Defective Altruist

Hi everyone I’m Justin and I’m 3 years sober.

Hi Justin.

I first used when I was 12 years old. My older brother and his friends had gotten access to copilot and they said now that I “was a man” I could use it for a couple minutes. I’ll never forget my first time. The text raced across the screen faster than I could read. Garbage output they said. Low grade shit, and they could find much better if their buddy they bought the login from didn’t fuck them over. I didn’t care. All I could see was parentheses closing on their own and function headers appearing out of thin air.

By the time I was 15 I was mainlining Claude every day. I fell in with the wrong crowd. I was a part of a discord community filled with anime pfps from every corner of the earth. They were teaching me how to run 5, 10, even 20 agents at once. I would use those agents to hack people’s api keys, just to get a little more squeeze. I remember at my peak I had nearly 100 different agents running across 10 separate machines I had rootkitted.

Then one day it all caught up to me. I was 17 and going steady with an e-kitten. We would run agents together, have them build our little digital world while we would sleep on call. I got woken up in the middle of the night to an alert. 10% of my agents had died in the last 15 minutes. By the time I opened my customized monitoring dashboard they created, I was down to 80%. What the fuck was going on?

I needed to get an agent to debug. But none of them were launching. I started realizing I would need to solve this myself. I went into complete and utter shock. I couldn’t remember the last time I had thought without an agent. I had almost no memory of what life was like before. I had been using all day every day for nearly 5 years at that point. My panic attack woke my e-kitten up.

“Babe what’s wrong?”.

50%.

“Nothing go back to sleep.” She could hear the panic in my voice.

“Just tell me”.

“I’m losing my agents”. We sit in silence for a few minutes, and then she hangs up the call.

18%.

I check the discord. Is anyone else experiencing this? I see users I’ve talked to for years go offline one by one. I tell myself, I just need to talk to an agent and it will all be okay. I try launching Gemini, Deepseek, ChatGPT even Mistral’s Le Chat once I got desperate enough. Down. Down. Down. Down.

3%.

I didn’t know it then, but I was facing severe withdrawals. When I woke up in the hospital the doctors said if someone hadn’t called 911 when they did, I would have been braindead within minutes. If you go years without using your brain, and then suddenly try to engage your neurons, the entire system collapses. Acute Cerebronimia they call it. Luckily the ambulance had many cups of lean to slow my nervous system down. I thank God every day for those styrofoam cups.

I haven’t touched a keyboard since that day. I remember one time 2 years ago I was sitting at the airport waiting for a flight, just reading a book. A well-dressed young woman pats me on the shoulder.

“Can you watch my stuff for me?”. “Sure.” I look over and her MacBook is sat open right next to me. I just stare at it. How quickly could I start an agent? 30 seconds? 15 seconds? All the memories of the good times start flooding back to me. I turn the computer to face me. Can I put my hands on the keyboard? I sit there staring at that screen for an eternity. She finally comes back.

“Thank you!”. “Yeah no problem.” I go back to reading my book, with relief flooding my whole body. That’s the closest I’ve gotten in the last 3 years.

Thank you for listening to my story.

Thank you for sharing Justin.

There’s a moment in Piers Morgan’s interview with Nicholas J. Fuentes, where the beet-faced British broadcaster asks the young demagogue “What is very fucking cool about Hitler?”. Without skipping a beat Fuentes responds, “Uhh, the edits”. Morgan continues the interview without interrogating this answer further, likely because Morgan has no conception of what an aura edit is. This 2-hour interview is scored with moments like these, borne out of the incredible difference between a man who grew up indoctrinated within modernism and one who lives and breathes the current reality of metamodernism.

The oldest tale of this world is the one of Gilgamesh, a demigod who battles gods and confronts the very essence of human mortality. Gilgamesh is likely based off a historical Sumerian king, who was later deified over the centuries of oral tradition. Throughout history, monarchs have adopted titles and myths to justify their imperial dominion over large swathes of humankind. King of kings was an imperial title adopted by rulers from West Asia to the Indian subcontinent throughout millennia, the same title used in the Bible to refer to Jesus Christ. Emperors of China obtained the Mandate of Heaven imbuing them with the right to rule all that lies below. An average peasant would go their whole lives without knowing anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone that had held court with their Emperor. These figures owned the right to your life, were as distant as any divine described in your religious tradition, and thus these legends permeated reality for the common-folk.

