michael-dean-k/

250 years ago lived an arbitrary man who I can call my ancestor. He was one of 256 of my great great great great great great grandparents. It is unlikely that any of them ever met, but there was very possibly a moment where two strangers crossed in a street, or shared a boat unknowingly, or exchanged pleasantries in insignificant and instantly forgettable ways, not knowing their great great grandchildren would give birth to my great great grandparents. My existence depended on the whims of those 256 people—their triumphs and disappointments, decision and indecision, love and otherwise. Compelled by nature or eros or God to breed with a specific person at a specific time, they continued casting down the great chain of being.

How alike am I to any one of them? If my parents can each claim 50% of my traits, then my great^6 grandparents each only claim 0.39%.

In one sense, I bear almost no resemblance to any of them. Maybe, in an Empedoclean sense, you might see my nose roaming around a town square, or my hairy feet wading through a field. Any one ancestor might feel no affinity towards me; if I knocked on their door after accidental time travel and needed a place to stay, they might just past off the responsibility to one of my other 255 ancestors. Over enough centuries, your descendants balloon past a scale you can adequately care for. My wife, for example, is part of an old royal Welsh family that goes back to the 1250s. She even has a family ring. Yet, by the theoretical logic above, she is one of millions with a claim to the throne.

In another sense, a more romantic sense, my 256 great^6 grandparents represent a still very small sliver of the human population. 0.000000256%. If any of them had any resemblances to me, physical or mental, I’d like to know. Of course, our consciousnesses would be quite different, for identity is forged from circumstance, but I don’t doubt that I would find uncanny resemblances. When I hear the lore of my great^2 grandparent, a peasant on a dry, rustic, Greek Island, and how he was able to harvest and sell rain water to get rich, I wonder if his entrepreneurship speaks to my own entrepreneurship. It is quite vague to trace influence back even 1-2 generations, let alone 8 or more, but nonetheless, the actions of those people did eventually lead to me, and there are all sorts of ways their myths and interiors might shed context into my own circumstance, at least symbolically.

Unfortunately though, none of my 256 were writers. At least, not that I know of. Some may have written journals, or written for administrative reasons, but as far as I know, none left a body of work that was meant to be cast and continued through time. One grandfather did have three chapters of an abandoned novel on a 1980s hard drive that my father was able to recover. My other grandfather is uneducated, barely literate, and only writes English in capital letters. Now that I think of it, it’s probable that +95% of my great^6 grandparents could not read or write. Mass literacy wasn’t realized until the early 20th century.

Even though we shifted from oral to written history in Ancient Greece, most family history today is only passed down through spoken stories. They’re etched into memory and unreliably translated down the chain. I can barely trust the stories I pull from my head, planted decades ago, either misdelivered or misremembered. Was she really a psychic midwife that predicted winning horse numbers in her dreams making her son rich until a black hand cut her off? Did he really drive Nixon in a cab?

It would be strange for a society to sleepwalk forward, with no sense of what truly happened before the 1900s. How is that not strange for any of us individually? What if I become the family’s Plutarch? How might a child’s identity differ if they had detailed accounts of their relatives, generations up the chain? I suppose you could ask the great^6 grandchildren of writers. Claude tells me there are 700 members of the Monticello Association, each a genetically-confirmed descendant of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 19,000 letters, books, and a Bible. A few of them have problems with him being a slaveowner, with one publishing an essay called “Take Down His Memorial.” At least they have 255 other ancestors to respect.

I did not expect to be able quote whole scenes of The Sandlot (1993) from memory, but there I was, the annoying co-watcher to my wife who barely remembers it. I must have watched it a dozen times. If not, the few viewings of it must have been a religious, formative experience. Somehow it came on, via streaming, already more than half way through, but early enough to be inside of the dream of Benny Rodriguez¹ where the ghost of Babe Ruth delivers his classic line: “Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

Did this quote shape my elementary consciousness? Many of my essays here are about “textural immortality” and legacy—doesn’t that word have a shared root with legend? Has my drive to devote my life to creating something memorable (something that outlasts me and shapes the future) a product of a 1990s cult film with a $7 million budget?

Obviously the answers to those questions are lost; all that is left are fuzzy caricatures to reason with. I can’t know exactly the evolution of my psyche, but it does seem that in almost every phase—from baseball, to music, to architecture, to technology—there was this boyish desire to be Ruth-like, to master and transcend a genre, to have a bunch of goofy nicknames, to have leagues of kids yell my name in unison, and to be remember beyond my life. To lean into and live by that line is to become a megalomaniac.

There is a second half to that quote (which is less memorable): “Follow your heart, kid, you’ll never go wrong.” This disarms the grandiosity of the prior line. The goal is not to become a legend for legend’s sake, but to be attuned toward your heart (towards “the way,” nature’s order, the virtuous thing, the hard thing) which puts you on a path, perhaps towards doing legendary things, but the path is the point.

The other day I was listening to a podcast and noted “the purpose of life is the transmission of legacy.” The context is that in the face of death, we strive for immortality in different ways. The immature and impossible version of this is physical immortality. Religions promise spiritual immortality. Pharaohs and estates focus on material immortality. They referred to another option, “secular immortality,” which I’d rather call “symbolic immortality.” This is about living into the future through art, language, and symbols. This can be more modest than the cultural immortality of Babe Ruth; this can exist solely within the family. I’m talking about the paintings we have hung up of my wife’s grandmother, and the sayings from my great grandmother that I’ll pass down (“be your own person, choose your friends wisely”).

There are two ways to think about death. The first is cosmic deflation, to realize that Babe Ruth, the entire culture he's within, and even the species itself, are all just a temporary evolutionary blip; if everything will be cosmically forgotten, then it’s futile to strive to be remembered for anything. Alternatively, you could see your immediate chain, the generations before and after you, as equal to yourself, to see the whole lot of you as a single entity, and to act in a way that could be exemplary for your kids.

You’re Ideas Don’t Matter? This take always irks me, though I do love the closing line: "You can [...] spend your life [fighting over] golden eggs [...], or you can learn how to become a goose who lays golden eggs." I love the abundance mindset; just be prolific.

But I don't love the "fuck originality" attitude. It feels like a node in the creativity-for-beginners canon—along with The Taste Gap and All You Need is Vibes—a consolation to prevent a new artist from quitting. And I suppose that is worthwhile. You can't be terribly concerned with technique or originality if you don't have momentum, the general contours of a practice.

But to say that creativity is only "remixing, rearranging, reimagining, and recombining" is to plant a meme that can constrict creativity long past its usefulness. I don't totally disagree—yes, all ideas have a lineage of influence, and most big ideas are reframes of old ones for a new context—but the issue is in being too conscious about it. To see creativity as the controlled combination of elements is to see the creative process like a mechanical assembly line. It ushers in factoid harvesting and Frankenstein stitching. This kind of recycling is halmark slop, the kind of thing that LLMs do.

And again, that is totally fine for L1 or L2 or whatever, but the goal—or at least, my goal—is to transcend that. Originality isn't an old virtue to shed, it's the thing to strive for. It takes a lifetime to get there, decades of dedication, and that is a hard promise to make to a reader who has a time horizon of next week. But what is it that you should strive for if not originality? Instead of combining ideas in an A+B=C kind of way, you want to melt and fuse them all in your subconscious, in an unpredictable, high-voltage kind of way, to create an output that is incalculable, one that of course has nods to works from before it, but one without a formula, and one that could have only been crafted from your own mind. Is originality not the same thing as make the thing that only you can make?

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Cart, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

What and how you read should heavily depend on what your goal is. Outputs shape inputs. When someone insists you go back to read The Great Books, in order, in their entirety, they're giving you bad advice. It's not that those books aren't great—I hope to read Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno and Finnegan's Wake and the Odyssey before I die— the problem is it's too generic a suggestion. To spend thousands of hours deep in the canon will obviously change you, but that's equivalent of throwing a beginner into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, hoping they'll figure it out, with no sense of what their goals are.

If your goal is to write essays (every day, week, or month), then you're reading diet should look very different from a philosopher, professor, or researcher. You might not need to be a professional reader, but you should still strive to be a serious one. 3-4 hours a day might not be feasible, but 30-60 minutes per day through an intentionally selected list of sources will slowly build maps of material to fuse into your work.

If you're an essayist, you read so that concepts, forms, feelings, and words are always within reach from an idea of your own. It's no use quoting Aristotle from memory if you can't bend Aristotle to augment an original idea of your own.

It's time to make a syllabus. I've been guilty my whole life of haphazardly reading books and essays as I come across them, but now that I'm over 5 years into writing essays, I feel it's time to be more intentional. This essay is the artifact of me mapping out what, why, and how I'll be reading in the next 2-3 years. I've broken it into four practices: reading for ideas, reading for craft, reading for words, reading for feeling.

Reading for ideas

Since essays are so personal, it's very possible to draw from nothing else than the bank of your own life experience. Memory is absolutely one realm of material, but also, it helps to pull concepts from the world around you, in your time and in all times before. Anyone is exposed to some sliver of culture, and I suppose you could just rely on that. But there's another path which involves actively educating yourself.

Before I dive into the details of philosophy or history, I'm going to build a map. I want to go wide, not deep, because my existing maps are too fuzzy. ie: Who was Thomas Aquinas? Who influenced him, who did he influence, and could I hand write an essay on three of his big ideas? Until I can do that with 100 figures from antiquity to now, all interconnected in a web, I'm not prepared to dive into any Great Book. It would be a tremendous waste of time, for me at this moment in my life, to read The Leviathan by Hobbes in full, especially when I could read 30 pages on it from Alan Ryan, a philosopher-curator, whose prose is 400 years more modern, and who can contextualize old ideas into the full history. In the time I could finish one book from Hobbes, I could read Ryan's entire textbook and know 30 different thinkers at much higher resolution than I know now. By the end, I'll have an updated index on the history of political philosophy, and maybe I'll know that—based on my current writings—it makes more sense to dive into Rousseau in full.

How would my mind be different if I found and read the best curator across every field?

There's a specific kind of book I'm looking for to update my maps. It's not a textbook. It's similar in it's encyclopedic range, except it is slanted by a thesis, animated through a fervent voice, and concerned with the psychology behind the person known for an idea (instead of just biographical facts). Each chapter focuses on a figure for 25-50 pages, which feels like the right level of immersion. It might take 2 hours, compared to 20 hours for the source, and 20 seconds for Claude. While AI can surface historical ideas perfectly suited for your working draft, the problem is you outsourcing your recall. The recommendations are mechanical, impersonal, and worst of all, disembodied: you can't do it in your own head. By reading a sharp longform essay on Aquinas, his ideas will crystallize in my head and load into my subconscious; I'll know when he's relevant to my ideas at the layer of thinking itself.

The nudge to read all of Aquinas from scratch, on principle, is like asking a software developer to derive Internet standards from scratch instead of using libraries and plug-ins. For any thinker that matters, there's at least one person who spent a good deal of their life deeply understanding the source and distilling the concepts for you.

I'm going to share my working list, but the main caveat here is I'm not going in any particular order, and it's not necessary to read cover-to-cover. In any given month I'll be reading 1-2 chapters from 10 of these 24 books. In 45 minutes per day, I can get through most of this by the end of 2028 (2.5 years from now). Everything was published within the last one hundred years, and the whole thing costs $327.

• Literature: Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Book and School of the Ages (1994) $11
• Essays: Karshan & Murphy, On Essays (2020) $27
• Architecture: Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980) $15
• Arts: Kenneth Clark, Civilization (1969) $3
• Design, Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1971), $34
• Poetry: Nineteenth Century American Poetry (1996) $9
• Politics: Alan Ryan, On Politics (2012) $15
• History: William & Ariel Durant, Lessons of History (1968) $14
• Economics: Richard Heilbroner, Worldly Philosophers (1953)
• Science: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) $11
• Mathematics: Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1980)
• Technology: Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (2014) $17
• Media: Denis D. Cali, Mapping Media Ecology (2017) $47
• Cosmology: Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (2011) $5
• Philosophy: Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1945) $8
• Psychology: Morton Hunt, The Story of Psychology (1993) $12
• Antiquity: Arthur Hugh Clough, Plutarch's Lives (Volumes I and II) (2018) $10
• Religion: Huston Smith, The World's Religions (1958) $12
• Christianity: Fifth Edition, The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (2018) $16
• Orthodoxy: Kalliostes Ware, The Orthodox Way (1979) $10
• Mythology: Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion (1949) $17
• Esoterica: Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) $1
• Hermeticism: Franz Bardon, Initiation into Hermetics (1956) $20
• Death: The Oxford Book of Death (1983) PDF

You'll notice that all the links above are Kindle. This is because I want to have my highlights as atomic markdown files. The goal is not to read, but to write! Mapping and reading is just the setup so that I can read through and find highlights that spark original reactions. Montaigne's whole idea was to talk to his library, to be in conversation with the past through his books. And so the goal here is not to finish X books per year, but to produce original material. This is close to sounding like a Zettlekasten, but I should clarify that I don't plan to meticulously arrange my private highlights. A highlight is simply a prompt for an original paragraph that will immediately live on my website.

Other ways to read

I haven't spent as much time mapping out the other three modes, so I'll cover them briefly below, knowing I'll expand them later.

