Violences policières, Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Front national, Nuit debout mais aussi écologie, Pierre Rabhi, spiritualité et zapatisme… la rappeuse marseillaise Keny Arkana a accordé à Reporterre un entretien. Redoutant une guerre civile, elle souhaite une ouverture des consciences à la bienveillance.
Keny Arkana a grandi à Marseille. Militante altermondialiste, elle a confondé le collectif La Rage du peuple et réalisé Un autre monde est possible (2006), documentaire tourné au fil de ses voyages au Brésil, au Mali, au Mexique et en France. Son nouvel album, État d’urgence, est disponible en ligne à prix libre.

Reporterre — Ton nouvel opus s’intitule «  État d’urgence  ». Parles-tu de l’état d’urgence du gouvernement, de l’état d’urgence social, de l’état d’urgence écologique  ?
Keny Arkana — En vérité, j’aurais pu l’appeler «  hymne à la paix  ». J’ai écrit ces textes suite aux événements de novembre, dans le contexte de la mise en place de l’état d’urgence. C’est un état d’urgence national mais aussi mondial. Depuis le 11 Septembre, il y a eu toute cette conjoncture de lois liberticides et antiterroristes, et puis la France est partie en guerre, ça fait 15 ans maintenant. Mais la guerre, c’est dans les deux sens : c’est facile de la faire du haut de ton avion, en envoyant des missiles et en tuant plein de gens. Mais, à un moment donné, on se la mange en retour, et c’est toujours des innocents qui payent. Pour moi, il y a vraiment un avant et un après 11 Septembre  et on vit cette continuité, avec notre  11 Septembre  à nous aussi.

Le 13 novembre, c’est un 11 Septembre français   ?
Certains diront Charlie Hebdo, d’autres le 13 novembre, mais ce qui est sûr, c’est que tout le monde est dans la peur maintenant, on cherche des coupables tout le temps, on est dans la division et la haine, on se communautarise à fond. On en est arrivé à des pensées hyper-violentes, la majorité des gens serait presque pour la peine de mort maintenant  ! Mais comme on est représenté par Sarko ou Valls, qui sont eux-mêmes hyper-violents et hyper-bas… Peut-être qu’on a les représentants qu’on mérite, mais je trouve qu’on tombe dans une vague d’obscurantisme.
Et pour moi, c’est devenue une urgence de se poser les bonnes questions. Je crois qu’il est important de canaliser cette violence et d’insuffler un peu de paix. Il faut qu’on arrive à faire un effort de bienveillance, parce que sinon, ce n’est pas la révolution qui nous attend, mais la guerre civile.

Violence d’État, policières, politiques : le climat s’est dégradé ces derniers mois.
Plus il y aura cette escalade de la violence, plus il y aura des lois ultrasécuritaires qui donneront justement raison à cette violence-là. Bien sûr que je comprends les manifestants qui n’en peuvent plus de toutes ces lois, on a toujours l’impression que notre violence est légitime. Mais si on prend une grille de lecture plus haute, j’ai l’impression que tout est instrumentalisé. Y’a un truc où je me dis qu’on joue le jeu du gouvernement.

Mais que faire face aux violences policières  ?
J’en ai parfois parlé avec mes amis militants, qui me traitent d’ailleurs de grosse naïve, mais je pense qu’il faudrait faire des actions de sensibilisation dans les commissariats. Sensibiliser les policiers et leur expliquer pourquoi nos luttes sont justes, et pourquoi elles les concernent eux et leurs enfants. Aller dans les commissariats et discuter, parce que, face aux barricades, chacun est dans son rôle, ça devient compliqué. T’imagines si demain, en pleine manifestation, un CRS décidait, devant ses collègues, d’arrêter, de poser son casque et de passer de notre côté  ? Ça casserait une division à laquelle on veut nous faire croire. C’est le truc qui ferait le plus peur au gouvernement.
Mais j’espère juste qu’à ce moment-là, il n’y aurait pas un lâche qui en profiterait pour aller savater le flic. Parce qu’à un moment, la lutte n’est pas seulement politique et sociale, elle est aussi humaine. Et il faut savoir où est vraiment ton ennemi et où est vraiment ton camarade. Bien sûr qu’on a toutes les raisons d’avoir la haine des flics surtout lorsqu’on a subi ses violences — moi, j’avais 13 ans lors de mon premier passage à tabac, ils m’ont frappée pendant des heures et j’avais la rage. Mais veut-on se venger ou veut-on changer les choses  ? Il faut savoir avaler sa rancœur, la transmuter, pour l’intérêt général et collectif.
De toute façon, on ne gagnera pas dans le rapport de force d’aujourd’hui. Et même si on y arrivait, on reproduirait les mêmes schémas après. Parce que, malheureusement, la plupart des gens n’ont pas fait ce travail intérieur de changement de conscience, au service de la bienveillance.

Ne vois-tu pas une forme d’espoir avec Nuit debout  ?
Si, c’est clair  ! On touche justement cette humanité-là quand on résiste comme cela à plusieurs. Depuis les Indignés, il y a cette nouvelle forme de résistance où il n’y a plus besoin d’être encarté ni de donner son petit pouvoir à un représentant politique ou syndical. On crée des outils, des assemblées populaires, des tours de parole, on apprend à s’exprimer et à s’écouter, etc. C’est super important de récupérer son petit pouvoir et de construire un truc horizontal. C’est quelque chose qui n’existait pas il y a dix ans. Donc oui, Il y a un éveil des consciences, une nouvelle manière de voir les choses, plus solidaire et plus horizontal, et c’est très positif.

Faut-il ensuite s’institutionnaliser à l’image de Podemos, qui est l’une des formes héritées des Indignés  ?
Personnellement je suis contre, j’ai toujours dit que le changement se construirait par le bas. Pourquoi faudrait-il prendre les outils de Babylone pour lutter contre Babylone  ? À partir du moment où tu te structures autour d’un parti, à chercher des financeurs, tu retombes dans le jeu.
J’ai été au Chiapas pendant un an, en 2014. Les zapatistes sont pour moi le meilleur exemple d’autonomie et de politique au service de l’humain. Et ils sont très à cheval sur le concept de la révolution totale : apprend à te changer toi-même avant de vouloir changer quoi que ce soit !
Mais aussi en France : partout il y a ce mouvement de retour à la terre, de construction en autonomie, sous forme de petits collectifs d’une trentaine de personnes, chacun récupérant son pouvoir créatif. Ça ne veut pas dire qu’il n’y a pas d’organisation : il faut les gérer, les trente personnes  ! Il faut trouver les bons outils.
C’est important dans sa propre réalisation, cette idée de pouvoir créateur, parce qu’à la base, l’humain est fait pour créer. Mais vu qu’on évolue dans un monde qui ne nous donne pas cet espace-là, il y a une distorsion. Du coup, on se détruit nous-mêmes, on détruit les autres.
Aujourd’hui, la plupart des gens, si tu leur demandes ce que serait la maison de leur rêve, ils vont te sortir un truc préfabriqué, la villa avec la piscine… Mais non, frère  ! Je te parle de toi, la maison qui te ressemble, toi  !
Peut-être que toi, ton kiff ce serait une maison dans les arbres, et toi, une grande maison sans angle droit avec un toit-terrasse. Et moi, ce serait une maison toute bleue ou peu importe. Chacun peut aller au fond de son imaginaire, on est tous singulier. Mais aujourd’hui, on est vampirisé jusque dans nos imaginaires.
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Keny Arkana lors du festival Solidays de 2013.

Comment faire pour toucher la partie de la population qui n’est pas aussi politisée  ?
Sensibiliser les gens passera toujours par l’exemple. La plupart des gens rêvent d’un autre monde. Juste, ils ont peur, ils n’y croient pas, il n’y a pas de références auxquelles s’accrocher. Mais si demain, ils voient à côté d’eux qu’il y a une autre manière de vivre, que tous ces petits villages qui se mettent en réseau partout créent de l’autonomie alimentaire, que les gens sont plus épanouis, qu’il y a un truc juste et sain, eh bien, petit à petit, ça va se contaminer. C’est important de résister et de pousser les murs, mais il faut aussi construire derrière. Sinon on s’essouffle.

On dirait le proverbe de Gandhi, «  soyez vous-même le changement que vous voulez voir dans le monde  »   ?
Exactement. Pour moi, dans la désintoxication des imaginaires, on a besoin de spiritualité. Ça n’a rien de dogmatique ou de religieux. Tout le monde fait un truc mystique du spirituel, mais c’est juste l’adjectif du mot esprit… Il s’agit de pouvoir se regarder et creuser un peu en soi-même, pour se libérer de tous nos schémas.
Gandhi, il était puissant. On se moque du petit Indien, mais dans le pays le plus divisé du monde, avec les castes et l’empire anglais, il a tout retourné avec la parole, la force de la compassion et de la tolérance, il a su casser les schémas.
On peut avoir les meilleures valeurs et défendre les meilleurs principes du monde, il y aura toujours dans notre quotidien une part de jalousie et d’ego qui reviendra. Et tant qu’il y aura ça, j’aurai du mal à croire qu’on peut vraiment changer les choses. Parce qu’on sera toujours à l’image de ce qu’on combat.

Spiritualité, révolution des consciences, changement individuel : connais-tu Pierre Rabhi et le mouvement des Colibris  ?
J’ai énormément de respect pour Pierre Rabhi, il a fait des choses incroyables, autant par sa pensée que dans ses actes : il a fait pousser des rizières dans le désert… Ce mec-là est puissant.

Le renouveau politique passe-t-il forcément par la terre  ?
Si tu n’es pas autonome sur le plan alimentaire, tu n’es pas autonome tout court. C’est une de nos premières fonctions vitales, le reste est forcément superflu. C’est une évidence qu’il faut reconnecter l’humain à la terre pour de vrai.

Te qualifierais-tu d’écologiste  ?
Je n’aime pas ce terme. Je trouve que c’est encore trop compris comme au service de l’homme. D’ailleurs, je ne me considère pas comme humaniste au sens occidental du terme, qui met tout au service de l’humanité. Une fois, on m’a dit que c’était humaniste de détruire la moitié de l’Amazonie, puisque c’est pour le besoin des humains… alors si c’est ça, je ne suis pas humaniste !
Moi, je suis «  vivantiste  », je suis pour le vivant. Je vois la terre comme les Amérindiens, une vision maternelle de la Pachamama : j’entends la détresse de la Terre, je sens les espèces vivantes, les plantes. Ce n’est pas pour mon intérêt d’humaine que j’ai envie de défendre la Terre. Dans ma conception, la Terre ne m’appartient pas, c’est nous qui appartenons à la Terre. Je crois que, dans tous les écosystèmes, il y a une harmonie. Et nous, dans notre instinct de domination, on casse cette harmonie.
C’est le Vatican et l’inquisition qui nous ont coupés de la nature en nous faisant croire qu’elle était une menace, que c’était le diable. Au contraire, si tu connais vraiment la nature, tu sais que là où tu te fais mordre par un serpent, à côté il y a la plante anti-venin. La nature est bien faite. Il y a un truc beau, un truc aimant. Elle te soigne, la nature, si tu es un peu connecté aux énergies, tu sens qu’elle est puissante, vivante…

Tu es végétarienne  ?
Oui. Mais je ne veux pas être trop rigide non plus : si je suis chez des indigènes qui ont tué un poulet pour moi, je ne vais pas faire la tendax.

En France, l’une des luttes emblématiques pour la terre, c’est Notre-Dame-des-Landes…
La dernière fois que j’y étais, c’était en 2013, ça fait un petit moment. Je trouve ça super, tout le mouvement des Zad en France, mais des fois, ça me met aussi un peu en colère. Une colère de grande sœur, tu vois, mais j’ai envie de leur dire : « Les frères, soyez vraiment des gardiens de la Terre  ! » Je suis désolée, mais la lutte, c’est sérieux, c’est pas boire des bières et fumer des pétards. D’ailleurs, quand tu vas chez les zapatistes, c’est interdit. Je suis moi-même une fumeuse, je suis pas en train de juger. Mais je dis ça parce que j’ai vu trop de fois des pollutions de Babylone-système sur la Zad. Il suffit pas de faire le révolté, il faut aussi être à l’image du changement.

Mais défends-tu tout de même l’occupation  ?
Bien sûr qu’il faut occuper  !

Et pour la consultation, tu voterais non si tu pouvais  ?
Non à l’aéroport  ? Ah oui ! D’ailleurs, ça fait chier de devoir voter pour ça : ça devrait être une évidence  ! La France, c’est tout petit : vous voulez mettre combien d’aéroports  ? L’aéroport, il y en a déjà un à Nantes. Là, il y a un super écosystème, préservé. Sans parler de toutes les familles, de tous les agriculteurs, de tous les paysans. Et puis, il y a le problème du financement aussi. Les contribuables qui paient un truc dont ils n’ont pas forcément envie, pour les bénéfices d’un privé [Vinci]. Et si ce privé-là ne rentre pas dans ses chiffres, il y a encore l’État qui lui donne des subventions  ! Il faudrait plus qu’un référendum local.

C’est-à-dire  ?
Pour moi, le meilleur moyen de se faire entendre dans le rapport de force, c’est de bloquer l’économie. C’est l’exemple des piqueteros en Argentine : ils ont réussi à le faire dans un pays qui fait huit fois la France. La France, c’est petit : il y a cinq autoroutes principales… C’est Vinci, l’ennemi : on pourrait faire une action « péages gratuits », des concerts et des teufs sur les autoroutes pour les bloquer. Si tu bloques ne serait-ce qu’une journée, tu bloques toute l’économie du pays, et tu fais perdre des millions à Vinci  ! Il y a de vraies actions à faire, et quand tu touches au nerf de la guerre, on t’écoute un peu plus.

Le « collectif de Tarnac » dit qu’il faut que tout s’arrête pour pouvoir tout recommencer. Es-tu d’accord avec cette approche  ?
Oui. Le seul problème, c’est qu’il y aura toujours des gens qui le prendront comme un acte violent. Parce que c’est une frustration et parce qu’ils n’en sont pas là dans leur conscience. C’est compliqué : au bout d’un moment, où s’arrête l’autoritarisme  ?

La grande difficulté des mouvements de contestation aujourd’hui, c’est de toucher les classes populaires…
C’est compliqué. Un mec de quartier a toujours été exclu, pourquoi il se sentirait concerné ? Qui est là pour lutter à ses cotés contre la discrimination, la ghettoïsation, les abus policiers et toutes les portes qu’on lui ferme à la gueule ? En voyant les manifs, il peut se dire que c’est les bourgeois contre les bourgeois, que ces mêmes gens qui militent n’en ont jamais rien eu à faire de lui. Il y a un désintérêt du fait de l’exclusion. Le manque d’humanité pousse au manque d’humanité, c’est un cercle infernal. Et puis, il y a aussi toute cette pression capitaliste, dans les quartiers, une sorte de culte de l’argent. Quand ta famille a tout sacrifié, qu’elle a quitté son pays, ses proches, pour pouvoir t’offrir une situation et un certain confort de vie, c’est difficile de mettre une croix sur toute cette douleur et tout cet espoir sous prétexte qu’il faut faire la « révolution ». C’est dans les quartiers qu’on subi toutes les pires galères dans ce pays. Quand ton grand-père s’est battu pour la France et que, trois générations après, on te parle encore de rentrer chez toi, il y a de quoi cultiver quelques rancœurs. Ça rend la convergence beaucoup plus compliquée. Je pense qu’il va falloir une génération ou deux encore, pour faire évoluer cette situation.
Forcément, ceux qui viennent de la classe moyenne n’ont pas tout cet héritage, ils sont forcément plus libres. Et puis, en France, il y a toujours eu ce côté élitiste chez les militants. Leurs brochures, c’est pas donné à tout le monde de les lire. Quand tu vas en Grèce, il y a un truc beaucoup plus populaire dans le militantisme. Il n’y a pas la même histoire d’immigration aussi, parce qu’il n’y a pas toute cette histoire des colonies. C’est compliqué, la France, et c’est pour ça que, tant qu’il n’y aura pas eu des guérisons entre les gens, j’ai peur que pousser à la révolte ne rapporte que la guerre civile. Et ne fasse le jeu des identitaires, qui prennent à fond du galon depuis quelques années.

Certains mouvements d’extrême droite noyautent les quartiers populaires, autour de Dieudonné ou de Soral, par exemple. Le FN a déjà tenté à certains moments de récupérer tes chansons. Que fait-on face à cela  ?
Je suis pour l’humain et donc pour le débat. Pas avec des Marine Le Pen, parce que c’est des manipulateurs, ces gens-là. Mais avec les petites gens. Souvent, les gens qui ont les idéologies et les pensées les plus nauséabondes ont aussi des blessures de ouf. Est-ce qu’on continue à alimenter cette blessure  ? Je veux que les gens comprennent bien mon discours, sans faire d’amalgame, parce que c’est subtil ce que je raconte. Je pense qu’on se trompe à faire des camps. L’exclusion ne fait que renforcer les fractures.
Franchement, si demain, avec mes potes du quartier, on voit débarquer des fachos, plutôt que d’aller se «  fighter  », je préférerais dire : « Venez, on se pose et on discute, c’est quoi le problème en fait  ? Elle vient d’où, toute cette haine  ? Pourquoi  ? Tu connais l’histoire  ? La France, si c’est un pays riche, c’est grâce aux minerais de l’Afrique noire, encore aujourd’hui. Vous êtes sûrs de vouloir faire chacun chez soi  ? Parce que c’est vous les perdants  ! »
Dans l’histoire de la France, on ne peut pas enlever la colonisation. S’il y a une dette, c’est les pays coloniaux qui doivent beaucoup… Je me dis qu’il faut parler, aller au fond des choses, mettre les mecs face à leur contradiction. Alors que dans le rejet, tu donnes raison à l’autre. On est semblable dans nos cœurs. Tu vois, même le raciste, peut-être que si tu connais son histoire et que tu as un peu de compassion, tu peux te dire : «  Ah, okay, il en est arrivé là, pour ça, il a eu telle expérience de vie.  » La compassion, c’est important pour notre guérison générale. Parce que vraiment, on est tous un peu malade. Il faut être tolérant. Et ne pas être comme ceux que l’on combat.

As-tu prévu de voter en 2017  ?
Je ne sais pas. On ne changera jamais rien par ça. J’aime bien le dicton : « Voter, c’est lécher le fouet de son maître. » En même temps, je me dis qu’au nom de tous les gens qui se sont battus pour ce droit, les femmes qui n’ont voté qu’en 1945… C’est clair qu’ils n’ont pas lutté pour cette mascarade-là. Mais ça ne nous coûte rien de mettre un bulletin dans l’urne. Le XXᵉ siècle, c’était gagner des droits, le XXIᵉ, faire qu’ils ne nous les enlèvent pas  ! Notre acte citoyen devrait être au quotidien. Je ne ferai pas la promotion pour les grandes campagnes de vote, mais peut-être que j’irai à titre personnel.
« ÉTAT D’URGENCE », UN EP À PRIX LIBRE

Keny Arkana — Ça faisait longtemps que j’avais envie d’essayer pour être plus en direct avec le public. L’accès aux chansons est gratuit, mais sans dire gratuit, car en France, on a un problème avec ça : la gratuité sous-entend quelque chose de bâclé, qui n’a pas de valeur… Donc là, si tu veux participer, tu participes.
J’aimerais pouvoir tout faire en prix libre, mais c’est compliqué dans ce système. T’imagines du « prix libre » à la Fnac… ? Du coup, c’est moi qui ai tout produit, et j’ai laissé Because Music [sa maison de disque] le mettre sur Itunes, pour qu’ils s’y retrouvent.
J’ai décidé de rentrer dans l’industrie pour sensibiliser des gens qui ne seraient pas touchés sinon. Ma maison de disque comprend la démarche et valide depuis le début la profondeur du projet. On ne m’a jamais dit « il y a une phrase que je n’aime pas » et ça, c’est le plus important.

• Propos recueillis par Barnabé Binctin et Vladimir Slonska-Malvaud

On this newsletter, we talk a lot about the ambiguity and uncertainty caused by technological change, and the resulting feeling of anomie and being lost. This means a lot of people are looking for a purpose, and almost always doing so through their work. How do you find your purpose? It's quite simple. Find your people. Specifically, what I call your pizza team.

"Purpose" is one of those rare "deep" life questions that actually has a simple, practical answer that works for almost everybody. I didn't see this for a long time because I happen to be one of the minority for whom this simple, practical answer DOESN'T work. So this is one of those "do as I say, not as I do" issues of the breaking smart newsletter.

1/ Several big, anchor ideas in Breaking Smart Season 1 revolve around small teams.

2/ The idea of a rough consensus around a direction of maximal interestingness assumes a small team.

3/ The idea that most effective teams can be fed by two pizzas assumes a small team. Let's call such teams pizza teams.

4/ The importance of pizza teams goes far beyond mere effectiveness in pursuing the specific work you're doing.

5/ For whatever complicated reasons, small teams don't just effectively pursue a direction in the outer world, they induce a sense of inner purpose in members

6/ This sense of inner purpose is crucial for psychological health for most people, and is what makes the specific thing you're doing meaningful.

7/ What you do may make an impact on the world due to how tens or hundreds or millions of people react to it.

8/ But it will make an impact on YOU because of at most 11 other people. This is is your meaning-creating pizza team.

9/ Solitary individuals struggle to find purpose. Equally, groups larger than about 12 struggle to catalyze purpose in their members

10/ You may depend on larger groups -- your "tribe" say, or strangers providing critical services, or your ideological "people," be they liberals, conservatives or libertarians.

11/ But they aren't going to create meaning for you. Only your pizza team can do that. Purpose is personal and social, not institutional or impersonally cultural.

12/ This effect can be seen in many domains: military units, science collaborations, sports teams, business turnaround teams, and startup teams.

13/ Finding purpose and finding your pizza team are a chicken-and-egg pair of problems, but it's generally easier to start the loop by looking for your pizza team.

14/ This is necessary, not sufficient. Whether your pizza team decides to create a great product, make a movie, or plan a terror attack depends on many other things.

15/ Business teams, and startups in particular, unlike sports teams or military units, have a double jeopardy situation: they have to find external AND internal purpose.

16/ A sports team has its external purpose defined by the sport: win the big tournament. It just needs to find the inner purpose/meaning.

17/ But a startup has to find inner purpose by discovering its pizza team at the same time as it pivots around looking for a product-market-fit in the market.

18/ Mature organizations have a weaker version of this: a historical purpose and an existing senior executive team that may have become maladapted to current reality.

19/ The "bus principle" proposed by Jim Collins ("get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, then decide where to go") is the big-corp version of (re)discovering your pizza team.

20/ Occasionally a really powerful and charismatic leader can start with a one-person purpose and attract a rallying around his or her flag.

21/ But this is rare. Most often, fertile, high-bandwidth personal relationships form first, and great external missions start to emerge as inner purpose starts to gel.

22/ When such relationships form, they create one of the most scarce things in the world: collective attention from two or more people.

23/ Collective attention is MUCH more powerful than the attention of a single person because it allows for shared meaning creation through communication.

24/ When only one purposeless person sees something to possibly latch on to as a purpose, not much can happen. And they are more at risk of chasing delusions caused by ambiguities.

25/ When 2+ do, they can talk, validate each other's perspectives ("no, it's not all in your head"), learn from differences ("you're missing this part"), and make great things happen.

26/ So if you find a relationship that seems to catalyze meaning and purpose in your life, make sure you immediately begin investing in it. Your life depends on it, not just your current project.

27/ Even if you are most effective alone (like me), you likely have a pizza team of (possibly dead) people you relate closely to through their writings or loose collaborations.

28/ But don't rationalize the social situation you may have adapted to out of necessity. It's far too easy to believe that the life you have is where you'll discover purpose.

29/ Until you've tried a variety of trust relationships of various intimacy levels, in groups of various sizes, you don't know what kind of pizza team you need.

30/ So go forth and eat as much pizza as you need to, until you find your purpose. There's all sorts these days: gluten-free, vegan, low-carb. So you have no excuse.

« And there are gods who would trade their lives
To have a heart that can know human pain,
Because our sufferings will allow us to become
Greater than any world or deity. »

Several months after my mother was killed, I was helping to relocate a pear tree from a learning garden in Vancouver. I spent hours digging around its roots so as to give it the best chance of life in its new home, another garden not far away. As I dug, I recalled the tree in Kabul. The bullet-riddled trunk was more than a reminder of environmental loss. That tree in the historic garden demonstrated something I came to understand in the months following my mother’s death: the resilience of resuming our shape before trauma strikes is an impossible request of our souls and our spirits.

In whatever we do, we do not forget the pain of the past, but rather hold it and the joy of the present, simultaneously. This trunk of a tree, riddled with bullet holes, stood as proof of the shallowness of resilience. To remove it and create a space that had erased the trauma of the garden’s past is akin to asking someone to return to the person they were before a life-changing event. As it stands in the garden, that tree trunk now is a quiet champion of patience, a movement to endure. And it bears witness to all those who have crossed its path.

I think of the tree trunk in Kabul often. The city’s landscape will forever hold the scars of what happened to its people. The holes left behind by bullets stand as witness to the lives lost and the millions of refugees who are no longer home. From this landscape, I take the lesson that I need not be who I once was, that I may hold my scars and my joy simultaneously. I need not choose between bending or breaking but that, through patience, I may be transfigured.

One day in the early 1980s, I was flipping through the TV channels, when I stopped at a news report. The announcer was grey-haired. His tone was urgent. His pronouncement was dire: between the war in the Middle East, famine in Africa, AIDS in the cities, and communists in Afghanistan, it was clear that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were upon us. The end had come.

We were Methodists and I’d never heard this sort of prediction. But to my grade-school mind, the evidence seemed ironclad, the case closed. I looked out the window and could hear the drumming of hoof beats.

Life went on, however, and those particular horsemen went out to pasture. In time, others broke loose, only to slow their stride as well. Sometimes, the end seemed near. Others it would recede. But over the years, I began to see it wasn’t the end that was close. It was our dread of it. The apocalypse wasn’t coming: it was always with us. It arrived in a stampede of our fears, be they nuclear or biological, religious or technological.

In the years since, I watched this drama play out again and again, both in closed communities such as Waco and Heaven’s Gate, and in the larger world with our panics over SARS, swine flu, and Y2K. In the past, these fears made for some of our most popular fiction. The alien invasions in H G Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898); the nuclear winter in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957); God’s wrath in the Left Behind series of books, films and games. In most versions, the world ended because of us, but these were horrors that could be stopped, problems that could be solved.

But today something is different. Something has changed. Judging from its modern incarnation in fiction, a new kind of apocalypse is upon us, one that is both more compelling and more terrifying. Today our fears are broader, deeper, woven more tightly into our daily lives, which makes it feel like the seeds of our destruction are all around us. We are more afraid, but less able to point to a single source for our fear. At the root is the realisation that we are part of something beyond our control.

I noticed this change recently when I found myself reading almost nothing but post-apocalyptic fiction, of which there has been an unprecedented outpouring. I couldn’t seem to get enough. I tore through one after another, from the tenderness and brutality of Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2013) to the lonely wandering of Emily St John Mandel’s survivors in Station Eleven (2014), to the magical horrors of Benjamin Percy’s The Dead Lands (2015). There were the remnants of humanity trapped in the giant silos of Hugh Howey’s Wool (2013), the bizarre biotech of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), the desolate realism of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).

