America's infatuation with boy geniuses and ‘Great Men' is ruining us

The Guardian

5 hours ago

One Saturday in the spring of 2021, a little achy after receiving our first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, my husband and I decided to stay in bed and click on the first thing suggested to us by our TV. It was WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, a documentary produced by Hulu about the New York startup WeWork's spectacular fall from grace. The film mostly chronicles the misdeeds of founder Adam Neumann, the surfer-dude dolt who turned a good idea – co-working spaces that lease small offices to tech startups – into a surreally overvalued conglomerate, before he made a mortifying attempt to take the company public that eventually ended in his forced resignation. As a consolation prize, Neumann infamously received a $1.7bn golden parachute.
The WeWork cautionary tale is partly about slick marketing, which is what seems to have convinced its investors that it was a tech startup. Neumann tried to position WeWork as something much more than a real estate company: he borrowed the tech industry's idealistic language about changing the world but upped the ante, insisting that the company's sole mission was 'elevat[ing] the world's consciousness'.
This is a smart idea when trying to keep billionaire investors' money spigots flowing. A real estate flipper has a finite worth, based on markets, profits and expenses, but a company that 'elevates the world's consciousness', well, who knows where they might go with it? There is evidence, though, that WeWork executives were starting to buy into their own marketing – to get high, so to speak, on their own supply. As Gabriel Sherman writes in Vanity Fair, Neumann was known to make insane pronouncements about 'wanting to be elected president of the world, live forever, and become humanity's first trillionaire'. When SoftBank CEO and future WeWork investor Masayoshi Son met Neumann, he asked him: 'In a fight, who wins – the smart guy or the crazy guy?' 'Crazy guy,' Neumann answered.
WeWork pushed its romantic origin story, which involved Neumann and co-founder Miguel McKelvey's idyllic childhoods thousands of miles apart: Neumann on a kibbutz in Israel, McKelvey on a hippie commune in Oregon. From this formative experience of communal living, so the story went, they created WeWork – what Neumann described with the impossible concept of the 'capitalist kibbutz'.
These canned origin stories are what passes for good storytelling in an age when we are eager to swallow anything tech jams down our throats. And tech is only the most recent phenomenon that has made us simps for narratives about powerful men and how they got that way. This is a tendency that seems rooted particularly in American DNA, one that has been exploited for centuries to rope people into wars, cults and scams – with our unjust societal status quo being the greatest scam of all. Our obsession with brute power has gotten us where we are now, a system where nearly 100% of American wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few men, one of whom has ascended to the highest political office (twice!) to become our very own authoritarian strongman.
Neumann fashioned himself after the spiritual tech-guy archetype, like the shadow side of Jack Dorsey from Twitter, whose Buddhist renunciation act contrasted dissonantly with the famously toxic website he founded. But Neumann has his own shadow in Billy McFarland, the con artist laughingstock who took entrepreneurial speculative fiction to Icarian heights with his Fyre festival. The 26-year-old McFarland and the rapper Ja Rule went all in on a pipe dream to hold a luxury music festival on what was once Pablo Escobar's private island in the Bahamas. Marketing the festival on social media was their sole concern – they reportedly paid Kendall Jenner $250,000 for an Instagram post – when it could have been food, bathrooms and housing for their 5,000 ticket holders.
When their guests arrived, instead of luxury villas on a deserted private island, they found hurricane tents and inflatable mattresses on a residential construction site. The privileged would-be concertgoers spent a terrifying night of Lord of the Flies-style chaos in the tents before the festival was canceled, prompting schadenfreude the likes of which Twitter had rarely seen.
I'm not saying that McFarland, who was released in 2022 after serving four years in prison for fraud, is the same as any other tech entrepreneur, but it's easy to see how the tech market draws con artists like roaches to grease. For one thing, McFarland was punished not for defrauding his customers – whom he put in serious danger, in addition to stealing their money – but his billionaire investors. Once again, the flows and reversals of capital float above real life, with all our ant-like obsession with cause and effect and human suffering.
