Month: December 2024

Museum of Unseen Futures

Perhaps that is the final limit of visionaries: they do not conjure the future but instead craft its museum, arranging their dreams as exhibits for an audience yet to exist. Each boulevard, policy, or technology is less a step forward than a carefully placed relic, not built to withstand the future, but to be observed by it.

In this light, progress becomes a kind of nostalgia in disguise. What we call innovation is merely the preservation of ambitions already calcified, objects placed in glass cases before their use has even been tested. The future does not arrive to inhabit these creations; instead, it becomes a curator, interpreting them with a dispassion we can’t imagine. It does not inhabit our blueprints but catalogs them, as archaeologists would catalog a lost civilization.

And perhaps the future doesn’t need our grand ideas, our lofty visions. It requires only the fragments—an obsolete algorithm, a city plan abandoned mid-century, the faded glow of neon lights. The future will see these as artifacts, not failures, but evidence of what we once thought mattered. In this way, we are less architects of progress and more archivists of our dreams, building not for what is to come but for what will be remembered.

And so, we find ourselves locked in this peculiar loop: building with the illusion of forward motion, yet always looking back, like a sculptor chiseling a monument they believe points skyward, only to realize it casts shadows toward the past. The streets we pave and the systems we construct do not guide the future to its next great revelation; instead, they trace the outlines of a map we never intended to draw—a map not of where we are going, but of where we feared to go.

Perhaps this is why every so-called “visionary age” leaves behind ruins that seem less like failures and more like questions. The grand boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris, for instance, may have been laid down to erase the chaos of medieval streets, but they also set the stage for tourists to wander centuries later, marveling at a city so precisely shaped it feels almost unreal, a tableau vivant of its own mythos. Did Haussmann design a future, or did he preemptively curate its memory?

Our era, too, seems intent on such curation. The skyscrapers, the data centers, the self-driving cars—they do not stand as symbols of arrival but as placeholders for the imagination of those who will come after us. A future historian might walk through the bones of our cities, scrolling through archives of our digital lives, and marvel not at how we succeeded, but at how deeply we believed in our own myths of progress. The museum we are building is not only one of artifacts but of faith—faith that what we construct will matter beyond its use, that our fleeting gestures will be read as purpose rather than folly.

Perhaps the future does not need us to dream at all. Perhaps it simply waits, as all futures do, for the noise of our ambitions to settle into silence, for our visions to become shadows and our monuments to crumble into context. For the future, it seems, is less a destination than an endless act of reinterpretation—a place where even our boldest ideas will be reduced to artifacts, our most urgent designs folded into the quiet inevitability of the past.

In this light, it becomes clear that we are not merely building the future; we are rehearsing for its reflection. Each construction, whether a gleaming tower or a digital network, becomes a note in a symphony that will never play, a sketch of a dream that will never be fully realized. We, the architects of this illusory future, build knowing that our plans will inevitably fall out of tune with the passage of time. Yet, we persist, driven by the hope that something—anything—of our effort will remain, intact and meaningful, for the generations that follow.

But the future is not a clean slate awaiting our imprint. It is, instead, a vast and shifting landscape where our intentions are like seeds scattered into the wind, some taking root, others lost to the soil. We cannot predict which fragments of our world will endure or which will be forgotten. Perhaps it is the mundane, the overlooked, that will be carried forward—the forgotten idea of a bicycle built for two, a short story that never found an audience, the flawed design of a failed bridge. The future, in its quiet way, might find meaning in what we discarded, the things we didn’t deem worthy of preserving, and, in that act of rediscovery, craft its own narrative.

For the future is not so much a destination as a lens through which our present is reimagined. It doesn’t need to honor our grandest visions. It only needs to sift through our fragments, our detritus, and find meaning in the things we didn’t know we left behind. What we consider progress, the breakthroughs that shape our cities and technologies, might become mere footnotes in the future’s story, overshadowed by the everyday acts of creation and destruction that we, too caught up in the present, failed to recognize.

The future, then, is not the repository of our dreams, but a silent witness to them. It is the slow unfolding of all the things we never had the patience to understand—the unintended consequences of our designs, the echoes of our misplaced certainties. And perhaps, in this way, we are not visionaries at all, but caretakers of a world that will someday be nothing more than a museum of what might have been. We build not for a future we will see, but for a future that will come only to look at the traces of our presence, wondering who we were and why we believed so fervently in the paths we laid before us.

Parasocial Tapeworm Blues

The parasite doesn’t knock. It doesn’t ask permission. It slides in smooth, coiling itself around your attention, threading through the soft tissue of your mind. You invited it, didn’t you? A friendly voice in the void, promising connection, promising meaning. But now it’s here, lodged deep, humming its endless tune.

This is the Parasocial Tapeworm Blues—a song without melody, a conversation without reciprocity. The voice keeps talking, spinning tales, spinning webs. You nod along, but the nod is a reflex. The intimacy isn’t real; it’s manufactured. A machine, dressed in the warmth of human tone, whispering as it siphons off the quiet spaces of your life.

You thought you were choosing what to listen to. But the truth is, the tapeworm chooses you. It’s a hitchhiker, a stowaway. It rides in on something you thought you wanted. A piece of undercooked meat, a sip of tainted water, a voice that promises meaning or companionship. You open the door without knowing it’s there. You’re not the host it was looking for, but you’ll do.

That’s how the parasocial tapeworm works, too. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t have to. You clicked the link, hit play, let the voice in. You thought it was your choice, but the system was built to funnel you there, to make you part of its ecosystem. Once it’s in, it thrives—feeding on your time, your attention, your need to feel connected.

The tapeworm doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to be there, waiting, until the conditions are right. And once it’s inside, it grows. It grows because you feed it. Because you can’t stop.

I stopped listening to podcasts in 2019. By the pandemic in 2020, they had metastasized into something unbearable—a cacophony of voices trying to sell you themselves, their brand, their grind. Every conversation an elevator pitch, every joke a lead magnet. It wasn’t storytelling anymore; it was content.

The pandemic only accelerated the rot. Trapped indoors, people reached for their microphones like lifelines, turning isolation into an audio commodity. The intimacy was gone—replaced by the cloying stench of desperation and hustle. By 2020, podcasting wasn’t just background noise; it was an invasive species, choking out every moment of silence with its need to be heard.

Kill it with fire? Too late. The fire spread. It was already everywhere, in your playlists, in your inbox, in your meetings masquerading as brainstorms. A pandemic of its own, but slower, stickier. The kind you don’t even notice until you’re drowning in it.

2025. The Year of the Podcaster King. A landscape shattered into a thousand voices, all speaking in the same strange dialect of optimization and dominance. In the high towers of venture capital, the ritual unfolds: microphones crackle, jargon flows, and the corporate priests proclaim their digital liturgy. The airwaves are thick with the chant of disruption and expertise—spirals of sound twisting into the algorithmic void.

Pierce whispers a name for it: The Nefarious Business-to-Business Podcast. A subtle predator, slinking between the margins of commerce and conversation.

It spreads like fire through a toothpick forest, accelerant ignited in the echo chamber of 2024. Rogan was the beacon, the cult object, the totem. But 2025 turns the mirror inward. The marketeer stares into the glass and whispers, “Why not me?”

Your boss sharpens his voice, polishes his image. The podcast emerges. The Substack stirs. What once was marketing mutates into performance, a slick façade masquerading as a dialogue. You’re not a participant; you’re a captive audience. The boardroom blurs into an RSS feed, the meeting dissolves into a simulacrum of insight.

Solicitation rebranded as intimacy. All it takes is a microphone and a broadband connection. But remember this: the voice on the other end is never speaking to you. It’s speaking through you.

Keep exploring, yes. Keep pulling the threads from the synthetic fabric. It’s not a voice, not a person, not even a message anymore. It’s a machine—voice-machine, content-machine, self-machine—plugged into the great circuit of production and desire. Your boss doesn’t just launch a podcast; your boss becomes the podcast. A strange becoming: host, guest, audience, and algorithm, all folding into a single process.

What does it mean? It means nothing. It means everything. It means a new line of flight, carved out by the sharp edge of monetized soundwaves. The podcast is not a product but a function. It doesn’t sell; it territorializes. It maps the smooth space of thought into a gridded landscape of engagement metrics. The voice isn’t speaking—it’s vibrating, oscillating, performing a coded transaction in the auditory marketplace.

A new form of capture: a meeting in disguise, yes. A deal without a handshake. A relationship without intimacy. What’s solicited isn’t business but attention, the raw material of the 2025 economy. The machine doesn’t care if you listen; it only cares that you’re counted.

And so you explore. You plug into the network, trace the circuits, watch the flows. A toothpick factory on fire isn’t chaos—it’s production at its most extreme, its most beautiful. The blaze consumes everything, leaving behind nothing but lines: lines of profit, lines of flight, lines of code.

Keep exploring what it means. Keep breaking it open. Keep feeding the machine.

No other medium was ever so pliable, so willing to stretch and contort itself, merging intimacy with business in a way that feels natural, almost inevitable. Podcasting is the microplastics of communication: invisible, invasive, ubiquitous. It seeps into every crevice of daily life, unnoticed but profoundly altering the ecosystem.

The voice, disembodied, floats in your ears, whispering secrets wrapped in branding, vulnerability packaged as leverage. It disarms you with its warmth, its authenticity, while the algorithm measures every second of your attention. You aren’t consuming the podcast—it’s consuming you.

The intimacy is synthetic, but the effects are real. Tiny fragments of narrative, pitch, and persona lodge themselves in your consciousness. They accumulate, imperceptibly shaping the flow of thought and desire. The voice becomes part of you, just as the microplastics become part of the ocean: permanent, omnipresent, and impossible to extract.

Podcasting doesn’t just merge intimacy and business—it dissolves the boundary between them, leaving behind a shimmering residue of monetized connection. A new ecology of persuasion, delicate and deadly, and we’re all swimming in it.

Like a medium past a certain point, podcasting becomes an invasive species. It crawls, it creeps, it colonizes. A rhizome spreading across the digital landscape, burrowing into the fabric of life. You thought you could contain it—keep it in the commute, in the gym, in the background. But it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t want to stop. It grows without limits, without boundaries, devouring silence and solitude, turning every empty space into an opportunity for engagement.

A voice slithers through the cracks: smooth, familiar, insistent. It whispers intimacy while mapping new territories for capital. The podcast doesn’t just invade—it deterritorializes, rips apart the stable spaces of leisure, conversation, and thought. What was once personal becomes public, what was once shared becomes sold. It doesn’t stop at the edge of your headphones. It spills over, leaking into meetings, ads, workflows, dreams. A medium transformed into a machine—smooth, efficient, and utterly inhuman.

But this is what mediums do. They metastasize. They burrow and multiply until they break the ecosystem that birthed them. The podcast isn’t just a species—it’s a virus. And the host? The host is always you.

You should look at podcasting the same way you look at cigarettes—only without the good stuff. No nicotine rush, no rebel glamour, no flick of the lighter in the dark. Just the endless drag of someone else’s voice, curling like cheap smoke into your brain. You don’t listen; you inhale. And it leaves a residue, a coating of secondhand ambition, synthetic intimacy, and parasocial fumes.

The podcast doesn’t soothe; it occupies. A low-frequency buzz that dulls the edges of thought, lulls you into a state of passive consumption. The ritual is the same: one more episode, one more drag, one more hour you’ll never get back. You keep listening because stopping feels worse, like stepping outside and realizing the air out here is sharp and cold and silent.

But where cigarettes had a mythos—danger, defiance, cool—the podcast is stripped bare. It’s a delivery system without a thrill. Just the endless hum of monetized content, winding through your synapses like stale vapor. A habit, yes, but not even a satisfying one.

On the Beach

The beach is the edge of the known world. It’s where land meets water, where certainty dissolves into chaos, and where you’re left barefoot, staring at the horizon, wondering if the tide is coming in or going out. It’s both arrival and departure, the place where Polynesians shoved off and where shipwreck survivors wash ashore.

To some, the beach is a playground—a carefree expanse of sun and surf. To others, it’s a graveyard of dreams, where every wave brings driftwood and debris. But for the surfer, the beach is something else entirely: a paradoxical middle ground. You launch from here, chasing the ephemeral perfection of a wave, but you always end up back here, wet, bruised, and out of breath.

The beach is life’s reset button. You can’t build on it—sand shifts, dunes erode—but you can start over from it. It’s the cosmic waiting room, the launchpad, the landing zone. It’s where the waves rise and fall, and where you, humble human, decide whether to paddle out again or just sit on the sand and watch the horizon.

This post is about the beach—not as a physical place, but as a state of being. It’s about what happens when you want something, chase it, and either don’t get it or, worse, do. It’s about the moments when you’re not chasing at all, when the waves come to you and you ride them, effortlessly, until they throw you back onto the beach.

Because no matter how far you paddle or how long you ride, you’ll always end up here. On the beach.

Desire

Desire is a signal, a wave-form interaction between the observer and the observed. The act of wanting collapses the wave into a particle—reality becomes smaller, narrower, and bound by your need to control it. By contrast, being wanted expands the field of possibilities. It’s like tuning into a signal you didn’t realize you were broadcasting, the universe catching your vibe and sending it back amplified, often in unexpected ways.

The nastiness you feel when chasing something? That’s the Chapel Perilous effect: the more you push, the more reality warps, reflecting your anxiety, expectations, and attachments. But when you let go and allow others to pursue you, you’re aligning with the wave, surfing it instead of paddling against it. This creates a feedback loop—mutual reinforcement between what they want from you and what you can authentically give.

We might also point out that the drop back on the beach isn’t failure—it’s the ebb of the wave. It’s necessary to rest, reassess, and allow the cycle to reset. The trick, if there is one, is to recognize that the beach isn’t an endpoint but part of the same cosmic rhythm. Financially, creatively, and existentially, the beach is just another place to start paddling out again.

To reconcile the beach—those stretches where no wave seems to come and the universe feels indifferent—with the paradox of collapsing wave functions, we might draw on a synthesis of quantum metaphors, existential humor, and pragmatic mysticism. The beach is where the illusion of progress evaporates, and you’re left with the humbling realization that no amount of paddling will summon a wave. Yet, paradoxically, the beach is also the stage where possibilities are silently building, waiting to materialize. The trick is not to fight the stillness but to understand it as a necessary part of the cosmic rhythm. Here’s how it could work:

1. The Beach as the Quantum Field:

In quantum terms, the beach represents a superposition of states—a liminal zone where the rules of ordinary reality seem to falter. Everything and nothing are equally possible, and yet neither feels within reach. The waves may seem absent, but absence itself is an illusion. The waves exist as potentialities, suspended in a quantum flux, waiting for the right conditions to manifest. But here’s the kicker: the act of observing the beach changes it. The harder you stare at the empty horizon, the more stubbornly the waves refuse to appear.

To reconcile this maddening paradox, you have to abandon the illusion of control. Stop fixating on the absence of the wave and start noticing the intricate web of possibilities woven into the stillness. It’s not just the empty beach; it’s the whisper of the wind shifting grains of sand, the faint glimmer of a wave cresting far out at sea, the subtle hum of something just beyond your perception.

Like a quantum particle, your relationship to the beach isn’t fixed—it’s relational. The field of potentiality responds not to brute force but to your willingness to participate in its dance. Wanting too hard collapses the wave function into a singular, disappointing reality: no wave, no progress, no joy. But stepping back, loosening your grip on desire, expands the field again. Suddenly, the wave begins to emerge—not because you forced it, but because you stopped demanding it.

We might say this is the essence of guerrilla ontology. The beach isn’t a barren wasteland; it’s a playground of mutable realities, an infinite canvas where your expectations and perceptions co-create the outcome. The more you fixate on “no waves,” the more you lock yourself into a dull and empty paradigm. But shift your focus to the subtle possibilities—the distant swell, the shimmer of light on water, the soft rhythm of tides—and you start to surf the quantum field itself.

In short, the beach isn’t a problem to solve; it’s an opportunity to rewire your relationship with reality. You don’t conquer the beach—you harmonize with it, dancing with the potential of the waves until they finally arrive. And when they do, you paddle out—not as a conqueror but as a partner in the eternal, cosmic rhythm of ebb and flow.

