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: they offer you a McDonald’s, a world-famous geyser, a strip club, they tell you it’s only five miles, and which exit to take. But these are the least solicitous billboards imaginable, solitaires throning over the highway, haughty and without any desire to be understood.

In this respect, this sphinx feels like a perfect distillation of Silicon Valley. The billboard makes a demand without being able to clearly express what that demand consists of. This billboard seems to be telling a story about something entirely different: the fact that people no longer project onto this region what they once did, and that the region has therefore ceased to offer a screen for those projections.