Congratulations, You’ve Successfully Networked Yourself Into a Spreadsheet!
Witness Y Combinator Sex Trafficking!!
Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Around here, innocence is just an unmonetized customer acquisition channel.
Ding!
2:41 A.M.
Discord.
Another notification.
Another twenty-year-old founder announcing he’s “shipping.”
“Someone should do a study about how I fell off…”
Nobody builds software anymore. They ship. They deploy. They accelerate. They “cook.”
The only thing anyone seems incapable of shipping is a complete sentence.
My name is Jack Rouen. Asian Studies major.
Currently building a biohacking platform because apparently that’s considered a more respectable midlife crisis than buying a Corvette.
I live down on the Peninsula with my wife and kid. We eat dinner together. We own actual chairs instead of modular productivity furniture. Nobody in my house has ever interrupted bedtime to ask whether a bedtime story could be “AI-native.”
By Silicon Valley standards we’re basically an isolated mountain tribe.
Yet every few days I wander back into civilization.
Or at least whatever civilization has evolved into between Palo Alto and SoMa.
Let’s see how far we can take this logic and what the end of the logic actually is.
…
The invitation arrives through Partiful.
Of course it does.
Every event description reads like it was generated by the same language model trained exclusively on Burning Man flyers and McKinsey slide decks.
Curated founders.
Intentional conversations.
Builders only.
Translation:
One hundred and twenty men.
Three women.
Four venture capitalists.
One photographer.
Zero self-awareness.
The photographer is the busiest person in the room.
Nobody wants memories.
They want evidence they were standing near someone whose valuation recently exceeded their cholesterol.
Look around. The venue smells like San Francisco trying to convince itself it’s Zurich.
Fresh espresso.
Sourdough.
Expensive perfume.
Cedar from reclaimed wood furniture.
Somewhere nearby, scented candles drift out of an old storefront, mixing with the sweetness of boba tea and artisanal coffee.
Then the breeze changes…
Urine.
Hot electronics.
A faint chemical sweetness that suggests somebody is conducting pharmaceutical research with absolutely no institutional oversight.
The city has developed its own bouquet.
Top notes: venture capital.
Base notes: municipal collapse.
…
A founder materializes beside me with the stealth of an HR department.
“So…” he says,
“…what are you building?”
Not, “What do you enjoy?”
Not, “How’s your family?”
And certainly not, “Who are you?”
Those questions don’t scale.
“I’m building a biohacking platform.”
His pupils dilate.
Finally, a respectable religion!
He nods with solemn approval, as I’ve just confessed belief in the One True KPI.
…
Across the room stands “The Collector.”
Nobody actually introduces him.
People simply begin orbiting.
He’s calm. Measured.
Every sentence sounds like it has already survived three podcast appearances.
People laugh a fraction of a second too early.
They’re not reacting.
They’re investing.
Nearby, someone has laid out glossy founder cards as conversation starters.
Faces.
Company logos.
Funding milestones.
Exit stories.
Adults are comparing them with the seriousness previous generations reserved for baseball cards or rare coins.
“I’ve got a First Cohort.”
“No way.”
“I heard they’re impossible to find.”
“I’ll trade you two unicorn founders and an AI infrastructure guy.”
No one laughs.
That’s when I realize they aren’t joking.
Let’s see how far we can take this logic.
Every civilization manufactures saints.
Rome carved marble.
The Middle Ages collected relics.
Silicon Valley laminates founder bios.
…
The conversation drifts.
Someone explains that AI will eliminate loneliness.
He’s standing in a room full of people who haven’t looked away from their phones for longer than twelve consecutive seconds.
Another founder describes replacing therapists (“the rapist”) with language models.
A third says children should probably have personalized AI companions before they learn cursive.
Everyone nods.
Nobody notices the irony.
I glance toward the projector.
The demo machine briefly flashes the browser history before switching slides.
Half a dozen tabs.
LLM documentation.
Three dashboards.
An alarming amount of furry fan art.
The presenter closes the window with the speed of a man who has rehearsed this exact mistake before.
No one acknowledges it.
Silicon Valley has evolved beyond embarrassment.
Everything is just another tab.
…
And that’s when I look around the room.
Everyone insists they’re rebels.
Everyone dresses identically.
Everyone reads the same newsletters.
Quotes the same podcasts.
Uses the same AI.
Attends the same mixers.
Repeats the same vocabulary.
“Accelerate.”
“Leverage.”
“Network.”
“Founder mode.”
The strangest cults are the ones that spend all day insisting they don’t have a doctrine.
I type a note in my smartphone…
Field Notes, Observation #17:
“The average founder can detect market inefficiencies at one hundred yards but remains completely incapable of detecting status rituals occurring inside his own skull.”
I smile.
Nobody notices.
Who cares? They’re all networking.
- pe / nj
7-29-2026
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