Mimicry: October 7, 2018 Snippets
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This week’s theme: mimicry as a fundamental aspect of human behavior. Plus a certain portfolio company making Waves
Last week in Snippets, we introduced a new topic for the next several weeks: bubbles. (That’s right, another one! You may remember a similar series about a year ago. Well, guess what, bubbles always find a way to reappear!) This time around we’re going to start off by going deep into the psychology of bubbles and mass movements, starting with the core human behavior at their core: mimicry.
Humans aren’t the only animal that learns by watching and copying our peers, but we’re without a doubt the species that has most perfected this behavior. Beyond our immediate needs for food, water and shelter, our desires, values and actions are all built over years and across generations as learned behavior. Almost everything we think, feel and do is a reflection of what someone else has thought, felt or done.
We can roughly categorize mimicry into two kinds of behavior: good mimicry (which is net productive) and bad mimicry (which is net destructive). In the first category, shared norms and goals can be a very good thing: they give us cause to join together and act in concert with one another to accomplish a goal that would otherwise be too difficult for any one person, family or tribe to do on their own. Mimicry turns I into We; helps us establish culture, community, and emergent society. On the other hand, mimicry can also lead to symmetric desire, and then conflict and violence. You want this object of desire; I see you wanting it and therefore also want it; we can’t both have it; now we are in conflict. At its worst, symmetric conflict can expand beyond the original object of desire, into something called mimetic violence: I’m fighting you because you’re fighting me, and the original reason why we’re fighting no longer matters: the symmetrical nature of conflict has spilled over its initial boundaries and has itself become the cause of our conflict. This kind of fighting is deeply and painfully human in nature, and part of what makes stories like Shakespeare’s plays so timeless is that they capture its inherent futility: when there’s nothing to actually fight over, no one can ever really win; we simply all lose.
We can boil down these observations on mimicry and human conflict into two powerful ideas. First: Conflict tends to come from similarities, not differences. Differences between the people fighting are almost always brought up as a pretext for why we fight, but they’re almost never the actual reason. We don’t fight because I’m A and you’re B; we fight because we both want X. (Or, worse, we’re fighting because yesterday we fought over X, and so today we will too.) Second: Intensity of conflict tells you more about the similarity of the participants than it does about the value of what’s being fought over. As Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked about his time in an academic position at Harvard, “The battles were so fierce because the stakes were so small.” The reason Shakespearian stories like Othello feel so timelessly real is that they capture this kind of tragedy so perfectly: the escalating conflict originated over next to nothing, and in the end made no difference. In Silicon Valley, the thinker who has led the most provocative charge around this idea is a Stanford professor named René Girard: we’ll be revisiting his ideas around mimicry, conflict and human social organization many times over this series.
The fact that the human species has advanced beyond its early roots into a complex, ordered and sophisticated society is a testament to the fact that we have found strategies to overcome viral symmetric conflict in groups. Organizations like tribes, governments, armies, and religions all serve an essential function of helping to organize large numbers of people in ways that direct their desires and competitive energy outward, rather than inward. (Religions are the oldest and most powerful of these groups, and we’ll revisit them in a future issue.) Technology also matters: we’re able to invent tools, machines and complex systems that let us create more with less, reducing the need for conflict over scarce resources. Clearly, mimetic conflict is something we can manage and keep at bay, and the success of the modern world reflects our ability to organize ourselves strategically and sustainably.
But on the other hand, the world today seems to be descending into more mimicry and symmetric conflict, not less. As we get more networked together, the world becomes more reactionary and more complex. And as our understanding and perspective on the world lurches increasingly closer to a real-time hive mind, modern mimetic conflict certainly seems as though it will be an inevitable part of our future we will need to understand. Bubbles are one expression of this phenomenon, but it’s not hard to find others in our political, social and economic lives. Next week, we’re going to talk about what happens when we take the concept of mimetic behavior and then add it into an environment that’s complex and hard to understand, and revisit a theme we talked about last year: reflexivity.
This week’s must-read story, which dropped like a bomb on Thursday morning, is a long, detailed and devastating piece in Bloomberg BusinessWeek about international cyber-warfare. Somebody, presumably a nation-state attacker and likely China, appears to have pulled off a “hardware attack”, infiltrating a San Jose-based motherboard manufacturer and their entire adjacent supply chain, inserting microscopic chip implants into their boards. That hardware was then allegedly sold and deployed into major American businesses and computing providers, creating an unknown but potentially massive level of exposure:
As shocking as the story was, the response doubled down on the drama: Apple and Amazon, the two most prominent companies apparently targeted in the attack, immediately responded with denials so specific and so forceful, bordering on genuine anger, that it became quite clear that something more had taken place than met the eye at first. Apple wrote: “Over the course of the past year, Bloomberg has contacted us multiple times with claims, sometimes vague and sometimes elaborate, of an alleged security incident at Apple. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. We have repeatedly and consistently offered factual responses, on the record, refuting virtually every aspect of Bloomberg’s story relating to Apple.” AWS security chief Stephen Schmidt was even more blunt: “There are so many inaccuracies in this article as it relates to Amazon that they’re hard to count.”
