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Tim Peter's avatar

Great stuff as always, Dave. Well reasoned and equally well stated. The only place I might push back is on this point:

>> I like to say that what the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years” [snip] What part of our weekday in 2024 was “the smartest peoples’” weekend hobby in 2014?

You say Dixon's statement "isn't even faintly true." I'm not so sure.

I'm giving Dixon lots of (maybe too much) benefit of the doubt here, but what if we change "smartest" to "wealthiest" and 10 years to "roughly 10-15 years"? That's a common framing I first heard from economist Hal Varian some time ago.

For instance, YouTube launched in 2005, Facebook in 2006. Twitter and the iPhone in 2007, and Instagram in 2010. BBSs, message boards, and Usenet predated those by decades (hence my "roughly 10-15 years" thought). Google Docs launched in 2006 as well. Today, we're all commenting all the time in Slack and Teams in a way that was not workday typical in the aughts and early 2010s, borrowing from the norms that started a while back, migrated to social media around 2007-2010. We're all using SaaS tools and ubiquitous internet connectivity in a way that wasn't the norm 10-15 years ago. More broadly, where the wealthy once had media rooms, today the average TV size in the US is 50". We've ended up in the same place. Sure, all of this is just a version of Moore's Law writ large, but in that sense, Dixon is right. He's just being overly pithy/glib about it.

Again, your review is spot-on. Dixon's book deserves the criticism. I also find that looking at what companies and people in the highest socioeconomic strata are doing with tech today to be a relatively decent predictor of what "everyone" will be doing within the next decade, give or take. At least there's some truth to it.

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Charles Arthur's avatar

The question that immediately occurs to me is when that $7bn invested in these blockchain projects/startups/whatevers is going to start being written down or off. That's got to put a hole in someone's day, and my expectation would be that there would be Consequences for anyone who had steered that amount of real money into a whole set of junk ideas which never came good.

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