
Fred Wilson: Am I Bored With Web 2.0? - Mystalic
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/06/am-i-bored-with.html
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mynameishere
He links to this:

[http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/06/a_manifesto_f...](http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/06/a_manifesto_for_the_next_indus_1.html)

I'm having a hard time separating the above from revolutionary socialism, and
the best I can do is simply admit that he's completely ignorant--doesn't
understand economics at all, and is just spewing received wisdom like so much
bilge from a cracked hull.

Google wants to organize the world's information.

Information has these qualities:

1\. It is good.

2\. It is mostly unstructured.

3\. It is found in uncountable places.

So-and-so wants to "Organize the world's hunger." Hunger has these qualities:

1\. It is bad.

2\. It is a biological phenomena, rather than a product--something you can
create, and then move around, and store, like information.

3\. It is found in places with undeveloped economies.

...point is, there is absolutely no comparison. The two words have no points
of connection. Information is subject to organization, hunger is not. In fact
"organize hunger" is a meangingless combination of words.

So, as usual, when someone spouts literal nonsense, it becomes the reader's
burden to figure out what he means. Fine. He wants rid of the invisible hand
which has tricked google into benefiting mankind, and he wants to set up
planning committees to eradicate (not "organize") hunger. And he wants
startups to do this. Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the viewpoint,
Harvard.

Want to end hunger? No, really? Okay, shoot the latter-day communists in
Africa, set up strongmen who will protect property, and let capital flow.
Period.

~~~
izaidi
I don't think the article makes enough sense to be called socialism. It sounds
more like what would happen if you gave a 12-year-old a copy of Google's
mission statement and a Wikipedia article about Joseph Schumpeter and said,
"Misunderstand all of this, then write a thousand words about it."

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jasonlbaptiste
well i think theres a lot of room to mix the two together

web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it allows us to do two main things: move
information a whole lot faster and with people anywhere in the world that we
may not have known before. similar to what zuckerberg refers to as information
flow. if you could leverage those concepts to help do good in the world, i
think that would make a huge impact. some companies that i can think of:

a) causes by sean parker and joe green. helping spread causes youre passionate
about with your network

b) terrapass. helping buy carbon offsets and green products.

long story short, but my niece and nephew had a fatal disease. my family was
told they had no more than 6 months to live. first thing we did was use the
internet and find other families who were afflicted with the disease+ doctors
trying to solve it. Theyre now 11 and 10 years old, because we were able to
connect with other people who knew otherwise. This was back in 1998. If it
were 1988, they would be dead. that right there is power. Think what we could
do in 2008. Thinking about this sometimes makes me think that although I love
what I do on a daily basis, the world doesnt need a software company. What ive
learned could be used to build an application to help connect doctors,
families, companies with cures,etc. more easily.

hmm, and my hacker news comment has now turned into a blog post.

~~~
wumi
Jason, a question to ask, of course, would be -- 'what about those who can't
access that information?'

