It was another Thursday night in Mountain View — the kind of “casual mixer” that felt like a disguised pitch event. Same bar, same kombucha-on-tap, same algorithmically selected crowd of founders and funders pretending they weren’t job-hunting. Mr. X and I were at our usual corner table, watching a recruiter named Maya make her rounds with the zeal of a missionary selling salvation through stock options.
Except tonight she wasn’t talking about stock options. She was selling synthetic equity — digital shares in “AI colonies” springing up across Austin, Miami, and something called The MetaZon.
“Think of it as relocation with liquidity,” she said. “Remote work made geography obsolete — now we’re monetizing the migration.”
The pitch was absurd but oddly magnetic. For every engineer too fried to finish another sprint, Maya offered a way out: a rent-controlled condo in Austin, a VR penthouse in The MetaZon, or a “founder village” in Miami that promised “communal bandwidth and emotional uptime.”
Mr. X took a sip of his Old Fashioned. “So basically Burning Man with payroll.”
“Not quite,” she replied. “We’re reengineering community for the post-scarcity creative class. Participants earn AI equity — fractional ownership in our proprietary model training network.”
“Equity in the AI itself?” I asked.
“Exactly. The next generation of wealth won’t be geographic — it’ll be algorithmic.”
At this point, Brandon — an angel investor who once bragged about living in a Sprinter van “for the tax efficiency” — joined in. “But if you leave the Bay,” he said, “aren’t you basically shorting your own identity? Like, you can’t just upload ‘founder energy’ from Miami.”
Maya smiled like she’d been waiting for that one. “Identity is portable,” she said. “We’ve tokenized it.”
Everyone laughed, but not in a way that felt like a joke.
Someone else chimed in: “So, if I’m vesting synthetic equity in an AI I don’t control, am I still an entrepreneur — or just human middleware?”
Silence. Only the low hum of startup fatigue and cognitive dissonance.
Mr. X finally broke it. “Geography used to define who we were. Now it just defines your latency.”
Outside, a self-driving shuttle glided past a mural that read ‘Stay Hungry, Stay Here.’ But inside, the question lingered over the half-empty glasses and the soft glow of AR name tags — whether leaving Silicon Valley meant more than moving zip codes. Whether it meant admitting the boom had already left you.
Leave a Reply