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March 4 - March 14, 2018
This is breaking smart: an economic actor using early mastery of emerging technological leverage — in this case a young individual using software leverage — to wield disproportionate influence on the emerging future.
How and why you should choose the Promethean option, despite its disorienting uncertainties and challenges, is the overarching theme of Season 1. It is a choice we call breaking smart, and it is available to almost everybody in the developed world, and a rapidly growing number of people in the newly-connected developing world.
Putting these four characteristics together, we get a picture of messy, emergent progress that economist Bradford Delong calls “slouching towards utopia“: a condition of gradual, increasing quality of life available, at gradually declining cost, to a gradually expanding portion of the global population.
authoritarian high modernism is a kind of tunnel vision.
As we will see in upcoming essays, enhanced information availability and lowered friction can make any field hacker-friendly.
While the details, assumptions and scope of applicability of these different statements vary, they all amount to leaving the future as free and unconstrained as possible,
In other words, true north in software is often the direction that combines ambiguity and evidence of fertility in the most alluring way: the direction of maximal interestingness.
patrick needs to podcast w Venkat
A good discussion of the application of maneuver warfare concepts for business environments can be found in Chet Richards’ excellent book, Certain to Win.
Science fiction writer Douglas Adams reduced the phenomenon to a set of three sardonic rules from the point of view of users of technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
