I had watched enough true crime to know that you should never talk to the police. And I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that I was different. While I felt like I knew the interrogation tactics in and out, they were repeat customers of that interaction. I wasn’t going to call. I was going to ignore it. I’m not getting Reid techniqued. Why did they ask for me? This house was owned by my mother, how do they even know I live here? Wait who am I kidding, of course they know. I went to high school here, governments have records of that kind of thing. But still, why ask for me? Another thing was odd. We lived in Brooklyn, aka Kings County. Not Nassau County. These guys must have driven all the way here on a Saturday night. I felt like I was being watched. They wouldn’t drive all the way here to just leave a business card. I felt trapped in the house. Like they were a mountain lion on a rock perch and I was the prey in the valley below. They had the high ground and I didn’t know what they could see. But this was crazy, I didn’t do anything! Should I call them? Figure out what they want? No! That’s exactly what they want. They know I feel like this. This is exactly what they are going for. Another system carefully crafted based on years and years of “user feedback” designed to manipulate you into doing what it wants. But what if I’m doing what they want right now? Maybe they don’t want me to call. Maybe the real goal is to figure out what I do next. Watching and hoping I’ll go check on the body or something. But there wasn’t a body! If I did commit a crime this would all be a lot easier, I’d know why they were here and what they wanted and could plan my next move accordingly. I opened another Bud Light, took my clothes off, and got into bed. Even though there was nobody else home, I kept the sound off on the porn. Just in case they were listening. After I finished, I felt a bit more calm. Dude get a grip, all they did was leave a business card. Coming out of the paranoid spiral a bit, I realized what it must be about. It must have had to do with my Dad’s meeting. That was in Long Island, aka Nassau County. Probably some dumb financial crap. My mother was out with her friends in Manhattan, but she’d be home tonight and maybe she knew what the meeting was. It was now twenty to nine and I texted Brian. He’s like yea bro Dave just got here come through. And you still have that case of Bud Light? I put the beers in a backpack. Is this what the detective planned? Maybe I was playing right into the plot; arrest me for underage possession of alcohol and then get me to talk about what I knew. But I didn’t even know anything! This whole thing was stupid. I thought about how I got the beers, wondering if the whole thing was somehow a set-up. Totally nonsense thought. Kids buy beer with fake IDs all the time. When I got to Brian’s everything was normal. I walked around the back of his house and opened the screen door to his basement. There were three leather couches in a U-shape, two of which were sparsely occupied by Brian and Dave. I took my place on the third empty one and put my backpack on the center ottoman. “Pretty cool, right? Yea I found it in my Dad’s old stuff.” said Brian, referring to the inflated bag atop a device labeled Volcano sharing the ottoman with my backpack. “What is it?” “Bro it’s like an old vape. You put the weed in and plug it in to the wall.” He detached the cloudy bag from the device and demonstrated. If you pushed on the mouthpiece, it let air through and you could breathe in the vaporized drug. “It’s like a bong but chill.” I inhaled. This probably wasn’t smart with how paranoid I was from the interaction earlier, but I felt safe in the basement. It was a summer night, I was with friends, I had drank beer. Life was good. Dave showed us this reel. It was a mouse in a maze, and it started from the mouse’s perspective. Kind of like a skater cam, wow these things could scurry. Then it zoomed out so you could see the maze from the perspective of the experimenter. Then seeing the back of his head looking down at the maze, cutting to sped up dashcam video of him driving home from work. Zooming out again with a sparkling line showing his route through the grid of city streets. AI has done wonders for these video transitions. Maybe this whole video was AI. “What if we’re the mouse,” said Dave in the most stereotypical stoner voice. He’d always find shit like this, in that way that when you are high the thought seems really deep. But if you think about it more it’s nonsense, like that mouse is in a maze constructed by humans, and even if it doesn’t always feel like it, the society we live in is jointly constructed by all of us. Brian showed a video of two girls at some Mardi Gras bead type event licking one ice cream cone. He told us he wasn’t a virgin but I didn’t really believe him. It was a bit after midnight and it was time to go home. I hadn’t really thought about the interaction from earlier, but I started to again when I got outside. It was a half mile walk back home; I was grateful to hear all the noises of the city. Even though I couldn’t see it, it reminded me that there was a society out there. My mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe she met a guy. Nothing too out of the ordinary. I unlocked the door, closed it behind me, locked both the knob and the deadbolt, went upstairs into my room, locked that door, and with the blanket of those three locks, a bunch of beers, and a couple hits of the Volcano, drifted off to sleep.

