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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.

Ashes in the Ledger

Sometimes I wonder how many social democrats and Jews of all extractions—bankers, pharmacists, tailors, teachers—found their hands brushing against the paper edges of stock certificates for Audi, Bayer, Hugo Boss, Thyssen, IG Farben, Krupp. How many of them sat in cramped apartments in Berlin or Vienna, trying to reconcile their progressive ideals or ancestral guilt with the dividend checks that arrived on time? Could they have known, or did they simply not look? And if they didn’t look, was it because they couldn’t bear to, or because the alternative—a life without that income—was unthinkable?

Maybe there was a Jewish chemist in Frankfurt who believed in the socialist cause, the kind who lectured his son on solidarity and the workers’ struggle, but who also rationalized his holdings in IG Farben. “What can I do?” he might have said, folding his hands. “It’s not my factory. It’s not my Zyklon B.” Did he know? Or a Social Democratic alderman in Hamburg who wore Hugo Boss suits—tailored perfectly to his reformist speeches, perfectly stitched to stand up to the bourgeois opposition—and who privately thanked himself for his wise investment in the firm.

It’s not hypocrisy exactly, though hypocrisy plays its part. It’s survival, wrapped in capitalism’s suffocating embrace. It’s the damned problem of complicity in a world where even the innocent are investors, where justice and profit are rarely bedfellows. And I think about that, about them, because isn’t that the Jewish question, after all? Not the one history asks, but the one we ask ourselves: “What am I supposed to do when my hands are tied to the same wheels that crush me?”

And, of course, it’s never just Jews. The Germans, the Americans, the French. Everyone has a stake in the machinery. Everyone owns a little piece of the war, even the peace-loving ones, even the idealists. Maybe especially the idealists, because they need that stake to keep on dreaming their dreams.

And me? What would I have done if someone handed me a share of Bayer in 1925, a tidy inheritance from an uncle with no children, just chemicals in his veins and ambition on his mind? Would I have burned it in defiance or tucked it into a portfolio, knowing it might pay for my children’s education, my wife’s medical bills, my own peace of mind in an increasingly unpeaceful time?

I’d like to think I know the answer. But that’s a lie, isn’t it? We never really know what we’d do—not until the papers are in front of us, not until the money is in our hands, not until we feel the weight of history bearing down on us like a shareholder’s meeting we can’t refuse to attend.

Did the Captains of Industry know? Did the men who sat behind the polished mahogany desks of Audi, Bayer, Hugo Boss, Thyssen, IG Farben, and Krupp, men who dressed in finely tailored suits and polished their egos with the same attention they gave their portfolios, know that the great, shining machine of industry they were feeding would, in time, begin to chew on its own? Perhaps not in so many words. Perhaps it was a matter of not knowing as much as it was not asking. The slow, almost imperceptible gnaw of complicity that runs like a thread through the fabric of a company’s rise and fall, through the lies we tell ourselves while others take the brunt of it. But in the quiet corners of their minds, buried beneath layers of ambition and arrogance, could they have known that the very system they were financing—the grand spectacle of global capitalism, of shareholder value, of industrial might—was a beast that would eventually devour even the hands that fed it?

Perhaps they did. Perhaps some of them saw it coming, the great collapse, the inevitable breaking point. But what choice did they have? Could you be a player in a system so vast and powerful and still hold on to your purity? Could you climb to the top of a mountain of capital built from the ashes of others’ suffering and still look down without a touch of pride? Could you gaze at your dividends, the returns on your investments, and not see the hand of history drawing ever closer, a hand that might one day slap away your carefully constructed facade?

No, they didn’t know, not in the way one knows the end of a novel, the way you know that the last chapter will arrive before too long. It was a slower process—an accumulation of small decisions, of overlooking the darker corners, of pretending the rot was someone else’s problem. IG Farben’s contracts with the Nazis, Krupp’s steel feeding the war machine, Bayer’s patenting of chemicals—these were just facts of doing business, weren’t they? They were the necessary costs of progress. A price paid for the bright future. In the margins, somewhere between board meetings and champagne toasts, they told themselves that the world was a place where winners win and losers lose. They were simply winners.

There’s a cruel irony in it, of course. Because even as the foundations of their empires began to crack, they clung to their faith in the system, even as the system turned on them. They thought, as all men in positions of power think, that they could control it. That with enough maneuvering, enough strategy, enough money, they could ride out the storm. They were wrong. But of course, by the time they realized it—when the cracks were too deep and the storm had already broken—their wealth had become as fragile as the paper it was printed on.

And so it goes.

The Jew owns shares in IG Farben. The teacher owns shares in Bayer. The Social Democrat owns shares in Audi. They own them reluctantly, sure. They own them because a cousin said it was a sound investment, because a neighbor swore the yield was better than war bonds, because some analyst with a reassuring face on the radio promised dividends as sturdy as the Reichsmark. They own them not because they love what the companies produce, but because everyone owns something, and better to own a piece of progress than to be left out entirely.

But what are they really buying? IG Farben isn’t just a chemical company. Bayer isn’t just pharmaceuticals. Audi isn’t just cars. They are machines on sliding scales of entropy, machines dressed up in the finery of industry, their factories humming with the energy of collapse. These companies don’t just produce goods—they go from raw materials to heat death. They extract, they exploit, they expand, and in the process, they wear down everything: workers, resources, the very society that props them up. Every share is a vote of confidence in the machine of entropy. Every dividend a reward for feeding the beast that devours us all.

The system is designed for heat death. It’s not an accident, not some tragic malfunction. It’s the design. Progress doesn’t run on innovation or ingenuity; it runs on entropy.

The concept of heat death is simple, almost banal, but its implications are vast and unyielding. It begins with a law, one of the few laws that govern the universe without exception: entropy always increases. This is not a law of man, to be bent or debated. It is a law of nature, universal and absolute, indifferent to our desires or fears.

Imagine a system—a room, a planet, a galaxy. In it, energy moves like water spilling from a higher to a lower place. Heat flows from the hot to the cold until there is no difference, no gradient. At first, this is productive, even vital: the flow of energy fuels stars, sustains life, and drives machines. But the same process that creates order—by burning fuel or building structures—inevitably creates disorder elsewhere. The ashes, the waste, the broken pieces—these are entropy. Slowly, inexorably, the system approaches equilibrium, where no more energy flows, and nothing changes.

On the scale of the universe, this means that the stars will burn out, one by one. The galaxies, which now swirl in splendid motion, will become cold, diffuse clouds of gas. In time—unimaginable spans of time—there will be no more movement, no more light. The universe will become a uniform, silent void. This is heat death: not fire and fury, but the absence of both.

What is unbearable about this idea is not its inevitability but its finality. The universe, in its birth, promised so much: complexity, beauty, possibility. And yet, written into its very fabric is the promise of its own dissolution. Entropy is not merely a force of nature; it is a force of betrayal. What builds also destroys, and the greater the structure, the greater the collapse.

