When you onboard at meta (circa 2020) the execs like to make vague references to this rare out of print book on media studies that they say presaged everything and explains a lot about how they think about their role in the media ecosystem. They liked to lift quotes from it to justify certain decisions or whatever. They encouraged you to buy the book “if you could find a copy”.

I like reading old books and philosophy so I found a copy. It was basically completely unfollow-able, and at best tangentially related to anything they were doing.

I think having some biblical text to appeal to, in order to justify what is otherwise completely self-dealing, self-serving behavior is some foundational principle of the VP lizard school in Silicon Valley.

It’s a sleight of hand. People will come up with brilliant illusions to distract you from the convenient hand that’s wrist deep into your coin purse.

Not to say there aren’t interesting or valuable intellectual ideas in these books — in Girard, or what have you. But ultimately you have to judge people objectively on the sort of behaviors they exhibit, not on the “illusions” of the intellectual or philosophical explanations they give for those behaviors.