Rocket Philosophy

Too Many Tools

Nerds¹ love elegant solutions to difficult problems. Elegant solutions often involve precision tools that are specifically designed for the task at hand. This is usually a great idea for highly technical projects (like surgery, or building space ships), in which small errors can accumulate rapidly. But when we’re dealing with the real world, and with large populations of potentially irrational actors, then maybe there’s no such thing as a precision tool, and maybe seeking elegant solutions blinds us to the messy vagaries of reality.

Take online privacy. It’s an incredibly difficult problem,² and, at least for now, many of the people dealing with it are nerds to some degree or another. This means that these well-meaning folks are attacking the issue by trying to find or create the precision tools (technical or psychological) to solve it. Many of these tools are undeniably clever, sometimes even brilliant.³ But they all require that users introduce a degree of complexity⁴ into their lives in exchange for some intangible, often theoretical benefit.

By way of example, imagine that you are making your own sous vide immersion cooker, and you need a piece of plastic cut to exacting specifications. You could trust a rotary cutting tool and your steady right hand…but wouldn’t it be better to use a CNC laser cutter?

Here’s the thing: almost anyone can use a pair of scissors. It takes just a bit of practice to achieve basic proficiency with a Dremel. But it takes quite a lot of specialized training to program the cutting templates and operate The CNC machine.

Nerds spend the time learning how to cut plastic with lasers and computers. Yes, because lasers are cool, and yes, because for nerds learning is playing, but also because, to that particular mindset, it’s the best solution to the particular problem. Realistically speaking, a hand-cut piece of plastic would suffice under nearly all real-life scenarios. For nerds, the elegance of using the laser cutter is an end in itself. Just knowing that their cuts are 90 degrees to computer precision gives the nerd a nice, warm feeling in his belly.

Normal people,⁵ on the other hand, distribute their time according to a different set of priorities.⁶ While of course a normal person would prefer the more perfect result,⁷ they also recognize that perfection can be the enemy of good. I’m pretty sure that a homemade sous vide cooker’s ability to regulate water temperature has very little to do with how precisely its plastic sheeting is cut—at least past some basic adequacy threshold. And while, tautologically, better is better, I get the feeling that normal people don’t have trouble falling asleep with the knowledge that their homemade project is less than perfect in some abstract, invisible way.

What, the conscientious reader might ask, do exotic cooking techniques and precision engineering have to do with online privacy? It’s all about apply value to abstractions. Nerds are very good at valuing the intangibles. Elegance and aesthetic beauty is worth pursuing, regardless of practical application.

Today, protecting your privacy online is complex.⁸ Using Tor radically degrades the online experience, and if you’re not the kind of person who values privacy for its own sake, it’s all cost and no gain. Bitcoin is a fascinating economic experiment, but I have a hard time imagining anyone using it to buy groceries. And if currency isn’t universal, it means there are transaction costs associated with its usage. In these cases, the only balance to those costs is the internal value a user places on enhanced privacy. Any halfway decent economist would tell you that paying tangible costs (time, money) with intangible currency (satisfaction, peace of mind) is not exactly a sustainable proposition.

So what’s the solution? First, I would point out that the question is malformed—”the solution” implies there is one, monolithic answer that we just haven’t found yet. Second, I would argue that only the smallest part of any solution we create should rest on the shoulders of end users who, statistically speaking, are normal people.

Creating a sustainable concept of online privacy is a bit like creating a herd immunity to a certain pathogen. In order for herd immunity to work its magic, a sufficiently large portion of the population must be vaccinated, such that the given pathogen can’t even get a foothold. Crucially, you don’t get herd immunity by trusting individuals to do what’s best for the group. We wiped out polio by lining kids up in elementary schools, not by sending a letter telling everyone to make sure to see their doctor. The idea is to find the optimal level at which to institute policy, such that the economies of scale mitigate the majority of the transaction costs. In the case of polio, schools were the natural nodes in the network. For online privacy, I would argue that proposed solutions should focus less on end users and more on service providers.⁹ Give service providers the tools they need to protect the privacy of all of their users. A better privacy policy protects all users nonexclusively. Protecting the many costs just as much as protecting the one.

Let end users know that privacy, in the abstract, is good. Focus user education less on specific, technical options than on a broad, nigh-political message. Let them choose to support providers that, in turn, support pro-privacy policies. But put as little individual responsibility upon them as possible. Learn the lessons of Whole Foods and fair trade coffees. I’m sure people enjoy the fact that Whole Foods promotes sustainable farming and is environmentally conscious, and I’m sure people like knowing that buying fair trade coffee ensures more money flows to actual growers. But most people volunteer to pay the admittedly higher prices because the food and coffee taste better.