Everyone must die

There is sufficient Content for everyone already; you are not needed.

I have some bad news: there are too many of us. Too many interesting people. Too many supposed mavericks. Too many locuses through which we all commingle. Too many people trying. Too many people cracking jokes. It’s not a value judgment; there is simply too much of people!

A mutual follower of mine, a certain someone at CoinDesk, recommended the Substack of someone else I follow and whose content I enjoy a lot.

Earlier in the day, I sat on the couch unclothed, talking with my husband before he readied off to work. My girl was mentally suspended from a spider bite and its neurotoxicity and I wasn’t going to get to see her that day, so I figured I ought to wrought more of my life with him. I haven’t been feeling right since our roommates’ betrayed us and left, and I really wanted to get to the bedrock of what was wrong with me because I know that they don’t fucking matter.

Earlier in the week I had hatched a mad idea not unlike my previous attempt to break the mould back in May with Charles: I wanted to work for Twitter. Musk had taken over, and the day before I watched him fire somebody on the spot for public insubordination. My judgement changed from impersonal support to what some might call a moral belief in the potential of his resolve – while I don’t know any certainties or specifics, this was a tell that the transition is real and good. He was dispensing with the possessed, the ill-trained, the people who simply cannot regulate themselves. A necessary thing everywhere these days, really.

My husband has never believed this idea would work, or at least, it’s about as likely to work as @ing him on Twitter. I was steadfast at first, but he explained to me a theory he has had for years by now: there are simply too many people.

I had a brief back-and-forth with Charles about a supposed ‘mercenary’ who was going to work for Twitter on an internship “for the cost of living in SF”. He was livestreaming his late night dives into the Twitter Engineering blog, and raking in considerable viewership. I told them both at some point or another that I would qualitatively beat the snot out of him one-on-one, and when I saw Lewis praising him for output, I became certain of this.

My view on what kind of value I could bring to Twitter kept changing as I refined my vision and thought about the problems at hand. I told Charles the morning before this talk that I needed to make a complete map of Twitter’s infrastructure, and only then could my argument hold for why I needed to be there. All of this was built upon the assumption that if I could get to Elon, in the right context, he could understand me as someone across from him, not above or below, and we could have a highly productive conversation about whatever mattered at hand.

My husband then explained that honestly, there is no way for me to differentiate myself from somebody like the mercenary I mentioned above. This is different from being able to merely match him and do as he does; to be frank, I come from a very similar technical background and possess all of the same skills he does, more or less. I did things with baremetal hacking that had never been done before. Unlike him however, I garnered no limelight for this, nor any internal community clout, and left with what amounted to resume fodder in my rear view. Even as I do not match him, I beg the question: even if I did, what is the merit in that? Where is the room?

An old adage in showbusiness is that you never make it alone. You always had someone who helped you out, someone who gave you an open mic or introduced you to somebody, and the lesson is you ought to be thankful for the small thing they did to get you there. If the exchanges I linked a few paragraphs before are any indication though, our work is now indistinguishable from showbusiness. I don’t even know where to begin, there is so much showboating. The putting his money down? Some luxury you have. The other commenter talking about how people should be serfs for life to billionaires? How much PCP do you have to smoke to start thinking like that? The worst part is, it works! His interview is scheduled. Mission accomplished, right?

We don’t have missions that don’t star Tom Cruise anymore. Every sortie is nothing less than fucking Top Gun. Everyone leads a double life as a movie star, or you simply don’t hear about them at all. There is no manual, tender cultivation of intelligence or work produce anymore. Everything is Content.

There was a lot of spillage in this vein from me earlier as I choked down a burger before my mother had to head to work, in the replies of a certain poster who is locked. Since Twitter still deboosts my replies (defeating the Archive from the thread) and the OP is padlocked anyway, let me just post the transcript here:

stuff like this reminds me of a conversation I had earlier with my husband about the visceral disgust I have for the content economy extinguishing pretty much all other forms of socially coherent intelligence. he says there are too many people, today’s Einsteins are forgotten

it’s not like I blame you, or anyone in general. there are too many interesting people, the scaling function is shot. he told me this quite succinctly: how many people indistinguishable from you are gonna slide into Elon’s replies? they can’t tell anymore

many people have atrophied the mental organelles necessary for growing from genuine conflict. nobody progresses anymore. the ancient TV shows of the 70s are a window into a time where this still happened.

everyone and everything is content now. even I am content. I have a substack too, but I don’t have it out of want. and if any platform of content degrades, we’ll all just move to a new one that’s interesting. my life’s purpose is not merely to be interesting. it sucks

I don’t want to be content. I want to be with people who I can show my mettle to like I do my hb, my gf, or my mother. I want you to viscerally feel my presence like they do. if you turn that into content, I sound like some terrible bitch.

I just don’t care to sound good because I know the truth that none of this is real and it hardly matters anyway. even if we entertain it, it won’t stimulate the parts of us that need attention. it’ll just entrench the shit that keeps us suffocated and stuck here. 🤡

To briefly reiterate: I don’t want to be Content. But nonetheless I am, because I have no choice. I want to build great systems. I want to make optimisations that other people lacked the courage, imagination or authority to pull off. Eventually, I want to get back to telling beautiful stories, many of them through video games. My work in computer science is but a grand detour from the things I want to tell you, and everyone, in Project Trinity, Project Unity, and Project Eternity.

While I would ordinarily give in to overwhelming societal precedent like this, I can’t ignore the comorbid truth that there are simply too many of us. Even if I gave myself Death Grips Syndrome jerking myself off about how great Pokémon Citrite was—a very degrading and self-disrespecting thing to do—how will I ever be distinguishable from the countless other Interesting and Supportive Real Tech Guys who are in Elon’s replies these days?

I simply won’t. This is a problem of scale, and it’s not one I am equipped to solve. I can build great personal computers from nothing, but I cannot do it in the state I am now.

And if you think you are going to help matters by saving me or vouching for my work, ask yourself, how many others who are just as credible, competent and accomplished as us don’t have Substacks? And would you blame them for not bothering, what with the Almighty Content sucking everything away, extinguishing all conflict and outright sums of human intelligence that don’t package for prime time? Your internet has fallen victim to this too. Everything is words and soundbites. None of it is real. It never was, when you think about it. The internet is not real life. It can be more than a TV show, but for many, it isn’t.

To be honest, the things that make these computers great are never appreciated in terms of austerity, which seems to be the only social currency in circulation nowadays. I even have a guy in my DMs asking elementary questions about the architecture because he knows somebody who is throwing bucketloads of cash at “weird compute”, and some days I just wonder to myself, “won’t you give it a rest?” Quit fucking digging for the Lost Ark. You’re making a mess of the temple, and why do you care, anyway? Are you going to be another one of those demons that runs scams on the general public under the guise of doing the most good? Go to hell then. I don’t want to know your name.

In the 1930s, geniuses could write treatises of great work and have people rushing down to the patent office where they worked to tell them how wonderful it was. Now, they post tired screeds on the internet for some pithy amount of subscribers and not a drop of serious human interaction. Einstein was never a Scientist, and what we are doing now is commensurate with reinventing the Institution in the frothy, soupy bounds of emergent social networks. This is mind-bogglingly stupid, and since it’s an emergent, decentralised phenomenon, no one can see or even prove it.

And lastly, if anyone has any smart ideas about that, it’ll still be little more than interesting Content for you to consume over your morning coffee before you go off doing whatever you do best. How interesting. All hail, right? I hope you all enjoyed the ride. I hope it was entertaining, because after all, nothing else really matters on here.

That’s all, folks!