They see far ahead. They drive relentlessly toward the future. And they sometimes have all the human sensibilities of an inebriated armadillo. I was oddly uplifted, therefore, to see at least one big tech company try to rebalance modern thinking toward something a little happier than the notion of permanently living in space. I was oddly bemused that the company offering this message was Salesforce. If I think of Salesforce at all, it’s to associate it with software that many friends complain about – and a phallic edifice that now dominates the San Francisco skyline like a homage to a misguided masculinity. Still, the company has suddenly appointed itself Defender of the Earth. In a new ad – hey, it’s Super Bowl week – Salesforce shows Matthew McConaughey cheerfully sneering at the dreams of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s not time to escape,” he says. “It’s time to engage.” Oh, engagement has become such a loaded word. Loaded with marketing meaning, that is. But McConaughey’s intentions are pure. He wants to plant more trees. He even wants to “build more trust.” Now that is truly a stellar endeavor. But he’s only just begun. “So while the others look to the metaverse and Mars,” he continues, “let’s stay here and restore ours.” Who on earth could Salesforce have in mind with those words? Surely not the three most escapist tech founders of our time? I almost found myself cheering at this simple, extremely-welcome thought. A tech company that wants to think about the humans, rather than leave them all behind? I’d vote for that. No wonder McConaughey recently considered running for Governor of Texas. “The new frontier, it ain’t rocket science,” says Earth’s Lone Defender. “It’s right here.” Of course, there’s very little here about what Salesforce is doing to ensure that the three wayward tech founders don’t see their twisted dreams realized. Moreover, it seems that corporations in general have been blowing smoke about how much they’ve done to improve our climate – or, perhaps, to not damage it further. One can hope, though, that more messages such as this might permeate not merely human thinking but, say, VC thinking. Ultimately, the question is simple: Would you rather spend the rest of your life with Musk and Bezos in space, with Zuckerberg in some putrid virtual world, or with Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff in Hawaii? I know Benioff comes across as his own sort of weird, but I’m still heading for Hawaii.
