Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Earlier today I wrote about the new dotcom bubble and how similar it seemed to the last dotcom bubble. A regular reader from Silicon Valley writes to offer a different kind of complaint:

See, this is the kind of crap you get when people look at “Silicon Valley” and see Facebook. The investors I have spoken to accept a fairly stable universe of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon and Netflix into the mid-future. Nobody likes to look any farther down the road than two to three years anymore, so that’s the horizon.

The excitement, the “bubble” if you will, is not about creating another Facebook, it’s about finding a way to enhance and monetize an established internet ecosystem. It’s the cloud, it’s big data, it’s Hadoop, Cassandra and Mongo on commodity hardware, it’s faster, cheaper storage subsystems, it’s scalability and flexibility, the sudden newfound ability to just “switch on” five hundred new servers with no capital cost, and turn around and switch them off on Tuesday. It’s deep, low-latency analytics, clickstream analysis, social media mining, and targeted marketing. It’s mobile localized communications. It’s seamless integration between the OS, the browser, the web application server and the data, all stored in remote indexed and optimized servers that autonomously move the data closer to the user.

It’s really interesting and exciting stuff, and all the pieces are almost there. They’re still trying to figure out how to scale web properties to hundreds of millions of users, which is incredibly hard, especially because most of them were built on the previous generation’s technology — think LAMP stack with sharded MySQL and Memcached. But the infrastructure is catching up. The hardware is actually moving backwards: lower-power, cheaper, slower processors, memory and disk, but now in a clustered and distributed environment that, because failures in that kind of environment are a common event, protect themselves against failure (think multi data center replication, autonomous P2P status monitoring, disk writes to append-only tables before memory writes…).

But most people don’t know or care about that stuff. They just know about Facebook and Amazon and Apple, and they get frustrated when they don’t work. And that leads to these articles that get the core part of the conversation so dreadfully wrong.

I didn’t actually understand most of the geekspeak here (I’ve been out of touch with the tech world for too long), but I think the general point is sound: too often, when people think about the future of the internet, they focus exclusively on superstar apps like Facebook or Twitter and miss the impact of business apps and the plumbing that drives them. To the extent that the internet will have an impact on future economic productivity, this is where the action is.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate