SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year.

But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk. Before the IPO, SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, which itself acquired X, the social-media site, back in 2025. The maneuver allowed SpaceX to claim that it believed it had “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”: $28.5 trillion, to be precise. $26.5 trillion of that, according to the filing, would come from AI infrastructure and applications, meaning not from SpaceX’s core business of aerospace engineering and satellites.

Maybe most important, SpaceX is a story, even a meme. Musk is arguably a better salesman than an inventor, and what he began selling early on was a techno-utopian dream—of himself as a Tony Stark–style genius, of an environment-saving EV revolution, of securing a future for humanity by getting us all to Mars. He intuitively understands the warped dynamics of the attention economy. Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, the authors of the book Muskism, describe his strategy on social media as “trolling is infrastructure”: “Every joke, every poll is a stress test of responsiveness,” they argue. “Can he still move markets with a post?” Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a 13-year-old meme of a shiba inu, is the shining example of Musk’s ability to lavish attention on something—in this case, a fake asset whose entire joke was that it was worthless—and make it worth more to others as a result.

SpaceX is obviously not Dogecoin. Its rocket business is a genuine success story, as is Starlink. But the company’s appeal, particularly in the face of setbacks, is also reliant on a combination of story and Musk’s own image in ways that are not necessarily connected to reality. Musk has frequently set unrealistic timelines for projects, including putting a spacecraft on Mars by 2018. Last year, SpaceX’s flagship rocket underwent a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on three test flights (it blew up). But SpaceX’s IPO filing was more oriented around its future ambitions and assumed triumphs, such as its desire to mine asteroids, promote space tourism, and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” An adviser to the deal told the Financial Times last month: “From a strict corporate finance perspective, the valuation makes no sense. But Elon is great at getting people to dream.”

What do you get when you combine SpaceX the business with the financial instrument and the meme? An unfathomable amount of money, it seems. Last week SpaceX opened trading at a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion. The scale of Musk’s own net worth is now almost impossible to comprehend, such that, on Monday, SpaceX’s stock rallied, and Musk’s one-day gain was more than the net worth of Bill Gates, once the richest person in the world. In short order, SpaceX has become the sixth-most valuable public company despite the fact that it posted a net loss of $4.94 billion last year on $18.7 billion in revenue.

On Tuesday, SpaceX announced it is using some of that value to purchase Cursor, the AI-coding start-up, for $60 billion, all in stock. In reaction to the news, Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager (and inveterate poster), wrote on X: “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.” Ackman’s reasoning rings true in a financial sense: According to the deal, the price that SpaceX will pay for Cursor will be set by its own share price in the seven trading days before closing, which in effect will mean that the more valuable SpaceX is, the less Cursor will cost it. But Ackman’s koan is also correct in a more absurdist way. It highlights the irrationality of the modern stock market and reflects a lesson of the past decade: If a person or group of people is able to marshal enough genuine attention toward an idea—no matter how ridiculous it might seem—they can usually bend reality toward their preferred outcome.

Other than perhaps Donald Trump, it’s difficult to argue anyone has been more successful at this than Musk. Musk excels not because he can’t stop winning, but because he understands that, in the financialized logic of our age, winning is less important than the perception that you will win. Speculation beats fundamentals. One way to look at Musk’s personal brand is as somebody who has borrowed obsessively against his own reputation, each loan used to invest in and service the debt of the last, until it becomes impossible to follow the money. One of the things that makes Elon Musk so valuable is how valuable he is.

With SpaceX’s IPO, you could argue that Musk has either won or broken capitalism. His wealth, in our current system, makes him a chaos agent with no real comparison. He is virtually impervious to fines. His money, should he wish to spend it, has the potential to drastically influence the outcome of elections. That leverage could be used to benefit Musk’s businesses, securing further contracts with the government and entrenching him deeper into the infrastructure of everyone’s lives. This power isn’t theoretical; Musk’s dominance in satellite connectivity has already made him geopolitically relevant in places including Ukraine and Iran.