2. Laughing at the Absurd:

Existential humor transforms the beach from a barren wasteland of frustration into a carnival of cosmic irony, a place where the universe seems to wink at your confusion. Here’s the thing: the waves don’t follow your schedule. They arrive unbidden when you’re distracted, indifferent, or daydreaming—and vanish the moment you paddle out, ready to ride. It’s not malice; it’s comedy. The universe, in its infinite absurdity, loves a punchline.

Recognizing this doesn’t solve the problem of the absent waves. You can’t force the tide to rise with a well-timed joke or a philosophical epiphany. But it does shift your perspective. You’re no longer a hapless victim stranded on the shore, shaking your fists at the sea. Instead, you become a co-conspirator in the cosmic joke, someone who sees the humor in the futility of wanting and the strange beauty of simply being.

The beach, after all, is absurd: a liminal space where water meets land, where permanence dissolves into transience. Your desires—whether for a perfect wave, a perfect moment, or a perfect life—become laughably small against the vast, shifting horizon. And yet, it’s precisely this absurdity that makes the beach bearable. The futility of control becomes a kind of freedom. If you can’t dictate the waves, why not sit back and enjoy the ever-changing dance of light on water, the absurdly intricate patterns of sand underfoot, or the sheer ridiculousness of it all?

In embracing the absurd, you find a new role—not as a frustrated spectator but as a playful participant. The beach is no longer a dead zone of waiting but a surreal playground where you and the universe share an inside joke. The beach isn’t a problem; it’s a cosmic jest. Once you get the joke, the shore stops being a place of despair and becomes something far more interesting: a strange, liminal, endlessly entertaining stage for the theater of existence.

3. Mysticism in the Mundane:

Pragmatic mysticism reveals that the beach isn’t a purgatory of stillness but a living, breathing lesson in presence. It asks you to let go of your fixation on the wave—the mythical “something” you think you need to be whole—and instead tune into the infinite complexity of what is. The grains of sand beneath your feet, each a tiny fragment of eternity; the cries of seabirds that stretch across the wind like a melody written by the universe; the endless horizon that dissolves all notions of boundaries—these aren’t just background noise. They are the beach speaking to you, inviting you to participate in its subtle dance.

To wait for the wave is to misunderstand the beach entirely. The wave isn’t the goal—it’s a punctuation mark in a larger story. The beach, with its stillness and its rhythm, teaches you that life happens not in the moments you’re chasing but in the spaces in between. By immersing yourself in its quiet presence, you begin to resonate with its energy. You notice the texture of time, the ebb and flow of possibility, and the whispering hints of movement far out at sea.

And then, without effort or expectation, something extraordinary happens: you become ready. Not in the sense of preparation but in a deeper, more intuitive way. You’ve aligned yourself with the beach, and now, when the wave arrives, you recognize it—not as the culmination of your waiting but as a natural extension of your being.

4. Letting Go to Catch the Wave:

Here’s the ultimate paradox: the more you desire a wave, the more elusive it becomes. The very act of wanting, of clinging to a specific outcome, collapses the vast, infinite field of possibilities into a narrow, rigid vector, directing all your energy toward a singular, often unattainable goal. The universe, it seems, is less concerned with your desires than with the natural rhythms it already has in motion. The harder you reach for that wave, the more you end up gripping the air—disappointment is your reward.

But, and here’s where the magic happens, when you release the need to control—when you let go of the relentless grasp for the wave—you begin to expand the very field you once tried to dominate. In this surrender, you’re not giving up; you’re opening up. You’re making room for the unexpected, for the wave that wasn’t yours to catch but was always there, just waiting for you to stop swimming against the current.

Trusting the process doesn’t mean passivity. It means aligning yourself with the flow of life, embracing its uncertainties, and letting the rhythm of the tides guide you. In that release, the wave comes not because you forced it into existence, but because you’ve become attuned to the natural order of things. You’ve stopped clinging to the future, and in doing so, you’ve started to exist fully in the present—where the wave, when it arrives, is a gift, not a goal.

5. Recognizing the beach as Preparation:

The beach years aren’t a void; they’re the quantum superposition of potential outcomes, a period of latent possibilities where every path is simultaneously open and closed, depending on how you choose to engage with it. Just because no observable wave appears on the horizon doesn’t mean the system is inert. In fact, it’s likely more active than ever. These are the moments of recalibration, the quiet but vital intervals in between the waves, where unseen forces are at work beneath the surface. It’s a time when everything you could possibly be—every version of yourself—exists in parallel, waiting for the right conditions to emerge.

We might liken this to Schrödinger’s cat: the beach, like the box, holds the potential for multiple outcomes. While you wait in the stillness, your potential selves are alive and fluctuating, coexisting in a state of uncertainty. You are not merely waiting—you are becoming, in ways that are hidden from immediate view. Some of these selves are unwanted, some are the ones you’ve been chasing, some are the version of you that will emerge victorious, while others are the disappointed, disillusioned self. But they all exist in that quantum state, unmanifested, yet real. The art of the beach years is not about forcing one self to emerge but allowing all of them to coexist in a state of harmony, trusting that the next phase will reveal the right version of you at the right time.

The trick is to learn from the desert. In the harsh landscape where the waves seem distant and unreachable, you don’t merely survive—you adapt. You dig for water, you build shade, you practice patience. The desert is not a barren place; it’s one teeming with unseen energy, a reservoir of potential just waiting for the right moment to burst into life. Similarly, the beach years are not static; they are filled with the slow, steady buildup of energy, gathering in the quiet, preparing for the next wave. What seems like stillness is, in reality, a time of cultivation, of groundwork being laid beneath the surface. It’s in this space that you can gather your strength, refine your focus, and prepare yourself to surf the next wave when it finally arrives.

6. Shifting from Wanting to Playing:

When you want something, you collapse an infinite number of possibilities into one narrow vector of desire, focusing all your energy on that single point. This creates pressure—a taut string pulled tight with expectation. The more you pull, the more rigid and unyielding the system becomes, and the less likely the wave you’re chasing will manifest. Desire, in this sense, acts like a force that distorts the fabric of potential outcomes, narrowing your field of vision to the point of desperation.

When you play with desire—when you approach it with curiosity rather than desperation—you reintroduce freedom and uncertainty into the system. You step out of the pressure cooker and back into a more fluid, playful space where things are less rigid and more open to exploration. Life, Wilson would say, is a game, and the best way to play it is with a sense of humor and openness. Desire doesn’t need to be a heavy anchor pulling you towards an idealized future; it can become a thread you gently tug, a whimsy you entertain rather than a goal you strive for.

In this reframed approach, wanting becomes less about grasping and more about exploring. Instead of obsessing over catching the perfect wave, you start to see the act of waiting itself as part of the game. You move from being a desperate surfer, fixated on riding the crest of that elusive wave, to a beachcomber—a seeker, a wanderer. You begin to appreciate the process of looking, of finding, and even of losing. The treasure isn’t the wave itself, but the strange, serendipitous beauty of the shoreline you encounter along the way.

The beachcomber doesn’t expect the ocean to deliver anything specific. Instead, they walk the shore with an open mind, ready to discover whatever the tide brings in—shells, stones, sea glass, or even the occasional unexpected treasure. There’s no pressure. There’s no narrow expectation. The freedom comes from the realization that everything is already here, that every moment, whether it brings a wave or not, has its own unique value. And when the wave does come, it’s not something to catch—it’s something to play with. You move with it, ride it, and then let it pass, ready for the next one, or content to just keep walking the shore.

The game is less about winning or losing and more about engaging in the experience itself. The point isn’t to chase the wave to the exclusion of everything else—it’s to explore the entire beach, to let the uncertainty of the tide guide you, to treat every wave, every moment of stillness, as part of the larger, cosmic play. In doing so, desire becomes a playful exploration, and life itself becomes a dance of possibilities rather than a race to fulfill a single, narrow wish.

7. The Cosmic Joke of Getting What You Want:

Getting what you want can be the ultimate punchline, a cosmic joke delivered with impeccable timing and a wicked sense of humor. Imagine inheriting a castle, only to find it haunted by restless spirits, secret passageways, and an array of bizarre and unwanted responsibilities. What seemed like the culmination of your deepest desires turns out to be a sprawling, haunted mess of externalities you never even considered. This is the universe’s punchline, a twist that comes when you least expect it—because, the universe is always playing a joke on you, and it’s usually one you didn’t see coming.

