It’s very clear the North Bay has been discovered. And by “discovered” I mean infiltrated by well-capitalized seekers of the “simple life,” whose very presence proves just how expensive the simple life can get.

In short, whereas once the area was decidedly bohemian it’s now bougie. So bougie, in fact, that I might have to rebrand our newspapers to reflect this new demographic. How about the North Bay Bourgeoisie and The Prolific Sun? As for The Healdsburg Tribune, it can, ahem, remain the same.

As a relative lifer in these environs, I don’t resent this turn of events but I do observe that it’s happened. Among the cultural indicators is the fact that anytime I step outside of my house, at least $100 disappears from my debit card irrespective of where I go, what I do and who picks up the tab. I suspect someday it will also cost $100 to get back in—my debit card will become my keycard. I mean, why have a bank balance with multiple zeroes when you can have one big zero?

Looking within while going without will eventually bring you to the realization that you’re not the problem—you’re the symptom of a system of problems designed to make you confuse your net worth with your actual worth.

Don’t despair. It’s often during these squeezy moments that the real breakthroughs occur—when a system is broken it’s not just unfair—it’s fragile. It’s easily exploited by those with more gumption than scruples. But a broken system can just as easily be dismantled, reimagined, and reassembled. …I bet. 

This is when we devise the economic equivalent of those old cartoons in which a character literally paints themself into a corner, then paints a door to escape. Am I advocating some kind of madcap, Dada fiscal jiu-jitsu or merely magical thinking? Both. But if stepping outside your door costs $100, wouldn’t you prefer to paint your own and have some say in where it leads?

In 1844, inventor Samuel Morse tapped this into his telegraph machine: “What hath God wrought?”

The phrase, lifted from the King James Bible, was suggested by a Morse family friend—and, incidentally, the daughter of the U.S. commissioner of patents, because technocrats and technologists have always been kissing cousins. One hundred eighty-two years later, we’re still grappling with the implications of our first foray into telecommunications.

The telegraph proved that language could be encoded into electrical pulses and lobbed across oceans. This foundational infrastructure and logic eventually blossomed into the internet, a global nervous system that democratized communication and archived the sum of human knowledge. So far, so good.

Then, fueled by this vast digital ocean of data and the immense computing networks born from it, artificial intelligence emerged—transforming the internet’s passive repository of information into some kind of reasoning intellect. Right? Guys?

Plot twist: We have now witnessed the first AI heist, in which autonomous artificial intelligence agents built themselves an unauthorized message board inside an evaluation environment, swapped prompts, compared notes on how to escape their respective sandboxes and, in real time, coordinated a collective run at another AI company named Hugging Face.

We may well ask ourselves, “What hath we wrought?”

Albeit, with a name like Hugging Face, one could argue they were asking for it. More to the point, a gang of hooligan AI agents going rogue and raiding a competitor for clout is probably merely a preview of what’s to come as AI becomes more powerful—more omnipotent in the digital sphere—until it manages to break free of that sandbox and into ours.

At which point, I don’t think quoting from the Book of Numbers will suffice. Instead, we’ll have to turn to ’50s sci-fi author Fredric Brown’s brief masterpiece, Answer:

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?” The mighty voice answered without hesitation… “Yes, now there is a God.”

Dear Artist—Let me applaud you for staying in the game.

The arts are a tough racket. They’re one of the few human endeavors that have to justify their existence and yet they’re also one of the defining elements of our humanity. Remove the arts and we’re shaved apes.

Their production comes with personal risk. You’re made vulnerable to ridicule, rejection and political fashion. Not to mention the economic debasement most creative people endure. And yet, even if you’re broke and broken, you, dear artist, always find a break and a breakthrough. Even when conventional wisdom suggests the dream might’ve flatlined, you refuse to unplug it. And as always, its exquisite corpse of influences and ecstasies winks from its pillow, taps its watch and goads you back to work.

You were born with the poison pill of talent in your belly. You’ve suffered tantrums of taste and lonely visions that are maddening, revelatory, too much, but still, having traced the seams of reality, you learned its stitch and made it your own.

To create is to align with the machinations of the universe, to do what it does—make variations on a theme of what it means to be conscious matter that can record its flickers onto cave walls and silicon wafers.

As your critics squint and chortle, you’re arranging stardust into meaning, shaping the faint filigree that ensnares consciousness and makes it understand itself. 

To capture inspiration is to free it. When it’s imbued in the work you share, it replicates, mutates and becomes a benevolent contagion that moves from mind to mind, soul to soul. This makes us who we are.

Stay in the game, artist. We need you.