You can observe this at any level you like, and from many different cultures too. I know of many Americans my age whose parents are fully resigned to auto-pilot, either crashing out deadbeat in economic failure or towering themselves up in hybrid work-from-home benzodiazepine-fueled children’s stories doing fake jobs and/or mooching off HELOCs. I know of many Indonesians my age who follow similar stories, subbing out the bumming for BNPL-fuelled gambling addictions and the spectres of success taking more banal forms through things like deep withdrawal into television and social media. Countless parents are brazenly failing their offspring who are languishing in early adulthood now with no relevant lessons imparted and no fallback support structure that doesn’t come with a heaping helping of contempt, spite, sabotage or some combination thereof.

If you’re living in the same reality as the rest of us, that all rings very true without question. But for the rock-dwellers among us or even—heaven forbid—the architects of contemporary disgust who may have the aesthetic pain of happening upon this article, there is also a wealth of empirical evidence for the criminal quality of world leadership today. For example, the narrative collapse of the Iran conflict in 2026 is met by the admin with firing rampages, which makes sense when one has spent their entire adult lives threatening and torching their way through problems while ordinary people bear out all of the kindness and labour needed to make up for it.

Or take the ongoing AI datacentre fraud as another example. Even if you’re hog ignorant of the hot mess that is, you can see plain as day that there is no originality or imagination about what’s going on here anymore. There’s no earnestly new thing that some actual person discovered that stakeholders are jumping on to foster. It’s just a bunch of assholes pouring money on the same tired fantasies that had them starry-eyed when they were in their twenties: Hackerman this, Space Odyssey that, to the tune of trillions of dollars that don’t belong to them. The most pathetic part is they don’t really give a shit what anyone thinks about this or what it accomplishes. They just see the matter as “well, it’s my toy to fuck.”

China is also similarly bankrupt in quality, albeit this is a more established trait of theirs by the political climate of today. Tallest bridges, longest bridges, most kilovolts on an HVDC line, and so on. China has ample land like the US to build more originally and functionally but they make empty skyscrapers anyway just to prove a reactionary point against their own sense of inferiority. It would be more evil if it wasn’t so pathetic.

It’s far from an American problem, though I lead with it as it is my nation to reference. I think the most infamous exponent of this very same lifestyle of pissing on reality is none other than the recently assassinated Ayatollah.

The Ayatollah is dead, his family is dead, and his one son took a piss break and God rewarded him with being maimed for life and shooed into serving as the absent figurehead of the country’s preeminent criminal syndicate instead of being taken into the next one and out of this sorry existence.

I’ve heard a lot of abstract bullshit from people around the world about this when it gets brought up. They often say shit like “I don’t care about the religious conflicts,” or some conventional gotcha about the Israeli regime, American folly or the Chinese government. This is how you know they’re living on cloud nine with Elon and the rest of the turds.

The Ayatollah dying presents a disgustingly simple and direct refutation of that entire mode of being: he obviously had every insurance policy available to him enacted against this exact sort of outcome, and it did him no good. All the loyalty and illicit funding and secret nuclear programmes he ever wanted and he still got blown up by a conventional Israeli airstrike.

If you are somebody whose first reaction to events like this is to parsimoniously frame it into your ongoing mental map of geopolitics, or more pathetically an ideology you faithfully subscribe to, you are exhibiting the very failure mode that brought the Ayatollah to his untimely death. It’s also the same failure mode that is bringing Trump’s administration to tatters about their handling of the conflict, and the same failure mode that leads your parents to treat you like shit. Loyalty over competence. Aesthetics over substance. Someone else always picks up the pieces. These are the hallmarks of Lucifer.

I wrote about this before in a much more exploratory fashion. I called this archetype the ultimate coward, and I still think today the name is quite fitting:

The new angle this year is that this kind of person is becoming ever more central, important, and unavoidable in the course of bearing out the suffering of our lives today. We have to deal with this type of person, and like, now. Leaving the situation on autopilot is essentially guaranteeing World War III.

I made a video during the course of my campaign where I attempted to complete the puzzle started by GEN, explaining why the ‘AI bubble’ is not actually a bubble but a black hole.

The thing the public still does not quite understand is that the veracity of ‘AI’ or any other use of the datacentres does not matter beyond getting key stakeholders—who are very, very corrupted by the way—to sanction the buy. Once the buy happens, the game is won: the sole point of these endeavours is to seize and consolidate control. The ‘AI taking your jobs’ pretext merely needs to be barely true enough for neurotic regulators and sleepy lawmakers to turn a crossed eye, because in spirit it’s a completely false pretext to snap up lots of land and infrastructure just so it can be possessed. It’s best thought of as a kind of soft coup under what remaining pretensions of capitalism still hold cachet with the somnambulant public.

But regardless of how that whole sham pans out, at the end of it you’re still faced with the same ugly, personal problem: self-appointed leaders with massive maturity deficits are dragging us down the road to hell and making us pay for it every step of the way. The IRGC executed a 19-year-old wrestler for protesting. Trump handed Congress a $1.5 trillion ask for defense spending alone with fantastical projections about economic growth countermanded by every active public policymaker of relevance to the matter. As I explained in my previous treatment of this, you can’t run from it. But what are you going to do?

In pursuit of finding a complete answer to that, I think it’s helpful to frame the problem in detail. Being poetic yet precise about what is ugly and wrong, and correctly identifying the species and malignancy of the sickness, helps people identify on their own what the weak spots may look like so they can better attack it should they have the courage to.

A recent instance of this exact therapy has surfaced in the form of Apple TV’s first original production: the bombshell hit show Your Friends & Neighbors. Now, I’m a famously unplugged person, lacking cable since I was eight years old and I didn’t ‘cut the cord’ into a streaming service addiction as in that corrupted pop culture refrain. But I got clued into what this was about by a friend and let me say it’s important to what we’re all kind of suffering through, because it’s a first-person journal detailing the escapades of the architects of today’s living hell.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of work is simply a matter of putting down the self-destructive impulses so many still cling to as vice. But when that is not at hand, being constructive, imaginatively and creatively, is vitally important. I hope I gave you a better picture of what we’re up against so you are at least more inspired—if not more informed—on how to attack it. With no honest living in sight for many, what else is there to do?

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Before I even get into it, I just want to say that this was offered for a domicile that is part of a city-managed public housing project. There are city contractors that come around on a regular basis to trim hedges and deal with stray tree branches, and they also mow the lawns and occasionally pressure wash the driveways. The lease agreements forbid tenants from hiring their own people to do this stuff. But yea, expect a hapless 20-year-old on Ritalin to know all of that and see how it goes.

I don’t know how perceptive you are when it comes to the world around you, but this is no ordinary solicitation. This is what I call the ‘helium flash’ of the American economy, analogous to the runaway fusion of helium our Sun will experience in about 1.2 billion years. Per Wikipedia:

Low-mass stars do not produce enough gravitational pressure to initiate normal helium fusion. As the hydrogen in the core is exhausted, some of the helium left behind is instead compacted into degenerate matter, supported against gravitational collapse by quantum mechanical pressure rather than thermal pressure.

Gravity is money, and gravitational pressure is money compelling people to act. Gravitational collapse is the expulsion of economically active people from the system.

Degenerate matter is what young people have become, as quantum mechanical pressure is intrinsic and for us is analogous to the fountain of youth – they simply act, regardless of how objectively bad things are. Thermal pressure is the more conventional systemic nudging of people to glom onto what’s most profitable, and is dominant for older, more established people who in our analogy have ‘escaped’ to the outer shell of still-burning hydrogen.

However, a property of degenerate matter is that increases in temperature do not produce an increase in the pressure of the matter until the thermal pressure becomes so very high that it exceeds degeneracy pressure. In main-sequence stars, thermal expansion regulates the core temperature, but in degenerate cores, this does not occur. Helium fusion increases the temperature, which increases the fusion rate, which further increases the temperature in a runaway reaction, which quickly spans the entire core. This produces a flash of very intense helium fusion that lasts only a few minutes, but during that time, produces energy at a rate comparable to the entire Milky Way galaxy.

When you’re 20 years old, being degenerate hasn’t much consequence. So turning up the heat in your life is something you can live with, up to a point. We are reaching that point, and this explosion of door-to-door salesmanship is the telltale. This is the last stand for the most valuable and productive segment of America’s population; there is no ‘next stop’ after this. Next stop is between a dog’s hindquarters to be frank.

It is beyond banal for me to observe that things have gone to shit in America. Everybody knows this and everybody who cares to talk about it at all says so. What’s less banal is to properly assign responsibility for it; for the most part, Americans of all ages and statures are still content to play the blame game. They’re so addicted to it that they usually can’t even recognise someone who is trying to find productive fault – to them, it’s just another someone laying the blame to where they think it belongs. Hence the obsession with ‘both-sidesing’ every conflict they encounter – objective reality does not exist, and so objective morality goes out the window with it.

The reason that this delusion has been so widespread and unshakeable is because of the historical American wealth – our problems have been far too immaterial for far too long, and we have raised four successive generations of people who live their lives on pure executive fiat. The first to grow up like this have grandchildren now who don’t know how to give a shit if their lives depended on it—and their lives quite often do. We’re still running on the old software that christened shit like Live Aid in the 1980s – where not only did people act as if American consumerism could be pointed at world problems like some kind of directed energy weapon, but in a strange, reality-defying sense it actually was. We don’t live in a world capable of that anymore.

I’m no stranger to business and I just got done running a political campaign from zero with help from essentially nobody besides my husband. I got a fuckload of SPAM in my inbox from vultures trying to sell me SMS and email campaigns for tons of money I don’t have that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to receive even if I did, and I got zero volunteers and four donations that paid for the campaign business cards and nothing else. All the while my husband is doing roofing sales—something that has become a very similar door-to-door grift to the tree trimming thing mentioned at the start—and we’re running headlong into the same personal failures I bore witness to every day while running for office. Nobody gives a shit about anything. Everyone is pretending. Everyone of note is shamelessly corrupt. Nobody wants to confront this even though there’s no other way to solve it. Cowardice rules the day in America and American cowards only have themselves to blame for why criminals feast every day in our country.

If there was any conciliatory point to my campaign besides trying to win—and I was the only earnest candidate on the ballot, mind you—it was getting people to realise that they can’t keep bullshitting themselves like this.

It’s frustrating because it comes across to their immature minds like I’m trying to chastise or bully them into giving me something that I want, and they always remain suspicious of me even though I have no ulterior desire and never, ever get anything out of them in the end (because duh, I’m not trying to). Their heads are so far up their asses that all they do anymore is walk around being paranoid that everyone is trying to screw them over, resolving to be truly, originally woke in whatever way is fashionable in their subculture, and then they get totally reamed by somebody else anyway. Democrats are always faithfully en garde against Republicans and the Trump administration, only so that Paul Barringer can swoop in from behind and absolutely mog them and all they want to do about that is fight to remain in denial. Republicans do the exact same thing while their enemies from within feast with impunity. There’s no earnestness anywhere, because God forbid you look uncool for five minutes in a time when the generation of Cool is in charge, running everything into the ground.

I wish I could walk through these people’s thought processes with them just once to demonstrate how genuinely stupid and broken they are. I know why they do this. Every time I’m just seeing someone covering their homework like that one guy on Idiocracy did during Not Sure’s IQ test scene. “You’re not gonna get one over me!” Yes, you’re right, I’m not. And now that you’ve been proven right and I have obtained nothing from you whatsoever, do you want to talk about why you’re still not getting what you need elsewhere? Or are we gonna keep talking in circles playing mind games about this? Congressional budgets are riding on these decisions you think I’m here to grift on.

People need to realise that just because they’re drowning in demagoguery doesn’t mean demagoguery is all there ever is. They need to know what it looks like when someone gives a shit, and that’s the hardest thing, because to be honest, it’s probably true that no one ever gave a shit about them in the first place.

The threat in all of this is not coming from me or anyone like me. The threat is coming from reality. Look at the bond market:

When U.S. government bond holdings drop, their yields via interest rates rise to compensate. As with the Federal Reserve, interest rates are a lever that directly affects the heat of the economy. We know what higher interest rates do to the economy: they hasten the collapse of debt instruments, which we have been abusing relentlessly for decades to prop up an increasingly hollowed-out economy for American workers.

You don’t need the blatantly cooked JOLTS books or the latest CPI report to bear witness to this. This article opened with young people badly soliciting public housing projects for shrub trimming. These people are not even trying to go to college. They’re not going into trades. They’re not going into anything. They’ve been 100% abandoned by the stewards of the American economy who chose to ship their livelihoods overseas quite consistently for decades.

The reason that the youth aren’t rioting right now is because they’re doing as their parents taught them: lying to themselves and pretending their lives are just peachy to keep up pretensions of attractiveness so they don’t lose everything by appearing broke. The American youth have a pretty impossible dilemma: be honest one time and lose everything as people realise you’re broke and start avoiding you like a leper, or compulsively lie about your livelihood and try to prevent the mask from becoming a permanent part of your face. Neither of these options are healthy or conducive to success or happiness, but it’s what older generations have essentially mandated onto everyone as a hidden entry fee for their hilariously corrupt economy. “Just do X,” say the 50-year-olds who could—and often did—just walk in to get a job, or start hustling one day and their chutzpah carried them because everyone wasn’t permanently glued to their phones in public and otherwise locked into their bedrooms yet.

The older people have no insurance policy against the flip for this either. They’re 100% reliant on people being pliant and self-betraying, giving into bullshit legalisms about the rules that have been disingenuously twisted to disfavour them, or just being too cowardly to ever defy something that hurts them. This is why some of the worst actors in global geopolitics are building bunkers: they have no intention of trying to stop this oncoming mayhem, and in fact they often want to encourage it so they may profit from it at a safe distance. Zuckerberg anticipates war, and like a good millennial he treats it like an action movie where he’s going to be a supporting cast member in some Top Gun rip-off and all the peons are extras who don’t matter. Gen X is even more pathetically movie-brained about this. Total unreality, and billions of dollars are moving to make it happen anyway.

The first people to confront this reality will be those with the incentive to do so. On balance, that’s probably gonna be the people with the least amount of mortgages or HELOCs. It’s probably not gonna be people who went to trading firms because they hit every arbitrary mark with grades and school selection.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not here for that old world. That old world has been trying to kill me more or less since I can remember. I’m here for the new one, and I gotta admit, I’m pretty damn early aren’t I? Typical…

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How is an election?

As you may already know, the polls handed me a loss in the primary this past month. I have several videos in the pipeline discussing how and why this is, but instead of spoiling it for you I’m going to take it from the top and explain this election to you by illuminating the following:

1. How electoral candidates are supposed to be evaluated by the public

2. How the electoral candidates were, in fact, evaluated

3. How this difference between ethics and reality will be mended moving forward

Three categories of judgement

At the most basic level, an election held for a political office is a contest to win the moral judgement of the public. Moreover, the specific morals in question for that win are already well-known in advance: chiefly, a candidate’s reputation is what is morally in question. Reputation is then further decomposed pragmatically into components of the existing track record (ergo, look what I have already done), the incidence and circumstance of both goodwill and/or scandals, and lastly the personal character of the candidate to the extent that may illuminate their moral qualifications. It is also key to know that this is an ordered list in descending importance: track record is most important, personal character is least important, and goodwill/scandals float between as a sort of X factor.

Track record

In the Democratic primary for District 13, all three candidates earn a zero in the first category of existing track record for the simple reason that they have none. None of them have ever held popularly-elected public office before, period. So on this matter, the race was a wash.

Now, I understand that it is very common for hucksters to twist the meaning of ‘track record’ to be expanded beyond the applicability of their claims (e.g. being a farmhand makes Candidate X the better choice for leading Agriculture policy). Of the three candidates, Paul alone deployed this manipulation tactic, and in a particularly nasty way: by citing his 25 years of legal experience as a private attorney in the Beltway as a cause for credibility in being a Congressman, he not only conflated the charge of being a bona fide Representative with merely being near the House, but additionally trampled on the deep ethical separations that exist between attorneys and the outside world they represent. As an ethical matter, attorneys have to be neutral and unopinionated in their own rights in order to credibly do their jobs on behalf of their clients – they themselves cannot have a horse in the race. This neutrality of attorneys is foundational to their work and is completely orthogonal to the ethics of representation by election, where the foundation of a representative’s ethical credibility is the legitimacy and trust built in their relationship with their constituents. By taking his own side in the course of self-advocacy as an attorney running for office, Paul is throwing the entire ethics of legal representation in the garbage and denigrating the ethics of democratic representation at the same time. I can scarcely think of a more morally disgusting thing to say regarding one’s track record in seeking public office.

Infamy

Moving on to the second pillar—goodwill and/or scandals—both Paul and I get a zero for this as well. It’s worth remembering as well as those numbers may change in the future that they are only quantifiable in magnitude, not direction, meaning it is more honest to call this a sort of ‘infamy measurement’. Frank alone demonstrated sustained infamy in what appears to be a mostly positive direction, and this is resultant from his relentless canvassing efforts in both the previous election and this one. I think it is reasonable to credit this for the bulk of Frank’s showing in the polls, all things considered.

