The 2021 Stratechery Year in Review
Courtesy of Ben Thompson at Stratechery
There is a perspective in which 2021 was an absolute drag: COVID dragged on, vaccines became politicized, new variants emerged, and while tech continued to provide the infrastructure that kept the economy moving, it also provided the infrastructure for all of those things that made this year feel so difficult.
At the same time, 2021 also provided a glimpse of a future beyond our current smartphone and social media-dominated paradigm: there was the Metaverse, and crypto, and my contention they are related. Sure, the old paradigm is increasingly dominated by regulation and politics, a topic that is so soul-sucking that it temporarily made me want to post less, but the brilliance of the Internet, and of business-models like that which undergirds Stratechery, is that freedom to not only write what you want, but build what you want, and be what you want, is greater than ever.
This year Stratechery published 40 free Weekly Articles and 121 Daily Updates, including 13 interviews. I also launched Passport, the new back-end for Stratechery and Dithering, the twice-a-week for-pay podcast I host with John Gruber; Passport remains under development, so stay tuned for updates in 2022.
Today, as per tradition, I summarize the most popular and most important posts of the year on Stratechery.
You can find previous years here: 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013
On to 2021:
The Five Most-Viewed Articles
The five most-viewed articles on Stratechery according to page views:
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Clubhouse’s Inevitability — I was very bullish on Clubhouse; unfortunately, it looks like I got this one completely wrong. I admitted to my error and explained my thinking in this Update.
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The Relentless Jeff Bezos — Jeff Bezos is retiring, and will go down as one of the great CEO’s in tech history, in part because of how he transformed Amazon into a tech company in every respect.
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Intel Problems — Intel is in much more danger than its profits suggest; the problems are a long time in the making, and the solution is to split up the company. See also, Intel Unleashed, Gelsinger on Intel, IDM 2.0 and Intel vs. TSMC, How Samsung and TSMC Won, MAD Chips.
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Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History — The actions taken by Big Tech have a resonance that goes beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics. Even if they were right, they will still push the world to Internet 3.0.
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Apple’s Mistake — While it’s possible to understand Apple’s motivations behind its decision to enable on-device scanning, the company had a better way to satisfy its societal obligations while preserving user privacy. See also, Apple Versus Governments, Apple’s Legitimate Privacy Claims, Privacy and Paranoia, Apple’s Point-of-View, NFTs and Status, NFTs and Standard Formats, and Facebook Messenger Updates, WhatsApp vs. Apple, Facebook’s CSAM Approach.
The Next Revolution
Several posts throughout the year wrestled with the theory of the next revolution, from memes to metaverses:
- Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History — The actions taken by Big Tech have a resonance that goes beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics. Even if they were right, they will still push the world to Internet 3.0.
- Mistakes and Memes — Information on the Internet is conveyed by memes, which can be anything and everything. The real world impacts are only now being understood.
- The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions — Carlota Perez documents technological revolutions, and thinks we’re in the middle of the current one; what, though, if we are nearing its maturation? Is crypto next?
- Sequoia Productive Capital — Sequoia’s transformation of its venture capital model is actually a shift from financial capital to productive capital.
- The Great Bifurcation — Tracing the evolution of tech’s three eras, and why the fourth era — the Metaverse — is defined by its bifurcation with the physical world.
