One thing that really stands out to me is the dichotomy between a few self ascribed “really great men” determining they are the best tool for the betterment of society and the idea just 60 years ago that the betterment of society comes from lifting everyone up to their best potential through ending poverty and providing access to education. (How convenient a rationale to disinvest from society and convince yourself it’s the best use of your billions to own and control everything instead!)
Noah Smith’s piece was quick to quantify Musk’s “genius” by his 1400 SAT score. How many others of us got 1400 SAT scores, but didn’t have any emerald mine money at our disposal?
I know for me, I went on to be saddled with student debt for decades despite my relative genius, working normal person jobs for normal person wages. Weird how the thing that lets these guys change the world is having the money and connections to buy other people’s ideas and labor to exploit for personal gain. Everyone else’s individual genius and efforts get squandered and cannibalized to give the very few everything.
It's nice to be born at the finish line. Not only did they not have to expend too much energy actually running in the rat race/hamster wheel, but it makes it easier to keep everyone else off the track.
IMO, the rot set in when Disney's Michael Eisner wanted to be paid like a sports star. This set off a competition that kept boosting CEO wages, gaming stock options, and a business press focussed on "leaders" rather than businesses. Somehow all the "success" was due to the leaders, not the employees, and failure was rewarded with golden parachutes rather than ignominious firings. A company became like a cattle drive - heroic cowboys steering the herd through nature's vicissitudes and predatory rustlers and Indians to distant markets to be sold and slaughtered. The spoils were due to the owner.
I don’t think he’s the cause in isolation. It’s pretty much the entire Reaganomics and Jack Welchification of the country that got us here. Executives and shareholders deciding “more money for us!” is the only purpose of their businesses. They’re happy to destroy anything and everything for short term personal financial gain, and blame someone else as they retire with their golden parachutes.
I agree. Eisner was just a trigger that seemed to start the trend. The foundations were laid by the idea that the ONLY purpose of a business to maximize wealth for the shareholders, and damn the fuzzy notion of "stakeholders". While the US had Reaganomics, the UK had Thatcher with her creed of individuals no society. There was the YUPPY trend of self-interest with the revival of the "F**K you, I've got mine" attitude. As corporate managers were "aligned with the business", stock options became one of the main ways to reward top managers, and this led to junk bond financed takeovers that were paid for by asset stripping, workforce reductions, and looting pension funds. Executive rewards were continually rejigged so that awards got larger, but were tailored by captured boards to "heads I win, tails you lose" CEO remuneration. "Neutron Jack" Welch was famous for removing people from businesses, and he also availed himself of a "trophy wife", another executive trend. I think the 1987 movie "Wall Street" caught the mood well with the corporate raider, Gekko's line: "Greed is good!". This mood hasn't gone away, just continued with various excesses for over 30 years. There have been many corporate scandals since, rhyming with those of the "robber baron" era of the late 19th century Gilded Age. What is different now is that the sheer size of individual and corporate wealth has firmly controlled government actions. Existential threats like global heating are never seriously addressed. The wealthy are buying "bunkers". Governments dare not upset their donors by increasing progressive taxes, trying to make them regressive instead with ideas such AS "flat taxes", and even tariffs. I would characterize this whole stage as increased looting of society's wealth for the few who want to be the power behind the throne, and in Musk's case, wanting the throne too.
-- it was illegal for companies to do stock buybacks (it was market manipulation)
-- it was usually illegal to issue stock to their CEOs (it was considered self-dealing)
-- and most companies had "rights" rules which meant all new stock issued must be offered proportionally to existing stockholders?
Reagan removed all the barriers to self-dealing by CEOs (some had been weakened already in the 1970s), and they promptly started looting their own companies. (Forget the shareholders -- they just run the companies as their own piggybanks).
Henry Farrell: This is a very important piece, Silicon Valley, which had been intellectually daring, succumbing to a numbing worship of the Super-Rich, Super-Famous.
