sad mammal

Escaping slopworld

2026-05-14T00:00:00Z

I finally became disgusted enough to actually try and escape slopworld. I'm sick of slop, algorithmic feeds, and centralised, corporate control over the internet. Here is how I hope this might actually result in durable change.

Cultivate disgust

This is the novel element of my technique. Disgust is a highly motivating emotion.

Try to mentally frame slop engagement as a disgusting thing. You should find it disgusting that people want you to consume slop, and disgusting that you'd allow them to get what they want. This is not difficult, as both positions are natural outcomes of understanding why slop exists and why we're drawn to it.

Try to be, though this is difficult as it's contrary to its goals, mindful of your slop consumption. Actively consider the user experience, and the content you're seeing, instead of falling into a trance. Try to catch the feelings that lead you to slop, and the ones associated with scrolling. How does it make you feel? How do you feel after a session? Do you feel better for that? Relaxed? Entertained? Enriched in any way? Was it... good?

Why slop exists

Brad Troemel made a very good video essay^[1] which covers this well, tracing the phenomenon from central banking responses to the 2008 financial crisis.

I'll summarise parts here. Slop is a result of the logic of venture capital and, later, public companies' duty to shareholders. Venture capital investment strategy is predicated on many failures and few, very successful, successes. This led to a growth strategy called "Blitzscaling", enabled by the cheap money which central bank responses to the crisis provided. Startups sought to grow and capture market share quickly via subsidisation, and then, once near-monopoly was secured, become profitable.

This is why the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy of the 2010s existed. Cheap subscriptions, cheap Uber rides, cheap trial periods, delivery-fee-free food couriering. But eventually interest rates had to rise, and money became expensive again. By this time Uber, Netflix, Spotify et al. held strong market positions, and VC investors and post-IPO shareholders were demanding returns. So, enshittification^[2] began as an autocannibalistic means of providing them.

This is why Netflix is now full of ads and second-screen-friendly slop. Why the pushback on account sharing exists. Why Spotify is increasingly expensive and keeps trying to push royalty-free AI slop on you. Why Uber is at least as expensive as any other taxi. Why Google search results blow ass^[3], and why people have wistful memories of 2010s YouTube. The only thing constraining extraction is the degree to which consumers feel they can leave, and between platform lock-in and the market concentration created by Blitzscaling, that degree tends to be low. It feels like there's nowhere else to go online now. As if the inexhaustible-feeling variety, strangeness, creativity and wonder of the 2000s internet has disappeared. It has not.

The increasingly obviously non-democratic nature of algorithmic feeds exacerbates feelings of captivity and passivity. Content recommendation used to feel relatively user-driven, as if we were served things other people enjoyed, but manipulation has become flagrant enough that our feeds are obviously inorganic. Instead, it feels like platform owners are filling the trough with what they want you to be watching. The non-neutrality of platforms and algorithms has become blatant.

Some might look at this more charitably, and interpret slop as an unintended side-effect of myopic optimisation for engagement. But this interpretation would lead to an equally naive view of enshittification. Both are optimising for logically sensible goals in context of the systems they operate in, and both worsen outcomes for everyone and everything except capital. Both are examples of market logic being treated as a natural law which must, where it conflicts with social good, trample it. Whether you believe it to be due to helpless complicity or callous disregard is largely semantic, outside of our efforts towards disgustmaxxing. Either way, moral responsibility is being overridden by the dictates of markets, and our feeds overrun with slop.

Similar logic reaches across the entire economy. Superhero movies and nostalgia reboots have near-zero artistic merit, but they're assured to be low-risk, hog-approved investments. Academia has become increasingly concerned with extraction over education, and AI-generated papers keep appearing. Even state power has incorporated the logic of enshittification^[4].

Creator involvement

Creator platforms are far from neutral. They have an incentive to influence what is created, in order to maximise advertiser income. This is achieved by their enforcement of an opinionated meta, instrumented via recommendation algorithms and creator reward programmes.

When the YouTube reward programme switched from payments based on view counts to viewing length, it rewrote that meta. Hence the current popularity of overlong video essay slop and paucity of short content - this is what killed 2010s YouTube. These things strongly affect what's created (and what you see). Unless there's a coincidence of wants between the meta and their own goals, creators are unable to gain an audience for the content they actually want to make.

The frenzy at the trough attracts plenty of money-driven creators to YouTube, but even well-intentioned ones struggle to avoid having their work tainted and distorted to some degree. This is why YouTube thumbnails are... the way they are. And you WON'T BELIEVE what happened when THIS AFFECTED TITLES. But worse, it bleeds into content itself. With annoying hooks, padding to ten-minute runtimes for algorithmic ad revenue rewards, jarring flow due to re-engagement peaks, consistently-disappointing delayed curiosity payoffs to extend your watch time, "Don't forget to like, subscribe and hit the bell", comment bait via artificial questions, deliberate mistakes, or the almost-quaint "Comment where you're watching from!"

YouTube kids' content provides perhaps the starkest examples of what happens when utterly cynical content creators start playing the meta^[5].

So you're getting slop foisted on you from both sides. Platforms have built this horrible machine, and creators, having little alternative, must operate inside it and either service its dictates, or accept a relative lack of engagement and income. At best, they can try to ease the pressure by appealing to Patreon.

This is why the hog analogy is so apt. It describes not only the low value of slop content and how scrollers passively consume and relate to it, but implies a farmer who installed the trough, keeps it full, and profits from their livestock's naive slop-swilling.

Why you are a slop-loving hog

What is it that appeals about slop? We know that it's trash, almost entirely devoid of meaning or value. We know that, while it's highly engaging, it's also highly unsatisfying. That queasy, jarring feeling of simultaneous overstimulation and unalleviated boredom after a session is widely observed. So why do we keep returning to the trough?

Tristan Harris's post How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind gives a good summary of the psychology which is leveraged by UX designers to achieve platform engagement in general. I will avoid being exhaustive here.

Variable-ratio reinforcement schedules

I had AI make this, and look how awful it is. Like all those anti-scrolling TikTok and Reels videos, it's slop about slop. Perfect.

This underlies the most fundamental dark design pattern involved in infinite scrolling, and is called out a lot^[6]^[7]. B.F. Skinner put rats and pigeons in little boxes, and rewarded them for desirable responses to stimuli according to various schedules. Variable-ratio reinforcement was the schedule under which the desired behaviour was most frequently performed, and the one under which it would be continued for the longest time without reinforcement.

It's the same operant conditioning mechanism by which slot machines are addictive. You pull the lever, and you might get a reward, or you might not. This is exciting. You might get something you like next! Every scroll is a little thrill. It's like opening a bottomless crate of mystery boxes. Even when there's little reinforcement, because most of this is slop, you'll keep at it. Because what if the next pull isn't slop? Exciting!

This is also why you impulsively unlock your phone to check your notifications, or find it in your hand without really knowing why. And why posting is so engaging - will you receive likes, or not?

Finally, this gives us another way in which slop-filled feeds are an outcome of enshittification. Scrolling providing more consistently good content (more continuous reinforcement) wouldn't serve the interests of platform owners, because continuous reinforcement schedules lead to lower response rates. You will view more content, and therefore more ads, if you're hunting for "good" content amongst slop.

It's not that variable-ratio reinforcement is awful and should be avoided entirely. It's that we should recognise it being used against our best interests. Slop scrolling is a particularly horrible Skinner box to get trapped in, and understanding how a trap works is helpful in avoiding it.

Overestimation of self-agency

Most people believe that they have a high degree of control over their behaviour, and thus fall prey to restraint bias. The idea that their behaviour could be manipulated against their best interests, without their conscious awareness, is scary, because they prize their perceived degree of agency. If I'm not strongly in control of my actions, then... there are unpleasant implications, and most people would really rather not entertain them.

That fear and aversion, combined with cognitive dissonance, allows this belief to persist even as it's repeatedly shown to be ridiculous. How many times have you accidentally spent far longer than intended scrolling? Aimed to reduce your screen time, and utterly failed? Yet the idea that your will could be subverted so easily and consistently by a silly little app still feels ridiculous. It isn't, and you already have all the evidence of that you need.

This is a large part of why things like screen time limits, the analogue bag trend, YouTube videos about how to reduce screen time and "Ten things to do instead of doom scrolling" are popular despite their ineffectiveness. They serve the belief that you are, despite your creaking shelfful of "Won't get fooled again" awards, a strong agent.

Escape and avoidance

Many memes like this exist. Part of being human is experiencing unpleasant emotional states, and we do not like it.

David de Segovia Vicente, Kyle Van Gaeveren, Stephen L Murphy, Mariek M P Vanden Abeele, Does mindless scrolling hamper well-being? Combining ESM and log-data to examine the link between mindless scrolling, goal conflict, guilt, and daily well-being, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 29, Issue 1, January 2024

It is relevant to make a difference here between behavior initiation and execution. People may intend to use [social media]—for instance, because they feel exhausted (or bored) and desire some hedonic pleasure to recover (or escape boredom). When highly aware of this intent, that is, when mindful over [social media use], this can be considered goal-directed behavior (Hefner & Freytag, 2023). In reality, however, [social media use] is often habitual, resulting from an automated response to external cues and internal states triggering the behavior as an automated response to the stimulus (Bayer et al., 2022). For example, while exhaustion and boredom might have originally served as mental states leading individuals to consciously seek out [social media], because of the learnt association with these platforms’ social, informational, and awareness rewards, feeling tired or bored may over time come to automatically trigger a [social media] checking habit. When users already access the platform with the reduced awareness that comes with habitual behavior, they may be easy targets for the design architecture of contemporary [social media] platforms, falling prey to the rabbit hole effect of consuming one piece of content after the other.

It's easy to reach the conclusion that scrolling satisfies a need, because this is generally the case for things you feel motivated to do. But I don't think that's what's happening. If it was then you'd feel better afterwards. Instead, scrolling is a dangerously easy means of distracting oneself from undesirable emotional states. This is part of why, when you eventually stop, you usually feel worse. It's ultimately harmful but does provide a reprieve. This is a striking commonality with the logic of harmful yet persistent substance abuse.

The problem is not seeking a reprieve sometimes. It's that scrolling is depleting rather than restorative, but is seductive because it's so easy to access, demands no effort, and provides a strongly dissociative trance. When we want distraction we tend to be in a vulnerable position, and scrolling predates on that.

Problems do arise, though, if we're seeking a reprieve all the time. Consistent experiential avoidance prevents us from taking any actions which might result in durable change (efforts to change our habits, beliefs, lifestyles), and long-term increases the frequency and intensity of the avoided experience.

Emotions which we allow to be experienced and processed rise, peak, and dissipate naturally. Avoidance stymies that process without changing one's underlying mental state. Further, you never obtain evidence that these internal states could have been tolerated and could have passed - there is no catharsis. Feeling unpleasant feelings becomes a very frightening thing which we are desperate to avoid, and avoidance itself exacerbates them.

Scrolling is also a wildly bad avoidance mechanism because algorithmic content is so frequently optimised for engagement by being negatively emotionally activating. You end up consuming material that makes you feel outraged and sad in your quest to escape from unpleasant emotional material, and you probably feel guilty for having done so.

Psychiatry (notably, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is clear on exactly the opposite being a better approach. Leaning into, with acceptance, experience of unpleasant internal states, so that you can gain tolerance for them and trust in the natural arc of emotional processing. Meditation practice can work similarly.

Your brain on slop

Here, I'm going to discuss short-form content specifically. People tend to really like it, and this should be a sign that it is not good for you. While we want to avoid long-form slop principally because it's of low value, short-form slop is, as well as being of near-zero value, outright bad for you.

Meta-analysis finds association with poorer mental health, and with cognition, across attention, inhibitory control, language, memory and working memory^[8]. As the analysis says, this may be explained by the dual theory of habituation and sensitisation.

Nguyen, L., Walters, J., Paul, S., Monreal Ijurco, S., Rainey, G. E., Parekh, N., Blair, G., & Darrah, M. (2025). Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use. Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125–1146

According to this framework, repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task. Simultaneously, SFV platforms may promote sensitization by providing immediate, algorithmically curated rewards, potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification...

The ability to swipe to new content could support a pattern of rapid disengagement from stimuli that do not provide immediate novelty or excitement. In line with this theoretical framework, frequent SFV use may diminish attentional control and reduce the capacity for sustained cognitive engagement, as cognitive processing becomes increasingly oriented toward brief, high-reward interactions rather than extended, goal-directed tasks.

Neuroimaging studies further support this interpretation by revealing structural and functional differences in brain regions associated with attention and cognitive control among individuals who engage in high-frequency social media use.

It's careful to impress that directionality remains unestablished, but we can look to subjective empiricism here. When's the last time you were able to sit through an entire movie, or read a book for a few hours, whether at all or without feeling the urge to check your phone? Has it always been that way?

Some may say that lazy, sweeping and usually-unsourced generalisations about "shrinking attention spans" are commonly made, and what's actually happening is that a type of attention is being trained, one that allows users to rapidly triage whether they want to engage with content. But what is this form of attention good for, except sifting through torrents of slop? When what's being lost is the capacity for deep and rich engagement with things of value, this seems like a poor trade. Even if you can find something of worth in the trough, you no longer have the faculties to appreciate it.

Ensloppification can promote drawn-out filler content, or brain-frying short-form, or forms of man-made horror yet to be seen. There's short-form slop and essayslop, and also academiaslop, workslop, movieslop... Slop is not a format, but a cultural logic of the attention economy.

What is slop?

We can make sense of Troemel's^[1:1] answer now. Slop is the finished product of enshittification.

It is the result of maximally applying managerial principles to content creation, and thereby entirely discarding concern and responsibility for social, informational or artistic value. The sole optimisation target is engagement (which is, anyway, far easier to quantify).

It is technocapital's algorithmic fun-house mirror reflection of humanity. Art stripped of artistry. Education reduced to trivia. A mockery of the human spirit. A busted fibre-optic refraction of what we "want", through the most vulnerable and base zones of our psychology. Tech's most cynical realisation yet of capital's extractive tendencies. That's what's in the trough - peak innovation in self-debasement.

Some^[9] may be charitable, and say that it's not intentional. Following market logic, it's just what people want. That somehow feels even worse.

We should feel disgusted by our complicity.