Even we, in our small lives, see this mirrored everywhere. The machines we build to sustain us wear out. The systems we create to organize ourselves decay into corruption. The fire of human ambition burns, yes—but it also leaves ashes. We dream of progress, of permanence, but in the end, everything succumbs to entropy.

What then can be done? Nothing. The laws are immutable. And yet, perhaps there is some consolation in understanding. To know the law of entropy is to know the truth of existence: that all things are temporary, and that within this temporary nature lies their meaning. We do not fight entropy to win; we fight it to live, for as long as we can, with as much grace as we can muster.

What they did not understand, or perhaps did not wish to understand, was that the heat—the very heat that powered the engines of production, the machinery of life itself—was not a promise of life, but a prelude to death. The machine he had helped to build, like all machines, was an agent of entropy. Not the sudden, violent collapse of a great empire, not the crash of a factory, but the quiet, slow death of all systems, the unrelenting expansion of disorder. This was not the collapse of one man’s dream, or the failure of one system—it was the universal condition of things. Heat death was in the machine long before he ever invested his faith—or his shares—in it.

The machine knew this, of course, in ways that its creators never could. The gradual acceleration of decay, the increasingly complex forms of its demise—the system that promised life did not know how to give it, and thus, it only ever devoured. But there is no steering entropy. Entropy does not heed the will of men. Entropy is not a force to be bought or sold. It is the price of the universe itself—the price of every system, every plan, every certainty. No matter how fine the mechanism, no matter how polished the machine, it is bound to the same finality: the dissolution of all things into an unstructured, featureless state. The machine that had promised him a future would deliver none. In the end, he was not an owner of shares, but a shareholder in oblivion.

And so he sat, at his desk perhaps, or at the table of some meeting, eyes fixed on the horizon of history, unaware that the very thing he had pledged his loyalty to—the thing that had promised him security, comfort, continuity—was the very thing that would, inevitably, turn its machinery inward and consume him, and all those like him.

The Social Democrat with their earnest morality, the Jew with their scruples, the teacher with their quietly ethical heart—all of them believe they’re different. That their investment is reluctant, that their participation is marginal, that they are outsiders in the system they profit from. But there are no outsiders. Once you own shares, you’re inside the machine, and the machine is entropy.

The collapse isn’t a bug; it’s the system’s final, perfect feature. The same industry that builds wealth also builds collapse. The shareholders think they can stand apart, that when the system devours itself, they’ll be spared, standing tall on a mountain of profits. But they’re wrong. Entropy eats everyone in the end. And it saves the shareholders for last, savoring their illusions of immunity, their desperate belief that they’ll somehow escape the inevitable.

DRESSING ENTROPY IN HUGO BOSS

Entropy is the ultimate shapeshifter. Today, it wears the sharp tailoring of Hugo Boss uniforms, medals gleaming like a carnival trick, its shoulders broad and its authority unquestioned. But this is just the latest costume. Entropy has been in disguise before: sometimes it drapes itself in the gilded robes of monarchy, at other times in the starched collars of Enlightenment rationalism, or the red banners of revolution. The costume changes, the slogans change, but the fundamental fact remains—Entropy is still Entropy. No matter how shiny the veneer, no matter how polished the facade, the cracks are already there, running invisibly beneath the surface.

Humans have a knack for dressing up their decay, for putting lipstick on the inevitable. We build systems, we erect ideologies, we manufacture empires, and then we place Entropy at the center of it all, decorating it with ceremony and pomp as if to ward off the truth of its nature. The uniforms are meant to inspire confidence, to convey permanence, but they do nothing to stave off the collapse. Entropy doesn’t care about uniforms. Entropy eats uniforms for breakfast.

It’s a sick sort of comedy, isn’t it? We design systems to fight the forces of chaos, but we build into them the very seeds of their undoing. We invent new costumes to dress up the old monster, thinking maybe this time we’ve outsmarted it, maybe this time Entropy will play by our rules. But Entropy doesn’t play. It just waits.

In the end, the uniform is meaningless. Whether it’s the imperial purple of Rome or the mechanized efficiency of modern industry, Entropy always wins. It is the true constant, the quiet devourer behind every proclamation of progress and power. And yet we keep decorating it, as if a bit of gold trim might turn the tide. As if a new name, a new flag, a new uniform might trick the untrickable.

And so, as the once-great men in their now-wrinkled suits and ties watched the world burn, they discovered something else that nobody likes to talk about—when it all goes up in flames, nobody’s standing on top anymore. Nobody gets to win. They were just cogs in a wheel.

The Social Democrat owns shares in Volkswagen. The Jew owns shares in Audi. The teacher—mild-mannered, bespectacled, grading essays about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice—owns shares in IG Farben. This is not hyperbole; this is history. These are facts. They didn’t buy into Nazi uniforms or Zyklon B. No, they bought into progress. Into a system that promised efficiency, productivity, order. What could be more innocent, more ordinary, than owning a piece of a well-run machine?

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The machine wasn’t broken. That was the worst part. It was humming along perfectly, like a well-fed beast, doing exactly what it was designed to do: chew up the world and spit out ash. People kept talking about fixing it, but no one had the guts to admit it wasn’t broken at all. It just didn’t care about them. It never had.

The funny thing about machines is that they’re supposed to make life easier. And they did, for a while—until everyone realized the machine wasn’t running on oil or electricity. It ran on people. You could grease its gears with sweat and hope and maybe even a little love, but sooner or later, it wanted bones. And it always got them.

People at the top didn’t see the problem. Why would they? The machine worked for them. It gave them everything they could possibly want—money, power, bigger yachts, smaller waistlines. Every time the beast coughed up a new disaster, they just threw another party. “It’s just business,” they said, sipping cocktails made from the tears of the damned.

Meanwhile, the rest of us kept turning the crank, pretending we weren’t the fuel. We told ourselves we had no choice. The machine needed us, and we needed the machine. Sure, it ate a few of us now and then, but that was just how it worked. Progress always comes at a price, right?

Here’s the kicker, though: we knew better. Deep down, we all knew. The machine didn’t need to run. It never did. But stopping it would mean admitting we’d been suckers all along. And nobody likes being a sucker.

So we made excuses. We called it entropy, the natural order of things. The universe is falling apart anyway, right? Might as well enjoy the ride. But entropy doesn’t need our help, does it? It’s perfectly capable of wrecking everything on its own. We just speed things up because we’re impatient. Or maybe because we’re scared.

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The thing about jumping off the machine is that it always feels like the wrong time. The gears are grinding, pistons pumping, the whole thing vibrating like it’s alive, and there you are, clutching the edge, staring at the mess of parts below. The other operators look at you like you’ve lost your mind. “You can’t jump,” they say. “You’ll get chewed up in the gears. Or worse, you’ll end up in the scrap heap.” Nobody seems to notice the machine is falling apart—or that it’s always been falling apart.

