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[1]Back button double caret [2][coffee-cup] [graphic-22]
12 March 2024
essay
Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something
Somewhere between the [3]death of our favorite aggregator websites and the
world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies
in a trench coat. On the breast pocket of that trenchcoat is a name tag that
reads “The Cloud.” Under that name tag is an older name tag that reads “The
Internet.” And under that name tag is a frayed embroidery that reads, “ARPANET
(non-commercial use only, motherfuckers),” in a lovely script typeface and
craftsmanship you just don’t see nowadays.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM) now own most of the steel and glass
that makes the internet go vroom. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft control
seventy-five percent of the cloud computing market^[4][1]. Meta and Google own
half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents^
[5][2]. Most of our favorite productivity apps, retail websites, and social
media platforms are beholden to proprietary infrastructure controlled by these
four corporations. They own the most heavily trafficked server networks, all
the GPUs, and gigawatts, and whatever.
They call it the cloud, but really, that’s just the internet.
So, what we know as the cloud doesn’t actually exist. It’s a euphemism that
obfuscates the consolidation of critical infrastructure. The cloud is
metaphysical porn for wild-eyed technocrats in Allbirds who say things like,
“I’m making a dent in the universe” without a whisper of irony. It’s bullshit.
It’s fugazi. There is no spoon, Neo.
The cloud is a lie.
So, now that GAMM owns all this infrastructure, but no one really knows they
own it all, or even that there's an "all” to own, they're doing what American
corporations do best— selling us the biggest truck we're willing to drive off
the lot. But instead of F-250s, it's raw computing power manifested into
virtual reality conference rooms.
The future of the web is consumption [6]#
Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We
all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our
faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our
graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job
titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
But none of that really matters. We keep waiting for the next iteration of the
web, or the internet, but the future is now, baby. We’re living it at this very
moment. It snuck through the backdoor when no one was looking.
Over a decade or more, while our politicians were busy sub-tweeting fascists
for clout, GAMM was buying up all the infrastructure it could carry. The old
sync-and-share business model wasn’t working for them anymore, so they turned
the internet into a network of expensive, gas-guzzling computing power.
It makes sense. The production cost of data storage plummeted by 94% in just
ten years^[7][3]. You can't sell 50GB plans to college kids who own M2 Macbook
Pros with a terabyte of solid-state storage. That's not how you build
hundred-year empires.
So what did GAMM do? They convinced us that our notetaking apps require an
internet connection and forty thousand dollar GPUs located on a server three
hundred miles away. That's the future they've made for us.
It’s consumption. Its monopolistic control. It’s computing-hungry magic tricks
thrown at the wall, hoping something sticks. The next iteration of the web by
way of the internet is just one long infomercial of fifty-dollar solutions to
fifty-cent problems.
I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little
digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the
blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because
those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That
fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but
it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
Open(ness) for business [8]#
The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk
with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and
minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with
human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed
crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that
would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful
won't do anything to stop it.
Right now, there's a four-way chess match in which each competitor will take a
position of openness or security depending on which ideology helps them gain
more market share.
Amazon controls 35% of the cloud computing market and has created a tight seal
around its customer base. So, Meta and Google started preaching the importance
of data portability. The [9]Data Transfer Initiative is a red herring protocol
that does little more than allow Meta and Google to compare notes on the data
they have on us. But the message is, of course, "user empowerment.” [10]El oh
fucking el.
If either Google or Meta's market positions change, you better believe they
will pivot to security fearmongering while lifting that drawbridge.
Amazon is mostly quiet as the frontrunner in the cloud computing market.
Microsoft, however, may've earned itself a hundred-year reign with OpenAI. So,
its job is just to scare us into believing that AI has the power to bring about
the apocalypse and that Microsoft is the only company that can control it.
There's no way OpenAI survives any of this, by the way—not as an independent
company anyway. Without Microsoft running ChatGPT on its servers, OpenAI has no
product.
Google and Meta want the tech world to believe that building a sufficient moat
for its respective AI businesses is impossible. Google went so far as to leak a
[11]frantic internal memo. In it, an employee claims that open-source AI is
"eating its lunch” and that they might as well release their code to the
public.
