Disney’s classic animated short, “The Skeleton Dance,” is now in the public domain (Duke Law). Why is that such a big deal? Watch as Internet Archive’s Sean Dudley, a researcher specializing in the public domain, takes viewers on a tour of what makes “The Skeleton Dance” special, and why the film being open to remix and reuse is important for creators.

On Social

• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/archive.org/post/3lfasdtzq2624
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DEkZu-0spas/
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@weareinternetarchive/video/7457559522199047467
• X: https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1877052986104455476

Transcript

Hi, my name is Sean, and I’m a researcher with the Internet Archive. One of the most iconic pieces to become public domain this year was 1929’s “The Skeleton Dance.”

This Disney short is revolutionary. 

Its synchronization of music and animation still holds up. Primarily animated by Ub Iwerks, the short feature skeletons turning into Lovecraftian monsters and getting down to some really cool beats.

This was in no small part thanks to Carl Stalling, who would later become famous for doing a lot of Looney Tunes music. And really being accented by the “Mickey Mouseing” effect of timing the animation to the music.

The beauty of this short is that it’s already building on the public domain with the music that it’s utilizing and taking inspiration from previous artists like Thomas Rowlandson for the skeleton designs.

And now because it’s public domain, you are able to remix, reuse, or do whatever you want with it. Because it’s ours. It belongs to all of us.

The chase for the golden 200 grams of protein per day, and the pop-up notification confirming such maxxing, has many of us thinking differently about what, and how, we eat. But is this actually healthy?

The post Smells Like Protein Spirit appeared first on TASTE.

It is a Wednesday morning in Columbia, South Carolina, and the weather outside is uncharacteristically dreary. It is one of those days when the wind whips through the tunnels created by downtown buildings, fall leaves that have turned brown fly from parked car to parked car on the side of the streets, and only a few people are feeling brave enough to venture outside their places of work. In many ways, it is the type of day local coffee shop owners dream about. On days when the outside world is chaotic, the hospitality of local coffee shops is particularly inviting.

The coffee shop I am working from today is a small establishment in downtown Columbia. Situated near the University of South Carolina, it is a common gathering place for students throughout the year. Often, they gather in large groups to hang out and sip coffee, but today is the week of finals and the mood is more serious. The coffee shop is also near several local churches in the city of various denominations. On most days, a dozen or so pastors slip through the doors to set up shop in what has become their unofficial office of sorts. Like any good community gathering place, this coffee shop breaks down barriers. Baptist pastors, Presbyterian pastors, engineering students, and art students learn each other’s names in a way that would be unlikely in any other sort of social arrangement. On one side of the coffee shop, a group of local business leaders meet to discuss funding for their next project. Sitting at the back table, two older folks are chatting over espresso. In an American moment characterized by division, the republic is alive and well on this December day in a Southern city.

The Republic of the United States, a political organization resting on the tenuous combination of state sovereignty and national unity, has always relied on robust social structures. Much has been written in the past few decades on the breakdown of traditional rhythms that united folks in the past, particularly social clubs and religious organizations. While every nation needs strong social structures, the importance of these institutions is particularly important in America. Despite the desire of Americans to speak of a common history, the uniting force that history provides in many other nations is simply impossible in America. A nation of immigrants, like the United States, creates a situation where the origin stories of our citizens are wildly different. For some, the story begins in the seventeenth century with ancestors traveling to the new world. For others, their story may include relatives coming to the U.S. as slaves during the eighteenth century or escaping a famine in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century. Still others have a story that is much younger, such as the many Indian immigrants who came in the past twenty years to work in a variety of industries. Because America lacks a shared history that can adequately unite, our nation must rest on something else. For most of American history, this foundation has been community created by local gathering places.

