Patch Notes #11

Degens, modernity, bugfixes and performance improvements

The vibe of the thing

The name of this Substack, Speedrunning Towards Bethlehem, is nod towards Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is a collection of essays (and titular essay) from 1968 that captures the turbulence of the 60’s. Ever since I read them, nothing has managed to condense the tone of a era quite like Didion. I’m not sure what precisely is missing today, but when I find something that glimmers with a hint of the absurdity of life today, I file it away in a folder called “modernity”. This includes the 2011 Tumblr Yelping with Cormac which features a review in the style of Cormac McCarthy of the gleaming Apple Store in San Francisco:

What were all these people waitin for. He told me it was for a apple phone or some such. I said dont these folks have telephones already? He told me they all had apple phones but it was the older one. I asked him what would happen to the old apple phones. He told me about a fella named Craig had a list and everbody sold their old telephones on it. A telephone sellin list.

Well I told him that all made about as much sense as a horse with two heads and he laughed like that was the funniest thing he ever did hear. Said he was goin to twinkle it. I left before he said anythin else that didnt make no sense and I went to the nearest bar and ordered a double whiskey and sat there drinkin it. I guess I sat there for a long time. Wonderin if when Rome was fallin all the Romans was standin in line waitin to get that new chariot or the like. The barbarians at the gates and them just standin there waitin.

He was ahead of his time—the barbarians would not arrive for another decade. But here, post-2020, the vibes were finally way off, and my “modernity” folder fills up faster every day.

Anyway, here is the latest addition:

Degen communism

Here’s Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum—which is definitely not a security—proposing degen communism, a hybrid of dynamic chaos and emphasis on social good:

What does the internet of the 2020s - not the "respectable" internet of Substack, not a hypothetical version of Twitter where the bad people and somehow only the bad people are censored, but the real internet as it exists today - fundamentally want? The answer is, it wants chaos. It does not want gentle debates between professionals who "disagree on policy but agree on civics". It wants decisive action and risk, in all its glory. Not a world with genteel respect for principles, where even the loser peacefully accepts defeat because they understand that even if they lose one day they may still win the next, but a world with great warriors who are willing to bet their entire life savings and reputation on one single move that reflects their deepest conviction on what things need to be done. And it wants a world where the brave have the freedom to take such risks.

At the same time, the general welfare of humanity demands a greater focus on the common good. We've seen too many instances of epic collapses, orchestrated by failed machinations of the elites, where the common people end up screwed but the elites remain immune or even benefit.

His view of what makes something “degen” outside of crypto roughly equates to “dynamic”. For example Harberger taxes on intellectual property:

This would work as follows. For a copyright or patent to be valid, whoever owns it must publicly register a value, which we will call that copyright or patent's "exclusivity price". They must then pay 2% of the exclusivity price annually in tax (they can change the exclusivity price at any time). Anyone can pay the owner the exclusivity price, and get an unlimited right to also use (and if they wish sub-license, including to the entire world) that copyright or patent. The original owner would retain the right to use in all cases; others can gain permission to use either by getting the original owner's permission, or by paying the owner the exclusivity price.

I don’t know enough to comment on whether I think his ideas have merit, but I think he’s right that “there is a widespread feeling throughout the Western world that all of our political ideologies are outdated, and are increasingly failing us”. It reminds of what I felt reading Ted Gioia’s piece from last week’s Patch Notes: We can mostly agree that things do not seem to be going quite how we would like, but it’s unclear what anyone is proposing we should do about it. At least Vitalik is trying.¹

More on dopamine culture

Speaking of Gioia’s piece, Jonathan Haidt also wrote a recent article on a very related topic around child/teen use of phones, which has a bunch of interesting bits.

On cable news contributing to the rise in safety concerns and associated overprotection:

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears.

Teens apparently spend five hours a day on social media platforms, which does sound like a lot, but then US adults are spending five hours a day watching TV, which seems barely better:

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average.

And evidently a majority of students (sampled in a study, caveat emptor) would prefer to live in a world without TikTok or Instagram, but are trapped in the mutually-assured destruction world of social media proliferation and unable to opt out because everyone else is there:

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes—58 percent for each app.

Haidt proposes some norms, such as no social media before age 16 at the end of the piece to try and address the issues. He suggests that we can make inroads at the community level to tackle the collective-action problem of everyone wanting out but no one individually being willing to exit, but I have low hopes that there are communities with enough agreement on the issue (and solutions) to cross some critical threshold. And it’s not like communities have hard social boundaries—except those like the Amish, who are presumably fine. If one school district implements a policy, and the neighboring one doesn’t, kids are still going to interact with each other at sports games, the mall, or whatever it is that kids do these days. The real world is messy, and the internet knows no bounds.

One bit I did find amusing was on how newer generations are supposedly more risk averse:

In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

I mean I don’t know. The Forbes 30 Under 30 is famously a “pipeline to prison”. Between SBF, Elizabeth Holmes, and Charlie Javice, maybe we have the opposite problem?

Miscellany

• Here’s a really really fantastic video explaining on GPTs work:

• Forget social media, Mambo No. 5 played with bike horns is actually what the internet was made for:

Have a great weekend!

1. Purely from a branding perspective I wish there was a better term than degen “communism” though, which has been poisoned by our friends the CCP (and the Soviets before them).