Some 20 years ago I cut my bones in blogging with a simple trick: take a press release for a gadget and rewrite it in snarky terms. The reader is pleased to be swindled of trust and attention because they sense kayfabe and enjoy the act, which in stylized repetition shapes a space for community and storytelling. Even writing about the typeface on the squishy keypad of a fax machine or the user agreement of a VoIP crapgadget might have striking outcomes. Sometimes I go back, just to see who is still there.
When I read stories about Mark Zuckerberg's tech bro glow up, then—alongside ones about Facebook relaxing policies against misinformation to please conservatives or about billionaires such as he moving to the right—I can see a trick or two. From California Ideology to the 2010s media tech backlash and now back again, we perform the roles of thrilled or disgruntled courtiers. But tech is now more than just a business or enthusiast press. It's … everything.
Read, then, Ed Zitron's gloriously acerbic and well-researched polemic about the ongoing journalistic retreat into "being friends with the rockstars," as Lester Bangs put it. It hits home because so many of the current "rockstars" are rich kids, lottery winners and reactionaries—and because so many people are eager to experience the world in their shadows.
There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.
The problem isn't so much how dull they are, but how desperate some are to make them exceptional. Sam Altman's rise to power came, in part, from members of the media propping him up as a genius, with the New Yorker saying that "Altman's great strengths are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems," a needless and impossible-to-prove romanticization of a person done in the name of rationalizing his success. Having watched and listened to hours of Altman talking, I can tell you that he's a pretty bright guy, but also deeply mediocre — one of thousands of different "pretty smart Stanford guys" that you'll find in any bar in the Bay Area.
The New Yorker's article is deeply bizarre, because it chooses to simply assume that people like Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman are, by virtue of being rich, are also smart, and that because they think Sam Altman is smart, he is, indeed, smart. Altman's history is steeped in failure and deceit, yet he knows that all he has to do is say some vague epithet about how superintelligence is "a few thousand days away" to get attention, because the media will not sit and think "hey, is Sam Altman someone that would lie to us?" despite him continually lying about OpenAI's progress toward this very goal.
The other day, when Tesla's bartender robot was shown off, some rich VC fellow on Twitter gloated specifically about it putting humans out of work and ending the need to even interact with them. What he didn't know, of course, is that the robot bartender was secretly remote-controlled by a human. I was tempted to write something snarky, but smarm already won and there's no court here worth holding.
You Can't Make Friends With The Rockstars [wheresyoured.at]
