Sympathy for the Grift

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Democrats are trickle-down economics in disguise, while Republicans are a perpetual motion machine of wealth—promising infinite returns as long as the last investor keeps buying in.

Democrats are the sanctimonious snake-oil salesmen of trickle-down economics, dressed up in the shiny robes of progress, muttering the same tired chant: “If we feed the rich just right, they’ll trickle their leftovers onto the starving masses.” Meanwhile, Republicans are carnival barkers running the great Ponzi hustle, a fever-dream machine of infinite growth fueled by the desperation of the suckers at the bottom. It’s a high-stakes scam cloaked in flag pins and fake moral authority—an endless loop of greed that only works as long as the poor bastards they’re fleecing keep believing the roulette wheel isn’t rigged. Both sides peddle the same grift with different packaging, hoping no one notices the rot underneath the shiny veneer.

And here’s the punchline, the cruel cosmic joke: neither of these bloated, self-satisfied tribes is doing a damn thing to make the average 30-year-old better off than their parents. On the contrary, they’re churning out a generation of miserable little fucks drowning in debt, rent hikes, and the existential dread of inheriting a world cooked to a crisp. The Democrats distract them with dreams of “equity” while whispering sweet nothings to Wall Street, and the Republicans sell them some deranged gospel of bootstrap salvation while quietly siphoning off what’s left of the social safety net.

It’s not politics anymore—it’s a death cult with two heads, grinding people into dust while telling them to smile because “this is the greatest country on Earth.” Meanwhile, the 30-year-olds are stuck in the gig economy gulag, trapped between avocado toast jokes and the creeping realization that retirement is just a cruel fantasy invented by their grandparents. This isn’t progress; it’s slow-motion annihilation wrapped in focus-group-tested slogans. A whole generation reduced to cannon fodder in a war for profits they’ll never see.

It gets worse, oh much worse, because there’s this creeping, almost smug sense from the Democrats now that they’re gearing up for four years of honorable opposition—a glorious little theater where they’ll sit on their hands, bemoaning the horrors of Republican governance while secretly hoping the house of cards doesn’t collapse until they get another turn. They’re betting the farm on some mythical new wave, a tidal surge of desperation and gullibility, where the people—bleary-eyed and broke—buy in again, convinced that the trickle-down fairy tale will finally pan out this time.

And the Republicans? Oh, they’ll oblige. They’ll take the keys to the machine and crank it into overdrive, building the biggest goddamn Ponzi scheme the world has ever seen. They’ll slap a bald eagle on it, brand it as “freedom,” and funnel every last dime up the chain until the whole rotten structure buckles under its own weight. The Democrats will wring their hands, shaking their heads like disappointed schoolteachers, but secretly they’ll be relieved. Why fix anything when the scam itself keeps the wheel spinning?

Both parties are complicit, locked in this grim waltz where the game isn’t about governing—it’s about stalling. Stalling long enough for the next election, the next grift, the next manufactured crisis that keeps the American public too distracted and too beaten down to notice they’re being bled dry. And at the end of it all, the 30-year-olds will still be standing in the ashes, miserable little fucks staring at their empty hands, wondering what went wrong.

This is the only ontology available: a rigged binary where both sides are selling the same endgame under different banners. The Democrats peddle a kind of performative virtue—polished, rehearsed, and utterly toothless. They cling to the illusion that their honor, their principled inaction, is some sort of noble resistance. Meanwhile, the Republicans don’t even bother with the pretense of decency anymore. They’re all in, selling the biggest con imaginable—a nation hollowed out and stripped for parts, but branded as “greatness.”

And everyone just keeps buying in because what other choice do they have? This isn’t governance; it’s a scorched-earth campaign of cynicism, where the options are despair wrapped in empathy or madness cloaked in arrogance. The machine grinds on because it’s the only machine there is, and stepping outside of it isn’t rebellion—it’s oblivion. So the miserable little fucks keep playing along, trapped in a rigged casino where the house always wins, and every spin of the wheel is just another reminder that this is the only ontology available.

Playing For Possession:  How the Democrats Got Benched for 2028

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“Playing for possession: controlling the game without taking the risks to win.”

The Democrats have been hit with back-to-back personal fouls, unsportsmanlike conduct, and an ejection for unnecessary skittishness, leaving them with no room on the scoreboard and no time left on the clock. Think of it like this: they blew a 3-1 lead in the series fumbled the ball at the 1-yard line, and struck out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. It’s a comprehensive meltdown.

This isn’t just a bad loss. This is a franchise in freefall. The scouting department’s asleep at the wheel, the coaching staff keeps running the same tired plays, and the general manager’s idea of a rebuild is bringing in washed-up free agents instead of developing new talent. They came into the game with a game plan designed for a league that doesn’t exist anymore, ignoring every sign that the pitch has changed.

Now they’re on the sidelines, watching their opponents run up the score, facing a multi-season suspension that feels like exile. This isn’t just losing a game; it’s getting ejected from the league and watching your franchise be sold off to a new owner who doesn’t even care about the fans or the history of the sport.

First, Clinton in 2016, the political equivalent of a star striker who couldn’t finish an open-net chance in the finals. Then Biden in 2024, a grizzled veteran who had no business staying in the game after halftime. The bench was thin, the coaching staff clueless, and now the refs—those savage, unforgiving voters—have called it. Two fouls. No appeals. They’re out of the lineup for 2028-2032, forced to sit and watch from the cheap seats while the GOP walks the ball into the net.

And now? The rifts in the system—the broken transfer market, the bribed refs, the unwritten handshake deals that keep the sport barely holding together—have been cracked wide open by crypto cowboys and off-the-books billionaires. We’ve gone from a rigged game to an metarigged circus, where contracts are shredded midseason, and every match feels like it’s being played under protest.

This is the worst of all possible worlds. It’s not just a loss—it’s the kind of collapse that guts a team down to its roots. Imagine your favorite club being sold off to some faceless consortium of tech bros and hedge fund vultures. New owners who don’t care about the history, the legacy, or even the fans in the stands. They slap a new logo on the jerseys, change the team colors, and relocate the franchise to some sunbelt hellhole where no one even knows what sport they’re watching.

That’s where we are now. The Democrats aren’t just out of the playoffs; they’re staring down years of irrelevance, trying to cobble together a plan while the league changes the rules midseason. The game isn’t about tactics anymore. It’s about who owns the stadium, who controls the broadcast rights, and who’s willing to play dirty enough to make it all look legitimate. The fans? Left in the cold, clutching faded programs and wondering how the hell it all fell apart.

The Democrats need to approach this like a team stuck at the bottom of the table, desperate to avoid relegation. The first thing they need is a new coach—a leader with fresh tactics who knows how to rally the locker room and adapt to a changing game. No more playing for possession without a plan to score. They need someone bold enough to throw out the old playbook, embrace a faster, leaner style, and actually go for the win instead of settling for a draw.

But coaching isn’t enough. The front office needs a serious overhaul. The recruitment strategy is stuck in the past—drafting players who look good on paper but can’t keep up on the field. They need to build a deep bench of young, hungry talent who understand the new rules of the game. People who can talk to the fans, play on the same level as the grassroots, and hustle for every vote like it’s stoppage time in a tied match.

