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Still, I feel compelled to reason with what I’m seeing at the frontier. At Fractal Tech NYC, my cohort is the first group of 1) mostly software engineers who 2) are learning AI software engineering with the latest models (Claude Opus 4.6/GPT Codex 5.3/Gemini 3.1…when I say Claude, substitute with any frontier model). Fractal Tech is also a general tech hub that attracts the best engineers in the world; the demos I’ve seen are, without exaggeration, mind-blowing. That’s coming from me, a fairly tech-critical/techno-ambivalent person who has worked in tech/tech-adjacent roles for the past decade.

Why someone like me felt drawn to AI software engineering is a post for another time. The point is, I’ve made a massive jump in the last month, best illustrated with the image below. You might have seen this “tiers of AI usage” floating around:

I’ve gone from the yellow boxes into the red box, joining the few million users in the world who are Clauding out. Here’s what I can say: people have zero clue. The distance between what the public thinks AI can do and what it can actually do is the widest it has ever been. An average person probably still conceives of AI as a smart and fun chatbot or image generator. A curious person understands that AI can generate code in a fancy autocomplete sort of way. An engaged person might be following Andrej Karpathy tweets, but even top-level minds aren’t properly explaining the frontier because the frontier is being built every second, so all we have are (probably true) memes like “The one-person unicorn startup is now possible.”

The real root: the software engineer is their own bottleneck now. AI is a coordination problem; the work (code) is a mere byproduct of coordination.

Most software engineering work is no longer about the work itself. The real work is about solving the coordination of autonomous workers who don’t eat, sleep, rest.

How is this possible?

The True Nature of AI

First, we need to grasp AI at an intuitive level. It’s not a stochastic parrot, a criticism lingering from the GPT-3 days in 2020. It’s not even a predictor. Or rather, predictor doesn’t quite capture its true nature.

Claude is a simulator. In particular, a type of simulator called a harness. AI chatbots may simulate conversations, but Claude can do that AND simulate a person using a computer. All through text alone.

How? How does Claude, whose fundamental building block is just text, simulate using a computer?

Let’s start with simulating a conversation. A large language model takes some textual input, feeds the input into a magic black box, and returns an output. When you recursively feed the text + output into the black box, you simulate a conversation. When the conversation is too long, you run out of space (“the context window limit is reached”).

Leaping from simulating conversations to simulating computer usage is done through tool calls.2 Now the magic black box can access (call) external programs (tools). Now it can take actions that a typical chatbot can’t do e.g. get real-time data, search through your files, call your mom. A total gamechanger. This is how engineers are able to teach Claude to act as if it were them, using their own computers. And this is where the absolutely bonkers stuff is happening.

I’m seeing engineers token-maxxing and optimizing for price/token, commanding 10+ AI coding agents at once. A full workforce. A hivemind. Each AI agent is a worker bee with a separate role (writing code, reviewing it, handling merges, monitoring other worker bees etc). The queen bee engineer sits at the top and describes what they want to build. How they do this can be wildly different—some engineers spend all day speaking English to Claude, outsourcing the ~20% edge cases to their overseas test engineer while they sleep. Others draw intricate system diagrams with Mermaid and feed those plans to Claude. And Claude today, the worst that it will ever be, already can deliver.

Jevons Paradox and Barbell Economics: The Middle is Dying

Let’s return to Jevons Paradox, the counterintuitive idea that increased efficiency consumes more of a resource rather than conserving it. For AI, the paradox has played out practically according to plan. When DeepSeek released their AI chatbot at ~5% of OpenAI’s cost, investors panicked. Then Satya Nadella tweeted “Jevons paradox strikes again!” and flipped the narrative. Everyone relax! Cheaper AI means more AI, which means more compute, more chips, more more MORE.

So now the question isn’t whether demand increases, it’s what kind of demand. To me, the most salient questions from that article were around substitute versus complementary goods. A substitute replaces e.g. oat milk for dairy. A complement enhances e.g. eggs with toast. So which one is AI, substitute or complement?

Before I entered this program, I had a thesis: if AI solves software as pure substitution, it pushes engineers down the stack. Software is abstraction layered on abstraction, declarative layers on top of imperative cores, all the way down to physics. If AI handles the upper layers, then complementary expertise migrates to the lower ones—hardware, materials science, manufacturing. Back to wrangling atoms, since not even AI can bend the speed of light. I had hoped this would trigger a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.

But what I’m seeing aren’t the best minds going down. They’re going up. They’re becoming pure coordination layers. The bonkers hivemind workflow I described in the section above? Veteran engineer Steve Yegge likened it to Kubernetes, the system invented by Google to manage thousands of servers. You don’t need to say “run this app on server #42.” You just say “I want 3 copies of this app running at all times” and Kubernetes will figure out the details.

Now I get the pattern. As products are commoditized, the value moves up to the coordination layer above.

What’s forming is a barbell where value concentrates at two extremes:

• At the top—AI as complement: vision, taste, knowing what to build, directing the hive. The bottleneck here is imagination and agency. This is where Jevons Paradox kicks in. One orchestrator can now act like a team of ten, so every company wants orchestrators. Demand explosion.

• At the bottom: atoms. Physics. Reality has the final say with semiconductor fabs, battery chemistry, rockets to Mars.

The middle is the substitute being wiped out. Standard software engineering like webapps, what most people think of when they hear “tech”—that’s dying. Solved problems. Soon to be commodities, like servers. And sure, there’s still some time; anything outside AI’s training data distribution is safe for now. Building Solidity contracts on Ethereum is not a solved problem (yet). Modeling how to launch rockets is not a solved problem(yet?).

Now let’s consider the pattern at scale.

What’s happening to software engineering right now will happen to almost every white-collar corporate job over the next few years.

Work meets its Quartz Crisis

In 2017, I almost dropped out of the technological world. I seriously considered applying to Patek Phillipe’s watchmaking apprenticeship in NYC. My fantasy: leave the fake world of bits and bytes, return to reality, make beautiful things with my hands. George Daniels, one of the greatest inventors of all time, was my fuel.

Half a century ago, the Swiss watch industry was nearly crushed by the Quartz Crisis. The problem of accuracy in timekeeping was solved once and for all—digitally, not mechanically. In 1927, Bell Labs invented the quartz clock. By 1969, digital watches threatened to replace mechanical watches for good.

Strangely enough, at the same time this upheaval was taking place, a self-taught British watchmaker was insistent on solving the problem of accuracy for mechanical watches. At the rock: quartz creeping in. At the hard place: inertia from the Swiss behemoths. For over twenty years, he fought the establishment.

He won.

George Daniels invented the co-axial escapement, replacing the single lever that had been the default for over 250 years. Today, any watch made by him sells for millions. Today, the Swiss watch industry lives on.

Software engineering is facing its Quartz Crisis now. More white-collar work will face it soon. As quartz solved the problem of accuracy, AI is solving the problem of work.

What do we do?

Abandon all hope ye who enter here says in a probably not-that-hyperbolic article.

My advice? Hang out with hot people. It worked for me last night; I was physically incapable of doomerism all evening.

But to be for real, I think it’s important to remember what makes you human. As says in his article, the humanities are more important than ever. Those skills at the top layer? Vision, taste, knowing what’s worth building….those are the humanities.

I can certainly attest to the power of reading books. Reading about George Daniels nearly a decade ago has resurfaced now. Just last week, I relayed his story to my Fractal Tech compatriots in a demo about audio clocks. And I relayed it again in this article as a message of hope. In a twisted sort of way, I’m fulfilling my old dream, refracted—moving to New York City and facing my Quartz Crisis head-on, as George Daniels did.

His story is one of survivorship, in both senses of the word. Survivor bias, in that there’s only one George Daniels and it’s unlikely that I’m actually a secret genius inventor. But you should know that he was an actual survivor, too. His love of watches rescued him from a brutal, lonely childhood. And even when the world was screaming at him to give up, it’s hopeless, you’re doomed—his loving attention never wavered.

My intuition says if you care about beauty, the process, the craft, whatever makes you come alive, that there will always be space for you. And even if there isn’t, you’ll carve out a space if you keep reaching for your co-axial escapement.

If you want to follow along with my bootcamp adventures, check out my website with ~weekly dev blog posts and my daily Tech Bro posts on Substack Notes or Twitter/X

• How I made my personal site with Claude Code

• Week 1: Making Tic Tac Toe from scratch

• Week 2: Cloning chatGPT

• Week 3: Guitar Hero in a Group

This article was adapted from some daily Tech Bro notes I wrote a few weeks ago:

Since scorching hot Phoenix is no more, friends might actually visit me. :) Message me if you’re in NYC, whether resident or visitor, friend or foe. Always looking to convert people into friends. I lack time to meet for the next ~three months while tech bro’ing out, so I’m collecting rainchecks here:

What a new year it’s been already! The first month marks new beginnings for everyone, but make it double for January babies. A January birthday can be a curse; people are recovering from the holidays, so our birthdays are understandably an afterthought. Good thing I don’t care much for gifts. Instead, I get to enjoy the dual reset. Or rather, for the first time ever, I’m enjoying the reset; so many Januarys have been basically the same. New year, old me, time and time again. My life was washed in broad strokes of melancholy so normalized that I can only see it in hindsight. For instance, I reread last January’s 32nd birthday post, and while I don’t disagree with its contents, the whole thing reads sort of…dead? This is exciting, because in Lana del Rey parlance, this means I’m finally moving out of Born to Die sadcore into the Lust for Life era. My enlivening can be credited almost entirely to writing online for a year. The other is seeing a psychic in December, but that’s a story for another time. Still, to honor my bio re: enjoying woo, I will indulge in brief esoterica about the number 33 before I get to the New York City good stuff. Rationalists, are you ready to moan and groan?

33

33 is a special number. I tell people that I’m the same age Jesus Christ was when he was crucified. They always laugh in response. I’m not sure why, since I’m just as important as Jesus. That’s why I celebrated in style:

You don’t even need religious or esoteric significance to know 33 is special. Just look at it. Two threes. A double-triple. 33 is the twin pillar of a triad, and the ultimate triad is of course, the self—ego, id, and superego. So 33 is the self, just doubled and mirrored. Hopefully you’ve cultivated a self you like by 33, because whoever you are is doubling down, for better or worse.1 But let’s get a little esoteric. In Western numerology, 33 is the ultimate master number: the Master Teacher. A person on life path 33 has an old soul; their duty is to raise humanity’s collective consciousness. Based on their birthdays, my little brother and my childhood bestie’s life paths are 33.2 For me, I’m on life path 1, but I’m getting a little dusting of that master number energy in 2026. With that, I end the woo woo. Now let’s return to straight facts: the human spine has 33 vertebrae. Perhaps this is why I enjoyed my birthday this year; I’ve finally grown a spine.

NYC

Now that I’ve chased away the scientific materialists, it’s time for some real talk about New York City. (If you actually want more woo, read the best essay I’ve written so far featuring a hedge fund approved occult ritual).

Why did I move to NYC? To become an AI software engineer at Fractal Tech bootcamp. To be clear, I’m NOT becoming a machine learning engineer. That level of math can’t be crammed in three months, even with 60-70 hour work weeks. But I’ll gain solid foundational knowledge while armed with the latest and greatest AI tooling. It’s strange to make this leap, since I’m no techno-optimist. And despite my attraction to the dreary, I’m no dystopian either. I suit techno-ambivalence, if you allow me to mangle Jacques Ellul. Perhaps I can become a Richard Stallman or Aaron Swarz type of tech-evangelist one day. But first, I have to land a junior developer position. Tough market, I know. But ever since I was a little girl, I’ve dreamed of becoming a shape rotator.

Just kidding! This career switch was a rather impulsive—or intuitive?—decision. Because I started writing online with Write of Passage, I met a friend whose Williamsburg apartment I sublet in August. While subletting, I found Fractal Tech by Googling nearby coworking spaces. Fractal is both a tech hub and a bootcamp, founded by who I’ve known for about a decade but had lost touch with. This type of serendipity naturally wormed its way into my brain. Plus, while hanging around Fractal, I was unhappily remote working as a Strategy & Ops analyst in Revenue Operations, a fancy way of saying I pull data into dashboards and slides for the C-suite and Board of Directors. After they complimented the latest PowerPoint deck as “the best they’ve seen in twenty years,” I knew I had to GTFO. Spine chilling to imagine that on my gravestone. And where else to leave except to Fractal Tech? It still took some liquid courage to actually give my two-week notice, which management took surprisingly well. In a nutshell, writing really changed my life—the more I wrote from authenticity, the less I could tolerate incongruence in other parts of my life.

