An engineer's perspective: Why everything feels broken and what can we do

Summary

Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between how fast some actors can change the world and how fast others can respond to those changes. Think about it: A small team at TikTok can alter the attention patterns of a billion teenagers in months. Meanwhile, educational institutions need years just to update their curricula, and democratic governments require decades to develop coherent responses to technological change. This isn't just about technology moving fast—it's about different types of power operating at completely different speeds. The framework begins with a simple observation made by entrepreneur Naval Ravikant: there are three types of leverage. Labor leverage scales through human coordination—think committees, voting, traditional management. Capital leverage scales through resource deployment—investment, market creation, financial engineering. Code leverage scales through systematic automation—algorithms, platforms, network effects. Each operates at a different mathematical order: linear, exponential, and systematic respectively. Here's where it gets interesting: we're experiencing massive "leverage arbitrage" where actors with higher-order leverage can extract value from systems faster than actors with lower-order leverage can maintain those systems. Google's compensation revolution didn't just raise tech salaries—it systematically destroyed entrepreneurial ecosystems globally by making employment more attractive than company-building. Social media platforms don't just connect people—they reshape democratic discourse faster than democratic institutions can adapt. AI systems aren't just tools—they're deployed faster than we can develop frameworks for understanding their social implications. The result is what we might call the "modern tragedy of the commons." In Garrett Hardin's original formulation, everyone...