Episode 127 Transcript
Podcast: Our Opinions Are Correct
Episode: 127: Silicon Valley vs. Science Fiction: “Difficult Geniuses”
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Hey, Annalee, do you remember what it was that Arianna Huffington called Travis Kalanick back when Susan Fowler Rigetti wrote that whole blog post that exposed Uber as a hotbed of sexual harassment and abuse?
Annalee: [00:00:14] It's really funny because you and I were having this conversation the other day and I was like, oh, yeah, she called him a “difficult genius.” And you know, this is—
Charlie Jane: [00:00:22] That's what I thought too.
Annalee: [00:00:24] Yeah. And she was just basically apologizing for his behavior at the time. This was several years ago when Arianna Huffington, the entrepreneur, was brought into the Uber board to basically kind of clean house and that was her assessment of him that he was this difficult genius. The guy was amazing, but he was really difficult. But then I started doing some research and discovered that she actually called him a “brilliant jerk.”
Charlie Jane: [00:00:51] That's so much better. That's just so much better.
Annalee: [00:00:52] I know.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:53] It's really hard to keep track of all of the many wonderful euphemisms that we've used for, you know, shitty people who run Silicon Valley companies. You know, it’s just a bouquet.
Annalee: [00:01:04] It’s amazing. Yeah, a bouquet.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:06] A bouquet of euphemisms.
Annalee: [00:01:06] Exactly. And Huffington did the same thing with Elon Musk just last year. She was interviewed about his takeover of Twitter, and she was very, very critical and basically said he was terrible. And then she called him a “glow in the dark genius,” which I have to admit is actually kind of a good turn of phrase.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:26] I mean, how much radioactive material are they storing at SpaceX? Is this like, I don't even know. That's a little scary.
[00:01:33] You know, thing is, I feel like this idea of the “difficult genius” has been with us forever. But it used to be something that we kind of applied more to artists. I think Picasso, or Marlon Brando or some musicians that we could name, who were famous for their horrible behavior and just their destructive patterns of behavior.
[00:01:56] But it's, they’re such geniuses. When I started working in television, I kept hearing about writers' rooms where people would be terrorized by the people in charge, but it's okay because they're geniuses.
Annalee: [00:02:09] The creativity outweighs the horror, somehow.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:12] And usually you end up getting to a thing where like, actually they'd be getting way more done and actually coming up with better ideas if they weren't being such obnoxious babies. But this is a meme. But it used to be applied mostly to artists, and creative people.
Annalee: [00:02:27] But we do start to see it creeping into the tech world. I mean, now I think it's a meme about tech entrepreneurs. But you really don't start seeing that until, I would say, the early 21st century. The first example I could find when I was researching this was an article in 2010 from Tech Republic, a publication that I barely remember, which had an article in 2010 for managers. So, it was written to managers. And it was about dealing with difficult genius engineers who are toxic in the workplace. So, it's clearly identifying these as toxic people, but it's looking at them as workers, not as leaders. But then you start to get, like a trickling out of this idea, and I think it reaches a kind of apotheosis in 2017 when this Google engineer, James Damore, a someone who would love to think of himself as a difficult genius wrote this famous memo at Google about how women and POC just didn't belong in engineering roles at Google. And there were all these biological reasons for that.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:38] Yeah. And you know, I think it's not an accident when you say 2017. That was the year that #MeToo started and that was also the year that Susan Fowler Rigetti was exposing the abuses at Uber and Ariana Huffington came out and called Travis Kalanick a brilliant jerk. But that is the thing, the #MeToo movement happened. We started critiquing bad behavior in the workplace, and that was when this emerged as kind of a defense against that. But it was exposing an attitude that was already there.
Annalee: [00:04:03] Yeah. I mean, That idea of this amazing guy. It’s frequently a guy, although not always, this amazing guy who also happens to be a toxic asshole. It's been out there for a long time and it has its roots in science fiction. And I think the question that comes up, both in fiction and now, of course, in real life is, so do we fire these difficult geniuses or just let them do their horrible things?
