Getting Old
A very common trope in 80s movies was the tired, obstructionist, authority figure. You know, the EPA guy, the high school principal, the bad boss, whatever. The guy in a suit trying to stop the premise of the movie from happening.
These characters had two roles, narratively speaking. First, they acted as secondary antagonists, a miniboss for the middle part of the movie, if you will. But they also gave voice to the obvious objections to the high-concept premise, but did it in such an asshole way that the audience wouldn’t take them seriously. There probably are regulatory concerns about storing ghosts in a basement in Manhattan? Or problems with high school kids skipping that much school? But having the person bringing it up be such a jerk defuses it, and solidly positions the audience against the man with no dick, or whoever.
I suspect the reason these don’t crop up as often anymore is that movies feel that audiences are more confortable with those sorts of high-concept premises, and don’t feel the need to smooth that over as much. As an example, every John Hughes high school movie has the principal as one of the antagonists, but Clueless doesn’t even have the principal on screen, even though Cher spends less time in class than Ferris ever did.
I bring this up because one of the weirder changes I’ve noticed in myself—and by extension, my politics—as I’ve gotten older is an increased sympathy with these figures.
This observation is brought to you mostly by having rewatched Die Hard at the end of the year (remember kids, Santa won’t come until Hans Gruber falls off of Nakatomi Plaza) and I keep thinking about how Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson is a massive jerk, but isn’t actually wrong.
Die Hard is a great movie that has aged in some really interesting ways, which probably deserve a longer post at some point, but recall there are two sets of authority figure minor antagonists—the LA police, who are basically hapless, and the FBI, who are actively malevolent. The LAPD are there to make things harder at the start of the movie, as Hans Gruber says, he’s waiting for the FBI.
Deputy Chief Dwayne’s major objection is that, as he puts it, all the LAPD have is McClane’s word for what’s going on. What he doesn’t know is that he’s in an 80s action movie where reality is bending around Bruce Willis to make sure the first sentence of his obituary won’t contain the word Moonlighting; under “normal” circumstances, none of this would work out. The movie knows this, too, and makes sure we know it’s in on the joke by making his first objection, which the dad from Family Matters angrily denies, “how do you know he isn’t the guy who shot up your car?”—which of course, McClane was. When the FBI show up and turn out to be actual bad guys, the movie makes sure we know that Dwayne is as horrified as we are; he’s a jerk, and a dipshit, but he’s not evil, and he’s not wrong. Most days, he’d have probably even been right.
But that’s not the one I keep thinking about. The one I keep thinking about is the “Duality of Man” scene in the better, funnier second half1 of Full Metal Jacket. You know, this one: Full Metal Jacket Born to Kill/Peace Button Duality of Man. It’s one of the most quoted scenes in the movie for a reason, it’s basically the whole movie’s philosophy in a nutshell.
The usual “young man discovering the movie” interpretation here is that the Colonel is confused, and that Joker outsmarts him here, and that the Colonel responds to his own confusion with angry bluster and weird jingoism. A scan of the youtube comments, which is always a mistake but bear with me, shows most of the people commenting have that view.
But go watch that scene again. General Rieekan, presumably fresh in from Hoth, knows exactly what the score is before he says anything. He’s not asking Joker about the peace sign because he’s confused, he’s asking because he wants to make Joker say it out loud.
“Then how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?"
There’s a whole media thesis in all this about the American Individualist Hero as the Lone Sane Man standing up to authority figures who represent The Establishment and the Insanity of the Status Quo, which I’ll spare you because I want to write that even less than you want to read it.
But look. If there’s one thing I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older, is that we’re only going to be successful if we all work together. There are very, very few situations where one person can actually ascend and leave everyone else behind. The colonel knows this—he might be waiting for this peace thing to blow over, he might be an asshole and probably a low-grade war criminal, but he knows all the marines are in the same danger, and all the statements in the world about the duality of man aren’t going to stop a bullet. (This is also kinda the point of the last scene in the movie.)
If I was living near that firehouse, I’d want to know that the EPA had signed off on anything called “a containment facility.” School is worth it, no matter how good your synthesizer coughs are. The guy on the radio who likes Roy Rogers really might have been the one that shot up your car.
