We have reached the end of the known Steve Jobs Vision of computing. In two separate interviews he references two forms of computing he would like to get to. One is a headphones for video display you would wear on your face. The second is being able to converse with the essence of someone that you don’t normally have access to (Einstein etc), being able to consult the great and talented men and women of history. An experience now made possible with LLMs.
So what’s next?
First we have to break out of the hauntology of these characters. Then we can dream again.
SEEING THE GHOSTS
What is hauntology? Pulling from the always true, never wrong, tablet of Wikipedia: Hauntology is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.
How does it show up?
Similarly as I wrote in a previous piece, these ghosts act as referential objects for our desired trajectories. In Steve we see a complicated driven individual that pushes those around him to create beautiful breakthrough products. He builds both the most influential company of all time while also becoming a popular culture icon. Everything a tech boy wants.
It’s not limited to individuals, but in how we view break out companies. In the post-Snapchat, pre-Tiktok breakout… every single consumer app company tried to reproduce the Snap magic. At the same time, every investor was benchmarking to the Snap story. This motion we generally describe as “pattern matching”. It allows capital to move without too much critique (up or down the ladder), but it’s come at the cost of a lack of progress, compelling ideas, and diversity of individuals.
FREE FROM GHOSTS
We end up producing the same image. The same energies. We are breathing old life into new ideas.
The real tragedy of Virgil dying young is that our obsession with speculating of what he might have done produces a lot of derivative miniatures. That neither pushes the culture forward, nor is it healthy for the individual.
Eugene describes it as a prison for your ego… and that is completely accurate. The same is true for those overly pattern matched to previous company forms. Overly pattern matched to their iconoclastic references. This is unironically the search for the road less traveled… which is what made those ghosts we admire, admirable in the first place.
KNOW YOUR HISTORY → MAKE NEW HISTORY
To be free from our ghosts does not mean we should aim to be free from history. Yet, this is the basis of the trap. What the eye takes in, the heart desires, from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. History has its fingerprints all over the creation happening in the present… there’s a balancing act there.
This is the new job. Finding newness in the land of the God Emperor (yes another Dune reference).
Newness is incredibly hard work, and will come with a new set of critique that the pioneers of newness will have to weather for the communal benefit it brings.
And as time moves forward, of course, the next generation will have new ghosts to free themselves from.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
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Much love.
Live in the light