God forbid a person has pores or, worse, cellulite.

In a way, one could consider looksmaxxing to be a kind of evening out of the pressures put on the genders, but alas, that is not correct, and little does it help that the looksmaxxers tend to have objectively horrible views on women.

That’s why it is hard to feel any sense of pity, similar to how it’s hard to be too compassionate about the male loneliness crisis when my yt feed is full of essays on digital violence perpetuated primarily by dudes against women.

Anyway, the thing that fascinates me isn’t their political (or lack thereof) stance. It’s the fact that even the number #1 looksmaxxer Clavicular appears to be so unhappy. Unlike Sisyphus, one cannot imagine him happy.

The best he’s giving off is a dispassionate smile that triggers a sense of the uncanny in the onlooker.

Let's move on without elaborating on his bio because it frankly isn't all that interesting. Suffice it to say that at the young age of 14, he decided that looks are all that matter, and to his credit, he’s lived in adherence to the principle.

Like any good masculine modern ideology, looksmaxxing wouldn’t be compelte without the scientific-esque charts, and ranking sytems that assign everyone a place on the spectrum of being an absolute chad to someone whose only option based on their looks is to rope-maxx.. (This is their synonym for unaliving. iykyk).

If that sounds like eugenics to you, it is, but at the same time, the guys deep into this don’t seem to mind too much, and it is therefore no surprise that people of color in their books could never be “chads”, let alone asians. Just another flavor of white supremacy.

Fortunately, with such a detailed ranking system also come instructions from people like Clav on how to improve your appearance to the point of “mogging” (aka looking better than) others - a term originating from bodybuilders' "alpha male of the group".

This positivist approach to one's flesh suit is coherent with our times, which thrives on reducing complex humans into simplistic data points. For the looksmaxxers, you are not the combination of personality, experience, and narratives; you are just how you look. What can be seen is all there is, as Kahneman and Trotzky would say.

We’re all familiar with this modus operandi. It’s the same way social media works.

Social media, dating apps, our relations to ourselves mediated through the tracking apps... it is all data.

We siphoned from the big universe that is one self and took away only the easily quantifiable.

Looksmaxxing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is fuelled by a society in which we’re alienated from ourselves to the point of shopping for identities on TikTok.

The death of God left us without a moral foundation. We didn't magically transmorph into Uebermenschen. The vacuum left creates space for nihilistic ideologies. Or, well, perhaps calling it an ideology is too generous.

It is a pseudo-scientific theory developed by incels - the kind of men who believe that they are owed sex for being born a man and that their lack thereof is a good reason to hate and despise women (yet seeking something from them, an unhealthy place to operate from).

There sure is a healthy dose of wanting to be a better person, but the looksmaxxers approach is not it.

In a way, these front-facing looksmaxxers aren’t necessarily incels. Part of their spiel is bragging about having a lot of sex thanks to their great looks. All that smashing bones, breaking your legs to insert magnet sticks that; controlled by a remote; slowly distend, hence triggering your bones to grow with it, only to gain a few centimeters in height.

The ironic bit is that in the documentary I watched about leg-extending surgery, the guy even had a girlfriend. But somehow, he had deluded himself into thinking that the reason he did not get a promotion was his lack of height. Should have read biographies of great conquerors and not incel forums.

The point of all this pain isn’t to become a better person, or even to feel better in your body - in fact, you might even ruin your health - it’s just to climb the hierarchy. And as a result, sleep with as many women as possible, because this is how the "Sexual Market Capital" is accruing. For men, not women, needless to say.

Clavicular, who streams nearly all day, certainly likes to make reference to his conquests. He’s also no stranger to kissing random girls on his streams either.

At least it’s reassuring to hear that, thanks to his perpetual biohacking, he’s managed to turn himself infertile, leaving us with the slight hope that this ideology could eventually die out quite literally (a gal can hope).

His relentless streaming is another source of fascination to me. The concept, not the content. For one, there are certain occasions that had he not streamed, he’d be better off. Take, for example, when he figured that he should be filmed while shooting an already dead alligator. Despicable for sure, but if you commit illegal acts, wouldn’t the sane move be to not film them?

My guess is, he is very little without the eyes of others.

Hannah Arendt once wrote: Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody. Plurality is the law of the earth.

Little did she know of streamers, and let us just say that plurality is not a value looksmaxxers would be after. Instead, one can’t help but wonder whether it’s just a very misguided attempt at compensating for a different need not even the most impeccable looks could fulfill.

Clavicular might be an extreme case, but he can only exist because, in a way, the narcissistic is the moral exemplar of neoliberal society. Take American Psycho. Like Frankenstein written as a warning, it has become an inspirational tale and a favorite cosplay for finance bros (self-awareness:0)

“Only an entity, no real me.”

-American Psycho

Outwardly successful: a skincare routine before it was cool for guys to have one, and an apartment that, in its lack of personality, rivals ChatGPT Pinterest interior slop.

The narcissism exposed by the protagonist has become a defining characteristic of our age, Byung Chul Han (a favorite) going as far as writing “live in an age of narcissism”.

Not hard to come to that conclusion. Ask anyone whether they have ever had to deal with a narcissist, and the anecdotes will pour in. It should, however, be mentioned that the clinical kind is further removed from what hobby psychologists attest those who rubbed them the wrong way.

As with many fun psychological concepts, it was Sigmund Freud who came up with the term, leaning on a tale from Ovid about a cold-hearted youngster whose condescending attitude leads him to harshly reject all love interests to the point where the Gods decide to punish him. And what better way than to make him fall in love with his own reflection?

Such is the myth of Narcissus, who will be ruined by his love for his own mirror image.

Narcissism, accordingly, is an unhealthy relationship with the self. What narcissists are in love with is the reflection of themselves in flat mirrors and in our world, screens.

Often, by conventional standards, such people in our world look highly prosperous. They are business tycoons, social media barons, or politicians.

The reason is simple: lacking healthy self-esteem, they seek external validation and revel in the envy and admiration reflected in others' eyes. Naturally, the well of their motivation doesn’t dry up. They can outcompete anyone with a healthy sense of self who doesn’t need to be at the top of the hierarchy to feel like a worthy being. You are not your achievements.

(Btw, this is what I tell myself too when wondering why I do not have that drive to have a grand career or to work 80 hours a week to escape the permanent underclass).

While our world has recently given us the first trillionaire, the world of Fullmetal Alchemist gave birth to a wannabe God.

The main antagonist is a homunculus, a being created by alchemy, going by the name Father. Thanks to the blood he receives from a slave and a dirty little trick, he manages to assume human form.

He haughtily looks down on humans, decrying them as pathetic, and to further put distance between himself and them, decides to rid himself of all his desires, aka the seven deadly sins (gluttony, envy, greed, etc.). Not too dissimilar from the way Voldemort tried to achieve immortality.

Father embarks on a journey to become a perfect being, powerful, in other words, a God. The best way to become one is to eat one, and after succeeding in that, Father is still not satisfied.

Ultimately, the pathetic creatures weren’t the humans. It was this Homunculus who didn’t realize that he was empty. All he had was his want to want. Once he had it all, there was nothing left. No more power to grab.

For a short moment, he was at the pinnacle. Yet, before he had to confront the abyss, he was toppled by a group of imperfect humans banding together for the greater good. He is thrown ultimately into the nothingness.

To his detriment, or perhaps fortune, Clavicular has reached no such apex. He walked a runway show and inspired countless documentaries, even being interviewed on a YouTube Channel called “Channel 5” (not related to TV broadcast). Still, the maxxing continues as his journey knows no end.

Byung-Chul Han explained in psychopolitics that there is no end to what the subject can optimize under the regime of constant self-optimization. We all become projects to be managed by ourselves.

Clav is just taking this logic to an extreme end. His entire raison d’etre is maximizing his “Sexual Market Value”. Asking the posterchild why he follows this path is as pointless as asking why companies ought to maximize their profits or investors their ROI.

He’s but a little capitalist managing his own bodily capital in pursuit of higher exchange value - to use the Marxist term.

Erich Fromm would have called him a marketing character. A personality structure that arose as a rational response to a society governed by markets. The marketing character does not introspect and find themselves. They ask, "Who do you want me to be?" And serve.

For him, it was a sign of a crisis turning humans into selfless tools, lacking any authentic identity. As much as they might shape their outer appearance and even their “personality,” the inner lives remain a barren wasteland.

The modern versions of this type turn to dataism as their religion, collecting endless data points, flattening themselves into graphs and charts, competing in a sport they can never win.

They live in a world where everything needs to have a defined output. It explains how people like Clav cannot fathom going on a date without streaming it.

What’s the ROI in that?

The ROI of likes, engagement, chatter, the money, the (mostly) men cheering in the comments. Everything is performance, everything is appearance to a man like that.

"The achievement subject develops auto-aggression that often enoug escalates into violence of self-destruction.”

Byung-Chul Han

There is no genuine friendship if all one asks is: what is in this for me. No accepting others as fellow men, only the constant threat of others beating him in the game of “mogging.”

It’s no coincidence that the media eats it up whenever Clav is confronted with a man who, by normal standards, is undoubtedly more handsome than he is - even without cringe-posting their 17-step method and skincare routine.

“The men who builds his identity on mogging others, lives in permanent threat of being mogged.”

Folks of Yore

In a hierarchical view of men, there is no win-win.

If anything, he has set up a lose-lose structure as his self-worth hinges on factors beyond his control. All he has is his outer appearance. The inside not worth contemplation.

You’re probably thinking, so what, I’d never go as far as that. Still, in less extreme ways, we all (ok maybe you are the exception) have a tendency to seek external validation. The path we chose might differ: monetary success, climbing the career ladder, accumulating power, status…It could be buying whatever is trending, or posting rage bait to at least trigger reactions.

I’ll be the first to admit not being immune to trying to prop up my self-worth with external surrogates. When I was young and dumb(er) male validation was one such attempt. Not so dissimilar from maximizing sexual market value. I wore high heels, short skirts I had to pull down every few seconds, and fake lashes.

I made my fair share of conquests - or was used by another to expand their body count - that is in the eye of the beholder. Needless to say, the goal of feeling better about myself was not achieved.

The thrill was there, but nothing remained. What followed was just reinforced emptiness. No fulfillment, just another person on the hedonic treadmill, running from the existential darkness.

I eventually snapped out of it when I started studying something I actually cared about and found other meaningful activities to engage in. My goals changed, and so did I.

“The goals we work on also work on us.”

Brad Stultberg

While living in Japan, my strategy shifted to career. I flew to glamorous conferences across the world, cried in a toilet stall after learning of my grandma's death, only to be told by a boss to "get my shit together" and go on to record crypto bros droning on about "freedom".

My outer life looked exciting: fancy drinks, paid trips, interesting people. Yet this too grew stale. The distractions kept me from confronting the lack I felt. I was escaping into business. Eventually, I had to admit: I was not made for chasing a grand career.

I wondered if something was wrong with me.

It was around that time that I picked up The Courage to Be Disliked by Kishimi and Koga.

Building on Adler's philosophy, they posit that we can all choose to be happy (or perhaps we should say content, because happiness carries a lot of weight in Western Culture and is just an ephemeral sensation).

Unhappy (or discontent, as Freud would put it) people simply have the wrong goals. They seek approval by others, recognition, being perceived as if not virtuous (because this does not translate quickly on the feed), at least as hot.

Clav is one such person, in pursuit of rising the ranks in the perpetual competition of all against all. Yet, in doing so, he is still living under the regime of others' expectations.

"When you only seek recognition from others and only care about how others perceive you, you end up living the life of other people.”

Kishima and Koga

Kierkegaard had a name for such a state: despair of not becoming the self you ought to be. His antidote was Christianity, not an easy sell in the modern day. *Also, quite unclear whether this choice made him very happy in the end.

Fortunately, Kishima and Koga have more practical advice: focus on human relations without expecting ROI.

“If one really has a feeling of contribution, one no longer will have any need for recognition from others.”

It’s by perceiving ourselves as useful for others that we can experience self-worth. Their worldview is one in which all humans have value, regardless of their achievements, which, in turn, allows anyone to accept themselves as valuable and, therefore, realize that their presence is worthy.

Such a person’s self-worth cannot be impacted by another being more successful or, God forbid, looking better. They can help selflessly because the act itself already provides them with the reassurance and satisfaction they seek.

They don’t need to maximize their looks because that, again, means adhering to others’ expectations. The path of maximizing leads not to a happy place.

Take the latest Clavicular news. After getting a nose job, he’s reaping what he sowed: bullying from his audience that only cares about aesthetics.

I doubt he’ll find it in himself (whatever is in there anyway) and will just continue on the path of “ascending” to the infamy of celebrities overdoing the plastic surgeries. He built his identity on maximizing. Now he is trapped in it.

There is truly nothing new. We just find new insidious ways of telling each other how deficient we are, inspiring each other to “maximize” towards a goal we can never reach, on a path that leads nowhere near happiness.

Don't be like that.

Thanks for reading 💚

I am glad to report that I have found a new interest: trad-wife fiction. So expect no more looks-maxxing think pieces from me.

It started to appear a pointless exercise to write about random stuff on my mind, when I had so much bigger things to worry about: namely, financial instability.

Turns out it's a b*tch - and there's very little one can do to control it. Freelancing for web3 projects has gotten even worse than it used to be. It's not news that paying freelancers is, by some, considered optional, particularly when your entity is in an offshore location, and freelancers have little legal recourse.

I, too, have been there. Yet little did I know that the experience of chasing late payments for months on end is equally distressing. It doesn't help that AI has made finding paid writing work much harder. Not because the AI'd be writing equally compelling posts. It's simply used in callous attempts to force writers to lower their (salary) expectations.

Or worse, to train custom AI models and be complicit in further hits to their livelihood.

The bear market and lack of sensible treasury management might be to blame too, what do I know. It's not like contractors are owed any explanations, amirite?

When it rains, it pours, and at some point, I had three clients I was chasing after to get paid. I am still waiting for one payment for work delivered from January to February. How nice is that?

The uncertainty did little for my mental health. As the Germans say, a misfortune seldom arrives alone. With my cognitive resources depleted, an innocuous click on the wrong transaction link drained one of my wallets.

In hindsight, I could have avoided this, but I am just human. I had so much shit on my mind, I simply had no space to be as distrusting as I should have been in that very moment. I was busy trying not to go insane, so I gave myself some grace for acting dumb in that one second.

I admit, at first it was a shock. There went all the NFTs and crypto associated with my public ENS.

RIP. May it make the attackers happy.

Instead of writing a lengthy X article about my experience, I just let it be. I could have used the funds in that very moment as member of the proletariat.

Alas, I was thrown back onto myself. An expensive lesson, another milestone in the "working full-time in crypto" journey.

A realization that it'd all been built on sand, that onchain history of mine. May it lead to a good place one day.

Being self-sovereign was never for me.

A big part of my identity rests on what I am to others: a daughter, a big sister, a good friend, a nice neighbor. Materialistic goods or onchain achievements have contributed very little to the bundle of narratives I call myself.

Yet, even with the most Zen Buddhist aspirations, in late-stage capitalism, not earning money is simply not an option. Unless you sit on a wealth of assets, where capital just magically accrues.

I never had enough for yield farming to secure my livelihood, and with the entire fallout from the Resolv Labs exploit, I doubt I'd even put my life savings into DeFi.

All this to say, work's been super annoying, the need to earn money is such a pain, and it's been stressing me out so much my eczema made a comeback (so the dermatologist said, who also recommended reducing stress - if only that was so easy).

There is no escaping materialism.

I still spent time writing, but it wasn't for me anymore. It was dreadful, it lacked meaning, and I'd lost sight of the spark that usually pushed me beyond the discomfort of the blank page, through the dizziness of conflicting ideas.

I wrote perfunctorily, typed sentences about tokenization, XRP, and any other "high-ranking" keywords I couldn't care less for.

I wrote cover letters for positions I didn't feel I actually wanted, but seemed to offer relief from the looming threat of not having any income, not for my own failings, but for others' unwillingness. Culpable once again of trusting people, where perhaps I shouldn't.

List of jobs I've considered

• undertaker but for pets

• staff at a local food truck

• secretary for a bio-gas company

• customer service for a company managing claims with their vehicle fleets

• first aid course teacher

• optician

• hearing aid technician

• household aid

• train driver (at least can't take wrong turns there)

• receptionist at a concert hall

Not a healthy place to be operating from.

I think my soul was rescued by the fact that my social life has been great, and my perpetual singledom has come to an end. The casual coffee-and-cake dates with friends, the evenings on the sofa trying to learn medical Latin vocabulary with him, became my respite from the heaviness my existence had assumed.

These moments were effortless.

I didn't need to be a certain accomplished someone; I could be me, and that was enough. Even things done to prepare for visits, such as cycling through a storm to the farther-away market to get the better chicken to cook for dinner, felt less effortful.

Similarly, the herding of cats that it is at times to keep a local book club running doesn't feel nearly as effortful as chasing work.

Visiting my parents, even when exhausted and unsure whether I can handle them saying: "I'm proud of how you manage your life..." When I feel all but as if I've got my shit together at all 90% of the time. The rest of the time, I'm just giving in to delusion.

I try very hard to be a self-reliant, empowered woman; still, I can't help but occasionally dream of a provider husband. Not because I want to laze around or embrace my soft girl era.

I'd just like to find out what I could create or dedicate myself to if I weren't forced to pour much of my energy into what often feels like meaningless work, to make money. Because somehow that's what we all ought to do with our lives.

In the wise words of the great Cobie: It's all a great scam.

Through it all, I wrote. I wrote all those words, forcing myself to continue in a desperate attempt to avoid the cliff.

The work became heavy. Imbued with my livelihood attached to it. The worst place to be in for something I used to love.

The fear created necessity. I had to try hard to coerce myself into continuing, publishing stuff. Quickly after it went live, I had already forgotten what it was about.

By making it important and serious, she deprived it of its lightness and it became forced, laboured, overdone.

Milan Kundera: The unbearable lightness of being

Then I stumbled on a podcast where they discussed the point of trying hard, and asked why certain hard things don't feel effortful.

Effortless effort was a phrase they used to describe hour-long meditation, hard workouts, or a week-long sugar fast.

The great differentiator they identified was whether the effort sprang from a place of fear or love.

Fear kills the lightness. The joy.

Just what happened to me. I had stopped feeling a connection with the words I typed. I had let fear overtake.

Sounds obvious. I had let fear take something from me, which had been a great source of... what Marx would deem expression of my species being.

My creative force, an attempt to make sense of the experience of living through "unprecedented times" , a way to learn and pass on what I found, to feed my soul, and to hit back at the alienation.

In a world where billionaires pride themselves on - and encourage others to not have - introspection, maybe putting my own thoughts into words is a small act of protest.

The inner lives, they cannot take from you unless you offer it up. Don't.

For my part, I decided I should reclaim writing for myself in my leisure time.

Rediscover the joy I used to derive from language, to the point of picking a linguistics major when the management orientation would have been a much safer bet.

I started picking my vocabulary cards up again, found a YouTube channel of a professor explaining formal English words, and more frequently caught myself when letting endless scrolling of job listings fuel the despair.

The rational mind whispering: It's so over. This market is not for the faint-hearted.

In those moments, I unplugged the router and went to lie outside in the grass looking at the sky. Observing the birds, trying to take in all the details to forget myself and my pathetic worries. (On the grand scheme of the universe)

It worked. It helped create in me the space I needed to sit down, take up a pen, and scribble what would turn into this essay into my notebook.

To be engrossed in something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind

Annie Lamott: Bird by Bird

A few months ago, when I started driving lessons, fear was always at the back of my mind. It didn't help that I'd done the math to know that even if I hit a kid at 30km/h, it could have deadly consequences.

Speed was my biggest enemy until it wasn't, because I'd learned to just do it scared, as they say, and to tell myself I'd never be safer while driving than with a professional instructor in the passenger seat.

I am still unsure what the point is of needing to drive 130km/h on the Autobahn, and the one time I rode at 200km/h just to get a sense for it, my mind went to the place of: if I sneeze, we're both dead.

