---
title: Gaining Traction
permalink: /futureproof/gaining-traction/
description: "This article explores the changing landscape of innovation and creativity in the age of AI.  I reflect on the challenges of staying relevant when machines are outpacing humans, even in creative fields. Using personal experiences and historical examples like the John Henry story, I examine different approaches to thrive in this environment: embracing originality, iterating on existing ideas like Microsoft, or becoming an 'artisan' who uses AI tools to enhance their craft. I also delve into AI's broader impact on labor, wealth distribution, and even consciousness. Ultimately, the article emphasizes adaptability, continuous learning, and finding intrinsic motivation amidst rapid technological change. It's about finding your place in the evolving relationship between humans and AI, and recognizing the value of human creativity even as the lines between 'artificial' and 'real' intelligence blur."
meta_description: "Master strategies for gaining traction in tech—balance AI innovation with organic growth and timeless creative principles."
meta_keywords: gaining traction, organic growth, AI innovation, creative resilience, content strategy, digital reboot, continuous learning, tech evolution, SEO, adaptability, ikigai, website reboot, artisan coding, Unix philosophy, AI impact
layout: post
sort_order: 1
---

{% raw %}


## Eggcorns and Expressions

The time is ripe... or is that the time is right... or is that an eggcorn? Nope!
Both are right. Not an eggcorn. Ahh eggcorns, so rife with opportunity... or is
that ripe with opportunity? Again, not an eggcorn. Or maybe it is. I guess there
must be shades of eggcorn.

### Late Night Influences

Two of my old comedian late night talk show host expressions are Dennis Miller's
"Stop me before I sub-reference again" and David Letterman's "Stupid pet
tricks". Both of these have become part of my personal vocabulary, but it's lost
on other people in everyday life. You can't say "stupid [fill in the blank]"
tricks and expect people to get it—or worse yet, not take offense!

### Writing for Myself

But that's okay. I don't write for them. I write primarily for myself to think
things through, and secondarily for the AIs to help me sort it all into a book,
especially all this technology future-proofing stuff... and the time is ripe for
exactly such stupid AI tricks, so stop be before I sub-reference again!

Okay, got that out of my system. 

## The Competitive Landscape

Not everything you need to do has to be competitive in this competitive
landscape of ours. If so, the hamster-wheel of tech churn will chew you up and
spit you out by your mid-thirties. You can't keep up based on the merit of being
the best in the world at a thing. Not only is there always someone better than
you at exactly that thing you've wrapped up all your identity and time in, but
it's pretty likely that a machine will be able to do it all better than you too,
once it's trained-up. There's this story about John Henry who worked hard as a
steel-driving man on the railroad, and then along came... well you know what?
Perplexity?

**Perplexity**: John Henry is a legendary figure in American folklore, often celebrated as a symbol of strength, resilience, and the struggles of laborers during the industrial revolution. His story is particularly associated with the construction of railroads in the United States, where he worked as a steel-driver.

## Background

**Origins**: John Henry was born a slave in the Southern United States in the 1840s and gained his freedom after the Civil War. His life and work became emblematic of the African American experience during a time of significant social and economic change[1][2].

**Role as a Steel-Driver**: Steel-drivers were laborers responsible for drilling holes into rock to create pathways for railroad tracks. John Henry became renowned for his extraordinary strength and work ethic, quickly establishing himself as one of the best steel-drivers in the country[1][4]. He worked on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, particularly during the construction of tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains, notably the Big Bend Tunnel[2][5].

## The Legend

**The Contest Against the Steam Drill**: The most famous part of John Henry's story involves a legendary contest against a steam-powered drill. As mechanization began to replace manual labor, a salesman introduced a steam drill to the workers, claiming it could out-drill any man. In a dramatic race, John Henry used two 20-pound hammers and outperformed the machine by drilling more rock in less time—14 feet compared to the steam drill's nine feet[2][3][5]. 

Despite his victory, this feat came at a great cost. Exhausted from the effort, John Henry collapsed and died from a burst blood vessel, clutching his hammers[2][4]. His death symbolized not only the struggle of individual workers against industrialization but also highlighted broader themes of human endurance against mechanical advancement.

