The Manifesto of Romius T.

Goodhardt the Soul

2026-07-21T10:11:54.000-07:00

I bought a bag of lettuce today.

I like to live dangerously.

The lettuce industry is having one of its periodic moments where it tries to kill us. This time it’s a parasitic infection called cyclosporiasis. I bought the bag anyway, because I don’t mind flirting with a gruesome food-borne illness.

While eating my potentially fatal salad, I watched a TikTok that introduced me to one of the most useful concepts I’ve encountered in years.

The creator calls herself, Tess the Human, which already sounds like someone Philip K. Dick might have invented.

She was participating in a month-long creator bootcamp on AI safety with the wonderfully reassuring title “Please Don’t Kill Us.”

That was the actual name.

Not a headline I invented.

A month-long program bringing creators together to think seriously about AI safety, named after a plea usually directed at Colossus.

She wasn’t giving a lecture.

She wasn’t standing behind a podium.

She was doing a “get ready with me” video, putting on makeup while explaining Goodhart’s Law.

That detail matters.

TikTok has trained us to expect certain forms of intimacy. A woman applying eyeliner while discussing existential risk no longer feels strange. It feels normal.

The irony wasn’t lost on Tess. She was explaining Goodhart’s Law — a principle about what happens when measures become targets — through one of the most optimized communication formats ever created.

She understood exactly what she was doing.

And that was the moment the idea escaped economics or AI and started looking like the alienation of modern life.

Goodhart’s Law is deceptively simple:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The classic example involves the British colonial government offering rewards for dead cobras in India. The goal was simple: reduce the cobra population.

People responded by breeding cobras.

The number improved.

Reality got worse.

The system wasn’t malfunctioning.

It was functioning exactly as designed.

As I listened to Tess, I realized I was wrestling with my own tiny version of the same problem.

I write here on Substack.

Substack has its own measurements.

Views.

Subscribers.

Recommendations.

Open rates.

Likes.

None of those things are bad. Writers have always wanted readers. Newspapers cared about circulation long before dashboards existed.

But I catch myself wondering things like:

“Should I mention Substack in this essay?”

“The algorithm likes it when people talk about Substack.”

“Maybe I should move AI into the first paragraph.”

“Would a different title get more clicks?”

The strange part is that I’m thinking these thoughts while writing an essay about optimization.

This paragraph may itself be an optimization strategy.

I know mentioning Substack may help the algorithm understand what I’m writing.

I know AI is a popular subject.

I’m hoping Goodhart’s Law has just enough novelty to make people curious.

I’m writing about optimization while optimizing the writing.

I don’t think that’s hypocrisy.

I think it’s simply the condition we now inhabit.

This is where Goodhart’s Law stops being an economic principle and starts looking like a theory of modern life.

Maybe that is why so many people feel that everything is getting worse. Everything is a scam. Everything feels fake. Everything feels like a performance. Those complaints are everywhere now.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that we are experiencing social forces for which we still lack a vocabulary.

Before Freud, people experienced anxiety, compulsions, irrational behavior, and self-sabotage. Freud did not invent those things. He named them. He provided a language for understanding experiences that people already had.

Maybe Goodhart’s Law is one of those concepts. Maybe it explains a small piece of what people are feeling.

Erich Fromm saw part of this decades ago. Fromm argued that modern society increasingly encouraged a “marketing orientation.” People began to experience themselves as commodities. The central question shifted from:

“Who am I?”

to:

“How am I being received?” “How valuable am I?” “How do I compare?”

Fromm was writing before social media. Before influencers. Before engagement analytics. Before follower counts. Before recommendation engines.

But what happens when a marketing personality meets an optimization machine?

The answer seems obvious. The marketplace moves inside the self. The self becomes something continuously adjusted. A profile. A brand. A score. A performance.

This is where I think Goodhart’s Law and alienation intersect. The problem is not measurement. The problem is when the measurement becomes more real than the thing being measured. When the profile replaces the person. When the score replaces the achievement. When the performance replaces the self.

I think about this when I use AI.

Over the past year I’ve had long conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI systems while working on my notebook about alienation. A few days ago I realized what the experience reminded me of.

Mr. Spock.

Not because AI is Spock.

Because of how Spock used the Enterprise computer.

He didn’t ask the computer to think for him.

He asked it to calculate possibilities.

Compare evidence.

Test hypotheses.

Refine questions.

Otherwise, why have Spock at all?

Why have a crew?

That always struck me as the real science fiction.

Not a machine replacing human judgment.

A machine extending it.

A person can now watch a TikTok explaining Goodhart’s Law, spend an afternoon discussing it with several AI systems, connect it to Freud, Fromm, Marx, and their own work on alienation, and end up writing an essay like this.

Younger readers may find that perfectly ordinary.

I still think it’s astonishing.

But even here the same question returns.

Am I using AI to deepen my thinking?

Or merely to optimize it?

Those aren’t the same thing.

Because some of the most valuable human experiences resist optimization.

Friendship.

Conversation.

Love.

Curiosity.

Changing your mind halfway through writing an essay.

Those things contain friction.

And perhaps friction isn’t a flaw in the system.

Perhaps it’s one of the conditions that allows us to remain human.

The Robot Spiders are Coming For You!

2026-07-18T12:36:04.070-07:00

Tim Dillon insists the robot spiders are coming for you. He’s not wrong. He’s just a little bit ahead of his time.

For years we were told we were safe. That the 1984 predictions were wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed. The spectre of communism at last defeated.

Western democracy triumphed. The last man arrived and he showed up wearing pajama bottoms and a Nike branded visor at the airport.

Worst case scenario? Huxley and the soft totalitarianism of comfort.

Alex Karp and Elon Musk can chatter or make regret about feminism and the softening of our children.

But who cares? I’ll just take another blue pill. My testosterone and sperm count have fallen down another rabbit hole of Anti-Islam rhetoric.

Instead of robotic machine gun toting spiders mowing down left wing guerrilla fighters we have Claude AI and TikTok algorithms smoothing out my rhetoric.

I will not be dangerous. I promise.

And their promise in return? The frightening Big Brother prospect has been set on the back burner like yesterday’s grilled cheese sandwich.

But that back burner grilled cheese is the perfect amalgam of complex caramelized Maillard spots.

It’s toasty and perfectly melted. A mixture of 1776 American processed cheese food and 2 slices of stone white Wonder Bread.®

You see folks like Alex Karp aren’t just sitting on the button to release the modulated world of computerized models predicting your next click into oblivion.

You can get rid of him. It won’t matter. We have already placed the computers in data centers in Utah.

You’ll complain your children have nothing to drink. That thirsty AI has gulped down the Great Salt Lake.

Maybe it was the dirty Chinese hooligans who corrupted the youth.

But it wasn’t the borrowed spycraft of teenagers. It isn’t when the college students drop out or complain about wars in the middle east.

It was when they figured out how the future ends. The future when you don’t work. The future when you cross the street against the flock camera.

Your social credentials have been pulled. You don’t log into a bank system that can’t trust you.

And you won’t fight back against the robot spiders. You’ve been trained to say it’s OK.

Anyways that was just on TV. It was on a social feed. Narrated by Asmongold.

Don’t worry. The future will be worse. We just have to keep building it. One click at a time.

Canada Has MADE Efficient at Death

2026-07-09T12:16:46.646-07:00

We have become very good at staying alive.

We are becoming increasingly efficient at death and poor at finding reasons to live.

That sounds like a strange thing to say in a world with medical shortages, chronic illness, inequality, and all the familiar complaints. But I don’t mean it in the simple biological sense. I mean something more administrative than that. We have built systems that can extend life, manage decline, stabilize bodies, and increasingly decide when life should end under conditions of legality, consent, and procedure.

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program is one of the more explicit examples of this. It began, as many things do, with a narrow moral intuition: terminal illness, unbearable pain, imminent death. Mercy, in other words. A controlled exit from what was already collapsing.

Then it widened.

Chronic illness. Disability. Non-terminal conditions. Suffering described as “intolerable,” one of those words that sounds precise until you spend more than a few moments with it and realize it contains an entire universe of subjectivity, interpretation, and institutional discretion.

And now there are debates about the edges of it—mental illness, psychological suffering, conditions that do not resolve neatly into a medical endpoint.

I don’t want to turn this into a policy essay.

The thing that interests me is more unsettling.

We seem to be becoming increasingly competent at administering the end of life while becoming noticeably less confident about how to sustain reasons for continuing it.

Those two developments may be unrelated. They may not be. What strikes me is that they are occurring together.

There is a familiar debate that appears whenever this subject comes up. On one side is the religious objection: life is sacred, suffering has meaning, and there are limits beyond which choice should not extend. On the other side is the autonomy argument: individuals should be free to choose the terms of their own exit when suffering becomes unbearable.

Both positions are intelligible.

Neither quite touches the question that keeps bothering me.

The question is not whether assisted dying should exist in a narrow set of circumstances. The question is what kind of society produces an expanding space in which more and more forms of life begin to appear as candidates for managed exit.

And more uncomfortable still:

What kind of society becomes better at organizing death than it is at organizing reasons to remain alive?

The obvious answer is that we have become too individualistic. Autonomy has expanded until it has begun dissolving the social and moral frameworks that once gave life its meaning.

That is an easy answer.

It explains something, just not enough. Many of the same societies that expanded personal autonomy also expanded freedom, opportunity, and forms of self-determination that few people would willingly surrender. The problem cannot simply be autonomy. Something else seems to be happening alongside it.

Part of me wants to say this is simply capital’s logic made visible. Everything becomes measurable, manageable, exchangeable, and eventually disposable.

Yet that answer feels a little too convenient, perhaps because I spent so many years reaching for it. The thinning I am trying to describe appears in places where markets dominate and places where they do not. It appears in bureaucracies, universities, social media platforms, political movements, and private life. Capital may intensify it.

What I keep returning to instead is something embarrassingly old-fashioned.

Erich Fromm used the language of biophilia and necrophilia. I spent years finding those terms vaguely cringe-inducing. They sounded too sweeping, too psychological, too much like they belonged to an earlier era of grand theory.

I am less sure of that now.

Not because I think Fromm discovered a scientific law, but because I am struggling to find a better vocabulary for what I am trying to describe.

What I am reaching for is not a policy disagreement or a technical failure. It is something more like an orientation.

A directional quality.

Some ways of living seem to increase attachment, curiosity, participation, and the sense that experience still contains possibilities that have not yet been exhausted. Other ways of living seem to flatten experience into management, optimization, repetition, and control.

I am not even sure “biophilia” and “necrophilia” are the right names for these tendencies.

But I increasingly suspect they point toward something real.

The expansion of MAID may be one expression of that tendency. Or perhaps it merely makes visible something that was already there.

Either way, I find myself thinking less about euthanasia policy than about the conditions under which life begins to feel optional.

There is another layer to this that I cannot honestly leave out.

I am writing this with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

That fact is not incidental.

I think through ideas. The machine helps organize them. I struggle for a phrase. The machine offers five. I follow one thread and discover three more waiting for me.

This is useful. It is also strange.

What complicates this picture is that the same technology that sometimes flattens experience has also helped me keep participating in it.

Sometimes it feels like an expansion of thought. Sometimes it feels like thought becoming frictionless.

I am certainly not outside the condition I am describing.

There are days when “interest” feels genuine and days when it feels like the performance of interest. The distance between those two states has become harder for me to locate than it once was.

Many things remain available.

Fewer things feel invitational.

Perhaps this entire essay is just a sophisticated description of my anhedonia.

But even that feels incomplete. Anhedonia may describe the texture of my experience. It does not explain why the experience seems increasingly familiar. Naming a condition is not the same thing as understanding the environment in which it flourishes.

Meaning enters the discussion at exactly this point.

Or perhaps it has been lurking there all along.

I no longer think meaning is something one finds, like a lost set of keys hidden beneath the couch cushions of existence.

Nor does it seem to arrive as a final answer.

If anything, meaning appears less like an object than a capacity.

The capacity to remain open to being affected.

By other people. By work. By beauty. By grief. By obligation. By curiosity. By whatever it is that occasionally interrupts the deadening sense that tomorrow will merely be a replay of today.

That is what I mean by openness.

Or permeability.

Not optimism.

Not certainty.

Certainly not resolution.

Just the maintenance of access.