Here is a key passage:
"One of my purely personal reasons for resenting DOGE is that it deliberately cannibalized the U.S. Digital Service, which modeled the kind of curious-driven problem oriented engineering approach that once made Silicon Valley into an intellectually attractive place, turning it into a Kafkaesque device to stamp Musk’s incoherent ideology into the flesh of the body politic. As in many other areas, the intellectual diversity has been replaced by monomaniacal ideological fervor."
Very, very good!
As one who reads Franz Kafka, I love your commentary.
Apparently, Silicon Valley "worships" Elon Musk under some sort of "Great Man" idolatry.
But I would prefer reserving that august title for Alexander, Caesar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Charlemagne . . . Mozart, Bach, Franz Josef Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn . . .
Elon Musk is certainly super-rich and super famous, and super Neo-Nazi.
Which makes Silicon Valley's perverse worship of Musk an anomaly, because the James Scott book, "Think like a State," from my limited information, was based upon the Economics of the Austrians -- Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
These two were very anti-Nazi!
Yours is a very important piece, for which I am placing a ribbon, so I will read it again and again. Your piece is so information-rich that it deserves multiple readings.
Back when I was still on Twitter, I had mentioned _Seeing Like a State_ as a cautionary tale of technocracy writ large (both by states and private entities) and that “seeing like a machine learning algorithm” would just be another round of the same high modernism that James Scott was describing. (I had not come across your work with Marion Fourcade on high-tech modernism yet at that time.) One of the replies pointed me to Byrne Hobart’s take, which diagnoses more or less the same issues but still insists that, with ML at scale, it’s somehow different: https://www.thediff.co/archive/big-tech-sees-like-a-state/
thanks for the mention! enjoyed your Bloomberg piece also, the DOGE comparisons are very apt
I do also worry about “how [intellectual culture] will fare in a milieu that depends on a very different political economy of tech” — as I find my legs as a writer here, it seems clear that the intellectual tastemakers are often the people who make a lot of money or can give out a lot of money; most “builder” types aren’t reading for its own sake nor are they incentivized to.
simultaneously, pockets of extreme wealth often do catalyze interesting cultural scenes because of elite patronage as well as political opposition… and I’m hoping that tech folks’ self-interest in “living among & enabling a cool fun vibrant culture” might win out over whatever ROI calculations they’re otherwise doing. possibly naive but a girl can dream!
Well, Musk, Bezos, the Zuck, Gates, et al may or may not fall under the "Great Man" rubric, but at bottom, the drive to "move fast and break things" is no more than a cover for creating monopolies where the broken things once thrived. And once achieving monopoly position in their chosen space, any smaller, more cleaver, more innovative startups get either swallowed or driven out of their respective marketplace by anti-competitive actions. All creativity is subsumed by market consolidation, which in turn has led to the undeniable "enshittification" of consumer life, with the dead hand of monopoly capital imposing its will unchallenged.
However, in the rapidly evolving AI space, the emergence of the Chinese "Deepseek" tool, which has not only "moved fast", but also has apparently "broken things" in the form of the current paradigm of AI expansion: massive compute needs, massive energy inputs, and billions/trillions in investment dollars. So, perhaps there is hope after all, where a "black swan" breakthrough can confound the SV ethos...we shall see.
Sam Altman attempted to slow it all down, seeking regulation with the Biden administration. Is Sam Altman a “great man”? I don’t see why he should be excluded.
Andreessen claims to be fighting for Little Tech against Big Tech, citing the importance of a healthy startup atmosphere. (And there appear to be TONS of startups right now.)
“Great Man” smugness and psychopathy is invoked when the politics are wrong. When they’re not, they’re simply geniuses.
