Daily Balajisms – Venture journalist and angel influencer
Balaji, with his BitSignal, is an example of an Overton whale and a torchbearer of the third culture.
Balaji Srinivasan sees a new productive, left-right, creative – entrepreneurial, fusion, and a media business model emerging – what he calls a venture journalist or an angel influencer.
A person who writes for the audience of one, and can inspire or discover the next Mark Zuckerberg or Palmer Luckey and invest in them. Eric Jorgenson, in an interview with Balaji, suggested another term – a creative capitalist.
This is very different business model and modus operandi from the current clickbait and content for the median person. Twitter is upstream of what Balaji calls the downstream media. And internet allows for niche long-form content for the long-tail audience.
I call this new type of a public intellectual who can bootstrap the desired future or prevent the undesired one – an Overton whale. Balaji with his BitSignal tweet and $1m bitcoin bet is a good example of an Overton whale.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy describes a prophet, in a technical sense, as the effective fusion of the futurist-prophet-expert triad. A futurist is too broad, an expert too narrow, but a prophet can bootstrap the desired future - he can provide a vision, facts and get people to act.
Balaji connects the idea of an Overton window with the V-shaped depth chart of an orderbook. If you are a big buyer or a seller, you are not just a price-taker, but also a price-mover or price-maker. You can quickly get through the orderbook and thus shift the market price.
Balaji applies this observation to the market of ideas. If people say that “it got political”, they mean that someone tries to move the market of ideas and is placing big sell or buy orders on certain ideas and memes to shift the Oveton window.
Eric Weinstein has a related idea of going short on a certain idea, but long on a related idea. Instead of being for or against immigration – you can be for high-skilled immigration of tech talent and against illegal immigration.
This is itself related to the concept of noopolitics – connecting various memetic tribes and searching for golden nuggets of wisdom in the noosphere. For a weak signal amid lots of noise. One can find Baudrillard’s simulacra useful as a mental model, disregarding other ideas or politics of Baudrillard.
Balaji collects and tracks hundreds of graphs in a search for weak signals that can go exponential. He says, the internet increases variance and turns constants into variables. Venture capitalists, as counter-elites, are the opposite of the old establishment, that cannot perceive weak signals and only sees phenomena that are in the size of a constituency (10-50% but not 0.1%).
Therefore, old elites get constantly surprised – the global financial crisis is a surprise, Trump is a surprise, Covid is a surprise, Afghanistan, El Salvador with bitcoin, Russia, China, Ukraine, BRICS with Middle East… and now the (central) banking crisis and de-dollarization are a surprise.
John Brockman who founded Edge.org wrote 32 years ago that we need the third culture – an effective fusion between a public intellectual and a scientist, or an effective Hegelian synthesis, if you will.
Something between wordcel, numcel and a person who has a bias for action, an actcel if you will. The capacity to act is somewhat orthogonal from both, the ability to express ideas well and numeracy.
Someone who is between tribes – nor blue nor red – but a part of the technologically-progressive gray tribe, or a purple tribe, engaged in what I call pragmatic antagonism – fighting against bad ideas and maximalists in various tribes.
Balaji, as an example of the Overton whale is next level, and a good torchbearer of the third culture.