So, last time I told you, happy globalization is dead.

That was the belief system of the modern neoliberal economic and corporate universe: that everything, whether social or economic, would at some point be solved by free trade, corporate incentives, and deregulation.

Left, right, and centre, pundits and economists are writing the obituaries.

I also told you we cannot live in an ideological vacuum.

We, humans, need to feel we are moving towards a story in which our spreadsheets and standups add up to personal and corporate salvation.

Because the alternative to having a "saviour" idea is to become rational and human… and we cannot allow that disaster to happen.

Well.

Good news, everyone.

The new faith has been formally announced, and unusually for a religion, it comes with a pre-published scripture, a funding round, and a market handle.

Or rather, we have been living through its announcement for a few years now, since the AI boom began.

September 2024: Sam Altman posts an essay called "The Intelligence Age."

Superintelligence, he writes, may arrive in "a few thousand days."

Then: "fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics".

Marc Andreessen, one of the most important venture capitalists of the modern age, wrote his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" that promises growth "with no upper bound," demands we increase humanity's energy use a thousandfold, and announces "we are the apex predator; the lightning works for us."

Modest stuff.

His manifesto also contains something that some older religions needed centuries to develop: a list of heresies.

In a chapter literally titled "The Enemy," you will find "sustainability," "social responsibility," "trust and safety," and my personal favourite… "tech ethics."

There is, however, a catch to this new faith.

To become a true corporate techno-optimist, one needs to remove a part of one's humanity and "evolve" in one's thinking.

To start thinking a bit differently.

To stop being limited by all-too-human constraints.

Zuckerberg, talking about friendship, for example, mentioned that the average American has fewer than three friends, but "the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15" — and goes on to suggest that AI will help bridge the "friendship gap."

Notice what each statement does.

It takes a moral/human category, friendship, freedom, and intelligence, and re-describes it as a logistics problem.

Every totalising corporate faith eventually re-describes humans to fit the promised land, rather than adjusting the promised land to fit humans. Previously, it was shareholder value; now it is technology as the solution to everything.

Now, the thing we have all quietly forgotten.

There was a time when the moral obligation of a manager was not a values section on a website.

It was a job requirement, written into management science by the man who founded it.

Peter Drucker, the patron saint of this Meme Guide, in The Practice of Management, 1954. 

Promoting a person without character was not an HR miss.

It was proof that the organization is failing. Management, Drucker insisted, deals in "moral concerns, the nature of man, good and evil." Good and evil. In a management textbook… those were the days, my friend.

Now, there is a date and time when morality was escorted out of the corporate office and handed out its 3-month notice period. 1970: Milton Friedman (Google him), one of the prophets of the now-deceased faith of happy globalization, declared in a New York Times essay that business has exactly one social responsibility… profit.

I am ready to bet that everyone reading this letter grew up in an educational system that taught exactly this.

To the point where, in 2005, London Business School's own Sumantra Ghoshal, professor of strategy and management, acknowledged that: "by propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility."

So, what do we do today, when our organisations push us to adopt techno-optimism as the new saving doctrine?

To believe that enough data centres, AI agents, compute, and chips will save us all, while ethics sits on an enemies list?

We must restore moral seriousness as a job requirement for managers. A requirement, hired for, promoted for, and fired for the lack of, exactly as specified in 1954. When someone delivers the quarter by quietly damaging the people around them, that is proof of failure, not achievement.

The new faith says ethics is the enemy. Our patron saint says that ethics is the proof of the seriousness of a manager’s character.

I know which sermon I'll attend.

Talk soon,
Sultanbek