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Equinox greetings: the case for humble businesses and picnics
March 20, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
March 20, 2025

At 8:46 a.m. one day in late 1999, a telecom analyst at the investment firm where I had been newly hired breathlessly declared in the daily firm-wide meeting that he had seen the future in Italy: “People are walking around everywhere talking on their cell phones!” I recall the room being quiet after his pronouncement, as dozens of analysts and portfolio managers looked around at one another, unsure whether to seriously ponder a future in which we would be on cell phones all the time. Then an older, curmudgeonly portfolio manager, who loved to be left alone to read financial statements in his office with the door closed, said, “Italians just like to talk. That’s never going to happen here.” It put a quick, culturally satisfying end to the conversation. We Americans wouldn’t be so frivolously social. The moderator moved on to the next topic.

For years this moment stuck in my head because the curmudgeon seemed so wrong: We had become quickly addicted to our phones, and companies that made and lured people to these devices dominated the stock market in the ensuing years. Now it’s stuck in my head because he was so right: Our future didn’t turn out to be anything like walking around our neighborhoods, towns, and cities talking to people we know. What turned out to be profitable was selling isolating placelessness at a global scale. Today’s most valuable companies encourage us to be like the portfolio manager himself: Stay indoors, alone, gorging on information and developing opinions about other people we will never meet in places we don’t live.

Thanks to our screens, each of us has an individual take on climate change in the abstract; we know some things about California’s fire risk, Los Angeles reservoirs, and insurance costs, yet almost none of us has paid much attention to how the climate in our town or region has changed, how it is likely to change further, what risks those changes will pose, what our government officials are proposing or debating, or what our neighbors, friends, and family are thinking or doing about any of it. 

To live well in a changing climate, we must find ways to connect at scales and in contexts that are healthier and more productive. Thankfully, such technologies exist. Indeed, many of them have existed for a long time. But making them work will take real effort and require changes by investors, philanthropists, government officials, and citizens. I have some ideas that might help.

Shifting scales

In the 25 years since that meeting, shares in Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), the wireless telco that connected those chatty Italians, have lost more than 90% of their value. I’m sure there are many reasons for the company’s decline, but a simple one is that ”Italia” turned out to be a suboptimal scale. The stocks that went up the most don’t work on a local or regional scale. Instead, they connect the individual (YouTube, iPhone, Microsoft) to something too large to even imagine (Meta, Amazon, Google (which is an alternative spelling of googol, a one with one hundred zeros after it)) through opaque technological and commercial magic. For these corporations and their investors, this combination of microtargeting and limitlessness was unprecedented and unfathomably profitable. But what was good for shareholders was unnatural and, quite frankly, often very bad for humans—physical, social animals who evolved to thrive in small communities—and the local and regional institutions that communities need to thrive.

Finding the right scale to live well has been a challenge since the dawn of civilization. As I’ve discussed in another letter, our first ancestors didn’t settle for roughly 200,000 years, most likely because Earth’s climate was unstable, causing plants and animals to keep moving to find the climatic conditions that suited them. If your community is on the move, it makes sense to keep it small, which is what our earliest ancestors did.

Starting around 10,000 BCE, however, the climate stabilized and plants and animals settled into niches. This made it easy to plan, cultivate, and build accordingly. It was the dawn of specialization, and over millennia, with improvements in food storage, transportation, supply chain management, sanitation, and other technologies, people could agglomerate in previously unfathomable numbers. For people to settle in cities, however, they need to have confidence not just in the local climate but also in their community, their institutions, and their relationships with other communities. Whole systems need to work, and human systems are not inherently stable.

In their tremendous book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow document a huge variety of community types from the past 10,000 years. Groups experimented with patterns of living (migratory, settled, isolated, open, etc.), cultural identities (warlike, peaceful, religious, secular, mystical, etc.), forms of government (egalitarian, democratic, authoritarian, anarchic, etc.), and commercial relations (gift, barter, market, feudal, slavery, etc.). The book is a prompt to get readers to see today’s systems, institutions, and ways of living not as the inevitable, final outcome of a linear process but as a contingent, accidental state of affairs that should be questioned and is always in flux. The past and present of Italy illustrate this well.

