Linked – You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars
Ed Zitron starts this screed about tech journalism with this reminder from the movie Almost Famous –
You cannot make friends with the rock stars…if you’re going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist.
He then discusses journalists who have been “friends” with Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Sam Altman, etc.
It would be best if you read the whole thing, but I wanted to add something else. A few tears back on my Child Abuse Survivor site, I wrote about something called the “halo effect.”
In that post, I’m talking about Jared Fogle, the nice, friendly guy from the Subway ads who turned out to be something entirely different.
I’ve also written the same story about Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nasser, and other infamous child abusers. The common denominator in these cases was someone very nice, helpful, and committed to the community—all traits that we assume make them safe to our kids when they aren’t. We considered them safe because we saw them do “good” acts, and our cognitive bias assumed they were good people.
I’ve often said that glowing articles about successful men make many unfounded assumptions. Following the same morning routine as the super-wealthy, for example, won’t make you rich. Myriad factors led to their success, luck maybe being the first and foremost. Yet, we consider them to be smart because they are rich. In some ways, they are smart, but we should never assume that makes them smart about everything. No one is smart about everything. Everyone has holes in their working knowledge.
We often create this halo effect around successful tech founders despite the countless examples of people who were very successful at one thing but failed miserably at others.
It turns out that Michael Jordan wasn’t that great at baseball. He wasn’t necessarily terrible, but baseball was pretty mediocre compared to his success at basketball.
That seems to be what happens in the tech journalism space. We have a list of people who’ve created successful companies and made a ton of money doing it, and everyone is supposed to assume that they are so bright they can do it over and over again. Then we are surprised when Elon buys Twitter and runs it into the ground or when Meta can’t find a market for the Metaverse. Microsoft spends billions upon billions of dollars on AI without any hope of making a profit for years while conducting rounds of layoffs to offset those costs. We assume they know what they’re doing because they’ve succeeded in other markets before, and the press doesn’t challenge them when they say provably false things.
It’s the Halo Effect. We assume that successful people are smart and kind and live healthy lives, especially if they are white men. When they contradict this picture we’ve painted, we loathe to admit it, let alone call it out in an interview. It’s more cognitively comfortable for us to continue believing they are competent and will figure it out. Admitting that people are a complicated mix of good, evil, intelligent, and dumb is too much work. That’s why we struggle to believe the friendly coach is a pedophile and the super-wealthy are mediocre at many, many things.
If we realized how mediocre we all are regarding specific skills, we could look at the giants of the tech industry or any sector a little more critically. We shouldn’t take what they say at face value any more than a less-famous person. Journalists should know better. They can’t be friends with the subjects of their writing any more than music journalists can be with rock stars. .
Sometimes, even smart people do dumb shit. Pretending it’s not dumb shit because you admire them makes all of us dumber.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/
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