The constant expansion and destructive acquisition of small innovative companies maintains the illusion that the latest digital horse is something special. It’s not. The unglamorous truth is that Google makes its money selling ad space to insurance companies and Microsoft makes its money releasing incremental updates to its flawed operating system that it alternately sabotages and then repairs. If you’re annoyed by Windows 8, don’t worry. Windows 9 will “fix” the problem. It’s part of the idiotic business plan by a company that exploited a niche in IBM to become a much lamer IBM.
The “genius” factor is the sizzle that convinces investors to put their money into companies that have one core product whose profitability depends on the internet remaining the same ten years from now. It’s a furious buzz of activity that makes investors overlook the hard numbers. Take Amazon, which sells physical objects for money, and yet has been described as a shareholder subsidized charity because it funnels all its profits into getting bigger and bigger without actually turning a profit.
The absurd economics of the thing have made it so that not having a business plan is proof of sincerity. Any MBA can put together a business plan, but it takes a real genius to waltz into Wall Street wearing a hoodie and flipflops accompanied by a few celebrity pals with a plan to become the biggest companies that does everything ever… at which point it might turn a profit.
All this silliness has distorted our sense of how business is supposed to work and how things actually get done. Every CEO is supposed to be brilliant, to make irrational snap decisions that his peers will think make no sense and to parachute out of the company just ahead of the next trainwreck. And now it’s also how our government runs.
Obama’s public image is tethered to some illusion of genius entirely divorced from real world results. If he accidentally sat on the red button and ended the world in a blaze of nuclear fire, his horribly scarred mutant biographers would still explain in detail why he was much too smart to be president. And they’re probably right. Dot coms are likewise full of CEOs who are too smart to run companies, but enjoy solving abstract puzzles, buying other companies, waterskiing in Samurai costumes and giving interviews full of buzzwords to business magazines. Another word for them is idiots.
Applied intelligence is far more useful than abstract intelligence. It’s the difference between an eight foot basketball player who never bothers to learn the game and the six footer who spends every waking hour practicing and strategizing. The former has a genetic gift combined with some good nurturing and no useful skills beyond that. The latter has cultivated and applied his talents to the task.Work isn’t glamorous. Not even the kind of work that most people think is glamorous. Being a movie star is about walking along a taped line and reciting the same lines again and again. Running a company is about knowing how the sausage gets made and seeing that it gets made on time. And being president is about doing both of those things a whole lot.
If Obama were a sports star, he wouldn’t be a basketball player, to the disappointment of so many white liberals. He would be a wrestler. You could easily see him playing a character, running around the ring, winning over the crowd, feeding off the drama and then staying around for a rigged match; the only kind he could win. It’s the easy glamorous stuff that he likes. Not the hard work.
[…]
Obama kept comparing Healthcare.gov to dot com companies because he assumed that building it would be some childishly simple act of genius. And he had every reason to think it would be easy. For the lifecycle of a mediocre internet company, he has lived a charmed life in which he only has to snap his fingers to get things done. There’s an extensive infrastructure of websites built around him that transcribe his speeches and inserts references to him into the biographies of American presidents.
But Healthcare.gov was actually supposed to a bunch of things, most of them more complicated than just delivering another dose of Obamaganda do the masses. And it had to be done, not by engineers waiting around for their stock options to (hopefully) make them millionaires, but by government contractors who spend all their money on lobbyists, not on talent, because that’s where their payday comes from. If you have to choose between working for CGI or the next Facebook, why would you choose to spend your days poring over charts from some clueless government idiot at CMS?
Now Obama has run into the end of his own political lifecycle. The billionaires who invested in him, no longer need him. The Democratic Party needs to convince voters that Hillary will fix his messes. And he stupidly made the mistake of actually trying to implement one of his ideas in a way that will directly affect people. Obama is no longer Google. Now he’s been reduced to being a Yahoo.
[…]
Obama’s real crime was to make it obvious that he isn’t a genius. Just a guy in flipflops and a hoodie. Not an eccentric genius who wears a hoodie and flipflops because he’s an original thinker, but a guy who wears them because kids half his age wear them and he’s too lazy and deluded to grow up.
Obama and the left must now make it their mission to keep the stink of ObamaCare off them — to put the blame for its (completely foreseeable) “failings” on evil insurance companies, recalcitrant Republicans, or mouth-breathing members of the great unwashed too ignorant of their own best interests and deplorably ungrateful of the Great Man’s mental largess.
Utopian socialism can never be allowed to fail. And to maintain the illusion that it hasn’t, the narrative must always be that some impediment outside of the unrealistic and soul-crushing ideology itself has caused its destructive ripple effects to damage the social fabric. Obama, therefore, isn’t flawed; he is merely on his way to becoming the latest Marxist who couldn’t overcome the roadblocks to Utopia — the latest communist who was unable to break free of societal constraints in order to bring Heaven to earth. The failing isn’t His. It’s that we weren’t quite ready for His Grace, and so our redemption must wait until he is later reborn, possibly in a pant suit and a boasting a shriek that could scare the stain off of a certain blue dress.
Sadly, Obama is also one of the most successful failed Marxists. And that’s because he will have caused potentially irreparable harm to the representative republic and the ideals of individual autonomy and personal liberty that have always been bolstered by private property rights and free market capitalism — and in so doing, has set the stage for even more dependency on government and even greater movement leftward, as Republicans, in their rush to fill the big government void, adopt as foundational many of the assumptions that underpin collectivism and the authoritarianism of a centralized government too big to fail.
Unless we have the will to fight it, that is. I guess time will tell.
(h/t Guido)
Nice writeup by Sultan Knish. Another way to look at it is that in the Obamanauts postmodern worldview where perception is reality they have mistaken the pitch for the product and believe they only have to sell it, they don’t actually have to deliver.
