Cascadia Calling, 2026.3.9
"the first time as tragedy, the second time [with VC backing]"
There’s a certain tragedy to a bar or restaurant you love being featured on social media. On the one hand, it’s nice when a great local spot gets exposure and it’s certainly good for their business and such. But it also means that it’s likely going to be slammed for the foreseeable future.
There’s a deli that I’ve liked that happens to be near my new office. I walked over there to get lunch earlier this week. I was in early, but it was already filling up. I ordered my usual (their hot pastrami with a small side of potato salad) and sat at the window counter with my book. As I read and gorged myself I became increasingly aware that the crowd was getting denser and louder. By the time I was finished, the line to order stretched out the door and down the block.
On my way out the door I heard someone in line say “according to Instagram this is the only good cheesesteak in Seattle.”
In this case, Instagram is correct, but it means my dreams of easy access to a truly great hot pastrami will be frustrated for the foreseeable future.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things.
I liked this piece about a tedious Silicon Valley sociopath in Harper’s. The author, Sam Kriss, is somewhat more charitable to Roy Lee than I think is strictly necessary. The fundamental fact is that Lee appears to be lacking any kind of moral core. Perhaps he has no real interior existence at all. He’s the natural consequence of VC money poured into a childish id that happens to know how to use a computer. Lee clearly still believes that attention of any kind is not only good, but the point of life. He has a 12 year old’s conception of his own identity.
As such, Lee is, himself not an interesting or fit subject for analysis. The only thing that makes investigating his psyche necessary is that the coterie of ghouls in charge of global tech capital have decided to drizzle some of it all over him in response to his childish antics.
This is my primary critique of Kriss’s piece: he falls for the propaganda. His piece fails to mention that Roy’s wealth and attention are the result of an intentional choice by a handful of actual people. In this respect, his “success” isn’t actually an indication that he is (to abuse the term in the same way the subjects of the article do) “agentic”, but rather than he fits the purposes of those fortunate to be already wealthy. Kriss seems to actually buy the framing of “agency” provided by the Silicon Valley set that he’s critiquing. He mentions in passing that they have a concerning lack of understanding of what the point of their efforts are, but he doesn’t ask the obvious followup question: “what acts count as agency and why?”
When the Rationalists and the VC hogs say things like “high agency” and “you can just do things” they always, invariably, mean things like starting a company and begging for VC dollars. Highly agentic people, in their mind, build tools to enable easier stalking and abuse of women or scrape a bunch of data and sell it to a bunch of dead-eyed sociopath freaks who will use it to better drone strike civilians.
They never mean that you can go and get a library card and spend the entire afternoon reading Canticle for Leibowitz. Deciding that you’re going to knock off work early today and get boba and walk to the park to watch the ducks doesn’t count as something you can “just do” for the purposes of their model of agency. The only actions that count as “agency” to these people are actions that serve the existing Silicon Valley/VC branch of Capitalism.
Kriss’ inclusion of Donald Boat in the piece as something of Roy Lee’s Wario points in this direction a little bit, but even in trying to set this up as a dialectic it collapses the notion of agency. Agency still looks like choosing to shit-post your way to attention and fortune. Kriss asks himself why he didn’t scam people by accepting contracts and outsourcing them to exploited third-world labor (a thing that is heralded in the piece as being highly “agentic”). It never seems to occur to him that it’s because he is an agent who made other choices. He made the choice, in fact, to write this piece and submit it to Harper’s. That requires a significant amount of agency.
Agency, ultimately, is a good thing. But it’s not innate or completely endogenous. I am once again tapping the sign:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
When people truly have agency thanks to a confluence of their own nature, their cultural context, and their material and social conditions, they get to use that agency to pursue what gives them meaning. That usually looks nothing like sitting in a grotty office in San Francisco dreaming up the best way to draw attention to your shitty AI slop that doesn’t work.
Often, it looks a lot like deciding to fuck off from work to go hang with the ducks.