Originally published on Substack.
Earlier this year I spent 87 days in the city which could be perceived as the last bastion of definite optimism, which in Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’ book Zero to One would be defined as having the worldview that the future will be better than the present (optimism) and having a plan for making it so (definite).
There is no mistaking it, I’m talking about San Francisco.
This was reflected in the conversations I had and the people I met within this 49-square-mile tip of the peninsula. The first question was never “How are you?” It was “What are you building?” and even though this question has become almost as hollow as the one it replaced, it does show a radically different way of thinking. Some of the conversations I had included the phrases “I’m building a hotel on the Moon” and “A friend of mine is building a device that lets you record your dreams.” And these are not rare instances, after all, this city and the peninsula it’s a part of have a history of this kind of audacious optimism around “solving” the future.
Silicon Valley is the place where computers were made personal and accessible thanks to the development of microprocessors at Intel, in addition to the contrarian and non-obvious judgment of figures like Steve Jobs, who also helped build Pixar, the studio behind Toy Story. Later, network effects and algorithms were harnessed here to make virtually any piece of information and any person’s contact available within seconds, from anywhere.
With every era of Silicon Valley starting to look more like science fiction or even magic, we’ve entered the era of machine intelligence and, according to many in SF, the era of silicon deities. Cars are driving themselves, software is a commodity operated through MCP, and computers are headless because voice is now the primary way of interacting with the digital world and its networks. Robotics lets machine intelligence act in the physical world, transforming manufacturing, blue-collar labor and, most exciting of all, space exploration.
This San Francisco ethos is even more potent because it isn’t homegrown. SF attracts the rare earthlings that combine brains, a bias toward action, and vision from all over the globe. SF is the network effect (dating back to Shockley and the traitorous eight) that might be America’s greatest superpower because, unlike other geo clusters (finance in London/NYC, academics in Boston, religion in Israel, etc.), this cluster of technologists isn’t bound by tradition, money or status but by the worldview that it’s their mission to create the future for the rest of us. This meta-belief is why San Francisco could be seen as the last stronghold for definite optimism.
The people gathering in SF are the ones that grew up seeing technology and building as something fun and exciting.
But this worldview is far from normal. The number of people who see building technology as genuinely exciting, creative, or even aspirational is remarkably small. And in some ways, how can you blame them? For much of the last decade, technology has been presented to the public as B2B SaaS, workflow optimization and enterprise efficiency. Useful, perhaps, but hardly the stuff that makes people dream about the future.
AI has often been framed in similarly uninspiring terms, as a productivity tool, a cost-cutting mechanism, or a way to replace human labor. It is therefore not surprising that much of the public conversation around AI, particularly among young people, has become defensive and even hostile. If technology is presented primarily as something that makes companies more efficient and people less necessary, why would anyone grow up seeing it as a source of wonder?
What gets lost in that framing is the older and much more ambitious idea of technology: not merely as a way to optimize the world we already have, but as a way to build a radically better one.
Technology as an alternative to politics
For most people, when something about the world seems broken, the conversation defaults back to politics and the way to fix things is arguing about it, organizing around it, voting on it and regulating it. This is where Peter Thiel’s idea of “technology being an alternative to politics” comes in. Read literally, this phrase can sound kind of dystopian & 1984ish, suggesting that technologists should replace democratic institutions and AI should govern society. That reaction has its roots in the ongoing fearmongering as well as the lousy way AI companies and techbros have marketed themselves.
This doesn’t help:
In reality, the more useful interpretation is that politics tries to negotiate between competing interests in the world as it exists while technology tries to expand what’s possible in the first place and thus create the future.
A classic example of politics vs. tech is protecting the Earth:
The political instinct is often to ask how humanity can shrink itself to fit within the limits of this finite planet. That results in things like regulating emissions, restricting polluting industries, reducing consumption, limiting development and debating how scarce resources should be divided. (constrained)
The technological instinct starts from a different question: how can civilization continue to grow without destroying the Earth? Make access to space radically cheaper, move heavy industry and resource extraction off Earth, use the vast resources of the solar system, and eventually allow millions, perhaps billions, of people to live and work in enormous O’Neill habitats across space, while preserving Earth as a clean, livable base for humanity. (expansionist)
Some oversimplified math
The technological worldview is not just incrementally more effective at solving problems, in many cases it can be orders of magnitude more effective. So let’s do some oversimplified math.
Let’s assume, for simplicity’s sake, that of the people actively thinking about how to solve societal problems, 99% have a political worldview while only 1% have a technological one. In reality, a huge portion of the population probably doesn’t care about either and is solely focused on their own life. For this exercise, we’re excluding them.
Let’s also assume that technology is exactly two orders of magnitude, or 100x, more effective at solving problems than politics.
If politics is our baseline, then a world where 100% of these people are political has a problem-solving velocity of 100%. If 99% are political and 1% are technological, that jumps to 199%. If we can get just 3% to have a technological worldview, it becomes 397%.
So moving only two percentage points of the population from a political to a technological mindset would, under these assumptions, nearly double the velocity at which we solve problems.
