Daniel Andrlik

Every single one of these problems comes down to one simple thing: growth. Limited Partners invest in venture capitalists that can show growth, and venture capital invested in companies that would show growth, which would in turn increase their value, which would allow them to sell for a greater amount of money. The media covers companies based not on what they do but their potential value, a value that’s largely dictated by the vibes of the company and the amount of money that they’ve raised from investors.

And all of that only makes sense if there’s liquidity, and based on the overall TVPI (the amount of money you made for each dollar invested) of funds raised after 2018, the majority of VC firms have not been able to actually make their investors more than even money in years.

Why? Because they invested in bullshit. It’s that simple. The companies they invested in are dogs that will never go public or sell to another company. While many people believe that venture capital is about making early, risky bets on vestigial companies, the truth is that the majority of venture dollars go into late-stage bets. A kinder person would frame this as “doubling down on established companies,” but those of us living in reality see it for what it is — a culture that has more in common with investing in penny stocks than it does in understanding any business fundamentals.

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The problem with a system like this is that it naturally rewards grifting, and it was inevitable that a kind of technology would come along that worked against a system that had chased out any good sense or independent thought.

The impulse to find the One Big Thing that will dominate the next five years is a fool’s errand. Incremental gains are diminishing across the board. The markets for time and attention2 are largely saturated. There’s no need for another streaming service if 100% of your leisure time is already committed to TikTok, YouTube and Netflix; famously, Netflix has already considered sleep its primary competitor for close to a decade - years before the pandemic.

Those rare tech markets which aren’t saturated are suffering from pedestrian economic problems like wealth inequality, not technological bottlenecks.

For example, the thing preventing the development of a robot that can do your laundry and your dishes without your input is not necessarily that we couldn’t build something like that, but that most households just can’t afford it without wage growth catching up to productivity growth. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to commit to the substantial R&D investment that such a thing would take, if the market doesn’t exist because the average worker isn’t paid enough to afford it on top of all the other tech which is already required to exist in society.

A cartoon model of collective knowledge-making goes like this: Some people—scientists, reporters, scholars, fixers and builders—go out and mess around with the surfaces of the world and return with artifacts like papers, datasets, reported stories, recipes, hacks and tricks and tips and workarounds. And then the rest of us turn those artifacts into knowledge by making sense of them in the context of everything else we think and know. Expert knowledge production goes at the foundation of things like medicine, engineering, and physics and inexpert, marginal sensemaking swirls around those foundations, ignored by most people, at least when it comes time to do something serious. It’s all much messier than that and the experts are often terrible and wrong, but bear with me.

Marginal sensemaking communities—the ones that break the rules meant to keep mismatched frames like theology or mysticism out of zones like scientific inquiry—have always flourished in America, and not only in the discipline of economics. They’ve famously produced dire stews of pseudoscience and heresy: Proto-televangelist Father Coughlin’s racist American fascism is an obvious avatar of our own age. I think also of the still-formidable Oprah Winfrey who, with her less personally gracious imitators, steered decades of daytime television audiences into and through a Boschean landscape of satanic ritual abuse, the Law of Attraction, vaccines causing autism, and psuedo-medical nonsense of every kind.

And here in the US, the distinctions between respectable and marginal sources of information and sensemaking on top of information have been eroding for decades. Among other things, I’d argue that this erosion has allowed highly motivated actors to draw marginal forms of knowledge formation—baseless conspiracy theories, cultic and magical thinking, Nazism, grifts—closer to the center of civic life. In our late age of the world’s experience, the erosion has put unqualified conspiracists on federal vaccine evaluation panels and Oprah-favored supplement-peddling weirdo Mehmet Oz at the helm of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

And yes: this was happening long before the internet, but the internet’s arrival produced enormous increases in scale.

They made the kind of subtext that I took for granted and very much appreciated in more complex and “high minded” shows and just made it actual text.

And while all us critical adults with college degrees might find all this “subtext as actual text” too simplistic, consider where exactly we are in the state of the world right now. Look at the simplicity of the messages that are working. Look at how complex messages are failing.

You want to reach more people?

Tell them what you’re telling them.

Then tell them again…