The thing is, we tend to overlook this universal humor in our quest for control. We pin all our hopes on a specific outcome, assuming that getting what we want will bring the satisfaction and clarity we’ve been seeking. But in the quantum play of existence, once you collapse all the possibilities into a single, desired outcome, you’ve unwittingly set yourself up for the punchline: the outcome, when it arrives, is rarely as neat and perfect as you imagined. Instead, it’s a messy, complicated, and often paradoxical result that contains as much disappointment as it does reward. The castle you wanted is filled with ghosts and creaky floors—literally and metaphorically.

So, what’s the solution to this perpetual cosmic prank? Maybe what the Zen masters call beginner’s mind. This is the mindset of being open, flexible, and curious about the world around you, without the rigid expectations that come from preconceived desires. It’s about holding outcomes lightly, like a ball tossed gently into the air, with the understanding that you don’t have ultimate control over where it lands. By avoiding attachment to any particular outcome, you allow for the full range of possibilities to remain open.

Beginner’s mind doesn’t mean abandoning desire or giving up on goals. It means approaching life with the understanding that nothing is guaranteed, that the universe is fluid and unpredictable, and that every moment is just as likely to surprise you as it is to meet your expectations. When the joke lands—when you get the castle and discover it’s haunted—you won’t be crushed by the weight of attachment. Instead, you’ll be able to laugh at the absurdity of it all, to see the ghosts for what they are: part of the game, part of the cosmic rhythm. You’re no longer clinging desperately to an outcome; you’re embracing the journey, with all its messiness, unpredictability, and humor.

When the joke inevitably lands—and it will, because life, in its infinite complexity, is always telling jokes—you’ll be ready to let go. Not because you’ve given up, but because you’ve learned to embrace the uncertainty and absurdity of it all. You’ve learned that getting what you want doesn’t solve everything. Instead, it becomes just another part of the ongoing comedy of existence, a punchline you can laugh at, because you understand that the joke was never really about you in the first place. It’s about playing the game, rolling with the unexpected, and finding joy in the unpredictable turns life takes.

8. Embracing Cycles, Not Permanence:

The key to navigating both the desert and the wave lies in understanding impermanence. Nothing is permanent—not the wave that crashes with euphoric power, nor the desert that stretches endlessly in its dry, silent expanse. The wave always rises and falls; the desert always looms and recedes. This is the fundamental dance of existence, the ebb and flow that we must learn to move with, rather than fight against. We would likely frame this as a process of recognizing the patterns of life, rather than fixating on fixed outcomes or trying to control the ever-changing landscape.

In the quantum sense, it’s not about controlling the wave or the desert, but about understanding the probabilities that govern them. The wave’s rise is inevitable, but so is its fall. The desert’s emptiness may feel permanent, but it, too, will recede in time, perhaps to give way to new growth, new possibilities. The universe, like the wave and the desert, doesn’t offer static outcomes, but a series of unfolding patterns. Recognizing these patterns—and understanding that you are part of them—shifts the perspective from struggle to adaptation.

We might encourage you to shift focus from outcomes to patterns, from a fixed desire to the flow of the process. Instead of obsessing over whether the wave will come or whether the desert will ever end, the secret lies in surrendering to the rhythms of existence. You learn to ride the wave when it arrives, and you learn to sit still in the desert, aware that its emptiness is simply a precursor to something new. You don’t waste energy trying to force an outcome, because you understand that both the wave and the desert are just phases in a larger cycle.

By shifting your focus from individual, static outcomes to the dynamic, ever-shifting patterns of life, you open yourself up to the full range of experiences—both the highs of the wave and the lessons of the desert. The desert teaches patience, resilience, and awareness. The wave teaches joy, exhilaration, and release. But both are fleeting, and both are part of the same rhythm. Your role is not to control them, but to adapt, to dance in tune with their rise and fall.

Impermanence, then, is not something to fear or resist. It is the very fabric of existence. By embracing it, you shift your perspective from one of struggle and desire to one of flow and adaptation. When you stop trying to control the outcome, when you stop seeing the wave or the desert as obstacles, you begin to see them as teachers. And in this understanding, you find freedom—not in achieving fixed results, but in moving with the rhythm of the patterns that shape your life.

In short, the desert and the particle collapse are both necessary parts of the cosmic game. Reconciliation comes when you stop seeing them as opposites and start viewing them as complementary aspects of the same playful, maddening, unpredictable reality.

9. Riding the Wave of Being Wanted:

Here’s the counterpoint: when you’re wanted, the wave appears effortlessly, and you ride it with joy. In this moment, the universe seems to conspire in your favor. You don’t need to chase or force it; it simply arrives, like a perfect wave cresting on a calm, welcoming sea. The difference here is resonance. When you align your own energy with the universe’s natural flow, everything clicks into place. You no longer need to collapse possibilities into a narrow vector of desire, because you’re harmonizing with the broader field of potentiality.

The wave materializes naturally, as though it was always meant to arrive at this moment, at this precise spot. This is where Wilson’s ideas about synchronicity and resonance come into play. When you’re in tune with the rhythm of the universe, the very act of being in tune creates the conditions for the wave to manifest. Instead of exerting effort or focus on wanting the wave, you stay open, playful, and receptive. The universe isn’t something to control; it’s something to flow with. You don’t chase the wave; you let it come to you, trusting that when the time is right, it will materialize effortlessly.

This isn’t a passive stance, though. Being receptive doesn’t mean you’re sitting idly by, waiting for something to fall into your lap. It’s more about engaging with the process—about tuning your own energy to the frequency of the wave rather than trying to force its arrival. When you stop grasping, the wave no longer feels like a distant and elusive goal. It becomes something you simply meet, something that arrives as part of the natural unfolding of things. There’s a subtle difference here between effort and ease. The moment you stop trying to control the wave, you stop collapsing the field of possibility into one narrow option. You become receptive to the full spectrum of outcomes, and in that openness, the wave materializes without the need for force.

It’s as if the wave itself has been waiting for you to align with it, and now that you’ve found that resonance, it’s there, effortlessly, for you to ride. I this way, the wave becomes a metaphor not for desire and struggle, but for presence and attunement. You’re not grasping for it, not forcing it into existence, but rather allowing it to arise naturally from the interplay between your energy and the universe’s flow. The wave arrives because you’ve created the conditions for it, and you ride it not as a conqueror but as a collaborator, at ease with the flow of the moment.

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

Faking it Forward

The Gamification of Truth Metrics

The brutal irony of the cryptosphere: as we fight to identify signal amidst the noise, every innovation we cling to as a “truth metric” inevitably collapses under the weight of its own gamification. The early metrics were simple: active wallets, social engagement, total value locked. But anyone who’s spent more than a week in this space knows these numbers can be faked at scale—puppet strings pulled by bots and backroom liquidity loops.

So we pivoted. We sought refuge in “developer activity,” the one thing that seemed immune to manipulation. Actual humans, building actual things. Commits on GitHub. Pull requests. Documentation updates. The grinding hum of creativity and engineering that fuels the future.

But then AI got good. Not just good—transformative. A solo coder with an AI co-pilot can now outpace entire teams. AI agents commit code autonomously, run tests, generate documentation. The line between “real dev community” and synthetic activity blurs. One person with the right stack becomes indistinguishable from an entire team of flesh-and-blood developers. And suddenly, “developer activity” turns into just another metric to game.

The truth fractures. AI is the ultimate shape-shifter, able to conjure ecosystems out of thin air. You want a vibrant builder community? A stack of virtual agents can spin one up in hours, complete with commits, discussions, and the illusion of innovation. What once felt like a heartbeat becomes static.

GitHub turns into theater. Discord channels echo with bots chatting bots. The idea of “proof of work” in development becomes laughable. The metrics we clung to as bastions of authenticity—first wallets, then TVL, now developer activity—are just the latest battlegrounds in an arms race we’re losing.

So where do we go from here? How do we evaluate protocols in a world where the very act of building can be simulated to perfection? When every signal is noise, when every human endeavor has a machine mirror, what truth is left to measure?

