Episode 154 - Googlezon
The Local Maximum takes a look back at a video that circulated the internet in 2004 called Epic 2014 that predicts a merger between Google and Amazon, an upheaval in the media landscape, and the rise of internet giants. Max and Aaron review the predictions made in this video, and talk about what it means for our present and future.
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PROMO CODE: Max
Links
Epic 2014/Epic 2015 Website
YouTube: Epic 2015
Wikipedia: Dartmouth Workshop on AI
Daily Mail: Jack Dorsey Defends Banning Trump
Metro UK: What is Blue Sky, Twitter’s Blockchain Project
Mastodon Devs: Throws Shade on Blue Sky
Metro UK: MeWe (Facebook Alternative) Downloaded a Million Times in 72 Hours
Related Episodes
Episode 36 on the Google Graveyard
Episode 91 on Ad Tech with Shoshana Wodinsky
Episode 153 on the coming decentralizations
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 154.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. This is a co-hosted show, of course, today joined by Aaron. How are you doing today?
Aaron: Hi dee ho neighbors.
Max: That's a new one.
Aaron: I saw some Simpsons meme today, so it's floating around in the back of my head.
Max: Okay. Okay. So where are we gonna start today? Oh my god. So, let's start with the decentralization episode from last week because I was surprised at how much of a positive feedback I got. Sometimes, I listen to all these other podcasters and all these other creators, whether it's a Local or somewhere else, and like they're on fire, and I'm like, "Wow, this guy's putting together..." And I sort of rounded up the news stories and gave some good reporting. But I was a little bit disjointed. So I'm glad that people saw the value in that.
Aaron: I think everyone's been a little disjointed in the last 7 to 10 days. It's been interesting times.
Max: Yes, yes. So I just want to follow up on that story because there's obviously in terms of, like, the decentralization of the internet, which is a slow-moving 10-15 years story, as we'll get to in a little bit. But now, this week is the time things are moving very fast.
And so I saw a bunch of messages on Twitter from Anthony Pompliano. Anthony Pompliano, @pomp, I think. And he writes a lot about Bitcoin. He's a big Bitcoin investor. And he also really believes that the decentralization decade is coming, he sort of gave, he went through like the bet of the 1990s with the internet, the bet of the 2010s is mobile, and cloud, and some social, and the bet of the 2020s will be decentralization, and I thought yes. And this really goes along well with classification system that Chris Dixon gave, which was 1990 to 2005 web, decentralized web 2005 to 2020, big tech web, Facebook, Google, all that. And then 2022—presumably 2035, is the decentralized era. Or at least, that's when we'll be building it. I assume we don't get to enjoy the fruits of it so much. Until the end of the era, although many people are already enjoying the fruits of Bitcoin, to be sure.
Aaron: Yes, and I guess we've seen a bit of chatter in The Local as well, with responses to tyour last show, I think particularly...
Max: Yes.
Aaron: ...around, was it Mastodon and people checking that out?
Max: Yes, yes. Some people are checking out Mastodon, which is the alternative to Twitter. I have not personally been able to get really into it yet. But I think it's interesting. Like just because I can't get into it. Well, then again, I don't tweet that much. So it's like, so maybe I'm not the person to get started. Now, I'm just putting my random thoughts. I'll go on Locals, maybe, so you all can get them on maximum.locals.com to connect with me directly.
But I think that I'm sort of starting to learn about it. Because if I've learned one thing about valuing startups, and I know Mastodon isn't a startup, it's a collection, but it's like growth matters. And the growth has been tremendous. Are we still allowed to say tremendous? That's gonna be a problem. No, but it has been.
Aaron: It's been hugely tremendous.
Max: Oh, no, that's clearly out.
Aaron: Bridge too far.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: So, I am not yet on Mastodon. But much like you, I've been putting things that previously I might have sent directly to you as a private conversation, I've been sharing some of those thoughts over on The Local as well, so...
Max: Oh, good.
Aaron: And I'm glad to see that some of our listeners have been chiming in on some of those topics.
Max: I'm surprised because—pleasantly surprised because I had a Facebook group for the whole time, and nobody ever said anything on the Facebook group. So, there's something about these Locals where it's like it's just us or just the Locals that you subscribe to. That is very interesting.
Aaron: I would be very curious to see how many of the members of the maximum.locals.com are also members of other Locals. Or if we are the participation that has brought them to the platform. Because I think that may have been part of the problem over on the Facebook side is that there's so much other stuff going on that maybe they add you to their feed, but you get drowned out in all the noise there.
Max: Right, especially since my feed was just announcing new episodes, which I do on locals, but, it's, there's...
Aaron: There's more than that going in there.
Max: ... there's more random thoughts on the feed. Yes. Okay, so another follow-up, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, defends banning Trump as the right decision. But he says that he wants to work on a crypto version of Twitter, and he's calling it "Blue Sky." And so he says, "This is going to be the decentralized Twitter and then we're going to put Twitter on top of it."
And so I haven't found too much specifics on how Blue Sky would work. There's one article in—I believe it's Metro saying that it's that they're trying to make it more blockchain-y. It’s model on Bitcoin, whereas Mastodon is just decentralized, not a Blockchain. But the Mastodon developers are skeptical. They kind of think Dorsey is working on something that's competing with them in order for him to have control over. But he also said that, "Hey, I just appointed a small team of five people to do this, and they have complete freedom to identify and use existing technology."
