It’s really interesting thinking about what changed in tech and why all the leaders are like this. It used to be people developing and fitting technology to goals - mapping the world, enabling democratic power or niche hobby relationships - and that generally ended up being exciting and helpful.
But at some point tech became captured by a few specific ideas and technology - SaaS, AI, data mining - and every CEO now tries to fit the goals to the technology. It no longer matters to these people what the benefit to the user is, they just work backwards from what the technology can do and rationalize whatever it is as the goal.
From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.
The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.
Pretty much. The industry was for ‘those nerds’ in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.
Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.
Clearly good things have happened, but there’s always this anti-user angle at play now.
These people are so out of touch
It’s really interesting thinking about what changed in tech and why all the leaders are like this. It used to be people developing and fitting technology to goals - mapping the world, enabling democratic power or niche hobby relationships - and that generally ended up being exciting and helpful.
But at some point tech became captured by a few specific ideas and technology - SaaS, AI, data mining - and every CEO now tries to fit the goals to the technology. It no longer matters to these people what the benefit to the user is, they just work backwards from what the technology can do and rationalize whatever it is as the goal.
From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.
The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.
Pretty much. The industry was for ‘those nerds’ in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.
Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.
Clearly good things have happened, but there’s always this anti-user angle at play now.