The fear is there, but it's probably a healthier amount now. Keeping me on my toes.

The fear of hitting rock bottom financially (again) still persists. Yet, I also know that I've been in worse spots.

And I'm learning to deal with it. There's a reason Maslow considered safety second-highest on the pyramid of needs.

Perhaps, that safety is also psychological.

I feel safe in my being, even if my professional future is all but.

I tell myself, in the worst case, I'll just go back to working in retail or hospitality. At least there's no need to chase clients there to get paid.

I don't want fear to take the things I love from me. Even if these words are just another scream into the void, for me, it wasn't pointless.

"Without being melodramatic, I don't know how anyone can bear to live at the moment

Adam Philips on the Philosophy for Our Times podcast.

Thanks for reading 💚

All the images I've found on Pinterest.

Another winter evening in another town with a lot of water and wind. A couple steps out of a bar, wrapped in layers of clothing, hands in gloves and pockets, skin slightly red from the sudden exposure to the weather, or perhaps it’s blushing at the thought of what could be. In the LED light of the Irish Pub’s sign opposite, he leans down to find her mouth, tasting the leftover sweetness of her cocktail.

From the outside, these moments from memory look like the start of very similar stories. If I had worn an all-tracking recording device on my neck, it might have stored them with the same label. I have no way of knowing, but biomechanical readings could be the same, but in my mind, the experience was all but alike.

The first was the start of a short, intense romantic relationship that was ripped apart by the pandemic. The second was a bumble date where the kiss felt more like checking off another box on my to-do list, leading me to decline an invitation to his hotel. A few minutes later, I stood in the freezing cold, trying to survive the 40 minutes until my next train. The next day, he’d blocked and deleted our chats - the anticlimactic end to a week-long exchange.

Anyway, why bring this up here? Because memory isn’t just data, it’s meaning and deeply personal. Still, it has become yet another realm that tech bros want to get into without ever pondering the consequences.

For tech bros, a dream come true. Surveillance once again sold as a supposed fix for a human shortcoming: our memory’s inaccuracy and incompleteness. Never lose a memory again; go back to the highlights of your life later as a spectator with a front-row seat. Direct access to your memory that’d otherwise require a Proustian flashback, notoriously hard to trigger intentionally. What is outside our control = worth eradicating.

When a friend sent me a deck to a startup in the realm of recording all your memories so you don’t have to use your own brain space - this I read in the subtext, it was not actually there - the humanist in me wanted to smash her face against a concrete wall.

Does the Black Mirror-esque vision not give them a creeping sense of doubt? Apparently not in a world where we sell AI-avatars of deceased ones, so we will never have to deal with real loss again, wrapped in a blanket of denial, fuelled by a replication of the deceased we continue talking to in a semblance of love.

Is this not more about us than them? A lil narcissistic to force our elders to spend their last days speaking their thoughts into a machine?

Is that real love? Kierkegaard would like a word. In his view, our relation to the deceased is the purest form of it, as it does not evoke any reciprocity. Once we have AI avatars of the dead, this idea crumbles.

Whether it’s honoring or disgracing the dead’s memory does not factor into the calculation of such startups. Neither does the question of: What does it say about your view of humans?

Isn’t memory one of the most intimate things we have? Isn’t it up to us to keep our loved ones alive, to remember them, to rely on other humans to continue keeping us alive in their stories?

Perhaps these builders never once considered that forgetting is human and that their desire to outsource and control certain things is yet another flimsy attempt at grasping the metaphysical, which might forever transcend their pathetic minds.

In a world where all of us record every single moment, and certain people are already damn close to it, what happens to us?

Biography might not be identity, but memory sure contributes a large chunk to how we view ourselves, the narrative we have of who we are and how we got here.

Remembering is an inward process, as the German word for it, er-innern, suggests. What happens to us if it becomes a process of consumption instead? Wouldn’t that rob us of a fundamental piece of ourselves?

If I were to be presented with an accurate depiction of all the horrible experiences I went through in relationships with the wrong men, I’d likely never go on a date again. I’d never experience the sweet anguish of falling for someone without knowing whether it’s reciprocated again. I might turn into a version of the underground man, pushing away all that could hurt, justifying it with the past pain.

We forget the hardship of new beginnings, the hurt caused by past relationships, and the awkwardness of learning something from scratch. We view the past through rose-tinted glasses, so much so that even months of heightened financial distress suddenly take on a glow. The glow reminds us of how far we’ve come, strengthening our resilience.

Not good enough for the tech elite. They want to dominate it all, root out the seeming imperfections in pursuit of “perfect memory”.

A Faustaian bargain.

The more fleeting the moment, the bigger the drive to capture it. Ironically, the endeavor usually fails, leaving you with a failed picture and no actual memory thereof, since you were busy trying to take a pic or video instead of just using your eyes and ears to experience. A quixotic quest.

From there, the assumption isn’t too far off that the more we archive, the less we might actually be able to actively recall. What a device that constantly surveils us would do for this, unsure. The lingering sense that someone else does the documenting might simply lead to even more scattered attention. After all, anything is archived no matter what.

The next logical step: we just stop bother remembering altogether. After all, the machine can do it for us, right? What’s that if not forgetting?

We amputate our cognitive functions, we lock ourselves in the glass cage of technology, and delight at our own brain rot.

What if forgetting happens at collective levels, though?

In her 1994 book Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa asks: What would happen if things disappeared from the memories of a large part of society?

Naomi (@naomiii) cast on Farcaster

Looking forward to reading memory police in its original language. 😍

Farcaster

The protagonist, a novelist, lives on an island where exactly that happens. Her mother, we learn early on, had been taken by the memory police because she retained the ability to remember. This hasn’t been passed on to her daughter, who goes on living her life, facing the disappearances stoically, as just another fact of life.

“It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing one by one.”

Yoko Ogawa - Memory Police

Eventually, she decides to hide her editor R. (who also remembers) at her house in a small, hidden room she built with an old friend. Over the course of the book, more and more things disappear, and the editor tries to halt the impoverishment of the lead characters’ souls through talking to them about items that have been lost.

“I was sure that any memories that remained inside him would be very much alive, so different from my own, which were few in number and very pale-sodden flower petals sinking into the waves of the ashes at the bottom of the incinerator.”

Yoko Ogawa - Memory Police

Throughout the entire novel, we never learn why things disappear. We never learn whether any overarching ideology exists or what drives the memory police. We can only guess.

One of the most puzzling elements is that… It’s never clarified whether things actually disappear or whether they’ve just lost their meaning. In one scene, the protagonist sees a woman wearing an item on her head, which she correctly identifies as a hat… even though hats have technically disappeared. She also recognizes a bird-like creature after its supposed disappearance years ago.

“But they’re invisible, aren’t they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed.”

Yoko Ogawa - Memory Police

Things don’t have to actually disappear; we just have to lose relation to them, and they become obsolete for our brains. An increase in blind spots until we’re cornered by darkness.

Not so dissimilar from the way the rage economy is short-circuiting people’s brains. Heightened stress over time shrinks the hippocampus, thereby worsening memory, focus, and concentration.

Ogawa’s book is often pitched as a dystopia up there with Orwell’s 1984, but it feels very different in its emphasis on the mundane, the fabric that makes up our lives, which remains least prominent in our minds. It’s this dedication to the calm, everyday life that feels so inappropriate in the face of the disappearances.

As you scour the internet for different people’s analyses of it, you’ll often come across those interpreting it as a fable of living under totalitarianism. Others view the disappearances as a reminder of wartime, the slow fading of what makes us us.

It’s hard to dismiss the similarities between the hiding of the editor, R., and Ogawa’s professed temporary obsession with the story of Ann Frank. Yet, totalitarianism and war don’t entirely explain it all either.

Another line of thought relies on Shinto, the Japanese nature religion, not far from animism, which views the natural world as inhabited by very much alive spirits, an idea familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Ghibli movie.

This life force assumes that we’re all connected and should move toward creating. In her fable, the disappearances outpace new creations, destroying any equilibrium. But unlike in Princess Mononoke, there’s not even a good reason for the destruction (Lady Eboshi is not an entirely evil person, providing homes and protection to outcasts, and the complexity of Ghibli antagonists)

I reckon there’s a direct line one can draw from this dynamic of destruction and creation to our own memories. If we do not experience things ourselves, we rob ourselves of future memories, eventually draining ourselves of the ability to creatively use them.

There’s an episode of Mushishi that explores memory and draws a parallel to this. It follows Ginko, the protagonist who deals with Mushi (parasites that are invisible to most, a different life form, very shinto) as he comes upon a young boy, Kaji, consulting him on his mother, Sayo’s, memory loss.

After Ginko observes the mother for a while, he identifies the Mushi as Kagedama. A mushi that eats memories, starting with the least important ones, which explains her forgetting distant relatives’ names or what a sneeze was.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to rid herself of the Mushi, so Ginko suggests that the best she can do is continue making new memories every day, to keep as much as possible of her current memories alive.

A few years later, Ginko checks in on them. After discovering that her husband had started a new family in a nearby town, Sayo fell into a deep slumber, leaving her with barely any memories. She’s now making new memories every day, but waking without them the next.

In a sense, she has reached a state of blissful happiness. The happiness of Nietzsche’s beast.

“Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than any beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness.

F. Nietzsche - On the use and abuse of the history of life

The happiness some chase by drinking themselves to oblivion, taking drugs, in an attempt to reach a sense of freedom, freed from one’s own self-awareness, and memories. Yet, we all know the saying that “I drink to drown my bad memories, but those mfers know how to swim.”

This shows that memory is messy, and the quest to store it all accurately is another tech bro utopia.

It’s also highly questionable whether any tech would really catch all there is to a memory…as any musician can tell you, there’s a moment when you learn a piece by heart, and it flows automatically, but stops to do so the second your cognition kicks in, asking, what’s next. Such muscle memory probably won’t be part of the archive of it all.

Even if it were, wouldn’t having everything and all stored for easy retrieval paralyze us?

In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.[…] He reasoned, that his immobility was a minimum price to pay. Now his perception and his memory were infallible.

Jorge Borges, Funes the Memorious

Funes, the character of Borges's short story, spends much of his time sitting in a dark room to avoid information overload. He’s incapable of getting up to much, immobilized, struggling to sleep, as “to sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world.”

With a memory so stuffed with details, a “garbage heap” as he calls it, he’s not achieved a perfect state for a human. Quite the opposite. As the narrator concludes his recollection of encountering this man, he postulates that Funes was likely incapable of thought.

“To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”

Borges gets to something that eludes the AI startups building perfect memory-capture machines. The necessity for us not to get tied up in too many details, to paint with rosy colors the hardships of the past, the forgetting of what didn’t matter, because the brain isn’t about quantity.

It’s about quality. Our memories carry what we need, not all we’ve ever experienced. The paralyzing effects Funes experiences aren’t too dissimilar from our frenzy to gather more and more information before taking action ahead of a big decision.

It feels good to do so; it suggests we’re moving toward the thing we want, but at the same time, it might mean we just never actually start doing the thing because we get so enamoured with the process of envisioning ourselves doing so and preparing.

The lack of perfect memory isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It allows us to creatively draw from what we’ve seen to use experiences in meaningful ways to guide our future. This wouldn’t be possible if what we had were a perfect collection of it all, perhaps with an AI to provide an interpretation on top.

Perhaps all of this storing personal history outside of our brains movement is another attempt to face the inevitability of death. The twisted desire to live on, not in the stories we tell each other, the ones passed on among humans, the narratives that slip even through the cracks of oppressive regimes, the small tokens we hold onto to remind us of another we cared for.

"He has always said that we exist as long as someone remembers us."

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Shadow of the Wind

But how do you want to be remembered? As a digital garbage heap of the stuff you once posted online? As an archive of what an AI pendant might capture in your body’s reaction data, and with its sensors?

I doubt it. I’ll go out on a limb and assume that what we want to be remembered as isn’t any of that. It’s way more human, more on the emotional level, the impact we’ve had, and the way we’ve been there for others. It’s not necessarily the highest high of superficial success we want to remain. It’s our essence.

This too shines through in one of the saddest Arias ever written: Dido’s Lament, in which she asks her lover to “remember me, but forget my fate,” as she is about to burn herself to death in despair, while Aeneas, her lover, sails away, unlikely to hear her plea, making the scene ever more harrowing to watch.

She doesn’t want him to remember the burning blaze her last cry is underlined by; she wants to be recalled as a lover, as a whole person, not as all the little things she did accurately retained.

She wants him to care because what is remembering another than to exercise our capacity to go beyond our own selfish bubble and use our mental capacity to keep the memory of someone else alive.

Now we’re to outsource that? No thanks.

It’s not just a question of yet another very human (supposedly flawed) act becoming mechanized; it’s also a potential hazard for living our lives unburdened by the shackles of the past archive.

Already now, they say what’s been uploaded to the internet will always be there, a silly joke from the past might at any point resurface to haunt us, completely negating the possibility that - god forbid - a person has changed.

In self-reliance, the American naturalist Emerson wrote that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,” condemning our tendency to judge others based on whether they’ve stayed consistent in judgment. Why hold ourselves to what we said in the past when today is a new day, and we’re not the same; we’ve learned a thing or two, leading us to revise.

It doesn’t help that, when a prominent figure backtracks on what they stood for, outrage often ensues. The mob is unforgiving of the signs of betrayal by a beloved popculture icon.

And if you still do, you risk angering or losing your audience.

In German history, there’s one prominent author illustrating this conundrum: Thomas Mann. During World War 1, he excelled as a writer in the service of the nationalist cause, going so far as to describe the war as a necessary cleansing act that would lead to a great German renaissance.

The longer the war lasted, the more soldiers fell, the more he had to re-interpret his previous ideas. Eventually, Mann would become an outspoken advocate for democracy.

The inner fight he must have gone through is captured in his monumental work, Magic Mountain, in the shape of two characters in a mental asylum trying to convince the protagonist, Hans Castorp, of their political leanings. In the beginning, he’s a staunch opponent of the world laid out by Lodovico Settembrini, who speaks in favor of democracy.

By the time this feud reaches its climax in a direct duel with the opposing worldview embodied by the nationalist Leo Napta, our protagonist - and, we suspect, the author himself - has come around to favor democracy, not least because the character has better arguments and is more likable.

During World War 2, Mann emigrated to the US, from where he supported the Allies’ cause by recording speeches to his fellow Germans appealing to their better senses, and arguing that the destruction even of his beloved Lübck was something they’d brought onto themselves, and was to be welcome if it meant ending the barbarities.

When Mann visited Germany after the war, his welcome ranged from cold reserve to outright hostility. One did not appreciate his referring to the Germans as a crowd of “senseless killers” who, amidst the depravities they committed, shouldn’t be surprised that Western civilization had no recourse but harsh measures.

It was a direct attack on the consciousness of a people who found solace in viewing themselves as having been seduced and suffered in consequence. Needless to say, they had little to counter, and their frustration led them to lash out at the one who delivered it.

It took many decades for Thomas Mann’s work and political deeds to be fully appreciated back home. Only in the last 10, 15 years has the affect-driven dislike been disappearing, giving way to a newfound appreciation for a great author. Perhaps we’ve finally forgiven his ruthless reckoning, or perhaps we’ve just forgotten why the dislike existed in the first place.

Either way, in time for his 150th anniversary, we were ready to embrace the whole, republishing many of his novels, and re-evaluating his political messages, the speeches he delivered from exile, which did not stay abstract but were deeply personal, delivered by someone who loved his country, afraid of what it had turned into.

The lesson here? We need distance at times to reinterpret our memories and revise how we view others and ourselves. For a person in the public eye, changing what they stand for might mean losing their standing, and they might not live long enough to witness their own re-establishment. Unmistakeably, it was the right thing to do for Mann, even if the German public didn’t appreciate it back then.

50 years forward, and we celebrate him. Our memory hasn’t vanished; we’ve just retold it, gained distance, and let go of the resentment.

I wonder how many like Mann are afraid of doing what he did, changing their political leanings publicly in the internet age, because it means ostracism. Even without perfect recording devices, the internet mob is ruthless.

Imagine if we kept an immaculate track record of all we did in the past, and all that others said. They sell it to us as "freedom,” but to me it seems just another form of locking ourselves into ever-narrower cages.

If there’s no more forgetting, no more re-interpreting, we might find ourselves stuck in a glass cage that keeps us from transforming. A glass cage that makes forgiveness near impossible, as it constantly reminds us of what others did, how we felt back then, and that there’s really no point in reversing course now.

For Hannah Arendt, forgiveness was the foundation of action, as it is the only tool that alleviates the burden of the irreversibility of consequences. A world of perfectly captured memories with no leeway for human re-interpretation is an unforgiving, unfree world.

To be remembered is to be loved.

Why would we want to give that up?

Thanks for reading 💚

It's a messy process trying to mend these individual ingredients into a cohesive whole that sticks together. Sure, there are kneading machines, but I'm not rich enough, nor does my once-a-year heavy baking commitment warrant it.

It's the season I'm fully committed to handwork.

Apparently, Heidegger was a big hand guy, he loved writing about the importance of using them, already criticizing using typewriters instead of pen and paper, as they abstract us from the movements that form our letters.

Or so I deduce based on my secondary readings of Heidegger (I just read his essay about technology first-hand), thrown at me by Byung-Chul Han, who treats Heidegger's hand fetish in an essay that's been living in my head rent-free for years now. To learn the grammatical rules and quirks of a language, the best way is to write. For languages like Japanese with lots of Kanji, this is even more true.

And yet, in pursuit of efficiency (and or convenience and laziness) keyboards are more often becoming the prime way even for kids to write. I'm not saying this is the main reason for the literacy crisis, but it sure doesn't help.

All of us, we're guilty of this too. Who here is still writing their notes on paper? In the supermarket, most shopping lists are in note-taking apps, letters replaced by lengthy WhatsApp voice messages when even the process of typing has become too arduous.

Do you remember the things you typed this way?

I mostly don't. I've gone back a few years to write down my notes on actual paper notebooks, among other things, to get away from screens in my leisure time, and for the sense of accomplishment and the occasional flow state thus triggered.

Leuchtturm 1917's slogan is "Thinking with the hand".

They even have a dedicated section on their website explaining this, quoting Immanuel Kant, who said that the hand was the window to the soul.

For Heidegger too, thinking was handwork, the work we're constantly nudged to do less of.

Not sure how to start an email? Just ask the suggest feature.

Not sure what to do with the leftovers in the fridge?

Just ask ChatGPT... When really the answer is usually throwing them all in the oven + cheese, a soup, or a variety of fried noodles/rice.

No personality? No problem. Claude can write your Hinge bio.

You create ever more bits and pieces this way, but what's missing is the sense of having had an impact, of having actually contributed.

For me, this is a constant struggle as a remote worker, where nearly 100% of outcomes come in abstracts, rarely tangible in my surroundings.

That's why getting a short excerpt of my writing printed in a CD booklet was a very happy moment. Seeing my name in print, on paper, next to a recording of two violin concerts I quite like... that's the dream, right?

When writing on paper, there's a physical sensation, a sort of feedback, the pen pressing against my middle finger, the empty page filling with words, the ink slowly moving from cartridge to paper, turning neuron impulses into blue on white-ish eco paper.

It's a sense of self-efficacy I'm missing in digital work. Sure, there are ways that a great essay does numbers and sparks conversations, a shitpost that gets lots of engagement... still, it feels flat.

Meanwhile, when trying to channel the warmth of my hands to get the ingredients of my baking endeavors to stick, I'm fully there. I feel the consistency changing, the butter doing its job as the adhesive... maybe even when I'm lucky, what Hartmut Rosa calls resonance, after an initial phase of despair over how proceeding according to the recipe didn't work - when finally I realize, I can just follow my intuition and form the half moon shapes one by one right between my hands, not on the table.

A lot of handwork when you've made nearly 1kg of dough. A dough that easily falls apart, only held together by butter and my manifestations, so that later it'll melt on the tongue.

This work requires what we call "Fingerspitzengefühl": finger tip feeling.

A great German word which slightly increases my sympathy towards Heidegger's view that it's the perfect language for philosophizing. You need Fingerspitzengefühl for handling delicate tasks from Christmas cookies, playing an instrument, or mediating heated discussions.

Funny enough, the finger tips are probably the body part getting the most action in modern man's life: swiping, typing, unlocking.

20th-century German philosophers did not see that coming, I bet. Chances are, neither did they consider cookies as a work for the modern remote worker to reassert a sense of self. After all, they lived in a time when the household remained firmly in the women's domain.

Certain household chores sure are better mechanized, from laundry to heating. Yet, when it comes to baking, I find a weird sense of solace in it. It's a nice way to bring something into the world that wasn't there before.

With just a few ingredients, some finger tip feeling, and contribution by the oven from a random assortment to eventual delightful smiles as the cookies melt on the tongues of their recipients. A lil brightness in this dark season.

It ain't much, but it's honest work.

A little sphere of influence I latch my sanity onto. Each cookie is shaped differently, by my fingers, a testament to my humanness, my individuality, my imperfection.

My kitchen: a mess. My fingernails are sticky from the dough and sugar I bathed the cookies in.

But not just the external has changed. It's also me. I've become a bit of a different person than who I was before this process. A bit fulfilled, a bit more energized, a bit less alienated.

What tech bros who tell us to just generate everything at the press of a button with our fingertips forget is: the reward from a task can only be reaped when we spend time and attention with it.

The empty space generated when my hands were occupied with the dough gave my mind room to think, and later on, as the cookies were in the oven, I started writing down in my notebook what would become this short essay. I understood something new.

Another way to say it in English is: comprehend... and guess what the root of this word is? It's Latin for "grasping," an act we usually perform with our hands. In German, it's even more obvious: begreifen (comprehend), greifen (grasp).

It's seemingly inefficient, and yet, it really is not.

If you think about it, most of the things that make life worthwhile are inefficient.

So screw that efficiency maximalism, and take the time to create something with your own hands, the mess, the path, the breaking out of the constant accelerationism..that's the point.

You might be surprised by how you feel afterwards.

Thanks for reading 💚

In case you too want to bake the cookies in question, here's the recipe. I used normal butter and was more generous with the spices as prescribed. Recipes are just a guideline after all.

They turned out quite delicious.

For why doing stuff with your hands is good for your brain, here's a nice video essay on that. In case you need more reasons.

Unhooked

You're the creator, but I am your master Frankenstein's Monster, Marry Shelley I don't know when exactly it happened. There's no specific moment I can point to. One day, I just woke up and realized I had an unhealthy relationship with my phone.

https://paragraph.com

One year later, and I've achieved what I set out to. My phone time consistently clocks below one hour a day, the amount of pictures I take has shrunk, and I'm not feeling that sense of nakedness, helplessness, inability to face the empty space of waiting, of just being in public.

I've been reading a book titled "Digital Depression" from a few years ago, which explores the impact of digital media consumption on our happiness (spoiler: not good). Happiness is a flimsy thing, and for all we know, it's pretty impossible to linger in that state forever. Nor is a direct pursuit of it likely to result in the desired state.

Nevertheless, of course, the more time you spend on platforms like Instagram (which was my poison of choice), the more you come to believe that you have to go lots of places, eat fancy foods, constantly be around good-looking people, and never forget to snap a pic of it to prove you were there.

Because "pics or it didn't happen." The joy of the moment experienced through the screen; evaluated later based on its success as "content".

Going through the world more often without my phone has opened my eyes to others' dependence, and also given me the ability to observe funny things.

It's like when you stop consuming alcohol and then realize how many people can't fathom such an existence, with reactions swinging between:

"Are you pregnant?" and "But life is hard enough and not very fun without. Therefore, you must not be fun." Starting arguments then about how Russians drink a lot of Vodka and yet have given rise to famously depressing, nihilist literature does little to refute such thinking.

(Kudos to the alcohol lobby, you've won many hearts and souls.)

Similar incredulous looks when you go meet people and then tell them you left your phone at home - like an insane person. Indeed. Very insane.

Yet, it's also freeing.

If you don't have a phone on you, there's no need to check and respond to messages. There's no need to "capture" the moment.

"Being available everywhere also means being at the mercy of others."

- Diefenbach & Ullrich in Digitale Depression

It allows you to just be.

A few days ago, I was sitting in a busy train station restaurant with a friend, and observed at least two people struggling with their tea bags. As is often the case in such places, when ordering tea, they'll bring you a cup of hot water and a pyramid tea bag, where the paper tag sticks to the actual tea bag. It's really easy to untangle that... if you use two hands.

The people in question did not. One of their hands was occupied with their phone, their eyes glued to it, which made for a funny impression as they tried to shake off that tag (unsuccessfully for a while) with one hand. Only once they moved their eyes to it - still a one-hand business, not very elegant - they managed.

I felt a weird kinship with another guy sitting in front of an empty coffee cup and, like me, just rawdogging reality. Staring straight into the void, the surroundings, maybe contemplating the purpose of life, or just counting the glasses displayed on the shelves over the bar counter. Who knows.

I have way more time to see my surroundings now. It's not always thrilling, but at least it gives me a better sense of real time passing and the small changes happening around me.

It's also opened up space to talk to random strangers I encounter in my daily life, from sales staff in the electronics market to people at a bus stop, fellow walkers I cross paths with on the fields, librarians, cashiers, and other people in supermarket queues...

None of these chats is remotely like an interaction on X. If anything, they restore a little of my faith in humanity.

Life's quite good with less FOMO, with less outsourcing of one's cognitive abilities to a device. The funny thing is, the less you interact, the less interesting the phone becomes.

My friends and family are aware that I'm not fast to respond, so they don't constantly text me. This then means when we meet, there's usually quite a bit to catch up on.

In return, when checking my phone, there are fewer notifications (ofc I also disabled all of them lol, so I do have to go directly to an app to check).

I don't conemn phones; I think they're a great invention. Maps are useful, so is the ability to tell your friends in real-time when your train is once again quite late. They just should not get in the way of us actually being present with the people we love and care about. Nor in the way of us giving our brain a real brain.

Or figuring out who we actually are, without the constant behavioral conditioning by an ecosystem of engineers whose sole purpose is to extract more of us in the service of Big Capital.

Going back to the cover image, some might feel alone in the world the second they disconnect. That's just because you've not learned to see all that's around you.

You're never really alone, even when walking across empty fields. There's always something or someone, a deer behind the bushes, a woodpecker in the tree crowns, a hare quickly jumping off as you approach, the blubbering of a small stream.

If you can't be alone, how can you be with others?

By cutting down my time on the phone, I have more time to focus on being with people, on the activities I care about, and that aren't necessarily good content, the dull staring into the woods.

My social life has not worsened—quite the opposite.

The Instagram algorithm has quickly replaced me in others' feeds; barely anyone ever asked about my disappearance.

The feed does not care about me, nor does it need me.

But I do want to know who I am without it and its constant allure.

I'm still on X - mostly for work - and Farcaster, but both are increasingly becoming boring to me. It might be the state of what's displayed on there, the gambling epidemic more broadly, and/or my realization that I have better things to spend my time on.

Thanks for reading. 💚

If you haven't watched the movie Sweet Bean, it's beautiful. I highly recommend it.

Cover: The Mirror by director Andrei Tarkovsky

In short, it's the epitome of North German weather, the kind everyone tells you is the reason for North Germans' inner coldness and lack of humour (both of which I'd refute).

It's cosy sitting inside, observing the crows flying back and forth between the increasingly bare branches of the trees, wondering what they're chatting about.

But it's Sunday, and my cake cravings aren't satisfied with the odd dry cookie I discovered at the back of my kitchen shelf.

The typical urban elite dweller in such moments would reach for their phone, open the delivery app of their choice, and get an other to put up with wind and weather. Couldn't be me.

Besides, I live in a small town where delivery options are limited, and the Cafes get by without offering such service. Even when living in bigger cities, I've not felt the need to order cake; it just seemed too ridiculous: a 5 EUR piece of cake + 4 EUR of delivery?!

Wrapped in two layers of clothing, complete with a rain jacket, hair kept in place by a hat, armed with an umbrella, I stepped out to venture to one of the few bakeries still open after 13:00 on a Sunday.

My field of vision limited to the 5-meter stretched out underneath the black edge of my umbrella, enough to avoid crashes, not enough to see how much distance I have left to cover. The changing direction of the wind tugging on the umbrella, requiring my full focus to try to angle it such that it would not break.

All five senses engaged to spot dangers, and break the raindrops' trajectory to avoid them hitting my glasses -- one of those things you realize when wearing glasses, rain on them is really not fun.

Sounds like a maximally unpleasant Sunday walk, right?

And yet, at some point, despite the annoyance caused by it, I also felt alive, asserting the edges of myself against the forces that are, and will outlast me, and probably the whole of humanity.

The gaze forced to look on the ground, observing only the next 5 steps ahead, weirdly meditative; and every time I decided to look ahead; surprised at how far I'd already got. The colorful leaves swimming in puddles, covered half in mud, entertaining enough.

Once inside the bakery, I was greeted by a great selection of cakes, among them my absolute favorite —a hit of joy that's impossible to replicate by endlessly scrolling through menu items.

Sure enough, you can get very unlucky during a Sunday bakery visit, but that's part of what makes it so rewarding when you don't.

On my way back, two rays of sunlight stole their way through the cover of clouds as if to bestow their gaze upon me as a little reward.

I bet the cake tasted a million times more delicious than if I had just ordered it to my doorstep.

The contrast between the wet, windy outdoors was the reason I could appreciate my candle-lit, warm apartment all the more after.

This goes against what the hedonists and pleasure maxis will tell you. They say we need to get rid of all inconvenience. They say, we'll all be happy once we are cocooned off into pleasure. Into never having to put up a little fight, into never facing any resistance.

Part of why Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World are so dystopian is that they drive this idea to an edge. The people in there don't have much discomfort to put up with; they can just sit in their salons surrounded by the fake family entertaining them through their screen systems or consume a bit of Soma to never feel bad again.

The trade-off? Robbing themselves of the negativity, they also rob themselves of the ability to feel true joy.

Is it any wonder that the chronic disease of our times is depression, even if we supposedly all chase happiness and have all the more tools to get it?

Depression isn't really about feeling sad. As Erich Fromm reminds us, it's a state of numbness, an inability to feel, a lack of motivation, a sense of having no connection with the world.

As such, the opposite, happiness, might not be as suggested, just never feeling bad; it is instead the ability to sense the ups and downs, and be resilient enough to cope with them.

Take the world of Psycho Pass, an anime set in future Japan, where people are presumably quite happy. Everyone has a Psycho Pass, measuring their emotional state in order to maximize their "well-being" and detect crime before it happens.

A society that has traded freedom for security.

Everyone whose Psycho Pass shows tendencies toward criminal ambitions is caught, and if the crime coefficient is too high, they are simply executed on the spot. So far, so good.

Enter Akane, a new investigator with a remarkably resilient Psycho Pass and her own sense of what's right and wrong. She does not simply obey the dominator (the system's guns that measure and execute).

Still, she quickly realizes that... people's crime coefficient also shoots up in traumatic situations—meaning, when they are overwhelmed by emotions such as terror or fear. There are countless cases in which she relies on her judgment instead of doing the easy thing: blowing up the supposed latent criminal (It's comical how the Sybil system figured that the best way to deal with criminals is to literally make them explode... how's that good for the mental health of everyone around?!)

It's not so dissimilar to Brave New World, with medication for those whose Psycho Pass is edging into a danger zone.

No wonder such a world gives rise to its own kind of villain: Makishima Shogo, a brilliant criminal, versed in classical literature, and set on unmasking the system that claims to want the best for people.

He realizes it creates shallow, empty beings, void of reflection and the ability to make their own value judgments.

Makishima rightly points out that the removal of all stress and discomfort is not, despite common belief, only virtuous.

"For some time researchers have understood that moderate stress has benifical effects. It boosts the immune system for example. Stress motivates and prepares us for action. It compels our body to survive."

- Shogo Makishima

Intuitively, we know this.

The moments we felt most accomplished were rarely those where we chose to maximize pleasure.

The memories we look back on with rose-colored glasses, while in the depths of it, were quite often not fun at all to be in. In hindsight, I can laugh at the small-minded one-man CEO who had to yell at the 25-year-old me when he ran out of arguments.

I chose the hard thing to do in that moment. To speak up for what I believed was right. It cost me my job, but at least I got to live on with my conscience intact.

In Psycho Pass, people are robbed of the hard decisions. They're told what job is most suitable to their emotional state, and who to marry. They've come to see it as a privilege, a comfort, with some wondering "how the hell did they manage in the old days."

There's no need to do hard things. And yet, while some live blissfully unaware of the cost incurred, the likes of Makishima, disappointed by what has been done to the human condition, rebel. In their own, cruel ways.

It's impossible not to feel sympathy for this villain, who's driven by despair over the loss of humanity and connection.

Not so dissimilar to the world we live in, where all our connections have been flattened into the same device. Messages to my mum living next to advertising push notifications.

It's very comfortable to send all those messages to all those people, to collect all those connections... deluding oneself into thinking one has a thriving social life, when what's often happening is a simulacrum of real connection.

We're still creatures of the realm of the real, embodied selves. As such, without occasionally getting out of the comfort zone to help them move, listen to their complaints about their on-/off relationship, get into passionate disagreements, and still stick through it... We'll not be rewarded with other significant others (as Alain de Botton puts it).

"We are lonely because we are refusing to accept as genuine those cheap, counterfeit images of friendship promoted by a sentimental world keen to disguise the challenges of real connection. Those who feel a lack of friendship most deeply may simply be those who cleave most intensely and sincerely to its genuine promises."

- Alain de Botton

Ease is not the goal, friction not the enemy.

The discomfort of opening up to someone new = the only way to ever achieve true communion.

"Without vulnerability, there can be no compassion or depending on another."

- John O' Donohue

It might be that the constant pursuit of ease, of frictionlessness, has caused the nostalgia epidemic, people longing for a past they've not lived.

Everything, everyone being available at a scroll.

No more need to think, to remember, to write yourself.

You can outsource all of that.

And then we wonder why the world online feels so fake.

Why is it that nothing really moves us anymore?

It might feel good in the moment, but in the long run, it's hurting us.

In an economy where everything constantly wants our attention, one of the hardest things to do is to opt out. To say no. To do nothing.

Because only then does the space open up to do meaningful things.

Often, these involve discomfort. Doing a hard thing.

It's the effort it takes to create something that makes it valuable.

This is why we admire musicians who play the hardest pieces seemingly effortlessly.

Imagine this entire essay was just spit out by an AI. How would you feel then?
It's the same question Bas Kast explores in his essay, trying to answer how to learn to love the ice baths of life.

He answers that he, as the author, wants the struggle for the words, the painstaking attempt to encroach on just the right phrase to express what he's feeling.

"It's the resistance and hurdles that make our lives valuable. They give us the chance to grow. They offer us a unique opportunity to show ourselves and the rest of the world what we're made of."

Bas Kast

Every writer will tell you, writing is not that much fun. It's hard to start, it's hard to keep at it, and it sucks reading your own writing later on and cringing at it.

But sometimes you are rewarded with that feeling of... resonance, of getting somewhere you did not foresee arriving.

Perhaps, the way to break through the glass wall between us and the world is discomfort.

It's the walks in the storm you persisted through, the sitting down in front of a blank page and pushing through, the feeling your fingers fall off holding while practicing the guitar, the stopping to wait for your own turn to speak, and instead listening with all your heart to a friend.

We're creatures of contrast.

Without resistance, how can we know where we end? How do we get a sense of making a difference?

If you're never in pain, you never know how good you have it living pain-free.

One of the funniest things to me is still the number of cars parked in front of gyms. People set on doing a hard thing, training their muscles, but they can't put up with the discomfort of cycling or walking there.

(I've lived plenty in non-car-centric areas)

In our chronically online age, there's one discomfort well worth putting up with: FOMO.

It's been one year since I radically reduced my screentime outside of work, removed Instagram from my phone, forced a 1-hour lock, and generally tried to train myself to engage in other activities instead.

I'm often asked how I manage to read so much. It's simple. I just do. It's a question of discipline, book availability, and of telling yourself you're the person who can do this.

Reading classics is hard. This year, I read Thomas Mann, and it took me about 400 pages to actually get into the story. I could have just thrown it out at that point, but I didn't, and now I regret nothing.

Another secret is not depleting your happiness hormones elsewhere.

As much as tech bros talk of abundance, they can't change our biological reality. If you've ever taken ecstasy, you know the highs followed by a slump. After all, when serotonin is released, it takes time to refill the tank.

Once dopamine has been spent on the joys of online shopping, the depleted brain will no longer feel able to read classic literature or engage with a difficult concept. You might look at the beauty of the world outside and feel nothing.

One aspect of the constant pleasure/comfort-maxing is certainly that one's resilience drastically declines. When you never do mildly uncomfortable things, the slightest inconvenience can push you over the edge.

According to my YouTube feed, the US, for example, has a road rage problem. I wouldn't be surprised if, in part, it's because people do not have much resilience to deal with slight discomfort anymore.

One doesn't have to go over the Atlantic either. Yesterday, as I was crossing (it was green for me), I nearly got hit by a car turning right into the street I was crossing. By all measures, drivers are not supposed to endanger pedestrians, and the rules are clear that when turning, you have to wait.

And yet, they nearly hit me and figured that... I must be the issue, honking at me. I could have struck back, but honestly, what's the point? I just walked on and let them be.

Maybe they just had a bad conversation with their boss and were in a horrible mood. Maybe their girlfriend just broke up with them. You never know what others are going through.

That's the thing I realized as I decided to spend less of my dopamine on scrolling and online shopping and instead chose to do the difficult, exposing myself to the discomfort of a walk in the rain, a tough philosophical read, quitting alcohol in a country with an alcohol problem.

I have the capacity to be more generous towards others in such moments, and even when bad things happen, I'm a bit better prepared.

The discomforts of pushing through get me a step closer to the freedom David Foster Wallace speaks of in his This is Water speech:

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

Without darkness, you can't see the stars.

Why would it be any different with the great joys and pleasures in life?

Thanks for reading

As a freelancer with medium income, I'm getting milked by the financial authorities via taxes, and have a big social contributions burden. 40 - 50% of my salary are easily spent on this.

At the same time, since it's always based on last year's income, even if I don't have any income for a few months this year, I still have to pre-pay the same amount every quarter - if lucky, I get what I overpaid back in 6 months, if not, much later.

There's zero flexibility in this. No acknowledgment of fluctuating income situations or the human behind. The typical bureaucratic monster from Kafka novels, the great scam of capitalism that it’d rid us of such bureaucracy. It’s just created this labyrinth of procedures where humans don’t matter. Only numbers do.

I wouldn’t mind paying taxes this much if there were at least a little more flexibility in payment schedules/acknowledgment of income fluctuations, and more influence on how they’d be used…More participatory democracy, and not those on the top deciding stuff for people in situations they’ve not even got the decency to try and empathize with.

You look to politicians who tell you to "work harder" and that the fight for fairness is between the "have-nots" and those "having even less" - squarely avoiding the topic of the inequality between the rich and the rest.

Fairness to them is pitting those at the bottom against those still clinging to the cliff. Like the rabbits in the Aesop fable, who lived in fear and therefore decided to commit suicide, only to realize that, as they approached the lake, there were frogs in fear of them.

This gave them the spirit to continue living—a familiar trope: finding someone even lower to kick down on to feel a bit better yourself. Although this might not last for long because, in the end, all we want is recognition and a sense of having an impact on the conditions we live under.

I used to think that maybe crypto would be the place for enabling such things. I don't feel so anymore. All we seem to do is drive the dehumanization, losing sight of the people behind the wallets, probably why AI agents became such a compelling thing, the prospect of never dealing with humans again… This tech bro idea that humans just present unnecessary friction for the fluid functioning… Feelings not to be considered because, one can’t measure them.

“the idea that we need to overcome failings of humanness by becoming objective, every thing created fairly, equally… It’s getting rid of passion, of all the things we’re told are primitive and it scares me.”

Terry Gilliam

Sure, some projects don't do it...

However, generally speaking, crypto focuses largely on individuals who are already doing well for themselves and are secure enough, rather than on the majority of people living paycheck to paycheck under precarious economic conditions. That’s people who live in fear… not of missing out, of the next letter from the financial authority, of an unexpected bigger expense, of loss of their livelihoods..

We don’t seem to have grasped this concept at all, considering that our best idea now is to say that “low-risk DeFi” is all that is needed to onboard the masses.

Do you really think those 4% over a year on the $200 they can spare means anything at all?!

It's a drip on a hot stone when inflation easily outpaces that. It's again an offer most attractive to people with a lot of spare cash.

If you're desperate, you'll be more enticed to gamble.

Even I feel the allure of it, the idea that, hey imagine if I turned this $200 into $20,000. I could pay off student debt, and for once have some breathing room, not fear the next letter from the financial authority or a health incident. Such amounts, if you go by CT, are a joke.

They’re not for the grand majority of humans living on earth.

So I have all this anger and frustration, but nowhere to take it.

Crypto has squarely failed to provide a compelling vision for actual human empowerment to me. Its political mission seems largely an attempt to escape politics altogether by turning each interaction into a transaction, the only visible ideology: money, the benevolent dictator: the smart contracts ’ unforgiving rule.

I’m still doing my little talks, trying to get at least a few people to care, although, it of course is always hard to explain to someone why they ought to care about more than just number go up once they’ve become so estranged from themselves, they don’t even know who they are outside of a personal brand & job.

Why care about other people? Why about the material conditions shaping all our lives? Why should crypto deal with it when a few of us could make a shit ton of money instead by onboarding BlackRock? Why care about experimenting with non-financial apps when everything is money?

I can’t give a logical argument. If the cost of what we do is morality, and utopia for the few at the cost of dystopia for the rest, I don't want it.

I feel that as an industry, we’re failing to live up to what we could be. We’re treading the path prepared by TradFi, risking becoming just another sector of the behemoth we set out to slay. (Or at least be a shadow to). We’re also on a good path to further become alienated, and miserable, all in the service of what exactly?

In a world of rage-bait marketing, we should ask ourselves more often whether we aren't using our rage for the wrong things, vain arguments, cheap engagement farming when really... There are more fundamental things to be angry about. Much bigger, more significant things.

Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best I can do to try and shape my conditions is to become active locally, outside of crypto.

I just needed to get this out of my system.

Thanks for reading

Every once in a while, you watch an anime, and still in the midst of it, you mourn that you'll never be able to experience it for the first time again. But if the story is complex enough, at least you get further re-watches during which you might notice entirely new things. Attack on Titan has been such an anime for me, with each encounter bringing new details to light.

Of course, the story is flashy and gory, plenty entertaining. As such, in our anti-intellectual climate, viewers might be inclined to say, "It's not that deep."

Fair enough, not all anime has to be overanalyzed. Take Hellsing, that one is really not that deep and attempting to assign more meaning to it than what it is: an over-the-top, cliche evil nazis meet megamanical catholic priest, all eventually erased by Acuard, the vampire with the best drip, while London drowns in blood, is as fun as a wisdom tooth removal.

Back to AoT, the masterwork by Isayama. The typical it's not that deep viewer can easily be identified in conversation by asking them how they thought the ending was. If they say it was mid, I'm sorry, you just didn't get it, and that's where I stand on this.

After all, what did they expect? The entire world to be crushed under the feet of giant Titans? Erens' friends living in the knowledge that the price for their freedom was genocide of all other races? The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the ending. See, that's the perk of overthinking things.

But let's step back a little because.. the thing AoT is about, despite the title having the name Titan in it, titans are just a tool to address a much more philosophical theme:

Freedom

Since AoT is about freedom, and since crypto people, especially those affiliated with Network States, love to talk about it, I'd say it's required viewing. Or reading. The manga and anime don't deviate a whole lot, I will say, though the music is so awesome, so if you wanted to pick one or the other, watch it.

The interesting part about freedom conversations in crypto is that they evolve around the freedom from, the external freedom from annoying things such as taxes, more than, of the philosophical kind, the qualitative kind, and rarely ever address the question of where does one's freedom end, or whether freedom is, after all, not a relation and not complete isolation from all consequences (where the crypto freedom overlaps in cursed ways with the alt-rights love for the term).

That's why... I think that Eren, in a different timeline or a fanfic written by a crypto enthusiast, would have made for a perfect network state leader.

Let me explain...

The evolution (or lack thereof) of Eren

When we first meet the protagonist, he's a kid living in the walled city on Paradis Island (the name is a very obvious hint at what the first king had tried to build on this island; but there's a dark twist put on it when it becomes a dumping ground for activists/people the regime on the other side wants to get rid of..but anyway, that's a tangent for another time).

Eren spends most of his days staring at the sky, watching clouds pass by, and occasionally picking fights, but ultimately finds his existence to be horribly boring. Yet, he does not question his surroundings. The first time his boredom is alleviated, and the seed is sown for his idea of freedom, is when Armin, a friend, shows him a book depicting the world outside the walls, rivers of fire, huge salty lakes, planes of ice and sand.

In that moment, Eren realizes, he's unfree. He cannot see any of these things as they lie behind the walls where Titans roam, keeping the humans on Paradis Island inside the confines of the walls.

Not much later, Armin's foreshadowing that just because the walls had held up for the past 100 years, there was no guarantee that they'd do so today, turns into reality. After the gate to the wall is destroyed, Titans enter the city and quickly wreak havoc, leading to Eren seeing his own mother being eaten alive. While being carried away, he swears that he'll rot out every single one of them.

So far, so simple a character arc. The goal, too, seems simple: save humanity from extinction through Titans. This is where it'd end if it were a typical shojo manga and the creator not Isayama.

Eren, Armin, and the third member of their friend group, Mikasa, join the Survey Corps, a troop exploring the outskirts of the walls and killing Titans along the way —a logical progression. What isn't, is that not long after Eren finds out he can turn into a titan himself. This muddies the easy villain picture, as it now appears that what they killed wasn't some evil menace sent by God, but humans turned into titans. - The difference being, for some reason, Eren can turn back, while those roaming around can't.

What this does for Eren's character is mostly nothing, except that it bestows him with greater destructive powers when lashing out, and puts him in a special spot as he becomes the hope for humanity inside the walls; at once using his titan powers to fix a hole in the wall.

Outside of that, he remains an immature, childish, annoying brat, which is why, during the first season of AoT, he was pretty unpopular. It didn't help that his role was that of a passive agent, best known for being kidnapped by others and pushed around without much ability to logically think ahead. He often feels powerless and unable to do much at all, while completely blind (or let's say incapable of) responding to Mikasa's feelings for him.

His perception and character, at least to the outside, only change once he unlocks more of the abilities of the Attack Titan (the one he holds), allowing him to see a future memory (let's not get to deep in the mechanics of that, suffice to say, at this point he does not see the entire future, he only sees the scenery of freedom as used in the cover :)).

Along the way, we learn that humanity outside the walls exists, and is actually plotting to kill all the Eldians on Paradis Island because the island holds valuable natural resources (some things never change). The titans sent to destroy the walls (Reiner, Berthold, Annie) were just the first forebearers of that.

"I'm just like you, Reiner.."

Reiner is worth mentioning, as his character mirrors Eren's in many ways, except that he manages to grow up, whereas Eren does not. Reiner grew up in the ghettos on the other continent, in the Marley nation, where Eldians, due to their ability to be turned into titans once injected with a titan's spinal fluid, are cast as devils. Living in this Apartheid state, the only way to escape this status is by becoming an honorable citizen, by becoming an excellent soldier, and then inheriting one of the titans Marley holds.

Indoctrinated from an early age, as the child of a Marley dad and an Eldian mum, he dreams of becoming a hero and then living in peace with both his parents. Yet, he learns from visiting his father that this dream will never come true, but chooses to pursue the hero's path nonetheless. The idea of saving the world justifies all the killing he brings about. It helps that all he's ever heard about people on the island is that they were island devils. Language, always a first step toward dehumanizing and paving the way for cruel deeds.

In the end, though, he goes to live among multiple Eldians and realizes they were no devils. They were just people all along. In one scene, he reminisces about this before trying to kidnap Eren, wishing he had never found out, so he wouldn't have to become so evil himself (or recognize himself as such - his way of dealing with his own moral corruption is a splintered personality).

Despite knowing it, he still goes through with his plan because he can, and he still clings to the idea of becoming a hero. He realizes that he killed thousands for selfish reasons, and eventually is seen trying to commit suicide as he has nothing to live for anymore (so he thinks...anyway, Reiner's character arc for another time).

The illusion of free will...

Not long after, the audience's perceptions of Eren start to shift. Still, what many viewers think of as a glow-up is actually the opposite, though; it's one of the worst things that can happen to someone so obsessed with freedom. It's realizing one lives in a deterministic universe where the future one has seen is bound to happen. That's why he doesn't care to cut his hair anymore; he just doesn't give much f*ck anymore.

The freedom scene above (cover img) is brought about by Eren making contact with royal blood, specifically, his brother from another mother, Zeke, and kicking off the rumbling: summoning all the giant titans that are hiding inside the walls to trample down all life outside the island.

Reiner knows this is the potential Eren has, and therefore wants to stop him (and ofc, for ideological reasons of early childhood indoctrination). Unlike Eren, he maintains his illusion of free will because he does not see the future. Eren, however, knowing that the future is already written, tries to push ahead to reach his highest goals:

• Freedom

• Safety for his friends.

The freedom he seeks is the scene he's seen in his future memories, the one of exploring an empty Earth. He goes on to live undercover in Marley, and once again learns that they aren't all enemies. They're just humans.

In one scene, he breaks down to a kid who doesn't speak his language, and cries as he knows he'll trample this kid to death in the future. This is the future he brings about with his desire for freedom.

There are surely logical reasons for him to activate the rumbling, especially after learning that the world was about to stage a full-force assault on the island, trying to kill all Eldians to erase that threat for good. He waited to see whether there were options for peace, but with the entire world stacked against them, and negotiations failing to deliver promising outcomes, it seemed no other path was open. He tried, and realizes again and again, the future is set in stone.

And anyway, he had in his memories the future foretold. To the people who say, Why start the rumbling if he knew he was gonna be stopped: he didn't. He only unlocked full access to the future once he came into contact with Zeke and kicked off the great trampling.

His desire for freedom and safety for his friends isn't the only reason he decided to commit such an atrocity. It's much more childish than that.

"When I learned that humanity was alive outside the walls, I was disappointed."

The world was nothing like the dream world Armin had shown him. Even worse, they were all against them. He was living a lie. He realized no one was truly free; we were all victims of fate.

At the same time, his triggering the rumbling is a logical culmination of a concept in the show: the idea that only a human who casts aside their humanity can break through the cycle of hatred they're trapped in. Become a monster to beat the monsters...

Take my favorite character, Erwin. As a commander, he led thousands to their early graves for what he believed in, and the desire to finally understand whether his father's theory of how humans came to live in the walls was true. As such, he's not a good person.

Still, in his last moments, he's able to abandon his dream.

That's another theme of AoT... how we become slaves to our dreams, unable to see clearly, and eventually consumed by them. Is such a person really free?

Kenny Ackermann offers a case study of this. A cruel, murderous, violent man the first time he meets someone more powerful than him, it's Uri, a Titan holder, who, instead of crushing him, offers kindness, and asks for forgiveness for what the royal family had done to the Ackermanns (Ackermanns were a family that the royals could not influence, therefore a thorn in their eyes).

The lesson Kenny takes away is that, only once one becomes uber powerful, can one afford to be kind. He then goes on to become an even stronger, more ruthless person, a mercenary who even fights his own nephew. In his last moments, he breaks free from this. He realizes that he'd been drunk on something to keep him going, but he is not ready to turn into an ultimate monster (a titan; he holds an injection that could turn him into one). He avoids complete self-destruction by choosing to die a human instead.

Both Erwin and Kenny manage what Eren can't: give up on their dreams, acknowledging the limitations of it, and stop short of being fully consumed by it.

Ironically, the guy most infatuated with freedom is the least free of them all.

Eren, enslaved by his nature, his desire for adventure, and to fight for freedom, would have brought havoc on to the world one way or another. That's the kind of person he was - a theory that's further solidified when reading the school cast special attached to the last few bands of the manga. In it, Isayama casts a world as if Eren and the others were just normal school kids.

In one episode, Eren dreams of a Zombie apocalypse in which he fights to regain his freedom. When waking up, we see him crying, not because of being scared, but because he wished it to be true. A normal life is too boring for him; he wanted the adventure, the drama, a threat to fight against, regardless of the world he was born into. That's just his nature. Even Zeke, his half-brother, fails to understand the drive in Eren, especially once realizing that Eren was nurtured by a loving father, unlike him.

In an interview, Isayama once wondered: "Is it just a coincidence that I was not born a murderer?" The environment we're born into is a mere accident, yet it doesn't absolve us from accountability.

"Being born in one's country of origin is a mere accident; nevertheless it does not dissolve the subject of all responsibility."

Mbeme in Necropolitics

In short, Eren never grows up. He doesn't remember the first words his fathers said to him as a baby except for "Eren, you are free."

Towards the end of the show, he does go a bit insane, thanks to temporality collapsing for him, as when he touches Zeke and triggers the rumbling, he gains the ability to see the future and the past all at once. From that second, he knows that he'll be stopped, and that the choice Mikasa brings about will end the curse of Titans for good. He choses to not control his friends, and tries to make sure they become the heros to keep them safe.

Eren knows before launching a full-on assault on humanity outside the walls, that they are just humans, and many innocent will die. He does it regardless.

He remains an immature child throughout the series. What changes is just our perception as he tries to drive away his friends from him, takes a more active role in bringing about disaster, but is still driven by the same twisted idea of freedom, sown by the book Armin has shown him.

That's why many viewers were confused when, suddenly, while speaking to Armin, Eren breaks down the second Armin brings up, namely that Mikasa should move on and be happy with another guy.

Deep down, he was never the stoic guy he pretended to be in the latter part of the story. He was the same kid who swore to eradicate all the Titans in revenge. That asked whether freedom was on the other side of the Ocean only to find it was not what he thought it'd be. Let's not forget, he is 19 at the end of the series.

The end is not mid

Speaking of the end, there's, of course, the idea that the ending was mid. I beg to differ. I think it's quite genius for a series that deals with the theme of freedom, free will, and desire.

In the end, what brings about the end is the person who loves Eren through it all, despite how horrible actions he takes. While she never quite confesses her love to him, it's evident for all to see, and certainly Eren knows this too, as in an alternate timeline, he envisions them having run away from it all and living out their last few years in peace in a hut near the woods.

He tells her to forget him and to live on. The one moment he sets someone free.

She doesn't do that. While from the start she still wished there could be a way to end it without killing Eren, in the finale, she wraps the scarf he once gave her around her neck, and proceeds to ask the others for support to bring about Eren's end.

She doesn't reject the love she felt, but she also does not let it blind her to the reality, and what she has to do.

She musters the strength to do the unthinkable, and so breaks through the cycle. The cycle that held hostage the founder Ymir, who was the first Eldian ever to be turned into a Titan. A girl who only sought love and acceptance, a slave, once set free, only to be haunted, then comes in touch with a life force giving her Titan powers. As such, the king acknowledges her, and once she's built bridges, streets, and contributed to society, as a reward, he gave her kids.

Eventually she's trapped in her Stockholm syndrom, unable to break from her being a slave due to loving her master, therefore keeping up the Titan's existence.

Ultimately, it's not by becoming a monster oneself that the cycle of hatred is broken, but rather through love.

That's a genius choice, as love and freedom are often cast as opposing, because to love is to give up some of one's freedom. What if the opposite is true?

"The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom."

Bell Hooks

Back to Eren and the thesis I had at the beginning: Eren would make a perfect Network State leader in our modern days.

He's immature and driven by a twisted sense of freedom

That's quite similar to many conceptions of such escape states that crypto bros are promoting these days. It often looks more like a selfish desire to free oneself from what one perceives to be unfair conditions, using one's success and monetary wealth as proof that one has earned it and owes no one anything.

But unlike Eren, who at least acknowledges that violence would be a problem, they pretend that the material conditions don't exist, or if so, they don't speak of them because, let's be real...

That'd make things so much more complicated. Imagine having to acknowledge that not everyone has the same notion of freedom as you do. That your state will crumble at gunpoint, because outside of "freedom from," you've not managed to establish a philosophy to die for.

Or that, for humans, freedom is not just a singularly positive thing. At least part of drug abuse is related to the desire to escape being human and to be free of one's own consciousness. That's why John Gray picks up on the marionette as the most free, for it does not know it's unfree.

Like Eren, who had no such consciousness until Armin showed him his book, opening a Pandora's box.

Erich Fromm dedicated an entire book to exploring how the relatively free citizens of Germany chose an authoritarian, dictatorial leader, leading them into a war they couldn't win, committing genocide along the way; it's not a coincidence if there are parallels with AoT, manga authors love Nazi Germany for villain inspiration.

Being forced to reckon with the fact that when we speak of freedom, we often mean different things, and that there is a dark underbelly to it, is not a comfortable endeavor, especially not in an industry where the only important ideology is becoming capital. The most important freedom: that of moving one's money as one pleases, and the freedom to max extract—a pvp. Anything goes; consent is not required.

There's a dangerous tendency there, and while Eren might live in a deterministic universe trapped in his collapsed temporality, we do not. We'd do well to at least speak of the fact that we're all born in this world, we all are physical beings, in a society. We're humans.

"... the theory that every individual is completely free to will and what is good and noble [...] ignores the legacy of heredity and the pressure of environment; it suggests that the individual lives in a vacuum whereas the only life he has ever know or can know is a social life."

- J.S Whale in Facing the Facts

Our freedom does not exist in a vacuum. It's not isolation. It's a relation. It's not just quantitative, it's qualitative. A state of mind, an ability to realize ourselves, and to have faith in this life.

Eren is focused solely on his freedom and the safety of his friends. As such, he commits the same crime as all those network state leaders who seek to achieve freedom for a select few, while fleeing the economic realities of the many and the potential oppression that is the price of their liberty.

"To want to be free is also to want others to be free."

Simone de Beauvoir

Thanks for reading

I obviously limited the plot lines quite significantly; had I covered them all, it'd be an entirely new book, that's how complex AoT is altogether. It's also a beautiful tale of the best and worst of humanity, a meditation on nature vs. nurture, fate, and the concept of freedom.

It'll also make you cry a lot. But that's good, it means you're not yet dead inside like many of those tech bros :))

Scrolling through what's trending fashion items on the feeds, one quickly realizes people don't adhere to the rule anymore. If anything, they go by sex sells...

Not everyone is taking it to the extremes that Kanye pushed his ex-girlfriend, Amber Rose, to — having her tiptoe essentially naked on the red carpets of the world — a spectacle to incite sexual desires in all the other guys seeing her, with nothing left to the imagination.

Presenting her proudly like a breeder might show off their show poodle’s long legs, meticulously cut hair, and perfectly shaped snout.

Those in denial might evoke erotics, but there was nothing erotic about it. It was pornographic, reducing her to just a collection of body parts, devoid of the person behind. The person behind has since explained that she’d feel sad, and used to hate how he made her dress.

That being said, it’s shocking how many women, seemingly (on algorithm-driven feeds anyway), have chosen to lean into similar tendencies. The office siren trends follow the same pattern, featuring countless creators posing in outfits that you’d expect to see in the roleplay section of a sex shop, not in any cubicle office with stale air, which explains how the few that went to an office like that often got fired (that too however makes for good content so they should look at the bright side)

Short skirts exposing buttchecks, going by the name bubble skirts, have become appropriate wear for Disney World visits (apparently so), and even pupils at schools aren’t safe anymore from seeing more than they’d ever desired from their teachers.

It’s worth noting that America appears to be the most advanced in these trends. It makes sense considering how other countries tend to be more collectivist. Take, for example, Japan, where you'd most definitely be made to sit in a corner and never be talked to again if you showed up like that to the office.

