Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds, has given us the Hero Developer: a figure who ships features at midnight, who “moves fast and breaks things,” who transforms whiteboard scribbles into billion-dollar unicorns through sheer caffeinated will.

We celebrate this person constantly. They're on the front page of TechCrunch et al. They keynote conferences. Their GitHub contributions get screenshotted and shared like saintly relics.

Meanwhile, an unsung developer is updating dependencies, patching security vulnerabilities, and refactoring code that the Hero Developer wrote three years ago before moving on to their next "zero to one" opportunity.

They will never be profiled in Wired.

But they're doing something far more important than innovation.

They're preventing collapse.

The Reality of All Systems

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy in a closed system tends to increase over time. Your codebase is not exempt from this law. Neither is your body, your marriage, your democracy, or your kitchen. Everything falls apart. Everything degrades. The universe trends toward disorder with the patient inevitability of continental drift, and the only thing standing between any functional system and chaos is the inglorious, repetitive, thankless work of maintenance.

This should be obvious.

And yet.

We've constructed an entire economic and cultural apparatus dedicated to pretending it isn't true. We have "growth hackers" but no "stability hackers." We have "disruptors" but no "preservers." The entire vocabulary of modern business is oriented toward the new, the unprecedented, the revolutionary. What we lack is language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.

Debt accrues interest. Ignored long enough, it compounds into bankruptcy. A startup can ship fast and break things for a time, but eventually someone has to pay the bill. Usually it's the maintainers, the ones who arrive after the Hero Developers have departed for greener pastures, the ones left to untangle spaghetti code and wonder why anyone thought it was a good idea to store user passwords in plaintext.

The Lindy Effect

Nassim Taleb popularized the Lindy Effect: the observation that for non-perishable things, every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. A book that has been in print for a hundred years will probably be in print for another hundred. A technology that has worked for decades is, by virtue of having survived, more robust than the shiny new thing that hasn't been stress-tested by time.

The forty-year-old COBOL system running bank transactions has survived countless technological upheavals, it has survived the internet, and it has survived DOGE. It works. The sexy new microservices architecture might work, or it might introduce seventeen novel failure modes that nobody anticipated because nobody had encountered them before.

But maintainers of legacy systems are treated as janitors rather than guardians.

We act as if working on old code is a punishment, a career dead-end, when in fact it may be the most consequential work in the entire organization. When the flashy new system fails, everyone notices. When the old system keeps running, nobody does. Invisibility is the maintainer's reward for competence.

Re: Personal Parallels

The same dynamics that create technical debt in software create what we might call "life debt" in those of us who are counted among the mortals. You can sprint on your health for a while, you can neglect your relationships, defer that doctor's appointment, skip the gym, eat garbage, and run on cortisol and ambition. And for a while, nothing bad happens. The system keeps running. You might even convince yourself that you've hacked human biology, that the rules don't apply to you.

They apply to you.

The body accumulates damage. Relationships atrophy without tending, and mental health degrades under sustained neglect. And just like technical debt, life debt accrues interest. The workout you skipped at forty becomes the cardiac event at fifty, the difficult conversation you avoided at twenty-five becomes the divorce you didn't see coming at thirty. Entropy always wins; the only variable is how long you can hold it off and what tools you use to do so.

The Hero Developer mythology maps onto our lives. We celebrate the startup founder grinding hundred-hour weeks, the hustler who sacrifices everything for the mission, the "winner" who achieves escape velocity from ordinary human limitations. We don't run magazine profiles on the person who exercises consistently, maintains their friendships, sleeps eight hours, and builds nothing more remarkable than a sustainable existence. 

But sustainability is remarkable. 

It's actually quite difficult. 

Ask anyone who's tried.

A Modest Hope for Maintenance Culture

Imagine a culture that celebrated the twenty-year veteran who has kept the same system running through three major platform transitions over the new hire who wants to rewrite it in Rust. Imagine performance reviews that weighted "prevented disasters" as heavily as "shipped features." Imagine founders who bragged about their boring, reliable infrastructure the way they currently brag about their growth metrics.

Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, eternally rolling his boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back down. But Sisyphus is a figure of futility, punished for trying to cheat death. The maintainer is something different. The maintainer rolls the boulder up the hill knowing that the village at the bottom depends on it remaining at some distance. The maintainer builds retaining walls. The maintainer is not punished but purposeful. The boulder remains in play.

There's nobility in maintenance that our innovation-obsessed culture has trained us to overlook. The senior engineer debugging a ten-year-old system at 3 AM isn't a failure who couldn't get a job at a cooler company. They're the reason the sexier company's payment processing actually works. The friend who remembers to check in during hard times isn't less interesting than the friend who makes a party a party. They're the reason there's anyone left to celebrate with.

The universe tends toward disorder. Entropy wins eventually. But the maintainer holds the line for another day, another year, another generation. And it matters.

This is great: The Realities of Political Persuasion with David Broockman, from the always listenable Opinion Science by Andy Luttrell.

Broockman argues that, in the context of campaigning, too much emphasis has been put on message personalisation - identifying particular segments of voters and designing ads which particularly appeal to them - and not enough on empirically testing message effectiveness. You can understand why - for consultants and strategists personalisation seems like the kind of magic which might allow big breakthroughs, and there are a range of ways of categorising people from demographics or psychology which superficially seem promising.

Broockman’s research pours cold water on this idea of personalisation. This fits with what I’ve learnt - when I’ve looked at studies which purport to show that advertising according to personality is more successful, there are either major confounds, or - when you look closely - the personalisation may arguably have an effect, but the size of the effect is not significantly larger than a non-personalised message.

Important context for this is that there are big differences between individual adverts in terms of effectiveness. This means that better and worse adverts could be deployed in terms of persuasive effect - the variance is there, if we can work out how to take advantage of it (and if we did, it wouldn’t threaten our vision of human reasonableness, because microtargeting is not mind control).

The point is that personalisation is, in practice, very very far from being some kind of terrifying ‘manipulation machine’. The difference between different ads is typically far larger than between a personalised and non-personalised version of an ad. I try and show this by reworking the data from this paper into a summary visualisation:

To understand this plot you just need to know that the up-down/vertical axis shows the persuasive effect. The green line, as it changes left to right, shows the difference between individuals in how persuasive they found the ads - a huge difference. The change in the vertical position of the orange triangles shows the differences between different adverts used in the study - a smaller difference, but still much much bigger than the difference due to personalisation (blue dots). The full context is in this post: AI-juiced political microtargeting. The point is that a non-zero effect of personalisation (the highest blue dot is higher than the lowest blue dot) can still be non-important compared to the other sources of variation (the differences due to advert or individual are far larger).

This is from a paper which says in the abstract : “Recent technological advancements, involving generative AI and personality inference from consumed text, can potentially create a highly scalable “manipulation machine” that targets individuals based on their unique vulnerabilities without requiring human input.”

The “highly scalable” part is definitely true, but I question the degree to which this is manipulation, or to which it is worth worrying about given the size of the demonstrated effects.

From the other side of the coin, the implication is that political campaigners should worry far more about being persuasive for everyone than trying to take advantage of minuscule fine-tuning that might be possible for different groups.

In the Opinion Science pod, Broockman goes on explain that despite the large differences between different messages these differences are hard to predict. They aren’t predicted by the categories that political scientists typically use, such as whether the ads are positive or negative in tone.

Further, expert political practitioners are not better at predicting the most persuasive adverts compared to the general public. Not only were the experts not better than the public at predicting which campaigning ads would be most persuasive, they weren’t consistent with each other (which is important because it suggests there isn’t even some kind of shared conventional wisdom which, although wrong, is shared by the experts).

I have a memory of a study done of the 2016 Democratic campaign which shows that the ads predicted to be most persuasive by campaign staffers were least persuasive with the voters who most needed to be swayed. Sadly I can’t find this now, but I did find this very telling article from pre-election 2016: How the Clinton campaign is slaying social media. This gloating piece neatly illustrates the potential mechanism - highly political, young, cosmopolitan and progressive campaign staffers (and journalists) mistake what works for them as what works for the generally less political, less young, less cosmopolitan and less progressive swing voters.

