Will more software save us?

Probably not!

Pixabay

If you’re looking for something tremendously bleak to read today, might I suggest Child’s Play? It’s a dispatch from the current Silicon Valley scene by Sam Kriss that begins with a clever sentence: “The first sign that something in San Francisco had gone very badly wrong was the signs.” What follows is a contrast between some absurd billboards hanging over the city and the public and intersecting issues of homelessness and mental health directly beneath them, then a close portrait of Chungin “Roy” Lee, Eric Zhu, and “donald boat”—college-age guys who run startups or laps around titans of industry to extract value from them.

I would understand if a long, depressing essay about the young people making millions off of an industry’s current thirst for “agentic” founders isn’t your vibe at the moment, given that there are plenty of ways to achieve the same bummer feeling in a much shorter word count—as low as zero! Go to nytimes.com or wsj.com! Open TikTok or X! Et cetera! Still, I think Kriss’ piece is well worth the read, because as someone who works in tech and likes to think he’s pretty up on the cultural pulse, going through it myself was actually something of a shock. Maybe that’s because I’m 35, and as Kriss writes, in the eyes of these gen Z founders, “a thirty-five-year-old wouldn’t be expected to know how to use anything more advanced than a rotary phone.” It’s good to be reminded of what you don’t know, even if it’s completely ridiculous, even if it makes you want to run as far away as you can from it.

Lee, Zhu, and “boat” don’t seem like bad people. They just seem aggressive and chaotic and insecure. In other words, young. I don’t take issue with the first two being ZEOs—lots of CEOs are bad regardless of their age—but channeling millions toward cheating on everything and sperm racing seems like a questionable use of capital, even when venture capitalists are eager to provide the funding. It sort of screams “the world is messed up, so let’s just make some money off of it while possibly making things worse in the process.” This is a bummer! I don’t want it to exist, so maybe I should just ignore it?

I wrestle a lot with the eternal question of how best to stay informed without getting bogged down by the world’s goings-on or the way they’re presented. It strikes me after reading this essay that an even better question might be how best to contribute toward building a world you want to live in. Yes. This is at least more proactive, which could be a cure for one of my biggest pet peeves that also happens to be a trap I fall into myself occasionally: circular complaining.

The cycle goes like this: something isn’t as I would like it to be, I get irritated or frustrated about it, I complain to a safe audience, I try to do something about it, either that effort isn’t enough or the issue is much bigger than just me, I get irritated or frustrated, I complain some more. This can go on for quite some time—a lifetime, even, if you approach challenges the same way regardless of what shape they take. It happens. We’re all human.

But, yeah. How to step off of the cycle once you sense you’re on it? If you’re in tech, the answer is simple: build something. In spirit, I’m what we like to call “aligned” with this take in the biz. In practice, or I should say the way I see it practiced, this behavior often plays out as problematic or outright bad for society. We know this. It looks like hating on social media platforms and building your own platform that becomes the same thing. It looks like worry over the safety approach at your AI company turning into endless new AI companies that also have to confront safety in the context of an industry that prioritizes growth at speed. It looks like building an app to help you connect with people in person, because you’re lonely after years of neglecting your relationships to focus on working in tech. It is, perhaps despite the best intentions, an unpleasant cycle of its own.

Listen, I’m certainly getting my ass in gear to engage ever-more meaningfully in the AI-first shift that threatens all of us knowledge workers. I’m getting better at Python, I’m sharpening my vibe prototyping and coding skills, I’m even futzing with the new capabilities of agentic (!) AI tools like OpenClaw. But I do this in the context of ideas that excite me, not simply to be in the mix of some frenetic, frivolous race to the bottom. This isn’t a subtle swipe at AI—I’m genuinely fascinated by its explosion and want to continue working on it. It’s a less-than-subtle swipe at techno-utopianism, which has powered much of that explosion. The idea that technological advancement will solve all of our problems isn’t just ignorant, it’s false. People don’t need more software. They need to be more human.

This would be the perfect time to segue into pitching my startup idea, whether seriously or as a joke. But don’t worry, I don’t have a startup and this isn’t a shitpost. It is, earnestly, a plea to go a little further than the call to touch grass. To become more human, whether you like technology or not, you need to recognize that the only way to connect, to feel connected, and to live and breath and experience life as a human is to…nurture that which makes you human. Go for a walk. Meet someone for coffee. Stand in line for something you want to do. Embrace boredom and awkwardness and things not fitting together. Make stuff. Feel good. Feel bad. Let feelings pass. Work hard. Challenge your mind. Challenge your body. Grow!

And if you come away with only one thing from this 1,000-word essay that you read online, let it be this: no one knows exactly what will save us, but it’s definitely not more software.

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