When did you last check if any of it was real?

We live in an attention economy. All of us suffer from a surplus of dopamine. These systems are built to turn you into an addict. The algorithms whose only purpose is to keep you hooked are designed by the most brilliant engineers in the world. The very best minds. It always amused me that my grandmother warned me about everyone staring at their phones in public. Now, with age and a better understanding of how the technology works, I see exactly what she meant. We consume what we are fed. We no longer have original thoughts. We mirror whatever content resonates with us and call it our own. The clearest example is people reposting memes on TikTok or Instagram and assembling an entire personality out of other people's work. When was the last time any of us had a genuine thought?

If you have ever spent time in academia you notice a flood of papers. Everything is "novel". Everything is "robust". Everything is ground-breaking. Most of it is ordinary work dressed in extraordinary language. So what is academia actually about? People are proud to call themselves researchers, but what does that mean? There are of course the real ones. The elite labs. The people who invented everything what we take for granted in life. But walk through a place like RWTH and you mostly find clones, of which ninety-five percent are studying something no one cares about. A niche problem of a subniche of a niche. No relevance. No industry relevance. Ask them what they think about combining research with industry and they look at you with suspicion. Proud, drinking their bad coffee, eating in the same canteen as the undergrads and paying four times the price for the same poor food. So what is it they are actually so proud of?

One of the projects I looked at was about a moving roboter cutting a ship apart with multiple lasers. The supervisor walked me through slide after slide. The algorithms I would build. The computer vision involved. He was enthusiastic and I liked it. Then I asked a single question. Is the robot here? He said no, plainly and with complete confidence. He told me it was a joint European project and the robot was somewhere in France. He took its existence for granted but this was what stayed with me. The slides were real. The work was real. His confidence was real. The only thing no one could vouch for was the robot itself. How can you commit years of your life to a machine you have never seen, that no one around you doubts and you couldn't prove exists?

Every time I start using a new product or find something cool I love reading about the history behind it. Figma with Dylan behind it. A Thiel Fellow. Anduril with Palmer Luckey. Same story every time. And at some point I started noticing a pattern. All these cool new-gen companies are well, in the US. Most of the successful German companies today already existed in the Kaiserzeit. Siemens. Bosch. Bayer. The big ones are over a hundred years old. So why is that. Where are our unicorns worth multiple billions. Not capped at ten or eleven figures. Where are our twelve figure companies?