"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."

I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.