06: Crusonia plants
Hello!
Sometimes, writing feels as easy as exhaling. Other times, it’s like bricklaying in the sun. Right now, I’m in the latter mode.
I didn’t publish anything new this month, which is, I think, the first time I’ve sent this out without new content to share. My brain’s been mired in the longer piece I’m working on. It’s a thoroughly miserable experience that I’ll look back on fondly on day.
On the bright side, my garbage can of thoughts are finally congealing, like an aspic Jell-O mold, into a narrative that I like, which goes something like this: How do we design a sustainable internet? On the one hand, you have hardcore optimists who insist upon the open web, and on the other, bleak pessimists who think we have to withdraw entirely. Both narratives are depressing: the latter because, well, discovery is the best part of the internet, and the former because it’s stubbornly utopian and obviously not sustainable. But the polarity of these arguments means that if you're not pro-democracy, you must be pro-tyranny, which I find a bit maddening.
So, I’m trying out a middle path, in which we protect the “Crusonia plant” (see Books section, below) of freely available access to knowledge and information, while also being realistic about who produces that content, and who participates. Think read-only access.
And, of course, I’m drawing examples from open source communities (the seminal darling poster child of the open web) to demonstrate why from an economic perspective, this behaves differently from anything else we’ve seen before. But I think the same principles apply to social media, online communities, and how we communicate with each other in a highly networked world. It’s easier to see in open source because there is a tangible good (software) being produced. But it’s not much different from the incentives that drive production of other types of knowledge (ex. Twitter threads, subreddits).
Put this all together and you have a world composed of cities (i.e. online communities) that produce goods (i.e. information, knowledge, and content), which can be studied and valued as economies, which collectively comprise our digital infrastructure. And as it turns out, they behave in some pretty cool and unusual ways.
So. That’s what I’ve been working on this...fall? Winter? Hopefully it’s interesting to others. If you have any initial reactions or feedback, I’d love to hear them!
Writing
I didn’t publish anything new this month, but I am writing a lot. To make up for it, here’s a smorgasboard of music that I've been writing to. Send me your suggestions!
Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP (Aphex Twin)
Vicious Delicious (Infected Mushroom)
Into the Trees (Zoe Keating)
Grow Up and Blow Away (Metric)
The Future (Leonard Cohen)
Notes
Notes from this past month have been updated, with a lot less filtering, in the spirit of the first bullet point below. A few highlights:
From a friend, re: why we should say more controversial stuff out loud: “If you’re researching and writing for the sake of uncovering good ideas, keeping the best ones held closely to your chest seems perverse” (link)
Reading books that your friends have annotated is like an async book club (link)
Adults can never write childhood books in a way that accurately reflects the next generation’s experience, because they’re not children anymore. So all children grow up reading snapshots of a generation behind them. It’s like seeing a star’s death from a gazillion years ago (link)
Putting together a few things: if online communities are like cities that produce goods, that makes the balkanization of the internet seem even more plausible, bc if these “goods” are exportable and tradeable, other cities might want control over them, thus defense systems become necessary (link)
Hacking is often intertwined with the notion of showmanship, but I think this is just one interpretation that’s been conflated with the definition itself. Is a good hacker someone who’s widely known for their cleverness, or someone who never shows their hand? (link)
Links
Useful articles I’ve read this past month.
“On Consensus and Humming in the IETF” (Pete Resnick): A helpful guide to using rough consensus as an alternative to voting systems, which I’ve previously written about.
“The philosophy and practicality of Emergent Ventures” (Tyler Cowen): Refreshing take on how philanthropy can look institutionally different at internet scale. A few years back, I wrote about how I’d like to see philanthropy focus on funding individuals rather than just organizations. Tyler makes the argument for what is basically angel investing, applied to philanthropy, an idea he's exploring through Emergent Ventures.
“The crumbling public/private distinction” (José Luis Ricón): The lack of clarity around property rights (i.e. what even qualifies as “digital infrastructure”, and who's responsible for it) is IMO one of the most important problems on the internet today, so obviously I really liked this post.
“Statement on event-stream” (Dominic Tarr): The internet was up in arms last week over malicious code inserted into an npm module, which happened after the author, Dominic, handed control over to a stranger. Dominic said everything that I wanted to say about it, so I’ll just point you to his statement. An important point to emphasize: he followed maintainer best practices exactly (hand off access to others), meaning this was a systemic failure of incentives, not an individual one, buoyed by arcadian rhetoric.
“Monolithic vs. modular” (Sven Slootweg): Great explanation of monolithic vs. modular software design (with a bias towards modular ;). It’d be fun to evaluate government design against his checklist. The US, like other federated governments, was designed with modularity in mind, but is not as “loosely coupled” as it should be. How do we make it easy to swap out components and spin up new local experiments, without breaking the whole framework?
“How Filter Bubbles Will Save The World” (Byrne Hobart): A bold argument in favor of filter bubbles as a place to sandbox weird ideas with likeminded people.
Books
Relevant books that I’ve read this month.
The Grid (Gretchen Bakke): Easy, breezy read about the history of the electric grid in the United States. This felt like getting a brain dump from a friend who’s an expert on the topic, which is exactly what I wanted. A bit editorializing at times, but I learned some new stuff about the challenges of physical infrastructure, which is plenty relevant to digital infrastructure.
Stubborn Attachments (Tyler Cowen): Making the case for economic growth as a positive social outcome. I already agreed with his take, so it’s hard to critique, but it’s clarifying to read a succinct manifesto on the topic. I particularly enjoyed Tyler’s metaphor of “Crusonia plants”: plants that, once planted, have exponential compounding growth (think an apple tree that continues to produce apples every year), which is useful in explaining the value of information goods.
Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer): Diving into the intellectual origins of the darker side of contemporary governance, through the lens of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and the horror genre. She concludes with a stunning firework display of political thought, dancing the reader through William Blake’s gods and goddesses in “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. Mind blown. I’m really into these techno-political-literary mashups. Actively on the hunt to find more.