Dave Winer posted an important piece of text yesterday under the title Transcript of AOC’s answer. This is the American politician and congresswoman from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to an interviewer’s question of whether she would run for president in 2028. [Note: Not yet being a US citizen I will refrain from commenting on her politics. Though, provided the federal government is still functioning, 2028 may be the year I actually get to vote! ] It is short and to the point and you should read or listen to the whole thing, but here is the meat of it:
So the elite think: if you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it’s in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms. And we’re gonna — we’ll make an example out of you.
And what’s funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. But my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.
“Positional ambition” is the perfect way to describe much of the American — and indeed the world’s — malaise. Many heads of various institutions, from state to corporate, are there because they imagined themselves at some point sitting in the chair, or being in the room, or having some letters next to their name, without much thought of what they would do once they reached the position except whatever it took to keep it. In fact, I can think of only a single US president in living memory whose ambition wasn’t primarily positional — and he was kicked out after 4 years in a landslide. But of course that is by design: the system is made to produce the exact results that it does (see also: the American business).
So that is an important lesson for any young person, to think in terms of actions not positions. It is a spectrum, sure, and you cannot completely separate what you want to do from what it would take to do it and how to get there, but you shouldn’t dream about having a rock star lifestyle unless you also want to make music. And if we dialed down our collective positional ambition I suspect there wouldn’t be as many aspiring influencers around, most “influencers” being all about the position and without even a pretense of substance.