Safe is the New Dangerous

Kary Mullis is a 64 year old surfer who also happens to have won a Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, a technique that reinvented biochemistry and microbiology, and paved the way for the Human Genome Project. He is as anti-establishment as Nobel Laureates get. In many ways he embodies, in the context of the science community, the subversive spirit of the Internet.

Mullis credits his Nobel-winning breakthrough to his natural disregard for dogma and authority in general. As a boy he ordered an amateur rocketeering book from the US Air Force, and by doing exactly what the book told him NOT to do, he succeeded in building a rocket that could repeatedly fly his pet frogs out of sight and parachute them back to earth alive. The idea for PCR came to him while driving his car, and when his molecular biologist friends advised him to abandon it because it would never work he ignored them and went on to make history.

His method is to have an idea, skip the step where you consult what the established authorities say about it, go into the lab and make it work, then look for ways to improve it. This is also how online companies work. It works because the cost of failure is so incredibly low. If you experiment long enough you will eventually succeed and along the way you will learn a lot of things no one else knows. The Establishment wants us to believe we have to play by their rules, that trial and error is a bad thing, that their conventional wisdom is the only path to success. They want us to play it safe, because their authority comes from the fact that most people don't remember a time before the Establishment so we fall in line and follow their rules, thereby implicitly affirming their authority without asking for any proof of its legitimacy. They indoctrinate us with fear of failure and rejection, and they use this fear to control us.

The online world is about as developed as 17th century science. We are only taking our first steps toward the age of online enlightenment, and those who would transfer their offline authority online are no different than the clergy who accused scientists of heresy.

There is no such thing as playing it safe online. Safe is the new dangerous.

I hope the parallels to our industry are obvious.