The Long Arm

On deploys, leverage, and power at distance

By Gareth on 26th Sep, 2025

There is something deeply satisfying about deploying a smart contract or publishing a new website. The cursor blinks. Enter. Deploying... Green check. My intent now exists somewhere I’m not. It will probably be ignored. But it could reach billions of people. That possibility alone lights up some part of my brain.

My friend luke had a naive (but correct) theory when we were young: men like to execute power at a distance. His example was a gun; mine is a deploy. Action here, consequence there. It feels primal because it is.

Trace it back and you hit rivers and fire pits. We’re animals that push agency outward - nets, walls, kilns, granaries. Biologists call it the extended phenotype: a beaver’s dam is part of the beaver. Code is the modern dam. I write symbols in one place; machines in other places keep acting on my behalf while I sleep. My nervous system reads that as: good job, more fitness, do it again.

Here’s the simple way I think about it. Call it leverage, power at distance, written like an engineer:

L = (R × P × A) / C

R: causal radius (who/what it touches). P: persistence (how long it acts without me). A: alignment (does the world do what I meant). C: cost (my effort and the adopter’s friction). Open networks blow up R and P, deterministic code and audits improve A, and software pushes C toward zero. When L jumps, the nervous system registers the gain and reinforces the behavior.

There’s a social element too. A public deploy is a costly signal: I accept irreversibility and scrutiny. People aren’t tracking likes; we’re running a prestige heuristic - who should I learn from, who coordinates cleanly? Shipping something others can inspect and attack is scary, so competence gets inferred. Historically that bought allies and resources; it still does. Open artifacts also plug you into reciprocity loops. Someone uses my thing, I fix their bug, they improve my docs, and a small coalition forms around an object in the world instead of a meeting on the calendar.

Commitment is where the power sharpens. A website persuades; a smart contract commits. Credible commitments change payoffs for everyone else, so people begin to coordinate around them. "It’s on mainnet" isn’t bragging; it’s a promise that my future mood isn’t a dependency. Coalitions with hard edges outcompete soft promises, and our brains track that.

Ethereum turns the dials further. Credible neutrality and immutability extend persistence and alignment. Composability expands radius, clean interfaces let strangers plug in without asking me anything. Public ledgers give honest feedback, use is visible, fraud is legible. The actuator upgrades, too: not just messages, but money and rights. The first time an address I don’t recognize routes value through a function I wrote, I feel my hands busy in rooms I’ve never entered.

None of this is new. We’ve been lengthening the arm forever. A spear is a thrown promise. Fire is stored heat on tap. Writing lets a dead person argue with the living. Money lets trust travel farther than reputation can. Telegraphs and radios shrink space; packet switching shrinks it again. Software adds precision and copyability; blockchains add enforcement with no single throat to choke. Each step multiplies radius, persistence, or alignment while shaving cost. The deploy high is just the beaver adding another stick to the dam and being happy with his work for the day.

There’s a quieter human frame: autonomy, competence, relatedness. A deploy compresses all three, no gatekeeper; my logic runs; other people interact with it. That’s why building feels like play. It’s also why it can feel like meaning. An address, a commit, a bytecode hash, time‑stamped signatures. If you squint, that’s a clean form of legacy for a dev: something keeps happening because you meant it to.

So yes, Luke’s theory is blunt, but the core is right. We like affecting at greater and greater distances. Modern networks make that reach ridiculous. A smart contract is a spell with a gas fee; a website is a public charm; an interface is a handshake you can’t fumble. I press the button and somewhere I’m not, a machine makes room for a new rule. Most people will ignore it. Some will build on it. A few will try to break it. Perfect. The thrill isn’t applause; it’s the quiet knowledge that a path bent a millimetre to accommodate something I meant.

If wizards had incantations, we have imports. If they had wands, we have APIs. Technology is the long project of lengthening the arm, steadying the hand, and sharpening the fingertip. Deploy, and, for a moment, you feel exactly what that project is for.