Once upon a time, being big in Japan meant you’d failed in America but succeeded in myth. These days, we’ve moved the mirage inland. Now it’s Texas — the South Capital of Soft Capital — where every hustler, coder, and half-famous band gathers to pretend they’re building something that matters.
I wasn’t looking forward to traveling to Austin this week. I’ve probably become immune to the nonsense after too many years out here in Venice — Silicon by the Bay. Crypto McMansions sprouting like weeds along the canals, each with its own salt lamp and liquidity crisis. The tech joggers barrel down narrow streets into packs of off-leash dogs, literally as if basic Bronze Age caution no longer applies to them. At least here, when it gets too insane, you can walk to the water. Austin has no water. Just sprawl in every direction.”
So I was forewarned: this isn’t the early-days 6 months out SXSW anymore. The cowboy hats are still wide, but the dreams underneath have gone paper-thin. What used to be a messy frontier of half-crazy coders and hungover guitarists has been replaced by an endless carousel of personal brands and pre-seeded “disruptors.” Every handshake feels like a pitch deck, every smile has venture debt behind it.
You can feel it in the air, thick as brisket smoke and venture debt. Every conversation starts with the same euphoric pitch: “We’re disrupting authenticity.” No one has cash, but everyone’s got an “ecosystem.” You can’t buy a cup of coffee without being asked to “collaborate.” The local currency is hope, denominated in networking credits and podcast appearances.
Austin is a giant open-air conference call. The guitars are real, but the checks are not. The money isn’t here; it’s somewhere offshore, watching your set through an algorithm and nodding approvingly. You’re not paid, but you’re validated, and that’s supposed to feel the same.
That’s the thing about soft capital: it’s soft because it’s warm and it melts fast. You can’t build a house with it. You can’t even build a decent lie. But it sure photographs well.
The venture crowd rolled in like missionaries in Patagonia — khaki prophets of the pivot, bearing buzzwords and drink tickets. They talked about “runway” while living on barbecue sauce and optimism. Somewhere, a startup founder would be giving a TED Talk on how “community is the new currency,” while his employees live four to a room in Pflugerville.
I was there the night it all came into focus. Three a.m. at a place that claimed to be a “pop-up thought incubator” but was really just a warehouse with Edison bulbs and a liquor license that expired in 2019. A kid — couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, wearing Google Glass ironically — was explaining his “disruptive model for democratizing empathy.”
“We’re building an app,” he said, pupils dilated like manhole covers, “that uses machine learning to predict when your friends are sad, then automatically sends them a curated care package of artisanal beef jerky and motivational Spotify playlists.”
His co-founder, a woman who introduced herself as “Chief Vibe Officer,” nodded solemnly. They had seventeen thousand dollars in pre-seed funding from an angel investor who made his fortune selling counterfeit Eames chairs to WeWork locations. Their burn rate was four thousand a month. They gave themselves eighteen months of runway.
The math was bad. The vibes were immaculate.
“We’re not selling a product,” the kid insisted, his voice taking on that messianic frequency that venture bros get right before the Adderall wears off. “We’re selling *permission to care in late capitalism.*”
I excused myself to have a cigarette in the alley, where I found a man in a bolo tie doing the same thing. He worked in “strategic foresight consulting,” which meant he got paid six figures to tell companies what they already knew but were afraid to admit. We became instant comrades in nausea.
“You know what the problem is?” he gasped between heaves. “We’ve financialized friendship. We’ve turned human connection into a pitch deck. And the fucked-up thing? *It’s working. “I tried to walk it off. Three miles through downtown, then east, then north. Everywhere I went, more of the same: co-working spaces, popup concepts, branded experiences. In Venice, you can walk to the edge of the continent. Here, there’s no edge. Just more Austin, radiating outward like a Ponzi scheme.”
Meanwhile, the musicians circle the same block, playing for drink tabs and exposure, which is another word for evaporation. They don’t sell records anymore; they sell access. You can pay five bucks to “join the experience,” which usually means standing in a parking lot next to a mural that says Stay Weird — a slogan now trademarked by a holding company in Delaware.