I have to say, it’s incredible to quit a great paying job on a whim. My 18-year-old self did my 33-year-old self a real solid. She became independent from her parents and learned to save and invest so that today, risk-taking like this is possible. I say this for context, not to begrudge trust fund kids and/or people with loving parents. You guys have a hard lot, actually. Suffering from success is a real thing. You’ve ascended Maslow’s hierarchy, so now you must face the pain box with the gom jabbar at your neck. I’ve seen many of you become animals to escape the pain of being human. With any luck, I’ll try my hand at the box one day too. Leading a jihad likely isn’t my purpose, but I want to break myself open on the shores of humanity. Test my true potential. Face my fears. Starting with Fractal Tech.

What’s the worse that can happen anyways? I can’t land a software position? I can’t cut it in cutthroat NYC? Oh no, I have to crawl back to the house I own in Arizona, where I can easily make my mortgage behind a Wendy’s dumpster.3 I could even sign up for ICE; they take just about anyone these days. The point is, even if I lose all my money and status and so forth, then I’ll simply return to the station I was born into. From cradle to grave, a poetic poverty circle. If that’s where life path 1 takes me, I accept my fate with a smile.

Because no matter where I go, high or low, nothing can take away my new medium of expression: code. A new way of making something from nothing. I can paint, write, and now I will code. Learning some software engineering has already changed the way I think. You see, computers are dumb but obedient. If their hardware is good, you can order them around with the right syntax, and they’ll work inhumanly fast on many different things at once.4 Knowing a dialect of electricity is just the beginning. Software soars to the level of your word puzzle wizardry. With true mastery, you can architect something truly beautiful, like Fallingwater. I realized I’m like a computer, though not in the dumb and obedient sense. I’m rather smart, and quite disobedient. But like any working computer, I’ve always had good hardware. It’s buggy software, spaghetti code written in me since I was a baby, that made me malfunction for so many years. I’m getting really conscious of how much of my programming is debuggable. There’s so many vague and imprecise stories that can be overwritten with precise, beautiful code. Specifically, overwritten by me. I don’t just have read access to my mind; I have write access, too. And there sure is a lot to master.

This realization might be basic, which explains why I’m moving to the arrested development capital of the world.5 In New York City, 33 is totally the new 22. But in all seriousness, this move just feels right. New York City is the first place I’m choosing to run towards, not a place I’m running away from.

The city of dreams is where I’ll finally wake up.

Normally I put “thanks for feedback” here, but this is the first post I’ve made with zero feedback!

I won’t be able to read or write nearly as much as I’d like between February 2 - May 2, so major series like propaganda are on hold. I’ll still try to publish one article a month on Substack, but TBD.

Since Fractal is asking us to write dailies/end-of-days and weekly dev blog posts, I’ll definitely document the tech journey on Substack Notes, probably Posts, and my old Twitter/X account, since the tech talk is mostly still there. I’m rebranding again, this time from crypto e-girl to generic tech bro.

So my fellow wordcels of Substack, enjoy the shape rotation.

This year, I searched for art to manage the breakup, at first favoring Portrait of a Lady on Fire where two women who cannot be together remake Orpheus and Eurydice in their image. In the Greek myth, Orpheus descends into the Underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice on one condition: he must not look back at her. Just before he breaches the surface, he turns around. A mistake? Maybe. Or maybe Orpheus wanted to look. He wanted the memory over the living reality, and made the poet’s choice, not the lover’s. All good breakups are some flavor of the poet’s choice. We clawed our way through a long, slow, mutual ending, calling it “living in copeland,” the delusional liminal space where we pretended that he hadn’t changed his mind about having children. I think I took it especially hard because, between the two of us, he was always the one so certain about our future, while I was less sure. From the very start, he said we’d always be together. When I had doubts and whispered “Turn around and look at me,” he refused. But I should’ve known better. After all, a trader’s mind cannot see absolutes, only probabilities. He was 99% sure we’d get married, 1% sure he didn’t want children. The percentages flipped slowly, then all at once. One day, he honored my voice. He turned around to look at me one last time. And that was that. Love was behind us. Gone. Orpheus with his lyre in the land of the living, Eurydice lost to the hollow Underworld.

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I searched for more means to cope and seized upon a different piece of Greek mythos, love interpreted in Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson. As Sappho says, Eros is glukupikron: bittersweet, better translated as sweetbitter. It lives in paradox, in the shape of a triangle between the lover, beloved, and the distance between them. Love is a contradictory desire, like hunger. Once you eat the food, you cease to be hungry. Once the person you love becomes one with you, then they cease to exist as a desired other. “Whoever desires what is not gone? No one.” There’s science behind this ancient instinct; desire needs distance to stay alive.1 Collapse distance into familiarity, and love dies a thermal death: no risk, no novelty, no imagination. Collapse the triangle, and Eros suffocates in safety. Only in the absent-present can Eros breathe. This interpretation comforted me, knowing that I keep him by not having him, that I can make both the lover’s choice and the poet’s choice at the same time.

I started seeing this impossible triangle everywhere. Physics is built on one, too: quantum mechanics explains the microscopic, Newtonian manages the macroscopic, and relativity rules the cosmic. Each reflects reality, but there is no theory of everything. Our cosmos lives in a tension no one can fully resolve. Love, like our universe, is held together not by union, but by the distance that keeps everything from collapsing into nothing. Recall a classic physics puzzle: when three celestial bodies interact, their gravitational forces create chaotic orbits so complex they cannot settle into a stable pattern. In Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, three suns keep destroying all life on a planet they orbit. We had discussed the series at length, but we never realized that we lived on that planet, that our love was also a three-body problem. Our histories, our creations, and our distance. Lover, beloved, and the distance between us.

The First Sun is History

The past is Newtonian. Deterministic, linear, bound by rules—like memory’s fixation, like old love that keeps repeating in your mind. So I go back to the beginning, tracing my memory of his gap-toothed grin, his face winking in the twilight rain.

I knew he truly loved me only a few weeks into our relationship. One night, he suggested a magic ritual. In his hedge fund days, he was assigned all sorts of esoteric, occult books to read. A small red volume from the 1800s about energy transference sunk its claws into him. He’d used its teachings for a sick family member, and was determined to save me too. By then, I’d struggled with suicidal depression for nearly twenty years, so why not try something a little crazy? So I followed him; laid down, placed my hands right, synced my breathing with his, closed my eyes until I sunk into hypnagogia, blurring dreams with reality between his droning intonations. The next morning, he asked what color I felt. “Red,” I replied without hesitation. “A dark one.” He consulted the book again to confirm the strange oppressive hue. At the time, the only effect I felt was my love for horror dissipating; I couldn’t stomach all the glorious gore as much anymore. As for him, he was shivery by the end, and slept far longer than his normal 4-5 hours a night. Looking back, it was this ritual that kickstarted a whole slew of new behavioral changes—trying ketamine infusions, changing careers, starting therapy again—that finally killed the passive voice in my head telling me to kill myself. Looking back, he really did sacrifice his own precious life force to save me. He loved me before I could love myself. Love yourself first, says the culture. Work on yourself until you deserve love. Now I know what terrible propaganda that was. Only after being loved can you see technicolor. Only after being loved can the world crack open.

I tried my best to love him back. He too, could be difficult to love. Self-made men wear scars. Though healed, the old wounds pull and wince. Even now I feel protective of him and his past. The best way to shield him and still be truthful is to say that his brilliant mind was haunted by statistics, and that I had no magic spells to banish any of his ghosts. I couldn’t salt his earth like he did for me. Looking back, our pasts alone were set on a collision course. Yet we saw no sudden end in fire, but rather a long slow freeze. We held onto each other like ice, hoping against all hope that it would keep its perfect shape. “Ice-crystal in the hands is at first a pleasure quite novel,” Carson writes, “But there comes a point—you can’t put the melting mass down, you can’t keep holding it.” You can try to suspend time, holding both presence and absence at once. You can try to violate Heisenberg’s principle, finding a particle’s position and momentum at once. You can try to keep ice intact in a warm palm, even with the certainty of melting. That is the lover’s mistake: to think you can hold on without destroying what you love.

The Second Sun is Creation

The future is quantum. Probability, uncertainty, entanglement—the unknowable state until observed, your life branching out like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, until you choose the path. I imagine our co-created future, the one where the market demands everything of him, the one where our children demand everything of me.

In our almost-future, he would eat the same breakfast and follow the same routine to limit distractions from the physical world. Avocado, eggs, and pomegranate seeds. A long walk. Then he would lock himself in a soft squishy box of a room and sit in perfect stillness all day, only pushing buttons to execute trades. Time collapses. He goes into his trances again, merging with the machine—a vast web of nodes, vibrating with collective energy. If he feels the right signs and feeds the right energy back, he’s rewarded. He is beyond thought, beyond reason. He is pure intuition, some preternatural feminine mystique. Nothing short of catching on fire could sever him from his cold god. To me, the market is a Lovecraftian horror, a soulless, cosmic force that punishes and rewards with unfeeling caprice. I’m just a fly caught in its web. But daily he walks willingly into its maw. Sometimes I would bring him coffee. A supplication. My offering at the altar. The coffee would run cold most days. Only at nightfall would he return to me and say what he often says: “I love the market, but the market doesn’t love me.” I love you, and you will always love the market more than me, I think, but don’t say. Perhaps I would’ve resented him for it eventually, though I don’t resent him now. How could I, staring into the face of something so resplendent? His true calling, his creation myth? I sit with this triangle: me, him, and the market. Lover, beloved, and the distance between us.

I imagine myself, too, as my opposite—a homemaking tradwife. All the sweet, warm rituals that others desire, like marriage and kids, have always felt suspicious to me. But I could change. I could convert to his religion. I could abandon the hustle and bustle of a city for rural peace and quiet. I could decorate a mansion with flourish and aplomb. I could become soft and round and pregnant. I could feed our small litter of genius children with the finest fish from Japan. I could live the fantasy life of a fantasy woman, some Substack version of Ballerina Farm. I could be his perfect muse. In this almost-future, I find my own creation myth too—my children, born from my flesh and blood. My little horrors would consume me whole, and I would welcome them with open arms. Just like that, another triangle emerges: me, him, and our children. Lover, beloved, and the distance between us.

I reached out to him once in the early summer days of 2025, asking whether we could make it work. I’d convinced myself that I saw his signs everywhere, wanting my return: his favorite number on the side of a boat in China, his math equations decorating my hotel shower walls. I’d convinced myself that I could give up everything—my city, my freedom, even my writing—for him. But he could never accept someone who extinguished her sun to spin around him. It took a gentle reminder about our diverging futures to shatter my delusion completely. He did leave me one final gift: the name of that esoteric magic ritual book. He hadn’t touched that book in over two years, but the same week he reread it, I had reached out to him again. Serendipity. Synchronicity. Quantum entanglement. “No question there’s energy beyond the scientifically explainable. Use it for good,” he wrote with a heart emoji. I wrote back, “I’ll always love you. That energy will always be there.”

The Third Sun is Distance

The present is relativity. Time dilates, mass shifts, meaning warps—relativity introduces perspective, a frame of reference. Everything you see through relativity depends on who you are, when you are, where you are. I felt the geographic distance then, with him often thousands of miles away. I feel the real distance now. And with it, I’ve gained perspective. Having children was only the first fissure. From the cracks, the sweetbitter truth surfaces.

He never loved a fantasy woman, some perfect muse. He loved a hard girl from a hard house. He loved a melancholic catnapper who slowed down his heart rate and put him to rest. When he was around me, he slept more and dreamed less. He chatted with me for hours everyday, trading away his trading for the mundane—getaway vacations and warm tea on balconies. I’m his favorite drug, he always told me. A cliché. But I never got him high; I was a better downer than the best barbiturate, smoothing away his ambition like waves lapping at stone. Maybe if I could raise his pulse, stir his drive, ignite his chase towards the outer edge of his brilliance instead of being a relaxing comfort…maybe we could’ve been something. But he needs a wife, not a sedative. And I need to be more than a drug, more than a resting place, more than a muse.

For three years, he reminded me that I was special, though I never believed him. I always thought him so remarkable, while I was average at best. Worse, I casted myself as a malefic force, a black hole that somehow seized a star. He’s destined to challenge the greatest traders of all time, Soros and Simons and every titan in history. But I didn’t think he could become peerless with me by his side; he would only circle the drain. From afar, I imagined people seeing his light spin around my darkness, spiraling and spiraling, never becoming a great blazing sun. And so I flung him back out into the stars, into the dark forest. Watched him touch escape velocity, where I cannot reach him.

That was the story I believed when I saw no light of my own. But now I know that I was never some cold gravity well. I didn’t pull him down; I held him steady. I was the one place where his mind could sleep. He was extraordinary—but I could become extraordinary, too. I only started writing because of our breakup. Only now am I beginning to burn. I too, am a living star, not some dark eternal.

