The year is 2020. After what had been a tumultuous twelve months, I finally made up my mind to focus my career efforts elsewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time I changed directions. I moved to the US to become a pilot and ended up spending 10 years in the earth sciences — geology then petrophysics.
Being stuck at home for months on end came with enough challenges, but it was a great time for introspection. I wasn’t certain what I wanted to do, but I was clear on what I didn’t want anymore. Slowness, bureaucracy, lack of innovation, monotony. In fact, I thought the subsurface work we were doing could use two-thirds fewer people if we focused on automating some core tasks.
I made up my mind to leave. One problem though, where to this time?
I considered the usual oil and gas exit routes—banking and consulting—but both of them ticked boxes I was trying to avoid.
Then I realized the answer was in all the exploration I was doing in my free time. I was always interested in how things got built and how they worked. Naturally, I found myself spending a lot of my time immersed in the history of the technologies that power our everyday life. From electricity to the telegraph and telephone, to computers and the internet.1 2 Particularly, the internet. I noticed three things they had in common.
Ubiquity
Morse code encodes text characters using a combination of long and short signals. Modern computer systems use binary to encode instructions and data. The periodic table classifies elements into periods and groups–denoting their atomic size, metallic character, electron size, and valency. Most civilizations tell the time of year using solar- or lunar-based calendars. Languages encode information for oral or written communication.
Code is everywhere.
Composability
Tools built from a finite set of primitives (building blocks) can be recomposed.
Computers perform addition using a series of electrical switches to handle summation and overflow. The recomposition of these primitives allows for the computation of subtractions and multiplications.
Telegraphy is a composition of signals transmitted using visual, auditory, or electrical means.
The internet is a composition of networked computers interacting using a series of protocols. DNS locates sites, HTTP/S handles requests and responses between web clients and servers, SMTP sends mail, IMAP/POP retrieve mail, and so on.
DNA is the most complex program. Four primitives (nucleotide bases) are responsible for the unique cellular expressions of the over 100 billion humans that have ever lived.3
Leverage
Software is executable thought
There are two forms of productivity leverage—labor and capital. Creating value by leveraging labor requires the coercion of people (with money or the threat of violence) to do productive work. Capital refers to resources such as money, property, or machinery. It can be allocated to produce goods or services.
The challenge with labor and capital is their cost of replication increases linearly. Having labor does not cheapen the cost of additional labor, the same is true for capital (under most circumstances). In essence, permission is required to leverage labor and capital at scale.
Content and code are permissionless.4
If I had a great singing voice, I could stand in the middle of a public square and sing to everyone within earshot. I could even record my performance, upload it to YouTube, and profit from it whenever someone watches it.
Alternatively, assume I have an idea for a better video hosting site than YouTube. I could write the code for the new site, put it online, and take all of YouTube’s customers. Theoretically, of course.
The internet makes code and content truly permissionless forms of productivity leverage by offering instantaneous, global reach at negligible replication costs.
…
Ultimately, the choice was between sticking with what had worked for me or taking the fork that just appeared in the road. In early 2021, this showed up on my Twitter feed…5
Notes
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Some interesting reading about the origins of computing. Really, the history of logical thinking. ↩
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If I had to choose a book that make everything click for me, Code by Charles Petzold would be it. Great recommendation if you want the fundamentals of how things work under the hood. ↩
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Genetic code is borne of a combination of 4 nucleotide bases. These bases encode all the information required to build and maintain an organism. The key to its complexity and efficiency is its composability. From just four bases it can be combined in almost limitless ways to create an astounding variety of enzymes, hormones, and antibodies, each with a specific function. Here’s an interesting read. ↩
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Content is a colloquialism for information or entertainment. Text like articles and books; Audio like songs, podcasts, or audiobooks; and Visual depictions like imagery and video. The medium of distribution is quite important as well. Historically, content replication required physical mediums. Paper for writing, vinyl records for audio, canvas for imagery, and film for video. The replication cost for a CD was the price of a blank CD (and its labeling). No matter how cheap a CD is, the cost scales linearly as more CDs are printed. An artist only requires one copy of an MP3 for unlimited online downloads or streaming. ↩
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The opportunity for introspection brought on by the pandemic was most impactful in making me switch career paths. Cleansing politics from my Twitter feed (2020 was a wild one, huh?) was the second on the list. The image is “Life Paths, by Tim Urban.” ↩