Over at BlueSky, Dell Cameron brought up that Facebook’s involvement in crypto, VR, and GenAI aren’t working out because they are only secondary to their main business purpose: surveillance. (link)
I disagreed. Cameron was right in that it failed because their main business is surveillance, but I suspect they screwed it up because it was such a great fit that they got too greedy.
Crypto would have been for them - if Libra had taken off, Meta would have gotten access to their users' transaction information, something they don't necessarily have right now.
They luckily came out the gate too hard and scared everyone off by making it too obvious it was a supranational currency.
— Ricardo J. Méndez (@ricardo.bsky.social) Jun 4, 2024 at 9:08
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Would it have been different if they’d seen it as a technology investment?
Two projects grew on the compost of Facebook’s Diem open source dump: Sui and Aptos. As of June 4, 2024, their combined fully-diluted valuation is about $10 billion. Facebook could have captured that value if they had spun it out from the start, even as a subsidiary where they control most of the token supply.
But Libra was never a tech investment. You don’t get to have an arms-length independent company and share data.
When all you have is surveillance, everything looks like a data trove.
Back in 1999, David Bowie spoke about how music used to be subversive, but had since become merely an information delivery mechanism - it was the Internet that was subversive.
Fast-forward, and the Internet is an information (and disinformation) delivery mechanism - it is crypto and other areas that are subversive.
The thing that is subversive now is the what will make money in a few years.
Backlash Technology is a term coined by Peter Watts - it’s tech for which one of the key properties is a prominently displayed middle finger at something else. Think Signal and Telegram adoption spikes whenever WhatsApp screws something up, or crypto as a reaction to the financial system (particularly in places plagued with hyperinflation).
I got reminded of the term by a discussion regarding Bluesky vis-a-vis Mastodon, the Fediverse, and ActivityPub. It seems that something being Backlash Tech can also provide a certain stickiness, since it a lot of the reactions could be summed up as “I’ve already lashed back, what else does this add?”
Here’s the link, if you are curious. The conversation is biased towards skepticism - expected, given the participants and where it’s taking place - but there are some good points in there.