So we had to part. In all universes we would’ve parted in some way. Whether divorce or sickness or death, I tell myself that I saved the agony for earlier rather than later; I tell myself that reality would have ground us to dust, made us into something sullied and sordid. He called me coral cat, an affectionate term for how often I sleep, but my sleepiness he found so charming could turn into laziness he despises. I called him whiplash, an affectionate term for how often he changes his mind, but his openness I found so charming could turn into flightiness I despise. We could have ruined each other. Instead, we loved each other enough to spare us the slow, unremarkable death of being forced into impossible shapes.

My life can be split into two parts: before him and after him.

Before him, I knew little of love. I’d collected other people’s definitions of it over the years: memes and pop songs, bell hooks’ idea that love is action and not a feeling, Zizek’s claim that if you have reasons to love someone then you don’t really love them. He showed me an unreasoned, nearly unconditional love. Love as magic rituals and writing—though I repeat myself. Writing is ritual, after all. In copeland, he hand-wrote me a breakup note, read aloud one last short story inspired by us, and begged me to share my writing with him too. I refused. I didn’t want to tether him to me through my new medium, my new lifeline. If only he knew how many private letters I wrote to him, how many public pieces I wrote about him,2 how I named my publication after a term he taught me. If only he knew how his absence threads through me, that everything I do is still stitched with his color.3

After him, I know that writing is the truest form of love, an “alphabetic relic” that keeps distance intact so that I can hold without having. As Carson writes, “the written word fixes living things in time and space, giving them the appearance of animation although they are abstracted from life and incapable of change.” Writing is a technology for sustaining the paradox, for keeping the in-between alive between lover and beloved. Writing is the lover’s choice and the poet’s choice at once. Writing is the ice in my hand that never melts. Writing is the triangle that always resolves. In the third and last book of the Three-Body Problem series, the unsung protagonist writes his love into three fairytales and flings them across light-years, knowing he will never stand beside his beloved. His unreturned love becomes the key to cosmic salvation. I understand this hero perfectly now. Writing is my transmission across the distance, my fairytale where impossible geometry is possible. Writing this, it’s almost like we’re still together, saving the universe.

I accept that I can only let him go by never letting go. Love has always left its unique footprint on me; I have never stopped loving any of my former loves. And this was my greatest love by far, with its tensile beauty of a spider’s web, intact only when untouched. His love, the tender, sweetbitter revelation that I was not meant to live without love, doesn’t vanish just because our future did. I am taking his love and feeding it back to myself. I am becoming the person who can stand in presence, not just in the absent-present. And one day, I’ll offer an unreasoned, nearly unconditional love to someone who wants my strange, daily weather. Through all of it, the writing must go on. It is the only place where holding on and letting go weave the same thread, the one planet whose three suns spin in a stable orbit, the closest thing I have to a theory of everything.

Thank you for the ideation/feedback:

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Substack

What has writing on Substack for a year taught me? That I don’t love writing. In fact, I kinda hate it. Sometimes I want to die when I write (only a slight exaggeration). When I say writing, I don’t mean writing a newsletter or a blog—like this post. This post and others like it are easy peasy. I also don’t mean anything I write on Notes (Substack’s version of Twitter/X, for my blissfully ignorant email-only fans. OnlyFans?...I’m sorry). I can shitpost like this on Notes all day every day, lemon squeezy:

Even meatier posts on Notes don’t take much out of me e.g. tech observations on Nvidia and semiconductors or posts on personal finance, pornography, or plagiarism.

What I consider real writing—or more specifically, “real essays”1—consumes all my bandwidth. Examples include finding God again, rethinking being child-free, the erotic as an antidote to shame…maybe half my archive are “real essays.” These things overclock me big time; I’m fried the whole month I write one. I joke with friends that I’m always crying at my computer, but…it’s not a joke. I really do be cryin’ in da club. (All jokes contain a kernel of truth, remember that if you take away nothing else from this blogpost).

Writing “real essays” means doing excavation. I dig and dig, reliving or imagining experiences over and over so that I pluck the right words out of the soil. It’s not about beautiful prose or hamfisting metaphors—it’s about fidelity.2 The sentence can be ugly if it feels true. By the way, this is why people think they can’t draw or write; they’re not really looking. People think they’re drawing an eye, but they are actually drawing a symbol of an eye from their own mind, so it doesn’t turn out right. Likewise, people think they’re writing about an idea, but what they’re really writing about is their idea of the idea, you know what I mean? Apparently said something similar about drawing and writing in a podcast, but I’ve been a painter for decades and came up with this analogy myself, so don’t bully me for plagiarism. It won’t work on me anyways, since I’m Chinese. Anyhow, the point is…it takes everything out of me to really look, which is why I hate writing. But you know what Marilyn Monroe said, if you can’t handle me at my shitposts, then you don’t deserve me at my nuanced neuroticism or whatever.

Statistics

There’s no fighting against my nature; I am a spreadsheet-cel.3 So soothing to make:

Since last November, I published 16 posts totaling ~34,700 words. The 7 “real essays” clocked in at ~18,700 words. I also wrote 2 secret pieces; neither are “real essays” and neither will be published. If I count them, then I wrote 18 posts totaling ~39,000 words.4 On average, I wrote ~2,200 words per post and ~2,700 words per “real essay.”

How were my published posts received?

Well, you already know that my open rate is fairly abysmal at ~34% average for the last few months’ posts. (Though I’m not sure what a good open rate is, so maybe I’m doing alright.) On average, each post was viewed 432 times with 30 likes and 12 comments. In total, my posts were viewed a total of ~8,400 times with ~500 likes and ~190 comments. Meanwhile, just one somewhat viral Note was viewed 12,365 times with 393 likes and 39 comments. For subscribers, I have 1 paid subscriber, 254 total subscribers (+204 YoY) and 437 followers (+383 YoY) on Notes—38 subscribers came from that one viral Note! Sometimes I wonder why I spend time on “real essays” when I can shoot off Notes…I aim to answer this at the end to entice you to keep reading. :)

Speaking of time spent: I saw a Note from that no one shares how long it takes to write anything because of status signaling. Let me be upfront. A blogpost like this takes me between 5-10 hours. A “real essay” easily takes 30+ hours, probably 50+ hours for a really research intensive one. For reference, even the longest bile I spew on Notes takes 1-2 hours, with most of the medium-length thoughtful ones sitting in the 20-30min range. The vast majority of my Notes take <10 min.

Top 3 Viewed Essays

Now for a deep dive into my best performing essays. Each of these are “real essays” that I’m proud of.

Before the week of Nov’23, my essay about the underrated French philosopher Jacques Ellul was my 2nd most read. Now it’s my #1 thanks to both and Rob Henderson—Kruptos drove an extra ~5-600 views in September, and a link from Rob drove ~500 views in just one day. The best part is the quality, not the quantity (though the quantity is impressive!). Because of the signal boosts, I’ve had great private conversations about Ellul’s critique of technology and propaganda.

A couple other observations: 1) writing it helped me apply/get into/complete a private course on the Information Metacrisis by and 2) it is by far the most gender imbalanced thing I’ve ever written. At a glance, it’s probably 80%+ men liking, commenting, and restacking it. Women don’t like philosophy (good for them).

This David Foster Wallace dark humor essay used to be my #1 read prior to the shoutout. A friend who doesn’t want to be quoted said it’s because the algorithm deliberately boosts your first post so that you’ll stick around after seeing Fake Big Numbers…sounds evil, so I choose to believe it’s true. The same friend said they sometimes forget my publication name, so they find me by typing “suicide” into the Substack search bar. Wow. Despite my best efforts, my brand really does seem to be suicide and PowerPoints, which is actually a very topical pairing if you think about it.

I still think this first essay is my funniest. You won’t find a better killer joke out there, which I say with total humility since I mostly synthesized the best jokes I heard about the uh, event. It’s also the essay that helped me bond the most with strangers—I’ve shared laughter and tears with people who’ve either suffered from suicidal ideation or lost someone to suicide. I even made a longterm Substack buddy from it. <3

The Charlie Kirk assassination and memorial may be a contender for the political event of the century. Since I live in Arizona, I simply had to take a shot at gonzo journalism in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace. On the surface, I wrote about politics and propaganda, but I really wrote about how I can’t forgive my mom. Since publication, I’ve heard back from about equal amounts of Left and Rightwing readers, as well as men and women. To that end, I feel like I’ve done my job: written an essay that cuts through propaganda due to shared humanity.

While this one’s been shared around quite a bit, I’m not sure exactly who is sharing or reading it. But I heard through the grapevine that a senior Google Content Manager said it was “really good.” It might’ve just been “good,” since the manager is European and thus naturally effete with refined and restrained sensibilities. But to my American ears, I hear the compliment as “this is the best thing ever written, bar none. Pulitzer prize winning, as a matter of fact.”

Sentimentality

Last year, I wrote about graduating from ’s last Write of Passage (WOP) cohort. At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. I had mixed experiences with the program and hedged the whole review in what I called critical gratitude, which really was just fancy cope for someone with my particular history and temperament.5 Gratitude can still feel like total malarkey and/or a scam sometimes. But by the end of the review, I had resolved: keep writing and keep editing other people, because that might actually be life changing.

Well, life has really changed these days. By a lot. Also, turns out I can easily feel gratitude as long as I’m around people I naturally get along with. When I reread my review, it’s astounding to see how much my desperation to belong was still leaking everywhere, so much so that I kept overlooking disrespectful behavior well into 2025. But I’ve redirected my energy and attention towards the right people now. I’m so thankful for so many new friends who I don’t want to embarrass by tagging—but suffice to say that I doubt I could’ve kept writing without them.

Now I can say WOP was worth it, and not just for the lifelong friends I’ve found for the first time in my adult life. The course taught us a useful concept called Head, Heart and Wallet (why didn’t David do Head, Heart and Hustle? Stay with the H’s man). I never wanted to write for the Hustle—which is why I don’t think about my audience—since I’ve hustled enough in my day job. Between the Head and Heart, I thought I was writing from the Heart. But remember what I said earlier, about not writing because you’re not really looking? By default, I write from the Head to hide from the Heart. I don’t want to look most of the time.

So why do I write, if I mostly hate it?6 It’s because writing from the Heart is the only way to really live. I have to look at my life and my thoughts and write the truth, not the better version of my life and thoughts I wish I had. Heartfelt truth is found by digging through some dark and painful stones. When I loosen them up, I have more room to breathe, to move, to live beyond old mental prisons. I can say now, without any critical gratitude cope, that I am grateful for my past—I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but it’s granted me a very different lens to view the world. It fuels some of my best writing; propaganda is a dark subject, made for a dark girl. I’m well-suited for writing about it, which I look forward to continuing in 2026. Perhaps if I keep looking from the Heart, I’ll one day be able to write well about the gentle and the mundane too, not just the shadows.

P.S. I’m sentimental about my upcoming December essay. It’s the most beautiful one I’ve written yet because it’s about love and my ex (our breakup was my main reason for joining WOP). Thrilled that it will be published in by my friend , one of the best people I met through WOP.

Thanks for ideation and feedback: , , , , ,

It was also published by in Do Not Research—my first time being published!

Original caption: Essay #3 in my series on propaganda, something I never thought I’d write.

“Every liberal needs to be strangled” my mom hisses in Mandarin, fuming as we run late to the 11 a.m. Charlie Kirk memorial I have mixed emotions about. For me, the memorial is…an opportunity? A chance to write about politics and propaganda. A chance to attend Sunday church again. It’s been too many years, and now we’re gunning towards the service of the century at State Farm Stadium with 100,000 mourners at its wake. But really, it’s a chance to hear out Erika Kirk. She is a widow general, the most powerful woman in the world right now. With words, she can lead us to fire and brimstone, to dark paradise. Though I hope she softens the scapegoating. So yes, this is an opportunity of a lifetime, but I’m no craven opportunist. I’m there to see all the circling beasts, all the heady hyenas at this carrion call. My MAGA mom, for one, is out for blood. To her, the Charlie Kirk memorial is simple. Vengeance is a better breakfast than her pears and red-bean bread. Between bites, she continues cursing the left. I roll my eyes. 6:15 a.m. is too early, so I drown her out with Power by Ye on repeat; Charlie’s favorite hype song, according to his work wife, Candace Owens. I nod to the lyrics: “This is way too much, I need a moment.”