I read these books like my life depended on it. It was impossible to look away from the ruins of our civilisation. There seemed to be no end to them, with nearly every possible depth being plumbed, from Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers (2011), about the people not taken by the rapture, to Nick Holdstock’s The Casualties (2015), about people’s lives just before the apocalypse. The young-adult aisle was filled with similar books, such as Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011), James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (2009) and Michael Perry’s The Scavengers (2014). Movie screens were alight with the apocalyptic visions of Snowpiercer (2013), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The Hunger Games (2012-15), Z for Zachariah (2015). There was also apocalyptic poetry in Sara Eliza Johnson’s Bone Map (2014), apocalyptic essays in Joni Tevis’s The World Is on Fire (2015), apocalyptic non-fiction in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007). Even the academy was on board with dense parsings, such as Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (2010) and Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife (2013).

I would stand on the overpass and watch the cars flow underneath. They never slowed. There was never a time when the road was empty

In the annals of eschatology, we are living in a golden age. The end of the world is on everyone’s mind. Why now? In the recent past we were arguably much closer to the end – just a few nuclear buttons had to be pushed.

The current wave of anxiety might be obvious on the surface, but it runs much deeper. It’s a feeling I’ve had for a long time, and one that has been building over the years. The first time I remember it was when I lived in a house next to a 12-lane freeway. Sometimes I would stand on the overpass and watch the cars flow underneath. They never slowed. They never stopped. There was never a time when the road was empty, when there were no cars driving on it.

When I tried to wrap my mind around this endlessness, it filled me with a kind of panic. It felt like something was careening out of control. But they were just cars. I drove one myself every day. It made no sense. It was like there was something my mind was trying reach around, but couldn’t.

This same ungraspable feeling has hit me at odd times since: on a train across Hong Kong’s New Territories through the endless apartment towers. In an airplane rising over the Midwest, watching the millions of small houses and yards merge into a city, a state, a country. Seeing dumpster after dumpster being carried off from a construction site to a pile growing somewhere.

When I began my apocalyptic binge, I could channel that same feeling and let it run all the way through. It echoed through those stories, through the dead landscapes. And now after reading so many, I believe I am starting to understand the nature of this new fear.

Humans have always been an organised species. We have always functioned as a group, as something larger than ourselves. But in the recent past, the scale of that organisation has grown so much, the pace of that growth is so fast, the connective tissue between us so dense, that there has been a shift of some kind. Namely, we have become so powerful that some scientists argue we have entered a new era, the Anthropocene, in which humans are a geological force. That feeling, that panic, comes from those moments when this fact is unavoidable. It comes from being unable to not see what we’ve become – a planet-changing superorganism. It is from the realisation that I am part of it.

Apocalyptic fictions of the current wave feed off precisely this fear: the feeling that we are part of something over which we have no control

Most days, I don’t feel like I’m part of anything with much power to create and destroy. Day to day, my own life feels chaotic and hard, trying to collect money I’m owed, or get my car fixed, or pay for health insurance, or feed my kids. Most of the time, making it through the day feels like a victory, not like I’m playing any part in a larger drama, or that the errands I’m running, the things I’m buying, the electricity I’m wasting could be bringing about our doom.

Yet apocalyptic fictions of the current wave feed off precisely this fear: the feeling that we are part of something over which we have no control, of which we have no real choice but to keep being part. The bigger it grows, the more we rely on it, the deeper the anxiety becomes. It is the curse of being a self-aware piece of a larger puzzle, of an emergent consciousness in a larger emergent system. It is as hard to fathom as the colony is to the ant.

Emergence, or the way that complex systems come from simple parts, is a well-known phenomenon in science and nature. It is how everything from slime moulds to cities to our sense of self arises. It is how bees become a hive, how cells become an organism, how a brain becomes a mind. And it is how humans become humanity.

But what’s less well-known is that there are two ways of interpreting emergence. The first is known as weak emergence, which is more intuitive. In this view you should be able to trace the lines of causation from the bottom of a system all the way to the top. In looking at an ant, you should detect the making of the colony. In examining brain cells, you should find the self. In this view, the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga explains in his book Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011), ‘the emergent property is reducible to its individual components’.

But another view is called strong emergence, in which the new system takes on qualities the parts don’t have. In strong emergence, the new system undergoes what Gazzaniga called a ‘phase shift’, not unlike the way that water changes to ice. They are made of the same stuff, but behave according to different rules. The emergent system might not be more than the sum of its parts, but it is different from them.

Strong emergence has been grudgingly accepted in physics, a field where quantum mechanics and general relativity have never been reconciled, and where they might never do so because of a phase shift: physics at our level emerges from below, but changes once it does. Quantum mechanics and general relativity operate at different levels of organisation. They work according to different rules.

Whenever I think about reconciling my own life with that of my species, I have a similar feeling. My life depends on technologies I don’t understand, signals I can’t see, systems I can’t perceive. I don’t understand how any of it works, how I could change it, or how it can last. Its feels like peering across some chasm, like I am part of something I cannot quite grasp, like there has been a phase shift from humans struggling to survive to humanity struggling to survive our success.

The problems we face will not be fixed at the level of the individual life. We all know this because none of us have changed our own lives anywhere near enough to make a difference. Where would we start? With our commute? With candles? Life is already hard. Solutions will need to be implemented at a higher level of organisation. We fear this. We know it, but we have no idea what those solutions might look like. Hence the creeping sense of doom.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ says a character in Mandel’s Station Eleven. ‘Are we supposed to believe that civilisation has just come to an end?’

Another responds: ‘Well, it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?’

This is what our fiction is telling us. This is what makes it so mesmerising, so satisfying. In our stories of the post-apocalypse, the dilemma is resolved, the fragility laid bare. In these, humans are both villain and hero, disease and cure. Our doom is our salvation. In our books at least, humanity’s destruction is also its redemption.

Standing on that bridge now, I see even more cars than ever before. Beneath the roar of engines is the sound of hoof beats. As they draw closer, the old feeling rises up, but I know now that it comes not just from a fear of the end itself, but from the fear of knowing that the rider is me.

Chapter 1
I've been lucky enough to have been born before computers and video games were ubiquitous. I had the luck to play outdoors with friends and my brother, and of inventing our own games.
We could be our own heroes, use a twig that would instantly become a bow, a gun, a sword, or a telescope. It could be anything, except maybe a boomerang because once you throw the stick away, you have to go fetch it back.
comparison between a boomerang and a stick
At some point I grew up, and it became embarrassing to play that way. You can't treat a pinecone as a grenade and pretend to have magical powers when other kids think being an adult is cool. You just don't fit in anymore. You eventually get pressured into growing up. Still, that's a very lucky childhood.
At some point I got the chance to play video games, and to use computers. There could be the imaginary world you had wanted all this time, materialized in front of you. It's consuming you, and for a moment you live a different life.
But there's something particular about most video games: you don't create, you react, you consume. I eventually did improvisational theatre as a teenager. Then, again, it was okay to be with people and create and pretend out of nothing.
an improv rink with people playing
Of course, improvisational theatre in Quebec is different; there's an ice rink in there — everything's hockey.
When I got to a vocational college to study multimedia from 2005 to 2008, I eventually tripped into programming work. I found it amazing! Creativity was there again, and it could get me money! I then designed the mechanism of my first game, and it blew my mind.
HTML form of an old browser game named 'DANGER IL Y A UN HOMME ARMÉ DANS CET ÉDIFICE 3'
That's not a real video game, I was told. That's just an HTML form. You should have used an array for the text and options it would have been better. The code needs cleaning up.
I was a bit disheartened; the game was really about the 11 pages of text I had written for the "choose your adventure" aspect of it. But I realized that if I wanted to make stuff more people thought was good, I'd have to learn a lot.
I'd have to learn "real programming". Move from JScript in a GUI toolkit to something better, like PHP. So I learned that, along with Javascript. Then eventually I was told to learn how to do real programming again; PHP is terrible. I was told to maybe try Python, which I then learned.
But real programmers knew fancier stuff, and python's lambdas didn't cut it, object-oriented programming was not where you wanted to be. Reading SICP would be the next good step, I was told, because it was like the bible of computer science.
Book cover of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
That got me to Scheme. And I got the K&R book because real programmers in the real world did C, and I registered for part time classes at my local university while juggling them with work, because real programmers knew data structures and math, which I learned to some extent. I started reading papers and books, because real programmers stayed up to date and knew fancy algorithms.
Somewhere through that I picked up Erlang and started making a career out of it. I wrote a book on it. Curiously enough, nobody ever questioned if I were a real author, or a real writer, or a real illustrator. Hell, I got a job teaching Erlang without ever having used it in a production system.
Chapter 2
So I lived my life flying around the world, telling people how to do things I had sometimes never done myself, while everyone suddenly seemed to believe I was a real programmer because of things I did that were mostly not related to programming in the first place.
One day, I was stuck in an airport coming back from a conference, furiously typing at a terminal, when an odd, gentle voice asked me:
If you please, design me a system!
What?!
Design me a system!
I looked up from my screen, surprised by the request. I looked around and saw this kid who aspired to be a developer and wanted me to call him "printf", which I felt was very stupid and gimmicky. He looked a bit like this:
little printf, with a red and yellow tuque, similarly colored scarf, green coat, red mittens, and beige-yellow pants, standing in snow with a broken laptop at his sides
I don't know computers much yet, but it seems you do. I want to write programs and blog about them and have people use and read them. Please, design me a system!
Now that was a surprising request, and I had been awake for 20 hours by then, not too sure I fully understood or felt like it. I told him systems were hard. I didn't know what he wanted to do, how he wanted it to fail, how many readers it should support, where he'd want to host it, and I could therefore not design a proper system with so little information.
That doesn't matter. Design me a system.
So I made the following architecture diagram:
somewhat complex architecture diagram
He looked at it and said No, this system is not good enough. Make me another.
So I did:
a rather complex architecture diagram
and I gave him a rundown of how it would work.
My new friend smiled politely. That is not what I want, it's way too complex and does a lot of stuff I don't need
I felt a bit insulted, having considered redundancy, monitoring, backups, caches and other mechanisms to reduce load, external payment processor for legal protection, failovers, easy deployment, and so on. I could have charged decent money as a consulting fee for that! Out of patience, I just drew this:
a black box with the text 'enjoy!' written under.
And I added: this is your design. The system you want is inside the black box, hoping this shitty answer would have him leave me alone. But I was surprised to hear back:
That is exactly the way I wanted it!
And that is how I made the acquaintance of the little printf.
Chapter 3
I soon learned of this little guy's portfolio. In his repositories were only small programs, simple web pages with forms, trivial command line utils. They would be unspectacular, would come into being, and no sooner disappear.
Then at some point, he started working on a bigger program, that used multiple modules. It needed sockets, accessed the disk, talked to an actual database. When it first built and ran properly, little printf was amazed. But the program was not enough yet.
It needed refactorings, better tests, documentation, linting and analysis. The program would run for a while, and one morning, it crashed.
And it crashed again, and again.
The configurations were wrong, the logs would not rotate, the disk had unpredictable speed, the network would get the hiccups, bugs would show up, the encodings would be confused, the database needed vacuuming, transactions would hang, certificates would expire, CVEs would keep coming, and the metrics would remain silent.
a plate of meatball spaghetti
It kept turning to Spaghetti.
He told me: the fact is I didn't know anything! I ought to have judged by my needs. I got the hubris of writing a fancy system, and I spent so much time fixing it, it felt like it cancelled the time it saved me. Still, I should have known what a wonderful thing it was.
One morning, he decided to leave his office. Goodbye, he said to a blinkenlight that seemed to have burnt out. He left to see what the world of software had to offer aside from his messy little server.
The logs would keep accumulating, until the hard drive would fill no more.
Chapter 4
a building
He went to a workspace, looking for experienced developers from whom to get tips and help.
The first one he met was a very proud senior engineer who seemed to feel rather superior.
a balding man in a suit, with thick glasses
Ah, here comes a learner! Welcome to my domain, of which I am the expert he said.
An expert? Little printf asked. Does this mean you can program anything and everything?
Yes! the expert answered. He added Well almost; I only program programs that are worth programming. I don't lose my time on trivialities. Many programs I have never written but could write with all the ease in the world.
Ah, so could you help me with my system? As soon as the little printf started explaining his business, the domain expert interrupted him:
I'm sorry, but I don't really see the point of doing that.
Why not?
Experience. I am good at programming the things I program, and I program things I am good at. By getting better at this fairly restricted set of things I'm already good at, I make sure I'm more valuable than ever at it. Call it job security, call it survival of the fittest, but that's how I roll.
And why can't you help me?
Well you see, taking my time away to help you means I divert important self-investment into furthering the progress of others — that's a losing strategy for me. The best way to learn for you is the way I took myself: struggle very hard and figure it out yourself. It helps forge character.
That doesn't seem very efficient...
Well you can go to school and learn, or you can learn on your own. Really what it does is weed out the lazy people who just want it easy, and forces everyone who stays here to be those who really deserve it. The moment we let moochers in, the very value of the work I produce goes down with it.
Do you not think cooperation or colleagues could help you?
Not really. I work best when left alone and not being distracted. Every time I end up forced working with others, it's nigh impossible to get our stuff working together. Out of exasperation, I grab their work and rewrite most of it in a sane way; then it works right.
Little printf was surprised to meet an expert who seemed so disinterested in helping others, yet so annoyed by their perceived lack of skill. It was a bit sad that this man narrowed his vision of himself to just the one area he knew, to the point where he didn't do anything else than create problems for himself to fix!
I see... well I guess I'm happy you won't give me your help, said my little friend
What do you mean? asked the meritocratic man, whose value seemed suddenly downgraded. Don't you think the work I do is interesting?
Oh that I do. It just seems like you would see me as a hindrance and annoyance more than anything else, and what I am looking for is help, not affliction.
And little printf left swiftly, leaving the expert to realize he had made himself untouchable in more ways than just his job security.
Chapter 5
a man sitting at his desk in front of multiple filled bookcases
On his way, little printf went in front of the door to an office occupied by a man surrounded by thick hardcover books, with fancy images on them like wizards and dragons and fractals and mathematical patterns.
Nice books, sir, said printf
Thanks. I think they're essential material for programmers. If you don't have them, you're not really a pro
I guess I'm not a pro then, said little printf. Which one is your favorite?
Oh, well I haven't read most of them.
Are you not a good programmer then?
No, I am not. The developer proudly added: In fact, I'm a terrible programmer.
That's a shame, said little printf, who continued: I'm getting better myself.
Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?, asked the man.
No, what is it?
It's a cognitive bias thing. It basically says that people who are less competent tend to overestimate their qualifications, and people who are competent tend to systemically underestimate theirs.
So if I think I'm getting better, I'm probably not great
Yeah, exactly. You're probably bad. On the other hand, I openly say I'm a terrible programmer. But according to Dunning-Kruger, I'm probably underestimating myself, and that makes me a good developer, don't you see?
I guess?
That's because self-deprecation is a vital tool of the developer. The moment you feel you're good, you relax and stop improving.
Doesn't this mean that the moment you feel good about yourself, you're on your way to failure and then you should feel bad?
yes. But the way to go about this is to say that everything is terrible, even if you have no solutions to offer. That way you look smart, but don't have much to contribute.
What do you mean?
Say I go online and see a project I dislike. The trick is to point out everything that is wrong, give no more information than that. You can probably subtly point ways in which the person who did the thing is an idiot and get away with it.
And how is anyone better for this?
Well I like to think they are better for knowing they're on the wrong track, and I'm better off for showing them that. It's a bit of smoke and mirrors. Nobody knows what they're doing but that way it looks like I do.
And what happens when you are asked for help and can't do anything about it?
That's when you go back to saying everything is terrible; you have too much yak shaving to do, improving other things, and being overly pessimistic. They're on their own.
So this is all posturing? You're gaming your way through? You're the person who pretends to be incompetent at things they know, which makes people who actually know nothing there feel even worse, and you're the person who pretends to be competent at things you don't know, so that people trying to improve there also feel bad.
In any case, competence has very little to do with it. Reputation is pretty important though. People hire friends, and people who aren't liked and non-essential get fired first; try to change the system and you become disliked. It's all a very social game. It's how it works in the industry, and probably in academia too, though I wouldn't know, now would I? It's all about who you know, selling yourself, your own personal brand you know? That's how you get jobs in the business.
If this is how things are and that you must feel bad and make others feel bad to do well, maybe I don't want a job in the business, said little printf, before walking out.
Chapter 6
nondescript programmer sitting back to the viewer in the dark, with a sandwich on their desk
During the time that would have been lunch break, Printf interrupted a person who had seemingly forgotten to eat their lunch, a sandwich growing cold by the minute, while sitting at their desk and looking at their screen.
That seemed like quite a busy person who might have known what they were doing. Printf asked:
If a primary database can fail, can the follower fail too?
Everything you run, the person said, can and will sooner or later fail.
Even the things telling you things have failed?
Yes, even these ones. All large systems are in some state of partial failure at any given time.
Then, trying to make reliable systems, what use is it?
The person did not know, for at that moment, they were trying to answer a page for the sky falling out onto their head due to a broken cloud, wondering the same thing.
Then making reliable systems, what use is it? pressed little Printf again
Upset as the person was dealing with a production issue, with this kid not letting go and a sandwich going to waste, the person impatiently shot back:
It's of no use at all. Programming is all shit anyway.
oh!, he gasped.
Then there was a moment of complete silence.
a garbage can on fire with a golden plate saying 'programming' on it
The little guy responded, with a hint of resent:
I don't believe you. Programs are fragile, but programmers can make good efforts and make things better and useful.
No answer came back. At that point the person had opened the document explaining how to boot a new copy of the whole cluster from scratch, and things seemed to go from bad to worse.
And you actually believe good reliable prog-
Oh no! the person said. No no no! I don't believe in good or reliable programs! Not anymore! They're all terrible! I just told you the first thing that came to my head because I'm dealing with one of these shitty systems right now. Don't you see I'm trying to keep this stuff running? This shit is actually of consequence.
Printf stared back, with a shocked expression.
Actually of consequence? You talk just like a 'real programmer'.
He added:
You mix everything up, confuse everything. There's been millions of programs, and for years they've been running and failing just the same. And people have used them and needed them. And I know of some programs that run nowhere but on a single laptop, and in a single mistake could destroy entire communities, without even noticing. And you think that this is not important?
The person remained silent.
Chapter 7
a man at his desk in front of two monitors
The fourth workspace my friend visited had a man whose computer was covered in so many stickers nobody could tell what brand it was.
motor-mvc, quadrangular JS, GoQuery, cometeor, some japanese soundy thing, ...
Hi, interrupted printf. What are you doing?
alchemist, bongodb, mochascript, walktime.js, portasql, ..., the man kept going
What are you doing?, he asked again, louder this time.
Oh, I'm trying out new frameworks, tools, databases, languages.
Whoa, you seem to be going fast, maybe as fast as 10 programmers put together!
yes! well, the industry moves so very fast!, he looked at his phone for a second, and added there! the cardboard.io framework came up with version 3.5 which broke compatibility with 3.4 and this yielded 4 forks in the community! I have to try them all to know which to choose!
and what do you do learning all of these?
I'm an early adopter. If you don't stay up to date you get stuck writing COBOL or MUMPS for a living. You want to find the next big thing, and ride the wave to the top!
Has it ever worked?
Oh yes! I found out about Rails before it got big, and I figured out node.js before it was popular, and I was on the first beta copies of redis and mongodb and riak! I was the first one to use vagrant and then I got us to switch to docker but of course now it's all about unikernels..
Cool, and all these things you were at the forefront of, how did it pay off?
oh it didn't; by the time rails became huge I had moved on to the next big thing so I didn't get left behind. Similarly for the other ones. Here's hoping for unikernels though
I see, added little printf, pensively. What problems do you solve with all of these frameworks?
Oh, I make sure we don't use something that is not going to be big, so that this company doesn't get to bet on technologies that have no future. It's very important work, because if you don't do that, you can't find anyone to hire except old grey beards behind the times, and you want self-motivated go-getters, who are also early adopters., said the man.
That is funny, chimed our friend.
It is very hard! in the startup world, if you want a-players, you need good technology to bring them in! Otherwise you're stuck with inflexible laggards. Nobody wants to be an inflexible laggard.
The little printf interjected: No, that's not what I mean, and he then added I mean it's funny that tools are meant to solve problems for us, but for you, the tools themselves have become a problem.
And while the man stood there in silence (on his new cool treadmill desk), little printf hopped out of the room.
Chapter 8
a woman in purple hoodie, slouched over her keyboard with her desk full of empty mugs and bottles
In the next office over sat a tired employee, with dozens of empty coffee cups, slouched over, typing angrily.
Hi, said little printf.
The woman didn't stop what she was doing. She kept typing furiously.
Hello? he asked again.
The woman stopped at once, got a flask out of a drawer in her desk, and took a swig.
I have a terrible job, she said. I do devops. It started okay, where I'd mostly develop and then sometimes debug stuff, but as time moved on, it got worse and worse. I started fighting fires in our stack, and then more fires kept happening. I got rid of most of them, pulling small miracles here and there to then meet the deadlines on dev stuff I also had to do
And did they hire anyone to help?
No, that's the thing. Small fires kept happening here and there, and because of the time I took to fight them, I couldn't be as careful as before with the dev stuff, so I created more fires all the time. Now I'm fighting fires all day and all night and I hate my job
Why doesn't your employer do anything?
I'm good at my job, and I managed to keep things under control long enough that everyone got used to it. When you make a habit of small miracles, people get used to it. Then you're stuck doing miracles all the time or they will think you won't do your job at all.
That sounds very sad
It is; and because you're the most familiar person with these fires, you get to only work on them more and more, until your employer hires someone else to cover your old job, the one you loved. If you care hard enough about your work to be the one doing the stuff everyone else hates, you're thanked by doing more and more of that work you don't like, until that's all you do. And then there's nothing left for you to enjoy.
Then you're unlucky, said little printf.
And her pager went off again.
That woman, said little printf to himself, as he continued farther on his journey, that woman would be scorned by all the others: by the senior expert, by the rockstar developer, by the serial early adopter. Nevertheless she is the only one of them all who seems helpful. Perhaps that is because she is thinking of something else besides herself.
Chapter 9
software architect sitting at his desk with reams of paper on top of it
At the corner of the building, printf found a large office with big windows giving a stunning view of the area. In it sat an old gentleman with reams of documentation on his desk.
Ah, here comes a developer exclaimed the man, as printf stood in the doorway. Come in!
Looking through the windows, little printf noticed that they were full of writing. With the help of a dry-erase pen, the view to the outside world was masked by tons of circles, arrows, cylinders, and clouds. While it was curious the man needed clouds drawn where real ones could be seen outdoors, the whole ensemble was more intriguing.
What is this?, asked our friend, pointing at the windows.
Oh this? This is our production system! Said the man, not once thinking the question was about the outside world. I am a software architect.
What's a software architect?
Mostly, it's someone who knows how to best structure and coordinates the components of a large system so they all fit together well. It's someone who has to know about databases, languages, frameworks, editors, serialization formats, protocols, and concepts like encapsulation and separation of concerns.
That is very interesting! said little printf, here is someone who can answer all my questions! He glanced at the architecture diagrams. Your system is very impressive. Is it running very fast?
I couldn't tell you, said the architect. It should, though
How's the code then, is it good?
I couldn't tell you
Are the users happy about it?
I couldn't tell you either, I'm afraid
But you're a software architect!
Exactly! But I am not a developer. It is not the architect who goes and writes the modules and classes, combines the libraries. The software architect is much too important to go around touching code. But he talks with programmers and developers, asks them questions, provides them guidance. And if the problem is looking interesting enough, the architect takes over the planning.
And why is that?
Because we are more experienced. We know more about systems and what works or not. Developers can then be an extension of our knowledge to produce great systems!
But how do you know if things are going well without getting involved with code?
We trust the developers
So you trust them to implement your ideas correctly, but not enough to come up with their own ideas?
The software architect was visibly shaken by this comment. I guess I might have been a bit disconnected, he finally admitted. The problem is that after a while you are asked to work with ideas so much you don't have a good way to get them tested or verified... he stared down, pensively. Sometimes a software architect does neither software nor architecture, it seems.
Little printf left the room, and being done with his visit, exited the building.
Chapter 10
man in a plaid shirt, winter hat, with a clipboard and a bell
Little printf, once outside, met a man collecting money for some charity.
Hi, said the man. how would you feel about helping someone today?
It would probably make me feel better, said little printf back. I have been in this office all day, and now I'm more confused than ever.
Ah I see. These people are all developers. They are not really helpful, are they? What they love to say is that they're changing the world, and they pretty much succeed at that, in fact.
Why does it feel so awkward, then? Asked little printf.
Well, the best they do is often help convert some people's jobs into programs, or make everyone's leisure more leisurely. Software is eating the world and that changes its face for sure... but deep down it's the same old world, with a mangled face. The reason it feels awkward is that changing in that way doesn't mean things are getting any better. We have the same flaws and problems we always had, the same holes to fill deep down inside.
So how can I feel better? Little Printf was visibly anxious.
The man thought for a while, and offered printf to come help him help others, as this was this man's way of feeling better. During the afternoon, printf told the man about his problems and his adventure. After a long silence, the man said:
The games people play, the roles and reputations they chase and entertain, the fleeting pleasure they derive from solving intricate problems, is all fun for a while. Ultimately though, if you do not solve anything worthwhile, if you forget about the people involved, it's never gonna be truly fulfilling.
And that may be fine, and it might not be, and you may or may not get that from somewhere else than your workplace when you grow up. Work can be work; it can be for the money, it can be for the fun of it. That's okay. As long as you manage to get that fulfillment somewhere in your life.
In the end though, it is only when you solve problems with a human face that you can feel truly right; What is essential is invisible to the computer.
It is the time you have spent on your system that makes it so important", the man added, "and when you lost sight of why it made sense to spend time on it, when it became a game of pride, it caused more grief than relief.
Developers have often forgotten this truth; If you lose sight of things, working on your system becomes its own problem, and the most effective solution is to get rid of the system, given it's the problem.
It is only when you solve problems with a human face that you can feel truly right, repeated little printf to himself, so he would remember.
Chapter 11
same image of printf as before, except he's smiling this time around
Printf, who's now sitting right in front of me, is on his way home. Talking with him made me realize how much of what I do flies in the face of what I liked, what I started programming for. Each of the people Printf met are roles I see myself taking one day or another over time. I was encouraged by them to become them, and probably encouraged people to do the same.
Where I got dragged in the game of trying to become a real programmer, Printf didn't. He said he was okay with not being a real programmer, that he preferred to be a programmer with a human face.
Today I'm stuck in the situation where I look back, and have to figure out if I can, too, become a programmer with a human face; or if everything I do is just a job. There doesn't seem to be too much that's worthwhile in-between.
In any case, where printf felt he didn't need to be a real programmer, I think I feel the same now.

Hey Friend, been a long time. Usually this would be a conversation I have with you over an instant messaging media. We would argue, because I need to confront my views, and you'll help me to step back a little bit and try to force me to take care of me.

This conversation would probably splitted across several media and people, because this is how I function, in weird ways and without focus.

