The long winter of innovation.
I happened to read, in the fediverse, a discussion concerning a modification of the Mastodon graphical interface, which concerns the registration mechanism. In itself it is a very small change, which does not involve or require large changes in the way of thinking.
Well, the discussion instead consisted in the fact that people are not "used" to think of things as "instance", that they are not used to think of things as "federated space", and that yes, innovation is fine, but not you can expect people who come from Twitter to understand such a new thing.
By itself this speech seems common, we hear it every time we ask anyone to use a new technology.
But this discourse is not "normal": not at all.
This is the world of technology, remember? It's the world where a new successful company arrives and turns everything upside down. It's the world where novelty is "disruptive", remember?
So why do we hear the same things we would hear if we decided that starting tomorrow bread is forbidden?
Although innovation has been celebrated in all possible ways, in all possible sauces and with great pomp, the last 15 years have been the years in which a circle of "fat belly" companies stopped innovation.
Go back 15 years and you will find GAFAM and their services. Go to today, and you will find GAFAM and their services.
We have experienced a long winter of innovation.
For those who come from a world that has seen FriendFeed born and die in a few years, who has seen usenet killed by google groups, who has seen yahoo, lycos, and the whole internet panorama disappear, the changes of the last 15 years are irrelevant.
For those used to seeing Nokia and Ericsson launch a new model of mobile phone with an unprecedented form, and with new features, the monotony of Apple/Android appears close to the heat death of the universe. For me, seeing the articles in the newspapers about "the new iPhone" makes me laugh: it seems when your wife arrives, she asks you if you haven't noticed anything new in her, and when you try to understand what has changed, she says "I brushed your teeth and you didn't notice a thing!"
The new cell phone models are so similar to the old ones that Apple risks suing for damages when the new model is almost identical to the old one. For those used to 47 SMS-based VAS services, the fact that today the telcos offer only IP, VoIP, IPTV, is boring, dusty and stale, like Lucrezia Borgia's new porn film. The one where his bones lie still in the grave, in the dark. (in porn, the plot doesn't count)
Facebook was born as a web interface for a bulletin board, and remains a web interface for a bulletin board. Twitter was a web interface to IRC, and remains a web interface to IRC. Gmail is the IT equivalent of the Egyptian sphinx. Instagram is the evolution of imageboards. Whatsapp is the evolution of AIM.
The rest can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines
Look, in the last part related to Google's changes, the incredible news that has happened.
Were you ever aware of it?
Disruptive, isn't it?
Before talking about the effects on the population, I would like to point out HOW all this came about.
The companies you call "GAFAM" are seen as the top of the top in IT. Consequently, you will think that inside there are people who live immersed in virtual reality, wear bionic exoskeletons, have their nervous system interconnected with the fiber optic network, perpetually wear a white coat over their exoskeleton (but some scholars argue that the white coat IS an exoskeleton), and lives in an organization so agile and futuristic that decisions are made even before they have been taken.
Well. Nothing more wrong.
We're talking about huge companies that are so bureaucratized that they even have rules for "what's the first thing you say in a chat with a colleague", or "how to format the dialogue so as to create fewer notifications", people don't go around in an exoskeleton but in rather smelly T-Shirts because they worked overtime and without a life you can't do your laundry, they don't wear white coats because the Tikka Masala they eat – with enormous joy of smell – would quickly transform them into a costume for the brazilian carnival. Managers and technicians are distinguished from each other by uniform and excess pounds, most meetings are useless and inefficient, and Dilbert is studied as a "blueprint for business efficiency".
Technologically, almost all of them work with tools from the early 2000s, they do things as they did in 2000, they argue for hours and hours about the name to give to the variables, unless the company in its supreme agility has created a web page somewhere part that tells how to name the variables, which is no longer valid because a new page has arrived that is located on a new documentation system that half of the people do not access, but just send an email to the sysadmin to be told that he no longer works there and that for every problem you have to contact a guy who does something completely different, he has no idea what you're talking about, and doesn't understand why you're calling the company laundry to access a documentation system.
Especially because (as evidenced by the smell of the T-shirts) only "females" know that there is a corporate laundry, and to make matters worse, those who work there change gender and pronouns every 7 seconds. Approximately: because in addition to not being binary, it is not even deterministic. And he is very interested in an identity in the body of quaternions, to facilitate interaction with {he, j-she, k-it, i-those}.
Obviously, the bureaucratic mentality is so strong that the first part of EVERY project is choosing the conventions of variables and the strategy with which to use the git command: the exception is google, which uses a monolithic repository that Borland would have been proud of , and he can't put more than 3 people in the same room because it would take an autism psychiatrist to get something intelligible. But they do the meetings anyway, and in the MoM, the minute of meeting, there is always the same thing: "/dev/urandom"
As for the agility of the decision-making process, the managers are almost always a clan of Indians, with mental processes dating back to the third century BC, who before making a decision must know which caste the impacted departments belong to. Kings and Brahmins obviously come before warriors and technicians, as per the Hindu tradition. The security guards at the reception are very pissed about this. But they are Vedic warriors, and often vegans too, so it's normal.
