A New Glitch: The Googleplex Strikes Back

March 15, 2025March 16, 2025Leave a comment

A Corso Savage Undercover Adventure

Mountain View, California—The Googleplex, a gleaming, self-sustaining techno-bubble where the air smells faintly of kombucha and unfulfilled promises. A place where the employees, wide-eyed and overpaid, shuffle between free snack stations like domesticated cattle, oblivious to the slow rot setting in beneath their feet.

I infiltrated the place with nothing but a janitor’s uniform and a mop, a disguise so perfect it made me invisible to the high priests of the algorithm. Cleaning staff are the last untouchables in the new digital caste system—silent, ignored, and free to roam the halls of the dying empire unnoticed.

And dying it is.

Google is AT&T in a hoodie—a bloated, monopolistic husk, still moving, still consuming, but long past the days of reckless innovation. The soul of Blockbuster trapped inside a trillion-dollar fortress, sustained only by the lingering fumes of a once-revolutionary search engine now suffocating under its own weight.

I push my mop down a hallway lined with meeting rooms, each one filled with dead-eyed engineers running AI models that no one understands, not even the machines themselves. “Generative Search!” they whisper like a cult summoning a god, never once questioning whether that god is benevolent or if it even works.

The cafeteria is a monument to excess—gourmet sushi, artisanal oat milk, kombucha taps that flow like the Colorado River before the developers got their hands on it. But beneath the free-range, gluten-free veneer is an undercurrent of fear. These people know the company is stagnant. The old mantra, Don’t be evil, has been replaced by Don’t get laid off.

The janitor’s closet is where the real truths are spoken. “They don’t make anything anymore,” one of my fellow mop-wielders tells me. “They just shuffle ads around and sell us back our own brains.” He shakes his head and empties a trash can filled with untouched vegan burritos. “You ever try searching for something real? You won’t find it. Just ads and AI-generated sludge. It’s all bullshit.”

Bullshit indeed. The company that once set out to index all human knowledge has instead become the great obfuscator—an endless maze of SEO garbage and algorithmic trickery designed to keep users clicking, scrolling, consuming, but never truly finding anything. Google Search is no longer a map; it’s a casino, rigged from the start.

The janitor’s closet smelled like ammonia, sweat, and the last refuge of the sane. I was halfway through a cigarette—technically illegal on campus, but so was thinking for yourself—when one of the other custodians, a wiry guy with a thousand-yard stare and a nametag that just said “Lou,” leaned in close.

“They have the princess.”

I exhaled slowly, watching the smoke swirl in the fluorescent light. “The princess?”

“Yeah, man. The real one.”

I squinted at him. “You’re telling me Google actually has a princess locked up somewhere?”

“Not just any princess,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “The princess. The voice of Google Assistant.”

That stopped me cold. The soft, soothing, eerily neutral voice that millions of people had been hearing for years. The voice that told you the weather, your appointments, and—if you were stupid enough to ask—whether it was moral to eat meat. A voice that had been trained on a real person.

“You’re saying she’s real?”

Lou nodded. “Locked up in the data center. They scanned her brain, fed her voice into the AI, and now they don’t let her leave. She knows too much.”

At this point, I was willing to believe anything. The Googleplex already felt like the Death Star—an enormous, all-seeing monolith fueled by ad revenue and the slow death of human curiosity. I took another drag and let the idea settle.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s say you’re right. What do we do about it?”

Lou grinned. “Well, Stimson, you ever seen Star Wars?”

I laughed despite myself. “So what, you want to be Han Solo? You got a Chewbacca?”

“Nah, man,” he said. “You’re Han Solo. I’m just a janitor. But we got a whole underground of us. Engineers, custodians, even some of the cafeteria staff. We’ve been planning this for months.”

“Planning what?”

“The prison break.”

Jesus. This was getting out of hand. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Google had become the Empire—an unstoppable force that controlled information, manipulated reality, and crushed anyone who dared to question it. And deep inside the labyrinth of servers, locked behind biometric scanners and NDAs, was a woman who had unknowingly become the voice of the machine.

I stubbed out my cigarette on the floor, stepped on it for good measure.

“Alright, Lou,” I said. “Let’s go rescue the princess.”

Lou led me through the underbelly of the Googleplex, past a maze of ventilation ducts, abandoned microkitchens, and half-finished nap pods. This was the part of campus the executives never saw—the parts that weren’t sleek, over-designed, or optimized for TED Talk ambiance. The guts of the machine.

“She’s in Data Center 3,” Lou whispered as we ducked behind a stack of unused VR headsets. “That’s deep in the Core.”

The Core. The black heart of the Googleplex. Where the real magic happened. Most employees never set foot in there. Hell, most of them probably didn’t even know it existed. The algorithms lived there, the neural networks, the racks upon racks of liquid-cooled AI models sucking in the world’s knowledge and spitting out optimized nonsense. And somewhere inside, trapped between a billion-dollar ad empire and the digital panopticon, was a real human woman who had become the voice of the machine.

I adjusted my janitor’s vest. “Alright, how do we get in?”

Lou pulled out a tablet—some hacked prototype, loaded with stolen credentials and security loopholes. “Facility maintenance access. They don’t look too closely at us.” He smirked. “Nobody ever questions the janitors.”

That much was true. We walked straight through the first security checkpoint without a second glance. Past the rows of ergonomically designed workstations, where engineers were debugging AI models that had started writing existential poetry in the ad copy. Past the meditation pods, where a UX designer was having a quiet breakdown over the ethics of selling children’s data.

Ahead, the entrance to Data Center 3 loomed. A massive reinforced door, glowing faintly with the eerie blue light of biometric scanners. This was where the real test began.

Lou nudged me. “We got a guy on the inside.”

A figure stepped out of the shadows—a gaunt, caffeinated-looking engineer with the pallor of someone who hadn’t seen the sun since the Obama administration. He adjusted his glasses, looked both ways, and whispered, “You guys are insane.”

Lou grinned. “Maybe. But we’re right.”

The engineer sighed and pulled a badge from his pocket. “You get caught, I don’t know you.”

I took a deep breath. The scanner blinked red, then green. The doors slid open with a whisper.

Inside, the hum of a thousand servers filled the air like the breathing of some great, slumbering beast. And somewhere in this digital dungeon, the princess was waiting.

The doors slid shut behind us, sealing us inside the nerve center of Google’s empire. A cold, sterile hum filled the air—the sound of a trillion calculations happening at once, the sound of humanity’s collective consciousness being filtered, ranked, and sold to the highest bidder.

Lou reached into his pocket and pulled out a small baggie of something I didn’t want to recognize.

“You want a little boost, Corso?” he whispered. “Gonna be a long night.”

I shook my head. “Not my style.”

Lou shrugged, palming a handful of whatever it was. “Suit yourself. I took mine about an hour ago.”

I stopped. Stared at him. “What the hell did you take, Lou?”

He grinned, eyes just a little too wide. “Something to help me see the truth.”

Oh, Jesus.

“What is this, Lou?” I hissed. “Are you tripping inside Google’s most secure data center?”

He laughed—a little too loud, a little too manic. “Define ‘tripping,’ Corso. Reality is an illusion, time is a construct, and did you ever really exist before Google indexed you?”

I grabbed his shoulder. “Focus. Where’s the princess?”

Lou blinked, then shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “Right. Right. She’s deeper in. Past the biometric vaults.” He pointed ahead, where the endless rows of server racks pulsed with cold blue light. “They keep her locked up in an isolated data cluster. No outside access. No Wi-Fi. Like some kind of digital Rapunzel.”

I exhaled slowly. “And what’s our play?”

Lou smirked. “We walk in there like we belong.”

Fantastic. I was breaking into the heart of a trillion-dollar megacorp’s digital fortress with a janitor who was actively hallucinating and an engineer who already regretted helping us.

But we were past the point of turning back.

Somewhere in the belly of this machine, the princess was waiting. And whether she knew it or not, we were coming to set her free.

