Post on 15-May-2015
description
Game of Pickaxes
The past, present and future of creative
destruction in America
First book, 2011
http://tempobook.com
Second book, planned: 2014
http://gameofpickaxes.com
What is this game you speak of?
“This is a game changer”“Level playing field”“See three moves ahead”“Let’s fix the game by…”
Asymmetric games
with evolving
complexity
Games of Asymmetry• 2-20• Moral hazard• Principal-agent situation• Pickaxe markets• Bringing a knife to a gun fight• Limited liability• Patent regimes• “Heads I win, tails you lose” structures
Human range of variation gives you natural evolution rate
Humans+TOOLS range of variation gives you technological creative destruction
Frequen
cyFr
equen
cy
Height, weight, etc… “Olympics” variables
Wealth, weaponry, information
Looks more like an ECOSYSTEM than a SINGLE SPECIES
Frequen
cy
Wealth, weaponry, informationSpecies sizes, other attributes
Why don’t we just kill the damn fat-tail freaks before they get too big?
Why don’t the fat-tail freaks kill the rest of us?
How to model this evolution?
• Mokyr: Cumulative path dependence• McLuhan: “extended human”• Stephenson: different species (Morlocks, Eloi)• Marx: Good vs. Evil (also, other religions)• Dawkins: extended phenotype with memetics• Various social scientists: organizations
(Fukuyama, Nozick, Rawls, Foster…)• Diamond, Kurzweil: Collpase/Singularity models• Rao: all of the above
Technological Species
Recursively homeostatic bags of different sorts of tool-extended humans defined by internal realtechnik détente
Ecosystem types
Interacting species in a given technological ecosystem tend to have a shared “flavor” based on the characteristic “tooling”
Barbarianecosystems
Civilized ecosystemsRentier
ecosystems
Segmentary
Complex
Stratified and decoupled
Ecosystem type determines the kinds of games played
Veblen - Marx Model
UnstableFrontier Games(tragedy)
UnstableRentier Games(farce)
Fair
Fair
“Unfair”
Barbarian Class
Leisure Class
Dynamically quasi-stableCivilization Games(tragicomic)
(assuming an endless frontier)
?
CIVILIZATION TOOLS
“Give a man a pickaxe and he will eat for a lifetime. Give a man a pickaxe shop and his descendants will eat for free forever.”
BARBARIAN TOOLS“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”
RENTIER TOOLS
“Should I use a fork or spoon for the caviar?”
NEW TOOLSEMBODY
NEW INTELLIGENCE
AGING TOOLSDESTROY
INTELLIGENCE
frontier closesCain kills Abel
New frontier opensAbel kills Cain
About 250 yearsLast time
Human lifespan80 years
Com
ple
xit
y o
f C
ivili
zati
on
al
“Tool B
ase
”
Time
Pure “Frontier” and “Rentier” periods are extremely short-lived.
Most people spend most of their lives playing civilization games.
TOOLSMake and BreakCIVILIZATION*
*EXACTLY equivalent to “Medium is the Message”
All TOOLS are POLITICAL…
…Some are just more civilized than others
Barbarian or Civilized?• Medieval armor vs. Roman armor• English longbow vs. crossbow• Pattern lathe vs. regular lathe• WordPress vs. printing press• Village clock towers versus pocket watches• Amazon Kindle vs. paper books• Self-checkout vs. human cashier at grocery
store• Commodity money vs. fiat money• Lean startups vs. bootstrapping
?
CIVILIZATION TOOLS codify a de facto
ASYMMETRIC BALANCE OF POWER
NEW INSTITUTIONSturn an
ASYMMETRIC BALANCE OF POWERinto a systemic
REALTECHNIK DÉTENTE
This is SOCIAL ORDER
It defines “NORMAL”
In America nearly every man has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all-pervading speculativeness which we tried to illustrate in “The Gilded Age”. It is a characteristic which is both bad and good, for both the individual and the nation. Good, because it allows neither to stand still, but drives both for ever on, towards some point or other which is a-head, not behind nor at one side. Bad, because the chosen point is often badly chosen, and then the individual is wrecked; the aggregations of such cases affects the nation, and so is bad for the nation. Still, it is a trait which is of course better for a people to have and sometimes suffer from that to be without.
?
Mark Twain1835 - 1910
Huckleberry Finn1884
All kinds of awesome
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court1889
Pretty decent
Gilded Age: A Tale of Today1873
All kinds of awful
Future Nausea
When the manufacture of new “normal” isn’t keeping pace with the rate of change
Manufactured Normalcy FieldTM
In 1873 the…
was collapsing
How do you cope?
John D. Rockefeller1839 - 1937 J. P. Morgan
1837 - 1913
Thomas Blanchard1788 - 1864
PICK TWO
BEAUTY
MONEY
SENSE
Des
troy
ers
of the
OLD
NO
RM
AL
Creators of the
NEW
NO
RM
AL
Physical and SocialNORMALCY ENGINEERS
PICK TWO
BEAUTY
MONEY
SENSE
PICK TWO
BEAUTY
MONEY
SENSE
Dennis Ritchie1941 - 2011
Jeff Bezos1964 --
Steve Jobs1955 -- 2011
Future Nausea
Realtechnik Equilibrium
The new normal does not just emerge.
It is designed.
Folkways*
…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.
David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed* UX elements of “manufactured normal”
speech ways, building ways, family ways, gender ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways, learning ways, food ways, dress ways, sport ways, work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways, social ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways.
Oral, farms, extended, traditional, missionary, parenting, traditional, patriarchal, by disease, protestant ethic, folktales, home schooling, local-agrarian, utilitarian, unorganized, 80% farm and free-agent, local/natural, LAND RENTS, nobility-based, class-based, Wild West, moral authority, guns.
Written, townhouses, nuclear, feminine mystique, Kinsey, television, fashion, SSN, Anglo, “retirement”, by aging+lifestyle, “New Age”, science fiction, K-12+4, factory-farmed, mass fashion, organized, paycheck, national time, TECH RENTS, talent based, homogeneous, police, lobbying and voting, free press.
Google Translate, couchsurfing, gay parents, LGBT, OkCupid/50 shades, iPad, Twitter handle, mini-retirements, by choice+economics, religious ways, hacker-lore, TED, Paleo, Hipster clothing, World of Warcraft, coworking, atemporality, wealth ways, Klout, subcultural, antivirus, Twitter, bitcoin/Net Neutrality.
17
80
19
79
20
25
*
In Kindles Spring 2014
http://gameofpickaxes.com