17776, One year later: July 8, 2018 Snippets
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This week’s themes: the one year anniversary of 17776, one of the most unusual and profound explorations of scarcity and human behavior we’ve ever seen. Plus a deep dive with Cryptomove into the state of moving target defence in 2018.
One year ago during the July 4th holiday, Jon Bois and the creative team at the sports blogging community SB Nation released a new project — we can’t really call it an essay, nor video or any defined form of media — called 17776. It may be the most creative and thought-provoking piece of new media about humanity, scarcity, and purpose I’ve ever seen. So today we’re going to think about it a little bit, as we reflect over a July 4th holiday week and the upcoming summer.
Note: if you haven’t read 17776 yet, be aware that some spoilers will follow. The piece is well over an hour long, so consider yourself warned and proceed accordingly.
The subject is America, 15,000 years in the future. In this world, we’ve conquered scarcity, and have solved death: no one is born, injured or dies in any way starting around the year 2026; we simply have a single, final generation of people who have been alive for 150 centuries, and whose cultural upbringing took place in present day. We are faced with only one final, existential challenge: how to spend an infinitely available amount of time, and find purpose for our never-ending lives. So we play football.
Bois and the other creators of 17776 have a remarkable premise and canvas to play with: our pursuit of the elusive goal of conquering scarcity of all kinds — scarcity of resources, of time, and of life — where the game of football represents the end zone. When all other forms of scarcity have been conquered, only one remains: scarcity of purpose. In order to keep ourselves motivated and engaged with life, we do what humans have always done: we play. In one game, the playing field consists of the entire state of Nebraska (Wyoming and Iowa are the end zones), and we follow one particular running back carry the ball through fields, towns and even natural disasters in her pursuit of scoring the next touchdown, a process which can take decades. In another, an obscure interaction between different rules in the future NFL rulebook creates an opening for teams to claim legal title of ownership over portions of the field, turning into a development bonanza and caricature of zero-sum capitalism. In a third, players compete to acquire every single football ever signed by obscure backup QB Koy Dentmer; since the total number of footballs ever signed by him are relatively small but still unknown, players are drawn towards the inherent uncertainty and mystery as something to be savored and rationed out.
The overarching theme of the piece is one of those essential characteristics of the human condition: one of the things we want the most is the condition of wanting itself. A state of existence that is free from conflict, free from inhibition of any kind, and presented with infinite resources to consume may feel like a worthy goal to pursue (particularly in the tech industry, with our sights set on ever-ambitious futures) but it’s distinctly un-human. Without scarcity, without purpose of some kind, we go crazy. In 17776, we look at an American society that has faced exactly that challenge, and has figured out a way to remain as happy as possible: by halting all technological progress where it stood, and keeping just the right amount of struggle and challenge remaining in the world in order to preserve some semblance of collective joy. And we succeed, thanks to football. As one of our narrators explains:
“Humanity could have advanced if it wanted to. In fact, it did. Almost everything you thought it would invent, they did. Flying cars, buildings that could build themselves jets that can take you from Arkansas to Paris in five minutes. You don’t see any of those things because people didn’t want them. If they advanced too much further technologically, those advances would inevitably intrude on their humanity. People wanted to walk. They wanted to take the bus that smelled like cigarettes. They wanted those precious three minutes between asking a question and knowing the answer.
People defeated scarcity. Everyone had what they needed, and nobody got sick, but they found that they needed things to be just a little bit difficult once in a while. They needed to stub their toe and wait in line and see that CHECK ENGINE light. They decided to leave their existence just a little short of perfect, because they wanted to want.
There is also something to be said for the mechanism of human change. It’s largely generational. People’s wants and hopes and dreams evolved because young people entered the world and took another step forward. But this is the final generation. Yes, it is a 15,000 year old generation, but just as you wouldn’t expect them to grow a third arm, you shouldn’t assume they want different things, different lives. They wanted things and they got them all. The end.
…
Of course, humans could, at any time, introduce things to make their lives more efficient. But when we consider post-scarcity humanity, we must also note that time is no longer scarce. Efficiency is meant to save time. But their time is infinite. Why try to save something you have in infinite supply? You may as well tell them to dig up dirt and hoard it in boxes.”
Now why should we care about this? What do 17776, football, and Koy Dentmer have to do with the tech industry? Well, this story should matter to us a lot because the Silicon Valley startup world is in many ways a loosely organized coalition of people who, to varying degrees, are trying to conquer scarcity. So it’s worth taking the time to reflect on why scarcity and abundance aren’t just states of relative supply, but instead are just as much (if not more) statements about people, and how we act and behave. We’ve written about this idea before, in a different place and context: scarcity and abundance are really statements about users, not about what they’re using.
Understanding Abundance, Part 1: It’s caused by consumers | Alex Danco, Social Capital
When we say that something is scarce, we’re not just talking about whether something is present in small or large quantities; we’re talking about wants, and we’re talking about competing desires. We’re talking about a state of conflict whereby we don’t fight due to our differences, but rather due to what we have in common. And when we say that some resource is abundant, we’re not really talking about the resource in question. We’re talking about a certain kind of human behavior where we treat something as abundantly available. We all use it for our own purposes, free from conflict from one another, each enjoying the benefits of this abundance in our own, unique way.
