Demiurgical Businesses Ribbonfarm Studio

In today’s episode of the Breaking Smart podcast, I want to discuss a concept I call demiurgical businesses that I think goes beyond the 3 kinds you may be familiar with: lifestyle, customer-driven, and product-driven.
1/ In the discourse around tech, both on the tech side and the techlash side, you’ll often hear the term “real problems” which should make you wonder what “unreal” problems are.
2/ When the term is used, it’s usually used by socially conscious people, whether builders or critics, who use “real problems” as the notional antithesis of whatever is behind what they see as bad, misplaced entrepreneurial priorities. Today it is NFTs, ten years ago it was apps.
3/ The term “real problem” is misleading because even though people who use the term will offer some cliched examples like climate tech or world hunger, the point of the term is to point at the thing being criticized, not the thing being aspired to.
4/ But if you take real and unreal seriously, you actually get an actually interesting train of thought. Usually, the thing being criticized is an example of a thing that doesn’t seem to solve any problem, whether real or made up.
5/ If you ask, “what problem does it solve?” about the thing being criticized, you’ll find that the people building it can’t even supply a bad, disingenuous, or morally indefensible answer.
6/ For example, if I answer the question, “what real problem does space exploration solve?” with “it helps discover better cancer drugs through zero-gravity biochemistry experiments,” you know that’s b******t. It is obviously a rationalization. It’s both a bad answer and a disingenuous one. If you claim it is a real answer, you’re either stupid or lying. I discussed the real answer for that a couple of weeks ago.
7/ For a morally indefensible example, let’s say I build luxury yachts with built-in torture chambers. The answer to “what real problem does it solve” would be, “the problem dictators have of partying and torturing their enemies at the same time.” Now that’s a bad and morally indefensible answer, but it is actually a real answer that points to a real problem that a real person has, just not a very pleasant kind of person. I’d want such a yacht if I was an evil dictator.
8/ If you think about it, there is no such thing as an unreal problem. If it can be posed as a problem at all, it’s real. You just may not share the motives or values of the person who wants to solve it.
9/ Or to put it more simply, the idea of a “real problem” is actually an expression of identity. Evangelizing “real problems” is a way to do identity politics by indirect means. The problem you choose reveals who you are, what values you prioritize, and what identity you’re attached to.
10/ An easy way to see this is to notice that “real problems” are actually a generalization of “customer-driven.” A real problem points to a real person who already has that problem — namely a customer. Whether it is hungry children or evil dictators.
11/ It might be quite abstract — for example, the “customer” for climate tech is people who believe in climate change and also believe it’s good to ensure the survival of as many humans and animals as possible, and will vote for politicians who will make policies in favor of that. But it’s still a direct equation between being customer-driven and focusing on “real problems.”
12/ I’ll even go further and say that all identities are in fact customer identities. So identity politics is actually customer politics. The only reason to have a stable identity is if you want to acquire something through it, whether it is through participation in family, community, the market, or politics. So things like race and ideology are customer identities just like preferring vanilla over chocolate ice cream is a customer identity. You buy things through those identities, even if it isn’t with money.
13/ If you’re f