Why We Can't Have Nice Things
A partial list, by Corey Quinn.
A partial list, by Corey Quinn.
Nobody's a villain in their own story, but they don't extend that courtesy to others.
People who got where they are thanks in no small part to privilege and luck mistake it for pure skill.
Folks who struggled to get where they are don't send the elevator back down to make the next person's journey easier.
The world is full of people who'd rather make $50K just so long as their neighbor is making $40K instead of both of then making $100K.
Nobody considers others' constraints when evaluating what they've built, preferring instead to believe that $60 billion companies are somehow run by complete incompetents.
People who are incredibly good at one thing (engineering, marketing, sales, accounting) tend to massively discount the value / depth of other business areas to the point of trivializing them.
Advertising annoys the hell out of people, but the 1% who buy make the entire enterprise massively lucrative. Nobody has come up with a better model.
The internet rewards outrage and nastiness far more than it does humanity's better nature.
We live in a world where the police probably can't straight-up murder someone and not face the severe and just consequences for their actions--so long as the victim is white. #BlackLivesMatter
People look at the wrong numbers (retweets, credit scores, number of cars) to judge people's value rather than the right numbers (how many people's lives have they bettered, their monthly @awscloud bill).
Folks mistake "this trillion dollar company did something boneheaded" as akin to "Jordan at that company did something boneheaded." They're worlds' apart.
PR specialists outnumber journalists 6 to 1.
It's seductive to fall into a reductive model of believing the world is black and white. When someone does something bad, they're clearly a terrible person who should be written off completely.
99 out of 100 people can tell you you're amazing, but you'll lie awake at night stuck on that one jackhole.
If someone breaks a leg, holy shit--go to a hospital! Can I drive you? If someone struggles with mental health, they should suck it up and get over it. This is wrong.
"Hang on, let me check my bank account before you drive me to the hospital" says something truly monstrous about what we value as a society.
Some people don't feel complete as people until they've absolutely trashed someone else's day.
Every day for the last 26 years every executive at @EA has woken up and affirmatively decided not to remake TIE Fighter. #remakeTIEfighter
The people who believe they have something to say that should be heard and the people who speak up aren't the right Venn diagram.
People conflate "right to free speech" with "entitled to a platform."
You can justify any atrocity you'd like in the name of "principle."
SMTP wasn't designed with "malicious jerks with massive financial incentives" in mind.
Society is structured so that companies making hundreds of billions a year need to continue to grow that revenue by double-digit percentages well past the point of "population limits" interfering.
We mistake "mergers" for "growth."
We think single exceptions to general observations somehow invalidate the entire point.
We think that our younger selves were just more physically adept versions of our current selves, then judge the youth by that false standard.