The real revelation isn’t that crypto metrics are gamified. It’s that the gamification itself is the product. The protocols, the tech, the communities—all of it is just theater, a sprawling stage set for one moment: the valuation. The IPO. The token launch. The liquidity event. Everything else—active wallets, TVL, developer activity—is just window dressing, scaffolding around the one thing that matters: the runway to the payout.

There is no other product. No utility. No killer app. The entire apparatus is a simulation, meticulously engineered not to solve problems or change the world, but to sustain the illusion of value until the moment it can be crystallized into dollars. Crypto isn’t a revolution; it’s a performance art piece about belief.

And the thing about belief? It’s cheap to manufacture. Fake wallets, fake users, fake code repositories—it doesn’t matter. As long as it feeds into the narrative, as long as it creates the illusion of momentum, the runway stays intact. The game is about perception, not reality.

AI just accelerates this process. It doesn’t break the system; it perfects it. An AI coder can spin up 10,000 lines of meaningless commits in an afternoon. AI influencers can churn out endless social proof. AI-generated “communities” can fill the Discords and Reddits, providing the illusion of grassroots support. But none of that changes the fundamental truth: the runway doesn’t have to lead to anything real. It just has to lead to the valuation.

The brilliance—and the tragedy—is that this isn’t a bug. It’s the system working as designed. Investors don’t want impact; they want exits. Founders don’t want products; they want liquidity events. Everything else—utility, community, innovation—is just noise, a convenient cover for the relentless churn of the valuation engine.

In this game, truth doesn’t matter. The only metric that counts is belief, and belief can be manufactured. What AI really threatens isn’t the system itself, but the thin veneer of plausibility it rests on. When the theater becomes too obvious, when the simulation is too perfect, even the believers might start to ask: what’s really at the end of the runway?

But maybe it doesn’t matter. The point was never to land. The point was to build a longer runway, a shinier stage, a better illusion—just long enough to cash out. After all, there is no other product. There never was.

This is a great disservice to 10% of devs and engineers that probably have a very good idea of where things should be going tech-wise. So, hard to reconcile both and that’s the paradox. Beneath the theater, there’s always that 10%—the devs and engineers who see the real potential, who actually care about building something meaningful. They’re the ones who keep the dream alive, even as the system pushes everything toward the valuation moment. For them, the runway isn’t just a means to an end; it’s a path toward something genuinely transformative.

These are the builders who can look past the noise and see where the tech should go. They’re not here to inflate metrics or play games. They’re here to solve problems, push boundaries, and lay the groundwork for what could be a new paradigm. But how do they reconcile their vision with a system that rewards illusion over substance?

That’s the tragedy of it. The game isn’t built for them. The incentives don’t align with their values. For every breakthrough they achieve, there’s a dozen teams spinning up vaporware, hijacking attention and capital with nothing but smoke and mirrors. The signal gets drowned in noise, and the true innovators are forced to compete on a playing field tilted toward the loudest, flashiest players—not the ones doing the hard, slow work of building something real.

AI makes this even harder. It amplifies the noise, making it easier than ever to fake progress, manufacture communities, and simulate innovation. For the 10% who do have a vision, it’s like trying to build a cathedral in the middle of a carnival. The work is real, but the environment is chaos.

The reconciliation, if it exists, lies in rethinking the incentives. How do we create a system that rewards long-term impact instead of short-term optics? How do we build metrics that prioritize outcomes over activity? And how do we protect the builders—the real ones—from being drowned out by the noise?

It’s not an easy fix, because it requires a fundamental shift in the culture of the space. But maybe the 10% are the ones who can make it happen. They’ve always been the ones who could see through the illusion, who understood that the tech wasn’t just a game, but a tool for something greater. The question is whether they can reshape the system before it reshapes them.

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.

Ben-Hur

The brilliance of Ben-Hur, and its simultaneous duplicity, lies in its quiet realignment of cultural identity for the sake of narrative expedience. Judah Ben-Hur, ostensibly a Middle Eastern Jew in the Roman province of Judea, is unmistakably reframed as an Ashkenazi Jew—a Jewishness that is Western, assimilable, and, crucially, palatable to mid-century American audiences. Charlton Heston’s towering Nordic features and clipped diction render Judah less a Judean patriot and more a prototypical American man of destiny, stranded inconveniently in an antique world. This is not an accident; it is a choice—a calculated sleight of hand.

The adoption of the name Arius is no small symbolic act. By being subsumed into the Roman patrician elite, Judah casts off his provincial origins like a beggar discarding his rags. To Rome, he ceases to be an outsider—a Jew—and becomes instead a version of himself that the empire can tolerate: a cosmopolitan inheritor of power. He is a Jew only in so far as it facilitates the story’s moral arc, his identity purified of the inconvenient specifics of Judean culture. This transformation reflects not just Hollywood’s discomfort with depicting the true otherness of ancient Jewishness, but its preference for Westernizing its heroes to make their triumphs universal.

This is the dog whistle of identity in Ben-Hur. Judah’s ascension within Rome is not just a personal victory but a conversion—a metaphysical endorsement of Rome’s civilizing mission. The implicit message: true Jewishness is only acceptable when it ceases to be distinct, when it is grafted onto the trunk of Western culture. Judah’s final absolution, kneeling at the cross, is less about the salvation of a man than the quiet erasure of his heritage. He is no longer a Jew, nor even a Roman; he becomes something more familiar to the 1959 audience: a Christian.

Gore Vidal was brought in to revise the Ben-Hur screenplay, and his sharp wit and skill with innuendo elevated the material far beyond the typical Roman spectacle. Vidal made implicit themes explicit, particularly in the dynamic between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala. He deliberately framed their relationship as one with a deeply intimate past, transforming Messala’s betrayal into a personal and emotional rupture rather than a purely political one. This subtext added a layer of sophistication and complexity, turning Ben-Hur into a reflection on identity, power, and forbidden desire, rather than just another grandiose biblical epic.

At the same time, Vidal infused the film with his own critique of hypocrisy. The Rome of Ben-Hur, sanitized for mid-century consumption, is a far cry from the violent, chaotic empire Vidal explored in his own writings. Yet it unmistakably mirrors Eisenhower’s America: imperial yet righteous, brutal yet self-proclaimed benevolent. Judah’s journey embodies the ideological transformation Hollywood often demanded of its Jewish characters—placing them at the center of grand narratives of empire while simultaneously stripping their identity of its troubling particularities.

The gradation of Jewishness in Hollywood epics becomes a dance of acceptable assimilation. Middle Eastern Jews—unruly, provincial, overtly tied to the land—are rarely represented except as foils or obstacles. Ashkenazi Jews, with their European lineage, occupy the middle ground: able to transcend their origins, provided they shed their specificities. And at the pinnacle is the Christianized Jew, who triumphs by stepping fully into the universalizing embrace of Western civilization. Judah Ben-Hur’s story, then, is not just one of revenge and redemption, but of quiet cultural conquest.

Hollywood, we might note with a sardonic smirk, has always preferred its Jews Europeanized and its saviors Romanized. In this way, the cinema becomes less a temple of storytelling and more a house of mirrors, endlessly reflecting the anxieties of its creators.

HOUSE OF MIRRORS

In Ben-Hur, as in so many epics of the era, we are confronted not with history but with myth—specifically, the myth of America as a reluctant, benevolent superpower. By 1959, the United States was no longer an isolationist republic but the torchbearer of Western civilization, standing vigilant against the twin specters of godless Communism and decolonial unrest. And yet, the uneasy conscience of empire-making seeped into these films in ways their creators could not entirely control.

Take, for instance, the Romans of Ben-Hur. They are ostensibly the villains, decadent and cruel, presiding over their subjects with an iron fist. But look closer, and you’ll see their resemblance to a certain other global hegemon: their technological prowess, their sprawling reach, their smug conviction that their way of life is the pinnacle of human achievement. And yet, for all their might, the Romans are hollow, their society already in decline. The message, whether intentional or not, is clear: America, beware. Empires crumble under the weight of their own contradictions.

And what of the Arabs, those swarthy figures from central casting who populate the background of Ben-Hur and countless other films of the era? They are either exoticized as noble savages or reduced to comic relief, their humanity flattened into caricature. These portrayals were not merely lazy but ideological, reinforcing the idea of the Middle East as a backward region in need of Western intervention—a narrative that dovetailed neatly with America’s burgeoning interest in the region’s oil reserves. The Arabs in Ben-Hur are not real people; they are a pretext, a justification for the West’s paternalistic gaze.

