So It Turns Out, Issue #2
Recent rambles on the intersection of technology and society
Dear friends,
(In case you missed the last issue, or I just added you to the distro list since then…)
You might be wondering “why is this odd newsletter in my inbox?” Well, it’s an experiment. I’ve realized that I’m a) pretty inconsistent in keeping in touch with folks, and b) really missing writing down things that aren’t tweets or Powerpoint decks. So, this is an effort to solve both while digging into the intersection of technology and society. Hopefully some of it will be of interest to you, too (if not, tell me to unsubscribe you, or just unsubscribe — you won’t hurt my feelings!).
So here are some things I’ve been thinking about recently:
Why does Elon Musk Need A Starlink?*
For a while now, I’ve been meaning to do a deep dive and understand Starlink, Elon Musk’s plan to put up satellites in space to offer internet bandwidth to people on earth. Luckily, this article by Jeffrey Paul has done it for me. (I assume below that this guy knew what he was talking about, but I only worked at a space camp, not SpaceX, so take it with a grain of salt).
For those less familiar, Starlink is Elon Musk’s plan to hang satellites in orbit to beam down internet access to anywhere on planet Earth. The satellites need a base station about the size of something between a pizza box and a briefcase — it won’t be on your phone. But it offers a lot of advantages:
Preliminary tests with fewer than 100 satellites up showed approximately 600Mbps available as tested on an aircraft in flight to Starlink. For reference, my last flat in Berlin (the capital of the largest economy in the EU), on the ground on a main street in the city center, was serviced with approximately 14Mbps ADSL, and this was the fastest offering available from any vendor.
This is not just a game changer for people like you and I, living in relatively populated places struggling against greedy last-mile monopolists: remember that half of the human beings are not online yet…
Starlink means that you can go live in the woods in Siberia if you like, with relatively little impact to your team (presuming you already work with your team via an internet connection).
There are some really interesting questions:
Who’s the first customer? Well, it turns out that an orbital link is actually faster than fiber optic cables; the speed of light in fiber optic is only about 2/3rds of that in vacuum, and so high-frequency financial traders are willing to beam a signal through a satellite in order to send more quickly…
Who else wants it? Well, it will probably enable even broader spread of cell phone towers with even faster speed into even more rural areas. What does that mean, when there’s no real reason to be living in an urban area for basic bandwidth?
What are the use cases that still won’t work well? Well, a lot of what enables your Netflix and other high-bandwidth solutions aren’t just server farms sitting somewhere, but also Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that sit far closer to the user in the network to stream data without dealing with bandwidth and latency issues — will that be something that transfers to Starlink? I genuinely don’t know enough to know.
Will the Starlink base stations in China obey the Great Firewall? You might think not, but then again, Tesla is trying to grow its market in China dramatically.
*If you got this reference, then you suffered through Star Trek V like me, and you are my friend in sympathy.
Supply chains are fascinating, I promise:
I’ve been fascinated by this video from Strange Parts, one of my favorite weird internet video people. The concept of Strange Parts is that it’s a Westerner in (mainly) China visiting all the incredible places that you can find when you visit the Other End of The Supply Chain. This video of industrial parts markets in Shenzen is particularly amazing:
I think on one level, there’s a story that we tell, which is that “all the factories are in China now.” That’s not actually true — production has gone up as the total number of jobs has gone down. The second-level story is that the manufacturing has become more specialized and high-end in the US, and to a certain extent, that’s certainly true. There’s a reason that high-end jet engines, for example, are still made in the West.
But one thing that Strange Parts has reminded me of is that there’s a different kind of specialization that you can have when you have a LOT of production in the same place. There are suppliers and manufacturers that have specialized into extremely narrow niches, because at the scale of industrial production in Shenzen, being known as the Guy Who Can Get You That New Part Today can still be a lucrative business. There are still parts of the US where businesses are concentrated like this — think the LA or NYC Fashion Districts — but they’re rarer in the US, so it’s really cool to see elsewhere.
There’s a fascinating moment, about 2/3rds of the way in, where one of the guys touring the shops notices how cheap a set of Andon lights are. (Andon lights are the flashy things that you put on top of a machine that turn colors when there’s an issue), He then notices that they’re made of lower-durability materials than the version he’d buy in the US for hundreds of dollars. Now, I’m sure some of this is that they’re serving manufacturers who just can’t afford the longer-lasting versions — but he also notes that if you had a market this big, you wouldn’t need the higher durability, since replacements come from the same city, not FedExed overnight from a warehouse elsewhere. And sometimes, quantity has a quality all of its own.
Ok, but what if art had to deal with those supply chain issues too?
Possibly one of the most surprising threads I read this week (some key tweets below, but read the whole thing!):
Fascinatingly, you start to get the sense that digital art is just another kind of startup, where shipping is prioritized over long-term technical debt, where hacks are prioritized over durability. And you begin to wonder if Shakespeare’s plan of just needing some new words, some seats, and a stage wasn’t ultimately more of a technical innovation than all sorts of digital art was….
Meanwhile, Samsung’s next phone allegedly is just straight up a tricorder?
One thought about the Iowa Caucus:
This newsletter may occasionally get political. But at least as of now, I’ve decided it won’t be explicitly partisan (you can find enough of my rants elsewhere). But there is one political position that this newsletter feels very strongly about, and stands in solidarity with Iowa Caucus-goers everywhere in saying:
The Proper Name of carbonated, sugary, non-alcoholic beverages is Pop, not Soda.
Other news:
Would you like to read what would happen if Jim Scott was a communist, instead of an anarchist? If so, David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules is for you!
Anti-facial-recognition makeup developed by activists in the UK, or has LAMDA’s clown class just gotten really political?
The Good Place may be over, but we’ve been gifted with one. last. Kierkegaard. rap.
Next time, on Dave Kasten:
Can we be safe on the Internet?
What happens when we let civic hackers build things for cities?
Is Dyneema the future of one-bag suitcase travel?
Will I ever write about the things I listed last time?
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
I may on occasion use Amazon Affiliate or similar links when referencing things I’d tell you about anyways. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases; I donate the proceeds to charity. While Substack has a paid subscription option, I don’t have any plans to use it at this time and anyone who gets this newsletter now surely won’t be ever paying for their subscription.