The Great Men Obsession of the Musk/VC-adjacent x-Twitter court constitutes, on its own, self-pandering for financially successful folks in the tech industry that often veers into the realm of the absolutely ridiculous ("It's Time To Build a Thousand Memecoin Shitcos") while ultimately serving to advance demands for power, respect, and the occasional federal bank bailout. However, when considered in the context of the broader ideas of the Court influencers, it's clear that it is just one edge of an ideology that smells of the mindset that Seeing Like a State does indeed explore. In this narrow subculture, where raw technical/business performance is not just valuable but arguably the only virtue worth pursuing and idolizing, the Great Man is simply the edge case in a linear, one-dimensional scale of skill, efficiency, or "cracked"- / "goated"- ness. This one-dimensional scale is then easily correlated with IQ (a connected obsession), which then blends smoothly into the resurgent race science stuff in the right-wing political interface. The time of the "dumb" non-software people in power with dumb, obsolete ideas has passed; it is time for the Smart Man from Tech to guide the NPCs. After all, has software not "eaten the world"? Isn't AI smarter than domain experts? Are not FAANG+ the apex stocks? Then, by application of vulgar economic cliché, financial success proves superior understanding of the world and higher social value contribution. "Just ship" became moral philosophy in the form of "e/acc"; if more tech is all we need, there is then no need to worry about anything but "progress". Anything that doesn't keep Twitter online, such as moderation, is fraud, abuse and waste; anyone that works in the government is inefficient or scamming the taxpayer (otherwise they would work on the private sector). You just have to cut through the complex nonsense of the bureaucracy and start firing people.
As you write, it wasn't always like this, and not even now is this universally true beyond this strand of the Californian ideology. The conceptual threads are there, sure: before the Founder was the Visionary CEO, before the 100x programmer was the genius jerk, and some BDFLs still rule from nordic thrones. But techy peoples did and still do celebrate a much wider range of views, folks, and virtues. The pioneering scientists, the discoverer-inventors of hardware, algorithms and theory are in the big public pantheon, but there are also family shrines dedicated to the person somewhere in the Great Plains maintaining a little Unix utility running in every Linux distro, or the pseudonymous Eastern European kindly helping in mailing lists or forums, or the developer of a widely-used open-source library that facilitates the work of many around the world. The wisest among us remember something that the agentic-pilled Great Men Enjoyers of today, like the Prussian foresters of James C. Scott, have forgotten: that between the roots of large trees and SaaS products rise wild complex ecosystems where even humble weeds and beetles of no renown may be contributing something important to the foundations of the cyber-sphere, or indeed, society at large.
So big big difference, and I think it's worth explaining exactly what this difference is:
The "genius jerks" and BDFLs of the earlier programmer culture were acknowledged the leader and expert of *their own little corner*, not of the entire world. Linus runs Linux, Guido ran Python, they didn't start claming they could do *everything*. I've got my own little corner, for that matter. When RMS started trying to act as expert on everything he got massive pushback.
The current "Great Man"-worshippers think their "Great Man" is expert in everything, which is never, never, never true. There are a few things I'm really good at. And a lot of stuff I suck at. I don't think Elon will ever admit that.
(Of course, these BDFLs face the succession problem, like every leader of any organization, even the smallest. Some have done better at this than others. But the important point was their fundamental humility. The open source ethos is very much "if you don't like the way I'm running my little corner, please make your own and convince everyone to go to it, and you can use my code to do so". This happened twice with what is now LibreOffice. If "everyone do your own thing" isn't viable, we don't try to strongarm everyone into our idiosyncratic vision like the Musk-type authoritarians.)
That's a great point you raise - in open source, the possibility and viability of a fork can provide implicit checks and constraints on the power of the BDFL and the governance of a big project, whereas a founder-CEO in an Imperial Mag 7 company has a more protected position (a "moat" in VC-speak) thanks to network effects in the userbase, an existing codebase and organization, and large amounts of spare capital cushioning his power from even catastrophic misallocation of resources.
If you're suggesting Shaun Tan's *The Lost Thing* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In3d1KM6l3k) alongside Middlemarch as an emblem of a counter-literature of 'incalculably diffuse effects', then that gets a tearful bravo.
The climactic moment in *The Lost Thing* is an interesting model for a resurgent social-democratic humanism. Would love it if you would expand on that ..
Wow, what a great issue of Daedalus (danah boyd, Nathan Schneider) - thank you!
Here's how i encountered Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing:
Ca. 2014, while working on a Finnish prototype for a personal -omics app, i contacted the creators of a Quantified Self app called BodyTrack [1] (then Fluxtream).
The founder was one of the lead engineers for NASA's Mars Rover [2]. She became sick, but for 6 years the doctors found no cause. Applying the scientific method to her own health, she started quantified-self logging, discovered she was allergic to anthocyanins, and cured herself.