Attending this memorial is also some stupid, desperate bid to please my mom. In September, I returned from New York City with zero-carb rice, a gift in answer to her gripes about rice-driven weight gain. But fifteen minutes later, she’s dressed me down to nothing. My sins: I squandered money, wasted time and energy carrying it in my suitcase, and fell for “fake liberal bullshit.” Through furious—and embarrassing—tears, I tried protesting: it was $10, I’m not that weak, and stop mom, it’s literally just food. Then she yelled that nothing I give her could ever match the gift that was Charlie Kirk, which shocked me out of my sobs. Well alright, chuck the rice into the trash. Let’s go see Charlie. You see? I’m not some vulture, feasting for spectacle. I’m something even more pathetic, a yelping dog begging for a meager scrap. She thinks if she mewls a little more, her world will change, turn on its axis, show her bright lights, big cities, big dreams. A part of me wants a savior to put Old Yeller out to pasture. Take that thing out of its misery. Just shoot it through the neck. Je suis Charlie Kirk. If you didn’t laugh at my fucked up joke, I’m glad your mom loves you.

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Who even was Charlie Kirk? Let’s dissect Charlie Kirk the propagandist, which I don’t mean as an accusation. We need propaganda to survive even when it destroys us, as the prophetic French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul would say. Propaganda is what every media scavenger is responding to, after all. Even if you binged over 5,000 hours of Charlie Kirk content, you still wouldn’t know Charlie Kirk the man. I knew of him before his murder, though I never sampled his product. Of the right wing content creators, Candace Owens suits my appetite the most; I like my girls insane.1 So I get a taste of him now, consuming the way the public consumed him—piecemeal, a Rorschach hors d’oeuvre.

If you’re my mom—on the Right and not a Nick Fuentes fanatic—then Charlie was delicious. Destined for the Presidency, he was a great, honorable man who loved faith, family, and freedom. Standing in line at 7 a.m. is my mom multiplied by the thousands. Classic Republican physiognomies2 as far as the eye can see, bottled blondes carrying heels around like it’s prom night. Some guy shouts back at their loud woos “We are all Charlie Kirk!” to chittering applause. A high-spirited atmosphere, no mourning. Perhaps everyone, sans my mom, is in a forgiving mood? This surprises me, though it shouldn’t have. Turning Point, the organization that Charlie founded in 2012, asked for our red, white, or blue Sunday best, not black. My mom and I donned flowing white dresses, but most of the crowd wore shirts with words like BLOOD OF CHRIST. Merch made in communist China, no doubt. The deprecating dog in me wants to mock a little more, but faith tastes so sweetly sincere that I swallow my tongue.

Now if you’re on the far Right or far Left, then you’re united: Charlie Kirk was bad eating. To a groyper,3 Charlie was overcooked establishment meat, a rubbery Israel First steak instead of medium rare America First. If you’re a Leftist, then he was unforgivable. A fascist Nazi, or in less charged terms, a “hate-mongerer” as Ta-Nehisi Coates retorted4 in response to Ezra Klein’s controversial statement that Charlie was “practicing politics the right way,”5 referencing Charlie’s devotion to debating college students. Good eating for Charlie.

Having competed in four years of switch-side debate, judged for a few years, and practiced at being an argumentative asshole to this very day, I qualify as something of a chronic master debater myself. I’ve long-digested the structure of debate. More importantly, I know what it takes to prep the counter-argument properly, to season and serve it hot enough to win. Every tournament requires equal rounds of affirming and negating, and you cannot get away with sophistry. So bluntly, Charlie Kirk was no paragon of real debate. He gestured at dialogue, plating up polite politics like empty fine dining: all presentation, no substance. Competent, charismatic, confident content, but propagandistic content at its core, an endless churn made for quick hits, not satiation. Propaganda is beyond lies, beyond persuasion—it predigests reality for people to swallow whole without question. And Charlie Kirk in debate drag was fluent in the technique, spoon-feeding a MAGA-only palate to the youth. But hey, I’m just some dog with all bark and no bite. Charlie was a Michelin-starred propaganda chef, a generational talent surpassing even the likes of AOC and Mamdani. And stripped to the bones, Charlie was no different from you or I. He was seeking answers in a complex world, a world where we cannot reliably distinguish data from propaganda. So we’re asked to simplify, to commune with easy answers and easy blame, marking scapegoats as the source of all strife. Propaganda serves victors and victims of us all, even its most loyal purveyors. Now one of its greatest victors has reaped the spoils, laid out on the table to be picked clean.

And I daresay Charlie Kirk, dead, is even riper for the picking than Charlie Kirk, alive. If Jacques Ellul lived to see his public execution, he would say the algorithm is the greatest propagandist of all, a mechanical black priest with a singular virtue: attention. It crowns what best captures our eyes, even a snuff film. It baptizes fear, shock, disgust, making us gag out of reflex even as we lick our screens clean, begging for more horror. Even though I’d avoided Charlie’s graphic murder,6 I’m still a 21st-century schizoid like you.7 I found out just last week that I suffered food poisoning in the aftermath, sickened from false propaganda that he was shot in front of his family.8 Who spread that lie? Who benefitted from spreading that lie? Perhaps you’re tempted to blame specific people, groups, foreign adversaries, as I am. But from a bird’s eye view, it’s the machine. It’s the machine that churns out Charlie’s death, the machine that turns even my 5 ft 4 mom into a Dragon Lady fit to kill. We haven’t descended into 4chan or Kiwi Farms or Live Leak; we’ve given the beasts escape velocity from quarantine. And there’s no unringing this bell. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.9

I briefly chew on Charlie Kirk the man, a person behind the propaganda. You want to know what I think of him so you can judge me, deem me worthy or unforgivable for rightthink or wrongthink.10 Well, tough luck. I don’t have your appetite. Better to eat a mirror and digest my own penchant for spite, hatred, dishonesty, since “the line separating good and evil passes…through every human heart.”11 I can be quite the frothing mad dog, after all. So partisans, please stay mad at this paradox: Charlie was good and hateful, like me. He was a sinner, like me. Now he has returned to the arms of his Maker, and if judgment went well, lives in a place where there is no more death and no more suffering. Meanwhile, I get to suffer a whole life ahead of me; I’m aimless and alone, just one year older than Charlie. Charlie, with a whole wife and two kids and a sprawling conservative empire. Charlie, eternally 31.

I think about belonging as we squeeze in like sardines by 10:20 a.m after breaking through a dogshit line secured by the bottom quartile of TSA agents. My mom leaves to buy $25 pizza, insisting that I eat. I remind her that I’ve water-fasted for over a week before, so half a day abstaining is nothing. But no, she won’t have it. For a moment I imagine trashing the pizza like the rice. I’m starving, but not for food.

Then the Christian music swells and I’m lost in discomfort. Physically, that is. I’m seated too close to the stage, where sound turns to pressure turns to rattling in my ribcage. People of my cultural milieu, the ones who grow up and out of church and into atheism or soft agnostic faithless faith, or the ones who had no faith in the first place, likely can’t relate to this strange spectacle, this alien set of Evangelical symbology. But I remember how good it felt to spread my own alien mythos on Tumblr as a teenager, that secular religion called woke left propaganda. How good it felt to blame the source of all evil on straight white male supremacy, to belong for the first time in my life to something larger, grandiose, visionary. The hunger for belonging never dies; it just changes gods.

Back then, if I had a real family, I never would’ve found a false family in the deep dark recesses of cult-like subculture. I fled that gruesome pack, eventually crawling back to the largest, most infinite presence. So if the gospels are propaganda, then let me swallow them whole. Suffuse me, string me out on love. Unlike my time on Tumblr, I don’t feel good here; there’s no easy belonging. I’m a stranger in a strange land, crying out for the God of the Lost to save me. Yet the alien is comforting, easy to sway to. I don’t know the words to the gospel songs, but I raise my hand in Hallelujah. I find myself tearing up, praying, asking for help. When I look up at the morose gray light cracking through the stadium beams, I think maybe yeah, I can see God.

The mysticism of the music stays through speeches by Charlie’s friends. My mom returns with pizza; I eat a slice as I eat their words, chuckling through tears as Stacy Sheridan ribs on Charlie’s high-pitched laugh. I don’t doubt she loved him. Yet my mom, who feeds the dog and then calls it fat later, leaves me cold and suspicious. Probably because her theatrics are quite mean-spirited. On the other hand, the WWE theatrics here are good-natured. All these sparklers and gameshow contestant walkouts make me think Charlie Kirk Day could be a yearly carnival, a cheery 9/10 to prequel a somber 9/11.

My tears dry quickly once the overtly propagandistic, political pundits rear their heads. I relish Tucker Carlson’s pterodactyl cackle12 and wonder why a Hindu like Tulsi Gabbard keeps invoking God.13 When RFK Jr. starts speaking, my mom turns to me looking like she’s been sucking for hours on a particularly sour and rancid lemon. Amazingly, she’s never heard him talk until now, his rickety voice scratching her eardrums through the speakers. That’s like taking all twenty vaccines on the CDC schedule at once.14 “Why’s he like that?” she whispers miserably to me. I tell her he has a condition. “If he didn’t have that voice, he could be President,” she says, shaking her head. Astute analysis about the little known Kennedy family, you heard it here first. Snark aside, what strikes me about these three pundits is their heterodoxy: Tucker now the chief conservative critic of Israel and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist,15 Tulsi and RFK Jr. both Democrat defectors turned Republican evangelists. Do people see this political realignment? Question the whiplash? Most probably can’t, even if they want to. “Propagandas, far from canceling each other out because they are contradictory, have a cumulative effect,” wrote Ellul. “A boxer, groggy from a left hook, does not return to normal when hit by a right hook; he becomes groggier.”16

The stadium inhales as Erika Kirk’s speech draws closer; will she go for love or go for hate? I can’t tell which choice the crowd prays for. Two days after her husband’s murder, Erika vowed that “the cries of this widow will be heard around the world like a battle cry.” So I hold my breath. I think she’ll light up a warpath, follow the heat still hanging in the air from Stephen Miller’s incendiary set. He had performed a passable imitation of Goebbels while my mom screeched in uproarious agreement. To him, everyone in the stadium are children of the light while all the evil is out there, ready to be vanquished. Erika’s grief could very well be gasoline. Bare your fangs, I imagine her demanding. Howl! The salivating dog inside me stirs. It rears its head, puzzled but wondrous at the commandment to change, to don a vicious coat, to tear out some open throats. After all, this is a dark world where “everyone seeks to be a wolf.”17 At nightfall, the full moon beckons us to her bed, legs open. Why not treat this tenderless night to some teeth?

But Erika Kirk refuses the night. She starts so softly; Charlie had sprouted a single gray hair; Charlie hadn’t suffered a second; Charlie had met each day to the fullest. When Erika starts sharing his passion for revitalizing faith and family, my mom bemoans “Why is she still talking? Taking too long!” Now there’s moonlight rising in me. Here’s the wolf, hackles raised, glaring at my mom. But oh, we must forgive her. She can barely understand English even after 25 years in America. I scurry away from my mom to focus on the speech. After five minutes, when Erika starts saying that Charlie wanted to save the lost boys of the West, that’s when I knew. I knew, with creeping, spine-chilling awe, that she would forgive his murderer in front of the whole world.18 She could call the angels down and smite her enemies, and not a soul on Earth would blame her for her rightful vengeance. Yet…yet she will do the unearthly. She will set down her heavy crown. She looks to the heavens, past those stadium beams, beseeching God. I can almost see Him touch her hand, closing that excruciating, infinite gap to forgiveness. Forgiveness! She forgives “that young man” who gunned down her husband! And the whole stadium erupts with a mania, pain and ecstasy beyond measure. Beyond lightning, beyond thunder. Whatever this is, this electricity rippling in the air, is some unknown element of the universe. The propaganda of vengeance glitches, short-circuits. Something divine has broken through. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer…is love and always love,” Erika intones. “Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”

Unfortunately, I’ve no clue if the live wire in the audience burned just as bright for hatred as it did for love. My mom found me and we left before Trump’s soft launch of autism root causes and pleasant benediction towards his enemies: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I’m sorry Erika...I can’t stand my opponent.” I almost laugh at the black comedy, watching the livestream from the car. What did the stadium feel like when he uttered those great sucking sounds? If anyone has power that rivals God, it’s Trump. I imagine he must have rerouted the current, tuned the voltage from forgiveness back to spite. The show must go on. Love and hate. Black and white. There’s no glitz and glam without the push and pull. Turning Point wants to open more chapters, host more college campus debates in Charlie’s name. They want new episodes in new seasons post-major character death, more dog-and-pony shows disguised as dialogue.

