Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

In July 2014 Taylor Swift wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled, For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story: There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to...

2d

Sovereign Writers and Substack

There has been a bit of controversy around Substack over the last week; I’m not going to get into the specifics of various accusations made about various individuals, or their responses; I do though, think that there are a few fundamental issues about the Substack model specifically, and the shift to sovereign writers generally, that are being misunderstood....

4w

Moderation in Infrastructure

Manage your Stratechery subscription. It was Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, who pointed out to me that one of the animating principles of early 20th-century Progressivism was guaranteeing freedom of expression from corporations: If you go back to 1900, part of the fear of the Progressive Era was that privately owned infrastructure wouldn’t be...

5w

The Roblox Microverse

Manage your Stratechery subscription. The degree to which Stratechery Weekly Articles are pre-planned varies; Eddy on Twitter, though, had this article pegged: yeah or Roblox — Ben Thompson (@benthompson) February 17, 2021 Tomorrow, after a number of delays, including switching from an IPO to a Direct Listing, is finally the day that Roblox...

Mar 2021

The Web’s Missing Interoperability

Manage your Stratechery subscription. It was 2004, and Tim O’Reilly needed a name for his new conference, and so “Web 2.0” was hatched in a brainstorming session devoted to finding a name. A year later O’Reilly would flesh the concept out with his definitive 2005 post What is Web 2.0, but given the fact so many Web 2.0 applications were about creating...

Mar 2021

Clubhouse’s Inevitability

To what extent are new companies, particularly those in new spaces, pushed versus pulled into existence? Last week I wrote about how Tesla is a Meme Company: It turned out, though, that TSLA was itself a meme, one about a car company, but also sustainability, and most of all, about Elon Musk himself. Issuing more stock was not diluting existing shareholders;...

Feb 2021

Mistakes and Memes

Paul Krugman, back in 1998, was pretty sure he had this Internet thing figured out: The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law” — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say...

Feb 2021

The Relentless Jeff Bezos

Manage your Stratechery subscription. It’s the refunds that blow my mind. You may be surprised to know that, despite the fact I live in Taiwan, I have an Amazon Prime account. It turns out that Amazon ships to Taiwan, which is particularly useful if you need something rather obscure and you’re not quite sure where to buy it locally: Amazon doesn’t...

Feb 2021

Publishing is Back to the Future

Andreessen Horowitz is going direct. From the a16z website, natch: People want to learn about the future. If Software really is Eating the World, there needs to be a place that is dedicated to explaining and tracking it. So we are doing just that: we are building a new and separate media property about the future that makes sense of technology,...

Jan 2021

Intel Problems

One of the first Articles on Stratechery, written on the occasion of Intel appointing a new CEO, was, in retrospect, overly optimistic. Just look at the title: The misplaced optimism it twofold: first there is the fact that eight years later Intel has again appointed a new CEO (Pat Gelsinger), not to replace the one I was writing about (Brian Krzanich),...

Jan 2021