{"id":19069,"date":"2025-06-08T13:37:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T11:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/08\/americas-infatuation-with-boy-geniuses-and-great-men-is-ruining-us\/"},"modified":"2025-06-08T13:37:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T11:37:17","slug":"americas-infatuation-with-boy-geniuses-and-great-men-is-ruining-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/08\/americas-infatuation-with-boy-geniuses-and-great-men-is-ruining-us\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s infatuation with boy geniuses and \u2018Great Men\u2019 is ruining us"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re obsessed with narratives about powerful men and how they got that way. But our mania for founder myths obscures an ideology of inequality<\/p>\n

One Saturday in the spring of 2021, a little achy after receiving our first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, my husband and I decided to stay in bed and click on the first thing suggested to us by our TV. It was WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn<\/a>, a documentary produced by Hulu about the New York startup WeWork\u2019s spectacular fall from grace. The film mostly chronicles the misdeeds of founder Adam Neumann, the surfer-dude dolt who turned a good idea \u2013 co-working spaces that lease small offices to tech startups \u2013 into a surreally overvalued conglomerate, before he made a mortifying attempt to take the company public that eventually ended in his forced resignation. As a consolation prize, Neumann infamously received a $1.7bn golden parachute.<\/p>\n

The WeWork cautionary tale is partly about slick marketing, which is what seems to have convinced its investors that it was a tech startup. Neumann tried to position WeWork as something much more than a real estate company: he borrowed the tech industry\u2019s idealistic language about changing the world but upped the ante, insisting that the company\u2019s sole mission was \u201celevat[ing] the world\u2019s consciousness\u201d.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nWe\u2019re obsessed with narratives about powerful men and how they got that way. But our mania for founder myths obscures an ideology of inequality
\nOne Saturday in the spring of 2021, a little achy after receiving our first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, my husband and I decided to stay in bed and click on the first thing suggested to us by our TV. It was WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, a documentary produced by Hulu about the New York startup WeWork\u2019s spectacular fall from grace. The film mostly chronicles the misdeeds of founder Adam Neumann, the surfer-dude dolt who turned a good idea \u2013 co-working spaces that lease small offices to tech startups \u2013 into a surreally overvalued conglomerate, before he made a mortifying attempt to take the company public that eventually ended in his forced resignation. As a consolation prize, Neumann infamously received a $1.7bn golden parachute.
\nThe WeWork cautionary tale is partly about slick marketing, which is what seems to have convinced its investors that it was a tech startup. Neumann tried to position WeWork as something much more than a real estate company: he borrowed the tech industry\u2019s idealistic language about changing the world but upped the ante, insisting that the company\u2019s sole mission was \u201celevat[ing] the world\u2019s consciousness\u201d. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re obsessed with narratives about powerful men and how they got that way. But our mania for founder myths obscures an ideology of inequality One Saturday in the spring of 2021, a little achy after receiving our first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, my husband and I decided to stay in bed and click on …<\/p>\n

America\u2019s infatuation with boy geniuses and \u2018Great Men\u2019 is ruining us<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":19070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19069"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}