From Real Life Magazine:
Kids’ Stuff
In 2010, venture capitalist Chris Dixon wrote a blog post that sought to explain why the multimillion-dollar businesses that once dominated the consumer web at the turn of the millennium — companies like AOL or AltaVista — had been displaced in a single decade by the likes of Facebook and Google. The answer, he argued, was not that the older companies were complacent or stupid. Rather, “the reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a ‘toy.’”
By this he meant that when disruptive technologies first emerge, vendors and consumers often overlook their novel utilities, since their assumptions about use and value are still framed by old paradigms. Compared with the existing tools that seem to sufficiently address consumer needs, the new tech seems trivial, redundant — a toy. In time, however, the new invention disrupts our understanding of utility itself: It creates new kinds of demand, new use cases and new satisfactions, cornering new markets and eventually turning the tables so that the old systems now seem like kids’ stuff.
The “commoditoy” refigures consumption as a continuous loop
As a theory of how particular technologies come to dominate the market, Dixon’s idea is not especially illuminating. Facebook and Google did not succeed because their competitors misunderstood what they were offering; rather they emerged victoriously from a commercial struggle with a range of companies offering similar services. But it does work as a piece of rhetorical ju-jitsu, seeming to transform any criticism into a source of strength. Every snarky takedown further proves that the target is a misunderstood visionary, being punished for peeking a little further over the horizon than their short-sighted peers. In this sense, it perhaps offers some insight into the behavior of certain Silicon Valley founders — recall Mark Zuckerberg attending a meeting with Sequoia Capital in his pajamas, for instance. In a culture where innovation is fetishized, creating the impression of being written off by the square world helps confirm your disruptive bona fides.
We are 12 years on from Dixon’s blog post. Its author is now general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm funding some of the most hyped startups in the rapidly expanding crypto/metaverse/web3 space. His prolific posting has turned him into something of a guru, and among his followers, “the next big thing will start out looking like a toy” is one of his most popular mantras. This in itself is no surprise. Many crypto enterprises depend on mobilizing a critical mass of investors around a project with extremely basic functionality. If their confidence starts to get shaky, then you’ll need some good slogans to stave off the “FUD.”
However, a look at some of the biggest projects in the crypto space suggest that the “future will look like a toy” is not just rhetoric but a core element of their design philosophy. I don’t mean that they offer hidden utilities that transcend consumers’ blinkered understanding of their own desires. I mean that they seem like they’re made for children. Take a look at the collections at the top of NFT marketplaces, or “play-to-earn” games like Axie Infinity, or any of the multitude of metaverses currently being peddled, and it appears that Dixon’s prediction has been turned inside out: Start out with a toy, and it will become the next big thing....
....MUCH MORE
