Category: tech

Finding grace in the troll bombing

Everyone is carrying something, especially now, when we’re all exhausted from the past three years of chaos and death, and the first thing the world does when the pandemic shows signs of slowing is to bomb kids in apartment buildings and dither over responses.

We’re all carrying a lot, and even those people who were awfully intent on tearing me down were just responding from fear, and exhaustion, and the scarcity of understanding that the investments everyone told them to make aren’t going to safely carry them into the future, no matter what they do.

If I can’t respond from grace, I shouldn’t respond at all. I do believe in humans, the messy and fragile goodness of us, buried underneath a lifetime of trauma and stress. I do believe that most people are trying to be and do good and that if we’re all kinder to one another it goes a long way towards making this difficult life a bit easier.

How we value failure

When we treat a founder’s failure as a bump in the road on their way to millions and an entrepreneur’s failure as the end of their financial security for the next several decades, something is truly wrong about the way we value failure. Something is truly wrong with the way we value humans who want to build things.

Founders are not entrepreneurs

For me, as a human, as an ethical being trying to hold on to something solid as I age and the world burns down, I have to believe that there’s a balance between naked self-interest and the kind of world that recognizes that resources are finite and we’re all we’ve got.

I just can’t find it in Silicon Valley. When asked to choose between those two missions, unabashed capitalists will always, always choose profit. I can’t reconcile that, or support it functionally, because capitalism without constraints isn’t real.