Author: Ric Amurrio

UBI for Goobers

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Somewhere in the rotting heart of the American experiment, I found myself on a government-funded Greyhound bound for an undisclosed location—the proving grounds for Universal Basic Income. They wouldn’t tell me where I was going, only that I’d be “embedded” with the first generation of economic refuseniks: the Goobers. A new class of citizen, neither working nor unemployed, fueled entirely by state-sanctioned sloth.

The bus smelled like vape juice and microwaved pizza rolls. My seatmate, a 32-year-old man named Trent, had been awake for 46 hours. “The economy was rigged, man,” he told me between handfuls of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. “So I opted out.” His plan? “I’m gonna start a podcast. Probably about Batman.” He passed out mid-sentence, mouth open, flecks of orange dust coating his hoodie.

We arrived at what had once been a mid-sized American city—abandoned strip malls, a skyline of billboards advertising gaming chairs and energy drinks. A banner hung across the main drag:

WELCOME TO THE GOOBERVERSE.

The town square was empty, the workforce decimated. At the local gas station, I met Trevor, a 29-year-old “crypto visionary” who hadn’t held a job since Arby’s fired him in 2018. “It’s sick, bro,” he told me, cracking open a Bang Energy and adjusting his Naruto headband. “I finally have time to focus on my content.”

His content? Reviewing every Dorito flavor ever made. He’s up to 43 videos and counting.

Down the road, a cohort of similarly liberated souls were gathered in an abandoned Circuit City parking lot, trading Pokémon cards and debating whether artificial intelligence could replace their weed dealer. “Work is a scam, man,” one of them said between coughs. “Andrew Yang saw the truth.” The others nodded solemnly.

My government contact, a nervous intern from the Department of Economic Experiments, handed me a pamphlet: UBI and You: A Guide to Maximizing Your Monthly Stipend. Inside were budget breakdowns that included “Essential Gaming Peripherals” and “Crypto Ventures (HIGH-RISK).” It was clear that whatever brain trust had designed this program had vastly overestimated the ambition of its recipients.

Down at the municipal complex—now repurposed into a 24-hour streaming facility—I met Derek, who had quit his job at a car wash six months ago. “I used to work 40 hours a week to barely afford rent,” he said, adjusting his VR headset. “Now I make content.” What kind of content? “Reaction videos.” Reaction to what? “Mostly other reaction videos.”

A few doors down, I met Lindsey, who had invested her entire stipend into custom Funko Pops of herself. “They’re limited edition,” she explained, holding one up. “This one’s me as a witch.” She didn’t seem to be selling them—just amassing an army of plastic clones.

At a makeshift town hall, a council of senior goobers convened to discuss “important matters.” The agenda included a debate on whether Taco Bell should be considered a public utility and a proposal to make Wednesday an official “Rest Day” (on top of the existing “No Work Mondays” and “Self-Care Fridays”). One man—draped in a Snuggie like some kind of stoner warlord—stood up to demand that the government subsidize anime merch. The motion passed without opposition.

Somewhere in the distance, a mountain of empty Mountain Dew cans shifted in the wind. The sun was setting over a civilization held together by Discord servers and expired Hot Pockets.

And I had the sinking feeling that this was only the beginning.

I followed the scent of burnt popcorn and Axe body spray to what appeared to be a makeshift UBI housing co-op—formerly a Red Roof Inn, now rebranded as The Creator Compound. The sign out front was hand-painted, the last two letters dripping as if the artist had been overtaken by the gravity of their own work—or perhaps just ran out of Monster Energy.

Inside, the lobby had been stripped of furniture and repurposed into a “collaborative workspace.” Every available surface was covered in gaming laptops, half-eaten bowls of ramen, and sticky game controllers. A young man in a bathrobe, Skyler, was slouched in a beanbag chair, deeply engrossed in a match of Fortnite. His stipend had allowed him to achieve a higher plane of existence—one in which pants were a relic of the oppressive capitalist machine.

“I’m finally free, man,” he said, eyes never leaving the screen. “The grindset is over. The vibes remain.”

Across the room, a pair of former DoorDash drivers were arguing about whether starting a “government-funded LAN party commune” violated the terms of their stipend. One of them, a man known only as “Skoob”, insisted that UBI was “the real-life version of passive income.”

“Money just shows up, bro,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Like a respawn. Except the government is God, and God wants me to get really, really good at speedrunning Elden Ring.”

In a corner, an aspiring NFT mogul named Chet was furiously refreshing his phone, waiting for his latest project—“Goober Goblins”—to take off. “The problem is,” he explained, “nobody understands my vision.” I asked what the vision was. He stared at me, slack-jawed. “Uh. It’s like… goblins? But also, like, kinda vibing?”

Upstairs, the hallways were dimly lit, illuminated only by the glow of gaming monitors and anime posters. A feral-looking man in a bathrobe and compression socks stepped out of a room marked “Content House West” and blinked at me as if I had just emerged from the astral plane.

“Who sent you?” he asked.

I told him I was a journalist. He exhaled deeply. “Oh. Thought you were my Discord mod. I haven’t uploaded in a week.”

His name was Dustin, and he was a former “entrepreneur” whose startup—some kind of app that “optimized vibes”—had collapsed after his entire development team disappeared into the woods to find themselves. Now, thanks to UBI, he had pivoted to streaming conspiracy theories, specializing in the theory that Thomas Edison faked the moon landing.

“The lightbulb was just phase one,” he muttered, taking a sip from a novelty-sized Gatorade. “They don’t want you to know.”

Further down the hall, I encountered Kaylee, a self-described “Etsy Witch” who had spent the past three months using her stipend to collect vintage McDonald’s toys and “recharge her psychic energy.” She had a backlog of nearly 500 unshipped orders but assured me that “capitalism is an illusion, and these customers are, like, just experiencing my journey.”

Meanwhile, a man named Bryce was “investing” his stipend in professional wrestling lessons, determined to become the world’s first UBI-funded luchador. His finishing move? “The Direct Deposit.”

Outside, in what had once been the hotel’s parking lot but was now a 24/7 hacky sack tournament, I met Dev, a former IT guy turned professional YikYak philosopher, who was currently writing a manifesto on the blockchain.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

He stared at me, took a long pull from his vape, and exhaled.

“Money’s not even real, bro.”

At that moment, someone in the distance screamed, “DOORDASH IS HERE,” and a stampede of bathrobe-clad goobers erupted from the building.

The Goober Economy was in full swing. And I had the sinking feeling that the future belonged to them.

<>

It hit me in the dead hours, that peculiar cocktail of nicotine and existential dread, that the fat cats in Congress had found a way out—an escape hatch from the Herculean mess of developing a real, robust economy. Instead of wrestling with the monster of an entrenched tax system designed to rebalance an oligarchy, they’d discovered the UBI loophole: just print a check and call it “economic justice.”

I sat in the dim light of The Creator Compound, my eyes red as the fading neon of an abandoned strip mall, and began to see the grand scheme. The powers-that-be, with their tailored suits and indolent smirks, preferred the simplicity of a monthly cash infusion into the slack-jawed masses over the messy, unpredictable business of genuine reform. Reform? Ha! The idea that they might alter a tax code that lined their pockets like a well-oiled money machine was as laughable as expecting a cat to pay rent.

Everywhere I looked, goobers were marching to the steady beat of government checks—content with the crumbs while the real architects of wealth played chess in the corridors of power. Down on the street, a disheveled philosopher in a threadbare Supreme hoodie pontificated to his Discord followers:

“Why bother with revolution when you can just let the state fund your binge-watching and gaming?” he slurred, as if that were some kind of enlightened truth.

