Real life, baby

Sometimes a demo is simply to remind the world that your competition has no desire to dream -- and no ability to evolve.

Real life, baby

Towards the New York City Network State?! Mamdani has still unfortunately declared himself the tribal enemy of many of my colleagues, but one has to be bullish on him as the future of the Democrats after this. He’s a live player who can jettison democratic socialists for venture capitalists in one week — and rise to power on abolishing the police while then very publicly embracing the police. Like Trump, the man is not really ideological. He can pivot, he’s smart. This is a real problem for the Republicans. Along with Xi overseas, Mamdani’s faction of immigrant strivers represents an IQ bailout for otherwise mathless American wokes. After all, it doesn’t actually matter how Mamdani’s check to a quantum lab is written. In order to overcome his party’s reflexive anti-tech, pro-state orientation he had to emphasize at least one part of this initiative, which was the statism. Talking up the (arguably real) benefits to the public thus blesses a quasi-venture-capitalist action as democratic socialism, a sort of Dengist maneuver in which communism becomes capitalism through sufficient legalism, lip service, and legerdemain. It’s similar to how Trump justifies state venture capitalism through nationalist rhetoric. MAGA has an understandable skepticism of the centralized state, but anything that invokes nationalism (or national security) can mollify that skepticism. And yeah, one can talk about price discovery, and who knows if this $30M investment was market or whatever. The point is that the most important Democrat in America is taking an action which is NOT anti-tech, and is indeed pro-tech. If this continues, only the most retrograde, reactionary Democrats will remain anti-tech. I mean, look…if one must pipe some NYC budget into quantum mechanics at NYU instead of syringe-distribution at NGOs in order to keep blues in the style to which they are accustomed, so be it. Basically, what Mamdani is doing here is very similar to Trump’s sovereign stake in Intel, or any sovereign fund’s for that matter. At a structural level, we’re seeing the network (meaning tech, meaning the Internet) fuse with the legacy state. Yes, Trump’s Intel stake represents a right-coded variant, while Mamdani’s stake in quantum computing is left-coded, but the outcome is the same: the network state. Blue cat, red cat, doesn’t matter if it advances tech.

Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are: • Proprietary data • Network effects • A physical component

The marketplace moat is going down…personal agents materially weaken the historical truth of liquidity begetting more liquidity. With agents like Muse, ~all supply across the internet and offline world will be discoverable, not just what’s housed in the dominant marketplace people know to visit. Supply doesn’t need an aggregator to be found, will multi home, won’t accept the rake, etc etc. and demand will programmatically find the best supply at the best price, regardless of whether its online or offline, requires a deep web search, agentic phone calls to offline establishments, email inquiry and negotiation, whatever. The world just isn’t gonna need marketplaces for transactions to clear. Of course there are categories, especially where a marketplace isn’t purely governed by economic theory, that are more insulated, but that’s the exception…most marketplaces are in for a rude awakening.