The coffee shop culture of today was once found in the tavern culture of Colonial America. In 1634, Samuel Cole opened the first tavern in America in Boston. Cole was born in 1597 and arrived in Boston in 1630 with his wife and four children to begin a new life. While the area he arrived in was known as the Shawmut Peninsula at the time, it would be renamed Boston shortly after and would become the most important city in early Colonial America. Cole was a perceptive entrepreneur who was able to identify a need and opened an establishment known as Cole’s Inn in the center of the growing city in 1634. The tavern quickly became the hub of colonial life in Boston, and in 1645 he relocated his business to a more desirable location close to today’s Faneuil Hall. Cole’s tavern in downtown Boston was not the only establishment that popped up in Colonial New England. By 1655, the demand for taverns, also known as “ordinaries,” was so great that the Massachusetts General Court mandated that each town in the state had at least one tavern where citizens could congregate. While Puritan New England was built around local church life, these settlers knew the importance of informal gathering places where community could take root.

Why were taverns so popular in colonial America? Perhaps one reason was their formative nature in creating community. In a city like Boston where new residents were constantly joining the thriving young city, a place was needed to break down social barriers and create a sense of stability among the public. For the city, the colony, and the future Republic to survive, institutions had to be created that would form community networks deeper than mere business and political relationships. While church was certainly one of these institutions, the tavern allowed for residents of multiple churches and walks of life to come together to create a shared identity.

The community life that grew from tavern culture was robust. In many ways, the tavern was the foundation of business, political, social, and intellectual life in the early Republic, especially in New England. Along with alcoholic beverages, colonists were offered numerous important activities at taverns like the one Samuel Cole opened. These institutions offered colonists games, musical entertainment, countless types of discussion groups, and a place to receive news and debate public ideas. According to historian David Conroy, taverns helped redefine authority in the colonies as people lived daily life in a melting pot of different classes and professions. In many ways, the tavern in colonial America served as a major democratizing force in the new nation and fostered the egalitarian spirit of the future United States.

The comparison of modern coffee shops to colonial taverns is not perfect. Taverns, despite their benefits, were often places of public drunkenness and gambling. Often, prostitutes used taverns as a place to troll for clients to bring back to their brothels. Despite the sin in these places, it is without question that the tavern was an important factor in building community in American life. Likewise, today’s coffee shops function as places of community where powerful formation is happening. Like the tavern, local coffee shops in the United States have become places where business deals are executed, religious discipleship happens, and friendships are formed by those who would otherwise never meet. Perhaps just as important to community formation, these shops help local business leaders make a living and create jobs for community members. In some cases, like the coffee shop in Columbia I often visit, the coffee is brewed in-house and shipped to other parts of the state for sale. Not only is community and local business happening, but the coffee shop is also bringing attention to our growing city through its sale of coffee beans to other locations.

The reasons that taverns in the past and coffee shops today are foundational for the future success of our nation is twofold: both institutions break down social barriers and bring different types of people together. While political polarization is a major issue today, the more foundational problems are those that create the polarization. According to a study done by Duke University, one of the major problems driving polarization is the growing divide between social media and reality. In their research, they found that seventy-three percent of political tweets were derived from just six percent of Twitter (X) users. In addition, that six percent held mostly radical views. In a modern phenomenon, the masses attach themselves to the views of a radical minority while retreating from public interaction in any meaningful sense. While people are often careful to avoid extreme political discussion with the people in their community, social media creates a perfect environment to air the most extreme thoughts. Rather than forming opinions through interaction with community members, opinions are now formed through provocateurs online who care little about the repercussions.

In addition to polarization driven by social media, the “Loneliness Epidemic” continues to rage in the United States. Currently, twenty-one percent of Americans feel lonely and many of those feel disconnected from other people. Loneliness creates a variety of social problems. One example of its effect is that it exacerbates negative emotions that contribute to social decay, specifically hostility. In a study done by UCLA, researchers found that loneliness leads to increased hostility, which in turn creates more loneliness. This vicious cycle, combined with social media ranting, makes for an environment that poses a great threat to democracy. If democracy in our republic depends on some level of consensus, these social forces only work to alienate. Our culture needs to cultivate greater levels of understanding that can only come through relationships. Unfortunately, very few institutions are left that bring people together.

It is obvious that coffee shops alone cannot rebuild the United States. Even the term rebuild itself is open to interpretation and is largely used by politicians afraid of saying anything that is clear and concise. It is also true that America has always been a place of division. In Federalist #10, written by James Madison in 1787 to persuade states to join the new American union, the idea of “factions” or divisions was acknowledged. In his paper, factions were groups of people united by ideological belief. According to Madison, factions were best dealt with by a pluralistic society where no one faction gained complete control over the nation. Fortunately, Madison’s prediction has held true so far. The problem of division, however, can become so entrenched that healthy debate is no longer tolerated and even basic institutions like church and family are strained. At different times in the past decade, it seems as though America has come to this point.