The silent treatment but corporate.

There’s an argument that this is about female empowerment, but is dressing largely to impress teenage boys really all that?

Chances are, a lot of these super sexy teacher or office siren videos are less about inspiring the girlies, and more about… anyway.

To be honest, people can dress as they wish, but I have a caveat.

That’s context.

Why would grown women have to wear skirts so short they can’t even sit down without their bare s imprint remaining on the seat once they get up again at a place that’s first and foremost for families, like Disney World or a preschool?

There are times and places for specific fashion, but in an age where social media feeds dictate the quickly cycling micro-trends, it appears that what works for the feed versus the real world isn’t all that clear anymore to people.

As someone good at what they do, dressing like a red-light district worker on duty achieves quite the opposite of being valued for actual work. What message are the office sirens really sending? At best, they’ve never stepped foot into an office before. At worst, the best way they can express their worth is through what works on the feed. Well congrats.

It’s not that deep — some will argue — but I think it is. How we present ourselves to the world always communicates something, whether we like it or not.

Isn’t it a sign of decency to dress appropriately for the circumstances, and with a little regard for the people one will encounter?

A non-empirical analysis based on the sample size of women I talked to about their sexual encounters in the past 13-ish years has shown that it’s quite common for guys to proceed to acts they’ve not bothered to ask consent for.

I understand that there’s both implicit and explicit consent, and that might be hard to navigate at times.

This goes for sexual harassment in clubs, which appears so familiar; I’ve barely met any woman who hasn’t had at least one such moment, but it leaves an even more haunting experience when encountered in a relationship, where one was under the impression that the other respected and deeply cared for you.

The incredulous looks when you deny them that, reacting with a “what the fuck” to their “I just wanted to switch things up” or worse, use their physical advantage to impose themselves, your pleas and sobs just etching them on.

Yes, this is r*pe and we should call it that regardless of the context. As impossible as it might be to prosecute it legally if it happens between partners.

Experiment as much as you want between consenting adults, but just assuming that anyone goes because the other one has agreed to end up in this naked, vulnerable spot with you… nah.

Here we are. I wanted to talk about decency, and somehow ended up talking about the influence of porn. I do attribute quite a bit of the treatment of others to a lack of respect and decency — in bed and elsewhere.

And what’s that if not acknowledging the others’ person, humanity, and the dignity we’re therefore obliged to honor. Porn is just at the frontier of highlighting such behaviors.

I’m barely the first to make such an observation. Chris Hedges, in his Empire of Illusions, long before Only Fans Empire rose to grandeur, explains that “porn is not about love or eroticism. It’s about power and money.”

He further goes on..

“Porn glorifies the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the same way popular culture, glorifies the domination and cruelty of war.

It is the same disease… It is the belief that ‘because I have the ability to use force and control to make others do as I please, I have a right to use this force and control.’

It’s the disease of corporate and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force and pain.”

More than a decade later, and we all know some random British girl’s name because she’s set out to sleep with as many men as possible — selling this as her road to self-worth, and finally finding her self-esteem. I’m sorry, what?!

The language she used to describe this record-breaking exercise later, as some journalists noted, was more akin to soldiers reporting from a battlefield, including detachment, a common way to deal with trauma.

We talk about her, but what about the men?

Well, I don’t know. And also, I didn’t want to really talk all this much about sexualization and self-objectification, but it just happened to be on my mind.

Maybe because, as the algos change up their game, and there’s a lot of competition, there’s very little unique edge left to succeed, and the way to maximum success might be paved with the clothes and strips of dignity and decency.

Such is the violence of turning ourselves into just another commodity.

It opens Pandora’s box to treat other humans as just a side character in your movie, an audience to admire your sexual attractiveness (bubble skirts, office sirens) a tool for your pleasure (see gooning), a stepping stone to greater success (Logan Paul and the dead people in the suicide forest), an inconvenience (when asked to wait until others exit the train before entering yourself or the whole genre of influencers complaining about being treated like a normal person).

It becomes all about power and money.

That's not a very human way to go about life. It's quite undignified, yet it's sold to us as liberation.

That's how all of this ties together.

It's just different flavors of how human values, such as dignity and decency, lose out once they are pulled down to the arena of the market—Marx's crippled monstrosity.

In his book about decency, Alex Hacke laments that we lack a clear vision of how we as individuals want to be in the lives of others. Looking at idolized entrepreneurs and influencers does very little to provide such a vision.

The people who might nudge us in the right direction, however, lack the visibility.

As this German author concludes, the people who help without much ado, and treat those they encounter as fellow human beings, not merely tolerated; for already Goethe knew that tolerance is just the first step, it should really be respect; are extremely important because they offer orientation for those who are insecure and easily manipulated.

The issue arises when we live in a world of the spectacle, where we are inundated with messaging about how unique, special, and powerful we all individually are, entitled to everything, blinded to the little acts of kindness, of sacrifice in the name of what's the right thing to do.

I know the freedom individualist maxis hate this, but I believe we all owe each other a little bit of decency.

Thanks for reading.

If there was to be a CTA here, it'd be that well.. you can't change others, so might as well start with the very simple imperatives of treating others as you'd like to be treated, with dignity, with respect, and... occasionally, with a little grace even if it means putting up with a little inconvenience yourself (Such as, when giving up your seat to an elderly after a long day walking around, telling the cafe owner whose card terminal just failed to not stress about it, and transfer the money on the spot instead without making a scene etc.)

That's not to say to put up with abusive, narcissistic pricks.

We might respectfully remove ourselves and call out their shitty behavior.

It doesn't have to happen on a public platform, though. Certain things are best dealt with in private.

Cover Image: Opening sequence for The Night Walker (William Castle, 1964)

But what does that even mean? In the context of a medium that, more often than not, rewards conformity over originality. That houses a mob with wifi acting as the Gestapo over who is deemed real and who is fake.

I have a love-hate relationship with social media. When I was in high school, Facebook was still a place where the feed was full of pictures shot at awkward angles during a house party the night before. You'd find yourself tagged in one and wish for nothing more than to sink into a hole in the ground because, by your estimates, you look horrible on there, and what if your crush sees this?

In hindsight, it was still preferable to the algorithmic feeds' fascist approach to what's considered beauty nowadays. At least most of the people back then, who'd see that picture, had already seen me in real life, from potentially even less flattering angles (and also from better ones).

Perhaps those images back then were more authentic, shot just to commemorate another booze-fuelled night in a home alone/ We weren't as much doing it for the gaze of strangers online, but largely for the crowd that was there. The scale was smaller, the image less concerned with generating lots of engagement.

There's a chance that nostalgia blurs my view, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who berates the lost promise these networks once held. Did they have to turn into a panopticon, where each of us is prisoner and guard simultaneously?

The advice to be more authentic is hardly new. It is a standard for building one's own brand -- when have we started to accept this is just the way it has to be? -- although the same advice is followed by the one to be consistent, pick one's niche etc.

Which makes it incoherent with what it'd mean to truly be oneself. As Emerson reminds us: "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

Remember Be real? I do, but only because I found its premise dubious and the behavior it led to telling of our desire to portray ourselves well. It was a short-lived social media app that nudged users to take pictures with the front and back cameras in that exact moment, showing their most real moments, picked at random.

It caught some users on the toilet (real), but quickly led to them modifying their behavior. It didn't help that the app later allowed people to re-take, and therefore killed its own stated goal. It became just like any other social media app, where people modified their real-life behavior to show off their lives as more glamorous, more interesting than they might have been—a highly curated selection.

We have that already, be real gave us nothing new, therefore it faded into obsolescence.

What does it even mean to be real? To be authentic on these platforms? Are we not all playing a role on the big stage?

It's rather ironic that authenticity has been turned into something we judge others by on a platform that, let's face it, always has a performative aspect to it. We self-censor and edit our thoughts before posting.

We should all be aware and intuitively grasp that the way to gain the most attention is not to be our most true self, but to carefully cherry-pick the niche we fit in, and if necessary pivot to whatever is currently loved by the algo (labubus, dubai chocolate, other weird food trends).

The feeds don't care about us being real to our inner self, they care about what gets clicks. Add our human crowd mentality, and what you get is hugely successful influencers whose only personality is consumption and pretty privilege.

"The price for attention is assimilation."

Ashley Viola

Brands love it. There's nothing better than a creator who does not have a stance or stand for much besides looking good, as long as their audience gobbles up those referral links.

It's easy to blame the system — I'll never shut up about the downsides of commodification of the self when asked — but that's letting ourselves get off the hook a bit too easily. We're complicit whenever we lay eyes on it. Whenever we request that others be more as we want them to be.

"The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity."

Lydia Tar in the movie Tar

We live in a world where everything is marketing, and selling out is not frowned upon; it has become the norm. We shrug and get on with our lives.

"Marketing has taken the place of creation in the same way that conforming to the algorithmic feed has taken the place of creative self-expression"

Naomi Klein in Doppelganger

Occasionally, though, people wake up to the uncanny slumber induced by the filters, and it dawns on them that what's been rewarded is not to their liking.

Take the outrage at New York influencers, all going to Pilates in their expensive Lululemon uniform, carrying a Matcha Latte in one hand, and donning their effortless clean-girl no make-up make-up.

After one TikToker pointed out that these influencers were just plain boring, slowly but surely more jumped onto this, sharing the same discomfort with how what is supposed to be a medium to display one's uniqueness has done the complete opposite of giving us a bunch of clones of the same person.

Do these girls really love Pilates? Do they really look like that naturally, or is this one of those cases of thousands spent every month on their effortless beauty?

It's anyone's guess, and the whole filler and plastic surgery epidemic warrants a whole other essay, just so much, isn't it dystopian that we let a filter tell us how to fix our face to look like a better version of ourselves?

I wonder, what if you stripped these people of the attention? What's the self underneath? Hiding behind the aesthetics and products bought to hide what might be a lack of personality.

Many successful influencers are a good example of a well-commodified person, what Adorno and Horkheimer would describe as the liquidation of selfhood in the name of capitalist rationality.

Online, they're not a mere person, but a corporation of the self, a "corporace", as Grant, Dallmer, and Katherine establish in their Marxist influencer theory, laboring under precarious conditions.

I bet that the second clean girl aesthetics (problematic to begin with... but that's another story), and pilates fall out of favor, these influencers riding the trend waves will be the first to adjust their brand. They're the epitome of Fromm's marketing character. Who does not ask "Who am I?" but "Who do you want me to be?"

That's a danger we all face, not just online, in a world that loves to reduce us to data and indoctrinates us with a limited view of what success looks like. The danger of falling into performing for external validation instead of what the previous ethical dimension of authenticity called for.

"The performative fosters a detached form of self-awareness that potentially measures everything in terms of its strategic value for visibility, recognition and reward."

Psyche.co

It's what happens when we pursue goals because everyone says it's the thing to do. It's when we conform to the mainstream view on things, despite deep down thinking something else, just because we don't want to risk being ostracized. It happens when we base our entire identity on just one aspect —the one that brings external validation. When we can't but turn everything into content.

A common culprit is one's career. How many people do you know who'll mention it as one of the first things when you ask them to tell you about themselves?

It's great to love what you do, but it's not when it becomes the only thing you are.

A company does not care about the maintenance of a healthy self. A job can be lost in an instant. So can your standing as a thought leader, a person blessed by high view counts and engagement.

The question is: what's left then? What's the core of you, even when all that's stripped away?

More than 200 years ago, Kierkegaard warned of this tendency, of losing oneself in the finite, the easily definable, the concrete. He believed that the self held two poles in balance:

• the finite: your concrete circumstances, your past, your nationality, what is.

• the infinite: your imagination, capacity for freedom, the ability for a sense of transcendence, what could be

With personal brands and performative authenticity, we're treading the waters of collapse into the finite. Reducing ourselves to only what's easily validated.

We collapse into products, and that's somehow empowering (so neoliberalists tell us). Coining of our own pictures and thoughts on platforms like Zora is just another blatant example of it. You might reach all that fame and the achievements society will cheer, but you still feel empty.

You might feel compelled to go on one of those "finding yourself" trips, forgetting that, as Grizzly-kun teaches us in Polar Bear Cafe, that's not how it works.

The self is a constant construction, and if we don't fight against the collapse into the finite, we will end up paying the price: despair.

"You have lost yourself in the finite and the silence that follows is the sound of the infinite self, your true self, starving to death."

Kierkegaard

On a side note, what happened to the internet where we did not have to be ourselves? With the rise of verification requirements, we might be on the verge of losing that forever.

"All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can't survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel's mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It's impossible to have just one or the other. That's who we are. And that's Carneval. Schumann was able to see that many faces of humanity - the masks, and the real faces, because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap between the two."

Haruki Murakami - 1st Person Singular

Complement with Carneval played by Tiffany Poon.

Thanks for reading. 💚

Header: Empty conversations by abstractjity

After nearly two years of working alongside them, I was quickly reduced to a human resource, measured in the cost that could be saved by getting rid of it, as quickly as possible — presumably to make shareholders happy and not stir emotions in current team members — with the least human touch.

Of course, those who made the decisions would hide behind HR, none of them offering constructive feedback, it's just a "fresh start" and that's that. Fair enough, on an Excel spreadsheet, their calculation sure made sense. Plus, it's always better to do something than to do nothing... well.

Suffice it to say, the entire thing was handled in such an undignified, cruel way, I was well-incentivized to want to burn bridges. Their luck is that I am not the person to hold a grudge because that's bad for my zen and, as we all know, the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference :))

There's an irony in a humanist getting dehumanizing treatment. At the same time, that's just business as usual in corporate.

Any success or impact that cannot be broken down into raw data points might as well not exist.

They've convinced us that peak self-optimization consists of capturing everything about yourself, from the step count to heartbeat to the number of pages you read, and then feeding it to an AI so you can talk to it about your own progress.

Why listen to yourself when you can maximize the self-alienation by asking a machine instead how you're doing based on seemingly objective data points?

They'll brag about how many books they read, but never go into which one left a mark.

They'll show you how much their follower count has increased since pivoting to the latest hype thing, but have no idea how many existing community members and customers they are on the verge of losing by betraying the initial mission they set out to achieve.

They'll remain blissfully unaware of the parts of reputation not showing in likes, shares, and engagement in their Telegram group.

Let's be real for a second, not all projects need a huge community, especially not if your idea of community is: throwing together customers, investors, and contributors in one chat that's then spammed with gms or semi-abusive comments the second the price goes down.

The conversations I've partaken in normally start with:

"We need to build a community. A tribe. Something like the Chainlink Army."

The why is rarely considered; it's just a must-do. And if one must do it, one might as well have ludicrous growth aspirations, completely neglecting how communities grow organically around shared values, love for the same cultural artifact, or a shared worldview.

It's always about growth, never about maintenance.

Easy come, easy go. Where will the Galxe campaign joiners be when the rewards dry up? Probably not in your Telegram chat.

Chances are, by playing that game, you shot yourself in the foot because no one will now consider anything happening on your feed or groups to be authentic engagement to begin with, when it has once been so obviously faked.

peach

@33b345

once you bot or pay for engagement even one time, everyone will know, and no engagement will ever seem real again even if you manage the near impossible mission of getting back from negative to 0

84

0:05 • 11 Aug 2025

In many ways, these crypto communities aren't far away from the "communities" big brands are grooming, which are really just a bunch of consumers classed together by their favorite choice of logo to wrap themselves in.

Here's the big difference with real communities and those of corporate consumers cosplaying as such (and many crypto communities): a sense of obligation.

Where that comes from, I can't say. I assume it's deeply rooted in the human desire to connect, and be part of something bigger than oneself.

Consumers in a collective don't owe each other anything. The bonds that form the community are transactional; the only commitment is to pay the company for the privilege of wearing their logo. In some instances, buying into such a community comes with quasi-religious aspects in fetishizing the aesthetic, or a tendency to make being a "glossier girl" or a "lululemon wearer" one's whole personality.

It's just sparkling commodity fetishism y'all.

Specific crypto communities are not much different, except less aesthetically pleasing on the eye in most cases.

Yet. what bothers me is whenver projects say they need to build "communities" real quick, to appeal to investors, or to CEXs so that their token might get listed. The most important feature of such communities in their understanding is: it being huuuge and and becoming ever-more so. Growing forever, as only cancer can do.

This obsession with growth is intricately tied to our obsession with and inability to look beyond the numbers.

It doesn't help that many typical workers in crypto come from tech, finance, and management backgrounds, where efficiency and profit maximization are the primary goals. Ethics and morals are weaknesses, and ideally, humans would become more, not less, predictable.

Value becomes price. What doesn't have a value not expressed in price is worthless. Emotions? Meanings? Don't compute to raw data, can't be put onchain to be valued.

The idea of turning it all into "hard" science, seemingly objective, is hardly new. If we had more students of history in the space, we'd have realized that this is merely extending the cult of reason from the Enlightenment era to fit our own.

“Reason is the ultimate language of madness.”

Foucault

To label this ideology, I came up with the term Crypto Positivism for my Dappcon talk, poking fun at the audience for not recognizing Comte. An effect one can easily achieve using any other 18th-century philosopher.

chandresh 🪴

@thisischandresh

crypto needs more @naomi_fromhh and more poetry

27

0:18 • 19 Jun 2025

That's because the lion does not concern himself with the fields not directly providing utility to his cause in crypto. We repeat mistakes others made because of our unwillingness to study what came before, and a dash of arrogance.

"Whoever aspires to create a new social or political reality must before all concern himself to ensure that these humble commonplaces of historical experience will be invalidated by the situation he brings into being."

Ortega

How many network state fan bois have you seen discuss the lessons from the village modelled after Skinner's Walden 2 or the garden of Epicurus? I'd guess: zero.

Let's take a step back in history and talk a little about Comte, because his trajectory doesn't seem all that foreign to the modern observer.

Comte is quite important in philosophy and sociology, yet lesser known due to a quirk of his personality. Mainly that he was, what kids nowadays call, delulu.

Living in a time where sciences increasingly demystified the world, following the chaos of the Enlightenment, he aimed to unify all the sciences under one method: the positive.

The positive method is intuitive for us; everyone who believes that data holds the key to truth already is a bit of a positivist. It establishes that we should let go of all the metaphysical nonsense and focus purely on what can be directly experienced, measured, and seen.

"What you capture is all there is."

Comte theorized that all sciences would eventually reach a stage where everything is quantified, after passing through a theological and a metaphysical stage. He thought, similar to how many of the current AI oligarchs do, that science could serve an integral function in society—the "abundance promise" of his time.

Ironically, he lost faith in that idea toward the end of his life, and instead claimed that what we really needed was a new religion, one with himself as the "High Priest of Humanity."

To us, people in the 21st century that doesn't sound so crazy when we have the likes of Sam Altman saying things like the most powerful men build religions" or like Elon Musk casting themselves in the role of savior of humanity - oblivious to the undignified conditions he put workers in his factories, or women who served in satisfying his breeder fetish... guess they don't count as humanity.

The best way to de-humanize anyone, is to turn them into a number. Rob them of a name and story, take their dignity, measure them by a handful of data points, and that's that.

In many ways, that's the alienating treatment we give people in crypto - be that by turning each of their posts into tokens, or reducing interactions to transactions.

Crypto positivism is the ideology of quantifying everything - for the sake of it - and often, because, I suspect, some of these people have already lost touch with their own humanity. All they can appreciate now is: numbers go up.

Confront them with the concept of intrinsic motivation, and the risk of crowding it out by throwing money at people, and they'll look at you as if you've gone a bit crazy. Ask them whether they ever talked to a community member about how they enjoyed their experience in this group, and they'll be flabbergasted.

What they can tell you straight up is the growth rate, the token price, and the total value locked. The amount of followers, the engagement, and how many people tuned in for a live stream.

What they can't say is, did anyone on there actually learn something? Felt compelled to dig deeper? Or hated it?

Anything that doesn’t conform to their idea of computation and reason is simply suspect, invalid. It’s this obsession with measuring everything as such that enticed Adorno and Horkheimer to criticize the Enlightenment as totalitarian.