On the 13th of November, coming back from le Louvres to Saint Denis - where I live - you sent me a SMS asking me if I was safe. I did heard a loud noise from the Stade de France when I was heading out the subway to my home, but since there was a match I just flagged it as "weird noise made by sports fan". I didn't understood why I received this text.

Then, once home. I started a web browser. After receiving half a dozen a tweet of various instance of you, I reassured you by posting that I was home and safe on twitter. And then, with my room-mate and coworker we just thin about the huge amount of work that we would have to do on Monday - and even before that.

I told you, I work in strange ways. I wasn't emotionally affected by the death of 300 people. It's random and I knew no one there. The shooting happened in places I can happen to go, but it's as random as a plane crash (and in fact there's a higher probability to be killed in a plane crash than being hit in a terrorist event).

I checked upon friends (or waited for news)(yeah, I suck at maintaining friendship, I think you're kind of aware of that now) to be sure everyone was mostly safe. And then I waited for the political disaster that will ensure. Until the next Monday I really hoped that our politicians would do something clever, like calling for respect and fraternity and unity.

You called me naïve, but if I'm not that naïve, then I turn cynical. I tried very hard to shut down my inner voices warning me of what would come next. And since you told me that being cynical might hurt you, I try to avoid that. Also it's better for my moral and my depression.

And then our Beloved Socialist President of the Republican Democratic Palpatine ordered the Senate to vote the martial law … Mmm, no, I'm on the wrong movie here. It was the talk of Mr. Hollande in front of the congress - higher and lower chamber gathered at Versailles - when he asserted that we were at war. And that we need to form an alliance with Putin and Assad to fight ISIS. And that we need to extend and modify the State of Emergency, and the Constitution.

This is where I broke up. Syria is still a hard political subject for me. You know that since I talk a lot about it. You even asked me to get diagnosed because I might have some sort of trauma. SO, yes, this is where my emotions finally set me adrift.

What people call emotion wave or surge are - in my case - chaotic tsunamis destroying anything that might be related to reason. That's my poison. That's what will kill me in the end. You're important there, in the fact that you help me resurface in those situation and kind of freeze the emotional disaster.

We talked about it. I see no hope in our current situation. Warrant-less search and warrant-less house arrest; total stop of support of any kind toward the refugees - who already had a hard time; suspension of the right to protest and, more generally, confiscation of the political debate by the politicians - Mr. Valls said that he won't accept any discussion about the incidence of social or economic factor on terrorism; those are what we live on now.

I mean, I'm used to see army in the street of Paris. In fact, I never knew them without troops - the bombing attack of 1995 happened at a time I wasn't that much in Paris and since then troops are always in the street. But now, their in battle suit, helmet and bullet proof vests, way to much weapon for my sanity, etc.

Cops did change also. They weren't on a short leash before, but now they're out for blood and revenge. Usually, even on the few forbidden protests I was at, there's always a way to get out if you ask nicely, they will let you go without hustle - they're basically filtering you to be sure you won't sucker punch them, but in the end you can escape before they arrest everyone. But on the 28th of November, there wasn't such a thing like a possible escape. They wanted to fight.

There was a public announce that unemployment was on the raise just before the COP21. And nothing in the government deemed important to say anything about it. I mean, they're supposed to be socialists for fuck sake. They should at least says that they will work on a new way to count unemployed people, or that they will do something about it. But they only speaks about security. Mr Valls eve stating that "Security if the first of liberty" which, ironically, is a quote made by JM. Le Pen as a slogan for it's presidential elections back in the eighties.

We have a socialist prime minister, defending a security only program, based on pricniple established by the far right movement.

That's about the state of our politics in France. But don't get me wrong, The FN is a bit worse than he PS in that he will actually do what they said they're gonna do, and they plan to cut funding for planed parenthood (which depends largely on regional funding), and other nice stuff.

Politicians wants me to vote to block the National Front, in a national movement aganst fascism. But I won't. I do not see the point on voting for a lack of response to social issues, just for the sake of protecting us against fascism. Politicians who enabled the police state, who are asking for a republican merge, who are saying that young people in teh suburb should cultivate themselves, who plans to bomb people in collaboration with Turkish, Russian and Syrian - all extremely democratic - governments, who reduce democratic life to vote, who won't do a thing about the unemployment, wants my vote to oppose fascism?

You see my dearest friend, you asked me to look on the bright side. But it's more than hard to do that. You told me that bitterness is like Beaujolais Nouveau. You can drink a bit of it, it can even be good - and I disagree on Beaujolais Nouveau being a good wine ever - but too much and it will kills you. Or hurt you.

I don't know.

I work at La Quadrature du Net now. And I really try to avoid the repetitive self destruct pattern that leads me to chain burn out. Me or other staffers. Or you.

During the attacks on the 13th of November, I focused on the solidarity part of it. That's what I'm trying to do. That's why I keep informed on the Syrian situation by following the White Helmets.

But there's something that is absent of our political life in France. We have traditional organisations who covers for themselves without caring about anything else than their way to power: syndicates, political parties. We do have old style NGO, advocating nd lobbying behind the scenes. We have radical groups who are busy fighting cops. But we do not have orgs who works on party. Militantism in France is a serious business. And if you're not working yourself to death you're doing it wrong. ANd you end up without anyone willing to take up the fight, to think on long term strategies, to federate smaller groups who exhausts themselves beyond repair.

And I hear you. I need to focus on the positive sides. So that's what I'm trying to do. There's some good stuff happening. LQDN is finally having a nice and more inclusive community - there's a lot of effort to do, but it's in progress. I'm working there to build tools to bother our deputies - piphone and similar stuff, provide tools to flatten the democratic process. Or at least to help the circulation of information.

And that's my target. You said me that we're in for a long fight. I'm not even sure we can win this fight, and the nihilistic part of me keep thinking that it's useless. But since I try to not killing myself, I need something. If I can bother an intelligence officer, a head of office somewhere, deputies or senators, ministers or head of state that's a win.

If, when they see us, in the press, or elsewhere, or when they hear about us those people think "Oh no … not them again … my day is now ruined" then, it's a win. It won't makes them stop doing shit, but at least, I'll smile when thinking about all the pain they'll get.

And in the meantime, we should try harder working with other small organisation specialised in other aspect of the fight. There's a lot to do with queers, feminists, ant racist groups. And I really think that's where I can help - beyond the purely technical point.

So, you see, I'm trying to stop sipping the bitterness part of things. It's hard 'cause I've turned cynical/realist. And because I love the bitterness. But you're right. I should stop drinking it.

I'm happy you're here. Because at least I can talk to you. And there's here also. This post is fucked up, and makes no sense. But I think it's a bit like what's the political life looks like. Socialist calling voters to vote for traditionalists.

It's fucked up. But I'm gonna ignore that, because it's useless and I can't spend any more energy on that. I'll focus on building things.

Thanks for still being here.

En lisant le livre de Bernard Stiegler, « Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer » (Galilée, 2003), on peut ressentir un sentiment de découragement.

Le philosophe explique dans son livre que les électeurs FN sont, comme beaucoup d’entre nous dans cette société malade, victimes de troubles narcissiques. Pour s’en sortir, ils ont la particularité de désigner des boucs émissaires. C’est un symptôme, une façon d’évacuer le mal-être.

Il est impossible de discuter avec des troubles et des symptômes (seuls les psys savent faire). Les journalistes peuvent donc continuer à s’agiter, à « fact-checker », à enquêter, à essayer de comprendre à coups de portraits, ils n’ont aucune prise sur rien, me suis-je dit.

Je suis allée demander à Bernard Stiegler ce que la presse peut et doit faire au lendemain des élections européennes, qui ont vu le FN atteindre le score de 25% des votants.

Une conférence, ce samedi
Ars Industrialis, le groupe de travail de Bernard Stiegler, organise une conférence ce samedi baptisée « Extrême nouveauté, extrême désenchantement, extrême droite ». La réunion aura lieu au Théâtre Gérard Philipe à Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis), de 14 heures à 18 heures. L'entrée est gratuite.

Rue89 : Dans « Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer », vous dites que les électeurs FN souffrent d’un défaut de « narcissisme primordial ». Dès lors, peuvent-ils changer d’avis comme une personne rationnelle ?

Bernard Stiegler : Je parle avec des gens du Front national, il y en a même que j’aime bien. Je vous le dis très franchement : certains sont plutôt sympathiques. La plupart ne sont pas des racistes ou des antisémites, mais des gens très malheureux. Mais pour votre question, la réponse est non. Je n’essaye jamais de les dissuader de voter pour le Front national. Plus j’essaierais de le faire, et plus ils voteraient pour le Front national. C’est complètement inutile.

C’est d’autant plus inefficace que, pour une part, ils n’ont pas tort d’exprimer une souffrance. Le paranoïaque, le psychotique, le névrotique ne racontent jamais que des bêtises. Il y a toujours un fond de vérité. Le problème, c’est que ce fond de vérité qui devient pathologique exprime une maladie qui n’est pas seulement celle de ces électeurs : c’est celle de notre société.

Ce qui est spécifique dans la pathologie des électeurs du Front national, c’est que par leur vote, qu’ils le veuillent ou non, ils s’en prennent à des boucs émissaires.

Comment avez-vous compris ce qui les faisait souffrir ?

Je parle, dans le livre que vous citez, de Richard Durn [responsable de la tuerie du conseil municipal de Nanterre en 2002, ndlr]. Je me suis intéressé au sujet après avoir lu un extrait de son journal intime cité dans Le Monde et dans lequel Durn disait « avoir perdu le sentiment d’exister ». Ces mots m’ont énormément frappé. Moi aussi j’ai parfois le sentiment de ne pas exister. Et moi aussi je suis passé à l’acte : j’ai braqué des banques...

En lisant l’article, je me suis dit que ce type était extrêmement dangereux, mais qu’on était des millions comme lui. Et je me suis dit qu’un jour, les gens qui perdent le sentiment d’exister, de plus en plus nombreux, voteraient pour le Front national au lieu de tuer des gens ou de braquer des banques.

J’ai été scandalisé par l’attitude d’Eva Joly, au lendemain du premier tour de l’élection présidentielle, qui a qualifié le score du Front national de « tâche indélébile sur les valeurs de la démocratie ». Ce sont des propos honteux.

Comment expliquer cette liquidation du narcissisme primordial ?

Elle vient de l’organisation illimitée de la consommation via le marketing et la télévision. Vous avez vu le film « Le Festin de Babette » ? C’est une histoire magnifique : une Française qui vit au Danemark décide de faire un repas immense, somptuaire. Le film raconte la préparation de ce repas coûteux par une personne modeste, et c’est extraordinaire.

Quand j’étais enfant, le repas du dimanche avait beaucoup d’importance. Il était courant dans les classes populaires de faire des festins, comme Gervaise et son oie dans « L’Assommoir ». Il est très important de recevoir, de se rassembler.

C’est ce que le consumérisme a concrètement détruit : il n’y a que du prêt-à-porter, du prêt-à-manger – de la malbouffe et plus de fête.

Comment faire réaliser aux électeurs du FN que cette souffrance est déconnectée du chiffre de l’immigration ?

Cela ne sert à rien de leur dire : ils ne l’entendront jamais. Précisément, ils entendent autre chose si vous leur dites cela. Ils entendent que vous n’avez pas écouté leur problème. Et ils ont raison. S’en prendre à un bouc émissaire [ce que Bernard Stiegler nomme un « pharmakos », dans « Pharmacologie du Front national », Flammarion, 2013, ndlr] est un symptôme. C’est un symptôme horrifique, extrêmement dangereux, et le nazisme est l’exploitation de ce symptôme à l’échelle cauchemardesque du XXe siècle. Une telle horreur peut tout à fait revenir – c’est même plus que probable : si rien de décisif ne se passe, c’est ce qui finira par arriver. Et cela dépend de nous que cela n’arrive pas – mais ce n’est pas en insultant les électeurs du FN que cela s’arrangera.

Il est totalement vain de dire aux gens d’arrêter de symptomatiser : il faut les soigner, je veux dire prendre soin d’eux (au sens que j’ai donné à ce mot dans « Prendre soin »), s’occuper d’eux, leur donner des perspectives, leur tenir un autre discours que celui de François Hollande et de Nicolas Sarkozy...

Comment les journalistes peuvent-ils participer à ces soins ?

Je pense qu’il est urgent que la presse reprenne son rôle, qui est de défendre des idées, de les faire se confronter, et par là, de construire des opinions. Cela veut dire faire des choix politiques, esthétiques, intellectuels, sociaux, etc. – et les assumer. Le Monde diplomatique continue de faire ce travail, et c’est pourquoi je ne manque jamais l’occasion de le lire, même s’il m’énerve souvent.

Aujourd’hui, la désespérance est le fond de commerce du Front national. Pour redonner de l’espoir, il faut donner la parole à ceux qui ont quelque chose à dire et qui sont prêts au débat public – et par là reconstruire une pensée, des concepts et des perspectives, et les socialiser.

L’idée que les gens ne veulent pas penser est totalement fausse : quand le Collège de France a mis en ligne ses cours, des millions d’heures de cours ont été téléchargées. Ars Industrialis, qui fait des conférence souvent difficiles, a une très large audience. Ce que les gens refusent n’est pas la pensée : c’est la langue de bois, d’où qu’elle vienne.

Si le capitalisme consumériste s’effondre et qu’il n’y a pas ce travail d’invention d’une alternative à ce qui fut la base de ce consumérisme, à savoir le fordo-keynésianisme (la « croissance »), et qui s’est définitivement épuisé, l’extrême droite s’imposera partout – bien au-delà de la France et de l’Europe.

Vous pensez que c’est sur le point d’arriver ?

Dans les années 80, il s’est passé quelque chose de très important. Il y a eu la « révolution conservatrice », fondée sur l’idée qu’il valait mieux liquider l’Etat et financiariser le capitalisme en laissant la production se développer hors de l’Occident – et cela a été le début du chômage de masse.

Cette liquidation a créé une insolvabilité de masse dissimulée par les systèmes de subprimes et de « credit default swap » très profitables aux spéculateurs mais ruineux pour l’économie, un hyperconsumérisme extrêmement toxique sur le plan environnemental, une grande misère symbolique sur le plan mental, et une précarisation généralisée provoquant un sentiment d’insécurité bien réelle et une désintégration sociale.

Cette désintégration rend impossible l’intégration non pas des immigrés, mais de la population elle-même dans son ensemble, les immigrés y étant exposés plus que tous évidemment.

La crise de 2008 a mis au clair cette insolvabilité et cette fragilité extrême et structurelle. Et elle a ruiné durablement la confiance – ce à quoi Snowden mais aussi Fukushima et bien d’autres catastrophes ont ajouté leurs effets.

Un système économique ne peut pas fonctionner sans confiance – et il n’y a plus de confiance. Comment peut-il y en avoir quand 55% des jeunes Espagnols sont au chômage et que tout le monde s’en moque – cependant que l’automatisation est en train réduire l’emploi dans tous les secteurs et dans tous les pays ? Qui a parlé de tout cela au cours de la campagne sur
l’Europe ?

Les caissières disparaissent...

Oui, on n’a plus besoin de caissière, et on n’aura bientôt plus besoin de chauffeurs de camion – ni de nombreux techniciens, ingénieurs, etc. Ce qui est en train d’advenir, c’est la disparition de l’emploi. Pas un mot de cette question dans le tout récent rapport Pisani-Ferry si j’en crois la presse – pas plus que dans le rapport Gallois d’il y a presque deux ans déjà... Que de temps perdu ! Et que de fureur accumulée !

L’automatisation va se développer désormais massivement, notamment parce que le numérique permet d’intégrer toutes sortes d’automatismes jusqu’alors isolés, et qu’il en résulte une baisse rapide du coût des robots.

Jeff Bezos, le patron d’Amazon, est en train d’en installer partout dans tous ses entrepôts. Arnaud Montebourg a annoncé il y a un an qu’il allait lancer un plan de robotique française.

Le coût de l’automatisation va diminuer, et les PME françaises vont de plus en plus pouvoir s’y engager – même si elle ne le veulent pas, en raison de la concurrence, et le chômage va monter en flêche. Il n’y a qu’une solution pour contrer la montée proportionnelle du FN, c’est de créer une alternative au modèle keynésien : un modèle contributif.

Pouvez-vous donner un exemple concret de modèle contributif ?

Dans l’économie contributive, il n’y a plus de salariat ni de propriété industrielle au sens classique. Pour vous donner un exemple, j’ai travaillé il y a quelques années avec des étudiants stylistes sur un modèle d’entreprise de mode contributive. L’entreprise devenait un club d’amateurs de mode, dont certains contribuaientt par des idées, d’autres par des achats, d’autres par un travail de confection, d’autres par tout cela à la fois ou alternativement.

A son époque lointaine, devenue aujourd’hui mythique et totalement révolue, la Fnac était une sorte de coopérative où les vendeurs étaient d’abord des passionnés de musique ou de photo, et où les adhérents de la Fnac n’étaient pas des consommateurs, mais des amateurs.

Il y a des gens qui s’expriment extrêmement bien dans leur façon de s’habiller. Ils ont du goût, ils savent agencer des vêtements. Je pense que leur savoir peut être partagé et valorisé.

Et comment seraient-ils rémunérés ?

Ce n’est pas à l’échelle micro-économique de la firme qu’il faut poser et résoudre ce problème : c’est une question de macro-économie qui doit dépasser le couple valeur d’usage/valeur d’échange, et promouvoir ce que nous appelons valeur pratique (c’est-à-dire savoirs) et valeur sociétale (c’est-à-dire qui renforce fonctionnellement la solidarité).

C’est la valorisation mutuelle et par une puissance publique réinventée de ce qu’Amartya Sen appelle les « capabilités » – c’est-à-dire les savoir-faire, les savoir-vivre et les savoirs formels – qui constitue la base d’une économie contributive. C’est en fait la généralisation du modèle des intermittents du spectacle, qui cultivent leurs savoirs avec l’aide de leur revenu intermittent et qui les valorisent lorsqu’ils entrent en production, et que l’on voudrait détruire au moment même où il faudrait en généraliser l’état d’esprit si intelligent.

J’y reviens, quel rôle peut jouer la presse dans cette réflexion sur le modèle économique actuel ?

D’abord, elle-même devrait inventer, pour elle-même, de tels dispositifs contributifs. Le fonds d’aide à la presse devrait servir à cela, et les journalistes devraient se battre pour cela. Ensuite, il faut que la presse parle de l’automatisation et plus généralement du numérique en un sens approfondi et non « tendance » ou dans la rubrique « geek », et qu’elle ne soit pas dans le déni. L’automatisation vient, il faut l’assumer, et arrêter de dire qu’on va inverser la courbe du chômage. Celui-ci va considérablement augmenter.

Toutes sortes de gens réfléchissent à des scénarios qui permettraient d’entrer dans un nouveau monde – en Amérique latine par exemple, mais aussi en Amérique du Nord. Il faut leur donner la parole. Et il faut solliciter l’intelligence des lecteurs plutôt que de présupposer qu’ils ne recherchent que le scoop ou l’information sensationnelle et vulgaire.

Désormais, le FN se présente aussi comme l’un de ces scénarios alternatifs à l’ultralibéralisme...

Oui, c’est très malin. Ce matin, j’ai eu la grande surprise de lire une déclaration de Florian Philippot [vice-président du Front national, ndlr] qui défendait la grève de la SNCF dans Libération, au nom du service public. Imaginez le désarroi des syndicalistes de la CGT et de SUD.

Le Front national, c’est une idéologie ultralibérale déguisée en anti-ultralibéralisme. Jean-Marie Le Pen est un ultralibéral. Il l’a toujours dit, et il l’est plus que jamais. Il est absolument contre l’Etat, contre les fonctionnaires.

Quant à Marine Le Pen, quoiqu’elle dise, elle a besoin de l’ultralibéralisme pour se développer : c’est son terreau parce que ce qui attire chez elle ses électeurs et la désignation de boucs émissaires, ce qui provoque cette recherche de boucs émissaires est l’ultralibéralisme au service du capitalisme financiarisé pulsionnel et spéculatif. Qu’est-ce que le FN ? C’est le grand spécialiste des inversions de causalités.

Le FN vit sur l’idée que la souffrance est attribuable aux immigrés parce que personne n’a le courage de fournir les vrais schémas de causalité nouveaux qui s’imposent.

Le FN distille la peur en parlant des milliers de Mohamed Merah en latence. Mais ces jeunes qui partent en Syrie ne souffrent-ils pas du même trouble narcissique que les électeurs du FN ?

Bien entendu. J’ai appelé cela le complexe d’Antigone. « Antigone » est un texte absolument fondamental.

Je soutiens que les terroristes intégristes, beurs ou blancs, nés et élevés en France, qui d’un seul coup, se mettent à devenir musulmans, sont des petites Antigone. Je ne veux pas les défendre en disant cela. Ce que je veux dire, c’est qu’un adolescent a besoin de sublimer – et de le faire comme toujours « au nom de la loi ». Antigone est une adolescente qui défend la « loi divine ». Merah est aussi un adolescent.

Ces mômes-là, à un moment, ont besoin de s’identifier à leur père, puis à une figure de rupture avec le père qu’ils accusent alors de ne pas incarner correctement et sincèrement la loi. Ils cherchent alors d’autres figures identificatoires. Mais s’ils ne trouvent plus de possibilité d’identification dans la société, et s’ils vivent dans une société qui est en train de s’effondrer, ils sont prêts pour s’engager dans ce que j’ai appelé une sublimation négative – qui peut conduire au pire. Ce sont là encore des symptômes.

Vous pouvez faire tout ce que vous voulez, cela se développera encore longtemps et inévitablement si la société ne produit pas vite des capacités nouvelles d’identification positive sur des idées républicaines, constructives et vraiment porteuses d’avenir.

My flight from Athens where I had the pleasure to attend the first “reproducible world summit” landed at the scheduled time in Paris (CDG). While people were getting their bags and putting their coats on, one member of the cabin crew announced that a police control will take place outside the plane and that we should have ready identity documents. My seat was in the back of the plane, so I had time to wait in the cold of the jetway while all passengers were controlled one after the other.

Three cops were set up right at the entrance of the terminal. One was taking cards or passports and looking at people's face. He then passed it to another cop in front of a suitcase that seemed to contain a scanner and a computer. The third one was just standing against the wall watching. When it was my turn, after scanning my passport, the cop had this nice gesture where she started to move her hand holding the passport toward me —just like she had just did a hundred times—before pulling it backward when the result appeared on the screen.

I had the confirmation that I was registered as a dangerous political activist in 2012 when David Dufresne published Magasin Général. One report from the interior intelligence service from 2008 was leaked to promote the book. My name had not been properly redacted from the very first version that went online and was associated with a political self-organized space in Dijon. Some Debian Developers had the pleasure to visit that space in 2005, 2006, or 2007. The report was full of mistakes, like almost all police files, so I don't want to comment on it.

The good news is that since then, I have stopped being paranoid. I knew, and thus could take appropriate precautions. Just like every time I have to approach an airport, all my (encrypted) electronic devices were turned off. I had shaved a couple hours before. I know a lawyer ready to represent me. I am fully aware that it's best to say as little as possible.

Although it has been a while since I had such a blatant confirmation that I was still a registered anarchist. It should not be a surprise though. Once you are in, there's no way out.

I was then asked to step aside while they proceeded with the rest of the queue. I put my backpack down and leaned against the wall. Once they were over, one of the cops asked me to follow him. We walked through the corridors to reach the office of the border police. While we were walking, they asked me a series of questions. I'm not mentioning the pauses in between, but here's what I can remember:

— Do you have a connection?
— No.
— Are you going to Paris?
— To my parents' in the suburbs.
— How long have you been staying in Greece?
— 5 days.
— flipping the pages of my passport And you come back from the U.S. in Feb. 2015?
— No, that was the maximum stay. I was there in August 2014.
— Why were you in Greece? Vacations?
— Work. I was at a meeting.
— What do you do?
— Free software.
— What is that?
— I am a developper.
— Oh, computers.
— Yes.
— Is that why you also were in the US?
— Yes, it was another conference.
— And so you travel because of that. That's nice.
— …
— Are you a freelancer?
— I work with a coop, but yes.

The cop also commented that they had to do some simple checks and that they would then let me go as I was coming back. I did not trust this but said nothing.

When then passed through a door where the cop had to use their badge to unlock it. I was asked to sit on a chair in the corridor between two offices (as far as I could see). I could hear one cop explaining the situation to the next: “— Il a une fiche. — Ah, une fiche.” They seemed quite puzzled that I was not controlled when I flew out on Monday.

After some minutes, another cop came back asking me for my boarding pass. Some more minutes later, he came back asking me if the address on my passport was still valid. I replied “no”. They gave me a piece of paper asking me for my current address, a phone number and an email address. As these information are all easy to find, I thought it was easier to comply. I gave my @irq7.fr address that I use for all public administrations. When the cop saw it, he asked:

— What is it?
— I don't understand.
— Is it your company?
— It is a non-profit.

He gave me my passport back and showed me the way out.

(I will spare you details on the discussion I had to listen while waiting between two cops about how one loved to build models of military weapons used in wars against communism because of his origins. And that he was pissed off because fucking Europe disallowed some (toxic) paints he was used to.)

To the best of my understanding, what happened is that they made a phone call and were just asked to update my personal details by the intelligence service.

I don't know, but I'm left to wonder if all these people might just have been controlled because I was on the flight.

All-in-all this didn't take too long: one hour after leaving the plane I was on the platform for the regional trains. The cops stayed polite the whole time. I am privileged: French citizen, white, able to speak French with a teacher accent. I am pretty sure it would have not been that good if I had been displaying a long beard or a djellaba.

I took the time to document this because I know too many people who think that what the French government is doing doesn't concern them. It does. It's been a couple of years now that antiterrorism is how governments keep people in check. But we are reaching a whole new level now. We are talking about cops keeping their guns while off duties, house searches at any hours without judge oversight, and the government wants to change the constitution to make the “state of emergency” permanent. We've seen so many abuses in just two weeks. It will not go well. Meanwhile, instead of asking themselves why young people are killing others and themselves, state officials prefer dropping bombs. Which will surely prevent people ready to die from using suicidal tactics, right?

We are at the dawn of an environmental crisis that will end humanity. Every human on this planet is concerned. People get beaten up when they march to pressure governments to do something about it. We need to unite and resist. And yes, we are going to get hurt but freedom is not free.

Dans La Médiocratie (Lux), le philosophe Alain Deneault critique la médiocrité d’un monde où tout n’est plus fait que pour satisfaire le marché. Entretien.
“Les médiocres sont de retour dans la vallée fertile”, déclarait aux Inrocks le journaliste Daniel Mermet lors de son éviction de France Inter, en juin 2014. Le philosophe Alain Deneault, considérant la conjoncture globale, va plus loin : “Il n’y a eu aucune prise de la Bastille, rien de comparable à l’incendie du Reichstag, et l’Aurore n’a encore tiré aucun coup de feu. Pourtant, l’assaut a bel et bien été lancé et couronné de succès : les médiocres ont pris le pouvoir”. C’est cette révolution silencieuse qu’il analyse de long en large dans La Médiocratie (Lux), un livre coup de poing. De passage à Paris, cet enseignant en science politique à l’Université de Montréal nous explique le fond de sa pensée. Entretien.

