Listening to Cryptonomican 20 years after reading it. It is a curious embodiment of this "cult" but from a deeper, more epistemic place. The way Steaphenson treats the world, the way he describes it, is frenetic, packed with trivia and connections and ADHD deep-dives into related topics...but there is no heart to it. It's an empty, mechanistic view of the world, reducing almost every person a neat little network of abstractions, and then moving on. It is a strange book in that it seems to be a promotion of a narrative viewpoint rather than about the plot or characters. It is certainly the viewpoint of the "modern" tech entrepenuer, circa 1999. Somehow both extremely open minded AND judgemental; utterly unsentimental about anything, including the self; mere acceptence and wariness about indelible human needs. And so on.
Word on the street is that Cryptonomicon was required reading at Thiel's early Palantir. I read it now and it definitely hits differently. To accept that you must dwell in something in order to understand it, and therefore in order to wield power over it with any wisdom, is the antithesis of "The Cult of Doing Business". The hubris is baked in deep at an epistemic level, which is demonstrated to lead to epic moral hazards at an epidemic level.
You should read Zero to One if you really want to unlock Thiel's thinking re: business. It's both the best business book I've ever read and the perfect distillation of the core soullessness at the root of the matter. The goal is positive cash flows that can't be successfully attacked by competitors. That's the game, that's all everyone here is working for.
I will never, ever understand the praise for that book.
It can be summarized in one sentence: ‘Get a monopoly if you can.’ Brilliant insight there - thanks captain obvious!
If the author wasn’t famous it wouldn’t have even been published, and certainly wouldn’t have appeared as a ‘best business book.’
Maybe, arguably, true when he wrote it. But it is clear now that Thiel absolutely has values-based motivations behind his business goals.
But Stephenson describes things in this mechanistic, ADHD way. It’s just his technique - he still paints a picture of people with rich inner lives and strong desires. Maybe the characters’ sentiments (mostly pro-Western tech optimism) don’t resonate with you, but that hardly means they don’t have any.
It definitely wasn't required reading. I have never met anyone who's read it or even mentioned it.
> Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship.
The story of the modern Western economy is that all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of technological and productivity improvements (in the context of the regulatory environment).
Therefore, the proportion of profit and revenue rooted in exploiting human flaws is and will continue to rise.
Examples are:
* Humans engage with drama and negative content (ad supported media)
* Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)
* Etc
Perhaps the biggest is regulatory capture and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.
Sounds like exactly what happens when an empire is on its way to collapse. It eats its young.
The irony of "higher" standards of living is that meanwhile, African countries, and a few strict islamic ones, have much less of all this and they're the only places reproducing at faster than replacement rate.
I have run into many of these types over the years. It's amazing to watch them run up their ladder of manipulative tactics until they realize that they aren't going to get what they want. Then you see who they really are. The whole problem is that being genuine matters.
The best boss I ever had never tried to be charismatic. He was a good listener, he was fair, and he took us seriously.
The Naploean Hill/Dale Carnegie types make my skin crawl.
Or the Protestant work ethic? I didn’t think this needed a new explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
For me, an American, the work ethic comes from reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography after being inspired by a passage found in an American Literature textbook in 10th grade. [0]
edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just.
I think there are several weakneses in the Protestant work ethic as an explanation.
1. why is it directed at making money rather serving society? 2. Why does it glorify the rich rather than the "lowly workman" mentioned in the intro to your wikipedia link? 3. lots of evidence against it
The first two of these are even less convincing given that background of a religion that condemns the accumulation of wealth ("eye of a needle" etc.) and literally worships a "lowly workman".
As for evidence, this section of the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...
right, a.k.a "European Miracle" . I had classes about this (racist and largely debunked) concept in undergraduate Geography. But the link above is a review of a book that presumably aims to take existing research further.
