The value of the liberal arts education is to spot inauthenticity. This essay has plenty.
The reason there's "cynicism", more accurately skepticism by the way, about "the uncertainty of the edge of tech development" is precisely because of what Builders have done with it for the past 20 years in particular. Famously, Thiel said "We wanted flying cars and got 140 characters." Ask a professional pilot what they think about everyone having a flying car...but really the 140 characters is worse, and I certainly see no indication that Builders are building *anything* to address well-established problems without regard to their individual gains. (AI? Insofar as it's done anything, it's certainly done wonders for solving the problem of too many entry-level jobs.)
All those pesky rules, Builders, are to keep you from strip-mining the mountain we live on. It's been consistent in my 25 years of tech; it was even somewhat endearing, like a dog that persists in swallowing socks, until you decided that dopamine manipulation was the way we go. That was as if you invented gunpowder, and now you're a bunch of monkeys banging on a warhead with bigger and bigger rocks.
You could start by building affordable high-rise housing in San Francisco, for instance. Come to think of it, Mountain View would be a great place to start! Central access, lots of growth benefits. Do it like China: as quickly as possible, and pay people incredible incentives to move there. Whatcha say?
Remember when the "cynics" in tech were the ones pushing for quality, reliability, and the other "ilities?" Oh, wait, that is still who they are now. This essay grossly mischaracterizes an important part of quality ecosystem. Vilify the people pushing for the industry to do better and all we will get for it will be worse outcomes.
Smart framing, and I actually agree that cynicism has become a cultural force worth understanding.
But I don’t think Cynics are anti-technology. We’re anti-bullshit. We like innovation just fine. We just don’t confuse marketing with progress.
The gospel of startups has many prophets and no messiah. Belief turns ideas into decks and decks into rounds. It’s a fine system until belief moves faster than reality. Then it becomes hype.
We’re not reacting to progress. We’re reacting to the unbridled enthusiasm of the people who sell it and the people who own it. It’s easy to label skepticism as pathology when your worldview depends on uninterrupted belief. The “Solver–Cynic alliance” reads less like analysis and more like rhetorical inoculation for the AI bubble.
Cynics aren’t the problem. We’re the immune system.
I admire the framing, but your characterization of the cynics isn’t a good faith attempt to be genuinely open-minded about your opposition. The term “enshittification” was coined by cory doctorow, who, to put it mildly, has thought about tech for some time, and if you’ve read his new book of that name (I have), you know that it’s full of very concrete descriptions of ways different tech entities overstep their rights/ behave in assorted dubious (often explicitly illegal) ways, up to and very much including labour and antitrust breach lawsuits. People complaining about freshwater lakes being drained for AI slop may be bitching, but ultimately they are basically right (see, eg, Jon Gorey’s article in the Lincoln Institute from last week).
Lately, in personal conversations, I’ve heard various types of the “reactionary anti-tech sentiment” you describe from everyone from award-winning journalists who specialize in AI to my peers who spend a lot of time in the command line to my neighbour who drives a cement mixer for work and is angry at how his messaging apps are now harder to use and everything needs a fingerprint. These people don’t have a “death drive”, and they’re not primarily motivated by fear of looking stupid — they all have far better things to do. Furthermore they very much want a future, many of them are reasonably abreast of current developments and maybe are even ok with some amount of uncertainty, but they have real, lucid, and understandable concerns about the way things are going now — and they want regulation. That’s not anti-tech! That’s pragmatic. And it’s motivated party by wanting a safe world for their kids to grow up in, as do you. But you know all this.
Alex, this framework resonates deeply with what we're seeing in the AI infrastructure buildout right now. The Builder-Solver-Cynic dynamic is playing out in real-time around LLM inference optimization and hardware acceleration.
Builders like NVIDIA are pushing forward with Blackwell and GB200 NVL72 systems, betting on exponential compute scaling. Solvers are working on more efficient architectures (think Groq's LPU approach or Cerebras wafer-scale engines) to address the practical constraints of power and cost. Meanwhile, Cynics dismiss the entire AI wave as a bubble, missing that the real value creation happens when Builders and Solvers iterate together.
What's fascinating is how the Cynic mindset can actually freeze capital allocation at critical inflection points. We saw this with cloud adoption in 2008-2010, and we're seeing it again with AI infrastructure today. The companies that recognize they're at the "edge of uncertainty" and lean in—whether through aggressive capex or architectural innovation—tend to capture disproportionate returns.
Your point about Cynics being "tech-savvy" is particularly astute. They understand the constraints well enough to articulate why something won't work, but lack the conviction to build through the uncertainty. That's why we see so many former engineers becoming tech critics rather than founders.