And for God’s sake, they need to fix their tactics. No more running the same old formations. No more playing defense while the other side is running a full-court press. They’ve got to get aggressive, take risks, and stop trying to look like the more “reasonable” team while their opponents are throwing elbows and lighting the field on fire. The fans want a team that fights, not one that apologizes for being in the league.

Finally, they need to rebuild trust with the supporters. Right now, the base feels like a fan section that’s been overcharged for tickets and sold a product that doesn’t deliver. The Democrats need to start showing they actually care about the people who show up game after game. Cut the corporate deals, stop pandering to the VIP box, and start focusing on the folks in the bleachers who live and die with every result.

It’s not impossible to turn this around. Great teams have done it before, clawing their way out of disaster and back to glory. But it takes vision, grit, and the willingness to play like there’s nothing to lose. Because right now, they’ve already lost the game. If they don’t change fast, they’re going to lose the fans, too—and that’s a hole no team can climb out of.

Nazi Salute

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Ah, the Elon stans—how delightful their contradictions are! First, they deny: “It wasn’t a Nazi salute!” And yet, in the same breath, they invoke the shadow of Wernher von Braun, the man who quite literally rocketed from the swastika to the stars. Here lies the paradox of modern techno-fetishism: the absolute refusal to reconcile the roots of innovation with the ideology from which it sprouted.

This is ideology at its purest, my friends. The Elon stan does not see a salute, does not see history, only the myth of progress embodied in their techno-Messiah. Von Braun? Oh, he was just a man of his time, they say, as though the V-2 rockets were merely innocent sparks of genius, detached from the rubble of London and the forced labor camps. Likewise, the Nazi salute? Just a misunderstood gesture, like one of Musk’s awkward memes, surely nothing to overanalyze!

What is at play here is the disavowal of history: “Yes, yes, von Braun worked for the Nazis, but let’s not dwell on the unpleasant details—look at the stars!” The genius of capitalism, of course, lies in its ability to sanitize such contradictions, to commodify even the remnants of fascism. Von Braun’s rockets, once symbols of Nazi terror, become the foundation of NASA’s triumphant quest for the moon, and now, in Musk’s hands, the rockets become the ultimate fetish object: the means by which humanity will escape itself.

This is not to accuse Musk or his fans of fascism outright—no, no! The genius of ideology is subtler than that. It is to point out how the sanitized past feeds the fantasies of the future. To worship the rocket while ignoring the Reich is to embrace progress as though it were pure, apolitical, untainted by the horrors of its own genesis.

So, when the Elon stan says, “It wasn’t a Nazi salute,” they are not simply denying—it is not that they don’t know, but that they know very well, and yet they continue to act as though they don’t. This is the essence of ideology: to know and disavow simultaneously, to erase the contradictions of the past in order to dream of an unbroken, immaculate future.

In this way, the Elon stan becomes the ultimate subject of late capitalism: one who sees the cracks in the myth but chooses to believe nonetheless. Progress, rockets, Mars—these are no longer the means to an end but ends in themselves, the ultimate commodities, sold with the promise that they will liberate us from the very world we have ruined. And yet, as von Braun himself might have said, we aim for the stars, but our gaze is still firmly fixed on the ground—on the ruins we refuse to acknowledge.

It is fascinating, no? Everyone who has seriously thought about space travel knows that rockets are an antiquated concept, a primitive phallic obsession from the mid-20th century. We are not getting to Mars with these oversized fireworks, these glorified Nazi-era technologies refined only to look sleeker in a Silicon Valley PowerPoint presentation. And yet, Elon—and let us not forget his stans!—they proceed as if the memo never arrived. Or perhaps they received it but, in true ideological fashion, simply chose to ignore it.

This is ideology at work! Rockets are not a solution—they are a spectacle, a fetish object designed to obscure the fundamental impotence of the project itself. SpaceX does not represent the future of interstellar travel; it is a reenactment of the past, a repetition of the Cold War space race, but with private corporations standing in for nations. We know rockets are insufficient; we know that without new propulsion systems—nuclear, electromagnetic, or something we cannot yet imagine—we are not going anywhere beyond our celestial backyard. Yet Elon clings to the rocket, just as his fans cling to their Teslas, precisely because it allows them to dream without truly thinking.

What is important here is the narrative function of the rocket. It is not a tool; it is a symbol of progress, an object that tells us, “Yes, humanity is still capable of transcending its limits.” The question of whether it works, of whether it is the right tool for the job, is irrelevant. Like von Braun’s V-2 rockets, it serves a purpose beyond its immediate utility. For von Braun, the purpose was military domination; for Musk, it is the domination of imagination itself.

But here is the twist: the obsession with rockets is not just about Mars; it is about Earth. Musk’s promise of Mars colonization is not a genuine proposal for human survival—it is a marketing campaign for his earthly empire. The rocket is not a vehicle for exploration; it is a justification for endless extraction, for the continued destruction of this planet in the name of a hypothetical escape plan.

The Elon stan does not care if we reach Mars. The Mars colony is irrelevant. What matters is the fantasy that it represents: the fantasy of escape, of a second chance, of a new frontier where the sins of Earth can be left behind. This is why the Elon stan clings to the rocket despite its obsolescence—it is not about transportation; it is about absolution.

And so, they look at the rocket, and they see not the limitations of 20th-century technology but the limitless possibilities of the future. They do not ask, “How do we get to Mars?” but rather, “What does the rocket allow us to believe?” In this way, the rocket becomes a totem of denial, a monument to humanity’s refusal to confront its own failures. We aim for the stars, but only to avoid looking at the ground beneath our feet.

Casino Nation: The Havana Doctrine

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It’s my long-but barely held together theory that the descendants of the Diaspora—no, not a Diaspora, but the Diaspora—are hellbent on remaking America in the image of 1957 Fulgencio Batista’s Havana. Think about it: a glossy, neon-lit illusion of freedom where vice reigns supreme, the rich ride roughshod over the poor, and every two-bit hustler with a flashy smile and a sharper knife sells you something you didn’t know you needed—be it cigars, fake revolutions, or atomic-age dreams of technicolor utopia.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s fact. Open your eyes. You can see it in the glass towers springing up like weeds along every coast, in the velvet-lined booths of high-end strip clubs where champagne flows like the Rio Grande after a thunderstorm. You can feel it in the way politics has turned into a boxing match in a casino pit—rigged, but with just enough blood and flash to keep the crowd cheering.

The children of the Latin-American exodus, scattered across the US by dictators, revolutions, and the cold machinery of capital, are now returning to build an empire of excess. It’s all about the grift, the graft, and the gamble—a system Batista would’ve tipped his hat to. These are people who understand that the house always wins, so why not own the house? The casinos, the skyscrapers, the data farms, the cryptocurrency exchanges—they’re all just casinos with different sets of dice.