This led her to design a personal health monitoring framework. She would screen Shaun Tan's film when she spoke.
She struck me as a forerunner of the collective trauma healing work now underway [3], and of metamodern approaches to science and health.
So your possession of storyboards from The Lost Thing, and use of them for Daedalus and this article, really strikes a chord!
What is astonishing is that they are such poor readers, given how much they talk about the books.
Seeing Like a State is a fantastic book. Still, as you say, it is about the folly of presuming you can radically simplify a complex society to increase legibility and control and understanding why such attempts don't work. It is as strong an indictment of DOGE as there is out there.
It is improbable that the book made it off the shelf for many of them to read, and if they view it as some Austrian School primer, they are missing the mark. Sure, both decry centralized planning, but Scott is an Anarchist (a real, no property anarchist, not a rebranded libertarian), and Hayek et al. are libertarian.
For the record, what the Silicon Valley elite share with Genghis Kahn, Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon: devastating narcissism and unfettered cruelty.
Usually, getting people killed looks bad on your resume, unless you a mob hit man. Is breaking a few eggs to make a techie omelet the new moral high ground? Or is it just Big Brother and his Ministry of Love all the way down?
Was the whole tech industry born in sin? Asking, because our moment has a "morning after" vibe of deep regret.
Nice Piece. All industries have their cycle, and all imaginary havens like Silicon Valley. Has it fallen to hero worship as 'late stage' Silicon valley? The gentile heterogenous genii that coalesce through the intersection of their individual pursuits, that have each mapping the rich waters of Silicon Valley. The short hand of 'now' demands we put the past behind us, with Musk a capstone. What I see is the atomization of ideals that inhabit Silicon Valley, just as media has atomized all the rest of culture. A non-local crowd sorcery will resurrect the ideal, but I fear the integrated system that comes next will be elsewhere.
As with Seeing Like a State, the tech right is also very enamored with James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution as predicting the middle managers being supportive of communism and looking busy (in today's terms the MBA busy bees and the woke) getting in the way of the genius of the founder.
I just read Noah Smith's piece "defending" Musk, and if you read that piece as justification that Musk is very smart, then you've missed the point. At the end of that article is a warning. Everyone can argue how smart Musk or how lucky he was, but that is beside the point. The main point is that he is smart enough and has his hands inside of the government, and he is delusional. I hope people realize that he is not trying to make the government more efficient, and I believe he knows that. What he is actually trying to do is to remake government to serve his self interests. What is not exactly known is what his self interest is, but at minimum lots of people are going to get screwed. At worst, he and Trump shuts down our democracy. Elon Musk may well believe that he should be turning our country into what he wants it to be, not what the rest of us wants it to be. We may now be seeing the end of our democracy.
One thing that really stands out to me is the dichotomy between a few self ascribed “really great men” determining they are the best tool for the betterment of society and the idea just 60 years ago that the betterment of society comes from lifting everyone up to their best potential through ending poverty and providing access to education. (How convenient a rationale to disinvest from society and convince yourself it’s the best use of your billions to own and control everything instead!)
Noah Smith’s piece was quick to quantify Musk’s “genius” by his 1400 SAT score. How many others of us got 1400 SAT scores, but didn’t have any emerald mine money at our disposal?
I know for me, I went on to be saddled with student debt for decades despite my relative genius, working normal person jobs for normal person wages. Weird how the thing that lets these guys change the world is having the money and connections to buy other people’s ideas and labor to exploit for personal gain. Everyone else’s individual genius and efforts get squandered and cannibalized to give the very few everything.
It's nice to be born at the finish line. Not only did they not have to expend too much energy actually running in the rat race/hamster wheel, but it makes it easier to keep everyone else off the track.
IMO, the rot set in when Disney's Michael Eisner wanted to be paid like a sports star. This set off a competition that kept boosting CEO wages, gaming stock options, and a business press focussed on "leaders" rather than businesses. Somehow all the "success" was due to the leaders, not the employees, and failure was rewarded with golden parachutes rather than ignominious firings. A company became like a cattle drive - heroic cowboys steering the herd through nature's vicissitudes and predatory rustlers and Indians to distant markets to be sold and slaughtered. The spoils were due to the owner.