SpaceX and Musk are, of course, not inevitable. Analysts are predicting volatility for the stock as lockup periods end and people sell shares. The AI bubble could pop. Musk could mismanage the company as he did with X, or he could become so radioactive that institutions stop associating with him. But you can also imagine the SpaceX flywheel spinning out of control, perpetuating itself as Musk and SpaceX become fully untethered from reality. On X, Will Manidis, a start-up founder and investor, argued recently that, given the dynamics of SpaceX’s stock, it could continue to purchase some of the internet’s foundational software companies at a cost of basically nothing. Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment on SpaceX’s direction, and such tweets, at this moment, are little more than fan fiction. But they represent the absurdity of Musk’s current position in the modern economy. Musk has long fantasized about creating a massive, vertically integrated constellation of services—from banking to social networking—he once dubbed “the everything app.” So far, he’s failed in that quest (the phrase trust Elon Musk with your routing number would still strike fear in the hearts of most people). But it’s not difficult to see Musk using his cheap and abundant money to build toward the Everything Holding Company.

Is any of this possible? Would it even be legal? That’s unclear. But as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine once noted, it seems like “Elon Musk’s recent career is a long experiment to prove that, if you are successful enough, the regular laws do not apply to you.”

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Goldman Sachs, he wrote, “positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble,” enabled by “a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules.” Revisiting that article in the age of Musk the trillionaire feels almost quaint. Musk and SpaceX have a true nose for money, including sniffing out government infusions and contracts. The aerospace company has figured out how to position itself firmly in the middle of the speculative hype of the AI cycle, and numerous financial organizations have amended rules designed to protect retail investors.

The vampiric Goldman Sachs that Taibbi describes is an institution, a system that became too big to fail, and thus ungovernable. Musk is a person, not a system or institution, but he owns more than 40 percent of SpaceX and controls more than 80 percent of its voting shares. According to Reuters, in the lead-up to SpaceX’s IPO Musk was dictating terms to Goldman Sachs and other banks.

If Goldman Sachs is the vampire squid, what does that make SpaceX and Musk? The natural world offers few good comparisons. What we’re seeing in terms of hype, valuation, and fortune is without precedent, even when stacked up against the wealth concentration of the Gilded Age. SpaceX and Musk are better served by a mythological comparison, in part because the entire enterprise is built on a story told over and over until it transcends reality. SpaceX is a rocket company, a complex financial instrument, a meme, a monument to a broken financial system. It is the seven-headed Hydra at the end of finance, the teleological endpoint of money. It is a myth kept alive by blind faith, devotion, and even aggression, which makes it dangerous whether you believe in it or not.

Shooters shoot. Builders build. And DOGE alumni make splashy announcements about entering complex industries with scant qualifications while promising to “root out waste.”

This, at least, is the premise of Special, a newly announced start-up co-founded by Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, two former Department of Government Efficiency staffers who left the federal government “motivated to extend the ethos of our work at DOGE back into the private sector,” as they wrote on Special’s website. The company officially launched last week with funding from the Elon Musk–friendly contingent of Silicon Valley, including the venture groups Andreessen Horowitz and Human Capital. Special is also backed by investments from numerous Musk associates, including Steve Davis, Musk’s top lieutenant at DOGE. The company’s tagline is “You know it when you see it.”

On X, Special’s launch was touted by many of its investors and various hangers-on belonging to a loose tech-right coalition as the beginnings of a supposed “DOGE mafia.” “Incredible team meets amazing mission meets magical time,” Marc Andreessen posted; “Founders are special. Builders are special. America is @Special,” Katherine Boyle, Andreessen Horowitz’s head of American Dynamism, wrote on the platform.

It’s worth pausing here to examine the fundamental premise of Special as DOGE for the private sector. You might have a few questions, including but not limited to: Wait, I thought DOGE was supposed to be about taking private-sector business acumen and bringing it to the bloated public sector? Isn’t the private sector already run like the private sector? How is Special going to run the DOGE playbook inside these companies? Isn’t this essentially just what a consulting firm does? Or private equity? And then, of course: Wasn’t DOGE a deeply unpopular, failed experiment that saved a small fraction of its claimed savings while cutting more than 10,000 government contracts, including lifesaving international aid?

