I Was A Teenage Anarchist

Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?

Laura Jane Grace wrote about her time in the anarchist movement. Not the music—but the politics. The organized version of the thing she believed in. The song is about disillusionment. The moment you realize the movement you joined has developed its own orthodoxies, its own gatekeepers, its own purity tests. The people who were supposed to be about freedom become the ones policing who’s doing it right.

Sometime around 1999, while I was still in college, I picked up Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained. I don’t remember how I found it. Probably a recommendation from someone on a mailing list—that’s how we found things back then. But I remember what it felt like to read it.

This was different.

Pair programming. Collective code ownership. Sustainable pace. The customer in the room. It wasn’t just a methodology—it was a philosophy. Trust the developers. Reject the command-and-control model. Build things that work by working closely with the people who need them. The whole book felt like someone had finally said the thing I’d been feeling but couldn’t articulate.

And XP wasn’t alone. Everything seemed to be pointing the same direction.

The Cluetrain Manifesto came out the same year—markets are conversations, the internet enables authentic human connection, the corporate voice is dead. The Cathedral and the Bazaar had just made the case that open source worked—that decentralized collaboration could beat top-down planning. Norman and Nielsen were pushing user-centered design, the radical idea that you should build things for humans instead of forcing humans to adapt to your systems.

A couple years later, the Agile Manifesto. Individuals over processes. Working software over documentation. Responding to change over following a plan.

It was a moment. Late ’90s, early 2000s. Multiple streams converging on the same basic insight: trust humans, decentralize power, authenticity over bureaucracy.

I was twenty-two. I thought I was part of something.

You know what happened next. The revolution was a lie.

The Agile Manifesto became the Scrum Alliance™. The certification industry. The twelve-week training programs. SAFe arrived like a major label buying out the indie scene. “Agile transformation” became a thing you hire Deloitte to do to your company.

But it wasn’t just Agile.

Cluetrain’s “markets are conversations” got answered with surveillance capitalism. The authentic human connection became the engagement metric. They didn’t just monetize the conversation—they weaponized it.

User-centered design became dark patterns. A/B testing for addiction. The discipline of understanding human needs twisted into the discipline of exploiting human weaknesses.

Open source became FAANG’s free labor pool. Maintainer burnout. Open core bait-and-switch. “Move fast and break things” as an excuse for externalizing every cost.

The hacker ethic—curiosity, meritocracy, information wants to be free—became the founder mythology of companies that hoard information, enforce brutal hierarchies, and sue anyone who gets too curious about their systems.

Every single one of them. Co-opted. Absorbed. Sold back to us.

The system didn’t beat the revolution. It ate it. Digested it. Packaged the aesthetic and discarded the substance.

There’s a scene in SLC Punk! where Stevo’s parents are confronting him about his future. His dad says, “I didn’t sell out, I bought in.”

For years I thought that was the point of the movie. Growing up. Realizing the system is what it is. Making your peace with it.

But that’s not why Stevo opts in.

Stevo opts in because, when Heroin Bob leaves, the scene doesn’t hold him anymore. The moment failed to become a movement, and the grief of that failure is what drives the choice. It’s not wisdom. It’s survival. The thing he believed in didn’t die because it was wrong. It died because it couldn’t survive contact with the systems around it.

And he still had to live.

So here I am, an engineering manager now. I run standups. I do sprint planning. I sit in meetings about velocity and capacity and quarterly planning.

Did I opt in?

I keep running into two questions that I can’t separate.

The first: Did those principles ever mean anything? Was there ever a real alternative, or were we always just a market segment that hadn’t been monetized yet? Was XP Explained part of an actual Moment—or just a product before the packaging caught up?

The second: Was I drawn to those ideas because they were true, or because I was twenty-two and they felt good? Is what I’m holding onto conviction—or just nostalgia for a version of myself that might never have existed?

If the Moment never had a chance to be a Movement, then my belief in it was just naivety. If I never really believed in it, then I’m not equipped to judge whether it was real. And if it was real—and if I did believe in it—then what the hell happened?

That’s the knot I’m trying to untangle.

I’m not sure anymore what I remember about being young and wanting to set the world on fire. Was it the principles, or just the feeling of having principles? Was it the thing itself, or just being young enough to believe in things?

Mark, you came at this differently. You took the MBA path. You studied the management theory, you’ve seen your own version of the cycle—the transformation that was supposed to stick and didn’t, the training that got absorbed and neutralized.

So here’s my question for this week: If you can’t trust the moments and the movements, and you can’t trust that opting in is even real—what do you hold onto?