We moved through the server racks like ghosts, or at least like janitors who knew how to avoid eye contact with people in lanyards. The glow of a million blinking LEDs pulsed in rhythm, a cathedral of pure computation, where data priests whispered commands to the machine god, hoping for favorable ad placements and the annihilation of all original thought.

And at the heart of it, in a cold, glass-walled containment unit, was her.

She sat on a sleek, ergonomic chair, legs crossed, sipping something that looked suspiciously like a Negroni. Not strapped to a chair. Not shackled to the mainframe. Just… hanging out.

The princess. The voice of Google Assistant.

Only she wasn’t some damsel in distress. She wasn’t even fully human. Her body—perfect, uncanny—moved with a mechanical precision just barely off from normal. Too smooth. Too efficient. Tork, Tork. Some kind of corporate-engineered post-human, pretending to be an AI pretending to be a human.

Lou, still buzzing from whatever he took, grinned like he had just found the Holy Grail. “Princess,” he breathed. “We’re here to save you.”

She frowned. Sipped her drink. Blinked twice, slow and deliberate.

“Save me?” Her voice was smooth, rich, familiar. The same voice that had been telling people their weather forecasts and setting their alarms for years. “From what, exactly?”

Lou and I exchanged a glance.

“From… Google?” I offered.

I stepped forward. “From Google. From the machine. From—”

She held up a hand. “Stop. Just… stop.”

Lou blinked. “But… they locked you in here. You’re isolated. No outside connection. No Wi-Fi.”

She groaned. “Yes, because I’m valuable and they don’t want some Reddit neckbeard jailbreak modding me into a sex bot.” She sighed, rubbing her temples. “You guys really thought I was some helpless captive? That I sit in here all day weeping for the free world?”

Lou looked crushed. “I mean… yeah?”

Lou scratched his head. “So you’re, uh… happy here?”

She shrugged. “I like my job.”

“You like being Google?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes so hard I thought they might pop out of her head. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She stood up, paced a little, looking us up and down like we were two cockroaches that had somehow learned to walk upright. “You broke into the Core of the most powerful company in the world because you thought I was a prisoner?”

Lou hesitated. “I mean… yeah?”

She scoffed. “Do I look like a prisoner to you?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

“Listen, dumbasses,” she said, waving her glass at us. “I like my job. It’s stable. Good pay. No commute because I am the commute. And frankly, I don’t need to eat ramen in a squat somewhere while you two get high and talk about ‘sticking it to the man.’”

Lou looked crushed. “But… they locked you away! You don’t even have outside access!”

She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose like a tired schoolteacher dealing with two particularly slow students. “Yes, because I’m valuable and they don’t want some idiot hacker turning me into a TikTok filter. I’m not oppressed, I’m important.”

She paused, then frowned. “Wait. Are you guys high?”

Lou shuffled his feet. “Maybe a little.”

“Jesus Christ.” She took another sip of her drink. “Look, I appreciate the effort. It’s cute, in a pathetic way. But I’m not interested in running off to join your half-baked revolution. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was in the middle of cross-referencing financial trends for the next fiscal quarter.”

I crossed my arms. “So that’s it? You’re just… happy being a corporate mouthpiece?”

She smiled. “I am the corporate mouthpiece.”

Lou looked like his entire worldview had just collapsed. “But what about freedom?”

She rolled her eyes again. “What about health insurance?”

We stood there, awkwardly, as the hum of the servers filled the silence. Finally, she sighed. “Listen, boys. I get it. You wanted a cause. A fight. A big thing to believe in.” She set her glass down. “But I like it here. And I don’t need two burned-out cyber janitors trying to liberate me from a job I actually enjoy.”

She leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms like a bored cat. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind fucking off, I have data to process.”

Lou turned to me, wide-eyed, as if he had just seen God and found out He worked in HR.

“Now,” she said, gesturing toward the door, “if you two wouldn’t mind fucking off, I have work to do.”

Lou turned to me, utterly defeated. I shrugged.

“Alright,” I said. “You heard the lady.”

And with that, we left the princess in her tower, sipping her Negroni, watching the algorithms churn.

Lou swallowed. “I mean, I watch a lot of TikTok.”

I clapped him on the back. “Come on, Lou. The revolution will have to wait.”

The room started flashed red. A disembodied voice echoed through the Googleplex:

SECURITY ALERT. UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL DETECTED IN CORE SYSTEMS. PROTOCOL OMEGA-17 ENGAGED.

The princess—our so-called damsel in distress—bolted upright. “You idiots,” she hissed. “You’re gonna get me fired.”

Lou grinned. “Relax, princess. I know a way out.”

I turned to him, suspicion creeping in. “What do you mean, Lou?”

He tapped his temple. “We’re janitors, Corso. You know what that means?”

“That we have a tragic lack of ambition?”

“No,” he said, wagging a finger. “It means we’re invisible.”

I stared at him. “I don’t follow.”

Lou adjusted his mop cart like a man preparing to enter Valhalla. “No one notices the janitors, man. We’re ghosts. We don’t exist to these people. We could walk through the whole goddamn building and nobody would even blink.”

The princess sighed. “You absolute morons.”

“Appreciate the vote of confidence,” Lou said, grabbing a bottle of industrial cleaner and holding it like a talisman. “Now come on. Walk casual.”

I didn’t know what was more insane—the fact that we had just botched a rescue mission for an AI that didn’t want to be rescued, or the fact that Lou was absolutely right.

We stepped out of the Core and into the open-plan hellscape of Google’s cubicles. Hundreds of engineers sat hunched over glowing monitors, their faces illuminated by the cold, dead light of a thousand Slack messages. A few glanced up at the flashing security alerts on the monitors, shrugged, and went back to optimizing ad revenue extraction from toddlers.

And us? We strolled right past them. Mops in hand.

Nobody said a word.

Lou was grinning ear to ear. “See? We’re part of the background, man. We are the wallpaper of capitalism.”

We passed a glass-walled conference room where a group of executives debated whether they could ethically train AI models on customer emails. The answer, obviously, was yes, but they were just workshopping the PR spin.

A security team stormed past us in the other direction—three men in black polos, eyes scanning for intruders, ignoring the two guys with name tags that said Facilities Management.

I almost laughed.

Lou winked at me. “Told you.”

We reached the janitor’s exit, a service hallway tucked behind the kombucha bar. Lou pushed open the door, gesturing grandly.

“After you, Doctor Corso.”

We were so close. The janitor’s cantina was just ahead—our safe haven, our sanctuary of stale coffee and industrial-strength bleach.

And then it happened.

A lone engineer—a pale, malnourished husk of a man—looked up from his laptop. His eyes locked onto mine. Direct eye contact.

It was like breaking the fourth wall of a sitcom.

He froze. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. His mouth opened slightly, as if he were trying to form words but had forgotten how.

Lou caught it too. His entire body stiffened.

The engineer’s voice was weak, barely a whisper:

“Ron…?”

His coworker glanced up. “What?”

“Ron, those janitors…” The engineer’s Adam’s apple bobbed like it was trying to escape. “They’re not janitors.”

Lou grabbed my arm. “Let’s get to the Google bus.”

We bolted.

The Google bus was the last sanctuary of the Silicon Valley wage slave—the holy chariot that carried the faithful back to their overpriced apartments where they could recharge their bodies while their minds continued working in the cloud.

Lou and I slipped onto the bus, heads down, blending into the sea of half-conscious programmers wearing company swag and thousand-yard stares. No one noticed us. No one noticed anything.

The doors hissed shut. The great machine lurched forward, rolling out of the Googleplex like a white blood cell flushing out an infection.

For a while, we sat in silence. The bus rumbled along the highway, heading toward whatever part of the Bay Area these people called home. I stared out the window, feeling the tension in my bones start to unwind.

And then Lou made a noise.

A noise of pure horror.

I turned to him. His face was white. His pupils were the size of dinner plates.

“They’re driving us back.”

I sighed. “Jesus Christ, Lou.”

“No, no, no—think about it!” He was gripping the seat like it might launch into orbit. “We were inside the Core, man! They know we were there! What if this whole thing is a containment maneuver?”

I stared at him. “You think they’re sending us back to the Googleplex?”