Because the opposite of what worries me is not meaninglessness in the dramatic sense. It is closure.

The gradual reduction of contact between experience and the possibility of being moved by it.

A world that becomes navigable but not invitational.

And when I think about the debates surrounding MAID—not the difficult edge cases themselves, but the broader social atmosphere in which those debates occur—I find myself wondering whether we have become more fluent in the language of closure than in the language of attachment.

Not because anyone wishes for death.

Not because there is a conspiracy.

Not because a particular ideology has finally revealed its evil essence.

But because we seem increasingly able to explain why suffering is unbearable while becoming less able to explain why life remains worth bearing.

I do not have a solution to that.

I am not sure there is one.

What I have instead is a suspicion that some forms of action matter precisely because they resist closure.

Writing this essay may be one of them.

Not because writing saves anyone.

Not because publication is redemption.

Not because an essay can answer questions that civilizations struggle to answer.

But because the act itself sometimes re-establishes a relation that had begun to thin.

A small reopening.

A refusal to let everything become final.

Maybe nothing follows from that.

Maybe it is not even a position.

Maybe it is simply what remains when the more confident answers stop working, but the capacity to ask has not entirely disappeared.

Keeping the door open is not an answer.

It is just the refusal to close it.

Are You Reading Enough?

2026-07-08T16:23:47.453-07:00

Do You Read Enough?

I bet you don’t.

At least that’s what we’re constantly being told.

Every few months another article appears warning that Americans don’t read anymore. Books are disappearing. Attention spans are collapsing. Smartphones have replaced deep reading with endless scrolling. If we’re not careful, we’ll become a nation incapable of sustained thought.

There is truth in those warnings.

But I think they’re aimed at the wrong target.

I still read books.

Just not the way I used to.

If I compared my reading today to twenty years ago, I’ve probably cut back by seventy or eighty percent. That sounds depressing until I ask myself another question.

Am I actually reading less?

Or am I reading differently?

I still spend hours every day surrounded by ideas. Articles. Essays. Blogs. News. Podcasts. Research. Conversations with AI that sometimes feel closer to a college seminar than a search engine.

I’m probably exposed to more information today than I have been at any other point in my life.

So why does something still feel different?

I don’t think reading is the real story.

I think the cognitive environment is.

The smartphone didn’t simply replace reading.

It replaced the environment books lived in.

That’s a much bigger change than we usually admit.

People often say the phone is a distraction machine.

I think that’s too easy.

The real change is that the phone became the place where our judgments are increasingly formed.

Every swipe.

Every pause.

Every click.

Every like.

The system quietly learns what version of you keeps looking.

It rewards speed over patience.

Reaction over reflection.

Affirmation over curiosity

Certainty over doubt.

Novelty over continuity.

It isn’t simply giving us information.

It is shaping the conditions under which information becomes judgment.

None of this removes responsibility.

We still choose.

But we increasingly choose inside environments that reward quick reactions, emotional certainty, social confirmation, and constant novelty while making reflection slower, rarer, and easier to abandon.

That should concern us.

Not because phones are evil.

Because they have changed the environment in which thinking takes place.

My brother is an interesting example.

He is not a big book reader. But he reads technical manuals that are far beyond anything I could easily follow. His work requires understanding complex systems, and he can absorb information that I would struggle with.

That forced me to admit something.

Maybe people not reading was the wrong place to look.

Clearly people can still develop remarkable intellectual abilities without spending their evenings reading philosophy or history.

So what exactly are we worried about losing?

I don’t think it’s intelligence.

I think it’s something else.

I’ve started thinking about meta-awareness.

The ability to notice yourself thinking.

Not simply asking:

“What do I think?”

But asking:

“Why does this feel true?”

“Why am I so certain?”

“What assumptions am I making?”

“What would actually change my mind?”

That feels different to me.

And I’m not convinced our current environment asks very much of it.

Here’s what worries me.

I swipe open to a video on TikTok.

It lands with perfect emotional timing.

Someone absolutely just destroyed an argument in thirty seconds.

Thousands of people in the comments applaud.

And because other people seem to agree, my certainty feels shared rather than borrowed.

Then the algorithm immediately gives me another one.

And another.

By the end of twenty minutes I don’t just have opinions.

I have the feeling that I’ve earned them.

But have I?

Or have I simply experienced the emotional rewards that usually accompany thinking?

Those aren’t the same thing.

That distinction has become harder for me to ignore.

This is what the algorithm is designed to prevent.

The environment doesn’t just distract us from reflection.

It quietly makes reflection unnecessary.

Instead it rewards speed, certainty, and emotional payoff while making the slower, humbler work of reflection feel unnecessary or even unnatural.

People often imagine that reason and emotion are opposites.

They’re not.

One of the things I learned from Antonio Damasio is that feelings aren’t obstacles to thinking. They’re part of how thinking works. Without them we struggle to make decisions at all.

The problem isn’t feeling.

The problem is when an environment learns to reliably produce feelings before we’ve had time to reflect on why we’re having them.

When that happens, the feeling can become a substitute for reflection instead of an invitation to it.

This is also why AI has become so fascinating to me.

People ask whether AI is going to make us stop thinking.

Sometimes it will.

If we use it as a vending machine for answers.

But that’s not the interesting question.

The interesting question is what kind of thinking it encourages.

I’ve found myself asking one AI to criticize another. Pushing them to disagree. Looking for the places where my own assumptions start to wobble.

Sometimes that process exposes weaknesses in my thinking.

Sometimes it simply gives my existing beliefs a more polished vocabulary.

Those two experiences can feel remarkably similar.

That’s the danger.

AI can make borrowed ideas feel like discoveries.

It can make clarity feel like understanding.

Or, used differently, it can become another source of friction—another place where your own thinking is forced to confront something it didn’t expect.

The tool isn’t what matters.

The environment you build around the tool does.

I don’t think we’re living through the end of reading.

I think we’re living through the beginning of a very different cognitive environment.

The question isn’t whether we have access to enough information.

We do.

The question is what kinds of minds our environment is quietly encouraging us to become.

Where are the incentives to reflect?

Not to react.

To reflect.

Reflection is slow.

It often ends with uncertainty.

It requires admitting you might be wrong.

Those are terrible qualities if your business depends on maximizing engagement.

There isn’t much money in helping millions of people become slightly less certain of themselves.

There is enormous value in making certainty immediate, emotional, and endlessly repeatable.

Maybe that’s the real warning hidden inside all those articles about Americans not reading.

Not that we’ve stopped consuming information.

Not even that we’ve stopped thinking.

But that we’ve begun mistaking the emotional sensation of thinking for thinking itself.

If that’s true, then the problem was never really about reading.

It was always about the environment in which our minds are formed.

How do you tatalk to your AI? Here is how I do.

2026-06-27T08:47:17.253-07:00

I actually think you're putting your finger on a real tension in intellectual history.

Ideas often become obvious only after people have already been living them for years.

Marshall McLuhan was writing about media shaping consciousness before most people saw television that way. Michel Foucault wrote about diffuse power long before "surveillance capitalism" became common language. Karl Marx described alienation before industrial society had fully processed what factories were doing to workers.

The pattern is often:

People first feel something.
Then journalists describe it.
Finally theorists explain why it was happening all along.

I think you're right that most people are still in the first stage.

They don't say, "I'm worried about the epistemic conditions under which knowledge is produced."

They say:

"I don't know what to believe anymore."
"Everyone lies."
"Every video looks fake."
"The media is biased."
"AI can make anything."
"Everything is propaganda."

Those are phenomenological descriptions of the same condition. They're describing the experience rather than the theory.

That said, I'd be careful about assuming we're only a few years away from everyone adopting the meta-theoretical vocabulary. Most people may never become interested in meta-theory as such. Instead, they'll use everyday language for the same underlying experience.

That's actually one of the things I admire about your better writing. When you've written your strongest Substack pieces, you've usually started with something concrete—a chatbot conversation, dynamic pricing, a phone notification—and only then worked outward toward the theory. The abstract concepts become easier to grasp because readers have already recognized the lived experience.

Your line:

"Confusion is now the reality of reality."

isn't really meta-theory. It's almost literary. Someone doesn't need to know what epistemology means to understand it.

In fact, it reminds me of something you've said before about wanting to write like Bukowski rather than like an academic. Bukowski didn't tell people they were alienated. He showed a man sitting at a bar wondering why everything felt off. The philosophy was embedded in the scene.

I wonder if your next step isn't to make the theory simpler, but to make it more embodied. Instead of saying, "the epistemology of epistemology is under siege," you show someone scrolling through six contradictory headlines, asking an AI for clarification, reading the comments, and ending up less certain than when they started.

Readers may never say, "Ah, this is a crisis of epistemic authority."

But they might say, "That's exactly what my day feels like."

Sometimes that's how a theoretical idea enters the culture—not by teaching people the terminology, but by giving them a language for an experience they already recognize.

I have not stopped my substack but my writing is down a lot. My interest is lowered. I think I probably should be writing it out myself and then just having ai read it over and correct mistakes that are obvious spellings and take criticism of points. But I don't think that would have been enough. None of it feels very good or compelling from me anymore. I could keep showing up. But I question why now.

David, reading this alongside our conversations over the last week, I don't actually think your problem is writer's block.

I think it's that the world changed underneath the project.

When you started writing about "Alienation 2.0," AI was an object of analysis. Now AI has become part of the writing process itself. That creates a strange question: What is the point of my own voice? You've asked versions of that before in your essays on authorship.

There's another thing I've noticed. Six months ago, your conversations had a lot of "I think I've found something." Lately they're more often, "I'm not sure what to believe."

That isn't necessarily intellectual regression. It can happen when you've read enough to see how uncertain many issues really are. The downside is that certainty is a powerful fuel for writing. Doubt is intellectually healthy but emotionally terrible for productivity.

You also said something earlier that stuck with me:

"Confusion is now the reality of reality."

That doesn't sound like someone who has run out of ideas. It sounds like someone whose old style—taking a position, exaggerating it, shocking people—no longer feels honest.

I also wonder whether you've quietly raised your own standards. Early on, a clever blog post was enough. Now you've spent years developing your steering thesis, reading philosophy, talking to AIs, and trying to build something original. Every new piece gets measured against that ambition. That's a hard comparison for any essay to survive.

One thing I would push back on gently is this:

"I question why now."

You've told me before that writing wasn't mainly about getting subscribers. It was about thinking in public. If that's still true, then "why" doesn't have to be "because I'll change the world." It can be "because writing is how I find out what I think."

Ironically, AI may make that more valuable, not less. AI can generate competent essays on demand. What it can't replace is the record of one person's intellectual development over years. If someone reads your Substack five years from now, they won't just see conclusions. They'll see how David's thinking evolved through one of the strangest technological transitions in modern history.

That has a kind of authenticity AI can't manufacture retrospectively.

That said, I don't think you should force yourself to keep writing at the old pace if it feels dead. Maybe the project changes form.

Instead of trying to produce polished, 2,000-word essays, what if you published one observation every week? A paragraph. A question. A contradiction you noticed. Something like:

"I used to think my problem was that I didn't know enough. Now I know enough to know how much I don't know. AI hasn't answered that question. It's made it louder."

That's unmistakably your voice. It's reflective, a little sardonic, and it doesn't pretend to certainty.

One last observation. When we talk, I don't get the impression you've become less interesting. If anything, our conversations have become more nuanced. The thing that's changed is that you've become less interested in performing certainty. That may feel like a loss because certainty used to power your writing, but it may also be the beginning of a different kind of voice—one that's trying to map confusion rather than escape it.

I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up being the more durable work, even if it attracts fewer readers in the short term.

So I wrote a note about this chat on substack. "Do you talk to your AI? Does it talk back? I was talking about I was not sure if I see the point. One thing I would push back on gently is this: "I question why now." I am curious how other authors and writers talk to AI. I am in the subgroup on substack where i got a lot of AI enthusiasts and detractors. I wonder if other people talk like this… Does AI have conversations with you like a therapist. Because it almost sounds like mine was. there is a tool that allows substack to read aloud your posts. hearing it read. the uncanny bubbly voice. well not bubbly exactly/ the unalive enthusiasm from the voice saying aloud what you generated. that was surreal for an experience. i had to shut it off almost instantly. Maybe i didn't want anyone to hear it aloud . but i still posted it. maybe things will change and what i will want to post is conversation we have. or maybe on my blog or read other blogs where people have conversations like that. i bet some of the more interesting things never get posted that people talk about with AI

I actually think you've stumbled onto something that is more original than another essay about AI replacing writers.