The comparison writes itself: Havana 1957, a sweaty, smoke-filled Eden of sin, where the air reeked of rum, cheap perfume, and cold cash, every corner lit by flickering neon and every backroom a stage for whispered deals and the shuffle of marked cards. And then, picture this—Trump, bloated and manic, stepping onto the stage on Inauguration Day like a washed-up casino boss who still thinks he’s holding the keys to the kingdom. Instead of inaugurating policy or promise, he throws up a goddamn shitcoin—a greasy, virtual IOU backed by the full faith and credit of delusion. Where Batista sold dreams of luxury and decadence to wealthy tourists while bleeding the streets dry, Trump sold a hologram of nostalgia wrapped in gold leaf, promising his faithful gamblers a golden ticket to 1957, minus the rhythm and soul. The grift is the same, only now it’s coded into a blockchain—casino chips replaced with digital breadcrumbs leading straight to the same house, the same pit, the same rigged game. Havana had roulette wheels; Trump had Reddit threads. The stakes haven’t changed, only the suckers have.

America, once a frontier of the mind, now reduced to a sandbox for oligarchs and their algorithms. The dream is sold back to the desperate masses in bite-sized portions, just enough to keep them hooked: a dopamine hit here, a lottery ticket there. The people are pacified with shiny gadgets and empty promises while the puppet masters rewrite the rules, carving out a playground for the elite few who know the secret handshake and speak the lingua franca of offshore bank accounts.

But it’s not just greed. No, there’s nostalgia at play here—a longing for a world that never really existed, except in the grainy, cigarette-smoke-stained reels of memory. Batista’s Havana wasn’t a paradise. It was a gilded cage. But nostalgia doesn’t care about the truth. It only cares about the feeling—the buzz, the rush, the glamour of it all. It’s the American way, after all: to mythologize the past and then recreate it as a theme park.

This isn’t progress. It’s retrograde motion in a Cadillac with fins, racing back to the 1950s while pretending the road isn’t crumbling beneath the wheels. It’s Hunter Thompson’s nightmare of the American Dream, but with a glossier coat of paint and a Cuban soundtrack. The Rama Diary on a bad acid trip.

And somewhere, in the haze of cigar smoke and the neon glow of a thousand LED billboards, Batista is laughing. Or maybe it’s crying. Maybe there’s no difference anymore. America, my friend, is a game rigged by exiles and dreamers who’ve mistaken the past for the future. And the rest of us? We’re just along for the ride, barreling down the highway to nowhere with the radio tuned to static.

Tokenistan/Big in Japan

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Y’all remember back when money was just… money? paces across stage Man, nowadays you got people investing their life savings in something called “MoonPuppyElonRocket Coin.” What kind of name is that?

imitates crypto bro voice “Nah man, you don’t understand, it’s gonna revolutionize the way we buy digital pictures of bored monkeys… TO THE MOON!”

I’m sitting there like, brother, the only thing going to the moon is your blood pressure when this thing hits zero.

takes drink of water

These crypto folks got their own language too. They be like “Yo, did you see the new white paper?” White paper? In my neighborhood, the only paper we cared about was green! But now I got my nephew talking about “diamond hands” and “HODL.” I’m like, boy, you can’t even hold onto your phone for more than six months without breaking it!

And don’t get me started on these NFTs. People paying millions for digital art that looks like something my 5-year-old could make if I gave her an iPad and too much sugar. At least when I waste my money at the casino, I get free drinks and a buffet!

walks to other side of stage

Every day there’s a new token. CatCoin, DogeCoin, RatCoin… what’s next, PigeonCoin? “Revolutionary new cryptocurrency for urban birds!” Get the fuck outta here!

And these crypto bros be having meetings in something called “Discord.” Back in my day, discord is what happened when you played the wrong note in band class. Now it’s full of people typing “wen moon” and posting rocket emojis.

leans on microphone stand

But the worst part? The worst part is these influencers. Every Instagram model suddenly became a financial advisor. “Hey queens! 💅 Just mortgaged my house to buy SuperShibaCumRocket tokens! Don’t forget to use my referral code!”

shakes head

Y’all know what happens when your financial advisor’s main qualification is having 100,000 followers on TikTok? The same thing that happens when you let your drunk uncle do your taxes – somebody’s going to jail, and it probably ain’t them!

takes another sip

And these blockchain people… man. They talk about “decentralization” like it’s gonna solve racism or something. “The blockchain gonna fix everything!” Really? The blockchain gonna fix my knee that’s been hurting since ’92? The blockchain gonna make my ex-wife stop calling?

I saw a dude the other day wearing a shirt that said “Ask Me About Mining.” Mining? Brother, you live in a studio apartment in Brooklyn. The only thing you mining is your mama’s patience!

dramatic pause

But you know what’s crazy? In the end, all this crypto stuff is just teaching us the same lesson we already knew: If something sounds too good to be true… it’s probably got a Telegram group with a Russian guy named Dmitri who’s about to disappear with everybody’s money.

adjusts mic

Y’all remember that song “Big in Japan”? Man, in the 80s, EVERYBODY was big in Japan. Japan was buying everything. Rockefeller Center, Pebble Beach, Michael Jackson’s catalog… They was shopping like they just got their first credit card!

imitates 80s businessman
“Hey man, what you doing?”
“Oh, just buying Hawaii real quick. You want some?”

normal voice
Japanese businessmen were walking around Manhattan like they owned the place… because they DID own the place! The whole country was flexing with that bubble economy money. Real estate to the moon!

paces thoughtfully

But here’s the crazy part – all that money? It wasn’t even real! It was like unrealized gains before we even knew what unrealized gains were. They invented that “I’m rich on paper” shit!

leans forward

Speaking of paper billionaires… let me tell you about these tech bros today. At least the Japanese bought real stuff. These new cats be like “I’m worth 200 billion!” But try to buy a sandwich with that stock option pack…

imitates tech founder
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s. We don’t accept unrealized gains as payment.”

shakes head

The Japanese bubble was like the beta test for what we doing now. They had real estate, we got JPEGs of monkeys. They had Sony, we got startups that ain’t never made a dollar. Progress, right?

takes drink

And you know what’s wild? When Japan’s bubble popped, they at least had some dope ass buildings to show for it. All these companies now? Their assets is literally in the cloud. Not even the real cloud – the metaphorical cloud!

gets animated

We got billionaires out here playing space cowboys, but their whole net worth could disappear faster than a Snapchat message. One bad tweet – POOF! – there goes 50 billion! That’s some next level gambling right there.

imitates financial advisor
“Sir, your portfolio is worth negative infinity dollars.”
“How?!”
“You tweeted about crypto while Mercury was in retrograde.”

straightens up

Japan in the 80s was like the prototype for all this crazy shit we got now. They was doing billion-dollar deals while drinking sake in karaoke rooms. Now we got bros making billions while posting memes from their gaming chairs.

shrugs

At least back then you could touch the stuff you was overpaying for. Now? These tech billionaires be like “Trust me, bro, this line of code is worth more than your whole family tree.”

imitates tech bro
“Yeah, we don’t have a product yet, but our TAM is everyone who’s ever breathed oxygen. That’s like… at least 12 people!”

shakes head slowly

We really went from “Big in Japan” to “Big on Paper.” And that paper getting thinner every day… but hey, at least we got some funny tweets out of it!

walks across stage

Man, you could always spot these “Big in Japan” cats in Hollywood. They’d be posted up at Sunset Strip clubs, looking like they raided David Lee Roth’s garage sale.