As scientific advances in communication and travel closed distances, the divine images of these men were slowly destroyed. Men had to become great because they espoused and demonstrated ideological convictions, leading to the greatest of wars over the grandest of narratives. With radio and widespread print, the distance was just right for millions of men to die for the cause. This was going quite well, until it was realized that this might all end with cockroaches inheriting the earth. This led to the rejection of everything sincere, because sincerity was going to get us all annihilated. People who read books label this as post-modernism, a firm embrace of performative irony in order to avoid the catastrophic mistakes of modernism.

It’s no accident that post-modernism coincided with television sets arriving in every living room. The serfs could see the men in suits, and confirm with their own two eyes that these were not men worth dying for. Even with the slow death of society and culture and life and meaning as the fat cats expedited the stripping of the world for their own pleasure, there was nothing to believe in and fight for.

So what is to be done? If you grew up after the turn of the millennium, everywhere you go you can smell the decline. A half-century of rejecting the narrative has led to the evident immiseration of every facet of being. However, holding beliefs too close to your heart has been tried before and we all know where that leads. Thus, one must exist in a permanent state of metamodernism, the continuous oscillation between modern sincerity and post-modern irony.

No political figure alive today embodies this better than the 27-year old Irish-Italian-Mexican man from the suburbs of Chicago. When Morgan questions Fuentes about how many jews died in the Holocaust, and Fuentes responds with “at least six million”, simultaneously exuding sincerity about Holocaust numbers being made up and performing irony about the very story of the Holocaust itself. When Fuentes quotes inaccurate statistics about the proportion of black men who end up in jail, he signals to his audience the sincere feeling that our inner cities are crime-ridden shitholes primarily caused by a certain segment of society, while simultaneously ridiculing his counterpart for taking the issue of the exact statistics seriously.

Aura edits get millions of views across Instagram and Tiktok from our youngest generation. They center on grand figures of the past and present, from FDR to Obama to Stalin to Trump to Hitler to JFK to Mao Zedong to Putin to Xi Jinping to Lee Kuan Yew to Malcom X and many more. Consisting of flashing images synced with uptempo or downtempo remixes of popular 2000s songs, anyone with a cursory introduction to CapCut can produce their own edit and upload it to the social media site of their choosing. Onlookers ask themselves, do the kids really love these controversial men of history? The answer is dependent on when and where you observe them on the pendulum swing of sincerity.

In the ham-fisted 2009 movie Surrogates, humans inhabit pods that let them control perfectly humanistic robots. If the robot is destroyed, the human jumps into a new pod and operates as them. Just few years later, a handful of Rubik’s cube solvers at MIT realized that replicating the complex bipedal mechanics which developed over 4 billion years of expensive evolution is rather difficult. So they made a robotic dog.

When they unveiled this dog to the world, some alarmists imagined a world where incredibly agile dogs dart through the battlefield with machine guns mowing down soldiers before they can react. Luckily for them the future we got is much worse. The average Ukrainian who has been forcibly dragged to the frontline and handed a rifle spends their remaining days scanning the sky and listening. Kept awake listening for the low hum.

The last thing you will see in this life is a low-flying consumer-grade quadcopter kitted with a ballistic. You might try to play dead, and hope the drone operator flies past in search of a fresher target. The remote pilot stares at his iPad patiently. The moment you twitch, look up or breathe too heavily it’s lights out.

In Gaza autonomous drones tracked thousands of suspected (resistance fighters / terrorists / Palestinians / brown people / Hamas extremists / jihadists / freedom fighters) with facial recognition technology, waited until they entered their home and blew up their whole lineage with “dumb” bombs. Project Lavender will be exported to every state apparatus, with next token predictors deciding who has a right to breathe the free air, and who is an enemy of the good people.

Two weeks into the new year, the American regime issued a no-fly zone around DHS facilities and mobile assets. The state is exceedingly aware that common drones are the tools of the Davids. Carrol Quigley argued that the weapon type accessible to civilians compared to the state directly effects the political structure. When the state has far more effective weapons, citizen soldiers become dominated by specialist soldiers. This guarantees concentration of power, as despots can exercise their will with smaller proportions of the population required to be subservient. When the populace and dogs of the state have access to equally effective weapons, then democracies flourish.

