Issue #27: Extraction
The worm at the centre of it all.
I started working in tech in 2012. Visiting San Francisco for the first time was like stepping onto a movie set. All those cliches were real. The Patagonia gilets, the juice cleanses, so many 25-year-olds trying to change the world.
On my first taxi ride from the airport into the city, every billboard advertised social media apps. The highway was full of potholes. I was surprised that a country as rich as America had roads this bad. Over the years the ads changed. In 2014 it was enterprise software. In 2018 it was crypto. By 2024 everything was an AI agent. The potholes stayed the same.
The book The Worm at the Core argues that when you remind people of their mortality, they chase status and accumulate wealth. All the fear around AI feels like a fear of death. Of our identities becoming obsolete.
As Rosie Spinks points out, the dominant response in tech is now of extraction. Maybe it was always like that. Maybe I was just naive. But if you can’t change the world, you can at least get rich before it falls apart. It’s why Anthropic are advertising for a $850k a year job and there’s a rush to work at an AI startup. Make bank before the crash.
Five links about that shift.
Five Links
Read: The Logic of Extraction. Rosie Spinks: “They are not founding companies because they have a great idea or want to change the world anymore. They are founding companies to extract value.” This is the best articulation I’ve read of this “vibe shift” in Silicon Valley. It’s been rumbling for a while, and now it feels like, for a lot of people, making as much money as possible before a crash is the whole goal.
Read: Child’s Play: The Changing Tech Persona. A Harper’s reporter set out to meet the people now arriving in San Francisco. Once, the city drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks. Today it’s an enormous magnet for “highly agentic young men”. Agency is the buzzword of the year. What does it mean? Who knows. I’ve seen this happening in product roles, I guarantee you will be asked “are you agentic?” in your next interview.
Read: Everything is Private Equity. Speaking of which. PE now owns a remarkable amount of things that used to be public or mission-driven: hospitals, care homes, schools, education providers. In 2011 I interviewed at a PE magazine and it felt like a niche corner of finance. I didn’t take the job, instead I took a job writing about football transfer rumours. That didn’t work out either. PE is the water the education industry is now swimming in. The product implications are real: shorter time horizons, margin over mission, and a hyper-focus on EBITDA.
Read: Teaching When to Trust. Finland bakes media literacy and critical thinking into every subject from an early age — maths, art, history, language. Resistance to disinformation is treated almost as a form of civil defence. The contrast with the UK’s exam-driven approach is abrupt.
This is the kind of story that makes you feel something in education is still working. If you’re designing a curriculum product, the question this raises: are you building critical thinking into the fabric, or bolting it on as an optional extra? Just be careful about using the term ‘AI literacy’. It’s a slippery term, hard to pin down. And often co-opted by consultants trying to sell you something.
Read: Maybe there is a third option? Oliver Burkeman: “Consider the possibility that building the next phase of your career around the fear of getting left behind might be a really bad basis for producing the kind of work people will want to pay you for.” This is the best thing I read this week.
See you next time.