A litany of disgust

Slop is things working as intended
Slop delivery mechanisms are intentionally designed to make you consume (more and more of) it
You are conditioned by slop
Slop is lobotomising you
Slop is robbing you of the ability to appreciate non-slop
Slop is impairing your ability to be present in your life
Slop is stunting your emotional processing
You are allowing all of this to happen
And in doing so, you are pleasing and enriching big tech CEOs and shareholders

What is to be done?

Either accept your servitude as a craven slop-scroller in big tech's engagement mines, or leave sloppy platforms. What's really necessary is only to disengage from algorithmic feeds, and perhaps for people with more psychological fortitude than me there are viable compromise positions. But I am an utter hog and have continually proven to myself that it's all or nothing, and I don't really buy that you're not a hog too.

I know that less drastic measures sound more appealing. There's the promise of still being able to scroll a bit and, due to restraint bias, it feels like that could work. However, relying on willpower in moments of temptation is a losing strategy. Effective change tends to involve environmental restructuring, which asks far less of your restraint. It's far easier to not scroll at all than to moderate scrolling. Scrolling involves momentum and habit, and once habitual behaviour has been triggered, it consistently overrides intentions. Ask any recovering addict about what they learned from attempts at moderation.

Some people's livings and/or social lives are deeply tied to these platforms, and if that's the case... it doesn't change the binary available to you. It's just going to make leaving, if you choose to do so, a lot harder.

The tragedy of it is that there are still creators producing actually good things on the big non-short-form platforms. But how much of that do you actually see when you're engaging via algorithm? It's buried. There is a disincentive to serve you much of it via algorithm. Some will still make its way to you, the old-fashioned way, via personal recommendations, and probably it'll lead to more enjoyable consumption.

Short-form content is out entirely. It's pure slop. There is virtually nothing of value here. Cooking your brain while scrolling hundreds of items of slop is not worth those ultra-rare, slightly life-improving tidbits. I realise that it feels like you have actually learnt a lot of useful things (or if you're like me, magpied them into a saved list you never review and continued hunting for more), and that feeling is exactly what keeps you hooked. You may have learnt some useful things... at the opportunity cost of not learning many more, because you were busy slop-panning.

Cutover

When you have cultivated a healthy amount of disgust, motivation to change your consumption of algorithmic content should be strong. This makes it more likely that you'll be able to succeed. Now you should start to consider the environmental changes you can make.

Introduce friction, reduce tension

Create the amount of friction required, via a process of trial and error, for success. I suspect this will lead most people to the conclusion that moderation is not feasible, and that if they want out of slopworld they must disengage from feeds entirely. But that's probably something that must be arrived at oneself, so by all means follow a ladder of escalation if you're unconvinced.

Application usage time limits, screen time reminders
Application interruptors/blockers such as one sec, ScreenZen (both of which also have desktop options)
Modded applications which allow the sloppiest feeds (e.g. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) to be disabled
- These are usually closed source, which your security risk tolerance may not allow for
Permanent greyscale mode
⚠️🤡 ENTERING MEGACOPE/"MORE CONSUMPTION CAN SAVE ME" ZONE
Entrust someone else with your parental control PIN
Get a second phone exclusively for this stuff
Physical anti-distraction devices like Brick, Halo
Buy a dumbphone. Things like getting into concerts or paying for parking often require an app nowadays, so have fun trying to participate in society.
- Seek salvation in hyperconsumption. Buy several other devices to replicate the functionality of a $100 smartphone.
🧘🧠 EXITING TROUGH OF MEGACOPE, WISDOM GAINED
Uninstall applications entirely
- While you shouldn't intend to use them, web versions of platforms tend to have more UX friction/awkwardness and thus be less absorbing. They can also be blocked using apps, browser extensions.

On PCs, more control is available via browser extensions and userscripts. Unhook is a popular browser extension which can hide all YouTube feeds (homepage, comments, Shorts). Various userscripts can block site elements, like Instagram Reels. You may find that only using social media on your PC is manageable.

The idea of reducing tension applies to impulsive/compulsive phone usage in general. It's about trying to reduce the tension involved with checking, not having checked, or not having acted on calls to action (e.g. "reply to this message!") from one's phone. Turn off all non-DM notifications for any remaining slop apps. Turn off all the notifications you can for every app. Turn off read receipts for messaging applications.

Reattune to lower stimulation, gain comfort with boredom

Many people treat uncontrolled slop consumption as a discipline problem, and give advice like "build a morning routine", or "use a Pomodoro timer", "write a dopamine menu", "do breathing exercises first". But this is cope and doesn't work. At root it is not a discipline problem, but a problem of scrolling-exacerbated aversion to unpleasant internal states. Productivity porn cannot help you to recover from this. Self-work can. Self-work is hard and often unpleasant and people generally don't want to do it, and if that's you then okay, but understand that nothing is going to change. If you want to actually live, you must work towards having an examined, mindful life. One which you are actually present and engaged in. Apocryphal and cringe or not, "The unexamined life is not worth living".

Find some sort of low-energy, mind-numbing activity^[10]. Something you can do while lounging, that keeps your hands busy, and can be initiated instantly and impulsively. This will help to replace what scrolling does for you. I would suggest chain smoking hand-rolled cigarettes^[11].

Spend time each day doing nothing. Just stare at a wall. Start with ten minutes. This will probably be painful, and it being painful should bring into focus how fried you are. It is clearly not good for time spent without stimulation or distraction from one's thoughts to be so unpleasant. When discomfort arises, try not to do anything about it. Just notice it, stay with it, and see that you don't die and it doesn't last.

Use this insight to spur some sort of self-work. Anything. Journal about your self-concept, emotions and insecurities, as these things can only improve if drawn into the conscious mind and confronted. Make some art. Start a meditation practice. If you're really suffering with this, and perhaps anyway, you should seek therapy.

Purge

Outside of accounts you can trust yourself not to scroll on, and which are useful to retain (e.g. Facebook for events and marketplace), purge your posts and delete the account.

Thankfully I never got into Twitter and got sick of Facebook years ago. My thing was Reddit, which is a lot more embarrassing. You can use a script such as this to mass-edit posts, which I'd recommend over immediate deletion because it should result in greater loss from Reddit's database and search engine indexes. Wait a few months and run again with deletion if you want, then delete your account.

What's left of the web?

There's still more web out there. What just used to be called "the web", and has now fractured off into the indie web, or small web, is where people who are still down with the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, or just aren't as fried as everyone else, have escaped to. There are still many interesting, informative and weird personal websites and webrings, forums and IRC channels and so on. The internet Hypnospace Outlaw pays tribute to does still exist. It's a place where curation and signposting are very important, as search engines have become so degraded, though alternative and indie web search engines exist too. Take back curatorial control, become your own algorithm^[12].

Perhaps you'd like to join in? Try making your own site. It's fun, educational and highly rewarding.

Maybe it's not like it used to be, but it's still a vast improvement over slopworld. Enjoy exploring! Enjoy being able to explore! There's much more than you might expect outside of the big platforms, and it tends to be much more interesting to engage with.

THE ZIRPSLOP REPORT, 2025, Brad Troemel ↩︎ ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification ↩︎
The Man Who Killed Google Search, Ed Zitron ↩︎
The Enshittification of American Power, Henry Farrell & Abraham L. Newman, wired.com ↩︎
The disturbing YouTube videos that are tricking children, bbc.com ↩︎
How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind, Tristan Harris ↩︎
Why the infinite scroll is so addictive, Grant Collins ↩︎
Nguyen, L., Walters, J., Paul, S., Monreal Ijurco, S., Rainey, G. E., Parekh, N., Blair, G., & Darrah, M. (2025). Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use. Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125–1146. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000498 ↩︎
Liberals, probably. I imagine rightoids are with me on this. ↩︎
why "things to do instead of doomscrolling" never works, Hazel Thayer ↩︎
In case you're even more autistic than me, this is a joke ↩︎
be your own algorithm, pagemelt. It's also worth mentioning that RSS still exists, and many indie web sites serve RSS feeds. ↩︎

What the fuck is happening? The Great Power Competition and Western enablement of a genocidal ethnostate

2026-04-23T00:00:00Z

2026 is turning out to be quite a year. But this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. This is the intensification of a conflict which has been simmering for decades - the Great Power Competition (GPC). Mainstream media tends to stick to proximate reporting, avoiding geopolitical analysis. But none of this stuff makes any sense without geopolitical analysis.

The frame of the GPC allows for some sensemaking. It exposes the underlying logic of what's happening. Makes sense of why the war in Iran is occurring (it is not because Orange Man Insane - the US, and to a lesser extent the West in general, has wanted this for a long time. Biden^[1] or Harris would likely have done the same). Why Western states continue to fund and arm Israel, and suppress domestic protests, despite all the noise they made about genocide being really bad, actually. Why the US double-blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, despite saying they want to keep energy flowing. And more!

What is the GPC?

A framework for understanding what's happening in global geopolitics. It outlines a balance of power contention involving three loose blocs.

Western, US-led bloc

The most aligned of the blocs. It aims to retain its global hegemony. Formed of the G7, NATO, "Five Eyes", and key Pacific allies Japan, South Korea, Australia/AUKUS.

Despite being the most aligned bloc, there's significant friction as Europe increasingly questions whether being dragged into US wars is actually to its benefit. The US has effectively been cannibalising Europe's already-enfeebled industrial base. Rejecting cheap Russian energy - though Ukraine did encourage this by blowing up Nord Stream, which Germany has faced significant intra-bloc resistance in prosecuting - in order to retain bloc cohesion over Ukraine required importation of US LNG at a significantly higher price, which harmed European industrial competitiveness by driving up costs. And American protectionism, like the Inflation Reduction Act, exacerbated this with the offer of huge subsidies and relatively cheap energy, incentivising migration of green-tech manufacturing from Europe to the US. Europe fell on its own sword for the sake of economically punishing Russia, and the US, as is typical of transatlantic relations, took advantage, effectively leveraging the GPC and the Russo-Ukrainian war to poach from an allied region's industrial base. And then there's Trump's further protectionist sanctions, and all his shit-talking about Europe and NATO.

Sino-Russian bloc

Led by China and Russia, key members are Iran, North Korea, Belarus and, increasingly, freshly-megacucked Venezuela. It's an alliance of necessity. Most members hate and distrust each other. Russia, for instance, fears a future for itself as a Chinese resource colony - it has become highly, deeply asymmetrically, dependent on Chinese imports^[2]. And China is pissed that Russia's adventures in Ukraine (triggering secondary sanctions against China, given their involvement in Russia's economy) and military support to Iran (aiding with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz) keep fucking with its growth.

Nevertheless, they are fractiously bound by a common interest in challenging Western economic hegemony and interference. They have their own shadow economies, but those are very much overshadowed by USD/SWIFT.

Multi-aligned/BRICS bloc

Outside of Russia and China, the BRICS are mostly multi-aligned. They share a desire for global financial reform and the end of the USD's dominance, but they certainly don't share a desire to be dominated by China.

India, for instance, hates China. They've had plenty of border skirmishes, and India cooperates with the US (via the Quad) to contain China's navy, and on AI and semiconductor tech. But, in the spirit of non-alignment, it also buys a lot of cheap Russian oil and refuses to say bad things about Putin.

Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and South Africa really are multi-aligned. They'll play this however it benefits them most.

Saudi Arabia, for example, is happy to take US weapons in order to deter Iran. It's also been happy to invite Chinese companies to build out its recently-completed 5G networks^[3], and to sell oil to Beijing in yuan (via SWIFT alternative mBridge) after the 2024 expiration of a US exclusive-dollar-pricing agreement^[4].

This bloc is out to extract as much as it can from the events and incentives created by the GPC. The risk is that if the conflict becomes hotter, having pursued multi-alignment will destroy their economies.

A brief history of the GPC

The multipolarity of the "Great Game" saw many empires competing for colonies and trade routes. World War 2 destabilised this multipolar system, leaving just two superpowers, the US and the USSR, who led us into the Cold War.

After the Cold War ended, as Russia underwent shock therapy, there was a triumphalist assumption that Francis Fukuyama's very stupid 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, was right - it was the end of history, because the liberal international order would automatically prevail throughout the world. Russia and China would eventually, as their wealth grew, become integrated into this order. Fukuyamaists believed that the GPC was over, and that the US had won.

But this isn't how it turned out. Instead, the GPC resurged. The post-Cold War era was in fact a gross and temporary geopolitical anomaly. By 2018, the US Department of Defence was saying:

Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy defense.gov

Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order—creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.

China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea. Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors.

So kind of like the shit the US has been doing, then?

The relevance of the energy transition

The transition from oil to renewable/battery power complicates matters significantly, as does technological development.

Resource conflicts

First, the energy transition involves new technology, and this makes new materials strategically important. This is part of why Greenland has become relevant to the US - it would represent access to rare earth elements without Chinese supply chain involvement.

This is also why there's so much interest in the "lithium triangle" of Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. The Democratic Republic of Congo's cobalt reserves. Indonesia's nickel.

Argentina is particularly noteworthy due to its capture by the US-led bloc. When Milei took office, he abandoned Argentina's tradition of multilateralism by explicitly rejecting joining BRICS^[5], aligning Argentina strongly with the US^[6], and making himself known for unwavering support of Israel^[7]. Argentina is now a US-led bloc presence in South America. However, material reality asserts itself - fast-moving Chinese capital is buying up Argentinian lithium assets under the US's nose^[8].

Climate change and ice loss are highly relevant here. In the cases of the Arctic in general and Greenland in particular, mining access is opening up. So are new Arctic shipping routes, which bypass Western-controlled chokepoints like the Suez Canal. This is why there has been heightened military presence in the Arctic for some time.

Industrial competencies

Second, the West really dropped the ball during the Fukuyamaist era by cannibalising its own industrial base in favour of saving money by outsourcing to China and Taiwan.

Even if the West can secure strategic resources, China is strongly dominant in their processing. For example, the processing of ores into battery-grade materials predominantly takes place in China.

Taiwan houses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. This represents an incredibly centralised strategic fabrication competency, and this is one of the big reasons there's so much Western opposition to Chinese ownership of Taiwan.

America in particular has done quite a lot to try and redress the balance here.

The 2022 CHIPS act represented $280bn targeted squarely at protectionism for the underperforming US semiconductor industry.

