Uri: ADS, you’re a prolific blogger spanning a range of topics that feel quite coherent to me even though it’s hard for me to define precisely, an

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2021-09-05 00:30:05

Uri: ADS, you’re a prolific blogger spanning a range of topics that feel quite coherent to me even though it’s hard for me to define precisely, and a lot of which I think could be called "tech culture.”

I’ve always found [something] culture to be an interesting category of thought and writing, and I’m wondering if you’d accept that designation, and if so what you think of it. What does it mean to be a [something] culture writer, rather than a [something] writer directly? Do you think all fields eventually develop this kind of category around them, or are some fields more amenable to that than others?

Applied Divinity Studies: In software it's usually pretty clear. Some of the writing is actually technical. I can't understand it, it's not really of interest to lay people. And then the other half is stuff like Alex Danco describing how Venture Capital functions socially, or Byrne Hobart writing about the conditions for business mafias, or the numerous blog posts about how to raise money for your startup. That last one is kind of interesting, because you might think it's only of interest to founders, but it has far reaching implications. If you're a policy maker in DC, you care, or ought to care, about what kinds of startups get funded, what kinds of technology can be built. If you're a student aspiring to be a founder one day, you might want to do some long term trajectory planning. If you're a product manager at Google, you still care about what companies are getting founded that might compete with you... etc

But in other domains it's less clear that the distinction exists at all. In Effective Altruism, "meta" is a top level priority. So if you're writing about the construction of EA organizations, are you an EA writer or an EA culture writer? That's probably true in a lot of fields that are more relationship driven too. There's no distinction between being a celebrity gossip journalist at gawker, and writing about "celebrity culture" as some distinct thing.