The Stack Report

Stacks?

The Stacks are like vertically integrated social media empires, and we've got five of them ... Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

If you're a Stack, you've got this capacity to route on the internet ... but you don't really have the values of the internet ... so you want the internet to be seen basically as the legacy internet, and your task is to pull people out of what they call "the internet" without them realizing that they've actually entered your stack.

If you're a Stack you've gotta have an operating system. Even if you don't have one you've gotta build one. If you're Google you have to build Chrome, and so forth. If you're Amazon you've gotta come up with your own internet hardware. You have to have a kind of sociality component so that everybody in your stack will stick together and corral themselves for you. ... You need some kind of pet mobile device ... you need a slab, some kind of extra gizmo that's not really "of the internet" and that it's easy to funnel stuff through. And you need a marketplace, you need to sell stuff, and you need an internal payment system so you can suck money out of people without them actually going onto the internet and messing with eBay's weird bullshit thing. You want your own finance system, and some productivity software, you might want to throw some of that in so you can make them work and keep them busy.

Basically it's this kind of vertically integrated silo. ... And there's an internet layer in there so I can send email or whatever, but you don't really want me to do that, you want me to use an internal messaging system, or posts or likes or touches or grabs, pokes, circles, whatever euphemism you've come up with for the fact that somebody's in your stack.

The future of The Stacks is basically to take over the internet and render the internet more or less irrelevant.