These Used to be Serious People

M.G. Siegler
500ish
Published in
3 min readJun 23, 2023

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m jaded. Maybe I’m boring. Maybe I’m no fun anymore. Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit. Maybe I’m the old man with the lawn. But maybe I’m not.

Admittedly, I haven’t been paying that close of attention — because, in general, I’ve been paying a lot less attention to Twitter itself recently — but the idea of a cage match between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk doesn’t strike me as fun or exciting or cute or clever. It strikes me as lame.

Really fucking lame. Honestly, sad.

I wrote something just over five years ago about Silicon Valley losing the plot which got some attention, and truly this is almost exactly how I extrapolated it all playing out. We’re barreling ever faster towards literal Idiocracy. And the powers that be — people with all the money and power in the world — are fueling it. And they don’t see it. They’ll say they do. That they’re in on the joke. That it’s all for the lols or whatever. But it’s fucking stupid. These people have given us some of the greatest products and technology the world has ever known. And now they’re wrestling. Literally wrestling. In some weird combination of Peter Pan Syndrome mixed with Revenge of the Nerds. Or something. It’s all just so stupid. And depressing.

Here’s an idea: don’t wrestle. Go back to building stuff. Making cool shit. That’s the job. It may seem sort of boring now with all the money and attention of the world. But that’s what we, the people, actually want. And like and respect. Do that. That’s the North Star.

But you can do both, you say! You can! You can also walk and crap your pants at the same time. You can do anything. Literally. Do something else. Use the time to do something great. Spend more time with your families.

I don’t care if it’s for charity or whatever guise is put in place to justify this. Just donate some money directly to not fight. It would be more money anyway. We have MMA fighters. If we want to watch MMA, we can watch them. Those MMA fighters aren’t technologists, nor are they trying to play ones in the public eye. If you want to train and learn to fight in your own free time, by all means. But don’t drag us all into it.

This all feels rather Fall of Rome-y. It’s probably not — it’s hopefully not. But it’s still clearly all driven by this really annoying level of hubris and really just a general lack of being able to read a room. That room being the entire internet. Yes, some people say they want this. And think it’s fun. But only because it’s so fucking weird and stupid. Newsflash: the internet loves weird and stupid.

If you take a step back and think about it, it’s depressing. What are we doing? What have we become? To quote the late, great fictional-ish billionaire of our time, Logan Roy: “you are not serious people.”

Get serious, people.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Published in 500ish

A collection of posts by M.G. Siegler of around 500 words in length.

Written by M.G. Siegler

Writer turned investor turned investor who writes. Now writing at: https://spyglass.org

Responses (46)

What are your thoughts?

I am 50+ and have been in the tech industry since before Internet 1.0. The ride was exhilarating until about 2015, and then the lunacy started. Sure lots of people made gobs of money, but the seriousness of the art started dying. Now it is just sad.

This essay nails it.

--

We’re barreling ever faster towards literal Idiocracy.

Who would have thought Idiocracy would have turned into a documentary of the near future? Welcome to Costco, I love you!

--

This all feels rather Fall of Rome-y.

Your idiocracy comment was on target, but this is even closer to the bullseye. What we are seeing over the past decade truly does reek of the fall of Rome.

--