Culture fights back: The revolt against Silicon Valley.

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Civilization runs on two engines: Technology and Culture. One builds the world, the other gives it meaning. Sometimes technology leads the dance, sometimes culture does.

For the past 50 years, technology led and culture followed. PC, internet, mobile - Silicon Valley was the rebellion, arming us with digital weapons to fight the gatekeepers. But a decade of doomscrolling later, the rebels became the empire. Today, by threatening to replace us with AI, technology is triggering a profound crisis of meaning. Because meaning is the matière première of culture, culture is fighting back.

Two violent attacks on Sam Altman in 72h and 13 shots fired at a councilman with a note reading, “No Data Centers.” Tech’s instinct is to ignore this - to retreat into the bubble, secure the bag, or seriously suggest building data centers in space to avoid dealing with the masses. But you cannot code your way out of a physical revolt. Silicon Valley is now the ruling class, and because we live in a democracy, not an authoritarian state, brute-forcing the future is not an option. You actually have to get the public on board.

Tech must finally act like the leader it has become. To earn the public’s consent and keep leading the dance, Silicon Valley needs three elements it currently lacks: 1) real skin in the game, 2) a clear cultural intention, and 3) the ability to tell an honest and credible story about a better collective future.

Here is the anatomy of this cultural revolt, and the new social contract Silicon Valley must adopt to survive it.

Why is the public revolting?

For centuries, we’ve been running on a fragile societal operating system. After the religious wars of early modern Europe, the West struck a deal to stop killing each other over the definition of “the good.” We outsourced our morality to two amoral mechanisms: the free market (do people want it?) and the law (is it legal?).

The Liberal OS worked for a while, burning the latent moral capital inherited from the past, sustained by the new religion of continuous growth. Indeed, improving your material condition in this life was simply a better deal than waiting for salvation in the afterlife.

But we hit the wall of exponential, and the deal broke.

AI crashed the party and brought friends: robotics, biotech, longevity, and defense. Multiple civilizational technologies are landing at once. More than just their jobs, people are terrified of losing agency over their bodies, minds, identities, and futures. Right at the moment we hit this exponential wall, we find ourselves in a total moral vacuum with a violently bifurcated society.

On one side, the top 0.1% of tech now wields god-like leverage. Drowning in infinite optionality, they are paralyzed by a profound existential crisis, desperately searching for a mission actually worth dedicating their lives to. Pour quoi faire? On the other side, the 99.9% are experiencing a nihilistic crisis. They are staring at the exact same wall and seeing absolute obsolescence. À quoi bon?

In the middle of this philosophical panic, the tech elites started defecting. They began preaching a post-scarcity utopia while quietly buying bunkers and talking about “securing the bag to escape the permanent underclass.” You have never seen less moral decency than on a Thursday morning at a South Park Blue Bottle café.

The public sees the defection, hears the incoherence and most importantly, feels the asymmetry of the risk-reward bargain. The people building the future capture the upside: unassailable status, generational wealth, and total control. The public absorbs the downside: addiction, displacement, surveillance, cultural fragmentation, infrastructure strain, and the fear of becoming irrelevant.

So, the public is revolting. They should, and now they can.

It is easy for tech insiders to dismiss this as just the next wave of Luddites, but that fundamentally misunderstands the physics of the rebellion. Unlike the historical Luddites, today’s public is permanently online and permanently mobilizable. The internet collapsed the cost of coordination to zero, transforming passive consumers into a hyper-networked stakeholder class. When a connected swarm with zero trust in the elite realizes they hold actual veto power over both physical infrastructure and consumer adoption, they revolt. And it’s just the beginning.

So, culture has moved upstream of technology.

The new tech social contract

The public deeply feels this asymmetry. Their demand for a wealth tax is ultimately a desire to make the tech elite bleed. We don’t need regulations but we need to rebuild the tech social contract around three pillars:

First, Skin in the Game. Historically, elites justified their extreme leverage by riding at the front of the cavalry charge and bleeding on the battlefield. Modern tech severed that feedback loop. Today, a founder will tweet about being “in the trenches” while sitting in a Pac Heights penthouse, completely insulated from the societal shockwaves of their own deployments. We need a massive correction back to the true entrepreneur - the person who actually absorbs the risk and “fails for the rest of us.” I desperately don’t want Silicon Valley in 2026 to be Wall Street in 2007, but using massive early secondaries, late-stage SPVs, and decade-long private horizons to extract wealth without consequence feels like the exact same sickness.

Second, Soul in the Game. Silicon Valley turned inward, creating a sterile bubble obsessed with accumulating status building stuff designed to impress other insiders. Soul in the game means abandoning that to reclaim a deep cultural intention. It requires a real obsession with the craft and a transparent belief in something greater than yourself. The public viscerally hates elites who build with nothing but their own enrichment in mind. Today, many of the true missionaries are found in deeptech, biotech, and defense - arenas so structurally unforgiving that you simply cannot fake obsession. Look at the momentum of frontier ecosystems like El Segundo or Proto City. Or Palmer Luckey, who earns public grace for building weapons precisely because his conviction is absolute and transparent. Even in software, Anthropic topped the charts just by broadcasting a clear moral vector. The public craves leaders who believe in something greater than themselves.

Finally, Narrative Capacity. In an era where institutions are fragile and trust is shattered, builders must articulate their moral direction to the existential talent pool, the terrified regulators, and the nihilistic public. In the middle of this revolt, the culture absolutely cannot stand legacy journalists, polished PR machines, or visionary LARPers playing the role of the bullshit storytelling consultant. We want maniacs for whom narrative is the honest, unavoidable exhaust of a good quest. That communication will not come from traditional media anymore; it will run entirely through a new decentralized layer of creators who possess their own skin in the game - an ecosystem I will unpack across my next articles.

If the ecosystem lacks skin in the game, it becomes a visionary LARP demanding power without consequence; if it lacks soul, it devolves into a mercenary casino where the public is just collateral damage. And without narrative capacity, even the most well-intentioned builders will be crushed by a terrified society that fills the silence by inventing a villain.

Enter Babylon

Six months ago, I moved from Paris - the most cultural city in the world - to San Francisco, the most technical one. Operating here as a VC (no one’s perfect lol) - deep inside the belly of the beast - you can feel the moral emptiness in your bones; it is a city desperately in need of cultural inspiration.

Being French and having committed to San Francisco, I only have two options: complain, or revolt. I am not here to complain. We must wake up to the new reality of the world and ourselves. The future demands that we merge the cultural gravity of Paris with the compounding engineering of San Francisco.

That is why I am naming my fund Babylon.

Babylon was the original metropolis where culture and technology learned to dance, raising the massive engineering marvels of the Ziggurats while immortalizing the meaning of human ambition in the Epic of Gilgamesh. More importantly, the city was governed by Hammurabi’s Code, the ultimate historical monument to extreme accountability: if a builder constructs a fragile house that collapses on its owner, the builder suffers the exact same fate. That is the standard we have to return to.

Culture has moved upstream of technology, and I am only going to fund the builders willing to live under that code.