It was 2011 when Marc Andriessen -- the brains behind Netscape, now a founder of VC firm Andriessen Horowitz (AKA A16z) said that "software will eat the world." Somewhere in the last couple of years Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group started talking about the mega technology firms, now christened the "Magnificent 7," as political powers in their own right, having more power in fact than most smaller nations. It was a prescient observation. The hosts on the Acquired podcast like to gush about software as the greatest business model of all time because the marginal costs on it are so low: once it is created, the cost to manufacture and distribute another unit of it barely exist.
Now here we are. The PayPal Mafia (including Thiel, Musk and David Sacks, the "crypto Czar") has effectively staged a coup. The richest man in world history (in absulute dollar if not relative terms -- but he may be the latter also) is running amok throughout the Federal government, an entity charged with effecting public goods, with a bunch juvenile jack-booted laptop wielders with minimal controls around them.
I've been enjoying listening to the podcast of Dwarkesh Patel, including most recently a series of lectures by Sarah Paine of the US Naval War Colege, a refreshingly old school intellectual corrective to his at times tech addled mind. But I was a little shocked when Patel, in a short ad he's been running announcing a couple of roles for which he's hiring, has referred to the people at the WaPo, CNN, etc. as "mediocre." OK. Fine, they're not all rocket scientists. But do we really want the world to be run by an ever smaller set of geniuses? For my money, we don't. I'd rather see a broader set of decent people slogging together towards a diversified set of aims on which they've all muddled towards consensus, a world in which more of them can go to sleep feeling and knowing they've contributed, hoping their children can do the same in the future.
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