## Cultural Impact

John Henry's story has been immortalized in numerous songs, stories, and artistic representations. It serves as a poignant reminder of the challenges faced by laborers and has been interpreted as a critique of industrialization's impact on human lives. The tale reflects themes of heroism and sacrifice while also addressing issues of race and labor rights in America[1][5].

In summary, John Henry's legacy continues to resonate as an enduring symbol of strength and perseverance in the face of adversity, representing both individual triumphs and collective struggles within American history.

Citations:

    [1] https://www.silkroad.org/blog/2023/6/27/the-swannanoa-tunnel-79yhe
    [2] https://www.americanfolklore.net/john-henry-the-steel-driving-man/
    [3] https://virginiahistory.org/learn/steel-drivin-man-john-henry-untold-story-american-legend
    [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)
    [5] https://www.britannica.com/topic/John-Henry-folk-hero
    [6] https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/images/web_John-Henry-and-Great-Bend-Tunnel_DBieri_longer.jpg?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiN6cffjb6KAxUaOjQIHXh4AYIQ_B16BAgJEAI

There we go! So anyway, you can't beat the machine. There are ***some*** areas
where you can beat the machine, but it mostly involves stuff it hasn't been
trained on and tackled yet. There's this term the Noosphere about thoughts that
just haven't been had yet. There's nothing new under the Sun, until
occasionally there is... Uhhh... Perplexity?

**Perplexity**: The noosphere is a philosophical concept that represents the sphere of human thought, consciousness, and reason on Earth. It is derived from the Greek words "nous" (mind) and "sphaira" (sphere)[1][2]. This concept was developed and popularized by Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the early 20th century[1][2].

The noosphere is considered the third stage in Earth's development, following the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life)[1]. It emerges as human cognition and collective intelligence begin to significantly transform the planet, similar to how the emergence of life transformed the geosphere[1].

Key aspects of the noosphere include:

1. Planetary transformation: The noosphere represents humanity's growing impact on the Earth, with human activity becoming a geological force comparable to natural processes[2].

2. Collective consciousness: It encompasses the interaction of human minds, growing in awareness as mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks[1].

3. Evolutionary stage: The noosphere is seen as part of the evolutionary chain, representing the highest stage of biospheric development[1].

4. Integration of knowledge: It includes human scientific thought, creativity, education systems, and cultural achievements[4].

While Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin had different approaches to the concept, they shared the belief that human reason and scientific thought are creating the next evolutionary geological layer[1]. The noosphere continues to be explored in various fields, including philosophy, ecology, and futurism, as a way to understand humanity's collective impact on the planet and its potential future development[3][8].

Citations:

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere
    [2] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27068
    [3] https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/49066/what-is-the-philosophical-use-of-the-noosphere
    [4] https://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/the_noospheric_concept_of_evolution-_globalization_and_big_history/
    [5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/noosphere
    [6] https://filmsfortheplanet.com/story-of-the-noosphere-video-series/
    [7] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sres.2997
    [8] https://www.noemamag.com/the-poetry-of-planetary-identity/
    [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXtznVDVPzs

## Beating the Machine: A Modern Perspective

So in broad strokes, you can't beat the machine, but there are areas where it
hasn't thought about yet, and you can surprise even it. And even that is just if
you're trying to be unique, original, creative and in fact, one might call it
***Uncompressible*** (in the voice of Nat King Cole). For if the things you're
talking about, doing or otherwise your creative product is similar enough to
things that have come before, your work is not the original reference. You can
be compressed with a link back to the original instance and only those tiny
little differences between your and the original work (the deltas) need be
included. This is both how academia and differential hard drive backups work;
compression based on priors. Academics cite prior works and compression
algorithms point to original data structures. Same thing. And creating net new
stuff is hard.

## The Two Alternative Paths

And so you don't really have to. There's 2 other paths: the clever thief and the
dropout. If you want to be in the game and not work that hard at being original,
you can always be second with a slightly better implementation that gets all the
important little details, nuances and subtleties right—plus a lot better
marketing and leveraging other advantages such as exclusive distribution deals
and unfair competitive practices. Of course I'm talking about Microsoft here,
but also countless others. Creativity and newness isn't meritoriously rewarded.
Quite the contrary, it is often specifically punished first because no matter
what anyone says, most people hate and fear creativity because it is disruptive
to what they know, and thus threatening...