The Inflation Reduction Act, also of 2022, significantly invested into energy transition infrastructure, and thus energy security. $37bn was allocated for investment into advanced manufacturing capabilities (as well as $30bn for nuclear).

And, of course, this is also why you can't buy a BYD in America and are stuck with Elon's clown cars.

How does this explain the Iran war?

Iranian alignment in the GPC

For decades, Iran remained unaligned in the GPC. Despite the Western sanctions regime, it was wary of the Sino-Russian bloc.

Russia seized vast amounts of Persian territory in the 19th century (modern day Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia), and the hangover from this was lasting animosity. During WW2, the USSR occupied northern Iran and supported separatist movements. Even after the 1979 revolution, the USSR supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. And later, Moscow used its relationship with Tehran as a geopolitical bargaining chip, going so far as to vote for UN sanctions against Iran's nuclear program from 2006 to 2010.

With regard to China, there was a fear of being caught in a Belt and Road trap - either ending up in heavy debt, or simply having cheap oil extracted from it. There were also worries that Chinese support for Iran would always come second to China's trade relationship with the US (for example, when China pulled out of the South Pars gas field project).

But in 2018, the US withdrew from the JCPOA (a deal offering Iran sanctions relief in return for nuclear program limitation). This killed any Iranian aspirations of economic integration with the West, and proved to Iranian leadership that the US was not a reliable partner.

In 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year, $400bn cooperation agreement. This signalled that China had become less willing to bow to US economic pressure. In 2023, Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

In 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Now Russia was a sanctioned pariah state. It needed military support, and Iran had been working on drone and missile tech behind its own sanction barriers for decades. It also needed support in evading sanctions.

In 2024, Iran joined BRICS.

While it now has much closer ties with the Sino-Russian axis, Iran's wariness remains. Fundamentally, Iran wants allies, whereas China and Russia want junior partners. Iran is not a superpower. It is not a state which is taken seriously by superpowers.

Iran supplies Russia militarily with drones and missiles, thus helping it to prolong the war in Ukraine. It supplies China with a lot of cheap oil. So an attack on Iran weakens Russia militarily, and challenges China's energy security. Iran has done enough to make itself an attractive proxy target in the GPC.

And, the window of opportunity is closing. Iran's full integration into BRICS would massively reduce its vulnerability to Western sanctions. It reaching the nuclear threshold would really change the game, because you would not be wise to fuck with a nuclear state like this.

The role of Israel

The US no longer wants to be directly militarily involved in the Middle East. It is now a net oil exporter, and has less strategic reliance (economic reliance, sure) on Middle Eastern exports. It would prefer to finally extricate itself from the region and execute on the Pivot to Asia, to further its regional goals in the GPC. Every aircraft carrier sitting in the Persian Gulf is one that can't be deployed to the South China Sea.

However, it does not want its withdrawal from the ME to create a power vacuum which the Sino-Russian axis can exploit. The US does not want them to do what it did in the region.

This is meant to be what Israel is for. The Abraham Accords (2020) were intended to normalise relations (i.e. make nice after Israel being assholes) between Israel and the Gulf states, in order to support a regional "police force" led by Israel which would act to contain Iran and deter Sino-Russian regional influence.

This also gives us the reason that the US is blockading ships entering and leaving Iranian ports. It seems to have been portrayed as more infantile Orange Man idiocy in mainstream news, presumably because actually explaining is too hard and/or would violate the propaganda line, but it's not.

It isn't a full blockade. Saudi and Kuwaiti oil could, if Iran allowed it, reach the global market. But 90% of Iran's oil exports are bound for China and Iran was allowing them passage. In context of the GPC, this is a gambit to force China to demand Iran makes concessions in order for it to regain access to cheap oil supplies, rather than suffer the economic pain of buying non-discounted oil on the global market.

The propaganda line and weaponised antisemitism

Now we can explain why the rhetoric around antisemitism has become utterly bizarre during the last few years.

Nobody involved in this actually gives much of a fuck about antisemitism or legitimate opposition to it. They are utter ghouls. If anything, they want to encourage antisemitism. It's very important that a propaganda line supporting Western hegemony in the ME exists, and this is apparently seen as a worthwhile part of that. I can at least admit that it makes a neat counterpart to all the Islamophobia.

Justification for support to Israel

It's not much of a justification to anyone who has a hint of critical thinking skills, but it's enough to hook useful rightoid idiots and enough to provide a plausibly-defensible propaganda line.

Clearly, Israel is a genocidal apartheid ethnostate. Just about the only sympathy card it has going for it is that it's a Jewish state and the Holocaust was an abomination. So, antisemitism must be leant on in order to try and legitimise its actions.

We need not mention that, erm, Israel treats Holocaust survivors pretty poorly^[9]^[10]. That'd be inconvenient for the narrative.

Muddying the debate

Killing airtime by forcing leftist commentators to debunk the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism.

It doesn't sound like much, but this comes up in practically every mainstream media debate I've seen on the subject. It's pure distraction. Even though most people seem to see through it now, it does still provide friendly media with a means of wasting the time of and talking over anti-Zionist commentators.

Enabling repression of dissent

As the GPC intensifies, so does domestic resistance to its manifestations. This is not good. Internal dissent of this sort is malignant, and needs to be controlled.

This is democratic backsliding. We were told genocide was bad, no? Turns out there are some conditions on that. Like, in the case of the genocidal state forming a strategically important part of a geopolitical alliance we're involved in. Then we'll just do the Keir Starmer thing of saying how disappointed we are^[11] while continuing arms exports ^[12] (even if, hilariously, a couple are seized by Belgium). Even this mild telling off drew Islamophobic ridicule from Israel.

But the defence of Israel is just a smokescreen here. It's really about having an excuse to repress anti-imperialist dissent. Conveniently, we have thoroughly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism, and Zionism is rather imperialistic - so we can use inappropriately broad and deliberately misapplied antisemitism laws to repress anti-imperialists who are denouncing Zionism. Very good.

What happens now?

So, we can make more sense of why geopolitics is growing increasingly fucky. Unfortunately this is not very heartening, because we can also see that things are likely to get much worse before they get any better.

Not in terms of military escalation outside of the ME. Heaven forbid any of this actually come home to roost in a nuclear state. But the blocs will continue to wage economic war against each other via actual war, the sort schoolgirls get blown up in, in the ME.

The US will aim to starve China of energy until it forces Iran to make concessions in order to reopen the strait. The US's energy independence can shield it from global energy market price shocks if necessary, but the interest rates for government debt will make drawing this out a challenge.

China is the world's largest energy importer, so this will really hurt. About 90% of Iran's energy exports go to China. On the other hand, China can exercise far more strategic central control over its economy, and Xi need not worry about approval ratings and midterms.

The funniest possible (not actually particularly funny when you think about its broader implications - it would cause a global recession) outcome is that this causes the world to finally conclude that the US really cannot be trusted to avoid economic/sanction warfare, find a way to trade without SWIFT/USD (possibly getting on board with the BRICS SWIFT alternative), this ends the USD as global reserve currency, it significantly devalues, and the US finds itself stuck in a huge debt trap, unable to fund any more expensive wars. It's a legitimate risk, and the GPC has become sufficiently existential that it's one worth taking - if the US-led bloc loses, China will be setting global trade terms anyway. Nothing to lose.

A bright point would be that the end of USD hegemony would go some way towards freeing the Global South from its US and IMF-imposed debt trap. Global debt is largely USD-denominated, and the Fed has been keeping interest rates high in order to combat domestic inflation. This has resulted in African^[13]^[14] and Latin American^[15] (most topically, Argentina^[16]) countries struggling to service their debts, being forced to take out further IMF loans with stringent, inhumane economic conditions attached.

What should I do about it (assuming I'm cosily nestled in the imperial core)

The impacts for us will largely be economic. Lucky us.

I started divesting from semi-liquid equity positions last year, because I got spooked by the AI bubble, and am now pleased to have done so. After the recent rally, I've switched my entire pension from equities into short-term bonds. This is not financial advice, but if you have any investments then you might consider some amount of reallocation. I figure that if I am going to try and do market timing, at least it's out of fear rather than out of greed.

Buy that heat pump. Fix your home's insulation and get those solar panels installed. Energy prices seem unlikely to normalise before winter. At the least, buy an electric blanket, jacket or similar. It's far cheaper to heat your body than to heat a room^[17].

Keep a stockpile of non-perishable foodstuffs. Start getting comfortable with plant-based food (it's good!) Approximately 1/3 of global fertiliser is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. Food prices are likely to rise significantly.

Prepare mentally for shortages. Many of us have never known anything other than relative wealth and abundance. This is a gross historical abnormality which we're lucky to have experienced.

And as always, class consciousness and praxis are important.

Hustling and hopelessness

2026-04-16T00:00:00Z

The "AI bubble" narrative has become popular and entered the mainstream. Wired^[1] has a very good article. The importance of a good narrative as a defining feature of financial bubbles got me thinking about other narratives, and about the contradictions of capitalism, and the way they've led us to the collective delusion of the hustle economy.

AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All (Brian Merchant, Wired)

There’s no bigger narrative than the one AI industry leaders have been pushing since before the boom: AGI will soon be able to do just about anything a human can do, and will usher in an age of superpowerful technology the likes of which we can only begin to imagine. Jobs will be automated, industries transformed, cancer cured, climate change solved; AI will do quite literally everything. Add in the industry narrative that we have to “beat” China to AGI, and thus must not regulate AI at any cost, and you have even more fuel on the fire.

“Is this a good story?” Goldfarb says. “The answer is profoundly yes.”

Crypto

Right back to Bitcoin. That had a fantastic narrative. A decentralised, and thus incorruptible store of value which would challenge, or even usurp, legacy banking and fiat currency. Unfortunately the technology and user experience remain far from able to deliver. It's much too complex for the average person to use, and the mainnet still handles only five to seven transactions per second (VISA et al. can do thousands per second). You might appeal to Lightning, but that's another layer of complication, nobody is really using it, and it still has significant scaling limitations. Hence the popularity of holding funds on exchanges, which really was not meant to be the point, and is mostly about naked speculation (and has seen plenty of people get hustled).

The revolutionary narrative is pretty dead now. So far as I can tell, people tend to promote BTC as a store of value - "digital gold". But it's become more of a store of shared delusion than ever. Unregulated and commonly manipulated, not much of an escape from legacy banking. Can hardly spend it, so not much of an escape from fiat either. Any genuine true believers who remain form a shrill minority. For idiot whales who don't have to worry about paying their bills it remains an ideological playground, but for the majority, everyday bagholders, it's an evangelical cult with faith that more, greater fools will arrive some day and pump the value of their holdings. The fiat value^[2] because, although 1 BTC will always be worth 1 BTC, there's a growing awareness of how much bullshit that is.

NFTs are worth a brief mention as they also had a strong narrative. Independent artists could market themselves, digital assets could be securely owned etc. Of course, this was another obvious hype scam and nobody gives a fuck about NFTs anymore. Congratulations to all the Bored Ape "owners" out there.

After the disillusionment and end of BTC's time in popular consciousness (it feels a bit odd that, yes, there was a time when it was discussed - at length - on TV news), the pretence of this being about anything other than making (fiat) money for most of those involved became increasingly unbelievable. From early crypto and NFTs, through thousands of memecoins and scamcoins, to $TRUMP, a barefaced pump and dump from the president of the United States. The rot has set in this deeply.

Which brings us to neoliberal/late-stage capitalism and its contradictions. Even the pretence of believing in capital as a means of incentivising the production of things which will improve people's lives is becoming increasingly shaky. In this late stage, many have dropped it entirely in favour of nakedly zero-sum competition and an unapologetic, or even malicious, disregard for its social costs. Going further than simply not being of benefit to society, this is strongly malignant.

Prediction markets

Consider prediction markets. For everyone except their owners, for whom they're highly lucrative, they're a zero-sum (okay, fees make them negative-sum) proposition. Sportsbooks, as predatory as they are, feel almost innocent by comparison. There's a litany of examples of the perverse incentives these markets create, but I'll confine myself to a few. First, insider trading on the advent (and surely subsequent happenings) of the US/Israeli war against Iran^[3].

Second, causality running the other way - prediction markets incentivising the manipulation of reality. This is perhaps occurring in the Iran war too^[4], but there are proven examples, like that of Emanuel Fabian. Polymarket bettors lost out on positions that no Iranian missiles would strike Israel on March 10, due to his report that a missile "struck an open area" rather than being intercepted. So they started making threats against his life. Fabian stood his ground and, thankfully, everyone else involved is apparently a coward.

Consider the incentives created by other positions which have been available on Polymarket. You could have bet on how many acres of California would burn in wildfires^[5]. When prominent CEOs would depart their positions (due to, say, being killed). When products would be launched, creating incentive for corporate sabotage.

And clear insider advantage runs through all of it. This is just another means for regular people to try and hustle each other, and for capital to most definitely hustle them. Like crypto, retail trading, NFTs, prediction markets are obviously extractive. Late-stage capital is out of ideas, so the mask becomes ever-flimsier as its rapacious quest for greater, more desperate fools continues.

Prediction markets: the hunt for the new 'dumb money' (Financial Times, on predictionmarkets.org)

The highest profits on [Polymarket], meanwhile, were concentrated among a few users. Keyrock, a market maker that tracks the sector, said that $15.2bn in profits — more than two-thirds of all money won on Polymarket — was held by just 740 accounts — a tiny fragment of the more than 2mn trading on the platform.

I don't think even the most ideological libertarian could claim straight-faced that anything of value is being created here. There is no worth at all to any of this. It's just a particularly ugly manifestation of zero-sum competition and extraction, with the bonus of perverse, reality-weirding incentives.

Attempts are being made to legislate against these sorts of positions, which is good. But the fact that they ever existed is dialectically instructive. We're in the hustle economy now. Extraction will only intensify. Increasingly immiserated, alienated and avaricious workers will continue to be pitted against each other in risky, zero-sum competition, while capital securely takes its cut.

None of this analysis is original, of course. In explaining the element of desperation, Demetri Kofinas coined the term financial nihilism back in 2021^[6]. If you can see that the economy is rigged against you - that home ownership is likely to always be out of reach for you, that pursuing higher education is unlikely to make financial sense - then YOLOing all your savings on $TSLA, or spending on luxury goods and experiences, starts to make sense.

