A brief personal history of optimistic futures

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I was raised in the suburbs of Connecticut during the 90s and 2000s in a town called Waterford, right next to the small city of New London. The defining event of my town’s existence during my growing-up years was the abandonment of New London by Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant. Pfizer was the main source of white collar jobs in my town, and many of my friends’ parents were employed by them. Right as I was about to enter high school, Pfizer decided to close their R&D plant in New London, lay off their senior people, and tell all their junior people that they were moving to Groton, CT, a few miles away.

Ironically, this occurred just a few years after the single biggest court case in the city’s history, the Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London, which revolved around the city of New London seizing the property of local homeowners for a Pfizer-anchored redevelopment project. The city did successfully seize the property, but once Pfizer moved out from New London, the developer couldn’t get any additional funding. The property remains an empty lot to this day, while the cost to the city and state reportedly amounted to $78 million in total. 

From my local newspaper, The Day. At the time, Pfizer said they were moving “most” of the 1400 jobs to their Groton campus, a few miles away. As far as I can tell from what happened to my friends’ parents, “most” was an overstatement, and a lot of those R&D jobs were just eliminated. They did eventually open another R&D plant in Cambridge, MA, not too far from where I am now, and presumably have hired back some of those people.

There’s a lot I can say about this pair of events. There’s: 

1. The shortsightedness on the part of the city to not guarantee their anchor tenant would stay in place before they spent $78 million and went to the Supreme Court 

2. The questionable merger of state power with private advancement when a city seizes property for the benefit of a developer 

3. This arrogant Robert Moses-esque focus on top-down development at the expense of bottom-up, although carried out way more sloppily than Moses ever did or would have. 

4. A cavalier waste of public resources with little to show for it.

But, overall, what comes to mind is cynicism. There’s a cynicism in the actions of Pfizer and of New London. Pfizer’s cynicism is obvious: they saw all this hubbub going on for their benefit, used their weight to make sure the decision went their way, and then decided to pull out anyways, not caring about the lives ruined in the process. New London’s cynicism is a little more under the surface, but still there: after they won the Supreme Court case, officials in New London announced plans to charge the residents of those houses tens of thousands of dollars in back rent, backdated from the start of the court case 5 years ago. It wasn’t exactly the action of a gracious victor.

I don’t think this cynicism comes out of pure meanspiritedness, though. Instead, I think it’s a sort of pessimism. I think both Pfizer and New London believed that their best days were behind them. As a company and a city, respectively, they needed to get out while the getting was good. The individuals in those organizations, too, acted desperately, trying to get resources for themselves at the expense of others. When the ship strikes an iceberg, most people commandeer lifeboats for themselves.

I assume this was their mentality because that was, generally, the mentality that I was raised with. My area of Connecticut had seen nothing but downturn since I was born. The only industries for smart young people to aspire to enter were finance, medicine, or law, or, barring that, academia. Notably, none of those are productive industries in the sense that none of those make the things of daily life. And while, sure, a few of my classmates entered engineering (notably those few who were strong in math but weak in liberal arts), they ultimately aspired to be managers. The goal was to get away from making things, not towards them.

This wasn’t unique to my corner of America, of course. This was in the water, generally. The only big change that happened as I got slightly older is that programming, once again, became lucrative. So, once I got to college, many of my smart classmates didn’t only aspire to be in finance, medicine, or law (or consulting, a career track that I did not know existed in high school). They also aspired to be overpaid programmers. Programmers of what, you might ask? It didn’t really matter. Programmers of apps, or ads, or websites, or databases, or mobile games. The important thing was that they would get paid $200k first year out of college and get to eat snacks all day.

At no point did anyone in my high school or college, either student or teacher, express any optimism about the future besides a vague hope that things in the future would be more equitable. Like, there was a hope that the playing field would be leveled, that everyone would have the same “privilege as the straight white man”, as the parlance of the time went. I actually don’t think this was terrible: America made some significant gains in gay rights and in not being jerks to minorities, although some of the latter backlash went too far. Still, it was revealing that that was it. Nobody could imagine their future life being better than, like, George W. Bush’s life in the year 1999.

To some extent, this might have just been a failure of perspective. After all, the Kindle came out in 2007, when I was 14, and I distinctly remember feeling like a device that you could read books on and that could connect to the Internet was pretty close to the fictional, futuristic handheld encyclopedia-of-everything Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from the book series of the same title. And I lived through and was acutely aware of the insane pace of videogame graphics and AI advancement, given that I begged my parents for each new title and console.

