Épisodes

  • You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - The Notion of Having a Boss: The Unnaturalness of Working in Large Corporations

    You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - The Notion of Having a Boss: The Unnaturalness of Working in Large Corporations
    Nov 12 2023
    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2008 discusses how working in large companies is at odds with human nature. It argues that people are not adapted to working in large groups and that this situation restricts our mental freedom. It suggests that working for yourself and working in small groups is more suited to human nature. According to Graham, working in large companies stifles individual initiative and creativity. He asserts that working independently provides more freedom and opportunities to do new things. Therefore, he argues that working in a small company or starting your own venture is more valuable than working in a large company.---# You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (The Notion of Having a Boss: The Unnaturalness of Working in Large Corporations)March 2008, rev. June 2008Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.> ""...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day."" - Charles DickensI began to suspect this after spending several years working with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts.Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be working in a way that's more natural for humans.I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.**Trees**What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups.Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. [1]Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them.In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree. [2]Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.**Corn Syrup**A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative...
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    17 min
  • Writing, Briefly - Concise and Effective Writing Techniques

    Writing, Briefly - Concise and Effective Writing Techniques
    Nov 12 2023

    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2005 discusses the importance of good writing and how to improve one's writing skills. It points out that writing not only conveys ideas but also generates them. It emphasizes that being a writer requires constantly rewriting your work, eliminating anything unnecessary, writing in a conversational style, and recognizing and correcting bad writing. It also provides tips on self-confidence, writing for the general reader rather than the careful reader, and correcting your mistakes. This is a valuable guide for anyone who enjoys writing or wants to improve their writing skills.

    ---

    # Writing, Briefly (Concise and Effective Writing Techniques)

    March 2005

    _(In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)_

    I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

    As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don't(always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see(a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and(b) which bits are boring(the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

    ---

    Relevant Keywords: writing tips, importance of writing, writing process, improving writing skills, writing for idea generation, conversational writing, rewriting and editing, writing and creativity, writing for an online audience, effective writing techniques"
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    4 min
  • Writing and Speaking - The Art of Writing and Speaking: Exploring the Relationship Between Ideas and Communication

    Writing and Speaking - The Art of Writing and Speaking: Exploring the Relationship Between Ideas and Communication
    Nov 12 2023
    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2012 highlights the differences between being a good speaker and a good writer. Graham points out that speaking skills usually contain fewer ideas compared to writing skills and that being a good speaker is often about the ability to impact and motivate listeners. He also states that speeches are generally superior to written texts in terms of personal interaction and motivation. This article is a must-read for those who wish to explore these striking dynamics between speaking and writing.---# Writing and Speaking (The Art of Writing and Speaking: Exploring the Relationship Between Ideas and Communication)Mart 2012I'm not a very good speaker. I say ""um"" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker.Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you're talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.I first noticed this at a conference several years ago. There was another speaker who was much better than me. He had all of us roaring with laughter. I seemed awkward and halting by comparison. Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do. As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy's talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he hadn't said very much.Maybe this would have been obvious to someone who knew more about speaking, but it was a revelation to me how much less ideas mattered in speaking than writing. [1]A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker. Boy was he good. So I decided I'd pay close attention to what he said, to learn how he did it. After about ten sentences I found myself thinking ""I don't want to be a good speaker.""Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction. For example, when I give a talk, I usually write it out beforehand. I know that's a mistake; I know delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. The way to get the attention of an audience is to give them your full attention, and when you're delivering a prewritten talk, your attention is always divided between the audience and the talk — even if you've memorized it. If you want to engage an audience, it's better to start with no more than an outline of what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. But if you do that, you might spend no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say it. [2] Occasionally the stimulation of talking to a live audience makes you think of new things, but in general this is not going to generate ideas as well as writing does, where you can spend as long on each sentence as you want.If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can get asymptotically close to the sort of engagement you get when speaking ad lib. Actors do. But here again there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better. Actors don't face that temptation, except in the rare cases where they've written the script, but any speaker does. Before I give a talk I can usually be found sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper, trying to rehearse it in my head. But I always end up spending most of the time rewriting it instead. Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out and rewritten. Which of course makes me um even more, because I haven't had any time to practice the new bits. [3]Depending on your audience, there are even worse tradeoffs than these. Audiences like to be flattered; they like jokes; they like to be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words. As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter. That's true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks. Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader. Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it. Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Every audience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that. Part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by ...
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    8 min
  • Write Simply - The Importance and Impact of Writing in a Simple and Understandable Manner

    Write Simply - The Importance and Impact of Writing in a Simple and Understandable Manner
    Nov 12 2023

    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2021 highlights the importance of writing in a simple and understandable manner. He asserts that allowing readers to easily read the text enables them to connect more deeply with the ideas presented. He also states that using complex sentences and difficult words places an extra burden on the reader and hinders the understanding of ideas. Writing complexly just for the sake of impressing, he suggests, could actually be an attempt to hide a lack of ideas. Ultimately, Graham emphasizes that simple writing is not only more understandable but also more resilient against time.