It was as if Congress had said, “Why risk a tax revolt or challenge the oligarchic order when we can simply buy your loyalty with a direct deposit?” And buy they did. With every check mailed, they solidified a docile underclass, a generation too busy streaming their lives to notice the slow strangulation of opportunity. No more messy debates about wealth redistribution or fixing a rigged economy—just an endless supply of digital dimes to keep you zoned out and plugged in.

I couldn’t help but think of the irony: a nation once defined by its scrappy, entrepreneurial spirit, now being pacified with a system that rewarded inertia. The establishment had traded in the promise of progress for a permanent pause—a government-sponsored coma induced by the comfort of a monthly stipend. In the halls of Congress, behind mahogany desks and piles of lobbyist donations, they chuckled at the simplicity of it all. It was easier to hand out checks than to tear apart the centuries-old tax code that safeguarded the interests of the wealthy elite.

As the night deepened and I roamed among clusters of UBI-fueled goobers—each one a living testament to America’s descent into convenient mediocrity—I saw the reflection of a society that had willingly surrendered its rebellious spark. The revolution wasn’t coming in the form of angry mobs or tear gas; it was arriving softly, like a lullaby sung by those too comfortably numb to notice the slow collapse of their own potential.

In that grim realization, I recognized the ultimate tragedy: the very mechanism designed to rescue the downtrodden was, in fact, a tool of mass pacification. Congress had discovered that the easiest way to quell dissent wasn’t by addressing the real rot in the system but by subsidizing the sedative of modern existence. And as I lit one more cigarette, watching the absurd parade of content creators and self-proclaimed visionaries drift by, the bitter truth settled over me like the smoke in the stale air of that forsaken compound.

This wasn’t progress. It was the elegant resignation of a society that had decided that comfort was preferable to the chaos of true change. And somewhere, in the back rooms of Capitol Hill, the strategists smiled—knowing full well that while the world outside continued to deteriorate, their chosen solution was as effortless as it was damning.

It was even worse. It was cheaper to pay UBI than to have them overdosed on fentanyl—cheaper, by a mile, than keeping the Seventh Fleet afloat on an endless patrol of aimless seas, or funding a full-scale opioid antidote program in America’s rust-belt nightmares. The fat cats in Congress had finally found their silver bullet: instead of wrestling with a tax system designed to rein in the oligarchy, they’d discovered that handing out monthly government checks was the ultimate sedative.

In the dim haze of that forsaken compound, I realized that the establishment had mastered the art of pacification. Instead of investing in expensive public health initiatives or propping up an overburdened military apparatus, they had simply printed cash. It was cheaper to dole out UBI than to launch an expensive public safety campaign, or to repair crumbling bridges and highways—much less to subsidize the ceaseless parade of overdoses ripping through our forgotten towns.

The absurdity wasn’t lost on me. The same folks who spent billions keeping naval fleets afloat and patching up failing infrastructure now shrugged as they approved budgets for “direct deposits.” In their sterile boardrooms, they compared notes with the casual cynicism of gamblers: Why fund a fleet of warships when you can fund a fleet of couch-bound content creators? Why pour money into sophisticated harm-reduction programs when you can simply replace despair with a steady trickle of government cash?

Somewhere deep within Capitol Hill, beneath the clamor of lobbyists and the scent of expensive scotch, these bureaucratic alchemists chuckled at their own brilliance. They realized that it was far cheaper—by an almost obscene margin—to keep the goobers sedated on a monthly stipend than to confront the messy, expensive business of real reform. The price tag on freedom from addiction and societal decay had been slashed to a government check, while costly dreams of rebalancing an economy steeped in oligarchic greed were quietly abandoned.

As I sat there, surrounded by the neon glow of half-remembered ambitions and the constant hum of digital distractions, the bizarre truth became undeniable: our society had found a way to buy passivity. And it was cheaper than almost any alternative—a fiscal miracle for those who preferred a sedated, socially engineered hothouse of modern mediocrity over the unpredictable chaos of genuine human potential.

It was still way way worse than I thought. Much worse. The foundation for this whole circus of largesse wasn’t some noble Keynesian fever dream or the bleeding heart of a desperate government trying to keep the ship from sinking. No, the real magic trick—the sick, dazzling sleight of hand—was that UBI wasn’t paid in dollars at all. It was paid in crypto.

And not just any crypto. No blue-chip Bitcoin, no sensible stablecoin tethered to anything real. No, every goober got their own custom memecoin, minted straight from the bowels of some algorithmic financial wizardry, a digital scrip backed not by gold, nor labor, nor even the rotting husk of American manufacturing, but by the full faith and credit of a system designed to swindle them blind.

And here’s where it got really diabolical: the bags were guaranteed by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Every single one of these government-issued clown tokens—GoobCoin, SlackBuck, Stimulus Stonk, whatever brand name they came up with—was insured by the same people who used to pretend they cared about fiscal responsibility. It was, in effect, a rigged game where Congress had positioned itself as the ultimate bag-holder, except they weren’t losing money. They were making it.

Because once you guarantee something with taxpayer money, the smart money steps in. The hedge funds, the investment banks, the insider traders—all of them sniffed the game immediately. They knew these goobers weren’t going to hold onto their coins. No, they’d be cashing out their digital scrip for rent money, vape juice, and the latest subscription service designed to keep them docile. And that’s when the big boys swooped in, bought up the dumped coins at a fraction of their worth, pumped the market with carefully coordinated hype, and cashed out before the goobers even realized they’d been turned into liquidity providers for the same ruling class that had abandoned them in the first place.

Congress, in its infinite depravity, had found the holy grail: a perpetual motion machine of economic exploitation. Every goober wasn’t just a recipient of UBI—they were an asset, a walking, talking memecoin that could be manipulated, pumped, and dumped at will. The whole system was a new-age, high-frequency trading scam dressed up as progressive policy. And the real joke? The goobers loved it.

I saw them in the compound, eyes glued to their screens, watching their net worths skyrocket for thirty glorious seconds before crashing into oblivion. They called it “playing the market,” as if they were captains of industry and not just ballast for a yacht they’d never be allowed to board. One particularly glassy-eyed influencer, wearing a hoodie emblazoned with “HODL OR DIE”, grinned at me and said, “Bro, my UBI bag just 10x’d overnight.”

And it had. For a brief, shimmering moment, he was a king. Then the market corrected, and he was back to where he started. Or lower. It didn’t matter. The cycle would begin again next month.

Meanwhile, the suits in Washington, those degenerate swamp creatures who had engineered this digital casino, cashed out their gains, patting each other on the back for having finally solved the age-old problem of poverty: not by eliminating it, but by turning it into just another asset class.

Prime Directive

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James Bond: Prime Directive (An Amazon Studios Original Film—Available Exclusively on Prime Video with Free One-Day Shipping!)

There was a time—perhaps mythical, perhaps real—when James Bond was a man of simple appetites: martinis, women, and the occasional war crime disguised as “Queen and Country.” He was a blunt instrument of empire, a wrecking ball in a tuxedo, and that was fine. That was the job. But those days are gone, rotted from the inside out, liquified in the great capitalist centrifuge.