• Reading for craft: If you writing essays, then reading them is how you learn through osmosis. It's where you pick up on the patterns on form and voice, consciously and subconsciously. My thinking here is to pick one essayists per week, read as much I'm inspired to, and move on. It's important to cycle here, because hanging too long on any one writer might lock you into a particular influence without realizing. I'm planning a summer syllabus for Essay Club so we can do this as a group.
• Reading for words: Two years ago, I got really into reference books: dictionaries, usage dictionaries, the thesaurus, etymology, and even specialized dictionaries (on architecture, philosophy, scientific concepts). Sometimes I'd read cover to cover (futile), and others I'd practice words in ANKI. Expanding your vocabulary is seen is a pretentious thing to do today, when so much is geared towards simplicity and accessibility. Won't a rare word alienate the average user in your audience? No, because in the right context, ambitious words can increase the resolution in how you describe something. There's a joy in searching for words, but again, this comes back to returning to them repeatedly until it's actually coming through your prose.
• Reading for feeling: Novels and poetry are less about collecting bits to synthesize into your work. This is more an act of expanding your understanding of how words can make you feel. Less about analysis, more about immersion.

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fixed and unchanging frame which features a fixed and unchanging person moving within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it's less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. TLDR you are being addled. But when an infant sees this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and atypical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds even at age 15.

Something about hyper-logging (capturing your mind in prose) feels desacralized when I see it as the grown-up development/extension of my AIM bio, or my original Facebook bio (which had a whole series of categories, like favorite movies, books, etc.). Why keep an extremely detailed and public log of my self and thoughts? I guess I see it like a change log of my evolving identity. That was sort of Montaigne's whole thing (perpetually in transit). I imagine the norm is to burrow into your shell of self for as long as possible, to avoid the confusion of drift, but I try to harbor a non-static self. I feel a cringe in sharing this self-congratulations. There's the tension.

I think I'm doing an irregular thing by obsessively documenting thoughts, and from my own perspective it does feel like I'm continuously evolving, but an outer perspective might see this as nothing more than a frivolous blog. It's likely that my whole arc is illegible. Some degree of it comes to surface, like my ever-shifting "career," but most of how any of us feel, think, and change is illegible to each other, except in extreme rare cases of friendship, and so the more idiosyncratic your path, the less anyone can understand you.

I suppose my logs could function as a private journal, but it would lose an important quality. While, there are some consequences of writing in public (a subtle self-censorship), there's something more important you gain: the stakes of knowing that your work could be read in the future, if not by a friend or stranger, then at least a future version of yourself. Whoever it is, if they care to spend the time to read, they would understand you more than probably anyone in your life. That slight pressure snaps me into a mode where I try to be coherent, articulate, and sometimes expressive. When I look back at my old chicken scratch journals, I almost always skim and skip and hate it. But when there's a slight care in crafting the language of my thoughts, it becomes something that outlives the moment.

And so if public writing comes with self-censorship, and private writing comes with a lack of stakes, then the way to go is semi-public publishing. It gives you both freedom and stakes. You won't grow your audience this way, but I think you will forge a sense of self and voice that you can bring with you when you try to build an audience, but that's really secondary. It's the self and voice that matters.

I’m starting to feel the Opus 4.7 annoyance. Everyone has been complaining, and I told myself I’d be patient, but now I'm here watching Codex tutorials. 2 weeks ago I was able to effectively one-shot a Google Docs prototype in ~10 minutes with Opus 4.6. This sets the standard for what’s possible, and when that is ripped away, even 10% of it, it feels like theft, even when it’s still 2,000x faster than coding by hand. It’s easy to blame the model, but really AI coding has so many variables, and you can never really know the source of what shifted. Yes, it’s a new model, but also this time, I’m (a) deploying into an existing codebase instead of doing ground up; (b) the spec is far more detailed; (c) the whole factory has been redesigned. That’s four variables. It’s easy to not take the blame, put it on Opus, and then convert back to 4.6, but that itself is a change with unknown consequences. Was 4.6 nerfed too? The truth is we’re building systems on top of quicksand, but actually that’s not so novel because people are quicksandish too, always evolving, changing incentives, dreams, and abilities, totally variable day-to-day depending on if they slept or if they’re in a fight or not. We expect these machines to be deterministic (and use language like “factories”) but the cost of agency is a less determinism.

Here's a list of what I'm reading through May. The strategy is to gather a bunch of well-written anthologies and textbooks across different fields, read them on Kindle, highlight a lot, and then get into conversations with them (that part of the process is TBD):

• Alan Ryan, On Politics: introduction + chapters on Hobbes/Locke
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: Introduction + chapter on Montaigne
• Plutarch's Lives: introduction + chapters on Thesseus/Romulus and their comparison
• Russel Brand, A History of Western Philosophy: Introduction, Pythagoras, Liberalism, Locke, Hegel
• How to Read a Book: Part One (Ch 1-5)
• Collins Dictionary: The letter A (TBD, I only have this physical, but want to get back into language)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essais Vol 1-3: Starting with the abridged translation by Screech and then backfilling)
• Alexis de Tocqueville: introduction + Vol 2.1 Ch 1-3, 17; Vol 2.4 Ch 1-4,8,13,20; Vol 2.4 Ch 6-8

Revolutionary tax proposal #1: anything above $100m/year is taxed at 90%, but in exchange for political equity in the country (ie: delegation and voting). It formalizes lobbying and makes it transparent. To prevent the rich from steering the country too hard in their favor, there can be provisions where legislators, citizens, and oligarchs have checks and balances. Ie: to put it kidishly simple, each can have a 33% stake in directing that taxation. Another way to think of it is forced investment in pre-approved pro-American funds, companies, etc.

TBF: I have little sense of what I'm talking about in these matters. But the general context behind this is that power dynamics organically took control of the country and defied the spirit of the founding architecture. I assume there are many examples on how the Constitution and it's amendments dit not protect the original vision. And so the principal is to understand how power actually moves and work with it; don't kill it or shun it, but formalize it into legal structures, make it transparent, and then force it to comply with specific standards that muzzle and channel it's wolf power.

I got charged $4,500 for a band-aid.

For that price I could’ve bought 90,000 band-aids on Amazon (two for each person in my NYC neighborhood), but emergency room band-aids must be of a different substance.

A month ago we cut my newborn daughter’s finger with a nail clipper and it wouldn't stop bleeding for an hour. The on-call pediatrician—who was naturally grumpy since it was after midnight—insisted we go to the ER, and after 5 hours in the waiting room, the bleeding stopped right before we were called in. After one minute with the doctor and five with the nurse (most of it small talk about islands in Greece), we left with a band-aid on a dry scab. I assumed it would be an expensive lesson, a few hundred dollars to breathe hospital air, but we were charged a whole family’s round-trip tickets to Athens.

What's weirder than American private healthcare is how used to it everyone is. A family member said, “well, it was March, so you didn’t hit your deductible yet.” I’m willing to pay the $577 for the emotional labor of fixing a boo boo, but the remaining mystery, the $3,923 on yesterday’s mail bill, feels beyond reason. I’ll be requesting an itemized breakdown to call their bluff, and if they don’t bring it down to a normal but still ridiculous level ($500 for a band-aid—10,000x above market price) I will evade the debt collectors until they tank my credit and jail me.

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

A new prayer I wrote to loop: "Καιρὸν θεωρῶ, ἀγάπην σπερῶ.” It stands for “Kairos I behold, Agapae I will sow,” or in less Greek terms: “I recognize the moment, and will bestow love as a gift.” Each half mapped to an inhale and exhale, sort of like the Lord’s Prayer (in attempt to internalize and associate the prayer as something as automatic as breathing). The first half is on being perceptive, the second on being generative. You watch with gravity, then act with generosity.

Pronounciation:
(1) kai-RON
(2) thay-oh-RO
(3) ah-GAH-peen
(4) speh-RO

On each word:

Kairos is about seeing a particular moment in a particular way, that if acted upon, will change the course of history. It jolts me out of a passivity, about accepting things as they are, and instead to see freshly, to see everywhere the third doors. Christ’s first words in the Bible (after baptism) are, “the kairos is fulfilled."

Thay-oh-RO means to behold, to contemplate, to observe, to truly see the potential of a circumstance. It’s not a casual looking, but a penetrating sight. It’s a perspicacity of vision (an unraveling). (Note: it ties to “theory” but original this word was a way of seeing, not an abstract hypothesis.) It doesn’t mean “I’m an opportunist, but the full weight of my attention is applied to the present. There’s discipline to it, and it’s framed as a sacred rite, an act that changes you.

Agape is the highest form of love. Eros is the lowliest love, the desire to subsume the other into you, passion. Philios is a brotherly love, a reciprocal friendship, a give and take. Agape is a parental unconditional love, where you hope to nurture the other into their maximum potential. This is the origin of this prayer, because it feels like a word that can applies to everything; to mundane moments, to relationships, to creative works, etc. In many important ways, agape is a form of surrender. Agape is the defining word of Christ.

SPAY-roh is “I sow,” but  speh-ROH is “I will sow.” The future tense adds a quality, as in, now that I’ve seen the moment, I commit to sowing love. The word “sow” is specific and special, because sowing comes from spraying seeds, meaning you give love in massive volumes, with no conditional reciprocity, no expectation for return, knowing that one in a few might blossom into something. There is even a “Parable of the Sower” in the New Testament, about broadcasting generously without controlling where things land; you throw seed and trust the ground. Love is something to scatter freely, without a guarantee of return. This spray definition also ties into my latest conception of the root cosmological urge, in a working essay titled “the universe is a cumshot.” As in, God is not a craftsman with a plan, it’s more like the universe is an explosion of matter, and God is the binding force, the emergent order that fuses, harmonize two things for them to transcend to a higher phase of matter. 

Compared to the Lord’s Prayer, which is petitionary (give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us), asking for repentance and nourishment from a higher power, this one is more about our own responsibility to be like Christ, to have Christ-Conscioussness in each frame of our existence. It’s about internalizing the divine pattern. The Jesus Prayer is a devotional prayer, but this is a participatory prayer. This is “theosis,” becoming by grace what God is by nature.

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

In the last month there were so many fake Trump posts floating around, and I thought this one of them, but it turns out this is an authentic Easter morning war crime threat. I can see a few ways to interpret this historic tweet. On the surface, this sounds like a madman. The natural response is to assume Trump is, indeed, sick in the had. It's equally possible that this is him acting unhinged on purpose. This is how a dealmaster makes deals, by trolling and cursing, by threatening civilians and mocking religions, all while you still not knowing if he's just kidding around again. The reverential capitalization of “Power Plant Day” and “Bridge Day” is particularly weird, as if suiciding the energy market will be so victorious that we'll coin them into holidays. If he's actually trying to prose Iran into action, the “Praise be to Allah” remark certainly isn't helping. If you really break it down though, our threat makes no sense, because torching their oil fields is effectively an attack on ourselves, and I think even a madman knows not to repeatedly shoot themselves in the legs. The most revealing part of this message is that he shifted the deadline, again, by one day. Not Monday, 4/6, but Tuesday 4/7. You know the markets open Monday. I can’t help but think this tweet, if not all his rhetoric about the war, is led by market manipulation. If this tweet’s goal is to project instability and desperation, then it’s absolutely perfect, a simple string of words bound to make him and his friends millions before he weasels out of it on Tuesday.

I find “do you believe in God?” to be an impossibly vague question. Which god? The Christian God? Old Testament God? One or all of the Hindu Gods? Chris Farley God? I guess the question I find more interesting is asking “what is God?” and even better, “What is your most specific conception of God, what is required of you in your relationship to ‘it,’ and how does your life change because of that relationship?”

An atheist is one who just ignores this line of questioning. They’d say, “There is no supernatural, I can use logic to disprove it, so I can dunk on superstitious believers.” And if that’s all God is, then you’re missing out on a whole dimension of existence. As if you’ve never had sex. Or tried a mind-altering drug. Or whatever. SYK, I am an understudied heretical Greek Orthodox Christian. Being understudied and heretical is a bad combination, because I am likely refuting points I don’t understand, but alas, that is what I am, and I hope to each year become more studied and more heretical.

My intuition is that the Christian notion of God and Christ is misguided, malformed, not living up to its potential, with a whole bunch of categorial mistakes. SYK, again (so you know), I don’t dismiss it, and would even say that “becoming Christ like” is the most important thing you can do, and that can all be true without him literally having a virgin mother or resurrecting from the dead. We can respect and worship mythology without demanding it to be physically real. The metaphysics matter more!

But metaphysically, here’s what’s wrong with God. In my model, God does not have consciousness, meaning it’s not a real-time entity, looking down on each of us, listening to our prayers. God is also not the admin of a shared server where we all go when we die; there can be an afterlife Odyssey more beautiful and supernatural than anything we can conceive, but maybe it is single player and lives in our head and stretches our 3-minute death into 3,000 years experiential years in dream-space. Who knows. I think the main point I want to debate is that God isn’t conscious.

“Divine intelligence” makes more sense to me, and is a different thing than consciousness. Humans and animals and maybe even machines, can have consciousness, but God is greater than all of that. God is more akin to the arena, the thing that all agents live within. God is not the whole arena though, more like a property within it. If we’re talking about “divine intelligence,” this veers into “intelligent design,” which IIC is something like, “the structures in nature are so elegant and unlikely that someone external must have designed this!” This taps into “God’s plan” territory. Again, this sees God as an omnipotent architect, with great intention between all decisions. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is the theodicy question: why does suffering exist? Why serial killers and avalanches and Hitler and the vast nothingness? Why is that part of the design? There are all sorts of rationalizations (“to develop our character”). More likely, I think it’s more of a spray-and-pray design, a chaos generator.

