This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: are you high-agency or an NPC?

San Francisco is in the throes of an AI-fueled renaissance, buzzing with wealth, 22-year-old techno-prophets, and absurd $100M salaries, even as anxiety simmers beneath the surface. In a city caught between triumph and precarity, the culture has splintered into “high-agency” hustlers poised to surf the AGI wave and “NPCs” drifting toward a permanent, algorithm-sedated underclass.

Key Insights

• High-agency behavior—the ability to adapt, create, and thrive despite uncertainty—is the ultimate currency in AI-era San Francisco.
• NPCs (non-player characters) are those stuck in predictable routines—reliant on corporate jobs, recommendations algorithms, and passive cultural consumption.
• The “permanent underclass” is a looming fear, where post-AGI inequality spikes and many slide into digital sedation.
• Work culture is shifting back to 996-style grind, signaling both real ambition and performative hustle.
• Taste is the new status marker, with founders and VCs signaling cultural cachet to distinguish themselves from AI-automatable players.
• Tech tribes now brand dissenters as “decels” or “doomers,” making skepticism about AI progress a low-status trait.
• Money now functions primarily as status within the SF bubble, as even $180K engineers feel “lower class” next to post-economic peers.

The article paints a vivid portrait of San Francisco’s AI-driven boomtown energy, where wealth gushes post-ZIRP and young coders promise to “solve hurricanes” or the national debt. Parties are lavish, salaries are astronomical, and an unspoken hierarchy has emerged in which agency—not intelligence alone—separates the techno-kings from the soon-to-be-obsolete. Surface-level swagger hides a fragile ecosystem where status anxiety, ironic doomposting, and an obsession with hustle culture define the city’s social metabolism.

The piece dives into the language of this new era: “high-agency” players versus “NPCs,” memes about escaping the “permanent underclass,” and the rise of 996 grind signaling. High-agency individuals are those who can cold-email their way into a dream job, pivot careers, or build companies from nothing—humans who maintain adaptability as their moat against AGI. NPCs, meanwhile, are content to live on algorithms and routines: Starbucks, Spotify, Netflix, and slow career drift toward irrelevance. The tech elite’s humor, like China’s 996 and tangping memes, is a coping mechanism for the underlying fear of being left behind.

Beneath the memes lies a more existential narrative about labor and inequality. AI accelerates returns to capital, decouples profits from payroll, and threatens to entrench a “gentle singularity” where a small techno-elite thrives while the rest dissolve into digital sedation. Concepts like “taste,” “founder mode,” and the social arms race for exclusivity are all strategies for signaling survival in this landscape. Jasmine’s sauna anecdote—overhearing GPU procurement debates in a haze of steam and status games—captures the city’s surreal mix of post-economic abundance and ambient dread, as even AI-rich engineers wonder if they’ll end up above or below the API.

The culture is now defined by tribal performance: techno-optimists versus decels, hustle-posting 996ers versus ironic doomers, taste-makers versus algorithmically numbed NPCs. Yet, despite the bravado, everyone knows the clock is ticking. Agency—not raw intelligence—is the last human moat, and in the next wave of AGI progress, even that may not hold.

• 🤖are you high-agency or an NPC? – A sharp, funny, and chilling exploration of San Francisco’s AI-era social hierarchies, memes, and the looming specter of a permanent underclass.

Summarized by ChatGPT on Sep 22, 2025 at 7:14 AM.