Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy

Foundations existing in perpetuity is an accident of charter law, not original intent: when John D. Rockefeller first proposed foundations he wanted them to have a finite end state of only 50 or 100 years and sought a federal charter to that effect, but the federal charter failed, leaving state charters that let foundations exist forever.

“when John D. Rockefeller was first proposing the idea of foundations, he wanted them to have a finite end state. He wanted them to last only 50 years or 100 years when he was proposing this federal charter, but that federal charter failed. And so now we have these state charters and foundations can just exist forever.”

Drawing on Elinor Ostrom's fieldwork on common pool resources like fisheries and forests, the tragedy of the commons is not the only possible outcome—commons can be managed perfectly sustainably and are not necessarily treated extractively by everyone.

“'Actually, I don't think tragedy of the commons is a real thing it's not the only outcome that we can possibly have.' Sometimes commons can be managed perfectly sustainably and it's not necessarily true that everyone just treats them very extractively.”

For a very long-lived endowment, growing the assets is easy (just put it in the stock market); the hard problem is ensuring whoever distributes the funds shares the original donor's intent—and additionally that long-term planning is dangerous because you cannot know what will matter in a thousand years, as impact is highly contextual to its time.

“The question for me is not about how do I make sure that there are assets available to distribute in a thousand years? Because I don't know, just put it in the stock market... The more difficult question is, how do you ensure that whoever is deciding how to distribute the funds, distributes them in a way that you personally want them to be spent?”

When you open something to mass democratic participation—as in open source or social media—most participation turns out to be noise rather than useful, which scares everyone away until one or a small handful of people do all the real work while everyone else screams around them; this dynamic drives the retreat from open public spaces (Twitter) into smaller private ones (group chats, Substack).

“Tons of people participate and then it turns out that most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. It ends up scaring everyone away and in the end, you just have one or a small handful of people that are actually doing all the work while everyone else is kind of screaming around them. And this becomes a really great metaphor for what happens in social media.”

The Ford Foundation illustrates value drift: Henry Ford created it shortly before death for tax reasons with no philanthropic interest, then the board filled with people Ford would never have wanted, becoming hugely influential in directions contrary to the family—so much so that his grandson resigned in frustration that it was 'not at all what my family wanted.'

“the board ended up being basically a bunch of people that Henry Ford certainly would not have ever wanted to be on his board... The grandson at the time famously resigned because he was really frustrated and was just like, 'This is not at all what my family wanted.' and basically got kicked off the board.”

Robert Caro, a Pulitzer-nominated top investigative journalist, chose to spend seven years in near-poverty obsessively writing The Power Broker about one influential New York figure—a choice no number-crunching would justify—yet it became one of the most influential books on urban governance, illustrating that the most impactful work is often unreachable by prior calculation.

“There's no way the number crunching would get you there but it's probably been one of the most influential books in terms of how urban governance is done. Presidents have praised and read the book and said it changed how they think about politics.”

The gentleman scientist era (the Charles Darwin type) is bygone because science is vastly bigger, mostly government-funded since the mid-20th century after WWII, and unrecognizable from a century ago; while a full return is unlikely, there is enormous room to give scientists more academic and creative freedom within the current constrained funding model.

“Government funding of science became a thing right around the middle of the 20th century after World War II. The way that science ran before then was that there was very little government funding and very little involvement. Now the fact of the matter is that most of it is government funded and that just means it's a completely different kind of ballgame.”

Companies release valuable code as open source because mindshare is more valuable than the literal IP—it raises their status as an open-source-friendly company and, crucially, helps recruiting (the hardest thing for any company) by demonstrating their internal code culture and attracting developers who fit, doing with code what they cannot do with words.

“mindshare is a lot more interesting than your literal IP... Recruiting is the hardest thing for any company. Being able to attract the right kinds of developers or people that might fit really well into their developer culture just matters a lot more. And instead of doing that with words they're doing it with code.”

Unlike Europe, where public institutions are created by the government and private citizens defer to government to shape public society, the US has a 'choose your own adventure' culture in which many major public institutions were founded by private philanthropists rather than the state.

“Whereas in the U.S., it's much more choose your own adventure and we don't really see the government as the sole provider or shaper of public institutions. We also look at private citizens and there's so many public institutions we have now that were not started by the government, but were started by private philanthropists.”

DAOs face a common failure mode where founders try to be super-democratic and leave everything to the crowd, but—as open source showed 20 years earlier—projects rarely succeed starting leaderless and faceless; you actually need a strong creator or leader driving the project early on, who can only later step back once an active community exists, so crypto's protocol-governed, leaderless ideal will have to confront this lesson.

“it turns out you actually do need a strong leader, even in the beginning. And something I learned from open source projects is that it's rarely the case, if at all, that you have a project that starts leaderless and faceless. Usually there is some strong creator, leader, or influential figure that is driving the project forward”

Contrary to the romantic view of open source as a collective volunteer effort, it actually converges from broad collaborative participation down to single creators—a 'Wizard of Oz' model where one person behind the curtain does everything—and this undervalued reality means a small number of single creators drive much of the internet and cultural production today.

“Maybe it's a little bit more of a Wizard of Oz type model. It's actually just one person behind the curtain that's doing everything and you see this huge grandeur and you think there must be so many people that are behind it. It's one person.”

Writing cryptically and long-windedly—against the standard advice to write clearly and succinctly—can be more effective, because cryptic, Bible-like or Yarvin-like text invites endless interpretation, lets people with different temperaments project their own preferences onto it, and thereby spreads influence.

“You're always told to write very clearly, you're told to write succinctly, but in a weird way, you can be much more effective by being very long-winded and not obvious in what you're saying.”