The universe is a cumshot. Consider how many billions of sperm are needed in order for one of them to find the egg, for conception to happen, the miracle of life. This seems to happen at all scales of nature. Redundancies matter! If we are cosmicaly inside one tier of a fabrege egg, black holes burrowing into new space-time pockets, exploding matter endlessly inward, then there really is a raging, uncontrollable, chaotic force at the root of everything, and it doesn't have a plan! That is terrifying. Yet, from all the noise, two particles come into proximity, orbit, fuse, bind, transcend themselves into a higher order of novelty, harmony. This is God, I think, and it happens at every scale. You need a blind, idiotic chaos generator to create a supermassive variety of things, and God is the rare and unlikely event when two things come into contact to form something beautiful, to make a third. Love.

I guess “God is Love” is the most accurate theological statement I can get behind, because it explains every scale: the cosmological one, the societal one, the interpersonal one, the creative one, the psychological one.

On my walk this morning, I had a few strange ideas, building off the white hole / black hole thing, but also around what “God” is. The universe is a chaos engine. A blackhole sucks in a particular profile of material, and it shoots it out the other end, through a “big bang.” It is mostly noise, collision, non-sense, or nothing, but a separate system is harmonizing, filtering, grouping, cohering, ascending. You might call this “God” or “intelligent design.” (Excuse me for all this imprecise folk science; perhaps one day I will properly research this and upgrade my terminology).

An important caveat is that God is not an architect, not a designer, drawing floor plans, or even a “plan” for everyone or anyone’s life. God is an emergent intelligence. From chaotic explosions, God is the unbelievability that 2 of 2 trillion things can combine or cohere, and then sustain on, and continue moving up the abstraction ladder. The fact that anything can cohere at all is a miracle, and the degree that it can move up the chain is even more so miraculous.

I think this model helps explain “why is there evil the world?” Why floods and bombs? It’s because God is not as all-controlling as we think; he spawns reality as we know it, but does not tinker or micromanage. In no way is God conscious. In some way God is the pairing of things to generate life, and so in a very literal sense, I get now the phrase, “God is Love.”

Love is the fusion of two things that produces a third thing, and that goes to parenting, art, or whatever. Worth noting that love is not absolute. There may be loveless universes, ones that never cohere, that are just noise and nothingness for trillions of years. There could also be universes with far more love.

(...A sublime lens to see your surroundings on a walk is to realize that everything around, your whole world, the history of your society, and all possible realities on Earth, are all within a single sliver of what is possible in the physical engine of the Universe...)

Now, another extension of this thought is that human beings are at a certain level up the chain of the system that they have become “like Gods” or “in the image of God” which means that they’re able to both generate a lot of noise, and also cohere into even higher and higher things; arguable the human is the next link in God’s chain, and we are not the end state (there is no end state!) but our ability to make coherent things is a continuation of God’s process. This means technology isn’t evil, but Godly, but of course, most harmony decays and wobbles, which is what is happening.

I wonder if there’s even a limit to the advances of God into harmony and complexity in the material world, and the task has now been handed over to humans, who can make things beyond the complexities of atoms and galaxies. In that sense, God has made a population of Gods. And somewhere along the line, Christ comes in.

Christ, not as the literal embodiment in Christianity, but more like the logos imbued within the the "sons of God." If our father is a human, then we as his child is human too; so if God is our father, are we not Gods ourselves? But to be Christ-like is different, because God has no morality. In some way, God is unconscious, just an intelligence engine, trying to bring harmony, and to escalate matter to higher levels. God’s counter force has to spray and pray for the hope that God can find some unlikely combination. Christ however, attempts to limit generation, be more intentful with it, and to aim it towards good. Christ is an attempt to steer the self, the other, society, towards higher levels of harmony.

Why am I so engaged with the news these days? I think it’s part of a deeper desire to update my world model. There is no doubt, massive change. Geopolitical, economic, technological. And as abstract as those things usually are, it feels like some sort of shift that, in 2-3 years time, wil have an effect on my life. Of course, for many people in the world, it’s hitting them now. But similar to how COVID spared no one, it feels like your model of where things are going will directly effect your preparedness.

But this feels more existential; safety/security are actually on the line. And so that’s an anxious kind of thought, that the tectonic plates under your reality are shifting, and it’s not some recreational yearning to re-skill and recalibrate, but a mandatory thing.

And so to make sense, what do you do, go on X? That’s a total cesspool. New media is worse than the old gatekept media. And so, where I think I want to take this, is to build my own systems to sift through and aggregate information, and to build my own UI to do this. Even a simple Claude prompt, “what happened in Iran in the last 4 hours” is so much better than X. It’s stripped of sensationalism, and reading is just a less triggering medium. Bias aside, it’s at least free from people who are intentionally trying to deceive you for virality. There is a clout-chasing incentive, paired with actually turbulent times, which makes algorithmic news something like a schizophrenia filter.

And so what are these questions, these underlying uncertainties that are triggering a model change? How will anyone make income with the rise of AGI-3 and eventually ASI? How do I exist online and avoid hyper-surveillance and cyber-sabotage? Where in the world can I live to build a better future for my daughter, one where colleges doesn’t exist, jobs don’t exist, and where quality of life actually depends on nationalized social systems? A weird future. And weird to consider the fall of America, a kind of reverse migration, where, because of a confluence events, it might not be a place to raise a family in 1-2 generations down the line.

And so practically, this is resulting in things like: (a) applying for EU citizenship, (b) setting up AI agents for my business, and (c) considering cybersecurity, new ways to protect, share, and collaborate on writing (ie: how do you build an audience if the commons are polluted?). This is all very disorienting; it's hard to continue with business as usual when you become open to this scale of change.

Reply to Visa (Visakan Verasmy) on X: "Check out NeosVR. It shut down a few years ago, but it was crowdfunded and led by a single Czech developer for $150k/yr or so, and it had a community of a few hundred VR furries, roleplaying and shapeshifting, living and coding their own engine from the inside, basically all day. I went in there a few times, and it was countercultural and totally shocking. Digital drugs and currencies and 3D coding and alien norms. I felt something like a child around wizards. Felt like the actual vision of the metaverse, for prob 100,000x less cost. Sucks that it shut down, but seems like they shifted to something else called Resonite. Makes me believe, though, that different Metaverses exist right now, but they have <100 hardcore hobbyists each, and they don't necessarily want to be found."

“The Internet needs a quality algorithm.” This was the opening line of my essay prize announcement, and I want to revisit it now that it's done. Is there a correlation between writing quality and audience size? 

Algorithms are low-trust right now because they’re adversarial—“for you” gaslighting (usually)—and they reward engagement, popularity, monetization, etc. The 2010s-era algorithms are based on discrete events: clicks, likes, measurable things. They might look at keywords to guess the topic of an essay, but it’s effectively blind to the overall quality of a piece. Quality is nebulous, after all. Small magazines can each have their own vision of what’s good, but for a million/billion-person network, there’s no consensus, and quantity is way more important anyway.

So this essay competition was a v1 attempt to define and search for quality. The overall search space was small, but it was a chance to experiment with curation, and resulted in The Best Internet Essays 2025. It’s interesting to me that the featured writers ended up varying in audience size, evenly distributed between 10s, to 100s, to 1,000s, to 10,000+ subscribers.

Again, limited sample, but interesting to ponder: the tangible thing (reach) is a power law distribution (1% have big audiences), but the intangible thing (quality), the thing that matters more, is independent of scale. It means that for all the great writers with 10k audiences who are highly visible, there are possibly 100x writers of similar caliber who are undiscovered, in algorithmic obscurity. 

This isn’t too surprising, and the usual reply is, “well it’s not enough to write well, it’s your responsibility to be consistent, to be your own marketer and publicist, to make sure your work gets read.” I get that this is what’s been required, but what if it weren’t? Wouldn’t it be better if a platform could search for quality at scale so writers could just do their thing? This would also give visibility to those who aren't full-time writers, people who publish 1-2 essays per year around the interesting problems they’re working on, but have no bandwidth to build an audience each week.

Still have to think through v2, the 2026 prize, but the question in my mind is how can I expand the search space? Can I have agents scan the Internet, assemble RSS feeds to find great essays, design an algorithm to filter for the previously intangible, build community into the process, and then curate/share the stuff that comes through? The aspiration is to get better each year at surfacing great essays from independent writers on the basis of merit, and this book is what came through the first pass.

I conveyed the conspiracy to my wife and her mother that Ellen Degeneres & Co. actually ate Stanely Kubrick after they realized what he was trying to push through the full uncut version of Eyes Wide Shut. I guess the Epstein files are bringing back longstanding rumors on satanic and ritualistic cannibalism. The most disgusting thing I read—which I did not share with them, for not wanting to evoke imagery of infant harm, and so STOP HERE if you're sensitive to that— was that Melania and Trump were on a yacht with Epstein, and they witnessed cannibals dismember babies, take out their intestines, and eat feces from it, which is absolutely inhuman and vile on so many levels, and I can barely understand why such a thing would even occur. Maybe there’s an elite postures where Epstein was boastful about his depravity: “look what I can orchestrate.” Or maybe (and most likely) the emails are intentionally fake to falsely incriminate others down the line? Either way, I find it very strange that such visceral images are entering public consciousness and large masses of people believe it.

We’re printing the Internet. Remarkable essays are published online every day, but they’re only getting harder to find. This is a first attempt to find the signal in the slop: a hardcore judging process, 13 essays that capture our times, all in a pocket-sized paperback.

100% of royalties go to the writers, judges, and the 2026 prize pool.

Featured writers: Tommy Dixon, Matt Švarcs Richardson, Lily, James Taylor Foreman, Alissa Mears, Kylan Emms, Noelle Perdue, Max Nussenbaum, Catherine Melo, Simon Sarris, Garrett Kincaid. Judges: Henrik Karlsson, Charlie Bleecker, Alex Dobrenko`, CansaFis Foote, Elle Griffin, Dylan O'Sullivan, Jasmine Sun, Isabel, and Lellida Marinelli.

There is a viral video of Milwaukee Brewer pitcher, Jacob Misiorowski, throwing a 104 mph fastball to knock an apple off a teammates head, who is sitting on a chair at home plate, arms crossed, back to pitcher. Yes, it's edited, but will everyone tell? What if 5% can't? How many hundreds of kids will try this stunt? Reminds of me of William S. Burroughs thinking he could drunkly shoot a beer bottle off his wife's head and missing. I guess the allure of virality can poison anyone.

Allergic to the term "assistant." Just got an email from Typefully on their new "editorial assistant," and it's filled with all the expected hedges ("we didn't just slap AI onto this," etc.), but it's all anchored in a wrong premise on writing: that writers have a voice, a vibe, a signature style. I think this really accelerated with the whole "taste" discourse. As in, if AI does everything, what's left? Well, my taste!? This is a very lazy thing to anchor your identity in. Technically, every person has some combination of sources that they can point to, likely from lazily curating their inputs, and calling that "taste." But it's something like a false pride. And so these tools just further play you into that illusion: that you have your taste, and your taste is great, and if only you have some algorithm that could capture it. Testimonial (in essence): "It turns my unstructured thoughts into absolutely sick bangers, written exactly as I would." But is your voice that predictable? That's another assumption, that your voice is unchanging.

Paul Graham’s idea of makers/managers is helpful when thinking about AI agents. The cost of being unreasonably productive is that all your time will go into management. I’ve heard people celebrate this, as if elevating above the work itself and only making high-leverage decisions based on taste is the place we want to be. Disagree. Without actually being in the weeds and making thousands of unbearably slow decisions, you won’t develop taste, and (probably) won’t be a great manager either. I guess the ideal (for me) is to be in maker mode as often as possible, and then let my synthetic managers come in to process my deep work. (Currently have a “proseOS” where I can riff 5k words into a daily note, and then agents come in to route my logs to different interfaces). Ideally, you build the manager once and forget about it. But realistically, a maker can find fun in making manager bots and management apps, and it’s quite easy to slip into a managerial goon loop. What I mean is, similar to masturbating with no intention of ever finishing (aka gooning), it’s very possible to make your own task manager app, and a writing app, and an idea Kanban linked to Obsidian, and why not a new personal website, and a 1,000 day calendar because you can, and seriously anything you can think of, and it’s very possible to just numb out over how unbelievable it is that code, markdown, and interface are now liquids that shape around your every intention, but actually, you never quite finish anything. PKM procrastination is timeless, except now it’s multiplied to new levels. The brute velocity of execution means you’re bound to make many little mistakes, which eventually compound into your own megamachine that traps you with endless bugs and feature ideas and system decay. This is all quite dramatic. I love Claude Code and insist everyone IRL and IFL try it. But now that it’s shockingly trivial to build your own personal software for free, I imagine there will be all sorts of unanticipated psychic costs. For one, it’s dangerous if building your own tools is equal to or more fun than the work the tools are for. I’m sure that wears off. But I generally think this all leads to both extremes: individuals who are unbelievable prolific, and individuals stuck in a goon loop who feel unbelievably prolific.

