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Essays on Technology and Culture

Whether the Lean Lifestyle

There’s a sense that the Valley thinks we should run our lives with the same brutal efficiency as a lean startup. Constant work, with an intense focus on quantification. Instead of a hobby, you have a side hustle. If you’re lucky, that side hustle is something you’d like to do anyway, but if you’re into something unprofitable like fiction writing, macrame, or stamp collecting, you can be a Lyft driver or a TaskRabbit. You take the income from your side hustle, and invest it in self-tracking gadgets that help you eat, sleep, and exercise more efficiently. You can experiment on yourself with different diet and fitness regimens for optimum efficiency—or just switch to an all Soylent diet so you don’t have to eat, let alone cook. All the more time to devote to your side hustle(s), and I guess your full-time job, if you’re lucky enough to have one.

Should we be living like this? Is the end goal of our lives to just be efficient machines, churning out our widgets, working at peak productivity, and constantly hustling to monetize everything? I worry when I see the latest new app or service for logging yet another set of numbers that’s supposed to represent something about us. As the American economy stagnates, more people push going into business for yourself. “Make an app,” they say, even if the app gold rush is over. Now, the only people making it rich are the people selling the Kim Kardashian game, or the people selling how-to guides for making smartphone apps. Be a freelancer, or a consultant! How soon before that market becomes saturated, too?

And who benefits from all this efficiency? The quantified app makers, the how-to book sellers, the weirdo who makes Soylent, and advertisers, advertisers, advertisers. Because, of course, our downtime—if we’re lucky enough to have it— can be spent on social media, Netflix, and ordering crap from Amazon to fill up the rooms we’re not renting out on AirBnB. We’re not that far from THX–1138, when you think about it, right down to roommates that just occupy wasted space. “Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy” could be any “sharing economy” company’s advice to its workers. The better a worker you are, the more your reputation grows, and even that can be quantified. And someone takes a little off the top to keep it all going. If you question it, they’ll tell you that good jobs are gone for good. It’s either be an entrepreneur, work the sharing economy, or to hell with you.

I don’t necessarily believe that good jobs are gone for good. I do believe there are things we can’t do with Big Data and algorithms, that there will always be a place for real human beings to do real human things. What I write above is a worst-case scenario, but it’s important to think about. Can we be human if we’re just constantly working away, whether it’s at our day jobs, our side hustles, our “sharing economy” gig, or all of the above? It’s even possible that we could quantify our social interactions, earning Whuffie for conversing with someone who’s algorithmically determined to be on our wavelength. (Don’t laugh, that’s how Tinder works!) If you’re an awkward geek, that might make interaction easier, but then we lose the human ability to fail and learn from our failures to communicate. The brutal quest for efficiency means that we never get to truly live. Let’s not be afraid to examine the assumptions of the Valley’s ideal of what work will be in the future—at least for non-programmers and CEOs. We have a lot to lose.

The Endgame of the “Sharing Economy”

I have a startup that I plan to launch soon called LiveIn that combines all the best features of TaskRabbit, Lyft, Zaarly, and AirBNB. It’s a sharing economy enabling service to end all others—we match people with empty rooms with people who can fill them. However, instead of paying money, our LiveIn Chore Monkeys pay for their space by performing chores for the space owner. The responsibilities are negotiated up front through our iOS and web apps, along with terms and length. A LiveIn Chore Monkey could cook meals, do laundry, clean house, drive people to work or school, or other “unspecified services,” and are compensated with the ability to live in some of the hippest communities in America. We’re currently in private beta in Brooklyn and the Bay Area, but planning a public launch in 2015. LiveIn also collects a small listing fee to help keep us sustainable.


Okay, this isn’t an actual startup, but it seems like live-in help is the inevitable endgame of the “sharing economy” promoted by Bay Area technologists and Venture Capital types. The premise at least makes sense on the service: you have something you can provide: a spare room in your house, the ability to mend clothes, a car with a back seat, and you offer it to anyone who is willing to pay your price. Of course, anyone can tell right away that this isn’t actually sharing. The “sharing economy” is a wonderful piece of doublethink that hides the truth that these companies are just enabling a new form of a “freelance gig economy” with more middlemen to take your share. Even the marketing for some sharing economy apps pin it as a side hustle. Lyft promises drivers that they’ll make up $35 an hour as a taxi hack.

There are some great takedowns of the “sharing economy” floating around online, including this great comic on how a sharing economy doesn’t work for the poor. Even for those with enough time, skills, and a car, living as a part of the commercialized “sharing economy” isn’t likely to make enough money for you to live on. The New York Times has a full article on how AirBNB is abused in New York City’s competitive housing market. The most damning inditement, however, is the look inside Couchsurfing, one of the original sharing economy darlings, and how VC funding destroyed its community. Meanwhile, the real sharing economy is overlooked by high-profile, Internet enabled startups and VC funding.

