Driving across Pennsylvania yesterday. Cracker Barrel after Cracker Barrel; stretches of farmland—and thankfully there are many of them—are a relief because that feels like how things that should be. Only certain forms make sense—city, town, farm, old suburbs—but America contains long stretches of mutant forms: places where the membranes around the old way of doing things has broken down, and invasive species get in (strip malls, casinos, weed dispensaries, sex shops, cult churches) which are all sort of parodies of pre modern small town life.
On OpenAI. Silicon Valley understands itself to be a center of a transcending political power—that is the my takeaway from Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI and his return. This isn’t just about value destruction at a valuable startup—it’s about transfers of real, abiding power; the American democratic republic is really a sort of power-sharing arrangement with tech and finance (which are increasingly the same thing) and it’s increasingly obvious that the real power struggles are playing out outside of the Federal government, that “SF”—and this is only underscored by the decay around the glassy towers—has been marked as the future capital of a techno-feudal patchwork empire. What happened at OpenAI was a failed palace coup—with all the drama you might in the historical medieval record or Shakespeare’s Richard II…