The Meritocracy Trap: From Open Source Ideal to Billionaire Weapon

Part 1: The Warning Nobody Heeded

In 1991, Linus Torvalds posted a simple message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." When patches started arriving, he judged them by one criterion: did the code work? Not who wrote it. Not where they went to school. Not who they knew. Just: does it work?

This was meritocracy in its purest form. Technical merit, openly evaluated. Anyone could contribute. The best code won. That 'hobby' became Linux, which now runs most of the internet and forms the foundation of Android. Pure technical merit, openly evaluated, built the infrastructure of the modern world.

Three decades later, Elon Musk sits across from Bill Maher on HBO, warning about the "woke mind virus." When pressed to define it, he declares: "I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic." His $400 billion fortune? That's meritocracy working perfectly. When MacKenzie Scott donates billions to organizations focused on race and gender equity, he posts that "'Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse' should be listed among 'Reasons that Western Civilization died.'" In his worldview, helping marginalized communities doesn't just interfere with meritocracy. It kills Western civilization.

This is what meritocracy means now. Not contribution to the commons, but wealth as virtue. Not open evaluation, but market judgment. The same word, completely transformed.

How did the same word come to mean such radically different things? How did a principle meant to democratize technology become a weapon for oligarchs? The answer lies in one of history's greatest semantic inversions: a word that began as dystopian satire, became an open source ideal, and finally transformed into something its creator desperately tried to prevent.

Over the past decade I have noticed one of the key principles that I have believed in being slowly transformed into something that I consider evil.

I'm talking about meritocracy. The idea that people should be judged by their contributions, not their connections. That talent matters more than titles. That anyone, anywhere, can rise based on what they create.

I watched this principle build the open source movement. I saw it democratize technology. I believed in it completely.

Now I watch Elon Musk declare that helping poor people threatens Western civilization because it's "anti-meritocratic." I see Peter Thiel announce democracy itself is incompatible with freedom. I witness a word that once meant "contribution valued over credentials" transform into divine justification for unlimited wealth.

This is the story of meritocracy's trap.

The Book Nobody Read Right

I first encountered Michael Young's name while researching governance models for a major infrastructure project. Someone had mentioned "The Rise of the Meritocracy" as a cautionary tale about technical hierarchies. I expected another dry academic treatise. What I found instead was prophecy disguised as fiction.

Young wrote the book in 1958, but set it in 2034. His narrator, a smug sociologist, chronicles Britain's transformation into a perfectly sorted society. Children tested at eleven. IQ determining everything. The bright rise to power, the rest sink to servitude. The narrator thinks it's wonderful. Right up until rebels tear him apart in the streets.

I read it in one night, increasingly unsettled. Young wasn't celebrating this system. He was warning against it.

The genius was in the psychology. In Young's Britain, a coal miner's son who failed the test couldn't even rage against unfairness. The system had measured him, found him wanting, and assigned his fate based on objective merit. No aristocratic prejudice to blame. No class barriers to protest. Just the cold verdict of intelligence testing telling him he deserved exactly what he got.

"It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none," Young would later write. That line haunted me. I'd built systems where code reviews sorted contributions into accepted and rejected. I'd never considered how those rejections accumulated into a judgment of worth.

When Satire Becomes Scripture

Young spent the rest of his life watching his satirical term transform into political gospel. By the 1970s, politicians left and right were promising to build "true meritocracy." They'd either completely missed that his book was a warning, or they'd decided the dystopia actually sounded pretty good.

The more I read about Young's work, the more I understood his horror. This wasn't some ivory tower academic. He'd founded the Open University specifically to give working-class students educational opportunities. He'd spent decades fighting the British class system. Then he watched politicians adopt his nightmare word as their ideal.

I recognize this pattern from platform evolution. You build something with clear intent, document the dangers, warn about misuse. Then watch people ignore every warning and implement exactly what you cautioned against. Except Young hadn't built code. He'd built language. And language, once it enters the cultural infrastructure, can't be patched.

By 2001, Tony Blair was praising Britain's evolution toward "true meritocracy." Young, now 86, wrote a desperate editorial that read like a developer watching his code being weaponized:

"The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get... So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves."

CEOs who'd earned 20 times their workers' wages when Young wrote his book now earned 200 times as much. They didn't see this as excess. They saw it as justice. The market had recognized their merit.

The Architecture of Delusion

What Young understood, what I've learned building platforms that serve hundreds of millions, is that words create infrastructure. They're not just labels. They're protocols that shape how people interact, how resources flow, how power accumulates.

Change a word's meaning and you change society's operating system. Young watched "meritocracy" evolve from dystopian warning to aspirational ideal to justification for inequality. Each iteration built on the last, creating new layers of meaning that made his original warning literally unspeakable.

Try explaining today that meritocracy is bad. You sound like you're opposing fairness itself. Young's actual position, that sorting people by "merit" creates psychological devastation and social explosion, has become impossible to articulate. The word he created to describe the problem became the framework preventing its discussion.

I've seen this in technology constantly. Build an open platform, document best practices, warn about capture vectors. Watch bad actors use your own documentation as an exploitation manual. The difference is that Young created something more powerful than any platform: he created language that rewrote society's source code.

The Prophet Dies Unheard

Young died in 2002, still warning against the word he'd created. The irony that meritocracy had become political orthodoxy while its inventor begged for its abandonment seemed lost on most.

I'm filled with dread watching Young's prophecy unfold: His fictional meritocracy ended in blood. He set the revolution in 2033, the "unmeritorious" finally refusing their assigned fate. We're not just approaching his date, we're following his script.

Every billionaire insisting their wealth proves their worth, every politician promoting "equality of opportunity" while inequality explodes, every tech leader claiming disruption justifies domination, they're all following Young's script. Not his warning. His dystopia.

We had 44 years of warnings, from 1958 until Young's death. A brilliant sociologist explaining in real time how meritocracy would transform from ideal to weapon, showing us the psychological mechanics, the social dynamics, the inevitable endpoint.

Some didn't listen. But others listened very carefully, recognized the power in what Young described, and decided to build it anyway. They took his dystopia as a blueprint.

The question is: who were they, and how did they turn his nightmare into Silicon Valley's favorite justification?

But first, I need to tell you how I learned what real meritocracy could be, before I watched it die.

Next: Part 2 - The Open Source Dream. How I learned to stop worrying and love meritocracy, back when a broke college student's code could beat a professor's and collaboration could change the world. Then I watched the very openness we celebrated become the weapon of our destruction.