Tag: culture

Categories
Bread California San Francisco/California

Larraburu

There were three sourdough breads in San Francisco and they were not the same thing. Boudin was at Fisherman’s Wharf, which told you everything. Parisian was on the better grocery shelves and at the airport, which told you the rest. Larraburu was in the neighborhood, which is to say it was not selling anything except bread.

I was living in Daly City when I found them. I was seventeen, or eighteen, which is the age when you begin to understand that the thing everyone points to is rarely the thing worth finding. I had eaten Boudin at the wharf, standing in the fog with everyone else who had just arrived somewhere. It was fine. It was what people meant when they said sourdough. Parisian was more serious, or wanted to be — the bread you bought at the airport to prove you’d really been here, to carry the city home in a bag. But there was something in both of them that felt like a performance, and I was at the age when performance was exactly what I was trying to see through.

Larraburu didn’t perform. The crust was softer than it had any right to be. The sour was there but it didn’t insist on itself. You tasted wheat and time and something faintly cool and creamy underneath. It was bread that assumed you already knew what you were doing.

They closed in 1976. Parisian lasted until 2007. Boudin is still on the wharf.

I have thought about this more than is strictly reasonable. What I keep coming back to is not the taste exactly, though the taste is there when I reach for it. What I keep coming back to is the distinction itself — the fact that I made it, that it mattered to me, that I was nineteen years old in Berkeley and buying bread from a neighborhood bakery in San Francisco because I had decided it was the real thing. You make these small declarations about who you are. Most of them dissolve. Some of them stay.

The two brothers who started Larraburu came from the Basque country in 1896 and brought their starter with them. By the time I was eating their bread the starter was already older than the state of California. They fed it three times a day, every day, for eighty years. That kind of commitment doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up in the bread.

In 1969 scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture began studying sourdough cultures from five San Francisco bakeries. They were trying to understand what made the bread taste the way it did, why you could not replicate it elsewhere, why bakers who moved away and took their starters with them found the flavor slowly changing, the sourness shifting, something essential escaping. They worked for years before a team at Oregon State University finally isolated what they were looking for — a previously unknown bacterium living inside the wild yeast, producing the lactic acid that gave the bread its character. They named it Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. One of the five bakeries in the study was Larraburu.

The starter the brothers brought from the Basque country in 1896 was not simply old. It was a living record of every bakery it had passed through, every hand that had fed it, every climate it had survived. A sourdough starter is not a recipe. It is a culture in the biological sense — a community of organisms with a history, shaped by everything that has ever happened to it. You can write down the formula. You cannot write down what the starter knows.

Larraburu baked twenty-four hours a day. The sponge was rebuilt every eight hours, three times daily, without interruption. Two parts previous sponge, two parts high-gluten flour, one part water. Hold seven to eight hours. Rebuild. The rhythm was closer to farming than to cooking — less a process than a relationship, sustained across decades, across generations, across an ocean.

What I know now that I didn’t know then is that the starter survived the bakery. Someone saved a piece of it when they closed. It traveled to Hawaii, sat in a refrigerator on Maui, kept being fed. A culture that old doesn’t care about bankruptcy or lawsuits or whether the ovens are still running. It just wants flour and water and time.

I find something in that. Not consolation exactly. More like confirmation of something I already believed at seventeen, standing in the fog, learning to tell the difference.

Categories
AI Silicon Valley Technology

The View from the Edge

“Living on the edge” usually means you’re taking risks. One of the guests on the More or Less podcast used it the other way: as a diagnosis. A description of people who’ve lost their depth perception.

From where they sit, it looks like everyone is moving. The feeds are full of demos. The group chats debate which model won the week. Colleagues are building agents that book their dentist appointments and summarize their email while they sleep. David Sparks is selling a Robot Assistant Field Guide. The frontier feels like the present tense — not where things are heading, but where things already are.

When everyone around you has already crossed a threshold, you stop being able to see the threshold. You mistake the edge for the center.

The primary point — that the tech community wildly overestimates how much ordinary people want AI in their lives — lands harder when you hold it against that image. It’s not that the industry is wrong about the technology. It’s that it has miscalibrated the desire. Most people aren’t trying to optimize their Tuesday. They’re just trying to get through it. An always-on personal agent isn’t a solution to a problem they’re carrying.

Think about the woman in the Safeway parking lot, sitting in her car for three minutes before going in, scrolling back through her texts to find the thing her husband asked her to pick up. Egg product and cheddar cheese. She finds it, pockets her phone, and goes inside. The whole problem — the forgetting, the retrieval, the solution — lasted less time than it takes to read about it. She didn’t need an agent. She needed three minutes and a text thread she already had.

The edge distorts in a specific way: it makes appetite look like inevitability. From out there, adoption feels like a question of when, not whether. But whether is a real question. Most technology that could be woven into daily life never is — not because people couldn’t learn it, but because they didn’t want what it offered badly enough to bother.

The view from the edge is intoxicating. Everything looks like signal. But the middle is where most people live, and from there the signal looks a lot more like noise.

Which is why WWDC matters more than any model release this year. Apple doesn’t sell to people living on the edge. It sells to people who just want their phone to work. If Apple makes AI invisible enough — tucked into the camera, the keyboard, the thing that finds your photos — it stops being something you adopt and becomes something you already have. That’s a different motion entirely. Not convincing people they want AI. Delivering it before the question occurs to them.

Whether Apple can actually pull that off is a separate argument. But the watershed, if it comes, won’t look like a frontier crossing. It’ll look like a Tuesday that went slightly smoother than usual. Most people won’t even notice the edge they just walked past.

We will find out in a week or so.

Categories
AI California San Francisco/California

Distant Billboards

Greg Isenberg came back from San Francisco with seventeen observations. The billboards advertising either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies, the seed rounds, the forward-deployed engineers, the founders showing each other their Obsidian vaults like athletes comparing gym routines.

He noted an important thing in observation fifteen, almost as an aside.

Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats — none of them use any AI at all.

Everett Rogers formalized the technology diffusion model in 1962. He was studying hybrid seed corn in Iowa. He noticed that the farmers who adopted early weren’t just better informed — they had different social networks, different relationships to risk, different orientations toward outside knowledge. The late adopters weren’t slower. They were operating from a different set of facts about what was safe to try.

Those AI billboards in SoMa are not visible in the Mission. That’s not metaphor. That’s just geography.

What strikes me about the taqueria is not that it’s behind. It’s that the conversation happening a mile away — about MCP endpoints and agent fleets — is not legible to it. The vocabulary doesn’t exist there yet. Nobody has sat across from the woman making carnitas for twenty years and said: here is what this could do for your ordering, your scheduling, your response to a customer who asks on Yelp at 11pm whether you’re open on Monday. One day her daughter or son might.

The builder class optimizes for the builder class. You build what you understand, for people whose problems you can see. The founders in SoMa understand each other’s problems with extraordinary precision.

The woman making carnitas has different problems — thinner margins, less access to capital, relationships built over decades that don’t easily transfer to a new system. Nobody is at the Series A meeting making the case that her problems are the interesting ones.

The historian of technology David Nye wrote about the “technological sublime” — the awe Americans felt in the nineteenth century standing before a great bridge or a locomotive or the first electrified city. The feeling was real. But the sublime is a view from a particular angle. The workers who built the bridge experienced something quite different. The families displaced by the railroad’s right-of-way experienced something different still.

The question isn’t whether the technology will eventually reach her. It will. The diffusion curve is patient. It likely will surprise.

The question is whether anyone is doing the translation work. The act of standing in a specific kind of life and asking: what would this actually change here? In the actual kitchen, on the actual Tuesday.

Isenberg noted that the coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people.

The taqueria is also a place where people want to be around people. It has been that for a long time.

She’ll adapt. She’s been adapting for twenty years.

But that’s a very different story than the one being told in San Francisco on those billboards.

