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entries for 2002/7/17
visons of a capitalist pig farm
I'm having a good month. I got it in my head at the beginning of the month that I was going to collect on my receivables and automate certain parts of my business. I'm making good progress on both fronts. When I move, my living expenses will drop considerably,
which means I can take a pay cut and still have a higher personal cashflow. A paycut means more money for my company to spend on marketing and automation, and (eventually) employees.
I think part of the reason I've been treating cornerhost as a job rather than a business is that I haven't had a clear view of where
I wanted to go. I knew I didn't want to work for anyone else, but I wasn't sure I wanted other people working for me, and I really didn't know what I'd do if I had enough money coming in. I didn't have a goal. I pretty much started automating things just for the sake of improving... And oddly enough, I started getting ideas about where I could go next.
Over the past couple days, a plan has been coming together in my head. Something that ties together many, many tangents that I've run off on, and provides an open framework for exploring those tangents while still staying true to a simple, powerful purpose. I mean, it fits with NLP, artificial intelligence, extreme programming, subscription service hosting, fiction writing, teaching, artificial language, stock trading bots, virtual reality, network marketing, real estate and the cashflow 101 game... Even the Flake Effect concept I've been thinking of for the past couple years.
In a way, this kinda reminds of the short novel I wrote after high school. It's horribly written, but the ideas behind it were kind of cool. I basically took everything I'd been interested in or written about, and put them all together into this one coherent story outline. Except I'm not talking about a story, but a company.
When I wrote that novel, I thought of the metaphor of sculpting, and the difference between carving a statue out of stone and welding together a sculpture out of metal. My book was like a sculpture welded together, and so is this idea I'm thinking of.
It's odd because I was looking for some huge goal to strive for. I thought I'd pick some big, focused, ideal and work for it - like global literacy or something. And yet all this time, I've been fighting the flake effect - getting caught up in an idea, and then deciding it wasn't all that important, and focusing back on my business. And it's true that most of those tangents didn't go anywhere. BUT! When I start to think about the connections between those tangents... A pattern starts to emerge.
When I go off on a tangent, I tend to get obsessive about it for a few days or weeks. Like with computer languages. Another computer language is about the last thing on earth I need. But if you show me a new language, I'll gladly read everything I can about it. Not because I want to build anything in it... But because I like to explore things and go off on tangents. Of course, then I start to wonder why I'm bothering, since I'm not going to do anything with it.
The real benefit doesn't come from the ideas, but from the relantionships between them. If get obsessed with my business and turn it into a money machine, great... I'll be rich, but I wouldn't be happy... Not until I could use that business system to power some other idea... Then I've got two systems working for me, and they can make each other stronger.
In this case, the first system is cornerhost, and the second
system is montybot (the AI stock trader)... To be honest, if I had a ton of money coming in from cornerhost, there's not a lot of reason to make a stock trading bot. I mean, okay, it'll make more money if it works, but so will just sticking excess cashflow into index funds and letting it all compound. Or, rather than buying individual shares of companies, I could just buy other companies outright. Especially little hosting companies that got to where I'm at now but would rather sell than figure out how to deal with the issues that
come up. My point is that building montybot would just be a fun
thing to do, but once it's finished, it's just another stream of income. It's a black box that sucks money out of the stock market, just like a completely automated hosting company would be a black box that sucked money out of the web hosting market.
But then I'd have two self-sustaining systems, and some byproducts. Like the software. Like knowledge of how markets work, coded as software. Like a billing system. Like a system that can handle large numbers of linux machines. Like excess cashflow. Like free time.
And then the thought wanders into my head, as it often does, that I might like to make a game someday. I really like games, but I think they're often frivolous. I like the challenge of solving adventure games, but when I run into a puzzle that requires learning a meaningless skill, I reach for a hint book and blow right past it.
Role playing games where you have to beat up monsters to gain experience points bore me to tears. I'd rather just get on with the story.
Or... If I need to learn a skill to play the game, why can't it be a skill that is useful to me in real life? Like programming? Or running a business? Or learning about math or music or whatever? Cashflow 101 is a perfect example of a game that teaches a usable skill.
So is the old ninendo game, Mike Tyson's Punch Out! (no, really!)... So is Sim City.
So... Why not make a game that teaches business? I don't mean
a board game. I mean like a game - a MMORPG. A huge virtual world where people can actually do business. No fighting for experience points. Instead, you buy and sell things. So at first, you may have to work for someone else to make money. But then you can use it to buy and sell goods. Even set up your own trade route, or a corporation, or whatever. Things would be simplified, but the real flavor of business would be there. You could even invest in companies.
Or you could start out lving in a slum or small, third-world villiage, and work your way up to running an empire.
And to keep it interesting, there could be laws, and therefore criminals and police. Perhaps you have the option of selling
drugs to get off the street, but of course you have to pay the
price. And if the world is big enough, then you can do actual experiments that would be unethical in the real world. What if
one city legalized drugs? Or required everyone to carry a
handgun? What if you could have multiple characters, and program their daily habits? What if you could store those programs as "how to" books or "seminars" and sell them to other players?
I think this sort of virtual worlds by themselves are pointless. But
when you start thinking of it as a simulation not just for entertainment but for learning real skills that you couldn't perform in the "real" world, then it becomes a whole lot more useful. There's a reason to enhance the software, make it more and more realistic, etc. It's not just a place to go goof off, but a place to go to learn about the real world.
So that's my story... Or part of it anyway. And it fits in very well with what I'm doing today at cornerhost. Just another subscription service. Plenty of room to make interesting models of stuff and play with systems and have fun. Add an affiliate program so that people can earn money recruiting their friends (WHILE you're teaching them the skills of business) and blam... You've got a network effect.
And it can be cooperative. For all I care, the whole thing
can be open source. (Worldforge, maybe?) I'm
just a hosting guy with a little extra cash for a development team.
What do you think?