But the truth is, jumping off is easier than they make it sound. The hard part isn’t the jump. The hard part is convincing yourself that you don’t need the machine. It’s realizing that every promise it made—of progress, of purpose, of some great outcome—was just noise. It was all designed to keep you cranking levers, pulling switches, and feeding it more fuel. Once you see that, really see it, the grinding metal below stops looking so terrifying. Sure, you might take a few bruises on the way down, but at least you’ll be free of the endless clanking that’s deafened you for years.

Of course, the machine doesn’t stop for deserters. Once you’re off, it keeps roaring forward, its gears turning without pause. And that’s the punchline, isn’t it? The machine doesn’t care that you’re gone. It never cared. You were just one more cog, easy to replace. And while that truth stings, it’s also the best feeling in the world: knowing you’re free to walk away, to start building something of your own—something that doesn’t grind people into dust.

But the machine was entropy. Always entropy. System-entropy, wave-entropy, market-entropy. Whatever you called it, it wasn’t designed to spare its own architects, let alone its investors. Yet they believed. They believed in their special exemption, their clever foresight. The collapse was for someone else—those other investors, those other shareholders, the poor fools who didn’t know how to hedge, who weren’t smart enough to see where the world was going.

So you jump. The air rushes past, the noise fades, and then—wham. You hit the ground. Your knees buckle, your hands scrape the dirt, but you’re alive. For the first time in what feels like forever, the noise is gone. The world is still. You look back at the machine, its smoke trailing into the distance, and realize it wasn’t the gears you were afraid of—it was the silence that came after.

What makes it worse, what makes it unforgivable, is that you knew. You knew what Volkswagen built, what Farben manufactured, what Krupp supplied. You knew, and you told yourself it didn’t matter, because what mattered was the system itself—the unstoppable force of progress, the indomitable march of capital. Entropy wrapped itself in precision engineering and quarterly reports, and you convinced yourself that it was something else entirely. Something clean. Something you could benefit from without ever being touched by the blood it spilled.

And when the system collapses, it collapses for you too. It devours you last, not out of mercy but because you taste the sweetest. You, the self-aware shareholder, the reluctant participant, the one who held your nose while collecting dividends. The machine feeds on your denial, your smugness, your belief that you stood apart.

The world is still, as if you’ve stepped into a void where sound was never born. You look back at the machine, its smoke thinning against the horizon, and realize it wasn’t the grinding gears that filled you with dread—it was the immensity of what lay beyond them. The silence stretches, vast and infinite, a space too big to hold onto and too deep to escape. And yet, that vastness is yours now. It wasn’t the gears you feared, but the quiet that comes after. That quiet isn’t emptiness; it’s potential—the first step toward something unbound and true.

And so it goes.

Decline? Yes. Collapse? No.

Decline? Yes. Collapse? No. Collapse would mean CIA spooks scribbling op-eds on Substack and hawking $10-a-month subscriptions like two-bit grifters at a carnival sideshow. The agency boys in their ill-fitting suits, slumped in coffee shops from Langley to Lincoln, churning out think pieces titled “The Death of American Empire: A Personal Journey” or “How I Lost My Clearance and Found Myself.” Picture it: operatives reduced to grinding out conspiracy-laden screeds for an audience of doom-scrolling paranoids, trading cryptic tips on counter-espionage for thumbs-up emojis.

This isn’t a collapse. It’s a slow, shambling descent into mediocrity—less Rome burning and more Rome outsourcing its fire brigade to a Silicon Valley startup promising AI-enhanced water buckets. The spooks wouldn’t vanish into the ether, oh no. They’d pivot. A little less covert action, a little more hustle culture. “Learn how to stage a coup and build your personal brand!” The kind of moral rot that isn’t dramatic, but banal. Bureaucratic.

And that’s how the empire falls—not with a bang, but with a LinkedIn post: “Former clandestine operative seeking new opportunities. Skills include psychological warfare, asset recruitment, and SEO optimization.”

Decline? Yes. Collapse? No. Collapse would mean Goldman Sachs executives ditching their bespoke suits for hoodies and baseball caps, launching NFT collections called Bond Ape Yacht Club and hyping memecoins like GoldenBoiCoin on Twitter Spaces at 3 a.m. It would mean the masters of the universe pivoting to online casinos, hawking sketchy roulette apps with slogans like “Double or Nothing, Baby!” and adopting bizarre Keke Palmer-inspired influencer personas to stay relevant.

Picture it: Lloyd Blankfein rebranded as “CryptoDaddy420,” hosting live streams where he explains fractional reserve banking while doing TikTok dances. Or David Solomon, no longer DJ-ing for private equity parties, but spinning tracks for a metaverse nightclub called Liquidity Trap, offering free “SolomonCoins” with every overpriced cocktail.

Collapse is when Goldman Sachs stops building empires and starts building virtual slot machines, where every spin is a bet against their old dignity. It’s the high-finance sharks rebranding themselves as meme lords, desperately slapping doge faces on dollar signs and posting thirst traps on Instagram to pump the latest Ponzi. Collapse is when the titans of Wall Street get stuck hustling to pay off their own margin calls, swiping right on venture capitalists and pitching “decentralized financial synergy platforms” to crowds of indifferent day traders.

Decline, though? Decline is where we’re at now—Goldman still has its hands on the levers, still squeezing the juice out of the system, but you can see the cracks forming. Collapse is when the juice runs out, and they’re left hawking virtual blackjack in some dystopian e-casino, chanting “to the moon” like the rest of the rubes.

Decline? Yes. Collapse? No.

Collapse is when Hollywood’s not just phoning it in anymore, it’s mainlining pure, uncut digital sewage straight into the veins of the American consciousness. It’s become a goddamn content farm, a festering pustule of spin-offs and reality TV simulacra churning out mountains of digital excrement that’s no longer art, no longer entertainment, no longer even remotely recognizable as storytelling. It’s the Ouroboros on a bad acid trip, devouring its own tail for profit until there’s nothing left but a greasy stain on the digital carpet.

Decline? That’s some half-assed Transformers sequel. Collapse? That’s Hollywood turning into a goddamn NFT vending machine, it’s movies nothing more than flickering delivery systems for monetized absurdity. Imagine Star Wars: Ewok Influencers. Christ on a crutch, what a nightmare. A show designed solely to sell digital skins and loot boxes in some Fortnite-style digital shooting gallery. It’s not entertainment, it’s a goddamn transaction. A digital fleecing.

And then there’s the final, ignominious surrender: the abandonment of film itself. Hollywood shuffles off into the digital void, embracing virtual reality and interactive gaming, ditching those “old-fashioned” movies because they’re too damn difficult to monetize effectively. The focus shifts entirely to endless monetization schemes—pay-to-win models, microtransactions embedded in the goddamn content itself. You don’t watch The Avengers: Cash Grab Chronicles; you pay five bucks every time Iron Man wants to throw a goddamn punch. It’s a digital bloodletting.