In my previous post, I advocate turning against the unproductive. Whenever you decide to turn against a group, it’s very important to prevent purity spirals. There needs to be a bright line that doesn’t move. Here is that line. You should be, on net, producing more than you are consuming. You shouldn’t feel bad if you are producing less than you could be. But at the end of your life, total it all up. You should have produced more than you consumed. We used to make shit in this country, build shit. It needs to stop. I have to believe that the average person is net positive, because if they aren’t, we’re already too far gone, and any prospect of a democracy is over. But if we aren’t too far gone, we have to stop the hemorrhaging. The unproductive rich are in cahoots with the unproductive poor to take from you. And it’s really the unproductive rich that are the problem. They loudly frame helping the unproductive as a moral issue for helping the poor because they know deep down they are unproductive losers. But they aren’t beyond saving. They just need to make different choices. This cultural change starts with you. Private equity, market manipulators, real estate, lawyers, lobbyists. This is no longer okay. You know the type of person I’m talking about. Let’s elevate farmers, engineers, manufacturing, miners, construction, food prep, delivery, operations. Jobs that produce value that you can point to. There’s a role for everyone in society. From productive billionaires to the fry cook at McDonalds. They are both good people. But negative sum jobs need to no longer be socially okay. The days of living off the work of everyone else are over. We live in a society. You have to produce more than you consume.

Billionaires, am I right? Immigrants, am I right? It’s going to be so painful to watch. Billionaires will go away. Immigrants will go away. The problems will continue to get worse. The problem is the unproductive. The rich unproductive and the poor unproductive. The finance middle-man and welfare recipient. The real estate agent and the person on disability. The person with a fake job. Anyone who purposefully creates complexity for others. The obstructionists. Rent seekers. Anyone who lobbies against others getting so they can have relatively more. Broken systems that elevate zero sum losers. Why can’t we all turn against them? The first step is recognizing this is the problem. I don’t know why most people don’t see it.

Total disassociation, fully out your mind That Funny Feeling I was thinking today about a disc jockey. Like one in the 80s, where you actually had to put the records on the turntables to get the music. You move the information. You were the file system. I like the Retro Game Mechanics channel on YouTube. What was possible was limited by the hardware, and in a weird way it forced games to be good. Skill was apparent by a quick viewing, and different skill is usually highly correlated. Good graphics meant good story – not true today. I was thinking about all the noobs showing up to comma. If you can put a technical barrier up to stop them, like it used to be. But you can’t. These barriers can’t be fake, because a fake barrier isn’t like a real barrier. A fake barrier is one small patch away from being gone. What if the Internet was a mistake? I feel like it’s breaking my brain. It was this mind expanding world in my childhood, but now it’s a set of narrow loops that are harder and harder to get out of. And you can’t escape it. Once you have Starlink to your phone, not having the Internet with you will be a choice, not a real barrier. There’s nowhere to hide. Chris McCandless wanted to be an explorer, but being born in 1968 meant that the world was already all explored. His clever solution, throw away the map. But that didn’t make him an explorer, it made him an idiot who died 5 miles from a bridge that would have saved his life. And I’ll tell you something else that you ain’t dying enough to know Big Casino Sure, you can still spin real records, code for the NES, and SSH into your comma device. But you don’t have to. And that makes the people who do it come from a different distribution from the people who used to. They are not explorers in the same way Chris McCandless wasn’t. When I found out about the singularity at 15, I was sure it was going to happen. It was depressing for a while, realizing that machines would be able to do everything a lot better than I could. But then I realized that it wasn’t like that yet and I could still work on this problem. And here I am, working in AI 20 years later. I thought I came to grips with obsolescence. But it’s not obsolescence, the reality is looking to be so much sadder than I imagined. It won’t be humans accepting the rise of the machines, it won’t be humans fighting the rise of the machines, it will be human shaped zoo animals oddly pacing back and forth in a corner of the cage while the world keeps turning around them. It’s easy to see the appeal of conspiracy theories. Even if they hate you, it’s more comforting to believe that they exist. That at least somebody is driving. But that’s not true. It’s just going. There are no longer Western institutions capable of making sense of the world. (maybe the Chinese ones can? it’s hard to tell) We are shoved up brutally against evolution, just of the memetic variety. The TikTok brainrot kids will be nothing compared to the ChatGPT brainrot kids. And I’m not talking like an old curmudgeon about the new forms of media being bad and the youth being bad like Socrates said. Because you can never go back. It will be whatever it is. To every fool preaching the end of history, evolution spits in your face. To every fool preaching the world government AI singleton, evolution spits in your face. I knew these things intellectually, but viscerally it’s just hard to live through. The world feels so small and I feel like I’m being stared at by the Eye of Sauron.