Vice is profitable

Vice is profitable.

It’s not a better UX, but it is more sustainable, from a business standpoint, for the business.

In order to propagate systems that are healthy for users, we must build virtuous systems in the absence of the strong financial outlook that fuels the development of extractive systems.

Healthy systems are possible. They are buildable. But the incentives to build them are less compelling than the incentives behind extractive systems.

It is harder to build a system that resists profit incentives. It has to be built healthy on purpose.

Just as organisms thrive when they eat, building an organism that eats less is harder. An organism that eats less is unlikely to spontaneously emerge in the presence of food.

Humans are the food. Our data is the food. And we have been trained by profitable systems to offer ourselves to be feasted upon, for the endorphins.

So systems that are good for the human are hard to build, and unlikely to arise spontaneously.

It is easy to convert a human-respecting system into a system that feeds on humans. Just collect the data and sell it. Just goose the pixels and tokens to funnel the human toward the profit mouth. That is all it takes to warp what was once good, if it ever was good at all.

The most important invention now is a system that is good for humans. Not just lip service. Not just feed them with one hand while stabbing them with the other. But a system that wants to help the human.

Lots of builders have good hearts and good intentions, but we are thrown into a capitalist world, and the machine of our society that has emerged from natural forces sustains itself by feeding on the well-being of the individual. Humans would lose in the natural-selection competition against the machines we would inevitably build.

It’s time to be thoughtful.

We must invent the machine that actually helps the individual, end to end, horizontally, vertically, over time, and across domains.

A system built to serve the human individual.

Tech of Our Own.