Battery Ventures State of the OpenCloud 2022
Steven Johnson: “Our extraordinary ability to see anything, anywhere in the world—and not just share text about it—is partly the result of Nasir Ahmed’s breakthrough idea about image compression from nearly half a century ago. Small files make for a small world.”
Ezra Klein: “If you were looking for a three-sentence summary of American politics in recent years, I think you could do worse than this: The parties are so different that even seismic events don’t change many Americans minds. The parties are so closely matched that even minuscule shifts in the electoral winds can blow the country onto a wildly different course. And even in a time of profound economic dislocation, American politics has become less about which party is good for your wallet and more about whether the cultural changes of the past 50 years delight or dismay you.”
Arnold Kling: “I am against what in philosophy is called naive realists. A naive realist believes “I see the world clearly. What I perceive to be true, is true.” In politics, if you are a naive realist, then you think more highly of your opinions on public policy than you should. Ordinary voters suffer from naive realism. But intellectuals can suffer even worse from naive realism. I think that the best protection from naive realism is having ideas tested in the market rather than imposed by monopoly government. The market will expose and weed out misconceptions. Government will not.”
Edward Chancellor reviews “The Cashless Revolution”: “On a visit to Tencent’s headquarters in 2012, Mr. Xi was struck by the “abundant data” gathered by the firm, asking its boss: “How do we adapt the internet to manage society?” We know now that Mr. Xi’s own answer was to develop a social credit system, which uses information technology to control the actions of refractory Chinese nationals—preventing them from taking high-speed trains or traveling abroad, for instance. When Covid struck in early 2020, fintech was adapted to facilitate lockdowns and issue individualized stay-at-home orders. Where will this cashless revolution take us? As Mao’s premier Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, it’s too soon to say. Mr. Chorzempa appears to be of two minds. He suggests that Chinese fintech poses a threat to Western payments systems while acknowledging that Tencent and Ant have made little progress outside their home turf. Nor is he sure whether financial technology represents a liberating force or a “privacy nightmare.” Friedrich Hayek once said that money was “one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man.” A centralized digital currency may turn out to be the most effective instrument for social control ever created.”
