We are in for a snowstorm tonight, the reports are saying. There is something about being at the mercy of weather that really is refreshing. I have, over the years, become more and more skeptical about city-living, and have enjoyed being ice-locked on an island in the archipelago and now huddling next to the fireplace in our rented cabin in the north. I am working, reading – but I am also connected with the nature around me in a way that feels extraordinary.

I have found that a lot of friends and colleagues are worn down by the pandemic. I don’t think that they are tired of it or sick of the restrictions, that is not it (and the restrictions have been lighter in Sweden than elsewhere), but I do think that there is something about the way we spend our time that is at work here.

Some time ago I read a small paper about how women in women’s prisons in the US were developing coping strategies for dealing with the fact that they would spend perhaps decades incarcerated. One key element, the paper noted, was to create really monotonous routines – since those routines work as time compression algorithms. If everyday is the same they compress to the same day in your mind. When you are incarcerated that becomes a coping mechanism, and the compression is your friend.

When this is what your freedom looks like – when this is the natural state – I think it generates a sense of dull sorrow over time compressed. At some level we are all aware that we have a limited time in the world. The memento mori may not be as articulated as with cancer survivors or others having a near brush with death, but it is there. It touches us, absently, in the middle of the night when we realize that at some time we will leave our loved ones behind and that our children will cover our eyes. It can fill you with a startling moment of deep sadness, but most of the time it just alights like a butterfly and then leaves in the tyranny of everyday things, or better: in the variety of everyday things.

When the variety disappears, we end up feeling time not slipping away but being compressed. Every day becomes the same, and that makes the thin veil separating us from our demise thinner, more translucent. The routine inherent in pandemic life, the lack of variety, the lack of distraction from our mortality is wearing us down.

Knowing it will pass is not enough. In a sense we are, to varying degrees, going to be survivors. How will that impact our lives? I know that there are those who think that we will rush to forget it and jump in to a new version of the 1920s, but I wonder if that is true. I, for one, feel more like seeking out other rhythms and paces, finding new contexts and building a good routine around being with family, learning and experiencing. Once the allure of the busy life lifts, it is less likely to put its spell on us again.

But, hey, on my part it may was well just be age – and maybe the younger generations will jump back into the fray. They should, and it is probably likely they will. And we will emerge not stronger, not weaker – but different from this year.

Outside the storm is building, eternal and ageless. The snow is blanking out the mountains and other cabins, and in a way it reminds me of the pandemic – it is a different whiteout, where we lose the contours of life and it all melts into a single time.

The way you formulate your problem at least weakly determines your solution space. Let’s take a simple example. In Sweden, we have set a goal to have zero deaths in traffic every year. This is proudly referred to as a zero-vision, and is the overarching narrative around how we think about traffic safety.

Sweden has a low rate of traffic deaths compared with many other countries, and the common assumption is that the zero-vision is responsible for this — but the zero vision was put in place when the number of deaths were already declining fast, in 1997 (the graph is of the number of people dead in traffic:

The current state of affairs is good – Sweden finds itself at the bottom of the list of deaths in traffic by any number of measures. But we have quite obviously also plateaued. And this where it gets interesting.

Are we likely to get anywhere if we continue to iterate the zero-vision here? If we do, the kinds of solutions we are looking for tend to be absolute – we will ask the question “how do we get to zero?” – but those solutions, that solution space, seems limited.

What happens if, instead, we start thinking about relative goals? Decrease the number of dead 5% every year. If we do, we will make progress toward the goal because there will always be something we can do, some small measure that helps.

This is where incrementalism beats big vision – because in incrementalism you deal with solution spaces that are orders of magnitude bigger than in “vision”-spaces.

Now, this is not just relevant for traffic issues. It is even more relevant for the big vision political pieces we see coming out with frightening regularity. The EU has turned this into an artform. Every decade or five years it comes out with a paper arguing that in a certain amount of time it will become “leading” at this or that. The Lisbon Agenda was a great example — the EU set the goal to become the world’s leading R&D region with government spending on science the highest in the world.

