Coming from a family of alcoholics (roughly a year later)

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Last year in October, Reed and I had a conversation about how I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of my drinking. It had recently become more “European” and less “poorly managed coping mechanism,” but it still wasn’t making the cut. I wrote three blog posts about it, at the 2, 4, and 6 month marks of running an experiment.

I consider the experiment a successful one. My relationship to drinking has been radically reshaped to one I’m not ashamed of, one that feels manageable in perpetuity, and one that allows me to show up in ways I’d like for myself and the people around me.

I also don’t think my relationship to intoxicants will ever actually feel resolved. I feel like I am full of bees, and anything that changes the relationship to those bees is intriguing to me — both in unhealthy (extreme intoxicant use) but also in healthy ways (reading, meditating). I have realized the easiest way to explain this is that I feel literal, deep discomfort when witnessing others’ suffering and/or injustice in the world. And well, gestures to the world. Most of the time these days, I do a pretty good job of staying present and bearing witness and seeing what my role is (and isn’t). But the temptation to Feel Less (or at least differently) is always there.

I believe I have unique drive and skill to help the world suck less. I believe every single person has this as well, regardless of how quashed it’s been by working environments, surviving capitalism, bad bosses, etc. I am also more forgiving (and frankly envious) of others who do not react to that drive than I used to be. Maybe they just don’t feel it as deeply as I do. Maybe they have more scar tissue. That doesn’t prevent us from being good neighbors to each other.

So, it’s nice to have found a homeostasis that isn’t rigid, but is based on shared goals of how I want to inhabit the world. It’s nice to have some space and awareness of the urges when they do kick in. As my therapist said recently, “the bees are smart, but they are not wise.” So, I wonder what it would be like to be wise, and what choices I would make if I were, and I try to make those choices.

Choosing a path for wealth redistribution

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We’re all suffering under capitalism. There are lots of efforts out there to shift the world to a better place. And yet, it doesn’t yet feel like enough, at least to me. So I want to start logging what I’m seeing out there in the world, so far as fighting back. I know it’s there. Hell, I know a lot of people doing the actual work. I take small steps in my own life to help create a more just world. But I truly feel like we’re on the cusp of something different. As Saul Williams opened with when I saw him last year, we are the death doulas of empire.

A bit ago, I brought together folks from the anticapitalist art and music festival I help produce, neighbors organizing against fascism, and some guests from the esteemed East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative to talk about wealth redistribution. I imagined the arc to be: how do we take wealth away from those who have far more than is reasonable, redistribute it in a way that shifts but doesn’t collapse what we have now, and what does that mean about our everyday living?

We kicked off by talking about how wealth is created and held in our country. We talked about the stock market and how stocks are owned by a smaller and smaller set of people, removing any “collective intelligence” from “fiduciary responsibility.” We talked about real value versus market value, and how many of the ultra wealthy don’t actually have cash on hand, but borrow against their market-valued assets to pay for expenses, rather than selling and getting taxed. And we came to a fork in the path of how to redistribute wealth — should we try to take imagined wealth away from those who have it, as absolutely does impact what they have access to, power they hold especially with politicians, etc; or should we focus on turning our backs on the oligarchs to build and control real value within our communities?

The thing we came to, with much respect to those who go the other path, is that we don’t actually care if some chucklefuck wants to live on a private island and jump out of planes every day, so long as they leave the rest of us alone. If the end of the world does come, they’ll get killed by their guards anyway and/or die alone. Choosing this path means building alternative political structures as well as holding onto our own wealth, as the current political system is essentially owned by those with lots of imagined wealth.

But, as Noni from EBPREC pointed out, the goal is not to simply pass debt around in our communities. So how do we open up space for those with more wealth than they need to invest in communities without the expectation of ownership? Poor Skool does this in radical ways, as does EBPREC. Seed Commons allows folks to invest in community-led work with a lower return rate than the stock market, but still a return.

We also brushed on hyper individualization in this country making it hard to get organized, including with eviction culture making it difficult to impossible to invest with and know your neighbors. But what if we shared what organizing is working? Great work is happening, but it’s hard to see. So I might start collecting stories and sharing them, unless someone is already doing this. Point me to great things! Let’s all share what’s working. And let’s also bring our neighbors cookies, no matter how long or short we might know them for.

Hierarchies and second puberty

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I’ve been getting feedback from those in a position to do so that I’ve turned into a bit of an asshole. I explored some of the contributions to this personality shift a bit ago, but I didn’t actually address the behavior.

I didn’t address the behavior because I wanted to know what it was like to take up space in the world, to not be full of crippling doubt at every moment, and to trust in the strength of others.

I now know what that’s like, but I don’t have the limited grace and abundant guidance we give pubescent boys as they learn how to navigate the world when full of certainty, rage, and energy. I am mid-stage career with a kindergartener and a community built around empathy, connection, and listening. So while a few folks closest to me have asserted new boundaries and talked to me about what it is to be a Good Man (which I am also not interested in being, but I am interested in how they approach things to integrate it), I have run roughshod around those who perceive me as having some sort of power over them.

