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This week's Techsight. covers the deplatforming of the sitting president of the United States, the recent bitcoin rally and a huge content drop in biotech and healthcare
DEPLATFORMING THE PRESIDENT
In the last couple of days, Twitter and Facebook, took action to silence the president, citing rules prohibiting content that incites violence. They were joined by companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Snap Inc, Reddit (and some more), that shut down services related to Trump as well as his fallback social media platform Parler.
In my opinion, corporate (Tech) America has done something that the senate wasn’t able to do. Ending Trump's presidency. Do I think this is the ideal solution? No. Do I think that this is how these company should regularly exert their power to moderate speech on the internet? No. But, this week's events hadn't been „normal“ in any possible way.
The magnitude of Trump's actions has been such a strong attack on democracy in general, that general rules/principles for content moderation should not apply in this context. Nevertheless, I think that the measures that Amazon, Facebook Twitter & co took in the last days will (and must!) incite harsh discussions over content moderation and free speech globally.
As I said, this isn’t an ideal way to handle Trump and impeachment would have been (and still is) the only right way to go here in my opinion. However, given this weeks events, I think deplatforming Trump was the right thing to do at this exact moment in time.
The two learnings I got from this going forward… 1.) We have to find better ways to moderate the internet without censoring it 2.) A hand full of tech companies based in Northern California and Seattle were able to do something that the senate of the most powerful country in the world has not been able to (yet) - deplatform the President.
More on this in the coming Techsight…
(Links: Trump & Twitter, AWS shutting down Parler, Stratechery Update - paid)
THE FIRST 2021 TECH NEWS OVERVIEW
Benedict Evans released one of his annual slide decks on the European market, unicorns, and global tech diffusion. (Link)
2020 was a year of change - McKinsey dropped an interesting deck: „A tale of 2020 in 20 charts“ (Link)
Ben Thompson published his annual Stratechery 2020 year in review post. (Link)
The Crypto Madness continued in 2021 with Bitcoin hitting $40k for the first time ever and even Rapper started to jump onto the crypto bandwagon:
Shortly afterward, BTC dropped to $34k again… I can imagine this going both ways… Bitcoin becoming a new trusted asset class like Gold and hitting $150-200k OR becoming more or less worthless…. For everyone who has experienced some kind of Crypto FOMO recently, former Sequoia Capital Partner Matt Huang wrote a great intro to Bitcoin: Bitcoin For The Open Minded Skeptic. (Link)
Google’s year in review based on the most common search terms. (Link)
Andreessen Horowitz started the year by dropping 10 blog posts biotech and the future of healthcare. (Link)
More on Biotech - Due to the race to the vaccine, the biotech industry has become more and more in the focus of the media. Now there has been another breakthrough independent of the vaccine development: Google's Deepmind announced 'Alphafold', which uses machine learning to work out the likely structures of complex folded proteins People who, unlike me, know an enormous amount about research and industry agree: This is a historic breakthrough! On their site, they explain it very clearly. (Link)
Quote of the week:
Innovation flourished in cities that traded freely with other cities. Places where ideas could meet and mate to produce new ideas. Hence, innovation is a collective phenomenon that happens between and not within brains.
By Matt Ridley - How Innovation Works
Techsight. Evergreens:
Stratechery (Link)
Y Combinator (Podcast & Startup School)
Naval’s podcasts & blogs (Na.val, Spearhead & Venture Hacks)
20Minute VC podcast (Link)
If you disagree or want to add a thought or two, feel free to connect with me via: Twitter, LinkedIn or email me at julian1108grunewald@gmail.com