Comment les médiocres ont-ils pris le pouvoir selon vous ? Depuis quand est-il valorisé d’être moyen ?

Alain Deneault – La généalogie de cette prise de pouvoir a deux branches. L’une remonte au XIXe siècle, à l’époque où on a transformé progressivement les “métiers” en “emplois”. Cela supposait une standardisation du travail, c’est-à-dire qu’on en fasse une chose moyenne. On a généré une sorte de moyenne standardisée, requise pour organiser le travail à grande échelle sur le mode aliénant que l’on sait, et qui a été décrit par Marx. On a fait de ce travail moyen quelque chose de désincarné, qui perd du sens, et qui n’est plus qu’un “moyen” pour le capital de croître, et pour les travailleurs de subsister.

L’autre versant de cette prise de pouvoir réside dans la transformation de la politique en culture de la gestion. L’abandon progressif des grands principes, des orientations et de la cohérence au profit d’une approche circonstancielle, où n’interviennent plus que des “partenaires” sur des projets bien précis sans qu’intervienne la notion de bien commun, a conduit à faire de nous des citoyens qui “jouent le jeu”, qui se plient à toutes sortes de pratiques étrangères aux champs des convictions, des compétences et des initiatives. Cet art de la gestion est appelé “gouvernance”.

Ces deux phénomènes ont amené des penseurs au XXe siècle à constater que la médiocrité n’était plus une affaire marginale, qui concernait des gens peu futés qui arrivaient à se rendre utiles, mais qu’elle faisait désormais système. En tant que professeur, qu’administrateur, qu’artiste, on est obligé de se plier à des modalités hégémoniques pour subsister.

Au niveau politique, cela a pour conséquence que chaque sujet est analysé sous l’angle du problem solving. Ce qui se passe en France en ce moment est emblématique : en réponse aux attaques terroristes, on bombarde, on répond par une stratégie de la solution au sens chirurgical du terme, alors qu’il faudrait prendre du recul et être plus subtil.

L’avènement de la médiocratie est-il à lier à la révolution libérale qui a eu lieu dans les années 80, au conformisme dans les entreprises et à la mise au pas du monde du travail qui en a découlé ?

Oui, et c’est d’autant plus vrai que la gouvernance mis en place par les technocrates de Margaret Thatcher a transformé l’ultralibéralisme en une approche réaliste. L’option du néolibéralisme n’est plus une option, mais quelque chose d’aussi normal que de respirer. La gouvernance a réussi à déguiser l’idéologie ultralibérale en savoir, en mode de vie en société, comme si c’était le socle à partir duquel on devrait délibérer, alors que ça devrait être l’objet de la délibération.

Désormais on ne parle plus du bien commun, on fait comme si l’intérêt général n’était plus que la somme d’intérêts particuliers que les uns et les autres sont ponctuellement invités à défendre. On est amené à n’être plus que le petit lobbyiste de ses intérêts privés, ou de ses intérêts de clan. C’est à partir de là que la culture du grenouillage, des arrangement douteux, se développe.

Selon vous “l’expert est la figure centrale de la médiocratie”. Comment expliquez-vous ce paradoxe ?

L’expert ne se contente pas de rendre disponible un savoir auprès de gens qui délibèrent. Il est un idéologue qui déguise son discours d’intérêt en savoir. A l’université, un étudiant devra désormais se demander au cours de son orientation s’il veut devenir expert ou intellectuel, sachant que l’expertise consistera surtout à vendre son cerveau à des acteurs qui ont intérêt à calibrer la production de notre travail intellectuel d’une manière orientée, de façon à satisfaire des intérêts.

Vous citez à ce titre le recteur de l’Université de Montréal, qui disait en 2011 : “Les cerveaux doivent correspondre aux besoins des entreprises”.

Tout à fait, c’est comme Patrick Le Lay [ancien PDG de TF1, ndlr], qui déclarait en 2004 : “Ce que nous vendons à Coca-Cola, c’est du temps de cerveau humain disponible”. Ce recteur, voit son institution – une des universités les plus importantes de la francophonie – comme une entreprise qui vend des cerveaux à l’industrie. Celle-ci occupe d’ailleurs plusieurs sièges au Conseil d’administration de cette université, et décide donc en partie de son orientation.

On est dans un monde où le savoir est généré pour satisfaire l’entreprise, alors que le rôle des intellectuels est de faire de l’entreprise un objet de la pensée. Edward Said en parle très bien : l’expert ne se préoccupe pas de ce que son savoir génère. On peut très bien être géologue, aller chercher du zinc ou du cuivre au Katanga, mais être totalement incompétent quand il s’agit de penser les incidences de cette pratique à l’échelle du Congo. L’industrie ne veut pas qu’ils soient compétents, car ce n’est pas dans son intérêt.

A l’inverse, l’intellectuel agira en “amateur”, c’est-à-dire en aimant son sujet et en se sentant concerné par toutes ses dimensions, ce qui appelle nécessairement à l’interdisciplinarité.

Vous expliquez que le discours politique a été colonisé par un vocable centriste, celui de la “gouvernance”. Ce que vous déplorez sous le terme de “médiocratie”, n’est-ce pas finalement la fin des utopies ?

Je n’irai pas jusque là. Ce n’est pas une terminologie centriste, mais d’extrême-centre, qui s’est développée – c’est presque le contraire. Un discours centriste se situe sciemment sur un axe gauche/droite, alors que le discours d’extrême centre ne tolère rien d’autre que lui-même. Il ne se situe pas sur un spectre mais en nie plutôt la réalité et la légitimité.

Les tenants de la gouvernance sont loin d’être pondérés, contrairement à ce que leur vocable pourrait laisser croire. Ce sont des sophistes des temps modernes, qui ont l’art d’amadouer les syndicats en leur faisant croire qu’ils souhaitent prendre en compte leurs aspirations lors de “Conférences sociales”. En réalité ils militent pour que ceux-ci soient acquis à leurs positions a priori. Leur prétendue synthèse est en fait un discours radical, souvent en phase avec des pratiques inégalitaires et antidémocratiques. Un ordre qui met en péril 80 % des écosystèmes, et qui permet à 1 % des plus riches d’avoir 50 % des actifs mondiaux n’a rien de pondéré.

La médiocratie semble en effet être dotée d’une formidable faculté à tout dépolitiser, alors que ce qu’elle propose est radical : vous citez par exemple la loi 78 encadrant strictement le droit à manifester, qui était passée au Québec en 2012. Comment repolitiser la société ?

Je milite pour le retour à des mots investis de sens, tous ceux que la gouvernance a voulu abolir, caricaturer ou récupérer : la citoyenneté, le peuple, le conflit, les classes, le débat, les droits collectifs, le service public, le bien commun… Ces notions ont été transformées en “partenariat”, en “société civile”, en “responsabilité sociale des entreprises”, en “acceptabilité sociale”, en “sécurité humaine”, etc. Autant de mots-valises qui ont expulsé du champ politique des références rationnelles qui avaient du sens. Le mot “démocratie” lui-même est progressivement remplacé par celui de “gouvernance”. Ces mots méritent d’être réhabilités, comme ceux de “patient”, d’usager, d’abonné, spectateur, qui ont tous été remplacés par celui de “clients”. Cette réduction de tout à des logiques commerciales abolit la politique et mène à un évanouissement des références qui permettent aux gens d’agir.

On n’a pas le choix entre agir ou penser: quand on a agi, c’est qu’on a pensé, et pour penser, il faut avoir les termes qui conviennent. Ce ne sont pas des utopies mais des traditions mobilisatrices dans l’histoire qui sont en train d’être détruites. Aujourd’hui les Etats ne sont plus que les partenaires d’entreprises qui ont un statut équivalent. On greffe des petits intérêts aux grands, mais pendant ce temps là il n’y a pas de notion commune.

La COP21 est-elle un bon exemple de ce processus de gouvernance, puisqu’elle est sponsorisée par des entreprises et des banques qui font de l’évasion fiscale ?

Ce qui est emblématique de la gouvernance dans la COP21, ce sont tous les préparatifs qui ont consisté à accueillir dans l’agenda autant de propositions émanant d’écologistes, que de propositions émanant de Total. Comme du point de vue du climat, le gaz est mieux que le pétrole, Total propose de se reconvertir, quitte à ruiner les nappes phréatiques. C’est ça la gouvernance : on transforme en grand débat de société l’organisation d’un rapport de force dans lequel, pour gommer les oppositions, les plus forts essayent d’amener les plus faibles à adhérer à leurs projets dans une mascarade de consultation et de délibération.

Rancière a écrit que nous sommes tous équitablement dotés de ce qui est requis pour gouverner. Le tirage au sort est-il une solution pour réaffirmer l’idée de bien commun ?

Rancière était mon directeur de thèse. Le tirage au sort ne doit pas être considéré comme une panacée. Ce qui est intéressant c’est toute la pensée sous-jacente à cette proposition. Dans La Haine de la démocratie, Rancière développe cette idée sans a priori militant. Si par exemple en France, au Québec ou au Canada on faisait élire le Sénat au sort, ça changerait considérablement le positionnement des gens. On aurait un autre lien aux institutions. On redécouvrirait alors qu’en ce qui concerne les enjeux généraux de la vie publique, personne n’est plus compétent qu’un autre.

Rancière a raison de dire à ce titre que très peu de gens sont démocrates. Ce mot finit par tellement gêner, malgré les usages abusifs qu’on en a fait, qu’on est en train de le remplacer par celui de gouvernance, plus compatible avec ceux qui veulent utiliser la consultation et l’opinion à des fins de manipulation.

Personnellement je ne suis pas pour faire de grands bonds utopiques. On ne va pas tirer au sort du jour au lendemain tous nos représentants. Commencer par le Sénat, une chambre haute, qui n’a qu’une force de blocage et pas de proposition, rassurerait les gens. Ce serait une manière de responsabiliser les citoyens, à condition d’inventer des mécanismes pour s’assurer qu’il n’y ait pas de trafic d’influence.

Après les attentats du 13 novembre, la lutte contre le terrorisme rend les discours critiques assez inaudibles de manière générale. Elle incite la population à remettre le bien commun entre les mains d’un gouvernement, voire d’un homme providentiel, plutôt qu’à s’en saisir…

C’est très certainement ce à quoi le gouvernement aspire. La lutte contre le terrorisme est une bêtise conceptuelle, qui équivaut à dire que l’on va lutter contre les grenades. Dire qu’on fait la guerre au terrorisme c’est ériger un discours martial contre un adversaire qui n’a encore une fois “pas de visage”, ce qui est une aubaine pour le pouvoir. Et d’un point de vue tactique c’est une folie, car dans les conditions de possibilité historiques actuelles cela va générer encore plus de tensions, qui risquent d’exposer encore plus les Français à la barbarie qui s’est déployée le 13 novembre. Sur le plan intérieur cela va conduire le pays à prendre des mesures d’exception encore plus drastiques et liberticides par rapport à des adversaires toujours plus flous. Pour finalement mettre entre parenthèse ce qui est si insupportable pour les gens de pouvoir, la démocratie.

Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.
But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
The Dream of Internet Freedom
For me, the Dream of Internet Freedom started in 1984 with Steven Levy’s book “Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” Levy told the story of old school coders and engineers who believed that all information should be freely accessible. They imagined that computers would empower people to make our own decisions about what was right and wrong. Empowering people depended on the design principle of decentralization. Decentralization was built into the very DNA of the early Internet, smart endpoints, but dumb pipes, that would carry whatever brilliant glories the human mind and heart could create to whomever wanted to listen.
This idea, that we could be in charge of our own intellectual destinies, appealed to me immensely. In 1986, I entered New College, a liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida. Its motto is “Each student is responsible in the last analysis for his or her education.” That same year, I read the Hacker Manifesto, written by The Mentor and published in Phrack magazine. I learned that hackers, like my fellow academic nerds at New College, were also people that didn’t want to be spoon-fed intellectual baby food. Hackers wanted free access to information, they mistrusted authority, they wanted to change the world — to a place where people could explore and curiosity was its own reward.
In 1991 I started using the public Internet. I remember sending a chat request to a sysop, asking for help. And then I could see the letters that he was typing appearing in real time on my screen, viscerally knowing for the first time that this technology allowed talking to someone, anyone, everyone, in real time, anywhere. That’s when I really began to believe that the Dream of Internet Freedom could one day become a reality.
Twenty years ago, I was a criminal defense attorney, and I learned that hackers were getting in trouble for some tricks that I thought were actually pretty cool. As a prison advocate in the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, I represented a guy who was looking at six more months in jail for hooting into the pay phone and getting free calls home. My research on that case made me realize there were a lot of laws that could impact hackers, and that I could help.
That was also the year that a guy by the name of Marty Rimm wrote a “study” saying that pornography was running rampant on the Internet. A law review published the paper, and Time Magazine touted it, and that’s all it took for Congress to be off to the races. The cyberporn hysteria resulted in Congress passing the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), an attempt to regulate online pornography.
For all you porn lovers out there, that would be a big disappointment. But there was something worse about the CDA. To stop porn, the government had to take the position that the Internet wasn’t fully protected by the First Amendment. And that would mean the government could block all kinds of things. The Internet wouldn’t be like a library. The Internet would be like TV. And TV in 1985 was actually really bad.
But this was even worse because we had higher hopes for the Internet. The Internet was a place where everyone could be a publisher and a creator. The Internet was global. And the Internet had everything on the shelves. Congress was squandering that promise.
At that time, John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a rancher, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote what is essentially a poem about love for the Internet. Barlow wrote:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Barlow was reacting to the CDA and the assertion that the Internet should be less — not more — free than books and magazines. But he was also expressing weariness with business as usual, and our shared hope that the Internet would place our reading, our associations and our thoughts outside of government control.
It turns out that Marty Rimm and the Communications Decency Act didn’t kill Internet freedom. Instead, there was a strange twist of fate that we legal scholars like to call “irony”. In 1997 in a case called ACLU v. Reno, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the CDA. It said that the First Amendment’s freedom of expression fully applies to the Internet.
The only part that remains of the CDA is a part that might seem like it achieves the opposite of Congress’s goal to get rid of online porn. It says that Internet providers don’t have to police their networks for pornography or most other unwanted content, and can’t get in trouble for failing to do so. This provision of the CDA is why the Internet is a platform for so much “user generated content,” whether videos, comments, social network posts, whatever.
Together, the Hacker Ethic, the Hacker Manifesto, and the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, ACLU v. Reno, and even the remaining piece of the CDA, describe a more or less radical dream, but one that many, if not most, of the people in this room have believed in and worked for. But today I’m standing here before you to tell you that these dreams aren’t coming true. Instead, twenty years on, the future not only looks a lot less dreamy than it once did, it looks like it might be worse.
Racism and sexism have proven resilient enough to thrive in the digital world. There are many, many examples of this, but let me use statistics, and anecdotes to make the point.
Statistically: At Google, women make up 30 percent of the company’s overall workforce, but hold only 17 percent of the company’s tech jobs. At Facebook, 15 percent of tech roles are staffed by women. At Twitter, 10 percent.
Anecdotally: Look around you at your fellow audience members. How very male and white this field is.
I find this so strange. The security community has historically been very good at finding, cultivating, and rewarding talent from unconventional candidates. Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on the autism spectrum. Being gay or transgender is not a big deal and hasn’t been for years. A 15-year-old Aaron Swartz hung out with Doug Engelbart, creator of the computer mouse. Inclusion is at the very heart of the Hacker ethic.
And people of color and women are naturally inclined to be hackers. We learn early on that the given rules don’t work for us, and that we have to manipulate them to succeed, even where others might wish us to fail.
This field should be in the lead in evolving a race, class, age, and religiously open society, but it hasn’t been. We could conscientiously try to do this better. We could, and in my opinion should, commit to cultivating talent in unconventional places.
Today, our ability to know, modify and trust the technology we use is limited by both the law and our capacity for understanding complex systems. The Hands On Imperative is on life support. “The Freedom to Tinker” might sound like a hobby, but it’s quite important. It means our ability to study, modify and ultimately understand the technology we use — and that structures and defines our lives.
The Hands On Imperative is dying for two reasons. We are limited by both the law and our capacity for understanding complex systems.
The law: Two examples. It was exactly ten years ago that Black Hat staff spent all night cutting pages out of attendee books and re-stuffing conference sacks with new CDs. Security researcher Mike Lynn was scheduled to give a talk about a previously unknown category of vulnerability, specifically flaws in Internet routers. Cisco, and Mike Lynn’s employer ISS, decided at the last minute to try to keep the vulnerability a secret, ordering Mike to give a different talk and leveraging copyright law to force Black Hat to destroy all copies of Mike’s slides. There’s nothing that cries out censorship like cutting pages out of books.
On stage the next morning, Mike quit his job, donned a white baseball cap — literally a white hat — and presented his original research anyway. Cisco and ISS retaliated by suing him.
I was Mike’s lawyer. We managed to fight back that case, and the criminal investigation that the companies also instigated against him. But the message from the lawsuit was loud and clear — and not just to Mike. This is our software, not yours. This is our router, not yours. You’re just a licensee and we’ll tell you what you are allowed to do in the EULA. You can’t decompile this, you can’t study it, you can’t tell anyone what you find.
Aaron Swartz was another sacrificial lamb on the altar of network control. Aaron was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) because he wrote a script to automate the downloading of academic journal articles. Much of this information wasn’t even copyrighted. But Aaron was a hacker, and he challenged the system. They went after him with a vengeance. The case was based on the assertion that Aaron’s access to the journal articles was “unauthorized” even though he was authorized as a Harvard student to download the same articles.
Aaron killed himself, under immense stress from prosecutors twisting his arm to plead guilty to a political-career-ending felony, or face years in prison.
Here, too, the message was clear. You need our permission to operate in this world. If you step over the line we draw, if you automate, if you download too fast, if you type something weird in the URL bar on your browser, and we don’t like it, or we don’t like you, then we will get you.
In the future will we re-secure the Freedom to Tinker? That means Congress forgoing the tough-on-cybercrime hand waving it engages in every year — annual proposals, to make prison sentences more severe under the CFAA, as if any of the suspected perpetrators of the scores of major breaches of the past two or three years — China, North Korea, who knows who else — would be deterred by such a thing. These proposals just scare the good guys, they don’t stop the attackers.
We’d have to declare that users own and can modify the software we buy and download — despite software licenses and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
This is going to be increasingly important. Over the next 20 years software will be embedded in everything, from refrigerators to cars to medical devices.
Without the Freedom to Tinker, the right to reverse engineer these products, we will be living in a world of opaque black boxes. We don’t know what they do, and you’ll be punished for peeking inside.
Using licenses and law to control and keep secrets about your products is just one reason why in the future we may know far less about the world around us and how it works than we currently do.
Today, technology is generating more information about us than ever before, and will increasingly do so, making a map of everything we do, changing the balance of power between us, businesses and governments. In the next 20 years, we will see amazing advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Software programs are going to be deciding whether a car runs people over, or drives off a bridge. Software programs are going to decide who gets a loan, and who gets a job. If intellectual property law will protect these programs from serious study, then the public will have no idea how these decisions are being made. Professor Frank Pasquale has called this the Black Box Society. Take secrecy and the profit motive, add a billion pieces of data, and shake.
In a Black Box Society, how can we ensure that the outcome is in the public interest? The first step is obviously transparency, but our ability to understand is limited by current law and also by the limits of our human intelligence. The companies that make these products might not necessarily know how their product works either. Without adequate information, how can we democratically influence or oversee these decisions? We are going to have to learn how, or live in a society that is less fair and less free.
We are also going to have to figure out who should be responsible when software fails.

So far, there’s been very little regulation of software security. Yes, the Federal Trade Commission has jumped in where vendors misrepresented what the software would do. But that is going to change. People are sick and tired of crappy software. And they aren’t going to take it any more. The proliferation of networked devices — the Internet of Things — is going to mean all kinds of manufacturers traditionally subject to products liability are also software purveyors. If an autonomous car crashes, or a networked toaster catches on fire, you can bet there is going to be product liability. Chrysler just recalled 1.4 million cars because of the vulnerabilities that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek are going to be talking about later today. It’s a short step from suing Tesla to suing Oracle for insecure software… with all the good and the bad that will come of that.
I think software liability is inevitable. I think it’s necessary. I think it will make coding more expensive, and more conservative. I think we’ll do a crappy job of it for a really long time. I don’t know what we’re going to end up with. But I know that it’s going to be a lot harder on the innovators than on the incumbents.
Today, the physical design and the business models that fund the communications networks we use have changed in ways that facilitate rather than defeat censorship and control. But before I delve into issues of privacy, security and free expression, let’s take a few steps back and ask how we got to where we are today.
The design of the early public Internet was end-to-end. That meant dumb pipes that would carry anything, and smart edges, where application and content innovation would occur. This design principle was intentional. The Internet would not just enable communication, but would do so in a decentralized, radically democratic way. Power to the people, not to the governments or companies that run the pipes.
The Internet has evolved, as technologies do. Today, broadband Internet providers want to build smart pipes that discriminate for quality of service, differential pricing, and other new business models. Hundreds of millions of people conduct their social interactions over just a few platforms like TenCent and Facebook.
What does this evolution mean for the public? In his book The Master Switch, Professor Tim Wu looks at phones, radio, television, movies. He sees what he calls “the cycle.”
History shows a typical progression of information technologies, from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.
Eventually, innovators or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins afresh. In the book, Tim asks the question I’m asking you. Is the Internet subject to this cycle? Will it be centralized and corporately controlled? Will it be freely accessible, a closed system or something in between?
If we don’t do things differently, the Internet is going to end up being TV. First, I said we’ve neglected openness and freedom in favor of other interests like intellectual property, and that’s true.
But it’s also true that a lot of people affirmatively no longer share the Dream of Internet Freedom, if they ever did. They don’t think it’s the utopia that I’ve made it out to be. Rather, the Dream of Internet Freedom collided head on with the ugly awfulness called Other People. Nasty comments, 4chan, /b/tards, revenge porn, jihadists, Nazis. Increasingly I hear law professors, experts in the First Amendment, the doctrine of overbreadth and the chilling effect, talk about how to legislate this stuff they don’t like out of existence.
Second, there are the three trends I told you about: centralization, regulation and globalization.
· Centralization means a cheap and easy point for control and surveillance.
· Regulation means exercise of government power in favor of domestic, national interests and private entities with economic influence over lawmakers.
· Globalization means more governments are getting into the Internet regulation mix. They want to both protect and to regulate their citizens. And remember, the next billion Internet users are going to come from countries without a First Amendment, without a Bill of Rights, maybe even without due process or the rule of law. So these limitations won’t necessarily be informed by what we in the U.S. consider basic civil liberties.
Now when I say that the Internet is headed for corporate control, it may sound like I’m blaming corporations. When I say that the Internet is becoming more closed because governments are policing the network, it may sound like I’m blaming the police. I am. But I’m also blaming you. And me. Because the things that people want are helping drive increased centralization, regulation and globalization.
Remember blogs? Who here still keeps a blog regularly? I had a blog, but now I post updates on Facebook. A lot of people here at Black Hat host their own email servers, but almost everyone else I know uses gmail. We like the spam filtering and the malware detection. When I had an iPhone, I didn’t jailbreak it. I trusted the security of the vetted apps in the Apple store. When I download apps, I click yes on the permissions. I love it when my phone knows I’m at the store and reminds me to buy milk.
This is happening in no small part because we want lots of cool products “in the cloud.” But the cloud isn’t an amorphous collection of billions of water droplets. The cloud is actually a finite and knowable number of large companies with access to or control over large pieces of the Internet. It’s Level 3 for fiber optic cables, Amazon for servers, Akamai for CDN, Facebook for their ad network, Google for Android and the search engine. It’s more of an oligopoly than a cloud. And, intentionally or otherwise, these products are now choke points for control, surveillance and regulation.
So as things keep going in this direction, what does it mean for privacy, security and freedom of expression? What will be left of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
Privacy
The first casualty of centralization has been privacy. And since privacy is essential to liberty, the future will be less free.
This is the Golden Age of Surveillance. Today, technology is generating more information about us than ever before, and will increasingly do so, making a map of everything we do, changing the balance of power between us, businesses, and governments. The government has built the technological infrastructure and the legal support for mass surveillance, almost entirely in secret.
Here’s a quiz. What do emails, buddy lists, drive back ups, social networking posts, web browsing history, your medical data, your bank records, your face print, your voice print, your driving patterns and your DNA have in common?
Answer: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn’t think any of these things are private. Because the data is technically accessible to service providers or visible in public, it should be freely accessible to investigators and spies.
And yet, to paraphrase Justice Sonya Sotomayor, this data can reveal your contacts with “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, or the gay bar.”
So technology is increasingly proliferating data…and the law is utterly failing to protect it. Believe it or not, considering how long we’ve had commercial email, there’s only one civilian appellate court that’s decided the question of email privacy. It’s the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006, in U.S. v. Warshak. Now that court said that people do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their emails. Therefore, emails are protected by the Fourth Amendment and the government needs a warrant to get them. This ruling only answers part of the question for part of this country — Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan and Ohio. Because of it, almost all service providers require some kind of warrant before turning over your emails to criminal investigators. But the DOJ continues to push against Warshak in public, but also secretly.
But I want to emphasize how important the ruling is, because I think many people might not fully understand what the reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant requirement mean. It means that a judge polices access, so that there has to be a good reason for the search or seizure, it can’t be arbitrary. It also means that the search has to be targeted, because a warrant has to specifically describe what is going to be searched. The warrant requirement is not only a limitation on arbitrary police action, it should also limit mass surveillance.
But in the absence of privacy protection — pushed by our own government — the law isn’t going to protect our information from arbitrary, suspicion-less massive surveillance, even as that data generation proliferates out of control.
Centralization means that your information is increasingly available from “the cloud,” an easy one stop shopping point to get data not just about you, but about everyone. And it gives the government a legal argument to get around the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement.
Regulation is not protecting your data and at worst is actually ensuring that governments can get easy access to this data. The DOJ pushes:
· Provider assistance provisions to require providers to assist with spying;
· Corporate immunity for sharing data with the government, for example giving AT&T immunity in its complicity with NSA’s illegal domestic spying and in CISPA, CISA and other surveillance proposals masquerading as security information sharing bills;
· And, not so much yet in the U.S. but in other countries, data retention obligations that essentially deputize companies to spy on their users for the government.
Globalization gives the U.S. a way to spy on Americans…by spying on foreigners we talk to. Our government uses the fact that the network is global against us. The NSA conducts massive spying overseas, and Americans’ data gets caught in the net. And, by insisting that foreigners have no Fourth Amendment privacy rights, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that you don’t have such rights either, as least when you’re talking to or even about foreigners.
Surveillance couldn’t get much worse, but in the next 20 years, it actually will. Now we have networked devices, the so-called Internet of Things, that will keep track of our home heating, and how much food we take out of our refrigerator, and our exercise, sleep, heartbeat, and more. These things are taking our off-line physical lives and making them digital and networked, in other words, surveillable.
To have any hope of attaining the Dream of Internet Freedom, we have to implement legal reforms to stop suspicion-less spying. We have to protect email and our physical location from warrantless searches. We have to stop overriding the few privacy laws we have to gain with a false sense of online security. We have to utterly reject secret surveillance laws, if only because secret law is an abomination in a democracy.
Are we going to do any of these things?
Security
Despite the way many people talk about it, security it isn’t the opposite of privacy. You can improve security without infringing privacy — for example by locking cockpit doors. And not all invasions of privacy help security. In fact, privacy protects security. A human rights worker in Syria or a homosexual in India needs privacy, or they may be killed.
Instead, we should think about security with more nuance. Online threats mean different things depending on whose interests you have at stake — governments, corporations, political associations, individuals. Whether something is “secure” is a function of whose security you are concerned with. In other words, security is in the eye of the beholder. Further, security need not be zero sum: Because we are talking about global information networks, security improvements can benefit all, just as security vulnerabilities can hurt all.

