sari

Schools were built for a static industrial age. The education system assumed that the outcomes you wanted to produce were clear and you could harness massive scale to train students, factory style.

The Metaverse is just that process taken one step further. The more fun or useful stuff you can do in VR — games, business meetings, vacations, hangouts — the less you’ll have to suck up physical resources to do it in meatspace. The more you can transform your subjective world by overlaying it with AR, the less you’ll have to suck up resources... See more

The device model that could perhaps replace the smartphone is VR, or AR, or both. These cannot reach more people than smartphones (again - we ran out of people) but they could nonetheless replace the experience.

Jet black also arrived at a time when a few startups had been trying text-based shopping, including Hello Alfred, Magic, GoButler, Operator, Fetch, Scratch and others. (Most have since failed or pivoted.) Walmart’s entry into this market, at the time, was then considered notable.

So it makes sense that video games would be the primary educational environment of the future: they are the best way we have of (a) creating simulations of reality (b) with fast feedback loops (c) accessible at low cost.

To solve the problems of overwork and time starvation, we have to recognize both that individuals have the agency to make small changes to improve their lives and that, without broader changes to our laws and norms and social expectations, no amount of overwork will ever be enough.

Thankfully, the founders figured out a subtle shift in positioning around the time I joined that made a big difference. They kept all three core elements in place, but started pitching it as a newsletter platform rather than a paid publishing platform.