Technology Is Good Actually

My great-grandmother’s toilet was a hole in the ground until she was 61 years old. Despite bathrooms being common in America since the 1880s, she was unable to afford indoor plumbing until 1963. Her family lived off the land by hunting, fishing, and farming in the summer and eating canned veggies from their garden in the winter. When I asked my dad about his memories of visiting his grandparents, his most vivid recollection was of “having to bathe in a bucket.” The last time I went to our ancestral home in the hills of rural Virginia, this was no longer the case. Water was abundant, and there was a small grocery store nearby (it had a public bathroom).

It isn’t as if we have solved the problem though. Studies estimate that 500K Americans don’t have access to indoor plumbing. Even in San Francisco, the technology capital of the world, nearly 15K people, mostly low-income renters, don’t have functional toilets. How can this be? We have had the science figured out for hundreds of years, so why can’t we fix this?

The answer to this question usually depends on your political ideology. Some blame the rich tech bros for pushing up the cost of housing. The billionaire set blames the left and their restrictive regulations. The YIMBYs blame the NIMBYs. The city government blames the state budget, which blames federal policy, which blames the UN goals, which blames.... You get the idea. Of course, someone out there has the right answer. However, the myopic discourse that is now the norm for politics-adjacent issues makes the truth nearly impossible to uncover. 

Watching the SVB debacle has similar shades of this argument, partially because people have behaved pretty shitty. But also similar lines of debate have formed around the bank's failure. Some blamed the bank’s leadership team, some the VCs who sparked the run, some the Federal Reserve, some the founders. And again, someone(s) does deserve the blame here! But by the time this is all figured out, we will have already moved on to the next scandal. The best we can probably hope for is some form of token regulation to prevent this level of leverage and customer concentration in midsize banks.

However, in the midst of all-caps tweets and salvos of prose careening back and forth between tech and socialist publications, I’ve seen new startups launch that are attempting to solve the uninsured deposit problem. I’ve seen multiple SaaS startups, themselves worried about funding, improve their product to provide more coverage, cover payrolls with their own balance sheet, and onboard hundreds of new customers. They did not solve the problems of interest rates, but they did all they could for thousands of people, all in the space of 72 hours. Six days later, I watched as we publicly birthed three gods in miniature, with the launch of multiple AI models, including GPT-4. Yesterday afternoon, as I sat and procrastinated writing this essay, I saw a drone delivery system launch that claims to use 34x less carbon than driving a car. 

Despite all of this, the SVB discourse dripped with vitriol, targeting not just the culpable VCs but technology startups in general. I’m not going to link to any of the articles/tweets, but if you just search for tech bro or VC on Twitter you’ll easily find the anger I’m referencing. 

I understand making fun of VCs—you can and should mock them mercilessly. People making millions are auto-enrolled in the jokes-at-my-own-expense club. But the technology sector and startups have merit and value that I fear is being lost. I get where the anger is coming from. In the past six years, we’ve seen the ways software—accidentally or otherwise—can make more problems than it solves. But there are a few reasons why I continue to believe. It comes down to this:

• A startup is a permissionless way to improve society
• Startups make things cheaper, which is a moral good 

Innovation is systematically undervalued at solving these problems, and you should consider it a good addition to more typical solutions. If you wanted to fix SVB, you would need to band together Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and SF Socialists into some sort of loose coalition of policy reform. Or, you could just go build a better bank that requires buy-in from only one party: customers. You are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price and that’s it. That’s what we saw over the weekend with those startups attempting to solve SVB-related woes. 

How could you fix the plumbing problems of San Francisco? You could band together the landlords, renters right advocates, city governments, and nonprofits to come up with some sort of policy. Or, you could invent and sell a toilet that is cheap and functions regardless of how well the rest of the plumbing in the house works. You may say, well, that toilet sounds impossible. Yes! That’s the point! Technology is the way that impossible becomes realized. Someone needs to invent it.

Do regulations and community co-ops matter? Of course. They serve a role that is crucial and important and irreplaceable in society. However, only a startup can be created by the furious genius of a lone tinkerer in their garage. In the face of such overwhelming political complexity that feels, frankly, outside of anyone’s control and expertise, a startup where people pay to solve a problem feels delightfully straightforward. 

What is so inspiring about technology companies is that they are, by nature, deeply individualistic. They can be started in three months by some spunky 20-year-old with a dream. No permission required. That same 20-year-old might get nowhere with banking and plumbing reform, but they may stumble into a whole new way to take care of business. And to be fair, many of the problems resulting from tech’s dominance can be traced to the individualistic nature of the endeavor. By reporting to no one, these young entrepreneurs may end up causing consequences, like, say, riots in Washington, D.C.