Talk at Lean LA, July 2012

1. Game of Pickaxes
The past, present and future of
creative destruction in America

2. First book, 2011 Second book, planned: 2014
http://tempobook.com http://gameofpickaxes.com

3. What is this game you speak of?
“This is a game changer”
“Level playing field”
“See three moves ahead”
“Let’s fix the game by…”

4. Games of Asymmetry
• 2-20
• Moral hazard
• Principal-agent situation
• Pickaxe markets
• Bringing a knife to a gun fight
• Limited liability
• Patent regimes
• “Heads I win, tails you lose” structures

5. Human range of variation gives you
natural evolution rate
Frequency
Height, weight, etc… “Olympics” variables
Frequency
Humans+TOOLS range of variation gives
you technological creative destruction
Wealth, weaponry, information

6. Frequency
Wealth, weaponry, information
Species sizes, other attributes
Looks more like an ECOSYSTEM than a SINGLE SPECIES

7. Why don’t we just kill the damn fat-tail
freaks before they get too big?
Why don’t the fat-tail freaks
kill the rest of us?

8. How to model this evolution?
• Mokyr: Cumulative path dependence
• McLuhan: “extended human”
• Stephenson: different species (Morlocks, Eloi)
• Marx: Good vs. Evil (also, other religions)
• Dawkins: extended phenotype with memetics
• Various social scientists: organizations
(Fukuyama, Nozick, Rawls, Foster…)
• Diamond, Kurzweil: Collpase/Singularity models
• Rao: all of the above

9. Technological Species
Recursively homeostatic bags of
different sorts of tool-extended
humans defined by internal
realtechnik détente

10. Ecosystem types
Interacting species in a given
technological ecosystem tend to
have a shared “flavor” based on
the characteristic “tooling”

11. Segmentary
Barbarian
ecosystems
Civilized
ecosystems
Rentier
Complex
ecosystems
Stratified and
decoupled

12. Ecosystem type determines
the kinds of games played

13. Veblen - Marx Model
Barbarian Class Leisure Class
Fair “Unfair” Fair
Unstable Dynamically quasi-stable Unstable
Frontier Games Civilization Games Rentier Games
(tragedy) (tragicomic) (farce)

14. (assuming an endless frontier)
?

15. BARBARIAN TOOLS
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will
eat for a lifetime.”
CIVILIZATION TOOLS
“Give a man a pickaxe and he will eat for a lifetime. Give a man a pickaxe shop
and his descendants will eat for free forever.”
RENTIER TOOLS
“Should I use a fork or spoon for the caviar?”

16. NEW TOOLS New frontier opens
EMBODY Abel kills Cain
NEW INTELLIGENCE
AGING TOOLS
frontier closes
DESTROY
Cain kills Abel
INTELLIGENCE

17. Human lifespan
80 years
Complexity of Civilizational
“Tool Base”
About 250 years
Last time
Time

20. Pure “Frontier” and “Rentier” periods are
extremely short-lived.
Most people spend most of their lives
playing civilization games.

21. TOOLS
Make and Break
CIVILIZATION*
*EXACTLY equivalent to “Medium is the Message”

22. All TOOLS are POLITICAL…
…Some are just more civilized than others

23. Barbarian or Civilized?
• Medieval armor vs. Roman armor
?
• English longbow vs. crossbow
• Pattern lathe vs. regular lathe
• WordPress vs. printing press
• Village clock towers versus pocket watches
• Amazon Kindle vs. paper books
• Self-checkout vs. human cashier at grocery store
• Commodity money vs. fiat money
• Lean startups vs. bootstrapping

24. CIVILIZATION TOOLS
codify a de facto
ASYMMETRIC BALANCE OF POWER

25. NEW INSTITUTIONS
turn an
ASYMMETRIC BALANCE OF POWER
into a systemic
REALTECHNIK DÉTENTE

26. This is SOCIAL ORDER
It defines “NORMAL”

27. In America nearly every man has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he is to
advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all-pervading speculativeness
which we tried to illustrate in “The Gilded Age”. It is a characteristic which is both
bad and good, for both the individual and the nation. Good, because it allows
neither to stand still, but drives both for ever on, towards some point or other
which is a-head, not behind nor at one side. Bad, because the chosen point is often
badly chosen, and then the individual is wrecked; the aggregations of such cases
affects the nation, and so is bad for the nation. Still, it is a trait which is of course
better for a people to have and sometimes suffer from that to be without.
?

28. Mark Twain
1835 - 1910
Huckleberry Finn A Connecticut Yankee Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
1884 in King Arthur’s Court 1873
1889
All kinds of awesome All kinds of awful
Pretty decent

29. Future Nausea
When the manufacture of new “normal” isn’t
keeping pace with the rate of change

30. In 1873 the…
Manufactured Normalcy FieldTM
was collapsing

31. How do you cope?

32. MONEY
John D. Rockefeller
1839 - 1937 J. P. Morgan
1837 - 1913
PICK TWO
Physical and Social
BEAUTY NORMALCY ENGINEERS SENSE
Thomas Blanchard
1788 - 1864

33. MONEY
PICK TWO
BEAUTY SENSE

35. MONEY
Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos
PICK TWO
1955 -- 2011 1964 --
BEAUTY SENSE
Dennis Ritchie
1941 - 2011

37. Future Nausea
Realtechnik
Equilibrium

38. The new normal does not
just emerge.
It is designed.

39. Folkways*
…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that
exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one
thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from
the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people
do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In
the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the
conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and
increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a
cultural elite.
David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed
* UX elements of “manufactured normal”

40. speech ways, building ways, family ways, gender
ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age
ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways,
learning ways, food ways, dress ways, sport ways,
work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways, social
ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways.

41. Oral, farms, extended, traditional, missionary, parenting, traditional,
1780 patriarchal, by disease, protestant ethic, folktales, home schooling,
local-agrarian, utilitarian, unorganized, 80% farm and free-agent,
local/natural, LAND RENTS, nobility-based, class-based, Wild West,
moral authority, guns.
Written, townhouses, nuclear, feminine mystique, Kinsey, television,
2025* 1979
fashion, SSN, Anglo, “retirement”, by aging+lifestyle, “New Age”,
science fiction, K-12+4, factory-farmed, mass fashion, organized,
paycheck, national time, TECH RENTS, talent based, homogeneous,
police, lobbying and voting, free press.
Google Translate, couchsurfing, gay parents, LGBT, OkCupid/50
shades, iPad, Twitter handle, mini-retirements, by choice+economics,
religious ways, hacker-lore, TED, Paleo, Hipster clothing, World of
Warcraft, coworking, atemporality, wealth ways, Klout, subcultural,
antivirus, Twitter, bitcoin/Net Neutrality.

42. In Kindles Spring 2014
http://gameofpickaxes.com