In the 1900s, over 4,000 wagon manufacturers dominated American transportation. They had infrastructure, expertise, and supply chains refined across generations. How many became car companies? One. Studebaker. One company out of four thousand made the transition.
There's a particular kind of knowing that comes from walking—from months spent in neighborhoods where you learn which doors open easily and which remain forever closed, from conversations that drift and return like tides, from the smell of cooking that tells you more about a place than any survey could capture. Ethnographers have walked like this for decades: slowly, attentively, building trust one cup of coffee at a time, noticing the things people don't say as carefully as the things they do. It's intimate work, this ground-level knowing; embodied, reciprocal, achingly slow.
The best pranks take ten thousand years to set up.
That's what the Dwellers do in Banks' The Algebraist: beings who live for eons in gas giants, playing elaborate jokes on each other because when you have infinite resources, reputation through novelty is all that matters. One Dweller breeds a sentient species just to have an audience for their poetry. Another spends centuries setting up a pun.
They would find our current situation hilarious.
Consider the hospital administrator's daily reality: You're running critical infrastructure on OpenAI's API while your radiologists use sketchy Discord models on the side. Your lawyers demand compliance certificates. Your engineers contribute to repositories that will make your product obsolete. Your board wants quarterly growth. Your mission statement talks about serving humanity. Three different economic games, incompatible rules, everyone pretending this is normal.
For twenty years, we've lived with a particular story about how digital growth works—the flywheel spinning faster with each turn, users attracting more users, data improving services which draw more data; it's a narrative that explained why Amazon felt inevitable, why Facebook seemed unstoppable, why Uber could burn billions and still look like the future. The flywheel wasn't entirely wrong, of course. It captured something real about network effects and compounding advantages; it gave us services that were genuinely transformative, at least for a while. Yet what looked like perpetual motion from one angle, we now see, looked like extraction from another.