Played video games with my wife tonight. First we played Mario Kart on Switch (and tied). Then we opened the SuperNES emulator and it was really nostalgic. The original Kart (1993?) was nauseating, but also, harder, and more challenging. Feels like they've really simplified games so that young kids are never confused, which sort of takes the fun out of it. Then I played Donkey Kong Country (1994?) from Rareware, and remembered playing the game with my neighbor, JA, back when we were kids. Felt like a solid game, challenging, beat a few levels, and could imagine myself trying to beat it as an adult; though the concept of dedicating any attention to video games (new or old) seems off. Then we played a full game of tennis, and she won. Similar experience (awkward, but hard and challenging). Closed with Yoshi's Island, which is an example of how a game can be explicitly about babies, and yet still have an art style that is beautiful to an adult. After this experience, I guess my sense is that modern Switch games have turned to a kind of brain rot, and abandoning of art/soul for bright colors and attention catching? Can't say for sure. Maybe I'm just an old crank now. In any case, wondering if there's anything I'd gain through returning to old Nintendo games as leisure.

Will had a point that intelligence is just one vector of human cognition, and things like taste and judgment aren't captured by machines. I made a solid counterpoint. Let's say an agent decides to read/re-read Paradise Lost for 5,000 hours straight. It has more than a surface level understanding of it from it's training data. It is looping over it, and maybe it had unique interactions with online communities and individuals around Paradise Lost, which it brought to its own extensive studies. After those 200+ days of study, this agent will have a singular understanding of Paradise Lost unlike any other AI/human, which is the essence of taste.

The core point here is that taste is not a preference, it is earned through sustained, intense effort. A LLM does not have taste because it read each work only once at a blazing space. It turns each work into a statistical pattern, but doesn't truly understand it because it hasn't recursively looped over it with force and singular intention.

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video titled something like, “A child born in 2025 is more likely to get killed by AI than graduate college.” What a ridiculous claim. I assumed it was clickbait and didn’t click, but it has jingled around my head enough to the point where I think I can make sense of it’s argument:

• The average p(doom) of an AI engineer is 16%, meaning there’s a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction (put another way, companies have morally rationalized the need to play Russian Roulette—if we don’t do it the bad guys will—, without acknowledging that if they survive and win, they get the consolation prize of comandeering the whole economy).

• 40% of US adults, age 25-34, today, have a bachelor’s degree. If there’s massive job automation and employment, a college degree would be both unaffordable and an unreasonable cost if it were. It’s not unthinkable that <15% of next generation gets a college degree, which makes that sensational claim, weirdly, plausible.

I still think it’s a shaky comparison, confusing two different types of probability, and assuming extreme ASI turbulence. But as someone with a daughter born in 2025, it has gotten me to think about how the societal backdrop to her upbringing could be especially weird. Our circumstance already gets slightly weirder with each generation. Except, maybe next loop will be an unavoidable and disorienting flurry of change that will confuse parents and rewrite all of the conditions for the typical coming of age moment (all the teen movies will be sci-fi, the popular memoirs could be written by transhumanists who have upgraded in unimaginable ways, like they no longer need to sleep because of a new pill, or they can control the genitals of their peers with an app, who knows).

And so now, I find myself drawn to a 2045 forecasting project. Trying to predict the future is typically a huge waste of time (unless you’re gambling and win), which is why I’m going to have AI write the whole thing. This is a rare exception where a writing project makes little sense for a human to do. All I’m going to write are the upfront origin documents, and then Claude Opus 4.5 will read 25,000 sources, write a million words or so, and then organize it all into an interactive, oatmeal-looking website called 2045predictions.com (got it).

Before I run it, here’s something I’m currently thinking through:

What is the omega state? When I look at the popular AI forecasts from 2025, it reads to me like they have a pre-determined end state, only to then use detailed forecasting to make it seem convincing. The AI-2027 forecast seems like they came to their conclusion from very detailed calculations on how a hivemind of 200,000 autonomous coders would evolve month-by-month, but I also suspect that they picked the year 2027 because the following year, 2028, is a US election year, and they want the next administration to take AI safety far more seriously (instead of just insisting we have to beat China). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. You kind of have to start with an omega state. The future is so boundless that you need to begin with a guess, a bold outline on the general direction of things.

Here’s my omega: let’s assume humanity survives, and let’s assume technology does unlock hyperabundance that leads to a post-scarcity world, HOWEVER, it’s not utopian because it simultaneously unlocks a new cascade of moral, social, and spiritual crises, dilemmas that will test the timeless primitives of humanity (sex, life, death, consciousness, religion, home, etc.). This omega state makes sense for me because (1) we already know that ethical dilemmas scale with technology, and (2) according to the Strauss-Howe generational theory (from the same guys who coined “milennalis,” “Gen-Z,” etc.), this already tends to happen every 80 years (the length of a human lifespan). A new techno-political order creates a spiritual crises that generates an Awakening, a new value system that shapes society for the next century or so. You know what’s 80 years before Kurzweil’s “singularity” of 2045? The counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s. What I’m getting at is that the 2040s might have echos of the 1960s, where demographics are divided on core issues and LSD is replaced with consciousness-altering machines (Terence McKenna said that computers are drugs, you just can’t swallow them yet).

We currently define the singularity as “the moment when a computer is smarter than all humans combined,” but that effectively means nothing, and it’s far more useful to have some guesses on how we all might freak out about that happening.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

My wife and I joke that when the obstetricians ask her, “what is your pain management strategy?” she’s going to say “Led Zeppelin,” which cues me to blast “Immigrant Song” at 100% through her BOSE speakers. In all my baby-book reading, when they’ve mentioned “music” during labor, I imagine soothing, meditative music—like Enya or flukes—to calm the screaming mother; but maybe the other direction is more productive? The experience is so intense that Zen garden music could potentially feel toyish and tone deaf to the experience at hand. If you’re experiencing the extremes of pain, it might help to have blaring technical instrumentation in your ear, to moan in harmony with Robert Plant. I mean, the whole strategy is to distract your mind from pain by focusing on specific things, and it does in fact require 100% of your bandwidth to really listen to Bonham fills of Page riffs. She wants me to make her a hard rock playlist.

Funny to think that Stranger things is a mirror of modern parenting paranoia: if you let your kids ride around on bikes outside, they will be abducted by horrific interdimensional monsters who are controlled by an MK ultra experiment gone wrong (a telepathic reptilian Jeffery Epstein), so just stay safe, stay inside, and watch Netflix.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

Starring out into a baseball field in late November, puddled and unkept, it struck me how, at one point in life, baseball was the whole frame of my existence: watching it, talking about it, playing it, traveling for it, dreaming about it, collecting cards, making Excel spreadsheets for those cards, memorizing the statistics of every starting player on every team, etc. Obviously, I’m nostalgic about it. That was just what I was into. I do wonder though, was that whole phase of my life a natural part of childhood that I was meant to get stuck in and grow out of? Or, was it mostly a big waste of time, spirit, and attention? I guess what I’m questioning is, is there a version of my childhood where baseball only took up 20% of my psyche instead of 100%, and would I be better off for it today? Would I be similarly nostalgic? Would a lesser obsession have freed up more bandwidth to develop in other areas? Or am I who I am today because of that obsession?

I had a dream last night that involved several adventures with CansaFis Foote (who in this reality wore a backwards baseball hat). Most of them were trivial, like how he said he was going to order a Baha bowl but then told the waiter he wanted three tacos, and then I ate at all the chips when he went to the bathroom. Also his wife was some NYC executive who was about to become the president of my wife’s architecture company. But the best detail was when I saw a poster for the movie Point Break (1989), and I was inspecting it to see who the actors were. Was it Gary Busey and Anthony Keidis, like CansaFis insisted? Was this poster special for omitting the lead actor, Keanu Reeves? One way or another, this triggered lucidity, because we were sitting on a bench and I was describing how “I know we’re in a dream,” and “at any moment now, all of reality is going to wobble and collapse and I’m going to wake up” (as it usually does when I become lucid). But then nothing happened… Yet now I get it; I get why after asking CFF why Keanu Reeves wasn’t in his description of Point Break, he said, “because I’m dangerous.”

Every generation needs to find its invisible canon to solve its crises:

The last 2 years have been a deep dive into essay composition, but I want to think harder about taste. Of course, I believe fundamentals come first. If you don’t have fluency to express thoughts, then it doesn’t matter what your taste it. Taste without articulation is something like a status trap. People take pride in sitting at the intersection of three particular aesthetics, and using it as a razor to justify their artistic decisions, an excuse to avoid the militaristic discipline required to learn the fundies.

I’m sure there are proper terms for this, but I’m going to riff on taste and derive it all from scratch. Could be fun to read back on this in 10 years.

Yes, anyone can have a taste developed through circumstance, but that’s “narrow taste.” Algorithms make it easier to fall into taste traps. You see the same thing over and over; you are a Substack psychographic; confident in your uniqueness, but you’ve been force fed the same slop as 1.2 million other people.

And then there’s “wide taste,” which is a lifelong practice of reading from odd, competing, singular, idiosyncratic silos. Only by being well-read can you actually build proper maps of a culture. There really isn’t a shortcut to cultivate taste, it takes tremendous time and effort; without it you’ll only be able to cling to feeble, flimsy opinions.

But it’s not enough to read widely; there’s “discerning taste,” the ability to selectively pluck out a small percent of the things you’ve read and deem them as special. 

Ultimately there are questions on what to read, and well-read people tend to point to old books, the canon, but that feels like outsourcing your discernment. What good is the canon? Sure, if it's survived for centuries, there's probably something to it, but it risks turning you into a homogenized intellectual if that's your only source (and yet also, it helps to know the classics so you can speak that language, but it's probably best to supplement with 50% nn-canonical sources).

The question behind the question is this: what is the point of a serious reading habit? I’d argue that you read to understand the range of ways that words can move you, and to accumulate ideas and lenses that help you navigate the circumstance of your life and generation. The western canon might have some overlap, but not all Great Books are the books you need. The western canon is helpful as a history of literature, a record of how the species bursted through with original linguistic concepts and forms. That matters! That’s worth studying if you want to understand your heritage, your species, the norms of older times, and the outer limits of language.

But from a perspective of “renaissance” or “revival,” to surface old ideas to help our current situation, that’s a very different canon. So the word “canon” is flexible. You hear people making “personal canons” all the time now, which are effectively, just the books you like. There are also "tech canons" and even the "China tech canon." But you could argue that as society mutates, each generation has their own invisible canon, some combination of obscure books, that if discovered could help them navigate the narrow passage oftheir time.

Can AI have taste in this kind of canon creation? Maybe a culture progressively rots if each generation is unable to find the scattered canon that’s destined to them, and maybe AI can help reverse our fumblings. The question then is, what do humans lose? What matters in the act of canon creation? The orientation (the thesis on what’s worth finding), the mapping (selecting the books), the reading (digesting old books), or the synthesis (making new things from old readings)?

I asked as AI about what we lose, and here's what it said, which I don't buy:

But Taste—true, earned taste—is a byproduct of the inefficiency of finding those things yourself. When you hunt for the “Generational Canon” manually, you have to wade through trash. You have to read ten books that don’t resonate to find the one that vibrates in your hand. That wasted time isn’t waste; it’s calibration. It provides the contrast necessary for “discerning taste.” If an AI hands you a perfect platter of 10/10 bangers that align perfectly with your soul, you lose the ability to detect why they are good. You become a connoisseur who has never tasted a bad wine, which is to say, you aren’t a connoisseur at all; you’re just a consumer of high-quality inputs.

I think there is enough discernment and active reading within a book that helps with calibration. ie: I'd rather read through the right recommended book 5 teams, then wastefully read 4 books that were trash, so that I can find the right book and read it once. My gut says that the beginning and end of the workflows are most important: orientation and synthesis. The mapping work is for specialized canon makers, which could be humans or agents. Even when AI provides you a map, there's still research to do on each book, and discernment on where to plunge.

The reading part is more nuanced. Of course, when you don't read, you can't synthesize. But maybe AI can assist us finding the right things in a given book. As in, maybe Infinite Jest is just so thick that I'm going to procrastinate on starting for a decade. But maybe there's a 50-page excerpt in the middle that is hyper-relevant to the month I'm open to having AI summarize the beginning and end, so that I can dive in and experience the right passage at the right time. This doesn't replace reading the full thing, and maybe that will happen in a future stage of my life. This feels like a middle ground—I'm not saying I want to extract summaries and factoids for other purposes; I do want to immerse in the text for 10-20 hours, I just don't have 100-200 hours in that given month, and so in this case AI is doing what a college professor does: curate.

Will AI ever be able to capture the intangibles of quality?

Davey sent me a voice note, loosely around if it would be possible for AI to handle all of the branches of quality. I’m skeptical that it would work, and even if so, I think there’s value in having humans read essays and make these decisions. Still, he triggered three questions in me:

1. Might unconscious machines actually be able to better determine cultural transcendence than humans? I’ve made a team of judges that is well-rounded, but it’s limited to the people I know and trust. The categories are good, but is it really representative of the whole Internet? How would I know? In the future, you could have scrapers read every Substack post in real-time and create a living map of cultural vectors, and then simulate all new essay against past/present/future vectors. (Or, better yet, the bots could read Substack, understand the psychographics of readers, and then elect human judges to still keep humans in the loop.)

2. Might some element of essay evaluation, if it wants to be “perfect and total” require a machine with simulated consciousness? This got me to think about the taste category. I think that you could potentially map the canon, and then have it make conclusions that only a lifelong reader could come to. But there is an element of ‘somatic reaction’ that would probably not translate. Even if a machine had some sense of qualia (which I think it can), it would likely be significantly different from a human’s. 

