Simple Reasons
Why’s that? I’ll mention three simple reasons, and three more complex ones.
Here’s one: our inarticulacy about sources of meaning—that we can answer questions about our goals far more easily than about our sources of meaning—that inarticulacy makes it hard for businesses to detect sources of meaning. Which makes it harder to make a relevant business.
Think about making a new business. You experiment with different offerings, different feature sets, until you hit upon what’s sometimes called “product market fit”—the point when your offering resonates with customers, and delivers on their needs.
Content creators also do this—experimenting with styles and formats. App-makers show mock-ups to their friends, and so on.
All these “creators” are searching for demand.
- They use customer surveys and interviews to search for it.
- Design methods are part of their search process.
- Product success metrics are ways they detect demand.
Now, inarticulacy about sources of meaning affects these things.
- First, if customers are much more articulate about their goals, then all these processes will be more sensitive to goal-related demand.
- Second, the standard way to do these things—customer surveys, user research, design, and metrics—they’re all specialized for funnels and tubes, not spaces. For instance, the two most dominant design trainings—UX and incentives design—tend to mean moving people along through a funnel, smoothing out their experience, reducing choices, and incentivizing or entertaining them along the way. So people making spaces won’t find space-demand using conventional user research, conventional metrics, or conventional design. They are more likely to move their business towards a funnel.
But it doesn’t stop there. Let’s say you are a special kind of entrepreneur—you can talk to people about their sources of meaning, even though they’re inarticulate about it. You can magically design good spaces.
Well, you’ll still have to justify your project to colleagues, funders, employees, and customers. Say they’re inarticulate about meaning… Then, you’ll struggle. You’ll struggle to tell employees what meaning-related targets to hit; or to plan around meaning, etc. Your space, if it gets off the ground at all, won’t scale.
This is so different from if your project was based on tastes: imagine you were raising money or assembling a team to open a bubble-tea shop—you can point at an expanding market for bubble tea, talk to bubble tea-lovers about their preferences, etc. Right now, you can't do that with meaning.
There are other problems, for your customers.
- When they see your space, they won’t know if it’ll be good for them.
- They might hear a friend say your space was meaningful—but they won’t know if they’ll feel the same way. They don’t know if they share the same sources of meaning. So word-of-mouth won’t work.
- Next door, there’s a businesses which claims to be about ”community”, “sharing”, “adventure”, or “love”—words that suggest a space. But it’s not a space. It’s smart marketing, slapped on a funnel which can’t deliver what a space could. Some of your customers will go over there. Some will get cynical, and won’t come to your space either.
Part of the bias, we could say, is due to transaction costs:
To know your sources of meaning, you have to introspect. That’s a transaction cost. On top of that, you’d need tosearchfor other people who’ve also done that introspecting and somehow shared their results. And you’d need tocoordinatea group action together. Those costs are hard to overcome, so the advantages of togetherness get buried.
Finally, part of what makes a space work is when people are excited to come together. When people know each other’s sources of meaning, they get excited: a group that values a certain kind of vulnerability is excited to be vulnerable together. A group that values a particular kind of creativity is excited to be creative.
In general, shared sources of meaning are the reason people come together and do shared practices. But if your customers never realize they share a source of meaning, they won’t see the potential, and your space will struggle.
A group with shared tastes is a kind of degradation—if you get together a group of shared tastes and try to serve them as a group. You're often in a position where you can offer less personalization than you could if you took each person as an individual.
Simple Wrap
So those are the simple reasons why we have too few spaces. If this were it, you could fix the problem with the internet and markets—just help people discover their sources of meaning!
Unfortunately, there are some more complex feedback loops. Here are three.
Complex #1 — Hustle
First, your customers may think something like this:
“If I can only get my goals finished, and gather enough money, I can escape these funnels and tubes and find a space. But for now, I’ve got to focus on funnels and tubes—even though I don’t really care about them.”
Those people won’t seek spaces. They also won’t recommend them. Instead, they’ll recommend whatever helps them “get ahead” in the hustle.
- Notice: this happens even if it’s not true. Maybe spaces aren’t so expensive, maybe you don’t need to hustle first. But—if people believe you do—they’ll skip the spaces.
- Or maybe they really do need to hustle: they need to give their kids an edge, afford real-estate, or whatever. Maybe the only high-paying gigs are hustle-based, funnel and tube gigs. So, they really do need to defer the search for meaning.
Either way—whether the need to hustle first is true or a widespread myth—it creates a feedback loop. In a society with few spaces, meaning will feel remote. More people will believe they have to hustle for it. But that society will also have fewer meaningful jobs, so more people really will have to hustle first, if they want to make a living.
Complex #2 — Meta-structures
That’s one feedback loop. Here’s the next.
