Palo Alto Bullshit
The weird language of Silicon Valley
11 May 2025
Palo Alto is a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds. The zombies who inhabit this greyzone speak a strange language known officially as Palo Alto Bullshit, or PAB for short — an inelegant amalgam of hippie cliches, high tech jargon, countercultural memes, and econospeak.
Only positive thoughts can be expressed in PAB. The fact that Palo Alto is, for example, the world capital of teen suicide is literally impossible to articulate within its terms. For someone who only speaks PAB, such ideas are literally unthinkable.
Ayn Rand famously wrote Atlas Shrugged in PAB, which is why the English translation sounds so grotesque. It has been called a language of psychopaths and hustlers.
In PAB, the verb to be declines as follows:
I am
You suck
He pays
They pay a monthly subscription
There is no first person plural. Nouns are optional, adverbs are discouraged, and all sentences must end with either going forward, at scale, or a confident smirk. It is a dialect that evolved not to convey truth, but to efficiently vaporise it into aspirational fog.
A thing of great ugliness
It is all a far cry from 1769, when a group of Spaniards led by Gaspar de Portolá became the first Europeans to cast their eyes on the vast expanse of San Francisco Bay. For five days, the expedition camped under a towering sequoia near what is now San Francisquito Creek. This tall tree (or palo alto in Spanish) is now over one thousand years old, and still looms over the creek.
The Spanish language is a thing of beauty, with its rolling rhythms, rich vocabulary, and poetic elegance that can make even the simplest phrase sound like a song. PAB, by contrast, sounds like an over-caffeinated TED Talk given by a ChatGPT-powered juicer with a minor in narcissism.
PAB is spoken fluently by the native species of the region: Venture Human™. The Venture Human™ is an agile, pivot-ready mammal, usually spotted in Patagonia vests and Allbirds, subsisting entirely on cold brew and data. Their primary mode of locomotion is the keynote address, and they communicate through decks — slick, PowerPoint-based mating calls that advertise “disruption” and “mindshare” while revealing absolutely nothing. The PAB-speaking Venture Human™ does not ask, Is it true? but rather Is it scalable?
Even their children are fluent. At age three, the average Palo Alto toddler has already launched a mindfulness app, pivoted it to a Web3 platform, and raised a Series A round from their Montessori classmates. These toddlers are deeply optimized, emotionally unavailable, and wear Oura rings on their juice-stained fingers. They dream of sandboxed realities and gamified empathy, and if they show signs of actual human sadness, they are immediately referred to as product-market misfits.
The architecture of Palo Alto mirrors the language: clean, affectless, algorithmically beige. Every house looks like it was designed by a committee of drones trying to synthesise cosiness from satellite data. Historic preservation is a crime against “innovation velocity,” and heritage trees are often reclassified as “legacy inefficiencies.” The past is a deprecated feature. Even time is just another UX problem.
To the untrained ear, PAB sounds a lot like English, in the same way tastes vaguely like food. You can almost understand what’s being said — until you realise that optimising interpersonal throughput means breaking up with your girlfriend via Slack. Failing forward means exploiting a tax loophole. Being your authentic self means purchasing a $12,000 ayahuasca retreat in Ecuador, taking a selfie with your shaman, and writing a Medium post about your trauma as a six-figure crypto bro.
Nothing is sacred
What happened to the land under the tall tree is not a mystery — it was not “disrupted,” it was desecrated. But PAB has no word for desecrated. The closest approximation is “underleveraged real estate opportunity.” In this tongue, nothing is sacred, but everything is brandable. The old burial grounds are now co-working spaces. The ghosts are on unpaid internships. And the only spirits that walk among us are microdosed.
According to the sacred scriptures of the Quantum Ascension Protocol (QAP) — the only holy book written in PAB — salvation is achieved not through grace, but through quantified self-improvement and VC funding, and enlightenment can be scheduled between a product demo and a thought leadership brunch. The soul is a metric. The divine is A/B tested. The holy sacrament is a kombucha subscription box. Known informally as Neurocalvinism or Muskism, QAP has been described as spirituality for the elite, where meditation doubles as encryption and rebirth is a reboot.
The shamans of this new faith wear noise-cancelling headphones and charge $400 per hour for “consciousness hacking.” Their temples are open-concept studios with exposed brick, essential oils, and the faint hum of MacBooks syncing to the cloud. Here, the Wi-Fi password is a mantra, and the incense is a vape pen. Worshippers sit cross-legged on beanbags, chanting disrupt… iterate… disrupt… while a former Google engineer reads passages from the Blockchain Sutras.
Instead of prayer, they journal. Instead of confession, they podcast. The central spiritual dilemma is whether to align one’s Chakra stack before or after the next round of seed funding. A spiritual crisis, once called the dark night of the soul, is now diagnosed as insufficient user engagement. Salvation comes via dopamine dashboards and a digital cleanse at Esalen with a founder-turned-shaman who once raised $60 million to gamify empathy.
Watched over by machines of loving grace
Even death, in Palo Alto, is just a bug in the code. Immortality is a design challenge to be solved by Peter Thiel’s alchemist interns at a libertarian cryogenics lab shaped like a giant iPod. They are close, apparently. Very close. The beta testers are in freezers.
And so the faithful wait. In their electric SUVs, they meditate using mindfulness apps that shout affirmations in soothing, AI-generated voices: You are enough. You are an MVP. You are the future of wellness as a service. The mantras echo through their AirPods as they drive past the empty husks of bookstores and churches, replaced by innovation hubs and AI-generated juice bars.
Because in Palo Alto, the only true religion is scale. And God, they fervently believe, is the most scalable product of all.
