In the second part of the series of posts about mythology and the tech industry, based on an email exchange with Petri Mähönen, I reflect on Apollo-Dionysus dynamics in tech entrepreneurs and their companies.
Celebrity signifies
One might ask, "What’s the point of trying to link entrepreneurs and companies to archetypes? Especially, Pierre, if you’re interested in the mythical aspect of technology itself, not in individuals?" I’d respond that archetypes are a way to understand the characters not only of entrepreneurs and companies, but perhaps even of the technologies they represent. Once one grasps the characters, you have a handle on their motivations and (perhaps) what they’ll do in future.
Why famous entrepreneurs? Because celebrity signifies. If someone’s persona becomes a focus of rapt communal attention, that persona points to something bigger than just the individual. There are many reasons someone becomes a celebrity, but I’m going to focus on cases where I think it says something about the technology they’re associated with.
Non-celebrities, even entrepreneurs and CEOs of super-corporations, don’t function as signifiers. Larry and Sergey, Sundar Pichai, and Tim Cook come to mind. Celebrities like Larry Ellison that are famous for their personal lives don’t signify anything about their tech. (How many people know or care that Ellison's company sells databases?)
Therefore, famous individuals can be stand-ins for the technology. If the characters are larger than life, one could read their archetypal attributes across into the technologies they’re associated with. That is: the way society sees celebrity entrepreneurs is a proxy for how it thinks about the technologies, which are much harder to grasp than personalities. The heroes and villains are symbols for the moral content of technologies they’re associated with.
Petri observed that it’s difficult to aggregate people and companies into myths about technology because, just like Greek and other myths, none of the individual humans and lesser gods on their own generate the whole Olympian story. Insight only comes once one reads all the adventures together. One then sees the patterns and learns (for example) that chance rules even over the gods.
He suggested that I populate the technological chessboard with some of the players. For example, posit that all our heroes (Jobs, Gates, Musk, etc.) are just flies on the game board of the great gods; it might then be possible to see a bigger tech-myth picture. Given our cultural context, the average person doesn’t see technological myths; they only observe heroes (entrepreneurs) and perhaps lesser gods (companies). But if our age had its Homer, then we would be able to understand technologies in the language of myth.
A-D in companies and their leaders
Apollo-Dionysus is a binary that is synthesized into a whole in some sublime works of art according to Nietzsche, and perhaps (as I argued in Part 1) in some successful tech entrepreneurs. Thinking about Larry Ellison and Oracle prompted the thought that the components don’t all have to be present in one person.
In some cases, the synthesis is found between a leader and the company around them, not in the leader themselves. As Petri put it, the principal human actor could be biased to one end, with their company providing the balancing factor. Oracle is a very nuts & bolts outfit (hard to avoid if you sell databases). It’s good at the Apollonian (or perhaps Hephaestean) grind. The Sun Microsystems acquisition was a good fit; as Petri points out, Sun was also focused on clean, crisp, solid, Swiss-style engineering rather than outrageous innovation. This, then, is a case where the gods are divided among the entrepreneur and their company: Oracle-Ellison maps to Apollo-Dionysus. One can make the same argument about Musk: Apollo is in the companies he built around himself, not in the man himself.
In addition to SpaceX-Musk and Oracle-Ellison, the robotic Mark Zuckerberg could be another example. In McLuhanesque language, Zuck’s a cool medium, but Facebook is hot: rich in sensory stimulation, emotion, connection, etc. Therefore, Zuckerberg looks even more robotic since he’s in a figure-ground relationship with Facebook. (Hmmm: does McLuhan’s cool/hot correspond to Apollo/Dionysus?)
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I’ve tried to think of companies that combine Dionysian and Apollonian qualities, beyond the ones I’ve already mentioned (Tesla, SpaceX, Apple). There aren’t many; only Nokia comes to mind, with its repeated self-reinventions.
The dichotomy needn’t be obviously A-D. Perhaps Jeff Bezos is Athena (the ruthless general) with Amazon as Hermes (the patron of merchants and commerce).
This leads to a hypothesis about why companies often fade after the founder’s exit from day-to-day management. A founder at one end of the A-D axis generates a company at the other end, and the lieutenant who rises from the ranks to take over reflects to company’s personality, not the founder’s. Thus, when the founder leaves a company, one loses the A-D synergy between leader and company.
Several founder-successor pairings that could be worth investigating for evidence: Sculley followed by Cook at Apple, Ballmer then Nadella at Microsoft, Schmidt then Pichai at Google, and perhaps eventually Safra Catz at Oracle. Long-lived companies like Nokia and Shell could be interesting in a different way, since they have long outlasted their founders – and in Nokia’s case, have changed their core business several times.
