Scroll through today, past, and X photograph As I watched Kamala Harris, wearing her Apple earbuds and holding her phone to the side of her head as she dodged reporters' questions, I realized why I called her the first cyborg candidate, the first word cloud candidate.
Then I remembered Apple Vision Pro. Remember that? I remembered the semi-viral video that accompanied the original pitch for this lame product: a bunch of tech dudes wearing it, driving a Cybertruck, walking through a mall and dramatically swiping at windows and apps that only they could see.Beast ModeA style that makes the most of devices in the technological world.
The main aim of the Kamala Sect is to completely free the people from all proper political education and reflection, and to free them from the difficult details of self-governance.
But no one would mistake Harris for a founder — not the founder of a company, a nation, or even a cult, despite the fandom that has been built around her.
Critics like Twain and Mencken might argue that America has been run by cult leaders — the socio-economic equivalent of a diet of vodka and Red Bull — for too long, dangerously long. Today, the secret is mostly out, and (as we covered in Return earlier this year) much of tech is about unearthing talented cult leaders and “funding” them in the same way that powerful corporations and family offices “fund” lawyers. So today, many technologists and aspiring technologists are labeling their businesses as cults and explicitly positioning themselves as cult leaders.
It's up to the reader to consider how fascinatingly the dark world of evil and espionage intertwines with the realm of cults, and how long that might last.
Meanwhile, cults rarely work as good business. That's why, over the past quarter century or so, the relationship between cults and workplaces on the East Coast has run in the opposite direction from the West Coast: HR's goal is to turn companies into cults, not the other way around. So there's a certain logic to the tech industry defusing the whole cult thing by refocusing on the possibility that potential cult leaders might actually be better for business.
Enter founder mode: Legendary venture capitalist Paul Graham Dropped One of his legendary blog essays, written a few days ago, gave birth to the founder mode meme. In summary, he argues that “There are two ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Until now, even most people in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that you need to switch to manager mode to scale your startup. But the disappointment of founders who have tried manager mode, and the success of their attempts to get out of it, lead us to infer that another mode exists.”
Importantly, he continues, “As far as I know, there are no books written specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are experiments by individual founders who have been trying to figure it out for themselves. But now we know what we're looking for, and we can look for it. My hope is that in a few years, founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. Already, we can infer some of the differences.”
The details of the paper are interesting, but what's even more interesting is the overall context, because until the 21st century, the personalities of the Founding Fathers were overwhelmingly more closely tied to politics than to business. If the 1619 Project folks and their Borg hadn't been so successful in erasing the Founding Fathers from the public imagination, perhaps more Americans would think of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, etc. than Jobs, Bezos, Musk, etc. Maybe I'm a little ahead of my time to think we're there already, but we're definitely on our way.
But even technocrats committed to the Founder mode are themselves increasingly aware that, however symbolic Biden’s use of Franklin Roosevelt’s portrait in the White House may be, the founding spirit (or otherwise) is increasingly missing from political life, especially at the top. The whole aim of the Kamala cult is to completely free the people from any proper political education or reflection, and to free them from the difficult details of self-governance.
“I cannot say it enough,” Tocqueville wrote, “that nothing is so wonderful as to be free, and yet so difficult as to practice it, except in the case of despotism, which often appears as the healer of all that is suffered; it is the support of good laws, the support of the oppressed, the originator of order; men fall asleep in the bosom of the temporary prosperity which despotism produces, and wake up in misery.”
Politically speaking, the years since the Trump administration have been, perhaps more than anything, a wake-up call for people in the tech industry to the disturbing reality that America needs to rebuild from the ground up if it is to survive — and that neither political party has been able to produce elected officials capable of carrying this out.
This is a kind of dilemma. Long before the emergence of Silicon Valley, American businessmen tended to view politics as a kind of administrative task that was auxiliary to the actual job of leading a business. But at the same time, the weakening and bureaucratization of the military makes it hard to find a way to channel executive talent into government outside of business. The classic political theory of dictatorship is that decadent regimes must rely on men of iron, not on the rich, in the endgame. No matter how well-intentioned or skilled any of us are in this complex situation, we are all in fairly unchartered territory.
This is a big reason why we get into trouble if we don't focus on finding the spiritual dimension. For a better analogy than the pagan Rome of the late game, we should look to the misty Middle Ages of the early game. The pious Duke of Aquitaine founded many monasteries, none more famous than the Abbey of Cluny, founded on September 11, 1,114 years ago. This monastery was a pillar of an order that focused on liturgy and constant prayer in a fractured world after the fall of the Roman Empire. Even more understandable and thought-provoking is another monk, St. Benedict. St. Benedict's monastic life owes a little-known figure who can give us all a lesson about the character of the founder of a new frontier, a hermit monk named St. Romanus. It was St. Romanus who gave the wandering Benedict his monastic habit and a home, where he lived for years and eventually went into founder mode.
