$God Is in the Bubbles$

God Is in the Bubbles

By Evan Armstrong / Napkin Math

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$God Is in the Bubbles$

Length20m

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Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that I'm teaching a new cohort of my course,How to Write With AI. Take it from me: There is no higher ROI activity you can engage in than writing. If you make writing a serious practice, your career will flourish and your intellect will thrive. But writing ishard. Thankfully, AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Spiral, and Lex make it far easier to transform blank pages into powerful content. I will teach you how and show you my exact workflow for writing this column.The four-week cohort-based class runs from Feb. 13 through Mar. 6 and includes:4 live lecturesand hands-on workshopsA writing groupoverseen by an Every-trained editorInterviews with successful internet writersincluding Every CEO and cofounder Dan Shipper30 daysof quick writing exercisesYour own, customized LLM promptfor improving your draftsA chance to share your writingwith Every’s 90,000-plus readersOver 90 students—including founders, aspiring writers, engineers, and professors—have already taken it. Check out thecourse websitefor more information and to enroll. Act quickly: There's a $300 early bird discount, and if you register byJan. 23, you’ll jump ahead of the nearly 10,000-person waitlist for our new AI email toolCora:Register for How to Write With AIAnd now, on to my piece...On Monday, tech is taking over Washington, D.C.When he begins his second term in office, Donald Trump’s administration will be teeming with Silicon Valley personalities. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is a Peter Thielprotégé. Sriram Krishnan, who’s been named asenior advisor for AI, is a former Andreessen Horowitz partner. David Sacks, the incoming White HouseAI and crypto czar, is an influential venture capitalist andAll-Inpodcast host. And then there’s whatever Elon Musk is doing with DOGE, a new government efficiency commission.The East and West Coast power centers seem to be merging more each day. Marc Andreessen himself is nowrecruitingfor government positions, while others in the Thiel-ian orbit will occupy the positions of Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services (Jim O’Neill), ambassador to Denmark (Ken Howery, who will presumably try to help Trump buy Greenland), and Under Secretary of State (Jacob Helberg). Surely more will join.Reading this list may make you caw like a bald eagle and shoot a firework out of your window. Alternatively, it may make you spontaneously combust. What matters more than your opinion of these men is how they are positioned to affect policy in the United States and abroad. Regulation on crypto, open-source AI, energy policy—all of it seems up for revision during this administration. It’s safe to assume these Trump whisperers will influence tech regulation—or deregulation—directly.While considering the looming eastward migration of tech luminaries, I found myself interested in a new book published by Stripe Press calledBoom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnationby Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber. (We’ll call them H&H.) Hobart (with whom I haveco-written a piece) writes a popular business and tech newsletter and has an intellect that makes me feel dumb. Huber is an angel investor and a partner at aventure capital fundthat I don’t know personally.Their work examines how bubbles—which have a popular reputation for being stupid, wasteful, and harmful to investors—can actually accelerate technological progress. (We’ll get to this later, but they don’t exactly define bubbles.) The book ends with a section on how the “techno-scientific sublime…invokes a spiritual or religious experience of transcendence.” In other words, technology can be viewed as a form of religion. That’s all to say this book takes on the ambitious task of redefining an established economic phenomenon and writing a bible for progress at the same time.Both Andreessen and Thiel blurbed it. Andreessen said thatBoom“makes the case that humanity’s greatest risk is not climate change or misaligned superintelligent Al but not making enough progress.” Thiel said, “The dot-com bubble looked like the peak of delusion, but the truly deluded were those who wanted to indefinitely defer the future.” Shoot, even the book’s philosophical section is mostly couched in the frameworks of René Girard, Thiel’sfavorite philosopher.Boomacts as a handy guide to the ideological underpinning of this new fusion of political and technological power. It is an amalgamation of hyper-influential, relatively niche ideas that have been quietly driving much of the libertarian discourse around Silicon Valley for the last decade. By studying it, I hoped to gain some insight into what the next few years of tech influence in Washington may hold.What is a bubble, anyhoo?H&H’s argument can be compressed into three components:...Become apaid subscriber to Everyto unlock this piece and learn about:The fusion of tech wealth and political influenceProgress as religion: The ideological framework driving new tech policyRedefining bubbles to justify speculative excessWhen innovation benefits insiders but socializes riskUpgrade to paidClick hereto read the full postWant the full text of all articles in RSS?Become a subscriber, orlearn more.

Political Intrigue Artificial Intelligence Futuristic Gods & Mortals Psychological Dystopian