We Cannot Abandon the World to People Who Are Good at Computers

This piece first appeared on my newsletter, Future Proof. Please do subscribe to that to support my writing on Medium and elsewhere.

Do you remember your first computer?

I remember mine. Well, it wasn’t mine. It was a time when we had a ‘family computer’ that occupied its own bespoke desk/shelving unit. It was a horrific, lumpen thing, made by Gateway, a company with the improbably twee logo of a cow-print cube (they were sold to Acer in 2007, so this is now a genuine artefact). It was cumbersome and the internet was terrifyingly slow (I have early, frustrated, memories of trying and failing to play an Anna Kournikova tennis game), but magical all the same. This great box of tricks; the hearth of the home.

I felt myself glued to that computer at the turn of the millennium. It occupied a little study in the very draughty part of our house. Sometimes I’d wheel a little electric heater in there so that I could stay at the keyboard for hours, doing whatever I was doing. It all seemed important at the time. Sometimes I’d just spend hours experimenting with WordArt and ClipArt to make posters for movies that existed only in my mind (this was all when I was too young, really, to understand the potential vices of the internet, though the promise of the Anna Kournikova tennis game, perpetually frustrated by our slow dial-up internet, was that the cartoon avatar would, eventually, be naked). The thought of that room — that computer — has an almost Proustian sense-memory quality. Just remembering the chill coming though the floorboards, I find myself transported.

And yet, despite all this, I didn’t end up good at computers. I was the right age, had the right opportunities of access, and yet here I am, tapping away on a MacBook that’s held together by gaffer tape. Meanwhile, some of my contemporaries who loved their computers in a similar way (or so I thought) have ended up controlling the flow of power in our modern world. How did we, the average users of the web, allow something so disastrous to happen?

The 1990s were characterised by a pithy adage: “the geeks shall inherit the world”. This was a period when Bill Gates wasn’t just the world’s richest man, but a symbol of modernity. His wealth wasn’t tied up in old money, oil money or boring things like banking or telecoms, but in computers (insert the “oooing” noise from Toy Story, for the full 90s experience). Those glittery, snazzy things where you could design billboards for Bloodhound V: Scent of Death or dispatch a backhand volley past a scantily-clad Russian tennis star. And Gates himself — in all his nebbish glory — looked like the physical manifestation of a modem. Dull on the outside; loaded with promise.

Gates became the world’s richest man in 1997, a time of sweeping change in the West. Clinton was in the White House and, here in the UK, Tony Blair’s New Labour congaed into power to the strains of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. The information age was upon us. In becoming the world’s richest man, Gates toppled Rob Walton, then the patriarch of the Walton family who operated Walmart, a vast chain of hypermarkets scattered across the United States. Gates’ coronation marked a significant change to who held the pursestrings of the world. Before Walton, the top spot had been occupied by Japanese real estate tycoon Yoshiaki Tsutsumi. Before that? John Paul Getty, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. That takes us back to 1900, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne of England.

Because Gates was so rich, he also became powerful. Not least as an aspirational figure. It was drummed into the heads of a generation of children that computing was the next frontier, that we would need to learn how to ‘code’ if we were to get ahead. In the UK (and, I suspect, the US) the spectre of Asian dominance over technology reigned. If we wanted to stay ahead of China, we were told, we’d have to take our ICT lessons serious.

And yet, all I recall learning, in school, about computers, was how to format a spreadsheet. I vaguely recollect my ICT teacher bragging about being in the Top 100 for Fantasy Football players in the country, and making us all sign-up to that platform so that he could consolidate his godlike status. But I don’t remember coding or anything of that sort. When I wanted to start my own website (I was, after all, addicted to computers, if not computing) I purchased the Adobe software Dreamweaver and made a half-hearted attempt to learn how to build a site. In the end, I gave up, begged some money off my parents, and paid a bloke in Australia £300 to design it for me. I was, approximately, 12 or 13 at the time, and saw this as quite a natural way to do things. After all, I had the great idea for the site (it was a forum for sharing trivia, with a league table for the top responders) and the enthusiasm to make it happen. Why shouldn’t I outsource the tricky technical bit?

But over the subsequent 20 years, I’ve become more acutely aware of the value our society places on the intersectionality of skills.

Take, as an example, this year’s Best Director category at the Oscars (a strange tangent, but all will become clear). Ten films are nominated for Best Picture but only five films for Best Director. The directing nominees are: Sean Baker for Anora, Brady Corbet for The Brutalist, James Mangold for A Complete Unknown, Jacques Audiard for Emilia Perez and Coralie Fargeat for The Substance. All of these directors wrote their films, as well as directing them. Of the five Best Picture nominees not to scoop Best Director nods (Conclave, Dune: Part Two, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, and Wicked) only Nickel Boys and Dune 2 were written by the same person who directed them (and both are very much outsiders in this category). Conclave, a decent bet to win Best Picture, feels like the obvious omission from the Directing category.

But it’s not really surprising. We love people who can do more than one grand task. There’s no good reason why the skills of writing a movie and directing a movie should be so routinely present in the same person. After all, one is a combination of aesthetic artistry and personnel management, the other is, well, writing. But the idea of auteurship — the sense that a filmmaker is the author of this vast visual text — is important to cinema. The practical reality might mean it makes more sense for writers to be writers and directors to be directors, but the self-mythologising tendency of human psychology will always champion the ‘writer-director’.

The same is true in all sorts of fields. Why, in football, should we expect a talented box-to-box midfielder to also be a good manager? Why, in journalism, are we so reluctant to hire people specialised in management to oversee teams, rather than give these jobs people who have risen to the top because of their prowess with the written word? And why — most importantly — have we allowed the world’s most powerful and influential businesses, again and again, to be run by people who are good at computers?

The past year or so has made me very sceptical about our modern oligarchy, an elite that can be summed up in two figures: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Musk is too old, really, to be good at computers. He’s the same generation as my Fantasy Football aficionado ICT teacher, not the generation on the frontline of the HTML-war with China. And his wealth isn’t built on computers, like Gates’s has been. But what’s clear about Musk is that he is obsessed with the computer. At Zip2 he was obsessed with digitising our mapped Earth, at PayPal with digitising our banking system, at X with digitising our social sphere. His other enterprises — like SpaceX and Tesla — have born out a desire to conflate the digital and physical worlds. SpaceX has been instrumental in littering the cosmos with satellites that will, eventually, make it impossible to disconnect; Tesla has turned the motorcar into a gadget. Musk loves computers.

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, is precisely the right age to be good at computers, and boy is he good at computers. It’s often forgotten in the story of how Facebook has developed, but Zuckerberg was a genuine, self-starting prodigy. The kid who eschewed fresh air and sunlight in favour of hours spent coding away, changing the world. The evolution of Facebook and, by extension, Meta has been typified by a question asked of its investors: how do we turn Zuckerberg the computer genius/nerd into Zuckerberg the CEO? Even now, it is an unanswered question. I recently watched a short, undoubtedly PR-organised, video in which Zuckerberg participates in a music quiz (where the contestants are usually pop stars or other musicians). The geek — who inherited the world — is gone. In its place is someone dressed in all the trappings of jockdom, flaunting his music knowledge and sporting a natty pair of Ray-Bans.

On the Instagram page for Track Star — the reasonably popular social media quiz show — the response to Zuckerberg’s appearance is unanimous. “Great hanging with you guys,” says [at]zuck on the platform he owns (774 likes). “Love you guys, but this sucks,” says the next comment (1,175 likes). “Ick. Pass. Read the room” (875 likes). “cannot think of a single reason why you would do this other than being paid a ton of money” (623 likes). “The show has definitely lost its soul” (386 likes). “Can you please get normal people in the show again?” (205 likes). Scroll as I may, I cannot find a non-Zuckerberg authored positive response to the appearance.

Because people recognise, instinctively, something uncanny about our oligarchs. “All these social networks and computers,” 26-year-old rapper Jack Harlow proclaimed on his hit ‘Industry Baby’. “Got these pussies walkin’ ‘round like they ain’t losers.” It has cost Musk a multi-billion dollar fortune to create a social network that amplifies his image. Zuckerberg has dedicated his entire professional life to it, yet still gets dunked on by commenters. Money is power but money is not image; we recognise them for who they are.

Zuckerberg and Musk are, fundamentally, different characters. At his core, Zuckerberg is a builder (in another world, in another lifetime, in another body, he would be an artisan carving stone gargoyles for the keep of some Gothic castle) and Musk is a promoter. For a while, they transparently hated each other, but they seem united, now, by a form of masculine defensiveness. Musk is 53, Zuckerberg is 40, but both seem at that curious midlife moment where paranoia about defenestration seems to set-in.

Let’s get real: neither man is psychologically, emotionally or intellectually equipped to be a powerful player in the world. An accusation frequently levelled at CTOs who become CEOs (or others from the technology sphere who become significant industry leaders) is that they have a process-based way of seeing the world, that they perceive problems as tasks with linear solutions. This is a dull critique, not least because generations of CEOs and business leaders — who might have seen the world in more nuanced, creative terms — tended to arrive at the same conclusions. No, the bigger problem is that neither man seems interested in understanding what people want, what is good for people, and where those two things might intersect. Both believes, instinctively, in a prescriptive pro-future, pro-innovation pathway. And that’s because both of them spend too much time on the computer.

