friction as innovation and stagnation
Neal Stephenson Patrick Collison
Why stagnation according to Stephenson
As we become more cautious during a big project (like hoover dam etc.) we limit bad side effects.
Wrt the innovation that seems to be taking place with computers
the amount of innovation has been unbelievable. It’s just been spectacular, and it’s because there’s so little friction.
Innovation in those areas is definitely amazing, but I think it’s had the side effect that if you are an innovation-minded person and you want to do something new, you always end up finding your way, sooner or later, into implementing whatever it is in software. And if you can’t do it in software, then things slow to a crawl, comparatively, and you’ve got to be ready for a lot of frustration and obstacles.
In contrast
The Collison brothers https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/85748309/collison-a-business-state-of-mind?tab=shownotes
”Stripe aims to reduce friction and expand global commerce by solving practical barriers”
They try and promote autonomy. So theres some niche problem, their employees should go tackle it, get in the weeds. ‘Mundane’ things like sales tax or something.
They don’t look for billion dollar markets, you look for 0 billion dollar markets. You try to create your own markets (Thiel). Much more in tech commerce is possible today than widely considered.
A lot of business, looking for the profit pools, inadvertenly bet on economic stasis.
the causal attributions that we give to things aren’t necessarily of sufficient memetic interest that they can survive in the ecosystem
Given the choice between the interesting and the comprehensible choice, the comprehensible will survive in the zeitgeist. Reality does not have this interestingness bias. the mechanics of taxes, remittance etc. they’re not interesting but they’re not an less true.
For Stripe’s there’s so many areas where gainful activity is just not taking place due to this friction. Stripe believe that the sum of these things add up to a lot.