Nobody is quite sure where these unmanned aerial vehicles will land on the spectrum. Smaller actors can produce cheap one-way attack drones en masse, and defending against them is orders of magnitude more expensive. Larger powers can produce drones capable of flying for over a day and a thousand miles in order to unload explosives of enormous proportion. History will determine where the true power rests. The only question remains: will you be in front of the screen or inside of it?

Hey you. Yeah you over there. What are you doing that for. Don’t you see what you’re doing. Oh you don’t? Apologies then. I thought you were aware.

Do you want to slay a dragon with me? Oh that’s a PETA violation? Don’t you know the dragons are the ones funding PETA? What did you think they did with all that gold they rest on? You’ve never thought about it? Jeez man you gotta escape the Matrix. Read a book or something. Better yet buy my course where I distill dragon-slaying to a science.

Me? I’m not a dragon what are you talking about. I grew up just like you. Actually I was uglier. Actually I was shorter. I’ve worked hard for every ruble I’ve ever earned. Now my parents have flying carpets. They are so proud of me. Are your parents proud of you?

You never met your parents? You think I’m going to buy that sob story? I had it worse. Let me tell you. I’ve had it worse than anyone could have it. Ok except maybe Jesus. But like he’s like The Guy. Worse than everyone but Jesus. And look at me now. Look at me now. Why aren’t you looking?

Great. Perfect. Superb. You’re not going to regret this man. Can you pay via Klarna? Are you fucking with me? If you’re that broke you should have said so before I started talking to you. Look. I’ll take your money. But we’re starting on the wrong foot you and I. You’re really gonna have to do some extra work outside the course if you ever want to get to my level.

I think you’re a prime candidate for 1:1 coaching. Yeah the more I think about the more I realize you need it. Prime. It’ll pay for itself, once we get you set straight the yuan will just start flowing. Trust me. I mean isn’t my sex robot hot? You think I could afford her if I didn’t know what I was talking about?

Yeah man stare at her. Ok that’s enough. Oh one last thing. Let’s keep this lowkey. I’m giving out trade secrets here. If you go around blabbing about what we’re doing, you’re gonna ruin this gravy train for all of us. Your twin sister who you’ve confided everything in life with? See man. That right there. This is why you’re so screwed up. Do you want to change or not? Alright, good. I’m glad we could get this sorted out, I’m so happy for you man.

We live in a time of unease. Everyone knows that the system itself is being torn at the seams, after being worn out for decades. We all want to know what comes next. But next hasn’t quite arrived yet. Only glimpses of it. The recession has been right around the corner for a while now, but it won’t bite. People proclaim that these are America’s years of lead. That World War III is inevitable and you better learn how to a shoot a drone with a shotgun, preferably sooner rather than later. Maybe in the history books the starting point they’ll mark for this period has already passed. You won’t recognize it until you’re staring down the barrel.

Nothing dictates the pot has to reach a boil. It’s already been simmering for decades, tiny bubbles at the edges. Maybe these bubbles have grown bigger recently, but there’s always been bubbles. Many years ago many people believed smart sensible people would rise up and drop some ice cubes into the pot. This faith in self-correcting systems has melted faster than the polar ice caps.

No one escapes this tension. Billionaires build bunkers, fearing the society they looted will turn on them when the immiseration reaches a breaking point. Post Y2K babies live in a pit of irony, knowing their future will look drastically different than the generations that came before them. The marginal face the full might of declining powers desperately clinging on to the control they once had. Nerds seek to build a supercomputer to alleviate the suffering of thought itself, having concluded that the human experiment was decisively a bootloader.

How strong is the rope of liberal society? Every day more and more fascists and socialists run to either side of it, and start tugging. The table stakes couldn’t be higher. Unfortunately for those of us that have to live through history, we must wait for the march of time to see how this tension breaks.

Recently I’ve been informed that I arrived at the end of things. Communism was declared dead before I was born, and there is no alternative to the way of things. AI will come and render human thought quaint, and so we have every big tech company seated at the World Series of Poker Final Table where the first place and only prize is the fate of humanity. Best not bubble this tournament Sam Altman. If we’re lucky, anthropogenic climate change will cancel the tournament before it’s heads-up.

