The Power of the Marginal

[The Power of the Marginal]

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June 2006

*(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and
Railsconf 2006.)*

A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple
garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in
Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak
must have had to work in a garage.

"Those guys must have been
freezing!"

That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means
there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets
trimmed off. There's a sharper line between outside and inside,
and only projects that are officially sanctioned — by organizations,
or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself — get proper indoor
space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can't
just tinker. You have to justify.

Some of Silicon Valley's most famous companies began in garages:
Hewlett-Packard in 1938, Apple in 1976, Google in 1998. In Apple's
case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend. Woz says all
they did there was assemble some computers, and that he did all the
actual design of the Apple I and Apple II in his apartment or his
cube at HP.
[1]
This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR
people.

By conventional standards, Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people
too. Obviously they were smart, but they can't have looked good
on paper. They were at the time a pair of college dropouts with
about three years of school between them, and hippies to boot.
Their previous business experience consisted of making "blue boxes"
to hack into the phone system, a business with the rare distinction
of being both illegal and unprofitable.

Outsiders

Now a startup operating out of a garage in Silicon Valley would
feel part of an exalted tradition, like the poet in his garret, or
the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to
wear a beret indoors. But in 1976 it didn't seem so cool. The
world hadn't yet realized that starting a computer company was in
the same category as being a writer or a painter. It hadn't been
for long. Only in the preceding couple years had the dramatic fall
in the cost of hardware allowed outsiders to compete.

In 1976, everyone looked down on a company operating out of a garage,
including the founders. One of the first things Jobs did when they
got some money was to rent office space. He wanted Apple to seem
like a real company.

They already had something few real companies ever have: a fabulously well
designed product. You'd think they'd have had more confidence.
But I've talked to a lot of startup founders, and it's always this
way. They've built something that's going to change the world, and
they're worried about some nit like not having proper business
cards.

That's the paradox I want to explore: great new things often come
from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked
down on by everyone, including themselves.

It's an old idea that new things come from the margins. I want to
examine its internal structure. Why do great ideas come from the
margins? What kind of ideas? And is there anything we can do to
encourage the process?

Insiders

One reason so many good ideas come from the margin is simply that
there's so much of it. There have to be more outsiders than insiders,
if insider means anything. If the number of outsiders is huge it
will always seem as if a lot of ideas come from them, even if few
do per capita. But I think there's more going on than this. There
are real disadvantages to being an insider, and in some kinds of
work they can outweigh the advantages.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if the government decided
to commission someone to write an official Great American Novel.
First there'd be a huge ideological squabble over who to choose.
Most of the best writers would be excluded for having offended one
side or the other. Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse
such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition.
The committee would choose one at the height of his career — that
is, someone whose best work was behind him — and hand over the
project with copious free advice about how the book should show in
positive terms the strength and diversity of the American people,
etc, etc.

The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge
weight of expectation on his shoulders. Not wanting to blow such
a public commission, he'd play it safe. This book had better command
respect, and the way to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy.
Audiences have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people they
feel obliged to take you seriously. As everyone knows, America
plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that's what it would have to
be about. When finally
completed twelve years later, the book would be a 900-page pastiche
of existing popular novels — roughly Gone with the Wind plus
Roots. But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller
for a few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host's
autobiography. The book would be made into a movie and thereupon
forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom
it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or *Battlefield
Earth*.

Maybe I got a little carried away with this example. And yet is
this not at each point the way such a project would play out? The
government knows better than to get into the novel business, but
in other fields where they have a natural monopoly, like nuclear
waste dumps, aircraft carriers, and regime change, you'd find plenty
of projects isomorphic to this one — and indeed, plenty that were
less successful.

This little thought experiment suggests a few of the disadvantages
of insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people, the
excessive scope, the inability to take risks, the need to seem
serious, the weight of expectations, the power of vested interests,
the undiscerning audience, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency
of such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure.

Tests

A world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of test for
distinguishing between them. And the trouble with most tests for
selecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be
good at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the
test itself.

So the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests
are, because this tells you what it means to be an outsider. This
tells you how much to trust your instincts when you disagree with
authorities, whether it's worth going through the usual channels
to become one yourself, and perhaps whether you want to work in
this field at all.

Tests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for
quality, and the people running the test really care about its
integrity. Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are
fairly honest, for example. The professors will get whoever they
admit as their own grad students, so they try hard to choose well,
and they have a fair amount of data to go on. Whereas undergraduate
admissions seem to be much more hackable.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the
overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach
the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have
fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are
among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law,
history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At
the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where
there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading
practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those
who can't do, teach."

[...]

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