While coffee shops will not save America, to the opportunities they provide to cultivate relationships among different types of people can improve our Republic. These relationships can heal communities in small ways as people make friends and discuss opposing views. The best way for this to happen is through a localist agenda that values community, local businesses, and a shared vision for a particular place. Local coffee shops, like taverns in the past, provide a service that the masses desire. Because of coffee’s popularity, coffee shops can draw people together like very few other modern institutions. In my experience, coffee has become the new social lubricant that opens the door for important relationships and discussions. The best place to unite America is not national politics, but local businesses that bring people together. Maybe the first step for American citizens is not posting on social media or campaigning for a candidate, but finding a local coffee shop and having some interesting discussions with new people.

Image Via: Flickr

.

Nobody cares

N.B. I'm in a mood tonight, so this will be less of a well-considered essay and more of a rant, partially in the vein of Fuck Nuance. Don't take anything here too seriously.

Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don't care.

Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.

Ever used a piece of software that's buggy as hell, looks bad, but still costs money, presumably because the company behind it has found some regulatory capture to justify their existence? The programmer who wrote it probably doesn't care. Their manager definitely doesn't care. The regulators don't care.

You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.

I've met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say "stability" or "job security" as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.

Here's a dumb example. This bike lane ends at the bottom of a hill near me. It merges onto the sidewalk at a crazy sharp angle. Cyclists are coming down this hill at 20mph or so. Tons of people can't make this angle at that speed and hit the vertical curb face, damaging their bike and injuring themselves. If they're unlucky, they go flying into the signpost.

Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?

Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.

This isn't even a pro- or anti-bikes thing. The ramp was getting built by whatever mandate. You're the engineer. Do you make it bad, or do you spend 1% more time thinking about it and make it good for literally the same cost? You make it bad, because you do not care.

I actually pointed this ramp out to the director of the Seattle Department of Transportation during a walking tour. He made a note of it over a year ago that I assume was promptly forgotten about. He does not care.

Here's another example. Street lights. Seattle has been engaging in a program to reduce everyone's natural melatonin production up to 5x by replacing the sodium lights with harsh-white LEDs.

These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving. If your house is near one, they suck. If you're walking your dog at night (which starts at 5PM for much of the year in Seattle), they really suck.

But whoever made the decision to switch the lights does not care. It's entirely possible they don't even live in the city, but instead live in a pleasant exurb. Or maybe they don't walk at night and have never considered that other people do.

White LEDs reduce car crashes by 0.1% and that is measurable, but sleep quality and aesthetics are not measurable. You just have to care about them. And nobody cares.

But that's enough city stuff. Plenty of people don't care about plenty of other things.

You put on your turn signal in traffic to merge. The person who could let you in is looking straight ahead, zoned out. Why would they look around to see if they could cooperate with anyone? They're already in the lane they need to be in. They. Do. Not. Care.

You're at the airport. There's a group in front of you on the escalator taking up the full width, preventing anyone from walking by. They do not care.

You're on the sidewalk and someone has headphones in, walking in the center of the path. A mom and stroller are behind them. They can't hear her "excuse me" to get their attention. They have not even considered the possibility that anyone in the world exists but them. They do not care.

The McDonalds touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.

At work the junior engineer sends you some code to review. The code was clearly written in a first draft, and then just iteratively patched until the tests passed, then immediately sent to you to review without any further improvement. They do not care.

The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.

The doctor misdiagnosis your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.

People don't pick up after their dogs. The guy at the gym doesn't re-rack the weights. The lady at the grocery store leaves the cart in the middle of the parking lot. They. Do. Not. Care.

I could continue in this vein for another few pages, but it would be boring at you get the point. We are surrounded by antisocial bastards.

Some of them like the people who don't pick up after their dogs are legitimately just assholes.

