# Scarcity Breeds Mythology

> How the intersection of three major events: America's 250, Taylor Swift's wedding, and Anthropic's release of Fable 5 all keep the American Dream alive

**Published by:** [Hard Mode First](https://hardmodefirst.xyz/)
**Published on:** 2026-07-06
**URL:** https://hardmodefirst.xyz/scarcity-breeds-mythology

## Content

A real photo, enhanced with a little surrealism, thanks to NanoBanana America has always sold us a frontier. This weekend, three very different stories reminded me that AI may be the newest one: America’s 250th birthday, Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Anthropic’s temporary release of Fable 5. They all revolved around the same thing: Mythology. One celebrated a nation’s founding story. One became more powerful by refusing to feed the internet. One promised limitless possibility to anyone willing to sit down and build. If you spent even a single second in New York City this weekend, you couldn’t have missed the remarkable and rare feeling seeping out of the corners of the city: Unity. Parents dragging star-spangled toddlers by the hands to the riverfronts, folding chairs and picnic blankets in hand. You can AI-generate an image of an antique plane flying over the skyline, but you can’t replace the feeling of hearing and seeing it with your own eyes. It harkened back to a folksier, simpler era. One where patriotism didn’t feel like such a charged ideology. I went home with the kids and felt compelled to watch The Sandlot, with my kids, for the very first time. “I liked it when the doggie ate the ball.” I watched it for the folklore, I suppose. For a couple of hours, New York felt strangely close to the watermelon-drippy, backyard summers I grew up with. But when it finally showed itself this weekend, I wondered: Is this just a giant tease? Thanks to Anthropic’s temporary re-release its long-awaited model, Fable, I found myself wondering the same thing with every seemingly superhuman task I assigned my new AI senior software engineering militia for the weekend. Am I talented, or am I participating in arbitrage? Anything is possible, the tech titans tempt us. The only limit now is your own creativity. What will you build next? And so, as the modern-day pioneer, I built. I built all weekend long. I built while my mind wandered to what was happening inside Madison Square Garden, just 40 blocks south, at a wedding that surely rivaled the Great Gatsby era for the modern-day elite. I updated security protocols and permissions across my apps, waiting for the photos to drop. And when they didn’t, I realized something remarkable: That despite all the press, the crowds, the gawkers, and the celebrities, not a single damn photo got leaked. After all, the absence of any real content makes anything digital a fake by default. Taylor Swift, the most popular human on the planet, reminded us all that the rarest form of power may simply be refusing to publish. Scarcity breeds mythology. We play stupid games, we win stupid prizes. America has always romanticized the frontier. We’ve always had to travel far to find it, whether by boat or by foot or by carriage. The founders back then had to endure great periods of separation from the people they loved, all in the name of actualizing that great American idea. You can always go West. Just one more mountain, one more quest. “Mommy is working again,” I overheard the kids say to their dad after they ask me if I want to play another card game with them before bed. The frontier-seekers of today are disappearing, too. We drift further and further into our computer terminals and digital devices, lost in our heads to the imaginary folklore of the promise of a better technological frontier. “Just one more prompt,” I catch myself thinking. “I’m almost there.”

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