Links to Consider, 7/10

Freya India on online friendships; Ed West on the British Muslim vote; Paul Kupiec on bank unsoundness; A16Z talk their book

Freya India writes,

And so, many of us don’t have friends anymore; we have followers. We don’t deeply care about each other’s lives; we consume them as content. We don’t have people we can be vulnerable with; we have people who view our Stories. It’s hard to tell if we have loyalty, or just people hoping we like their photo back. Nowadays we meet someone new and immediately exchange socials and end up committing to scrolling and skipping through each other’s lives, forever. Friends are for keeping up Snapstreaks. Friends are for forwarding each other memes that our algorithms sent us first. Friends are numbers. Sometimes it feels like the only one left asking us “What’s on your mind?” is Facebook. 

I like to say that social media mashes together the remote world and the intimate world. Our friends act like celebrities, and celebrities act like our friends. India goes on to suggest that we experience too much shallow virtual reality and too little deep friendship.

Ed West writes,

The pro-Gaza candidates were supported by a lobby group called The Muslim Vote which ‘presents a list of 18 policy demands’ which include ‘provision of Sharia-compliant pensions, a system for Sharia-compliant student finance, and changes to Ofcom extremism rules.’ As Sam Bidwell put it: ‘This was never just about Gaza - Muslim voters are emerging as a distinct bloc.’

…There are 20 constituencies which are more than 30% Muslim, all of which went Labour in 2019, and according to the Henry Jackson Society, 40% of British Muslims would consider voting for an Islamic Party, a number which rises to 46% for younger voters

Paul Kupiec writes,

Bank of America National Association has approximately 0 capital on a market-to-market basis as of March 31 2024, and yet the Fed stress test says that its BHC is well capitalized

Kupiec says that the bank stress tests are opaque, so it is hard to tell what is going on. He speculates that a lot of the optimism in the Fed’s analysis comes from not marking assets to market. Some of it may come from doing the analysis at the level of holding company rather than at the bank.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz write,

The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be.

For example:

• Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

• Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

• Regulatory agencies are applying direct pressure to banks to cut off disfavored startups and founders from the financial system.

• Regulatory agencies are punitively blocking startups from being acquired by the same big companies the government is preferencing in so many other ways.

…

There’s sort of a Bootleggers and Baptists problem right now in Washington. The Baptists see genuine danger in nascent tech. The Bootleggers are large incumbent firms who feel threatened by A16Z startups.

But in general I describe Washington as the Culture of No. If I had been based in San Francisco, I probably would have never left the startup world.

By the way, when I commented on Andreessen and Horowitz’s podcast on the early days of the Web, I should have mentioned their highlighting of “View Source.” Those of us who were maintaining Web sites had to figure out how to keep up with the state of the art. We could go to a web page that had a feature we wanted to adopt, click our browser’s “View Source” button, and see the HTML codes that generated the desired feature. That really democratized the Web and helped it to spread rapidly. Now, web pages have become much more opaque. “View Source” does not work the way it used to.

A16Z and I are interested in AI as another Web-type innovation. But maybe one thing that will hold it back is that there is not the equivalent of “View Source,” that is a mechanism that allows what one user learns to be quickly spread to other users.

substacks referenced above:

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THE LITTLE TECH AGENDA

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‘The worst election I have ever stood in’

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Aren’t You Lonely?