Eli Dourado’s Anarcho-Curious Structuralism

Fellow Ümlauteer Eli Dourado is not just your garden variety GMU-trained, public-choice-heavy, anarcho-curious libertarian. He also comes to any discussion with an interesting, deeply structuralist view of human social systems. As The Ümlaut closes out its first calendar year, I thought it might be fun to dig into the larger story that emerges from across Eli’s writings on the web.

Anarcho-Curious

Eli is an affirmed philosophical anarchist, and from what he has written publicly and from our overlapping GMU education, I can surmise where he stands on anarchy as an ideal. I think Eli’s ideal governance arrangements look like the “ordered anarchy” revealed in the work of people like Bruce Benson; both in the private law in places like pre-Battle of Hastings England, and the private international law such as the Lex Mercatoria.

 These systems have the benefit of removing outright coercion while also providing mechanisms to defend against violent crime, theft, and all the other things we tend to believe a government should protect its citizenry from. He does not believe these systems as they existed historically were without their serious flaws, but no system is perfect.

His main reason for being merely “anarcho-curious”, as far as I can tell, is that there doesn’t appear to be any practical path to old school ordered anarchy in any countries currently existing on the planet. We’re certainly not going to get there through the democratic process. And even if by some fluke some small enclave of ordered anarchy sprung up on some corner of the Earth, the current underlying structure of human affairs would probably doom it before long.

The Industrial Revolution is a History of the Technologies of Control

The post of Eli’s that had the greatest impact on my own thinking was written two years ago. It is called Technologies of Control and Resistance. The piece is framed against the then-recently published Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen. The former argues that technological innovation has been accelerating, the latter that it has been stuck in a rut. Eli makes a can’t-it-be-both argument by distinguishing between two types of technological innovation.

Let’s start with the first:

The first kind of innovation is geared toward brute maximization of production. It is typically centralized and makes use of economies of scale. Examples might include an assembly line factory or a big, coal-fired power plant. Because these innovations tend to be centralized, they introduce points of control. The capital is typically fixed and therefore easy to tax and regulate. It’s well known in the development literature that it’s really hard for governments to control rural peasants who live off the grid. Once they move to the cities and plug into centralized services, it is easier to require them to send their children to school, for instance. Because these innovations introduce points of control, I will call them technologies of control.

Eli’s story of the Industrial Revolution goes something like this: there was a sudden explosion in the development of technologies of control. This expanded pure output to a phenomenal degree; I will here refer you to Deirdre McCloskey’s conservative estimate that US standard of living has increased sixteen-fold since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It is hard to understate how big a discontinuity this was from previous human history.

However, there are no free lunches, even in gigantic welfare improvements. Back to Eli:

What determines how invasive the state will be? Call me a cynic, but I think it correlates strongly with the availability of points of control. When factors of production are fixed, when demand for government supplied public goods is inelastic, when there are lots of points of control, the government will exercise more control.

So many explanations for the growth of government draw on the rise of specific ideologies or the specific history of a country like the US. But as GMU’s John Nye has put it, growth in government spending as a percentage of GDP was far too global, far too cross-cultural, for any of these explanations to make much sense.

Eli makes the more persuasive case that growth in government came on the heels of the Industrial Revolution as its impact was felt around the world. For it is intricately linked with technologies of control, which provide big fat high-population density, enormously wealth-producing targets.

Abandon Anarchy for the Utopia of Infinite Elasticity

Moving on to the second form of innovation that Eli describes:

On the other hand, not all innovations are about brute maximization of production. Some are about producing things that we already know how to produce in ways that have ancillary benefits. An important ancillary benefit is evading control. Examples of these innovations include 3D printers and solar power. The evasion of control that is possible with 3D printers is the subject of Cory Doctorow’s short story Printcrime. And portable solar power cells can make people harder to control by supplying electricity without the need to register an address, have a bank account, stay put, and so on. These are obvious examples, but control can be evaded through more subtle innovations as well. I will call innovations that circumvent points of control that can be used by governments or monopolies to exploit, tax, or regulate technologies of resistance.

In Eli’s view, Brynjolfsson and McAfee are correct that innovation has been accelerating, but Cowen is also correct because it has been accelerating in an area that does not produce much in the way of output, proportionately.

