Envy: January 20, 2019 Snippets
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This week’s theme: Exploring something that is taboo in the rest of the world, but celebrated in the tech industry. Plus Relativity Space announces a new spot at legendary space port Cape Canaveral.
As we continue our discussion about The Organization Man and the evolving relationship between individuals versus the group in business culture — from Holly White’s 1950s to today’s 180 in Silicon Valley — an obvious but essential point to recognize is that in any culture, people generally learn the rules and norms and expectations of the culture by watching other people. It’s just what humans do. And arguably the most important thing we learn and model from other people is the basic human drive that motivates us to do what we do: desire.
If you watch kids at early stages of their life, they are very explicit about how desire works for them: they select another person as a model (which could be one of their parents, it could be one of their peers, it could be anyone) and then make clear that when the model wants or has something, then the kid wants it too. (Watch any child play in a group setting, and it becomes pretty clear, more often than not, that kids’ interest in a particular toy will have more to do with the behavior of the other children than with the toy itself.) The object of desire is less important than the model for that desire, which is the other person.
In toddlers, this desire for what other people want will usually be pretty ham-fisted: a toddler doesn’t really understand the difference between kids and adults, or why one person might have or want things that are different from another person. But as kids grow up a little bit, and they begin to learn who their peers are, their models of desire get sharpened: they don’t just want what anybody has or desires. They’re specifically interested in what their peers are interested in; particularly peers that they come to see as role models, like the cool kids in class who set trends and induce jealousy in others.
Is this model for desire any different in adults? Well, not really, except there’s one crucial difference. By the time children grow up and become adults, something interesting happens: they learn to hide these desires from other people, and publicly act as though they’re not there. Envy is still quite frowned upon in society; it’s frowned upon to blatantly pattern yourself on the desires of others. Modelled desire in adults is like the frame of a house that gets plastered over with drywall: it’s still there, and it’s still driving the core of your behavior, your wants, and your self-image. But it’s been papered over with a kind of mask: the need to be seen as your own person; as secure in yourself; as “your own man”, or whatever.
Now why is it that modern, “healthy” societies, pretty much to a tee (with one big exception) follow this code of behavior, where envy and blatantly modelled desire is tabooed and frowned upon? Well, there’s a pretty important reason why, which is that there’s a pretty direct path from envy to violence. In a group of people that are largely homogenous (say, a tribal village that has grown up together, learned from one another, and generally will perceive and desire things similarly), letting envy run free is a pretty surefire way to make sure your group will destroy itself from the inside out. Envy, especially when it becomes reciprocal, rapidly gives way to a kind of symmetric or “mimetic” violence (I hate you because you hate me; we’re fighting because we’re fighting!) where the initial object that was being fought over rapidly falls away in importance and becomes irrelevant.
It’s generally accepted that in “healthy society”, or whatever that means, you can’t let envy just run free. But that doesn’t mean envy isn’t there; it’s still the framework of our house; still the deep driving force behind a lot of our motivation and our energies. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are fond of observing: “Greed doesn’t drive the world; envy does.” They’re not wrong. Desire, especially envy, can unlock powerful new sources of energy, creativity, resourcefulness, and other human drives that are what it takes to take big steps forward, for better or for worse. Envy is a theoretically unlimited resource: not only does it drive people more powerfully than greed or any ‘rational’ reward ever could, but it’s also contagious, and can run away into a positive feedback cycle that unlocks more and more motivation in its participants.
Now, let’s return to Silicon Valley. What makes Silicon Valley and the modern tech industry unique as a community? What makes it work? We danced around the idea last week that the incredible early stage community, mindset, and momentum that we are so lucky to have in tech isn’t because of what a lot of outsiders think it is. It isn’t because there’s money. It isn’t because of the technology either; yes, software and the internet have enabled incredible new disruptive business models, but they’re also available anywhere. Silicon Valley doesn’t have any special software or tech that the rest of the world doesn’t have yet; at least not appreciably. Is it the people? Well it’s certainly true that the people are a crucial part, in the sense that if everybody suddenly left, something very real would end. But I would also submit that nobody is that important; you could rotate out existing people with new people, and so long as some important element of the culture is preserved, you’d find that the culture would keep working. So what is it?
Well, if I were to hazard a guess, it’d be something like this: Silicon Valley is a culture where modelling your desires off of others isn’t culturally taboo; it’s the opposite. It’s celebrated. I think this is part of why when many outsiders criticize Silicon Valley as being “a place full of children”, or something along those lines, a part of it rings very true: it’s an environment where that “childlike” (really, just human) urge to pattern our desires off of other people, and eagerly leap to wanting to go build things, disrupt things, own things, win at things, because other people have announced that they want it too, isn’t repressed: it’s out in the open. We’re open about the fact that startups are like cults, and couldn’t really function any other way.
