Mathes.ben

The genesis for this line of thought is not some respectable philosophy paper or classic novel. It’s 100% YouTube videos. 

I became interested in fake martial arts through the beneficence of the YouTube algorithm, which oddly but correctly thought that I might be interested in the work of gentlemen such as Rokas Leonavičius, who diligently practiced aikido for years and now uses the term “fantasy-based martial arts” to describe his own former art and practices like it, and Ramsey Dewey, who enjoys pressure-testing dubious self-defense techniques against resisting sparring partners on his YouTube channel.

Here is the fake martial arts situation as I understand it, as a sort of gestalt impression of many videos that are difficult to cite point-for-point individually:

Teachers of fake martial arts, whether they are unscrupulous or pious frauds, teach techniques that are not useful in actual self-defense situations, but sell them under the guise that they are, in fact, useful in self-defense situations. Because of deference-oriented institutional cultures and a lack of testing against resisting opponents, the uselessness of the techniques is kept hidden from students, and sometimes even from the masters themselves. 

I hadn’t thought of it this way before. The only martial art that bananas practice is fencing, and humans don’t normally think of that when they think of “martial arts.” But only a very foolish fencer would ever think that being a master fencer would translate into victory in a bar fight. The most important artificiality of the martial art of modern fencing is the beautiful linear piste, a narrow strip of territory that confines the opponents for the entirety of their contest. They go back and forth, but they do not go sideways or around. Should their bodies cross on the piste, violating the mandatory one-dimensionality, then a halt is immediately called. 

But most martial arts are not so neatly differentiated from the dark and mysterious domain of fighting. Martial arts sparring (to the extent that it occurs) takes place in something like a ring or an octagon, rather than a linear piste, and the footwork includes pivots and turns that no fencer would contemplate. If anything, most martial arts present themselves as fighting methods, even if (as in aikido, according to Rokas) they do not actually allow for stress testing of their methods with an actively resisting opponent. 

Thinking about it in a general way, there are two main standards against which the fakeness of a martial art might be measured:

1. utility in modern mixed martial art competitions 
2. utility in real-life self-defense situations

Some martial arts (such as judo and western boxing, from what I understand) are non-fake in the sense that many of their techniques (and practitioners) find success in the modern mixed martial arts competitive arena. Others (such as aikido and tai chi, again as I understand it) are “fake” in the sense that few, if any, of their techniques find a place within the martial arts “meta” (in the sense of a game “meta,” the community’s current shared understanding of strategy), and few, if any, of their serious practitioners are champions. There is a lemma to this: those serious practitioners of “fake” martial arts who do find success in the modern mixed martial arts arena use a fighting style that does not actually resemble said “fake” martial art in the octagon. If a practitioner of a fake martial art becomes a champion, it is through abandonment, not use, of his fake techniques. 

However, even fighters who enjoy making fun of fake martial arts in the “not useful for MMA” sense are still quick to admit that all martial arts are largely fake in the second sense. Ramsey Dewey in particular enjoys demonstrating the fallacy of trying to fight off multiple opponents, or a single opponent with a knife, as opposed to employing wiser (but not useful for MMA!) strategies like diplomacy, going armed, making better life choices, and running the fuck away. 

In fencing, the unreality of the dull-tipped competition weapon prevents you from thinking of it as an instrument of destruction. Its elegant pistol grip reminds the holder that it is not a pistol, but that a pistol is a real thing that exists in the world. In the case of MMA, however, if the octagon is imagined to be very similar to a street fight, one might be tempted to imagine that there are no guns or knives in street fights, or multiple attackers. And in their absence, one might be tempted to imagine that such obstacles could be overcome with cunning technique. After all, most people have more experience of the cinematic imagination of narratively compelling fights than of actual trivial altercations over status and mating opportunities. And for all that, imagining fights might be an even more important cultural activity than fighting. 

Perhaps you have not heard the sad story of Xu Xiaodong, a Chinese mixed martial arts fighter who gained prominence for soundly beating traditional martial arts masters in China. Unfortunately, people are not always happy to hear that the emperor isn’t wearing clothes, and Xu began to take heat from the government for disparaging Chinese culture through his epistemic crimes. Police stopped his fights, and his social credit score is said to have fallen so low that he couldn’t fly on commercial airplanes. It is interesting here to see fake martiality protected from challenge from a martiality a level more real than it (Xu’s), in service of a martiality yet another level up. Fakeness often appears in absurd structures like this. (See also Ramsey Dewey’s theory that the phenomenon is due in part to the fact that China didn’t experience the epistemic revolution of UFC I. Common knowledge matters.)

There is something I encountered recently, which is that there’s a popular misconception that parasitic fungi take over ants’ brains and mind-control them to do their bidding. Apparently, according to very serious science, what actually happens is that the fungus leaves the brain intact and doesn’t even bother with it, opting instead to attach itself to the ants’ muscle fibers and establish control over the muscles directly. I mention this because I think it productively expands the reference class of what we might mean by self-defense, and conflict, and bodies, and it might now occur to us that taking control of the opponent’s cellular processes is not allowed in MMA fights any more than guns or knives or nuclear weapons are. The rules and the fakeness are what differentiate it from the background chaos of reality, rendering it recognizable as a skilled craft.

There’s something interesting about safety and protection in martial arts. Bare-knuckle fighting sounds scary and dangerous, but human hands are rather delicate structures. As I understand it, when no gloves are worn, the dominant fighting style is one of mainly grappling and perhaps kicking, with less emphasis on striking with the hands. Wearing gloves, however, whether boxing gloves or the more minimal MMA gloves, protects the hands and allows them to deliver forceful strikes. It seems likely that traumatic brain injuries are more common with gloves than without gloves, all things considered. 

Traumatic brain injury is another interesting thing. For a martial art to be living, it must have practitioners and training and contests. There is not much chance to develop virtuosity and excellence, for example, if you’re likely to die in your first fight. The highly experienced gunfighter of the old west is a telling myth. Lethality is not so much of a constraint when animal bodies are substituted for human bodies in fights, as in the cock fighting of the Balinese and the dog fighting of the North American underground. The paradox for a serious game that simulates combat is on the one hand, to allow for true testing of fighters and techniques, and on the other, to protect the fighters from serious injury so that skills can develop over time. Injury risk must be minimized enough to allow for training and experience, but maximized in the sense of demonstrating real fighting prowess through overcoming strong resistance. Ultimately, the regime of gloves and more powerful strikes (and, presumably, more TBIs) won out in modern MMA, and in some sense we must grant that this is the better game. What is the point of these skilled and (at least technically) refined warriors training for battle, if no minds are engaged in witnessing their fights? 

I have been wondering if there are intellectual equivalents of fake martial arts. The highly ritualized and hierarchical culture of the legal courtroom is one example of how epistemic battles are rendered civilized, and in some ways less real. Yet one can’t deny that legal systems are having a genuine and ongoing encounter with reality, from top to bottom. They are embedded in reality. Their fakenesses serve realities on other levels. 

The main thing is that everyone practices a fake martial art. That routine you have, that day you live over and over with variations, is training you all the time to have that day, but more efficiently. And you are becoming better at it, to the admittedly ever-lessening degree that you can fight off the ongoing insults of aging. 

There is a kind of truth in active resistance. In this sense, a cooperating sparring partner acts out a kind of lie, a lie whose denied truth is total war. Total war is a kind of truth, as illustrated in the fungus-controlled muscles of the ant. Some have even said that war amounts to the world performing a calculation. Peter Turchin has argued that war has historically been such an epistemic boon that the skill trees of the mega-empires could only be unlocked along contested steppe boundaries between fighting settled farmers and mounted raiders. 

There is also truth in cooperation, and even more truth in the vast majority of human behavior that is hard to classify as either cooperation or resistance. Our cultural traditions of elaborate fakeness and order are as real and important as the chaotic mess that they comprise.

stone house ~ chrofi

Good designers are rarely appreciated and often unknown. Their solutions are so ‘obvious’ that few get credit for crafting this obviousness.

This is the first part of a series that was originally intended as one post, but will take more. For obvious reasons, I’d rather run five 1000-word posts than one 5000-word post. This assumes that I can keep a post short, brevity not being my strong suit. So, let’s just go into it. What the fuck is VC-istan?

I’ve used that term a lot, and many take it to be pejorative, as if there were something negative about “stan”. That’s not correct. I frequently use “stan” to describe one metaphorical space of people, and it can be a group that I’m fond of (e.g. “Nerdistan”) or one I dislike. After all, “stan” only means a place where people live. The name, itself, is utterly neutral.

So what is VC-istan? It’s not just a snarky name for venture capitalists and the toxic technology ecosystem that some of them (some, I reiterate, not all) have created. VC-istan means something, and I’m going to explain just what.

The VC-istan Hypothesis

The VC-istan Hypothesis is that the leading venture capitalists, the “cool kids” in that set who all know each other, have created a postmodern corporate entity– possibly the first of its kind. It functions as one company at the top echelon, but has recognized that corporations themselves are disposable (much moreso than projects or departments within a company, which are more difficult to cut). This insight isn’t new (shell companies are disposable by design) but the VC startup is a fully-fledged, single-product enterprise designed entirely to take on a specific high-risk business gambit (usually in a red ocean where first-mover advantages dominate, making VC “rocket fuel” especially powerful). The disposable company inside VC-istan is a true startup, almost free-standing if you don’t see the strings.

The “marquee” investors function as the executives of this larger, shadowy, not-exactly-a-corporation entity that I’ve described. Middle managers, maligned as inefficient, corrupt, and often stupid, have been replaced with founders and startup executives who inhabit about the same economic and social stratum as their gray-suited forebears, but have sexier job titles: Senior VP of something no one outside California has heard of, as opposed to Associate Director at a household name. (In truth, I think those founders are no more virtuous, as a class, than the maligned middle managers of the old companies.) The tech press are a bizarre HR organization, as are the fully-corporate bean-counters who sign of on acquisitions (the bonus committee). To attract top talent, one has to pay for it; the generous annual compensation for which banking is known has been replaced by less generous (but possibly more variable) lottery-ticket allocation given the name of employee equity.

The “one corporation” dynamic is held together by the collusive– and almost certainly illegal– reputation economy that the venture capitalists have created. As a group, they decide whether they like a company or not. If appropriate laws were enforced, stopping all of that anti-competitive note-sharing and forcing them to think independently, the VC-funded world would behave much more like a fair market. Then, there probably wouldn’t be a palpable entity or “scene” that one could call “VC-istan”. There would be a much more heterogeneous array of new businesses, not all concentrated in one sector or geographical area.

Like the Efficient Market Hypothesis, the VC-istan Hypothesis is neither fully true nor fully false. There is truth in it, but it is not absolute. It seems to be mostly true, now. Its truth might change as conditions do.

Why is VC-istan bad?

I find it important to describe VC-istan and why it emerged because, to be blunt, I want to kill it. In order to defeat it, we must know it. I want to bring truth forward, because its particular truth is ugly and, if proper information percolates, it will render the VC-istan route a second-tier career, starving it of talent unless it changes its ways. Every time a smart person learns what VC-istan truly is, its position becomes weaker, because it becomes that much harder for its established caste to peddle unreasonable dreams and broken promises.

It’s not that I want to end venture capital as a financing process. To the contrary, I think it’s a very good concept, if poorly implemented now. So, what went wrong? The feudalistic reputation economy of VC-istan has a simple (and disgusting) rule: the VCs are your owners. They are not partners; they can destroy your whole career by picking up a phone. If you say anything negative about a venture capitalist, much less sue one in the (admittedly, fairly rare) even that he robs you, you’ll never raise money again. This sort of blacklisting could not exist on a fair market, because a small set of people taking the “protect our own at all moral costs” approach could only exclude their enemies from a small social circle, and not preclude venture investment outright.

It is, of course, this collusion that enables investors to establish themselves as the executive suite, to which even the most talented entrepreneurs and technologists (who are too numerous and unruly to hold any kind of collusive arrangement together) are subordinate. On a fair market, investors, entrepreneurs, and technologists would not separate so cleanly into these distinct strata with the bottom of one still above or near the top of the next. Rather, the talented technologists would outrank the untalented investors. The parties involved would have to find mutual respect for one another as doing fundamentally different, but important, jobs.

Investors have always been the top jocks in VC-istan, but the distribution of power between business founders (i.e. people offering connections to investors) and technologists (i.e. those doing the actual work) seems to have evolved out-of-favor for the technologists. Of course, there are plenty of computer programmers (myself included) who frequently turn away solicitations from “idea guys” who “just need a programmer”, so it might seem that tech is hot right now. Not quite; most of those are cases of “8″ technologists turning down “5″ business guys. If you compare at-parity, the business side has much higher status. A Business 8 is on the partner track at a top-5 venture firm and can raise a six- or seven-figure seed round on an idea; a technology 8 cannot afford to buy a house in the Bay Area.

This lexicographic rank-ordering replicates the old industrial regime in which being an “8 worker” just didn’t matter, because a 2 manager outranked you. That led to a collapse of motivation at the bottom, caused a bilateral loss of trust, and produced the Theory X culture of a hundred years ago. It wasn’t pretty. I hope that the software industry doesn’t go that way and, to tell the truth, I don’t think that it will; I take it as obvious that technology is much stronger than VC-istan and will resurrect itself no matter what goes down in the Valley.

That said, VC-istan has replicated all of the worst aspects of corporate life, but almost none of its virtues. The old corporate regime was bureaucratic, slow, and prone to corruption and inefficiency, but there were good things about it. Companies invested in their people, and job losses were a rarity, taken as a sign of business failure, rather than an artifact of the mean-spirited “stack ranking” for which companies like Welch’s GE, Enron, and Microsoft have become notorious. The negatives of the old corporate regime were conformism, short-sighted profit-seeking behavior (externalized costs, mostly), subordination, political corruption and inefficiency, and the emergence of an exclusive, sexist and classist “old boy’s club” at the top. That those failures existed (and continue to exist) in many powerful corporations is not controversial.

Most VC-istan companies, as it turns out, have all of these negative traits as well! Startups who no-hire (or fire) over “culture fit” (often, synonymous with “being old, female, or of low socioeconomic origin”) are taking conformity to a far worse extreme than a 1970s-era corporation, which would make much more of an effort to find a place for a “nontraditional” but talented person. The evidence, in truth, is pretty strong that the stodgy bureaucracies of yesteryear were will much fairer (if frustratingly impersonal, since that is usually a prerequisite for fairness) than the new VC-funded “lean” regime.

Sure, there are excellent startups that are free of the above-mentioned ills. They exist, no doubt. However, it’s no easier to find one of those than it was (or is, now) to find a bullshit-free niche of a large company. On the whole, I think having traded in the large companies of the 1960s and ’70s for VC-istan has not been a good deal.

Then, there’s the issue of age discrimination. This will fuck all of us in the ass, and sooner than most of us think, so we need to address it head on. More importantly, ageism is just terrible for technology. Yes, the modeling profession has an expiration date as well; it’s not only programmers who face that. On the other hand, models get to start working in their teens, and there isn’t much of a learning curve, so the loss to the industry is minimal. In technology, on the other hand, it takes years of dedicated full-out work-your-ass-off experience to get any good. It’s an insult to programmers and technology as a whole that a group of talentless, superficial people who have no fucking idea what it takes to be any good at this work, have decided to impose age-grading that begins to close opportunities almost as soon as one has developed a passable level of skill.

In a later essay, I’ll reveal the true and secret cause of VC-istan ageism. It’s not lower wages or some belief that younger people are more creative. It’s far more damning. Here’s a hint. Watch The Office, pay attention to Michael Scott and Ryan Howard.

I don’t know if I will succeed in killing VC-istan. I don’t know what will replace it if I do. I do know that the guys at the top need us more than we need them. I’ll cover that in a future essay, as well.

What is not VC-istan?

Having described what VC-istan is and why I don’t like it, let me give a few comments on what it’s not. First, it’s not all of venture capital. I don’t consider biotechnology or clean energy to be part of VC-istan. The rules in those industries are different, because one actually has to know something about biology, for example, to launch a medical-device startup. The superficiality, ageism, celebrity culture, and lack of respect for hard work that characterize the current bubble crop are not found there; in fact, it’s the opposite, because there are objective goals to be met. VC-istan is focused on light technology, which I use to describe the marketing experiments using technology that, in 2013, seem to outnumber and outcompete (for funding and attention) true technology companies. In light technology, the sole technical challenge is “scaling”, which can be back-filled once flush with cash and able to hire the Valley’s best engineers; but the glory goes to the investors and founders who “had the vision”. So perhaps I might say, “venture-funded light technology” instead of VC-istan; the former sounds less pejorative; but VC-istan has fewer characters and it’s 10:40 at night so, fuck it, brevity wins.

What is it that marries VC-istan to light technology? After all, shouldn’t profit-maximizing venture capitalists go in search of meatier ideas that actually need the investment? Well, many do, and I’m not writing about them. I’m writing about the starfucker types who want to be profiled in business magazines, the ones who want social access more than success on the market, and who thereby sell out not only their own chances at success, but also human decency by creating the collusion and celebrity culture.

