What will it take for us to connect and solve the future?
The greatest threat to America is that our risks have never been more interconnected, and yet, we have never been more disconnected as a people.
Derek Thompson had a blockbuster cover story for The Atlantic on what he is dubbing “The Anti-Social Century.” It’s part of a line of work dating back to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone about the decreasing social capital and increasing isolation of American citizens. Thompson updates the 2000s-era story through the key invention of the smartphone and its implications:
The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.
Screens, in fact, are so important that Americans are redesigning our homes to accommodate them more effectively:
As our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?,’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.”
This anti-social obsession reminds me of the puzzle explored by Sherry Turkle in her 2011 book Together Alone. Turkle analyzed how and why we increasingly intermediated our social relationships with screens and robots, to the point that a dinner with good friends could be silent as everyone at the table texted others who weren’t present. Why would we invite people to sit together and then teleport our minds into the virtual space of social media? Part of the answer were the design affordances and feedback loops that make technologies more addictive than our flesh-and-blood brethren, and she argued that more human-centric technologies could prove a solution.
Fifteen years have passed, and there’s little evidence that technologists are improving their products to offer a better relationship. As patience has run out, we have been relegated to solving the problem through legislation (Florida banned social media for children under 14 this year) and through no-device policies at schools. These are bandaids and not solutions.
Yet, should we solve it? While there are many indications that this solitary relationship with technology makes us less happy (see Riskgaming podcast guest Jon Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation and a plethora of other options at your almost-certainly-defunct local bookstore), we do choose to be alone. Given the option of going to a bar or staying in and streaming a show, we vastly prefer the latter. The Financial Times pointed out this week that global late-night dancing like clubbing and raves is in global decline. Don’t we have a right to just be alone and ignore the rest of the world? Why do social observers and their far-worse cousins — social engineers — feel this has to change?
Disconnection has important and negative consequences for the functioning of society though. Take the wildfires that have tragically destroyed several neighborhoods across Los Angeles, including Pacific Palisades and Pasadena. I used to cover disaster tech for TechCrunch, and founders had immense enthusiasm for wildfire technologies (I wrote about Cornea, Perimeter, Dorothy, Gridware, One Concern, Qwake, Paladin, BreezoMeter, Firemaps and more). Part of the reason for this enthusiasm is that many founders live in California, where the risk of wildfires is high and attention was keen post the Camp Fire of 2018.
These technologies offered all kinds of different solutions. Cornea optimized firefighting with better data. Gridware detected problems with the electric grid before it could start fires. Qwake designed virtual reality goggles for firefighters to see better in buildings. BreezoMeter monitored air quality, while Firemaps used drones to survey homes and identify optimizations that would make them safer from fires and improve insurance underwriting costs.
Yet, what I came to understand in covering these and many other startups is that technology is only part of the puzzle. We sprawl homes on the wildland–urban interface where fire danger is highest. Popular designs of lawn vegetation can act as an accelerant for fires. Changing costs of global building materials means that many new homes are less fireproof than they would have been in the past. Climate change is intensifying wildfires by increasing their scope, duration and temperature and thus massively heightening their destructiveness. Meanwhile, sources at FEMA and Cal Fire at the time emphasized to me that the always-on nature of modern firefighting meant that training was all but impossible since fire season had extended to nearly the entire year.
In other words, it’s great that many founders are building tools to improve our effectiveness and increase resilience, but their brilliant technologies can only take us so far. As a nation, we need to strategically select tradeoffs to mitigate these problems earlier than when an entire neighborhood goes up in flames. That’s ultimately our goal with Riskgaming: to remind us that not selecting an option is an option, and often a subpar one.
We don’t select an option very often, unfortunately. As politics becomes more polarized and the online discourse coarsens, we have lost the ability to actually build up our collective wisdom to encompass the full range of outcomes of our decisions or non-decisions. As I wrote in “Consensus Functions” back in early 2022:
Why can we find scientific consensus, investment consensus, token consensus on the blockchain and even mostly consensus around Russian troop movements, but not around areas like health or immigration or infrastructure or climate change?
