YOUR AI AGENT NEEDS A WORKFLOW ENGINE.
The billboard stands by a nondescript stretch of highway somewhere between Redwood City and Mountain View. A boom, likely a bubble, made manifest. A cry of triumphant return. And probably one day, a monument to a bubble bursting. All hype seems destined to furnish tomorrow’s ruin. But for now, this ruin in waiting stands by the side of Highway 101 to inform us that our AI agent needs a workflow engine.
Exactly 101 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald described a postindustrial wasteland on Long Island, “halfway between West Egg and New York,” with a giant billboard towering over it, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. This stretch of highway may be less desolate than what Fitzgerald described, but the billboards seem just as unsettling and disconsolate as the unnerving, faceless eyes of the fictive Queens optometrist.
Fitzgerald uses those eyes to find something sublime amid capitalist kitsch: the ephemera of consumer culture come to watch over and judge their creators, with the bizarre advertisement standing in for last things: God, fate, judgment, time. I feel judged by “Your AI Agent Needs a Workflow Engine.” First of all, because I had no idea, having left my AI agent lamentably bereft of a workflow engine. Second, because I don’t even have an AI agent. And third, because I have no clue what any of it means. Like Rilke before the torso of Phoebus Apollo, I pass before the monument and get a sense that I am being told to change my life. Unlike Rilke, I have no idea what is wrong or how to go about remedying it.
The fact that this billboard poses an unremitting demand, but that even on repeat drive-bys I cannot for the life of me figure out what that demand is, says something about the company it’s advertising. A company that, by the way, I have already forgotten. American billboards tend to be solicitous: they offer you a McDonald’s, a world-famous geyser, a strip club, they tell you it’s only five miles, and which exit to take. But these are the least solicitous billboards imaginable, solitaires throning over the highway, haughty and without any desire to be understood.
In this respect, this sphinx feels like a perfect distillation of Silicon Valley. The billboard makes a demand without being able to clearly express what that demand consists of. This billboard seems to be telling a story about something entirely different: the fact that people no longer project onto this region what they once did, and that the region has therefore ceased to offer a screen for those projections.
This is by and large a new phenomenon. “What has happened to Silicon Valley?” is one of those questions that’s so broad as to be unanswerable. In recent years, the technology sector has extended its already dominant position. Almost all of the “Magnificent Seven”—the incredibly valuable tech companies Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—have more than doubled their market value in the last five years (in the case of Nvidia, by 1,300 percent). While the market capitalization of these companies accounted for approximately 12 percent of the S&P 500 stock index in 2020, that number reached 35 percent in 2025. The superrich among their founders had accumulated absurd wealth by 2010. Today, one would have to coin a superlative beyond absurdity to even remotely characterize their wealth. We live in a world of budding trillionaires, with payouts that exceed the gross domestic product of many industrialized nations.
Their political influence too has grown. In the 2010s, the major tech companies lived in fear of regulation; in the 2020s, they seem to have either checkmated the regulatory state or simply acquired it. Just ten years ago, SpaceX was offering its services to NASA as a supplier. Now, it is well on its way to merging with the US space program. Thanks to the crypto boom and AI hype, the companies’ tendrils can now be found almost everywhere. Google was once exotic and far away. Today, the nearest data center or logistics hub is probably just a few highway exits away from where you are reading this.
Successive waves of Silicon Valley hype have washed over these billboards and then vanished from the earth. Ten years ago, the billboards overflowed with a cacophony of messages about e-commerce, chatbots, the Cloud. Then there was a moment in 2020 when they fell into disuse, when Silicon Valley—the region, as opposed to Silicon Valley the set of companies—seemed unsure of itself. Campuses along this highway stood empty. The shock of the pandemic was global, but it chipped away at this region’s self-image in a very particular way.
The region, the industry, and its billboards have recovered, and today they appear more triumphant than ever. And yet, as with so much that’s currently making a comeback in the United States—Trumpism, oligarchy, white supremacy—one gets the impression that this isn’t a more-or-less-normal swing of the pendulum. The boom, the bubble, the power that is currently swelling in Silicon Valley, and the ruthlessness with which boom, bubble, and power are presenting themselves by the side of this road, are more or less trying to equate themselves with the fate of the country, of humanity: If our bubble bursts, you, your planet, your future are going down with us. The billboards symbolize the fait accompli that Silicon Valley presents us with: systemic relevance as an all-or-nothing bet.
In the 2010s, Musk promised us the moon: the Hyperloop, an implant that would enhance our brains, a Mars colony. It was a fictional universe that rivaled Marvel or Star Wars. He delivered none of it. Nevertheless, he took over the US government. The supposed creators of yesterday have become the furies of destruction today; the prophets of disruption have become purveyors of “enshittification,” and geniuses have become emperors in new clothes.