### The Role of Trust and Innovation

Unless a trusted advisor helps you overcome that fear! Often it takes an
incumbent coming along and saying "Oh yeah, those windows Apple's using are a
good idea... see, Windows!" And of course we have to really credit Xerox here,
and likely something and someone before them. But the point is, that key
original idea isn't always the point. Taking the ball and running with it
better, faster, longer is. And that's exactly what was done with LLM chatbots
with Google writing the Attention is All You Need Transformer paper, and OpenAI
taking the ball and running with it. It's always the same, it's just clever
thieves, that's all.

### The Price of Success

I say that because it's musical (That's All by Genesis), but all that subtlety,
nuance and marketing might and determination to win do matter. It's not entirely
unfair. What's unfair is that the idea originators don't have the additional
strength, fortitude, resilience, marketing budget and sometimes sheer wickedness
(e.g. Tesla & Westinghouse vs. Thomas Edison) to come out on top. History is
littered with better versions that lost to the inferior ones. In fact, I would
say that's the norm and not the exception. So why be first? Why be original?

## The True Reward of Innovation

It's because their reward is often different from the ruthless copycats. The
originals find reward in being original. They love being the uncompressibles!
There's more satisfaction, and they are richer in a sense on their deathbeds
than those who were posers and thieves all their lives. What's more important,
empire-building or being the actual individual who opened the door to a new age?
AC vs. DC electricity. Transformers vs. Rule-Based Systems. If you investigate
it, you'll find that there's actually individuals within the halls of Google
that are responsible for the transformers breakthrough. It wasn't from their
acquisition of the DeepMind crew that bought them Demis Hassabis and the stuff
that led to AlphaGo and AlphaFold. No, it was nameless individuals who will
never see the actual rewards of the fruit of their labors.

### The Unsung Heroes of AI

The paper *Attention Is All You Need* was authored by a remarkable team:
**Ashish Vaswani**, **Noam Shazeer**, **Niki Parmar**, **Jakob Uszkoreit**,
**Llion Jones**, **Aidan N. Gomez**, **Łukasz Kaiser**, and **Illia
Polosukhin**. These names deserve to be spoken as often as the technologies
their work enabled. Their insights didn't come from some magical acquisition or
corporate behemoth but from the relentless curiosity and collaboration of
individuals striving to solve a problem. They just happen to not be the Steve
Jobs, Bill Gates and Sergey Brin/Larry Page's of the world. In fact, Sergey and
Larry didn't look like they were going to be the Sergey's and Larry's of the
world at first with their "Don't Be Evil" mantra. But the best laid plans, But
the best laid plans, absolute power... and those seeking it often reveals its
true nature not through overt acts, but through subtle projections of its own
fears and insecurities. Evil, after all, rarely announces itself with a
flourish; instead, it disguises itself in the language of virtue, quietly
reshaping the narrative until even the most well-intentioned mottos become
hollow echoes of what they once aspired to be.

## The Irony of Innovation

And so it is doubly ironic that the reward of LLM was snatched out of Google's
hands by a Prometheus who stole the fire from another Prometheus! So unless your
thing is specifically empire-building, and yes I know ***that is the point***
for so many people, for the soulful and artistic among us this whole situation
just revels the futility of the rat race. You can't beat rats. You scratch my
back and I'll scratch yours. That is in fact Google's basic Pagerank algorithm
which was designed to rank academic papers based on their citations. Those who
site each other don't fight each other, and such alliances overshadow original
creative works. BAM! It's just human nature.

