The Tragedy and Farce of TempleOS
Terry would hate most of the people claiming to love him above all.
Thanks to the many exposés done by mainstream YouTubers in the years since he died, much of the general public is aware by now of the existence of an American programmer named Terry Davis and his operating system project called TempleOS. He was born in 1969, grew up to become an electrical engineer, held down work for a while until being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent his latter days—about 15 years of them, give or take—creating his magnum opus, originally known as the J Operating System and now known finally as TempleOS. After its development plateaued, Terry’s behaviour became more erratic, he went off his medication, became homeless, and was struck by a Union Pacific train in Oregon on August 11, 2018. This is the tragedy so many of us are familiar with, but it’s not what I’m here to write about today. No, I must tell you about what followed this tragedy. It’s something I can only call a farce, a petty idolatry borne of the worst excesses of American backwater culture and supercharged by the Worldwide Web.
The first and most important thing any student of this history must know is that Terry Davis was unequivocally, unambiguously and universally reviled, loathed and mocked for his work throughout the entirety of his time alive on this Earth. Wikipedia has done a fairly good job of smearing this fact to bolster the popular perception, with misquotes saying “the critical reception to TempleOS was mostly favorable,” exclusively citing news articles that appeared after his death. I don’t know how David Cassell got the impression that “programming websites tried to find the necessary patience and understanding to accommodate Davis,” because they were absolutely relentless in being hypocritical, vicious dogs towards him because of his apparent eccentricity. Wikipedia also states that “TechRepublic and OSNews published positive articles on Davis' work, even though he had been banned from OSNews for hostile comments targeting its readers and staff.” Of course, those ‘positive articles’ were also all published after he died. You’ll notice pretty quickly when reading up on Terry that this is a recurring theme. Not only did people never help or support Terry while he was alive, they went out of their way to destroy his credibility and reputation as if his schizophrenia didn’t already put him at a disadvantage without their ‘help’. That’s the reality of what ‘reviews’ were actually in for Terry and his TempleOS that for some bizarre reason Wikipedia is smearing out of view.
In this world, there are countless cases where people have, through their own poor decisions, biases or misjudgements, actively and directly contributed to other people deciding to end their lives. What results after that comes to pass is arguably one of the most horrifying and disgusting renditions of cognitive dissonance known to mankind: they act as if they cared all along. Suddenly after they kill themselves, the dad or the sister or the aunt or the family friend are so oblique — they were actually helping them as best they could, they’ll tell you! — when the reality is that’s a bald-faced lie and they’re counting on the fact that you’re not close enough to refute them on it. It doesn’t matter that they were a piece of shit who helped cause a suicide – they can act like saints and no one has the wherewithal to say anything to the contrary. Even other people who were immediate to the tragedy often can’t fight this deception, because it’s so blatant that it would cause a massive and bloody rift in the family that may never be mended for the rest of their lives.
In this day and age, we live in a world where manipulations and lies that rely on information asymmetry get exposed more quickly than they can be deployed. This is because, due to the existence of the Worldwide Web, there is literally too much information being pumped out everywhere all at once for some jackass to have enough time to even decide on a lie to go with. We’ve seen this happen for years on sites like Twitter, when something happens and there’s this uncanny silence that people even comment on: “they haven’t decided on a narrative yet.” We’re not even done seeing world governments embarrass themselves over and over through this, because they haven’t figured it out fully yet.
A constant feature of human civilisation has been the incidence of cults and the behaviours that animate them. Our powerful intellects as human beings presents a geometry problem: the amount of brain power you need to manage your own ethics and morals adequately is the square of how much brain power you have to begin with. In other words, ‘doing the right thing’ needs to take up a disproportionate amount of your thinking, otherwise you’re going to fuck up and become evil. That’s the timeless issue of all issues in a nutshell.
So how do these things tie together, then? The incidence of the Web is the monkey wrench thrown into this otherwise simple two-prong issue of humans being manipulative and humans being susceptible to the occult. I assert that the occult issue is a fairly charitable explanation for how the manipulation issue comes to pass and persist. In asserting this, I can then explain how a massive increase in information bandwidth destroys the credibility of the occult operation: there is simply too much information showing how and why this is actually a giant crock of self-serving shit.
The timing is consistently wrong. With the story of Terry Davis, there is virtually no one with clean hands in the matter – no one who claims to be a fan of his work on social media or gloms onto his creations ignorantly like some kind of barnacle is actually earnest. I also think the Wikipedia smearing demonstrates that this is not concerted – on the contrary, this is just an idle manifest collective delusion waltzing its way through the Web like a giant cognitive sea urchin on the ocean floor of the collective unconscious. No one cared about Terry Davis while he was alive, and a bunch of people have acquired licence to act like they do now, simply because no one else who would care about Terry Davis cares about him enough to have a problem with the fact that they’re full of shit about it. When a person leaves this mortal coil reputationally bankrupted as he did, those who live on are apparently entitled to take out massive liens on his name through the notoriety, and since he’s dead, no one will stop them because there’s no one who will object. In practical terms, he created a bunch of clout, was actively denied its use in his lifetime by hostile nobodies, and now is having his coffers looted by idolators who are as morally bankrupt as those aforementioned nobodies, all since he’s too dead to stop them.