[00:04:30] And that's one of the things we're gonna talk about today.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:34] Yeah. In this second installment of our ongoing Silicon Valley vs. Science Fiction series, we're gonna be exploring the myth of the difficult genius, and we're gonna talk about the roots of it, which go back to the figure of the mad scientist in early science fiction and how that kind of became the like brilliant, colorful, entertaining figure that we see today.
[00:04:55] Also, I talked a lot with Christopher Cantwell, who's kind of in a unique position to talk about this because he was the co-creator of the show Halt and Catch Fire, which is all about the early days of the tech industry or the computer industry.
[00:05:07] And he also just finished a, an amazing run as the writer of the Iron Man comic dealing with Tony Stark. And he had some really interesting things to say about the difficult tech genius in science fiction and tech dramas.
Annalee: [00:05:18] You are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science, fiction and society. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer, and my latest novel is called The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:31] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My next novel Promises Stronger Than Darkness, comes out in about a week. It's the final book of the Unstoppable trilogy.
Annalee: [00:05:39] Also on our mini episode next week, which is for patrons, we will be posting Charlie Jane's full interview with Christopher Cantwell.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:48] There's so much great stuff in there that we couldn't include in this episode. And by the way, did you know this podcast is entirely independent and most of our funding comes from you, our listeners, via Patreon? That's right. You're helping to keep us going and you're just supporting us and filling us with buoyant wisdom and joy through your financial and other contributions.
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[00:07:08] Okay, let's get into it.
[00:07:12] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:38] Okay. So, Annalee, how does science fiction create this myth of the “difficult genius” or “brilliant jerk” like Travis Kalanick or any of a number of other Silicon Valley leaders?
Annalee: [00:07:49] I really think we have to start by thinking about the mad doctor or the mad scientist figure, and these are characters, tropes, really, that go all the way back to the origins of modern science fiction with people like Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, and I think that one of the things we forget is that Frankenstein, remember Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster. Everybody's favorite little factoid to point out, Frankenstein is a romantic figure in a 19th century sense. He’s super emo. He's really tragic. He feels an incredible sense of guilt about what he's doing. He's a loner. He literally lives in a castle that has lightning going around it and stuff, and he's messing around with nature in a way that's scientific, but also has a feeling of almost like alchemy to it. And also, Frankenstein is the figure who gives us the really important aspect of this trope, which is the idea of someone who's playing God and just goes too far.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:54] Yeah. And you know, I think that part of that story, and part of a lot of the other stories like this is that they’re trying to do something that's actually kind of benign or you know, at least worthwhile. Like Frankenstein is trying to create new life and bring people back from the dead, which seems like a really cool thing to do. And he actually succeeds and how is it that he's taking things too far? Or why is this story so dark and scary?
Annalee: [00:09:21] It's funny, nobody ever asks that question. Nobody says, well, why is this story so dark? And I think the answer is that generally, especially in the 19th century, but obviously going up until the present, people have thought it was really obvious what Frankenstein was doing wrong. They're like, well, obviously trying to create life is a bad thing, which when you think about it, no, that's actually the goal of a lot of medicine and science is to bring people back from death, to prevent death. I mean, there's so many, especially in Silicon Valley now, people who are trying to basically turn themselves into Frankenstein, you know, to be reborn and, and to not die.
[00:10:00] And Frankenstein is kind of doing that. He's pursuing something that is a legitimate kind of medicine. And I think what goes wrong, according to Mary Shelley, the author, is really how he mistreats the person that he creates. He creates this creature who is a person who he calls a monster. He abuses the monster. He doesn't name him. He kind of sends the monster into exile through his maltreatment of him. And I think this is the piece of the difficult genius story that we often forget about, which is that the downfall of the mad scientist often comes from how he treats other people as objects or things to possess rather than as his equals.
[00:10:48] And remember, part of what makes Frankenstein this romantic figure is that he is destroyed for what he does. The monster righteously kills everything that Frankenstein loves. He leaves him lost and alone in the Arctic. He suffers. And that's really the essence of the early mad scientist is this person who is suffering for what he's done.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:08] Right. And like it's a tragic figure. Frankenstein is one of the first examples of this trope of the scientist who goes too far or is too careless or whatever. And then how does that develop over the next 200 years? And what other kind of tropes do we start seeing?
