Macrodoses #1

Sports betting, Seeing Like A State, Civilization VII, and more

Hello! As you know, Reboot normally ends each essay with a set of related “microdoses”: links and ephemera foraged from around the web. These have been surprisingly popular—at one point, we asked readers if they’d prefer to nix the microdoses to focus on the essay, which was… not our most popular idea.

So today we’re coming to you with a new format:

Reboot Macrodoses are an informal ~weekly dump of what our editorial board is reading, watching, playing, seeing online, thinking about, or otherwise experiencing. It includes mini-essays, links, pictures, plus perspectives from our beautiful brilliant readers—if you’d like to publish a 250-word Letter to the Editor about our previous essays, you can now do so here.

(For folks worried that macrodoses will supplant Reboot’s longer-form work, they won’t! These mini-essays are purely additive, and allow us to share more timely, somewhat quicker thoughts in between the Big Essays.)

For today’s macrodoses, we have:

1. Why Seeing Like A State is so popular in Silicon Valley

2. Sid Meier’s Civilization and its discontents

3. Sports betting is bad, actually

4. A letter to the editor on last week’s essay, “The Concrete Oasis”

5. Reboot personals

Ok! Let’s get started.

— Hal

Seeing Like a Tech CEO

I asked Twitter Why is Silicon Valley so Seeing Like a State-pilled? and had one of the only interesting interactions I’ve had there in the last 3 years. A few highlights: 

• The most straightforward reason?

  Venkatesh Rao
  blogged about it in 2010, after borrowing the book from his wife who was in an Anthropology masters’ program. 

• But why would SLAS catch fire from there, and persist for a decade-plus in the Hacker News recommendation mill? Arguably, because it’s useful and relevant to the problems that people who run business and platforms face. It’s tempting to take the high-modernist approach—to write down a clear set of content policies, to abdicate decision-making to A/B tests—but there will always be hidden expertises or the nth-order harms that your metrics miss. Per

  Emmett
  Shear, “if you run a consumer internet service you are basically running a state.” Or from
  Kasey Klimes
  : “If you’re a technosolutionist and nothing around you is working like you thought it would, SLAS has a ton of explanatory power.”

If SLAS is one slice of the “vague tech canon,”

Patrick Collison

took a solid stab at defining the rest, and

T. Greer

at describing its traits:

“This silicon union of intellect and action creates a culture fond of big ideas. The expectation that anyone sufficiently intelligent can grasp, and perhaps master, any conceivable subject incentivizes technologists to become conversant in as many subjects as possible. The technologist is thus attracted to general, sweeping ideas with application across many fields… If the Washington intellectual aims for authority and expertise, the Silicon Valley intellectual seeks novel or counter-intuitive insights. He claims to judge ideas on their utility; in practice I find he cares mostly for how interesting an idea seems at first glance.”

By my meager assessment, Collison’s book list is genuinely good. Lots of science/tech history, Great Man sagas, systems and complexity, counterculture, and yes, libertarianism. You can fill in what’s missing :)

— Jasmine

Civilization & its Discontents

If any video game series belongs in the vague tech canon that Jasmine (& Pat Collison et al) are defining, it’d be Civilization. The long-running turn-based strategy game series is known for its grand ambitions (you do, literally, guide a virtual civilization from the dawn of the agricultural age to the stars) and its intense fandom, which counts Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk among its numbers (I, personally, have logged an ungodly number of hours on the last two games of the series.) 

This is all to say that the announcement this week of Civilization VII, the upcoming new installment in the series, is an opportunity to look at what Civilization wants to tell us about Civilization. Core among its discursive innovations (to Silicon Valley, at least) is the idea of the “tech tree”—a branching set of paths, starting with agriculture and ending with interplanetary travel—which has become for many a mental model for how technological progress works. You, as the founder of your civilization, have control over its linear ascension through the eras, one dependency after another. Yet one of the major changes in Civ VII is that civilizations are no longer fixed—the societies of Ancient Egypt can transition into medieval Mongolia or Songhai, for example—a sign that a series sometimes critiqued for euro-centric, essentializing narratives of progress might be venturing into more ambiguous territory. 

— Jacob

Sports betting is bad, actually

The 2024 Summer Olympics finished a few weeks ago, which made me (an unabashed track and field fan) deeply sad. Although it was annoying to watch the same six AI products several dozen times each—which, by the way, is the result of literally hundreds of millions of dollars of ad spend—there was one feature of sports advertising that was notably absent: sports betting ads.

If you, as I am, are a young man in the US with at least a mild part-time interest in sports, sports betting has probably saturated your algorithmically curated feeds. This noise—“$250 free on your first bet!”, “Bet on individual football plays!”, “Endorsed by Ben Affleck”—has slowly built across American sports culture over half a decade like a bad case of tinnitus. Only in an international competition without sports betting was I reminded of the blessed sound of silence.

You may at this point think I sound like a curmudgeon. You’re probably right. But there are tons of anecdotes about increases in gambling addiction in the last few years, particularly among young men. That’s why I feel thankful that this week I came across a paper that systematically analyzes the larger negative effects of this industry: ”Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting's Impact on Vulnerable Households.” To me, this paper puts a hard quantitative backing behind my kvetching. In fairness to me, sports betting companies were already up to lots of shady shit, like paying universities to promote betting to their 18 year-old students. 

Compared to controls in counties without legal sports betting, the authors show that

legalization reduces net investments by nearly 14%. A rough quantification of the causal effect of sports betting on investing behavior suggests that $1 of betting reduces net investment by just over $2.

These effects are particularly pernicious among people who are already poor.

[T]hese results suggest that sports betting exacerbates the financial constraints of households already operating with less flexibility. The reduced payments towards credit card bills, coupled with rising debt levels, indicate that these households are not merely shifting funds from one type of entertainment to another but are instead becoming more indebted to fund an addictive losing proposition.

Documenting the concrete negative effects of this culture is a rhetorical tonic those intensely Bayesian pundits—*ahem* Nate Silver *ahem*—who evangelize the importance of betting on everything. For a much more in-depth analysis of this phenomenon, and a refutation on its own terms, please read

Leif Weatherby

and

Ben Recht

’s recent essay in The Point, “The Bookmaker.”

— Hal

Letters to the Editor: On “The Concrete Oasis”

When Noah speaks of architecture, it makes me think of software design. While economically motivated, software design ought also to carry aesthetic value—though it’s at times hard to measure. 

I don’t know if anything compares to brutalism, but product design sure has its duds. Like this new trend of greeting mobile app users with an un-skippable welcome video. It has to be the software equivalent of the ROM Crystal. Instead of trying out the app, you’re forced to sit through a 30 second rundown while your phone (and I swear this is true!) incessantly buzzes. It makes you wonder what’s the point.

Still, for all the silliness, I appreciate the trying. I miss the early mobile era. Back when Snapchat threw absolutely insane design ideas at the wall (like automatically starting a video chat when you were synchronously DMing!). It might not have appeared sensical, but it sure seems to have paid off (Stories?). In an era of mostly commoditized design, I like apps—and architecture—that bear a message, even if it’s a slightly obnoxious one.

—

Gabriel Birnbaum

(website) is a product designer and the co-founder of Can of Soup.

Reboot Personals

For sale:

• Caltrain, Heavily Used

• 1998 B-2 Spirit Bomber (yours for the low, low price of $2,899,999. Do not inquire about provenance.)

• A fictional semiotic standard (someone make a poster of this please) and a whole lot of clicky switches and buttons

Seen outside the DNC in Chicago:

Want more silly little links? Funky Facebook Marketplace ads? Or just thoughtful, longform analysis? You know what to do: