He describes it as “extraordinary”, saying it is way better than a smartphone or a laptop.
A couple of months later, a journalist from the New York Times threw him a question.
“Your kids must love the iPad.”
What Jobs replied staggered the journalist.
He said, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Then in August of 2018, Apple becomes the world’s first trillion-dollar company.
A privately owned platform is great, but not without its trade-offs.
Jobs understood the dilemma of privately owning a platform.
Even Bill Gates hinted, “A platform is when the economic value of everybody who uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it.”
A company that controls a platform naturally wants to maximize its own value rather than the socio-economic value of everybody that uses it.
Therein lies the problem.
The company starts off wanting to grab as much market share as they can.
They take actions that increase its own value but reduce its social value in the process.
As platforms grow in size, they hoard and control access to all their users’ data.
In the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, the value of those preferences is starting to make itself clear.
Facebook prods us to remember our past memories at periodic intervals.
It’s not only our old lives that are kept in the cloud.
Over the decades, we’ve gotten used to the habit of keeping almost everything online…
From our bank details, to our personal details and documents, love letters to our intimate shopping preferences.
To a point where search engines are able to read our minds on a daily basis with just a few clicks.
Our minds are now accessible over vast distances, ready to be intercepted by the highest bidder in a moment’s notice from data centers run by Google, Amazon, Facebook or even Microsoft.
Big centralized data is worrying because it’s a honeypot for bad actors.
The nature of tech companies is centralization.
And with centralization, we are once again hot on the heels of ownership rights and freedom of choice.
Ownership Rights:
If you own a house and you put all your personal possessions there, you don’t have to worry about it getting taken away from you.
Property rights is a good thing to have, but it has been taken for granted in developed countries.
In certain countries like Venezuela or Zimbabwe, most people don’t have that luxury.
They’re usually struggling with some dictator confiscating every thing they have.
Freedom of Choice:
If you live in a country where there is only one product or service that controls the entire industry.
You have no other choice but to keep using them even though they suck.
In a country where there are 10 different competing products, it’s beneficial for us.
I can always stop using a service or stop buying a product if they’re bad or unreliable.
Today, most of the information and data you put up on social media, e-commerce and financial institutions aren’t yours to control.
Companies have a monopoly over your private information and digital assets.
You don’t have any ownership, let alone freedom of choice to switch or completely pull out of each network.
If you’re a creator or author , it’s worse…
They either make it too complicated for you to understand, or they can just make use of legal obscurities to coerce you into giving in.
Most people don’t really understand or care about decentralization until they’re forced to give up their ownership rights or freedom of choice.
From the smartphone in our hands, to the computer we use is controlled by a few companies.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc…
Again, the crucial question here is control.
If one day I no longer want to be entered into this contract that I have with them, there isn’t another option because they’ve locked me in.
Make no mistake, they’ve locked us all in.
Imagine the amount of information and data we put up about ourselves on these platforms.
Now imagine that in a global scale with billions of users.
We have so much social capital on a single platform that it is not worth changing after awhile.
The amount of power that large tech companies have over us is grossly underestimated.
Unless these companies go the way of the fax machine, I don’t see people giving up or even migrating any time soon.
The more time you’ve invested on a platform, the more locked in you are.
User-generated content platforms like Facebook have us voluntarily upload our own personal data into their servers.
And yet we don’t get paid. But why not?
They’re selling all of our most intimate desires and preferences to the highest bidder.
Unlike fax machines, a social network is like a walled-garden that can’t be instantly swapped for another.
Facebook won’t make it easy for you. All your friends and families are there taken as hostages.
And so now the tech giants even get to decide what speech is allowed on the internet (and what speech is banned).
In the case of Alex Jones of InfoWars; like him or hate him, this is as close as it gets to the end of free market ideas.
If you’re an App store developer, here’s more bad news.
Even big companies like Uber aren’t an exception.
There was this famous incident where Apple threatened to kick Uber out of the App Store if they don’t comply with their rules.
It’s an $80 billion company and it can just disappear with a snap of a finger, subject to the whims of the custodian.
Apple can just remove any apps from my device or just not allow them on the App Store.
You may think they are competent enough to be trusted to make all the important decisions for your safety.
Unfortunately, they’re not.
A #1 top paid app in the Mac App Store has been stealing users’ data for years. 😳
Adware Doctor, which promised to “prevent malware and malicious files from infecting your Mac” actually created a locked history of your personal data, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari browser history… then uploaded it to a server in China.