One of Silicon Valley's most dearly held and deleterious myths is of its boy geniuses. McFarland reportedly idolized Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and I would be willing to bet that he styled himself not only on the real Zuckerberg but on Zuckerberg as he was fictionalized by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in 2010's The Social Network, one of the most influential documents in shaping the narrative of Web 2.0. My husband and I also watched The Social Network while laid up from the vaccine. I had never seen it before, and more than 10 years after it was made amid a tech backlash with its target squarely on Zuckerberg and Facebook, I found the movie's tone strange, as it portrayed Zuckerberg as a manipulative misogynist who is nevertheless one of the visionary geniuses of our times. As Zadie Smith pointed out in her 2010 essay on the film, Generation Why?, this does not really conform with what we know of Zuckerberg, who is so bland that his only explanation for why he invented Facebook, beyond a mystical fixation on the word 'connection', is that he liked 'building things'.
The unwitting assault on democracy, community and the human sense of self by a bunch of college sophomores who liked building things is not a bad story, but it's clear why it is not the one that Sorkin chose. As Mark Harris wrote in New York magazine in 2010, the film's central narrative question could be stated as: 'What exactly does it mean to be an asshole?' Women in the film's first and last beats tell Zuckerberg that he either is or isn't an asshole, and in the intervening two hours, he confidently fucks people over like an oblivious poster in the Am I the Asshole? subreddit.
But this does not make him a villain; it is more of his tragic flaw. One must imagine that Elon Musk has done some of this same rationalizing as he has gone from being hailed as the real-life Iron Man to his new role as Twitter's head troll and eviscerator of the American federal government at Doge. Moving fast and breaking things means some people will think you're an asshole. Or maybe you have to be an asshole to be effective – assholes are the real good guys! Harris innocently reports in New York that Sorkin and the film's director, David Fincher, relate to Zuckerberg, having 'been at some point in their professional lives on the receiving end of the word asshole'. The Social Network's alternate title could be Sympathy for the Asshole, having been created by a team of men who have internalized the myth of their own temperamental genius and are intoxicated by stories of others who have done the same.
This is a favorite theme of Sorkin, who has become the go-to screenwriter for contemporary 'Great Man' stories. His Steve Jobs, from the biopic Steve Jobs, is a total dick, questioning his daughter's paternity in the national press and screwing over his collaborators and mentors. And still his genius is assured, if ineffable: in one scene, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak blows up at Jobs, telling him: 'How come 10 times in a day, I read Steve Jobs is a genius? What do you do?' Jobs's response is that his inability to write code is irrelevant since he is like a conductor, 'play[ing] the orchestra', coordinating technicians under his sweeping business vision.
Tech founders' self-belief is broadcast by the geniuses they name their businesses after: Tesla is a conspicuous example, and Apple is, of course, a nod to Isaac Newton. Steve Jobs and The Social Network are full of mini-monologues about the future of computing and the lives of historical Great Men like Alan Turing, creating little biopics within biopics.
Intelligence is signified in Sorkin's work by simply knowing a lot of facts, and his nerd heroes are often being asked difficult trivia questions so that they can answer them correctly, like the sixth-grade brownnosers they once were. As Joan Didion said of Woody Allen's characters in 1979: 'They reflect exactly the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class,' but at least Allen's characters are just dilettante writers with teenage girlfriends, not the supposed incarnations of the spirit of American innovation. This juvenile intelligence and ruthlessness seem to go hand in hand. One of the leitmotifs of Sorkin's tech biopics is, as I am sure he read on brainyquote.com: 'Great artists steal.' Zuckerberg and Jobs in his movies are defiant about their practice of plundering other people's hard work. This Sorkin does not exactly share with them, since his biopics are ahistorical fantasies, telling stories that are mostly Sorkin's own invention.
'I'm really weak when it comes to plot,' Sorkin told New York. 'With nothing to stop me, I'll write pages and pages of snappy dialogue that don't add up to anything.' By seizing on poetic license, he can push those popular narratives even further, plating up the Zuckerberg and Jobs of our dreams, our very own assholes to rival the assholes of history such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. Sorkin's appeal is not to artistic ingenuity but national pride, creating corporate propaganda so satisfying that his lines from The Social Network have become tech truisms – 'we lived on farms, then we lived in cities, now we're going to live on the internet' – reshaping reality around itself.
I can admit that this version of the Facebook story is easier to face than the truth. As Smith writes in Generation Why?, Facebook was a haphazard invention, with little thought given to its look or function, reducing all of us in the end to the 19-year-old who invented it. There is a strange resonance with Smith's unanswerable questions – 'Why? Why Facebook? … Why do it like that?' she asks. The granddaddy of all tech scams, Enron, the energy provider turned online trading marketplace whose unironic motto was: 'Ask why.' In addition to wreaking havoc on Texas and California energy sectors (damage that, in our climate change–addled present, we are still suffering from), Enron's executives were maestros of fake accounting, hiding billions of dollars in debt to keep the firm's stock price high before its epic collapse in 2001. The definitive book on the Enron scandal, adapted into a documentary with the same name, is called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and its executives loved to congratulate themselves for their intelligence, casting it as the means to justify any sordid ends.
In a Sorkinist reading of history, American progress is safe-guarded because the assholes we endow with great power are inoculated with visionary genius. But intelligence, popularly taken to mean devious cleverness or maybe just privilege, has never been synonymous with moral goodness, and we should no longer blindly celebrate people for so low and ambiguous a bar as 'changing the world'. Why? Why Facebook? Why Enron? Why is our economy an unregulated wasteland of self-dealing, where theft is not an aberration but the very foundation of the world's greatest fortunes? Musk has become the archetypal tech founder not only for his passion for self-beatification – he revived the dream of space travel! And he makes electric cars! – but now also for his Dr Evil-style eccentricity and megalomania, essentially buying control of the federal government, which he spent four months haphazardly decimating.
Tech is only the latest sector to take cover in the American mania for founder myths, with the virtual requirement that they be mostly made up. (Elizabeth Holmes, the sociopathic founder of the fraudulent medical startup Theranos and one of Silicon Valley's few girl geniuses, courted investors with a falsified sob story about her uncle dying of skin cancer.) This narrative impulse comes from our own epic origin story, our misplaced pride in the genius of the founding fathers that has become one of the main stagnating forces of American government.
Our stubborn American social structure, where wealth and political power are so ludicrously concentrated, was seemingly incarnated in the founders, some of the smartest guys of the 18th century, whose inspiring opening salvo, a poetic ode to all men being created equal, was maybe more marketing than actual game plan. With this, they got the foreign policy apparatus of France to buy into what might be the most ambitious and visionary startup venture of all time: the United States of America. The figures of the founders are narcotizing antidotes to the reformer spirit; depictions of them as revolutionaries foreclose any further revolution as redundant. It is no wonder they are foisted on us by the entire spectrum of cultural gatekeepers, including politicians, publishing, Disney, the Tonys, the Grammys and the Pulitzer prize.
Why else would we be so taken in by the romanticized story of our most corrupt and problematic founding father? Yes, you know the one.
Lin-Manuel Miranda got the idea for his musical Hamilton when he bought a copy of Ron Chernow's biography of the founding father at the airport. 'When I encountered Alexander Hamilton I was immediately captivated,' Miranda said. 'He's an inspirational figure to me. And an aspirational one.' Miranda has popularized the fantasy that Hamilton's was a New York immigrant story, like those of Miranda's parents, who moved to New York from Puerto Rico. But Hamilton was not an immigrant as we now think of them: he did move to New York from the Caribbean, but as an English citizen moving between two of England's colonies. (Despite having American citizenship, Puerto Ricans living in the United States are seen as more 'foreign' than Hamilton would have been.) And disregarding rumors kicked up by the musical's popularity, he was white.
