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There was a time when tech took the effort to lie to you. The future it envisioned for you was undercooked and sketchy, self-serving and arrogant, but it was a future envisioned for you. The future imagined on these billboards is terrifying, and at best these billboards promise you might be spared …

As an individual driver on Highway 101, you don't get the impression that these billboards want anything from you. These billboards are simply telling you how important they already are. Of the ninety billboards we pass during our drive, only about thirty have no connection to AI. The ones advertis…

Successive waves of Silicon Valley hype have washed over these billboards, and then vanished from the earth. Ten years ago, the billboards overflowed with a cacophony of messages about e-commerce, customer relations management, chatbots, the Cloud. Then there was a moment in 2020, when they fell in…

There was a moment when people readily confused men in turtlenecks with lapel mics pacing across a garishly lit stage with thought leadership. As a whole, we seem to have gotten better spotting that sort of thing as what it is: a pitch. Silicon Valley's ability to take over the world's collective i…

The fact that this billboard poses an unremitting demand, but that even on repeat drive-bys I cannot for the life of me figure out what that demand is, says something about the company it’s advertising. A company that, by the way, I have already forgotten. American billboards tend to be solicitous:…