But also, in another interview with Jack Dorsey that came out today, he said that Twitter needs to stamp down harder on some of the conspiracy theories and whatnot on Twitter. So which maybe is not necessarily inconsistent with wanting to build this freer platform, but maybe it is. I don't know. He's giving mixed messages.
Aaron: Yes, I would be very interested to see something that is Blockchain-based because presumably, that would mean that you can't censor...
Max: Uncensorable.
Aaron: ...once it goes up there. It's there; you can alter it.
Max: Right. Even Mastodon can basically you can collude and censor, I think, theoretically.
Aaron: Granted it's very much buzzword bingo at this point since we don't know what's actually going on under the hood here. But the idea of having an uncensorable layer and then sit on top of that you have your Twitter interface, which among its features could be a filter to filter out all the stuff they view as objectionable. And you could use this viewer this interface to view that blockchain, or you could have some other viewer interface that maybe it's via Gab or Parler or something that's hooked into the same blockchain but has a different set of filtering criteria. And you've talked about having competing filter models as a solution to some of these problems before..
Max: Right.
Aaron: This might be a way to operationalize that vision.
Max: Yes, I mean...
Aaron: I don't know if I have faith in Twitter being the one to do that properly. But I like the idea.
Max: No, some people might like it. If you're happy with the way Twitter is filtering, then...
Aaron: If you like your Twitter, you can keep it.
Max: Yes. In some ways, they don't filter. Like, if you go to your Twitter feed, it might be okay if you follow the people you want to follow. But when you look up their news items on the right, then it's all just like the whole random bunch. It's just like, you get your news item.
Aaron: In terms of what's a branding?
Max: It's just a bunch of crap. Well, like the people who are commenting on it, so that feature is kind of broken, I think. Yes.
So, you also see these alternative social platforms. Another one is MeWe that are just starting to shoot up to the App Store. It's like every day, another one is shooting up. I haven't seen anything like this for a long time. The App Store has been stable for many years and had been considered saturated. So, this is very interesting development.
Aaron: Yes, and Parler was shooting to the top of the list for a while until they got deep-sixed...
Max: Yes.
Aaron: ...or torpedoed or however you want to put it. So, I'm curious how long MeWe is going to be able to ride this wave before either outside influence or their own stumbling causes them to topple. Because I...
Max: Right, well, I think...
Aaron: ...even if they don't screw something up or get torpedoed, they can't stay at the top of that store forever. Something's gonna happen.
Max: Sure, sure. And it's not like—they need an excuse to get rid of you. Parler kind of handed them excuses and also made themselves vulnerable to it. So I think a lot of these other platforms we're saying, "Okay, we have to have a game plan if they do X, Y, and Z to us," and I think they're also seeing, "Hey, this is how we can kind of tamp down on some of the crazier stuff in our platform to make it less likely for this to happen." But—and yet still be independent of what these other groups are doing, of what the big tech companies are doing.
Aaron: Yes, and those backup plans are certainly sensible.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: And anyone in this space who isn't doing that is committing malfeasance at this point because we know it's a real risk.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: But there's definitely a case to be made for prior restraint coming into play here that if they think that the results of unrestricted speech or less restricted speech could be this deplatforming, then they're going to be incentivized to exercise more censorship. And is that desirable or not?
Max: Yes, but...
Aaron: I think those are discussions to be had there.
Max: I think they'll just do the bare minimum kind of, it's—they won't do what Twitter is doing. I mean, there's been like a massive deplatforming of tons of people. Somehow I'm still standing. I haven't lost users. But I see a lot of people…
Aaron: I wonder how much of it is—there's an actual line that you can go up to, but if you cross it, then you're in trouble versus whoever the one that furthest to, I hate to put this in terms of left and right, but just assume a spectrum here. And whoever is the furthest to one side of the spectrum, they're gonna get lopped off no matter where the line is actually drawn. And once they're gone, well then, the next person up is on the chopping block. So, maybe now that Parler is...
Max: But who's the next one? I don't know.
Aaron: I don’t assume—does that make MeWe next on the chopping block? And is there anything they can do? Other than shifting themselves far enough in the other direction that somebody else is now the nail that sticks up?
Max: Yes.
Aaron: I don't have a good answer to that, I'm kind of trying to get a sense of what the real landscape is out there.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: That being said, I'm not on any of these platforms. So, I don't have a good sense of what's really going on, on the platform itself or if it should be a victim or subject to these types of actions.
Max: MeWe, to me, just seems like a clean Facebook at this point. I haven't seen any crazy stuff on it. Actually, some of the groups I was in on Facebook have moved, migrated over to MeWe, and it seems like they are less vitriolic on MeWe than they ever were on Facebook.
Aaron: Yes, I've heard of a bunch of groups, actually starting pretty early in 2020, shifting over to MeWe, mostly because key members of the group were getting repeated bans. And so it wasn't worth it for them to try and fight it and stick it out.
Max: Interesting.
Aaron: And then they decided to move camp.
Max: I think it was more like Facebook started harassing the group owners and like...