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Silently resolved ambiguity is comprehension debt of intent

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In our theory, the development lifecycle is compressed, and the decisions that are made at “transition” points are moved to later. Even “transition” here is a bit nebulous, as stages of the lifecycle are overlapping more and more with each other. So instead, the types of decisions being made with AI tooling (and the debt they incur) is different. Decisions made with awareness reduce comprehension debt but incur naps; decisions you allow (intentionally or accidently) your agent to make prevent the nap but increase debt. Decide which decisions you should be making, and set your system up to surface them to you alongside relevant data.

The development lifecycle in the "double diamond" structure, with empathy starting small and expanding. Next is defining, which picks up big where empathy left off, and hones down. At that decision point, a problem definition is created. Ideation again expands the space, and an architectural decision record hands off to the prototyping stage, which starts to narrow the space down again. Finally, testing finishes out that point and the decision is whether or not to ship.
Empathy still expands and hands off to a defining stage. However, the definition stage is truncated and moves to a broader ideation stage with a problem definition that is broader. Testing begins in a narrow but straight shot in ideation, soon followed by and overlapping with a broad prototyping stage. When ideation completes, an ADR and goal document is written. Prototyping continues to its truncated point, and then testing finishes out and the final decision point of shipping still exists.
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Organizational size and maturity

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One thing I didn’t understand during my job hunt was how much organizational size and maturity matter for a person’s fit on their new team. Which is funny, considering how much I care about organizational theory and what different organization structures mean about scalability. But, as I geared up to hire backfill for my team, I realized how much I would be setting someone up to fail if they weren’t a good fit in these ways. Someone might be exactly the right personality to fit onto the team, but if the type of change available to them doesn’t suit their proclivities, they’ll feel unsupported and/or stymied in having an impact. There are two vectors here I think are worth talking about, and a few different “levels” within each.

Rule of Threes

There is a pattern in organizational theory (I haven’t found one good catch-all for different things here about how things change at different scales. I might write up more at some point), but in short, your organizational approach changes dramatically each time your size shifts by x3, with the in between being wishy-washy.

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Capitalism isn’t inevitable and it isn’t permanent

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“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

Orroborus, the snake eating its own tail

Oligarchy and capitalism are literally burning up our world. A small few dozen people hold decision-making that impact the entire world. Some of that is locked behind “fiduciary responsibility,” but even the number of those holding stocks in corporations has been skewing wildly. I don’t think I need to sell my audience on all this, so I’ll just leave this point here. The question is: “what can we do differently?”

I think of this in three phases, which are all deeply linked to each other: how do we take hoarded wealth away from those who have it; how do we redistribute in a way that responsibly shifts, rather than all-out collapses, our existing systems; and what does living in the new world look like? There’s a bonus question of how to prevent future hoarding from happening embedded in each of these.

Socialism has some of this. I’d agree the Soviets had it the most right to date. Anarchism warns us away from hoarding power, and wealth as power. Ostrom talks about how there is a third, secret option that is neither markets nor surveillance for allocating resources. Pikkety talks about how we’re well past every other threshold for violent revolution based on inequality. And so what would it look like for us to throw off these chains and do something more care-full, more labor-forward, more “no war but the class war“? Can we do it with minimal suffering incurred, and a more stable outcome?

A triangle with socialist democrats at one point, anarchists at a second, and communists at the third. Socialists and anarchists share participatory decision making, anarchists and communists revolution, and communists and socialists share state power.
Margaret Killjoy made this great chart

I don’t think I have all the answers. I also believe that solidarity is born out of shared work, and shared work begins with being in conversation with each other. So join me on Sept 11 for a salon on what wealth redistribution might look like.

The interest rate on comprehension debt is set by how well relevant information survives

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In the last post, we talked about how debt is an instrument, not a smell. We carry forward the intentionality and the financial metaphor into the thinking for this post.  

In particular, we want you to remember 

  1. Mark’s metaphor of “AI companies that sell coding agents are the equivalent of predatory credit card companies offering introductory cards on college campuses to freshmen.”
  2. Comprehension debt as a new and higher interest-rate loan. “Every agent is the new hire on day one, forever.”
  3. “The Last Responsible Moment” needs to account “for ‘holding costs’ [to] curtail sidequests and keep your project running tightly and in its desired direction.”

Building from these cornerstones, this post asks “if that’s comprehension debt, can we just not take on any? Can we pay for all of our understanding now, in cash?” The answer is “no,” for three reasons we’ll get into.

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Agents and Acquiring Debt

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I had a lovely chat with Kate Chapman and Tom Henderson recently, where we discussed how the shape of technical debt is changing as people become “genie wranglers” and “robot life coaches” (their clever terms, not mine). Specifically, what does using AI mean about addressing pre-AI and accruing post-AI technical debt. Our main takeaway from this session is that commitments should happen at “the last responsible moment,” and AI pushes that moment later.

Human context: Cowritten with Tom and some AI agents; lovingly curated, proofread, and fact-checked by us humans, including Mark. We’re still exploring these ideas, so very much consider this open for feedback. We tried to bridge our academic approach with making things useful in a business sense. We are assuming you have made it past the “spicy autocomplete” phase of using LLMs in your work for this piece. It’s up to you how much you care about code quality for the purposes of this piece, but we think we’ll get into that in a potential later piece. In this article/series, we assume debt is taken on intentionally. This is often not the case, but that is a different problem space than the one we intend to explore.