Unsettled states

When the American investors in that meeting room in 1999 were prompted to imagine Italians using cell phones, they likely conjured a jarring tableau of new technology in an old country. But what we now call “Italy” is both new and a work in progress (or regress). For millennia, the areas that now constitute the Italian Republic mostly functioned as distinct city-states and regional administrations with their own unique characteristics. A traveler observing the land from the northern to the southern extremes of Italy would find this variety obvious. They would start thousands of meters above sea level in the Alps, descend through the irrigated fields of Lombardy, navigate the barely-dry land surrounding Venice, traverse myriad hills and valleys down the spine of the peninsula, look out at the Adriatic Sea to the east and the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west, and end up on tough, volcanic islands in the Mediterranean. 

Each of these places had its own specific climate, and communities in each place developed their own traditions, foodways, and political and commercial systems that were little changed by the empires that claimed them (Roman, Ottoman, Spanish, and Austro-Hungarian) before unification in the global wave of nation-founding in 1871 when “Italy” was born. (Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian engineer who invented wireless radio transmission was born in Bologna just three years later.) The year 1871, however, was not the dawn of a stable, coherent Italy, as the national government almost immediately sought to increase its reach through colonization in Africa. In the 1920s, Fascists, fueled by the belief that Italy wasn’t nationalistic enough, took over and ramped up colonization efforts both in Africa and in neighboring Europe, only to lose all of the nation’s colonies in WWII. At the war’s end, Italy ended its monarchy, and became a republic and member of the postwar order. In doing so, it immediately began losing power to European and global alliances, agreements, and governing institutions. Since then the country has cycled through new governments almost annually. 

The siren song of infinity

For a physical empire or company, annexing additional territory often grew increasingly expensive and more complicated the farther the additional lands were from the center of power. Maintaining control of remote operations required costly and often brutal information, monetary, and physical systems. In contrast, digital assets can be duplicated at nearly zero cost regardless of distance, and network effects can make a software product or system more compelling the larger it gets. And so it was that software achieved superhuman scale at inhuman speed.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Microsoft changed investors’ and entrepreneurs’ sense of what was possible. First the company demonstrated software’s increasing returns, and then it added two new strategies to further increase and strengthen its vast reach. Internally, the company found ways to design its products to lock customers in. Externally, it solved the problem of potential competition by buying companies that had invented something that might be better. Sometimes Microsoft incorporated these enterprises, and sometimes they simply killed them. What’s more, Bill Gates translated his unprecedented wealth and Microsoft’s ubiquity into influence over many aspects of life—even those completely unrelated to software. 

Once investors saw how rich and influential you could get owning part of a business like Microsoft, many of them lost interest in any other kind of business. Similarly, potential entrepreneurs shied away from projects that could make modest improvements in society or earn a solid, stable return. They were only interested in infinity. 

Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel followed the lucrative digital siren to software and then to venture capital, public punditry, and provocative spending on personal causes. Andreessen began a famous Wall Street Journal op-ed with the short sentence: “Software is eating the world.”1 Silicon Valley VCs desperately sought sweeping technologies that could overwhelm everything in their path, with no regard for local distinctions, values, and idiosyncrasies. Andreessen’s article ends with “I know where I’m putting my money.” (As if software were a place.) 

Thiel’s extremely popular book Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future offered an even grander vision for investing (and for society) built on the following assertions:

  • Proprietary technology is the key to success, so the most valuable assets are secrets.
  • Monopolies are more efficient than markets because they can take a long view.
  • Due to what he calls “the power law,” a small number of high-performing companies drive most returns.

If a venture capital investor accepts these assertions, Thiel argues, they must follow two rules: 

Rule #1: Only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. 

Rule #2: Because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.

In his description of rule #1, Thiel mentions, “Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.” 

This kind of worldview is exciting and, in Thiel’s words, optimistic. When secrets, power, and wealth can be combined with assertions of wisdom and promises of immortality, you can really get things done. You can move fast and break things with the confidence that you are part of a grand narrative and will be the subject of legend and lore. (Many of Thiel’s companies have been given names from the fictional world of J.R.R. Tolkien). It shouldn’t be a surprise that the quotes on the back of Zero to One are from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. 

Micro and Meta made money, but man is a mezzo mammal

As his wealth has grown, Thiel has undertaken philanthropic efforts on utopian causes: artificial intelligence, human immortality, and seasteading (societies that live only on the seas, free of the constraints of life on land with its restrictive rules and institutions). But the word “utopia” was coined by Sir Thomas Moore out of the Greek words “ou” (not) and “topos” (place). Utopian visions are never in actual places. 