Aaron: Yes, exactly. That's what I mean. Yes.
Max: Yes. I t's interesting that—I've been on a bunch of Facebook groups, and every once in a while, these Nazis come on and try to Nazi it up. And I have seen that...
Aaron: Now, when you say Nazis, do you mean, like, literal white supremacist, anti-semitic, or are we talking, like, grammar Nazi Nazis, but not just grammar, but, thatkind of vitriol in some other field?
Max: Like, well, let's just say it was like, literally—I hate literally Nazi now. But it was like, use people who were hurt.
Aaron: Yes, I wouldn't expect that you would use the term as generic a-hole substitute.
Max: Right.
Aaron: You're using it a little bit more specifically than that.
Max: No, yes. In some of the more open groups on Facebook, I've seen those crop in, and even if they weren't Nazis, they were whatever racist or whatever and really racist, not just... But like, MeWe I haven't seen that yet. So, maybe it's just my experience, but that I find that theory interesting how Facebook has gotten so ugly. And that nobody talks about it.
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Aaron: One with magnitude.
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Aaron: I haven't listened to any of them yet. But I've already got Scott Kelly's Go For Launch course on my shortlist, along with about a half a dozen other courses that I want to take a look at and check out. So, hopefully, I'll be able to report back more on those in the near future.
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All right. Another thing, another quote that I saw, I think this was from Anthony Pompliano, I'm not sure, "The crypto version of any project ends up being a lot more valuable." Now it's a little bit interesting because people sort of conflate the crypto, like a Blockchain project and a decentralized project like Mastodon. They're not really the same thing. But they sort of have the same idea. And obviously, a Blockchain project is something you set in motion; you can't stop. So that's like the most secure.
Aaron: Blockchain, by its very nature, is decentralized, I think.
Max: Yes, it's a subset.
Aaron: But not all decentralized projects must use blockchain.
Max: Exactly. Exactly. All right. So all of these tech stories that we're talking about, we're gonna continue to follow them as we come back every week on The Local Maximum, maybe not every week, but it seems like in the near future, a lot of weeks.
I always feel like when you go through times like this, it'll be interesting to think like, "What are we going to think about this 5 years from now? Or 10 years from now? Or we make these kinds of forecasts about Blockchain technology? About decentralized technology? What's going to come true 10 years from now, what are we going to get wrong?" And I feel like, since we try to project out so many years, you also kind of have to go back and look at past projections that people have made a long time ago.
And so I wanted to talk about this video. This is a viral video that came out in 2004. Now, there was no YouTube at the time. So how do you have a viral video?
Aaron: I was just gonna ask when YouTube came along because I didn't think it was there at the time.
Max: No, no, it wasn't there yet. I don't know how it went viral. But it was something that was like going around the internet. I don't know how it was.
Aaron: And it was Flash...
Max: Yes.
Aaron: ...which interestingly enough, we are—so we're recording on the 14th of January. So 14 days ago, Flash was officially deprecated on the internet. It stopped working.
Max: Oh, but the videos are now available on Youtube.
Aaron: Yes. Yes, they've been ported over. But the original no longer works because of that.
Max: Okay, so this video is called Epic 2014, and then there's another one, Epic 2015, where they just added a few extra sentences and extra year. And so this was kind of from the standpoint of 2004. And they were trying to project out the next ten years of media on the internet. So, it was a presentation given to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Tampa, Florida.
So, they were talking to media people about how technology is coming for you, and how it's going to change your world, of course, it did. Now, the same Institute runs fact-checker PolitiFact, which didn't exist in 2004. So they are now part of the Borg, as they say. So, they tried to predict the future of what we now called big tech, and they had a lot to say on news and blogging, and journalism. And we want to see how they did.
So again, 2004, Facebook was a small college thing. I was on Facebook. Maybe it was going around Facebook a little bit. No iPhones, no YouTube, no Twitter. Not a lot of text messaging. They talked a lot about Friendster app, actually, which was the proto-Facebook. So, when they say, “Well, Friendster will do this, and Friendster will do that.” You’ll be kind of thinking, "What are they saying?"
Aaron: I'm surprised that you didn't even mention MySpace because I think it was around at that point, right? Or...
Max: Yes. It would have been.
Aaron: ...you think it come along after that? I know it preceded Facebook, right?
Max: Yes, yes. I feel like MySpace, like people in the media, were still using it as the dominant social network in like, 2010. When, in 2010, Facebook was clearly the dominant one. The people are a few years behind on that stuff.
Aaron: We have to remember that people in the media, there was a long stretch where it was only really available and used by people who were in college.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: So even though it had grown across the country and across the world, it was very much a college kid thing.
Max: Until like, 2007.
Aaron: Not a professional thing.
Max: Yes, yes, exactly. Okay. So let's talk about what they said. Let's actually open up the—let's listen to the beginning of this, just the first minute of this video.
Aaron: Okay.
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. In the year 2015, people have access to a breadth and depth of information, unimaginable in an earlier age. Everyone contributes in some way- participating to create a living, breathing mediascape. However, the press, as you know it, has ceased to exist. The fourth estate's fortunes have waned. 20th-century news organizations are an afterthought, a lonely remnant of a not too distant past.