Others, like the bureaucrats in the city who mess up our lives in more indirect ways are more a victim of The System. But they are still guilty of lacking the personal agency to fight it or leave in protest, and I still — potentially unjustly — condemn them.

We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeat armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.

When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.

Now, I'm at a small startup full of people who care. Customer bug reports go right to our chatroom. We fix them immediately. I feel guilty I wrote the bugs at all. We reach out to users to see if we can make their lives better. We care.

I want to live in a community where everyone cares.

The one place in the world you get this vibe is probably Japan. Most people just really care. Patrick McKenzie refers to this as the will to have nice things. Japan has it, and the US mostly does not.

In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat. And the result is obvious if you visit both places.

Is it possible for us to care in the US? To foster the will to have nice things? I think we actually had this in the aftermath of WW2. The country was mostly on the same page about progress, values, the future. But over a few generations, more and more people defect. Living among defectors is demoralizing and causes more defections (much like my own departure from my Big Tech job!). Eventually society is full of defectors.

But I don't think this is a full explanation. Most people aren't assholes, they merely won't go out of their way to add to the world. And I can feel myself getting pulled in that direction.

I used to go a lot more out of my way to add to the world. A few years ago, I installed a bunch of dog bag dispensers on the telephone poles of my neighborhood. I still keep them stocked.

I was, somewhat naively, hoping that somehow I could get a snowball of care going. I built curb ramps on legacy curbs that lacked them. I lobbied the city to open new park space. Improve crosswalks. And much more!

But the snowball never started. Nobody cares. Rather, there is a tiny minority of activists who care. They spend all their free time doing activist stuff — basically fighting the city to try to make the bureaucrats care about little bits here and there.

But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.

We're not going to move to Japan, but would absolutely be willing to move within the US.

Does such a community really exist? Where everyone cares? Or at least a supermajority? Or does it need to be built?

I.

A few years ago, I had an annual one-on-one with the Chief Technology Officer of an employer with more than ten thousand staff.

Senior management absolutely fawned over this person — extremely politically savvy, they would say. Amazing at acquiring funding. Really cares about everyone on the team. The platform that paid my salary would not exist without their incisive mind. They're invited by multi-billion dollar companies to speak on stages about the immense success they've had deploying their products across every possible sector of the economy, and magazines would breathlessly extol their astounding virtues by placing them on lists with titles like 'Australia's Top 200 Tech Innovators!'

I had no idea what to make of this. People who I respect had only positive things to say, but I had never heard this person say anything beyond the most tepid of platitudes. Break down silos. Be more Agile. Deliver value. They had no technical background, were frankly a weaker speaker than I am, and a weaker writer, but because of the ringing endorsements I tried to understand why this person has gotten to where they are. While I was broadly aware that many people are promoted to positions they were unfit for, savvy friends saw something in this one. And I dearly wanted to understand because I was beginning to realize that either a huge amount of work is fraudulent nonsense in the style of what the late David Graeber called a "bullshit job" or I was so inexperienced that I was missing something important.

In short, what separated this titan of industry from the mere mortals? What impressed my colleagues so? What made the rest of the organization swoon over this avatar of capital, likely salaried anywhere between A$300K to A$1M, when they themselves were striking over wage negotiations?

This meeting was my chance to figure it out. One hour a year. Sixty minutes to see what their unique intelligence manifested as. I'd present some problems that weren't tractable for me as an individual contributor, which so many others had reported doing, and be blinded by their overwhelming brilliance in people management. They would stare into the soul of my problem and bestow upon me the magic words that would convince my peers to have logs that worked.

We sit down and exchange pleasantries. It starts off fine. They ask the correct questions. I raise some serious technical issues, framed in terms that are comprehensible to non-engineers, and include an outright assessment of the issues using terms like "serious, existential risk" to the work we do. I go so far as to mention that we just had an outage in some data processing that lasted a month without anyone noticing due to the poor quality of our codebase, and they adopt a very concerned expression then ask me to write a document about it for them to read, which I suppose is fair enough.

It is at this point that things begin to derail.

"Would you say that data observability is an issue?", they inquire with a tone that very clearly implies that this is a leading question.