And this is assuming technology is only two orders of magnitude more effective. It also ignores the network effects of technology, because new technologies become the building blocks for other new ones. SpaceX making it dramatically cheaper to send things into orbit doesn’t just make rockets better. It allows an entire space economy to start appearing on top of it, from companies trying to build hotels on the Moon like GRU Space to Reflect Orbital trying to sell sunlight at night.
Creating the future
But there is another distinction here that I think is even more important.
Politics can obviously play a role in creating the future too. Apollo is probably the best example. JFK set the goal of putting a man on the Moon, James Webb helped keep NASA politically alive, and the space race with the Soviet Union created the kind of urgency that made technological progress happen at an insane speed.
You could argue that this was still a technological mindset operating through political institutions, but the politics itself clearly mattered. Apollo was one of those rare moments where political incentives, public support and technological ambition all happened to line up.
But that overlap is the exception, not the rule. Technological progress does not inherently depend on political consensus. If people are free to build and motivated to do it, they can just start creating. Politics can constrain that process, slow it down or occasionally accelerate it, but technology itself is not dependent on politics to create the future. Politics, on the other hand, is fully dependent on technology whenever it wants to create something genuinely new.
So there are really two velocities here.
For solving problems, politics has a baseline and technology accelerates it enormously.
For creating the future, the baseline without technological people is effectively zero.
If the technological share went from 1% to 0%, we wouldn’t just solve problems more slowly. We would entirely stop expanding the frontier of what is possible. And if we can move it from 1% to 3%, then in this deliberately oversimplified model we haven’t increased our future-creating capacity by a few percent. We’ve tripled it.
This is why making technology exciting matters so much.
The number of people who choose to spend their lives building the future is not fixed. It depends, at least partly, on what a generation grows up believing is exciting, meaningful and worth dedicating their life to. If technology looks like B2B SaaS and efficiency gains, fewer people will want to become builders. If it looks like rockets, robots, new forms of intelligence, curing diseases and expanding civilization into the cosmos, more of them probably will.
And if the oversimplified math shown above is even remotely right, even a tiny shift in the number of technologists could have a completely disproportionate effect on how quickly the future arrives.
This is why excitement itself matters.
As Elon puts it:
“You want to get up in the morning and be excited about the future.”
But before people can get excited about creating the future, they first have to be excited about what that future could actually look like.
We ought to MAKE TECH FUN AGAIN.
SF story
So how do we do that?
Let me tell you a story from when I was in SF.
One morning, I woke up to a DM from a guy named Adil saying something like: “Hi, I’ve got an offer for you. I’m launching the first tech late-night show, and I’m looking for someone to host a short segment.”
I didn’t immediately understand the concept because, quite frankly, he didn’t explain it very well. But I thought, what the hell. Worst case, this would be a fun experience and I’d meet some new people.
So I met up with him and somehow, this Moroccan-French guy convinced Sebastian Thrun, the man behind Google’s self-driving cars (Waymo) and Google X, to appear on his show within weeks of him arriving in SF.
I filmed my segment, and on the night of the show, I showed up without really knowing what to expect. Then I found myself sitting with about a hundred other tech dudes, fangirling over Sebastian Thrun’s every word, and couldn’t help but think: holy crap.
We were watching a late-night show where, instead of asking a celebrity about their coffee order and then sitting through a crappy seven-minute political Jimmy Kimmel monologue, they were talking about lidar versus vision-only and somehow, it was actually funny, interactive and genuinely entertaining. There were video segments (including mine), a Waymo cake, and more than an hour of a great inventor sharing things I actually wanted to learn about.
Of course, not everything was perfect. The cameras stopped working, so there was no livestream. Personally, that made it feel more special. You had to be there.
They eventually discontinued the show, but that’s beside the point. If you’d asked me six months ago whether I’d go out of my way to attend a Sebastian Thrun late-night show, I probably would have said no. Yet there I was, spending my evening laughing, learning and getting excited about an inventor in the way people get excited about an actor or musician.
Of course, a room full of techbros in SF is probably the easiest audience for this. But it made me wonder why we don’t see more of it, and what it could look like for people who aren’t already into technology.
Adil and his company, Silicon Mania, have been experimenting with that through a printed magazine, competition videos with founders, founder-investor speed dates, and animated tech recaps that look like they’re part of a Family Guy episode.
And honestly, when I want to relax, I don’t want to watch brain-rotted “pop the balloon” dating shows. But I also don’t want to watch a five-hour Dwarkesh episode about AI supply chains.
Love Dwarkesh, though.
We need entertainment that’s insightful, funny, engaging, and appealing to the imagination. Something you’d enjoy even if you weren’t into tech, perhaps just getting you interested along the way.
I wish I’d had more of that growing up, and I still want it now. Rockets, robots and space exploration don’t stop being exciting once you become an adult (I’m 19, so barely one). Yet so much of what we see about technology is either industry news, fearmongering or long, technical conversations.
We need a Disney for the next generation. We need a TLC that isn’t brainrot. We need entertainment that makes people of all ages curious about what we could invent, explore and build.
(Silicon) Mania is one experiment in that direction. We need many more.
Let’s end the era of slop and usher in a new era of entertainment that inspires the next generation of definite optimists & technologists.
make tech fun again
Big love,
Finn Jennen.
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