> Weber also argued that the Protestant work ethic influenced the creation of capitalism
An alternative explanation is for the first 140 years of the US, "Protestants" were the "people that did the work". Catholicism was illegal until the states re-wrote their constitutions/laws after the revolution (or ratification of the First Amendment, which ever came first).
Also, there wasn't anything to do but work. If you wanted a house, you cleared land and built it. 50% of early European settlers were indentured servants.
Oh and there wasn't any money or banks. Tobacco was the currency (in Maryland/Virginia). The only business partner was the UK, that managed the colonies as businesses. The entrepreneurial part was the Crown getting shareholders to foot the bill for provisions for the colonies. Shares in Virginia were sold on the London Stock Exchange. Maryland had a sole proprietor that funded the infrastructure build out.
This is a book review, right?
I'm confused by this pattern of people reading book reviews and treating them as if they were the book itself, or an original article.
Isn't the purpose to decide whether you want to buy the book?
If you are interested I always recommend to at least download the "sample" from Amazon Kindle before buying it.
Keep your own house.
I like working, I’m not quite sure what I would do otherwise. It is perfectly acceptable to have genuine relationships with your coworkers, employees, and customers, but “genuine” is the key. What’s bad for you is not work, but lying and trying to pull a fast one on everyone around you.
Work, family, and a little leisure. Those are the three pillars. This hasn’t changed since we grew a brain stem, it comes far before language or farming.
21st century version is naval's twitter thread about becoming rich and paul graham's blog and tim ferris's 4 hour work week. i call it "microfeudalism", a riff on technofedualism and microcelebrities
> But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work.
While Maslow's hierarchy of needs help us understand motivation, this is the most true.
Strip him of his tenure, and let's see if love pays the rent.
What’s wrong with finding meaning in work?
Of course like all things the entrepreneurial ethos gets very silly and begins to incorporate a lot of very silly other ideas (think and grow rich!) when you dive deep into it, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that most movements, philosophies, and ideologies get silly if you go deep.
Thinkers, like people on dates, put their best foot forward first. As you get to know them is when you find out they never wash their underwear.
The alternative, I guess, is finding meaning in things other than work, and that’s okay too. Or you can do both.
Specifically, if your work is a typical job, it makes your meaning dependent on a business relationship where one side has a lot more power than the other side. Example: an employer may end or modify the relationship for factors that are unrelated to your goals at any time.
In general, depending on work for one's ultimate meaning is dumb because whether or not you worked "hard enough" is judged by other people, not the entity responsible for putting humans (and therefore you) on the planet in the first place--you're already here so you obviously are supposed to be here, otherwise you wouldn't be. Good work makes you deserve to be among others but it can't make you deserve to exist on the planet.
> What’s wrong with finding meaning in work?
Who told you you did not have meaning?
Only an academic could write something like this;
"But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work."
Your mortgage servicer doesn't accept love as payment.
The comment below yours mentions suicide. Your brain doesn't accept mortgage servicing as a reason to continue living. So I think the idea is that priorities should flow from fundamentals.
This all makes more sense if you go through the article, and every time you see the word "work", substitute "work for money".
I’m surprised that the author thinks devotion to vocation is uniquely American.
The Japanese take their jobs so seriously, that some have committed suicide, upon losing their jobs. Some CEOs have committed suicide, if their business fails, or there’s a big scandal (an idea that I sometimes think could be useful on this side of the pond).
You almost had me agreeing with you, but advocating for someone to kill themselves is way out of line.
Its because buisness escaping control forms a "nature" complete with behemoth out crowding the smaller critters, destroying the ecosystems that fed them, plagues and forrest fires. The state if it exist is a park if its not, its a dark forest. Worshipping this is just nature whorship redecorated.
A weird thing to be coming from an academic, which has 10x the cult of “make your work your entire identity” that corporate America ever did. But they don’t make any money doing it so I guess that’s why it’s ok?
If you get tenure you make pretty good money, no? (Which is the academia equivalent of IPO, or successful exit, or that mythical first one million.)