Andrew Carnegie's influential essays on wealth, while ostensibly about a moral obligation to give back, were really a protective stance: by framing wealth in terms of moral duty he forestalled people knocking down the concept of wealth altogether.

“I think it really was much more of a protective stance of saying, if he doesn't frame it in this way, then people are just going to knock down the concept of wealth altogether.”

Philanthropy is not really about altruism; the meaningful part is what motivates elites to move from self-focus to engaging public society, which begins with seeking to control the three arms of the public sector—media, academia, and government—making it more about maintaining one's own power than altruistic whitewashing.

“And that starts with thinking about — How do I control the three arms of the public sector: media, academia, government? And we think of it in that way a little bit more broadly where it's really much more about maintaining control over your own power, more so than this altruistic whitewash”

Wealthy people only become publicly active elites when their power is threatened; tech became active in the public sphere only after the mid-2010s tech backlash turned mainstream critique toward it, mirroring how the Davos elite and Gilded Age cohorts also mobilized to defend their power once attacked.

“It was only when the panopticon turned its head towards tech and they had this onslaught of critiques coming from mainstream discourse where they went, 'Oh. What is my place in this world? If I don't try to defend that, then I'm going to just lose all that power.' So I think that the need to defend one's power can prompt that action.”

Conquest's Second Law (institutions not explicitly right-wing drift left) holds in NGOs because institutions need simplified messages that make people feel good—like pacifying values of democracy, peace, and freedom that are hard to disagree with—whereas nuanced thinkers who reject mindless playbooks lack mainstream appeal and don't end up running institutions, producing a natural drift.

“there's a set of pacifying social values like democracy, peace, and freedom, that are very hard to disagree with so there's always this natural drift towards that... If you think that Institutions need to have simplified messages that they pass on to people and those simplified messages work much better when they're things that make people feel good about themselves, you're always going to have that kind of word drift more or less.”

Wealthy people increasingly conduct philanthropy through LLCs (Emerson Collective, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) and donor-advised funds rather than traditional 501(c)(3) foundations, because LLCs offer far more flexibility—allowing them to fund companies, individuals, and nonprofits rather than only other nonprofits.

“in recent years, we've seen this trend towards LLCs. Emerson Collective might have been maybe the first one to do it... since then, especially within tech wealth, we've seen that move towards people using LLCs instead of 501(c)(3) because it just gives you a lot more flexibility in the kinds of things you can fund. You don't just have to fund other nonprofits.”

A bunch of tech founders (Palmer Luckey, Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Armstrong) now refuse interviews with mainstream outlets like The New York Times and instead talk to individual influencers and creators (e.g., Zuckerberg announcing Meta via Ben Thompson at Stratechery), reflecting the anti-institutional, individual-power mindset rather than building new media institutions.

“You have a bunch of founders Palmer Luckey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Brian Armstrong that will not really talk to mainstream media anymore. They will not give an interview to The New York Times but they will go to an individual influencer or an individual creator and do an interview with them. When Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, he did not grant interviews to mainstream publications, but he went and talked toBen Thompson at Stratechery.”

The Medici-style patronage model is already very much alive—many people are quietly funded by a single patron rather than via legible mechanisms like Patreon or Substack—but it is not obvious because those quietly funded don't talk about it, and the speaker is excited about this shift toward concentrated individual funding for tech-adjacent creators.

“There's so many people that are just being quietly funded that just don't talk about it. I do actually think the model of patronage is very alive and well right now. It's just not super obvious.”

Drawing on Carlota Perez's work on technological revolutions and financial capital, technological revolutions follow a cycle—new technology, industry development, public frenzy, backlash, then public institution building—but not all technology fits this pattern; sometimes technology is just technology, and much wealth (e.g., Texas energy) falls into that non-paradigm category and stays locally focused.

“She identified a few different technological revolutions over the last hundred plus years that drove this cycle of — A new technology is invented... And then there is some kind of crazy public frenzy and then a backlash. After that, you have this focus on public institution building. But she points out that not all technology fits into that. Not all technology is a paradigm shift.”

When measuring the impact of writing or essays, the right metric is quality not quantity—not page views but whether the specific people whose opinions you care about and who can act on the ideas end up reading and talking about it—and founders undervalue indirect influence even though the books and essays they read in their free time shape how they think.

“when I think about how do I measure my impact? It's not how many page views that I get on an essay. It's more of who ended up talking about it and are those people that I wanted to talk about it? And I think people really undervalue that.”

There is no perfect governance design; the right structure depends on the population—small homogenous populations with little dissent can be governed easily by one person, while extremely heterogeneous populations like America cannot, so for America the focus should be on improving the speed and efficacy of government rather than changing its structure or seeking one person who represents one's views.

“There are some very small homogenous populations that can be very easily governed by a small government or one person because there isn't that much dissent or difference... I would focus more on effectiveness in governance than having just one person in charge.”

There is an implicit belief that direct, highly participatory democracy is the greatest thing to aspire to, but evidence repeatedly shows it doesn't really work; one can keep the underlying values—meritocracy, access to opportunity, pursuit of happiness—while rejecting the premise that they must be achieved through highly participatory methods.

“We have this implicit belief that direct democracy is somehow the greatest thing to aspire towards. But we see evidence over and over that it just doesn't really work. It doesn't mean we have to throw out the underlying principles or values behind that.”

The common claim that people aren't religious anymore is mistaken; people are still religious, just about different things—climate, for example, has become a genuine religion providing meaning and community—so rather than asking how to create new religions, we should recognize that religious practice is active everywhere and lean into it.

“I feel like people are religious. They're just religious about different things. And that was one of my conclusions with climate... 20 years later, I think it just is a religion for a lot of people. Why not just lean into that? That is how people are finding meaning, that is how people are finding community.”