Categories
Technology

The Silence of Glass

There is a moment, right before surgery, when the anesthesiologist asks you to count backward from ten. You get to seven, maybe six, and then the world goes clean and white. Scientists have a word for the material responsible for that transition: borosilicate. The same compound in the syringe barrel is in the telescope mirror trained on the Andromeda galaxy, in the fiber strand carrying the surgeon’s consultation with a colleague three thousand miles away, in the smartphone screen the patient’s wife is staring at in the waiting room, hands shaking, refreshing nothing.

Glass is everywhere and we have made it invisible, which is the oldest trick civilization knows.

Vaclav Smil argues in Making the Modern World that the most consequential material of the last two centuries is not steel or silicon or oil. It is float glass — invented by Alastair Pilkington in 1959, when he watched dishwater spread across his kitchen sink and understood something that had eluded glassmakers for four hundred years. Pour molten glass onto a bath of molten tin and it finds its own level. It becomes, on its own, perfectly flat. Every window, phone screen, solar panel, and architectural facade descends from a man watching his wife do dishes.

What Smil doesn’t quite say — though you feel it accumulating across his pages — is that glass is the one material that consistently mediates between the inner and the outer. Not metaphorically. Literally. It stands at the boundary and says: you may look, but you may not touch.

The fiber optic cable looks like nothing. Pull back the orange jacket and you find strands thinner than a human hair, each one pure silica glass so precisely drawn that a photon launched into one end will emerge after sixty miles having lost less than five percent of its energy. That number seems impossible. It is a kind of miracle achieved through obsessive purity: any contaminant at the molecular level, any stress in the crystal lattice, any deviation in the core diameter, and the light scatters and dies. Underneath every ocean, through every mountain, connecting data centers in Virginia to servers in Singapore, there are hundreds of millions of kilometers of this material, laid in darkness, carrying light.

I think about that sometimes when I hit send. The electrons leave my keyboard, convert to photons at some local junction, and then travel — genuinely travel, as light through glass — to wherever they are going. There is something devotional about it, though I can’t quite say why. Maybe it’s the invisibility. Maybe it’s the faith required — that the thing you release will arrive, intact, somewhere it has never been.

Glass is in the MRI machine and the X-ray plate and the laboratory flask where the drug was first synthesized and the vial where it is stored and the syringe through which it enters the body. Glass does not react. It does not corrode. It does not leach. This chemical inertness, which seems like absence, is actually the whole point. Medicine needed a container that would hold the thing without becoming it.

There is also glass in the eye reading the label on that vial. The human lens is, optically speaking, a soft glass. It focuses, ages, clouds — cataracts are the eye’s glass going milky — and the surgeon replaces it with an intraocular lens engineered to behave like glass. We have spent considerable effort making fake versions of something the body was already doing.

For most of human history, clear glass was expensive, fragile, and small. Window glass in medieval Europe admitted light hazily, like looking through ice. Clear vision was for churches, which is perhaps why we came to associate light with the sacred — it literally arrived, in those buildings, in a way it did not arrive anywhere else. Then Pilkington’s tin bath made clarity cheap, and the world changed in ways nobody fully catalogued because the change was so pervasive: big windows, watched experiments, extended growing seasons, telescopes reaching farther, microscopes going smaller. Each a story of glass making a distance crossable that was not crossable before.

The screen I am writing this on is glass. The Corning Gorilla Glass on this display is an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet, chemically strengthened through ion exchange, harder than most knives, clear enough that the pixels look like they are sitting on the surface rather than behind it. Apple spends considerable engineering effort making the glass seem like it isn’t there. The ideal phone screen is invisible. A window to computation.

And yet the glass is the thing you actually touch. All day. More than you touch almost anyone. The glass is warm from your hands. It has learned, in a way, the pressure of your thumbs.

Glass is the material of thresholds — it makes the threshold visible, makes it possible to stand at a door and see all the way through before you decide whether to enter. We built the internet through it. We see our loved ones through it. We study cancer through it. We watch the news through glass that traveled to us through glass captured by cameras with glass sensors launched on satellites with glass lenses through a sky that is itself, technically, a lens — bending and filtering the light from everything that has ever been.