Out on South Congress, someone’s trying to sell cowboy hats made of recycled NFTs. A local brewery has renamed its IPA “The Monetization Problem.” The buses are wrapped with ads for mental health apps that look like confessions disguised as products: “Feeling burnt out? That’s a feature.”
And through it all, the city hums with that peculiar electricity of the nearly-successful — people who almost matter, almost make rent, almost break through. The dream is alive because it never pays out.
Big in Texas. Big in theory. Broke in practice.
Soft capital forever.
Most of the people cashing checks in Texas didn’t earn them here. They made their money somewhere colder, duller, more accountable — then came south to cosplay independence. They buy the boots, the hat, the pickup, the narrative. They play the stoic cowboy, the electric cowboy, the vehicle cowboy — take your pick — all funded by dividends from their former lives. The new Texas economy runs on the fantasy of having paid your dues somewhere else. It’s a reenactment of risk with the danger safely deleted. No one’s broke enough to be desperate, no one’s rich enough to admit it. It’s the frontier as curated lifestyle: the last stand of soft capital disguised as grit.
I met one of these refugees at a ranch-themed co-working space called “The Spur & Spreadsheet.” His name was Brad — of course it was Brad — and he’d cashed out of a Series B in Palo Alto before the bloom came off the SPAC rose. Now he owned forty acres outside Dripping Springs and a collection of pearl-snap shirts that would make Porter Wagoner weep with envy.
“I wanted *authenticity*,” he told me over a sixteen-dollar cold brew that came in a tiny mason jar with a handle made of reclaimed barbed wire. “Up in the Bay, everything was so… *optimized*. Here, you can just *be*.”
What he meant was: here, you can buy the aesthetic of being without the inconvenient reality of becoming. His “ranch” had never seen cattle, but it had excellent fiber optic. He’d never roped a steer, but he had roped a limited partnership in a “regenerative agriculture” startup that mostly generated pitch decks and carbon credits.
The previous week, I’d watched him struggle to operate a chainsaw during a “masculine reclamation workshop” that cost nine hundred dollars and included a catered lunch of heritage pork tacos. He’d nearly removed his own foot. The instructor — a former Goldman Sachs analyst who’d reinvented himself as a “wilderness integration coach” — had to intervene with the calm professionalism of someone who’d seen this exact scenario play out seventeen times already that month.
“The frontier,” the instructor had said, binding Brad’s self-inflicted wound with a Hermès pocket square, “is now an internal landscape.”
They were selling the rugged individual as a subscription service. Pay monthly, get your manhood in installments, cancel anytime with no penalty except the gnawing certainty that you’d bought another lie.
It was 2 a.m. in my hotel room when I realized why I’d bought it. In Venice, when nothing makes sense anymore, you can walk to the Pacific — something older and more indifferent than capitalism. But Austin is landlocked. When soft capital melts here, there’s nowhere for it to drain. It just pools. Everyone here is trapped in the same terrarium, breathing each other’s recycled delusions.”
I found myself in a place called The Grackle & Term Sheet, a temple of distressed wood and distressed dreams. The air was a poisonous mix of agave sweat and the acrid tang of burning VC funding. A man in a $300 artisanal t-shirt, who called himself “The Closer,” was holding court. His eyes were two tiny black holes burned into a face stretched tight by Pilates and perpetual deal-flow.
“We’re not just investing in a product,” he hissed, slamming a fistful of gluten-free poker chips on the bar. “We’re investing in the narrative. The pain point! We’re monetizing the existential dread of a generation that can’t afford a down payment!” He leaned in, his breath smelling of cold brew and collateralized debt obligations. “We’re going to pivot the entire concept of melancholy into a scalable SaaS platform. We’ll call it Saudade-as-a-Service.”
The Closer had done three deals that year, all of them structured like Russian nesting dolls of speculative bullshit. The first was an app that helped you “gamify your grief” through a points-based mourning system. Cry at a funeral? That’s fifty points. Write a heartfelt eulogy? Unlock the “Authentic Sadness” badge. The company burned through two million in seed funding before anyone realized the founder had never actually lost anyone close to him — he’d just read a lot of Kübler-Ross and watched “Six Feet Under.”