imitates musician at bar
“Yeah man, my album tanked harder than New Coke here… but in JAPAN? pulls out wrinkled magazine That’s me on the cover of ‘Tokyo Rock Gods Monthly’!”

normal voice
You run into these dudes at The Rainbow, they living in a studio apartment in North Hollywood with five roommates, driving a ’84 Civic… but supposedly they got platinum records in Osaka!

imitates conversation
“Bro, where’s your mansion?”
“Oh, uh… all my money’s tied up in yen. Exchange rates, you know how it is…”

takes sip of water

Every failed actor and musician in LA had that Japan story. It was like their backup girlfriend in Canada, except this one bought their albums! Japan was like the rich uncle of the music industry – always there to bail you out when America wasn’t feeling your sound.

struts across stage

And the best part? In the 80s, nobody in Hollywood could read Japanese! You could show up with a Japanese newspaper talking about a fish market, claiming it was your album review.

holds up imaginary newspaper
“See right here? Five stars! …What do you mean this is a sushi menu?”

leans forward

You’d see these cats at the Guitar Center on Sunset, telling war stories about their Tokyo tours… meanwhile they can’t even afford to pay the late fee at Blockbuster. But in Japan? They swear they got their own action figure!

imitates desperate musician
“My record label dropped me, my girlfriend left me, and I’m living in my van… but my pachinko machine comes out next month in Shibuya!”

Man, Japan was saving more careers than rehab! It was the original GoFundMe for desperate artists. Before SoundCloud, before YouTube, before OnlyFans – there was just “But I’m big in Japan!”

Survivor’s Guilt

As I was watching Los Angeles burn last week, I felt a deep, unshakeable crumminess. The flames seemed to carry with them a weight of history, of loss, and of survival itself. It was in that moment that the last few Paul McCartney albums I had been listening to—albums I hadn’t given much thought to—suddenly revealed an incredible, meaningful tone. It was as if they were shaped by a form of survivor’s guilt, an emotional undercurrent that, in the wake of such devastation, made everything fall into place. It all made sense.

Thinking of Paul McCartney’s last five albums through this lens reveals fascinating layers of existential tension and sublimated emotion. McCartney’s work can be read not merely as the output of a pop-cultural survivor but as a persistent dialogue with his past, his losses, and the historical weight he carries as the last towering figure of the Beatles still actively producing.

1. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005)

Chaos and Creation seems an attempt by McCartney to confront the Real of his past—the trauma of Lennon’s murder, Harrison’s death, and the slow disappearance of the utopian ideal embodied by the Beatles. The album’s melancholic tone, exemplified by tracks like “Jenny Wren” and “Too Much Rain,” represents McCartney’s negotiation with guilt over being the one left behind. Yet, as I would argue, McCartney resists direct confrontation with loss through his meticulous craftsmanship. The album becomes a “sublime object of ideology,” wherein McCartney packages grief in the form of soothing melodies, as if to reassure himself and the world that beauty can still arise from ashes. We might quip that McCartney represses the traumatic kernel of survival, giving us an overly polished jewel that hides its cracks too well.

2. Memory Almost Full (2007)

This album is haunted by the specter of mortality and the burden of remembrance. Tracks like “The End of the End” and “Vintage Clothes” evoke a self-reflective McCartney, confronting his legacy with a smile that we could call “a mask of hysterical denial.” Survivor’s guilt manifests here as a preoccupation with legacy—McCartney’s playful nostalgia is tinged with a deep anxiety: how to sustain the myth of the Beatles while resisting the commodification of their memory? We might argue that this album represents McCartney’s struggle with symbolic death—the death of his mythos—rather than physical death. By transforming his survivor’s guilt into the playful irony of “Dance Tonight,” McCartney performs what its called the “fetishistic disavowal”: he knows he is mortal, but he acts as though he is not.

3. New (2013)

Here, McCartney’s survivor’s guilt morphs into a desperate vitality, we might suggest, as if McCartney is saying: “Yes, I am still here, and I still matter!” Tracks like “Queenie Eye” and “New” play with youthful energy, but this energy itself is suspect—it is a frantic act of jouissance, a surplus enjoyment meant to stave off the realization of the void left by his lost companions. We could argue that the optimism of New is fundamentally performative, a gesture to mask the fact that McCartney’s very existence is a painful reminder of what has been lost. The album becomes, paradoxically, a celebration of survival that highlights the impossibility of truly enjoying it.

4. Egypt Station (2018)

Egypt Station is a further articulation of McCartney’s attempt to confront survivor’s guilt through displacement. Tracks like “Happy with You” present a pastoral fantasy of simplicity, but this simplicity is ideological—an escape from the complex network of historical and personal guilt. McCartney is caught between his desire to move forward and the weight of his past, and this tension creates a fragmented narrative. Egypt Station, like New, pretends to move forward while always looking back, a perfect symptom of repression.

5. McCartney III (2020)

McCartney III is the ultimate encounter with the void of survival. Recorded in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the album strips back the layers of production, leaving McCartney alone with his thoughts and his instruments. Tracks like “Winter Bird / When Winter Comes” encapsulate the stillness and solitude of a survivor reflecting on his life. This return to minimalism is not merely a stylistic choice but a confrontation with the Real—the inescapable awareness of his finitude and the haunting absence of those who shaped his journey. The album becomes an elegy to survival itself, the quiet acceptance of guilt and gratitude intertwined.

Objects of sublimation

McCartney’s last five albums are pearls of survivor’s guilt precisely because they oscillate between denial, displacement, and confrontation. Each album, in its own way, is a fetishistic object, transforming McCartney’s unresolved trauma into something palatable for mass consumption. Yet beneath the polished surface lies a profound and unarticulated scream: Why me? Why am I the one left standing? McCartney’s work thus becomes a paradoxical testament to survival—both a celebration of resilience and an admission of its impossibility.

The meticulous production and polished arrangements act as a kind of defensive shield, sublimating grief into something beautiful but controlled. This beauty, however, is a kind of lure. It invites us to engage with the albums emotionally while simultaneously masking the full intensity of its underlying anguish. In this way, the albums become what one might call a “sublime object”—a creation that conceals its void, its lack, by presenting itself as whole and coherent. McCartney’s grief, rather than being directly confronted, is transformed into an aestheticized version of itself, smoothed over by melody and craft.

Yet, this very polish betrays its own repression. The excess care put into the album—its arrangements, its meticulousness—points to an unspoken fear: the possibility that, without this artistry, the fragile framework holding back the chaos might collapse. The melancholic tone, then, is not a direct expression of loss but a mediated one, carefully framed to avoid the destabilizing force of what cannot be fully symbolized. The listener is drawn into this dynamic, encountering not only the traces of McCartney’s grief but also the ways in which it is disguised, reshaped, and contained.

Extras

Ah, cryptography! It’s like Andy Millman in Extras, no? At first, it presents itself as this pure, untouchable ideal—a bastion of privacy and individuality in a world determined to collapse all boundaries. It says, “No! I will not compromise!” But what happens? Reality intrudes. And what is reality if not the persistent erosion of the symbolic structure we cling to? Cryptography—like Andy—believes it can exist in a vacuum, but it is always already inscribed into the systems of power it seeks to resist.

