One year later, is the River winning?

The paperback edition of On the Edge is out today.

The paperback edition of my recent book, with a new foreword and a cheaper price, is out today! You can find it at your favorite online or brick-and-mortar retailer. After I publish this, I’m also headed to a couple of Barnes & Noble locations in New York — at Union Square and also on 5th Avenue at 46th Street — to sign some autographed copies.

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On the Edge was published on August 13, 2024 — that is, almost exactly one year ago. We’d carefully chosen the date to fall in the lull in between the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention, hoping to have a quiet little news cycle to ourselves.

Instead, the book launched amid one of the most frenzied periods in American political history. On June 27, Joe Biden turned in the most disastrous debate performance of all-time.¹ On July 13, Trump was shot while delivering a speech in Pennsylvania. Eight days later, Biden dropped out — really, he was pushed — and Kamala Harris essentially wrapped up the nomination by the end of the day.

August 13 was pretty much the exact peak of Kamalamania, a.k.a. Brat Summer. She’d been rising in the polls, albeit never enough to break the race out of toss-up range. But the mood among liberal, college-educated types — i.e., the types of people who tend to buy serious nonfiction — was giddy. The headlines that day were about how Trump had bungled an X Spaces appearance with Elon Musk and how Harris might even win Florida.

From a sales standpoint, this all worked out just fine. Even as we insisted on some diva-ish rules — if you wanted me on to talk about the election, you also had to let me talk about the book — the cluster-bomb of media hits, plus a lot of help from Silver Bulletin readers who had bought plenty of advance copies, sent On the Edge to #5 on the New York Times bestseller list.

The downside was that the timing obscured a pretty dark narrative arc in the book (although some reviewers picked up on it). Erase Brat Summer — to some extent, it was never clear whether it was genuine or an artifact of partisan non-response bias in the polling — and the trajectory of 2024 was that Trump, at age 78 after January 6 and 34 felony convictions, had triumphantly returned to office, with the help of Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires, right at the moment that the world was possibly on the brink of transformation. Meanwhile, Democrats had catastrophically bungled the race by renominating Biden, and hastily choosing his vice president as she rapidly cycled through various rebrands, none of which involved distancing herself from her deeply unpopular boss.

The River and the Village, revisited

The two communities that I identify in On the Edge, the River and the Village, don’t formulate a neat one-to-one mapping with Republicans and Democrats. Still, in the context of an election campaign, it was a close enough approximation. The Village — my name for the risk-averse progressive establishment symbolized by institutions like Harvard and the New York Times — was and remains on its heels, discredited now even among Democrats. The 2020 election might have seemed like a triumph for the Village, with Biden winning by promising a return to normalcy and more competent handling of COVID. But over the next four years, from virtually Biden’s first day in office forward, it misread the mood of voters, treating anyone who wasn’t in the tribe as an alien species.

The River, conversely, is my name for risk-seeking types, people who seek to maximize expected value at every opportunity, canonically associated with Wall Street and Las Vegas and Silicon Valley. Although there are exceptions like the World Series of Poker and the Manifest conference where you can find an undiluted version of the River, it’s generally less of a discrete community than the Village.

Still, I’ve had enough people come up to me and tell me they identify with the River that I think it’s more than just a literary device. The River didn’t used to be associated with Trumpian politics, and most of it still isn’t.² Instead, its politics were traditionally more aligned with the “libertarianish tech-savvy nerds” that Scott Alexander calls the Gray Tribe, the types of people who accuse others of being “too political”.³ But a sizable faction of the River — led by Musk⁴ — sensed an opportunity in 2024. From the earliest days of the race, Trump was always at least as likely as not to win. But with all the expert class being card-carrying members of the Village, the right lacked human capital, and Musk and others figured to benefit by filling the vacuum.

I wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of On the Edge in February and March, at which point Musk’s plan seemed to be working. $TSLA stock doubled during the presidential transition, with the unelected Musk poised to play the role of co-president. But the Trump-Musk relationship didn’t survive even five months.⁵

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has, among other things, raised tariffs to their highest levels since the 1930s, fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, deterred the bright young students that might once have founded unicorn companies from coming to the U.S. in the first place, and struck an agreement with Nvidia, the leading semiconductor manufacturer, that will deal the government in to chip sales to China, potentailly undermining American leadership in an AI race that many Riverians regard as a matter of existential importance. For good measure, it even raised taxes on gambling-related income as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

None of this is in the River’s best interest — you can’t make data-driven decisions if you don’t have reliable data, for instance. But what’s more, you can see the contours of a backlash forming. Many consumers are still boycotting Tesla, even as Musk has retreated to making smutty anime with Grok. In the past year, there have been almost too many sports-betting scandals to count. Vegas may also be entering a bust cycle right as new $5 billion resort projects are on the way. Meanwhile, in a rebuke to the River’s unapologetically capitalistic spirit, a self-avowed socialist is likely to become the next mayor of New York.

A compendium of River-related Google search terms shows more mixed results. (In the charts that follow, I’ve set the baseline to spring 2021 through spring 2024, since that’s when I was reporting and writing On the Edge.) Prediction markets — I’m an advisor to Polymarket — appear to be on a growth trajectory even if sports betting isn’t. A single Bitcoin now sells for almost $120,000, near its all-time high.

And, of course, there’s artificial intelligence, which progressively eats up a larger and larger proportion of both mindshare and capital expenditures. If there’s one thing you absolutely do need to give the River credit for, it’s AI. Both doomers and accelerationists saw this coming years before most people did. And AI is the one area where the White House’s association with the River probably gives it smarter policies than it otherwise might have had.

I’ll mostly stand behind what I wrote in January, which is that the Village and the American left more broadly has been way behind the curve on AI. Even if AI comes in at only, say, the 20th percentile of reasonable expectations — the term “reasonable” is doing a lot of work there, I’ll acknowledge — it could still be one of the most transformational technologies of the century.

My personal view, as a near-daily user of large language models like ChatGPT, is that AI progress has been just a hair slower than people in the River might have expected when I finished the book. But it’s well within the middle of the range — perhaps more like the 40th percentile. I consider this to be a reasonably well-informed view — I track AI progress more than I write about it in the newsletter. At the Manifest conference, for instance, some of the authors of the AI 2027 project, which envisioned a rapid takeoff for AI (very possibly with tragic consequences for us humans) had pushed back their timelines by a year or two.

What’s clearer is that, for better or worse, we’ve thrown out the steering wheel and are accelerating ahead — talk of a pause in AI development has all but disappeared. And I’m not sure even people in either The Village or The River fully appreciate the consequences. I consider Sam Altman’s notion of a “gentle singularity” to be naive, for instance. I’m not as convinced as some other River types that an intelligence explosion is inevitable. (This deserves a longer essay or two.) But as On the Edge reports, profound technological shocks are nearly always accompanied by profound political and cultural transformation. So if we do get a singularity, nothing about it is going to be gentle.

A year after the book came out, perhaps what I feel most of all — I’m sure many of you agree — is that there aren’t a lot of adults in the room. One of my critiques of the Village is that it’s a bubble, but you can say that for the River, too. In my periodic trips to Silicon Valley, it has increasingly felt like a foreign country, with its own values and cultural tropes, but insulated from the consequences of its own actions. Even if the Riverian mentality holds up better than the Village one under conditions where everyone is making up the rules as they go along — it’s better at “decoupling”, at focusing on the task at hand — it’s also become powerful enough that it’s often subtly rigging the rules in its favor. So we have the curse of living in interesting times, and I hope On the Edge is as good a guide to them as you might find.

1. Although Michael Bloomberg and Marco Rubio would like to have a word.

2. If you took a poll at the WSOP, you might have gotten as many Kamala voters as Trump ones, although with a disproportionate number of third-party voters.

3. As a Riverian, I’m guilty of this myself.

4. I’d note for the record that Musk’s impulsiveness makes him an outlier relative to the River’s generally more calculating nature.

5. Although this was somewhat predictable.