Our Silly Story was our first introduction to this work. It was meant to describe on the largest scale the problem our new technology poses. It was trying to illuminate the problem of the century.
But framing things on the largest scale renders issues too black and white. When lightning illuminates a landscape, the flash washes out all color. To navigate the transitional era the shading must be judged subtly.
So now we are going to describe a stance more appropriate for our own time. As I said earlier, this book steps into its material using three introductions: one about the fight that will occupy this century, the second about the fight of this decade, and the last about the fight for this year. This is the second in the series, seeking to paint the picture in the middle distance. Having thrown down our gauntlet, we now qualify our challenge. We seek to soften it and place it in our own time. We ask: how should we think about the battles in which we are now engaged?
To answer that question let us ask another. Famously, in the rap opera about Hamilton, at critical moments we pull back from Hamilton’s perspective into that of Aaron Burr, the true narrator. Burr begins as Hamilton’s friend, but ends his mortal enemy. We watch Burr slowly going mad with fury and envy. Nowhere is this more dramatic than the juncture Burr describes thus: “Decisions are happening over dinner. Two Virginians and an immigrant walk into a room… And here’s the pièce de résistance: No one else was in // The room where it happened.” As he continues, he reveals the source of his growing hatred of Hamilton: “I wanna be in the room where it happens // I’ve got to be in the room where it happens.” Hamilton is on the rise; Burr feels shut out.
Another Level of Ambition…
Something is strange about Burr’s furious envy. There are many things to which an ambitious person can finagle admittance through persistence fueled by envious wrath: a country club, or an exclusive resort, or a college, or even, as our recent president has demonstrated, the Oval Office. But demanding admittance to the “room where it happens” is another level of ambition.
Trump illustrates the problematic aspect of such an undertaking. The Oval Office certainly has a happening aura: a feel of authority; a hush-voiced reverence assumed by those who enter; and a long and storied history of past consequential happenings. But even a room like that—even a room premier among all rooms in the happening department—if occupied by a sufficiently lead-footed clunker of a leader, ceases to be a room where happening happens.
It becomes a room where congressional leaders hem and haw about advancing their own party leader’s agenda. A room where cabinet members steal directives off their leader’s desk in hopes that he’ll forget about them. And not in vain. Where the generals who are supposedly bound to carry out the orders of their commander in chief promise to… “study the question.” When even generals react to direct orders by “studying questions,” there is serious trouble in the happening department.1
Made Possible By…
For, you see, happeningness is not really a property of the room. Fancy, happening-seeming rooms can turn into big nothing-burgers. And nothing-burger rooms sometimes go down in history as the site of tremendous happenings.
After all, the room referenced by Burr’s song wasn’t a special room. It was just an ordinary dining room in Jefferson’s private home. The only thing special was the people in it. And their relationship.
It isn’t the room that makes for happening, it is the people. If a person doesn’t have what it takes, no matter how stupendous and shocking their achievement in gaining admittance to a storied place, happening doesn’t happen.
The goal “I want to be in the room where it happens!”, taken literally, is the wrong goal. A more precise (if less dramatic) version would be: “I want to make the room where I am into the room where it happens!” Of course, wanting this is not enough, by itself, to succeed. But there is no hope to succeed without at least first seeing the goal that way.
And if one looks at that goal seriously, one has to admit a few more painful consequences. The first is that one has to pick very carefully the other people in the room. And the criterion is different than for less perilous endeavors. For a heartfelt chat, one needs a trusted confidant; for a dinner party, conversationalists; for a conspiracy, true believers. A political rally requires vocal supporters; the overthrow of a government, those capable of violence; but the room where it happens needs something else. It needs a worst enemy. A good worst enemy.
A Good Worst Enemy.
Why an enemy? Well, first, because the room cannot have many people. Too many people guarantees nothing will happen. Second, for whatever deal that is struck to stick, much hard work must be done to convert opponents to at least grudging acceptance. So one must invite those who wield the most influence over one’s bitterest opponents. Only worst enemies have such power.
For instance, Hamilton wanted a federal financial system that would assume state debts. There was widespread opposition to this plan throughout the South. For one, Southern states had already paid their debts. For another, the plan was designed to foster manufacturing in the North, a goal hardly beloved to the agricultural South. For the plan to stick, this widespread opposition needed to be placated.
