Seeking Ferret

The Immodest Proposals mega-event was Wednesday. Probably 50 people, definitely the biggest ImP yet. The topic was titled "The Locationless Economy", and its focus was on start-ups, entrepreneurship (particularly ecommerce entrepreneurship), and its relationship with physical place. In particular, several of the panelists were advocates of a program called Start-Up Visa that would provide access to the US immigration system for would-be entrepreneurs wanting to start companies in America. The panel consisted of Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit and Breadpig, Alex Torrenegra, a tech startup founder and Columbian immigrant, Jeremy Robbins, an official in the Bloomberg administration with a portfolio that includes startups, Craig Montuori from Politihacks, and Steve Berg from the blog Brooklyn startup. All of them were extremely thoughtful, extremely smart, and extremely well-spoken.

The panel part of the discussion went really well, though because the panel was so good and had so much to say there was a bit less give and take than usual with the audience. I don't think anybody wanted to stop them from talking. I definitely felt more hesitation when it comes to asking questions at certain moments, though ultimately I felt like I was active in shaping parts of the conversation through some of my questions. Immodest Proposals is so different from any other kind of political panel discussion I've been to because it gives you that opportunity to be part of the conversation from wherever you sit, and I'm always trying to take advantage of that both for my own enjoyment and to model that kind of participation for other people. The more people we have active in the conversation, the better, I think. At the midway point, we broke up into smaller groups, each with one of the panelists, and had a really good conversation about solutions for making America a better environment for business innovation.

The conversation began with the panelists discussing what they thought America did have to offer to entrepreneurs that set it apart. Generally speaking, this amounted to easy access to venture capital, a large, active, and technologically engaged market, access to skilled and educated workers, economic freedom, and in an idea we kept coming back to all night even though it was ill-defined, a culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking that made it more comfortable for people to take the leap. On the downside, we have an economic regulatory regime that is less aggressive in making company founders feel comfortable than other countries: Alexis discussed getting an offer from Singapore with incredibly generous subsidies to locate a Reddit office there, and others talked about programs in England, Chile, and a number of other countries to entice entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, if a foreigner wants to move to the US to start a business they face inordinate obstacles just from the immigration process, let alone regulatory hurdles, adjusting to a new legal system, and cultural challenges.

Historically the US has grown and prospered by integrating immigrants and their ideas, vigor, and desire for improvement into our culture and our economy. Someone in the audience was very careful to caution us against reading that narrative nostalgically as containing a golden age where immigrants were fairly treated and encouraged to participate in the economy, since that age never existed. I went so far as to wonder aloud whether it was in fact, in some degree, the pressure exerted on immigrants that encouraged their success.

But in our breakout session we brainstormed ways to reengineer our immigration system to better foster growth. We talked about moving away from country-based quotas to mimic countries with occupation based quotas, or even doing away with quotas altogether. We proposed economic asylum or entrepreneurial asylum, where prospective immigrants could argue that conditions in their native countries posed obstacles to their starting businesses, and America would welcome the opportunity to show that we could alleviate those obstacles. We discussed parcelling out quotas to each state or municipal region and letting them decide what kind of immigrants they wanted based on local needs, rather than a one-size fits all national system. We discussed ways to let immigrant startup founders into the country that recognized and dealt with the fact that most startups fail, and this isn't necessarily a problem with the startup model. Can you build a system that says "Ok, you want to start a business? Come here, give it a shot. If you fail, we won't deport you immediately, but we will put pressure on you to get back into being economically productive."? That's not an easy thing to engineer, especially because the looming underlying question is how do we handle providing the social safety net to an immigrant who we know for sure isn't yet economically contributing, and who may never economically contribute, to America?

And meanwhile in another breakout group people confronted the cultural problems, how to make Americans think of immigrants as contributors to American growth instead of as potential drains on our social services. How to address problems as simple as the audience member who spoke of mild harassment from immigrations officials who seemed hostile or skeptical about the reasons for her visit. They came to a number of conclusions, but most of them circled around the idea that continued advocacy is the only way to move the needle on this stuff. The more you talk about it, the more you make people think about the fact that America is being pressed by other countries with more competitive legislative regimes, the more it becomes part of peoples' awareness.