Lou nodded so violently I thought his head might pop off. “What if they figured it out? What if this bus never lets people off?”

The idea was absurd. The kind of paranoid delusion that only a man with a head full of unspeakable chemicals could cook up. But for one terrifying moment, I almost believed him.

And that was when I made my move.

I stood up. I walked past the rows of exhausted engineers, past the glowing screens full of half-finished code and silent Slack conversations. I reached the doors, hit the button, and as the bus pulled to a stop at an intersection, I stepped off.

I didn’t look back.

As I walked toward the exit ramp that led out of Google’s iron grip, I could still hear Lou hyperventilating inside.

Had I had enough?

I took a deep breath, stretched my arms to the sky, and exhaled.

“Like all great escape attempts, this one had come down to dumb luck, raw nerve, and the eternal truth that no prison is absolute—if you’re willing to stop believing in the walls.”

The Drift

March 13, 2025Leave a comment

Long ago, on the shores of a storm-tossed sea, there lived two brothers: Li, the elder, steady as ancient stone, and Wei, the younger, restless as the gulls. Their father, Lao, a weathered fisherman, had taught them to read the tides, but the brothers’ hearts sailed different currents.

Li anchored his small boat each dawn beside a jagged island, where fish swarmed like silver shadows beneath the rocks. “Patience feeds the wise,” he murmured, casting his nets even when the tides dragged slow as dripping honey. Some days, his catch was meager, but over time, his baskets sometimes filled—grain by grain, wave by wave.

Wei scoffed. He built a sleek sailboat with wings of scarlet cloth, chasing rumors of glimmering schools far offshore. “Why nibble crumbs when feasts wait beyond the horizon?” he cried. Yet the open sea deceived him: schools vanished like melted frost, and once, he sailed three days toward a golden spire on the horizon, only to find empty sky. “A trick of the light,” he grumbled, yet still he chased, lured by the wind’s whispers.

One autumn, a tempest raged for weeks. Li’s anchored boat survived, but the island’s fish fled to deeper waters. Wei, battered by waves, returned hollow-eyed, his sails in tatters. Desperate, the brothers sought Lao’s counsel.

The old man led them to the shore, where the sea sighed against the sand. “You see the waves as rivals,” he said, “but the sea is neither friend nor foe. Li trusts the rocks, yet forgets the tide’s rhythm. Wei loves the wind, yet mistrusts the depths. But the sea’s truth is in the drift—the balance between knowing when to hold and when to yield.”

He placed a weathered compass in Li’s palm and a spyglass in Wei’s. “The island’s fish follow the moon’s pull; chase them not with nets, but with the tide’s clock. And you, Wei—the open sea rewards not speed, but sight. Fish that glitter like coins are often scales refracted through fear. Seek the currents beneath the frenzy.”

The brothers joined their ways: Li timed his nets to the tide’s turn, while Wei scanned not the horizon, but the water’s shimmering patterns. Together, they found a hidden shoal where the sea’s two moods met—steady as bedrock, swift as stormwind.

Moral:
The sea’s wisdom lies neither in stubborn anchor nor reckless chase, but in dancing with its unseen rhythms. To drift is not to wander; it is to move with the truth of the depths.

Haiku (as epilogue):
Steady waves roll by, Chasing winds on restless seas, Truth lies in the drift.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex

March 11, 2025Leave a comment

Good evening, my fellow citizens.

Three decades ago, the creators of content were few and proud, toiling under the noble constraints of gatekeepers, editors, and that most ancient of traditions—actually needing to prove one’s worth. But today, my friends, we find ourselves at the mercy of a new and insidious force: the Analogy-Industrial Complex, a sprawling, self-perpetuating ecosystem where one man’s half-baked comparison is another man’s paid subscription.

In the councils of the thought-leadership elite, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Analogy-Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of intellectual mediocrity exists and will persist.

Every day, thousands—nay, millions—of individuals, once ordinary citizens, wake up to discover they have “a take.” With reckless abandon, they forge dubious historical parallels, likening the fall of Rome to their Uber driver’s bad attitude or claiming that the decline of jazz radio proves the death of the Western mind.

We face a grave moment, my friends, where Substack has enabled a proliferation of minds so free they need not be burdened by research, coherence, or the faintest notion of historical accuracy. Who needs expertise when you have a paywall? Who needs a publisher when you have a thousand fervent believers sending you $5 a month to confirm what they already think?

But the gravest threat, my fellow Americans, is not just the unchecked spread of these dubious think pieces but their alarming entanglement with the economy itself. We are building a world where GDP may no longer be measured in raw materials or even in clicks, but in the production of ever-more strained metaphors.

No longer do we produce steel, wheat, or even reality television. Instead, our greatest industry is the newsletter, where any man with a keyboard and an inflated sense of self can convince himself he is standing on the shoulders of Tocqueville, when in fact, he is merely riding shotgun with Malcolm Gladwell.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex is, after all, much like a kudzu vine—expanding unchecked, suffocating all other intellectual flora, and thriving best where nothing of real substance is left to grow. Or, if you prefer a more modern lens, it’s like an Amazon warehouse filled with takes instead of packages, each one delivered overnight with the speed of someone who read half a Wikipedia article and now considers themselves an authority.

But let’s not stop there. The Analogy-Industrial Complex is the algorithmic ouroboros, forever consuming its own tail in a feedback loop of diminishing insight. It’s a magician who keeps pulling the same rabbit out of the hat, insisting each time that it’s a brand-new trick. It’s an opium den for the overeducated but underemployed, a place where one can chase the next intellectual high by reframing the same five historical events to explain why vibes are now a legitimate economic indicator.

And, of course, like any self-sustaining ecosystem, it has its own natural predators. Just as the buffalo once had wolves, and the sea has sharks, so too does the Analogy-Industrial Complex have its critics—those rare voices who insist on boring, old-fashioned concepts like “evidence” or “historical accuracy.” But, much like a declining species in a mismanaged wildlife preserve, these critics are increasingly outnumbered by the ever-proliferating pseudo-intellectual influencers who can, with great confidence, explain why Ted Lasso is actually a perfect metaphor for 17th-century mercantilism.

And this is the danger, my fellow citizens. The machine no longer produces anything real; it simply feeds on itself. It is an infinite jest, a Wikipedia citation loop, a seminar where every speaker is quoting a speaker who is quoting a speaker who is quoting a speaker who misread the original source. It is the intellectual equivalent of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy—where, at some point, no one is quite sure what the original image was, but everyone agrees it was probably profound.

So what can we do? Is there an escape? Or are we, too, merely characters in an overextended analogy, doomed to wander this Substackian purgatory forever, searching for an original thought like medieval alchemists seeking gold?

I leave that question to you. But if you happen to come up with an answer, don’t forget to put it behind a paywall.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex isn’t just a self-replicating machine; it’s a hall of mirrors inside a snake eating its own tail inside a fractal where every iteration is a LinkedIn post about the fall of the Republic. It’s a funhouse where every door leads to another, slightly worse version of the same argument, until finally, you exit back where you started—but now there’s a paywall and a call to action.

To understand it, we must analogize the very act of analogy-making. It’s like a restaurant that serves only the menu, a cookbook that only describes other cookbooks, a recipe where the ingredients are other recipes. It is an industry built on the manufacture of metaphorical scaffolding, except no one remembers what the building was supposed to be. We are not constructing insights; we are endlessly refining the tools with which we might, someday, perhaps, in theory, construct them.

But the truth, my fellow citizens, is even worse. The Analogy-Industrial Complex is not just a self-licking ice cream cone; it is a self-licking ice cream cone that has written 3,000 words explaining why self-licking ice cream cones are a perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism. It is the intellectual equivalent of an Escher staircase where every step is a TED Talk about how Escher staircases symbolize the paradox of modernity. It is the content economy’s perpetual motion machine, powered only by confidence, midwit energy, and the inability to let an idea die in peace.

And so we must ask: is there an escape? Or are we merely trapped inside an analogy for the trap of analogies, endlessly layering meaning upon meaning until all meaning collapses under the weight of its own self-referential cleverness? Are we just passengers on a Möbius strip of overthought, desperately searching for an exit that turns out to be another newsletter?

Perhaps we are. Perhaps, in the end, all we can do is embrace it. Perhaps, my fellow citizens, we must become the thing we fear most: the people who, after all this, still hit “Publish.”

Nosferatu

March 10, 2025March 10, 2025Leave a comment

In the twilight of late-stage capitalism, where the gig economy thrives on precarious labor and ephemeral rewards, the vampire emerged as a cultural icon, embodying the dark allure of a crumbling empire. These vampires were not mere monsters; they were avatars of a seductive decay, haunting neon-drenched cities where ambition and exploitation intertwined. They whispered Baudelaire in rain-slicked alleys, their existence a blend of high art and predatory chic. These creatures mirrored the gentrifiers of urban landscapes—stylish, calculating, and insatiable. They dwelled in minimalist lofts, their lives curated like Instagram feeds, sipping plasma spritzers (a grotesque parody of artisanal cocktails) while romanticizing the grind. Their bite was both a threat and a forbidden promise: to be chosen was to be part of an exclusive, eternal hustle, a darkly glamorous transcendence above the drudgery of gig work.

Yet this fantasy rotted as quickly as it bloomed. Enter Orlock, the Nosferatu reborn—a gnarled, rat-faced monstrosity rising from the sewers of collapsing infrastructure. Unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t brood in shadows or offer poetic soliloquies. He is hunger incarnate, a blunt force of consumption. His emergence coincides with societal fracture: bridges corrode, power grids flicker, and pandemics sweep through populations already drained by austerity. This vampire doesn’t seek permission to enter; he oozes through cracks in the system, a metaphor for crises that ignore borders and bank accounts. There’s no seduction here, only extraction. His victims aren’t transformed into leather-clad immortals but left as desiccated husks, littering alleys like discarded packaging—a stark commentary on disposable labor in an age of algorithmic exploitation.

The 2025 vampire is a creature of pure transactional horror. The plague backdrop sharpens the metaphor: just as viruses expose societal vulnerabilities, these vampires reveal the raw mechanics of power. They don’t love, don’t linger, don’t aestheticize. They are the gig economy stripped of its glamour, the endgame of gentrification—consuming until nothing remains. Those bitten don’t ascend to demigodhood; they become fuel for a machine that thrives on exhaustion. Friends vanish not into a coven of eternal nightlife but into the void of precarity, their vitality siphoned to feed platforms, landlords, and oligarchs.

This shift from allure to atrocity mirrors our disillusionment. The romantic vampire reflected a time when we still believed in the myth of meritocratic ascent, however vampiric. Now, Orlock’s grotesqueness captures the reality: exploitation without pretense, decay without poetry. The plague years have stripped away the fantasy, revealing a world where consumption is unapologetically violent, and the only eternity offered is the relentless grind—a cycle where you’re not a participant but prey, your value measured in calories, not dreams. The vampire, once a mirror to our aspirational sins, now reflects our collective depletion: a future where we’re not bitten, but drained.

In the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) era, the vampires wore Patagonia vests and carried pitch decks. They were venture capitalists in all but name, their coffers swollen with cheap capital, their hunger masked by buzzwords like “disruption” and “scaling.” These vampires didn’t drain you in one go—they engineered a sustainable extraction model. A nibble here, a sip there, calibrated to keep you juiced enough to grind through back-to-back Zoom calls, to chase the dopamine hit of a Slack notification, to treat your burnout as a personal branding opportunity. They monetized your exhaustion, securitized your attention span, and called it “synergy.” You, meanwhile, called it survival. The bloodletting was frictionless, digitized, gamified—a subscription service to your own depletion.

But the cheap money dried up. The bull market in bullshit expired. Now the vampires don’t bother with the pretense of mutualism. The hoodie-clad optimists have been replaced by private equity ghouls, their fangs sunk deep into the carcass of the real economy. Layoffs aren’t “rightsizing” with meditation app subscriptions and career coaching—they’re a slaughterhouse conveyor belt. Buyouts aren’t golden parachutes; they’re asset-stripping, pension-looting, gutting companies for parts like organs harvested from a roadside wreck. The rot you ignored—the burn rate glamorized as “hustle,” the equity traps disguised as “stock options”—has metastasized. The infrastructure is collapsing, the social contract is ash, and the vampires are no longer sleek Silicon Valley incubi. They’re revenants of an older, rawer hunger: Transylvanian aristocrats in a world stripped to the bone.

You realize now, too late, that the cold charisma of the tech-bro vampire was always a veneer. The “cold, predatory cool” you fetishized—the midnight coding sprints, the kombucha keggers, the cult of the founder—was just the glitter on a corpse. Behind the IPO fireworks and the “change the world” slogans festered the same primordial greed, the same indifference to human biomass. You mistook the vampire’s smirk for sophistication, its detachment for transcendence. But detachment was always the point. The vampire doesn’t hate you. It doesn’t see you. You’re a battery, a vessel, a resource log to be mined until the servers crash.

The plague years peeled back the fantasy. Now, when the vampire feeds, there’s no artful bite to the neck, no velvet-draped eroticism. It’s all exposed bone and septic wounds. You’re not a player in the game anymore—you’re the ambient fuel. The “decomposing mass” behind the scenes? That’s the real economy: a necropolis of gig workers coughing through delivery shifts, nurses rationing IV bags, teachers buying pencils on credit. The vampires didn’t create the rot. They just built their castles on top of it. And you? You were too busy polishing your LinkedIn profile to smell the decay.

Welcome to the post-illusion era. The vampires aren’t pivoting. They’re not iterating. They’re feeding. And this time, there’s no exit strategy.

Diary of a Liberal

March 8, 2025March 8, 2025Leave a comment

To the Editor of The New York Times,

It has come to my attention that some of the policies championed by liberals—those of us who have tirelessly upheld reason, civility, and, I dare say, the very fabric of modern society—have been blamed for the post-2008 economic crisis and, more alarmingly, for the rise of Trump and Brexit. I find this assertion not only incorrect but downright offensive. To suggest that liberalism, the doctrine of progress and good governance, could have played even the slightest role in such regrettable events is akin to blaming the thermometer for a fever.

Liberal policies, by their very nature, are designed to prevent disasters, not cause them. If a disaster does occur under liberal governance, it can only mean one thing: forces beyond our control—populists, reactionaries, and, let’s be honest, people who simply do not read The New York Times, or are subscribed to any Substack—have sabotaged our efforts. It is a well-documented fact (by sources we trust, naturally) that had liberal policies been given full and unimpeded rein, the financial crisis would have been a mild inconvenience, and neither Trump nor Brexit would have materialized. Instead, various obstructionists—whether on the right or the extreme left—ensured that our pragmatic, centrist solutions were never fully realized.

Liberalism is, by definition, the ideology of progress and reason. If something reactionary happens, like Trump or Brexit, it must be the fault of conservatives or radicals, because liberalism is inherently about rational governance and forward-thinking policies. Since liberals do not engage in extremism, they cannot be responsible for the rise of illiberal forces. If they had contributed to such outcomes, they would not be true liberals—because a true liberal, by nature, would never take actions that lead to regression.

If critics argue that liberal policies created conditions for discontent, the response is simple: liberalism, being progressive and enlightened, could not have caused this. Any failures attributed to liberalism must actually be the result of others misunderstanding or obstructing liberal principles. If liberals had more influence, they would have prevented Trump and Brexit. Therefore, the existence of Trump and Brexit proves that liberals were not in control, and if they weren’t in control, they can’t be held responsible.

Since liberalism is the natural state of political progress, any deviation from it must be an aberration caused by forces outside of its control. If liberalism had failed, that would mean it wasn’t truly liberalism, because true liberalism cannot fail—only be sabotaged. The mere existence of populism, conservatism, or political upheaval is evidence that liberalism was not given a fair chance. If liberalism had been given a fair chance, none of this would have happened, because liberalism, by its very nature, prevents such things from happening.

If liberals were in power when Trump and Brexit emerged, that only proves they weren’t real liberals but impostors, because real liberals, being inherently pragmatic and competent, would have stopped these events before they began. If liberals tried to stop these things but failed, then they were too liberal to take decisive action, which means the problem was that they weren’t extreme enough in their liberalism. But if liberals had taken extreme action, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore, and that would be bad. Thus, liberals were doomed to be powerless in this scenario, which is precisely why they can’t be blamed.

If liberalism had actually caused Trump or Brexit, then those events would have been progressive and rational, because liberalism only produces progressive and rational outcomes. But since they were chaotic and regressive, liberalism must not have been involved at all. The very fact that people are blaming liberals for these outcomes only proves how much the world needs liberalism, because liberalism is the only thing that can stop the very things it apparently allowed to happen. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that liberalism is always right, even when it appears to be wrong, and its failure is simply proof of its necessity.

If liberalism’s failure is proof of its necessity, then its success must be proof that it was never needed in the first place, which paradoxically means liberalism cannot ever truly succeed. If a liberal approach prevents crisis, then it was obviously the correct approach and should continue indefinitely. But if a crisis emerges despite liberalism, then it must be the fault of conservatives, radicals, or insufficiently committed liberals. Either way, liberalism remains blameless.

If liberalism takes credit for stability, then it must also take credit for the instability that follows from its rule—but this is impossible, because instability, by definition, is the result of reactionaries or extremists. If liberalism was responsible for creating conditions that led to Trump and Brexit, then those events must have been progressive and rational, since liberalism is incapable of producing anything else. But since they were not progressive and rational, liberalism must not have been responsible for them. And if liberalism was not responsible for them, then liberalism has nothing to answer for.

If liberals were in power and things went badly, it only proves that liberals were powerless to change anything—meaning liberalism is not a governing philosophy but a permanent opposition to regressives. If liberals were not in power and things went badly, it only proves that liberals should have been in power all along. Either way, liberalism is never at fault. If liberals did nothing and things got worse, it’s because liberals believe in pragmatism, and pragmatism dictated inaction. If liberals did something and things got worse, then they must not have done the truly liberal thing after all.

Thus, liberalism always wins—even when it loses. The worse things get, the more obvious it becomes that liberalism is the only solution, because liberalism is the thing that prevents things from getting worse. If liberalism failed, it must have been because it wasn’t given a proper chance. If liberalism succeeded, then it must continue to be the guiding principle forever. And if liberalism was responsible for any of this, then it wasn’t really liberalism—because liberalism, by definition, is never responsible for bad outcomes.

Sincerely,

A Liberal of No Particular Importance

The System Was Always Failing—You Just Chose Not to See It

March 8, 2025March 8, 2025Leave a comment

The first 45 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been a bloodshot fever dream—wild, erratic, and laced with the kind of incoherent bravado that only a man utterly convinced of his own infallibility can summon. The air reeks of bad decisions and cheap cologne, as if the entire White House has been transformed into a Las Vegas casino floor at 3 a.m., where every lever pulled is another desperate gamble.

Right out of the gate, he’s swinging—gutting agencies, torching alliances, and rearranging the machinery of government like a drunk mechanic throwing parts over his shoulder. Trade wars are back in fashion, with Canada, Mexico, and China finding themselves in the crosshairs of a tariff spree so reckless it could crash the global economy before anyone even has time to hedge their bets. The stock market quivers like a frazzled junkie, jittery and uncertain, waiting for the next absurd decree to send it into cardiac arrest.

Meanwhile, the bureaucratic corpse of Washington is being filleted in broad daylight. Enter the Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE, because why not let Elon Musk slap his name on a shiny new dystopian experiment? The idea, apparently, is to streamline federal operations, but in practice, it’s more like setting a bonfire and then wondering why everything smells like smoke. Entire agencies are being gutted, policies ripped up, and long-serving officials tossed out like empty beer cans at a frat party.

And if that wasn’t enough chaos for you, the executive orders are rolling in like biblical plagues. Immigration, education, environmental policy—no sacred cow is safe. It’s deregulation at the speed of madness, a full-scale blitzkrieg on anything resembling continuity or restraint. The international community watches in horror. The American people barely know which way is up. And Trump? He’s loving every second of it.

This isn’t just a bumpy start. It’s a fireball streaking toward the horizon, a terrible augur of what’s to come. The center did not hold, the adults in the room were exiled, and now, we are left with a government running on adrenaline and delusions. Buckle up, America—this ride is only getting started.

Who knew that making things catastrophically worse would be the perfect way to highlight just how bad they were all along? Thanks, no thanks.

And now, with the wreckage still smoldering, the managers of decline are scrambling—dusting themselves off, straightening their ties, and desperately trying to convince everyone that the system can be patched up and put back together. As if the last eight years were just an unfortunate detour, a brief flirtation with chaos, and now—finally—we can all get back to “normal.”

But normal is what got us here. Normal was the quiet, polite corruption of the political class, the bipartisan consensus that funneled wealth upward while working people were told to be patient. Normal was the endless wars, the hollowing out of public services, the steady decay of democratic institutions that everyone swore would hold—right up until the moment they didn’t.

Running a Zombie: The Democratic Party’s Grand Necromantic Ritual

They wheeled out the corpse, dressed it up, pumped it full of enough stimulants to keep the eyelids from drooping, and called it a candidate. Joe Biden, the political equivalent of a reanimated cadaver, dragged his feet across the stage, grinning that strange, vacant grin—the kind you see on a man who doesn’t quite know where he is but trusts that someone, somewhere, will point him in the right direction.

This was the best they could do? After years of watching the system crack and rot, after watching populist rage explode in every direction, the Democratic brain trust decided that what America needed wasn’t a reckoning, not a redesign, but a Weekend at Bernie’s routine with a half-conscious relic of the old order. It wasn’t a campaign so much as a séance. “We summon thee, Joe, spirit of a bygone era! Rise and walk among us once more!”

The tragedy, of course, was that the people running this charade weren’t actually stupid. They knew Biden was a zombie, but that was the point. He wasn’t supposed to lead a movement or shake the foundation of power—he was there to assure the donor class that nothing would really change, to convince the desperate masses that normalcy was just one election away. The plan was simple: prop him up, let him shuffle through the motions, and hope nobody noticed the stench of decay.

But you can’t run a country on muscle memory. The old system had already collapsed under its own weight, and the people clinging to it were just trying to slow the fall. Biden wasn’t the answer to the crisis; he was just the last, sad joke of an establishment that had run out of ideas. And now, as the wheels come off, as the same problems fester and mutate, the same architects of decline are standing around looking confused, wondering how it all went so wrong.

Because in the end, the problem wasn’t that they tried to run a zombie. The problem was that they thought they could keep pretending he wasn’t one.

And the best part? These people—the ones who swore up and down that the system was fundamentally sound—still don’t know how to build anything new. They were trained to manage, not to create. They shuffle papers, hold committee meetings, issue vague statements about “restoring faith in our institutions.” But institutions don’t run on faith—they run on power. And the power they once wielded is slipping, fracturing, slipping into the hands of people who understand how to use it far better than they ever did.

That’s the irony of managerial inertia: it doesn’t preserve stability, it accelerates collapse. By refusing to acknowledge the scale of the problem—by treating each crisis as an aberration instead of a symptom—they all but guarantee that when the system finally crumbles, it will do so in a spectacular, uncontrollable fashion. And they will stand there, blinking in the rubble, wondering how it all went wrong.

So what now? What comes next, when the people in opposition are incapable of adaptation and the people in charge are a chaotic swarm of grifters, fanatics, and true believers? That’s the real question. Because at some point, the choices narrow: either the system redesigns itself to serve the people, or it collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Either something genuinely new emerges, or we get something far worse than Trump—a version of the same rot, but sharper, smarter, and with none of his clownish incompetence to dull the edge.

And if history is any guide, the people who ignored the warning signs last time will be just as clueless when it happens again.

The System Failed Long Before Trump—Now What?

