In Douglas Adams’ seminal work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he recounts the tale of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet. In it, the population of the planet Golgafrinchan realized that a full third of the population were useless middle-management and nothing more than a drain on society, so they devised a plan to send them all off into space under the guise of an impending doom they were escaping. It is these TV executives and management consultants that end up being the origin of the human race on earth. Spoiler alert for one of the most popular books of all time I guess.
I think Douglas Adams may have been right, as it is exactly these people that we’ve elevated to the highest rungs of power and influence in the tech industry. As patron saint of the blog Ed Zitron points out several times (his most recent podcast at the time of writing is a brilliant piece, go listen), none of the people at the head of the big tech companies today are actually tech people. They are MBAs and McKinsey graduates, marketing strategists and pitch people, propped up by an army of consultants and fed by algorithmic data designed to predict and manipulate behaviour in order to maximize their monopolies and exploit captive audiences.
The blueprint for this was really Steve Jobs. Certainly in the early days he understood the tech, but that quickly shifted to marketing and “presentation”. The “vibe” became all important, and the mere business of how the actual tech worked was relegated to underlings, who Jobs would bully and intimidate until he got what he wanted. Steve said “it has to do this” and you made it do that, no matter how. And when the tech actually did something new or innovative, it wasn’t the people who actually made it work who got the glory. It was all on Jobs, the glorious visionary handing down Holy edicts from his transcendent brain.
This is all part of a long chain of contempt for labour, going right back to the Luddites (who were not, as they got painted, anti-tech. They were anti-exploitation). When a technology is new or sufficiently complex, the people who know how it works are held in regard or at least compensated well. You take your car to a qualified mechanic. You call an electrician or plumber. But when that tech becomes invisible or thoroughly internalized and simply too unwieldy to comprehend, the people who maintain it are lost. Humans want to mythologize. We want heroes and saviours. And there’s always a few who know how to capitalize on the labour of others to prop themselves up. It is definitely getting Musky in here.
This is why the Gen AI grift has been so embraced by these people. They want the thing that removes the pesky and troublesome minions that actually do the work. They want to have an idea and then that idea just happens. It is the ultimate expression of hubris — that having the idea is the real genius, and how it actually happens is a mere trifle. Their Big Giant Brains are busy with lofty things, they can’t be bothered by the details.
But anyone who actually makes things or has learned a craft or skill knows how laughably inverted this logic is. The idea is the easy part. Actually doing it requires time, patience, and the development of problem solving abilities. It is only through the doing of it that one learns. No other way. And it is exactly this process that the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world cannot and will never understand. They are the opposite of a genius. They lack the ability to learn and grow, they assume they’re smart because they can have an idea. Well Elon, any idiot can think of a thing (and most do). It takes skill and talent to actually do it.
This is why we should always be wary of the narrative of the Single Visionary. It’s never that simple. It takes the collective effort and talent of multitudes of diverse and driven people to bring something worth while to fruition. And it does not move fast and break things. Toddlers do that. It moves slow and fixes things. That’s what adults do.
I’m off to move slow and fix things.