One of the panelists spoke about more global approaches to startup culture, too. He talked about his own experience running a startup whose founders had presences in Argentina, Columbia, and the United States, and how that both built on the patriotism of its founders in building local connections in all three countries, and helped establish the company as an international story for an international age of business, where computers connect everyone and the location of customers is often not the location of the business itself. Someone else followed this up by mentioning a program in Silicon Valley where governments like New Zealand, Canada, and others have created 'launch pads' to give businesses from those countries an office to work out of when they're trying to establish themselves in the US with Silicon Valley venture capital investors. It provides them a place with familiar cultural touchstones when they're out in unfamiliar territory, and again establishes a sort of linkage between the local and the international.

I tried to push this forward a little, with an Immodest Proposals-style leap into 'world government' and how this can have an impact on startup growth. It didn't really take off or go anywhere, unfortunately. I think there's a lot of good questions to be asked in this area. Companies that do business around the world may benefit from streamlined payment systems. In fact, when the panelists were discussing reasons why America is a good place to start a business, the fact that you don't need to design your payment system to accept each country's payment models as you might in Europe or Latin America was cited as an advantage. I am not a bitcoin user, but I find it or similar ideas interesting because I do think an international currency and internationalized payment mechanisms would go a long way to making it easier to establish new markets for your company. I know that Dreamwidth itself has struggled to find ways to accept international money for accounts- at some point the only way for a non-American to buy an account was to mail a check across the pond. This is just one example of a place where international leadership instead of just American leadership can improve the chance of startup success. We're going to see more movement in this direction in coming years on a lot of fronts, I predict, because economics will demand it.

And then Alexis Ohanian closed off the night with a great little minispeech about the power of startups to change the world. He mentioned Skype, founded in tiny little Estonia. On the day of its highest valuation, it was worth one tenth the GDP of the whole country. That is a tremendous force for good and change, and all it takes, he said, is creative and daring people and the right support systems for them to try new ideas.

Another Immodest Proposals discussion the other night. The topic was mind-enhancing drugs, for various definitions of mind enhancing. The primary real drugs discussed were adderall, alcohol, caffeine, marijuana, and percocet, for no reason other than those were the drugs that the people present had the most experience with. We also discussed a variety of hypothetical drugs, which seems to be an Immodest Proposals specialty. People are really good at imagining drugs that do interesting things to our bodies and minds. We discussed the drug from Limitless a lot. We discussed the drug from Flowers for Algernon. We discussed the Eternal Sunshine drug.

The discussion was broken into three parts, that were roughly: personal experience, social implications, and ethical implications.

In the first part of the discussion, we talked about what taking these drugs did for us. Artists and writers spoke about using marijuana or alcohol to help break down barriers in their minds, to access new ideas their conscious minds weren't able to bring up. A musician and writer talked about how adderall focused him and concentrated the diffuseness with which he otherwise experienced the world. I brought in an engineer's perspective when I commented that I seem to do arithmetic better while drunk, an experience other science/math types in the audience confirmed. I theorized this was because the arithmetic relationships were so deeply drilled in that alcohol freed us from thinking and made us more instinctive.

People spoke about the way some of these drugs brought a sort of 'childlike' approach to the world, and we argued a little bit, none too rigorously, about what childlike meant and why it was something artists sought. There was also some equally unrigorous talk about 'primitive approaches' that I would have preferred to skip altogether.

And then the conversation started moving into social issues provoked by these sorts of mental enhancements. Like what kind of pressure it puts on non-users when drug users reap intellectual or creative benefit? And even more simply, what kind of society do we live in where we're constantly seeking to change ourselves through biochemical experimentation? Some wondered if there were something uniquely American about the better living through biochemistry approach, which I doubt, though I think our scientific ethos has made us in some ways better at it. There was a detour into abuse of alcohol in the middle ages that didn't really lead anywhere. There was a proposal that the original addiction was to grain, which pulled us out of hunter-gathering by giving us an endorphin fix that made us want to continue to farm. There was some discussion of straight-edge culture and the various religious ascetic movements that believe the opposite is true, that drugs distract us from our full mental capacity. (In writing all of this down, I stare in wonder at how varied and creative the conversation can get at ImP. This was when the conversation started to drift away from just being about the panelists and started to take advantage of the varied crowd we had)

The third segment covered 'ethics', which really was focused primarily around comparing the ethics of mind enhancing drugs to the ethics of physical performance enhancing drugs. There is considerable agreement that doping in sports is unethical, though as you know I take a more permissive view on this than most people. Is doping in science class the same way? What about in professional academia? What about in an artistic competition?

