Scores and Power, Agency and Anxiety

Last month, when my family came to visit us in San Francisco, my sister-in-law commented that people here are obsessed with changing the world. She wasn't wrong, and I gave her an almost twenty-year-old Paul Graham essay as homework to explain the particular citywide psychosis she had noticed: in a city full of smart, high-agency people, everyone is anxious about the ever-rising bar for doing anything consequential. In *Cities and Ambition*, Graham argues that every city whispers a specific instruction to its residents. New York tells you to be richer. Boston, or really Cambridge, tells you to be smarter. The Bay Area pushes you to be more powerful. And when Graham talks about power, he does not mean inherited money or political access. He means our ability to affect the world. Whoever controls the platform, the network, the protocol, or the model is powerful. They control the future. This week I attended two book talks hosted by Bloomberg Beta on the same day. In the afternoon, Theo…