The battleground of the future is that people in power want more security for themselves at the expense of others. The U.S. Government talks about security as “cyber”. When I hear “cyber” I hear shorthand for military domination of the Internet, as General Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA head, has said — ensuring U.S. access and denying access to our enemies. Security for me, but not for thee. Does that sound like an open, free, robust, global Internet to you?
Here’s just one public example: our government wants weakened cryptography, back doors in popular services and devices so that it can surveil us (remember, without a warrant). It is unmoved by the knowledge that these back doors will be used by criminals and oppressive governments alike. Meanwhile, it overclassifies, maintains secret law, withholds documents from open government requests, goes after whistleblowers and spies on journalists.
Here’s another. The White House is pushing for the Department of Homeland Security to be the hub for security threat information sharing. That means DHS will decide who gets vulnerability information… and who doesn’t.
I see governments and elites picking and choosing security haves and security have nots. In other words, security will be about those in power trying to get more power.
This isn’t building security for a global network. What’s at stake is the well-being of vulnerable communities and minorities that need security most. What’s at stake is the very ability of citizens to petition the government. Of religious minorities to practice their faith without fear of reprisals. Of gay people to find someone to love. This state of affairs should worry anyone who is outside the mainstream, whether an individual, a political or religious group or a start up without market power.
Freedom of Expression
Today, the physical architecture and the corporate ownership of the communications networks we use have changed in ways that facilitate rather than defeat censorship and control. In the U.S., copyright was the first cause for censorship, but now we are branching out to political speech.
Governments see the power of platforms and have proposed that social media companies alert federal authorities when they become aware of terrorist-related content on their sites. A U.N. panel last month called on the firms to respond to accusations that their sites are being exploited by the Islamic State and other groups. At least at this point, there’s no affirmative obligation to police in the U.S.
But you don’t have to have censorship laws if you can bring pressure to bear. People cheer when Google voluntarily delists so-called revenge porn, when YouTube deletes ISIS propaganda videos, when Twitter adopts tougher policies on hate speech. The end result is collateral censorship, by putting pressure on platforms and intermediaries, governments can indirectly control what we say and what we experience.
What that means is that governments, or corporations, or the two working together increasingly decide what we can see. It’s not true that anyone can say anything and be heard anywhere. It’s more true that your breast feeding photos aren’t welcome and, increasingly, that your unorthodox opinions about radicalism will get you placed on a list.
Make no mistake, this censorship is inherently discriminatory. Muslim “extremist” speech is cause for alarm and deletion. But no one is talking about stopping Google from returning search results for the Confederate flag.
Globalization means other governments are in the censorship mix. I’m not just talking about governments like Russia and China. There’s also the European Union, with its laws against hate speech, Holocaust denial, and its developing Right To Be Forgotten. Each country wants to enforce its own laws and protect and police its citizens as it sees fit, and that means a different internet experience for different countries or regions. In Europe, accurate information is being delisted from search engines, to make it harder or impossible to find. So much for talking to everyone everywhere in real time. So much for having everything on the Internet shelf.
Worse, governments are starting to enforce their laws outside their borders through blocking orders to major players like Google and to ISPs. France is saying to Google, don’t return search results that violate our laws to anyone, even if it’s protected speech that we are entitled to in the U.S. If you follow this through to the obvious conclusion, every country will censor everywhere. It will be intellectual baby food.
How much free speech does a free society really need? Alternatively how much sovereignty should a nation give up to enable a truly global network to flourish?
Right now, if we don’t change course and begin to really value having a place for even the edgy and disruptive speech, our choice is between network balkanization and a race to the bottom.
Which will we pick?
The Next 20 Years
The future for freedom and openness appears to be far bleaker than we had hoped for 20 years ago. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let me describe another future where the Internet Dream lives and thrives.
We start to think globally. We need to deter another terrorist attack in New York, but we can’t ignore impact our decisions have on journalists and human rights workers around the world. We strongly value both.
We build in decentralization where possible: Power to the People. And strong end to end encryption can start to right the imbalance between tech, law and human rights.
We realize the government has no role in dictating communications technology design.
We start being afraid of the right things and stop being driven by irrational fear. We reform the CFAA, the DMCA, the Patriot Act and foreign surveillance law. We stop being so sensitive about speech and we let noxious bullshit air out. If a thousand flowers bloom, the vast majority of them will be beautiful.
Today we’ve reached an inflection point. If we change paths, it is still possible that the Dream of Internet Freedom can become true. But if we don’t, it won’t. The Internet will continue to evolve into a slick, stiff, controlled and closed thing. And that dream I have — that so many of you have — will be dead. If so, we need to think about creating the technology for the next lifecycle of the revolution. In the next 20 years we need to get ready to smash the Internet apart and build something new and better.

Human beings make a big deal about being normal. We’re probably the only species for which it’s normal to think you’re not normal.

Every society operates under thousands of unspoken rules, and when you break them people get nervous. There are acceptable and unacceptable ways to stand in line at the bank, order at restaurants, and answer the phone. There are appropriate and inappropriate birthday gifts, wedding toasts, and hugging styles.

Every type of social situation has its own subsection of laws and procedures. You can make everyone around you instantly uncomfortable just by facing the back wall while riding an elevator, or asking a fellow bus passenger if they want to hear a story.

Miraculously, most of us have learned most of these rules by the time we become adults, at least enough to fulfill our basic responsibilities without causing a scene. The moment kids are born, they begin to absorb clues about what’s okay and what’s not by continually watching and emulating.

We learn some of these rules in explicit mini-lessons from our parents and teachers, and occasionally friends, when they pull us aside and tell us, “We don’t talk about pee at the dinner table,” or “We don’t bring up sports betting around Eddie.”

We also learn the location of certain boundaries when we bump up against them, by remembering which acts triggered dirty looks, and which got laughs, or no reaction at all. Over time, we learn that we can avoid awkward and painful collisions with these boundaries by simply doing what other people are doing, and not doing what they’re not doing.

Stand where the other people are standing. When other people are quiet, be quiet. When they’re eating, eat. When they’re being somber, be somber. When they laugh, laugh (even if you don’t get the joke).

This survival tactic eventually becomes a part of our worldview. Humans are an easily frightened, highly social species, and we put together a sense of how things are supposed to be—of how we’re supposed to be—by what seems normal for the people around us. How do you know if you’re in good health for someone your age? For some places and times in history, failing health at age 48 is expected; in 21st-century USA, it means something’s gone wrong.

Every life is mostly private

Our reliance on using norms for guidance gets us through a lot of confusing social situations, but it creates a huge problem when it comes to evaluating ourselves.

We can’t compare ourselves to what we can’t see, and most of a person’s life is invisible to everybody else. Our thoughts, feelings, moods, urges, impressions, expectations and other intangible qualities happen only on the inside, yet they constitute the largest part of our lives. They aren’t just important to us—essentially, they are us.

Life is ultimately a solo trip, and most of the landscape is mental. Even when it comes to your closest loved ones, you never get access to another person’s internal experience. They can talk about it, or hint at it through their actions, but everything behind their eyes is fundamentally off limits to you, while to them it’s everything.

Our public selves are that one-tenth of the iceberg that sees the Sun. The other 90% is who we are only to ourselves, and we have nothing to compare it to. You can’t tell, just by observing, whether other people have a similar inner world to yours, especially socially unacceptable feelings like intense guilt, or feelings of incompetence, or apathy, or uncontrollable sympathy.

One of the behaviors we learn to emulate is to always present our “best face”, so we learn to keep our most insecure and ugly thoughts to ourselves. This leaves a lot of us wondering if we’re crazy, or especially messed up inside.

Many of the emails I get from readers are private disclosures that they feel like impostors: they have successfully fooled their friends, family and co-workers into thinking they have things together, but they’re only pretending. Their stories are so similar it’s almost unbelievable. Usually they have a respectable-sounding career and home life, but they feel particularly fragile and troubled compared to how everyone around them appears to be.

My answer is always that I feel that way too, or at least my own version of it, on a regular basis. Hearing these stories over and over has all but confirmed my suspicion that human beings live with a consistent discrepancy between what we’re each like in our private world, and what we think others are like.

Somewhere along the line, human beings have convinced themselves that the normal way for a grown human being to feel is prepared, secure and competent. Serious feelings of anxiety, incompetence, guilt or insecurity must always mean something’s wrong with you—either there must be some past life event that justifies these feelings, or you’re just crazy.

You might get comforting glimpses of the dark, bulbous root of someone else’s iceberg by reading Sylvia Plath poems or Cormac McCarthy books, but in social situations it is as hidden (and as officially non-existent) as the Pentagon’s security schedule.

You’re on your own but you’re not alone

The other day on Reddit, someone asked any therapists and psychologists in the audience to answer a question: What is something that most people think they are alone in feeling/experiencing?

Dozens of therapists answered, and hundreds of people learned that their unique inner problems weren’t unique and might not even be problematic. They’re just hard to see in others, because most people never share them, except maybe with a therapist. (The thread is definitely worth a read.)

The “Impostor syndrome” I mentioned was a really common one. So if you’re the one who thinks their entire career is a fluke and that it will all soon be exposed in a nightmarish intervention scenario at your office, you are not alone.

A lot of perfectly sane people have deep insecurities, dark thoughts, and peculiar aversions to everyday things. Intrusive thoughts, about sex, violence, humiliation, suicide, the end of the world—not at all uncommon.

We all have our own craziness going on, but we’re very good at hiding it from everyone else. While some of our neurotic patterns are serious enough to warrant treatment, a lot of it is quite normal.

All of our personal dilemmas and life situations aside, simply being human is just plain hard. We want to make it look easy though, because almost everyone else does. But if you could look right down through everyone else’s iceberg—if you could see exactly how much insecurity, stress and craziness there is hidden in the average office floor or subway car—you might be glad for your own.

Ce qu’on est en train de vivre mérite que chacun se pose un instant à la terrasse de lui-même, et lève la tête pour regarder la société où il vit. Et qui sait... peut-être qu'un peu plus loin, dans un lambeau de ciel blanc accroché aux immeubles, il apercevra la société qu’il espère.

Nous sommes en guerre.

Nous sommes en guerre contre une système nocif d’une extrême violence (cache) que nous alimentons chaque jour autour du capitalisme. Un système qui renforce les inégalités et conduit à une perte d’identité que certains retrouvent dans le fanatisme ou la religion. Il y a pourtant des alternatives pour un travail moins dégradant.

Nous sommes en guerre contre notre nature animale qui fait qu’il y a des viols, des charniers, des mutilations, des meurtres. Tous les jours. Notre nature humaine réclame de la bienveillance, de l’éducation et une vision partagée pour prendre le dessus. Elle nous demande de prendre du recul sur nos émotions.

Nous sommes en guerre contre notre auto-destruction en tant qu’espèce. Les conflits sont climatiques (cache) et ne pourront s’apaiser dans un écosystème qui change à une telle vitesse. Le danger n’est pas la surpopulation mais la sur-concentration de cette population qui cristallise les tensions et les haines.

Nous sommes en guerre depuis toujours, c’est ce qui nous pousse à progresser. Le numérique n’est qu’un catalyseur qui réduit le temps et l’espace, confisquant notre attention au service du marketing. Il est possible d’en faire autre chose, pour du bien commun, pour de l’entraide et de la réflexion distribuée.

Alors oui, nous sommes en guerre et cette guerre s’appelle vivre en communauté dans un espace fini. Je ne crois pas à l’insouciance perdue qu’il faudrait retrouver (cache), même collectivement. Saisissons cette chance pour prendre pleinement conscience ensemble de cet état avec du recul et du discernement. Nous reconstruisons ce monde chaque jour et je crois en notre capacité à le faire évoluer pour réunir les conditions propices à une vie digne pour tous. Nous avons le choix de voir nos enfants vivre en paix ou reposer en paix.

I used to think that religion is for weak people, people who prefers to delegate comfortably their thoughts and sometimes manpower to one central authority.

It hits me lately that politic follows the exact same pattern, annihilating any self-consciousness and thus self-esteem. Electing a president at the head of a nation creates the feeling that you did your job as a citizen for the next X years but being a citizen is not a one-shot, it’s a daily challenge to find your place in the society not as a consumer but as an actor. Our societies are relying on one person with his government to drive our countries for a few years without any long-term vision, a scapegoat for our lack of thinking, our lack of acting, our lack of humanity. Where is your dignity when you can’t even think and act by yourself?

In 1721, Montesquieu published his Persian letters and the 14th is very important to me, here is an extract (in French) but I recommend the whole reading:

O Troglodites, what moves you to this; uprightness becomes a burden to you. In your present condition, having no head, you are constrained in your own despite to be virtuous; otherwise your very existence would be at stake, and you would relapse into the wretched state of your ancestors. But this seems to you too heavy a yoke; you would rather become the subjects of a king, and submit to laws of his framing-laws less exacting than your present customs. You know that then you would be able to satisfy your ambition, and while away the time in slothful luxury; and that, provided you avoided the graver crimes, there would be no necessity for virtue.

Such an idealist! Nobody can live and work in this context today. Virtue, really? Almost a hundred of geeks at Github are proving that it’s possible, see that blog post from Ryan Tomayko:

Telling people what to do is lazy. Instead, try to convince them with argument. This is how humans interact when there’s no artificial authority structure and it works great. If you can’t convince people through argument then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. […] Essentially, I try to create little mini-managers, each responsible for managing a single person: their self.

Confirmed by Brandon Keepers, working there for 6 months:

Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyone’s trust.

Marriage is another way of delegation, behind the love story that’s a way to state administratively (and sometimes religiously) that you’re forming a couple. Validating your love by a piece of sheet and a ring instead of daily attention, it surely deserves a huge celebration in our attention-deficient world.

That’s why I’m agnostic. That’s why I’m a blank voter. That’s why I’m running my own company. That’s why I’m not married.

The worst part is that by delegating, you can loose your knowledge too. Think about it in our geeky world of Clouds, Proxys, Frameworks, each introducing more and more opaque layers.

We are Tailorizing the Web and soon nobody will be able anymore to put a service online without heavily relying on an uncontrolled — delegated — stack.

Behind this dynamic is a monoculture of money optimizing for more money. An investment mentality that hollows out our culture. Real estate is just one example. It’s happening across many segments of our society. And in each case, the existing community pays the price for the investor’s upside.

There are different forms of this dynamic.
A New York Times investigation found that just 158 families have provided nearly half the funding for presidential campaigns. What better investment than your own politician?

In music, 80% of the concert industry is owned by Ticketmaster. A diverse universe of record labels is steadily consolidating down. A shocking percentage of Top 40 hits are written by four Scandinavian men.

In Hollywood, it’s sequels, prequels, and risk-averse exploitations of existing IP — now in IMAX and 3D!

In tech, many investors’ first question for entrepreneurs is “what’s your exit strategy?” Big rounds, big burn rates, and big valuations push startups in the same direction. Maximize growth so you can eventually maximize money for yourself and somebody else.
When everyone is optimizing for money, the effects on society are horrific. It produces graphs that are up and to the right for all the wrong reasons.

We can’t assume that this will work itself out. As money maximization continues, all of us — and the poor and disempowered especially — face a bleak future. This model is only interested in supporting those that can afford to buy in.

It feels like we’ve been auto-subscribed to a newsletter that’s sending increasingly depressing emails. How do we get off this ride?

Do we stay opted in? Or do we opt out?
If you stay opted in and play the game, the ultimate best case is you’re one of the few that gets rich. Later you can give some money away to charity. But other than your bank account, little has changed. The existing structure is reinforced.
Do we opt out? Imagining opting out is emotionally satisfying.
“I might delete Facebook today.”
“I’ll go back to my Razr phone.”
“Maybe I’ll try homesteading.”

But to do any of these means becoming a ghost to your community. It’s impractical. Very few of us ever follow through.
Is there a third option? I think so. I don’t have a fully-fledged plan, but I have some thoughts on where we can start.

Number 1: Don’t sell out.
At some point in the past ten years, selling out lost its stigma. I come from the Kurt Cobain/“corporate rock still sucks” school where selling out was the worst thing you could ever do. We should return to that.
Don’t sell out your values, don’t sell out your community, don’t sell out the long term for the short term. Do something because you believe it’s wonderful and beneficial, not to get rich.
And — very important — if you plan to do something on an ongoing basis, ensure its sustainability. This means your work must support your operations and you don’t try to grow beyond that without careful planning. If you do those things you can easily maintain your independence.

Number 2: Be idealistic.
Always act with integrity. Really be clear about the things that drive you. Remember the lessons your parents and grandparents taught you about how to treat people and make sure your business lives up to that.
Don’t sink into the morass of “industry standards.” Don’t succumb to the inertia of the status quo. Don’t stop exploring new ideas. A small number of people can change how society works. It’s happened before and it will happen again.
There are some great examples to look to for inspiration.

Patagonia is a Benefit Corporation that will share proprietary information with competitors if it will help the environment.
REI is a co-op that announced they’re closed on Black Friday and they’re encouraging their employees to “opt-outside” instead.

Basecamp and the Hype Machine are independent software companies that put their products and life experience ahead of creating massive growth curves. Ten years in and they’re independent and going strong.

Another inspiration is Fugazi and their label, Dischord Records. From playing all-ages $5 shows to running an independent label for 30 years, we can recontextualize them as entrepreneurial heroes. Look at that photo — that could be a founding tech team. There’s even an office dog!
What these businesses have in common is that they are clear on their purpose and they follow a strict code in its pursuit. They don’t want to be everything to everybody. They just want to be themselves.

This thinking is very contrary to the current business zeitgeist, which is all about aggression and being big and fast. Everyone wants to be Napoleon. And we all know how that turned out.
Look at the language on that cover: “be paranoid,” “go to war.” Its violence suggests that being ruthless is the only way to survive. We all hear this tone all around us.
When I became the CEO of Kickstarter two years ago, this tone created a crisis for me. I had never approached my work as something to be done aggressively, but with the weight of the new job and those external voices on my shoulders, I suddenly had doubts. Is that who I needed to be as CEO? Everywhere I looked I saw messages of anxiety and fear. I questioned my instincts and who I was as a person.

Then I read Not For Bread Alone. Konosuke Matsushita ran a company in Japan for many years with a clear ethos. His philosophy was to always act creatively and with integrity, to pursue a positive impact on society, and to encourage collaboration among his team. It’s an ethos that’s as right today as it was then. It confirmed that I didn’t have to play the fear game.
Approaching your work with thoughtfulness at the core is challenging. You’re going against the grain. Your tools of measurement are very different from your peers. It’s easy to doubt yourself — I still do it all the time.

But in more important ways, it’s so much easier. You’re free to act with conviction. You can say and do what you believe is right. Your principles will still be tested, but you can respond in ways that will make you, your community, and your family proud.
It’s not about conquering the world, it’s about doing the right thing. When done correctly, this creates the ultimate product-market fit.

Community supported agriculture is a great example of this. A farm produces its crop for a community of people who receive the bounty every week. The value created and shared is balanced.

We want Kickstarter to be similarly in sync with society. Earlier this year we became a Public Benefit Corporation. This means we are legally obligated to consider the impact of our decisions on society, not just our shareholders. It’s very different from the expectation that for profit companies maximize shareholder value above all. It acknowledges and embraces that you are a part of a larger community.

We don’t expect everyone doing a Kickstarter project to become a Public Benefit Corporation, or to even care. We want artists and creators to be able to create and build for their own reasons — not just for money. No single mentality is forced on anyone. It’s a polyculture of aspirations and motivations — just as it should be.

Walking around NYC and seeing a bank on every corner is depressing, but the monoculture’s reign is impermanent. As more of us challenge the status quo, change will spark and spread. The hollowness and corruption of the pursuit of profit above all is obvious to even those who practice it. A new approach founded on a diversity of thought and experience can and will thrive.
I don’t know what the exact right steps are to change all of this. This is just me thinking out loud about something that doesn’t get talked about enough. My hope in sharing it is that someone here can build on these ideas, and make them even better. Ultimately this is going to have to be a group effort.
But we want to be very clear on where we at Kickstarter stand on this. Internally we have a Mission & Philosophy handbook that was written by our founder, Perry Chen. Its final page says it all:

Thanks for your time, and thanks for listening.

Tellement intéressant : raisonner de manière rationnelle/scientifique, appliqué à… la vie.

Welcome to the last post in the series on the world of Elon Musk.

It’s been a long one, I know. A long series with long posts and a long time between posts. It turns out that when it comes to Musk and his shit, there was a lot to say.

Anyone who’s read the first three posts in this series is aware that I’ve not only been buried in the things Musk is doing, I’ve been drinking a tall glass of the Elon Musk Kool-Aid throughout. I’m very, very into it.

I kind of feel like that’s fine, right? The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren’t supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge, old industries that aren’t supposed to be revolutionable. After emerging from the 1990s dotcom party with $180 million, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 900-pound sumo wrestlers—the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry, the military-industrial complex, the energy utilities—and he might actually be winning. And all of this, it really seems, for the purpose of giving our species a better future.

Pretty Kool-Aid worthy. But someone being exceptionally rad isn’t Kool-Aid worthy enough to warrant 90,000 words over a string of months on a blog that’s supposed to be about a wide range of topics.

During the first post, I laid out the two objectives for the series:

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing.

2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing.

So far, we’ve spent most of the time exploring objective #1. But what really intrigued me as I began thinking about this was objective #2. I’m fascinated by those rare people in history who manage to dramatically change the world during their short time here, and I’ve always liked to study those people and read their biographies. Those people know something the rest of us don’t, and we can learn something valuable from them. Getting access to Elon Musk gave me what I decided was an unusual chance to get my hands on one of those people and examine them up close. If it were just Musk’s money or intelligence or ambition or good intentions that made him so capable, there would be more Elon Musks out there. No, it’s something else—what TED curator Chris Anderson called Musk’s “secret sauce”—and for me, this series became a mission to figure it out.

The good news is, after a lot of time thinking about this, reading about this, and talking to him and his staff, I think I’ve got it. What for a while was a large pile of facts, observations, and sound bites eventually began to congeal into a common theme—a trait in Musk that I believe he shares with many of the most dynamic icons in history and that separates him from almost everybody else.

As I worked through the Tesla and SpaceX posts, this concept kept surfacing, and it became clear to me that this series couldn’t end without a deep dive into exactly what it is that Musk and a few others do so unusually well. The thing that tantalized me is that this secret sauce is actually accessible to everyone and right there in front of us—if we can just wrap our heads around it. Mulling this all over has legitimately affected the way I think my life, my future, and the choices I make—and I’m going to try my best in this post to explain why.

Two Kinds of Geology

In 1681, English theologian Thomas Burnet published Sacred Theory of the Earth, in which he explained how geology worked. What happened was, around 6,000 years ago, the Earth was formed as a perfect sphere with a surface of idyllic land and a watery interior. But then, when the surface dried up a little later, cracks formed in its surface, releasing much of the water from within. The result was the Biblical Deluge and Noah having to deal with a ton of shit all week. Once things settled down, the Earth was no longer a perfect sphere—all the commotion had distorted the surface, bringing about mountains and valleys and caves down below, and the whole thing was littered with the fossils of the flood’s victims.

And bingo. Burnet had figured it out. The great puzzle of fundamental theology had been to reconcile the large number of seemingly-very-old Earth features with the much shorter timeline of the Earth detailed in the Bible. For theologians of the time, it was their version of the general relativity vs. quantum mechanics quandary, and Burnet had come up with a viable string theory to unify it all under one roof.

It wasn’t just Burnet. There were enough theories kicking around reconciling geology with the verses of the Bible to today warrant a 15,000-word “Flood Geology” Wikipedia page.

Around the same time, another group of thinkers started working on the geology puzzle: scientists.

For the theologian puzzlers, the starting rules of the game were, “Fact: the Earth began 6,000 years ago and there was at one point an Earth-sweeping flood,” and their puzzling took place strictly within that context. But the scientists started the game with no rules at all. The puzzle was a blank slate where any observations and measurements they found were welcome.

Over the next 300 years, the scientists built theory upon theory, and as new technologies brought in new types of measurements, old theories were debunked and replaced with new updated versions. The science community kept surprising themselves as the apparent age of the Earth grew longer and longer. In 1907, there was a huge breakthrough when American scientist Bertram Boltwood pioneered the technique of deciphering the age of rocks through radiometric dating, which found elements in a rock with a known rate of radioactive decay and measured what portion of those elements remained intact and what portion had already converted to decay substance.

Radiometric dating blew Earth’s history backwards into the billions of years, which burst open new breakthroughs in science like the theory of Continental Drift, which in turn led to the theory of Plate Tectonics. The scientists were on a roll.

Meanwhile, the flood geologists would have none of it. To them, any conclusions from the science community were moot because they were breaking the rules of the game to begin with. The Earth was officially less than 6,000 years old, so if radiometric dating showed otherwise, it was a flawed technique, period.

But the scientific evidence grew increasingly compelling, and as time wore on, more and more flood geologists threw in the towel and accepted the scientist’s viewpoint—maybe they had had the rules of the game wrong.

Some, though, held strong. The rules were the rules, and it didn’t matter how many people agreed that the Earth was billions of years old—it was a grand conspiracy.

Today, there are still many flood geologists making their case. Just recently, an author named Tom Vail wrote a book called Grand Canyon: A Different View, in which he explains:

Contrary to what is widely believed, radioactive dating has not proven the rocks of the Grand Canyon to be millions of years old. The vast majority of the sedimentary layers in the Grand Canyon were deposited as the result of a global flood that occurred after and as a result of the initial sin that took place in the Garden of Eden.

If the website analytics stats on Chartbeat included a “Type of Geologist” demographic metric, I imagine that for Wait But Why readers, the breakdown would look something like this:

Geology Breakdown

It makes sense. Whether religious or not, most people who read this site are big on data, evidence, and accuracy. I’m reminded of this every time I make an error in a post.

Whatever role faith plays in the spiritual realm, what most of us agree on is that when seeking answers to our questions about the age of the Earth, the history of our species, the causes of lightning, or any other physical phenomenon in the universe, data and logic are far more effective tools than faith and scripture.

And yet—after thinking about this for a while, I’ve come to an unpleasant conclusion:

When it comes to most of the way we think, the way we make decisions, and the way we live our lives, we’re much more like the flood geologists than the science geologists.

And Elon’s secret? He’s a scientist through and through.

Hardware and Software

The first clue to the way Musk thinks is in the super odd way that he talks. For example:

Human child: “I’m scared of the dark, because that’s when all the scary shit is gonna get me and I won’t be able to see it coming.”

