by
Adrian Daub
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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.
Silicon Valley has returned, with fire and fury. It does not promise a world in which Al makes previously unimaginable things possible but a world in which only Al companies can protect you from AI. "You" in this case being the owner of a tech company, not a regular user, citizen, human being. For the rest of us, these billboards evince open contempt: "Who says hiring has to be fair?" asks a billboard for Metaview, "unfairly effective AI, built for recruiting." "Trust Humans" declares one Orwellian billboard for Checkr—a service that uses AI to run background checks on future employees, pitched at people who definitely do not in fact trust humans.
Just as Fox News sometimes runs segments with exactly one viewer in mind (President Donald Trump, these billboards have a target audience that runs in the low double digits. For all their parochialism, these billboards stake a claim to the world. It's unlikely there are billboards for these companies anywhere else in the world, but these companies nevertheless claim world domination.
They can justify their valuations only by promising to destroy not just your job, but your entire line of work. They can justify their high-flying claims only by strip-mining your posts, comments, photos. And they can scale only by building a gigantic data center near you, sucking up your water and polluting your air.
These billboards are claims to dominance, but those claims are not addressed to you. You are a mere onlooker to your own domination. There is something deeply unsettling about a power that seeks to justify itself but doesn't seek to justify itself to you. Such is the power of Silicon Valley. We can all opt out of caffeine, frame, C3.ai, and together.ai. Whether our opting out has any effect whatsoever is another story entirely. In many ways, witnesing the Al boom feels like driving along this forest of billboards: it's the dubious honor of getting to watch money fornicate with money.
Even Chevron's billboard along 101 is AI themed, emphasizing how many data centers run on burning oil and gas. Amid the glitter of solar panels to the left and to the right, the billboard is almost sneering in its petro-masculinist swagger: our Al is so important, we're feeding it your environment.
No, it feels like these billboards are a sunk-cost fallacy given physical form. They appear to be here for people who have already invested, or are fairly certain they're about to invest. This is why they are so maddeningly withholding. That's why this advertising is so unbearably self-absorbed. For a long time, tech companies reveled in the role of outsiders, even when the basis in reality for this self-conception was rather thin. But the self-driving cars roll through San Francisco courtesy of subsidiaries of the Magnificent 7. And the Al ecosystem, through the practice of circular financing, resembles a fortified encampment: gigantic companies like Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle all own stakes in one another or are interdependent through licenses, for example, in data centers or chips. Here, too, the focus is no longer on catering to individual consumers or investors, but rather to the state. Because only the state could still save these companies if the sector were to implode-yet again.
I begin to picture someone who works for one of the small "family offices," investment funds charged with increasing the fortune of a single wealthy family. When it comes to venture funds, family offices are often at the back of the line. A venture capitalist would much rather have a pension fund, a university endowment, or a sovereign wealth fund dumping billions into his accounts than a midsized family office. As a result, family offices often feel like they're on the outside looking in. I could imagine one of them looking at one of these billboards and thinking, "They're no unicorn, but at least they're an AI company." The investment world often operates with a distinction between "smart money" and "dumb money." But here it's probably more about early and late. The investor swayed by a billboard that simply says "caffeine" knows they're getting table scraps. Note that, in this image, our money doesn't even bear grifting.
We're not eating. We see a billboard with the word "caffeine" on it, and drive on, borne ceaselessly into their future.
And that feels ultimately like what these billboards-like the faceless eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg a hundred years before—are telling us about America's new Gilded Age: so much of our public discourse, so many of our vaunted institutions, so much of our collective attention, care, and heartbreak are sacrificed to the superrich conning one another. We can't understand what tech calls governing without the simple truth that it doesn't ultimately seem interested in governing us. What Silicon Valley calls governing is detached from and disinterested in human nature and normal life, even when it comes to normal life with technology and the internet. It is fixated on privilege and hierarchies for their own sake. And whatever intellectual ambition it possesses is easily seduced by ideologies that support these privileges and hierarchies.
The money of John Arrillaga Sr., whose name is immortalized in the names of these buildings, is also Silicon Valley money. However, Arrillaga didn't found any start-ups, though he sometimes accepted their shares as rent. Instead, together with Richard Peery, another real estate developer, Arrillaga began in the 196os to buy up gigantic parcels of former farmland in San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale and throw up dozens of anonymous office Parks-often without firm commitments or potential tenants. As the orchards and abandoned navy sites increasingly gave way to semiconductor factories and software companies, Arrillaga became enormously wealthy.
Together, these two incubators-the university and the research parks next door-have launched multiple generations of entrepreneurs. Surprisingly often, those generations have been understood as, and indeed presented themselves as, nouveau riche. In some cases, they were indeed that, biographically speaking. But the money that so reliably found its way to funding their sometimes bold, sometimes quixotic, sometimes fraudulent endeavors was old.
Today it comes from Saudi princes and Japanese banks. It comes from family offices that manage the real estate wealth or stock portfolios of American dynasties? It comes from the endowments of universities established by America's kleptocrats. It comes from the "friends and family" of founders, from whom every start-up raises its first round of funding. Which means that far from opening up wealth to new entrants, the funding system actually highlights the opposite development: in the United States in general, and at institutions like Stanford in particular, the wealthy are increasingly keeping to themselves. And they manage to create wealth precisely by virtue of that fact. Silicon Valley is where chthonic cash is given the veneer of eternal youth.
sick
Silicon Valley dominates by converting power into other forms of power and by obscuring the obvious continuities between these forms. What neither Moore's law nor blitzscaling truly possess is a theory of dominance: How does dominance arise, and how does its mechanism manifest itself in reality? Kurzweil's singularity, the merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence, requires no coercion. It just happens somehow, at some point in the future. In truth, the leaders of Silicon Valley, like perhaps every nerd, did have such a theory. It was a theory of what they lacked, what they felt they were owed. As a result, it wasn't a particularly realistic one, but rather one based on science fiction and comic books. The CEOs embroidered it with their own moralism, combining power fantasies of the Muad Dib from Dune or Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series with another equally potent fictional narrative.
That narrative was Reaganism. The religious scholar Adam Kotsko has emphasized the theological aspects of neoliberal politics, pointing out that, for all its ostentatious appeals to rationality, the rhetoric of rationalization is not without its "demons. Reagan's demons were students, "welfare queens," drug addicts, and people with AIDS. Reaganism's others tended to be characterized by two things: On the one hand, the moral calculus of the 198os emphasized self-control; it was terrified of permeability, loss, and waste. On the other hand, it depended on a preestablished harmony between what the individual deserved and what they received. It was animated by a concern that someone somewhere was getting something they were not entitled to, or that someone somewhere was not getting what they were by rights entitled to, which presupposes a set of hierarchies that are understood as natural but never explicitly named. Consider that in Reagan's language games, "taxpayers" never meant everyone who pays taxes, "citizens" never meant everyone who held a passport, and even "the people" seemed to exclude certain individuals who very much looked like people. In this view of the world, moral categories and hierarchies were (and in fact still are) simultaneously assumed and concealed. This mode of explaining the world has lived on in the way our tech overlords pitch their wares. In Silicon Valley's pitches, "everyone" has meaning only because it does not mean everyone.