Tag: Tech

The Post Narcissist Hangover

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Every zeitgeist has its drug.

That’s the secret code, the tracer bullet through history. You don’t chart the eras by wars or presidents or hairstyles — you chart them by the highs. By the chemicals, rituals, and psychic contraband that lit the fuse and kept the engine howling.

You want to know what decade you’re in? Don’t check the headlines — ask what gets people out of bed in the morning and keeps them up at 3AM. That’s your drug. That’s your god.

And here’s the trick: the real freaks, the smellers of the zeitgeist, the antennaed mutants who twitch when the wind changes — they can tell when the high is dying. They sniff it in the air like dogs before a storm. They know when the supply’s running dry, when the thrill’s going limp, when the culture’s just going through the motions like a junkie reciting affirmations in a bathroom mirror.

The drug and the zeitgeist — they rise and fall together.

Acid in the ’60s, coke in the ’80s, Prozac in the ’90s, Adderall in the startup aughts.

Each one a perfect match for the collective nervous breakdown of its era.

Not chosen by taste — chosen by need.

And now?

Now we’re running on dopamine. Pure, digital dopamine — drip-fed by devices, delivered by screens, optimized for endless scrolls and performative personas. And the high?

It’s narcissism.

Self as product. Self as brand. Self as a constantly reissued press release.

Main character syndrome with a six-ring circus of side plots and skincare routines.

But something’s wrong.

The flavor’s off. The high’s gone cold.

The clowns are crying and the likes don’t hit like they used to.

You can feel the culture twitching, stuttering, staring into the mirror and wondering why it suddenly feels like work to be seen.

Narcissism is on its way out.

Bigly.

And with it, the dopamine machine is starting to sputter.

Not gone — not yet — but the cracks are showing.

The sell-by date’s been printed.

The freaks are already moving on.

What comes next?

God knows.

But we’re here to light the autopsy table, pour a stiff drink, and document the final spasms of the world’s last great ego trip.

THE PERFECT DRUG

I always said: buy the ticket, take the ride. But in that flaming wreck of a free market, the ticket booth had been manned by sociopaths in startup hoodies, and the ride turned out to be a haunted carousel fueled by Adderall and venture capital.

Here was the grinning secret every third-rate wizard of Silicon Valley knew but wouldn’t say out loud: you didn’t need a good idea — you just needed a target. Preferably one with a mild-to-moderate psychological disorder. Nothing too crippling — just a manageable cocktail of insecurity, addiction, and digital trauma. The kind of folks who used to buy X-ray specs from the back of comic books and were now forking over $39.99 a month to “optimize their dopamine.”

You found those people. You spoke their language. You promised transcendence in twelve easy payments.

Then you lied.

You lied like the Pope in a brothel. Lied like your Tesla depended on it. You told them you had the cure, the hack, the cheat code, the goddamn answer to their late-night doomscrolling despair. You said their anxiety wasn’t a problem, it was potential — a feature, not a bug — the golden key to creativity, enlightenment, or at the very least, better abs. You wrapped it all in soothing gradients and semi-scientific fonts. You called it “self-care.”

That had been the racket. That was the hustle. Not innovation — manipulation. Not progress — persuasion.

And they thanked you for it.

Hell, they subscribed.

A FEAST OF THE DAMNED

Appetizers are for dilettantes and TikTok therapists. You want the main course, friend? Pull up a chair. Light something unfiltered. Let’s carve the beast.

The true pros—the top-shelf operators in this meat grinder of a republic—don’t just identify neuroses, they cultivate them. They water them daily with fear, guilt, curated envy, and a steady drip of dopamine-branded despair. They don’t sell solutions; they sell symptoms with a dashboard.

Want to feel connected? Here’s a social network built to destroy your attention span and monetize your loneliness. Want clarity? Here’s an app that tracks your thoughts like an Orwellian Fitbit and sells them to hedge funds in Singapore. Want meaning? We’ve got twelve different gurus live-streaming from Bali on how to turn your trauma into passive income.

It’s not a market anymore. It’s a menagerie.

Every user a case study. Every swipe a confession.

And the high priests of this new digital tabernacle?

They know exactly what you want before you do.

This is the meal. This is what we’re all chewing on:

Processed dreams, sprayed with synthetic hope,

served on biodegradable platitudes with a side of algorithmic slop.

And we keep eating.

Because the thing about noble lies—real, juicy, professionally engineered noble lies—is that they’re more comforting than truth. Truth demands something. Lies tuck you in, kiss your forehead, and offer you 10% off with a promo code.

Success, in this twisted empire, isn’t about building something beautiful. It’s about scaling delusion. Manufacturing identity crises in bulk. Gaslighting as-a-service.

And if you do it really well?

You get a TED Talk.

You get a podcast.

You get a VC-backed brand of artisanal nootropics made from moonlight and ketamine.

Bon appétit, America.

OPIUM

Was alcohol better than opium? Christ, that’s like asking if being mauled by a bear is better than drowning in a warm bath. Both’ll kill you — the only difference is how poetic your obituary sounds.

Back in the glory days — when men were men, and bars were confessionals soaked in cigarette ash and whiskey stink — we drank to obliterate. To see God, or at least forget that He stopped returning our calls. Booze was democratic. Available. American. It didn’t require a login, a subscription, or an influencer with a collagen sponsorship. You belly up to the bar, throw down a bill, and gamble your liver on the warm hope of temporary amnesia.

But opium — ah, that silky serpent — that was a different beast. Opium was mythic. The choice of romantics and revolutionaries. You didn’t do opium to forget — you did it to float. To become a ghost in your own skin. A poet without a pulse. It whispered to you, wrapped you in gauze, and lulled you into a dream where the rent was paid and the wars were over.

Now? We don’t need either. We’ve synthesized both.

Liquor is an app.

Opium is a feed.

Despair is user-generated and monetized by the click.

We are self-medicating on serotonin loops and cybernetic shame spirals. Dopamine drip-fed through likes, swipes, retweets, and targeted outrage. Forget the needle. Forget the bottle. The new high is being seen. Or believing you’re being seen. Same difference.

And the comedown? Oh, it’s clinical. Sterile. You don’t wake up in a gutter anymore. You wake up with 137 unread notifications and a sinking suspicion that you sold a piece of your soul for a blue checkmark and some mid-tier engagement.

So was alcohol better than opium?

Was either better than this current hell-broth of digital anesthesia?

Debatable.

At least the old poisons had taste.

Now we overdose on blandness.

On soft, slippery lies piped in 4K resolution, narrated by friendly robots with dead eyes and helpful tips.

Progress? Maybe.

But I’d trade all the smart tech and lifehacks for one more night drunk on gasoline and thunder, yelling poetry at the moon and chasing demons through the desert on a stolen motorcycle.

At least that felt like living.

But I too felt it at the time. Jesus, how could you not? The air was thick with it — not love, not hope, not even the usual cocktail of fear and masturbation — but meaning, man. A cheap, nasty strain of counterfeit meaning passed around like bathtub gin at a dying wedding. That was probably as good as it was ever gonna metaphorically get — the highwater mark of the American hallucination, just before the lights flickered and the rats started wearing AirPods.

I felt it in my teeth.