In Jon Bois’ 17776 football universe, where we’re faced with an abundance of time and an abundance of every kind of resource except mystery and purpose, humans solve this problem to the best of their ability not through one game of football, but through many, many different games — of all kinds, of all varieties, each one unique in its own way. There’s a lesson here: real, sustainable abundance does not come from something that we can create on the supply side (no matter how sophisticated our software, connectivity, and other tools may get), but rather in the way we learn, as people, to live together in these new environments, each in our own way. I can say to a fairly high degree of confidence that our world will never look like the world portrayed in 17776. But fiction is often the way we learn the most effectively about ourselves, about what we’re striving towards, and about what really motivates us deep down.
If you find yourself with a spare hour or two this summer (which I hope you will!), I highly recommend spending the time to go through 17776 and really immerse yourself in it. The best fictional writing tells us something about ourselves that we know deep down but have trouble bringing to the surface; 17776 does just that, in its own amusing, unserious yet profound way.
In many ways, the single biggest story in tech:
Made in China 2025 is not just top-down anymore; it has become a groundswell | Li Yuan, NYT
Xi’s World Order: 2024 | The Economist
Podcast episodes for your commute, your jog, or wherever:
Front’s Mathilde Collin on why email is making a comeback | Converge with Casey Newton
Smart stents, surveillance tech and Alexa-powered faucets | The IoT Podcast with Stacey Higginbotham
Black boxes:
An astronomer explains black holes at 5 levels of difficulty | Robbie Gonzalez, Wired
How should we evaluate progress in AI? | David Chapman
Perfecting the Internet’s native business models:
How the 100 largest marketplaces solved the Chicken and Egg problem | Eli Chait
Who has the best business model (and it’s not Google or Facebook) | Eric Feng
Other reading from around the Internet:
After the Fall: 10 years since the Financial Crisis | John Lanchester, London Review of Books
Designing Google Maps for motorbikes | Google Design
New “light-eating” protein discovered in Sea of Galilee | Shandria Sutton, Science
Siemens tests ammonia as a form of energy storage for renewables | Jason Deign, GTM
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, we’re going to take a deep dive with Mike Burshteyn of Cryptomove on the the state of enterprise security, specifically around moving target defences and other ways that businesses protect “crown jewel” information in an age of increasingly sophisticate attacks.
Moving target defence: state of the field in 2018 | Mike Burshteyn, Cryptomove
Defending against attackers, malware and ransomware, and other cyberthreats gets both easier and harder every year. The good news is that standardized tools that we all use in our everyday lives and jobs, especially web browsers, have gotten a lot more secure over the last couple years. Better hygiene, better security and more airtight, idiot-proof encryption have gone from luxuries to standards we take for granted, out of sight and out of mind for nearly all of us. The bad news is that for high-value targets, like the critical business data, passwords, private keys, and other “crown jewels” that customers need to keep absolutely hidden, hackers have an asymmetric advantage that compounds in their favor with every passing day.
That advantage concerns the problem of “zero-day” vulnerabilities: software bugs and security holes that aren’t known to their creators, giving knowledgable attackers a long time to study, plan and carry out their attack. Zero-day vulnerabilities are the unknown unknowns of the cybersecurity world, and over the long run it’s difficult, if not impossible, for defenders of systems to be 100% sure that the complex castles that they defend have no zero-day holes anywhere in their walls or basements.
One approach to solve this problem, as you know if you’ve learned about Cryptomove before, is moving-target defence (MTD). Instead of leaving the crown jewels in one place, move them around constantly; change their form and the obstacles around them. Modelling these threats and quantifying the degree to which we can alter and reduce threat risk is a critical and underserved skill we’ve needed to develop in this area, and having frameworks and mathematical approaches to quantifying the efficacy of MTD is a key area where Cryptomove and their colleagues are looking to help. In his post, Mike highlights a few standout papers at the 2017 MTD workshop in Dallas that are interesting to check out:
Performance modelling of moving target defences | Connell, Menascé & Albanese
A quantitative framework for cyber moving target defenses | Warren J Connell, PhD Thesis
Another great thing about the cybersecurity community is that, to a fair degree more than other industries, they tend to think of each other as being on the same team. And, really, it’s true: they’re all fighting the same battle, against the same faceless enemy; it can often make sense for them to share resources and know-how in order to all get better and help their customers do the same. Mike highlights a few of Cryptomove’s competitors, Polyverse and Morphisec, explaining what they’re working on and how their progress in parallel with Cryptomove’s is something to celebrate. If you think your business might be interested in participating in Cryptomove’s beta, you can contact them at cryptomove.com to find out more.
Finally, one last important note as we march towards the World Cup final: did you know that Slack makes it very easy to change the sidebar color theme of your desktop client to match your country’s colors? Find out how here.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
