Gotham and the Golden City
A.I. and other Civilizational clashes
Several months ago I was introduced to a curious phenomenon, the idea that “New York and San Francisco are fighting one another for the total reconstruction of Civilization”. After some initial skepticism, the theory started to metastasize in my mind into something coherent, and bit by bit I started to see it in the metapolitical interplay here in the United States. Even on an aesthetic level, its noticeable.
The Patagonia jacket1 is almost considered formal on the west coast. Pictures abound of tech executives donning it, and it approaches being a sort of standard. Contrast that with New York, where the Anglo American style of oxford shirts, suits, and wool jackets remains firmly entrenched. There’s a sort of leisure about California and San Fran particularly which is utterly alien to New York. On the contrary, in Gotham you can still feel the beating heart of Bourgeoise Civilization, the same that conquered much of the known world through the Anglos and the Dutch. Efficiency, optimization, victory. All pulling you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
These two cities have different driving forces, in San Francisco, tech. In New York, finance. Now granted this is shorthand, as there is plenty of overlap between the two. Both cities have tremendous wealth, but the wealth feels different. New York has been the finance capitol for over a century now, and it shows. The Golden City, alternatively, positively reeks of Nouveau Riche. When we examine something like NRx, the picture becomes even more interesting. What we call NRx is undoubtedly a phenomenon of San Francisco, as is the website you’re reading this essay on. I should state in the interest of full disclosure I am not necessarily a partisan for one or the other side, merely trying to observe to a degree that is helpful to my friends. Like everyone else, however, I have my sympathies.
“In New York, you’re judged by your output. In Silicon Valley, you’re judged by your potential.”2
Antonio Garcia Martinez, Chaos Monkeys
Martinez’s quote here cuts even deeper into this divide. San Francisco and the west are about ideas, it doesn’t particularly matter how good those ideas are. This is totally alien to Gotham, who’s telos is the most brutally materialist version of Christ’s words, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”3
My point in prefacing this is to tender a possible explanation for a truly bizarre phenomena I and others have observed in recent weeks. In the wake of Open AI’s revolutionary ChatGPT, alarm bells have been frantically rung by Roko (of Roko’s Basilisk fame) and a truly bizarre looking man named Eliezar Yudkowsky. Their rhetoric is nothing short of hysterical.
In this war over Civilization, San Francisco appears to be losing, and is flailing wildly at a chance to castrate this new superweapon. When it comes down to it, the fact is GPT is no mythical beast, no ‘horror beyond comprehension’. What it actually represents is a potential throat punch to DEI. As my friends at the American Sun put it, “ ‘AI safety’ of all kinds is an attempt to graft a commissar-tumor on the only plausible source for massive economic growth in the next decade. Altman's words v actions here are so obviously an attempt to cartelize the industry that he should be excluded from polite society.”4 But a different twitter user delivers the coup de grace.
Its easy to get lost in the religious dogma but this is a point that hitting directly on the k lines of how these rival city states operate. Their valuation metrics demonstrate why it is that DEI and startups could only come from San Francisco. The focus on potential, on story, on narrative gives San Francisco several layers of abstraction from reality. What you materially are right this second is less important than where you’re going. This is both their strength and their weakness. What has been called the rules based order finds a natural home in New York, which is totally alien to this abstraction. Gotham demands nothing less than the unvarnished truth. This has nothing to do with virtue, but with the strict regulations that act like a harness on a racehorse, channeling the explosive power of capital markets in a controlled direction. New York has a history of Progressive Politics, but you have to understand what progressive means in New York. What the average Glenn Beck5 American does not understand is that New York's materialism actually militates against ideology, and as such their Progressivism is in service to further optimization, further verification, above all efficiency.
By hook or by crook this innovation of LLMs is an incredible breakthrough in efficiency, and gives New York a decisive upper hand. And this breakthrough in efficiency has the Priests of the new Religion absolutely up in arms, utterly unreasonable and screaming in all directions. LLMs could be the next printing press, and we should vigorously resist attempts by the priesthood to take castrate it.
Admittedly something I both like & wear regularly
Garcia Martinez, Antonio. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. New York: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2016. p. 9
Matthew 7:20 (KJV)
New Atlantis Sun. Twitter, January 22, 2022, 11:08 AM, https://twitter.com/NewAtlantisSun/status/1641430488685371394
Incidentally Mr. Beck is one of the oldest and most virulent Yuddites and has been beating this drum for at least half a decade