I believe this is why so many are saying that mobile is the future, because
all that information flow moves to those without computers -- and even those
with, wherever they are.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
make it everywhere. I think you make a BIG focus on helping bring access to
those who wouldnt know about it. We were fortunate, we knew about the internet
and what to do. in 1998, im pretty sure not many people were yahoo experts
(google was in a garage still). What about those in poor areas of the country
+ world? They're kids + loved ones are afflicted with diseases just as much as
anyone else. I would have a huge focus on making sure they knew this resource
existed. Mobile is also key. i think we need to make information ubiquitous
across all platforms. the faster you can make it flow, the better.

~~~
wumi
in 2008, i have friends in the US who didn't know you could use Google to find
recipes.

what Fred (citing Umair), seems to be searching for, though, is a way to hack
some of those big, hairy goals Umair listed:

 _Organize the world's hunger. Organize the world’s energy. Organize the
world’s thirst. Organize the world's health. Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance. Organize the world's education._

Information flow can certainly help facilitate some of those, and will most
likely be an important player in all, but can information alone organize the
world's hunger or thirst? Research, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Capital, Market
and Reach. Very resource intensive and surely not relying solely on an
increased information flow.

Information access won't change the fact you don't have water to drink. Even
if you could search to see how to purify your water, if you don't have access
to the materials needed to do so, what would you do?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Youre right, it's not an end all solution. There has to be more to it, but
it's definitely an enabler. It would help bring people together to do
something about it. It's then up to those people to fix the problem. Good
quote:

"Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Meade

Sounds like this is an area of interest to you wumi?

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wumi
first, people have to care enough before they can change the world. in my
experiences, many people just don't care about anything outside of their
immediate surroundings, for better or worse.

second, the barrier to entry for a web 2.0 company relative to a company that
will organize the world's health, hunger,thirst, etc. is a few orders of
magnitude lower.

I've got a few friends with prototypes for companies that could effect serious
change on the scale Umair constantly references, but they'd need several
millions of dollars before having something that's even ready for mass
production.

(edit: these buddies of mine, will end up working for corporate america in
non-innovative companies because they just don't have the resources to be able
to take their prototypes and build them into companies. One of the guys would
need about 18 months and 6 full-time research technicians/machinists.)

even with PG's "be good" it's debatable how much the majority of YC companies
are going to have a positive impact on the world ... but then again, is that
their aim?

maybe Fred, Umair, and a few other big players idea/operations/capital wise
should start a YC to attack those very problems with young, hungry,
entrepreneurs. $250-$500k per entrepreneur should be fairly reasonable to get
to marketable prototype/ alpha version.

~~~
fredwilson
that's a good idea. i have certain responsibilities to our investors that i
have to live up to. but a YC to change the world is a great idea

~~~
ryanspahn
Yes that would be a good idea!

As for organizing the world's health, we may look to the future toilet
connected to the Internet as a solution?

Upon use this smart toilet sends your specimen data over the net to doctor's
computer. If there are any irregularities in the data you receive an email to
schedule an appointment. With the world using such a technology and all the
data compiled, I'm thinking our life expectancy rate would increase!

Im not in the medical field so Im not sure if using specimen data would be a
fool proof way for early detection of life threatening diseases or not?

 __*Not sure why this got dugg down? Is there someone in the medical field who
knows this concept would not work or argue against it?

~~~
wumi
I've heard of a company with a similar concept, although not utilizing
toilets.

 _Mashavu enables medical professionals to e-adopt children in the developing
world using modern technology and communications infrastructure._

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goodgoblin
"That’s partially why I want to spend a month in Europe and will do that
starting tomorrow." I can't wait until I can offhandedly toss out comments
like this and follow through on them.

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peakok
"As the “rest” modernizes in the next 20-40 years, we have a unique
opportunity to create a world where people all feel like they belong to the
same society. It’s already happening in business. Look at the EU to see a
model of what the entire world could become."

Scary. I thought 1984 was a popular book in the US, so why is that so much
people buy in that "One World, One Government, One Society" distopian future ?

By the way, did he follow the actuality of Europe at all ? When we asked the
people directly (by referendum), in France, Netherlands, and very recently
Ireland, they said NO to the next step of European construction. A world where
the technocratic elites go against the will of the majority (aka people) isn't
supposed to be a model to be followed. That's precisely what is slowely
happening in Europe, you can bet that Ireland was the last referendum ever
organized.

~~~
dreish
They still don't want to be governed by people with different cultures -- I
think that's what it boils down to, and it's mainly a phenomenon of the lower
classes who aren't really as hip to the Internet, or whose interests aren't
broad enough to bring them together with people in other countries very often.

But increased communication, economic mobility, and business' willingness to
adopt English as a standard language even in (gasp) France, are clearly
knitting the continent together socially and economically.

I agree with the consensus that this guy goes a little nuts at the end. When I
read it, I couldn't help thinking, "So, what, are we going to put hunger in
neatly-labeled boxes?"

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gscott
Re: Umair’s questions

First you have to organize people. What I work on, OfficeZilla.com helps
organize people accross hundreds of non-profit organizations.

For example Mercy Ships uses OfficeZilla to upload pictures, video, and
documents created out at Sea and the communications department uses that
information to raise awareness of what they are doing and raise funds to do
more.

Organizing people is much more power then say creating a database of
resources. Organizing people creates capacity to act.

I have a child starting 6th grade. Before she starts school they are having a
class on how she can get more out of school by being more organized. Using
time, etc. This way she gets the most out of her own resources. Non-profits
are the same way. You have to organize human resources but it is not easy,
that is where OfficeZilla comes in.

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rokhayakebe
_There’s pretty much nothing I’d rather do outside of family time than spend a
few hours talking with the entrepreneurs who run OUR companies about their
businesses and the opportunity and challenges facing them_

OUR? Okay.