Perhaps the tech bros are wrong and it turns out enhanced text-prediction clankers can’t out-compete 4 billion years of evolution intellectually. Then we can look forward toward a slow death where the digital machine slowly replaces human connection, and reproduction grinds to a halt. Why would you have kids at the end of time? There is no after, you might as well enjoy while you can. Maybe you would have kids if you could afford it, but there’s no need for a future labor supply, so why would the ruling class let you afford it? They need all the money they can get before it’s time to descend into the bunkers.

The books say we just recently avoided the end. Apparently the clear minds of Kennedy and Khrushchev prevailed, preventing full-scale nuclear war. Now our leaders are emperors without clothes, so they can freely end our misery in minutes.

The nice thing about the apocalypse is that there’s a lot of different doomsday cults to pick from. Every ideology has a corner on the map, feel free to jump around and try a few. Maybe when you’re young you start out as a rationalist, and then become a zizian. Or you could go from a libertarian to a constitutional monarchist. Maybe you zigzag a little and go from watching Ben Shapiro to Hasan Piker to Nick Fuentes. Your beliefs don’t matter anyways, there’s nothing you can do to change anything when you’re on the last page of the book. You should probably just pick the one that has the people you want to hang out with.

I stumbled on https://unequalscenes.com/ the other day while doing my language learning routine. My second youtube account recommended me a street interviewer talking to residents of Mexico city about inequality. That lead to this website which showcases amazing shots of stark inequality, populations coexisting with a tiny physical wall separating life expectancy, way of life, and living room space.

In America we often separate the rich from the poor with leagues of space. The rich live in far off gated suburbs outside the city, with no public transportation. The poor are cordoned off into either urban ghettoes or sparse rural land. In most of the world the poor and rich live in the same expansive metropolises, sharing the same wall to kick a soccer ball off of.

The conversation of our times is inequality, the failed experiment of neoliberalism (or late stage capitalism if you choose to view it that way) causing skyrocketing inequality between nations, between cities and even between neighborhoods. I recently read The Divide by Jason Hickel, which dives deep on the myth of poverty reduction over the past 50 years, would recommend.

Now I want a print from https://unequalscenes.com/, but alas I have no apartment for this print. Hopefully soon.

For a long time I’ve insisted on referring to alcohol and caffeine as drugs. I’m sure this has annoyed one of my friends at least once. Obviously as far a stimulants go caffeine is the mildest, and alcohol is probably is least powerful depressant (I wouldn’t know I’m more of an upper guy (ok but not like that you know what I mean)).

For a long time I resisted caffeine. I felt that I shouldn’t be dependent on a drug to function daily. I made all through college pulling many a all-nighter while avoiding the temptation of an energy drink. Now that I’m a regular user, I shudder to think I how managed that. Anyways I was drugged against my will. When I interned at Roblox, they had bai flavored water which I would drink constantly. The caffeine is only listed in tiny text at the back of the bottle, and needless to say I just thought I really was quite productive in the office. I only found out there was caffeine in them when I returned for my full time job.

This disconnect between how productive I felt in my internship and my slow and lazy mind during full time work compelled me into a caffeine addiction. Then I discovered if I took pre-workout I was more energetic about pushing my limits in the gym.

I have a slippery slope mindset, so it’s hard for me to distinguish the rules I used to have for myself. I once said drugs should only be used for fun, ideally socially around friends. Take adderall to play smash with your friends and do combos that you could never do otherwise. Don’t take adderall to study for an exam, because drugs == FUN and you’re breaking the sanctity of fun.

But now I do caffeine daily to enhance my performance. How far will I go?

My recent interest has been economics and geopolitics. As a person who loves clicking through wikipedia for hours, it often feels like every interest is transient and competing for attention. It’s just a matter how long that transient feeling can last. As I grew older and realized that one must trade breadth for depth, a little part of my soul died. Being a specialized worker is rewarded in a world of 8 billion people, so you must choose what knowledge you seek.

Ok but I did enjoy learning about computer science. It’s a pretty broad field of study all things considered. But I missed learning about history, lucky for me there’s a whole cottage industry of pop-historians on youtube.

Apparently if you were a rich aristocrat in Europe, you can insure that your son was a proper “renaissance man” and they conceivably held the forefront of knowledge in almost every discipline.