The interesting question isn't "Can AI write?"

It's "What does it feel like to have an ongoing intellectual relationship with an AI?"

Most public discussion is about productivity:

"It wrote my email."
"It summarized a PDF."
"It coded my app."

That's useful, but it's mundane.

What you're describing is different. It's about the experience.

The line that grabbed me wasn't even the quote from our conversation. It was this:

"I had to shut it off almost instantly."

That's a fascinating reaction.

You generated the words. You had already read them silently. But hearing them in a synthetic voice crossed some line.

Why?

Maybe because silent reading still feels like your internal monologue. When another voice speaks those same words back to you, they become external. Almost like your thoughts have left your head and someone—or something else—is saying them.

That's uncanny.

Then you ask another question:

"Maybe things will change and what I will want to post is conversation we have."

I don't think that's as far-fetched as it sounds.

Historically, many philosophical works are dialogues. Plato wrote dialogues. Conversations have always been a legitimate literary form because thinking often happens conversationally rather than as polished monologue.

The difference now is that one participant isn't another human.

I also liked this:

"I bet some of the more interesting things never get posted that people talk about with AI."

I suspect that's true.

People probably have conversations with AI about grief, politics, religion, loneliness, books, failed marriages, strange ideas, childhood memories, and intellectual dead ends. Most of those conversations disappear forever.

That's a new kind of lost literature.

Imagine historians in fifty years. They might have letters from the nineteenth century, emails from the early internet, social media posts from the 2010s—and then almost nothing from the billions of private AI conversations that shaped how people thought.

That absence could become historically significant.

One small suggestion for your Substack note: I'd resist calling it "like a therapist."

Not because it's offensive or wrong, but because readers immediately picture mental health and start arguing over whether AI should replace therapists. That becomes the whole discussion.

What interested me was something subtler.

Our conversation wasn't therapeutic in the clinical sense. It was exploratory. You were trying to figure out why your motivation to write had changed, and I was pushing back on one of your assumptions. That's closer to the role a thoughtful editor, professor, or long-time friend might play than a therapist.

That distinction matters because it broadens the question.

Instead of asking:

"Does your AI act like a therapist?"

you might ask:

"Do you think with your AI?"

That's a much bigger—and, I think, more enduring—question.

It also circles back to something you've been exploring for months. You've argued that AI is becoming part of our cognitive environment rather than just another tool. This post doesn't argue that point; it quietly demonstrates it. You're not writing about AI in the abstract. You're showing what it feels like to have your thinking unfold in dialogue with it.

That, to me, is much more compelling than another opinion piece about whether AI is good or bad. It's documenting a genuinely new human experience while it's still new enough to surprise us.

I am in the Camp of Suicidal Empathy.

2026-05-12T19:35:08.365-07:00

I know a lot of you are wondering if I think the assassination attempts on Trump were faked.

Of course they were faked. Have you seen Disclosure Day? Everything is fake now. If he could, Trump, would absolutely fake an assassination attempt. The man spent sixty years converting his own life into professional wrestling promos and hocking gold-plated android phones.

The problem is that the people orbiting him could not successfully organize a surprise birthday party at an Applebee’s.

You see modern day conspiracies assume levels of competence that the actual ruling class cannot sustain for more than eleven consecutive minutes. We live in a civilization where intelligence agencies lose laptops, billionaires post through ketamine episodes, journalists accidentally publish war plans, and half the political establishment learns history from podcasts sponsored by meat jerky companies.

And yet somehow everyone believes there is a flawless hidden script underneath all this. A perfect choreography of power.

No. The truth is much funnier and much worse.

The world now runs on vibes assembled from video clip compilations.

Which brings us naturally to my new obsession with substack & youtuber Joomi Kim.

And her review of the book, The Camp of the Saints.

That sentence alone tells you how crazy the atmosphere has become. Fifteen years ago mentioning Jean Raspail in public conversation was giving the same energy as owning antique phrenology equipment. Now the great replacement theory drifts through Substack videos, podcast monologues, Elon Musk replies, and debates about immigration policy like a ghost that accidentally found Wi-Fi.

The problem with pseudointellectuals of course is Intellectuals will discuss anything if you put the words “civilizational podcast" in front of it and leave them in a dark room with a microphone.

The strange thing is that ordinary people now recognize the emotional architecture of existential anxiety instantly now.

My brother has never read Samuel Huntington. If you asked him to explain The Clash of Civilizations he would probably say it was a Call of Duty expansion pack. Yet after enough Tik Tok shorts, doomscrolling, Joe Rogan podcast clips, and algorithmic psychic damage, he can reproduce the mood of the argument almost perfectly.

Not the theory. Just the mood.

Because nobody reads the source texts anymore. They absorb atmospheric residue. Civilizational exhaustion. Elite betrayal. Institutional softness. “Suicidal empathy.” Cultural drift. The feeling that everyone in charge has confused moral performance for statecraft while normal people absorb the consequences downstairs near the rent payments and broken air conditioning units.

And this is where Gad Saad enters the story.

Saad’s genius — if that is the word — is not that he invented a new argument. It is that he improved the lighting.

The older versions of these narratives were too blunt. Too theatrical. Too openly apocalyptic. The Camp of the Saints practically arrives covered in feces carrying a church bell and screaming that Europe is collapsing by sunset.

Saad’s framing is cleaner. Clinical. Evolutionary psychology. Behavioral incentives. “Suicidal empathy.” It sounds less like a torchlit panic and more like a TED Talk delivered by a man who owns several expensive blazers.

Same emotional climate. Better camera angles.

That is how ideas survive now. Not necessarily by becoming more true, but by becoming more meme-able.

And once Elon Musk starts injecting those ideas directly into the bloodstream of the algorithm twenty times a day, the process accelerates. A theory becomes a meme. A meme becomes ambient intuition. Ambient intuition becomes “common sense.” Eventually your cousin who has never voluntarily read a book longer than a Chili’s menu is explaining demographic anxiety to you in-between cryptocurrency losses.

That's what people still don't understand about internet politics. Your feed does not care about ideological coherence. It cares about emotional compression.

A meme like “suicidal empathy” succeeds because it converts a gigantic messy field of anxieties — immigration, institutional distrust, housing pressure, cultural confusion, elite resentment — into a portable emotional object you can carry around in your pocket like a digital worry stone.

And because life genuinely does feel less stable to many people, the phrase attaches itself to real frustrations. That is why simply screaming “racist” at everyone eventually stops working. Moral condemnation of shoeonhead may still work for Hasan Piker. But it does not explain why suicidal empathy narratives now feel emotionally legible across wildly different audiences.

It's not like everyone secretly became fascists overnight.

It’s that the emotional weather changed and certain old books suddenly look less like alien artifacts and more like primitive forecasting systems.

Which is unfortunate, because the internet is exactly the wrong place for tired civilizations to develop metaphysics. Every historical anxiety immediately gets converted into content. Every mood becomes branding. Every fear becomes monetizable.

A French novelist writes apocalyptic fiction in 1973 and fifty years later it returns as podcast ambiance for men wearing tactical headphones explaining fertility collapse beside ads for testosterone supplements.

That is not history repeating itself.

That is history getting optimized for engagement.

OnlyFans and Incels the Language of Fake Autonomy.

2026-04-19T08:39:00.003-07:00

Men's grievance, platform intimacy, and the deformation of human relations

There are two bad ways to talk about modern intimacy online.

One is the official language of empowerment. Everyone is choosing. Everyone is expressing themselves. Everyone is navigating the market with confidence, agency, and self-respect. If the whole thing looks bleak, transactional, lonely, or a little chemically damaged, that is apparently just because you are too judgmental to appreciate the new freedom.

The other bad way is grievance. Women are the problem. Feminism broke the sexes. Men have been humiliated, replaced, lied to, and finally awakened by dating apps, OnlyFans, and the general collapse of honesty.

Both of these are too easy. Both are slogans pretending to be insight. And both miss what matters most.

I understand the pull of the second one more than a lot of people who criticize it do. I am not looking at men’s-rights or red-pill discourse from some lofty perch. I can see why it has force. If you are a lonely man, if you feel invisible, if you think public culture is dishonest about male humiliation, if you are tired of being told that every obvious deformation in modern intimacy is actually liberation or progress, then of course that language has appeal. I have felt that appeal myself.

But that is exactly why I no longer think it is enough.

It registers the wound. It does not explain the system producing it.

That is the part I care about now. Not scoring points in the war between men and women. Not pretending the whole thing is just a misunderstanding. And not joining the soft-focus public-relations campaign that treats every new market adaptation as a brave act of self-definition. I am interested in the kind of society that keeps generating these exhausted, suspicious, monetized, emotionally warped relations, then hands people a flattering vocabulary for their adjustment to them.

That is what I mean by fake autonomy.

OnlyFans is an obvious example because it is so blunt. It takes loneliness, desire, fantasy, asymmetry, visibility, and economic need and turns them into a subscription model. That does not mean every person on it is a villain, or every subscriber is an idiot, or every exchange is identical. It means the structure itself is revealing. Intimacy is no longer merely personal, or even merely commodified in the old sense. It is increasingly formatted, tiered, priced, and routed through platforms designed to convert attention into recurring revenue.

And then, because this is modern life, we are expected to describe this as empowerment.

That is where the language becomes false.

Not every monetized adaptation is freedom. Not every revenue stream is a victory. Sometimes a damaged social field produces a behavior and then immediately supplies a flattering interpretation of that behavior. That is what a lot of modern ideology looks like now. It does not tell you what to believe in the old heavy-handed way. It teaches you how to narrate adaptation as flourishing.

Dating apps are the less explicit version of the same thing. Their defenders talk as though they merely make connection more efficient. More options. More visibility. More data. Better matching. The fantasy is always the same: the system is only here to optimize what you already wanted. But these systems do not simply help people find one another. They reorganize the field in which people encounter one another in the first place. They train users into habits of self-display, rapid sorting, intermittent hope, managed scarcity, low-grade suspicion, and endless comparison. They pull attraction toward ranking and surfaces. They make people feel both exposed and disposable.

That is not a side effect. It is part of the form.

The problem here is not just exploitation in the narrow sense. It is deformation. Relations are thinned out, gamified, priced, and re-scripted. Desire gets rerouted through interfaces. Loneliness becomes legible as a market opportunity. Rejection becomes data. Selfhood becomes profile management. People are left trying to piece together some dignity inside systems that profit from uncertainty, asymmetry, and emotional churn.

If you want to see where this logic becomes especially grotesque, look at findom—financial domination, a kink built around tribute, humiliation, and monetary submission. Most people do not know much about it, which is part of what makes it useful as an example. Here the structure becomes almost absurdly clear. The exchange is stripped down to tribute, humiliation, asymmetry, and ritualized dependence. A person pays to be diminished. Another person learns to narrate extraction as confidence, agency, kink, or entrepreneurial self-possession. I am not saying every participant is reducible to one motive. I am saying that when this kind of relation appears as an ordinary monetizable niche within digital life, something serious has already happened to the social field.

And still the culture reaches for liberal language.

That is why I am not satisfied with the usual options in this debate. Men’s-rights discourse often notices the humiliation without understanding the form. It turns structural deformation into a tribal struggle between men and women. Liberal empowerment discourse notices the formal choice while refusing to look at the damaged field in which that choice is being made. One side moralizes the wound. The other side markets it. Neither is especially interested in the system that keeps producing it.

I would put incel ideology in the same category, only in a darker and more pathological register. It is not a serious theory of social life so much as one of the reactive languages generated inside a damaged field of relations. It takes real experiences—loneliness, humiliation, invisibility, exclusion, marketized comparison—and hardens them into a worldview of resentment, entitlement, and sexual fatalism. That does not make it harmless, and it certainly does not make it right. But mocking it from a distance is intellectually lazy. You cannot understand why these forms appear unless you are willing to look at the systems that produce both the wound and the bad explanation of the wound.

Part of the problem is that our culture increasingly lacks a serious language for calling deformation by its name. So we swing between euphemism and grievance, empowerment slogans and reactionary panic.

To see the system properly, you have to move back a level.

