@TodePond I like to look up to people who are humble and struggle like me. I find individuals who are hyper-confident and build a cult following are often narcissistic. Unfortunately, our society seems to reward this kind of personality
@lesley@TodePond Yep I think narcissistic supply is a big part of it too. But I don't think the problem is only that tech idols tend to be toxic. Another big problem is that you can only have so many of them. If I think about the field of experimental music there's only a handful of people (men) who get referenced all the time (Reich, Eno, Cage, Glass, Stockhausen, Russolo..). The same handful of references taught in almost every University computer music course and referenced in every talk or paper. They're not going away and there's no room for more. At the same time you can't do anything remotely similar to them without your work being seen as about them. So the whole field ossifies.
It's pretty easy to step out of this trap though by just finding other people to be inspired by. There's a whole world out there. I think often the canonised don't really want to be, and even constantly reference others as inspiration themselves (Bret Victor being an extreme example), so it's just pure laziness to stop at worshipping the individual..
Add comment