The future of social media
4 February 2025 | 12:00 am

The future of social media

Imagine a world, in the not-so-distant future, where anyone can launch a fully functional social media platform with a few clicks and a credit card.

From a menu of options, you choose the primary media type (video, microblog, photos, etc.) and basic functionality. You can upload your logo and choose your color palette.

There's a marketplace for algorithms, recommendation engines, and other backend AI-powered functionalities.

AI moderation engines are pre-baked in and meet all necessary regulation requirements for every major country in the world.

A turnkey advertising network is optionally available. If you choose to run ads on your new social media platform, it's a 60/40 split.

You choose your monthly cloud service subscription based on estimated monthly active users, enter your credit card info, click “agree” and voilà! You are now the proud owner a your very own social media platform. Now all you have to do is get people to sign up for it.

What I'm describing would be the world's most sophisticated Platform as a Service offering in the history of Silicon Valley. Moderation, advertising, bug fixes, and improvement updates are all handled for you without you having to do much but cultivate a community.

Sound too good to be true? Yeah, it probably would be. But my guess is people would do it anyway.

Such a technology would completely change how venture capital is invested. Whereas in the platform era it would take a talented team of engineers and a business-savvy founder to lock in that round of seed funding, this new era, what I call The Computational Web, would dictate that any social media founder must only have a certain level of celebrity and influence to attract investors.

At first, this new Platform as a Service—let's call it Meta Cloud—would likely attract grindset influencers who see it as another Discord server where they can trap an audience and convince them to buy thousand-dollar e-seminars. Eventually, though, a big-name celebrity will see the potential and launch a fully-branded social media platform to great fanfare. It'll only take one, then the floodgates open.

Exclusive merchandise, early releases, a chance to chat one-on-one via live stream, whatever it would take to build a niche social media community with ten million users. Who will be the first? Taylor Swift? Oprah? Surely, Jeremy Renner would do it purely for the meme.

Of course, not everyone will want to spend their scrolling time on a celebrity-branded app. Even Taylor Swift's number one fan would want to switch it up a bit from time to time.

And that's where it gets interesting.

You see, all these micro-platforms run on the same cloud infrastructure. The account you created for Taylor Nation (working title) is actually a Meta account that gives you the privilege to hop in and out of any platform you want, whenever you want. So long as it's running Meta Cloud. It's like a digital passport that lets you visit anywhere on the internet without ever having to change your “digital identity.”

Think about it. A whole digital universe at your fingertips. A Metaverse, even.


OpenAI's “Operator” is Facebook's “like” button
23 January 2025 | 12:00 am

OpenAI's “Operator” is Facebook's “like” button

Remember when Facebook convinced us that our websites needed a "like" button in the late aughts? Few, if any, of us at the time knew what Facebook was up to. We all sort of just obliged, and by 2010, tens of millions of websites installed the bit of JavaScript that enabled users to "like" the webpage they were on.

Then Cambridge Analytica happened, and most of us wised up to Zuckerberg's game. He needed a way to secretly track us off Facebook's platforms, but he couldn't just give us a tracking device and ask us all to attach it to our digital legs. (We have legs!) So, Zuck sold his diabolical plan as a “feature.”

This sort of thing happens in tech all the time. I've given it a name— Feature Chum:

Feature chum is a shady business goal presented to consumers as a useful feature to a company’s product line or feature set. Feature chum always benefits the company’s objective of obtaining more power and growth, but not necessarily valuable for the end user.

This past November, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI will soon launch a new AI agent named "Operator" to complete tasks for you across the web. Need to book a flight? Just give Operator all the information you need, ensure you're logged into Priceline (or wherever), and Operator will get it done for you. In fact, let's make sure that you're logged into all your web accounts so that Operator has access to them.

See where this is going?

Eventually, every big tech company will offer its users feature chum so that it can wrap its tentacles around your digital self. Facebook did it with the like button. Google did it with Analytics (and essentially every product since). Now, OpenAI too, will know everything about you the moment you unleash its AI Operator onto your digital world.


The Computational Web
11 December 2024 | 12:00 am

The Computational Web

This note is a placeholder for a potentially longer, more in-depth essay I hope to publish in the future.

Decentralized social media, like blockchain and crypto, promises to topple old power structures and hand the Internet back to the people. But the Internet runs on a stack of technologies, and if you venture just a few layers down, you'll see some familiar faces. The techno-oligarchy is not only alive and well, but it's getting stronger. They moved underground to the Internet's infrastructure layer.

While companies like Bluesky are open-sourcing the protocol layer, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, and Nadella are building a new Internet on which those open-source technologies will run. It's an Internet that relies on massive kingdoms of data centers, thousands of miles of deepsea cable, and billions of dollars in specialized GPUs. This is Web 3.0. This is The Computational Web.

I'm defining The Computational Web by the increasingly massive amounts of computing required to run the modern Internet, thanks to AI and decentralized technologies and the elite group of tech firms that can meet those demands—Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM). The more we expect these eyewatering levels of computation from our apps and websites, the more The Computational Web takes hold as the successor to Web 2.0.

Take AI, for example. We may not like it, but these large language models and recommendation engines have been able to intertwine into our daily lives in a way blockchain and crypto haven't. AI is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Compute is expensive and increasingly difficult to scale. These hurdles make compute accessible only to the largest tech firms in the world. Shoehorning AI features into our apps isn't just tech bros following their tail. It's a strategy to set the expectation that all consumer technology requires resource-hungry AI. If all technology requires AI, and only a handful of companies are equipped to handle the computational power that Al requires, then computation becomes a moat too deep for competition to cross. The Computational Web grows stronger.

"Computational power, or compute, is a core dependency in building large-scale Al. […] It is profoundly monopolized at key points in the supply chain by one or a small handful of firms." –AI Now, Computational power and AI

We can debate what Web 3.0 will be, but it's been here the whole time, and it's not Web3.

Decentralized social media, blockchain, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence are part of the new web, just as the automobile is part of the electric battery market. Tesla isn't an automobile manufacturer. It's a battery company that sells the most battery-hungry product possible. Similarly, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta aren't platform companies. Not anymore, at least. They're an Internet infrastructure oligopoly that sells retail computing power (Meta is not quite there yet, but I believe they're pivoting to offering cloud computing services).

What we're seeing with all these computing-hungry products and decentralized networks is just the top layers of the stack falling in line for the new iteration of cyberspace—The Computational Web.

So, I wonder, how can we have this new decentralized Internet if all the infrastructure required to run it is owned by just four companies?

Computational Power and AI

Big tech’s great AI power grab

The Great Computing Power Chase: Why It Matters and How We’ll Win

How cloud computing became a global monopoly

Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world, sources say



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