Deus ex machina

My kids are avid readers of and listeners to Greek mythology. Our oldest started reading mythology books in the evening, and she has a massive number of names and details in mind for quick recall. Recently both kids used their TV time to make their way through Disney's "Hercules" animated TV show (voiced by a surprisingly large number of big name '90s actors). Our youngest listens to "Percy Jackson" adventures as audiobooks. The namesake character is a teenage boy whose mortal mother lives in everyday New York and whose father happens to be Poseidon. That was the inspiration for our son's recent birthday party in the park (as well what was probably the first 100% battery powered jumpy house under ARPD permit — a topic for a future blog post). As the books progress, Percy Jackson's adventures battling mythological creatures and navigating the machinations of gods take him to local landmarks recognizable to our kids, including Mount Tamalpais and Mount Diablo.

I've been thinking about those hills and their depiction on the seal of California, behind the Greek goddess Athena. The goddess of wisdom, the goddess of war, the goddess of handicraft. Athena has long felt like an appropriate Greek god to represent the Bay Area, and now especially.

Our home region combines the best of learning and teaching, research and application, culture and craft, and the physical and political power of war-making. The overt signs of that martial past have been fading:

• The Presidio of San Francisco is less associated with its founding as a Spanish military outpost in 1776 and now more known for office buildings in which Star Wars movies and games and "IP" are created.
• Alameda's Naval Air Station and Mountain View's Moffett Field and Oakland's Army Base and Vallejo's Mare Island Naval Shipyard and Concord's Naval Weapons Station and San Francisco's Hunters Point and Treasure Island have all been formally closed and transitioning ever so haltingly to civilian uses. (There are so many of these former military facilities, I'm sure I've missed some.)
• "Kaiser" refers these days to an insurer with a medical practice (or is it a medical practice with an insurer?) not to massive shipyards in Richmond.

When Kirk and Spock visited the San Francisco of 1986, they found a Bay Area in transition. The orange portions on a street map highlighting the still active military installations in Alameda ("nuclear wessels"), San Francisco and Richmond (maybe the Point Molate Naval Fuel Depot?):

Consider the contrast of today's de-militarized Bay Area with the view from the window while landing at San Diego's civilian airport — that's an aerial tour of bases supporting every military service branch, plus the Coast Guard and V.A. and whatever else.

And yet, it would be disingenuous to pretend all the warships sailed off and only visit during Fleet Week. The industries — and industriousness — of the Bay Area still very much support the United States's so-called strategic industries:

• Lawrence Livermore's fusion breakthrough may have been covered in the press as an advance in clean energy. Maybe. But it was also a signal to the other nuclear powers of the world that the U.S. now has the potential to safely perform testing, data collection, and modeling of reactions that are otherwise banned by international treaties. Like Athena, knowledge and war.
• Some employees of Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and other large IT vendors have become publicly uncomfortable with some of the major customers supported by their organizations. (No need to include Oracle on that list, since one probably must leave all of one's qualms at the door to those offices.) A relational database is just a database... a spreadsheet is just a spreadsheet... an AI-enabled automated data movement platform is just a bunch of script tied together with bailing wire sold to you for a lot of money... and yet even the most mundane of information technologies (punchcards) can operationalize atrocities. Thanks to the intrepid SF bureau chief for The New York Times and a Salesforce employee brave enough to leak Slack screenshots, we can see how enthusiastically some salespeople are currently pitching their software to support ICE's hiring of even more masked and armed officers. The new release of the Salesforce CRM apparently featured less ohana and more banality of evil.
• The current rush to build large language models as (potential) foundations for new forms of software — and (potential) new fields of international competition — has turned the graphics cards of PC gamers into the priciest of commodities. Nvidia is making so much $$$$$ selling its GPUs (and paying so much stock-based compensation to their employees) that their tax payments have been surprising the State of California.
• As a kid when I would visit my dad in his various offices at Hewlett -Packard Laboratories, we'd often first drive through a gate, even though their work was for civilian/commercial purposes. HP had fenced off all of their facilities after a radical group exploded a bomb in a company building. I recalled the vague story, but never knew exactly when it was. It was in 1976 according to the LA Times, as well as according to the bombers' typewritten newsletter that's been scanned and archived online:

