Who?I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill in the role of founder or early team member as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Compulsory Schooling and Mass Culture
I often wonder if compulsory schooling is largely responsible for the homogenized, "mass culture" that so many like to criticize. Here's why.
The transition to adulthood in the past often marked the adoption of extreme subcultures. If you study "the ancients" it's striking how intense these options were. Stoics or Epicureans. Shaolin warrior monks or beer-making European monks.
This still exists on the fringes of the world. Google "The Hyena Men of Lagos", a group of guys whose whole lives revolve around domesticating cobras and hyenas using (what they believe to be) secret magic. Hunter gatherer rituals like shoving your hands into bee hives for long stretches also show how the costly choices and rituals mark the transition to adulthood.
Some will say that today we have a lot of subcultures too. Yes, we do. But membership in Goth or Rockabilly or Hip Hop is mostly about clothes and music taste. Even large intellectual subcultures like Rationalists do not impose costly choices or rituals. There is nothing wrong with these subcultures, but there is something that makes them feel like "Subculture Lite" compared to taking a vow of silence.
Today, compulsory schooling dominates the transition to adulthood. It robs many young people of the chance to forge radically unique identities and worldviews in their transition to adulthood. It does this by robbing kids of time to be alone. In school you are handed pre-processed culture from authorities and forced to survive the dysfunctional same-aged peer culture of teenage life.
Homeschooled or unschooled kids are walking evidence of this. These kids often have obsessive and obscure interests. Competitive LEGO grandmaster. Spelling bee wizard. Rubik's cube champion. Bedroom indie hacker. Or perhaps inventor of the Oculus.
In my own life as an unschooler, I immediately developed eccentric and nerdy interests when let out of school. I obsessed about jazz music and dumpster diving for electronics so I could fix and re-sell them. My biggest challenge when I went to university is that I had no idea what anyone was talking about — I had few of the cultural references that were popular among other 18-19 year olds.
Some might see this as an argument against unschooling. But it was actually a liberation. I was mostly confused, not insecure about this mismatch between my understanding of the world and my peers'. It equips you to be a bit less controlled by social risk.
The best thing we could do to defeat mass culture is to widen the range of alternative forms of education. In particular, forms of education that allow young people to follow idiosyncratic paths of their own design.