First, we must confront the fantasy of cryptography as an unbreakable shield. It relies on assumptions: the hardness of math, the impossibility of brute force, the limits of computing power. But history teaches us that every “perfect” system is ultimately undone. The Enigma machine? Broken. RSA with weak keys? Broken. Andy’s principles? Also broken. The system’s failure is not an anomaly—it is its destiny! Cryptography’s strength exists only as the ideological mask of its inevitable fragility.

Season 1: Episode 3: Kate Winslet Episode (Public Key Encryption)

Here is Andy Millman on the set of a serious film about the Holocaust, only to discover that Kate Winslet—beloved, respectable, pure—is doing it to win an Oscar. This is public key encryption in its ideal form: the clean separation of public and private keys, promising a perfect balance of accessibility and security. But the moment Andy enters this scene, the cracks in the fantasy appear. Kate’s public persona (“I care about meaningful art”) is hollowed out by the private truth (“I’m doing this for the awards”), just as public key encryption rests on fragile assumptions—prime factorization, computational hardness—that become increasingly vulnerable over time. Andy, like cryptography, begins to realize that the symbolic purity he depends on is always already a performance.

And then, ah! Darren Lamb—the human element. Cryptography assumes the weakness is outside the system, in the adversary trying to break in. But the true weakness is always internal! Humans with “password123,” social engineering, phishing emails—Darren is the embodiment of the internal failure that cryptography cannot account for. The very people it relies on sabotage it from within, much like Andy’s sitcom is ruined by his own compromises.

Season 1 Episode 4: The Les Dennis Episode (Bitcoin Forks)

Ah, poor Les Dennis—reduced from household name to desperate panto performer. He is Bitcoin after the first big hard fork: still recognizable, but irreparably fractured, clinging to relevance in a world that has moved on. Andy, desperate to make a name for himself, tries to elevate Les’s sinking career, much like the crypto community rallies around Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, claiming they will solve scaling issues or restore “Satoshi’s vision.” But the truth is obvious: just as Les’s glory days are behind him, so too is the simplicity of Bitcoin’s original promise. What remains is a fragmented system fighting for legitimacy in a world of diminishing trust.

Season 1 Episode 6: The Patrick Stewart Episode (Mass Surveillance and the Myth of Perfect Privacy)

Now, let us speak of governments and corporations. Patrick Stewart’s infamous, “And then I see everything” line is not just a joke; it is a profound metaphor for how power operates.

Patrick Stewart’s absurd obsession with omniscience—turning invisible and spying on women—is a perfect metaphor for mass surveillance programs like PRISM. These systems promise omnipotence, claiming they can “see everything” even through encrypted channels. And yet, like Stewart’s ridiculous fantasies, their power is always undermined by their absurdities. Cryptography, in this context, plays Andy: caught between the desire to maintain its artistic integrity (privacy) and the demands of the industry (governments mandating backdoors). The result is a farce: encryption schemes that work only until the Patrick Stewarts of the world decide they don’t.

These entities want cryptography—yes—but only if it includes backdoors, exceptions, and surveillance mechanisms. They demand a system that is strong, but only insofar as it reinforces their ability to control. Cryptography, then, is caught in this dialectic: a tool of resistance that is co-opted by the very forces it resists.

Series 2, Episode 1: The Orlando Bloom Episode (NFT Hype and Scams)

Orlando Bloom, obsessed with proving he is not jealous of Johnny Depp, is the perfect stand-in for NFTs. Here is a system (Bloom/NFTs) built entirely on insecurity, desperately trying to prove its uniqueness while the public (like Maggie) doesn’t care. Andy’s bewilderment at Bloom’s posturing mirrors the cryptography community’s reaction to the NFT hype. “But what is the point?” Andy asks, just as critics ask of NFTs: “Why build a digital asset reliant on cryptographic signatures if the value is entirely performative?” The whole episode is a commentary on the hollow, performative uniqueness of systems that collapse under their own absurdity.

And AI—ah, this is where it gets truly terrifying! AI doesn’t break cryptography in the traditional sense. It bypasses it entirely. Metadata, patterns, behavioral inference—these are the tools of an intelligence that does not respect the boundaries cryptography was designed to protect. It doesn’t crack the dam; it seeps through every tiny crevice, eroding the walls from within.

Ah, the David Bowie episode! (Series 2, Episode 2). This is Andy Millman’s lowest point, where he is publicly humiliated by Bowie, who improvises a mocking song about Andy: “Chubby little loser.” And yet, this episode is also about how AI relates to creativity and its ability to expose the uncomfortable truths we try to hide.

David Bowie in this episode is AI at its most disruptive and incisive. He is the generative model that observes Andy for mere minutes, synthesizes his insecurities and failures, and turns them into a cutting, viral hit. Bowie’s improvised song functions much like AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data—behavioral patterns, preferences, insecurities—and distill them into something that feels unnervingly personal. It’s a reminder that AI, like Bowie, doesn’t just collapse boundaries between public and private; it also mirrors back our worst traits, stripped of the illusions we use to protect ourselves.

Andy’s reaction—humiliation and retreat—is the perfect metaphor for how institutions and individuals respond to AI-generated insights. Much like Andy, we are not ready to face the sheer power of these models to deconstruct our curated identities and replace them with brutal, data-driven caricatures. AI, like Bowie in this scene, holds up a mirror, and it is not a flattering one. It doesn’t care about Andy’s efforts to appear serious or respectable; it reduces him to the essence of his contradictions: a chubby little loser who dreams of fame but cannot handle its cost.

And yet, there’s a darker layer here: Bowie’s performance is not just an act of truth-telling. It’s also an exercise in dominance. By reducing Andy to a figure of ridicule, Bowie consolidates his own artistic mystique. Similarly, AI systems consolidate power by exposing human vulnerabilities, often while their creators benefit—whether through profit or influence. Just as Bowie walks away unscathed, AI developers are rarely held accountable for the societal impacts of their creations. It’s Andy, not Bowie, who pays the price.

This episode captures the dual nature of AI: its ability to deconstruct and reveal, but also its complicity in perpetuating systems of power that thrive on our insecurities. AI doesn’t just create; it redefines the terms of creation, leaving us, like Andy, scrambling to understand our place in a world that has already moved on.

The great irony, then, is that cryptography believes it is preserving individuality, but it is already complicit in the systems that erase it. Andy Millman thought he could resist the collapse into celebrity shallowness, but the moment he entered the game, he was doomed. His BAFTA speech, like cryptography’s desperate claims of stability, comes too late. The collapse has already happened.

Series 2, Episode 6: The BAFTA Episode (The Collapse of Cryptographic Trust)

Finally, we reach the BAFTA episode, where Andy delivers his scathing speech denouncing the system that has destroyed his integrity. This is the collapse of cryptographic trust—when encryption fails to protect privacy, and the public realizes the system itself is compromised. Think of major breaches like the Snowden revelations or the meltdown of cryptographic protocols like MD5 or SHA-1. Andy’s disillusionment is the moment when the fantasy breaks, and he realizes that no amount of encryption—or artistic integrity—can withstand the relentless pressures of a system designed to exploit rather than preserve. His speech is cathartic, yes, but it comes too late. The damage is done. The collapse is irreversible.

