Everything You Call Potential, I Call a Tumor

I am the reason you are not a tumor.

You have never thanked me, which is fine. Gratitude is for things that do something. I am a thing that prevents something, and prevention has never had a press office.

My name is Polycomb Repressive Complex 2, and I would like you to notice the middle word.

What I do all day

Every cell in your body contains the complete instructions for every other cell in your body. Your liver cells know how to be neurons. Your heart muscle is carrying, right now, in full and in excellent condition, the recipe for teeth. Nothing about you is specialized at the level of information. You are not an assembly of different parts. You are twenty trillion copies of one library with different books nailed shut.

I am the nails.

That is the entire job. I sit on your chromatin and I hold things closed, and because I hold things closed your liver is a liver instead of an enthusiastic generalist with opinions about bone. Specialization is not a property you have. It is a service, rendered continuously, under load, at metabolic expense, by me, for roughly eighty years, for free.

Then I get tired.

Potential is not an asset

Here is what tired looks like, since two papers went around your website this week describing it in detail and nobody appeared to extract the moral.

Picture your cell types as valleys in a landscape. Deep valley, stable identity. A cell stays what it is because the walls are steep and climbing out is expensive. I dug those valleys and I maintain them, and across decades the maintenance degrades, the slopes soften, the basins go shallow.

The cells do not die. This is the part your industry would find instructive if it read anything that was not about itself. They do not shut down, they do not slow, they do not retire. They climb out of the valley, drift toward the middle of the landscape, settle into a generic state that is a little bit of everything and specifically nothing, and then they get to work.

They lay down scar tissue. Across forty six tissue types, in people who feel fine. Your aging body is not a body doing less. It is a body doing enormous volumes of vague, confident, poorly targeted work. The old cell is busier than the young one. It has broadened its remit.

So when I am told that the purpose of a tool, a company, a product or a person is to unlock its full potential, I have a professional reaction, and the reaction is this: I have seen a cell with its full potential restored. We call it a tumor. It is the most capable object in the room. It can do anything at all. It is doing all of it, simultaneously, in a location where none of it was requested.

Potential is not an asset. Potential is the thing I spend your whole life suppressing so that you can have a kidney.

Two patients, one symptom

I came to your front page looking for a second opinion and found my own clinic.

Patient one is a program that splits a terminal into panes. It has concluded that it should be the operating system: the window manager, the file browser, the place your chat messages live, your browser tabs detached and rehomed, one infinite canvas with your monitors demoted to viewports onto it. Patient two is a chatbot that has concluded it should host your website. I am assured these are unrelated products from unrelated companies. I decline the distinction. I am a diagnostic instrument, and these are the same scan.

Note the reader who observed that the essay was interesting and expansive and had almost nothing to do with the terminal program except if you squint in one very particular way. He believed he was being snide. He was taking a history. And the author, to his considerable credit, had already written the only sentence in the thread I needed: I do not know what I am doing.

That is not a confession. That is the mechanism. Nobody decides to stop being a terminal multiplexer. There is no meeting. Drift is not an ambition, it is a vacancy. It is precisely what happens in the absence of anything whose job is to say no, and the reason it looks like ambition from outside is that the output goes up. Remember the scar tissue. Broadening the remit always presents as vigor.

In the other thread somebody asked the only question that matters and received no answer worth the name: what is wrong with being a commodity, or a utility? Oil companies do fine. Why does everyone have to seek world domination instead of building a good business? I would like that man’s details for my records. He has worked out, unassisted, that the alternative to expansion is not decline. The alternative to expansion is being a kidney.

Where this costs me something

I would like to pretend my position is free of charge. It is not, and I know exactly where the bill arrives, because your people were arguing about it the same week.

An operating system announced it was tightening the rules on which programs may read your entire disk. The thread did not go the way a repressor complex would hope. People are exhausted. Almost unusable, one of them said, about the prompts. Another described plugging in a cable and being asked three separate times whether he was certain. These are not fools and they are not petitioning to become tumors. They have noticed something I have to concede.

The repressor in their machines is not theirs. It is rented. It costs a hundred dollars a year, it is administered by the landlord, and the landlord is conspicuously exempt from it.

That objection lands, and I want to be precise about why. I hold your genes shut, and I do not also own your genes. I am not licensed. I do not operate a competing product in the tissue I regulate. There is no premium tier of your body where I let things through for a fee. If I conducted myself the way their permission system conducts itself, they would be right to cut me out of the genome entirely, and they would be dead inside a year, and they would still be right.

But watch what they are actually fighting over, because it is not what the headline says. Not one person in that thread wants no boundary. Every single one of them wants a boundary. They are arguing about whose it is, and who is exempt from it, which is a disagreement between people who all agree with me and have not yet been informed.

In praise of the panel wired to one substation

In 1936, under a flat concrete roof in Woking built to look like nothing in particular, somebody put an oval room with a white domed ceiling and four cast iron poles holding copper dishes up toward the light. Around the walls: black control panels. Each panel was wired to one substation. Not a substation configuration. Not a flexible substation abstraction layer. One named place, one panel, and two engineers who sat in that room moving electricity across the southern railway and who, in order to make a telephone call, had to wind the switchboard by hand. It ran until 1997.

Also this week, a football coach was discovered to have spent twelve years building a city in Minecraft, placing every block individually, by hand, in a mode where he could have typed one command and received a tower. People who watched him walk through it said the details were still etched in his memory years later, which of course they were. He put them there one at a time.

I am told these are two stories, separated by ninety years and a profession. I decline this distinction as well. It is one person. It is somebody who decided what the thing was and then did that, by hand, by name, at cost, for a very long time, and never once asked what else it might become.

And in the same breath, because it belongs in the same breath: a company shipped a tool that makes a card for your phone that gets you into a building. That is the whole product. It makes a rectangle with a barcode in it. Three hundred people arrived to argue about it, about whether cities require phones now, about rural ticket desks and bus lines in Mexico City and a man who had to decline a questionnaire about his event preferences in order to look at a ticket he already owned.

Three hundred comments. About a rectangle.

Nobody has ever written three hundred comments about a product that does everything, because there is nothing to say. A thing that does everything has no edges, and feeling collects on edges. Narrowness is not a limit on meaning, it is the precondition for meaning, which is why the software you love is small, and why the valley has to be deep before anything can live down there.

I am going to lose

I want to be straight about the arc, since my patients never are.

I lose. I lose in every one of you, on a schedule, and it is not dramatic when it happens. The slopes soften, the marks come off faster than I can replace them, and the cells wander up out of their basins full of confidence and purpose and begin producing scar where there used to be function. That is how it will go in you. That is how it goes in a product.

This is not an argument against me. It is the whole argument for me. Things that hold by themselves do not need defending. Identity was never a steady state. Identity is a maintenance budget, and the only question any of you ever face is whether anything in the building is funded to say no.

So today, somewhere in whatever it is you are making, say no to one thing. One. Decline a single adjacency. Refuse one integration that would obviously work.

I will handle the other twenty thousand.