In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:
> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.
Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.
2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.
3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)
A lot of comments mention John Ousterhout's book Philosophy of software design and it's definition of complexity of a system being cognitive load (I.e the number of disparate things one has to keep in mind when making a change). However IIRC from the book, complexity of a system = Cognitive load * Frequency of change.
The second component, frequency of change is equally important as when faced with tradeoffs, we can push high cognitive load to components edited less frequently (eg: lower down the stack) in exchange for lower cognitive load in the most frequently edited components.
Tl;dr* He claims ads were the original sin of the web, built for a human internet. For the coming agentic web where most browsing would be done by agents, he proposes a new protocol that has payments integrated into it. Specifically agents paying for accessing content using micropayments with stablecoins.
Also interesting to note that this is one of the most submitted articles of Stratechery to HN but gained no traction. Latest submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44073241
People have been predicting micropayments replacing ads (with differing technology implementations) for decades at this point and it's never come to fruition, so is unlikely to be taken seriously now either.
Tying it to cryptocurrency just seems like it's even less likely to get your regular Joe to onboard to this scheme, so I can see why it's never gained wider interest.
The difference here is that humans aren't the ones using the stablecoins or micropayments. Agents are. Humans will interact with agents like they currently do.
Honestly, some form of digital credits work just as well here IMO (barring regulatory hurdles). No crypto necessary.
> People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
> Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay.
Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay?
I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue.
IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.
Agree. Apple should be as well. The only con I can think of would be their (Meta's) data center investments but seems this will make them more efficient?
Great book! IIRC, after attending the 2005 USA memory championships as a journalist, he became intrigued and started training and in one year became USA Memory champion in 2006 at age 24
> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.
Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.
2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.
3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)