Zugunruhe

Their feathers are matted. Their eyes are deep anxious pools. And despite their cages, still they flap their wings, restless, desperate. It's winter in Colorado, and the birds can smell it in the air. Even when the food keeps coming and the heat never turns to cool, they need to get out.

It's Zugunruhe, the despair that overtakes migratory animals who get stuck in one place. Those who for generations have flown rather than stayed need to keep moving; where relatives might hunker down in beak-drilled holes or stolen furs, these birds make migration to better lands.

I am familiar. Every week last year, I'd land just enough to puff up my feathers in Atlanta before going back to warm the nest in San Francisco. The weather turns from fog to sun and back to fog and already those engines are spinning me back.

Walk around any reputable computer science department, and ask what people want. The first thing, of course, is to get out. Leave your city to Silicon Valley, or New York, or Austin. And then the second thing they want, of course, is to get out. Retire to some quiet suburb where they can preen some hobby. Most young technologists I meet are anxious to get their next internship, anxious to know the right shibboleths to get them a stable career and place them into the woodwork. It's expected that you work there for at least a year—but the common advice is to quit and move up in the world. You can make more money by fluttering away than by sticking around. And the technology too, is always moving—any sufficiently old codebase has strata to it of the preferred stacks/ideologies of the time. No doubt people were rewarded for their staying up to date, for their ambulatory mind: the movers-and-shakers rewrite it in rust.

I grew up running in the wetlands of the south bay, half superfund site (a high school girlfriend's mother drank only bottled water for fear of the water supply's corruption by the early chip industry), half superfunded suburbs (courtesy of google). You can see that ninety percent of the original marsh is gone, and with it many of the birds that adapted for the environment. So too is the story of the banking sector in SF, its branch of the Fed the vestigial arm of the once banking capital, rest of its body wholesale eaten by tech. Silicon Valley used to be the place where the real startups ran, but even it seems eager to migrate north this season.

Today, San Francisco is the tech conference that never ends. It is overwhelming, the billboards with strange AI-generated dogs, the buses plastered with unbiblical words, the giant neon pingpong balls anxiously bouncing around salesforce tower through the night. It has an air of evanescence to it, as if the city the actual people live in will emerge from underneath the carpet of marketing whenever the conference wraps up. But it never does, and the bacchanalian venture dollars keep flowing; new attendees pour in from every corner of the world. Immigrants descend in flocks for byzantine visas, feast on three letter acronyms and ten dollar lattes. When you go to comic-con, the streets are filled with strange costumes and otherworldly creatures that make the rest of the town feel out of place, even though locals outnumber guests 12:1. When you go to the Bay, businesses outside of tech feel anachronistic and uncomfortable, even though their employees outnumber tech 9:1. By the entrance to UCSF is a bus-stop plastered with a sickly-grey woman's face advertising Piper, the AI SDR, and every day, nurses pass by bewildered, not knowing what an SDR even is. Much of the city exists in perpetual state of occupation for the outsize minority that has landed here, in constant costume until the conference ends. Which it never does.

Everyone is here like the birds, here for opportunity and network effects and food—the getting while the getting is good. Many of my best and brightest friends growing up were children of immigrants, and many of them felt (were forced to feel?) a sense of urgency in hitting the commons before it was eaten in full. My parents didn't expect it of me, but I felt it on the monkeybars and in the classroom on test day. No doubt I genuinely wanted to work full time in high school, then in college— but it is impossible to ignore the internal pressure to be the best while there was an industry to be the best in. When the getting isn't good, when we can do better, we as a species have a way of migrating. Maybe this is the history of our state, gold rushes and dot com booms, or maybe it's our destiny manifesting as a nation.

There is little loyalty to this city of mine. Once, featherless wings left San Francisco daily for Bali, carrying on them a sense that we can do better than we do here. If you can't recognize it, try and taste it in the water coming down from Hetch Hetchy with the tourists, see it in the smiles of weekend commuters who can only find dates in New York, in the incoherent social media rambles off of ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru. If she were there, Rachel Carson might have noticed in March of 2020 how quiet it was on market street, how from the Twitter headquarters, there was barely a chirp. For the longest time, our society has been constrained socially by how well we can collaborate, but it seems to me we are becoming more like the birds. No longer do you need to live in Montmartre to be a great artist, Murray Hill to reinvent engineering. There is better, more readily available food the world over, and so we go, invasive species to ourselves. In the information age, there is less keeping us rooted in place. Long before whole brain emulation, most of us already spend our days making countless glass-quiet commutes between us-west-2 and us-east-1.

It seems the current AI hype has worsened all of this. More and more among old college friends there's a sense that you need to get good at machine learning now or get left behind. People can see their jobs flying into the server as birds into jet engines. Campuses seem rookeries for thousands of GPT wrappers ready to take off and land in the bay. People who once studied compilers or physics or entomology are now looking to do their part in scaling intelligence, are praying they can make it in before the cold snap. If your eyes are peeled you can see a hundred CVs fattening up ahead of the long flight.

A friend once told me we arrived in SF as part of the same cohort, like two geese in the same 'v'. Two big idiot birds of the same pod, drafting tailwinds, shitting all over the park (too on the nose for SF?). Since dropping out, I've resolved to stay a while, fight the impulse to treat my time in the city as I might a trip on one of its ferries. But lately I've been feeling that pathological need for change. Despite how much I love what I do at Neuralink, despite finding it fulfilling and interesting, despite every incentive to stay put, my wings are starting to flap of their own accord. Bird that I am, I don't know where I need to go so much as that I need to. Not from this city, but from this work and this state of mind. I'd like to think that we're not entirely the same, though. The birds fly far away because they think the seasons are going to make their homes and habits unlivable; their anxiety to migrate is almost a form of generational trauma. But I could live like this forever. I'd like to think what drives me is almost a generational optimism. I have a sense that I can winter anywhere if need be, that the trade winds fluttering for me thousands of miles away are peculiarly accessible, that there are nests in every stone hollow and cairns on every trail. Zugunruhe translates from German as migration anxiety, but perhaps it's better understood as migration optimism. The history of technology can be read as less of a smash and grab of opportunity in the present, but a societal migration away from the misconceptions of our ancestors— a belief that you can just keep finding better places for me and you, better planets, even. A 'v' flying forward. Progress.