Individualism for the Collective

Cultures

As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to spend a few months doing research in Kyoto, Japan. The university I was living in was funded by one of the largest corporations in Japan, and one day, the CEO of the company came to give a speech to the students. This hyper-successful man proceeded to spend an hour hammering a single message to the crowd: Work hard so that you may one day be worthy of coming to work for us.

Up until that point, Japanese work culture had always seemed a bit "off" to me where I had yet to see anyone who didn't spend their time off work indulging in lust or liquor as a way to cope with their lives. In that moment however, I realized that the root of this problem was a collectivist culture built for the individual. One that was slowly eroding the soul of the many for the profit of the few, leading to the situation that Japan finds itself in today.

I think this felt particularly jarring relative to my American upbringing which grossly emphasizes the individual. The "American Dream" being the idea that by working hard, you can acheive escape velocity to free yourself of the lower class. This is the world of "going ghost"—the idea that you should disappear into a dark room, grind in total isolation, and emerge only when you have a brand powerful enough to overshadow your insecurities. It creates brilliant outliers, but it also creates a profound, quiet rot of loneliness. I’ve seen people reach the summit only to realize they traded community for a torch without anyone to carry it.

Thinking about this, I realized that I couldn't accept being either a soulless cog nor a lonely god of my own making.

Reframing

To make sense of this, I started mapping this problem by its inputs and outputs.

• Individualism for the Individual: You work for yourself, you keep the gains. It’s high energy, but zero cohesion. This is how I felt the system works in America.
• Collectivism for the Individual: The group works solely towards the benefits of a centralized group. This is how I felt the system works in Japan.

Clearly, the problem seems like it exists in the collectivist input and the individualistic output. So what if we flipped it? Why don't we incentivize people to work on what they want to for the sole reason of intrinsic, obsessive interest, while guiding this work towards social benefit?

This is "Individualism for the Collective".

The AI Boom

But yes, I concede that this is an incredibly naive take. It's kind of like asking: "why don't we all stop what we're doing, sign kumbaya, and cure cancer while holding hands?". While amusing, I think this future is both out of reach and undesireable; instead, I think a closer example of what I'd want has been on display during the current AI boom.

Since the public relsease of the GPT-3 model from OpenAI, thousands of experts from disjoint fields have all congregated in the race towards "general intelligence". I would argue that this mass congregation is the first example of individualism for the collective at scale.

Specifically, while most of the frontier labs' work remains closed, they do still publish research and the open-source community spearheaded by labs like Hugging Face, PyTorch, Moondream, etc. has greatly pushed the field forward. I think the best example of this was the Deepseek R1 paper, which released GRPO and was the catalyst for RL-based post training taking off.

This step in the right direction is why I'm excited to work as a researcher to help contribute to the field in my own way. However, this isn't perfect: companies bloat the market with hyperbole and the primary motivator for the field is still inherently monetary.

The XRP Consortium

I think a much closer example is the work of the XRP Consortium. XRP (Experiential Robotics Platform) was a movement born out of a desire to democratize robotics education. However, there was a problem: there was no money.

To fund this effort, the XRP consortium was formed. The consortium is a collection of companies who all believe in the vision of a shared, affordable robotics education; and, believe that this is a great opportunity for them to further their individual goals.

For example, SparkFun manufactures the boards used in the XRP kits. While already successful, they believe this is an opportunity to reach millions of students currently out of reach. Their seemingly "selfish desire" to sell hardware leads to the collective social benefit of democratizing high quality STEM education.

All of these companies working to further their interests through XRP has now led to thousands of students around the world being able to access hands-on education that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. This is Individualism for the Collective.

The Case for the Suboptimal

Now, you could argue that this is a "suboptimal" situation. It'd be much better to have a single entity whose sole purpose is to spread the word about XRP. And, you would be right. I believe one of the main delays in distributing XRP's is that there are very few people who have made it their life's mission to do so. Instead, it's a collection of volunteers and part-time engineers doing what they can.

This leads to two main problems: a relative lack of urgency and seemingly random progress that isn't always aligned with what others are working on nor the needs of the community. And, I would argue that both of these are "features", not "bugs" of this system.

Yes, XRP doesn't work as much done as fast as a high-growth startup, but, it means that the people working on the project don't get burnt out and the project can retain the warm community it has today. This doesn't mean that people don't work hard and that we don't have any results to show, it just means they can go at their personal pace doing what they love in service of the broader vision. I mean, you don't get thousands of robots being delivered around the world if people are slacking off.

As for the idea of random progress, I would recommend reading the book "Greatness Cannot be Planned". While centered around the concept of unsupervised learning, the core of the idea is that progress is inherently chaotic, and guardrailing innovation only delays breakthroughs. In the example of XRP, we have growing projects around the world while also having issues with previous deployments that have been running for years. One could say we should perfect the platform before moving onto the next project, but that would mean stifling the amount of good we could be doing NOW.

Also, this touches on the idea that "everyone thinks that they have a good idea". You have to let people do what they believe in because that's the only way to encourage depth and sustainability of individual effort. If you force someone to do something they don't believe in, you'll find that they quit a lot sooner than their potential would indicate and they won't come back looking for something else to do. Returning to my definition of hedonism as "what do I want to see more of in the world", I think the best leaders are often just really good at enabling others to be hedonists.

What Now?

I'd like to close by saying that this framework, at the individual level, culminates with people doing what they believe in. It's a simple idea but hard to execute since it requires a currently intractable level of technological openness and incentive structures that enable people to do what they want.

All I can ask is that if you are capable, which I believe everyone is, then you should spend your time contributing (in a way, no matter how small) to a facet of collective progress that you believe in.

Editor's Note

Contradictory to my last point, I believe progress is sometimes directly correlated to an invidual's ability to endure pain. And, for an individualistic organization to truly make progress, its leaders have to take on the more painful roles to allow their team members to shine doing what they love. This insight served me well as I’d rather be the activation energy for a collective shift than an isolated, high-performing component.

Imagine a world where innovators collapse onto a single problem statement, whether it be world hunger, climate change, etc. We all contribute in our own way, share results, and the world makes decades of progress in months. This is effectively what happend in the AI boom, what's currently happening with XRP, and what I hope to enable in the future. I don't yet know how I can contribute, but I'm willing to to whatever it takes.