#36 - 2020 reflections; 2021 predictions
This newsletter launched over a year ago with the Introduction, a throat-clearer that paved the way for 36 posts (including this one) throughout 2020. For years, I wanted to write a consistent blog modeled after some of my personal heroes Ben Thompson and Benedict Evans, but my hesitation was always whether I’d have enough ideas to write about, or whether I’d have the time to write on a consistent basis. This year, I decided to bite the bullet, and I’m happy I did.
Here’s a look-back at some of the posts from this year.
Five most-viewed posts
Post-election blues - The 2020 Election was a narrative violation for progressives. The Democrats need to take a long-hard look in the mirror and ask themselves: What is the actual narrative behind Trump’s incredible support?
The COVID-19 forcing function - New technologies and applications that may otherwise have required longer times for adoption have now been ushered into the market thanks to COVID-19.
Is software eating the world, or is the Star Trek computer not enough? - DeepMind’s protein-folding discovery can be viewed as innovation in the world of bits applied to an intractable problem in the world of atoms. But can the former alone break us out of innovation stagnation?
The Facebook naysayer conundrum - Many of the criticisms against Facebook are logically incoherent.
Palantir goes public: Is Palantir a SaaS company? In my very first crack at an S-1 analysis, I examine some of Palantir’s financial data and whether Palantir should be classified as a software-as-a-service company.
Speech and the Internet
I have been outspoken in my willingness to suspend disbelief in “fringe” ideas and my belief in the Internet as an open marketplace for ideas. At the same time, I recognize that the Internet amplifies some vile, vile speech. The problem, of course, is definitional: One person’s hate speech is another’s lyric. Here are some posts exploring this:
Section 230 (content moderation) - A brief introduction to the law that forms the cornerstone of the American Internet.
Facebook’s content review board - A good move for consumers and a good move for Facebook.
Fighting fake news: A tale of two platforms (Twitter) - My first exploration into the marketplace of ideas. Twitter’s fact-check label is good in theory but discriminatorily applied in practice.
Fighting fake news: A tale of two platforms (Facebook) - Some thoughts about Facebook’s approach to fake news, from my time working on Facebook’s News team.
Facebook bans QAnon - While I agree with the substance of the ban, I’m not so sure about the procedure.
2021 prediction: Washington DC will talk a lot about Section 230 (as it did in 2020), but little, if anything, is going to change to the law itself. Even though Democrats and Republicans broadly agree that Section 230 needs to be modified, their proposed changes pull in different directions. Democrats think platforms aren’t doing enough to clamp down on bad speech while Republicans think platforms are unfairly clamping down on conservative voices. If Section 230 does get modified next year, though, I can perhaps see common ground around certain measures like requiring platforms to provide transparency reports on their content moderation practices.
Politics, Principles, and Power
These are intimately linked. Politics today is so polarized that everything is a land-grab for ever-increasing, even if fleeting, power. The obsession with power is drowning out reasoned discussion rooted in principles. As a result, we’re having a hard time finding common ground to drive progress. This was my favorite topic of the year, one that produced some of my best writing.
Power is king - People today are ready to abandon their principles for power. Or, to be even more explicit, for many people, their number one principle is the accumulation and exercise of power in their favor.
Post-RBG politics; Is it wrong to be friends with conservatives?; Principles vs. policies - Some progressives refuse to be friends with conservatives. I contend that this thinking is flawed and rooted wrongly in a disagreement about policies rather than a disagreement about principles.
De-polarizing the Supreme Court - Is the Supreme Court polarized in the first place? If so, what are some ways to de-polarize the Court?
Corporate dictatorship and efficiency; The corporate nation-state - Is Coinbase so powerful that it’s becoming what I call a “corporation nation-state?”
Palantir goes public: Principles over profits - In part 2 of my Palantir S-1 analysis, I argue that Palantir is a principled company.
2021 prediction: Trump will leave office on January 20 but will continue to occupy media attention (at the very least, social media attention). His followers will continue to listen to his rhetoric on Twitter rather than what Biden or the New York Times (i.e., “traditional media”) have to say. In 2021, the rift between the left and the right will unfortunately continue to widen. In spite of all of Biden’s attempts to create consensus in politics, he will be unsuccessful.
Parting words
Back in March, Sequoia Capital released a memo calling COVID-19 the black swan event of 2020. The memo painted a picture of doom and gloom, urging startups to hunker down for what we all predicted would be a bleak year. It was an inauspicious start to our new decade.
But as the pandemic progressed, Sequoia’s mayday signal proved to be a false alarm for the tech landscape. What we’ve actually seen in innovation over the past year has been nothing short of incredible. SpaceX, a private company, sent Americans back into space. OpenAI unveiled GPT-3, an uncannily-human natural language processing model. DeepMind essentially solved the protein-folding problem, which had plagued biologists for 50 years. In merely 8 months, three separate biotech companies developed vaccines for COVID-19. The IPO market is now red-hot, with many tech companies stronger than ever before. Tech entrepreneurs and investors are finally dispersing from the coast to our vast interior. Venture capital investments have rebounded and are back at feverish levels. At bottom, the pandemic has issued an ultimatum to our companies and institutions: Adapt or die. While many of our old institutions of the industrial world have hemorrhaged at the hands of COVID-19, tech has been able to change and thrive. As the old passes away, it will be replaced by the new.
There’s a misanthropic, scrooge-like sigh that treats January 1 as nothing new, just another day in the life, no different than December 31 or January 2—“stop celebrating, people!” While this is true on a mechanical level, let’s not forget what a new year represents: A sense of wonder and mystery at what the new year will bring, and a sense of hope that what comes next will be better than what came before. Now, more than any other year I’ve been alive, 2021 promises to be the beginning of a phase change, an injection of vibrant color into a sepia-toned past. Tech trends are accelerating and penetrating the physical world. Ossified institutions are actually beginning to crumble. The end of COVID-19 is in sight, promising to unleash an unprecedented wave of consumer demand and optimism. Even our home-favorite innovation stagnationist Peter Thiel calls 2020 the first true year of the 21st century.
So, with that, I wish you a Happy New Year, and here’s to hoping that 2021 will mark the beginning of our own Roaring ‘20s. Thank you for reading, and see you sometime in January.
—Chris
📚 What I’m reading
Extract or die. Mike Solana does a deep-dive into how SF politicians have horribly mismanaged the city and are now blaming it all on technologists. (Pirate Wires)
The grey hoodie project: Big tobacco, big tech, and the threat on academic integrity. (arXiv)
Platforms, bundling, and kill zones. (Benedict Evans)
Facebook takes the gloves off in feud with Apple. (New York Times)
Zoom executive in China charged with disrupting Tiananmen memorials. (Wall Street Journal)
The AI girlfriend seducing China’s lonely men. (Sixth Tone)
WeChat becomes a powerful surveillance tool everywhere in China. (Wall Street Journal)
Nobody says hi in San Francisco. (Noahpinion)
A peculiar kind of racist patriarchy. (Quillette)
Why I’m losing trust in the institutions. (Persuasion)