Hacking Capitalism: Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money.

by Kris Nóva

The most valuable and prized knowledge within the tech industry is much more than the ability to code or craft technology. The ability to apply technology to business is the knowledge that’s most often withheld.

Find hackers who you can trust, and tell one another everything you know.

Thus, we find that women disproportionally carry the burden of collaboration in competitive (capitalist) work cultures.[

Letting those who will be affected by the decision have an opportunity to influence the decision creates a higher likelihood that they’ll respect the decision.

Even a simple task—if executed in collaborative harmony and at scale—can be overwhelmingly powerful. Within

But who defines the task? What about the vast overhead of collaboration? Who defines the mission?

Competition can bring about technical innovation. Collaboration can reinforce this innovation as greater scale as resources are applied to the original innovation.

having ethics in your favor is going to be critical to move you closer to capital.

Corporations build rapport by advertising ethics. When there’s a conflict, profit will always win over ethics.

This code of ethics is somewhat fictitious. This code exists primarily for official record-keeping purposes. This first code is what the tech industry will try to convince you exists.

Diligently noting observations is the first part of effective scientific research. If your goal is to prepare a working ethical model based on reality, that begins with collecting data.

I think that the primary ethical concern in tech is deciding whether the industry is ethically responsible for its actions.

The sentiment that employees hold any ethical responsibility to companies is deceptive and hypocritical.

But in my experience, job-hopping is an extremely strong indicator of future successes.

I’m of the mind that employers have no ethical responsibility to society, so I also think that it’s unreasonable to expect employees to act ethically toward employers.

So if you’re working in tech, I think you make self-interest your top priority.

Haugen illustrated through her testimony and interviews that Facebook knowingly favored profit despite Facebook’s harm to society.

What this means to you in the tech industry is that in any situation where ethics and profit are in contention, the safe bet is to assume that profit will win.

Companies don’t prioritize kindness, compassion, empathy, or humanitarianism anywhere in their ethical models. Capitalism is purely a profit vehicle.

What this means to the tech industry is that if you’re working on a production system, your nearest subcomponent in the machine of capitalism will be the marketing department! Or if you’re in the marketing department, the gears that turns the marketing department will be the production systems that technologists build and maintain.

Closest to capital, then, is the intersection of tech and marketing

Production manufactures products. Marketing brings the products to market. Sales sells products.

An understanding that the goal of a production system is to help to sell things using marketing can simplify the even the most overwhelming distributed compute layer.

It doesn’t matter how badass your production system is—ultimately, production is a vehicle for the sales bros and the marketing department.

tech companies also employee specialists to come up with identify ways to increase the value of their products.

Production systems can be damaged if there aren’t clear definitions and expectations of which subsystem do what.

code probably isn’t intended for anything more than generating profit.

As opposed to what?

A limitation on potential workers and high-value product-manufacturing differentials can yield high compensation. This fact alone is what makes tech such a desirable career path for many technologists.

that health coverage or adequate time off are somehow benefits and not requirements is ethically questionable.

So it’s in your best interest to assume that all debt under capitalism that knowingly enriches its lenders is immoral.

Knowingly excessively enriches sure, but there are legitimate costs to extending credit, and legitimate uses for debt…

Where there’s technical debt, there’s also technical interest: technical usury to the systems.

As technologists and entrepreneurs demonstrate an ability to generate revenue with small initial investments, these initial investments can become quite attractive to anyone looking for a high return. These investments are typically very lucrative. Within the context of the global markets, the tech industry is a fast-paced industry with high risk, and high reward.

Venture Capitalism offers a strong and compelling opportunity to propel an idea to the status of the lite with external funding. Organizations can get more done with a strong team, and some starting funding.

As the company earns more money because of the production cycle, the value of the company is divided by the shares of stock.

Post-economic is a term used to describe a personal financial state where compensation is so high that economic pressures no longer exist.

To be in a position in which the economy no longer has a control or an effect on your life is in many cases a fantasy. The economy will always have some effect on your life, regardless of your wealth.

The elite understand these constructs, and they embrace and celebrate them. I was astonished when I first made the discovery that the elite understood these concepts, understood the consequences, and simply didn’t care.

They seemed to forget about the fact that their wealth came at others' expense.

No. Tech is often creating products out of nothing and well compensating the people who make it.

Production will endlessly cycle through itself time and time again, and new production cycles can be bootstrapped by investment.

Corporations—by design—won’t reward you enough to promote you to the next level in the system.

The reward needed to move closer to the elite has to come through cleverly engineered hacking tactics that are external to your compensation and your traditional work.

There seems to be an ever-present longing for more while never being able to satisfy that need in a world structured around money, labor, and work.

Alienation of labor

In other words, there may be peers in the tech industry who have had a head start in their careers, but in some cases, building can help to offset those head starts.

I’ve built systems for climbing mountains.

If you can build comfortable systems, you’re demonstrating an exceedingly competent understanding of the skill of building.

Make it Make it work Make it work well

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

Systemantics!

tedious planning and preliminary work that goes into the building process.

This is. Building! Engineering is 80 pct comms

Use prototyping as a way to organizationally tiptoe into a project.

At the prototyping phase, the project should not work. The project should be relatively wonky, for lack of a better term. It should work enough to show something is possible. It doesn’t need to be polished.

Definition of Success is a simple way of determining if a system is working.

I often have very simple definitions of success that guides my building process. Some example definitions of success that allow for reliable building: