Wake up! It's time to build.
The recent must-read article from Marc Andreessen It's time to build, has made waves far beyond the Silicon Valley.
He comes in, tearing down the gates
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
In the west, we've become complacent. We are merely making little bets and stopped taking big risks.
Andreessen identifies four major examples of that (all directly quoted, just summarized):
1. You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities.
We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential — which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?
2. You see it in education.
We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. We know one-to-one tutoring can reliably increase education outcomes by two standard deviations (the Bloom two-sigma effect); we have the internet; why haven’t we built systems to match every young learner with an older tutor to dramatically improve student success?
3. You see it in manufacturing.
Why has so much manufacturing been off-shored to places with cheaper manual labor? We know how to build highly automated factories. Outsourced production and supply chains are not sustainable. Not for us, not for the planet. Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our countries?
4. You see it in transportation.
Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?
His rant goes on excluding both money (all of the above fields are highly lucrative already) and technical competence (we do know how to build the next generation) as possible reasons on why we stopped building and stopped dreaming.
But then Andreessen hit the nail on the head:
The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if existing players don’t like it, even if only to force the existing players to build these things.
"Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?"
And while he is certainly polarizing in his essay, I think he has a point. I feel like this virus has woken us up from a big nap. People are slowly waking up to the fact that the west has turned comfortably numb. We forgot that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. The people who we owe our comfortable numbness to: The people who built the roads, the factories, the computers, the internet, smartphones and all those other things that we are taking for granted.
It's cool when startups innovate on new remote working tools, meditation apps and online plants delivery, but where are the big risks (high reward) bets? Especially governments and the corporate world have become more polarizing and power-grabbing over the past 15 years rather than stepping in and leading the way. Because big challenges like housing, education, manufacturing, and transportation can certainly be innovated upon by startups, but are only really possible to go mainstream if the governmental regulations and corporate investments follow suit.
However, I honestly ask myself, now that the media, world organizations, our politicians and power-holding corporates are so divided and have lost so much of the public trust, are they even able to lead the way and get back to building (in the way Andreessen talks about) in the foreseeable future?
In his words we must:
There is only one way to honor the legacy of previous generations and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.