In the hospital waiting room, the wife is still holding her phone. The screen has gone dark. She taps it. It lights up. She looks at her own reflection for a moment — the screen a mirror now — before the notification arrives and the glass goes transparent again, the way it always does, showing her something other than herself.

That is what glass does. It waits. It holds. And then, when there is something to show, it gets out of the way.

Categories
AI India

The Polyglot Machine

There is a subtle but profound shift happening in the global architecture of artificial intelligence. For the past few years, the gravitational pull of the AI revolution has been overwhelmingly centralized—anchored in the server farms and venture capital boardrooms of Silicon Valley. But if you look closely at the horizon, the center of gravity is beginning to disperse.

Activity in India’s AI ecosystem is accelerating (witness this week’s India AI Impact Summit in Delhi), and it feels less like a replication of what we’ve seen in the West and more like an entirely new paradigm.

Take Sarvam AI, for example. What strikes me about their approach isn’t just the technical ambition of building foundation models, but the philosophical underpinning of why they are building them. They are focusing heavily on Indic languages. This is not a trivial detail; it is the crux of the matter.

“We often forget that language is the original operating system of human culture. It shapes how we think, how we empathize, and how we conceptualize reality.”

When the foundational models of artificial intelligence are trained overwhelmingly on English, they inadvertently inherit a distinctly Western worldview. They learn the biases, the idioms, and the cultural frameworks of a specific slice of humanity, leaving the rest of the world to interact with technology through a translation layer that often strips away nuance.

India, a nation woven together by dozens of distinct languages and thousands of dialects, presents the ultimate crucible for AI. What happens when a machine doesn’t just translate, but actually “thinks” and generates natively in Hindi, Tamil, or Bengali?

The rise of AI in India represents a push for digital and cultural sovereignty. It is a recognition that the future of technology cannot be a monolith. For AI to truly serve humanity, it must reflect the pluralism of humanity. It must understand the local context, the regional slang, and the deeply rooted cultural histories that define how people live and work.

Watching companies like Sarvam AI pick up momentum reminds me that the next great frontier in technology isn’t just about achieving higher parameters or faster compute times. It’s about representation. The models that will truly change the world won’t just be the smartest; they will be the most deeply attuned to the beautiful, noisy, and diverse chorus of the human experience.

Categories
Authors Books History

The Devil’s Rope

We often mistake simplicity for innocence. When we look at a technological innovation, we tend to judge its weight by its complexity—the microchip, the steam engine, the nuclear reactor. But sometimes, history turns on the axis of something far more rudimentary. Sometimes, the world changes not with a bang, but with a sharp, metallic scratch.

I was recently reading Cattle Kingdom by Christopher Knowlton, and I stopped cold at a passage regarding the invention of barbed wire. It’s an object we pass by on highways or stumble over in overgrown fields without a second thought. Yet, Knowlton writes:

“None was more significant than the creation of barbed wire, which literally reshaped the landscape and set the stage for the era’s eventual destruction—at great personal cost to so many of its key players.”

It is a profound observation. We tend to romanticize the American West as a geography of endless horizons—a place defined by what it didn’t have: fences, borders, limits. It was the Open Range. But that openness was fragile. It existed only as long as the technology to close it was absent.

When Joseph Glidden and others patented their variations of “The Devil’s Rope” in the 1870s, they weren’t just selling steel fencing; they were selling a new concept of ownership. Before wire, a man owned what he could patrol. After wire, a man owned what he could enclose.

The quote strikes a melancholic chord because it highlights a paradox of human progress: the tool created to maximize the land ended up destroying the culture that relied on it. The cowboys, the cattle barons, and the drifters who defined the era were undone by the very efficiency they sought. The wire made the cattle industry profitable on a massive scale, but it also ended the cowboy’s way of life. It stopped the long drives. It turned the cowboy from a navigator of the plains into a gatekeeper.

And, as Knowlton notes, the “personal cost” was staggering. This reshaping of the landscape wasn’t just aesthetic; it was violent. The wire cut off migration routes for bison and the Indigenous tribes who followed them. It sparked the fence-cutting wars, neighbor turning against neighbor in the dark of night, snapping tension wires that represented their livelihood or their imprisonment, depending on which side of the post they stood.