On the other hand, civilization began with—and continues to depend on—settlement in specific places with specific, local climates. The peculiarities of local temperature, precipitation patterns, and seasons determined local ecosystems and guided agriculture, infrastructure, architecture, traditions, and all the other facets of human culture. The resulting variety was one of humanity’s biggest strengths. But local variety is at odds with the ambitions and strategies of venture capitalists and most climate investors and philanthropists, the majority of whom made their fortunes in digital technology or finance. Their approach to climate tends to embrace the same utopian philosophy. They want speed and scale, look for S-curves and breakthroughs, and cast their hopes on the inevitability of superior, dominant technologies that will obliterate local indifference, resistance, or alternatives.

Much to these folks’ dismay, however, we are seeing that the rollout and adoption of clean energy, carbon-free industrial products, and sustainable agriculture don’t depend solely on innovation and prices but on a host of local and regional factors including regulations, market conditions, climate specifics, and culture. The great trick of information technology was how incremental and inevitable it felt. At no time did we get together and discuss whether we wanted to be on our phones all the time; it just snuck up on us each individually, often under the guise of being “free.” In contrast, groups of people will need to actively choose to change what they buy, build, protect, and value in their communities as the climate changes.

After years of working on climate change, three things are clear to me:

  • Adapting to climate change is necessary (i.e., even decarbonization needs to be suited to present and future conditions in every location).
  • Climate adaptation will always be a local process undertaken by individual communities in their specific, changing climates, considering their own values and options.
  • Local communities will only successfully adapt to climate change—and be willing to pay for that adaptation—if they have some amount of climate literacy. 

Acknowledging these truths leads to a very different investment philosophy than that which has dominated the past 30 years because, while there will be good businesses that offer valuable, local adaptation services—what Thiel calls “humble scale”—there aren’t going to be a bunch of great new products that create stability and resilience with the margins, speed, and scale that “all in” VC investors consider essential.

Perhaps most vexing for those attracted to grand narratives is that adaptation will inescapably be more like aging than immortality: coping wisely with limitations instead of shooting magic bullets. This is not to say that adaptation won’t benefit from various kinds of innovations, but instead of looking to Gates, Thiel, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the like, let’s consider the insights of Robert Putnam.

Capitale sociale

In 1970, in one of many efforts to increase both stability and growth, the Italian national government decentralized power to new, directly elected regional governments. In doing so, they created a natural experiment in democracy. Since the regions were quite different from one another in their customs and cultures, this shift of power to these new, local democracies offered potential insights to the question “Why do some democratic governments succeed and others fail?” Putnam, a young American political scientist, moved to Italy a few years later, obsessed with that exact question. 

Putnam thought he could learn something about what makes democracy work well by measuring the performance of the various regional governments. He asked questions like: How stable were they? How well did they deliver on their promises? How much did citizens trust them and participate in them? Initially, his research looked promising because by the late 1970s there were stark differences in Italian regional performance. Some regional governments delivered the daycare centers and roads they promised, had sound budgets, were reelected by enthusiastic majorities, and were trusted by their citizens, while other regions suffered through one ineffective administration after another, each of which failed to develop much more than a reputation for corruption and ineptitude. If Putnam could find an explanation for these differences, he would have something valuable to say.

He started by interrogating the obvious candidates like wealth, education, religion, and industry, but found that they didn’t explain success or failure. One day, frustrated and stewing over his stalled research, he happened to hear a chorus in a church. The mix of professional desperation and ethereal beauty made him wonder if communities in which people got together to sing might have better governments. Pursuing this question led to an unexpected avalanche of evidence that membership in local groups was a fantastic predictor of the health of both democracy and community in Italy. It wasn’t just choral societies but reading groups, sports leagues, fraternal orders, newspaper readership, volunteer associations, and all kinds of other examples of social engagement. The more participatory, informed, and connected people were, the more they trusted one another and the better their governments performed. In the language of a few scholars who had been thinking about similar things, some communities had more “social capital” and others had less, and social capital was valuable.