I wouldn’t have the conceit to say I cared about Terry Davis while he was alive. For the record, I was aware of his existence and his project on IRC and didn’t pay much mind to it one way or the other, because I was very busy learning how to hack the Game Boy Advance and I don’t derive any pleasure from fucking with people online. And though I would not say I cared, I will say that I understand Terry Davis as he was at the time he was alive and working on this TempleOS. I understand him because for many years I have done the same kind of work he does, albeit for much more terrestrial ends, and thankfully without the encumbering of mental illness that he had. I understand him because I have faced the brunt of exclusion and demonisation from so many people, just as he did in his time on all the places he would be banned from. The crab bucket spans thousands of miles and it’s filled to the brim with arrogant, self-absorbed assholes who find their crowns in the mud and filth because they conflate their covert narcissism with humility.
But more than that shared experience, I understand that he knew many of the things I know about computing, and was unwaveringly resilient in his intention to actualise that shared knowledge in spite of being encumbered by his schizophrenia. Terry intended to create a great operating system by critically revisiting the paradigms of personal computing, and he did this because he had a gift from God relating to that which he wanted to share with the entire world.
The last thing he would have ever desired was to be some kind of phoney cult object for lazy, glib morons on the Web who would have hated him if he were still alive because they’re aimless, worthless people who run their lives on envy and conceit and only know how to tear others down. The people who claim he had a connection to God and evidence it by overlaying a trashy Jesus cargo cult on top of his work are the scourge of mankind – they’re the very same people that have been clogging up the progress and ascension of the human species since the dawn of civilisation, with every Godforsaken organised religion that was ever made to the chagrin of everyone who has had a personal connection with God.
Do you see the irony in all of this now or not? Does the wear of 17 years since this shitshow transpired help you see how crockery like that post is an unambiguous net negative on the social fabric with no possible upside whatsoever? What the fuck is anyone learning from this unsolicited lecture about nothing, even at the time it was posted? What were people thinking when this thread derailed? Why was this ever anything more than an intervention from moderators to keep the thread on-topic? They couldn’t have just deleted all the off-topic bullshit and left the thread open?
Terry was never confrontational or belligerent in the thread, but a bunch of other people were, and they were quite vocally nasty towards him personally. But since they were claiming victimhood and successfully advanced a narrative to the moderators that Terry’s the one causing them to act out by talking about God, he gets egged on, singled out and eventually banned. Great job, guys. Way to show everyone how disgustingly petty humans can be. You really saved us all from Terry’s nonsense with your angry nonsense. To be frank, this was far worse than whatever he did and it wasn’t handled in kind – on the contrary it was rewarded. Why? Did everyone have amnesia about what baiting is on forums, causing them to act like the people who baited Terry aren’t chiefly responsible for the mess? Is this all kosher just because Terry was a weak target and no one would care if he got banned? Do people really need to be threatened into doing the right thing because the default for them is to do this crab bucket eugenic mobbing bullshit with anyone who appears to be queer?
Here’s the bottom line about Terry: he was a man who was not only intelligent, but given a gift of some knowledge about computing. I don’t know much to say about God, but I find it likely that it’s the sort of gift of knowledge that would come from God, in the same vein as Einstein and Newton and so many other luminaries of history. Terry was also burdened with schizophrenia, an illness that eventually consumed him.
But know this: no man of God was ever given what he had just so you could have an excuse to be a piece of shit. These things were given to serve some kind of purpose for the world and to change things. Usurping the catacombs of a useless operating system created by an intelligent yet troubled man is just the latest and greatest way to couch your own moral bankruptcy in obscurantist occultism. It’s disgusting, evil and you are already in a metaphysical hell because of it – not living, not learning, not doing anything but asking for purgatory when you die, because you suck and don’t want to get up.
I would know what genuine interest in and respect for TempleOS looks like. I don’t see anything but a mockery of it in almost every place I look, and I really think people ought to know about that.
There are a lot of interesting things about TempleOS, and I’m going to be a little angry for a long time that my fellow man held the presses until its creator stepped in front of a train to acknowledge that. Why couldn’t you respect and appreciate it for what it was at the time? You waited until he killed himself to give him any credit whatsoever for what he did. For the love of God, why?
Love it or hate it. He's in the hall of fame, alongside that guy who was played by Russel Crowe