Annalee: [00:11:28] Yeah, it's a great question because I think that Frankenstein kind of snowballs into a much bigger figure, especially in the 20th century. So, I wanna talk just briefly about two iconic mad scientists from this period. One of whom is imaginary and one of whom is real. The first one is Dr. Moreau, the real one is Jay Robert Oppenheimer, who I'll talk about in a second.
[00:11:49] So, Dr. Moreau, for those of you unfamiliar with the legend starts out as a character in an HG Wells novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, that comes out in the very, very late, late 19th century. It's basically the turn of the century. And it ends up becoming a very important story in the 20th century. It's been made into a ton of movies. And even today, it's being retold in fiction. We've talked before about the novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia called Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which is just an incredible book, and these are all stories about a guy who is trying to turn non-human animals into humans. He's turning cats into cat women. He's turning bears into bear men and a whole variety of other animals on this island. And it's very much, for Wells, the original author, it's very much a metaphor about colonialism. It's about a white guy who comes to an island and invents reasons to enslave the people on the island by accusing them of being animalistic or bestial. And he's just kind of literalizing it. He's like, oh, well this person is actually working with non-human animals.
[00:12:56] But again, like Frankenstein, Moreau is destroyed for what he's done. He's gone too far. He's gone too far, again, not so much because he's trying to turn cats into people, but because he's abusing them. He's a horrific abuser. He enslaves all of these people that he creates. He has this house of pain where he takes them and tortures them when they don't obey him.
[00:13:24] So, eventually, thankfully the non-human animals rise up and just beat the shit out of Moreau. A very happy ending for the revolutionaries.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:34] That got a little dark.
Annalee: [00:13:35] I actually see that story as one of triumph. It is dark, right? He's punished for what he does. And again, he's punished because he abuses these creatures, not because of the science he's doing. And I think that that's really interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:51] Yeah, no, we're definitely seeing a theme here of the kind of dehumanizing and that going hand in hand with horrible behavior, so.
[00:14:02] Okay. What about Oppenheimer? How does he fit into this?
Annalee: [00:14:05] Yeah, I feel like Oppenheimer is maybe the… possibly the first and last real-life scientist who kind of fits into this model. And he's a little bit different. He's not a Moreau or a Frankenstein, but he kind of is because he creates something so horrific. He heads up the research group that developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s for the US government.
[00:14:25] And his bomb is gonna kill tons of innocent people. And as a public figure, Oppenheimer became really famous for, after the war, pushing back against nuclear proliferation. He was part of the Communist party. He became very anti-atomics, essentially. And of course, he ended up getting kicked out of all of his government positions because he was against the Cold War, basically.
[00:14:54] So he's also this figure who is wracked with guilt. He's a, a tragic romantic figure. And he kind of plays with this trope of the scientist who plays God. He gave this really famous speech toward the end of his life where he talked about seeing the bomb detonate and how it reminded him of a line from the Bhagavad Gita.
Oppenheimer: It says, “Now I am become death, the destroyer worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Annalee: [00:15:24] So, like I said, here we come back to this scientist who knows that he played God, but he also feels incredibly guilty about it, and he’s wrecked, he's gutted by what he's done.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:36] Yeah. But of course, as an atheist, when people say playing God, I'm like, and who cares? I guess if you're gonna play God, you really need to wear like a big fluffy robe. I don't get why playing… it’s like playing any other character. I don't know.
[00:15:51] But, and then we see this turn, though, right? Like late 20th century, this kind of reckless wild scientist character suddenly kind of morphs into the innovators of Silicon Valley and we start to see figures like Steve Jobs and also comic book heroes like Tony Stark. They're sexy, charismatic showmen, and they're not tragic figures who are haunted by what they’ve done, except a little bit in the case of Tony Stark.