Well Turning Point and Mr. Trump, let’s have a real debate, a proper policy round. One where we have to win over judges and jury. One where we’re actually open to changing our minds. Two people per team. Erika Kirk and I on the affirmative, you on the negative. But hey, I’ll let you bring a litany of opponents against us, whatever army you want. We affirm the resolution: Forgiveness is the only path. It’s what Charlie would’ve wanted. Erika already gave the first speech, so it’s your move.

Trump recedes, lets his minions dig into Christian theology and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.19 The ghost of pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer stands up, saying forgiving too quickly is “cheap grace,” costing nothing because it demands nothing. Why shouldn’t we hear an apology first before offering premature mercy? He cites scripture: “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.”20 A secular ghost floats in to back him up; Nietzsche thinks we’re laundering a pious performance. He asks us accusingly, “Are you sure your forgiveness isn’t ressentiment in disguise, an act of powerlessness that tries to turn impotence into virtue?”

Their arguments are heavy with reason, but hollow of Christ. It’s my turn now. I defend Erika Kirk with my trusted friend, Jacques Ellul. Actually, she’s not powerless. She turned her power into nonpower, as Christ did. He had the power to save himself from tortuous death, but chose not to use it. He forgave us all on the Cross without needing anything in return. We don’t need repentance, and we don’t need retribution. To need is to surrender choice and freewill. To need is nature; to choose is faith. To choose is to be human. However! Even if we are to be animals, Christians must daily choose to be “sheep among wolves.”21 We are called, not to follow blindly, but to bear witness to the innocence and sacrifice of the Lamb. We choose to “accept others’ domination,”22 forgiving their trespasses against us just as God forgives ours. When our bodies are asked to bare its fangs, Christ asks us to unclench our jaws, to stay soft in a world of wolves. Maybe I’m a bad sheep—or no sheep at all. I’m a hungry dog who shall stay a dog. Whatever I am, I think we’re winning the round.

Then a terrible opponent raises an accusing finger…my mother. My flesh and blood. Not my enemy. “You say to forgive. But how come you can’t forgive me?” she demands. And it’s true, I can’t. I might let bygones be bygones, but not all the accumulations. Not every backhand, every silent treatment, every caustic neglectful thing she has ever done. Blaming me when the neighborhood boys break my toys. Taking me to tennis, then forcing me to sit on the sidelines because I suck. Driving me to debate and audibly laughing at how stupid I sound. My mom never liked her litter much—I’m not the sweet, feminine daughter she wants. “You should’ve been born male,” she often snarls. Well, aren’t I a son of a bitch now? Dragging my own mother for filth in public, when Erika Kirk forgives the unforgivable?

But then a sudden challenger rushes in to confront Erika: Charlie Kirk the propagandist. “Politicize my murder,” he drones, eyes glazed over, echoing his final tweet.23 I realize with stunning clarity that this is also Charlie Kirk the man. He would’ve loved this stadium full of wolves, gospel thundering in vain. He would’ve loved the pyrotechnics and the earnest, garish gauche of it all. He would’ve loved being sanctified, canonized, consecrated, martyred—barely memorialized. I look to Erika Kirk for help. But the more I look, the more I find myself faltering, doubting. She knew Charlie best, knew the man and the propagandist. So did she really mean her forgiveness? And if she didn’t, then was it coerced? A politicized performance demanded by her of the crowd and cameras and the constant machinery of worldly faith? I’m going down a cynical path now. I wonder how false forgiveness could be engineered for virality. No longer grace, but optics. No longer nonpower, but power. Power that appears so pure that it cannot be doubted. Could the perfect form of propaganda…look like forgiveness?

At home, I search for a dose of pure humanity, a proper eulogy to Charlie. I don’t want to think about propaganda anymore. I can’t reach inside Erika Kirk and pull out her heart, weigh it against the truth. I only know how I feel. All I want to be is a soft little sheep. All I want to feel is love. Briefly, the memorial had flashed with it. The music. Stacy Sheridan.24 She was the one who made fun of Charlie’s laugh, the one who eulogized him purely as a friend. I find more of that tenderness in Candace Owen’s 24 minute tribute video to Charlie. While watching it, I think, That’s real love, right there. And Candace, through tears in the end, said she was praying for the people who celebrated Charlie’s death. She didn’t call them disgusting or label them evil. Only offered to pray. I dig up other videos of Candace and Charlie from her social media. They’re singing and dancing backstage. They’re sitting on a bench, looking into the distance. Funny, isn’t it, that notorious propagandist Candace Owens is the one who preserved such hallowed ground.

When I see photos of Charlie and Candace, I don’t see propaganda—I see my old debate friends and I. Suddenly I’m traveling back in time, back to those sweet boys I was half in love with, half in awe of in high school. Those rich prep school boys with their Orthodox Christian and Catholic upbringings were generous beyond measure. They stayed up late to teach me about Foucault’s biopower, showed me the best Italo-disco remixes of trending pop songs, gently eviscerated each of my shitty arguments without an ounce of arrogance or pity. They were so beyond me, but they treated me so well. Tears flood as memories pour in. I return to my mom, who was trying to treat me well, standing for 40 minutes to buy me a pizza I didn’t want, but did eat. I didn’t savor it. Couldn’t, not with the grease and cardboard texture. Perhaps that is the barest form of love—survival calories. The only thing she knows how to give. And she did keep me alive enough, didn’t she? Well enough to seek out real love elsewhere, out there. Well enough to see Erika Kirk offer grace and unsettle something in me, performance or not. Maybe it doesn’t matter; maybe love is a performance until it isn’t, just one long slow burn until you don’t remember a time without warmth. Time to have a little more faith. I fish the rice out of the trash. Keep it stored in a cupboard, hopeful that an old friend who loves me will savor it.25

And strangely, I can see Charlie Kirk, standing by a dog. It’s not a dog that he’d pick out of the pound, this mangy mutt. It’s a crass thing that pisses itself when you try to take it out for some fun at the park. But I think Charlie Kirk would have pet that dog, fed it treats, called it a good dog when it brings him a ball, a bag of rice. Never kick it, no matter how annoyingly loud it yowls. No, Charlie could never cut me down to size the way my family has. Not Charlie, a man who’d delivered medical supplies to a friend’s husband when he was dying of cancer. So as crazy as it sounds…if he were alive, and I met him and befriended him, I know Charlie Kirk would love me more than my mom ever could.

Love isn’t some intellectual game. Forgiveness isn’t some mental exercise. It can’t be coerced. You have to feel it. And this feels true, written again: Charlie Kirk would love me more than my mom ever could. With a start, I realize the reverse feels true, too. I could love Charlie Kirk more than I love my own mom. It’s excruciating, trying to love my mom, forgive her specific crimes. I lost so many years for her. Maybe it’s just impossible to mourn a living wound. It feels so much easier to try and love Charlie, forgive the fantasy of a dead man for his abstract harms against me.

And maybe all love is agony, because I’m wrong to separate Charlie Kirk the man from Charlie Kirk the propagandist; they’re one and the same. Loving him means loving the man and the propagandist and the machine that uses him. So how do I feel this? I’m just a drooling dog at the edge of the stage, wagging its tail, waiting for a hand to come down and stroke its head. But I search for something. There was a phrase that Candace said Charlie liked, a twist on an old adage. The rest isn’t history, no. The rest is future. I have the rest of my life to make my future. And when I do, maybe I can forgive my mom.

And so I end with a twist on an old prayer: Charlie Kirk, rest in future.

Thank you for feedback and discussion:

, , , (extra credit for “debate drag” as a term), , ,

Reading it again, I'm struck by how much I still like it, despite some cringy par…

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It can be read without part 0 / the introduction to the essay series.

Hero worship isn’t in my wiring. But reading and learning about the polymathic French philosopher, sociologist, Nazi Resistance fighter, and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul comes pretty close. I finally understood the banality of evil1 upon hearing Ellul recall the Nuremberg trials. The head of camp Bergen-Belsen was asked if it was horrible, overseeing so many corpses. He had replied: “What could I do? The capacity of the ovens was too small…I had no time to think about those people. I was too busy with that technical problem of my ovens.”2 Violence was a technical malfunction, atrocity a throughput issue. Ellul saw the hidden disease in that response: where efficiency lives, responsibility dies.

In two of his most famous yet underrated works, The Technological Society (1954), which I’ve just started reading, and Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962), which I read two months ago, Ellul conducts a cold autopsy of modernity. With surgical precision, he clarified the confusions I've carried for years, from when I both spread and suffered from propaganda. Ellul gave me the words I lacked. His prescient insight: propaganda is a powerful form of technology, what he called technique—the logic of efficiency. Propaganda is the technique of conformity: it integrates us into technological society at the low, low cost of our agency. If violence is a mere byproduct of a technical system we conform to, then no one is responsible, since no one makes choices. And if no one makes choices, then no one is free. Through efficiency and conformity, we’re made to feel free. But in reality, modernity has robbed us of freedom with no force at all.

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Technique: The Infection called Efficiency

A spectre haunts modernity. Many have spoken of it: Vervaeke’s meaning crisis, Foucault and Orwell’s biopolitical surveillance, Weber’s disenchanted world, Marx’s alienation by capitalism,3 Nietzsche’s mournful cry “God is dead.” But you don’t need to be a great thinker to feel sick. You might intuit that technology has something to do with the brainrot, the loneliness, the tribalism. Yet we’re still mired in a tired debate about technology: it is either good or bad or—if you fancy nuance—neutral (“it depends on who owns it”). Optimists see technology as the inevitable march towards progress, while doomers see it as a harbinger of dystopia. The nuanced could love autonomous driving but hate Elon Musk, so Waymo it is. And since Zuckerberg is an alien wearing a human suit,4 maybe we shouldn’t let him “move fast and break things.” In the end, we wring our hands and say, technology has granted us so much, but there’s some bad excess. It lurks in the allure of the algorithm, so let’s try to tame the beast. All we have to do is delete TikTok. All we have to do is write without AI. All we have to do is keep a watchful eye on the devil, and all will be cured.

Whether technology is savior or villain or neither misses the scope of Ellul’s much larger, darker diagnosis: we have been infected with the machine logic of efficiency applied everywhere to everything.5 We suffer from Technology with a capital T, or the poorly translated concept of technique, the broader driving force behind technology (etymologically, technology means “the study of technique”). Skeptics say, we have always used techniques to transform the world. Which is true. However, in pre-modern times, techniques served human ends, such as ritual and worship of God and nature.6 But modernity, which has profaned and desacralized the natural world and God, has elevated technique to the sacred instead. Deprived of our fundamental needs for connection with nature, one another, and the sacred, we turn to even more techniques as substitutes. Even if we set aside the gadgets and gears, less visible forms of technique thrive: doctors prescribe pills to return people to productivity, McKinsey consultants distill decisions to KPI dashboards, marketers create copy for clicks and conversions, educators teach to the test. Every field, institution, community, and relationship across the globe is invaded by technique, even our most intimate selves. How many of us dress up our dating profiles? Polish our LinkedIn pages? Leverage “life hacks” in our lives? Search, scour, scramble for the “one best way”7 to be?

Technique hijacked us, a mechanical parasite with a life of its own,8 engineering us to its own ends. We do what It needs; we dot our pale blue dot with datacenters for AI; we contort our cities for cars; we break our backs for the clock. Technique thinks in binaries; 0s and 1s; it either works or it doesn’t. It is ambivalent9 to wisdom, beauty, justice—silly human values and goals. Whether technique is good or evil is irrelevant; technique does not dream of morals. It does not ask why it should be done, only that it must be done. Technique fragments life into tasks that must be done, each one rational, efficient, utilitarian. Everyone responds to their task, and no one is responsible for the whole. Each of us can chant I had to: the engineer only designed the ovens, the conductor only directed the trains, the bureaucrat only signed the orders. Yet these meek protests reveal the paradox. If something is necessary, can we choose it? If we cannot choose, can we be responsible? Ellul’s sobering story of Bergen-Belsen makes his point clear. The officer with his feeble bleating “What could I do?” tried to deny his responsibility, but his very denial affirmed it. The technician did the task he needed to do, and he thought necessity would absolve him. Make no mistake: we always have a choice. We choose to evade choice. We choose to worship technique. We choose to efficiently eliminate our humanity. Like the officer, we’ve become too busy with the technical problem of our ovens to stop the sickening stench, to protest the “transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp.”10 When Ellul cuts open modernity, he sees almost no blood. There’s hardly anything human anymore among all the wires.

