End of a Decade
amursoftware.comThere's a lot of.. weird stuff in here.
- The idea that Apple, Amazon, and Google entering into healthcare would be taking healthcare services "away from centralized gatekeepers." What?
- Two lines about Climate Change in the whole post, and the 2nd is "We’ll remember this as the decade of unfortunate procrastination." That's quite the understatement.
- "We’ve also had more equal access to the good parts of economic growth." This needs explanation. Who is "we"? What are the "good parts" and the "bad parts" of growth?
- "Everything has gone from centralized to distributed." No, not everything. In many important ways the opposite has happened. eg. corporate conglomeration.
thanks for the critical feedback and thoughts.
as another poster put it, perhaps disintermediation would be a better word to describe it. Individuals now have power to do things that they didn't before, or for much cheaper. Can see this happening in healthcare once 'big tech' is involved. It will be good for healthcare costs at least in the United States.
any suggestions to improve it? or do you think the decade will be remembered for totally different things?
Decentralization in healthcare is basically not going to happen unless the US stops giving tax exemptions for employer-provided health insurance.
> Everything has gone from centralized to distributed.
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google like this. (Microsoft also does.)
The illusion of decentralization given by "you don't need a publisher, you need Amazon" and "you don't need marketing, you need a Facebook page" is one of their most successful creations. We haven't gone decentralized. We've given even more power into singular technology monopolies and eliminated many of the intermediaries that gave us actual choice of who to ask for publishing and how to market our products.
Now it's "sell it on Amazon"/"market it on Facebook" or you just don't exist at all.
I think he should have written "disintermediated" for those examples. There are now fewer intermediaries, maybe only a single layer - but the companies in that layer occupy almost all of it.
You can publish books without having to worry about publishing and distribution - if you go through the publication-and-distribution vertically integrated monolith.
Yeah, this would totally have been a better / more nuanced way to put it.
I agree. Publishing overall is substantially easier.
Publishing without going through the publishing monopoly is substantially harder though.
This may be a minor distinction but it is easier to publish but harder to get reach when disconnected. This is important in a "allowed to try" way.
Generally for books and music the answer for "should I sell on Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Soundcloud, or my own website" is "yes".
In addition to convenience people are understandably leery about where they put their credit card info and the financial infastructure hasn't generally caught up although there are a few "one-off" credit card number generators.
> The healthcare system is broken in ways that are hard to fix.
So we need more of the same old FAANG guys to 'fix' this? Do we really want our health data to be controlled in the hands of these FAANG companies because they are able to disrupt anything they touch? I hope not.
> What should we take away from the 2010 decade?
2010s: Was the discovery of democratising access to anything by 'programming an app for that' with collecting user data from a tool called a smartphone, which brought in a surge of unprofitable app / web companies IPOing everywhere and crazy tech companies raising ridiculous funding rounds with huge losses with little to no profit. I cannot see this continuing on into the 2020s. So my so-called 'machine learning crystal ball' forecasts something else.
2020s: Will have a tech crash due to this hyperactivity of these startups which many of them will shutdown. The transportation market will start to shift to carbon neutral alternatives over fossil-fuel based solutions in the late 2020s. AR will beat VR to consumer mainstream and will overlay our daily lives with wearables. Cryptocurrency becomes a financial alternative in the mid-2020s. Privacy will be more controversial and questioned by many users as we keep giving it away to be collected by FAANG companies and we start to have information which can be easily faked making it easy to spread disinformation, ie. mainstream fake news.
Now if you excuse me, I'm going to buy this cryptocurrency dip and to prepare my tinfoil rucksack and to continue to buy multiple newspapers from the local shop across the street. Hopefully that should be my new-decade's resolution.
> Do we really want our health data to be controlled in the hands of these FAANG
Then we should stop deliberately giving it to them? E.g. in the name of privacy, Google has secured health data access for its own machine learning systems , to the exclusion of everyone else who is working on health ML. Laws like HIPPA were meant to facilitate the anonymous sharing of health data, not to block it. Health feels like a hugely lost opportunity exactly because nobody wants to touch that data with the current legal repercusions.
