Indistinguishable from Magic

Magical Technology: iPod, Spotify, Figma, AI Art, Arc, web3, and beyond

Sep 19

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Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Polywork

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It’s been in private beta for just over a year, but this week it publicly launched for everyone, was #1 on Product Hunt, and announced its Series B funding. So what’s its magic?

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! Last week, I asked people on Twitter for the best essays and blog posts they’ve ever read and they delivered. You should check out the replies. There’s gold in there.

I think as a result of reading so much great stuff, I had more fun writing this week’s piece than I’ve had writing in a long time. It flowed.

I hope you like this one, and if you do, that you’ll share it and spread the magic.

Let’s get to it.

Indistinguishable from Magic

(Click that link 👆 to read the full thing in your browser)

There’s a famous quote from “English science-fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host” Arthur C. Clarke. You probably already know the one I’m talking about:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

That’s been quoted so many times that it’s lost its meaning. “Yeah, yeah, technology can be really cool. I get it.” Personally, when I read it, I think about the technology itself, but that’s not the important part. The important part is the magical experience a sufficiently advanced technology makes people feel.

Here’s what I mean in an example. Sending a rocket into space with people on it and bringing them back to Earth safely, is, at least to my non-rocket scientist brain, indistinguishable from magic. But the technology itself wasn’t nearly as magical as watching, two months into COVID lockdowns, SpaceX and NASA send humans to space from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

While the launch itself was a feat of engineering, the fact that watching it could transport me from the tiny apartment we’d been locked in for two months and into orbit might as well have been a feat of real, honest-to-Merlin magic.

I’ve been writing a lot about technology’s role in making the future better, about how it can improve metrics like lifespan and economic output and lift people out of poverty. As Balaji wrote, “If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.” That’s all incredibly important and I’m going to keep writing about it. But I also think that, technology can play another, equally important role: help people experience magic.

Rocket launches are big, once-in-a-while events, but technology can create more quotidian magic, too. Jumping into a chat room with my friends on AIM when I was younger was magical. Meeting someone at a party in college and coming home to the Friend Request on Facebook was magical. Pulling up all of the world’s music on Spotify from my phone for the first time was magical. Today, getting the prompt right and watching what DALL•E and Stable Diffusion come back with is magical. Jumping into a well-curated space in OnCyber is magical. Even using the browser I’m using right now – Arc by The Browser Company – feels magical.

Magic can, even must, be a strategy for startups. It’s something they can uniquely create, that incumbents often can’t.

Last week, Figma announced that Adobe was acquiring the company for $20 billion (plus an extra $2 billion in potential options).

*Figma (wizard hat added in Figma, too)*

Figma is just a decade old. It came into a space that Adobe completely dominated. If you had evaluated Figma vs. Adobe at the time, you would have pointed to Adobe’s network effects, the high switching costs for designers, and its more richly developed product suite. What you might have underestimated was Figma’s magic.

I’m not a designer. I tried using Photoshop once (evidence below) and gave up. It was too complicated. There were too many features. I never knew what layer to use. Then, when I started writing this newsletter, I tried Figma. It was magic. I could actually do things – not well, but I could do them – and all of a sudden, visuals became part of Not Boring’s identity. All of it, right there in the browser. I, never before a target customer for a design tool, became part of the TAM. I created more myself, and told other people about Figma, too.

There are a lot of reasons that Figma succeeded in the face of a much bigger competitor to the point that that competitor was forced to pay 50x ARR to stop the advance. Practically everyone in tech has shared their opinion in the past few days. Kevin Kwok broke many of those reasons down in his classic Why Figma Wins and I agree with all of it. But what the piece doesn’t address – even though the mechanics Kevin covers are inputs to it – is the magic powers that Figma gives its users. Just look at all of the results for “Figma magic” on Twitter. As if on cue, Adobe’s Chief Product Officer, Scott Belsky, tweeted: “Figma will continue to operate w/ autonomy, continuing to work their magic.”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The sufficiently advanced part of that gets less credit than it deserves, too, and I think it holds the key to why startups have a magic advantage over incumbents. Kwok wrote that Figma’s network effects were “made possible by Figma’s key early choices like:

Architecting Figma to be truly browser-first, instead of just having storage be in the cloud
Their head start in new technologies like WebGL and CRDTs that made this browser-first approach possible”

Starting with a blank canvas, Figma was able to choose the (right) sufficiently advanced technologies at that moment in time without worrying about two decades’ worth of technical debt. As a young startup, it could focus on creating magic and ride that magic until, one day, it, too, had too much technical debt, until we were all too used to its technology to be awed, and until the demands of the public markets forced it to make the kinds of practical business-driven decisions that kill the magic.