Before we move on to character, recall what I said before about relative importance and set it against the facts already laid out with Paul and I holding zero–zero. By this reasoning, Frank should have handily won the election and the following discussion about us two would be purely academic. But since that is not only not what happened but quite far from it even, we have to—at the very least—admit that this last avenue of evaluation actually took paramount importance for the voters in deciding this election, since even combining Frank’s votes with mine still nets a loss in the hypothetical contest between Paul and the Frank–Alexander Amalgamate.

Character

Voters examined “the personal character of the candidate to the extent that may illuminate their moral qualifications.” Let us enumerate them then, starting with Paul:

• Registered in the opposing political party for 25 years out-of-state and moved here specifically to run for office

• Independently wealthy farmer who owns a textile company but chose instead to have a law career in Washington

• Family heritage traces back to emigration from Germany in the early 1850s to Lee County before the Civil War

• Married to an elite Jewish woman of unknown association, as documented in the New York Times

And for I:

• Registered unaffiliated since age 18 in 2016, claimed to have voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary and swore off politics since then until deciding to run, his family having been generational Democrats

• Itinerant tech industry worker with an ax to grind against the criminal syndicates in that industry

• Family heritage immediately goes back to West Virginia and stays there all the way back to the 1700s

• Gay married to an Indonesian green card holder

Right away the first items of each profile make the rest into afterthoughts: Paul was a registered Republican for a quarter of a century in Chevy Chase, MD, coterminous with his entire career as an attorney. Paul was evidently successful in this endeavour; an analogue in the tech industry would be someone who worked on anything trendy in the 1990s, did a tour as a baron of the various FAANG companies in the late 2000s and 2010s, and finally aped into crypto for an afternoon before championing some ill-fated AI startup. His party association, his vaguely unspecified ‘work on Obamacare’ that he describes as a glorified government IT help desk operation and otherwise never elaborates on, and his sudden entry into politics squarely marks him as an established architect against the public interest. Everything that has been personally working for him is congruent with the things that have been making life materially worse for Americans. It’s no wonder then that Frank’s campaign often took on a character of spite: he often appeared to be less running for himself and more running to sound the alarm about Paul. Not that it stopped him.

Well, my story is pretty much the exact opposite: my research never focussed on any of the latent obsessions with cryptocurrency or machine learning, I never made any serious money despite the industry being so explosively cash-laden that it has been subbing in for the nonexistent world economy in the last few years, and I stuck to my ethics about the decisions I made that led me down that path.

The reasonable outcome

So it should all be very straightforward, then: people think for five seconds about Paul, think for five more seconds about Alexander, and pick the person who is less full of shit: the kid who’s trying to stick it to the primary forces behind Trump’s second term. They tell the Republican to kick rocks, then Frank wins the election because he’s the only one to put hard work in ahead of time, and I’m not writing this for you to read right now. So why are we sitting here staring at a 60% win for the obvious plant—the literal Republican swamp monster waltzing into a Democratic primary? What were the voters thinking?

The reality: a tale of two groups

There are two answers for this electoral outcome depending on which voters you are examining. For the purpose of explaining I will simply call these groups of voters the ‘inner group’ and the ‘outer group’, and they are distinguished as follows.

Inner group

The inner group are people who tend to regard themselves as ‘insiders’ into the Democratic process. They tend to be older, whiter, wealthier, and treat politics as their personal hobby. They are disproportionately active on Facebook and serve as ‘hubs’ to the ‘spokes’ of organised Democratic outreach. And finally, they are completely unrepresentative of the public they spend their time reaching out to; this fact will prove key later.

Outer group

The outer group, on the other hand, are people who are civically involved for earnest—if often selfish—reasons. When you get out into the proper sticks of District 13, these people start comprising a supermajority of Democratic participants. They tend to be of a more widespread age distribution and are comprised of higher levels of minorities and working class people – all qualities that empirically overlap with constricted electoral participation. Finally, they are far more representative of the public they reach out to, for the simple reason that their formation is far more spontaneous and organic, mostly retreading existing social structures outside of politics.

The democratic chasm

The problem at hand is that neither of these groups are very numerous, and that reduction only gets compensated for in the case of the inner group, who have more time, more money and more meaningful connections that can all be pulled together to enhance their influence. The outer group, by and large, simply cannot afford to do this, ever. They are far more dependent on the highly constrained opportunities of candidate fora and meet-and-greets for which County parties have no ethical rubric of any consistency, making them very cheap to overrun with quid-pro-quos like what we saw between the Barringer campaign and the Granville County Democrats: a $750 donation and a few days later they jointly announce a meet-and-greet that no other candidate had all the while the Party never hosted a single candidate forum of any kind. This is one instance of a pattern of corruption that the inner group of voters stands squarely in the middle of, explaining Paul’s overwhelming win.

A familiar Orwellian story

The best explanation for the absurd outcome of this election is that Paul successfully convinced the pigs on the Animal Farm that were actually more equal than the others to back his campaign. He did this partly as I warned of before in Harnett County: weaponising Democratic financial anxiety by waving his $600,000 of campaign funds around—two thirds of which was his own money, mind you—in the hopes that people will lie to themselves that they need his money to beat Brad Knott. Never mind that Knott will always outraise any Democratic challenger by virtue of how easily defensible his position is, implying that beating him requires breaking the metagame.

Picking a ‘winner’

But Paul also activated a uniquely American delusion that is most prevalent among yuppies and the various kinds of old people chiefly responsible for today’s social decay: he convinced them that their vote in this primary is a matter of ‘picking a winner’. Despite the phrase’s appearances, his is not the straightforward notion of voting for whomever has the best odds to win in the general election; rather, this is the idea of ‘choosing’ the person that most strongly exudes the aesthetics of someone who already won, because it’s fashionable, low-risk, and enhances one’s social status after the likely outcome comes to pass. Exploiting the same psychological vulnerabilities as the tech mob does with cryptocurrency and the following FOMOs surrounding AI, Paul goaded them again into discarding the fundamental diseases afflicting his pitch to the voters in favour of a more contrived idea that he should win because he should win. This obviously circular logic is even more insane than the first rationale about fundraising, but it’s par for the course when dealing with millionaires who took for granted everyone who helped them when they were young and are ditching everyone else on the side of the road today. Cue the TED talk from morons like Mark Cuban and Patrick O’Leary who think spending money is a skill – same disease, different khakis. Some people are too rich and happy to understand the world is not an extended universe for the idiot box.

The reason that this clinches the election is painfully simple: this inner group controls all of the levers for accessing an obtuse and downright medieval voter outreach system. Even the Wake County Democratic Party is still sending out these ‘voter guides’ to people, really just to sanctify their ritual petitioning of candidates for answers to an arcane set of elementary questions under the false pretense that there is no way for them to know about candidates otherwise. It’s not the 1970s anymore; I made a point to disregard this circus just to show you that the only outcome from it was having my name kicked off of their fake ballot. And what other purpose does this ‘voter guide’ serve? Its sole demonstrated purpose is to disinform the voters by selectively removing names according to outmoded and arbitrary rules. Doesn’t the party owe it to the people to tell them everything they can reasonably figure out and copy regarding all of the Democratic candidates they have the choice of voting for? I mean shucks, isn’t that their whole reason for being? Well, what do we call it when an organisation betrays their own core ethics? Corruption.

(An aside: There is an impulse among those who are predisposed to Paul or otherwise feel too ‘seen’ by this analysis to dismiss this writing without even reading it as being a product of some kind of ‘sour grapes’. Not only is this dishonest and immature, its strongest possible pretense—the notion that at the end of the day Paul is popular, so what you think went wrong isn’t true—is false. Don’t run with the percentages: at the end of the day, Paul obtained less than 30,000 votes. I obtained less than 6,000. It’s more honest to say that none of us are popular, and therefore it remains to be seen whether either of us will ever demonstrate a genuine resonance with the voting public.)

What is to be done

So, for all of these reasons, the inner group picked their ‘winner’, and the resultant outcome is the result of two forces colliding: the negative force of the wider public fatigue and (understandable) contempt for conventional electoral processes, and the positive force of monopolising an archaic and corrupted information highway and deputising it for a specific candidate ahead of the primary. This leads me to what I’m going to be doing to move forward once I return to the United States: bridging that information gap. This will come in two forms:

• constructive outreach addressing the negative force of apathy and disengagement, and

• destructive outreach addressing the positive force of petty corruption in the Democratic apparatus

American politics has a perennial credibility problem that several successive movements under names like Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang have, so far, failed to mend. Crotchety goblins like Paul are no different from dinosaurs like Joe Crowley or Jeb Bush – nobody likes them, they have no redeeming ethics to compensate for their repulsiveness, and their political careers depend on the wider public being too disgusted with the mere sight of them to bother kicking them out of the fray.

Paul has tried in vain to preempt the reality of why people like him are not welcome in Congress – chiefly the problem of affordability – by hijacking it as a narrative talking point, but at the end of the day, he has less than zero credibility to be claiming to help anyone besides the culprits of it. People know this already but they need a reason to believe that there is a realistic and effective opening to get rid of his ilk. Giving them that reason is now my job.

I’ll leave you with one more thing regarding my personal place in all of this. I’ve learned a very valuable lesson from this election: positivity does not sell in the current American political economy. The places where I talked up Asian food regulations and made callbacks to the Progressive Era were the places where I did the worst electorally. In contrast, the places where I did the best were either defined by podium-mediated negativity towards the candidate plant, or were based on direct voter contact where people picked me simply for my earnestness and Democratic credentials. I know what it’s going to take to win these follow-up contests, and it’s something that I’m actually far more talented at than being all naïve and positive. I didn’t spend my twenties fighting the mob for my livelihood just to be sitting on my hands when the same problem crops up in the Democratic weeds. Hold on to your hats, because this is about to get nasty.

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On December 7th, 1703, the Great Storm struck Wales and southern England, claiming over 8,000 human lives, over 5,000 homes along the Thames, innumerable thousands of livestock, thousands of chimneys in London and over 4,000 oak trees in the New Forest.

On December 7th, 1776, Lafayette joined the Patriot cause in the American Revolutionary War.

On December 7th, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution of the United States of America.

On December 7th, 1917, the United States declared war on Austria–Hungary in World War I.

On December 7th, 1932, Einstein was first granted his American visa.

On December 7th, 1941—a day which will live on in infamy, not the least because of the infamous irony in the speech given to Congress declaring it to live on in infamy—the Imperial Japanese Navy carried out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, leading the United States to declare war on the Empire of Japan.

On December 7th, 1949, the government of the Republic of China relocated to Taiwan, where they would then remain unto the present day.

On December 7th, 1965, the Catholic and Orthodox churches simultaneously revoked mutual excommunications upon the other that had been in place since the Great Schism of 1054.

On December 7th, 1972, the last Apollo mission is launched, upon which the Blue Marble photograph is taken of the Earth.

And on December 7th, 2017—a day which will also live in infamy—I got married.

You might have to wait a while to see the significance of that though. 😉

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Sebastian’s Substack

Marginal Revolution

The most successful economics blog in the world is called Marginal Revolution…

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2 months ago · 50 likes · 5 comments · Sebastian Galiani

The most successful economics blog in the world is called Marginal Revolution.
That is not an accident.

It could have been called Markets and Power, or Inequality Today, or Political Economy. It could even have been called Capitalism Explained. Instead, it is named after a nineteenth-century intellectual earthquake: the marginal revolution. A quiet reminder that modern economics begins not with slogans or moral postures, but with a way of thinking.

That reminder matters today more than we like to admit.

Admitted.

In the 1870s, almost simultaneously and largely independently, three economists overturned classical political economy. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras broke with the Ricardian tradition that explained value through labor, costs, or embedded substance. Value, they argued, does not come from the total amount of work put into something. It comes from the last unit—from what economists would soon call marginal valuation.

It’s also not an accident that this thinking emerged in the 1870s – a decade that historians know heralded the beginning of the first Gilded Age. It was violently suppressed during both World Wars and nonviolently suppressed by the New Deal, which was exported to the rest of the world after 1945. The New Deal would collapse as the fervour of postmodern relativism became too great a temptation in the 1960s, causing the political economy to change. Naturally, the real economy had to follow suit, or else economists would be out of a job.

This was not a semantic tweak. It was a change in how economic reasoning itself works. Decisions are not made by comparing wholes; they are made at the margin. Not “is water useful?” but “how useful is one more glass of water, given how much I already have?” Not “is labor important?” but “is the next worker worth hiring at this wage, given current output and technology?”

This change in thinking was fleetingly useful because the information climate of the 20th century was so comparatively poor compared to the innate complexity at hand in the reality of the economy. It was essentially a heuristic that was usually true, not unlike setting one’s polynomials to zero to find their roots. Since the advent of air travel and the Worldwide Web, it has stopped being so useful, as we can now directly acquire the necessary information about the whole to make decisions quickly and effectively. Now, it only persists as it is demanded so by the political climate of complacency, complicity and aggregated theft of public goods by private gangs. Margins are a great excuse to justify half-truths: doing things that you know are bad in the long run for others even as you’ve guarded your own long run using the information that is now readily available.

Once you take the marginal perspective seriously, the world looks different.

Firms hire workers up to the point where the value of the marginal product equals the wage. Consumers trade off goods until their willingness to substitute at the margin aligns with the market’s trade-off—relative prices. Investment flows to activities where the expected marginal return is highest. Growth happens because resources—labor, capital, ideas—move from low-value uses to higher-value ones.

Without marginal analysis, you cannot explain prices. You cannot explain allocation. You cannot explain why reallocation—sometimes painful, often disruptive—is the engine of productivity growth. You cannot explain why protecting existing structures, however well-intentioned, so often leads to stagnation.

The marginal revolution is why economics stopped being an exercise in moral arithmetic and became a discipline focused on mechanisms.

The political failure here is in the assumption that anyone really wants to hear an explanation of prices, allocation or other marginal decisions. Think about it in reality: what is the marginal analysis explaining the absurd prices of graphics cards right now? You’ll get some vague and thoroughly unconvincing hand-waving about supply and demand, as if it suffices to say “consumers want this because if they didn’t it wouldn’t be selling.” It ignores the more basic problem that these things have vastly little utility to those members of the general public that are buying them, and don’t actually justify themselves in any rational sense at all. A typical failure mode of economics, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, the mob has understood the whole more directly than any marginal economists ever cared to, and they are conspiring to corner markets like these so they can monopolise them permanently. You can explain all of the prices and allocation with much more respect to Occam’s razor by dropping the pretensions of this so-called ‘marginal revolution’: they are dictated by the threshold between stakeholders’ capital accumulation and consumer tolerance for financial pain. It has nothing to do with the product or its value in any larger economic system, being only incidentally related to it via manipulated consumer psychology.

What is striking is how often public debate slips back into pre-marginal reasoning—especially when moral intuitions are strong.

We see microeconomics arguments based on levels instead of changes, on identities instead of incentives, on stocks instead of flows. We see decisions justified by who someone is rather than by what happens at the margin. We see calls to preserve structures because they exist, to freeze allocations because change feels uncomfortable, to judge outcomes by averages rather than by trade-offs.

From a marginalist perspective, these arguments are not just wrong; they are incoherent.

Consider a few common mistakes that reappear whenever marginal thinking is abandoned:

• Treating the owner’s biography—wealth, identity, status—as if it entered the firm’s marginal conditions. It does not.

• Confusing redistribution with allocation. Redistribution is a legitimate political choice, but it should not be smuggled into production decisions where it distorts incentives and blocks reallocation.

• Ignoring opportunity cost. Resources used to sustain one activity are resources not used elsewhere. The relevant question is always: what is the next best alternative?

• Believing that efficiency is static. In reality, efficiency is dynamic, and depends precisely on the ability of resources to move when margins change.

It’s news to me that this is the enlightened norm anywhere in the industries we live by. Maybe once upon a time, it was; I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t alive then (classic mistake young people make these days). But I can absolutely guarantee you that who someone is matters more than anything now – I have seen this time and again firsthand. You can call this analytically incoherent, but I think that says less about the world and more about the limits of your framework.

One of the most uncomfortable implications of marginal analysis is that reallocation is essential. Labor and capital must sometimes leave declining uses so they can enter expanding ones. That process is rarely smooth, and never painless. But blocking it does not make an economy more humane; it makes it poorer.

The twentieth century gave this insight a name. Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction. János Kornai warned that when losses are systematically covered—when budget constraints are soft—adjustment never happens, inefficiency becomes chronic, and stagnation follows.

Marginal analysis explains why. If losses have no consequences, margins lose meaning. Prices stop signaling scarcity. Productivity differences stop guiding allocation. The economy becomes a museum of preserved structures rather than a system that adapts.

I understand what phenomenon they are getting at here. A really good example of it is post-studio Hollywood: since the collapse of the studio system in the 1980s, Hollywood movies have overwhelmingly been independent ventures, with IP neatly encapsulated into a project-specific LLC and buttressed by the political goodwill to keep the ability to write off box office failures. That is the best case example of ‘creative destruction’.