I don’t think he’s the cause in isolation. It’s pretty much the entire Reaganomics and Jack Welchification of the country that got us here. Executives and shareholders deciding “more money for us!” is the only purpose of their businesses. They’re happy to destroy anything and everything for short term personal financial gain, and blame someone else as they retire with their golden parachutes.
I agree. Eisner was just a trigger that seemed to start the trend. The foundations were laid by the idea that the ONLY purpose of a business to maximize wealth for the shareholders, and damn the fuzzy notion of "stakeholders". While the US had Reaganomics, the UK had Thatcher with her creed of individuals no society. There was the YUPPY trend of self-interest with the revival of the "F**K you, I've got mine" attitude. As corporate managers were "aligned with the business", stock options became one of the main ways to reward top managers, and this led to junk bond financed takeovers that were paid for by asset stripping, workforce reductions, and looting pension funds. Executive rewards were continually rejigged so that awards got larger, but were tailored by captured boards to "heads I win, tails you lose" CEO remuneration. "Neutron Jack" Welch was famous for removing people from businesses, and he also availed himself of a "trophy wife", another executive trend. I think the 1987 movie "Wall Street" caught the mood well with the corporate raider, Gekko's line: "Greed is good!". This mood hasn't gone away, just continued with various excesses for over 30 years. There have been many corporate scandals since, rhyming with those of the "robber baron" era of the late 19th century Gilded Age. What is different now is that the sheer size of individual and corporate wealth has firmly controlled government actions. Existential threats like global heating are never seriously addressed. The wealthy are buying "bunkers". Governments dare not upset their donors by increasing progressive taxes, trying to make them regressive instead with ideas such AS "flat taxes", and even tariffs. I would characterize this whole stage as increased looting of society's wealth for the few who want to be the power behind the throne, and in Musk's case, wanting the throne too.
Did you know that prior to the 1970s/1980s:
-- it was illegal for companies to do stock buybacks (it was market manipulation)
-- it was usually illegal to issue stock to their CEOs (it was considered self-dealing)
-- and most companies had "rights" rules which meant all new stock issued must be offered proportionally to existing stockholders?
Reagan removed all the barriers to self-dealing by CEOs (some had been weakened already in the 1970s), and they promptly started looting their own companies. (Forget the shareholders -- they just run the companies as their own piggybanks).
I had a 1580 SAT score. Several of my friends had 1590s and 1600s. It's not like it's *hard*, the test tests specific things which you can prep for.
Musk ain't all that.
Henry Farrell: This is a very important piece, Silicon Valley, which had been intellectually daring, succumbing to a numbing worship of the Super-Rich, Super-Famous.
Here is a key passage:
"One of my purely personal reasons for resenting DOGE is that it deliberately cannibalized the U.S. Digital Service, which modeled the kind of curious-driven problem oriented engineering approach that once made Silicon Valley into an intellectually attractive place, turning it into a Kafkaesque device to stamp Musk’s incoherent ideology into the flesh of the body politic. As in many other areas, the intellectual diversity has been replaced by monomaniacal ideological fervor."
Very, very good!
As one who reads Franz Kafka, I love your commentary.
Apparently, Silicon Valley "worships" Elon Musk under some sort of "Great Man" idolatry.
But I would prefer reserving that august title for Alexander, Caesar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Charlemagne . . . Mozart, Bach, Franz Josef Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn . . .
Elon Musk is certainly super-rich and super famous, and super Neo-Nazi.
Which makes Silicon Valley's perverse worship of Musk an anomaly, because the James Scott book, "Think like a State," from my limited information, was based upon the Economics of the Austrians -- Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
These two were very anti-Nazi!
Yours is a very important piece, for which I am placing a ribbon, so I will read it again and again. Your piece is so information-rich that it deserves multiple readings.
There’s a certain age element to this all too. And I think the key image is not Genghis Khan but the Pied Piper. And we all know who the pipers are.
