In the ever pleasant environs of coastal San Diego, where I spent the 1990s, whatever was happening in Silicon Valley reached us faintly, like the buzz of cicadas sealed out by good windows. Still, the vibrations traveled. You could feel them most clearly at the magazine rack, which became a monthly trading floor for belief. Wired, Fast Company, Mondo, ICON Thoughtstyle, Business 2.0; each arrived like a traveling revival, pitching a future that promised transcendence and, with luck, a respectable exit. They welcomed everyone to the tent, prophets and wizards, charlatans and sideshows alike, united by the same faith that this time, finally, the old rules no longer applied.
Cypherpunks rubbed shoulders with insurance executives. Mathematicians waxed philosophic with rock stars and welders. Chaos was rehabilitated into understanding; dreams became reality, became failure. Failure, in turn, was rehabilitated into education, then into credentials. We told ourselves we were living at the end of history while the future stretched on forever, fully automated, luxuriant, affluent. A world with no remaining problems that could not be solved by the straightforward application of computation and capital, the new lever and the new fulcrum. In this world, everyone wins. Losers, by definition, no longer exist.
Belief in an unshackled future hardened into a shibboleth, separating those who spoke the language from those who mispronounced it. The in group became increasingly symbolic, as abstract as the code we wrote to instruct machines. Optimized, elegant, and brittle, it served narrow purposes and particular tastes while presenting itself as universal. The foundational stories sank deeper into the soft ground reclaimed from the San Francisco Bay, as tech recast itself as both savior and prophet. We built walls to protect it, as if belief itself required fortification.
When the shocks came and the ground liquefied, the walls slid like jello on ice. Another failure followed, quickly rehabilitated, its survivors rebranded as victors. The first lottery winners set up shop on Sand Hill, selecting the next generation as if chance itself were wisdom
2000, 2001, 2008, 2020. Cataracts of failure. Each collapse narrowing the field, each recovery breeding inward, until the same names circulated behind higher walls. Locked away in curated gardens, they listened to charlatans and recycled their own convictions as insight. The dreams that once felt like guarded sparks of sacred fire were gone. In their place remained a juvenile longing for importance, men passing the conch with solemn ceremony, mistaking rehearsal for leadership and survival for wisdom.
Self sanctified at last, the gates flung open and they poured out from behind the walls, like Baudelaire’s black battalions, convinced of their own necessity, carrying corruption as culture and calling it efficiency. They declared themselves captains of industry, builders and thinkers, innovators and revolutionaries. They were none of these. Everything they touched fractured, not because reality resisted them, but because they no longer encountered it. What surrounded them was not a reality distortion field but a fog of unknowing, where ignorance passed for virtue, facts became inconveniences, and the universe, stubborn and indifferent, remained entirely undented.
Because they cast themselves as heroes, everything became tech. Every touch was leveraged; every break converted into debt. Those debts were bundled, folded, packaged, and massaged into earnings statements until tech itself resolved into services with meters attached. “Everything as a service” was not a freer market but a return to rents. Rents are antisocial. Government exists, in part, to restrain them. So government had to be reinstalled, not as a counterweight, but as an instrument. Beyond regulatory capture, tech demands that democracy legitimate it. It must confer status, certify virtue, and grant permission. Properly credentialed, tech is then free to optimize and parameterize, to reform “We the People” into a dependent variable, a derivative taken along the gradient of a proprietary algorithm. The infraction point, once a metaphor, was made literal by people so insulated from reality that irony itself became inaccessible.
Such is the landscape of our atemporal aftermath. Still, those faded magazines remain on my shelf, in the cold, damp Seattle darkness. The pure dream lingers there, optimistic, naive, unvarnished. The tools have changed, but the sentiment persists. Meaning is more powerful than money. That was never the lie. The lie was believing anything intangible could be owned, that a world of ideas built from bits could be enclosed, defended, and financialized without losing the very thing that made it alive.
This is a chronicle of categorical error, where villains are frightening not because of their power, but because of their inertia. From that inertia emerges the bullshit job; labor devoted not to creation or care, but to maintaining the fiction that an emptied system still deserves to endure.