Alex Komoroske: preference

Transcript context

…Great. This is written a year ago. "We've forgotten a world without aggregators. Non-aggregator ecosystems make it so participants don't have to fear empowering their overlord, where that you have to worry about each bit of action you're doing, the aggregator is getting it more and more powerful. MySpace was the Wild West. Facebook made it so you can't change the CSS, which was better for users, containing some freedom. Aggregators make sense in the late stage of an era. At the beginning, they curtail too much exploration." That's just my random reflections. I don't even remember what conversation that came from originally, but of the power of... I am just so obsessed with the idea that we are in the late stage of this current technical paradigm that we're in and so many things we feel like we figured them all out and nothing can be any different, and I don't love this outcome that we're in, the idea of you're... Just one quick framing. To me, if you ask somebody on the street to tell you what the canonical piece of software is, the answer they'll give you is something like Instagram, which is to say an app, which I think is a shame because an app is monolithic. It's one size fits all. It's not decomposable. It doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the broader ecosystem. And it's also only allowed to exist if some of the largest companies in the world say it may exist, which is insane to me. To me, software is alchemy. It's the ability to extend human agency beyond ourselves to create something that can then combine with what others have created in unexpected and unforeseen ways to create this commentary of possibility of human agency. And somehow in the past decade, we've become convinced that all of this potential should be squeezed into about a dozen little boxes on your phone. And now with the power of AI, everyone just is default assuming that what's going to happen is we're all going to be locked inside of a box with a super God AI Clippy. And the only thing that people disagree about is which Clippy is it going to be? Whose Clippy is it going to be? That to me is bonkers. I don't want that world at all. I want a world where we use this magical duct tape to escape the box, to allow software and humans using it to lean into their agency. And I think aggregators are amazing in an environment where you have a safe environment to have all kinds of interesting stuff that can't be fully open-ended because the aggregator can't allow it to escape the possibility of that ecosystem. And so for me, one of the reasons I'm excited about LLMs being a disruptive technology is I think that it allows us to get out of this monolithic sense of whatever. We're all just beholden to a decreasing number, very powerful organizations, and lean into everybody being able to be creative and collaborative and exercise their agency in a pro-social way. Wow. Well, you blew our mind as a final element of this conversation. Alex, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where do they find stuff you're working on if they want to read more and follow the stuff you're thinking about? And then how can listeners be useful to you?…

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