What matters in tech? Newsletter, essays and presentations by Benedict Evans.
Visit ben-evans.com → On Hacker News May 2013 – Sep 2026
Tech Industry & Business 33AI & Machine Learning 7Society, Policy & Culture 5Networking & Internet 1Life, Learning & Writing 1
The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or would be) disasters. So which is it? Well, there are three ways that people say ‘NO!’
Can we get content moderation to work, or is it as much of a dead end as virus scanning? Do we need to change the whole model of social instead?
For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and atti
Machine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks.