psychology

They Can’t Stand Humanity

by

(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

by

(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

Video Games: People Care

by

(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)

I’m my previous column I discussed the weird state of “people caring less” from the blog post “The Who Cares Era” and the value of having things be BY people and FOR people. Yeah, it involved AI, but also general issues in our culture.

So I was thinking about areas I saw a lot of care, a lot of involvement. One of them – perhaps the largest I could discuss – is video games.

Video games are things that people experience very hands-on. You guide things, you type, you make choices. You may have involving stories, if not stories that at least keep you moving ahead. There’s music to enthrall you, there’s graphics to show the story, there’s UI design to help you play. Video games are involving as a form of media – in many ways they are an intersection of media.

Getting this right takes work. Yes you can use pre-existing frameworks. Yes you can use premade music. There’s plenty of tools to help you. But that also means so many other people can do it. To make a game people care about you have to make something for someone, you have to at least give enough of a damn to make something people will want and pay for.

That’s because with games you are having a highly interactive experience and one where multiple forms of technology and art come together. Everything has to come together to make the experience work because that is what you are getting – an experience. If you’ve ever played a game that just compelled you, you know what I mean.

I think because of all of these interacting elements, because of the hands-on nature, gaming is one area where you can feel the care. Even if such care is a good job of engineering Space Shooter Knockoff Whatever, you can at least feel that. A game is something you live in with relative ease, and you want to belong there.

I’d also add that games take so much effort to make, to make really good ones, there’s a boundary to not caring. If you just want to grift or something, games are too much work.

So let me close up with a reflection on a few games I enjoyed the last few decades that I felt showed people cared (Most are indie)::

Approaching Infinity: A vision created by one author, a space Roguelike that got “rebuilt” with over a decade of history, released in 2025. A roguelike space adventure with classic graphics that has multiple plots, spaceship management, planets to explore, sci-fi drama to experience, and just about everything you’d imagine in a space adventure. The author cares and you cannot only feel it, but they even have a Discord.

Dungeonmans: A comedy Roguelike fantasy RPG that is also a serious game where you build a Dungeonmans Academy which continues even when characters die, create adventurers, build equipment, and so on. It’s both funny and an actually good game, and one I played in multiple times in Early Access and after release. The author has even updated it since it dropped in 2014.

Our Adventurer’s Guild: A game of, well, managing an Adventurer’s guild. It’s chock full of the things people that like fantasy adventures want – crafting, characters, adventuring, etc. Your growing teams have their own independent personalities, turning the game into a kind of procedural soap opera. It also has plot twists that really hit me in the gut, all with a kind of 80s-90s anime aesthetic. You can feel the care, a game that felt like someone saying “this is what I want and I bet others do to.”

Shadow Hearts (Series): A classic-type JRPG series, but with a kind of horror/macabre mix with humor. You assemble a team of weirdos to fight some evil supernatural force, and there’s all the classic JRPG elements, but with more horrific monsters and interesting twitch-click gameplay. The games all feel like they’re taking chances with their strangeness and weirdness, and it’s clear each one was fun to make. (Also, oddly, the only big name game I mention here).

The Slormancer: An ARPG released in 2025, a humorous game of battling the evil Slormancer (Slorm being a powerful magical substance), but the game is hardcore. You customize characters with complex interacting abilities, you build equipment, and everything interacts. It’s a game where someone had a vision, a vision so good a friend and I both had the game and obsessively swapped tips for weeks – we even won the game on the same day.

Star Traders: Frontiers: A spaceship management game in the Star Traders universe. Open-ended with a plot that repeats each game, you can choose your profession, make alliances, run a starship, and manage a crew where each member has a personality. The creators have done multiple games in this setting, and this one is a compelling space manager game.

Hope this gives you some food for thought. I’d love to hear your thoughts on games, caring – and ones that you enjoyed where you know people cared.

Steven Savage