Max: Okay, so that from the standpoint of 2004. And just in broad terms, I think they—well, I mean, maybe it wasn't that hard to see, but seeing the total disruption of the press was certainly—it is nothing like it looked 20 years ago.
Aaron: Yes. And so I assumed that most of the facts that they had up to 2004 were pretty on the dot, things like Google buying Blogger they mentioned happening in 2003.
Max: Right.
Aaron: I even fact-checked that. But I'm assuming that until they got to the future part, they didn't alter the timeline.
Max: Right. Right? So they mentioned Google buying Keyhole...
Aaron: And Picasa.
Max: ...which was kind of the key to Google Earth, Images, yes, which—does that still exist? Or it's just Google Photos?
Aaron: I think It's just Google Photos now.
Max: Yes.. So right, they have the timeline of the internet up to 2004. And remember, in terms of the Chris Dixon thing, this is 2004 is around the time when we're switching from the decentralized net to the big tech net. And then now is the time we're kind of switching back. So they're kind of talking about this big 15 year, I know they're doing 10 years, but they're talking about—just to fit it in with like, kind of Chris Dixon's timeline. They're sort of fitting into this big fixed 15-year block of consolidation of media in web technology. And basically, it's interesting because the outcome they're talking about is the outcome we're in now that we're kind of sliding out of. So, that's where we are, okay.
Aaron: If we are sliding out of it?
Max: If we're sliding out of it, right. So they talk about, they think that—so, they think Microsoft is going to buy Friendster. And it's interesting because Microsoft did invest heavily in Facebook. But when you talk about the social apps—they did see social coming, but they used Friendster as a cycle.
Aaron: Well, then, and they now own LinkedIn, I believe.
Max: Yes, Microsoft owns LinkedIn.
Aaron: There's something very Microsoft about, like, if IBM or Microsoft were to own a social network, obviously it would be LinkedIn.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: It's like the most suit and tie version of a social network you could come up with.
Max: Right, right. Okay. And they also talk about—they say, okay, in a few years, Google is going to come up with this thing called the Google Grid. Now I'm trying to wrap my head around what their version of the Google Grid was and then what actually happened. But it kind of sounds like a Facebook, Twitter with really good privacy controls. Like, they're like, “ Everybody will have privacy controls.” I'm like, "Yes."
Aaron: I think the way they talk about it and the visual that goes with it. It's basically that, "All your data goes here, all of it. And you can pick and choose what is privately stored and only visible to you, and you can pick what to publish."
Max: Yes.
Aaron: And they don't talk about publishing it to different groups. So it's unclear whether that's a—there's—it's kind of a binary private versus global setting or not. But basically that all your data is going to be with them. And it's also giving you the power to share it with everybody else.
Max: Right. So, there was Google Buzz that maybe was a little bit like this as well. I think we did an episode called The Google Graveyard.
Aaron: Yes.
Max: Do you remember that one? Which is I'm trying to let me see if I can get the...
Aaron: There was Google Buzz, there was Google Plus, there was Google Reader. And those all kind of moved close to that area, but none of them fully materialized into this, what they're calling the Google Grid.
Max: Episode 36. So the Google Grid can almost be thought of as all of social media today, I think. And so they have that coming about in 2006 and 2008 with Microsoft. In reality, it took a lot longer for those things to come to fruition.
So, they talked about Microsoft sorting news socially with their new Friendster acquisition, really, it ends up being Facebook, sorting news socially in Twitter, sorting news socially with comments for everybody. So, what they're talking about, it sounds very, Facebook, Twitter-like, but of course I feel like they also had a lot of stuff about Google writing news articles using AI, which does happen quite a bit. But their description of lwriting a different article for each user was—that's clearly not something that happens.
Aaron: They didn't have that happening until 2010. After the merger, which I guess I buried the lede there.
Max: Oh, did I skip ahead in the timeline?
Aaron: Well, with that super synthesized news. Yes.
Max: Yes. Okay. Okay. So sorry.
Aaron: So, popping back for a second to what was it that happened in 2006, when they came out with a Google Grid. The other thing they mentioned is that Google consolidates all of its businesses or all of its products into this Google Grid. And that made me think about when did Google become Alphabet? And apparently, that was in 2015.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: But even now, five, plus years later, they haven't—Alphabet is just kind of a parent company, a holding company. It's not like all of those projects and programs and sub-companies under it have truly merged into one mega beast. It's more that it's a hydra with many heads, rather than one giant Mechagodzilla, and I'm mixing my monster metaphors there. But however.
Max: Right. So, right, they predict the 2008 merger of Google and Amazon. And that's why it's called the Googlezon video. So they're like, and they make Googlezon. And that never happened. But those companies are incredibly symbiotic. Amazon is Google's biggest advertiser. Yes, that makes sense. Because they have lots of products they advertised, they have the most information. And Google is Amazon's biggest source of traffic.
Aaron: And presumably, Google search is somehow rolled into the Amazon product, I would expect.
Max: In the fictional world that they're creating? Or the real one?
Aaron: It definitely—well, so they mentioned back in 2004, Amazon launching A9, which I think was a real thing using Google search. I don't know to what extent Google search is used inside of the Amazon ecosystem today.
