This thread was, I suspect, compounded by the fact that the modern tech industry had its inception in the 1980s, a period deeply shaped by Reagan, Thatcher and the Friedman doctrine. There’s a lot to be said about this period and its discontents, but for the purposes of this article, the point is that the tech industry and tech culture made its debut at a time where prevailing beliefs about what companies were for were that they were for creating shareholder value at all costs and that no other motivations were acceptable. More broadly, it was also by all accounts a time when the pursuit of wealth and material goods were seen to be laudable and indeed, often the only laudable thing. A nascent industry developing at this point could not really do anything other than absorb a lot of those messages, and in such conditions, the very idea that a nascent industry might need to find some idea of its social role and how it contributed to the social good was suspect. So long as you were making money, the idea that you might need to contribute other forms of value was thought to be either stupid or evil.

Given this, it’s perhaps not surprising that tech people often have real issues with a void of meaning in their lives, perhaps better described (by contrast with other professions that exhibit difficulties with meaning) as a void of telos, a void of final purpose. While other professions might find their telos inadequate or impeded by circumstance (a common problem in healthcare, for instance), the purpose of what they’re doing is usually fairly clear.

This culture is deeply destructive to our wider society because it keeps creating people who enshittify things (and do a lot of other bad stuff as well). Moreover, the people whom this culture creates (the poor enshittified souls of the title) are miserable, neurotic people who either live lives devoid of meaning and desperately try and fill it with LinkedIn clout, or people who ascribe deep moral importance to the most abstruse of subjects and seem to exhibit symptoms of what my Catholic ass can only describe as scrupulosity, a mental illness similar to OCD and featuring extreme fear of ever even possibly committing a sin. It is genuinely almost impossible to internalise this culture and live a happy meaningful life. This cultural gestalt, quite simply, needs to end and be radically reformed into something that respects human dignity.