Marc Andreessen told the world, back in the Dark Ages, that software is eating the world. And it did. It ate all the ‘doing’: the production, distribution, optimization, logistics, etc. Now AI is commoditizing software, generating and replicating everything. Scarcity, exemplified in business by the mindset of Zero to One (be a one of one!) is not a thing anymore. Now that every advantage can be smashed by code, and every product can be reproduced by prompts, tokens, and time, undifferentiated abundance is the new new.

When differentiation becomes impossible, or at least irrelevant, what then? Your blue widget is not really different from their green widget, and at best you’re trying to rely on brand (ours is BLUE, yo) to create that differentiation. One to Zero – the book to come – tracks meaning’s ascendance over monopoly, and confronts Silicon Valley’s organizing logic of exit — from a company, the planet, and the body itself.

Binary logic didn’t just shape technical systems; financial instruments and incentives then further shaped how reality itself gets construed: as something to extract from and eventually get out of. Silicon Valley is philosophically and financially organized around exit. The path is pretty linear: binary computation, the ones and zeros, becomes the governing metaphor (best realized in efficiency and optimization) which leads to institutional selection of the optimizers, which leads to ‘society’ over-rewarding those best suited to that logic, and then calls the result “merit”. It’s a civilizational system that can’t see anything that it wasn’t built to prioritize. And what does Silicon Valley prize more than anything else? A successful exit. They just extend the logic all the way to abdication (exit from) responsibility and accountability.