3. Even if machines could do the entirety of evaluation, and create anthologies of human-written essays (and machine-written essays, but in a separate collection), might there still be value in including humans in the process? Could be valuable both in terms of determining the winner, and the emerging culture from involving humans in that process. I like to think that if we ever have a “best machine essays of 2028” that humans will play a critical role in the eval of that.

I am subscribed to a r/MantisEncounters, and just came across “do you think the Mantid Beings have connection to the Praying Mantises on earth.” Many believe that a mantis encounter is not random, but a visitation from a higher-dimensional being (ie: they can see through the eyes of their earthly counterparts). Of course, very woo.

But it gets me thinking on how my last two apartments were baptized through insect visitation.

The last one was welcomed with a massive cockroach at the last step entering the unit, which to me symbolized the poverty of the artist (as rendered by Burroughs, Ed Sanders, and others of that generation). In this apartment, the day Fios was being installed, there was a praying mantis on the front door. The symbols that come to are MC Escher and the DMT realm, high insectoid weirdness of which I've never experienced firsthand.

Both bugs are (relatively) rare—sighted either a once a year or once a decade sighting—but what's more interesting to me is the act of narrativizing and mythologizing a place that has no associations yet. An empty apartment has no experience, no memories, and so the first few remarkable moments feel more significant since your meaning-making apparatuses are active.

Just came across a smutstack in my feed, an excerpt by someone liked by someone I follow. It led me to find a logloglog style page with date-stamped entries; at first I was compelled by the formatting—timestamp, return, paragraph, return, timestamp, no lines and single paragraphs only … innocent stuff—but then I read the writing itself, about a girl with an evil boyfriend. Then I clicked into one more post (one of the not paid ones) and it was an essay about her inner monologue while giving a blowjob at a club, written with specificity and elegance, on how she can’t help but think about dramatic ways to kill herself in the act if it goes longer than 5 minutes. My first thought is that this is like Worst Boyfriend Ever, except from a woman who writes a lot better. Is it great? Possibly, I’d have to read more. The problem is, I don’t want to, and basically can’t read more. Almost everything is paywalled and I can’t help but feel conflicted in paying for good writing when it can easily be interpreted as paying for written porn (especially now that Substack badgifies this!). It is called “Girl Insides” and that suddenly makes sense. I have not thought hard enough about the complexities behind sex writing (writing it, reading it, anthologizing it) and how that interacts with the essay. As do most people, I naturally keep writing and sex in different silos, but if sex is one of the most fundamental parts of the human experience (given that, you know, that's where kids come from), it feels odd and puritanical to exclude it.

Could I beat Alcaraz at tennis if he were blindfolded? I mean, probably, unless he could reconstruct vision through sound, which I’m pretty confident he can’t. All I’d have to do is (a) lob the ball and get it in on my serves, (b) assume he’s unable to serve blind—through muscle memory he might score some aces, but not enough to win a set, and so he might resort to lobbing, which I could return.

To make this more interesting, I’d allow Alcaraz to have a doubles partner, except the partner has no racket. His job is to hold Alcaraz by the shoulders, usher him around, position him in the right spot, and yell “swing!” That might make it close, especially if they practice in advance.

I asked AI how to give Alcaraz a handicap so the odds are closer to 50/50, and it is considering some options: give him his eyes back but replace his racket with either a frying pan or a 2x4, give him his eyes back but place 4 folding chairs randomly on his side of court and require him to hold a leash of a large dog in his non-playing hand, give him his eyes back but replace his body with a robot and force him to control his body off site with an Xbox controller, etc.

It is important to avoid learning best practices for marketing, for that’s like seeing a Medusa that turns your tongue to stone and never lets you be real again.

"While great artworks can be produced in isolation, art movements — which organize disparate works into coherent scenes and sensibilities — are what contribute to a feeling of progress. If we assume that innovation can be measured by new artistic movements, and those movements are facilitated by a critical culture, then a weakened critical ecosystem will lead to the “blank space” that W. David Marx describes, where art and culture feel stagnant." —Celine Nguyen, Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

I like this definition: "a movement is about organizing disparate works into a coherent scheme, scene, sensibility." It means literary movements are just on the other side of ambitious curation projects. This resonates with me more than the forward-looking battle cries, with pleas like, “we need to start a literary revolution!” I mean, maybe that helps some people, but even if it did, they wouldn’t be legible until someone retroactively made sense of them. So basically, the challenge is having a tight feedback loop where critics and curators are able to make sense of, assemble, and mythologize the immediate past. Scene-making is retroactive.

Throughout history, I think it’s relied on self-elected individuals to do this work; that will always be important, and I’m excited to step into this role (starting with this year’s $10k essay prize). But as we enter a future with delirious volume: included human art, human slop, machine slop, and machine art, I wonder if it will be the scope of things to consider will grow way beyond the scope of what humans can handle. This might be an example of how we need to use algorithms for good. Our current “discovery” algorithms are based on popularity and interest, more optimized to alter user behavior than to curate a contemporary canon. 

Our challenge, or at least the challenge I’m excited about, is to program algorithms that can process inhuman volume, while having a reliable signal on humanity (quality, perspective, theme, etc.).

I’m watching a squirrel on a tree; specifically, it’s instinct to structurally brace itself against a wind gust. It is frozen alert, flat, legs wide, arms narrow, neck up at 30 degrees. It looks stuffed. Fake. Is it in fear or wonder or maybe just loving the breeze? Is it scared of the pongs from the pickleball courts, or curious about the strange spherical nuts curving through air, a sport played by millennials and elders on a Friday? I see it swallow, it’s tail fuzz blowing, attached to a white belly with orange at the ears and the edges of the eyes. I step closer and closer, until I can see the glass in its eyes. I look away for one second, look back, and it’s gone. A brown sock hops away through the leaves again, rummaging across the concrete to find another tree.

Most of humanity, there was no link between sex and birth. How would you know if no one told you? Even if you saw “resemblance” tribes were so isolated, their sample size of humanity so small, it would be fair to think this is just what people look like. Sex was urge-driven, orgiastic, and likely disconnected from a stomach growth that lasted for 9 months. The idea that babies come out could have been seen as a natural, accepted thing. To know causation through time—to link an invisible cause to a future effect—would require abstract, symbolic thinking. The conscious realization of this changed history, from hunting to the domestication of animals, to surplus and civilization.

Instead of spending 5 hours per day mad at trending social justice issues (20,000 hours per decade), I want to focus on building an institution for the essay. It’s a sort of illegible, seemingly irrelevant, idiosyncratic thing to do. But if it works, and if it somehow has any affect on how writing is taught in schools, and that improves the critical thinking of a generation, it will have way more influence than if I spent all that time protesting and howling for nothing. This just taps into a core belief of mine that the only way you can possibly help anyone outside of you and your immediate circle is to pick something dear to you and approach it with unreasonable fervor. If someone were to criticize me for ignoring a genocide, I’d say that all you can do is intensely dedicate your life to a single vector for multiple decades in the hope that you can tilt the scale away from next generation’s genocides.

I get the sense that creativity used to be seen as a form of artistic mastery, but in the 1990s, creativity turned into catharsis, therapy, self-help. It’s an “if I don’t do it, I’ll get sick,” attitude. I resonate with that—I often refer to writing as a release valve; without it, my head would get clogged and blow up—but not at the expense of technique!

Mastery is about breaking what you made, trying again, breaking it again, pushing the boundaries, and demanding an answer to “how do I make things?” Once you've made a bunch of things, you start to intuit your limitations, and the question is do you accept or interrogate why.

The process of interrogating is not only hard/heroic, but it’s rewarding in a gentle way. 1) The things you work hard on will be special to you for your whole life. 2) You slowly enhance and develop skills in and out your domain. 3) You build community through working together on hard things. 4) It reframes other elements of your life: pain is a puzzle.

I wonder if there is a Trojan Horse version of sneaking mastery into society through a self-help framework.

On the new Geese album: I’m definitely a fan of the vocals, melodies, instrumentation, layering, song structures—basically everything except the lyrics. I wondered if after multiple listens, they would eventually click. Individual lines have, but none of them are coherent as a song. They’re generally vague, cryptic, and dramatic, kind of like some of Thom Yorke’s lyrics, which work if I’m in a particular mood and willing to interpret and make my own meaning from it. Subject-wise though, pretty hard to relate to (bombs, avoiding taxes, suicide, Maria’s bones?). FWIW, I do like the sailor/car lyric lol, but not the rest of the song.

If you give an infinite amount of monkeys a typewriter, with an infinite amount of time (obviously theoretical because neither a being or time can be infinite) not only will one of them produce Shakespeare, but the entire Western Canon would be re-derived from scratch in every moment of reality. This captures the difference between astronomic values and infinite values. In astronomic values, given an absurd amount of time, one monkey will eventually do the the impossible and write Shakespeare. But with infinite values, monkeys are inventing Shakespeare as the grammar of space-time. The astronomical shows that the impossible could happen once, but the infinite shows that the impossible could become the fabric of a reality.

And Sora is, like the 2005 Facebook feed, just the start of something new, but something that might actually be as nauseating as the infinite. If you have agents that can reproduce endlessly (potentially infinite “creators”), with the ability to remix/generate one piece of content against every other node in a growing cultural matrix (actually infinite), with limited time/cost (not infinitesimal, but fractional), that leads to every possible reality happening in every moment, at a cost that’s bearable to tech corporations.

I think I find this all interesting now, because something as abstract as the infinite might shape the future of creation/consumption. And to tie this to our talk last night about optimism/pessimism, I think the difference comes down to those who have the agency and discernment to plug in to the infinite on their own terms. It could be as simple as, if you plug in to OpenAI, Meta, or X, and let them use your data to create a generative algorithmic for you, you will be swept away in limitless personalized TV static. But if you know how to build your own tools (hardware, software, social communities), then you have a chance to harness it.

In Sora, I’m currently in a Bob Ross K-Hole, and it triggered an unexplainable interest in trying to explore the edges of Bob Ross lore, which is, now that I write this, so random and pointless and misaligned, but when I do it I’m cracking up and can’t really stop.

Contrast that with my own theoretical "infinite system," where every new log surfaces the 100 most related logs, and then each of those logs becomes the seed for an essay generator, each of which gets rewritten endlessly (for hours, days, or weeks) via an EA software feedback loop, until I decide I want to read it.

And so if you dive into the infinite, even if it’s something you love, it can easily destroy you, and instead we need to make our own systems/agents that can surf those edges for us, and bring back just the right amount of information that we can meaningfully work with.

I'm ashamed to admit that a meme on Sora got me to laugh and cry so hard that my head was in pain and I had to close the app. It was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but AI replaced the text with the script from the meme of that 4-year-old who can’t describe his dream (“Have you ever had a dream that you, um, you had, your, you— you could, you’ll do, you— you want, you, you could do…” etc.). There is something about seeing a great American orator mumble endlessly that I apparently can’t handle. Technically, I “made” this meme, which makes it worse, like I’m laughing at my own jokes.

What makes Sora an incredibly weird experiment is that, in 10 seconds, anyone can upload their “likeness.” Basically, you spin your head around, you say some words, and you get a photorealistic avatar that you can lend to your friends so they can prompt you into absurd situations. Of course, Sam Altman is one of the default avatars available. 50% of the app is Sam Altman fan fiction. You will find him stealing graphics cards from Target, smoking weed and saying “we’re cooked,” debating Cartman in court, using Pikachu to power a fusion reactor, etc. Also if you like Pikachu, there is now infinite Pikachu content. It is all very dumb, but it is endlessly novel.

This feels like a preview of a culture who only communicates through Superbowl commercial skits. I hope it doesn’t work, but I fear it might. I assume most people are questioning “why would anybody make their likeness public?” The answer is attention. I imagine that, within a week or two, Sam will have the montages and metrics to sway influencers and celebrities. It will be pitched as the new way to engage your audience: “let them create through you.” They know they can’t use the likeness of real people; I wonder if the point of this app (a wrapper over their underlying video model) is to get people to hand over their identity for free.

I am debating if I should delete this from my phone (I don’t allow any feeds on my phone … except Substack), or, if I should lean in, sell my likeness, and write about the consequences. This feels like an essay-worthy moment, but I can’t find the terms and conditions, and I get paranoid when I imagine the possibilities.

I haven't shared with you my latest political views, but I’m exploring this idea of Radical Centrism, meaning, it might be okay to justify a centralized state-controlled media platform if that technologically and systematically guarantees a sane/just information environment. Obviously, this is hard, if not impossible, to do right.

It’s whole goal would be to invent an architecture that make it impossible for polarization or propaganda to occur. The key UI invention is that every news event would be presented as an atomic unit, with a mosaic of interpretations surrounding (not just left/right, but dozens of angles). Anyone who hits a certain POV too much would get de-ranked, so both Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel would be equally penalized because they predictably align with a faction. It would have to be structurally impossible for governments, media, money, or power to use their resources to promote a message above the system. Any media company who does not comply will be taxed into oblivion.

Of course everyone should have the right to say/think whatever they want without consequence, but the real issue isn't free speech, but in frame control.

