Thread by @Conaw

Three times I've written drafts of this thread in my Roam, and three times I've failed to publish it.

But Feynman is right

So for next 4 hours: one like one tweet on difficult lessons and painful mistakes I made as CEO in 2021

In the words of Bill O'Reilly "We'll do it live"

First: A confession.

You know the trope of the Zealot who condemns in the world the thing they are ashamed of within themselves?

Think of the fundamentalist who wants to stone gays, but turns out to be closeted.

Tonight I finally saw that same level of hypocrisy in myself.

I've got a lot of tweets to fill, and it's been a long time since I actually put adequate effort into communicating something that felt important.. so rather than trying to be pithy I'm going to do this more stream of conscious and tell a few of these as stories

So... context...

If there is one thing that has been consistent over the last 12 years in the story I told myself about who I was... it was that I was someone who had dedicated their life to the pursuit of truth, specifically through trying to find or build a community to do this in practice with

I didn't study CS, or really know there was such a thing as a startup when I went to college.

I studied Anthropology, and far more expected I'd spend my life studying 1000 year old tech than living in the world of bits.

https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1173339039660773376

Jump to the present

Tonight I tried watching "Don't Look Up"

A couple astronomers discover a 5-10km "Planet Killer" "Extinction Event" comet heading for earth, 99.75% chance it kills everyone in 6m

No one listens.

It hit WAY TOO close to home.

Now, I hear this is supposed to be a comedy, but I'm having flashbacks to some of the most painful moments of my life, I'm sitting there in horror and despair.

When my GF takes the laptop into another room about 10 minutes in, I'm just sitting on the couch staring into space.

When I finally join her again, I'm surprised when she asks me what's wrong.

So I ask her to put on the first public talk I gave, a five minute talk from 2009, about the political significance of social media, new problems, and my first startup...

It's bittersweet to hear how optimistic and naive I was back in 09... and I definitely mention the problem and fears that were literally keeping me up at night back then... but it's shocking how I basically brush them aside, roll right into how my startup will fix everything!

So I think - I must have gone into the magnitude of the problem more a year later in my TEDx talk.

This time I almost feel sick

Here's the thing I found I was hiding myself from.

For 10 years, I've felt like there was this glaring cliff that humanity was careening towards... I felt like by grace of God I had found some path where a small group of people MIGHT have a chance to do something about it....

The whole time, I've always felt like I was so so so far from being up to the task - but over and over again I had the painful experience of trying to rally my smartest, most industrious, capable friends to just look at the danger and try... over and over again I failed...

Even as Roam took off, I've not been able to shake this feeling that on the most important problem or opportunity, somehow I'm still failing horribly to communicate

I blamed myself, my ego, my communication style, my ability, personality, for years I blamed the other people...

What somehow I can't remember really putting together before was the irony, the ridiculous hypocrisy, of taking on a mission of trying to bootstrap a collective intelligence... while believing that major parts of my plan and mental model HAD TO BE KEPT ABSOLUTELY SECRET

I know I'm taking a pretty round about path here - gonna take a quick walk and get into specifics when I get back - but if I were to sum up the realization...

It was like seeing this cancerous deceit had been living in my soul... Like I was trying to build truth out of lies

Alright so we're at 170 likes right now, and I'm only 16 tweets in... seems like a good idea to take my own advice and sketch a brief outline of topics I want to try to cover in this thread

https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1099184479464185861

1. The future I was afraid of in 09, 2020, and why I'm terrified COVID is just the beginning
2. The Hidden Agenda of Localocracy and my political evolution
3. Hillary Clinton's Undergraduate Thesis and the first time I gave up on a meaningful question out of fear of future attack

4. The strategic shift I asked the team to make after Roam became profitable and we grew beyond 4, why I had planned on it from day 1, where I was importantly wrong
5. The many bad reasons #noroadmaps
6. How I've been anti-role modal for Roam Culture, inside team and in #roamcult

7. What I think the reddit revolutionaries were actually right about - what I think the actually right thing would have been for me to do
8. Attack of the Clones, and the question I'm confronted with now w open source
9. End2End Encryption
10. Multiplayer
11. Mobile
12. RoamDepot

Jumping back to 2008/9 and [[The Fear]]

Benkler was at most only half the story, I saw the idea of Open Source Economics as a sort of miraculous solution - a way out. The carrot

But there was another talk I saw that year I don't believe I ever mentioned in public. The Stick.

The talk was Ray Kurzweil's "The Accelerating Power of Technology"

First I heard of Moore's law, which was just one trend of many.

More powerful were the examples

"In 1968, $1 could buy one transistor. In 2002, it bought you 10 Million."

ted.com/talks/ray_kurz…

Tangent, on fetching the link I realized that we're getting close to 2022, and it'll be possible to test some of his forward looking predictions from 20 years ago...

That talk was also the first time I heard the idea of "The Singularity" or as some call it "The Rapture of the Nerds"

The idea that we might within our lifetime create a self-improving artificial intelligence, which would very quickly gain the powers we'd associate with a god.

So, what was the fear?

Well, around the same time I had gotten the idea in an Anthro class that a small change in the shape of an arrowhead thousands of years ago had lead to total reworking of systems of bridewealth

sadly, can't cite

I started getting into the idea of technological determinism -- that changes in technology could quickly lead to really radical changes in culture.

I started to wonder - how long before some random school shooter type could build a nuclear weapon, or engineer a virus?

The Gutenberg Bible was first printed in the 1450s

Martin Luther kicked off the protestant reformation in 1517

The Peace of Westphalia (the two treaties which ended the thirty years war and created the idea of the nation state) was in October 1648

But change is speeding up...

What if the institutions that had been developed in the age of tall masted ships could not be retrofitted to a world of exponentially advancing technical power

These concerns were not exactly new

This is from 1945, from the man who created the Manhattan Project

This video essay is painfully on point

https://twitter.com/thesublemon/status/1477370712692338690