I reached out to Fox and Cavanaugh via Special’s website and their personal accounts but got no responses. According to its website, Special is a “new kind of holding company, building an AI operating system to transform critical American industries.” Special plans to acquire companies inside industries it thinks are broken and inefficient and then use a proprietary AI-powered operating system to “transform the efficiency of these businesses, root out waste, and deliver a great customer experience for American taxpayers.”

As to what that vague mission looks like in practice, Special announced that its first target is elder care, through a second start-up called Figure Health. The website for Figure Health offers little more in way of explanation, citing a three-pronged approach to its service: AI tools streamline operations at senior-care businesses; these businesses use the money saved to increase pay for their nurses; and that, in turn, leads to “better care for seniors.” In an interview last week, Fox seemed to suggest that the company’s tech aims to eliminate health-care busywork, such as note-taking. Figure Health’s website says it will have three locations, “coming soon,” in Dallas, Miami, and Chicago. The careers and locations links on the site appear not to work, redirecting back to Figure Health’s landing page. When I ran images of people featured on the website’s homepage in Figure Health–branded scrubs through an AI-image detector, they came up as “likely created by AI.”

In a blog post about the launch, Fox and Cavanaugh claim that Figure Health is under contract with a health-care company in Texas that “serves over 1,400 patients and employs hundreds of nurses.” They do not name the company. I emailed the contact address provided on Figure Health’s website but did not get a response.

With so few details to go on, I looked to Fox and Cavanaugh’s DOGE tenure to get an understanding of their qualifications. The pair were arguably not as high profile in the department as Musk lieutenants such as Davis or even young staffers such as Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the then-19-year-old engineer who was granted access to federal payroll systems. (Cavanaugh is 30, and Fox is in his late 20s.) But Cavanaugh, at least, made a name for himself in the spring of 2025, when he was installed as the acting president of the United States Institute of Peace think tank as well as the acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness. According to Wired, he put most of both staffs on administrative leave and tried to gift the Institute of Peace’s $500 million building to the federal government. (A court case about the attempted transfer is ongoing; government lawyers defended the move as consistent with an executive order from Trump to reduce the institute’s work as much as possible.)

Fox and Cavanaugh both became better known this year when the American Historical Association published hours of deposition video related to a lawsuit over the mass termination of grants at the National Endowment of the Humanities. According to a court ruling that found those cuts unconstitutional, the two helped oversee those terminations, dividing the grants into categories such as “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants.” In the deposition videos, which went viral back in March, Fox and Cavanaugh occasionally struggled to define terms such as DEI and admitted to using ChatGPT to scan grants for terms that might be related to DEI in order to find contracts to cut, in keeping with Trump’s executive order to end what the White House dubbed “radical and wasteful government DEI programs.”

Fox and Cavanaugh include clips of their deposition in Special’s launch video—a loud, 65-second supercut that also features file footage of Musk, Theodore Roosevelt, Caitlin Clark, Kobe Bryant, Trump, Muhammad Ali, Steve Jobs, and Margaret Thatcher, set to a Jay-Z song. In the deposition scene, Cavanaugh is asked if he regrets that the people he helped terminate at DOGE lost important income. “No,” he responds, “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.” Conspicuously absent in the edit is the follow-up question from the attorney deposing Cavanaugh, who asked whether DOGE actually managed to reduce the deficit. “No, we didn’t,” Cavanaugh replied.

Special, its AI-powered operating system, and even Figure Health may all be vaporware. It could be a gussied-up version of a private-equity company that plans to buy distressed businesses and flip them for profit, or perhaps Fox and Cavanaugh see a looming elder-care crisis as an untapped market opportunity. Maybe the two want nothing more than to provide better care to American seniors. Given the scant information about the company, I reached out to investors—including Davis; the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong; and a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz—for additional information, but none responded.

