“Neat to think about... “

[REDACTED] proposed building platforms in the ocean. War-surplus deep-sea drilling rigs1. Engineering distance. 24 miles. Space enough for sovereignty to dissolve into open water. Ideas, platforms, scheeeming.

Freedom from regulation, laws, moral conventions. Floats.

“Stamp collectors will pay a fortune apiece to insure that they have each and every country.”

A nation with no citizens. Abstract. Just existence. Declare sovereignty, print stamps, compulsive completionists pay. The entire apparatus of statehood reduced.

“What I think would be cool would be to try this in Africa.”

Everyone agreed. The weight distributed so thin that no one feels ownership. The system decided. Attribution dissolved.

“How do we get rid of poor people as a whole?” A question asked at dinner, reportedly, between billionaires2.

Nice.

“I think it would be cool to offer this up to Somalia or somewhere desperate and see what happens.”

Cool.

“Even cancer cells stop multiplying when you confine their space.”

Ambiguous, but the sentiment is loud and fucking clear. You don’t negotiate with cancer. It is identified, isolated, eliminated. Treatment.

Someone simply replies with desalination requirements. Gears already spinning on logistics. The language is already there.

Peter Thiel: “I’m looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting”3.

Bryan Johnson’s plasma exchanges with his son4. On camera.

People. The final resource.

Peter Thiel’s question: “How do you start over?”

“Rich people don’t innovate as quickly!!”

The question sounds philosophical. It’s not. Logistics. How do you clear the space?

The deep ocean. International waters. Somalia. The void doesn’t exist. It has to be manufactured. And manufacturing a void means removing what’s there. The fodder that exists in the space where the void will be constructed, they are not displaced. They are designed out.

They build the platforms. We use them. We don’t ask what’s underneath. We never read the terms.

Clean hands. Clear conscience. We all clicked “Agree.”

The smoother, the better. Fewer steps, higher conversion rate. Every point of friction between impulse and action introduces risk.

The obstacle used to be geographical. Trips to the store, waiting for the weekend to purchase. Checking the mailbox for correspondence. These were inefficiencies to be solved, but it comes at a price. We’ve few spaces left where we could change our minds, reconsider, grow within these periods.

No friction, no heat, no transformation. The age of impulse winks at you and you haven’t learned a thing.

Fuck impulse. Be more deliberate. Intentional. Take the journey, the scenic route. Use your imagination. Rub it out.

Calcification

Algorithms don’t expand your taste, it confirms it.

Platform algorithms use collaborative filtering (user + item) to identify patterns in user behavior and predict future behavior based on statistical clustering. The result is that your preferences calcify. You stop happening upon ideas, culture, viewpoints that are outside your established patterns. You’re shown variations of what you already like, eventually forgetting you could like other things.

FUN FACT: “51%. That’s the percentage of internet traffic that was generated by bots, as opposed to humans, in 2024”. Sweeet!

Petrichor (wink Max wink), the smell of rain on dry earth. You might have encountered the word once in a game of DnD. These chance discoveries won’t happen when every recommendation is optimized for engagement probability, monety, or you explicitly fucking ask for archaic & obsolete words (RIP Luciferous Logolepsy), which is a cognitive burden.

Fuck that, officer, I have something to say and you might even like it, but prob not.

Anonymity

“Way back” online users were anonymous by default. You could have a dozen identities across a dozen forums, chat rooms, etc. You were a creative, weird as hell, and brave little artist. You could be because there was so little risk!

Anonymity correlates with experimental behavior. Identity, persistence, attribution precipitates homogeneity. When everything you say is attached to you and archived forever, you may more spare yourself exposure or risk of criticism.

Anonymity was a baby. You could have many, expendable personas. Blinks. The Internet is different now. It’s still young, but unrecognizable. You could still be anonymous within an immediate, online audience, but lots are still being logged. Your litany on a ledger. An enrichment machine with guilty knowledge incapacitating you.