~~~
seekely
I think it was probably meant more in the 'companies in OUR portfolio' sense
than the literal 'these are OUR companies'.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I think he totally meant well, but I could not resist. I found it funny how
one little word can have a big impact.

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xccx
i agree that lots of problem solving talent could go to the root and tell a
more meaningful story.. i'm hoping web 3.0 is less about threadless t-shirts
levering "architectures of participation" for private gain and more about the
next billion of us, connecting, cooperating, identifying and solving real
problems, like maybe the biodiversity crisis and finding smarter energy.

maybe better connecting we'll have chance to bust out of our monkeyspheres and
denials.. it's powerful potential. then again, in 1990's i remember a John
Gage quote: "What stopped the vietnam war was we told the truth about what was
happening. Now the truth telling mechanisms are a thousand times more
powerful".. sounds great, but look what happened: the trwtf telling mechanisms
of today have sold endless war with victims unknown and gross costs, all to
control stupid and ugly oil.

yes i'm complaining.. no i can't solve biodiversity and energy.. the best i
can do, in my dream, is work toward universal literacy.. so even the final
billion can someday read wikipedia, get informed and solve real problems..

------
fredwilson
i'd like to say once more for the record that this conversation should be
happening (or at least replicated) on my blog so that the people who don't
know about hacker news can participate in this discussion

~~~
bootload
_"... i'd like to say once more for the record that this conversation should
be happening (or at least replicated) on my blog ..."_

Hey Fred, I note from your comment getting modded down indicates not too many
readers care about where the conversation occurs ~
[http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/05/a-vc-web-
discus.htm...](http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/05/a-vc-web-discus.html)
and thinking about it I sort of agree.

Quite a few hackers, entrepreneur types have figured out there is value to be
extracted from _"aggregation"_ of links and the associated attention. The
comments here and at other places like friendfeed ~
<http://friendfeed.com/fredwilson/comments>

    
    
      "... 10 people liked it but nobody commented ..." 
    

are the result of someone else working on building the software, creating the
community and collecting this information. Maybe even making a business out of
it? Downstream attention collectors are gaining the advantage by collecting
your ( _"and many others"_ ) articles. It's not really fair, but it is also a
_"free market"_. Working for a rival VC firm does not help either. If you want
your readers to benefit, do something about it. Manually summarise the best
bits on your blog. Better still get some tools written to scour the Internet
to do this automatically - a process that scales better.

If this attention leakage, the inability to maintain and capture attention is
happening to your blog, a blog with readership and attention most hackers
would readily kill for, it could also be happening to others.

An _"itch"_ that needs scratching perhaps hackers?

~~~
Mystalic
Fred, with all due respect, there's almost no way to centralize the
conversation anymore. Twitter, FriendFeed, Social Media, Digg, Hacker
News...it has spread the conversation to many, many corners so people in many
niches can discuss what's going on.

Yes, in an ideal world, the conversation would happen in one place (that's
part of why I think Disqus was a great investment and FriendFeed is destined
for greatness), but this is a fragmented world and fragmented conversations
are going to always be a part of the world's dynamic.

~~~
fredwilson
totally agree that it's "happening" everywhere now

but what i want is for it to be recorded and synched everywhere as well

~~~
Mystalic
Then we need to build the technology.

Hm, I'm thinking of ways now...

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ph0rque
> Organize the world's education.

That's what I'm working on with my app, ezlearnz

------
wumi
the original post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222486>

