27. Blue Collar Innovation 🔗

A thread on innovation theory pointing out some connections that have been clear in my head for years, but I’m realizing are not even visible to many people interested in the topic. I’m always surprised when I have to point these things out and pass along these references.

In the history of innovation revolutions, after the pioneer stage but before the institutional phase, you usually have a “blue-collar innovator mutual-influence network”, BCIMIN, basically consisting of people dropping in on each other’s workspaces and freely stealing tricks.

Here I overload “blue-collar innovator” to mean anyone producing stuff using an emerging medium of any sort, not just physical making. So early bloggers or first cohort of bands in a new music scene count. Sorry if that offends your class sensibilities but it’s the best term.

Out of necessity they have to work on/around deficiencies of medium and get hands dirty. Typically they are much more deeply knowledgeable about their tools than later institutional era non-innovator blue-collar types, who will also work at the tool level, but at stable maturity.

Often they may seem “overqualified” for the tool level. Early computing pioneers like Turing, von Neumann, and Richard Hamming were often mathematicians who knew vastly more math than modern programmers ever learn. If formally credentialed, they may look like they’re slumming it.

Interesting datapoint: much of the hands-on early work on drones and driverless cars was done at university labs by people getting Masters or PhD degrees. They did everything from soldering to writing advanced math papers. But today a high-school kid can work with the tech.

But credentials are not necessary for a BCIMIN. Only the impedance mismatch between the depth of knowledge and experience being brought to bear on the work, and the seemingly “beneath them” level of hands-on-work and mucking about at the tool level.

I’ve seen credentialed, decorated types literally turn up their noses with “this is contractor/intern/newbie grunt work”. When a respected, high-reputation person says something like that, I immediately flip the bozobit and look skeptically at their supposed great reputation.

Invariably I find they’ve been doing shallow, dull work aimed at racking up institutional merit points (number of papers/patents, awards etc). They are the Paris Hiltons of innovation. Famous for being famous. A resume stuffed with everything except blue-collar innovation.

Blue-collar innovators are “new medium pilot plant” producers. Their workspaces/tooling are inbetween basic research labs and scaled production. They produce in small batches not because they have artisan sensibilities but because they’re pushing the scaling limits of new media.

BCIMINs are the most stimulating and energizing place for most smart, creative, imaginative, and growth-oriented people to participate in. It’s not the rare lightning-strike regime that creates pioneers, nor is it the predictable world of institutions built around stable tools.

I’d guess 1% of the population will end up as pioneers, 9% as blue-collar innovators, and 90% as mature-institution normies. Of that 90%, a third to half (so 30-45% of total) will be bullshit workers, predators and parasites at maturity. Free riders of one sort or the other.

This is fine. I approve of non-producing free riders right up to the point that kills the host process of wealth creation. It’s only good wealth if it produces a surplus, and somebody has to consume it. Somebody has to eat all that cake.

Modern startup ecosystems and open-source communities before large-scale financialization are of course the most familiar example of BCIMINs, but it’s a more general phenomenon. See for example steam engines after James Watt’s patents expired: Collective invention during the British Industrial Revolution: the case of the Cornish pumping engine on JSTOR

Robert Allen called BCIMINs “collective invention settings” (his concept is the basis for the paper above). A more contemporary model is settler phase of Cringley’s pioneer-settler-town planner model which @swardley incorporated into his mapping model. Bits or pieces?: On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft.

The model applies to cultural production too. See the idea of scene-hacking from @sebpaquet Scene Hacking by Seb Paquet | PDF

And to general intellectual production. See Fred Turner on “network celebrity” fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-content/upl…

See also @Meaningness on the underlying social evolution process. Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | Meaningness

BCIMINs are a natural expression of human motivations. When they are repressed, potential blue-collar innovators turn to crime and other pathological activities. You can’t get rid of the 9%. See this Baumol paper. Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive on JSTOR

For fun fictional portraits of a BCIMIN era, try Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam or HBO’s Deadwood.

Let’s finish with some subtle takeaways.

1. Innovation watchers often uncritically fetishize either credentialed expertise or unqualified blue-collar doerism. Nope. BCIMINs run on expertise (credentialed or not) slumming at blue-collar levels. Get this wrong and you’ll end up either academic posturing or JohnHenryism.

2. The 90% normies often assume the 1% pioneers are the only ones who matter and form “scenes” of personality cults around them. The 9% BCIMIN types are often viewed with suspicion and become targets of societal policing. This never works. They just turn to crime etc.

3. Unlike the 1%, who have a love-hate tortured relationship with fame and the attention of the 90%, the 9% neither attract, nor crave the spotlight. But they will not toe the lines or conform to societal norms or social proof either. They’ll tolerate some spotlight as a burden.

4. They aren’t a community. They are a network of competing/cooperating individuals stealing tricks from each other. Ideas diffuse slowly through the BCIMIN, as each skeptically tests tricks before adopting. It’s not viral meme floods. It’s a slow network with fad defenses.

All this is fairly well-known and uncontroversial to students of innovation history. But people who enter BCIMINs attracted by 1% personality cults or with an uncritical fetish for either credentials or blue-collarism invariably don’t last. They crash and burn as scenesters.