Even the projects greenlit for nostalgia or marketability become self-aware cash grabs, openly mocking the audience’s pathetic willingness to consume this digital garbage. Jurassic Park 12: Dinosaurs on Mars. No plot. Just dinosaurs, explosions, and random celebrity cameos, marketed as “The ultimate cinematic experience for our ADHD era!” It’s a goddamn insult. A digital middle finger to the remnants of taste.

The Space Merchants

The Space Merchants—a book that captures today’s farcical present and inevitable future better than any Orwellian or Huxleyan fever dream. Forget 1984; this is a world where satire from 20 years ago gets picked up by the tech industry and polished into grim reality. What was once a joke is now a business model, and what was once a warning is now a quarterly strategy meeting.

By now, it’s obvious that the tech industry is less a bastion of innovation and more a godforsaken clown car, careening down the information superhighway while vomiting buzzwords like “acceleration”, “AI” “synergy” and “blockchain.” The whole mess is a recursive satire of itself, a Möbius strip of idiocy where last decade’s parody becomes this year’s mission statement. It’s Silicon Valley’s greatest magic trick: turning late-night satire sketches into venture capital pitch decks.

Take the rise of the “metaverse.” What started as a dystopian joke in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—a world so unbearable we had to digitize our misery—has now been Frankensteined into existence by Zuck and friends. Never mind that no one asked for a corporate-sponsored Second Life reboot; they’re too busy selling us digital real estate, NFTs of fake sneakers, and virtual workspaces where avatars fumble through PowerPoint presentations like acid-tripping Sims.

Then there’s the gig economy. Remember when The Onion joked about Uber offering rides on piggyback to save costs? Fast-forward a few years, and DoorDash drivers are practically paying for the privilege of delivering your cold Pad Thai, all while their app begs them to “rethink” their $2.50 tip. Every dystopian headline about these companies feels ripped from South Park: “Amazon Tests Drone Delivery by Dropping Packages on Homeless Camps—50% Accuracy Rate Declared a Success.”

Artificial intelligence is the real crown jewel of this lunacy. What was once the nightmare scenario of 2001: A Space Odyssey is now the selling point for every tech startup. “The machine will take your job!” they say, with a grin so wide you can hear the stock options jingling in their pockets. But the AI they’re so proud of? It seems to be only helping people they don’t really like, writers, editors and journalist and their half-baked recipes and nonsense essays while not really making jobbers any wiser. Meanwhile, the “jobbers” it’s meant to enlighten are left just as clueless as ever, proving that even the future’s smartest tools are still dumb enough to miss the point.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk, the industry’s high priest of self-parody. He’s like a Bond villain written by Reddit, launching flame-throwers and tweeting crypto scams while promising to terraform Mars. The man is a walking Saturday Night Live skit, except he’s real, and he’s somehow convinced the world to treat him like a messiah instead of the world’s most expensive meme generator.

These bastards don’t want to innovate—they want to outdo each other in a game of techno-jester brinkmanship! The next 20 years will bring us robo-lawnmowers with ads on their screens, blockchain funerals, and emotional support drones programmed to tell you your father really did love you! The future of space isn’t bold explorers or visionary scientists; it’s Space Merchants hawking cosmic toothpaste and Moon-themed protein bars. Imagine it: astronauts proudly unfurling banners not for humanity, but for the “Pepsi Zero-G Experience,” while Jeff Bezos unveils Amazon Lunar Prime—guaranteeing next-day delivery of oxygen tanks, assuming you survive the shipping fees. And let’s face it, the first structure on the Moon probably won’t be a research station. It’ll be an Amazon warehouse with drones zipping around faster than a rocket launch, ensuring that even in space, your one-click addiction follows you.

Because let’s be honest—if the cold, efficient pragmatism of an Arthur C. Clarke universe collided with the bloated bureaucracy of our reality, the scientists wouldn’t just lose their jobs; they’d be relegated to gig economy serfdom, side-hustling between adjunct lectureships and data-entry freelancing on Fiverr.

Picture it: Dr. Heywood Floyd, instead of riding a Pan Am shuttle to the moon, is stuck at a community college teaching Introduction to Space Science to a room of TikTok-addicted freshmen, hoping his next course evaluation doesn’t torpedo his contract. Meanwhile, Dave Bowman—astronaut and theoretical physicist extraordinaire—is reduced to analyzing corporate KPIs for Amazon’s new orbital warehouses.

HAL 9000? Oh, he’d have a job, all right—automating HR decisions and writing passive-aggressive rejection emails to underemployed PhDs applying for “entry-level” positions requiring 10 years of experience.

The dystopian twist on Clarke’s utopia practically writes itself. In a world where basic research fights for crumbs against trillion-dollar ad-tech and space-mining oligarchs, the explorers of Rendezvous with Rama would spend more time groveling for corporate sponsorships than investigating alien megastructures. Any attempt to propose something revolutionary would be met with the dead-eyed stare of an Amazon middle manager muttering, “That doesn’t align with our quarterly KPIs. Have you considered developing a more efficient packaging algorithm?”

Even the aliens wouldn’t bother contacting us. Why waste time with a species that lets its brightest minds teach six courses a semester for $25,000 a year while tech bros are celebrated for inventing subscription-based refrigerators?

Tech’s greatest irony isn’t that it’s overtaking satire. It’s that it’s not even good at it. Satire requires wit and creativity, not a bloated venture capitalist with a God complex. The only thing the tech industry innovates is the art of being insufferable—and it’s doing a damn fine job at that.

THE SPACE MERCHANTS

The book that nails 2025 on the head isn’t 1984 or Brave New World—it’s The Space Merchants. We’re not living in a dystopia of surveillance or soma-fueled complacency; we’re living in the grinning, grease-slick hellscape of corporate colonization. There’s no need for Orwellian nightmares or Huxleyan hedonism when you’ve got The Space Merchants, a book so surgically precise it feels like Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth—are the patron saints of acid wit—stole the blueprint for the 21st century and decided to play it for laughs. Except the joke was on us.

The world is no longer run by governments or ideologies; it’s run by marketing departments with the moral backbone of a jellyfish and the self-awareness of a goldfish. Politicians are just mascots now, soft-selling trillion-dollar subsidies to the equivalents of SpaceX, Amazon, and a dozen other megacorps that suck the marrow out of the planet while running ads about sustainability.

The only real difference between The Space Merchants and our current reality is the dress code—and the women. Every character in The Space Merchants feels like they’re auditioning for Mad Men in space—smooth-talking, chain-smoking dealmakers with an arsenal of backhanded compliments and a firm belief that advertising is destiny The men oozed self-importance, while the women, though written in as afterthoughts, were crafted with an edge that hinted at power they were never allowed to wield.

Today’s hustlers? They’ve ditched the suits for “authenticity”: Aviator Nation jackets, hoodies, and whatever passes for paleo-tech chic. Don’t mention the Patagonia vest; it’s lurking in the closet, waiting to remind you that “relatable” is just another marketing ploy.

