The Future of Work [4]
The Morphology of Work and the TBL Thought Experiment
[ Link to Part 3 ]
What is self-actualisation? To project creative will into the world and express agency (the ability to act and cause change). On the high-achieving end, this expression is amplified through the leverage of capital. To put it tritely, the peak of entrepreneurial self-actualisation is Steve Jobs, not Grigori Perelman.
Seizing the Means of Production
The mythology of entrepreneurship is that one has an idea, pursues that idea, and builds a business out of it. These days I’m more than ever convinced that the competence of building a business, getting customers, landing contracts, hiring teams, making things happen and so on, has almost no overlap with the mythical impetus of original ideas. Business is about a capital operations machine. If GOOG wanted to get in to the business of SquareSpace or Wix, it could; if it wanted to get into the business of selling mattresses online, it could. It has the capital, the middle managers, the overhead admin processes, the whole “ops” machinery. Reviewing your drawers of brilliant ideas only brings on a tragic sinking feeling about the discrepancy between “what could have been” and the context in which ideas can be executed to create and capture value. Elton John, sans piano, is not nearly as great. What is that context?
The Paradox of Knowledge
In the Sound Lab of Aalto’s Media Department, right before its demolition, in the trash piles lay this “Technical Pocket Guide” amidst other abandoned trade books, posters, artworks, equipments etc. waiting to be disposed of. It’s about 700 pages. Flip through it, and you’ll see it’s quite a treasure, a densely and concisely compiled collection of virtually all key facts of human engineering knowledge, along with the maths and sciences.
If you need to rebuild the human civilisation after an apocalypse, this book is it. Imagine, if it were held by Newton or Napoleon or Edison… Now it’s a pocket-sized book, available at the price of a sandwich. And it gathers dust in obscurity, not even thick enough to be used as a doorstop.
Workdays and Structure
When most people at work (against their preference) fantasise about not having to go to work, they are not longing for a state of listlessness, of having nothing to do. What excites us is the freedom to make audacious (even whimsical) plans and act on them, unencumbered by the obligation of attending to sundry nonsense.
Doing nothing does not spark joy. A sense of progress sparks joy. How can I use my days to make meaningful progress towards worthwhile goals? Forget about dilettante fads and profit-scraping side-hustles. Do you solve interesting problems? Do you create value? Fulfilment is a long game. Open bar at beach resort won’t suffice. You must find your life’s work.
What can be achieved in a day, a week, a month, a quarter? Time passes nonetheless, what has changed? When you think you have a month, do you have a full month? A week away here and some other events there. When you think you have two full days, you may not marshal the efficacy to get much done by the end of those two days. Calendar time spans are deceptively generous.
Somehow, sometimes, miraculously, some work does get done at work. Bugs get fixed and features get built, tickets get moved along the kanban columns. It means that making something happen is possible. Having this possibility is inherently better than a state of listlessness, paralysis, and stagnation.
Context and Structure
Every time I pick up one of these design books, e.g. “Universal Methods of Design” or “Value Proposition Design” or some books on traction or product marketing, even the multitude of gratis resources (many of which are impressive and neatly organised), I can but be amazed and wonderstruck by the sense of hidden potential of applying these ideas.
The recurring thought was: “If only I were working on something real…” building something of distinct and lasting relevance (compared to these hackathon exercises or simulated business creation courses at uni), something I could call my own…
“To study and to get to practice what one has learnt, is it not also a pleasure?” — Analects 1:1
Imagine you’re at your nice desk under post-it plastered walls with your co-founders in a glass box in some modern and comfortable co-working space, working on a product, an app — every time you flip through these design books with colourful diagrams, you can instantly try some design exercises and methodologies, or apply an idea to make immediate incremental improvements to the product or company.
I long to soon end this false conundrum of “if only…” What’s stopping people from realising the vision? What’s stopping me? Waiting to win the lottery of meeting the right people to work with? Or waiting for fleeting windows of opportunities to experiment with the right things at the right time? All of these may well be specious obstacles.
The Nature of the Firm ¹
The whole motivation of this article is to explore the idea of quietly working away at some project you are deeply interested in. It’s about the idea of being in a room with someone you can sit down with next to a whiteboard, and talk about solving real problems (the world is full of real, unsolved, lucrative problems), working from first principles, Zero to One style. It’s about the intellectual environment of delving into deeper diffusive questions like “What does it mean to have read a book”.
The purpose of profitability is not about sustaining the supply of ramen, it’s about sustaining the provisions for the working life that is itself a significant part of life. The benefit of a firm is not limited to efficient spending on improving the quality of life, such as the depreciable coffee machine. It’s the entity within which engineering and innovation capital is accumulated.
[1] Vague reference to Coase (1937).
Structure and Exploration
There are often highlights when I browse the internet, every once a while there are these delightful happy discoveries… a seminar presentation on phonological encoding that points to Harvard sentences and modified rhymes, Indie Hackers interview podcasts, data visualisation on Pinterest, all the cool and new shiny things and yearly design trends and weekly suave visual design inspirations on blogs or Hacker News or Behance…
Let’s say this is the joy of exploration. The question is how to make the exploration effort productive — that something comes out of it, at the end of the day, there’re some artefacts, some output as a result of this exploration.
In software development we kind of know how productive results happen, we have tools to facilitate “velocity”. We have Jira, sprints, standups, and various boards to make things move forward. The question is how to integrate the joy of spontaneous exploration and discovery and novelty and inspiration, with the tools of production and progress, or at least have the working day distributed between the multiple modes, so that “working away” in a glass box paradise is neither senseless drudgery nor a drifty mental vacation.
The Tim Berners-Lee Thought Experiment
Imagine walking past or sitting in front of a computer that was running as the earliest web server — there’s nothing especially glamorous about the machine. Imagine you weren’t a time traveller, just someone from that time. Ponder for a moment. Could you possibly have “seen” the impending future, the thereafter trillions and trillions 💸 of boom (the web, SaaS, cloud, mobile…) that’s about to arrive?
The pioneers were extraordinary visionaries — from Vannevar Bush (1945) to Ted Nelson (1965) to “The Dream” at CERN (1989, 1992) — yet the pictures envisaged in their minds were infinitely pale in comparison to the vast galaxies of applications and commerce that sprung into being ever since.
I quite vividly remember hearing on the radio some comments about how AMZN’s P/E ratio was unjustifiably high — when it reached a “whopping” $100 in 2009 — and obviously I found that opinion totally reasonable, as I found its successive echoes at each new price point — as we do in each iteration of the “present”. This is not an allegory about stock prices, though. When Marc Andreessen of a16z arrived in the Valley, his thought was:
“I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the ’80s, and I got here too late.”
— Marc Andreessen, 1994
We now know that “peak innovation” was definitely apocryphal, but the sentiment and experience are absolutely real at the personal level. For almost anyone stuck in the present viewpoint of time, it naturally feels that way, that all the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, what could possibly come afterwards? Where are the opportunities?
The internet boom, the mobile boom — the next tidal wave is yet ten times higher. We were, and are, unable to foresee any of that. We experience a kind of collective “end-of-history illusion”. Isn’t that paradoxical?!