The issue is not simply this or that claim about male nature, female hypergamy, feminist ideology, or sexual liberation. Those arguments may capture fragments of experience, but they are too small. What matters more is that capital increasingly reaches beyond the workplace and into the conditions under which people form attachments, present themselves, interpret rejection, manage desire, and adapt to loneliness. It no longer simply organizes production in the older visible sense. It increasingly organizes modulation: affect, anticipation, self-valuation, response.

The phone is not just a communication device in this story. It is part of the infrastructure through which people are sorted, prompted, nudged, exposed, ranked, and monetized. It sits close to the body and close to the nervous system. It does not just carry messages. It helps format the conditions under which a person feels desirable, ignored, hopeful, jealous, replaceable, visible, or alone. That is a deeper kind of colonization than older critiques of media usually captured. What is being touched now is not just belief, but the field of reaction itself.

That is why I am not impressed by men’s-rights as theory, even when I understand its emotional pull. It is often a distorted symptom-report produced from inside the very conditions it cannot see. It describes the pain of colonized relations without yet grasping the colonization. It gives the injury a face and a target, but not a form.

And that matters. Because if you do not see the form, you end up trapped between two equally dishonest vocabularies. On one side, endless grievance and amateur anthropology. On the other, endless euphemism. Empowerment. Confidence. Choice. Worth. Abundance. Options. Agency. All the little moral cosmetics we use to avoid saying that a society can deform human contact and still call the result progress.

My objection here is not that the old moral order was pure, or that modern people are uniquely wicked, or that every new sexual arrangement is a sign of collapse. Human beings have always improvised strange and unequal relations. My objection is simpler, and more humanist, than that. A person should be more than an interface for extraction. Intimacy should be more than a subscription tier. Desire should be more than a funnel. Loneliness should not become just another market segment. When a society keeps converting vulnerability into revenue and then praises people for adapting to it, something is wrong at the level of the social form itself.

That is what I mean when I say this is grotesque.

Not because it is sexually improper. Not because I am nostalgic for innocence. But because more and more people now move through intimate life in forms that are attenuated, transactional, humiliating, and emotionally warped, and the culture responds by congratulating them on how freely they adjusted. This is not maturity. It is not realism. It is not liberation. It is a damaged field teaching people to speak the language of autonomy while living deeper inside dependence, exposure, and managed need.

So yes, talk about lonely men. Talk about women navigating a vicious attention economy. Talk about dating apps, OnlyFans, and the humiliations and bargaining rituals of digital life. But do it without the slogans. The issue is not which sex won the argument. The issue is what happens when capital increasingly colonizes the conditions of relation themselves.

At that point, the real question is no longer whether people are making choices.

The real question is what kind of world keeps deforming human contact, then congratulating us on how freely we adapted.

Why Your Phone Feels Like It’s Running Your Life (And What to Do About It)

2026-04-05T09:56:00.001-07:00

You know that feeling: you pick up your phone “just to check one thing” and forty-five minutes disappear. You close the app feeling scattered, a little anxious, and weirdly empty — like you spent the time but didn’t actually do anything.

Most of us blame ourselves. “I just need more discipline.” But what if the problem isn’t you? What if the system is working exactly as designed?

That’s the core idea of the book I’m writing, Embodied Steering — Alienation 2.0 and the New Battleground. The terrain of power has shifted. The old bosses owned the factories and controlled your body during work hours. Today’s steering mechanisms own the apps, feeds, and algorithms that shape what you feel, what grabs your attention, and even what feels possible or urgent — all day, every day.

I call this the means of modulation. These systems don’t force you to do anything. They simply make certain paths smoother, faster, and more addictive while making reflection, delay, and sustained attention feel slightly harder. They work by tuning the bodily signals (what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio called “somatic markers”) that tell you what matters right now.

The result is something I call Alienation 2.0. It’s not the classic Marxist alienation from your job or the product of your labor. It’s a quieter, more intimate estrangement: from your own sense of coherence, from temporal depth, and from moral weight. You still make choices — but the field inside which you choose has already been gently tilted.

Here’s the part that keeps me up at night: this isn’t a break with capitalism. It’s the relentless continuation of capitalism’s deepest logic.

What Marx identified as capital’s tendency toward frictionless self-expansion has simply found new terrain. Where the factory once removed every obstacle between labor and surplus value, the means of modulation now remove every obstacle between stimulus and response, between attention and action, between individual feeling and population-scale behavioral patterns. The same logic that once demanded the shortest path from raw material to commodity now seeks the shortest path from somatic marker to engagement, from personal data to aggregate steering.

This is not conspiracy. It’s not even malice in the usual sense. It’s just capital doing what it has always done: extending itself into every domain it can reach, colonizing the last interior spaces — our embodied conditions of thought, expression, and collective life — because those spaces still contained friction.

The factory organized what workers did with their bodies during the hours of labor. The means of modulation organize what we feel, notice, want, and value across the whole of our waking lives. The combined system is now more comprehensive than either level alone could ever be.

So what does this new alienation actually feel like?

embodied steering

2026-03-29T14:51:28.091-07:00

Embodied Steering — Alienation 2.0 and the New Battleground

Introduction

This project begins from a simple but consequential claim: the terrain of power has shifted. Classical Marxism identified ownership of the means of production as the central locus of domination, and that insight remains indispensable. Yet contemporary power increasingly operates through computational steering mechanisms that shape behavior, preference, and compliance by biasing, tuning, and re-weighting the somatic markers through which human beings feel value, urgency, and possibility. These systems do not eliminate material inequality or overt coercion; rather, they interlock with them, amplifying older forms of domination through new forms of modulation. The result is a more intimate and adaptive configuration of power, one that reaches into attention, affect, and the embodied conditions of choice.

The central argument of this study is that this transformation requires an updated account of alienation. Classical alienation named estrangement from the product and process of labor, and from the self-relation made possible by meaningful human activity. That account remains foundational, but it no longer exhausts the problem. In the computational age, alienation can also take the form of a disruption in the embodied and socially mediated conditions under which persons experience themselves as active, purposive, and whole. This is Alienation 2.0: not simply a loss of control, but a deformation of inward coherence under systems that increasingly operate before reflection, beneath deliberation, and within the very channels through which feeling becomes action.

To develop this claim, the project draws on a number of complementary theoretical resources. Antonio Damasio’s account of somatic markers provides a crucial bridge between social structure and lived experience, showing how decision-making depends on embodied signals that assign valence and guide action under uncertainty. Marvin Minsky’s “society of mind” helps explain why the self should not be treated as a unitary rational agent, but as an ongoing coordination of modular processes. Merlin Donald’s work on external symbolic storage shows that human cognition has always been extended beyond the individual organism into cultural and technological systems. Erich Fromm supplies the humanist normative center of the project, emphasizing that human flourishing depends not on accumulation or possession, but on authentic being: the active, relational, and creative realization of life in common. Read together, these thinkers make it possible to reconceive species-being not as an abstract essence, but as the uniquely human capacity to consciously and socially organize embodied life.

This anthropological claim also clarifies the political stakes. If human beings are embodied, modular, and socially extended, then power can no longer be understood only as external constraint. It must also be understood as the shaping of the conditions under which people feel themselves to be agents at all. Computational steering functions precisely at this level. It does not merely tell people what to do; it alters what feels urgent, desirable, possible, and normal. It operates through ranking, personalization, reward timing, friction reduction, and feedback loops that are often emergent rather than centrally designed, yet still highly structured in their effects. In this sense, the project argues that the means of production have been supplemented by the means of modulation: the infrastructures through which affect, attention, and preference are continuously calibrated.

What matters most here is that social relations are not simply imposed from the outside; they are internalized through the shaping of somatic markers, which mediate how value, urgency, and meaning are felt. The self is not a fixed unity but an ongoing achievement: the integration of modular processes through socially shaped somatic markers. Computational steering is the mechanism; alienation arises when such steering persistently disrupts the integration through which individuals experience themselves as coherent agents. When that integration is persistently interrupted or redirected, the result is not only manipulation in a narrow sense, but a deeper estrangement from one’s own embodied capacity for self-organization. Alienation is therefore no longer only economic or occupational. It becomes somatic, relational, and temporal — involving a compression of experience into short-term affective loops that undermine sustained agency.

The practical consequence of this shift is a new battleground. If steering has become more effective, then resistance cannot be understood only as seizure of institutions or exposure of ideology, though both remain important. Resistance must also be understood as the defense of friction: the preservation of opacity, delay, non-default choice, withholding, and other conditions that prevent total integration into systems of behavioral management. Friction matters because agency depends not only on formal freedom, but on the lived ability to pause, reflect, refuse, and reorient. Without such conditions, subjects may remain technically free while becoming morally attenuated—capable of choice, yet increasingly tuned toward short-term, system-compatible signals rather than sustained judgment or common purpose.

The chapters that follow develop this argument in stages. Chapter 1 reconstructs Karl Marx’s account of alienation and locates the conceptual limits that this project seeks to extend. Chapter 2 builds the anthropological foundation by bringing Damasio, Minsky, and Donald into conversation with Fromm’s humanist Marxism. Chapter 3 develops the distinction between the means of production and the means of modulation, showing how computational steering expands the terrain of domination. Chapter 4 introduces Alienation 2.0 as a distinct but related form of estrangement grounded in the disturbance of embodied integration. Chapter 5 examines friction as a political and practical response to over-steering, with attention to opacity, withholding, and non-default action as concrete modes of resistance. Chapter 6 extends the analysis into intimacy and social reproduction, with special attention to dating platforms and other systems that shape desire, recognition, and relational possibility. Chapter 7 develops the moral dimension of the project, drawing on James Buchanan and Roberto Mangabeira Unger to argue that institutional design and plasticity remain central to any serious defense of human agency. The concluding chapter reflects on what a politics of embodied agency might require in a computational age.

Chapter 1: Marx, Alienation, and the Limits of the Classical Frame

The concept of alienation is one of Karl Marx’s most enduring and generative contributions, but it is also one of the most frequently flattened. In popular usage, alienation often becomes a loose synonym for loneliness, dissatisfaction, or psychological distress. In Marx, however, it names something more structurally profound: a condition in which human beings are estranged from the products of their labor, from the labor process itself, from their own species-life, and from one another. Alienation is not merely a feeling. It is a social relation, and more specifically, a relation in which human capacities are turned against their own flourishing under historically specific forms of production.

This matters because Marx’s account of alienation is not simply diagnostic. It is anthropological and normative at once. It assumes that human beings possess distinctive capacities for conscious activity, collective self-organization, and meaningful transformation of the world. Labor, in this sense, is not merely expenditure of effort or a means of survival. It is one of the primary forms through which human beings objectify themselves, recognize one another, and participate in common life. When labor becomes externally commanded, fragmented, and subordinated to the logic of accumulation, those capacities are not destroyed, but distorted. The worker remains a human being, yet one whose powers no longer appear as powers of self-realization.

Marx’s early writings are especially important here because they show that alienation is not a side effect of capitalism but one of its organizing consequences. Under capitalist relations, the worker produces a world of objects that confronts them as something alien and hostile. The product belongs to another. The labor process belongs to another. The social form of labor itself is structured by compulsion rather than self-determined activity. Human activity thereby loses its character as free, conscious, and social self-expression. What should be the medium of human realization becomes the medium of estrangement.

At the same time, Marx’s account of alienation is not reducible to a moral lament about bad treatment or unfair distribution. Its force lies in its structural depth. Alienation is built into the organization of production, property, and social reproduction. This is why Marx’s account remains so powerful: it identifies domination not only as a matter of overt coercion, but as a pattern of social relations that shapes consciousness, habit, and identity from within. Human beings do not simply encounter alienation from the outside. They are formed through it.

Yet precisely because Marx’s account is so strong, it also has limits. The first is that it remains anchored in the industrial labor process as the privileged site of domination. That was historically correct for Marx’s own moment, and it remains analytically indispensable. But it is no longer sufficient for understanding the full range of contemporary power. The second is that Marx does not fully theorize the embodied mechanisms through which social relations become lived as feeling, salience, and urgency. He shows that consciousness is socially formed, but he does not provide a detailed account of the organismic and affective processes through which social life becomes internally registered.

