Tyranny of the Marginal User and Customization

This week go deep with Alex Komoroske, CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked.

The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld.

Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality.

We can’t take a reasonable principled stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. I’m grateful that I get to share it with you and help light the way for promising alternatives to what many of us have come to accept as “the way things are.”

Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!

✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Become a member to support the show and score myriad perks, like our book club: our next call is on Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words this Sunday, Feb 15th!

✨ Become a founding member for access to my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)

✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant

Referenced & Related

• The FLUX Collective (team project w/ several people mentioned in this episode)

• Bits and Bobs (Alex’s long-running archive of weekly notes)• Common Ground (Alex’s dialogues w/ Aishwarya Khanduja of The Analogue Group)

• The Iterative Adjacent Possible (Alex on Medium)

• The Runaway Engine of Society (Alex on Medium)

• Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice (podcast w/ Lenny Rachitsky)

• Media and Machines by Anu Atluru at Working Theorys

• Accelerando & Glasshouse & Halting State (three books) by Charles Stross

• The Transparent Society by David Brin

• The evolution of Covert Signaling by Paul Smaldino

• Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul by Stefani Crabtree et al.

• The Tyranny of the Marginal User by Ivan Vendrov

• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly

• Blindsight & Echopraxia (two books) by Peter Watts

• The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor

• Silicon Valley’s quest to remove friction from our lives by Rohit Krishnan

• The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by Kyla Scanlon

• Bernhard Seefeld

• Situated Software by Clay Shirky

• Das Rad (animated short)

• Geoffrey West

• Mark Pesce

• Fred Turner

• Robert David Steele

Explore hundreds of related podcast episodes in the archives!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe