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Personality
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…
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Permaservism
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…
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Symbolic Warfare
“Trout Mask Replica” stands as one of the most radical deconstructions of American music ever recorded. Released in 1969 on Frank Zappa’s Straight Records label, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band created a sonic landscape that defied every conventional notion of rhythm, harmony, and structure. Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) orchestrated a work that simultaneously…
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Dog Eats Übermensch
I was on my usual caffeine circuit, shuttling between the Starbucks and The Cow’s End, because one coffee is never enough and also because I enjoy the illusion of productivity that comes with walking briskly while holding a cup. It was a normal Venice morning—skaters wiping out, tech bros on rental e-bikes, a guy playing…
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UBI for Goobers
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…
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Prime Directive
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…
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In Defense of Piracy
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…
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The Great American Firewall
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…
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Intraclass Warfare
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…
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The Great Atlantic Dog Show
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…
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