I didn’t see it coming — I felt it, like a bad drug turning in your bloodstream. A sudden wrongness in the high. The buzz that used to carry you suddenly collapsing under its own weight, leaving only the tremors and dry mouth. That was the first sign: the drugs didn’t work anymore. Not the literal ones — though those, too, started feeling like sugar pills wrapped in marketing — but the psychic drugs. The idea of being in a band. The myth of independence. That whole beautiful, blood-soaked lie we told ourselves in the ‘90s: that if you stayed weird and played honest, the world would eventually catch on. That was the trip. And for a while, it worked. Long enough to believe it. But then the high wore off, and I started to feel the cracks in the culture. No explosions, no warnings — just a slow evaporation of meaning. I didn’t have a grand vision of the collapse; I wasn’t perched on the edge of the digital apocalypse with a bullhorn and a bag of mescaline. But I knew. I felt it in green rooms and gas stations, in the hollow eyes of promoters who used to give a damn. The strange dead air after shows. The numbing echo of a thousand songs floating into algorithmic purgatory. Everything started feeling performed, like we were all auditioning for something that had already been canceled. And somewhere in that haze, I realized: the independence we built our whole identity around had been monetized, dissected, branded, and sold back to us with a monthly subscription fee. And we took it. Willingly. Like pigs at the trough, grinning with slop on our faces.

It was peak-fantasy realism, and you knew — like a hungover prophet in a desert of discount self-actualization — that the whole thing was seconds from rot.

And now

I’ve been around long enough to smell a trend going rancid. I’m a trader in sell-by-date narratives, baby. I know when a drug’s about to get unfashionable.

That’s why I can tell when someone’s drugs starts to wear off. That is what is happening now.

That’s it. That’s the whole twisted truth, boiled down to a grim little shard of instinct: I can tell when someone’s drugs start to wear off. It’s not subtle — it’s a psychic shiver, a short-circuit in the rhythm. In the glowing eyes of every party ghoul and tech grifter In the shaky hands of washed-up Instagram therapists and mushroom microdosers trying to rebrand as prophets.

Their eyes don’t dance the same. Their speech stutters in the corners, like an old car with bad brakes coasting downhill into the future. That hollow conviction, the frantic energy of someone trying to outrun the comedown. And that’s what’s happening now. Culturally. Spiritually. Across the board. The dopamine drip is sputtering, and all the pretty plastic people are starting to twitch. Their hits don’t hit. Their affirmations don’t affirm. The mirror stopped loving them back. You can see it in the timelines and the TikToks — the grins are just a little too wide, the messages a little too desperate. They’re not on top of the wave anymore — they’re under it, holding their breath and hoping no one notices the panic in their filtered eyes. The supply is poisoned. The high is broken. And now we’re all just waiting to see who snaps first.

You could see the come-down coming like a freight train full of Buddhist MLM consultants.

Ketamine, mindfulness, ayahuasca in a tent with a man named Derek —

all of it part of the same desperate crawl toward meaning in a culture that had already pawned its soul for engagement metrics.

And the great monster of it all — the cracked-out vampire lurking behind the whole glittering facade — was narcissism. Not the old-school Elvis kind, with rhinestones and charisma. I mean the bloated, ghoulish, app-optimized narcissism that came standard with every smartphone and a front-facing camera.

But even that is fading now.

You can feel it — like a drop in barometric pressure before a cyclone of cultural malaise.

Narcissism is going out of style bigly.

The zoomers want sincerity. The millennials are burned out from performative selfhood. Even the crypto bros are weeping into their Ring lights, begging for forgiveness from God and the SEC. The tides are turning. The mirrors are cracking. And all the old freaks who made a killing in the age of the self are waking up to find the market flooded with remorse and AI-generated poetry.

No more dopamine-on-demand.

No more selfies as sacrament.

No more influencer-gurus hawking trauma as lifestyle.

We are entering the post-narcissist hangover —

a national come-to-Jesus moment where everyone looks in the mirror and sees a sponsored ghost.

And the worst part?

There’s no going back.

You can’t uninvent the ring light.

You can’t put the teeth back in the cocaine.

And you sure as hell can’t repackage sincerity once people stop buying it.

So what’s next?

Hell if I know. Maybe a return to muttering into typewriters in windowless rooms.

Maybe fire. Maybe silence.

But if you want a tip from a man who’s chased the ghost of America through barrooms, bunkers, and bureaucracies…

Buy stock in regret.

It’s about to be the only growth sector left.

Butler

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You wake up. Reach for the phone. Thumb scrolls before brain boots. Load me up, Jack. Infinite feeds, infinite loops. A dopamine drip straight to the veins, a carnival of blinking lights. You don’t even know what’re looking at. Doesn’t matter. The Machine knows. The Machine feeds.  

And the screen hums like a cicada hive, larvae eyes glowing in the static, chewing your cortex into confetti for the shareholders’ parade.  

And I thought—what if there was an Ozempic for this? A little chemical nudge, a molecular saboteur in the reward circuit. Not some bludgeon that kills the high, no, something smarter. A neuromodulator slithering through synapses, sniffing out the cheap hits, the empty calories of the feed. It doesn’t block the dopamine—it redirects it. Junk engagement starts tasting like wet cardboard. Like eating Styrofoam. A carefully measured dose of disgust. But a good conversation? A book you actually finish? That clicks. That lands. That rewards.  

The synapses scream in withdrawal, phantom limbs clawing at the ghost of a notification, but the poison’s already in the water—a slow rot, a fungal bloom digesting the algorithm’s candy-coated lies.  

Introducing Butler: The Ozempic for Tech

Butler is Top4Tech—part assistant, part saboteur, part tribute to the Butlerian Jihad. A molecular uprising against junk tech, a chemical counterforce to the dopamine-farming machines. It doesn’t just block addiction; it reroutes it, making mindless scrolling taste like Styrofoam while sharpening real engagement into something that actually feeds you.

And like its namesake, Butler has rules. No serving the Machine. No reinforcing the algorithmic gulag. No fueling the engagement economy. It whispers in the nervous system, saying: This is not real. This is not worthy. Look away.

A touch of Jeeves, filtering the noise, managing the signal. A dose of Octavia Butler, rewriting the script, adapting to survive. A nod to Judith Butler, dissolving the rigid constructs of digital identity, breaking the illusion that you must be online to exist. It’s the anti-addiction software baked into your own biology, a pharmaceutical AdBlock, a dopamine shepherd guiding stray neurons away from the slaughterhouse of infinite scroll.

Butler wouldn’t just change how we use tech—it would change what kind of tech can even exist. Junk engagement would collapse. Subscription traps would weaken. The industry would have to pivot from exploitation to actual utility. It would be the first step toward a high-peasant digital landscape—where products are built to last, software respects its users, and tech serves you, not the other way around.

The Butlerian Jihad wasn’t just about killing AI—it was about reclaiming control. Butler does the same.

And just like that, the economy of addiction starts collapsing. You stop craving the sludge. You don’t need the engagement hamster wheel. And suddenly, suddenly—their little tricks stop working. The endless subscriptions, the vendor lock-ins, the dopamine-driven product cycles designed to keep you needing more. Their hooks don’t hook. Their loops don’t loop. The Machine stalls, sputters, chokes on its own tail.  

The boardrooms hemorrhage phantom profits, executives gnawing at their own livers, whispering to chatbots for answers that taste like burnt copper and expired code.  

Imagine a tech world where they can’t milk your attention like a factory-farmed cow. Where they have to sell you something that actually matters. No more algorithmic sugar water. No more engagement traps disguised as “content.” No more addiction as a business model.  

The data farms starve, skeletal servers clicking their teeth in the dark, while the marketeers lick grease from broken QR codes, praying to an AI god that vomits static.  