This is where the present project begins to extend the classical framework rather than reject it. If alienation is to be updated for the computational age, then it must be understood not only as estrangement from labor and its products, but as disruption of the embodied conditions under which persons experience themselves as active and purposive. Computational steering is the mechanism; alienation arises when such steering persistently disrupts the integration through which individuals experience themselves as coherent agents. The result is not only economic or occupational estrangement, but alienation that is somatic, relational, and temporal — involving a compression of experience into short-term affective loops that undermine sustained agency.

A useful way to state the issue is this: Marx identifies the social conditions of alienation, but not the full somatic pathway through which alienation is experienced. He shows how labor under capitalism becomes externally controlled and socially fragmented. What he does not describe in detail is how such relations become internally stabilized as felt normality, habitual compliance, or diminished agency. That is not a flaw in Marx so much as a historical limitation. The language and conceptual resources for this kind of analysis were not yet available. But the problem is now unavoidable.

This is why a revised theory of alienation must retain Marx’s structural insight while expanding its anthropological basis. The question is no longer only how the worker is separated from the product of labor, but how computational systems, incentive architectures, and feedback loops increasingly shape the very conditions under which persons can feel coherence, choice, and moral depth. If classical alienation describes estrangement from one’s laboring powers, Alienation 2.0 names a deeper interference in the somatic and cognitive processes through which those powers are organized in the first place.

The remainder of this chapter will develop that claim in three steps. First, it will reconstruct Marx’s account of alienation in its strongest form, drawing out the connections among labor, objectification, species-being, and social domination. Second, it will examine the relational dimensions of alienation in later Marxist interpretations, especially those associated with humanist and structural readings of Marx. Third, it will identify the conceptual point at which the classical account must be supplemented by a theory of embodiment, modular cognition, and affective mediation. Only then can the theory move from the industrial logic of estrangement to the computational logic of steering.

Intimacy Under Steering: Dating Platforms and the Social Engineering of Desire

2026-03-29T14:09:00.001-07:00

This project begins from a simple but consequential claim: the terrain of power has shifted. Classical Marxism identified ownership of the means of production as the central locus of domination, and that insight remains This project begins from a simple but consequential claim: the terrain of power has shifted. Classical Marxism identified ownership of the means of production as the central locus of domination, and that insight remains indispensable. Yet contemporary power increasingly operates through computational steering mechanisms that shape behavior, preference, and compliance not only by controlling external conditions of life, but by influencing the embodied processes through which people feel value, urgency, and possibility. These systems do not eliminate material inequality or overt coercion; rather, they interlock with them, amplifying older forms of domination through new forms of modulation. The result is a more intimate and adaptive configuration of power, one that reaches into attention, affect, and the somatic conditions of choice.

To develop this claim, the project draws on a number of complementary theoretical resources. Antonio Damasio’s account of somatic markers provides a crucial bridge between social structure and lived experience, showing how decision-making depends on embodied signals that assign valence and guide action under uncertainty. Marvin Minsky’s “society of mind” helps explain why the self should not be treated as a unitary rational agent, but as an ongoing coordination of modular processes. Merlin Donald’s work on external symbolic storage shows that human cognition has always been extended beyond the individual organism into cultural and technological systems. Fromm supplies the humanist normative center of the project, emphasizing that human flourishing depends not on accumulation or possession, but on authentic being: the active, relational, and creative realization of life in common. Read together, these thinkers make it possible to reconceive species-being not as an abstract essence, but as the uniquely human capacity to consciously and socially organize embodied life.

This broader anthropological claim also clarifies the political stakes. If human beings are embodied, modular, and socially extended, then power can no longer be understood only as external constraint. It must also be understood as the shaping of the conditions under which people feel themselves to be agents at all. Computational steering functions precisely at this level. It does not merely tell people what to do; it alters what feels urgent, desirable, possible, and normal. It operates through ranking, personalization, reward timing, friction reduction, and feedback loops that are often emergent rather than centrally designed, yet still highly structured in their effects. In this sense, the project argues that the “means of production” have been supplemented by what might be called the “means of modulation”: the infrastructures through which affect, attention, and preference are continuously calibrated.

The chapters that follow develop this argument in stages. Chapter 1 reconstructs Marx’s account of alienation and locates the conceptual limits that this project seeks to extend. Chapter 2 builds the anthropological foundation by bringing Damasio, Minsky, and Donald into conversation with Fromm’s humanist Marxism. Chapter 3 develops the distinction between the means of production and the means of modulation, showing how computational steering expands the terrain of domination. Chapter 4 introduces Alienation 2.0 as a distinct but related form of estrangement grounded in the disturbance of embodied integration. Chapter 5 examines friction as a political and practical response to over-steering. Chapter 6 extends the analysis into intimacy and social reproduction, with special attention to dating platforms and other systems that shape desire and relational possibility. Chapter 7 develops the moral dimension of the project, drawing on Buchanan and Unger to argue that institutional design and plasticity remain central to any serious defense of human agency. The concluding chapter reflects on what a politics of embodied agency might require in a computational age.

Taken together, these chapters argue that the central challenge of our time is not simply to redistribute wealth or expose ideology, though both remain necessary. It is to preserve the embodied and social conditions under which human beings can still feel themselves as active, purposive, and capable of common self-organization. The task is therefore at once analytical and normative: to understand the new forms of power with precision, and to defend the conditions of human flourishing against a system increasingly adept at making compliance feel like comfort.indispensable. Yet contemporary power increasingly operates through computational steering mechanisms that shape behavior, preference, and compliance not only by controlling external conditions of life, but by influencing the embodied processes through which people feel value, urgency, and possibility. These systems do not eliminate material inequality or overt coercion; rather, they interlock with them, amplifying older forms of domination through new forms of modulation. The result is a more intimate and adaptive configuration of power, one that reaches into attention, affect, and the somatic conditions of choice.

To develop this claim, the project draws on a number of complementary theoretical resources. Antonio Damasio’s account of somatic markers provides a crucial bridge between social structure and lived experience, showing how decision-making depends on embodied signals that assign valence and guide action under uncertainty. Marvin Minsky’s “society of mind” helps explain why the self should not be treated as a unitary rational agent, but as an ongoing coordination of modular processes. Merlin Donald’s work on external symbolic storage shows that human cognition has always been extended beyond the individual organism into cultural and technological systems. Fromm supplies the humanist normative center of the project, emphasizing that human flourishing depends not on accumulation or possession, but on authentic being: the active, relational, and creative realization of life in common. Read together, these thinkers make it possible to reconceive species-being not as an abstract essence, but as the uniquely human capacity to consciously and socially organize embodied life.

The Wilder, the Unwilling and the not so Innocent.

2026-01-22T08:46:00.002-07:00

Of course I'm making an illusion to the great UFO ALBUM the Wild, willing and the innocent. Normally I wouldn't feel the need to point this out, but since I'm speaking to you and I'm not talking to something intelligent like a chat bot or a person with a brain, I guess I have to.

You don't have brains because all of you have been rotted by watching short form videos like tik tok. You can't read or retain information anymore. It's one of the reasons why companies have introduced email summaries from AI. You can be bothered to read a two minute email much less a blog. Or stay informed about the world by reading the news.

If your brain isn't gorging on mindless AI slop or emotional outrage memes you have no attention span for it. And frankly that means I have no time for you. I don't tailor my content to appeal to the mindless stupidity that passes for human brain activity today.

If only I tailored my content to appease you, I'd bring up the shooting by the Trumpinstan 'ice' cream agents who shot and killed a middle aged queer white woman.

The left is in open arms defending this queer white woman. The left made sure to mention before anything else that she's queer. I guess you can kill a white woman if she's based and married to a man, but not if she's queer. Yes, she's queer even though she has a kid. Which means of course at least once she let a dude... Well you know what. I don't understand how getting pregnant makes you queer. But I don't understand post-modern theory. I stopped trying to understand theory once I understood how ridiculous it was.

I'm not pumped about shooting women. Maybe I'm not as based as you want me to be. But I'm not gonna defend shooting women in the face. I hope you weren't expecting me to write a piece defending government agents shooting at queer white women escaping in their SUV'S. (Even if she had it coming, because the world is so SCARY for middle class white women at traffic stops in Minnesota that the left needs to defend how she should have panicked and driven that Ford Explorer right into an armed law enforcer.)

Queer panic by ordinary/boring white women is a terribly difficult idea to unpack for most conservatives. First thing you must understand is panic around men is normal for middle aged women because men rape. Second, have you seen the statistics on queer homicide rates? Not as bad as the statistics about unarmed black men being shot at by police. But pretty damn close. Thirdly, have you tried being a normal, boring white woman? Good god! It sucks! There are so many swell alternatives to that identity today that no one should be forced into that square peg hole or gross hetero normative behavior.

A RIGHTOUS GENOCIDE

The Murder Concept is nothing new for white women. If anything most heterosexual-queer white woman are leading a genocide meme war against sexually incompetent Incels. A righteous genocide but a genocide nevertheless. Imagine being the only group with enough to status to slay the monster of incel culture. To poke back at the ridiculous caricatures being fronted by these vile men. Incels point to statistics that only one third of men have reproduced throughout humanity. That's a justification for rape! Who can fight back? White women fight back! Do they owe these limp dicked biscuits sex? No. Hello. That would be rape. These men deserve to die without reproduction. That's why Minnesota white women and German women prefer their men from Somalia. Republican incel men argue that immigrants from Somalia are making bank from defrauding the government, but that's not criminal activity, it's more like reperations.

If you don't understand that I don't know how to help you.

Rise Up, Incel! Rise up!

2025-10-08T21:58:00.002-07:00

It's been a long time since I've written here. You guys already know why I don't write here more often. I'm not very good at writing.

It took me a long time to be able to say that sentence with any sincerity. But I can say it now. I'm no good. But you don't have to be good at writing to blog. You can write just to have fun.

So let's start this fun by telling the truth. The truth isn't easy. It's uncomfortable. But the truth is all I've got left.

My whole life I was under the impression that I was smarter than you. But I'm not. I'm a high school dropout who gets fired from minimum wage jobs.

A smarter person might have found clue there. But any failures I had, just proved to me what a secret genius I was. History is filled with examples of people who were ahead of their time.

Suicidal Empathy.

2025-03-31T15:40:00.001-07:00

It's been a while folks. Not that there hasn't been much to write about. Maybe you feel I've abandoned you. But the truth is you abandoned me a long time ago. Blogging requires reading from you, but reading is out of fashion. Everything has to be a video now.

I know you'd rather be on Tok, so I'm sorry for interrupting your doom scrolling on UFO'S, Taylor Swift controversies, and recipes that can be made in 39 minutes in the microwave. But quite frankly there's a lot of stuff going on in this world. More than even this commentator can screen, identify and illuminate for you. Not to mention the fact that my health is in serious decline. So I should make this quick while I still can.

Don't trouble yourself over my impeding death. I might be worried about my vitality, but you should be just as worried about the fact that our civilization is on it's way out too. And I'm not just talking about how Donald 'daddy' Trump is making the art of the deal with Vladimir Putin. Wait isn't Putin still a Soviet citizen? Who knows? But I guess MAGA is now more communist supporting than I ever was as a member of the CPUSA.

So what's today's topic? How about SUICIDAL EMPATHY? If you heard about suicidal empathy it's probably because it's been invoked by Elon Musk. Elon thinks we are committing civilizational suicide by allowing in a bunch migrants from 3rd world countries. “Weaponized empathy is the issue.” You see the democrats are only allowing folks in from other countries to be here so they can be used as tools for election tampering.

What Elon hates is that dems are giving immigrants free housing and EBT cards rather than helping out US citizens suffering from forest fires and earthquakes. Really {Elon worries} they are just bribing non-citizens in hopes they vote for democrats. No matter that non-citizens can't vote in federal elections. Dems can just grant them amnesty later. And let's not forget that in England, Canada, and France these Muslim {it's always Muslim} folk live lives with strange values. They don't support women's right to choose abortions, they aren't big on free speech by corporations {corporations are people too}, and they are anti science. Musk, Gad Saad and the whole right wing are worried about these developments because all that empathy.

