IMO, the smartest analyst of the technology industry and its social impact is Ben Thompson, whose blog Stratechery is a gold mine of original insights. He also has a podcast, Exponent, which often amplifies on his writing. Its latest edition commemorates the 10th anniversary of the announcement of Apple’s iPhone.
As Thompson (with whom I have no relationship except as a fan) tells it, that event led to the radical transformation of, well, everything. And ultimately made possible the success of one Donald J. Trump.
I recommend listening to at least the last 10 minutes of Thompson’s podcast Episode 100. And to really grasp his world view, you should read a few of his key earlier pieces (there are links on the podcast page; see especially The Voters Decide.) But I’ll try to give you the TL;DR version here.
Before the Internet, and especially before the smartphone, society was basically governed by geography: we dealt with the people, stores, jobs, media, and resources that were located conveniently close to us. As Thompson notes, the traditional model of the economy was that we’d see a commercial on TV (a geographic information monopoly), drive to Wal-Mart (a distribution monopoly) and buy a box of Tide from Procter & Gamble (a manufacturing monopoly). Society was built on “friction”: the possibility that companies and institutions could control access to things: customers, information, products.
…and voters: political parties are very much part of this traditional model.
But the Internet and smartphones have destroyed this model. We can now get anything we want, any time we want, and associate with anyone we want, instantly. We simply don’t need these old, monopolistic institutions. And Trump was the first politician to realize that he could address voters directly, and bypass the gatekeepers of the Republican party. Not because he was such a visionary, but because he had no choice.
In Thompson’s business-oriented terms, if you give people a superior user experience (as the iPhone did), nothing else matters. In politics, this translates into telling voters what they want to hear. And boy, were Trump’s supporters eager to hear what he was selling! In surveys, their No. 1 reason for favoring him is because “he tells it like it is”.
The old politics is dead. Welcome to the iPhone era. As Billy Beane memorably said in Moneyball, “Adapt or die.”