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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.

Block Time

“Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.”

He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of Now stacked like bricks, stretching infinitely, refusing decay. Tick-tock and stop. Time was not a river here; it was a warden.

He’d been writing his book for five lifetimes—or none at all. Hard to tell.

Somewhere, outside the cell of Now, the Clockmen shuffled with their pendulum limbs, heads like grandfather clocks, their faces frozen at 11:59—forever awaiting the strike that never came. One of them rattled its bones against his door. Thump.

“Keep writing, Writer,” it moaned.

He spat on the floor where the saliva evaporated into whispers.

The book was about Block Time but was also Block Time. It fed on paradoxes like a boa constrictor eating its tail, growing fatter with self-references. Chapter 9 explained Chapter 4, which rewrote Chapter 12, which negated Chapter 1. Readers wouldn’t read it; they’d inhale it, like dust from a forgotten library. And then they’d dream it.

He remembered what it was like before. Linear time. Dirty stuff—ran like oil over gears, constantly breaking down, needing grease. He’d lived there, with the rest of them, breathing in moments like cancerous smoke, dying one inhale at a time. That’s where the Clockmen found him—off his face on forward motion, thinking he was going somewhere.

They hooked him with a gold-plated second hand and dragged him here, kicking and screaming into stillness.

Now? Now he wrote.

Somewhere deep in the block—a block beneath the block—there were whispers of others like him: the Repeaters. People who’d escaped linearity but couldn’t escape habit. A man peeling an apple over and over for eternity. A woman pulling thread through fabric, stitch-by-stitch, sewing together nothing. The Repeaters wanted him to stop writing. Said the book was a virus that spread stillness.

“You’ll freeze it all,” they hissed.

“But it’s already frozen,” he growled back.

He scrawled faster, words bubbling up from inside him like vomit: “In Block Time, all books have already been written, but every page is unwritten until you look. Schrödinger’s notebook.”

He thought of escape sometimes. Just out of curiosity, you understand. He imagined prying open the walls of Now with a crowbar, tearing through to something with edges. Real time. Maybe he’d sit in a diner and drink coffee that got cold. Let a clock run out. Watch seconds collapse into oblivion like bodies falling from a skyscraper.

But then he’d look down at his book, at the words slithering onto the page, and he knew there was nowhere to go. Block Time wasn’t a place; it was a condition. It wasn’t keeping him here—he was here.

A knock came at the door. Another Clockman. He heard it ticking behind the woodgrain.

“Chapter 37 is eating Chapter 5,” it said.

He wiped ink from his lips and smiled.

“Good. That means it’s working.”

Hallmark Movies

In the banal, saccharine world of Hallmark movies, we find, paradoxically, a profound confrontation with the abyss of Being itself. These films, with their predictable plots and saccharine sentimentality, seem to offer a kitsch escape from existential dread. But in their very banality lies the mechanism by which they reveal the Heideggerian truth of Dasein—that is, our being-thrown into the world.

Consider the archetypal Hallmark protagonist: the career-driven woman who leaves the big city to rediscover “what really matters” in her quaint hometown. On the surface, this is the bourgeois fantasy of returning to authenticity, of escaping the alienation of modernity. Yet Heidegger teaches us that authenticity is not found in external trappings—whether rural or urban—but in the confrontation with our own finitude, the Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death).

In this light, the Hallmark movie is not a return to authenticity but its negation. By structuring the protagonist’s world around clichés and stereotypes, the genre enforces what Heidegger would call Das Man, the “they” of everydayness, the inauthentic mode of existence where one avoids confronting the groundlessness of one’s being. The Christmas lights, the snow-covered streets, the inevitable kiss at the town square—all these are rituals of avoidance, not moments of authentic being.

And yet! There is a twist. In their relentless repetition and artificiality, these films also gesture towards a kind of radical emptiness. The overly constructed “perfect moments” become too perfect, and thus uncanny. We, the audience, start to suspect that the town, the love story, the holiday spirit—all of it—is hollow, an empty shell that conceals nothing but its own constructedness.

Here, the Hallmark movie inadvertently becomes a confrontation with das Nichts—the Nothing. It does not provide meaning but instead shows us the void around which meaning circulates. Like the Heideggerian clearing, it offers a space in which Being is revealed—but what is revealed is the vacuity of the rituals we construct to avoid our finitude.

