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