What stood out to me isn’t the split between builders, solvers, and cynics, but how people move between them.
A lot of the cynicism we see today feels like what happens when people who used to build lose faith that their work still matters. They still see the constraints and complexity, but without a way to turn that into something productive, it turns into irony.
Maybe cynics feel so familiar not because they’re tech-savvy, but because they’re former builders who stopped believing anything can (or should be) really be built.
I think the way survivorship bias has risen in casual popularity has a lot to say here. It states that everything is luck, which gives cynics a way out and also could birth them.
I find the risk angle most intriguing. It reframes your whole triad around uncertainty.
Builders embrace uncertainty and learn through it; Solvers try to eliminate it through design and coordination; Cynics reject it entirely, defending themselves with irony. That spectrum explains not only online culture but also why only the Builders can turn uncertainty into motion. The future, perhaps, belongs to those who can stand in the fog the longest.
Long ago, the People of the Industrial Era began building a Cathedral of Unfinished Consequences — not to worship gods, but to house their aspirations. Each generation added to its structure: engineers laid lattices of logic, dreamers carved glyphs of progress into the stone, and economists in gilded robes wove vaults from numbers and hope. It rose higher with every passing age, a monument to mastery.
But there was no master blueprint.
As the world shifted beneath it, the foundation of the Cathedral of Unfinished Consequences bent and cracked. Columns meant to support justice began sinking into sediment laid by forgotten empires. Stained-glass algorithms flickered with data no one could interpret. Ivy of unintended consequence wound up the walls.
Still, the builders kept building — unable to stop, unsure how to begin again. Some came merely to admire its beauty, others came to seal away its failures. But deep inside, the pulse of its original purpose still echoed like a heartbeat in stone.
Now, at twilight, the cathedral stands both sacred and strange. It is the most human of creations: unfinished, imperfect, and alive.
While the universe may be indifferent, humans are not — and our need for meaning, connection, and awe will always outpace what science alone can deliver. The stories and our metaphors don’t fill that gap with metaphysics. They simply show us what it’s like to live with the gap.
The value of the liberal arts education is to spot inauthenticity. This essay has plenty.
The reason there's "cynicism", more accurately skepticism by the way, about "the uncertainty of the edge of tech development" is precisely because of what Builders have done with it for the past 20 years in particular. Famously, Thiel said "We wanted flying cars and got 140 characters." Ask a professional pilot what they think about everyone having a flying car...but really the 140 characters is worse, and I certainly see no indication that Builders are building *anything* to address well-established problems without regard to their individual gains. (AI? Insofar as it's done anything, it's certainly done wonders for solving the problem of too many entry-level jobs.)
All those pesky rules, Builders, are to keep you from strip-mining the mountain we live on. It's been consistent in my 25 years of tech; it was even somewhat endearing, like a dog that persists in swallowing socks, until you decided that dopamine manipulation was the way we go. That was as if you invented gunpowder, and now you're a bunch of monkeys banging on a warhead with bigger and bigger rocks.
You could start by building affordable high-rise housing in San Francisco, for instance. Come to think of it, Mountain View would be a great place to start! Central access, lots of growth benefits. Do it like China: as quickly as possible, and pay people incredible incentives to move there. Whatcha say?
Remember when the "cynics" in tech were the ones pushing for quality, reliability, and the other "ilities?" Oh, wait, that is still who they are now. This essay grossly mischaracterizes an important part of quality ecosystem. Vilify the people pushing for the industry to do better and all we will get for it will be worse outcomes.
Smart framing, and I actually agree that cynicism has become a cultural force worth understanding.
But I don’t think Cynics are anti-technology. We’re anti-bullshit. We like innovation just fine. We just don’t confuse marketing with progress.
The gospel of startups has many prophets and no messiah. Belief turns ideas into decks and decks into rounds. It’s a fine system until belief moves faster than reality. Then it becomes hype.
We’re not reacting to progress. We’re reacting to the unbridled enthusiasm of the people who sell it and the people who own it. It’s easy to label skepticism as pathology when your worldview depends on uninterrupted belief. The “Solver–Cynic alliance” reads less like analysis and more like rhetorical inoculation for the AI bubble.
Cynics aren’t the problem. We’re the immune system.