Max: Right, right. And of course, back then, Amazon didn't get into cloud computing yet, which now they're in. So now, they control half the internet. I find it interesting.
Aaron: Yes. I mean, the Google Grid, I certainly visualize it as a cloud. But there's nothing in here that predicts cloud computing, necessarily.
Max: Right. I think back then you sort of, like, you can sort of see that that's basically what they're talking about, even though that's not what they called it back then.
Aaron: Well, and part of that is that the cloud is a weird metaphor that we use.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: The cloud is really just a fancy way of saying putting your stuff on other people's computers.
Max: Yes
Aaron: There's nothing special about it being the cloud.
Max: Right, right, right. The cloud. And you kind of think of the cloud is, it's almost like a metaphor for centralization, where I'm not going to keep things locally. I'm going to keep things in... And now, Amazon is not a central location like if you upload something to Amazon servers. It could be anywhere. It could be broken up into many different pieces, but it's centrally controlled.
Aaron: Right.
Max: So, okay, so they have...
Aaron: Physically distributed but logically centralized.
Max: Right. So they have this Googlezon company, this mega tech company that merged in 2008. Create user profiles of all of us. Interestingly enough, they used Winston Smith as the example user profile. Who is the...
Aaron: Paging George Orwell.
Max: Yes, the protagonist of 1984, which is a book that has been discussed many times these days. I think a lot more people are saying, "Hey, George Orwell's book 1984 describes this time, than they were saying it in 2005-2004." There's certainly some parallels you could find back then. But not nearly as much. That's actually when I read it. And I remember thinking, "Oh, wow, this is an interesting book, interesting academic exercise. I don't really find it that relevant to my life." And then...
Aaron: Fools. All of us.
Max: ...15 years later, yeah. Then 15 years later, like, "Oh, well, actually, it's a lot of stuff that is so relevant.”
Aaron: That's at least the second literary reference that we get in the video because, in the opening bit, I think the clip that you played, we get the opening lines of A Tale Of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." I'm not sure quite what to read in from that. But definitely, some literary references buried in here.
Max: The people who made the video are well-read.
Aaron:That’s why I read it too.
Max: So, no, I mean, I'm sure they were trying to say—there's some truth to that too. Right? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Aaron: That was the time of the revolution. Was it not? The French Revolution?
Max: Yes.
Aaron: I presume it's the guy who was being held on the Bastille. It's been a long time since I've read that.
Max: 2020 and 2021 are probably not the best of times. But I think you could almost say that about maybe 2018 is the best of times, the worst of times. Everyone's great. And I think once we come out of this pandemic, if the economy's good, it'll again be the best of times and the worst times at the same time if we don't fix what's going on with our technology. So I do see how that line kind of works. So, right.
Aaron: The other thing they call that happening in 2008 was The New York Times moving to a paid online-only subscription model. They haven't moved to online-only, but they are leaning much more heavily today into the online subscription mode.
Max: I have an online subscription with them. I don't know if I should advertise that. But I do. And it's, yes, that is basically what they—well, I don't know. I don't know where most of their revenue comes from. I assume it comes from the online subscriptions more than the papers, but I could be wrong.
Aaron: That would be interesting to see what their breakdown is.
Max: Yes. Okay. But it's definitely a much bigger deal. If you remember back to 2004. I don't think there were papers that we're doing online subscriptions.
Aaron: It's tough to remember back then. I feel like you probably could get an online subscription to The New York Times at that point. But it was so that you could do the crossword puzzle. So, you can print out the crossword puzzle. Not...
Max: Not to read their articles.
Aaron: ...that you were realistically only using it online. Or if you were, that certainly wasn't the bulk of their model?
Max: Yes, I don't think they had their articles behind the paywall either. So there was that too because we recycle these technologies.
Aaron: I remember creating an account when I was in college so that I could read articles online, but I definitely wasn't paying anything to do it.
Max: Right. Right. All right. Interesting. And now they have The New York Times Archive, which is fantastic. You can go back and read anything since, like, 1851.
Aaron: Yes, that's kind of mind-blowing. That what used to have to go to a library and dig out stacks and stacks of microfiche, you can do with a touch of a keyboard from your own home today.
Max: Yes, yes. I kind of wish other newspapers had that, like, the New York Post or whatever because we’re always, New York Post is such an old paper in New York. And it's changed viewpoints multiple times. I kind of be interested to see what it had to say in like 1983 or something.
Aaron: Yes, I'm sure that, like, the Library of Congress probably has an archive of it, but it maybe isn't fully digitized and searchable by the public at this point. I wonder how the copyright and that kind of thing works for that.
Max: Yes, yes. Okay. So let's get back to the video and what they predict. They predict, kind of, this master algorithm where Google uses natural language processing to take facts available on a given day and presents it to us in a personalized way. So we each get the most relevant news.
Aaron: Yes, that sounds going a level beyond what we currently get, which is picking out the news stories and articles and headlines that you might be interested in reading. And literally breaking it down on a fact-by-fact sentence-by-sentence basis, and then re-mixing it for you personally, which we haven't seen that level of intelligence being applied to. I'm sure you could do a deep learning approach to this, but I'm kind of afraid of what it would spit out.
