Great analysis, and really explains Musk's weird behavior at Trump's rallies: he's chasing that prophetic high again, and it makes him feel Young! (jump!)
By same count, nothing is more terrifying than the idea of Musk in charge of any government office.
A lovely and illuminating analogy. As a vet of 30 years in the SV trenches, I agree with everything you've said here. Its hard for people who didn't live through it to grasp, but in early days what SV produced looked a lot like magic. A personal computer, lookzury! The Internet, a dream made real. A stick of gum that holds 1000 songs, a computer in your pocket. But all that low-hanging hardware fruit (made possible mostly by government funding of R&D in the 50s and 60s) has been long plucked. A lot of hardware pioneers fell by the wayside as hardware became a commodity (mostly thanks to IBM and Microsoft, Intel may be the exception to prove the rule. Most of our tech overlords are software guys who proved more adept at throat-cutting competition (Gates) or investment politics (Andreesen, Theil), where the real money is. I just realized Musk tries to straddle both hardware and software. He's had the classic combo of an eye for opportunity, ruthless determination, a quick but not too deep mind, and a world-spanning ego, but its his incredible insecurity that keeps him from being Steve Jobs, the archtype of SV techlords. He's accidentally accumulated enough capital that he can coast on the fumes for the rest of his life cosplaying a 50's sci-fi engjneer saving the world, but he'll never let go enough to let the grownups build something that lasts.
Seeing you write: "They’d ride their sandworms from the desert through the shield to their own glory and the despair of their enemies, smash everything up, and create a galactic empire of inspiration and awesomeness." I can't help but think that they should have read the later Dune books where the precise conflict you write about is described. :)
Fascinating premise! The mix of business and political roles filled by Musk make the argument quite interesting. Outsiders to government can routinely be confounded. Old, networked systems tend to be guarded by those who rise from the inside. The priestly class carries some weight!
Eventually they become financial organizations with a sideline in religion. One of my hobbies is following the stories of ex-cult members of scientology and Mormonism.
"one of SV’s culture problems right now is that it has a lot of cult leaders who hate the dull routinization of everyday life, and desperately want to return to the age of charisma."
Also they are feeling the effects of aging. Youth = charisma. I am 89 so I know all about the effects of aging.
Codification is necessary for institutions, besides which humans always like to put things inside a "four corners" frame, but a real gift of prophecy is ephemeral. It shakes the trees and moves on. When Jesus said "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" people generally assume he is deprecating the former, but a more reasonable opinion (he is saying, pay the tax) is that both are necessary. Simultaneous, not "non-overlapping" magesteria.
Being a cult leader is neither of these things. No scalable organizational ability despite a grasping desire to get big, and no real contact with the infinite either.
Perfect. I’d only add that narcissistic, charismatic leaders *always* resort to management by fear when they need to get stuff done. It’s just easier than lots of nice quality circles rippling through the system & doing useful - but slow improvement. Ford, Musk, Dalio, Welch (Stalin, Hitler) - all the same. Brilliant, dynamic, capable but all relying on centralised, authoritarian top down control rather than bottom up adaptation.
SV ... a stand in for all these things...subject verb, survival, El Salvador, sievert... oh context, I've lived a fairly computerless life so Silicon Valley didn't automatically spring to mind. So right about the boy king/ sandpit scuffles...there's a side order of eternal life going on too. Lucid to the max, even given these tense times. Thankyou.
Arbitrary shifts in direction = how much ketamine Elon had ingested that day. If the dumpster fire that is now Twitter proves anything it’s that the only reason SpaceX is still functioning is due to Shotwell and company. Elon couldn’t run a bath.
Great analysis, and really explains Musk's weird behavior at Trump's rallies: he's chasing that prophetic high again, and it makes him feel Young! (jump!)
By same count, nothing is more terrifying than the idea of Musk in charge of any government office.
