure bill has little to inspire “moon shot” ambition or even due diligence on known crises-in-the-making. Rather, we get more road repair, more slow trains, more monopoly broadband. The Biden administration has a moment of historic need, a less oppositional Congress, and public appetite for new and better. Looking ahead to 2050, where are the walkable, bikeable, safe U.S. cities? Where is competitively priced broadband, possibly of the municipal variety? Where is tomorrow’s electric grid? Where are the relocations of coastal communities being pushed underwater by climate change, and the rethinking of those that are next on the list (hello Houston, I see you Miami)? Speaking of water, where are hard discussions about droughts and the unsustainable water allocations in the western U.S.? Replace lead piping, absolutely, but let’s not pretend that Los Angeles can siphon off more and more of its water supply from the Colorado River indefinitely.

There is a fight brewing in Congress, and I hope both that infrastructure gets properly defined and addressed, and that some of the parties take the opportunity to look farther ahead than the already-inevitable swing to electric vehicles. Great civilizations always boast great infrastructure, and it’s time to declare ourselves one way or the other.

Early Indications February 2021: Foundations and Scaffolding

First of all this month, I ask a favor. Last week, the website for a professional doctorate in information studies at Syracuse University went live. I direct that program, and we are looking for 10-12 mid-career leaders in information industries to join us in writing a thesis in information issues, broadly defined: enterprise architectures, misinformation/disinformation, the future of work, privacy/security, and data and analytics are all in play. The program teaches no content courses from the existing catalog: the members of the cohort will be sufficiently diverse and accomplished that finding common ground would be impossible. Rather, we focus on the writing of a 5-chapter thesis, with each chapter a common semester deliverable in semesters 4-8. Methods courses and topic selection precede those semesters, and semester 9 is devoted to thesis defenses. The course is mostly synchronous on-line, with 12 of 51 credits being earned in 2 1-week residencies per year. These residencies will offer topical seminars of broad interest: those of you who attended my Center for Digital Transformation meetings at Penn State will have had a taste of these. Cost is on par with an executive MBA or many DBAs, about $100k; no financial aid is available through the program.

The ask: because we had to wait nearly a year for state of New York approval of the program design, we are on a very short runway to fill this year’s class that will begin with a May 24 residency. Applications are due March 15 for preferred consideration, but we will look at later candidates if the class doesn’t fill. We have 5 applications already submitted, from fascinating people of substantial accomplishment: the cohort will be 3 years of the best conversation you’ve ever had, I predict. 40 more people have already registered for information sessions this week: Wed March 3 for the general population and Thursday the 4th for military and veterans. Here are the links: please forward them to anyone you know who might be interested, or let them know to email me directly to set up a call. Thank you for the assist.

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Let me start by enumerating a few themes, which I’ll then try to tie together.

As I watched the World Wide Web emerge early in my professional career, I shared the hopeful positivism (or, more accurately, positivist hopefulness) of Tim Berners-Lee and his intellectual kin. Having recently finished a doctoral dissertation in which I learned to construct Boolean queries inside expensive CD-ROM data sets, I was ecstatic to find in Google plus the Web the biggest research library ever conceived, much less built. Some readers may know that in ancient libraries, including Alexandria, books were chained to the shelves: print knowledge was that valuable. Now (circa 1996), I didn’t know if information actually wanted to be free, but a whole lot suddenly became so. From access to such wealth, it was a short hop to the belief that people could operate under less uncertainty and make better, fact-based choices and decisions.

People wiser than I knew better. As I discovered while researching my new book on YouTube and TikTok (coming next year from MIT Press, it looks like!), James Katz at Rutgers saw in 1998 the cost of removing gatekeepers to content dissemination. If everybody could publish an opinion, the Yeatsean center could not hold:

The Internet and the Web allow for the quick dissemination of information, both false and true; unlike newspapers and other media outlets, there are often no quality control  mechanisms on Web sites that would permit users to know what information is generally recognized fact and what is spurious

Years later, when DARPA ran the geospatial intel challenge of having ad hoc teams coordinate via social media to find 10 red weather balloons, I failed to grasp the importance of the counterintelligence efforts that slowed the winning team (out of MIT’s Media Lab) by spoofing IP addresses and GPS coordinates. Rewatching the 2010 video a couple weeks ago was another realization that the information universe does not only, or probably primarily, operate under logical assumptions. Rather, PT Barnum, Joseph Goebbels, and George Orwell seem to set much of the tone.

A second theme relates to the contention (by Scott Galloway among others) that COVID-19 was an accelerant more than a disruptor. The pandemic, and our responses to it, made socio-technical developments happen far faster than predicted: telemedicine visits, remote work, grocery/meal delivery, and Zoom schooling are all a permanent part of the cultural landscape only months after the initial lockdown. All of these new practices stress the existing infrastructure, whether it’s laptops for 5-year-olds, rural broadband, a sustainable economic model for car-share drivers, privacy practices for connected video cameras, or the simple but often impossible task of checking up with vulnerable neighbors and family members. This need to invest in 21st-century infrastructure — cultural, economic, and physical alike — was highlighted by The Economist in a recent article on mass transit. If buses and subways are not perceived to be safe from pandemic spread, people will turn to cars, with dire consequences for densely populated urban areas. New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Mexico City cannot absorb all the migration headed their way with a car-based transport model. Gridlock, of every type, is not sustainable. At the same time, infrastructure is slow to rebuild, tough to expand, and expensive to maintain. Tax revenues are down everywhere, making the barriers to mass transit investment that much higher. And subways are far from the only economic priority.