In other words, after striking the deal with Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison had hard work to do. They had to face those furious that the deal had been made at all. They had to justify their choices to those open to compromise but unhappy with the particular concessions. The job of winning support for the deal from its most implacable opponents was no small burden.
Jefferson and Madison were better suited to the task than anyone else in the world. For that reason, they were the ones Hamilton wanted in that room. Even if they were his worst enemies.
No: not even if they were his worst enemies. Because they were his worst enemies. For this purpose, only worst enemies will do. Only enemies can make a deal, sell a deal, and make it stick. Only enemies can make happening happen.
Another Painful Reality
Facing this painful reality leads us to another. Think about the conversation Burr imagined happening in the room.2 It isn’t about Hamilton’s plan, or, in fact, anything about Hamilton’s concerns at all. Instead, it is only about what the Virginians want. Burr imagines Madison saying “wouldn’t you like to work a little closer to home?” Jefferson replies “Actually I would. Well, I propose the Potomac.” The imagined conversation focused exclusively on the potential improvement to the lives of Hamilton’s enemies if they accepted the deal.
Yes, I’ll Fight…
Contrast this story with the liberal rhetoric of the 2020 election season.3 Candidates are vying to tout their bona fides as aggressive defenders of the people against the depredations of the wealthy. They promise to “feel the people’s pain.” They promise to fight for the dispossessed. Elizabeth Warren told of a woman who had walked miles to come to her event. The woman had neither a car, nor a job, nor a prospect for either. She begged Warren to fight for her. As Warren tells it, her answer—“Yes, I’ll fight”—were the three words that led her to run for office.
This story is inspiring, for sure. And yet, one can’t help worrying that it sounds… amateur. After all, would happening have happened if Hamilton had spent that dinner hour talking about the pain of the dispossessed? Would happening have happened if he had spent it talking about how he’d fight for the people’s interests? Would happening have happened if he had take a Warren-style stance of shouting about structural inequality?
Sounds Amateur?
Of course, one can always object: “amateur compared to what?” I agree with the opinions of the recent article “I Want to Live in Elizabeth Warren’s America” which says “Three months ago, when Warren outlined her plan for cleaving the economic dominance of large technology companies… I planned to write about [the flaws in her approach], but I was beaten by a wave of other tech pundits with similar reservations. But then, in the discussion that followed, I realized what a service Warren had done, even if I disagreed with her precise approach… For a moment, it almost felt like I was living in a country where adults discuss important issues seriously. Wouldn’t that be a nice country to live in?”
Still, the bar is upsettingly low. America was founded by leaders who didn’t merely discuss ideas languidly and then self-consciously congratulate themselves for doing so. They engaged with them urgently, acted quickly, and fully grappled4 with the challenges of their time. We aren’t even beginning to live up to the example they set.
Happening Happened…
Hamilton was fighting for ideals that were, in their day, akin to Warren’s. We tend to remember those Virginians as cuddly idealists. After all, Jefferson is of “we hold these truths to be self-evident” fame, while Madison lives in renown for the design of the Constitution.
But for all that, the Virginians were as much defenders of structural inequality as any of the so-called robber barons of our era. And Hamilton was as much a representative of the pain of the dispossessed as any of the current Democratic field. He was a penniless bastard from the Bahamas. He hoped to fashion America into a land of opportunity—at a time when that outcome was still far from certain.
Our founding fathers are so mythologized that we forget the danger of their battles. We also forget the uncertainty. Since we know so well how it all turned out, we forget that it might not have. We might not have gotten New York City and Washington, D.C—and everything they represent.
Remember, the greatness of America wasn’t preordained. It might seem a coincidence that the storied room just happened to be situated in the greatest country in the world. But causation may go the other way: America is now great because it once hosted that particular room. After all, at the time America was a tiny, weak, undistinguished backwater. Happening put it on a path to greatness.
So we can’t assume that America will repeat its performance as catalyst of grand happenings. Maybe such a feat needs the “young, scrappy and hungry:” that is to say, qualities possessed only by an undistinguished backwater on the make. But this work holds out the hope that greatness has not rendered America hopelessly sclerotic. We hope latent energy can be reawakened.
… Repeatedly.