Where this ultimately leads is the Parable of the Bikeshed, or what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. People (even those in power) are generally willing to defer to the experts on the big, infrastructural, but usually aesthetically unpleasing (due to their complexity) matters, like how to design a nuclear power plant. “Just bring me the sausage; don’t tell me how it’s made.” On the other hand, on those matters that seem accessible, people form strong opinions. There is little power in the complex and objective, where those who are blatantly wrong will be punished regardless of who they are, and those who have knowledge generally got it through that rank-middling practice of working very hard; but much more power in the simple and subjective, over which simply having made the decision is victory. (The association of arrogant simplisticism with power seems to be present in literalistic religion, too. Notice how many historical deities had strong and explicit opinions about mandatory metaphysical beliefs and about gender roles; but said not a damn thing about how to make antibiotics, which would have actually been useful.) The consumer-oriented light technology that’s in vogue in modern VC-istan is a realm where it’s easy to debate what color to paint the shed, and that’s why it attracts the biggest narcissists.

Venture-funded light technology is, to put it bluntly, a multi-billion-dollar bike shed. In biotech, one can only fund companies whose founders actually understand the science, and pumping money into smiling, stylish idiots is equivalent to incinerating it. For a contrast, the upshot of VC-istan light tech is that any idiot can come up with a plausible scheme, which is much to the benefit of sad-but-established men who “see things in” mediocre but superficially attractive suitors.

One might prefer that this arrogance remain in light technology, which would render it fairly harmless and, in fact, useful. Light tech isn’t a bad thing. Often, it does a much better job at marketing real infrastructural improvements than the inventors ever could. It also can disrupt established and parasitic rent-seekers. I’m not a fan of Uber, a service used mostly because it confers the value of being able to say one uses it (i.e. is able to afford it) but I do welcome anything that threatens to take down the Medallion Mafia. The problem with light technology’s bubbles is that they overreach and, when they get beyond their natural territory, the marketing wizards become devastatingly incompetent. We see a once-great city ruined by absurd rents due to the complete inability of the supposed wunderkinder to solve the city’s biggest problem: housing scarcity. We see that horrific, Aspergerian foray into politics that is Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us (which I call “fweed-oos” because I refuse to call it “forward” anything). We see a whole society beginning to hate technology because a few hundred overprivileged celebrity jackasses (most of whom haven’t written code for decades, if ever) are going out and making a bad name for all of us. That’s bad for the future of technology. It’s bad for those of us who are coming up.

So… fuck it, let’s see if we can end this shit on our own terms, or at least take it down a peg or few. My job is to bring truth, and then it’s up to us as a group to decide what to do with it.

I started my first business (a computer programming consultancy) when I was pretty young (21), in 1986. At the time I had worked for a little over a year and a half for the application programming department of a dutch bank. The department had 100 employees divided into several teams and about 35 people hired from companies such as BSO and Volmac (loosely termed ‘body shops’, not a very nice term).

The atmosphere there was very corporate, lots of suits, almost exclusively guys, programming main frames with a terribly old-fashioned development cycle (if you got 2 ect’s in on a day you were a lucky guy). It felt pretty stifling there and I longed for more freedom. In part this was caused by me actually liking programming and working really hard whereas the majority of the people there were happy to putter along as long as they got their salary. Morale there wasn’t exactly at an all time high. After talking with my manager (http://nl.linkedin.com/in/esdeleeuw hey Eddy! thanks!), we agreed that maybe banking wasn’t for me and I should try to use my skills to do my own thing. I wasn’t let go but I’m quite sure that a lot of people breathed easier when this misfit left.

Within a week of starting I’d found my first contract job and I managed to find another before that one ran out and so on. Little by little I managed to build up a reputation for delivering the goods and I got more and more work by referral.

At some point this led me to having more work than I could reasonably be expected to perform and I increased my prices to match. In 1995 I hired my first employee, by 2000 it was up to 25 employees in two offices.

This was the first time I realised that my desire for freedom had led me straight back to having less freedom than I had when I started this whole saga!

As an entrepreneur, if you are successful, you will automatically reduce your freedom as long as you haven’t sold your business. Only when you’re between projects or companies do you actually have a degree of freedom. The only other time that you have freedom is when you’re entirely alone and working in some ‘life-style’ (I hate that term) business. As soon as you’re successful, boom, freedom gone.

So if you’re planning on doing a start-up because you’d like to have more freedom, think twice. Do not aim for success, or if you do realize that you are going to give up your freedom for the foreseeable future with a chance of recouping it at some level in the future. (Hopefully, if you exit successful you’ll be able to live the good life for a bit but unless your exit is a spectacular one you’ll be back in the harness sooner or later).

Freedom at work, you can get at some 9-5 job just as easy if not easier because even though you have responsibilities, you can always quit. Founders of companies can’t quit that easily, they would have to at a minimum find a suitable replacement (very hard) or a company to sell theirs to without having to sign on for another 3 to 5 years (also very hard). There is a subtle trade-off here, with a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. A one-person company that does not aim for the stars, makes you enough in a few months to live for a few years is probably the best to aim for if you really desire freedom, if that freedom means to be able to do whatever it is that you want to do with your remaining time.

Entrepreneurship at even a moderate level of success is an endless chain of responsibilities and hardships wrapped in a foil thin layer that spells ‘freedom’, but it really isn’t all that free at all!

The idea of quality of life is very twentieth-century. It sparks associations with ideas like statistical quality control and total quality management. It is the idea that entire human lives can be objectively modeled, measured and compared in meaningful ways. That lives can be idealized and normalized in ways that allow us to go beyond comparisons to absolute measures. That lives can be provisioned from cradle-to-grave. That an insistence on a unique, subjective evaluation of one’s own life is something of a individualist-literary conceit.