Miranda's casting of the founding fathers with Black and Hispanic actors was a stroke of genius, since it clouded Hamilton's politics in a confusion so profound that few people felt like questioning them. One might even forget to notice that the musical portrays no actual people of color. As the historian Lyra D Monteiro wrote in The Public Historian, Hamilton repackages the same myths of the founders that we have received from time immemorial, particularly the myth that white men were the only people of any importance living in America during this time.
Despite his overtures to the subjectivity of history, with the final song in Hamilton repeating the question: 'Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?' Miranda misses the irony – that he has perpetuated a narrative by white men about white men, because the founder biography is an essentially white genre, especially the ones you can buy at the airport.
Maybe I'm crazy, but as I sat down to watch the live version made available on Disney+, I assumed that a hip-hop musical about the founding fathers would be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, poking holes in our pieties about the founders. Instead, I watched a very long and self-serious biography of Hamilton, with a sentimentality about its subject worthy of the Walt Disney Company. This combination – a performance of diversity crossed with the familiar sanding down of the sharper edges of American history – makes Hamilton 'one of the most brilliant propaganda pieces in theatrical history', as Matt Stoller writes, and one, if Disney has anything to say about it, that will be shown to schoolchildren annually for the rest of forever.
Stoller's essay The Hamilton Hustle from the Baffler is an exhaustive and illuminating rundown of all of Alexander Hamilton's faults and misdeeds. Hamilton not only was in favor of centralized government but was vehemently anti-democracy, calling the American people 'a great beast'. Instead, he envisioned a United States run by an elite coalition of wealthy financiers and military officers, and much of his career was dedicated to fucking over the small farmers who formed the majority of the American population. And while Chernow presents Hamilton as an abolitionist, he married into a family of slaveholders and sold enslaved people himself.
Hamilton's authoritarianism had long-lasting effects, eviscerating the economic power of the middle classes and creating stratification and inequality that we still recognize today. It is baffling that educated, progressive people so willingly accepted Miranda's fairytale about the father of modern finance so soon after the 2008 financial crisis, in which the craven stupidity of Wall Street bankers nearly caused global economic collapse. But this may be exactly why Hamilton was such a phenomenon. As Stoller writes, Hamilton is so resilient a figure in the American popular consciousness that 'the shifting popular image of Hamilton is itself a gauge of the relative strength of democratic institutions at any given moment'– that is, the more popular Hamilton is, the less healthy American democracy is.
Hamilton the musical exemplifies a familiar leftist critique of contemporary liberalism: that the appearance of progress, particularly involving narratives about 'strong women' and 'breaking down historic barriers', stands in for the real thing. With this frame, Hamilton is the quintessential Obama-era document, with Obama's secretary of the treasury, Timothy Geithner, calling Hamilton the 'original Mr Bailout'. Geithner's blanket bailout of the big banks, with the architects of the financial crisis going totally unpunished, was a travesty we are only beginning to reckon with, but one thing it did for certain is pass the baton of bank-friendly economic policies between the Bush and Obama administrations, with Obama's innovation being an even closer relationship with tech founders, the titans of our new Gilded Age.
Barack and Michelle Obama have said of their greatest strength: 'One way of looking at what we've both been doing for the last 20 years, maybe most of our careers, was to tell stories.' This is true, and they are maybe a little too good at it. Maybe this is why I am a bit grumpy about the Obamas' choice to start a film and TV production company with their post-White House popularity, moving decisively into the realm where they have always most excelled: celebrity. Their company is called Higher Ground Productions, which they claim is an ode to Stevie Wonder, but this phrase inevitably evokes Michelle Obama's catchphrase on the 2016 campaign trail: 'When they go low, we go high.' This policy of tight-lipped civility was no match for the emergency of the Trump moment – it's embarrassing when one thinks of how low we have sunk from there – but it was a savvy act of image preservation, one that ensured that the Obamas would weather the Trump era unscathed, no matter if the rest of us will.
