{"id":360,"date":"2025-08-04T17:07:34","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T17:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/showey.net\/?p=360"},"modified":"2025-08-04T19:52:57","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T19:52:57","slug":"build-something-massive-and-other-bad-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/showey.net\/?p=360","title":{"rendered":"Build Something Massive (And Other Bad Ideas)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The motto of the Creative Destruction Lab – \u201cBuild something massive\u201d – captures, perhaps a little too neatly, the central affliction of contemporary entrepreneurship: the conflation of magnitude with merit. \u201cMassive\u201d has become shorthand for ambition, but without qualifying what that mass is composed of- or directed toward – it becomes meaningless at best, and harmful at worst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scalability in itself is not a virtue. It\u2019s a vector. What matters is what you scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silicon Valley didn\u2019t begin this way. The early days of Silicon Valley- when Hewlett-Packard was building precision oscillators and Intel was advancing the semiconductor – were not about lifestyle optimization or frictionless consumption. They were about expanding the frontiers of technology. They were, in the true sense of the word, transformative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, to \u201cbuild something massive\u201d often means \u201ccreate a minimally useful digital product and deploy it globally before anyone notices the ethical implications.\u201d The result has been a twenty-year arc of increasingly derivative ventures, with a brief interlude of Utopian rhetoric. In the early 2000s, startups routinely declared their intent to \u201cchange the world.\u201d Elizabeth Holmes channelled Gandhi via Steve Jobs: \u201cFirst they think you\u2019re crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.\u201d And they did change it – though not always for the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Silicon Valley was at its most self-congratulatory, \u201cchanging the world\u201d could mean something as trite as \u201cchanging how privileged urbanites order lunch.\u201d At its more troubling moments, it genuinely did<\/em> change the world – through platforms like Facebook – in ways that reshaped politics, culture, and the structure of public discourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the net effect of building two of the most massive enterprises of the past two decades – Facebook and the \u201cUber for X\u201d model- has been mixed, at the absolute best. Facebook has, ironically, been a powerful tool for strengthening local communities and reuniting long-lost acquaintances. But scaled without limits, it has become a platform for misinformation, polarization, and in places like Myanmar, instigators of actual violence and war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uber, similarly, represents a marked improvement over legacy taxi systems in terms of convenience, access, and price. But the model it inspired has had a devastating effect on the dignity of labour. The \u201cUber for X\u201d playbook has extracted the worst elements of precarious employment and repackaged them with cheerful UX. The gamification app offered to the driver is infantilizing. The algorithm never sleeps, never bargains, never empathizes. There is no water-cooler, no colleagues, no promotions, no rituals- just metrics, ratings, and relentless hustle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Office Space<\/em>, once a satire of stifling, white-collar mediocrity, now plays almost like nostalgia cinema. Innitech\u2019s employees had humiliating moments, but they also had weekends, healthcare, and the psychological space to complain, or even organize. The gig worker has no such luxuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To truly increase human thriving, we must aim higher than scale. The most urgent problems of our time are not engineering problems in search of a pitch deck. They are complex, moral, and systemic. Consider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n