Putnam published Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy in 1993 after moving back to the U.S. Shortly thereafter, he read in his local newspaper that membership in the parent teachers association (PTA) in his local school district had declined. This prompted him to start asking questions about America like the ones he had asked in Italy. He found that not only was PTA membership declining across the country but membership in every other kind of local group was declining as well. In what is now a famous conversation, Putnam learned from the owner of a bowling alley that people were no longer joining bowling leagues. They were still bowling, but they were bowling alone. The owner explained that this was bad for his humble business because people in leagues buy beer and snacks, while solo bowlers roll and leave. 

In the U.S. in the late 1990s, Putnam could get even more data than had been available in Italy. This was a big, rich economy, filled with opportunities to lure consumers, so clever marketers had been asking Americans questions about their social behavior to figure out how to advertise ketchup, napkins, beer, and soft drinks. These surveys gave Putnam decades’ worth of answers to questions like “How many times in the past year have you attended a picnic?” In 1975, the average American went to five picnics a year. By 1999, that number was two. Did you attend a public meeting? Go to or host a dinner party? All of the graphs pointed downward. Just as Putnam’s Italy research predicted, social capital and trust in government also declined as people became more isolated. 

In his Italy research, Putnam had essentially treated social capital as a stable feature of different communities, like their local climates. But for America, he was documenting rapid changes in social capital. This revelation was powerful, and the resulting book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community was a phenomenon. It led to an extensive, public debate across the country about the role of individual-oriented politics, forces like union-busting and suburbanization that divided work and city communities, and the decline of religious membership. These all certainly played a role, but it’s hard to ignore the one chart that went up as participation went down: hours spent watching television. It makes sense: The people on TV are more consistently and reliably entertaining than people at the picnic, and they’re right there, seemingly for free.  

Bowling Alone was a phenomenon for a brief moment in the 1990s, and a community of activists and scholars tried to fight the antisocial trend. But by the turn of the century, the internet was beckoning with more temptations and distractions to keep you from parties, picnics, potlucks, town meetings, and choral practice. You will not be surprised to learn that those falling social participation numbers have only continued to fall in the past 25 years. But what has been bad for communities has been very good for some businesses.

VC is a bad model for funding civilization

Last spring I was asked to be a judge for a climate entrepreneurship competition. The scheduled judges were all venture capitalists, but one of them had canceled unexpectedly, and I was happy to fill in. Over the course of a day, ten teams pitched business ideas on a stage in front of an audience of a couple hundred entrepreneurs and investors, and my fellow panelists and I asked questions. The businesses were all interesting, the entrepreneurs were passionate and compelling, and their ideas were diverse. It was an excellent event, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my fellow panelists were repeatedly asking versions of the same two questions: “What is your moat?” and “How big is your TAM?” 

Historically, a moat is a deep, wide ditch around a castle or a town to protect against attack. In modern business parlance, a moat is an advantage competitors can’t overcome and enables a business to charge a high margin. TAM is short for “total addressable market,” a proxy for the maximum potential revenue of a business. The VCs had embraced Thiel-like strategies and were thus looking only for companies with valuable secrets and the opportunity for massive scale. 

The judges did a good job, and the winners were impressive. I hope they succeed in their quests to make ammonia production cheaper and more energy efficient and to capture and upcycle industrial CO2 exhaust in some industrial processes. However, I worry that, while a few big successes and lots more failures may make sense for a fund (whose investors are already rich and diversified into many investments), it isn’t great for communities. 

One of the teams pitched a modest business called Eki, which I thought was quite promising: installing solar panels on increasingly arid farmland in a novel way. Instead of facing the panels horizontally toward the sky (thus covering the ground below), this company had developed a process and bracket system that could hold two-sided panels vertically and run them north-south alongside rows of crops like a hedge. The panels would generate electricity from morning and evening sunshine (which horizontal panels do not capture), and crops would still get most of their sunlight. Additionally, the solar “hedge” provided some of the benefits that a natural hedge offers crops, buffering winds and limiting heat, thereby lessening evaporation, which meant that farmers could keep planting a traditional crop in a more arid climate. 

The team was from Spain, had already proven their products and processes on a large farm, and had contacts with networks of farmers in the region. It seemed like a safe investment that had little technological risk and lots of benefits. But my fellow panelists felt that the moat was too shallow (anyone could make a bracket) and the TAM was too small (Spanish and possibly some Portuguese and French farmers). In Thiel’s words, it was too humble a business.