 The stagnation debate was in many ways just a set piece with which to present this dichotomy, which is far more important to Eli’s larger view of things. In another piece, Eli reveals his practical programme for promoting a more libertarian world:

Imagine a world in which all factors of production were as mobile and elastic as financial capital. If labor and physical capital could flea instantaneously and at low cost from bad policies, there would be little danger from either the predatory or incompetent state. In short, it would be a libertarian utopia.

This utopia seems hard to realize. It’s hard to believe that labor and physical capital could ever be as elastic as financial capital is today. Nevertheless, I think this framework provides a way forward for libertarians who have given up on political reform (and maybe even those who haven’t yet). Even if we can’t make the supply of most factors of production infinitely elastic, maybe we can make their supply more elastic. To the extent we succeed, we reduce the power of governments around the world.

Bold added by me.

In fact, Eli is all about giving up on political reform. The far ideal of infinite elasticity provides more concrete possibilities for an ideological minority like libertarians. In the previously quoted post, he lists a few examples of how we might move in that direction; everything from refining 3D printers and solar cells to promoting a global lingua franca.

He has returned to this theme several times. Back in July of this year, he asked Can We Engineer for Liberty?

If 3D chemical printers become commonplace, say goodbye to the War on Drugs. If Bitcoin succeeds, it will be more difficult to censor unpopular speech by prohibiting payments. If solar power becomes cheap and ubiquitous, it will be easier to literally live off the grid. If mesh networking gets good enough, the government won’t be able to deputize ISPs to enforce unjust laws or to spy on people. As robots improve, it will be harder to enforce labor regulations, because businesses will just switch from labor to capital as the implicit price of labor increases. And ubiquitous private drones equipped with cameras will place limits on police brutality and misconduct.

Nevertheless, Eli is fully aware that technology in the 21st century so far has hardly been entirely of the resistance variety.

While most of us have until now considered the Internet a great force for individual empowerment, it has also become history’s most effective government surveillance apparatus. Where the ultimate balance of power lies depends crucially on both political and technological choices going forward—on decisions about the Fourth Amendment and about the use of encryption and decentralization.

Plus, the people who have the know-how to actually build these technologies are not necessarily a predominantly libertarian sort—they have to be persuaded, and Eli is deeply skeptical of our ability to succeed by persuasion.

The successes we have had so far have been structural in nature, not persuasive. For instance, the Wikileaks and Snowden strategy:

The Snowden leaks are instructive for a couple of reasons. First, there is good evidence that they have made it harder for the United States intelligence apparatus to function. Congress may limit contractor access to highly classified material, and the NSA has implemented a buddy system for accessing sensitive documents.

Cheap storage and the Internet, plus the sheer number of people who have access to any government agency’s data, make those agencies fundamentally vulnerable to leaks. By leaking that data to the public, rather than using it privately for personal profit, Snowden and Wikileaks reveal the points at which these agencies are vulnerable. The measures that agencies must take to avoid such leaks in the future significantly reduce their operational effectiveness.

Institutions Matter, and So Do Incentives

The components of Eli’s point of view that we’ve looked at here can be boiled down, more or less, to two fairly straightforward assertions.

First, econ 101 is basically right—if you lower the cost of an activity by a lot, people are probably going to engage in that activity more than they had been, and vice versa. If the cost of raising tax revenue falls, governments will raise more money, and subsequently spend more. If it’s easier to impose regulations than it was before, you will get more regulations. If the costs of taking care of people in their last year of life explodes, people will find ways to shorten that year. If we have to obtain permission from slow-moving bureaucracies before we can engage in anything innovative, we will get less innovation.

Second, there an underlying structure of institutions, Hayekian dispersed knowledge, and economic interdependencies—to the extent that these things are even separable—that explain the lion’s share of why anything happens larger human affairs throughout history.

Though anarcho-curious, he does not seem to believe in some notion of rights that are embedded in the very fabric of the universe. Take his most recent piece of Property Rights versus Property Institutions:

[I]t is necessary to revise the shallow lesson of the Cold War—property rights are good—with a deeper lesson: good property institutions are important. The Soviet Union’s property institutions failed to assign rights where they were necessary. But it is an equal and opposite error when our property institutions assign rights that impede human flourishing. Taxi medallions are an indictment not of the idea of property but of the quality of the government that decided to limit taxi service. We have poor rules for spectrum allocation because the FCC is terrible at centrally planning a system of property for spectrum. We have generally efficient rules for property in land because the common law has refined a large series of cases and controversies into an effective body of property law. In every case, what matters is the quality of the institutions that defines the exact contours of property rights.