What is the real sharing economy? It’s tool libraries, material exchanges, carpools, and food pantries. It’s New York’s shadow transit system. It’s services where people give as well as get, and where money rarely changes hands except perhaps a membership fee. Food pantries are in serious need as donations drop and need rises with cuts to government assistance. Of course, there’s no money to be made by venture capital in those spaces, which echoes a statement I’ve made before: there’s no money in solving real problems faced by real people. Once again, we have to think outside the startup to find new solutions that aren’t just adding middlemen and profit taking.

Thinking Outside the Startup

Back in 2005, Paul Graham of YCombinator wrote “Why Smart People Have Dumb Ideas” in the midst of approving applicants for the first YCombinator class. Nearly a decade later, his thoughts are even more relevant. Graham bemoans applicants with startup ideas that just seem “cool,” but aren’t anything that will get customers—business ideas that don’t solve problems.

Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas for two or three new startups. The articles are full of descriptions of problems that need to be solved. But most of the applicants don’t seem to have looked far for ideas.

Lack of imagination is a problem in every space. But, I don’t want to turn out another angry screed against seemingly frivolous startups that exist just to get bought out. Paul’s essay gave me something else to think about: whether we should focus so much energy into the startup model to solve real problems in the first place—especially technology startups.

Despite what some like to think, not every problem has a technological solution, at least no exclusively technological. Consider the scope at which many startups and solo entrepreneurs work. A smartphone app can tell you how much CO2 you put out on your drive to work. It won’t get high-speed commuter rail in walking distance of home. Changing the transportation infrastructure of the country into something environmentally friendly takes cooperation and sacrifice. It takes government, not just private enterprise. It’s part of why Elon Musk’s Hyperloop might never get off the ground. [1]

Such thinking is anathema to Silicon Valley ideals of individualism, where “sharing” is something you do as a side hustle on Lyft or AirBNB. Compare building out high-speed rail with Google’s self-driving car. The Google Car is the Silicon Valley ideal: individual and asocial. It makes a great demo, but it’s far from a solution to real transporation and environmental issues. Cars For Trees, the carpooling app by Leo Grand, the homeless coder, has the potential to change behavior, but it’s a hack over existing infrastructure, not a change.

The startup model fails at solving problems on a large scope for one reason: money. From the moment a startup gets its first round of seed funding, the pressure is on for it to grow, and either start profiting, or get the attention of a larger company for an acquisition. Only then does the VC get a return on their investment. To go back to Paul Graham:

Most of the groups applying have not stopped to ask: of all the things we could do, is this the one with the best chance of making money?

Paul’s job, the job of any Venture Capitalist, is to make money. It’s why the VC’s investors chose to invest with them: the promise of a lucrative return. By any measure, Paul is doing his job when selecting companies on the basis of if they’ll succeed and profit. The problem is that not every problem can be solved in a way that turns a profit. And, when the race is on to make more money (or a higher valuation) faster and faster, any endeavor that requires a large investment in time before a return can be realized is just isn’t going to cut it. When the California Public Employees’ Retirement Board wants to know they’ll get back so much percent on their fund inside of six years, anything that takes five-plus years to realize is in trouble. This is why biotechnology firms got hurt so bad during the financial crisis, and they still haven’t recovered.

It would be great to see other models explored for solving problems that don’t just focus on what consumers will buy, and what will turn an investment. It’s interesting that growth in non-profits has outpaced growth of for-profit businesses in the US, but you don’t hear much about that. Many of these new non-profits are probably working similarly to startups: focusing on a small niche and working to solve a small problem before expanding—if they expand at all. It also could be advocacy groups, SuperPACs, launching to promote political causes.

What if the serial entrepreneurs who made it big decided to start a non-profit that focused on improving public education, and fund it with their own money instead of putting it into another college drop-out’s idea for a service that could be acquired by Facebook in two years? What if they took their money and used it to lobby for progressive policies in Congress like net neutrality and breaking up the cable monopolies? These aren’t even new models. Imagine what the sort of minds who create groundbreaking new consumer tech could do if they were free from the requirement to make money: just to improve people’s lives with the wildest ideas they can come up with.

It’s high-minded idealism, but there’s so much money being created and recirculated back into the system of startups, acquisitions, and acqui-hires. I don’t see why a civically minded, successful tech entrepreneur couldn’t just say “to hell with it” and fund some blue-sky project for the good of even a community, not just a wallet. Dale Carnegie built libraries. The best we’ve gotten is Mark Zuckerberg throwing $120 million at San Francisco schools. It’s a drop in the bucket of his $28 billion net worth, and hopefully it’ll work better than the $100 million he gave to Newark, New Jersey. The rhetoric of Silicon Valley is all about thinking bigger. Let’s see them put their money where their mouths are—without worrying about making it back.

Choosing Exploitation

Something really set me off this morning, and it’s still setting me off. It came from reading a book by James Altucher, Choosing Yourself. I picked it up because of a glowing review from someone I respect and admire, Patrick Rhone. The book has some good points, especially around health (physical and mental) and well-being as a foundation for success.