[00:16:17] You know, I talked to Christopher Cantwell who just wrote 25 issues of the Iron Man comic, about why Tony Stark has become such an icon in Silicon Valley and why so many people want to be like him.
Christopher: [00:16:31] Tony Stark checks all these boxes where it's like he's handsome. He's the most brilliant person in the room. He's the funniest person in the room. Like that comes from, I think Robert Downey Jr., more, right? He wasn't really that before, but.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:45] He was definitely not funny before Robert Downey Jr. I remember.
Christopher: [00:16:48] He was kind of stuffy and like Stan Lee even talked about the creation of that character. He was like, I wanna make somebody that it'll be so hard to identify with and be hard for an audience to empathize with as a superhero and see if it works, right? That was part of the character's incarnation of let's make a rich billionaire who really has kind of the cheat codes to life and turn him into a superhero. And give him all these flaws. Stan Lee thought that'd be a really difficult figure for people to wrap themselves around and identify with. And the funny thing is, it’s become, I think even now, it’s evolved into such an aspirational figure, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:31] And so it was interesting to kind of think about how Tony Stark actually has changed in the 21st century because the comics I grew up reading with Tony Stark, he's not that kind of charismatic figure. Like Christopher was saying, he's kind of a difficult figure for people to admire.
Annalee: [00:17:47] Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's fun to trace the history of Tony Stark because it kind of bridges the gap between like an Oppenheimer type guy who's really like a technocrat in some ways, and then he becomes this other thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:01] Yeah. Christopher and I talked a lot about how in the comics, especially in the 20th century comics, Tony is wracked with guilt about these weapons that his family helped to create. But also, he's this guy who has alcoholism. He has a huge alcoholism storyline where he ends up in a cardboard box and you know, they give him this foil, James Rhodes, Rhodey, who is also in the films and he's kind of the funny guy to Tony Stark's kind of uptight guy. So, I was curious to hear more about how Tony Stark has changed, and this is what Christopher Cantwell had to say.
Christopher: [00:18:36] He’s a blow hard in a way.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:39] Yeah.
Christopher: [00:18:39] You know what I mean? He’s a little humorless and like yeah. I mean those early issues, he's very serious. He's very scientific. He's very like, we need to do this.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:48] And you know, part of what was really interesting about that is this notion that people who kind of want to be Tony Stark. Like the thing you said about him being more of a tortured figure in the past and more of an Oppenheimer figure, that's kind of a core of his character.
[00:19:05] You see that in the first Iron Man movie more.
Annalee: [00:19:06] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:06] And so Christopher Cantwell was talking to me about how the people who really wanna be Tony Stark are the people who most misunderstand who Tony Stark actually is.
Christopher: [00:19:17] Go back to the original story of another scientist who may be as brilliant as Tony, who helps him build the suit. He didn't do that himself. Two men are in that cave.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:28] Right, right, right, right. There’s Professor Yinsen.
Christopher: [00:19:30] They both build that suit together and that man dies so that Tony can live in that suit and escape in that suit. And that is sometimes… I think a lot of people who celebrate Tony Stark in the wrong way forget that. That's a core tenant of that character.
[00:19:48] Right, and that he builds himself as a weapon in order to dismantle the weapons profiteering his father and those before him have built in the world, right? He is a weapon to end all weapons, which itself is a loaded concept, but it's infinitely more complex than, here's a handsome guy who has all the money, all the smarts, and he doesn't need anyone else in his life, and therefore he is safe. And he doesn't have to be afraid of being hurt by anyone else in the world, which I really feel is what all this masks is just massive wells of insecurity in people. And the fear to connect. The fear to actually connect. Right? Which is what technology can offer and promises, but is often refused and used for in the opposite way.
Annalee: [00:20:32] Yeah. It's so funny because I sort of feel like the, the life of Tony Stark in the comics and the movies really is about the rise of this trope in Silicon Valley of the difficult genius who now, as you said, and as Cantwell said, has left his guilt largely behind, or just doesn't focus on it a lot.
