Wrapping up the code for an election poll simulator project I wanted to ship this week took more time than finishing the article it is associated with. As is the case with most of my projects, once the leaves start growing, I have to commit to a period of hyperfocus to ensure all the branches are forming properly. It's all part of cultivating curiosity, sure, but sometimes I wonder if there might be a more efficient way of working...
For me, the concept of efficiency comes up in two places. The first is software engineering, where making decisions that maximize efficiency results in faster programs. When programs run faster, users tend to have a more pleasant experience, so software tends to be designed and implemented with efficiency in mind.
The other place I find efficiency being part of the equation is in the process of working at a software company. Here, efficiency means we're making decisions about the systems we design and implement that strike a good balance between good, fast, and affordable. Maximizing efficiency means we're making decisions out of a scarcity mindset; since money is a scare resource and we need money to pay for our company's salaries and services, maximizing our money (or minimizing the reduction of our money) must be a high priority. Good business people I've known would agree that if making more money (or losing less money) is not a top priority, then you are communicating to the people who work there that paying their salaries is also not a top priority.
As you can imagine, that's a difficult position for someone to be in when they need to be focusing on building out the product and new lines of business. On top of that, it's often not financially feasible for people to quit their jobs and form a company together without serious financial help. Sometimes that means a small business loan from a bank, but banks are generally hesitant to give loans out to people who don't have an existing business or who don't have plans for profitability yet.
So what do tech startups do?
They seek out venture capitalists—people and firms that are willing to exchange large sums of cash in exchange for a percentage of ownership in a company that, in many cases, doesn't really exist yet, or if they do exist, their product is often a prototype and they have few to no customers. This arrangement enables startup teams to focus on rapidly building their product rather than having to repay business loans. Since venture capitalism relies so much on good networking, startups that receive venture capital also receive valuable mentorship, industry connections, and operational support that traditional lenders don't offer. It's a very risky investment with a very high failure rate, but the potential returns outweigh the risk.
Venture capitalists have enough money that they can wait several years before their investments need to be profitable. Put another way, venture capital enables companies to exist that, due to lack of funding, wouldn't exist. That seems like a good thing, right? Who knows what kind of things we could discover about tools, about our world—about ourselves!—if only our builders and explorers could focus on the work of building and exploring...
It would seem like having several years of funding with no obligation to pay it back might even be a good thing. As it turns out, though, most startups that take venture capital don't exist longer than a couple years. There are a lot of reasons for this phenomenon, not the least of which may be the fact that they are building a business without having to worry about customers. It's efficient, you see, to build a product that people love and then later commercialize the hell out it.
But for whom is this product development process efficient? Where does this drive for efficiency come from? Well, it's not from the users, and it certainly isn't from the builders—they have their own efficiency to worry about.
It comes from the venture capitalists, and that is where lies the problem:
When efficiency is measured solely by the velocity of capital (or even the potential velocity of capital) rather than the velocity of true value creation, we end up with a system that optimizes for quick exits over sustainable solutions. Even the "value" that is created—the product enhancements, the technology improvements, etc—becomes inextricably linked to the for-profit interests that often shield the fruits of that work—the lessons learned, the technological puzzles that have been solved—from wide dissemination.
The irony is that this "efficient" process often produces exactly what you'd expect:
- products built for investors rather than users;
- companies optimized for acquisition rather than longevity;
- innovations that chase valuations instead of solving problems sustainably.
Many people working in software companies genuinely love to build tools. People like me see the apps on your phone and the software you run on your computer or laptop as tools for information interaction. Those tools were constructed in other tools that were written by other software engineers—which were written in computer languages designed and implemented by OTHER software engineers!
That's how technology works, and that's what draws me to it so much. Everything starts with the flow of electricity across a circuit board, which represents a configurable and controllable abstraction over our physical reality. We build out complex hardware abstractions, then use those abstractions to build languages for controlling the computer hardware. Then we build abstractions on top of those lower-level languages, and with these higher-level languages, we write interpreters to translate other languages into millions of instructions for your computer to execute. In my line of work, people like me are constantly using, improving, and coming up with new abstractions to help build tools for people.
The kind of tools I like to build and think about are those related to social technologies, which is why a recent social technology announcement got my attention. BlueSky, the tech startup that began as an internal project at Twitter, recently announced a $15M funding deal led by the venture capital investment company Blockchain Capital.