Despite their differences, somehow our founders made happening happen. They did it not once but twice. The storied dinner party was the second time Hamilton had fought with Madison. The first was over the design of the Constitution. Though they worked together and published the Federalist Papers under a common pseudonym, they had distinctly different philosophies. Madison pushed for checks and balances to limit power and thwart its exercise. Hamilton pushed in the other direction, for an empowered executive who could ensure the effective exercise of policy. The durability of the government they designed is a direct result of this creative rivalry.
The world is filled with bitter enemies. Everywhere there are those whose economic interests are so fundamentally opposed that they can do nothing but fight. And, if their fight gets sufficiently bitter, even kill each other and die. Enmity is common. But this rivalry was different. It was creative.
An Exceptional Rivalry…
In our romanticization of memory, we should not forget that they were enemies. We should not forget that by the time of the story Burr relates, their politics could not have been more opposed. Yet for all this real rivalry, they still managed to work together effectively. Every time they fought, eventually they got in a room together to make a deal. And every time they got in a room together they not only made a deal, they made a deal that stuck. They followed through and sold their compromise to the world. Those deals turned into major structural foundations of our society.
This was an exceptional rivalry. Most such rivalries merely throw off hatred. Some even throw off violence. This one threw off structure instead. There was no Warren-style fulmination against inequality. Yet, arguably, the structures they built did more for the dispossessed of the world than any other set of deals in history. Their fight threw off the foundations for new hope, new wealth, and a new world. These weren’t ordinary enemies.
Made Possible By…
How did they do it? Not only that, how did they do it so quickly? They worked with amazing alacrity: these deals were made in 1787 and 1790 respectively. That is to say, about half a century after the start of the industrial revolution. If our new industrial revolution started in the 1960s, we’d have reached the half-century mark around 2010. Yet no such comprehensive deal exists; nor even yet the idea of one; nor even yet the worldview which would give rise to such a deal.
Another consideration should make us marvel particularly at their relative speed: happening like this does not happen without preparation. Think about Hamilton at that fateful dinner party with Jefferson and Madison. The deal he struck that night was one of the great victories for the dispossessed strivers of the world. Does that mean he spent the dinner talking about the pain and hopes of those such as himself? Did he insist his enemies feel his pain?
Feeling His Enemy’s Pain…
Absolutely not. If any pain was discussed, it wasn’t his own. As Jefferson described the discussion later, they did discuss someone’s pain: “It was observed… as the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states, something should be done to soothe them…” Two years later, Jefferson didn’t even remember who had so observed. That meant the tone of the dinner was sufficiently cordial it might even have been Hamilton who had brought it up. It mattered so little, Jefferson forgot. Over dinner, Hamilton wasn’t insisting his enemies feel his pain. Instead, he was feeling theirs. And he was looking for ways to remedy it.
While Analyzing His Own…
How was it possible to so sympathize with his enemies while still effectively representing his own interests? It was possible because he came prepared. He hadn’t just felt his own pain. He had thought about it. He had analyzed it. He had an idea of its source. He had devised a remedy. That, he transformed into a proposal for action. Included in that proposal was a means by which enemies could aid him. This, they complained, was a bitter pill. But Hamilton was ready to talk about ways to help it go down easier. He was ready to make a deal.
All this takes enormous preparation. The musical about Hamilton’s life asks the question: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” It wasn’t so he could later be celebrated on the Broadway stage. With a bunch of kids to support, no inherited wealth, and a profession to ply, it wasn’t like he naturally had huge supplies of extra time and energy. Yet he made the time. Somehow. What was driving him? He was determined to make happening happen. To that end, he did what needed to be done.
Through Massive Preparation.
It wasn’t just that he had to prepare for the meeting. He had to prepare the world to make the preparation for the meeting even possible. The institutions he was trying to build, the constitution and the financial system, were both conceptually and physically complex. And they were novel, unlike anything that had been built before. He couldn’t expect the meeting to be devoted to explaining the vision or its implementation.
Instead, his proposal had to already be well understood by the world at large before he could even try to convince his enemies to support it. So first he had to push into the world the vision and its rationale. By the time he arrived at this important meeting, these ideas had to already be well known.
To give an idea of how far away we are from this level of preparedness, let us ask a funny question. Are we ready to feel our enemy’s pain?