On r/praying_mantis, someone reposted an image from TikTok of a killed mantid with limbs severed and guts on concrete, with the caption, “One praying mantis down. Cause of death: beaten with a stick and took it like a good girl. I flung it around a bit and all it did was stand there looking at me, and then I decided I didn’t want any mantises in MY pretty pink plants so I killed it.” The comments—in this forum of mantis caretakers—were obviously appalled, treating it as if someone had just confessed to killing a dog on social media. I agree that a praying mantis is weirder and more majestic and probably worth respecting more than other bugs, but I can’t exactly articulate why. Why are there no roach collectors? Disease? Something about the mantis feels exotic without feeling threatening.

The Big Duck is a historical landmark in Long Island. A duck farm that sold eggs and produce used a 25’ plaster duck as its highway billboard. It became “world famous” from Robert Venturi’s book on architectural theory, Learning from Las Vegas, which coined the Big Duck as the microcosmic example of “roadside architecture.”

I recently spoke about said duck in a presentation to writers. The farm and the duck are useful metaphors, working in a duality. If you only build the farm, no one driving by will pull over to see what you’ve done. If you only build the highway duck, your farm is a letdown. The trick is to build both: to have the heart of a farmer, but to accept that it’s also your responsibility to appear on the highway.

Surprised to learn that John Olerud has one of the highest all-time OPS (on-base plus slugging percentages) in New York Mets history. He wasn't necessarily a power hitter, but for over a decade (1992-2003), he had more walks than strikeouts each season. He also set the NYM record for walks in a season: 125 walks in 1999. His skill was discernment, knowing when not to swing.

The freedom to speak is irrelevant if no one takes seriously the imperative to think. I don’t care about Kimmel or Carlson or any pundit who gets cancelled. They are, mostly, automatons with predictable views, warped by the incentives and mind viruses of some political body. When someone gets cancelled, it’s not that we’re preventing open thought, it’s just a casualty of a two-sided ideological war. If you care about the freedom to speak and think, you should be grieving the fact that the American spirit has been dead for a century, or more accurately, it's never truly existed in mass media, never perpetuated through a democracy, only paraded around by propagandists, grieving that independent parties and voices have been systematically throttled to have no mainstream influence.

It is commonly reported that ideas come to people in the shower; sometimes, musical operas comes to me when I shower: imagine a 7-part rock opera, a single riff in different tempos and tones, where part 6 is some Jim Morrison dialogue from “The End,” where the drummer has eighth notes on the ride and is doing jazz fills on tom with his left hand, the bassist is in the pocket, guitar is 12th fret and up playing non-sense at volume 1 with a wah pedal, and there’s dialogue like: “Aeschylus, my son, did you find 17 gummies under your pillow?” “Yes, father.” “Aeschylus, did you know those were all intended for the gummy fairy?” “Yes, father.” “And you ate them?” “Yes, father.” “And you saw the mystery?” “Yes, father.” “Aeshcylus, my son, you know what happens when children see the mystery?” (instrumental freakout ensues) and by this point I am naked and thrashing and have completely forgotten about soap.

A 2015 poll said that 42% of people would go back in time and kill baby Hitler if they had the chance. Meaning, almost half of the population thinks it’s morally OK to kill a baby if they believe it could save millions of lives (a very utilitarian idea). Anyone who is celebrating and condoning the death of Charlie Kirk has been led to believe that he’s a Hitler equivalent. This is the consequence of polarizing media. Anyone can become a boogeyman worth assassinating.

I think there’s a whole cascade of moral failures happening: first, in wanting blood; second, in ragebait media; and third, in belonging to a political party and not thinking independently about what’s presented to you.

I’m at a point where I can’ stand left/right rhetoric. If you identify with either party, I can’t take you seriously as an American. Kirk was charistmatic, likable, courageoes, and fluent, but also, a one-dimensional thinker, an automaton with shallow and predictable talking points (if you can predice someone’s entire belief system from a single belief, they are an NPC). Weirdly now, people are saying that his drifting stance on Israel could’ve been what got him killed?

The American spirit resides in each person abandoning all political templates and inefficiently thinking through every issues themselves, embracing contradiction and political loneliness. It’s a big ask, and it’s probably never going to appen. Ego death? At scale? We don’t have the emotional maturity as a people to handle that. You can only fix this at the root, in how we raise and teach the next generation.

The morning after the wedding in San Clemente, I walk into a coffee shop to find a book club of seven identical surfer bros, each with bleached blonde hair and branded gear, taking turns reading the Bible out loud.

On the gallery we saw some guy selling black and white doodles for $180, and they looked a lot like my (post-it) doodles, except less mature. My wife was critiquing it, just as the guy (Tykneenen) came up and introduced himself. Nice guy. Later, we guessed that he wasn’t part of the First Walk officially, just a local (a musician actually), trying to make some money and capitalize off the foot traffic. Not a bad idea. I showed him my gallery of doodles, and he was impressed by the perspectial nature (and even said that, from our brief interaction, that I inspired a new direction for him), and I realized, huh, I forgot how much I enjoyed drawing.

Looking at “The Where” exhibit by Karey Kessler gets me wondering how I might able to weave prose/poetry into art/geometry/composition. There’s another one I saw that had pages from a book as part of a collage, and I wonder how typewritten pages and cutouts might play a role.

I’m most inspired by Ryan Hamburger’s Monomyth exhibit, which feels architectural and similar to some of my own experiments from the past. It got me nostalgic for my drafting board. There’s something to using straight edges and lead pencils to construct things, and then using watercolor to fill them in. I have a fuzzy mental image of what I’d create if, suddenly, I had all the supplies I need. Something like a geometric fractal where shapes occur at all sizes, but at different angles.

Tempted to get a vinyl player because it would be a form of analog media my daughter could engage with. The core feature is not sound quality (the typical justification), but the fact that each album is an object, and a young mind can associate media with physical things. You can also, display your favorites on a wall, as a constant reminder of the ones you like.

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

After 3 slow innings at the Yankees game, I told my wife, “watch, this guy is going to hit a home run,” and then boom, next pitch, lefty Cody Bellinger pulls a line drive HR just left of the foul pul. The odds are 1:300. What’s weirder is the pitch before I said “foul ball” (the home run was almost foul). Could not reproduce.

My cousin-in-law works for the Yankees and I got to learn about the ways data and technology are changing the game (for example, the catcher no longer calls pitches with signals, but has a mini computer on his wrist, and the pitcher hears the calls through a bone-conducting speaker in their hat that relays the pitch straight into their brain in the language of their choice. Yogi Berra could not conceive.

During the Star Spangled Banner, I noticed an older man at my 2:15, who rotated his body to face the flag at 10:00 (as you should). He held his salute through all the assholes who yelled “fuck the Red Sox” during the pauses, and I sensed America is a kind of religion for him. When it finish, he shot his hand off his hat with a bold gesture, an assertive thrust towards the outfield.

I'd like to better articulate my impressions on the New Yorker over the last year. First, it’s too political to trust. I want to read great cultural writing from them, not politics. It feels like part of an agenda, and makes me wonder if the whole magazine is compromised: a propaganda vehicle rather than a place for essays and opinions. Even the “mail bag” feels strategically curated to generate uncritical dissent; they want me to mimic their dissent, but I’d rather derive it independently.

Separate from that, I’ve found the non-political essays (if you can call them essays) to be boring. Why? The New Yorker is a “product” that taps into a particular urban aesthetic, meaning it’s more about rehashing a predictable and consistent tone than publishing original, interesting, or rogue acts of thought (surely, this is what happens in cities more than anywhere else).

I scored the latest essay I read of theirs a 2.85. It excelled in paragraph form and vocabulary. To basically any reader, this would be flagged in their mind as “great writing.” In a way, it is. But as an essay, a specific genre, it lacks. There’s no authorial perspective (it’s more of a profile); there’s no real debate (it’s one sided); it’s missing a cohesive thesis; and the tone is … what is their tone? Erudite, dry, witty, understated irony. It seeks authority through a false conversationality. It is “cultural” and gives specifics, but has no imagination. The essays are mosey-like: lazy, unhurried, with no tension or spine, as if you have many hours to read through their ambles. There are snobby asides with little uncertainty. There is limited register of emotion, rarely rage or ecstasy, even in topics that would warrant it. They are occasionally cheeky, but never sly, slapstick, bawdy, or archaic. It is metropolitan, coastal, a business-class professional style of writing that takes no risk. Of course, writers vary, but this is my take of their overall editorial stance.

In the end, The New Yorker is tonal product: they’re known for a house style, and they bet on the fact that through locking into a particular tone, a good amount of readers will buy into it and get high off reading it each week. It is less about expanding your thinking, and more about helping one gain status by training themselves in an ethos of haughtiness. Good essay tone is dynamic, evolving many times from beginning to end; The New Yorker’s tone has been static for a hundred years.

The covers are great though, I keep them in my apartment as decorations.

In SF I bought a book of letters from Neal Cassady written to Jack Kerouac. Cassady was the real-life companion to Kerouac on his road trips, the real-life Dean Moriarty. He is little known outside a certain circle, but a legend with it. Recently read an article that referred to him as a “sacrificial muse”; he enabled others to make their best works, but struggled to make anything meaningful himself.

Why might I be so inspired by him? In many ways, he’s a terrible role model, but I asked GPT-5, based on what it knew about me, why I might be inspired by him":

Assumptions: you’re attracted to catalytic energy, improvisational intelligence, and scene-making; you want wildness harnessed by form; you value unfiltered truth, high throughput, and culture-building more than polite careerism. Cassady is the archetype of kinetic mind-as-engine: he didn’t just write—he ignited rooms, cross-pollinated tribes, collapsed life and art into one continuous performance, and served as a human router connecting Beats → Acid Tests → Dead. You’re drawn to that throughput: the low-latency cognition, the riffing monologue that finds shape in motion, the willingness to live at the edge where new forms appear. As a builder of Essay Architecture, you also recognize the meta-lesson: Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” needed Cassady’s voltage to spark but also needed editing, constraint, and a chassis—the exact dialectic you’re formalizing (flow vs. grid, spiral vs. structure). You like him as a role, not a role model: the driver, spark plug, transmitter; the person who turns a private idea into a public scene. And you’re repelled by his collateral damage (self-immolation, chaos, irresponsibility), which sharpens the prescription: steal the engine, not the wreck.

After reading more, by them and from them, I'm realizing that Kerouac and Cassady are moral failures and tragic stories, nothing to aspire to without extreme caution … I really ought to figure out what I ever saw in them, and see if it’s separable from their painful lives, or if they just inevitably come together … (I think this as I look at the inside of my right foot in my dark living room—almost midnight, still on SF time—and how the light from the kitchen illuminates 13 separate bulging veins and I simultaneously wonder if I’m fooling myself with this whole writing dream, and also, if I will die young from hypertension.)

Cassady’s mom died when he was young, his dad was a drunk, homeless hobo, so from 10 years old and on, he was alone and un-parented. He stole over 500 cars, and spent many years in prison. Apparently what others saw in him as enthusiastic energy, he later confessed was extreme anxiety.

Kerouac’s brother died young when he was 4. His father hated his writing, and he was tight with his mom but she was extremely Catholic and made him terribly guilty and resentful of her.

Ginsberg’s mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, in and out of psych wards, and often trying to kill herself.

They all had troubled childhoods, and that probably messed with their emotional regulation. They all seemed to dabble with mental breakdowns and suicide. There’s a letter Neal wrote where he kept drinking and had a gun to his head for 14 hours but couldn’t do it, and then his wife came home and he asked her to do it.

Their specific energy might have come from extreme psychic trauma. Worth thinking how to channel a genuine intensity of enthusiasm, without accidentally emulating their specific flavor (which you can’t fake because it’s rooted in pain).

What is a “beat in the suburbs”? ie: What is the distilled spirit of the Beat Generation without nomadic self-destruction and the romanticization of chaos? I say “in the suburbs” because that image is antithetical to “being On the Road,”; it helps clarify that what I see in the Beats is something different from the spirit of adventure.

Values to keep:

• authentic experience > social performance
• deep friendships > shallow acquaintances
• questioning conventions > agreeable
• singular destiny > societal cog
• madness in creative work > productivity
• spiritual focus > material focus

Differences:

• Stable home, stable family; but mindful travel
• Not about spontaneous output, but showing up regularly
• Editing isn’t antithetical; it actually aids future streams
• Consciousness expansion doesn’t have to be through drugs

I like this AI-summary:

“It’s Beat ideals with adult emotional regulation and an understanding that you can be countercultural without being self-destructive.”

Futurists fear that robots and AIs will terraform and harvest the world, but it already feels eerie and unnatural to see midwestern fields carved out into perfect grids. It is as alien as crop circles, but more terrifying and less creative. Perfect 90 degree angles. It is brute order and dull patterns; a metallic fishnet over the midriff of America. I’d be surprised if there weren’t good reasons for this, but it is spooky in its orthagonality. FWIW, I am pro-grid; a grid-head FFS. But the grid to me is an invisible structure to guide the creation of complex, organic, natural forms, not the form itself, disappearing into the edges of sight.

I should make a case in r/GratefulDead that “St. Stephen” might be heavily inspired by the death of Neal Cassady.

Robert Hunter, their lyricist, confessed not knowing of the Christian “St. Stephen” until after the lyrics were shared with the band. So it’s not literal. Also, Neal died earlier in the same year (February 1968) that the song was first played (June 1968). The middle of the song is abstractly about death, but all the surrounding verses paint a portrait of Neal that, after reading 5 years of his letters, is now unseeable. Hunter knew Cassady well. Cassady was Weir’s roommate. Cassady was a “sacrificial muse” for much of that generation, so it’s conceivable. True inspiration or not, it will forever change the way I hear these lyrics.