This strategy fails, over and over again, and it is not because the EU is not trying — it has summits and writes papers and sets up projects. But the projects are all within the solution space of the question – they deal with how to become leading.

Would it not be much better to look at relative, incremental goals instead? To increase the spending on R&D 15% a year would be a start. To increase investment in R&D – whether private or public – 15% a year even better. The solution space here is much larger and much more interesting.

This post almost ends up being a post in praise of incrementalism, you may say. Should we not have visions? Should we not set Big Hair Goals? Of course we should, but we need paths there – and where the vision is the end of the process, the solution space remains small. We need to get much better at mechanism design, and realizing that within the visions and missions we should try to maximize our solution space by asking the relative, incrementalist questions, questions like:

• Can you make this grow by 10% YoY?
• Can you increase the pace of this by 5% a year?
• Are there ways to chip away at the corners here and get us 3% more revenue?
• How would you go about decreasing complaints just 5%?
• Etc.

These questions are more interesting than you think, because they compound. And that is where the visionary change hides, in compounding increments.

(H/T to Hosuk Lee-Maikyama for the pointer on yet another EU document looking at becoming leading – and as a European I applaud the ambition, heck, it is necessary – but the targets are in absolutes which limits us in growing in two ways – in limiting the solution space as suggest above, and in locking us in to targets that may well be overtaken by the often fast and unpredictable changes in the world. If it is absolute numbers (20 million this, 10000 that) or “cutting edge of quantum computing”, we still end up with the wrong kinds of targets).

Adrian Daub’s book on Silicon Valley thinking is intended as a criticism of the ideas that underpin the Silicon Valley-ideology, if there is one. This in itself is a worthwhile project, and teasing out the intellectual underpinnings of different spheres in society is in itself a good form of critical philosophy. It is fair to say that Daub is writing in the tradition of Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman and, more lately, Evgeny Morozov.

The book is divided into different sections dealing with different themes identified by Daub as the core themes in Silicon Valley thinking and in these Daub discusses various subjects, such as the genius cult and the disregard for content that he feels that he can read out of Silicon Valley culture, or, to be precise out of corporate Silicon Valley culture.

The book runs into a problem here. Daub is aware of, and writes extensively about, the counter cultural roots of some of the technology culture that he describes, but he assumes that it is now absorbed into corprorate structures and subverted into meaningless TED talks and empty PR-speak – but that is not entirely true. He, himself, is a professor at Stanford and there is a broad counter cultural community still left in the Bay Area. Look at the recent political shifts in downtown SF or at organizations such as the Foundation for the Long Now — these are signs that the counter culture is alive and well, so what Daub seems to limit himself to is the the way that “Corporate Silicon Valley” speaks.

By missing this distinction, Daub paints his target with too broad a brush and doesn’t engage with the fundamental ideas that still organize a lot of the discourse around technology in the region. That is a pity, because he is clearly very well-read and argues forcefully — so wasting that energy on a strawman version loosely put together seems unnecessary.

It is also part of the current discourse of technology criticism, itself a genre that has become lazy in the face of absolutely no resistance whatsoever.

If we were to critique Daub’s book with the same low-resolution analysis we would end up saying things like this:

• Daub suggests that Silicon Valley is idolizing the dropout in order in order to advance a weird elitism anti-elitism that allows them to ignore accumulated knowledge, but instead of arguing for a less elitist model his critique slips back into the original, academic elitism, suggesting that tech entrepreneurs have only a shallow understanding of what are really complex problems only understood through years of academic study and university lectures.
• Daub suggests that Silicon Valley is economically dependent on content, but refuses to engage with it – devaluing it both in partnerships and in moderation of their platforms. Content, he thinks, is a key driving force, but in doing so he reduces the people who use the technology to bystanders without any agency at the same time as ignoring the enormous explosion of creativity and content that the Internet has brought about.
• Daub wants desperately to paint Silicon Valley tech bros as adolescent Randians focused on individual independence and rationality, but in doing so engages in the same rote simplification you find in the TED-talks he despises. Yes, there are people who read Rand in the Bay Area, but it is the most communitarian and liberal-leaning area in much of the US — so claiming Rand is the intellectual lodestar here is clearly not just a stretch argument, but a disappointingly sensationalist one.
• When Daub turns to trolls he produces an interesting essay that is entirely decoupled from any analysis of Silicon Valley. The communication patterns that he is studying are not typical or unique for the area, and he makes this point himself, so claiming that the troll is a Californian species is not only not credible, but borders on guilt by association.
• For someone intent on criticizing the shallow argument offered by tech thinkers, Daub suprsingly often falls for the temptation to make quick jabs and lazy attacks. In an otherwise interesting chapter on Girard and mimetic desire – and there is something to his criticism here – he writes “It’s highly dubious that Girard would have thought that the PayPal mafia was the solution to mimetic desire. Thiel likes the PayPal mafia so much he renders it sacred”. This is tweet-level trolling, from the mouth that condemns it.

We could go on, but let’s not. I think the reality is that this book is an important read. A book that could have been more, and should have been more, than it ended up being. I think Daub should have written that book. In that book we would have had to face harder questions, like questions around how progress and technological innovation really should be coupled in a democratic society or questions around what the Internet should evolve into if we could build it further into the future. It could be a book about the history of ideas clashing here – Ellul, Postman, Winner and on the other side the likes of Herman Kahn, John McCarthy (with his extreme optimism) and Herbert Simon. Or why not a real discussion about the ideas of Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil as key missing elements in the intellectual endeavor undertaken in the Bay Area.

Because this is the thing: a majority of tech leaders are interested in the intellectual debate about their industry and, in my albeit limited experience, committed to understanding how to best solve the fundamental challenges we are facing. That is quite the audience to be addressing – compare that with the leaderships and elites of past decades!

That is, I think, why it is so disappointing to see tech criticism succumb to the formulas and gestures of generic capitalist critiques.

But Daub’s book can be read for the nuggets of constructive criticism it contains as well, and that alone makes it worth your time (some resist this idea of constructive criticism – I remember Morozov telling me in a chat at Google that it was not his job to come with alternatives, that Adorno had it right when he said that the criticism should not engage in alternatives but tear down the edifice and then stand back – I can respect that, but think it, personally, a waste of time).

In a newly published survey, the Pew Research Institute is looking into how Americans view China. The outcome at first glance seems unsurprising: Americans are increasingly skeptical of China, and are concerned about China across a number of different dimensions. But when you look more closely at the numbers you cannot but notice something interesting, and it has to do with what kind of concern this is.

This chart, looking at the republican / democratic divide is a case in point:

The structure of bipartisan agreement on how to handle China is oriented around the issue of human rights, not about any real threat from China to the US. We can simplify and tease out the narrative here: The US thinks of itself as a democracy responsible to speak up on and deal with human rights issues, and not as an empire about to be replaced by a rising China.

It would be very interesting to see what a similar survey in China would look like. Would Chinese be equally concerned with the US, and across what dimensions? The Chinese narrative is around the recovery from past humiliations and the rightful rise of China as a world power, I think, and this clash of narratives is likely to structure the relationship in important ways going forward.

Other interesting data that indicate the same thing:

The US-China relationship would look very different if the category “Threats” was the top one, and especially if the “China wants to be the most powerful country” trended to the top.

The NPR reported another interesting aspect of this – that Chinese trust in the state increases as US sentiment grows more negative. US negative views are consolidating the Chinese around their narrative.

In any geopolitical analysis the relationship between the US and China is one key aspect, and the way the two countries view each-other is an interesting way of cutting the data.