Design Twitter melted down upon hearing the news of the Adobe acquisition, fearing that Adobe would kill everything that made the product beautiful. But whether Adobe accelerates the downfall or not (and I think both Scott Belsky and Figma CEO Dylan Field are good enough that it won’t), the magic would have, eventually, degraded anyway.

It’s the Magical Startup Circle of Life. A startup, if it’s lucky, creates magic, turns that magic into dollars, and transitions to life as a successful Big Muggle Company, capable of enormous profits and power but no longer able to conjure magic. Then a new Magician comes along, using sufficiently advanced technology to build something indistinguishable from magic, and uses that magic as a wedge to challenge the Big Muggle Company.

My friend Nathan Baschez’s conspiracy theory captures the idea well:

Nathan Baschez @nbashaw

Weird conspiracy theory? What if @zoink thought “now is the time to sell” in part because of all the progress AI image generators are making

When I decided to write a piece on magical tech a few weeks ago, it was more negative. The draft I started was titled “Where Did the Magical Tech Go?” It was inspired by personal frustration and a wave of tweets that proved I wasn’t alone.

Shannon Vallor @ShannonVallor

The saddest thing for me about modern tech’s long spiral into user manipulation and surveillance is how it has just slowly killed off the joy that people like me used to feel about new tech. Every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer. 1/n

I was planning to bemoan the loss of magic in the products I once loved and try to figure out why the technology I use isn’t as magical as it once was. But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is more fascinating. The last generation of magical products has matured, turned into Muggles, and in so doing, has cleared space for a new cohort of Magicians.

So let’s take a trip down Memory Lane to remember and celebrate those once-magical products, before getting excited all over again about the new magic being created today.

The Last Era’s Magic

Exactly one decade ago, in the summer of 2012, I taught myself to “code” and spun up a website for the party bus “startup” I ran, ThrowGo.

*lol. I designed this logo in Photoshop.*

Each weekend in the summer, I’d rent party buses to take other young New Yorkers from the city to Avalon, NJ and the Hamptons. As you can see, the website was horrendous, but to me, it was magical. Instead of having to deal with a wave of texts while at my day job, people could just book directly online, and then pay on the bus via cash or a Square reader. Riders could #throwgo on Instagram and the photos (usually) automatically got pulled into the site, where they could relive half-drunk memories (or hit themselves with an extra dose of FOMO). And with a nifty little Spotify embed, anyone could add songs to the playlist that we’d listen to on the ride.

Spotify was particularly magical. I grew up in the era of dial-up and Napster and Limewire. I was used to having to wait minutes while a song downloaded, then doing the same thing 14-20 times (you could try to do them all at once, but then they all slowed down) before burning them onto a CD, which I could play in the car until it got so scratched that it didn’t work anymore or until I was sick of the songs. Sometimes, I’d download a song and it wasn’t what I wanted. Other times, I couldn’t download the song at all. When iTunes came out, it at least guaranteed that I’d get the song I wanted, even if it still took some time to download and cost a then-pricey $0.99 per track. It was definitely better, and the iPod, with its 1,000 songs in my pocket, was pretty damn magical.

I remember the first time I listened to an iPod. It wasn’t mine. It was also on a bus, on a school field trip to Killington, Vermont. I sat next to my friend Pat Wilkinson, because he was one of my best friends, and also because he’d just bought an iPod. He let me listen to it, and while our taste in music didn’t overlap perfectly (his was more refined, he had older siblings), I scrolled that scroll pad until I found something that we both liked:

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1

The Flaming Lips

I clicked, the wheel clicked back, and the song played. Magical. But I don’t think I’ve thought about that moment until I weaved my way there a couple paragraphs ago. Typing “iTunes” triggered “iPod” in my brain, and the memory came back.

Spotify was a different story. I’ve thought about my first Spotify experience a lot. I vividly remember the first time we used Spotify on the party bus. It was a Sunday. People were half-asleep, half-dead, just hoping to survive the trip back to the city. But as sometimes happened, a small group didn’t want to waste the last few party-able hours of the weekend before heading back to the office.

So I plugged in my phone to the audio jack and connected to the Spotify app.