I think for sure the rise of app and web economies have been the defining characteristic of this decade. They have had an unexpected monopoly on our attentions. From memes, to changes in consumer behavior, to social uprisings, to mass shootings, to instagram influencers, to determining elections, it would take a lot to convince me that there was not a single greater force that influenced us more in the past ten years than the side-effects of what came out of a few internet companies. Its almost hard to imagine what life was like before things like twitter, uber, spotify, youtube, and to think that they were either only a few years old or barely taking their first steps at the beginning of the decade is mind-blowing.
In hindsight, a lot of people might claim they saw it coming, but a lot of the things I see today are things I would have never predicted the "future" to be like, and were never things I ever heard anyone predict prior to the events happening. Seriously, all these amazon boxes everywhere? ... how many people saw that coming? For sure none of the real estate developers who poured millions into building all those shopping malls now lifeless like the coral reef on a warm 2019 summer day.
As for whats to come in the 2020's? clearly - flying cars, jet-packs, laser guns, self cleaning rooms, holograms, shiny pants, and robot servants. /s
> Its almost hard to imagine what life was like before things like twitter, uber, spotify, youtube, and to think that they were either only a few years old or barely taking their first steps at the beginning of the decade is mind-blowing.
All things you listed were founded in the previous decade, and indeed nothing in tech of this decade would be shocking to someone in 2009.
Based on this I expect the next decade will also see very little innovation.
Sure, from the technology innovation perspective I 100% a gree with you. But IMO chansiky has a point with the social aspect of it all.
In 2008 it all felt new or at least new-ish. In 2008 I did not have a YouTube addiction or kicked off a Facebook addiction. Those things started happening at the beginning of this decade.
People are beginning to have more well-defined opinions about these big companies. I have non-techy friends who left FB, for example.
The difference is that it is now part of daily life, even in developing nations. In the 00s it was mostly the early adopters in rich western countries that were using modern tech.
Not in 2009..
2020s = VR
Do you think VR will be more mainstream than AR? I tend to believe that once AR becomes really good it will be more mainstream than VR because it can integrate with your normal life and provide useful things like a HUD and also crazy cool things like interactive holograms.
I’m not an expert on VR, but it seems to me that the consensus is that AR will truly mature after VR. So maybe it doesn’t make sense to differentiate, because at that point AR will be “VR-lite” rather than VR evolving as “AR-heavy”.
My personal opinion is that full immersive VR will be more compelling, as it’s going to all be about people interacting and collaborating over distance, and VR will work better for that.
The web preexisted. The app economy is only $16billion and probably past its peak already. There is a rising saas economy, but also of dubious sustainability beyond a downturn
The comments about neo liberalization at the end make me wonder if the “20s” will be remember as an era of Anti globalization and nationalism.
We saw it start to take hold about halfway through this decade and I wonder if the trend will continue.
I remember left-antiglobalisation (against free movement of goods) being huge in the late 90s and early 00s. The days of huge clashes at the G20 meetings. This eventually got suppressed by the police, and now we've shifted to "right"-antiglobalisation with a very different focus against free movement of people and the use of trade policy against national enemies.
Rising nationalism in the 20s and 30s eventually leading to major armed conflict from 39 onwards.
Let's do the time warp again!
We seem on track to avoid the jump to the left in the UK, alas we've already stepped to the right several times
My crystal ball says remote work will revolutionize lifestyles, we ll see huge changes in health tech (long overdue), and in governance. Nomadism is a 2010s trend and ,even if not scalable, it shows the way. The renationalisation experiments did not bear fruit, i think it s becoming increasingly evident. I think the 20s will be a good time for freedoms
There are other types of reaction to neoliberalism (and the concentration of power in a handful of people that seems to be its hallmark in this context). They seem to have far less steam than nationalism, but there's a few other ways things could go. Mostly nasty, I suspect, though :(
Teaching our kids about Siri and Alexa... and how to subvert it.
By not participating. Reading books. Enjoying time together at a park. Finding mirth in games and late night conversations.
By teaching them to pick up their own groceries, shop local, use the library, see local performances, and enjoying our neighbourhood.
If 2010’s were all about staying in and binging on Netflix I hope the next decade will be about getting out and letting our computers gather dust.
The author's later point is that this may not be an option.
"Where a home just has one of these [AI / connected home]. Like an in-sink trash disposal, or an answering machine."
Consider phones. In the early 2000's, most people had a cell phone. By 2010, most people have a smart phone. These devices are much more capable than their predecessors. I've read books (Hans Rosling, Factfulness) that suggested communities with access to smartphones have a 3% GDP increase over communities with cell phones. That number may seem small, but remember it's a global scale. 3% is a significant amount.
