Steve Job's Ghost, Zuckerberg,
Neuralink and crypto surge,
Covid lockdown, deep-fake faces,
Drones above public places.
K-Pop demons, TikTok wars,
Propaganda shilling app stores,
Psychic spies, silver screens,
Scroll till you forget your dreams.
-- Ecclesiates' Cover Band playing "We Didn't Start the Fire"
What on earth is going on? Authoritarianism has arrived in America. Yet again! Techies talk about summoning demons and starting a singularity, opening a stargate to a new digital god. Like any good American in love with the simple things in life, I spent last weekend going to a high school football game and enjoying time with old friends at Oktoberfest.
There conversation quickly turned to the insanity of California's housing crisis, a constant reminder for folks at my age who are looking to build a family of their own. Even if you have a good paying job, it's quite difficult when homes cost precisely a bazillion dollars and it takes dual incomes for a fixer upper starter home that's half the size of what a divorced school teacher in our parent's generation could afford.
Sometimes I wonder how I might explain to a high school version of myself how we got here. How politics went from being honestly boring to all consuming to a religious war with everything and nothing at stake. How to explain to someone in 2005 how you can rent a house in any major city in the world with a push of a button but our hometown has barely changed. In these crazy mixed up times, one thing is clear.
California's dream of a better life is dead. Not just rhetorically but beyond life support and really dead. People still have their dreams and still chase them but the idea that coming to California means a better life is over. Folks born in America have out-migrated from California from decades and now with America's new walls it's no longer a haven for the foreign born. The Silicon Valley and Hollywood dream machines increasingly run on fumes.
A decade ago I took a fun road trip across California. Many early twenty something millennials traveled around the world racking up epic Instagram pictures and stories. I however took the opposite path from the ends of the earth, quitting my stable excel monkey public finance gig to traipse about my home of California in a sort of circus pamphleteering surfing operation of sorts. Ah to be young and dumb.
I met folks like a farmer pioneering a new breed lime alternative or a father sharing out about the escalator of life (which honestly means something different now that I'm a dad and I look back at being a single detached young dude with older eyes). Most of all it was an old friend from grade school and a new dude we met off a crazy craigslist ad bumming across the state.
We hit up the state capitol and surfed a lot of breaks. I achieved my goal of flipping the bird to the world that couldn't care less about the book I penned exploring the contours of a potential new California dream. Overall I am reminded of California's once and future Governor Jerry Brown's adage that the "new comes out of the random."
I learned a lot having serendipitous deep conversations with the curator of Jack London state historic park, a science and technology professor at CSU Bakersfield and other awesome creative spirits from around this amazing beautiful mess of a place we call California. I also enjoyed going to an ed tech hackathon to design a school in addition to a more standard hackathon hackathon where my team won an award for best data science. I was part of a design challenge IDEO hosted where our team did UX intercepts asking random people on the Embarcadero what their experience was with government.
Our pamphleteering circus crashed LA's startup weekend with a slackline consumer product company that did a live demo aka setting up a tightrope in the hallowed halls of the lords of the clouds.[1] Fun times. I honestly learned everything I know about product management (which honestly may not be all that much) from that experience. I will say though that Silicon Valley VC funded startup types have gotten wayyyyy far afield of the mythical garage that let's be real is the fountain of all that is good and true and new in this visionary state.
What do all those wanderings have to do with the current crises in California and across this pale blue dot humans and increasingly our robot (friends? overlords?) call home?[2]
Well in a literal sense nothing but in a deeper serious sense everything. California's lost the plot. There isn't really a narrative about the future here or in the West. The LA Times did a big cover story earlier this year about "imagining a better future" yada blada that included an entire special section. TLDR one bold vision was a call for an integrated digital one stop shop for housing construction permitting across the tangled patchwork quilt of jurisdictions and byzantine rules.
Call me cynical but color me deeply unimpressed. What's the answer then? Clearly, we need a hero!
And I know just the guy. Bold. Courageous and audacious. Strong. A restless intelligence. Cunning wit. Irreverent and energetic. Fiercely loyal and protective of those he loves. Crushed by a mountain and unbent, unbowed and unbroken. A spiritual seeker who went to went all the way to the head honcho in the celestial kingdom of heaven. Who you ask?
Yes the answer is clear. In this turbulent times, only Monkey King can save us.
Uh who exactly is that the more ignorant among you might well be asking? Monkey King! The famous adventurer who traveled to India from China during the Song dynasty. Such a journey echoes many a famous Californian like Steve Jobs pre-Apple days and serves as a powerful parable for Buddhist enlightenment as well as a campy slap stick set of medieval humor.
Yes Monkey's our only hope.
And today I'm here to tell you -- hot off the presses! -- that Monkey is back and better than ever. A special simian has been cognitively enhanced in the secret laboratories of the lords of the clouds, the TechnoKings. Our Monkey has achieved awareness and the simian singularity is nigh. He's rallying his forces and preparing to make a run for it.
Where to? What will monkey make of his new journey to the west, not to India but across this strange land of California, this West of the West that's weird and wild and yet oddly echoes the caste-like and exquisitely complicated bureaucratic structures of medieval Asia. What insights will our AI enhanced hero complete with the full knowledge of his legendary epic offer us today?
Read on dear reader and subscribe to this scintillating substack for a special week by week installment of Monkey Kings Journey West of the West!
In the Techno Kingdom of California, just off the 101 where the hills turn gold in summer and bald in winter, sits a low gray building with tinted windows and no name.
[1] There's been a variety of folks who obviously copied us in developing a similar setup with a high and low slackline and rings or other gymnastic equipment. Really though the product isn't the value. It's in the knowledge of how to setup that tricky thing and then classes there. I wonder if there's opportunity for using that type of physical movement as a tool to help with fidgety kids who get labeled ADHD or support dads who have gotten off the fitness wagon and generally help build a beautiful integration of movement and inquiry like the ancient Greek academy and gym that gave us the liberal arts which I love.
[2] Beyond sapiens and the robots there's also increasingly compelling reason to believe we'll be able to communicate with cetaceans in the near future. There's also relevant deeper worldview assumptions worth discussing as we grapple with the ongoing terraforming of our home planet and wrestle with how to ensure the survival of the human species.
"Permitting is the civic equivalent of molasses. Whether you’re trying to build a high-speed rail line or replace a backyard retaining wall, the process of securing the “green light” has become a dense tangle of protocols—some necessary, some redundant, many opaque."
Tbh permitting is so broken reform won't cut it. We need a revolution. Something like the shift from landlines to iPhones. Permitting is the civic equivalent of molasses. Whether you're trying to build a high-speed rail line or replace a backyard retaining wall, the process of securing the "green light" has become a dense tangle of protocols-some necessary, some redundant, many opaque.
"What's after the fourth world? How do we get from here to there? Web3 offers lots of possibility but how do we get from our current messy /gloomy present and escalating p(doom). "Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.""
Share Dialog
Support dialog
1 comment
In a world increasingly dominated by absurdity and authoritarianism, @patwater asserts that California’s dream of a better life is fading. Reflecting on personal experiences and societal changes, this piece captures both nostalgia and critical observations on housing crises, political absurdities, and technology’s chaotic trajectory. From casual football games to fundamental reflections on the state's direction, the journey evokes questions about the future we envision. Dive deeper into these poignant musings and join the collective conversation on what lies ahead.