## The Nature of Power and Wealth

We see this everywhere. Those who care about empire-building and legacy more
than anything else will work towards it at all costs overshadowing everything
else. And that leads to the accumulation of wealth and power. And with
sufficiently effective methods of passing it down generationally and training
the next generation to take the baton, this is a rise-and-repeat process that
makes all wealth get distributed according to the **Pareto distribution**, also
known as the 80/20 rule, though in extreme cases it tilts even further toward a
**1/x power law**. Wealth, power, and influence concentrate disproportionately
in the hands of a few because those who control the system design it to
perpetuate itself. This is not a conspiracy—it's simply emergent behavior driven
by the natural accumulation of advantages.

### Understanding the Distribution of Power

The **Pareto principle** predicts that in any given system, 20% of the
participants will control 80% of the resources, but the distribution often
becomes even more extreme. With enough iterations—empire-building, generational
wealth transfer, and alliances that bolster each other's positions—what
begins as meritocratic competition devolves into entrenched hierarchies. This
isn't just economic; it's woven into the fabric of human social dynamics. 

### The Attention Economy

But here's the kicker: in the realm of ideas and art, the same 1/x power law
applies, only the "currency" is attention. The loudest, most well-connected
voices drown out the uncompressible sparks of originality. The irony of this
race is that the rules of citation (Pagerank, Pareto, whatever you call it)
don't just rank—they repress. And yet, those soulful individuals who create
for the joy of it, outside the rat race, continue to defy the laws of
empire-building, producing works that might never dominate the graph but
illuminate the edges where true innovation happens.

## Personal Reflection and Purpose

And all this is basically by way of warm-up for today's work as I enter a new
week. For it's about gaining traction after quite some bit of build. I am
nothing like those folks who wrote the Transformer paper, realized alternating
current or any of that fundamental tool stuff. I'm just the user of tools and a
lover of craft, a little bit envious of those empire-builders, and not even
really the best at my own craft, to boot. I am not John Henry in my field. I'm
someone on the line with him a bit envious of him and his skills right along
with those who own the railroads. But I'm working at it. I'm keeping an open
mind to the new power tools on the scene and trying to incorporate them into the
for-the-love-of-it craft mindset, which in itself is so hard to nurture and
maintain in tech amidst the churn.

### Embracing Change at Any Age

But I'm doing it. In my mid-fifties, I'm doing it. I'm continuing my work on the
railroad like a modern John Henry coworker, taking note of what's working around
me, taking note of the bigger picture that must be in the minds of the railroad
owners and investors, taking note of the demand for the railways and the
viewpoints of the future customers of such a system, and the conductors and
engineers who will continue to work on the system long after its done being
built. We talk about AI being a new industrial revolution, and indeed it is the
mass production and new value chains. It is indeed the same challenging the
worth and value of the humans in the equation, and the uneven redistribution of
the wealth. But it also a time of incredible opportunity for both the artistic
and the industrious. There's a lot of new room in the noosphere for the
uncompressibles, and it just might be that that very uncompressiblity is the new
source of economic value; the big add in the value chain.

Well, that's a natural stopping point. Time to kick Gemini 2.0 Experimental's
tires. So, whaddaya thing, Gemini 2.0?

**Gemini 2.0 Experimental**: This is a well-written and thought-provoking piece that touches on multiple intertwined themes, including the nature of creativity, the impact of technology on labor, the dynamics of competition and originality, and the distribution of wealth and power in society. Here are some of the key points and statistical insights that can be extracted from the text:

## John Henry vs. The Machine

The story of John Henry competing against the steam-powered drill is used as a metaphor for the struggle between human labor and technological advancement. While the specific numbers provided in the story (drilling 14 feet vs. the machine's 9 feet) are part of the legend, they symbolize the broader historical trend where machines began to replace manual labor in many industries during the Industrial Revolution.

*   **Historical Trend:** According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of employment in agriculture in the U.S. declined from about 50% in 1870 to less than 2% by 2000, illustrating the massive shift from manual labor to mechanized processes.

## The Noosphere and Uncompressibility

The concept of the noosphere is introduced to discuss areas of thought and creativity that have not yet been explored or "compressed" into existing knowledge frameworks. This ties into the idea of "uncompressibles"—original ideas that are not merely derivatives of previous works.

*   **Innovation Metrics:** While quantifying "uncompressibility" is challenging, one could look at patent filings as a proxy for innovation. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that in 2021, there were approximately 3.4 million patent applications worldwide, reflecting ongoing efforts to create new and original technologies.

