Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pan out).

It's basically the same thing that happens to dictators. They become unhinged. Their craziest ideas receive no pushback so they go ahead and implement every whim.

What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.

And they are likely even aware of this dynamic which is why they view everyone in the world as being just in it for the money. So why not do everything in your power to horde more since that's what everyone else you interact with is doing?

A lot of times people create problems and can't take responsibility for their own actions, so they blame externalities. That's what the author was saying about blaming DEI.

It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place.

Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc

Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere.

And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.

I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.

Funny I am known for being a steady, slow and dependable hand in real life but I team up with youngsters to win hackathons, I drive them nuts with my insistence on minimal and viable but my ability to go up on stage and demo something broken and make it look great carries the weekend -- good 'old fashion startup veteran skills.

> "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems."

Who is the author referring to here?

(I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)

The business side's goal is to obtain a monopoly and extract rent. You can see it in google search getting worse so they can show more ads, you can see it in Apple's app store behavior, pretty much all the examples.

The objective is not to provide a good product that people want to buy, except insofar as that drives adoption towards a monopoly

I have sort of come to that believe anti-trust may be the solution to finding more successes and enabling better products

What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them.

One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys.

Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.

Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.

Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.

Their entire life was in an environment where nothing was stable or cohesive or efficient and everything was either "free" or rented. They don't recognize what they're missing or why it might matter.

So as consumers they don't know to care when you build better stuff, and as producers they don't even know what it means to build better stuff. And soon these people will graduate into leadership and management with the same understanding of the world.

Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects from disaster, shoring them up as their sloppy compromises overtake them, but unfortunately it's very possible that it'll be a long while still before a strong and viable demand for "better stuff" returns.

you can build great software, but the bigger challenge is to defeat network effect of preoccupied/monopolized market.

It is getting a little tiring to hear that building software is a superhuman endeavor and that almost nothing new can be built and nothing can be replaced.

If anything, this attitude plays right into what the people criticized in the article want everyone to think. “Just give up, there won’t ever be another Marc Andreesen or Mark Zuckeberg”

There will eventually be new waves that create opportunities for startups again, LLMs are like that in some cases, but I’d argue that mobile phones were by far a larger disruptive innovation than LLMs so far.

Consider how many businesses are built around Excel and either cannot re-create their workflows in LibreOffice Calc/Google Sheets or don't see the value proposition in doing so. You can argue till you're blue in the face that business critical processes shouldn't rely on Excel, and you'd be right, but good luck convincing the people who matter most that they need to change something that still works well enough (especially if they're not privy to the behind-the-scenes work required to integrate other systems with Excel). It's not like Excel is the only thing keeping them hooked on Office.

When it comes to other, less ambitious projects, like email software (not even hosting, just an email client; hosting is its own can of worms), you're competing against companies that either give it away for free or include it in a bundle of other applications businesses really want, like O365. I pay for Shortwave because I loved Inbox by Google that much, but it's a very niche product. I doubt the average person loved Inbox enough to trust a third party with their emails so they can get that experience back, much less pay said third party when the Gmail web interface is good enough for most tasks.

There's a reason we can describe companies like MS as being entrenched: there are no real competitors left. Enshittification works because people aren't inclined to switch without significant upsides. If your selling point is not being actively hostile to your users, why should I believe you will resist doing the same when you IPO or get bought out?

What usually happens next is that 99% of that "better-ness" value then gets clawed back by the creator and monetized, and then users are left with something roughly comparable to the product it was supposed to supplant. E.g. "we're gaining users left and right, how many ads do you think they will tolerate without abandoning us?"

If you’re talking about starting a business, the market has shown that it largely doesn’t care about those things.

Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work.

Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook).

It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in.

(Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google.

As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to.

Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).

Eh, Mark Zuckerberg is 40. Facebook is planting seeds in some pretty ambitious places (VR/AR + AI). To put that into perspective, Elon Musk is 53 now, but he was ~40 when the Falcon 9 first launched for SpaceX and the Model S was released at Tesla. In June 2012, when the S was released, Tesla was worth about 0.7% of what it is now. Elon Musk was certainly rich, but no where close to the wealthiest folks at the time. Similarly, at 40 years old (21 years ago) Jeff Bezos was worth about 100th of what he is now. Rich, but it wasn't clear that Amazon would ever come close to, say, Walmart, in terms of market cap.

Mark Zuckerberg's empire still has plenty of time to grow.

Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.

Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.

Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.

My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.

They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.

Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.

By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.

But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.

You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.

You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.

Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.

Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.

I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.

Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.

But that always happens when times are good. Crazy emerges out of desperation.

This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement

Isn't it such a strange coincidence that you can imagine all of the things that have ever been invented in the past, and none of the things that will be invented in the future?

Are you a robot?

https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication...

Basically he has kept a very low profile.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations

Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck.

There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out.

The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we measure. On an individual, family or community level its almost certainly net bad. However, on a societal level it could be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.

Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.

Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.

But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.

The opening statement makes it sound like it's only the wealthy "tech-bros" that are rubbed the wrong way by DEI.

(in my recollection of it, the wealthy techbros were the first ones on the uptake of the whole DEI swindle. It's just that it's not the direction the wind blows these days)

What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.

Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.

Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.

And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.

It felt like a lazy generic swipe at 'tech bros'.