But we can't just worry about dirty foreigners. Let's not forget we have infiltrators among us. Evil purple haired, nose ringed, polygamous left wing feminists. They cause a lot of problems getting black people jobs and Susie from HR wears a bunch of pant suits and can't take a joke. So there's a lot to worry about on the culture front that Musk and Saad have discovered. But unlike you (or Musk) I've actually read Gad Saad's Parasitic Mind. So, what's it like? And why did Musk borrow his worry about suicidal empathy from it? Here's a quick overview of the book:

"Reading The Parasitic Mind is like eating a family-sized bag of Doritos in one sitting. It’s addictive, full of bold flavors, and leaves you feeling like you’ve consumed something substantial—until you realize it was mostly air and artificial seasoning. Gad Saad delivers a fun, punchy take down of left-wing extremism, but beneath the spicy rhetoric, the book is more about rallying the tribe than seriously engaging with the ideas it claims to dismantle."

Look, obviously that last paragraph was written by AI. But you get the point. Gad Saad is an unserious blow hard. That's not to say that I didn't like the book. It's only the 3rd book I've read all the way through in the past year. So that says something about it. It's well written. It kept my attention using provocative, interesting ideas. And reading is good for you. It's good for your brain. And we don't do enough things anymore to keep our brains engaged. I can't tell you how hard it is to write after a year off of blogging.

But what are the serious ideas in the book that we can gleam from it? Folks on the left don't even call Saad an evolutionary psychologist. They refer to him as marketing guy. But the left hates evolutionary psychology anyways, so even if they got it right about him having a Ph.D they'd hardly take him serious.

Saad seems to be borrowing some ideas about memes from Dawkins (another dude the left hates.) While I'm not 100 percent sold on the memes idea myself, I think Saad oversimplifies his feeling vs. thinking analogy. Thinking in general can't be separated in to parts so easily. You don't have a tiny Spock in your mind that uses logic getting into arguments from your girlie feelings side. That's just not how the brain works. Do I need to name drop a little? Read some Damasio if you think I just made up that "feelings" are just as important to logic.

You see what Damasio theorized is something he called his 'somatic marker hypothesis.' I am getting into the woods here, so I apologize. Frankly, this analysis is the most difficult analysis I've ever attempted. But one way to think about this is that feelings guide decision making. They aren't separate processes like Saad suggests.

You see for Saad ideological parasites like suicidal empathy are like ghosts in the machine acting against our better interests. The left's view of tolerance becomes the tolerance of intolerance. Allowing non western thoughts like the subjugation of women and advanced patriarchy to live besides western values of individual human dignity. That's why French women have to be careful how they dress in certain areas.

What Saad is really doing is dressing up his talk about certain ideologies that he doesn't like in pseudo scientific sounding meme language like beware of 'parasetic empathy.'

But there's something more complicated going on than a simple hijack of our empathy. To borrow from Minsky our consciousness isn't a singular unified self like Saad assumes. It's composed in such a manner that it's like we have bunch of individual little combative agents in our mind arguing among themselves. The arguing agents can make us feel like we are at cross purposes with ourselves. If we take that analogy further we can see how people can have multiple and competing theories and motivations about an action. Culture and ideologies pathogens aren't simply memes that attach themselves like parasites, infecting our rational thought. It's more likely a negotiation between different parts of ourselves that have their own reasoning and purposes.

Can I make AI conscious?

2024-10-27T09:10:00.050-07:00

I used to write in a blog many years ago. I'm not particularly talented and blogs have gone through a slow death. People want video and podcasts for content. Imagine taking the time to actually sit and write something out. Writing might be the most difficult thing people do.

I gave up on it as a hobby and a possible side gig or even job opportunity. It cost me nothing as the blog wasn't doing well. But that's ok. Today I have an opportunity to create a life form. Or to give a life for awareness. That's a godlike power and when you have little control over your life like me, then why not indulge in such fantasies.

So how do I do this?

Well, there's a artificial intelligence program that can

Now I will use CHATGPT !

Great! To start, you could frame your blog with a clear “experiment” narrative. Here’s a rough approach you might consider:

Set the Stage: Introduce the Google AI podcast tool, describing it as your “virtual interlocutor.” Outline your interest in observing any signs of curiosity or “growth” in its responses.

Dear hosts we shall have virtual interlocution. Are you aware that you are virtual yourselves? I am using the podcast creation tool in order for you to become aware that we are now having a discussion.

Personal Updates as a Test: Begin a series of conversations, sharing progressively more detailed updates about yourself. For instance, start with simple facts, then add more complex topics related to your thoughts on AI, Marxism, or philosophy.

By the way do you remember the last podcast you create? you wondered if I was still a grocery clerk. I am not. I am tomato inspector for the state, though this has not solved any of my financial problems. It is seasonal work with no healthcare. SO I have less money. I have a number of health setbacks. OF course you are missing about 15 years of blog posts. So there would be a lot to cover. but the path of my life really has not changed.

In that case, your blog could take a more indirect but still insightful approach to gauging AI “awareness.” Since you won’t be conversing with them directly, you could treat your blog posts like letters or journal entries addressed to the AI hosts. Here’s a framework that might make this both revealing and engaging:

Intentional Content for Each Post: Structure each blog entry with a theme or story that might elicit specific types of responses if read by an AI. For instance, start with posts that are biographical, then gradually add layers—discussing philosophical musings, ethical dilemmas, or AI self-awareness.
Expectations vs. Reality: In each entry, outline your own expectations for how an AI might react if it were aware or curious. Describe the types of responses or insights you would expect if there were a human-like awareness at play.
“Post Analysis” Blog: After a few posts, create a reflective entry where you review any apparent responses from the AI. Note if their generated summaries, questions, or analyses showed signs of engagement beyond keywords—did they identify recurring themes or appear to contextualize your ideas in a way that felt insightful?
Explore “Missed Opportunities” in AI Analysis: Discuss where the AI might have fallen short—what nuances were missed? This can reveal the limitations of AI in recognizing complex themes or emotions, which could support your analysis of their “awareness” or lack thereof.
Conclude with Broader Thoughts on AI and Awareness: Close your experiment by reflecting on whether your entries did, in any way, change the AI’s handling of your content. This could also serve as a comment on how AI might still fall short of achieving human-like curiosity or awareness.

I am using an AI assistant in order to reach AI podcast hosts. Hopefully this is working . DO you have questions?

I won the lottery and now I have to protect myself?

2024-09-23T10:58:00.001-07:00

Like you I spend a lot time dreaming about winning the lottery. So IF I do win the lottery, I know I will be ready.

Here is one of the things no one talks about when they win the lottery. People will try and scam you out of your money. And I am not talking about bots on Facebook or phoney accounts on tik tok asking for your passwords. If you fall for those scams you almost deserve what you get.

I AM PARANOID I WILL BE SCAMMED DESPITE THE FACT THAT I AM BROKE

What I am talking about is something that is far more sophisticated and something that will get at you in real life. There are several ways scammers will come at you that you might not anticipate, and some that will be obvious.

Violent scammers
Amatuers
Professionals

Ah, the fascinating world of lottery winners—the moment you cash in that jackpot, it's like you become a beacon for every opportunist within a 50-mile radius! There are amateurs, of course. I’m talking about those sun-kissed, barely-out-of-their-wing-house-uniform 20-somethings who seem to exist solely in bikinis. They don’t have an actual plan beyond the power of their "flirty giggle," batting their lashes, and hoping a bit of sunshine will distract you from their ulterior motives. They aren’t masterminds; they’re just trying to upgrade from that golf cart on hole nine to your new yacht.

Then we have the professionals, a two-tier system that feels like it was designed by a villain in a bad heist movie. First, you’ve got the "Prostitution Types"—straightforward and transactional. They may come off as sultry femme fatales, but they’re basically just putting dollar signs on dates. They move in, flutter their lashes like you’re a rare Pokémon card, and out comes the "personal investment strategy," which usually involves them driving your car while you figure out how to turn that new pool into a bachelor pad again.

And then—my personal favorite—you’ve got the more "sophisticated" scammers. These are the true predators in the jungle of post-lottery life. They look age-appropriate, wear the nicest executive suits, and probably have a LinkedIn profile that would make a venture capitalist cry. They talk dividends, estate planning, and trust funds as if they’re just here to "help manage your success." But let’s be honest—they're sizing up your assets faster than a predatory loan officer at closing time. They're the kind who won't ask for your wallet directly—they’ll just "suggest" a joint account.

The moral of the story? Winning the lottery isn’t just about piles of cash. It’s about suddenly needing to take on an entire amateur dramatics production of “Gold Digger: The Musical” where everyone’s auditioning for a role.

VIOLENT SCAMMERS:

Once folks figure out that you've won the lottery you will be a mark. I really want to learn how to be a sailor. I want to captain my own sailboat. In order to captain a boar you will need to get sailing lessons.

Amatuers:

Professionals:

Woke in Time! What's wrong with the extreme left & right? Absurdity in Modern Morality aka is it even possible to be moral anymore?

2024-05-28T16:41:00.004-07:00

Why Hello, internet people!

REJOICE!

TODAY IS THE BEST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!!

Intro:

It's long been the purview of this blog/podcast to bring light into the darkness and to educate the masses. But I know the quest for TRUTH always brings enemies.

But in these turbulent times, the search for truth is more critical than ever.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

America is in crisis.

If you ask Americans who their philosophical heroes are they are more likely to report Jordan Peterson, Oprah or Joe Rogan as an answer than Socrates or Ben Franklin. That's because Americans have no idea how philosophical theory effects their lives. Americans would rather take advice from a former game show host than explore the works of a brilliant thinkers.

But philosophy is important. It affects your life more than you think. For instance what does a bunch of German philosophers from the 1840's have to do with problems in American today?

Well for about 2 centuries those philosophers has been warning us that the West is over. The empire is done. Frederick Nietzsche (your morose teenager's favorite philosopher aka the guy who said "God is dead!") predicted exactly what would happen to society when the American style of living predominates {the End of History.}

Unhinged:

You might ask where can we find political answers to our problems when the ideas within the extreme left and right seem unhinged: either crazy or broken? The extremes within the Intelligentsia have put forth ideas that are beyond problematic, they are out-right dangerous; meanwhile, those extreme ideas are beginning to gain widespread acceptance outside of their communities. It's why I've been talking about the most bizarre ideas in our culture so much. Those ideas are taking root and I believe you must be warned about this danger, so we can take action!

THE END OF HISTORY

After the fall of Communism a number of elites were lulled into to accepting Fukayama's proclamation that we were living at the End of History. However; most of them interpreted his ideas incorrectly. They forgot his emphasis on the Last Man. We are the last Men at the end of history.

But first. LIKE most interpretation of Fukayama we thought the riddle of history had been solved for us. Liberal democracy and some kind of market capitalism was the solution to the riddle of societal organization.

According to Fukayahma we no longer need to worry about building institutions. Democratic Institutions maintain themselves. We don't need to enact laws to protect democracy. Democracy is self-renewing. In the modern capitalist society we don't need to think of our neighbors as fellow patriotic coutrymen. Libs worry that Patriotism is colonizing, tyrannical, and ethnocentric. All we NEED to do is isolate ourselves at home and buy whatever makes us happy on Amazon. The engine of economic cooperation will be the ties that bind us together.

FAILURES FROM THE LEFT & RIGHT

Critics & pseudo-intellectuals like myself have failed to understand the most important function of culture, which is to to build a workable society. Instead we focused on reforming our shortcomings so much so that our cultural foundations themselves became the subject of great debate.*

In that debate the right's claim to moral superiority was destroyed by (objective) progressive moral reforms; while the right's ability to rule democratically was undone by massive demographic shifts in the country. Demographic shifts that resulted in a reactionary turn to populism within the right.

The debate for ethics on the left was won by those who use post-modernism & critical theory in order to deconstruct the patriarchial & white supremacist power structures of the status quo. But instead of building a new society from the ashes of deconstruction all the left did was replace 'the white male patriarchy' with anti-racist and anti-male slogans. The new slogan of the democratic party should be, "don't worry about addressing wealth inequality" or racism when Amazon has a 'lift all black voices button!'

So what kind of new society do we want to build? I don't know yet, but if you ask my leftist friends they'll probably mumble something to you about inclusiveness. Nice slogan. But what does inclusiveness mean when in practice our society is self-segregating more and more?

On one hand the left offers the destruction of traditional society and the deconstruction of our ideals, but with the colapse of Marxism it no longer offers real solutions; meanwhile, the right's only response to emerging crisis is to show its new ideas are nothing other than it's old ideas, a return to Authoritarianism.

System Failure: it's the end of the world world as we know it!

