You make the bed you lay in

Have you ever heard the saying: “you made your bed, now lie in it?” I have. Its both common and often misunderstood. To the unwitting observer, it means decisions have consequences and the bed is an analog for some greater loss you have incurred due to your own negligence. To the deeply attuned reader, it actually represents a bit more than that…

The bed you lay in is about organization and meta-strategy. A meta-strategy is a overall vision that humans “reap what they sow” with a qualifier meant to protect extreme cases: “do not judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.” Sometimes life gets in the way. Your harvest may not be bountiful through misfortune or adversity and sometimes it takes effort and time to grow. But, if you attempted to maximize all your opportunities, we say you gave it your best shot. The bed you made was a good one but it turned out poorly anyways.

I like to look far back into the past and see the brilliance of what was and compare it to the mediocrity that is the now. Innovations of the 90s were absolute game changers. They paved the way for everything in our world. Sure, we needed the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s but the 90s… the 90s were and always will be the definition of American exceptionalism and innovation. It was like the wild west became electronic. The Star Wars franchise, with all its realism and mysticism, just couldn’t compete with Sandra Bullock in The Net or Angelina Jolie in Hackers. Take my humble opinion for whats its worth but those movies are still iconic because the themes are reused often without as much effect. While there are many inventions of the 90s we can examine, the one that is often relegated to obscurity is actually the one that changed the world: Napster. Some call it the new millennium of technology, as it was founded at the end of the 90s. And yet, it is very much a product of the 90s in both technical code and culture.

People tend to think of this company as the pirates of yesteryears. And yet, if you actually think about it, the sheer volume of innovations created by this company will blow your mind. Napster wasn’t a music or technology company. By all rights, it was the first social media one – both technically and culturally. For one, it operated on a protocol called peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing. In order for someone to get music, people have to share their own in what was becoming a library of music with a “cloud storage” that was much easier to access because it was a direct hook to others and couldn’t be intercepted or traced easily. Its technical brilliance is still in use today (even though it is outdated) and law enforcement still cannot defeat the P2P protocol, as piracy sites still rely on a version of it that hasn’t changed in almost 20-30 years. If success is measured in capability and endurance, P2P would be a nuke in the technical arsenal of the coding community. Two, the music industry was absolutely awful at getting the word out about new music. Napster made their industry successful and gave them the model to be successful before they even thought about it. Think about iTunes and think about how it was just a recycled version of music purchasing schemes that already existed in two spots. First, at a retail CD stores. Second, as a free commodity on Napster or the radio. Then, think about why iTunes came into existence. Our obsession with music occurred in direct relation to our fetish of it from Napster because we could experience more of it without as much effort (like going to a store or constantly pressing the tune button on our radios). If it hadn’t been free, we probably would have given up on all the effort of finding our tastes and just gone to our 3 concerts per year on average and been mostly happy. Instead, Napster made music the definitive commodity fetish of the new millennium and Apple leveraged this to create the iPod so you could take it on the go. Without Napster, Apple was useless. This means Napster both enabled the music industry, reestablished Apple’s capability to become a dominant technology player, and invented the iPhone, as this was the natural progression from the iPod. Heck, we can even give Napster credit for making new music or giving America cultural supremacy, as American music traveled to foreign countries before their own music had a chance to become successful. You could give credit to the music industry’s roaring efforts and Hollywood marketing schemes. Or, you can lay it all at Napster’s beautiful and magnificent feet. Let’s expand this even farther and let’s blow your mind even more so we can make you a true believer.