The problem arises when you remember that the rest of the world economy does not work that way. America’s stock markets are notoriously brittle and sticky, and this has caused them to become an object of gamification which you see now in the form of tech stocks dominating the charts and using their financial leverage to bully the rest of the world into doing their bidding. The rest of the world works much more like New York than Los Angeles, and so the logic against marginal thinking still holds. And well, wouldn’t you know it? Inefficiency is chronic and stagnation abounds. But you didn’t need a Gilded economic analytical framework to figure that out.

It is tempting, especially in polarized times, to replace mechanism with morality. To judge economic decisions by intentions rather than by incentives. To treat outcomes as expressions of virtue or vice.

But that temptation is precisely what the marginal revolution was meant to overcome.

Marginalism does not deny morality. It simply insists that morality cannot substitute for analysis. If we care about employment, innovation, growth, or even redistribution itself, we need to understand how choices respond at the margin. Otherwise, well-intentioned interventions end up doing the opposite of what they promise.

This is why the name Marginal Revolution still resonates. It is not nostalgia. It is a warning.

I’m going to borrow a phrase I befriended in my more recent court filings: this argument fails by its own construction. It lacks the credibility on its own face to purport the warnings or explanations it declaratively espouses. It isn’t explaining prices. It’s purporting to predict or provide the power to prevent stagnation as if it’s the 1980s and we aren’t living waist-deep in it right now. How can it possibly warn me of anything?

Yea, let me give you the explanation for that which fails to explain: the ‘marginal revolution’ is what the dog trafficked in when neoliberals took power in the late 1960s. It’s been the economic stooge of neoliberal public policy for decades and there is a lot of good stuff from more educated people than I on what the problem is with that. It’s led us to a very predictable and antisocial conclusion: people, in general, are marginal. Comprising the economy, the marginal framework subordinates them to balance sheet efficiency and creates incalculable amounts of needless human suffering while whitewashing it with vague gestures to Hollywood accounting and vestiges of systems it helped to destroy.

The author can try to parry his shield about it with disclaimers that it doesn’t substitute morality, but this is just a veiled admission of what it has already failed to survive: its weaponisation by liars and thieves.

In many discussions, the distinction between allocation and redistribution, between constraints and intentions, quietly disappears once marginal analysis is set aside.

The marginal revolution was not a technical curiosity. It was the moment economics learned how to think.

Let’s not forget that.

***If this essay resonated with you, you can subscribe to my Substack for regular reflections on economics, politics, geopolitics, AI, and literature.

*** Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT-5.2. as an editorial and language-refinement tool. The ideas and arguments are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them.

Well then. Birds of a feather.

I rest my case.

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The most charitable lens to take in looking at RISC-V is through the eyes of the biggest Santa Clara Valley operation funded to take advantage of it: SiFive. Over the years, they have released development boards with chips that are meant to get people like me excited: another toy for me to port my projects to, right?

Well, I can’t get excited even though I wanted to, and the reason is because I know too much as to why this actually exists. Broadly speaking, there are two clinchers at work that convinced the tech industry to invest in this:

1. Improving profit margins currently lost as royalties paid to Arm

2. ‘Getting in on the ground floor’ of The Inevitable Future™ where Arm dies to its higher cost basis

When you remember that the tech industry is a lot dominated by greedy delusional gamblers, this is a sick combination. If you’re a thinker you probably already noticed how neither of those things directly involves the general public.

The first reason is cynical and narrow to a fault, and it’s the only future I can concretely imagine existing. It looks like this:

That’s it. Really. A hard drive controller that was previously Arm (and in decades prior was some random architecture nobody remembers). Talk about a marginal revolution. The worst part is, it won’t lower the price you pay for any devices using it at all. Much like the industry’s crusade against inventors under the banner of royalty-free video codecs that suck, the only ones saving money here are corporate balance sheets. Does that get you excited?

“But wait, that’s not all that Arm is,” say the tech mobsters! Don’t you know Apple uses Arm too? We’re investing in the future that some day this device will run RISC-V too!

Remarkably, the proponents still miss the fundamental fact that the RISC-V iPhone will cost as much as it did with Arm. The pennies paid in royalties—which ultimately really fund the inventors that make these things so good in the first place, if we’re being honest—will be sucked up into the balance sheets of the corporations, and investors in SiFive are banking on being first in line to get to do that.

Much as is the case with codecs, RISC-V is another instance of the mob selling out the industry. They’re throwing inventors overboard by ripping off their inventions and freezing the clock on innovation by destroying their incentive to do it, because in their world, smart nerds are fungible assets to be collected and traded like Pokémon cards. They intend to so exclusively own the industry that they simply own every one of them through enabling and never need to pay them a dime as free agents. In the same move they’re consolidating their portfolios to put themselves at the top of this phoney stock market the public has increasingly no part in.

So yeah, it’s pretty easy to see why I’m not excited about RISC-V. You shouldn’t be either.

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The first thought I had is the first thought you should have had and the first thought any sceptical person would have: we have finally reached the point where it needs to be explicated that just because something is in the Epstein files doesn’t make it true.

This is a perfect time for me to articulate to you what’s really been happening with these things and why it’s unfortunately more bad news without upside for you, the public.

I don’t know how much you have heard me wax about the tech mafia, but even so it’s probably something you can grok at first pass on your own. Since 2023 the corruption that has kept me terminally underemployed has been inviting itself into the U.S. government, showing everybody how rotten tech has become in a very painful and expensive way. Whether it’s buying themselves datacentres on the public credit card or conspiring to capture the only social media platform accessible to Americans that they don’t own, they’ve been making a mess pretty consistently, and the Epstein files are their latest and greatest plaything.

Two of the biggest names being dragged through the mud with this right now are Donald Trump and Bill Gates. These two men have almost nothing in common from a personality or business standpoint except for one thing: they have a common enemy in the tech mafia.

The thing you have to understand about Trump’s relationship with the tech mob is that it’s always been a marriage of convenience. Corrupt elements in the FBI were the last ones in and first ones out of the operation of having Thomas Crooks try to assassinate him during the election – yes, the very same people officially supporting him right now are the prime suspects in trying to have him taken out. I’ve talked about this before, laying out a really strong thesis that basically revolves around the perpetrators having information that is statistically impossible to get independently. Read all about it.

Basically, from the earliest point that they could have shooed their stooge JD into the White House, they have been opportunistic as all get out, and the fake Epstein discourse is their latest angle of attack. The biggest motivation for it these days is the fact that Trump doesn’t obey them enough during his second term – he’s been doing a lot of things that the other faction that helped him get into office—the New York libertarian banker faction—and also sometimes just things that nobody wants him to do but he wants to do, like acquiring Canada or Greenland. The bankers even had to start crashing their phoney little stock market to get him to let off that last one. Point is, Trump is absolutely captured, and some of his comments during the funeral of Charlie Kirk make me think he’s slowly waking up to realise that… not that it changes anything.

On the other hand, Bill is an old enemy of the Santa Clara Valley remainder that is running the show now. This has been a long running rift that almost certainly stretches back to the beginning for the latter, but the most salient recent example of it is Microsoft’s double-crossing of OpenAI with their exit from the AI Ponzi involving Azure credits.

These two names have been on blast pretty much continuously, becoming synonymous with contemporary ‘Epstein files’ discourse. This has been achieved through narrative management on social media platforms, which are all captured by the very same mob who has bones to pick with these guys. Did you even notice the transition? How long ago was it that we were hearing the caterwauling of ‘stop talking about the Epstein files’ before it became this hybrid disinformation–blackmail operation where Ghislaine is openly negotiating with the mob for her freedom in exchange for helping to nail Billy G?

A year ago, the Epstein discourse was organic. Now, it has been given placement. All of your social media algorithms now govern the subject in accordance with the framing given to it, and it will be yet another topic that the public gets to pretend to talk about while the voices allowed passage through the algorithms are herded into a false consensus that buttresses the desires of the criminals running this operation.

Once again, you are being lied to. It’s so diffuse you probably didn’t even notice it. But this has been standard operating procedure for years – powerful people have realised a common interest in capturing and controlling the Internet so that embarrassing shit like this has no flight potential like it did in yesteryear:

To be clear, the problem is not the ‘trolling’ that most of the article devotes itself to. It’s the lede buried in the details if you actually read through it, which is hinted at the top of the page: “it’s all a scam to make money.” This is a textbook example of garden-variety corruption and things like this are fucking everywhere if you look. The problem that this online potentiality poses is that it can expose things that matter a lot more than the No Cussing Club and its third-rate political connections in California. As it turns out, this exact political problem was litigated through the persecution of Julian Assange. Who won that fight? What do you think the norm is now for exposing powerful criminals?

Epstein was so brazen and careless that there didn’t even need to be investigative journalists at work exposing him; if there were they would have been Kashoggi’d a long time ago by now. It was so spontaneously bad, but even so, it’s been woven back into the new power paradigm at the behest of tech’s preeminent mobsters.

The norm now is the Russian propaganda tactic of admittance without repentance. Naked corruption turning all of their crimes into a taunt against the public: “you won’t do anything, or you can’t do anything, but at least we’ll sort of tell you that we really are evil and corrupt and all of that.” I can think of no better example of this than these mock interviews of Epstein made using generative AI, sandwiched right next to another, older corpse of mainstream media manipulation:

At the end of the day, it’s all a big joke to the stakeholders powering these productions. They hope you never notice them behind the scenes—that you will think they are laughing with you—and in your hypnosis you laugh at the destruction of your own country. Watch another cold open and tacitly accept that nobody is ever going to cut the shit and prosecute these criminals. You’ll keep getting poorer and more destitute, paying for their crimes through inflation and job market distortions, and it’s all a fucking joke.

You can laugh at it if you like, but the joke is still on you.

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To better do my judgement justice, I decided I needed to pore back into the archives of history and find a reference for comparison of him that we have seen before. Fortunately, America is not so young that we have not seen a role like his played already, and that is when I found a great many parallels between him and Andrew Jackson. I have often said that history is going to frown upon Reagan especially poorly, and this comparison gives us a much more grounded and credible way to see that.

Jackson was an officer of wars that have generally been embarrassing in retrospect. In his time, there was no radio, let alone television or movies, and his role as a ‘war hero’ was comprehensively the analogue to that of the movie star since the 20th century. It was for these reasons that Jackson and Reagan were popularly thought of as ‘men of the people’.

Jackson was conspicuously middling about public policy issues of his day that did just as well in maintaining his political position indefinitely as they did in setting the stage for long-term chaos and suffering in the decades following his death. In much the same way, Reagan adapted quickly to the climate of governance that since JFK and Nixon had become increasingly subverted by domestic intelligence, shaking off conspicuous investigations without explanation so that he could see to the policies he believed in. He brokered alliances with far darker and more overtly evil people—much as Jackson did with future Confederates—to avail himself of persecution. (Interestingly, this makes H.W. Bush a soft analogue to Calhoun.) He claimed to value the conditions that held things together, but his actions overwhelmingly destabilised them in ways just diffuse enough to outpace his mortal term. It’s more honest to say he valued the comfort of false consensus, irresponsibly wistful for the ‘good old days of today’.

Jackson’s policies with American Indians turned into his biggest historical blemishes by a large margin, and Reagan’s analogue to this is his relationship with labour. His betrayal of the air travel industry was not just momentous for setting a new standard against organised labour, but was a total shock to a lay public that were utterly blindsided by the decision, having voted for him with such enthusiasm. So much for the populism of war heroes and movie stars when the rubber his the road… or in this case, the tarmac.

Reagan’s breaking of labour will haunt his legacy more than Iran–Contra or any other scandal, as it is emblematic of his greatest sin: the economic policy of neoliberalism. Privatising and deregulating industry set us up for the hyperinflation we live in today, and in the future will require more hard progressive anodynes like that we saw from the Roosevelts.

Jackson, for his part, nurtured the status quo of slavery while going on a crusade against the banking system, setting America up for half a century of robber-baronism and what we now call the Gilded Age. This was the product of policy he normalised, but the connection was not direct as these developments were cleanly interrupted by the deeper conflict of the Civil War. Today, we are on a direct collision course with the effects of irresponsible idealism like this.

The reason these things work at all to begin with is the same reason the Roman Empire functioned and why the Nazi state was able to prop itself up: it is a Ponzi in some form supplicated by legalised robbery of others. Romans dined on the blood of barbarians, Nazis sold bonds paid for with Jewish possessions stolen, and the nascent Jacksonian ‘democracy’ expropriated land and natural riches from Indians without a second thought. The modern instance of neoliberalism is nothing more than an invention of conniving the public to steal from their future selves through financial instrumentation – for example, nobody has retired on those 401(k)s that we were all conditioned to sub in for the pensions nobody gets anymore. Does anyone seriously question if we ever will? I know people who make good money in the market ask themselves this question. What about the public?

If you have to ask yourself if the money you let someone else hold is really safe in their hands, and you don’t already have an immediate and hefty threat of pain to hold over their heads as recourse, it’s safe to say you might have been screwed. How many people are still in denial about this? For chrissakes, they were inventing billionaires out of pure fiat in the 90s. I wasn’t even born and Jeffrey Epstein already had a private plane and all this enterprising going on like that’s just something people do on layaway. Everybody bought it back then, too. How many still do? How much of the economy now is just doom-spending because people realise that saving back is structurally pointless? What happens next? Do people even want to know?

To bring it back full circle, part of me wants to give Thatcher a break even though her policies were overwhelmingly bad for Britain and the world. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something unshakeable within me that sees the power in her personality as my husband did—and as much as I saw in Mao—that I think if she were in a different time, she would have soared to much greater heights and did much better things for the people. Perhaps she had the misfortune of being born into a time that was the beginning of the end of what was good. Regardless of the details, there is something really admirable to me about being an uncompromising, cold bitch in politics. I can be like that sometimes myself.

Jokes and musings aside, we are gamboling into a future of chaos much more quickly than anyone in charge right now cares to realise. The bulk of the civil servant sector is still fed by middle class survivors from the old, rusted university pipelines, and this is absolutely not cutting it when the opposition are neo-fascist mobsters who murder their exposed opponents in front of God and everybody. Something has to give and in a big way, like yesterday. There’s negative time on the clock for late 20th century electoral angling.

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This is what the build looks like at a glance, with all of its components present as I wait for the remaining cables to trickle in from schmeBay. It is built into this ‘hot plate PC case’ from Antec that I must say has been an absolute joy working with, which surprised me considering its unorthodox design.

Now that all the parts are in, I can say absolutely none of those front ports you see will be functional in any way. That said, the power and reset switches will both be fully functional, and their LEDs will work swimmingly too. And yes, that is a 5¼″ and 3½″ combo floppy drive. It might be my favourite part of the build.

The plan is to run four operating systems on this machine (the maximum possible with MBR bootloading):

1. Windows 2000 Professional with the unofficial patched kernel

2. Windows NT 3.1 for universal compilation targeting of 32-bit NT

3. Windows 95 for universal compilation targeting of 32-bit DOS-based Windows

4. MS-DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.11 for targeting 16-bit real mode and Win16 applications, respectively

I am also considering swapping out MS-DOS + Windows 3.11 for Debian 7 so I can run somewhat recent Linux on it as well, since I read somewhere that’s the last Debian to support legacy Nvidia drivers for cards like my FX 500. I have another (much more archaic) i486 build that is supposed to run that combination anyway and will be taking NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 as well (absent here).

The boot drive holding all of these will be an 8GB UDMA 7 capable CF card (in UDMA 6) running on the primary master IDE, while the very nice Plextor DVD writer will be on the secondary master IDE.

These are the build’s mass storage drives: six (6) count 80GB Maxtor IDE hard disk drives that were open-box when I bought them as a lot on schmeBay. They present an opportunity for me to experiment with designing my own software JBOD and eventually software RAID solutions – something that fascinates me as software RAID is the norm today but was not at all twenty years ago when these parts were contemporary.

This is the supplementary IDE card (also from Maxtor 💛) which takes four of the six hard disk drives. The other two will occupy the primary slave and secondary slave positions on the motherboard’s IDE cables that run to the boot drive and the DVD writer.

This is my primary graphics card: an Nvidia Quadro FX 500. It sports 128MiB of DDR SDRAM for VRAM and a core that is fully certified for OpenGL 1.5 and partially certified for OpenGL 2.1. I bought it as a baseline for immediate-mode-style GL programming that is more era-correct than the other, more anachronistic GL 1.x chips I have (namely the GMA 3150 on Jericho).

This is a USB 2.0 PCI card. It provides the fastest data transfer ports that are realistically ever going to function on this computer, and unfortunately lacks any USB 2.0 panel headers (I looked everywhere and couldn’t find any PCI cards that did). The motherboard has two USB ports, but they are almost certainly 1.1 at best (slooooow!).

This is my system’s sound card. I bought it because I correctly anticipated my PCI port complement would be completely filled and didn’t want to risk slowing down the other high speed cards with something low bandwidth like a sound card. Like with the USB card, no modern case headers of any kind can be found on this, but at least it provides the usual complement of ⅛″ jacks on the back.

This fills in my other free ISA slot: an 8-bit ISA card (ergo, a PC card) that does CGA graphics. Stuck on the 9-pin port is a passive DB-9 to DB-15 connector so it can pipe to VGA monitors. This can be helpful when testing out Sirius DOS’s Subprime ABI for example, since it only uses text modes.