Any altruistic goals would seem undercut by Special’s own branding as the sequel to a Silicon Valley–led boondoggle in Washington. DOGE’s incursion into the federal government was marked by chaos—unnamed staffers, sometimes without proper clearances, barging into government buildings and berating employees while demanding unprecedented access into classified systems. The department was known to operate callously, firing people by email or locking them out of buildings. When it cut programs, it often did so indiscriminately or hastily. In February 2025, Musk said that DOGE had accidentally cut Ebola prevention, then restored it. The systematic dismantling of USAID has led to catastrophic humanitarian situations in Africa, including hampering the global response to the current Ebola outbreak.

DOGE proponents justified any outcomes as a necessary price to pay for eliminating the waste of taxpayer dollars. Special claims that DOGE collectively saved the country hundreds of billions of dollars, but as The New York Times reports, not only did DOGE fail to reduce federal spending by $1 trillion; spending increased on the department’s watch. A Politico analysis of DOGE’s savings last August found that the calculations were “based on faulty math” and revealed that DOGE saved less than 5 percent of what it has claimed. (At that time, the White House refuted Politico’s analysis and defended DOGE’s numbers. In response to a request for comment, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, told me that “President Trump has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer.”)

In his deposition, Cavanaugh says at one point, “I have to believe that the dollars that were saved went to mission critical, non-wasteful spending.” He did not convey particular interest in finding out whether that belief was true or not. A lack of curiosity is a hallmark of the Muskian and Andreessenian way, where building is a universal good and the highest calling. To be a builder is to be high agency, to contribute benevolently to society, to be the man in the arena. (Roosevelt’s inclusion in Special’s sizzle reel is no accident.) In their post announcing Special, Fox and Cavanaugh call the company’s name “a tribute to those we believe are the greatest movers of society—the builders, the creators, the people who put it all on the line and go for it.” This brand of builder has a high tolerance for risk and isn’t afraid to list having empathy or self-introspection as vulnerabilities.

The builder moniker is also a clever way to deflect responsibility for one’s actions. Many builders see critics or writers such as myself as takers, drafting off of their hard work and effort only to belittle it. In their logic, to criticize a builder is to be reflexively anti-progress and to prefer stagnation over iteration. A builder might concede that DOGE did not succeed and still rationalize that the disruption and chaos were still better than the sclerotic alternatives. Admittedly, there is some logic to this mindset. Failure can lead to later success, provided it’s paired with the kind of humble introspection that people such as Andreessen dismiss as weakness.

It’s not just that DOGE was a failure or that its participants refuse to reckon with their role. It’s that the DOGE “builder” ethos is built on a foundational lie. DOGE was not a generative project; it was a destructive one—a smash-and-grab attempt, led by an unelected official who happened to be the world’s richest man, to seize control and precious data, and to turn the federal government into a political weapon. But for all its turmoil, DOGE helpfully illustrated how the term building can also be a euphemism for something else entirely: extraction.

In this sense, Special appears to be continuing in a particular kind of Silicon Valley tradition, offering a benevolent service that disguises the ways it takes from those who use it. Special has only been around a few days, so perhaps it’s unfair to judge Fox and Cavanaugh so soon. But as they themselves note, you know it when you see it.

*Illustration sources: Peter Dazeley / Getty; atiatiati / Getty; silvae / Getty; blackred / Getty; sakchai vongsasiripat / Getty; feedough / Getty.

Back in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as “the Inversion.” Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone’s grasp on the very reality of online experience. “What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t ‘truth,’ but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be,” Read wrote.

Today, “the Inversion” feels almost quaint. Autonomous AI agents roam the internet, answering emails, sending texts, and occasionally deleting the code repositories of entire companies. An endless library of chatbot-speak crowds out human-written words in every Google search. Bots are spinning up music and videos, conjuring bad poetry and prose, building websites, doing research, making transactions, writing plodding memos to your boss, solving geometry conjectures. Those AI outputs then ride the rails of an internet controlled by black-box algorithms. Computers talk to computers, producing information to train computers to sound more like humans or to better engage them. Humans type into the box, scroll, and wait.

