Contending with Chesterton’s Fence: Challenges to a Founder’s Vision

Wayback Wednesday

This post is a review of Balaji Srinivasan’s "Founding vs Inheriting."  It was so good that he sent me $100 in BTC as a prize, but I haven’t heard from him since.  Anyway, for context, B.S. contrasts the entrepreneurial spirit of founding institutions on the West Coast of the U.S., such as those in technology, with the East Coast's tradition of inheriting established institutions, like government and legacy corporations. He argues that founding new entities requires innovative skills and the ability to start from scratch, which differs significantly from simply inheriting and managing pre-existing structures. The post suggests that inheritors often lack the founders' capability to innovate and adapt, especially evident during crises like COVID-19, leading to a "read-only culture" where successors can only maintain, not create. Founders, like those who started major tech companies and cryptocurrencies, have reshaped industries and governance, indicating a shift towards founding over inheriting as a more successful model in modern society. The discussion culminates in suggesting that the future may involve founding new forms of communities and governance structures rather than inheriting them.

A metaphor for our technophiles.

“Computer Science Collapsed the Distinction Between Word and Deed” 

Those who have had the pleasure of talking to me for an extended period will know about my interest in etymology.  When a reader looks behind the superficial symbols of letters and chooses to deconstruct words, the reader discovers a rich marrow. These words are the DNA of our culture and programmed linguistically into us across our history.[1]  

The Greeks, for instance, gave us some doozies.   “Nostalgia” is a portmanteau of “nostos” (home) and algos (“ache”). It’s the Homeric notion of longing for home. “Galaxy” comes from the Greek for “milk.”  Like “The Sahara Desert”, the “Milky Way Galaxy” is a redundancy in terms. 

Let’s take a look at one of the words we’ve inherited from the Greeks that has had tremendous influence in contemporary discourse and action: “Technology.” I have little patience for pedantry, but as in computer science, precision of language and syntax is important if you want to arrive at a sound solution.  After all, language itself is technology, but for now, let’s not contemplate that ouroboros.

Here’s technology’s standard definition contrasted with a slightly more interpretive definition: 

Standard Deconstruction  

• Tekhne: Art, craft  

• Logia: Systematic Treatment  

Practical Deconstruction 

• Tehkne: Work [2]

• Logos: Word, reason, plan. AKA: Writing 

The standard deconstruction of the word “technology” connotes the Founder’s Vision of Institutions.  Apply some mathematical rigor to artistic inspiration or praxis and the result is a net good and a moving of the needle in the direction of human flourishing.  Ideally, this takes place in a scenario without a great deal of institutional or regulatory baggage. 

The practical deconstruction of Technology leans more towards the inheritor’s vision.  We have an extant set of tools available to us and by re-organizing said tools in a process, we become more efficient.   Hammurabi’s Code, a landmark innovation for its time, was literally set in stone.  It was reinforcement for practices that were already part of the fabric of daily life.  The innovation simply documented them.  In addition to prescriptions for crime and punishment, it helped organize Babylon economically: “Plan the work, work the plan.”  For all its merits, most of it doesn’t translate well into our modern society.  For example: “269. If he hire an ass for threshing, the hire is twenty ka of corn.”  I know that in today’s world, when I’m hiring an ass for threshing, I have no expectation that corn be involved.

We can similarly view the foundations of our own legacy institutions as ossified, many times for the worse, as noted in Balaji’s prompt.  Many of the foundational principles are sound, but the art, syntax, and execution leave us with a lot of bloatware.  Examples of this are rife across Yarvin’s Cathedral of legacy media, universities, and governments.  Since these institutions are showing increased decrepitude, ineptitude, and general bad attitude, the suggestion is that we found new institutions from scratch.  Here’s the issue: is ex-nihlio creation possible and does it ignore important sinew? 

“What is Scratch?”