“Today, we no longer have any narratives that provide meaning and orientation for our lives. Narratives crumble and decay into information.”

Byung-Chul Han

The result of a total belief in numbers is that there’s no other success than numbers going up. There’s no place where a project can say, well, we accomplished what we wanted, when there’s always the expectation to continue growing because that’s really all there is.

Then you have those who recognize that modern man is experiencing a meaning crisis, and in trying to fill this void, they sell us their grand visions and the opportunity to be part of them. All it takes is buying the token and yapping about it. We’ll give you purpose as long as you give us your attention.

A great deal, in many cases, what’s sold isn’t as much purpose as the dream of financial freedom through early investment in this coin. That’s all fun and games, yet it does not create meaning.

Money is just a means. The myth of financial wealth through crypto so pervasive because we live in a society where, unfortunately, there’s a select few able to do, pretty much whatever the f*ck they want and getting away with it.. and instead of us deciding to band together, the best we can think of is, wanting to join them.

For saying such things, I’ve often been labelled socialist or Marxist, but hey, since I’ll never ditch that label, might as well roll with it. At least they were preaching solidarity, and that is indeed something that does provide humans with some meaning.

As Vernake rightly diagnosed, the meaning crisis has little to do with numbers — you won’t fix it by hitting your stated 100,000 followers goal on X — and a lot to do with other humans. It’s more often about going beyond our own utility-maximizing selves.

In his essay Culture, Terry Eagleton writes that it’s quite remarkable how many of the most valuable human activities are also the most useless. Or to pick a reference that’s more popculturally spread

It would appear this truth has often been forgotten, swept under the carpet in pursuit of bigger better numbers. Yet might that not be the reason why a lot of sensible souls are starting to feel it’s all too shallow, it’s all just business, no one is your friend, everyone is just out to get each other’s liquidity?

Is it surprising that we’ve alienated artists by turning their works into yet another commodity thrown under the bus of speculation in pursuit of trading volume? Then we turn back and wonder why there’s so much ugliness.

The lack of beauty in crypto sure warrants a whole other essay — and after I studied Hildebrand’s Aesthetics, I’ll get to it — but it's just another symptom of the fetish of quantification.

It’s what makes it so hard to argue against doing morally questionable things, because the language to do so simply does not stick. Kant’s conscience in many has given way to Locke’s wolf.

Arguing that something is simply wrong, because you wouldn’t do it if you cared for the people you supposedly work for, rarely works. Care just isn’t big enough of a concept because, after all, it cannot be turned into a number.

What does history tell us about positivism? Well, it was hugely popular in Vienna circles until the logical positivists realized their fallacy: that all verifiability criteria were always provided by the social context and era in which they lived.

There never was a clear-cut differentiation between our subjectivity and objective reality. Even seemingly objective data can and will lie. Ask a logical positivist for their moral philosophy and what you get is a vacuum.

In a way, Sigmund Freud was one of the first to try to break from that, and marry it instead with the subconscious, the subjective, the inner worlds that can never be directly observed.

There are lessons in there. The discontents he found in his society aren’t all that different from the ones we live under in crypto. Weren’t we supposed to position against the extraction, the dehumanization practiced by Big Tech?

Don’t let the business school mindset take over.

It’s worth acknowledging the perils of quantifying everything. It might pave the way to a more humane, less desensitizing, and less rage-bait-driven environment.

It doesn’t always have to be world domination. A community doesn’t need millions of members to be a success. Growth doesn’t have to continue forever.

That’s if we dare to explore different ways, breaking from the positivism, and get back to acknowledging that in the end, we’re still dealing with humans, with all the messiness and beauty that brings with it.

Thanks for reading

The modern urge is to take out your phone, or maybe, if you're fancier, a camera, and record it.

Often, when looking at the so-captured moment, it disappoints. It's nowhere near as vibrant, as visceral as experienced. No filter helps,.

In those moments, I often think to myself, 'I should learn how to paint.' Perhaps this explains why humans continue to create despite the technology supposedly capable of capturing it all. Even the best camera might never be able to really see what we see.

That's why the onset of the camera did not stop painters from painting, nor did the advent of music software mean that composers would quit using vintage synthesizers.

"Nowadays you can do all of this inside a machine. But to me, the screen and the computer can have a flattening effect on anything that goes on inside them. These old synthesizers, by contrast, are a bit wild, and unpredictable. They have personalities. They feel alive."

Max Richter in the CD Booklet for a recording of his 4 seasons

The rationalists of our time suggest that there's one set of truths, and reality can and should be neatly captured by sensors, translated into the 0s and 1s that are the language of the internet.

Why create, why express, when the picture has been taken millions of times before you by people who just like you, saw something in the item, or maybe they didn't; maybe all they saw was that millions of other people were taking a picture of it, forcing them to go ahead and do the same.

After all, the best way to be popular online isn't to fall out of any category; it's to neatly fit in to be authentic in the way that your chosen aesthetic requires.

"The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow."

Italo Calvino in Adventure of a photographer

Now, with genAI, why bother to write, compose, paint, or rhyme? All the hard work now is simply done by a machine for you, a great liberation, at least according to all the deeply invested VCs and SV cultists who could otherwise not care less about people's liberation (if anything their goal has always been addiction, which is just another enslavement).

But of course, if you ask ChatGPT to write a poem that conveys the scenery you view, it might not really succeed at finding the essence. It might give you some hotchpotch, an averaged-out version of whatever it was trained on.

Philosophers still have no consensus on what differentiates humans from machines; they warn that we're trying to become them. It might just be the wrong question to begin with. What's clear to me is that, at least what genAI is concerned, the difference is this: we all experience the world a little differently.

Earlier this week, I walked into a small gallery in the Levantehaus in Hamburg, a small exclusive shopping centre that used to be an office building erected according to the North American ideal in the 19th century.

Below a decent Vietnamese place, and opposite a Steiff plush toy shop, is nestled in one big room making up the VonWegen gallery. The exhibit on display: "The place you can't remember. The place you can't forget."

Artworks of four very different artists juxtaposed, all dealing with the question of how they view landscapes.

What drew me in was a massive canvas, an explosion of purple, blue, with spots of yellow. As I learned a bit later, it was by a Japanese artist drawing inspiration from Zen gardens. On closer inspection, the explosion appeared less haphazard and as if each stroke had been placed very intentionally, after careful consideration in an attempt to portray what the artist saw, not a figurative display but one of attempt at sharing the essence.

Opposite the large canvas, I stood in front of a painting of what looked like a wild flower, more real than life. The gallerist explained to me that part of Philippa Brücks signature was creating the hyperreal. Some even asked whether the painting was AI-generated.

The flower felt palpable, as if its branches were poking the air, at the same time I couldn't shake the eeriness. Just as when looking at AI-generated photography, yet unlike that, there was also a sense of awe at the painter's immense talent poured out in the form of an oil painting.

In a world where we experience scenes through the lens of our cameras, only to have them later judged by the crowd through likes and shares, who knows whether, at some point, such hyperreal images might not be more real to us? After spending hours scrolling through highly edited images, you can't help but feel that the nature around you is a bit dull.

If we live detached from nature, or simply lack the eyes to discover the little wonders happening all around us, how could we feel other than disappointed?

If AI-generated images fill the Google image search results, even standing in for real paintings of historic figures, and all period movies star filler-faced people, perhaps our whole perception of the past will eventually disappear. Why bother with the archive when you can generate an image of the person in question? If all we care is the now, what gives.

A third artist, Christian Augusts, whose works were more political in a way, showed landscapes under seeming threat, with blank spots leaving the viewer to fill them in as they desire. The artist believes that the future is already decided, and all he's doing is delivering Polaroids from the future, retrieved from our subconscious; he himself is just a vessel delivering them. Space disappears, and landscapes seem to be uprooted.

I felt reminded of the grass dying next to the big crossing in my neighbourhood. In May, when it had not rained for weeks on end in North Germany, a rarity yet a small catastrophe becoming more common. The polaroids just thought such smaller incidents forward, into the future with a little space to interpret.

The fourth and last artist, again, a complete 180 turn. With simple stokes, big impact achieved, one painting showed a forest landscape with a woman riding through on a horse, peaceful, harmonious, and a little mystical. It could have well been featured in a Nordic children's book, one nearly expected an elf to show up in the corner.

I walked out of the gallery, my soul replenished with awe and admiration, not without thanking the gallerist for all the explanations and the bottle of water he'd kindly offered me. More attuned to the world around me, inspired to write about it.

Proust once wrote that the true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes. In a slightly modified version, this quote has ironically been used by travel agencies to sell you on the benefits of travelling. Although I doubt that mass tourism and resort holidays lead to the revelations Proust was after.

He was speaking to an internal, not an external voyage.

Each one of us views the world colored through the world of our subjectivity.

It shines through in the paintings, which shared the same theme, yet couldn't have been more different in feel, and for lack of a better term: aura.

world commune

@sean_obee

If you haven’t read Proust already, forget it mate. Your brain is destroyed from short term dopamine burst addiction and algorithmic k-hole content.

220

4:05 • 17 Jul 2025

It's evident to anyone reading Proust (apparently fewer and fewer people). You don't write thousands of pages on which, going by brain-rot TikTok dynamics, very little happens at all, dedicating whole pages to describing landscapes if you're not already a person well-attuned to paying close attention, locking the details into memory only to have them reappear later on during a flashback.

Our subjectivity is why rereading a great book never hits the same. It's how musicians can continue playing a piece through their entire lifetime, never quite being done with it.

Igor Levit, a pianist, when asked whether he could still listen to or play the Moonlight sonata by Beethoven despite having heard it thousands of times, responded: It's different every time. Every time I hear something new in it, there's a part of the piece that's always out of his control.

A state that sociologist Hartmut Rosa would describe as very aspirational, a state he has titled: resonance.

It's also something we are not capable of when our mindset is one of domination, complete understanding, control, utility.

There's beauty in not being in full control. Not capturing everything yet doing our best to express it.

In a world obsessed with quantifying everything, turning it into another data point, flattening it into a picture shared with millions of strangers, let's not forget we're not looking at the world the same way.

Not everything can and should be measured by this standard.

We paint, we compose, we rhyme and write in an attempt to express ourselves, to make ourselves heard and seen, to feel less alone in the world.

And sometimes, when we're lucky, someone discovers it and comes out of it a different person.

Feeling less crazy, less lost, reassured in not having gone completely numb yet.

Thanks for reading

If you're in Hamburg, definitely check out the VonWegen gallery in the Levante Haus.

The team is down-to-earth and very friendly. Plus, there's also the great Vietnamese place just on the floor above so you get two in one: cultural and culinary delight ;))

Cover image: landscape photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo

So should we meet central and later go to my place?"

In the context of the sender being a friend or partner, quite normal.

In the context I encountered this in, to me, a reason to start overthinking about this culture of instant gratification.

The irony was heightened by the fact that the sender had, in previous messages, established that he found relationships to be a beautiful thing, but wouldn't be opposed to a friendship with benefits either.

What's more, the sentence was followed by: "or are you more the non-commital type?"

As if agreeing to the suggestion was not, in fact, a commitment itself.

A commitment to sleeping with a stranger.

I'm not a saint, nor a prude. I wouldn't deny having done it in the past, yet upon further reflection, when it occurred, it was never a pre-agreed thing; it was always something that followed naturally out of the encounter itself. Not an agreed-upon meet with the outcome set in writing.

What annoyed me was that in the communication, other outcomes of hitting it off potentially were negated. The only logical consequence for him was either to get freaky in the sheets or never see each other again.

What's wrong with not instantly exploring each other's bodies stripped of the protective layer of clothing?

Why was a simple kiss not an acceptable ending to a great first date?

Or, as I've found more commonly, an awkward hug and goodbye; often while one party is convinced this went great, while the other one is mentally sketching a message to tell them it did not, because ghosting is not cool.

People confuse intimacy with being intimate and then wonder why they feel empty afterwards.

Am I overthinking? Maybe, but none of this is happening in a vacuum. It happens amidst a culture that pushes us to want everything now, to be unable to wait, and unwilling to put up with friction or smaller inconveniences.

And what's getting to know someone other than a frictionful process. Completely in the way if the only goal is the fulfilment of sexual desire as fast as possible, and maybe (although I can't know whether the counterparty had this in mind) as many people as possible.

After all, there are now adult creators whose sole goal is to break the world record for the most people one can sleep with in a day (we really have lost the plot, haven't we).

Once what matters isn't the other but the personal utility derived from the quick sexual thrill, there's no room for other considerations. It's unclear whether this is what he wanted, but it struck me as odd to talk about friendship with benefits in one and about something that sounded more like a One Night Stand in the next sentence.

Isn't friendship a commitment that evolves? You're not just friends after one meeting. At that point, you're probably strangers, and if we buy into Camus' view, we will forever remain.

Compared to starting straight-up with sexting, the above is still tame and safe for work.

My favorite contemporary philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, could well use these anecdotes to underline how everything is turned pornographic, how we killed Eros, and rob encounters of the tension that makes them meaningful to begin with.

Another video essayist picked a more internet-native term for it, naming the phenomenon of constant chase for instant gratification: goonification.

Where is room for anticipation, for tension, for the thrill of turning a stranger into someone you feel intimately connected to, when you constantly race to the endpoint you already defined in your head?

Erotic lives from imagination, from tension, and from the play of not showing it all. That's how Geishas could be highly erotic while fully clothed.

Although I doubt they'd do well on OnlyFans -- interestingly, a friend told me that the highest-earning creators on there haven't shown it all.

This is anecdotal; I have not checked, but if true, it might undermine the thesis that, if that's what people want to get from it, by showing it, you rob yourself of the ability to engage the viewers. The anticipation gone, there's not much left, and the only path is one of chasing greater extremes (see the creator who slept with 1k men or whatever count).

In a way, in this game, the other person is just something to consume. Be that sexually, or otherwise.

This chase for instant gratification isn't limited to online dating; that's just the sphere where it hit me.

Of course, it's always right in front of my eyes. Every day working in crypto. What are many motivated if not by the desire for quick, easy wealth that comes without the need for skill or hard work?

Outside of CT, the pattern extends to small TikTokers quitting their 9-5 in the hopes of making it, because once they do, a pension plan or health insurance will be no problem for them.

Not all have to quit; some just go viral while filming themselves during their 9-to-5, as recently happened here in Germany, with an Aldi Cashier lip-syncing for the camera during her shift. Once you start looking, there's countless people who go viral for.. what exactly?

Not for skill, nor for knowing anything, for saying one thing, one dance, or just for being great at rage bait, because the latter appears to be the newest strategy for making it big.

The algo loves an angry mob in your comments.

The virality is short-lived and usually completely unrelated to a deeper meaning, message or political endeavor. Aesthetics is all.

Maybe this desire to be famous is just the modern equivalent of a legacy.

It's easy to blame influencers and their shallowness, but none of their success would be possible without millions of willing viewers engaging with and commenting on their content.

Taking out one's phone so automated, it's not even consciously registered anymore. Whenever there's a moment without immediate entertainment, it's what we do.

One swipe, an endless stream of short bursts of dopamine to ease the restlessness.

It takes seconds for this entertainment to yield a result. Other forms take more effort and time.

Try reading a classic. Chances are, they won't have you hooked on the first sentence. Maybe not even with the first chapter.

If your poison of choice is the buy button, you live in fantastic times. A new microtrend reigns every week, providing an excuse to buy new stuff to fit in, without the need to figure out whether you actually like that.

With buy now pay later, even getting in debt has become cutesy, and aspirational. No need to save toward an important purchase, you can just finance it and if the debt is too high, it's not your problem anymore but Klarnas.

At the end, your feed is stuffed and your closet overflowing with cheap polyester clothes you've worn once for a video. Yet despite this abundance of some, the same abyss remains.

When everything becomes something to quickly consume, how can we ever hope for a real encounter with the other? How could anything be uniquely precious?

The tyranny of wanting everything now consumes and spits out empty shells, bereft of a solid core, forced to follow what's presented as desirable.

Giving in to the dopamine economy comes at a cost. It numbs us.

It conditions you, it resets your threshold so that you become unable to perceive the small joys.

It forces you to capture everything, make everything content, because you don't have other ways of judging its validity anymore.

Often, the best moments are those that resist capture. The landscapes that unfold in front of your eyes whose sense of wonder doesn't translate easily into a snapshot, not even when slapping filters on it. The flow of an effortless conversation. The sound of a small stream flowing through the mountains.

Being chronically online is not a virtue, your brainrot not a badge of honor.

Believing people, things, art, that doesn't entertain you or instantly reveal itself to be boring, arrogance.

Thanks for reading

Cover img: "The closest to heaven" by ivettttve.

We learned — sometimes the hard way — that this was not true. It might have been true for your ridiculous takes, you had the audacity to publish on Twitte, which, judged by today's standards, made you a target of cancellation.

It is, however, not necessarily true for webpages and personal blogs, as projects like AR.IO don't tire to remind us. Every day, we're living through a small-scale burning of the Library of Alexandria, without us noticing.

Just the other day, I realized that my website was no longer showing. Not that it was a high-traffic page, but few are in our world of aggregating all information in a handful of centralized avenues.

Still, it felt like a little loss, and I continue trying to get it back, re-instored as it's a little part of me on the web.

I'm not alone with such an experience. Data loss has become so common that we just shrug and leave it be, like the dead hedgehog lying in the middle of the crossing.

The natural response to this happening has been to develop networks that prevent the loss altogether. Our dream of storing things forever is drawing closer, even if none of us will be around to check whether Arewave really lived up to the promise of 200+ years of storage.

Nevertheless, even before this happens, in a way, humans have always managed to preserve what mattered to them.

As a classical music lover, I can't escape a sense of wonder whenever I find out how a composer felt about his works, from letters he wrote himself on a sheet of paper 200 years ago. Isn't it insane that these things survived when paper is so fragile?

We even have Twitter accounts dedicated to sharing what philosophers and authors wrote in their diaries centuries ago. I can't help but wonder, how would Kafka feel knowing that his innermost thoughts are on public display in the 21st century, on a platform whose workings escape our understanding just as much as his novels?

Much of what we know about the past is thanks to the efforts of other humans to preserve and archive. The second I started thinking about what it would mean for things to be stored forever, I realized that it's insane that in crypto, no one has ever mentioned the science of archiving to me before.

In Dresden, they recently opened the Archive of Avantgarde. An immense collection of items gleaned by Egidio Manzona, a rich Italian infatuated with the avant-garde. It was my first conscious, irl encounter with an archive. I've been to plenty of museums, but never thought of them as much as archives, when really that's what they are.

When entering the Archive of Avantgarde, you're greeted by paintings, sculptures, and videos. Yet, you'll also find more everyday items such as postcards, magazines, and even the tools artists used to create their works. One thing that struck me especially was a photo of a group of avant-garde artists.

All of them were neatly dressed in suits and costumes, completely rejecting the fantasy I had of avant-garde artists being as flamboyant as their works in fashion.

Who knows whether I'd ever have found out if it wasn't for this one collector dedicating his life to the task of preserving the avant-garde?

One man, wealth, and the means to achieve his goal, fulfilling his very human desire of transcending the present and making a dent.

Isn't that the same longing that drives us to find platforms where our voices won't just disappear?

Writing has always been linked to the desire to preserve. While often nowadays degraded to writing for the sake of content creation, for people who write as a passion, it's much more than that.

It's an attempt to find one's voice, to make sense of the world, to connect with others, to assure ourselves that we're not insane, it's just the world that is.

By writing, we bottle up moments, states of mind, as they come for the future, and for our current selves.

At a larger scale, in the past, whose writing got to be preserved, and whose stories continued to be told, was always tied to power.

“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory.” - Derrida

History, they say, is written by the winners. How many voices have been suppressed or forgotten just because they had the wrong gender or skin color? We will never know.

Once the archive is open for everyone to write to and read from, will that change?

As Derrida reminds us, archiving is always closely linked to memory.

We want to remember, which is why we obsess over creating second brains and capturing every moment we live through with the lens of our smartphone.