Petit AI psychosis

Regular AI psychosis is all narrative, but it's pretty old news now^[7]. Though it is part of another, more personal layer to the narratives around AI.

AI is exacerbating the Dunning-Kruger effect^[8]. A notable and amusing case of this is the CEO of Krafton, publisher of Subnautica 2, using it for legal advice^[9] in a failed attempt to try and welch on a deal made with the developers.

Another interesting strand of this is how it affects corporate decision-making. Here, things become muddled with the AI booster narrative. A lot of CEOs are, as much as it pains me to admit it, intelligent people. But they have specific and limited domain knowledge, and probably tend to be selected for self-confidence. Add AI, something the workings of are very much outside their field of expertise, to this, and... yikes. Forrester Research found^[10] that 55% of employers who made workers redundant in favour of AI regret it. Of course, they also predict most of these employees will be replaced with cheaper, offshore workers, presumably as admitting the mistake (like Klarna was forced to) would be too embarrassing. Both personally and to markets. Going against the AI narrative would, presumably, make a bad situation even worse.

But even for CEOs with domain knowledge, the effect seems to persist. Garry Tan is the CEO of Y Combinator and holder of a Stanford degree in Computer Systems Engineering. But he also seems pretty cracked.

The Garry Tan Stack: A Definitive Guide to gstack littlemight.com

At SXSW 2026, Tan told the audience he had “cyber psychosis” and was barely sleeping. “I don’t need modafinil with this revolution. I’m up. I slept at 4am. I woke up at 8am. I wanted to sleep more, but I couldn’t because: Let’s see what’s going on with the 10 workers.”

gstack README.md github.com

I've been building products for twenty years, and right now I'm shipping more code than I ever have. In the last 60 days: 600,000+ lines of production code (35% tests), 10,000-20,000 lines per day, part-time, while running YC full-time.

There is absolutely no way this isn't total slop. His GitHub doesn't have many new projects on it. Show us the code, Garry!

We can at least look at his website, garryslist.org, people have^[11], and unsurprisingly it's not great. Shipping test files, unused JS controllers (including the Rails "Hello World" scaffold), uncompressed images, an unused rich text editor. Rendering the entire page content twice in the DOM for mobile compatibility. While this should be embarrassing, it's true that it's not a big deal for a personal site. But the narrative pushes the idea that it's okay to bring this approach to things which are actually important, and these people don't seem to question it. Real backends, for real, consequential applications.

Enshittification enablement

This is the grindset/productivity narrative playing out in software development. We have the tools for it now - you can totally obtain that Duolingo 200-day shipping streak, push out as many lines of code as you want, and claim that you're a 10x developer. But if you think you're doing good engineering, you will be deluding yourself.

And this explosion of shitty code ties in with the AI booster narrative. Things are going wrong^[12] and will continue to. Up to 30% of Microsoft's code is now written by AI^[13] and, ironically by ramming AI features into it, they have managed to introduce a remote code execution vulnerability into, uh... Notepad^[14]. For years, I've wanted Windows' basic text editor to have AI integration. All in service of the narrative, I guess.

For people like Garry and Satya Nadella, part of the appeal is presumably the advancement of capital's ongoing quest to eliminate labour. Capital is laying people off due to, or at least using the excuse of, AI capabilities which even they believe are only nascent. If you have 10x developers, you only need 10% of the headcount. The snake is eating chunks of itself for the sake of a short-term, narrative-based pump. This is the hustle economy manifesting as autocannibalism, via shortsighted layoffs and a frenzy of enshittification by means of attempted justification for bloated AI valuations and hype. I can only imagine that, when the narrative cools, AI boosters are going to look at their mangled codebases and think "Well... shit".

That's a large part of what AI represents in tech. The capacity to enshittify things more efficiently than ever before. Yes, you can ship very quickly! You can ship as much as you want. At the cost of rotting your codebase.

I predict some good times for engineers with strong foundational skills (i.e. actual engineers).

Conclusion

In the 2010s, the economic narrative was still relatively meritocratic. Startups were a fairly new, seemingly exciting thing. There was a lot of tech optimism, and some amount of feeling that it was possible (albeit unlikely) to make a lot of money by realising a good idea. A belief that smart people with good ideas could find funding, become rich, and improve society while doing so. Around the end of that decade, a frenzied period of obsession with meme stocks^[15] and crypto/day trading. That didn't pan out, so moving into the 2020s, grindset and side hustle culture really took off. A return for the many to a more grounded vision of entrepreneurialism. Albeit an extractive, exhausting one. And that didn't work either. Busting your ass for 40 hours at your low-paid job, and another 20 in the gig economy, did not make people rich. It just exhausted them.

And now, narratives of achievable personal financial security are failing entirely. People are increasingly unable to believe in stories. For some, self-delusion does remain in the form of AI fairytales. For the more clear-eyed, narrative has collapsed - all that remains is nihilism.

As is ever the case, more than ever, we need class consciousness.

The Cool Americas, 2026

2026-04-16T00:00:00Z

First big trip after ASD diagnosis. Picked up an ADHD diagnosis during. Four months across Mexico City, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina. My first time in both subcontinents.

Some favourites:

Experiencing Mexico City, in general
- Nexus flipping at a kink rave
- Dropping acid and rowboating in Chapultepec park
- Mexican surrealism
Beautiful mirador sunsets (Lima)
Monsaterio de Santa Catalina (Arequipa)
Being in a desert for the first time (Paracas)
First time being pickpocketed (Paracas)
Hiking down the Inca steps from Pisac archaeological site
An ayahuasca retreat (Cusco)
- Dying was rough, but I feel much better for it!

Bottoming for god: nervous system regulation, unmasking, and spirituality

2026-04-05T00:00:00Z

Introduction

I've been thinking about the synergies between learning how to live well as an autistic person, and spiritual practice and experiences. The below is scattered across several threads of my life, along which run and entangle a journey towards acceptance. Whether you think of it as (radical) acceptance, submission (to the universe, experience), or equanimity, everyone's talking about the same thing. Accepting experience as it is, without fighting, without wanting it to be some other way.

Neurodivergence, nervous system regulation and unmasking

So many autistic people - probably especially those of us who are late-diagnosed and/or high-masking - live with chronically dysregulated nervous systems and hypervigilance. I spent years not even knowing what feeling safe and relaxed in my body felt like. Occasionally it'd happen, and it was so unfamiliar that it tended to freak me out. I knew there were a few things that might allow me to access it. Drugs in just the right quantities and ratios, long massages, sensory deprivation tanks, and intimate, vulnerable sex with familiar partners. But I didn't recognise how abnormal and damaged this relationship with relaxation was, or appreciate how hugely deleterious it was to my ability to be present for and enjoy life, until I started doing somatic work and thus coming out of it. It's hard to recognise the cave until you can poke your head outside.

And at its root, this is an issue with being unable to allow experience. With bracing against it, wanting to permit the "good" and reject the "bad". As such, there are very deep synergies with...

Spiritual practice

I'd had a meditation practice for years prior to diagnosis, and it was not unhelpful. But starting to work with somatic work made a huge, synergistic difference here too. It's very difficult for the mind to relax if the body is tense, whether in context of practice or everyday life.

While the relative comfort in day to day living is very noticeable and welcome, it's the synergies with spiritual practice that are really interesting. So much of practice is about cultivating equanimity.

That "everything is perfect" is sure to sound very callous if you're not familiar with the territory, but it's not. Ram Dass, amongst others, has a lot to say^[1] about simultaneous perception of both conventional, human reality and all its suffering, and ultimate reality, which is indeed perfect as it is. I agree with him that this simultaneous perception is the root of true, boundless compassion.

Because while from an ultimate perspective this is mechanistic, serene and elegant, from a human one it's tragic. Most of the people in the world do not have the advantage of appreciating this ultimate perspective. They're being crushed under the wheel of samsara, and they don't even know. It feels like watching mice in an experimental maze, ignorant of the mechanism that's leading them to receive food pellets as well as electric shocks.

And it has to be this way. The maze (samsara) must exist, and the mice (us!) must be experimented upon. The only way it could be otherwise, is if there were nothing at all. Light and dark can't exist without each other. They're totally interrelated. You cannot have rainbows without genocide - it's a metaphysical impossibility.

And this is where boundless compassion and Bodhicitta arise from. Seeing that we're all in this predicament together, as one, and that so many people suffer, so, so much, due to ignorance of the situation. They take their experience as a lab mouse literally.

Sex and submission

This will be brief, as I don't care to get into details on the subject.

A prior partner always wanted to peg me. It was something I was utterly closed off to, and we never explored it. I'd always considered myself to be exclusively dominant.

But my current partner is a switch. It turns out that I'm a switch too, and it's wonderful. I suspect that I'd never been able to recognise it before because the idea of vulnerability terrified me. It did not feel safe. I was not able to trust, or to relinquish control.

The psychology of sexual dominance can be deeply rooted in fear, and invovlve strong needs for control, predictability^[2]. It's the subs who know really what's up. Getting fucked in the ass is, in fact, a deeply spiritual act - allowing, and thus enjoying it requires an open root chakra. Or perhaps liberal use of poppers.

Ayahuasca, death and rebirth

I attended an ayahuasca retreat recently. And I tried to be as humble and respectful as I could, but apparently it was not sufficient. The meat of the first ceremony was about the medicine showing me its power, rendering me appropriately humble. Making me puke my guts up. Trying to resist is not a good idea - which I knew, but I've had an aversion to puking for years, exactly because of the vulnerability and lack of control it involves. And by the end of it, I was humbled. I was thinking about Ayahuasca as a harsh but loving pro domme.

In the final ceremony, I died. The medicine became more and more overwhelming. Anxiety started to build. Visions arrived. There hadn't been any in prior ceremonies. Just vague, ghost-y psychedelic visuals, of mandalas, geometry, some snakes and bugs. This was very different. Strong, pulsing Shipibo patterns, shifting, pressing in on me. I felt like my nervous system and brain couldn't handle what they were being shown, like they were being pushed past their limits and were going to burn out.

Then, the DMT nexus. It seemed like Aya was showing me where she lived. I felt as if I were in a zoo enclosure. There were a lot of entities there - again, represented as intense, morphing, Shipibo-ish patterns - and they were very interested in me. The pressure was almost unbearable now. My skull felt like it was cracking apart. When I managed to become aware of my breath, I realised it was shallow, irregular and tight. There was a feeling that my body could not possibly sustain this.

Shortly, I left the nexus and found myself back in the ceremony space. And utterly, crushingly drained. There was nothing I could do but think, weakly, "I guess this is it. This is how I die." And I was okay with that. I accepted it. The ultimate act of submission. I hope to never forget how that moment of total surrender felt. It was wonderful.

And then... rebirth. Boundless gratitude and compassion. Laughter and bliss.

Dying was rough, but I feel much better for it^[3].

Conclusion

It's highly pleasing to have drawn all of these threads of my life together in writing. This has been a journey of years, and will continue for years more. It's been incredibly beautiful and healing, and I would highly recommend it.

And, I understand Evangelion a bit better now. Totally worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym4Rpd72tq8 ↩︎
As well as many, many other things, of course. ↩︎
I spent perhaps an hour laughing about this joke. Finally got to tell it when one of the facilitators came to blow tobacco smoke over me. ↩︎

My reading of Tarkovsky's Stalker

2025-11-02T00:00:00Z

Info

Started writing this in mid-2025, and only now revisited it to finish up and publish. I should really have rewatched the movie first, but did not!

Had the pleasure of attending a screening of this recently. I'd only seen it once, and that was years ago. Don't think I had any idea what to make of it then, but upon seeing it again, mulling it over and doing some reading I arrived at a core interpretation which, while naturally subjective and partial, feels pleasing. There's a huge richness of potential symbolism and subtext in this film! Many valid interpretations are available, so it's a very fun one to ponder. Tarkovsky also, so far as I understand, refused to be drawn very far regarding what any of it meant. Allegedly^[1] he took the position of "I don't do symbolism; I do story". But he also said:

Stalker: How Andrei Tarkovsky's Film Discloses the Meaning of Life - MovieWeb

“Stalker is a tragedy, but tragedy is not hopeless. Tragedy cleanses man. I believe that only through spiritual crisis, healing begins.”

In summary, my reading is that the film is about spiritual crisis caused by belief in the primacy of concepts and ego. The dangers of perceiving totalising conceptual frameworks as having primacy (seeing them as a possible means of directly engaging with experience, losing sight of their inability to provide ultimate answers), and the dangers of strong identification with ego.

Each of the three main characters represent a mode of engagement with experience, and each have some sort of unhealthy egoic relationship with their mode.

The Stalker represents the truth-seeking of religious institutions and faith. For him, the Zone is a divine site and each incursion is a pilgrimage. But understanding and interacting with the divine via the abstraction of a conceptual framework (the rites and rituals of Zone traversal, the Zone as a holy site) cuts him off from direct experience of it, because he has confused the map for the territory - direct, preconceptual experience is the only way we can actually apprehend the divine. So, he has come to identify with the role of helping others to experience it, as this is the closest he can get. But because of this self-serving element his motivation cannot be truly compassionate. This is why he never enters the Room - on some level, he always knew that his motivation was impure. And why he becomes so distraught when the Writer calls him out on it, and with people's inability to get what he thinks they should out of Zone pilgrimages. He's experiencing a total crisis of meaning. Already his faith was in question, because he'd cut himself off from divine experience. Now he can't even consciously deny the impurity of his motives in helping others to access such experience. And yet we get "Calling themselves intellectuals... they don't believe in anything!" because he still cannot integrate these things. He can't accept that his reification of concepts and belief is exactly the problem.

The Writer represents the truth-seeking of the arts. He's on an impossible quest to truthfully represent direct experience in conceptual/linguistic terms. This provides him with the identity of a tortured artist, and the material and social success which come with it. He's the boldest of the three, the only one who's able to confront the inadequacy of his framework, even though his remaining attachment to ego continues to prevent him from accessing transcendence. He does at least realise that he should not enter the Room, because it'd only end as it did for Porcupine. So he'll go and continue the bit of the "tortured artist" identity he can still manage (the actual writing now being understood as pointless, because it cannot access truth), by drinking himself to death in his mansion. He's seen through the false pretence he was labouring under, but still can't make the leap into unknowing that moving past it calls for.

