@vgr

I liked the “it’s time to build” pmarca essay when it came out, in a very different era, but now I think the underlying idea is incoherent. Builder, unlike destroyer, is an aptitude, not a role anyone can play. And since building is a “creative destructive” process that you might naively assume can be unbundled into pure “creation” and pure “destruction” what general calls for a society-wide period of building do in the best case is try to elevate builders in status, but in the worst case simply unleash a wave of pure destruction much larger than any wave of building. And the building itself ends up being mostly naive “pure creation.” Ie doomed first-principles Xanadu projects. What’s the alternative? Recognize that “building” is just one aptitude and personality among many. The real challenge is recognizing that a finite game is ending and figuring out how to continue the infinite game by improvising a new finite game. And that comes from play-testing, not slogan-led missions.

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