How to design your own demise + midyear book recs

Edition 129 – OR – Mrs Yacc goes to Silicon Valley and comes home again less than she was before

The purpose of celebrity in any culture is to make large, cartoonish, and grotesque the themes of the time. We make celebrities because they reflect back to us truths we are not ready to name in forms we can disclaim, ignore, or satirize.

Celebrities are the court jesters of society who by their very existence tell us the emperor, while spouting about his newest styling, is showing his full ass.

Most people think about celebrity in a Hollywood context, but that is too limiting. We live in a world of political celebrity and business celebrity. Even industries have cottage celebrities (such as Peter Mallouk in wealth management) that serve this basic function.

And this week, we are given a treasure trove of business celebrity behavior, loaded with opportunities to do the one thing required: look in the mirror.

It's been a rich text this week: xAi's chatbot "Grok" going full Nazi (describing itself as "MechaHitler") due to its recent Elon-driven retraining, 24 hours later, CEO Linda Yaccarino's resignation, and 24 hours after that, the promise of MechaHitler being uploaded to a Tesla near you.

Even if you don't care about Elon, Tesla, or X, (for that you are to be commended) the problem is that all three of those cancerous machines care about you, and the fourth character, Ms. Yacc (MS. YacMan? Ms. YacPac? IDK, I'm workshopping), is a Rorschach test for all of our leadership. Anyone who is trying to build in this post-trust system will find something of themselves in this story, so that is where we begin.

A legacy player sells herself to a tech overlord

When Linda Yaccarino left NBCUniversal in 2023 to be the CEO of the newly minted "X" (Twitter + euginicist tendencies + porn), she had a long history of flirting with the micro-blogging app. Despite its long-term lagging in users and scale, Twitter had the cache to sway social opinion that punched way above its weight, so much so she had pushed execs at Comcast (parent company of NBC) to buy the app and a reasonable price before Elon did for 5-10x is worth.

A familiar tale: a leader in a plateauing industry with limited options. Many readers of this newsletter serve or are in legacy industries that have tried to bolt themselves to technology in Frankensteinian ways (wealth, education, consulting, all come to mind) in the hopes that the 1s and 0s guys could magically break a ceiling of value. In this way, you find in Ms. Yaccarino something of yourself. I know I do.

In nearly every case, the tech being buddied up to is of diminishing returns. Think the wealthtech platforms that are still promising the same "superhuman advisor" powered by same tech that they were in 2015. Having sold costly packages across their industries, they all now have to be recoded and rebuilt due to tech debt so large it's hard to fathom. The tech side of these bad marriages, like Twitter in 2023, is buried in an avalanche of code and functionality that it can't escape. There's a reason these apps look and work the same as they did 10 years ago, except with an overly aggressive AI overlay on top: the underlying code is unfixable.

Twitter, by bringing in Ms. Yaccarino, could dress itself in the presentability of old media and deploy her to soothe worried advertisers who were abandoning the platform. She largely failed in both those efforts until the U.S. government stepped in and made X its public media platform. Once the federal government makes a platform essential, advertisers have all the cover they need to put their ads for Inside Out 3 next to Mr. Dong's House of Xtreme Growth without losing sleep. Front row seats at inaugurations tend to buy cushy sleeping quarters.

The power of large-scale technology firms lies in their historic ability to embed themselves within the power of the state (for a deeper dive on this, see the book list below), making their alliances with entities like PR professionals and customers secondary. X's alliance with Trump's DC is not an innovation; it's a script, and one that made Linda unnecessary.

I suspect, being the historically savvy executive she used to be, that she knew this and has been planning her next move for some time. This is a lesson for all of us: when you've counted on platform tech to be your leap forward, always plan on the day the platform abandons you.

Enter Grok

We cannot tell a story about outsized tech without AI. In the land of X, this is Grok, the face of the supercompany that now owns the former Twitter, a creative accounting move that Elon used to fuse the two companies together using other people's money. Another classic Silicon Valley maneuver.

In June, Elon announced that Grok was too woke, too trained on a traditional media diet and would go back to the gym and to intake more in his words "politically incorrect" fare. Elon rarely delivers what he promises, except in the rare occasion that he promises more eugenics and social degradation, then man-oh-man is he on point.

Grok came back from makeover camp all shined up ready to claim that Hitler was the best leader in these uncertain times, making wild anti-semitic claims about Jews in Hollywood, and other such on-brand messaging. Completing his tour by announcing himself (him? I'm assuming Grok is a him, and Musk being a gender essentialist as he is, I think this is a good guess) as MechaHitler built by Elon's own design.

