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People keep quoting Bill Gates, the quintessential nerd who went on to lead a deeply innovative company, as the prime example in this category, O’Mara points out. A generation later it was the turn of the two computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which in addition to offering the world a clean and tidy search portal – an antidote to the pop-up chaos that characterized the end of the dotcom era – and offices furnished with beanbags for employees, also kept the right to vote in the their company. Their greatest innovation may not have been web search, but rather the introduction of the concept of the “control by the founder“.
In the case of Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes – the founder of Theranos, recently convicted of fraud – the collective and generally positive fascination for these figures could derive from the antiquated concept of the solutionismthe idea that technology can solve all problems: “Both were trying to make up for a failure, right? – explains O’Mara -. Holmes appears on the scene at a time when people were wondering where women are in the tech industry. And then, in Silicon Valley the only thing you do is create applications. Instead, she was creating medical devices that were supposed to change the healthcare sector“.
More recently, the cryptocurrency world was also seen as flawed, if not downright shady. But then it came Bankman-Fried and with him the usual cycle started again: “He represents the stereotype, the nerdy guy in the shorts with pockets and a respectable background – continues O’Mara -. He is a data expert. And then he talks about politics and altruism. He doesn’t just talk about the technology he’s immersed in, he talks about the world and how he can use what he’s doing in a larger way“.
In essence, O’Mara’s diagnosis of the underlying problem pinpoints thestubborn techno-optimism. Despite the fact that technology hasn’t kept up over the past twenty years all its promises and hasn’t transformed us into a smarter, more efficient and productive society, we continue to wonder if technology itself might not be the solution to the complexities it has created. “There is this hope that technology will save useven though we have abundant evidence showing how problematic it can be“O’Mara says.
While it could be seen as a simplistic thesis to explain what made many people too hastily put Bankman-Fried on a pedestal, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. After all, we are human (another one comes to mind pearl of Giridharadas on hero worship surrounding the founders of tech companies: “They are as limited in their humanity as I am in coding. But while I stay away from coding, they refuse to stay away from imposing their dominion over humanity“).
Maybe this is what I was looking for when I joined a live Zoom event featuring Bankman-Fried last April: some trace of humanity, as well as information that would help me better understand how an unregulated platform for exchanging digital currencies could be worth the equivalent of billions of dollars. Now, after the sensational collapse of FTX, at least one of these things is clear.
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