The West Coast and Silicon Valley, for all their merit and propensity towards innovation, can also be overwhelmingly parochial.  Just ask the average Californian where the center of the universe is located. You’ll get a similar answer from a New Yorker.  Enriched by decades of growth, prestige, comfort, and respect, it appears that these accolades have allowed many to eschew the lessons of the past and assume that much of this creation is automatic.  Many would-be modern creators are unaware of the history and conditions that led to technological innovation and wealth creation in California.  If this is the culture that continually shows the East Coast that it is second best, how did this “Frontier Spirit” manifest and more importantly is it still present today?

Like any other phenomena, the roots of a culture need to be understood and viewed from their ancestors.   As stated by Ken Jowitt, something new always comes from something old. If one looks to understand the contours of the New, one doesn’t just sit down and close one's eyes in a vain attempt to think of the New.  In the case of the frontier spirit, Silicon Valley innovators inherited this from elsewhere in space and time. Now it seems that the Founder Class in California is becoming the Inheritor class. Actual founders are moving their hearts and wallets elsewhere (see Austin, TX).  What may have made Silicon Valley great is vanishing.  But founders cannot operate as if from scratch.  They are not Howard Roark.  The mindset needed is to be cognizant of the role of cooperation. This creates a safeguard to avoid evolving into the Inheritor class.  In short, genius requires a bit of humility. 

The Role of Cooperation

Economies are presented to us in the mass media as a grand competition, but in reality, they function as an even more vast cooperation. To quote teen heartthrob Barack Obama: “You didn’t build that.”

The other day, I watched a guy on YouTube show his audience how to build their own bow out of willow.  Very cool stuff.   One comment thread was both hilarious and poignant: “How to Build Your Own Bow:  Step 1: Build an Axe.  Step 2: Build a Hammer” And so on.

There are countless examples showcasing the requisite interconnectedness of any creative process across the supply chain. Famously, in Leonard Read’s “I Pencil” essay, he shows the worldwide, cooperative effort for creating a number 2 Pencil.  More recently, Andy George created his own home-built Turkey Sandwich.  The process cost $1,500 and took 6 months; however, Andy “founded” a sandwich and was rewarded intellectually and monetarily for his effort.  One can build their own sandwiches from scratch, but such a micro-autarchy exhausts time resources and shows an unwillingness to cooperate.  Even the genius in the studio creating fine art has to liaise with power providers for the studio, art suppliers for canvas, and so forth.  No man is an island, and no founder will create solely by their bright and divine light.

Founders Glimpsing into the Nietzschean Abyss 

Steve Jobs is a Patron Saint of Silicon Valley founder culture.  What could be more frontier than building one of the biggest companies of all time in a garage?  Decades down the line, Apple appears to relish in its role as ruler and not the promise of design.  Still lauded by many in the media and technology world, Apple runs a huge bulk of its technical and financial processes on SAP, considered by many in the technology world to be a dinosaur.  One former executive on why he left SAP: “They stopped innovating.”  You’ll get no argument from me that much of this platform investment is centered on regulatory compliance.  Apple needs to render unto Caesar if they are to provide the masses with dopamine. 

Even radical new institutions are either referential to, or need to contend and liaise with, Legacy institutions.  The rub is this, some of the legacy institutions are so ingrained that they co-opt the founded institution.  Take this example from our beloved Bill Gates:

“When I was building Microsoft, I kept my distance from policy makers in DC and around the world, thinking that they would only keep us from doing our best work.  In part, the US government’s antitrust suit against Microsoft in the late 1990s made me realize that we should have been engaging with  policymakers all along… we need the government to play a huge role in creating the right incentives and making sure the overall system will work for everyone.”

Reading between the lines, when the Department of Justice sued Gates for unscrupulous practices under the Sherman Antitrust Act, he realized that he could actually leverage the US federal government to extend his software monopoly!  As written by Orwell in Animal Farm, “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."  

Founders Appreciating Chesterton’s Fence

I had the honor of taking some religious studies courses with Dr. David Pinault at Santa Clara University.  He liked wool ties, spoke Urdu & Arabic and had a vast understanding of the history of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the main religions of the Indian subcontinent.  A major takeaway was this: “The mark of a successful religious reformer is that they take as much of the legacy tradition with them as possible.” 