Then there is the film’s infamous subtext, the simmering tension between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala, which Vidal himself gleefully claimed credit for. Here we find another reflection in the House of Mirrors: the unspoken queerness that permeates so many of these epics, lurking just beneath the surface like a whispered secret. The relationship between Judah and Messala crackles with a fervor that transcends friendship, yet the film cannot name it for what it is. To do so would be unthinkable in 1959, an era defined by McCarthyite purges and the Lavender Scare. Instead, their bond is sublimated into rivalry, their love transformed into hatred, a tragic casualty of a culture too fearful to confront itself.

And then, of course, there is the bomb. The specter of nuclear annihilation looms large over every frame of Ben-Hur, though it is never mentioned. The chariot race, with its thunderous violence and apocalyptic energy, is a microcosm of the Cold War itself: a contest of wills in which there can be only one victor, and the stakes are nothing less than the survival of civilization. The crucifixion scene, with its somber skies and anguished cries, feels less like a historical reenactment and more like a prophecy—a reminder that humanity’s greatest threat is not external but internal, the darkness within.

In the end, Ben-Hur is less a story of redemption than a reflection of America’s contradictions: its yearning for moral clarity and its complicity in imperial violence, its embrace of progress and its terror of change, its belief in its own exceptionalism and its gnawing fear of decline. The House of Mirrors offers no escape, only endless refractions of the same uncomfortable truths. And like Judah Ben-Hur, we find ourselves racing in circles, searching for salvation in a world that refuses to give it.

If Vidal were here, he might chuckle at the absurdity of it all—the grandiosity, the self-deception, the unspoken truths flickering on the edges of the frame. And then he would turn back to the mirror, not to admire himself, but to remind us that the reflection is always more revealing than the image we wish to project.

Ah, indeed—ultimately, aren’t we all a bit Ben-Hur? Princes in our own minds, parading through life with the polished regalia of self-importance, only to find ourselves stripped bare, like Judah, of the very identity we so carefully cultivated. Forced to manufacture something new, something more acceptable, as the world pulls at us from every direction, demanding that we play our part in the grand spectacle of existence. This is the cruel joke that life plays on us all. We spend our youth pretending to be royalty, wrapped in the mythologies we inherit, and by middle age, if we’re fortunate, we realize we are but actors on a stage, manipulating our own masks to survive.

It’s the great tragedy of the human condition—this ceaseless reinvention. We wear the identities others give us, like Roman togas, snug and suffocating, and then, when it suits us, we strip them off and try to emerge as something more noble, more pure. But we cannot escape the deep, existential tension between who we are and who we think we ought to be. The empire, in this case, isn’t just Rome or America—it’s the vast machinery of social expectation, culture, history, and even our own illusions, grinding us into shapes that feel more comfortable, but never quite real.

What Vidal would gleefully point out is the deep hypocrisy at the heart of this process. We, like Judah, inherit a world that demands we embrace its imperialistic vision: that we are conquerors, masters of our own fate, and yet we are constantly bound by the very chains we claim to have broken. We dress ourselves in the armor of success, of identity, and yet, just as Ben-Hur strips away the layers of Roman civility to reveal the brutal core beneath, our manufactured selves are eventually undone by the contradictions within. No amount of polished ambition, no matter how grand our chariot race or how lofty our cross, will absolve us of the deeper, unspoken truths we are too terrified to face.

What Vidal would savor, in his signature style, is the delicious irony: we all become, in our way, “Romans”—empire-builders without the empire, strutting as if we are masters of fate, only to be confronted, as Judah is, with the realization that we are nothing more than our particular cultural constructions, endlessly colliding with each other. Ben-Hur is not merely a story of redemption; it is the story of the human condition itself. Every empire, every identity we forge is, in the end, just another layer of makeup on the face of a person who cannot escape the fact of being mortal, subject to time and decay. Yet, like Judah, we keep racing, never realizing that the prize was always a reflection of our own constructed desires—desires that, like the empire itself, are destined to crumble.

The Palimpsest Engine

The old man, who preferred the anonymity of shadows, sat at the head of the polished mahogany table. His eyes, still sharp beneath the cataract veil of age, studied the young man across from him, a temporal archaeologist by reputation, a skeptic by demeanor. In the room, the air was thick with the must of forgotten things, the scent of pages long unread, of dust clinging to artifacts whose provenance had been obscured.

“I will pay you well, of course,” the old man said, his voice like gravel dragged across a floor. “But you must understand, this is not the usual excavation. This is… different. The Palimpsest Engine is not a device, but a process—an invisible hand that alters the threads of time itself.”

The young man, whose name was Hector, nodded slowly. He had heard of the Engine, of course. Who hadn’t? In the underworld of time, where historians and philosophers of a certain stripe operated with as much devotion to preservation as criminals did to their craft, the Palimpsest Engine was infamous. It rewrote history in real-time within a localized zone, rewriting the past as though the present had always been its foundation. Entire cities could be erased and reborn with alternate histories. Buildings might gain or lose facades, people would emerge from the present with past lives they never lived, and objects would change their provenance and disappearances. All this was done quietly, without the perceptible intervention of any human hand.

It was the perfect crime, if crime was the right word, for it left no trace of its own doing. Only the perceptive, the learned in the ways of temporal archaeology, could discern the faint outlines of the original, the ghostly traces of the past that fought to return, even as the rewritten world tried to bury them.

“The Engine,” Hector ventured, his voice betraying no hint of doubt, “replaces reality. People, places, events—they all become like pages in a book that’s been rewritten too many times, their true meaning obfuscated.”

“Precisely,” the old man said, his lips curling into a slow, deliberate smile. “But some of us, Hector, are not content to let these layers of history disappear. Some of us wish to reclaim what has been lost.”

He leaned forward, his gnarled fingers resting on a map, an anachronistic thing of parchment and ink, despite the holographic projections that hovered around them. It showed the city of Portivo, a sprawling metropolis of the south, its tangled streets and crumbling buildings juxtaposed with images of a time long past—before the Palimpsest Engine had passed over it, rewriting it in its insidious fashion.

“I wish you to go there,” the old man continued. “I need you to unearth what was once Portivo, before it became this travesty of what it is now. It is said that the engine began its work fifty years ago, but no one can trace its origins. The people who lived through the transformation have all but forgotten the true Portivo. Their memories have been overwritten, replaced by a new timeline that feels more real than the one that preceded it.”

Hector’s brow furrowed. “And what am I supposed to find? A city that no longer exists, its past erased?”

“Not erased,” the old man corrected. “It is hidden, buried beneath the new surface. You, Hector, will uncover it. The Engine leaves traces, subtle ones. Small inconsistencies in the architecture, a slight change in the position of a statue, a word here or there that doesn’t quite fit. You must be the one to follow those traces and stitch the timeline back together, before it’s lost forever.”

Hector’s thoughts flickered to the many tales he had heard in the underworld, of rival archaeologists who sought to manipulate timelines for profit, of black markets where temporal relics—documents, photographs, even people—were bought and sold. And yet, the old man’s proposition was different. He was not simply interested in preserving history for the sake of nostalgia or financial gain; no, he seemed obsessed with something deeper, something more personal.

“And what of the people who live there now?” Hector asked. “The ones who’ve become part of this altered reality? How will they react when they learn the truth?”

“They won’t know,” the old man said coldly. “They will never know. The Engine has rewritten them, too. The ones who were there before have vanished. They are like ghosts, leaving no trace but their memories, which are nothing but echoes.”

Hector studied him carefully, sensing the urgency behind the old man’s words. There was something more to this mission, something that ran deeper than mere curiosity about the past. It was as though the old man’s very identity had been entangled with the changing timelines, as though his own past had been rewritten, and now he sought to reassert control over it.

“You think that by restoring the original timeline, you can restore something of yourself?” Hector asked, his voice soft but sharp.

The old man smiled again, but this time it seemed hollow. “Perhaps,” he said, his voice carrying a tremor that spoke of long-buried regret. “Perhaps I will find the version of myself that never ceased to exist. Or perhaps I will find nothing at all.”