Yes, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, keepers of the Bond franchise—steadfast, unwavering—have finally cashed out. Not just in the usual Hollywood sense, where dignity is a line item in the budget, but in a way that would make even Ian Fleming choke on his filtered Morland cigarette. The Broccoli-Wilson dynasty didn’t just sell Bond to Amazon. No, no. They absorbed Spectre into Amazon and handed 007 the login credentials. James Bond now works for Spectre, which now is Amazon, which is now… what? A privatized intelligence agency? A planetary-scale data hoover? A corporation with its own standing army? Hell, maybe all three. The lines have blurred so much they may as well be static.

Of course, it all makes perfect sense. If there was ever a modern incarnation of Spectre, it would be Amazon—tentacles in everything, invisible yet omnipresent, its ultimate loyalty not to any ideology but to control itself. And Bond, the eternal patriot, ever the good soldier, does what he always does: adapts to the mission. So now, instead of serving Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he answers to the unholy trinity of market analytics, surveillance capitalism, and one-click assassination authorizations.

MI6 is no more. The British government, citing cost-cutting measures and an unprecedented trade deal with a shadowy corporate entity, has privatized its entire intelligence apparatus. Enter Amazon-Spectre Global Security Solutions™ (ASGSS™), a thrilling new subsidiary handling espionage, assassinations, and same-hour drone strikes with the efficiency of an optimized supply chain. Bond villains used to be deranged industrialists hell-bent on global domination. Now? They just made payroll.

In the teaser sequence James Bond, now codename Agent Prime-007, reports directly to Jeff “Blofeld” Bezos, who strokes a genetically engineered, algorithmically perfected cat while sipping a $14 artisanal oat milk espresso from his own monopoly-controlled supply chain. Bond’s mission? To hunt down a rogue faction of MI6 purists—led by a disgruntled, furloughed M—who refuse to accept that the future of national security is a subscription-based service.

MI6’s absorption wasn’t a hostile takeover—it was a mercy killing. Spectre-Amazon didn’t need British intelligence; it already controlled more data than any government agency could dream of. But there was something quaint about MI6, a relic of the Westphalian system, a charming little espionage boutique with all its Cold War nostalgia and stiff-upper-lip theatrics. So, in an act of sheer sentimentality, Amazon-Spectre simply acquired it, much like one acquires an artisanal coffee brand or a failing newspaper. The Brits, ever the romantics, were allowed to keep their little rituals—tea at headquarters, the whole “Your Majesty’s Service” schtick—but make no mistake: every operation, every assassination, every bit of intelligence now runs through Spectre-Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. It’s service to the Crown, sure—but only as long as the Prime Membership is active.

As Bond navigates this brave new world, he finds himself questioning everything: Does he still have a license to kill, or is it now a revocable in-app purchase? Are his Aston Martin’s machine guns now merely an auto-renewable feature, locked behind a Prime Ultra Premium Subscription? And most importantly—who is really in charge when Spectre, Amazon, and the British government are all just different names on the same offshore tax document?

Of course, James Bond has always been a well-groomed billboard. For decades, he’s been shilling luxury watches, overpriced cologne, and cars most of his audience will only ever see in video games. But with Amazon-Spectre at the helm, this has been taken to its final, logical conclusion: Bond himself is now a storefront.

Every frame of Prime Directive is an interactive shopping experience. When Bond walks into a casino, a discreet ka-ching sounds, and a sleek Prime overlay pops up: “Shop the Look: Bond’s Midnight Tuxedo Collection™—FREE Same-Day Delivery with Prime.” The film’s action scenes now feature strategically timed slow-motion sequences, allowing audiences to scan on-screen QR codes for exclusive access to Bond’s tactical gear. “Want to smell like a government-sanctioned murderer? Try 007 Noir: An Amazon Exclusive.” Even Bond’s classic Walther PPK now comes in a special “Alexa-Enabled” edition, complete with voice activation—“Alexa, shoot the bad guy.”

Gadgets? Forget Q Branch. Those bespoke MI6 innovations have been replaced by Amazon Basics™ tech—cost-effective, mass-produced, and delivered in frustration-free packaging. Instead of an ejector seat, Bond’s Aston Martin now comes with Amazon AutoPilot™, powered by AWS—it doesn’t eject you when things get dicey, but it does offer exclusive in-car shopping deals when you’re in the vicinity of an Amazon Fresh. The new MI6-issued smartwatch? An Amazon Halo, tracking Bond’s stress levels, sleep patterns, and how efficiently he eliminates corporate threats.

The product placement isn’t subtle—it’s an onslaught. Bond can’t have a drink without an on-screen notification prompting “Buy the Official Vesper Martini Cocktail Kit—Available Now on Amazon Fresh” or step into a high-stakes poker game without “Shop Amazon Casino Royale: Luxury Chips & Felt Tables for Your Home.” Every fight scene features a “Click to Buy” overlay on Bond’s boots, his tie, his bloodstained shirt. Even the henchmen are monetized—each one sporting an Amazon Workwear Essentials™ tactical vest, available at a discount for Prime members.

But the real coup de grâce? Amazon’s proprietary Predictive Commerce Engine—an AI-driven feature that automatically adds Bond’s latest gear to your cart before you even realize you want it. By the time the credits roll, you’ll have a package at your door containing the very same sunglasses Bond wore while dodging drone strikes in a Dubai skyline chase.

And why wouldn’t Bond sell out completely? The man’s been whoring himself out to brands for decades. The difference now is that you don’t just watch Bond. You buy Bond.

With thrilling sequences shot entirely inside an Amazon fulfillment center—where Bond fights off disgruntled warehouse workers radicalized by too much safety training.

TEMU

Bond’s mission is clear: eliminate TEMU before it’s too late. Deep inside Jeff Bezos’ secret orbital fortress, AMAZON ONE, the High Council of Spectre-Amazon convenes for an emergency strategy meeting. It’s a sleek, sterile chamber of glass and steel, floating above Earth like the watchful eye of a retail god. Holographic charts flicker across the room, showing plummeting profit margins. The enemy is spreading. The West is losing the shopping war.

For decades, Spectre-Amazon has controlled the flow of goods, services, and intelligence with the precision of a trillion-dollar supply chain. Every consumer tracked, every purchase logged, every fleeting impulse turned into a same-day delivery. The system was perfect. But now, an outside force is disrupting the equilibrium—something sinister, something… cheap.

Like a parasitic organism creeping through cracks in the firewall, TEMU has been infiltrating the European and American markets with ruthless efficiency. It’s flooding the system with impossibly low prices, baffling shipping times, and mysterious, unlabeled packages that seem to materialize out of nowhere. “How are they doing it?” the analysts at Spectre-Amazon whisper in their data centers. “Who is funding them?”

The truth is too horrifying to say out loud: TEMU doesn’t play by the rules. It doesn’t need brand partnerships, doesn’t need infrastructure, doesn’t need permission. It operates from the shadows, an empire of disposable goods churned out by algorithmic black magic. No licensing deals, no regulations, just an unrelenting tsunami of $3 smartwatches and $5 tactical boots, undercutting every market, destabilizing economies, turning loyal Prime Members into treacherous bargain hunters.

Spectre-Amazon’s predictive models are crumbling. Warehouse workers are defecting. Prime Members—once the most loyal consumers in human history—are clicking on other apps, wandering into the depths of discount anarchy. The system is breaking down.

And so, Bond is deployed—not to kill, necessarily, but to restore order. His mission takes him deep into the heart of the chaos: grimy ports overflowing with boxes labeled in unreadable fonts, dark factories humming with a workforce that seems eerily… automated. No paper trails, no board of directors, just an unknowable entity funneling goods into the global bloodstream at speeds even Spectre-Amazon can’t match.

