N° 003Planted 2026

Note · draft

Building Things Here

  • Destin and the Smarter Scrubber
    • making new things is hard
    • making things in this country is expensive but not impossible

Marc Andreessen in It’s Time to Build:

Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts”—giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product… all throughout our country?

Andreessen may have a point: building physical things here has gotten harder, and Destin’s scrubber shows how much work it takes. But who does the building matters. Many of the platforms funded and expanded over the last fifteen years got markedly worse for the people using them once investors demanded their returns.

Anna Wiener in Does Tech Need a New Narrative?:

If Andreessen’s exhortation to build was a call for “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward,” it was also a call to power. … The sorts of projects Andreessen proposed don’t really make sense under the venture model; they’re unlikely to be as profitable as the products that have come out of Silicon Valley since the popularization of the commercial Internet. Building may need a different set of incentives, investment models, and values.

Maybe we can separate out the “wishful, ahistorical thinking” (Anna) from the elements of truth in what Marc said here, and tie in with smaller and more personal efforts instead of grand power-grabbing schemes.

Human scale is where most of us already build: a website, a tool, a fix around the house, things one person or a few people can make, understand, and repair. It doesn't need a gigafactory or a venture fund behind it, just someone who cares enough to make the thing and keep it working. People who've been making things on the web for a long time keep coming back to that.

Here's Matt Webb in A few technical words about Upsideclown: > It seems to me that, sometime in the last 17 years, the web forgot the simple pleasure of making, and appreciating what’s made, together.

Dan McKinley in Choose Boring Technology: > We should generally pick the smallest set of tech that covers our problem domain, and lets us get the job done.

These resonate with me as I've continued to build out my own little corner of the web. I make the conscious choice to use the smallest set of tech that solves the problems I encounter while building, instead of platforms built by others who have a vested interest in maintaining power and control.

Questions

  • Why does it have to be gigafactories and moonshots?
  • What if we start at a human scale solving human problems, like grill scrubbers with dangerous wires and making tools that last?
  • Isn’t Andreessen one of the backers of some sort of techtopian city-state (California Forever) that’s buying up all the real estate in my hometown’s backyard?

Paths from here