pygmalion mode

things right now 67—8.3.26

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Los Angeles is the new Detroit and San Francisco is the new San Francisco. By which I mean, the original boomtown is booming once again. Gone are the days of doom-loop discourse. And as with every new fountain of wealth, the courtiers and consultants are carpetbagging to the Bay.

They say, during the Gold Rush, the people that sold the shovels did better than the miners who dug with them. I wonder if that will be true today…

I don't know anyone selling shovels. (I suppose keeping with the metaphor, shovels would be chips today.) But I do know quite a lot of people selling status services: art advising, styling, decorating and designing. And I've heard stories of a lucrative market for etiquette classes.

In so many ways, our current tech boom is the inverse of the last. Feel-good grand narratives are in short supply. Facebook is no longer trying to connect the world. Rather, AI companies caution that they may be building Satan in a black box. There's no Zuckerberg-style Revenge of the Nerds middle-finger antics this round. Instead, tech seems, for the first time, anxious about how both institutional America (i.e. the government) and the American public-at-large receive them.

This may be as simple as the fact that this round's boom doesn't seem to be translating into prosperity for the masses. Or, more worryingly, that the general distrust and dislike of the tech industry will make building the infrastructure necessary for the roll-out impossible. You need community buy-in to build new energy infrastructure, data centers, and chip fabricators.

This round, Silicon Valley is trying to learn from past mistakes. They imagined themselves outsiders, disruptors. But now they seem to want to be let into the fold. They're looking beyond the tech industry bubble at the status signifiers that enamor, well, everyone else.

Despite its post-Google-bus reputation, San Francisco isn't the worst place to figure this out. Not so long ago, tech was not the dominant industry in the city. San Francisco has a patrician tradition dating back to its once-upon-a-time status as the largest city on the West Coast. In the nineties, the stereotypical San Franciscan was not a software engineer. The city was defined by Beat poets, hippie artists, gay sailors, and old-money California families.

There seems to be the desire to harken back to this, to remind people of the San Francisco of Pacific Heights rather than SoMa. That’s why everyone is going pygmalion mode. Like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play, Pygmalion, they hope a more refined affect will convince people Silicon Valley is up to the task of guiding us through whatever the AI boom might bring: economic catastrophe, the singularity, the apocalypse…

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pygmalion mode

/pɪɡˈmeɪ.li.ən moʊd/ noun

1. The attempt by those from lower classes to affect the manners, diction, and taste of a higher caste — class passing as self-transformation, made newly conspicuous by the AI boom. Over dinner in Marseille: "Everyone in San Francisco is in pygmalion mode."

Origin: From George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913).

Not to be confused with: Pygmalion effect: psychology term for high expectations raising another’s performance (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

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Other neologisms I've encountered recently. Some words are newer than others:

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dark whimsymaxxing

/dɑːrk ˈwɪm.ziˌmæk.sɪŋ/ noun