Naval Ravikant distilled the modern tech ethos into neatly memorizable shapes: "Play long-term games with long-term people," "Learn to sell and learn to build," "Productize yourself." It was smart. Catchy. Clear. And it spread...

Navalification isn't about Naval Ravikant the person so much as the linguistic and conceptual style he popularized: aphoristic, self-optimizing, philosophical in tone but firmly Silicon Valley in application. It's minimalism as enlightenment. Wisdom as formatted bullet points. 

You can see its disciples on Twitter, Linkedin etc. They write in clipped pseudo-koans, recommend meditation as the ultimate productivity hack, and treat wealth-building as a spiritual practice. Every third post reads like an entry in a crowdsourced, AI-trained sequel to Meditations: optimized, marketable, legible. The medium is clean. The message is clean. The conclusions are clean. No mess, no contradiction, no contingency. Just frameworks.

Where did all the nuance go? Where are the strange, digressive thinkers, the idiosyncratic voices who sound like no one but themselves? Why does everyone now sound like an algorithm trained on Naval, Taleb, and Marcus Aurelius with a sprinkle of Steve Jobs?

It wasn’t always this way.

We used to have folks like Stewart Brand, a proto-tech intellectual whose Whole Earth Catalog offered ideas in sprawling, joyful, chaotic formats. Or Jaron Lanier, whose writing remains defiantly human: strange, baggy, emotional. Voices shaped weirdness and depth, not just virality. Even when they were wrong, they were wrong in interesting ways.

What changed? Partly, the audience. Content is now written less to persuade or provoke than to mime alignment with a high-status ideology. Navalification is clarity as an act. You show you're smart by speaking in frameworks, not in ideas. An insight can now be measured by its potential to be clipped into a viral slide deck.

The collapse of context hasn't helped. X encourages compressed wisdom. Longform weirdness drowns. In its place: atomic truths, made for consumption at speed. "Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want." Is it true? Doesn’t matter. It fits. It slides neatly into a thread, a blog, a personal brand. It signals.

But when you shave off mess, you shave off texture. Aphorisms don’t tolerate contradiction. They rid the local in favor of the universal, the anecdotal in favor of the abstract, and the result is that much of tech discourse feels like a parody of a Stoic’s notebook.

None of this is Naval’s fault. He was just early, and unusually good at talking in a way the internet liked.

But maybe we've hit a ceiling. Maybe this is as far as the tidy little insights can take you. You scroll through thread after thread of curated clarity and start to feel a little lost. It’s all epiphany, no struggle. All takeaway, no argument.

I wouldn't call it a renaissance. 

More like LinkedIn with incense.