Pylimitics

JA Westenberg just posted a message to tech founders: You, Sir, Are Not Steve Jobs. The subtext is that neither was he. If you’re trying to channel Jobs in your fantasyland of “tech startups,” you’re emulating a fictional character.

The more interesting thing to me is that “tech founder” and even simply “founder” is now a thing. It’s a thing largely because of software. As a business, software is easy. All the infrastructure has been provided for you, and the barrier to entry is…well there practically isn’t one.

If you’re young and ambitious, you might have any kind of dream. Architecture, science, building bridges, you name it. Even becoming the top plumbing contractor in your state is a dream somebody has. But there are barriers to entry; you need to learn a trade, possibly get a license, build a reputation, and all that takes years. Software, though, has managed to co-opt the term “engineering” without any of the requirements of other types of engineering (with the possible exception of driving a locomotive, but even that might require licensing; I don’t know). But not software. You don’t even need college, as many programmers say. Why is that? Because software is easy. So easy a statistical algorithm can do a pretty good job.

The first years of programming computers were not nearly as easy; you had to know some math, and be able to work with a particular sort of logic, but now the machines can take care of that for you.

There’s an old movie about coming to grips with adulthood back in the 1980s: The Big Chill. An ensemble cast of baby boomers come together soon after college to attend the funeral of one of their friends. As fictional characters, they were all more or less archetypes, much like the fictional character “steve jobs” is for many today. It was mostly a discussion movie; most of them had pretty inflated opinions about their college experiences, not to mention their aspirations. But at some point one of them has a flash of honesty and admits that it was all very easy for them. They’re the children of privilege, and so much of their comfortable lives was simply handed to them.

I think one of them was even a computer programmer. I could be wrong; I haven’t watched that film in decades. But it was the 1980s, and Apple Computer (and the fictional character “steve jobs”) was already wafting around in the zeitgeist.

Maybe Westenberg, who is a gifted writer and insightful critic of tech and its denizens, will do a followup piece, something like “You, sir, live in the real world, not fiction.” That might be nearly the same essay, come to think of it.

But isn’t it fascinating how some people do live a fictionalized life, full of pretending. Pretending to be “steve jobs,” pretending to be “anakin skywalker,” pretending to be “whitney houston.” And nearly every time, the characters they’re pretending to be are just pretend to start with.