A-D binaries across companies
The A-D complementarities could also be within an industry rather than within a company or an individual.
Petri recalled Steve Jobs discussing the difference between early Apple (himself) and Microsoft (billg). He said that because Apple was so passionate about building and designing the entire package, and was so vision-oriented, it wasn’t very good at reaching out and partnering. On the other hand, Microsoft was very good at just that. Since Microsoft’s primary goal was selling a lot of software rather than being creative as such, it was very good at building an ecosystem. According to Jobs in later interviews, this skill came to Apple very late in its corporate history, and he admitted that it was not easy to learn. Reading between the lines, he finally hired trusted lieutenants to do that – people like Tim Cook.
One could therefore say that the success of the computer industry in the Nineties wasn’t due to either Apple or Microsoft, but to the fact that they complemented each other: Apple-Microsoft was Dionysus-Apollo. That duality lives in in iOS and Android. Other candidate contemporary binaries: Twitter and Facebook; Amazon and Walmart; Samsung and Huawei; Tesla and General Motors (GM beat Tesla in a Consumer Reports evaluation of 17 vehicles equipped with active driving assistance systems).
Technology’s Shadow
Jungian psychology looks for the ego and its shadow. I suspect Tech’s self-image is Apollo, the Golden Boy: powerful (Zeus’s stand-in), beneficial (god of health), future-oriented (all those prophecies), popular, etc.
To the extent that Tech is Apollo, its shadow is Dionysus and/or Trickster. The shadow is the part of technology that Technology itself (and its human mouthpieces) is unaware of, and/or tries to suppress. As Marie-Louise von Franz described the shadow in “The Process of Individuation” in Man and his Symbols (1964, 1978, edited by C. G. Jung)
[If and when] an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others—such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions—...[a] painful and lengthy work of self-education.
The harder Tech, speaking through engineers and their apologists, insists on the supreme importance of rationality, clarity, rigor, and logic, the more clearly they point to their shadow: irrationality, feelings, and ambiguity. The contempt some technical types have for the Humanities (“useless, imprecise, touchy feely, would you like fries with that?”) is an expression of a fear of Shadow.
In running from their shadow, technologists seem to be transmuting (or perhaps perverting) their Apollonian ego into a caricature of Nietzsche’s bitter enemy, Socrates. Near the end of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche bemoans the rise of the rationalists:
“Dionysus had already been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a demonic power which spoke through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked on it. . . . In this contrast, I understand by the spirit of science the belief which first came to light in the person of Socrates,— the belief in the fathomableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.”
Do tricksters become entrepreneurs?
I was intrigued to discover research that supported a link between Trickster and entrepreneurial success: “Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes An Entrepreneur And Does It Pay?” by Levine & Rubinstein, 2017. From the abstract: “Besides tending to be white, male, and come from higher-income families, the incorporated—as teenagers—typically scored higher on learning aptitude tests, had greater self-esteem, and engaged in more disruptive, illicit activities. The combination of ‘smart’ and ‘illicit’ tendencies as youths accounts for both entry into entrepreneurship and the comparative earnings of entrepreneurs.”
However, a subsequent literature review suggests (surprise!) that it’s murky: “Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs: A Review of Recent Literature,” Kerr, Kerr & Xu, 2018.
Petri’s take was that personality research results will always be a muddle. He recommended that I select some “great entrepreneurs” and then pretend that these celebrities are indeed mythological and somehow different. That kind of study would resemble Jim Collins’ Good to Great: cherry picking some people/companies and asking what made for superstars.
While a paean to mythological super-entrepreneurs would certainly be a potent business book proposition, I just can’t see myself doing it. I’m most interested in technology as a social phenomenon, and it’s hard to generalize to technology at large from specific companies, let alone from individual entrepreneurs. I’m still struggling to find the right level of analysis. Individuals and companies are easier to grasp than technologies, although I think the more aggregated level is more powerful.
Is “Dionysian entrepreneur” just a trope?
Susan Tonkin has pointed out to me that it’s fashionable to depict innovation as disruptive, rather than as something that solves problems. (See e.g. Clay Christensen.) She notes that this might lead tech entrepreneurs to be portrayed in the media as Dionysian, even if that's not really their archetype. Given libel laws, it’s less likely that journalists would use trickster tropes, though Trickster is the ultimate disrupter.
All the posts in the Techies & Myth series
- Part 1: Apollo, Dionysus, and the Entrepreneurs
- Part 2: Mythical entrepreneurs
- Part 3: Goddesses and Tech
- Part 4: More Gods as Tech
Update, Dec 2021: A few copy edits
Update, Oct 2020: Added links to other posts in the series
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