business idiots

The Unaccountability Man

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So lately for many reasons I’ve been thinking about how supposedly Great Men fail and let us down. We’ve all been disappointed, and as a person working in technology, I’ve had so many supposed luminaries disappoint me. I’ve been contemplating this for awhile, and I found something that helps understand it and makes clear how really bad it is to Hero Worship someone into deciding your life.

(And notice how we always talk Great Men? More on that later . . .)

Now as any regular reader knows, The Unaccountability Machine was a book that changed how I see the world, and I haven’t yet shut up about it. As I continue to not shut up about it, let me sum it up quickly: the book’s thesis ends up being organizations go insane because they follow limited measures as goals (like stock market value). These organizations may persist – they may be quite good at it when they go mad – but their decisions will cause problems.

Those problems, by the way, are sort of the last twenty-thirty years.

Now the idea of some Great Awesome Business Leader is a form of madness no different than deciding stock value is the only thing to pursue. You have decided to focus only on one thing, and that thing is “whatever this dude says.” That is insane it’s just one we allow because some people believe in the Great Super Savior who will save us.

(Also, ever notice how this one Dude also is good for stock prices? Hmmm . . . )

Anyway this problem has a few facets.

First, as cynical as I am about some Great Dude Saving us, let’s say you find an actual Great Dude. Fine, maybe they’re worth following but for how long? They may navigate issues today but not tomorrow after the world changes. They may age out of understanding things or just age. They might drop a bunch of very expensive hallcinogens on some New Age trip and fry their brains. Someone truly awesome isn’t forever and is still only human.

And that’s assuming that the hero-worship, the money, doesn’t go to their head. How many people who actually had at least some good ideas got so insulated from reality they lost any actual skill they had? How would we know when we’re so busy still telling how awesome they are.

Second, there’s what ed Zitron called the Business Idiot. People who know how to play the various stock market and business games but don’t really know anything else. They’re good, perhaps every good at fundraising and upping the stock price and getting venture capital – but that’s all they’re good at. They’v learned how to work the system, and in doing so give an illusion of a deliverable.

Follow those people – who are great at selling themselves – as you have the madness of following a so-called Great Man, but also of following a shyster.

Third, there’s people who fit the Great Man who are similar, fitting what I call The Narrative. Some guy shows up who says the right thing and does the right thing that fits people – and the press’ – narratives and wham they’re rich and famous. You can make a lot of money and get power jut by checking off the right boxes at the right time. This I think explains a lot of people.

This is where the term Great Man reveals the sexism in the discussions. Which tells you how much The Narrative controls our thoughts.

Fourth, of course, the Great Man idea just leads to grifters coming in, lying, and ripping people off. And we keep falling for it.

Looking for some hero to save the day, for someone to be the next Fill In The Blank, is a fools game. That person probably isn’t out there, possibly is coning you, and even if they are out there, they won’t last, they will get out of touch or want to retire or just pass away. It’s madness to rely on one person, no different than running a company just to get the stock price to go up.

Even if you benefit, what you leave in your wake will be harmful.

Steven Savage

They Can’t Stand Humanity

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As is my usual, I’ve got an obsession, and if you follow me you know my latest is about Ed Zitron’s Business Idiots – his explanation for why things are messed up, “leaders” living in abstract bubbles away from reality. Zitron hit on something that summed up things I’d seen elsewhere, that some so-called business leaders end up isolated from reality and some people find that to be a goal Since then, I’ve been chewing this over – like Dan Davies or Ted Giola, Zitron got me thinking.

As I’ve been analyzing the Business Idiot phenomena, it struck me that some Business Idiots actually don’t seem to like people. I won’t be naming names, but you can guess.

I first began thinking about this when I noticed some Business Idiots having a rising anti-diversity mindset. As if acknowledging people’s differences is some kind of assault on their senses and so on. Of course really it’s a mix of political opportunism and a belief in their own superiority (which is easy when you hit the jackpot and spend ten years with yes-men). The thing is humanity is diverse, and the idea that you don’t have to deal with that tells me you just don’t want to deal with people – unless they’re little clones of you.

And clones of you aren’t really people, but the Business Idiot can’t bear to have their world intruded on by anything but the same thing.

This of course also goes into the weird natalism of some Business Idiots. The people who suddenly want a harem and a ton of kids. The people who get real worried about birthrates (at least of some colors of people) yet don’t acknowledge how hard it is to raise a kid in many countries. The people who talk having more kids while forgetting our world is really becoming inhospitable.