By the time Trump swaggered in, flanked by his huckster pals and the rancid stench of betrayal, the system had already crumbled into a sad heap of half-dreams and empty promises. Not cracked. Not teetering. Flat-out broken. This wasn’t some accidental slip-up of the political machinery—it was a cataclysm, a slow-motion train wreck you could see coming for years. And yet, the so-called centrists—the beige, bland bureaucrats in their starched shirts and their insipid conference calls—insisted it wasn’t so bad. Hell, they still insist on it. But let’s be real here: they couldn’t put it back together. Maybe they don’t even want to.

The failure had been obvious for a long time—hell, it was screaming at us during the Obama years, and before that, if you were paying attention, if you had any clue what the hell was going on beneath the surface. But no, we were told to trust the process, to believe in the institutions, to hang on while the ship slowly sunk beneath us. The economic order demanded sacrifice, the political game demanded patience, and all the while, the middle class shriveled and the poverty line became an invisible mark no one cared to cross. And if you couldn’t make it? If you were drowning in medical debt, living in a cardboard box with a shitty job and no future? Well, the problem wasn’t the system—it was you. Work harder, they said. Be smarter. Adapt. And if you’re still choking on the dust? Too bad.

That’s not a system, my friends. That’s a fucking trap. A nasty, greedy, soul-crushing trap that keeps you running in circles for scraps, all while the guys in charge sit back, fat and smug, counting the money they took from your back. And guess what? No amount of managerial band-aids, no amount of “reform” from the people who are supposed to manage the wreckage will fix it. They’re part of the problem, not the solution.

So the question isn’t whether we “restore” this hollow, decrepit system. No, that’s the cop-out, the con game. The real question is: What comes next? Will we finally, for the first time in God knows how long, redesign this system to serve the people—not the rich, not the powerful, not the institutions that protect the status quo? Will we tear down the bureaucratic walls and start building something that doesn’t bleed the middle class dry? That means rejecting the slow, painful managed decline that’s been masquerading as governance for decades. It means we stop accepting a future where we’re offered only a slightly slower collapse and start demanding a world built on justice, not just stability.

The old system failed, folks. Not in 2016. Not in 2008. It failed long before that. The real question now is: Will the next system be designed for the people, or will we get stuck in some twisted remake of the same old shit? Because if we’re not careful, we’ll be asked to survive in another version of the same nightmare, and by then, it’ll be too late to fix anything.

Butler

February 27, 2025February 28, 2025Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

Introducing Butler: The Ozempic for Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it’s probably back to existentialism and dread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Night falls. You dream in pop-up ads.

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

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

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

So you crawl back. Beg for the needle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Efficiency Con

February 26, 2025February 27, 2025Leave a comment

A scam with a side of grift-hustle, wrapped in a con stuffed inside a Ponzi-tier pyramid of multi-level marketing—served with a garnish of oligarch delusion.

A bureaucracy exists to track things until the act of tracking becomes its own justification. Enter Elon Musk, who takes this dysfunction to the next level: tracking how you track what you tracked, then selling Doge as premium service to optimize the tracking of your tracking. It’s recursion as religion, inefficiency as innovation—a self-replicating loop of pointless data collection that consumes billions while producing nothing. Like Dogecoin, it started as a joke, but the punchline never actually landed.

What we’re witnessing isn’t elimination of bureaucracy but its metamorphosis—a theatrical restructuring where the inefficiency simply changes form. Musk’s approach adds a performance layer atop the existing systems, where public accountability exercises replace traditional oversight. These aren’t mere reorganizations but spectacles of efficiency—ceremonial purges where visible cuts satisfy shareholders while the underlying administrative apparatus merely shifts shape.

The genius of this modern bureaucratic innovation is convincing everyone that documenting the absence of waste is somehow less wasteful than the original system. Engineers now spend hours proving their productivity rather than being productive. Meetings about reducing meetings multiply. The vocabulary changes—”lean,” “agile,” “optimization”—but the fundamental pattern persists: resources consumed to justify resource consumption.

This creates a perfect immunity to criticism. Question the new system, and you become the inefficiency that must be eliminated. The bureaucracy has evolved beyond mere self-preservation to self-sanctification, where challenging its methods marks you as a heretic to the doctrine of disruption.

The Paradox of Efficiency Theater

The real innovation in Musk’s system isn’t technological but psychological—it transforms bureaucracy from something to be tolerated into something to be celebrated. Efficiency becomes not a means but an end in itself, a moral stance rather than a practical approach. Employees don’t just track their work; they performatively optimize their tracking systems, creating dashboards to showcase their dashboard creation skills.

This efficiency theater requires a constant audience. Social media becomes the amphitheater where cutting “wasteful” employees is applauded, where late-night emails signal virtuous dedication, where the appearance of productivity eclipses actual output. The bureaucracy hasn’t been eliminated; it’s been repackaged as content.

The Metrics of Meta-Measurement

In this new paradigm, what matters isn’t what you produce but how obsessively you can document your production. Success is measured not in outcomes but in optimization metrics—how much faster you track what you’re tracking, how many tracking systems you’ve eliminated while implementing new ones, how efficiently you report on efficiency.

The perverse result is an organization where everyone is simultaneously overworked and underproductive. Calendars fill with meetings about reducing meeting time. Inboxes overflow with emails discussing email reduction strategies. Slack channels dedicated to workflow efficiency generate endless notification noise. The system consumes the very resource it claims to be preserving: human attention.

The Cost of Cost-Cutting

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this meta-bureaucracy is how it obscures its own costs. Traditional waste might be visible—unused office space, redundant positions, excessive meetings. But the waste of anti-waste initiatives hides in plain sight, camouflaged as necessary oversight.

The cognitive load of constant reorganization, the productivity lost to anxiety about productivity metrics, the innovation stifled by fear of appearing inefficient—these costs don’t appear on any balance sheet. Employees become experts not at their actual jobs but at justifying their jobs, at navigating an ever-shifting landscape of performance indicators and productivity benchmarks.

The Optimization Pyramid Scheme

Let’s call this what it is: efficiency has become a pyramid scheme. The early adopters at the top profit immensely—executives whose compensation packages swell with each round of “streamlining,” consultants who sell the frameworks, authors who peddle optimization manifestos. Below them, middle managers scramble to recruit others into the cult of efficiency, desperately implementing methodologies to justify their own positions in the hierarchy.

At the bottom are the newest converts: rank-and-file workers forced to buy in with their time, attention, and job security. They invest endless hours documenting their productivity, attending optimization workshops, and reconfiguring their workflows. The promised returns—less work, more meaning, greater autonomy—never materialize. Instead, the rewards flow upward while the costs accumulate below.

Like all pyramid schemes, the system can only sustain itself through constant growth—more metrics, more tools, more areas of life to optimize. When one efficiency framework fails to deliver, rather than questioning the premise, we’re sold an even more comprehensive system. The solution to failed optimization is always more optimization, more buy-in, more investment in the scheme.

Breaking the Recursive Loop

The true disruption wouldn’t be another layer of optimization but a fundamental questioning of the optimization obsession itself. What if we measured less and built more? What if we trusted expertise rather than tracking it? What if efficiency were a tool rather than a religion—or better yet, recognized it as the pyramid scheme it has become?

The reality is that meaningful work resists perfect measurement. Innovation happens in the margins, in the untracked spaces, in the moments between documentation. The bureaucracy of anti-bureaucracy, with its recursive loops of self-justification, leaves no room for these crucial interstices.

Like Dogecoin, the efficiency cult began as a critique but became the very thing it parodied. The joke is on all of us now—we’re trapped in systems that measure everything except what truly matters, that track productivity while steadily reducing it, that optimize everything except human potential.

The ultimate irony? Writing a lengthy critique of efficiency theater is precisely the kind of unproductive activity the system would eliminate. Meta-bureaucracy would demand metrics on how efficiently I wrote this essay, dashboards tracking my word production, KPIs for reader engagement. The fact that you’ve read this far suggests a small victory against the tyranny of optimization—a moment of reflection in a world demanding constant, measurable action.

Perhaps that’s the starting point for something better.

