The skyscrapers get to me. I’m an heir to Art Deco and the cult of progress; I should idolize skyscrapers as symbols of human accomplishment. I can’t. They look no more human than a termite nest. Maybe less. They inspire awe, but no kinship. What marvels techno-capital creates as it instantiates itself, too bad I’m a hairless ape and can take no credit for such things.
I could have stayed in Michigan. There were forests and lakes and homes with little gardens. Instead I’m here. We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history. It will be the best investment we ever make. Imagine living when the first lungfish crawled out of the primordial ooze, and missing it because the tidepool down the way had cheaper housing. Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC, and being anywhere except Chicxulub. [ed. asteroid impact crater, Yucatan Peninsula.]
Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn, $20/month GPT-4 subscriptions. “We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
The sky is still dark, but the streets begin to stir. The Muni slithers past a line of self-driving cars wearing lidars like silly hats. The few visible human commuters pump thick black Arabian hydrocarbons into their vehicles, or thick black Ethiopian methylxanthines into their bodies. The city is a machine made of submachines, each with its own fuel. A particle accelerator, a summoning circle, a stargate, choose your favorite megastructure that calls up things of dubious put-downability.
Somewhere to the south, Ray Kurzweil walks into his office at Google. Twenty years ago, he conjectured that all human history - no, all evolutionary and geologic history - was a series of accelerating movements, which would crescendo at the end of time in approximately 2029. Six years to go. San Francisco doesn’t feel like the sort of place willing to wait another six years. The doomed summoning-city at the end of time seethes with palpable impatience. Too much Ethiopian methylxanthine, that’s my diagnosis. It feels eerie and unreal in the darkness, like everything is underwater, and I remember Poe:
Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn, $20/month GPT-4 subscriptions. “We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
The sky is still dark, but the streets begin to stir. The Muni slithers past a line of self-driving cars wearing lidars like silly hats. The few visible human commuters pump thick black Arabian hydrocarbons into their vehicles, or thick black Ethiopian methylxanthines into their bodies. The city is a machine made of submachines, each with its own fuel. A particle accelerator, a summoning circle, a stargate, choose your favorite megastructure that calls up things of dubious put-downability.
Somewhere to the south, Ray Kurzweil walks into his office at Google. Twenty years ago, he conjectured that all human history - no, all evolutionary and geologic history - was a series of accelerating movements, which would crescendo at the end of time in approximately 2029. Six years to go. San Francisco doesn’t feel like the sort of place willing to wait another six years. The doomed summoning-city at the end of time seethes with palpable impatience. Too much Ethiopian methylxanthine, that’s my diagnosis. It feels eerie and unreal in the darkness, like everything is underwater, and I remember Poe:
Lo! Death has reared himself a throneA Muslim woman walks by in traditional dress, followed by a dark black man in African garb. All clothing sends a message; theirs is “everything that ever happened anywhere in the world however far away has converged here for this moment; it was all for this.” A crazy person walks by, mumbling to himself. We nod at him and let him pass; he seems to know the score. Here we have all gathered, abandoning our green and pleasant homes in Pakistan or Nigeria or Michigan to see the doomed summoning-city at the end of time.
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
[ed. Then again, there's always L.A. (Randy Newman/YouTube).]