The Scientist represents the truth-seeking of rationalism, and is attached to a rationalist metaphysical mode of understanding due to a need for existential certainty. But, he finds that he's so attached to it that he can't bear to enter the Room even with the goal of destroying it. Whatever he might find in there is such a threat to his worldview, and thus his identity, that he can't bear to confront it. We learn that even amongst his colleagues he's particularly dogmatic when he makes a gloating phone call to boast about having found the bomb which they had reconsidered the use of. This also displays his egoic need to maintain the legitimacy of rationalism - it was never about humanitarianism, as he claimed, but about his ego. If he had an experience in the Room which could not be accounted for by his worldview, it would destroy his perceived legitimacy of that worldview, and thus himself - a philosophical/egoic death.

This is why only the "wretched" can have a non-negative outcome from visiting the Room. They've accepted that divinity, or truth, cannot be apprehended via concepts or ego, and so have given up the search. In this they have found what they were looking for, or at least stopped grasping for it and gotten comfortable with simply not knowing. Which wouldn't leave any desire to use the Room anyway - either way, like Monkey, these people have already achieved transcendence. The Room would perhaps do nothing at all for them. As the Writer points out, we don't know that anyone except Porcupine has ever entered it.

Monkey is one of the "wretched". She does not reify a conceptual framework or ego (she seems to be characterised as little as possible) in order to mediate experience. The divine is thus accessible to her without any need to go anywhere, or do anything. She's simply being, and thus is not getting in her own way.

So the Room could be a spiritual trap. It represents an ultimate reification of concepts and ego - follow these proscribed rites and rituals, and you can access divinity, whatever that means to you. There's no need for any kind of spiritual alchemy - come as you are. But anyone "wretched" enough to experience a non-negative outcome from visiting it would have no interest in doing so. Anyone who would wish to use it should not, because their relationship to experience and ego is guaranteed to be perverse, and the Room will punish that by giving them exactly what they want.

Or the Room just is, and it's the main characters who make it into a trap by interacting with it via ego and frameworks. In this way it could be similar to existence itself - the trap of identification has already been sprung^[2], and the hope and anguish inspired by the Room, one representative symbol among many, are merely symptomatic of this. Resolving ignorance via direct knowledge of what's happening removes any danger, and we discover that all this suffering was self-inflicted.

If the three could only stop striving, they would find the same peace Monkey has. This invites some delicious, maddening, and familiar to those on the path spiritual paradoxes. How can one end striving, without striving to? How can one deconstruct ego, from within ego? These are all soluble, but not in a way that makes conceptual sense, because experience and divinity are themselves not conceptual.

Meaning of Tarkovsky's Stalker - dreamsinshadow.com ↩︎
Refer to the first of the twelve links of dependent origination ↩︎

Me in mirrors

2025-11-02T00:00:00Z

I like to take photos of myself reflected in (mostly, but not exclusively) traffic mirrors for some reason.

Balkans, 2025

2025-11-02T00:00:00Z

A trip to Sarajevo, Zagreb and Belgrade. I was feeling pretty regressed, burnt out, and honestly worried that I'd struggle to solo travel again, so figured I should book another trip. Happily, things went well.

We are not getting AGI out of this stuff

2025-06-19T00:00:00Z

Introduction

AGI is not imminent. It's not arriving any time soon, if ever, and it's not arriving as an evolutionary progression of today's AI. I'm pretty confident in this position, so I'll hang my lil' hat and see how it goes.

There is no credibility to the idea of an evolutionary route from generative AI to artifical general intelligence (AGI). The mainstream has seemingly picked up on this a bit since the latest Apple drop, spicily titled The Illusion of Thinking, but I think it was already pretty clear to anyone who wasn't stoned on booster farts and ignorance.

We can certainly look to other approaches. None of which, so far as I'm aware, are delivering results at anything like an AGI-compatible level or getting anywhere near as much investor attention. There's this feeling that, because of what transformer architecture has delivered, we're on the precipice of AGI. It must be so close. But we are not - it remains just as much a prospect for the far future as it was before all this hype.

Before proceeding, a disclaimer. I don't have a particularly good technical understanding of any of this stuff. I have probably overreached significantly and unknowingly here. My argument is fundamentally vibe-based, and I'm sure that I could have found plenty of convinving-sounding evidence for an opposing argument. As ever, do your own due dilligence and critical thinking.

Also I should probably define AGI. Let's say uh, it can perform any cognitive task that a human can, with equal or greater ability. It can reason, think abstractly, deal with novel problems and a reasonable amount of complexity, acquire new knowledge and skills, stuff like that.

The Illusion of Thinking

An Apple research paper attempting to fundamentally evaluate the capabilities of Logical Reasoning Models (LRMs). Most evaluations of this are not fundamental. First because they focus on outputs rather than internal processes, and second because the benchmarks used are potentially contaminated (in my understanding, by problem answers being contained in training data and thus muddying determination of reasoned vs. regurgitated answers). So, the paper is trying to evaluate how much reasoning LRMs are actually capable of.

They did this by having LRMs try to solve puzzles. For every model tested, accuracy progressively declined as complexity increased, before collapsing entirely (to zero). LLMs (surprisingly) performed best in low-complexity tasks, LRMs in medium-complexity, and both collapsed in high-complexity tasks.

The Illusion of Thinking

We observe that reasoning models initially increase their thinking tokens proportionally with problem complexity. However, upon approaching a critical threshold—which closely corresponds to their accuracy collapse point—models counterintuitively begin to reduce their reasoning effort despite increasing problem difficulty. This phenomenon is most pronounced in o3-mini variants and less severe in the Claude-3.7-Sonnet (thinking) model. Notably, despite operating well below their generation length limits with ample inference budget available, these models fail to take advantage of additional inference compute during the thinking phase as problems become more complex. This behavior suggests a fundamental scaling limitation in the thinking capabilities of current reasoning models relative to problem complexity.

What this means, in my intepretation, is that LRMs are not a stepping stone towards AGI. This also lends credence to the argument Gary Marcus (I'm going to be mentioning this guy a lot) has been making since 1998 - that neural nets suck at novel (outside of training data) problems. For the runaway self-improvement path to AGI everyone seems to keep talking about, we are going to need AIs which are good, or at least fairly capable, in dealing with novel problems.

Gary Marcus

We are not going to be “extract the light cone” of the earth or “solve physics” [whatever those Altman claims even mean] with systems that can’t play Tower of Hanoi on a tower of 8 pegs.

Addressing criticisms of the paper

Most booster criticism seem to be along the lines of "Well, most humans couldn't solve the Tower of Hanoi problem at the level LRMs break down at either." Which is true, but is not the point.

Gary Marcus responds to this criticism with a quote from the paper's co-lead:

Quote

it's not just about "solving" the puzzle. In section 4.4 of the paper, we have an experiment where we give the solution algorithm to the model, and all it has to do is follow the steps. Yet, this is not helping their performance at all.
So, our argument is NOT "humans don't have any limits, but LRMs do, and that's why they aren't intelligent". But based on what we observe from their thoughts, their process is not logical and intelligent.

Really, you should probably just read Gary's blog. Unlike me he actually knows what he's talking about, and he responds to more criticisms of the paper here.

So, this is a straw man. The claim being attacked by the Apple paper is not "LRMs are better at reasoning than humans", but "LRMs have legitimate reasoning ability". Which they do not - they can simulate reasoning, which is a crucial distinction because simulated reasoning will always collapse in the face of nontrivial complexity and/or novelty - the point at which the reasoning required cannot be interpolated from that which is already encoded in latent space. Again, this is a limitation of neural nets that has been known of for decades, and persists in a major way.

Why can't AGI evolve from generative models?

Because generative models are incapable of understanding, which makes them incapable of reasoning.

There is stuff happening in LLMs that, following limited, functional definitions, can be described as "thinking" and "reasoning"^[1]. But those would be unconventional and very limited definitions.

If you were to ask someone whether they'd expect a "thinking, reasoning" artifical intelligence to be able to solve the Tower of Hanoi for n disks, they would probably say "yes". Especially if the intelligence in question were supplied with an algorithmic solution (which was done in The Illusion of Thinking). It should be as simple as understanding what the algorithm is, reasoning that it could be applied to the problem, and applying it. But LRMs cannot do this, because they cannot actually reason.

There's a whole lot more to what people tend to think of when prompted with words like "thinking" and "reasoning" than what's happening in language models. General intelligence is far more than probabilistic computation based on the statistical relationships between symbols.

LLM performance has hit diminishing returns

No need for me to comment.

Symbolic grounding problem

It's cool that deep patterns emerge when a text corpus as large as LLM training data is mined. For example, a shared symbolic topology which underlies separate languages^[1:1]. Very cool, albeit unsurprising (how else would this work?) Language models then use that stuff to generate sensible-seeming outputs.

But this symbolic topology doesn't mean anything to the model. It's just symbols, and their relationships to other symbols. Nothing is known about their real-world referents. This is the symbolic grounding problem.

Consider what the word "apple" means to you. It's symbolically understood as a fruit, which comes from an apple tree, is coloured red and/or green, can taste sweet, tart, looks a certain way, and so on. This is all referential to your embodied, phenomenological experience. That an apple tastes a certain way, or is a certain colour, means something to you.

A language model has access to far more symbolic knowledge about apples than you. It can identify an apple from a photograph, tell you all about apple varieties and cultivation, depictions of apples in noteworthy artworks, whatever. But the knowledge it has access to is exclusively symbolic - it is not grounded in any phenomenological experience of apples and apple-ness.

Language is not as powerful as we think it is. The map is not the territory, but we increasingly (since the Enlightenment, probably) forget that, especially in the field of AI research. It's like we're giving a hypothetical model which has legitimate reasoning ability ever-increasing volumes of geographical maps, and wondering "Why does it still not get what a mountain is? They're right there, on the maps!" But a load of squiggly lines on a map is not experience of a mountain, in the same way that no volume of symbolic representations of an apple is experience of an apple.

It thus seems very likely that AGI will require the symbolic grounding problem to be resolved, and we seem to be quite some way from achieving that.

Have yet another Gary Marcus quote:

Gary Marcus

There is no principled solution to hallucinations in systems that traffic only in the statistics of language without explicit representation of facts and explicit tools to reason over those facts.

Which I... think is what I'm saying here? A general intelligence must have grounding for its symbols and a means of actually understanding/reasoning about things.

LRMs are not what they claim to be

LRMS are just fancy prompting (and some tools/extensions, like scratchpads). They eke out a bit more performance, but cannot address the fundamental shortcomings of LLMs. Like the appearance of thought is not thought, the appearance of reasoning is not reasoning.

Emergent LLM abilities actually existing is dubious

The pro-scaling current has relied on emergent abilities to justify their position, and there is a huge amount of research purporting to show emergent ability. The problem with this is that measuring things well - especially new, complex things - is hard. Whether the dominant measures of LLM performance actually measure what they intend to is not clear.

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?

Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

If emergent abilities aren't real, that would seem to be a further indictment of the scaling paradigm.

Why would this surprise anyone?

Wizard of Oz type shit, technical ignorance

I figure this is mainly due to the Wizard of Oz type shit going on here. You show most people a LLM, and they figure that it walks like an intelligence, and quacks like an intelligence, so it probably is one. And there are all these smart-sounding people with ostensibly, or even actually impressive credentials saying it's an intelligence, or is very close to becoming one. They probably know what they're talking about?

But in reality, when you look behind the curtain there's not even a Chinese Room there. If there were, I'd be proved wrong because the "thinking" and "reasoning" language models do would be functionally equivalent to humanlike verions of them. There's just an illusion of intelligence. Which is useful, but should not be confused for what it appears to be.

Bubbles and hype, boosters and doomers

In short, I think people would do well to consider the enormous agency problems involved here. There are many ways in which people in the AI space are incentivised to be dishonest.

For example, we've got Bob McGrew, OpenAI's former research head (and Palantir alumni, so good confidence he's entirely amoral), spouting insane takes about LLMs scaling to hallucination-free infinity and AGI-enabling tech already existing... on Sequoia Capital's YouTube channel. Even in 2023, Sequoia had eleven billion USD invested in OpenAI. Their AUM in late 2024 was $56.3bn USD, so unless things have shifted significantly, OpenAI investment is a full ~20% of their AUM. I'd imagine, if anything, it has grown. Sequoia also backed FTX (yes, the Sam Bankman-Fried FTX) with $225m, and published a blog hyping SBF up. Gee, I wonder if there might be an incentive for some bias here? And a precedent for it? It's almost like venture capitalists can somehow benefit from creating and pumping speculative bubbles and hype.

So yeah, we're in an enormous speculative/hype bubble. This doesn't incentivise sober analysis. Airing a moderate view like "I think it'll be a big deal, but we're really not on the path to building God here" doesn't tend to attract media coverage, investment, or returns on investment.

Whereas takes like "We are going to achieve superhuman AI soon, and it's going to be bigger than the industrial revolution and very scary" are much more enaging. It doesn't matter if your "predictions" are really speculative fiction - nobody who attention would be paid to is likely to call you out on it, because the bubble is getting everyone paid and many don't know better anyway. The amount of hand-wringing I've seen over AI 2027 is straight up embarrassing, Roko's Basilisk levels of silliness. It has been misunderstood and misrepresented to an absolutely incredible degree. I'll link to yet another Gary Marcus post wherein he dissects the whole thing and reflects on its potential impacts - stoking the AI arms race by speculating on AI's intersection with the Chinese threat to Western hegemony, and making Sam Altman stacks of money. Which brings us back to - ah, lovely - agency problems.

Gary Marcus

First, materials like these are practically marketing materials for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, who want you to believe that AGI is imminent, so that they can raise astoundingly large amounts of money. Their stories about this are, in my view, greatly flawed, but having outside groups with science fiction chops writing stuff like this distracts away from those flaws, and gives more power to the very companies trying hardest to race towards AGI.

Read with the understanding of it actually being speculative fiction^[2], AI-2027 is quite fun, interesting and potentially valuable as a thought experiment for policymakers. I certainly agree that they should be doing more in anticipating AI risks. What we have today is already incredibly risky. But so far as I can tell, the authors are effective altruism/LessWrong^[3] rationalist types - i.e. so smart they've looped round and become total idiots. If you're to read it as a legitimate prediction, you may as well huff some glue and watch a Terminator movie.