    ---

    # Write Simply (The Importance and Impact of Writing in a Simple and Understandable Manner)

    March 2021

    I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.

    That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.

    And the further they'll read. Most readers' energy tends to flag part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end.

    There's an Italian dish called _saltimbocca_, which means ""leap into the mouth."" My goal when writing might be called _saltintesta_: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.

    It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

    Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry.

    And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can use difficult words.

    Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way, to conceal the fact that they have [](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hermeneutic+dialectics+hegemonic+modalities)nothing to say. Whereas writing simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you.

    Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the future will be in much the same position as people from other countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain for a woodworker to build a chair to last.

    Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job.

    But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated, or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy to me. It seems clumsy.

    There are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence or fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident.

    The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler.

    ---

    Relevant Keywords: writing simply, benefits of simple writing, engaging readers, clear writing, writing for non-native English speakers, honesty in writing, lasting impact of simple writing, editing for simplicity, writing process, effective communication in writing"
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    4 min
  • Write Like You Talk - Writing as You Speak: A Simple Method to Engage Your Audience in Your Writings

    Write Like You Talk - Writing as You Speak: A Simple Method to Engage Your Audience in Your Writings
    Nov 12 2023
    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2015 focuses on an easy method to get more people to read your writings: writing in conversational language. Graham states that most people use a different language when they start writing, which makes the writings harder to read. He notes that using conversational language will intensify the reader's attention and make the writings easier to understand. He also adds that writing in conversational language gives the writer a feeling of saying more than they actually thought.---# Write Like You Talk (Writing as You Speak: A Simple Method to Engage Your Audience in Your Writings)October 2015Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language.Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are different. No one uses ""pen"" as a verb in spoken English. You'd feel like an idiot using ""pen"" instead of ""write"" in a conversation with a friend.The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago:> The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: ""After Altamira, all is decadence.""It's from Neil Oliver's _A History of Ancient Britain_. I feel bad making an example of this book, because it's no worse than lots of others. But just imagine calling Picasso ""the mercurial Spaniard"" when talking to a friend. Even one sentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation. And yet people write whole books of it.Ok, so written and spoken language are different. Does that make written language worse?If you want people to read and understand what you write, yes. Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read. It's also more formal and distant, which gives the reader's attention permission to drift. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are.You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way.Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.I'm not saying spoken language always works best. Poetry is as much music as text, so you can say things you wouldn't say in conversation. And there are a handful of writers who can get away with using fancy language in prose. And then of course there are cases where writers don't want to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example, or at the more [bogus](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=1,5&q=transgression+narrative+postmodern+gender) end of the humanities. But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is better.It seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken language. So perhaps the best solution is to write your first draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask ""Is this the way I'd say this if I were talking to a friend?"" If it isn't, imagine what you would say, and use that instead. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. When you write something you wouldn't say, you'll hear the clank as it hits the page.Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation. I even fix bits that are phonetically awkward; I don't know if that's necessary, but it doesn't cost much.This trick may not always be enough. I've seen writing so far removed from spoken language that it couldn't be fixed sentence by sentence. For cases like that there's a more drastic solution. After writing the first draft, try explaining to a friend what you just wrote. Then replace the draft with what you said to your friend.People often tell me how much my essays sound like me talking. The fact that this seems worthy of comment shows how rarely people manage to write in spoken language. Otherwise everyone's writing would sound like them talking.If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend.**Thanks** to Patrick Collison and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.---Relevant Keywords: writing in spoken language, improving writing skills, conversational writing style, writing tips, importance of simplicity in writing, writing for understanding, informal language in writing, writing like you talk, difference between written...
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    6 min
  • Why YC - The Founding Purpose of Y Combinator: Understanding Our Existence and Goals

    Why YC - The Founding Purpose of Y Combinator: Understanding Our Existence and Goals
    Nov 12 2023

    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2006 and revised in 2009, explains why they founded Y Combinator. He states that YC was not established solely for making money or to help young entrepreneurs. The main reason, he says, was the idea of mobilizing potential entrepreneurs worldwide and making the economy more efficient. Graham refers to this situation as a 'hack', and notes that this process is beneficial both for himself and the economy.

    ---

    # Why YC (The Founding Purpose of Y Combinator: Understanding Our Existence and Goals)

    March 2006, rev August 2009

    Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com). Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly for fun.

    Kind of, but not quite. It is enormously fun to be able to work with Rtm and Trevor again. I missed that after we sold Viaweb, and for all the years after I always had a background process running, looking for something we could do together. There is definitely an aspect of a band reunion to Y Combinator. Every couple days I slip and call it ""Viaweb.""