The second deal was even more beautiful in its audacity: a platform for “democratizing nepotism.” The pitch was that everyone deserves access to the kind of professional networks previously reserved for Ivy League legacies and country club spawn. For $299 a month, you got “curated introductions” to “industry thought leaders” who were really just other people paying $299 a month for the same hollow promise. It was a Ponzi scheme for social capital, and it worked brilliantly until it didn’t.
The third deal was still in stealth mode, but The Closer was drunk enough to leak details. “We’re calling it ‘Truth Serum,’” he whispered, his pupils doing that thing where they independently track different sources of ambient lighting. “It’s an AI that tells you the brutal reality about your startup idea *before* you waste your twenties on it. We’re pre-revenue, obviously, because who the fuck wants to pay to be told their dreams are dogshit? But the *concept*…”
He trailed off, staring into his mezcal like it contained the secrets of sustainable unit economics.
I felt a low tremor in my gut, a primal warning. This wasn’t business. This was a cargo cult for the spiritually bankrupt, dancing around the burning pyre of real value, chanting incantations about “community engagement” and “viral loops.” They were building a kingdom out of smoke and tax incentives, and the only thing holding it up was the collective, terrified agreement to never, ever look down.
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Later, on a street that reeked of dried urine and fresh capital, I saw a man who was the human embodiment of a non-fungible token. He was trying to sell “augmented reality ranchland” from a holographic kiosk powered by a sputtering Honda generator. “It’s all about the meta-verse, man!” he screamed at a confused tourist. “You can’t ride the digital cattle, but you can leverage the grazing rights!”
I stopped. I had to. This man was either a prophet or a perfect fool, and in Texas in 2025, those categories had merged into a single grotesque hybrid.
“How much?” I asked.
“For you? Because you look like you *understand*?” He leaned in conspiratorially, his breath a weapon-grade combination of Red Bull and existential panic. “Ten thousand gets you a hundred virtual acres in the Metaverse Guadalupe River Valley. Water rights included. Virtual water, obviously, but *certified* virtual water. We’ve got the blockchain receipts.”
“What the hell do I do with virtual water?”
“Same thing you do with regular water, except nobody can drink it and it doesn’t evaporate. It’s *permanent hydration potential*. The value proposition is infinite because the use case is imaginary. Don’t you see? We’ve solved scarcity by eliminating materiality!”
He was right, in the most horrifying way possible. This was the new frontier. Not land, not oil, not even code—but pure, abstracted claim. A society built on owning the concept of a thing rather than the thing itself. It was a terrifying and brilliant hustle. They had finally figured out how to securitize the wind.
I bought in. Five thousand for fifty acres. I don’t know why. Maybe the heat. Maybe the drugs. Maybe because in that moment, in that place, the only rational response to the absurd was to embrace it fully and without reservation.
He emailed me the NFT at 4 a.m. The subject line read: “Welcome to the Future of Property (Please Don’t Check Your Wallet in Direct Sunlight).”
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I found my prophet in a concrete bunker under I-35, a place that served whiskey in mason jars and didn’t have a QR code menu. He was a grizzled old musician, a veteran of a hundred failed “synergistic brand integrations.” He strummed a guitar with a cracked neck and sang a song called “The Ballad of the Liquidity Event.”
*“They came from the coasts with their algorithms and ghosts,*
*Selling shares in the Second Coming…*
*They’ll buy your whole scene with a line of credit clean,*
*And leave your damn soul running.”*
He took a long pull from his jar and fixed me with a bloodshot eye. “You see it, don’tcha, Doc?” he whispered. “They’re not selling a product. They’re not even selling a dream anymore. They’re selling the receipt for a dream that was never purchased. It’s the most American hustle of all time. They’ve finally made failure a speculative asset.”
His name was Terrence, though everyone called him “Two-Takes Terry” because he’d recorded a single in 1987 that required only two takes and had haunted him with competence ever since. He’d been in Austin since before it was weird, back when weird was just what happened naturally when rent was cheap and nobody gave a shit.
