Silicon Valley’s Sociopathic Saints

Religion may have declined, but our appetite for gurus remains insatiable.

Increasingly, people who need direction and advice have been looking to tech founders and CEOs. They are rich, of course — and most of us want to be rich — and they are thought to be especially insightful on the future.

Now, a tech founder or CEO might have good advice (and not just on fixing your computer). Successful people really can have useful insights on what it takes to succeed. People working on the cutting edge of innovation can have useful insights about the future of society. It would be silly and resentful to deny it.

But I think some people have been making a mistake in seeing tech leaders in quasi-religious terms, not just as interesting people but as an enlightened class. Simultaneously, tech people seem to have been dangerously emboldened by attention. They have started to believe that their every thought is infused with genius.

On the “Modern Wisdom” podcast, for example, Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList and prolific social media mind-blower, says he is above having demands on his time. He doesn’t just mean skipping meetings. (Why be rich if you can’t skip meetings?) He means that he is:

… not expected to go to couples dinners … not expected to go to birthdays … not expected to go to weddings.

Fun! To be fair, before we call Ravikant “Worst Husband of the Year,” he adds that the same applies to his wife. But this sort of Naval-gazing still dresses up borderline sociopathic behavior as spiritual insight. I’m sure all of us have gone to birthday parties or weddings with a slight feeling of resentment, but we still went for the sake of someone else. Try telling a close friend that skipping their wedding was a valuable exercise in “freeing up … time” and you’ll soon find yourself with a lot more time when you might have been seeing friends. And then what’s the point of having time at all?

I’m not sure Mr. Ravikant behaves like this in practice. But his words fit a pattern of tech founders and CEOs framing bizarre antisocial behavior as the key to productivity and efficiency. The more radically monomaniacal and hermetic people are, they seem to think, the more successful they will be.

“I’ve never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20,” says Alex Karp of Palantir when asked for the advice he would give young people. Now, I’m not denying that some ambitions demand a serious level of work-life imbalance. I’m a lowly opinion commentator — hardly someone who’ll be asked for advice from young people — and even I have spent a lot of sleepless nights miserably trying to finish columns. But does anybody think that Karp’s experiences are representative? Does anybody think you have to work on a Friday evening to be successful? Or did a lot of people in tech — like, in fairness, a lot of us outside of tech — not have a great social life at 20 to begin with?

The Twitter account “Chase Passive Income” is a fun satirical insight into the kind of LinkedIn-maddened perspective that this sort of pseudo-wisdom could encourage. “Spoke to 1,000 billionaires to learn how they got rich,” Chase muses:

Here’s the shocking thing

Not a single one of them said they got rich by attending their kid’s little league games

Lesson learned.

Never making that rookie mistake again.

Again, I don’t disagree that achieving something exceptional sometimes takes exceptional behavior. At the very least, it takes very hard work. Stubbornly refusing to work weekends or in the evenings means it is almost impossible that you will win the Super Bowl, found a tech company, or even — sorry, “even” — become a doctor.

But this kind of extremism is unhelpful. In most cases, we simply don’t have to — and won’t be able to — work all the time in order to be successful. (No one could call Jeff Bezos a professional mediocrity, and the former Amazon boss has talked about his love of “puttering.”) To suggest otherwise raises the question of what it even means to be successful. What is the point of “success” if you don’t have a social life? What is the point of “freeing up … time” if you don’t make time for a friend’s birthday? Personal success entails more than professional success. Sure, there will be exceptional cases. But exceptional cases definitionally make for bad advice.

It’s tempting to wonder if this kind of inhumane thinking has fuelled the development of inhumane technology — algorithms colonizing our consciousnesses, dating apps sucking the romance from our hearts, and AI slop drowning creativity.

This is a bit unfair. No one forces us at gunpoint to download an app. Technology develops as it does because it meets demand, even if it isn’t the healthiest form of demand. That said, I think tech leaders should sometimes reflect on what their work is actually achieving. They might not need work-life balance, and that’s morbidly impressive, but we really do have to balance technological progress with civilized societal existence. Even if that sometimes means going to a wedding.

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Ben Sixsmith is the Online Editor at The Critic.