Just as it is for Silicon Valley founders, for the Obamas, 'good storytelling' is synonymous with good branding. And, of course, big streaming companies such as Netflix, whom the Obamas' production company signed an eight-figure deal with in 2018, do not see their 'content' as separate from the demands of marketing. To them, good stories are the ones people want to hear because they've heard them before, thus the knockoffs they produce of all their most popular shows: iterating, iterating, iterating. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
Since I wrote the first draft of this piece in 2021, there have been so many tech scandals and meltdowns that I have been able to shoehorn in only a few of them here, and it is interesting how we seem to have as healthy an appetite for stories of tech villains as those of tech founders. Sam Bankman-Fried makes a great story whether he's the barefoot CEO giving all his money away or the incompetent crook gambling with his investors' savings. We love Musk whether he's exploring space or destroying Twitter (now X) and the American administrative state. It's the ultimate postmodern nightmare, where truth and taste are not only contested but irrelevant.
One simple reason that documentaries have abounded in the past 10 years – particularly notable was the release of two competing Fyre festival documentaries at the exact same time – is because of the amount of video footage that now exists of basically everyone since the rise of reality television and the iPhone. Social media feeds exemplify the total victory of spectacle over argument, a stream of unlimited, barely distinguishable content, narrativeless and authored by everyone. We look at the dominance of social media apps and start seeking the Great Men behind them, completely ignoring the billions of users who have donated their time, confessions and creativity to make them compelling.
One sees this startlingly with HBO's documentary series Q: Into the Storm, which seeks out the men behind the mega-conspiracy theory QAnon. The documentary film-maker Cullen Hoback had remarkable access to Jim and Ron Watkins, the father-son duo in the Philippines who ran the anonymous message board 8chan, where Q, a supposed 'deep-state' operative, posted warnings of a cabal of powerful pedophiles who can only be stopped by a heroic President Donald Trump. Hoback comes to the same conclusion that many other journalists already have, that Ron Watkins had been writing Q's posts since 2017, and that both Jim and Ron had heavy interests in promoting QAnon.
But Q was never one person: Ron Watkins did not originate the persona, and the anonymous message board that was QAnon's birthplace was crucial for its development, as a kind of collaborative fiction written by a web of different authors. QAnon is a case study in the power of emergence, though it is all in service to perhaps the least deserving and most powerful Great Man on the planet: Trump. In terms of sheer people power, it acts like a microcosm of social media or even the United States itself, this concentration of human ingenuity misdirected to benefit people who are already rich and powerful. This is another way of saying, as my Marxist brother tells me, that workers create value, even as regular people have so little power in this time of inequality, price increases, stagnant wages, environmental injustice and war.
The current billionaire class has more power than any human beings have ever had, and they wield it with remarkably little responsibility. Billionaires must be cut down to size through every means possible, from breaking up monopolies to tax reform to financial regulation to union drives. But we also need to stop swallowing these Great Man stories whole and recognize them for what they are: an ideology of dominance. I do not exaggerate when I say that this ideology is not only impoverishing the narratives available to us but endangering human lives and the future of civilization.
But the wheel is beginning to turn. Tech billionaires' public image is in the toilet, with these former 'visionaries' seeming ever more embarrassing, monomaniacal, shortsighted and pathetic. This is true of Trump, too, whose bizarre and ever-changing tariff policies led to awful approval ratings almost as soon as his second term started. Of course, we could have said this in the fall of 2024, too, when he was making rambling speeches about Hannibal Lecter and interrupting campaign events to sway sleepily to Ave Maria – none of which was enough to cost him the election.
The fickle winds of marketing may finally be blowing against these self-styled Great Men, but they know more keenly than anyone that all publicity is good publicity: McFarland was recently back in the news, capitalizing on the attention garnered by his notorious failures, claiming he wanted to host a Fyre festival 2. It will take more than our disapproval to stop them all from failing up like Neumann, who was so incompetent that he got paid more than a billion dollars to quit his job.
Who wins, the smart guy or the crazy guy? The crazy guy, and he's getting crazier every day.
Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession and Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse, out this month. This essay was adapted from Culture Creep courtesy of Mariner Books, HarperCollins Publishers