I basically agree: the article loses a lot of credibility making Heroic Age / Iron Age comparisons, and I think you & others are right to call them out. But I d

I basically agree: the article loses a lot of credibility making Heroic Age / Iron Age comparisons, and I think you & others are right to call them out. But I do think there are things that are uniquely worrying about the present moment. IBM has a lot of skeletons in its closet, but for many years one of its biggest clients (perhaps the biggest -- does anyone know?) was the US government, which made IBM at least minimally responsive to public needs. IBM was paid very handsomly by government clients to keep the US in the lead in science and technology, and that meant that a lot of people at IBM had the necessary leisure and latitude to think about some serious problems, some of whom went on to win the Turing prize and invent things like relational databases. I don't think these people were smarter or more virtuous than us. (The comparison is specious on many levels, but bear with me.) I simply think that things were set up in such a way that it was possible for them to follow their natural creative and intellectual impulses and in so doing gain a measure of social respectability and pride that we all basically crave. I think the startup world is different. The shoestring budget and (even more critically) the highly compressed timeframe in which startups operate create powerful incentives to take up easy problems that could be monetized quickly. I'm struck by how much of the advice that is offered to young people here amounts to something like, "stop thinking so god damn much and build a business." That seems so toxic! It creates an atmosphere of scorn toward big ideas and impatience with moral and intellectual reflection, with lasting consequences on the life-choices people make. I suspect a lot of young men and women internalize this ideology and develop a real sense of shame about being thoughtful or conscientious. I'm not suggesting we all apply for a job at Big Blue. There are a great many wonderful things about the present moment, chief among them the enormously expanded access to creative computational tools and its concomitant, the wonderful increase in the geographical/cultural spread of creative work with technology. But there are also some very worrying trends, and I think we ought to confront them.