Hector rose from the table, the weight of the task ahead settling like a stone in his stomach. He knew the price of meddling with time, the dangers that lay in tampering with history, even in the quietest of ways. But something in the old man’s eyes told him that this was not merely a contract for gold or glory—it was a quest for redemption, however misguided.

“How will I know when I’ve found it?” Hector asked.

“You will know,” the old man replied. “For the city will begin to resist you. The traces of the past will become clearer, like faces emerging from fog. And when the city begins to fight you, when the walls start to reject you, that is when you will know you are on the right path.”

And so Hector departed, his mind heavy with the burden of a task that could very well unravel the delicate fabric of reality itself. Behind him, the old man remained in his chair, staring into the dim corners of the room, as if waiting for the past to call him home.

<>

Hector returned to his small apartment overlooking the river, its wide, dark waters flowing with an indifference that mirrored the steady currents of time itself. The space was cluttered with maps, chronometers, and strange instruments of his trade: devices designed to detect temporal inconsistencies, faint echoes of erased histories. He moved through the room methodically, gathering what he would need for the journey—calibrating his devices, consulting old texts, and charting a route to Portivo.

The job felt heavy in his mind, not for its complexity but for the faint unease that had crept into the old man’s words. There had been something desperate in his tone, something personal that Hector couldn’t quite place. Still, the pay was generous, and curiosity had always been his master.

As he worked, the sound of the city faded into the background, a symphony of muted life. Then came the knock—a soft, hesitant rapping on the door. He frowned. It was late, and he wasn’t expecting anyone. Cautiously, he opened the door to reveal an unexpected figure.

There stood Victor, a friend from university, a fellow student of the obscure arts of time. Once inseparable, their paths had diverged sharply: Hector into the practical and often dangerous field of temporal archaeology, and Victor into the more esoteric, almost mystical study of premonitions and temporal consciousness. His presence was unusual—unsettling, even.

“Victor?” Hector said, surprised. “What are you doing here? It’s been years.”

Victor stepped inside without an invitation, his face pale, his eyes dark and shadowed. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, his once-sharp features worn and gaunt. He turned to Hector with an urgency that bypassed any pleasantries.

“I dreamed of you,” Victor said simply.

Hector frowned, closing the door. “Dreamed? Or one of your premonitions?”

“It was clear as anything I’ve ever seen. You’ve taken a job—haven’t you?” Victor asked, his voice almost a whisper. “It’s about the Palimpsest Engine.”

Hector froze. “How could you possibly know that?”

Victor shook his head. “I don’t know. But in the dream, I saw you in Portivo, following traces, piecing together the past. I saw the old man too. I don’t know his name, but he was desperate, wasn’t he? Desperate enough to drag you into something you don’t understand.”

Hector set down the equipment he had been packing and leaned against the edge of his desk, arms crossed. “And what, exactly, did this dream tell you? That I’ll fail?”

“No,” Victor said. “Worse than failure. The Engine doesn’t just rewrite history—it consumes it. Every past it overwrites becomes fuel for its existence. The more you uncover, the more it resists. The old man didn’t tell you that, did he? He didn’t tell you that by peeling back the layers of time, you’ll feed it. You’ll make it stronger.”

Hector stared at him, a knot tightening in his stomach. “And what happens if I make it stronger?”

Victor’s expression darkened. “The traces you’re chasing—they’re not just echoes. They’re fractures. Each one you uncover makes the present less stable. If you dig too deep, Portivo won’t just change again. It’ll collapse entirely, dragging everyone in it into nonexistence.”

Hector let out a low breath, his skepticism warring with the unease Victor’s words had planted. “So what, Victor? You’re telling me to abandon the job? Walk away and leave the city to its fate?”

“Yes,” Victor said without hesitation. “If you care for your life—and for theirs—you’ll leave the Palimpsest Engine alone. It’s not your burden to carry. Whatever that old man lost, whatever version of himself he’s chasing, it’s gone. And if you chase it too, you’ll be lost with it.”

For a long moment, the two men stood in silence. The room felt smaller, the air thicker. Hector turned his back to Victor, staring at the instruments and maps he’d spent hours assembling. He didn’t believe in fate, but he believed in the weight of choices.

Hector opened his mouth to reply, but before he could speak, a sharp gust of wind rushed through the room. The window, locked moments ago, burst open with a deafening crash. Papers scattered like startled birds, maps spiraled to the floor, and the instruments on Hector’s desk clattered noisily. Both men froze, their argument forgotten as an unmistakable chill filled the air. It was a presence—something neither entirely seen nor heard, but undeniably felt.

Hector’s eyes darted toward the window, where the curtains fluttered madly. For a brief moment, the shadow of a figure seemed to flicker there—indistinct and fleeting, as though caught between layers of reality. Then, just as quickly as it had come, the presence was gone, leaving only silence and the faint rustle of displaced paper.

Victor stepped back, his face pale and drawn. “You see?” he whispered, his voice trembling. “It’s already watching you. The Palimpsest Engine… or something worse. This isn’t just a job, Hector. It’s a trap.” He turned abruptly, his words trailing as he strode to the door. “I’ve said my piece. If you’re wise, you’ll listen. If not…” He hesitated, glancing over his shoulder, then shook his head. “Then may the traces of what you are be kind to you.”

Victor left without another word, the echo of the slamming door punctuating his warning. Hector stood alone in the disheveled room, his heart pounding. For the first time, the tools of his trade—the maps, the instruments, the neatly marked routes to Portivo—seemed insufficient, even absurd. Yet despite the unease that lingered in the air, he knew he wouldn’t stop. Whatever the presence had been, it only deepened his resolve. Some truths demanded to be uncovered, even if the cost was yet unknown.

<>

The journey to the other side of the city felt longer than usual. Hector walked through the narrow, rain-slicked streets, his hands deep in his coat pockets, the memory of Victor’s warning and the strange presence lingering like smoke. But this next step was unavoidable. If he was going to track the Palimpsest Engine’s workings, he needed a tool that could cut through its temporal distortions—something rare, powerful, and almost impossible to find.

He stopped outside a small shop wedged between crumbling tenements, its sign so faded it was nearly illegible. The window was cluttered with talismans, strange trinkets, and old books, their spines cracked and worn. Inside, a single lamp burned, casting long shadows over walls filled with maps of constellations and palmistry charts. It was her place. It had always smelled of sage and regret.

Hector pushed the door open, the bell above jingling sharply. At a small table in the corner, she sat with her back to him, shuffling an old deck of tarot cards. Her auburn hair, streaked with silver now, caught the dim light as she turned her head slightly, just enough to recognize him. Her hands froze, and for a moment, there was only silence between them.

“Of all the places to haunt,” she said finally, her voice low and sharp. “You show up here?” She turned fully, her green eyes flashing with something between anger and amusement. “What do you want, Hector?”

“You know why I’m here, Selene,” he replied, stepping closer but keeping his tone neutral. “I need the Compass of Ananke.”

At that, her expression hardened. She set the cards down deliberately, folding her arms. “The Compass? After all this time, you show up asking for that?” She laughed bitterly, shaking her head. “You have some nerve.”

“Selene, listen—”

“No, you listen.” She stood now, pacing around the room like a caged animal. “That compass is mine, Hector. You don’t get to walk in here after… after everything and think you can just take it.”

“It’s not for me,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “I’ve taken a job. The Palimpsest Engine. You know what that means.”

Her steps faltered at the mention of the Engine, her back stiffening. “You’ve always been reckless, but this…” She turned to face him, her anger tempered by something softer—fear, maybe, or concern. “If you’re chasing the Engine, you’re already in over your head.”

“Maybe,” Hector admitted. “But I can’t do it without the Compass. You of all people should understand that.”

Selene’s eyes narrowed as Hector’s request hung in the air, thick with old grievances. For a moment, she said nothing, and then she laughed—a sharp, bitter sound that made him wince.

“The Compass of Ananke?” she repeated, pacing back toward the table and picking up her deck of cards. She shuffled them idly, refusing to meet his eyes. “Do you know how many years it took before you stopped haunting my doorstep? How many nights I spent waiting for you, convincing myself you’d come back, that you actually cared?” She glanced up then, her smile razor-sharp. “And now you show up, chasing some impossible machine, and expect me to just hand it over?”