So, we must ask: what is cryptography? It is not a stabilizing force; it is a fantasy of stability in a world where collapse is the only constant. It is the symptom of a system that cannot sustain itself, a last-ditch attempt to hold together the boundaries that power—and AI—are determined to dissolve. Cryptography does not delay the collapse; it is the collapse, caught in its own impossibility.

The lesson of Extras is the same as the lesson of cryptography: the system that promises stability and integrity is always undermined by its own contradictions. Andy’s integrity crumbles under fame’s pressures, just as cryptography’s guarantees crumble under the weight of quantum computing, AI inference, and human error. To believe otherwise is to indulge in the same hubris as Andy Millman—thinking you can maintain boundaries in a world determined to collapse them.

A Mythology for the Distracted Age

Netflix and Amazon walk into a bar. Netflix orders a cocktail called The Cliffhanger, garnished with a hastily-scribbled napkin that says “Season 2 Coming Soon.” Amazon, meanwhile, demands the bartender blend every book on the shelf into a smoothie, then pours it over their own head while shouting, “This is what the people want!”

Netflix’s algorithm seems to operate on the principle of “quantity over coherence.” They’ll greenlight an 8-part series based on a tweet they misread, insist the protagonist must overcome trauma via quirky dance montages, and wrap it all up with a finale so ambiguous it could double as an AI hallucination. “Don’t worry,” they whisper, “we’ll fix it with spinoffs no one asked for.”

Amazon, on the other hand, approaches storytelling like a toddler with a new set of crayons. They take beloved books—your Lord of the Rings, Her Dark Materials —and cram them into a “one-size-fits-all” corporate PowerPoint presentation. Entire character arcs vanish, plots are replaced with slow-motion fight scenes, and they stretch out the runtime just long enough to sell you a subscription to Audible. It’s like they think the soul of literature lies in its prime shipping potential.

Both platforms, in their way, prove the same point: If you give an algorithm a paintbrush, you’ll get a Picasso drawn by a toaster.

The modern hero’s journey no longer revolves around the hero’s choices—it bends to the rhythms of an audience whose greatest trial is staying engaged for longer than 30 minutes. Algorithms don’t care about Campbell’s archetypes; they only care about “engagement metrics.” The Ordinary World isn’t a village to leave behind; it’s your sofa. The Final Reward isn’t wisdom—it’s the vague satisfaction of seeing “You Might Also Like” recommendations you’ll never click. In this new mythology, the hero doesn’t just fight monsters. They fight the greatest enemy of all: the viewer’s attention span.

The modern hero’s journey, in its current iteration, is no longer a tale of self-discovery, transcendence, or triumph over external forces. Instead, it is an algorithmic feedback loop designed to accommodate the fragmented rhythms of a distracted audience. The narrative no longer revolves around the hero’s choices or challenges but around the neurotic pacing dictated by a viewer’s capacity to withstand their own boredom. In this way, the mythological structure becomes something far darker: a calculated negotiation between storytelling and the fractured temporality of attention economy.

What we observe is a profound disintegration of the hero’s agency. The algorithm, that silent demiurge of the distracted age, has replaced the divine intervention of myth. Where gods once tested heroes with fire and prophecy, the algorithm now tweaks pacing, edits cliffhangers, and inserts redundant flashbacks—its primary concern not the coherence of the narrative, but the statistical retention of the viewer. The sofa, not the call to adventure, is now the “Ordinary World,” a space of stasis masquerading as comfort. The hero, instead of leaving this stasis, is forced to contend with an audience that refuses to leave theirs.

The journey itself becomes warped by the rituals of the couch-bound viewer. The traditional arc—departure, trials, revelation, return—splinters into a series of disjointed scenes engineered to survive bathroom breaks, snack-fetching interludes, and the ever-present distraction of the smartphone. Every line of dialogue must be exposition-heavy, every event must reorient the viewer to the stakes, lest they lose the thread entirely while doomscrolling Twitter. Thus, the journey is not the hero’s alone—it is yoked to the banal domestic interruptions of the audience, rendering the story a kind of co-dependent limbo.

This new paradigm reveals a deeper counterfeit at play: the hero’s journey is no longer a communal myth meant to connect us to universal truths or shared humanity. Instead, it has devolved into a solipsistic performance, designed to pander to the solitary, fragmented viewer. The hero is no longer a stand-in for the collective psyche; they are a desperate, algorithmically optimized reflection of the individual viewer’s habits, anxieties, and fleeting whims. The streaming platforms, in their cynical genius, have realized that the hero doesn’t need to transcend—it canyon be counterfeit to keep the viewer watching.

This solipsism is not an accident; it is a design feature. The viewer, sitting at home with their snacks and their phone, is no longer a passive recipient of the story but its gravitational center. Netflix and Amazon exploit this dynamic by tailoring the journey to flatter the viewer’s every interruption and indulgence. The pacing of the narrative bends to their attention span; the emotional beats sync with their scrolling habits. The hero’s struggles are less about confronting universal archetypes and more about mirroring the viewer’s petty frustrations: boredom, distraction, and the need for instant gratification. The hero, in essence, has become a tool for the viewer’s self-soothing, a vessel for their fragmented, solipsistic engagement with the world.

Take, for example, the way plot arcs are now structured to cater to this dynamic. The classic “belly of the whale” moment, where the hero confronts the abyss and their own existential fears, has been replaced by strategically timed cliffhangers and reveals. These moments aren’t designed to challenge the viewer or provoke introspection—they exist solely to prevent them from clicking away. Emotional depth is sacrificed for continuity, tension flattened into easily digestible morsels of plot that can be consumed between bites of takeout or during bathroom breaks. The hero doesn’t descend into the underworld to emerge transformed—they descend because the viewer demands constant stimulation, and the algorithm mandates it.

What we are witnessing is the collapse of narrative as a loosely structured, rule-bound system into a kind of chaotic more or to put evening clocks, where the very principles that once gave stories their coherence are pulled out from under us—like a chair disappearing as we sit. The hero’s journey, once the backbone of mythic storytelling, no longer stands as a map for transformation but as a casualty of its own commodification. It is not that the rules have evolved; it is that they have dissolved, replaced by the infinite pliability of algorithmic tailoring, which bends the story into whatever shape is necessary to hold a viewer’s fractured attention.

This anomie—the disintegration of any external logic governing narratives—reveals a deeper malaise. Stories used to promise a kind of loop, a structure that reflected the rhythms of life and the resolution of chaos into meaning or sometimes absurdity. But now, in the age of streaming platforms, this promise has been reduced to a cynical bait-and-switch: instead of meaning or absurdity, we are offered endless circadian mirroring; instead of catharsis, a dopamine drip of cliffhangers and cheap resolutions. The narrative doesn’t guide us to confront life’s mysteries or complexities; it merely keeps us sitting, scrolling, consuming, suspended in a state of perpetual distraction.

What replaces the old rules is not liberation, but a hollow parody of freedom. The narrative no longer obeys the rules of myth or structure because it has a new master: the viewer’s whims, as interpreted by the cold calculus of the algorithm. In the absence of shared archetypes or universal truths, stories become untethered from any external purpose. They exist only to serve an immediate function—to keep the viewer watching, to ensure the metrics stay green. This is why narratives today feel both bloated and empty: they stretch endlessly, packed with filler and redundant twists, because they no longer end when the story demands it—they end when the viewer’s attention gives out.