The dominance of corporations is increasingly tautological. We owe Elon Musk attention, we owe Meta our time, we owe OpenAI the use of its products, because it is simply our due. In 2025, Palantir CEO Alex Karp published The Technological Republic, his attack on the declining self-confidence of the “Western world.” The West has lost the belief in its own excellence—through postcolonialism, through egalitarian state programs, through postmodern relativism. But tech companies, too, have lost their self-confidence, have gotten “lost in toyland,” and have preferred to create consumer baubles instead of doing something real, where “something real” seems to mean either projecting power or helping the state project power. For Karp, the West’s fundamental problem is that it no longer has an unproblematic relationship with its own dominance. We should be dominant because we are dominant. This is how Silicon Valley dominates today: simply because it does.
Just as Fox News sometimes runs segments with exactly one viewer in mind (President Donald Trump), these billboards have a target audience in the low double digits. It’s unlikely there are billboards for these companies anywhere else in the world, but these companies nevertheless claim world domination. They can justify their valuations only by promising to destroy not just your job, but your entire line of work; by strip-mining your posts, comments, photos. And they can scale only by building a gigantic data center near you, sucking up your water and polluting your air.
These billboards are claims to dominance, but those claims are not addressed to you. You are a mere onlooker to your own domination.
It feels like these billboards are a sunk-cost fallacy given physical form. They appear to be for people who have already invested, or are fairly certain they’re about to invest. This is why they are so maddeningly withholding, so unbearably self-absorbed. For a long time, tech companies reveled in the role of outsiders, even when the basis for this self-conception was rather thin. But the self-driving cars roll through San Francisco courtesy of subsidiaries of the Magnificent Seven. And the AI ecosystem, through the practice of circular financing, resembles a fortified encampment: gigantic companies like Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle all own stakes in one another or are interdependent through licenses, data centers, or chips. Here, too, the focus is no longer on catering to individual consumers or investors, but rather to the state. Because only the state could still save these companies if the sector were to implode—yet again.
The more I try to imagine the kind of person swayed by these advertisements, the more the group shrinks. I doubt that someone working at one of the big venture capital funds, the ones that pride themselves on early access and unerring instincts, would bet on a start-up he found out about from a highway billboard. The real money in Silicon Valley is made well before anyone thinks to put up one of these garish monstrosities.
I begin to picture someone who works for one of the small “family offices,” investment funds charged with increasing the fortune of a single wealthy family. When it comes to venture funds, family offices are often at the back of the line. A venture capitalist would much rather have a pension fund, a university endowment, or a sovereign wealth fund dumping billions into his accounts. As a result, family offices often feel like they’re on the outside looking in. I could imagine one of them looking at one of these billboards and thinking, “They’re no unicorn, but at least they’re an AI company.” The investment world often operates with a distinction between “smart money” and “dumb money.” But here it’s probably more about early and late. The investor swayed by a billboard that simply says caffeine knows they’re getting table scraps.
And that feels like what these billboards—like the faceless eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg a hundred years before—are telling us: so much of our public discourse, so many of our vaunted institutions, so much of our collective attention, care, and heartbreak are sacrificed to the superrich conning one another. What Silicon Valley calls governing is detached from human nature and normal life, even when it comes to technology and the internet. It is fixated on privilege and hierarchies for their own sake. And whatever intellectual ambition it possesses is easily seduced by ideologies that support these privileges and hierarchies.
The C-suites of many iconic companies of the 2010s appear to have shifted dramatically to the right, conservative voices dominate among tech investors, and the heads of the largest social networks have quickly caved to the new government. The tentative and often dishonest attempts to make the tech industry less male and less white are being rolled back all the more vehemently. And emerging fields like crypto and AI are dominated by voices ranging from hyperlibertarian to outright fascist.
The tech elite is in power, but what do they mean by power? It’s about questions of authority, control, oversight, and dominance. What is the understanding of authority and power held by a Peter Thiel, an Elon Musk, or an ordinary venture capital investor?
As you drive, and watch the billboards singing each to each, knowing that they will not sing for you, you also notice that the dominance they project comes at the price of insularity. These billboards promise and demand the world, yet they seem to know less and less of it. “In the lives of emperors,” Italo Calvino’s narrator says in Invisible Cities, “there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.” We may be living in that moment.
Excerpted from What Tech Calls Governing by Adrian Daub, published by Stanford University Press, ©2026 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All Rights Reserved.
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