It’s simple: most of the consensus has already been established in the fields among the former. Scientists share a common set of principles, experimental approaches, and procedures to drive toward consensus. Venture funds like Lux, even if they are heterogeneous in making decisions, share a common perspective on what makes a distinguished investment and the kinds of evidence that should exist to identify them. Blockchain protocols rigorously apply consensus algorithms to their database, and analysts of Ukraine have constraints and norms that push them to at least some form of consensus.
Society, meanwhile, doesn’t have all those layers of consensus to build upon for new decisions. There’s no algorithmic blockchain ensuring that the basic facts of reality are cross-validated, or the scientific method to ensure that evidence is considered with appropriate context. Consensus is recursive, and without better consensus functions around values and tradeoffs, it’s impossible for a nation to make decisions.
The fires in Los Angeles are likely the most expensive in American history — and as of this writing, were not fully contained yet. Will crisis and tragedy combine to force a consensus on how to avoid these disasters in the future? Can a nation ever more alone come together?
It’s still possible. After 9/11, a bipartisan commission was formed to seek out every problem that led to those horrific terrorist attacks. I was one of those high-school nerds who bought the paperback copy of the report and read it cover to cover. What seems impossible to believe is that just two decades ago, a fact-finding mission could be assembled, heaps of evidence and interview notes synthesized, a set of clear recommendations could be made, and most of them would enter law by wide bipartisan majorities all in less than two years.
It shouldn’t take tragedy to wake us up from our screens. We can build the relationships we need in order to solve all of our problems today, but that would mean looking away from another short-form video and out the window at the potential on the horizon. Maybe a Supreme Court-endorsed ban is needed after all.
Podcast: Why financial booms and busts are the key to our progress
When we think of booms and busts, we often think of waste. The dot-com bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, and the late 2010s crypto craze drew insane levels of capital into new markets, proceeded to overheat them, and then vaporized everything — leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Is there a more positive way of looking at these feverish moments of economic activity though, one that accounts for progress?
That’s the question at the heart of Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber’s new book Boom from Stripe Press. They argue that far from being a destructive force, booms are in fact the critical ingredient needed to induce change in companies, institutions and people. For the low price of the dot-com bubble, we got some of the world’s greatest and more valuable companies, whose worth dwarfs the original cost of the bubble by multiples. Progress can be brought forward in time by the exuberance of these heady eras.
I talk with Byrne and Tobias about what booms are and what they do, how economic progress is triggered through business cycles, the cultural spillovers of periods of change, why we should stop being concerned about the scarcity of capital and how to avoid zero-sum thinking in the economics of growth.
🔊 Listen to “Why financial booms and busts are the key to our progress”
Lux Recommends
- Our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman enjoyed Andrei Kashcha’s design demo which beautifully renders the streets of any city ready for export or for printing on a mug thanks to the magic of OpenStreetMap.
- From our holiday hiatus, Grace Isford was petrified by Nat Friedman’s launch of PlasticList, which shows just how many common food and beverage products across the Bay Area have high levels of microplastics in them. You’ll never think about boba and burgers again.
- Sam liked the story of Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts. “The company’s proprietary alloy was alchemized 13 generations ago in Constantinople (now Istanbul) by Debbie Zildjian’s ancestor, Avedis I. He was trying to make gold, she said, but he ended up concocting a combination of copper and tin.”
- Brian Klaas is a previous Riskgaming podcast guest, and I enjoyed his latest essay, “Against Optimization.” “We often call such inefficiency slack. But the obvious lesson we too easily ignore in the modern world is this: slack is often both necessary and desirable. Our ability to predict the future is limited, and in an era of hyper-uncertainty, relying on ever-more precise past data only yields ever-more misguided certainty that the patterns of the past will be a reliable guide to our future.”
- In addition to Derek Thompson’s cover story, Laurence Pevsner liked Ellen Cushing’s essay, "Americans Need to Party More.” “Simply put, America is in a party deficit. Only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a 35 percent decrease since 2004.”
- Finally, Tracie Rotter enjoyed the latest podcast episode of Vox Unexplainable, which asked the question, “Will AI ever ... feel?.” “So on one hand, you have people who are computational functionalists. And these are people who think that what matters for consciousness isn't what the system is made out of. What matters is what it can do. And most of those computational functionalists I spoke with, they don't think that any of today's AI are conscious, but they do think that in principle, down the line, they could be.”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