FUN FACT: “In 2024 Meta discloses that the total “inauthentic” duplicate and false accounts for 14% of their monthly active users, roughly 430 million accounts”! Rock on!

Fuck something. Someone.

Censorship

Panopticon (WINK), a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched [Wikipedia].

Scribble scribble, type type. Pause. Review. Revise. Delete. Soon you stop writing at all. The system is working. The system has crippled you, your voice. It shouldn’t. It should go fuck itself.

Employers (current and prospective), algorithms, the rabid mob, your family, friends, lover. The probability of exposure is never zero, but it weighs a ton!

“I have nothing to say.” Bullsh--t. You’re burning with commentary, but you know the Internet doesn’t forget. And more! The Internet reminds you.

F--k the Internet.

Grrr Angry

Metrics aren’t “good” or “evil”, but they do tell you what’s good and what’s bad: Good interaction? Pump it up. Bad interaction? Dump it off.

Outrage, disgust, fear, contempt are high-arousal states. High-arousal? More interactions. More interaction means more algorithmic promotion.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” a burning house captures more attention than an opulent house. You are thence informed, appalled, engaged. It’s harder for good people to do good than it is for malicious people to do malice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not hard to do good, but it is hard to do so much good that it bubbles up above atrocities.

Glacier

Abstraction: protocols, CDNs, HA, load balancers, (v)LLMs, hyperscalers, moderation pipelines, PIPELINES, advertising auctions, data brokers, agreements, model training, automated workflows, everything as a service, each layer representing decisions made by others about what you can see and do.

And this infrastructure moves. You don’t feel it, but when you wake up, the service is… different. Something new to acknowledge, something new to, skim. Opt-in.

The layers are shaping our choices. Your options fade as the system learns more of what you want, what you need, because we’re all in its wake.

Enrich

Your behavior is represented by data points, yummy model training food. You’re laboring for an entity that will sell the product of your labor to third parties who will use it to influence your future behavior. Isn’t that fucked up?

This is not a metaphor, but the business model. You clicked agree. The asymmetry between what you assumed (because you didn’t read) and what you consented to is not a flaw.

YoU aRe ThE pRoDuCt. Sure, sure. It’s lost it’s meaning to you, but it’s still true. You’re not without compensation, though. You’re still allowed to participate for free!

Self Defeat

If all users stopped contributing, the system would collapse. No individual user can collapse the system by withdrawing. Individual withdrawal carries social costs: disconnection, irrelevance, loss of access to network effects.

This is nothing new.

We are being overgrazed. We cannot fence ourselves off without coordination and coordination requires communication and communication requires the platforms you are trying to fence yourself from!

So when/where/how to share the sacrifice? You can start whenever, dude. There have been SOOO many opportunities to tell [service A] and [service B] to fuck off. So many injustices to not tolerate. Giving up a minor conveniences one at a time can be liberating.

Volunteering

Anytime we share, the model ingests. Then, from offered talent, the model creates. Still no compensation. No recognition. No attribution.

The better the work, the richer the data. The richer the data, the closer we are to parity with our likenesses. Our acolytes. Our replacements. How do we stop? The sensors are ubiquitous, omnipresent, persistent, pervasive. But convenience is instant! I was unhappy, but these new whateverthefucks made me happy again. Future me can wait.

FUN FACT: “74% of New Webpages Include AI Content“

Just Watch

What if we only consumed? Read-only. Take take take. That’s pretty safe.

Nash equilibrium (no winks). A situation where no player could gain more by changing their own strategy (holding all other players' strategies fixed) in a game. [Wikipedia].

Silence protects. You can’t (mis)quote what’s not published.

The forum keeps on, the blogs continue, but they’re uncanny. We migrate to private accounts, then no accounts, then physical media only and local markets. Threat modeling against the information economy that drove us underground.

Dead Internet

A theory. The Internet will be marshaled by bots, apparent users simulations; real humans the online minority. Like a mall, void of humans, billboards and kiosks still clamouring for customers.

It’s being observed. Deviation is a-gen-tic-al-ly suppressed. Conformity is trending.