I am immediately deeply worried. For those who are unaware¹, my specialty is building systems that move large amounts of data through companies, organize them in a way that is at least marginally less of a horrific clusterfuck than what random people without specific training will do when left to their own devices, and sometimes assist with statistics. Data observability is the high-level term that captures the ability of a business to go "Instead of downloading the data, it would appear the computers caught fire this morning. Would you like to fix this or pretend it never happened?"

The reason that I'm concerned is that the executive in front of me should not be using that term. They have no idea what it really means, which is fine because they aren't specialized in my area, but I am wondering why someone who requires crayon-tier technical explanations is inquiring about a niche, unsexy element of a platform they don't understand. This would be like my 96-year-old grandfather asking me about Bitcoin mining—impressive if he had arrived at the question organically, but in practice I'm already dialing the bank to report a massive theft.

"...Yes," I reply hesitant, "but I think we can remedy most of that by implementing some basic testing. With some backing, I can accomplish that in a month or two."

"What do you think about Monte Carlo?"

What the fuck is Monte Carlo? I've never heard of that. I mean, I know there's a place called Monte Carlo, and I know of Monte Carlo algorithms, but there's no way this person is talking about either of those. It must be a product.

"I don't know what that is."

"I saw it on LinkedIn last night and I think it will solve our observability issues. Do you think we should get it?"

Oh. Oh no. I don't understand what exactly happened last night on LinkedIn, but I know it is dark and sad and reeks of unfulfilled wants. The executive sat before me has been marketed to. No, worse, they have been Marketed to, with a capital M.

I have a friend who is kept away from late-night telemarketing by her partner, because no matter how ridiculous the appliance is, she will become convinced that she needs it. The siren song of the Shamwow is too alluring. That is being Marketed to, and I hadn't realized until that exact moment that people will make purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with that level of thought².

"I don't think we need that," I croak, dimly aware that one wrong word could result in six months of terrible, pointless work for everyone on the team, "We can solve our problems via some simple discipline."

(The reality is that the work they had done was so poor that no product would work with it.)

We still have fifteen minutes left, and it becomes more and more apparent that the executive desperately wants to buy Monte Carlo, as desperately as my little cousins demand another go on the machines at the arcade. For the next day or so, they will wake and see Monte Carlo wherever they go, and when they close their eyes they will see the Monte Carlo sales team leering in their slumber, their tentacle sales-fingers reaching through monitors and rewiring cortices. Every word I say is potential ammunition in their case for buying this piece of software, which I know nothing about. I am nothing to the C-suite but a device that emits words that will ultimately result in being able to say "Ludic supports buying Monte Carlo".

We reach the end of the conversation, and my face hurts from the forced smile. They are doing their best to relate to some of my earlier sentiments.

"Why do you think some of the engineers are struggling?", they ask.

"I'm sure you understand exactly how it is," I lie, "it just takes a lot of work to perform at a high level, and sometimes people fall behind."

"Yes, absolutely", they laugh, "I study on LinkedIn for up to two hours a day after work sometimes³."

We are not the same.

Dazed, I leave the room and collapse into my chair. Two of the other engineers gather around to ask how it went, as time with an executive here is rare and of immense gossip value.

"We started talking about the things that I wanted, and I thought it was going well, then we somehow ended up on something else entirely. How about you two?"

"No, they just kept asking us about something called Monte Carlo. Bro, what the fuck is Monte Carlo?"

They had asked every data engineer in the department about it. Oy vey.

II.

A huge amount of the economy is driven by people who are, simply put, highly suggestible. That is to say that it is very, very easy to get them excited and willing to spend money.

Consider, for example, what it would take to get you to approach your company's lawyer and suggest software to them, totally unprompted, because you saw an advertisement last night. Scratch that, make it every lawyer at your company as each and every one of them goes "I... have never heard of that". But you just keep going because the next one might tell you that the Shamwow is an awesome product.

The answer, in all likelihood, is that no possible advertisement could get you to behave in such an embarrassing fashion. You would instead think things like "I am not a lawyer", "What the hell is this program and why do I feel fit to judge it?", and "The shame from this conversation will keep me up at night for the next five years."