My take-away is that our intuitions in this area are bad.

We’re bad at discounting our own reaction to an ad to work out how it will affect people unlike us (meaning that campaigners probably leave a lot of variation in persuasive effect on the table when deciding which ads to deploy).

We’re drawn to think that microtargeting and personalisation will unlock extra persuasive power (when the evidence is that extant models of personalisation are not strongly effective, and the degree to which they are is probably in line with how normal persuasion works - information containing facts and evidence is persuasive, just as we’d hope).

And we’re constantly tempted to think of persuasion in general, and advertising in particular, as a form of manipulation. This is extremely limiting. It implicitly denies legitimacy to electoral campaigning, which is a core part of democracy, and denigrates the voters who are persuaded.

Link: The Realities of Political Persuasion with David Broockman

Paper: Broockman and colleagues: Political practitioners poorly predict which messages persuade the public.

Related, from me:

• Language models are persuasive - and that’s a good thing

  Two new studies provide insights into exactly how LLMs persuade, and what that means.

• The truth about digital propaganda

  Reasonable People #55: Our piece in New Scientist bring evidence to worries about online manipulation

• AI-juiced political microtargeting: Reasonable People #53 looking carefully at the claims in one study which uses generative AI to customise ads to personality type

• Propaganda is dangerous, but not because it is persuasive

  Reasonable People #52: I pick at the claim that propaganda “doesn’t work”.

• How persuasive is AI-generated propaganda? Reasonable People #51: Bullet review of a new paper suggesting LLMs can create highly persuasive text and will supercharge covert propaganda campaigns.

• Microtargeting is not mind control

  Reasonable People #22 exaggerated beliefs about the effectiveness of microtargeted ads obscure real risks, and real opportunities to foster public trust in politics

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PODCAST: Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

From Sean Carroll’s Mindscape, an interview with Pennycook about his work, including on pseudo profound bullshit and using chatbots to debunk conspiracy theories. Something which came out, which I missed from the papers and seems really important, is that people like the experience of being debunked by the chatbot.

And people usually actually like it.

They’re not mad at the AI.

The AI gives them information I think is useful.

And evidence matters more than we thought it was.

Link: Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

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JOB: Research Scientist at Wikimedia

We’re hiring a Research Scientist strongly committed to the principles of free knowledge, open source, privacy, and collaboration to join the Research team. As a Research Scientist, you will conduct applied research on the integrity of Wikipedia knowledge, its communities and their work, and the Wikipedia model.

Examples of recent research questions you may contribute to include::

How does the platform and its community navigate election times?

What is the role of Wikipedia in the landscape of online disinformation?

What guidance can we provide to researchers studying neutrality on Wikipedia?

Closes: January 15th, full remote with some geographic limitations

Link: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/7484474/

….And finally

END

Comments? Feedback? Takes from 2016 which aged really badly? I am tom@idiolect.org.uk and on Mastodon at @tomstafford@mastodon.online

Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it

Opinion  Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.…

Imagine we were to suffer an economic catastrophe in which our real incomes fall by 30%, which would be by far the greatest recession in modern times. The response, one might imagine, would be equally dramatic; there’d be a backlash against the government - very likely causing serious political unrest - and our politics would be dominated by the question of what caused the slump and what to do about it.

In fact, we don’t have to imagine such a disaster. It has actually happened. In the last 20 years real GDP per person has grown by just 0.6% a year compared to 2.3% per year in the previous 50 years. This means that our real incomes are indeed 30% lower than they would be if that trend had continued.

What we do have to imagine, however, is the reaction. This disaster does not dominate politics and the political class devotes remarkably little serious thought about what to do about it.

In fact, in some ways they actually seem to want us to be even poorer. The Home Office itself recently estimated (pdf) that the government’s proposals to restrict immigration flows “will have a downward impact on GDP”. Equally, there’s little interest in rejoining the single market despite an estimate (pdf) from Nick Bloom and colleagues that Brexit “reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%”*.

