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The clean-up crew stays deliberately out of sight [...] their clients think consulting them will constitute a capitulation. An admission that what they're running is a business, that their career is in the end just a career, that gravity has some kind of purchase on their meteoric trajectories.
A lot of the younger VCs are themselves highly successful founders, and the contingency of their own success hasn't yet sunk in. [...] Why do they deserve their good fortune? What does it mean?
This matters because only those who have encountered the most stupefying, most inexplicable success will end up funding the next generation of startups. [...] Among those who do have that kind of cash, their sense of reality can be deeply warped - perhaps it almost has to be a little bit, shell-shocked as they all can be by their extraordinary luck.
[...] The term "lifestyle business," he points out - meaning a business that is designed to keep its owners fed and happy rather than making them brain-meltingly wealthy - is "kind of a pejorative in this world." Because to be reminded of why people normally work is an unwelcome dose of real life, of gravity, of adulthood.
love the last bit. startup life is about escaping the reality that most people are compelled to sell their labour-power merely in order to survive. it's fetishising work-as-choice
The reason is what one VC calls “the repeat business effect”. Sure, a 24-year-old can run his company into the ground – but he’s still a 24-year-old, with time and energy for another startup, and then another. And any one of those could pan out and make everybody fantastically rich. It is, as one founder told me, “the luxury of having a lot of runway left”. Why would you upset a person like that and potentially miss out on a future payday?
There is a lot of money sloshing around Silicon Valley in search of that payday. It laps up Sand Hill Road, all the way to the famous Rosewood Hotel with its Tesla-filled parking lot and tech divorcees on the prowl. [...] The money that pours in – from pension funds, hedge funds, private investors – has to go somewhere. It is agnostic about individual failure or success; its mantra is the law of averages. By the time one venture crashes and burns, everyone is already on to their next one.
But failure comes encased in bubble wrap – at least among those who have a reasonable expectation of running into each other again. What about those who don’t? Many of the employees who have foregone sleep, pay, healthcare and a social life for the benefit of now-worthless shares will not be instrumental in making the next spin of the wheel the winning one.
There are many ways to close up shop in Silicon Valley: get acquired or acqui-hired, wind the company down, buy out your investors and start anew as a small business. Depending on how a company dies, however, most or all of the employees will not be part of these transactions. Google won’t acqui-hire the receptionist, or even the publicity person. They won’t take on those who were only contractors, or those who mysteriously got the boot right before a desperate final funding round.
And even among those with titles, salary, and equity, the acqui-hiring party gets to pick and choose: in an acqui-hire truly deserving of the name, the company’s product and assets matter little. It’s really a way of hiring a very small group of people – and it falls to that group to stand up for those members of the company that the hiring party is not interested in. “They know what they’re prepared to spend,” one person whose company got absorbed into Google told me. “How equitably that gets spread around is basically one big prisoner’s dilemma.”
That’s the funny part of the tech industry’s narrative about itself. For tech, failure is always assumed to be temporary; for everyone else, it’s terminal. Taxicab companies are going out of business because they’re losing money? Creative destruction, my friend – sink or swim. Uber hemorrhages cash? Well, that’s just a sign of how visionary the company is. This double standard justifies the exploitation of workers outside of the tech industry – and, in certain cases, the exploitation of workers within it.
YOUR AI AGENT NEEDS A WORKFLOW ENGINE.
The billboard stands by a nondescript stretch of highway somewhere between Redwood City and Mountain View. A boom, likely a bubble, made manifest. A cry of triumphant return. And probably one day, a monument to a bubble bursting. All hype seems destined to furnish tomorrow’s ruin. But for now, this ruin in waiting stands by the side of Highway 101 to inform us that our AI agent needs a workflow engine.
Exactly 101 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald described a postindustrial wasteland on Long Island, “halfway between West Egg and New York,” with a giant billboard towering over it, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. This stretch of highway may be less desolate than what Fitzgerald described, but the billboards seem just as unsettling and disconsolate as the unnerving, faceless eyes of the fictive Queens optometrist.
Fitzgerald uses those eyes to find something sublime amid capitalist kitsch: the ephemera of consumer culture come to watch over and judge their creators, with the bizarre advertisement standing in for last things: God, fate, judgment, time. I feel judged by “Your AI Agent Needs a Workflow Engine.” First of all, because I had no idea, having left my AI agent lamentably bereft of a workflow engine. Second, because I don’t even have an AI agent. And third, because I have no clue what any of it means. Like Rilke before the torso of Phoebus Apollo, I pass before the monument and get a sense that I am being told to change my life. Unlike Rilke, I have no idea what is wrong or how to go about remedying it.
god he's so good
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.
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 imagination has noticeably diminished, in inverse proportion to its ability to actually take over our labor, our politics, our media. Silicon Valley's new innovations hardly get anyone excited, and they aren't presented to us as potential cult objects.
If your new iPhone now comes with Al and your vacation photos are automatically compatible with the virtual reality headset you'll never buy, the tech industry has replaced yesterday's glittering promises with the exhausted air of neoliberal government - the shrugging acceptance of having no alternative.
In the last five years, companies have stopped promising us the world and are instead content to dominate it. Their power of persuasion has run out; raw power remains. Every story about Silicon Valley will always be incomplete.
But this unassuming stretch of highway might offer a glimpse into how this happened.
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 into disuse, when Silicon Valley-the region, as opposed to Silicon Valley the set of companies-seemed unsure of itself. Work-from-home became the new watchword, and the campuses along this highway stood empty. The shock of the COVID pandemic was global, but it chipped away at this region's self-image in a very particular way.
The region, the industry, and its billboards have recovered, and today they appear more triumphant than ever. And yet, as with so much that's currently making a comeback in the United States - Trumpism, oligarchy, white supremacy - one gets the impression that this isn't a more-or-less-normal swing of the pendulum. The boom, the bubble, the power that is currently swelling in Silicon Valley, and the ruthlessness with which boom, bubble, and power are presenting themselves by the side of this road, are more or less trying to equate themselves with the fate of the country, of humanity: if our bubble bursts, you, your planet, your future is going down with us. And so the billboards symbolize the fait accompli that Silicon Valley presents us with today: systemic relevance as an all-or-nothing bet.
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 advertising Al are nondescript and interchangeable to a depressing degree. As Wendy rattles off what these companies actually do-background checks, website design, and (again and again) compliance - you get a sense of a crowded marketplace with very few ideas. "Wearable tech, shareable insights," reads one, promising "the AI data cloud." Saying that AI could have written that one feels generous. It reads like a bingo card.
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 that future.
They don't tell you what you can do with their tech; they tell you what you can prevent. Six of the thirtyish non-AI ads promote the new iPhone, five have to do with customer relations management (CRM), one has to do with crypto. The rest: United Airlines, Coors beer, a NorCal casino, a steak house, and "Caring Erin", a divorce attorney. We both cheer when a billboard appears for Shen Yun, a dance troupe sponsored by a Chinese cult. At least it's not AI.