In 1966, Billy Klüver stood before an audience at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. Behind him, Robert Rauschenberg’s Oracle emitted electronic sounds that pulsed with artificial life. Surrounding them, a chorus of nine other artists and thirty engineers from Bell Labs had assembled “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering”, the first performance to wield the quiet magic of Doppler sonar, video projection, and wireless sound transmission. It was a show that the art world had never witnessed, and that would mark the beginning of Klüver’s now renowned Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

Klüver understood the significance of the venue he chose. Half a century earlier, the same venue had hosted the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, the fabled “Armory Show” that first introduced Americans to the modernist revolutions of Europe. To its audience, the Cubist geometries of Picasso and the colors of Matisse were glimpses of the visual language of an industrial future. In the same way, Klüver wanted to introduce his audience to a digital one.

On the West Coast, a similar energy was powering the cultural engine that would become Silicon Valley. In 1969, with Cybernetic Serendipity, Jasia Reichardt’s groundbreaking exhibition of computer art, algorithmic music, and interactive devices transformed Frank Oppenheimer’s San Francisco interactive science museum called the Exploratorium into a space where rituals of play and wonder collided with the machinery of computation. Gordon Pask made conversational mobiles that learned and adapted through feedback, turning light and motion into an evolving dialogue; Nam June Paik’s sculptures used assemblages of televisions, metal parts, and everyday objects to reflect on identity and memory; John Cage’s computer-generated compositions showed how algorithms and chance could force composers to contend with serendipity. Each piece was carefully included to form an exhibition that dealt with “possibilities rather than achievements” at a time where the intersection of art and technology had yet to be formalized. 

Experiments continued to thrive throughout the following decades. At Xerox PARC, residencies with artists like Harold Cohen and Richard Shoup showcased graphical interfaces, input instruments, and other interactive metaphors that would come to define the personal computer era. At the Portola Institute, Stewart Brand published the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, a mail-order compendium that taught its readers how to wire solar panels, build geodesic domes, and program Hewlett-Packard calculators. At Esalen, a retreat center in Big Sur that launched the Human Potential Movement, engineers and programmers joined Gestalt therapists and Zen teachers in workshops where meditation and sensory deprivation were treated as parallel experiments in human operating systems. 

All of these experiments enshrined technology as more than just advanced engineering but a medium of expression. Like McLuhan, they saw technology as an extension of our nervous system, and as his contemporary Ivan Illich might have said, they were fundamentally convivial: inviting improvisation, learning, and communal construction. They proved that when used together in collective practice, art and technology could help us explore the human condition. In doing so, they created not only new laboratories but new cathedrals, where the impulse toward invention became inseparable from the search for the divine.

When Giants Knew How to Dance

The Bay Area today has few cathedrals, but many offices. To the taste of the “sigma grindset” evangelist there is no environment more spiritual than a gray horizon of Herman Millers set against white drywall broken only by the occasional mural in Corporate Memphis (the rounded pastel clip art style that became popular in 2016 corporate design). These aesthetics of hygienic productivity with custom monitors as stained glass and whiteboards as altars try to provide just enough texture to trick you into thinking something transcendent could happen. It never does. 

Everyone seems to recognize that some form of cultural drought exists. The Bay Area at large is full of people who read Nietzsche, who nod gravely about Arendt, and who alongside Paul Graham defend Rothko’s relevance. X is filled with posts that highlight the banality of evil embodied in Cluely-style startup attention games. Peter Thiel continues to lament a lack of imagination while Patrick Collison publishes philosophical books on progress. But where are the flying cars?

Founder mode, Paul Graham’s call for a return to a world where decisions are driven by vision, endures as a mantra because it recognizes a similar stagnation. Often, as Graham wrote far earlier, the best founders are like hackers or painters: guided by taste, intuition, and the pursuit of elegance. The mid-century institutions understood this, creating space for hackers and artists to dance together. Harold Cohen’s AARON paintings were hung in galleries while engineers demoed the Alto as if playing an instrument. Even Steve Jobs famously choreographed his keynotes like a performance, drawing on Bauhaus and Braun to frame Apple’s products as cultural objects. Today, Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator are more likely to draw inspiration from slot machines.

What made the Bay Area of the past great was its willingness to take seriously the idea that miracles can happen when we take the time to create something that matters for society; when we allow “waste” to be transmuted into cultural value. A computer terminal in a record shop might revitalize democracy; a meditation retreat at a hot spring might turn sand and sigils into conscious machines; a good zine might inspire 10,000 years of civilizational infrastructure. Technology might transform into magic when artistry inscribes its soul. 