And sometimes, in real life, the lame authority figure isn’t being obstructionist for obstructions sake, they sometimes know something you don’t. Or they’re remembering that there are other people here that you didn’t.
It’s worth acknowledging at this point that the “punk rocker to aging conservative suburbanite” is a cliché for a reason, and you have to stop and check yourself from time to time to make sure you didn’t accidentally dose yourself with the wrong red pill or whatever. But I think as long as you can keep your empathy up, you can shake that off, no matter how much you realize the boss might have a point.
Because real life is complicated, and messy, and full of choices with no good answers. And you have to power through, knowing there’s no good options, reducing harm as much as you can, linking arms, working together, pull as many people up the ladder behind you as you can. As fun as it is to be “that guy”, this isn’t Die Hard, for just about any possible definition of “this”.
There’s at least a dozen things I’m subtweeting here, but I cannot tell you how often I’ll see something—in the news, at work, just generally “around”—and mutter under my breath “why don’t you jump on the team?”
Kid, we all want to go home, and none of us want to be here. Let’s figure out how to all go home together.
-
Don’t @-me, it’s true.
Covering the Exits
So! Adobe has quietly canceled their plans to acquire Figma. For everyone playing the home game, Figma is a startup that makes web-based design tools, and was one of the first companies to make some actual headway into Adobe’s domination of the market. (At least, since Adobe acquired Macromedia, anyway.). Much ink has been spilled on Figma “disrupting” Adobe.
Adobe cited regulatory concerns as the main reason to cancel the acquisition, which tracks with the broader story of the antitrust and regulatory apparatus slowly awakening from its long slumber.
On the one hand, this was blatantly a large company buying up their only outside competition in a decade. On the other hand, it’s not clear Figma had any long-term business plan other than “sell out to Adobe?”
Respones to this have been muted, but there’s a distinct set of “temporarily embarrassed” tech billionaries saying things like “well, tut tut, regulations are good in theory, but I can still sell my startup, right?”
There’s an entire business model thats emerged over the last few decades, fueled by venture capital and low interest rates, where the company itself is the product. Grow fast, build up a huge user-base, then sell out to someone. Don’t worry about the long term, take “the exit.”
This is usually described in short-hand as “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer, you’re the product”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s not totally right either. There’s one product: the company itself. The founders are making one thing, then they’re going to sell it to someone else.
And sure, because if that’s the plan, things get so easy. Who cares what the long-term vacation accural schedule is, or the promotional tracks, or how we’re going to turn a profit? In five years, that’ll be Microsoft/Adobe/Facebook/Google’s problem, and we’ll be on a beach earning twenty percent.
Anf there’s a real thread of fear out there now that the “sell the company” exit might not be as easy as deal as it used to be?
There’s nothing I can think of would have a more positive effect on the whole tech industry than taking “…and then sell the company” off the table as a startup exit. Imagine if that just… wasn’t an option? If startups had to start with “how are we going to become self-funding”, if VCs knew they weren’t going to walk away with a couple billion dollars of cash from Redmond?
I was going to put a longer rant here, but there must be something in the water today because Ed Zitron covered all the same ground but in more detail and angrier today—Software Is Beating The World:
Every single stupid, loathsome, and ugly story in tech is a result of the fundamentally broken relationship between venture capital and technology. And, as with many things, it started with a blog.
While I’m here, though, I’m going to throw one elbow that Ed didn’t: I’m not sure any book has had more toxic, unintended consequences than The Innovator’s Dilemma. While “Disruption Theory” remains an intellectually attractive description of how new products enter the market, it turns out it only had useful explanatory power once: when the iPhone shipped. Here in the twenties, if anyone is still using the term “Disruption” with a straight face they’re almost certainly full of crap, and are probably about to tell you about their “cool business hack” which actually ends up being “ignore labor laws until we get acquired.”
It’s time to stop talking about disruption, and start talking about construction. Stop eying the exits. What what it look like if people started building tech companies they expected their kids to take over?