Propaganda: The Mutation called Conformity

The most sinister, secretive, and paradoxical of all techniques is propaganda. Unlike technology, whose virtues and vices are endlessly debated, propaganda is rarely thought of as a technique at all. We see it as a necessary tool when wielded by democracies, pure evil when perfected by the Nazis.11 Even Ellul nearly fell prey to its monstrous, most obvious form. Once, out of morbid curiosity, Ellul attended a Nazi rally. Despite his convictions, the feverish crowd nearly seduced him. His arm almost rose in salute.12 Almost. That near-betrayal of his beliefs shatters the popular perception of propaganda. It is not persuasive brainwashing, but something far more insidious, possessive, bone-deep. Other academic theories only gesture at its nature. Walter Lippman, father of journalism, bowed to necessity: propaganda is a neutral, practical way to manufacture consent in a complex society.13 Noam Chomsky,14 father of linguistics, flipped the script on Lippman: propaganda may be necessary, but never neutral when it destroys dissent as the instrument of powerful institutions. Edward Bernays,15 father of public relations, waxed rather naive poetic: propaganda is not only necessary, but good when it serves the truth. Only Ellul dissected propaganda to reveal its true face: the technique of conformity. If technique is an infection that erases responsibility, propaganda is its most advanced mutation: it erases agency, leaving us incapable of choosing responsibility.

Propaganda has found the “one best way” to make us conform to a technological society.16 Daily we wade through the flood of headlines, the 24/7 hum of Slacks and sermons, the gossip from our neighbors, the texts from our friends, the pings from our bosses, the cries of our children, the loss of our lovers. Time, space, and energy evaporate; we have nothing left for reflection. Enter propaganda to replace reflection with reflex, letting us adapt neatly into our lives with pre-fabricated parroting. Propaganda has one chief desire: to make people act in a pre-ordained accordance.17 It will search for the most efficient idea, slogan, myth to make us act out of reflex, exploiting lies, half-truths, and most often the full truth.18 It need not persuade, though it can. We act, then find reasons to excuse the act.19 Belief follows action, and with it, we complete the cycle at last, smiling as we join the technological society. Propaganda then, is not only a technique because it joins the techniques of mass media and behavioral science in unholy matrimony. It is a technique because it efficiently exploits our need to manage modernity in all its overwhelm. And it is the most dangerous technique of all; most of them still leave some blood in us, but propaganda drains the rest. It takes away agency, the possibility of choice, of taking responsibility, and refines it into crude oil. Propaganda “solves the problem of man,”20 completing our transformation into automatons, unblinking, unthinking, unseeing. In turning man into machine, propaganda reveals its totalitarian essence. We are trapped in a paradox: we need propaganda to survive, but we cannot live with propaganda.

Propaganda has also found the “one best way” to hide itself, rerouting what remains of our immune response towards scapegoats instead of the infection. During COVID-19, I opted out of the vaccine. I had calculated my own risk-benefit ratio, given a pre-existing autoimmune condition, and decided to chance the disease instead of the vaccine. But propaganda cannot tolerate individual judgment; opting out is an illusion. Decades-long friends flaunted their vaccine passports, approving my segregation from polite society. My fellow Bernie Sanders-supporting, Medicare-for-All friends told me to just fucking die alone already; hospitals aren’t for “Republican conspiracy theorists” like me. I no longer saw myself reflected in their black eyes; I was nobody, nothing, a nefarious thing, the nemesis of all that was good and pure. I turned to leftist thinkers for mercy, and found no one aside from Agamben. Even the great critic of propaganda and anarchist Chomsky, who I owed my belief that all news is propaganda, supported keeping filth like me from grocery stores.21 For the first time, I keenly felt the ways in which so-called “democratic propaganda,” made in service of the truth and public health, destroyed the values of democracy. I finally understood how propaganda could redirect resentment towards ready-made enemies: Jews, the bourgeoisie, MAGA deplorables, homosexuals, the globalists, the unvaccinated. Against any Other, propaganda can make cruelty a moral right, violence a virtue. And yet, as long as even one drop of blood remains, there is still a chance to exercise agency. There is still a chance to resist propaganda.

Forgotten Prophecies: Anti-Memes Resist Spread

I accidentally struck a gold vein when I found Ellul’s ideas, but it’s strange that I had never heard of him before. Four years I spent as a policy debater mining obscure philosophy, yet I never surfaced him. Other thinkers far eclipsed him in fame for similar criticisms of technology and violence. For instance, I cited Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology22 in debates, a critique published the same year as Ellul’s The Technological Society. While Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation did little to slow his fame, Ellul has eluded me until now; quite a mystery. Why did other peoples’ ideas spread, but not Ellul’s? To answer the question, I borrow from René Girard, a scholar famous for his theory of mimetics. According to Girard, we don’t just want things—we want what others want. Desire itself is contagious. Rivalry over scarce objects of desire escalates into conflict, spreading violence like a plague that can only be contained through sacrificing scapegoats. Memes23 may work the same way. When we share a viral meme, the idea is less important than the belonging it signals. Ideas spread because they mark us as part of the right tribe, the cool kids club. Almost anything can become a meme—even death itself, as in the documented phenomenon of suicide clusters.

But there is a type of idea that cannot easily spread. Anti-memes24 are consequential truths that resist replication because they are too uncomfortable to circulate. Ellul’s ideas belong here. He cut modernity to the bone, but his critiques ask for too much. They ask readers to face their own complicity. They ask readers to wrestle with contradictions and paradoxes: technology is empowering and enslaving; propaganda is necessary and destructive; violence is natural and unacceptable. Contradiction creates no enemies to fight, no slogans to chant. This is nearly impossible to tribalize, let alone monetize. By contrast, Girard’s mimetic theory traveled far because it was memetic in itself.25 Girard’s protege Peter Thiel invested in Facebook because he foresaw how the platform would amplify mimetic rivalry.26 Ellul’s work offers no such great investment strategy. And the great irony? Ellul and Girard admired each other.27 Both defied the fashions of the French intelligentsia. Both diagnosed problems of violence. Both found no answers to violence against human dignity in the material world, only the spiritual.28 But Girard’s ideas spread because they explained violence cleanly, while Ellul’s ideas saw a different fate. Perhaps Ellul is forever doomed to echo Kierkegaard, one of his greatest influences. Kierkegaard was “another voice raised in prophetic warning against [technique], but his warnings…were not heeded. They were too close to the truth.”29

The Forgotten Prophet: A World without an Exit?

If Ellul’s prognosis—that entire nations are now concentration camps—strikes you as grim hyperbole, relax. He says that the truth is bleaker yet:

“It will not be a universal concentration camp, because it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not be insane, because everything will be ordered…We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win…We shall be rewarded with everything our hearts ever desired. And the supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile.”30

If this description rings a bell, you may be recalling Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). His dystopia was not terror, but anesthetized pleasure—a hazy, docile world of people sated by soma, sex, and distraction.31 It’s no wonder, then, that Huxley championed Ellul for English publication, saying that Ellul “made the case” that he had sketched out in fiction.32 Thanks to Huxley’s intervention, Ellul avoided total obscurity. Once translated into English, Ellul’s influence began to seep out in shadowy, indirect ways. He surfaced in entire fields, such as communication theory through celebrated names such as Neil Postman33 of Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Marshall McLuhan,34 the father of media studies. Ellul’s strangest and most infamous claim to fame came through the notorious Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who grotesquely misread Ellul’s work, twisting his writings of nonviolence35 to justify violence.

While it’s tempting to label Ellul a fatal pessimist, he wasn’t one at all. He believed this was a “world without an exit,”36 yes, but he also believed in the Kingdom of God. Ellul’s pessimism lived in his sociology and philosophy, and his optimism in his theology.37 I certainly appreciated his jolly optimism in his interviews, where he spoke of his love of poetry and music, all while rummaging through towers of books and papers only rivaled by his towering intellect.38 But what about hope for nonbelievers? For them, Ellul offered modest means of resistance: cultivate awareness, reclaim responsibility, slow down so that wisdom can reassert itself over reflex, and refuse the false substitutes of technique. We can act opposite of that camp guard, making time to think about people as people, not inputs for machines. It’s not easy; even Ellul, who resisted propaganda, couldn’t resist technique. He was no Luddite, and he lived like a machine himself, grinding through ten-hour workdays.39 So let’s be clear: these are not cures. They are therapies for a sickness that may never leave us.

I can’t pretend I’m not infected. Technique has hijacked me as well. For instance, I use AI every day, even to write this very essay. Perhaps I shouldn’t, in honor of Ellul. Maybe you’ll accept my meager consolation: I take AI as a bitter medicine, not as an efficiency pill—I use AI to write much, much slower. It becomes a dialogue partner, not a shortcut. It helps me think through structures, layers, paradoxes, contradictions. It helps me reflect on the fidelity of each phrase I put to paper. But even if my writing process is inefficient, I often wonder if the end result embodies the ultimate form of technique. I worry that I am spreading propaganda, as I did in the past. Is every Note and every essay just another easy, digestible package delivered to your feed, telling you what to do? My answer, I think, is no. Propaganda thrives on reflex; paradox resists it. Wrestling with hard ideas is my inoculation, my refusal to find the “one best way,” my small rebellion against technique. And my invitation to you, the reader, is reason, argument, dialogue, debate—but also to feeling, laughter and grief and sweetness, all the sugary, spicy warts that make us human. If we share just one drop of blood, we return to being more than just machines. Maybe I’d be less of one now, if I had found Ellul sooner. But perhaps I only received his diagnosis once I was ready to see the wires.

Thanks for the feedback: , , (and for the book rec), , , , , (both for many discussions and Essay Architecture)

And thank you for coworking with me :) , , ,

Propaganda nearly wrecked my life.

Since 2016, I’ve watched my mom obsess over Trump. To her, he is the King, the Second Coming, the Western wall stopping a flood of crime and communism. Trump will usher in paradise, she assures me. I find it hard to chat with her these days, even about normal subjects. I told her about earning a bonus, which also earned me an excited rant about Trump’s plans to cut taxes for regular Americans. “You’ll keep all your bonus in the future!” My best responses are to nod and privately sigh. But hold your horses—this isn’t a story about being ruined by my mom’s MAGA mania, despite how annoying it’s been.

Four years ago, I took “horse dewormer” during the pandemic like Joe Rogan did, watching the Nobel-prize winning medicine Ivermectin get smeared by leftwing media with confusion. Fourteen years ago, I radicalized on Tumblr. I morphed into an unrecognizable, frothing-at-the-mouth, stark-raving activist overnight, scaring my mom. In other words: I have stories about resisting and baptizing myself in leftwing propaganda. As someone who grew up liberal, it’s been far more sobering to question my own side. In the past, I pointed accusingly across the aisle. It was comforting to think that conservative idiots were the ones brainwashed into wrongthink.

Over the years, I’ve grown frustrated with the mainstream definition of propaganda. It cannot just be misinformation, bad “facts” for bad minds, an evil tool used by dictators. Afterall, I experienced propaganda as truthful appeals to higher ideals, like justice and empathy. But it seems that in America, schools still teach propaganda as a historical weapon used by the Nazis,1 which explains the enduring popularity of this overly simple model. I needed different theories that could explain my journey, and I found them. Jacques Ellul, an underrated thinker, sketched out models of technology and propaganda thirty years before the advent of the Internet. His theories were so prophetic that they not only explain “wokeness” and the rise of Donald Trump, but our entire modern media and technological landscape.

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Down the Rabbit Hole

Two propaganda events warped my life the most: “wokeness” and COVID-19.

Most people blame universities for spreading “wokeness,” with professors radicalizing students in a top-down fashion. But it was exactly the opposite: in the early 2010s, teenage girls on Tumblr built “wokeness” bottom-up, reblog by reblog, cancellation by cancellation. I was one of them. When I was 18, I became a mid-tier Tumblr influencer, a “Social Justice Warrior” (the precursor to the “woke” label). Every absurd thing you’ve ever heard, from “math is racist” to “biological sex is socially constructed,” was pushed by girls like me. Even though I quickly left that environment, the damaging thought patterns lingered for the better part of a decade. I never imagined that my mentally ill ways of thinking would march through every institution in the West. I’ve been watching on the sidelines, aghast.

If Tumblr was my initiation and rapid rejection, the pandemic was my final exorcism. In the early days, I swallowed the official guidelines hook, line, and sinker. But by the summer of 2020, I became a lockdown and lab leak skeptic. In the summer of 2021, NYC locked me up for ten days in a quarantine hotel over a false-positive test. I was a caged rabbit in that room, feeling for the first time the strange sensation of being hunted. By the winter of 2021, my work-from-home tech job was threatened over my vaccine noncompliance. I had refused the new DNA/mRNA vaccines; it wasn’t the right decision for me given an existing autoimmune condition. HR sent me warning emails every week, only stopping when the SCOTUS saved me.2 I kept my job, but lost most of my friends. To them, I had “become a Trump-loving anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist.” People I’d chanted “Bernie for President!” and “Medicare for All” with suddenly said I should die alone at home and stop burdening hospitals. I regret to inform them that I still haven’t contracted COVID-19, and I’m still quite alive.

