What happened to nerds?

书呆子们怎么了？

I’ve befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I’ve ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends are former coworkers. I’ve also encountered the most egocentric, delusional, irritating personalities imaginable in tech. It is a mixed bag, like anything. 在科技行业，我结识了一些我所见过最深思熟虑、才华横溢、充满好奇心、古怪且真诚的人。我许多挚友都是曾经的同事。当然，我也遇到过科技圈里最以自我为中心、妄想症严重且令人恼火的人。和任何事物一样，这里也是鱼龙混杂。

But increasingly, the egomaniacs are not only taking center stage at the most influential tier of their respective companies - whether as ‘founding engineers’ or founders/CEOs/CTOs/ETCs or ‘GTM engineers’ - but they’re also talking about themselves incessantly online. That is not good for any of us. 但越来越多自大狂不仅在各自公司最有影响力的层级占据了中心舞台——无论是作为“创始工程师”、创始人/CEO/CTO等，还是“市场进入（GTM）工程师”——他们还在网上喋喋不休地谈论自己。这对我们所有人来说都不是好事。

This blog is long so here is the short version: the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign. Over the last decade and change, its leadership discovered that this trust could be liquidated and converted into a different asset, attention, at what looked like a great exchange rate. 这篇博客很长，所以这里是简短版：科技行业花了四十年时间积累了一种非常特殊的信任，而且动机大多很单纯，这让我们看起来值得信赖且基本无害。在过去十多年里，其领导层发现这种信任可以被“变现”，并以看似极高的汇率转化为另一种资产——注意力。

The problem with liquidating an illiquid asset though is that you don’t find out the real price until you try to buy it back. The Founder’s Fund Mafia video is the most egregious example of this. If there are any founders out there considering doing their own version of the Mafia video, please don’t. 然而，清算非流动性资产的问题在于，直到你试图买回它时，你才会发现其真实价格。Founders Fund 的“黑手党”视频就是最恶劣的例子。如果有创始人正考虑制作自己的“黑手党”视频，请千万别这么做。

Instead, focus on publicizing your core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility re: how you present yourself to others and talk about your accomplishments. This will probably catch on slower and be less viral, but it will pay off in the long-run once people ‘turn against’ tech founders as reality stars, which they eventually will. 相反，请专注于宣传你们核心的书呆子价值观：热爱学习、好奇心、对所在领域的痴迷，以及在向他人展示自己和谈论成就时令人钦佩的谦逊。这可能传播得较慢，也不那么容易病毒式传播，但从长远来看，当人们开始“反感”那些把自己当成真人秀明星的科技创始人时（这终将发生），这种做法会带来回报。

The charming & visionary nerd trope

迷人且富有远见的书呆子形象

Ten years ago, the cultural idea of the technologist was still basically Jobs and Wozniak. Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you’re just right.) 十年前，大众文化中对技术专家的印象基本上还是乔布斯和沃兹尼亚克。乔布斯有缺陷，每个人都知道，但这都在意料之中。他在野心上咄咄逼人，对公司最细微的细节也毫不妥协，偶尔还会傲慢（在我看来并不总是这样，有时候你只是对了而已）。

But people admired him anyway because the products he made worked well and were more tasteful/subtle/beautiful than any consumer electronic that had come before it. When Jobs was cruel, in the public’s memory at least, he was cruel about kerning or whatever. The cruelty was presented as if he was cruel for our sake - for the sake of the customer. 但人们依然钦佩他，因为他制造的产品运行良好，且比以往任何消费电子产品都更有品位、更精致、更美观。在公众记忆中，当乔布斯表现得刻薄时，他至少也是因为字距调整之类的事情而刻薄。这种刻薄被呈现为一种“为了我们好”——为了客户的利益。

Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth. He gave away early Apple stock to colleagues because he felt weird about having so much and went back to teaching fifth grade. 然后是计算机科学的守护神沃兹：害羞、慷慨、谦逊、厌恶聚光灯，满足于拥有合理的财富，而不是那种荒谬的、看起来邪恶的巨额财富。他把早期的苹果股票送给同事，因为他觉得拥有那么多财富很奇怪，随后回去教五年级学生了。