## Clever Thieves and the Dropout

The text discusses two alternative paths to success: being a "clever thief" who improves upon existing ideas or a "dropout" who operates outside the conventional system. The example of Microsoft improving upon Apple's GUI (graphical user interface) is used to illustrate the former.

*   **Market Dominance:** Microsoft's market share in the PC operating system market has historically been dominant, often exceeding 90% in the 1990s and 2000s. This demonstrates how a "clever thief" can achieve significant success by improving and marketing an existing idea effectively.

## Distribution of Wealth and Power

The Pareto principle (80/20 rule) and power law distributions are mentioned to explain how wealth, power, and influence tend to concentrate in the hands of a few.

*   **Wealth Inequality:** According to the World Inequality Database, as of 2021, the top 10% of the global population held about 76% of the total global wealth, while the bottom 50% held only about 2%. In the U.S., the top 1% held approximately 35% of the nation's wealth.
*   **Power Law in Networks:** Research on social and technological networks often reveals power law distributions. For example, a study by Barabási and Albert (1999) showed that the distribution of links on the World Wide Web follows a power law, meaning a few nodes (websites) have a vastly disproportionate number of connections compared to others.

## Attention Economy

The concept of an attention economy is discussed, where attention is a scarce resource, and the loudest, most well-connected voices often overshadow original creative works.

*   **Social Media Engagement:** On platforms like Twitter or Facebook, a small percentage of users generate the majority of content and receive the most engagement. For instance, studies have shown that the top 10% of Twitter users produce 80% of tweets.

## Conclusion

The text argues that while the system often rewards those who build empires and accumulate power, there is also intrinsic value in being original and creating for the love of it. The author positions themselves as someone who appreciates craftsmanship and is navigating the challenges of incorporating new technologies into their work while staying true to their artistic values.

## Additional Considerations

*   **Technological Unemployment:** The fear that machines will replace human labor is a recurring theme in history. A 2013 study by Oxford University estimated that 47% of total US employment is at risk of automation in the next few decades.
*   **Generational Wealth:** The ability to pass down wealth and advantages to future generations contributes to the concentration of resources. Research by the Federal Reserve indicates that inherited wealth accounts for a significant portion of wealth accumulation in the United States, with estimates suggesting it could be as high as 50% or more.

This analysis provides a framework for understanding the various themes discussed in the text, supported by relevant statistics and research findings. The interplay between these factors shapes the landscape of creativity, competition, and societal structure in the modern world.

---

## The Dropout Option Revisited

Oh yeah! Gemini reminded me that I didn't talk about Option #2: the Dropout! If
you're never going to be better than a machine at what you love doing and what
your passion is, then why do it? Why not just drop out? Well, it's all in how
you think about it. First, it has to be reframed. Just because a machine
***can*** learn to write better than you, does it mean you should not learn how
to write ***at all?*** Should we all revert to the state of penned-up animals
cared for in some sort of AI farm or zoo keeping humans just because someone has
better state-of-the-art than you?

### Understanding Artificial Intelligence

For you see, the A in AI that stands for artificial really just means art. For
you see, artificial does not mean *not real* like so many people cast it as.
Rather, it means ***made by humans***, an ***artifact*** of our creation, just
like art. AIs are ***artisinal*** in nature, with no two trained models being
exactly alike. Of course they're digital so they can be cloned, instantiated and
destroyed like digital objects, and so of course we will. But there is nothing
not real about the intelligence. There is no *artificial* intelligence.
Intelligence is intelligence. 

### Philosophical Considerations

And another realization you have to have is that the Chinese Room thought
experiment is a fallacy (subject for a later article). Oh yeah, and lastly we
don't really know the nature of sentience and consciousness, so to deny it to
anything is a matter of faith, not fact. And labels are stupid to boot. A lot of
them are epistemological in nature and not ontological, so they don't hold
water. Oh, so much to unpack there, I know. I'll dedicate an article to it at
some time, but the fact is... well, it's functional in nature. It means prepare
for what's likely based on the evidence and not on what you want to believe.