I suspect the phrase itself is a generalization of the older notion of modern conveniences, a phrase you frequently find in early twentieth-century writing. It referred to the diffusion of various technologies into everyday pre-industrial life, from running hot and cold water in bathrooms and garbage collection to anesthetics and vaccines.

That conception of the quality of life, as the sum total of material conveniences acquired and brutalities of nature thwarted through technology, seems naive today. But with hindsight, it was much better than what it evolved into: baroque United Nations statistics that reflect institutionally enabled and enforced scripts, which dictate what people ought to want.

***

In 2013, the concept of quality of life is effectively drowning in the banality of self-reported statistical surveys based on unreconstructed concepts overloaded with institutionalized connotations.

Just looking at (for example) the Gallup well-being survey categories – career, social, financial, physical, community – depresses me. It’s not just that the words themselves denote banal categories with which to think about life. You know that they also have the force of committee interpretations by statisticians and economists behind them. Committees that probably included no writers of imaginative fiction or speculative philosophy.

The very consensual familiarity of those concepts, which makes them suitable for designing metrics and assessments, makes them useless in actually figuring out what quality of life means. The idea that you take a survey repeatedly over a long period of time, with thousands of others, to figure out whether you are living a quality life is in the not-even-wrong category. That mental model is suitable for tracking your weight or height. Not for quality of life.

An indicator of the sort of absurdity that results when you take such thinking seriously is the research finding that money does not buy happiness beyond a point. Or more precisely, that subjective self-reported “happiness” does not correlate with income above $75,000 or so, in the US.

Why is the hypothesis that we earn incomes in order to buy happiness from some sort of standard-life-script store even a reasonable one, worthy of research?

How about money as a creative stab at attaining retirement security using something other than a tax-law-incentivized 401(k) plan? Money as planning for kids’ futures outside of colleges? Money as a Plan B for health emergencies that occur while uninsured? Money as flexibility in when and how you can choose to do stuff? Money as a necessary kind of fuel in status races we instinctively engage in? Money as the capacity to spiral into stoned, drunken debauchery? Money as something to blow on a yacht in order to investigate the idea that sailing in luxury around the world might be create meaning in life? Money for individuals to invest in building both useless first-world apps and Mars rockets?

In short, money as freedom to decide what quality of life means to us?

***

To start with the can-money-buy-happiness question is to assume you have a valid framework within which to make sense of what people might mean by a loaded-and-focused word like happiness.

To measure the ability to pursue quality of life in terms of income is to assume the validity of prevailing scripts that classify quality of life as a consumption commodity. Something to be acquired through some mix of direct provisioning by others, and cash outlays within restricted categories.

The problem goes deeper than this artificial separation. How is it meaningful to ask how income correlates with happiness without asking precisely how much control we have in spending it? Could the $75,000 threshold discovered merely be an artifact of enforced consumption rigidity in middle and upper-class scripts, where marginal income dollars above that amount are already earmarked for socially expected and institutionally incentivized expenses (think home-buying and saving for college)? A sort of “cost of doing business” in a particular social class? Do people who flout those norms manage to move the threshold higher? Or are they penalized so harshly that they regret flouting those norms? Do mavericks see increasing happiness levels up to $200,000 instead of $75,000? Or does the threshold drop because of the increased financial burdens that come with breakaway scripts?

Why isn’t the most important financial threshold in the inner lives of many, rich or poor, the subjective notion of fuck-you money, the first thing to study? Why isn’t there a major UN study tracking what people consider fuck-you money? Why aren’t Nobel-winning behavioral economists designing clever experiments to tease out how we think about this quantity? It is, after all, our main subjective measure of how not-free we perceive ourselves to be.

Nobody, other than bureaucrats who fund research and economists, asks the question “how much income is needed to be happy?” We already know that talking about happiness without talking about what trade-offs we are making to pursue it is meaningless. The rest of us real people ask the question “how much wealth is required to be free of scripts that dictate what trade-offs you are allowed to make?”

It does not really matter if you generalize beyond income to various in-kind quality-of-life elements like a clean environment or access to healthcare. If you are not measuring prevailing levels of freedom you are measuring nothing relevant. Until people start answering $0 to the fuck-you-money question across the planet, you can be sure that they do not perceive themselves to be free enough to properly pursue quality of life.

The interesting question is not what money doesn’t buy us that economists assume we do, but what it does buy us that we seek it so obsessively.

***

At the other end of the spectrum from happiness-money and fuck-you-money, we have dollar-a-day politics.

McDonald’s was recently excoriated for daring to actually engage the question of how to live on a minimum wage in the United States.

On the other side of the planet in India, a politician recently found himself in trouble for suggesting that it was still possible to have a hearty meal in Mumbai for Rs. 12 (about $0.20), as part of an ongoing debate to redefine the poverty line at Rs. 33.30 per day (about $0.54).

It isn’t that these suggestions are offensive in and of themselves. I actually found the McDonald’s chart thought-provoking (even though the motives behind it are probably not-quite-best-faith) and the Indian politician’s remark a reasonable enough factoid to throw into the debate.

The problem isn’t specific stupid numbers or specific ideas about how to live on certain incomes. The problem is that we have stupid discussions about numbers because we cannot have intelligent discussions about what quality of life means. Our culture forces us to argue about how others ought to pursue quality-of-life. You there, save for college. You there, buy a house. You there, get your calories and daily protein requirement before you get your psychadelics.

Both McDonald’s and the Indian politician might have sparked far more interesting debates if they had included the local price of pot in their speculations about the budgets of others. But of course, they couldn’t, because they would have faced even greater punishment for tangibly highlighting freedom as potentially being a component of a quality life.