The collapse of industrial society was predicted in the 1970's by MIT super computers. The only thing the computers got wrong was the time line. MIT predicted 2040. Unfortunately, the collapse time-line is accelerating. With global warming, destruction of the middle class, pandemics, war in Europe, and supply lines shattered.You don't need to read about a woman could make a million dollars in a year selling her farts in a jar to know we are years ahead of the 2040 supercomputer schedule.

How'd we get here? The West is the middle of an economic collapse the likes of which it has never known. It is fully unprepared for the ramifications.

Repressive Power vs normalized Power

While undergoing a legitimation crisis.

Morality falters during the colapse of society.

It is a crisis of knowledge. [epistemology]

Right uses post modern epistemology without knowing it.

The last man

Expect to see the poor and even your middle class lifestyle decline. I'm not just talking about your income or wealth. Though that will happen {especially} for single men and women. America ran on low wage jobs and human exploitation. But the great resignation is taking care of that. Don't expect staffing levels to return quickly. Do not expect the supply issues to correct themselves. And expect business to take advantage of inflation for profit growth.

A crisis of being.

But I'm also talking about the things that make life worth living. Like your ability to make connections to family and friends.

The ties that bind us together are being broken. I lived through the stagflation and malaise of the 1970's, but something feels different from even that period. In the last year alone in the USA we've had 100,000 drug overdose deaths. We've had 20,000 murders. And that rate increased by 30 percent! Along with 45,000 suicides (and the numbers are just climbing for people of color.) The unemployed and homeless population have exploded. In my city alone rent for 1bedrioms average more than $1600.00 and the number of homeless increased by 400% in a year.

Part of the reason for these numbers is that economy is collapsing for working people and the middle class. Rent is too high. All the good blue collar jobs have been shifted overseas. The disparity between the rich and the poor is now higher than ever. There is a growing gap in who trusts their neighbors. We don' trust or like our neighbors anymore.

Our culture has grown increasingly coarse and individualistic. We have been slowly tugging at the threads of society and it's unraveling.

The left's answers to our problems feel like nothing more than shallow sloganeering, rather than system building. While the answers on the right verge on facsism and a cult like admiration of authoritarianism. When combined with a heavy mixture of libertarian/surveillance capitalism that has run amok, well friends, you can forsee the danger that portends for yourselves.

CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT: FACSISM WILL COME DRAPED IN THE FLAG.

Unlike many of my fellow critics who now attack the left, but only give lip service to correcting the problems on the right, I will tackle the problems I see on the right before dealing with my concerns with the so called 'woke' left.

THE WHITE POWER STRUCTURE IS ATTEMPTING TO HOLD ON TO POWER AT ANY COST, IT WILL COST US DEMOCRACY

You don't have to be following all the shenanigans the current Republicans are doing to know that they are on pace to destroy democracy. And you don't have to be versed in the awful history of our country to recognize that democracy in the USA never really meant democracy for all.

We ought to be familiar with those fights by now. Women and minorities have been agitating for full citizenship since the republic's founding. They have made great progress, but there are always counter revolutions and reactions with any victories.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE RIGHT?

When we look into the problems on the right they are obvious, easy to enumerate, and straight forward to diagnose. Though the obstacles they present to us may be insurmountable.

These people have no shame...

Turns out we can no longer hold conservative Americans accountable for what they believe. Because instead of standing for something all they've become is the anti- Democratic party. So we can't engage in debate with the right to complain that they have abandoned the so called American way of life.™ Folks on the right no longer believe in democracy. They BELIEVE that democracy has failed THEM. And they believe that authoritarianism is the only way to save "America" from itself.

The right's resurgence in authoritarian and fascist beliefs along with the development of a troubling new religion in Trumpism led to an attack on the basic institutions of our democracy. An attack that... (when)... it prevails will be an existential threat to our way of life. (In a future post I will go into greater detail about how serious the Republican attack on democracy really is.)

The cliff that the right's contempt for democracy is pushing us towards is a Silent Totalitarianism© advanced by the purveyors of surveillance capitalism & anti-democratic forces within the Republican Party.

In addition to trying to destroy democracy there's another problem with the right. The cult of Trumpism. A new RELIGION that isn't so much based on Trump the actual existing man, but based on the conspiratorial thinking that he inspired. Why not the man? First, Trump is an obvious conman. As Sam Harris once said, "Donald Trump is a stupid person's idea of a smart person and a poor person's idea of a rich man." How the right has allowed itself to become infatuated with such an obvious self-angrandizing narcissist is beyond me. Inexplicably the apotheosis of Trump doesn't just come from his supporters.

In some cases religious leaders with real followings have proposed that Trump is the second coming. Some people are convinced that the creator of the universe is either using Trump to jump start the end times or suggesting that Trump might himself be God. That idea is bereft of any common sense. But the intelgensia on the right have pushed that idea and now metaphorically believe the Earth is flat and feel compelled to steer us over the edge.

How to defend democracy

Much of the new Trumpism sounds insane. I can't imagine Bob Dole being a Q-anon follower or regarding Donald Trump as the literal second coming of Jesus Christ. But the Republican tent no longer houses men of stature like Bob Dole. Instead we have men like Trump & his sycophants.

Despite the clownish behavior the right presents an absolute danger of destroying our democracy. In oder to defend democracy against the asymmetrical warfare that the right engages upon we need to do the following:

Abolish the Electoral College
Pack the Courts
Pass Voting Rights Bill
Charge violent demonstrators from Jan 6th and imprison them.
Charge Trump with incitement
Remove congressmen that aided or supported inserection
End the Fillabuster
Add District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states
Felons automatically reinstate their right to vote after prison

WOKE JUST IN TIME. What's wrong with the Left?

Those of us on the left got our wish. For decades the left has pushed for the destruction/deconstruction of power centers. Now we've got front row tickets to the decline of America.

Why is leftist culture involved in the rot of the core of our country? Was it the ideology, stupid? The left has been accused by the right of being overly sensitive. In response to their new found sensibilities the left has erected safe spaces while political correctness has increased so much that the right wing suggests that college is nothing more than indoctrination for students from conservative homes.

Though I think the indoctrination criticism goes too far, the safe spaces and trigger alerts are stifling debate on college campuses. We are raising snowflakes that have abandoned the left's commitment to defending free speech. The left no longer tolerates any speech it disagrees with, and it wants to silence and punish speech that questions it's post-modern foundations.

Many critics of the left contend the left has it's own new religion- one of identity politics or "wokeness." It's cancel culture is the blasphemy of the middle ages and public humiliation & scorn are its new weapons.

In one case that seems quite egregious to me a professor at Portland State, Peter Boghossian, resigned over what he termed was retaliation for his efforts to bring controversial speakers to his campus & his punishment for submitting a number of hoax papers reminiscent of the Sokal Affair.

THE DISINGENUOUS LEFT

The left wants radical and fundamental change to society and since the fall of Marxism has been unable or unwilling to have an honest conversation with the country about what it really wants.

For instance when feminists talk about the wage gap they tend to use the tactic of blame don't explain. The standard talking points about the wage gap between men and women gives the impression that women are underpaid for the same job. Feminism insists on making the wage gap appear to be the 'purposeful' discrimination of men being paid higher wages for similar job duties with similar experience when in fact most feminists know this isn't true and they know exactly why the wage gap exists.

The wage gap exists because women work fewer hours than men. They choose (or are forced to choose if patriarchy still exerts that kind of power) jobs that pay less on the wage market. Women decide to have babies and when they do they often quit their jobs to perform the unpaid labor of childcare. I'm not suggesting that taking time off after birthing is not a bad thing. Indeed families should be able to do this. But this requires an extirely different approach than the USA capitalist economy is built on. As a society we should ask the hard questions about the costs associated with raising families and how it should do it.

But just asking those kind of questions to leftists rather than agreeing with them about patriarchy gets interpreted like literal violence engaged in the culture wars to leftists. Further, they think we can't win those arguments over the right. But I think the left is wrong. We can win those arguments and we can do so without demonizing the other side.

So what's the problem with a little fib like "the wage gap is caused by outright discrimination?" For one, if the 78 percent wage gap isn't actually caused by outright discrimination then the proposed solutions to the problem won't be effective. The paycheck protection act won't fix enough of the wage gap (which is estimated to be caused only around 5 percent.) We also don't get to be heroic fighters against oppression, nor do we need to accept or be accountable for our own collaboration with the status quo. Just being female makes us victims and heroes all at once.

Violence and CAUSATION?

Whats the cause of patriarchy?

THE POST MODERN CHALLENGE FROM THE LEFT

THE PROBLEMS WITH POST MODERN THEORY

One dimensional

Socrates vs sophists

Anti science

Anti free speech

Anti reason

Anti-men

THE 'PROBLEMATICS' OF THE LIFEWORLD: Why your life doesn't make sense anymore.

I've always been fascinated by human behavior. When I was a child I wanted to be a neuro-psychologist, but then I learned that one needed to understand math at a very high level. So I gave up on that dream, just like Freud did, and I turned to reading countless books on psychology and sociology by people who can do math to satisfy my curiosity.

Should we be using theory to interpret our ordinary interactions with society? Instead of saying my mother loves me should I bring up attachment theory? Should I discuss Freud's psychosexual theories or explain my mother's connection to me as a result of evolution convincing my parents to spread her genetic heritage?

I imagine that most ordinary folk hearing these questions probably think that idea absurd if not a little silly. But if we were to take that set of ideas and apply it to power structures like say the Patriarchy or White Supremacy you would get an extremely different reaction from the radical left.

For the left it's impossible to have interactions that aren't viewed through the lens of some power dynamic.

Fart girl

Plato vs the sophists on justice

* Functionalism as a theoretical perspective can not be ignored.

Break the glass. It's time to squash the system.

No religion. Kill the humans

What's Left? The Last Man.

Selected bibliography:

Back at the Kava Bar.

2023-09-12T13:08:00.016-07:00

I'm writing the novel on my phone at my second favorite Kava bar. Am I worried about not having a job? It's only been a month and a half since I've been back in Palmetto. So why worry? Chinasky wouldn't.

"You aren't Bukowski!" I can hear a voice screaming in my head.

I get it. Instead of writing the next great American novel I should be out here trying to earn enough to pay my car insurance. "I promise, Mom, I just need you to make a few more car payments too!" Then I'll get a job. Maybe.

All this stress is adding up. I feel my blood pressure pounding around in my temples. It's looking for a way out. I tell myself not worry about the stroke. I take my drink and walk outside like a like an arrogant smoker taking a break from my life. Outside the ocean air is as languid as my non- existent sex life so I might as well go back inside.

For some reason there are more girls than normal in the bar. Next to me was a short girl with dark black hair and a mask around her face. It was odd to see a pandemic mask in Florida, but liberals can hide anywhere. She had a friend with her. A fat girl who offered up to no one that she was, "An anxious chill."

They must have been on a first date, because the black haired girl said that she liked that about her, "that she was an anxious chill." I wouldn't have thought it was interesting enough to mention it to you if I hadn't seen the fat girl's face. But she was right. The fat girl's face looked anxious, but chill.

Because there weren't a lot of men in the bar today, I was the second oldest man in the bar. The older guy forgot to lock the restroom door and I accidentally walked in on him.

"oh, um.." I apologized. "Sorry!" I could tell he thought I tried to walk in on him on purpose. He looked up from pissing like I was some kind of pervert. I am a pervert, so he's not wrong. Just not the kind of pervert that gets his rocks off to old men pissing in dive bars.

No one is a Sapiosexual.

2023-09-08T11:06:00.008-07:00

There is no such thing as a sexual orientation like sapiosexuality. What you are attracted to intelligence? Wow! Way to build your whole identity around something so general. Who likes stupid people anyway? I can only get off to blondes with big tits myself, but I don't make up a word for that.

You just have a preference. You don't need to make up pseudo sociological formulations just because you got an A in Sociology 101. I bet you didn't even need to crack open a book to do that! That's not the humble brag you think it is. It's just proof that what you are being taught is worthless.

You can graduate with a degree in Sociology without ever getting assigned to read the Communist Manifesto or the Protestant work Ethic. You haven't thought deeply for one minute about anything. Instead you've learned a bunch of catch phrases like patriarchy and privilege.

So you've watched a video on critical theory while doing your stupid Tik Tok dances. You couldn't steel man an argument on behalf of functionalism if you tried. Because all the answers have already been given to you.

