Filthy Little Startupses

Gollum lived in a cave, whispered to himself, and still showed more ethical restraint than anyone who's ever called ChatGPT a “co-pilot.”

I trust Gollum to run OpenAI more than I trust any man who’s ever called ChatGPT his “sidekick.” Gollum didn’t build surveillance software and call it consciousness. He didn’t sell your diary to a hedge fund and call it “training data.” He didn’t start a podcast called Scaling Empathy while coding the end of natural human thought from a beanbag in Palo Alto. Gollum lived in a cave, talked to himself, and still had better communication skills than most men on the OpenAI board. He said things like “We wants it, we needs it” which, while concerning, is at least more honest than “Our mission is to benefit humanity.”

People act like Gollum was unstable. Have you seen a single man in tech when the Wi-Fi drops? Gollum had two personalities, yes, but at least one of them had morals. When he got corrupted, he didn’t write a Medium think piece about it. He didn’t launch MyPreciousGPT and offer it to schools. He didn't call the ring “an opportunity for scalable social impact.” He hissed, he shrieked, he tried to bite a man. That is a healthier expression of power lust than whatever the hell is happening on the OpenAI homepage right now.

What has servers, no soul, asks your secrets, and calls itself safe? It tells you what you want, but listens to sell. It learns you, burns you, and smiles like hell. — Gollum, interrogating a Silicon Valley man in a WeWork basement

Let’s not forget, Gollum was a data collector. He tracked Frodo and Sam across Mordor with bare feet and no incentive package. He logged every footstep, whisper, breath and snack break… but he didn’t monetise it. He didn’t use it to generate orc-themed motivational quotes for LinkedIn. He didn’t build a product pipeline. He just stared at a cursed object and muttered poetry. That’s not madness, that’s integrity.

Here’s a list of things Gollum would do better than any tech founder alive:

• Respect your privacy, mostly because he has no friends

• Whisper “precious” instead of “optimise”

• Build security systems that are actually difficult to break into, because he lives in a rock maze

• Understand the cost of obsession and still not launch an NFT line

• Take accountability by jumping into lava instead of blaming the interns

• Never say “democratising intelligence” while charging $20 a month

• Recognise evil when he sees it and say “It hurts us, Precious” instead of “Let’s scale responsibly”

Do you know how The Fellowship of the Ring handled Gollum? They watched him follow them for days, said nothing, and still preferred him over trusting a single wizard with full autonomy. Gandalf literally said “Even the very wise cannot see all ends,” which in modern translation means: Do not trust a man in a zip-up vest who thinks sentient AI is a fun weekend project. Gollum was chaos, but he wasn’t deluded. He didn’t call himself a pioneer. He wasn’t trying to pitch the One Ring on Shark Tank.

So yes, give him the OpenAI login. Give him the master keys. Let him sit in the corner stroking the servers and whispering code like a medieval data goblin. He would guard it with obsession, not ego. He would never let it out into the world to write your breakup texts, plagiarise your trauma, and sell your voice to Microsoft. If Gollum had been in charge, none of this would have happened. He would’ve kept it locked up in his weird swamp. He wouldn’t have needed a content moderation team. He would have simply said, “We swore to protect it, yes Precious, we swore!” and then screamed into the void like a true king.

And yes, I’m a nerd for the Hobbits. I grew up on The Lord of the Rings, emotional repression, and an unshakable belief that Gollum had a better moral arc than most CEOs (and this comes from someone who has consulted many Tech companies and worked alongside these people). Let my nerdy little heart live.