Finally, the pièce de résistance of the build: the Oxygen 402 from 3Dlabs.

3Dlabs was a trailblazer in the nascent industry of 3D graphics: in a world of SGI workstations and so-called Windows accelerators, they were the first to make CAD workflows practical on IBM-PC compatibles with the Oxygen series video cards, of which this 402 was their highest end model. They created the GLINT 300SX, which was the industry’s first single chip, 3D-capable graphics device that went to market. They also were a huge influence on OpenGL 2.0 as a member of its Architecture Review Board, and made huge strides filling in the budget end of the 3D graphics market with their Permedia brand. In short, 3Dlabs walked so that 3dfx, ATi and Nvidia could run.

Why do I have this card? Well, for the same reason I have everything else here: programming research. This card does original OpenGL in a way that is unlike any other card of its era, sporting four processing chips in parallel with a monstrous 32MiB of VRAM in total. I want my software to get stable framerates on this—within its feature capabilities of course—just as it should on the FX 500, Jericho’s Intel GMA, and any modern graphics chip you could think of.

This is what the cards look like installed. The Oxygen 402 is absolutely massive and barely fits in the case (though it does fit).

To accommodate the CPU’s power draw on my modern PSU’s 5V rail, I have acquired a PCIe-to-Molex breakout board that properly provides the 5V as well as 12V, converted on-board. That means all of the hard drives, the DVD writer and the combo floppy drive will draw from the PSU’s 12V rail, virtually eliminating the risk of overloading its 5V rail.

I’m excited to run this build, but I have to wait for the rounded IDE cables (which are thankfully UDMA capable), the rounded floppy cable and its card edge adapter, and some Molex adapters for those Shenzhen breakout boards to power it all. That big fan up top takes Molex too, which means there is not a single SATA power cable in sight. Very slick stuff.

All of these photos were taken with a Sony α7R IV camera with automatic exposure and manual focus and touched up in Adobe Photoshop CS2’s Camera Raw on Windows XP x64 Edition.

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Now, I had no idea this happened at all and discovered it by accident after clicking home from a 2006 article about DirectX 9.0c versioning problems. I must emphasise to you that this article was more than just on-par for readership expectations – it was so concise and typical that it fit in its entirety in a single screencap despite the long screenshot embedded within. Observe:

Conversely, this is what the home page shows today:

Holy shit. Where do I even start.

I suppose the best way to give you my first impression upon seeing this horror that has nothing to do with coding is that it reminded me of a sentiment forwarded to me by a good friend about the descent into right-wing echo-chamber politics of Computing Forever. They conveyed to me this grounded confusion that only the insane dismiss: “I clicked on Computing Forever expecting videos about computing, and WTF it’s all racism now. What happened?”

That’s basically how I felt upon parsing this pile of radioactive crap at the first pass. “I clicked on Coding Horror expecting coding horror, and WTF it’s Thielian UBI evangelism. What happened?”

I had to dive into it at least a little bit to get the broad strokes because, to be absolutely clear, I have a massive personal stake in efforts in the vein of “effectively helping those most in need”. All told, it’s a layered shitshow of personal delusions, luxury beliefs and a lack of self-awareness from the author that he’s been propagandised (or potentially even brainwashed considering his proximity to the source of this nuclear hazard) into supporting political initiatives that will effectively end public political participation in America while framing it as salvation for that public.

To start off, Jeff missed the memo that most Americans right now—especially younger ones—are living in the wreckage of years of cumulative negative cashflow positions. In simpler terms, their wages haven’t been paying for shit for a good while now, so they don’t have money to donate to pet causes like Jeff does. This relative poverty goes hand-in-hand with a loss of public notoriety if they ever would have had any, so their ability to evangelise about this is also moot. All the American public can do stand by, waiting to be victimised by this. This makes me wonder, who the fuck is Jeff referring to when he addresses ‘Americans’? Is this one of those Thielian sleights-of-hand where they pretend to be talking to you when they really mean their friends?

I should have expected this shit. This is blatantly ripped off from the Carnegie playbook on how robber barons can apologise for their wealth without giving up any control of it. “Make universities and parks so you can point to them as an example of how you’re actually a Good Person as a form of gaslighting to thwart your opponents who want to stop you from funding Latin American death squads or enabling catastrophic mining accidents.”

You know we can do this ourselves, right? We don’t need billionaire middlemen to improve society. We are society. It’s literally us and everything around us. Healthy, earnest representative political participation is the solution to society’s problems because it allows concrete solutions to emerge from within instead of being imposed from above, which stifles opportunities for corruption and minimises the energy costs of actually figuring out what people need.

By the way, for what it’s worth since this often plugs into the fantasy of ‘neofeudalism’: it’s a lie implied by the structure of the proposal but never explicated. Calling their totalitarian despotism ‘neofeudalism’ implies there will be some kind of ‘deal’ with the peasantry that, however unfair, means that they can reasonably expect bread and pussy like real medieval serfs could. In reality, this new fascism is even worse than Nazi Germany, because they’re not even going to bother building the death camps to deal with the nuisance of you. The plan is more like you’ll take care of yourself by having a death of despair and normal paramedics can take your corpse away, keeping their hands clean while burying the lede of their negligence and complicity in your death. As I said on the campaign website, their future doesn’t include you.

Before we continue, I want to address the elephant in the room that is UBI, and very briefly explain why it is a giant Trojan horse in the current political context: the power brokers advancing this right now through mouthpieces like Jeff intend for it to be a replacement for the very pretense of an open and (relatively) free market economy. This should be fairly self-evident with how long they have been threatening to fire everyone forever because of AI, and then doing it anyway even though the AI doesn’t work because things are so consolidated at this point that there is no meaningful competition happening in any major sector of the economy anymore. UBI means the end of you having any ability to change your circumstances by your own free will. They will have you waiting in line, playing far more fraudulent games not so different from their phoney startup incubators, knowing all the while that the results have been rigged and their rich friends, associates and their trouser stain children were already betrothed to the grand prize. They think you’re stupid enough to fall for this and that’s why they’re doing it, hoping you’ll take the bait, falling for it again, believing that these Silly-Con Valley assholes who have been conning everyone for decades actually want to give you free fucking money because they love America so much. No, they want control. That’s all they’ve ever wanted, because billions of dollars isn’t filling the hole in their gaping black hearts so they need to surreptitiously kill everybody.

These fundraising numbers are the philanthropy equivalent of trying to solve third world poverty via immigration. It’s a total failure to appreciate the scale of effect, let alone the second order consequences, and to top it all off it’s embarrassingly ironic coming from people whose industry regards scaling as a cornerstone of their credibility.

The write-up is so myopic; it’s premised like we don’t already have institutions that actually fucking handle this problem (yes, in the social dimension), like the Federal Reserve. The feckless cowards don’t want to deal with the reality that the admin just nominated Yuppie Cocksucker Extraordinaire to be in charge of that this month. No, that’s Just According to Keikaku™ to continue down the path of the controlled demolition of American governance by appointing pliant idiots to key positions who are easy to manipulate into doing their bidding on command. $50 million raised is an open insult to economists and policymakers – it’s a direct statement of contempt for them by its insinuation that the public doesn’t care about what they do, only the propaganda. They’re making taunts with millions to establishments that deal in billions, or in the case of monetary policy, in trillions. The Fed might be one of the organs that ought to do what they’re describing, but they can’t take it over and so they’ll just create their own with blackjack and hookers while trying to undermine it from within.

One of the things people forget about mafias is that they were never a unified front—quite the opposite—and the tech mafia is perfectly in line with that description. They have a long history of doing this exact sort of strategy: building their own desired thing when other stakeholders don’t give in to their demands, while engaging in protracted subterfuge to undermine the opposition into caving into them anyway. That’s precisely what Google and pals did when they created WHATWG – an initiative that was nothing more than a coup d’état of the Worldwide Web Consortium – because the mob wanted to force the entirety of computing as we know it into a web browser and the W3C wasn’t playing along. Did you know that idea didn’t begin with Google, but rather the conspicuous Marc Andreessen, who somehow has nothing directly to do with the Chrome initiative that happens to implement the very dream he espoused in the 90s with his lifting of Mosaic from the University of Chicago? Are you starting to see why it makes sense to regard these people as a mafia now?

Whaaat? Netscape Navigator was once upon a time the Big Bad? And how on earth was this predictive description of it perfectly matching what Chrome is now, not only as the browser but as the replacement for the operating system a la ChromeOS? Are these guys genies or something?

In fact, Firefox is a case study in reputational laundering and narrative management. They flipped the script for themselves for free by recasting the same product under a new company and new name, and on top of it they got to get some punches up on the big bad Billy G by being a special guest in his company’s antitrust trial. It was nothing but winning all around and somehow even as Chrome is ten times more monopolising today than Microsoft ever thought about being with IE, nobody cares. Strange how that works, isn’t it? Are you starting to see why it makes sense to regard these people as a mafia now?

Too late, Jeff. The damage is already done. But that was the point, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll take great glee in gaslighting anyone who idly complains about this heaping pile of shit you posted that you’ve already accommodated the likes of them, so they need to pipe down and quit complaining that you’ve fried your brain for Thiel’s death cult. All optics, zero truth.

In general, UBI studies are little more than meta case studies on the propensity for social studies to serve as mere reputational laundering machines for the power apparatus – much like it did in the Soviet Union, to catastrophic effect. There are fundamental questions of economics and psychology at hand here that cannot be captured for meaningful examining in a fucking study, no matter how ‘big’ you claim that study is.

This is the same playbook used with open source software, by the way: 90% of projects are either one-off resume fodder or they’re a living plea from the authors to be picked up by the same vulture capitalists that own everything, because it’s no longer practical to build anything substantive on existing computing platforms due to the immense burden of maintenance. They slap the word Open in front of everything like that makes it sanctioned by God, and subvert the people doing the work at the root so there’s never any energy to oppose this without blowing up your career. Game, set, match.

See what I’m saying? It’s all posturing, no substance. Until the tech mob switched sides this used be brutally criticised as cargo culting Science™ worship. Strange how that angle vanished somehow just in time for them to start doing it again from the right. Honestly, these websites are less examples of the virtues of open source and more case studies in just how socially inept programmer-executives can be – Discourse’s feed format being inherently scatterbrained compared to the established form of boards, forums, subforums and threads, and Stack Overflow being an implementation of democracy so naïve that it got completely captured by the users and has needed to be propped up by corporate to maintain any pretense of credibility. Yeah, these are not your star quarterbacks when it comes to openness or ‘what works’.

The only thing I really need to say about this bit is that ‘trickle up’ has no consistent difference in definition from ‘trickle down’. It’s a secondhand buzzword that still refers to trickle down economics—where you give rich people all the money and hope they share, even though they don’t have to—that they’re hoping you’re too stupid to notice because they swapped the directionality of the buzzword. Jeff is literally advocating for trickle down economics in 2026. The guy is so cooked.

I thought it was funny in a dark way that this point contains a tacit admission that they’re stakeholders in the very same organisations they’re claiming to get all this wonderful study data from. Really drives home the thesis that this is a gigantic public policy scam where they are making up basically all the inputs and outputs as they go along. Zero truth anywhere in this trash.

My God, Jeff! Why didn’t you say something sooner?

Mercer County is exactly where both of my parents laid their heads from crib to college. God even willed it that I had been fated to have a political connection to it all my own, and I still stop by there on occasion to see the friends I’ve made since.

This is incredible because I’ve got a great opportunity for you that will make you feel like a kid on Christmas once you hear it. Not only am I that very salt of the earth that you’re after, but I can give you so much value for your investment in poor little me.

You’re so generous for taking it on faith that we just have to help those in need wherever they are, but I’ve got wonderful news for you about that: you won’t have to in my case. The work is already there, happening for years and just waiting to be funded. Have you ever heard of the Dynabook concept? I’m sure you’ve seen Pirates of Silicon Valley at least once. Remember how they explained that Steve and Bill had a ‘rich neighbour’ called Xerox, and they were stealing everything they could from their PARC? Well, the Dynabook was the ultimate intention of the PARC. It was so ambitious and central to their developments that Apple and Microsoft failed to steal it, though they tried.

Not only do I have the missing theory needed to realise it according to Alan Kay’s vision, I have already been productising it and downsizing the research efforts to build towards it effectively. That’s what I’ve been doing in my off hours for the bulk of 2025: Sirius DOS, and a lot of computers from the mid-1990s when PC architectures weren’t yet consolidated around x86. Mechanicalism is the secret sauce the world has been waiting for to properly realise affordable computing. I call it Anodyne.

This is the opportunity of a lifetime for you. I’m absolutely not kidding about any of this; I am dead serious about every detail and the impact it’s going to have. Fair warning, it’s going to cost ~$20 million to really get started including office leases and wages and all that, but that’s well within your reach since you raised more than double that to buy diapers for my extended relatives so I’m sure you can lead the round to success. Then I can open up shop in Washington’s Penn Quarter like I always intended, focussing like hell for the couple of years we’re going to need to get to product.

Just think about what you’ve got here. An old Appalachian boy like yourself, and the upside is already baked in from the get-go for you. You don’t have to cross your fingers that I’m going to be a wunderkind; I already am. You don’t have to hope that I’ll dream up something cool one day that will change everything for the better for all of humanity; I already did. And I’m a sitting duck right here waiting for literally anyone to take up the offer. You’re so generous to put all this money out for the hillbillies expecting so little in return; but right here you can make a far greater positive impact for humanity that’s essentially guaranteed by the fact that I already did all the hard thinking alone for free. I just need to put it into a device so people can experience it – batteries that last for weeks, monitors coupled to their graphics processors, the obsolescence of drivers and the end of software maintenance as we know it – the world wants this. The world will kill for this. And you can make it happen Jeff.

In case you still think I’m being disingenuous or playing on some level about the opportunity, let me cap it with one more earnest piece of truth: I don’t think you will do any of this in a million fucking years, because you’re completely and terminally full of shit about your angle of ‘social do-gooding’ via tech. To be clear, I could be wrong, but I rarely am, and believe me, I don’t enjoy being right at this point in the game. I just can’t stand the lies others are content to live with when things just aren’t working, with the neverending Ponzi scams and all the social ruin because guys like Thiel can’t experience love and want to make that everyone else’s problem.

You won’t lift a finger to help make any of this happen even though it matters supremely to everything you’ve ever known. Indeed, I will continue scraping by with no truth and no earnestness from an industry that has been emptied of goodwill by yuppies and out-of-touch 50-year-olds who think they worked hard but forgot how much help they had in getting their start and aren’t passing any of it on to the next generations. And finally, I will continue on my warpath to get into Congress or some place like it, because—as I’ve always said—this is the most direct path to arresting the corruption that is actually ruining life for the American people. The only thing that is unique about me in this struggle is that I am merely the first domino to fall. My suffering is the same as theirs in nature and can only be distinguished as a matter of degree. Soon, the middle classes will join me in despair at the destruction players like you are helping create.

You will dismiss or ignore the luminary who possesses the crown jewel of Xerox PARC, because you don’t have any sense of duty to humanity about your place in the tech industry or even society itself. You ape into shit like Stay Gold to lie to yourself—and the world—that you Care™ when you really really really fucking don’t. That’s where I’m putting my money, because I’ve been through this shit too many times by now and seen too many others continue to believe, including myself at times, to their own peril, that this was ever going to go any other way for us. Prove me wrong. If this really isn’t about you and you are literate enough to parse what is in front of you, you wouldn’t hesitate to. But I know you won’t. So I carry on.

I’m spelling this out because it’s the truth, and because it must be recorded for posterity. God forbid that people never learn or later forget the gross negligence committed against the Anodyne to their computing pains.

This is not for me. This is for them. Once they have it they will understand what was being withheld by the arrogance of the tech mafia, and until they do, I must carry on with it. I’m not going to let our world be subsumed into the bank accounts of the preeminent international crime syndicate and loaned back to us at interest, and you’re a giant tool for proselytising for it. You are going to hell unless you change your ways.

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From the authoritative wiki page:

What other languages often call ‘modules’ or ‘namespaces’ are provided by C* as domains. Domains are a simple semantic grouping tool for making coherent collections of symbols and identifiers. In contrast to C++ namespaces, they are not lexically ‘grouping’, that is, they are merely declared to exist, and used in other declarations directly as desired.

While in a vacuum, C*’s domains hardly justify their existence in light of the sufficiency of normal symbols as in ANSI C, the utility can be realised in how it makes possible smarter contextualisation of parameters for routine calls and structure initialisation, like so:

domain mylib;

enum mylib.foo
{
	PRIMA,
	SECUNDA
};

void mylib.bar( enum mylib.foo e );

/* regardless of the presence of using statements, the enum would be
 * contextualised in the routine call so it never needs qualifying */
mylib.bar( PRIMA );

/* or, with using */
using mylib.bar;
bar( SECUNDA );
/* never brought in enum mylib.foo directly */

/* this can be avoided by globalising the call with a leading dot */
.mylib.bar( mylib.PRIMA );

/* or, with using */
using mylib.bar;
.bar( mylib.SECUNDA );

The main danger of domains is obfuscation of interface – for this reason, C* disallows using statements outside of block scope, and additionally forbids any form of ‘wildcard’ selectors in using statements entirely. Since the above feature of soft contextualisation applies to all identifiers in a given domain, the application of using statements as a general ‘decluttering’ is avoided and refitted solely as a tool for bringing desired subroutines into scope. In this spirit, C* mandates that using statements are hoisted to the top of the block scope, before all variable declarations.