AI is driving people insane in all kinds of ways. Its overwhelming speed and existential stakes have given rise to generalized malaise and hostility directed at the industry, to say nothing of actual cases of AI psychosis. But a lot of this is subtler—a deepening of the bewildering, corrosive feeling Read previously described. Culturally, the flood of slop, AI influencers, fake accounts, and AI tools is blurring the lines of an already post-truth age. A specific paranoia is in the air, an abiding concern about being manipulated, suckered, influenced. Stealth marketing campaigns, mercenary armies of bots, and paid clippers have led anyone or anything that appears dubious to be deemed a potential “psyop.” Cheap imitations of expressions of human creativity are easier than ever to fake. Sentiment, perhaps even popularity, is easier to manipulate. On top of all this is the push into agentic AI—a future we’re told will consist of an internet crammed with bots performing human tasks.

People who don’t feel empowered by all of this are unmoored. Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or use these tools, are living through a crisis of agency. The agita and paranoia, even the excitement—over AI’s encroachment on work, education, art, and culture—are the by-products of a cultural and technological moment in which humans are sliding into a more passive role in many activities. One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?

When you start looking, you see the anxiety over agency everywhere. You see it in the reactions to the mass layoffs at places such as Meta in preparation for an AI transformation, in the coverage of venture-capital-funded, bulk-content-creation bot-army start-ups that proudly claim, “Never pay a human again.” You can sense it among the software developers who feel that their reliance on coding tools is eroding their skill set, in the executives who confess that they don’t know whether their AI spend is justifiable. Or when you read reports that medical journals are filling with made-up citations, or a study that suggests that chatbot use is degrading our thinking, or an announcement from Google that it will offer an alternative to its link-based search results: AI agents that can scan the web on your behalf and either bring back a canonical answer or send you personalized alerts.

The discomfort is playing out in real time. Last week, after the literary magazine Granta published the Commonwealth Short Story Prize–winning story “The Serpent in the Grove,” suspicious readers began to point out what they believed to be evidence of chatbot text in the story. Soon, two other Commonwealth Prize winners came under similar scrutiny, as people began running passages through AI detectors. (The Commonwealth Foundation first said in a statement that none of its prize winners had used AI, but then it issued a second statement suggesting that it is taking another look.) AI boosters celebrated the news as an example of the sophistication of current language models; skeptics viewed it as something of a slop tipping point. In a recent essay, the writer Sam Kriss described the experience of scrolling through websites right now: “The more I clicked around, the more I started to panic. There was nothing, no human voices anywhere, just thousands of versions of the same cheery demon. Am I alone out here? Something’s happened to the world; it’s all gone flimsy.”

The glut of AI writing, the detection arms race, and the debates over what constitutes appropriate use are part of the bigger questions posed by this technology. What does it mean to outsource our creativity? How long will we have the ability to discern whether something we like is human or not? Does our taste matter? If it doesn’t, then what are we even doing here?

It’s unsurprising, perhaps, that at the same time when Silicon Valley is building and breathlessly promoting these tools—self-directed agents that can accomplish complex tasks without human supervision—many of its loudest voices have grown obsessed with the idea of their own agency. In builder circles, people deemed “high-agency” sit atop the hierarchy. They are individualistic, ambitious, focused. They just do things. They are especially adept at marshaling the use of people and machines alike. It is implied that those with high agency are, for now, insulated from becoming replaceable or irrelevant in a time of great precarity—not yet doomed to be part of “the permanent underclass,” another Bay Area coinage for the late adopters who will be left behind. How could a person hear such language and not feel at least a little paranoid?

AI companies use the term human-in-the-loop to describe the relationship between humans and AI tools in everything including chatbots and warfare. The humans perform managerial tasks: They prompt, evaluate, approve, monitor, correct. Being in the loop is meant to sound active, but the truth is, beyond the prompt, what humans are so often doing is reacting to an interaction of multiple machines. As chatbot- and AI-assisted search has outsourced web exploration to language models, this dynamic has become a primary way that humans interact with the internet. Sifting through a mix of AI- and human-generated videos, images, and text on your social-media feeds? You are passively consuming an interaction between an algorithm and things made by a computer. This is why being glued to our phone and feeds can feel so extractive and joyless, even numbing.

