Good morning. Hello. How are you? #602
Climbing out of a funk, America is lead poisoned, donating jackets a new theory of tail-end Network Effects
Good morning! Hello. How are you? I am better today, thanks for asking. Was really kind of down yesterday, as you will see from the playlist below. I did have think of one silver lining, though. This pandemic has given me a very convenient excuse for any malaise I’ve had. It’s not a midlife crisis, it’s the pandemic! I’m not in an existential k-hole of despair at mankind, it’s the pandemic! Very convenient.
It’s very hard for me to write a GMHHAY when I am that down. I used to do it a lot more in the worst of the pandemic, but these days, it feels. Well, first off, I am worried I’ll be very convincing in my despair, and bring some of you guys down and it is just rude to make people feel completely hopeless. And secondly, I’ve learned through a lot of years, trial, error and suffering that by far the best way for me to handle my depression is to starve it, to focus on the good in life, to not wallow. You know, like the wise woman Lana Del Rey said, “Hope is a dangerous thing for me to have but I have it.”
As an aside, I’ve always thought that song should have ended in a noise jam freak out where she wails “I have it” on repeat over an increasing swell of avante noise, sorta like the squall in the background of “Headed For The Top” by Spiritualized, while Lana sings it in a Diamanda Galasian voice, ever more intensely until she just passes out from so much hope.
If you are feeling down, do not read this phenomenal column by one of America’s best science reporters, Ed Yong: “How Did This Many Deaths Decome Normal?” Every one of the first six or so paragraphs is just an absolute gut punch. Over and over. Let’s just pick one of them, shall we?
Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. Dying from COVID robbed each American of about a decade of life on average. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century. Neither World War II nor any of the flu pandemics that followed it dented American longevity so badly.
We are going to pass one million Covid deaths in mmm, imagonnasay 30 days or so? Sometime in mid-to-late April. And that’s if things go well. Eh, fuck it, one more quote, I’ll be a real Substacker today and use multiple large block quotes to pad things out:
Why were so many publications and politicians focused on reopenings in January and February—the fourth- and fifth-deadliest months of the pandemic? Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?
Anyway, thank you, Ed Yong, for at least putting this into the record. That some of us are not happy about this path the country’s taken. That some of us object.
In a possibly related bit of news, turns out that half of all Americans are probably suffering from lead poisoning, and it leads to an average of a 2.6 point drop in IQ per person. This took me down a rabbit hole, cuz, my god, how long have we known that lead is poisonous, don’t we, like, routinely attribute lead poisoning to the demise of the Roman empire? Seems like 2,000 years or so should be enough time to suss it out. Turns out it was only the late 70’s when one man figured out that lead was not just poisonous in large amounts, but in small amounts as well. As a reward for the discovery, Dr. Herbert Needleman was subjected to a lifetime of assaults on his integrity, and false accusations of plaigarism by big lead. For a decade. While Americankept getting poisoned.
Feels like maybe this explains almost all of America.
Some good news: Our federal government is poised to finally fix the Postal Service. The bill is headed to Biden’s desk, and he’ll be signing it any day now. The Postal Service, as you probably know, was totally fucked by a bunch of republicans sixteen years ago during the Dubya administration, and required to carry 75 years of retirement funds on its books — separate from the rest of the federal government’s budget, a requirement that no other federal agency is required to do. Obama didn’t fix it. Trump didn’t fix it. It is finally getting fixed now, with bipartisan support even.
Of course, the bill does not remove the evil postmaster, Trump holdover Louis DeJoy, who is ignoring the EPA, the president, and several of his governors by plowing forth and attempting to buy a gargantuan number of new mail trucks with internal combustion engines, even though electric vehicles are perfect for this sort of fleet application. That is a battle that will have to be fought in the courts, since the Senate has, for four months now, failed to consider and confirm Biden’s nominees to the Postal Service Governor’s Board. The Postal Service is the largest non-military governmenal purchaser of automobiles, and we’re talking a 116 thousand new ICE engines on the road so, you know, not a big deal or anything.