It is easy to dismiss such ideas as the  criticism of hard-working bureaucrats in thankless jobs by first-world residents working the top of their Maslow hierarchy of needs. Perhaps those navigating the bottom of the hierarchy of needs in Africa benefit from hard-nosed attempts to reduce poetic thoughts about freedom into clean-edged models and metrics.

The problem is, this approach doesn’t work in Africa either. And it is paternalistic to suggest that it does.

***

The basics. It is perhaps the favorite phrase of aid workers working to bring modern conveniences to the millions who lack it, starting with the basics, such as clean water and early childhood healthcare.

It is not that the act of providing the basics is itself a paternalistic act. But the notions of quality-of-life informing the act can make it so, and radically affect the structure of societies that start to emerge as the provisioning mechanisms harden into institutions. We know this because over a century, that is precisely what happened in the “developed” world that so many are miserable in today.

The disturbing paternalism in the idea lies in the implicit assumption that those who lack clean water can be treated as desperate water-seeking zombies with no higher aspirations. That when water is the immediate priority, it is the also the only priority and the most important priority. That it would be somehow wrong of a poor person to choose to spend money on a temporary escape by watching a movie for instance, before prioritizing clean water. That it would be even wronger for that person to succumb to hopelessness and find solace in getting stoned for a while.

When you actually meet people living in tough conditions, you realize that they don’t exactly make up dreams for their lives in some UN-approved sequence; water first, food next, healthcare third, money fourth, philosophy when I am rich, alcohol and marijuana never. With “democracy” injected somewhere along the an S-curve from pre-industrial squalor to post-industrial anomie.

Humans are capable of nurturing rockstar dreams even while they are schlepping their twenty-miles-a-day to fetch water. There is a reason there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones.

Basketball — hardly a “basic” —  has arguably done more to help the Black community in America heal the scars of slavery and overcome the tribulations of life in violent ghettos than clumsy efforts to provide the “basics.” In India, I suspect denial of access to street cricket and Bollywood music would cause riots faster than turning off the water supply. We are willing to trade running tap water for a mile-long walk if the alternative is to give up TV.

Even for those literally living on less than a dollar a day, the quality of life is about more than a hard daily scramble for the “basics.” Humans strive to live full lives whatever their situation. This requires freedom. 

Fear of this fact is at the root of all authoritarian attempts to model and measure the quality of life.

***

I sometimes get the feeling that benefactors who set out to help others navigate by their own notions of what constitutes unsightly and smelly squalor in their lives rather than what counts as quality in beneficiaries’ lives.

We are afraid that if we allow those with less the right to choose what quality of life means to them, they may make choices that lower the quality of our lives. If a slum-dweller chooses to use resources to buy a TV rather than address the squalor that intrudes on the visual and olfactory lives of the rich, there is a problem. A problem to be addressed by taking away cash and offering in-kind “aid” in the form of housing and sanitation projects that conform to the aesthetic priorities of the rich.

Worse yet, a minimum-wage worker might find balanced quality-of-life by doing her work at a fast-food chain with visibly sullen reluctance, and finding relief elsewhere. A problem to be solved by offering motivational seminars in the workplace and requiring fast-food workers to sport duchenne smiles and pieces of flair while they are visible to the rich.

And perhaps worst of all, the slum-dweller, once basic needs are taken care of, might use his next few marginal dollars to feed his now-foregrounded resentments with radical literature rather than spend money on showers, haircuts and turning his shanty into less of an eyesore.

I suspect the fear of such choices is what makes us fearful of simply giving the poor money rather than solutions to what we perceive as the problems in their lives. Money has its problems as a proxy for freedom, but it is better than offering a sandwich to a homeless person because you suspect he might use the equivalent amount of money to buy a beer instead.

The free response of less privileged individuals to perceptions of relative deprivation is not always what the more privileged hope it will be. If I were poor, and had to choose between eating more protein and escaping the hopelessness of my life for a few hours a day by watching TV while stoned, I’d probably choose the stoned TV-watching. Like millions of actual poor people seem to. Along with their $75,000+ middle-class peers.

This should tell us something: whatever its definition, quality of life cannot be a partial notion that focuses on “basics” and tables questions of freedom and self-actualization for future discussion when all participants are well-fed, watered, bathed, clothed and clean-shaven. Because people don’t define or seek out quality piecemeal, let alone in a sequence.

As Macaulay once noted: “If men are to wait for liberty till they become good and wise in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.”

***

So the search for meaning in life does not wait on the satisfaction of basic needs. Any notion of quality of life that starts with a breakdown and classification of quality of life into more and less basic needs is starting in the wrong place. Any model that conceptualizes development as a progressive fulfillment of needs in a predictable sequence, and offers aid constrained by that sequence (or worse, penalizes attempts by beneficiaries to break out of the sequence), is headed for a very quick unraveling.

You need music and literature even when you are hungry and ill. There is a reason middle-class revolutionaries stir up popular passions among the hungry and dispossessed with theology, philosophical rhetoric and self-actualization narratives rather than narratives driven by the logic of access to basic resources.

Prisoners in California currently on a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement policies illustrate the poverty of such linear-sequential approaches to quality of life. I know nothing about the issue or the merits of various positions in the debate. What interests me is the undoubted symbolic significance of refusing satisfaction of a “more basic” need in order to protest non-satisfaction of a “less basic” one. Though I am not a Gandhi fan, he understood the power of such signalling. It is the most basic way to undermine the mental models of those who presume to dictate what “basics” ought to mean to you and whether you are competent to decide for yourself.

***

We vastly underestimate the degree to which humans will prioritize recognition and honor, even under the most extreme of conditions.

To provide the basics in order to allow the recipients of charity to make more choices as they see fit is to understand quality of life.