In the Space Merchants itself science has been reduced to another cog in the advertising machine. Every discovery is just a stepping stone to a new product launch. Forget curing cancer—there’s no profit in that when you can develop a cancer-adjacent “cure subscription plan” instead. Scientists are no longer innovators or dreamers; they’re corporate drones in lab coats, paid just enough to keep the patents flowing but not enough to escape their student debt.

And the working stiffs in this grand carnival of corporate feudalism? They’re not citizens—they’re marks. The human race has devolved into two groups: the consumers, who exist solely to buy garbage they don’t need, and the corporate overlords, who crank out this garbage with the glee of mad scientists.Every moment of their lives is an “grift opportunity” tracked and monetized by some program that knows their bathroom schedule better than their own mothers. The corporations don’t sell products anymore; they sell realities, and they buy them with every click, every swipe, every goddamn piece of our souls we trade for convenience.”

Here’s the setup: Earth is a shithole, ruled by corporations so massive they’ve replaced governments, religions, and any remaining shred of human decency. Advertising isn’t just a tool—it’s the ultimate weapon, shaping reality itself. Our protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, is an elite copywriter tasked with selling humanity on colonizing Venus—a toxic hellscape that only an ad agency could spin as a paradise.

Our guide through this capitalist hellscape is Mitchell Courtenay, a top-tier ad man at Fowler Schocken, the most powerful agency in the world. His new assignment? Sell colonization of Venus to a population so brainwashed they’ll eat literal reprocessed garbage if you slap the right logo on it. Venus, by the way, is a deathtrap—uninhabitable, lethal, and about as appealing as living in the exhaust pipe of a diesel truck. But that doesn’t matter. Mitchell’s job is to make the suckers believe it’s paradise, and the suckers, naturally, lap it up.

Things go sideways when Mitchell gets tangled up with the Consies—a scrappy underground resistance movement that’s somehow managed to survive in this nightmare world. They’re fighting for… what? Clean water? Less garbage in the food supply? Something human, at least. Mitchell is yanked out of his cushy corporate life and dumped into the very trenches his ads exploit, forcing him to confront the machine he’s helped build.

And what’s the solution to this corporate nightmare? A cynical, high-concept shrug dressed up as a revolution: sabotage the system by embracing the same cynical manipulation that got you into this mess in the first place.

Because, let’s face it, Pohl and Kornbluth weren’t idealists—they were realists with a mean streak. They knew that humanity wasn’t going to save itself with hope or morality. No, their solution is high-concept cynicism: beat the system by out-hustling it. Turn the same tricks, tell the same lies, but aim them at the machine instead of the masses. Mitch’s arc isn’t about enlightenment or rebellion—it’s about recalibrating his target audience.

Take the Consies, the eco-terrorist movement in the book. They don’t inspire Mitch with some grand moral truth. They recruit him by appealing to his bruised ego and dangling the same carrot the corporations used: power. It’s cynicism weaponized as strategy, and it works because, in a world ruled by marketing, the only way to beat the pitch is to make a better one.

And that’s the real gut-punch of The Space Merchants. It doesn’t offer a way out of the nightmare—it offers a way deeper in. Mitch’s final revelation isn’t that the system is broken, but that he can sell a better lie. It’s not redemption; it’s adaptation. And isn’t that exactly what we see today? Tech companies spinning promises of utopia while charging monthly subscriptions for basic survival, activists branding their movements like startups, and everyone hustling to stay one step ahead of the collapse.

Karl Rubin and Paul didn’t believe in heroes. They believed in survivors, hustlers, and con artists—the only people who thrive in a world where cynicism isn’t just a defense mechanism but a survival skill. Their solution isn’t to tear down the system—it’s to play the game so well that you rewrite the rules.

So here we are, living their nightmare. Venus is still uninhabitable, but who cares? Mars will do just fine, and there’s no shortage of Mitch Courtenays ready to sell us the dream. The Consies of today aren’t blowing up pipelines; they’re launching greenwashing campaigns with better graphics. And the corporations? They’re still running the show, grinning as they sell us the same lies dressed in new logos.

Karl Rubin and Paul are probably laughing somewhere, watching us prove them right. Because in the end, their high-concept cynicism wasn’t just a solution—it was a prophecy. Let’s not beat around the bush: The Space Merchants isn’t just a novel—it’s a goddamn manual. A step-by-step guide to the gleaming, hollow machine of late-stage capitalism. If you’ve ever wondered how to sell a dream to a population so beaten down they’ll eat recycled garbage with a smile, this is your book. It’s not satire anymore; it’s a how-to guide for the grifters running the show.

Pohl and Kornbluth didn’t just write a dystopia—they wrote the Bible for the 21st century grift. This isn’t a warning; it’s a blueprint. Welcome to the machine, where the only rule is: create a subscription model for everything, including the soul, and make sure the packaging looks good while you do it.

The Great Christmas H1-B War

The Great Christmas H1-B War of 2024 is the inevitable crash when Tech, high on its own self-congratulatory bullshit, thought it had meat space in lockdown. These are the same people so tangled in their pitch decks they actually believed they could hitch a ride on the venomous wave of Jacksonian nativism—stoking the flames just enough to prop up their handpicked candidates, all while patting themselves on the back for being “progressive” enough to pretend they weren’t courting the very forces that have historically been the death knell for entire cultures.

But nativism isn’t a programmable variable—it’s a primal force, rooted in the same cultural strain that is responsible for the Trail of Tears, the displacement of entire Mexican populations, and the scorched-earth mentality of Manifest. And now, with Musk playing provocateur on X, that force has been roused again—not as a tool for Tech’s ambitions but as an unstoppable tide that doesn’t care about “elite human capital” or strategic hiring practices.

What Tech thought was a clever way to “own the libs” is now spiraling out of control. Aligning with nativist populism to push their agenda was like playing with nitroglycerin: every bump and misstep sets off an explosion. Now, as they try to rally support for their H1-B pipeline, they’re slamming into a brick wall of deep-seated anger and generational trauma—a rage not rooted in economic data or hiring strategies but in the primal need to protect what they see as their homeland.

What’s truly unfolding here is that the Trump administration—an administration that couldn’t give a damn about H1-Bs, Indian immigrants, or any of that tech-centric nonsense—is now in a position to extract real concessions from the industry. They’re not worried about the supply of cheap labor or the flow of skilled immigrants anymore. No, now it’s about infiltrating the platforms, the tech giants, from Google to crypto, with their own people. The deal is on the table, and it’s about power, not principles.

The tech companies, who thought they could dance with nativism without losing their grip on their shiny little empires, are now about to find themselves with former Trump cronies and acolytes crawling into the higher echelons of their organizations. It’s the perfect bait-and-switch: tech, thinking it could leverage nationalism for political gain, is now going to be the one getting leveraged.