[00:20:53] He's not a romantic figure. He's more of a rogue. And of course rogues can be romantic, but they also can be thieves and just downright bad guys. And it's funny because I feel like there's this classic moment in a lot of mad science stories, especially from the 20th century where you have this lone figure of the scientist in his lab, it's almost always a guy, and he's rubbing his hands together and he's either talking to himself or to his Igor figure or to somebody he has in a cage who he's about to experiment on and he like gives his evil info dump where he is like, and at last, my plans to rule the world will come to fruition through building these glowing worms that she'll go into everyone's brains. And it's like this purely terrible guy alone in this place and now I feel like every movie with a difficult genius / mad scientist guy has to have a TED talk.
[00:21:54] And so instead of being off in the middle of your darkened lab with the glowing worms, you're on stage at TED and you're presenting your evil ideas to this adoring audience. And it's the same speech, right? It's the same. I'm going to build glowing worms. And like everyone is like, yay, standing ovation.
[00:22:11] There’s a great moment in the TV series, Orphan Black, where the evil mad scientist does an actual TED Talk and we hear about his awful plans of cloning and such. And we see it in the terrible movie Transcendence about brain uploading. There's a, there's a TED Talk in there. I feel like every, like, literally every mad scientist character has to have a TED Talk at some point.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:35] That’s how you know someone’s a genius, right? Is if they're giving a TED Talk and there's an audience that's like, “Yeah!” That's how you know they're a genius. That's usually where you get the info dump, and it's really true. You're so right that that speech that they used to give with lightning crackling around them in their lab, to rats—
Annalee: [00:22:53] To an audience of no one.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:55] To rats. There's rats listening. Now they give that speech to the TED audience and it's the same speech. It's just usually a little bit more zingy and there's like, “Yeah.” And “Hey, I'm making a joke.” And stuff. It's part of them becoming more charismatic, which is the thing that we're gonna really talk about.
[00:23:17] I think that part of the shift is what these difficult geniuses are creating. It used to be about, when you look at Frankenstein or Dr. Moreau, they were trying to rework our biology and change what it means to be human on a biological level. Or Oppenheimer is creating this super weapon, the atomic bomb, which also, I mean, sidebar, the Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner, is that guy, like explicitly he's creating this new kind of bomb and that's how he becomes the Hulk. And that is his whole story is about like, he did science that went too far and he's paying for it.
[00:23:54] But now it's about guys who are selling consumer electronics or software, basically.
Annalee: [00:23:59] Yeah, they've become hucksters or instead of being the guy in the lab, they're the head of sales, which is why I think Steve Jobs is such an important real-life person to think about in this context, because he really was… I mean, his genius was sales and product design, not technology. And yet he's still thought of as a technical genius, which I think is kind of hilarious.
[00:24:26] I think the thing that we have to keep in mind is that, over and over, the lesson that we get in these stories from science fiction that spill over into real life, is that the problem with the mad scientist or the difficult genius isn't the science or the genius part. It's the part where they abuse people or kill people en masse with a giant bomb. It's about how, even once you get into the consumer electronic space, these leaders are willing to mistreat their employees. To build their billionaire empires, they're willing to just destroy small companies with innovations. They'll just eat those companies up. And maybe these are people who do wanna do something helpful for science, but they wind up destroying things rather than making them better.
[00:25:13] And you go from someone like Oppenheimer, who’s mourning the way he's broken the world to a Silicon Valley credo, which is that breaking things is awesome. And that's just this huge, huge shift.
[00:25:29] And after the break, we're gonna talk about how the difficult genius of Silicon Valley is breaking the world and whether he's ever gonna feel guilty about it.
[00:25:39] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:18] Okay, so as we talked about in the first half, the miserable, gloomy, mad scientist who's kind of in his slimy lab somewhere in a decaying castle, has been replaced with this kind of bouncy, cute asshole who is charismatic and kinda lovable, like you think Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man movies. And you think about some of these other stories of lovable obnoxious jerks who know everything.
[00:26:47] So why, obviously, this can be a little annoying in some cases, but why does it actually matter? Why should we care?
