(This piece is my year in review; I skipped a letter last year)
One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.
If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.
It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.1
It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless.
Earlier this year, I moved from Yale to Stanford. The sun and the dynamism of the west coast have drawn me back. I found a Bay Area that has grown a lot weirder since I lived there a decade ago. In 2015, people were mostly working on consumer apps, cryptocurrencies, and some business software. Though it felt exciting, it looks in retrospect like a more innocent, even a more sedate, time. Today, AI dictates everything in San Francisco while the tech scene plays a much larger political role in the United States. I can’t get over how strange it all feels. In the midst of California’s natural beauty, nerds are trying to build God in a Box; meanwhile, Peter Thiel hovers in the background presenting lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. This eldritch setting feels more appropriate for a Gothic horror novel than for real life.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to say that I am rooting for San Francisco. It’s tempting to gawk at the craziness of the culture, as much of the east coast media tends to do. Yes, one can quickly find people who speak with the conviction of a cultist; no, I will not inject the peptides proffered by strangers. But there’s more to the Bay Area than unusual health practices. It is, after all, a place that creates not only new products, but also new modes of living. I’m struck that some east coast folks insist to me that driverless cars can’t work and won’t be accepted, even as these vehicles populate the streets of the Bay Area. Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.
I enjoy San Francisco more than when I was younger because I now better appreciate what makes it work. I believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America. Tech is so open towards immigrants that it has driven populists into a froth of rage. It remains male-heavy and practices plenty of gatekeeping. But San Francisco better embodies an ethos of openness relative to the rest of the country. Industries on the east coast — finance, media, universities, policy — tend to more carefully weigh name and pedigree. Young scientists aren’t told they ought to keep their innovations incremental and their attitude to hierarchy duly deferential, as they might hear in Boston. A smart young person could achieve much more over a few years in SF than in DC. People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age that took place decades ago, as New Yorkers in media might do.
San Francisco is forward looking and eager to try new ideas. Without this curiosity, it wouldn’t be able to create whole new product categories: iPhones, social media, large language models, and all sorts of digital services. For the most part, it’s positive that tech values speed: quick product cycles, quick replies to email. Past success creates an expectation that the next technological wave will be even more exciting. It’s good to keep building the future, though it’s sometimes absurd to hear someone pivot, mid-breath, from declaring that salvation lies in the blockchain to announcing that AI will solve everything.
People like to make fun of San Francisco for not drinking; well, that works pretty well for me. I enjoy board games and appreciate that it’s easier to find other players. I like SF house parties, where people take off their shoes at the entrance and enter a space in which speech can be heard over music, which feels so much more civilized than descending into a loud bar in New York. It’s easy to fall into a nerdy conversation almost immediately with someone young and earnest. The Bay Area has converged on Asian-American modes of socializing (though it lacks the emphasis on food). I find it charming that a San Francisco home that is poorly furnished and strewn with pizza boxes could be owned by a billionaire who can’t get around to setting up a bed for his mattress.
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