Read this on Substack - The Impossible Brief.
In 1967, Joan Didion went to Haight-Ashbury to observe what daily life had become for the people living there. She found a generation that had been failed by every structure meant to support them, improvising a world from scratch with no frame of reference, no scaffolding, no one to show them how. Into that vacuum came people with a pitch: liberation, consciousness, a new way of being. The language was utopian and deliberately vague, because precision would have exposed how little was on offer. The centre was not holding because nothing had been built to hold in the first place.
Silicon Valley has been running a version of that pitch on the enterprise for the better part of a decade, and the pitch has now done what pitches of that kind eventually do. It has not just sold a technology. It has relocated the authority to decide what organisations should do next - out of the executives, professionals, and institutional processes that historically held it, and into the vendors, consultancies, and narrative apparatus selling the tools.
This is the authority transfer. It is not a single decision, and no one signed it off. It happened through the accumulated weight of individually reasonable steps - a procurement here, a pilot there, a board paper citing the same three McKinsey statistics as every other board paper - whose cumulative effect was that the question of what we are for migrated outside the building. What follows are the four stages by which that migration happened: the seduction that made urgency feel like strategy, the language that disabled internal resistance, the displacement of responsibility once things went wrong, and the hollowing of the institutional capacity to ever take the authority back.
Move Fast and Break Things
Didion watched a generation dismantle every structure that had failed them; and in its place, build nothing. What looked like liberation from the outside was, from the inside, a vacuum dressed in the language of intention. The runaways arriving in San Francisco in 1967 were not nihilists, they genuinely believed that throwing off convention was the first step toward something better. Nobody had thought carefully about the second step.
Silicon Valley has been running the same sequence. AI is positioned as a liberating force, liberating organisations from slow decisions, from human bottlenecks, from the friction of oversight. In practice, the disruption has meant bypassing data privacy commitments, eroding labour protections, and moving into regulated sectors (healthcare, law, education) before the tools were ready for them. Disruption is the word that makes breaking things sound like building.
The Gospel of Vagueness
What struck Didion most about the Haight was not the chaos but the language. The hippies spoke in recycled slogans, “doing your own thing”, “grokking”, “turning on”, not because they were being evasive but because they genuinely lacked the vocabulary to describe what they were after. The vagueness was not a strategy. It was a symptom of a generation that had never been given the conceptual tools to articulate, let alone build, what they wanted. The slogans filled the space where a programme should have been.
The AI industry has its own liturgy: Democratising intelligence. Achieving AGI. Saving humanity. Unlocking human potential. The language arrives pre-elevated, quasi-religious, and deliberately resistant to interrogation because interrogation would require precision, and precision would expose the distance between the vision and the product. Behind the gospel, the motives are considerably more legible: cutting labour costs, driving stock prices, consolidating market position. The vagueness is not a symptom here, it is the strategy.
The Desertion of Accountability
The most reported scene in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a five-year-old who has been given acid by the adults responsible for her. Didion simply records the parents’ serenity, their certainty that this is consciousness expanding rather than a child being harmed, the complete absence of any felt responsibility for the consequences. The scene is devastating precisely because the negligence is not malicious but ideological. The belief system has done the work of separating the action from its consequences so completely that the people performing it cannot see what they are doing.When AI tools hallucinate in ways that affect a patient’s care, a legal outcome, a hiring decision, the companies that built them do what Didion documented in the Haight: they gesture at the largeness of the moment, the inevitability of the direction, the responsibility of whoever was standing closest. In Mata v. Avianca, two New York lawyers submitted a federal court brief containing six entirely fabricated case citations generated by ChatGPT; one of them testified at the sanctions hearing that he had been “operating under the false perception that this website could not possibly be fabricating cases on its own.” In Moffatt v. Air Canada, an airline whose chatbot invented a refund policy that did not exist argued before a Canadian tribunal that the chatbot was “a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.” In EEOC v. iTutorGroup, a tutoring company settled for $365,000 after its hiring software was found to have automatically rejected female applicants over 55 and male applicants over 60; not as an emergent bias but because the software had been deliberately configured to do so. In each case the structure is the same: the algorithm is complex, the technology is moving fast, the tool is somehow not quite the company that deployed it. The belief system of disruption as progress, of speed as virtue, has done the same work of separation that Didion observed in the Haight. The product was built and released, and the consequences belong to someone else. The absence of accountability is dressed up as freedom.
Atomisation and the Loss of Meaning
By the end of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, what Didion finds most disturbing is not the drugs or the chaos but the disconnection. A community that has no shared history, no common frame of reference, no felt sense of consequence. People entirely unmoored from what came before and from each other, unable to locate themselves in any story that extends beyond the present moment. The social fabric has not been replaced; it has been abandoned.
The corporate AI push is accelerating a version of that abandonment. When human writers, artists, researchers, and customer service agents are replaced not because they are doing the work badly but because the work can now be done without them, something beyond efficiency is being reorganised. The shared practices through which organisations developed judgment (argument, revision, accountability for a recommendation) are being automated away at the same moment that the outputs they produced are being scaled up. The organisation moves faster and knows less about why it is moving in any particular direction. Coherence dissolves, not suddenly or dramatically but through a series of individually reasonable decisions whose cumulative effect nobody planned, and nobody owns.
Didion offered no remedy at the end of her essay, and one is not on offer here either. But the authority transfer is not a force of nature. It happens through specific decisions, in specific rooms, made by specific people who could decide differently. The organisations that will come out of this period intact are not the ones moving fastest. They are the ones that have noticed what is being transferred, and from whom, and have decided to keep a hold of it.