To provide the basics as the first step in a fully scripted development path, deviation from which invites withdrawal of the basics, is to be paternalistic about it. In a way, it is our modern version of the medieval idea that the needy should “know their place” and “not forget their station.”

I don’t know much about the history of civil rights in America, but I remember a lecture explaining the difference between the views of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois in precisely these terms.

It is the difference between quality of life as an affordance to be provisioned and quality of life as a freedom to be protected. 

In America itself, the conception of quality of life itself started with a very shaky idea, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the contradiction between the second and third elements of that phrase that is the problem.

In order for a definition of quality of life to be meaningful, it needs to include a mechanism that allows it to be challenged and reconstructed by individuals. Happiness in America has become such a loaded signifier of entrenched scripts that it is less than useless to talk about it.

We should be thinking in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of fuck-you money. The last element is not a restatement of the idea of liberty. Liberty, understood in the traditional sense, is freedom from having others arbitrarily beat you up, lock you up, or kill you. Pursuit of fuck-you money is much more than that: the right to seek resources to script your own definition of quality.

***

So to repeat, the Maslow pyramid isn’t some sort of sequential script for life. Once truly acute stressors — we’re talking being chased by lions right now – are removed, the quality of life is a function of the whole pyramid, not just the level you happen to be navigating at that moment. Life isn’t a video game. You never really complete a level and move on. You don’t need to complete a level before being afforded a glimpse of the next one. You don’t need to tackle the levels in a set order.

Heck, you don’t need to go to Africa, India, American prisons or the home of a McDonald’s worker to appreciate how we pursue quality in life. Just look at your own. I, for instance, happen to be royally screwing up all sane notions of “retirement security” in order to pursue some sort of self-actualization through writing. At an age — 38 — when Fidelity is emailing me notices informing me that the investment choices in my retirement portfolio are “not appropriate for [my] age.”

It is easy to let yourself believe that the “middle class script” that we all like to criticize these days is merely some irrational pattern of individually chosen behavior that exists purely in culture and persists because we adopt it through mindless imitation. Gemeinschaft stupidity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Imitation is actually not a particularly important force. In fact, as an expression of free choice, it is entirely defensible as a way of picking a life-script.

The problem is that there is more than imitation at work here.

The script is hard-wired into the institutional landscape in ways that make it nearly impossible to break out of. From government programs that navigate by statistical models of quality of life to retirement planning infrastructure like the 401(k) program in the United States, to appropriate-behavior cues that are relentlessly reinforced in a million little ways, ranging from paternalistic emails from Fidelity to regulations that make it vastly simpler to seek paychecks than business income.

The justification for such mechanisms is usually conflict pre-emption. The systems are supposedly designed to ensure that your pursuit of your idea of a quality life does not get in the way of others pursuits.

That supposition does not hold up to scrutiny. But I won’t go there today.

***

When UN economists celebrate some book-keeping milestone towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, nobody really feels like joining them. Most have no idea what precisely is worth celebrating. When you get to more ambitious constructs, like the Happy Planet Index, you get greater absurdity, not greater insight.

Human life, modeled by economists, measured by bureaucrats, and celebrated by statisticians, seems to miss the point in some deep way. If we need those sorts of experts to tell us what constitutes a good life, and whether or we’ve achieved it, something is already very wrong.

The industrial approach to the quality of life is less about actually ensuring subjective quality of life via increasing freedom, and more about achieving stabilizing conditions via more complete provisioning. Conditions under which nobody is acutely distressed enough to disrupt a prevailing social order. Ensuring “happiness” or anything else is not the point. Reducing the urgency of the desire to define happiness for yourself is the point.

And so we are told that money does not buy happiness above $75,000 a year via a conjuring trick of a question that allows us to believe that our own definitions of happiness are in play. It is a lie in the same category as the ones parents tell their children when they cannot grant freedoms, or do not want to do so, you don’t really want to go to Disneyland, there’s nothing there really, our local theme park is much better. 

Money does not buy happiness not because it cannot, but because the freedom to spend it intelligently is locked away in institutionally advantaged scripts that make irresistible claims on marginal discretionary dollars above that amount.

Which is why fuck you money is the right term for aspiring to more. To reach for $75,0001 while rejecting the approved list of ways to spend the extra $1 is to say fuck you to somebody else’s notion of a happiness-and-well-being script.  Incentives to conform to said script be damned.

***

A deep truth about the human condition as captured in the Maslow hierarchy is that it is much easier for humans to help each other with acute needs at lower levels of the hierarchy. For all non-acute needs, and acute needs in the upper levels, the only defensible way to help others is to increase their freedom of action. Whether they choose to make themselves happy or miserable with that freedom is up to them.

So how did we get ourselves into a situation where institutions, politicians and economists are trying to tell us what quality of life ought to mean? How did we get to the point where arbitrary ideas like home ownership and a college education have been inserted into the script of oughts and shoulds?

In a way, the King of Bhutan is to blame for this state of affairs. When it was first introduced in 1972, the idea of Gross National Happiness seemed like a farcical idea from a pristine Buddhist Eden far from the concerns and constraints of modernity.

And it was farcical, but only visibly so because of the pre-industrial context. Industrial-era happiness scripts have been pulling a King-of-Bhutan on large populations since about 1900. The good king lent such macro-scale script engineering efforts a kind of hippie-Buddhist legitimacy that they were unable to achieve on their own.

Four decades later, with the rise and fall of positive psychology and the rise of Tony Hsieh style corporate cultural engineering, the Big Idea from Bhutan idea seems serious in a way it never did before.

Whether it is a UN committee or a Buddhist king doing the defining doesn’t really matter. To the extent that freedom is a central element of it, happiness defined is happiness denied.