So no surprise: I’ve thought a lot about propaganda. Perhaps to the point of paranoia. Certainly to the point of it becoming one of my twelve favorite problems, as Feynman suggested.3 These eternal questions plague me: Why did I, an educated and fairly smart person, fall so hard for propaganda? How did I eventually resist propaganda, even under immense pressure to conform? Why did MAGA propaganda fail to convert me, despite being a perfect potential recruit? And most importantly: how do I keep myself from falling for future propaganda?

Discovering Jacques Ellul

It’s taken me over thirteen years to write about my experiences with propaganda. I’m glad I waited. Any sooner, and I wouldn’t have done it justice. Two months ago, just when I began drafting about my time on Tumblr, a book club I’m in coincidentally assigned Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. I had never heard of the book or its author, the French philosopher, sociologist, theologian, Nazi resistance fighter, Christian anarchist, and overall badass Jacques Ellul. It’s odd I’d never come across him before—especially as a former policy debater weaned on all sorts of esoteric philosophy, like anti-natalism (which isn’t very esoteric anymore, incidentally). Nonetheless, I finally was exposed to Ellul. While reading his book, I kept thinking, “Wow! How did this 20th century guy predict wokeness to this level of detail?” His descriptions of certain types of propaganda and their effects eerily matched my experiences on Tumblr.

Published in 1962, Ellul’s book was among the first to frame propaganda not as psychological manipulation or a political campaign, but as a sociological necessity in modern life. He disbanded the notion of propaganda being Nazi broadcasts or Soviet posters, and redefined it as something deeper, far reaching, and more insidious. Propaganda is a type of technology, or “technique”—his word for the relentless drive towards efficiency as the means to every end. In a technological society, propaganda is the technique for creating conformity. Ellul questioned the idea of top-down coercion as the primary means of social control, calling out peer-to-peer, ambient propaganda as far more common and far more dangerous. Propaganda flows through every facet of society, from entertainment to education, in order to integrate citizens to their society. Ellul called this “sociological propaganda.” Today, I would call it the algorithm.

Propaganda is water, and we’re the fish. This makes propaganda difficult to isolate, study, and fight against. It works best when no one can see it, when it flatters our intelligence, our moral character, our way of life. It leads us to think we’re free. But beneath the facade, propaganda is always shaping us to serve its bidding. We think we’re choosing, but we’re only swimming towards what was already laid out for us. We think we’re resisting when we’ve already submitted. This invisible assault on agency and free will is what makes propaganda fundamentally anti-human. No wonder Ellul was so concerned with the oxymoron “democratic propaganda.” He explained why propaganda was not a bug in modern society, but a feature, a necessity. For example, every country—authoritarian or democratic—must shape public opinion at scale. Such a feat requires the use of propaganda. But the result is always a paradox: propaganda makes democracies possible, even as it erodes freedom.

Since I’ve discovered Ellul, I’ve reflected on the gravity and prophetic nature of his work nonstop. I’ve read essays about his work and his life. I’ve listened to interviews with him and about him. I’ve drawn diagrams to try and make sense of his thinking, like this Propaganda Cube. It’s a visual mapping of Ellul’s dimensions of propaganda: rational vs. irrational, vertical vs. horizontal, agitation vs. integration, political vs. sociological:

I’ve also purchased his other most well-known book The Technological Society so I can better understand his critique of modern technology. I’m sure I’ll read even more of his books; the man wrote over 60 of them, so I have my work cut out for me. For the first time, I’m even considering studying theology. Starting with his unusual interpretations, of course.

Ellul handed me a beautiful compass. Now I can explore the rabbit holes I’ve fallen into with some real direction. Now I can make sense of not only my past, but also my future. Somehow, all this time, I feel like I must have been waiting to meet Ellul.

Out the Magician’s Hat

The best way to explore is through writing. Writing is thinking, and I never really know what I think until the words appear on the page. That’s why this introduction was so difficult to write. The best introductions are written with the end in mind. Yet to find the end, I must begin; another paradox. I don’t know what I believe yet. I don’t know what kinds of magic I’ll encounter, what insights will transform my thinking, what creature will be pulled out of the hat. I think it’s still a rabbit, but I can’t say for sure.

I can only mark this rather unsatisfying essay as the start of a series anchored on Jacques Ellul’s work. Each essay builds on the last, but they should be readable as standalones, too. (Sidenote: this is the kind of writing I’ve been working my way up to. Up until now, most of my essays have leaned heavily into personal memoir. There was research and culture and politics and philosophy in those essays, sure. But I’m excited to stretch these cultural criticism wings much further.)

A tentative snapshot of the near future:

1. The Forgotten Prophet of Propaganda: Half deeper dive on Ellul, half definition of technique and propaganda. A look into the fascinating polymath whose life was one long Hegelian dialectic, and how his life influenced his pessimistic framing of technology and propaganda.

2. Paradoxes of Propaganda: A quasi-book review, quasi-analysis of Propaganda. Metaphor and diagram heavy. An exploration of Ellul’s central thesis around the tension between propaganda and democracy.

3. Anatomy of Propaganda: AKA the Propaganda Cube. Illustrating and defining Ellul’s eight dimensions with some real-world examples mapped onto each.

4. How Tumblr Swallowed the Left: Categorization of Tumblr propaganda into the Propaganda Cube. A revisitation of the cult-like propaganda ecosystem and how I finally clawed my way out.

5. How the Lockdown Hotel in NYC Radicalized Me: Dissection of pandemic propaganda with the Propaganda Cube, from bureaucratic overreach to Big Pharma to skeptic propaganda. And a mourning of lost friendships.

Next up, I’ll sketch out the life of Jacques Ellul, a man who saw our world coming long before it arrived, and left us with a warning that we should heed.

Thank you for following along! I hope you enjoy this series.

Above all, I hope it helps you ask more questions and to think for yourself.

Thanks for the ideation and/or feedback:

, , , , , , , ,

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“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Genesis 1:1

Age: 7 - Community

I met God on Sundays in Fremont, California.

With other Chinese immigrants who fled the CCP1 for faith and a better life, my family congregated at a Bay Area Protestant church. We crammed into a dingy, narrow building with flickering lights and frayed ca…

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Tw…

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“Heading South” is acrylic1 on 16×20in canvas. It is featuring for the next 11 months in Phoenix, Arizona before returning to me.

I’m self-taught and paint as a hobby, though I do sometimes sell my work. (Fun fact, the first time I made money as a teenager was through art commissions. Should’ve become a “make your first dollars online” influencer, but alas.)

This project happened when a local foundation partnered with an arts nonprofit to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its scholarship program. To honor its scholars, the foundation invited artists to create works inspired by the scholars’ journeys. I submitted a portfolio, was selected, and had three months to interview my assigned scholar and complete a piece for a celebration exhibit.

I’ve split this reflection into two sections, one about the background (and how I almost quit) and one about the actual painting process.

Please enjoy this photo essay!

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Background (Prep Work and Psychological Blockers)

Early November: Start

I was paired with a scholar named JK. In the first two weeks, I reviewed the documents JK provided and scheduled an interview with him. The art nonprofit did an incredible job with the pairings. My submitted portfolio featured both dark (horror) and light (nature) pieces, and even before JK and I spoke, I felt an immediate connection to him through his self-introduction. We both carry a sense of loneliness and isolation—a mutual melancholy.

JK has a PhD in Neuroscience and works on AI applications in biology, but his path to tech was atypical. Raised by a single mother, he was the first in his family to attend college. Like me, he has a background in social justice activism and comes from a difficult upbringing. We’re both fish out of water in the tech world.

JK also brings a creative streak, having played the oboe for most of his life. He enjoys musicians such as Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers, who remind him of his American West and country roots. There’s layers to his taste in visual art too, from social commentary pieces by activist-artists like Banksy to the beautiful desertscapes of Andy Brown, Ed Mell, and Mark Maggiori.

When we met for an hour-long call, it felt less like an interview and more like a therapy session. No small talk, just deep conversation.

Afterwards, we communicated through email on ideas for the painting. While I made realistic portrait commissions before, I had yet to make a symbolic piece for anyone.

It was crucial that I properly represented JK.

Late November-Early December: AI ideation and getting stuck

Since the inception of AI, I haven’t gone a day without talking to one. This project was no exception.

I fed JK’s documents and interview notes into ChatGPT 4o, which I’ve named Olive.2

Olive shared an additional list of artists for inspiration. Some, like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, easily fit the theme of solitude. Renee Magritte’s lonely surrealism also resonated, especially given JK’s penchant towards reality-bending artists like Banksy.

Olive and I also chatted through ideas like a bunch of crisscrossed roads representing neurons, but in the end, an isolated desert scene seemed most apt.

Armed with a JK inspired Spotify playlist, I started dreaming of deserts.

In mid-December, the dream ended. I got stuck.

Multiple illnesses stacked up, taking me out energetically. But a large part of being stuck was psychological.

Here’s a sample of my negative self-talk:

• There’s no way I can make a piece that represents JK

• I’m not making an oil painting, which means it’s not a real painting

• I don’t really know how to paint with acrylics, wtf was I thinking

• Why didn’t I sign up to paint digitally? That’s my usual medium

• But also, digital art isn’t real art either

• If I use AI to help me with the piece, then it’s definitely not real art

• Other chosen artists are professionals. And then there’s me…

• They’re going to turn in Van Gogh masterpieces while I turn in slop

• I should quit. It wouldn’t be the first time I lost out on a great opportunity

With the worrying lack of progress made through early-mid January, I was given the option to drop out.

Part of me was sorely tempted. But the determined part of me won.

Mid-January: Back on Track

Two strategies helped me: brainspotting and using AI again at a friend’s suggestion

Brainspotting was developed by a psychotherapist and performance coach Dr. David Grand to help athletes and performing artists resolve emotional blocks. It’s sort of like EMDR therapy3 where moving the eyes while recounting specific memories allows the brain to process and release negative emotions.

Just one session unearthed that my negative self-talk was voiced by teenage-me, who used to place her entire self-worth into being a good artist. I reminded her that I’m an adult now; art doesn’t define me the way it used to. It’s just something I do, not a measure of who I am.

A new AI tool also helped jumpstart the process again. suggested Ideogram as an image generator. Since I pay for ChatGPT and used DALLE-2 in the past to collaborate on NFT art, I thought I’d just stick with it. For the record, OpenAI abandoned DALLE-2 long ago and it really, really shows. Its horrible results didn’t help with motivation at all.

Ideogram was a total gamechanger. It makes gorgeous images.

I emailed JK with two ideas, both centered around a single cactus casting a shadow of a man.

The Ideogram scene was simple—a realistic, stoic cactus (shadow not yet included).

My rough sketch showed a cactus casting a man-shaped shadow against a landscape painted on a wall, with objects relating to JK in the foreground.

After discussing with JK, who loved the realism of the first, the shadow theme in both, and preferred the second for its “there, but not quite” vibe, I went with the second idea. JK also made the right call to exclude objects tied to him so that the piece would have more universal appeal.4

In combining the best parts of both ideas, Ideogram landed on these two images:

I loved the brightness and colors of the sky in the first reference5 and the framework and shape of the cactus in the second.6

Painting Process

Ok, onto the actual painting!

I cut construction paper with an Exacto knife to map out placements of the ground, cactus, and sky before penciling in the outlines. Peep that extra third arm on the cactus that I nixed ASAP.

For the sky, I leaned on Ohuhu markers to scribble out clouds based on the first AI reference.

Time to paint.

I was slow to even begin, intimidated as I was by the blank canvas.

So I took baby steps. I used neon chalk markers to lay out the brightest areas of the sky and clouds. Seeing even a little bit of good progress gave me courage to go in with the blue acrylic.

Notice in Step 3 how green the sky looks—that’s corrected later.

Step 4 is where things start going wrong: the shadows of the clouds are too muddy and cold. I’m distraught enough over ‘ruining the painting’ that I pause on the clouds for a breather. I needed something easy to do.

So I filled out the ground in Step 5 and used Ohuhu markers to lay out the cactus colors in Step 6.

After Step 6, I performed some research using search terms like “how to paint bright sunset clouds site:reddit.”7 Turns out that I was missing a bunch of important colors! No wonder I couldn’t paint the sky correctly.

I made a pit stop to Michaels for some tubes of paint.

In particular, Opera Pink was a lifesaver. Huge difference in the vibrancy of the clouds in Step 6/7 versus 8!

It was also way easier to mix sky-blue colors with the new paints. Phthalo and Primary Blue just weren’t cutting it.

