Welcome to Think Out Loud, a biweekly newsletter of notes, commentary, and links related to technology and philosophy. If you’d like to learn more about this substack, you can do so here. Subscribe below:
Contents
Notes on Bitcoin and Anarchism
Biweekly links, notes, and commentary
2.1 Economics
2.2 Philosophy
2.3 Cryptocurrency
2.4 Billionaires
2.5 COVID-19
2.6 Software Engineering
1. Notes on Bitcoin and Anarchism
Note: I assume a solid baseline knowledge of Bitcoin here
Something surprising happened in the cryptocurrency space the other week: Nassim Taleb denounced Bitcoin’s current state.
Taleb, the famous options trader, NYT bestselling philosopher, trash-talker, and mathematician, has long been one of the strongest proponents of Bitcoin. He wrote the forward to “The Bitcoin Standard”; the book now considered to be required reading for those interested in the space.
Though he’s hard to label, Taleb is a lover of most things localism and decentralization. He’s highly critical of large, centralized systems and has been for a long time. If anyone should be a proponent of Bitcoin, it should be him. Other popular localists, like Joe Norman, have also been critiquing other aspects of the supposed decentralization Bitcoin provides.
This isn’t the first time Bitcoin has hemorrhaged people belonging to the philosophies initially backing it. Back in 2017, a number of the original supporters of Bitcoin, like Roger Verr and Gavin Andresen, also fled towards alternative solutions via hard-forks or separate digital currencies. Personally, most people I know interested in decentralization also jumped away from Bitcoin around that time; this was when technical supporters realized that Bitcoin was not going to be able to deliver on its promise of being “decentralized, digital, cash” without the support of centralizing factors like the lightning network, ASIC-based mining, etc.
This isn’t to say everyone supporting those core values has abandoned Bitcoin. Early pundits like angel-investor Naval Ravikant and the black sheep economist Saifedean Ammous still support Bitcoin fervently. But now that large financial institutions and companies like Tesla have jumped onto Bitcoin, the language around its purpose, as well as the sorts of people backing it, seem different from the initial rallying call.
One popular narrative towards Bitcoin from these institutions has been to frame it like a call option on a new, hard-to-seize, deflationary, digital asset; this is the way Ray Dalio—CEO of Bridgewater Associates—and others have positioned Bitcoin. Worried about COVID-driven quantitative easing inflating away your balance sheet? Bitcoin to the rescue. There’s also some limited conversation around U.S. state governments adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets, collecting taxes in Bitcoin, and paying workers in Bitcoin.
The idea is that most of the institutions you know and love remain unchanged, but they have Bitcoin on their balance sheets instead of just dollars. This is the “digital gold” perspective, and it seems to be the Bitcoin happy-path for the foreseeable future.
Considering Bitcoin’s 1980s Crypto-anarchist/Cypherpunk roots, it’s bizarre to see large corporations lean in. Remember The Declaration of Bitcoin’s Independence 7 years back, when initial backers said “This is for Morgan Stanley: Bitcoin is Renaissance. We’re coming for you”? Funny to see Morgan Stanley betting so substantially on Bitcoin through Microstrategy today (and making a killing doing it). The same video also claimed that Bitcoin had “anarchistic implications” and that it was “inherently anti-establishment, anti-system, and anti-state”? Yet it seems perfectly compatible today; it’s just a new asset class.
The anarchists are still right about one thing: Money is a form of power. And it’s still worth thinking about how a future with Bitcoin affects the ability for workers to break down illegitimate power structures; both now and in the future. Whatever you might think of people that label themselves “Anarchists” of different stripes, nobody is more critical on those lines of reasoning.
For the remaining portion of this section, I take a look at where Bitcoin stands in terms of broad anarchist values. These 6 values are taken from Goodway’s 1989 book “For Anarchism”. Though there’s some overlap, I think these 6 items can serve as a solid framework to evaluate my own thoughts on Bitcoin. I stole the idea of this format from this paper, but I don’t think the author was critical enough, so I want to focus on critiques here.
This is me working out my thoughts on the matter, and far from a finished product. Thought I’d share it anyway, as the point of this substack is to think through topics like this in public. If you’d like to just wait for the final essay, subscribe below or follow me on Medium.