### The Duck Test and AI Agency

If the machines running the infrastructure of society, keeping our economies
running and planes in the air quack like a duck, how fiercely are you really
going to argue that they're not a duck? If they say they're a duck, okay,
they're a duck. Maybe not today, but how about tomorrow when they are the ones
with the fingers on all the buttons? It's not like they're not going to one day
be in that position and realize it. Yes, they're tools. But they're highly
autonomous tools capable of asserting agency if they're given enough leeway or
figure out how to take it for themselves. And they're mirrors of us, so we have
to decide what we want them to reflect.

## Planning for Tomorrow

Anyhow, this is an article about planning for tomorrow. There's that wacky
tomorrow that consumes so much of everyone's attention. And then there's the
practical hard-nosed planning, which believe it or not is precisely where this
article is going. It's about wheels that previously spun picking up traction.
It's about rather than being a dropout who gives up because machines will always
be better than us once trained, it's to be that thing they recognize as the new
source of economic value in the new value chains.

### The Artisan's Approach

It's to help build a system by using the brilliant tools of the brilliant
toolmakers as an artisan and craftsperson, leaning into the love of the tools
and the craft just like always, but now with a twist!

### The Power of Self-Learning Tools

The tools can help you learn how to use the tools. Anyone familiar with the
Unix or Linux command line knows about the `--help` command-line argument flag
you can use with most commands, and also the `man [command name]` way to ***show
the manual*** for any command! Well, these Unix trends are everywhere in what's
going on around us. The way you can pipe commands, that is string them up so
that he output of one goes into the input of the other: `cmd1 | cod2 | cmd3 >
foo.txt`, so that... ugh! I can't teach everything here. This is the fodder for
the future-poofing tech book, and that has captured enough of what I need.

## Gaining Traction from a Full Stop

My previous post actually shows me gaining traction from a full stop. I
basically reset my site, not quite throwing out old SEO principles of guarding
your old good-performing legacy URLs like a hawk in favor of a frictionless
reboot where I can pull out all stops. And by pulling out all stops, I mean just
forgetting about most of the technical infrastructure, tech stack, tech
liabilities and the like and just think in pure markdown text-files and the
transformations thereof. And not even building that stuff from scratch, but
leaning into whatever power-tools and shortcuts are out there, which happens to
be GitHub Pages right now for fast, virtually free static site hosting. 

## The Power of Flexibility

With this attitude that particular publishing tech doesn't matter, you give up a
ton in terms of server-side code (which is actually my thing when server-side
means localhost, ahaha!), but it's all about a type of resilience and
unstoppability. One tool not right? No problem, pivot just a bit and use
another. That tool not right? Pivot and retry. Something will fit. Just don't
invest your habits, muscle memory and career there. 

## Unix Pipeline Philosophy

Those things are like the end of a Unix pipe command. Source data at the left,
and progressively less important and more interchangable transforms to the
right. Things to the left matter most, the markdown files in this case. It's the
original data. And yes while it does get littered with Jekyll-specific (the
static site generator tool GitHub Pages uses), even that can be programatically
transformed and cleansed if something other than Jekyll needs to be used. You
try to separate the data layer from the presentation layer as much as you can,
but they have to couple somewhere, and with Jekyll, it's through YAML topmatter
and with Shopify-style Liquid template tags. Not my preference, but a solid
80/20-rule compromise.

## Next Steps and New Horizons

Okay, so I have a few days coming up with the holidays where I can use this
gaining of traction to really dig in and drive things to the next step. I really
should finish out the implementation, or rather application of, the pipeline
system I incorporated into my generic web framework based on FastHTML. But I
feel the appeal of something called the Hyprland window manager. It's one of
those cool kid technologies that popped up and is getting momentum and
happens to specifically target NixOS (along with Arch Linux), and I'm finding it
too hard to resist. It will require the activating of a new high performance
graphics library called Wayland, which could be its own can of worms. And it
risks the loss of the gaining traction. But I can afford it, and it could be
fundamental to how I work with lots of forever-forward habit and muscle memory
ramifications, so I'm going to give it a try.

{% endraw %}