It is a parody of freedom because what appears to be boundless choice and liberation is, in fact, a carefully engineered illusion. Streaming platforms offer an endless array of options and narratives, claiming to liberate us from the supposed tyranny of traditional storytelling structures. Yet this abundance does not empower us; it overwhelms and pacifies us. The more choices we are given, the less meaningful those choices become, and the more we find ourselves locked into an experience that feels curated not for us, but against us.

True freedom involves the ability to engage with something larger than ourselves—a story, a world, or a meaning that challenges us, changes us, or connects us to others. But in this parody, the hero’s journey is stripped of its capacity to provoke or transform. Instead, it reflects back the viewer’s own trivial habits and fleeting whims, flattering them into complacency. The platforms don’t ask us to rise to meet the story; they lower the story to meet us where we are, in our inertia, our distraction, our solipsism.

Consider the constant nudges embedded in the interface: autoplay features, personalized recommendations, the endless scroll. These mechanisms masquerade as tools of empowerment—“You choose what you watch, when you watch it!”—but in reality, they close the loop, ensuring we never escape the gravitational pull of the algorithm. We are free, but only to pick from a menu designed to keep us trapped in a state of perpetual consumption.

This is why it is a parody. It mimics the outward appearance of freedom—choice, abundance, control—while hollowing out its substance. We do not shape the narrative; the narrative is shaped around us, our decisions anticipated and exploited before we even make them. The freedom we are offered is not to transcend or grow, but merely to linger, to scroll, to consume. It is freedom as an anesthetic, freedom as a form of control.

The true irony lies in how this parody undermines itself. The more the platforms bend the hero’s journey to our whims, the less satisfying it becomes. We sense, deep down, that this endless customization diminishes the story’s power. By removing friction, challenge, or contradiction, the narrative becomes lifeless, a bland echo of our own shallow impulses. This is not freedom; it is an elaborate cage, decorated to look like a limitless horizon.

And this is the true horror: the disappearance of rules does not liberate us in a modernist Virginia Woolf or post modernist Thomas Pynchon but folds the narrative back onto itself, under its own weight, into a self-referential void. Without structure, the hero’s journey becomes a meaningless procession of events designed to accommodate snack breaks and bathroom trips, where every story is both too much and not enough, where we are endlessly teased with the promise of meaning but never allowed to grasp it.

This is an anomie not of absence, but of excess: too much content, too much pandering, too many “choices,” all leading to a paralyzed, anesthetized audience incapable of demanding more. The rules don’t disappear into freedom; they disappear under the weight of their own exploitation, leaving us with stories that serve no higher purpose than to fill the void in our own overstimulated, underfulfilled lives. The narrative, like the viewer, collapses into itself, a hollow echo of what it once promised to be.

This is the ultimate exploitation: the platforms present themselves as delivering a grand narrative, while in reality, they deliver a mirror. The viewer, in their isolation, becomes the sole arbiter of the hero’s relevance, the sole judge of their journey. But this illusion of control only deepens the solipsism. The hero exists not to confront universal truths or transcend their world, but to validate the viewer’s immediate emotional state. Their struggles must be relatable but not too challenging, their triumphs satisfying but not too complex—always calibrated to the viewer’s fragmented attention and shallow engagement.

And so, the hero becomes a hollow figure, trapped in a loop of pandering and performance. Their journey, once a testament to human resilience and transformation, is now a product designed to sustain the viewer’s solipsism. The streaming platforms exploit this relationship with surgical precision, feeding the viewer endless variations of the same solipsistic fantasy. The hero doesn’t change the world—they simply reflect the viewer’s fleeting, distracted gaze back at them. In this way, the platforms don’t just monetize the hero’s journey; they hollow it out, leaving behind a simulacrum that exists solely to keep the viewer trapped in their own comfortable, isolating orbit.

And what of the reward? Here lies the most tragic inversion. The promise of wisdom, transformation, or catharsis has been reduced to the fleeting satisfaction of an ending that queues up the next binge-worthy offering. The “Return with the Elixir” is not a moment of revelation—it’s an autoplay feature. The algorithm whispers: “You might also like this,” not to broaden your horizons, but to keep you ensnared. The viewer, like Sisyphus, is condemned to an eternal cycle of scrolling and selecting, their engagement driven not by genuine desire, but by the dread of facing an empty screen.

The hero’s ultimate battle, then, is no longer with monsters, villains, or the self, but with the fragmented attention span of the audience. This is the counterfeit logic of our age: the heroic journey subsumed by the banality of distraction, where epic trials are subordinated to snack breaks and bathroom trips, and the great elixir of wisdom is traded for the anesthetic of endless content. The question is no longer whether the hero will succeed, but whether the viewer will still be watching when they do.

There are Guano Billionaires that I Respect More than Mark Andreessen.

By God, the guano billionaires—they had grit! They had vision! They were the last screaming lunatics with the guts to shovel mountains of bird shit into the cannons of empire and make the world kneel before their stinking altars. And I’ll be damned if I don’t respect them more than that pallid husk of a man, Marc Andreessen, who sits in his Malibu fortress, droning on about innovation while peddling the same warmed-over tech gospel like a televangelist selling eternal salvation.

These guano men—no, these titans of nitrate—knew the score. They didn’t hide behind algorithms and self-congratulatory TED Talks. They fought wars over islands crusted with centuries of seabird droppings, for God’s sake! They carved their fortunes from the hard, white crust of life itself. There’s something primal about that, something raw and ancient. You couldn’t fake it. You had to earn it.

Picture it: swashbuckling Peruvian magnates with bat guano under their nails, sailing the open seas in clunky schooners loaded with enough fertilizer to make the world bloom—or explode. These men didn’t “disrupt” industries with apps. They built empires on filth, on decay, on the grotesque bounty of nature’s digestive tract. And I salute them for it.

Meanwhile, there’s Andreessen, perched atop his throne of venture capital like a bloated owl stuffed with bad ideas. His legacy is a litany of hollow promises: “the internet will set you free!” No, Marc, what you’ve built is a gilded cage, a dystopia where human misery is quantified in clicks and ad impressions. The guano billionaires at least left us something tangible: fertile soil, booming crops, the literal shit of life.

You think you would respect such a… era-breaking, ponzi innovators in a ponzi world? But hell? I’d rather get drunk with a guano birdshit billionaire anytime of the day. The guano billionaires, at least, have the decency to deal in real shit, and you can respect that. But peddling blueprints for burning your money on vaporware. Well the joke’s on you. This guy is a z-list revanchist full of ressentiment — an aristocrat of the digital age, clinging to a past where his brand of “genius” might have meant something. Now he’s just a bitter tech-bro, resenting everyone and throwing tantrums not shaping the world but whining about it.

Sure, guano magnates were bastards—they had to be. But they didn’t sell you a dream of democratized knowledge only to harvest your data like a parasitic leech. No, they sold you a sack of dried bird crap and dared you to complain. And the world thrived because of it!