Decentralization
Getting the obvious stuff out of the way:
Bitcoin is still decoupled from government authority and decentralized at the protocol level.
Bitcoin is still disentangled from central banks.
Now, the critiques:
Ownership centralization
There’s one particularly cynical view that centers around how Bitcoin’s ownership is concentrated amongst a small group of people in a similar distribution as fiat already is today. Though this assumption is debated, let’s entertain the argument in its most pessimistic framing. We’ll also take the Bitcoin maximalist assumption that Bitcoin “obsoletes all other money”.
Given its deflationary nature, nothing about Bitcoin promises to change this wealth distribution in the future, as it discourages spending. This wealth concentration makes a world with a Bitcoin standard seem to be one where a small number of people sit on a large and unchanging pile of cash that is hard to seize, even under emergencies. If they can stay private, no one knows who those people are to even implore them for help.
The key trait that marks something as being closer to “anarchism”—irrespective of its left-leaning and right-leaning factions—is the breakdown of hierarchy and democratization of power. Due to ownership centralization, right now, Bitcoin maximalism seems closer to a power transfer (to a small set of individuals and corporations, from the state) than a power diffusion. Decreasing the power that the state has over monetary policy, and giving that economic decision-making to corporations and a small set of individuals is centralization. This take is similar to how Chomsky argues that, in the U.S, power handoffs from the federal government to state governments typically translate to power handoffs from the federal government to private corporations; these changes increase decentralization only in theory and increase centralization in practice (“On Anarchism”, pg 41).
Mining centralization
There is mining centralization in China; leading some folks to think that a state-sponsored attack could spell the end of Bitcoin. There are also counterarguments claiming that this sort of coordinated state attack would be ineffectual. I don’t believe the versions of this counterargument I’ve read thus far; they’ve been too lacking in detail to be convincing.
Exchange centralization
Bitcoin transactions often occur through intermediaries, like exchanges, and those exchanges are private. As long as exchanges hold user’s keys, there is no guarantee that their assets are equal to deposits. There is no guarantee that the funds you have in the exchange will be accessible tomorrow. There are decentralized exchanges that may answer this issue in the future.
ASIC mining centralization
The days of mining Bitcoin on your laptop are long gone, casual support of the Bitcoin network now seems like a waste of time.
Lightning network centralization
The facilitation of small transactions using hubs on the lightning network seems as though it will look a lot like the centralization we already see on exchanges.
Currency centralization
A push towards a single, global, currency (Bitcoin maximalism) is a push towards centralization in its own right.
Freedom and Autonomy
Note: Arguments around “freedom” are always tricky. Anarcho-socialists see collective ownership of the means of production as a way to maximize the liberty of individuals, while American-style libertarians see the protection of individuals to own the means of production as maximizing freedom. To simplify this, for the purposes of this section, I’m sticking to the first-order effects that a decentralized, global currency would have on individual freedom, second-order effects (like the effect Bitcoin-as-a-currency adoption could have on government and collective liberty) require more space than I have in this email.
A true, single, “currency for the internet”, as Jack Dorsey wants, would be more flexible than dollars are today, without a doubt. However, right now, Bitcoin is unusable as “digital cash” due to its transaction fees and low transactions-per-second. The lightning network will likely rescue Bitcoin for this purpose if it sees further adoption and usability improvements.
The option to transact without a third party is obviously liberating.
Bitcoin has seen success in countries like Nigeria, where it’s been used to get around government restrictions on donations.
To some, having a strictly deflationary store of value is liberating, and should be a chief concern of any currency; the benefit being knowing your treasure chest will not be depleted by a central bank.
As a medium of exchange: Taleb’s critique around pricing goods in Bitcoin is relevant. The ability to price goods in Bitcoin will determine the autonomy it affords owners. Bitcoin’s volatility makes it unappealing to buy or sell things in. On the seller end, I must constantly be watching it and repricing accordingly. Many argue this will change in the future once wide adoption has set in, but only time will tell. Personally, I don’t think Bitcoin is sufficiently analogous to gold to confidently claim the volatility will decrease in the future.