It died when we became indistinguishable from bots. It died because we avoided friction.

Fuck you, I hope this message finds you.

. . .

A little more fun, in incrementally more fun format:

1. More articles are now created by AI than humans.

   • Graphite Growth Report

2. Artificial Intelligence fuels rise of hard-to-detect bots that now make up more than half of global internet traffic.

   • 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report

3. AI Content Is the New Default.

   • Ahrefs AI Content Study

4. GPT-4.5 Has Passed The Turing Test.

   • UC San Diego / Tech & Learning

5. Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.

   • Noema Magazine

I paid for lunch. Tapped. Thousands of processes spanning hundreds of platforms across dozens of institutions for food, labor, time, life to pay. One single transaction. A purchase and its intricacies are lost to us. In fact it’s taken for granted. In fact, it seeps into entitlement. Convenience as a Service; as a right.

We’re contained. We fit in an infinite number of boxes, categories, on a volatile spectrum. Decisions and paths made for us before we were born. Name, money, minutes, ready for us to learn and identify with. Age as noun. A discrete number for decay. Tomorrow is a clean break because we must sleep, but the sun doesn’t care.

Singular pronouns for parliaments. Abstractions are so ancient. “Where does my shit go when I shit,” asks semi-ancient dude. Today abstractions are deeper, stranger, outrunning our ability to understand more and more of the layers beneath. A great deal of vulnerability and surrender was required when the layers were few. Now we just trust the magic. There’s too much to comprehend. Plant, sheep, oil, polymer, fiber, thread, fabric, pattern, cut, sew, tag, ship, hang, wear, forget, waste, pollute, consume. An iterative loop, like a coil or spring or a lil Slinky. We trust it with our privacy, our health, our safety. We trust it with our family, we trust it at home, and inside our bodies.

Driving, flying, cameras, medicine, electricity, ice, water, wifi. Skills, competence, abstracted. Each layer a new floor. Coding became possible without knowing how it’s read by machine. Today code can be spoken, gestured, iterated on prompt after prompt. The programmer who doesn’t understand assembly stands on shoulders. The photographer who doesn’t understand light stands on shoulders. Timepieces, calculators, logic gates, resistance, capacity, composition. The woman stuck inside her car because her battery died and she never had to touch locks.

Memory outsourced to search. Chat. Shortcuts. “Saved you a click.” McDonald’s delivers. Locality transcending. Journey abstracted.

Trade, dollars, speculation, crypto, NFTs, the pursuit to gamify life; yours and theirs. But grief isn’t abstracted. Taste, sleep, skin. Not yet, anyway. No service for dying. No layer between you and love. Not yet.

Am I liberated or am I terrified?
Relief |---------------x-----| Terror

I hope this message finds you.

I’ve been thinking about the structures I impose on reality (on platforms, systems, memory itself) and where that impulse began.

As a child, I drew square suns. I had a yellow toy box with an orange lid covered in shitty drawings of square suns. Sometimes with clouds. Sometimes with clouds behind the sun.

I reflect a lot on who I’ve been and who I am as a person. More recently, tracing back the meaning behind some of my profound childhood memories. Correlations emerged in how I internalize them.

I had a lot of freedom back then. Too much, I think. Bored? I didn’t understand it then, but I weep for my younger self now. No, I was lonely.

In the Philippines we had Ida; I was closest with her. She taught me how to clean, how to cook things, Tagalog. She also disciplined me harder than pops. Ida was made to leave after only a couple of years with us after contracting tuberculosis. I don’t remember feeling anything when she left. I can’t recall crying or even being confused. The same thing happened when my grandfather died and my cousin was crying on my shoulder. It’s strange because I’ve been so empathetic and emotional these last decades. But back then, the grief had nowhere to land. I lost the bit of structure at home, what safety I had. The only nurture I can recall. The impact of that deficiency was so evident in my teens, 20s, 30s, today.

