And why the magazine Fast Company used to drive me batshit. Hated that magazine.

Below is a response I wrote on the Fast Company web site. A festering brood I've had about this for some time. Nothing against the guy personally, but Po Bronson needs to take responsiblity for the bullshit mythology his writing and others' helped to create.

What Should I Do With My Life? [Slashdot]

I hate to rain on the parade, but Po Bronson is a comodifier of mythologies. He finds a horse and rides it. There were stories that needed to be told when Po Bronson was repeating endlessly the myth of the Entreprenuer Hero getting rich and taking names. Po Bronson only had one narrative then and he's looking for a new one now because that one was a bill of goods.

We are the suckers if we buy snake oil from the same guy twice.

How much more interesting would the world have been in the late 1990s if magazines that accepted articles by Po and his ilk had actually been interested in some OTHER narrative than the Entreprenuer Hero, like the story of waste, or of foolish business plans, or of fiddling while Rome burns?

I didn't submit any article queries to magazines in those days because there was no way in hell I was going to try to turn my stories into the far more marketable but less journalistically true commodified mythos of the Entreprenuer Hero.

There are a lot of good books to read about the lives of real working people by writers like Studs Terkel or Mike Rose or even Barbara Ehrenreich.

Mr Bronson is trying to do their schtick because he is a writer who doesn't know what to do if he doesn't have his commodified and marketable narrative mythos already spelled out for him. If he had even half of he larger sensibilities of the 3 writers above, maybe he could open the eyes of those pitiful Fast Company cheerleaders. God save us from this book.

Miasma
2:17:52 AM