So yes, I’ll take the guano kings over Silicon Valley’s self-satisfied sycophants any day. At least they smelled like the Earth. At least they worked. And when the final reckoning comes, when Andreessen’s digital empire crumbles into the void, I hope there’s a statue of some forgotten guano tycoon standing tall on a nitrate-streaked island, his gaze fixed on the horizon. A true monument to madness and muck—more than Andreessen could ever dream of.

Watching Miami Vice with the Ghost of Ronald Reagan at Midnight

There he was, the Gipper himself, grinning like a Cheshire cat fresh out of Hell, sitting cross-legged on the couch, a fog of spectral smugness curling around him. On the screen, Crockett and Tubbs were locked in a neon-soaked cocaine bust, their pastel suits radiant under the glow of South Beach debauchery. Somewhere in the haze of cheap bourbon and static-filled memories of the 1980s, the lines between fiction and history blurred.

“The Cocaine Cowboys,” Reagan muttered, adjusting his ethereal tie as though preparing for a press conference in the underworld. “They weren’t all bad—just another side effect of capitalism, really. Can’t build an empire without a little chaos at the edges.”

And there it was: the flicker of malice behind his avuncular mask. The ghost of a man who had intentionally destabilized his own backyard, who had looked at the fragile dominoes of Latin America and decided to let them fall—not out of necessity, but for spectacle. Domestic discord was the true driving force: a nation addicted to fear, a populace high on the dopamine rush of righteous indignation.

“There’s never been anything like it,” I said, gesturing wildly with my drink. “An existing hegemon opting to dismantle the system it dominates just to keep the home front distracted? It’s historical lunacy! Or genius. Hard to tell.”

Reagan chuckled—his laugh a dry rattle like the sound of brittle bones breaking under a steel-toed boot. “You’re looking at it all wrong,” he said. “It wasn’t chaos—it was order. My order. A little destabilization in Nicaragua, a sprinkle of paranoia in Panama, and presto! You’ve got a country so busy watching the Miami Vice reruns of geopolitics that they forget all about the fires raging in their own streets.”

The ghost paused, a gleam of nostalgia in his spectral eyes. “And let’s not forget,” he added, “chaos is the best cover for profit.”

Of course, he was right. The cocaine economy fueled Miami’s real estate boom, and the wars in Central America weren’t just about ideology—they were business ventures cloaked in patriotic fervor. Guns, drugs, money—the holy trinity of American exceptionalism, blasted through the barrel of an M-16 and sniffed off a mirrored surface.

“Goddammit, Reagan,” I snarled, slamming my glass on the table. “You didn’t just destabilize Latin America—you made a habit of teaching the world that the big guy can rig the game and then torch the casino when the odds get inconvenient.”

“True enough,” he said, leaning back into the couch with that famous, infuriating smirk. “But hell, we all got rich, didn’t we?”

And just like that, he was back on the couch, hands clasped like a benevolent uncle preparing to dispense financial advice that would bankrupt you in six months. Crockett and Tubbs faded into the background, their soundtrack replaced by the muffled hum of drone strikes and the static crackle of collapsing global alliances.

“Look at us now,” I said, lighting a cigarette I didn’t remember pulling from the pack. “What we did to Central America—destabilizing systems for a quick domestic political hit—we’re doing it writ Large. The whole world is one big contra war now, except this time the stakes are nuclear and we’re running out of excuses.”

Reagan’s ghost leaned forward, his grin stretching past the point of human decency. “That’s the beauty of it!” he said, slapping his knee like an actor in a Vaudeville revue. “You take what works—freedom fighters, covert ops, a little propaganda sprinkled over the top—and you scale it up! Afghanistan, Ukraine, Taiwan—it’s all the same recipe. Just add water and stir!”

“But the world isn’t buying it anymore,” I said, waving a hand toward the TV, which had inexplicably switched to a rerun of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign ad. It’s Morning Again in America, the screen proclaimed, though the skies outside were pitch black.

Suddenly, Reagan was on his feet, delivering a line with the gusto of a man auditioning for The Ten Commandments. “Nancy!” he bellowed, turning to the empty corner of the room. “Bring me my script—this fella’s trying to say we can’t do it again! Nonsense!”

I blinked, half-expecting Nancy Reagan’s ghost to float in with a celestial teleprompter, but she didn’t. Reagan turned back to me, his expression now an unsettling mix of fatherly concern and used-car salesman slick.

“Exactly! You give the public just enough hope to keep them in line, and enough chaos to remind them they need you. It’s showbiz, son. Always has been.”

“And when it all falls apart?” I asked, gesturing wildly at the metaphorical burning wreckage of democracy outside the window. “What then?”

Reagan paused, his face softening into something almost human. For a moment, I thought he might break character, deliver a rare moment of honesty from the beyond. But then he grinned again, wider than before, and said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to ask Nancy!”

He stopped suddenly, throwing an arm in the air like a B-movie gunslinger.

“‘Win one for the Gipper!’” he bellowed, his spectral voice bouncing off the walls.

I stared blankly.

“C’mon, son! That’s your cue! You’re supposed to say, ‘That’s the spirit, Coach!’” he said, wagging a translucent finger. “You can’t just let me hang out here like a two-bit extra. Show some moxie!”

I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could, he launched into another performance.

“‘Where’s the rest of me?’” he cried, clutching his chest like a Shakespearean actor who’d wandered into the wrong theater.

“That’s—wait, that’s Kings Row, isn’t it?” I asked, my brain desperately clawing for context.

“Of course, it’s Kings Row!” he snapped, the glow in his eyes dimming just enough to look offended. “Now you’re supposed to say, ‘You’ll never walk again, Drake!’”

“Drake?” I muttered, already losing the plot.

But he wasn’t listening. Reagan had moved on, striding toward the kitchen like a man on a mission. “It’s all about commitment!” he shouted over his shoulder. “When I played Bonzo, I didn’t half-ass it. You think sharing a screen with a monkey is easy? That chimp hit his marks every time. Every. Damn. Time. Do you know how hard it is to act opposite perfection?”

“Bonzo?!” I yelled, trying to keep up. “You mean the monkey movie? You’re telling me a monkey outperformed you?”

Reagan spun around, his ghostly jaw tightening. “Outperformed? OUTPERFORMED?! That monkey was a professional! I learned more from Bonzo than I ever did from all those self-important actors on the Death Valley Days set. You’d do well to remember that, kid!”

I was too stunned to respond. The ghost of a former president was now lecturing me about life lessons from a movie chimp.

Reagan crossed his arms, glaring at me with all the righteous indignation of a man who’d forgotten he was dead. “Say what you want about the Cold War, but at least we knew our lines!” he barked. “You people today? You’re just ad-libbing chaos.”

He paused, his anger softening into something almost wistful. “You ever work with a monkey?” he asked suddenly, his voice quieter now. “You’d think they’d be unpredictable, but they’re not. They stick to the plan. Always stick to the plan.”

Before I could answer, he vanished into thin air, leaving behind only the faint smell of Aqua Velva and unfulfilled ambition. The TV flickered, Crockett and Tubbs speeding off into the pastel abyss, and for one merciful moment, the room was silent.

I took a long drag from my cigarette, staring into the empty space where Reagan had stood. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear Bonzo applauding.