Also the message can still be very true even if it comes from a messenger you don't like.
Good read. I wish there was a bit more advice than the final sentence offers though.
Zizek has a few pretty good tips!
This isn't uniquely American, but obsession with wealth accumulation as an individual is. I don't think this applies to all Americans at all, but it is just mire commonly accepted than other cultures.
Wealth is freedom. One of the core tenets of Americanism is "freedom", in quotes because most of us are far from free, just different from "freedom" in monarchical/feudalistic societies. We are bound to the accumulation of wealth. However, some of us are able to break free. Software engineering for instance is a profession that allows this. It doesn't require the full commitment of your life to attain wealth, like finance or law or medicine for someone who has some intelligence and drive.
It is very deep in American culture. I think this sums it up when Tocqueville was talking about America not having a true aristocratic class, circa 1830s
“In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who becomes possessed of riches and power in a few years; this spectacle excites their surprise and envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday very equal is today their ruler. ” ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
In 21st century America, the internet and social media has poured huge amounts of gas on this fire that was already burning quite hot for a long time.
Even in my own lifetime, the character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wallstreet has gone from a villain to pretty much the aspiration and hero of most high school seniors. Greed is good, greed make number go up.
It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. The human mind has wandered since. We’ve built systems of belief, technological systems, political systems, every possible system you can imagine. All to deal with the simple fact that our minds feel like they should be doing something, but there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done; surplus.
Since our first surplus all those years ago, we have continued to increase our surplus relentlessly. The problem is the more surplus we have, the more the mind idles, the more we try to invent things for the mind to do.
That is where I see the cult, the cult consists of faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus, whether it’s through positive means like improving technology or business, or negative means like slavery and exploitation. It’s a hollow existence. There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
I think it's deeper. The mind is an optimization tool. It always keeps looking for something better, hence it is always not completely happy with the current state of things. The first noble truth (aka the principle of dukkha) is at least 25 centuries old; it says that sentient existence is inseparable from discontent, and thus from suffering.
This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible.
On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent.
(I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)
I don’t have a lot of surplus. I hope to, I’m working towards it. I have the privilege, talent, and positioning. But I can’t understand how anyone just below me in the hierarchy making ends meet.
> It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there.
The article and the book it reviews isn't really about what happened in roughly 9,750 of those years. It's about a narrow band of meaning and apologies that happened during the small slice of most recent time due the vast majority of people falling for Worthington's Law[1].
Coloring the vast majority of the time slice with this idiosyncratic problem seems like the kind of notion that would be covered in the book. It's also confusing-- from those 10,000 years there must still be dozens of mainstream, practical political ideologies and belief systems based on embracing "the positive aspects of our spirit." It seems like you're identify this subset as examples of the problem you're discussing, but also as a potential solution to the same problem. I don't get it.
> caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry.
Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus.
> There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?
Have you read “The Accursed Share”? Batailles argues that society is shaped by the ways we squander surplus (eg in war, sacrifice, carnival, art, sex, etc)
It's not "faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus"
It's "mute compulsion"
Well put. Now that we're trying to replace jobs with AI, just like we replaced jobs with software before, it's becoming less clear what "purpose" actually means.
Once we have the surplus of resources, but no job, I wonder what life would look like.
> One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses <...>
The idea behind this - expressing oneself - isn't American. When ideas like that come to this world, they come to many nations at the same time, the greatest minds pick them up and create their own interpretation, based on local culture and their beliefs. Some of those great minds see the great ideas well and express them cleanly. Others distort the ideas with their egos and sometimes even add poison, creating intentionally misleading interpretations.
The idea that you need to express yourself, find a calling that's bigger than you, is true and spiritual in nature. It draws attention to a core aspect of what we are. However some of the great minds are also selfish: they are able to see this idea, they recognize it as an important and powerful truth, but then they find a way to distort it for personal gain. So they create a thin lie around this truth: that you need to express yourself thru work for self at the expense of others, because that's the only way to survive and thrive in this world of scarcity. Most people will be fooled because this lie is an artwork of minds far greater than them. So the common folk embrace this false interpretation and start living according to it.
