culture

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

The Rapture for the Disconnected

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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 all my regular readers know, I get obsessed with things, which finds its way into my blog posts. I’d like to share my latest obsession, Ed Zitron’s comments about how terrible leaders in the business world are what he calls Business Idiots.

The Business Idiot is going to sound familiar to a lot of people – and you, my regular readers, are almost certain to have met these people. People who are completely outside of (and unfamiliar with) actual productive work, focused on things like “growth” and “market share” but not doing things, and absolutely out of touch with reality. They may be lauded by the business press for their genius, but what we don’t have any proof they actually know how to do anything. They probably have business majors and have never not been in some kind of management.

They don’t actually do anything, but want to enter the world of vibes and powerpoints and that’s it. They move things around and get press, money, and venture capital. Any actual useful product, anything for community, is at best a side effect.

Business Idiots, worse, are aspirational for people. Their goal is to get away from people doing actual work as soon as possible so you can enter the airy world of management. It’s like some kind of Rapture for the Disconnected.

You’re probably nodding, if only in your head. You’ve dealt with people like this. You might even be trapped in a Business Idiot job and hate it. We’ve all been there.

I got Zitron’s post and am going to be chewing this one over for awhile – and for several blog posts doubtlessly. Beyond bringing it to your attention, I wanted to note the importance of being good at something. That’s a good reminder of why these Business Idiots are dangerous – the contrast.

I work in IT, in medicine and academia, as a Project Manager. Now the best Project Managers are people who’ve done something else before being a Project Manager. You were good at something and you can in turn apply that to managing things. I used to code, still mess around a bit and do websites, as well as my art under a pen name and other project. I get doing something and still do, and thus I can be old and crotchety and complain about web frameworks.

I also work with a variety of doctors, nurses, researchers, and so on who moved into management, leadership, and so forth. Some of them still practice their previous profession, but all of them knew how to do something and the results it had for other people. As I put it to a friend, when you work with someone who has reached into a human torso or handled deadly chemicals, you pay attention to them.

That old joke about people getting overpromoted to management ignores the problem of management that never knew how to do anything. I’ll take the people who have done surgery, written code, or had to ask the safest way to handle acid, thanks. They get results and they get who they work for and what their co-workers are like.

And yes, I’ve dealt with people promoted over the heads. But upon reflection I’d rather deal with the formerly competent who may be so again, who get how things run, than those that never did. It’s also a reminder to value real leaders.

The Business Idiot reminds me of distant royalty – inbred, pampered, only knowing how to lead their lives moving people around like chess pieces. We have, unsurprisingly, re-created royalty, and as royalty does, it’s pretty inbred – only this time it’s mental. Well, for now.

It’s also not just Business. But that’s for later discussions.

I think Zitron’s definition is something that needs to get out there, become part of the lingo. Business Idiots. We have name for the people running huge companies and more that make horrible decisions to the applause of a sycophantic press. Because naming it is the start of addressing it – and if you look at the state of economics and government, we’ve got issues.

Now prepare for more posts on this subject over the next few months. You’ve been warned.

Steven Savage

False Geniuses And Not 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)

My friend Serdar had another banger post “Maybe we need fewer not-idiots.” He discusses many things, from how we keep the worst out of power to our weird worship of so-called geniuses. It’s worth reading on it’s own, but I want to zero in on something – America’s worship of supposed “geniuses” and treating them like divinely-appointed rulers. I find this strange because America also has a strongly anti-intellectual streak that you’d think would make people wary about such “geniuses”

Thing is, the worship of “genius” in America isn’t about intelligence.

Let’s take a look at the “lauded genius” of the last few years. Inevitably a “move fast and break things” person. Iconoclastic yet somehow worshipped by those who are supposedly “conservative.” Also, inevitably, kind of an a-hole. Also, sometimes dumb and clueless and even self-destructive, with an unsurprising side of drug abuse. Also on top of that, why do they have a business major yet talk science and so on?

Those following these supposedly superior humans sound suspiciously like the “cult of the auteur,” where someone is a creative genius, supposedly above us all, and thus not bound by our rules. It’s often been applied to artists and writers, excusing bad or even horrific behavior. “What would we do without them,” is what said cult essentially says, while the truth is such people’s destruction destroys more than it creates – if said creation was even worth it.

Yet this praise of geniuses (and thus auteurs) exists alongside anti-intellectualism. We are in an age where science and education is under attack by people who will them praise ketamine-fueled techbros and their supposedly brilliant ideas. Scientists who raise valid concerns on health or the environment are sidelined, while a business major who spends a family’s inheritance to buy a company is considered our intellectual better. The love of the genius and the hatred of intellectualism seem to go hand in hand.

I think this is obvious when you look how the cult of the “genius” and the cult of the auteur are similar – they praise someone for being an asshole. It’s not about brains, it’s about cruelty

These cultists do not want someone civil or functional, but someone brutal and uncaring. They want something “muscular” in the most insulting way, someone who is about force not thought, someone to hurt the other and rally the us. Saying such people are “geniuses” is a way to provide the veneer of intelligence while valorizing behavior that should land someone in therapy, rehab, or jail – or all three.

Such people see actual intelligence as weak, you know all beholden to facts, understanding, and – horrors – empathy that helps them understand how people work. Those worshiping the faux geniuses don’t want actual knowledge or wisdom, but a regressed-adolescent image of strength. Which is why so many lauded geniuses turn out to be both not that smart but remarkably weak as they are performers first and foremost.

We don’t need these “geniuses.” We need real intelligence of all kinds, from the understanding of math to the understanding of people. We also need the maturity to step outside of the games of the emotionally arrested who want a “genius” to worship.

And that, to go back to my good friend Serdar, is why we need less not-idiots.

Steven Savage