Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness
Software possesses an extremely strange property: it is possible to create high-value software products with effectively zero capital outlay. As Mozilla engineer Sam Penrose put it, software programming is labor that creates capital.
The difference has a simple cause: unsullied purist visions have value beyond anxiety-alleviation and planning. They are also a critical authoritarian marketing and signaling tool — like formal dinners featuring expensive china — for attracting and concentrating scarce resources in fields such as architecture. In an environment of abundance, there is much less need for visions to serve such a marketing purpose.
Purist visions tend to arise when authoritarian architects attempt to concentrate and use scarce resources optimally, in ways they often sincerely believe is best for all.
tinkering is focused on steady progress rather than optimal end-states that realize a totalizing vision. It is usually driven by individual interests and not obsessively concerned with grand and paternalistic “best for all” objectives.
With Moore’s Law kicking in, pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay codified the idea of abundance orientation with the observation that programmers ought to “waste transistors” in order to truly unleash the power of computing.
Constraints in software tend to be relatively few and obvious. Possibilities, however, tend to be intimidatingly vast. Resisting limiting visions, finding the most fertile direction, and allying with the right people become the primary challenges.
This general principle of fertility-seeking has been repeatedly rediscovered and articulated in a bewildering variety of specific forms. The statements have names such as the principle of least commitment (planning software), the end-to-end principle (network design), the procrastination principle (architecture), optionality (investing), paving the cowpaths (interface design), lazy evaluation (language design) and late binding (code execution).
Such principles might seem dangerously playful and short-sighted, but under conditions of increasing abundance, with falling costs of failure, they turn out to be wise. It is generally smarter to assume that problems that seem difficult and important today might become trivial or be rendered moot in the future. Behaviors that would be short-sighted in the context of scarcity become far-sighted in the context of abundance.
At an ethical level, rough consensus is deeply anti-authoritarian, since it avoids constraining the freedoms of future stakeholders simply to allay present anxieties. The rejection of “voting” in the IETF model is a rejection of a false sense of egalitarianism, rather than a rejection of democratic principles.
The decade after the dot com crash of 2000 demonstrated the value of this principle clearly. Startups derided for prioritizing “growth in eyeballs” (an “interestingness” direction) rather than clear models of steady-state profitability (a self-limiting purist vision of an idealized business) were eventually proven right.
Iconic “eyeball” based businesses, such as Google and Facebook, turned out to be highly profitable. Businesses which prematurely optimized their business model in response to revenue anxieties limited their own potential and choked off their own growth.