There must be a causal relationship between this experience and my dream with the white room. No foundation, no limits, no security, no rules. The ultimate un-held space. I’m too afraid to experience it myself, so I just watch the blob encircle me. I watch me watch the blob, this polymorphous mass waiting for purpose. Waiting for shape, rules, definition. Containment. Structure. Square suns.

I hope this message finds you.

When I was a child, I had this recurring dream. I’m in a white room. Bright. Moments where I’m in my first person and others in the third, a fish-eye camera hanging off my temple. In these moments, I’m leaking anxiety. I’m lost to where I am or why I’m there. I can’t see the floor, the walls, the corners. A black, inky blob begins to form around me, surrounding me, pulsing. It’s a direct contrast to the environment. I’m sweating. I know because in third person I can see it. Back in first person, I start to spin, tracking the blob during my rotations. As I accelerate, the contrast blurs until the blob and the room become a unified, featureless void. I feel the ceiling open up, but my memory of this dream becomes fuzzy.

Well, I wake up and I’m sweaty...

I never made the connection between this dream and my helpless feelings about the universe (in Alpha), but like they’re connected and stuff.

Forty years later, I fantasize The End. With helplessness, for sure. Is this common? Doubt it. Healthy? Yyyyy-no? You have no business contemplating time before existence nor the thing after. And the where? WHERE do we exist? WHERE is our universe? IN WHAT VESSEL? Is it a vessel? A medium? Brane Cosmology offers The Bulk, but what contains the container?

Is the true nature of this medium fundamentally absent to a mind bound by our present dimensional constraints? Now to a lesser, yet still colossal degree: superstructures. They’re revolving around something greater that’s revolving around something even greater. Orders of magnitude greater. Where is it? What the fuck is it? Who’s Shapley! Does the absolute center that commands revolution exist? We’re being repelled, too? Did I do something? Am I depressed? We’ll never know (about the universe).

In my dream, this blob cast no shadows. Maybe it was too bright. Maybe The Bulk was light. Or maybe the blob was the sum total of existence in the uppermost dimensions, where shadows are impossible. If the blob is the vessel itself, there is no outside for a shadow to fall upon. Just us and the room. I’m VERY frustrated.

Now, the end. There’s an end. There’s an end to you and to everything our senses and instruments have measured. We’re but a bead in the quantum foam where bubbles form and pop cosmic realms in and out of existence. But nothingness is impossible; we inevitably blink out for another superset of potential to blink in. A transition, not a vanishing. A balance where the energy of our end provides the pressure for another thing to emerge and my brain insists fish-eye was the way to look at it.

I hope this message finds you.

I've always wanted to write, but lacked any enduring commitment to do so. I wondered why. I still wonder, but am not lost on the reasons. Lack of accountability. Lack of focus. Lack of time? No. Never time. Everyone has time. These are not revolutionary or even at all unique. But they are like chasing thoughts while editing. Compounding distractions, fragmented ideas, formatting, grammar, style, forks, tangents. Running in a dream. White noise. Snow. Static. Space. Drama.

I have a thing for waste. Words that are unremarkable fall into waste, which is greatly discouraging when you're trying to write. I recycle too much abstract shit. If I want to swap a word out for another word, I'll try to reuse as many of the letters as possible. Need to search for something online? Use an already open tab, if I'm done with it. Spaces? Only ever one space. I'm triggered by formatting that uses two spaces and love abusing conjunctions.

But I'm inspired. Persons inspired. There are a lot of talented writers, but without any deeper connection to the author, it gets lost in space. These bonds coalesce in different ways, different directions.

*Pause for paranoia...*

So, here's where I begin to document (un)relatable thoughts. The agony of an uncertain future, immediate and unreachable. The helplessness of space beyond our universe, beyond our imagination. The enormous worlds within worlds, fractals of reality spiraling into a point so fine it's nothing. Frustration. The utter fucking magnitude of things we don't know or understand, but spend a disproportionate amount of time speculating on possibilities. Sovereignty of self, the greater good, karma, more space...

Utility, drama, longing, sitting here stalling to post this but fuck it.

I hope this message finds you.

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