Elon: “When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength—400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that.”2

Or:

Human father: “I’d like to start working less because my kids are starting to grow up.”

Elon: “I’m trying to throttle back, because particularly the triplets are starting to gain consciousness. They’re almost two.”3

Or:

Human single man: “I’d like to find a girlfriend. I don’t want to be so busy with work that I have no time for dating.”

Elon: “I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. That’s why I need to carve out just a little more time. I think maybe even another five to 10 — how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours? That’s kind of the minimum? I don’t know.”4

I call this MuskSpeak. MuskSpeak is a language that describes everyday parts of life as exactly what they actually, literally are.

There are plenty of instances of technical situations when we all agree that MuskSpeak makes much more sense than normal human parlance—

Heart Surgery

—but what makes Musk odd is that he thinks about most things in MuskSpeak, including many areas where you don’t usually find it. Like when I asked him if he was afraid of death, and he said having kids made him more comfortable with dying, because “kids sort of are a bit you. At least they’re half you. They’re half you at the hardware level, and depending on how much time you have with them, they’re that percentage of you at the software level.”

When you or I look at kids, we see small, dumb, cute people. When Musk looks at his five kids, he sees five of his favorite computers. When he looks at you, he sees a computer. And when he looks in the mirror, he sees a computer—his computer. It’s not that Musk suggests that people are just computers—it’s that he sees people as computers on top of whatever else they are.

And at the most literal level, Elon’s right about people being computers. At its simplest definition, a computer is an object that can store and process data—which the brain certainly is.

And while this isn’t the most poetic way to think about our minds, I’m starting to believe that it’s one of those areas of life where MuskSpeak can serve us well—because thinking of a brain as a computer forces us to consider the distinction between our hardware and our software, a distinction we often fail to recognize.

For a computer, hardware is defined as “the machines, wiring, and other physical components of a computer.” So for a human, that’s the physical brain they were born with and all of its capabilities, which determines their raw intelligence, their innate talents, and other natural strengths and shortcomings.

A computer’s software is defined as “the programs and other operating information used by a computer.” For a human, that’s what they know and how they think—their belief systems, thought patterns, and reasoning methods. Life is a flood of incoming data of all kinds that enter the brain through our senses, and it’s the software that assesses and filters all that input, processes and organizes it, and ultimately uses it to generate the key output—a decision.

The hardware is a ball of clay that’s handed to us when we’re born. And of course, not all clay is equal—each brain begins as a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses across a wide range of processes and capabilities.

But it’s the software that determines what kind of tool the clay gets shaped into.

When people think about what makes someone like Elon Musk so effective, they often focus on the hardware—and Musk’s hardware has some pretty impressive specs. But the more I learn about Musk and other people who seem to have superhuman powers—whether it be Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Genghis Khan, Marie Curie, John Lennon, Ayn Rand, or Louis C.K.—the more I’m convinced that it’s their software, not their natural-born intelligence or talents, that makes them so rare and so effective.

So let’s talk about software—starting with Musk’s. As I wrote the other three posts in this series, I looked at everything I was learning about Musk—the things he says, the decisions he makes, the missions he takes on and how he approaches them—as clues to how his underlying software works.

Eventually, the clues piled up and the shape of the software began to reveal itself. Here’s what I think it looks like:

Elon’s Software

The structure of Musk’s software starts like many of ours, with what we’ll call the Want box:

Software - Want Box

This box contains anything in life where you want Situation A to turn into Situation B. Situation A is currently what’s happening and you want something to change so that Situation B is what’s happening instead. Some examples:

Wants

Next, the Want box has a partner in crime—what we’ll call the Reality box. It contains all things that are possible:

Software - Reality Box

Pretty straightforward.

The overlap of the Want and Reality boxes is the Goal Pool, where your goal options live:2

Software - Goal Pool

So you pick a goal from the pool—the thing you’re going to try to move from Point A to Point B.

And how do you cause something to change? You direct your power towards it. A person’s power can come in various forms: your time, your energy (mental and physical), your resources, your persuasive ability, your connection to others, etc.

The concept of employment is just Person A using their resources power (a paycheck) to direct Person B’s time and/or energy power toward Person A’s goal. When Oprah publicly recommends a book, that’s combining her abundant power of connection (she has a huge reach) and her abundant power of persuasion (people trust her) and directing them towards the goal of getting the book into the hands of thousands of people who would have otherwise never known about it.

Once a goal has been selected, you know the direction in which to point your power. Now it’s time to figure out the most effective way to use that power to generate the outcome you want—that’s your strategy:

Software - Strategy Box

Simple right? And probably not that different from how you think.

But what makes Musk’s software so effective isn’t its structure, it’s that he uses it like a scientist. Carl Sagan said, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge,” and you can see Musk apply that way of thinking in two key ways:

1) He builds each software component himself, from the ground up.

Musk calls this “reasoning from first principles.” I’ll let him explain:

I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.

In science, this means starting with what evidence shows us to be true. A scientist doesn’t say, “Well we know the Earth is flat because that’s the way it looks, that’s what’s intuitive, and that’s what everyone agrees is true,” a scientist says, “The part of the Earth that I can see at any given time appears to be flat, which would be the case when looking at a small piece of many differently shaped objects up close, so I don’t have enough information to know what the shape of the Earth is. One reasonable hypothesis is that the Earth is flat, but until we have tools and techniques that can be used to prove or disprove that hypothesis, it is an open question.”

A scientist gathers together only what he or she knows to be true—the first principles—and uses those as the puzzle pieces with which to construct a conclusion.

Reasoning from first principles is a hard thing to do in life, and Musk is a master at it. Brain software has four major decision-making centers:

1) Filling in the Want box

2) Filling in the Reality box

3) Goal selection from the Goal Pool

4) Strategy formation

Musk works through each of these boxes by reasoning from first principles. Filling in the Want box from first principles requires a deep, honest, and independent understanding of yourself. Filling in the Reality box requires the clearest possible picture of the actual facts of both the world and your own abilities. The Goal Pool should double as a Goal Selection Laboratory that contains tools for intelligently measuring and weighing options. And strategies should be formed based on what you know, not on what is typically done.

2) He continually adjusts each component’s conclusions as new information comes in.

You might remember doing proofs in geometry class, one of the most mundane parts of everyone’s childhood. These ones:

Given: A = B
Given: B = C + D
Therefore: A = C + D

Math is satisfyingly exact. Its givens are exact and its conclusions are airtight.

In math, we call givens “axioms,” and axioms are 100% true. So when we build conclusions out of axioms, we call them “proofs,” which are also 100% true.

Science doesn’t have axioms or proofs, for good reason.

We could have called Newton’s law of universal gravitation a proof—and for a long time, it certainly seemed like one—but then what happens when Einstein comes around and shows that Newton was actually “zoomed in,” like someone calling the Earth flat, and when you zoom way out, you discover that the real law is general relativity and Newton’s law actually stops working under extreme conditions, while general relativity works no matter what. So then, you’d call general relativity a proof instead. Except then what happens when quantum mechanics comes around and shows that general relativity fails to apply on a tiny scale and that a new set of laws is needed to account for those cases.

There are no axioms or proofs in science because nothing is for sure and everything we feel sure about might be disproven. Richard Feynman has said, “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” Instead of proofs, science has theories. Theories are based on hard evidence and treated as truths, but at all times they’re susceptible to being adjusted or disproven as new data emerges.

So in science, it’s more like:

Given (for now): A = B
Given (for now): B = C + D
Therefore (for now): A = C + D

In our lives, the only true axiom is “I exist.” Beyond that, nothing is for sure. And for most things in life, we can’t even build a real scientific theory because life doesn’t tend to have exact measurements.

Usually, the best we can do is a strong hunch based on what data we have. And in science, a hunch is called a hypothesis. Which works like this:

Given (it seems, based on what I know): A = B
Given (it seems, based on what I know): B = C + D
Therefore (it seems, based on what I know): A = C + D

Hypotheses are built to be tested. Testing a hypothesis can disprove it or strengthen it, and if it passes enough tests, it can be upgraded to a theory.

So after Musk builds his conclusions from first principles, what does he do? He tests the shit out of them, continually, and adjusts them regularly based on what he learns. Let’s go through the whole process to show how:

You begin by reasoning from first principles to A) fill in the Want box, B) fill in the Reality box, C) select a goal from the pool, and D) build a strategy—and then you get to work. You’ve used first principles thinking to decide where to point your power and the most effective way to use it.

But the goal-achievement strategy you came up with was just your first crack. It was a hypothesis, ripe for testing. You test a strategy hypothesis one way: action. You pour your power into the strategy and see what happens. As you do this, data starts flowing in—results, feedback, and new information from the outside world. Certain parts of your strategy hypothesis might be strengthened by this new data, others might be weakened, and new ideas may have sprung to life in your head through the experience—but either way, some adjustment is usually called for:
Software - Strategy Loop

As this strategy loop spins and your power becomes more and more effective at accomplishing your goal, other things are happening down below.

For someone reasoning from first principles, the Want box at any given time is a snapshot of their innermost desires the last time they thought hard about it. But the contents of the Want box are also a hypothesis, and experience can show you that you were wrong about something you thought you wanted or that you want something you didn’t realize you did. At the same time, the inner you isn’t a statue—it’s a shifting, morphing sculpture whose innermost values change as time passes. So even if something in the Want box was correct at one point, as you change, it may lose its place in the box. The Want box should serve the current inner you as best possible, which requires you to update it, something you do through reflection:

Software - Want Loop

A rotating Want loop is called evolution.

On the other side of the aisle, the Reality box is also going through a process. “Things that are possible” is a hypothesis, maybe more so than anything else. It takes into account both the state of the world and your own abilities. And as your own abilities change and grow, the world changes even faster. What was possible in the world in 2005 is very different from what’s possible today, and it’s a huge (and rare) advantage to be working with an up-to-date Reality box.

Filling in your Reality box from first principles is a great challenge, and keeping the box current so that it matches actual reality takes continual work.

Software - Reality Loop

For each of these areas, the box represents the current hypothesis and the circle represents the source of new information that can be used to adjust the hypothesis.

In the science world, the circle is truth, which scientists access by mining for new information in laboratories, studies, and experiments.

Science Loop

New information-mining is happening all the time and hypotheses and theories are in turn being revised regularly.

In life, it’s our duty to remember that the circles are the boss, not the boxes—the boxes are only trying their best to do the circles proud. And if we fall out of touch with what’s happening in the circles, the info in the boxes becomes obsolete and a less effective source for our decision-making.

Thinking about the software as a whole, let’s take a step back. What we see is a goal formation mechanism below and a goal attainment mechanism above. One thing goal attainment often requires is laser focus. To get the results we want, we zoom in on the micro picture, sinking our teeth into our goal and honing in on it with our strategy loop.

But as time passes, the Want box and Reality box adjust contents and morph shape, and eventually, something else can happen—the Goal Pool changes.

The Goal Pool is just the overlap of the Want and Reality boxes, so its own shape and contents are totally dependent on the state of those boxes. And as you live your life inside the goal attainment mechanism above, it’s important to make sure that what you’re working so hard on remains in line with the Goal Pool below—so let’s add in two big red arrows for that:

Software - Full

Checking in with the large circle down below requires us to lift our heads up from the micro mission and do some macro reflection. And when enough changes happen in the Want and Reality boxes that the goal you’re pursuing is no longer in the goal pool, it calls for a macro life change—a breakup, a job switch, a relocation, a priority swap, an attitude shift.

All together, the software I’ve described is a living, breathing system, constructed on a rock solid foundation of first principles, and built to be nimble, to keep itself honest, and to change shape as needed to best serve its owner.

And if you read about Elon Musk’s life, you can watch this software in action.

How Musk’s software wrote his life story

Getting started

Step 1 for Elon was filling in the contents of the Want box. Doing this from first principles is a huge challenge—you have to dig deep into concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, important and valuable, frivolous and trivial. You have to figure out what you respect, what you disdain, what fascinates you, what bores you, and what excites you deep in your inner child. Of course, there’s no way for anyone of any age to have a clear cut answer to these questions, but Elon did the best thing he could by ignoring others and independently pondering.

I talked with him about his early thought process in figuring out what to do with his career. He has said many times that he cares deeply about the future well-being of the human species—something that is clearly in the center of his Want box. I asked how he came to that, and he explained:

The thing that I care about is—when I look into the future, I see the future as a series of branching probability streams. So you have to ask, what are we doing to move down the good stream—the one that’s likely to make for a good future? Because otherwise, you look ahead, and it’s like “Oh it’s dark.” If you’re projecting to the future, and you’re saying “Wow, we’re gonna end up in some terrible situation,” that’s depressing.

Fair. Honing in on his specific path, I brought up the great modern physicists like Einstein and Hawking and Feynman, and I asked him whether he considered going into scientific discovery instead of engineering. His response:

I certainly admire the discoveries of the great scientists. They’re discovering what already exists—it’s a deeper understanding of how the universe already works. That’s cool—but the universe already sort of knows that. What matters is knowledge in a human context. What I’m trying to ensure is that knowledge in a human context is still possible in the future. So it’s sort of like—I’m more like the gardener, and then there are the flowers. If there’s no garden, there’s no flowers. I could try to be a flower in the garden, or I could try to make sure there is a garden. So I’m trying to make sure there is a garden, such that in the future, many Feynmans may bloom.

In other words, both A and B are good, but without A there is no B. So I choose A.

He went on:

I was at one point thinking about doing physics as a career—I did undergrad in physics—but in order to really advance physics these days, you need the data. Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of engineering. This debate—“Which is better, engineers or scientists? Aren’t scientists better? Wasn’t Einstein the smartest person?”—personally, I think that engineering is better because in the absence of the engineering, you do not have the data. You just hit a limit. And yeah, you can be real smart within the context of the limit of the data you have, but unless you have a way to get more data, you can’t make progress. Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.

A and B are both good, but B can only advance if A advances. So I choose A.

In thinking about where exactly to point himself to best help humanity, Musk says that in college, he thought hard about the first principles question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” and put together a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”5

Hearing him talk about what matters to him, you can see up and down the whole stack of Want box reasoning that led him to his current endeavors.

He has other reasons too. Next to wanting to help humanity in the Want box is this quote:

I’m interested in things that change the world or affect future in wondrous new technology where you see it and you’re like, “How did that even happen? How is that possible?”

This follows a theme of Musk being passionate about super-advanced technology and the excitement it brings to him and other people. So an ideal endeavor for Musk would be something to do with engineering, something in an area that will be important for the future, and something to do with cutting-edge technology. Those broad, basic Want box items alone narrow down the goal pool considerably.

Meanwhile, he was a teenager with no money, reputation, or connections, and limited knowledge and skills. In other words, his Reality box wasn’t that big. So he did what many young people do—he focused his early goals not around achieving his Wants, but expanding the Reality box and its list of “things that are possible.” He wanted to be able to legally stay in the US after college, and he also wanted to gain more knowledge about engineering, so he killed two birds with one stone and applied to a PhD program at Stanford to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy.

U-turn to the internet

Musk had gone into the Goal Pool and picked the Stanford program, and he moved to California to get started. But there was one thing—it was 1995. The internet was in the early stages of taking off and moving much faster than people had anticipated. It was also a world he could dive into without money or a reputation. So Musk added a bunch of internet-related possibilities into his Reality box. The early internet was also more exciting than he had anticipated—so getting involved in it quickly found its way into his Want box.

These rapid adjustments caused big changes in his Goal Pool, to the point where the Stanford PhD was no longer what his software’s goal formation center was outputting.

Most people would have stuck with the Stanford program—because they had already told everyone about it and it would be weird to quit, because it was Stanford, because it was a more normal path, because it was safer, because the internet might be a fad, because what if he were 35 one day and was a failure with no money because he couldn’t get a good job without the right degree.

Musk quit the program after two days. The big macro arrow of his software came down on the right, saw that what he was embarking on wasn’t in the Goal Pool anymore, and he trusted his software—so he made a macro change.

He started Zip2 with his brother, an early cross between the concepts of the Yellow Pages and Google Maps. Four years later, they sold the company and Elon walked away with $22 million.

As a dotcom millionaire, the conventional wisdom was to settle down as a lifelong rich guy and either invest in other companies or start something new with other people’s money.

But Musk’s goal formation center had other ideas. His Want box was bursting with ambitious startup ideas that he thought could have major impact on the world, and his Reality box, which now included $22 million, told him that he had a high chance of succeeding. Being leisurely on the sidelines was nowhere in his Want box and totally unnecessary according to his Reality box.

So he used his newfound wealth to start X.com in 1999, with the vision to build a full-service online financial institution. The internet was still young and the concept of storing your money in an online bank was totally inconceivable to most people, and Musk was advised by many that it was a crazy plan. But again, Musk trusted his software. What he knew about the internet told him that this was inside the Reality box—because his reasoning told him that when it came to the internet, the Reality box had grown much bigger than people realized—and that was all he needed to know to move forward. In the top part of his software, as his strategy-action-results-adjustments loop spun, X.com’s service changed, the team changed, the mission changed, even the name changed. By the time eBay bought it in 2002, the company was called PayPal and it was a money transfer service. Musk made $180 million.

Following his software to space

Now 31 years old and fabulously wealthy, Musk had to figure out what to do next with his life. On top of the “whatever you do, definitely don’t risk losing that money you have” conventional wisdom, there was also the common logic that said, “You’re awesome at building internet companies, but that’s all you know since you’ve never done anything else. You’re in your thirties now and it’s too late to do something big in a whole different field. This is the path you chose—you’re an internet guy.”

But Musk went back to first principles. He looked inwards to his Want box, and having reflected on things, doing another internet thing wasn’t really in the box anymore. What was in there was his still-burning desire to help the future of humanity. In particular, he felt that to have a long future, the species would have to become much better at space travel.

So he started exploring the limits of the Reality box when it came to getting involved in the aerospace industry.

Conventional wisdom screamed at the top of its lungs for him to stop. It said he had no formal education in the field and didn’t know the first thing about being a rocket scientist. But his software told him that formal education was just another way to download information into your brain and “a painfully slow download” at that—so he started reading, meeting people, and asking questions.

Conventional wisdom said no entrepreneur had ever succeeded at an endeavor like this before, and that he shouldn’t risk his money on something so likely to fail. But Musk’s stated philosophy is, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

Conventional wisdom said that he couldn’t afford to build rockets because they were too expensive and pointed to the fact that no one had ever made a rocket that cheaply before—but like the scientists who ignored those who said the Earth was 6,000 years old and those who insisted the Earth was flat, Musk started crunching numbers to do the math himself. Here’s how he recounts his thoughts:

Historically, all rockets have been expensive, so therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive. But actually that’s not true. If you say, what is a rocket made of? It’s made of aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. And you can break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these components? And if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be? And I was like, wow, okay, it’s really small—it’s like 2% of what a rocket costs. So clearly it would be in how the atoms are arranged—so you’ve got to figure out how can we get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently. And so I had a series of meetings on Saturdays with people, some of whom were still working at the big aerospace companies, just to try to figure out if there’s some catch here that I’m not appreciating. And I couldn’t figure it out. There doesn’t seem to be any catch. So I started SpaceX.6

History, conventional wisdom, and his friends all said one thing, but his own software, reasoning upwards from first principles, said another—and he trusted his software. He started SpaceX, again with his own money, and dove in head xfirst. The mission: dramatically lower the cost of space travel to make it possible for humanity to become multi-planetary.

Tesla and beyond

Two years later, while running a growing SpaceX, a friend brought Elon to a company called AC Propulsion, which had created a prototype for a super-fast, long-range electric car. It blew him away. The Reality box of Musk’s software had told him that such a thing wasn’t yet possible, but it turns out that Musk wasn’t aware of how far lithium-ion batteries had advanced, and what he saw at AC Propulsion was new information about the world that put “starting a top-notch electric car company” into the Reality box in his head.

He ran into the same conventional wisdom about battery costs as he had about rocket costs. Batteries had never been made cheaply enough to allow for a mass-market, long-range electric car because battery prices were simply too high and always would be. He used the same first principles logic and a calculator to determine that most of the problem was middlemen, not raw materials, and decided that actually, conventional wisdom was wrong and batteries could be much cheaper in the future. So he co-founded Tesla with the mission of accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-vehicle world—first by pouring in resources power and funding the company, and later by contributing his time and energy resources as well and becoming CEO.

Two years after that, he co-founded SolarCity with his cousins, a company whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes. Musk knew that his time/energy power, the one kind of power that has hard limits, no matter who you are, was mostly used up, but he still had plenty of resources power—so he put it to work on another goal in his Goal Pool.

Most recently, Musk has jumpstarted change in another area that’s important to him—the way people transport themselves from city to city. His idea is that there should be an entirely new mode of transport that will whiz people hundreds of miles by zinging them through a tube. He calls it the Hyperloop. For this project, he’s not using his time, energy, or resources. Instead, by laying out his initial thoughts in a white paper and hosting a competition for engineers to test out their innovations, he’s leveraging his powers of connection and persuasion to create change.

There are all kinds of tech companies that build software. They think hard, for years, about the best, most efficient way to make their product. Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns—and since there aren’t companies out there designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tests it every day, and makes constant updates. That’s why he’s so outrageously effective, why he can disrupt multiple huge industries at once, why he can learn so quickly, strategize so cleverly, and visualize the future so clearly.

This part of what Musk does isn’t rocket science—it’s common sense. Your entire life runs on the software in your head—why wouldn’t you obsess over optimizing it?

And yet, not only do most of us not obsess over our own software—most of us don’t even understand our own software, how it works, or why it works that way. Let’s try to figure out why.

Most People’s Software

You always hear facts about human development and how so much of who you become is determined by your experiences during your formative years. A newborn’s brain is a malleable ball of hardware clay, and its job upon being born is to quickly learn about whatever environment it’s been born into and start shaping itself into the optimal tool for survival in those circumstances. That’s why it’s so easy for young children to learn new skills.

As people age, the clay begins to harden and it becomes more difficult to change the way the brain operates. My grandmother has been using a computer as long as I have, but I use mine comfortably and easily because my malleable childhood brain easily wrapped itself around basic computer skills, while she has the same face on when she uses her computer that my tortoise does when I put him on top of a glass table and he thinks he’s inexplicably hovering two feet above the ground. She’ll use a computer when she needs to, but it’s not her friend.

So when it comes to our brain software—our values, perceptions, belief systems, reasoning techniques—what are we learning during those key early years?

Everyone’s raised differently, but for most people I know, it went something like this:

We were taught all kinds of things by our parents and teachers—what’s right and wrong, what’s safe and dangerous, the kind of person you should and shouldn’t be. But the idea was: I’m an adult so I know much more about this than you, it’s not up for debate, don’t argue, just obey. That’s when the cliché “Why?” game comes in (what ElonSpeak calls “the chained why”).

A child’s instinct isn’t just to know what to do and not to do, she wants to understand the rules of her environment. And to understand something, you have to have a sense of how that thing was built. When parents and teachers tell a kid to do XYZ and to simply obey, it’s like installing a piece of already-designed software in the kid’s head. When kids ask Why? and then Why? and then Why?, they’re trying to deconstruct that software to see how it was built—to get down to the first principles underneath so they can weigh how much they should actually care about what the adults seem so insistent upon.

The first few times a kid plays the Why game, parents think it’s cute. But many parents, and most teachers, soon come up with a way to cut the game off:

Because I said so.

“Because I said so” inserts a concrete floor into the child’s deconstruction effort below which no further Why’s may pass. It says, “You want first principles? There. There’s your floor. No more Why’s necessary. Now fucking put your boots on because I said so and let’s go.”

Imagine how this would play out in the science world.

Higgs Hawking 1Higgs Hawking 2Higgs Hawking 3
Higgs Hawking 5Higgs Hawking 6Higgs Hawking 8Higgs Hawking 9Higgs Hawking 10

In fairness, parents’ lives suck. They have to do all the shit they used to have to do, except now on top of that there are these self-obsessed, drippy little creatures they have to upkeep, who think parents exist to serve them. On a busy day, in a bad mood, with 80 things to do, the Why game is a nightmare.

But it might be a nightmare worth enduring. A command or a lesson or a word of wisdom that comes without any insight into the steps of logic it was built upon is feeding a kid a fish instead of teaching them to reason. And when that’s the way we’re brought up, we end up with a bucket of fish and no rod—a piece of installed software that we’ve learned how to use, but no ability to code anything ourselves.

School makes things worse. One of my favorite thinkers, writer Seth Godin (whose blog is bursting with first principles reasoning wisdom), explains in a TED Talk about school that the current education system is a product of the Industrial Age, a time that catapulted productivity and the standard of living. But along with many more factories came the need for many more factory workers, so our education system was redesigned around that goal. He explains:

The deal was: universal public education whose sole intent was not to train the scholars of tomorrow—we had plenty of scholars. It was to train people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave, to comply, to fit in. “We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you again. We sit you in straight rows, just like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about interchangeable people because factories are based on interchangeable parts.”

Couple that concept with what another favorite writer of mine, James Clear, explained recently on his blog:

In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old, only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”

It makes sense, right? Creative thinking is a close cousin of first principles reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways. People think of creativity as a natural born talent, but it’s actually much more of a way of thinking—it’s the thinking version of painting onto a blank canvas. But to do that requires brain software that’s skilled and practiced at coming up with new things, and school trains us on the exact opposite thing—to follow the leader, single-file, and to get really good at taking tests. Instead of a blank canvas, school hands kids a coloring book and tells them to stay within the lines.3

What this all amounts to is that during our brain’s most malleable years, parents, teachers, and society end up putting our clay in a mold and squeezing it tightly into a preset shape.

And when we grow up, without having learned how to build our own style of reasoning and having gone through the early soul-searching that independent thinking requires, we end up needing to rely on whatever software was installed in us for everything—software that, coming from parents and teachers, was probably itself designed 30 years ago.

30 years, if we’re lucky. Let’s think about this for a second.

Just say you have an overbearing mother who insists you grow up with her values, her worldview, her fears, and her ambitions—because she knows best, because it’s a scary world out there, because XYZ is respectable, because she said so.

Your head might end up running your whole life on “because mom says so” software. If you play the Why? game with something like the reason you’re in your current job, it may take a few Why’s to get there, but you’ll most likely end up hitting a concrete floor that says some version of “because mom says so.”

But why does mom say so?

Mom says so because her mom said so—after growing up in Poland in 1932, where she was from a home where her dad said so because his dad—a minister from a small town outside Krakow—said so after his grandfather, who saw some terrible shit go down during the Siberian Uprising of 1866, ingrained in his children’s heads the critical life lesson to never associate with blacksmiths.

Through a long game of telephone, your mother now looks down upon office jobs and you find yourself feeling strongly about the only truly respectable career being in publishing. And you can list off a bunch of reasons why you feel that way—but if someone really grilled you on your reasons and on the reasoning beneath them, you end up in a confusing place. It gets confusing way down there because the first principles foundation at the bottom is a mishmash of the values and beliefs of a bunch of people from different generations and countries—a bunch of people who aren’t you.

