Linked List: September 27, 2019

Friday, 27 September 2019

Echo Loop and Echo Frame: Almost nobody wants either of these products as they exist today, and Amazon knows it — both products are “limited quantity” and invitation-only. Neither product does anything you can’t just do with your phone. Their only reason for existence — in their current forms — is to make Alexa an always-available voice assistant. Siri and Google Assistant are always available on their respective companies’ phones; Amazon’s attempt to make a phone didn’t turn out so good.

Rings and glasses are good ideas for smart wearables. My pal Craig Hockenberry speculated on the potential of a smart ring back in 2014, even, before Apple Watch was announced. But to get people to actually buy and wear things like this, the devices have to do more. Apple Watch gives you glanceable notifications and complications, and is an excellent fitness and health tracker. The Echo Frames aren’t as ugly as Google Glass was, but wake me up when someone makes smart glasses that people would actually want to wear and which actually display useful heads-up information.

Celebrity Voices Coming to Alexa: Replacing Alexa’s voice with Samuel L. Jackson’s? With an explicit option? Hell yes, sign me up.

WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism ★

Matt Stoller, in his Big newsletter:

Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. The subprime fiasco was one example. Another example was the Worldcom fraud in the late 1990s, which forced the rest of the U.S. telecom sector to over-invest into broadband. Competitors have to copy their fraudulent competitors. It’s a variant of Gresham’s Law, which says that “bad money drives out good.” If you can counterfeit something for cheap, the counterfeit will eventually take over the entire market and drive out the real commodity. That is what is happening in our economy writ large, a kind of counterfeit capitalism as ‘leaders’ like Neumann are celebrated and actual leaders who can make things and manage are treated like dogshit.

This kind of counterfeit capitalism is terrible for society as a whole. At first, with companies like Walmart and Amazon, predatory pricing can seem smart. The entire retail sector might be decimated and communities across America might be harmed, but two day shipping is convenient and Walmart and Amazon do have positive cash flow. But increasingly with cheap capital and a narrow slice of financiers who want to copy the winners, there is a second or third generation of companies asking Wall Street to just ‘trust me.’

Compelling argument. I have always been deeply suspicious of any company whose business model is “lose a ton of money for the foreseeable future and eventually we’ll make a fortune”. It’s the South Park “Collect Underpants / … / Profit” business model, but real investors pump billions into it.

As a kid, when I heard the fable of the emperor with no clothes, I never bought the lesson, because I just couldn’t believe adults would go along with a sham that their own eyes told them wasn’t true. Turns out it happens all the time, over and over.