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How a New York Times Puff Piece Missed the Toxic Creed of the Tech Oligarchy

How a “New York Times” Puff Piece Missed the Toxic Creed of the Tech Oligarchy

A profile of an AI healthcare start-up overlooked the creaky business model behind it, as well as the tech sector’s worship of “high agency.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the sociopathic poster boy for Silicon Valley’s “high agency” revolution.

Was The New York Times just bamboozled by a grifter? Earlier this month, the paper of record ran what it clearly intended as an inspirational story for our AI age, profiling a 41-year-old entrepreneur named Matthew Gallagher who used an assortment of AI tools to conjure up a telehealth marketing start-up called Medvi. According to Gallagher, the company is on track to do $1.8 billion in sales this year, with a staff of only two (Gallagher and his younger brother).

Too good to be true? Well, yes. Almost immediately, critics online filled in what the Times had left out: a warning letter the FDA sent to Medvi over alleged deceptive marketing practices; a RICO lawsuit against Medvi’s fulfillment partner over a weight-loss compound that hasn’t been proven to work; a slew of AI-generated fake doctors shilling for Medvi in thousands of spammy ads.

After the online outcry over the article, the Times added a few paragraphs describing some of the ways that “Medvi’s aggressive advertising has led to legal and regulatory issues”—which is putting it a little gingerly. But the story remains largely unchanged on the Times website. I say let it stand. Because every age gets the heroes it deserves, and Gallagher is in many ways a perfect representative of our current Gilded Age 2.0.

The problem runs deeper than the Times’ questionable editorial judgment; the paper seems to have been seduced by an ideology that made it incapable of seeing the con. That ideology is “high agency,” Silicon Valley’s currently trendy success mythology, which suggests that the defining trait of the exceptional individual is the refusal to accept constraints. Its catchphrase is “just do the thing.”

The high-agency concept was introduced in 2016 by Eric Weinstein—mathematician, podcaster, and at the time managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment firm. Weinstein described high-agency people as those who, when told something is impossible, immediately begin formulating ways around the limitation. The concept lay largely dormant until early 2024, when a viral essay by writer and entrepreneur George Mack titled “High Agency in 30 Minutes” sent it exploding across Silicon Valley and into mainstream business culture. Mack’s touchstone example: a quote from Silicon Valley “hacker philosopher” Paul Graham about Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI: “You could parachute him into an island of cannibals........

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