• That newsletter notes how David Packard had temporarily left the company to serve as the deputy secretary of defense for Nixon. However, they don't note, since it's more recent and perhaps not of interest to the SLA, that to honor Packard's successful procurement reforms, the US Department of Defense each year presents the David Packard Excellence in Acquisition Award for "exemplary innovation and best acquisition." Like Athena, knowledge and war (and perhaps also a hint of Dunder Mifflin).
• As an adult, working for a mapping startup, I joined my boss on a trip to Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto. Tesla had installed our open-source software into its car's infotainment systems to plan routes and turn-by-turn directions. Maybe we could negotiate a support package to actually get them to pay for all of our work — our wisdom. The visit was uncanny since the last time I had entered that specific building was as an elementary school-aged student visiting my dad. The generous lab floors and trademark cubicles of HP Labs had been replaced by open-floor plans of man after man at standing desk. No need to mention the unproductive outcome of the days' meetings...
• From one story I recall, that particular building was originally built by HP to have an in-house chip fabrication research facility. The fab portion was seismically isolated from the rest of the complex, to minimize vibrations. In 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, the fab moved one way; the office part of the building moved the other way; however the building's engineers never considered that possibility when they ran fire sprinkler lines throughout the entire complex. Those water lines sheered. In my dad's telling, the earthquake shook the books and papers off everyone's shelves. Then the foam panels suspended from the ceiling started showing water stains. Upon reaching saturation, the slush of the panels fell down and mixed with the papers on the floor. To clean up the mess required snow shovels. Anyway, the silicon handicraft of that fab has presumably been replaced by Tesla engineers writing "Beast Mode" for "Full Self Driving" mode in the "Cybertruck."
• If we visited in the evening, my dad and I would often walk past the janitors — full employees of HP — buffing the floors. In another HP office complex, we'd sometimes stop by the library staffed by librarians (also employees), stocked with shelves of books and generous discard bins of books you could take home. Tesla certainly doesn't employ janitors or librarians, or buy books. (Elon Musk: war without wisdom.) The Bay Area is much worse off for no longer having large corporations that in addition to paying their "10x engineers" also directly employ and provide benefits to all of their equally necessary support staff.

I feel fortunate to have work that enables me to use technical skills without involvement in the Bay Area's war-making side. (Also not related to online advertising or gambling — which may not be war-making, but also certainly aren't knowledge-producing.) And yet, that image of Athena in front of the Golden Gate shades all our regional wealth and all our regional power with some moral ambiguity.

(Speaking of ambiguity: According to Wikipedia, various regions of California lay claim to the seal. Note the snow added to the peaks. Is it Mt. Tam or a mountain in the Sierras? And to heighten the moral grayness of this blog post, we can also add that the fellow who is credited with creating that seal for California was later the first general to die in the Civil War — according to Wikipedia — on the Confederate side. The seal also obviously makes no visual references to California's pre-European peoples, even though their descendants are still here while that gold miner is not. Unlike Athena, this land didn't pop out fully formed from Zeus's head.)

The Trump administration's latest threats of federal forces have perhaps been called off from the Bay Area thanks to Trump's momentary deference to our mythical protector Athena and to our much less mythical "demigod" billionaires, each self-identifying with totems of our regional capabilities of "wisdom" (CRMs and LLMs), war (GPUs and LLMs), and handicraft (Levi's jeans... and LLMs). On Thursday, the same day as local officials began confirmed the cancellation of additional federal forces (although with no comment on the ICE agents already targeting immigration courthouses), Trump expressed an interest in buying equity in quantum computing startups, juicing stocks in Palo Alto and in Berkeley. "Quantum supremacy," here we come!

Deus ex machina belongs only in my kids' books – and yet we are now, in a world of capricious power.

Let's hope for a future in which we are all again mere mortals – however imperfect and however committed to our technological arms – once more living alongside each other, equal in a nation of laws.