At the surface level, it sounds like you have a desirable characteristic in senior leadership, and that is true in the sense that you're unlikely to waste company money. Yet statistically you are not in senior leadership at an organization with ten thousand employees, someone who buys software at random and hires Deloitte is, so what gives? Don't companies want people who aren't going to be conned into purchasing nonsense?

It turns out that there are tremendous reasons to want people like this running many organizations, and social mechanisms that move the most easily-impressed of us into positions of power, those reasons just exist at the expense of the company or society in which that person is embedded.

There is a massive industry that is built around gathering people that fit the "thinks LinkedIn is studying" profile into rooms, who also have access to organizational money, and then charging sales teams for permission to get into that room. I was dimly aware that this stuff happens, but it is now impossible from my professional profile to tell that I am one guy doing his best to write good software with a few friends, as opposed to a millionaire, which resulted in the following message:

Dear Ludic,

I saw that you are featured in an upcoming webinar as below:

A Boardroom Guide to AI: Spotting Hype and Managing Costs

Noting this, I would like to bring the below to your attention, as [REDACTED] staged this as a very successful in-person event in June of this year targeting directors.

[REDACTED] is the leading annual event for board directors from publicly traded companies across the United States, attracting directors now for the last 20 years.

Next year's event will take place at [REDACTED]

We expect around 70-80 directors to be in attendance, representing some 200+ boards.

The event is entirely in-person.

If it works for you, I would suggest a short call to discuss the specifics, including positioning Hermit Tech on the agenda (attached) with a commercial opportunity.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

With best regards,
[REDACTED]

After a quick exchange, it became apparent that the deal is as follows: I can wire them money and in exchange be granted access to the fancy room, where I would be allowed to Market to these people. I would turn up in a suit, exaggerate how successful my business is, possibly make some incredibly grotesque comments about women⁴⁵ depending on the clientele so that the male directors know that I'm one of them, and finally we will Do Business.

Money now in exchange for access to credulous people who use words like synergy with a straight face later. I have no doubt that the actual attendees would vary wildly, ranging from a few savvy people, to outright grifters, to the terminally deranged. Even the pleasant and sufficiently skeptical can feel compelled to attend because the truth is that executive compensation and funding is driven by your relationships to other people, but make no mistake, the goal of salespeople with weak products is to find the weakest minds in the audience and lay siege. They are enormously vulnerable — I know many people who fit this profile, and it is disconcerting to see people put the whammy on them. They zone out when Donald Trump is on a nearby television, eyes glazing over, and in private will say "he makes a lot of sense" without being able to repeat anything he said. They buy into things like the prosperity gospel with hardly any prompting, and can more-or-less have absolutely no ability to avoid scams — they'll happily say that they're not technical people but quantum is the future.

To quote Ed Zitron, who later on in this excellent piece quotes me, forming the mythical content promotion ouroboros:

Whatever organization that's burdened you with some sort of half-baked, half-useful piece of shit business app has done so because the people up top don't care if it's good, just that it works, and "works" can be an extremely fuzzy word. It doesn't matter that Microsoft Teams is universally-loathed and regularly threatens to crash every time you load it. A Microsoft salesperson used its monopoly power to cut your boss a deal to either bundle it with a bunch of other mediocre shit or they saw the name "Microsoft" and said "oh boy! I love Microsoft Word!" and pulled out their credit card so fast it left a gouge in their monitor.

Indeed, we've only seen one side of the coin — I get the messages aimed at sponsors, where they trust that I will don the mantle of the wolf and select the choicest morsels from the flock that they have gathered. A friend who wishes to remain anonymous sent me what the prey receives:

This is absolutely shameless. "Ensure you're guaranteed to meet and engage with an elite group in the cybersecurity space". What are the actual questions?

Do you have lots of money? Are you authorized to spend that money? They're just doing lead qualification. That's all this is. I currently run sales and marketing for about twenty hours a week — I know, I know, what have I become? — but I would not be able to ask questions this crass without hiding my face in shame.

The same person sent me the following PDF from a Melbourne-based conference which includes a sponsorship package that they call the "guy at the bar thinks you're cute and wanted to buy you this drink" package.