Back when I was still on Twitter, I had mentioned _Seeing Like a State_ as a cautionary tale of technocracy writ large (both by states and private entities) and that “seeing like a machine learning algorithm” would just be another round of the same high modernism that James Scott was describing. (I had not come across your work with Marion Fourcade on high-tech modernism yet at that time.) One of the replies pointed me to Byrne Hobart’s take, which diagnoses more or less the same issues but still insists that, with ML at scale, it’s somehow different: https://www.thediff.co/archive/big-tech-sees-like-a-state/
thanks for the mention! enjoyed your Bloomberg piece also, the DOGE comparisons are very apt
I do also worry about “how [intellectual culture] will fare in a milieu that depends on a very different political economy of tech” — as I find my legs as a writer here, it seems clear that the intellectual tastemakers are often the people who make a lot of money or can give out a lot of money; most “builder” types aren’t reading for its own sake nor are they incentivized to.
simultaneously, pockets of extreme wealth often do catalyze interesting cultural scenes because of elite patronage as well as political opposition… and I’m hoping that tech folks’ self-interest in “living among & enabling a cool fun vibrant culture” might win out over whatever ROI calculations they’re otherwise doing. possibly naive but a girl can dream!
Not mentioned is also the oligarchs devotion to Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.
Well, Musk, Bezos, the Zuck, Gates, et al may or may not fall under the "Great Man" rubric, but at bottom, the drive to "move fast and break things" is no more than a cover for creating monopolies where the broken things once thrived. And once achieving monopoly position in their chosen space, any smaller, more cleaver, more innovative startups get either swallowed or driven out of their respective marketplace by anti-competitive actions. All creativity is subsumed by market consolidation, which in turn has led to the undeniable "enshittification" of consumer life, with the dead hand of monopoly capital imposing its will unchallenged.
However, in the rapidly evolving AI space, the emergence of the Chinese "Deepseek" tool, which has not only "moved fast", but also has apparently "broken things" in the form of the current paradigm of AI expansion: massive compute needs, massive energy inputs, and billions/trillions in investment dollars. So, perhaps there is hope after all, where a "black swan" breakthrough can confound the SV ethos...we shall see.
Sam Altman attempted to slow it all down, seeking regulation with the Biden administration. Is Sam Altman a “great man”? I don’t see why he should be excluded.
Andreessen claims to be fighting for Little Tech against Big Tech, citing the importance of a healthy startup atmosphere. (And there appear to be TONS of startups right now.)
“Great Man” smugness and psychopathy is invoked when the politics are wrong. When they’re not, they’re simply geniuses.
The Great Men Obsession of the Musk/VC-adjacent x-Twitter court constitutes, on its own, self-pandering for financially successful folks in the tech industry that often veers into the realm of the absolutely ridiculous ("It's Time To Build a Thousand Memecoin Shitcos") while ultimately serving to advance demands for power, respect, and the occasional federal bank bailout. However, when considered in the context of the broader ideas of the Court influencers, it's clear that it is just one edge of an ideology that smells of the mindset that Seeing Like a State does indeed explore. In this narrow subculture, where raw technical/business performance is not just valuable but arguably the only virtue worth pursuing and idolizing, the Great Man is simply the edge case in a linear, one-dimensional scale of skill, efficiency, or "cracked"- / "goated"- ness. This one-dimensional scale is then easily correlated with IQ (a connected obsession), which then blends smoothly into the resurgent race science stuff in the right-wing political interface. The time of the "dumb" non-software people in power with dumb, obsolete ideas has passed; it is time for the Smart Man from Tech to guide the NPCs. After all, has software not "eaten the world"? Isn't AI smarter than domain experts? Are not FAANG+ the apex stocks? Then, by application of vulgar economic cliché, financial success proves superior understanding of the world and higher social value contribution. "Just ship" became moral philosophy in the form of "e/acc"; if more tech is all we need, there is then no need to worry about anything but "progress". Anything that doesn't keep Twitter online, such as moderation, is fraud, abuse and waste; anyone that works in the government is inefficient or scamming the taxpayer (otherwise they would work on the private sector). You just have to cut through the complex nonsense of the bureaucracy and start firing people.
