Technocapitalism increases returns to judgment relative to labor.
One excellent idea with no hard work will turn into power (i.e. cash) at a rate thatâs accelerating over time, whereas a moderately good idea that requires hard work to implement will turn into power at a more linear rate. This is partially due to the increasingly permissionless and fluid nature of payment infrastructure (less organizational effort required to monetize ideas, a longstanding trend), and partially due to the propertization of digital assets (we now have deeds to ideas, a recent and sudden rupture).
One implication is that you should be less worried about convincing others and demonstrating your arguments.
If one is correct about a novel idea, in many contexts it is sufficient to assert the idea, publish the idea, place practical bets on the idea with your behavior and personal projects, and then just wait. Time will demonstrate your argument for you, and you will be getting richer, or time will show that you were wrong, and you will be getting poorer.
Why persuade people who are wrong, when you could spend all of your time becoming more right? Persuasion has rising costs, and itâs manual labor that doesnât scale. The goal is to advance so far out on the correct branch, that few currently living people even understand what youâre talking about, but future generations eventually must know what youâre talking about. Not because youâre special, but just because you arrived early where they were destined to land sooner or later.
In school essays or scholarly treatises, it will be necessary to lay out the full case. But in many contexts, it is sufficient merely to be correct. My argument is that an increasing proportion of life is composed of such contexts.
Around 2011, you only needed to be correct about the nature of Bitcoin in order to become wealthy for life. You only needed to be correct about one thing. Had one spent every waking hour for several months reading and thinking about whether Bitcoin was true, it could have been worth it, if you got the answer right.
A less discussed implication is that the same logic holds in the cultural domain. Even if you didnât have a dollar to your name in 2011, writing a detailed blog post or creating videos on Youtube about how Bitcoin is true could have accrued a lot of cultural capital (always convertible to cash, of course, and increasingly so).
âHard workâ and manually âbuildingâ are overrated, unless you have a comparative advantage in building, or you personally love building. Hard work can get you into sub-optimal equilbria, if youâre not careful. As I wrote in *Personality War (*ČČǤĆČ 70), if you lean too much on grit to supplement your lack of something else, you may find yourself miserable, in a zone thatâs custom tailored for a different kind of person.
âYou can break into the middle class thanks to grit and craftiness, the problem is you have to stay there through grit and craftiness. Others stay there by just staying there.â âPersonality War (ČČǤĆČ 70)
Hard work can be a way to compensate for mediocre ideas, and one can inadvertently come to specialize in making mediocre ideas work. Hard work can get you stuck into ideas on their way to being outdated. In this particular sense, then, Andreesen was wrong. It is not time to build so much as it is time to be correct.