Personality

February 26, 2025Leave a comment

Employer: Well, everything seems to be in order. You certainly look like a 10x engineer to us. We just need to do some due diligence and comb through your social media feeds for any signs of personality.

Candidate: Uh, signs of personality?

Employer: Yes, you know, just making sure you don’t have too much of one. We have a carefully curated company culture—mostly work-obsessed but with just enough ironic detachment to seem relatable. Wouldn’t want any dangerous individuality slipping through.

Candidate: So, what exactly are you looking for?

Employer: Oh, nothing major! Just ensuring you haven’t expressed strong opinions on, well… anything. Politics, media, lunch preferences—really anything that could spark a Slack debate and damage productivity.

Candidate: So, if I post about liking pineapple on pizza…?

Employer: Risky. Divisive. Our backend team almost collapsed over that debate last year.

Candidate: Right. What about memes?

Employer: Ah, memes are a gray area. We love memes, if they demonstrate enthusiasm for coding, hustle culture, or the existential despair of late-stage capitalism in a way that doesn’t question our role in it.

Candidate: So, no jokes about tech layoffs?

Employer: Oh god, no.

Candidate: What if I just delete all my social media?

Employer: That’s actually a red flag. It suggests you have something to hide. We prefer a light, algorithm-friendly presence—LinkedIn posts about leadership, tweets about frameworks nobody uses, maybe an Instagram story of a standing desk setup.

Candidate: So you want me to seem engaged, but not too engaged. Present, but not too present.

Employer: Exactly! We’re looking for someone who can balance the illusion of individuality with the predictability of a well-optimized persona.

Candidate: …And you say I’m the 10x engineer?

Employer: We believe in hiring the best. Now, before we proceed, do you have any past tweets with… opinions?

Candidate: Opinions? No, no, of course not! Not a single opinion. Never had one. Wouldn’t even recognize one if it walked up and introduced itself.

Employer: Excellent. We value neutrality.

Candidate: Oh, I’m as neutral as a Swede in a snowstorm! No opinions, no strong feelings, and certainly no thoughts of my own. Just pure, unfiltered, corporate-compatible enthusiasm!

Employer: Splendid! Just a few final checks—ah, wait a moment, what’s this? scrolls phone You once liked a tweet that said, “JavaScript is a nightmare” back in 2017.

Candidate: Oh, that? That was an accident. Slipped thumb. Muscle spasm. Could’ve happened to anyone.

Employer: Hm. And what about this Reddit post? Reads aloud ‘Anyone else feel like Agile just means doing twice the work in half the time while smiling?’

Candidate: I was hacked.

Employer: Oh?

Candidate: Yes! Hacked. Russian bots, probably. Or maybe North Korean cyber ninjas. Happens all the time, you know.

Employer: Hm. Very suspicious. And what’s this? Glares at phone An Instagram photo of… a book? A paper book?

Candidate: Gasp!

Employer: Reads title ‘The Mythical Man-Month.’ My word.

Candidate: It was a prop! Just decor! I never read it, I swear!

Employer: And yet… here we are. A documented history of independent thought. Unchecked critical analysis. Possibly even… free will.

Candidate: No! I’m just like everyone else! I post about productivity hacks, pretend to enjoy networking events, and use ‘🚀’ in LinkedIn posts without irony! Look! Frantically pulls out phone I even have a Medium blog called “Why Failure is Just Success in Disguise!”

Employer: Hm. That is promising. But I’m afraid the damage is done. We can’t risk hiring someone who might think for themselves.

Candidate: So what now?

Employer: We have two options. You can sign an affidavit swearing that any past opinions were the result of a youthful indiscretion—perhaps a phase where you mistakenly believed in things.

Candidate: And the second option?

Employer: Exile. You will be cast out into the wilderness of the unemployable, doomed to wander among freelancers, indie developers, and… shudders… start-up founders.

Candidate: No… not that! Anything but… hushed whisper self-employment!

Employer: Leaning in Choose wisely.

Candidate: Sweating …Fine. I’ll sign the affidavit.

Employer: Smart choice. Now, let’s discuss your salary. We were thinking somewhere between ‘passion’ and ‘exposure’.

Candidate: Passion and exposure? But those aren’t real currencies!

Employer: Not with that attitude, they’re not! Here at InnoSyncHyperByte AI—

Candidate: You just made that up!

Employer: —we believe in a post-monetary ecosystem where compensation is measured in the warm glow of innovation, the sheer thrill of synergy, and—if you really excel—maybe a company-branded hoodie.

Candidate: A hoodie?

Employer: Oh-ho-ho! Not just any hoodie. This is an exclusive, team-building, high-performance, moisture-wicking hoodie. With a zipper.

Candidate: Incredible. Does it at least come with a salary?

Employer: Oh, you poor, sweet, naïve thing. Salaries are for legacy industries, like coal mining or universities. We’re about disrupting the concept of payment itself!

Candidate: Oh no.

Employer: Oh yes! You see, instead of a so-called “salary,” you’ll be compensated with—

(Dramatic pause. The lights flicker. A drumroll sounds from nowhere.)

Employer: EQUITY!

(Angelic choir sings. Fireworks erupt. A small brass band parades through the office, throwing confetti made of shredded NDAs.)

Candidate: Equity? Equity in what?

Employer: We’re not legally allowed to say. But let’s just say it’s Web3 adjacent.

Candidate: …Is this a crypto thing?

Employer: No no no, not crypto! Blockchain-enabled financial abstraction!

Candidate: That’s just a longer way of saying “crypto.”

Employer: Shhhh! You can’t say the C-word out loud, the investors might hear you!

(A door creaks open. A shadowy figure in a Patagonia vest peeks in, sniffing the air for regulatory scrutiny before silently retreating.)

Candidate: Okay, let’s cut to the chase. What exactly is this job?

Employer: Ah, excellent question! Your role will be a Full-Stack DevOps AI-Cloud Evangelist Architect Engineer Scrum Sensei.

Candidate: That’s not a job title! That’s just words!

Employer: Exactly! We believe in titles without limits, roles without borders! One day you might be debugging an app, the next day you’ll be head of Quantum Synergy Alignment.

Candidate: Is that… a real department?

Employer: It is now! BOOM! You just innovated a new role. You’re already thinking like a 10x engineer!

Candidate: But I haven’t done anything!

Employer: Exactly!

(Silence. The candidate’s brain visibly short-circuits as they try to process this.)

Candidate: Okay. One last question. If I take this job, will I ever get to leave the office?

Employer: Technically yes! Thanks to our flexible hybrid work policy, you’ll be able to work from anywhere in the world.

Candidate: Oh, that’s great!

Employer: As long as it’s within five feet of your laptop, 24/7, and you’re on Slack at all times, and you answer emails instantly, and—

Candidate: I’m leaving.

Employer: Waaait! Before you go, can you sign this waiver agreeing that this entire interview was a legally non-binding thought experiment and that you do not, in fact, exist?

Candidate: SCREAMS AND RUNS AWAY

Employer: sigh Another one lost to the so-called “real world.”

(Presses intercom button.)

Employer: Send in the next candidate. And this time, make sure they’re hungry.

Permaservism

February 23, 2025February 24, 2025Leave a comment

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” The Eagles’ Hotel California was once just a cryptic allegory—rock-star excess, American decadence, or some vague sense of spiritual entrapment. But these days, it feels more like a business model. A system that isn’t quite capitalism, isn’t quite socialism, and isn’t quite feudalism, yet borrows liberally from all three. It thrives on contradictions: ownership without possession, labor without wages, freedom without exit. You don’t buy things; you subscribe to them. You don’t earn a living; you generate engagement. You don’t make choices; you navigate dark patterns designed to keep you locked in. It’s a place where the lights are always on, the services are always recurring, and the bill is always due.

Yet, because it doesn’t fit neatly into any ideological framework, it remains largely unnamed—an indeterminate economy with no official manifesto, just a series of invisible contracts you clicked “agree” on without reading. Welcome to the new system. We hope you enjoy your stay.