Max: Well, right. Like you could say, "Okay, train GPT-3, to work with the individual." GPT-3 doesn't really—yes, it seems like a lot of work to get an outcome that might not have any tangible benefit, to try to have a different writing style for each user. But I understand what that means.
And so I understand the idea of personalized news is obviously what Twitter and Facebook and all these companies were advertising, what they were trying to do, although I don't think we really get personalized news anymore. I feel like we get news that these companies choose for us, essentially.
Aaron: We basically get to choose which echo chambers to subscribe to.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: And actually, it's personalized, but it's not really personalized to you. It's that you've chosen which reality to subscribe to.
Max: But I also think that it's beyond that like these companies do actually decide you can go into an echo chamber. But they do kind of decide what you see within that echo chamber, and they do try—they do tip their hands on the scales, more than you would expect.
Aaron: Sure. And that's not necessarily new. It's just that the editorial power is shifting a little bit here.
Max: Right, right. So I think they were way, way too optimistic about AI. I think a lot of these large language models are still in the works. And it's possible that some of this will never come to fruition. But I don't think it's—I think it will because...
Aaron: I don't think they call that specifically as AI, but that definitely seems to be what they're talking about there.
Max: Right, right. And I think that—but there's been such tremendous progress in the field of language models and pulling out facts and stuff like that. Just listen to the Episode on GPT-3 and all that and what Google's doing. It’s probably something like this is probably comin. Although the thing about natural language is that it always takes longer than expected. I feel like that's going back to like the 50s, where they thought they could model language in with like the—or maybe the 60s with the technology they had then and it just wasn't possible.
Aaron: Was this the Dartmouth conference, or I'm trying to remember the...
Max: I'm not sure.
Aaron: I feel like there was some famous meeting for AI that happened at Dartmouth. And they all got together and basically said, "Based on what we know, we think it'll take a couple of grad students like six months to solve this problem," and then they went off, and it still hasn't been solved today.
Max: Oh, I'd like to find that.
Aaron: I'll have to do some research and see if I can find exactly what I'm talking about there. I might be mixing up some apocryphal stories from...
Max: All right. No, I think that sounds about right. All right. And so then they finally get to 2014. They predict immense advertising revenue.
Aaron: We skipped 2011, where The New York Times sued Googlezon for copyright infringement for continuing to crawl all of their articles and basically re-mixing their news and loses at the Supreme Court.
Max: Yes, so that didn't happen.
Aaron: Although there's certainly been conflict between news organizations, and both Google, and probably moreso, Facebook with, if their stuff gets posted on there, then they don't get any of the ad revenue and so on.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: I don't know if any has gone to the Supreme Court or not. But there's definitely been lawsuits thrown around in that realm.
Max: Right. Right. I have to say is...
Aaron: And I think in the early days, there was some news organizations that were trying to force—I don't know if it was Google or another search engine. It was probably Google—to try and prevent them from crawling their sites because they felt that that was an infringement. I think they ended up losing that. Not clear whether they lost that in the courts or if they just came to the realization that if we don't let Google crawl us, nobody's gonna go to our website.
Max: Right, right. Yes. Who was that?
Aaron: I don't remember the specific news organizations, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was somebody like The New York Times back in the early days.
Max: Yes. Yes. So they predicted 2014, The New York Times goes offline, only its paper print only, just for the elite and elderly. Well, that was not the fate of The New York Times. But a lot of these papers don't carry the half that they once did. That's clearly true.
Aaron: Yes, does Time magazine exist anymore. Where did that one...
Max: Oh, sure.
Aaron: No.
Max: Yes. No, no, that exists.
Aaron: It must be Newsweek I think that disappeared. But there—yes, there are plenty of publications that either disappeared completely or went digital-only.
Max: Yes, I feel like there was a lot more theory that print would just go out of fashion or just be something that nobody did. And they go on printing. And you could still go to whatever like around to your CVS and get all the printed newspapers. So things don't go away that quickly. Or actually, that stuff might never go away, honestly. There’s some sci-fi movies, I think it was Minority Report or also like Harry Potter, where somebody has a newspaper that changes.
Aaron: Yes.
Max: So, it's kind of like a paper E ink type situation. But I wouldn't, the best thing about buying a newspaper is that it's disposable. You could get food on it, you could crumple it up, you can throw it out, use it to line a birdcage.
Aaron: When the Kindle first came out, and this is something that's more or less dropped out of their bag of tricks, but a big piece of it was, "Oh, we can customize your news feed and have news stories from certain publications sent to your Kindle every day." And now with the newer—which is the Kindle Fires you can have—well, because Amazon owns The Washington Post, they basically come with The Washington Post app installed there, and you can install other news apps there. So that's kind of supplanted that. But that's moving away from E ink and towards a color tablet.
Max: Yes, yes. That's interesting. I mean, we haven't really talked about display technologies on the show yet. And those tend to move pretty fast. And I would love to do an episode on that and try to learn a little bit about where they're going. Because E ink's been around for a long time. But I haven't heard of any really cool products in the space of e-readers that have come out recently.
Aaron: The foldable screens seem to keep attempting to launch and then either faceplanting...
Max: Oh, yes.
Aaron: ...or launching but not getting adoption. But there's...
