[gumby]

This was such important and transformational work and I remember at the time being quite dismissive of it.

I knew Orr’s and Suchman’s work (they worked in a physically adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people). Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came from ignorance.*

To be fair, I was not the only one: the insights described in this book draft surprised a lot of people, not just how they improved the copiers but how those two even approached the problem (starting with the sociology of the repair workers). It sure surprised Xerox management. But I’ve heard it said many times that this work led to restructuring the paper path in a way that justified (paid for) everything spent on PARC.

I did grow up of course and now do see my work (machines, chemistry, etc) as a small part of a large social system. A successful company has to base its product plans starting this way.

To choose an example of failure to appreciate the social scope (but not pick on it) the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a social model they want to exist rather than the one that currently does. I think it’s a big reason why it’s barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years? Xerox was the same, and it helped them sell a lot of copiers, but didn’t make them as ubiquitous as they could have been. Another example: everybody laughs at Google for launching “products” that go nowhere and are quickly forgotten. We all know it’s because of a screwed-up, internally-focused culture. But sometimes a product succeeds without marketing (e.g. gmail, at the time) because it happened to be matched to the actual, external need. It makes this kind of continuous failure even more damning.

* TBH, 40 years later I have not 100% shed this view — e.g. my attitude towards complaints about git. Maybe this means I’m still a jerk.

[com]

Thank you for this very honest comment. It means more to to me than I was expecting it to when I started reading it.

Were there any moments on the journey of growing up that stick in your mind as being turning points in your path from techno-determinism to whatever you describe yourself now?

I’m really interested in how we can intervene earlier in people’s journey to provide bigger horizons, rather than just waiting for enough experience to build up…

[gumby]

Thanks. I think I mainly developed more empathy.

I married an artist. She knew no physics, no advanced mathematics, but plenty of philosphy and languages as well as the technology and philosophy of representational art. She was a lot smarter than me and we spent a lot of time expanding each others' horizons, not deliberately or didactically but just through living.

Also so many things seem clear when you are young and I was repeatedly humbled by how complicated the real world is compared to academia or research (where I worked on very abstruse subjects, e.g. the denotational semantics of reflexive languages).

I think you see this in a lot of people: libertarianism and even Ayn Rand is more popular with young people ("hey I'm smart and responsible; why are there all these annoying and pointless rules getting in my way?"). I was never a libertarian but back then I was sympathetic to Rousseau. But you have fewer grown up libertarians because many learn to realise that sure, things are imperfect, but we live in a world that evolved (sometimes well and sometimes not) to work with fallable systems and lots of opinions, some well thought out and some...not so.

[bigstrat2003]

One of the interesting insights I've had recently (in my late 30s) is that young people always assume that the older generation is out of touch and can't see the obvious solutions to all of life's problems. But it seems to me now that the truth is rather different - the older generation often has the experience to understand why those solutions are not going to work, whereas the young don't yet have that hard-won experience (cause it takes time).

I myself have been (and still am tbh) fairly libertarian. But the older I get and the more I see, the more I start to understand that there are flaws in the idea. Not everyone is going to do the right thing (for various reasons), and sometimes you simply have to intervene because the cost of not doing so becomes too high. I do think that our government tends too much towards nanny-ism, but at the same time I kinda get why.

[kragen]

> the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a social model they want to exist rather than the one that currently does. I think it’s a big reason why it’s barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years?

assuming you mean cryptocurrencies, i think they kept several million people alive throughout the venezuelan civil war, sustained wikileaks through the visa and mastercard blockade, and have made sci-hub and library genesis financially stable; maybe they haven't impacted the people in your direct vicinity, but they've made a huge impact in places like moldova which don't have functional currency

[gumby]

Yes, cryptocurrencies not cryptography. Bad of me to use that contraction for anything but the latter.

Have they really made a significant difference? A bit of searching around resulting in a few articles with anecdotes, and if someone's life really was saved this way of course it made a huge difference to them.

But for some macro perspective the best I could find was the "Crypto Adoption Index" (https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2023-global-crypto-adoption...), where VE, or MD don't even register (AR barely does). In fact US is listed as having one of the highest levels of adoption, and it's basically invisible here.

Countries with nonfunctional currency systems usually do better by adopting an existing stable currency like USD or EU (or even better someplace economically coupled with them).

But I'm no expert and I'd be happy to be proven wrong. On a financial macro perspective cryptocurrencies don't even exist.

