The Systems Interventionist

Silicon Valley, and especially the South of Market district in San Francisco, has long operated under a particular ethic: disruption. The word itself carries a strange prestige. To disrupt is to be bold, visionary, and unafraid. In practice, however, disruption has become a socially acceptable form of aggression. It is the decision to attack an existing system rather than participate in it, improve it, or work alongside it. It is the choice to treat other people’s work, their infrastructure, and their livelihoods as territory to be conquered rather than something that might be strengthened or enclosed.

This aggression is rarely named as such. Instead it gets dressed up in the language of markets and inevitability. Investors talk openly about stealing their lunch. Founders get celebrated for being willing to beat the crap out of incumbents. When Steve Jobs said Android was trying to kill the iPhone, he wasn’t describing some clean technical competition between two corporate entities. He was describing a billionaire’s intention to destroy something smaller and less organized. Android didn’t even have a proper corporate structure at the time. It was still just an idea moving through the world. And it was spoken of like it needed to be stomped out.

Don’t get me wrong — you still have to be a genius with something that looks like a gift from God to build anything that actually matters. But that is exactly the kind of person this industry attracts right now and then squanders in an idiot’s zero-sum game of disruption and theft, when it could be building something that doesn’t require constant casualties.

So the choice becomes do I want to keep playing disruption? Do I want to keep competing in a zero-sum where the other side is likely to die of exposure if I win? Or do I want to start looking at the world through a different set of glasses?

I’m not talking about a kinder, gentler world. I’m talking about a more focused kind of competition. Not over who gets to own the thing at the end, but over who can design the intervention that lifts the greatest number of people into the greatest profitability.

This is not disruption. This is intervention.

An intervention starts with modeling the actual enclosures so you can see exactly what changes are necessary to make the lift as efficient and easy as possible. The best intervention is the one that raises profitability across every layer at once — like capitalism but cubed, where each layer of profit lifts the layer of work beneath it, and the people willing to do the work capture more of it. You are not trying to make a small surgical change that creates some abstract desired effect. You are trying to make the specific intervention that produces the largest, most stable increase in real profitability for the largest number of participants without requiring anyone to be destroyed in the process.

I’ve done this with economics through the RTLDI Atlas of UN member states. By modeling the relationship between protections for human life and the actual capacity of populations to generate and hold onto economic value, it became possible to see roughly fifteen trillion dollars in capital that was being systematically excluded from national economies because the protections were too weak. The intervention wasn’t to attack the existing financial systems or build a new competitor to them. It was to make the structural cost of weak protections visible down to the dollar so the people who actually make those decisions could see what it was costing them every year — and what they stood to gain by lifting the floor. Did The World Bank set up a 15 trillion dollar fund to support nations who want to reform their legal systems? No. The universe and the data support this action. The invention was the RTLP scoring method. The data was peer reviewed and meticulously investigated by the Varieties of Democracy project. Why would any nation choose not to implement whistleblower protections once they found out the annual cost of not having them? The RTLDI Atlas makes the potential recovery of those funds nearly inevitable.

I’ve done it with physics in my paper that intervened in physical sciences and quantum engineering, Nothing Is All You Need: Depart