Tech’s fatal mistake was thinking their dominance over the digital world made them untouchable in the physical one. They assumed they could stir the pot without spilling it, that their carefully constructed systems of control could withstand the backlash. But now, as their H1-B advocacy smashes into a wall of pure, undiluted rage, it’s clear they never understood the stakes.

The chuds aren’t debating visas or bottom lines. They see Tech as the latest in a long line of invaders, looting their homeland under the guise of progress. And while the tech CEOs scramble to make their case with PowerPoint decks and hashtags, their own “elite human capital” is busy torching what little goodwill remains, gloating about displacement and dominance in a way that only fans the flames.

This isn’t just a PR crisis—it’s a moment of reckoning for an industry that thought it had transcended history. Because meat space, as it turns out, isn’t as secure as they thought. And the forces they’ve awakened don’t bow to algorithms or quarterly reports—they destroy everything in their path, including the hubris that summoned them.

It’s not clear how much they’re going to miss the Democrats yet, but it’s becoming painfully obvious that their flirtation with nativism was a catastrophic miscalculation. They thought they were playing 4D chess, cutting loose the libs for a more pliable power base. Instead, they’ve found themselves neck-deep in a raging cultural inferno, with racists, revanchists and misogynistic while keeping the rules of the game firmly under its control. They assumed that because certain minorities were part of their enterprise—working for them, building their systems, contributing to their bottom lines—they’d somehow be exempt from the wrath of the mobs they’ve emboldened and that the chuds would just go against more traditional minorities like black and Latino.

The logic is psychotically idiotic. As if the same people who’ve been stoking this fire for years, fueled by fear and resentment, would suddenly stop and say, “Oh, not those ones, they’re with the good guys.” As if the monster of nativism can be housebroken with a memo or a motivational TED Talk.

The absurdity lies in believing you can weaponize hate and still dictate its trajectory. That you can stoke the flames without getting burned. But that’s not how this works. Hate is indiscriminate, unthinking, and once unleashed, it doesn’t follow instructions. It devours everything, including the people who thought they could control it.

Meanwhile, this is fantastic news for Trump, Stephen Miller, and the entire Jacksonian nativist right. With the tech industry now scrambling to align itself with their agenda, they’ll be able to start positioning their people right at the top of these organizations—whether it’s in the platforms themselves or the lucrative tech sectors like crypto. What was once a distant battle over H1-Bs and immigration policy is now a full-on power play. They’ll place their loyalists in key positions, leveraging their newfound influence to control the direction of these tech giants, ensuring that the platforms, algorithms, and policies that shape our digital lives reflect their nativist, populist worldview. It’s the perfect storm for them—getting into the very heart of Silicon Valley, while the tech elites, too blinded by their own ambition, fail to see they’ve just handed the keys to their kingdom over to the very people who want to burn it down.

This whole mess feels like the inevitable fallout of tech’s LARPing-as-builders syndrome. The original promise of tech was to disintermediate, streamline, and reimagine systems with minimal scaffolding, using software to make things work faster, leaner, smarter. It wasn’t about reinventing the wheel—it was about putting a turbocharger on it.

But somewhere along the way, that wasn’t enough. Now, a few years in, they’ve decided they need to be builders—grandiose architects of entire ecosystems, spinning up new structures with no understanding of the foundations they’re replacing. The result? A lot of brittle, overengineered nonsense that collapses under its own weight the moment anyone tries to use it in the real world.

It’s like they forgot the first rule of systems: if it works, don’t break it just because you think you can. But tech, drunk on its own mythos, can’t resist. And so, here they are, desperately trying to play “visionary architect” while their creations creak and groan under the strain of reality. It’s not just arrogance—it’s incompetence disguised as innovation.

A lot of the systems they’re trying to replace are racist, revanchist, and misogynist to their core. These aren’t just antiquated architectures—they’re deeply oppressive structures that tech claimed it would disrupt, dismantle, and rebuild better. And instead of grappling with that reality, they pretended for years that the problem wasn’t as bad as it was—or worse, that their shiny new platforms were somehow neutral, magically immune to the rot baked into the foundations they’re built on.

But here’s the thing about ignoring rot: it spreads. And now, it’s coming back to bite them in the butt. All that performative hand-waving about “disruption” and “innovation” was just a distraction from the fact that they never did the hard work of actually addressing the ugliness they were so eager to replace. So instead of progress, we get the same broken systems in a new wrapper—just with more data harvesting and less accountability.

And hopefully—hopefully—this is just a passing spat that burns itself out before it does lasting damage. Maybe cooler heads will prevail, and this wreckage can be steered toward something marginally productive. But let’s be honest, the odds aren’t great when both sides are so committed to tearing each other apart that “winning” has become indistinguishable from mutual destruction.

So how do you say I told you so without actually saying it? You don’t. You sit back, crack a cold one, and watch the tech overlords fumble their way through the mess they made. Because the truth is, anyone with half a brain saw this coming from miles away: you don’t unleash the darker angels of American culture and expect to walk away unscathed. That’s not strategy. That’s hubris. And now, hubris is coming to collect its due.

RECAP

For you who’ve been in a deep Christmas hibernation and just woke up blinking at the mess, let’s do a deep dive

On Government

Jacksonian Right: Government is fine as long as it’s a muscular sheriff with a shotgun, chewing tobacco, and telling brown people to shove off. Anything more complex smells like Ivy League meddling, socialism or child trafficking

Techno-Libertarian Right: Government should be a smartphone app that deletes itself after pump-and-dumping the next Mars colony. If the Department of Defense can be decentralized on the blockchain, great. If not, just slice up the military and sell shares. Anything more involved is tyranny.

Neoconservative Right: Government is an all-knowing, all-seeing guardian angel of freedom and my expense account , tasked with making sure every world country votes correctly, buys U.S. weapons, and watches Top Gun—

On Cultural Values

Jacksonian Right: Culture is barbecues, church potlucks, and Toby Keith lyrics. If it doesn’t involve a flag, a gun, or a front porch, it’s probably un-American. Camo gear is preferred and not having a truck is pretty disqualifying

TechRight: Culture is an 8 bit NFT of a flaming eagle or whatever Roman Empire meme. If the kids are coding it, but they’re not suffering like in the movie whiplash they’re not doing it right. Fun comes years later when you make fun of chuds. Meant to fix cybertruck but didn’t come around to

Neocon Right: It’s the Magna Carta, the Federalist Papers, and Saving Private Ryan on repeat. Anything modern is suspect unless it can be repackaged as a Blue Sky tv show series about heroic U.S. intelligence “Judeo-Christian values” and served with a side of military recruitment ads.

Foreign policy:

Jacksonian Right, foreign policy is only worth it if it’s a World War II-style righteous crusade—or at least one where we don’t come out looking like chumps. Anything else is someone else’s problem.