Max: Well, I don't know why that is. So I'd have to look at that.
Aaron: Yes, we're not prepared to talk in detail about that. But let's hit the 2014 highlight here, the apotheosis.
Max: Right.
Aaron: The release of EPIC.
Max: Right, epic. Well, first of all, they predict immense advertising revenue for Google. And that's spot on.
Aaron: Yes.
Max: Especially in 2004 when Google really was only six years old. And people are really just starting to talk about Google in polite conversation. Yes, we had Google in 2001, 2002. But like for me back then, it was kind of like something that I knew about. It was a search engine that I found, and I wouldn't have assumed that other people would know about it. And I think that by 2004, it was clearly like, everybody knows what Google is, but they was just starting.
Aaron: So 2004, when this came out, I'm assuming this is accurate.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: Because it was in the real top before they started forecasting, they have Gmail coming out in 2004. And I remember getting a Gmail invite being like, a hot commodity that you needed to know somebody who knew somebody to do that.
Max: Yes, yes. And eventually, I did, and it was so exciting. And you get one gigabyte of free space. So yes.
Aaron: The amount of free storage to go along with your Gmail account has not grown according to Moore's law.
Max: No, definitely not. I don't know how much it is, but it's not enough.
Aaron: Mine tops out at like, I think, 15, and that might be because I've got some promotional bonuses in there. Not enough. Not enough.
Max: And that's what they say. Okay, so they predict the rise of EPIC in 2014.
Aaron: The Evolving Personalized Information Construct.
Max: Right.
Aaron: How was that for an acronym?
Max: They used E as in like
Aaron: Epsilon?
Max: No, no, no E, as in the constant E, personalized information, Pi as In "P-I" and construct C as in the speed of light. Okay, so contributors can get paid a fraction of ad revenue based on the popularity of their content. So that describes YouTube...
Aaron: Which is a Google company.
Max: ...pretty spot on. Yes, yes. And it was bought by Google in 2006 for $2 billion, one of the best acquisitions of all time.
Aaron: It was that long ago?
Max: Yes, this is one of the best acquisitions of all time because now that thing's worth—I mean, YouTube has got to be one of the major sources of Google's revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if it’s half. And contributors do get paid.
And also, they predicted custom content for each user based on what the system knows of it. So yes, again. Nowadays, a lot of that custom content is in the form of ads. And there is so much money to be made in the ad industry that that thing becomes basically as efficient as it possibly can be. It's like a living, breathing system. And even though we get dumb ads, sometimes, it's amazing how sophisticated the tech underneath is. I'll link to the episode where I talked to Shoshana Wodinsky about the ad tech space.
Aaron: So there's also a little tag on for 2015, I guess, which was their added bonus material.
Max: Right.
Aaron: And they talk about an ex-New York Times reporter who's tagging what they refer to as broadcasts with GPS data and other users joining in. And this sounds—the first thing that popped to mind was microblogging of audio.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: And maybe this is a prescient view of like, TikTok? Or maybe they were thinking something more along the lines of podcasts? But there's a kernel of something that they got there. And if they added this in 2014 or 2015, then maybe that's not that forward-looking because I mean, it was vying around then, when did that happen? And Periscope, my sense of time is all out of whack. But...
Max: That was—yes, that was around 2014.
Aaron: Yes. So there was stuff like this popping up then. But what was new and innovative then is newly trending again now. It's kind of come around again in the cycle.
Max: Right, right. I mean, this almost reminded me of what I'm working on with Marsbot audio, where you can create geofenced audio content. You'll walk around, and all of a sudden, someone, maybe me, comes on and starts talking to you about where you are. So that's really, and of course, it predicts in some ways Foursquare, which wouldn't start for another five years from when they made the video. So where you kind of broadcast your location and a check-in. It’s not audio, but it's a very simple piece of data that could then be sent to all your friends and all that stuff.
So, all right, I think we've gone through the video and everything that they've said on it. Very interesting stuff. Very cool to see what people say about essentially our time in 2004. I mean, I know their prediction was five years ago. But again, this is the prediction of big tech. And that's where we're in now.
And so, let's see if we get some final thoughts on how they did. First of all, I think they did very well, I don't think you could do much better than how they did. I think they benefited from talking to the people who were creating and evangelizing this technology. So they were actually talking... So I don't know who said, like, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” But they were talking to the creators and the investors. And so that sort of gives me optimism for this blockchain tech because a lot of the people who are predicting it are also involved in creating it. So that's really encouraging.
They kind of missed mobile a little bit, although a lot of this stuff can't be done without mobile. I think it was just they did they miss, like how big of a deal it would be in terms of a business opportunity, but also in terms of how it changed all of our lives?
Aaron: Yes. And while they kind of missed it, they did... They got a close but no cigar on one of those items. And actually, let's step back a second is one of the things we skipped over that they did mention, which I think actually did happen in 2004. They talked about the iPod, launching the podcast movement.
Max: Oh, yes.
Aaron: And they refer to it as personal radio.
Max: Yes.
Aaron: It kind of removed the gatekeeper to some extent, much in the same way that blogs did for a lot of early citizen journalism in a pre-Twitter world and even in a pre-Facebook world.