I appreciate that it’s hard for people with hundreds of millions of dollars to imagine putting some money into backing a regional specialty solar business or a local heating and cooling contractor, but it’s not crazy (and if no one does it, even potentially transformative, VC-funded technologies will struggle with deployment). I recognize that such a strategic shift also reduces the infinitesimal odds that an investor might become legendary for saving the world. But in my limited reading and watching of stories like The Lord of the Rings, the heroes are humble characters who don’t seek glory, let alone riches, and they collaborate. Meanwhile, evil Sauron is very big on scale. 

The Shire probably isn’t full of innovation, but it does seem well maintained, and maintenance requires dedicated, patient capital as well as lots of community gatherings. The Shire’s economics may not attract VCs, but humble businesses might do very well there.

Great businesses that wrecked social capital

The problem with the big winners of the past 20 years isn’t just that they lured money away from the mundane but that they actively destroyed crucial social capital.

Sam Walton’s first business was a variety shop in a small town. The business succeeded and Walton bought another store in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas. Then he figured out moats and TAMs. He realized that if he built big, warehouse-like stores on cheap land just outside of towns, he could seize the local retail market without paying town land prices or property taxes and would discourage other merchants. If his chain became big enough, his company could dominate supply chains as well, further discouraging local and regional competitors. As Andreessen says in laudatory terms in the article “Why Software Is Eating the World,” “Walmart uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.”

Jeff Bezos was a moat and TAM man in search of domination from the beginning. As Thiel says about Bezos’s company, “The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company’s scaling strategy. The biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest reflected Amazon’s first goal of cataloging every book in the world, and now it stands for every kind of thing in the world, period.” 

Walmart and Amazon (and most economists) say that these massive retail platforms were good for “consumers” who could buy everything without interacting with anyone. But neither is each of us merely a “consumer,” nor do consumers make communities. Buyers clubs like Sam’s Club (which is owned by Walmart) and Costco are certainly the biggest clubs in America, but they aren’t exactly meeting places to discuss local issues, and their profits leave town as soon as the member’s card is swiped at the register.

As community members, workers, mentors, mentees, citizens, friends, neighbors, and most other ways we relate to people near us, we lost social capital as town centers and local marketplaces—places where we could interact with fellow citizens—drifted into vacancy. 2 Over the same period, we lost another important institution: local newspapers. 

Until recently, most people started the day by going outside to pick up a newspaper that had been written and printed locally. By reading it, they learned what was happening in their community and were exposed to local voices respectfully engaged in local debate. Like going to the annual pancake breakfast fundraiser at the high school and chatting about the weather with fellow residents, it wasn’t the most exciting thing, but it was what people did. It kept them informed and connected, and Putnam’s work verified that readership of local newspapers was a component of social capital. 

Because everyone did it, local and national merchants paid for ads in the local paper and sponsored the pancake breakfast. The newspaper owners didn’t know that their revenues were potential TAMs for Google, Meta, and X.

We didn’t collectively decide to kill local papers and magazines, but watching online highlights and funny videos and reading tweets about scandal, conspiracy, and outrage before you get out of bed appears to be free, doesn’t require going outside, and is more exciting than reading the local paper’s coverage of local sports, weather, government, and business. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok’s algorithmic surveillance enable instantaneous auctions for advertisers to reach us right when we might be hungry or having trouble sleeping or gazing at our navels and their surrounding belly fat, so national advertisers abandoned the less efficient print ad. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism provides an annual assessment of local news in the U.S.3 It’s a grim read. Consider this excerpt from the 2024 edition:

Since 2005, more than 266,000 newspaper jobs have been lost in the U.S., a decline of 73%… Taken in context, this is one of the most significant declines in employment across any sector over the past two decades. In raw numbers, the loss of jobs in newspapers is the single largest drop in all industries… Percentage-wise, the newspaper industry’s losses are… on par with manufacturers of cassette tapes and DVDs.

