cult_of_we

reviving an old throwaway:

the last two years have been incredibly depressing in the space of dedicated hardware for doing high performance computing tasks.

all the air has been sucked out of the room because the world can’t get enough of generating more text that no one has any meaningful use for besides hyping up their product whose primary focus is how it “leverages AI”.

and in the midst of all of this, I’m seeing these same technologies dramatically accelerate problems in short fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and education.

it will be absurdly bleak if the grotesque reality we’re creating destroys the things that made go into science & engineering in the first place…

Throwaway (but at least the name is apropos).

I worked as a software engineer at WeWork for a bit and no other startup or tech company has come close to the cultishness that Neumann is trying to cultivate there.

Some highlights from my brief time there:

- mandatory spiritual guidance at a company summit where the “guru” enforced the importance of one’s place in the organization

- mandatory attendance at “Summer Camp”, a weekend long music festival with excessive drinking

- mandatory attendance of a talk led by Neumann and transferred to Deepak _fucking_ Chopra at Summer Camp

- the Meetup founder displaying a picture of the twin towers, post plane crash, on a giant screen at Madison a Square Garden during a company summit

And these were just the noteworthy events that rose above the background noise of “What insane thing will Adam Neumann say this time?” each time an all-hands was held.