For the proficient programmer, that is introduction enough. But later on, the feature comes up again in the context of symbol limits:

As the preeminent mechanicalist systems programming language, C* also imposes limits on symbols and other identifiers. Specifically:

• up to 4 levels of domain hierarchy including the final symbol

This limit helps programmers make code modular while still remaining manageable in its own right, but it hearkens toward a cross-discipline I’m not sure exists yet in quite the way I envision it: infolinguistics.

The most basic way to grok the idea of infolinguistics is to load up the Linux man pages (perhaps even online) and declare the thing to be a collection of dictionaries. Yes, in the elementary sense of the word, rather than the informatical meaning.

The Linux man pages in particular offer us a particularly colourful set of dictionaries in the sense that the various sections correspond to different kinds of words: section 3, for example, has the useful ceil() math function, while section 1 has the diff utility commonly used in patch authoring.

In the same vein as these man pages, then, does a domain acquire its ultimate purpose: the collation of words into a book, the book being, of course, a dictionary. Given the particulars of C*, though, a rough sketch of how the full hierarchy might look is as follows:

language.canon.book.word

For example:
win32.printf, or posix.linux.printf, or (abstractly) posix.printf
...where generally printf sends formatted output to stdout as described in standard C

The highest level, 'language', serves as a separation of last resort, in cases where many words may be similar but their meaning is so distant that it is like a different natural language. Thankfully, we don't yet have this degree of divergence in programming language much yet! Certain Haskell-isms may qualify though...

Also, this hierarchy isn't strict, as in, it is by its constitution naturally self-collapsing: if you had a 'canon' with only one book, it is really just a book. Don't overthink it!

This expression provides a more complete articulation of the organic and multiplicitous reality of computer code, where a commonly used symbol name like malloc—or the family of subroutine names related to it—can be defined both in the general case and also expounded upon encyclopaedically for each of the many notable implementations. Where the definition of such a name differs, a difference in dialect is discovered, in much the same way as seen in natural language.

What I am describing here is a toolkit for exposing the true language being articulated by programmers in the course of authoring code – not ‘language’ in the narrow, established sense of lexical symbols and context-free parsers, but language in the human sense of revolving around the vocabulary bearing the meaning of our programs. The study of this is infolinguistics, and in time as the broader idea of mechanicalism flourishes it will come to supplant the archaic caricature of proper linguistics currently delineating programming language theory as we know it today.

In the near future, I expect to undertake work documenting a dictionary for PC DOS and its clones, including MS-DOS, DR-DOS and Novell DOS among others. After this, perhaps I could continue it into work on early Unix and eventually Linux as well as Darwin, along with extending the DOS family dictionary into Microsoft Windows. But more important to me is the DOS family dictionary, as it will prove more immediately useful in the course of developing Sirius DOS in support of Anodyne.

I hope you enjoyed this article on informatics (also known as computer science). If you aren’t already aware, I am running for Congress, and while it’s far from an easy task, some very intelligent people in my corner of this fight are reporting I’m holding a 15 while the dealer is showing a 2. I am happily fundraising, and I have video editing going on full-time that will break me out so all of you can enjoy my full personality and help carry that energy I need to win. Regardless of how it goes, writings like these from me will continue to arrive the same, because I love computers.

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This is something my husband and I have been thinking about for years, but only seriously within the last year since the spring when I met the late great Tony Whitlow. It’s time to test the limits of the grotesque gerrymandering at work in this state and punish the GOP for indulging in it.

Ordinarily, I’d carry on a fair amount right here on the weblog, but I’ve already done that on the campaign website. Why not check it out? Every page is designed, written and implemented by yours truly and contains a wealth of information showing you my priorities, my values, and how I think about the problems facing all of us today.

In the mean time, consider subscribing as well. All of my posts regarding current events for the campaign—which is now my full-time job—will show up here first and foremost.

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On Wednesday, November 12th, 2025, Tony met an unforeseeable and tragic demise at the careless hands of an impaired driver, who collided with his vehicle head-on near the Willowbrook Road intersection with U.S. 460. He was airlifted to the nearest hospital and succumbed to his injuries that evening. His immediate family were devastated, and I had heard the news from my feed of all places on Friday night. I can’t adequately communicate their grief, but I can mine, and so I will try.

When I heard of this, the first thing I did was rush into my husband’s room to tell him. The fraught sense of urgency, fear and horror in my voice had not been heard since I had bore witness to the tragic accident involving our cat Senusret in 2022. After telling him and showing him the report, I sulked over to his desk chair and threw my head into my arms, lamenting that I was already not in a good mood for this and how I really dreaded going into work tomorrow now. Soon, I began to cry.

It would not be long into my sobbing before the tears turned bitter and I became angry—so intensely, squeezingly, violently angry—at myself perhaps, but in general at the realisation that I had lost someone I desperately needed and had thought I would still be able to call well through the rest of this year and beyond. The fire that bellowed out of me—face red and expressively contorting around—was fed by two things: the betrayal of expectations regarding the survival of someone who deeply cared about me, and the guilt at being forced to admit by that circumstance once again that in some ways I am still angry after all this time.

On this weblog I have written countless analyses and reflections about recent degradations in human relations. In these I comment on the busy intersections of politics, social life and psychology trying to wrangle a dragon’s tail about what seems to be changing lately for the worse. But as I carry on trying to make the best of things nonetheless, I have found great contrast that has helped me mature immensely in a moral sense. At 27, all of the people I have met that I could both trust and confide in could be counted on one hand. My husband was the first such person. Tony was another, as was another elder gentleman I befriended, partnered in business with and later lost to stomach cancer. I angrily lamented in the bedroom that night that “I can’t afford to keep losing people like this.” I need them! My experiences in life have only continued to embolden the understanding I have of how rare these people truly are. Tony’s reputation exists for terrifyingly good reason.

Many other reports have covered the basic biographical details of his life and service to the world, but for completeness and posterity’s sake, and because I am a reputable primary source on the matter too, let us remember:

Tony was born on May 9th, 1933, in a place called Happy Hollow (pronounced holler) in Kellysville, West Virginia. In light of the old family wisdom passed down from my mother, I reckon my own grandfather and closest tie binding me personally to Tony was very much as well, considering his place of birth was also Kellysville: “born at home, had to obtain his birth certificate at great trouble in a time when Social Security numbers were not ubiquitous.” That was Delma Dean Whitlow, an immediate first cousin of Tony whose father, Robert Whitlow, or “uncle Rob” as Tony would call him, was of good familiarity.

Tony told me at least two stories about my great-grandfather, one for each domicile he built in the old Happy Hollow: first, Rob built a shack on a retaining wall built by the local railroad that ran through the hollow. In those times of great poverty and subsistence, collecting blackberries and storing them through the winter was typical. So, Robert’s house contained a great number of jars filled as such, stored in underneath the floorboards of his house. At one point, this house collapsed, and a great volume of blackberry purée ran down that old retaining wall, which from how Tony told me the story, at least mildly amused him. (Although this is a story of loss, it hints to a greater context at the time of community and camaraderie that implied to me that Robert’s losses were absorbed by the family throughout the hollow.)

The second story Tony told of Rob was of his second domicile, for which Rob dragged every single item of timber halfway up the hollow himself on his own back. Rob did not live very long, and this embracing of labour and righteous suffering was part of the reason why. Tony showed me in person just how far up the hill Rob built his second house: level with what are currently the highest elevation inhabited domiciles present today. Tony also explained to me how much larger the hollow once was, as what we were visiting—Whitlow Road—was what remained of it after they built the new four-lane U.S. 460. (Tony also helped secure funding for that highway expansion project, by the way.)

Tony was someone whom I was only familiar with by name growing up. My mother told me that we had a relation who was once a state Senator, but she seemed to feel too distant from him and did not know much about him at all. In retrospect, Princeton was the staging ground for all of the men in my immediate family, chiefly my father and my mother’s father. After her separation from my father and Dean himself passing away, she claimed to have no one to visit in Princeton anymore.

One of the formative experiences I had early in my marriage was hearing of a similar relation on my in-laws’ side of the family. When I first visited Indonesia in 2018, I was made aware of a man who was unusually long-lived and once quite important in the Suharto era of governance – a man who was more than your typical government minister or politician, and uncharacteristically moral to boot – and it would turn out to have been my only chance to meet him, as I would not get another chance before he passed away in the time between then and my next trip there in 2024. I knew in my heart how remarkable it was that Tony was still around, and felt a great calling in my heart to make an effort to meet him, because I did not want to miss him before he goes as I missed that great man of Indonesia.

I did not expect to befriend Tony, but I quickly did, as each time I would come to visit, we would run out of time talking about just about anything and everything. Tony came to admire me greatly the more that he learned about my ambitions, telling me that he saw a great honesty in my eyes and at times complimenting my intellect, way with words and even my looks. He was intelligent enough to see the potential brimming within me and was more than humble and God-fearing enough to cherish it on sight, and it gave me a great boost in confidence to carry on with what I am doing these days. The last time we met at the museum, I finally managed to recruit him in on my plan to reach out to fellow West Virginia Democratic politicians in an effort to seek advice and to be sized up as a candidate in my own right – he left a voicemail at one of their companies, and I’m still chasing leads on that today.

Tony and I spent a lot of our time discussing intentions I have in running for public office. Having what he would often say was “what feels like a lifetime” of such public service behind him in Charleston, he was more than willing to fill me in on his story and how he managed it over the years. We also discussed much about the current days with Trump and his flaunting of the Constitution. Tony lamented the loss of civility between the parties, a sentiment much more publicly echoed from similar hollows by Joe Manchin, whom Tony was senior to and good friends with in their time in the state chambers. Tony’s priors as a staunch liberal were so fresh that he exclaimed his desire to be able to vote for AOC into the White House – a powerful thing to hear from someone who was 92 years old in a deeply Republican state and held in immensely high regard personally in his community. He also came to recognise that I properly understood the original reason why we are Democrats: liberal values with emphasis on blind inclusivity and care taken for the poor. This is something I suspect Manchin also knows about but is utterly lost in the caught-up cacophony of ‘flaming ant epidemics’ we call a media nowadays.

Tony helped me immensely as a friend and treated me like the furthest thing from a stranger since the day I met him. Indeed, even before then, the very first text message he sent me was a picture he had of my mother and her immediate family. A great part of my anguish was directed at the suddenness and unfairness—which so many others must have also felt—that I suddenly lost someone I had every reason to think I could still talk to when I needed.

Today, I am trekking up to Princeton again, as I have so often done to see him, but for a different purpose: to petition the Mercer County commission to rename the memorial building hosting his museum in his honour.

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The thing that really stinks about this development is not so much the loss of friendship itself as it is the false implications that seem to abound as to why people flake. Ghosting—a terribly antisocial behaviour that has not magically become less antisocial with the advent of smartphones or the incidence of more people doing it—creates this impression that you have committed some kind of transgression or mistake to deserve being suddenly ignored by someone who was as friendly as can be to you the day before. It also poses a practical issue in that it cannot be forcefully arrested; one does not simply say, “why the fuck are you ghosting me?” This keeps happening because people simply don’t care what they are missing in doing this, treating it as a non-existent thing, as if we are all on call these days through technology to simply be forgotten about until someone wants something out of us. I shouldn’t have to explain how awfully corrosive this is to one’s soul.

The other thing that fascinates me is how predominantly immune to it old people appear to be, especially those few remaining at this point who were born before the end of World War II. I recently attended the funeral of a relation of mine—my grandfather’s first cousin—and honestly, the bigger cause for my connection was not the blood relation, but our friendship. I talked constantly with this man every time I came up to Princeton, spending the whole day until it got to about 5pm and he had to go home to tend to his wife. He would do this even when I showed up unannounced and unexpected at his museum, and he would always pick up the phone when I called. He read my text messages as soon as he actually had time for them. As far as I’ve ever been made aware, this is normal for anyone who has a smartphone.

Tony wasn’t the only old person I knew who is like this. Before I befriended Tony, I befriended my landlord when I lived downtown years ago as I first got married. He was a baby boomer and a born again Christian who didn’t make a fuss to anyone about it, and he really admired me as what he thought of as a clean, good-spirited young man. That led him to start an electronics repair business with me out of the basement of the house we leased an apartment in. He would later pass away from cancer, and I found out at his funeral something you can never learn from the movies: it’s quite possible that you care about someone more than their entire family does. It was horrible and was soon actualised as his wife allowed her sons from another marriage to basically loot everything he had spent his working life building. They got all the money selling everything he owned and never even knew the man while he was alive. To me it was a cautionary example of the importance of preparing for death – he simply didn’t want to die, because in truth, he had never been truly living until he hit 40 and entered into Alcoholics Anonymous. He died as a man spiritually in his 30s even though he was over 75. So, I was immensely relieved to witness Tony’s lionesque acceptance of mortality in contrast to this – Tony left his family in as perfect of a position as he possibly could have.

I wish I could say this about younger people, but so far the list of people who have basic social decency about this is astonishingly short. Once you start dealing with Generation X and younger, the rot really sets in and it starts being less of a thing people just do and more of a game that everyone is trying to play against one another. The most egregious and embarrassing example of this that comes to my mind is Kevin O’Leary’s TED talking point about how he has two phones – a meaningless pile of drivel no one could hope to learn from that was essentially bastardised from Steve Jobs’s old schtick about how he would always answer the phone. People sit around and clap for this shit anyway somehow, or maybe they don’t and this is another kind of false popularity the tech mafia is concertedly lying about.

Rewatching Steve’s clip is a searing reminder of how much social cohesion and ‘giving a shit’ we’ve actually lost in the last 15 years or so. He plainly and confidently said, “I’ve never found anyone who said no or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be as responsive, you know, to pay that debt of gratitude back.” I can’t even begin to count the number of experiences I have contradicting this, and how normal they were. Like it was expected! As if to say menacingly, “who do you think you are?”

I don’t think that this degradation is happening for any good reason and I’m not just asserting that in the sense that it’s morally wrong, though it obviously is. I would go even further so as to assert that everyone doing this is basically insane because it actually makes no sense at all when you think about it. I became resoundingly convinced that this was a soft psychosis when I observed several key instances of people—mostly Gen Xers as they have the most material potential to reveal any delusions, being the wealthiest—simply choosing whatever option resulted in the most pain or social ruin for the other party, because their frame of thinking revolves entirely around appearances, aesthetics and ego. In other words, you were fucked in their minds the moment you had to ask, regardless of the facts and often even regardless of how much they could profit from not treating you like a dog for asking. (Unless it’s a whole lot, in which case they suddenly get ‘smart’ for taking advantage of that and then brag to their fake friends for the next 30 years about it as if noticing truckloads of money was a skill.)

Here’s a tame example: a couple of years ago, my husband and I lived with my mother, and we had a project as a family to financially cooperate to maintain our extant standard of living, continue getting to work, and try to save back some money so we can eventually think about buying some property. For reasons of good precedent that all of us wholeheartedly agreed with, we decided it was best for my mother to move her direct deposit into an account all three of us had access to; this we called the ‘triple joint’ account. My mother was content to work more at her factory job at Kellogg’s while my husband also worked there the same, and my job was to look after the house, run errands for everything as needed and keep up with basically everything else. This fell apart as for months on end my mother did not hold up her end of things, constantly calling out of work, cutting her own overtime terribly, and the result was very well reflected on her pay cheques. She also refused to switch from 8 to 12 hour shifts even though we all understood that we will not make enough money to do this if she doesn’t. In the end, this all falls apart as expected, and she moves out into some roommate situation leaving us to fend for ourselves. My credit card debt exploded to cover all the losses incurred by all the money she wasn’t making, and it has been basically maxed out ever since. Compounding matters was her buying a lemon car at an eye-watering 37% APR from a buy-here-pay-here place because she was absolutely obstinate in wanting something for herself even though we could not yet afford it. The whole time she is complaining to us, starting drama at home out of spite for not being given what she wants, and fostering this delusion that she has been paying for everything this whole time even as my husband had been bringing home cheques double hers in size for the whole time. Him and I ate all of the losses from this, and this was just the encore for a collapsing roommate situation where some younger, equally-selfish people decided to up and leave after starting drama in the house over nothing. Someone I befriended a month or so ago remarked upn hearing the cliffnotes of this that they should have all had stock market marquees bolted above their doors that simply flashed how much rent they were paying each month to live there: in some cases as little as $300/month. The highest was $500.

None of these people ever had any kind of atonement for their part in things. The roommates have self-relegated to being Facebook friends who never talk, and my mother is stuck up in Ohio living with her mom, which is insane for someone in their 50s who is not retired. To add insult to injury, my sister even believes the whole faerytale my mother spun about this debacle and torched her relationship with me permanently in a Facebook comment, because she took massive issue with a post I made about taking responsibility for my life and not tolerating bad people anymore. It’s just mental how married bad people are to their sins.

