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In this episode of Breaking Smart podcast, I want to explore what it means to say that Covid has accelerated everything. If so, it means we’ve done some time travel relative the old timeline. As the cryogenic lab tech said to Philip J. Fry on Futurama, when he landed in the year 2999, welcome to the world of tomorrow!
1/ Let’s set the stage a bit. We’re now in the early days of post-Covid for at least some people, in some parts of the world. We don’t yet know how costly the endemic management problem will be, in terms of treatment, vaccination, fatality prevention, and surveillance, but it feels like we have one foot out of the tunnel now.
2/ I don’t know about you, but I personally feel a bit like Fry in the pilot of Futurama. Right after he is greeted with “Welcome to the world of tomorrow!” he is assessed to determine what sort of “career chip” should be implanted in him, because in the bureaucratic future, everybody has a career determined for them.
3/ The joke is, he is assessed to be best fit to the job of “delivery boy,” the same job he hated in 1999, so he runs away from the career assessment officer, Leela. As it happens, by the end of the pilot, he ends up a delivery boy anyway, but with an illegal career chip, but is happy about it because he gets to work on a spaceship and has new friends.
4/ I hope to get my vaccine within the next few weeks, and the idea reminds me of the idea of Futurama career chip, including vaccine hesitancy. In many ways, this is not far wrong, what with all the talk of vaccine passports, green zones, and so on your vaccine status might shape your career. Unlike Fry, I don’t want to run from the career chip. I don’t have career chip hesitancy. I’m kinda looking forward to reinventing my life in ways that I didn’t expect to till 2031.
5/ Even the idea of a very bureaucratic future is not wrong. Given the amount of fiscal stimulus, the effects of new geopolitics with China, and vaccine nationalism, the role of states everywhere has become radically stronger. Like it or not, the world of tomorrow has governments everywhere getting more into your business, not less. Not least because governments effectively own a lot of assets through the loans they have provided for bailouts and stimulus.
6/ So the vaccine can be considered philosophically like a career chip for a new life in a future we’ve time traveled to, and are still getting used to. One of the signs for me has been that my Twitter feed, which is my main sense-making media feed these days, feels mis-tuned, and I’m re-tuning it. It feels like wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. Everything is a little blurry and distorted.
7/ Okay, so we’re in the future, and like Fry and other time travelers, one of our first questions should be, what year is it? Obviously, no provable answer is possible to this question, since we can’t actually run a believable no-Covid simulation. The new timeline might not even be comparable at all to the old one, because qualitatively different sets of things are happening or not happening. Maybe we’ve gone sideways rather than leaped forwards. Some parts of the world have definitely gone backwards.
8/ I do think the idea of an acceleration is well-posed though, and that we do overall have a forward acceleration rather than a sideways or backwards leap. I’m just going to propose 2031 as a strawman answer to what year it is, with the caveat that you shouldn’t anchor on it. The point of pretending we’ve time traveled 10 years in 1 year is to break old habits of thought and reorient. So how do we do that?
9/ One way to think of this is as a weighted average of trends by acceleration. So for example, if vaccines jumped ahead 20 years, but other kinds of medicine stayed the same, and public health for pandemics is 50% of all healthcare by cost, then you could say the average leap ahead is 10 years.
10/ But this is kinda silly, like applying a uniform rate of inflation even though your consumption basket may be very different from the consumer price index. In thinking about inflation, you should probably think about inflation in the specific range of goods you consume. So by analogy, in thinking about acceleration, you should think about the specific range of trends you’re riding, or not. A personalized basket of accelerations.
11/ For example, let’s say work-from-home would have progressed at a particular rate, such that we are now where we would have been in 2040 otherwise, which I think is true. What does that mean? Well for me, it doesn’t mean much, since I’ve been working from home since 2009. The big difference for me is actually being unable to work from Starbucks, and whatever acceleration is going to hit cafe culture.
12/ You can measure the importance of a particular acceleration in several ways. Like for WFH, you could talk about commute miles saved, C02 emissions from commute avoided, webcam sales, GDP of commercial vs. home office furniture, traffic at business district vs. entertainment district restaurants, etc. All these would be good macro measures of acceleration.
13/ At a personal level, you could simply think in terms of well-being improvements, and more time created due to not having to commute. The personal acceleration in this case could be an earlier arrival of lifestyle elements that you only expected with retirement, if at all.
14/ Some things are tricky when you talk about accelerations. For example, with a slower rate of shift to WFM, real estate would have evolved in sync, so commercial real estate would have shrunk, while residential square footage would have increased. But this takes time. Time we didn’t spend. So what are the implications of that?
15/ I recall reading somewhere that housing stock takes 70 years to churn, so if we logged 20 years worth of trend time in 1 year, then we have a churn-demand shock worth 1/3 of the total housing stock. Or to put it another way, 1/3 of real estate, both commercial and residential, is now either under distress from underuse or overuse.
16/ By a similar logic, car fleets take about 10-20 years to churn through, depending on the country’s laws about old cars. Public transit projects probably take about the same on average. WFH changed a lot of demand patterns overnight, so now you have idle cars and empty trains, and people rethinking their car situations earlier.
17/ When you look at all these individual accelerations, one thing that you might notice is that we’re talking about something very different from the acceleration due to Moore’s Law, the sort of everything-is-faster megatrend that gave rise to philosophies like accelerationism.
18/ This isn’t that. To the extent that was true, it is still going on. To the extent that was a shaky hypothesis, it still is. What we’re talking about is a different kind of acceleration from a one-time drastic shift, caused by a pandemic shocking the system into a new equilibrium that looks like the future we used to extrapolate.
19/ Let’s talk a bit more about how weird it is that we’ve leaped forward rather than sideways or backwards. A different kind of shock could have easily shifted us sideways into a kind of future we weren’t thinking about, a parallel timeline. Or it could have thrown us back into a more primitive past. But this one uniquely seems to have kicked us forward. Yes we’ve shifted sideways a little bit, and backwards a little bit, but the vector sum of all the accelerations seems to have been a global fast-forwarding effect.
20/ I think this is for two reasons. One, pandemics aren’t black swans. They’re not unknown unknowns. Not only do we have recorded histories of several examples to learn from, we’ve specifically had experts predicting this kind since SARS in 2003, and have even made what are in hindsight fairly realistic movies about it. Global civilization has a lot of cultural memory of pandemics, and ways of responding without being knocked off its historical course. This would not have been true of say an asteroid hitting earth or a major nuclear war.
21/ Second, many of the trends that have accelerated, such as WFH and climate action, were dealing with inertia effects. The pandemic did the equivalent of knocking out some inertia, causing a sudden, jerky leap forward. Kinda like dumping some cargo off an overloaded truck might cause it to leap forward.
22/ I think the right unit of analysis for thinking about acceleration is categories that have necessary, flexible roles in the world, with relatively linear evolution paths, no clear substitutes, and a lot of baggage available to shed. For example, cars, homes and countries. All are entities with steady rates of evolution, and loads of baggage.
23/ For example, cars were already undergoing dual trends of electrification and computerization, and on pre-pandemic timelines automakers were planning to fully transition to EVs in a decade or so. That’s probably accelerated because I suspect people will buy cars sooner now.
24/ EVs should be cheaper in the long run than IC engine cars, but in the short run, cars are actually getting way more expensive due to more compute elements. For example, cheap bumpers are now expensive to replace after an accident because they hold cameras and radars.
25/ So even though we’re probably in the same future qualitatively — more computerization and electrification is still going to happen, we’ve probably accelerated by at least a few years. Some things though, have shifted sideways. The idea of cars as a cloud-like on-demand service might take a hit, and more people might want to own cars. We’ve learned the importance of controlling some of your own physical assets and environments. Those who relied purely on rideshare or transit probably faced more risk last year.
26/ You can do a similar analysis for other stable units of our world. Countries are interesting. I’d say they were weakening before Covid, but have been made stronger. Vaccine development, public health management, and supply chain geopolitics have all strengthened the role of country-sized units.
27/ When you talk of more diffuse trends, without clear units, things get murkier. Two such examples are climate change and extremist politics.
28/ I think for a lot of people, Covid was a sort of prequel to how climate action might unfold. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in it or not, just as it didn’t matter whether or not you believed in Covid or vaccines. Enough people believe that there will be drastic responses. And I think Covid gave people sitting on a lot of capital a reason to start putting it into climate response investments. One example is the rise in SPACs. I suspect that’s going to be a lot more sideways than an acceleration though.
29/ It’s hard to judge what’s happened to politics, but I think it’s fair to say that both far left and far right currents got to crucial tests of their coherence and capacity to govern far earlier than they otherwise would have. Ideas that were outside the Overton window, like UBI got an early test through things like stimulus checks. I suspect the culture war overall accelerated by about 4-5 years at least. We’re already at the point in the conflict that might have otherwise arrived around 2025.
30/ To get back to the personal question, and the idea of a personal basket of accelerations leading to a personal estimate of how far in the future you’ve jumped, I think it’s a useful exercise to think about that, and also think about the question of what kind of new career chip you should install in your head, suited to the future you’re in, based on how far into the future you’ve leaped.
31/ How much of a jump have you made? I think looking at your typical sources of information and sensing how out-of-tune they feel, like with Twitter in my case, is a good starting point. The more weird your old pre-Covid news feed feels, the farther into the future you’ve leaped.
32/ Then you can think about the specific persistent units in your life, and how they might change or should change. In my case, I’m already thinking of living situations and travel plans in ways that I didn’t expect to be until 2031. I moved to a bigger apartment last year, and will probably look for a bigger place in a smaller city in the next few years. My domestic travel is probably going to go sharply down but my international travel and living might go up.
33/ I think the world of work has changed too. There is now more fat in supply chains, more resilience and sustainability in both production and climate senses. There is more national structure to industries. The story of vaccine nationalism might repeat in sectors like semiconductors and other critical and strategic ones. As a consultant, I’m rethinking how I approach my work.
34/ On this front, I am trying out patterns of work that I didn’t expect to see for years, such as more collaboration with other indies and free agents. I think relatively shallow managerial cultures are on their way out, and a more depth-oriented culture is on the rise, where people are expected to understand narrower parts of the tech stack, geographies, and markets more deeply. It’s an overall shift to a more vertical-grained global industrial structure, at the sectoral and national level. Again, this is what I expected with software eating the world, but not for another decade.
35/ Overall, I find this frame of a net acceleration, personalized to my context, very useful. The thought experiment of living in 2031, and installing a new career chip in my head, is very useful, and I recommend you try it.
So that’s it for this week, I’ll be back again next week with another essay for subscribers.
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In today’s episode of the Breaking Smart podcast, I want to discuss a concept I call demiurgical businesses that I think goes beyond the 3 kinds you may be familiar with: lifestyle, customer-driven, and product-driven.
1/ In the discourse around tech, both on the tech side and the techlash side, you’ll often hear the term “real problems” which should make you wonder what “unreal” problems are.
2/ When the term is used, it’s usually used by socially conscious people, whether builders or critics, who use “real problems” as the notional antithesis of whatever is behind what they see as bad, misplaced entrepreneurial priorities. Today it is NFTs, ten years ago it was apps.
3/ The term “real problem” is misleading because even though people who use the term will offer some cliched examples like climate tech or world hunger, the point of the term is to point at the thing being criticized, not the thing being aspired to.
4/ But if you take real and unreal seriously, you actually get an actually interesting train of thought. Usually, the thing being criticized is an example of a thing that doesn’t seem to solve any problem, whether real or made up.
5/ If you ask, “what problem does it solve?” about the thing being criticized, you’ll find that the people building it can’t even supply a bad, disingenuous, or morally indefensible answer.
6/ For example, if I answer the question, “what real problem does space exploration solve?” with “it helps discover better cancer drugs through zero-gravity biochemistry experiments,” you know that’s b******t. It is obviously a rationalization. It’s both a bad answer and a disingenuous one. If you claim it is a real answer, you’re either stupid or lying. I discussed the real answer for that a couple of weeks ago.
7/ For a morally indefensible example, let’s say I build luxury yachts with built-in torture chambers. The answer to “what real problem does it solve” would be, “the problem dictators have of partying and torturing their enemies at the same time.” Now that’s a bad and morally indefensible answer, but it is actually a real answer that points to a real problem that a real person has, just not a very pleasant kind of person. I’d want such a yacht if I was an evil dictator.
8/ If you think about it, there is no such thing as an unreal problem. If it can be posed as a problem at all, it’s real. You just may not share the motives or values of the person who wants to solve it.
9/ Or to put it more simply, the idea of a “real problem” is actually an expression of identity. Evangelizing “real problems” is a way to do identity politics by indirect means. The problem you choose reveals who you are, what values you prioritize, and what identity you’re attached to.
10/ An easy way to see this is to notice that “real problems” are actually a generalization of “customer-driven.” A real problem points to a real person who already has that problem — namely a customer. Whether it is hungry children or evil dictators.
11/ It might be quite abstract — for example, the “customer” for climate tech is people who believe in climate change and also believe it’s good to ensure the survival of as many humans and animals as possible, and will vote for politicians who will make policies in favor of that. But it’s still a direct equation between being customer-driven and focusing on “real problems.”
12/ I’ll even go further and say that all identities are in fact customer identities. So identity politics is actually customer politics. The only reason to have a stable identity is if you want to acquire something through it, whether it is through participation in family, community, the market, or politics. So things like race and ideology are customer identities just like preferring vanilla over chocolate ice cream is a customer identity. You buy things through those identities, even if it isn’t with money.
13/ If you’re familiar with the idea from Peter Drucker that the purpose of a business is to create a customer, this equivalence between “real problems” and pre-existing identities should be a red-flag for you. It means you’re talking about a world where innovation gets reduced to exceptional customer service through incremental improvements.
14/ So let’s ask again, what is the actual logical opposite of a “real problem?” We’ve already seen that “unreal problem” goes nowhere, and that “real” is just indirectly about affirming an identity, possibly while criticizing other identities.
15/ Here is my proposal: the opposite of a “solution to a real problem” — real to anybody, whether you think they are good or evil — is a “reality transformer.” Instead of solving a problem within reality as currently defined, in relation to a particular identity-based point of view, you make something that creates a new reality, forcing people to create new identities in relation to it.
16/ Twitter is my favorite example of a reality transformation business, or what I call a demiurgical business. Nobody asked for it, and even 14 years later it is unclear what problem it solves, and for whom. It was built because it was possible to build, and it ended up transforming reality for everybody. Now people have “real problems” within the expanded Twitter reality, such as being able to edit tweets.
17/ I used to think of this point of view as simply being “product-driven” instead of “customer driven” — see the potential within a new technological capability and work to realize it in a way that creates a new kind of customer, ie. catalyzes new identities in the market. I wrote a popular article about this in 2014, called Product-Driven vs. Customer-Driven, but that article now feels incomplete to me.
18/ The thing is, though product-driven businesses are in general more powerful than customer-driven things, most product-driven businesses are also often degenerate customer-driven things in disguise, where the customer is the entrepreneur. So you could call it entrepreneur-driven.
19/ An entrepreneur-driven business solves the problem of affirming the hardened, often narcissistic identity of the entrepreneur as the only real customer. They may want to put a dent in the universe, but typically they don’t want to put even a scratch on themselves. They want to transform without being transformed. Everything else is a side-effect.
20/ The side-effect is usually what we call product-driven: it creates a customer rather than serving an existing market. But the most important customer, the entrepreneur, remains unchanged.
21/ In my experience, I’d say about 90% of entrepreneurs are customer-driven. They build boring businesses that solve an existing problem for an existing customer, and make themselves and some others rich. About 9% are entrepreneur-driven: they work to validate the identity of the entrepreneur, and might distort reality for everybody else except the entrepreneur, via a reality-distortion product. That leaves the last 1%.
22/ This last 1% is what I think of as the truly powerful things. They transform reality for everybody, including for the person making it, forcing everybody to forge new identities. They transcend the product-driven vs. customer-driven dichotomy. Twitter is an example of this kind of business. It may have under-performed as a business compared to entrepreneur-driven businesses like Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, but it transformed reality more powerfully.
23/ It feels wrong to call the creators of such products mere entrepreneurs, since they are typically not about merely building a successful business or even validating their own identity. They act in the role of what the Greeks and gnostics called a demiurge. Not quite a god, and not quite human. Agents of transformation who are themselves part of the transformation process and subject to it.
24/ Demiurgical businesses tend to be far more powerful than either customer-driven or product-driven businesses, even when they make less money. The limiting factor for customer driven businesses is existing identities in the market that can be served. The limiting factor for product-driven businesses is the existing identity of the entrepreneur that must be affirmed. But a demiurgical business essentially has no limits besides the laws of nature.
25/ Demiurgical businesses often convey the impression of having escaped the control of their creators. I once described Twitter as occupying a business space that is too big to nail, a play on “too big to fail.” Just too large for any one business to fully occupy, and beyond the ability of any human CEO to govern. It’s not that the founders of Twitter were significantly less capable than those of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google. It is that Twitter opened up a transformed reality that was too big to nail.
26/ In my experience, it’s definitely not the case that people who build demiurgical businesses are somehow more evolved or enlightened than regular entrepreneurs. Often, they are just as narcissistic and driven to validate their own fixed identity as product or customer-driven entrepreneurs. What happens is something like a natural accident. They stumble on an idea that is too powerful to be limited by their own identity. They have no choice in the matter. The thing they unleash transforms them, whether they want be transformed or not.
27/ You can reduce this whole idea to a 2x2: if the producer, or entrepreneur changes but the consumer doesn’t, you essentially have a lifestyle business. If neither changes, you have a commodity customer-driven business. If the consumer is transformed, but the producer is not, you have a product-driven business. If both are transformed, you have a demiurgical business.
28/ Personally, I like demiurgical businesses the most. They have the most powerful effects on our world, and are the only kind of business that can break humanity out of seemingly hopeless equilibriums, where everybody has locked-in identities, and is fixated on “real problems” instead of “transforming reality.”
29/ In fact, flipping things around, the things usually called “real problems” are in fact the most “unreal” of all. The fact that they exist as persistent, named conditions that seem to defy solution, and demand really virtuous behavior of humans suggests that there is a misframing going on somewhere. A problem that requires humans to be saints to drive solutions is not a problem. It is virtue blindness.
30/ Real problems are problems that real humans, not saintly ones, can solve. If existence is threatened by a huge problem that require us all to transform into saints to solve, then the problem is actually unreal since it involves imaginary, fictional human beings. The actual response to such problems is to transform reality in unpredictable ways through demiurgical businesses. That’s what can get the situations unstuck. Maybe in the transformed reality, the problem is actually possible for real humans to solve.
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Space exploration has an unusual side effect: giving us a sense of the value of money on earth.
1/ The Perseverance rover, shown touching down on Mars in the photo below, cost about $2.2 billion to design and build, and about $243 million to launch on an Atlas rocket.
2/ Now that it is on the ground, if all goes well, and it is able to operate, it will cost another $300 million to operate for two years. So that’s at least $2.7 billion overall, or about 54,000 bitcoins. Hopefully more, if the mission gets extended.
3/ For those who don’t track this stuff, it is the fifth Mars rover, not counting the early Viking missions in the 70s which were not rovers. The previous ones were Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity.
4/ Perseverance is very much like Curiosity — about the size of an SUV, and powered by an MMRTG — Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. By contrast, Sojourner in 1997 was about the size of a lawnmower, and the MERS were about the size of golfcarts.
5/ Probably the most charismatically interesting thing about Perseverance is that it is carrying a drone helicopter called the Ingenuity, which will be a genuinely fascinating thing if it works. An aircraft on another planet — one with 1/6 the gravity, and about 0.6% the atmospheric density.
6/ So how should you think about the value of the Perseverance mission? Some people who are space-exploration positive are still kinda defensive about such things and try to make up rationalizations like R&D benefits for problems here on earth.
7/ I think this is not even wrong. When someone asks why we spend money on Mars missions when there are starving children on earth, the answer is neither to make up specious theories of how space science can lead to life-saving medicines on earth, nor to walk away saying values are different, but to talk about how money works.
8/ Money is the largest-scale coordination mechanism we have for negotiating differences in values of things, and is what allows us to define what the word “we” means. Its design has to accommodate everything humans might disagree about. Money that cannot value space exploration or art cannot value medicines or food very well either.
9/ So I think the simplest mental model is as a civilizational art project. 2.7 billion is about 0.013% of the GDP of the United States. This is actually pretty cheap by civilizational artwork standards.
10/ For comparison, at the height of the Mughal empire, the Taj Mahal cost about a billion of today’s dollars, and a double digit percentage of the empire’s GDP at the time. Possibly as high as 20-25%. According to some historians, it contributed to the bankruptcy and decline of the empire.
11/ A good question about civilizational art projects is — who is the art project for. Whether you’re talking medieval monuments or Mars rovers, it is easy to figure out who the artwork is by, but it’s not always easy to figure out who it is for.
12/ Pre-modern civilizational art projects were generally monuments to the narcissism of emperors and religious leaders. To get people to accept the fiscal burden to undertake them, you had to make up myths and religions.
