Weak Signals
A weekly newsletter about the small signals that get lost in the noise
‘What we aim at is what we see.’
I had a fairly ignominious undergraduate experience as far as grades go, but if I ever showed a spark, it was in my philosophy classes. Tacked on to my economics major, I basically backed into the minor because it became the shortest path to graduating after I had built up enough electives in the subject.
Forgettable as I was as a student to my professors, I learnt a lot studying philosophy. One class in particular, a course on Senecan philosophy taught by a Rhode scholar, and one of the first Canadians to hold a medical marijuana license, Doug Hutchinson still stands out. So for however I ended up in those classes, in hindsight, I am happy for the experience and in that vein, I was reflecting on those courses this weekend.
For starters, I’m reading The Little Book of Stoicismfor a book club. I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I remember. More importantly, I think I’ve finally found a chance to use ‘dialectic’ in a sentence, correctly.
As I wrote in December, I wanted to kick off the calendar year with a series of 2021 predictions, but last week this note got necessarily side tracked. The riots that rocked Capitol Hill were fresh in the news and the two reactions by Big Tech, the de-platforming of Donald Trump along with the containment of Parler, merited comment. But while I’ll waste little time writing about Donald Trump going forward, I believe the coordinated response among Big Tech last week as representative of a shift in the dialectic between these companies and us.
In philosophy, Dialectics is “a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned methods of argumentation.”
It’s a conceit was popularized by Socrates and Plato, and it’s one that’s been appropriated and reworked many times within Western philosophy. Hegel’s construct is my favorite, and Marx’s perspective is very good too, but you don’t need to get bogged down in the nuances to understand that at its base; dialectics is debate in good faith that drives progression for all sides.
So what will the dialectic look like on big Tech in the coming years?
It’ll look like this,
and this
This is the conversation that matters right now.
At the crux of it is - to date in Western economies, the internet has biased to monopolistic business models. The downstream effect of that, beyond competitive concerns; as more and more of our lives come online, monopolies have the power not to just provide service but dictate access - to everything.
We should, ahh talk about this.
Weak Signal: Keeping with the Greeks, If #WFH is the Alpha of this newsletter, than by way of last week, Decentralization will become the Omega. The ramifications of these supra-national corporations, superseding government to become the arbitrators of civil access, are tough to over-estimate. Twenty years on, we still take off our shoes before we get on a plane, a legacy of 9/11.
Twenty years on, we’ll still be ‘doing x’ as a result of last week. (From home of course)
Back to the beginning and fulfilling a promise to my readers from December - those 2021 predictions without further adieu. No mother sauces, just one recipe: the shift and adoption to remote work in major sectors of the economy, initially in response to COVID-19, will become permanent.
The internet shrunk the world by connecting all of collectively. Remote work will now expand the world by allowing all of us to disconnect from any one single place physically. The shift of business and corporate arrangements to digital by default is the real world effect of the promise of the internet. It represents, structurally an almost incomprehensible shift.
#WFH forever & our new digital by default world - the mother’s mother sauce
Consider these my biggest weak Signals of 2021. (In no particular order)
Output > time:
Good weather, low state taxes, natural beauty > the alternative
Contagion explained 2020 | Elysium will explain the 2020s
Public writing > Public speaking
Community as Moat
Death of the CBD
‘Civic life’ & the new social compact:
W Network plotlines are suddenly realistic
Home schooling becomes a thing
TBD