00:01:01.220For our listeners who might justifiably be wondering what the fuck we're talking about, this is an episode about the 101 corridor.0.88
00:01:09.120So this is something I want to explain to people who do not live in the Bay Area, because there's a few uncanny things about living in San Francisco, as Adrian and I do, and working on the peninsula that is sometimes referred to as Silicon Valley.
00:01:28.220But what we're talking about today is a strip of highway between San Jose in the south and San Francisco in the north along this little peninsula of land on the west side of the San Francisco Bay and east of the Pacific Ocean on a highway called Highway 101.
00:01:48.340It goes through the towns in which most of the big tech companies of the last 10 to 15 years sit.
00:01:55.980And part of it is named, I don't know if you know this, it's the Fred Terman Highway.
00:02:00.340It's named after the provost who first sort of brought incubators, startups, and VC money to Stanford University.
00:02:11.840Dean of the School of Engineering, I believe, in the 50s and early 60s.
00:02:17.080This may sound extremely local, and it kind of is, but this is where sort of our digital future is engineered and where, frankly, a lot of the rightward lurch of the last five to 10 years has also originated, right?
00:02:32.440Yeah. And I think part of what we're doing in this episode is taking this strip of highway and this sort of like physical and intellectual terrain that is, quote unquote, Silicon Valley.
00:02:45.700And we're going to try to use some of the artifacts that we encounter there to explain what has happened in our politics and our economy and the ideologies that are governing both over the past 10 years or so.
00:03:02.440That's right. So let me set the scene for people. The most obvious feature of Highway 101 is, I would say, it has no features. It's literally just the highway. Everything's very flat. There's salt flats on one side sometimes. And then there's like, because these towns tend to be pretty wealthy, there's sound barriers. So you're just kind of driving through.
00:03:24.600The second most obvious feature, though, are the billboards.
00:03:27.460And this is where I encountered the fact that my AI agent needs a workflow engine.
00:04:46.280There are ads for like services you could potentially subscribe to.
00:04:50.160But it's gotten less and less over the years and really more your paradigmatic experience with one of these billboards is like, oh, wait, I'm not I'm not the CEO of a hundred million dollar company.
00:07:24.480That they move through it in extremely predictable ways, also sort of encoded in this.1.00
00:07:28.780This is actually a very small group of people, and that small group of people is fairly lemming-like0.99
00:07:32.840and fairly similar in the way they occupy this space, right?0.99
00:07:36.840they show up in the same places. They go through the same kind of rituals and rhythms. Lexicadas.
00:07:42.860So these billboards are aimed at a very small number of people who are this tech elite. Tell
00:07:50.140me who those people are. What is the demographic that these billboards are aiming for? What do
00:07:58.560they look like? How do they vote? How do they spend their time? Yeah, it's a very good question. And I
00:08:03.960honestly don't know the answer. I mean, I'm guessing this is between each of these companies
00:08:08.480and whoever fucking designed these incomprehensible signs. But here's a few things we can say. So I0.89
00:08:15.000took this drive down to Palo Alto and back with a writer, Wendy Liu, who has been on the beat of
00:08:21.560these billboards for years. These have been around. We can talk about their history, but like,
00:08:25.800this is sort of a good place to sort of take the temperature of Silicon Valley. And it is just a
00:08:30.500very, very obvious place to start. And we were kind of starting to think like, who is this for?
00:08:35.180You might think like, oh, it's for tech workers. Well, or for tech people. You and I have lived
00:08:40.120here long enough to know that that's not a very sharp definition of anything.
00:08:43.080Yeah. I mean, you say tech people, and that can mean a 30-year-old software engineer who's making
00:08:50.660like $120,000 a year. And I don't particularly think of that person as like the proletariat,
00:08:55.580But she is very different from your Mark Zuckerbergs, your Elon Musks, and even the people like two or three rungs below them on an org chart.
00:09:03.920There's a kind of generalized wealth in San Francisco.
00:09:09.780It's really hard to afford to live here.
00:09:12.000You can see it in the culture, the atmosphere, the sort of businesses that are able to survive here.
