Attack of the Garage Guys

Balaji Srinivasan, from Stanford, gave this talk (I don’t know the word for it), where he asked this provocative question:
“Is the USA the Microsoft of nations?”
That’s Microsoft as in obsolete, a dinosaur.

Back in 1998, Bill Gates feared that Microsoft’s rule would end not due to the likes of Oracle but due to “some guys in a garage”. Those guys turned out to be Larry and Sergey (Google’s founders). And now, says Srinivasan, Silicon Valley is becoming the garage guys to the entire US!

Pointing out that the post-war US was run by 4 cities (Boston: education; New York: Madison Avenue and Wall Street; Los Angeles: music and Hollywood; and Washington DC: laws), he next says that Silicon Valley is “putting a horse head in all of their beds”: that’s a declaration of war, Godfather style.

If you’re wondering how, consider how the Valley’s outputs are taking on the traditional bastions of those 4 cities. Online courses, Khan Academy, and Udacity are the Valley’s assault on higher education. What Napster started, iTunes and YouTube extended in the clash with the entertainment industry. Twitter, Blogger and AdWords compete with traditional media and forms of communication. And then there’s Bitcoin, the Internet’s own currency. Used to be the preserve of governments. Not anymore.

No wonder then that there is a backlash from, well, the Gang of Four. Problems in the economy? They say “iPhone and Google that done did it, not the bailouts and the bankruptcies and the bombings”. So how should the Valley respond?

Fighting is not an option: “they have aircraft carriers; we don’t.” That leaves voice or exit as the other options:
“Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas exit is leaving to create a new system…voice in the context of a country is voting, while exit is emigration…a voice gains much more attention when people are leaving in droves... exit amplifies voice.”
Srinivasan calls it Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit:
“What do I mean by Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit? It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology... we can build a world run by software… 3D printing…Bitcoins…Quantified Self…telepresence”

Think this is all far fetched? Paypal founder Peter Thiel is into seasteading; Elon Musk wants to build a Mars colony; and Larry Page wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation.

We do live in interesting times…

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