It started slowly.
Seattle-based companies made the move to Vancouver, with generous re-location packages.
The Valley, bit by bit, moved northward, first capitalising on the cheaper real estate in Portland and Seattle, then joining the ex-SFats in Canada.
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SoCal had crumbled a decade prior - the nexus of water-guzzling, power-sucking AIs that mimicked Hollywood actors only worked as long as there was water and power - and Hollywood actors to mimic.
The LA fires of '32 had destroyed so much infrastructure the city was broke - and dry.
And once they'd been cloned and recast as AI avatars of themselves, actors retired - on albeit reduced residuals. No-one flew to LAX with a dream and a cardigan. Those left were either ICE agents or Undocumented they hunted.
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The Big Beautiful Bill had exactly the intended effect - an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor. You either had capital or you died - usually from something preventable like gum disease or pneumonia.
Those with capital moved north.
Those who only had labour - human, devalued yet expensive, connective yet computed labour - stayed. Inflation grew. The $USD sank.
The future, as the Great Dismal wrote, was already here - it just wasn't evenly distributed.
Five eyes became three when Australia and Aotearoa ripped up ANZUS in '30. Canada followed and Starmer, enjoying an unprecedented fourth term in a time of turmoil, made it one in '31.
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NoCal took a little longer - the vulture capitalists hanging on to the carrion of would-be unicorns, hoping to get a RoI.
After adding AI to everything, they had to enshittify to get a return. Inferencing a 5Q parameter model doesn't scale, even with a Redis cache the size of Sonoma county.
AI had, paradoxically, re-ignited the Open Source movement, who, determinists at heart, rejected the stochastic musings of the Bullshit Machines.
A team from Eleuther paired up with Wikipedia and dropped a reciprocal-licensed distilled RAG model that inferenced quicker than DeepSeek. They might have had help from CC Signals, who reached out to people interested in opening their information - but not for profit.
Then they used BitTorrent to do results caching. Inference cost dropped to marginal. A couple of big names saw, ahem, a slight decrease in market cap.
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Anyway, enough of the history lesson!
We're delighted to welcome you to Victoria Island, the new headquarters of FAANG, Inc.
We've pivoted a little in the last few years, and now most of our work involves geo-engineering so we can stay under 3 degrees.
We like it here, and we hope you do, too.
#TootFic #AlternateHistory #MicroFic #MicroFiction
