Crypto bro wants giant Prometheus in SF Bay — as if California needed more fire | Opinion
What do you do when you have more money than Midas and even less sense than Icarus?
Build giant statues, apparently.
Despite the 8.8 million, or 1 in 5, Californians that live with food insecurity, the nearly 200,000 who are homeless and the state’s crumbling infrastructure, what we really need now — according to one tech entrepreneur — is a colossal statue of the Greek god Prometheus. Why? As a “monument to American manifest destiny.”
According to an article that appeared in Bloomberg last week, crypto bro and venture capitalist Ross Calvin wants to mar the public’s view of San Francisco Bay with a 450-foot statue of the Greek god of forethought: Prometheus.
(He should next consider a giant statue to Momus, the Greek god of irony.)
Calvin wants to place the colossal statue on Alcatraz Island, already home to the infamous now-defunct prison and a bird sanctuary. He proposes it to be made of a nickel-bronze alloy, and stand taller than the Statue of Liberty by some 150 feet. At that height, it would peer even over the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The behemoth statue would cost an estimated $450 million — so, a cost of around $1 million per foot — and “unapologetically symbolize a brilliant, optimistic American future, calling us to visionary thinking, bold achievement and forging this new world into a powerful ideal,” as Calvin wrote on the American Colossus Foundation’s “manifesto,” on its website.
Calvin, who lives in Denver and runs an obscure Bitcoin mining business, dreamed of the idea while visiting friends in San Francisco in 2018. Apparently, as he watched the sun set over the bay, he must have thought: “You know what this breathtaking vista really needs? A towering monument to man’s hubris.”
That’s what the tale of Prometheus is, by the way, just in case you’re not familiar with the ancient Greek myth. Prometheus was a god who betrayed his fellow gods on Mount Olympus and stole the gift of fire for all mankind. For this theft, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to live in eternal agony as eagles attacked during the day and ate out his liver (then believed to be the holder of a body’s emotions) and to suffer immortality each night as it grew back.
Never mind, too, the irony of installing a giant statue in ode to a mythical fire-bringer in a state that is annually destroyed in one part or another by catastrophic wildfires. (Hey, you know what project could really use $450 million? The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.)
In order to build the Prometheus statue, President Donald Trump would have to reclassify the island from a national park to a national monument, and the president’s stated plans to reopen Alcatraz as a functioning penitentiary would complicate the project, to say the least.
Calvin’s American Colossus Foundation says it plans to submit a proposal to Trump by January, while in the Bloomberg article, he brags about how his wealth gives him special access to the president.
God — or gods? — forbid the nation’s nouveau tech riche do something with their billions that would benefit Americans beyond vaguely inspiring us to… do something? At least Andrew Carnegie funded libraries with his ill-begotten gains. It’s still not clear how a giant statue of a Greek god represents anything profoundly American, but according to Calvin: “Prometheus is kind of the patron saint of what it means to be American,” he told Bloomberg. “The West is the thing where original things happen.”
(This is, I assume, news to the East.)
As a big fan of Greek mythology, I feel somewhat obligated to point out that man’s hubris — particularly when paired with an enormous building project — has, mythologically, not ended well for anyone.
So rather than tempting the gods, I would like to propose a compromise between Calvin and the people of California: Instead of building a 450-foot statue of Prometheus in one of our national parks, how about he builds a 45-foot statue of Koalemos, the Greek god of stupidity, in his own backyard?