Again, wanting a world of people like them (as well as being such Business Idiots that they don’t want to face Climate Change). And they don’t want people, they want copies – something my friend Serdar even speculated on in his book Flight of the Vajra.

But really if you want to get the Business Idiots not liking people, just look at the endless emphasis on AI replacing people. They’re giddy over the idea of getting rid of so many people to replace them with slop, half-baked ideas, and things that “so-called AI can’t do. And yes, insert my usual disclaimer on AI here, but still.

They’re selling us a world with less people – and less people different from them. The Business Idiots don’t like people.

Yet, there’s more. Some Business Idiots get obsessed with life extension and self-perfection, going to ridiculous lengths. Biomonitoring, slamming supplements, dropping ritual hallcuinogens with no instructions, etc. There’s a point where this isn’t so much refining the self (a term I like as it implies a calm approach) but outright attempts to beat the self into a new form.

They don’t even like themselves, these Business Idiots.

Of course it’s no surprise, the Business Idiots, from nepo babies to people who won the VC lottery at the right time then lost their minds, live in a world insulated from humanity. They live in a world of yes-men and confirmation bias, grifters and hangers-on. Past a certain point you have to loose your mind a little bit because you’re outside of reality.

People remind you of reality. Even your aging face reminds you of reality.

So we may laugh at the Business Idiots. But I’m really coming to the conclusion that some of them don’t like us that much and we need to deal with that.

Steven Savage

The Emptiness of Business Idiots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Sorry for the lack of posts. My fiancee got COVID and I took care of her while she isolated, while work was busy, the holiday was happening, etc. So I sort of wasn’t thinking of my columns for awhile. But now I’m back, and it won’t surprise you that I want to discuss my latest mental chew toy, Ed Zitron’s idea of Business Idiots – people who live in the world of vibes, leading while disconnected, having deliberately sought out their disconnected state of power.

Now a strange thing about Business Idiots is that they really do seek a state that is purely performative. If you’ve ever listed to a podcast with some overpromoted idiot with a business degree or a TED talk that is making the audience cringe you know. There are people who have worked their way up the ladder because their only skill is working their way up the ladder.

Ever see a politician good at winning elections and not much else? Wait, don’t answer that, we all have, and we probably voted for one at least once. That’s a Business Idiot.

The thing is these Business Idiots are posing as something they aren’t. Visionaries, geniuses, great leaders. The thing we don’t want to admit – and they don’t want to admit – is that all they are good at is working their way in the system. If there was no “system” they might not be in power, but their sole skill is twiddling the knobs of our culture.

Kind of like people who treat talking to AI as a skillset. Hmmm.

I find it’s hard to actually see this because the business press and hell, the press in general, loves to laud some vapid moron they have access to. They need that access! So they’ll parrot whatever is said to get clicks and sell issues, and the vapid idiot just gets more powerful. However, I recently found a way that helps me understand Business Idiots.

Social Media. Wait, trust me on this, it’s not “old man yells at cloud time.” It may be old man yells at CROWDSTRIKE now and then, but trust me.

I was recently contemplating the utter vapidity of some modern social media stars, which is easy as we have a lot of examples. They’re good at promotion, they’re good at algorithms, they optimize their thumbnail images. They are in short good at marketing, because a lot of social media being about clicks and selling ads, is primarily a marketing machine.

I’m sure you know some teeth-grinding examples. You know the Social Media figures you hate (as opposed to the ones you love that are virtuous and good).

This Social Media manipulation is a skillset. It can get you rich and famous because you’re tweaking a giant social-technical-financial machine. You didn’t build the machine, you don’t work on the machine, but as a user you spend a lot of time figuring out how to work it. So you can reach great heights – and be insulated from reality, and thus a form of Business Idiot.

The thing is on your way up you don’t necessarily get good at anything else. You’re a salesperson and an attention-getter and that’s pretty much it. You may be famous and powerful because our systems love centralization, but you’re not really anyone but the same person podcasting or videocasting about their latest purchase.

Now when I look at these media stars and work backwards it’s a lot easier to see how our social, media, and financial systems can be taken advantage of. You don’t need any skills but hacking a complex system people are used to and that they probably didn’t put a lot of thought in. You don’t have to be anything but a knob-twiddler if you know the right knobs.

And that’s where we get Business Idiots. Worse, people who are quite competent get taught to twiddle the socio-economic knobs, become Business Idiots, and lose whatever they were.

And you know? You can’t run a complex society that way. As, I fear, we are finding out.

Steven Savage