A working space. There are screens, and at least one cool keyboard. One of the screens is showing the C.E.O.
…'s how the market's reacted to our latest plays, and that's how I know we're gonna WIN.
There is a flood of celebratory emojis.
Alice looks away from the screen, and gazes out across the Indie Wastes.
I am so sick of all this meaningless winning
crap.
Oh, don't be so hard on the businesscats — you know what they mean. And they pay our bills. And besides, they're kinda right — we all want to win in our own way.
I don't.
I don't think you particularly want the company to win, but I'm pretty sure you want to win. It's just a matter of discovering your win conditions.
No! I don't want to win
anything! I just want to make
cool things that make people's lives better.
Well there you go. Alice wins if Alice is making cool things that make people's lives better. See?
Alice sighs.
It's more complicated than that. Because it's about
collaboration, not competition… and slow growth not
fast… and human-scale not hyperscale… and
… And I know that whatever I say now, you're
going to add it to a box in your brain labelled Alice's
Utility Function
, and you'll keep on believing that all
humans want to win
just so long as you can find the
right definition of win
for that person…
But seriously. You're trying to model a lisp macro from my brain as a java class in yours.
You can kinda do that. But you're either going to end up
writing a lisp interpreter in your java utility
function
superclass, or (way more likely) you're going
to over-approximate. You'll find a representation that works
most of the time, under the circumstances you encounter most
often — within the confines of this company maybe, or
the sector we operate in …
But then one day, your model will break. Maybe you'll meet me in a different context, or I'll do something you didn't expect in this one. You'll be surprised at how different I am, even though I told you that difference just now.
There are better ways than winning.