Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose | Defector »

Every week, I listen to Kevin Roose and Casey Newton’s podcast and I’m flabbergasted by the complete lack of incredulity these two bring to the world of technology, so it’s great to read a thorough dunking like this:

And I was thinking about Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all on behalf of a grift.

But this paragraph also resonated with me, after a week of reading so many “Nintendo Switch 2 vs Steamdeck” arguments:

My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.

Spot on.