The current state of AI is where cell phones were 20 years ago. We may get to a point where not using AI (as you said, "not participating") may put yourself at a clear disadvantage - you will not be as capable as your peers.
It's sort of like those 50-60 year olds in the workforce who refuse to use a computer. They've always done their job a particular way, but they are not as productive as some of the younger hires who use computers. Then they are shocked when they are laid off - their current (disadvantaged) output is far below what is expected, since technology has become ubiquitous and people expect you to be able to use a computer to do your job.
More likely, wearable computing and augmented reality will allow people to get out of the house and to the parks or local performances, while still remaining fully jacked into the social-media world.
As for books and libraries: when libraries are upgraded these days, or new ones are built, the new buildings focus heavily on providing people with connectivity and games, with books relegated to an afterthought that you have to request from closed stacks (i.e. you have to already know what you want and patiently wait for it to arrive). I don’t envy any parent trying to bring their children up with 20th-century notions of reading.
I feel like decades stopped having distinctive identities somewhere round 2000.
Previous decade-by-decade changes from the 50s to the 60s to the 70s to the 80s to the 90s were, it must be admitted, mostly aesthetic rather than being the “fundamental changes in society” that people like to pretend — people in general didn’t become greedier in 1980 and less greedy again in 1990. But there were huge changes in the aesthetics of everything — clothes, interiors, graphic design, music, cars etc.
What has changed since 2004, in the actual physical world?
I think it’s just that we don’t have enough distance yet. Plenty of things only seem iconic in reverse. I’m thinking primarily about music, where often the best-selling music of an era isn’t what it’s remembered for. Plenty of very forgettable chart toppers.
In terms of physical space, technology has become much more pervasive. I’m 2004 did you see everyone in a bar/cafe day reading a device? Internet dating was for losers and now Tinder is huge.
We’re constantly on the internet or somehow connected, wherever we go. Smartphones are ubiquitous, as are more laptops and tablets as opposed to large, yellowy desktops. We don’t really watch TV cable anymore in the traditional sense afaik.
There have been fashion changes. Boot cut jeans came and went. Malls aren’t as popular as they once were. Victoria’s Secret Fashion show isn’t a thing anymore. We’ve begun doing away with the image of the skinny, magazine model as solely defining “beauty”.
If you compare even something like vehicles from 2004, there’s certainly a shift in aesthetic. More recent models have a more aggressive look.
But maybe your point had something to do with changes in behaviors. The younger generations aren’t consuming the same kinds of products as their parents.
Meme culture has been massive this decade and it's not just online. I regularly see memes in street art or stickers on light posts. I also think it's just that we haven't had enough time to judge yet. In another 20 years when things have changed you can reflect on them instead of it being the current reality.
Memes are last decade. It s old technology nowadays tbh , i wonder how come kids still use it
The iPhone was introduced in 2007. I’d say that had some pretty large effects. Reusable rockets. The explosion of social media. Electric cars. A number of other things.
Facebook stopped growing around 2013. I think that trend is if anything dwindling. electric cars and rockets are niche- the big change there is the digitisation of work which makes cars obsolete.
Well, the question was what had changed since 2004. FB gained more than a billion users since then.
Electric cars and reusable rockets are niche now, but picking up steam quickly. Seems pretty safe to say that those were watershed moments.
Remote work might be taking off, but I haven't seen the evidence of it accelerating. Seems like most companies like it more in theory than in practice. I'd love to be wrong about that, though.
I feel that the 00s didn't have a well-defined "youth culture", in the sense that people used for 50s onwards where a culture and visual and musical style all combine. But the end of the 2010s definitely does have this, at least for women - Youtube/instagram have evolved a distinctive makeup style!
To me the 00s is the "war decade" and the 2010s the "financial crisis decade", despite the defining events being in 2001 and 2008 respectively. Post-2015 is the "chaos decade", where politics stopped attempting to make sense.
I think the youtu culture thing is a result of MP3s "balkanizing" things as their music exposure is less decided by the record store.
A sock hopper in the 70s would look out of place and like lazy and out of touch writers. Now a teenage fan of Nirvana or 80s metal is normal essentially.
In comparison wit music tastes it is like a bunch of time travelers into the same high school for a bunch of anchronistic cliques together.
