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3.0
Paper Belt on Fire
ByPublisher Description
Written by a successful venture capitalist (and university dropout), this book is part memoir, part guide for the next generation of innovators who seek an alternative to the traditional path in higher education.
“Part adventure tale, part manifesto, Paper Belt on Fire is a battle cry for anyone who ever dreamed of wresting power back from corrupt institutions—or of nailing the truth to the cathedral door.”
—Peter Thiel, author of Zero to One
Paper Belt on Fire is the unlikely account of how two outsiders with no experience in finance—a charter school principal and defrocked philosopher—start a venture capital fund to short the higher education bubble. Against the contempt of the education establishment, they discover, mentor, and back the leading lights in the next generation of dropout innovators and in the end make their investors millions.
Can such a madcap strategy help renew American creativity? Who would do such a thing?
This story is the behind-the-scenes romp of one team that threw educational authorities into a panic. It fuses real-life personal drama with history, science, and philosophy to show how higher education and other institutions must evolve to meet the dire challenges of tomorrow.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesPaper Belt on Fire Reviews
3.0
“Great example of cloaking self interest in faux social impact messaging.
Start with saying, I agree wholeheartedly with parts of this thesis. Couple years ago I got into Columbia, and after a lot of consternation, decided to attend a state school with a full ride instead. School is a performative series of hoops one jumps through, it’s increasingly becoming a bad bargain, and I'd agree most of the criticisms of higher ed in this book are valid.
What I view as the steel man here is “modern education doesn’t adequately serve large portion of the population” I think if you follow Turpin and his model of elite overproduction this seems to be fairly true. Used to be that college produced a small number of people for management jobs, but now we’re producing a lot of people for management jobs, without having that many management jobs, and that’s just driving down overall balance of the system. Combine this with the growing trend that middle tier jobs are disappearing or paying relatively less, and I'm on board with the idea that schools fail us.
But it takes no talent to point out what everyone else is already coming around to agreeing. And releasing a book now that points to the failings of modern education is just about as risky and bold as saying “modern politics is really divisive“ in a tweet. And so while I mostly agree with the thesis, I don’t think you get much credit for regurgitating culture war talking points. The modern playbook for books like this is to basically say things that people agree with and then impose your own frame and solutions on to the reader or audience that you’re speaking to. And this author does a terrible job with that. Simultaneously victory lapping while not really making much of a coherent or reasonable argument for their proposed cut to our cultural ailments. It comes across disingenuous and as a cheap surface level solution to what are fairly sprawling problems.
The parts of the argument I think are disingenuous are the comparisons to very extreme outcomes as a template for how we should treat people generally. It’s a bait and switch of the most basic variety. The author points at Shakespeare, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as examples of people who dropped out of college or didn’t have college and went to those successful lives. I hope the average reader has enough critical thinking to realize that throwing Shakespeare in that equation is kind of ridiculous. Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t go to an ivy league school either, that doesn’t mean shit. And when we look at Bill and Mark, they had successful businesses and extreme long tail outcomes. Mark had traction and a product before he dropped out of Harvard and they both are a .000001% outcome. There are thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of people who have tried to imitate that path without the same results. So to reframe the authors contention, it they're saying something closer to “people should take an outsized amount of risk for their future because we, those who might invest in your outsized outcomes, think so" also known as "You should take the risk and we both will share the reward."
And most of this book reads very similarly to that. The author comes from a place of security, wealth and privilege despite his blue collar bonafides of: arguing with Bill Gates at a dinner one time, and raising millions of dollars for his investment fund. Real “man of the people” shit there, bro. There is a pathological need to brand himself as "outsiders" throughout the book, using themes and language of Martin Luther rebelling against the church, which rings hollow given the context and stories told. The author will describe how they are "the little guy," while raising millions for an investment fund and rubbing shoulders with CEOs and the Davos crowd. I think in this authors head, you have to be an actual Vanderbilt or descendant of JP Morgan to be an elite. I found myself giggling at the lack of self awareness.
Returning to the main issue that I see, is these guys use the language of change and innovation, but it’s cloaked in self interest to the point where actual good can happen and we could improve society, but they’re in conflict with the community because of how they've committed to their self interest. All the while pretending that their opinion is for the redemption of the community.
It’s saying "the system is broken“ but instead of using something like we have for hundreds of years, improving laws or working towards the establishment of better systems for people. Looking at how other countries do education, historical systems of teaching, policy reform. Their answer is that we need more technology to do…. Things. And this has been a popular idea in areas adjacent to technology and technology investors of certain type. People who have more money than a small nation who decide that they should try their hand at social reform. At least the Kennedys were beautiful disasters, these guys are just disasters.
Unfortunately, this idea seems more ridiculous the more that I hear it. The "stagnation of innovation" is a concept that seems tenuous at best and deliberately misleading generally. Scientific revolutions as say Thomas Kuhn talks about, do not happen all at once. True genius is rare. And so bemoaning the fact that we haven’t had some sort of groundbreaking discovery of the last fifty years, while being ignorant of actual scientific discoveries happening, is also just propaganda at this point. It’s the same as the bitcoin people talking about how everything is gonna go to blockchain because…. Things. And even within this book it doesn't hold up, these clowns invest in companies who are somehow the exception to "everything is shit" and THEY seem to do just fine at coming up with translating scientific discoveries into businesses. Since the Thiel bubble seems so enthralled with Gerard, it literally just codes to me as mimesis for fucking money and it colors what seems to be all of their thinking. It's a cheap sales pitch. Im reminded of Upton Sinclair's “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The penultimate example is towards the end of the book, the author begins to wax poetic about "all the challenges the world faces." All his “largest problems in the world” are all tech related. Not war, not famine, starvation or distribution of food. Nope. “Make the compootor faster” is what we get.
“It is essential that we find solutions to the top unsolved problems in the following fields: energy creation, transportation, health, education, computation, freshwater abundance, increasing crop yields for less, cleaning the air, and, lastly, the problem of human flourishing.”
Undoubtedly these things are great. Lets work on them. But its extremely telling that these are all focused on issues that wealthy, tech investors would be concerned with. Theres no awareness of humanitarian crisis, obviously those will be solved as we (checking notes) get better GMO crops. conflict in the Congo naturally goes away if we (reading hold on) just clean the air more, (waving hands frantically) everyone knows this. But really, there’s no accounting for issues that are not US centric. This is so indicative of this worldview, so clearly in their own little bubble, but so confident that their "solutions" solve things for everyone. It's kind of infuriating.
At the end of the day, this was a book with a few interesting personal anecdotes and definitely gives you a level of insight into this guy and how he thinks of himself and his world. But it’s also an intellectual dead end because he’s just talking his book and cherry picked solutions the whole time.”
About Michael Gibson
Michael Gibson is the co-founder of the venture capital fund 1517, which is devoted to backing dropouts and people who never stepped foot on a college campus. Before his academic apostasy, he was working towards a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has written on innovation and technology for MIT’s Technology Review, National Review, the Atlantic, and City Journal.
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