Logistic Planet 2: SaaS brain

I really appreciate all the people who read my first post, especially the ones who gave criticism and pushback. I want this post to be a refinement of the ideas I tried to articulate there.

I started writing that post as a meditation on the famous Thiel quote about flying cars and 140 characters. In the post, I tried to argue that maybe we were wrong to expect flying cars in the first place, and that we should expect the tech industry to grow logistically. I’m new to writing and the first draft of that post had many scattered pieces of an argument, most of which I cut in an effort to be concise. The actual result was an argument so pared-down as to lose the thrust of what I was trying to say.

Last year, I started a computer job that doesn’t require nearly as much effort as I can put out in a day, let alone in a week. I felt really bored and like I didn’t have a future here, but the money per unit effort is so good that I felt insane even considering switching jobs. And what’s more, I started to notice that my internal effort-valuing engine has been really thrown off by how easy and remunerative this job is. If I could rewrite that last post, I’d say this: for better or for worse, this economy’s priorities are set by capital allocators. I believe that these allocators, particularly in venture capital, suffer from the same kind of acute ADHD that this job gave me. I think the last two decades of growth in tech have given them a delusion that we can move society forward without making investments any more capital-intensive or less quickly scalable than SaaS companies. And in a society dragged along by the economy, I think that mindset, or at least a recognition that the allocators have that mindset, has kind of seeped down to our level.

The hope that we could really restructure the world by giving everyone a laptop and reducing the latency hasn’t really come to fruition. The world is still an organic thing made of dirt and blood and concrete, not a piece of software that rewrites itself at each instant. The capital-L Liberal idea that we can still change the world like a piece of software is a comforting one. It validates people who live in the world of ideas (like the entertainers who invented millenial politics), and it provides a straightforward blueprint for making things better without a ton of effort. But this isn’t really a machine that runs on logic. It takes a lot of time and energy to change the material world. This delusion creates political incoherence everywhere. Some people think they can get bomb companies to turn off the money hose by being loud and messy. Others think they can revive the strong social bonds and purpose some felt in the past by getting rid of gender and turning middle school textbooks into comic books where the founding fathers are really jacked. I eventually want to write a longer post about these people (who I like to call ‘good boys’) and their monomyth, but I wanted this one to be short.

It seems like there’s a growing understanding that what happens in the software petri dish doesn’t have the kind of holistic advancement effects that might make you think flying cars are around the corner. Many of the problems facing humanity right now - a global supply chain that isn’t very robust, a food system that’s having trouble keeping pace with human population growth, tons of “surplus people” who deserve to live but have little marginal value to the current machine that decides if you get to have a roof over your head - aren’t really solvable with more and better smartwatches or chatbots. I’m excited and heartened by the venture investments in more capital-intensive industries, even if I disagree about whether we need more defense tech. Building a real future that allows all of us to live good lives on this planet can’t be done on the cloud from a laptop. We’re gonna have to get our hands dirty.