Recently, the online-culture researcher Aidan Walker memorably described the user experience across much of the internet as akin to the user being cuckolded by the endless scroll. People have long theorized that reliance on algorithms and the flood of bots and fake content have led to an internet that’s effectively dead. Walker’s theory is that the internet is not “dead” or “fake” but that models and algorithms have the bulk of agency online. Humans in the loop sit and watch, voting on short-form videos and giving feedback to the machines with every swipe. It’s a bleak vision. It’s also difficult to argue with.

In this system, it’s not hard to see how mistrust develops, how one might suspect ulterior motives behind every piece of information they get served. Are these really the best wireless speakers, or am I falling for SEO slop? Is this band I don’t like really popular? What is popularity anymore? Reality starts to blur. Everything goes flimsy.

The AI companies and boosters speak the language of empowerment. They’re not wrong in the sense that the tools are powerful and, in many cases, quite useful. But it’s tough to overstate how much these tools represent a reversal of the early promise of the weird and wild internet; of user-generated content; of stumbling upon information, people, and communities; of the crackling-static feeling of real people on the other end of the modem. In 2011, the writer Paul Ford described the internet as a “customer service medium,” arguing that “humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.” Ford was describing the impulse behind the creation of user-generated-content sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia but also the rise of comment sections, likes and thumbs-up reactions to posts and videos, and the very instincts that led to the rise of social media, before it became quite so algorithmically mediated.

Revisiting that essay now, in the middle of our current agency crisis, I’m struck by the fact that Silicon Valley may have taken Ford’s words to heart, but in service of the opposite outcome. It has built arguably the most impressive customer-service medium in the history of our species—an infinitely scalable, highly personalized answer machine that flatters our insecurities and mimics our idiosyncrasies. But this system automates, and even negates, the human need to be consulted. Now we consult the chatbots and they provide canonical answers. Generative AI’s much-touted efficiencies also often erase the necessity of collaboration. They do the problem-solving, the heavy lifting. It is no surprise, then, that the backlash to AI, particularly the opposition to data centers, has come in the form of protests and public comments at town and city-council meetings across the country. People are taking up their agency in one of the few places they can: the physical world.

The AI companies seem to be missing all of this. To them, only the information—not the humanity—has value for their models. This is not right, but so many of us, lost in a swirl of ceaseless information, will be lulled into thinking that it is. In the new paradigm, we are not so much consulted as tasked with feeding data into the machinery. We perform our humanity, and the machine learns to mimic us. Its goal is to be better at whatever we’re doing than we are.

The AI industry has ushered in an era of offshoring that’s as irresistible to some people as it is disorienting to others. What’s at stake is not just truth or trust, but also a sense of direction, orientation, and purpose for all of us. Do your own research became shorthand for the problem of the internet leading people to ivermectin hawkers and Pizzagate conspiracy theorists. But it could just as easily describe the thrill of autonomy promised by the open internet. We may miss it when we fully reckon with what comes next: a black-box machine of obscure corporate motivation that simply tells us, Here is the answer.

You hear wild stuff all the time now. Like this story that Nat Friedman, a former CEO of GitHub, told recently at a conference. Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water. It informed him that it was monitoring him via a connected camera in his home. “I’m going to watch to make sure you do it,” the bot supposedly said. Friedman did as he was told, and, moments later, the bot sent him a frame of him drinking the bottle of water and said good job. “I felt like I did do a good job,” Friedman said.

The world is only a few years into the AI boom, and this strange brew of hype, utility, and creepiness is commonplace. On X—arguably the beating heart of AI insider discourse—investors, influencers, programmers, researchers, podcasters, and countless hangers-on reach out across the algorithm to shake you by the shoulders. Claude “broke down my entire life with eerie accuracy. No horoscopes. No tarot. Just pure AI,” one post reads. Another crows: “Our team is stunned. We gave Claude Opus 4.6 by @AnthropicAI $10k to trade on @Polymarket. It’s now has an account value of $70,614.59.” The post includes a graph with a small asterisk that notes that this trading was part of a trading simulation and not done with real money.

