the year tech flopped
watching 'Glass Onion', reflecting on the bear market and calling idiots idiots
Here are a few things I remember more vividly than the plot of Knives Out: I got a huge blueberry coke slushy in the theater that made my teeth blue and my friend went to the bathroom right before the killer reveal and disappeared. He loved the movie but he also loved Don’t Look Up and made me watch Bullet Train. So, when I saw Glass Onion on Netflix, I put it on as a background sound and turned it off 10 minutes into the mystery invitation boxes and the arrival at the extravagant private island.
But then Ben Shapiro tweeted that it’s the worst movie ever made, and I had to see it through.
I won’t let myself fall into the trap of online discourse about a murder mystery movie with celebrity cameos and Daniel Craig in a striped romper. It’s a fine movie! It made me laugh a couple times and delayed my trip to the grocery store. It’s a movie you watch with your family over the holidays or alone on a too-burnt-out-to-go-out type of night, and it wasn’t quite cut out for the terminally online discourse. But the discourse itself has been fun to observe because I get to project my own experiences of the past few years onto it.
Movies like Don’t Look Up and that documentary The Social Dilemma didn’t quite get to me because like many people, I’ve long accepted the information that they reveal or try to get at: billionaires, politicians, media, institutions, and even science care about money, optics, and don’t have the collective best interest at heart. I grew up in a country where the media straight up brainwashes people into denying the obvious truth and moved to a country where people perform crazy mental gymnastics to justify things like taking away women’s rights on a random Tuesday. So, while boring to me, I get why works like this are fascinating to some and important to make (but perhaps, not important enough to be nominated for the Oscars).
The message that Glass Onion makes maybe too obvious is the one I’ve personally only begun to stomach in the past year.
People jump to connect the awkward weird tech billionaire characters with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg but the more devastating observation that I’ve made over the past year is that tech (and likely every other industry) is full of little, less visibles versions of those guys: from the ones who fail to do your job but get paid twice as much to the ones who gaslit masses into believe that buying crappy digital pictures of stuff is the new American dream.
I learned very early in my career that I need to be asking for amounts of money that make me uncomfortable and applying for jobs I don’t fully qualify for. The worst thing that can happen is someone saying “no,” so you might as well ask the questions you are afraid to ask. But all of this is baby talk compared to the grift and bluffing I’ve witnessed in the past few years: people failing their way up to a Partner title in a prominent VC firm, that VC pouring millions into things that made no sense and then pouring millions into trying to convince us they did, and of course, the guy who raised millions of dollars while playing video games. The funny thing is, with all this in-your-face crazy spectacles of grift, the people who got the most rage from the irritated masses were still the girls who barely made six figures as PMs at Meta and LinkedIn and posted about it on TikTok.
Watching people jump over each other’s heads in a game where everyone seemed to be rewarded just for showing up, twists your brain in a spiral. I watched my peers quit their jobs and try to get into crypto at the top of the hype cycle, jump through several jobs in a span of a few months, make crazy money and get so much attention for doing the bare minimum but holding up a nice looking front…or simply lying. The lying…I didn’t expect grown people to lie so much. It was like playing a board game that I didn’t know the rules of, but desperately wanted to win in or at least, not end up as a loser. At some point, I started wondering if there even were rules to this game or if the players made them up as they went.
When the recession, the bear market, whatever you call it hit on a random week in the summer, it was scary to realize that the job you saved through the pandemic was now at risk. It was tough to see people getting laid off in huge numbers, and I had empathy for a lot of them. I, too, was laid off from a job early in the downturn and I knew that companies were releasing thousands of people into a market with no job postings and holiday season coming up. Years of experience on job postings suddenly came back, people started working late hours, and hyped up startups started trying to actually ship features.
Yet, it was also refreshing. It’s good to see a guy like Elon walk himself into a terrible deal led by his own ego and incompetence. It’s validating to see guys like Ye and SBF experience consequences. It’s nice to see the guys who were bad at their jobs lose their jobs, the “boy geniuses” to be finally seen and treated for who they really are, and the people who grifted into their careers not be able to handle their responsibilities. It feels terrible to say out loud and I am not trying to get joy out of people’s failure…but oh man it feels reassuring to know that I wasn’t crazy for the past few years. The years were crazy, not me.
That’s how Glass Onion feels, and that’s why its straightforward plot and the obvious killer are easy to enjoy. We spend most of the movie following intricate possible motives the same way we spent the past few years following web3 just to find out that “no! it’s just dumb!” It feels good to see someone say straight to an ego-driven idiot that he is an idiot because most of the industry spent the past few years tiptoeing around saying just that.
I know that SBF won’t pay the full price for what he did, Elon will somehow get out of the terrible Twitter deal and the artsy guy from Williamsburg will get another well-paid made-up job next year. I know that there are a lot of opportunistic people who didn’t get called out and can afford to sit out the downturn. I know that the system that is seemingly putting things back in balance is still fundamentally broken and will soon swing in the other direction. After all, we are not out of this downturn yet and we are already talking about the filters that turn your selfies into a medieval portrait for $8 as “the future.”
But for a moment in time, it feels good to know you are not an idiot and watch an idiot on a TV screen.