Maybe ChatGPT is our modern day “renaissance man”. It relies on bluffing as much as they probably did when confronted with something they did not know.

I’ve skipped the last couple days. I could never be https://www.jquiambao.com/. I’m just not a consistent person anyways. I bet that guys never been on a 48-hour multiple addys dopamine bender tho (because he’s smarter than me).

I don’t know why I’m not a consistent person, which isn’t to say I can’t be consistent on certain habits like gym for extended periods of time, but in general I don’t view myself as a super consistent person. I blame this on the fact that as a kid I got away with procrastinating everything to the last minute, and this never caught up to me even in college. Me and my close friend like to joke that we perfected the art of estimating how long an assignment will take, always joking about how submitting an assignment with 20 minutes to spare is a huge amount of breathing room. I’m not joking though when I say I’ve submitted assignments when the software 0 minutes remaining more than once.

This sounds like bragging, but I obviously think for the real world the practice of discipline and learning to consistently do the work is very important for a child to learn. I think I’ve gotten better at this though (hopefully).

First of all I’m no expert on economics, but I always end up at logical paradoxes within capitalism. When you do proofs in mathematics, everything can be derived from axioms and the logical conclusions arrive at full your heart with joy, and you can hold those truths close to your heart knowing they can be translated a million ways and still hold their cogency.

The first problem I have is the inherent disconnect with profit existing at all. The theory behind capitalism is that rational consumers will choose the cheaper option between two identical products. Thus assuming infinite competition, a company that generates profit would get outcompeted by an identical company that simply lowers prices instead of extracting that profit. Instead we see profit margins increase decade by decade, markets consolidate into oligopolies, and less and less competition.

How can we point to a system that inherently trends to consolidation and market concentration and claim that capitalism drives innovation through competition. I think I need to read more books on economics honestly…

My motivation for learning languages is bad. I have unshakable yearning for understanding humanity and ever person that has ever lived. To this end when I was rather young I told myself I should learn the most useful languages to be able to communicate and the understand all the world, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic. The problem is that I’ve been stuck on Spanish as my first foreign language for about 10 years, and honestly I’ve probably regressed after leaving school.

In order to learn a language (in the modern way), you should do both a lot of deliberate practice accompanied with many many hours of passive exposure to the language. The problem I stumble into is that I’m just not particularly interested in much Spanish-speaking TV or youtube. The reason is obvious, which is that I don’t really have a particular interest in the language outside of the utilistic aspect, which is not nearly enough motivation to power through the countless hours necessary to approach being conversational.

There is alternative ways to fix this problem, which is simply drop yourself in a place where you’re forced to use Spanish to communicate, but that requires a large commitment. A more practical answer is to push myself a little harder to stop ignoring the cultural output of nearly half a billion people and truly find something I’m interested in.

Oh I and I’ve never kept it as a consistent habit in the first place. Time to roll the boulder up the hill again I guess.

We live in an age of infinite opportunity to share yourself. The primary method people have of interacting with the world in 2025 is to produce, consume and distribute “content”, which is a vague enough to describe literally anything. And yet I’ve always felt a discomfort in the idea of sharing myself over the internet. I’ve been a terminally online user of the internet since the ripe age of 12, but I have spent 99.99% of that lurking. Maybe it’s because of early indoctrination to not reveal you’re a kid on the internet, but more likely it comes from both laziness and and a lack importance placed on what I had to say.

It’s somewhat self-aware to realize as a kid that you don’t know much about the world, but you grow up and realize everyone’s just pissing their thoughts and identities everywhere. The internet town square is polluted with bot armies, the beautiful uniqueness of strange humans and everything in between.

This leads to the other conclusion, which is that even if you were to make something share your thoughts, you’re screaming into the void hoping somehow people will be spit back out.

In reality, maybe you’re just making “content” to share with your friends and family. The real promise of the internet though in my mind is that you should be able to find like-minded individuals through it. The promise of a recommendation algorithm is that it will find the people most likely to enjoy the thing you made, but it seems to work in a way that emphasizes parasocial relationships rather than facilitating social life between equals.

Anyways I’m hoping I’ll get better at sharing myself and meet cool people along the way.