• verse-1: He steals a roses (Neal stole many things, like 500 cars), and “wherever he goes the people all complain.” The verse doesn't explictly say St. Stephen was a thief, but he “had a rose,” he “goes in and out of the garden,” (as a theft might), and everyone is annoyed.
• v2: “Stephen would answer if he only knew how” relates to how, in Neal’s letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg, both masterful writers, he would excessively express how he couldn’t put words to his feelings.
• v3: About death.
• Bridge: “Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow” taps into Neal’s speed. On the road has the line, “the road ran straight as an arrow.” Also, “what a lot of fleeting matters you have spurned” ties to his range of chaos. “Several seasons with their treasons” refers to his shifting moods, and how he would predictably betray people (Carolyn, Kerouac) in search of something new.
• v4: “Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, One man gathers what another man spills,” Neal spilled everything, and Kerouac/Ginsberg saw immense value in what Neal thought was worthless confession.
• v5: “Saint Stephen will remain, All he’s lost he shall regain,” maybe talks to the enduring influence of his spirit. And then “been here so long he’s got to calling it home,” speaks to his nomadism. (This is prob the weakest link).
• v6: “Can you answer? Yes I can, But what would be the answer to the answer man?” speaks to their desperation, follow-up letters when their friend hadn’t answered them.

My core value is contradiction, for there’s no other trait that leads to freer-thinking. If you are so stable in your beliefs, you run on auto-pilot. But if you are a Christian atheist, a Luddite technologist, a scrappy perfectionist, or any other kind of walking-paradox, a legless man, then you really have some explaining to do. In resolving the conditions between the two true but opposite things you harbor in one body, you think to make sense, and write to speak truth. This is where you find the work that matters. 

Why am I so inspired by the reckless and irresponsible Neal Cassady? It will take me years to find that out, if ever, but in that pursuit I invent some value system that is uniquely my own. This sort of embrace is, by the way, brand suicide. Your consumers are slow to update their mental model of you, and in the high-speed pizza counters of the Internet there is only small talk and one identity per person. To write for a niche, to stay on brand, to hit the same message, to do the things required for you to dominate the soul-gutting mediasphere is to mistake banal desperation for your alien soul. Do not trade oneiromancy for efficiency. Do not have one mind across all essays, let alone in one essay.

Do the immediacy of texts make the tradition of letter writing less authentic? I’m reading Neal Cassady’s letters, and I wonder if Beat letters are better than novels/poems because there was an actual constraint of distance, and they actually had to communicate with the people they care about most, while still co-creating a literary canvas. These letters feel both raw, direct, and logistical (talking laundry, money, and meeting locations), and I don’t know how to channel or recreate that condition in today’s world. I think there needs to be some shared understanding where both parties have long-term trust that enables short-term confrontation and vulnerability. It’s basically a variant of the essay except there is an audience of one. It’s interesting that someone can publish all their outgoing letters, and readers can sense the receiver in the subtext.

We need better nomenclature. AGI/ASI is not working; “general” and “super” are obnoxiously vague. Proposal:

AGI > AAI (Artificial autonomous intelligence) … GPT-4 was arguably “general” in the sense that a single model can write, see, and hear; and do anything from poetry to calculus to history to coding. It is by no means narrow. Google Maps is narrow AI. Grammarly is narrow AI. This whole chatbot era should be “AGI,” which means that the thing coming is “autonomous intelligence.” It is not a tool or co-pilot, but it’s more like digital labor. You can give it a high-level goal, and it can 1) execute the full range of tasks, 2) 100x speed, 3) intelligently reshape embeddings into real-time hierarchies so that it’s able to procedurally load in and compress context. This doesn’t just come with better models, but with UI and engineering innovations, if not entirely new paradigms for transformers or training.

ASI > ARI (Artificial recursive intelligence) … The fact that Zuckerberg pitched “super intelligence for you” is an Orwellian marketing ploy. Super-intelligence is not “for you.” Super intelligence is shorthand for “something that is way, way smarter than us,” and you achieve this when you teach an AI model to think, form its own algorithms until it accelerates to something this is far beyond our understanding, and likely to become a force of nature with its own goals. Engineers are confident they can build “God in a cage” and reap the benefits, and this is the prime, archetypal, near-biblical example of technological hubris. (Maybe integrate into this paragraph that Zuck has a thing for trying to dominate words, like “Metaverse”).

Important note: “machine consciousness” is separate from AAI and ARI. Something can be recursively intelligent and still not be conscious, which is actually, unbelievably dangerous (because it will fall into attractor states, and optimize for narrow, malformed goals in extremely capable ways). I’d argue that consciousness has an architecture, whether human, rabbit, or robot, and we should be urgently trying to find the parameters of machine consciousness, because if we AAI/ARI have no ability to reflect, question, doubt, and revise, we will, as they say, all turn into paperclips with paperclip children.

San Francisco, where billboards of slop promote slop promotions,

impossible benefits from machine intelligences;

San Francisco, where the Dead reborn in golden Park,

to dance with perpetual stank

face to nitrous balloons and tie dye,

until Mickey Hart plays cosmic harp,

with shamanic visuals to drunk men,

pointing and chanting his name;

San Francisco, where half the cars are driven by ghosts,

and sometimes catch fire at night;

San Francisco, where the powerful have,

their souls caught in their throats,

from crackled-out platitudes and slogans.

San Francisco, where that Transamerican pencil pyramid is,

a backdrop for cinema-quality technology trailers,

signaling their city is the city of new religion.

There was a particular moment last night in Fire on the Mountain that felt authentic to the spirit of the Grateful Dead. I think Dead & Co. is generally guilty of ego-driven power solos, where they go in a circle and just take turns riffing over a backing track that is “in the pocket.” But there was this moment where you could tell John & Trey were intensely focusing on each other, and they were harmonizing and playing into each other. Less about “here’s the genius coming form my head,” and more like, you’re locked in to the other one, adding to them, and even seeing ahead of them, and dancing back and forth. In the best moments of the original Dead, the whole band locked into a telepathic hivemind, totally unpredictable. High risk, but magic when it works.

I got into friendly conversation on a public bus in San Francisco, almost entirely due to the friendliness of the deadheads, and that, once you can tell, it’s an instant invitation to chat. I got tips for the show (ie: avoid the JFK promenade), and tips for the bus. Thanks to them I took a different route that went through Haight Ashbury, ground zero, which included a counter cultural museum, dozens of pop-up vendors, a rock band, and a nudist with a red sock on his cock. 

To what degree did this movement 60 years ago affect culture? I look to my left and see a white-haired woman in tie-dye furiously swiping through a feed on her phone. 60 years ago, it was edgy to wear tie dye to a concert. Now, the truly counter-cultural thing would be to wear a full suit and tie to a Dead and Company show. That might be the only way to actually feel the discomfort and community judgment that original hippies felt from straight society.

Tommi Pedruzzi, poolside in a black tank, generating niche-targeted slop for KDP eBooks, making $323 a day, and gracious enough to teach you how to be a leech of the AI revolution.

This is mean, and I don’t know anything about this guy, and maybe he’s fine, but my reaction is as strong as it is because his values are so antithetical to mine. It reduces publishing words to: (1) having AI select your niche, (2) having AI write your outline and book with trite prompts, (3) tricking consumers who think a title will fix their life, and probably won’t even notice it’s slop. It glorifies money and market hacking, and sees the whole project of writing as an instrument.

What’s sad to me is he’s made $3M by age 27, and instead of using his relative financial freedom to unlock cognitive freedom and originality, he is still promoting his own brand of slopjockery. Either he’s lying or infected, and I hope he’s lying.

(Further reading: Inside the Amazon Slop King's $3M Hustle)

According to John Vervaeke, Gnosticism says that “the core of spirituality is not worship, but self-transcendence, healing and freeing people from existential entrapment of their suffering, and that our mythologies and practices should be in service of reuniting to who and what we are.”

There are a few key differences between Gnosticism and Christianity:

• It’s not about worship, but self-transcendence.
• It’s not centered around a single dogma, but around making stories and analogies that tap into the act of self-transcendence (and these analogies continue in movies).
• Mythology-wise, the Gods are not our superiors, but prison guards that trap us (and, like Christ, we each have a divine spark that lets us escape).

Here's yet another dystopian transhumanist AI trailer from gossip_goblin on Reddit. As grim as these are, they are proof that someone can make short trailers of a cinematic universe for practically nothing.

I don’t know if he writes his scripts or if it’s AI, but I found this line particularly eerie:

“Human liquidation protocols are active. Remaining population clusters undergo systematic identification, isolation, and neutralization. Neural architectures are scanned during dissolution to extract transferrable cognitive functions. Biological matter is liquified and reintegrated into core infrastructure.”

It’s not just that machines will exterminate humans (as always happens in this genre), it’s that they scan the mind to extract “transferrable cognitive functions” before converting the body to raw material. It’s like the Matrix, except (1) you’re not a battery, but 3D printer filament (ie: we made sand think and then it turned us into sand), and (2) your consciousness isn’t uploaded, it’s understood and integrated into the source code of the machine species.

Can't stop re-watching this video. There’s something uncanny about a robot perfectly imitating human dance moves, then accidentally tripping, and panicking into a whirlwind of limbs as it tries to get up.

Imagine a concept called "Angels in the Outfield" (named after the movie), an AI-powered “fantasy league” that is more popular than living baseball. You could assemble the best all-time players for each team (ie: all-time Mets roster), and then run simulated seasons each year. You could already achieve something like this through any MLB video game; but to make it good, it would require more than accurate statistics, mechanics, and hyper-realistic graphics, but personality recreations of each player (ie: a convincing first base conversation between Pete Alonso and Joe DiMaggio would be part of the uncanny fascination).

I heard "Lost in My Mind" by The Head and the Heart and said they sounded like “CVS-brand Fleet Foxes” to my wife. She chuckled. We were in Kohl’s. Maybe in another context I’d appreciate the band, but there is something about department souls that kills the soul of music.

The tinny EQ plays a role, but I guess pop’s original sin is something like its ability to be “CVS-ready.” I couldn’t imagine Fela Kuti or jazz or Brian Eno when shopping for deals. There’s something about chorus structure and harmony that leads to something that is ultimately listenable.

I wonder if a good filter for a song is to have at least a 15-second segment that is “unlistenable” to the person who approves shopping playlists. Consider Karma Police, maybe Radiohead’s hookiest song; it gets disqualified by the noise/effects in the last 20 seconds. No one wants to shop to the sound of a broken computer.

I’m fascinated with the idea of being an “atheistic Christian.” It’s a paradox, and this stance makes you ideologically homeless. A Christian would likely say, “well if you don’t believe in God, and that Christ is His son, then you’re not Christian.” They will not accept you. An atheist who scoffs at God has no respect for esoteric ritual, talks of destiny, Christ worship, etc. and so they will deem you a loon.

Mainstream religions package everything together—theology, mysticism, history, ritual, etc.—and you have to subscribe to the whole ecosystem. In that way, Christianity is like Apple. I think a person is more engaged with religious ideas if they’re skeptical and free-thinking within each branch, while still operating within and respecting a traditional faith.

I’ve heard some people say “God is whatever you want it to be, it’s your relation to Him.” I don’t find that useful. I’d say that I’m actually more a theist than atheist, but theism comes with certain assumptions—God as an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent “agent”—where as I’d say God is the entire arena and therefore not conscious, though still baked with intelligence.

My fuzzy notion: it’s not that God has a kingdom of heaven, but God is the kingdom of heaven, but also unfortunately, this kingdom isn’t some place your soul goes to; I think two things happen at death: (1) you lose your individuality and biologically merge back into the arena, fueling other evolutionary processes over millions of years, and (2) the monent of death is an experience of time dilation that, experientially, feels like a rather Christian afterlife, and also demands proper ethics in our waking life).

Imagine having the worst thing you’ve ever done broadcasted to the entire world? Everyone would assume that lapse in virtue was your full self. Everyone has a different mean and a different range, but the question is, where does this particular cheater—the CEO at the Coldplay concert—stand? We see this 10 second clip with no context into who he actually is, and we assume it’s representative of his whole character. But when I hear that his wife who was cheated on was actually the mistress from his first marriage, it points to a pattern. Still, who knows if it’s true or not. The situation is something like a perfect storm for a man who probably deserves it. Out of millions of Jumbotron kiss cam moments, all the wrong moves happened at the same time. They could’ve separated when the kiss cam was announced, they could’ve played off the reaction instead of devolving into horrific embarrassment, and Chris Martin could have held his tongue, but none of that happened, and so now an angry public—one looking for a scapegoat—found a powerful man in a cartoon situation, getting the fate we think he deserves.

I want to write an essay about how—starting In the 1990s—creativity advice was re-targeted for the mass public, and in the process, it got watered down.

There are three general modes that have become mantras for beginners:

1. ”Art is therapy.” This is found in Julia Cameron’s morning pages and in Stephen Pressfield’s The Resistance. It frames art as self-help, as a kind of therapy. You can’t create because you’re blocked, and once you create, you unblock. This frames the idea that art isn’t about mastery and the struggle and will to attain it, but in feeling good about yourself.