But, somehow, those genuine technical achievements, as well as the other ones that swept across my landscape (like smartphones), never registered. I never once heard of any of my classmates wanting to work for Amazon or Apple, or to create anything similar. Apple’s products seemed as mysterious in their creation as, well, apples themselves.

Funnily enough, crypto guys were the first people I heard elucidate a unique, positive vision of the future, one in which they played an active role. My first in-person encounter with a true believer in crypto was my freshman year hallmate, Pranav, who mined bitcoin on his laptop (this was 2011, when that was still feasible). Like most of the early bitcoin adopters, Pranav mined bitcoin not because he was interested in becoming rich. Being rich off of bitcoin didn’t even make sense at that stage. He mined bitcoin because he thought there was some small chance that it was the currency of the future, and, besides, it was just plain cool to be able to buy pizza with the proceeds of a cryptographic algorithm.

Pranav, and those other early crypto guys, had a vague vision of a future in which money was permissionless and frictionless. Anyone could own money, nobody could be de-banked, their money would be theirs to keep and do with as they wished, and money transfers would be effortless and free. In this crypto future, our laptops would be our banks, and our USB drives would be our wallets.

This future largely did not come to pass. There were always problems with this idea and, as it turns out, crypto is a much better tool for asset speculation than currency, with some exceptions. I felt that way then, too, and told Pranav as much. Later on, once Pranav pivoted to quantum computing, getting a PhD then starting and selling a startup in it, he told me that I was right about bitcoin after all. This was, of course, after Pranav had mined a number of bitcoins, held them for a while, then sold them for a healthy profit, while I did none of those things and did not make money. But, at least I won the argument.

Anyways, that was my first encounter in real life with someone who had an optimistic, positive view of the future, one in which the future was better for everyone than the present we had today. I was 18. Nuts, right? By that point, I had been exposed to numerous futuristic dystopias in school and at home, both fictional, like The Giver and Brave New World, and seemingly prophetic, like An Inconvenient Truth. But, to get an idea of a futuristic utopia, I had to go all the way back to The Jetsons, a cartoon from the 50s that I never even watched and was only vaguely aware of. My next best option after that was Mass Effect, a videogame series which is mostly an epic space opera about ancient robot aliens taking over the galaxy, but which is set in a future in which technology has solved pretty much all issues of scarcity and disease, at least until the ancient robot aliens start turning crucial members of society into zombies (it makes more sense in context). That was almost it for optimistic visions of the future.

As a result of this, I didn’t have a clear idea of the future I was working towards when I graduated college. I didn’t feel like I fit into the doctor/lawyer/consultant mode, and my college GPA agreed. I decided to strike out on my own and do test prep while doing projects on the side. This did feel a little like making a positive contribution towards a future world, in that I was helping people become a bit smarter, at least in an academic sense. But the link between that and The Jetsons utopian future was so sketchy as to be nonexistent.

In that way, I think I was much like many people of my generation. A lot of us had a vague yearning to create a better future. The cynicism and pessimism of our parents’ generation, with endless worrying about terrorism, moral decline, and “protecting what’s yours” was exhausting. And sure, many of us just turned to doomerism of our own (and many of us are still stuck there). But, for the builders and dreamers among us, we wanted to create that ideal future.

It seemed impossible, though. Building the future cost money, and money was only available for ventures that, ironically, didn’t seem to require money to expand, like apps, crypto, and SaaS. So, we ended up awkwardly shoehorning our utopian desires into mundane startups and businesses. We were forced to claim that our digital analytics or ridesharing apps would make the world a better place, like the only thing that stood between where we are today and a future of abundance was correct view attribution on mobile ads.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think some of these innovations were actually good. Uber and Airbnb provided much needed competition for taxis and hotels. Facebook was and is actually pretty convenient for social stuff. Even my small education business was a lot better than the Kaplans of the world, although I never was able to figure out how to scale it like a Kaplan and still maintain any semblance of quality.

But we weren’t building anything that was really going to take us into the future. The utopian future of The Jetsons or even Mass Effect had a world without diseases, with robots who did our menial labor, and spaceships that whisked us between the stars in seconds. No number of note-taking apps, email marketing platforms, or dog-walking websites were going to get us there.

This is very obvious to me now looking back. At the time, though, I think I only had a vague sense of things not quite fitting. On the one hand, I heard endless pronouncements of the end of the world in 50 years, usually due to climate change. On the other hand, the smartest people I knew were working on things that were, well, trivial in comparison.