The sad thing is that to a large extent, they are correct.
I swear geoffb, I never saw the Knish piece until just now.
Anyways, the future which has not come is the complete basis of progressivism, which necessarily looks to the next thing as to an end (telos), which, however, is only present to the all-seeing mind of the progressive ruler, and is incommunicable as such to the polloi over whom he rules. “Suck it,” is another [short-hand] way of describing this one-way-street of a relationship.
Utopian socialism can never be allowed to fail. And to maintain the illusion that it hasn’t, the narrative must always be that some impediment outside of the unrealistic and soul-crushing ideology itself has caused its destructive ripple …
Maintaining the illusion also means projecting success into the future, after we crest this next hill, after this one last obstacle is moved, after these few provisions are put into place.
Obamacare’s primary “mistake” is that it has actually been put into effect and its consequences made manifest.
Draw back the curtain to reveal the sorry little wizard with his hands on the levers, and The Great And Terrible Oz can never be great and terrible again.
It’s instructive to read the comments to Rich Lowry’s piece in Politico The Bad Faith Presidency. The True Believers are sneering “racist” “tea baggers” etc all in an effort to stick their fingers in their ears while screaming “Because SHUTUP”
No matter how transparently bad Obama has actually acted, his is still The Bestest Prez EVAH.
they have mistaken the pitch for the product
“Sell the smoke, then build the fire,” is what our sales team says to engineering.
Sometimes the fire gets built in time; sometimes it doesn’t. Difference is, our developers eventually do get the features working, and they don’t intentionally break a version just to fix it in the next. We’re still in the stage where there IS new functionality to be pursued that isn’t merely bells and whistles and blingity bling.
Software does suffer from the fact that it can’t wear out — it can only be obsoleted by new software. Not much more you can do with an operating system or a word processor these days except change the interface.
And make it work with new hardware, which IS actually improving or at least morphing into form factors that people find more useful than the last. Individual hard drives are measured in terabytes anymore and one server can store petabytes, but that’s just for server farms, not home use.
There ARE only so many LOLcats to store, after all.
Knish is usually spot-on, but he seems pretty clueless here about the tech business.
Ask the brick-and-mortar businesses that no longer exist if they think Amazon is some sort of subsidized charity, and that market share is a meaningless metric.
he seems pretty clueless here about the tech business.
Some of what he says is true, especially about the illusion of genius often substituting for the real thing. Which is really just another way of observing that a coding genius has no clue about business strategy.
Also known as Teh Obvious.
Meagan McArdle’s article about the illusion of omnicompetence is illustrative as well.
“The Future That Never Comes”
Well, it’s either that or wiping out the past and starting at year 0, for these types.
“and yet has been described as a shareholder subsidized charity because it funnels all its profits into getting bigger and bigger without actually turning a profit.”
Amazon.com has been profitable since 2001. Also, their website works. Also, they have a competent CEO who hires based on talent and motivation rather than political ideology.
Not the best comparison.
Also, they convince customers to buy their good deals by offering them actual good deals, not forcing customers to buy from them under the color of law.
SBP
A lot of times, for me, Amazon is the place to go to find hard to find items. Why run around town chasing down something when you can have it delivered in a couple of days?
Amazon also is extremely kind to small bookstores and small vendors, who are able to pitch their wares from that site.
Amazon delivers.
End of story.
Absolutely. They’re also very kind to authors. You can write a book, upload it to Amazon, and have it on sale world-wide within 12 hours, not 2-3 years, and you get to keep 70% of the money, not 15% (said 15% assumes that your conventional publisher isn’t playing accounting tricks that would make Hollywood blush, which is a big assumption).
I have known several people who are smart, but not too smart yet, think they a really smart. I assume that at one crucial point in their development they were the smartest kid in the room and that perception of their genius never left them despite all evidence to the contrary.
For Obama, I don’t think he has ever been around many truly smart people and the ones he has been around are back-stabbing opportunists or straight out psychopaths.
Okay, I believe you.
A future that is already here.
“Blake says November 27, 2013 at 2:26 pm
SBP
A lot of times, for me, Amazon is the place to go to find hard to find items. Why run around town chasing down something when you can have it delivered in a couple of days?”
Exactly. My county is roughly 30 miles square. Somewhere in all that might be a store that still sells bars of Fels Naptha.
Or I can search Amazon & get it delivered in 2-3 days.
I’m just not seeing the black vote, Obama’s 93-96%-guaranteed-for-life supporters, freely wafting to the pantsuit. The letdown would be too much; she’s just too white. So, I surmise the Democrats won’t turn ever, ever turn their backs on Barky. They’ll need him to keep hold of that short leash, and deliver to them once again that bloc of voters.
Hillary will not be allowed to deviate from unwritten policy and attack Barack. To do so would drive away the black vote. President Cult of Personality for Life retains His subjects, so hand’s off Mr. Obama! will be included in any successive Democratic presidential candidate’s marching orders.
I’m just not seeing the black vote, Obama’s 93-96%-guaranteed-for-life supporters, freely wafting to the pantsuit. The letdown would be too much; she’s just too white.
Which is why Liz “Princess Fauxcahontas” Warren wants to jump in… to get the vote from “her peeps” (not using slang, I really do mean the little marshmallow chickens).
Yeah, that’s not going to happen either. Half a term as Senatrix? No sale.
Who else do they have? Biden. Martin O’Malley. Please.
They gwain git shellacked.
Half a term as Senatrix?
That didn’t stop them in ’08…
They’re going to run Fauxcahontas and Booker. Count on it.
50-50 as to which one is the top of the ticket.
Coin-toss, indeed.
I hope the country is sick of rookies and commie rookies at that, running the joint.