We Are Insufferable — And I Digress

We are insufferable.

And I say this as someone who is very much one of us.

I'm a software engineer through and through. I think about distributed systems problems in the shower. I talk about work issues on dates. I have opinions about infrastructure. I'm not not a part of this.

And that's precisely why I feel confident speaking up about the culture that we have created for ourselves.

Last week, a founder launched "ABG CMO," an AI tool that generates a fake Asian female influencer for users to post content under. The product's pitch: "Design a hyper-realistic persona in seconds. Pick a look, a niche, a vibe."

On X, the replies came quickly. "So sick!" someone wrote. "I'm going to get 10 CMOs." The founder responded: "who's your ABG CMO boss man."

The whole thing left me gravely disappointed.

ABG is already a reductive abbreviation in its own right. It stands for "Asian Baby Girl." It's a term with enough internet history that ignorance is not a credible defense. And this product doesn't just invoke the ABG archetype—it makes her puppetable. You pick her look, her niche, her vibe, and then you profit off her image without her existing as a person at all. The intended customer, per the site's own testimonials, is overwhelmingly male founders and growth guys. These men are operating in an industry that is, by its own numbers, predominantly male. The same rooms that have no space for real Asian women are buying a tool to manufacture fake ones for profit.

I keep asking myself what emboldens this. What makes a person so thoroughly unconcerned with the weight of their own actions?

The answer comes from the top.

When the figureheads of an industry begin eroding the standard of how we conduct ourselves—that is, diminishing the importance of professionalism or the responsibility of upholding a position of visibility—it doesn't stay contained to them. It trickles down to the little guys. It always does.

Then we augmented this with the coordinated dismantling of DEI programs and the the contempt expressed—by powerful men, in powerful rooms—for the idea that the composition of a team might matter.

And what we have arrived at now is not the meritocracy that was promised. Instead, we are building a wildly regressive and destructive framework in the name of growth and innovation.

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator and one of the most influential figures in startup culture, wrote an essay in 2005 called "Good and Bad Procrastination." It is, on its face, about productivity. But embedded in it is a philosophy that has been absorbed—and badly misapplied—by a generation of founders and builders.

Graham's argument is elegant: the most impressive people he knows are all procrastinators of a specific kind. They put off small things to work on big things. They blow off errands to pursue what he calls "real work." And he is honest that this comes with a social cost: "The people who want you to do the errands won't think it's good. But you probably have to annoy them if you want to get anything done."

There is something genuinely useful in this framework. Deep work requires protection. Sustained attention is a scarce resource, and guarding it is not selfishness—it is a prerequisite for producing anything of consequence.

But then a generation of people decided that they were all building something important. And then they concluded that they were exempt—that the social contract, the small obligations we owe each other simply by virtue of coexisting, were the kinds of errands Graham was telling them to skip. Why return the favor? Why participate? Why move through the world as though other people exist and matter? They were building, so the externalities were someone else's problem.

I do not think that most technical endeavors in this day and age are so great and so urgent that they preclude a person from doing the things we are all but contractually obligated to do. I do not think that building an LLM wrapper, or founding a startup that will pivot twice before acqui-hiring into obsolescence, exempts you from basic human decency. I do not think that ambition is a license for abrasiveness.

But we have made it one. And more than that—we have made it a signal. The abrasive founder is not a cautionary tale. He is, in the current cultural register, something to aspire to.

What I want to say, carefully, is: this makes you a bad person.

Not a misunderstood visionary. Not someone too focused on the work to bother with niceties. Just a bad person. Or at least, someone who has decided to act in ways that are bad, which amounts to much the same thing over time.

This matters not just as a moral observation but as a practical one, because there are real and measurable costs to making a community hostile to the people who aren't already inside it.

In 2020, Timnit Gebru—then the technical co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team and one of the most prominent Black women in AI research—was fired. The circumstances were contested; Google maintained she had resigned. Gebru maintained she was pushed out after submitting a paper on the risks of large language models that the company found inconvenient. The letter condemning her departure was eventually signed by thousands of Google employees and academics.

What was lost was not just one researcher. Rather, we lost the institutional capacity to scrutinize ourselves—to accept the presence of someone who is asking, with rigor and credibility, whether the thing being built is good.

Gebru's work on algorithmic bias had shown that a particular facial recognition implementation was 35% less likely to recognize black women than white men. This is the kind of finding that emerges from a team that looks different and has different stakes in the outcome.

And when you make the room inhospitable to the people who are not already there, you do not just make it unfair. You make it stupider. You narrow the set of questions being asked, and you remove the perspectives most likely to catch the failure modes you cannot see because you have never had to live with them.

The exclusionary club does not just harm the people it excludes. It harms the work.

I believe in this industry. I believe in what's being built. I work in infrastructure, and I have spent the last two years thinking very hard about technical problems that I find genuinely captivating. I am not immune to the pull of it—the seductive logic of 996 culture, the idea that total immersion is the only honest way to build something that matters. I understand the appeal. I feel it.

But I will still clean up after myself. I will still be kind to the people around me. I will still uphold my end of the social contract—the small, unglamorous, non-negotiable part of it—because exemption from the social contract is not something you earn by being busy. Graham's absent-minded professor forgot to shave. That is endearing. What is less endearing is the person who remembers perfectly well that the sink is full and has simply decided it isn't their problem.

But I also believe that technical excellence and basic human decency are not in competition. The person who occasionally neglects self-care is not the same person as the podcast guest who says demeaning things about women and calls it candor, or the founder who names his product after a racial-sexual stereotype and calls it a brand. The first is forgivable, even charming. The second is a choice.

We have glorified founding. And more than that, we have glorified the character that is now associated with it—the ruthlessness dressed up as focus, the contempt dressed up as standards, the bad behavior dressed up as a side effect of genius. We have made the social contract optional and called it a feature.

This is not the industry we should be building. We can do both: expect exceptional work and expect the people doing it to behave like they understand that other people exist.

That is not a high bar. We have to clear it.

We have to bring back decorum.