There are many more examples I can give you of this. Many of my more career-focussed ones have already been laid out on this very weblog:

Speaking of career, one time I had managed to actually convince someone online to sponsor me on GitHub just by earnestly and thoroughly demonstrating to them that their carelessness is, in part, the cause for all of the shittiness and ruin haunting the stuff they enjoy. They complained about this, as so many do, and I patiently and selflessly explained it to them. “Hey, I’m working on this and the nature of that work is more comprehensively addressing the root of the problem here than anything else we are aware of. If you want to see it solved, you need to help me do it.” Thereupon, money changed hands. That’s supposed to be the undeniable bottom line in this shitty, materialistic world we’re living in nowadays. “Can’t argue with money,” they always like to say. Anyways, after a few months he just quietly cancelled the subscription. I guess the temptation of believing in whatever you want to hear instead of what’s actually going on got the better of him in the end. The problems of shitty computers or whatever it was just didn’t matter that much after all.

Another egregious example of this kind of television-esque madness was something that transpired about a month ago. As my husband’s first roofing employer was collapsing, we were brainstorming alternate routes to keep being able to make sales. Then we remembered we knew a couple of good fellows from back in college whose dad owned a roofing company around here, and a commercial one at that. Our situation at the time was that we had some pretty large leads on the hook, and we wanted to talk with him about making a sale because they have the skills to physically get the job done. What we encountered on the phone was as insane as it was insulting: this man, whom we were basically offering large amounts of money to, turned the whole conversation around and told my husband to go down to his office and get a job application. Ran his mouth on all this feel-good bullshit about how you need to physically put roofs on to sell them or some shit. Not true on its face because we are literally right in front of him literally selling roofs, but you know, reality is no burden to people like this.

The stories of family and former friends are sobering reminders of the banality of evil, but the ones about business also show you just how much staying power delusional people can have. Near as I could tell, the roofing dad has his company because he’s in an informal network of Southern good ol’ boys, and his fellow Bible study goers all faithfully bring whatever jobs they have to him. So, their success is founded less on honest work and more on the kind of petty corruption guys like Paul Newby are known for. There isn’t really roofing salesmanship in that company in the sense you would hear about it from credible professionals like Deshaun Bryant or Adam Bensman. It’s just some mobbed up Southerner raking it in for every random schoolhouse project that comes up in the area.

One of the other big things I was thinking about in the car ride mentally drafting all of this was self-checking to see how much of a friend I am to others as far as I can tell. I empathised with an acquaintance who had recently ghosted me after I asked him a question relating to an earlier conversation we had in person – I really thought about how I would feel as him, with that question I sent waiting in my SMS inbox, just not responding to it at all. I would feel bad enough to just want to reply – something, anything. I could not just ignore someone else I met showing overt interest and curiosity in my life like that. Even if I wasn’t in the mood to entertain it, I thought, “surely I would say something.” As I checked my other messages, I discovered that I do. I don’t do this kind of shit to people. He is being shitty after all, it’s not just me second-guessing myself into friendlessness. I have not made some microaggression or error in tact. Actually, I have done something that is not only positive but increasingly rare these days: I reached out and gave another person ample leverage to pull themselves up back into society. I made the conversation about them and asked them a question that is incredibly easy and enjoyable for them to answer. It was basically the epitome of selflessness in that moment, and I got ignored for it.

When confronted with these kinds of things, my husband often says that these days, people view reaching out as some kind of weakness. They operate like people who ask or reach out have some kind of problem or are inherently desperate. This just goes to show how sociopathic people have allowed society to become, because again, this just blatantly contrasts with how things were even as recently as the 1980s. Steve Jobs picked up the phone until it was physically impractical for him to do that any longer. Now, Kevin O’Leary brags about having a second phone he doesn’t answer and all the magical shit that supposedly accomplishes.

Even besides the economic problems we’re all staring down, it’s never been more unreasonably difficult to get a hold of someone than it is right now. Actually, perhaps that’s the real issue in the economy: nobody wants to start giving a shit to answer their calling. (Literally.) As I drove my Skyline around to get groceries today, I reflected on all the countless times I got the thumbs-up from passersby. I remember an impromptu JDM meetup I found and how none of the people there ever even got my name, even as I tried adamantly to connect with them, trading numbers, asking what social media they’re on if any, and so on. Nobody cares, and if no one cares, what’s the point in all of this anyway? Is real life just a pornographic montage to be masturbated over now, or is there somewhere I can still find people who are trying to give a shit for the sake of tomorrow?

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• They got a great mugshot of him looking like a crook

• Took the steam right out of his run in Florida

• Reddit even joined in to twist the knife for good measure

I wasn’t born yesterday – I know what it’s like having serious traffic violations in my past driving record. Believe it or not, there was a time when I had a suspended licence! The simple fact is, I screwed up twice and got two separate hefty speeding tickets. It was a cut-and-dry affair and the second time had me distraught enough that I learned my lesson after all by then. I managed to work through the consequences of my mistakes and earn back my driving privileges, and now, since driving across the country and back plus making a dozen trips to Princeton, I haven’t been pulled over once. God willing, I never will again. This sucks for Cawthorn, but I think you already know that I’m not here to take this naïve angle about his screw-ups while driving.

Drawing on my past experiences dealing with these same problems, I want to make a couple of educated guesses as to what sorts of things probably happened to lead to this magical epic caption-able moment that the cabal of criminals gleefully blast onto all our mainstream media platforms.

Firstly, when I had my tickets and court appearances (I never got a ticket that was minor enough to simply be paid off), I had a consistent correspondence with my attorney about what was going on and what I needed to do. He was affordable, too; only about $600 and he would even show up in Court for me. He picked up the phone, told me what to do, and that’s honestly more than you tend to get from most attorneys, especially for that kind of money. I afforded it working dead-end blue collar jobs. Now, I have to think that whatever equivalent Cawthorn had of this sort of help was conspicuously absent, helping to greatly increase the chances of this magical epic caption-able moment happening. Has it occurred to Cawthorn to perhaps ask if certain people he trusted were being grossly negligent? I would be wondering that right now if I were him.

Secondly—and this one is more to blame his own affluence on—is Cawthorn aware that you can check the status of your licence on the NC DMV website? My husband sure was and checked it all the time for me. Nobody wants to be caught driving on a potentially suspended licence. It’s not crazy to presume that Florida has one of these services in some form too, but I could be wrong. In any case, the onus was on him to be proactive in checking this sort of thing. Does Cawthorn have the survival skills necessary to self-sustain without being propped up by helpers and enablers from party machines?

The bottom line for me when it comes to asking, “where does the buck really stop for Madison Cawthorn?” is painfully simple: the Party made it abundantly clear to him that he is out. His orders are to go home and do something else that doesn’t involve him running for election anywhere. He’s not doing that, so the punishment continues. I have to wonder how aware he even is that this is being done to him. This is painfully obvious from the outside.

The fix was put in his electoral career in March of 2022, the same month he decided to publicly mention being invited to one of their orgies on Capitol Hill: the GOP had dirt of him being gay, and that’s not very heckin’ Republican of you, so we’re just going to forcibly primary you, and run you out of town, no no you’re totally unelectable now, so stop trying, just go away.

The GOP can’t afford to allow him to stand for election because they understand that their kompromat of him doesn’t actually hold water: people very well may vote for a gay man if he is charismatic enough and they feel like he better represents their interests than the default wrinkled rusty crooked asshole Jack Republican Holden Bloodfeast demonspawn. I don’t wonder why they invited him to the orgy—just look at him—and I think they’re credibly scared shitless of him using those looks to win over the people without their permission.

We have media rags reminding us of the conspicuous and borderline-irrelevant facts, treading the line between journalism and propaganda as always.

We have captured social media drumming up false consensus that looks like “this is what people think” if you just got out of a time capsule from 2014. The CIA is along for the ride on this one.

At the end of the day, it all shapes up to one thing: you don’t get to decide who you want to vote for.

By the way, the GOP might be the pioneers of electing new publics in the last 60-odd years, but they’re not the only ones who are doing this. It’s going to get worse before it gets better guys, so hold on.

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I implore you doubly to read on if you are someone who has read the so-called ‘recaps’ about the event in magazines like Forbes or Snopes. You haven’t been told the full story.

Like most astroturfed social media discourses, the Cracker Barrel logo discourse traces its origins to the mobbed up cesspool formerly called Twitter (now called X.com). While Cracker Barrel revealed the logo change to the public on August 18th, it wasn’t until three or so days later that the influencers at the top of the X.com pyramid decided there wasn’t anything more interesting going on and went ahead and aped into it:

Stage 1: Degrade

Once the usual suspects on X.com got a hold of it, it was showtime. The website would be absolutely battered by the overwhelming groupthink of conformist losers that Elon and friends keep around their dying forum, making such shit takes as these basically inevitable:

And following the opening salvos from the Retards in Command, of course they had to sanction the most banal sort of controlled opposition to throw their two cents into the dungheap so the website doesn’t look like the totally empty dumpster fire it increasingly is:

This is stage 1 of the stratagem: Degrading the public.

The uninitiated might find the above interesting or not, but what won’t occur to them to look for are all the dimensions others had about this conversation that they were never shown.

Stage 2: Dismiss

The reason that so many people have a problem with goings on like the Cracker Barrel logo change is that it’s evidence of how helpless they are to the onslaught of massively wealthy stakeholders that have only been getting richer as of late while the rest of us get poorer. Ever heard of BlackRock?

The key people who decide to sanction discourses like this are aware of this well of grievance the public has. That’s actually the very reason why they deliberately open up the floodgates of sentiment about it – think of it like a kind of psychosocial bloodletting ritual. Before we complete that picture though, we have to talk about stage 2 of the stratagem: Dismissing the public.

Some time elapses between the opening of the discourse in mid-to-late August and its closing some time in early September. This is where the dismissal effectively happens: you’re all busy chattering about the subject, sharing your opinions and trying to organically form a consensus about what this is, how you feel about it, and why.

The first order of business the mob has is to ignore all of you while you do that. They don’t engage, they don’t listen, and they explicitly avoid sanctioning anything that looks like organic discontent or strikes at the heart of the real animus for this suffering. When you are ignored, you are effectively dismissed, and your opinion does not count. What you think about this does not matter, and you are explicitly shown this in the form of low engagement and algorithmic hellbanning of your account.

While all of that is happening, the second order of business in stage 2 is to also collect and collate data about what the public is really saying about this. They perform a kind of temperature check on you: how much does this really bother you all? How angry are you actually? They’ll keep that in their notes on the off chance it might be useful to know later, and because it helps them more clearly separate genuine public sentiment from the puppet theatre they’re ramming down everyone’s throats in real time.

Stage 3: Disinform

After a little while though, the dismissals have run their course, and it’s time to finish the whole thing off by finally smearing out of the public record any pretence of genuine discontent. This is accomplished by simply replacing any would-be instances of organic thought with the most banal and thoughtless musings about the event that can be found, usually from accounts that functionally exist as wells for that sort of content. This picture is then completed with a highlight reel of all the worst takes from stage 1 to really jam in the contempt for the public’s thoughts on the matter. Observe:

And no discourse would be truly complete without backpedaling from the unwitting star of the shitshow:

See guys, wasn’t that great? Isn’t it nice how it all worked itself out? They put the picture back, and now this still-owned-by-private-equity carcass of former American glory is going to be good as new! Moreover:

• We didn’t address any of the real grievances people have about this.

• On the contrary, we gaslit all of them and made them feel alone in thinking that this is a symptom of a really deep, fucked up problem that’s ruining our country right now.

• We insulted the public intelligence by reducing their complaints to an utterly retarded caricature about a fucking logo change as if that is the only thing anyone cares about in this.

• And above all, we made sure that nobody has to fess up to reality or face consequences for any real harm caused to the public. We lit the PR firm behind it on fire as a show of brutality and contempt for rule of law and consensual business transactions while actively running interference for the true perpetrators of this cultural massacre.

What we have done here is created an actively managed outlet for socially organic frustrations and grievance, where we use the weight of those issues against their holders, like a kind of discourse martial arts technique. It allows the arbiters of the discourse to actively transmute anger into sadness while closing all of the false avenues of redress that are ostensibly open to actually resolve the problem (democratic process, collective action, self-organising, etc.), and further cementing that closure by humiliating whoever thought they would be able to take those avenues and help themselves better their lives. This is mind-bogglingly evil.

With the two notable exceptions of TikTok and to a lesser extent YouTube, all social media platforms are completely captured in this way. They are tools of a self-appointed cabal of billionaire mobsters used to degrade, dismiss and disinform the public by giving them an illusion of participation in public discourse and then promptly stringing up every inconvenient complaint they ever had and whipping them with it.

The hint that none of this is genuine was even dropped early in the reel of controlled opposition:

Truth is, nobody’s hearts is in any of these discourses, any more than they were for Peanut the squirrel or the countless other collections of zombie noise social media produces to drown out and preempt any genuine human consensus. It really is just bullshit for bullshit’s sake, or as Americans used to call it, horseshit.

God knows if the people could form a consensus, they might actually figure out how they’re getting fucked and try to do something about it. That must be prevented at all costs so the looting can continue.

Bonus stage: Discredit

The icing on this cake is in all of the old hat journalism rags unwittingly deputising themselves in service of the disinformation, because in truth they don’t really give a fuck either. This has the effect of creating a fourth D, if you will: discrediting.

If you were one of the unlucky few to serve as sacrificial lambs in the course of the discourse while it was ongoing, trying in vain to share your thoughts and socialise with your fellow man on platforms that now exist only to brutalise you, then whatever friends you have who didn’t keep up with this live are going to start doubting you. They weren’t there for it, but they read the recap on Forbes or Snopes or wherever, and they just can’t find what you’re talking about!

Aw, shucks! Now you sound like a crank for caring about private equity destroying your country, even though it totally is and nothing else is really going on here, and that’s even more demoralising and humiliating, isn’t it? Even your real life friends have been put at a structural disadvantage from even seeing what’s happening here because they don’t appreciate how brazen, shameless and vast the lying about everything has really become. The amount of cynicism required to independently arrive at the truth today is unbearable, perhaps even life-ruining in its own right. Isn’t that a convenient shame?

It’s time to stop choosing appeasement and trying to cooperate amicably with people who have shown no bottom to their appetite for delusions and the expedient denial of reality. This is costing us everything we truly care about in our lives; increasingly we are helpless or immobile when it comes to actualising our goals and living our lives to the fullest potential, and it’s because of this kind of shit.

It’s a false choice to play along or give into this; all you’re choosing is to lose more later, and you will live to regret it. My suggestion? Quit now while you still can and start organising for your lives, because no one else is going to do it for you.

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• Core i9

  • reason: bullshit branding tack-on to devalue Core i7 and bolster profit margins for nothing

• Nvidia RTX

  • reason: same as Core i9

• FORTRAN after F77

  • reason: versions after this not blessed by Backus due to his retirement, and were not fully capitalised as is proper

• C after the end of the 1980s

  • reason: if you know, you know

• C++ after 2014

  • reason: we had exactly the correct amount of metaprogramming at this juncture and every addition since has been an exercise in performative masochism

• Windows Vista onward

  • reason: Ballsmer was not a visionary and Nutella is somehow even worse

• OpenAI

  • reason: figure it out

• Twitter changing to X.com

  • reason: evil man

• Facebook changing to Meta

  • reason: evil man

• Chip and tap on credit cards

  • reason: it all gets stolen anyway, especially online. none of your shit is safe from anything besides the fact that nobody cares about you

• 12VHPWR connector

  • reason: TDPs are already insane stop it

• Xeon Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum

  • reason: this was so greedy I haven’t the words

• Xeon Scalable

  • reason: same as RTX and Core i9 like guys WHAT was WRONG with the E3/E5/E7 setup my God

If these things, by themselves, disappeared from the Universe as we know it without leaving butterfly type gashes in the fabric of spacetime, I would be a significantly happier informatician and product developer. I have the utmost confidence that their intrinsic value to the world is zero at best and in all likelihood severely negative.

Over time I may add more items to this list, so be sure to check back on it once every blue moon. You may very well be undisappointed.

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Earlier today I was perusing the video archives of FUTO, the grant organisation my former partner-in-crime was so excited to pontificate to back in ‘22 in the hopes of winning a payday so he could live as a pauper in Austin City for a while longer. While I don’t know if that ever panned out for him, I do know that Louis Rossmann was involved as a celebrity headliner for the ordeal at least since that point, as part of his strategy to save face in light of the reality that he hates New York and had to quit on it despite making NYC at least 40% of his personality. He got a few million bucks by selling his business or so I heard, and somehow the mob he sold it to managed to move it to Austin City eventually anyway for him. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Looks good from here

No, we have to start fresh and naïve about this. It’s time to get into that beginner’s mindset and marvel our eyes at the bright future that FUTO is purportedly helping build. So let’s see what’s cooking in the kitchen for, I don’t know… maybe the last two months? Yeah. Starting small.

Oh boy.