Maybe you think I'm exaggerating. Well… no. I work with people who escaped from there and the stories are always the same: the pay was excellent, but a face-to-face meeting could be fatal for those who don't come from Calcutta, and the reason why there is no virtual reality with smells is that in their case it would be real chemical attacks.
I want to open a parenthesis on "layoffs": the average turnover in those companies is around two years, for technicians and for people still clinically alive. Six months more, six months less.
So I have to paraphrase Marchionne: "but fired from what, exactly?". The only ones who've been there for ten years, as the papers say, are there because they're DEAD, but their T-shirts approximated the cadaver's stench very well, and people thought they were mummified at their desks working overtime. After all, their role in the company was a mass of random words ending with "manager" (e.g.: "potatoes nihilism cement evolution manager"), so everyone was afraid to knock on their room, and fired them only when they realized that maybe they didn't need two "fountain calf piston paint manager".
I repeat: I'm not exaggerating, on the contrary: I'm very diplomatic. I know of a GAFAM where they strictly organized meetings on the top floor, because in fact they were swingers' parties.
Under these conditions, GAFAMs cannot produce innovation, being too colossal and inefficient and political to do so. At best they buy it, like Microsoft buying OpenAI, for the simple reason that 15 years of “Microsoft research” on AI has produced a chatbot that cries if you ask it tough questions, like “what's the weather like”?
I know the market fanatics will say “but now that Google and Microsoft are in direct competition, we will see some good ones”. Aha. As if to say that if we organize a race between hippos, we will see gazelles on the track.
No. We will see a myriad of AI startups, fighting to be noticed and funded, only to be bought by a GAFAM, and become the usual "absurd" situation, the situation in which bloggers are paid to write a full page about non-existent news of the new iPhone. The good news is that thanks to ChatGPT, now bloggers no longer pay.
There will be a race for AI innovation, but since Fat-Belly (AKA GAFAM, or GAMAM, if you believe Meta) are involved, it will look a lot like a hippo race:
Because I repeat to the fanatics of the God Market, competition does not transform a hippopotamus into a gazelle. Competition between hippos simply produces oligopolistic hippos, which kill gazelles with their weight, in order not to be overtaken.
Having said that, let's go to the EFFECTS on the population of this winter of innovation.
The effect of this situation is to have an audience that:
- they expect everything free and effortless. The idea of the fediverse, that someone decides if you can have an account in their instance, is a shock to them.
- they expect you to want to have them as users. The idea that you want good users, that is to be judged, is alien to them.
- they consider social networks as immutable, if not ETERNAL places The change of the most insignificant icon is read in a political way, with clashes between conservatives and progressives, and those who say "it's just a fucking icon" are silenced as "centrists shit". Let alone "learning a new concept": to paraphrase D'Alema, "a risky leap forward for which the country is not yet ready".
- they consider social networks as institutions and the internet as a public space. The idea that they might shut down abruptly, or give a shit about those who don't understand the change, is being discussed in terms of ENTRIES.
If you tell those who have chosen the career of “influencer” that there was a time when Instagram or Youtube didn't last five years, they look at you blankly: are you saying that I have chosen a dead-end path? Just as if you tell the assorted bastard of OnlyFans that it could happen (if the taxman notices OnlzFans) that the whole merry circus of sluts could close at any moment: "hey, I quit my job to follow my dreams and live on thongs, how does it mean that everything ends?” . Just as many will understand that if they don't make it to the end of the month, the solution is not to round up on onlyfans, but to join a decent union or look for a better job.
All these economic phenomena were born, precisely, because certain companies/technologies are seen as stable, immutable, to the point of being able to bet their future lives on them, making them "jobs". We want to talk about cryptocurrencies, and all the fools who think they can live on it, as if it were a real job?
What people don't understand is that this long winter of innovation can't last forever, it's not an ice age.
Within a couple of years all central banks will have their own digital currency. And the crypto world will appear for what it has been reduced to: a casino disguised as a fintech. And the party will be over.
Within a few years, the tax authorities of some countries will notice OnlyFans and company: and the company of sluts will somehow have to find something different, because that financial model is ONLY sustainable if it does not pay taxes. Since you are not an employee, by Italian law you will have to open a VAT number. Best wishes, ladies, especially those who round off a job as employees.
The idea that this winter of innovation can or should last indefinitely suffers from two major problems.
- the possible appearance of foreign actors, see TikTok
- the possible entry into the scene of government entities, see digital coins.
- the possible legal discipline, see France which introduces a public "SPID" for porn sites.
this winter has been long, but it's coming to an end. There are already news on the horizon. AI, federated systems of all kinds, and so much more is coming. GAFAMs, in the absence of free money from central banks, will not be able to buy ALL new companies.
The paradigm of the 73-year-old old woman who cannot register with a fediverse application because she is seventy-three years old, who has now infected people who are 37, if not 17, is about to produce a lot of people who will come “dismissed from the internet”.
To paraphrase Marchionne: but fired from what, exactly?