Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy

You start with this idea that, like, democracy is great and, like, we should have tons and tons of people participating, tons of people to participate, and then it turns out that, like, most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. That really squarely puts SBF in sort of like the finance crowd, much more so than, um, startups or, or crypto. Founders will always talk about, like, building and, like, startups is, like, so important or whatever and, like, what are all of them doing in their spare time? They're, like, reading books. They're reading essays and, like, and then those, like, books and essays influence how they think about stuff.

Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Nadia Asparova. She is previously the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, and she is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like. Nadia, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Okay, so this is, uh, perfect timing obviously, given what's been happening with SBF. How much do you think SBF was motivated by effective altruism? Wh- where do you place him in the whole dimensionality of idea machines and motivations?

Yeah. I mean, I know there's sort of, like, conflicting accounts going around. Um, like, I mean, just from my sort of, like, charact- character study or looking at SBF, it seems pretty clear to me that he is sort of inextricably tied to the concepts of utilitarianism that then motivate effective altruism. Um, the difference for me in sort of, like, where I characterize effective altruism is I think it's much closer to sort of, like, finance Wall Street elite mindset than it is to startup mindset, even though a lot of people associate effective altruism with tech people. Um, so yeah. To me, like, that really squarely puts SBF in sort of like the finance crowd, much more so than, um, startups or - or crypto and I think that's something that gets really misunderstood about him.

Interesting. Uh, yeah, I - I find that interesting because if you think of Jeff Bezos when he started Amazon, he wasn't somebody like John Perry Barlow who was just motivated by the free philosophy of the internet. You know, he saw a graph of internet usage going up and to the right and he's like, "I should build a business on top of this." And in a sort of loopholey way tried to figure out, like, what is a thing that is, uh, that is the first thing you would want to put a SQL database on top of to, uh, ship and produce and books was the answer so... And obviously he also came from a hedge fund, right? Would you place somebody like him also in the old finance crowd rather than as a startup founder?

Yeah, he's kind of a weird one because he's both associated with the early complete- computing revolution but then also AWS was sort of like what kicked off all the 2010s sort of startup boom.