As you write, it wasn't always like this, and not even now is this universally true beyond this strand of the Californian ideology. The conceptual threads are there, sure: before the Founder was the Visionary CEO, before the 100x programmer was the genius jerk, and some BDFLs still rule from nordic thrones. But techy peoples did and still do celebrate a much wider range of views, folks, and virtues. The pioneering scientists, the discoverer-inventors of hardware, algorithms and theory are in the big public pantheon, but there are also family shrines dedicated to the person somewhere in the Great Plains maintaining a little Unix utility running in every Linux distro, or the pseudonymous Eastern European kindly helping in mailing lists or forums, or the developer of a widely-used open-source library that facilitates the work of many around the world. The wisest among us remember something that the agentic-pilled Great Men Enjoyers of today, like the Prussian foresters of James C. Scott, have forgotten: that between the roots of large trees and SaaS products rise wild complex ecosystems where even humble weeds and beetles of no renown may be contributing something important to the foundations of the cyber-sphere, or indeed, society at large.
Dev's with morals. Yes, we do exist. Hidden deep in the forests of github and elsewhere. We're not extinct, at least not yet.
So big big difference, and I think it's worth explaining exactly what this difference is:
The "genius jerks" and BDFLs of the earlier programmer culture were acknowledged the leader and expert of *their own little corner*, not of the entire world. Linus runs Linux, Guido ran Python, they didn't start claming they could do *everything*. I've got my own little corner, for that matter. When RMS started trying to act as expert on everything he got massive pushback.
The current "Great Man"-worshippers think their "Great Man" is expert in everything, which is never, never, never true. There are a few things I'm really good at. And a lot of stuff I suck at. I don't think Elon will ever admit that.
(Of course, these BDFLs face the succession problem, like every leader of any organization, even the smallest. Some have done better at this than others. But the important point was their fundamental humility. The open source ethos is very much "if you don't like the way I'm running my little corner, please make your own and convince everyone to go to it, and you can use my code to do so". This happened twice with what is now LibreOffice. If "everyone do your own thing" isn't viable, we don't try to strongarm everyone into our idiosyncratic vision like the Musk-type authoritarians.)
That's a great point you raise - in open source, the possibility and viability of a fork can provide implicit checks and constraints on the power of the BDFL and the governance of a big project, whereas a founder-CEO in an Imperial Mag 7 company has a more protected position (a "moat" in VC-speak) thanks to network effects in the userbase, an existing codebase and organization, and large amounts of spare capital cushioning his power from even catastrophic misallocation of resources.
Exactly 😊
If you're suggesting Shaun Tan's *The Lost Thing* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In3d1KM6l3k) alongside Middlemarch as an emblem of a counter-literature of 'incalculably diffuse effects', then that gets a tearful bravo.
The climactic moment in *The Lost Thing* is an interesting model for a resurgent social-democratic humanism. Would love it if you would expand on that ..
It's a piece that I own - Margaret Levi and I used it for the inside cover image of an issue of Daedalus that we co-edited - https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/daedalus/downloads/Wi23_Daedalus_Creating-a-New-Moral-Political-Economy.pdf . Here is what we said then, which captures why I used it here too (which I think and hope is OK - he has said he is happy with noncommercial uses which this definitely is).
"The images on the inside covers are by the Australian artist Shaun
Tan. They are taken from a storyboard for the Academy Award–winning short flm
The Lost Thing, based on Tan’s book of the same name. Tan says that The Lost Thing
incorporates “ideas about social apathy and dehumanizing economic policies,”
depicting a city where “all value and meaning is so clearly defined, it leaves no room
for alternative ideas and inventiveness.” But those who follow the clues can discover
the door to a place where the things that don’t fit can be found. Tan’s image captures
what we wanted to create with this issue–a first sketch of a political and economic
world that seems morally exhausted, but that has wonderful possibilities for change if
only we lift up our eyes. We’re grateful to Tan for giving us permission to use his art."
Wow, what a great issue of Daedalus (danah boyd, Nathan Schneider) - thank you!