13/ There is some of that in modern space programs. We still quote Kennedy’s speech about getting to the moon. But even the most powerful modern cults of personality, whether you’re talking Kennedy or Trump or Xi Jinpeng, pale in comparison to the cults of old monarchies and religions.
14/ Presidents get to bask in the reflected glory of space programs a little bit, but ultimately, they ultimately get only a small slice of the attention. If you add up all the attention we give to astronauts and Nasa, and the people who work on missions, you still get a big deficit. You’re left asking, who exactly asked for this?
15/ It’s not even national pride really. Space programs in the 1950s were strongly linked to national industrial bases, but today, a modern space program, even the US space program, sources talent, materials and technologies from all over the world.
16/ For example, NASA has been promoting a PR video around the rover showing immigrants from all over the world who have worked on it. And on a material level, the rover uses many components from outside the US. For example, the motors used on the rover are made by a Swiss company called Maxon.
17/ So as an art project, I think it makes most sense to think of space programs as art projects by and for global economic systems. They represent an economic system as an emergent entity admiring itself in the mirror. In the case of NASA missions, it is the Western economy. In the case of China, it is the Chinese economy.
18/ What they do is help calibrate what an economic system is capable of, when stretched to its limits, and how it compares to competing systems. And this, I think, is not just valuable, it is functionally necessary. Any kind of economic system can only work if it constantly tests the limits of its ability to price things against competing systems.
19/ A functional economic system isn’t about judging human choices and preferences, but to price them. Everything from cancer drugs and aid to disaster zones to climate change and space programs to luxury yachts and obscene extravagances by rich celebrities. If humans are capable of it, a real economic system should be able to put a price on it.
20/ One of the reasons cryptocurrencies aren’t taken seriously yet is that the economic system they represent is restricted to a very small set of activities. It hasn’t been calibrated against a large enough scope of activities. The equivalent of space programs for the cryptoeconomy is games on the Ethereum blockchain like CryptoKitties or the recent innovations in NFTs (non-fungible tokens). It has a long way to go.
21/ Many people want to translate their political and ideological interests into economic terms. They want to somehow design an economic system that makes, for example, Mars missions so expensive we don’t do them, and saving lives so cheap, we never fail save them. But this is fundamentally wrong-headed.
22/ If you can’t come to terms with the diversity and variety of things humans want and value, and are willing to work for, you will want to design economic models to coerce them to act differently. This is a version of what statisticians call the bias-variance tradeoff, which I’m using as a metaphor here. The more you try to bias an economic system to do certain things, the more you’ll narrow the overall range of things it can do.
23/ If you think people suck, and try to make an economy that prevents them from sucking, you’ll either oppress people, or create an economy that sucks, or most likely, both. The only way we know to avoid that is to keep recalibrating the scope of the economy — the things it is capable of pricing, at the weirdest extremes, without unraveling entirely.
24/ In other words, if the economy does things you think are horrible, and refuses to do things you think are necessary, you don’t have a problem with the economy. You have a problem with people, and you’re not willing to cop to the desire for coercive control.
25/ Yes the economy has lots of distortions, but it had even worse distortions in the past when it was the plaything of emperors building monuments to their own grief. To make the economy better you have to remove distortions, not add them. And the only way we know to do that is to constantly calibrate by letting it do weird things so it can look at itself in the mirror.
So that’s it for this free podcast edition. I’ll see you next week with another subscriber post.
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In this first 2021 episode of the Breaking Smart podcast, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot lately that I call anti-network effects.
1/ As I am recording this, governments around the world are working out the logistics problems of distributing billions of vaccine doses. It feels like a symbol of the times we are entering into, times that I think will be defined by anti-network effects.
2/ Vaccinations and mask-wearing are examples of anti-network effects. I’ll define these as effects that can slow down, regulate, arrest, or reverse the operation of network effects, and which might themselves be network effects.
3/ For almost 50 years, since the invention of the PC, the world has been riding one network effect after the other, all of which ride on top of the infrastructural network effect of the internet.
4/ To review, a network effect is when the power of a system grows faster than its size. The original form was called the fax-machine effect. One person with a fax machine is useless. Two people is one connection, three people is 3 potential connections, 4 is 6, and in general n nodes is n(n-1)/2 unique connections. So the power of the network grows as the square of its size.
5/ Network effects in computing infrastructure are deeply connected to Moore’s Law. When computers get cheaper, network nodes get cheaper too, and more things can get attached to computers, and then to each other via the network.
6/ This leads to a double effect. Every 18-36 months, the density of transistors doubles. This makes the cheapest computers based on the cheapest chips much cheaper, and what’s more, this allows whole new classes of even cheaper computer to be invented ever decade or so. So one compounding effect rides another. That’s how we we went from mainframes to Raspberry Pis, and from an internet of 2 computers to an internet of billions.
7/ There’s in fact a third effect. If computers get more powerful at a steady geometric rate, and industrial mass production lag is minimal, then the rate at which the network can grow is itself a function of network size. You don’t have to add 1 node at a time, you can bulk-add n nodes.
8/ Everybody with a home computer already had an internet connection, so with a router, everybody can add a wifi connected device at the same time. With software it’s even easier: everybody with a phone can download an app at nearly the same time, creating near-instantaneous soft networks.
9/ We’ve been riding this triple-punch meta-network effect for nearly 50 years. You’ve got Moore’s law, the basic network effect of devices, and then the network-size-proportionate growth effect. And for people about my age and younger, our entire lives have been spent on this ride. To the point where it is second nature.
10/ This is actually pretty unnatural. Think about the classic brainteaser to teach exponential or geometric thinking. If a lily plant doubles in size every day and on the 30th day covers the whole pond, when did it cover half the pond?
11/ The answer is of course, the day before, on the 29th day, and to people like us, this barely even counts as a brainteaser. In fact, for kids today, I suspect the expected wrong answer, which is the 15th day, will feel unintuitive. They deal with fewer important things that work that way.
12/ There’s a lot more to say about network effects and various formulations like Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law, but we’ve been doing that for my whole life, so enough said. I’ll just add one more point: network effects are pretty dumb. I mean even viruses and lily plants on ponds can embody them.
13/ This is in general not true of anti-network effects. While some anti-network effects are themselves driven by network effects, most work on other principles. So let’s take an inventory.
14/ The first kind of anti-network effect is self-limitation, when a network effect self-neutralizes. For example, once you have had Covid, reinfections are unlikely and you’re immune for a while. This is why you get an S-curve ending in a plateau, though a lot of people have to die along the way.
15/ Then there are anti-network effects that are themselves network effects, but distinct from the original one. Like the idea of wearing a mask spread pretty fast. Faster than the virus itself. The production of masks also spread via network effect. Some people saw others making masks and started imitating their behaviors.
16/ But many important things are not driven by network effects. Like when non-trivial habits have to be adopted. For example, disinfection and washing hands are behaviors that took a really long time to spread, and are still not universal more than a century after germ theory.
17/ Atul Gawande wrote a great essay called Sharing Slow Ideas in the New Yorker in 2013, that talked about innovations that are like this. That don’t spread like wildfire via network effects, but require pretty painful and slow diffusion via deliberate efforts.
18/ The reason slow-spreading non-network effects can sometimes still beat fast-spreading network effects is that they can be governed more intelligently. They are not as dumb as network effects.
19/ For example, it would be nice if we had a really dumb kind of network-effect vaccine that could be transmitted by a cough, via some sort of good virus that can fight the bad virus. Then the two network effects could race each other in a pretty dumb way. Explosion and counter-explosion.
20/ Unfortunately we don’t know how to make that kind of vaccine, that spreads via a network effect. Good things seem to spread slower than bad things in general. Brandolini’s b******t asymmetry principle is an example: it takes an order of magnitude more effort to refute b******t than it takes to produce it.
22/ The kind we do know how to make have to be slowly scaled in production, painfully distributed and administered by a small group of trained people. The only reason it has a chance is that we don’t have to be random.
23/ So that’s why governments are being deliberate and strategic in the order in which they vaccinate people. Of course you can be too careful. New York was criticized for expecting senior citizens to complete a complex form with 50 questions and multiple attachments to get vaccinated, and most efforts have now gone much simpler. Still, unlike the virus spread, it’s not dumb or near-random.
24/ You see the effect in computers too. In cyber-warfare, you don’t attempt to shut down the enemy’s capabilities by knocking out random computers in their network. You target key chokepoint routers or undersea cables. If you are an authoritarian government, you install firewall technology at the network edges. So those are anti-network effects that win by being topologically intelligent.
25/ There is a broader theme here: network effects are dumb, indiscriminate and very, very fast. They rely on abundance and target rich-environments. They think one step ahead in time, and one step around in space. But for those very reasons they are also very fragile. They can run out of raw material and starve. They can run into boundaries. They can even be slowed by simple ideas like six-feet separation.
26/ Anti-network effects sometimes incorporate network effects of their own, but are generally more deliberate, intelligent, and actively governed. They are designed with scarcity in mind and are not so easy to starve out. They have long horizons and think many steps ahead in time, and can be spatially intelligent across entire topologies.
27/ They need all these abilities because otherwise network effects have incredible advantages. Anti-network effects are like the tortoise that can eventually catch up with the hare. But because they lack exponentially increasing impact, they need other features to spread.
28/ Things can get worse though. There are network effects that also benefit from intelligence. Well-designed computer viruses are an example. They don’t spread indiscriminately. They can carry a payload of navigational intelligence in space and time and spread very intelligently. This is why countering clever computer viruses is so hard.
29/ There’s one more important class of anti-network effects we haven’t talked about, namely in information flows. After the January 6th storming of the Capitol, we saw how an anti-network effect operated with kinda stunning speed.
30/ The highlights, as you know, were that Donald Trump was suspended from major social media platforms, and Parler was suddenly cut off at the knees by major infrastructure providers. A good reminder that when the topology of a network effect is fragile — in this case the Trump influence network with Trump himself as a single point of failure — what takes years to build up can take minutes to shut down.
31/ That raises other issues I won’t get into, but here I just want to note that the anti-network effect here — simply cutting off a major source of disinformation and noise — was both easy and instantaneously effective. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed how much drama has been cut out overnight.
32/ I want to round out this set of examples with another big important class of network effects and their anti-network effects: markets and regulation. Markets are generally based on network effects. Everything from price information to manufacturing capacity to early adoption tends to have a network effect in it. The economy grows via network effects, which is why critics compare it to cancers and viruses.
33/ Anti-network effects in the economy on the other hand, are slower and more deliberate. Anti-trust mechanisms are like taking out a major node once it reaches a certain scale. Monopolies are a special case. In network theory terms, they are a single node cut point, where for example, removing a producer entirely disconnects demand and supply.
34/ The broader theme I’m getting at here is that after 50 years of riding a big meta-network effect, we are entering an era of anti-network effects. Slower, more deliberate, more intelligent phenomena that achieve effects in very different ways.
35/ This is neither a good or bad thing. It is just part of how the world works. In biology, technology, and economics, there seem to be phases of dumb growth driven by network effects, and phases of intelligent regulation driven by anti-network effects.
36/ In a way this is how intelligence evolves. The human brain is like this too. There is a network effect in a baby’s brain during gestation as neurons get very densely interconnected in a pretty dumb way. Then as the baby learns after birth, the connections start getting cut and the ones left behind embody what we think of as intelligence.
37/ There’s going to be a temptation in the next few decades to come at this ideologically, like regulation and damping of network effects is always bad, and network effects are always good. After all that’s the religion the world has run on for 40 years. I’ve been raised on Reagonomics like most of you. But that’s all it is, a religion.
38/ The smart thing to do is to simply start learning the physics of anti-network effects. It is going to be hard for most of us below 50 since we have no memories of a world that was not being driven hard by network effects, but I think we can learn. At least it will be a fun new kind of thinking to get used to. A world in which the lily plant does NOT go from 50% to 100% on the 29th day.
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Well, I guess 2020 is a wrap. I’m going to do a quick round-up of everything I published on Breaking Smart this year, and try to tease out the larger themes, but obviously no look back at the year can begin without acknowledging the 800lb virus in the room.
To quote J. Peterman on Seinfeld, in the episode where he takes back the reins of his company from Elaine after she mismanages it during his absence, kudos to all of us on a job…done. It’s a reference I’ve used before, in my 2018 annual roundup, but this time, I am really feeling it.
Whatever our personal successes or failures, as a species, the highlight of our collective performance is probably that we made it through the year without either sliding into apocalypse or going insane.
Well, most of us. As of this writing, 1.75m people are dead from Covid, and will not be seeing 2021. Against that backdrop, the best thing I can say about my writing and podcasting is that I continued doing it all, and that you guys continued to pay some attention.
On to the roundup.
It looks like we’re finishing the year pretty strong on this list, with just over 10,000 subscribers, and just over 500 paying subscribers.
I published 10 podcast episodes (free, with accompanying transcripts), 8 one-off essays, and 11 chapters or essays across 3 serialized projects. Let’s take a look.
Podcast Episodes (free)
* Beyond Optimism and Pessimism
* Defaults and Defaults
* How, What, and Where to Build
* The Medieval Future of Management
* From Story to Setting
* Big Moods, Little Moods
* The Next Experiments in Elitism
* The State of Business Play
* Fifth-Generation Management
* Involvement Capitalism
One-off Essays (paywalled)
* Life Go Brr
* Reimagining Publics
* Post-Covid Circularity
* A Bad Prequel
* Tunnelhead
* Notes on Textual Capital
* In the Wake of the Eighties
* Darker Things
The Great Weirding (paywalled)
* Into the Weirding: Part 1, Part 2
* Control Failure: Part 1, Part 2
After Westphalia (subscribers only)
* After Westphalia: Introduction
* The Descent of the Public
The Clockless Clock (paywalled)
* Chapter 1: Pandemic Time, Pandemic Time -2 (abridged free version in Noema)
* Chapter 2: Indoors in Time
* Chapter 3: Operating in Time, Operating in Time -2
This would count as a productive year if it were any other year besides 2020, but obviously, against the backdrop of everything going on, it feels marginal at best.
Still, thank you all for reading and listening, and here’s to the light at the end of the tunnel that we will hopefully emerge into sometime next year. I’m not going to wish you Happy Holidays or Happy New Year, since I personally find it kinda unseemly to even attempt to be festive this year, but I do wish you some productive introspection and contemplation, and perhaps a brief personal break from the bleakness.
I’ll see you again in January 2021. Have a good week.
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Welcome back. The Breaking Smart newsletter and podcast is starting up again after a very refreshing 6-week break.
I want to kick off the post-break programming with a podcast on a big question: if we are headed at least partially towards a post-scarcity world, as we seem to be, does it look more like the Star Trek universe, or the universe in Iain M. Banks Culture novels? Both are varieties of something I call involvement capitalism, which I think it’s going to emerge in the next decade one way or the other. The choices we make in the next few years will determine which flavor we end up with.
1/ Over my break, I had a chance to unplug from weekly writing, and reflect on the broader theme of this mailing list, while watching the news. In case you forgot my tagline for breaking smart, this broader theme is serendipity through technology, and in the last few years, that has been a murky theme to think about. Is it the best of times or worst of times? Hard to tell.
2/ I unplugged from writing, but not from media consumption. As you might know I don’t believe in that, especially when historic news is unfolding, and the last six weeks have of course been extra historic. Very much in the “weeks when decades happen” category, so I was very plugged in.
3/ The US elections happened, a second or third wave of the pandemic kicked off (depending on where you live), and multiple vaccines passed early trials, in the process pioneering a whole new class of mRNA vaccines.
4/ Closer to our own set of usual topics, bitcoin neared its historic all-time highs, a DeepMind AI sort of solved the protein-folding problem, SpaceX launched its first operational crewed mission, and also launched its beta Starlink broadband services.
5/ There was a small detail in that last news item that’s my jumping-off point for today. The Terms of Service for Starlink require you to agree that Mars is going to be a free planet, outside the jurisdiction of Earth governments, which is an interesting move with real consequences.
6/ The thing is, if SpaceX’s plans continue to succeed, they may put a Starlink constellation around Mars and offer very cheap launch services to Mars, which would lead to a broad-based democratized Mars access at least for rovers and robots, with low-cost communications once your rover is on Mars.
7/ Even if human settlement does not follow, we are on the cusp of creating at least a robotic telepresence society on Mars. And if you read between the lines of the Starlink ToS, SpaceX hopes to keep that presence an open, anarcho-capitalist zone of sociopolitical experimentation.
8/ What might that look like? Well, there are two precedents to consider, one fictional, one factual. The factual one is the current state of Earth oceans, which are essentially an outlaw zone. I highly recommend William Langewiesche’s brilliant 2005 book, The Outlaw Sea, for a deep look at how the world of oceans works. Shipping, piracy, law on the seas, ship-breaking, all sorts of cool stuff.
9/ The fictional one is the post-scarcity anarchist civilization called the Culture, in Iain M. Banks’ novels. We know SpaceX is inspired by that since they name their barges after Culture space ships: their current fleet of 3 comprises the drone ships Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions, and A Shortfall of Gravitas.
10/ The two together paint a consistent portrait. The Outlaw Sea kinda does look like the fictional universe of Culture books, especially the margins of the civilization, where the Culture’s Special Circumstances agents, a sort of CIA, interfere in less advanced civilizations.
11/ The fictional plots of Culture books very much resemble British and American interventionist global foreign policy, enforced by naval power projected across the world’s outlaw seas, and directed at less-developed countries, over the last two centuries. Internally, the Culture is quite different from Britain or the US, but you could say developed US-UK societies are as close to the Culture as real earth societies get.
12/ So this brings me to the idea of Involvement Capitalism. I got the idea for the name from the Culture books, where the multiple species that engage with the Culture are called Involved species, which I think is a very powerful concept. I define it as capitalism based on money as a way to engage more deeply rather than disengage from society. So the opposite of f**k-you money. More like hello-world money.
13/ The core idea in the Culture books is that despite its post-scarcity abundance, the AIs and biological species of the Culture don’t retreat from the universe into either pure hedonism or spiritual retirement. They stay engaged, both with each other, and with less developed civilizations. They never stop experimenting, learning, growing, and interfering in the affairs of the universe. They are involved the way annoying parents are involved in their children’s lives.
14/ The Culture is both like and unlike the Star Trek Federation, which is also a post-scarcity society built around powerful spaceships and a multi-species civilization. While both are left-leaning, powerful, and militarist without admitting it, the Culture is what you might call a neoliberal anarchy with no real rules, unlike Star Trek, which is a benevolent paternalist civilization that takes its rules very seriously, closer to LBJ’s Great Society model if that had actually worked out.
15/ You could say the Culture is like the Star Trek Federation, except with AI Minds in place of charismatic captains, and no Prime Directive, only a history of interference and consequences to guide individual choices, and social consequences for making good or bad decisions as individuals. For example, there is a norm but not a rule against reading the minds of humans, and a ship that violates that law is ostracized and given a pejorative nickname.
16/ Star Trek captains try to avoid mistakes, and when they do make mistakes it’s a rare crisis. First do no harm, like doctors. Culture Minds try to learn from mistakes and come out net positive and win-win long term, but in the short term they are willing to play pretty dirty. Mistakes are not exceptional. It’s a startuppy fail-fast world with consequences. This is a pretty powerful attitude. Great power, great responsibility sort of thing.
17/ Not only are you willing to take risks, you are willing to take risks on behalf of others. They are willing both to commit sins, and then ask for forgiveness and atone for the sins, a kind of ask for forgiveness not permission culture, which is a very different, and in my view, much more alive posture.
18/ Compared to the Culture, the Star Trek Federation has what Bruce Sterling called an acting dead posture. Or equivalently, to use terminology coined by Samo Burja, the Culture is a live player civilization, while the Star Trek Federation is a dead player civilization.
19/ The Culture society reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s definition of a free public as one where freedom is experienced through involvement in mutuality, not going off by yourself with f**k-you money, and the moral universe is based on the risky posture of making mistakes driven by curiosity and growth motives, and then seeking forgiveness, rather than trying to avoid mistakes.
20/ Now the interesting thing is that both Star Trek Federation and Culture lack a meaningful scarcity-based capitalism based on money. The Star Trek has replicator credits, but they’re not really that important. They deal with lesser species like the Ferengi, which do have a concept of money in the form of latinum plates. There’s a good book about the Star Trek economy called Trekonomics, by Manu Saadia by the way.
21/ Within the Culture, again there’s no money. But sometimes there are fads and fashions that create money-like dynamics. Like in Look to Windward, where there is some trading based on scarce concert tickets. But again, for the Culture, money only comes into play when dealing with less advanced cultures. So overall, both the Federation and the Culture not just post-scarcity, but post-capitalist.
22/ Let’s connect all that up to the current state of the world. The interesting thing is that despite all the political strife and pandemic-related troubles and deaths, we are actually starting to hit post-scarcity dynamics for real. Money is rapidly losing all its traditional meanings, and behaving in new ways we don’t really understand yet. One obvious sign of that is that service economy workers are in the deepest s**t ever, while anyone holding stocks has been doing great. So there’s a dissonance there that’s going to get sorted out, and it’s probably going to get ugly.