00:09:17.400It's very clear that there's a much wealthier local group and then sort of a ring of the actual workers who serve them.
00:09:26.360But then that's very different from the strata of elite.
00:09:31.360These billboards are going to, which are people in like high management positions at these companies, like sort of the top tier tech executives.
00:09:40.000Well, I'm not even sure it's tech, right?
00:09:43.440It could be people in the upper echelon of these tech companies.0.97
00:09:46.460On the other hand, one thing you notice is these billboards are fucking inscrutable.
00:09:52.120There's one that just says caffeine, and you have to kind of look really closely, much closer than you should if you're driving on 101, to find out that it's for a company called Caffeine AI.0.85
00:10:02.540So it's for people who are being driven down there, which already kind of excludes most actual workers at these companies.
00:10:10.000And I think even someone who's on one of the famous Google buses, they are all like on their laptops typing.
00:10:14.620Like, they're not going to be like, oh, caffeine AI, oh, great, right?
00:10:17.660It's really for someone who's in the back of a limo, maybe an Uber, maybe eventually a Waymo, right?
00:10:23.400Like, this is something that you're seeing out of the back of a car while you're being driven and you're not working.
00:10:30.360And I think that already tells you something, right?
00:10:32.400The other thing is, like, it may not even be for people in the tech industry.
00:10:35.340It may well be for the people who invest in these things.
00:10:37.700A lot of these companies are, right now, as best as I can tell, mostly huge investment vehicles, right?
00:10:43.320they do stuff in the sense that they clearly develop large language models, et cetera,
00:12:05.120I'm using keywords that you know are shibboleth, that you know indicate a membership in this elite group that you're very proud to be a part of, right?
00:12:16.780So that's part of what's going on is that it's not just any billboard.
00:12:21.180It's a billboard that is very conspicuous and self-conscious about the fact that it's not like other billboards, that it's not for other people.
00:12:28.560And I think that's why I wanted to talk about this today, because these billboards say something about, well, about what tech calls governing, because these billboards kind of do two things, right?
00:12:38.400They are, on the one hand, claims to dominance, right?
00:12:41.860They're not saying, hey, invest in us.
00:12:43.920They're saying, we are already important.
00:12:45.960And if you don't get that, you're not important, right?
00:12:49.020If these shibboleths don't make sense to you, you don't matter, right?
00:15:26.240So what did Silicon Valley used to be like and how do we see how it has changed through these billboards?
00:15:33.780Yeah, and I guess there we have to be very careful about what we mean by Silicon Valley.
00:15:36.820But I do think those billboards are a pretty good deep core sample for that cross-section, which is companies that both are beloved by investors.
00:15:46.320If you were some kind of very hyper-specialized tech manufacturer who only really needs to market to specialists, you're not going to buy this billboard.
00:15:54.860It's for ones that kind of have to work the refs a little bit, have to maybe work regulators a little bit, which is true for AI as well, and has to kind of persuade politicians as well as the general public.
00:16:05.920Like, you know, these billboards have always been kind of inside baseball-y in their tendencies,
00:16:11.480but there was definitely a moment when you could tell what it was selling you.
00:16:14.980If you'd taken that drive like five to ten years ago, it would have been some social media ads, not a ton.
00:16:21.720It would have been some ads for things like CRM, so customer relations management,
00:16:27.200which, again, is not aimed at you and me, but like, you know, mid-sized companies use these.
00:16:33.160So you can see, like, that's a somewhat larger group of people.
00:16:36.620And in each case, the pitch was convenience.
00:16:39.420It's very much in the mode of American consumerism.
00:16:43.720It's like, we've identified this problem that we've decided you have and that you may or may not actually have.
00:16:49.720And here's the thing that's going to fix it, right?
00:16:51.940Yeah, the tone of those ads, even the ones that are for, like, I don't know, some Salesforce product that a lot of mid-level employees might be using,
00:16:59.500they have, like, a kind of cheerful populism in the tone of the ad, right?