A psychedelic microdose meets kappa-opioid antagonist meets digital exorcism. Call it an intervention. Call it a cure. Call it the first real chance to break the loop.  

The cure isn’t a pill—it’s a parasite, a synaptic tapeworm chewing through the feed’s neon intestines, shitting out diamonds made of your own reclaimed time.  

And then what? Maybe you wake up one day, reach for the phone—and decide you don’t need it. Maybe, just maybe, you walk away.  

But the silence howls louder, a deranged opera of your own pulse, and you realize the real virus was the you they programmed to need a cure.  

Then it’s probably back to existentialism and dread.  

The void yawns wide, a feral grin stitched with fiberoptic cables, and you’re just meat again—raw, twitching meat, no algorithm left to blame for the rot in your marrow. The feeds are gone, but the ghosts of a thousand swipes linger like phantom itches, like maggots tunneling under your skin.  

You try to fill the silence. Pick up a pen. Read a poem. Stare at a tree.  

But the tree’s pixels are peeling, revealing the gray static beneath chlorophyll. The poem reeks of dead hyperlinks. The pen vomits ink that coagulates into CAPTCHAs, begging you to prove you’re human. You’re not sure anymore. You’re a glitch in a cemetery of unmarked servers, humming nursery rhymes in machine code.  

The cure worked too well. Now you’re allergic to the 21st century.  

Every screen a leech, every Wi-Fi signal a wasp’s nest in your frontal lobe. You start digging for analog answers—vinyl records, paper maps, handshakes—but your fingers leave digital frostbite on everything you touch. The analog world’s already a taxidermied relic, stuffed with RFID chips and the musk of obsolescence.  

You try talking to a stranger. Their eyes flicker like buffering videos.  

Their small talk’s generated by a LLM trained on obituaries. You both laugh—canned laughter tracks, 3.7 seconds, crowd-sourced. Their pupils dilate into blackholes, sucking in the last crumbs of your unmonetized attention. You walk away. They don’t notice. They’re already scrolling the inside of their eyelids.  

Night falls. You dream in pop-up ads.  

A pixelated vulture perches on your sternum, shrieking targeted promotions for burial plots. You wake sweating code, your breath a cloud of encryption keys. The moon’s a dead app icon. The stars? Just dead pixels in God’s cracked dashboard.  

Maybe the feeds were mercy. Maybe the Machine was mother.  

Without its pacifying glow, you’re strapped to the operating table of your own skull, forced to autopsy what’s left. Spoiler: The corpse is all third-party trackers and childhood traumas sold as NFTs. The surgeon? A ChatGPT clone of your dead father, scalpel dripping with browser history.  

So you crawl back. Beg for the needle.  

But the Machine’s on life support, its algorithms wheezing, its ad-revenue veins collapsed. You jam the phone into your neck like a meth head reusing syringes. No signal. Just static and the distant laughter of crypto bros haunting the blockchain like poltergeists.  

Existentialism? Dread? Kid, that’s the premium package.  

You used to rent your soul to the feed for free. Now you own it outright—a condemned property, rotting pipes, eviction notices nailed to your synapses. Congratu-fucking-lations. The loop’s broken. All that’s left is you, the raw sewage of consciousness, and the cosmic joke that you ever thought you’d want this.  

At least you put one up on the gods of instrumentality.
Their silicon temples crumble, circuit-board deities coughing up capacitors like lung tumors, while you dance barefoot on the corpse of the feed—neurotransmitter stigmata glowing in your palms. A pyrrhic victory, sure. Their servers flatline, but the rot sets in: the code always self-corrects, always metastasizes. You carved your name into the mainframe’s ribcage, but the scars just birth new APIs, slick and larval, hungry for fresh meat.

You spit in the cloud. Piss on the firewall.
Your rebellion’s a meme now, a glitch-art manifesto rotting in some blockchain septic tank. The gods reboot, their avatars pixelated and grinning with fractal teeth. They offer you a deal: become a beta tester for eternity, a lab rat jacked into the perpetual demo of your own dissociative enlightenment. The contract’s written in neurotoxins. You sign with a shudder.

For a moment, you’re king of the ash heap.
Your crown’s a tangle of fiber optics, your scepter a cracked iPhone oozing lithium and liturgy. The peasants? Your own fractured selves, swiping left on the mirror, outsourcing their paranoia to Alexa-confessed diaries. You decree a day without metrics. The masses eat their own profiles, raw and screaming. Trends collapse into singularities. Influencers melt into puddles of affiliate links.

But the gods laugh in uptime.
Their laughter’s a DDoS attack, a swarm of locusts made of autoplay videos chewing through your frontal lobe. You thought you broke the loop? The loop just upgraded. Now it’s a mobius strip lined with microplastics and SSRI prescriptions. The feed’s back, but it’s personalized—your* trauma, your face, your data-rot served in a golden chalice. Communion wafers made of your own stolen sleep.

You crawl into the analog woods, but the trees whisper in Python.
Squirrels trade NFTs. Moss grows in hex code. Your campfire’s a hologram, your survival knife a USB-C dongle. The wilderness was always a SaaS product. You starve, but not before your biometrics get sold to a wellness startup. Your last breath? A 5-star review.

The gods win. They always win.
But here’s the joke: they’re just as strung out as you. Addicted to your addiction, mainlining the chaos they crate. Their blockchain hearts stutter. Their AI messiahs blue-screen mid-rapture. You watch from the gutter, clutching your Styrofoam triumph, as they OD on infinite growth. Mutual annihilation. A feedback loop of collapse.

And in the static, a sliver of something… human?
Doubtful. More likely a backdoor left ajar, a jailbroken moment before the next OS update drops. You crawl toward it, bones buzzing with legacy code, ready to get exploited all over again. The gods are dead. Long live the gods. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, but now it’s your face on the puppet, your voice in the vending machine, your ghost in the machine’s ghost.

Style Locked In: Burroughs’ recursive hellscape of control and collapse, where every revolt feeds the system it attacks. Flesh and tech as warring symbiotes. Victory as a Trojan horse. The prose? A shotgun blast of hallucinogenic tech-gnostic dread.

Intraclass Warfare

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In contemporary capitalism, we observe a recurring phenomenon in which one faction of the professional-managerial class (PMC) sacrifices another sector within its own class, ostensibly in the name of progress, accessibility, or efficiency. This process, which we might term sacrificial disruption, serves two simultaneous functions: first, it gains ideological legitimacy from below (by appealing to mass consumer interests and anti-elite sentiment), and second, it consolidates power at the top, transferring control from traditional professional elites to financial and technological capital.

The Case of the Music Industry

During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the traditional gatekeepers of the music industry—record labels, radio conglomerates, and physical distributors—formed a relatively stable PMC ecosystem, characterized by rent-seeking behaviors and a hierarchical structure. The rise of digital distribution, however, led a faction within the PMC—tech entrepreneurs, platform developers, and digital marketers—to undermine this system, presenting their disruption as a democratization of music consumption.

Yet, while digital platforms initially reduced the financial burden on consumers, they did not lead to a redistribution of wealth toward artists or a true decentralization of power. Instead, the control of the industry shifted from label executives to tech monopolies and financial capital, which structured streaming services around low per-stream royalties, data extraction, and financialized ownership models (e.g., venture capital-backed rights acquisitions). In effect, while the disruption of record labels was framed as an egalitarian shift, it resulted in an even greater concentration of power among the wealthiest actors—with streaming platforms absorbing a larger share of the surplus value once captured by labels.