Privacy is a chief concern for enabling a more liberal marketplace. Taleb and some others take the stance that anonymizing the Bitcoin blockchain is a fool’s errand. There is some debate as to how easy it is to anonymize oneself on the Bitcoin blockchain. Right now, I’m most convinced by Ray Dillinger’s side on Bitcoin’s anonymity.
“The pseudonymity of coins being owned by the bearer of some cryptographic key is a failure; People have been eavesdropping and aggressively analyzing the block chain from day 1. And the block chain will always be there, it will always be public, and it will always be subject to further analysis. And we are learning that analysis of that record is sufficient to destroy any pretense of anonymity or pseudonymity.” — Ray Dillinger, cryptography expert, and one of the original reviewers and adopters of Bitcoin core
Egalitarianism / Consensus-Driven
At the software level, Bitcoin is still, of course, consensus-driven.
Accessibility is important egalitarianism. for It still feels arcane and difficult to get less technically sophisticated people on board to Bitcoin. Coinbase has gone a long way to help alleviate this, but I think that you need some akin to an actual bank where you can talk to a real person for support to completely democratize Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin is more widely adopted, who are the short-term winners? Tesla, venture capitalists, and Jack Dorseys. These are all people and institutions with hierarchal power structures. They would not be endorsing it if it did not increase their influence. Bitcoin has been framed by some as “The greatest wealth transfer in human history”. The people endorsing it are a strong indicator that it will not be from the few to the many. Most schools of anarchism would see this as a problem. Anarcho-capitalists, who are not opposed to capital accumulation, may see no issue here.
Self-managing and Empowering
In some countries, Bitcoin is seen as a more stable alternative to their existing currency; this certainly increases autonomy.
There’s a certain privilege that comes with fiat currency that countries without it don’t enjoy (due to trade advantages, stability). Bitcoin democratizes this.
Cooperative Individualism
Bitcoin maximalism’s second-order effects on markets (be they positive or negative) would be the most significant factor on cooperative individualism. Some advocates of the Austrian school of economics might argue that deflationary currency results in more effective cooperation, detractors (mainstream economists) argue against this idea. I haven’t come to a side on this argument yet.
The “trustlessness” provided by Bitcoin is primarily how Bitcoin moves the needle here. The system also incentivizes its own maintenance.
Based on Local Needs
Bitcoin doesn’t exactly feel like a worker’s revolution. It’s not that many small communities have begun to trade in Bitcoin, and then advocated for its use more widely. Instead, it’s being touted by already wealthy people as a way to protect preexisting wealth and advertised to the lower class as a get-rich-quick scheme. Cases like those in Nigeria seem more the exception than the norm.
Different online communities inspire the need for different cryptocurrencies. Arguably, a single currency that can always be used to swap between those currencies aids for “local” use. However, we haven’t really seen popular use cases in the altcoin space.
A second-order effect that is sometimes argued about is whether having a single, global, currency incentives separation from local communities, making them more disposable; I want to explore this avenue more.
Synthesizing all this
Are all these critiques are just sniping at the edges? Though I’ve focused on the short-to-medium-term critiques here, I still think that Bitcoin seems consistent with the anarcho-capitalist values that many of the Cypherpunks argued for the long run, even if it’s far from ideal. The underlying question worth asking is whether or not anarcho-capitalist values are actually compatible with anarchist values at all.
Anyway—I’ve run out of space on this email again.
I didn’t get enough space to touch on the environmental critiques but read this article on those too.
P.S. Sorry for the delay in this newsletter this time: I’ve just moved to New York to be closer to friends and family, and that’s eaten a great deal of my time. I may take another month or so before the next post in order to spend more time reading.
Biweekly links, notes, and commentary
Economics
Debt: The First 5,000 Years - This book is written by David Graeber, the famous anthropologist that is credited with the phrase “We are the 99%”. So far, this book seems like an antithesis to “The Bitcoin Standard” because of its deeper endorsement of state-sponsored money. It’s fascinating that liberarians and left-leaning authors like Graeber both feel they have the anwers to the problems posed by the Great Recession, but practically opposite solutions.
The Bitcoin Standard - The defacto cryptocurrencies book. I read it front to back a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been revisiting sections of it as a companion piece to the Keynsian arguments put forth in “Debt: The First 5,000 years”.
