I became enamored by the world of startups after seeing The Social Network in high school. I had previously wanted to become a music producer and chase the dream of being an artist. Something was activated in me by that movie. It was likely equal parts that I identified with the outsider, Zuck, and that building startups was an incredibly monetizable route for my creative ambitions. Shortly after, I taught myself to build. I experienced all the pitfalls that come along with self-teaching programming, and I eventually pulled myself from the depths of tutorial hell with my keyboard held high. It wasn't for another, at least, 5 years until I'd come up with the basic concept of PLATO5, an AI social app of my own, and a decent amount longer until I'd stumble upon the idea for Emstrata, my most recent project that utilizes AI to generate emergent narratives you can live in. I had other ideas early on. My earliest was a weirdly ambitious idea for a 17-year-old: A new way to monetize music for independent artists called MUSICORUM, that allowed users to purchase percentages of independent musicians' royalties and fund their careers. Now, obviously, I could sit here and poke holes in that today, but what I had at that time was an idea that sounds a lot like what Patreon became. Later I pivoted the idea to include crypto for funding and also a music video streaming app, but I wasn't ready to build anything close to that complex on my own, nor should I have. I slowly lost interest and I had other ideas, like Isle, a simple app that was a mix between productivity software and social media. You would create public occurrences that would display on a timeline that other people could check out. It was clean and simple, and also an early example of me trying to give people tools to meet each other for public events. Isle was sort of a prototypical version of PLATO5 in many ways.
The Silicon Valley of my late teens was one that I glamorized. I don't recognize it. The startup stories of today are largely that of little innovation and quick exits. B2B SaaS products with a severe want for taste and imagination litter the rolling hills of tech hubs. Behemoth tech giant conglomerates eat competitors with their endless resources. Competition exists, but it exists between companies with pockets deeper than most countries and CEOs with net worths only matched by their arrogance. Perhaps I hold a misconception born of nostalgia, but I doubt it. Zuckerberg started Facebook in a dorm room and now he couldn't conceivably fall from the top of the subindustry of social media, without some sort of divine intervention. It has seemed almost insurmountable to build a new social app since at least 2015. TikTok has broken the mold there, but that was doubtless a herculean feat only possible with metric tons of money. Plus, the social apps of today aren't even original. Snapchat introduces stories and the others copy, TikTok blows up and all of a sudden every app has a short-video feed. Even the outbreak ideas of our time have a short-lasting impact due to obvious mimicry. Perhaps I'm just lamenting the fact that it's much more difficult to shock the world with an app, but I don't quite think it's that either. ChatGPT's launch was also enormous, and shocked the world in this traditional sense, but again, that was an Olympian lift, with the backing of an insane amount of capital and a once-in-a-lifetime innovation. And, further deepening my point, Meta, Google, and many others copied them within months of launch, rather than investing in their own new, exciting products. Smart Business? Maybe. Great for people who genuinely enjoy new tech and invention? Definitely not.
Naturally, founders have adapted to this new world of copycats and acquisitions. People have begun to build for exits, bump up their engagement metrics, and learn all the buzzwords that VCs orgasm to upon utterance. Founders don't opt to build new platforms or tools anymore, which on a personal level, is about the only thing I find interesting to build. They have moved toward building incremental improvements to existing solutions or products that are just branded slightly differently to capture a different market segment.
If we go back further in time, we have Steve Wozniak and Jobs' idyllic tech landscape. A relative blank canvas from where we sit today. Unfathomable possibilities and unparalleled innovation. They sat on the precipice of a typhoon of consumer electronics that they would unleash on the world from a garage in California. It was a world with far fewer gatekeepers or hyper-entrenched players with checkbooks utilized as artillery. A place where an early sort of Countercultural Tech thrived and things were built because they should exist.
This is gone. Maybe it exists in pockets, but from a bird's-eye view, it's nonexistent. Anti-competitive practices are simply the rules of the road on this highway and there's no clear upswell fighting against this. We will see less innovation, more pattycake between overpowered enterprises who have long forgotten what it was like to build what should exist and instead build what should pad their shareholders' pockets with buzzwords ready to fire at a moment's notice. They went from 'move fast and break things' to 'maintain market position and buy the competition'. The money that flooded into the industry over the decades following the era of the advent of the personal computer likely contorted this revolutionary wave into its current form.
Now, all hope is not lost. I guess hope is the one true human universal. There's always a chance to make things better, even in a face-off with entrenched powers with unbelievable resources. My proposal is a cultural one: Countercultural Tech. A philocultural path for bringing new ideas to bear under these circumstances, that maintains chiefly the aim of always building to build what should exist. A path that rejects VC orthodoxy and catering to people who want subpar or incremental creation because it's easier to sell. We want a tech that revolutionizes and inspires again and isn't beholden to the interests of financiers with 12 vacation homes in 7 nations and 4 yachts, but perhaps accountable to the people or at least genuine innovation and tasteful execution.
To build what should exist could be seen as ambiguous, so let me expound on how this relates to ethical and cultural considerations. As mentioned above, many ambitious, young founders have gone the route of building a company for a quick exits or to get noticed by a VC firm. They treat the term 'Founder' as if it's a job position, rather than an indicator of grit and creative entrepreneurship that struggles to find footing in normal employment. This is the VC orthodoxy that has captured an entire generation of industrious builders. To build counterculturally you must surgically remove that rot from your mind. You need to build to effectuate some ideal future, whether that means maximizing profit or not. And, to be clear, that doesn't mean that a hyper-profitable company can just paste on a slogan or two and be considered Countercultural Tech. It will be clear in how a business is run, whether they are trying to effectuate a better society or not, as it always was.
Let me be clear, I'm not begging for a change in this piece. This is a statement of intention. I aim to innovate at the level of the people I look up to and hope that's enough to break through the scaffolding and create something better on the other side. To find a place to build things that should exist. I hope you join me there.