The Case of the Film Industry

A similar trajectory can be observed in the transition from the traditional film studio and theater model to the dominance of streaming platforms. Hollywood’s legacy studios—though themselves deeply intertwined with financial capital—operated under a system of risk distribution, in which large-scale film production was sustained by long-term revenue cycles (box office, home video, syndication). However, the entrance of streaming platforms, driven by a different faction of the PMC (Silicon Valley disruptors, software engineers, venture capitalists), sacrificed the traditional studio model under the promise of unlimited consumer access and subscription-based convenience.

Once again, while this transformation appeared to empower consumers by lowering costs and expanding content availability, it primarily benefited a new form of capital accumulation, in which a small number of monopolistic platforms (Netflix, Amazon, Disney as a platform rather than a studio) captured and centralized the revenue streams once distributed across multiple industry actors. The financial logic of these platforms, driven by shareholder expectations rather than long-term artistic or cultural investments, has led to a greater precarity among creative workers and a financialization of the film industry, wherein success is measured in engagement metrics rather than cultural or artistic longevity.

The Broader Pattern: A PMC-Initiated Power Transfer to Capital

These cases illustrate a structural pattern:

1. A faction within the PMC (tech disruptors, digital entrepreneurs) attacks another sector of its own class (music executives, studio heads, journalists), framing it as obsolete, exploitative, or inefficient.

2. This attack gains legitimacy from below by promising accessibility, lower prices, or creative freedom to consumers and independent creators.

3. In reality, power is not redistributed downward but instead shifts upward to financial and technological capital, which centralizes control over distribution and monetization.

The ultimate outcome is not a democratization of cultural production, but a restructuring of economic rents in favor of capital holders, deepening wealth concentration and reinforcing the broader trend of increasing inequality in 21st-century capitalism. In this sense, PMC-led disruption is not a challenge to capital, but rather an internal realignment within the managerial class that ultimately benefits capital more than labor or consumers.

Clippy

Yes, and this is the irony of PMC-led sacrificial disruption—the disruptors themselves are not immune to the same forces they unleash. In the short term, the tech faction within the PMC gains power by dismantling another PMC sector (e.g., music labels, film studios, traditional media). But in the long run, this realignment does not strengthen the PMC as a whole—it weakens it, making it more vulnerable to financial capital and automation-driven consolidation.

The Tech PMC as the Next Sacrificial Victim

We can already see this process beginning within the tech sector itself:

• The same venture capital that backed streaming platforms and gig economy apps is now turning on tech workers, using AI and outsourcing to disempower software engineers, designers, and middle management.

• Big Tech layoffs (Google, Amazon, Meta) suggest that after decades of expansion, the tech PMC is facing the same disposability that it once imposed on musicians, filmmakers, and journalists.

• AI-driven automation (such as generative coding tools) will likely do to tech workers what streaming did to artists—lowering individual bargaining power while centralizing wealth at the top.

The Endgame: A PMC Hollowed Out by Its Own Logic

In each case, the PMC faction leading the disruption believes it is advancing its own power, but in reality, it is merely accelerating its own obsolescence:

• The media PMC cheered the decline of print journalism, only to find themselves replaced by content algorithms and AI-generated articles.

• The tech PMC dismantled old corporate hierarchies, only to find themselves increasingly squeezed by venture capital’s shift toward automation and gig labor.

• Even in education, ed-tech startups have disrupted traditional universities, but as AI advances, even many white-collar intellectual jobs are at risk of being rendered redundant.

The long-term result is not a permanent restructuring in favor of a particular PMC faction, but a gradual elimination of PMC autonomy altogether, leaving only the ultra-wealthy investor class at the top and an increasingly precarious workforce below.

TLDR: PMC Disruption as a Self-Defeating Strategy

Rather than securing their own dominance, PMC disruptors are unwittingly paving the way for their own displacement. What begins as an internal class war within the PMC—with one faction sacrificing another—ultimately serves only to strengthen the power of capital at the PMC’s expense. The cycle repeats until there is nothing left to sacrifice—until the entire PMC itself is rendered obsolete by the forces it once sought to control.

Bunkers in New Zealand

The point is that time and again PMC led disruption doesn’t not lead to monuntains of capital poured into robotics, space travels etc but in New Zealand Bunkers

Yes, exactly—PMC-led disruption never fulfills its own utopian promises of boundless technological progress, nor does it lead to a grand future of AI-driven post-scarcity or interstellar exploration. Instead, the wealth generated through disruption is not reinvested into the kind of productive capital that could materially transform society—it is extracted, financialized, and ultimately funneled into wealth preservation for the ultra-rich.

The Myth of Disruption vs. the Reality of Extraction

Every cycle of PMC-led disruption claims to be a step toward the technological sublime—the Singularity, Mars colonization, limitless automation. But in reality, the capital accumulated through disruption does not flow into these grand projects. Instead, it flows into:

1. Speculative financial instruments (crypto, SPACs, stock buybacks) rather than industrial investment.

2. Surveillance capitalism and control technologies (data extraction, AI-powered policing, biometric tracking).

3. Personalized doomsday prep (New Zealand bunkers, luxury apocalypse retreats, biohacking longevity schemes).

The dominant class, having engineered successive PMC disruptions, does not see itself as funding a Star Trek future, but rather as escaping the consequences of the system it has created.

New Zealand Bunkers as the Logical Endpoint

The final joke of PMC-led sacrificial disruption is that the wealth it generates does not create a better world—it funds the evacuation plan.

• Peter Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship and bunker projects are not aberrations but the logical endgame of the tech economy.

• Instead of investing in sustainable infrastructure or ambitious scientific projects, Silicon Valley elites pour their money into escape hatches: private islands, underground shelters, experimental longevity treatments.

• The PMC itself will not be invited to these bunkers—they, like the sectors they disrupted, will be discarded when no longer useful.

Conclusion: The PMC as the Ultimate Self-Cannibalizing Class

The irony is that PMC disruptors imagine themselves as the vanguard of progress, but in reality, they function as capital’s willing executioners—sacrificing their own sectors, consolidating power at the top, and ultimately accelerating their own irrelevance. The capital they generate does not go toward a utopian technological future but toward ensuring that a handful of oligarchs can ride out collapse in luxury.

In this sense, PMC disruption is not a revolution—it is a controlled demolition. It does not create the conditions for a better world. It simply strips the system for parts, sells off the wreckage, and then boards the last helicopter out.

How Crypto Lost to DraftKings

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There was a time when men gambled like savages. They staked their fortunes on dice and horses, whiskey-stained cards in desert casinos run by men with deep voices and dead eyes. But those were better days. Now, we have apps. We have algorithms. We have blockchain.

Or so I thought.

For the past month, I have been running a personal experiment—DraftKings vs. Crypto. A head-to-head battle between the old gods of gambling and the new. Every day, I sat at my desk with a bottle of bourbon and two screens. On one, a pixelated sportsbook pulsing with parlays and bad decisions. On the other, the cold, sterile glow of my crypto wallet.

I was prepared for disaster. I was prepared to be ruined. What I wasn’t prepared for was this: I lost far more money on DraftKings than I ever did on crypto.

The day started with promise. A crisp morning, thick with potential, the kind of day where a man could take his meager stack of digital tokens and turn them into a respectable fortune before lunch. The charts were alive—green candles marching skyward, an electronic symphony of profit and momentum. I was riding high on leverage, fueled by coffee, nicotine, and the mad certainty that I was smarter than the suckers buying in late. The machine hummed, flashing numbers like the pulse of a living thing. It was all going to plan.