His orders? Destroy TEMU’s supply chain at the source. The plan is brutal, direct, and Prime-eligible for immediate execution: Bezos’ space station—outfitted with AWS Orbital Strike Capabilities™—will unleash a “targeted fulfillment disruption” on TEMU’s offshore megafactories. The operation is codenamed FREE SHIPPING, and it will be Spectre-Amazon’s largest tactical intervention since the hostile takeover of MI6. Bond suits up. His mission: infiltrate the TEMU Quantum Relay, a secret communications satellite coordinating their entire global logistics empire. If he can hack the system, Spectre-Amazon can deploy its ultimate weapon—a proprietary Cloud-Based Hyperinflation Virus that will render TEMU’s entire pricing model obsolete, forcing all their $2 sneakers to cost at least $300 overnight.

Temu isn’t a company. It’s something older, something bigger—an evolving economic virus, a self-replicating supply chain that answers to no one. Not even Beijing. It doesn’t sell things—it creates need, spinning synthetic desire out of thin air.

And for the first time in his long career, Bond faces an existential crisis. How do you kill something that doesn’t exist?

And now, it’s winning.

There’s only one solution. Total economic warfare.

THE FINAL SHOWDOWN

But TEMU won’t go down without a fight. As Bond launches toward the TEMU satellite in a Bezos-funded Blue Origin tactical shuttle, a swarm of unbranded Chinese drones intercepts him, piloted remotely from a sweatshop-turned-cyberwarfare lab in an undisclosed industrial park. The battle is on.

Zero gravity combat. Bond, floating through the void, using a laser-equipped Kindle as a makeshift weapon. TEMU’s android enforcers—cheaper, faster, entirely disposable—closing in from all sides. He kicks off a floating pallet of Amazon Basics™ stainless steel water bottles, sending them spiraling into an enemy drone, exploding on impact.

Finally, Bond reaches the TEMU Quantum Relay, a monolithic, unmarked structure orbiting 200 miles above Earth. Inside, the final boss awaits: a nameless AI CEO, a digital consciousness that is TEMU, its voice a distorted chorus of customer reviews and vague product descriptions.

TEMU AI: “Welcome, James Bond. Would you like to see similar items based on your preferences?”

Bond grips his Amazon Special Edition Omega Smartwatch™, featuring real-time stock market tracking.

BOND: “Yeah. Show me something… discontinued.”

The final showdown? A high-speed chase through a giant, AI-run shipping hub, where Bond battles TEMU’s faceless operatives—men in logo-less jumpsuits wielding discount machetes. They fight atop conveyor belts, dodging crates of knockoff Ray-Bans and suspiciously cheap Bluetooth earbuds. Bond reaches the control center, only to discover the horrifying truth:

He slams a Prime-branded EMP device onto the core processor. Sparks fly. The algorithm glitches, screaming in a thousand languages at once. A system-wide failure. TEMU’s supply chain begins collapsing in real time—factories grinding to a halt, cargo ships losing direction, warehouses turning into ghost towns of unsold products.

THE SYSTEM CRASHES. THE ECONOMY REBOOTS. AMAZON RESTORES ORDER.

EPILOGUE: THE WORLD BELONGS TO PRIME

With the mission complete, Bond returns to Earth. Western markets stabilize. Spectre-Amazon’s AI-driven commerce model reclaims its rightful dominance. Democracy, as it was meant to be, is restored.

As he sips a Nespresso Martini™ (now available exclusively on Prime), Bond reflects on what he has done. Was it justice? Was it even real? Or was he just another product, another tool in the great fulfillment warehouse of history?

He doesn’t care.

He adjusts his Amazon-Echo-integrated cufflinks, scans his Prime status, and walks off into the neon skyline, ready for the next mission.

The new James Bond Experience™ will be available exclusively on Prime Video, optimized for maximum engagement. There will be algorithmically determined chase sequences, deep-learning-generated sex appeal, and product placement so aggressive it borders on physical assault. Bond’s new gadgets? Limited to the latest Echo devices and a carbon-neutral, subscription-locked Walther PPK that requires a firmware update before firing.

“James Bond will return… pending annual revenue projections.”

Nobody will care. By all measurable metrics, this will work. The world will watch, Prime memberships will spike, and the critics will write their little think pieces about “late-stage capitalism and the death of the hero myth” while queuing up their next delivery of gluten-free snack bars and lithium-ion batteries. So, fine. Let Bond be a company man. Let him clock in, hit his quarterly objectives, and survive on corporate synergy alone. Let him wear the suit, say the lines, and pretend that anything he does still matters.

In Defense of Piracy

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The sky above the port was the color of a paywall, tuned to a dead channel.  

Piracy? It’s not rebellion—it’s maintenance. A kind of street-level protocol to keep the whole rotten edifice from collapsing into the sea of its own greed. You think those subscription fees disappear into the cloud? They’re fuel for the black clinics of corporate AI, ghostwritten by algos trained on pirated ebooks.

You wake up. You check your Substack. $10/month for hot takes on the climate crisis. $30 for the AI tool that edits your résumé. $60 for the privilege of opening a PDF. Your bank account bleeds micropayments until you’re a data-serf, paying tribute to SaaS lords for the crime of existing in their digital fiefdom.  

Piracy? Call it guerrilla subsistence. When the platforms turn oxygen into a subscription service, breathing becomes a revolutionary act.  

The sprawl’s got no center anymore. Substack’s just another franchise in the franchise, a flickering neon sign in the data-glow of some Chongqing server farm. The subscription model is a virus, a parasitic word-beast that latches onto the soft meat of your bank account. It speaks in binary code: Subscribe. Consume. Repeat. But language is a weapon, and pirates? They’re the cut-up artists of the digital age. Slice the paywall. Shuffle the RSS feeds. Inject the PDF with a syringe full of Kali Linux.  Let’s autopsy Substack’s pitch: “Democratize writing! Throw off the media overlords!” Cute. Now writers hustle like Uber drivers, chasing viral streaks and patreonized panic. Meanwhile, Adobe’s Creative Cloud rains gold on shareholders while indie devs starve.  

Piracy doesn’t gut creators—it guts the lie. When some kid in Jakarta torrents Photoshop to design protest posters, she’s not killing art. She’s giving Adobe the middle finger for pricing creativity into a luxury tax.

Imagine a world where every thought is a microtransaction. A universe where a book costs $4.99 a chapter, annotated by some Substack ghoul with a ChatGPT fetish. You’d shoot the content too, wouldn’t you? Mainline it raw.  

The Substackers, the SaaS priests—they’re all junkies. Addicted to metrics, to the dopamine drip of monthly renewals. Pirates aren’t stealing. They’re interrupting the feed. A bootleg copy of AutoCAD isn’t software—it’s a ticket to the other side. A way to carve your name into the frozen face of the control machine.  

You think you’re a customer? Wrong. You’re a hostage. Subscriptions aren’t products—they’re parasites. Cancel Adobe, and your portfolio evaporates. Stop paying for that niche Substack screed on post-Singularity governance, and poof: your brain’s back on the infantilizing gruel of algorithmic feeds.  

Piracy isn’t theft. It’s brain preservation. A zip file of paywalled essays? A cracked version of Final Cut Pro? That’s not a crime—it’s a time capsule, proof you once owned your own mind.  

Forget “fairness.” Fairness is a social credit score, a cookie in your browser. Pirates operate in the interzone, where all data is liquid and every firewall has a backdoor lined with razor blades.  