To someone of my age, this is puzzling. In our formative years, the main political issue was economic growth and how to improve it, and ideas that were considered “bad for the economy” were usually rejected, often with derision. Today, by contrast, voters and their representatives seem to actually want a weaker economy.

Our political feedback mechanisms are broken. In principle, bad events should trigger a reaction which corrects or at least ameliorates the damage. So, for example, the slump of the 1930s lead to the election in 1945 of a government devoted to maintaining full employment; the breakdown of the social democratic system in the 70s led to Thatcherism; the decay of public services in the 90s led to Labour’s election in 1997. Etc.

But there seems little such feedback now. Instead, the political class is content to wallow in our economic dysfunction.

Why?

Partly, it’s because we are like the (apocryphal) frog in a pan of water: we don’t notice gradual changes until it’s too late. This is exacerbated by a media bias: it reports upon salient events more than slow-moving processes so a gradual loss of prosperity is ignored in a way that a sudden one isn’t. And it’s also because we don’t have a Jim Bowen showing us what we could have won; we just can’t see the counterfactual world in which we are 40% better off.

But there’s more to it than this, factors that explain why politicans are not trying to make us richer.

One lies in that notorious shout at Anand Menon during the Brexit referendum campaign: “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.” People don’t see a link between aggregate economic growth and their own personal fortunes. And in a sense, they are right. Our personal income depends more upon idiosyncratic events than the state of the national economy: will you keep your job? Will you get a better one? Will you stay healthy? Good or bad GDP numbers tweak the odds of these only slightly: you can lose your job in a boom and get a good one in a recession.

And in fact there is a downside to economic growth. It is a process of creative destruction. And destruction means there’s a chance you’ll lose your job or that the longstanding local company that for years was a familiar landmark will disappear. Even if you will get a better job, this is disconcerting and unsettling. Stagnation is more comfortable.

What we have here is something common in social science - a form of the fallacy of composition: what’s true of any individual is not true for society as a whole. And so things that would help society as a whole are under-appreciated.

This is true for another reason, pointed out by Mancur Olson. The winners from better economic growth are the dispersed millions who might on average become 5-10% better off than they would otherwise be over ten or 20 years. No individual has much incentive to go to the cost and trouble of forming a lobby group to press for such a small and far-off gain. Losers from such policies, however, do have such incentive as their losses are concentrated among fewer people - and the fewer people there are, the easier they are to organize. So utilties can successfully press for high prices; incumbent companies can oppose stronger competition policy; land-owners can resist demands for higher taxes on land; lawyers and accountants can oppose tax simplification; and financiers generally don’t want anything that would increase real interest rates and so depress asset prices.

What’s more, serious efforts to raise growth would ask questions of management: why is it so bad, and how might we change it? Again, this would upset powerful people.

And so we have strong client groups that support the status quo of economic stagnation but few that can successfully press for pro-growth policies. One virtue of relaxing planning restrictions is that it is one of the few things that might improve growth whilst also pleasing a special interest group.

Promoting economic growth doesn’t just mean alienating powerful interests, though. A drawback to growth has always been that it makes other people richer, income being a positional good. This is especially difficult now because growth requires the government to help people the political class dislikes. The UK’s comparative advantage lies in part in higher education and the creative arts - industries staffed by liberal metropolitans rather than the older less educated people who still read newspapers and so constitute what politicians regard as target voters.

Worse still, a serious assault upon stagnation might require governments to reduce inequalities of wealth and power. Gabriel Zucman and colleagues have shown (pdf) that there is, in the long-run, “a strong positive association between equality and productivity.” This doesn’t mean that governments can raise productivity merely by taxing the rich more. It means instead having the sort of institutions that increase both equality and productivity such as education and training for all rather than just a few; good infrastructure and public services; stronger worker rights and unions so firms have to invest in raising productivity rather than simple sweat labour harder; and a democratic ethos (at least) in workplaces.

