Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

WHY AREN’T PEOPLE LOOKING FOR SECRETS?
Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find. An extreme
representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the
Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He
went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But
you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged
with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople.
In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was.
The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and
anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to
publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother
recognized his writing style and turned him in.
You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity,
but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy,
every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and
needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals
into three groups:
1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort;
2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and
3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.
This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible.
Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard
problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or
impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do,
even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So
Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology,
and let people start over and work on hard problems anew.
Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological
frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban
hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record