00:17:02.780It's like, hey, we all have this problem.
00:17:05.560Like, what's the deal with airline food?1.00
00:17:07.340Now we have this stupid startup that can give you a better, you know, snack at the airport or whatever the fuck it is.0.99
00:17:12.240It's a sense of reaching for relatability is the difference.1.00
00:18:49.620And you're like, oh, I want to stay there. I want to have that camera and I want to be able to take that awesome picture of Bora Bora. Well, these ads seem to be telling you, be afraid. They're saying, you don't want to end up here, right? You don't want to end up on the wrong end of me.
00:19:05.940Yeah, there was one ad on the side of the Muni bus stop, not far from my apartment, like a couple blocks, for a long time, like months it was there.
00:19:15.300And it was just a black background with white font that said humanity had a good run.
00:21:00.800And accordingly, they are also sort of shifting from this polite, like, sneaker-clad optimism of, like, the Obama-era tech world, which, like, I saw the social network.
00:21:13.240I have no illusions about what that era was actually like.
00:21:15.560But they definitely were, like, pretending to be something different, right?
00:21:18.560And now they're, like, mwahaha, like, cackling, right?
00:21:22.700They've shifted their tone a lot in this way that I don't know what it does.
00:21:28.140Is it just like indexing the vibe of the smaller and smaller number of tech oligarchs who run this industry and this country now, who are like more and more red-pilled and drug-addled and weird in their like wealthy isolation?
00:21:42.940Or is it, do they think they're charting a cultural vibe shift?
00:21:50.120So it's definitely true that like a lot of these companies thought they could lean into populism, but they've been ground up by their own populism, right?
00:21:58.060Like, it turns out they wanted to be a bunch of things to a bunch of people.
00:22:02.560They wanted to be unusual companies, atypical companies.
00:22:06.040But in the end, you know, they're companies that are just as scared about losing market
00:26:43.860And the bad news is that a lot of us are disposable.
00:26:47.320Yeah, AI seems to be the buzzword for we hate white-collar workers, right?
00:26:52.100It's like all that knowledge economy, all the people that are less powerful than your Mark Zuckerbergs and your Elon Musks,
00:27:00.280but, like, do have the capacity to annoy them by, say, organizing in their tech companies for unionization efforts or, like, Black Lives Matter efforts or Me Too efforts, as they all did over the past 10 years, right?
00:27:13.740Like, those people are going to be eliminated from the workforce, from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman's, like, reliance on them.
00:28:47.440I'm going to go home and do laundry because I'm a fucking adult, all right?0.95
00:28:50.260But also there were things like the Google Walker that you were alluding to, where they were like, we would like to be harassed-less on the job. This feels bad. We don't like it. There were employees organizing to stop selling technology to autocrats and saying, you said we shouldn't be evil. Let's actually do that and not sell to these assholes.0.96
00:29:09.240And you can really sort of see that the radicalization of these tech CEOs comes out of that, out of the revolt of their immediate PMC subordinates being like, no, I'm a worker too, man.0.98
00:29:29.400And they just kind of fucking flipped out.0.99
00:29:32.040The classic example of this, I think, is Elon Musk, who very clearly sort of couldn't handle the fact that, like, people kept suing Tesla, being like, I got sexually harassed.0.99
00:29:42.180Why do people keep calling me the N-word?
00:29:45.980Yeah, the race discrimination in the Tesla workforce is insane.
00:29:50.220And it's not getting a ton of publicity because he has a nutso mandatory arbitration clause.
00:29:54.620So all of these people who get sexually harassed and called the N-word at Tesla get funneled into these secret courts where, like, the House always wins.
00:30:02.040Yeah, where Grok is the judge, jury, and executioner.
00:30:07.080Yeah, and I mean, and then 2020 happens
00:30:09.540and Musk just goes completely insane over COVID restrictions.
00:30:53.080These are people who had made their money 20 years ago, or at least 10 years ago, and
00:31:00.160We're now kind of just like ticking down the hours before they collapse on top of their fourth wife or something like that, right?
