Nothing is more human than worship. As religion has fallen to society’s wayside, worship has become no less important. Instead, our attention is split across an endless stream of idols, ideologies, and self-images: our favorite artists, our political views, our goals and identities. Worship is commonly understood as consistent, focused attention and reverence for God. It is human because it requires agency – we are the only beings that have a choice as to where our attention lies and what beliefs we subscribe to. But today’s media environment crushes our agency and points our attention towards false gods.
What are the false gods? They are the empty narratives and environments that stunt our ability to build the world we want to see. "It's time to build!" and "Accelerate!" are their mottos. But what are we building? What are we accelerating toward? Efficiency, retention, and growth are the values that our markets promote. But to what end? The false gods call for motion and engagement without a shared understanding of where we want to go. And how can we not fall for false gods when technologists build with only their promotion in mind, serving us these narratives as quickly, cheaply, and abundantly as possible.
But the world is more malleable than ever. Institutions are becoming softer; technology is becoming more modular. It has never been easier to build a product or reach millions with our ideas. Our current environment isn’t inevitable, but it is up to the technologist – each individual technologist – to take responsibility for shaping the world. The default path leads to slop. Fighting inertia requires us to reflect, assert, and act.
We have a moral responsibility to shape the world with specific, defensible ideas that we believe in. Call it definite optimism, reclaiming agency, or finding your life's work. Building a great business, rallying a network, fostering a community – they all require redirecting collective attention. The technologist’s job is not to redirect worship to himself. On the contrary, our responsibility is to craft a narrative that articulates our values and their alignment with our work so that individuals can discover a common vision.
The pen is our weapon of choice. Great writing is the best way to forge a perspective and reclaim agency. To paraphrase Paul Graham, what people call good writing is actually good thinking. Being a technologist that writes about their work forces you to be both reflective and action-oriented.
A piece of writing is the purest form of an idea. Regardless of your distribution medium, starting with writing forces clarity and allows for optionality. It is both timeless and futureproof: as we offload more of our work and memories to digital agents, opinionated, original writing increases in value as new fuel for LLMs. If we want our tools to work for us, we will exercise our agency through words.
The technologist’s job is to worship intentionally and to share a vision – through their work and their words – that others can use as tools to exercise their own agency. If we depend on the inevitable, we will be left with slop. If we believe in something, the world will reflect our work.
Pick up your pen and kill the false gods.