A neighbor is part of a group affiliated with a UNC Dean who’s working with some relief agencies on the Ukranian border, along with “the Ukranian version of UPS” (which seems vague but whatever) and they are doing a drive for a bunch of coats for refugees on the border. Seemed concrete enough. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I have so many coats. Fifty coats? God knows. And I never wear any of them. And they are mostly a record of disappointment because they’re really good coats, usually amazing thrift store finds, but in the end they’re too narrow in the shoulders, and I couldn’t really fit into them. Or, you know, still have like 10 Pendleton shirts from the grunge days. That sort of thing. And yes, I’ve been giving money to various causes related to the war, but this seemed like the moment to finally let go. So before I could think too much I went to the closet and pulled out maybe 20 coats and heavy flannels and hoodies and fleeces-with-law-or-accounting-firm-names-on-them that I didn’t need anymore. I mean, I kept all my favorites that actually fit, but I let go a giant number of garments that had emotional value for me, but didnt’ fit. I thanked them for their service, loaded them on a hand truck, and we walked them down to the neighbor’s.
Emma was smart enough to check the pockets in them as she packed them, and one of them had Benjamin Palmer’s business card from 1996 or so, his first Dot Com job, one of the cooler Boston dot coms. So, you know, that’s how long it had been since I wore that particular jacket: twenty-five years I’ve been carring it around.
Apple announced new phones and ipads yesterday (boring) but also a new monitor and an all new computer, a new cube-ish shaped Mac Studio (very exciting) and a new chip, the M1 Ultra (very exciting). The monitor especially looks very exciting, Apple has had only one monitor on offer for the last several years, and it was absurdly expensive, starting at $5,000. But the new one is somewhat more practically priced. The closest analog is the LG Ultrafine 5K monitor for Macs, which retails for $1,295 but you can usually find them for $1k or so. The new Apple monitor starts at $1,599, but almost certainly has much better speakers and camera, since the LG ones suck. But, then, I’ve already fixed that by setting up studio monitors and a Logitec Brio. Still, though, it looks sweet, and it’s nice that it exists again.
The Mac Studio looks exactly like the computer I am waiting for. Insanely fast — faster than my current Mac, which is the fastest Intel Mac ever made, and less than half the price. I was all set to buy it and then at the very end of the presentation they said something like “It’s by far the fastest Apple Silicon Mac ever made, except for the new Mac Pro” which got me so excited because I’ve been waiting for that thing for years now, but then they said “but that’s a topic for another day.” Which is such a tease. I mean, on the one hand, thank you for even letting me know it was coming, becasue I would have been really annoyed to buy this Mac Studio then a few months later learn about an even faster Mac. But also, more waiting before I can transition to Apple Silicon, and now the waiting is worse because Apple Silicon has finally caught up to and surprassed my 28-core Mac in terms of raw speed. Also… what is the Mac Pro even going to have to differentiate itself from the Mac Studio? I don’t really use PCI Cards, and while this thing looks amazing, it is a bit absurdly big for my needs. Apple has said the M1 Ultra is the end of the M1 line, so there won’t be, sadly, an M1 Ultra Mega or something, and I doubt they’re gonna put a a base M2 into the Mac Pro? That would be weird. Double M1 Ultra? Start the M2 line with the M2 Ultra? That seems weird from a chip fab POV. We will just have to wait and see.
Damon Krukowski, of Galaxie 500 and Damon and Naomi, wrote a great piece yesterday catalogging all of the book stores and record stores that have disappeared from Harvard Square. A few of them I didn’t explicitly know had closed, though if I had thought about it and had to guess, of course I would have assumed at this point that they were closed, but I was living in willful denial. So that was sad. But I also rather enjoyed his point about the scale at which businesses operate, online businesses generally (but not all) operating at a non-human scale, while physical retail establishments generally (but not all) operating at a human scale. It’s a useful prism through which to view the internet, I think. Also the accompanying photos are very sad.