Are We Prepared…
After all, Elizabeth Warren-style activism could inflict considerable damage. For all that her enemies are rich and powerful, they are not invulnerable. When I was interning at Google, a manager who had come there from SGI said to me: “This may all seem like fun. But that’s because there is plenty of money. If the money disappears, it can be… bad.” For a moment, he looked haunted. One might note that the storied Googleplex occupies the buildings which Silicon Graphics built in its heyday. They were architectural statements of its optimism and pride.
[TODO: show picture taken at Google of Indy?]
Google’s director of real estate describes the company’s siting strategy: “We’ve been the world’s best hermit crabs.” Google lives in SGI’s broken ruins. The latter’s end was ignominious. And fast. Their fancy new headquarters were proudly unveiled in 1997. They handed them over to Google in 2003. At the last, SGI traded below the value of its real estate.5 One can still see the SGI colors—Iris, Indigo, Octane6 and Crimson—on the powder coated towers which rise above the Googleplex. Below them sprout, like optimistic mushrooms, the courtyard umbrellas in Google’s characteristic child crayon palette.
To Feel Our…
The crayon-colored umbrellas, as declarations of Google’s identity, seem, to my eyes, disconcertingly impermanent. It is as if the resident crab has barely bothered to brand its shell. The impression is of a kindergarten class on a campout. The cautionary tone set by the purple-teal emblem of the dead behemoth is the stronger statement. It seems to be a reminder, like the burned-out churches preserved in European cities, of the possibility of total destruction. To those who can hear, it whispers the message: “Don’t forget. Markets shift. Complacency is death. Don’t forget.” These tech companies may fly high. But when they fall, they fall far, fast—and hard.
Now, one shouldn’t overstate the suffering in all this. After all, the ex-SGI manager may have lost his job. But he got a new one, just as good. Possibly even better. He may even have been given a new office in almost the same spot as his old one! Often, in these cases, the team stays together too. It isn’t uncommon to hear of long-term professional collaborations that weather the death of multiple companies that host them. One wonders if the only thing that changes is the company name on the façade. The façade isn’t even repainted: that would be too much work.
All this is hardly comparable with the pain of factory workers who lose jobs whose quality they can never hope to match. Maybe the SGI manager’s account of his trauma was over-dramatized. We must grant the real pain of struggling in vain to steady the trajectory of a company that was flying itself into the ground. But only the company died, after all. The people were just fine. Perhaps they were even set, maybe even better than ever. Cue the small violins.
Enemies’ Pain?
For all that, an aggressive agenda such as Warren’s can cause pain worth taking seriously. My introduction suggested skepticism about the worship of technical progress as a thing in itself. Even so, great engineering has been conceived under those brightly colored umbrellas. Eventually society will be glad of those advances; just as it was eventually glad of Haber’s breakthrough. For all the trauma society may go through adjusting to new technology, progress is still progress.
Warren’s proposal is likely to cause exactly the kind of market shifts that doomed SGI. Strangely, the body politic seems to have pivoted spastically from blithe lack of concern about the uncontrolled power of tech, to equally blithe lack of concern about the damage they can do with an ill-considered response.
Of course, any response, even a well-considered one, would most likely do some damage. Company-killing market shifts are common even in the absence of political action. So it is hardly likely that even carefully crafted regulation wouldn’t put somebody out of business. Or, if it doesn’t, it could be blamed for it anyway.
A modern-day Jefferson or Madison would have their work cut out for them convincing their supporters to get behind almost any deal. But even so, there are people out there who, like Jefferson and Madison, know they are better off negotiating a deal than letting things slide until they are forced to accept one they may like much less.
Warren’s Enemies…
For instance, someone recently leaked some unscripted comments by Mark Zuckerberg. He was asked “with the rise of politicians like Senator Warren… how personally worried are you about regulators coming in and breaking up Facebook?” He answered: “if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge… Look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.” He complained the proposed remedy would not solve the identified problems. Nor did it effectively address the underlying discontent.
But after all that, he said: “And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government… it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things.” He had prefaced his comments with the observation “as someone running a company that operates in a lot of different countries, I have to say one of the things that I love and appreciate about our country the most is that we have a really solid rule of law, which is very different from a lot of other places around the world.”
Worry Even Winning…
He continued: “I at least believe, I think, there are real issues. I don’t think that the antitrust remedies are going to solve them. But I understand that if we don’t help address those issues and help put in place a regulatory framework where people feel like there’s real accountability, and the government can govern our sector, then yeah, people are just going to keep on getting angrier and angrier. And they’re going to demand more extreme measures, and, eventually, people just say, ’Screw it, take a hammer to the whole thing.’ And that’s when the rule of law comes in, and I’m very grateful that we have it.”