At the bottom of this is a belief that the best institutions are those that respond to the ever-changing states of technology, individual preferences, and anything relevant to human affairs. As he said recently of the Lex Mercatoria:

In our most successful legal and governance structures, principles are discovered, not stated from the outset.

Sadly, the modern administrative state does no such thing and is, in fact, quite popular. Since it is also usually tied to some form of democracy, this means it is unlikely to be departing any time soon—hence Eli’s yearning for technological solutions to constrain its ability to raise revenue and tell us what to do generally.

If we could half the distance between our present state and the utopia of infinite elasticity, the result would not be chaos. No, as history has demonstrated, the result would undoubtedly be more institutions like the Lex Mercatoria.

And so Eli’s structuralism comes back around to his anarcho-curious side; it’s just that the only sustainable path to get us there is if we manage to reliably win the arms race between those investing in technologies of resistance and those attempting to adapt the infrastructure of control.

On Bets and Bullshit

Speaking of conversations, the economics blogosphere has recently erupted with a discussion that has been ongoing, at a much slower pace, for years. The subject is the effect of making a bet upon the kinds of claims one is likely to make. One side finds it inherently desirable to wager on your beliefs because it makes you put your money where your mouth is, discourages vagueness, and so on. The other side thinks the impact of this bet is overstated and perhaps even negative.

For my own purposes I’d like to collect the pieces of the conversation that I have managed to witness in one place.

Here we go:

What I love about this is how wonderful an illustration it is of the nature of conversations like these, which have existed long before blogs and the Internet and computers. None of the participants treat the subject as though it is occurring in a vacuum; all make reference to the larger conversation, making it easier for new spectators and participants to join in when encountering just one piece of it.

How to Avoid Gas Lines, Now and Forever

Let’s imagine for a moment what we want to happen when gas stations are all of a sudden faced with a shortage of gas.

We would want to encourage consumers to consume less gas. There are several ways they could do this. For trips they absolutely need to take, they could carpool much more often than they used to. There might be a whole set of trips that they decide they shouldn’t take right now, during this time of increased scarcity, so as not to reduce the overall supply further.

We would also want to encourage suppliers to divert from their usual routine to bring more gas to the area with the shortage.

So how do we get to a world where this is what happens during a shortage? Do we have to make laws about how gas is allocated nationally? About how many miles people are allowed to drive, or what the minimum number of passengers per car needs to be? Or more directly, how much gas per person we’re allowed to consume?

The Ideal Policy

In fact, there is a much more elegant solution, totally uncontroversial among economists and proven by the American experience of the 1970’s: just allow prices to rise. As soon as the price controls begun by Nixon were overturned, gas lines in America became something mostly confined to history books.

I say mostly because every so often, after a disaster like Sandy, we hear about gas lines cropping up temporarily again. But surely this is inevitable, right?

Wrong. What has happened consistently in these scenarios is that prices have not been allowed to rise.

You might ask how can economists be so cold and unfeeling as to say that the victims of a disaster should have to pay higher prices. Well, let’s do a little thought experiment.

What would happen if prices in New Jersey shot up to an astounding $20 per gallon?

The person who was thinking of doing a 5 minute drive instead of a 30 minute walk might opt to walk instead, since filling up will be so expensive. The group of friends all going to the same place a 30 minute car ride away or farther might all pool their money to pay for the gas. In other words, people will economize on their gas usage.

Meanwhile, since they are paying the cost in money rather than in time spent in gas lines, gas stations will be gaining more funds, which in turn will allow them to outbid gas stations outside of Jersey for additional supply. The influx of supply will eventually–and history has demonstrated that this can happen surprisingly quickly–start bringing prices back down.

In short, during a shortage the price system both forces people to reduce their consumption and bids additional supply towards the area that needs it the most. In other words, it accomplishes exactly what you would want to accomplish during a shortage.