I’ve been thinking for the last few weeks, since the Spotify Joe Rogan atrocity, since the Bandcam sale to Epic, since the teens have been leaving Facebook that I’m totally sick of the weird positive/negative tension of network effects. Network effects were always sort of bad — that a digital platform’s utility increased with the number of people on the platform, and this provided both a lock-in to the current users as well as a monopolistic/oligopolistic barrier to entry to competitors. I mean, that is bad enough! That is not good! But what I’ve been thinking about lately is the death of a network effect. Because they do die. Eventually your barrier to entry is destroyed, it’s broken down, the seige weapons of the next destructive cycle win, and suddenly it’s not cool to be on MySpace or whatever, and we all have to leave. The web is just riddled with dead brands. Maybe not dead, because it’s hard to kill them off completely, but… comatose brands. And we all have to get up and shift again and it sucks every time. Oh we’re not using Flickr anymore, we all have to use Instagram now. No more Livejournal we all have to go to Tumblr.
Meanwhile, in the physical world, if you want to keep buying Hondas, you can just keep buying Hondas for, like, fifty years, and no one else has to care about it. You can still drive on the same roads as everyone else, even if everyone else has decided they like Toyotas now. But on the internet? Your experience dininishes, at best, if everyone else suddenly decides they want to drive Instagrams instead of Flickrs.
And it keeps happening. And it is so exhausting. And I am so sick of it. I’m starting to think these trillion dollar tech brands are essentially ephemeral. Not to say that this impedes their monopolistic ability, because they are granted a monopoly for some amount of time, and if they’re not idiots, they can parlay that into a true larger monopoly, as Google has done, has Facebook as done, has Microsoft has done. It does not seem impossible that Meta will exist as a ridiculous, absurd monopoly for decades even as Facebook itself dies.
I haven’t quite sorted this out into a unified theory yet, but it is so stupid that we all have to keep picking up sticks and moving when network effects in one place die and network effects from a second place force us to. It is so stupid that each of these new companies gets to cheat and make the exact same mistakes as the one before it. Just as Platform A matures and starts making real revenue, and figures out how to be a real business, Platform B comes along and underprices them, backed by a bunch of venture money, only to comatize Platform A, and then slowly migrate to the exact same business models, only to be “disrupted” by Platform C, who does the exact same thing to them.
I remember long ago some “very smart” VC wrote an essay that I found very compelling at the time that essentially said “LOL to all these people who say how do you make money on the internet, once you have a bunch of eyeballs on a platform, the making money part is trivial,” and his essay became the sort-of talisman Silicon Valley pointed to about why they focus on growth at all costs, revenue can come later. And the essay was right, so far as it went. I bought it. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that there’s a coda to that entire act, where you are now making money, but Platform B comes along.
This has ramfications for valuations. We value these companies assuming that once they capture a bunch of revenue they’ll keep getting it forever. But they won’t. Platform B is going to come along eventually. Facebook’s revenue didn’t even sustain for two decades. The PE multiples have done a historically poor job factoring this in.
But even worse are the ramifications for users. This whole process sucks—they get tired of switching, they don’t trust these companies, their brand affinity will never coalesce around one of them the way they do with Ford. There is not a single internet company who will ever experience a second generation of users who inherited brand affinity from their parents the way BMW or Coke or Suave does.
Anyway, there’s a book in there, but I have a day job and a kid and a depression to keep in check and it turns out it’s much more fun to write books about nothing and self-publish them to a very small number of people. So thank you, friends. Thank you for keeping me sane. You mean a lot to me.
Okay this one’s a doozy not for the faint of heart, but if you’re feeling really down today, this is the playlist for you.
Talk tomorrow! Be well.
"Dying from COVID robbed each American of about a decade of life on average." yeah, no—that's not how death works, LOL. what is this sentence actually trying to say? i don't get it. especially when the next sentence says that life expectancy as a whole dropped by two years. (is it that americans who died from COVID died, on average, a decade earlier than they otherwise would have? <--what i've puzzled out after thinking about it for a while.) sorry for that editorial train of thought.
i can't believe jane has mastered the wink! very cute.
one final observation: that mac studio commercial—sorry "FILM"—features nike so prominently. i wonder what that deal entails. (i think about product placement a lot, even though i don't know the first thing about how it all really works.)
I'm going to be thinking about the 'death of a network effect' all day. Also i was thinking yesterday after reading that Damon K piece about how so many evenings in my 20s/30s were spent absentmindedly browsing book and record stores. Sadly in our neighborhood Books Are Magic closes at 6 each day (new pandemic hours that I fear will stick), robbing me of a place to wander to after work or dinner.