    Viaweb we started very explicitly to make money. I was sick of living from one freelance project to the next, and decided to just work as hard as I could till I'd made enough to solve the problem once and for all. Viaweb was sometimes fun, but it wasn't designed for fun, and mostly it wasn't. I'd be surprised if any startup is. All startups are mostly schleps.

    The real reason we started Y Combinator is neither selfish nor virtuous. We didn't start it mainly to make money; we have no idea what our average returns might be, and won't know for years. Nor did we start YC mainly to help out young would-be founders, though we do like the idea, and comfort ourselves occasionally with the thought that if all our investments tank, we will thus have been doing something unselfish. (It's oddly nondeterministic.)

    The real reason we started Y Combinator is one probably only a [hacker](gba.html) would understand. We did it because it seems such a great hack. There are thousands of smart people who could start companies and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place, we can spring on the world a stream of new startups that might otherwise not have existed.

    In a way this is virtuous, because I think startups are a good thing. But really what motivates us is the completely amoral desire that would motivate any hacker who looked at some complex device and realized that with a tiny tweak he could make it run more efficiently. In this case, the device is the world's economy, which fortunately happens to be open source.

    ---

    Relevant Keywords: why y combinator, y combinator purpose, y combinator origin, y combinator impact, startup ecosystem, startup funding, viaweb and y combinator, economic impact of startups, hacker culture in startups"
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    3 min
  • Why Twitter is a Big Deal - Understanding the Significant Influence and Importance of Twitter

    Why Twitter is a Big Deal - Understanding the Significant Influence and Importance of Twitter
    Nov 12 2023

    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2009 explains why Twitter carries great significance. He points out that Twitter is a new messaging protocol that doesn't require specifying recipients. He also emphasizes that Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company, which is quite rare. He mentions that the founders of Twitter focused on maintaining control and ensuring its spread, rather than quickly monetizing the platform. He states that this has facilitated the expansion of Twitter and increased its value.

    ---

    # Why Twitter is a Big Deal (Understanding the Significant Influence and Importance of Twitter)

    April 2009

    Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.

    The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP(the Internet), SMTP(email), HTTP(the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.

    Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.

    ---

    Relevant Keywords: importance of twitter, twitter as a new protocol, twitter's impact on communication, twitter's business model, twitter and internet protocols, Om Malik on Twitter, twitter's growth strategy, twitter's monetization strategy, private company owning a protocol"
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    2 min
  • Why TV Lost - Why Television Lost Its Dominance Over Computers and the Shift Towards New Media Concepts

    Why TV Lost - Why Television Lost Its Dominance Over Computers and the Shift Towards New Media Concepts
    Nov 12 2023
    "This article written by Paul Graham in 2009 describes how computers and television were on a collision course and that as a result, computers emerged victorious. Graham lists the reasons for this change as the internet being an open platform, Moore's Law, piracy, and innovative use of social applications. He argues that the replacement of television with computers and the internet is related to offering consumers a more comfortable and personalized experience. He also points out that TV companies need to adapt quickly to this change.---# Why TV Lost (Why Television Lost Its Dominance Over Computers and the Shift Towards New Media Concepts)March 2009About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word ""convergence"" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call ""TV shows,"" but they'll watch them mostly on computers.What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which one could have predicted, and one that would have been harder to.One predictable cause of victory is that the Internet is an open platform. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.The second is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth. [1]The third reason computers won is piracy. Users prefer it not just because it's free, but because it's more convenient. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen. [2]The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can't physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it's social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. [3] Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it.This was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers.After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words.---The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels. They still seem to wish people would watch shows on TV instead, just as newspapers that put their stories online still seem to wish people would wait till the next morning and read them printed on paper. They should both just face the fact that the Internet is the primary medium.They'd be in a better position if they'd done that earlier. When a new medium arises that's powerful enough to make incumbents nervous, then it's probably powerful enough to win, and the best thing they can do is jump in immediately.Whether they like it or not, big changes are coming, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality. On the Internet, you don't have to send everyone the same signal, and you don't have to send it to them from a local source. People will watch what they want when they want it, and group themselves according to whatever shared interest they feel most strongly. Maybe their strongest shared interest will be their physical location, but I'm guessing not. Which means local TV is probably dead. It was an artifact of limitations imposed by old technology. If someone were creating an Internet-based TV company from scratch now, they might have some plan for shows aimed at specific regions, but it wouldn't be a top priority.Synchronicity and locality are tied together. TV network affiliates care what's on at 10 because that delivers viewers for local news at 11. This connection adds more brittleness than strength, however: people don't watch what's on at 10 because they want to watch the news afterward.TV networks will fight these trends, because they don't have sufficient flexibility to adapt to them. They're hemmed in by ...
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    11 min