Consider what happened to past tech hypes. The Dot-com bubble has been the largest thus far, but there have been many underwhelming allegedly big deals more recently. Big data, crypto, blockchain, Web3, augmented reality, virtual reality, IoT, wearables, 3D TV, 3D printing. All of these things were purportedly going to be revolutionary. Most of them are still around, but their impact has been small. My point is not that this is always the case (phone, for example, has proven to be a pretty big deal), but that tech has a very established track record of overpromising/overhyping and underdelivering, and this should factor into how we critically engage with the AI media climate.

What do directly involved parties get out of hype/bubbles?

Part of it is staggering amounts of money. OpenAI is now valued at $300bn USD. But keeping a hype bubble going requires escalation. Each funding round requires more grandiose claims about how close we are to AGI, how much better the next model will be, who's going to be put out of work by it, and so on. The DeepSeek fallout seems telling here. The challenge to the scaling paradigm couldn't be outright ignored, but was interpreted as "No, it's still good - we just need to pivot to scaling smarter." Which would be a rather convenient narrative for rejustifying the bubble, buying time to try and deliver on all these outlandish promises.

The inventive structure here is very broken. Everyone needs to buy into, and stick to, a story. VCs to justify their investments, executives to justify their company's valuation, researchers to justify bubble-sustaining research directions, and employees in general to preserve the value of their equity. There's huge social and financial incentive towards not dissenting, and for dissent to be silenced - because if people stop believing the story, the bubble bursts.

This may explain why Sam Altman's ousting (which the actual reasons for were seemingly continually lying, a huge conflict of interest in his personally owning OpenAI's VC fund, and his concealing that ownership) incited an overwhelming employee revolt. The ousting occurred just before a planned $1bn USD employee stock sale - that is, just before employees got some big cheques. "The share sale was now in the balance, with the weekend’s drama representing a material change in circumstances, but could yet go ahead should Altman return, said one person with knowledge of the situation." Perhaps this guy who's widely reported to be a real prick is actually just that great of a boss and leader, but great enough for 95% of employees to threaten to walk if he wasn't reinstated? Hm.

There's also the fact that AI companies are incentivised to hype AI risks not only to seek growth, investment and market share, but in order to achieve regulatory capture. These "Please, our product is so dangerous, regulate us!" appeals aim to both allow them an inappropriate level of influence over the nature of regulation, and get regulation in place soon, erecting high entry barriers in the AI market. Which is dominated by huge players, so - another agency problem - of course they have an interest in keeping new, potentially disruptive entrants out. DeepSeek was embarrassing. Please, no more of that. We do need these incredible amounts of money and compute scale, actually!

And, of course, hype/doom can get people using products. Particularly when it involves threats that they're going to be out of a job very shortly, that they can save a lot of money on expensive developer salaries, or that their laggard company is going to be hopelessly outcompeted by early AI adopters.

This has been a lot of agency problem stuff. Hopefully you can see how strongly incentivised industry insiders are towards being less than honest.

Tech hubris

Big tech is a very hubristic industry. I don't think this has ever been more evident. I'm sure there are industry boosters who don't really believe what they're saying, but are saying it due to the aforementioned agency problems (I'll discount that possibility for this section). But there are also true believers, and they literally think that building God is imminently possible. Perhaps they've drawn reasonable conclusions from information I don't have, but I think it's far more likely that it's hubris and groupthink.

Plenty of Sam Altman examples here. This is a good one. In 2023, he said that "It’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models." In 2025, DeepSeek dropped. Here he is in June 2025 saying they've "cracked reasoning". And here, he responds in a very Elon-coded way to Gary Marcus mentioning how much he keeps doubling down.

In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton said it was "completely obvious" that radiologists would be replaced by AI.

SoftBank's legendarily incisive (sarcastic, derogatory) Masayoshi Son has revised his estimates on AGI realisation from "in the next ten years" (2023), to two to three years (late 2024), to "much earlier" than he previously thought (early 2025).

These are clearly intelligent people, but intelligence is not wisdom.

People are prone to being idiots

There seems to be something about AI which particularly encourages people to reach strongly-held beliefs based on little to no knowledge or understanding. Perhaps it's just the incredible volume and strength of bubble hype. I would not claim to have a good understanding of this stuff, but I'm confident that it's significantly better than average... and I'm fairly careful when forming opinions (or not) about things I'm ignorant of, at risk of being an idiot. Generally, I like to think of myself as someone who's quite aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect (yes, I know - but it doesn't feel like I need a really strong technical understanding of this stuff to write this). And I would hazard that most people are not.

It seems like most of these casual (no financial incentive) boosters do not work in tech, and that feels deeply telling. They simply do not have good opinions on this stuff.

Online boosters

Feels like I shouldn't be commenting on this as it's mostly because I wanna dunk, but a lot of the boosters someone is likely to encounter are online so it's probably warranted.

Going back to The Illusion of Thinking, a response appeared quite quickly and was widely shared and perceived as a legitimate rebuttal. Unfortunately it turned out that this response was literally a joke. This illustrates just how hyped people are, and how cult-y it has gotten.

The vibe reminds me of Bitcoin/crypto and Gamestop (stock) online spaces. A lot of people are very excited about the technological singularity, and probably a lot are excited about robot waifus. They've been dreaming about AGI and its implications for humanity for years, are very emotionally invested, and now something that's ostensibly a path to that has appeared - so of course their reasoning about it isn't, uh, very reasonable. So dissenting opinions tend to be answered by dogpiling instead of legitimate engagement. Being part of something world-changing is an exciting prospect, and it's presumably quite threatening when people call the reality of it into doubt.

I also have the impression that there's been quite a lot of goalpost-moving. Weren't we hearing that hallucinations would be quickly solved a few years ago? And that models would be able to perform better than people by now?

There really is a lot going on in humanlike cognition

We have many cognitive faculties besides thinking and reasoning. But people tend to use words like "thinking" and "reasoning" as shorthand which includes a whole mess of other, even more nebulously defined and understood, things. Even in neuroscience this stuff isn't really robustly defined, but it's particularly loose in the AI space.

A big part of the gap might fall under the heading "world modelling". We can create models of the world, and use them to make predictions. We have the ability to model ourselves (this is what the ego is), and place these self-models into our world models as a sort of subjective avatar, projected into a model of experience. The world models we create blend phenomenological experience with symbols.

We also do a lot of causal reasoning with these models. This does involve seeing patterns, which language models are very good at. But it also involves modelling interventions and counterfactuals, which they are very bad at.

Going back to the apple thing, if I ask you what will happen if I throw an apple at your head, you can reason about it using the parts of your world model relating to apples and human heads, and you can communicate that to me in symbols. You can do this even if you've never read anything about apple/human head interfacing, or experienced an apple being thrown at you, because apples and human heads are both part of your world model - you understand things about apples and human heads. Not merely in relation to other symbols, but in relation to your experience of apples and human heads.

So to answer, you'd probably use integrated perceptive, memory, emotional and physical understanding, along with your agentic self-awareness/self-modelling, to imagine the event. And what you'd be doing here by "imagining" is running a wildly sophisticated simulation. This is rich, sensoriomtor imagining - you might feel your anxiety, yourself tensing up in preparation to try and dodge, the sound of the apple whistling through the air, the slightly wet impact of it hitting your head, and the stinging it might cause. Any counterfactual that arises can be entertained - what if you dodge, or the apple is rotten, or unripe, or it's hollow plastic and I'm just pranking you, or you know I can't throw for shit, so I probably won't hit you. Because your symbols are grounded, you can then translate all this - which was both symbolic and experiential - into symbols (language), and communicate it to me.

While language models can simulate this sort of reasoning to a degree, they fundamentally cannot actually, really do it. You might still have the exchange:

User: If someone were to throw an apple at my head, how would it feel?
Language model: It'd hurt, but apples don't tend to be very hard, so you'd probably be okay.

But this would be a result of pattern recognition and interpolation, not modelling or reasoning. The model is just drawing probabilities from a deeply mined symbolic corpus in liminal space. What it would do is much less complex and rich than what you would, and as a result it is not anywhere near as useful.

What I'm trying to get at is that "meaning" is not something LLMs can apprehend. Training data and outputs are both meaningful when interpreted by us, and it's easy to assume that the chain of meaningfulness was not broken in the middle, in latent space. But this is a fundamental misapprehension - latent space representations are just mathematical objects.

I'd entertain an argument that the meaning in training data is encoded into latent space, and so can be reproduced from there even if the model doesn't "get it", but that is regurgitation and interpolation - not reasoning. Even if we accept that meaning is encoded and reproduced, it cannot be usefully transformed because that requires actual understanding - explicit representation of facts, the context of some kind of world model, and all that. So, claiming that LLMs deal with meaning in a legitimate way is like claiming that the words in a book have meaning, to the book.

I think this is why we see only limited, brittle (simulated) reasoning in LLMs, and why it collapses quickly when LLMs are asked to generalise much beyond the reasoning represented in their training data.

To summarise, we exist primarily in the world of direct experience. Our world of symbols is like a conceptual augmented reality overlay and communication protocol - a veneer which sits on top of experience, to some degree aids our modelling of it, and allows us to communicate about it. While we often consciously "forget" that it was experience which came first, our world models and symbols are nevertheless grounded.

But LLMs don't have access to anything other than the world of symbols. They can't world model, because they're missing the foundation of experience and the cognitive faculties required to do it. It's not that phenomenology or humanlike reasoning are necessarily required for AGI, but something like them is. AGI cannot happen without the ability to world model, and to do something like reasoning in a robust, strongly generalisable manner.

Alternative approaches

There is a lot of work going on in embodied robotics and world modelling, but it's very early days. Research has been simmering for years, but only with the AI bubble has it started to draw the attention of investors. Who are highly fixated on short-term returns, so... is their attention going to be held when the bubble bursts? Probably not, and only deep-pocketed tech companies will be left doing such research with an eye towards AGI.

Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, one of the more sober voices this directly involved in AI, recognises the need for world modelling. Perhaps this sobriety can be attributed to Meta having one of the sicklier dogs in this race - so, he may have the levity to say more or less what he actually thinks.

Yann LeCun, quoted by TechCrunch

“We need machines that understand the world; [machines] that can remember things, that have intuition, have common sense — things that can reason and plan to the same level as humans,” LeCun said. “Despite what you might have heard from some of the most enthusiastic people, current AI systems are not capable of any of this.”

But, for whatever his estimates are worth, he puts AGI-compatible world modelling at at least a decade away. I'm not aware of anyone offering a more optimistic estimate, and suspect his is overly optimistic anyway. But this stuff working well is crucial for AGI.

As an example of the current state of the art, Meta just dropped V-JEPA 2 - and it's impressive, but also very rudimentary. The only realistic applications in the nearish future are things like industrial robotics.

So, what will actually happen?

This isn't to say that I don't think AI will be deeply transformative. Speculating on how is happily out of scope. Though I do expect that large parts of the internet will become unusably sloppy, accurate and trustworthy information will become increasingly hard to find and identify^[4], and that this will have a huge contribution to the death of consensus reality^[5].

But for AGI, it's full self-driving all over again. Consistent messaging of "It's getting closer, we're almost there!", and not much else. Maybe it will arrive, one day, but not any time soon. I expect the bubble to have burst in spectacular fashion long before then.

Tracing the thoughts of a large language model - Anthropic ↩︎ ↩︎
But you may as well go all the way and read Charles Stross's Accelerando or something - if you're going to speculate, it seems more fun to go all the way to technological singularity and posthumanity. ↩︎
Where Roko's Basilisk came from, caused a huge flap, and was labelled an information hazard and banned from discussion for years ↩︎
Kinda like in Peter Watts' Malestrom series, where the internet has become ungovernable due to rogue AIs. Humans tend to use software filters or AI agents to access it. ↩︎
Stop! Stop! He's already dead! ↩︎

Evolution as the Great Filter

2025-06-11T00:00:00Z

I've long admired/feared those think-y, cool personal pages that outline psychosis-inducing-feeling (or perhaps psychosis-induced?) pet theories, and now I have one of my own to put out there. Which is that the process of evolution is bugged. Any sufficiently conscious and intelligent life which evolves will inevitably ruin its planet.

There's a thought experiment called the "paperclip maximiser"^[1] in the field of artifical general intelligence ethics.

Quote

Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
Nick Bostrom

I propose that the process of evolution is kind of like a paperclip maximiser in that both are blind optimisers. One cares about nothing but producing as many paperclips as possible. The other cares about nothing but optimising for local, short-to-medium-term reproductive success. Both of these are myopic optimisations. The paperclip maximiser because... it's going to turn all matter into paperclips (that is too many paperclips). Evolution, because traits which are highly locally adaptive in the short-to-medium term can be planetarily maladaptive in the long-term - and when this happens, it produces doomed offspring.

The capability for conceptual/abstract thought, and the capability to self-model^[2], are strongly adaptive traits. The former enables an intelligence to mentally model its experience - so it can, say, use tools, develop agriculture. But it would have no motive to do things like that without self-concept. The ability to conceptualise the self as a discerete agent, and thus to insert this conceptual agent into those mental models, is what enables autonomous strategic agency.

In the evolutionary meta, this seems overpowered. It will pretty reliably allow the intelligence to dominate over intelligences which are driven by instinct and/or do not have self-concept.

The problem is that, while these traits are adaptive at local scale, they are deeply maladaptive at planetary scale. They enable intelligences to exceed ecological constraints faster than they can model and internalise them, and this temporal scale mismatch leads to a malapdative evolutionary feedback lag. It becomes possible for the intelligence to fuck around, but to not find out until it's done some really dumb shit, because it can do dumb shit faster than that can be evolutionarily selected against. It can, for a time, avoid the need to be ecologically adapted in order to succeed - in fact, it can achieve supernormal short-term success by becoming ecologically maladapted. This is the basis of planetary-scale overshoot.

This species will easily outcompete others and achieve planetary scale. Any remaining animist/ecocentric cultures or tendencies within it will also be "outcompeted" (absorbed, overwhelmed) by species-centric, extractive ones. Restraint and reciprocity are wonderful, sustainable and ecocentric cultural traits, but cultures which embody them are inherently poor at scaling and reproducing.

After that, you have a planet dominated by a species which sees itself as separate from the rest of existence and whose culture is thus as extractive as its technology level permits. At some point an industrial revolution will kick off, rapidly raise that technology level, and catapult them into planetary overshoot.

