A problem with us as a tribe is that we tend to misunderstand the fact that most humans require conflict to reach for greatness. We, as technologists, perceive

A problem with us as a tribe is that we tend to misunderstand the fact that most humans require conflict to reach for greatness. We, as technologists, perceive a natural conflict between what we want (whether it's to live for 1000+ years, to fly to Japan for $50 on a non-polluting electric airplane, to have all of the world's information accessible at a computer terminal, or just to have more interesting jobs) and the actual state of the world, which we see as dismally primitive. We don't need a human enemy to have conflict and to inspire us to greatness; primordial entropy is our enemy. Most people don't think this way. It takes a fight to unlock their energies. This is especially true at the complacent top of society. The best way to create social mobility for smart people is to create a massive, irreparable cleavage in the elite. In 1540, it was the Protestant Reformation, leading to exploration and trade and new theories about politics, culminating in rational government and modern capitalism. (Henry VIII was no saint, but one of the reasons for his horrible reputation is that he promoted smart commoners to work out his split from the church, angering nobility of the time.) In 1965, it was the Cold War, resulting in incredible technical progress, including the space program and the Internet. Neither of these rifts was free of harm or pain, but ultimately, humanity is better off with its elite cleft in two halves that hate each other's fucking guts (and will therefore promote smart people from without in order to win their existential struggle) than it is with one elite that can singularly focus on keeping itself established and the "without" outside. When there's harmony in the elite, there is no progress. Most of our jobs are based on conflict. Hedge fund traders are trying to outsmart other hedge funds in a winner-take-all market. In VC-istan, it's all about ad dollars (hence, I call it "ad-banking"). Most of the great technologies we use (e.g. the Internet) were funded by military projects: people wanting to out-innovate and out-technologize the Russians. It'd be better if we could do great things without all the negative side effects of conflict, but human organizations are lethargic and no elite has been immune to the temptation of parasitism. The pointlessness we perceive in our jobs comes from the fact that most of what we do isn't about civilization's advancement, but about helping one party compete against the other. Web development is mostly about making one business more attractive than the other guys, which has a zero-sum, arms-race feel to it. All of this conflict leads to multiplicity of efforts, left-against-right work, and weird indirections that sap our efficiency. It seems like this renders 95% of what we do pointless. The problem is that, in reality, without the business conflicts that waste 95% of our work, most of us wouldn't have jobs or money at all, so the wastage would be 100%. The only thing that will allow transfer of wealth out of an elite and into new talent is some kind of severe conflict within that elite. The ideal of capitalism (until a parasitic, socially-connected corporate elite hijacks it and subverts whatever mechanisms it uses to force competition) is that business elites in competition with each other will always perform better than single monopolistic powers. This is also why VC-istan sucks Hitler's necrotic scrotum. VCs collude and decide, as a group, who's hot and who's not. They don't compete with each other. They'd rather get invited to each others' parties and in on each others' deals. The lack of competition within that elite leads to downright awful terms for the people actually doing the fucking work.