One of the more intriguing questions I came up with was "Suppose we could create a cocktail that would enhance a chess grandmaster so that she could beat Deep Blue in chess. Would that count as a human beating Deep Blue?" I don't have an answer.

But people did have some interesting answers to some of the other questions. Some divided the ethical situation based on the permanence of the result. For example, if you create a great work of art that wins a competition while on drugs, that result has permanent beauty regardless of any taint placed on it by the drug use, so that it produces something worthwhile in a long term sense to society. So too a Nobel Prize-winning scientific breakthrough achieved while abusing drugs. In contrast, an athletic achievement lacks that permanence, generally speaking. The victory itself is the goal, so if that is tainted by an unfair advantage, the signpost of achievement is forever tainted.

Another interesting segmentation was based on a satisfaction heuristic. If you win at a game by taking an unfair advantage, you're generally not going to feel satisfied with yourself. If you achieve a scientific breakthrough, the achievement brings satisfaction. I'm a little skeptical of this on both ends. Many of the top professional athletes, in my observation, have a competitive disorder that makes winning be the only thing that matters to them. Roger Clemens achieved satisfaction by winning, whatever the cost. At the same time, there are plenty of people, athletes and scientists and artists, who don't feel satisfaction no matter how much they achieve without any illicit help.

I also tried to reshape the conversation by pointing to things that sit on both sides of one of these heuristics. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition whose only point is to win, because the resulting vehicle is nothing more than a toy. If you cheat, that taints your victory, because the only direct reward for winning is the prize and the bragging rights. On the other hand, the reason for the challenge is to hopefully provoke discovery of new technologies, and if that comes nobody is going to care that the breakthrough was achieved using mind-enhancing drugs.

Lastly, we considered the implications of national competition. If China is giving its scientists powerful mind-enhancing drugs and we are at war/in competition with China and lives are at stake, what is the ethical obligation of American scientists? I don't think we came to a firm answer on this, other than that it obviously depended on circumstances, but possibly would require an American response.

All in all, a really fascinating, deep conversation that took all the beautiful wrong turns I expect of an ImP discussion. Next month, the topic if Kosher Pigs and other bioengineering of food. I'm responsible for suggesting this topic, obviously, but I was joking, damnit.

Last night, another Immodest Proposals event. The topic was the ethics of pursuing what freeradical42 termed 'dual-use technologies' when their pursuit offered clear and present risks to humanity. We narrowed down dual-use technologies to any technology or scientific idea that offered both benefits to humanity and the risk of malicious abuse. We weren't as interested, specifically, in technologies that might lead to accidental injury. What we were interested in was technologies like nuclear fission, useful both as a clean and abundant energy source and as the mechanism of the atom bomb. Or GPS, endless source of good directions and a powerful tool for government surveillance and tracking.

And like research that's hit the news recently about the Avian Flu and apparently successful efforts to make it more easy transmissible to humans. Controversy has erupted over attempts to keep this research from being published because of its dual-use status, and it served as the impetus and focal point of the discussion. The panel consisted of two virologists with experience with influenza and a science writer with a lot of experience with public communication about science and the major journals.

The flu stuff was fascinating and occasionally terrifying, but I was obviously most in my element when we discussed the ethics of the Manhattan Project. I made a point of shaping that narrative and offering some correctives to the conventional narrative. Scientists working for private institutions artificially split the atom for the first time, then immediately started writing to the government seeking guidance and decision-making. That was not a case of the government taking over research over the objections of researchers. It was, by and large, a case of scientists turning over research to government because they didn't trust themselves with the ethical decisions at play. They felt it required a national debate and national leadership.

We discussed parallel discovery and serendipitous rediscovery and all the ways nature has of making it hard for Pandora to be put back in her box- if there ever is a Pandora's Box moment at all. It's not clear to me that you can pinpoint a certain point in the evolution of atomic energy and say "If we'd stopped with that discovery, there would have been no way for people to independently move forward and create the atom bomb." Science doesn't work that way. (Though someone raised the P=NP problem, a major potential scientific discovery that doesn't require any expensive equipment and might be discovered and then hidden by its discoverer for exploitation. The difficulty of the problem means it might sit discovered but unknown for decades or more if some lone genius solves it. This is implausible, I think, but possible.)