You can straight-up buy people tickets to attend events, and have a concierge deliver them into the eager maw of your marketing machine. I was shocked to see an absolutely trivial price tag too. A$2.5K? Even my tiny operation spent more than that last week buying hardware for one engineer — it's a rounding error to get the person that chooses what technology you're going to be using for the next five years and whether you're being laid off into my sales kill box. I just have to wave my company credit card and bellow forth a wretched miasma of lies about no-code tools and generative AI, and voilà, some of you are unemployed now!

III.

Up until now, the picture that I've painted is one of credulous people who are easily excited. But, of course, people are multifaceted, and minds can contain complex, self-deluded, and contradictory motivations.

There is a horrendous incestuousness to the sales cycle at large enterprises, certainly in the AI and data space where I work, and it is tied intricately with the way that jobs are distributed in most of the economy⁶. The main way to get a good job offer is to come recommended by someone inside of a company. Software engineering and other specialties of a technical bent (including artists, writers, etc.) have the additional barrier that our skills are testable to some degree, but this is not the case for most senior management and executive roles.

In those roles, it is essentially impossible to work out whether someone's tenure as a manager or executive was useful. Consider Elon Musk, the patron saint of dysregulated man-children — it is surprisingly difficult to get one straight story about the man and the effectiveness of his methods. I've heard stories about how he boldly decided to build a rocket from scratch when providers were inadequate and about how SpaceX's dominance is attributable to him personally stalking the halls and firing incompetents. I've heard other people say that they hide interns from him because he has a habit of firing them on the spot over irrelevant trivia, and an executive in the space sector personally told me that SpaceX succeeds despite his antics due to the work of their COO, Gwynne Shotwell. I don't have any concrete evidence for which narrative is closer to truth, or if he has ever fired an intern after a pop quiz, and that's for someone that is written about more than almost anyone on the planet.

When Johnny McManager rolls into town and assures me that he was instrumental in tweaking the widgets in a massive banking application, and that this definitely drove massive revenue for the business, what recourse do I have? Do I trust the referees he provided? Do I start cold-calling executives at the bank to try and get an assessment? Do they even know and, if they did know, would they admit that a project failed on their watch?

Slava Akmechet writes:

Company metrics have momentum and lag. Nearly all political behavior exploits these two properties. [...] So opportunists don't worry about any of that. The winning strategy is to ignore company metrics completely and move between projects every eighteen months so that nobody notices.

Or, in other words, high-level statements like "I led a successful project" mean nothing. The project may not have been successful, or was judged to be a success for political reasons, or was successful for reasons that had nothing to do with management. This is a recurring theme across many sources. Sean Goedecke, another writer here in Melbourne, writes:

I know it sounds extreme, but I think many engineers do not understand what shipping even is inside a large tech company. What does it mean to ship? It does not mean deploying code or even making a feature available to users. Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship.

And conversely, if you do not deploy your system to a working state but can someone make your VP or CEO happy, then you did ship. This sounds even stranger. How can you ship if the code doesn't work?

It's called lying, and it'll solve all your problems!

Recall that the platform I was working on previously had logging that was broken for months and was idling to the tune of half a million dollars, but it had nonetheless "shipped". And the project before that claimed the full million dollars from the sponsor, deliverable upon shipping, from the funder despite still not actual being in production several years later. This happens constantly, and may be more common than projects actually working out.

Because management in large, dysfunctional (read: typical) companies is a game about promising to ship things to people further up your chain, people are broadly incentivized to say that everything has shipped no matter what has happened unless it is impossible to lie about this easily.

What ends up developing gradually is a network of people who are selected for their ability to support convenient social narratives, and if you're going to be negative at all, you aren't allowed in the club. When someone is asked to be a team player, what is really being said is "shut the fuck up and we'll let you into the club". That is precisely why people use phrases like team player — it isn't hard to pick something less clumsy and upsetting, but then you might not realize it's a threat which is the whole point!

IV. Mind Tricks Don't Work On Me, Only Status

Status absolutely fascinates me. I believe that is drives much more behaviour than even the acquisition of money — many non-introspective people only want money because they think it will bring them respect in the eyes of others. This theme emerges everywhere I read deeply. Keith Johnstone's seminal work on improvised theatre, Impro, opens with a chapter on status dynamics. The psychological difficulty of the status swings afforded by randomness-driven fields such as academia is a core theme in Taleb's The Black Swan.