In an episode of Yes, Minister titled “The Quality of Life” that aired in 1981, at the dawn of the Thatcher-Reagan era, Jim Hacker, the hapless minister decides to tilt at some Bhutanese windmills. Troubled by the ugly skylines of modernity, Hacker takes on the cause of a struggling urban farm at the heart of London, convinced that preserving a little patch of nature for urban kids would be a moral victory of sorts. He gets his victory, but it is a Pyrhhic one. He finds himself manipulated into supporting a property developer’s agenda elsewhere, in order to preserve the farm.

The fictional farce of Yes, Minister has turned into the genuine tragicomic farce that is the kerfuffle over Hayes Valley Farm in San Francisco.

***

I’ve been making a lot of fun in recent months of those who frame social evolution as a dialectical conflict between a human notion of the quality of life and an industrial notion of what it takes to sustain it.

I make no apologies for that. I find first-world artisans, Jeffersonian small businesses and other sorts of small-and-local ideologues funny. Funny because of the cluelessness of their underlying understanding of how the world does or could work.

But I do sympathize with the motives driving such behaviors. In a way, such behaviors constitute a rejection of industrial-age notions of quality of life developed by statisticians, bureaucrats and economists, and attempt to recover a more meaningful notion.

Right problem, wrong approach. Not aesthetically or ideologically wrong, but physics wrong. But still, it is better than the not-even-wrong approach of UN economists.

So it is a start. We have asked the right question. What does it mean to live a quality life today? 

If the answer is sought via a survey, or measured via an economic indicator, it is wrong. If the answer is philosophically different for Africans without access to the “basics” and privileged San Franciscans fighting to preserve an urban farm, it is wrong.

An objective, defensible notion of quality of life must exhibit, at the philosophical level, a certain context-independent universality  that reflects the shared human condition embedded within technological realities.

At the same time, at the subjective level, it must start with a freedom to define quality-of-life in more tangible, non-philosophical terms, for oneself.

Yes, paradoxical, I know, like those recursive acronyms computer programmers like.

The two must harmonize. The neo-Jeffersonians do have a word for it. They call it empowerment. The ability to decide what quality of life means to you, and pursue it.

Where they go wrong is in becoming attached to a fixed notion of what it means to be human. That it is an ideal created and promoted by a grassroots culture that romanticizes pre-industrial realities, rather than economists or Bhutanese royals, does not make it any less confining.

Sadly attachment to a pre-industrial notion of human means regress, not progress, which is perhaps worse than being told by the UN whether you are living a quality life.

***

In a way, it’s like the eighties and cyberpunk never happened.

We regressed from the adult appreciation and acceptance of technological realities that became widespread during that decade, to an unreconstructed revival of 60s and 70s idealism, repackaged in the language of social media and tyrannical #Occupy collectivism.

Rather than evolve to what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “simplicity on the other side of complexity” we are regressing to the simplicity on “this side of complexity.”

Like Holmes, “I would not give a farthing for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

The journey requires us to make sense of the hump in the middle, technological modernity, and reconstruct our notions of quality of life, individually and collectively around it.

I recently encountered a manifesto that’s been doing the rounds, the accelerationist manifesto, that does slightly better than neo-Jeffersonian romantic dreaming. Unfortunately, while it valiantly attempts to scale the mountain of technological complexity and get to the other side, it ultimately fails because it too remains attached to a 1960s notion of what it means to be human (as best as I was able to understand that document).

It frames an impossible problem: pursuing an idealized human notion of quality of life while acknowledging technological realities.

***

If the humanists of both Jeffersonian and Accelerationist persuasions fail to reconstruct their identities around technological modernity, another promising group, the liberaltarian technologist crowd, gets a little bit farther. Not far enough, but well beyond humanists of any stripe.

The operating categories of this crowd — entrepreneurship, PUA, passive income, 4-Hour Body, online communities  – suggests a mental model of quality of life that is not radically different from the one informing the Gallup well-being survey or the UN Millennium Development Goals. It’s still career, social, financial, physical, community.

The difference though, is that the base constructs have been loosened to the point that there can be significant individual autonomy in figuring out at least locally viable referents.

There is not much appreciative engagement of technological realities, but there is certainly highly competent instrumental engagement. Unlike the humanists, the liberaltarians can and do hack the planet to mine freedom for themselves.

But ultimately, a failure to appreciate one’s condition via abstractions becomes a failure to change it in more aggressive ways. This is a failure of imagination. The liberaltarians are not attached to romanticizied notions of human. But they are not able to offer alternative notions of being that rise above particulars like SEO consultant in Bali. 

The consequences are immediate in their own lives. The big, dark secret of the lifestyle design movement is failed relationships (or failure to even form relationships). When you cannot construct shared explicit meanings, your social possibilities narrow to those who make similar choices and therefore share tacit meanings with you.

Nature abhors a conceptual vacuum. Where new appreciative constructs are lacking, old ones get resurrected in repackaged ways. Any day now, I expect some lifestyle designer in Bali to collaborate with a quantified-self bro-scientist in San Francisco and come up with a notion of minimum-viable lean life. And then the UN will turn that into a survey and include an entrepreneurship metric in its models.

Freedom is not the same as access to entrepreneurial modes of being. That is still provisioning with an element of gambling.

But at least we’ve made another small improvement. From not even wrong questions and answers to right question, wrong answer, we’ve arrived at right question, workable starter answer. 

We are getting somewhere. Frustratingly slowly and painfully, but we’re moving.

It’s a start.

Note: this essay is a sort of companion piece of sorts to one that appeared in Aeon Magazine a couple of weeks ago, that you might also enjoy. That piece explores the specifics of how quality of life exists as a provisioned set of affordances rather than a set of freedoms. 

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So, either some garbage elves cleaned up part of the park and neglected the other part, OR some people are fucking assholes and some people are not.

(Thanks, @Braccs.)

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