A “man in the arena” gambit to shield Bold Doers™ from criticism is pure bs unless said arena is a vacuum-gapped spaceship >1 lifetime light-distance from earth, with no physical way to create externalities for the rest of us.
If not, you’re getting critical scrutiny. Deal.
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Civilization as a whole depends on enough people taking risks for the aggregate upside to overwhelm aggregate downside. This does NOT mean any specific individual risk-taker is above any collective response from soft critique to regulatory coercion.
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Society trusts the aggregate process, not arbitrary self-certified claims of a specific individual who declares themselves an Entrepreneur Doer in the Arena.™ A Roosevelt quote is not a get out of jail free card you scribble for yourself on a napkin that all must honor.
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Yes, we all get that it’s a game of privatized gains/socialized losses. We get that there is no innovation without cleanup after. We get that there are inevitably superfund cleanup sites, genocides etc at other end of innovative leaps.
But you’re still accountable for your part.
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This is a key point, except I’d replace “remind” with “gaslight”
It’s not irrelevant. It is just relevant later in the event the “man in the arena” *fails* in a way that hurts others. Then it becomes evidence in an accountability process.
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Replying to @vgr
don’t think ‘man in the arena’ is meant to shield people from criticism so much as to remind them that much of it is irrelevant
it’s far easier to scrutinize than be scrutinized
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The “easier to scrutinize” argument is also suspicious because it conflate the ease of the action with irrelevance of stake. If you have far less power but a lot at stake, and all you can do is scrutinize and criticize, you have every right to, and Arena Man must deal.
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I now want Arena Man Onion headlines.
Arena Man Tearfully Chews Glass in Novel Defense Against Heavy Metal Pollution Lawsuit
Arena Man Apologizes Soulfully to Friendly VC at Davos Panel for Causing Torment Nexus Genocide in Myanmar
Yeah. No.
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2013-15, tech backlash was 90% axe-grinding political grifts, and I felt tech had moral high ground.
Through Great Weirding 2015-21 we were all in quicksand.
Now hard ground is re-emerging, and it’s not clear anyone has moral high ground, but sadly I think tech mostly doesn’t.
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What was once a thoughtful anti-backlash narrative with principled advocacy for tech against shallow, ill-informed criticism has turned into a kind of shrill, besieged paranoia and entitled thin-skinned whining. The defense has degenerated to the level of the critique.
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There’s a whole strawmanning thing going on too. Where all critique is reduced to (say) what one not particularly credible critic like say Taylor Lorenz says. And on the flip side, equally low-credibility supporters are boosted with glowing endorsements.
It’s cartoonish.
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Excellent point. It’s not sufficient to be in the arena. The gods and lords must be seen to be on your side, and you must be the anointed champion.
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Replying to @vgr
There's also a bit of selectivity in who gets arena man status. When Elon first announced the Twitter deal, I saw a lot of arena man takes for him. Which is funny, because at that moment in time, Parag was the man in the arena and the Elon was the heckler.
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There is an episode in the Mahabharata that is literally about this. Karna (the better warrior) is prevented from challenging the prince Arjuna in a jousting arena because he is not of noble birth (though he actually secretly is… the MB plays with this tension a lot)
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This is probably true and could be quantified. The pace was forced by the amount of inbound capital flight seeking to get out of old economy more than by tech’s capacity to usefully absorb it. A $10m idea forced to absorb $100m turns to religion for self-justification.
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Replying to @atduskgreg and @vgr
You can only hype up so many Big New Things (drones? Internet of things? VR? Self-driving cars? Blockchain? VR again? Etc) that fizzle before people get skeptical. Not in your motives. But in your actual ability to do things that actually feel cool and new.
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