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I’ve had this nagging sense that something is not even wrong about the views (single-use weltenschauungs?) being applied to the pandemic: as a health or economic crisis. Both frames are wrong, because both presume a fundamentally intact (if stressed) civilizational tech stack.
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I think this is primarily a tech stack crisis, or just stack crisis since the tech is sorta implied. The assumption that it’s the same emergent machine, just overloaded and unbalanced in parts, and temporarily broken in non-fatal ways at the margins... this is false.
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What actually happened: 1. We assumed the stack has a pause button. We decided to hit what looked like a pause button, to trade a major health crisis for a major economic crisis. 2. It does not. We actually crashed it. 3. A backup stack we didn’t know existed kicked in
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People assume we are resourcefully improvising. No we’re not. Improvising is clever MacGyyverings with duct tape and paperclips. No. We’ve switched wholesale to videoconferencing, digital payments, delivery-based last mile, e-learning apps etc. Where did this shit come from?
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Here’s the key point: the attempted tradeoff wouldn’t have worked if we’d tried it with the main stack. Like at all. It would have collapsed instantly. “Social distancing” is not actually a feature available on the old stack. No amount of duct tape/paper lips would have helped.
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People act like the alt-stack is just a set of nice-to-have bandaids that are making the crisis a little more pleasant and convenient, with the main tradeoff being handled by the mature stack. No it’s not, it’s what’s making the tradeoff possible at all.
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Our explanatory model for HOW we’re doing this is flawed. We think we’re tightening a nut with a wrench when we’re actually welding a seam with an oxy torch. In a deep sense we don’t know what we’re doing or how. We are using this new stack *as a stack* for the first time.
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To use a software term — not a metaphor since the new stack is software — this is the first integration test. We’ve switched with zero warning from half-complete unit testing of point solutions, to a full system integration test at max load.
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The new stack was NOT ready. We were still running integration tests in emulation (aka tech futures), and working through unit tests in production systematically, sector by sector, app by app. What’s more, failure is not an option in this integration test. We cannot rollback.
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There’s no rollback. We’re stuck with this deployment of this integration model of this stack for the time being. There’s no significant do-over or refactoring option here. We’ve locked in a path-dependent full deployment of the software-eaten world. Release candidate 1 *is* V1.
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Now for the “crisis” part. Why is this a crisis? The techlash is over. Silicon Valley tech has won. We’ve been handed the game almost by walkover. We should be celebrating, right? Not quite. This is what I call suspiciously lucky. A crisis just happens to hand us the game? 🧐🤨
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Two possibilities: 1. There really were deep reserves of serendipity in the 2-stack system and this really is a well-timed and “lucky” (for some values of “lucky”) smooth changeover. 2. The integration test is failing in all sorts of invisible ways. It’s a house of cards.
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I’m betting the answer is 2. There’s going to be a huge pile of crap in the log file of this integration test to sort through. Full rollback is impossible, but we’ll do a lot of local, partial rollbacks/reverts to the old stack while we fix this in production.
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In a way this is the other side of the yin-yang. Pre-covid was the old stack with patches of localized new stack units. The rollback will be new stack with patches of old stack units. It will be an unholy mess that will take a decade to cleanup.
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So if this hypothesis is correct, the reboot problem is a tech problem: how to finish the unfinished stack that has been hot-swapped in? I think if the economic approach aims at this problem, it will “take” otherwise it will not, and trigger a secondary larger technology crisis.
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By which I don’t mean a tech market crisis like the dotcom bust, I mean an actual tech crisis like Y2K. But way harder.
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Political outcomes are also at the end of a supply chain with a pattern of consent of the governed as the raw material, political apparatus for making policy as factories, and executive as supply chain. The political supply chain is as broken as goods, services, and money ones.
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Macabre thing about covid is that the same demographics are at highest risk whether you open up slowly or quickly — the poor and unhealthy. Only question is whether they die of covid or destitution+desperation. If you try to minimize deaths, I think they end up being balanced?
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