The End of Thinking: Inside Silicon Valley’s New Generation of Tech Elites

In a sprawling 9,000-word investigation that has sent shockwaves through the tech industry, Harper’s Magazine writer Sam Kriss spent months embedded in San Francisco’s startup scene, emerging with a damning portrait of a culture he describes as “the end of thinking.” His exposé, titled “Child’s Play: Tech’s New Generation and the End of Thinking,” paints a picture of an industry where raw ambition and viral attention have replaced expertise and innovation.

Cluely’s Roy Lee: The Man Who Built a Cheat Code

At the center of Kriss’s investigation is Roy Lee, founder of Cluely, an AI-powered “cheating” application that helps users navigate conversations by feeding them real-time suggestions. Lee’s creation epitomizes what Kriss sees as the troubling new ethos of Silicon Valley: why solve problems when you can automate your way around them?

“His grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do,” Kriss writes, capturing the existential emptiness at the heart of many modern startups. The irony isn’t lost on the author that Lee built his empire on helping others avoid genuine engagement with problems rather than solving them.

The Rationalist Paradox: When Doomsday Preppers Become Arms Dealers

Perhaps the most intellectually provocative section of Kriss’s piece examines the relationship between the Rationalist movement and the AI industry. Scott Alexander, a prominent Rationalist blogger, emerges as a fascinating case study in cognitive dissonance.

Alexander tells Kriss that while his community theoretically believes AI could destroy the world and views tech companies as “evil,” the reality is far more complicated. “The entire industry is essentially an outgrowth of his blog’s comment section,” Kriss notes, highlighting how a movement dedicated to careful, ethical AI development has inadvertently spawned an “artificial arms race.”

“Many of them were specifically thinking, I don’t trust anybody else with superintelligence, so I’m going to create it and do it well,” Alexander explains. The result is a movement that simultaneously fears and enables the very technology it warns against—a contradiction that Kriss sees as emblematic of Silicon Valley’s broader moral bankruptcy.

Eric Zhu: The Teenage Tycoon Who Conquered the Bathroom

The story of Eric Zhu reads like a Silicon Valley fever dream, so absurd it might be dismissed as fiction if not for Kriss’s meticulous reporting. Zhu, who only recently turned 18, built a $20 million venture capital fund while still in high school, conducting business meetings from his school bathroom.

“I convinced my counselor that I had prostate issues,” Zhu admits to Kriss, matter-of-factly explaining his bathroom meetings. The teenager’s entrepreneurial journey involved buying hall passes from drug dealers to attend business meetings, taking Zoom calls with U.S. senators from toilet stalls, and eventually being kicked out of school for his bathroom-based business practices.

What’s most disturbing about Zhu’s story isn’t just its audacity, but his casual attitude toward it all. “I think I was just bored. Honestly, I was really bored,” he tells Kriss when asked about his motivations. When questioned whether anyone could replicate his success, Zhu responds, “Yeah, I think anyone genuinely can.”

This democratization of venture capitalism—where success apparently requires nothing more than boredom and access to Discord servers—represents, for Kriss, the ultimate hollowing out of Silicon Valley’s meritocratic pretensions.

The Agency Economy: When Attention Becomes Currency

Kriss identifies a disturbing trend he calls “the agency economy,” where investors reward young entrepreneurs not for their skills or innovations, but simply for their ability to generate attention and momentum. “Being a highly agentic individual had less to do with actually doing things and more to do with constantly chasing attention online,” he writes.

The case of Donald Boat, an X.com user who successfully goaded Sam Altman into buying him a gaming PC, perfectly illustrates this new economy of attention. Boat’s stunt—which he describes as “a brutally simplified miniature of the entire VC economy”—triggered a cascade effect where others rushed to give him free things simply because Altman had done so first.

“People were giving him stuff for no reason except that Altman had already done it, and they didn’t want to be left out of the trend,” Kriss observes, highlighting how venture capital has devolved into a game of follow-the-leader rather than a system for funding genuine innovation.

The Cheesecake Factory Philosopher

Kriss’s encounter with Boat at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant provides one of the piece’s most memorable scenes. Boat, who had been drinking all day, initially appears “irretrievably wasted” to the author. In reality, this is simply Boat’s baseline state—a perpetual performance of chaotic energy designed to maintain his viral presence.

Boat’s stories read like a picaresque novel of modern digital life: attending an Oasis concert in Los Angeles, ending up in a poker game with weapons manufacturers, making jokes about sending their poker money to China and watching them react with displeasure. His entire existence seems engineered for maximum attention extraction.

“I don’t use that computer and I think video games are a waste of time. I spent all the money I made from going viral on Oasis tickets,” Boat tells Kriss, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of his own grift. His contempt for the tech industry is palpable: “They have too much money and nothing going on.”

The Final Verdict: A System Without Merit

Kriss’s conclusion is devastating: Silicon Valley has created a system that rewards “agency” without requiring actual competence or contribution. “It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency,” he writes.

The implications are profound. If the tech industry’s most powerful investors are no longer looking for expertise, innovation, or even viable business models—if they’re simply rewarding young people for their ability to generate attention and momentum—then what exactly is being built? And more importantly, who is being left behind in this new economy of pure agency?

Kriss’s investigation suggests that Silicon Valley has become a hall of mirrors, where success breeds success not through merit but through the simple fact of having already succeeded. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle that rewards the already rewarded, leaving genuine innovation and expertise to wither on the vine.

The question that lingers after reading Kriss’s exposé isn’t just whether this system can continue, but whether it should. In a world facing existential challenges from climate change to geopolitical instability, is a tech industry built on viral stunts and bathroom-based venture capitalism really the best we can do?

The answer, Kriss suggests, is both obvious and terrifying: we’ve built a system that rewards the appearance of productivity over actual productivity, and in doing so, we may have built our own obsolescence into the very foundations of our digital future.

Tags: Silicon Valley, AI ethics, startup culture, venture capital, tech industry, Rationalist movement, viral marketing, meritocracy, innovation crisis, digital attention economy, teenage entrepreneurs, tech criticism, Harper’s Magazine, Sam Kriss, Scott Alexander, Roy Lee, Eric Zhu, Donald Boat

Viral Sentences:

• “His grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do.”
• “I convinced my counselor that I had prostate issues… I would buy hall passes from drug dealers to get out of class, to have business meetings.”
• “I think I was just bored. Honestly, I was really bored.”
• “They have too much money and nothing going on.”
• “It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency.”
• “A brutally simplified miniature of the entire VC economy.”
• “People were giving him stuff for no reason except that Altman had already done it, and they didn’t want to be left out of the trend.”
• “Being a highly agentic individual had less to do with actually doing things and more to do with constantly chasing attention online.”
• “The entire industry is essentially an outgrowth of his blog’s comment section.”
• “Many of them were specifically thinking, I don’t trust anybody else with superintelligence, so I’m going to create it and do it well.”

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