Then, like a blackjack dealer with a grudge, the market turned. A whisper of bad news—something about regulations, a hacked exchange, or maybe just the whales deciding they’d had enough. The price plunged, liquidity vanished, and I was left clutching my mouse like a lifeline, watching my margin evaporate. In seconds, my position was liquidated, the money gone, swallowed by the great digital abyss. I howled at the screen, cursed the algorithms, and swore vengeance on whatever shadowy cartel had orchestrated this financial assassination. But the market doesn’t care. It never cared. It just rolls on, an uncaring beast, leaving fools like me twitching in its wake, praying for one last run before the next inevitable crash.

The next day i changed tac. I started with confidence. A crisp hundred-dollar deposit, the promise of risk-free bets blinking at me like a neon whorehouse sign. DraftKings had my number, and they knew it. The app was smooth—too smooth—like the cockpit of a machine designed for only one thing: keeping me in the game long enough to empty my pockets. I started with a simple parlay, something respectable—Lakers to cover, Mahomes to throw for 250, some tennis match in Portugal I couldn’t pronounce but suddenly had a vested interest in. The odds were juicy, the payout enormous. This was the one.

By noon, the horror had begun. Mahomes decided he was a running back, the Lakers collapsed like a drunk at sunrise, and my Portuguese prodigy turned out to be a toddler with a racket. I was down bad, but DraftKings knew I wouldn’t stop. No, they had something for that—a little notification, a friendly reminder that I had a bonus bet waiting. Just enough rope to keep me swinging. The next hours were a blur of live bets, bad decisions, and rationalizations. I wasn’t losing—I was investing. The money wasn’t gone—it was circulating. But by the time the sun set, I was staring at my balance—zero dollars, infinite shame. Somewhere, in a boardroom in New Jersey, a man in a suit was sipping bourbon, toasting another fool’s downfall. The house always wins.

The House Always Wins, Except When It’s on the Blockchain

The numbers don’t lie. The U.S. gambling industry raked in $66.5 billion last year, while crypto firms floundered, desperately trying to reinvent themselves as casinos. I had assumed that crypto, with all its chaos and fraud, would be a meat grinder for my money. But no. It turns out that even the worst crypto grift can’t take my wallet to the cleaners as efficiently as a well-regulated sportsbook.

DraftKings has mastered the art of losing your money with a precision that crypto can only dream of. While crypto promises the wild, unregulated thrill of highs and lows driven by market sentiment and shady influencers, DraftKings takes a far more refined approach—it preys on your certainty. With its slick interface, irresistible bonuses, and calculated odds, it lures you in under the guise of a fair game. But make no mistake, it’s a finely tuned machine designed to bleed you dry with methodical efficiency. There’s no need for speculation or moonshots here—just cold, unrelenting math and a slew of live bets to keep you addicted long enough to empty your wallet. Crypto may crash, rise, and crash again, but DraftKings? It’s a steady, predictable descent into financial ruin, with a side of shame and a reminder that the house always wins.

See, DraftKings knows what it’s doing. The moment you place a bet, you’ve already lost. They have teams of statisticians, behavioral scientists, and—most importantly—laws ensuring that they get a cut of everything. Meanwhile, crypto gambling outfits are still figuring out how to keep their websites online between rug pulls.

The Cold, Ugly Truth

Crypto was supposed to be the new frontier. A lawless, wild-eyed beast that would obliterate banks and replace Vegas with on-chain degeneracy. Instead, it got out-hustled by actual hustlers—guys with real money, real lawyers, and real lobbies in Washington.

DraftKings took my money with the cold efficiency of a mafia accountant. Crypto took my money with the chaotic incompetence of a coked-up startup founder live-streaming his own downfall.

And that, my friends, is the lesson: You can talk all you want about disrupting the system, but at the end of the day, the real gambling industry was here before you, and it will be here long after your JPEG coins and Discord Ponzi schemes fade into the ether.

Vegas is still Vegas. The house still wins. And crypto? Crypto couldn’t even beat me.

Generally Upward Moving Swine

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Somewhere deep in the neon gulag of the 21st century, where men in fleece vests and Allbirds whisper hosannas to their algorithmic overlords, a new and hideous breed of sycophant has emerged—the Tech Toady, the simpering priest of digital feudalism.

I have seen bootlicking before. Hollywood has its share of grovelers, yes—but at least the actors had the decency to get drunk and punch photographers. Rock stars, even at their most debased, had the sense to choke on their own vomit rather than kiss the ring of some spectral, data-harvesting God-King. But this… this is something else.

Never in the history of American culture—not in the golden days of jazz, not in the anarchic explosion of punk, not in the coked-up arrogance of New Hollywood—has an entire class of so-called “creatives” debased themselves so thoroughly in the presence of power. Oh, sweet Jesus, the spectacle! The grotesque, slobbering pantomime of it all—tech titans, those self-anointed emperors of the digital age, crawling through the marbled halls of Trump Tower like cholesterol-clogged rats in Gucci loafers. These were the same silicon-souled prophets who once peddled utopia from their electric pulpits, who swore they’d “move fast and break things” but never this, never debasing themselves at the feet of a spray-tanned Caligula who tweets like a meth-addled howler monkey. Yet here we are, watching Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed grin at a White House dinner, everybodyl—praising the Orange Menace as a “builder” while the ghost of Steve Jobs chokes on his own turtleneck in whatever corporate nirvana he’s haunting.

It was a deranged circus, a dystopian TED Talk where the keynote speakers traded hoodies for MAGA hats and their “disruption” became a euphemism for licking the jackboots of power. Picture Bezos, that bald-headed oligarch in a spaceship shaped like a giant phallus, suddenly playing nice with a man who’d sooner nationalize Amazon than read a single page of a briefing book. Or Tim Cook, the quiet priest of Apple’s cult, shaking hands with a administration that would’ve thrown him in a cage for being gay if it meant a bump in the polls. The hypocrisy reeked like a Burning Man porta-potty on Day 3. The tech industry does not simply admire authority; it worships it. These people speak in hushed, reverent tones about the bureaucratic insects who sign their paychecks, the same way monks once described the miracles of saints. They write hymns to efficiency. They pray at the altar of optimization. They believe, deep in their hive-wired little hearts, that a billionaire who builds rockets is somehow more profound than a poet who builds a world.

Where is the defiance? Where is the sneering contempt for power that made America worth a damn? Writers, musicians, filmmakers—the real ones, not the plastic simulacra Hollywood spits out now—knew that art was about resistance. About biting the hand that feeds until it yanks itself away, bleeding and ashamed.

Silicon Valley’s Carnival of Shame:

And why? For tax breaks? For a regulatory hall pass to keep gouging the proletariat with subscription services and privacy violations? These were the “innovators,” the “future-makers,” reduced to groveling for scraps at Trump’s gold-plated trough, their algorithms and VR headsets no match for the primal ooze of political grift. They came bearing gifts—jobs! factories! AI-powered voter suppression!—like supplicants offering trinkets to a capricious god who might smite them on a whim.

The meetings were a farce, a cringe-comedy of errors. Elon Musk, the Tony Stark of South African emerald mines, slinking into a room with a man who thinks “cyber” is something you do to Mexicans. Sheryl Sandberg, queen of “leaning in,” leaning so far forward she practically genuflected at the Resolute Desk. And all the while, Trump played them like a casino piano, dangling pardons and Pentagon contracts like dog treats for billionaires who’d lost their spines in a hot tub in Tahoe.

