I only recently realized this, but looking back at my consulting history, I've never actually worked for a leader with zero moral curiosity. Which is actually very surprising because my primary lead-gen is from blog posts that are effectively paeans to amoral sociopathy.
Conversation
True moral vacuum type people are
a) surprisingly rare at the top
b) typically concentrated in finance or very financialized businesses (PE turnaround cos are snakepits)
c) accumulating a huge psyche toll that blows up at some point like a time bomb
1
3
11
I make a distinction between generalized criticism and "defense of the little guy" criticism. The latter is a solid place to put a stake in the ground. Liberal democracies only work if enough people prioritize individual rights and welfare as their moral project.
1
6
It's also an excellent way to tell principled moral curiosity at small scale apart from lazy ressentiment. The defenders of the little guy will go after very specific issues in specific ways. The ressentiment driven ones will punch randomly anywhere they sense an opening.
1
4
Tech companies add a third dimension to the money-curiosity/moral-curiosity design space. There is such a thing as raw tech curiosity, which typically is more fundamental where it exists at all, because it tends to subvert existing moral AND financial notions.
2
8
Elon I think is genuinely in this bucket in a way almost no other highly visible leaders are.
The DNA of any top-level leader is some ordering of curiosities. Elon is tech > money > morality.
1
1
9
Failures happen when you're not smart enough to actually deliver results in your preferred order. If you (costly) signal tech > money > morality, but deliver money > tech > morality, you'll bleed leaderly agency.
1
4
Facebook's existential dilemma is that it costly-signals tech > money > morality, cheap-signals morality > money > tech, but has actually failed to do truly interesting tech in the last decade in proportion with its reputation and costly signals.
Quote Tweet
Interesting rant, though I don’t agree with it. I think Facebook is a Hanlon’s razor company. Those who leave believe it is malicious. Those who stay (like me), believe it is incompetent. In a specific way — the product side isn’t strong enough to resist capture by the ads side. twitter.com/doctorow/statu…
Show this thread
3
8
Replying to
in what way does FB "costly signal tech"?
a few years ago I was interviewing at tech companies and got the impression that FB was *not* the place you go if you love the art of programming
2
1
Replying to
Big tech-focused acquisitions (you don't buy Oculus or a solar plane wifi company if you don't at least intend to be a tech company first, milk-the-ads company second). Also stuff like metaverse vision, exploring custom silicon, building an ML lab...
2
1
And "art of programming" being prioritized is not actually a costly tech signal. More "things worth high-effort programming."
Replying to
so "things worth high-effort programming" means things like "a site with high traffic that actually demands fancy tech to keep it from crashing"?
1
Replying to
That's an example, and taking commensurate bet-the-company risks. This sort of thing for eg. is not something a bank would try to do despite having equally mission critical big tech.
1
2
Show replies