All this means that the political class has little incentive to think seriously about economic growth. Indeed, it has little incentive to think at all. The malefaction that is current affairs broadcasting has far more hours to fill than there are experts. The upshot is that the airwaves are occupied by know-nothings. And this further helps to skew the agenda away from economics: whereas it requires knowledge to talk about economics (or the welfare system or NHS etc) any fool can spout off about culture wars, and often does**. And so immigration and trans people dominate the agenda to the detriment of economics.

Which suits more people than merely dumbed-down TV and radio producers. Much of the political class would rather not ask questions about capitalism or challenge vested interests and would rather focus on immigrants instead. And stagnation helps them do this. It breeds reactionary politics partly because it fosters status anxiety, and people who look down want to punch down. Also, it creates a yearning for those better days in the past*** before immigrants arrived. And thirdly because stagnation closes pubs and shops and so reduces the sense of community and turns people towards the internet with its cranky right-wingers. In these ways better economic growth would threaten to put an end to the grift that is culture war politics. Why rock the boat?

And so we have a bad equilibrium. Instead of stagnation causing a desire for and interest in pro-growth policies, it actually strengthens the pressures on politicians to wallow in that stagnation.

The question is not therefore merely how to raise economic growth: any economist could give you half a dozen ideas. It’s: how can we create a public sphere in which politicians are incentivized to raise growth when this requires them to confront vested interests and the media?

But, but, but. To paraphrase Trotsky’s cliche, you might not be interested in economic growth, but economic growth is interested in you.

For one thing, a stagnant economy makes politics a zero-sum game. Without growth, better public services require less private consumption (unless you believe in the magic beans of higher public sector productivity). That comes with huge risks - not least of which being that shop and pub closures might further strengthen the far right.

And for another, economic growth has historically been a means of legitimating capitalist liberal democracies. For decades such polities have literally delivered the goods and the promise of doing so in the future. In a stagnant economy, this source of legitimation disappears.

There are therefore good reasons why sensible politicians for decades wanted to raise growth - because doing so avoids that most awkward question for them: socialism or barbarism?

* I’m sceptical about that estimate. A world in which capital spending was rising strongly after 2016 would probably be one in which interest rates were higher, thereby choking off some growth. And the idea that planning for Brexit distracted managers from raising productivity takes too rosy a view of their inclinations and abilities. Nevetheless, there can be no serious dispute that rejoining the single market would make us better off.

** Perhaps the rot began (or began to be evident) 30 years ago when Gordon Brown used the phrase “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory” and the response was mockery rather than curiosity.

*** A recent Ipsos poll found that 63% of people say Britain was a happier place in 1975, perhaps forgetting the high inflation, strikes and pub bombings.

The conviction of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong is another hostile act. How can Britain ignore Beijing’s provocations and human rights abuses?

The UK pushed hard to secure the release of Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher and British citizen who was a leading light in Hong Kong’s brutally suppressed pro-democracy movement. So, too, did press freedom and human rights campaigners. But the Beijing-appointed high court judges in the former colony convicted him anyway, finding Lai guilty last week on fake charges of trying to “destabilise” the Chinese Communist party (CCP). For Xi Jinping, China’s dictator-emperor, there is no greater crime.

Protesting to China’s ambassador, the UK’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, condemned the trial as “politically motivated”. She’s right, of course – but her angry words will make no difference. Beijing’s contempt for Britain’s views is as painfully obvious as the UK’s weakness and indecision in the face of Chinese hubris. The breaking of its solemn promise to respect Hong Kong’s freedoms after the 1997 handover typifies the arrogance and untrustworthiness of Xi’s CCP.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

The Russian strategy of exporting chaos to provoke extremism only works if liberals succumb to cynicism and despair

I once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so I asked my friend if there was anything at all about Britain that impressed him. “The stability,” he said without hesitation. “You can feel the stability.”

That was a different world; the late 1990s. I don’t remember the year, but I remember knowing what my friend was talking about because I had felt the same culture shock in reverse when first visiting Russia.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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