Benji
@benji
Benji
@benji
• As Peter Thiel observed in his famous Stanford lecture, founders occupy a peculiar place in the Valley's collective psyche, simultaneously worshipped and vulnerable to sacrifice.
• The Valley's founding stories often follow ancient mythological patterns: the outcast-turned-hero (Jobs), the boy-king (Zuckerberg), the Prometheus figure bringing divine fire to mortals (Musk).
• As Thiel observes, the evolution of founders into sacred figures follows a consistent trajectory: the initial blessing (funding), a period of adversity (the "valley of death"), and eventual triumph or failure.
• When founders succeed at scale, their companies can transcend mere business to become something approaching cosmic centers.
• True sacredness is rooted in forms of value that cannot be bought or sold.
• The crypto space serves as a concentrated laboratory for understanding how sacred narratives can be corrupted into sophisticated fraud.
• The attention economy has created a new priesthood, where the sacred rite of "founding" requires no actual founding, only the ability to perform the outward signs of “founding.”
• When a critical mass of sacred narratives is exposed as cynical manipulations, the ability to discern genuine visionaries diminishes.
• This essay is less a prescription than a reckoning, a meditation on what we stand to lose.
Pirahãs take naps (fifteen minutes to two hours at the extremes) during the day and night. There is loud talking in the village all night long. Consequently, it is often very difficult for outsiders to sleep well among the Pirahãs. I believe that the Pirahãs’ advice not to sleep because there are snakes is advice that they literally follow—sleeping
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