I often wonder what my future wife is doing right now. The person who I will entwine my fate with is living a life somewhere, completely unaware of my endless curiosity about her. When I bring this up to my guy friends, they respond that she’s probably getting railed by some other dude. Thanks guys. Real helpful.

I imagine the feeling of her hugging me from behind, the moment where the weight of a quarter of a century of loneliness finally billows out of me. I imagine her head resting in my lap as her eyes grow heavy, and I think at least for a moment I’ve reached the eye of the storm. I imagine touching my forehead against hers, knowing that there once existed someone that understood me better than I understood myself. I imagine holding her, hiding the outside world from her view.

It feels as though those of us that have lived their lives relatively alone live across a canyon from those who have spent most of their time in one relationship or another. Most of us one day jump across that gap, to stay on the other side at least for a little while. Every day I wake up, hoping this is the day where I can find my fellow traveller. Maybe she’s been there before and knows the way. Maybe she’s never been close.

Sometimes I find myself chasing false images of the truth. I don’t know where to look for the real thing, so I heed advice from friends and foe. I carve my body in a naive emulation of a Greek statue. I enter into portals of the dating marketplace, saying things that don’t sound like me, obsessing over a presentation that no one looks at. I try older methods, but she’s definitely not going to be there. I don’t even know why I’m there. Sometimes I tell myself that desire is the root of all suffering, but I fail to unclench my tight grip.

I have infinite flaws. I’ve hacked away at them over time, while trying to preserve their beauty all the same. An impossibly hard dance that we all are forced to perform. I’d like to hold you still for a moment, to return the innocence of childhood expression for a single person who existed for a sliver of time on this tiny dot in the vast universe.

The main goal of many startup founders is to build a product that could vaguely threaten one the major tech companies enough to be bought by them. This is termed a “successful” exit. Everyone gets their bag, and any possibility for technological change is crushed. When people say there is innovation under capitalism, this is what they mean. A large company becomes a larger and larger behemoth constantly swallowing up even the smallest prey. If we’re even luckier, it might merge with another sprawling corporate entity, creating a shiny new conglomerate.

In the early to mid aughts, graduates from prestigious institutions were shoveled out to consulting and finance in droves. Supposedly intelligent people were encouraged to abandon any pursuit of pushing the human project forward, in favor amassing greater amounts of capital for the already wealthy. As the decades have rolled by, the people who plan their life from the age of 10 have shifted their goals from finance to technology. The unambitious set their sights for a spot at Google or Facebook, knowing that they will be satisfied with their life’s work being a minor contribution to one of their thousands of products. The more cunning realize they can squeeze these companies for more on the outside, rather than from within. Neither profess their love of the computer, for they never had any.

Advice columns used to be part of the quintessential newspaper experience. Along with comic strips and crosswords, advice columns are low cost media that draw people in and help pay for the actual loss-leading journalism. As the internet was born, people went from calling into radio stations and writing into newspaper outlets to submitting their life stories online. With the death of the phrase “you’re on the air”, came niche forums where you can ask advice on your particular hobby or lifestyle, which could never be asked to your local radio station or newspaper. Of course forums died as well (in the West), as the centralized social media conquered the forum model of the early 2000s.

The result of these hyper-niche communities is that people can identify themselves by a singular aspect of their personality, and find like-minded peers who share in their passion. This can lead to extremely beneficial outcomes, take the scenario where someone teaches themselves car repair directly from auto maintenance forums, and creates a livelihood from that. Truly a moment where the internet has democratized education as promised. Though these forums lack the hilarity of the Magliozzi brothers in “Car Talk”, their crowdsourcing nature means even the most obscure carburetor issues will be covered in great detail. On the other hand, internet forums also serve as a vehicle to reinforce negative self-beliefs to the extreme. The rise of the internet-dubbed “gender wars” are specifically engendered by forums that convince users that they don’t need the other gender, and provide strategies for manipulating the opposite kind. A unsuspecting person who is seeking advice on dressing a little bit better can quickly fall down the rabbit hole of insular and toxic beliefs.

