One very good thing coming out of the Silicon Valley culture is that having done one's best and failed at something bold and important is no longer a black mark. But I do think that it has gone much too far. Real artists ship. Real entrepreneurs can distinguish a bold exploratory gamble from a con game. The Financial Times calls this kind of thing "The Whole Economy is Fyre Festival". That is a good rubric to hold in the front of one's mind to understand a bunch of things these days: Scott Lemieux: Today Amongst Our Overcompensated and Underachieving Elites: "John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood is essential reading.... Throughout the book America’s most decorated elites are revealed as bad actors or easy marks (or in the case of David Boies, both.) Another example is alleged Trump administration Adult In The Room (TM) James Mattis.... Mattis not only served on Theranos’s board during some of the years after he’d retired from military service, while it was perpetrating the scheme, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the company’s technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general. Holmes settled the SEC case, paying a 500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court. (Holmes and Balwani are both battling criminal fraud charges.) Nobody on the board has been directly charged with anything. But accepting six-figure checks to serve as a frontman for a con operation is the kind of thing that would normally count as a liability in American politics.... Fundamentally, Trump’s rise to power is part of a broader epidemic of elite impunity in the United States. And Mattis’s ability to dabble in questionable activity, cash a few checks, and then skate away with his reputation intact is very much part of the problem...
#noted #2019-11-19