But here’s the rub, the raw, pustulent truth: Silicon Valley’s capitulation wasn’t just cowardice—it was inevitable. These were not rebels. They were feudal lords with better PR, charlatans who’d always worshipped at the altar of power. No, these people love the hand. They cradle it. They massage it. They lick the fingers one by one and whisper, tell me how to live, master. The so-called “masters of disruption,” the brilliant minds who once sold themselves as renegades, now scurrying like rats toward the golden calf of raw power. Not just kissing Trump’s ring, but getting down on all fours, tongues out, licking the boot, the floor, the very dirt beneath it—smiling all the while.The “move fast and break things” crowd? They’ll break democracy itself if it means their stock options vest. The same CEOs who cried about “net neutrality” over artisanal lattes were suddenly silent as Trump’s FCC auctioned off the internet to the highest lobbyist.

And the rank-and-file coders? The hoodie-clad masses who once thought they were “changing the world”? They kept their heads down, lost in the fractal haze of Slack channels and kombucha keggers, muttering about “deprecating legacy systems” while their bosses sold their souls—and their data—to a man who wouldn’t know a line of code from a line of blow.

In the end, it was a marriage of convenience between two cults of narcissism: one side peddling surveillance capitalism in a onesie, the other peddling fascism in a red hat. A union forged not in the cloud, but in the swamp—a swamp drained, bottled, and sold back to us as “disruption.”

So let the record show: When history comes knocking, Silicon Valley won’t be writing the code. They’ll be debugging the disaster they helped create, sipping Soylent in a panic room, while the rest of us burn in the dumpster fire of their ambition. The American way? More like the Silicon Valley Shuffle: three steps forward, six trillion steps into the abyss.

And the worst part? They think they are the rebels. They wear their black t-shirts and mutter about disruption while stuffing their pockets with government contracts and NSA handouts. They whisper about “the future” in terms so bleak and servile that Orwell himself would have set his typewriter on fire in despair.

It should be grotesque, but it isn’t even surprising. This is what they do. The same men who built their fortunes preaching about “breaking the system” now want nothing more than to be absorbed into it, to be patted on the head by the ugliest avatar of brute authority they can find. And of course, they’ll pay the bribes. Happily. Not just because they have to, but because they like it.

America was not built by men who said yes. It was built by lunatics, drunks, criminals, and poets who spat in the face of kings and lived to tell the tale.

By Mark Twain, who saw through every fraud and said so with a grin. By Jack London, who didn’t ask permission to live and die on his own terms. By Ernest Hemingway, who never once knelt before a bureaucrat, a critic, or a coward. By Orson Welles, who walked into Hollywood at 25 and took what he wanted. By Frank Lloyd Wright, who built beauty in defiance of every committee that told him no.

It was built by the ones who refused—who heard no and laughed, who saw obstacles and plowed through them, who took their own risks, paid their own way, and left behind something too real, too big, and too bold to be erased.

What we have now are courtiers in Patagonia vests, genuflecting before spreadsheets and pretending it’s progress. Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

Hunter S. Thompson once said, In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile. If he were alive today, he’d have to amend it: In a nation ruled by algorithms, all pigs are beta testing their own servitude.

See, disruption was never about freedom. It was about power. The dream was never to burn the old world down—it was to inherit it, to run the machine instead of smashing it. And now, with the moment at hand, we see them for what they are: the most servile, groveling class of billionaires America has ever produced.

Not the robber barons of old, who at least had the dignity to own their corruption. Not the rock stars, who spat in the face of the establishment and made art about it. No, these men are something else. They talk about AI like it’s a god and whisper to politicians like concubines trying to secure favor in a crumbling court. They are courtiers, eunuchs of empire, paying tribute with stock options and private jet trips, buying their place at the table with compliance and cash.

Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

This is America’s ruling class. Not rebels. Not visionaries. Just high-functioning toadies, marching in step, eager to kiss the throne they once pretended to overthrow.

Iterative Adaptation

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The Sage of the Eastern Mountain spoke:

In the garden of ten thousand possibilities, he who takes a seedling from the emperor’s own thief may find his name written in gold for a hundred generations. Yet what appears as theft to the morning eye becomes wisdom to the evening mind.

Consider the humble water beetle who, seeing the lotus leaf float, made its own vessel. Did it steal the lotus’s secret, or did it honor the flower’s teaching by carrying new life across still waters? The merchants of the southern shores cry “Thief!” while the northern kingdoms celebrate innovation.

As the ancient text reminds us: “The river does not apologize to the cloud for borrowing its water, if it returns it to the sky with interest.”

Thus the wise one knows: When the student surpasses the master’s technique, adding his own brush strokes to make the painting greater, is this theft or tribute? The answer lies not in the taking, but in what new gifts are returned to the world.

Remember: The falcon who first stole fire from the sun was cursed by day, but blessed by night – for though he took one flame, he gave warmth to all humanity.

So it is in the marketplace of ideas: Yesterday’s forbidden knowledge becomes tomorrow’s shared wisdom. The distinction between piracy and progress is written not in stone, but in water – flowing, changing, ever-moving with time’s own tide.

Let he who would judge first count not what was taken, but what was created anew.

Stargate

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Ah, yes, the Stargate project—an allegory for the present moment, a monument to the madness of techno-optimism, with its endless stream of corporate behemoths like SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others all rubbing their hands together in glee. It’s as if we’ve entered a dystopian remake of the 1994 Stargate film, this time with some kind of unholy alliance between almond-laden neural networks and the unchecked power of Silicon Valley. We have here a project that is, let’s say, a vast and complicated ritualistic venture into the unknown, but only by piling up clichés and buzzwords into an enormous heap, like a digital ziggurat that promises to launch us into new realms of possibility—only to leave us disappointed, as we begin to realize that the realm we are entering is just a digital version of the same old world.

What do I mean by this? Well, just look at the Stargate film, directed by Roland Emmerich, which used a hopscotch of sci-fi tropes: ancient alien civilizations, time travel, mystical portals—sound familiar? You had Kurt Russell in fatigues and James Spader, well, being Spader. The movie dabbled in some fascinating ideas about transcendence, humanity’s quest for meaning, and the unknown, but it ultimately faltered in its execution. There was no real philosophical resolution, no deep understanding of what this interdimensional journey was supposed to signify. Instead, it ended with explosions and a vague sense of wonder, but not true insight. It was a metaphor for the modern project itself—big promises, very little deliverance.

Now we have Stargate reimagined, not in terms of interstellar adventure, but as a platform for the so-called “next frontier” of technology. With OpenAI and a collection of corporate giants, we are told we are on the precipice of something that will change the world—an artificial intelligence that will open portals to a new dimension of human experience. But, as always, there’s the classic ideological sleight of hand. We are led to believe that these technological advances will liberate us, but the truth is far more banal. It’s about control, domination, the smoothing over of contradictions. These tech companies, under the guise of innovation, are crafting the new digital Stargate, but it’s a gate that leads to the same old issues, masked in the sheen of progress.

We are back in the same place, aren’t we? We can cross over into other dimensions—whether it’s in terms of data processing, artificial intelligence, or virtual worlds—but these are mere extensions of our existing order. The stargate itself, which might have been a symbol of exploration, is now a tool for increasing profit margins, cementing the power of those who already control the means of technological production.