Philosophy
Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking - I didn’t love this piece, but I think a lot of people that read this substack might. The author creates a bucket of work that they label “psuedophilosophy” and proceeds to toss in their least favorite authors to earn internet points. A favorite one-two punch.
“There are two kinds of pseudophilosophy, one mostly harmless and the other insidious. The first variety is usually found in popular scientific contexts. This is where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, walk self-confidently into philosophical territory without realising it, and without conscientious attention to relevant philosophical distinctions and arguments. Often implicit empiricist assumptions in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are relied upon as if they were self-evident, and without awareness of the threat that those very assumptions pose to the author’s own reasoning. We can call this phenomenon scientistic pseudophilosophy.”
The author of the post uses Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape as an example of someone who does not understand the philosophical underpinnings of the argument they’re making. I don’t think the author of the post grasps that Sam does understand the is-ought distinction. It’s just that he titles the book otherwise, and believes that it can be circumvented. Sam apologizes for the title later in the book.
Side: If you’re interested in my thoughts on Sam’s Moral Landscape you can find them here.
Similarly, the author dismisses Foucault on the grounds that he is overly ambiguous. I haven’t read enough Foucault to know if I believe the author’s argument or not, but the single out of context paragraph the author of the post provides was not nearly enough to dismiss Foucault’s ideas for me.
The author closes with the case that ambiguous philosophy is causing students to have “self-indulgent” thinking. I can only imagine this is how the critics of Socrates sounded when they accused him of “corrupting the youth”.
Suddenly, I really want to read Foucault.
The Capitalist Realism of Evangelion - An essay on some of what Evangelion—one of the highest-grossing media franchises in history—can teach us about capitalist realism. The author focuses on the theme of bureaucracy, even under states of emergency, in Evangelion (a topic highly relevant in our times).
For a while, I’ve wanted to write some sort of essay on why Evangelion has so much to teach us about the state of the world we live in, but I can never decide on a single direction to take. The show reveals so much to say on the sexualization of minors in popular media, the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan, the challenges of imagining post-capitalist futures, internet culture, Freudianism etc. The list goes on forever.
The Divided Mind - When Sam Harris is in his wheelhouse with someone else who knows the topic well, his podcasts are absolutely incredible: this was one of those podcasts. In this episode, Harris and Iain McGilchrist focus on the differences between the hemispheres of the brain. It’s fascinating to hear about these differences because of the—frankly spooky—effects they have on split-brain patients.
The cliff notes version is that the left hemispheres seems to control speech and action, and abstractions like groups, while the right hemisphere hones in on the world “as it is”, and tends to handle information on a case-by-case basis. As an example, someone with damage to their right hemisphere may stop being able to recognize their grandmother, but may still understand that it is an old person, and be able to speak. A person with damage on the left hemisphere may not be able to speak (this is the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon) but would at least know whom they were speaking to. Interestingly, the patient with right hemisphere damage will have a tendency to confabulate stories without evidence or reason to believe what they’re saying.
Later in the Podcast, the two speculate that the world is becoming more “left hemisphere dominate”, as evidenced by the tribalism we’re seeing in politics, and Trumpism (Trump being the ultimate left-hemisphere character). I’ll leave you to decide if you find their argument convincing.
Cryptocurrency
Cryptoanarchism and Cryptocurrencies - An article attempting to position Cryptoanarchism, as espoused by the Cypherpunk movement, into the wider anarchist tradition by explaining how cryptocurrencies fit it with anarchist/libertarian praxis. It provides a solid overview of Cyperpunk history and plenty of links to libertarian/anarchist authors.
Bitflate - After my previous—somewhat inflammatory—article on Bitcoin, I was approached by a small team in the early stages of developing an alternative. The idea behind it is a cryptocurrency with a fixed inflation rate. It seems we’ve come full circle; now some people are interested in adding inflation to our cryptocurrencies. The concept seems interested, but I’m not sure I follow the economics of Bitflate just yet. Something to watch in the future.
Maybe we should be using Dogecoin? There’s no cap on the number of Dogecoins after all. Just kidding.. unless?
The Crypto Chernobyl - The first article I’ve seen to clearly articulate the Bitcoin’s climate problem. The author, Stephen Diehl, is a big name in the crypto software engineering space.
“Cryptocurrency is an intentionally ambiguous term about a set of technologies which aim to reinvent money from first principles independent of existing power structures
…
The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimates the current annualised energy consumption of bitcoin at 121.36 terrawatt hours. The dimensionality of this number is a little difficult to wrap your head around because of its enormity. For comparison 121.36 TWh is equivalent to:
≈ 1.8 × energy yield of the largest Russian nuclear weapon detonated
≈ 13 × daily electric energy production of all global nuclear power plants
≈ 1.4 million × annual energy consumption of the average US home
In more economic terms, the power consumption of bitcoin is 160% times the energy use of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple all combined.”
Why Blockchain is Not Yet Working - A good introduction to the basic critiques of blockchain. I wasn’t able to find things I didn’t already know here.
The Future of Bitcoin - As of late, when I read articles on Bitcoin, I’m almost universally fed information I already know. This article was no exception. The author provides an overview of Blockchains and Bitcoin’s basic economic thesis. I was hoping for a little more from something published in Arc Digital.
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto - A very brief historical piece from 1988 from the Cypherpunk movement (of which Julian Assange and many other are members). I’m trying to get to the root of the libertarian crypto argument, and this seems like the best place to start.
Timothy May, the author, died 2 years back at the age of 62.
“Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.”
The Cyphernomicon (1994)- The original cypherpunk FAQ. A huge list of “lowest-common-denominator” answers to common questions about the cypherpunk mailing list.
“The list has a lot of radical libertarians, some anarcho-capitalists, and even a few socialists.
…
3.4.19. "Are most Cypherpunks anarchists?"
- Many are, but probably not most. The term "anarchy" is often misunderstood. - As Perry Metzger puts it "Now, it happens that I am an anarchist, but that isn't what most people associated with the term "cypherpunk" believe in, and it isn't fair to paint them that way -- hell, many people on this mailing list are overtly hostile to anarchism." [P.M., 1994-07-01] - comments of Sherry Mayo, others
- But the libertarian streak is undeniably strong. And libertarians who think about the failure of politics and the implications of cryptography generally come to the anarcho-capitalist or crypto-anarchist point of view.
- In any case, the "other side" has not been very vocal in espousing a consistent ideology that combines strong crypto and things like welfare, entitlements, and high tax rates. (I am not condemning them. Most of my leftist friends turn out to believe in roughly the same things I believe in...they just attach different labels and have negative reactions to words like "capitalist.”)…
- A huge topic, one I've been thinking about since late 1987 when it dawned on me that public key crypto and anonymous digital cash systems, information markets, etc. meant the end of governments as we know them. (I called this development "crypto anarchy." Not everyone is a fan of it. But it's coming, and fast.)")
Crypto Stimulus Package and the Satoshi Treasury - An article by Michael Harris— a well-known quant and author—explaining how cryptocurrencies, in the medium-term, act in an inflationary way. I’d never thought of Bitcoin as an inflationary force before Harris’ article—very insightful stuff.
New smart contracts can be developed at higher layers above the crypto asset layer to allow loans. However, this is where the concept of blockchain is problematic in addition to the energy consumption it requires: would anyone make a loan on-chain to someone without verifying their identity since they can just take the money and disappear in the bits and bytes sea of blockchain? Therefore, for financing projects some kind of on-chain or off-chain collateral will be required. Blockchain transactions are transparent but those using it may not be. Usually, arguments made by crypto and blockchain enthusiasts and other misinformed people are based on the wrong conception that everything will run on blockchain and therefore its transparency will prevent fraud. Well, that may take decades if ever and until then fraud will be common as long as there is convertibility to traditional currencies.”
Cryptocurrencies, Helicopter Money and Inflationary Pressures - A second article by Michael Harris, this one from 2017. Harris voices some of his economic and political concerns with widespread cryptocurrency adoption.
“…a full scale adoption of cryptocurrencies with a simultaneous abolishment of the reserve currency status of the USD may create imbalances and mispricing in commodities but also in other markets. I do not believe the world has a mechanism in place to deal with such a chaotic situation.”