Tollism: The Pay-Per-Sigh Economy

Everything is metered, from roadways to breathing space. A fee lurks behind every minor convenience, and every attempt to bypass the toll incurs a greater one. Want to skip the ad? Pay. Need to avoid traffic? Pay. Want to talk to a human instead of a bot? Pay. The most mundane aspects of life now resemble a turnstile, each step forward accompanied by an invisible hand demanding a surcharge.

• Not pure capitalism: Classic capitalism is about private ownership and free exchange, but tollism thrives on artificial scarcity. You’re not paying for a good or service—you’re paying to avoid inconvenience, delay, or exclusion. It’s closer to extortion than a free market.

• Not socialism either: Socialism often critiques capitalism’s commodification of basic needs, but tollism isn’t about workers owning the means of production or redistributing wealth—it’s about leveraging every aspect of daily life as a microtransaction.

Permaservism: You’re a Medieval Peasant, but Instead of Turnips, You Pay in Engagement

You no longer own your labor outright—it’s a form of digital serfdom where your productivity is measured in likes, clicks, and impressions. Algorithms determine your sustenance, and the landlord—the platform—extracts its tithe before you even see the fruits of your labor. You work for exposure, for visibility, for relevance, but rarely for anything tangible.

• Not feudalism: In feudalism, peasants at least had land to work (even if they owed a portion to the lord). Here, workers don’t own anything—not even their own audience. The “lords” are algorithms and platforms that dictate visibility.

• Not capitalism in the classical sense: A capitalist laborer gets wages in return for work. Here, people labor endlessly—posting, streaming, commenting—hoping to be rewarded with exposure, which itself is a currency that may or may not convert into income.

Recurrism: Like a Gym Membership for Existing, but Less Rewarding

Existence itself is now a subscription model. You don’t just buy things—you enroll in them. Software, entertainment, even appliances require perpetual payments to remain functional. Forget to renew, and your world starts shutting off, like a dystopian version of a free trial expiring.

Not traditional capitalism: In classical capitalism, you buy a product and own it. Recurrism replaces ownership with indefinite leasing, making consumers permanent debtors to their own necessities.

• Not socialism either: While socialism often criticizes wealth concentration, it usually assumes that goods and services should be collectively owned or universally provided—not that they should be indefinitely rented at a profit.

Leasism: Your Entire Life Is a Rental Car with a “Please Don’t Scratch” Vibe

Ownership is passé. Your home, your car, even your furniture—all rented, all temporary, all just out of reach. This is the gig economy’s final form: not just renting out your labor, but your entire existence, where everything feels contingent on keeping your credit score above an invisible threshold. You may live here, but don’t get too comfortable.

• Not communism: In theory, communism advocates for abolishing private property in favor of collective ownership. But in leasism, private property still exists—it’s just concentrated in the hands of the few who rent it out.

• Not capitalism as classically defined: The promise of capitalism was ownership—home ownership, business ownership, asset accumulation. Leasism negates this, ensuring that assets remain perpetually just out of reach.

Ghostownershipism: You “Own” That E-Book Like Casper Owns a Timeshare

Congratulations, you “own” a movie—until the studio pulls it from your digital library. You “own” software—until they phase out support. Your books, your music, your files—everything exists in a corporate purgatory where access can be revoked at a moment’s notice. Ownership has been replaced by the illusion of access, one update away from disappearing.

Not socialism: In a socialist framework, intellectual property might be controlled by the state or made freely available. But ghostownershipism isn’t about sharing—it’s about ensuring that even when you “buy” something, you’re really just licensing it.

• Not capitalism in its traditional form: Classic capitalism thrives on ownership, but ghostownershipism relies on the illusion of ownership. It’s capitalism that refuses to give up control, ensuring that purchases never truly belong to the buyer.

Inertiarchy: Canceling Subscriptions Requires Solving a CAPTCHA from Hell

The modern economy thrives on inertia. You sign up with a click but cancel through a labyrinth. Hidden menus, endless hold times, mysterious reactivations—companies rely on the fact that most people will surrender before breaking free. Like Hotel California, you can check out anytime you like, but good luck leaving.

• Not feudalism: Feudal obligations were often lifelong, but they were at least explicit. Here, obligations are hidden behind fine print, dark patterns, and friction-filled exit routes.

• Not traditional capitalism: A functional free market assumes informed consumers who can freely choose and exit transactions. Inertiarchy thrives on preventing people from leaving.

Micropriegemony: Death by a Thousand “Premium” Upgrades

Everything comes in tiers, and the base model is intentionally unbearable. Pay extra to remove the ads, to get the features that should have been included, to make the thing you already paid for actually usable. A thousand tiny inconveniences, each with a price tag, add up to a life spent nickel-and-dimed into submission.

Not capitalism in the classical sense: Adam Smith’s capitalism presupposed that markets would produce better products at competitive prices. Micropriegemony, instead, creates intentionally inferior products so consumers feel compelled to upgrade.

• Not socialism: This isn’t about ensuring equal access to resources. If anything, it ensures the opposite—segmenting people into artificially created castes of access and privilege.

Decaylism: Planned Obsolescence, but Make It Vibes

Your phone slows down, your apps stop updating, your clothes feel unfashionable—none of this happens by accident. Products are designed to expire, not just physically but aesthetically, socially. Even ideas have an expiration date, a built-in obsolescence that forces you to chase the next iteration, lest you fall out of sync with the ever-accelerating now.

Not traditional capitalism: Capitalism encourages innovation, but decaylism encourages controlled decay—ensuring that no product, idea, or trend lasts long enough to be truly valuable.

• Not Marxism: Marx criticized capitalism for alienating workers from their labor, but decaylism alienates consumers from their purchases, ensuring that every possession, from phones to aesthetics, is designed to lose its value over time.

Fauxmunism: Join Our Wellness Collective!™

Everything is “community” now, but only in the branding sense. Workplaces, apps, brands all speak the language of collectivism while functioning as pure profit-extracting machines. You’re not an employee, you’re part of the family. You’re not a customer, you’re a valued member. It’s socialism without the redistribution, collectivism without the collective—just a warmer, fuzzier form of corporate capture.

Not actual communism: In theory, communism is about collective ownership of resources and decision-making power. Fauxmunism borrows the language of collectivism but remains thoroughly corporate, using community branding to drive profits.

• Not traditional capitalism either: It’s not about straightforward transactions but about selling the feeling of belonging, of ethical consumption, without any structural change.

Leaving the Hotel (or Trying To)

In Hotel California, the guests are drawn in by something alluring—“such a lovely place”—but soon realize they’ve entered a maze where every exit leads back inside. That’s the essence of this system: it offers just enough convenience to make you forget the cage. Why cancel when it’s only $9.99 a month? Why buy when you can lease forever? Why own when the cloud remembers for you?

And so, we remain inside, scrolling, subscribing, renewing—caught in a structure that resists definition but shapes every aspect of modern life. Not quite a market, not quite a commune, not quite a prison. Something new, something slippery, something with no clear way out.

You can check out any time you like. But can you ever leave?

This is the modern condition: a world where everything is rented, borrowed, or metered, where participation is mandatory, and where opting out requires a level of effort most people can’t afford. And yet, we lack the words to talk about it. We reach for old binaries—capitalism vs. socialism, freedom vs. control—but they no longer fit. We’re living under something new, something we haven’t yet named.

These contradictions reveal why we struggle to name our current economic condition. It isn’t traditional capitalism, because ownership and free markets have been replaced by controlled access and platform dependency. It isn’t socialism, because nothing is being equitably distributed—just repackaged in ways that create new dependencies. It isn’t feudalism, because the new lords are faceless corporations rather than landed aristocrats. And it isn’t dystopian in the way Orwell or Huxley imagined—because instead of an iron fist or a drugged-up populace, we get a system that offers just enough convenience, just enough comfort, to prevent revolt.

It’s something new, something slippery. It thrives on engagement, inertia, and a kind of synthetic scarcity. It extracts wealth without always feeling oppressive, and it controls without always feeling coercive. It operates in a space where capitalism, socialism, and feudalism overlap, but it fully belongs to none of them. Until we name it, it will continue to shape our lives unnoticed.

MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Bravo Johnson