23/ Governments across the world have taken fiscal measures that look like close to free money. Especially if you’re in an industry like airlines, hotels, or restaurants, money is now a weird new kind of government action. It doesn’t mean what it used to. We’ve also been able to throw massive resources at vaccine development and not just develop them in record time, but do so with an entirely new method, and with higher effectiveness. And chances are it will be distributed nearly free around the world. Amazing compared to past pandemics.
24/ Even better, despite the strongest efforts of the fossil fuel lobby, the renewables economy has continued to develop strongly through the pandemic, and energy is getting closer to free. And by that I mean really free, after factoring in the cost of externalities like pollution and carbon. That’s worth a bit of a bunnytrail.
25/ There’s a famous paper by Nobel laureate William Nordhaus, Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not, analyzing the cost of artificial lighting measured in human labor hours that has some interesting implications.
26/ Nordhaus shows that between prehistoric times and campfires, and modern compact fluorescent lamps (which are already obsolete btw, and being replaced by even more efficient LED lights) the cost of lighting really has dropped by a huge amount. The amount of work that bought 1 hour of light in prehistoric times now buys 53 years of light.
27/ When Nordhaus wrote the paper in 1994, you could argue it was kinda dishonest since it didn’t account for the cost of climate externalities. But now with the renewables revolution, the figure is much more honest.
28/ And it’s not just lighting. Anything based on computing and electronics has seen that trajectory. The picture in this episode has an LED, as well as a knockoff Arduino board, and it’s worth thinking about that: that board is a Chinese knockoff off an open-source project, and all the code is open source. If you bought an Arduino original, you’d pay a higher price out of goodwill for the open source.
29/ We’re already into 5nm semiconductors, which means extremely low-power computing, in watts/cycle terms, and coupled with renewables, you could get solar-powered bitcoin mining on ocean barges that is literally almost free energy, not just in money terms, but in all-inclusive environmental terms, in real units like human labor.
30/ So at least where artificial lighting, computing, and energy are concerned, we are getting close to Culture or Star Trek levels of post-scarcity, and the dynamics of our world are starting to reflect it. Vaccines are not free to develop today, even if they’re distributed free, but with that protein-folding breakthrough, that might go the same way.
31/ So why don’t we see all this and celebrate? The thing is, post-scarcity doesn’t quite look like we expect it to, in naively idealist-utopian terms. We think it looks like the orderly Star Trek Federation, but it looks more like the chaotic Culture universe.
32/ Right now the light at the end of both the Trump and Covid tunnels are visible, and it’s also very clear that the world on the other side is going to be very different on every dimension: political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental. We’re going to go straight from Covid to Climate as the next challenge.
33/ Those dimensions, by the way, define what is called the PESTLE analysis framework — political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental — which I learned about recently via a project I was doing with the Yak Collective, which is a network of free agents and consultants I helped start.
34/ We just launched a project called Future Frontiers, using the PESTLE framework that you might want to check out. One of the things I hope to do with the Yak Collective in 2021 is kick off an open-source Mars rover project, betting on cheap Mars access from SpaceX. I’m looking for hackers and makers to join, so if you’re interested you should sign up.
35/ A bit of product placement PR: Next week, on Thursday Dec 10 at 8AM Pacific, we’ll be doing our first Annual Meeting, and it will be a good chance for those of you who are interested to check us out.
36/ But to get back to the topic, the Yak Collective is actually one example of the sort of socio-political experiment that makes sense in an emergent post-scarcity economy of involvement capitalism, where the scarce commodity is not any kind of material resource, whether it is atoms, joules, or bits, but human involvement.
37/ Both the Star Trek Federation and the Culture represent involved postures. They don’t retreat. They explore and stay curious. They are neither individualist, nor collectivist, but try to manage that tension while remaining involved. For me, the Culture is the better model, since it is much more alive, but either model is a good one to think about.
38/ What makes the Culture different from every other model of post-scarcity post-capitalism is that it’s not idealistic or utopian. It aspires to good, but accepts the necessity of mistakes, forgiveness, and messiness in a chaotic universe. In the Culture, the ultimate sin is not making mistakes, but disengaging. Involvement is good. Like in regular capitalism, greed is good, in the Culture, involvement is good.
39/ Covid has shown us that traditional capitalism breaks when faced with an extreme coordination problem and necessary collective action. The US is the most powerful country on the planet, and the most powerful economy and innovation engine. Yet, it has already let almost a third of a million people die, and the number is likely to be half a million by the time we’re done.
40/ Capitalism itself is here to stay I think, but no flavor seems acceptable for the world we’re heading into, and the problems will only get worse than Covid, not easier, but also more and more things will be moving into the weird post-scarcity regimes, like lighting, computing, and energy. We don’t have a system for this.
41/ Democratic capitalism leads to tyranny of the majority. Socialist flavors of capitalism as in China may do better on problems like Covid, and we can’t ignore that, but they do come at the cost of authoritarian repression with an AI surveillance state.
42/ Any sort of consensus-based approach to capitalism, as in many kinds of cooperative schemes, ends up vulnerable to veto dynamics, while more individualist leaning flavors of capitalism, like libertarianism and anarchism, end up sucked into low-level endless political life, which is ironic since that’s what they set out to avoid. In New Hampshire for instance, libertarianism went off the rails and resulted in bears running wild in a small town.
43/ In all cases, I think the problem is twofold — not recognizing that post-scarcity, even in limited form, creates more chaos and confusion than a utopian peace, and the urge to retreat from involvement of any sort, which backfires, and sucks you into the worst kinds of involvement possible.
44/ So what do we do? I think what we must learn to do is involvement capitalism. Stay involved, don’t ignore collective action coordination problems, don’t be idealistic about what post-scarcity means in practice, and try to have fun while figuring it all out.
45/ In this newsletter, I’ve referenced a famous line, usually attributed to Stewart Brand, several times: “we are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” I want to wrap this episode with that, but with a twist: what sort of gods should we aspire to be? I think the answer is, we should aspire to be like the AI Minds that inhabit the spaceships in the Culture. The first step towards involvement capitalism is to give yourself a witty and sardonic god-name that keeps you hungry and foolish, like Steve Jobs said.
So that’s it for this week. Don’t forget, if you’re interested in the Yak Collective, check out yakcollective.org, and drop by our annual meeting on Thursday Dec 10, at 8 AM Pacific.
We’ll resume regular programming and subscriber-only posts next week.
Note to subscribers: Billing, which was paused during my break, will resume starting today.
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In today’s episode, I want to talk about an idea I call fifth-generation management.
1/ Fifth-generation management is an emerging style of management we don’t know much about because it doesn’t actually exist yet. But it is guaranteed to emerge post-Covid because historically, big sharp disruptions have reliably triggered discontinuous changes in management culture, and it is already clear that this one is doing that.
2/ The idea of generations in management, in the form I’m going to lay it out, is causally related to the idea of generations of warfare, and in particular the idea that contemporary styles of warfare strongly shape future styles of management. So if there are generations in warfare, they are going to cause generations in management. Military ideas are not the only cause of course, but I’m going to argue that historically they’ve been the strongest one. Strong enough to almost be determinative. During WW2 for instance, business and military culture became almost the same thing for a few years.
3/ This is not a universally popular idea because a significant number people find even the business-as-war metaphor distasteful, let alone the suggestion that military culture directly shapes business culture, or worst of all, that it is in fact the dominant source of business thinking. But personally, I’ll admit I’m enough of both a military nerd and a management nerd that I actually find the connection stimulating rather than depressing to think about. And I have a little bit of history here, my research during my PhD and postdoc fifteen-twenty years ago was on military command and control models, and a lot of my consulting work draws from that experience.
4/ For better or worse, the connection between military and business evolution happens to be historically solid, and seems set to remain true. In the past this was much stronger, due to a large number of men serving in wars and then entering business, and business being male-dominated. Today, the coupling mainly has to do with relative rates of technology adoption in military vs business evolution, and to a lesser extent, shared exogenous events affecting both military and business affairs.
5/ Before we get into it, a couple of caveats. First, as with any clean, linear, sequential or cyclic model applied to a messy branching, evolutionary reality, you have to apply it very tastefully. You have to think like a historical artisan, matching up the conceptual boundaries of a constructivist notion you’re working with to real history. And where they don’t line up, actual historical events should shape your thinking rather than the abstract idea of one sequence of generations driving another. Second caveat, don’t make the mistake of thinking that each generation fully displaces the previous one in either military or business. Instead, it adds a new layer, and the older layer simply gets confined to a small zone of the action. Generations accumulate like geological layers, they don’t displace each other.
6/ To understand the management version, we have to understand the military version first. The idea of generations of warfare was popularized by William S. Lind, who coined the term fourth-generation warfare around 1980. It became the dominant style in actual warfare after the Iraq War, which was probably the last major third-generation war.
7/ I have illustrated the generations in the lower half of the diagram. The story basically starts with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, after the Thirty Years War. The first generation lasted almost 150 years. The second generation lasted about 100 years from 1815 to 1915, the third about 65 years from 1938 to 2003. The fourth, I will argue, only lasted about 15 years, from 2003 to 2020, and Covid will trigger a shift to a fifth generation.
8/ The first generation was based on final abandonment of medieval warfare, and relied on early smooth-bore muskets. It utilized uniformed, paid armies fighting for nations rather than feudal lords, or mercenary companies. It involved what is known as line-and-column warfare. Think of armies marching in long columns towards strategic targets. Maybe a little large-scale maneuvering and flanking, but lacking the communications and intelligence capabilities to do more.
9/ The second generation stretches roughly a century from the end of the Napoleonic wars, around 1815 to World War I. It was based on the development of rifled breech-loading guns, interchangeable parts, and early electronic communications with the telegraph. Technology improved steadily so that WW1 was quite different from say the war of Mexican independence. But the broad style is what’s known as attrition warfare between roughly evenly matched forces in numerical and materiel terms. Armies bogged down in trenches or extended sieges. In second generation warfare, usually the side with the greater economic resources eventually prevails, as in the US Civil War.
10/ Third-generation warfare was developed primarily by the German military in the interwar period, and is what is usually called Blitzkrieg in the historical case, or maneuver warfare in more modern terminology. It makes use of fast-moving mechanized infantry, tanks, and sophisticated local communications to move very fast behind enemy lines, maneuver and reorient rapidly in response to changing situations, and collapse the enemy from the inside.
11/ This is the style that was developed and refined by John Boyd, and is roughly what lasted all the way through the Iraq War. In third-generation warfare, often an asymmetrically smaller and technologically primitive force can beat a larger, technologically superior force. This is the style that is based on the OODA loop, which we talk about a lot.
12/ This asymmetric outcome potential often creates a conundrum around how to establish the peace after the victory, because economic superiority may not line up with military superiority. In the case of WW2, eventually the Allies got better at maneuver warfare, the Germans got worse and backslid into 2nd generation to some extent, and economic superiority prevailed. And after the war, the Allies won the peace with the Marshall Plan, which was second-generation peace thinking. So in a way WW2 was actually a Generation 2.5 war.
13/ Third-generation warfare is also what is sometimes called total war, where you fight with unsentimental professional skill to win. It’s not about honor or fair-play, and deceit, cunning, and cheating are considered legitimate. This means it can get really ugly by design. In older styles of warfare, you would have a collapse of honor norms like “giving quarter,” but for third-generation warfare, which is an extremely rational kind of warfare, you had to have things like the United Nations laws and the idea of war crimes and trials. Because everything from gas chambers to concentration camps is otherwise on the table.
14/ Now fourth-generation warfare is best defined not by how war is fought, but by who fights the war. In some ways the Vietnam War for the US, and the Afghanistan War for the Soviet Union, were both early fourth-generation wars. But proper fourth-generation warfare requires non-state actors who can operate with near capability parity on many fronts, which requires the internet and cellphones. It also often has non-state actors with more legitimacy than mere third-generation terrorist groups, and state actors that have much less legitimacy than they used to in the past. In a way, the Peace of Westphalia made states the legitimate combatants, and the Great Weirding is reversing that legitimacy after almost 400 years.
15/ Of course, as we’ve all learned by now, fourth-generation warfare, since about 2003, also means dank memes, influence operations, fake news, and disruption of political processes, especially democratic ones like elections, using social media. A good example is modern conflict like Syria involves both state forces, in this case Syria and Russia, as well as ISIS and a people’s resistance. Or Ukraine. It is what is sometimes called hybrid or nonlinear war, and Russia has been the leading practitioner of it. Arguably, the West has been subject to a fourth-generation war attack for four years from Russia.
16/ And of course this mix has always been present in warfare in some form, but what distinguishes 4th-generation warfare is that guerrilla goals shape the conflict via leveraged high-tech digital means, instead of just being subject to first, second, or third generation logic, or limited to violent terror tactics. This also means guerrilla goals become top-level political goals, instead of being subsidiary to the goals of a sponsor state. Guerrilla goals are what Henry Kissinger described with his famous line: “The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”
17/ In other words, fourth-generation warfare brings guerrilla goals to the political table directly. It is not total war, but what I call infinite war: it brings infinite-game war goals, into the picture, the goal being to continue the game rather than win it (infinite game in the sense of James Carse). It’s a true fourth-generation war if at least one top-level combatant is fighting with the guerrilla goal of simply staying in the game, rather than trying to win formally in the sense of a declared war, getting the opponent to surrender, and doing so without a state sponsor. Sometimes of course, the guerrilla actually wins in a conventional sense, in which case they often struggle to transition from a stateless actor to a state actor, as with the Taliban.
18/ Okay, now that we have our four generations lined up, let’s talk about how that connects to generations of business management. To do that, I want to talk about an episode you may have heard of, called the Millennium War Games, but you probably haven’t heard anything like my spin on it.
19/ Briefly, the Millennium War Games were games held in 2002 in which the Blue Team, operating by a doctrine called Network Centric Warfare or NCW, was defeated by Red Team, led by Marine Corps Lt. Gen Paul Van Riper, operating by standard third-generation Boydian doctrines. NCW was basically a very high-tech model, using satellites and surveillance and tight synchronization. Basically “how would we fight a war with the internet on our side.”
20/ Van Riper avoided electronic communications and instead used motorcycle messengers to communicate, and attacks with fishing boats to destroy the Blue Team. Basically, using relatively low-tech and irregular forces to operate in the blind-spot of the high-tech larger adversary that was overconfident in its technological ability. Classic OODA loop style conflict.
21/ The normal interpretation of the outcome is that low-tech with superior strategic thinking beats high-tech with weaker strategic thinking, but this is simplistic. It also doesn’t explain why, 50 years after Blitzkrieg was recognized around the world, the Blue Team would operate against the logic of third-generation warfare. The key point to note here is that the war games were primarily naval, and NCW was a doctrine that emerged out of the US Navy and its relationship to technology, specifically from an essay by Admiral William Owens in 1996.
22/ This is not an irrelevant fact. Navies have historically been the highest-tech branch of the military, but not in the sense of adopting the newest, shiniest tech. They are the highest tech in the sense of using the most technology, in the most complete and systematic way, to vertically integrate operations all the way from satellites to bullets. They are platforms. Today for example, the US Navy operates carrier groups, the most advanced version of this thinking.
23/ Aircraft carriers are obviously the most sophisticated technology in military use. They run actual little air forces and missile defense and offense that are superior to the entire militaries of small nations. They use satellites. They have destroyers, submarines, anti-submarine capabilities, all operating in coordination. And this has been true going back centuries. Large capital ships were hugely expensive technological marvels even in the age of sailing ships, and money and technological superiority can overwhelm a historic maritime tradition sometimes, as happened in the 18th century when France under Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s administrative leadership briefly pulled ahead of more naval nations like the UK and the Dutch in capability.
24/ On the other hand, prototypical third-generation warfare is best exemplified by the US Marine Corps. It’s not exactly a low-tech force, but you could say it selectively uses a few really high-tech bits in an otherwise low-tech style of fighting. The same is true of special forces, but to a greater degree of tech early-adoption. Third-generation warfare you could say is an early-adopter of technology that uses it in a small-scale but highly leveraged and strategic way. It’s the military equivalent of a startup, while navies are the military equivalents of large enterprises.
25/ These military startups don’t just use new technology, they rapidly evolve tactics through trial-and-error in actual conflict, and build out strategies and doctrines bottom-up, in real-time, adapted to the current conflict. And this is not because they’re smarter than navies, but because they play a different role: usually offensive, high-speed, messy and ground level.
26/ Navies on the other hand, usually play a very different role. Their firepower is primarily deployed from a distance and with overwhelming scale, in what’s called stand-off mode. A modern carrier group will park itself outside a battlespace and send hundreds of sorties into the warzone, launch hundreds of missiles, conduct economic blockades or humanitarian activities, and in general create a sort of boundary condition for the rest of the war. Their job is to create and maintain boundaries, not maneuver within them.
27/ In fact, historically, navies have been most powerful when they simply stood off to the side and did nothing. This is one takeaway from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s classic The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. It also applies to nuclear power, which has a similar effect (so nuclear deterrence enforcing the peace). Notably, Boydian thinking emerged out of fighter warfare and doesn’t have much to say about that side of warfare. The point is that complex, systemic technological capability is just a very different sort of weapon, and you have to apply generational thinking separately to it.
28/ Sometimes navies play a more active, maneuvering type third-generation role, as in the Atlantic war against U-Boats, but in general, you could say that navies play a late-adopter, complex systems platform technology role in warfare, while marines and special forces play an early adopter, startup role. If you want to apply the four-generations model to navies, you have to do it separately. I won’t get into how to apply the four-generation model to these boundary-condition parts of the military, but it’s possible.
29/ The quick version is that both have a role to play in modern warfare, just as both startups and large companies have a role to play in the tech economy. If your takeaway from the Van Riper Millennium war games episode is that you should give up high-tech complex military capabilities and network-centric operations, and run a cheap military using motorcycle messengers, and fishing boats, you learned exactly the wrong lesson.
30/ In fact all the conflict since 2002 shows the opposite. Network-centric warfare is what’s actually dominating war zones, though not in the doctrinal sense Admiral Owens imagined. Russia, ISIS, China, and other actors who are good at this all operate in a network-centric way. It’s just not in the form that the US NCW doctrine envisioned, but much messier and bottom-up. Missing this point is like thinking all companies should be small startups and that the Googles and Amazons can’t possible work.
31/ A better way to think about it is that you should pursue hot military objectives with marines style startup action, but consolidate victories and preserve the peace with navy style network-centric type systemic capabilities. Both have a role to play in every generation of warfare. You could say marines win wars while navies preserve the peace. Though of course in modern conditions, there is never really clear hot war or cold peace, or cold war and hot peace, but a continuous partial warm chaotic conflict.
32/ Okay, that was a very long preamble, which was unfortunately necessary because most people make military-to-business connections without knowing much of the relevant military history. But we’re now ready to make the connection to business management generations. I’m going to state it in the form of two laws, and then describe the four generations in relation to the top half of the diagram.
33/ The first law is: On average, business management generations lag military generations by one.
34/ This is an average in two ways. The first is across branches of the military. Military startups, marines and special forces, might be 1.5 generations ahead of management cultur, innovating tactics based on the most promising new technologies. Air forces and armies might be 1 generation ahead, using more proven technology, and navies might be 0.5 generations ahead, deploying the most proven technology at the most complex scale.
35/ The second is across time. You may have heard the line that generals are always prepared to fight the last war. This means, every significant new war causes a paradigm shift. It’s like a staircase evolution, and on average, military management culture is ahead. And in a world like ours, where we’re nearly continuously at war somewhere, the saying actually is pretty meaningless.
36/ The second law is: The evolution of business management is driven by more frequent, but smaller magnitude, exogenous events. So it has a much smoother evolutionary profile. Every war is an exogenous disruption to business, but not every exogenous business disruption drives evolution in warfare. Business is also driven by political events, economic crises, financial crashes, and many more technologies than warfare. Every military crisis is a business crisis, but not every business crisis is a military crisis.
37/ For those of you who follow the computer industry, an analogy to laptops and phones versus gaming consoles is useful here. Gaming consoles are like military technology, they have sudden jumps in capabilities every few years, as specialized chips are designed and launched. But phones and laptops evolve more smoothly with smaller jumps. They eventually catch up and even briefly overtake the console market. But then the consoles jump ahead again.
38/ So if you apply these two laws, you get a description of four generations of management that loosely correspond to the four generations of warfare, but with roughly a lag of 1 generation, and a smoother evolutionary profile. So let’s take them in order, as shown in the diagram.
39/ First-generation management, which is roughly the mercantile era, overlaps with the first generation of warfare in time, but resembles medieval warfare in structure. It is a little longer by about 25 years, about 1648 to 1854, the London Crystal Palace World Fair. It relies on ways of running businesses that would be familiar to people in the 15th and 16th centuries. Medieval management.
40/ Second-generation management, which is roughly the Robber Baron era, roughly 1870 to 1930, loosely resembled first-generation warfare. It features paycheck employees, a traditional column and line type approach to business operations, and leadership that looked a bit like 17th century military leadership. It established large business empires that resembled colonial empires, and used relatively primitive communications based on mail and telegraph to maneuver a little but, but not a lot.
