September 30, 2020 • #
Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.
That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).
This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:
I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually...
✦
August 14, 2020 • #
In his latest issue of The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks the economic models behind the boom in independent publishing and unbundling of analysis and journalism happening on platforms like Substack:
Bundles tend to grow until they reach a highly profitable mature state—at which point any change in the underlying audience, or the availability of competing products, seriously weakens their economics. The bigger a bundle gets, the more likely it is that a subset of users are all paying for basically one piece of the bundle, which could be...
✦
August 8, 2020 • #
My friend Joe Morrison’s latest is an extended rant on the commercial satellite imagery market, and a plea to that industry to rethink how they might improve their go-to-market approaches for selling to commercial businesses.
I can vouch for his account of what it’s like to work with a commercial provider first-hand. Their business models make it challenging to go direct-to-customer, even at fairly high price tags. Until they can lower the barrier to entry into the two-...
✦
July 25, 2020 • #
Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:
From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and...
✦
June 27, 2020 • #
I didn’t realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, and many times after. This retrospective (from 2016) brought the film back to mind and makes me want to rewatch.
Brian Timoney:
Google Earth led us to...
✦
May 22, 2020 • #
A couple weeks ago Ben Thompson and John Gruber launched Dithering, a new podcast they’re doing together with a unique model: 15 minutes per episode, 3 times a week, only for paid subscribers. They launched with a dozen or so episodes in the can from over the previous month, so I’ve already gone through the back catalog.
As with the open web and individual creators running their own web properties (versus only creating for other platforms like Twitter or Medium), I love to see certain folks in the podcast space pushing for business models that allow them to...
✦