Did you know Elon Musk just got caught paying people to hit the leaderboard in games so he could lie about being so smart that he's both the CEO of all those companies and somehow crushes people at games that they spend hundreds of hours on?

While I like Snowflake as a piece of software, it is probably not a high priority to move to it at most large companies for various reasons I won't get into here. Fine, I'll get into one of them. It's just a really good data warehouse, you absolute maniacs, it isn't the cure for cancer, why the fuck is it valued at $53B?

Because everyone is buying it, and this has to be driven by non-technical leadership because there aren't enough technical leaders to drive that sort of valuation. Why would non-technicians be so focused on a database of all things, a concept so dull that it is Effective Communication 101 to try and avoid using the term in front of a lay audience? It's because if you buy Snowflake then you're allowed to get onto stages at large venues and talk about how revolutionary Snowflake was for your business, which on the surface looks like a brag about Snowflake, but is actually a brag about the great decisions you've been making and the wealth you can deploy if someone becomes your friend. And the audience is full of people that are now thinking "If I buy Snowflake, I can be on that stage, and everyone will finally recognize my brilliance".

It is a bribe, straight up, and done in such a way that everyone understands that further bribes are available for anyone willing to be enthusiastic about something they don't understand. Matt Stoller has written at some length about how government purchasing is heavily driven by award acquisition, and it all rounds out to "this is discount Illuminati bullshit".

The net result is that a huge number of our leaders are essentially stealing money, but they can't withdraw the money directly, so they have to spend the organization's capital on expensive nonsense to purchase status then convert that status into a better salary somewhere else at a really, really bad exchange rate. It really is embezzling without the charm of efficiency. We'd be better off letting them withdraw $1M instead of forcing them to spend $30M so that your competitor offers them a $1M raise.

And it turns out there's a market for status too! I started getting these messages after changing my title to director.

Hi Ludic,

Would you like to be interviewed by one of our journalists and talk about your work and product? :)

Xraised (www.xraised.com) is a vibrant community of industry leaders and innovators like you. We offer a comprehensive package for £99, which includes an interview with our journalist to be posted on our website, Spotify and Amazon Music, with the option to add a dedicated press release about you and your company. The content is authentic, and the potential audience is 84M readers from North America, Australia, UK and the EU.

Would you like to schedule an interview via this link? [REDACTED]

Contact us at interviews@xraised.com if you have any questions :)

[REDACTED]
Project Manager at Xraised

You can see all the confluence of all the factors above. They're targeting a demographic that exists — unwilling or unable to attract an audience by strength of quality. Desperate enough for attention to pay £99 instead of just doing some email outreach. Dunce enough to think inserting the word "authentic" makes it so, and gullible enough to think that £99 could actually reach even 1% of 84 million people. The most popular thing I've ever written has done around 2M hits, and that was enough that I can fly to almost any country in the world and have someone buy me a beer. Xraised is trying to find people that think you can purchase anything like that forty times over for £99, and those people all have employees.⁷

V.

If that sounds dystopian, it is! But it helps to remember that many of us are, broadly speaking, living in an era of unprecedented wealth, and that is only possible because some things work. Cars do work. You're on the internet right now. Things working means that there are non-fraudulent sectors of the economy, it just takes some serious looking to find the people in those sectors, and unfortunately a willingness to bury the dream of becoming a full-time employee for thirty years and never having to make course adjustments to your career trajectory. Even a great company will have people move on, or grow until it is a big company, and if it doesn't then they aren't hiring anymore so you aren't allowed in.

I'll write about it at some length in the future, but my own consultancy currently only works with startups putting together an analytics stack to conform with the requirements of an enterprise sale because, while everything in business comes with some weird incentives, startups selling to enterprise is a case where the client has immense skin in the game and failure is not acceptable. No one pays us consulting rates to fail to ship in startup land (people can fail to ship on their own, thank you very much). Real work is possible! I've seen it!

And I've so far managed to avoid becoming ensnared in the status trap by strength of will, because I am a superior being and very important executive director with the greatest team on the planet and —