Push Your Chips Into the Center

Me on the case for bubbles

Over at The New Atlantis, I have a review of BOOM, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber. They want to make the case for bubbles to a world that’s too risk averse. So what do they like so much about bubbles?

A few massive successes, in their argument, more than pay for the short-term rise and falls. Bubble dynamics are marked, the authors write, by “definite optimism.” Bubbles, at their best, are a mechanism for trust and collaborative action. Major technological breakthroughs of the past century would have been impossible without them.

I’m sympathetic to this kind of argument! A number of industries (and some personal relationships) run on this kind of one-pays-for-all mechanic. Most authors in book publishing get more than they “deserve” since editors pay advances that mostly exceed what authors earn, and then the books that become blockbusters cover the money for everyone.

In dating, many many (sigh) many dates that go nowhere are worth taking a chance on because eventually the right connection pays off for your entire life. (Same goes for putting yourself out there to spark friendships).

But still, the case for bubbles feels more at odds with some of the spirit of Other Feminisms, which can be focused on careful, slow work of stewarding what you have and preparing to sustain new needs you encounter. So where does taking a wild chance fit in to this?

This is where I really appreciated the volte in the final chapters, where the authors made their case for the benefits of being part of a big project… even when it doesn’t pan out.

As the authors argue, each of us is already making a bet on the future in our choice of studies, career, friendships, and so on. They argue that we should have a greater appetite for risk when we stake our time and our sense of identity than when we simply plunk down money. They expect we will have more chances to get in on the ground floor of a fruitful bubble as a worker than as an investor — and that we would have better sources of truth from inside a company than from outside through a brokerage.

But, more than that, they argue that your investment of your self never goes to zero the way a series of stock puts might. “Investments can vaporize in an instant,” they write, “but the memory of being part of a tiny band of people trying to change the world, and feeling for a time like it’s succeeding, is timeless.”

I like the spirit of start ups and bubbles the authors describe, and the trust it requires/engenders. I just might want to push my chips in for something more like, well, the RPG-minicon-of-my-husband’s-games-we-run-annually than Theranos.

And in that spirit, I very much appreciated

Keller Scholl

’s comment on my “A Neighborhood of Needs” post, because Keller and I have been part of a positive bubble recently.

We both were part of the dozen or so people in a discord who researched and wrote the PEPFAR report, and then coordinated a demonstration in D.C. in defense of this lifesaving HIV/AIDS program.

So I certainly recognize some of what Keller wrote here:

This is a fascinating post to me because it is both wrong in my experience and observation, and I suspect that my view is very gendered. You don't need to prompt people to share needs if they're getting together for a shared project of some sort. Whether it's a political project, an art project, historical recreation, or a particularly intense and all-consuming workplace, sharing needs comes naturally out of having a shared task or goal that you are committed to, to the other extent those needs interfere with the project. And yet I still feel in the places I am thinking of it is the working together, trade, and assistance, not the vulnerability, that creates community.

I definitely operate in both spaces, and it was a pleasure working with Keller and others on researching how PEPFAR has saved 25 million lives, because people were so generous in naming what they needed done and setting out to do it. We moved quickly because of the trust and urgency of the project.

But I do think of it as a different kind of bond. Maybe more like C.S. Lewis’s distinction between friendship and lovers:

Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship.

Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.

When working on this kind of project, I… think less about the other people on it. I don’t ask about their families, I may not know their names, just their Discord handle and specialties. It’s very different from what I learn about a person when I ask, “Is there anything you want me to pray for for you?” and hear that e.g. their mom is moving into memory care next week.

I’m grateful to get to do some mixing of my all-in relationships, sometimes putting everything on the line together for a project, sometimes for a person.