☕️Interest

• As Peter Thiel observed in his famous Stanford lecture, founders occupy a peculiar place in the Valley's collective psyche, simultaneously worshipped and vulnerable to sacrifice.

• The Valley's founding stories often follow ancient mythological patterns: the outcast-turned-hero (Jobs), the boy-king (Zuckerberg), the Prometheus figure bringing divine fire to mortals (Musk).

• As Thiel observes, the evolution of founders into sacred figures follows a consistent trajectory: the initial blessing (funding), a period of adversity (the "valley of death"), and eventual triumph or failure.

• When founders succeed at scale, their companies can transcend mere business to become something approaching cosmic centers.

• True sacredness is rooted in forms of value that cannot be bought or sold.

• The crypto space serves as a concentrated laboratory for understanding how sacred narratives can be corrupted into sophisticated fraud.

• The attention economy has created a new priesthood, where the sacred rite of "founding" requires no actual founding, only the ability to perform the outward signs of “founding.”

• When a critical mass of sacred narratives is exposed as cynical manipulations, the ability to discern genuine visionaries diminishes.

• This essay is less a prescription than a reckoning, a meditation on what we stand to lose.

• The question isn't whether humans will work, but what kind of work humans do in the gentle singularity. It's not just art, and "creativity" isn't the only skill we'll need.

• Human work will be in Trades, Research, Art, Community, and Stewardship.

• The creator economy accommodates 8 billion creators when what they’re creating is local community. Robots can make products, but humans make connections.

• Community work is relational labor that AI can’t replicate. Genuine connection requires voluntary bonds and physical presence.

• We're going back to old times when your value was tied not just to your “useful” skills but to your integrated role in the community.

• When everyone has the same tools, stewards become curators of possibilities, choosing which solutions to implement, which problems to prioritize, which futures to pursue.

• This concentration of power creates a stewardship dilemma: the bold risk-takers who champion technological frontiers may also steer us in the wrong direction.

• The AI kings promise an artist's utopia, but we're not retreating to pure creativity, and we're not all becoming artists.

• If we want to compete at scale, we’ll have to play harder and smarter and faster. If we want to feel needed, we'll have to go local.

• Human‑centric layer over AI cores: As AI automates reasoning and procedural tasks, humans will shift into roles that emphasize judgment, relationships, and execution.

• Research thrives on curiosity: While AI can handle experiments and optimization, humans excel at choosing meaningful questions and exploring the unknown.

• Art becomes deeply human: With automation handling craftsmanship, genuine art will be defined by human signature, personal meaning, and connection.

• Community building as relational labor: Local, in-person community spaces where humans foster meaningful connections will be uniquely valuable and beyond AI’s reach.

• Stewardship over technological armies: Governance, oversight, and responsibility for AI deployment will remain in human hands, emphasizing emotional intelligence alongside rationality.

Dialectic Ep 21