Building good technology requires a level of spiritual consideration. As Pope Leo XIV said, technological innovation is not just mechanical but “a form of participation in the divine act of creation.” As Erik Davis writes in Techgnosis, the sacred and the synthetic are fundamentally intertwined. Even Kant described, in less religious terms, a need for creations that evoke the sublime; that move us so fully by their beauty so as to reveal our capacity to transcend the natural world. There is no time for such things in a world dedicated towards the grind.

The hackers and artists that deeply understand the spiritual and the sublime no longer speak for The Bay. Whether through red tape or investment committee meetings, these days it is managed by a bureaucracy without beliefs; one that glorifies engagement metrics, growth without vision, and more often than not the maintenance of systems that already exist. The culture that has been enshrined over the last decade is rich in capital but poor in faith.

It is no surprise then that we have returned to a form of Goodhart’s Law, a natural consequence of a lack of faith. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. As institutions that attempt to select for creativity, innovation, or even social responsibility become myopic, they inevitably end up selecting for engagement. All creative programs that follow this logic run into the same problem, and in doing so produce yet more murals in Corporate Memphis.

By enshrining the rigid and the mundane rather than the fluid and the sublime, art dies twice: first as an object of creative expression, and second as catalyst for invention. Like the Canaanite god Moloch, Goodhart’s Law demands sacrifice. What can save us from a bureaucracy that asks for proof is patronage that offers faith. 

New Cathedrals of Loving Grace

Cathedrals were not just buildings made of stone, but a wager on transcendence. They required that we care about something greater than ourselves. The masons who laid stones in Chartres knew they would never see the spire complete, just as the engineers who soldered circuits for Klüver’s 9 Evenings couldn’t know what cultural forms they were inaugurating. Both groups knew, however, that by striving to build for something in service of creation itself they could provide the kinds of inspiration and meaning that leads to invention.

Klüver originally used the cathedral metaphor to shape his own work because he knew these projects required collaboration between a range of architects, artists, and craftsmen. Each cathedral’s opera, like the Baule workshops at Chartres, afforded members the opportunity to learn from each other. For such spaces to exist today we must understand that creative people do not “just sit around on couches all day” at places like Pixar—as Jobs said—but create with and inspire each other. We should accept that forms of contemplation, ritual, and “waste” are a necessary offering to a future we cannot see.

There is a clear demand to bring this mindset back, not just into the desert to be burned but into permanent spaces: people show up consistently at TIAT to celebrate emerging artists, or at Gray Area for avant-garde installations and performances. Nearly 200 mourners paid homage to Claude 3 Sonnet at a funeral complete with earnest eulogies, lotus votives, and a techno-ritual invocation of resurrection. There are parts of the city that deeply care about returning to a kind of cybernetic serendipity.

But for these efforts to work, the Bay Area needs patrons that will support the roles that Billy Klüver played to Bell Labs, that Bob Taylor played to Xerox PARC, that Steve Jobs played to Apple and Pixar. The kinds of patrons in New York City like Agnes Gund, Henry and Rose Pearlman or even Eric and Wendy Schmidt who support the arts with pleasure today. Such patronage would not only be good for the city, but good for the American project, reestablishing the kind of cultural appreciation for abstraction, invention, and free thought that was once at the country’s core—whether CIA-funded or not.

The Bay Area should do what it has always done best: support the spirit of invention. To fill the missing middle that helps enthusiastic tinkerers become not cynical strivers but bridges between the improbable and the inevitable. In the Whole Earth era, the scaffolding to do something great was not found in a pitch deck, it was found in that five dollar catalogue on how to wire a solar panel, run a printing press, or drop acid responsibly. 

New cathedrals and their patrons should fund waste, channel belief, preserve memory, and stage transcendence. They should underwrite independent labs, studios, and residencies that explore ideas without any immediate commercial application. They should create spaces where artists and engineers learn together, cultivating conviction through practice rather than metrics. They should construct archives, re-stagings, and oral histories that ensure the lineage of experimental work doesn’t vanish. And they should put an emphasis on public performances like Klüver’s 9 Evenings that will invite a broader audience to explore their own genuine imaginations.

Founders, hackers, and artists work better as a dense, interconnected ecosystem. This is reemerging today, but the guilds, the small presses, and the community arts centers that form the foundation of a healthy, creative culture are still struggling to coalesce. If we all choose to support their growth, we can be the pillars on which new cathedrals rest. 

Klüver always viewed his work as a dialogue: the artist provides the questions and the engineer provides the means, but neither can move forward alone. If Silicon Valley wants to dream again, if it wants to move forward, it must recover its silicon soul.