Google just has to grow. It has to keep growing. But Google grows at its own peril. Google grew so much that what happened? It outgrew Google. Google had to become what? Alphabet. Now what is Alphabet? Alphabet is not Google. Alphabet is a holding company. So Google’s new business as Alphabet is to do what? It’s to buy and sell technology companies. So, once a company becomes just too big to flip anymore, it becomes a flipper of other companies.
Archive (Page 2 of 2)
I think that we need a radical design change. And I might ask if I were teaching an HCI class or design class with you, I would say, “How are you going to design this so that not one life is lost?” What if that were the design imperative rather than what’s your IPO going to be?
The whole point of myth is that it’s just the kind of ambient stuff of culture that you can reach out and do whatever you need to do with. Yes, it means things, sort of, it has dispositions, it has tendencies, but you could rewrite all of that.
As any working mage knows, the first thing that happens when you bring up a lot of power is that you have to figure out how you’re going to channel it. Now ideally, if you’re not an idiot, you figure that out before you bring the power up. Unfortunately this is Silicon Valley we’re talking about, so that’s really not on the table.
So the kind of technologies that get made are not necessarily very exciting. It’s something that [Alexis] Madrigal of The Atlantic said, these technologies that are coming out of these startups, they’re nice, they’re cheap, they’re fun. And they’re about as world-changing as another variation of beer pong. This is not big, radical change.
The Web We Lost
I can have my independent blog, but if it’s not being promoted through one of these networks, nobody sees it. If it’s not being injected in one of these streams in a format that’s consumable in one of these streams, that’s compatible with what they call native advertising, which is stream items that are ads, then it doesn’t get seen.