Leverage Maxxing

I get why people feel overwhelmed right now.

Every day, a new model release, a new sandbox escape, 30 new CVEs, a new breach, a new insane take from a geriatric politician, a new war, a new 9 figure Series A, a new manifesto and a carousel of things to be excited or enraged about.

Keeping up with the slopcannon feels overwhelming, and I honestly think there’s diminishing returns in trying to keep up with The Discourse ™️, but there’s a deeper temptation to throw one’s hands up and give up. “There’s no way I can keep up, there’s no way I can move the needle, there’s no way I can escape The Permanent Underclass, I’m just going to go and tend my garden and be grumpy on Reddit.”

I think this is the exact opposite necessary response.

Now is the time to maximize leverage

There has never been a better time to maximize leverage (levmaxxing, for you Zoomers out there) and the fact that people are taking the opposite stance is mildly infuriating to me.

Now is the time where the average builder can do more with a $200 per month AI subscription than most startups in the 1990’s to 2010s could dream of. Now is the time where information density and availability are the highest they’ve ever been. Startups and individuals are sending computers into space, they’re sending drones to the bottom of the ocean, they’re creating autonomous DAWs to let humans collaborate with AI to make music, they’re creating autonomous drone defense systems, new biotech making novel discoveries at rapid pace…

… how could you possibly want to go back to the days where you were spending 6 hours a day writing React components by hand?

Yeah a lot of stuff has gotten kinda wild. The slopcannon is one-shotting your boomer parents into thinking the lizard people are ruling the world from tunnels under Tel Aviv. Your favorite YouTuber is shilling misogyny and meme coins now. The entire political class is hellbent on ensuring that even if AI isn’t a market bubble today, it will be tomorrow.

That’s just a byproduct of the Levmaxxing society. Of course highly ambitious bad people are taking advantage of the situation, why wouldn’t they? They’d be doing it regardless of AI advancement and technological acceleration, but those things make it way easier to have an outsized effect on your Nefarious Deeds.

Yes, this is basically the “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a frontier model is a good guy with a frontier model” argument. It’s silly and doesn’t stand up entirely to scrutiny but I believe in the larger spirit:

The only thing that will stop a bad guy with leverage is lots of good guys with even more leverage.

Giving up to become an Adult Reddit Child collecting action figures and yelling about AI art on Twitch while begging for $25 Furry Art commissions isn’t going to save the people you love. Giving up and becoming an edgy nihilist isn’t going to save your friends. At the end of history you’ll look back on your last breaths and realize that the only metric you maximized when The Evil was building leverage was Reddit Karma and X followers.

Maximize your leverage

Look for ways to maximize leverage.

Historically, left-leaning groups have attempted to do this with grassroots social movements and protests, and in cases like the workers’ rights movement and especially the racial justice movement, this worked really well. In my view, things have changed quite a lot since then, and grassroots social movements and protests are simply not likely to succeed.

Maximizing leverage by increasing the raw people power as part of your movement has become a losing strategy. Bernie organized all of his many campaigns around grassroots funding and raised historical amounts of money and garnered massive public support and has lost handily every single time. You can point at the BLM protests and there’s a possibility that you’re right there. I’d argue that the BLM protests were largely an exception to the rule, were largely an end result of different leverage-maximizing strategies like ideologically and financially targeting corporate donors, and even in that case, the things that “changed” were extremely minimal and have largely been undone by now, admittedly aside from body camera legislation. My further counterpoint to the BLM protests: the No Kings protests, which brought massive crowds and achieved quite literally nothing.

What raw people power does lead to is an increase in infighting, fracturing and scandal. Bernie’s campaign was plagued with misogynistic Bernie bros, the DSA seems to have a new sexual assault allegation every other week and even on the ground in BLM protests there were huge fights and disagreements over protest tactics, slogans, aesthetics, etc. This isn’t me trying to convince you not to protest, this is me trying to convince you that you cannot just build leverage by convincing people to “join the cause.”

Increasing leverage means becoming more technically, financially, intellectually, philosophically or physically powerful, either as an individual or an organization. If you’re going to abandon technology as a battle ground or tool, you better have a really solid reason and a different way of increasing your leverage. If you’re going to become anti-intellectual, you better have a really solid reason and a different way of increasing your leverage.

Companies learned this decades ago, that’s why the lobbying industry is worth as much as it is. Companies learned that they can influence politics in such a way that $1.00 spent on lobbying leads to $100 more in profit. They increased their leverage in politics and business, and they did so in such a way that people-powered social movements have had an extremely hard time countering it without finding ways to increase leverage outside of just increasing boots on the ground.

If you’re staring in the face of an opposing force that has become extremely capable at maximizing leverage in their fight against you, your response cannot be abandoning technology, capital and tactics that asymmetrically increase your leverage against that opposing force.