The loss of practical, factual local news is a loss of shared reality. There is an argument that social media is superior because it’s “free,” unlimited, and open to anyone, but opinions, rumors, and attacks have the same status as factual reporting and clarifying explanations on social media. More importantly, the big tech companies’ need for ever-increasing scale makes the truth unattractive to them. Unlike the modest, finite newspaper you finished reading/skimming before work or over lunch, confident that you basically knew what was going on, social media companies want you to keep checking, to keep looking, to stay online. They do this by, as the journalist Brian Phillips puts it, “creating a permanent state of low-level uncertainty.”4 He elaborates: 

It’s not necessary to convince everyone that fluoride causes bird flu (or whatever). It’s necessary only to sow enough doubt that all narratives, including the accurate ones, become suspect. If you find yourself saying, ‘I don’t believe the anti-vaxxers, but I don’t trust scientists either, and anyway, would there be this much noise about vaccines if there weren’t something to it?’ then you have fallen into exactly the trap the people peddling the anti-vax narrative have set for you. You think you’ve achieved some sort of heroic skepticism. Actually, you’ve taken the first step toward letting your feelings determine what you believe.

This is why, for instance, the ramrodding of generative AI into search engines, which has been disastrous from a product standpoint—it’s made Google less accurate, less useful, and less trustworthy—has still served the ends of the tech oligarchy. If Google is your means of ascertaining reality, and Google leaves you dubious and uncertain, then you are a less functional citizen, a meaningfully less free citizen, than you were before. 

It’s not hard to see what effect this simultaneous isolation and globalization has had on trust in others and in institutions. If we wonder or worry about climate change, we do so on our own, typing our concerns into an empty box on a screen. We’re not voicing them at the pancake breakfast or the bar or the PTA meeting or between beers while bowling. We have literally gotten worse at talking about the weather just as the weather is becoming an essential thing to talk about.

The scale of climate adaptation

Even though climate scientists have warned us, the reality of local climate change functioned like a kind of open secret: Everyone sort of knew things were changing, but few people thought about what it would mean for them, and almost nobody talked about the ways the seasons, the seas, and the weather were changing. Entrepreneurs, investors, and philanthropists have focused their attention on “solving” climate change and meeting global targets for CO2 and temperature by deploying technologies that could achieve massive scale, but few have been interested in local stories or adaptation. This winter, that began to change as, for the second year in a row, global average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C  above the average of the preceding 12,000 years, and everyone’s news feeds filled with flames and deluges. 

For thousands of years, Southern California had distinctive, predictable fall and winter weather patterns. Near the coast, autumn was often the warmest season of the year, partly because the ocean held onto summer’s heat. But in November and December, temperatures dropped and the region’s rainy season began. In the inland deserts, fall’s shorter days and longer, cold nights caused cold, high-pressure air to build up. Pressure like this looks for an outlet, and when low-pressure areas would materialize near the coast, dry desert air would rush over the path of least resistance through mountain passes from the desert toward the ocean. These Santa Ana winds typically met the onset of coastal rain. But fall and winter don’t arrive when they used to, and the atmosphere’s increased energy is shifting pressure gradients, so when supercharged Santa Ana winds surged along the mountain ridges of Los Angeles this past January, they were greeted by dry tinder. Eventually, the rains came in late January, but by then vast numbers of homes in the Palisades and Altadena had already burned to the ground. 

The fact that fire risk has risen and will continue to rise in California is now out in the open. I have recently been called by numerous members of the national media and venture capitalists for my opinion about the market for adaptation to increased fire risk. I’m glad these conversations are starting, but all of the questions I’ve been asked and the investment pitches I’ve seen presume that successful adaptation companies will make fortunes by targeting individuals. I strongly doubt this will work, both because it’s unrealistic for an individual to process all of the implications of climate change on their own, and because climate hazards don’t neatly impact individual buildings. For most of us, climate hazards are community challenges. 

During the Palisades wildfires, an architect couple profiled by The New York Times demonstrated what it looks like to tackle climate hazards on an individual level.5 They had used their own capital to build what they believed was a completely climate-proof home near Los Angeles.

The home was built entirely of fire-proof materials with special fire-proof design features, but the main feature of the home, what made it less vulnerable than other homes, was its cleared surroundings and lack of neighboring homes. When I saw this photo of the couple’s Malibu house, all I could think of was a castle with a giant, unburnable moat.

ERIN SHAFF/The New York Times/Redux

The recent fires threatened the home, but the couple saved their house from burning: The generators kept the power on, the huge water tanks kept surfaces wet, all of the equipment performed well, and the unburnable moat held off the attacking flames. The capital and effort they had spent had been worth it: The house was indeed fully prepared. But a few days after the nearby fires were finally extinguished, instead of reveling in their resiliency, the couple said fighting climate change on their own was too exhausting. They were likely to move somewhere else, probably out of the state.

