Elizabeth Holmes, Chairman and CEO of Theranos, is a living archetype for the modern age.  Lauded by upmarket glossy magazines and heralded as a symbol of modern feminism, Holmes was the world’s first female tech billionaire.  In the tradition of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Tesla’s Elon Musk, Holmes was a driven individual determined to push aside the bureaucrats and naysayers who stand in the way of progress.  A university drop-out with no background in medicine nor tech, Holmes convinced some of America’s most powerful men – including Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Bill Clinton – that she had succeeded where thousands had failed in developing a Star Trek-type non-invasive blood testing technology.  But Holmes was closer to Elon Musk than to Steve Jobs, in that, like Musk’s hyperloops, solar roofs and Martian colonies, Holmes’ blood testing technology was a work of fantasy.  Unlike Musk – so far at least – Holmes is currently on trial for fraud and faces up to twenty years in jail if convicted.

My interest here is less to do with Holmes so much as with the technicians and engineers who she employed to work on the development of a technology which all of them must have known could never work.  Nevertheless, almost all of them continued to take their monthly salary in exchange for long hours and considerable effort which they knew could never pay off.  John Michael Greer offers a plausible explanation for why this occurred:

“Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…