Finally, it’s depressing to look at what the US tech sector has become. I’ve touched on this before, so won’t belabor the point. With the emergence of ad-revenue-powered software development, it’s hard to see tech innovation on the scale of the web browser, the search engine, the original online retail model, or the smartphone. Silicon Valley + Seattle have turned a lot of energy to scaling the aforementioned innovations, and many important developments have emerged, to be sure: mega-scale cloud computing, computational photography, and chipset design each exhibit true breakthroughs. For all of these upbeat notes, we must confront the failures of privacy protection, behavioral manipulation, energy consumption (with Bitcoin’s massive inefficiency exhibit A), and the industry’s contributions to economic inequality. Many business continue to run on Excel and email, again, tools that do not scale.

These three themes — access to knowledge fueled misinformation rather than enlightenment, the need to rejuvenate infrastructure, and Silicon Valley’s turn toward meal delivery and social media rather that worthier challenges — were floating around in my thinking as I read a short blog post by the tech journalist Om Malik (with a hat tip to Jan Chipchase for the pointer).

Malik posits that a precondition for getting anything done in a group is sharing an understanding of reality. He says it better than I could, and quotes the likes of psychologist Jerome Bruner:

"Our culturally adapted way of life depends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and depends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiating differences in meaning and interpretation,” the late psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote in The Acts of Meaning. “By following a set of rules governing interpersonal communication, people inadvertently modify their private, idiosyncratic conception of a state of affairs and reach a common understanding of that situation. As noted, these shared representations constitute the contents of a culture.” 

Given that Facebook is actively trying to build as many systems of meaning as there are ad market segments, and Google is imposing its own clustering algorithms on our ads, our emails, and our YouTube viewing, what counts as foundational bedrock in US (or any other) culture? Concepts (that carry critically important commitments) as essential as voting, epidemiology, and tolerance are no longer assumed. Millions of people are convinced that the US election outcome was fake, that the coronavirus is fake and/or a foreign plot, and that white supremacy is the core tenet of major political parties. Taken together, these beliefs undermine the foundations of western democracy. When people of different colors are successfully demonized as cover to extreme rent-seeking by white wealthy one percenters, and the blockage of economic mobility by the latter is blamed on the former, the consequences are truly life altering. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton make the case in their book Deaths of Despair, life expectancy, economic mobility, and personal wellbeing are all casualties of the past 40 years of health care, tax, and environmental legislation being written by industry lobbyists, many of them former legislators or aides, for the benefit of the already-wealthy.

A foundation holds a building up from the bottom. Good ones last centuries or millennia. Scaffolding is far more visible, but it is temporary and not typically structural. The belief that all people are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is foundational and served the United States well for 200+ years. The frequent fights of outsiders to be let in to that promise attest both to the power of the promise and to the benefits to some groups of denying it to others. Now, as Malik laments, there appear to be fewer and fewer shared realities. Reality TV, the utter antithesis of its name, made the Kardashian family a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Fake news has done the same for Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, political parties of all persuasions are torn by internal fights over the shared reality in which players on the same team operate. Religions from Anglicans to Catholics are seeing disillusioned and emboldened members either defect or stay and sow dissent within the ranks: there are currently 19 different Baptist subdivisions, according to Baylor University’s research center devoted to the denomination. Epidemiologists and public health official acknowledge that they have done a poor job navigating nuance and clarity at a time when faith in science has been tested by both external political headwinds and internal narrowing of disciplinary foci.

The core question is both simple and troubling: without something common to believe in, groups of people splinter. Religion, science, government, and economics are all torn by divisions over both what is real and what matters. Sport can bring groups together, often temporarily, and even here, ESPN had to shut down comments on the website because flame wars were instant and usually vicious. The moderator of a historical outreach website -- not what one would expect to be a snakepit -- had to quit as the site's comments became a “cesspool.” 

The tools that Berners-Lee and others invented have spread both knowledge and, maybe primarily if we are honest, divisiveness. One possibility is that people have been this divided for decades: white supremicists are as old as this nation. Now that they and everyone else have a public voice, maybe we are seeing a long-term lack of commonality that newspapers, TV stations, and book publishers covered over with their gatekeeping function. Alternatively, the collapse of Enlightenment epistemology took far longer than the history of the Internet, and it’s possible social media hastened the rise of pluralistic voices that could appeal to personal prejudice rather than shared norms of moral clarity, evidence-based argument, or peer review (none of which were as robust as its adherents claimed ).

In any event, as the world enters post-COVID-19 reality, which voices will gain the most adherents? Which institutions -- the press, government, academia, civil or spiritual religions -- can be either born or reborn as adequate to the moment? Which core beliefs can be reinvigorated — the US Declaration of Independence is acknowledged in foundation documents of roughly half the 192 countries at the United Nations — and which ones need to be invented in a post-newspaper, post-industrial, post-fact world? What ephemeral trends, scaffolding if you will, can draw adherents temporarily yet visibly and effectively? (The US Democratic Party struggled to counter the lies and insults Donald Trump consistent employed in 2016 and again in 2020: he successfully rewrote the rules of engagement, with help from the aforementioned Fox News and Facebook.) Without a foundation, preferably one in empirical reality, humanity is going to endure social chaos. My hunch is that we are seeing a race to master one of these new media channels with a compelling narrative: form and content will synch better than they do now, with substantial rewards for the entities that get there first.