Daily Balajisms – A phone is a new franchise
Mobiles made us mobile, crypto will make us cosmopolitan.
Balaji Srinivasan says that a phone is a new franchise. Where there is a phone, there is a job. Balaji and Amjad Masad discussed on Superteam podcast the rapid growth of Replit and Replit bounties in India, where tens of thousands of Indians code on Replit using mobile phones and can earn good money.
Balaji has a concept of a mobile telescope that searches for dark talent worldwide. Like a Hubble telescope that was built to search for dark matter. Thanks to the internet and mobile phones we can discover hidden tech talent in remote areas and teleport it to the cloud.
People from all around the world can be part of the biggest economy that is not the US, or China, but the internet. Many people shop online, but very few got paid on the internet. This is a huge yet untapped business opportunity. Crypto tasking and pseudonymous economy can be much bigger than PayPal or Stripe.
Social media brought us ultra-democracy. “Don’t argue with a man that buys ink by the barrel”, was the saying. Now everyone can record a vertical video with their smartphone and share it on a freer post-Elon twitter. The old establishment was for the free speech in principle, when it was prohibitively expensive for regular folks to acquire TV broadcast license.
In the post-Elon twitter even the blue checks are democratized. Blue checks are the new blue collars, a consumtariat as Alexander Bard would call them. NPCs that will be disrupted by an actual NPC, an AI.
Today anyone with a phone can create content, build a community, and access capital. Sand Hill was disintermediated. Mainstream media became the downstream media, as they are downstream of twitter. And after the digital death of SVB, we realized that twitter itself is downstream of group chats.
Before we used to have a paper, party, and polity, says Balaji. Newspapers were spreading the message of the political party and formed a polity, a nation around shared beliefs. Today we can create content, (social, crypto) capital and community using phones, AR glasses and the convergence of AI, Crypto and Social technologies.
Balaji says often that mobiles made us more mobile. People prefer accessing information on the go. The GPS navigation on our smart phones opened the map and people can now freely explore various new destinations and restaurants. We can uber to work and don’t need to own a car.
Less obviously, mobile banking revolution of M-Pesa in Kenya helped tens of millions of unbanked people to send cash to their families across thousands of miles, without the need to deliver it in-person. Even less obviously, mobile phones accelerated the progress in battery technologies what made the EV revolution possible. New vertically integrated rivals like BYD are disrupting the legacy auto makers. And China is also a dominant drone maker.
Mobile phones disrupted the automotive industry indirectly – by accelerating the progress in battery technology. Crypto and AR glasses, as the next predictable convergence device, might disrupt the legacy (fiat) countries, by driving progress in cryptohistory and physical social networks.
Mobiles made us mobile, crypto will make us cosmopolitan.