A common example of this in today’s world is that many people I know were raised by people who were raised by people who went through the Great Depression. If you solicit career advice from someone born in the US in the 1920s, there’s a good chance you’ll get an answer pumped out by this software:

Grandma Software

The person has lived a long life and has made it all the way to 2015, but their software was coded during the Great Depression, and if they’re not the type to regularly self-reflect and evolve, they still do their thinking with software from 1930. And if they installed that same software in their children’s heads and their children then passed it on to their own children, a member of Generation Y today might feel too scared to pursue an entrepreneurial or artistic endeavor and be totally unaware that they’re actually being haunted by the ghost of the Great Depression.

When old software is installed on new computers, people end up with a set of values not necessarily based on their own deep thinking, a set of beliefs about the world not necessarily based on the reality of the world they live in, and a bunch of opinions they might have a hard time defending with an honest heart.

In other words, a whole lot of convictions not really based on actual data. We have a word for that.

Dogma

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! —Richard Feynman

Dogma is everywhere and comes in a thousand different varieties—but the format is generally the same:

X is true because [authority] says so. The authority can be many things.

Because I said so 2

Dogma, unlike first principles reasoning, isn’t customized to the believer or her environment and isn’t meant to be critiqued and adjusted as things change. It’s not software to be coded—it’s a printed rulebook. Its rules may be originally based on reasoning by a certain kind of thinker in a certain set of circumstances, at a time far in the past or a place far away, or it may be based on no reasoning at all. But that doesn’t matter because you’re not supposed to dig too deep under the surface anyway—you’re just supposed to accept it, embrace it, and live by it. No evidence needed.

You may not like living by someone else’s dogma, but you’re left without much choice. When your childhood attempts at understanding are met with “Because I said so,” and you absorb the implicit message “Your own reasoning capability is shit, don’t even try, just follow these rules so you don’t fuck your life up,” you grow up with little confidence in your own reasoning process. When you’re never forced to build your own reasoning pathways, you’re able to skip the hard process of digging deep to discover your own values and the sometimes painful experience of testing those values in the real world and learning you want to adjust them—and so you grow up a total reasoning amateur.

Only strong reasoning skills can carve a unique life path, and without them, dogma will quickly have you living someone else’s life. Dogma doesn’t know you or care about you and is often completely wrong for you—it’ll have a would-be happy painter spending their life as a lawyer and a would-be happy lawyer spending their life as a painter.

But when you don’t know how to reason, you don’t know how to evolve or adapt. If the dogma you grew up with isn’t working for you, you can reject it, but as a reasoning amateur, going it alone usually ends with you finding another dogma lifeboat to jump onto—another rulebook to follow and another authority to obey. You don’t know how to code your own software, so you install someone else’s.

People don’t do any of this intentionally—usually if we reject a type of dogma, our intention is to break free of a life of dogmatic thinking all together and brave the cold winds of independent reasoning. But dogmatic thinking is a hard habit to break, especially when it’s all you know. I have a friend who just had a baby, and she told me that she was so much more open-minded than her parents, because they wanted her to have a prestigious career, but she’d be open to her daughter doing anything. After a minute, she thought about it, and said, “Well actually, no, what I mean by that is if she wanted to go do something like spend her life on a farm in Montana, I’d be fine with that and my parents never would have been—but if she said she wanted to go work at a hedge fund, I’d kill her.” She realized mid-sentence that she wasn’t free of the rigid dogmatic thinking of her parents, she had just changed dogma brands.

This is the dogma trap, and it’s hard to escape from. Especially since dogma has a powerful ally—the group.

Tribes

Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I’m very suspicious. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’d have the same solution to every issue. —Louis C.K.

What most dogmatic thinking tends to boil down to is another good Seth Godin phrase:

People like us do stuff like this.

It’s the rallying cry of tribalism.

There’s an important distinction to make here. Tribalism tends to have a negative connotation, but the concept of a tribe itself isn’t bad. All a tribe is is a group of people linked together by something they have in common—a religion, an ethnicity, a nationality, family, a philosophy, a cause. Christianity is a tribe. The Democratic Party is a tribe. Australians are a tribe. Radiohead fans are a tribe. Arsenal fans are a tribe. The musical theater scene in New York is a tribe. Temple University is a tribe. And within large, loose tribes, there are smaller, tighter, sub-tribes. Your extended family is a tribe, of which your immediate family is a sub-tribe. Americans are a tribe, of which Texans are a sub-tribe, of which Evangelical Christians in Amarillo, Texas is a sub-sub-tribe.

What makes tribalism a good or bad thing depends on the tribe member and their relationship with the tribe. In particular, one simple distinction:

Tribalism is good when the tribe and the tribe member both have an independent identity and they happen to be the same. The tribe member has chosen to be a part of the tribe because it happens to match who he really is. If either the identity of the tribe or the member evolves to the point where the two no longer match, the person will leave the tribe. Let’s call this conscious tribalism.

Tribalism is bad when the tribe and tribe member’s identity are one and the same. The tribe member’s identity is determined by whatever the tribe’s dogma happens to say. If the identity of the tribe changes, the identity of the tribe member changes with it in lockstep. The tribe member’s identity can’t change independent of the tribal identity because the member has no independent identity. Let’s call this blind tribalism.

With conscious tribalism, the tribe member and his identity comes first. The tribe member’s identity is the alpha dog, and who he is determines the tribes he’s in. With blind tribalism, the tribe comes first. The tribe is the alpha dog and it’s the tribe that determines who he is.

This isn’t black and white—it’s a spectrum—but when someone is raised without strong reasoning skills, they may also lack a strong independent identity and end up vulnerable to the blind tribalism side of things—especially with the various tribes they were born into. That’s what Einstein was getting at when he said, “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

A large tribe like a religion or a political party or a nation will contain members who fall across the whole range of the blind-to-conscious spectrum. But some tribes themselves will be the type to attract a certain type of follower. It makes logical sense that the more rigid and certain and dogmatic the tribe, the more likely it’ll be to attract blind tribe members. ISIS is going to have a far higher percentage of blind tribe members than the London Philosophy Club.

The allure of dogmatic tribes makes sense—they appeal to very core parts of human nature.

Humans crave connection and camaraderie, and a guiding dogma is a common glue to bond together a group of unique individuals as one.

Humans want internal security, and for someone who grows up feeling shaky about their own distinctive character, a tribe and its guiding dogma is a critical lifeline—a one-stop shop for a full suite of human opinions and values.

Humans also long for the comfort and safety of certainty, and nowhere is conviction more present than in the groupthink of blind tribalism. While a scientist’s data-based opinions are only as strong as the evidence she has and inherently subject to change, tribal dogmatism is an exercise in faith, and with no data to be beholden to, blind tribe members believe what they believe with certainty.

We discussed why math has proofs, science has theories, and in life, we should probably limit ourselves to hypotheses—but blind tribalism proceeds with the confidence of the mathematician:

Given (because the tribe says so): A = B
Given (because the tribe says so): B = C + D
Therefore (because the tribe says so): A = C + D

And since so many others in the tribe feel certain about things, your own certainty is reassured and reinforced.

But there’s a heavy cost to these comforts. Insecurity can be solved the hard way or the easy way—and by giving people the easy option, dogmatic tribes remove the pressure to do the hard work of evolving into a more independent person with a more internally-defined identity. In that way, dogmatic tribes are an enabler of the blind tribe member’s deficiencies.

The sneaky thing about both rigid tribal dogma and blind membership is that they like to masquerade as open-minded thought with conscious membership. I think many of us may be closer to the blind membership side of things with certain tribes we’re a part of than we recognize—and those tribes we’re a part of may not be as open-minded as we tend to think.

A good test for this is the intensity of the us factor. That key word in “People like us do stuff like this” can get you into trouble pretty quickly.

Us feels great. A major part of the appeal of being in a tribe is that you get to be part of an Us, something humans are wired to seek out. And loose Us is nice—like the Us among conscious, independent tribe members.

But the Us in blind tribalism is creepy. In blind tribalism, the tribe’s guiding dogma doubles as the identity of the tribe members, and the Us factor enforces that concept. Conscious tribe members reach conclusions—blind tribe members are conclusions. With a blind Us, if the way you are as an individual happens to contain opinions, traits, or principles that fall outside the outer edges of the dogma walls, they will need to be shed—or things will get ugly. By challenging the dogma of your tribe, you’re challenging both the sense of certainty the tribe members gain their strength from and the clear lines of identity they rely on.

The best friend of a blind Us is a nemesis Us—Them. Nothing unites Us like a collectively hated anti-Us, and the blind tribe is usually defined almost as much by hating the dogma of Them as it is by abiding by the dogma of Us.

Whatever element of rigid, identity-encompassing blindness is present in your own tribal life will reveal itself when you dare to validate any part of the rival Them dogma.

Give it a try. The next time you’re with a member of a tribe you’re a part of, express a change of heart that aligns you on a certain topic with whoever your tribe considers to be Them. If you’re a religious Christian, tell people at church you’re not sure anymore that there’s a God. If you’re an artist in Boulder, explain at the next dinner party that you think global warming might actually be a liberal hoax. If you’re an Iraqi, tell your family that you’re feeling pro-Israel lately. If you and your husband are staunch Republicans, tell him you’re coming around on Obamacare. If you’re from Boston, tell your friends you’re pulling for the Yankees this year because you like their current group of players.

If you’re in a tribe with a blind mentality of total certainty, you’ll probably see a look of horror. It won’t just seem wrong, it’ll seem like heresy. They might get angry, they might passionately try to convince you otherwise, they might cut off the conversation—but there will be no open-minded conversation. And because identity is so intertwined with beliefs in blind tribalism, the person actually might feel less close to you afterwards. Because for rigidly tribal people, a shared dogma plays a more important role in their close relationships than they might recognize.

Most of the major divides in our world emerge from blind tribalism, and on the extreme end of the spectrum—where people are complete sheep—blind tribalism can lead to terrifying things. Like those times in history when a few charismatic bad guys can build a large army of loyal foot soldiers, just by displaying strength and passion. Because blind tribalism the true villain behind our grandest-scale atrocities—

Equations

Most of us probably wouldn’t have joined the Nazi party, because most of us aren’t on the extreme end of the blind-to-conscious spectrum. But I don’t think many of us are on the other end either. Instead, we’re usually somewhere in the hazy middle—in the land of cooks.4

The Cook and the Chef

The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef.

The words “cook” and “chef” seem kind of like synonyms. And in the real world, they’re often used interchangeably. But in this post, when I say chef, I don’t mean any ordinary chef. I mean the trailblazing chef—the kind of chef who invents recipes. And for our purposes, everyone else who enters a kitchen—all those who follow recipes—is a cook.

Everything you eat—every part of every cuisine we know so well—was at some point in the past created for the first time. Wheat, tomatoes, salt, and milk go back a long time, but at some point, someone said, “What if I take those ingredients and do this…and this…..and this……” and ended up with the world’s first pizza. That’s the work of a chef.

Since then, god knows how many people have made a pizza. That’s the work of a cook.

The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw edible ingredients. Those are her puzzle pieces and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds.

The cook works off of some version of what’s already out there—a recipe of some kind, a meal she tried and liked, a dish she watched someone else make.

Cooks span a wide range. On one end, you have cooks who only cook by following a recipe to the T—carefully measuring every ingredient exactly the way the recipe dictates. The result is a delicious meal that tastes exactly the way the recipe has it designed. Down the range a bit, you have more of a confident cook—someone with experience who gets the general gist of the recipe and then uses her skills and instincts to do it her own way. The result is something a little more unique to her style that tastes like the recipe but not quite. At the far end of the cook range, you have an innovator who makes her own concoctions. A lamb burger with a vegetable bun, a peanut butter and jelly pizza, a cinnamon pumpkin seed cake.5

But what all of these cooks have in common is their starting point is something that already exists. Even the innovative cook is still making a version of a burger, a pizza, and a cake.

At the very end of the spectrum, you have the chef. A chef might make good food or terrible food, but whatever she makes, it’s a result of her own reasoning process, from the selection of raw ingredients at the bottom to the finished dish at the top.

Chef-Cook Spectrum

In the culinary world, there’s nothing wrong with being a cook. Most people are cooks because for most people, inventing recipes isn’t a goal of theirs.

But in life—when it comes to the reasoning “recipes” we use to churn out a decision—we may want to think twice about where we are on the cook-chef spectrum.

On a typical day, a “reasoning cook” and a “reasoning chef” don’t operate that differently. Even the chef becomes quickly exhausted by the mental energy required for first principles reasoning, and usually, doing so isn’t worth his time. Both types of people spend an average day with their brain software running on auto-pilot and their conscious decision-making centers dormant.

But then comes a day when something new needs to be figured out. Maybe the cook and the chef are each given the new task at work to create a better marketing strategy. Or maybe they’re unhappy with that job and want to think of what business to start. Maybe they have a crush on someone they never expected to have feelings for and they need to figure out what to do about it.

Whatever this new situation is, auto-pilot won’t suffice—this is something new and neither the chef’s nor the cook’s software has done this before. Which leaves only two options:

Create. Or copy.

The chef says, “Ugh okay, here we go,” rolls up his sleeves, and does what he always does in these situations—he switches on the active decision-making part of his software and starts to go to work. He looks at what data he has and seeks out what more he needs. He thinks about the current state of the world and reflects on where his values and priorities are. He gathers together those relevant first principles ingredients and starts puzzling together a reasoning pathway. It takes some hard work, but eventually, the pathway brings him to a hypothesis. He knows it’s probably wrong-ish, and as new data emerges, he’ll “taste-test” the hypothesis and adjust it. He keeps the decision-making center on standby for the next few weeks as he makes a bunch of early adjustments to the flawed hypothesis—a little more salt, a little less sugar, one prime ingredient that needs to be swapped out for another. Eventually, he’s satisfied enough with how things are going to move back into auto-pilot mode. This new decision is now part of the automated routine—a new recipe is in the cookbook—and he’ll check in on it to make adjustments every once in a while or as new pertinent data comes in, the way he does for all parts of his software.

The cook has no idea what’s going on in the last paragraph. The reasoning cook’s software is called “Because the recipe said so,” and it’s more of a computerized catalog of recipes than a computer program. When the cook needs to make a life decision, he goes through his collection of authority-written recipes, finds the one he trusts in that particular walk of life, and reads through the steps to see what to do—kind of like WWJD, except the J is replaced by whatever authority is most trusted in that area. For most questions, the authority is the tribe, since the cook’s tribal dogma covers most standard decisions. But in this particular case, the cook leafed through the tribe’s cookbook and couldn’t find any section about this type of decision. So he needs to get a hold of a recipe from another authority he trusts with this type of thing. Once the cook finds the right recipe, he can put it in his catalog and use it for all future decisions on this matter.

First, the cook tries a few friends. His catalog doesn’t have the needed info, but maybe one of theirs does. He asks them for their advice—not so he can use it as additional thinking to supplement his own, but so it can become his own thinking.

If that doesn’t yield any strongly-opinionated results, he’ll go to the trusty eternal backstop—conventional wisdom.

Society as a whole is its own loose tribe, often spanning your whole nation or even your whole part of the world, and what we call “conventional wisdom” is its guiding dogma cookbook—online and available to the public. Typically, the larger the tribe, the more general and more outdated the dogma—and the conventional wisdom database runs like a DMV website last updated in 1992. But when the cook has nowhere else to turn, it’s like a trusty old friend.

And in this case—let’s say the cook is thinking of starting a business and wants to know what the possibilities are—conventional wisdom has him covered. He types the command into the interface, waits a few minutes, and then the system pumps out its answer:

CWDOS

The cook, thoroughly discouraged, thanks the machine and updates his Reality box accordingly.

Cook reality box simple

With the decision made (not to start a business), he switches his software back into auto-pilot mode. Done and done.

Musk calls the cook’s way of thinking “reasoning by analogy” (as opposed to reasoning by first principles), which is a nice euphemism. The next time a kid gets caught copying answers from another student’s exam during the test, he should just explain that he was reasoning by analogy.

If you start looking for it, you’ll see the chef/cook thing happening everywhere. There are chefs and cooks in the worlds of music, art, technology, architecture,6 writing, business, comedy, marketing, app development, football coaching, teaching, and military strategy. Sometimes the chef is the one brave enough to go for something big—other times, the chef is the one with the strength of character to step out of the game and revert back to the small. And in each case, though both parties are usually just on autopilot, mindlessly playing the latest album again and again at concerts, it’s in those key moments when it’s time to write a new album—those moments of truth in front of a clean canvas, a blank Word doc, an empty playbook, a new sheet of blueprint paper, a fresh whiteboard—that the chef and the cook reveal their true colors. The chef creates, while the cook, in some form or another, copies.

Line of cooks

And the difference in outcome is enormous. For cooks, even the more innovative kind, there’s almost always a ceiling on the size of the splash they can make in the world, unless there’s some serious luck involved. Chefs aren’t guaranteed to do anything good, but when there’s a little talent and a lot of persistence, they’re almost certain to make a splash.

No one talks about the “reasoning industry,” but we’re all part of it, and when it comes to chefs and cooks, it’s no different than any other industry. We’re working in the reasoning industry every time we make a decision.

Your current life, with all its facets and complexity, is like a reasoning industry album. The question is, how did that set of songs come to be? How were the songs composed, and by whom? And in those critical do-or-die moments when it’s time to write a new song, how do you do your creating? Do you dig deep into yourself? Do you start with the drumbeat and chords of an existing song and write your own melody on top of it? Do you just play covers?

I know what you want the answers to these questions to be. This is a straightforward one—it’s clearly better to be a chef. But unlike the case with most major distinctions in life—hard-working vs. lazy, ethical vs. dishonest, considerate vs. selfish—when the chef/cook distinction passes right in front of us, we often don’t even notice it’s there.

Missing the Distinction

Like the culinary world’s cook-to-chef range, the real world’s cook-to-chef range isn’t binary—it lies on a spectrum:

Chef-Cook Life Spectrum

But I’m pretty sure that when most of us look at that spectrum, we think we’re farther to the right than we actually are. We’re usually more cook-like than we realize—we just can’t see it from where we’re standing.

For example—

Cooks are followers—by definition. They’re a cook because in whatever they’re doing, they’re following some kind of recipe. But most of us don’t think of ourselves as followers.

A follower, we think, is a weakling with no mind of their own. We think about leadership positions we’ve held and initiatives we’ve taken at work and the way we never let friends boss us around, and we take these as evidence that we’re no follower. Which in turn means that we’re not just a cook.

But the problem is—the only thing all of that proves is that you’re no follower within your tribe. As Einstein meanly put it:

In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.

In other words, you might be a star and a leader in your world or in the eyes of your part of society, but if the core reason you picked that goal in the first place was because your tribe’s cookbook says that it’s an impressive thing and it makes the other tribe members gawk, you’re not being a leader—you’re being a super-successful follower. And, as Einstein says, no less of a cook than all those whom you’ve impressed.

To see the truth, you need to zoom way out until you can see the real leader of the cooks—the cookbook.

But we don’t tend to zoom out, and when we look around at our life, zoomed in, what appears to be a highly unique and independent self may be an optical illusion.7 What often feels like independent reasoning when zoomed out is actually playing connect-the-dots on a pre-printed set of steps laid out by someone else. What feel like personal principles might just be the general tenets of your tribe. What feel like original opinions may have actually been spoon-fed to us by the media or our parents or friends or our religion or a celebrity. What feels like Roark might actually be Keating. What feels like our chosen life path could just be one of a handful of pre-set, tribe-approved yellow brick roads. What feels like creativity might be filling in a coloring book—and making sure to stay inside the lines.

Because of this optical illusion, we’re unable to see the flaws in our own thinking or recognize an unusually great thinker when we see one. Instead, when a superbly science-minded, independent-thinking chef like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein comes around, what do we attribute their success to?

Awesome fucking hardware.

When we look at Musk, we see someone with genius, with vision, with superhuman balls. All things, we assume, he was more or less born with. So to us, the spectrum looks more like this:

Chef-Cook Life Spectrum Skewed

The way we see it, we’re all a bunch of independent-thinking chefs—and it’s just that Musk is a really impressive chef.

Which is both A) overrating Musk and B) overrating ourselves. And completely missing the real story.

Musk is an impressive chef for sure, but what makes him such an extreme standout isn’t that he’s impressive—it’s that most of us aren’t chefs at all.

It’s like a bunch of typewriters looking at a computer and saying, “Man, that is one talented typewriter.”

The reason we have such a hard time seeing what’s really going on is that we don’t get that brain software is even a thing. We don’t think of brains as computers, so we don’t think about the distinction between hardware and software at all. When we think about the brain, we think only about the hardware—the thing we’re born with and are powerless to change or improve. Much less tangible to us is the concept of how we reason. We see reasoning as a thing that just kind of happens, like our bodies’ blood flow—it’s a process that automatically happens, and there’s not much else to say or do about it.

And if we can’t even see the hardware/software distinction, we certainly can’t see the more nuanced chef software vs. cook software distinction.

By not seeing our thinking software for what it is—a critical life skill, something that can be learned, practiced, and improved, and the major factor that separates the people who do great things from those who don’t—we fail to realize where the game of life is really being played. We don’t recognize reasoning as a thing that can be created or copied—and in the same way that causes us to mistake our own cook-like behavior for independent reasoning, we then mistake the actual independent reasoning of the chef for exceptional and magical abilities.

Three examples:

1) We mistake the chef’s clear view of the present for vision into the future.

Musk’s sister Tosca said “Elon has already gone to the future and come back to tell us what he’s found.”7 This is how a lot of people feel about Musk—that he’s a visionary, that he can somehow see things we cannot. We see it like this:

Musk Visionary 1

But actually, it’s like this:

Musk Visionary 2

Conventional wisdom is slow to move, and there’s significant lag time between when something becomes reality and when conventional wisdom is revised to reflect that reality. And by the time it does, reality has moved on to something else. But chefs don’t pay attention to that, reasoning instead using their eyes and ears and experience. By ignoring conventional wisdom in favor of simply looking at the present for what it really is and staying up-to-date with the facts of the world as they change in real-time—in spite of what conventional wisdom has to say—the chef can act on information the rest of us haven’t been given permission to act on yet.

2) We mistake the chef’s accurate understanding of risk for courage.

Remember this ElonSpeak quote from earlier?

When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength—400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that.8

That’s just a kid chef assessing the actual facts of a situation and deciding that his fear was misplaced.

As an adult, Musk said this:

Sometimes people fear starting a company too much. Really, what’s the worst that could go wrong? You’re not gonna starve to death, you’re not gonna die of exposure—what’s the worst that could go wrong?

Same quote, right?

In both cases, Musk is essentially saying, “People consider X to be scary, but their fear is not based on logic, so I’m not scared of X.” That’s not courage—that’s logic.

Courage means doing something risky. Risk means exposing yourself to danger. We intuitively understand this—that’s why most of us wouldn’t call child Elon courageous for sleeping with the lights off. Courage would be a weird word to use there because no actual danger was involved.

All Elon’s saying in the second quote is that being scared to start a company is the adult version of being scared of the dark. It’s not actually dangerous.

So when Musk put his entire fortune down and on SpaceX and Tesla, he wasn’t being bold as fuck, but courageous? Not the right word. It was a case of a chef taking a bunch of information he had and puzzling together a plan that seemed logical. It’s not that he was sure he’d succeed—in fact, he thought SpaceX in particular had a reasonable probability of failure—it’s just that nowhere in his assessments did he foresee danger.

3) We mistake the chef’s originality for brilliant ingenuity.

People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it’s mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you’re brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion—one that may or may not fall within the box.

When you’re in a foreign country and you decide to ditch the guidebook and start wandering aimlessly and talking to people, unique things always end up happening. When people hear about those things, they’ll think of you as a pro traveler and a bold adventurer—when all you really did is ditch the guidebook.

Likewise, when an artist or scientist or businessperson chef reasons independently instead of by analogy, and their puzzling happens to both A) turn out well and B) end up outside the box, people call it innovation and marvel at the chef’s ingenuity. When it turns out really well, all the cooks do what they do best—copy—and now it’s called a revolution.

Simply by refraining from reasoning by analogy, the chef opens up the possibility of making a huge splash with every project. When Steve Jobs8 and Apple turned their attention to phones, they didn’t start by saying, “Okay well people seem to like this kind of keyboard more than that kind, and everyone seems unhappy with the difficulty of hitting the numbers on their keyboards—so let’s get creative and make the best phone keyboard yet!” They simply asked, “What should a mobile device be?” and in their from-scratch reasoning, a physical keyboard didn’t end up as part of the plan at all. It didn’t take genius to come up with the design of the iPhone—it’s actually pretty logical—it just took the ability to not copy.

Different version of the same story with the invention of the United States. When the American forefathers found themselves with a new country on their hands, they didn’t ask, “What should the rules be for selecting our king, and what should the limitations of his power be?” A king to them was what a physical keyboard was to Apple. Instead, they asked, “What should a country be and what’s the best way to govern a group of people?” and by the time they had finished their puzzling, a king wasn’t part of the picture—their first principles reasoning led them to believe that John Locke had a better plan and they worked their way up from there.

History is full of the stories of chefs creating revolutions of apparent ingenuity through simple first principles reasoning. Genghis Khan organizing a smattering of tribes that had been fragmented for centuries using a powers of ten system in order to build one grand tribe that could sweep the world. Henry Ford creating cars with the out-of-the-box manufacturing technique of assembly-line production in order to bring cars to the masses for the first time. Marie Curie using unconventional methods to pioneer the theory of radioactivity and topple the “atoms are indivisible” assumption on its head (she won a Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry—two prizes reserved exclusively for chefs). Martin Luther King taking a nonviolent Thoreau approach to a situation normally addressed by riots. Larry Page and Sergey Brin ignoring the commonly-used methods of searching the internet in favor of what they saw as a more logical system that based page importance on the number of important sites that linked to it. The 1966 Beatles deciding to stop being the world’s best cooks, ditching the typical songwriting styles of early-60s bands, including their own, and become music chefs, creating a bunch of new types of songs from scratch that no one had heard before.

Whatever the time, place, or industry, anytime something really big happens, there’s almost always an experimenting chef at the center of it—not being anything magical, just trusting their brain and working from scratch. Our world, like our cuisines, was created by these people—the rest of us are just along for the ride.

Yeah, Musk is smart as fuck and insanely ambitious—but that’s not why he’s beating us all. What makes Musk so rad is that he’s a software outlier. A chef in a world of cooks. A science geologist in a world of flood geologists. A brain software pro in a world where people don’t realize brain software is a thing.

That’s Elon Musk’s secret sauce.

Which is why the real story here isn’t Musk. It’s us.

The real puzzle in this series isn’t why Elon Musk is trying to end the era of gas cars or why he’s trying to land a rocket or why he cares so much about colonizing Mars—it’s why Elon Musk is so rare.

The curious thing about the car industry isn’t why Tesla is focusing so hard on electric cars, and the curious thing about the aerospace industry isn’t why SpaceX is trying so hard to make rockets reusable—the fascinating question is why they’re the only companies doing so.

We spent this whole time trying to figure out the mysterious workings of the mind of a madman genius only to realize that Musk’s secret sauce is that he’s the only one being normal. And in isolation, Musk would be a pretty boring subject—it’s the backdrop of us that makes him interesting. And it’s that backdrop that this series is really about.

So…what’s the deal with us? How did we end up so scared and cook-like? And how do we learn to be more like the chefs of the world, who seem to so effortlessly carve their own way through life? I think it comes down to three things.

