michael-dean-k/

Silicon Valley has cannibalized The Fountainhead and inverted its meaning. They celebrate Roark-like rhetoric—innovation, disruption, individual genius—but then go on to act like Keating: obsessed with markets, perception, appeasement, hype, status, and conformity. To be Roark is to fundamentally not care what the market thinks or wants, which goes directly against the main ethos of “build things people want.”

Roark had an unshakeable ethical core, a vision for the world that the world didn’t want, yet. He was willing to endure hardship, poverty, and hate, but didn’t despair over it; he had patience, faith in his destiny, and saw no other point than to follow his dream even if all signs pointed to it being a dead end. He stuck to his vision long enough for it to manifest in the world, and eventually others saw the transcendent beauty in it (Roark is modeled off of Frank Lloyd Wright). Roark was a force of nature, understood by no one in his life time, but everyone afterward.

In contrast, Keating is a status-chaser that plays social games. He is practical, while Roark is extremely unreasonable.

The point of Fountainhead, to me, is that Roark tolerated pain without suffering for his virtues, making him far more like a Christ-like character than a capitalist. There is no doubt, anxiety, despair, spiraling. He accepts all pain and does what he needs to; it’s the reader that experiences the pain and questions his almost inhuman reactions.

Instead of spending 5 hours per day mad at trending social justice issues (20,000 hours per decade), I want to focus on building an institution for the essay. It’s a sort of illegible, seemingly irrelevant, idiosyncratic thing to do. But if it works, and if it somehow has any affect on how writing is taught in schools, and that improves the critical thinking of a generation, it will have way more influence than if I spent all that time protesting and howling for nothing. This just taps into a core belief of mine that the only way you can possibly help anyone outside of you and your immediate circle is to pick something dear to you and approach it with unreasonable fervor. If someone were to criticize me for ignoring a genocide, I’d say that all you can do is intensely dedicate your life to a single vector for multiple decades in the hope that you can tilt the scale away from next generation’s genocides.

Never respond with anger. Even when people give you snark, you should assume good intent, even if their intentions are ambiguous. Likely, they are confused. And how could they not be confused? They’ve maybe spent 5 minutes with your ideas, and were kind enough to even engage with you, before spending 2 hours to fully get it. So be friendly, be kind, and they’ll respond in kind. I don’t think most people want conflict. If someone is snarky, and then you’re kind, and they’re snarky back, what is it that they’re actually going for? Are they in a spiral?

Behind any technical skills, there are more general skills that enable those technical skills to develop in the first place. For example, underneath any of my writing/editing ability is patience, focus, and endurance. I’m realizing that some people are capped at 3-4 hours of focused work per day, and the norm is to spend something like 4-6 hours on feeds, YouTube, or Netflix. If you’re able to get into 10-12 hour flows each day, and spend considerable time on your projects, you’re compressing a year’s worth of growth into a month.

These kinds of AI paranoia posts are operating in the “anger” phase of AI adoption. They’re easily offended, and default to calling a pattern algorithm a psychopath. Their flaw is (1) they are anthropomorphizing it, and (2) they have expectations for it to perfectly comply to their exact need, without taking responsibility for their articulation.

Getting offended by a chatbot is sort of woke. The better frame is to see AI not as a chatbot or assistant, but as an information puzzle. You need to probe in different ways, reconfigure information, and doubt everything you read. You can’t trust it, you need to be skeptical, and you need patience. Someone who cries over the frequent bullshit and mirroring is simply getting distracted in level 1 of the puzzle.