Martin Gurri: “The will to liberty can overcome the will to power…Individual rights emerged during a centuries-long struggle against this kind of categorical tyranny: against the one-sided laws of aristocrats and bigots, against confusing power or wealth or even science with privilege, against the fiction that every human life is fated. We should expect today’s elites to fight back against threats to their rule—to pursue censorship schemes and claim ownership of “our democracy.” The struggle never ends. But an ideology of freedom makes sense only if it protects the claims of the individual over those of the group and the state and remains implacably hostile to the empire of labels and castes.”
Economist: “Throughout the 2010s the number of unicorns—private companies with valuations above $1bn—soared in America. Fully 344 of them were minted in 2021. Last year’s figure was 45. The end of the era of cheap money is largely to blame. In the go-go years, as investors raced to get a piece of the buzziest startups, tech firms had little need to tap public markets for capital. Crossover investors such as Tiger Global and Coatue, which operate in both public and private markets, flooded into Silicon Valley. Dharmesh Thakker of Battery Ventures, a VC firm, recalls that founders could “raise money on a Zoom call”. In 2021 crossover investors accounted for over half of startup funding. They have since retreated, last year contributing less than a third. Now investors are mulling how to sell their stakes in the unicorns of yesteryear. Most VC funds operate on a ten-year clock, backing startups in the first five and cashing out in the second. With over 700 unicorns, at a combined valuation of $2.4trn, a sizeable amount of money is at stake.”
FT: “The myth of the Great Writer creating in solitude is only sometimes true. People have long understood that most acts of creation are collaborative: pop music, sport, films, inventing the atomic bomb. Only for books, especially fiction, does the presumption of the lone genius hang on. That might have surprised Shakespeare, who co-wrote some of his plays and adapted many from other writers’ work. But at some point, literature grew snooty about collaboration. Writers who did do it, like the two cousins who co-wrote detective stories under the name Ellery Queen, often pretended there was a single author. The author Malcolm Gladwell told Vanity Fair: “Writers . . . have this false ethic of originality. Whereas musicians are like, ‘Yeah, totally — we took this little bit from that song. And it’s inspired by this.’ I love how open they are about the fact that creativity is a collective enterprise. I want writers to be able to talk that way.””
NYTimes: “The amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, from immersive LED art installations and carpets that glow to basketball courts that can play video. As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful. There’s an economic term for this: the Jevons Paradox, named for the 19th- century English economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as steam engines became ever more efficient, Britain’s appetite for coal increased rather than decreased.”
Ben Thompson: “I don’t, for the record, think we are at an iPhone moment when it comes to virtual reality, by which I mean the moment where multiple technological innovations intersect in a perfect product. What is exciting, though, is that a lot of the pieces — unlike three years ago — are in sight. Sora might not be good enough, but it will get better; Groq might not be cheap enough or fast enough, but it, and whatever other competitors arise, will progress on both vectors. And Meta and Apple themselves have not, in my estimation, gotten the hardware quite right. You can, however, see a path from here to there on all fronts. The most important difference, of course, is that mobile phones existed before the iPhone: it was an easy lift to simply sell a better phone. The big question — one that we are only now coming in reach of answering — is if virtual reality will, for a meaningful number of people, be a better reality.”
