Silicon Valley's Agency Won't Save You

I spent years in venture development, which means I learned a dialect before I thought to question it. In the VC custom, people sort.

There are the ones who make things happen and the ones things happen to, the high-agency and the low, the live players and the rest. It's the simple human urge to use heuristics to label people: silent and deadly prejudice. As part of the job I used the words as praise, and I used their absence as a quiet way to file someone under not-worth-the-follow-up.

I want to make it clear that it was easy to become part of the problem, because the flood of essays coming out of San Francisco lately, on agency, NPCs, taste, the permanent underclass, the gold rush, the return of hustle, makes me recognize myself. I still feel the language wanting to be true. And the fears of judgment rear their heads: Do I have NPC taste? Will I be part of the underclass?

Three Coats, One Fear

Strip the discourse down and the same three anxieties keep surfacing, usually filed as separate conversations. There is automation: the fear of losing your work to a model and dropping into what the essays call, with startling candor, a permanent underclass. There is sorting: the conviction that humanity divides cleanly into high-agency people and NPCs, live players and dead ones, those above the API and those below. And there is taste: the claim that once intelligence is cheap, judgment becomes the last scarce thing, the final moat a person can hold to have any sort of marketable value.

Three problems, supposedly. They are one fear in three coats. Each of them only generates this much dread if you have already swallowed a premise so deep it almost never gets said aloud: that a human being is what a human being produces. Grant it and the rest is arithmetic.

If you are your output, a machine that can outproduce you is not a rival but an executioner. If you are your output, the world obviously splits into those who generate and those who merely consume, and the second group slowly stops looking like people in a hard season and starts looking like furniture. If you are your output, then when the output is automated you will lunge for the one faculty not yet commoditized, christen it taste, and clutch it like a plank in open water. The premise does all the work, and nobody examines the premise.

The Steelman, Paid in Full

I have to concede something here, because the cheap version of this essay pretends the agency people are fools, and they are not. They are right about agency. Initiative is real. Adaptability is real. Learned helplessness is a real condition with real casualties, and the cult of structural explanation really can become a narcotic for the passive, a fluent way to narrate why you could not, while someone standing in the same broken institution simply routed around it and built the thing. I have watched both. I have watched people fail for reasons that were purely structural, and I have watched people fail while generating, on demand, a flawless account of structural reasons. Now and then it was the same person on different days. The high-agency crowd has its hand on something true: you almost always have more room to move than your story admits, and the story is frequently the trap that keeps you from taking the risk you should.

I am not going to take that from them. Their error is not believing in agency. Their error is what they did with it: they took a real virtue and promoted it to a verdict. A fundamentalism. Agency stopped being something you exercise and became something you are, the thing that decides whether you count at all.

A Ledger With No Auditor

And the instant agency becomes the thing you are, you have built a machine that can never let you rest. This is the part the discourse cannot say to itself. If your standing as a full human is something you establish by output, it is something you must re-establish continuously, because output is a flow and not a state.

No amount of shipping ever converts into being enough, because enough is not a line item the market keeps. There is always next year's cohort to be out-produced by, so the striving has no floor and no last page. The permanent underclass, read closely, is not an economic forecast at all. It is the shadow the system needs in order to define the saved. You require the NPC so that you can be sure you are not one. The sorting was never describing other people. It is maintenance on your own status, performed daily, forever.

None of this is new; only the costume is. Long before Silicon Valley there was a strain of Weber’s famously anxious Protestantism that turned salvation into a ledger of works and then could never tell you the ledger was balanced, so people labored and watched themselves labor, hunting their own productivity for proof they were among the elect. The Valley has rebuilt that machine almost part for part, with one renovation: it removed the God who could, in principle, have closed the account and declared a person finished. What remains is the anxiety with nothing on the far side of it, an election with no one authorized to elect. You are sorting yourself into the saved and the damned in a building with no judge, which is exactly why the sorting never stops.

I have a name for the deeper condition, borrowed from work I did long before any of this was topical. Call it metaphysical amnesia: the modern habit of forgetting that a person might hold worth that exists, in the old phrase, prior to and independent of anything he does. Strip that away and a human being is nothing but the social slots he occupies and trades. The agency gospel is not the cause of the amnesia. It is what the amnesia sounds like once it gets ambitious.

Taste, and the Thing It's Groping For

The taste anxiety is the same fear at altitude, and it is the most interesting of the three, because it is reaching toward something genuinely real and then fumbling it. When intelligence is cheap, the argument runs, taste becomes scarce, the irreducibly human judgment that says this is worth making and that is not. There is something right in this, the way there is something right in all of it. But notice what the discourse does with the insight almost immediately: it converts taste into status. Taste becomes a marker of who is inside, a sensibility you either have or pitifully lack, the last credential separating the curatorial elite from the people stuck consuming whatever the algorithm extrudes.