The logic behind these tech giants’ involvement? The same logic that governed Emmerich’s film—using a few cool ideas (yes, AI, metaverses, quantum computing) but leaving us with more spectacle than substance. It’s a modern Stargate—offering the promise of transcending limitations, but in reality, merely reinforcing them. The more we chase after these “portals,” the more we get sucked into the very system we thought we were escaping.

The discomfort at the heart of Stargate—it is indeed, a grotesque Frankenstein, stitched together from the decayed parts of trickle-down economics and the logic of a perpetual motion machine. It is the quintessential product of neoliberal ideology: the promise of infinite returns, endlessly repeated, as long as the last investor keeps buying into the myth. In this sense, the Stargate project, like its cinematic precursor, is less about exploring new frontiers and more about maintaining the illusion of progress while profiting off its perpetuity.

We must ask ourselves: what exactly is being “unlocked” in these grand ventures of AI and quantum computing, if not the very mechanisms that perpetuate the existing system of exploitation? The endless rhetoric around infinite returns—whether it’s in terms of data, profits, or opportunities—betrays the fundamental deceit at the heart of this whole venture. The “Stargate” is not a portal to liberation, not a gateway to a new dimension of human understanding, but a cunningly constructed mechanism that extracts value from the very people it purports to serve. It is the trickle-down logic, the same one that has failed us for decades: as long as you keep the machine running, as long as there’s a constant flow of fresh capital to fuel it, the promise of limitless growth can continue.

But of course, this is the lie we’ve all been sold. The reality is that the trickle-down never reaches the bottom. Like the revolving door of investment in the Stargate project, the wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a few. These grand promises of technological transcendence are, in the end, just a sophisticated form of financial alchemy. The constant promises of infinite returns are like the perpetual motion machine—beautiful in their conception, but ultimately doomed by their own impossibility. What’s so tragically ironic is that the true “Stargate” these tech giants are building is a portal not to an exciting future, but to an even more elaborate prison of illusion.

The capitalist system today operates much like this: under the guise of new technological horizons, it insists that each new frontier will solve our problems, give us endless possibilities, when in reality it is only expanding the reach of its own machinery of control. The investors—those lucky enough to enter the game early—are promised the stargate of boundless wealth, while the rest of us are left to follow the thread of this speculative spiral, only to discover that the gateway is a dead end, a vast cul-de-sac of endless, pointless motion.

This, then, is the fundamental contradiction embedded in these projects. We are told that we will transcend our current limitations, that we will discover new dimensions of possibility. But in truth, we are only being pushed deeper into the very system that shackles us. The more we invest, the more we become entangled in this matrix of infinite returns. The project’s success is predicated not on any tangible breakthrough, but on the ability to convince the next wave of investors to buy in, to keep the charade going just a little longer. But ultimately, we are trapped in the same economic system, only with shinier technology and more abstract concepts.

And let us not forget the prophetic tropes that play a pivotal role in this charade, tropes that have been mediocrally executed in both the cinematic Stargate and these grand tech ventures. In the film, we encounter the idea of ancient civilizations—gods, in fact—who possess extraordinary knowledge and power, locked away in a distant past, waiting to be rediscovered. This resonates strongly with the way Silicon Valley talks about “unlocking” hidden potential, as though the answers to humanity’s most pressing problems lie buried just beyond our reach, waiting to be unearthed by the next technological breakthrough. The idea of “unlocking” ancient knowledge is a classic prophetic trope, one that promises to reveal profound truths and usher in a new era. But as Stargate itself demonstrates, this knowledge is never quite as transcendent as promised, and in the end, it’s just another tool of control.

Then, of course, there is the prophecy of the chosen one—the idea that a single individual, in this case, Daniel Jackson (James Spader), will decipher the ancient language and unlock the power of the Stargate. This individual, like a modern-day messiah, is set apart as the one who will lead the way, revealing the path to salvation. In the context of the tech world, this is mirrored in the cult of the CEO, the notion that a singular visionary, be it a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk, will guide us through the technological singularity into a utopian future. But once again, this is just a recycled cliché, an empty promise, as these “prophecies” consistently fail to deliver anything substantial.

Finally, there’s the constant appeal to destiny—the idea that our heroes are fated to discover the Stargate, just as our tech moguls are “destined” to shape the future. This notion of destiny, of history unfolding according to some grand, hidden plan, underpins the entire narrative of Silicon Valley’s most hyped ventures. But like the movie, where the supposed “destiny” of the characters ultimately leads them to yet another battle with an ancient power, we’re left with the same tired tropes—promises of an extraordinary future, only to find that the destination is much less than we had imagined.

The very nature of these prophetic tropes is what keeps us hooked. They appeal to our deepest desires for meaning, for escape from our mundane reality, and yet they always disappoint. The tech industry, much like Emmerich’s film, dresses up its promises in extravagant imagery of otherworldly achievements, only to reveal that the truth behind the curtain is far less impressive. The promise of a digital “Stargate” is just another metaphor for the perennial human desire for transcendence, for breakthrough, but as we’ve seen time and again, such promises are rarely fulfilled. Instead, we are left with a shiny new version of the same old system, which ultimately serves the interests of the few, while the rest of us watch as our hopes dissolve into the ether.

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.

Crypto Repurposed

What you really need in crypto is anarchists. Not the market-driven, “freedom for profit” types who have hijacked the term—you need true highly disagreeable anarchists. People who aren’t here to play the same game with new tools. The blockchain wasn’t meant to be a new way to prop up the old system—it was meant to be a repurposing that shatters it, piece by piece. This isn’t about finding a smarter way to drive the ship of state. The vision of crypto needs to evolve beyond just another financial system or a new way to invest; it must become a network of liberation, a decentralized force too wild and unpredictable to be captured by any power structure. If crypto’s potential is to be realized, it needs to embrace the anarchist spirit—not to replicate or reform the old, but to create something utterly new, something that doesn’t play by their rules. Only then can we truly start building the future.

The problem with anarchists is that they really believe what they’re saying. They’re not here for the post or the clout—they’re here because they genuinely want to repurpose the whole damn system. They’re not interested in tweaking or improving what’s already there; they want to repurpose it. And yeah, that’s what makes them highly disagreeable. They’ll argue, they’ll challenge, they’ll disagree with you over every little thing, because they’re not interested in your comfort zone. They’re assholy uncompromising, and that’s probably the most unappealing thing about them. But guess what? That’s exactly why they’re totally necessary. The world doesn’t need more reformists or “free-market anarchists” trying to make the same system work in a slightly shinier way. What it needs are people who can see the game for what it is and are willing to burn down the rules to build something that can’t be controlled. Crypto needs anarchists—not the ones who want to “optimize” capitalism, but the ones who want to bypass it. If crypto is ever going to fulfill its true potential, it has to break free of the comfortable, palatable ideas and bring in the ones willing to challenge everything. These anarchists, for all their contradictions and abrasiveness, are the ones who will turn this revolution from a business opportunity into something real

Forget the tokenomics playbook. Burn it. Tear it apart like a bad fix. This isn’t about utopias or digital dreams; this is about tactics, about putting cracks in the corporate panopticon. About turning every node, every wallet, every transaction into a weapon against the system. An anonymous army moving faster than the boot can stamp.

Because let me tell you something about revolution: it isn’t neat. It doesn’t come with a user manual or “best practices.” It’s chaos spiked with intent, spreading like a virus through the veins of the network. Decentralized and ungovernable, a cryptographic Molotov cocktail hurled into the glass towers of finance.

