(2020-06-18) On Cultures That Build

Tanner Greer On Cultures That Build. Marc Andreessen's (Time to Build) essay has got a lot of play in certain circles, and it generated many responses.

I was greatly inspired by the essay. But there are a few important ideas that need to be interjected into this conversation that are currently lacking from it.

First, the TLDR version: In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side? This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds."

1. Andreessen is correct: our failure to build things is a problem of culture and will.

My baseline assumption is that when intelligent people produce failure, a nest of entrenched interests and perverse incentives lie at the problem's heart

The failures in America's coronavirus response suggests this is the wrong assumption to make. The scale of American errors simply range too wide.

Before us lies a national catalogue of dysfunction and disaster. A national explanation is needed. Something must be found that holds together the staffers manning the Mayor of New Orleans response team and those doing the same thing in Washington DC. I am comfortable calling that thing "culture." America does not have a culture that builds.

2. America was not always this way

Yet this has not always been true. Patrick Collison has fun list of grand projects that went up "fast." As Collison notes, most of those things went up before 1960.

this was also true for institutions. Consider how America responded to the last great pandemic to wash over its shores:

But it should not be that surprising that the Americans of 1918 could set up mixed civic-business-government organizations on the fly; they had just done the exact same thing at the exact same level of society two years earlier in order to sell war-bonds and rally the home front against the Hun. [2] Both efforts should be seen against the backdrop of an incredible nation-wide craze for institution building.

3. I mention the progressive era to highlight a fundamental contrast: in the America of the early 20th century, the default solution to any problem encountered was to assemble a coalition of Americans to defeat it.

This impulse was not new to the progressive era. One foreigner described it a distinguishing American feature all the way back in the 1830s.

Alexis De Tocqueville contrasts this unfavorably to the subjects of European kings.

He enjoys what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement. This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the danger he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his rescue.

4. I understand that no number of trees removed the street by neighborhood committees produces the Empire State Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry.

Likewise, the sense that "free action of the combined powers of individuals" is the solution to problems that plague you personally is a learned response. It is a response that America's governing elites have never had the chance to learn.

the problem is not limited to the federal government—these bureaucracies dominate large swaths of American life, from the global conglomerates that dominate our economy to the universities that crown our education system. (BigWorld)

It is striking to me how many of the old Silicon Valley builders—people of Andreeson's generation—were social outcasts in their youth

5. To clarify: Tocqueville blamed the passivity of the 19th century Frenchmen to his government. I am not sure the government as such is really the relevant variable here. To update his words for modern times, I would make them read: "he thinks that everything is outside of his concern and belongs to a powerful stranger called management." A culture that does not build is a culture habituated to living under management.

6. So why then is China, et. al. able to build things? Am I seriously arguing that they are less managed and bureaucratized than we are?

The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution destroyed the Party's countryside bureaucracies entirely, and they had to be rebuilt in the years that followed. Even now both the Party and the state bureaucracies that canvas the Chinese hinterland are highly decentralized; these government and Party units are given a great deal of room for experimentation and in many realms are practically independent from outside control. This causes endless frustration to centralizers in Beijing, but the benefits are clear: it is not wrong to think of these units as "labs of communism."

"Management" controlled urban Chinese lives in a way few Americans have ever experienced. But that way of life was largely dismantled as China opened up.

The Baby Boomers were the first American generation to live entirely beneath the management.

7. The real question is whether we will be able to rebuild a building culture. I believe it is possible

Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and cities in the state, perhaps California itself.