Comments - On the Garden (against Citrini)
Minutes
SubscribeSign in
On the Garden (against Citrini)
In 1661, André Le Nôtre completed the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte for Nicolas Fouquet, the French finance minister. The gardens were so spectacular that Louis XIV, upon visiting, had Fouquet arrested on embezzlement charges that historians now consider largely fabricated, and hired Le Nôtre to build something even bigger at Versailles. Read →
10 Comments
Top first
excellent sir
Reply
The Genius loci. The spirit of a place. We use it to try to build pastures well.
This is a great analogy.
Reply
To use your analogy, the ground is still being walked, it's just the AI that will be doing the walking. At least within software we are now the Lord rather than the gardener, we can still choose between the English or French design, but it will be AI presenting and executing the designs. I also don't agree on your assertion that new technology always assumes a ground up rollout, I assure you the people building these new AI systems are obessessing over the land contours of the domains they are building their products to. Didn't know the history of gardening though - very interesting.
Reply
I love this metaphor, but I have one addendum.
There is, in fact, a particularly American garden, although it offers fewer lessons about how to integrate nature and society. The true American garden is the National Park, a region of intense natural beauty cordoned off from modernity to the greatest extent possible while still allowing for broad useage of the park by the public.
This attitude, of setting aside the natural and wild, of intentionally refusing regulation and leaving some spheres of life to their own development, is as natural to Americans as is rationalist central planning to the French and spontaneous, decorous syncretism is to the English.
Reply
Apr 6Edited
What a beautiful essay. Thank you! The core idea reminds me of Chesterton’s Fence:
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
Reply
Im not in finance or in tech, but i am in design, and this metaphor holds true for any designer or problem solver. It is the greatest hubris to think you can simply glance at a system, say it is lacking, and pull it out by the roots. You may end with your perfect sterile system, but in doing so you have lost the very reason you wanted to design a system in the first place: to take care of the folks who depend on it
Reply
Great piece - technology as French gardening is an apt analogy (it doesn't have to be this way of course, and something like the resonant computing manifesto is trying to argue for the alternative).
It reminds me also of legibility in the "Seeing like a state" sense: systems can be unable to see beyond their own abstractions (e.g. GDP) and hence not see some of the costs they are producing/externalising - you are right to point out that this way of looking can be adjusted and is a choice.
Reply
I think the bigger problem here is that put lightly, most folks in tech lack life skills by over-indexing on tech and under-indexing on actual needs of customers.
You can only plow and re-build the garden and be succcessful when you're building a new technology, which is different than building a product for users.
Most of the time you have to work with what the garden has, see the potential points and enhance them with your product.
I don't think folks are good at taking the garden for what it is. Like to a pathetic degree. Then you'll watch an otherwise smart person spin their tires for 5 years.
Think about every dead unicorn from 2021, every single "healthcare has data movement problems, my startup will fix it" startup that pops up every 3 weeks, every single hardtech adjacent software startup that wasn't built by industry insiders, quite literally every single white collar finance startup of the last 5 years.
Really nobody gets exits in the "non-tech B2B" world anymore. Because they're too focused on how they can apply tech to what their super simple picture of the users' needs are and don't know how to get down and dirty to see where the real value is and then build from there.
It's really trying to apply strategies that work with new, evangelical technologies like Twitch or AirBnB to the B2B game. Shit just doesn't work because the users actually don't care, because you're not solving a real problem.
To the point where I almost think people are just picking big markets and taking advantage of VC's need to be "10 ft deep in 2000 topics" and FOMO.
Reply
Every landscape plan is a fantasy. Some are more than others.
I agree with the rest ;)
Reply
Your comparison of Le Nôtre and Brown recalls Walk VII of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Not all Frenchmen? In any event, nice.
Reply