I admire the framing, but your characterization of the cynics isn’t a good faith attempt to be genuinely open-minded about your opposition. The term “enshittification” was coined by cory doctorow, who, to put it mildly, has thought about tech for some time, and if you’ve read his new book of that name (I have), you know that it’s full of very concrete descriptions of ways different tech entities overstep their rights/ behave in assorted dubious (often explicitly illegal) ways, up to and very much including labour and antitrust breach lawsuits. People complaining about freshwater lakes being drained for AI slop may be bitching, but ultimately they are basically right (see, eg, Jon Gorey’s article in the Lincoln Institute from last week).
Lately, in personal conversations, I’ve heard various types of the “reactionary anti-tech sentiment” you describe from everyone from award-winning journalists who specialize in AI to my peers who spend a lot of time in the command line to my neighbour who drives a cement mixer for work and is angry at how his messaging apps are now harder to use and everything needs a fingerprint. These people don’t have a “death drive”, and they’re not primarily motivated by fear of looking stupid — they all have far better things to do. Furthermore they very much want a future, many of them are reasonably abreast of current developments and maybe are even ok with some amount of uncertainty, but they have real, lucid, and understandable concerns about the way things are going now — and they want regulation. That’s not anti-tech! That’s pragmatic. And it’s motivated party by wanting a safe world for their kids to grow up in, as do you. But you know all this.
Alex, this framework resonates deeply with what we're seeing in the AI infrastructure buildout right now. The Builder-Solver-Cynic dynamic is playing out in real-time around LLM inference optimization and hardware acceleration.
Builders like NVIDIA are pushing forward with Blackwell and GB200 NVL72 systems, betting on exponential compute scaling. Solvers are working on more efficient architectures (think Groq's LPU approach or Cerebras wafer-scale engines) to address the practical constraints of power and cost. Meanwhile, Cynics dismiss the entire AI wave as a bubble, missing that the real value creation happens when Builders and Solvers iterate together.
What's fascinating is how the Cynic mindset can actually freeze capital allocation at critical inflection points. We saw this with cloud adoption in 2008-2010, and we're seeing it again with AI infrastructure today. The companies that recognize they're at the "edge of uncertainty" and lean in—whether through aggressive capex or architectural innovation—tend to capture disproportionate returns.
Your point about Cynics being "tech-savvy" is particularly astute. They understand the constraints well enough to articulate why something won't work, but lack the conviction to build through the uncertainty. That's why we see so many former engineers becoming tech critics rather than founders.
What stood out to me isn’t the split between builders, solvers, and cynics, but how people move between them.
A lot of the cynicism we see today feels like what happens when people who used to build lose faith that their work still matters. They still see the constraints and complexity, but without a way to turn that into something productive, it turns into irony.
Maybe cynics feel so familiar not because they’re tech-savvy, but because they’re former builders who stopped believing anything can (or should be) really be built.
I think the way survivorship bias has risen in casual popularity has a lot to say here. It states that everything is luck, which gives cynics a way out and also could birth them.
Maybe worth exploring.
I find the risk angle most intriguing. It reframes your whole triad around uncertainty.
Builders embrace uncertainty and learn through it; Solvers try to eliminate it through design and coordination; Cynics reject it entirely, defending themselves with irony. That spectrum explains not only online culture but also why only the Builders can turn uncertainty into motion. The future, perhaps, belongs to those who can stand in the fog the longest.
Long ago, the People of the Industrial Era began building a Cathedral of Unfinished Consequences — not to worship gods, but to house their aspirations. Each generation added to its structure: engineers laid lattices of logic, dreamers carved glyphs of progress into the stone, and economists in gilded robes wove vaults from numbers and hope. It rose higher with every passing age, a monument to mastery.
But there was no master blueprint.
As the world shifted beneath it, the foundation of the Cathedral of Unfinished Consequences bent and cracked. Columns meant to support justice began sinking into sediment laid by forgotten empires. Stained-glass algorithms flickered with data no one could interpret. Ivy of unintended consequence wound up the walls.
Still, the builders kept building — unable to stop, unsure how to begin again. Some came merely to admire its beauty, others came to seal away its failures. But deep inside, the pulse of its original purpose still echoed like a heartbeat in stone.
Now, at twilight, the cathedral stands both sacred and strange. It is the most human of creations: unfinished, imperfect, and alive.
While the universe may be indifferent, humans are not — and our need for meaning, connection, and awe will always outpace what science alone can deliver. The stories and our metaphors don’t fill that gap with metaphysics. They simply show us what it’s like to live with the gap.
https://medium.com/@jylterps/metaphors-for-the-meta-crisis-c4d5c4d33e43
Nothing more inauthentic than the Cynic.
From Diogenes the on the run swindler and there’s worse recorded in history about him. Yes, on the run from Fraudster charges.
Envy is the most useless sin.