The empire of ideas
It's 2023, and many people have never lived beyond their basic needs or primal impulses. The majority of us are no longer hunting or fishing to put food on the table. Alarmingly, a significant number of us don’t even step outside to buy fresh food, opting instead to press a few buttons on our not-so-smartphones. This triggers a chain reaction, setting a less fortunate individual racing to ensure our keto burrito arrives on time. In addition, an increasing percentage of our available attention is spent on virtual realities, or on digital platforms we paradoxically label as social media, despite their tendency to foster antisocial behavior.
A common characteristic of these severe lifestyle disruptions in the past decade is their origin: they all trace back to one place, geographically speaking. This is none other than the hallowed Silicon Valley, the birthplace of a significant portion of the most revolutionary developments in recent times. However, I'm not going to discuss the detrimental effects of Instagram and Facebook on society. Instead, I'll focus on a largely overlooked consequence of Silicon Valley's dominance over the world of ideas: hyper-rationalism1.
It's no secret that the largest and most influential tech scene in the world resides in San Francisco and California, where most globally-scaling start-ups are born. Some might argue that their Chinese and Asian counterparts have reached larger markets. While this is true, the original business models and innovative supply chain methods have predominantly originated from a tech-bro paradise known as Silicon Valley. The crux of innovation in the computing world and the dematerialized economy is largely centered in this small parcel of land called California, for better or worse. At this point, Silicon Valley has been the leading spot for business knowledge creation over the last decade. However, I don't believe this holds true for general scientific and social knowledge. The former comes from many other places, and the latter has not demonstrated a strong capacity to spread to most parts of the world2.
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Silicon Valley is the birthplace of countless groundbreaking innovations that reach far beyond the confines of software. However, the central feature of these Silicon Valley-born innovations is their reliance on computation. They rest on lines of code, circuits imprinted on hardware, and computational systems capable of performing an incredible number of calculations. These systems bring immense computational power right to your fingertips, harness extraordinary network effects, and optimize the delivery of specific code to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. What catapulted Uber to fame was not its profitability, but its ability to be replicated globally at virtually zero cost, unlike traditional taxi companies that were mired in mafia-like business models dependent on fleets of drivers and burdened by stringent regulations.
It’s all about slinging code and algorithms around to make our lives “easier”. Take stuff we hate doing, automate it with fancy code, and bam! – it's like having a little robot helper in your pocket. This is what I call hyper-rationalism. Take Uber again for example, you tap your screen a couple times and you've got a ride. No waving, no whistling, just pure convenience. That's time you're getting back. And that's a win in my book. If a piece of code can give me more free time, that's generally success, plain and simple. But it’s not always the case.
While I'm convinced our brain is an emotional machine making emotionally biased decisions, I also believe some tasks involve a more rational process, at least in part. These tasks can be approached rationally, with the potential to create a programmatic solution or a system that leverages computational power to solve a specific problem. However, these tasks all share one thing in common: they require no creativity, and the main goal is not to elicit emotions. They are utilitarian in nature. In my opinion, this is where the ability to solve problems using systems hits its limits. These tasks don't have anything to do with feelings. They're just trade-based: you want something, you get it. It's all about supply and demand, no emotions involved. They can't give you that jolt of happiness you get when something unexpected or surprising happens. They don't touch on the things in life that you can't measure, like finding a five dollar bill in an old pair of jeans or bumping into an old friend at the supermarket. It's all just cut and dried, no-frills stuff.
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After all, everything consumes time and practically everything can be optimized. Optimization is typically based on certain constraints and metrics, usually relating to freeing up more time for work and profit generation, and to maximizing certain measurable performances. This is where a new generation of startups, addressing social issues dating and social moments like eating, often fail to positively impact society. They reduce many tasks to a few measurable inputs and a mere matter of time. Herein lies the unrealistic nature of startups and the tools they rely on - computers running binary codes. They often overestimate the scope of what they can truly grasp and manage effectively.
During one of my rare trips to social media3, I ran into a seemingly famous tech startup founder peddling her system for a healthy relationship. It was a sort of checklist, a daily discussion of set topics to ensure every important issue was covered, keeping both partners emotionally satisfied. Sounds neat, right? But if you want my opinion: just fuck off with your scripted conversations. Hyper-rationalism hits a wall where the beauty of life - emotions and creativity - begins, where the most messed up things can somehow work beautifully, and most importantly, where things exist just because they do, not to fit into some clever system.
Dating apps completely miss this point. The magic of meeting someone lies in the mystery, but that magic gets nuked when everything is on show. By encouraging people to put up what they want others to see and linking up their Instagram, you're dropping a nuclear bomb on the dating game, killing the whole chance for serendipity, where two people who had no business being together end up falling in love.
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Buying and choosing your food slowly, and cooking it with love is beautiful, and won’t make you inefficient.
I don’t want systems for my emotional life, I embrace my chaos, the screams, the jealousy, and the drama, because they bring memories.
Optimize distraction and watch Netflix series in 1.5X speed, then kill yourself because you are nothing but a zombie, millionaire or not.
One can’t program serendipity, and at the end, life and its inherent mystery always wins. Always.
Long live glorious unpredictability
Love,
Voss
Again, please don’t read this like a binary point of view : I’m not trying to crush everything that comes from SF and LA. In fact, there would not be substack without tech-bros, so thanks for that.
I can't envision a universal social model. Imagine trying to explain to the Danish that dancing is a social thing and that they should do it on the first date, like Cubans do. I mean, have you ever seen a Dane dance? They look like a damn broom.
And always useless.