Been thinking a lot about integrity, moral compasses and such in tech. I’ve always felt that tech has had a deep-seated moral compass, somehow rooted illegibly in the Great Truth of Moore’s Law. But as the law has weakened the moral compass has too.

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Biggest tell is people falling for Great Man theories post Steve Jobs 2.0 post 1997. Toxic waste coast Welchianism turned into tech Great Founderism. The harder and wobblier Moore’s Law got the more people started trusting the virtue promises of fallible humans.

I like Samo Burja’s writing and thinking, and he’s an astute observer of stuff, but I’ve always felt his big intellectual commitment to Great Founder theory was a mistake. A historical cyclical phenomenon mistaken for a fundamental principle.

In the last decade, even as the Moore’s Law moral compass wobbled, tech repotted its cultural roots in tenuous philosophical rationales for Great Founderism. Hence the infatuation with Girard, scapegoat-martyrdom larps, Straussianism, Noble lies etc. I think we’re seeing the results.

Crypto is fascinating because it provided the *best* shot at redemption:

Blue pill: Find a new true north in asymmetric cryptography, requiring a difficult world-building aka Ethereum 

Red Pill: Eagerly install the *pseudonymous* Satoshi as yet another Great Founder despite his own wise attempts to forestall that

ML to a lesser extent offered the same choice. 

Blue Pill: New true north in decades of slow accumulating knowledge in neural nets etc by a parde of obscure academics

Red Pill: Install messiah figures offering various flavors of Great Founder eschatology around bullshit singularity, simulation etc arguments

The hard reality is that the only true moral compass for a technologist lies in an important and generative technical principle/truth on which you can build… while it remains true.

If you put your faith in a mere human, raising them to an idol status, they will invariably turn out to have feet of clay.

And this isn’t because tech leaders are especially morally fallible (whatever their technical and business genius). I don’t believe in Great Man theory period. In any field. Not Gandhi, not MLK. Nobody. Moral fiber and integrity don’t follow power laws. There is no 10x morality.

If you want to endure and do interesting things in the tech world, you have to put your faith in technology principles. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust or bet on talented people. Technical and business geniuses do exist. Just don’t elevate them to moral geniuses as well. Don’t make them your moral compass

If you are in the habit of asking “what would Jobs/Musk/Satoshi do?” on questions of principle, stop… instead ask “What does Moore’s Law want?” or “What does asymmetric cryptography want?”

If you don’t grok the spirit of technological world winds, you shouldn’t be in tech. It’s a moral hazard.

Jobs was exceptional in many ways no doubt. But morally he was exactly as much a mediocrity as people who came before or after. Not a saint. That’s not the problem. The problem is tech-stans validated and rewarded saintliness performances. And then it got worse and worse.