When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain…
Robinson Jeffers
Stanford, that great monument to disruption, that factory of future-makers and world-shapers, that gleaming campus of kids who believe they’re gonna code their way out of mortality, has this reservoir dam squatting on Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve like a middle finger to the whole enterprise. Jeffers called it decades before the venture capital even showed up. “A concrete dam far off in the mountain”, the only thing he thought might outlast all our iron-age horseshit. And there it sits, proving him half-right already.
The preserve is supposed to be pristine, untouched, a laboratory for studying what the world looks like without us. But that dam says different. That dam says: we were here, we moved water, we made our mark, and this mark will outlast every pitch deck, every algorithm, every fucking innovation that came out of the quad. While the Server farms overheat and the startups implode and the stock options expire worthless, that dumb slab of aggregate and rebar just… persists.
It’s the perfect monument for a place that doesn’t believe in monuments. Stanford’s whole theology is disruption, obsolescence, creative destruction, but here’s this stolid bastard that won’t be disrupted, that’ll be standing there long after the Campus closes.
Jeffers knew. The cities become rust stains. The people become thigh-bones and poems. And somewhere, quiet and patient as geology, a concrete dam waits to have the last word. Not with a bang. Just with the slow, grinding, beautiful indifference of entropy doing what entropy does.
That’s the joke nobody’s laughing at in the innovation capital of the universe.