It’s bad points come as some of the examples James Altucher upholds as examples for success. When I got to this description of how a friend of his made $300,000, I came as close to closing the book and throwing it across the room:

He basically looked at about a dozen other databases keeping track of all housing data and scraped specifically the rent-to-own houses off of them… Since people could potentially spend hundreds of thousands on the right house, they were willing to spend a few hundred on a subscription to his database…

In other words, he’s scraping someone else’s data, someone else’s work, and charging for access. This is data that a prospective home owner could get free with a cursory Google, or Craigslist search. The reason I didn’t throw the book across the room because I was reading it on my Kindle, on the subway. After discussing my indignation with Patrick on App.Net, I calmed down, and then later in the day I read this about the same friend’s current business:

He just launched a rent-to-own laptop product. He bulk buys the laptops for $200 apiece and rents-to-own them out for $20 a week for a year. BAM! Huge margins. He started just a few months ago. He’s bringing in $300,000 a month now…

I went back to re-read that passage to make sure I didn’t read “$20 a month” as “$20 a week.” Upon checking, I went from merely angry to outright infuriated.

Why does this make me angry? Because James Altucher is holding up as an example someone who’s business practices are shamefully exploitive. The rent-to-own business is part of a whole industry that exploits the poor in a shameful, disgusting way. It’s in the same bins as subprime credit cards and loans, tax refund loans, “opportunity pricing,” [1] and the granddaddy of them all: payday loans. These are business models that prey upon the poor, exploiting their difficulty in meeting basic needs, and extracting grotesque amounts of money from it.

The exploitive nature of rent-to-own is illustrated as follows: a laptop that costs James’s friend $200, costs the poor person who is renting it $1040 dollars before they get to own it. That is an over 500% markup. A brand new, 11" MacBook Air costs $899 from Apple, and Apple doesn’t make nearly as much in margin (approx. 33%). If this were an ordinary loan, the interest rate would violate the usury laws in near every state in the entire United States. Not my idea of someone to be holding up as an ideal in a self-help book.

So, I’m angry.

I’m angry, most of all, at the implication that it’s all right to sell out your morals and ethics if it means you’re “choosing yourself” to get rich. I’m angry because it’s possible to do such a disgusting, exploitive thing, and not only get away with it, but be praised for it. This person is making money by actively causing harm to people, and that makes me angry enough to bang out 800-plus words about why.

If you have about fifty minutes, please watch Mike Monteiro’s excellent talk, “How Designers Destroyed the World.” If you do not have fifty minutes, the takeaway is this: “You are directly responsible for what you put into the world.” Mike rails against designers who actively, or passively, let things out into the world that cause harm to people. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re putting something into the world, too. The money may be rolling in, but you’re responsible for what effect it has on far more than your bottom line.

These are things we all need to think about. Making money is great, provided the people who are giving it to you get something of equal value in return. I do not begrudge anyone who makes their money by making people’s lives better in some small way. We’re in this together, and it’s possible to “choose yourself” in a way that doesn’t put other people further in the hole.

James Altucher has an email address set up to contact him if you read the book and want your money back. I reached out to him there, while writing this. I don’t want my money back. I don’t need to quibble over a dollar for an eBook. Life is too short, and I’ve probably gotten my money’s worth from the real advice in the book. I just explained my concerns over his choices of example, and how angry it made me. I hope he responds, and if he does, expect a follow-up.

I’m a lot less angry now, having explained myself.


  1. In short: working backwards from a price to create a payment plan where it is actually more profitable if the buyer defaults, and the item is repossessed.  ↩

Why I’m Afraid of Bitcoin

An unregulated fiat currency popular among technocrats and open source wonks. If that was all Bitcoin was, I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I just wouldn’t care. Instead, Bitcoin is an unregulated fiat currency popular among technocrats, open source wonks, and hedge funds. That scares me. Wall Street types going nuts over an unregulated fiat currency, considering their track record, should scare anyone.

There’s nothing to prevent fraud, and nothing to stop unscrupulous investors from crashing the currency and running off with the proceeds. Even worse, the very idea of regulation has already popped one bubble in the currency. Still, with people like famed hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry claiming a single Bitcoin could become worth $1 million [1], one can’t help but think there’s plans to inflate that bubble again.

It’s easy to be blinded by novelty. There’s enough people pushing and promoting Bitcoin as the latest technological salve and as a get-rich-quick scheme that I think most supporters are blinded. The dangers are real, and there’s real people’s money being invested in something frighteningly risky. I wouldn’t put even a penny of my money in Bitcoin, and as long as it remains popular among hedge funds and other unscrupulous Wall Street types. I’ll leave it to the technocrats and wonks to get burned instead.


  1. Apologies for the Business Insider link, but it’s the best I could find.  ↩