Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3)

by Venkatesh G. Rao

The history of history is neither Big, nor Little, nor a pile of data, nor a progressive forgetting. It is the story of a story breaking free of itself.

Once you do this, history goes from being a determinate technology for forgetting the known to an indeterminate technology for feeding on the unknown. A technology of curiosity. Because once you make the universe all about you, personally, data flowing from it

towards you becomes nurturing instead of threatening.

This means, ironically enough, that egocentrism is how you shrink the ego. Because if it’s all about you, it’s not threatening. Which means you can keep your eyes open and look instead of screwing them shut and trying to forget. And ...

If the Prohibition in America marked the maturation of the Industrial Age, it is the abuse of coffee and alcohol that marks its decline. A line from Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work has stayed with me since I first read it: Office civilization could not be possible without the hard takeoffs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.

The more in-memory maps you have, the better you get at conversational sparring. It’s a nonlinear scaling effect, since you can quickly spot connections across disparate maps within the space of a conversational pause. You can strongly stress the thinking of a person with fewer maps in their head. It’s like being capable of a conversational full-court press. When I meet somebody with as many maps in their head as me, it

makes for a serious conversational workout.

My in-memory maps (especially maps of business ideas and theories) are one reason I make a significant fraction of my income through conversational sparring. I can get from A to B faster than most people, even when they know ...

There is a general principle here that contradicts the naive idea “why remember things when you can just google them?” Because remembering is faster. And because it’s not an either-or. Things you carry change your brain, and the change is not as simple as a function atrophying through simple outsourcing. The cowpaths a thing-carried wears out in your brain are a mix of amplified and atrophied capabilities. Sometimes you migh...

When you think about it, the fallacy we call digital dualism is actually just a narrow, specialized version of what you might call tool dualism. Tool dualism is the fallacious idea that the world highlighted and constructed by the things you carry and the world of your immediate natural environment are somehow disconnected spaces.

The apparently profound distinction between being present in the moment and occupied elsewhere, so beloved of spiritual types, is a kind of deep bullshit based on tool dualism. The difference between here-and-now and there-and-then is a somewhat arbitrary function of the things you carry. Look through

binoculars and you’re 10 light years away in space and time. Get lost in thoughts about a fight at work and you’re “elsewhere” but read an email from work on your phone and you’re present here and now. Wear a suit and tie at a business meeting and you’re pr...

Your technologically extended phenotype is always present wherever you are. There is no other way for you to be. Unless you make a special, psychotic effort to create two worlds, there is only one world to inhabit. The things you carry determine how you’re extending yourself in order to curate your presence.

The main job of a human leader is to pretend that the mix of factors driving success is 90% vision, 9%

mission and 1% agility, when in fact the mix is 1% vision, 9% mission and 90% agility. The reason they fudge the ratio (aside from the fact that many actually believe it) is that a vision-dominant leadership image gets you lion-like wages. Mission-dominant leadership narratives makes you just one temporary goose among many, paid according to how long you actually stay at the apex of the V. Agility dominant leadership narratives are the worst, since your claim to doing effective leadering might vanish with the next change of direction.

Not only is a clearly painted picture of the future likely to become wildly inaccurate within minutes, it also exposes to rival twitterings a risk surface of exploitable predictability, while simultaneously constraining the creativity of your own twittering.