Earlier, I said our best practices and design methods are biased towards funnels and tubes. Something I didn’t say then, is that this is more true, the fewer spaces there are. A feedback loop.
The same’s true with funders. If funders mostly see funnels and tubes succeed, they’ll mostly fund funnels and tubes. So funding’s a feedback loop too.
And, same with social networks, recommender systems, and two-sided marketplaces. These all exist to serve the existing stock of entrepreneurs. YouTube Recommended and the TikTok algorithm exist to help funnel-people ramp their subscriber count. They are meta-funnels. Funnels that funnel people into smaller funnels.
In general, the fewer spaces there are, the more that meta-structures that serve entrepreneurs will be biased towards funnels and tubes.
Complex #3 — Alt Social Glues
Ok, here’s the last one. It’s the most deadly.
To make a society work, you need some kind of social glue. Spaces and meaning are a social glue—the one often called the “social fabric”, the “civil society”, the “third sector”, “social capital”. It’s got many names.
So spaces are one glue. The best glue. Spaces make the best friendships, the best loves, the best communities, the best citizens.
But there are other kinds of social glue.
- One type is force. Men with guns can force people to cooperate, even when they don’t share spaces, or sources of meaning.
- Closely related to force is incentives structures. You can force cooperation by making it the only way to survive economically, or the way to get ahead, to “get out of Dodge”.
- Finally, ideological cohesion is a social glue. A common ideology and a clear threat from an ideological opponents.
So, I think when a society has too few spaces, these other social glues ramp up to compensate. You’ll see more force, sharper incentive structures, and more ideological pressure—because that’s what’s needed to keep people in line when they don’t share meaning and togetherness.
I guess that’d be fine, except it’s hard to bring the spaces back.
Once they’re operating from these other glues, people don’t follow what’s meaningful to them, they just try to avoid being shot, going broke, or being ideologically denounced.
One thing economists have discovered, is extrinsic motives like this “crowd out” intrinsic ones. The intrinsic motives get lost.
People go into an emergency state where they don’t pay attention to meaning at all.
And this just makes the problem accelerate: Trust declines, so spaces are less appealing. Ideological leaders build massive funnels to rile up their base against the other side, which suck up all the attention. Incentives systems harden people into the grind-set. Funnels take over completely.
Simple Reasons
Why’s that? I’ll mention three simple reasons, and three more complex ones.
Here’s one: our inarticulacy about sources of meaning—that we can answer questions about our goals far more easily than about our sources of meaning—that inarticulacy makes it hard for businesses to detect sources of meaning. Which makes it harder to make a relevant business.
Think about making a new business. You experiment with different offerings, different feature sets, until you hit upon what’s sometimes called “product market fit”—the point when your offering resonates with customers, and delivers on their needs.
Content creators also do this—experimenting with styles and formats. App-makers show mock-ups to their friends, and so on.
All these “creators” are searching for demand.
- They use customer surveys and interviews to search for it.
- Design methods are part of their search process.
- Product success metrics are ways they detect demand.
Now, inarticulacy about sources of meaning affects these things.
- First, if customers are much more articulate about their goals, then all these processes will be more sensitive to goal-related demand.
- Second, the standard way to do these things—customer surveys, user research, design, and metrics—they’re all specialized for funnels and tubes, not spaces. For instance, the two most dominant design trainings—UX and incentives design—tend to mean moving people along through a funnel, smoothing out their experience, reducing choices, and incentivizing or entertaining them along the way. So people making spaces won’t find space-demand using conventional user research, conventional metrics, or conventional design. They are more likely to move their business towards a funnel.
But it doesn’t stop there. Let’s say you are a special kind of entrepreneur—you can talk to people about their sources of meaning, even though they’re inarticulate about it. You can magically design good spaces.
Well, you’ll still have to justify your project to colleagues, funders, employees, and customers. Say they’re inarticulate about meaning… Then, you’ll struggle. You’ll struggle to tell employees what meaning-related targets to hit; or to plan around meaning, etc. Your space, if it gets off the ground at all, won’t scale.
This is so different from if your project was based on tastes: imagine you were raising money or assembling a team to open a bubble-tea shop—you can point at an expanding market for bubble tea, talk to bubble tea-lovers about their preferences, etc. Right now, you can't do that with meaning.
There are other problems, for your customers.
- When they see your space, they won’t know if it’ll be good for them.
- They might hear a friend say your space was meaningful—but they won’t know if they’ll feel the same way. They don’t know if they share the same sources of meaning. So word-of-mouth won’t work.
- Next door, there’s a businesses which claims to be about ”community”, “sharing”, “adventure”, or “love”—words that suggest a space. But it’s not a space. It’s smart marketing, slapped on a funnel which can’t deliver what a space could. Some of your customers will go over there. Some will get cynical, and won’t come to your space either.