Author is an arts graduate. General Patton warned against such historians. It is why he recommended autobiographies rather than biographies. The words of Caesar rather than the words written about Caesar. You also delegate your agency to critique. Patton took the good of Napoleon and savaged the bad. To paraphrase Patton, it's a type of tall poppy syndrome. The historian lacks the skills, talent, and mindset that causes men and women who achieve success in the real world. They resent those who remind them of what they lack.
Because of his tenured position, he wants for nothing while, outside of STEM, contributes very little. He is wholly reliant on the types of men and women he bashes. It's the dilettante who mocks the farmer as he eats the farmer's food. Reminds of the critique of self righteous pacifists during the World Way 2(Godwin violation. Apologies.) "How easy it is to be a pacifist safe and secure behind the security of the American Navy's big guns." How easy it is to mock entrepreneurs, capitalism, and strivers when they permit your standard of living and very existence.
Even the words of Caesar mean nothing without context. (Yes, it's interpreters all the way down.)
The author doesn't mock capitalism or strivers, it mocks the self-promulgating Sect of Success, and points out how it preys on vulnerable people, and coerce them through peer-pressure into the good old "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" and then make them feel inadequate when they doesn't work out, and they burn out, and so on.
How easy it is to mock Stalin's USSR from behind the tanks of the Red Army, I think you mean. The USSR won WWII. So now I think you have to become Communist, or at least get a degree in Marxist-Leninist political theory, in order to comment on WWII.
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> There's a fundamental spiritual divide between people. One side hates being alive from the moment they are born, so everything is suffering, especially work. The other side loves life and loves doing things.
[citation needed]
:)
So even if people end up in these very black-and-white groups it's doubtful that they are predetermined. But it's more like it's a spectrum, and some people start from a very good place some from a very hard one. And there are many important and distinct factors affecting one's relationship with work, success, motivation, diligence. Not to mention that luckily people's life (and relationship with work) can get better.
>I love working (...) it's rewarding and mentally developing
Some work may be these things, but not all work. If your work is consistently both then there is a good chance your work involves some creation that is satisfying you.
I do agree that taking the morality out of our everyday tasks can greatly affect our outlook on life.
Or maybe some people don't get the chance to work on things that are rewarding and mentally developing? Not all work is equal.
Maybe have some gratitude that your work has given that to you, rather than assuming that other people who are drained by their work are somehow spiritually inferior.
Yeah I think you've sort of touched on something there.
Many of my hardworking friends also have interesting hobbies/interests outside work they pursue and are known for. Arts, literary, cuisine, gardening, sports, charity, whatever. Generally putting more out into the world in other non-work venues.
However practically none of my more "slacker" friends have anything to show for their time outside of work. They define life more in terms of what they are avoiding. Hobbies are more consumptive - watching TV/film, dining out, travel, etc.
Maybe at the end of the day being good at any one thing takes some intellectual ability, commitment and effort.. so once you've applied that in one area you are likely able to do so elsewhere.
I love working but, after two years of not taking vacations – due to several reasons that I should’ve anticipated – oh boy how much I’d like to take a rest. I counting the days until I can take a few weeks off.
> One side hates being alive
> I love working
You should stop hating being alive. There's so much more in the universe than work.
> I love working
What if you needed to work for free?
ah, if only the rest of us had the willpower to simply choose to not suffer and to enjoy life instead.
Seriously, who do you talk to that enables such viewpoints? I suspect not many people want to talk to you after their shift.
Work isn't the problem; it's doing bullshit work that's undervalued so that morons who don't work can eat. This has held true at every part of the pay scale. It's just the compensation on the upper end helps you have hope you may find meaningful work that can feed you.
I suspect we all WANT to work. We just need to eat, too.
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