Erich Fromm would diagnose us with a fixation on the mode of having instead of living in the moment. Yet, we wouldn't know this if it weren't for publishers printing his books so we could learn from him. There's that.

How do we gain any sense of self without memory? It's pretty impossible.

"But even if paper itself disappears, words will remain. We haven't lost the stories." - The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

We fear illnesses like Alzheimer's as they lead to our forgetting, our past, our beloved ones, our selves.

We live our lives as cyborgs, half online, half offline, expressing ourselves through what we do and share.

But how many times do we go back and look at all those pictures we took?

Archiving isn't just preserving what's there for generations to come; it's also often making an event. In the same way, we create a picture of ourselves, living the high life, when deep behind the facade, all the same anxieties lurk, opening their mouth, gasping for attention like Koi near the surface of the pond of your tranquility.

After all, if our lives were that great, would we feel the need to constantly document them to the outside world? Does what we write, what we share, eventually become us?

What does it mean then if all remains forever. Isn't forgetting also a healthy mechanism for us to cope? Our minds, unlike blockspace, are limited.

We'll never be able to memorize everything we've experienced. Whenever we remember, it's as much a reconstruction as it is a retrieval. It allows us to make peace with the past and find meaning in our trajectory so far.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Kierkegaard

How many times do we go back to something we've written or said in the past, only to nearly die from cringe? It's a sign of us changing, our selves evolving, and with it our views and words.

The problem is, the past can also hold us hostage, especially in a world where humans are reduced to brands, and expected to adhere to consistency is key.

Having endless storage at hand, then, might not be the panacea it's made out to be.

Assuming everything on the internet will remain forever… how do we ever find the things that mean something to us?

Even on a smaller scale, the one thing people forget is: archiving is also a labour of love.

A few years ago, I decided I should start collecting links to blogs I enjoyed, and useful tools in a personal archive. I started out fanatically adding new things to it, quickly accumulating a gigantic archvie.

But the bigger the archive, the heavier the task of maintaining it.

The other day, I deleted it completely.

The thought alone of needing to figure out how to optimize this thing had been hanging over me, and the dread had kept me from ever going there.

In the end, I asked myself: what's the point?

I wanted a clean slate.

A new beginning.

In our era of cognitive outsourcing, I've started to write down in physical notebooks the quotes and ideas I really want to remember.

What's the ultimate freedom? Having access to all the information as long as you're connected or… knowing the things you really want to by heart?

It's also occurred to me that anyone confronted with a forever storage solution might quickly feel the same way I felt about my personal archive: incapable of bringing order to the chaos.

I know what the Tech Bros will say: we will just use AI agents to help us sort through the mess that was created by bot-fuelled enshittification.

Still, it doesn't address the main question that I have if we were to store everything forever: how do we encounter the relevant?

The thing that makes us feel something?

I believe the missing ingredient is humans who will dare to champion and speak up for what they find in the depths of the dark forest. And infrastructure to support it.

In the Classical Music world, there's plenty of precedent for such happenings. Think about the most famous German composer you can come up with?

Probably Bach. (or Beethoven)

He wasn't actually very popular with mainstream audiences after his death. The connoisseurs sure knew him, but average concert-goers wouldn't be familiar with his works.

A few centuries later, the Bach festival draws 75.000 visitors in Leipzig alone. For the younger people, he's become like the Taylor Swift of classical music.

What happened?

I'll tell you: Mendelssohn.

A well-respected composer and concert master himself, Mendelssohn established a practice of performing old music, especially that of Bach, as part of his concerts.

The catalyst for the now existing appreciation of Bach.

His motivation was likely a mix of his own admiration of Bach and the educational mission he saw himself on, teaching the snobs something about music that pushed them outside their comfort zone.

Who will be the champions of the work we create? Writing we put out on the internet that's already nearly 50% dominated by bots?

If everything is stored forever, who will be the archivists of that?

The ones who lead us to the cemetery of the forgotten books, guiding us to the pages where a now-forgotten writer has put into words a sentiment we've had for a long time but never knew how to express.

“In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands." - Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I have all the questions and none of the answers.

Whenever we pretend that preserving everything forever is the solution for the current ills of the centralized mess, we assume that history is set in stone.

Yet, we all know that in our personal lives, we change, we adjust, and we're not always consistent, as is expected of a so-called personal brand.

On a larger scale, an archaeologist digging up one small artifact often triggers a massive shift in our perception of ancient civilizations.

For the longest, our view of history was that progress was linear. We were always moving forward, never back.

Even today's technodeterminists want you to believe as much that, in the end, there's abundance, the panacea for all our ills.

Unfortunately, this view is flawed. While not a history student, as an interested museum-goer, I can't forget learning about the discovery of the antikythera mechanism, the world's oldest calculator — some even call it computer — discovered in 1901, which led us to realize once again that progress was not a linear, but a boom and bust.

Believed to have been built during the late first or second century BC, it was used to calculate the positions of various astrological bodies.

With such a fantastic technology at hand, you'd assume the subsequent centuries would see further advances, but the opposite happened.

The mechanism was lost, and we regressed to more primitive ways of celestial happenings.

Will future civilizations dig through the mess we're leaving online in the same way and find artifacts that speak to our progress and ensuing regression?

Who will be those championing the voices from the fringes, those that are always at risk of getting drowned out by the algorithm-induced pressure to conform for clicks?

If memory is so closely tied to forgiveness, and, as Margaret Atwood would point out, debt, can we ever hope to start anew?

If the current archive is held in the hands of those in power, the ledger controlled by those who have the wealth, why wouldn't — as so often happened in the past — the majority be inclined to simply burn it?

P.S I don't have the answers. All I have is a lot of questions I rarely ever see discussed by those parading forever storage as the solution.

This essay was written for the Lens x Fountain Summer Creative Contest.

Cover image: Otto Painting: Freedom of the Unity

As a writer, I figured, while the recording isn't out in the open yet, I might as well try to write down the gist of it

Initially, when I was nudged to submit a talk, the title I gave it was "Marx for Crypto Bros." I'd been called a Marxist by crypto people before, because I dared to question the individualistic, greed-driven mindset. Upon closer inspection I realized, none of these people ever read Marx, at best their takes were "well Lenin's implementation didn't work so that's all you need to know."

And if we know one thing, it's that leftish thought is the most disdained in crypto; which is funny when we have sexists, fascists, and obnoxious AI peddlers.

laurence

@functi0nZer0

Tag yourselves, I’m the technofascist

200

11:28 • 24 May 2025

While there are entire talks to be done on what parts of Marx's writing make it conducive to dictators sacrificing present generations to a bigger cause, that's not what I spoke about. Instead, after being told I'm in the app track, I went back to reading some Marx and figuring out how that's relevant to apps.

My exposure until then had been primarily in the realm of a critique of Capitalism... I quickly realized there was more to it than that. A concept that perfectly described much of how I felt about crypto:

Do you ever feel like just a cog in the crypto machine? If so, I think that's by design, and by the culture we've built.

It's easy to feel like the main character of Tokyo Ghoul, all you wanted was to go on a date (make life-changing wealth), but instead, you got turned into a Ghoul (airdrop farmer), utterly dependent on external factors to provide you with meaning, or a sense of direction (or turn you into an even worse monster if you read Tokyo Ghoul re you know).

Our obsession with growth...

It's hilarious (not) how we, as a supposedly contrarian industry to Big Tech, have adopted much the same playbook. Think of the advice you're given when scaling your app. It's rarely go talk to your users and figure out what it is they seek.. It's more often, you should add the following to your thing:

• frictionless: you don't want people to stop and think, the ideal user is a mindless cog giving you money

• automation: as you wouldn't want to limit yourself to the times humans are awake. Anyway, it contributes to the previous point

• gamification: everything that can be measured can and will be gamified, you might as well lean into that and make sure people come back. It's worked for pigeons, when they provided predictable rewards, the birds would eventually stop trying, but with unpredictable rewards they continued...

• incentives: because if there's no actual good reason beyond that, and if we view a human as a purely "optimize for gains"-driven being, might as well slap those potential tokens on there. Plus, creating it is free.

The main goal of these things? Growth... and that's best achieved through? Addiction. Then you won't have to worry about users coming back. This might just work short-term, but what's crypto if not an industry running on short-termism?

"Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time. "

Byung-Chul Han

Put yourself in the shoes of the users

Imagine you're hooked to such an app. Actually, you don't even have to imagine. I bet you have at least one semi-addiction to one of the social media platforms of your choosing, where.. You find yourself going back to it, scrolling on despite a lack of actual joy derived from it. A sense of not being in control often accompanying that binge.

I'd assume that Sysiphus if asked whether he'd prefer the boulder or doomscrolling, he'd chose the first.

And we know what's driven this model in Big Tech: Capital.

There's no crypto exceptionalism. Similar tendencies are playing out right before our eyes, think about all the vaporware L1s that the VC cabal is pushing down our throats.

And yet, the second you try to point this out, you're a Marxist. So let's talk about Marx, the guy so obsessed with economic conditions as what's holding his contemporaries; mind you not him because he was bourgeoisie and had a sugar daddy; down.

Especially when reading his Economic and Philosophical Manuscript, one theme stood out. It wasn't a critique purely of the distribution of capital. It was what it did to people, especially the factory workers working under gruesome conditions, stripped of their dignity and intellect.

Now thinking about it, not so different from an Amazon warehouse worker, but we all love our convenience, so we push this aside.

The result is alienation. It's worth noting that Marx believed humans to have an inborn desire to create, to labor, to shape the world around us, and create tokens of our existence. That's why people will continue creating art even if they're not paid for it (I know this is really hard to understand for some capitalist tech bro who believes that humans are just machines)

By stripping men of the time, the energy to follow this calling and instead creating such dumbed down labor that anyone could learn the steps in week, Capitalism didn't just alienate these workers from their own human essence, it also alienated them from each other; since everyone was now a competitor, fighting the threat of being replaced; and from the environment which was now abundant with things created by men but in which none of them were really expressed.

Quite depressing.

He'd describe such men as a crippled monstrosity, enslaved by things and circumstances.

Ironically a diagnosis that aptly applies to our day and age. It's just that the ones who are most alienated aren't the workers using their hands to work anymore, it's people like us. The Tech workers...

And we do our fair share to contribute and accelerate that sense of estrangement.

Alienation in crypto

It's easy blaming the VCs, but that's letting ourselves off the hook. I believe there's largely three kinds of alineation in crypto. Of course, that's on top of the usual alienation we suffer in modernity ^^

Alienation from our values

Remember when this industry stood for something that wasn't trying to rug the others faster than they can rug me? When the main goal wasn't to grow the fastest, to raise the most money, or to hit untenable numbers of users within a week of launch?

It seems that we've lost touch with what made this industry special. It just takes a look at Bitcoin to understand what I mean. It started as a decentralized network that everyone could participate in. Now it's more like a currency that companies buy into when they need PR coverage, and as more BTC accumulates in the hands of the few... we stand and clap?!

It used to be about empowering, now we just empower people to launch shittier memecoins, or get hooked to yet another app. What happened to banking the unbanked?

Zora is another great example of how things can go wrong. The noble initial pursuit of creating a positive-sum ecosystem turned on its head.

Alienated from each other

In crypto, we often reduce people to wallets, which makes it easy to forget there are real humans behind them with real stories. It also paves the way to not treat them as equals. Adding further abstraction usually contributes to alienation.

One appalling example to how we forget or have turned each other into means to an end (the end of making money), was the debate of two crypto bros on CT on whether they should tokenize a screenshot they'd taken messaging a girl on Hinge on Zora or pump.fun.

satvik

@sxtvik

no way crypto bros are arguing about the original ownership of a screenshot of a woman from a dating app and which form factor between pump and zora is better for this instead of even for one second stopping to think about what an insane violation of privacy and consent that is

464

20:17 • 22 Apr 2025

It took an insane amount of time until it was pointed out in the comments that this was gross disregard for the lady's privacy. It hadn't even crossed any of the people's minds in their excitement over potential gains.

It also took Zora one entire day to eventually take down the image... you do your own thinking there.

Alienation from our own humanity

There's a certain crop of crypto and tech bro that's really depressing to spend time with. It's because they seem to have very little regard for the things that make life worth living. Their deeply rationalist approach to life, ruling out any supposed irrational behavior like.. learning for the fun of it, not for gains... everything always has to be optimized for efficiency.

It's as if they're alienated from their own humanity, out of touch with makes us human, all these things at best considered inefficiencies or flaws. Crypto's recent focus on PVP doesn't help, disregarding the fact that our species has a track record of collaboration, creating a hostile environment where any empathy is considered weak, solidarity naive.

Maybe people have just become numb, apparently, such is the effect of too much time in the dopamine economy, and crypto is a hellscape for rewiring those circles. Dead inside.

..."how can I be virtuous if I am not alive, and how can I have a good conscience if I am not aware of anything?"

Marx

We should ask ourselves more often:

Is this really how humans should spend their time? Trapped in toxic environments? In communities only bound by the joint desire of making it because the system is rigged? A dog-eat-dog world as imagined by Hobbes?

The biggest problem is that, as long as this is the only viable path we present, it's the one people imagine. The one that's looked up to and tried to be followed. If you can make it and disappear with complete disregard for morals, then why shouldn't you? (given you have no conscience ofc)

As long as we don't start speaking up against such practices, very little will change. As such, the problem is political as much as it's systemic, and I know tech lovers hate to read things like that. Not every problem can be fixed by tech.

That said, since my talk was in the app track, I concluded with a few ideas for people building with a more humanist mindset:

• Don't enslave people to your freedom tech. If it can only survive when everyone has to check five times a day, maybe it's not all that great. I'm just saying, it's worth a thought, and enslavement to freedom hasn't worked in AOT, why would it work here?

• Create a true antithesis to the walled gardens of Big Tech: empower in the true sense, not in the way that current capitalism does by selling us shit. Instead, give people agency and tools to shape the environments they're in online. You'd think that blockchain is perfect for more participatory, diverse modes.

• Listen, respect, and protect your users and their dignity. I know many might not be ready in crypto to start talking about dignity, but I think we should. Especially if we want to be more attractive to real humans, and to create an antithesis to what most of the internet has turned into.

"To be radical is to go to the root, and the root is man himself."

Marx

If being a humanist in this hyper-capital enamored crypto sphere is what gets me called a Marxist, I'm okay with that label.

And I've learned to not start fights with people who don't have the curiosity to actually read up on the thinkers whose names they throw around as insults.

Thanks to the people who listened to me irl, and thanks to anyone reading

Excuse any typos, it's Friday eve and I wanted to get it down before I lose the motivation ha.

Once the recording is available, I'll link it here as well.

So long,

don't forget to log off occasionally.

When you ask people what you should learn, it's usually related to paving the way for your future career aspirations or, at least, something that seems immediately useful.

I too fell into these traps at first.

I am sure it works for some, but it didn't for me.

When I started working in crypto, all I wrote were introductions to new token projects, and the occasional more in-depth post on issues we face, or simple experiences with trying to do stuff that seems easy at first, but turned out to not be (finding out the storage location of your NFT metadata).

In a similar vein, as I tried to figure out what I should study in university, I first went for a bachelor's in tourism management because I assumed that, as long as it's got management, I'd go places.

Are these two things related? I think so.

They both judge the way we approach our own life, and presentation thereof from a stancepoint of biggest utility, and the security of outcome.

A brand of my self would, by extension always also be a reflection of the things I studied.

Funny enough, tough, even in my early 20s, I realized that I just didn't have a whole lot of passion for management or anything remotely related to bookkeeping or org charts.

Instead, I loved languages. I quit the tourism management school, moved 800km across Germany, and started from scratch studying Intercultural linguistics, a field that would lead to constantly having to deal with the question of:

But what are you going to do profesionally? How will you sustain yourself?

The tragedy of education in our age is that it's largely framed as a means to an end. University isn't a place to indulge your curiosity, it's a place that serves as a stepping stone to rising the ranks in our supposed meritocracies.

This mindset extends beyond institutional education. A few years ago, we were suddenly all encouraged to learn how to code. Not because that'd be great for human flourishing by and large, or our quality of life, but that's what promised you the quick hack to get hired. Or even build your own startup.

"Knowledge everywhere is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad human outlook on life itself, but as merely an ingredient in technical skills"

Bertrand Russel in Useless Knowledge

I'm glad I never had the money for any of those boot camps. A friend gifted me a Scrimba subscription, and I made it to intermediate Front-end before I quit. I knew that coding just wasn't for me, and no potential reward could ever compensate for that feeling.

I did a bunch of Hubspot courses and completed a Marketing MiniMBA back in the days when I believed that the next step in my career should be managing a marketing team. I've largely abandoned that idea because the prospect of constantly being in meetings scares me.

Eventually, I kind of burned out writing about crypto projects. It became repetitive, and it started boring me. This is when I let go of the idea of needing to be consistent in my "personal brand."

After all, what's a personal blog if not the place to write about whatever the f*ck currently interests me?

As Emerson reminds us, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and why wouldn't we take his advice?

What's there to lose anyway?

Life feels shallow and empty? Maybe it's because much of our time is spent with passive consumption, and not much room for real leisure or play.

The ancient Greek philosophers would probably be appalled at the kind of lives we lead. A life not contemplated wasn't worth living to them, but to us, we're seemingly constantly chasing something, or trying to kill the time we tried to save so hard.

When all our time is spent advancing our skills further toward becoming better workers, how much is left for what interests us? Isn't that a form of alienation, too?

"The compulsion of work and performance intensify the profanation of life."

Byung Chul Han

How is that freedom? Liberation? I find it weird how these days we celebrate outsourcing much of our agency. Certain people will talk with pride about their "brain rot" and their inability to focus. They'll rarely ever leave their feeds, the algorithmic complacency is going strong.

The antidote to all that I've found?

Being curious and asking yourself questions. Finding time offline and just thinking about random shit. Even if it's deemed useless by people. Especially then. It's radical to learn stuff that's not directly conducive to being immediately consumed or turned into profit.

Reclaim learning

As something you do for yourself, and not for anyone else.

I'm afraid to tell you, it can actually be quite fun to go down the rabbit hole. Recently, thanks to a wood pigeon couple visiting my garden, I've been learning a lot about pigeons to the point where I started reading academic papers about them.

It's not like that knowledge will be fuelling my career anytime soon, nor does it make me appear like a cool, mystical creature online that'd appeal to the masses.

But it has made the experience of watching these two or three wood pigeons peck around my garden and crash through hedges much more enjoyable because I now have all that context on them. It makes me happy when I see them. It's another small joy to break through the veil of to-dos and latent anxiety of having forgotten an important one.

Of course, pigeons are far from the only theme I've spent countless hours researching without any obvious reward outside of the enjoyment derived from the activity itself.

Curiosity is the gateway to it. It is a way to re-discover childlike wonder and reclaim space away from what's imposed on us from outside. There's no goals, just a desire to understand and find out.

And sometimes, seemingly unrelated topics start to connect, and there's satisfaction in that.

As Josef Pieper asked in Leisure as the basis of culture

"Can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workday existence?"

No, it can't. We're not our job. Our jobs aren't the providers of meaning, nor is the carefully curated image we present of ourselves online. So we shouldn't be governed by them either in what we fill our minds with.

Already in the 1970s, Moritz Schlick reminded us that meaning is in the things that exist for their own sake and carry satisfaction within. There's much joy to be found in free, purposeless exploration.

Boze the Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️

@SketchesbyBoze

This is why I say curiosity and a love of learning are dying. Many people would rather be spoon-fed misinformation by a machine than explore new avenues of knowledge. It's not that tech is making us dumber - it's worse. It's killing the desire to even want to learn.

Culture Crave 🍿

@CultureCrave

ChatGPT now gets more monthly visitors than Wikipedia

(via @Similarweb)

9,677

18:59 • 19 May 2025

If we lose our curiosity, what's left?

If we let others dictate what we consume, where, what knowledge we gain, where does it end?

Will we become a society of shallow entertainment, as pictured in Fahrenheit 451? Will we eventually lack the words to describe what we see and, worse, how we feel, turning us into shells of a full human existence?

