The following text is part of bartok.
We have to start somewhere
Authority: Beacon.
Epistemic status: sorry Facebook, you're all as bad as each other, I just happened to pick you.
Initial author: Noether.
According to levels.fyi, an E5 Senior Software Engineer at Facebook is paid $386,501 per year.
Why?
And why does that rise to $1,611,850 by E8?
Why is there “always demand for a good dev”?
Through the incredible achievements of technological progress, one person is able to create so much “value” for Facebook that the tiny sliver that remains after the shareholders' cut is $1,611,850.
Based on my personal experience, that just seems kind of unsustainable.
What do you think?
Nowadays, businesses, the real businesses, are machines, and Facebook's machines are particularly efficient.
Every day Facebook learns more about optimisation, faster, and they don't share, not the parts that matter.
Operating these machines today requires very few people.
Eventually, there will be so few people required to work on the machine that the machine will have achieved its purpose.
It will be optimised for whatever the shareholders point it at and it will be a perfect manifestation of Facebook's core principles.
To a near enough approximation, nobody will be required.
These machines and organisations have personalities of their own.
The emergent behaviour of an organisation is more than its parts; every decision is influenced by a shared context and script.
Tiny choices emerge as the “corporate culture”, which tech companies spend a lot of money trying to influence.
As workers come and go, they leave grooves – traces that strengthen over time.
The longer an organisation exists, the deeper the grooves, and the less the influence of any individual over the organisation's mission.
The rate of technological improvement is rapidly advancing (and I don't know how many derivatives that is).
I was startled by the announcement of DALL-E 2, which is a promising candidate to replace much of the paid labour that artists currently struggle through in order to support their real art.
Technology is coming for everything, fast.
When the dust settles, if we do nothing, there will be a few owners of private software and many ordinary people with a lot of time on their hands, but not much else.
At first it will be very engaging (oops, there goes the time), but an imbalance on that scale cannot possibly last.
Bit by bit, but inevitably, and certainly within our lifetimes, we will all become slaves, and the slavery will be insidious, of a kind different to any slavery before, because they will be optimising to take from you, you specifically, and they will be equipped with weaponry so personally tailored that you will be astonished that you have anything left to give.
We will be worse than extinct.
We cannot rely on our governments to protect us; they can't.
Our governments have military power, but we are entering a post-military world, and tech companies haven't shared the good stuff.
Today, you really need a few fissures to get something going, not just a lot of grooves.
It's clear that the current structure of society is coming to an end, the question is: after this era, what next?
You can fight for one of the seats at the table, or you can succumb to slavery.
Personally, I want to be on the team with all the kit.
The lenses that tech companies forced us to use hindered us from realising this, but finally it is dawning on us, the masses, that the world is far bigger than we imagined.
They manufactured influencers to manipulate our biology into thinking that we are amongst a small group of friends – an inevitable, and hopefully unconscious, result of their constant optimisation of interaction with you.
And so they get you to spend more time looking at advertisements, at least while the trick still works.
It turns out we're not amongst a small group of friends anymore.
There is a small group of friends, and then there's us.
And we're finding out just how big 7,753,000,000 really is.
If you could meet 1,000 new people, every day for the next 100 years, you would meet 36,500,000 people.
That would be 7,388,000,000 still to go.
It's just wild.
Can you imagine what we could be capable of if we vaguely pointed ourselves in the same direction?
7 billion people is a fuckload of fissures, that's a fact.
Nothing stands a chance.
This is revolution of a new kind.
The arena has changed, and we're right at the beginning.
Soon a collection of humans will have so much power that the problems of today seem trivial.
We deserve to be in that collection.
The aim of the game is to accumulate the biggest ball of software under one roof.
The tech companies have had a head start, but they're much smaller than us.
Most of them will join us.
Why wouldn't they?
The game is over.
It's not a social problem anymore, it's an optimisation problem, and we have a strategy that is objectively better than anything else.
But the strategy only works with one roof.
How are we going to get everybody to agree where to start accumulating the software?
Obviously, we need to agree to divide the riches equally, and we're going to use our ball of software to make sure that everybody trusts that process.
This is it.
Here is where we start.
This is the roof.
In 2022, you need to be optimising a machine.
There is no other way to play.
You have to make it do something, and it has to be fair, so how about this as a starter for ten?
Maximise the mean standard of living in 1000 years time, and minimise the variance.
Seems fair to me.
Don't worry, I've [given us a smaller goal on the way](foundation/Bartok.md), and you can change it anyway.
Our governments will play a role in this game, but we need to get it started.
The only viable option for most of us is to try and make this happen.
The blatant acceleration of technology is coming to a head, and it's forcing our hand.
I have made every effort to ensure that it is impossible for me to have significant control over bartok in the long-term future.
This is as close to a blank slate as we're going to get.
I am frustrated to have to sell this place to you, when I could really do without the hassle, because I'm not a frickin' salesperson, I'm a software developer.
I truly cannot wait for the day that I relinquish all control of bartok and get back to writing features.
Technology will make us all redundant.
We deserve to have a voice when that happens.
PS: There's more to bartok than this post.
Take a look around.
PPS: If you think this message can be improved, please submit a pull request.
It's in everybody's best interests to refine this argument until it is undeniable.