The Glass Island

Hey friends 👋,

Long time, no email! I spent the last two weeks in Italy with my lovely wife celebrating a late honeymoon. It was a super beautiful, relaxing and romantic trip.

While I was in Italy, though, I discovered a few stories I may want to include in the book. One of them in the story of Murano - the glass island.

In late 13th century Venice, the Venetian Great Council was dealing with a literal "hair on fire" problem. The city was in a constant state of burning. Glass had become a big booming industry, and entrepreneurial glass makers were meeting the demand for windows, dinner wear, and lenses inside of their wooden homes and workshops.

Thanks to modern science, today we know that wood and 3,000 degree Fahrenheit furnaces don't mix well. But back then, the glassmakers and members of the Great Council were discovering it first hand.

Fire after fire for nearly a decade ravaged Venice until finally the council, in 1291, declared that all glass production had to happen on the island of Murano, completely separate from the main city. Any member of the glass making trade - including apprentices, shopkeepers, and servants - would be forced to live and work on the island or give up their craft.

This sounds like a harsh punishment until you hear that the Great Council also declared that unmarried glass makers would get to marry the daughters of the aristocracy. Those poor women didn't even burn anyone's house to the ground.

Begrudgingly the glass makers all made their way to Murano, retrofitted fish markets into stone walled "hot shops", and learned how to be neighbors with those that were once their competitors. Early in the Murano experiment, the glassmiths adopted a self-governance structure that helped them codify safety regulations, establish rules for sharing the limited resources and space on the island, and eventually share new techniques with each other. This was one of the first glassmakers guilds.

Over the course of the next century, Murano - or as it would now be called, "Glass Island" - became the epicenter of glass blowing in western Europe. The amount of experimentation, collaboration, and camaraderie formed amongst the artists there was astounding. The techniques the gaffers on the island developed together were instrumental in some of the most famous artistic works of the renaissance. And this rapid development in glass technology likely would not have happened if not for forcing them all to share a common space and share the risk if anything caught on fire.

There is so much I love about the story of Murano. Obviously, I'm a sucker for a story about a rising tide lifting all boats. But I'm also fascinated by how forcing the glass makers to assume the risks to public health and infrastructure quickly caused them to create guidelines for safety that they had not done while they were dispersed throughout Venice.

To me, the Murano experiment shows how we can make sometimes make greater progress in terms of technological development for the public good when we focus less on creating systems where people compete and more on systems that force people to collaborate.

Maybe we should try putting all of the AI tech bros on an island and burning their houses down if they cause any social harm.

Just a thought 😊.