How to Be a Chef

Anytime there’s a curious phenomenon within humanity—some collective insanity we’re all suffering from—it usually ends up being evolution’s fault. This story is no different.

When it comes to reasoning, we’re biologically inclined to be cooks, not chefs, which relates back to our tribal evolutionary past. First, it’s a better tribal model for most people to be cooks. In 50,000 BC, tribes full of independent thinkers probably suffered from having too many chefs in the kitchen, which would lead to too many arguments and factions within the tribe. A tribe with a strong leader at the top and the rest of the members simply following the leader would fare better. So those types of tribes passed on their genes more. And now we’re the collective descendants of the more cook-like people.

Second, it’s about our own well-being. It’s not in our DNA to be chefs because human self-preservation never depended upon independent thinking—it rode on fitting in with the tribe, on staying in favor with the chief, on following in the footsteps of the elders who knew more about staying alive than we did. And on teaching our children to do the same—which is why we now live in a cook society where cook parents raise their kids by telling them to follow the recipe and stop asking questions about it.

Thinking like cooks is what we’re born to do because what we’re born to do is survive.

But the weird thing is, we weren’t born into a normal human world. We’re living in the anomaly, when for many of the world’s people, survival is easy. Today’s privileged societies are full of anomaly humans whose primary purpose is already taken care of, softening the deafening roar of unmet base needs and allowing the nuanced and complex voice of our inner selves to awaken.

The problem is, most of our heads are still running on some version of the 50,000-year-old survival software—which kind of wastes the good luck we have to be born now.

It’s an unfortunate catch-22—we continue to think like cooks because we can’t absorb the epiphany that we live in an anomaly world where there’s no need to be cooks, and we can’t absorb that epiphany because we think like cooks and cooks don’t know how to challenge and update their own software.

This is the vicious cycle of our time—and the secret of the chef is that they somehow snapped out of it.

So how do we snap out of the trance?

I think there are three major epiphanies we need to absorb—three core things the chef knows that the cook doesn’t:

Epiphany 1) You don’t know shit.

You don't know shit

The flood geologists of the 17th and 18th centuries weren’t stupid. And they weren’t anti-science. Many of them were just as accomplished in their fields as their science geologist colleagues.

But they were victims—victims of a religious dogma they were told to believe without question. The recipe they followed was scripture, a recipe that turned out to be wrong. And as a result, they proceeded on their path with a fatal flaw in their thinking—a software bug that told them that one of the undeniable first principles when thinking about the Earth was that it began 6,000 years ago and that there had been a flood of the most epic proportions.

With that bug in place, all further computations were moot. Any reasoning tree that puzzled upwards with those assumptions at its root had no chance of finding truth.

Even more than being victims of any dogma, the flood geologists were victims of their own certainty. Without certainty, dogma has no power. And when data is required in order to believe something, false dogma has no legs to stand on. It wasn’t the church dogma that hindered the flood geologists, it was the church mentality of faith-based certainty.

That’s what Stephen Hawking meant when he said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Neither the science geologist nor the flood geologist started off with knowledge. But what gave the science geologist the power to seek out the truth was knowing that he had no knowledge. The science geologists subscribed to the lab mentality, which starts by saying “I don’t know shit” and works upwards from there.

If you want to see the lab mentality at work, just search for famous quotes of any prominent scientist and you’ll see each one of them expressing the fact that they don’t know shit.

Here’s Isaac Newton: To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

And Richard Feynman: I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

And Niels Bohr: Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

Musk has said his own version: You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.9

The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that as scientists, they’re aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. They firmly believe that reasoning of all kinds should take place in a lab, not a church.

If we want to become more chef-like, we have to make sure we’re doing our thinking in a lab. Which means identifying which parts of our thinking are currently sitting in church.

But that’s a hard thing to do because most of us have the same relationship with our own software that my grandmother has with her computer:9 It’s this thing someone put there, we use it when we need to, it somehow magically works, and we hope it doesn’t break. It’s the way we are with a lot of the things we own, where we’re just the dumb user, not the pro. We know how to use our car, microwave, phone, our electric toothbrush, but if something breaks, we take it to the pro to fix it because we have no idea how it works.

But that’s not a great life model when it comes to brain software, and it usually leads to us making the same mistakes and living with the same results year after year after year, because our software remains unchanged. Eventually, we might wake up one day feeling like Breaking Bad’s Walter White, when he said, “Sometimes I feel like I never actually make, any of my own… choices. I mean, my entire life it just seems I never… had a real say about any of it.” If we want to understand our own thinking, we have to stop being the dumb user of our own software and start being the pro—the auto mechanic, the electrician, the computer geek.

If you were alone in a room with a car and wanted to figure out how it worked, you’d probably start by taking it apart as much as you could and examining the parts and how they all fit together. To do the same with our thinking, we need to revert to our four-year-old selves and start deconstructing our software by resuming the Why game our parents and teachers shut down decades ago. It’s time to roll up our sleeves, pop open the hood, and get our hands dirty with a bunch of not-that-fun questions about what we truly want, what’s truly possible, and whether the way we’re living our lives follows logically from those things.

With each of these questions, the challenge is to keep asking why until you hit the floor—and the floor is what will tell you whether you’re in a church or a lab for that particular part of your life. If a floor you hit is one or more first principles that represent the truth of reality or your inner self and the logic going upwards stays accurate to that foundation, you’re in the lab. If a Why? pathway hits a floor called “Because [authority] said so”—if you go down and down and realize at the bottom that the whole thing is just because you’re taking your parent’s or friend’s or religion’s or society’s word for it—then you’re in church there. And if the tenets of that church don’t truly resonate with you or reflect the current reality of the world—if it turns out that you’ve been working off of the wrong recipe—then whatever conclusions have been built on top of it will be just as wrong. As demonstrated by the flood geologists, a reasoning chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

False Dogma 1

Astronomers once hit a similar wall in their progress trying to calculate the trajectories of the sun and planets in the Solar System. Then one day they discovered that the sun was at the center of things, not the Earth, and suddenly, all the perplexing calculations made sense, and progress leapt forward. Had they played the Why game earlier, they’d have run into a dogmatic floor right after the question “But why do we know that the Earth is in the center of everything?”

People’s lives are no different, which is why it’s so important to find the toxic lumps of false dogma tucked inside the layers of your reasoning software. Identifying one and adjusting it can strengthen the whole chain above and create a breakthrough in your life.

False Dogma 2

The thing you really want to look closely for is unjustified certainty. Where in life do you feel so right about something that it doesn’t qualify as a hypothesis or even a theory, but it feels like a proof? When there’s proof-level certainty, it means either there’s some serious concrete and verified data underneath it—or it’s faith-based dogma. Maybe you feel certain that quitting your job would be a disaster or certain that there’s no god or certain that it’s important to go to college or certain that you’ve always had a great time on rugged vacations or certain that everyone loves it when you break out the guitar during a group hangout—but if it’s not well backed-up by data from what you’ve learned and experienced, it’s at best a hypothesis and at worst a completely false piece of dogma.

And if thinking about all of that ends with you drowning in some combination of self-doubt, self-loathing, and identity crisis, that’s perfect. This first epiphany is about humility. Humility is by definition a starting point—and it sends you off on a journey from there. The arrogance of certainty is both a starting point and an ending point—no journeys needed. That’s why it’s so important that we begin with “I don’t know shit.” That’s when we know we’re in the lab.

Epiphany 2) No one else knows shit either.

No one else knows shit

Let me illustrate a little story for you.

Emperor 1Emperor 2Emperor 3Emperor 4

Emperor 5Emperor 6
Emperor 7Emperor 8Emperor 9Emperor 10Emperor 11Emperor 12Emperor 13
Emperor 13aEmperor 14Emperor 15Emperor 16Emperor 17Emperor 18

Yes, it’s an old classic. The Emperor’s New Clothes. It was written in 1837 by Hans Christian Andersen10 to demonstrate a piece of trademark human insanity: the “This doesn’t seem right to me but everyone else says it’s right so it must be right and I’ll just pretend I also think it’s right so no one realizes I’m stupid” phenomenon.

My favorite all-time quote might be Steve Jobs saying this:

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.11

This is Jobs’ way of saying, “You might not know shit. But no one knows shit. If the emperor looks naked to you and everyone else is saying he has clothes, trust your eyes since other people don’t know anything you don’t.”

It’s an easy message to understand, a harder one to believe, and an even harder one to act on.

The purpose of the first epiphany is to shatter the belief that all that dogma you’ve memorized constitutes personal opinions and wisdom and all that certainty you feel constitutes knowledge and understanding. That’s the easier one because the delusion that we know what we’re talking about is pretty fragile, with the “Oh god I’m a fraud who doesn’t know shit” monster never lurking too far under our consciousness.

But this epiphany—that the collective “other people” and their conventional wisdom don’t know shit—is a much larger challenge. Our delusion about the wisdom of those around us, our tribe, and society as a whole is much thicker and runs much deeper than the delusion about ourselves. So deep that we’ll see a naked emperor and ignore our own eyes if everyone else says he has clothes on.

This is a battle of two kinds of confidence—confidence in others vs. confidence in ourselves. For most cooks, confidence in others usually comes out the winner.

To swing the balance, we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public, your tribe’s dogma, and society’s conventional wisdom. We have a bunch of romantic words for the world’s chefs that sound impressive but are actually just a result of them having lost this respect. Being a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules. Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to blaze yourself a new one. Being a groundbreaker is just knowing that the ground wasn’t laid by anyone that impressive and so feeling no need to keep it intact.

Not respecting society is totally counterintuitive to what we’re taught when we grow up—but it makes perfect sense if you just look at what your eyes and experience tell you.

There are clues all around showing us that conventional wisdom doesn’t know shit. Conventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for a good reason—and history is one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again, every time some chef comes around and changes things.

And if you open your eyes, there are other clues all through your own life that the society you live in is nothing to be intimidated by. All the times you learn about what really goes on inside a company and find out that it’s totally disorganized and badly run. All the people in high places who can’t seem to get their personal lives together. All the well-known sitcoms whose jokes you’re pretty sure you could have written when you were 14. All the politicians who don’t seem to know more about the world than you.

And yet, the delusion that society knows shit that you don’t runs deep, and still, somewhere in the back of your head, you don’t think it’s realistic that you could ever actually build that company, achieve that fabulous wealth or celebrity-status, create that TV show, win that senate campaign—no matter what it seems like.

Sometimes it takes an actual experience to fully expose society for the shit it doesn’t know. One example from my life is how I slowly came to understand that most Americans—the broader public, my tribe, and people I know well—knew very little about what it’s actually like to visit most countries. I grew up hearing about how dangerous it was to visit really foreign places, especially alone. But when I started going places I wasn’t supposed to go, I kept finding that the conventional wisdom had been plain wrong about it. As I had more experiences and gathered more actual data, I grew increasingly trusting of my own reasoning over whatever Americans were saying. And as my confidence grew, places like Thailand and Spain turned into places like Oman and Uzbekistan which turned into places like Nigeria and North Korea. When it comes to traveling, I had the epiphany: other people’s strong opinions about this are based on unbacked-up dogma and the fact that most people I talk to feel the same way means nothing if my own research, experience, and selective question-asking brings me to a different conclusion.12 When it comes to picking travel destinations, I’ve become a chef.

I try to leverage what I learned as a traveler to transfer the chefness elsewhere—when I find myself discouraged in another part of my life by the warnings and head-shaking of conventional wisdom, I try to remind myself: “These are the same people that were sure that North Korea was dangerous.” It’s hard—you have to take the leap to chefdom separately in each part of your life—but it seems like with each successive cook → chef breakthrough, future breakthroughs become easier to come by. Eventually, you must hit a tipping point and trusting your own software becomes your way of life—and as Jobs says, you’ll never be the same again.

The first epiphany was about shattering a protective shell of arrogance to lay bare a starting point of humility. This second epiphany is about confidence—the confidence to emerge from that humility through a pathway built on first principles instead of by analogy. It’s a confidence that says, “I may not know much, but no one else does either, so I might as well be the most knowledgeable person on Earth.”

Epiphany 3) You’re playing Grand Theft Life

Grand Theft Life

The first two epiphanies allow us to break open our software, identify which parts of it were put there by someone else, and with confidence begin to fill in the Want and Reality boxes with our own handwriting and choose a goal and a strategy that’s right for us.

But then we hit a snag. We’re finally in the lab with all our tools and equipment, but something holds us back. To figure out why, let’s bring back our emperor story.

When the emperor struts out with his shoulder hair and his gut and his little white junk, the story only identifies two kinds of people: the mass of subjects, who all pretend they can see the clothes, and the kid, who just says that the dude is obviously naked.

But I think there’s more going on. In an emperor’s new clothes situation, there are four kinds of people:

1) Proud Cook. Proud Cook is the person drinking the full dogma Kool-Aid. Whatever independent-thinking voice is inside of Proud Cook was silenced long ago, and there’s no distinction between his thoughts and the dogma he follows. As far as he’s concerned, the dogma is truth—but since he doesn’t even register that there’s any dogma happening, Proud Cook simply thinks he’s a very wise person who has it all figured out. He feels the certainty of the dogma running through his veins. When the emperor walks out and proclaims that he is wearing beautiful new clothes, Proud Cook actually sees clothes, because his consciousness isn’t even turned on.

2) Insecure Cook. Insecure Cook is what Proud Cook turns into after undergoing Epiphany #1. Insecure Cook has had a splash of self-awareness—enough to become conscious of the fact that he doesn’t actually know why he’s so certain about the things he’s certain about. Whatever the reasons are, he’s sure they’re right, but he can’t seem to come up with them himself. Without the blissful arrogance of Proud Cook, Insecure Cook is lost in the world, wondering why he’s too dumb to get what everyone else gets and trying to watch others to figure out what he’s supposed to do—all while hoping nobody finds out that he doesn’t get it. When Insecure Cook sees the emperor, his heart sinks—he doesn’t see the clothes, only the straggly gray hears of the emperor’s upper thighs. Ashamed, he reads the crowd and mimics their enthusiasm for the clothes.

3) Self-Loathing Cook. Self-Loathing Cook is what Insecure Cook becomes after being hit by Epiphany #2. Epiphany #2 is the forbidden fruit, and Self-Loathing Cook has bitten it. He now knows exactly why he didn’t feel certain about everything—because it was all bullshit. He sees the tenets of conventional wisdom for what they really are—faith-based dogma. He knows that neither he nor anyone else knows shit and that he’ll get much farther riding his own reasoning than jumping on the bandwagon with the masses. When the emperor emerges, Self-Loathing Cook thinks, “Oh Jesus…this fucktard is actually outside with no clothes on. Oh—oh and my god these idiots are all pretending to see clothes. How is this my life? I need to move.”

But then, right when he’s about to call everyone out on their pretending and the emperor out on his bizarre life decision, there’s a lump in his throat. Sure, he knows there are no clothes on that emperor’s sweaty lower back fat roll—but actually saying that? Out loud? I mean, he’s sure and all—but let’s not go crazy here. Better not to call too much attention to himself. And of course, there’s a chance he’s missing something. Right?

Self-Loathing Cook ends up staying quiet and nodding at the other cooks when they ask him if those clothes aren’t just the most marvelous he’s ever seen.

4) The chef. The kid in the story. The chef is Self-Loathing Cook—except without the irrational fear. The chef goes through the same inner thought process as Self-Loathing Cook, but when it’s time to walk the walk, the chef stands up and yells out the truth.

A visual recap:

4 Subjects

We’re all human and we’re all complex, which means that in various parts of each of our lives, we play each of these four characters.

But to me, Self-Loathing Cook is the most curious one of the four. Self-Loathing Cook gets it. He knows what the chefs know. He’s tantalizingly close to carving out his own chef path in the world, and he knows that if he just goes for it, good things would happen. But he can’t pull the trigger. He built himself a pair of wings he feels confident work just fine, but he can’t bring himself to jump off the cliff.

And as he stands there next to the cliff with the other cooks, he has to endure the torture of watching the chefs of the world leap off the edge with the same exact wings and flying skills he has, but with the courage he can’t seem to find.

To figure out what’s going on with Self-Loathing Cook, let’s remind ourselves how the chefs operate.

Free of Self-Loathing Cook’s trepidation, the world’s chefs are liberated to put on their lab coats and start sciencing. To a chef, the world is one giant laboratory, and their life is one long lab session full of a million experiments. They spend their days puzzling, and society is their game board.

The chef treats his goals and undertakings as experiments whose purpose is as much to learn new information as it is to be ends in themselves. That’s why when I asked Musk what his thoughts were on negative feedback, he answered with this:

I’m a huge believer in taking feedback. I’m trying to create a mental model that’s accurate, and if I have a wrong view on something, or if there’s a nuanced improvement that can be made, I’ll say, “I used to think this one thing that turned out to be wrong—now thank goodness I don’t have that wrong belief.”

To a chef in the lab, negative feedback is a free boost forward in progress, courtesy of someone else. Pure upside.

As for the F word…the word that makes our amygdalae quiver in the moonlight, the great chefs have something to say about that too:

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. —Henry Ford

Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. —Winston Churchill10

I have not failed 700 times. I’ve succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a lightbulb. —Thomas Edison

There’s no more reliable corollary than super-successful people thinking failure is fucking awesome.

But there’s something to that. The science approach is all about learning through testing hypotheses, and hypotheses are built to be disproven, which means that scientists learn through failure. Failure is a critical part of their process.

It makes sense. If there were two scientists trying to come up with a breakthrough in cancer treatment, and the first one is trying every bold thing he can imagine, failing left and right and learning something each time, while the second one is determined not to have any failures so is making sure his experiments are similar to others that have already been proven to work—which scientist would you bet on?

It’s not surprising that so many of the most wildly impactful people seem to treat the world like a lab and their life like an experiment session—that’s the best way to succeed at something.

But for most of us, we just can’t do it. Even poor Self-Loathing Cook, who is so damn close to being a chef—but somehow so far away.

So what’s stopping him? I think two major misconceptions:

Misconception 1: Misplaced Fear

We talked about the chef’s courage actually just being an accurate assessment of risk—and that’s one of the major things Self-Loathing Cook is missing. He thinks he has become wise to the farce of letting dogma dictate your life, but he’s actually in the grasp of dogma’s slickest trick.

Humans are programmed to take potential fear very seriously, and evolution didn’t find it efficient to have us assess and re-assess every fear inside of us. It went instead with the “better safe than sorry” philosophy—i.e. if there’s a chance that a certain fear might be based on real danger, file it away as a real fear, just in case, and even if you confirm later that a fear of yours has no basis, keep it with you, just in case. Better safe than sorry.

And the fear file cabinet is somewhere way down in our psyches—somewhere far below our centers of rationality, out of reach.

The purpose of all of that fear is to make us protect ourselves from danger. The problem for us is that as far as evolution is concerned, danger = something that hurts the chance that your genes will move on—i.e., danger = not mating or dying or your kids dying, and that’s about it.

So in the same way our cook-like qualities were custom-built for survival in tribal times, our obsession with fears of all shapes and sizes may have served us well in Ethiopia 50,000 years ago—but it mostly ruins our lives today.

Because not only does it amp up our fear in general to “shit we botched the hunt now the babies are all going to starve to death this winter” levels even though we live in an “oh no I got laid off now I have to sleep at my parents’ house for two months with a feather pillow in ideal 68º temperature” world—but it also programs us to be terrified of all the wrong things. We’re more afraid of public speaking than texting on the highway, more afraid of approaching an attractive stranger in a bar than marrying the wrong person, more afraid of not being able to afford the same lifestyle as our friends than spending 50 years in meaningless career—all because embarrassment, rejection, and not fitting in really sucked for hunters and gatherers.

This leaves most of us with a skewed danger scale:

Danger Scale

Chefs hate real risk just as much as cooks—a chef that ends up in the Actually Dangerous territory and ends up in jail or in a gutter or in dire financial straits isn’t a chef—he’s a cook living under “I’m invincible” dogma. When we see chefs displaying what looks like incredible courage, they’re usually just in the the Chef Lab. The Chef Lab is where all the action is and where the path to many people’s dreams lies—dreams about their career, about love, about adventure. But even though its doors are always open, most people never set foot in it for the same reason so many Americans never visit some of the world’s most interesting countries—because of an incorrect assumption that it’s a dangerous place. By reasoning by analogy when it comes to what constitutes danger and ending up with a misconception, Self-Loathing Cook is missing out on all the fun.

Misconception 2: Misplaced Identity

The second major problem for Self-Loathing Cook is that, like all cooks, he can’t wrap his head around the fact that he’s the scientist in the lab—not the experiment.

As we established earlier, conscious tribe members reach conclusions, while blind tribe members are conclusions. And what you believe, what you stand for, and what you choose to do each day are conclusions that you’ve drawn. In some cases, very, very publicly.

As far as society is concerned, when you give something a try—on the values front, the fashion front, the religious front, the career front—you’ve branded yourself. And since people like to simplify people in order to make sense of things in their own head, the tribe around you reinforces your brand by putting you in a clearly-labeled, oversimplified box.

What this all amounts to is that it becomes very painful to change. Changing is icky for someone whose identity will have to change along with it. And others don’t make things any easier. Blind tribe members don’t like when other tribe members change—it confuses them, it forces them to readjust the info in their heads, and it threatens the simplicity of their tribal certainty. So attempts to evolve are often met with mockery or anger or opposition.

And when you have a hard time changing, you become attached to who you currently are and what you’re currently doing—so attached that it blurs the distinction between the scientist and the experiment and you forget that they’re two different things.

We talked about why scientists welcome negative feedback about their experiments. But when you are the experiment, negative feedback isn’t a piece of new, helpful information—it’s an insult. And it hurts. And it makes you mad. And because changing feels impossible, there’s not much good that feedback can do anyway—it’s like giving parents negative feedback on the name of their one-month-old child.

We discussed why scientists expect plenty of their experiments to fail. But when you and the experiment are one and the same, not only is taking on a new goal a change of identity, it’s putting your identity on the line. If the experiment fails, you fail. You are a failure. Devastating. Forever.

I talked to Musk about the United States and the way the forefathers reasoned by first principles when they started the country. He said he thought the reason they could do so is that they had a fresh slate to work with. The European countries of that era would have had a much harder time trying to do something like that—because, as he told me, they were “trapped in their own history.”

I’ve heard Musk use this same phrase to describe the big auto and aerospace companies of today. He sees Tesla and SpaceX like the late 18th century USA—fresh new labs ready for experiments—but when he looks at other companies in their industries, he sees an inability to drive their strategies from a clean slate mentality. Referring to the aerospace industry, Musk said, “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”

Being trapped in your history means you don’t know how to change, you’ve forgotten how to innovate, and you’re stuck in the identity box the world has put you in. And you end up being the cancer researcher we mentioned who only tries likely-to-succeed experimentation within the comfort zone he knows best.

It’s for this reason that Steve Jobs looks back on his firing from Apple in 1986 as a blessing in disguise. He said: “Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Being fired “freed” Jobs from the shackles of his own history.

So what Self-Loathing Cook has to ask himself is: “Am I trapped in my own history?” As he stands on the cliff with his wings ready for action and finds himself paralyzed—from evolving as a person, from making changes in his life, from trying to do something bold or unusual—is the baggage of his own identity part of what’s holding him back?

Self-Loathing Cook’s beliefs about what’s scary aren’t any more real than Insecure Cook’s assumption that conventional wisdom has all the answers—but unlike the “Other people don’t know shit” epiphany, which you can observe evidence of all over the place, the epiphany that neither failing nor changing is actually a big deal can only be observed by experiencing it for yourself. Which you can only do after you overcome those fears…which only happens if you experience changing and failing and realize that nothing bad happens. Another catch-22.

These are the reasons I believe so many of the world’s most able people are stuck in life as Self-Loathing Cook, one epiphany short of the promised land.

The challenge with this last epiphany is to somehow figure out a way to lose respect for your own fear. That respect is in our wiring, and the only way to weaken it is by defying it and seeing, when nothing bad ends up happening, that most of the fear you’ve been feeling has just been a smoke and mirrors act. Doing something out of your comfort zone and having it turn out okay is an incredibly powerful experience, one that changes you—and each time you have that kind of experience, it chips away at your respect for your brain’s ingrained, irrational fears.

Because the most important thing the chef knows that the cooks don’t is that real life and Grand Theft Auto aren’t actually that different. Grand Theft Auto is a fun video game because it’s a fake world where you can do things with no fear. Drive 200mph on the highway. Break into a building. Run over a prostitute with your car. All good in GTA.

Unlike GTA, in real life, the law is a thing and jail is a thing. But that’s about where the differences end. If someone gave you a perfect simulation of today’s world to play in and told you that it’s all fake with no actual consequences—with the only rules being that you can’t break the law or harm anyone, and you still have to make sure to support your and your family’s basic needs—what would you do? My guess is that most people would do all kinds of things they’d love to do in their real life but wouldn’t dare to try, and that by behaving that way, they’d end up quickly getting a life going in the simulation that’s both far more successful and much truer to themselves than the real life they’re currently living. Removing the fear and the concern with identity or the opinions of others would thrust the person into the not-actually-risky Chef Lab and have them bouncing around all the exhilarating places outside their comfort zone—and their lives would take off. That’s the life irrational fears block us from.

When I look at the amazing chefs of our time, what’s clear is that they’re more or less treating real life as if it’s Grand Theft Life. And doing so gives them superpowers. That’s what I think Steve Jobs meant all the times he said, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

And that’s what this third epiphany is about: fearlessness.

So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives—to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.

It’s a good plan—but also, ugh. Right? That’s a lot of stuff to try to do.

Usually at the end of a post like this, the major point seems manageable and concrete, and I finish writing it all excited to go be good at shit. But this post was like, “Here’s everything important and go do it.” So how do we work with that?

I think the key is to not try to be a perfect chef or expect that of yourself whatsoever. Because no one’s a perfect chef—not even Elon. And no one’s a pure cook either—nothing’s black and white when you’re talking about an animal species whose brains contain 86 billion neurons. The reality is that we’re all a little of both, and where we are on that spectrum varies in 100 ways, depending on the part of life in question, the stage we’re in of our evolution, and our mood that day.

If we want to improve ourselves and move our way closer to the chef side of the spectrum, we have to remember to remember. We have to remember that we have software, not just hardware. We have to remember that reasoning is a skill and like any skill, you get better at it if you work on it. And we have to remember the cook/chef distinction, so we can notice when we’re being like one or the other.

It’s fitting that this blog is called Wait But Why because the whole thing is a little like the adult version of the Why? game. After emerging from the blur of the arrogance of my early twenties, I began to realize that my software was full of a lot of unfounded certainty and blind assumptions and that I needed to spend some serious time deconstructing—which is the reason that every Wait But Why post, no matter what the topic, tends to start off with the question, “What’s really going on here?”

For me, that question is the springboard into all of this remembering to remember—it’s a hammer that shatters a brittle, protective feeling of certainty and forces me to do the hard work of building a more authentic, more useful set of thoughts about something. Or at least a better-embraced bewilderment.

And when I started learning about Musk in preparation to write these posts, it hit me that he wasn’t just doing awesome things in the world—he was a master at looking at the world, asking “What’s really going on here?” and seeing the real answer. That’s why his story resonated so hard with me and why I dedicated so much Wait But Why time to this series.

But also, Mars. Let’s all go, okay?