I was just in a lively email exchange with Fu and forwarded this along, I'm sure glad he did. Vibing with you deeply on David being "the one taking the same crazy pills as you, whose minds wander the same alleys." Well put!
This passage struck me, especially in relations to your post here:
"Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco."
It's another way of stating the goal/purpose point you highlighted, contextualized in the AI era of silicon valley. In some ways this is nothing new. The undercurrents of hype > product, goal > purpose have been around in the valley for a long time. It's now louder than ever due to amount and speed of vc capital deployment.
I'm bay area based as well, would love to meet up some time! Now to rabbit hole further on your writings...
Only seeing this exchange and article you shared and can only agree w Kris - wild ass article indeed.
This idea of homogenous agency Jim you and I traded emails on, and is it really agency or is it a by product of the lessons and pain and lived experience we internalize …
(Lessons kids internalize that are very connected to what all people Kris spoke to and about in his article seem to carry, to the point of slashing away sorts of our humanity to optimize for the human norms myths culture algorithm and the digital one… and the interplay of the two)
It does kind of make me wonder, though, how new this phenomenon really is. I suppose that in other societies with less social movement, you had more room for people with power (because of the families in which they were born) to be more completely human. That said, if you go back to the time of the oil barons, do we really think they kept any more of their humanity? Sure, they put their names on some universities, but I rather suspect that was a lot more about white-washing their history than anything else.
I don't think it's new so much as quantification culture spawns it in more places. Quantification becomes a stand-in for truth (with all the trade-offs therein vs prior accepted repreentations of truth) and connectivity spreads access to this particular representation of truth and because it travels well it also gets misapplied more easily or at least by more people.
Reflexivity, or the outputs becoming the inputs, handles the rest :-)
That's fair. I think this was one of those cases where basically everything you quoted made so much sense and clicked so quickly that I started to wonder if I wasn't giving into some major confirmation bias, which leads to trying to think a little more critically about the thing I initially just wanted to agree with wholeheartedly. The truth is somewhere in between, I'm sure.
Thanks Kris, I look forward to listening to the interview. It's hard to disentangle what we don't like about ourselves or our society from human nature. We're intensely social and so, like it or not, we care what other people think about us. Related, we're intensely competitive. While I can sit in my study and reflect on what I truly find valuable, in daily life my nature pushes me to attain that which others find valuable much like my stomach compels me to find food. I think we lost the plot when we decided the many things that evolved over time to point us in the right direction (community, the marketplace, institutions, the church, GAMES!) were actually the things corrupting us.
Thanks for the shout, and helluva great post highlighting all the salient points and quotes from the podcast episode and this author! Definitely on my to read list for the year / when it comes out. And killer title, you managed to surface the best quote and takeaway from it too.
I was just in a lively email exchange with Fu and forwarded this along, I'm sure glad he did. Vibing with you deeply on David being "the one taking the same crazy pills as you, whose minds wander the same alleys." Well put!
The article that sparked some of my discussion with him was: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/
This passage struck me, especially in relations to your post here:
"Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco."
It's another way of stating the goal/purpose point you highlighted, contextualized in the AI era of silicon valley. In some ways this is nothing new. The undercurrents of hype > product, goal > purpose have been around in the valley for a long time. It's now louder than ever due to amount and speed of vc capital deployment.
I'm bay area based as well, would love to meet up some time! Now to rabbit hole further on your writings...
what a crazy ass article, thanks for sharing this
Only seeing this exchange and article you shared and can only agree w Kris - wild ass article indeed.
This idea of homogenous agency Jim you and I traded emails on, and is it really agency or is it a by product of the lessons and pain and lived experience we internalize …
Fascinating also coming off the heels of reading
https://andrewbuher.substack.com/p/opportunity-knocks-141-the-hidden?r=4340o&utm_medium=ios
(Lessons kids internalize that are very connected to what all people Kris spoke to and about in his article seem to carry, to the point of slashing away sorts of our humanity to optimize for the human norms myths culture algorithm and the digital one… and the interplay of the two)
And
https://sive.rs/off23
Disconnecting to make space and be productive -
This was a good one, Kris. Thanks for sharing.
It does kind of make me wonder, though, how new this phenomenon really is. I suppose that in other societies with less social movement, you had more room for people with power (because of the families in which they were born) to be more completely human. That said, if you go back to the time of the oil barons, do we really think they kept any more of their humanity? Sure, they put their names on some universities, but I rather suspect that was a lot more about white-washing their history than anything else.
I don't think it's new so much as quantification culture spawns it in more places. Quantification becomes a stand-in for truth (with all the trade-offs therein vs prior accepted repreentations of truth) and connectivity spreads access to this particular representation of truth and because it travels well it also gets misapplied more easily or at least by more people.
Reflexivity, or the outputs becoming the inputs, handles the rest :-)
That's fair. I think this was one of those cases where basically everything you quoted made so much sense and clicked so quickly that I started to wonder if I wasn't giving into some major confirmation bias, which leads to trying to think a little more critically about the thing I initially just wanted to agree with wholeheartedly. The truth is somewhere in between, I'm sure.
Thanks Kris, I look forward to listening to the interview. It's hard to disentangle what we don't like about ourselves or our society from human nature. We're intensely social and so, like it or not, we care what other people think about us. Related, we're intensely competitive. While I can sit in my study and reflect on what I truly find valuable, in daily life my nature pushes me to attain that which others find valuable much like my stomach compels me to find food. I think we lost the plot when we decided the many things that evolved over time to point us in the right direction (community, the marketplace, institutions, the church, GAMES!) were actually the things corrupting us.
Thanks for the shout, and helluva great post highlighting all the salient points and quotes from the podcast episode and this author! Definitely on my to read list for the year / when it comes out. And killer title, you managed to surface the best quote and takeaway from it too.