It’s important to do a broad first pass over things like this, because otherwise you’ll very well get lost in the sea of ✨ content ✨. We’ll go ahead and cross out the following for failing to pass the title + thumbnail gauntlet:

• Filler – this is content that isn’t really substantive programming in its own right, often used to help pad statistics and in-fill the publishing schedule; blogs often publish ‘weekly recaps’ or ‘monthly roundups’ or feature a ‘guest writer’ to accomplish this basic task of pumping out content without having to bother making anything

• Recruiting propaganda – it’s just that: Organisation wants YOU to come be their next patsy for chump change that makes it look like they’re doing something and not just shuffling money around amongst themselves

• Current thing cash-in – when more than 3 popular Twitch streamers hit YouTube with videos about a Current Thing, all of the content farmers on X.com and beyond turn their attention to it in a hollow attempt to cash in on the momentum; it’s as vapid as it is disingenuous and would be counted as filler if it weren’t for the shoestring production we’re all supposed to be endeared with for its resemblance to real YouTubers 15 years ago

• and finally, blog slop – this is the most pernicious of the garbage, as it’s basically a simulacrum of weblogs like the one you’re reading, the weblogs I might recommend, or the weblogs those recommended authors might recommend in turn; it’s ideal content for people who have based at least 40% of their personality around reading weblogs but don’t like actually reading weblogs; the modern equivalent of daytime television programming or toilet literature, lacking any actionable substance but faithfully reproducing the appearance of it so you can show your friends, keep face and continue building your personal empire

The idiot box reigns

Before we get into dissecting what earnest content remains, I want to point out that this structure of publishing is familiar: it’s cable TV, or really just the idiot box in general. By virtue of the addictive relationship it fosters in some people, it often gravitates towards an equilibrium of 24/7 programming. Something needs to be pushed out on a regular basis all the time, because that’s what the viewers expect in order to maintain their psychokinetic tethering to the channel programming. There have been many deeper dives made into the perils of this elsewhere, but suffice to say that this is what we in tech would call a dark pattern: a deliberate yet subtle manipulation made in plain sight under cover of obfuscation and plausible deniability.

So what’s left after we cut out the filler, the recruiting propaganda, the current thing cash-ins that stop mattering in three days, and the blog slop written to sound like a bad caricature of Alan Watts? Let us enumerate.

Modular laptops

This looks like an interesting idea, and come to think of it they’re not even the first people that come to my mind when I’m reminded of efforts to implement user serviceability in laptops. Wasn’t there also that company doing essentially the same thing that got a big public investment and endorsement from Mr. Tech Tips? That’s right, there was:

Oh phooey. That’s OK though, because we can clearly lay the blame at the feet of the Government. This isn’t Framework’s fault! Everyone should be able to buy from Taiwan!

Oh no. That’s not good at all.

So it looks like this is a pretty difficult situation for them to be in. Making a modular, repairable laptop is evidently no easy feat, and there are many potentially ruinous pitfalls one could fall into even on a good day trying to pull this off. So, I’m sure there’s a video somewhere from the Open Sauce team addressing how they plan on overcoming these challenges, right? I’m sure we wouldn’t just get all of the stock non-answers spokespeople love to give when the companies they speak for don’t have a serious concern for something but are facing public pressure. Right?

I mean, I’m not supposed to have been born yesterday and just blankly expect them to succeed just because they act like they will, am I? Like, there’s a world they have to actually make these things in—a volatile, imperfect world—and surely they have to have some plan or strategy to confront that in pursuit of their great passion! 😧

‘Open, modular, and hackable’ Alexa

This was actually really interesting to me until I realised it’s one of those talking trash cans with always-on microphones all the big tech cos foisted onto the somnambulant public. Exciting because the thumbnail contained a decomposed schematic, and schematics are considerably closer to reality than fluff videos where we ‘meet the team’. I can’t say this is slop because it’s a substantive product development, but it’s still sorely disappointing as it’s one of those walking solutions looking for a problem that tech is so infamous for these days. And on the margin, open source mass surveillance devices are even worse, because they’re expressly pretending to be the opposite of what they actually are. (Pardon me as I hold back my laughter at people who think open source somehow precludes mass surveillance.)

‘Decentralising authentication’

I know this is going to sound really shitty, but I swear to God it was the very first earnest thought I had when I saw this: what’s wrong with passwords?

There have been serious assaults against this tried and true method of security, as the tech industry, all by itself, has yet again spontaneously decided to lead yet another crusade against the damn things despite nothing being seriously wrong with them. This time their chosen bait is the ‘passkey’, which is basically a password that’s not protected by the Fifth Amendment and is far easier to practically steal if you were a government surveillant or APT spelunking around the Worldwide Web looking for people to hack. Tech has been relentlessly nudging everyone to adopt these pieces of shit, too:

So okay Chad, I’m game: I agree with you, decentralised authentication is the only option. How is your Allthenticate business not a flagrant perversion of that moral (because it sure as hell looks like it), and how do you plan on convincing people to spend 45 minutes listening to you talk about this problem when it’s a coin toss at best that you will even get the framing correct, let alone bring something to the table that helps matters? I have no reason to believe he even addresses this. Maybe he does. Let me know in the comments. But somehow I already can figure he doesn’t.

Results never mature

I know it sounds like I’m being uncharitable, and that’s because I am, for a very good reason: it’s been this way for over a decade at this point. It’s always this menagerie of work that appears to pass muster at first glance, but when you take a closer look, or even just wait for more than five minutes and watch as none of these endeavours ever seem to mature and actualise their goals, you have to wonder if you’re not being bamboozled. You are. Sorry you had to find out this way.

I’m sorry that I have to be a stranger idly pointing out that this sucks from the sidelines like some kind of heckler, but weeding out jabronies was supposed to be the job of the showrunners and stakeholders organising this shit. Since they failed spectacularly in doing that, allowing tryhards, phoneys and frauds to basically run rampant, how can I just sit by and let this shit pass by as if it’s any good? It’s degrading to all of us to allow it to stand. We’re all sons of bitches for allowing this shit the dignity it didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve. This should have never been funded, but it was, and that cheapens the value of everything we do. If this is worth $10K, or more, and it comes into the fray with equal weight as legitimate work, then legitimate work isn’t worth shit.

I would love to be proven wrong about all of this. In the very same way, I always wanted to be proven wrong about the dog shit state of the tech job market over the last five years. It should surprise no one that this is the case, because it’s self-evident that I’m a capable programmer who can command a pretty high salary considering the nature of what I do. I have no reason to sit here penniless and blog about how much the industry is stuck up its own ass if it’s actually not, but that wasn’t my choice to make. I gained employment before out of my own chutzpah. I’m here to tell you why I won’t do it again, at least not like this.

The story of George

The industry wasn’t always like this. As recently as 2013, there was still goodwill, which would later enable guys like George Hotz to blow up and parlay their success into lots of opportunities to build basically whatever they wanted. He got free press for his hacktivism in the before times, when Ivy League professors would stick their necks out for your freedom of speech simply because it was the right thing to do and because their opinion made an impact and they knew it. Indeed, Sony settled their DMCA suit against him in fear of the negative publicity. Good times. Glad it all worked itself out.

Jobbing on easy street

Where did George take this goodwill? Well, first he took it to a free job at Facebook, where he worked for a split before joining a startup that he spent even less time at before starting his own. He would later illegally wire up his Comma.ai device to an Acura and drive it on the California interstate highways, but California asked him nicely to stop and he got a bunch more press that prompted investment to help legalise his device. And why wouldn’t he do that—taunting the legal system—considering how well it worked out for him with Sony? It must be nice being able to live out that tired Valley advice of ‘don’t ask permission’ when everyone in charge for the time being is so forgiving and charitable to you. These days, the rest of us have been finding out how worthless that advice is when you have no means to act in the first place; we’re all ‘not asking permission’ to do nothing.

Aping into AI

After Comma, George aped into the AI world Ponzi scheme with tinygrad, and grandstanded endlessly about how he was going to use AMD chips to get the job done. After discovering that AMD wasn’t willing to bankroll implementing the changes he would have needed in their driver stacks, he threw a tantrum on GitHub about it, ragequit on AMD, and later moved over to Nvidia, who for obvious reasons are much more amenable to mob machinations where dark money moves the levers as necessary to maintain the appearance of competence regardless of who’s paying for what. None of those embarrassing moments got any press coverage outside of Reddit, so it’s as if it never happened, and he carries on broadcasting himself and repping his image on social media. This is pretty fucking insane considering it was such a resounding ‘what the fuck’ moment that brought so many things into question about what he was really doing. People had supposedly invested several million dollars into this, so public meltdowns that existentially threaten the company aren’t things anyone just shrugs off. But when you’re bankrolled by the mob, I guess it’s all according to keikaku. Just another day’s work fixing the backend to work with the shit they got up front.

Just like you or I

Before all of his slimy dealings with the tech mob, George was a thoroughly unexceptional talented binary ROM hacker. I have known of several dozen people of his calibre or better in my years doing ROM hacking, and I count myself among their ranks as well because I have those skills. Sure, we’re a rare breed, but we’re not this exotic kind of special that his dealings would lead you to believe. The things happening to him and beckoning all of this sukses have nothing to do with his skills as a fabled Hackerman. That’s his cover story and it’s how he enjoys portraying himself to others. I’m not saying he’s a worthless nobody—in a fairer world he would command a lavish salary that would finance a happy family on his income alone in any suburb of America really—but he’s not whatever the hell he claims to be.

Conclusion

George enjoys this privilege because he’s willing to play along and say the lines. He’s far from alone in that, and indeed, the real reason why he ‘succeeds’ in the narrow, materialistic sense of the term is the reason I ‘fail’ just as narrowly: I’m not willing to play pretend with corrupt people because of the damage it invariably does to my soul.

The trainwreck of Unai

In my article Mechanicalism in the Real World, I opened with a big thank you both to Unai, now known as Unison, for giving me a 1099 job, and to Lewis, who helped me source that job by blowing up a Tweet thread about me where he was complaining that nobody in the industry cares about talented C programmers.

The developments that followed were nothing short of embarrassing in every metric that really mattered. I interviewed for months on end while working a dead end security job barely making ends meet, and although I thoroughly enjoyed those interviews and found them to be very earnest and productive, that was a lot of fucking time I really didn’t have that they did.

Piss poor compensation

When it came time for salary negotiations, it was a mess: I got offered $58K annually on a 1099 contract basis that they claimed was for probation. The CEO took my counteroffer of $60K because, in his words, he “didn’t want to be remembered as the guy who turned you down for $58K.” This is a very ironic and sad thing to look back on considering the job description was essentially everything I do already on my own accord, but affixed to his product and vision. Have some modern perspective on how vanishingly low this salary actually is: I’m doing theoretical informatics work for a Sequoia-backed Valley-headquartered company and I’m being paid less than I would make working twelves at the Kellogg’s bakery in Cary, North Carolina operating a Cheez-It packing machine. In the end, I’m fucking poor and they know it, so I don’t push the matter since I don’t really have a lot of leads to leverage anyway. And $60K/year did feel pretty good on my finances initially – I got debt-free again and even bought myself a nice Cannondale bicycle.

No job with that title

Okay, so I’m gonna go to work developing their VR headset protocol or whatever, right? Apparently not. I found out a week or so before onboarding that actually, wait, he doesn’t have that job for me right now, but if I’m willing to stick around and pitch in I’m sure I could find some way to make myself useful. Ah, the classic switch-a-roo, and for a pitiful salary on top of that. Insult to injury. Again, what choice do I have? Whatever. Let’s do it.

No leadership, just management

I get into the meat of the software at the company and immediately discover that it’s a giant pile of proprietary, undocumented code authored by a single person who works on the team and had this legacy codebase for years before joining. I get a small task on a kanban board to implement something basic on top of it, and psych myself to get into it before discovering all too late that I have no idea how any of this works and there’s no way for me to discover that on my own in a reasonable timeframe. So the deadline comes and goes and the management response to that failure was to tell me to just pester the author about everything even though he can’t respond right away. They literally said “DM him at 3am” just to insist upon me about this. I told them that I can’t really do that because if I have to ask a question every time I get stuck and wait for a response it causes me to stall out and I can’t do anything for that stint of the day. I told them as the second deadline neared that I need to sit down and document this code, because there’s no way in hell anyone else is ever going to be able to use this shit as long as its in the state its in. I had to insist on this, telling the CEO that it was morally wrong for me to keep pressing on this way because I can’t see any way to make this work without lying. And just like that, I was fired. For a time, the CEO went looking for another C++ dev, but never found one that lasted, and to this day their software guy is a team of one.

The managerial code racket

Looking back, it was painfully obvious what the situation was: the original C++ guy they had took this company by their technical balls and uses their codebase as leverage to keep and enhance their employment for as long as possible. It’s a variant of the often-discussed ‘malicious compliance’ that programmers will do with ignorant and hostile managers where they quietly create artificial problems for themselves down the road by either writing deliberately bad or at least totally undocumented code so they never run out of work and managers can’t let them go. The CEO was 19 years old at the time and had no idea that this was being done to his company, and on the contrary gave the guy’s expertise a lot of weight in making hiring and firing decisions, including my own. This was a classic case of a CEO having management skills but no leadership skills, and it’s why the company is more or less a ghost to this day.

I can only speculate that the reason this thing got funded had something to do with the CEO’s family relations, because he has no personal qualities that stuck out or demanded attention from money, and because he has literal Continental royalty sitting on his Board, self-styled as angel investors. The European aristocracy is famous for pantomiming world business, butting in uninvited and making up for the rudeness by serving as a giant piggy bank using their inherited sovereign wealth. They really just want to run with the big dogs and ignore the reality that they lost real power a long time ago.

This is what startups are really like

Either way, this absolute shitshow has not only European princesses aped in, but even big money from Sequoia Capital and their associates whose names you’ve probably heard of. Let’s be real: if they’re not the pinnacle of startup culture, no one is. And so we arrive at a very common refrain against startup culture I’m far from the first to espouse, in the most painful, firsthand way possible. I’m telling you this in an effort to underscore that this is what’s really going on in the industry. I’m tired of the misdirections and lies espoused on the mainstream Web that prop this shitshow up. I’m also not going to bore my readers to death with long-hand rebuttals to bad faith arguments made by psychopaths and regretful morons about this either. I trust that you are earnest, because I have to. The only way this is ever going to get solved is at the behest of people who want it to be solved. Fuck the ones who don’t or think this is good somehow. Reminder: these operations are still ongoing, sucking up money from everywhere they possibly can.

Enter David Holz

If you’re cynical or inexperienced enough to think my experience with Unai was a fluke or just doesn’t gel with everything you’ve seen in the industry in your life, I had another unfortunate run-in with the now-famous founder of Midjourney, David Holz. Unfortunately he has to pretend like he never knew me now—I don’t know what exactly I said but I’m 90% sure it was me criticising the wrong stakeholder on Twitter some time in 2022, because everybody who acted like they were somebody came to start conspicuously ignoring me around that point—but before he ghosted me he was talking to me on the telephone and trying to help me get a job. At the time he had just sold Leap Motion, his augmented reality startup, to a private equity fund, and was using the cash to build out the unnamed laboratory that would later become Midjourney.

David extends a branch

He told me that at the very minimum he could get me a basic, low-skill job being a sysadmin or devops type helper at that laboratory, but upon further thinking he thought I’d be a better fit at Leap Motion, because I was clearly particular to low-level embedded programming with my fixation on ANSI C. He knew this because I was a peer of someone else he also hired years before to work at Leap Motion: Max Thomas, also known as Shiny Quagsire, of GBA and later 3DS hacking note. Being the company’s former CEO, it was trivial for him to arrange a connection and from there I started scheduling interviews. The first interview was about culture fit, and it went great – we chatted about anything and recent developments in tech, and it was clear that I would be able to get along fine.

The whiteboard scam

The second interview is where things went wrong, and my best understanding of it is that they orchestrated what Richard Geldreich explains as ‘whiteboard tests’ – pre-employment screening tests that can be designed to essentially guarantee failure and use that failure as a substantive technical reason to not move forward with a candidate. In my specific case, they gave me a task to create a recursive algorithm mapping dictionary words to phone number digits in Python. This is a common task for university undergrads, and I had already explicitly told them multiple times that I never went to college and that my focus is heavily biased towards C, where doing recursion is heavily frowned upon due to the nature of the domain. I ended up timing out in the throes of writing a non-recursive solution to this stupid problem, and upon retelling this after the fact I have had the hilarity of people telling me “sometimes employers do whiteboard interviews just to see how you think!” If that were the case they should have been amazed, but they weren’t, and actively tried to make me feel like it was my fault somehow.

A charade for private equity

While it’s not possible to entirely rule out the chance that I was illegally discriminated against, I will say there’s a pretty simple theory that would explain their decision to do this. David had just sold this company to private equity, and there was an obvious understanding amongst all of us that they may not really fully understand what they bought into. My first interviewer alluded to this in speaking of the ‘solid air gap’ he was helping to maintain between the team and their new owners.

Here’s the truth about UltraLeap, formerly known as Leap Motion: it was a doomed company. David did the smart thing and parried his failure to attain market into a success by passing off the company to someone dumber who was willing to buy it. But importantly, everyone on the team was smart enough to kinda ‘get’ what this meant for them and how best they needed to play their parts to maximise the amount of time they get to coast working at this place.