Now, it would be a fair question to ask: if essentially every surviving culture has evolved a strict taboo or at least dissuasion against mimetic desire, for the purposes of its own civility and survival, how does Silicon Valley get away with this? The ecosystem has pulled off this remarkable feat: people are allowed, even encouraged, to model their desires off of one another — but then we help each other, to a much greater degree than almost any other business culture. People are unusually helpful. Barriers to accomplishing just about anything are lower than they would be elsewhere in the business world. For the most part, and although there are certainly anecdotal instances to the contrary, people here aren’t assholes. Silicon Valley (for some people, at least) is a culture of lifting each other up, which at first glance doesn’t square with the idea that it’s also a culture of modelling our desires off of others.
Is this some secret that Silicon Valley has discovered about the nature of humankind, the better angels of our innovative nature or whatever, or is it for some other, deeper, more structural reason? After thinking about it for a while, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter: it’s not that people are unusually generous, or that people here are consistently able to balance on that knife edge of patterning one’s desire off of others while not falling into the negative affect of envy and jealousy. It’s that we’ve evolved an intricate set of social rules, norms and behaviours that keep things just at the right balance. The “collective illusion” driving Silicon Valley that we alluded to last week isn’t economic; it’s social. Next week, we’ll talk about what those are, and we’ll spend time talking about one of the most important rituals of Silicon Valley that help keep the peace: what happens when companies fail.
One must-read article this week, which you’ve likely already seen if you spend way too much time online, is Ashley Feinberg’s interview with Jack Dorsey. To be honest, it’s frankly pretty remarkable for Dorsey to agree to doing this, so kudos for Jack for letting this happen to him. Feinberg pulls no punches, and as one of the resident rulers of Twitter she’s arguably one of the most capable people for performing this specific interview, and for being able to decipher between high-minded, abstract tech founder-speak and its actual, real-world translation. (As she put it: “My only real goal was to get Dorsey to speak in specifics, about anything.”). Enjoy:
Jack Dorsey has no clue what he wants | Ashley Feinberg, HuffPost
Another highlight, which by now is a great annual tradition, is Steve Sinofsky’s review of CES. Topics he covers in depth include: integration and smart devices in the home; voice assistants and their adoption; new TVs and new cameras; transportation; and the year-over-year trend of disappearing wires.
CES 2019: a show report | Steve Sinofsky
Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, who arguably did more than any single other person to improve people’s savings, investments and retirement prospects, passed away at age 89:
Q&A with Jack Bogle: ‘We’re in the middle of a revolution’ | Michael Regan, Bloomberg Markets
Interview with Jack Bogle | Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz
Stay the Course: the story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution | John C Bogle
Rethinking our genetic blind spots:
Narrative shapes:
How the idea of hell has shaped the way we think | Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker
Sugary sweet:
The strange marketplace for diabetes test strips | Ted Alcorn, NYT
In the future, your food will be sweetened with protein | Boyd Farrow
Other reading from around the Internet:
A curious case of Tether: a complete timeline of events | Amy Castor
The new hot channel for reaching real people: email | Christopher Mims, WSJ
Fed says student debt has hurt the US housing market | Josh Mitchell & Laura Kusisto, WSJ
And just for fun:
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, Relativity Space just announced another major launch partnership, this time with Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida:
Relativity to build launch site at Cape Canaveral | Jeff Foust, Space News
The history of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (next door to, and often confused with, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center) is full of important first launches: the first US earth satellite in 1958, the first American astronauts, the first unmanned lunar landing, the first American spacecrafts to orbit Mars, Venus, Saturn and Mercury, and the first spacecraft to leave the solar system entirely. The site is well-situated for rocket launches for two reasons: first, it’s near the equator, meaning launches can get an extra boost by the rotation of the earth (which will be felt more strongly at lower latitudes), and second, because launches take place over the ocean and farther out of harm’s way. The site is still actively used by the Department of Defense alongside Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Relativity will be taking over Launch Complex 16 for 20 years, and will invest more than $10 million to develop a launch facility on the site. (The site will be a long-term home for them for some kinds of orbits, but not others — they’re still on the lookout for a second site.) Their neighbors include SpaceX at Complex 13 and 40, and Space Florida nearby at Complex 20; the other private launch companies occupying space at Cape Canaveral are Blue Origin and the United Launch Alliance. It was a great get for Relativity; CEO Tim Ellis told Space News: “We’ve been thinking about launch sites since Day 1 three years ago. The clear winner to us was partnering with the US Air Force at Cape Canaveral. We really view it as the most elite launch site in the world.” Their selection by The US Airforce is an important milestone and recognition of the Relativity’s hard work and accomplishments over the last few years. The achievement isn’t lost on Ellis: “I’m quite pumped. Every launch company needs a launch site, and due to the hundred-plus companies that now say they want to develop a launch vehicle, to be the first venture-backed company to get a site there is a huge testament to our team.”
Relativity is currently hiring for many different positions at its headquarters in LA and also at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where its test facilities are located. If you’re up for the challenge, or know someone who might be, get in touch.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