MySpace was a great platform. But, honestly, at the time, no one actually wanted to share photos over cyberspace. They didn’t want to publicly communicate with people. They didn’t even want to make their own cool HTML pages that selfishly engaged their vanity. Obviously, a lot has changed since then. Most, if not all, people were on MySpace for the music. MySpace couldn’t have existed without Napster turning music into a commodity fetish and Facebook was a distilled and minimalist version of MySpace, the platform Napster enabled to become successful by fact. Imagine how many companies Facebook created and take all that credit and give it up to your new favorite company and business icon: Napster. At this point, if you aren’t just stumbling over your own thoughts, you haven’t thought about the inexplicable nature of innovation and exponentialism. Napster created from nothing what all these other companies needed from Napster. At the end of the day, the beauty of technology is in its capacity to enable multiplication. America lost track of this fundamental capitalistic practice and gutted the platform. Thankfully, they did it slowly and only after all the innovations were created – but it was a fluke. We are seeing that backfire on America now and I should probably explain why.

If you know me well, you’ll know my new favorite TV show is Ted Lasso. It is hands down the single greatest example of beauty in the age of binge-television as you can get. It has complex characters and a difficult to swallow story line that actually makes it believable. In this show, there is a character named Jamie Tartt, who is a selfish and aggrandizing soccer superstar. He doesn’t pass because he thinks the best player should take all the shots. He doesn’t give credit where credit is due. He doesn’t lift people up even when group effort yields more results than individual triumph. At the end of the day, he is America personified. That’s not a sleight. Individuals can accomplish a lot and many of the most brilliant innovations or ideas come from a single individual (I’ve checked) and not a group of people. And yet, it is a sort of intimate irony to engage as an individual in what is a team sport. This is where America is Jamie Tartt. Did you notice how Napster created all those innovations that simulated economic growth that even a financial collapse in 2008 couldn’t crush? Instead of passing the ball to the right player in the right spot to make the easy play, America makes a difficult play and, while still successful, presses their luck in the future of how talent versus luck creates winning events. Instead of giving credit where credit is due, the U.S. undercut Napster to relegate it and others in similar veins to obscurity. The P2P protocol still isn’t mainstream because of its association with piracy and theft in relation to law enforcement. Instead of taking the most innovative talent to the top, the American government made it easier for the un-merited elites to continue to engage their supremacist culture without realizing they are in a team sport – they will eventually run out of innovation, as Napster can only lift you up for so long. We made our bed and we have to lie in it. But, the truth is more complicated than that because the U.S. Government forces us to lie in beds that no reasonable person would make and engages a set of rules and standards that kill innovation that no reasonable innovator can understand. Let’s discuss how America is Jamie Tartt.

The world modifies to meet changing operand-based demands. This means the environment slowly changes through addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We either calculate the equation correctly or calculate it poorly, leaving us unable to navigate our environment appropriately or with success. If you calculate incorrectly for a multitude of decisions, you’ll eventually reach the equivalent of a critical mass event. You can only get decisions so wrong so often, otherwise they create compounding losses. Informational losses are pretty close to energy losses in how they work systematically. Critical mass events are usually associated with a massive loss-oriented event in order to redistribute information or energy evenly where before it was part of a lop-sided and unequal relationship. Suffice to say, explosion and implosion aren’t good conditions for human behavior, even though they are great at helping complex systems reach equilibrium in relation to energy. This is where the energy version of critical mass is unlike the informational one, as critical mass events are neutral. To human beings, they are the death knell for continued social power and we tend to try to force equilibrium onto complex systems unnaturally. Call it a sort of ego complex to try to control all those events that are only possible to control if your meta-strategy is a good one (and this is incredibly difficult). Jamie Tartt, like America, blames everyone else for the team’s loss instead of re-calibrating their perspectives to see where poor teamwork is responsible.

Recently, the U.S. Government decided to attempt to pass a complex technology policy that is the equivalent of gutting Napster before it has had a chance to set the stage for massive industry and financial gains and innovation. They have lumped it into an infrastructure deal in order to recoup revenues they feel they are losing to cryptocurrency in the form of unpaid taxes. Ironically, this type of legislation would have been ineffective against Napster and it is probably Napster’s utter brilliance that made Congressional impropriety unsuccessful when it first came on the scene. As a result, we were able to reap all the benefits of Napster instead of a portion of those additions in the calculus that is the global economy. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good and America is the luckiest country in the world. At its core, this amendment regulates everything in the cryptocurrency sector because it regulates improperly. It is complicated to explain and the point of this post is not to show the details of cryptocurrency regulatory framework. The point is to show how we got lucky with Napster and the inevitable unluckiness of our decisions on cryptocurrency are a direct result of our own free will improperly applied. To do that, I’ll need to describe part of the financial industry…

