Analogue Intelligence Meets the Sinners and the Commons
A Harvard professor responded to my essay about Bataille and luxury transgression. His framework reveals the fragility of "analogue intelligence" in watch collecting
A quick note before we start. This post is probably the most ‘academic’ thing I’ve ever posted. It involves motivation theory, open source software research, French philosophy (again), and something called ‘analogue intelligence.’ I promise it all connects to watches eventually. If all this academic stuff isn’t your cup of tea, no hard feelings - I have added a ‘short version’ at the top so you can get the gist of it. Normal service resumes next week. If it is your cup of tea, well, you’re my kind of weirdo.
Short overview
If you’re not sure whether you should read this in full, this is a kind of TL;DR for the whole post and everything which preceded it. A Harvard professor read my essay about why luxury should feel like a sin, and wrote an informal and slightly academic response. His big idea is that watch collectors are driven by three types of motivation - extrinsic (investment, status, signalling), intrinsic (the hunt, the craft, the joy of it), and prosocial (sharing knowledge, mentoring, supporting independents). His research on open source software developers found the same structure, and the communities that thrived were the ones where all three motives coexisted.
My argument in this essay is that the balance between these three is shifting in a bad direction. The 2020-2024 bubble redirected community energy from understanding watches to pricing them. Brands are now optimising for the wealthiest buyers and sidelining the passionate enthusiasts who built the cultural infrastructure around their products. Also, the knowledge base that collectors built over decades is now more fragile than anyone realises, because nobody deliberately built it; it just emerged from people who were obsessed.
We conclude with a concept the professor calls ‘analogue intelligence’ - this is the kind of human knowledge, taste and craft that can’t be reduced to just ‘data.’ The watch community is one of the places where this kind of intelligence gets produced and passed on. If we lose the conditions that make such a thing possible, the watches themselves end up being just… expensive metal.
If any of that sounds interesting, read on! If not, the takeaway is that you should keep sharing what you know, keep helping newcomers, and keep paying attention to the weird details nobody else notices. The commons was built by obsessive people who happened to be generous, so it can be maintained by them too.
Right, let’s begin!
A couple of months ago, I wrote about Bataille, luxury transgression, and the idea that watching your money burn is the whole point of collecting. The thesis, loosely, was that the 2020-2024 speculative bubble sanitised watch collecting by making every purchase feel ‘responsible,’ and that the real pleasure of luxury comes from the irrationality of it all. What is irrational, to be precise, is spending money you probably shouldn’t on an object that does its one job worse than your phone… and then feeling great because you had the freedom to do this irresponsible thing.
Based on a comment from long-time reader Amateur Hour Watches, I labelled these people ‘sinners’ - and I definitely didn’t expect a Harvard Business School professor to pick that up and run with it. Karim Lakhani - and I’ll copy this from his official bio page - “is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in technology management, innovation, digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI).”
This legend published a response which built a framework around the sinner concept. He connected it to his own research on open source software developers, and sketched a general theory of collector motivation - in doing so, he has given us some excellent food for thought.
Below is my attempt to take his framework, stress-test it against what I see in our community, and follow it through to some new conclusions…
Estimated reading time: ~ 25 mins
What Lakhani found
In 2003, Lakhani and his collaborator Bob Wolf surveyed 684 software developers across 287 open source projects to try and answer a question: why do people write code for free?1
The dominant assumption in economics was that they were doing it for career advancement, reputation, or because their employers told them to. We can call these extrinsic motivations.
That turned out to be wrong; well, kinda. They weren’t wrong about extrinsic motivations existing, but they’d underestimated everything else. The single strongest predictor of how much effort a developer put into a project had nothing to do with career signalling or compensation - it was creative flow; the feeling of being so absorbed in a problem that time seems to dissolve.
More than 61% of respondents said their open source project was at least as creative as anything they’d ever done in their lives. 73% reported frequently losing track of time while coding. The second strongest cluster was what they called obligation or community-based motivation which is a type of ‘felt duty’ to give back to ‘a commons’ that had formed you or contributed to making you who you are.
Their conclusion was that the most committed contributors had motivational drivers where intrinsic and prosocial2 motivations coexisted with extrinsic motivations in complicated (and constantly shifting) proportions. In short, no single motivation stood out, and thriving communities were the most diverse in terms of ‘what motivated who.’3
So the obvious question: does the same thing apply to watch collecting communities?
Three registers
Lakhani’s model splits collectors’ motivations into three broad categories - given that the rest of this essay depends on understanding how these interact, I would urge you to read these carefully… I am mostly paraphrasing his definitions, so if you already went through his essay, you can skip these three.
Extrinsic motivations are the ones we tend to talk about the most; investment rationalisation, store of value, wealth signalling, taste signalling, access signalling, and legacy all come to mind here. These are real and legitimate motivations, and they also include something more interesting, which is counter-signalling - I’ll come back to that later.
Intrinsic motivations are where the ‘sinner’ lives (from the previous essay). We can break these down even further… the hunt (episodic, dopaminergic, problem-and-solution structured), curation (the work of building a collection that means something as a whole), and aesthetic and engineering appreciation (the thoughtful engagement with a single object, but in your own head). It is also worth flagging autonomy and identity i.e. the assertion that ‘I choose this’ and ‘this is who I am’ - as these sit somewhere between intrinsic and extrinsic depending on how you think about it. Lakhani writes:
Both of these resist easy categorization. Autonomy may be less a discrete motivation than a psychological register in which other motivations are expressed. Identity sits uncomfortably between intrinsic and extrinsic — the self-image concern that feels internal but may be a form of inwardly directed signaling.
Prosocial motivations are the category that - as Lakhani points out - collecting literature has mostly neglected. Rather than trying to define it, I will list examples because that’s much easier. This category includes stuff like knowledge sharing, patronage of independent makers, mentorship, institution building, and the ‘felt duty’ to leave the hobby better than you found it. There is no ‘clear cut’ definition beyond some kind of broad brush label like ‘somehow doing good, for the greater good’ - which actually works for me.
What I particularly like about this approach is that it doesn’t force you to pick one. A single act of collecting, say, buying a rare independent piece from a maker you’ve followed for years - this can express investment rationalisation, taste signalling, aesthetic appreciation, and also still advocate for ‘patronage’ … all at the same time. The motivations are bundled, and the proportions - the ratio of each motivation - will change depending on your personality, where you are in your collecting journey, and what the market (and your friends) is (are) doing around you.
One of the more interesting findings from Lakhani’s research was that extrinsic and intrinsic motivations didn’t crowd each other out. So in that example, being paid to contribute code didn’t reduce creative enjoyment. The watch equivalent is that you can love a watch and also know it’s a decent store of value - without one feeling undermining the other. The problem during the watch bubble was the extrinsic motivations mostly overrode the intrinsic ones.
By the way, Lakhani’s reframing of my ‘sovereign expenditure’ concept is also much cleaner than I managed. The sinner isn’t irrational at all; they hold a different worldview in which financial returns don’t matter. The obvious test here is to note that when markets tank, the sinners keep buying watches. I mentioned in a comment on his post, that when you see someone buying a new watch knowing they’ll lose a fat proportion of their money via instant depreciation, those are intrinsic and prosocial collectors in action. The extrinsically motivated ones would never do something ‘so dumb.’
Flow states and accidental commons
Lakhani’s finding that creative flow was the strongest predictor of effort in open source projects, maps onto the watch community really well.
Think about collectors who put in the most effort - I specifically don’t mean ‘money’, I mean effort. These are the people who make special trips just to visit an atelier or a manufacture, and they spend their days reading about horological history, technical specs of new movements, or creating collector’s guides as a way to document their scholarship of some obscure vintage genre. These are the people who can tell you about transitional models that nobody’s documented yet, because they spent six months cross-referencing auction catalogues with production records. These people are experiencing something very close to what Csikszentmihalyi described as flow; when skill meets a challenge at the right level, it results in complete absorption, and time just seems to dissolve.
Anyway, like the developers in Lakhani’s study, these folks self-select into challenges that match their skill level. A newer collector might achieve ‘flow’ by learning to distinguish a ‘normal’ Daytona from an error dial variant. A veteran gets it by hunting down rare Patek Amagnetics in Eastern Europe… it’s all the same thing, just with varying levels of difficulty.
What fascinates me is how this effort compounds prosocially without any upfront intention. Even if you find a collector who deep-dives into reference variations for their own satisfaction, this work still ends up producing useful knowledge which the whole community can benefit from. I’ve seen random people online who spend hundreds of hours documenting random things they find interesting… they didn’t set out to build “public resources”, they were just scratching an itch they had. The commons just emerged as a side effect. To be honest, I see SDC this way; if I ever stop writing, I’d probably drop all paywalls and make the whole archive free; so thank you in advance for contributing to the commons. 🤓
I do wonder whether Lakhani’s data showed the same pattern - I would guess the answer is probably yes. Lakhani mentions the Ranfft movement database as perhaps “the purest expression” of a community-maintained resource for watch calibres. It’s a good example, partly because of what it represents and partly because of what’s happened to it; as far as I can tell, this is more of a static archive now than an actively updated project… which kind of proves the point about fragility.
This is important to understand because it speaks to the broader fragility of the commons; it wasn’t “constructed” nor is its existence deliberate. Nobody held a meeting and said “right chaps, let’s build a shared knowledge base for the benefit of future collectors.” It just grew organically from thousands of individual acts of intrinsically motivated effort. This means it can decay just as organically as it came to be, if the conditions that produce those intrinsic motivations happen to change.
What happened to the commons
During the 2020-2024 speculative bubble, the priorities of the commons were redirected from something inherently intrinsic, to something extrinsic. The community was still collaborating, maybe even continuing to produce shared resources, and still exhibiting what Lakhani would call obligation or community-based motivations… but the knowledge being shared was now different.
The focus on history, stories, or other such ‘nerd info’ gave way to price tracking, strategies on how to get allocations, analysis of market premiums, and a whole new wave of grey market ‘dealer-collectors’ popped up all over the place. Community energy that had previously gone into understanding what watches are, got redirected into understanding what watches are worth.
You could easily argue this was still a form of ‘commons maintenance’ in a different commons, and that’s basically true. The people building spreadsheets to track Nautilus premiums across different markets to find arbitrage opportunities were doing something collaborative and useful within their frame of reference. They had their own version of flow; their own version of “skill matching the challenge.”
But of course, this shift had consequences; if the main community activity is price tracking, the people who were contributing the ‘traditional’ knowledge would find themselves talking to an audience that’s no longer listening. Which means, the incentive to produce that kind of content will weaken. Some of these contributors were doing it purely for intrinsic reasons, and they kept going regardless. Others needed at least some community recognition, and when that recognition shifted toward whoever could predict the next hot piece, they kinda fizzled out.4
Before you run off to the comments, please understand that I am not trying to romanticise the ‘old’ pre-bubble knowledge commons. Forum culture had its own pathologies like gatekeeping, status hierarchies based on post count or frequency, and the occasional tyrant (see: Massena5). So yeah, the pre-bubble commons may not have been “pure” but its dominant orientation was, I think, more toward understanding watches as opposed to pricing them - and I think that does matter. I am not saying it was some kind of golden age of pure prosocial motivation.. people were always operating across all three of Lakhani’s registers simultaneously, but post-bubble, the balance shifted.
The question we need to ask today, is whether it has shifted back.