I blame the steve jobs cult
There has been a shift from "We" to "I". It rubbed me wrong when Apple launched the iPod, the iPhone, etc. In that moment, the world became more self-centered, instead of group-centered. Social media is the same, it's all about the individual: MY profile, MY followers, MY status.
It's anti-social by nature, and society is worse because of the shift.
> The "i" in iPhone originally stood for internet. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the lowercase "i" prefix with the iMac in 1998 to highlight the computer's fast, out-of-the-box web connectivity. During the launch, Jobs also revealed that the letter represented four other concepts: • Individual: For personal use and computing. • Instruct: For education and learning. • Inform: For accessing information. • Inspire: For creativity and future innovations.
In a more generous light, the focus on the individual is a reaction to an Authoritarian groupthink, eg 1984. Perhaps it’s just the Cobra Effect.
Fun real life story: I worked with an engineer once who had some sort of disability that required him to walk around with crutches attached to his arms. Before he worked with me, he worked at Apple, and was high up.
One day he had a meeting with Jobs, and he was late, because a non-handicapped car had parked in the handicapped spot, and as a disabled person it took him a long time to get from a normal parking spot. He said as much when he arrived in the meeting.
Now here's the "Jobs is burning in hell right now" part. Jobs looks the disabled guy directly in the eye and, without any shame whatsoever, says "oh, I parked there ... I believe the US government overreacted after WW2 and built too many disabled parking spaces, so I park in them."
He says this ... to the sweaty disabled guy who just had to "race" across the parking lot to get to the meeting! Fuck Jobs and fuck emulating him.
The same nut case responsible for pushing industries forward is the same nutcase that blows up.
Society can decide not to reward such people but it doesn’t.
Society has nothing to do with this, as pretty every member of society would agree the above is atrocious behavior. What you're saying is that the entire human system is bad about rewarding people at the top appropriately ... which is absolutely true, but its not about people wanting it that way; EVERYONE (except the 0.0001% at the top) wants it another way ... we just can't figure out how to get there.
But he was still famous for working his teams an insane amount of hours throughout his career. It was an open "joke" that any new project he released would be completely unsupportable for the first week ... because he drove the entire team that built it so hard, the entire team crashed for a week after.
That is not how any healthy/reasonable adult runs any team, tech or otherwise.
It takes exactly 0 talent to sit in a room and tell someone their worldclass effort is "not good enough". Just as it takes 0 ingenuity to say "I want a manned return mission to mars by 2030"... Just because the executive says it doesn't mean they're contributing anything of worth to the outcome.