A lovely and illuminating analogy. As a vet of 30 years in the SV trenches, I agree with everything you've said here. Its hard for people who didn't live through it to grasp, but in early days what SV produced looked a lot like magic. A personal computer, lookzury! The Internet, a dream made real. A stick of gum that holds 1000 songs, a computer in your pocket. But all that low-hanging hardware fruit (made possible mostly by government funding of R&D in the 50s and 60s) has been long plucked. A lot of hardware pioneers fell by the wayside as hardware became a commodity (mostly thanks to IBM and Microsoft, Intel may be the exception to prove the rule. Most of our tech overlords are software guys who proved more adept at throat-cutting competition (Gates) or investment politics (Andreesen, Theil), where the real money is. I just realized Musk tries to straddle both hardware and software. He's had the classic combo of an eye for opportunity, ruthless determination, a quick but not too deep mind, and a world-spanning ego, but its his incredible insecurity that keeps him from being Steve Jobs, the archtype of SV techlords. He's accidentally accumulated enough capital that he can coast on the fumes for the rest of his life cosplaying a 50's sci-fi engjneer saving the world, but he'll never let go enough to let the grownups build something that lasts.
Seeing you write: "They’d ride their sandworms from the desert through the shield to their own glory and the despair of their enemies, smash everything up, and create a galactic empire of inspiration and awesomeness." I can't help but think that they should have read the later Dune books where the precise conflict you write about is described. :)
Fascinating premise! The mix of business and political roles filled by Musk make the argument quite interesting. Outsiders to government can routinely be confounded. Old, networked systems tend to be guarded by those who rise from the inside. The priestly class carries some weight!
Yes, see Paul, letters of. Once long ago I wrote about how Stoker's novel was really about how Dracula couldn't scale either.
Yes! All of the New Testament after the gospels is the story of how people dealt with Jesus not coming back
Cults:
Eventually they become financial organizations with a sideline in religion. One of my hobbies is following the stories of ex-cult members of scientology and Mormonism.
"one of SV’s culture problems right now is that it has a lot of cult leaders who hate the dull routinization of everyday life, and desperately want to return to the age of charisma."
Also they are feeling the effects of aging. Youth = charisma. I am 89 so I know all about the effects of aging.
Of course Noah would fetishize someone who fails upwards.
"Inducing others to believe that his arbitrary shifts in policy were the product of inspiration rather than peevish frenzy? Check."
10/10 no notes
Oddly (or perhaps not?) applicable to much of SV
Codification is necessary for institutions, besides which humans always like to put things inside a "four corners" frame, but a real gift of prophecy is ephemeral. It shakes the trees and moves on. When Jesus said "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" people generally assume he is deprecating the former, but a more reasonable opinion (he is saying, pay the tax) is that both are necessary. Simultaneous, not "non-overlapping" magesteria.
Being a cult leader is neither of these things. No scalable organizational ability despite a grasping desire to get big, and no real contact with the infinite either.
Perfect. I’d only add that narcissistic, charismatic leaders *always* resort to management by fear when they need to get stuff done. It’s just easier than lots of nice quality circles rippling through the system & doing useful - but slow improvement. Ford, Musk, Dalio, Welch (Stalin, Hitler) - all the same. Brilliant, dynamic, capable but all relying on centralised, authoritarian top down control rather than bottom up adaptation.
On Dalio, The Fund is a quite remarkable book, which I have been planning to write about ...
Yes, I listened to the author discussing it last week. He sounded genuinely scared of Dalio.
He's definitely read a lot of SF: https://tempo.substack.com/p/thermians
And he definitely needs a Charlie: https://tempo.substack.com/p/in-need-of-some-restraint-founder
SV ... a stand in for all these things...subject verb, survival, El Salvador, sievert... oh context, I've lived a fairly computerless life so Silicon Valley didn't automatically spring to mind. So right about the boy king/ sandpit scuffles...there's a side order of eternal life going on too. Lucid to the max, even given these tense times. Thankyou.
Arbitrary shifts in direction = how much ketamine Elon had ingested that day. If the dumpster fire that is now Twitter proves anything it’s that the only reason SpaceX is still functioning is due to Shotwell and company. Elon couldn’t run a bath.