There is a lesson here for us today, far removed from the dusty plains. We are constantly inventing our own versions of barbed wire—digital boundaries, algorithmic silos, tools designed to corral information or efficiency. We build these structures to create order, to claim our stake, and to protect what is ours. But every time we draw a line, we must ask: what era are we destroying? What open range are we closing off forever?

The landscape is always being reshaped. The question is whether we are building fences that protect us, or cages that trap us in.

Categories
News

Turning Out the Lights

[Note: see also The Murder of the Washington Post by Ashley Parker who writes: “Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special.”]

I was struck this morning by the brutal dismantling of the Washington Post’s international reporting capabilities. The list of bureaus being shuttered by the paper reads like a roll call of the 21st century’s geopolitical fault lines: New Delhi, Sydney, Cairo, the entire Middle East team, China, Iran, Turkey.

It is a stunning retreat.

But to view this merely as a corporate restructuring or a casualty of the dying business model of print journalism seems to miss a deeper, darker signal. This seems like an actual cultural symptom.

“The world is becoming less America-centric by the minute while the United States is becoming more America-centric than ever.”

At the exact moment technology has rendered the world indistinguishable from a single room—where a virus, a meme, or a financial crash in one corner sweeps across the floor to the other in seconds—we are choosing to partition off that room.

There is a tragic symmetry to it. As the center of gravity shifts away from the us, the we respond not by engaging harder, but by closing its eyes.

When a newspaper that has shaped history decides that “reporting on the world” is no longer of valuable enough, it is doing more than saving money – although clearly that’s the primary motivation. It seems to be a surrender to the idea that what happens “over there” doesn’t matter enough to us because the people who were supposed to tell us it was coming are gone.

We seem to be turning out the lights in the rooms we find too difficult, believing that if we cannot see the world, the world cannot touch us. Feels wrong.

The moves closing these bureaus are part of broader cuts at the paper:

  • Closing the Sports section
  • Closing the Books section.
  • Restructuring and shrinking the Metro desk.
  • Suspending the Post Reports podcast.
Categories
AI Living Productivity

The Reality Gap

“I follow AI adoption pretty closely, and I have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap. People in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives… people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams.” — Kevin Roose

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from scrolling through the “Inside” of the AI bubble while the rest of the world simply goes to work. It is the dizziness of watching a new species of behavior emerge—”wireheading” and “claudeswarms”—while the vast majority of the economy is still asking for permission to use a spellchecker.

The future isn’t just unevenly distributed; it is becoming mutually unintelligible.

Roose notes a “yawning inside/outside gap” that feels distinct from previous tech cycles. In one reality—geographically centered in San Francisco and digitally centered in specific discords—people are operating with a level of agency only sci-fi writers dared to imagine. They are deploying multi-agent swarms to manage their lives and consulting large language models for existential guidance.

In the other reality—the one inhabited by the vast majority of the global workforce—people are still waiting for an IT ticket to clear so they can use a basic productivity assistant.

It is tempting to look at this divide solely through the lens of technical access, but Roose hits on a deeper truth: “there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one.”

This is the friction of our current moment. It is not just that the tools are different; the permissions we give ourselves to use them are different. The “Inside” is operating with a mindset of radical experimentation and integration. The “Outside” is operating within legacy frameworks of risk mitigation and bureaucratic approval.

The danger of this gap isn’t just economic inequality, though that is a guaranteed downstream effect. The immediate danger is a loss of shared context. When the creators of technology live in a reality where “claudeswarms” run the day, they risk losing the ability to design for, or even empathize with, a world that is still fighting for permission to use the tools at all.

We are living in the same year, but we are no longer inhabiting the same time. The challenge for those of us on the “Inside” is to resist the intoxication of the bubble long enough to build bridges, rather than just building faster escape pods.