The MO was simple: shut up, keep your heads down, maintain a low profile, and just act like you’re being productive and make a token show for the owners every now and then. If you do, none of us have to go look for real jobs and we can all just kind of fuck off for a few years and enjoy being paid market rate wages for mostly nonexistent work because our salaries were already priced in from the start. The entire team conspires together to put this performance on for their owners because they want to keep their now-mostly-empty jobs for as long as possible. Where I figure into that is painfully simple: I’m another mouth to feed, a potential liability in my own right because they don’t know me and can’t be sure if I’m intelligent enough not to give the game away when I’m being paid good money to keep quiet, and all else equal my hiring means less time that they potentially have to keep the whole charade going. It’s a material loss with no gain whatsoever, because they’re not starving for my talent and they’re not going anywhere that might demand it in the future. So they just throw up a whiteboard scam to preemptively deflect blame for not wanting to hire me and call it a day.

We know better than this

I have been through enough firsthand with the tech industry that I know better when I come across a YouTube channel filled with earnest-looking crap than to take it at face value. I opened with this and went along with the premise of goodwill just to give myself a sanity check and to extend an olive branch to my readers who might otherwise choke on this corrosive pill I’m bestowing.

Social media is no avenue

I’ve also known of others who have been methodically cast out of the garden by these tech mobsters, and I can hardly find or recall their names or the irrelevant podcasts they interviewed on, which really sucks because I know there’s no chance in hell I’m ever going to be able to find them just by going looking for them. If social media was ever an open platform for human discourse, it has definitely stopped serving that purpose in any capacity for some years now. No platform shows you the posts from the people you follow in the order that they were made, because that removes their ability to lie to you about what’s going on and what opinions really matter according to ‘everyone else’. Tech is flagrantly and systematically abusing their stewardship of the mainstream internet to further their interests and it’s so effective that people have barely noticed it’s happening, although that sentiment is starting to change. You just can’t make up for all the broken promises and products that never came into existence after a point.

Everyone had colossal amounts of goodwill that they then dispensed over and over into the accounts of disingenuous people that have never really led honest careers in the first place, and now we all have to act shocked and lean into our embarrassment that we got played so thoroughly. I have had to torch friendships with many online connections because they simply refuse to tolerate my idle dissent against this after a point, including with the Lewis above who got me the job at Unai. The saddest part is, his self-betrayal in welcoming VCs didn’t even net him any benefit in the end: his business went defunct and he hasn’t put up anything of substance since. It’s almost like I was right in vocally saying these people are psychopaths and you shouldn’t be anywhere near them if you can help it. There’s no winning move with them, or as Warren Buffett once said, “you can’t make a good deal with a bad person. It really does pay to avoid them.”

People hoped for better

When I was younger, I took a tech-adjacent job as a ‘coding coach’ for a franchisee of a Valley-based tutoring startup called ‘theCoderSchool’. The owners at the time, brothers Mehul and Kunal, took a liking to me, and I fared all right with the job until a very bigoted assistant manager got on board and wreaked havoc at their new location without them noticing until a lot of damage had been done. Before it all went to hell, Kunal told me something interesting in response to me saying “I never made it into university; I can’t get a good job in tech.” Kunal said it wasn’t going to matter, because companies will pay people like me to go to school and get the credentials I needed.

Like David, Maxim and many others, Kunal understood that I wasn’t an ordinary programmer, and to this day I am mystified as to why he ever believed such a preposterous thing about on-the-job training. But I nodded along and went back to work; what he thought didn’t matter that much anyway unless he was hiring (which he obviously wasn’t). Kunal is yet another example of all the goodwill the public has been pissing away in the tech industry, and I don’t blame him for it, but God damn, it’s really hard to have any sympathy for it at all. And as for the people who were naïve and now want to double down when faced with the facts? Fuck you outright.

No more rackets

It should be made clear right out the gate that it’s not reasonable to be a taker for operations like FUTO any longer, or any other organisation like them for that matter. The trappings of the tech mafia and their locale create a significant reputational burden for them to disprove, and I would have to be a gullible son of a bitch to say ‘OK’ if all they care to do is shrug that off and say “we’re not like that!” Yeah fucking right. We’ve been doing this over and over and over. It doesn’t mean anything to me that you found some new frontmen like Louis Rossmann to put a fresh coat of paint on the same old rackets. It’s time to face up to the lack of results in cryptocurrency, AI, quantum computing, software-as-a-service, and more. I’m done even half-trying to believe any of the shit they peddle is going to materialise and change anybody’s lives for the better, because I have seen over and over firsthand that all of these outfits select for loyalty over competence. They don’t love computers; they love subservient eunuchs that wait their turn and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when their tyrannical masters drop a morsel of starvation wages into their traps so they can carry on living as a pauper in the shadow of megalomaniacal moronic assholes like Elon every day. The insult to your intelligence is the point; that’s the loyalty test. You wanna eat shit with them? Then you gotta play along. Everybody has their part.

No more denial

I can’t accept dismissals of these things as if these experiences aren’t indicative of the rotten culture tech has come to exalt, either. People love to hit me with that one: ‘you were just unlucky!’ ‘I never had these problems!’ Yes, and you never did the things I did either, so you wouldn’t have. That doesn’t make it fantasy.

I had been on a Space years ago discussing the broken machinations of FAANG and diagnosed their problems in the chat with painful accuracy, and immediately someone in the chat initiated a pile-on to tell me I was full of shit, until someone else spoke up in my defence who happened to work at many of those companies. If you really don’t think this stuff is an expression of a larger problem, I really don’t think you’re sober. (And Aash, if you’re still around, God bless you, and I hope you’re doing well. I’m sure you remember me and I remember you.)

I chose the high path

This is not just a longhand account of my tribulations in the tech industry before, but also a square and earnest admission of one really big kind of choice I made, and made consistently, that led me to materially ‘lose’ all of these things: I chose to keep my conscience with respect to practicality, and it cost me everything as far as they were concerned. Don’t get it confused; I’m not some conscientious dissenter or grandstanding moralist. I did the best I could with the options I had, and the only ways I could have stayed in were so colossally shitty that I would become a monster if I acquiesced to them. It was too much to ask, and for far too little.

Why should you care?

Maybe you think that’s dumb, or at the very least hard to sympathise with. I empathise with that. To you I must ask one big favour: I want you to think really long and hard about what’s at stake here with letting essentially fraudulent nitwits run amok and ruin everything by gating it all off with empty loyalty tests for a burgeoning parasitism. I want you to consider whether or not it’s really worth letting this shit continue not delivering since they are resolute in shutting the door in the faces of people like me who know what they’re doing and also give a shit. The products aren’t fucking getting made. Where’s your Librem? Same place as your Framework, or your ClockworkPi, or a hundred other interesting things tied up in China’s counterleverage against the tech mob’s Ponzi scheme so they don’t get the bag shifted onto them. Ever wondered why it’s hard to find a GPU at MSRP? It’s because Nvidia doesn’t want to get fucked with a glut in the market by making GPUs for organised crime that they know could just wake up tomorrow and reneg on, thereby shifting the balance sheet out of their hands. And that’s just one of several ongoing battles in the underworld that’s effectively running the tech industry today.

This affects you, too

I want better computers as much as anyone does. I have my own takes on those things, but you never heard of it, and if you understand now that I wasn’t fired for a lack of talent or some overwhelming personal failing, but rather for a healthy excess of conscience, do you really think it’s because those ideas are unexceptional too? My work is the work you are missing, because it was shoved out of the fray in favour of cheap simulacrums made by pliant and loyal jabronies using Thiel-esque tax write-offs. These product segments are what’s ultimately at stake with the sappy sob stories about my professional career: it’s just all the things you could have had but don’t. And I’m sure I’m far from being the only one. So even if the grand picture problems don’t matter to you, this still does, because unlike video essays about the AI commons or whatever, this is real. I’m just sorry it’s so hard to show you that, but I hope now you understand why.

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Forbes’ retrospective on the FTX fraud is indicative of this kind of deliberate tone-deafness: “The Devil In Nerd’s Clothes’: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Cult Of Genius Fooled Everyone”.

He didn’t fool everyone, or really anyone that arguably didn’t already want to be fooled. That’s the lie in the headline: “we had no idea! Could have never seen it coming!” Are you sure about that?

But if you would rather cynically presume my clairvoyance about that, then simply look to the unraveling of the comedy world at the behest of Joe Rogan. Cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.

600,000 views on YouTube concurs with the sentiment of these productions, too:

Joe is at a point of spiralling now with these developments, because he’s finding out all too late that he was the chatty guy at the urinal. Nobody feels bad for him though, because we all understand that he made a conscious choice to ignore the warning signs as he took the deals that sent him soaring financially. Like so many members of Generation X, Joe gleefully sold out. He simply doesn’t give a fuck about doing the right thing.

So yeah, colour me sceptical whenever someone feigns ignorance about these things, especially at great personal profit. It’s not really ignorance if you could have—or hell, should have—known better. By the way, we have a word for cases where ignorance is revealed to be deliberate: it’s called stupidity. Who knew being stupid could be so profitable?

Unfortunately, this pervasive culture of negligence is far from limited to the ascendant bubbles of phoney right wing tech cliques. Remember how we got here: it was brought to us by the decadence and shamelessness of the permanent Democratic state culture that took form in Obama’s second term, brought us Hillary, Biden, and then Kamala. More generally, it’s a culture that is defined by the consensus of the most successful members of Generation X: the yuppies, professional agitators, and arbiters of the culture of victimhood that the right has been dragging since the fall of mainstream evangelicalism.

I don’t think the tech mob really knew how far they could fly with their unpopular ideology until the functionaries of the old regime showed them. That sentiment of mine tracks very well with the memoir of Sarah Wynn-Williams; as she said, they simply don’t give a fuck.

Given how long that old regime was able to keep throwing punches when everyone with a conscience already called the match, I’m also deeply sceptical about questions that have been called to my attention about whether JD Vance really is poised to win what with everybody now getting on his case and noticing who he works for. Unless something obviously sensible like an AOC run manifests—and there are several reasons why that may not happen—there is no serious Democratic answer to him, and he may narrowly clinch the Presidency as many have cautiously predicted.

Everybody wants to hold their horses. Nobody wants to cut the shit and be honest even when it might not be the most immediately profitable thing to do. And as long as that’s true, liars and psychopaths are going to be better at it than you. They’re willing to break more rules, violate more people and more totally force their will upon the world without reservation, and since all the ‘good people’ are content to stand by and let it happen, it will happen.

It’s time to stop prancing around, announcing vanity projects and grandstanding over the mounting issues facing the public. This is not a game of cards; this is your life and mine. I’m not going to allow my life to be hijacked and fed into some canned line about the common good at the behest of ugly middle-aged blowhards in empty suits who connived their way into whatever bureaucratic post they based their whole personality around.

As sure as I’m living through this I know those people are lying when they say they’re the big shots that helped suffering poor people like me. It’s time to stop tolerating the theatre. It’s killing us.

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The tech industry wasn’t always like this. In fact, one of their most infamous daddies (so called due to the love-hate relationship they all had when he was alive and the fictionalised romance they espouse now that he’s dead), the late great Abdul Lateef Jandali (PBUH) Steven Paul Jobs (RIP), famously and shamelessly loved patents. Here’s the first patent he ever filed:

This was not a fluke or one-off thing, but rather one of the many things Steve did that demonstrated his courage and conviction: he was making a point about the value of patents. Indeed, the MIT Technology Review wrote—not coincidentally around the same time the newly mobbed-up industry was making its mind up about patents—that even in death, Steve lives on at the Patent Office. So often historical research like this shows us we inhabit a small world, or rather a world that sometimes seems shrunk down to the comforts of the minds that agitate to control it. Unlike those guys, Steve thought that patents were the lifeblood of tech – why would anyone bother inventing anything if they have no means to make any money off of it? Touché.

For whatever rhetoric you may or may not have been told in the last ten odd years that the industry has been captured like this, the results are now bearing that out: a huge asymmetrical information warfare campaign has been silently waged in the margins of the mainstream Web to delete, distract and disinform about the existence and viability of the modern codecs of lofty MPEG heritage. One of the two patent pools for VVC doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article, redlinking from the other patent pool’s page. Wikipedia even lists all of the ‘notable companies’ not participating in either patent pool. Like all the mentions of Epstein on Bill Clinton’s Wikipedia page, this is one of those things that got the fix put in by the corrupt elements embedded into the WMF I guess, because it’s fucking insane that an international patents pool that counts Toshiba, Alibaba, Panasonic and several international universities among its licensees doesn’t have a Wikipedia article at all. Like, this isn’t 2006. We can figure what probably happened here.

While I can’t say for sure why the industry has such a negative opinion about patents, I can tell you for sure why they don’t—ergo, how they lie about it through misrepresentations—and I can tell you a pretty simple theory I have in lieu of hard facts from the horse’s mouth on why patents are non grata to them now.

One of the biggest misrepresentations around patents in the context of computing that really took off in the course of their capture of open source software culture is the conflation of software patents with hardware patents. Historically, many informaticians and digital rights groups have opposed the enforceability of software patents, usually citing a theory that code is better contextualised as information a la the First Amendment and does not meet the mechanical threshold to be considered an invention. While the latter part of that is debatable, it’s still pretty absurd overall considering this argument is never used to bring copyright into question – and I guess it wouldn’t, since that liberty has already been captured from the public with the technique of software-as-a-service. Most law exists to furnish the delusions and grandiosity of those with power, and these are textbook examples of that.

We just don’t hear earnest arguments about this part of things, because if we took these false premises on their faces as true and supposed that Congress or the Supreme Court should outlaw software patents, or that pools should offer some kind of goodwill or promise about them, then the rationale for their patent holding and royalty collection on hardware stands strong, and that’s just about the worst outcome imaginable for the industry.

This might sound wild, but the sole motivation for this concerted corporate hatred of patents revolves entirely around money. You see, patent royalties are in a kind of uncanny valley: they’re expensive enough to be more than an afterthought on corporate balance sheets due to their scaling factor with respect to sales, but also cheap enough that the corporation cannot comfortably pass on the volatility they experience in taking on this cost. Since we no longer operate in a world where citizens have any meaningful market participation power, corporations have moved away from simple models of profit and enterprising and onto deeper methods of value extraction – this means that it’s awkward for them to have to pass on a mere 30 cents to the customer. More exactly, they cannot trivially pass on the burden of dealing with this in a way that enables them to make additional money. 30 cents is nothing to someone who buys an iPhone—a rounding error for the sticker price really—but it’s a big bill at the end of the year for someone who makes all the iPhones ever. To them, it feels kind of like a tax, and we all know how corporations feel about paying taxes. And while even so most other corporations would just accept this as one of the so-called costs of doing business and get on with it, that’s not acceptable to the tech mafia, who are all coked out on novel hallucinogenics and practise their beliefs to a dehumanising fault. Accepting patents as a fact of life is anathema to their core sense of self—a sense of self that heavily depends on maintaining the image of their own primacy and inviolability—it’s an act of humiliation to have to pony up loads of cash to some other guy you don’t know and can’t easily get one over on. 30 cents is too small an amount to make it clear that the customer, not you, is the bitch in this transaction, because a device is costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. These men with widespread fatherly issues thus conclude that the only option is to cut it out entirely and rationalise the affair as some public service they’re doing for us all.

In conclusion, patents have been made victim to the onward death march our modern zaibatsus have embarked upon to maximise shareholder value, with special gravity given to the often petty and irrational windowpane views shareholders and executives take when looking at balance sheets. If all of this sounds too abstract or unbelievable, just look at the results: H.266 is functionally dead, despite the fact that it beats AV1 with one hand behind its back.

Look at that and then look at the discourse about it if you care. Tabloids and comment sections have all been heralding its doom. Reddit diehards all say it’s Joever, and often like to cite the inevitable win to be taken by AV2, a codec that does not currently exist, in face of the reality that VVC is objectively superior to AV1. They even finessed the FFMPEG maintainers somehow into delaying the VVC codec’s merge into mainline without explanation for years. Every regurgitated talking point online said AV1 was the future and VVC was dead on arrival, except VVC beats it outright and somehow the phoney mainstream Internet acts like that never happened. Even despite the Reddit thread being years old, there’s still one diehard in there spouting disinformation about it as recently as 3 days ago. Every Redditor spouts the line that ‘the licencing is garbage’ but don’t ever seem to understand why or have any opinion on the facts – almost like the confusion is being exploited and smeared to power a false consensus that keeps these patent-ridden innovations out of the picture entirely. This is some pretty hardcore unreality for a video codec, but I guess it’s all in a day’s work for everyone’s favourite mafia.

I hope you’re enjoying your worse video quality that they kept all the cost savings for. They could have made some great ASICs to encode and decode the best video algorithms known to man, and made your devices cost a tiny bit more for the trouble, but they didn’t out of principle. They’re showing the world who’s boss here, and that’s what actually matters right?

Sorry not sorry to all those normal people out there who recognise that the new codec is better for archiving and want to save space… I guess you’ll just have to get richer somehow or fuck off because they don’t care about you… such great innovation and disruption guys… I think I might buy a 5090 now and try to join you guys on your Heaven’s Gate spaceship to Mars using AI…

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