Ambitious Canada Part 7: Who is a Builder?

The tech world’s use of the term “Builder” is one of the most successful branding campaigns I’ve seen.

It is a brilliant piece of marketing. The word is romantic, active, and universally respected. It evokes images of rolled-up sleeves, tangible creation, and physical reality. It’s a term of action, of virtue.

You might be skeptical of today’s tech leaders, but who doesn’t love builders?

The Velvet Rope

The term’s power isn’t in who it includes, but in who it excludes.

To designate some people as “builders” is to implicitly designate everyone else as… anti-progress? They are administrators. Academics (wordcels!). Politicians (useless!). Facilitators. Or Employees (yuck!).

Who gets to be in the club?

In the lexicon of this brand, the “Builder” is, in the end, the capitalist. It’s a modern framing of the Randian “creator” – the lone hero who, as Ayn Rand wrote, “moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy.”

This is the brand’s core mythology: a single, heroic individual who wills an enterprise into existence.

The Trojan Horse

The fundamental problem: the “Builder” brand is a Trojan Horse, designed to smuggle a political worldview inside a term everyone loves.

It’s an agenda that seeks to elevate one group (am I allowed to just say techno-libertarian capitalist out loud?) above all others. Amazingly, it cleverly co-opts the language of progress without being progressive. It’s a political movement that wraps itself in the blue-collar, noble-sounding cloak of “just building things.”

The brand’s subtext is a demand: “Listen to us, for we are the builders. We are the ones who create all value. If you get in our way, you are doomed.”

Building Is a Team Sport

The mythology of the lone hero is just that: a myth.

Real-world innovation is a team sport. New products and new worlds are built by collectives. They are built by the engineers and the designers, the scientists and the product managers, the support staff and the executive who raised the capital. All of this happens within societies with millions of valuable players.

What do we do with a term

When you say someone is a builder or not a builder, what do you really mean? Does it mean they believe in unhindered technological progress of a certain flavour (like the e/acc movement)? Or do you mean successful business people (to the exclusion of their employees)? Or do you mean people who embrace a specific free-market form of capitalism?

Anyway… go build! (I think?)