Don’t yet know where exactly I’m going with this. Intuition I’m chasing is that after ~20 years of software eating the world, the “future of tech” is no longer synonymous with the fate of Silicon Valley. Even the future of computing and software are no longer synonymous with SV.
Conversation
We can’t seem to separate their feelings about SV (positive or negative) from their feelings about technology generally. Tech futures turn into either “un-Silicon Valley” or “next Silicon Valley” or “how history will punish Zuckerberg” or “Bitcoin solves this”
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I last circled this topic in 2019 where I explored what the monolithic term “Tech” (currently embodied by SV) stands for and whether it can die. I haz new thoughts on this. breakingsmart.substack.com/p/can-tech-die
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In that essay I reached 3 conclusions:
1. “Tech is not technological activity per se, it is a rate regime of technological evolution, defined as “fast enough”, and a necessary and sufficient condition to be a technologist in Tech, or a Techie, is simply being able to keep up.“
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2. “Tech is a single, connected, hydra, within which technologists make almost all the decisions that matter. Because they’re by definition the only ones keeping up sufficiently with the nature of the potential coming online, and thinking about what to do with it”
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3. “... VC sector is a sign that an area of technology is part of Tech. When technologists are in the driver’s seat, patterns of return on capital acquire a certain generic predictability (in terms of time horizons and rates) that allows for an efficient kind of investing.”
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tldr “Tech is a growing agency pie, and a Techie could be defined as someone who is participating in a way that they’re gaining agency faster than secondary actors can take it away. So Tech is simply the collection of all such Techies in a densely connected social graph”
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Re the “can Tech die” question I concluded that while it can’t die, it can slow down to the point of going dormant if other kinds of minority decision-makers, esp financiers and politicians, who slow tech to their speed rather than try to keep up, take over from technologists.
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I made this 3-phase diagram
1. When a few humans keep up with tech, you get Coherent Tech (eg 1978-2000)
2. When everybody gets caught up you get Incoherent Tech based on expanding access (eg 2001-15)
3. When politicians and financiers take over you get Stagnant Tech (2016 -)
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Yeah, there's an isomorphism there somewhere, but afaik her 4-phase model doesn't include a necessary populist-democratizing phase? I guess deployment phase is open to populism in ways installation phase is not... but doesn't require it.
Yeah, if her model is 4 phases with a game-change in the middle, the most agency/generativity is in phases 1 and 3.
(And we're in a dragging-out phase2.)