This framing is a half-truth, and it's purposefully deceptive. Yes, if everyone
open-sources its AI models, they cannot build a moat on proprietary software.
However, Google's memo fails to mention that it already has the infrastructure
to run computing-hungry AI models and that infrastructure is wildly expensive
to build. That's why four companies own most of it. The real moat is the fields
of data centers, specialized GPUs, and hundreds of miles of deep-sea fiber
optic cables.
And then there's Zuck [12]#
No one has a more grandiose vision for the internet than Mark Zuckerberg. The
dude read a 1980s dystopian sci-fi novel where the world was so shitty, people
spent all of their time in a virtual reality universe, and he thought— yeah,
humans will love this beep boop beep (or whatever sound he makes when he has an
idea). And you know what? There’s a sporting chance that the son of a bitch
pulls it off.
Whatever. The metaverse is not the story here. And whether or not Zuck actually
believes the bullshit he preaches about his virtual reality hellscape isn’t
relevant.
What matters is that Meta is likely the most sophisticated cloud computing
company on the planet. Facebook cut its teeth on a barebones web before the
cloud market even existed. Zuck has open-sourced more cloud architecture than
most companies could ever hope to develop in a lifetime. Amazon Web Services
doesn’t gain a third of the cloud computing market without Facebook’s
contributions.
So, I think it’s a mistake to write off Zuck as some tech-bro idiot chasing his
tail. He’s not Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg is a capable businessman who
understands the industry better than most tech founders.
I don’t know the guy personally, but look at the facts. Half of the world is on
his suite of apps. He’s been the king of social media for twenty years. You can
count on one hand the number of competing social media platforms that have
survived his reign. His anti-competitive strategies are so effective that
universities [13]have studied it.
Psychopath? Probably. Should you hate him? Sure. But don’t underestimate him.
He’s shrewd and cunning and will rip your fucking head off if you hit the App
Store’s top 100.
With that in mind, let’s examine some of Zuck’s recent moves with fresh eyes.
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t spend ten billion dollars on GPUs to achieve augmented
general intelligence, a pursuit no one can even confirm is possible, just so he
can then give away the technology for free. That doesn’t make sense. He is a
chief executive with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
He’s made these moves because raw computing power is the business model. So,
who gives a shit if Meta put Llama on Github for free? How will anyone ship
their resulting AI-featured app without Meta’s cloud infrastructure? Read the
terms and conditions. [14]Llama is not open-source.
Zuck isn’t the mad scientist his PR team wants us to think he is. He’s selling
us printers at cost so that later he can fuck us on the price of ink.
One layer up, one step ahead. [15]#
This post has been a stone-cold bummer, huh? I know, I know. I put you through
some shit just now. I’m sorry about that.
Listen, I know we want to believe that things are changing for the better. For
the first time in a long while, there’s hope for the future of the web. There’s
something in the air, something that feels like meaningful change. Things are
happening. It’s lovely, actually.
When corporate social media platforms began to crumble a few years ago, we
looked for alternatives. Some of us, like myself, rediscovered the open web. We
reminisced about a time when the web was more than just search engine
optimization and key performance indicators. Before an algorithm made us dance
for our dinners. And it just felt right. So, we made blogs and personal
websites and put little pixelated badges on the footers like we used to. We
then moved to decentralized social media and joined [16]small forums.
We carved out a space on the web that wasn’t for sale.
But don’t you see, you beautiful idiot? (Pretend like I’m shaking you by the
shoulders frantically.) Our existence on this unincorporated web threatens
those who have made their fortunes off our digital lives. The four largest
corporations in the world won’t just roll over and let us have the quirky indie
web we all want. They’ve moved one layer up so that they remain our gatekeepers
no matter where we go.
There are no easy answers. Entire books exist on how to take back the internet
they’ve stolen from us. [17]Internet For The People by Ben Tarnoff is one of my
favorites. It’s an inspiring exploration of the untold history of the internet,
and it has some great calls to action.
Today, we can start by giving each other some grace. Let’s move away from the
trappings of the morality Olympics we’re playing with the social media
platforms we participate in. The factions created by that behavior don’t
benefit us. It benefits them. They love to see it. Some people are on Twitter,
some are on Threads. What the fuck ever. It doesn’t matter. Under the hood,
Twitter is just the company that removed “Don’t Be Evil” from its mission
statement. Threads is run by the company responsible for [18]cultivating a
genocide. None of our hands are clean.