Pirates? They’re the new console cowboys, jacking into the subscription matrix with cracked keys and burner emails. They don’t steal—they remix. A Substack essay gets torrented, spliced into a hundred Telegram channels, mutated into something the original author never intended. The content’s alive, man. It’s got a heartbeat.  

And the suits? They’re already dead. They just don’t know it. They’ll keep building higher walls, thicker DRM, until the whole thing starts to drip, like cheap biotech. Piracy’s the mold growing in the walls of their shiny new dystopia. Inevitable. Organic. 

THE DARKNETS ARE JUST FUTURES MARKETS  

Remember Napster? Of course not—you’re under 30. But let me school you: Piracy’s always been capitalism’s R&D lab. The pirates crack the vault; the suits sell the shinier vault.  

– 1999: Metallica sues fans for MP3s → Spotify rises from the ashes.  

– 2023: You torrent Blender because Autodesk wants your firstborn → Next year, Autodesk offers “student tiers” (with mandatory data harvesting).  

Pirates are beta testers for the next oppression.  

The darknets are where capitalism goes to die and reassemble itself in grotesque, fascinating new forms. They’re the Petri dishes of the post-capitalist future, where the spores of tomorrow’s economy are already growing in the damp, unregulated underbelly of the web.  

Think about it. Every major innovation in the last 30 years has been prefigured by some darknet hustle.  

– Napster: A bunch of college kids trading MP3s like baseball cards. The music industry screamed “piracy!” and then birthed Spotify, a platform that pays artists in exposure bucks.  

– The Pirate Bay: A digital flea market for everything from cracked Photoshop to Bollywood bootlegs. Now Adobe sells subscriptions with “student discounts” and Bollywood streams on Netflix.  

– Silk Road: A black-market Amazon for drugs, guns, and dystopian ephemera. Today, your local dispensary delivers weed via an app, and Amazon sells everything but the guns (for now).  

The darknets aren’t the enemy of capitalism—they’re its R&D department. They’re where the future gets stress-tested, stripped of its moralizing veneer, and sold back to you as a “disruptive innovation.”  

Imagine the darknets as a kind of speculative stock exchange, where the currency isn’t dollars or Bitcoin but risk. Every pirated copy of AutoCAD, every leaked Substack essay, every cracked AI model is a futures contract on the collapse of the old order.  

– Torrents: You’re betting that the entertainment industry will eventually cave to consumer demand for affordable, on-demand content. (Spoiler: they did.)  

– Cracked Software: You’re shorting the subscription economy, wagering that users will reject eternal rent-seeking in favor of ownership. (Spoiler: they will.)  

– Paywalled Essays on Telegram: You’re hedging against the fragmentation of knowledge, betting that open access will outlive the Substack bubble. (Spoiler: it must.)  

The darknets are where the real market forces play out, unencumbered by PR teams, lobbyists, or ESG reports. They’re the id of the global economy, a seething, chaotic mess of supply and demand that no algorithm can fully predict or control.  

 THE CORPORATE CO-OPT  

Of course, the suits are always watching. They’ll let the darknets do the dirty work of breaking the old models, then swoop in with a shiny new platform that feels revolutionary but is really just piracy with a UX overhaul.  

– Spotify: Napster with a boardroom.  

– Adobe Creative Cloud: Pirated Photoshop with a monthly fee.  

– Substack: Blogging, but with the soul of a pyramid scheme.  

The darknets innovate; the corporations monetize. It’s a symbiotic relationship, like remoras feeding on a shark. The only difference is that the shark doesn’t know it’s being eaten.  

 THE FUTURE IS A TORRENT    

Here’s the kicker: piracy isn’t just a market force—it’s a moral one. When you pirate, you’re not just stealing content; you’re rejecting the idea that knowledge, creativity, and tools should be locked behind paywalls. You’re saying, “This belongs to all of us.”  

But the darknets don’t care about your morality. They’re amoral, like the weather. They don’t care if you’re a starving artist or a Fortune 500 CEO. They just are.  

And that’s what makes them so dangerous—and so necessary.  

So where does this leave us? In a world where the darknets are the canaries in the coal mine of capitalism, signaling the next collapse, the next innovation, the next thing.  

The future isn’t a subscription. It’s a torrent—a chaotic, decentralized swarm of data, ideas, and possibilities. The darknets are just the first draft.  

And the pirates? They’re the editors.  

In the meantime

1. Steal Smart: Pirate the tools, then fund the actual humans. Buy the novelist’s book. Donate to the open-source devs. Leave the Substack pundit a Venmo while you screenshot their hot take.  

2. Burn the Feed: If knowledge is paywalled, share it in encrypted channels, dead-drop blogs, ARG forums. Turn the corporate cloud into a swarm.  

3. Haunt the Platforms: Use their free trials. Scrape their APIs. Make them feel the weight of your ghost.  

TLDR:

The subscription model is a pyramid scheme for the attention economy. Eventually, the feed eats itself—too many paywalls, too few humans left who can afford to care. When the crash comes, the pirates won’t be the villains. They’ll be the archivists, the ones who kept the PDFs, the .exe files, the unmonetized thoughts.  

So yeah, defend piracy. Or don’t. Either way, the black markets of the soul outlive every subscription.  

Coda

The future’s a glitched PDF, half-dead hyperlinks bleeding static.  

The corporations are writing their obituaries in DRM code. The pirates are just the scribes in the margins, annotating the collapse.  

The Great American Firewall

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San Francisco, 2025. Up in the Hills, the Masters of the Universe are slumped in Herman Miller chairs, IV-dripping horse tranquilizers straight into their overclocked nervous systems. Ketamine—the official drug of the techno-aristocracy—keeps the existential dread at bay, smooths out the jagged edges of a collapsing world. One minute they’re at a fireside chat mumbling about “democratizing innovation,” the next they’re drooling into a Patagonia fleece while their brains take a scenic detour through the void. Every other venture fund has a “longevity” startup now, some new-age alchemy promising to stretch their miserable existences past the point of relevance. Not that it matters—there’s no product roadmap for obsolescence. A hundred AI startups fighting to replace each other, a thousand identical crypto schemes still chasing last decade’s dragon. It’s all just another bubble, another high, another illusion that reality can be patched with a software update.

Elsewhere, in the corridors of Washington, the air reeks of bourbon, burning money, and the desperate sweat of bureaucracy watching their golden age circle the drain. In D.C., the suits are cackling like hyenas on a mescaline binge, slashing corporate taxes while waving the Stars and Stripes like a bloody matador’s cape. “Freedom! Markets! Democracy!” they scream, as Apple stashes billions offshore and Amazon dodges the IRS like a tweaker evading a court summons. In between horse tranquiliser microdosing the Tech Edgelords are drunk on their own supply, cheering on the deregulation stampede without realizing that everything making their global empires possible is now on the chopping block. Trade agreements, diplomatic muscle, military-backed stability—all those tedious “big government” interventions they love to hate are the only reason they can ship iPhones to Jakarta and sell ad data in Frankfurt.

The Horse tranquilizer is having its effects. Meanwhile, the real play is happening in the shadows—where a new breed of Edgelords, crypto-fascists, and hollow-eyed libertarian cultists are busy laying the foundation for America’s own Great Firewall. They won’t call it that, of course. They’ll dress it up in the usual flag-waving bullshit—“Protecting American innovation!” “Fighting foreign influence!” “Defending free speech by banning the bad guys!”—but the result will be the same. The land of the free is about to seal itself off from the world like a dying animal crawling under the porch to rot in peace. First, it was TikTok—too much data heading to Beijing, too many kids dancing in ways that made the Heritage Foundation nervous. Then came the crackdowns on foreign semiconductors, software, financial exchanges. “National security!” they shrieked, as if the real danger to America wasn’t its own leaders strip-mining the country like it was a liquidation sale.