00:31:06.560And for them, the idea that others might not need to risk their lives needlessly by exposing themselves to a virus was somehow like super offensive.
00:31:16.320They really hated this idea that like others were not going to come in and be mission minded and committed to catching COVID in order to really deliver the best, you know, picture sharing app that you could possibly imagine.
00:31:32.580From my iPhone on the golf course, yeah.
00:31:35.300As a little girl, I always knew what I wanted to do was create shareholder value, right?
00:31:38.940Like it's this idea that there are values besides and potentially even greater than making money is like profoundly offensive to some of these people.
00:31:48.300Yeah, even though weirdly enough, I think that this radicalization has taken them away from shareholder value and has taken them away from wanting to make money, right?
00:31:58.480This is also the era in which these billionaires, especially the absolutely mega rich billionaires, I can't believe we're saying mega rich billionaires, but like, you know what I mean, like the billionaire billionaires.
00:32:09.000The ones in the hundreds of billions, as opposed to those little humble mom and pop billionaires who only have, say, $7 billion.
00:32:16.800And this is the kind of vulgar absurdity with which you have to talk about these people.
00:32:22.060It's just like the parodic moral rot of our time requires us to concoct these phrases like the super billionaires.
00:32:29.880But like you're talking about the people who wind up taking this resentment and the sort of moral and political stances that that resentment led them to into not just their workplaces and not just like their billboard choices along Highway 101.
00:32:49.200but actually into like some quite malignant political interventions,
00:32:54.540as in the case, of course, of Mr. Musk.
00:32:57.360Yeah, but also like into places where it really leaves behind kind of CEO territory
00:33:04.180and enters like pharaoh territory, frankly, right?
00:35:07.520has become a paper designed to be read by nobody but Jeff Bezos, right?
00:35:12.340Yeah. And X is a company that has become just a cabinet of mirrors for its owner. It's never going to make that money back that he invested in it. And no one gave him that money thinking that it would. This is just extractive. Like it's just there for him to feel less lonely. It's Versailles. X is Versailles.
00:35:33.480So I think what we're really seeing is this shift of our whole economy and increasingly our government to just being about like really a vanishingly few number of people.
00:36:06.840There were a couple of ice forward commands sort of deployed on an island off of Alameda.0.69
00:36:11.980And they got fucking beat up in the street with people trying to keep them from crossing the like little land bridge from that island into Oakland proper, right?
00:36:21.280There was resistance in the Bay Area to our city's great credit.0.95
00:36:44.680It was probably Mark Benioff, but it was also probably our billionaire mayor, Daniel Lurie, right?
00:36:49.160So this was a kind of political decision that was ostentatiously made over the heads of both those ICE agents and the people resisting them valiantly in the East Bay.
00:37:15.460It didn't matter what the actual security or, like, public safety issue in San Francisco was, which I assure you the, like, immigrant community here is not the problem.
00:37:24.860It didn't matter what the people wanted.
00:37:28.100It mattered that a rich guy made a phone call.
00:37:32.640And it's very clear that that's the kind of thing that Trump responds to, right?
00:37:36.720He kind of solicits that kind of governance.
00:37:39.340But it also is the way that tech CEOs are starting to think.
00:37:42.760They think of themselves in the terms of, you know, noted Silicon Valley creep that we'll have to do an episode at some point, Curtis Yarwin's sort of sense of corporate fiefdoms, right? These are corporate lords, manorial corporate lords who said, like, please don't invade my domain. This is actually mine, Donald, and I will bend the knee if you don't send your goons here.
00:38:07.320Politics becomes a communication between the few, but more importantly, the few want you to notice that you don't factor, that you don't matter, that you don't rank in their communication, in their power plays, right?
00:38:21.660And it's really noticeable that AI is the way that that's made aesthetic, that that's made obvious, that that's brought into people's lives, but that's not really about the technology and what it can and can't do.
00:38:32.760It's about what the people who make that technology and who embrace that technology really want to do with politics in the West, in democratic societies and worldwide.
00:38:44.280Adrienne, I think that might be a good place to end it.