I fully admit that this blindness was my fault, or at least my choice. I had heard the pronouncements of Elon Musk about humans needing to be an interplanetary species and Peter Thiel about humanity choosing flying cars over 140 characters, and I responded with cynicism and willful ignorance. I could have gone future-first much earlier and chosen to surround myself with those few people who were trying to build the future. But, I’ve never been the type to be particularly impressed with engineering, anyhow, even as I appreciate its importance. It was hard for me to imagine myself working on spaceships or flying cars, or even being a particularly early user of them. Peter Thiel’s and Elon Musk’s future worlds didn’t feel like mine.

It took a big shock to the system for me to start really thinking about the future. That came in the form of COVID. As Boston, then America, shut down, and as we were bombarded with apocalyptic messages (pandemics! mass death! hospital paralysis! race riots! police brutality!), I came to two startling realizations:

1. The only way out of this was technology

2. There are no adults behind the scenes

Of course, I didn’t mean there were literally no adults behind the scenes. I just meant that watching the American policy apparatus continually bungle the COVID response and watching public health officials operate about 6 months behind the release of every new study made me realize that the people who I had been relying on to bring about the future were no smarter than I was. In a lot of cases, they were dumber, or at least seemed to be from their decisions.

And then, on the other hand, watching the rapid development of therapeutics and vaccines for COVID, most notably the mRNA vaccine, was downright inspiring. This, at last, seemed like an optimistic future coming into the present. More than the iPhone, more than the Xbox, more than the Tesla: the COVID vaccine, developed in weeks and “programmed” against a novel virus, made me realize that a bright future was coming to me at last. It seemed obvious to me that while COVID was temporary, these innovations would be forever and they’d just keep coming.

That realization is what started my biotech journey, really. I started reading papers and blogging about science. I started to deliberately reach out to people I admired, trying to foster connections and learn from them. And, after deliberating briefly about going to grad school, I started a biotech company.

I can’t really explain why I started a biotech company over going to grad school or working at someone else’s company, except to say that starting companies and ventures is something I’m comfortable with and working under other people is something that I’m not. I think it’s a personality flaw on my part. Regardless, it gave and has given me some sense of bringing about this optimistic future, and for that I value it immensely.

By working on my company; by struggling against the forces of inertia, bureaucracy, and institutional cowardice; by contributing in some small way towards a future with no disease in humans or in pets, I feel like I’m participating in bringing about a different future. I am, for once in my life, optimistic about the future. I can see a future where death is optional, matter infinitely malleable, distances immaterial, and, yes, energy too cheap to meter. My fellow builders and I are bringing it about, each of us playing a small part.

I’m not saying this future is coming soon or easily. It’s so hard, actually. It’s so much harder to build things than anyone who hasn’t built things realizes. Atoms don’t like to be moved and people don’t like to do things. There’s always a wiseass to tell you why your idea won’t work, and sometimes they’re right, but you won’t know until you’ve poured 5 years of sweat into it. 

But it’s necessary. We live in such an imperfect world, even for those of us who are privileged white males like myself. Right now, I’m trying to get over a cold (my second in two months) and using the exact same remedies as I grew up with, but just with a worse decongestant since the US government banned pseudoephedrine and replaced it with the entirely ineffective phenylephrine. Roadworkers have been digging up my street for the past 4 or 5 months, supposedly to replace the pipes underneath, but there’s no end in sight. I’d like to go to my office to avoid the roadworkers’ noise, but that’s a rude thing to do when I’m still coughing, so I’m stuck in my apartment.

None of these are purely technological problems, but nothing ever is. An optimistic future can’t be brought about by purely technological solutions, any more than a company’s success can be. In my own company, I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with paperwork and following up on emails, and a lot of mental effort trying to figure out exactly how to navigate around rules and regulations. It’s not exactly Iron Man.

This isn’t different from many jobs, of course. The difference is that when I do so now, I’m doing so because I want to bring about a better world. I want to bring about a world where colds can be cured instantly, roadwork is done quickly and efficiently, and offices don’t spread contagion. Are we venturing towards that world now? Am I venturing towards that world? I think so.

And when I look at all of the builders in America now, people building real, material things: rocket ships, cars, satellites, drones, robots, vaccines, therapeutics, batteries, solar panels, nuclear power plants, I feel like I’m not alone. I’m part of a movement. There’s a new future coming, and it’s going to be better than our present.

So here I am, stuck in my apartment, on hopefully the last day of a cold, enjoying a brief, blessed lull in roadwork noise, dreaming of a better future and feeling, at last, like it’s coming. If that’s you, too, I’m glad to hear it. Reach out, and I’ll help any way I can.