The developers avoided Apple’s detection for months by pausing their data collection when the app was run for the first time.
How many more data breaches or hacks have to happen for something catastrophic like the Ashley Madison ‘Suicides’ to recur.
Today, a few select companies are determined to make sure we don’t deviate from the social utopia they’ve engineered for us.
They’ve turned into our judge, jury and executioner.
Should you choose to build your business on any of these platforms today.
Think twice, think thrice. Because years from now, lightning bolts of greed might wreck your kingdom with a single blow.
Imagine you’re an author with Amazon, and you’ve been publishing with them for years.
Amazon can literally change the rules overnight and decree that authors will now only get paid per pages read.
This is unheard off in the publishing industry.
If you’re an author, and someone only reads your first page, you only get paid less than a quarter of a cent, ~$0.0045.
Its tantamount to buying your book, but you only get paid if the reader reads and flips the pages of your book.
If the reader shelves your book, you don’t get paid. Nada. Zilch.
Its a totalitarian regime and nobody questions it, why?
Because they all rely on Amazon’s land to do business.
It’s a platform risk. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google; they are all like this.
Naturally, as more users get locked in, people start building these technology services or products on top of them.
There is that risk that at some point, they can change the rules and require you to adhere to new laws that isn’t part of the initial agreement.
And so with so much time and sweat invested into these marketplaces, you no longer question the authority.
They are the ones who make all the rules.
If our obedience is changed with our intimacy with these tech companies, then is this process being directed by people, or the ledgers of private companies, or governments keen on surveying its citizens?
If we conceive these platforms as extensions of our ideas and mind, what happens if they collapse one day?
Suppose we upload entire generations of data and private information, and then, one day, the technology supporting them is breached or controlled by a malevolent actor.
I suspect that would be like living under another totalitarian regime.
If they want to find you guilty of treason, they have every private information at their fingertips.
There’s no due process, no appeal, no transparency of any evidence against you, no ability to present any evidence in your defense, no means of recourse, nothing.
Understand that we had been over-relying on a single way of accessing our information from these ‘convenient’ platforms for far too long.
And it’s not just that they’re free and easy to connect with others at near instantaneous speeds.
I think anyone, if offered something valuable for free would like it, but economics is the study of the unseen consequences.
and free to use platforms gives us a set of diminishing returns as users.
They’re free to use, but could be costly to us. Much like food stamps, the cost is being paid in the long run.
In other words, free network services are a tax on our future selves.
We give up a lot of control of our private information.
Tech companies that gain so much traction and mass adoption are big single points of failure.
They’re fragile. Easy for surveillance. Straightforward to control and painless to manipulate.
‘Free’ to use is an investor subsidy being paid by you and me.
Investors who get in early in these tech companies will end up doing pretty well for themselves.
But if you look at all the users, they pretty much have a miserable life looking at all these ads that are being shown to them, all the data that is being tracked and monetized. Hacks and data breaches get covered up to protect their shareholders interests. And we don’t really have a stake in that economy.
It don’t have to be this way.
Technology has a long-standing habit of re-shaping the waves that created it in the first place.
The world was a much larger and lonelier place before the advent of the internet.
The internet is just a set of protocols known as TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, etc.
We take them for granted because its free and ubiquitous like the air we breathe.
What we do see are platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon or YouTube where most people come to know as the internet.
For the creators of the internet protocol layer, they don’t earn a single cent even though there are billions of people using them.
For the applications or companies that are built on top of this protocol layer, they make billions of dollars if they achieve mass adoption.
The lock in is so strong that you don’t get any value jumping to an alternative network because nobody’s there.
It’s monopolistic in nature.
There is so much loot piled up by Jeff Bezozes and Bill Gateses, that there is nowhere left to put it.
They’re the 1% that own half of the world’s wealth. All the islands, yachts, castles and mansions are under their names.
There’s a market for the ultra rich simply because of this monopoly.
We pay far too much respect, tribute and worship to these ‘tech titans’, while their main objective is not to please us but to please their overlords.
What blockchain and cryptocurrencies offer is the possibility of creating decentralize platforms to replace all centralize platforms and in the process allow us to own a stake (token) in the network.
If the network grows, and the project succeeds, the value of your stake would eventually increase.
In the past, decentralize platforms are much more difficult to design than centralized versions of it.
The technology just wasn’t available until Bitcoin was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Still, making these blockchain work at scale and speed is a challenge.
Right now, this space is sucking up all the talent.
And if you follow the talent, you get to follow the money.
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