AI technical debt is different from software debt because it shifts when commitments can be made in the arc of gathering information. We have historically taken on debt early in order to realize some value sooner. Now, we can gather information more cheaply earlier (in theory), and make our difficult-to-change decisions later. That changes the type of debt we’re taking on. It also makes testing even more necessary. You won’t be surprised to know that we’re highlighting and contributing to human judgement throughout, rather than trying to replace the humans. We hint a bit at product commitment points-in-lifecycles and decision making throughout this post, but we said NO to that side quest (for now).

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Moving towards “enough”

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Alongside emergent organizing (which I also have a bone to pick with), there has been a lot of talk about “abundance mindset.” It never sat very well with me. I tried in 2024 to make it my phrase of the year, to try to understand and move towards it, because it’s seemed to important to people I respect. I failed out that year, and have continued to fail out since. 

The thing that doesn’t sit right with me, I realized after lingering with it, is that it reminds me too much of Trickle Down Economics. If someone has more than enough, the thinking goes, they will use the wisdom by which they came to have so much to share with others and uplift all. But as history has proved out, Regan was a right cunt about this and other things. It just doesn’t work that way. Elon Musk has true abundance, and none of us (should) strive to be like him.

I’m also not interested in simply making do with whatever we have access to. That way lies tolerated inequity and “fuck you got mine.”

I am instead more and more deeply invested in understanding, striving for, and then being satisfied with “enough.” I like the life I have. It is a bit more than enough. I no longer feel guilt about having enough, while continuing to have an intrinsic desire to be sure others have enough, too. Not just enough to survive. But also not more than makes sense. 

Our earth is full of limited resources. Our time is limited. Our access to resources and time should be limited as well, then, while being sure we’re getting enough. 

So I wonder — what is “enough” for you? Do you have it? What does rebalancing to “enough” look like for you? What would it mean for the people around you? For the planet?

Textrovert

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A long-time friend and fellow academic nerd is working on her pHd, and had some questions for me. One was “Do you think of relationships that are almost entirely text based as real? Or even entirely text-based? Like things you’re never going to meet this person. Are those real relationships, too?” and Wow but I have Feelings on this one.

  1. I am grateful for all the friends I have all over the world. I think sustained relationships have as much to do with preferred modes of communication as shared interests. I have gone years without “talking” to people I love, all while keeping up in a heart-felt way.
  2. I love live blogging with other people in collaborative documents. I think there is a humor unique to being in a shared text space at the same time, honing in on what someone is trying to say (successfully or otherwise). The best sort of back channeling. I will forever remember typing into a doc with the Civic crew, 7 minutes into a rambling talk, “Have they actually said anything yet?”
  3. One of my oldest x closest friends and I will text each other from the same room, because it’s the form we both prefer, and we’re both funnier in text than in voice. On a community Slack with an #awkward-silence channel, I once posted an elephant emoji. The elephant was immediately removed by a moderator and made the subject of the channel.
  4. Another old, dear friend, who is also an ex, has referred to me lovingly as a “textrovert,” which I have adopted and use widely.

I was quick to vehemently say “of course.”

Then she asked me what that meant about relationships with LLMs. And I kind of went off. Because the “relationships” people have with LLMs has so much less to do with format and so much more to do with what a “friend” is and is not.

I have at least one friend I have kept from every stage of my life, so I think I can comment on this a bit. I have two friends I have had since preschool (and the following 9 years of Catholic school). I have remained friends with coworkers, exes, and people on other continents. If I may be so bold, friendship is kind of my superpower, and I’m damn proud of it. I’m not perfect at it, but I invest in it and it has paid me back multi-fold.

I’m not perfect at it… and that’s the point of this post. Because any long-lived relationship will have some History to it. It will have the time I fucked up and made someone angry or hurt, and visa versa. But for each of these relationships, we called each other in, came back to the table, and built a bigger table. A sycophantic LLM is not interested in how you can be a better person, it’s “interested” in appeasing the most people possible so people think they enjoy using it.

As Priceless enters our 20th year (I’ve been with the group for 10), we have been working to continue our historic ties to strong opinions lightly held. We lose some folks as they onboard with us, as they’re not used to arguments amongst friends. But we all always know we have each other’s backs, and that arguing isn’t personal, and that we’re stronger because we criticize each other’s ideas. This is one of the things I miss most about the Boston Area. The Bay Area seems to think you have to agree with someone to be friendly. And that is absolutely not the core of my friendships.

It’s like when I was reading Love and Sex with Robots… there’s a question of the overlap of sex and masturbation. If informed consent can’t be given, then all you’re doing is masturbating with something you think is an object. And all people who think they’re forming relationships with LLMs are doing is masturbating. Doing so is enjoyable, but it doesn’t prepare you for actual relationships with your fellow humans, and that is to your deep detriment.

If you also have opinions on this (and other things!) let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Alex for her research.