If a collection of internet strangers aren’t to always be trusted, and newspaper advice columns are flashes from a bygone era, than who can we go to for advice? Maybe the answer is not in a collective echo chamber, but in reputable person that is approved of by many people. In walks the aptly named influencer. A quick search on YouTube can lead you to an immensely popular and credentialed plastic surgeon, who will tell you exactly how a surgery will work and the possible outcomes. The consumer is more informed, and the surgeon gets to advertise that their clinic does things right. Of course, corporations did not take long to notice the rise of the influencer. If someone is trusted by a following of ardent fans, renting their reputation is the easiest way to produce guaranteed sales.

Suddenly one must weigh the financial incentives that are at play with free advice. An influencer who has had a positive experience with therapy will justify that a sponsorship promoting online therapy is a win-win as it aligns with their beliefs. But in doing so they may over-endorse the positive aspects of therapy and the specific online provider. They are being actively discouraged from independently verifying the actual effectiveness of both and presenting a balanced perspective due to monetary reward.

Recently a new challenger has appeared that wants you to ask it for advice. An unbiased source of truth with a slightly unfortunate habit of hallucination. Every investor in Silicon Valley is pumping every last dollar they have into language models that can spit out amalgamations of all the answers us humans have been posting to the internet for free. These investors of course want to reap significant returns off of the collective human knowledge that has been deposited on the vast plains of the internet. If the prophecies of people eventually completely relying ai assistants ring true, what happens when people stop posting their questions and answers on forums? Will these bots cease to function, or are they actually able to deduce novel answers from a set of solved principles the way a human does?

I was a happy child. I often daydream about when I will have kids and providing them a childhood filled with joy, excitement and curiosity. This isn’t some exercise in self-adulation, but an sincere expression of how much value I place into bringing other people into this world. Maybe I sound foolishly optimistic, the world is going to shit, why would you want someone to experience the ills of late stage capitalism they say. No one can be certain how the future will unfold, but I liken my unwavering optimism to the mindset of an athlete.

Every (good) professional athlete believes he is touched by god himself to be the best player of their sport. If you ever competed in anything, you know you have to believe you’re the best and that you’re going to win. Even humanity is a 100:1 underdog to the threats that loom over us, the collective has to believe another world is possible and follow through by continuing the human project.

Before I sound like one of those pro-natalist freaks that wants to have as many kids as possible, I find that equally irresponsible as how could they possibly provide adequate bonding time, nurture and education with several kids. Well they don’t, they simply outsource that labor. Take the situation where couples (or their companies) will pay a much poorer woman to bear their child, a complete commodification of the body. Once the baby has born it passes from the surrogate to a nanny, who feeds the physical and emotional needs of the newborn. This cycle is continued throughout childhood and this person is thus denied one of the most important human connections not out of the unfortunate circumstances of life, but rather the capitalistic excess that incentivizes careers before child-raising.

Every month, headlines pour in about South Korea’s declining birth rate and it’s governments hopelessness with dealing with it (it’s currently 0.72). When the underpinning of any modern economy is the prophecy of endless growth, the natural inversion of the demographic dividend is a fear shared by every OECD country. One solution is to allow for immigration, but the incredibly homogenized societies of East Asia and Europe fail both politically and socially to make immigrants feel belonging to that country. Another solution is to simply be okay with degrowth. Even if we can expand throughout the universe for eons as techno-optimists believe, entropy is irreversible and there is an inevitable point where we must accept finitude.

Its easy to point to the reasons why people aren’t having kids, and remark if that we solve them then birth rates will come back. Having kids is incredibly expensive, and governments like Hungary will spend 4% of their GDP incentivizing people to have kids. More women in the workplace leads to more woman not wanting to stymy their successful careers by the proven cost of leaving the workforce for raising a child. Even if a couple wants to have a child, in overworked countries like Japan or Korea they may not have the time or resources. It takes a village to raise a child, and there are no longer any villages. We live farther from our relatives and family, and so the only option to shift the responsibility of child-rearing is to daycares and schools (if you’re wealthy enough). Many a teacher today will complain that they simultaneously raise a child while trying to educate them.

Nowadays, who actually gets to raise their own child? It’s certainly not the financial elite, who extricate themselves from any responsibility for their children. It’s not the destitute, who have to work multiple jobs in order to simply provide for their families. It’s not the middle class, who are having fewer and fewer kids. There might be incredible couples out there that can balance the pressures of life while also spending adequate time bonding with their children, but that seems to be a smaller and smaller proportion of the population.