The tyranny of rounded corners still bugs me - and these were not even novel , its a modernist aesthetic! Architecture is still ‘contemporary’ since 2000, no impressive progress there, but probably huge horizontal expansion in china.
As for music and even film - maybe they re going through a long winter? Youtube travelogues are more interesting , to me. I think gaming , and virtual socializing has lots of unexplored potential too.
I m not even sure if someone is studying this seemingly quiet cultural period. I think we need someone to record this zeitgeist . Who are the eminent intellectuals that will be remembered in 2 decades?
Almost ten years old article on this, but still (more?) relevant
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-...
besides people walking around looking at little pieces of glass and these stupid scooters littered around everywhere?
You mention gatekeepers going away, but aren't the barriers to doing information warfare held by the same gatekeepers (the monied and the state)?
> With 6 billion people on the planet
Did he just miss 1.7 billion people?
He probably learned the 6 billion people fact sometime during high school and has never updated it since then.
(I may be projecting, as I'm often guilty of this especially w.r.t global geography)
Yes, yes he did. To be honest this post is riddled with mistakes and weird assertions. It’s not very good.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that it's not very good and anyway it's provided some good discussion here, so I've enjoyed that.
Haha, thanks. I did. Do you mind if I incorporate your point? I was speaking a bit colloquially, but the correct number would be better.
> Do you mind if I incorporate your point?
Not sure what this means. But if you mean correct the error, then you certainly should and you don't need anybody permission.
Dont forget the six people who are not on earth
Bitcoin was introduced in 2009-2010.
I can't help but think that the end of printed instructions can be shoehorned in here somehow. If I do get printed instructions with something, they're virtually unusable either because the type is far too small to read, or because it's all hieroglyphs without words. When I look for instructions online, I'm finding videos more and more often, even for something like a recipe.
> It turned out that someone had stolen my card information and bought two copies from their own Amazon listing
Far more likely is that you've stored those card details and your Amazon account was compromised, internally or externally.
Tinder in the main bullet points but not cryptocurrency/blockchain (hype or not, whatever, it was big thing throughout the decade), the "big bang" of deep learning or quantum computers?
Crypto is not a normal part of “everyday living”, which is what those bullet points are concerned with.
Says who? Number of just bitcoin users is more than order of magnitude higher than number of users of tinder.
Really? I would not have guessed that at all, seeing as basically everyone I know my age has used a Tinder-like dating app, but maybe 1-2 have used bitcoin as everyday currency.
Got some figures?
That picture looks like the Saarschleife in Germany.
The decade is not over. The gregorian calendar has no year "0", so decades start at for example: 2011-01-01 till 2020-12-31.
I don't use it that way either.
A decade can be any range of ten years. By common modern convention, we tend to refer to them as things like 80s, 90s, etc. No-one would argue that 1990 was in the "80s". Wikipedia has a bit more on this convention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade
Wrong - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s
The 2010s is the current decade in the Gregorian calendar that began on 1 January 2010, and will end on 31 December 2019.
Not wrong. Gregorian starts at year 1. If you want a decade to be 10 years, it can't end with 10, that would be only 9 years.
Daily usage differs from that definition of course, but that's not the point.
No you are wrong - The word 'decade' is not tied to any specific set of 10 years, so you can mark off any set of 10 years and call it a decade: 2000-2009, or 2005-2014, for example. By your logic the year 2000 should be part of the 90's which it wasn't.
I'm not wrong. Read the "specs".
>By your logic the year 2000 should be part of the 90's which it wasn't.
It was according to the gregorian calendar.
but you're still wrong - this decade ends at the last moment of 2019..that's the agreed popular opinion - didn't you even read the Wikipedia link?
Yes wrong. The first decade was either 9 or 10 years (depending on whether you want to be weird and include 1 BC), every decade after that was 10 years starting at 'X0 and ending at 'X9. This is how the common usage defines the term.
A lot of concepts in daily human lives get fuzzy near the edges. That's not a failing on humans, that's how language works. This isn't scientific or perfectly rational, yes, but neither are humans.
Yes this is common usage. I'll use it that way too. It's still wrong based on the calendar.
It's not an edge case though.
Quote: "What should we take away from the 2010 decade?"
Take that is not over yet, the 2010's will end in over a year from now, so still plenty things to happen inside this particular decade.