Every alternative to the simple solution of relying on the price system has proven itself pathetically inept. In the 1970’s they tried a whole gamut of different regulatory allocation approaches, and nothing worked until the price controls were ultimately revoked entirely.

It is frustrating that we still have not learned this lesson. But I suppose history has also demonstrated that we are terrible at learning from repeated failure.

 

Suggested Further Reading:

Our Lumpy Future

The total value of the companies we’ve funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don’t know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.

-Paul Graham, Black Swan Farming

The freelance writer has to hustle every day for gigs, and some months are better than others. The staff editor is always well fed; the freelance writer is hungry on some days. Then the day comes when print finally dies, the magazine industry collapses, and the staff editor gets laid off. Having built up no resilience, he will starve. He’s less equipped to bounce to the next thing, whereas the freelance writer has been bouncing around her whole life— she’ll be fine. So which type of career is riskier in the long run, in the age of the unthinkable?

-Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Start-up of You

The Industrial Revolution was characterized by the rise of well-defined, specialized, routinized jobs. Adam Smith made his observations about pin factory workers more than a hundred years before Henry Ford’s assembly line became an icon of modernity and efficient industry.

With routine work came routine jobs, and routine paychecks. Modern industrial era employment, while taken for granted today, is something of a historical novelty. Before this Bourgeois Era we live in, an overwhelming supermajority of humanity lived on farms, and the rest were aristocracy or warlords of one stripe or another.

Farm life was lumpy–every year had the high point of the harvest, sometimes even with a subsequent festival in the nearby town. Then every year had its long, hard winters. Then there were particularly lumpy years; a bad harvest could wipe out a whole village while a very good one would be the subject of conversation for years afterwards, and might result in a temporary growth in the population.

Lumpiness in Modern Life

This is not to say that modernity has been all smooth trend lines and uninterrupted flow. Nassim Taleb would certainly protest such a claim. Even if we are speaking in strictly economic terms, there have been big, dramatic events of the negative and positive sort. The Great Depression comes to mind. The hyperinflation of Weimar Germany. On the flipside, the German and Japanese post-war Miracles. The sudden gentrification of American cities that had been in decline for decades.

And on a company by company and individual by individual basis, there has been a lot of lumpiness. Google went from a Stanford computer science project to a multibillion dollar company within a handful of years. Apple rose and fall and then rose far more spectacularly than ever.

Taleb has argued that the more informational economic activity is, the lumpier it will be. Thus, the content industries, and finance, have always been lumpy. The scalability of informational goods makes it possible for a book, such as Harry Potter, to be a best seller across the entire planet, raking in enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of books that come out every year won’t sell more than a handful of copies; for we are a groupish species and we like to focus on a small subset of things that can create a common experience.

This latter piece is preferential attachment; if one person’s consumption of an informational good increases the odds that someone else will consume it “by even a fractional amount“, it will create extremely skewed distributions. And there are well understood reasons why the book business has always been skewed, and why globalization and digitization will only skew it further.

Also skewed, though not quite so dramatically, is income in a human lifespan–into your “peak earning years”. Then there is the well documented phenomenon of extremely skewed healthcare spending–dramatically backloaded into the last handful of years and handful of months of your life.

So we are no strangers to lumpiness. But it seems to me that we are blind to it. As Paul Graham notes, it “violates our expectations”. We expect life to be more like the smooth streams of compensation that the industrial revolution has provided us.

We are going to have to adjust, though, because there is good reason to think that those smooth streams are going away for good. Things are about to get a lot lumpier.

The Robots Are Coming

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.

Arnold Kling

Our capacity to automate seems, at times, to be limitless. One thing is for certain, however, and that is that if it is repetitive and has clearly defined parameters, we can automate it. The Kling quote above actually understates the extent of the circumstances by bringing outsourcing into it. The fact is that even in China, where labor is much, much cheaper at a far higher scale than any developed nation, they are moving towards automation. Does this sound familiar:

China’s manufacturing output was over 70% greater in 2008 than it was in 1996. Over the same period, manufacturing employment in the country declined by more than 25%.

This is the exact same trend that we have been seeing in the United States for half a century, only, as with everything else, China is playing catch up and so the trend has accelerated there. While politicians and pundits in America blame outsourcing for the loss of manufacturing jobs, the fact of the matter is that our manufacturing output never stopped growing; it was only manufacturing employment that declined.