Annalee: [00:26:52] I mean, I think the first reason is that it's a huge distortion of history. Science and technology are not created by one person sitting in a room saying, whoa, I figured it out. It’s always a team effort, a huge team effort. And when we see this idea of this inspiring genius, this one man who mythically develops a brand-new technology, it completely erases the work of all of the real people who are doing the innovation. And in fact, these are people who are not even really geniuses, they're just people with lots of money who lead companies. And so, the “difficult genius” idea, I think, basically erases workers, which is a form of abuse. Erasure is abuse, and I think erasing people is what allows you to abuse them.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:48] For sure. I mean, if you're taking credit for their contributions, if you're not giving them credit, it's just one step beyond that to kind of treat them as disposable to screw them over in various ways, to make their lives miserable.
[00:28:02] And when I talked to Christopher Cantwell about this, about he co-created this show, Halt and Catch Fire about the history of the early computer industry, and—
Annalee: [00:28:11] I love that show so much.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:13] --tech industry, it's such a wonderful show and it really explores a lot of these things at a very deep level and is based in real history.
Annalee: [00:28:20] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:20] And he kind of talked to me about how the history of tech is not about a single genius innovator, but it's actually about a whole ton of people working on things, including people who may be lost out.
Christopher: [00:28:31] That's the history, right? Because then, that's the reality of it, I think, is that there's some kind of concept in the ether that everyone is chasing and not knowing exactly how to get there, to the finish line.
[00:28:42] In American culture, in American business culture and in capitalist culture, the idea of the loser has become such a pejorative label that, especially in tech, is fascinating to me. So much of the work of the progress is done by those who might be at the end considered the “losers” who don't end up Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, right? Jeff Bezos or whoever. That there are so many other people who build something like that, that it really is this kind of collective effort in the industry and in the in the field, in terms of innovation.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:23] Now, I love that idea that actually the “losers” are often people who really made something possible.
Annalee: [00:29:32] Yeah, I think that's one of my favorite parts of Halt and Catch Fire, which I highly recommend that people check out, because it really does get into the ways that these innovations come from people who get forgotten. And then there's just some really charismatic dude who's like, oh, I can figure out how to sell this and get money.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:51] Yeah, and often it's just about luck, right? And he talked to me a lot about how there are stories that we're just starting to kind of know more about the people who made huge contributions, but they were never celebrated before.
Christopher: [00:30:04] Everybody has an iPhone, but the stories of the Apple One and the Home Brew Computer Club, and some of these other people and like the, the woman who designed Centipede, the arcade game and all of this stuff and Grace Hopper and these people that are now rising more to the fore. I think it's important because it challenges the singular, rugged individual myth, which is largely a myth. And I think that's important in terms of an increasingly kind of fractured, bifurcated society and culture we're living in now, to see how much of what we have and enjoy and aspire to is due to collective effort as opposed to just one single person. That said, like, there is a lot to be said for Steve Jobs, for Bill Gates, for Walt Disney, for these people that can come in and guide something through the chaos of not knowing what something's going to become, what the outcome's gonna be like, navigate that fog of war is pretty amazing.
Annalee: [00:31:18] It's true that these are amazing leaders and there's no doubt that they did transform the world. They broke the world in some ways. People like Steve Jobs, but later people like Mark Zuckerberg and the founders of Google and lots of these companies that altered how we relate to each other, how we do business. But it doesn't justify the bad behavior of these CEOs and powerful scientists. And I feel like the myth of someone like Steve Jobs, for example, really plays into the idea that we should just let these guys be as crappy as possible because somehow their genius is saving us from a dark unenlightened past or maybe preventing us from heading into a dangerous future. But really all they're doing is glorifying themselves. They're hiding behind this myth, and we're helping them hide behind this myth by continuing to prop them up as “difficult geniuses” instead of just crappy dudes who are abusing their employees.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:27] Yeah, and you can be both. I mean, that's the heartbreaking thing that we saw with a lot of artists. That someone can create really terrific art and also be kind of a horrible person. And those are both true, but also sometimes you could create better stuff if you weren't such a jerk. Obviously, you saw that with Arianna Huffington, kind of excusing all the misbehavior of Travis Kalanick and others at Uber.
