This article was part of my self-education project titled “Understanding Society” and it is centred around trying to explain the quick shift towards Web3 through the lens of Karl Marx’s virtually unknown paper named The Paris Manuscript.

In the SV mythology, there seems to be this well-known yet poorly understood idea that there is a pattern in technology where every 10-15 years, a new wave is meant to overtake and reshape the current state of affairs. Most know it as the “S-curve” where technologies follow a clear (in hindsight) growth, maturity, decline cycle. While most know of it, I’ve yet to find a convincing reason for why this is happening, and no, “this is the way it’s always been” is not a compelling argument. One of the explanations that come as close as possible is Chris Dixon’s “What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” In his article (with the same name), he talks about how engineers are often getting into the “tinkering” mode after clocking out from their job, a mode (what I like to call “playful experimentation”) that is often being responsible for most inventions in the modern world. While the idea is good, I, for one, I’m left unsatisfied by the depth of the argument.

The idea of the S-curve always seems to resurface once we’ve hit a significant plateau in one or more technologies. At this time, people wonder (often quite loudly): Are we going to be blessed with another one? Set aside the fact that it seems similar to the ancients who prayed to various pagan gods for plentiful crops, the answer is clear for at least a part of the tech population. Web3 or crypto or whatever designation it has morphed into in the meantime seems to be the answer to the people’s prayer. While many often doubt that a new S-curve is even possible, Web3 has been winning the hearts, minds, and attention of a large segment of the tech population. So much so that there has been a great migration of people leaving their web2 job to go on digging for gold in the new digital gold rush.

Employers and other people high up on the web2 ladder have been left stunned: how can it be that people are flocking to another field at such a rapid pace. Some exciting answers worth noting are: first, they offer programmers a new primitive (aka new toy) to play with, and second, it offers “superpowers” to programmers who are often bored with the deep optimization of the Big Tech. Both answers focus on empowering the individual contributor and getting people out of this baseline state of incremental growth. The latter we shall investigate further.

You often have these Reddit threads of Big Tech employees (Google, Facebook, etc.) anonymously sharing their experience at these companies where one is stripped of his agency all while working lax hours and enjoying their daily free lunches. Something is fascinating in the high salary and miserable quadrant because you’d think that there would be at least some correlation for a country that has managed to tie happiness to material well-being, but that seldom is the case. No wonder many of them are leaving their day jobs in search of a new “land to conquer.” William Bolitho had this quote I often think about “We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old” — people want adventure and to explore the unexplored, but in a world where the only way to do that is to go to Mars or get in a tin can many miles under the sea, a lot of them feel (correctly) that there aren’t places to explore anymore. If you need evidence of the desire for adventure, just read Samuel Zamurray’s biography that details the experiences on the isthmus where people flocked to go to this unexplored place in search of the gold of the jungle (bananas) — young, old, with dependable and without. Overall, it seems to be the case that the search for gold is less about the metal itself but more about the adventure part.

“Whilst the division of labour raises the productive power of labour and increases the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to a machine.” - Karl Marx in Paris Manuscripts

There is this obscure unpublished paper from Karl Marx from before he became “Communist” Marx that can help shed light on some of the questions we asked before: namely, what drives people to start the new “S-curve” and how come that people at Big Tech companies are wealthy, yet miserable. I think it’s helpful to break down the arguments Marx lays out in his paper to answer that.

We have to briefly discuss two concepts to understand his argument: division of labor and totality. Division of labor is straightforward, and if you’ve taken an economics course, you will quickly realize just how important this concept from Adam Smith has been in enabling the modern world: by specializing and trading with each other, we’re all better off (or so the theory goes). But one of the things about specialization is that as population increases, we tend to specialize more and more until a point where people are focused on such a small thing that it often seems like a trivial job, a sort of fake work done just for the sake of keeping people busy. Now, totality is a Hegelian term and points to the unity of the subject (man) from the object (of labor), which are often separated from one another leading to the problems of the human consciousness (as described by Hegel and later by various critical theorists). The concept seems like an overly abstract concept that some bored philosopher came up with on one of his daily walks. But bear with me because it will make sense as we showcase an example: an artisan shoemaker and his shoe. Before mass production was a thing, we would have craftsmen (with many years if not decades of training) individually make each good, which often meant that they would be able to see the product of their labor. As a craftsman, you could walk around your town and point out how your contribution to society: “Well, I made those shoes look!” Now that might be practical in a small society, but as the population grows, the demands of the many for productivity outweigh the needs of the few (pride in your work). It only is the case that the demands of the many were helped by this little event in human history: The Industrial Revolution. The first was often not as exciting as people would have liked but by the second round the world had changed: instead of working in your small shop, selling the good and seeing out in the wild you would have people work in cities, often in worse condition than before, as part of an assembly line. What Marx alludes in his paper is that the nature of work was not the only thing that changed during the transition into the Industrial Age but also the perception (or human consciousness) of individuals. So alienation for Marx is when totality is broken, which means that the subject (person) is separated from the object (the thing he wills into existence), which not only makes him estranged from his work (no one prides in putting the screws to an automobile) but also from other people. It is why even in today’s environment, when people cannot see themselves in their work, they react in the same way: general apathy.

Bringing the two concepts together, we can see how as the economy expands, the needs of the many again outweigh the needs of the few (like clockwork, once more). Thus the division of labor starts subdividing work into smaller and smaller chunks until there isn’t anything left to chew on. This constant process in modernity of increasingly tinier slivers of work that are bound to only be valid in the eyes of employers is why you have many thousands of people making 6 figure salaries and yet be in a constant state of neuroticism.

“The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.” - Karl Marx in Paris Manuscripts

While we have answered one of the questions of how big tech employees can be miserable while often being ahead of 99.999% of the population, we shall inquire into how our answer (alienation as outlined by Marx) can be applied to understanding the genesis of the (in)famous S-curve.

So far, we have talked about how S-curves tend to happen because people get bored with their day jobs, and they use their spare time to tinker with new technologies. This boredom is often best described by the concept of alienation from their work that is a by-product of the maturity and optimization stage of the current S-curve. As such, at a more abstract level, one can understand new S-curves as how individuals (often engineers) cope with the alienation of being separated (or abstracted) from their labor of work. By embracing novel and scrappy technologies, each person can take matters into their own hands and create a totality between the subject and the object (code, hardware, etc.), overcoming the alienation observed in their day-to-day life. By embracing a new “adventure,” the next wave brews, improves, and later hits the mass consumer like a tsunami.