Technology's egalitarianism has curdled into chronic restarting

The tech world's superpower is that it doesn't care what you did a decade ago. Only the present matters. That egalitarianism is real: nobody in the ecosystem cares about your past if you've stopped building.

But that quality has curdled. People move every eighteen months, never pushing past the frontier they set out to explore. Companies wind down not because they tested the idea and lost conviction, but because the initial excitement wore off and something shinier appeared. Engineers treat career progression like a video game: collect the title, vest the cliff, move to the next stage.

AI's pace makes this worse by making constant reorientation look like progress. Every week brings a new model, a new lab, a new consensus. The ecosystem has optimized for perpetual beginnings, but grown allergic to the endurance that real breakthroughs require.

Source claim: Silicon Valley's valuable future-orientation has flipped into chronic restarting, where nobody stays long enough to discover something non-obvious.