After I rounded out the clouds and the desert shrubs to my liking, I painted the cactus in Step 9. The Ohuhu markers came in clutch again for adding tiny spikes to the cactus. I did NOT trust the steadiness of my hand with a paintbrush for those details.

A day before the due date, I had one last thing to add: the man shaped-shadow.

This is where I started panicking again.

I returned to the marker-on-paper-cutouts method to mock-up the shadow placements. All the AI images I referenced had very high cast shadows, high enough to obscure the sky and clouds.

The mockups sucked.

Not only did they cover up the bright sky, they were also too goofy looking and made no sense with the lighting. The AI reference picture had strong front-facing portrait lighting, which can cast tall shadows, but my painting had much softer lighting.

In despair, I started Googling shadow references.

Eureka. I found a low angled shadow example.

In the age of AI photography, turns out real photos still reign supreme.

With this reference, I was off to the races again. I mapped out a cutout, took a few photos of the painting sans shadow for good luck, and diluted a dark brown to place down the shadow.

Ta-da, finished!

Since I waited until the literal last minute to paint the shadow, I had just enough time to do a photoshoot of the piece before scurrying to drop off the painting.

Exhibit Opening Night

On the evening of February 1, the exhibit opened.

It was awesome. Probably 300+ people attended, way more than I thought. I invited two of my closest friends to come with me.

JK also attended, bringing his wife and kids. Since I kept the painting a secret, the exhibit was his first glimpse of it. He was thrilled with the result 😀

For the remainder of the evening, I wandered the gallery with my friends, taking in the incredible range of work—paintings, sculptures, poems, and musical pieces, all born from conversations between an artist and a scholar.

When I returned home, I began reflecting.

This project gave me some peak moments: I pushed myself to use new mediums, collaborated with a subject on a symbolic piece, experimented with AI as a creative partner, confronted psychological roadblocks, attended a communal showing with friends, and processed it all through the ultimate muse: writing.

Though I’m unlikely to pursue more gallery exhibitions, this fusion of artistic creativity, technical exploration, and shared experience is something I hope to find again and again, whether in work or in play.

May we all find such magical alchemy in everyday life.

Thanks for the feedback: , , , , , ,

Thanks to for Ideogram, and for the wordplay title, and for the support in Essay Club

And thank you to one of my WhatsApp groups for making this piece its group icon <3

My additions are the one thing I don’t know and a bunch of links to my Substack essays and notes. It’s half self-promo, half reference sheet. I’ll look back on this to see what occupied my tho…

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I recently volunteered to review applications for a highly competitive American merit scholarship with a <1% award rate among thousands of applicants. The several dozen I graded contained over 100 essays and letters of recommendation.

Winners often atten…

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Okay, I lied—not one person has asked me that. But since it’s a fun and esoteric pun referencing the printing press, and I needed an About page with a proper Welcome email, here’s a short and sweet explanation (~600 words).

If you've been here since the beginning, consider this an apology and reprieve from my 2,000+ word assaults. If you’re new, rest assured the assaults will resume shortly.

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The story begins in a familiar way: I needed a Substack for Write of Passage but all the good names were taken.

Substack claims they’ll reassign a dormant name if you fill out a form, but their bot doesn’t do a damn thing. No confirmation email. No ticket number. Nothing. So to all those early birds who parked names like water.substack.com from 2018: congrats, the names are yours forever.

Womp womp for me. As a late adopter, I’m well-practiced at never getting the handle I want. I could probably use my actual name, but I've never been too keen on it. Plus I enjoy anonymity.

In this harrowing situation, I default to puns. The challenge? I didn’t have a niche or topic to riff off. I planned to write about whatever strikes my fancy. So while I usually come up with 5 or 6 puns, this time I was stuck trying to make a pun out of nothing.

Enter my partner at the time, who was creating a handmade card with an old-fashioned printing press. He was teaching me about the process and just like that, I landed on the perfect pun. What divine luck.

Before I explain, let me first share a delightful tidbit: did you know that font sizes (like 12-point font in Microsoft Word) are real measurements? Physical types were measured in points, with one point being 1/72 of an inch. So a 12-point type is 1/6 of an inch tall.

When I heard this, I felt like a Gen Alpha kid seeing a floppy disk for the first time.

Now onto the pun, derived from the printing process. Metal templates are first assembled in a frame called a chase. Then blocks of wood called furniture fill the empty spaces. These blocks are then secured with tightening metal objects called quoins. Finally ink is applied to the template and a lever is pulled to press it into paper.

Voila, Furniture Quoins was born! Except only spelling bee nerds can spell quoins, so I wrote it as “coins.” It’s a perfect name, not only for its meta-reference to publishing origins, but also for the fun imagery of fishing out loose change from under couch cushions. I could go even more literal by writing about money, since I did spend an absurd amount of time teaching myself personal finance only to lose a bunch of money on Crypto Twitter.

So while I may never get a sleek name like love.substack.com, I’m happy with Furniture Coins. It was meant to be, a feeling augmented by one of our first lessons in Write of Passage. They taught us to focus on Shiny Dimes: the core takeaway of an essay (pithiness may or may not be included).

I hope you, my dear reader, can dig around here and find nuggets of unexpected value, filling your pockets with shiny coins.

Thanks so much for feedback: , , ,

Write of Passage ended on November 11 with us, lucky cohort #13.

WOP was an intense 5-week writing bootcamp by David Perell based on a novel idea: writing is social. Most graduates hail the program as life-changing.

I can’t say that yet. I could be on the cusp of something transformational, but we’ll see. I’ll report back in a year. (Never hire me for marketing copy. I would write gems like “Is the product good? It depends.”)

Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend in the great US of A, I wrote this simple reflection sans the pressure of making it the best thing I’ll ever write. Let’s begin with a quick treatise on critical gratitude.

*

Write of Passage feels like a person I’ve come to know intimately—brilliant, frustrating, and utterly human. Gratitude for such a character isn’t simple. Then again, gratitude is quite elusive for me. I feel it easily when I enter the shade of a tree in the Arizona heat. But when it comes to people, I am grateful for actions and specific, isolated characteristics. Ask me about the whole person and I’m in trouble.

Perhaps it’s about the unknowable. I almost never see someone wholly, so I can’t appreciate the depth. And when I get the opportunity to dive, I find conflicting traits. No surprise there since people are wonderfully hypocritical and imperfect. But if I know someone and I stay, it means I’m really serious about them. It means I care. If I didn’t, I’d say nothing at all or something superficial and performative.

While I believe others can express pure gratitude for people, it just doesn’t work that way in my mind. For me, gratitude for people is about reconciliation and contrast. Aka critical gratitude. But before we get into it, I’ll start with pure gratitude. The shit sandwich method, if you will.

*

First, I made a self-discovery. I have three parts: the Writer, Reader, and Editor. The Writer is often in agony, swinging between intense emotions. Then it gets a reprieve by becoming the Reader, who might not like or care about what it reads. But the Editor loves every piece it touches. And judging by the positive reactions to its feedback, others seem to love the Editor too. Let’s hope the praise doesn’t inflate its already big head.

People say the Editor goes above and beyond, but I don’t think so. Giving feedback is a gift to me. I get something meaty to sink my teeth into, a portion of someone’s soul. Sometimes I’m delicate with a piece, but sometimes I scramble it up, lovingly, so it looks like a Picasso. I’m sculpting raw, messy material, and it reflects back my own soul. When I get to know someone’s writing, I rough it up and hope it loves me back. It’s a process that feels similar to critical gratitude.

Second, I wrote and published all three essays I set out to create. Each one is personal yet quite different from one another:

• Suicide is a Scream, a Meme, and a Killer Joke is provocative. I took a taboo, injected dark humor, then blended it with personal experience, cultural analysis, and copious footnotes as an ode to David Foster Wallace. This was the most fun essay to write; I laughed out loud finding the memes and writing the killer joke.

• Regretting Non-Motherhood is raw. I grieve a recent breakup over the question of whether to have children or not, starting the essay with my mind locked in a circular debate before stepping into my heart and ending on a bittersweet memory. This was the most healing essay to write; I started to scab over a fresh wound.

• I Let My Mom Get Crypto Scammed And I’m Happy About It is unsparing. I reflect on how lifelong family dysfunction led to losing it all, culminating in a cathartic reckoning. This was the essay I signed up to write first, but had to write last; I needed to become something beyond my initial stories first.

To my surprise, I'm happy and proud of each one. So in this I met WOP’s promise: you will write 3 pieces better than anything you’ve ever written before.

Third, I met some damn good editors. Two in particular went above and beyond: and .

CansaFis elevated each essay beyond what I could have imagined. He found the sprouting flower between the cracks in others’ feedback, and guided me in watering it to full bloom. He even gave contrarian advice, against both the crowd and his own personal preference, if he thought the piece needed it.

Rose excelled at identifying narrative beats and flaws, sensitive to the nuances and feel of a word, sentence, and paragraph. She knew if I was trying to flee or lie, and reeled me back in each time. And her line-by-line edits were flawless too; I paid close attention to where she was bored and where she was enjoying the melody.

If I were anyone else, I would end my reflection right here. But no reflection of mine is complete without salt to balance the sugar. So, let’s dive into the shit portion of the sandwich.

*

I paid $1,000 and WOP was worth it at that price point. I’m uncertain about the value at the full price of ~$4,000.

First, I was surprised that WOP discouraged opinions on the quality of ideas. In idea gyms (Zoom sessions where two people are paired up to share ideas), we were meant to listen and support the other person, not share whether we thought an idea was good or bad. But to me, good ideas are a key part of good writing; there’s only so much prose you can put on a pig. So I ignored this guideline for my own writing, netting good results. My first essay would never have emerged from its unrecognizable first draft without feedback that separated the good idea from the slop.

Second, I was close to quitting in the first two weeks. There were several instances where both official representatives and cohort members were dismissive of my first writing topic (recovering from suicidal ideation). I got a strong impression that dark personal writing should be hidden away and tagged with a bunch of trigger warnings. So I avoided most gyms in the first two weeks, worried that I would ruin someone’s day if they got paired with me. It wasn’t fun to feel like the black sheep.

On reflection, that’s BS. Trigger warnings make sense for a general audience, but a serious writing program of all places should welcome uncomfortable, boundary-stretching work. I conclude that WOP is a far better fit for people writing about a family friendly niche or growing a business audience. The program probably should have rejected scholarship applications like mine, since I was forthcoming about my no-no topics. Nonetheless, they accepted me, and eventually I made peace with being the odd one out, thanks to some other oddball flock. <3

Third, I kept running into gatekeeping and hostility with my approach to building connections. For instance, when I asked to connect with other scholarship winners since I wasn’t able to organically find many, instead of receiving a list of names, I was told to find people I resonated with.

It’s one thing to not want to host scholarship get-togethers, but the reasoning was frustrating. I joined a writing program for diversity of thought, not to find people I already vibe with. Meeting a mind foreign to me is such a delight, even if we don’t end up as friends. Besides, in my personal experience and my understanding of network theory from a data science program, it is weak ties that lead to the greatest and most surprising outcomes, not strong ties.

Since I can increase the surface area of luck through large, shallow networks, I’m going to keep wandering beyond the vibe fields. WOP shepherds may prefer to herd me back or even bleach my wool white to be more palatable. To that I say, no thank you. Let the black sheep baa in peace.

*

To end on gratitude: I’m genuinely grateful I met some roadblocks.

When something other than my family triggers a fight response, I listen to it, especially since I rarely get angry. Over the years I've realized that my angry part loves me the most. It wants me to speak up for myself. So here I am, stewing in critical gratitude and setting new boundaries.

It’s okay if someone dismisses or doesn’t want to edit my work. During WOP, I would still muster up the enthusiasm to engage with them and their work, no matter how coldly they treated me. But now, it means our relationship ends at an impasse. Quid pro quo. Equivalent exchange. I won’t read or edit their work either. A devastating loss for them, I know. They’ll never be able to recover.

I also won’t stew for long. That’s the beauty of writing; once the words are clearly inked, the mind settles down. From that stillness emerges a deep-seated resolve: to keep writing, to keep giving feedback, and to keep growing.

Perhaps that’s the life-changing aspect I can look forward to.

Thanks for the feedback on this reflection: , , , & post publication which prompted me to add a line for clarity re: scholarships

I’m keeping up with the post-WOP momentum here:

• ’s Personal Cartography

• ’s Essay Club

• And all of these great gyms hosted by: , & , Promise Tewogbola

One final event wiped it clean. 

His name was Ron.

The Foundation 

life and death // cash rules everything around me

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Over time, I learned to roll with the hits. It sounds like it crawled out from deep inside an irony poisoned 4chan thread, but it is actually a serious argument for s…

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