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# Created: 2024-01-14; Modified: 2024-01-14
Analog philosophers value life and vitality, and thus have a special affection for nature. They talk about energy and aliveness, but also the same thing in reverse, dissipation and death. The ugliest ugly is the most beautiful beautiful, and vice versa.
Analog philosophers admire diversity and heterogeneity, along with difference and multiplicity – qualitative multiplicity, that is, less so the arithmetic kind. “All creatures great and small” is the analogger’s mantra.
Valuing heterogeneity in things, analog philosophers also value heterogeneity in causal relationships. Analog causality is that of serendipity and coincidence. Whatever happens does so primarily through contingency, accident, or randomness.
Analog philosophers value honesty over virtue, beauty over truth. Proper proportion is the main thing that matters. They value nuance, ambiguity, paradox, and slippage between terms. They begin not from consistency but from contradiction, ubiquitous contradiction. Analog culture is a culture of iridescent vitality and spontaneous creativity. It is thus frequently absurd, nonsensical, or comic.
The digital philosopher’s [..] preferred mode of analysis is to divide a complex world into just two categories. The digital philosopher will favor analysis over synthesis; he will want to break things down into their constituent parts. These small parts turn primarily around binary difference, but ultimately constitute arrangements that are multiple. He will favor abstraction, structure, language, logic, rationality, and form. He will be a structuralist, a rationalist, a formalist, a critic, a mathematician, an idealist, a metaphysician.
(Alexander Galloway, How to Spot an Analog Philosopher, 2019)
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners.
The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up.
The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.”
(George R.R. Martin)
Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web of problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past—no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.
Romero, by contrast, was immersed in all moments: past, future, and present. He was an equal opportunity enthusiast, as passionate about the present as about the time gone and the time yet to come. He didn’t just dream, he pursued: hoarding everything from the past, immersing himself in the dynamism of the moment, and charting out the plans for what was to come. He remembered every date, every name, every game. To preserve the past, he kept letters, magazines, disks, Burger King pay stubs, pictures, games, receipts. To inflate the present, he pumped up any opportunity for fun, telling a better joke, a funnier story, making a crazier face. Yet he wasn’t manic, he knew how to focus. When he was on, he was on—loving everything, everybody. But when he was off, he was off—cold, distant, short. Tom Hall came up with a nickname for the behavior. In computers, information is represented in bits. A bit can be either on or off. Tom called Romero’s mood swings the bit flip.
(David Kushner, “Masters of Doom”)
Back then just the people who were interested in Tech at all were much more likely to be non-conformists. […] It was people who absolutely hated the idea of having a boss ever. It was a lot of people who didn’t want to wait in line. They didn’t want to be told like you still have 10 15 20 years to go to school or to work your way up through the system before you get to do stuff. They were like I want to do stuff now and what was funny was that Tech was the place back then where you could do stuff.
Fast forward a little less than 20 years and Tech is now attracting conformists. Today I might argue that big Tech has put itself solidly in that list. College kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They want the structure, the leveling, the status, the money that used to be associated with these Finance or professional jobs. At first you see the explosion of CS majors in school. And you would think it means there are a lot more people who are interested in building, but that’s not actually the case.
We also see a lot of these folks who are conformists who want to do startups but it feels like their motivation or starting point is very different than what we would expect. One of the things that we say sometimes at YC is that don’t make the investor your customer. But a lot of these conformists who are getting into startups that’s what they do. They want an idea that investor is going to like. They want to act the way an investor is going to like.
I think that the challenge nowadays is where will non-conformists go to find their home? It used to be as easy as going to Tech and now it’s not as easy to go to Tech. PG originally started YC to be a home for this type of people, to be a home for people who wanted to build who didn’t want to wait in line, who really didn’t care about status in and of itself. They just wanted to go out there and challenge themselves.
(Y Combinator, The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley [video], 2023)