Cory Doctorow wrote this morning about a short-lived business venture of his from the late 1990s that, during a brainstorming session, invented SEO slop years before either of those two terms became widely known. That train of thought didn’t go anywhere — they weren’t sociopaths — but it made him realize an important life fact:
The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn’t their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.
Apple is another clear example. The book Apple in China opened my eyes to the ruthlessness with which their operations team worked throughout the company’s history. Small wonder then that elevating their Chief Operating Officer to the CEO role would lead company valuation to skyrocket and its culture to decay so much that it got an introverted nerd to write an open letter to the presumptive CEO futurus.
And of course we have the modern-day King of the Sociopaths in Sam Altman. I have decided not to read anything that is longer than 10,000 words this week unless written by Philip K. Dick so I did not delve into The New Yorker account of Altman’s adventures in bullshitting, but John Gruber has helpfully provided some excerpts. Behold a quote from an OpenAI board member:
“He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”
Point number one is on display at any of his interviews. One of the last episodes of Conversations with Tyler I listened to was with Sam Altman and the extent to which he reflexively and without thinking agreed with every possible hypothesis and conjecture Cowen put out was comical. Point number two makes him exceedingly dangerous. That so many luminaries of big tech are willing to hold hands with the man and continue doing business with him is Wittgenstein’s ruler of Silicon Valley sociopathy.
The problem isn’t that sociopaths exist — they always have — but that the casinofication of the American economy has created outsized rewards for those particular personality traits while pushing away people with stronger ties to reality. Once a field attracts a critical mass of sociopaths What should be the collective term for a group of sociopaths? You know, like “a conspiracy of ravens” or “a murmuration of starlings”. Once comes to mind immediately but I will leave figuring out which as an exercise for the reader. the minority rule kicks in. Soon enough, everyone must exhibit sociopath-like behavior just to stay in the game. Like Venkatesh Rao recently wrote: “I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.”
Those who don’t adapt, retreat. Sometimes, if we are lucky, they even write about it. And there we have a paradox, in that the same technology supercharging sociopaths in their quest for bullshittification is enabling more and more people to retreat to a life of quiet content. For now.