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