(2017-02-27) Dhh Exponential Growth Devours And Corrupts

DHH: Exponential Growth devours and corrupts

*The goal of the virus is to spread as fast as it can and corrupt as many other cells as possible. How on earth did such a debauched zest become the highest calling for a whole generation of entrepreneurs?

Through systemic incentives, that’s how. And no incentive is currently stronger than that of THE POTENTIAL.*

This trend didn’t start yesterday

It’s companies like Salesforce.com that have shown just how long you can live on potential alone. Just how large and sprawling you can become without ever bothering to show much if any profits

Have you tried Angry Birds lately? It’s a swamp of dark patterns. All extractive logic meant to trick you into another In-App Purchase.

Principles are no match for the long-term corrosion of market realities and expectations.

But back to the incentives. It’s not just those infused by venture capital timelines and return requirements, but also the likes of tax incentives favoring capital gains over income.

The fancy word for that is fiduciary duty. To grow as fast as inhumanely possible is not just a goal, but a responsibility. A moral obligation to THE MARKET

The true puppeteer behind this homogenization of startup aspirations is diversification theory. Decisions are not driven by what’s good for a single company, its employees, and its customers. No, it’s what’s good for the basket

The key measurement is ENGAGEMENT. Who cares about the virtue of the endeavor, as long as your product is maximally addictive

startup accelerators that take the raw ingredients, preferably pattern-matched look-alikes of Zuckerberg, and turn them into securitized batches of startups. Whole tranches of burgeoning businesses packaged into Spring and Fall cohorts.

But what is a conscientious objector to do? Time waits for no one, and only the Luddites think that their home too won’t one day soon be configured with BUY NOW buttons for all the beloved BRANDS

Technology isn’t the only industry that grapples and struggles with growth, so we can learn from studying others suffering the same pressures. Take the drug business.

we reward the explorers with a Patent Monopoly when they strike gold. But it’s not a permanent one. There’s a time limit

What if we thought about how we could apply some of that to the world of software? How can we turn more of the Twitters and Facebooks and Googles into generics? What shifts in underlying technology and cost do we need to hit to make it feasible to run something like Twitter on Wikipedia’s budget (and fund it by donations rather than ads)?

We’ve made this transition at the infrastructural level, to some extent. Technological and algorithmic advances from closed-source software have been turned into generics via open source.

the automatron class. People treated as literal cogs in transportation and delivery machines

And this new world order is being driven by a tiny cabal of monopolies. So commercial dissent is near impossible.

This essay is a follow-up to RECONSIDER