Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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> > nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech.

The Hsieh story is a sad one, but I really find it disingenuous for this article to suggest that Hsieh is representative of “Big Tech”. Hsieh’s story is so bizarre because he got pulled into a vortex of drug addiction and self-destruction, but that’s not the normal “big tech” experience.

It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this.

> It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this.

I think the message is that these people were created by throngs of investors, media and fan adulation. There's an entire culture of revering people from SBF to Elon Musk to Bill Gates to Marc Andreessen. Some of those people have exploded more spectacularly than others, but the mechanisms and culture that create them are the same.

revering tech CEOs still seems better than the alternative. Outside of HN, most people revere celebs and athletes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

Why? Taylor Swift seems like at least as good as businessperson as the median FAANG executive, plus has an actual skill.

I strongly disagree. Celebs and athletes are innocuous compared to billionaires and politicians.

> Some of those people have exploded more spectacularly than others, but the mechanisms and culture that create them are the same.

The culture is called "marketing", and firms want that to get investors or push a product. And it works.

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