i moved back to the US from Cambodia in 2013 - to grad school at Stanford in the Bay Area - and the world felt like it was careening towards deadly tech dystopia to me then.

except it felt like almost no one around me noticed (or cared), which made me feel deeply insane.

i spent a lot of time driving aimlessly around the Bay Area alone at night while listening to . @BigDataBigData - i still remember driving over the Dumbarton Bridge very late, right by the Facebook HQ, and *knowing* the world was ending

also I would go to the In-N-Out Burger by the Google campus and watch very obvious Big Deal Googlers eating french fries late at night under very bright lights - they were the ones ending the world! and most of them didn't even know it!

i'm really not saying this to prove i'm cool and prescient: i was, at the time, even more of a neurotic freak than i am right now. people who think the world is ending are horrible company, until it's actually ending, and then at least you can comiserate

this was my other 2013-2014 Oh God The World is Collapsing Into Surveillance Horror And I Am The Cursed Human Nerve-Ending, the Sweaty Millennial Angelus Novus, Fated to Fleetingly See Its Enormity theme

California is my home and I've lived there off-and-on since I was 13 in 2001 - and visiting San Francisco that entire time, which means my growing into maturity coincided exactly with the collapse of the Bay Area into a terrible mish-mash of poverty and fancy spires of wealth.

Which, in context, does sort of explain why my life has gone the way it has - when you actively grow up with the direct evidence of the impending data-driven collapse of all things everywhere!

in all fairness, my parents also did not supervise my internet use at all which meant i *was* that 14 year old on IRC boards devoted to anime, and you know, Something Awful and 4chan

i'm sure i'd be much more boring today without all that early, uh, cultural exposure

but regardless! 2013 to 2014 Bay Area! that was wild! you were there, many of you - many people there were, in retrospect, so deliriously hopeful. nothing could go wrong. especially if you were at Stanford, the Elysium Fields of flawless universities! death cannot grab you here!

in 2014, the first rumblings of anger over the tech buses for Facebook and Google began. some people threw rocks at tech buses. this was a huge story.

in retrospect this was merely an early sign of a great and terrible acceleration

too, the 2013 shutdown. the GOP motherfuckers: crazy enough to shut down the government! but then it ended. we really should have taken that as an omen.

2013 and 2014 were full of omens - that I saw - but i was pretty sure i just had a bad case of post-expat crazy.

is this another defining millennial experience? you react with terror and dread to current events. you are reassured this is an overreaction. you talk to a therapist. you feel better.

and, then, the world confirms to you in brilliant detail that you were right to be afraid!

we are in the midst of a great, collective, societal Fear Modulation. Our fear was wrong-sized, or we thought we were nuts when it was right.

now we must right-size our fear. no one *likes* this, but the alternative is getting eaten by a tiger.

(in this metaphor technology is the tiger, and look, it's late and i'm filled with a weird mix of both nostalgia and lingering horror when reflecting on the state of things in 2013-2014 in Silicon Valley)

is it even a coherent argument, that i'm making here? i think back to 2013 Stanford and i recall so clearly the perfection of the mowed grass, like someone had been paid to cut it with scissors (on their knees). a banal observation, but still, always there.

at the time, the assumption was that we (the privileged, who i realize that I am and always have been) would always be fine, one way or another, and would always have nice manicured lawns and VC funding for our little dumb ideas. (I did not buy this, but I wanted to!)

you may recall right after Trump won, that various wise pundits confidently stated that the election would not materially change "our" (the privileged class) daily lives, and that we should calm down. this was bullshit. our lives changed less, but change they did.

another banal term: "you're not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you." i believe that in 2013-2014 in the Bay Area, there was a clear sense that politics and the outside world were largely irrelevant to the pursuit of VC money/lawns/minimalist homes.

but it is always interested. there is no place you can be on this earth where the monsters cannot get you, or at least, get close enough to you to make you afraid.

this is the ultimate lesson that a lot of Americans, especially of the Bay Area and Brooklyn and Cambridge ilk must learn. (you can, God knows, protect yourself far better than most if you are rich and white and fancy - but there is no certainty)

i also suspect a lot of my passion for being mean about big tech dreams is rooted in this 2013-2014 experience - i came so close to being seduced by it! the promises of VC funding and lawns! it embarrasses me. (perhaps it wouldn't have been so terrible, but i guess i prefer this)

and god, it is so seductive. i don't believe there is such a thing as an aggressive tech critic (like me) who isn't to some extent dazzled by the beautiful dream of saving the dying world with a beautiful tool, a God-like object. it is deep within human nature.

If I could do it, if I believe humanity could do it, I would absolutely forge the Tool Of Salvation! I would make that fucker and use it everywhere and bask in the gazillions of dollars and adulation that would follow me everywhere I went like a cloud of butterflies.