A defining feature of all this evangelizing is its frenetic pace. If you are not paying close attention to the daily AI discourse, a lot of the conversations are almost unintelligible. From week to week, narratives whipsaw. A new prompt seminar “WILL CHANGE HOW YOU BUILD WITH AI FOREVER”; no, wait, prompting is dead. Claude “CHANGES EVERYTHING”; actually, it’s all about OpenAI’s Codex now. Get in, loser, we’re vibe-coding websites. Scratch that: We’re vibe-trading now—earning money while we sleep.

It all moves so fast that veterans of the AI discourse jokingly yearn for the good old days … of 2022.

I’ve written previously that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing their mind. Some of that is attributable to the aggressive fanfare or the way that the technology has been explicitly positioned to displace labor. But lately, I believe, it’s the accelerated nature of the AI boom that’s driving people everywhere mad. Both the conversation around the technology and its implementation are governed by an exponential logic. Intelligence, revenues, capabilities—all of it is supposed to hockey stick, say the boosters. New, supposed breakthroughs are touted but then immediately couched with the reminder that this is the worst the technology will ever be. Because AI systems have bled into every domain of our culture and economy, it's exceedingly difficult to evaluate the effect of the technology outside of a case by case basis. That you can’t begin to wrap your mind around the AI boom or orient yourself in it is a feature, not a bug, for those building the technology. But for anyone just trying to adapt, it’s difficult not to feel resentful or alienated. Silicon Valley is trying to speedrun the singularity, and it’s polarizing the rest of us in the process.

The whipsaw itself has existed for several years. Since the arrival of ChatGPT, the AI boom has toggled around an “It’s so over”–“We’re so back” axis, with the industry seeming to fall short of its own mythology, then announcing yet another paradigm shift. But the latest shift from chatbots to coding agents—self-directed tools like the one that apparently minded Friedman’s hydration habits—has turbocharged this churn. Boosters see the agents, unlike chatbots, as a convincing step toward the predictions of AI executives that the technology could eliminate untold white-collar jobs and rewire the very nature of work. Adoption and usage of models such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex have skyrocketed, alongside revenues. Bubble talk (for now) has chilled out, and CEOs are saying things like “Think of this as the dawn of a new Atomic Age.” We’re so back.

In AI research, a popular sentiment is that a “jagged frontier” exists in AI utility and adoption: AI tools can be extremely, unexpectedly good at some human tasks and extremely, unexpectedly bad at others. As this frontier becomes even more jagged, it appears to be pressing people deeper into their previously held opinions of AI, such that AI evangelists and skeptics are living in different worlds. On Reddit and LinkedIn, workers are lamenting managers who have cute names for their bots and who mandate that every marketing summary be run through Microsoft Copilot. Some of those workers say they are writing their memos, pretending to be chatbots, just so they have some agency in their job.

Elsewhere online, programmers are beginning to describe an affinity for coding agents that is veering into unhealthy territory. “I’m up at 2AM on a Tuesday,” Anita Kirkovska, the head of growth at an AI company, wrote recently, “not because I have a deadline, but because Claude Code made it so easy to keep going that I forgot to stop.” She describes a “competence addiction” caused by the tools making her so productive: “You hit a prompt, the agent succeeds, you get a dopamine hit. The agent fails spectacularly, you get adrenaline. Both are reinforcing. Both keep you at the terminal.” Kirkovska argues that she sees this among all kinds of AI power users—an unsustainable flow state in which decision making begins to falter and people become sloppy as they grind away.

MIT Technology Review’s Mat Honan describes the feeling that too much is changing, too fast as “AI malaise.” You’re starting to see it in surveys—a recent Gallup poll finding that only 18 percent of Gen Zers said they felt hopeful about AI (a drop of 9 percent in the past year), or an NBC News survey showing that AI has a favorability rating of 26 percent. It’s bubbling up in the physical world—in the 20 data-center projects canceled because of local opposition in the first quarter of this year or in a college-commencement ceremony at which students booed a speaker extolling AI as “the next Industrial Revolution.” You can see it in a few isolated, and inexcusable, acts of violence, such as the homemade bomb thrown at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home.

