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·Sep. 23, 2019

Facebook’s Supreme Court is like Compliance in Banks, or Chinese Communist Party entities in joint ventures

I've seen a whole bunch of headlines this past week about how Facebook is launching its version of the "Supreme Court", as if that were an app feature. The oversight board is meant to police controversial content decisions, and have the power to overrule Zuck's judgment on political matters. Its charter is drafted as if Facebook's 3 billion users were citizens of an Internet nation. Add to this the insanity over WeWork's failing IPO plans, where the CEO has been personally named in the amended filing documents with clear checks on demonstrated abuses of power. We are drifting into a Twilight Zone episode where modern corporations act as if they were feudal states run by divine kings negotiating with their nobility over a Magna Carta. Which is actually sort of where we are.

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·Aug. 27, 2019

Fighting Chinese Artificial Intelligence with lasers and American Crypto with European Central Banks

How do the Americans and the Chinese have such different ethical takes on privacy, self-sovereignty, media, and the role of government? We can trace the root cause to the DNA of the macro-organism in which individuals reside, itself built over centuries and millenia from the collective scar tissue of local human experience. But there is more to observe. The technology now being deployed in each jurisdiction -- like social credit, surveillance artificial intelligence, monitored payment rails, and central bank cryptocurrency -- will drive a software architecture into the core of our societies that reflects the current moment. And it will be nearly impossible to change! This is why *how* we democratize access to financial services matters. We must be careful about the form, because we will be stuck with it like Americans are stuck with the core banking systems from the 1970s. But the worry is not inefficiency, it is programmed social strata.

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·Jul. 8, 2019

Google and Amazon’s mixed reality advertising could become digital lending and payments platforms

Finance is everywhere, and everywhere is finance. Smart city supply chains, self driving car insurance, video game real estate markets -- no matter which frontier technology you touch, it will have embedded implications on the delivery of financial services. And why wouldn't it? Like the use of language, finance is a human technology that allows societies to coalesce and compete with one another (in the Yuval Harari sense). It lifts people out of poverty and into entrepreneurship through microloans, providing generational sustenance for their families. And of course it also throws them into pits of corruption and greed, as they drink too deeply from the rivers of securitization and political power.

But enough poetry! I want to talk about augmented reality, attention platforms, and the re-formulation of payments and lending propositions in a global context.

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·Jun. 24, 2019

Lessons from Uber’s JUMP bikes on evolution in capitalism, Facebook’s crypto money monopoly

Jump is an electric bike that is being distributed by Uber, and it just happened to be launching 350 of them in the London borough of Islington. You can rent a bike for 5 minutes at £1, and pay £0.12 per minute thereafter. That's generally cheaper than a taxi, on average more expensive than a public bike subscription. So why am I going on an on about these bikes? Two things come to mind as jumping off points for deeper discussion: (1) the incentives and tactics of economic organisms under capitalism to gather and retain attention, and (2) the monopoly powers of Uber and Facebook, leading to the impact of Libra's cryptocurrency on open competition, as well as the public responsibilities of supra national corporations.

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·May. 13, 2019

What Uber’s IPO means for Fintech and Banks

The world is on fire with talk about Uber going public. First, let's talk about who makes money and when. It is becoming a truism that companies are going public much later in their vintage, and as a result, the capital that fuels their growth is private rather than public. The public markets are full of compliance costs, cash-flow oriented hedge fund managers, and passive index manufacturers -- not an environment for an Elon Musk-type to do their best work. Private markets, on the other hand, are generally more long term oriented with fewer protections for investors. This has a distributional impact. Private markets in the US are legally structured for the wealthy by definition and carve-out. As a retail investor, your just desserts are Betterment's index-led asset allocation. As an accredited investor, you get AngelList, SharePost and the rest. I am yet to see Uber on Crowdcube. Therefore, tech companies are generating inequality both through their functions (monopoly concentration through power laws, unemployment through automation), and their funding.

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·May. 6, 2019

Facebook and Bitfinex both want $1 Billion for Crypto Stablecoins

There is poetry in the symmetry of this situation. Bitfinex is looking to raise $1 billion in capital to support the most popular stablecoin Tether, which it controls. Facebook is reportedly looking to raise $1 billion in capital from First Data, Visa and Mastercard and other payments companies to shore up its own stablecoin asset. Poetry is where the similarities end, and all these devils are in the details.

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