Here's how i encountered Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing:
Ca. 2014, while working on a Finnish prototype for a personal -omics app, i contacted the creators of a Quantified Self app called BodyTrack [1] (then Fluxtream).
The founder was one of the lead engineers for NASA's Mars Rover [2]. She became sick, but for 6 years the doctors found no cause. Applying the scientific method to her own health, she started quantified-self logging, discovered she was allergic to anthocyanins, and cured herself.
This led her to design a personal health monitoring framework. She would screen Shaun Tan's film when she spoke.
She struck me as a forerunner of the collective trauma healing work now underway [3], and of metamodern approaches to science and health.
So your possession of storyboards from The Lost Thing, and use of them for Daedalus and this article, really strikes a chord!
[1] Anne Wright's BodyTrack: http://web.archive.org/web/20111029050151/http://bodytrack.org/
[2] Anne Wright, NASA Robotics
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5898-4282
[3] Collective Trauma Summit
https://thomashuebl.com/collective-trauma-summit-2023-creating-a-global-healing-movement/
What is astonishing is that they are such poor readers, given how much they talk about the books.
Seeing Like a State is a fantastic book. Still, as you say, it is about the folly of presuming you can radically simplify a complex society to increase legibility and control and understanding why such attempts don't work. It is as strong an indictment of DOGE as there is out there.
It is improbable that the book made it off the shelf for many of them to read, and if they view it as some Austrian School primer, they are missing the mark. Sure, both decry centralized planning, but Scott is an Anarchist (a real, no property anarchist, not a rebranded libertarian), and Hayek et al. are libertarian.
For the record, what the Silicon Valley elite share with Genghis Kahn, Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon: devastating narcissism and unfettered cruelty.
To whom did we just give the keys to our Kingdom? Horse, is thy name "Trojan?"
Please consider:
There are some people you just can't do business with, and shouldn't.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1978/12/the-monster-and-the-lamb/662832/
The Whiz Kid, they thought:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/05/31/178263/the-dictatorship-of-data/
Seduced by a dark, strange love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaTR46iU1Do
Rocket guy aimed for the stars, missed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=1s
Usually, getting people killed looks bad on your resume, unless you a mob hit man. Is breaking a few eggs to make a techie omelet the new moral high ground? Or is it just Big Brother and his Ministry of Love all the way down?
Was the whole tech industry born in sin? Asking, because our moment has a "morning after" vibe of deep regret.
Nice Piece. All industries have their cycle, and all imaginary havens like Silicon Valley. Has it fallen to hero worship as 'late stage' Silicon valley? The gentile heterogenous genii that coalesce through the intersection of their individual pursuits, that have each mapping the rich waters of Silicon Valley. The short hand of 'now' demands we put the past behind us, with Musk a capstone. What I see is the atomization of ideals that inhabit Silicon Valley, just as media has atomized all the rest of culture. A non-local crowd sorcery will resurrect the ideal, but I fear the integrated system that comes next will be elsewhere.
One genre that this group of people have read extensively and misunderstood is science fiction: https://tempo.substack.com/p/thermians
Good summary. SF has always been allegory. It's absolutely wild that there are Thermians in real life. Dangerous crazy people.
As with Seeing Like a State, the tech right is also very enamored with James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution as predicting the middle managers being supportive of communism and looking busy (in today's terms the MBA busy bees and the woke) getting in the way of the genius of the founder.
I just read Noah Smith's piece "defending" Musk, and if you read that piece as justification that Musk is very smart, then you've missed the point. At the end of that article is a warning. Everyone can argue how smart Musk or how lucky he was, but that is beside the point. The main point is that he is smart enough and has his hands inside of the government, and he is delusional. I hope people realize that he is not trying to make the government more efficient, and I believe he knows that. What he is actually trying to do is to remake government to serve his self interests. What is not exactly known is what his self interest is, but at minimum lots of people are going to get screwed. At worst, he and Trump shuts down our democracy. Elon Musk may well believe that he should be turning our country into what he wants it to be, not what the rest of us wants it to be. We may now be seeing the end of our democracy.
I always think of Shelley's poem, Ozymandias, with its closing lines:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.