Democracy

Portland is a great city.  Beautiful downtown, great physical setting, excellent food scene.  Easy access to so many great parts of the Northwest — the Columbia River, the Oregon Coast, the Cascades, etc.  We’ve enjoyed every visit there.  Our last two trips there were to adopt rescue dogs; they have a great network of people supporting dog rescue.  

And man, most Portlanders are really smart.  The protestors in Portland are making fools out of the federal forces — the Portland Frog is a hero.  This is maybe when I love our country the most — when people get out and actively participate in politics in a nonviolent but straightforward way — democracy in action.   The Portland protestors are holding a fun house mirror up to the Feds, and the Feds look silly.  

The protestors know when they are being fed nonsense, they know when the government is abusing its power, and these protests are showing that.  The people are on top of the issues — in contrast to the Republican Party, which is leading us off multiple cliffs, and the Democratic Party, which is dithering away.  Nevin Michael made an argument this week about the appeal of Trump and the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party's continuing failure to respond:

1.) voters will ALWAYS choose strong & wrong over weak & right, when given the choice

2.) america is neither a conservative or liberal society! more than anything, we’re an anti-establishment nation & society

Portlanders are demonstrating how to fight a corrupt establishment, and this gives me hope.   This weekend, the whole country has a chance to do the same at the nationwide "No Kings" demonstrations scheduled for Saturday.  I hope that everyone brings the good Portland energy to these events — most Portlanders are showing us how to be great Americans.   Our country is all about democratization, in the sense of “making something accessible to everyone”.   We were founded in an act of rebellion against centralized power, and in the subsequent formation of our country, we pushed power and rights out to everyone.  We don’t like “The Man” holding us down;  our movie and literary heroes are individuals who rebel against the corrupt and powerful; we love underdogs and Cinderella stories in sports.

“Don’t Tread on Me” is a profoundly American value, and not just in politics.

Technology Democratization

When I started my career, computers were things that were off in glassed rooms, tended to by a select elite who acted as gatekeepers.  We had to submit our programs to the computing center and wait until the gatekeepers saw fit to deliver us our response.  It was slow, the gatekeepers could be snotty, and there was nothing uplifting or inspiring about computers.

PCs were an upstart technology — a toy the gatekeepers sneered at.  I remember a guy telling me in 1982 that “all the software we will ever need has already been written” and that the most valuable thing to do with a PC would be to connect to a mainframe using something like a 3270 emulation board.  He was a technology-literate guy, and his attitude was typical of the time.   

So he clearly didn’t get Moore’s Law, but he also missed the powerful force of democratization.  Even though the early PCs were slow, they let users have all the power; they broke up the gatekeeper system.  Nobody likes snotty elitist gatekeepers.  IBM tried in many ways to remain the gatekeeper, most famously in attempting to re-establish a proprietary PC design standard with the PS/2.  But the combination of Moore’s Law, the flood of PC clones, and Microsoft's standard system software blew the market open.  Even though Apple didn’t fully benefit from the expansion of the market, they certainly captured the democratization appeal with their 1984 commercials.   

And the early days of the Internet continued the wave of democratization.  Anyone could bring up a website; every site was as equal as every other site. It was a very open time.  The rise of open source software held the promise of even greater democratization and decentralization.   And then mobile devices delivered ever more computing power to individuals, waves of cloud-based startups overturned staid old businesses and markets, and now we have more power and solutions at our fingertips than ever before.

But we have allowed a new set of gatekeepers to creep in.  Perhaps not as snotty as the old gatekeepers.  But Apple and Google have a chokehold on what apps we can use and can disable them at any time.  Algorithms from Meta, TikTok, and Google decide what news most people see.  Every app is now a subscription; publishers can turn off our access at a whim.   New AI tools are dominated by models trained by massively capitalized providers who may or may not have our interests at heart.  Large, well-funded VCs are pushing crypto on us, proclaiming “freedom from fiat currency” with new technologies that track every single transaction we make and have undisclosed levels of centralized ownership.

Gatekeepers often overplay their hand — jacking up prices, exerting anti-competitive controls, and slowing down innovation as they focus on protecting their business.  It is maybe no mystery that new iPhone releases have become kind of dull.   I have hope that aggressive startups and individuals will crack open all these systems again — Moore’s Law continues to crank away, lots of unencumbered brains enter the industry every day.

Democracy on the courts

It makes sense that pickleball has swept the nation — it is an incredibly democratic sport.  It is easy to learn and play.  Players of all ages can pick up the sport, it doesn’t require high levels of fitness and dexterity.  It is very social, mixing and matching of players is core to the sport.  16 players can play in the space of a single tennis court — and the courts are typically seeing higher usage levels than tennis courts.  Games can be completed in 15-20 minutes.  

It is a sport designed to be played by everyone and bring everyone together.  It is just a great American sport — democratic, inclusive, equalizing.  

And I admit a teeny bit of the attraction is that pickleball pisses off some of the tennis community.  Most tennis players welcome the sport, but there are the few that complain about pickleball encroaching on “their” courts, that it is not a real sport.  This kind of gatekeeping is exactly what needs to be torn down.  

I doubt that padel will ever be as popular in this country as pickleball — “padel, the racket sport that is easier than tennis, harder than pickleball and more exclusive than both”.  It has an exclusive vibe that just may not work well here.

Shorts

From Simon Willison’s Newsletter:

• “AI tools amplify existing expertise.”
• “If you’re going to really exploit the capabilities of these new tools, you need to be operating at the top of your game.”

Paul Kedrosky on the AI Bubble:  “Because, Perez and others rightly argue, the stranded and abandoned assets from a capex mania can become the building blocks for what comes next”.

Gold prices are up!  Or actually, the dollar is down, and it’s purchasing price is down a lot.