Slouching Towards San Francisco

On Thursday, I published an article in the new British outlet Dispatch . You can read the piece (and subscribe to Dispatch !) here . The magazine promises to “a commitment to exploring the world’s peripheries, and a promise to take seriously the people and ideas we find there.” My piece is reposted in full below. At a recent house party, a girl too drunk to be there leaned into me and murmured the speculative net worths of the people in the room, gesturing softly with her finger: “A few thousand. Broke. Can’t be more than a hundred thousand. Millions, I think.” At the same gathering, a man fact-checked something I said about local politics by taking out his phone and typing it into ChatGPT. He angled his phone towards me just before the little white ball spelled out: “Yes, it’s plausible.” I was right. After hovering through a few conversations about the AI revolution, in which I was mostly outed as someone not working in AI or even in tech, I glanced at the bookshelves around me — ... Read full article.