That is a debasement of the real thing, and the real thing is worth naming precisely, because it is the strongest card any human holds. The machine has no telos. It will optimize any objective you hand it and has never once, in the dark, wanted something of its own. It cannot author an end; it can only pursue one. This is the namesake of this very publication: AI has no purposiveness in it, no final end towards which it was created to fulfill and no way to do it itself.

So the genuinely scarce commodity in this economy is not taste-as-vibe but verified human authorship of ends, the departure from the mean that we call insight in matters of truth, style in matters of beauty, and character in matters of the good. The machine is a vast and beautiful regression to the median. A person worth the name is the one who leaves it on purpose and can say why.

You cannot buy that, which is the joke the Valley keeps walking into. In late 2025 the trade press reported that Slow Ventures had opened a Finishing School for founders, etiquette, comportment, how to carry yourself in a room. Read uncharitably it is tech founders learning which fork to use. Read closely it is the soteriology noticing its own gap and grabbing the nearest tool: install taste as a technique, a credential earned in a weekend instead of a character grown into across years.

Even the rebuttal stays inside the cage of its assumptions: Garry Tan waved the school off: you don't need finishing school, you need to build something great, because the truly rich are wealthy in relationships, not appearances. He is reaching for something real, but watch his hand. He doesn't drop the sorting, he moves the saving mark from manners to craft. Appearances are works; shipping is also works. He swapped a shallow merit for a worthier-sounding one, the vocabulary went holier, and the structure did not budge.

And it cannot get him what he wants, because authorship of ends is formed slowly, by submitting to a tradition long enough to be changed by it, and the same gospel that worships taste also worships exit. Route around the broken institution. Leave the failing city. Build the utopian network state somewhere cleaner, somewhere with less regulation.

Two Exhibits

If the premise is too abstract in the philosophy, it is perfectly legible in the business press. Somewhere right now a person is being paid a few dollars to physically move an object on a software agent's command, hired to be the literal hands that prove a bot is human, the residue of a labor market in which the cheapest thing a person can sell is the bare fact of his physical presence. That would be rentahuman.ai, YCombinator backed.

That is the floor. For the ceiling, consider that the writer Trung Phan recently posted the AI build-out's supply-chain bottlenecks by year: GPUs in 2023, power and transformers in 2024, memory and networking in 2025, and for 2026, deadpan, “CPUs, optics, SF prostitutes.” It was a joke about a real article. Forbes had just run a piece on the economics of intimacy during the boom, where the going rate has slipped its old moorings entirely, thousands an hour, tens of thousands for a weekend.

The scandal is not the prurience. It is the grammar. Intimacy entered the list in the same breath as silicon and cooling, one more input bid up by the same demand, one more bottleneck on the road to scale. When a human is fully an economic function, no part of the human stays off the market, not even the parts that were supposed to be the refuge from it. The escort priced like a GPU is not a malfunction of the system. She is the system telling the truth.

What the Discourse Can't Mention

So read it all again and notice the words that almost never appear. Dependence. Obligation. The body, with its limits and its sleep. Forgiveness, and failure that does not end the story. People who are plainly, obviously not NPCs and who have never scaled a thing in their lives. Work that is necessary and unglamorous and quietly holds the world up. An old widow, carefully and slowly loving her neighbors after a century of experiences. A child, who is worth more than you can compute and has produced, to date, nothing at all. None of it fits a story built on output and escape, because all of it slows the story down and ruins the sorting. That absence is the whole tell. The reason you fear the underclass, the reason taste curdled into your last redoubt, the reason it feels natural to file your fellow human beings into players and the played, is not that you thought too hard about what a person is. It is that you forgot the question was ever on the table. The fear is the symptom. The amnesia is the disease.

I don't think the cure is to lecture the Valley about its soul, partly because the lecture would be cheap and partly because I am not standing far enough outside of the economic machine to deliver it.

The fears underneath all this are real, of irrelevance, of being outrun by systems you neither designed nor control, and they deserve a better answer than the one the agency gospel offers, which is to run faster and pray you are on the right side of the line when the music stops. That the AI bear eats your friend instead of you. The better answer starts by recovering what got misplaced: that you were a person before you produced anything, that your worth was never a flow you had to keep topped up, and that a life can be full, can be, in the only audit that finally clears, a success, without scaling, without escaping, without ever once qualifying as a live player.

Agency matters. It does not save, and it was never the thing that made you a person to begin with. Any story that sorts the world cleanly into players and NPCs will, in the end, find a way to justify cruelty toward the NPCs, rarely loudly. Usually politely, with good vibes and clever language and an air of inevitability. It gets there because a story that has forgotten what a person is cannot help, sooner or later, but mistake some persons for table-setting.

The danger was never that we would build machines that think. It is that we would forget we once obviously knew we were more than machines ourselves.