no charm, only money

did you roomcuck yourself?

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Buddies, has everyone here seen Mountainhead? Some (spoiler-free) thoughts:

1. The entire movie is set in a ~17k square foot Utah ski mansion called Mountainhead — a reference to Fountainhead. A character even asks if the house’s decorator was named “Ayn Bland.” Heh.

2. The four tech titan Business Heroes™ do not have exact real world corollaries but to me they seem pretty clearly based on:

Randall (Steve Carell): 75% Thiel, 25% Andreessen

Jeff (Ramy Youssef): Altman

Venis (The guy who played Chevy Chase in that SNL movie): Zuckerberg. I’ve seen some people say Musk, which kinda makes sense but the age and relationship w/Randall is much more Zuck.

Hugo (Jason Schwartzman): Pick your favorite fawning, groveling, $500 millionaire who just can’t seem to crack the three comma club, sweatily trying to get his richer, more successful friends to back his thing. If you have had the unfortunate experience of listening to a tech podcast or spending much time in that corner of X lately, you know a few of these guys!

They are howling their greatest fears and desires with their net worths scrawled on their chests.

3. As a movie, Mountainhead is absurd, dark as hell and ultimately unsatisfying—not unlike Succession. Is it good? Eh. I loved the dialogue and satire. There were jokes about founder mode, steel-manning, decel, doom loop... One character accuses another of “roomcucking” himself for having a small bedroom.

4. I also loved how humorless these characters are while still being funny / clueless / ignorantly confident enough for the audience to laugh at. Linda Holmes put it so well:

They sometimes take a smidgen of true pleasure in cruelty or vulgarity, or in the fact that being trapped with people who believe it's financially advantageous to laugh at their jokes is the closest thing they experience to friendship. But they have no charm, only money. …

The point of "The Emperor's New Clothes" was less that it's shameful to be naked and more that it's shameful — and funny — to be a dope.

5. The 100mph dialogue is sometimes too much. I saw someone on Reddit describe the movie as 90 minutes of Kendall Roy talking to himself. Succession had dramatic Shakespearean cadences from the likes of Tom Wambsgans and Logan Roy, which helped to break up the rapid-fire bro-insults from the Roy children. Mountainhead does not have that. You also don’t get enough time to understand why these characters are so deeply damaged, so you wind up hating them all.

6. Watching this after reading Careless People and also, uh, the news, every single day, made me think about how drastically the zeitgeist around tech has shifted from the light and gentle mockery of Mike Judge’s HBO show a decade ago. Back then, the joke about tech was basically: Look these goofy dudes, they wear roller blades, are socially awkward and have a lot of dumb ideas. The bad guy was a Mark Cuban type (Russ Hanneman) who was kinda greedy and kinda annoying, or a Marc Benioff type (Gavin Belson), who was kinda full of shit and paranoid. The heroes were a ragtag group of founders and coders you could root for, because they just wanted to build cool tech.

Now it’s more like: Look at these scarily powerful guys burning literally everything to the ground. It’s all their fault and they don’t give a shit about anyone or anything but themselves. They think their casual cruelty is funny, but the actual joke is how clueless and incompetent they are and how little they deserve their power. In the end they’ll be fine because they are so rich. No heroes, all villains.

It’s a really brutal shift! I wrote about this as it was starting in 2017 for Wired. At the time, a lot of people in tech, especially at the top, were in denial that people no longer saw them as the lovable good guys of the economy and culture. I thought there’d be a reckoning and maybe even an earnest attempt to change — not just the perception, but the reasons behind it! But now, as movies like Mountainhead convey, they are well aware, and embrace it. Caring is for suckers!

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: Rocks. They’re investing in rocks!

Startup everyone’s over: Builder.ai is bankrupt! (Formerly known as Engineer.ai, for anyone who remembers the time they were secretly using hired help to power their AI.)

Reason to go on living: Drinking coffee helps with aging!

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: Every VC backed IPO in the last 12 mo has been a down round!

Latest crush: MEN!

Latest heartbreak: Dario Amodei says we’re sleepwalking into a white collar bloodbath! For example: AI is eating consulting!

Latest thing the kids are into: “TACO!”

Latest thing the olds are into: Dems love abundance!

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

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*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Thanks for reading, buddies!

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