Looking back, looking forward
WinSocially Newsletter
In this edition, we look back to posts we wrote four years ago, and last week.
Belief as a gateway
These two articles covered familiar themes for us:
SILICON VALLEY COULD be said to be in the business of reality distortion. Fundraising for startups can be as much about narrative as about economic fundamentals. Most venture capital portfolios are filled with companies that will fail because their model is wrong, their product won’t land, their vision of the future won’t pan out. The high dropout rate means that everyone is in search of the one thing that will reach escape velocity. Everyone is looking for an epochal success—a Steve Jobs, a Jeff Bezos. That creates a degree of hunger—even desperation—that can be exploited by someone who arrives with a great story at the right moment.
As a rule, not only is the bad or babyish behaviour of startup billionaires indulged by the people around them, this behaviour becomes, in and of itself, celebrated as somehow intrinsic to their success. The dynamics are, in some ways, an extension of basic laws governing celebrity; once a certain bar is cleared and a momentum gathered, an individual becomes surrounded by sycophants and enablers who normalise behaviour that results in the death or massive loss in value of the company
A consistent topic in our newsletters from 2019, was the idea that at the root of some of the most headline grabbing scandals was a combination of great storytelling pitched to an audience that was desperate to believe.
A bloody tale from Silicon Valley
Theranos & the Fyre Festival [WinSocially: 24 March 2019]
The Fake Socialite Who Scammed New York's Elite [WinSocially: 17 Jun 2019]
Also, noteworthy, given the controversy now over Elon Musk’s management of Twitter, we’ll draw your attention to something else we wrote in 2019:
Bullshit jobs?
In the last newsletter, we wrote about apathy and disillusionment among young people. Later that week, The Economist also covered this [soft paywall], but with data that suggested irrespective of age, “remarkably few people, just about anywhere, are happily engaged with their work.”
We can’t help but wonder if this is related to what the late David Graeber described as the growth in “bullshit jobs”.
He argues that there are millions of people across the world — clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel, and many others — who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, and they know it.
It didn’t have to be this way, Graeber says. Technology has advanced to the point where most of the difficult, labor-intensive jobs can be performed by machines. But instead of freeing ourselves from the suffocating 40-hour workweek, we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations that are professionally unsatisfying and spiritually empty.
A large part of our work involved connecting the dots, and to reiterate, a growth in apathy, disillusionment, and cynicism is something we see as having a corrosive impact through all aspects of society.