phantom zone

Moontower Munchies #154

Friends,

This is a straight-up rant.

If you are anywhere near financial or tech twitter you’ve seen Deedy’s tweet and the reactions to it. Here’s a reprint:

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

The speed and magnitude of the wealth creation is like a black hole. The envy and accompanying anxiety that AI will devour future paths to wealth for anyone who doesn’t already have it has a gravitational pull in the Bay Area from which no light can escape. The metaphor writes itself. The event horizon is the singularity moment where capital is the only thing that matters.

Stanford senior, author Theo Baker’s recent NY Times editorial What A.I. Did to My College Class indicates the black hole is growing at one of the world’s leading universities. Pardon another long excerpt, but it’s worth it:

Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become. As freshman year went on, some professors suggested that the “nuclear option” might be called for: allowing faculty to proctor in-person exams, a practice banned at the university for over a century to demonstrate “confidence in the honor” of students.

In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything. They would embezzle dorm funds to spend on their friends and lie about having Covid to get the UberEats credits that the school offered to those in quarantine. Some kids I knew published a paper that claimed a groundbreaking new A.I. advancement. Online sleuths quickly pointed out that it appeared to be just a stolen Chinese model, to which the two Stanford co-authors responded by blaming the plagiarism on the third author.

In junior year, 49 percent of the 849 computer science majors who responded to an annual campus survey said they would rather cheat on an exam than fail. A friend of mine captured the school’s ethos while we were discussing the tech hardware and other items our student club neglected to return to corporate sponsors. It was all, I recall her saying, “just a little bit of fraud.”

About halfway through freshman year, some coding classes started requiring students to sign a declaration — “I did not utilize ChatGPT” — to submit each assignment. During the first term these attestations began to appear, I watched a freshman I knew sign the declaration that he’d done his homework without A.I. as ChatGPT was still open in the next window — while on the deck of a yacht party financed by venture capitalists. The incentive structures were not aligned toward honesty. One could get ahead, quickly, by cutting corners, by focusing on self-presentation.

The money is a big part of it. A.I. has merely accelerated a trend that was already underway at Stanford and has been reflected by many of the country’s most corporatized universities: Education itself can be seen as a secondary goal to enabling future success, frequently defined as a future windfall.

The article then goes on to talk about the student body's fascination with getting rich as they watch peers and recent alum hit the equivalent of the lotto in this hockey-stick environment. And even if it’s not the lotto, there’s the constant reminder that any obsession not having to do with money is carrying an increasing opportunity cost:

Next to me, one student scribbled on a branded notepad from Hudson River Trading, a quantitative trading firm where fresh graduates can earn upward of $600,000 a year.

This is scrambling people’s brains. Here’s Educated Guess:

I would think that tech people have had plenty of practice coping since this has been going on for awhile even if the numbers are bigger now. Being in finance and watching more than a fair share of idiots get rich has given me plenty of perspective. But it’s exactly to not think of the idiots getting rich, but of all the great people who didn’t.

Think of the people you know who haven't had your luck and who you know are better than you. This immediately shifts your mind to gratitude. There are a million moments in a day to recognize how lucky you are. If you’re so f’n “agentic” why are you unable to choose to see that reality.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the most anxious people, the ones described in Deedy’s post, are the ones who are the most imposter. The ones who massively outperformed and in their hearts know it. They are not as self-reliant as they outwardly show and they hope their bank account will save them from ever having to face the truth that they are stunted in broad ways. They are less adaptable than they appear. They are specialized and therefore hostage to an environment that may well be artificial and, feeding their deepest fear, fleeting.

The deranged psychology in Deedy’s description isn’t about greed. Maybe for a few. It’s really about being fragile. These are rich but fragile people. And it’s even more twisted than this. The permanent underclass meme isn’t a nightmare. It’s a fantasy. If you’ve lucked into being “post-economic” by age 30, where even the most conservative compounding assumptions mean being able to throw out your alarm clock forever, you’ve secured never having the discomfort of testing your character and resilience.

But this fantasy is just that. A fantasy. And a poorly thought-out one. What’s a world where the United States has a permanent underclass? That’s what Egypt is today.

How do you get from where we are today to that arrangement?

1. We really do achieve capital singularity and pre-existing wealth becomes the only meaningful input to flourishing and class mobility. This might be a foregone conclusion to many, but I also think it’s short-term profitable to promote this view so it’s not a fully honest position.

2. This new order becomes common knowledge. The government and its wealthy owners use media and propaganda, supercharged by the tech they own, to pacify the unwashed (ie most of us.)

3. The dam eventually breaks. You know the scene already: The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests and cast into the cold world the rest of us have known and endured.

4. This aggression will not stand, man. The oligarchs respond. The ensuing authoritarianism in this country is unprecedented. Welcome to Egypt’s corrupt system of favor-trading and hopelessness, except it’s secured by the most dystopian sci-fi technology.

So let’s see, you're rich but not as self-reliant as you want others to believe, and this world is your salvation? What you’ve secured is a boot-licking future. At least you’ll still be able to afford DoorDash.

If you’re going to be a piece of shit, at least be evil and accountable instead of swallowing and boosting anxiety-porn because you either lack the imagination to see why either it’s wrong or how little your bag will matter in the world where it’s not.

Get over yourself. Show some gratitude. Do you hear what you sound like? If you’re fucked, then everyone else is dead. Do you really believe this? If so, while not redirecting your energy towards a remedy, is to admit being a rich coward. Enjoy your enclave while it lasts. It’s a life raft to nowhere.

I find being in finance and from NY, but building a life and family in the Bay Area makes it hard to avoid comparing the locations. The Bay Area really struggles to reconcile its identity with profound wealth. It’s not surprising given the velocity of change. The legacy of hackers, iconoclasts, and nerds who happened into insane riches bred a more institutionalized capital formation ecosystem. Like the kind that NY has always been known for.

But the cultures cannot thoroughly mix without paradox. The unabashed but honest avarice of NY capitalism meets the idealism of artists who, at some point, cannot resist turning in their bicycle for a Pagani and fuel-guzzling jet. But they also don’t wanna see themselves as “that guy”. So we endure this moralizing hypocrisy. Watching them strain to serve a master they haven’t checked in with since the days of eating ramen in a garage.

I kind of appreciate the Stanford story. For most kids, school was always about “is this gonna be on the test?” not skill-building. It’s a place to demonstrate the “right” mix of aptitude and conformity to keep the “right” options open. The “right” options being a white-collar gig with either enough prestige to please your parents or enough money to shut them up.

Instead of “Is this gonna be on the test?”, it’s ”Is this gonna make me rich?” It sounds crude, but given the cost of college and its role for many people as a way to break out of the lower class, it is what many people are already thinking. It’s the next logical step in the progression because money is prestige and prestige without money ain’t gonna get you into a Great Schools 10 zone to perpetuate the cycle with your own kids.

If there’s a devil, he doesn’t want to kill you. He wants you to live, but be obsessed with yourself. That scales. That is a cycle that goes deeper than the radiation from a one-time nuclear cloud. To stay alive, with your insecurity trapping you in a 2-D rhombus projecting its phantom zone on your bloodline for eons.

The upper bound of being obsessed with yourself is survival. That’s a strange peak ambition for people who are free of material constraint.

Perhaps they are anything but free?

Stay groovy

☮️

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