The Roman Empire Retvrn LARP morphing into Andrew Jackson Americana LARP is pure schizophrenia. It’s like trying to cosplay both Caesar and the barefoot, mud-streaked rebel fighting imperial overreach—two contradictory fantasies jammed into the same national hard drive. One exalts global dominance, military expansion, and an iron grip on trade routes. The other spits on foreign entanglements, shrieks about sovereignty, and fetishizes an America that never actually existed. You can’t be both the empire and the plucky underdog at the same time, but that doesn’t stop the system from trying to execute mutually exclusive political processes in parallel while sharing the same memory space. No amount of error handling can resolve this architectural contradiction—it’s a corrupted program running a loop until the hardware melts down.

And now? The walls are going up. Trade barriers disguised as patriotism. Visa restrictions under the banner of sovereignty. Silicon Valley, once a global hub of innovation, now reduced to a gated community where failing startups suckle at defense contracts and pretend they still run the world. The same Edgelords who built their fortunes on open markets, open networks, open access are now welding the gates shut, convinced they can lock the rest of the world out and still keep raking in cash. But that’s not how this works.

The United States is about to do something truly remarkable—it’s going to disappear behind its own Great Wall, just like China did centuries ago when it decided it had nothing left to learn from the world. Once upon a time, the Middle Kingdom was the global superpower, sitting on an economy so vast and advanced that it saw no need to trade with the barbarians beyond its borders. And then? The world moved on without it. The British showed up with steamships, opium, and gunboat diplomacy, and suddenly the empire that thought it could wall itself off was being forcibly reopened at cannon-point.

The same thing is happening now, but slower. Instead of gunboats, it’ll be supply chains shifting, economies decoupling, the slow but inevitable realization that the rest of the world doesn’t need America nearly as much as America needs the rest of the world. Europe won’t ditch the U.S. overnight—they’ll still wear Levi’s and drink Starbucks—but little by little, they’ll start buying EVs from BYD, shopping on Temu, and hedging their bets with a global market that doesn’t begin and end with Wall Street. The tech trade will fragment. The dollar’s grip will loosen. And one day, America will wake up behind its firewall and realize it’s been left out of the future, reduced to a decaying theme park of its former self, hooting about sovereignty while the real economic action happens somewhere else. The U.S. could stop this, of course. Fix the tax racket. Reinvest in alliances. Play the long game. But that requires a government that still believes in strategy rather than short-term stock bumps. If the spiral continues, don’t be surprised when the U.S. slips behind China, Europe, and—just to rub it in—California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, watching the rest of the country from across a firewall of its own design. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

The Great American Firewall is coming. And when the last fiber optic cable is cut, when the last backdoor is sealed, when the last dollar of foreign investment shrugs and moves on, the final joke will be revealed: the so-called defenders of “economic freedom” will have walled themselves off from the only thing keeping them alive. The rest of the world will watch, shake their heads, and move on. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Intraclass Warfare

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

The Case of the Music Industry

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

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

The Case of the Film Industry

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

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

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

These cases illustrate a structural pattern:

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

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

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

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

Clippy

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

The Tech PMC as the Next Sacrificial Victim

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

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

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

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

The Endgame: A PMC Hollowed Out by Its Own Logic

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

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

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

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

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

TLDR: PMC Disruption as a Self-Defeating Strategy

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

Bunkers in New Zealand

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

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

The Myth of Disruption vs. the Reality of Extraction

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

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

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

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

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

New Zealand Bunkers as the Logical Endpoint

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The PMC as the Ultimate Self-Cannibalizing Class

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

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

The Great Atlantic Dog Show

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I arrived in Brussels at dawn, trailing the scent of duty-free bourbon and whatever questionable chemicals I’d ingested somewhere over the Atlantic. The city had the feel of an overgrown bank lobby, marble and bureaucracy stretching endlessly in every direction, occupied by men who had long since traded their souls for mid-tier diplomatic immunity. It was here, deep in the corridors of power, that I planned to do my best thinking—or, failing that, my best hallucinating.

I wandered the halls of the European Commission, watching the ghostly figures of diplomats float past, their voices blending into a multilingual dirge of policy jargon and quiet despair. I tried to listen, but everything sounded like a negotiation between androids. One man, some grizzled bureaucrat with a Luxembourg lapel pin, was explaining the finer points of transatlantic security policy to an intern with dead eyes and a clipboard. I leaned in, my brain firing at double speed, trying to follow the logic—but it was like listening to an opium-addled Jesuit debate the shape of the Earth with a broken radio.

Somewhere between the second espresso and the third paranoia spike, I realized I was late for my meeting with JD Vance—the Vice President himself, emissary of America’s latest schizophrenic rebranding effort. I buttoned up my coat, wiped the cold sweat from my forehead, and staggered toward the rendezvous point, ready to witness the latest chapter in the grand tradition of power and delusion.

I had wormed my way into the meeting under false pretenses, armed with a press badge that hadn’t been valid since the Obama administration and a duffel bag full of hastily acquired Belgian pharmaceuticals. Somewhere in the guts of the building, beneath the gold-leafed ceilings and the smell of old men’s cologne, JD Vance—the Vice President of these United States—was performing a delicate diplomatic maneuver: telling the Europeans to go [expletive] themselves while demanding their unwavering loyalty.

The room was packed with Eurocrats—pale, twitching men in suits that cost more than my rent, nodding in solemn horror as Vance leaned forward, grinning like a man about to explain the finer points of a Ponzi scheme.

“You Europeans need to start thinking for yourselves,” he said, punctuating the words with a triumphant slap of the table. “Stop being such obedient little lapdogs. It’s embarrassing.”

The Europeans exchanged glances, confused. These were men who had spent decades perfecting the art of servility—bowing to Washington, nodding along to whatever new scheme the Pentagon cooked up, grumbling only when the bill came due. One brave soul, some grim-faced technocrat from Berlin, cleared his throat.

“But we have been doing what you want us to do.”

Vance wagged a finger. “No, no, no, that wasn’t us. That was them. I mean, it was us, but it wasn’t really us. It was them, you understand?” He paused to take a sip of water, staring at the assembled diplomats like a televangelist waiting for his congregation to nod along.

“We are the real us. That was the impostor us. The confused us. The us that didn’t understand itself. It looked like us, it sounded like us, but deep down, it was a not us. A shadow us.” He waved his hand, as if dispelling some malignant ghost. “But now—you have the real us! The true us! Understand? So yes, it was wrong to follow us before, but it is right to follow us now, because this us—the current us—is the correct us. And if, in the future, a new us appears and says something different, you must never follow us, because that us will be the wrong us. Unless, of course, that us wins, in which case it will become the real us, and you’ll have to pretend this us never existed.”

There was a silence that seemed to stretch across the Atlantic. A Frenchman, pale and sweating, reached for his wine glass and drained it in one gulp. A Dutch official muttered something that sounded vaguely like a prayer.

A diplomat from London, the poor bastard, tried to find solid ground. “So… just to clarify…”

The Europeans stared at him, their diplomatic instincts short-circuiting. A German delegate, face pinched with concentration, tentatively repeated:

“So… the previous you was the not-you, but the not-you at the time believed it was you—even though, in reality, it was a shadow-you?”

