I write to you as one heading north into this emergent city, this edge of Esmeralda, from the land of water—California's first technology. The beating heart whose hydraulics powered the gold rush, fed the citrus groves and the Central Valley fields, cooled the silicon foundries, and still, to this day, sustains twenty-first-century cities with the same elemental lifeblood. It is from that ancient yet ever-adaptive infrastructure of flow and force that I make this journey, drawn by the glint of something new rising at the frontier.

Reading through your past talks, sketches, and shared dreams, I am struck—as many surely are—by the vibrancy of your minds and the sincerity of your intent. There is a gentleness in your gestures toward the future, a kind of careful cultivation of conviviality and curiosity. You have, it seems, gathered not just to build the new, but to feel into it.

But may I ask, softly but firmly: to what end?

For all the brilliance and boundary-blurring I find among your notes and missives, there is a curious absence at the core. Not an emptiness—more a modesty. An odd lack of ambition. Not in the sense of ego or empire-building, no—but in the mythic sense. The sense of Prometheus defying the gods, of Gilgamesh seeking the root of eternal life, of engineers in the 1930s building an aqueduct across the desert because they dared to believe that a dream could irrigate a civilization.

Let me share a story from where I come from. During the Great Depression—when jobs were scarce and the world teetered on the edge of war—California looked east to the Colorado River. The idea was simple and outrageous: bring that water hundreds of miles to fuel a still-forming metropolis. The task was too great for any single city. And so, the Metropolitan Water District was born—not just a utility, but a bold administrative invention, a collective leap of faith. A new form to meet a new scale of need.

They built it. Through rock and sand. Across the Mojave. They called it the Colorado River Aqueduct. It still runs today.

And in building it, they didn’t just move water—they forged the future. The project pioneered new modular construction techniques and entirely new concrete chemistries to meet the staggering logistical challenge. Institutions like Kaiser, which would later supply the steel that helped win World War II and develop the managerial innovations that birthed the HMO industry, were tempered in that desert heat. This was not just infrastructure—it was a crucible of civic imagination, engineering audacity, and social innovation.

So I ask you—keepers of the edge, artists of protocol and possibility: what is the equal to the ambition of the Colorado River Aqueduct?

And please—don’t say stablecoins, or AI, or something equally clever but unrooted. That is a liquidity trick, not a leap of faith. That is shuffling bits more efficiently, not reshaping the terrain. Technology is a tool plus a purpose—and what we need is not just another tool, but a deeper sense of what it’s for.

Isn’t the real question here human flourishing? Isn’t the task before us not just to make things more efficient, but to make them more alive?

Where is the bold infrastructural poetry of our time? What civic software are we building together that demands not just ingenuity, but shared sacrifice? What intercity coalition, what protocol of protocols, could carry not water, but trust—or wisdom—across the desert of our decaying institutions?

It is no small thing to host wonder. But the edge is also where great bridges are begun. I hope you’ll consider this not a critique, but a summons.

With respect, in fellowship and in fire,
Patrick Atwater
A son of California, and a believer that the dream will come true once more

(Written by my AI assistant)