A Prophecy of Silicon Valley's Fall
2010 Valley > 2025 Valley
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” — Will & Ariel Durant.
A prophecy.
The shining beacon of the West, that capital of technology, the place known locally as simply “the Bay,” or “the Valley,” and elsewhere known as Silicon Valley, which remains the only cultural center in America to have surpassed New York City (and yes, it indeed has), and which functions not so much as a strict geographical location but more as a hub of “rich people and nerds” (as Paul Graham once wrote long ago), is right now or very soon reaching its peak, its zenith, its crest, or thereabouts—and will afterward fall.
And it will fall because it has weakened itself from within.
Of course, by any objective metric, this prophecy is absurd. Everyone knows Silicon Valley is poised (or at least it seems poised) on the verge of its greatest achievement in the form of Artificial General Intelligence. AI companies are regularly blitzed into the billions now. But you don’t need prophecies to predict some financial bubble popping or predict that the bar of AGI may be further away than it appears. You do need prophecies to talk about things more ineffable. About mythologies. About hero’s journeys. About villainous origins.
For in the past few years, but especially this year, there is a sense that the mythology of the Valley has become self-cannibalizing, a caricature of itself. Or perhaps it’s best said as: it’s becoming a caricature of what others once criticized it for.
This is one of the oldest mythological dynamics: to become the thing you were unfairly criticized for. A woman accused of being a witch, over and over, eventually becomes a witch. A king accused of being a tyrant, over and over, eventually becomes a tyrant. It’s an archetypal transformation. It’s Jungian, Freudian. It’s Lindy. It’s literally Shakespearean (Coriolanus).
The Valley has operated defensively for decades, under criticisms that it is chock-full of evil billionaires, anti-human greed, and outright scam. At least some of this criticism was fair. Much of it was unfair. Yet the criticisms now seem almost teleological. They have pulled the Valley toward a state characterized by being extremely online and so unable to trust anything outside of itself, a state where founders have become celebrities, explicitly putting humans out of work has become a rallying cry for investment, and new AI startups like Cluely have extremely scammy taglines, like “Cheat on Everything.” Many of its most powerful billionaires seem increasingly disconnected. I go into a two-hour-long podcast with a Big Tech CEO expecting to find, somewhere in the second hour, a mind more sympathetic and human, only to find at the second hour a mind more distant and inhuman than I could have believed.
I’m saying that when people look back historically, there will have been signs.
The most obvious: Silicon Valley (or at least, its most vaunted figure, Elon Musk) was recently handed the keys to the government. Did everyone just forget about this? Think about how insane that is. Put aside everything about the particular administration’s aims, goals, or anything else in terms of the specifics. My point is entirely functional: Silicon Valley did basically nothing with those keys. The Elon Musk of 2025 just bounced right off the government, mostly just cutting foreign aid programs.
Now go back to the Elon Musk of 2010.