We are staying at a farm house in the small village of Neu Heinde, somewhere in rural Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Absolutely nothing happens here and it’s what I needed most after months of stress: Nature, family and not much more.
One thing that is missing, though, is the internet.
I have surprisingly vivid memories of the many times I had to endure bad internet connections. I still see myself sitting in front of my father’s old Mac, for example, which was connected via some sort of dial-up modem, and while the websites were building up line by line I had enough time to dream up all the exciting things they may reveal. Fun in a way, but also tedious. Or the many times I was trying to talk to my parents from random internet cafés in Honduras (where I stayed a year after school), only to be disappointed by dropped connections again and again.
I am reminded of these times, because trying to access the internet in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 2020 feels like being a kid again in 1999 or like the young traveler in Central America in 2006. The pace of how the most crucial infrastructure of the century is set-up here is simply aggravating.
This book presents a fascinating thought experiment: What if evolution made spiders truly intelligent - and not only humans. How would their society work and evolve? What would their cities look like? How would their technology differ from ours?
It‘s amazing how the book made me care for this spider society, even though the story jumps through the ages in order to answer the questions above and does not focus on a single protagonist.
The story on the human side is much more straight forward and functions as the glue that holds everything together. I found this part enjoyable – even if it’s a bit cliché at times – but to be honest, I would have been okay with only seeing the spider side of things. You know, the surprising stuff.
Another great article by Ben Thompson and a insightful observation of how the internet seems to splinter even more between the US, Europe, China and now India. It shows that a) I know nothing about India, really, but that b) I desperately need to learn more about this fascinating country and market - especially as the conflict between systems and world-views (China VS The West / Authoritarianism VS Liberal Democracy / Free Markets VS Deeply Regulated etc.) heats up. It seems that India has a large role to play and this – so yeah, homework for me.
What stuck with me the most, though, was Thompsons evaluation of the state of the European Internet. Overburdened by good meaning but ultimately misguided regulations (think GDPR, for example, that favors big companies with large legal departments while leaving smaller start-ups with either legal bills or legal risk) it gets harder and harder for innovation to emerge here that truly competes with America’s giants (or, soon, China’s or India’s).
From India, Jio and the Four Internets:
“Europe, through regulations like GDPR and the Copyright Directive, along with last week’s court decision striking down the Privacy Shield framework negotiated by the European Commission and the U.S. International Trade Administration (and a previous decision striking down the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles framework), is splintering off into an Internet of its own. This Internet, though, feels like the worst of all possible outcomes. On one hand, large U.S. tech companies are winners, at least relative to everyone else: yes, all of the regulatory red tape increases costs (and, for targeted advertising, may reduce revenue), but the impact is far greater on would-be competitors. (…)
Any company that wishes to achieve scale needs to do so in its home market first, before going abroad, but it seems far more likely that Europe will make the most sense as a secondary market for companies that have done the messy work of iterating on data and achieving product-market fit in markets that are more open to experimentation and impose less of a regulatory burden. Higher costs mean you need a greater expectation of success, which means a proven model, not a speculative one. (…)”
“What differs Europe’s Internet from the U.S., Chinese, or Indian visions is, well, the lack of vision. Doing nothing more than continually saying “no” leads to a pale imitation of the status quo, where money matters more than innovation.”