[kragen]

pretty much the entire currency black market here in argentina used to run on cryptocurrencies, which is more significant than it sounds given how large a fraction of argentina's employment is illegal (something like a third, last i heard). i think us banks have taken some of that business away from cryptocurrencies in recent years, but every illegal moneychanger still accepts them even if most of their business runs over zelle

as for how countries might do better, while it is interesting to discuss what policies policymakers ought to adopt, argentine (and turkish, venezuelan, etc.) policymakers do not want to adopt the policies they ought to adopt; they want to adopt the policies that serve their political interests. the rest of us are left to figure out how to cope with their terrible policies. and that's the sense in which bitcoin matters; it makes it possible for argentines and venezuelans to do things like save money, leave the country, and send money to their families back home when they're working abroad

on a financial macro perspective, there's currently about 1.1 trillion dollars stored in bitcoin, which is a few days of global gdp. other cryptocurrencies together are something like half a trillion. it's entirely plausible that 80%, 90%, 95%, or 99% of bitcoin's number is owned by keys that were lost in disk drive failures back in the cpu mining epoch, but that's less likely for the other cryptocurrencies. so i don't know that i'd agree that they don't exist on a financial macro perspective. certainly they aren't anywhere near the importance of asset classes like real estate, commercial paper, forex, commodities futures, or stocks, and it's questionable how much real liquidity exists in the market—if satoshi were to start selling off his coins now, how much would it tank the market before he was done?

[gumby]

> on a financial macro perspective, there's currently about 1.1 trillion dollars stored in bitcoin, which is a few days of global gdp

You need to compare like to like. $2T of cryptocurrencies is about 2% of all the world’s stock exchanges (after the recent fall). Or compare it to total world fungible assets: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...

[kragen]

that seems like the right kind of comparison, yeah, although it's surprising the world's stock exchanges aren't worth more.† the infographic article is excellent, though i guess now cryptocurrencies would be more like 15 squares instead of three

2% is far from insignificant! argentina's gdp is less than 1% of the world's—as are each of switzerland, taiwan, belgium, israel, south africa, pakistan, new zealand, nigeria, greece, and hungary. if the advent of cryptocurrencies has added a new power to the world stage of the same order of magnitude as taiwan, pakistan, or nigeria, that's a momentous event—particularly since it's doing it by giving tens of millions of the world's poorest people relief from terrible governance

(funding universal public access to history's biggest library despite prohibitions from the world's greatest powers seems significant, too. you've been in india, you know what library access is like outside the rich world, and you're surely aware that sci-hub and libgen have had a huge positive impact even inside the rich world)

in the infographic, the m1 money supply is about four months of world gdp, 35 trillion dollars, and that seems like the most nearly equivalent thing in the list to compare bitcoin to. it's about 3%. if we assume that countries' money supply is close to proportional to their gdp, that would make bitcoin the 8th largest world currency, following the euro, the us dollar, the yuan, the yen, the indian rupee, the pound, and the brazilian real. it would beat the canadian dollar, the russian ruble, and the other 150 or so national currencies, going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

if we use the m2 money supply instead, bitcoin is about 1% of it and drops to about 15th

on the opposite end of the scale, supposedly there are two or three thousand billionaires in the world; bitcoin distribution is widely considered to be highly inequitable, and so it may have added a few dozen or a few hundred to that number. considering the historical impact of certain individual billionaires like andrew carnegie, george soros, john d. rockefeller, and leland stanford, that seems like it might also be important

______

† world gdp is 110 trillion dollars per year; if corporate profits are 10% of that, that'd be 11 trillion dollars per year of profits, and you'd expect share prices to average around 20 years of profits, which would be 220 trillion dollars, much higher than the 89.5 trillion dollars in the infographic. perhaps outside the usa corporate profits are much lower, or investing in the stock market is much riskier? it's certainly riskier here

[kragen]

an interesting additional data point is https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/bitcoin-market-data-exchang... — while i don't trust chainalysis in general i suspect that they are probably telling the truth when they say

> As of June 2020, roughly 18.6 million Bitcoin has been mined. (...) Another 20% hasn’t moved from its current set of addresses in five years or longer. We consider this lost Bitcoin.

which suggests that the amount of lost bitcoin is at most 20% rather than the 90% or 95% i was suggesting

also, in talking about its historical impacts, it seems like probably we really should mention ransomware and darknet markets for, mostly, illegal drugs

[jocoda]

tangential

... without marketing (e.g. gmail

I would hard disagree that there was no marketing.

gmail had one of the first really successful guerilla marketing campaigns imo. Google made the initial phase by "invite only". By making it exclusive, a whole ecosystem developed around getting invites so that you could have that @gmail.com account. By the time of the official launch they had captured what could losely be described as the influencers of the time.

Invite only has been tried a few times since then, but never to my knowledge has it been done as well.

[bigstrat2003]

I wouldn't say that word of mouth from satisfied users counts as marketing. Google didn't need to drum up interest, people did that by themselves. It was mind-blowing at the time to get a whole GB of storage space for email. People would've been banging down their doors with or without an invite-only system.