The consequences of that don't necessarily mean extinction. But, a planetary civilisation having extracted all the easily-reachable resources from its planet, rendered it far less of a hospitable habitat and then, rudely, collapsed is going to make it - at best - enormously harder for any future civilisations to achieve an equivalent technological level^[3].

This is what is happening to humans. Without us having achieved even Kardashaev one. Perhaps it's what happened to a lot of other species too.

Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence, Nick Bostrom ↩︎
Have some sort of ego - conceptualise oneself as an agent which exists separately from experience. Which, as an aside, is not how things actually are (see: nonduality). ↩︎
Riddley Walker is a cool book. ↩︎

Ow, my balls - procreation and opting out

2024-12-22T00:00:00Z

(Kurt Vonnegut)

I'd been intending to get a vasectomy for perhaps ten years, and known I didn't want to procreate for a lot longer. And a month ago I finally got it done.

Back when I was eighteen (or younger) and thinking about this, I figured that I might change my mind. But it's been sixteen years and that has not happened. At this point, I'd be somewhat untrusting of myself if my opinion did change.

Why not?

My motivation was simple - I have no positive desire to have children. There are all sorts of practical and ethical reasons which follow, but that one is primary and decisive.

I assume most people's motivation to procreate, or not, isn't really the result of much sincere thought. For the most part our desires just pop into our heads, and then our minds will serve up, or compel us to seek out, some appropriate justification of them. I can't otherwise explain how people who are very much aware of the state of the world generate enough cognitive dissonance to go through with childbearing. Though I'd do well to remember that I may well have gone through an inverted experience of that same process, and that I'm autistic, when considering this.

But beyond that...

Is it ethical to procreate, at all?

Antinatalism feels like a cringe philosophy, in the same way that nihilism does. But it does seem harder to refute.

Quote

In spite of its new eyes, mankind still had its roots in base matter; its soul was woven into matter and subject to its blind laws. But at the same time man could scrutinize matter as though it were a stranger; he could compare himself with other phenomena, uncover and categorize his own vital processes. He came to nature as an unbidden guest; now in vain he extends his arms and prays to be united with that which created him.

Nature no longer answers, it made a miracle with man but has refused to acknowledge him since. Man has lost his citizenship in the universe, he has eaten from the tree of knowledge and has been banished from paradise. He is powerful in his world, but he curses his power because he has bought it with his soul’s har mony, his innocence, his comfort in life’s embrace.
The Last Messiah, Peter Wessel Zapffe

While it's interesting stuff, I don't agree with Zapffe. I'm tempted to contend that the spectrum of human experience is the point. In the struggle and pain lies the point of it ^[1]. My refutation is principally spiritual - in particular, the Dharma recognises (and addresses) this condition with remarkable incisiveness.

And there's certainly an emotional response - this feels like an unnecessarily miserable manner in which to respond to the void. For me it's a parallel of nihilism (life is meaningless 🥺) vs. absurdism (life is meaningless 😎).

Happily I don't actually need to arrive at a position on this. It can remain an intellectual curiousity for me.

Is it ethical to procreate now?

The state of the climate is very fucked. Realistically, we've already blasted through the 1.5c Paris Agreement threshold^[2]. Things are truly going wild lately, outside of the realm of predictability by politically-acceptable models^[3], perhaps due to their poor accounting for feedback loops. While we have stopped tracking RCP 8.5, the IPCC's "worst case" scenario, in terms of emissions and atmospheric CO₂, we still appear to be surpassing its predicted atmospheric CO₂e (CO₂ equivalent) concentrations.

This highlights how limited our climate models are. Emissions mean little in and of themselves - it's atmospheric CO₂e that counts^[4]. And, while emissions have plateaued, atmospheric CO₂ (alone) continues to break records^[5], standing at 424 PPM at time of writing. Accounting in terms of CO₂e brings us to a 2023 figure of 534 PPM^[6].

And, climate change is only part of the problem. There's also massive wildlife loss, soil degradation, forever chemicals... I'm thinking of writing a separate post about this stuff, but there's plenty of doomerposting around and it suffices here to say that it seems very reasonable to expect increasing global instability and drastic declines in (even) Western standards of living within a few decades. I expect to live to see that. For young people, let alone children, it seems to be guaranteed.

Parenting in late stage capitalism

One aspect of the intensifying contradictions of capitalism is that, in its rapacity for value extraction, it is depressing birth rates. This is the principal reason that Western countries need immigration - to keep the pyramid scheme going. Our economies are predicated on infinite growth, with an ever-increasing tax base providing growth and funding the pensions of previous generations.

One of the expressions of this tendency is the normalisation of households with two working parents. This would have been quite abnormal only a few decades ago. I was lucky enough to have been raised by a stay-at-home parent, and this biases me - because, I wonder what the point of having a child is if you're economically coerced to bundle them off to daycare as soon as possible so that you can return to work. It feels like a poisoning of the experience of parenting, and of being parented.

There's a tendency to perceive women entering the workplace as a victory for gender equality. But, quite transparently, it was really a smokescreen for intensifying the extraction of value. A loss to the working class, necessited by structural economic changes (stagnating real wages, rising housing costs, the decline of union power). If it weren't, we'd have seen the normalisation of stay-at-home fathering rather than any significant change in employment levels. Capital has been using identity politics as a means of propagandising its intensifying contradictions for decades - that is, marketing exploitation as liberation.

"Selfish" practical reasons

First, I simply don't think I have the capacity for parenting. Many autistic people would and do make great parents, but I don't think that applies to me. Perhaps I could do it to a decent standard (I would try very hard to), but that seems unlikely - it'd ruin me, and I'd resent it.

Second, I want to retain my autonomy. Relating to the above, it's hard enough for me to function acceptably even with my normal (low) level of obligations.

Third, money. This also relates to retaining autonomy, because I can use the money I'd otherwise spend on childrearing to "buy" myself the ability to work less. Effectively, I am buying time.

Vasectomy experience and feelings

The experience was actually great. As relaxed as it reasonably could have been. Everyone who dealt with me was friendly, knowledgable, and supportive. This included asking about any accommodations that might be helpful - which was just going to be wearing earplugs/headphones, but I decided against that as the sounds were fine and there was someone there to distract me with conversation. Which was, surprisingly to me, incredibly effective.

The operation was obviously not pleasant, but also surprisingly mildly unpleasant. Some slight wincing which warranted a bit of additional anaesthesia. But the surgeon certainly knew what he was doing, as he presumably bangs these out all day, every day (he had 15 scheduled that day alone).

I'd been having last minute nerves about the finality of it the preceding day, but think that was quite natural, and partially anxiety over actually undergoing the operation "bleeding over". Afterwards I felt great, quite buoyant.

It's so affirming to have finally done it. Very happy with my perfectly ruined balls.

Of course, that's easy for me (being achingly middle class, having had a pretty nice life, and all) to say. ↩︎
I mean, not technically. It's usually evaluated using a two-decade average for the IPCC's purposes. However, it's highly unlikely trends will reverse or even be materially lessened. ↩︎
Even NASA Can't Explain The Alarming Surge in Global Heat We're Seeing, ScienceAlert ↩︎
Much analysis of real world figures vs. RCPs sticks to CO₂ alone, but this seems partial and misleading. ↩︎
Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Climate.gov ↩︎
The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), Global Monitoring Laboratory (see Figure 4, Table 2) ↩︎

Mysticism and finding oneself in the sauce (of egoism)

2024-10-09T00:00:00Z

From @dharfields_gharma

Summary

I recently read some very useful "pointing instructions" by Jamie of the Casually Explained YouTube channel, and... something happened. I don't think it was something permanent, but it sure was a novel altered state, and lasted for a couple of days. As best I can word it, it felt like stepping outside my ego, thereby realising that I was "inside" it, and that it's not who (or what) I actually am. This post will be an attempt to explore my understanding of that experience and concepts related to it. What Jamie wrote is great, and a lot of this post is repetitive of it, so do read his first.

Unfortunately we're probably going to benefit from a glossary

Belief: Intellectual/rational knowing. I believe that the Earth is roughly spherical. I believe that two plus two is four.
Direct experience: Immediate perception, without being parsed through concepts. Things simply are.
Knowing: Knowledge of direct experience, beyond any possibility of doubt. I know that I exist. I know that there is "something it feels like to be me".

The problem

We don't know the limits of conceptualisation.

It's is an incredibly useful frame for understanding the world and our interactions with it (and is also the only one we have available), but has a huge limitation - a concept can never be what it represents. The concept of "cup" is not a cup. This is intellectually obvious, and thus easy to believe, but we do not know it.

This doesn't cause any apparent problems when we're using conceptualisation to deal with things external^[1] to ourselves, because the limitation isn't apparent - we don't experience that the concept of "cup" does not capture what a cup is, because we are not cups - we don't know the experience of "being a cup" that would make the limitation obvious.

The problem occurs when we start trying to conceptualise ourselves - that is, construct egos, or "what we believe about ourselves". This is the only instance in which we do have access to the experience of being the thing which we are trying to conceptualise. So, it doesn't work. As much as I think about myself, whatever I am cannot be fully captured in conceptual thinking. Rather than realising this enterprise is misguided, we tend to assume that it'll work if we just keep butting our heads against the problem. But it won't ever work. Like trying to hammer a nail with a rubber dildo, we're using the wrong tool for the job, so we're not getting anywhere. "That's weird", we think, "why isn't it working? It worked fine when I was fucking myself with it."

That's not to say that thinking about ourselves isn't useful or necessary. A lot of people get the idea that the ego is bad or undesirable and should be eliminated, but this is not the case at all. If you've experienced full ego death, you can understand how being in that state constantly would render a normal life impossible. Having mental models of ourselves enables us to interact with the conceptual world, despite that not being the world we fundamentally exist in. You might think of them as our "conceptual avatars". In the same way we need an avatar to interact with the world of a video game, whatever it is that we are needs a conceptual avatar to interact with the world of concepts. Despite these avatars not actually being what we are, it's useful to know that "I like ramen" if someone invites us out for a bowl. Or, at a more fundamental level of ego, that we are bounded entities - subjects - within the conceptual world of objects. So, we understand that we become hungry sometimes, and eating alleviates hunger.

But, when we don't understand that our conceptualisations of ourselves are not what we are, things get out of hand. What does it say about me that I like ramen? Am I a sophisticated citizen of the world, or a weeb loser? Should I stop watching mecha anime - is it cringe that I do that? I really like Gunpla too, so I guess I am a weeb. That's bad, women don't like weebs. Maybe if I changed that, I could meet someone? Is that the thing that's fucking me up? Man, I'm such a loser. But this is what I am. I guess it's over for me.

It never, ever ends. We can only achieve respite via distractions. And when distraction ceases, there we are again, obessively working over this lump of clay, not understanding why it stubbornly refuses to be sculpted into a brass. But you can't alchemise between direct experience and concepts.

So, the problem is that we don't know that our concepts of ourselves are not ourselves and never can be. Following the video game avatar analogy, it's like we forget the avatar is not actually us, and thus forget we can relate to experience other than through our avatar's eyes, and on its terms. Then keep wondering why we can't get a date despite being a level 80 paladin with a sick mount.

The result of this is, in short, egoism - being puppeteered by our egos, letting the tail wag the dog. We identify with our egos, believing they are literally us.

If you think of yourself as a considerate person, and someone tells you "Actually, you were really inconsiderate of me last week", it has no inherent meaning. Nothing about your personality or past behaviour has changed. But the natural reaction is to become defensive - because this accusation is a direct challenge to what you believe is your self. The ego is a conceptual entity, and thus is vulnerable to conceptual attacks. It wants to protect itself. You might start to try and "disprove" this person, by thinking of instances when you did behave in a considerate way, or by asking friends "Do you think I'm a considerate person?" You might weigh up evidence and decide that the person is simply wrong. Or you might accept the criticism and amend your self-image. Whichever way it goes, it's not a pleasant experience. Challenges to our egos cause suffering because they feel like existential attacks. If I'm not what I thought I was, then... who, or what, am I?

The solution

In short, is to remove the misconception by achieving knowing that our egos are not what we are. This ends the process of compulsive/neurotic self-image construction, because we recognise the shortcoming of conceptualisation and thus realise that it cannot capture what we are.

When you know that you are not your ego, people can say what they like. You still reflect on their words, and you still experience the thoughts and egoic responses they give rise to, but you know that there's no threat to your "you-ness", because you are not your ego. The responses are just thoughts, just feelings - as real as ever, but now understood correctly. You know that many of your reactions and emotions are ego-driven, all are (like everything) impermenant, and none of them are you. This allows one to live more skilfully - to be less emotionally reactive, more compassionate. We can even feel compassion for our egos and their insecurities. "Buddy, you are fucked up. I'm sorry you got hurt like that."

The self is exposed - again, for real, not in the wooly arena of belief, but through knowing - as being inconstant. We realise that none of the things we thought defined us ever actually did.

Bridging the gap between "here" and "there"

"Pointing instructions" relate to mystic practice. Mysticism seeks to gain understanding and experience of the true nature of what it's like to be whatever we are^[2]. Many religions, or traditions within them, have a shared understanding that our egos are not what we are. Most prominently Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. But also mystic traditions of Christianity (Eastern Orthodox), Judaism (Kabbalah) and Islam (Sufism), amongst others. They all call this different things, and have different theological interpretations of and elaborations from it, but I believe they're all talking about the same psychological phenomenon.

Realisation is a difficult project^[3] because it depends on direct experience of the true nature of our reality. As has been discussed, we tend towards using conceptualisation to frame our experiences. But you cannot get "there", into understanding of direct experience, from "here", the world of concepts. And yet, the only way we can communicate is via concepts. You can try to explain these things in language, which is what "pointing instructions" do, but naturally we run into the limitations of concepts.

Intellectual understanding of all this stuff about ego and reality is pretty straightforward. Intellectually recognising and accepting all the relevant concepts, as beliefs, is trivial. The problem is that intellectual understanding operates on too high a level, separated from direct experience. We often believe things without knowing that they are true. For example, I believe some people have landed on the Moon and walked around there. I don't know that's the case because, not having accompanied them, how could I? All I've seen are videos. Based on whatever heuristic subliminal processes, it seems legit. But if you were to ask me if I knew, beyond doubt, that it happened, and if I were to answer honestly, I'd have to admit that no, I don't. The only things I actually know are things I have directly experienced. Which, if you're honest with yourself, you'll find really does not amount to much.

