(#042) The Inevitability of Playing Offence

Why Aiming to Preserve the Balance is a Dangerous Proposition

⏱️ 5 min read

July 24, 2025, Weirton (West Virginia)

What does the British empire, the Pentagon, and Jensen Huang have in common?

Bear with me through three short anecdotes. I promise it will all make sense.

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1.

Captains, sailors, and sovereign nations have been grappling with the challenge of measuring position over a parallel (longitude) for centuries—millennia, in fact.

Humans figured out relatively early that stars occupy fixed positions in the sky at any given moment on any given day of the year (at least within the limits of human observation). By comparing where those stars should be from a given parallel, navigators could measure their north–south position.

Latitude was solvable.

Longitude was not.

The problem was present and pressing as far back as ancient times. At sea, sailors had no way to know where they were, how long a voyage would take, how to repeat the same route, or how to avoid landfalls on a moonless night. It took thousands of years of ingenuity before a practical solution arrived.

That solution came from John Harrison, a self‑taught English carpenter and clockmaker. In the mid‑18th century, his H4 marine chronometer proved capable of keeping time accurately enough at sea to calculate longitude within half a degree—about 30 nautical miles. Ships could now sail more safely and directly, reducing losses and delays. Britain gained a decisive edge in trade, naval warfare, and empire‑building that lasted more than a century.

Other nations scrambled to catch up. France, Spain, and the Netherlands developed their own solutions within decades, but

it took nearly another century before accuracy in navigation became routine rather than miraculous.

(By the way, if this fascinates you as it fascinated me, Dava Sobel’s Longitude remains one of the most underrated books I ever read.)

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2.

I sent my first email in the summer of 1998.

I was 18, just back from a short study at UCLA and a stay with relatives in North Hollywood. I wrote to thank them for their hospitality. The feeling of being able to communicate nearly instantly and free of charge with someone on the other side of the world—when intercontinental calls were regular material for jokes ending with bankruptcies—was extraordinary.

It was mind‑blowing but not surprising (by then I had just begun studying computer science engineering).

By 1998, the ARPANET—linking UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, and Utah—was already 29 years old. We were on the cusp of the dot‑com bubble. What was still a nerd’s playground would, in the following decade, reshape the livelihoods of billions: retailers in every industry, postal services, banks, phone companies, stockbrokers, travel agents, newspapers, encyclopedias, movie and music stores, secretaries, typists, archivists, classified ads staff, distributors, real estate listing agents, telemarketers, the yellow pages—are either extinct or went through such profound transformations that we forgot how life worked before.

(I remember, in 2004, regularly crossing the border from Shenzhen to Hong Kong to visit HMV, a massive retailer of CDs and DVDs, my only source for music and films at the time. It still feels strange now to think that was a thing.)

Everyone who saw it coming—whether operating in the defence industry (Lockheed Martin integrated Internet-based networking in their products as early as the 90s), data (Google), commerce (Amazon), entertainment (Spotify), social networks (Facebook), capital markets (all the VCs behind those breakthroughs, and the investors on their tail), and Government agencies (NSA), just to mention a few, left everyone else behind by ages and, by and large, have only been growing their advantage.

Today, it’s no longer even funny when someone says they don’t use the Internet (with the sole exception of Christopher Nolan, who, frankly, has earned the right to ignore longitude coordinates too).

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3.

Last year I signed up a major development agency to help bring my new vision—Jam Nation—to life.

After nine months of work, we delivered a product I’m proud of: hundreds of registered users within three months, and growing, and have exciting new features we are developing based on what we have learned with our 1.0 release.

In June last year, it was easy to dismiss the idea of developing such a product on an AI platform: the UX was too complex, integrations with external service providers hard to automate, the core algorithm too customized.

Today, that assumption is worth revisiting.

Fortunately, mine is not a technology business but a technology-enabled business (a brilliant distinction introduced to me by my dear friend K), and my venture’s success depends less on technology choices and more on how well I understood my niche and captured the change my ideal users want in their lives.

Still, in less than a year, many of the people I worked with feel less relevant than they did barely 12 months ago.

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An ordinary person in the mid‑18th century couldn’t have cared less about someone working to measure longitude within half a degree. But when the consequences became obvious, their descendants lived in very different worlds depending on where they were born. Some inherited developed nations; others did not.

Our parents’ generation probably first heard of the Internet in their thirties or forties. By then, many of their jobs were already on the line. (My grandfather worked for SIP, the Italian phone company. His role is gone altogether.) If they were prescient enough, they mentored their kids accordingly—and gave them a far better shot at thriving.

When it comes to AI, a single year is already enough to observe multiple waves of job displacement. Directly, e.g., programming, data-science, AI-agents. And indirectly, paralegal work, general medicine, creative arts, entertainment, etc.

I often see people living by: “This technology isn’t here yet. It won’t arrive for at least a decade. What’s all the fuss about?”

The problem with evolution is that it doesn’t matter whether a new technology affects you today or takes ten years before it knocks on your door.

When it does arrive (and it will) you’ll be a decade behind.

Obsolescence moves incredibly slow. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Because it’s so easy to dismiss or ignore. But when it comes, it’s likely too late to play catch up.

And here’s the cruel twist: shorter cycles don’t make catching up easier.

Shrinking evolutionary cycles mean we are no longer fighting speed, we are fighting acceleration.

I’m not qualified to comment on how to prevent this process from wiping us out. That’s a different debate.

What drives me is the same spirit you’ll find across my work, both as an entrepreneur and a creative: the need for self‑renewal, curiosity, open‑mindedness, the willingness to see more, learn more, change jobs, reinvent old ones, even relocate, or simply

endure the profoundly uncomfortable habit of questioning the status quo.

These are all non‑technological and deeply human qualities. And they have never been more essential.

A restlessly curious mind used to be extravagance.

It is now sustenance.

L.F

(Read this article on Medium)