I Spent a Week in a Hacker House - The Atlantic

On a Friday in April, I hopped into an Uber to a fish market in San Francisco with a couple of tech founders on a mission to buy lobsters. Not for dinner, but for science: The duo dreamed of one day altering human consciousness, but they would start by toying around with some crustaceans. They intended to perform neurosurgery on the lobsters in the hopes of controlling them with an AI bot.

Leading the way was Elliot Roth, a bearded 32-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with Longevity printed across the chest and a silver chain with a double-helix pendant. To push the boundaries of the five senses, Roth has implanted a magnet in his left ring finger. He told me his nerves have grown around the magnet, giving him some sort of magnetoperception—he can feel when a microwave turns on in another room and sense when a radio tower is nearby. In the car, Roth took off his watch and allowed it to dangle, magnetized, from his finger.

Roth did not have any experience with lobster surgery, so he had enlisted a co-conspirator: William Joy, a lanky, 19-year-old redhead who also had never operated on a lobster but seemed confident in his fine motor skills. Joy would modify an off-the-shelf kit that can be used to remote-control a cockroach and implant the controlling device in the lobsters. If successful, Roth and Joy would then be able to send targeted electrical signals to direct the lobsters’ movements and, hopefully, the pinching of their claws. The final step: connecting the lobsters to the popular AI agent OpenClaw, which uses a lobster for its logo (get it?), and allowing the bot itself to decide what the lobsters should do. Perhaps the lobsters could even be made to control OpenClaw, Joy excitedly told me. “I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the first real instance of a complex AI agent interfacing with a biological organism,” he said during the ride.

With two lobsters secured in a pink plastic bag, we returned to an office building in downtown San Francisco where Roth and Joy would conduct the experiment. They began setting up an aquarium tank, fiddling with the water’s salinity and acidity. The duo claimed to be very concerned about animal welfare. “We are going to give a lot of thought to, How can we ensure that they don’t suffer?” Joy said, adding that he would look into giving them some kind of anaesthesia. These particular animals were “already destined for the dinner table,” Roth said, and they planned to later eat the lobsters out of respect.<br>Niki Williams for The Atlantic<br>William Joy in his bedroom at the Biopunk House.

This experiment was eccentric but not outlandish—at least not to Roth and Joy’s housemates. They both are residents of Biopunk House, a repurposed college dormitory inhabited by more than 20 aspiring entrepreneurs with dreams of curing aging and rewiring the human brain. In the lingo of San Francisco, this kind of co-living situation is called a “hacker house.” Out of sheer convenience, if nothing else, young tech founders have long decided to band together to make rent in one of the most expensive parts of the country. Mark Zuckerberg and some other early Facebook executives famously lived together in the 2000s.

In recent years, hacker houses have become more deeply woven into the Bay Area’s culture than ever before. During the AI boom, crashing in a group house is something like a rite of passage for any young AI founder. Across San Francisco, hacker houses are filling up with college dropouts and, in at least one case, exuberant tinkerers spending their Friday buying lobsters for science. They want to change the world and become spectacularly wealthy, but first they’ll have to share a bathroom.

Niki Williams for The Atlantic<br>Elliot Roth and William Joy housed lobsters in a fish tank before preparing to implant them with electrical nodes.

Niki Williams for The Atlantic<br>Roth, who has a magnet implanted in his hand, said he doesn’t want humans to be “trapped” by their biological limitations.

A couple of days before the lobster mission, I rolled my suitcase up to the front door of a slightly battered Victorian row house a few blocks from San Francisco’s famous Painted Ladies. This was the Accelr8 house, where I would spend the next week among half-a-dozen entrepreneurs. What better way to understand the hacker-house scene than to live in it?<br>Accelr8 has a more modest setup than the Biopunk House. There’s no theme other than trying to launch a tech company with little to no funding. After I’d settled into my room, which included a wobbly standing desk and a view of the adjacent building’s wall, I got a brief tour of the house. It has two floors, each with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen. On the top level is a shared workspace with desks and a small bookshelf featuring Atlas Shrugged; The Art of Power, by Nancy Pelosi; some Foucault; and three vintage issues of Playboy. Below, a living room is crowded with couches, succulents,...