41/ Third-generation management, which is roughly the familiar modern managerial era in the old economy, resembles second-generation warfare. It stretched from roughly the Great Depression to 1997, and has two clear phases. In the first phase, about 1935 to 1980, we had a heavily state-regulated corporatist environment, and in the second phase, from 1980 to about 1997, we had a deregulated environment. But despite the differences, the key feature is that professional managers ran the show, and the competition had some of the trench warfare attrition characteristics of WW1. Competitors were roughly evenly matched and were trying to wear each other out in the market.
42/ Finally, getting into modern times, fourth-generation management, which is roughly the entrepreneurial era, resembles third generation warfare. It stretches from the dotcom boom and the rise of Clayton Christensen’s disruption model, which is really maneuver warfare for business settings, all the way to 2020. It features charismatic founder-entrepreneurs, rather than professional managers, setting the agenda. Just like third-generation warfare, it puts marines/special forces type startups in the center, and navy-like systemic capabilities on the margins. In the fourth-generation, HBR, Michael Porter and McKinsey took a backseat, while Silicon Valley and the VC blogosphere was in the spotlight.
43/ There’s a lot more to be said, but that’s the basic model. Take the military generations, subtract one, adjust boundaries, smoothen the evolutionary curve, and you get management culture.
44/ Which brings us to fifth-generation management. Obviously, Covid and what I call the Great Weirding have been a huge disruption for both military and business. Obviously, climate action is already starting to shape the agenda in a very significant way, and business-to-business or military-vs-military competition is almost taking a backseat while society-to-nature competition is front and center. We are fighting a two front war, with the virus on one front and climate on the other. Neither will be the same coming out the other end. So what can we expect?
45/ First, military affairs are in uncharted territory. The US military for instance, is dealing with dangerously unstable domestic politics where they might become a factor for the first time since the Civil War. Syria and Ukraine were fourth-generation wars, but already fifth-generation situations are cropping up all over the place, like the urban conflicts in Western cities, detention camps for refugees, and so on. I won’t go deep into military futures here.
46/ But business affairs are in somewhat of a clearer situation. By applying the first law, we can already predict that fifth-generation business will look at least partly like fourth-generation warfare, 2003-20. In other words, like Syria or Ukraine. Just as non-state actors shape fourth-generation warfare, non-business entities will shape fifth-generation business. This includes culture war groups fighting for social justice, climate action nonprofits, governments administering post-Covid recovery funds, and so on.
47/ There is also stuff that’s already been recognized, ranging from open-source communities and the gig economy, to the blockchain economy, and various moves towards home-based economic activity and work-from-home that is outside the financial economy.
48/ But the big thing is that there are a large number of reckonings that have to be dealt with. Besides climate, we have the trade war, we have China turning into a new kind of evil empire and surveillance state, we have the techlash, we have financialization on Wall Street, we have a world awash in fiscal responses to Covid. And in the middle of all this, we have supply chains breaking down, wildfires, and other climate-related disruptions.
49/ A lot of what I write about on this newsletter is looking at various aspects of all this. The three main projects I have going here all are about researching the background context against which fifth-generation management is emerging, though that’s not the main motivation. In the Great Weirding series, I’m looking at how the equilibrium has been destabilized over the last five years. In the Clockless Clock project, I’m looking at how new temporalities are displacing the clock-based temporality that has coincided with all four generations of war and business, since the invention of the pendulum clock in 1657. In the After Westphalia project, I’m looking at the future of the nation-state.
50/ Trying to figure out how to manage military or economic affairs against this complex backdrop is the task of fifth-generation management in both domains, and it will be probably take us all the rest of our lives to figure it out. But at least we now have a starting point and a sense of the nature of the challenge. A lot of this thinking came out of my last few years of consulting work, with clients who are already practicing fifth-generation management, and I’m currently trying to put together an online course based on this material. So if that interests you, stay tuned. There will be an update on that front soon.
This has been one of the occasional free podcast issues of the Breaking Smart newsletter, where I send out an essay a week. Usually an installment of one of my longer series projects, which I just mentioned, and occasionally one-off stand-alone essays. So if you liked the ideas in this issue, do subscribe.
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For today’s episode, I want to share an out-take from my consulting work, something I think might be interesting for anyone working in the technology industry. It’s a set of 20 questions that can help you uncover the current state of play in your business. The questions are mainly useful for technology companies for reasons I’ll get to, and are probably of limited value to non-technology businesses, but you’re welcome to try using them for non-technology businesses.
A caution: The only person who can usefully answer these questions for the company as a whole is the CEO. But it’s a fun game to play from any position, and useful to the extent you are close to, and aligned with, the CEO.
I put this list together in the course of some work I’m doing with a client, and in doing that, I realized that these are the questions I tend to explore free-form in the first couple of orientation calls with all new clients. I don’t explore these via an explicit Q&A, but more in a sort of bingo-card format, where I look for answers to these in a free-form conversation. For me, it’s a way to efficiently learn about the business, and for them, it tends to be a useful exercise to turn an unconscious sense of the state of play into a conscious one.
So here are the questions, with some commentary afterwards. Note that this is written text is a skeletal outline, not a transcript. The audio has me riffing on all these questions and explaining the logic of the sequence, so you’ll have to listen if you want the whole thing.
The Questions
* What is the primary operational bottleneck or "firefight" currently consuming the bulk of your attention? (eg: "growing schedule slippage on launch of product X" or "difficulty filling critical CxO position" or "PR damage control due to issue X")
* What is currently the biggest source of uncertainty/doubt/anxiety for the company? (Be specific, eg: "high failure rate of manufacturing process X" or "poor conversion rates of sales campaign for product Y" or "What customer Z will decide for their product P")
* What are the top 5-7 events coming up on the company roadmap in the next few years? (eg: key technology tests, decision points, product launches, sales drives, external events like elections)
* Who/what are the top 5-7 most important external entities shaping your business sector environment? (key customers, value chain partners, government agencies etc. Name either individual entities, or classes that are as specific as possible, like "small food-service business owners").
* Which entity in the list from Q4 above exercises the MOST strategic control over the primary value chain of interest to the business?
* Which entity in the list from Q4 consumes the largest share of your personal attention? (can be the same as 5)
* What is the MAIN line of business (LOB) the company MUST win in, within the current business model, to be successful?
* What is currently the MAIN strategic metric/measure that tells you whether you're winning or losing in that LOB? (be specific, eg: "free cash flow" or "increasing yield rate from process X" or "rate of increase of production volume")
* Who is the ultimate customer/end user for the overall value chain this LOB is part of? (Be as specific as possible. Eg, "fast-food restaurant chains")
* Who is the immediate prototypical customer for this LOB for your business? (Eg, "commercial kitchen equipment manufacturers")
* What is ONE belief held by this prototypical customer that you would like to change, and what would you like it to change to?
* What they believe:
* What you would like them to believe:
* What is your "Thielean Secret"? ONE key belief held by you/your company that is NOT widely shared by the industry?
* What is working unexpectedly well, where you seem to be getting surprisingly lucky?
* What is working predictably badly, and seems hopeless/doomed?
* Overall, how well is the current business model working? Use a qualitative phrase in the range from "succeeding wildly" to "in big trouble"
* What do you estimate are the % chances you'll need to execute a major business model pivot within the next 3 years?
* If you do need to pivot, what is the most likely alternative business model you will be considering?
* What are the top 3-5 macro trends affecting your business environment (Be specific: examples: Covid, China trade war, climate change, software eating the world, input X commoditizing, industry structure going from horizontal to vertical…)
* What are the top 3-5 elements of the business environment that are NOT changing?
* Based on reflection on your answers to questions 1-19, list between 3-5 problems that you consider to be the top strategic priorities. Describe each with a single sentence. They can relate to any aspect of the business: internal or external, relating to marketing, engineering, HR, sales, or cutting across functional boundaries. Try and state it in terms of key details that have strategic significance, not generalities (eg, "Get defect rate for manufacturing process X below Y%" not "Improve quality")
These questions are specifically useful for technology businesses — businesses that develop and sell products or services that take significant engineering, and are driven by, and drive, technology trends. This is because technology businesses are strongly time-based, and have to evolve and maneuver in a marketplace where competition is based primarily on innovation, not supply and demand shifts due to macro factors in an otherwise unchanging market.
In other words, there is a sort of fast-evolving real history to technology businesses that’s not really there in non-technology businesses, like managing a corner grocery store or even a consulting business like mine.
These questions assume that the logic of the business is the logic of time-based competition, which means your approach will include things like OODA loops, S-curves, disruption, Simon Wardley’s Wardley Maps, Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory, and so on.
Even though the questions might seem banal and obvious, the thing is there’s a lot of banal and obvious questions you can ask about any business, like hundreds, and it’s not immediately obvious, at least to me, that these are the right ones.
These questions — in this rough sequence — are ones I’ve converged on through trial-and-error over nearly a decade of initial orientation conversations with new clients. Many other questions can be usefully asked once you have a sense of the answers to these basic questions, but skipping these and going straight to other questions is usually a recipe for frustration.
So that’s it for this episode. You’ve been listening to/reading a free podcast issue of the Breaking Smart newsletter, where I send out a longform piece for subscribers every Friday, usually an installment from one of my multi-part projects, and sometimes stand-alone essays. Once every 3 or 4 weeks, I publish a free public podcast like this.
In the previous 3 weeks, I published 3 subscribers-only essays:
* Control Failure -1 from my Great Weirding essay series, about the global transformation of the last few years.
* The Descent of the Public, from my After Westphalia essay series, about what comes after the nation-state.
* Operating in Time -2, the concluding part of Chapter 3 of my book project, The Clockless Clock.
Thank you for listening, andI’ll be back next week with another longform piece.
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A special episode, an audio roundup/summary of the last year’s podcasts. I cover the 19 episodes I did starting in June last year. A year of thinking out loud.
* The inaugural episode riffing on the like-new ethos of the industrial age and the transience/aging based ethos of the digital age. June 21, 2019: A Wabi-Sabi Technological Age.
* On the problem of how to repeatedly break into technology scenes. July 5, 2019: Following the Scenius.
* Plotting vs. pantsing, and setting the stage for creative, generative work vs. planning to finish something. July 26, 2019: Planning to Start, Planning to Finish.
* An episode on how marketing is now a bottom-up process with 3 layers: memes, brands, and missions. August 2, 2019: Memes, Brands, and Missions.
* On why social media favors positive behaviors such as clicking like buttons, but not negative ones like mute and block. August 23, 2019: Towards Subtractive Social Media.
* Investing in the things that make you ordinary rather than special, such as being an early adopter. August 30, 2019: Investing in Your Ordinary Powers.
* Probably my favorite thread of the first year, building an analogy between charismatic megafauna and technologies, built around a 2x2 of non-marquee vs. marquee, and smoke-and-mirrors vs. WYSIWYG. September 6, 2019: Technological Charisma.
* Riffing on the problem of how injecting AI into a system breaks learning curves for humans. September 20, 2019: Like Riding an AI Bicycle.
* Next up, another episode based on a 2x2, this one has normal versus weird on the x axis, and timid vs. bold on the y axis. September 27, 2019: The Direction of Maximal Derangement.
* Picking up the thread on charismatic technologies from September 6, an episode about an idea to replace the concept of Net Neutrality, based on the end-to-end principle, with one based on end-to-end encryption. October 4, 2019: Charisma Neutrality.
* A reflection on the death of Alexey Leonov and the first spacewalk with two women, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir. October 18, 2019: Spacewalks and the Species.
* Putting together ideas from Alan Kay, William Gibson to think about how December 6, 2019: Inventing Time
* Navigating time in ways that go beyond optimism and pessimism. February 21: Beyond Optimism and Pessimism
* The first pandemic episode. The word default has two meanings: failure to fulfill an obligation, and a preselected option. Both meanings became very salient with the pandemic. April 3, 2020: Defaults and Defaults.
* A riff on Marc Andreessen’s Time to Build essay which was doing the rounds then, based on a graphic I made up called the Builder’s Cone, comparing the relative rates at which you adapt versus society adapts. April 24, 2020. How, What, and Where to Build
* One of the things I’ve been doing with the pandemic is reading a lot of history that seems relevant. Through most of May and June, I was reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. An episode inspired by that. May 8, 2020: The Medieval Future of Management.
* In May, we had the BLM protests and that seemed to bump the pandemic from the headlines. What was the significance of that? May 29, 2020. From Story to Setting
* Connecting the idea of big moods to emotional common knowledge, and a complementary concept I made up called little moods. June 19, 2020. Big Moods, Little Moods.
* Probably my most popular episode from the last year, a detailed look at the concepts of elites and elitism, how elites fail, and how to get better elites. July 10, The Next Experiments in Elitism.
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In today’s episode, in honor of Bastille Day next week, and Fourth of July last week, I want to talk about the ongoing evolution in elitism, and the problem of how the emerging new elites can be better than the old ones being toppled.
1/ Elites are a constant and arguably necessary presence in history. Political revolutions that try to do away with elites invariably seem to either fail quickly, or install new elites without meaning to. So the question for me is not how to get rid of elites, but how to try and ensure the ones we end up with are better than the last lot.
2/ I’m going to sketch out a rough theory of elitism and its dynamics, and then get to posing the question itself, and then propose an answer, from the perspective of both the new TBD elites, and the masses they define, so let’s get started.
3/ First, the concept of an elite is not dependent on a particular structure of society. Elites might be kings, nobles, elected leaders, bureaucrats, scholars, scientists, priests, cult leaders, media leaders, business executives, or subcultural inner circles. The prevailing idea of masses is induced by the prevailing idea of elites as a complement.
4/ So there’s always a subset that regards itself, and is regarded as, entitled to a sustainably better than average human condition, with attendant privileges. And importantly, it is a stable equilibrium. Those who are worse off, the non-elites, and think the elites don’t deserve their better conditions, still live with it. The masses rarely disturb the peace unless they are under extreme stress.
5/ Elitism and privilege go together of course. The word privilege literally means private law. Elites are a group for whom laws apply differently, or a different set of laws apply. In the most extreme case, they are formally above the law entirely. That’s the usual definition of a monarch and the dividing line between monarchs and ordinary nobles.
6/ The nobility might have a privileged code of law, but they are still governed by a rule of law, even if it’s not the same one as applies to non-elites. This special treatment has to be pretty special though, so I don’t use privilege in the broad social justice sense of the term, as in white privilege. That’s a different, more diffuse sense of privilege as a structural advantage. I’m talking narrow privilege where you can get exceptional, personalized treatment under whatever rule of law applies to you.
7/ For example, in medieval Europe, the nobility had hereditary property rights, governed by Church law, and the commoners mostly didn’t have the same sorts of property rights, only duties. But what made the law for the nobility special was that it was personally administered, with exceptions being more important. Laws honored in the breach rather than observance, as Shakespeare put it.
8/ So for example, there were laws against consanguinous marriages, but the Church did brisk business in allowing exceptions. Or you have indulgences absolving you of sins that are more easily available to nobility. Or in more modern times, draft exemptions. That’s what privilege looks like.
9/ So one way or the other, some subset of humans will create not only better than average conditions for themselves through private laws, they will even get exceptional treatment under that private law. Or a position above the law entirely.
10/ A big part of the stability of this condition is personal social capital: knowing the right people, with the right level of trust, to get rules bent or interpreted in your favor. Or being treated as an exception. Or in the extreme case, laws simply made to your specifications to benefit you and disadvantage others. In the most extreme case, they simply don’t apply to you.
11/ If you ignore human fallibility and corruption, and look at this as a systems design, it is actually kinda smart to divide the world into 3 zones this way: a zone where the rules apply absolutely, a zone where they can be bent and exceptions are possible, and a zone outside the laws. It gives you a broad ability to evolve the system.
12/ It’s like how, in The Matrix, the architect declared that the city of Zion, Neo, and the Oracle were as much part of the design of the system as Agent Smith. You could even argue that though the architect was God, Neo was the emperor, the citizens of Zion, both red-pilled and native-born, were the nobility, the Oracle was the chief priestess, and the bots like Agent Smith and the blue-pilled people in the Matrix were the non-elites.
13/ But back in our world, I asked my Twitter followers whether they consider themselves part of the current elites. Out of 468 respondents, 34% said yes, and 66% said no. Which seems about right since I write for a pretty privileged class of readers.
14/ Okay, so with this definition, if you look back at history, it looks like a series of experiments in elitism rather than a series of experiments in governance. Some of them end well, some end badly. But all of them end. The conceptualization of an elite class is not stable.
15/ Definitions of elites shift pretty slowly, and typically only move significantly when the technology of trust changes. It used to be about provably noble blood-lines. Then it was about visibly living by a particular code, noblesse oblige. Then it was about money, then it was about education. Maybe in the far future, it will be about being red-pilled out of an AI simulation, so the rules don’t apply to you.
16/ Now, while a notion of elite is stable, there is what Vilfredo Pareto called circulation of elites. He traced how two kinds of elites, which he called lions and foxes based on earlier terminology from Machiavelli, tend to simply take turns being the elites. Foxes rule by the power of the pen, lions through the power of the sword.
17/ As I have said, the economy of elitism is sort of system independent, and is based on personal trust and social-capital based computing within a calculus of privileges — exemptions from the law.
18/ A good model of this calculus is Selectorate Theory, which is described in The Dictator’s Handbook, compares all kinds of political systems in terms of 3 groups: influentials, essentials, and interchangeables. Influentials are always elites, interchangeables are never elites, and some essentials are elites. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dictatorship or democracy. This is how governance by elites happens.
19/ My final theoretical point is about knowledge. The relation among elites and masses is one usually based on what are called noble lies, where elites exploit their privileged access to ideas, information, and education, to craft false consciousnesses for the masses to inhabit. Think of them as blue pills. How you feel about these noble lies, or blue pills, is a big part of your philosophy of elitism.
20/ You can distinguish two basic approaches of elitism. There is what is sometimes called Straussian elitism, which is generally conservative, but not always, and is based on the paternalistic belief that elites lying to the masses for their own good is a good thing. So you get a distinction between esoteric elite red-pill knowledge and exoteric, non-elite blue-pill knowledge meant for the general public.
21/ The other approach, which you could broadly call pluralism, is more democratic in spirit, and eschews noble lying, at least conscious noble lying, based on the principle that even if it gets noisy, messy, uninformed, and ignorant, it’s a good thing to level the epistemic playing field, and not privilege some flavors of knowledge structurally. I’m pretty strongly in this camp. There is no blue versus red pill. Everything is available for anyone to learn.
22/ Okay, now that we have this basic historical sense of what elitism is, and how it works, we can ask, what makes for good elites versus bad elites? It is important to keep a sense of the real history of elitism when you talk about this question, because it is easy to get caught up in theories. In the collage image accompanying this podcast, I’ve included several famous historical examples.
23/ The storming of the Bastille, the American Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and Lee Kuan Yew, Nehru, and Jomo Kenyatta giving their famous speeches. I also included a picture of Muammar Qadaffi’s corpse after he was killed by a mob — it is important to remember that elitism can end like that. So this is the gestalt of what elitism as a historical practice is. Or to use an esoteric word, the praxis of elitism as a consciously held philosophy.
24/ But we shouldn’t anchor too much on these iconic moments when one set of elites takes over from another, or when non-elites temporarily bring down elites altogether, creating a vacuum. The essence of elitism isn’t in these moments of creative destruction of elite power, but in quieter unaccountable workings away from public scrutiny.
25/ So think of closed-door board meetings, experts in a committee meeting setting health standards, Congressional committees hashing out the details of a bill, lobbyists waiting to meet a senator to push some agenda, unaccountable editors in a press room deciding which public figure to attack. Unaccountable tech leaders deciding how an algorithm should work. That’s day-to-day elitism.
26/ This unaccountability by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is what it is. To the extent the elites are agents of the will of society at large, there is just so much detail involved in the exercise of actual power that there is no possible way all of it could be made transparent to everybody. At best you can be slightly less opaque and unaccountable than the last crowd.
27/ There’s also a middle-class, provincial version I don’t want to discount too much, like a local city leader calling in a favor with the local police chief, or a powerful business person talking to a school principal about their child. Any behavior that exercises privilege is elite behavior. The defining bit is not amount or scale of power, but the fact that it is exercised in privileged ways — private law, with a degree of unaccountability and exceptionalism.
28/ Now that I’ve painted a portrait, there’s a fork in the road. You can either accept that this is the way the world works and always will, or you can imagine some sort of utopia where there are no elites and no zone of society that operates on the basis of privilege.
29/ Whether you are a commune anarchist who believes direct democracy or consensus will get rid of elites, or a blockchain libertarian who thinks code-is-law will get rid of elites, down that road I think is mainly delusion. I’ll just point to a famous article, the Tyranny of Structurelessness and leave it at that. Getting rid of elites does not work.
30/ One reason is of course that elites have power and they use that power to keep themselves in power even as structural definitions and models of elitism change, become more or less informal, and ideologically different and so on. Angry masses understand this aspect of the persistence of elites. But this is not the biggest reason.
31/ The biggest reason, which revolutionaries routinely discount, is that humans seem to desperately want elites of some sort. Maybe not the current sort, or the current model, and definitely not the current specific people, but some elites. Maybe you want black instead of white, women instead of men, techies instead of lawyers, or trans instead of cis, the point is, you want elites.
