The New Meta for Silicon Valley Startups Is Nihilism

For decades, the message out of Silicon Valley was a relentless optimism to the point of being unsettling. But there’s a new generation of startups arriving in the AI era, and they’ve got a new strategy: Get paid, even if it means destroying something in the process. If Silicon Valley’s new nihilism has a mascot, it may be the founder of Doublespeed, a VC-backed bot farm built around the explicit goal of turning dead internet theory into a business strategy. You might have a vague memory of Doublespeed—if not the name, at least the concept—after it got some buzz by securing $1 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, aka a16z. In a launch video, the company’s CEO, Zuhair Lakhani, bragged that they were going to kill the internet as we know it by flooding social media with AI agents that seem like standard accounts but can quickly be flipped into influencers for a brand for a price. Half a year later, Lakhani is no less cynical about his path to wealth. In a profile from New York Magazine, the 21-year-old leaned into the old mantra that any press is good press. “I have no problem leaning into the dystopian feeling of our company. That’s what brought us all this attention so far,