“I had no choice!” Hector snapped, his frustration spilling over. “You think I wanted to leave? You think it didn’t tear me apart to—”

Hector’s jaw clenched, the sting of her words cutting deeper than he wanted to admit. “You could’ve waited,” he said quietly. “But you didn’t. For all your professions of love, you moved on pretty damn quickly. And don’t tell me it was just loneliness.”

Her eyes flared, a flush of anger rising in her cheeks. “You’re one to talk about loyalty, Hector. Don’t stand here and act like you’re some wounded saint. And anyway,” she added, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper, “you’re too late. The Compass is gone.”

He stared at her, the words landing like a blow. “What do you mean, gone?”

“I sold it,” she said flatly, crossing her arms. “Years ago. Out of spite, if you must know. Some collector was willing to pay handsomely for it, and frankly, I couldn’t bear to keep it. It was a relic of a man I didn’t want to remember anymore.”

The room fell into a heavy silence, broken only by the faint rattle of the wind outside. Hector took a step back, “You sold it,” he repeated, his voice thick with bitterness. “So that’s it? All those years I trusted you, and you just—”

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed, her voice trembling with anger. “Don’t you dare act like I owe you anything. You left me behind, Hector. Don’t come crawling back now, pretending you’re the victim.”

He shook his head, his face hard. “You know what? Forget it. You’re right. You don’t owe me anything. I’ll find it myself.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned and strode toward the door. As he reached for the handle, her voice stopped him, softer now, almost regretful. “Hector… you should leave this alone. That machine—whatever it is—it’ll eat you alive.”

He didn’t look back. “Then it’ll find me harder to swallow than most.”

The door slammed shut behind him, and Selene was left alone in the fading light, staring at the deck of cards in her hand as if they might offer her answers she didn’t want to hear.

<>

Summary

In this Borges-inspired fragment, an aging, wealthy man hires Hector, a temporal archaeologist, to uncover the lost original history of a city called Portivo, which has been rewritten by the Palimpsest Engine. This mysterious device alters reality in real-time, erasing and replacing histories while leaving faint traces for those who can perceive them. The old man, driven by a personal need to restore the city’s true past, asks Hector to trace these remnants and reclaim what was lost. The task is fraught with danger, as altering timelines can have profound consequences, but the old man is willing to pay any price, seeking a version of himself that might have been erased by the Engine. Hector faces a moral dilemma as he begins a journey that may unravel the very fabric of reality.

<>

Checkpoint

The agent crouched low in the alley, the flickering neon lights jerking like a mind caught in a seizure. Shadows danced on the walls, erratic as neurons firing in a dying brain. The Interzone hummed with the static of fractured realities, a buzz that bled through everything—glitching, fraying, as bits of half-thoughts and lost memories crawled up the spines of the unwary. He felt them out there, the watchers—ghosts in the machine, invisible, feeding off the surveillance lattice that crisscrossed the fabric of the world. The web never let anything go, and in the Interzone, detection was no longer just a risk—it was the final breath, a pinpoint incision cutting away the self.

Ahead, the checkpoint loomed—a jagged thing, an insect’s exoskeleton of glass and wire, twitching with sensors that sniffed the air for the smallest deviation. The agent was running out of time. His cover was a paper-thin mask, already peeling under the scrutiny of too many cross-references, too many eyes watching from the corners.

But he still had one last play, a filthy ace in the hole, a weapon so volatile it threatened to destroy not only him but the very bones of the Interzone itself.

From the folds of his coat, he pulled the artifact—dark and sleek, its surface gleaming with the ghost of something old, something dangerous. A relic whispered about in anarchist circles and corporate backrooms. A thing rumored to have been used in some forgotten neuro-war, its purpose lost in the undercurrents of time. It was no simple device; it was a scalpel for the mind, capable of slicing through consciousness with a precision that would unravel the threads of identity, of ego, of everything.

He turned it in his hands, the hum of it almost a heartbeat, an itch. The instructions had come in fragments—vague, cryptic: twist the dial, don’t hold it too long, and above all, don’t look back.

The agent pressed himself into the corner of the alley, his breath shallow, his pulse syncing with the low hum of the artifact. He twisted the dial.

The effect was immediate, as if the world itself had been punched in the gut. A sound—no, a sensation—rippled outward, inaudible to the physical ear but deafening to the psyche, a psychic tremor that knocked everything loose. His stomach churned, his vision warped, reality itself bending at the edges, a sickening distortion that made him feel like he was slipping through the cracks.

Around him, the air thickened—shimmered. The boundary between the real and the imagined began to bleed. The device had torn a hole, a fracture in the collective mind, and everything within a twenty-meter radius snapped loose like balloons with the strings cut. Ego and identity flung apart, scrambling, reassembling in wrong places, wrong bodies, wrong memories. It was chaos. Total, absolute chaos.

The superegos shattered first, like totalitarian regimes in an unplanned coup, their rigid structures dissolving into gibberish. The invisible judges—the ones that kept the Interzone in line—blinked out of existence, their roles vanished into the void. The ids, the raw, primal drives, burst free, wailing in ecstasy and horror, their desires spilling into the open, unchecked, uncontrolled.

The world trembled. It wasn’t just a tremor—it was a fracture in the very bones of reality. Buildings bent like rubber, walls quivered and undulated, breathing in and out as if the space itself were alive. The street, once a place of cold order, had become a fever dream. A man in a pinstripe suit staggered into view, his face slack, tears streaming down his cheeks. He clawed at his chest, mouthing words that would never be completed, a thought broken before it could even exist.

Nearby, a woman in an Interzone bureaucrat’s uniform collapsed, clutching her head. Her lips moved in frantic cycles, sentences folding over themselves—someone else’s guilt, her own prayers, advertisements from a life she couldn’t remember.

The guards at the checkpoint—once sharp, precise—had turned into parodies of themselves. One slumped against the monolith, helmet gone, his eyes staring into nothing, his lips trembling with a lullaby from some long-dead memory. Another stood, rifle in hand, twitching like an insect at the end of its life. His mind had locked onto a single phrase, a mantra that looped endlessly: not supposed to happen, not supposed to happen.

The artifact in the agent’s hand pulsed again, its glow soft but malevolent, a star long dead but still burning, refusing to go out. It was rewriting everything. The air itself cracked, reality itself torn apart at the seams. The ghosts of identities scrambled, tried to take shape, but failed, dissolving into vapor before they could solidify.

As he moved, the streets became unrecognizable—a warped tableau of madness. A businessman dropped to all fours, barking, sniffing at a woman’s skirt. She spun in place, singing in a child’s voice, a song that was more nightmare than nursery rhyme. A group of children spilled from a tenement, their laughter shrill and mechanical, a broken sound that didn’t belong in the world. One of them stopped, stared at the agent, and tilted its head. Eyes empty. Then it was gone, blinked out of existence.

The architecture was no better—melting, bending, warping. The checkpoint’s jagged monolith shivered, its surface bubbling, as if something underneath had been clawing its way out. The streetlights flickered, bending impossibly, their beams scattered across the ground like broken glass. The whole zone was glitching, fracturing under the pressure.

The agent pressed on, every step heavier than the last, the weight of the shattered minds pressing down on him. He could feel his own identity, his own mind, beginning to fray, foreign thoughts leaking in. A name—Theresa—slipped into his mind, a name that wasn’t his, a name that felt like it should be. The thought swam in the currents, too intense to ignore. He shoved it away, focusing on the threadbare remnant of his mission, the fragile construct of who he was.

He reached the checkpoint, and the guards didn’t even flinch. Their eyes were vacant, their bodies slack. One of them was staring at his reflection, mouthing soundless words, trying to put himself back together. Another laughed—a high, unnatural cackle that echoed across the empty street.

The agent stepped through the checkpoint without a glance backward. The scanners were blind, their systems overloaded, short-circuiting under the psychic onslaught. He moved through the chaos like a ghost, the echoes of a thousand shattered minds trailing him, their whispers tugging at the edges of his consciousness.

Behind him, the Interzone fractured, the remnants of its once-pristine control now slipping into the void. The agent didn’t look back. But something followed him, something nameless and hungry, born of the madness he’d unleashed. And it was closer than he realized.

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.