32/ There may be strong preferences for a system of choosing elites. That’s kinda what ideology is. Or looser preferences. For example, I tend to prefer fox elites over lion elites, a large selectorate to a small one, and pluralism over noble lies. I also prefer strong mid-level mini-oligarchic patterns of power to either imperially centralized patterns or extremely fragmented, decentralized patterns.
33/ The psychological function of elites appears to be to model how life can and ought to be lived. But this is a pretty loose specification. Christians think in terms of What Would Jesus Do. Confucians in ancient China thought in terms of how to codify the will of the Emperor into law. Woke elites think in term of how to turn intersectional theory into prescription, and anti-Woke elites think in terms of making classical liberalism great again.
34/ It’s important to keep your definition of elites broad. For example, many people pretend that people like court jesters (and people often classify me as one) are among the non-elite. Maybe formally, but informally, they wield power and privilege — in my sense of access to exceptional treatment — in ways that makes them elite. So today in the US, the cast of Saturday Night Live, stand-up comics, and people like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah are definitely elites.
35/ Anti-elite philosophy and philosophers are also necessarily elite simply by virtue of how their influence operates. So whether you’re taking about the Taoist sage Zhuangzi in ancient China or important figures like Robert Anton Wilson in the Discordian subculture of modern America, they’re all elites. Just because you laugh at other elites with sticks up their asses doesn’t make you not elite.
36/ There’s many theories of this psychological function. There is a basic ethics theory of people just wanting guidance on how to have a good life, and looking for teachers. There is the theory of elites as surrogate parental figures. There is the Girardian theory of mimetic envy. Each theory explains some aspects and some situations well, and others poorly, but the point is, that psychological function exists. Elites are models of how to live life.
37/ Okay, so now that we know what elites are, who counts as elites, how elitism and privilege work, and why they are both psychologically necessary for societies and structurally hard to eliminate, you can finally ask, what makes for good elites.
38/ It’s an important question to ask right now, because the current regime of elites is definitely nearing its end. Chris Hayes wrote a good book about this back in 2012, called Twilight of the Elites, and there’s been a lot of other writing about it, like Moses Naim’s End of Power, and Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public.
39/ The elites are of course not going quietly. My friend Nils Gilman wrote a great article about the reaction, called The Twin Insurgency, and there is in general a lot of attention on how the current elites are rapidly trying to secure what they have, and sort of batten down the hatches.
41/ But I think the old elites are kinda done for in the next decade. My hypothesis about this is a simple one about how elites fail. In general, elites fail when their relationships with each other become more important than their relationships with the world. Not just masses, the world. The inner reality of the elites absorbs all their attention: whether it is court intrigues, scholarly debates in journals, boardroom battles, product architecture arguments, rivalries among schools of economists, or media wars.
42/ Once an elite class has turned into this kind of inward-focused blackhole unmoored from the larger universe, it’s only a matter of time before it self-destructs. With or without help from the revolting masses. It doesn’t really matter how much power they have. Their hold on that power is a function of the strength of their connection to the world.
43/ This is one reason the function of policing is in the spotlight, because the job of the police is to enforce a particular relationship between elites and masses. When this enforcement gets particularly one-sided, they turn into a Praetorian Guard like in ancient Rome. So calls to defund, deunionize, or demilitarize the police, and theories of how policing itself can be ended as a function, are also part of new experiments in elitism.
44/ Whether it goes down in flames or more peacefully, change of some sort is coming. If my theories are correct, any non-elite period will be short-lived. The shorter, the bloodier. The current idea of power may be ending, but the role of elite power and privilege will not end. Policing as we know it may end, but some enforcement of elite-mass relationships will remain. It will simply take on a new form in the new medium.
45/ Already you see weird kinds of new elites, like online personalities, offline protest coordinators, skilled hackers, and people who are good at crafting spectacles like videos of bad “Karen” behavior. Much of this gets labeled populism, but it’s important to note that each of these manifestations of so-called populism comes with its own breed of new elites, mostly descended from old elites.
46/ I think the populist phase of the culture wars might even be over. The actual commoners are exhausted from decades of violence, both physical and cultural. They can at most come out to riot online and offline occasionally. The real battle now is between old and new elites, and within old and new group. And of course, it’s confused by lots of overlapping membership.
47/ For example, in the last few weeks, an open battle has broken out between tech industry thought leaders and media leaders. And right now there’s a weird letter doing the rounds on Harpers magazine, signed by a bunch of old elites denouncing a bunch of the new elites.
48/ The elite wars have really gotten going now, because everybody senses old institutions are dying, and emerging ones are at the point in their evolution where they are ripe for capture by one faction of wannabe elites or another.
49/ Basically, you could say a new era of experiments in elitism is about to get underway, with more or less blood on the streets around the world. The question again is, what experiments should you support? How can you minimize the bloodshed? How can you try and ensure the new elites are good. If you’re a candidate elite, how do you plan to be good?
50/ I don’t know the general answers to these questions, but I suspect I have an approximately equal claim to being a D-list member of the elite in both the old and new worlds. So I can only share my answer. I think the key to being a good elite is to take your function — serving as a model of how life should be lived — seriously. This means thinking more about your connection to the world than your connection with other elites.
51/ If you want to define this function more precisely, I think it has to do with the idea that humans are ideally the measure of the world, not the other way around, and privilege is about being among those who get to measure the world rather than being measured by it, and in doing so, create ways to measure non-elites. So if you voted to self-identify as an elite in my Twitter poll, ask yourself: how do I measure the world with my life.
52/ The price of your privilege — which, remember, is special, personalized treatment under private law via access to social capital — is that you are expected to be at the forefront of relating to the wider world, and taking its measure on behalf of all humans. Which means facing uncertainty, and taking on risks, physical, intellectual, and psychological. This is why there is a natural relationship between being a member of the elite, and being expected to lead in the fullest sense of the word.
53/ To lead is to ultimately function as a model to non-elites on how to live, and not just live, but live with, for want of a better word, courage. Since that’s what it means to be the measure of the world, take risks, and deal with uncertainty. Otherwise you’re just a parasite pretending to be a lordly predator. And there’s no real way to fake this. People can tell when you are living courageously.
54/ To be non-elite in 2020, on the other hand, is to be measured in a hundred different industrial-bureaucratic ways. The world measures you. Height, weight, gender, wealth, skin color, zip code, credit score, criminal record, degrees, job titles, parentage, and so on. This is what makes you part of the industrial-age masses. This idea didn’t come from nowhere, and is only a century or so old. It’s the complement of the industrial age definition of elites.
55/ Being utterly unique and specialized with your 100-dimensional address in society is pretty new. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset studied how this industrial non-elite human differed from the peasants of the past. My gloss on his theory is that the masses were measured the way they were because the elites were measuring the world in a specific way: through science and rationality.
56/ One of the main proposals for new elites on the table right now looks like an extreme form of industrial bureaucratism, namely intersectional bureaucratism. The other one looks like a throwback to agrarian feudal elitism, with nobility and peasantry. Both are of course lazy and lousy, and you can tell because neither is in the least bit courageous, and both involve an existing set of elites primarily dealing with each other rather than with the world.
57/ If you think you aren’t elite now, or won’t be elite in the future, your part of the equation is to ask, first, whether you think elites are necessary, and if so what kind you want. A way to restate that question is to ask: how do you want to measure yourself against the world? The elites you want are the ones measuring the world itself in a complementary way.
58/ Whatever it is, it is a particular model of courage that inspires you enough to follow. Your main challenge is spotting real courage facing the world, which does not lie in facing competing elites. If your chosen elites are elites primarily by virtue of battling or beefing with the elites you don’t choose, they are not good elites, and you are not choosing particularly good elites to define who you are. Both of you are going to be miserable.
59/ The good news is, there’s never been such a culture of widespread experimentation in new modes of being elite, so you have a lot of choices. The bad news is, it’s going to get really ugly while it plays out. The future elites are going to be playing Game of Thrones for a while, and the future masses are going to be playing Hunger Games for a while.
60/ So all I can say is, may the best elites win, and may the best measure of the masses prevail.
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Today I want to talk about big moods, a phrase you may have seen on twitter, and also a related concept I made up called little moods.
1/ You may have seen the phrase “big mood” on twitter over the last few years, especially used when expressing resonance with a mood someone else has expressed. But it’s gone well beyond social media now, and things that look like big-mood dynamics are now showing up in corporate America as well.
2/ The basic memetic pattern is: someone might post a gif of a cat hissing saying “how I feel about recent events” and somebody else might quote tweet that with the phrase “big mood.” That’s typical usage today on social media. The corporate equivalent is something like employees signing a letter to the CEO around some cause.
3/ I also want to talk about the complementary idea of a little mood, which I don’t think is a thing yet, so maybe I’m coining the term here. But let’s start with big moods.
4/ The phrase itself indicates two things: a degree of individually felt intensity and a recognition of broader social resonance. The subtle thing to note is that a big mood is not due to emotional contagion but shared causes in a shared environment.
5/ In other words, a big mood is not when I’m sad because you’re sad and you’re my friend. A big mood is when, for example, we’re both reacting with sadness to some headline news we hear at roughly the same time, and I am agreeing with your expression of that sadness.
6/ That is oversimplifying it a bit though, because big moods don’t generally map to generic emotion words like sad or happy. A big mood is a unique type of shared mood that usually doesn’t have a word for it.
7/ This is why it is usually not communicated with emotion words, but things like reaction gifs or music clips. Or sometimes people might make a joke saying “what’s the German word for this feeling?” which they then describe with an awkward long phrase.
8/ So when you say big mood, you’re not just using a commonplace word for a vaguely similar stat as someone else, you’re indicating a very precise kind of atunement and emotional harmony that is beyond the reach of conventional emotional vocabulary.
9/ Here’s another lens on it. Big moods are the emotional equivalent of a concept in logic called common knowledge. Common knowledge is something that I know, you know, I know you know, you know I know you know, and so on ad infinitum. It’s a piece of knowledge that is as collective as it gets in some group of people.
10/ A big mood is something like that for an emotional state, it forms what I’ve previously called a sentiment superstate in a specific group.
11/ Normally, big moods are limited to local social groups and subcultures, and relatively transient, lasting maybe days to weeks. But sometimes they can be more broadly shared and last a really long time.
12/ So for example, the pandemic blues we’re all in right now are a really big global mood that has now lasted several months. And before that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 sparked two big moods — there was redemptive jubilation among his supporters, and despair among his detractors.
13/ Sometimes a big, long-lived big mood can be so persistent that it can define an entire culture. An example is blues music. It’s an entire genre of music that has roots in the big mood of being enslaved, and it can be inherited across generations.
14/ Another that I grew up around is the big mood of Punjabi culture, which was deeply traumatized by the India-Pakistan partition. The Punjabi big mood manifests through overcompensation in the form of a boisterous drinking and partying culture, to the point that it’s now become a stereotype of the community.
15/ A third example is what Koreans call Han which is this idea of a deep trauma felt by Koreans since the Japanese occupation in World War 2. You’ll see people attributing the stereotypical Korean hot temper to this really big, 80-year old national mood of Han, which might even have an epigenetic component at this point.
16/ A final example, which I recently learned about from my friend Sagar Dubey, is the tradition of Iranian lamentation music called Noha, relating to the martyrdom of Husayn Ali at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, which is the founding event of the Shia sect. This is definitely a really powerful big mood that has lasted about 1300 years at this point, and is the mood of an entire religion.
17/ My point with this list of increasingly bigger and longer-lasting big moods is that there is a conceptual continuity between big moods and culture in general. Even if the big mood you’re feeling right now is a transient one that’s restricted to your twitter subculture of a few hundred people, and might be gone next week, there is a potential for a kind of scale and longevity that you may not appreciate.
18/ Beyond a point of course, it’s more than a mood, big or otherwise, and has turned into a persistent cultural background state, or even the mood of an entire religion like in the Shia example. But I think there’s a genuine organic connection there between big moods and culture.
19/ So there’s a space of big moods here from big to large, transient to long lived, and in the foreground of culture to the background. And remember, big moods are directly induced by the shared environment rather than spread through social contagion. What spreads is the recognition of it being a shared state.
20/ And perhaps most importantly, big moods cannot be easily resisted. So trying to unfeel a big mood is like trying to unsee something or unknow something. You have to be living under a rock or in some sort of oblivious state to be immune to a big mood.
21/ In the short term, ignoring a big mood might be healthy, because you can be happy even if people around you are not, but in the long term if you don’t develop a sensitivity to big moods, both local or global, and transient or enduring, you’ll get left behind. Which is of course a big mood in itself, so you can’t really ignore big moods, because that is itself a mood.
22/ But even though you can’t avoid big moods, when they are less intense, there is room to experience the complementary state, which is what I call a little mood. A little moods is a mood that is widespread, but is not yet widely understood to be widespread, and may never get there. So they are not emotional common knowledge.
23/ An example is the mood of an early stage startup scene that has not yet become overheated, like the years between the dotcom bust and the iPhone, especially around 2002-2007. The big mood was that tech was dead. But the little mood was that it was thriving.
24/ Or the mood around crypto between around 2013-16, when it was no longer a tiny subculture, but not yet a mainstream big mood that everybody in entire regions was participating in and resonating with, which happened around 2017.
25/ So to repeat, it’s important to note that a little mood is not a mood that is unique to you, or an exceptional individual mood. It is one that is widespread, but you are not aware is shared by other people. It can even be global, in which case it is what is called globally local.
26/ A little mood is the emotional equivalent of what in logic is sometimes called mutual knowledge. When you and I both know something but don’t know that the other person knows it too. A little mood is like that. Widespread sentiment that is not yet understood to be widespread. If a big mood is a common sentiment superstate, a little mood is a mutual sentiment microstate.
27/ This means that it comes as something of a surprise to learn that other people are feeling the same way. When you find out that somebody shares a little mood with you, a special bond based on being initiates into an esoteric state of knowledge or sentiment can be the result, and this is pretty exciting.
28/ You might have experienced this. You are really excited about something, but nobody else around you feels the excitement. But the first time you meet someone who is excited in the same way, it feels really special. I remember feeling this way about the internet in 1994, about social media around 2007, and about crypto around 2013. Now I feel it around VR.
29/ In all these examples of little moods, a lot of people are experiencing a kind of individual hypomania, often from being individually exposed to some novel environmental circumstance that is not yet commonly or collectively experienced.
30/ So that experience divides people into those who have had the experience and are still connecting with each other over their mutual knowledge and mutual sentiment, and those who are unaware that this experience even exists.
31/ This should be obvious, but little moods are naturally much more diverse than big moods. Until people experiencing a little mood connect over mutual sentiment, which then grows into collective sentiment, they can’t form big, homogenizing resonance modes around it. There’s not yet a sentiment superstate. And definitely there’s no persistent cultural mood yet.
32/ The thing about little moods is that they can only exist in the shadow of sufficiently laissez-faire big moods. When big moods are too powerful, little moods wither and die. It doesn’t matter what the big mood is, and whether it is positive or negative. Intense big moods kill little moods.
33/ For example, if you have a triumphalist big mood in a political group that has just won an election, or an economic sector that has just experienced a big boom and created a lot of wealth, it kills little moods as surely as a negative big mood, like the pandemic.
34/ Speaking of negative and positive, let’s talk about how those valences connect to big and little moods. Here’s my hypothesis: even though both big and little moods can be positive or negative, I suspect most big moods skew negative, even if they don’t look like it. For example, I think MAGA is a negative big mood even among supporters of Trump. It is a mood of revengefulness and redemption for past wrongs.
35/ On the other hand, most little moods tend to be positive, for the simple reason that they depend on individual contact with novelty, and if that novelty is negative, it’s either a problem that gets solved quickly, or bad news that spreads really fast and turns into a big mood overnight.
36/ Negative little moods simply don’t stay little for long. They turn into big moods even if they don’t make the news, or they get solved as problems. But something like a first experience with a new technology can only spread slowly as more people have the experience and connect around it. There’s a natural rate limit.
37/ The final conceptual point I want to touch upon is how cultures differ in processing big moods, which becomes especially interesting if you think of culture itself as the outcome of historical big moods that have turned into tradition and institutions. So culture is like a long blockchain of past big moods.
38/ Cultures obviously differ in how they process big moods. For example, in individualist cultures like the United States, the suspicion of anything collective and negative tends to be translated into individual medicalization of collective problems.
39/ This leads to, among other things, a tendency towards drug abuse, and a hyperactive psychological imagination. You’ll notice that on American twitter, if you express resonance with a big mood, a certain type of person will immediately jump in to inquire about your mental health, saying something like “are you okay?”
40/ This is a somewhat contrarian position but I don’t think there is a mental health crisis in the United States. What we attribute to epidemics of depression or anxiety, I think, are a kind of referred pain. Because American society is bad at processing big moods at the collective level, it shows up as apparent depression or anxiety.
41/ Other countries have other biases. A friend from Argentina told me that there, almost everybody has a therapist, which doesn’t strike me as particularly healthy, but it does harmonize with the overall more sociable nature of Latin American countries. It also explains their dysfunction on other fronts, requiring non-sentimental forms of sociability, like managing the economy.
42/ Another example is India, which is a highly religious country, with a tendency to process big moods in religious ways. So on WhatsApp there is a lot of sharing of prayers, and emergent rituals around collective prayer. Nobody will ever admit they are depressed or anxious. They’ll just share some sort of religious thing, and with hundreds of gods, there’s a god for every big mood.
43/ So let’s summarize our theory. There are big moods that are collective sentiment superstates, and little moods, that are mutual sentiment microstates. There’s a yin-yang relationship between them. Little moods are generally positive, and big moods are generally negative. Big moods can spread and persist and turn into culture.
44/ To tie it to recent events, you could say that globally we’re in a big mood for big moods. Change is in the air, deep cultural change driven by big moods turning into new cultures that displace old cultures. So you should be paying attention to this stuff, or you’ll get stuck with the worst sort of big mood, which is the left-behind mood.
45/ To close this, I want to connect this to the business world. Normally, stuff I’m tracking on social media doesn’t line up with stuff I’m tracking in corporate culture and management, but in this case they line up. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, if you work in corporate America, you’ll have noticed that there’s a big mood for big moods. It’s not usual the usual flavor-of-the-month or fad-driven condition that management is usually in.
45/ One personal bit of evidence I’ve noticed is that in my consulting work, I’m increasingly helping people with what I call big mood navigation problems rather than typical organizational or process problems. There is a level of ungoverned emotional intensity that you don’t normally see in the corporate world. And I’m going to bet it’s going to end with management and leadership textbooks getting rewritten. We’re going to be talking about mood-based management and leadership in a few years.
So that’s it for this week. Big moods and little moods. Pay attention to them both in the broader zeitgeist and in places where they don’t usually matter, like inside businesses. This stuff is important and is driving big changes that we’ll be living with for the rest of our lives.
So that’s it for this episode of breaking smart. For those of you new to this list, Breaking Smart is my weekly subscription newsletter on technology and culture, where I serialize some of my my longer writing projects like my book-in-progress, The Clockless Clock, and an essay series, The Great Weirding. Most issues are essays, and the free issues are usually podcast episodes like this one. So sign up and subscribe if you liked this episode. I’ll see you next week with another episode, on something else.
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In today’s episode, I want to talk about a new phase in the pandemic, marked by a shift in the role of the pandemic itself from foreground story, to background setting of other stories. I also have a couple of interesting announcements at the end.
1/ So this week, several non-pandemic things are dominating the headlines, the big one in the US of course being the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. Now this is of course a familiar type of story by now, except that this one has very low ambiguity, and has had a much more violent response, including the burning of a police precinct building last night.
2/ A couple of days ago as this was starting to unfold, a twitter user named Robert Evans voiced the opinion that the pandemic might not be the biggest story of 2020, to which another user named Mach0 replied with what I thought was a very astute comment: “I'm pretty sure now that coronavirus isn't the story. It's the setting.”
3/ Now that’s a very clever line, and is the inspiration for the title of today’s episode, From Story to Setting. I think the pandemic has entered a new phase, where it is no longer the front-page story, but it is definitely the background context for every story. For example, in this case, social distancing is an element in protests, and everybody involved is already on edge, so you get a more raw, high-tension version of the script playing out. The story is familiar, but it is playing out against a new kind of background.
4/ I want to unpack what it means to for a big, all-subsuming condition to evolve from story to setting. In the case of the pandemic, we can detect 3 phases. Phase 0 was when it was just a story. A regular news story from China. Phase 1 was when it became both the story and the setting. We are now entering the third phase, when it is primarily the setting.
5/ But this setting phase is not like other settings, which is why I don’t like the phrase “new normal.” There’s nothing normal about it. But it is definitely the background setting now, just not a normal or indefinitely sustainable one. But even unsustainable things can sometimes last a really long time, even decades.
6/ When I think about what this setting is like, the main thing that strikes me is that between Phase 0 to Phase 2, we’ve gone from a setting that was very stable, reliable, and well-understood by people in the foreground stories, to a setting that is very unstable, unreliable, and very poorly understood.
