The tech industry as a grass fire – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

The tech industry as a grass fire

I have spent a lot of my career trying to envision and build better versions of the tech industry. To my face, people often say that I’m optimistic, though I suspect what they mean is that I’m engaged in an act of futility. I consider this work neither optimistic nor futile; I think of it more as a matter of persistence.

The dominant tech industry, after all, is not patient. It works on the logic of a phenomenon we know well in Colorado: grass fire.

Grass fires are fast, nearly impossible to stop, and devastating. They feed on the smallest, quickest-burning plants. One of these burned a thousand homes in my area a few years ago. They’ll skip one house and vaporize the one next door. But they don’t last long, and new things become possible once they are gone.

In what follows, I will outline a grass-fire theory of the internet, and suggest why this narrative offers some reason for hope that, after the burn, a better internet economy is possible.

Before the fire: old growth and primitive accumulation

A grass fire needs fuel. The fuel is grass. It is the field that has been growing for many years, not to fuel a fire but simply for the sake of growing, and hosting a reasonable ecosystem of plants and critters. In the economy, the fuel consists of the interconnected trades and companies that communities have accrued over the years. They do not exist to serve as fuel for internet-enabled disruption, but they come to serve that purpose. Perhaps the conditions become ripe: a wet spring of growth followed by a dry summer that leaves the grass dry; an industry of badly regulated taxis or dull hotels or local professions that have lost their dynamism.

This also has something to do with what Karl Marx called, in the old translation of Capital (and in Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, where I first learned the concept), “primitive accumulation.” This is the bedrock of capitalism, when entrepreneurs contrive to turn what was not a commodity into one. Maybe it happens through the colonization of others’ land by sword or gunpoint or legal decree. Maybe it happens by turning human relationships into a social graph that can be bought and sold. Maybe it happens by turning users’ thought processes into training data for large-language models. What once was a habitat turns into fuel. What once was a community turns into an inefficiency to exploit.

Early adopters—or more precisely what Andreas Hepp calls “pioneer communities”—are the spark. They tinker, they try things out, but most of them don’t end up catching fire or making much money at it. What makes a grass fire really dangerous is the wind.

During the fire: strong winds and venture capital

The wind is what turns a grass fire unstoppable. Without wind, it would burn the local fuel out fast and give fire crews a chance to put it out. But strong winds blow the embers too fast for anyone to stop them.

For the internet economy, the wind comes from capital markets. Most often it comes in the form of venture capital, specifically—a type of investment that pours huge sums into high-risk ventures in the hope that some of them will spread wildly across the economy. When this money blows their way, startups can spread their technology across the economy faster than policy or culture can catch up. It spreads the forgetting that I call “innovation amnesia” across society. It can feel like a force of nature. The fire spreads, burning through its fuel and everything near it.

Then, with time, the winds change. In tech, Cory Doctorow has called this moment “enshittification”—the once fast-moving, world-transforming startup grows into something sclerotic and extractive. We find ourselves not in the thrill of the fire but in the ashes, now lacking the benefit of institutions and inheritances that the startups burned through. Main street is empty. We no longer know our neighbors, but we all watch the same viral videos.

Mark Zuckerberg said last year in an antitrust trial that Meta was no longer a social media company, because it had “turned into more of a broad discovery and entertainment space.” This was not mere evasion; apparently the percentage of “friend” content users see on Instagram is in single digits. The vast majority is influencer content and AI slop. The media scholar danah boyd has declared the end of social media in exchange for the rise of parasocial media.

The apex social-media company stopped doing social media. What else could fill that niche?

After the fire: new growth and healing

It doesn’t take long before new growth begins to come up after a grass fire. The ash leaves behind good soil. There is no more fuel for fire, just charred dirt in which to grow. We might have lost a great deal in the inferno, but we can build differently—including in ways that will make the land less likely to burn again. Even if we couldn’t have stopped the...