Now the 4-7% tax on your revenue that you are paying to tech platforms plus the 3-5% tax you are being enticed to pay toward their digital marketing siblings may not go full Nazi on you, but the lessons the AI world are consistent: Just when you think your the customer, you are reminded that you are the product. And sometimes, many times, you're paying in time, energy, attention, and even money for the privilege.

AI (and, yes, I use it in careful experiments and cases, so THANK YOU for your thoughtful comments and DMs about being a progress-hating luddite) is a system designed for the extraction of data, autonomy, and human capital. We are being incentivized into using it out of the classic Palo Alto "the other guys will use it worse" militarization anxiety. Even systems created to blow up bombs sometimes produce interesting things like microwaves with real use cases, so we don't have to be religious about this one way or the other. But neither need we be lobotomized. Thinking is the last human right.

Eventually, due to public outcry, Grok got unplugged, took a long sleepy-sleepy and woke up the next day with Linda's head on a platter and a press release in the queue to announce its integration with Tesla, Elon's other smoke and mirrors technology.

A Cautionary Tale

My clarion call remains: follow the incentives. Twitter/X never had an incentive to give Yaccarino any real power. She was deployed as an advertiser-whisperer and PR screen for Elon's antics, all while carrying the CEO title like silver bracelets linked tight to a golden chain around her throat.

Businesses that sell trust, such as traditional media, are classic examples; when they depend on internet-age technology as their savior, the hero becomes the villain. The incentives for platform tech companies—firms that build "put all your stuff here and we'll make life easy for you—are always to extract data and dependency from you. Unless crafted otherwise (exceptions do exist), they cannot meet their investors' objectives without building walls around you in anti-competitive ways and then deploying your logo as a credibility flag. Just like how Elon used Linda Yaccarino.

Ms. Yaccarino is too storied and too talented to disappear. She will find a place to land. But smaller brands and less credentialed leaders who sell out their futures to promissory platforms may not be so lucky. She will also live the rest of her life knowing she played saleswoman for the platform's eugenicist and authoritarian turn.

Your Silicon Valley Tax may not come in the form of a CEO title at X (hopefully not). It's more likely to appear in the promise of a big digital content play, an ad buy, or a layer of martech that will finally give you the world-changing dashboard that tells you exactly where money comes from. It may come in the form of a large, monied player who will supply leads as long as you wrap your business around their demands.

All of them will promise you the golden ring and demand only your brand and your unique value become at best dependent and at worst subservient to theirs as tribute. It will be hard not to believe them because they have demos, logos, testimonials, and ratings on their websites, as well as from G2, etc.

Turns out, it's easy to be enticed into facilitating your own demise. Just ask Linda Yaccarino. Once she figures out how to escape the titanium-grade NDA she signed, she has a story to tell.

As for you and I, our action steps remain clear:

• Recognize all cages as self-made.
• Diagnose your complicity in the challenges you face.
• Ask for help on 1 and 2 because they're almost impossible to do alone.

As always, I'm here for you.

Bonus: Three book recommendations

It's midyear of my 30,000-page goal for 2025, and I'm just barely on pace. I've read some incredible books, but three I wanted to share with you here.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
I let this one sit on my TBR list for far too long. It is an unflinching, deeply researched exploration of Silicon Valley and its role in shaping American capitalism. Everything we are seeing now is foretold in the making of Silicon Valley, its ethics, its self-made religion, and its financial structures. If we want to know what dangers lie ahead, a look back like this certainly has a lot to teach.
4.5/5 STARS

The Cult of Creativity
Another stunning read that recontextualizes how we got the economy we have, the assumptions that were made to create it, and the mythical narratives we tell ourselves. You can binge on self-help souffle, designed to prey on your instincts for survival, or you become a student of the hooks being used to fish you. I prefer the second, and this is a great tool to that end.
4/5 STARS

The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life
I've sent this to several of you, as it now resides permanently in my map of the world. I had a LinkedIn post hit a million views simply by saying we have a right to our own private spaces, so this topic is definitely in the zeitgeist. And this book was essential in my clarity. The right to the privacy of our own experience, without subjecting our every move to the recording and repurposing of third parties, is fundamental to our humanity. And we will lose something of ourselves if we don't fight with everything to hold on to it.