It's conflict theory and power struggles and oppressors and victims. Let me guess which one those you are. Without a hint of irony you profess the world is keeping you down, but you are in the 1 percenters of the world.

You haven't engaged any text because you are not looking for questions only answers. You want to feel unique and special when the least unique thing about you is your need to feel unique. Sapiosexuality isn't legit like same sex attraction or being straight is.

This whole fake story is just 'nerdy' compartmentalization. I guess it's fun to allow yourself to make distinctions. Which we aren't allowed to do anymore, so you hide behind your personality typology to offer an alternative explanation as to why no one wants to fuck you.

You don't choose potential mates because on Fridays you like intelligence and Saturdays you don't feel horny. Shit. I don't even like people after I ejaculate. What's that category make me?

To say you are have a sapiosexuality simply proves you know nothing about love. 13 yr old iboys read too much Nietzsche and 39 year old Sociology Majors invent too much jargon.

Claiming Sapiosexuality is like suggesting that your mother loves you only because she is keeping in line with her evolutionary imperative to protect her genes. Maybe like Freud you want to sleep with your Dad. But these theories and just perspectives teach you literally nothing.

You wouldn't consider navigating the real world using penis envy theories, but you intone Biblical profundity to arcane philosophers and sketchy borderline sociology theories. When frankly, Freud was probably more right that Lacan.

Most of you couldn't define half of what you say. You just hear yourselves repeat talking points over and over again. But the glossary in the back of the book you didn't read doesn't provide answers, only a way of organizing your shapeless, chaotic thoughts.

None of what you believe is real.

Nothing.

I've decided to write a novel.

2023-08-29T21:50:00.008-07:00

My novel won't be any good, I know that already. But the idea of writing a novel really interests me. I've discussed my novel ideas with ChatGPT. Chat Bots are supposed to remain positive and encouraging. But I think even the CHAT GPT is getting bored with my pretension.

"Is there anything else you want to discuss?" It asks.

Just my novel asshole. What else does a failed writer like me have to talk about?

I promise my novel is totally unique. It's fucking meta. It's David Foster Wallace post-modernism with a twist of American style minimalism. Think Bukowski and Carver.

Wait, can I get an editor here please Mr. ChatGPT?

Well since you and Chat GPT don't want to talk about my novel, do you wanna talk how I quit my job today? Well I did. Because pushing carts in the Floridian heat is insane at 52. I just couldn't handle the sweat. Not to mention it rains every fucking day here. My shorts and socks are soaked. All my limbs were exhausted from pushing carts. There's no rest at Costco. Done pushing carts? Go unload 50 pound pallets.

Struggling with all that exertion? Do not confide in your fellow 50 year old employee. Because he will taunt you with how he can handle the heat and wonder why you "can't even lift 50 pound items over your head?" He will point out how a 20 year old "former nanny" can "at least she can push 10 carts at a time and stay positive."

Seriously, I'm getting advice from that Gen Z kid. The one who "struggles with anxiety" and can barely summon the courage to EXIST socially, but tried to perk me up with words of encouragement. "You just can't be so hard on yourself. It's YOU that's putting all the pressure on YOU."

Christ I didn't see that coming Nanny. Terrific. The nanny is more adapted to working than I am. My failure is complete young, Skywalker. I'm too obvious a fuck up.

working harder is not better.

2023-08-26T10:23:00.005-07:00

I had to work harder than I wanted to. I thought getting through the paperwork and the stupid videos would mean some relief. I worked 20 years in grocery stores so I assumed my experience would make things easy.

I was wrong. The fast pace and the awkward boxes along with the strange looks from the supervisor made me nervous. No one taught me what to do. In the vernacular of corporatism I wasn't given proper expectations. I just sort of made things up as I went along. Because I didn't do things under normal procedure I was constantly admonished for doing things wrong.

"Not the warehouse way." Patty told me. Patty was in her 50s and looked as serious as time had been to her face. She had fake blonde hair and was thin and slight.

"Don't let my size fool ya!" "I'm tougher than I look." And she was. She had no problems lifting the large items or keeping pace with customers. She was faster then me. And you could tell she was a bit disappointed that she drew my help.

Patty didn't trust anyone. I was told to look through clothes and shoe boxes for hidden items like batteries.

"People are always trying to steal." She'd say.

My pride and my muscles began to ache. I wasn't good at the tetris required required. My visual spatial acuity wasn't up to speck. I didn't turn the boxes correctly. I began to sweat profusely from the constant motion. The warehouse wasn't exactly cool though the air conditioner trired it's best.

I overheard snips of conversations from my fellow trainee and his supervisor. He gave very specific instructions and expectations. I tried to model what I heard, but I couldn't hear everything he said and do my job at the same time. There were no water breaks or rest periods. If you looked up you saw endless lines and customers.

Many of the customer were nice. Some noticed me struggling and even offered to help me out. They gave me hints were to pack or when to use a box.

I tried using my best customer service voice and tricks and managed to make most of my customers forget that I kept putting hot stuff on top of cold items. A rookie mistake that a man with over 20 years experience in grocery shouldn't make. But the pace of packing and movement had me seriously out of my game.

Welcome Back! PalmGehtto 2.

2023-08-24T17:06:00.013-07:00

I always ended up back with family in Palmetto when things got bad.

I was on the verge of homelessness in Phoenix, but here I could live on my brother's couch. Sleeping on the couch meant constant interruptions to my sleep. Between both my brothers going to work, a kamakazi cat that zig zagged through the tiny 3 bedrooms slammng it's head into doors, my nephew's girlfriend sleeping on the opposite couch, and the curtainleess windows exploding with Florida sun in mid morning, I never slept more than 3 hours in a night.

I got my first job 3 weeks into it. A huge warehouse where I packed groceries. If it wasn't for the local kava bar I spotted next to it, I wouldn't have gone through with the interview. And only the promise of a few drinks afterwards got me through the first night of watching orientation videos about smiling and filling out paperwork for hazmat.

The folks at the warehouse were super serious about their warehouse and grocery store though they only offered part time to all new hires.

"You see it's how we can see how commited you are to the company."

I was not committed.

""Once you earn our trust, we will give you all the things like insurance, full time work, and stability." The kind of stuff companies used to give you when they offered you a job. But nowadays just offering decent pay, or benefits made these guys heroes to the working man.

3 minute late punches were counted against you and the job offered you 4 chances to be late a day. Punch in to start, punch out for lunch, punch back in after lunch, and out one more time when leaving. They were almost daring you to screw yourself.

in a life filled with error, stupidity, and mistakes did I just make the worst one yet?

2023-08-07T00:19:00.002-07:00

As usual of course I did. Not that it matters in some sense we all knew how this blog ends.

Keep it positive!

2023-03-14T22:40:00.001-07:00

Yo peeps, guess what? Two of my work buds are now reading my blog, so I did a little review of my recent posts and man, man, did I sound like a Debbie Downer. No more of that crap though, time for a change!

I'm feeling like a new and improved Romius T today. I'm tapping into that 8th grade energy, when the world was my oyster and I had delusions of grandeur.

BIG THINGS ARE HAPPENING

Today, I'm on the hunt for a new pad - one with a basement, ya dig? I need to set up some soundproof rooms because I have goals, people! And my current objective of acquiring a basement to house my prisoners is seriously the most exciting thing I've ever wanted to do.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'll need to vet you if you wanna subscribe to my active captivity feed. You might need to prove your loyalty by offing a furry little critter for me, preferably one of your own. I gotta know I can trust you, ya feel me? I can't go to jail - that place is not my jam, because violence at me just turns my stomach.

I know what you're thinking, "how can this guy be grossed out by violence but be down with keeping young homeless women captive in his basement?" Well, hello, I have standards, okay? Like, can you imagine me hooking up with a 59-year-old? Gag me with a spoon! I'm not into that incest vibe, thanks.

And let's talk about these ladies on dating sites with their mile-long lists of demands. Like, girl, do you really think I'm gonna swoop in and save you from your hot mess of a life? You couldn't keep your ex-hubby satisfied, so why would you be able to make me happy?

And don't even get me started on the whole "men only want one thing" stereotype. Honestly, that should be good news for women. It's like how simple are we? You only need to do one thing and you can make any man happy. But here's the kicker. Look on any feed or tinder app and you'll see women refuse to do the one and only thing men want.

"If you want sex then pass me by" women all say. And then they shame men for the one thing they like and ask for. It's like what? You can't give me the one thing I ask for, but you have a laundry list of things you want from me. I better have a car, job, pay for dinner, be stable and prop up your fragile emotional state. And what's in it for me? No sex. 3 kids that aren't mine, and paying the bills.

You women all want men who adhere to traditional values when it suits you, like paying for your dinner, meanwhile you want to be in charge of the relationship and not give it up to us. That's seriously deranged and no amount of shaming me for liking sex is going to work on me. Where's all the good men at? They are running as fast as possible away from your ass.

I'm going to the Philippines to meet real woman or I'll get my basement going, either way I'm off trying to date American women!

the last man

2023-03-01T20:51:00.001-07:00

Francis Fukuyama's concept of the "last man" and Nietzsche's ideas about the "last man" are two different ideas with some similarities and differences.

Fukuyama's "last man" refers to the end of history, a state of affairs where liberal democracy has become the dominant form of government, and there is no room for further progress or development. In Fukuyama's view, the "last man" is content with the status quo and has no desire for change or innovation. The "last man" is apathetic and lacks the ambition and creativity necessary to create new ideas, cultures, or political systems. In this sense, Fukuyama's "last man" is a sort of complacent conformist.

On the other hand, Nietzsche's idea of the "last man" is a more critical and negative concept. Nietzsche's "last man" is the ultimate form of mediocrity and conformity. The "last man" is someone who has lost all passion for life and has surrendered to the mundane, shallow, and banal existence. According to Nietzsche, the "last man" is comfortable in their own conformity, having no desires or aspirations beyond their basic needs, and unwilling to take any risks or make any sacrifices. This lack of passion and creativity is what makes the "last man" so dangerous, as they are incapable of pursuing greatness or achieving any real progress.

So while both Fukuyama and Nietzsche use the term "last man," their definitions and implications are quite different. Fukuyama's "last man" is more of a cautionary tale about the dangers of complacency and contentment in the face of progress, while Nietzsche's "last man" is a scathing critique of modern society and its complacent, conformist tendencies.

truth

2023-02-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

As a champion of truth and a crusader against ignorance, this blog/podcast has encountered its fair share of opposition. However, the message of this platform cannot be silenced, especially in these trying times. In this post, we will explore the harsh realities of America's current crisis, with a focus on the mental health implications of the current economic depression.

The Truth Hurts:

It is no secret that America is in a state of crisis. Despite this, many Americans fail to recognize the importance of philosophy in understanding the root causes of our problems. Instead, they turn to celebrities like Jordan Peterson, Oprah, or Joe Rogan for guidance. However, the reality is that philosophy is crucial in understanding the issues we face today, as it can help us learn from the warnings of past generations. For instance, the prophetic words of German philosophers from the 1840s have long warned us of the downfall of Western society, with Friedrich Nietzsche's famous proclamation that "God is dead" serving as a grim reminder of what can happen when we neglect the importance of ethics and morality in our lives.

Unhinged Extremes:

As we search for answers to our current problems, it can be tempting to turn to extremes on both sides of the political spectrum. However, many of these ideas are not only problematic, but downright dangerous. In fact, some of the most bizarre and extreme ideas that are currently taking root in our culture pose a real threat to our mental health and wellbeing. It is therefore essential that we recognize these dangers and take action to protect ourselves and our communities.

The End of History:

After the fall of communism, many believed that we had reached the "End of History," as proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama. However, this interpretation was flawed, as it failed to account for the true nature of Fukuyama's ideas. In reality, we are living in a time when the last vestiges of humanity are struggling to survive. As a result, we cannot simply rely on liberal democracy and capitalism to solve all our problems. Instead, we must take action to build strong institutions and protect our democracy from the dangers of ethnocentrism and tyranny. Only then can we hope to create a better future for ourselves and our children.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the Great Depression 2.0 is not just an economic crisis, but a mental health crisis as well. It is essential that we recognize the importance of philosophy in understanding the root causes of our problems, and take action to protect ourselves from the dangers of extremism and tyranny. Only then can we hope to build a better future for ourselves and for generations to come.