7/ In Phase 0, our knowledge of the context of the stories was strong. You didn’t have to think about how Starbucks worked for example. In Phase 1, the context began unraveling, but because we were in emergency mode with limited goals, we didn’t notice as much. Our questions about the setting in Phase 1 were limited to things like “how do I pay rent” or “where do I get groceries?”
8/ Phase 2 is different. We’ve sort of figured out band-aid responses to emergency concerns for the time being. The full force of our deep ignorance about this new context is just starting to hit us. How will new outbreaks happen? We don’t know. What happens to unemployed people when the emergency measures run out? We don’t know. How will we travel? We don’t know. How will geopolitics shift? We don’t know.
9/ Another way to think about it is in terms of the relationship of foreground and background knowledge. Story knowledge versus setting knowledge. In Phase 0, when things were normal, both were solid ground. You understood the story of your life and you understood the setting at about the same level. Your story knowledge was like a walled garden on solid land.
10/ In Phase 1, your story knowledge was still solid land, but your setting knowledge began turning into quicksand. Everything outside your immediate control became uncertain at a very basic level. The game that kids play in the US, the floor is lava, became a common metaphor for this.
11/ In Phase 2, the setting knowledge has gone from quicksand or lava or water — whatever you want to call it — to a hardening vacuum. Now that immediate emergency concerns are taken care of, the sheer weight of what we don’t know is becoming clear.
12/ So if the pandemic is a setting, we know what sort of setting it is: it is a vacuum-like setting. A vacuum of knowledge, where we just don’t know the answers to far too many questions we’re used to knowing the answers to. This is of course, not normal, so calling it a new normal is stupid.
13/ So what can we expect in this Phase 2? I’ve been reading about 3 major historical precedent events to make sense of this question: the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and the reconstruction in the lead up to and after World War 2. And unfortunately, the grim news is that our situation actually most resembles the Black Death.
14/ So for those of you interested, the main books I’m reading about these three events are: Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror for the Black Death in Europe, which I’m halfway through, and live-tweeting, Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider for the Spanish Flu worldwide, which I’m just starting, and Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge for World War 2 in the US, which I’ve almost finished. Today, I mainly want to compare our condition to the Black Death.
15/ So obviously, in many ways, the Black Death is the worst precedent: it was almost 700 years ago, the technology was far more primitive, and the pandemic itself was far worse. Somewhere between a third to half of Europe’s population died then, whereas today, it’s probably going to land at less than even the Spanish Flu, which was about 2%.
16/ But in many ways, the Black Death is the right precedent. It brought a bunch of strong historical forces, which had been building up pressure, to a crisis point. It ended a 500-year historical era, namely the European Middle Ages. It was followed by a century of chaos, when it felt like the world had ended, followed by an age of exploration and a very slow rebirth with the Renaissance.
17/ In the book, Tuchman spends only a couple of short chapters on the Black Death itself, where the main wave was 1348-1350, right in the middle of the 14th century. The big story arc of the book is the before/after. In the first half of the century, a lot of strong tensions and trends were developing. In 2 years, the Black Death accelerated those trends and brought them to a crisis point.
18/ The second half of the century, and most of the book, is about the world carved out by the Black Death. There’s curiously little about the pandemic itself. But it was clearly the setting for everything else that happened. For example, pervasive labor shortages shaped the economy, and a pervasive sense of being abandoned by god shaped the collective psyche.
19/ So before the Black Death, there were growing 3-way tensions among the three estates — clergy, nobility, and commoners. There was also tension within the third estate, as the new urban merchant class of bourgeoise was starting to separate from the general class of peasantry, including people in varying degrees of serfdom.
20/ So what happened? Before the Black Death, things were going through a 14th century version of what I’ve called the Great Weirding in our time, the period from 2016-20. I just started that essay series in last week’s newsletter if you want to check that out, btw. But 1300 to 1350 were a Great Weirding period for Europe in the Middle Ages, culminating in the Black Death. It took them almost 50 years where it took us 5 years because it was a slower era.
21/ Back then, Phase 0 was the early part of the Black Death when it was still confined to isolated parts of Italy. Phase 1 was when it had spread throughout Europe. Phase 2 started around 1350, and lasted the next fifty years. Hopefully, we’ll get done with our Phase 2 more quickly, but there’s no knowing.
22/ Now here’s the thing about the Phase 2 of the Black Death: it’s clear that everything basically broke at a very deep level, which is a very strong statement coming from me. I don’t like to call complex systems broken very often. Usually when people say that, they are just complaining that the system is working for somebody else rather than for them. But when the system doesn’t work for any of its human individual or institutional parts, or even to preserve and perpetuate itself, I think it is safe to say it is actually broken.
23/ The Black Death, arguably, broke the society of the European High Middle Ages. In the transition from high to late middle ages between 1350-1400 or so, it didn’t work for anybody very well. Not for clergy, with trust in the church falling apart, not for the nobility, with the culture of feudal chivalry unraveling into Hobbesian warfare and what we would today call a warlord condition, and certainly not for the bourgeoisie or peasantry of the third estate. And it didn’t even sustain itself. It was falling apart.
24/ Now that’s what a Phase 2 condition is, and that’s why you can’t call it new normal because it neither sustains, nor leads up naturally to a true new normal. In the case of Europe after the Black Death, everything collapsed, but it took more than a century for a true new normal to emerge, what we recognize today as the Renaissance, by the early 16th century.
25/ Historians apparently call this collapsed period the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, which had 3 external triggers: a famine in 1315-16 as the prequel, the Black Death as the main event, and the start of what’s called the Little Ice Age towards the end. Socially and politically, this period was marked by the 100 years war, which was a straggling period of nearly continuous warfare rather than a single war.
26/ If you map it to today, you get a similar Crisis of Late Modernity. Our 3 events are probably the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Covid19, and climate change coming up. If the Black Death is a good precedent, we can expect at least a few decades of a broken world that doesn’t work for anybody in it, and can’t sustain itself either. That’s the worst case scenario. Hopefully we can do better than that.
27/ Which brings me to the third part. Assuming a condition of pandemic-as-setting, where the setting is characterized by a vacuum of knowledge, what kind of life condition can you expect? The answer emerging is not pleasant. I think of it in terms of a disease I call meta-covid.
28/ Meta-covid is a disease that has 3 key symptoms in Phase 1: An altered sense of time perception, which I wrote about in Pandemic Time (April 10), and a sense of things going brrrr, as in the meme, which I wrote about in life go brrrr… (March 27), and a weird sense of purpose, even in people who are not particularly purposeful, and actually prefer a playful, purposeless life. In Phase 2, the Phase 1 symptoms get altered and new Phase 2 symptoms appear.
29/ The altered time perception starts to acquire a non-specific waiting character. It’s not a waiting for normalcy or specific re-opening milestones. It’s a sort of generic waiting, like the Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, or like waiting for salvation or an afterlife in a highly religious time like the 14th century.
30/ The life go brrr…. aspect also shifts, as the initial things going brrr… much of it which has a positive exhilarating feel, runs out of energy. But other things, much less positive, starts to spin up, and bad things start going brrr….We just saw an early example of a bad thing going brrr…. in Minneapolis last night.
31/ The sense of purpose also transforms. Instead of being energizing, it now feels like a burden you cannot get rid of, like Frodo carrying the One Ring to Mordor. There was an article in HBR talking about this, where a lot of leaders are talking about a sense of clarity and purpose that the pandemic has given them. The article warns that this is an emergency response exhilaration, and it can give way to regression, which is described as: “Then the second phase hits: a regression phase, where people get tired, lose their sense of purpose, start fighting about the small stuff, and forget to do basic things like eat or drink — or they eat and drink too much.”
32/ But maybe the biggest new thing in Phase 2 is two new symptoms. The first is that it becomes harder and harder to simply waste time. There is a sense of foreshortened future, where you cannot see past the unspecified thing you’re waiting for. So there’s a sense of time being limited, and a sense of pressure to get things done, and then do more things. It’s not guilt or responsibilities. You cannot get into the mood to waste time.
33/ The second related thing is that it becomes harder and harder to have fun, make jokes, and in general relax. People certainly try. There is a certain desperate kind of hedonism that can often take root. This happened in the wake of the Black Death in the upper classes of Europe. But there’s an undercurrent of despair and hopelessness that makes it not truly fun. It’s like partying at the end of the world.
34/ So that’s Phase 2: The pandemic has shifted from story to setting, it’s no longer dominating the headlines, but it has this sense of instability, ignorance, and uncertainty in the background contaminating all things. The system is breaking down, and failing to work for anybody, and not even sustaining itself. But a new thing seems very far away. Subjectively you have a meta-covid mental illness, characterized by an altered sense of time that’s like waiting for Godot, things going brrr… in bad ways, a weird sense of purpose giving way to a burdensome sense of responsibility, and increasing difficulty wasting time, or having fun.
35/ Like it or not, that’s where I think we’re headed. The immediate emergency response is over. A gradual unraveling is starting. Problems are compounding. There are fewer good and fun things in the balance. Life is slowly shifting from a positive condition to one of general despair. And based on the the Black Death, this could last long past the actual pandemic, as we go into a very deep reconstruction phase of civilization. I guess this is what the idea of a Dark Age covers.
36/ Maybe things won’t get that bad. Maybe there will be surprising positive things that pop up even as the negative things mount. Maybe the stories and setting both will turn more positive. But I think it’s important to mentally prepare for the worst case, even while you hope it doesn’t happen. So that’s it for the topic of this week, the pandemic shifting from story to setting, with a look at the precedent of the Black Death, and a look at this disease of meta-covid descending upon on all of us.
Two Announcements
Before I wrap up this episode, I have two announcements.
First, I have a new eBook out, a compilation of the 32 best newsletters from 2015-19, in a sequenced and curated form. It’s called Breaking Smart Archives: Selected Newsletters, 2015-19.
If you’re a subscriber, you already got free access to it a couple of weeks ago. If you’re not a subscriber, you can get it on the Kindle for $3.99 from Amazon. For those of you who joined recently, this eBook should be a good way to catch up on the first 5 years of this newsletter, before I switched formats recently and turned it into a subscription newsletter.
It was really kinda interesting selecting and sequencing the pieces for this volume, and the eBook is a good view of how we got to where we are in sort of a live journal format. This is the raw material that I’m hoping to treat in a better theorized form in my Great Weirding essay series, but in some ways, this collection of raw in-the-moment newsletters from that period conveys a better sense of the transformation we’ve been going through than any post-hoc theory I could make up.
Second announcement, for those of you who enjoy this short-form monologue podcast, and are interested in a more traditional conversational podcast, you may want to check out Scorpio Season, which is a conversation-format podcast I do with my friend Lisa. Episodes are weekly, and just over an hour typically, and our format is that each episode is based on a letter of the alphabet, and we make a list of topics that start with that letter and talk about them. We just recorded the 12th episode, for the letter L. You can find Scorpio Season on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google.
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1/ Today I want to talk about an idea I’ve been developing, which is that the future of the business world, post-Covid, and post software eating the world, looks surprisingly like the High Middle Ages, between about 1000 to 1250 AD, rather than like any more recent historical era. Which of course leads to the question, how do you operate in this world?
2/ I also want to talk a little bit about the first ten decade of my life as an independent consultant, what I’m looking forward to in the next decade, and in that vein, I want to talk about a new initiative I helped start last month, called the Yak Collective.
3/ Next year, in February, I will have completed 10 years as an independent consultant, 10 years since my first client in 2011. I’ve probably had like 50-60 clients since then. So at a personal level, I was already in a mood to pivot to a different mode coming out of my 9-month fellowship with the Berggruen Institute, which gave me a chance to cut back on the consulting work, take a step back, and think about my journey so far, and where I want to go to from here.
4/ This planned pivot has coincided with Covid19, which has radically accelerated a trend that has been a big part of my career — software eating the world. Almost all the consulting I’ve done is, in one way or another, about software eating the world. Software eating the world is going through an inflection point I thought wouldn’t arrive till 2030. The pandemic has accelerated the schedule by 10 years.
5/ Previously, it was the margin to the industrial center, now the industrial world is the margin and the software world is the center. I don’t know about you, but I’m betting that this recovery will lead us to a world with software at the center sort of permanently, dominating not just the economy, but every aspect of our adapted way of life.
6/ But… there’s something bigger going on here. I’ve been reading a lot of history, and I’ve concluded that it isn’t just the 20 year old software-eating-the-world trend that is accelerating and going through an inflection point. There are several other much longer cycles that are going through similar inflection points. We are experiencing a sort of resonance peak in several cycles which happen to coincide in phase right now.
7/ For example, a 100 year culture of industrial synchronized clock-based time is shifting to post-industrial multi-temporality, based on subjective event-stream-based time. This is what I’ve been researching for the last year, and writing a book about, called the Clockless Clock, which I am serializing on this newsletter..
8/ Then there is a 400-year old cycle of Westphalian nation states that seems to be swinging towards some sort of city-state and regional coalitional world, thanks to how and where the battle against Covid19 is actually being fought.
9/ And going still further back, to before the Black Death, which I am reading about in a great book called A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, I think an 800-year-old cycle of centralization is reversing and giving way to a kind of decentralized, horizontally organized world last seen in the High Middle Ages, when the feudal nobility was more powerful than the monarchy, the Church in Europe had unquestioned authority, and imperial states were weak.
10/ Now if you’ve studied your history, you probably know that the Black Death, along with other factors like the rise of firearms, drove the world towards Great Powers and centralization, and weakened the feudal, manorial economy of barons and knights. I think Covid19 will drive us the other way, towards local and regional powers and decentralization. This is not an original thought. A lot of people have been saying that.
11/ The part that interests me is the implications of this huge multi-cycle inflection point for organizations and management. Assumptions shifting now are older than the oldest modern businesses. They are older than even mercantilism, which was based on the Age of Sail, and emerged in the 15th century, after the Black Death had destroyed the manorial economy.
12/ If you want to think about organizations and management in the next decade, you have to go back far, really far, to before there were modern public or private sectors, or chartered corporations. To a time when the economy meant a manorial economy, and globalization meant Templar knights going on crusades. To a time when honor-based politics was on top and economics was strongly subservient to it.
13/ Of course, the structural roles are played by different elements, and you can’t get too literal about this. You have a world awash in public debt, and likely, a wave of nationalization of large parts of the global business world. Instead of the church, you have the global liberal order.
14/ But the point of the loose historical analogy is that you can no longer rely on assumptions about business and corporations based on the last 50, 100, or even 400 years. The internet has been fundamentally undermining assumptions that were laid down as far back as 1000 AD. And Covid19 is accelerating the process of collapsing things built on those assumptions
15/ If you want to rethink the nature of organizations, business, and the economy today, you have to rethink ideas going back as far back as the 13th century from first principles. This is something I’m doing in one of my other projects, the Great Weirding, but that’s at the level of essay writing. This is a kind of thinking I want to bring into my consulting work as well.
16/ So to bring it back down to that, I’ve learned a lot in the last decades, and I think I’ve done more good than harm. There are even times I’ve felt like I added more value to a client in an hour than an entire McKinsey team in a year. This is not me bragging about my personal abilities, but a comment on just how much fresh intelligence there is to be mined from internet-first perspective, from a software-eating-the-world lens.
17/ For example, just this morning, I was leading a study group on online community governance, and we were reading a section of The Tao of the IETF, which is a seminal document in internet governance, and it suddenly struck me that governing and managing online communities, which is something I’ve been doing for over 20 years now, is actually a much harder problem than governing organizations.
18/ And much of the reason I am able to add a weirdly leveraged kind of value as an independent consultant is due to the fact that my primary home is on the internet. Even my main consulting methodology, which I call “sparring” is a skill I think I’ve honed more through 20 years of online discussions and flame wars, than through traditional business meetings.
19/ So here’s a weird way of looking at it: because the internet was something of a blank canvas in the 80s, and because the people creating its culture were not typical organization man types, they basically made up a playbook that seemed to work as they went along. And as it happens, a lot of the methods they discovered through trial and error look more like the culture of the 1300s than classic management texts from the 1970s.
20/ It’s not that Peter Drucker or Michael Porter are wrong; they were just working within organizational frameworks and mental models that are much younger, between 20 to 200 years old. And as it turns out, those frameworks and mental models are not as robust as we like to think. In fact, they’re pretty fragile, and are collapsing around us as we speak.
21/ I’m not the only one making this argument. There was a very interesting book by Matthew Fraser, that came out in 2008. It was called Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom, and it argued exactly what I am arguing — that in a world where Facebook shapes reality, you can learn more from the history of Templar knights than you can from the biography of Jack Welch.
22/ There are toxic aspects of this of course. I’ve written elsewhere about the Internet of Beefs, which is about the toxic world of culture wars. If you squint a bit, it resembles the culture of jousting and tournaments in the middle ages. But other aspects are much more positive. Good internet communities seem to have some of the features of good manorial economies for example. They have a whole-life sort of quality to them, instead of an artificial separation of work and life.
23/ Which brings me to the something I want to put the spotlight on. As many of you know, I write another newsletter called the Art of Gig, which is about independent consulting, contractors, and the gig economy. About a month ago, we spun up a sort of open-source initiative with the idea of discovering more internet-native ways of developing and delivering consulting services.
24/ The group, which we call the Yak Collective, just launched publicly last week, and released its first report, called Don’t Waste the Reboot. It’s a collection of ideas about how organizations can emerge from Covid19 in a way that makes the next normal better than the last one. We’re going to be producing a lot more like that in the coming months, and you can keep up by following our work on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
25/ But what I want to highlight is not the content so much as the method by which we are trying to generate it. With the Yak Collective, we are trying to practice what I am preaching here, which is to take a really long, historical view of organizations and management going back to the 13th century, combining that with what we’ve learned from 30 years of online, internet culture, and working in new ways.
26/ If you want to support us, you can do a couple of things. First, take a look at our first report, and get in touch with me or one of the other contributors if you think your organization can use some of the kinds of fresh thinking we think we can do that traditional sources of consulting cannot. Second, you can join us live as we do a lot of our thinking. The Discord community where we do our stuff is open to everybody, and you can just join it and hang out with us. Most of our meetings are also open.
27/ And finally, to bring it back to a personal note, one reason I’m taking this on is of course, because I think people who are new to the indie economy could use some resources and support like this, and it’s a way for me to make my own second decade as an indie different from the first. Among other things, I want to try and distill some of the management and business knowledge I think I’ve learned in the last decade into teaching and writing output that others can use, and also by doing that, maybe level up myself to different challenges myself.
28/ As one piece of that, next week, I’ll be conducting my first workshop on my conversational sparring model of consulting for a few others in the Yak Collective interested in learning it. I am hoping to do more such things, and make it a new part of my consulting life. But in the meantime, of course, I have to continue my own consulting practice.
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In which I shamelessly draft off Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build essay and suggest an approach to how, what, and where to do the building. I also have a framework I call the builder’s cone to think about it in a useful historical context.
1/ If you’re in tech, you’ve probably read Marc Andreessen’s essay It’s Time to Build (ITTB). It’s the first serious public thing he’s written in nearly a decade, after his 2011 WSJ op-ed, Software is Eating the World (SWEW).
2/ As most of you know this site and newsletter, Breaking Smart, came out of work I did with a16z on that idea, so obviously this new essay from Marc is of high personal interest to me, since it is in some sense, an important sequel.
3/ I thought I’d do this episode partly because a new generation of people in technology seems to have no idea who Marc is, and assumes he is just another VC, and that this is just another shallow take from the VC thought leader crowd that you can dismiss casually. Whether you agree or disagree with Marc, dismissing this essay casually is honestly just not a smart thing to do, so I want to try and give you a bit of an appreciation for it before diving into what I want to add to it.
4/ For those of you unaware of the history, Marc developed the first graphical web browser back in 1992, Mosaic, which later turned into Netscape. Later he also founded one of the first cloud computing companies, Opsware, with Ben Horowitz who later became his cofounder in a16z. This is basic history which I personally think everybody working in tech or reporting on it should just know.
5/ Something I don’t expect everyone to know is, he’s also a huge reader, and as you’ll know if you’ve talked to him, or follow him on Twitter. For every seemingly casual thing he says, he usually has 3 books and 10 papers he can cite. So even if you don’t agree with things he says — and I often don’t — it’s worth taking him seriously. He tends to present his thinking in a deceptively casual way, but there’s always more depth behind it than you would guess from a quick glance.
6/ Now for this essay. Like most things Marc says, I agree broadly with his argument. If you’re an engineer, with any experience at all in building things, it’s kinda hard to see this essay as anything other than tautological. I mean of course building is good. That’s the starting point if you’re in technology. The devil is in the details.
7/ I do tend to have somewhat different ideas from Marc about what aspects of building/doer culture are the important ones, and in general trust markets a little less, and state institutions a little more. He and I have had a productive ongoing conversation about this stuff for almost 7 years now.
8/ There’s a lot you can argue with in the essay, for example, his characterization of right and left attitudes towards building, but I’m not going to get into that, since plenty of others are doing that. And if you want critical views of the essay, there’s no shortage out there, and of course some of them make good points, while others are just shallow bits of the techlash. It’s what you’d expect for an essay like this in 2020.