Part of the bias, we could say, is due to transaction costs:
To know your sources of meaning, you have to introspect. That’s a transaction cost. On top of that, you’d need tosearchfor other people who’ve also done that introspecting and somehow shared their results. And you’d need tocoordinatea group action together. Those costs are hard to overcome, so the advantages of togetherness get buried.
Finally, part of what makes a space work is when people are excited to come together. When people know each other’s sources of meaning, they get excited: a group that values a certain kind of vulnerability is excited to be vulnerable together. A group that values a particular kind of creativity is excited to be creative.
In general, shared sources of meaning are the reason people come together and do shared practices. But if your customers never realize they share a source of meaning, they won’t see the potential, and your space will struggle.
A group with shared tastes is a kind of degradation—if you get together a group of shared tastes and try to serve them as a group. You're often in a position where you can offer less personalization than you could if you took each person as an individual.
Simple Wrap
So those are the simple reasons why we have too few spaces. If this were it, you could fix the problem with the internet and markets—just help people discover their sources of meaning!
Unfortunately, there are some more complex feedback loops. Here are three.
Complex #1 — Hustle
First, your customers may think something like this:
“If I can only get my goals finished, and gather enough money, I can escape these funnels and tubes and find a space. But for now, I’ve got to focus on funnels and tubes—even though I don’t really care about them.”
Those people won’t seek spaces. They also won’t recommend them. Instead, they’ll recommend whatever helps them “get ahead” in the hustle.
- Notice: this happens even if it’s not true. Maybe spaces aren’t so expensive, maybe you don’t need to hustle first. But—if people believe you do—they’ll skip the spaces.
- Or maybe they really do need to hustle: they need to give their kids an edge, afford real-estate, or whatever. Maybe the only high-paying gigs are hustle-based, funnel and tube gigs. So, they really do need to defer the search for meaning.
Either way—whether the need to hustle first is true or a widespread myth—it creates a feedback loop. In a society with few spaces, meaning will feel remote. More people will believe they have to hustle for it. But that society will also have fewer meaningful jobs, so more people really will have to hustle first, if they want to make a living.
Complex #2 — Meta-structures
That’s one feedback loop. Here’s the next.
Earlier, I said our best practices and design methods are biased towards funnels and tubes. Something I didn’t say then, is that this is more true, the fewer spaces there are. A feedback loop.
The same’s true with funders. If funders mostly see funnels and tubes succeed, they’ll mostly fund funnels and tubes. So funding’s a feedback loop too.
And, same with social networks, recommender systems, and two-sided marketplaces. These all exist to serve the existing stock of entrepreneurs. YouTube Recommended and the TikTok algorithm exist to help funnel-people ramp their subscriber count. They are meta-funnels. Funnels that funnel people into smaller funnels.
In general, the fewer spaces there are, the more that meta-structures that serve entrepreneurs will be biased towards funnels and tubes.
Complex #3 — Alt Social Glues
Ok, here’s the last one. It’s the most deadly.
To make a society work, you need some kind of social glue. Spaces and meaning are a social glue—the one often called the “social fabric”, the “civil society”, the “third sector”, “social capital”. It’s got many names.
So spaces are one glue. The best glue. Spaces make the best friendships, the best loves, the best communities, the best citizens.
But there are other kinds of social glue.
- One type is force. Men with guns can force people to cooperate, even when they don’t share spaces, or sources of meaning.
- Closely related to force is incentives structures. You can force cooperation by making it the only way to survive economically, or the way to get ahead, to “get out of Dodge”.
- Finally, ideological cohesion is a social glue. A common ideology and a clear threat from an ideological opponents.
So, I think when a society has too few spaces, these other social glues ramp up to compensate. You’ll see more force, sharper incentive structures, and more ideological pressure—because that’s what’s needed to keep people in line when they don’t share meaning and togetherness.
I guess that’d be fine, except it’s hard to bring the spaces back.
Once they’re operating from these other glues, people don’t follow what’s meaningful to them, they just try to avoid being shot, going broke, or being ideologically denounced.
One thing economists have discovered, is extrinsic motives like this “crowd out” intrinsic ones. The intrinsic motives get lost.
People go into an emergency state where they don’t pay attention to meaning at all.
And this just makes the problem accelerate: Trust declines, so spaces are less appealing. Ideological leaders build massive funnels to rile up their base against the other side, which suck up all the attention. Incentives systems harden people into the grind-set. Funnels take over completely.
Ideologies and incentives become dominant for two reasons: first, they aresubstitutesfor meaning and values. If you can’t hold a group together with meaning, you turn to ideologies and incentives. Second, they havenetwork effects. So, once demand shifts towards ideologies and incentives, a positive feedback loop forms.