09: Benevolent dictators
Hello!
A friend of mine has very good taste in music, but I couldn’t tell you what he listens to. I couldn’t name a single artist he plays, or where one song begins or ends. His view is that “the best kind of music is where nobody notices it’s playing”. In his ideal world, music shapes ambiance as a background process. [1]
Similarly, despite all our talk about governance design, I keep coming back to the idea that the best kind of governance is where nobody can tell it’s there. If I never notice Google’s presence, does it really matter that they hold my life in their hands? Is there any inherent value in industry competition, or do we only care about it at the first sign of conflict?
The fear, of course, is that if Google ever wanted to flex its muscle, we’d be entirely at its mercy. But I’m not convinced that even Google wants that to happen. The relationship between “government" and “the governed” is fragile and symbiotic. Submitting to authority is not a relinquishing of power. You’re just leasing it out to someone else, a social contract (hi, Rousseau) in which you are the landlord and they are the tenant.
In other words, those in power are just as terrified of destroying your trust as you are. They want to impress you and demonstrate that they are worthy of your confidence. Having authority is about gaining access to the nuclear option, not deploying it. It’s a lesson that Google, Amazon, and Apple seem to understand quite well, and one that Facebook is clumsily trying to catch up on.
We often talk about the vulnerability of the “disenfranchised”, but I think having power can be just as vulnerable, an act of cupping water in your hands, rather than closing your fist over it. If you flex mightily and recklessly, as Facebook did, you’ll eventually get knocked off. Conversely, the longer you can reign without being detected or raising questions, the longer you can stay in power.
In open source, there’s this concept of a “benevolent dictator for life”: a developer, usually the author, who runs the project and whose authority is not challenged. This phrase is often interpreted as “You’re the dictator, but at least you’re nice about it”. But I think there’s a hidden causal relationship that gets missed. It’s not that you’re a dictator who’s decided to be benevolent. Rather: because you are benevolent, you get to be dictator for life.
-----
[1] Funnily enough, he doesn’t really know what he listens to, either. One time, I asked where he gets his music, and he shrugged and said he trains the Spotify algorithm on his brain.
Writing
Posts I’ve written this month.
“Making money with licenses”: Why I’m not that into writing new licenses for open source. Licenses are one of my least favorite topics, which is why I decided to write this post, so I don’t have to keep talking about them. If you, too, hate licenses, you can also read this post as “Why I’m not that into content paywalls”, it’s the same problem. So in conclusion...uhhh...read it.
Notes
Notes from this past month have been updated. A few highlights:
I wonder if one of the reasons creators (ignore consumer demand for a second) are trending toward podcasts/newsletters is because of the lack of intense feedback loop. Yes, you can see number of listens/opens/subscribes, but both forms of media do a better job of embodying this idea of the one-way mirror. Longform, deeper dive, you can say what you want in a less reactive, ‘like’-free environment [Fun fact: got a newsletter from Mike Isaac this week where he says the same thing]
(from convo with a friend) Paintings as “containers of meaning that survive centuries…but sometimes meanings change”
What would a narrative for “mobs as force for good” look like? They feel overwhelming in the moment, but maybe it’s just how we realistically induce change over time. As an explicit alternative to gov’t / legislative process, seems like it is actually more appropriate in certain situations. Libertarians seem to hate “mob mentality”, but maybe mobs are the purest form of libertarian government?
Diversity exposes you to new ideas, but homogeneity helps you execute. You want to have serendipity at the edges, but your core “tribe” needs to be fairly stable to maintain sanity, get anything done, and have a coherent worldview. The edges keep things fresh, but they need to sort of “trickle” into the center in a filtered way (like groundwater filtering through soil back into the aquifers)
Links
Useful articles I’ve read this past month.
“Our Software Dependency Problem” (Russ Cox): A thorough breakdown of the software dependency problem; my only quibble is I think his suggested actions are unrealistic, relying too much on manual supervision. Need scalable solutions that reduce the time needed for each user to vet their dependencies (ex. software scanning, ratings, etc)
“A Journal is a Club (New Working Paper)” (Cameron Neylon): Cameron recently published this paper about classifying academic journals as club goods. He’s one of the few people making a case for revising our understanding of knowledge as a public good by introducing scarcity principles, which is relevant to the thesis I’ve been working on, so I was pretty excited to see this.
“A Perspective on Computing Research Management” (Roy Levin) Handy comparison of university vs. corporate research labs, plus a deep dive into Microsoft Research. Also discovered “Zen and the Art of Research Management”, a fun little set of koans for research labs that’s heavily referenced in the article.
“Decline in readers, ads leads hundreds of newspapers to fold” (David Bauder, David A. Lieb): I keep hearing about the decline of journalism, but I haven’t developed an intuition for understanding what might replace it. It was exciting to see individual “curators” portrayed here as an alternative to local newspapers: for example, the Pulaski County Daily News, a Facebook page run by a guy named Darrell out of his basement.
“The Trauma Floor” (Casey Newton) and “Your Speech, Their Rules: Meet the People Who Guard the Internet” (Alex Feerst): You know me, I love reading stories about the “judges and janitors of the internet”, and there were two good pieces last month about the lives of platform content moderators.
Books
Relevant books that I’ve read this month.
Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Jo Guldi): A history of Britain’s roads and transportation system, and how it changed culture, with the takeaway being “more access does not always == more democracy”. I read this last year, but re-read it to see if I’d interpret it differently (I did). The prose is a bit dry, but I love that it’s filled to the brim with primary data and anecdotes, from which you can draw your own conclusions.
The American Monomyth (Robert Jewett, John Shelton Lawrence): You know how some people see phallic imagery in everything? Yeah, this book is kind of like that. I’d been looking for books that’ll help me think about creators through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”. I got some of that here, but I also learned what Freud thinks about Donald Duck not wearing pants, among other imagery I can no longer unsee. I did enjoy their discussion of the tension between the lone American hero vs. Western democratic ideals (i.e. how can we sanction the judgment of both “the individual” and “the people”?), which IMO mirrors the tension between creators and their audiences. Might write more about that later.
Letters to a Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke): At risk of invoking platitudes, I enjoyed this short, refreshing dip into the mind of creators, and how it can be lonely, and spiritual, and powerful and explosive. Last month I mentioned this idea of freezing a “decisive moment” and living inside it for a hundred years, which I think parallels Rilke’s idea of “eternal solitude”: find focus by creating a sense of timelessness. Also pairs nicely with The American Monomyth above, as both discuss the need to sacrifice intimate relationships for one’s “life’s work”. I don’t know if I agree with that idea, but I find it fascinating to see how often it appears, over centuries of human thought: see also, monks and muses. (The movie Free Solo is a pretty good modern treatment of this topic, too. Need to curate a list!)