9/ What’s interesting to note is that unlike the SWEW, ITTB has had a very divided reception, which to me is an indication of the stage of the historical building cycle we’re in more than the specifics of what Marc is arguing.
10/ In particular, In 2011, when he wrote the SWEW essay, we had just moved from what I call the alternatives stage to the disruptions stage. Now we’re moving from the disruptions stage to the macro-rebuilding stage. Marc has offered an answer to the question when to build on a grand scale, which is obviously now, or very soon, after the first response to Covid19 is behind. What I want to do is build on what Marc wrote, no pun intended, and talk about how, what, and where to build.
11/ So here’s the theory. Building goes through cycles, with different kinds of building required at each stage of the cycle. Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is a good framework for thinking about these.
12/ As it applies to building, the Perez model can be thought of as 4 stages. In the first stage you build tools, in the second stage, you build alternatives to existing things. In the third stage, you disrupt existing things via a bunch of isolated disruptions. In the last stage, you do a whole sale macro-rebuilding from foundations on up.
13/ Somewhere along the way, there’s usually a big disaster, so you can link each complete building cycle to its disaster. The last two were linked to World War I and World War 2, this one is obviously linked to the pandemic.
14/ The disaster doesn’t always happen at a set phase of the cycle. For example, in WW1 it happened late in the disruption phase, when the macro-rebuilding was just starting. For example, asphalt roads being built for cars, which were disrupting horses.
15/ For WW2, it happened a little earlier, towards the end of the alternatives phase. For example, Chevrolet had pioneered an alternative to the Ford style one-size-fits all inflexible mass manufacturing. Disruption continued through the war, and the macro rebuilding happened in peacetime, with the Marshall Plan as part of the war reconstruction for example.
16/ For the Covid19 pandemic, the disaster has hit in roughly the same part of the cycle as it did in World War I, just as the disruption wave was going to give way to the macro rebuilding stage anyway.
17/ So what’s happened is: what I called the dessert course of software eating the world has coincided with a big disaster, and accelerated the process. I covered this in passing, in last week’s article on Pandemic Time, but I want to get at it more directly here.
18/ There’s two other things to think about in relation to this building cycle. The first is how individuals change, and the second is how society as a whole changes. I like to think in terms of 4 degrees of change depending on the phase of the building: reorient, revalue, resituate, and regenerate, that apply to both individuals and society.
19/ In reorienting, you change your mental models, for example realizing that digital media tools can do what paper printing can. So you wrap your mind around different tools. Like the graphical web browser, which Marc invented, rather than the printed book.
20/ In the revaluing phase you start valuing different things, for example, you value instant publishing and live conversations with readers more than the cachet of a brand-name publisher behind your book. So you build an alternative: blogs instead of books.
21/ In the resituating phase, you change how you exist in the world. For example, calling yourself a blogger instead of an author. You’ve created a new role in the world.
22/ And finally, in the regeneration phase, you change on the inside, you internalize the external label/role you’ve taken on. Like Doctor Who.
23/ Now here’s the thing, entire societies can go through this same kind of transformation. For example, in the WW1 cycle, the identity of the typical American changed from farmer to factory worker as the country urbanized, and America itself went from thinking of itself as an agrarian backwater playing second fiddle to Europe to a technological superpower. The self-image of the entire nation changed. Subjective transformation.
24/ Now what’s the upshot of all this. Here’s the thing, if you make a graph with x-axis being how deeply you as an individual are changing, and the y-axis being how deeply society is changing, it gives you a two-dimensional space where individuals can be ahead or behind society, and being matched with the times, or not.
25/ The ideal case is when the two are somewhat balanced, or when the individual is changing slightly faster, but not too fast, relative to the rest of society. The balanced case is the diagonal line, x=y. So for example, you and society are reorienting at the same rate, or revaluing at the same rate.
26/ Below that line, the individual is changing faster. The sweet spot is a cone slightly below the diagonal, which I like to call the builder’s cone. If you are too far ahead of society, too far ahead of the curve, you might be too early, and turn into a frustrated visionary.
27/ Or worse, you might end up going to the dark side and using your ahead-of-the-curve status to exploit others through profiteering, because it’s easier than building. Being too far ahead of that curve creates that tempation.
28/ Above the diagonal line is of course much worse, which is why I have represented it as a red zone. If you’re changing much more slowly than society as a whole, you get this left-behind feeling, and develop a deep sense of being exploited. Like people left behind in the 80s by Reagan’s deregulation. You develop resentment and what political scientists call ressentiment.
29/ So putting it all together, the sweet spot for builders is to be changing slightly ahead of society at large, and working at the right phase of the building cycle. So right now, we’re obviously in a macro-rebuilding phase that’s gone way past simple disruption.
30/ You should be thinking at that scale of ambition. Like Marshall plan scale, or foundational rebuilding phase, based on the logic of software eating the world. You should be reading about those periods of history to get an idea of how to proceed.
31/ I’m going to close with a bit of personal advertising. For those of you who want to take up Marc’s call to build, as you may know, the original essays of Breaking Smart were based on his software eating the world essay, and you can read them online or as an ebook.
32/ I also have an online recorded workshop based on those ideas, that you can sign up for. It’s based on live workshops I conducted in 2015 and 2016, plus some extra material. I’m thinking of adding a new recorded session on these ideas about building in the next few weeks.
So that’s it for this free episode/issue of Breaking Smart. For those of you just signed up for this newsletter, or had it forwarded to you, Breaking Smart is a weekly subscription newsletter where every week I send out either a free or a paywalled issue exploring some aspect of technology and the future. The free issues are podcast episodes or short essays on a current topic, and the paywalled ones are either an installment of one of my longer projects, or a stand-alone special topic essay. Right now, I’m working on two such longer projects, a book about time called The Clockless Clock, which has one chapter already published, and an essay collection called The Great Weirding, the first essay of which will go out next week, hopefully.
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The word default has two meanings: failure to fulfill an obligation, and a preselected option. We are finding out the hard way exactly how they are related.
Key points:
* A complex system can be defined as one where every feature has a default setting, and lots of corner cases that must be taken into account.
* A complex system can also be defined as one where a default of one kind — failure to fulfill an obligation, triggers a default of the other kind — a preselected contingency response option kicks in. So when you default on a car loan, the bank might repossess your car as its default response, unless a human overrides the decision.
* The two types of defaults allow a complex system to operate effectively in a core “normal” operating mode, and protect itself against a zone of modeled contingencies with default responses to defaults.
* This makes complex systems fragile in a very particular way. When the entire system needs to shift to a new equilibrium, it becomes very hard. Every default must be reset to a new value, which means every corner case around it must be re-solved. So for example, when you impose social distancing measures on an entire population, you have to suddenly figure out what to do about special needs populations, like prisoners, or sailors on a ship.
* When the equilibrium is not just new, but dangerous, you also have to re-solve all the default response protocols to default events, because a lot of people are going to be defaulting on a lot of obligations all at once. The statistical assumptions underlying the system are going to get violated. When one restaurant defaults on rent, it makes sense to evict the business and lease out the property to another. But when almost all restaurants default on rent, you have to reconsider your response at a policy level.
* So that’s where we are now with the entire world: we are resetting defaults, re-solving all corner cases, and reconsidering our default responses to all defaults. We are not particularly good at this, so it is already turning into an unholy mess. But I’m honestly surprised that it is working as well as it is. Perhaps the system has serendipitous levels of robustness.
* But at least we have a new lens on systemic robustness and fragility that we can use in our future designs. Whenever you set a default option, ask how hard it is to move it, including all the corner cases. When a default event happens and a policy kicks in.
Welcome aboard to everybody who signed up since last week. If you signed up for the paid subscription you can read the first paywalled post I published last week, life go brr, on the go brr meme.
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Hello and welcome back to the Breaking Smart podcast. In this episode, I want to pick up where I left off in my December 6 podcast, where we talked about the idea of inventing time. In particular, we talked about how to understand Alan Kay’s line that it’s easier to invent the future than to predict it, and William Gibson’s line that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. We talked about how to develop your instincts around recognizing when you’re living in a growing timeline versus a dying one.
In this episode, I want to build on that, and talk about how to navigate better in time by going beyond optimism vs. pessimism frames.
Here’s my definition of normalcy: things are normal when it’s easy to guess whether you’re living in a growing or a dying timeline. This doesn’t mean your guess is correct. It’s just means it is easy to guess. The options and their narrative meanings are unambiguous.
How do you know you’re in this condition?
You know by the fact that a particular anticipated event in the future acquires a particular significance, and you use the narrative meaning of that event to judge the good and bad things in the present. Let’s call it the Arrival Event.
For example, in 2012, two such arrival events framing the future for the United States were “software is eating the world” and “immigrants are taking over the country.” Both had implied events when the processes could be considered irreversibly complete. You could navigate around the progress of that process. It would have been your clock in 2012. Countdown timers to T=0.
The Arrival Event usually isn’t a real event. It just has to represent a significant irreversible phase transition hypothesis about history. An undeniable arrival into a new condition. In fact, the event is usually beyond the horizon in the distant future, so you’re always moving towards a horizon that’s moving away from you. But on the other hand, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Arrival Event is necessarily an imagined arrival into a pure utopia or dystopia. It can be more more real than that. So the Arrival Event you’re orienting around during normal times is somewhere between real and imaginary.
This semi-mythical Arrival Event is the temporal equivalent of a True North. A meaningful but beyond-the-horizon point in time that you can orient around. Just as you often head north, but rarely actually have the magnetic north pole within your spatial horizon, you’re always counting down towards your arrival event in time, but it’s rarely within any actual practical temporal horizon.
Now here’s my claim: the sense of a significant arrival event beyond the horizon is at the root of both optimistic and pessimistic attitudes towards the present. Both are patterns of horizon thinking. Both lead you to interpret current events, which are always a mix of good and bad, in specific ways. Misfortunes seem less burdensome if you sense good times are around the corner, and on the other hand, fortunate events seem less valuable if you feel it is all about to get destroyed anyway soon.
By definition, optimists tend to be cheerful about troubles in the present, and declare that better times are just beyond the horizon: “when this is all over….” X, Y, and Z will happen and things will be better.
Pessimists on the other hand, tend to be gloomy about positive things about the present and declare that the apocalypse is just around the corner: “enjoy it while it lasts….” because X, Y, and Z will happen and then it’ll an apocalyptic disaster.
The thing is, they are both right. Each is living in a particular fork of the unevenly distributed future being invented in the present. The optimist is choosing to live in what they think is the growing, generative part of the unevenly distributed future, while the pessimist is choosing to live in what they think is the dying, degenerating part. One is fighting to accelerate their Arrival Event, the other is fighting to delay theirs.
Importantly, both are just guesses. If in 2012, you thought that the growing future was happening in San Francisco and the dying past was in Pittsburgh, that was a guess about the relative significance of good and bad things going on in both places, in relation to your true north Arrival Event, and you made a choice based on that guess.
The thing about normalcy is that you can in fact make such a choice, because so long as the Arrival Event is in the far future, the estimated growing and dying parts tend to be clearly separated in narrative space, and moving from one to another can be as simple as moving from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. From a city you think is living in the dying past to a city you think is living in the growing future.
Or to put it another way, normalcy is when you can reduce the flow of time to a sequence of two arrows. There’s the past pointing to the significant future event T, and the post-arrival future starting at T, creating a new world. In this scheme, the present Now is not that important because you’re not oriented around it.
You can have the luxury of such a simple mental model because you’re choosing to live in a clearly separated narrative timeline: either an optimistic one or a pessimistic one. The only difference is which of the two arrows represents good times and which one represents bad times.
Now the interesting question is, what happens when you can’t separate the two that easily? What if the future is not just unevenly distributed in the present, but illegibly distributed, so you can’t easily put yourself in the middle of a purely optimistic or pessimistic narrative. This is that schizophrenic sense of being the best of times and the worst of times at once. This is the sense of being inside what I’ve been calling The Great Weirding.
One way to understand the collapse of normalcy is that you have actually arrived at the significant future event T that you were anticipating in normal times.
So T=Now. The countdown timer has counted down to zero.
It is the temporal equivalent of the phenomenon of the compass becoming useless when you are actually standing on top of true magnetic north. It’s right under your feet, so the compass can’t tell you which way to head. It’s a division or multiplication by zero.
So why and how can this happen? Because arrival events are not actually mythical events that are always beyond the horizon. Sometimes they cross over the horizon and get closer and closer, and more and more real, till we’re actually living right through them.
When that happens, the approximate separation of growing and dying futures breaks down. The estimates of whether you were living in good or bad parts of the unevenly distributed future have an encounter with ground reality. And the futures you were betting on have an IPO, so to speak.
And you have to scramble to correct your position.
What’s worse, because you have arrived, you no longer have a future arrival event as a reference measure to gauge the significance of current events, good or bad. You have no way to judge what anything means. You’ve lost your sense of proportion because you’ve lost the thing that gave you that sense of proportion. You don’t know what things in the now mean, because you can’t value them in proportion to where you’re going next.
That’s the condition of the Great Weirding. And next time, I’ll talk about how to orient when you’re in an arrival condition with a useless compass.
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Today I want to talk about time, which is a subject I’m researching quite a lot these days. In particular I want to talk about two of the most-quoted lines in technology conversations that are about time.
The first one is Alan Kay’s, famous line: it is easier to invent the future than to predict it. Alan Kay is a famous computer scientist who was at PARC.
And the second line is from William Gibson, the pioneering cyberpunk science fiction writer, who is famous for the line: the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.
What I want to do in this episode is change your understanding of such lines from figurative to literal, where the idea of the future being invented is not in the sense of specific things or events “contained” by the future so to speak, or from the future and “contained” in the present, but time itself as something that is invented.
Let’s start with a few examples.
In the last few years I’ve experienced a few technologies from the unevenly distributed future, as I’m sure many of you working in technology have. And I want to talk about four in particular: riding in a Tesla, trying on an Oculus VR headset, making a cryptocurrency transaction, and trying on a Magic Leap AR headset.
So the interesting thing is, my reaction to these four experiences was different in each case.
On one end of the spectrum we have Magic Leap and crypto. Both of those things, when I tried them, they were interesting, exciting, and stimulating, it was fun to try these things. But neither felt like an inevitable part of the future, at least to me, so subjectively speaking they did not feel like an inevitable part of the future.
In terms of Alan Kay’s line, they were auditioning for the role of being part of the invented future, but they were not decisively part of it yet, at least as far as I’m concerned. And in terms of William Gibson’s line, they may or may not be part of the actual unevenly distributed future. They felt like they might equally well be part of a fork future we may not go down, like I imagine it felt to play a BetaMax tape when it was still a competitor to VHS back in the day. That’s an important idea to recognize, right, that there are technological options we discover, uncover, and develop, but don’t necessarily exercise, and go down the future they create.
The Oculus headset, now that felt a little more substantial, like it was definitely part of the future being invented, but not necessarily an actual piece of the unevenly distributed future that I was experiencing in the present. Something like it seems inevitable, it feels like it rhymes with something from the future, but perhaps what we will actually see in the future is not that exact kind of thing. You can think of it as the future in a beta-test form, or at least that’s what it felt like to me. So I’m emphasizing repeatedly the subjective aspect here because what we’re talking about here is a gut experience of the temporal quality of a technological experience. We’re not talking about rational assessments of future probabilities, we’re talking about how real a sense of time feels.
And finally, riding in a Tesla made the electric vehicle future seem utterly inevitable in a way that kinda killed the present for me. Suddenly I could no longer look at gasoline cars the same way. Driving in my own car felt different, like I was stuck in the past, waiting for the price of the future to come down to the point where I could afford to live in it. So a Tesla creates the future in the sense of both the Alan Kay and William Gibson quotes. It makes the future real in a deep way that is like making time itself real. And you know this because the feel of the present feels different, like you’re heading down a dead-end, a lame-duck future. You’ll have to either abandon it as soon as you can, or end up dying with it.
Stepping back, I think it is important to understand innovation as the process of literally inventing time itself. The mark of success is that the present starts to feel dead, like the past, and the beachhead of the future in the present, let’s call it a Gibsonian temporal colony, feels like a portal for getting back into the present. So it’s almost like there’s been a time shift and you’ve been shifted back into the past and you have to step through a portal to get back to the present. There is a sense of inevitability to your experience of the new technology, and a sense of derealization — things seeming not quite real — in your continued experience of existing incumbent technologies.
You have to get very sensitive to this feeling in your gut if you want to do good work in the world of technology, even though of course it can be very misleading. There is a chance that feeling in your gut, that deep down sense that this is the future being invented, that this is time that is more real than the time I’m living in, that can be misleading. It could be that you’re mistaken. So that’s why I again emphasize this is a subjective feeling. But I think it is a very reliable indicator. When you get that feeling, there is a much stronger chance that you’re going to be right than wrong.
So you have to get very sensitive to this feeling if you want to do good technology, whether as an engineer, an entrepreneur, an investor, or an early adopter making new culture with it. And this is not the same thing as feeling excited or stimulated by the future. It is not the same thing as logically and rationally concluding that a certain scenario is the most likely future, and investing in it. It’s a sort of all-in psychological investment of identity into a sense of time that feels more real than the one you’re in. It’s a sense of switching timelines.
And this feeling can be evoked by very mundane and unexciting things. It doesn’t have to be a big flash-bang feeling.
An example of this: when I first moved to the US, I used a microwave oven for the first time, since they were not yet popular in India. And an Indian friend of mine taught me the trick of microwaving papads, usually called papadums when you get then in restaurants in the US, which are these little dried lentil crackers you typically either deep fry or roast on an open flame. But the microwave cooked it perfectly, and that was the moment when it was suddenly clear to me that that was the future of the Indian kitchen. So that’s a pretty mundane example. It’s not like experiencing space travel or something science-fictiony like that. It’s a very mundane example of switching timelines and feeling that one kind of invented future involving a certain technology is more real than the time you’re experiencing right now.
Once you get sensitized to this feeling of going down one fork of time rather than another, and the idea of more or less real timelines, I think you’re psychologically equipped to be much smarter about how you relate to technology. You’re equipped to be bolder about how you engage with the future. So it’s a skill worth cultivating. In a way, it’s learning a kind of time travel within the present.
And learning time travel is probably figuratively the most important skill you can develop as a technologist. And I know it sounds weird, but this is the reason all of us in technology tend to love science fiction and sort of reach for ways of to think about experiencing time in much more real ways. We are actually training our gut, we’re training our sense of time being real or unreal, learning to make forks and sort of fork-switching decisions at the right time, and getting a sense of are we in the past, are we in the future, are we in the present, how do we get back into the present, how do we actually make part of the future more real and bring it into the present. So these are all sort of temporal mechanics skills that you learn once you start to cultivate this feeling.
So that’s my topic for the day, let me know what you think. We’re just at the 10 minute mark, so looks like I’m back to slightly shorter podcast lengths, and I’ll be back again next week or the week after with my next episode, thanks.
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Two things happened this week. Last Friday, Alexey Leonov, the first human to walk in space (in 1965), passed away. And this morning, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir went on the first all-women spacewalk on the ISS. So two historic events. And they got me thinking about the meaning of we in its most universalist, species-level sense.
Let’s take them in order.
Alexey Leonov was the first human to walk in space. He was also on the crew of one of the earliest experiments in international space cooperation, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, ASTP. So this was at the height of the Cold War.
Before we had the ISS, the ASTP mission was as close as humans have ever come to a Star Trek like Federation. In some ways, it was a more impressive technical, social and political achievement, since it was at the height of the Cold War, and the mission had to be designed around the existing US and Soviet programs, which used different designs, unlike the ISS, which was designed collaboratively by multiple nations.
As a kid, I owned a beautifully written and illustrated book by Leonov about ASTP (he was also an accomplished artist, if you google him, you’ll find a bunch of his paintings, including space paintings), and though this may sound cheesy, that book was probably one of the things that got me interested in space technology and end up going to graduate school for aerospace engineering, where I worked on space mission problems for my PhD.
I remember a drawing of the Apollo-Soyuz docking mechanism in particular in Leonov’s book, and wondering at the time about the general problem of linking two incompatible technologies, which I think is kinda really symbolic of the whole problem of species-level human coordination. I want to digress a bit to talk about that.
If you’re an engineer you know this: in any design, any time two parts come together to form a coupling, they tend to be designed asymmetrically, because that tends to be the easiest way. So one part gets designated male and the other part female, and the logic is the logic you would expect. It’s one of the rare funny bits of sexual logic in the generally sexless world of engineering jargon.
Later, as an adult, long after I read Leonov’s book, I heard this story (I don’t know how true it is) that one of the bones of contention — which Leonov didn’t talk about in his book — was making sure the docking system design was symmetrical, in the form of what is known as an androgynous coupling, because neither side wanted to be the “female” side. Apparently the nickname of the system was “androgynous brothers”, which I find hilarious. The official justification was of course, more technical: that with an androgynous coupling, either side could play the active or passive role, and that would make for greater mission flexibility and system-level redundancy. But I kinda buy the theory that the system ended up ungendered for less technical reasons. It sorta makes sense for that era of technology.