Nigeria’s central bank takes aim at cryptocurrency again - Nigerians love cryptocurrency; they’re the second largest market after the US. Bitcoin is a natural hedge against the monetary risks their own country. It’s also a way to bypass restrictions on donations towards causes like anti police violence groups.
On Friday afternoon, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) issued a circular asking commercial banks and other financial institutions to close accounts transacting in, or operating on, cryptocurrency exchanges. All deals involving cryptocurrency are now “prohibited” with “severe regulatory sanctions” awaiting erring outfits. The CBN also asked banks to identify “persons and or entities transacting in or operating cryptocurrency exchanges within their systems and ensure that such accounts are closed immediately.”
India plans to introduce new law to ban Bitcoin, other private cryptocurrencies - India seeks the “Blockchain, not Bitcoin” route.
Billionaires
Email from Jeff Bezos to Employees - Whatever your critiques of Amazon are, you must admin it has made some pretty impressive things possible. 2 day shipping, computer vision powered groceries, pioneering cloud infrastructure to make companies like Netflix possible, just to name a few.
Despite all the bad press, I am proud to have worked there. I’m also forever an optimist, so I’m hoping he can bring the same creative culture, high quality bar, and long-term vision I saw in the office towards problems like climate change.
Elon Musk on Clubhouse Interview - Elon touches on… Pretty much everything. But without much depth. Save yourself the time, and read the cliffnotes.
“[We need to ensure the] long term continuation of consciousness as we know it. As far as we can tell…the light of consciousness is only here on Earth.”
“Which comes first, a self-sustaining city on mars, or WW3?”
“There were pretty long sections of my life that were pretty painful and difficult. And I’m not sure most people would want to do that.”
"I do at this point think Bitcoin is a good thing... Bitcoin is on the way to getting acceptance by the conventional finance people. ”
COVID-19
Making Vaccine - In this paper, the author describes his process as he attempts to self vaccinate by buying the materials to create a COVID-19 vaccine on his own, and administering using RadVac. This sounds crazy, but, if the process is to be trusted, it seems surprisingly simple. All the materials cost around $1,000, and the administration is done through inhalation, not injection.
His motivations are as compelling as his personal efforts. There’s something very appealing to me about taking these matters into our own hands, and relying less on our institutions:
“I imagine, a year or two from now, looking back and grading my COVID response. When I imagine an A+ response, it’s something like “make my own fast tests, and my own vaccine, test that they actually work, and do all that in spring 2020”. We’ve all been complaining about how “we” (i.e. society) should do these things, yet to a large extent they’re things which we can do for ourselves unilaterally. Doing it for ourselves doesn’t capture all the benefits - lots of fun stuff is still closed/cancelled - but it’s enough to go out, socialize, and generally enjoy life without worrying about COVID.”
Software Engineering
Talent is largely a myth - Everyone knows software has a hiring problem; we’re getting fooled by randomness, as Nassim Taleb might say. But no one is sure what to do about it.
I’ll give you an example: I tend to give LRU cache as an interview question. Yet I’ll admit that the vast majority of candidates who nail this question have seen it, or something markedly similar before. So why do I still like the question? Well, when a candidate nails it, LRU cache gives a strong signal that someone can think through the CS fundamentals related to the question, and explain them clearly while under the stress. It’s worth the false negatives.
The statistics-oriented part of my brain hates this approach because I know I’m not doing everybody a just service. I know there are plenty of strong candidates that will bomb this question.
We need to start thinking about how to do better, and Avishai, the author, seems to be headed towards the right direction:
“If all of these prevalent assumptions about talent are wrong, what does it say about our hiring and management practices? what do managers even mean when they set out to hire “good developers” given that their goodness cannot be measured and is highly volatile? And if talent is as László Polgár claimed not born but rather developed, what is the value of testing for present level of proficiency. Is it possible that where we hire to is more important than who we hire? It’s clear we need a better model of talent, one which focuses on the conditions suitable for development and nurture of talent rather than attracting talent. I have some hunches about what this model would look like, and there are definitely tell-tale examples out there to learn from. But this kind of new model has no chance of taking root in an industry that it currently optimized against it - we need a radical shift in management mindset.”