What BuisnessWeek got wrong about Apple | Apple Statement
Technical experts also dove in to investigate claims made by both sides, and general consensus seems to be that something serious did, in fact, happen — but the questions raised far exceed any answers uncovered.
Risky Business feature: a podcast on Bloomberg’s absolutely wild Supermicro story | Patrick Gray
Hardware implants | Joe FitzPatrick
Forecasting: Bloomberg’s “The Big Hack” | Ryan McGeehan
There’s only one thing we can count on for sure, and that’s that this story isn’t over. In fact, in all likelihood by the time you read this it’ll already be out of date, as it’s Thanksgiving up in Canada this weekend and I’m probably not going to update this with any newly revealed plot complications before Monday. We’ll be back with more updates on this story next week.
Nobel Prize season gives us a chance to check out some great science, and also reminded us that Donna Strickland’s physics award was the first to a woman in 55 years — and she still hasn’t been awarded a full professorship (tells you something!):
Donna Strickland, Gérard Mourou & Arthur Ashkin win Physics Nobel Prize | Nature News
Finance Twitter favorite Cliff Asness has a lot to say (and you’ll want to hear it):
Quant investor Cliff Asness hasn’t smashed his screen this year — yet | Erik Schatzker, Bloomberg
Liquid Alt Ragnarök? | Cliff Asness
Economic empowerment in the 21st century:
The co-op farming model might help save America’s small farms | Annelise Jolley, Civil Eats
The Economist at 175: reinventing liberalism for the 21st century | The Economist
The long arm of the law:
Other reading from around the Internet:
Rifts break open at Facebook over Kavanaugh hearing | Mike Isaac, NYT
Lone vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology | Mark Harris, Ars Technica
The World’s Fair and the death of optimism | Darran Anderson, City Lab
Microsoft is embracing Android as the mobile version of Windows | Tom Warren, The Verge
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, Wave has been making … Ok we’re going to say it, Waves over the past several weeks and we’re delighted to share some of their many recent announcements.
Ever since launching eight years ago in November 2010, Wave has been focused on a broad but very personal mission: to simply the entire range of financial management headaches that small business entrepreneurs face. Small business owners, especially those with under ten employees, tend to know their core business very well but lack formal training in financial issues like cash flow management, bookkeeping, and making payroll. For large companies, this takes a dedicated team with expertise and dedicated resources. But for small businesses, we should be able to automate away most of these problems with thoughtful, well-designed software. And that’s exactly what Wave has accomplished.
Just last week, Wave celebrated a major milestone: 3.5 million small businesses registered with Wave, 70,000 new businesses signing up each month, and over 185 employees now on the team. They’ve marked the milestone with a whole suite of new products: accelerated payment processing, payroll features for 1099 contractors, a “Checkout” feature for e-commerce”, and more. The most in-depth is Wave+ : comprehensive bookkepping service for Wave customers who want extra hands-on assistance from an accounting professional in addition to Wave’s core software.
Get ready for a whole new Wave | Wave News
What’s new at Wave (and what’s coming soon) | Wave News
In addition to their milestones and product announcements, Wave has introduced two new members to his board, both of which light up Wave’s ambitious and worthy road map over the next many years. Not long ago, Neal Wolin — former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, current CEO of the Brunswick Group, and Social Capital board partner — joined Wave’s board; now, he and the other members are joined by Joanne Bradford, SoFi’s CMO, who arrives as an independent member.
Taking a step back, we can see how Wave’s initial mission to help small business owners tackle their day to day problems like accounting and payroll more easily have evolved into a much grander mission: a suite of powerful, accessible and interlocking tools that unlock an entire new host of resources for entrepreneurs like lending, and eventually come together to solve the biggest problem for small business owners: cash flow. The days where small business owners must content themselves with second- or third-class software and tools with which they need to compete against big giants are over. To keep up with Wave’s mission to elevate the playing field for everybody, you can find continuous updates on their blog, and find open career opportunities at Wave’s Toronto headquarters here. They’re currently looking for software engineers, data scientists, payroll and customer support specialists, facilities managers, and more — if you know anyone interested, please send them Wave’s way.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