Woz was the proof of concept that you could be at the absolute center of the most important industrial transformation of the century and still not clamor to be famous for it. Instead, you could just do what you loved and make great money and share ideas about what you’d learned. 沃兹是一个概念验证：你可以处于本世纪最重要的工业变革的绝对中心，却依然不吵着要因此出名。相反，你可以只做自己热爱的事，赚大钱，并分享你所学到的想法。

Together they told this story: the people building your future are, at worst, perfectionist jerks, and at best, gentle obsessives, and in either case their attention is mostly focused on their work, not at ‘the world’ with its glamorous sins. Whether this was accurate or not is irrelevant. It is what the public thought. 他们共同讲述了这样一个故事：构建你们未来的人，往坏了说是追求完美的混蛋，往好了说是温和的痴迷者，无论哪种情况，他们的注意力大多集中在工作上，而不是集中在充满浮华罪恶的“世界”上。这是否准确并不重要，重要的是公众是这么认为的。

We trusted those people partly because they didn’t seem to want our attention. They were nerds with money who mostly just wanted to be left to their projects, and it made sense that they were in charge of our digital experience. We have strayed pretty far from that. 我们信任这些人，部分原因在于他们似乎并不渴望我们的关注。他们是有钱的书呆子，大多只想专心于自己的项目，由他们来掌管我们的数字体验是合情合理的。而我们现在已经偏离这一点很远了。

A short history of how tech leaders went from charming nerd to terrifying overlord

科技领袖如何从迷人的书呆子变成可怕的霸主：简史

I’m going to massively simplify the transition from ‘helpful, obsessive nerd who makes bank’ to ‘tech oligarch from hell who people joke is not human’ into 3 phases. 我将把从“赚钱的、有帮助的痴迷书呆子”到“人们戏称非人类的地狱科技寡头”的转变过程极度简化为三个阶段。

Phase one (late 1970s to 2007): the founder as charismatic, mysterious byproduct. Founders appeared in media, but the coverage was mostly centered on what they were building. There was a mythology to them and they’d take photos in their garage surrounded by sparkling machinery, and they’d do keynotes and magazine interviews, but they were always orbiting around their products and companies vs. boastfully putting their own identities as rich/influential people center stage. 第一阶段（1970年代末至2007年）：作为富有魅力且神秘的副产品的创始人。创始人出现在媒体上，但报道主要集中在他们正在构建的东西上。他们身上有一种神话色彩，他们会在车库里被闪闪发光的机器包围着拍照，会做主题演讲和接受杂志采访，但他们总是围绕着产品和公司，而不是自吹自擂地将自己作为富有/有影响力的人置于中心舞台。

Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable. TED talks become a fun and popular way to learn new things and find interesting thinkers, The Social Network is a huge commercial hit, and the beginnings of ‘founder’ as an identity starts to sneak into the cultural mainstream. Starting a company becomes a viable career path thanks to YC, and the founder-as-protagonist narrative became the recruiting funnel for the entire industry. 第二阶段（2007年至2015年）：作为寓言的创始人。TED演讲成为学习新事物和寻找有趣思想家的流行方式，《社交网络》大获成功，“创始人”作为一种身份开始潜入文化主流。得益于YC，创办公司成为一条可行的职业道路，而“创始人作为主角”的叙事成为了整个行业的招聘漏斗。

Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it’s not purely tech’s fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally, even if you are an otherwise ordinary person. But it is our fault that many of our ‘figureheads’ are leaning way the hell in on this. Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this, but he almos… 第三阶段（2015年至今）：与欺诈为邻的科技行业。2026年的数字公共空间被骗子所定义。因此，科技行业现在被视为一种不道德的快速致富途径，这并不完全是科技本身的错，即使你本来是个普通人。但我们的“领军人物”中有许多人对此推波助澜，这就是我们的错了。埃隆·马斯克就是其中最荒谬的例子，但他几乎……