Tech right: foreign entanglements are dumb unless they involve securing lithium for batteries or lowering cocaine prices

Neoconservatives, every single foreign policy challenge is a life-or-death re-enactment of Munich 1938. If you’re not marching in to topple dictators or “spread democracy,” you’re basically Neville Chamberlain handing Hitler the keys to the world. Rinse repeat

No Exit Christmas Special:

Locked in a suffocating room, a Jacksonian, a Neocon, and a Techno-Libertarian stew in a surreal cacophony of complaints, each convinced the others are the root of all the world’s misery. The Jacksonian, clutching a tattered American flag, howls about the “pussification” of America, blaming the Techno-Libertarian for flooding the country with “goddamn H1B visa workers,” turning real jobs into code-based fiefdoms for SV elites. He calls the others “namby-pamby globalists,” who wouldn’t know a real fight if it crawled up their asses and bit them.

The Neocon, strutting around like a whiskey-soaked war hawk, insists the only way out is to make the desert glow and bomb the world into a freedom-shaped crater. He accuses the Jacksonian of being a “cowardly isolationist” and a “Putin apologist,” sneering, “You’d probably let Moscow roll tanks right through Europe if it meant you could keep your beer and football.” Turning to the Techno-Libertarian, he scoffs, “And you, you’re just a fucking armchair general. A Hitler appeaser in a Patagonia vest, too busy building your little crypto empires to care if the world burns.”

Meanwhile, the Techno-Libertarian, hunched over his phone in his Patagonia vest, declares that everything would be solved if they just let him re-centralize the internet and put him in charge. Slapping around smart contracts and drafting 1,200-page terms of use, he blames the Neocon for “stifling innovation with endless wars” and the Jacksonian for “ruining birthrates by clinging to jobs for truckers and ditch diggers instead of embracing the gig economy.” At best, you’re sigma—and, honestly, ugly.

After hours of grueling back-and-forth, the Jacksonian finally breaks, muttering, “You know, any of you even know what George Clooney’s doing these days? I liked that Nespresso thing he did. Classy.”

The Neocon, without missing a beat, replies, “No idea., last thing I remember was catching up on Taylor Swift. She win? I lost track after that whole Ticketmaster thing.”

The Techno-Libertarian, hunched over his phone snaps his head up in disbelief. “What kind of hell is this? It doesn’t even have a goddamn copy of The New York Times!

The room falls silent. For a moment, the three of them just stare at each other, a surreal tableau of ideological absurdity. The Jacksonian adjusts his crumpled flag, the Neocon reaches for a whiskey that isn’t there, and the Techno-Libertarian flicks at his phone, still trying to connect to a non-existent Wi-Fi.

In that stillness, the absurdity of it all crashes down on them. There they we’re in a hell of their own creation, each secretly longing for the very things they once swore they hated—the pomp, the self-righteousness, the spectacle of a world that, for all its flaws, at least had the decency to pretend it knew what it was doing.

Startup Inflation

Startup inflation is just the credential inflation of the capitalist hustle culture. If everyone has a degree, it’s worthless. If everyone has a startup, that’s worthless too. We’ve gone from “what school did you go to?” to “what’s your pitch deck?” and the answer is often the same level of vapid. The whole system is less about building value and more about building a persona. It’s positioning, plain and simple.

Low interest rates have bankrolled this circus for years, inflating the importance of entrepreneurial theater. Want to differentiate yourself? Slap together an app that’s just x for [insert industry] or a platform to “revolutionize” something nobody asked to revolutionize. It doesn’t matter if it’s solving anything, as long as positions you. But as soon as rates tick up and the cheap money dries up, we’re starting to see how many of these “visionary founders” are just overqualified bullshit-jobbers in Patagonia vests.

The feedback loop is brutal: you can’t just have a job anymore—you’ve got to be the CEO of something, even if it’s just a half-baked idea running on vibes and angel funding. It’s not cynical to say most startups are worthless. It’s just calling the game for what it is: an overpriced signaling mechanism, dressing up mediocrity as innovation, until the house of cards collapses.

It’s peak managerial theater. As real governing and operational capacity declines, we see these performative structures take root. The titles grow fancier even as the ability to execute declines. Credentialed and non credentialed elites with nowhere to go, invent roles and titles to give the illusion of necessity. C-suite titles in NGOs and local governments aren’t a sign of progress; they’re a symptom of mirroring rot.

Cause let’s not pretend the private sector, propped up by the “best of both worlds”—a steady infusion of free money from artificially low interest rates and an endless buffet of government subsidies, is any better. It survives on the same cocktail of managerial posturing and state-backed largesse, only it’s better at hiding it.

The difference? The private sector doesn’t have to produce results, just valuations. It thrives on hype cycles and cheap cash, masking its dysfunction behind IPOs and PR campaigns. NGOs and government might bloat themselves with meaningless titles, but the private sector takes it a step further: it bloats its entire existence on the fiction of perpetual growth, subsidized failure, and the illusion of innovation.

In short, we’re here because the systems have become self-sustaining feedback loops of mediocrity. They’re all built on short-term gain, hollow metrics, and empty signals. As real productivity and progress have been sidelined, the only thing left is the illusion of action. The result? A world where nothing works, but it looks like it should. Feedback loops reinforce the rot, and everyone is too busy playing their part in the theater of competency to notice the stage is collapsing. It’s not that nobody cares—it’s that nobody dares to admit that the emperor has been naked for decades.

If you think this is bad, just wait until Trump gets back in office and Doge-backed speculators turn the Soviet-style fire sale of state capacity into a meme-fueled casino. Imagine the machinery of government sold off at auction to the highest bidder, except the bids are denominated in shitcoins, and the auctioneer is livestreaming it on TikTok.

The last scraps of state capacity will be repurposed for vibes: national infrastructure rebranded as NFTs, federal agencies spun off as startup incubators, and every last public good turned into a subscription service. It won’t just be bad governance—it’ll be a spectacle of entrepreneurial theater, with a live audience cheering as the scaffolding of the nation comes crashing down.

Think of it as late-stage capitalism with a postmodern twist: a state-capacity yard sale where the winners aren’t even serious players, just grifters who stumbled into power by accident or algorithm. It’s not dystopia; it’s clownworld, but with higher stakes.

Oh mighty Om,

Oh mighty Om,

Unseen force beyond pixels and pretense,

Deliver us from the eternal loop of 8-bit delusion,

From the fever dream of endless grind and shallow triumphs.

Rescue us from the cocaine-fueled chase of empty promises,

Where victory is a pixelated mirage and status a hollow echo.

Oh Om,

Who transcends the digital ether and sees through the gleaming facades,

Deliver the billionaires of Web3 from the pixelated prison of their youth,

Where 8-bit nostalgia is the balm for their empty lives.

Free them from their obsession with the past,

When their lives were unformed and brimming with delusion,

Stuck forever in the digital echoes of their 18-year-old selves,

Chasing a nostalgia that never truly existed.

Oh Om,

Let them see that no number of blockchain tokens can fill

The void where meaning should reside.