This trend, explored at length in Race Against the Machine, is not without historical precedent. Remember, we were an agricultural nation before we were an industrial one.

A century ago, 40 percent of Americans worked on farms. Today, the farm sector employs about 3 percent of our workforce. But our agriculture economy still outproduces all but two countries.

Some believe that the pattern will play out in a similar way all over again–manufacturing and anything else that can be automated will shrink down to single-digit percentages of our employment. But entrepreneurs will think up new ways to put people to work en masse.

A more pessimistic story, believed by Robin Hanson for example, is that there’s no going back. Automation has grown so good that the majority of people simply will never gain the skillset to be able to provide comparable value, in any sector. Anyone who has a successful company will be able to use automation to produce on an unimaginable scale and thus become unimaginably rich even by today’s standards, but a large segment of the population will not be able to find any way to contribute value whatsoever.

I am proposing a different story: we will all learn to live with ultra-lumpy incomes.

A World of Black Swan Farmers

Join me for a minute in our automated future. It only takes a few tens of thousands of people to produce agricultural and manufacturing output per capita on a scale we would consider absurdly large today. Delivery and postal workers have been put out of work by tacocopters. Maids, fast food workers and cooks have all been replaced with robots. What are we to do?

Well the first upside is that everything is extremely cheap. We can produce so much food, and so much stuff, and provide so many services, that our huge supply will drive prices straight down. So you don’t need a lot of money to maintain a standard of living that would be considered affluent by historic standards.

OK, but where does even that little bit of money come from?

We will all have to adjust to the lack of routinized and easily definable jobs by becoming a little like venture capitalists. We will put out blog posts, and Kindle books, and apps, and any other sort of informational good that we can, in the hopes that one blockbuster will support us for a while.

Since these black swans are, by necessity, very rare on a case by case basis, we will probably combine our efforts and share the spoils. The most obvious way would be for the member of the family who manages to get a hit to take care of the rest until the next hit comes along. But perhaps we will explore many more kinds of partnerships and legally binding revenue-sharing arrangements in order to cope with this radically different labor market.

And again, because of expanding supply and falling prices, you need not have a big hit in order to support yourself. Maybe 100,000 blog views will pay enough, through AdSense revenue, to feed you for a few months.

I can imagine a world where people have only periodic income and they have a higher standard of living than we currently do. I can imagine things would seem psychologically more tenuous in such a world, but it’s not as though anything was ever guaranteed under the old way. And maybe we will adapt, psychologically.

Do you think that you could live happily in a high volatility gig economy?

Capitalist Idealism

There is more to modern commercial culture than accumulating capital and mass production. Aspirations and ideals are not at odds with capitalism; they exist within it. As Deirdre McCloskey has argued and continues to argue at length, the Industrial Revolution and the resulting modernity have not hollowed out the human spirit, as many a sociologist and essayist have claimed from its early onset.

Ideals and aspirations must bend to prudence in the end; any attempt towards their realization must contend with scarcity. From this perspective capitalism does not crush ideals or push materialism more than any alternative; what discourages people in any system is the tragic but inevitable gap between reality and their ideals. Modern markets are no more relentless about this than any other system; indeed, as McCloskey would argue, they have made it possible for more people to devote themselves to the aspirational than any other systems at any other times in history.

Consider the great novelists of the 19th century; Dickens, Twain, and Dostoyevsky, for instance. All were deeply embedded in the commerce of literature of the day. Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler to satisfy a contractual obligation, while simultaneously writing Crime and Punishment at night, a more aspirational work. Yet the quality of The Gambler did not suffer from being born of necessity; Dostoyevsky had his pride as a writer–which is another way of saying that he had ideals. Dickens, meanwhile, was famously paid by the word–yet unquestionably earned a place in the Western Cannon of English classes.

McCloskey complains that even the defenders of commerce seem to think that it’s all about prudence; that the story of modern markets is one of assembly lines that drastically reduce prices. And there is no doubt that this is a very important and much misunderstood aspect of the market process. But even there you can find the aspirational–Henry Ford stated as his explicit goal that he wished to take cars from being a luxury enjoyed by the wealthy to a commodity for those of more modest means.