Compared with the Malibu couple, most of the residents of the Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods lived in very different surroundings, close to other people and surrounded by plants. I don’t have any information about social capital in these places, but in the wake of the fires, many residents shared stories about how special their communities were and how well they knew their neighbors. Their response to this tragedy will offer an important, fascinating case study. If they address it one individual, or one home, at a time, the ultimate outcome is unlikely to be good. The best approaches will be built on shared information about climate risk and ways to lower those risks. Ideally, residents will come together to deliberate and coordinate to set new local regulations and standards, issue bonds to build more adaptive infrastructure, and good businesses—some exciting, large-scale VC-funded ones, but mostly ones of humble scale—will design, build, and help furnish a resilient community. This may sound like pie in the sky as California state government officials are already promising to rebuild quickly in the same places and “get back to normal” as fast as possible. I am hopeful that before long, members of every community will start realizing that they can either wait for their local version of the fire or the flood or the drought or the dangerous heat or the viruses and pests to discover how unprepared they are, or they can start adapting their communities to the risks that are already here and prepare for the ones that are coming.

Financial, physical, and social capital

When we started Probable Futures, we were confident that people would eventually figure out they needed two things: 

  1. Well-resourced, well-written, well-designed explanations of how our planet’s climate works and how it is changing
  2. Maps that show past, present, and probable future climate patterns at the community level everywhere in the world so they could gather their communities to talk about what to do

If making this a business had been the best way to create a good future, we would have done it, but I was sure that moats would be awfully hard to dig, the potential TAMs would be small, and even if we could microtarget (which several other climate risk startups believe they can do), actual resilience could only be achieved not by creating competition between people but by encouraging cooperation. So instead of monetizing climate secrets, we chose to make climate data accessible and give it away to help communities start their own conversations. More and more people are coming our way, and we are eager to help them. 

Our next phase of work is about climate adaptation, and by the end of this year, we hope to be able to offer any community helpful resources to make their discussions and deliberations more fruitful and participatory. Every interaction we’ve had with a community so far has shown us, however, that adaptation will go better in places where people go to city hall meetings, participate in the PTA or the Boys and Girls Club or the bowling league, and share information, either in local newspapers or something similar. Climate adaptation requires renewed investment in social capital. Some of that (like starting a new local news outlet) will require some financial capital, but much of it simply requires being more social—and likely having more fun.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her recent book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, “all thriving is mutual.” This may sound airy and abstract, but Kimmerer tells a grounded tale of berries going from bush to bucket to pies to neighbors to potlucks to picnics and parties.

I don’t want to be too negative about the internet. It’s not only a great way to learn how to make a pie but also to find other people in your area and to coordinate—and there are benefits to digital surveillance. Netflix’s algorithm sensed that I might be interested in a new documentary about Robert Putnam’s work called Join or Die. Watching it reminded me that the best thing about modern civilization is that it is full of technologies we no longer think of as such. Technology is merely the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals in a reproducible way. Bike groups, Oddfellows societies, choruses, bowling teams, advocacy groups, and religious charities all qualify. You can also start or join a regular card game, a trivia team, a knitting club, or a Dungeons and Dragons group so you can be a hero on a regular basis. Throw a potluck dinner, a seance, or a scavenger hunt. Or participate in one of our oldest technologies: the town meeting.

In the Northern Hemisphere, winter is giving way to spring, while in the Southern Hemisphere, autumn is taking over after summer’s turn. These are good seasons to get out and do something together. Like me, you’re unlikely to change your life all at once, but I strongly recommend going outside, walking around your neighborhood, and calling friends and family on your phone like those chatty Italians. Together you’ll come up with something fun and worthwhile to do.

Thank you for reading, and happy equinox.

Onward,

Spencer

Endnotes:

1 Why Software Is Eating the World
2 The Walmart Effect
3 The State of Local News: The 2024 Report
4 What the Heck Is Going On With TikTok? Let Us Explain
5 They Built a Home to Fend Off California Wildfires. But Will They Stay?

Books:

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy by Robert Putnam
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Movies:

Join or Die: about Robert Putnam’s research and the broader concept of social capital, directed by Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis
BlackBerry: a fun fictional movie about the founding of the company Research in Motion that created the BlackBerry mobile device that every investor was addicted to in the early 2000s, directed by Matt Johnson