“I watched it all go down,” he said, pouring whiskey with the solemnity of a priest offering communion. “First they came for the music. Said we needed to ‘monetize our brand.’ Suddenly every show was a ‘showcase’ and every song was a ‘proof of concept.’ Then they came for the venues. Turned ’em into ‘experiential spaces’ where you paid cover just to watch other people take Instagram photos of themselves pretending to have a good time.”
He lit a cigarette that I’m ninety percent sure was illegal in seventeen states.
“But the real evil?” he continued, smoke curling around his words like visible grief. “The real evil was when they convinced us to do it to ourselves. Now every musician in this town has a ‘content strategy.’ Every kid with a guitar thinks they’re a ‘multimedia platform.’ We’re not making art anymore. We’re making*assets.*”
He played another verse. The crowd — if you could call eleven people sitting on milk crates a crowd — didn’t applaud. They just nodded, slow and knowing. They’d all been there. They were all still there. The gig economy had become the only economy, and exposure had replaced money so completely that asking for payment was now considered “not being a team player.”
“I had a kid ask me last week,” Terry said, “how to ‘optimize his setlist for virality.’ I told him the only thing worth optimizing was the space between the notes. He looked at me like I’d spoken ancient Sumerian.”
He was right. The whole city was a high-frequency trading platform for human potential, a roaring engine that converted ambition into heat and noise and nothing else. They had weaponized hope and turned it against the hopeful. It was beautiful and monstrous. It was, as they say, a hell of a thing.
The Exit Strategy We All Deserve
The Exit Strategy We All Deserve
Because the thing about soft capital is that it compounds in reverse. The more you have, the less it’s worth. The more people who believe, the hollower the belief becomes. It’s a perpetual motion machine powered by collective delusion and high-speed internet.
I left Austin on a Tuesday, driving west back to Venice in a rented Camry that smelled like failure and commercial air freshener. In my rearview mirror, the city glowed with the particular light of a place that hasn’t yet realized it’s already burning.
My phone buzzed. A text from The Closer: “Dude. That SaaS platform for melancholy? We pivoted. Now it’s an app that helps you monetize your own disillusionment. We’re calling it ‘Bitter.ly.’ Want in on the friends-and-family round?”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking about Lemuria.
You know the story — the lost continent, the mythical civilization that supposedly sank beneath the Pacific somewhere off the California coast. Advanced society, spiritual enlightenment, the whole utopian package. Then the ocean swallowed it whole. No exit strategy, no pivot, just gone. Geologists will tell you it never existed. The rocks are all wrong, the tectonic plates don’t support it, the whole thing is Victorian occult fantasy dressed up as science.
But here’s what I keep thinking: maybe Lemuria was the original soft capital. A civilization so advanced, so optimized, so perfectly aligned with its own mythology that it forgot the ocean didn’t care. They built their kingdom on the assumption that reality would respect their narrative. The Pacific had other ideas.
Austin is building Lemuria again. Landlocked Lemuria. Same utopian promises, same spiritual branding, same collective agreement to ignore the geology. Except this time there’s no ocean to do the work of correction. The soft capital just pools and compounds and radiates outward, metastasizing into suburbs and strip malls and co-working spaces, all of it vibrating at the same frequency of almost-real, not-quite-real, used-to-be-real.
At least Lemuria had the dignity to sink.
I made it back to Venice on Wednesday. Walked straight to the beach, stood at the edge of the continent where Lemuria supposedly isn’t. The Pacific was still there — cold, indifferent, real. It has drowned civilizations before. It will drown them again. It doesn’t care about your runway or your ecosystem or your content strategy.
My phone buzzed again. The Closer: “For real though. Friends and family. Ground floor.”
I looked out at the water. Somewhere down there, maybe, the ruins of the last group of people who thought they could build heaven without accounting for physics. Their soft capital is compressed into sediment now, if it ever existed at all.
I’m really big in Texas. The NFT deed says so. I’m probably big in Lemuria too, in whatever imaginary real estate still trades hands in civilizations that never were.
Just don’t check your balance.
And whatever you do, don’t move inland.
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