Meanwhile, in China (from the Financial Times)…

“I’ve witnessed first hand how China has grown from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass producing them,” he said. “Some of our most cutting-edge work is now done by fresh graduates. The real geniuses to change the world soon could well be among them.”

Categories
Art and Artists Living

Occupying the Artificial

There is a distinct texture to the modern shopping mall – polished tile, recycled air, and the relentless, humming promise that satisfaction is just a credit card swipe away. They’re designed to be transient; a place of movement, transaction, and eventual departure. You are not supposed to stay. You are certainly not supposed to live at the mall.

But recently, I came across a recommendation from Kevin Kelly about the documentary Secret Mall Apartment (currently on Netflix), which chronicles a band of artists who did exactly that. For years, they maintained a hidden sanctuary inside a busy mall.

“It is way more interesting and inspiring than first appears. It was a bold work of art, and I came away seeing art as a way of life.” — KK

This was art as an act of occupation. These artists didn’t just build a set; they altered their reality. They took a space designed for public consumption and carved out a private, human intimacy. They looked at the rigid architecture of the commercial world and saw a loophole, a blank canvas hidden behind the drywall.

Perhaps we should ask: Where are the secret apartments in our own lives?

We live in structures—both physical and digital—that are designed by others. It is easy to feel that our role is simply to navigate these spaces as they were intended. But the artist looks at the “mall” of daily existence and asks, “Where can I build something that is solely mine?”

Art as a “way of life” means we stop waiting for permission to be creative. It means we stop waiting for the studio or the gallery. For that “special” time or place. Instead we find the hollow spaces in our schedules, our environments, and our relationships, and we fill them with intention.

The sheer audacity of living in a mall was about a refusal to accept the world merely as it is presented – a reclaiming of individual agency.

Perhaps the most inspiring art in our lives isn’t what hangs on a wall, but how we choose to inhabit the “rooms” we walk through every day.

Categories
AI History Living

The Echo of the Roar

It is a strange sensation to look back exactly one century and see our own reflection staring back at us, sepia-toned but unmistakably familiar. We often think of the “Roaring Twenties” as a stylistic era—flapper dresses, Art Deco skyscrapers, and jazz. But beneath the aesthetic was a seismic technological shift that mirrors our current moment with an almost eerie precision.

In the 1920s, the world was shrinking. The radio was the “Great Disrupter” of the day. For the first time in human history, a voice could travel instantly from a studio in Pittsburgh to a farm in Nebraska. It was the democratization of information, a sudden collapse of distance that left society both thrilled and anxious.

“The radio brought the world into the living room; the algorithm brings the universe into our pockets.”

Today, we stand in the wash of a similar wave. If the radio brought the world into the living room, the internet—and specifically the generative AI of this decade—has brought the collective consciousness of humanity into our pockets.

The parallels in infrastructure are just as striking. One hundred years ago, the internal combustion engine was reshaping the physical landscape. The horse was yielding to the Model T; mud paths were being paved into highways. The very geography of how we lived was being rewritten by the automobile. In the 2020s, the “highway” is digital, built on cloud infrastructure and fiber optics, and the vehicle isn’t a Ford, but an algorithm. We are transitioning from physical labor to cognitive automation just as they transitioned from animal labor to mechanical muscle.

The Texture of Time

There is a specific texture to this kind of time. It is a mix of vertigo and acceleration. In 1925, the cultural critic might have worried that the “machine age” was stripping away our humanity, turning men into cogs on an assembly line. In 2025, we worry that the “algorithmic age” is stripping away our agency, turning creativity into a prompt.

But here is the insight that offers me comfort: The 1920s were chaotic, yes, but they were also a crucible of immense creativity. The pressure of that technological change forged modernism in literature, new forms of architecture, and entirely new ways of understanding the universe (quantum mechanics began finding its footing then).

We are not just passive observers of a repeating cycle. We are the navigators of the rhyme. The technology changes—from vacuum tubes to neural networks—but the human task remains the same: to find the signal in the static. To ensure that as the machines get faster, our souls do not merely get cheaper. We must decide, just as they had to a century ago, whether we will be consumed by the roar, or if we will learn to conduct the music.