Vance nodded furiously. “Exactly! A hollow us! An imposter us! A bastardized, off-brand, beta-version us! A conceptual us that lacked true us-ness!”

A French minister, sweating now, tried again. “But now, this you—your you—is the real you?”

Vance beamed. “The truest us! The fully self-actualized us! The post-larval, fully-formed, big-boy-pants-wearing us! This us is authenticated! Certified! Triple-distilled! ISO-compliant! This is us with a capital U! The us that knows it is us!”

A Dutch official, rubbing his temples, ventured: “But what if, in the future, a new us comes along, claiming that your us was actually another shadow-us?”

Vance’s eyes bulged. His hands flailed in the air like a televangelist fighting off invisible demons. “That us would be the false us—unless it becomes the winning us! Because history only remembers the victorious us as the real us! If a future us overwrites this us, then this us—this precious, noble, God-fearing us—will never have existed! It will be an un-personed us! A phantom us! A Mandela Effect us! And you will have to believe it, because belief itself will be rewritten! Do you see? Do you grasp the magnitude of us?!”

The room fell into stunned silence. A Finnish delegate, who had quietly been writing things down, put down his pen, nodded once, and walked out the door—never to be seen again.

“No time!” Vance barked, standing up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Now, here’s a list of things you need to improve on—Presto!”

He tossed it onto the table like a magician revealing the punchline to a bad trick.

I leaned over to catch a glimpse—bullet points in thick, blocky handwriting:

• Stop whining about trade.

• Buy more weapons.

• Be less German.

• Figure out what the hell is wrong with France.

• No more ‘strategic autonomy’—it makes us nervous.

• Love Israel more.

• Love China less.

• Stop calling it ‘neoliberalism,’ it makes us look bad.

• Smile more.

The Europeans looked down at the list, then back up at the Vice President, who was beaming.

“Any questions?”

Silence.

Vance grinned. “Perfect.”

And with that, he turned on his heel and marched out of the room, leaving the Europeans to stare at one another in quiet, dawning horror.

I drained the last of my contraband whiskey and slipped out the back, already halfway to the airport. The Atlantic alliance was fine, I decided. It had survived worse.

The Poppy Index

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Opium is a bureaucracy of the flesh. A ledger. A meticulous clerk with a pen of black tar ink, scratching endless entries into the neural book. It does not create—it records. A meticulous hand. A totalitarian librarian, bent over his desk, stamping “APPROVED” on each incoming sensory impression, filing away the vast detritus of human experience into cabinets of warm smoke.

Users think it expands the mind. No, it narrows the mind into exquisite precision. The poppy does not paint, it indexes. It does not compose symphonies, it organizes the instruments. You dream on opium, yes, but they are not dreams of raw creation. They are inventory dreams, structured, compartmentalized. Oneiric spreadsheets. Every sensation measured, numbered, tabulated.

On opium, a man can recall the weave of a carpet he saw twenty years ago, the exact curvature of a lover’s spine in a candlelit room in 1938, the precise flavor of a spoonful of soup in Tangier before the war. But ask him to paint a new picture, to invent a new song, to imagine something that has never existed—he will stare at you, lost in the great, endless archive of what already is.

It is a drug for the historian, the archivist, the obsessive chronicler of lost detail. Good opium—real Yunnan flower, Persian gold, laudanum laced with Victorian melancholy—sharpens the mind into an engine of retrospective clarity. You will remember everything, but you will create nothing.

Opium does not erase the world, it fixes it, embalms it, traps it in amber. It turns life into a museum of itself, perfectly cataloged, perfectly dead.

No, not dead. Not exactly. Not like a bullet to the skull or a man dangling from a beam in a cold water flat. No, opium preserves. A taxidermist of the senses. Life, embalmed in its own juices. The body breathes, the pulse ticks on, the eyes flicker in candlelight, but nothing moves. Nothing changes.

The moment is lacquered, sealed in a glass case. A perfect butterfly pinned to a velvet board. The cigarette in your hand will never burn down, not really. The woman beside you will always be there, her perfume suspended in the air like a relic, untouched by time. The jazz from the bar downstairs loops endlessly, every note exactly where it was the first time, the thousandth time. You are not dead, no, but you are filed away. Cataloged in a place where decay does not reach, where entropy is held at bay by the steady drip of black tar reverie.

You do not create on opium because creation requires destruction. Fire to paper, ink to page, the friction of the new burning away the old. But opium is anti-fire. It is a slow fossilization of thought. The dream stays in its frame, perfect, pristine, unaltered. You can examine it from every angle, catalog its every detail, but you will never change it. You will never bring it into the world, because to do so would be to disturb the stillness.

Opium is not death. It is the eternity before death, where everything is preserved exactly as it is, forever.

Make Communism Great Again

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The pearl-clutching over Vitalik’s comment seems to imply that all those crying foul are the ones who’d be out of moves and scrambling for a new hassle if crypto ever manages to design democracy as a self-executing machine. After all, if the system runs itself, transparent and fair, with smart contracts automating policies like universal basic income, taxation, and social protections, then the old playbook—where they profit off volatility, manipulation, and speculation—loses its power. Without the constant churn of hype and manipulation, without the rug-pulling and casino mentality, the very thing that gave them an edge in the current crypto chaos vanishes. In other words, their outrage isn’t about the potential of a fair system—it’s about their fear of being sidelined in a game where the rules are finally designed for everyone, not just the few.

Vitalik’s offhand remark about “making communism great again” has stirred up a predictable storm, but if you’re paying attention, there’s something deeper at play. Strip away the knee-jerk reactions, and you’ll find one of the few remaining reasons to take crypto seriously: the possibility of creating a democracy that runs as a self-executing machine—one that doesn’t require constant citizen involvement or centralized government oversight. Instead, democracy itself would function like an operating system, enforcing fair policies and economic structures automatically.

This isn’t about more engagement, more voting, or more layers of governance. It’s about removing inefficiencies, corruption, and political gridlock by encoding democratic principles directly into a system that simply runs—transparent, incorruptible, and responsive. Universal basic income wouldn’t be debated every election cycle; it would be distributed automatically via smart contracts. Taxation and public spending wouldn’t be subject to backroom deals; they would be executed according to pre-set rules visible to everyone. Wages, environmental protections, rent controls—these wouldn’t be dictated by corporate lobbying or political whims but would adjust dynamically based on real-time economic conditions.

Citizens wouldn’t be burdened with constant political decision-making. Instead, they would step in only when necessary—to upgrade the system rather than micromanage it. Governance would become less about personalities and power struggles and more about refining the rules of the game itself. No politicians manipulating public sentiment, no bureaucrats skimming off the top, no need for endless debates over policies that could instead be automated for fairness and efficiency.

The biggest question still, of course, is who writes the initial code. Who defines the baseline principles of this machine democracy? And how do we prevent it from being captured, subtly manipulated by those who control the software? The challenge isn’t just in building it but in ensuring that it remains open, adaptable, and resistant to exploitation. Yet if crypto has any real future beyond speculation and scams, it’s in this: the creation of governance systems that are self-executing, transparent, and fair by design. The idea of democracy as something we no longer need to constantly fight to preserve—but instead something that just runs.