There is an internet phrase — “touch grass” — that is generally deployed for men like Zuckerberg and Musk, who spend too much time wrapped up in a digital world, whether that’s the anonymised shouting match that is X (where Musk posts hundreds or thousands of times a week) or the Metaverse, where Zuckerberg proudly showcased his “legs”. Get off the computer, take deep breaths of cleansing air, touch grass. Talk to people — face to face; real people — and understand their wants and their needs. Engage with your workforce, not as arbitrary numbers to be perpetually winnowed, but as humans who are relying on you for their livelihoods. Understand the world, in all its grassy complexity, as somewhere that cannot be unilaterally changed or improved, but somewhere that needs constant coaxing, tweaking, around the margins. Geopolitics is not what’s happening on Twitter or Facebook, but what’s happening in Donetsk and Gaza; civilisation is not what’s happening on Instagram or TikTok, but what’s happening in Des Moines and Basingstoke and Nanjing and Kinshasa.

But the core problem is one of oligarchy. We are living, in the West, in a world in which power is vested in the rich. Just look at Jeff Bezos (a former holder of the world’s richest man title belt) who created Amazon as a sort-of digital Walmart. He got super rich and then bought the Washington Post, one of America’s greatest media titles. The paper of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. But it’s clear now that, in the era of Trump II, Bezos no longer has an interest in owning a paper that is proactively shitting on a man who wants to make the oligarch class richer and more powerful. A directive issued (today) renovated its hallowed opinion pages. “I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages,” Bezos emailed the Post’s staff. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Gone is the “broad-based” opinion section of old. In its place, a defence of two tenets that require little protection in the modern world.

If oligarchy is the problem, the subsidiary issue is that of the people who become oligarchs. How do you become an oligarch, today, if you neither inherit enormous wealth nor are good at computers?

Occasionally in my delusions of a life in which I walk in the shoes of Messrs Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos (sounds like a terrifying law firm) I conceive of new technology businesses that exist only in my daydreams. But often I see them quite clearly: something that I believe solves a problem, and would improve people’s brief time on Earth. And then I think about how I would execute them, which would involve me digging out $100,000 to even develop a prototype, let alone bring it to market. And I shrivel up, like a grape becoming a raisin, and go back to my writing. But another class of person — the ‘good at computers’ entrepreneur — just cracks on. They develop the prototype and then the app, and then people give them money to take it to market and they become the next generation of billionaires.

But, to some extent, they are fishing from an unequal pond. Just as Hollywood fetishes directors who are also writers, so too does the world of venture capital obsess over founders with technological skills. There is no particular reason why these people would have the best answers to the issues of our age — indeed, the evidence of the 21st century is that they don’t. It is like asking a question but only listening to the responses of people wearing hats. Does wearing a hat make your answer better? No. Does being good at computers make your answer better? No.

These are men — and they’re overwhelmingly men — who have devoted huge swathes of their 20–25 years on earth to sitting in a darkened room, alone, focused on solving the problem of reality by disassociation. And they often become very good at it, virtuosos in their field, which is great. The world needs its builders — needs the artisans to finesse the horns on the Notre-Dame gargoyles — and learned technique should never be undervalued. True genius requires a monomania. A great piano maestro will train for several hours every day until their fingers are calloused and their ear-drums half defeated, so that they can, one day, take to the stage at Carnegie Hall and play Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto. That is a dedication to be admired; one that lights up the world.

But I’d be very worried if that same pianist was given the keys to a FTSE 100 company or a government department. I’d be concerned that their view of the world was too blinkered, too focused on those black and white keys, and the strange variations of sound they can produce, to really understand the world. In short: it’s hard to be both a monomaniac and a good all-rounder.

But I don’t really know how you become rich — and thus powerful — these days, without being good at computers. If it’s not computers, it’s something similar. Maybe you’re a military engineer who now runs a satellite business; maybe you’re a maths PhD who’s become a crypto billionaire. But we have created an entrepreneurial culture that is too hospitable to single-mindedness. It is why the general low-level scepticism about Artificial Intelligence (present in most of the population who have bothered to engage with the trend) has been absent from Big Tech firms and investment arms, who have dived in, head first. It is digitising the last analogue bits of their sector, the culmination of the dreams of men like Musk and Zuckerberg who grew up playing Doom not football, talking over MSN messenger not the lunch tables in the canteen, touching mouse and keyboard not grass.

A better future means including a diversity of talents. The die cannot have been cast when, as a kid, you chose not to stay behind at school for a coding class. And yes, of course, we need to break the presumption that our business elites will also hold the reins of power, but given that trend seems to be entrenching rather than regressing, it’s up to society to ensure that some people who are good at things, other than computers, make it to the top. Because, otherwise, your role will have been pre-ordained, set in motion decades ago when you messed around on Paint or Myspace, or swept too many mines, rather than getting good — truly good — at computers.

Follow me on Bluesky, if you’re over there. Otherwise: log off.