So we discussed mechanisms of classifying or otherwise suppressing information and the tradeoffs involved in classifying information and we were just heading toward the interesting topic of how to find a middle ground between complete classification and open public knowledge when we ran out of time. I think that middle ground is vitally important because public knowledge isn't just part of the problem, it's also part of the solution. A populace that doesn't know about H5N1 doesn't know how to respond to it, potentially exacerbating a dangerous situation. Figuring out how to balance those competing needs will be an important challenge going forward- after all, as the Greeks teach us, Pandora's Box can be closed, but it can never be refilled.


The social aspect of the event itself was great. So many unexpected appearances from old friends!!! Just lots and lots of good hugs and good conversations. New friends, too. Somehow ImP has become larger than we all expected it to become, and people who were attracted by I have no idea what have become friendly faces over the past months. It's always a good time.

I went to another of freeradical42's Immodest Proposals salons last night. This one was the awkward futurists discuss socialist theory without ever using the S-word hour. My favorite moment was when one of the other participants started ranting about the damned Republicans and I piped up with "I should mention that I'm a Republican." There was the other lovely moment where we went around the circle and asked if we were in favor of raising taxes at the moment, and I was the only person who thought that would be a bad idea in the middle of an economic recovery. There are times when I adore having almost no conservative friends. :P

Nah, in all seriousness the topic of conversation was a Mother Jones article suggesting that the American response to this recession- cutting back on workers and demanding greater and greater productivity from those workers who remained- was problematic and the result of American values about work that might be out of proportion. Certainly a topic presented with a deep socialist bias, but an interesting topic of conversation nonetheless because it gave us a lot of opportunities to put our specific work experiences in a broader American context, escape the tunnel vision that can often afflict us when thinking about something that directly affects us, and wonder as always about what the future might look like.

We discussed the way the movement of the economy has demanded workers whose skillsets are more generalized- hypothesizing that both trained welders on one side and Ph.Ds with highly specialized areas of interest were ill-suited to an economy where a worker needs to be able to not only do their job but also handle numerous other subjobs that had once been given to others. One person said that their boss, who supervised 200 people, had no secretary and was expected to do his own word processing, scheduling, etc...

We spent a considerable amount of time debating the dynamics of the 'American work ethic', contrasting it to European labor standards that feature more vacation and discussing anecdotal evidence like the fact that it is apparently rude in France to ask what someone does at work. I took the lead in arguing that much of this idea is American exceptionalism, citing counterexamples like the trope of the Ugly American abroad to show that the idea that some sort of (Possibly Protestant) work ethic makes Americans value high productivity more than other countries is perhaps wishful thinking on our part. But others did make a strong case. I do think that some mixture of Protestant ideology, frontier ethos, constant influx of immigrants, the dynamics of the American labor movement, America's rapid move in the post-War era to the forefront of the world economic system, and other factors can be said to have shaped America's general cultural approach to work ethic, but I'm skeptical that it's really that different from our Western neighbors.

And then the conversation took a predictable futurist turn as we contemplated technological change and its influence on productivity. We discussed sociological advances designed to make the workplace a more satisfying environment, like a theory that making work seem more like a video game would reward the worker for completing tasks. And we discussed the omnipresent possibility that computers and robots could take all our jobs away, and what that might look like. Honestly, I didn't take much out of this part of the conversation but ideas for science fiction stories. In particular, I pondered the notion of an inflection point on the path between our present economic system and a system where money has been completely reshaped in its meaning by the fact that valuing money based on labor performed has been obviated by a universal robot labor pool. That transitional moment seems really interesting to me and I haven't really seen it explored much in SF. Except for that awful Harry Keeler short story I posted about using compound interest to crash the financial system. Taking us back, in the end of this post, to socialist propaganda. :P

Anyway, I had a nice drive home from Brooklyn listening to variations on a Middle Eastern scale on New Sounds. But I need to get better at navigating Brooklyn streets, because I screwed up two opportunities to take the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and avoid the exorbitant Verrazano toll. I did save a little money by taking 9 South instead of the Turnpike, but that was more a moral victory than anything. I only saved about 50 cents by doing that.