One wonders about the last comment: Is he envisioning that under a future Warren administration, Facebook would first win a major lawsuit? But later, faced with a backlash and widespread popular revulsion, would appeal to that same administration for protection under the law? As he observes, that might well, indeed, “suck for them.” It might “suck for us” too. It is not clear how the prestige of the rule of law itself would fare if whipped around that way.
Would “Suck For Them”
As Zuckerberg noted, it is hardly fair to expect him to negotiate his own destruction. Diminishment, possibly; destruction, no. Nor is it fair to expect him to accept a remedy which no one believes actually remedies the identified problem. Nor is it fair to expect, in a time of rising popular anger, that he accept a remedy that doesn’t either identify or redress the root cause of that anger.
One might expect me to say next that this book is meant to produce a better challenge to Zuckerberg than Warren’s. But it isn’t. Remember, Hamilton’s preparation for his dinner party with the Virginians proceeded in two stages. First, he explained to the world his idea of the problem. It included a proposal for a complicated new institutional structure. He spent a long time working with his allies to design that structure, to explain its rationale, to build support for the idea, and so on. Only once it was a clear proposal, and had considerable support from his allies, did he go to his opponents to ask for just enough more support to push it over the top. And he didn’t even ask for it without having something valuable to offer in trade. That’s the way a professional does such a thing.
Under anything like normal circumstances, that kind of trajectory would be my plan. Certainly when I laid out the structure for this book, that was the idea. It was to be addressed to my allies, to introduce the idea of the kind of structure that would be necessary to properly regulate the tech industry. Additionally, before I even got to that, it would first lay out the worldview that informed the design. This book lays out hundreds of pages of worldview before it even starts to talk about problems or their remedies. There is even a long chapter about sanity first.
To my eyes, we need to be thinking clearly—not just about the world but also about our own feelings—before we rush to action. With that much foundational work still to do, I wasn’t intending to address my potential opponents at all. I thought it would be obvious that nobody is ready. A good enemy is a terrible thing to waste. One doesn’t hassle them without proper preparation.
- Incidentally, this potential for failure is why I’d never want to be President. I am not asking for your vote, and never will. Think about it: half a president’s time spent in rooms with a huge history of happeningness. The other half is spent face to face with the consequences of failing to make things happen. A president tours disaster sites, comforts the parents of children lost, and talks on the phone with widows of those who gave their life for their country. With a life like that, the purportedly happening room would be maddening. At night it would whisper: “People depended on you. I gave you all the tools. And look what you did with them. Nothing. You failed them. You failed them all.” It would take me apart. It would be a recipe for madness. ↩︎
- Incidentally, there is no historical record of this conversation, only the results. All we have is a description written later by Jefferson: “It was observed, I forget by which of them [i.e., Madison or Hamilton] that as the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states, something should be done to soothe them; and the removal of the seat of government to the [Potomac] was a just measure, and would probably be a popular one with them, and would be a proper one to follow the assumption [of debts].” Besides this account, we only have this imagined scenario. It is, nonetheless, plausible. ↩︎
- which, as this is being written, is currently heating up. ↩︎
- Or, arguably, not. They didn’t deal with the problem of slavery, after all. The problems they left unexamined still led to disaster. It’s upsetting to realize that for all they did so much better than we are doing, they still didn’t do well enough to avoid a civil war. ↩︎
- This memory is vivid to me because my brother worked at SGI from the end of its golden era through much of its decline. He wasn’t a manager, however. Perhaps the experience informed his commitment to never go into management. ↩︎
- SGI was a pioneer of cool colors for computer cases. Octane, the only color name not self-explanatory, is teal-green. Whatever brand manager gave a green light to the names Iris, Indigo and Crimson must have decided “The Teal” just didn’t sound sexy enough for a supercomputer. When juxtaposed with Google’s primary colors, their secondary choices seem staid and corporate. But in their time they carried an analogous jazzy, unrepressed vibe. They were just as much pushing the boundaries in a more muted era. The computer named Crimson looked so cool it was granted a cameo in Jurassic park. Amazingly, the shade now seems understated when viewed next to Google’s chosen red. ↩︎