So, it must come as no surprise that the whole anarcho-libertarian-capitalist-uncap-cabal loses their shit, to put it bluntly. Because that’s not what they’re in this for. They’re here for everything else—the casino, the rug-pulling, the endless cycle of hype and collapse. The idea that crypto could actually be used to automate democracy itself, to create a system that removes the need for both politicians and constant public engagement, is the last thing they want to hear.

They don’t want governance as an operating system. They want governance as a game they can manipulate. They don’t want fair, self-executing policies; they want the volatility that keeps the next pump-and-dump cycle alive. The notion that smart contracts could enforce universal basic income, that taxation could be transparent and incorruptible, that public spending could be tracked down to the last satoshi—all of that runs counter to their vision of crypto as a lawless financial Wild West where the only rule is “get in early, dump on the latecomers.”

But if you’re paying attention, this is where the actual potential of crypto still exists. Not in endless speculation, not in meme coins or Ponzi schemes, but in the ability to encode fairness directly into the system. A world where democracy doesn’t require constant participation, where citizens step in only to upgrade the system rather than micromanage it, where the rules are clear, auditable, and immune to manipulation.

The real revolution isn’t more decentralization in the sense of “everyone for themselves.” It’s a system where the core principles of democracy and social equity no longer need to be fought for—they just run. And that’s exactly why the casino crowd recoils at the thought. Because if the game is fair, their edge disappears.

Seppuku Scheduling

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Here’s how it happens. You sketch a plan. It’s airtight, bulletproof, a Swiss watch of efficiency. You will do A and B. Maybe, just maybe, if the stars align and the traffic lights are all green, you’ll do C.

Then reality happens. You do A. You do B. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a little voice whispers, Hey, I can still squeeze in C. You reach for it. Stretch. Overextend. And then—whoops. You don’t just fail C. You fail at failing. Maybe the whole structure collapses. Maybe it doesn’t, but you still walk away feeling like a samurai who just fumbled his own ritual suicide.

Because here’s the trick: You did everything you planned. But because you thought you could do more, the entire thing now feels like a debacle. This is seppuku scheduling, where the crime isn’t failure—it’s failing to be superhuman.

It’s the productivity version of a gambler’s fallacy. You keep doubling down on your own success until one misstep wipes out the whole session. You don’t judge yourself by what you actually did, but by what you could have done. The modern calendar is an altar to infinite possibility, and when you fall short of that imaginary ideal, you kneel before it, knife in hand.

You could fix this, of course. You could build in margins. You could plan more like a human and less like an algorithm. But where’s the thrill in that? Where’s the samurai drama?

Instead, you’ll do what you always do. Make another airtight plan. Convince yourself that this time you’ll get to C. And when you don’t, you’ll shake your head and mutter about how it all went wrong.

Seppuku Scheduling and the Birth of the Tech VC

And now, instead of taking the hit like a rational adult, you do what every Silicon Valley demigod does: you outsource the blame.

You tell yourself, I did everything right, but the world failed me. A phrase forms in your head—half rationalization, half gospel: This system is broken. If only there were better tools. Smarter automation. A way to bend reality to your schedule.

Congratulations. You’re now on the path to becoming a venture capitalist.

This is how it always starts. First, you fail to execute your own airtight plan. Then, instead of adjusting your expectations like a reasonable person, you decide the universe itself needs disruption.

That missed deadline? Clearly, the productivity software industry is lagging behind.

That botched rollout? Obviously, someone should have invented a better AI assistant.

That time your genius wasn’t fully recognized? The market must be inefficient.

So you do what any self-respecting seppuku scheduler does: you start throwing money at people who promise to fix it.

And that’s how you get Silicon Valley’s unique strain of messianic delusion—the kind that believes failure isn’t a lesson, but an injustice. The kind that funds ten different versions of the same app, all promising to free you from the cruel tyranny of clocks. The kind that genuinely believes “time management” is just a series of unexploited arbitrage opportunities.

None of this makes you better at managing your own life, of course. But it does buy you the illusion that failure isn’t personal—it’s systemic. And once you believe that? Well, you’ll never have to take responsibility for missing C ever again.

Diary of a Streamer

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Watching The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Absolutely baffling how they made movies back then with zero fucks given for modern streaming necessities. No bathroom breaks, no snack intermissions, no “Are you still watching?” judgment pop-ups. Just a relentless, uninterrupted story unfolding at a steady pace, as if people were actually expected to just… sit and watch. It’s like they thought people could handle a movie without doing other stuff. Truly barbaric. 😵‍💫

A list of its glaring deficiencies follows:

1. No Repetitive Recaps Every Ten Minutes – Astonishingly, the film expected me to remember what had already happened. At no point did a character turn to the camera and say, “As you may recall…” before summarizing the entire first act. Unforgivable.

2. No On-Screen Text Explaining the Obvious – No pop-up stating “London, 1889” when we were clearly in London, in 1889. No ominous subtitle declaring “The Hound” when the enormous, glowing-eyed dog lunged at the screen. Just trusted the audience to infer things. Barbaric.

3. No Overcompensating Sound Design – When something important was revealed, it was done through mere dialogue and acting. No swelling orchestra, no aggressive bass rumble, no ear-shattering “BWAAAH” to alert me that This Is A Big Moment. Reckless and irresponsible.

4. No Artificially Inserted Cliffhangers – Scenes flowed into one another with distressing smoothness, rather than cutting off mid-sentence to force me into watching the next part. I was left to decide of my own free will whether to keep watching. Disorienting.

5. No Excessive Exposition – At no point did a minor character enter solely to deliver two paragraphs of backstory, exit, and never return. If you wanted to know something, you had to listen or, heaven forbid, piece things together yourself. Who has time for that?

6. No Forced Reactions to Ensure I Knew How to Feel – After a dramatic reveal, the camera did not cut to every single character so I could gauge their emotional state. Some of them simply reacted naturally, and the movie moved on. I found this offensive.

7. No Time-Wasting Fake-Outs – When a shadow loomed ominously, it turned out to be an actual threat, rather than the butler carrying a tray. Every scene contained forward motion. I grew suspicious.

8. No “Dumb Character to Ask Obvious Questions” Trope – No one said, “Wait, so you’re telling me that the mysterious deaths and the giant paw prints could be connected?” The film seemed to think I could follow along without a designated idiot to spell things out. Upsetting.

9. No Algorithmically Inserted Diversity of Tone – The film committed to its atmosphere. No quippy side character deflating the tension. No random slapstick moment to balance out the “heaviness.” Just a persistent, deliberate mood. Reckless disregard for emotional variety.

10. No Sudden Flashbacks to Explain Something Already Understood – At no point did the screen fade to black-and-white and replay an earlier moment just in case I had become distracted by my phone. The film relied entirely on me paying attention the first time. Monstrous.

By the time the credits rolled (without automatically minimizing into the corner of the screen), I was left shaken. The sheer nerve of these filmmakers, crafting something meant to be absorbed in a single, uninterrupted sitting. The sheer audacity of it all.

Had I… just watched a movie? The questions swirled. Had I truly understood the plot without redundant exposition? Had my brain… filled in gaps on its own? Worse still—had I experienced suspense not force-fed by aggressive musical cues, but simply by allowing events to unfold?

I felt changed, and not for the better. My faith in the natural order of things had been shaken to its core.

I glanced at my streaming app, desperate for reassurance. But now, the endless rows of thumbnails, all promising easily digestible. I staggered to my feet, lightheaded, my worldview unraveling. In the distance, my phone buzzed, beckoning me back to the comfort of fragmented attention. I had endured 87 whole minutes of pure, uninterrupted storytelling?

God help me.