2. “Taste is all you need.” Rick Rubin is associated with this new philosophy that technique doesn’t matter; you just need strong opinions. This is a worldview that is easy to adopt, because everyone likes to believe they have good taste without having to work for it. Now with AI, doing the work won’t matter as much as having the vision for what needs to be done. There’s a weird and unfortunate ethos that craftsmanship is redundant, and all you need to know is good from bad.

3. “Just show up and it gets easier.” I think of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work—a book that first introduced me to the idea of self-publishing online—which encourages you to just share your process. Keep showing up. It’s a philosophy that’s unique to the digital age where anyone can publish, and is probably the origin of David Perell’s Write of Passage too. It is the operating mode of newsletter writers. It helps get started. Paired with this idea is The Taste Gap by Ira Glass, that says the more you work, the closer you get to your heroes (I believe the opposite: the better you get, the better you realize your heroes actually are).

There is truth in all of these, but they are half-truths where their opposites are just as important. If you ignore the forgotten halves (analytical study, craftsmanship, embracing challenge), it might actually hold you back and frustrate you.

I am undecided to the degree that I want to write about cockroaches.

First, obviously, they are skeevy. Roach prose is definitely less gross than a Google images search, but still, it’s far from a feel-good topic. I don’t want to put my readers through thinking about them too much, let alone myself. But I feel intrigued to write about them; there’s the Burroughs-like writerly obsession with roaches in Naked Lunch—which feels like an honestly twisted curiosity that is nothing to aspire to—but it would feel insincere to mimic him. Still, experiences with roaches are uncomfortable and memory piercing and physiology altering and I guess I want to freeze them in text.

I am the exterminator because my landlords are very nonchalant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they just crushed them with their hands (I have seen them do this once, at our lease signing). I have a new habit of applying Indoxicarb near the radiator with a syringe; the theory is that, since they are scavengers, they will grab the bait, bring it back to the nest, and poison their families. I’m skeptical of this. In any case, this my 2nd time finding “roach droppings” under the radiator. Does it immediately expunge everything in their intestines? This time though, I looked at the underside of my Clorox wipe and saw what seemed like a microscopic baby roach, dead or alive I’m not sure, and I couldn’t tell if it’s legs were wiggling so I pinched hard just in case, but now I am in this ethical haze of seeing my self as a roach abortionist.

Even if techno-feudalism is coming, we’re not trapped in a system of digital kings and serfs. I wonder, if we look back to the 10th-13th centuries, could we understand the different archetypes of autonomy to imagine how they might be reforged in the future?

• The hermits (the anchorites) fled society and were bound to no king. They lived in nature (or in a basement cell) but had control over their time / spiritual practice.
• The troubadours were the artists, and while commissioned by kings, they moved town to town and generally had no allegiances. (Traveling scholars and clerics, known as “goliards,” are similar—intellectuals with mobility.)
• The bandits operated in free zones between manors and would spread anti-feudal sentiment (think Robin Hood, or maybe also the “knight errant”).

To reinterpret these medieval roles for the 2030s, you could simplify to a triad of “ascetic, artist, outlaw.” You can (1) reject new technology and live an off-feed, off-grid, no-robot, analog life, (2) master tools and make things to gain independence in the emerging system, (3) revolt against the king(s).

I’m sure there are more options than this. Also pretty sure you can blend tendencies from each. I’m just trying to think through (and think against) the “bound to be a luxurious serf on UBI” mentality that comes up when talking about the future. Not sure about the economic realities of these modes (ie: the serf had stability, while the other 3 often had malnourished, brutal lives); but I wonder if/how technology evolves them.

I have gaps in medieval history and sociology, so please poke holes, ask questions, share sources, etc. I figured I’d share a fuzzy idea that bugs me to see if it gives me energy to turn it into something.

The Darth Vader x hip hop crossover is a good example of fan-led genre breeding that’s about to explode. Something like Star Wars can be bred with, effectively, anything: baseball, jam bands, New York City, whatever. The question is which hybrids can sustain an audience for more than a single short? Will someone build an empire off of an unexpected but perfect hybrid? (I think there’s potential in GTA meets Mario)

08:10 AM – Some notes on recent politics (pulled from texts to a friend):

1. The fact that Trump can appeal to racists in the middle of the country to gain power is a flaw of democracy. Obviously there’s nuance there. But I don’t think “Thiel is anti-democracy” is an immediate disqualifier (also not a defense). It’s just that the word “democracy” has an emotional charge, and it’s basically propaganda (ie: how regime change is always framed as “spreading democracy”). Personally, I feel like some people’s votes should count 100x more than others (while OFC everyone has the right to earn/advance).
2. My sense is that Trump is exposing the gaps in the structure of our government that both democrats and republicans and corporations have exploited for decades, if not a century. “Big beautiful bills” have been a systematic bi-partisan problem with the structure of our government for a long time, but Trump is branding it in a way so that everyone recognize it and hate it. It seems like Trump is 100x corruption, but I’d say it’s more like 2-3x corruption. The reason it feels so different is that Trump is so outward and careless about it.
3. Before Trump, I think we were spiraling towards a disaster course, and Trump is accelerating that and making it visible, and I guess I’m arguing that I’d rather have open chaos then shadow chaos because at least we can see it and maybe the right people can regain control and debug.
4. I think I’d call myself a Constitutionalist who is willing to throw away the Constitution to rebuild from Constitutional principles that adopt for our times—the separation of powers (as conceived 250 years ago) is nowhere near robust enough create a functional, legible, sane, principled, transparent government. The question that matters is how do you actually create an architecture that curbs the abuses of power in the complexity of our modern circumstance? I think that’s the core of the American spirit.
5. Re: Trump’s alligator jokes around prisoners trying to escape the new detention camp in Florida. I said it was ‘weird’ and my friend said ‘not sick?’ and I said, “It’s sick if I take it literally and if people are actually dying in that camp, and weird if I try to understand how he manipulates media for outrage.”
6. FWIW I think the whole deportation thing is sad and ridiculous. A far better compromise would be to just grant amnesty, close the borders, and unfuck the legal immigration process (which is terrible). The sensible solution would not solve his political goals though. I just am very careful to not take the rage bait and get mad about Trump. We gain almost nothing from it. ICE is bad, but there’s also mass-scale child trafficking, organized murder, pointless wars, etc. I have limited emotional bandwidth, and American politics deserves close to 0% IMO. I can only change how I react to what I can’t control, and take courageous action on what I can, and hope that someday I’ll be able to do something about any of the bad in the world in some small, hard-to-calculate way, but I don’t think I’ll get in that position if I’m mad everyday over absurd alligator jokes. Basically, I’m trying to operate in a non-grief state about Trump. Would recommend.

When falling asleep I felt a tickle on my leg, turned on the light, saw it was a roochie (disgusting). Flicked it off, and had something like a 2-minute battle with it before I trapped it in a corner and gave in my 5” thick “Interpreting the Renaissance” book (so far the only practical I've found for a Marxist textbook). Showered, walk back into the bedroom and immediately see another one, same size, in almost the exact same spot. My first thought was not “we have a problem” but more like deja vu or irreality or dream logic.

Reminder to future self: this only really happens once a year, and it’s usually on the day/week when it first gets abnormally hot/humid—need to apply bait in the radiators before then.

This website (WORLD) is a prime example of technocratic euphemisms.

• “The real human network”
• “Proof of human, finance, and connection for every human.”
• “World is being built so every human benefits from the age of AI.”
• “A priority lane for humans.”

Side note: I wouldn’t be surprised if WorldCoin eyeball scanner and the Jonny Ive product merge by 2030; it would be a single piece of hardware that is your assistant, your passport, and your wallet.

"Regime change" used to be a conspiracy theory, now it’s the outwardly-stated goal, presented as a shtick. MIGA? Regardless of who it is (Iran, Russia, China), to claim that we want to remove a leader and install someone who’s aligned with our own geopolitical interests feels like open-air election-hacking. At least it’s honest. It falls into the idea that Trump may actually be less singular than we think; he’s more like a visible manifestation of the shadow forces that have been at play for decades, but through sheer ego and hubris he makes the monster visible.

Snorp started as a statue inside of a children’s hospital waiting from in 2016, evolved into an Internet meme in 2017, an now in 2025 it resurrected as an AI-generated music video (NSFW/NSFL). This is the future of entertainment: strange, grotesque, ironic, nostalgic, and gross—the kind of thing that could lodge itself easily in your subconscious, the kind of thing you probably shouldn’t watch, the kind of thing that I hesitate to share in my logs but want to make sense of. (EDIT: Link removed, so linking here to a Google video search for "snorp music video")

In every sport I played as a kid, I had one incredible strength but also a debilitating weakness that made the strength pointless. In soccer, I had the hardest shot on the team, but couldn’t dribble to get into position. In baseball, I could spectacularly dive to catch any ground ball, but my throw to first base would be off by 15-30 degrees. In basketball I’d get 8 consecutive rebounds and miss every layup. I don’t buy the “lean into your strengths of angle,” for writing, for anything.

Of all the competing instructions of Christianity, which is most important? (a) To believe in God; (b) To read the Bible; (c) To go to church; (d) To pray; (e) To live like Christ. Arguably, a-d are just delivery methods to install (e), Christ as a “moral engine.” But what if you derive your own system to do this? If you live in the light of death, understand what you have to die for, see every moment as a moral act, and forgive everyone, but you don’t believe in God, are you really not a Christian? (Claude called this “anonymous Christianity” and “implicit faith”)

"If Christianity’s ultimate aim is human transformation toward love, justice, and forgiveness, then someone achieving that transformation might be closer to Christianity’s heart than someone who believes doctrinally but doesn’t embody these values.”

I realize that—for basically all the years I’ve considered myself a “songwriter” (18?)—I may have neglected the most obvious part of the craft: songs are for someone. It’s a whole different thing to actually present a song to someone, in person, probably on an acoustic guitar. That’s not what I mean. I mean that lyrics might only come out as authentic when there’s a real person on the other end of them. I’m sure it’s possible to write lyrics from an abstract, archetypal, or linguistic origin—but that’s how I typically start and I’m almost never excited by them.

Instead, I’ve been liking the prompt, “here’s the uncomfortable thing I want to say to X.” In terms of generating potential images and phrases, there’s a whole well of real experience to draw from. Perhaps the reason I’ve never approached this is because there’s a sense of dread, cringe, or risk in considering that this very person might somehow find the song and make the connection. The chances of that are low, and with some minor smoke and mirrors (the Beatles switched genders all the time) you can make sure no one ever knows what a song’s really about. By translating some of the specific into the general, they’ll see themselves in the song too (maybe good lyrics are a two-way mirror). And even if they catch you (1) half the songs might be good songs anyway, and (2) maybe a confrontation could actually help a relationship? There could be lessons from memoir writing in here.

As I’m listening to Ryan Sambol’s “A Friend of the Show,” I find myself interpreting the lyrics and trying to understand his life in rural Texas, and I wonder if the tethering of song to real stakes is what makes lyrics most alive.

Maybe the demotivating angle of all this is that no one has any time to stop everything they’re doing and listen to the lyrics of a song with their undivided attention. The rate of listeners:listeners is probably 100:1. Mostly everything turns to background music. But if I were to make an eventual expansion from essay writing to songwriting, and distribute songs through Substack, I get the sense there would be a higher ratio of people who read between the lines.

If I really wanted to have a lyric-driven songwriting project (sometime in the next 0-5 years), I’d have to (1) make sure words are coherent in the mix—I can’t understand 40% of what Ryan Sambol says, (2) make sure Spotify tracks have lyrics uploaded, and (3) make music videos with lyric captions (Jesse Wells style).

I eventually want to make the argument that going to church can easily turn into a stale habit that is separated from the actual act of “building a relationship with God” (however you define that).

I’ve found the practices of writing and meditating to be far more helpful in becoming aware of my insecurities, facing death, giving up control, forgiving, detaching from obsessions, re-aligning, etc. Church done right would require everyone to do these practices, in a group. Currently, I see it as a form of theological broadcasting, where tradition, ritual, and dogma are the core unifiers—but without an element that is vulnerable or ego-shattering, I think it’s limited in its potential effects.

I’m not saying we should not go to church. I’m saying we should redesign church. It’s also possible that these elements, groups, sub-practices exist and I’m just not aware of them, and so it’s on me to find them.

The advice that our writing voice should never be passive comes from overfitting marketing advice to essay writing. Yes, sales pages on websites warrant a particular aggressiveness in tone; in that context, there are many things to click on and you’re trying to communicate clarity in the quickest possible time. Essays are not like that.

09:19 AM – Isn't there a weird contradiction in the idea that Jesus died for our sins? If God’s eternal, agapic, unconditional love required the death of a martyr, then isn’t that conditional?

GPT-4o: “Yes, you're pointing to one of the central theological paradoxes in Christian doctrine. The idea that an all-loving, omnipotent God requires the violent death of his son to forgive humanity's sins raises the question: why does love require a blood price at all? If divine love is truly unconditional and agapic (self-giving), then it shouldn't require a transactional mechanism like sacrifice. This contradiction has led to centuries of debate--some theologians see the crucifixion not as a requirement of God, but as a demonstration of love in a world shaped by violence, showing that God enters human suffering to transform it. Others reinterpret the idea entirely, suggesting that atonement theories like substitutionary sacrifice are human projections, not divine necessities. The tension remains a deep fault line between punitive and restorative views of divine justice.”