Two pieces of news dominated the tech industry in the final months of 2022: Elon Musk and Twitter, and Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Both showed how narratives can lead people astray.
Narratives are tempting but too often they are wrong, a diversion, or based on theory without any tether to reality. Narratives that are right, on the other hand, follow from products, which means that if you want to control the narrative in the long run, you have to build the product first, whether that be a software product, a publication, or a company.
That does leave open the question of Musk, and the way he seemed to meme Tesla into existence, while building a rocket ship on the side. I suspect the distinction is that both companies are rooted in the physical world: physics has a wonderful grounding effect on the most fantastical of narratives. Digital services like Twitter, though, built as they are on infinitely malleable software, are ultimately about people and how they interact with each other. The paradox is that this makes narratives that much more alluring, even — especially! — if they are wrong.
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