The fact is banks are dinosaurs. I said it. I mean it. Dinosaurs are great at killing – a product of their size and my own psychology after seeing one to many Jurassic Park movies. Dinosaurs are also a metaphor for people who are great at stopping the old from becoming the new through intense power fetish. No reasonable banker could possibly think the future of currency is not cryptocurrency. The facts are: electronic is better than cutting trees to print any number of currency related material on and currency is better when it is mostly encrypted and definitely more secure than when it is not. Currency is also better when transactions can be made open without middle men getting in the way. The only thing banks could do by the time they caught on to these inevitable realities was delay the success of cryptocurrency long enough to get in on it. And yet, we have a problem here… First, if a bank is delaying the adoption or success of the future financial system, and cryptocurrency is the future financial system, they are making it easier for them to stay relevant but harder for us as a country and society to innovate. If Napster never had the chance to scale, music would never have become a global commodity fetish and an industry that makes more money every year than many governments pull in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would be selling CDs in retail stores, advertising on bus stops, or making movies to prop up soundtracks. Cryptocurrency has been stifled and obstructed in order to give monopolies (or pseudo monopolies?) time to scale their own operations to meet those new demands. Actions have consequences and its the small consequences over time that add up to larger events beyond our control. A meta-strategy is a strategy that only works because it is aggregated and organized over time to maximize opportunities over time. Despite that, cryptocurrencies have had resounding success. My feeling is that this success could have been greater than it already has been and it would have largely protected economies around the world from the upcoming inflation we will undoubtedly see from a stagnating economy due to a global pandemic.

Right now, hands down, America is what I like to call the world’s greatest computing super power. Meaning, we have the lion’s share of all server space and real estate in the world. By top ten biggest square footage companies in the world, America has 7 of the largest data centers. Over those same top ten companies, we own an aggregated 13 million square footage of server real estate. In the top ten, only three other countries are up to our level: China, India, and the UK. These facts are meant to show both scale and dominance in this area based on characteristics any reasonable person would say are incredibly telling. If the financial system is going to be based on computing power (and we want that computing power to be used responsibly in ways that alleviate problems of climate change), it would behoove any country in the world to have a robust server real estate and this is especially true for a superpower like America trying to maintain its superpower status. If you watch Ted Lasso, you’ll realize the irony behind getting a superpower to act like a superpower because Jamie Tartt could possibly be the worst person (as a character) ever. The fact is: it makes no sense to regulate, even partially, the future financial system while it is still in its throes of scaling up because they have been pushed down by corporate systems in order for them to play catch up. The U.S. Government should know this and they should also know that a bed you lie in is less relevant than the seeds you plant producing a bountiful harvest in the future. Technology is about maximizing your opportunities and America has not done that over the last twenty years. But, we have complained a lot – especially about cryptocurrency. Then again, now that I think about it, the music industry did a lot of complaining when it came to Napster. It was just that the music industry was not nearly as strong as the banking sector and Napster was utterly brilliant in its design to inhibit regulatory frameworks, especially when it came to enforcement.

Eventually, luck runs out – and this is true even of the most talented players in the world. America is seeing its luck run out in ways that are unbelievable to a superstar in the same way Jamie Tartt can’t see his own failings. We tend to give a lot of leeway to ourselves or our culture when we mess up but absolutely no leeway to others when they mess up. There may very well be a Ted Lasso around the corner that can turn this whole thing around. How will we know if there is one? The U.S. Government only helps those who don’t deserve its help and innovators and inventions that make superpowers exist are relegated to pirates on the open sea, engaging their freedoms as outlaws instead of as the world’s greatest talents that can complement Jamie Tartt in the team sport that is the domestic and global economy. Let’s cross our fingers everybody.