This argument may appear conservative to a founder like B.S. who verges on becoming a utopian technophile, especially since many technologies are outpacing cultural norms on an exponential scale.  But we still have deeply rooted legacies in the fabric of many of our institutions that can and should be valuable reference points for the Founder. 

There is some institutional machinery that needs to be considered before starting from scratch.  Whether it was conscious or not, BTC Founder Satoshi tipped his cap to Amatino Manucci, the 14th Century Florentine inventor of double-entry bookkeeping, before rolling up his sleeves and solving the Byzantine General’s problem.  His innovation? Triple-entry bookkeeping.  Tehkne does not have to be reverential, but is almost always referential.  

This might be controversial when talking about political founding, but another example of a solid reference document is the Bill of Rights, which is itself referential to the Magna Carta, Locke, and Hume.  Ultimately, innovators, those constrained and those unconstrained, must always be on the lookout for how their system can be hacked.  Today, three of the most powerful legacy institutions (the legal technocracy, central banking, and the military) have been effectively co-opted by legacy types.  These three sectors are firmly outside America’s Overton Window. Innovators must also contend with traditionalists outside, or small players within the power structure. These gatekeepers call themselves pragmatists and maintain a type of unconscious, unquestioning reverence for legacy institutions.  They will have an exceptionally hard time parting with the status quo. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Inherited institutions are taking dead aim at innovators who threaten their Honeypots.  A great example of this is Uber in London.  Technology that doesn’t suit the zero-sum mentality of power brokers will continue to be contested.  

How to Let Creators Create

Given all of this, it’s still clear that founders can still take a relatively clean tabula rasa, found something more valuable than what we have, and do so without building too heavily on the detritus-laden foundations of the past.  Given that there are real hurdles facing would-be founders, it is also clear that technology seems to eventually beat entrenched culture every time.  You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  However, every founder who has a sufficiently novel and compelling value proposition will face resistance from the Inheritors.  The uncharted territory has been clearly marked by Gatekeepers, Inheritors, and the Superstitious for centuries:  “Here Be Dragons.” 

The best places to innovate have historically been geographic.  Athens and Venice carried the yoke of exploration, innovation and flourishing in their epochs.  The US has a tradition of 50 Laboratories. Many countries are beginning to explore “Free Economic Zones.”  While a step in the right direction, founders still find themselves ultimately accountable to a sovereign in these instances.   

Balaji suggests a viable option of creating Cloud Countries, but again, creators without access to wealth will find themselves ultimately beholden to the physical infrastructure supporting that community.  Currently, the most economic way of cloud hosting is through the hyperscalers. There is an extremely interesting prospect of individual sovereign computing, but it is still in its infancy. Superficially, one can compare the Capital C Cloud and private clouds as city-states versus monasteries. 

The silver lining to all this is that exponential technology continues to lance legacy companies that have outlived their utility.  This will accelerate.  In the next decade, it is probable that one of the 1990’s tech unicorns will file for Chapter 11.  Founders will continue to create, but will need to continually work through, around, and past Inheritors.  The most difficult part for the successful Founder is falling into the Success Trap and assimilating with the Inheritors.  

…

[1] Henry Hitchings’ The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English is a wonderful example of the evolution and etymology of English  language across the centuries and how it archives the human experience.

[2] “The ideal way of life for the ancient Greeks was not to have to work. Slaves in their society did most of the difficult labor. The philosopher Aristotle gave us insight to the Greek mind-set. He believed slaves were tools, which just happened to be alive. He also believed citizens should not work “since leisure is necessary both for development of virtue and for the performance of political duties. ” Evidence from the period suggests that many citizens were able to live off their land or small shops where they employed managers, leaving them free to pursue other things. If a person did work, they almost always were self-employed. To the ancient Greek way of thinking, taking a wage from another citizen was similar to slavery.”