And then they forecast into what then was the very near future in 2005, what they refer to as the the Apple Wi-Fi Pod, which was an iPod with a digital camera and built-in Wi-Fi. So you could share images and audio with other users without having to plug in to connect, which is so close to getting the iPhone prediction, which didn't come out until 2007. But completely changed the landscape for a lot of tech.
Max: Imagine if they went to Steve Jobs and be like, "You need to name this the Wi-Fi Pod..” “The Wi-Fi Pod? Really?" Yes, no, you're right. They did get some of that.
And yes, podcasting as well. I think they overestimated how much podcasting would be tied to a location. Because you think like talk radio has to be tied to a location, or at least it was historically because radio you're usually broadcasting to your city or 100, 200, 300-mile radius, depending on the strength of the radio signal. But now, there are some local podcasts, but I think that they are less common than just general podcasts about a topic of interest.
Aaron: Yes, I mean, it's a different kind of niche. But the freedom of the medium lets you pursue that because you don't have the—necessarily the overhead that would be required in a more traditional approach.
Max: Right.
Aaron: So you can cater to a very niche audience, whether that's geographically niche or niche in their interests.
Max: Yes. And podcasting is, I think, probably the freest medium on the internet right now that we're participating in because it's so decentralized. Somehow escaped the clutches of big tech, or some companies like Spotify trying to get it. But so far, it's been rather...
Aaron: Yes, I'm surprised other than—the only example I can think of is Alex Jones. But I'm surprised. Other than that, we haven't heard of more people being blocked from at least the iTunes store, or whatever they call the podcast, the iTunes podcast store.
Max: Right.
Aaron: Because Apple is well known for taking a walled-garden approach to all of their content in their services. That's where I would first expect to see some sort of censorship occurring there. Rather than...
Max: Well...
Aaron: ...like your SoundCloud or some of your other hosting services.
Max: I think it's because—well, a lot of podcasts are very small. They don't have the time or the resources to check into all of them, even using machine learning. I don't think they're transcribing all our podcasts. Secondly, podcasts don't have comments associated with them. So you don't see all the vitriol that's right in your face that you do on something like a Parler or Twitter or all that. And there are some podcasts out there that are probably censorable. Whether it's Alex Jones censorable, or like Howard Stern censorable, or...
Aaron: I know that they like the explicit tag...
Max: Yes.
Aaron: ...but I don't know whether that's a user, if the creator has to select that or if they have a way of checking for that.
Max: Right, but even so, other podcatchers that they allow, allow you to just type in an RSS feed...
Aaron: Right.
Max: ...or paste in an RSS feed. So you can actually get around all of this pretty easily.
Aaron: Right. I mean, if they actually wanted to censor on that level, then they would have to not only remove it from their store but then they would have to remove all of the other podcatcher apps from the App Store...
Max: Yes.
Aaron: ...which Apple certainly has the ability to do, but that would be a pretty dramatic undertaking.
Max: It would be very dramatic, it would kind of make people not want—yes, it would be extremely dramatic.
Okay, so we covered a lot today, we covered the rising decentralization, we went back 15 years and looked at what they were saying about this particular phase of the internet, and predictions of big tech and warnings of big tech that they gave us from 10 years ago.
One comment that really stuck out at me was, I think, it was the Google Grid. Oh, yes, they're talking about EPIC. And they said, “At its worst, it's a collection of trivia. Much of it untrue. Narrow, shallow, and sensational.” And I was like, “Yes, they know. They know.” So that I think was the best comment in the whole video. And that was the end.
So they basically warned about the whole thing. They saw the whole damn thing coming and raised the alarm. And now we're—now we've got to work to get out of it. But it's cool that people know what's going on. Some of this stuff is predictable.
Aaron: Yes, it's a fascinating view of the future from the past.
Max: Yes, or the fascinating view of the present, really.
Aaron: Yes. I don't know what the lesson we can take from this is.
Max: Well, I think one of the lessons is that forecasting is possible. If they did a pretty good job, but not completely. I think another lesson is that you never know which companies are going to do what, in the end. That's the hardest part to predict. Which specific company is going to get into which thing. And I think the further lesson is, yes, the story is not done. Now we get to create the rest of the story over the next 15 years, which could be very different than the last 15. Those are my three takeaways.
Aaron: To be seen.
Max: All right. Great. Any last thoughts on today's episode?
Aaron: It's very behind the band kind of story here. But apparently, one of the inspirations for this project, when they were creating it, was a massive multiplayer online video game, Ultima Online. And the way in which the users interacted with the environment to change the environment, and how that change the environment affected the other users, and how that influences journalism. So I think it's kind of cool that something completely separate from news and politics and current events, influence them in this way that we've certainly gamified the entire world around us.
Max: I've been a part of that.
Aaron: And see social media exhibit A.
Max: Yes, yes. All right. It is very fascinating.
Aaron: So it feels like we're trying to fight our way out of a dungeon on some days.
Max: Yes, yes. But hey, we did it. We created this amazing world.
Aaron: Hooray.
Max: Aaron, thanks for coming on the show today.
Aaron: Pleasure as always.
Max: All right. Have a great week, everyone.
Max Sklar: That's the show. To support The Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and their online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.
