Social Scalability: June 4, 2017 Snippets
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On Friday, a reddit member posed a slightly urgent question in the Computer Science Career Questions section, and the agony expressed in the post title is hard to overstate:
The response from the Reddit community was swift, sympathetic, and correct: Yeah, you may have messed up. But what happened is not your fault. It’s the CTO’s fault. No system should ever be designed such that one careless human error can destroy the entire thing; yet that seems to be precisely what happened. This sort of event is sadly more common than any of us would like; we’ve written about it in Snippets a few times before, and it’s present anywhere we see system design considerations being made in the name of “efficiency”. Indeed, it’s quite similar to another much bigger system catastrophe that occurred this week, when British Airways’ London operations were shut down for multiple days after a power surge knocked out their data center operations, and a single instance of human error may have been at fault:
What both of these stories illustrate very well is the concept of Social Scalability. What is Social Scalability? A quick definition might be: “The redundancies and inefficiencies that protect a system from being inadvertently ruined by idiots or villains.” A better and more precise definition comes from Nick Szabo, a great currency and economics thinker, in his must-read post on Bitcoin and social scalability from earlier this year:
Money, blockchains and social scalability | Nick Szabo
Nick writes, (emphasis ours): “The secret to Bitcoin’s success is that its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability. Social scalability is the ability of an institution — a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors — to overcome shortcomings in human minds and in the motivating or constraining aspects of said institution that limit who or how many can successfully participate. Social scalability is about the ways and extents to which participants can think about and respond to institutions and fellow participants as the variety and numbers of participants in those institutions or relationships grow. It’s about human limitations, not about technological limitations or physical resource constraints.”
Social Scalability can partly be understood as what it isn’t: “efficiency”, or at least what appears to be efficiency on the surface. Bitcoin, for instance, is a computationally inefficient system for processing transactions compared to Visa or Paypal. But it’s socially scalable — it spends cheap computing resources in order to avoid the tradeoff between expensive human redundancy and systemic vulnerability to human error. Nick again: “Computers and networks are cheap. Scaling computational resources requires cheap additional resources. Scaling human traditional institutions in a reliable and secure manner requires increasing amounts [of] accountants, lawyers, regulators, and police, along with the increase in bureaucracy, risk, and stress that such institutions entail.”
Designing a system for social scalability must be done consciously and deliberately, and by people with prior experience with failure. Indeed, many of the tradeoffs involved with making a system human-proof will appear to insiders and outsiders alike as inefficient, wasteful design that consumes unnecessary resources and/or creates unnecessary red tape. To many, this jars uncomfortably with the Silicon Valley mindset of circumventing bureaucratic inertia and doing end-runs around inefficient processes. But in the end, such end-run pathways are what often lead to embarrassing unintended outcomes. And a certain reddit post.
What’s a take-home lesson here? Ultimately, we build technology to support humankind and its institutions. When we make decisions in pursuit of technological scalability — both in the narrow sense (in the code we write) and in the broad sense (in what companies get funded, for instance) — we may be inadvertently making social scalability sacrifices that go unnoticed. It’s uncomfortable, but it could be very valuable for us to think about recent consequences of software and the internet — Fake News, for instance — through the lens of technical versus social scalability. There are consequences to what we build.
In memory:
Jean Sammet, co-designer of COBOL, dies at 89 | Steve Lohr, NYT
More token reading:
Crypto tokens: a breakthrough in open network design | Chris Dixon
The meaning of decentralization | Vitalik Buterin
Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s future | Vinay Gupta
Why the blockchain needs more failures to succeed | William Mougayar, Coindesk
Elsewhere in the world:
Bicycles are eating the lunch of China’s dominant car-sharing app | Li Tao, South China Morning Post
India will sell only electric cars within the next 13 years | Callum Brodie, World Economic Forum
Kenya’s $3.2 billion Nairobi-Mombasa rail line opens with help from China | Lily Kuo, Quartz Africa
The inside perspective:
What really happened with Windows Vista | Terry Crowley
JPEG your ideas: lessons from Jeff Bezos on how to compress a message | Eugene Wei
Next-generation cancer drugs boost immunotherapy responses | Heidi Ledford, Nature
Other reading from around the Internet:
Bill Simmons signs deal to move The Ringer to Vox Media | Lukas Alpert, WSJ
Gears of War: when mechanical analog computers ruled the waves | Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica
The case for nations: the nation-state and its important legacy of social trust | Roger Scruton, WSJ
The rise of auto-complete culture — and why we should resist | Mark Wilson, Fast Co Design
“Secular Stagnation” even truer today, Larry Summers says | David Wessel, Brookings Institute
This week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family:
Toronto-based Wave Accounting has raised $32 million in Canadian dollars to continue growing and reaching more small businesses around the world:
Wave is focused on the 95% of businesses in North America that have 0–9 employees — the independent entrepreneurs and truly small businesses that occupy every nook and corner of our economy. These businesses aren’t necessarily using sophisticated accounting software to manage their finances; they’re more likely to be keeping their receipts in shoeboxes and passing shared versions of Excel spreadsheets back and forth. Wave gives these businesses an easy way to handle transactions, accounting and invoicing, paving the way for them to more easily apply for loans, lines of credit and other critical lifelines for company growth. They’re currently hiring for a number of positions in Toronto including software engineers, risk analysts, and videographers — please share with your favo(u)rite Canadians, and anyone else who might be interested.
Quick shoutout to Mary Meeker’s always excellent 2017 Annual Internet Trends report, featuring many of our friends — including Propeller Health, highlighted as an example of new tech-driven models for patient empowerment and health. Make sure to read the whole slide deck if you can, as it’s always excellent.
And finally, an inspiring lesson in podcast form: Ysiad Ferreiras from Hustle on all of the fundamentals of selling, and how to break into sales at a tech company if you’re coming from a background or community that may be unfamiliar with the tech industry.
We also hear some great stories about Ysiad’s journey here: about how the first thing he ever sold, at 12 years old, was illegal cable boxes (which he cheerfully describes as “B2C sales”); his background growing up in the Bronx in the 90s and his experience with race, class and privilege; and so much more. We’re incredibly lucky to have Ysiad on the team at Hustle, and really recommend that everyone listen to this interview, even if you think you know a lot about sales. He can teach everyone a thing or two.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