And if you’re on Mastodon or some other decentralized social media, that’s
great! Don’t be a dick about it. For some people, TikTok is their livelihood.
For others, Instagram is the difference between speaking to someone that day or
not. We’re all just doing the best we can. But we’re fighting each other when
we could be working together to take these motherfuckers down a peg.
The internet doesn’t run on scattered clouds and rushing streams. It takes
heaps of fibered glass and twisted steel to send a DM to that cute French boy
from your year abroad. And it takes thousands of miles of laid cable, traveling
at impossible speeds through the depths of our oceans, for him to leave you on
read. I’m not judging. We’ve all been there, mon cheri.
But someone must own all that infrastructure. And with ownership comes control.
This fact is worth stating out loud. It’s worth communicating in our preferred
typeface. Even if some of us are more aware of it than others. Otherwise, we
get lost in the magic of it all. We become more beholden to our Internet
overlords.
Who’s to say how a cloud computing oligopoly will affect our everyday lives?
But it feels big—bigger than even the telecommunications and cable TV
monopolies of the 1990s or Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post. The
internet is how we’ve been able to disperse information and organize with each
other. Good people on the web have stepped up when our news organizations and
politicians failed us.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta already control so much of what we see and
don’t see. If they can suppress an active genocide on the platform layer,
imagine what they can do when they control the whole kit and kaboodle.
So, if we want a true indie web, we must be prepared to fight for it. Hope is
not enough.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
1. [19]Cloud Market Gets its Mojo Back; AI Helps Push Q4 Increase in Cloud
Spending to New Highs [20]↩︎
2. [21]Internet For The People [22]↩︎
3. [23]Historical cost of computer memory and storage [24]↩︎
Metadata
label name
Plot [26]notebook
Published 12 March 2024
Type essay
Phase sorting
Tags [27]technocrats, [28]the web
Assumed audience everyone
caffeinate me
If you have ever found my writing valuable and you want to help me continue
avoiding doing my laundry, you can [29]buy me a coffee. It would mean a lot.
† Article's assumed audience (AAA)
Sometimes, I identify who I'm writing for as a way to provide contextIt's like
saying, "I'm using a lot of technical terms because I wrote this post for
frontend developers,” or "Sorry if I'm getting too symmetrical, this one's for
my Wes Anderson fans." But, all are welcomed, always. If you're not in this
article's intended audience, but you find this article interesting, wonderful!
Please stick around, read the post, and feel free to ask me questions.
Referrals & affiliates
I do not receive commission for anything I share, endorse, or discuss, anywhere
on From Jason. I have no sponsorships, or advertiser agreements. If that ever
changes, I will let you know.
Ornamentation with the word Finis in a banner.
2086© (so I don't forget to change the year) From Jason [30]2.3.0
This site is dedicated to the old web, the weird web, the web that screamed in
horror when summoned through a land line.
[31]Don't click here
References:
[1] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/
[2] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/fromjason
[3] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/where-have-all-the-websites-gone/
[4] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#fn1
[5] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#fn2
[6] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#the-future-of-the-web-is-consumption
[7] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#fn3
[8] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#open-ness-for-business
[9] https://dtinit.org/
[10] https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/01/13/threads-now-lets.html
[11] https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/01/17/a-quick-rant.html
[12] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#and-then-there-s-zuck
[13] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_202019.pdf
[14] https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-source-llm-not-open
[15] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#one-layer-up-one-step-ahead
[16] https://32bit.cafe/
[17] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667898/internet-for-the-people-by-ben-tarnoff/
[18] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series
[19] https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-market-gets-its-mojo-back-q4-increase-in-cloud-spending-reaches-new-highs
[20] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#fnref1
[21] https://www.versobooks.com/products/2674-internet-for-the-people
[22] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#fnref2
[23] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?tab=table&time=2002..latest
[24] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#fnref3
[26] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook
[27] https://www.fromjason.xyz/tags/technocrats/
[28] https://www.fromjason.xyz/tags/the-web/
[29] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/fromjason
[30] https://fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/from-jason-2-0-is-an-11ty-powered-digital-garden-with-multiple-plots/
[31] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/#