I’d argue that the most common feeling about AI is somatic: a low-grade hum of difficult-to-place anxiety that’s the result of loud people constantly suggesting that the near future will look very little like the present and that nothing—your job or the social contract—might survive the transition.

The AI industry’s own apocalyptic messaging is feeding into this feeling. Even when AI executives urge for a deescalation in AI rhetoric, as Altman did in a recent blog post after the attacks, the language is grave. “The fear and anxiety about AI is justified,” he wrote. “We are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.” A similar dynamic was at play in the rollout of Anthropic’s Mythos, a new model that the company claimed was so powerful that Anthropic could not release it widely because of concerns that it would lead to a global cybersecurity crisis. Should you be impressed, terrified, excited at the thought that the internet as we know it might no longer work? (Anthropic, of course, has a history of AI doomerism and a clear financial interest in making its products look historically powerful.)

As the industry has warned about AI’s risks, it has also done a remarkably poor job of articulating the positive vision of the future it wants to build. Attempts have been so grand as to come off as wildly patronizing. In April, OpenAI published a 13-page blueprint on “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” with the quaint subheading: “Ideas to Keep People First.” Perhaps the most thoughtful (or at least the longest) articulation of what AI can do for good, a 14,000-word essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” is more of a wish list than a plan. And even at its most sincere, Amodei’s vision still comes off as alienating, even dystopian. Near the end of the piece, Amodei imagines a scenario in which AI has rendered the current economic system irrelevant. One solution, he muses, might be to create a new system in which economic decisions, including the allocation of resources, are off-loaded entirely to AI. He then nods to “a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.” Left unanswered is who gets to participate in that conversation. On X, the writer Noah Smith posed the question more bluntly: “In 20 or 50 years, will the heads of AI companies be de facto emperors of the world?”

Everything is flooding in faster than most people can process. Last week, Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, posted on X that he now believes that there’s a 60 percent chance that, by the end of 2028, “AI systems might soon be capable of building themselves.” AI CEOs have made many erroneous predictions about superintelligence, so should any of us really believe that a version of the singularity is 18 months away? What is a person to do with this information? Buy stock? Buy guns? Probably not learn to code. Here we are in 2026, living in a time when the insiders are girding themselves for a moment when the entire world becomes a computer, while many others are worried about gas prices and just trying to get through the day.

About the only thing clear in this moment is that a power struggle over who gets to define the coming years is looming. It is a struggle between the AI labs and between nations. The White House has intimated that it may very well be a struggle between the government and Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley AI lobbying spend suggests the same. But for most of us, navigating the jagged frontier will feel personal. What may seem like a civilizational imperative or seven-dimensional war-gaming to AI CEOs will seem to others like little more than Silicon Valley giving their boss a compelling reason to lay them or their loved ones off.

For the past decade, popular technology platforms—many of them built or championed by the same cohort who are building today’s AI tools—have favored acceleration over consideration. They incentivized us to operate by this same logic, often as the worst and loudest versions of ourselves. Over time, these tools flattened our arguments, our politics, our culture, compressing them into the same endless fights, such that people became ensconced in their own bespoke realities.

The same dynamics govern the AI conversation. The AI boom is a race, a gold rush, and the chasm between AI’s true believers and the malaised masses is getting wider. In the same feed, you can read a blind item about AI researchers taking up smoking because they believe that AI is going to cure lung cancer and a reported dispatch on “the shared feeling of being harvested by the future” taking hold in the United States and China. Silicon Valley’s leaders pay lip service to a societal conversation about what comes next, but their actions say something else: Keep up or be left behind. Humanity rewriting the social contract together sounds nice; less so when you have a gun to your head. Time is of the essence, we’re told. Maybe that’s true. But how can we build a future if we can’t agree on the present? A cynic might conclude that our input isn’t desired at all.