Let them cast aside their desire to recreate the halcyon days

Of pixelated joys and hollow victories,

And face the truth that their empire is built on

Flashes of neon, false status, and a never-ending grind

Of aggression in the pursuit of nothing real.

Grant them the clarity to realize that no tweet or NFT

Can save them from the emptiness inside.

Let them break free from the cycle of shallow pursuits,

And create not just for their own glory,

But for something that echoes beyond their own reflection,

For something that can’t be captured in a screen or sold in a wallet.

Free from the weight of their own arrested development.

Amen.

I don’t believe in a spiritually led, military-manipulated UAP community

I don’t buy the idea of a spiritually led, military-manipulated UAP community—a fragmented crew of hopeful mystics and starry-eyed believers, jerked around by the strings of men draped in medals and clearance badges. It’s too slick, too tidy, too perfectly packaged. This smells like a hustle, like a carnival barker luring suckers in with promises of cosmic wonders while secretly pocketing their cash. And behind that curtain? Not a single celestial revelation, but something grubby, mundane, and unmistakably human.

The spiritually led, military-influenced UAP scene is the perfect example of narrative capture—where the raw weirdness of a genuine phenomenon gets swallowed up by the mechanisms of bureaucratic theater. It’s an epistemic Potemkin village, a shiny façade built to house the dreams of mystics and conspiracy theorists alike. On one side, you have the believers—eyes wide with wonder—and on the other, men with their medals and badges, pretending to hold the keys to the universe. But what they’ve really constructed is a 21st-century cargo cult, armed with PowerPoint slides and a dash of New Age mysticism.

It’s a con job, plain and simple. A choreographed distraction, carefully designed to move curiosity out of the picture and replace it with spectacle. The modern carnival barker is alive and well, updated for the era of black budgets and soft power. “Step right up, folks, and catch a glimpse of the cosmic wonders!” they say. But behind the curtain? No great truths, no epiphanies, just the same tired bureaucracy with a fresh coat of paint.

And that’s the beauty of it: they’ve built a story that feels noble, almost sacred, while keeping the disciples starstruck enough to miss the man behind the curtain, cranking the dials and laughing all the way to his next classified briefing. Because that’s the game, right?

But here’s the good news—well, good in a grim, absurd way—this whole UAP show is probably just another covert military operation. A well-funded, well-crafted test program, operating under wraps. The government doesn’t bother with wild cover-ups. Why would they? In a world drowning in noise, they’ve figured out something better: omission. The real trick is letting the hysteria spiral out of control while quietly keeping the truth hidden in plain sight. The truth doesn’t need to be buried; it just needs to be drowned in a tidal wave of half-baked theories, wild conjecture, and outright paranoia. And that’s where counterintelligence comes in.

The signal gets lost in the noise—and that’s exactly how the system likes it. The UFO panic isn’t some sign of alien life; it’s the perfect cover for any operation that requires staying under the radar. It’s a smokescreen, a tactical maneuver designed to let the real action take place in the dark, behind closed doors.

The more people obsess over aliens and UFOs, the easier it is for the real secrets to slip by unnoticed. Forget about flying saucers and interdimensional beings—look at McGuire AFB. The truth there is boring. It’s military drones. High-tech stuff, the kind of thing that doesn’t want to be known. But it’s right there, hiding in plain sight. John Greenewald, Jr. called it out long ago: McGuire was already a “test corridor” for cutting-edge drone and air mobility technology. But nobody was paying attention. Instead, they were too busy chasing UFOs across the night sky, speculating about aliens while military experiments were quietly unfolding below.

Let’s get real for a second. The truth isn’t “out there.” It’s buried under bureaucratic layers, hidden in some Nevada desert hangar or Virginia basement office. It’s not the stuff of spacefaring civilizations or cosmic revelations—it’s cold, metallic, human, and thoroughly unspiritual. The real story is about control, power, and keeping the game going without anyone catching on. So spare me the sermons from generals-turned-gurus. They’re not prophets—they’re propagandists, hawking a narrative so loud you forget to question it. This isn’t a spiritual awakening; it’s a charade, and we’re all choking on it.

UAP believers and their government enablers are caught in a trap, trapped in their tiny, self-absorbed worldview, stuck thinking that more energy, more power, and more control—basically, the same tired narrative of human “progress”—are the keys to understanding the phenomenon. They can’t see beyond that scale, and as a result, they’re totally unequipped to grasp what’s really going on. The phenomenon itself? It doesn’t care about energy extraction, military budgets, or grandiose visions of power. It’s something more subtle, more complex, something that transcends human comprehension.

Ultimately, the question isn’t whether UAPs are real, but why they are so carefully maintained within the realm of the unknown. The mystery surrounding UAPs is not a mere byproduct of cosmic curiosity or scientific inquiry; it’s a strategic maneuver in the modern era of surveillance, control, and the manipulation of public perception. The enigma of UAPs serves those in power, primarily government agencies and powerful corporations, who have the capacity to manipulate information and shape technological futures.

In a world where information is the currency of control, the unknown becomes the ultimate asset. By maintaining UAPs in a suspended state of mystery, governments can leverage the resulting intrigue to distract, confuse, and captivate the public. The phenomenon allows for the creation of a narrative that is both too elusive to be disproven and too compelling to be dismissed. This is a perfect breeding ground for “soft power”—the ability to shape public opinion, influence policy, and cultivate legitimacy through the sheer force of narrative.

The true power of the UAP, then, lies not in what it is—in terms of physical reality—but in what it represents. The mystery surrounding UAPs acts as a kind of “floating signifier” in Saussurean terms, meaning that its meaning is in constant flux and can be shaped by external influences. This allows those who control the symbol (governments, media, conspiracy theorists, etc.) to influence how it is understood and to align it with particular agendas, whether that’s distracting the public from other issues, reinforcing narratives about technological superiority, or maintaining control over knowledge and information.

In sum, UFOs or UAPs function as a highly flexible symbol within the Saussurean system—an object whose meaning is constantly in flux, manipulated by those in power, and open to a wide array of interpretations. The meaning of the symbol is less about the object itself and more about what is projected onto it, shaping public perception and discourse in profound ways.

In this context, UAPs aren’t about alien life or intergalactic exploration. They are symbols of power—both in the sense of what can be hidden and what can be revealed at will. They are part of an ongoing game where governments don’t simply control what you know, but more importantly, control what you are allowed to wonder about. The mystery of UAPs isn’t about discovery; it’s about control over the unknown. This carefully cultivated unknown provides the perfect narrative frame for the forces that shape the technological, political, and economic landscape of the future.

Thus, the real power in UAPs isn’t in their potential to challenge our understanding of the universe. It lies in their ability to sustain a carefully crafted narrative of uncertainty, which, in turn, sustains the ability of powerful institutions to maintain their grip on knowledge, innovation, and the direction of human progress. The question, in the end, is not what UAPs are—but why they remain a carefully guarded secret, even as the world becomes increasingly transparent in every other way.