The difference between Hallmark movies and “art movies,” or what we might call “serious cinema,” lies not in their ability to reflect the human condition but in the strategies they deploy to confront or conceal it. If Hallmark movies are the ideological opium of the masses, art movies are the bad conscience of the bourgeois subject, forcing them to confront the truth they would rather ignore. But, of course, the dialectic is never so simple.

Hallmark movies, as we discussed, are ideological in the purest sense—they create a fantasy that denies the inherent antagonisms of existence. Their simplicity and predictability anesthetize us, smoothing over the chaos and contingency of life with comforting rituals: the big-city career woman always finds love, the struggling small-town bakery is always saved. They allow us to believe, for a moment, that the world makes sense, that things fall into place if we only “rediscover the magic of Christmas.”

Art movies, on the other hand, revel in the gaps and fissures of existence. They expose the fractures beneath the surface: alienation, despair, the absurdity of human relationships. Think of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, where the boundary between self and other dissolves into an unbearable void, or Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which confronts us with the inscrutable and indifferent nature of the “Zone.” Art cinema often shatters narrative coherence, leaving us with ambiguity, incompletion, and unresolved tension. This, ostensibly, is its hardcore nature: it refuses the ideological comfort of closure.

But here is the twist: art movies can also become ideological. Their refusal to comfort, their embrace of ambiguity, can itself become a fetish. The viewer of art cinema might pat themselves on the back for being “cultured,” for seeing through the kitsch of Hallmark movies, but this too is a form of ideological fantasy. The art film connoisseur often inhabits a similar position to the Hallmark viewer: they are reassured, not by the world making sense, but by the feeling of having seen through its nonsensicality.

To put it bluntly: Hallmark movies tell us that life is simple, while art movies tell us that life is complex. Both, however, risk avoiding the true hardcore question: what do we do with this complexity?

The horseshoe analogy falters here because the core mode of engagement with Hallmark and art movies is fundamentally different. Hallmark movies don’t just offer fantasy; they provide a step-by-step manual for acting out that fantasy. They say, “Here is what you must do to align yourself with this idealized, prepackaged version of the good life: bake cookies, decorate the tree, fall in love in a snowstorm.” It’s ideology in its most prescriptive form—a checklist of symbolic gestures that promise fulfillment if followed.

Art movies, by contrast, don’t give you a script. Instead, they force you to confront why you even want a script in the first place. The director’s personal note—whether explicit or implicit in the film—functions as a meta-statement: “The world doesn’t make sense, but here’s what I did to cope. I made this. What will you do?” It’s an invitation not to perform a set of symbolic acts but to grapple with the impossibility of such acts ever being sufficient.

Take, for example, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries or even Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Both films deal with existential disorientation, but they don’t end in nihilistic despair. Instead, they gesture towards the necessity of creating your own meaning—whether through art, memory, or a conscious return to some kind of routine. The protagonist in these films doesn’t resolve their crisis by following a script; they do it by embracing the absurd and making sense of their reality, however provisionally.

Hallmark movies, then, are about doing without thinking. They reduce life to a set of externalized rituals. Art movies, on the other hand, are about thinking in order to rediscover the meaning of doing. The “meaningful routine” you mention is a key point: it’s not the routine itself that matters but the fact that it arises from a conscious reckoning with chaos.

Here’s where Hallmark and art movies diverge radically:

• Hallmark says, “Follow this preordained path, and you’ll find happiness.”

• Art cinema says, “Happiness doesn’t exist as a universal formula, but here’s how someone—me, the director, or this fictional character—found their way toward something like meaning. Maybe you can do the same.”

Art cinema acknowledges that meaning is not given—it’s made. And this making is hard, messy, and deeply personal. That’s why art movies often end with a return to some sort of imperfect routine—it’s not a resolution but a recognition that we must actively choose to live, even in the face of absurdity.

Hallmark movies are ideological because they obscure this effort, pretending that meaning can be bought pre-assembled, like a flat-pack Ikea Christmas. Art movies are existential because they insist that meaning must be constructed from scratch, piece by piece, through the labor of being alive.

Perhaps the truly radical act this Christmas is to watch Hallmark movies not as escapism, but as a meditation on the void—to gaze into their glossy, snow-covered surfaces and see, reflected back, the inescapable truth of our own being-towards-death.