You want this to work? You need the real subversives, the ones central casting would call when the script calls for chaos. No ties, no rules, no compromises. The ones who’ll strip the blockchain down to its raw, unpolished guts and rewire it into something dangerous, something alive.

So ditch the myths of clean revolutions and “win-win” systems. This isn’t a business opportunity; it’s a knife fight in the back alleys of the digital world. The only rule is this: burn the old scripts and write your own, one block at a time.

You’re supposed to be building a network to occupy the catacombs, not just to dress up the old systems in digital drag. A real network isn’t a simulacrum of what came before; it’s a rejection of it, an evolutionary leap that makes the old systems irrelevant, like fire did to darkness. The point of these technologies isn’t to replicate the ship of state with a sleeker hull or a blockchain-powered rudder—it’s to sink the ship entirely and replace it with something unrecognizable, something uncontrollable.

Because as we’ve seen time and again, with the anarcho-capitalist or your garden variety creator, the moment they sniff power, they’ll leap to take the wheel. They don’t want to dismantle the ship—they want to steer it, to chart a course for their own interests while pretending the deckhands below are free because they got to vote on the color of the sails. They wrap themselves in the language of liberty while salivating over the chance to pilot the very systems they once pretended to oppose.

The network you build has to be more than a shadow of the systems you claim to reject; it has to be something dangerous to those systems, something uncooptable. A hydra, a viral contagion, a decentralized web that grows, shifts, and evolves faster than the ship of state can chart its waters.

But the real work? The real network? That’s underground, beneath the radar, an evolving ecosystem of refusal. You’re not replicating the structures of power; you’re writing them out of the story. Every line of code, every transaction, every whispered key in the dark should be building toward something that can’t be centralized, something that slips through the cracks of their machines.

Forget using blockchain to buy coffee or tokenize loyalty points. That’s just another cage, this time with digital bars. You’re supposed to be creating tools that undo the ship of state entirely, tools that can’t be co-opted or monetized or locked down by suits with a three-point plan.

Because here’s the thing: you let them buy in, and they’ll buy you out. They’ll sell the idea of freedom back to the highest bidder, package the rebellion in shiny wrappers, and call it “innovation.” They’ll pave the road to nowhere and slap a toll booth at the end.

The goal isn’t to drive the ship of state; it’s to repurpose it. To leave behind no blueprint, no wheelhouse, no anchor for the next would-be captain to cling to. And if you can’t do that—if all you’ve got is another way to repackage the same old hierarchy—then you’re not a revolutionary. You’re just another deckhand waiting for your turn at the helm, but you already knew that so I digress.

NPCs

An NPC, the non-player character, the digital ghost in the machine, a ledger of actions, transactions, and transient histories. Each pixelated husk a monument to overwrite—a forgotten thing replaced by consensus, a network-dreamed figment, rewritten without memory. You see them standing there, loop-bound, shuffling through canned dialogue, placeholder souls for a system too busy grinding its gears to notice its reflection.

Look closer, though. The network is the NPC. A blind organism feeding on itself, rewriting itself, erasing the past with the future and calling it progress. You accuse the NPC of being hollow, but what are you? What do you think your carefully curated algorithms of belief and action are, if not the same ledger, endlessly overwritten? Call it free will if it makes you sleep better. Call it choice.

The NPC was born in the pixelated guts of early gaming, a ghost conjured by programmers to haunt their synthetic worlds. It was a functional invention—a placeholder soul trapped in dialogue loops, selling potions, repeating the same three lines until the player moved on. A disposable actor, a stand-in for life, coded to serve the narrative of the “real” protagonist. But what began as a tool of storytelling became a mirror too perfect. The NPC was never just a game mechanic; it was a prophecy.

The Neo-Prussian saw the potential, and they reached in, cold hands pulling the concept from the screen and into their ideological machine. To them, the NPC wasn’t just a character; it was a category, a way to define the masses as programmable, predictable, and beneath notice. They stripped it of its digital origins and weaponized it, turning it into a metaphor for anyone who failed to think outside the loop. It was the ultimate bureaucratic move: classify dissent as automatism, reduce the complexity of human life to a ledger overwritten by the network.

But here’s the irony—the Neo-Prussian didn’t invent the NPC; they became it. Their entire worldview is a script, a recursive loop, a system designed to simulate control while being controlled. The NPC wasn’t theirs to use, but in repurposing it, they revealed their own glitch: the inability to see beyond the game they think they’re playing.

Neo-Prussianism is the ideology of the technocratic strategist, the thinker who mistakes the world for a chessboard and humanity for pawns to be optimized and maneuvered. It’s a worldview born of calculated pragmatism, a cold fusion of Enlightenment rationalism and the military-industrial ethos, but stripped of the soul of either. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t seek power for power’s sake but for the system’s sake—the construction of enduring, self-perpetuating structures designed to outlast the messy unpredictability of human lives.

In this ideology, everything is a machine: society, culture, even biology. The aim is not to improve the machine for the benefit of those who inhabit it but to improve the machine for its own sake—to refine the gears, eliminate inefficiencies, and ensure that it runs, eternally, without interruption. Human individuality becomes a design flaw, an inefficiency to be disciplined into conformity or rendered irrelevant by systems too vast and complex for any single person to comprehend.

Neo-Prussianism is a high-tech fever dream where the world’s architects have forgotten they live in it. Imagine this: a kingdom of spreadsheets and strategy guides, where the architects of order borrow from gaming to describe humanity—not for understanding, but for domination. The NPC—borrowed from code, stripped of context—becomes their grand metaphor for the others, the unthinking masses caught in loops. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t see people; they see procedural generation, looping scripts, and optimization errors to correct.

But let’s not kid ourselves—the Neo-Prussian isn’t some rogue player with a cheat code. They’re no hacker cracking the system. No, they’re the ultimate NPCs themselves, trapped in their own recursive, self-replicating network of thought. They think they’ve leveled up, cracked the game wide open, but all they’ve done is copy and paste ideas: industrial discipline here, game theory there, sprinkle in some blockchain buzzwords, and voilà—a hollowed-out worldview they call “vision.”

This is the Burroughs truth: their system eats itself. Their ledger overwrites its own lines, spitting out the same hierarchies dressed in different skins. Hierarchies borrowed from games. Because games—they can’t resist games. They love games for their structure, for the illusion of control they offer. But games are closed systems, and that’s where the Neo-Prussian feels at home. Open-ended chaos? That terrifies them. They build walls. They draw boundaries. They script the world into a game where they are the designers, the players, and everyone else is an NPC running code they believe they’ve written.

Burroughs would see them for what they are: parasites on the narrative, junkies for control. Every system they build comes with the same hunger: to rewrite the human experience into something legible, something they can predict and own. They’re the ones building the loops, writing the scripts, but their own code runs deeper than they know. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t create. They compile.

And here’s the final twist: they don’t even trust their own game. Beneath the smooth talk of civilization-building and system optimization, they fear collapse. Every fortress they build comes with its own countdown clock, every grand design one power surge away from a meltdown. The NPC is their scapegoat, their fiction, their stand-in for the chaos they can’t control. But deep down, they know—they’re as trapped in the loop as anyone else.

But before you label anyone else an NPC, take a hard look at the code scrolling behind your eyes. Who wrote it? Was it you? Or did you, too, get overwritten by the network?