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After decades of covering the nascent Internet industry from its birth, I could believe it. While my actual son filled me with pride, an increasing number of these once fresh-faced wunderkinds I had mostly rooted for now made me feel like a parent whose progeny had turned into, well, assholes.
And while there were exceptions, the richer and more powerful people grew, the more compromised they became—wrapping
When people get really rich, they seem to attract legions of enablers who lick them up and down all day.
All these companies began with a gauzy credo to change the world. And they had indeed done that, but in ways they hadn’t imagined at the start, increasingly with troubling consequences from a flood of misinformation to a society becoming isolated and addicted to its gadgets.
for tech to fulfill its promise, founders and executives who ran their creations needed to put more safety tools in place. They needed to anticipate consequences more. Or at all. They needed to acknowledge that online rage might extend into the real world in increasingly scary ways.
Once, I interviewed for an internship at the Washington Post, and the editor said I was “too confident.” I’ve since come to understand that this is something men say to women to shut them up and undercut them.
I decided that was the best way to go through life—not caring about the consequences of saying or doing what I believed was right.
Walt and I instantly became close, bound by professional kismet and a tech mind meld.
I will admit that I miss his quirky and tetchy personality. He was a jerk but an enjoyable jerk. Now he’s a tiresome and aggrieved jerk, who has joined the grievance industrial complex as a permanent citizen.
I came to realize that rather than lying to me, these entrepreneurs were more often lying to themselves.
I came to realize that many tech titans’ warped self-righteousness fueled them more than money, power, and the growing legions of obsequious enablers on the payroll. It inevitably curdled their souls, creating an arrogance that masked what was a deep self-hatred and anger.
Google was becoming a Borg that would suck in all the world’s information and then spit it out for profit.
Silicon Valley was already littered with look-at-me narcissists, who never met an idea that they did not try to take credit for.
Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. —LEMONY SNICKET
It was impossible for me not to say what I thought, which made me a bad employee.
We also set strict rules to protect our journalistic integrity. We would not pay any speaker or provide for their travel. We would not share questions in advance or pull our punches. We would not apologize for pissing off sponsors or give them any purchase onstage for their money. No one could hide on our stage, including us. As a result, the ATD conference (which later would be renamed Code) quickly became the place to prove your mettle as a tech leader.
Everything is always on its way to something else.
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. —STEVE JOBS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT SPEECH, 2005
Lucas continued to discuss the merger between technology and storytelling in a wide-ranging interview the next day with Walt and me. “Painting, music, any kind of art form is essentially technological. The most important part is to be able to communicate emotions. That is the key to what we do,” Lucas said. “Digital technology is a tool. Whatever you do, it’s going to get abused. Sound was abused, color was abused, everything gets abused. But that’s just the nature of human nature: When you get a new toy, you want to use it until it breaks, and then you start to calm down.”
Unlike the perpetually intriguing Jobs, Zuckerberg had almost no charm or game and it was painful how socially awkward he was then.
engagement equals enragement.
No, Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the worst of them.
I’ve since abandoned any hope of redemption, as idiocy has piled on top of idiocy, none of which has made Twitter a better business or a better product. Now, it was one long cry for help from a clearly troubled man, who had potential to spare. Musk’s initial flaws have taken over, and he’s just curdled into the worst aspects of his personality.
In that spirit, I created a metric, the “Prick to Productivity Ratio” (P2P), that’s neither scientific nor is it particularly fair. But it’s allowed me to quantify my judgments of the powerful people I’ve covered over the years. It gives flawed people—and we are all flawed in some way—a little break.
I have spent my career being hard on powerful people. I have done so because I think it is respectful to do so and because I believe that with great power comes great responsibility.
My upward trajectory was propelled by timing and talent and maybe a small bit of luck. But if I had to choose two reasons for my success, I’d go with: I worked harder than anyone else, and I was good at scenario building, which is a fancy way of saying I’m a good guesser.
Unlike these clowns, I have found that most journalists try their best to do their best.
While I have no particular secret, I approach every interview with these three goals: (1) to make it a conversation, (2) to not be afraid to ask the question everyone is thinking, and (3) to conduct each discussion as if I were never going to interview that person again.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness. —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS
Despite the heartbreak, we must act. And we must do it quickly to push technology toward its potential for positive impact. Digital is everything and everywhere, and like water, without any dams to stop it, it flows. Moreover, increasingly powerful technologies have capabilities far beyond what has come before, as we move to another Cambrian explosion, this time in the tech space around generative artificial intelligence. It has actually been around for a while, more commonly called machine learning, and everyone I interview now who knows what they’re talking about agrees we are at an
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I’m not as afraid of AI as I am fearful of bad people who will use AI better than good people.
If you can imagine your invention in an episode of Black Mirror, then don’t make it…
Life is a series of next things, and you’d do well to be ready for that.
