Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

@vgr post about hypernormalization vs weirdness as two opposite modes people are using to navigate the world in 2024 articulated something I’ve been trying to get at. 

Ties into the institutionalist vs anti-institutionalist groups as well. Though many anti-institutionalists simply want their point of view in power.

I think a few years ago, in either naïveté or optimism, I used to think we could take the YC model and reconstruct vital institutions from the ground-up from the SV playbook. I no longer think this: SV playbook is a narrow recipe for success in a domain with zero marginal costs and inexpensive iteration.

Even the non-software examples associated with SV like SpaceX or Tesla ride on massive institutional knowledge from industry veterans. Musk won’t acknowledge this because it doesn’t feed into his brand as the first-principles disrupter but it’s true.

There’s more personal upside in starting your own company so a lot of people do it and yes they wouldn’t have the permission to make the changes they desire if they joined Boeing. But abandoning them to the most incompetent people means catastrophic failure for society.

We need more of what Satya Nadella did at Microsoft. Revitalization of major institutions needs to go up in status. Hypernormal solutions are part of the puzzle.

And in this world, relegating important companies like Boeing to the dust while working on plane startups in YC seems like a case of misaligned personal incentives more than something the world needs.