You could say ASTP was consciously designed to not just be a showcase of global cooperation, briefly forgetting the divide between the two sides of the Cold War. It also ended up being unintentionally gender-neutral for what were perhaps the wrong reasons. Long before we had culture wars about gender-neutral bathrooms here on earth.
And speaking of gender and space, that brings us to the second historic event of the week.
This morning, I just happened to catch a retweet of the NASA live feed of the space walk. I had no idea it was going on, but I am always willing to interrupt whatever I’m doing to watch space stuff. So I started watching, and I found myself drawn to the very basic shared human things that space forces us to grapple with. For example, I found myself noting and counting the orientation words the astronauts were using, like up, down, aft, fore etc and wondering about how humans think and talk about orientation in microgravity, where there is no natural direction of up, which is of course one of the most basic shared human things, a shared sense of which way is up.
At the back of my mind I was also wondering if women coordinate and communicate any differently on complex tasks than men. The ground control person was also a woman, so the entire audio-track for the live broadcast was female, which was interesting. But the gender aspect was less interesting to me than the basic human aspect. Here we are, as bodies in space, being governed by the laws of classical physics. Inertia, movement, velocities, accelerations. That was the more interesting part.
In fact, I didn’t realize till later, when I read up on the event, that it was a historic all-women spacewalk that had to be canceled once before because they didn’t have two spacesuits of the right size.
Anyhow, the two events together got me thinking about our sense of collective nouns like “us” and “we” and how in everyday life, they tend to factor across obvious tribal, gender, or other sorts of identity faultlines. Sometimes, it can seem like there is no such thing as a shared “we” that applies to humanity as a whole.
In my more cynical moments, I tend to think that every use of the word “we” is a disingenuous attempt to humanize some people at the expense of others. My line about this is a version of the principle: you cut the cake, I’ll pick the bigger half. The identitarian version is: you decide what rights are basic human rights, I’ll decide who counts as human. Which is the version that has historically been the most common one practiced. When people say “we the people,” they typically mean a particular subset of people counting as human.
Space missions are a reminder that there is substance to both the differences and commonalities that make us human.
On the one hand, space missions reinforce the sense of idealism that yes, there is in fact such a thing as a non-vacuous universal “we” that includes all humans, and perhaps all living things. When any human does something interesting in space, we all participate in the moment. When I logged on this morning, there were 14,000 viewers of the live feed. That’s fascinating. Honestly, I’d be very interested in seeing the demographic breakdown of that audience.
When any human does something in space, what they do is human at a very basic level: they move, they breathe air, the grip things, they communicate. All the trivial unconscious shared humanity, including a sense of up, that we forget here on earth, becomes a very live concern in space. So yeah, the idealism has substance.
Hell, even a dog or monkey in space evokes identification.
Recently, a Chinese lunar lander recently even grew a sapling on the Moon, and frankly, I identify with that sapling too. Life in space is a very powerful reminder of how much all of life has in common. Yes, there is a Hobbesian struggle of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw aspect, so there is that aspect of nature as well, but it is amazing how much life has in common.
But on the other hand, space is also a reminder that we can’t pretend identity issues are entirely made-up political b******t.
We’ve had a complex bit of space technology, the ASTP docking system, possibly designed a certain way because of gender sensitivities. We apparently had the first all-female spacewalk delayed because they didn’t have two suits in the right size. And these are not cosmetic matters. It’s not all virtue signaling or identity signaling. Matters of life and death hinge on things like spacesuits being the right size. The live video showed this starkly: periodically the ground controller would ask the astronauts for suit checks. So, it’s real life-and-death stuff.
So yeah, space missions show us that both our differences and commonalities have deep substance to them.
But overall, the moral of the story of space exploration as revealed by the events of this week, reflecting on the life of Alexey Leonov, ASTP and the historic event of the first all-woman spacewalk, is a pretty uplifting one.
It’s hard, but we don’t have to choose between immutably essentialized identities on the one hand, and universalist tendencies to identity with all life on the other. Our differences and similarities are both real, and they both matter, and we — and I do mean we as a species now — we have to learn to accommodate both in our collectivist tendencies. They both matter, differences and commonalities.
And to bring this back to earth from space, when we think about this in terms of all the things that absorb us here on earth everyday as part of the culture wars, and the news headlines. And you make that seemingly sophisticated argument, whenever somebody says we must do this, we must combat climate change, we must combat sexism, we must not let identity and political correctness destroy things. Whichever side you’re on, there’s a lot of we and us words being used in conversation, and most of the time, they indicate we’s and us’es that are less than universal, and we all recognize that, and sometimes we call each other out on it.
Like one of the most common sophomoric debate tactics is, when an opponent says something like we must do X, you challenge them on what we are we talking about here. Even though this is a tactic you learn in college, it is important to call out, and force people to define and defend the level of collectivism at which they think good things are good and evil things are evil.
You kinda have to make people take ownership of their we’s and us’es.
So that’s the reflection of the week on the lessons of space walks and historic space events here on earth. If you didn’t know any of this history, I recommend taking 15 minutes to google and learn about it. It’s fascinating stuff, especially the ASTP mission.
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Today I want to talk about a possible emerging successor to net neutrality, which I call charisma neutrality, which I think is a plausible consequence of a very likely technological future: pervasive end-to-end encryption. (17 minutes)
Now net neutrality of course, was part of a very important chapter in the history of technology. Though the principle is now pretty much down for the count, for a few decades it played a hugely important role in ensuring that the internet was born more open than closed, and more generative than sterile.
Even though the principle was never quite as perfectly implemented as some people imagine, even when there was a strong consensus around it, it did produce enough of a systemic disposition towards openness that you could treat it as more true than not.
That era has mostly ended, despite ideological resistance, because even though it is a solid idea with respect to human speech, it is not actually such a great idea relative to the technical needs of different kinds of information flow. So as information attributes — stuff like text versus video, and real-time versus non-real-time — began to get more varied, the cost of maintaining net neutrality in the classic sense became a limiting factor.
And at least some technologists began seeing the writing on the wall: the cost of net neutrality was only going to get worse with AI, crypto, the internet of things, VR and AR.
What was good for openness and growth in the 1980s and 90s was turning into a significant drag factor by the aughts and 10s.
What was good for growing from 2 networked computers to a several billion was going to be a real drag going from billions to trillions.
I think there’s no going back here, though internet reactionaries will try.
To understand why this happened, you have to peek under the hood of net neutrality a bit, and understand something called the end-to-end principle, which is an architecture principle that basically says all the smarts in a network should be in the end point nodes which produce and consume information, and the pipes between the nodes should be dumb. Specifically, they should be too dumb to understand what’s flowing through them, even if they can see it, and therefore incapable of behaving differently based on such understanding. Like a bus driver with face-blindness who can’t tell different people apart, only check their tickets.
Now, for certain regimes of network operation and growth, the end-to-end principle is very conducive to openness and growth. But ultimately it’s an engineering idea, not divine gospel, and it has limits, beyond which it turns into a liability that does not actually address the original concerns.
To see why, we need to dig one level deeper.
The end-to-end principle is an example of what in engineering is usually called a separation principle. It is a simplifying principle that limits the space of design possibilities to ones where two things are separate. Another example is the idea that content and presentation must be separated in web documents. Or that the editorial and advertising sides of newspapers should be separate. Both of these again got stressed and broken in the last decade.
Separation principles usually end up this way, because there’s more ways for things to be tangled and coupled together than there are for them to be separate. So it’s sort of inevitable that they’ll break down, by the law of entropy. Walls tend to leak or break down. It’s sort of a law of nature.
Whether you’re talking about walls between countries or between parts of an architecture, separation principles represent a kind of reductive engineering idealism to keep complexity in check. There’s no point in mourning the death of one separation principle or the other. The trick is to accept when the principle has done its job for a period of technological evolution, and then set it aside. But that doesn’t mean you can’t look for new separation principles to power the next stage of evolution.
One such principle has been emerging in the last decade: the end-to-end encryption principle.
The similarity in names should suggest that we’re talking about a cousin of the original end-to-end principle, and you would be right to think that. Here, what you’re saying is that only the end points in a network should be able to code and decode messages, and the pipes should not.
If you think about it, this is a loosening and generalization of the original end-to-end principle. The pipes now don’t have to be dumb, but only the endpoints can control what the pipes can know, and therefore what they can do on the basis of knowledge. The pipes are not dumb, but the endpoints are in charge. Instead of a bus driver with face blindness, all riders are now wearing masks, but their tickets can now contain any information they choose to share, and the bus driver can act on that information.
As with the original end-to-end principle, the idealized notion is messy in practice. I was talking to some friends who are more tech savvy about this than I am, and they pointed out that an endpoint device itself is effectively a tiny unencrypted network, with more than one computer, and that the pipes in the intra-device network lie outside the scope of this principle.
So for example, you can have an extra invisible chip installed by the carrier, or something in the OS that traps what you’re typing before it gets to the encryption layer. And of course private keys can get exfiltrated without your knowledge. Maybe in the future end-to-end encryption will apply to the internal environment of every endpoint device, recursively all the way down to every logic circuit. But we’re not there yet.
And even without going there, it’s obvious the principle is not watertight anyway. Today, routers can peek inside packets, but in the future, even if they can’t, they’ll be able to tell a lot simply from the geometry of the connection and transmission patterns, even with technologies like VPNs and zero-knowledge proofs in the mix.
The thing is, different types of communication have different external heat signatures, and with AI, the ability to make inferences from such signatures will improve. It will be an arms race. The question will be whether pipes can get good at reading heat signatures faster than endpoints can get good at full-stack encryption that is secure in practice, not just theory.
There is no such thing as perfect containment of information. That’s another law of physics. Actually it is another form of the same law that tells you walls always break down.
So yeah, the technology is messy, but I think it already works well enough that it will create a broad tendency towards this new end-to-end principle being more true than false. You will never be able to hide from the NSA or the FBI or the Chinese government perfectly, but you can make it very much more expensive for them to monitor what you’re up to.
Now, this new end-to-end principle is also based on a separation principle. I’m not entirely sure how to characterize it, but I think end-to-end encryption attempts to make an approximately clean separation between custody of data and control of data, and tries to ensure that no matter who has custody, the owner has control over usage. We’ll see how well it works in practice as it becomes more widespread.
Now for the real question. Assuming the principle holds more often than not, and is more a de facto default than an opt-in exception that only libertarian crackpots use, what does an internet based on end-to-end encryption look like?
I think what end-to-end encryption sustains, that is worth enshrining as a new value for this next chapter of evolution, is charisma neutrality.
What do I mean by that?
Well, I talked about technological charisma a few weeks ago, but here I’m talking about the regular human kind. The ability of charismatic leaders to tell mesmerizing stories that spread fast and energize large dumb crowds to act as mass movements.
Or at least, that’s what human charisma looks like. In practice, the reaction of thoughtful people to supposedly charismatic messaging is cynicism and resignation. They only listen to some self-important blowhard with an imaginary halo droning on and on, because somebody is forcing them to. Only a subset of idiot fanbois at the core of the crowd is actually enthralled by the supposedly charismatic performance. And to the extent charismatic messaging works as advertised at all, it does so by reading the core of the crowd and responding to it, creating a positive feedback loop, telling it what it wants to hear, whipping it up. So this ability to read the crowd is critical to exercising charisma.
Everybody not in this feedback core is exchanging cynical jokes or shitposting about it on side channels that are much harder to monitor. So what defines human charisma is not the claim to captivating content, but three structural factors.
* One, the ability to keep captive audiences in place
* Two, creating a positive feedback loop with the small core
* And three, keeping the large cynical periphery too afraid to criticize openly
And historically, this kind of human charisma has always been a non-neutral thing. The people with the guns, able to control public spaces and distribution channels by force, had privileged access to charismatic structural modes. There’s a reason dictators mounting coups go after TV and radio stations and printing presses first. It is charisma insurance.
But end-to-end encryption as the default for communication makes it harder and harder to reserve charismatic messaging capability for yourself with guns. That’s the good takeaway from the culture wars. All charismatic messaging is created equal, so the messages are forced to fight each other in a Hobbesian war of stupid idea versus stupid idea.
The old charismatic media like large public plazas, radio, television, glitzy conferences, larger-than-life billboards, and showy parades, they don’t go away, but fewer people pay any attention to them. And it’s harder and harder to keep the attention captive. All the attention starts to sink into the end-to-end encrypted warren-like space at the edge of the network, and only the opt-in idiot core stays captive.
The cynical, anti-charismatic whispering on the margins becomes the main act, and the charismatic posturing in the center becomes a sideshow. And the whispering gets louder and bolder, and starts to drown out any charismatic messaging that does get in. Center and periphery trade places.
And with end-to-end encryption, because you can’t peek at or shape information flows without permission, even if you have large-scale centralized custody of the flows, the only way to spread or shape a message is, to a first approximation, by being a trusted part of the set of endpoints that are part of it.
Of course, more resources help you do this better — the idea of a Sybil attack is essentially based on gaining dominant access to a peer-to-peer network via a bunch of pseudo-identities, so basically sock-puppets. But it is much more expensive than simply having your goons take over the public square, secure the perimeter so nobody can leave, grabbing a megaphone, and boring the crowd to death while claiming charismatic reach.
In fact, the only way to exercise charisma at all will be through literal or figurative Sybil attacks. You either create a network of bot identities to dominate the end points of an information flow, or you find actual humans who are sufficiently dumb to act as your bots. And since it is becoming technically easier to detect and prevent the automated kinds of Sybil attacks, the action is shifting to human bots, essentially armies of mechanical turks.
But here there is a self-limiting effect: the value of a network drops in proportion to the percentage of bot-like idiots in it, or actual bots, so in the limiting case, your charisma can only reach mindless zombie idiots. Worse, these are the same zombie idiots you need in your core positive feedback loop, and now you have to tell them to turn around, sneak into the periphery, and act as your mindless secret agents to convert the cynics. And worst of all, you have no edge over your rivals trying to do the same thing.
That’s charisma neutrality.
And of course, in this condition, it becomes increasingly costly to control the thoughtful people, who are ultimately the ones worth controlling. The idiots are just a means to that end.
This means at some point it actually becomes easier and cheaper to simply talk to the thoughtful people rather than browbeating them with charisma. Charisma neutrality makes charisma less valuable, more equal opportunity, and more expensive. And beyond a point it starts to amplify non-charismatic thoughtful messaging over charismatic droning.
So modern networks are charisma neutral and charisma inhibiting to the extent they are end-to-end encrypted. This has huge consequences of course. Law enforcement types worry about one particular consequence, which is that the opposite of charismatic activity, namely dark, secretive underground activity, will get amplified. Particularly stuff like child abuse and terrorism.
The optimistic counter-argument is that the more thoughtful people get empowered by charisma neutrality, the harder it will be to keep such dark matters secret and secure from infiltration or whistleblowing. And remember, unlike shaping public opinion with charisma, unmasking dark activity doesn’t take dominant numbers or Sybil attacks. A single undercover law enforcement agent might be able to do enough to take down an entire network. So the dark activity networks will have to put in increasing effort to gatekeep and vet access, and maintain more internal anonymity and expensive trust mechanisms, which will limit their growth, and make them harder to get off the ground in the first place.
In other words, I’m bullish on charisma neutrality and end-to-end encryption. It’s early days yet so we are stumbling a lot on making this work well, but the benefits seem huge, and the problems seem containable.
And of course, it is important to recognize that this principle too, just like net neutrality, is not gospel. It too is just an engineering principle that will reach the end of its utility some day. Maybe it will be because of quantum computing. Maybe it will be some unforeseen consequence of the internet of things or crypto. But for now, this is the principle we need.
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In the original Breaking Smart essays, we used the idea of moving in the direction of maximal interestingness, or DOMI, as a way to advance boldly towards the future, and be on the right side of history as software eats the world, and avoid retreating timidly towards the past. In this episode (16 minutes), I want to update that rule. In the Great Weirding, you need to move in the direction of maximal derangement.
Note: the text below is not a transcript, but the rough script I mostly stuck to in the audio version.
The DOMI rule worked for normal conditions. Under the conditions of the Great Weirding, we need a new rule, which I call the direction of maximal derangement. It’s not a new rule per se, but a generalization and porting to a new environment.
The original algorithm was simple: figure out the zone of maximal uncertainty and ambiguity, and then start shipping whatever you ship. Release early release often. Rough consensus and running code.
In the process of exploring that principle, we discovered some subtleties. For example, the idea that you have to give up your credentialist ethos, and adopt a hacker ethos. Or the Chris Dixon principle that what the smartest people do on evenings and weekends, everybody will do in a few years. Or the Peter Thiel idea that you need a secret: something you believe that nobody else believes. Or the idea that you have to earn this secret by figuring out what Balaji Srinivasan called an Idea Maze. Or that this felt like dead reckoning with a gyroscope in a storm.
If you did all this, you would be on the right side of history, moving towards the future, rather than the wrong side. You’d be betting on the world that was being born than the one that was dying. You would be shedding an old identity and growing into a new one.
That rather than navigating with a compass on a clear day, towards a nice tropical island.
The reverse of this was chasing after credentials, going in the direction of certainty, navigating by a compass in clear weather, towards a sunny tropical island. Believing that what you did 9-5 was the important thing. Believing that there was a reliable script you could follow instead of a tricky idea maze you had to figure out. This was, in 2015, the playbook of not breaking smart, the playbook of both the tech backlash, and various flavors of reactionary politics, both left and right.
Now how has that changed? In one sense, it hasn’t changed at all. To head towards the future, you still follow the same algorithm.
But in another sense, an important thing has changed: the algorithm is now running on a different computer. The rule is being applied in a different context, the context of the Great Weirding. So what it feels like when you’re doing the right thing has changed, and if you’re not alive to this sense of orientedness, you might be heading in the wrong direction.
In 2019, the same algorithm works, but “direction of maximal interestingness” has flipped polarity. Instead of pointing at something exciting happening in the external world, it is pointing at something exciting happening in your internal world.
This is the way in which you are reacting to the events of the Great Weirding. And chances are, unless you have been hiding under a rock, you’re suffering from some version of a derangement syndrome, where you feel obsessively drawn towards an object of attention, but you can’t think clearly or effectively around it, and feel a strong urge to retreat for your own sanity and safety. It’s like watching a traffic accident unfolding. Maybe it is Trump Derangement Syndrome. Maybe it is Ocasio-Cortez or Greta Thunberg Derangement Syndrome. Maybe it is Wokeleban Derangement Syndrome, where you are obsessed with how Woke Thought Police is taking over institutions and canceling everyone. Or maybe it is IDW Derangement Syndrome, where you are obsessed with how self-styled intellectual dark web people seem to be normalizing fascist movements while espousing liberal values.
There’s a lot of Derangement Syndromes out there to choose from. It’s a target rich environment. And my suggestion for how to approach the future rather than retreat from it is simple: head in the direction of Maximal Derangement. This means growing in ways that gradually lowers the sense of derangement, restores a sense of orientation and movement, and gives you confidence in your agency again.
In 2015, doing the right thing to be on the right side of history made you feel some mix of exhilaration, fear, superhuman agency, and the sense of being a social subversive. Now, in 2019 it should feel like you’re fighting to reserve your sense of identity and resisting the world being taken over by various zombie armies you detest, while you get increasingly isolated as the only sane person around.
This is the process Jungian psychologists call eating your shadow. It is inner work, rather than outer work. And of course, it is a risky process, because in the process of trying to eat your shadow, you might get eaten by it. You might flip your identity and instead of growing into a new and improved version of yourself, you simply turn into what you hate, and start hating your old self. This is trading one derangement syndrome for another. This is moving sideways. It is like Android turning into the current version of iOS rather than the next version of itself.
Growth has a sense of what some people call include and transcend. You know your new identity is actually working if you get past all the derangement syndromes, and become a new, non-deranged person, and you do it without retreating from the future.
So let’s revisit our algorithm. You still have to do the same things, but in the direction of inner work rather than outer work. You still have to focus on what the smart people do in the evenings and weekends rather than 9-5. You still have to RERO and RCRC, except what you are building is not a software product but a new version of yourself. You 2.0, an identity that compiles and runs in the environment of the Great Weirding.
To stick with the nautical theme in our metaphors for orienting and vectoring yourself, this is not like navigating by either gyroscope of compass. This is like becoming the Ship of Theseus, where you change every part of the ship, while it is in motion, while retaining its fundamental identity. You head in the direction that forces the ship to transform the fastest.
The reverse of this is what I’ve been calling Waldenponding. This is a fate worse than the credentialist approach of 2015, where at least you’re moving in the wrong direction. Instead of heading in the direction of certainty, you’re not moving at all. The compass has stopped working. Plotting a course to a sunny tropical island through calm weather is no longer an option. You are caught in the storm you tried to go around and avoid. So all you can do is take down the sails, shut down the motor, batten down the hatches, and retreat, hoping that the storm won’t smash you to pieces. That’s Waldenponding.
So let’s put the picture together. I have a 2x2 accompanying this podcast. The x-axis is normal versus weird, the y-axis is timid versus bold. The 4 ways of navigating are illustrated on the diagram (the audio has a couple of minutes talking through the diagram, but if you’re reading this, it should be easier to just look at the diagram instead).
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