"There is no need to waste words showing that not everything is useless which cannot be brought under the definition of useful."

Josef Pieper

Thanks for reading

As serendipity will have it, my deep interest in figuring out why life felt shallow and my exploration of philosophy in an attempt to find words to make sense of it have led to me giving a talk at ETH Dublin this weekend titled "Cogs in the Crypto Machine."

If you're around, say hi! If not, I'm sure there will be a recording afterward.

And it's not just because I'm forced to using Notion at work (that is enough of a pain honestly for one human) - it's also because I feel consistently like being the odd one out for trying to argue against de-humanizing ways, against ways to strip all dignity away, from winning the race to the bottom just for the sake of quick attention.

I know this doesn't go in a Tech Bro's bird brain (oh wait sorry... actually pigeon brains have double the neuron density than we do so it's an unfair comparison to the birds), but attention is not made equal. Neither are all your users.

I've always been deeply critical about this attempt to squeeze everything into data points. Even when individuals do it to themselves. There's a reason Yuval considered data-ism one of the most dangerous movements of our time, and Byung-Chul Han deems this cult of transparency to be a culprit of our eroding social fabric.

There really is no need to become your prison guard and prisoner at the same time.

There's also really no need why we should be so enamored with the idea of stripping people of everything that makes them human only so they can fit your "data capture".

I'm really amazed at how many times discussions around new product launches are less about what does it solve for the people you create it for ⸺ assuming those exists anyway ⸺ and all about how to design it so that more people will use it, to ensure it goes viral fast, and keeps em coming back.

It's as if all that matters is number go up.

Transaction count, wallets connected, volumes, followers, engagement... pick your poison.

There's no place for qualitative measure there ⸺ and maybe that's by design.

Because we're not dealing in such particulars, we're only dealing with the lowest common denominator.

If a game designed to addict will be the fastest way to grow users, let's do it.

Who cares as long as we accumulate wealth, status, or attention, right?

That all too often seems the leading motivation.

As long as we make money out of it, it doesn't matter whether others' dignity or humanity is denied in the process. Attention is all you need; how it's gained does not matter.

In the Pedagogy of the oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that to the oppressor, humanity is something that they exclusively possess, an inherited property; whereas the others don't have it, so it's okay to treat them without regard for it. (If that sounds an awful lot like fascism... yeah it does)

Just like when crypto bros were super excited about turning a screenshot of a woman on Hinge into a coin on Zora without her consent...

satvik

@sxtvik

no way crypto bros are arguing about the original ownership of a screenshot of a woman from a dating app and which form factor between pump and zora is better for this instead of even for one second stopping to think about what an insane violation of privacy and consent that is

466

20:17 • 22 Apr 2025

Move fast and break things

That's the name of the game. Hey, even if it's social norms you don't understand at all, who gives a sh*t , after all, you're not in crypto to fix things, you're here for the disruption and if it doesn't work you'll just abandon the thing, and run up the next quick pump and dump. Maintenance is an art lost on most.

The longer I'm in this space, the more I feel like people have really forgot what it means to be a human.

Andrea

@andreaonchain

i’m sorry but if someone dies on stream and your first reaction is to tokenise it or ape in, there’s something deeply broken in this space. and maybe in you.

crypto loves to talk about freedom, community, and disruption. what exactly are we building here?

66

16:21 • 4 May 2025

And maybe it's all in the system, sure. After all, in the 18th century, Kierkegaard noticed that in the present age, too much information leads to confusion, forcing people to adopt whatever opinion they deem as the most socially advantageous without asking themselves what they actually feel or think.

In crypto, there certainly is a similar thing happening with the mob mentality.

For the time that Base tried to meme into existence the "coin everything", the cabal that was already associated with it was all in on this idea.

Although it wasn't quite new, it's just pump.fun dressed up in a boomer attire.

Innovation is now just new ways to extract value while financializing anything that's not yet tradeable.

As Heidegger noted in The Question concerning Technology, technology just turns the world into a resource ready for exploitation.

This too includes our selves. Our attention. Our souls?

Can't be long until you can trade your own thoughts.

This then begs the question, though... what even is a thought that you can coin?

It's not a conversation these people are ready to have.

Because it requires a little deeper consideration of what constitutes ownership over a thought and of individuality.

I know this would happen because every time I bring up that privacy goes beyond the individual, the best response I can get is that "I should have the right to sell my data".

There's no stopping to ask... is it really just my data. Is it maybe also someone else's? If so, do I even have the right to sell it? Should anyone of us? Is this a moral question?

Bringing up morals at a crypto happy hour is the best way to be left alone.

I can't help but feel that many in crypto are very out of touch with other human beings and themselves.

That, too, isn't a new trend either.

"We shouldn't allow these glories to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we've numbed an essential part of ourselves."

Nicholas Carr in Glass Cage

In 1867, long before crypo, Marx and Engels describe factory workers as "a crippled monstrosity" turned into such due to the power of capital.

By reducing the working class to cogs in the machine, easily replaceable, competing with each other, all in such a precarious situation, yet clinging on to the little they had, they couldn't see beyond the individual sphere to recognize the misery bestowed upon them and the power that would lie in their solidarity.

While during the time of Marx, the working class might have been the ones most hit by alienation, now it's all of us.

"Alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people."

Erich Fromm

Surely, you can't be watching this latest Zuckerberg video explaining that they'll fix the loneliness epidemic by creating AI companions and arguing against the fact that... these people are horribly out of touch.

neil turkewitz

@neilturkewitz

This is what happens when you believe that humanity is reducible to binary data—you think of friendship through the lens of supply & demand, and don’t understand why everyone despises you.

Roman Helmet Guy

@romanhelmetguy

Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.”

9,658

16:42 • 1 May 2025

It might just be that they're a crippled monstrosity, alienated from their own essence.

From all the things that make them human. That makes a human life worth living.

When everything is subsumed by the force of Capital, of financialization, of being turned into a coin for quick gain, what genuine interactions are left?

If anything you do is commoditized, what even is the real you? Is anything authentic anymore?

Is it worth it?

Maybe some are too deeply entrenched in the spectacle to ever break free from the world of appearance, from the addiction to growth at all cost, numbed, distracted by distractions from distractions, that they can't even conceive of a world beyond this.

You know the ironic part is, wasn't crypto meant to be freedom tech?

Yet I see awfully little discussion on that.

Getting people to constantly engage for the sake of earning points or some other sort of reward with an opaque distribution mechanism—isn't that a kind of unfreedom you foster there?

I'm not saying there's no room for reward systems, I'm just saying that a lot of crypto seems to have adopted the limbic capitalism playbook, exploiting our human weaknesses to get people hooked.

We see each other as wallets, maybe as exit liquidity, pixels on the screen.

There's often very little appreciation of the fact that we're dealing with real human beings. Their livelihoods. Nuances. Shades of grey.

The layers of abstraction, the lack of imagination, reducing others to wallets, to numbers, to resources to extract from. Even oneself then becomes but that.

It's not a coincidence that there's a big overlap between admirers of don't die and crypto bros. After all, what's the former if not an attempt to control your own body, treating it like a machine, giving up your agency to a blueprint, and flattening the perception of you in the world to data points on screens? It's a deeply nihilistic endeavor, if you ask me.

Similar to the attempts of a crop of crypto people very into turning everything, and everyone, into a number, a mindless cog in their liquidity machine.

The problem is that, by crypto standards anyway, it works.

Leaning on Byung Chul-Han's description of hyperconnectivity masquerading as meaningful engagement... I'd argue we have hyperactivity masquerading as meaningful adoption.

But as long as we're not even ready to discuss the system that gave rise to this, and have a reckoning on the social layer, I doubt anything will change.

In this system of soul-sucking apps, I would suggest being radical.

Build to empower, to enable, to meet humans in their wholeness.

In short, be a humanist.

Thanks for reading

I know not everyone in crypto is horrible, and I'm glad I met many of those, as hard as they are to come by. This isn't an individual issue; it's a systemic one.

Despite countless disappointments, I still have hope for this industry, and try to do my part to seed different ways.

Watch this space

Cover image: Scene from Code Geass

It got me thinking.

About the presentation by Rory Sutherland, I watched one year ago on YouTube, wondering whether we're too impatient to be intelligent.

About the hyped billionaire VCs posting about how SpaceX will radically reduce transit times, going from San Francisco to Tokyo in minutes instead of hours.

About how we think in goals and absolutes, and the value of the journey to get there usually isn't accounted for.

As in the joke about how this overnight success was really years in the making.

Is it pointing to something larger in our culture that the only direction we know is faster?

To what end, then, friend, if all our lives end in death and demise? Even the ambition to live forever, may be just another face of the death instinct.

We dream of beaming ourselves from one place to the other, never stopping to wonder whether that's even desirable.

When we discuss how to fix rails and roads, it's always about going places faster.

Rory Sutherland thinks that this is because we want to win arguments, so we pick what can be quantified - not necessarily what's human.

When you ask Google, you always get the supposedly fastest route, never the most scenic. Think about that.

If you're in a new place, isn't that what you'd sometimes want?

Leaving streets and rails behind, and taking off to fly away.

Isn't there something that makes the experience of flying weird?

You're far removed from the earth, one moment here, the next few hours on the other side of the globe.

It's an amazing invention, and without it, I quite literally wouldn't exist (I doubt my Dad would have used the Transsiberian train to get to Germany, even though it'd have made for an epic tale)

Still, I always sense the abstraction from space when flying to be a little disturbing.

If it's indeed true that the soul travels at the speed of walking, mine has long been left behind somewhere, trying to catch up.

Even on flights now, Wi-Fi has become so common that on every flight, you'll see people typing away on their devices—the same picture as on the train—never stopping to gaze out of the window and marvel at the beauty (or lack thereof) of the landscape passing by.

"When the airships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights and windows and the proportionate amount of discomfort to those who were civilized and refined."

E.M.Forster in The Machine Stops

I've tried and given up working on trains, mostly because I realized there is no point.

It's a privilege to travel like that, so why not enjoy it, take this as a moment of transition, a thing that has value on its own even if it can't be captured as easily as reaching a goal.

As so often with me, this isn't just about how to not squeeze work into every second of your life whenever there's connectivity.

It's about how, in general, we might over-focus on destinations and underappreciate in-between spaces.

I used to have this naive belief that once I made a certain kind of salary, the good life would begin. Of course, that's a bit stupid, and I'd say that at large, my life has been pretty great even when I was broke. I just got inventive and found out about the 100 Yen happy hours and went to all the crypto meetups because it meant I wouldn't need to spend money on dinner.

Still, the point stands that there are a lot of people out there with their versions of "once XYZ, the great life begins."

But what if it doesn't work out?

Does it mean all the efforts are for nothing?

Of course not.

Yet we have a culture of to-do lists, of things that need to be completed, not halfway, not just a little—100%. Either done or they'll forever live on to haunt you. Maybe that's purgatory.

It's like being stuck halfway to a beautiful place.

You can either yell angrily at the train driver or... step out of the wagon, guard your eyes against the burning sun (we learned this from Camus), and curiously look around.

Once I figured out that there is no magical moment, that now as things are that's just my life... it could be dreadful, but really it's freeing.

It means you can figure out how to enjoy the in-between spaces. Sure, I might earn the amount I figured would change something when I was young and naive, but honestly, it comes with much more taxes and health care costs, so the need to ponder expenditures never went away.

Maybe one day I might be able not to have to think about money at all, but today isn't the day, and that's fine.

And also it doesn't matter because I've figured out how to make place for taking in the in-between spaces, the long train rides, the pondering an idea for many months until it's ready to be written down, accumulating random bits and pieces of information for so long... and noticing years later that they all fit together somehow, moving places that don't work out for me, starting and quitting new hobbies without regret...

"The totalization of Here and Now divests the in-between spaces of any meaning. Today's experience is characterized by the fact that it's poor in transitions."

Byung Chul Han in The Scent of Time

In the end, all the things I tried, all the goals I failed, all the dreams I had and didn't quite get there... even the attempts, the tears cried over failed relationships, the anger raging inside at experiencing power harassment first-hand, it all has become part of me.

Thanks for reading

Cover image by Postwook, Space Travel: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cvr7O3kunbJ/

It has nothing to do with going through a crisis of the self. I'm doing just fine.

But ever since I've been ghostwriting, at times I wonder, what the f*ck are we (I) even doing here.

This isn't the first time it's crossed my mind. I remember vividly working under a pretty useless CEO once, who couldn't even formulate a comprehensible sentence in Telegram chats. The next thing you know, I see a book supposedly written by him in the Business section of my local bookshop.

Clearly it wasn't him writing that — it was someone like me who is lacking the "C-Suite" title or the social capital to be even considered for being quoted. For what it's worth, I do know the Cointelegraph Op-Ed policy by heart at this point, so if I ever felt some sort of opinionated way, I might as well submit something of my own and see what happens.

It's sometimes reassuring when external bystanders who know the person in whose name the work is printed say things like, "I knew he didn't write that." (It's almost exclusively he.)

Yet it feels weird, at times wrong.

Why do I write comments on behalf of leadership people who can't even be bothered to spend 10 minutes thinking about comments on current events in their area of expertise (not mine, but I somehow have to become a bit of an expert then) so that they can be quoted in a fancy newspaper?

What's real and what isn't? In the best case, they will at least provide some input into it, but many times, not at all.

Once you know about the industrial ghostwriting complex in crypto, you do wonder... why do we, as an industry that wanted to be bottom-up and different, adopt this?

Anyway, look, I am not complaining about the fact that I'm making some money on the side that way - it just makes me question whenever I see an Op-Ed whether the person supposedly publishing it is the actual writer.

Does it matter?

Maybe.

I guess if no one reads anyway, it's just about the backlinks or prestige.

And whenever I write such a thing, I can't connect with the work. I know this productivity guru said you should just imagine how a task would be if it were fun. Pretending to be a 40-year-old alpha male tech bro and being forced into the corset of an Op-Ed policy to write about their supposed smart commentary about tokenization of commodities just isn't fun no matter what way you turn it.

It's pretending to be another person in writing, like splintering a little.

Maybe it's how artists feel when commissioned to paint something that doesn't fulfill their artistic requirements, but another person's.

You turn off that personal voice of yours and pretend being someone else.

The result reads like...Something I don't feel in tune with.

Is it actually that other person's voice, though?

I can't know as I never read anything they actually wrote themselves.

That's the ironic part.

It creates an article that - at least is coherent and reads well - but it has nothing to do with me. Even if it was I who spent hours researching the topic, trying to find an interesting angle, and painstakingly typing it in.

That's what alienated labor must feel like.

I have no control over the topic. I have no control over the voice. No decision-making power whatsoever.

Marx stresses two points: 1) in the process of work, and especially of work under the conditions of capitalism, man is estranged from his own creative powers, and 2) the .objects of his own work become alien beings.

-Erich Fromm Marx's Concept of Man

I'm reminded again of the first lines of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novel The Angel's Game.

"A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange or a story [...] because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price."

What's ghostwriting other than selling pieces of my soul, then?

For what?

So I can afford to live. To pay my bills. To afford time to write on my account without needing to worry about monetizing. Without anyone else stamping their name on it.

But the messy feelings remain.

Thanks for reading

If you can relate, lmk.

The good news is that I have plenty of other side projects in which I do feel like I'm just doing me. Otherwise, I'd have gone crazy long ago.

"What are these people doing here? Don't they have jobs?" my inner monologue goes on before concluding that the same is true of me. Yet here I am on a sunny Monday at 3 p.m., about to step into an institution said to be long dead: the mall. 

As a teenager, malls were a meeting place I never entirely understood. In that regard, my evolution as a person is thoroughly lacking, as I'm nowhere closer to comprehending the appeal of spending more time than necessary in these temples of consumption.

Back then, the cool kids would go there, especially those girls who'd claim that shopping was their hobby — a hobby I couldn't afford nor appreciate — still don't, with the exception of shopping for books in cute little bookstores. These cool girls would try on clothes their pocket money couldn't afford, look longingly at the Pandora arm bracelet charms, and consume copious amounts of Bubble tea; that was a thing back then.

Driven by the sugar high, they might either challenge each other to steal small items or try and attempt flirting with a cute passerby in what always seemed more glamorous in the imagination, its emotional impact only matched by the awkwardness of the act.

Now equipped with two more decades of life experience, I still don't feel enticed to visit them, even if their feature of having lots of shops in one place is hailed as a great advantage. Maybe it's the lack of oxygen, the lack of daylight, the soundscape of malls, the ambiance of commodity fetishism seeping through. Maybe it's the mix of all the smells, an invisible attack overwhelming your olfactory senses.

As I walked through today, I thought about all that and how, at least, unlike people's now prime mode of consumption, malls allow you to touch and try things before committing. You're forced to face other human beings either on the staircase or when they come in the form of an over-motivated sales staff in the cosmetics aisle trying to sell you a $100 moisturizer, which, and I quote: "works miracles to prevent aging."

I got news for her, the only way to prevent aging is to die.

I didn't say that. I kindly declined, not without mentally calculating the price of my entire skincare routine, which came out to less than $100.

That might not be the most relatable experience but haven't we all once — intoxicated by the consumerism seeping into our pores — entered a shop, confidently and sovereignly picked a bunch of times, and then... backed out the last second when we realized that we had misread the price, and one item would be our monthly salary quadrupled.

With abashed feelings, you try to keep face as the shop staff keeps up the facade of a smile, but we all know they know, and that's that.

I hear people don't feel shame like that anymore these days, so that, too, might be a thing of the past. Or, thanks to credit cards and buy now, pay later schemes, people won't walk out but just make use of the newly gained rights to indebt themselves beyond forgiveness.

As usual, when I put it onto myself to walk through this sensory overload indoor temple, I was on a mission: reaching the supermarket in its basement, which unfortunately requires walking through half of the complex.

As I tried to carve my path through the leisurely strolling masses, I realized a guy intently looking at me as he approached. So I did as teenage me had always aspired to but never managed: reciprocated that gaze and when an acknowledging smile appeared on his face, I too smiled back at him.

If my life was a Hollywood movie, this would be a point of falling in love at first sight. My life is more of a European film, though, where things are real and, at best, tragic-comic.

This dialogue without words ended as quickly as it began when I descended the staircase.

I'll never know the others' stories or their names. Still, as a human-interaction-deprived remote worker, I cherish even small nonverbal interactions like that, especially on a day when I just jumped from TG chat to TG chat, seemingly accomplishing nothing at all except feeling horrible, my professional career devoid of impact.

It's nice to be seen like that—maybe even nicer than all the flame emojis people send in reaction to a selfie. You took 100 attempts to get the angle perfect and then added a filter to further improve the aesthetic before uploading it to your story. It feels more real.

They didn't get you from your best angle - just how you were at that moment.

Of course, it doesn't have to be some handsome guy walking past. It can also be a cute grandma chatting you up to ask about the way to get someplace (I seem to attract these), a cashier who just has to vent about a previous customer to offloaded some stress, or a ferry driver joking around about how you get the VIP package as the only passenger on board.

Somewhere, I read that even such small interactions with strangers go a long way in making us feel less alone in the world—a part of something else. Maybe the remains of the interconnectedness the human race built its empire on.

Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody… Plurality is the law of the earth.

Hannah Arendt

Thanks for reading 💚

I think part of the reason I feel sympathetic to shop staff, resulting in me letting them advertise fancy stuff I don't need to, is that I, too, once was a floor staff.

I worked at Calzedonia as a shop staff full-time for a few months when living in Tokyo, and it's not necessarily a job that's fun all the time nor satisfying for a brain person like me.

You face constant boredom, yet you are expected to look happy and be in a great mood whenever a customer walks in.

You're on your legs 8 hours a day. And you have to memorize the location of a shit ton of items spread across shop floors, all the shortcuts on the cash register, how to deal with the people who get duty-free, and the size conversions for different bra sizes. Oh and then there's the thing of hitting your sales quota that's pretty high every day... mostly by selling fairly cheap socks.

Anyway, it was still a great experience to have. Maybe I'll write about it some other day.

So long,

Don't buy their "never tearing tights." It's a lie. Mine tore the second I put them on. 😼