There are many reasons why someone would feel uncomfortable about BlueSky taking venture capital funding, but from the perspective of building a scaling a tech startup, BlueSky is doing everything I've seen every other tech startup do. So nothing is jumping out to me as out of the ordinary...
Which tells me that perhaps now is a great time to start thinking about whether what is ordinary in social technology is different from what we ought to be doing.
I wish BlueSky all the best at building out this social technology, and I genuinely look forward to contributing to this ecosystem. But for me, venture capital is a poison pill that destines companies toward a predictable path of unsustainable growth atop unsustainable business practices. This stacks up layers of venture capital dependency (called funding rounds) that are not appropriate for certain areas where human technology tools are used—like the tools we use to connect with each other, the means of connectedness in a highly distributed and digital world, the social platforms we find and share information on, constructing our realities about ourselves, our neighbors, and the world around us together.
In other words, social technology is too important to humanity for venture capital. Social technology is not a venture to me (a venture is defined as "a business enterprise involving some risk in expectation of gain"). Instead, it is a concept—it is our means of connectedness—and as we have seen over and over again, social technology is extremely powerful in a representative democracy like America because of the way information can be both overtly and covertly manipulated.
Thoughts from this week:
- There is so much Russian disinformation in American conversations online.
- On BlueSky, new bot/sock puppet accounts have flooded the social network. The comments appear similar to what I've discovered on TikTok; subtle nudging toward extremist views.
- While we all enjoy the content discovery effect of algorithmic feed curation, social technologies that algorithmically curate content to us have a latent effect of pushing us deeper into echo chambers. The problem with this is that many people need to be presented with information that challenges their views, especially if their views are not grounded in reality. Without this natural social process of having one's views challenged more openly and broadly, extremist ideologies metastasize into the minds of people already susceptible to influence based on their social media behavior.
Around the Net
- Robert Herian, author of the 2021 book Capitalism and the Equity Fetish, reflects on a question that I myself have wondered about for the last ten years: 'should we still take seriously the possibility that blockchain might still evolve into something other than capitalism’s latest technological fetish?'
Blockchain as we presently find it, and based on where it appears to be heading given all the signals at the time of writing, is a mere a tackle in the game of capitalism; it is capital playing with capital and all other social concerns are essentially excluded. Blockchain, in that sense, is not radical but just another technological fetish, a play-thing in the hands of capital. Arguably, Satoshi tried to invent rugby (although that is not entirely clear and certainly open to debate – with or without the sports metaphor). But what we are now seeing is a resurgent premier league of global financial institutions intent on ensuring that blockchain remains a part of their game, whether as a substitute bit player or a key striker.
Robert Herian
- Nathan J. Robinson's 2018 essay on Jordan Peterson is a must-read for anyone capable of recognizing that something is off about the way Peterson talks but for whom articulating such an observation feels moot—especially when talking to someone who reveres the man as some kind of philosophical elite:
Obscurantism is more than a desperate attempt to feign novelty, though. It’s also a tactic for badgering readers into deference to the writer’s authority. Nobody can be sure they are comprehending the author’s meaning, which has the effect of making the reader feel deeply inferior and in awe of the writer’s towering knowledge, knowledge that must exist on a level so much higher than that of ordinary mortals that we are incapable of even beginning to appreciate it. In fact, Peterson is quite open in insisting that he has achieved revelations beyond the comprehension of ordinary persons.
Nathan J. Robinson
- Josh Marshall's piece unraveling the not-so-secret billionaire-funded disinformation campaign against the Democratic presidential candidate shows that fascist desperation this election cycle knows no bounds—and in many cases, they may be breaking more laws than we realize:
The one part of this I’m not sure about, however, is the texts. Texts, like the U.S. mail and phone calls, come under specific regulatory and even legal frameworks. In some cases, it’s not enough to be technically accurate in the way I’m describing above. If you’re trying to impersonate someone, that can be enough to get you in trouble. That’s very different from a website in which you can say basically anything.
This issue of Weekender, along with everything else I've worked on this week, would not be possible without you. I left my corporate job at the beginning of October 2024 to focus on my work—video essays on TikTok, written essays here on my blog, and open-source development of social technologies. Thanks to your generous support, I'm able to do this full-time. I am and will always be grateful for you and the opportunities your support has empowered me to explore.
—Jesse