by mrandish | 2025-05-01 20:02:37+00:00
While I think the TFA makes some interesting points, I too felt the DEI reference was tangential. The point that I felt TFA missed is that none of this was fundamentally unique to the dotcom era. Random factors like "right place/time" have always applied at the birth of new industries whether dotcom era, 1970s microcomputers or 19th century punch card tabulating devices. Historically, new industries that quickly emerged from not existing to being consequential, had early players who achieved outsized gains and pole position during a limited window of time when a couple of reasonably clever outliers could choose to speculatively pour unreasonable amounts of time, energy and whatever environmental resources were at their disposal into delivering early value.

Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck.

There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out.

The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we measure. On an individual, family or community level its almost certainly net bad. However, on a societal level it could be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.