Ideals and Practical Knowledge

Much of entrepreneurship begins simply with someone believing that they can do better. In what McCloskey calls a Prudence Only mindset, this would mean nothing more than being able to provide the same product at a lower cost, or a higher quality product at the same cost, or a higher volume of products at a lower cost, and so on. And certainly this is an enormous amount of what goes on that we would consider entrepreneurship–taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities for personal gain, in the end making everyone better off.

But there is another respect in which some entrepreneurs believe that they can do better. A sort of aspirational arbitrage. Take the slew of editors who left Engadget last year to form The Verge. They left, in the spirit of the traitorous eight, because they believed they could do better than employment at AOL would allow. Reading editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky’s introductory letter to the new site, you can see the prudence as well as the aspirational.

They got away from AOL in part because they wanted to invest in better tools for getting their work done, certainly.

We’re going to do that on a new product that we’re really psyched about. A site that’s not just a stagnant, fixed entity, but an evolving, growing piece of technology. We think of The Verge (and its underlying CMS) as something akin to an app. A piece of software that is being constantly developed and updated. Today we’re launching with The Verge 1.0, but 1.1 and 1.2 are just around the corner.

But note also the idealism embedded in desiring a site that isn’t “just a stagnant, fixed entity” but is in fact “an evolving, growing piece of technology.” Moreover, in the context of the current state of online reporting, the letter contains some clearly idealistic features:

We’re focused on bringing you — our extremely savvy and frankly very handsome readers — the best and most comprehensive coverage of the consumer technology world. Not just the nuts and bolts, 24-hour news cycle stuff, but more in-depth coverage, bigger stories, and content that goes further.

The last couple of years in particular have increasingly seen the rise of the belief that the only way to make it in online content is through low quality, ultra high volume production.

It’s either a lolcats site or a content farm, or you’re out of luck. Or so the story goes. In any case, in an industry where advertising-subsidized free to consume products is the only model that appears to work, the appeal of the content farm approach is obvious.

Topolsky et al. aspired to something more than that, something more even than what they could accomplish at Engadget. I have speculated about how their costly feature pieces might pay off for them if you take a long view, but the point is that they are trying to make it work. They take one aspiration–professionally providing in depth and long form analysis of technology and society–and set to work attempting to make it work in practice.

From a certain point of view, all commercial culture entails is taking some ideal or aspiration and setting out to gain the practical knowledge of how to accomplish the closest approximation of that ideal they can. What makes it commercial rather than political is that it is accomplished through voluntary arrangements and exchange rather than through force.

And what the enormous growth in wealth since the onset of the Industrial Revolution has done is expand what is possible. Why some have taken this to mean that ideals were abandoned along the way for wanton materialism is beyond me. I stand with McCloskey in the belief that as our material possibilities expand, so too do the aspirations we are able to pursue.

I see examples all around me. Take the indie game developer Jonathan Blow. He worked in the video game industry for decades, and was frustrated by the constraints he faced at the big studios. He believed very strongly that video games could be a form of expression, that they could be up there with any art form. So he struck out on his own and worked on a game without institutional constraints for several years, and the result was Braid.

To any gamer, Braid clearly trumpets Blow’s aspiration for something more. It is full of allusions to the history of gaming, as well as to The Lord of the Rings and other such things. There was real innovation in the gaming aspect itself–the manipulation of time was not an entirely new thing (what is, in art or anything?) but nothing had taken it as far or made it as central to the gameplay as Braid did. Blow brought in David Hellman to make the game look like a gigantic, moving, interactive painting. And he clearly put a lot of thought into the soundtrack.

Whether or not Braid succeeds as art or even as a video game is one of those questions where the answer depends on who you ask. Roger Ebert didn’t think so, to no one’s surprise. But the reason he even mentioned it is because so many people have cited Braid as a counterexample to his claim that video games could never be art. Certainly, there are people who feel it is not just a good game, but a worthy artistic work.

Of course, it has been a tremendous financial success for Blow. Yet I find it difficult to believe that financial gain was his entire motive–with the low probability of success in indie game development, the expected return of going indie was probably break even with staying at his old job. But he had an aspiration, not just to create artistic video games but to push the industry in that direction. And his initial success means that he now has the practical means to pursue more such projects.

And I can’t see that as anything but a good thing.