Annalee: [00:32:53] Yeah. Although I would say part of this transformation that we've seen from the mad scientist figure to the difficult genius figure, it moves away from someone who is actually creating a thing, right? Like, a Frankenstein or an atomic bomb and towards someone who is advertising a service. A lot of these companies, they are inventing new technologies, but like Uber is not a new technology. It's a new service using very old technology, I mean, relatively old technology.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:28] I mean, the main innovation was that you could see where your driver was in real time, which did feel miraculous at first, and then it became really weird and oppressive at a certain point.
Annalee: [00:33:38] Yeah, I mean, I felt like it was convenient at first. Was it world changing? Like, is it gonna resurrect someone who's dead? I don't think so.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:49] It was one of many things that was just kind of more convenient and using the smartphone in a way that kind of like, oh, this thing that was more complicated used to be simpler, but also there was a hidden cost.
Annalee: [00:34:00] Yeah. And the hidden cost—
Charlie Jane: [00:34:01] In terms of the people who are being—
Annalee: [00:34:04] Yeah, the hidden cost always turns out to be the workers. And I mean, the workers, the gig workers who are created by something like Uber. We're just picking on Uber right now. But there's lots of other apps where you could say the same thing. And also, it's about how these billionaires with huge companies treat their employees. We mentioned at the top how movements like #MeToo revealed all this predatory behavior, all this abusive behavior. But not just sexual harassment. I mean, these are just abusive bosses in general.
[00:34:38] I should add, this isn't just men doing these things. There's a straight line between Sheryl Sandberg's, “lean in” idea and Elon Musk’s notion of being “hardcore” at Twitter. Both “lean in” and “hardcore” are about working harder, obeying the boss, and not questioning the system. And I remember when the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, who used to be an executive at Facebook, that became a huge meme, especially among women working in Silicon Valley and other professional fields that had been dominated by men. And the whole idea was, don't join a union, don't become part of a feminist movement. Instead, just work twice as hard as every dude and prove yourself.
[00:35:22] And I'm like, no, that is not the right answer. But that is—
Charlie Jane: [00:35:26] Nope!
Annalee: [00:35:26] But that is what Elon Musk wants his employees to do at Twitter. So, I really think it's all part of the same myth. The
“difficult genius” is on top, the workers are “leaning in” and being “hardcore,” and the system works great, except of course it doesn't. The system is terrible.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:43] Yeah, and I think that this kind of leads us to the question of progress, right? Because I feel like there's this moment where we kind of stopped believing that progress was inevitable or an unalloyed good. That kind of coincides with this kind of tech savior who's supposed to come along. And it plays into things like the singularity and other stuff where tech is going to save us from the dark side of progress because we're gonna advance so fast that we're gonna leapfrog over all the environmental and other damage we've done, and we're gonna talk more about that in forthcoming episodes.
[00:36:15] But, basically, we stopped being so obsessed with this notion of the scientist who makes progress in science but pays a huge personal price, like Frankenstein or Moreau or Oppenheimer. And instead, we started fantasizing about this figure of the manic pixie wonderboy, who's going to save us from the bad effects of progress by coming up with some miraculous new thing that's gonna fix everything.
Annalee: [00:36:39] Oh my God, I love the manic pixie wonderboy. I wanna watch like a really mean anime about that person, now. It is true that this plays into our idea of who's gonna lead us into progress. And it's funny because right now in Silicon Valley, it feels a little bit like progress… it’s not dead, but it's kind of slowing down. Like Moore's Law turned out to be more of a Moore's suggestion.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:11] Well, it was true for a long time, but then it hit an actual… [crosstalk].
Annalee: [00:37:16] I guess Moore's law became like Moore's previous law which is now no longer the law.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:23] It was true for a while, there, yeah.
