I wrote an angry piece (two) on so-called ‘Hacker News’ (lol, what an entitlement) community, and realised one simple truth: the source of my anger is the belief (I do not share) that they’re important. I was never a fan, or anyone who actually ever cared in investors.
Imagine what a miserable life you must live, if you need $10K of investor money to start a startup. In the fucking first economy of the world.
I’m too dumb to understand the investors thing. The getting-their-money, not giving-them-losers-money-to-make-them-earn-me-more-money thing. So, in that sense, I’ve never been their target audience. But I was led to believe they’re important, because I could not find any other similar community that exists around similar topics.
I have no proper alternative list on me right now, simply because I’m not having the resources to explore this topic properly. And so they felt like similar to what I sought.
There’s this idea (Peter Drucker taught me, by the way) that one must not combine two different concepts, and treat them as one. In this context, that means that if there’s no other community like that, that does not automatically make them that community I may seek.
Being irritated at someone is when you expect them to be one, and they’re something completely different, or even the exact opposite of one. The wrong thing is to have these expectations, because the basis for them expectations is non-existent.
You may believe they are important, and you’re entitled to that illusion, but in the same way, I’m pretty entitled to believe they’re completely irrelevant and not worthy of any attention. Beyond the law enforcement officers for potentially breaking the law. If any, I have no idea, I’m not implying they’re criminals. Just the logic steming from ‘move fast and break things.’ If they’re not breaking any laws, you can ignore them all you want. And nothing will ever happen, even if you chose to build your career in tech. That applies to anything, DHH, Amazon and their warlord, Zuck and his empire of spyware, anyone.
The uncomfortable thing though, most of them are actually mending the law, if not outright breaking it. But that’s a slightly different topic still. That does not automatically make them important in tech. They may be important as they’re dangerous in many aspects. And you may want to pay the attention you’d rather pay to a dangerous individual, when you’re around. But you don’t typically adore the maniac, do you?
Except the president of the United States, but I doubt that fucker can even read. And I don’t mean dyslexia, obviously. But the sheer stupidity. (Which is also completely different topic of the conversation.)
The power is an illusion, and sometimes it can be dismantled trivially and rapidly. As many things do in our ever-changing world.