Annalee: [00:37:24] But Moore's law was a kind of metaphor for what we expected Silicon Valley would do for us. And you have people like Ray Kurtzweil, you know, writing books about the singularity, where he's like, Moore's Law for everything. Everything is gonna be Moore Lawed, if you could turn that into a verb.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:39] We need more Moore’s.
Annalee: [00:37:43] Yeah. It's gonna have some Moore’s.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:46] We’re gonna sandwich all the progress together until it’s s’Moore’s law. Yes, exactly.
Annalee: [00:37:50] But actually—
Charlie Jane: [00:37:51] Chocolate progress, marshmallow… anyway.
Annalee: [00:37:54] I know, I'm excited about chocolate progress. But that in a sense, you know, what you're saying about like, we're gonna have better chocolate and better marshmallows. That is sort of like the principle behind like gadget fetishism as progress. There’s this idea that you’re gonna have something that's even shinier and tastier. And I remember back in 2015 when I took over Gizmodo, which was a gadget blog that was extremely popular and well read. And I was talking with previous folks who had run Gizmodo especially during like the early 21st century. And a lot of them said things to me like, gadget fetishism is kind of over. Well, we have computers in our pockets, but that’s just kind of normal now. And yeah. I just feel like the miraculousness is gone. And so now we wanna put even more emotional energy into these “difficult geniuses” because they're the ones who are kind of hyping us up and convincing us that yeah, there's another cool thing around the corner. Maybe it's cryptocurrency. Maybe it's AI.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:03] Yeah. And you know, I mean I feel like around that same time that the sort of gadget fetishism was fading. There was all this hype about the smart home and the smart home was gonna be this wonderful thing and that's ended up not really panning out. I feel like a lot of that stuff was rolled out and is now being unrolled out. It’s really interesting and I feel like we're at an interesting moment in our relationship to progress.
[00:39:26] When I talked to Christopher Cantwell about this, he suggested that this toxic notion of the lone genius who's gonna save us all has actually helped to make the internet worse. It's resulted in an internet that isolates us instead of bringing us together and helping us to understand each other the way that we thought it would.
Christopher: [00:39:45] I find the internet so specious in its current incarnations and I have a very wary viewpoint of technology. I think that the joy of Halt and Catch Fire was here are characters who are zealous and believe what they want to do, and they want to change the world and it's all coming from a good place.
[00:40:09] It really was. I had those early conversations with Lee Pace about how Joe is many things, but he's not a snake oil salesman. He's not selling a lie. He really does believe in what he's doing. I think what was unspoken in the show for the most part, was that we knew these people would be a part of a massive sea change akin to the discovery of fire.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:32] Mm-hmm.
Christopher: [00:40:32] But that there is now no off switch to where we are. There's no going back. We went so fast and so hard into it, just like Tony, that now we're knee deep into it and there's no way to course correct. There's just pure inertia carrying us forward, and I think the most dangerous thing about leaning so hard into the Steve Jobs cult or the Tony Stark mold is that you get someone who will be purely selfish and solipsistic everything else will cease to exist to them other than their own advancement.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:16] And Cantwell talked a lot to me about how this selfishness and this kind of solipsism leads to technology that drives us apart instead of bringing us together. Because tech companies figured out that anger and toxic conversations drive more engagement and are more addictive.
Christopher: [00:41:33] Then you get an internet that is not a collective, you get an internet that is furthering your own selfish consciousness.
Annalee: [00:41:41] think that is a great note to end on. Farewell to the “difficult genius.”
Charlie Jane: [00:41:49] Thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us wherever you find podcasts and if you've just stumbled upon us, you can subscribe in all the places. If you like us, please leave a review. It makes a huge difference. And you can also find us on Mastodon at @ouropinions and on Patreon, at @ouropinionsarecorrect and on TikTok at @ouropinionsarecorrect, and Instagram at @ouropinions. And thanks so much to Veronica Simonetti, our heroic audio producer. Thanks so much to Chris Palmer for our wonderful music. And you know, we'll talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll be hanging out with you in Discord. Bye!
Annalee: [00:42:26] Bye!
[00:42:30] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.