Pointing instructions attempt to nudge seekers in the right direction. To challenge their experience, and the way they engage with the world. Zen koans are a good example. Commonly in the West they're conceived of as unanswerable questions, but that's not the case - they do have answers, and Zen students are expected to arrive at and deliver them. They will unavoidably be answers expressed in conceptual terms, but teachers should be able to figure out whether an answer means the student has "got it" or not.

The point is that these answers aren't meant to be reachable via rational, conceptual thought. The koan aims to show students the limitations of this frame in engaging with reality, and push them outside of it, into direct experience. The idea being that, if you sit in meditation with a koan, an answer - an insight - eventually arrives. To use a famous example:

Two hands clap, and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Two hands represent dualisitic experience, of subject and object - the default mode with which we engage the world. One hand represents nondual experience. The "sound" of one hand is simply experience (or consciousness, awareness, mind, whatever you want to call it - the pure, empty phenomenon that underlies your sense of "what it's like to be you").

It's not that intellectual understanding isn't helpful. But direct experience is required if we wish to truly know. However much we might wish to know, the gulf between conceptual understanding and true knowledge cannot be bridged by thought. You can't get there from here. But, intellectual knowledge does help us to identify what we're looking for when we find it. The quest for realisation is usually most productive following a two-fronted approach - contemplation, and seeking direct experience. An analogy might be visiting a grocers' shop to buy some apples, never having seen an apple before. You've been told that apples are roughly spherical, red and/or green, about 10-15cm in diameter, and usually have a little stalk on top. That's the intellectual knowledge. So you turn up and look around until you find something which fits that description. You pick it up and feel its weight, see its colour and sheen, and take a bite. That's the direct experience. You then know what an apple is (so far as we can know apples) - you have had a direct experience of the thing which your intellectual understanding of "apple" points to.

So, what does realisation of this truth mean? Why bother? The best metaphor I can come up with is that it's like realising we were "in" the ego, by stepping outside of it, looking around and saying "Well damn, I was really in that bitch?". The ego is still present, but now we can see it and its operations clearly. So we come to recognise it for what it is, and to recognise that it's not what we are. This means that we can relate to our egos in a more skilful manner, rather than being puppeteered by them.

We all believe, conceptually, that egos are something we "have", instead of something we are. But we're so lost in them that we don't know it to be the case.

How the hell do I do this?

Some people just spontaneously have this realisation, without deliberately seeking it out. Most of us are not amongst that lucky few.

First, we need an idea of what we're looking for, and how to go about finding it. Then, we start to search, typically (or at least, in my case) via the practices of meditation and mindfulness. We train our minds to be incisive and discerning. Time and time again we observe mental appearances arriving and passing away, until we start to gain a direct experiental understanding of their nature. No longer parsed through concepts. Eventually, we start to appreciate that something weird is going on here. What we thought we knew about reality starts to feel increasingly insubstantial. Instead, there's something else underlying it. Gradually, at first just glimpsing it, we start to become acquainted with the direct experience which underlies our reality.

My experience, relation to Buddhism

I've been practicing insight meditation, primarily aligned with Buddhism, for about four years now. It's a fascinating and rewarding endeavour for... anyone, I think, but particularly people who find themselves interested in (and/or dogged by) big questions. Why are we here? How did we arrive here? What's this all about?

All of this ties in neatly with Buddhism's three marks of existence. Again, these are universal truths, and I imagine other religions (of which I'm even more ignorant) recognise them. They're all simple to comprehend on an intellectual level, to the point that they probably come across as just being common sense.

Dukkha (suffering, dissatisfaction)
- Dissatisfaction is inherent in life. Despite our unending attempts to escape it, it is stubbornly inescapable.
- So, plainly, it's ridiculous to try because our inevitable failures just create even more suffering. Yet, from egoic experience, we cannot submit either, because it's impossible to know this truth. We're cursed to keep obeying our ego's admonitions to attempt the impossible. This time it'll be different. I finally found the right self-help book. I found a new therapist^[4]. I'm moving to the country. I'm going travelling. I'm quitting drugs. I'm reading philosophy. I'm going to get fit. This is going to be the thing that finally does it. But, of course, it never is - dissatisfaction will return.
  - This isn't to say these things aren't worth doing, or can't mitigate suffering. But they are all about constructing or salving the ego, and so do not address the root of the problem.
Anattā (no-self or non-self)
- The lack of a fixed, unchanging self
- The Buddha refused to be drawn on whether a "self" exists at all. First because it would have meant wading into a contemperaneous theological debate (between Eternalism and Annihilationism), and second because it doesn't matter - it's simply not relevant.
- Ego construction is our attempt to put a line in the sand and stake out "No, this is me! I exist, and I know what I am!" But this is plainly not going to work. You as an adult are nothing like you were as a child. You're not the same as you were yesterday, or even one second ago. So, in this psychological Ship of Theseus, where are you to be found?
- The answer is that you're right there, in front of your nose. Seeing that is the tricky bit.
Anicca (impermenance - nothing lasts)
- Try to identify anything in your direct experience which exists, and has always existed. You can't. Every emotion you've ever felt, every thought you've ever had, sound you've heard and sight you've seen, every single instance of qualia you have ever experienced (which is to say, everything you've ever experienced^[5]), has arisen and then passed.

True knowledge - that is to say, direct experiental knowledge, past faith, or "This makes sense, seems legit" - of the truth of these three marks is considered by Buddhists to be the first step towards enlightenment. You have realised that by failing to know your nature, you have been creating suffering where none need exist.

The appealing thing about Buddhism, especially to Western sceptics of spiritual/mystic practice (like I very much used to be), is that none of the important bits (there are also plenty of suspect but probably unimportant bits) require anything to be taken on faith. Indeed, none of it works if you take things on faith. All insight requires that one achieves direct experience of the truths being described, such that they can come to truly, experientally know them as truths.

Of course, then we get into religious screwiness. There were centuries in which insight practices weren't taught to laypeople in many Buddhist traditions, instead being reserved for monastics. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries did teaching resume. In the interim, Buddhism operated (and in large part still does operate) more like the mainstreams of Abrahamic religions - observe the rites and rituals, do what we say because we say it, and you are to take on faith that it's legitimate and for the best.

I am not a Buddhist. But there's a huge amount of wisdom and insight there, and probably in all religions. There's no need to throw out the whole fruit because part of it displeases you, and doing so would be to cheat yourself - instead, cut the displeasing part out and take what's good. And you can engage with this stuff on an entirely secular basis. That's what Sam Harris, for example, offers via Waking Up.

Nothing fantastical whatsoever is happening. No faith is required. All we're doing is enquiring, and seeing what we find.

More accurately, apparently external, but I don't want to get distracted by nonduality here. ↩︎
It's commonly described as "the true nature of reality", but we don't have the sensory apparatus to experience that. The true nature of our reality, perhaps. ↩︎
Perhaps especially for Westerners, given the Enlightenment happened and stuff. ↩︎
That is not to say therapy isn't helpful. Far from it. And, therapy often contributes to progress in mystic pursuits, because it often works by forcing us to confront the fallibility of the egoic beliefs we hold about ourselves. ↩︎
Depending on your definition of "qualia". Apparently it's contested, but mine includes any mental/phenomenological appearance. ↩︎

Thoughts on quitting alcohol

2024-09-22T00:00:00Z

Totally sound advice (not really).

Have you seen that @worldoftshirts guy, Joshua Block, on TikTok? All of his content - and he posts a lot - is now binge drinking vlogs. I don't know much about his earlier career. Seemingly pretty banal stuff, but he became TikTok famous and something of a local legend. I think his guardian died and he fell under the influence of some nefarious characters. And now, a couple of years later, he's killing himself via alcoholism. It's so extreme that there's an account which uses a spreadsheet to estimate his consumption and blood alcohol content over the course of each day. It's not abnormal for him to vomit on stream (often on himself), then continue drinking. This tracker of his drinking "incidents" lists 31 incidents of public vomiting, 29 of violence, 32 of discrimination.

While he may well, separately from his alcoholism, be a shitty person, it's sickening to watch someone livestream their self-destruction like this. Both because it's disgusting and sad, and because it's such a spectacle.

My drinking career: a retrospective

Thankfully my alcoholism was never as extreme as Josh's is, but I find myself doom-viewing every once in a while because it reminds me of the way I used to drink, because it makes the idea of drinking again scare me a bit more, and because it's just... enthrallingly depraved. The idea of simply giving up and indulging myself in alcoholic self-destruction still lurks, albeit much subdued. I don't imagine it ever really leaves any addict.

I started binge drinking around the age of 14 and continued for 19 years. It was consistently problematic. At university I managed to slice my hand up while incredibly drunk. Had to visit A&E, then be driven by my partner at the time to a hospital further afield for microsurgery to stich everything back together. Thankfully it all works pretty well again. I'm just left with some twinges in cold weather, and the scars^[1], as a reminder.

That was one of the most extreme incidents, but there was a litany of others. Though I was always a "high-functioning alcoholic" and mine was a "soft (rock) bottom". I never had weeklong binges, or even drank all that much on a daily basis (probably five or six pints of beer at most. Which is a lot for normal people, but not very much for an alcoholic), and had long periods of hardly touching it (after starting to use cannabis). But I did love binge drinking. Once you started, why would you want to stop? There's something uncomfortable about being just a little drunk, and something very uncomfortable about cutting oneself off, to the point that I'd choose abstinence over limited consumption. The drunker I got, the better of a time I seemed to be having.

But, as well as creating new problems, drinking also allowed me to ignore the ones I already had.

Clarity and quitting

Towards the end of 2022, and the end of a six-month backpacking trip, I'd finally started to come to terms with the fact that my drinking was not actually okay after doing some stupid and potentially consequential things, and some particularly stupid and consequential things. After that happened for the last time I started trying to tone it down and made a first quit attempt, which was pretty decent for a first try, ending when I was a pushover while touring Drunkards' Alley in Tokyo. That evening ended was actually quite sensible (aside from missing the last train and having to walk for an hour. But I like walking), and I resumed sobriety after that.

Then, the last session. I don't entirely recall what my thinking was at the time, but now tell myself that I'd probably truly accepted that I had to quit and wanted to indulge myself with one last hurrah. If that really was my rationale^[2] then things went very much to plan.

I woke up safe, uninjured, but also slumped over a table in an Osaka McDonald's. Thankfully, extreme public drunkenness is (so long as you don't disturb anyone) gracefully tolerated in Japan, and they'd just left me alone to sleep it off. I dragged my miserable self to Starbucks for a coffee^[3], and then back to my hostel, to spend a three-day hangover almost entirely in bed, miserable, regretful (I saw little of Osaka), reading quit literature. This triggered the insight that finally gave me clarity.

There was a binary choice to be made. One option was to continue drinking, now entirely disabused of the idea that my relationship with alcohol could be reformed^[4]. Each session was a roll of the dice - after the first drink, I'd have ceded control of what was going to happen. Would I have a "sensible" night, avoid blacking out, offending anyone, having unprotected sex, and get myself to bed having drank a pint of water and secured hangover supplies? Or would I be out until 6am, blacked out, trying to find somewhere else to get served? And, now knowing that sort of outcome was an entirely predictable matter of chance, left without the ability to excuse or minimise my drinking.

The other option was to just quit. So for now, and hopefully until I die, that's the last time I drank.

Fear and liberation

The experience of admitting that my drinking was problematic and needed to end, let alone actually ending it, was scary. I don't think people develop substance abuse problems without reason. It turned out that my reason was undiagnosed autism. Drinking made sensory sensitivities (though I wasn't consciously aware of them) bearable, made socialising easy, and killed anxiety. Whatever our particular reasons, we abuse substances because we find it comforting in some way, and the idea of giving up such an easy, dependable source of comfort^[5] is terrifying. Quitting sustainably means no longer being able to ignore, and so having to confront, whatever trauma drove us there.

But there's also another side to it - quitting is liberating and empowering. I realised that I never had to wake up hung over, in the grip of hangxiety, wondering if I'd done some awful thing again. It was as easy as just... not drinking.

597 days later

While I try to remain cautious, things have gotten a lot easier. I rarely miss alcohol now. I've proved to myself that I can enjoy socialising without it, that people still enjoy my company without it, and that I am capable of facing and addressing the things which led me to abuse it. It's already difficult to remember what my subjective experience used to be like. The memories (patchy as they are) almost feel like another person's.

I still have other substance abuse problems, but thankfully relatively benign ones. Nothing else has ever fucked me up like alcohol does.

Not engaging in risky and shameful behaviours, damaging my relationships and no longer writing off days to hangovers were excellent outcomes. But the most transformational changes have come from being forced to confront the problems which led me to drinking. This is what started me on the path towards finding out I'm autistic.

Support

If you're wondering about your own relationship with alcohol, I'll signpost r/stopdrinking. There's lots of good information and incredibly supportive people there.

The sensation of having the stitches taken out was, at least, absolutely exquisite (like scratching an itch you've had for weeks, but an internal itch, and with the feeling of something being pulled out. Chef's kiss). ↩︎
The fact that I started off by chugging a 9% ABV can of chuhai on the street seems to suggest that it was! ↩︎
And took a selfie to commemorate the occasion. I look at it sometimes. ↩︎
Having tried and failed moderation. Which, even if it'd worked, would have been uniquely torturous as someone who exclusively enjoyed drinking immoderately. ↩︎
Perceived comfort, at least. It certainly didn't feel so comforting the morning after. ↩︎

Okay, I'm autistic. Now what?

2025-11-05T00:00:00Z

Adult autism diagnosis is awkward. You do all this research, finally arrive at a comfortable position with diagnosis (whether that's self-diagnosis or professional), and... then what? If you're anything like me, it probably feels as though there's a book you should really be given, and in lieu of that you're going to go looking for it. So here's a list of stuff I've found helpful. Though, as a disclaimer, I suspect autism is (and our life experiences are) sufficiently heterengenous that the same things strongly resonating with other people will be a bit of a crapshoot.

In general, I think the guiding principle for finding helpful content should be its relatability. I cannot overstate how helpful it is to hear people describing their life experiences and think "Oh, damn, I thought I was the only one!" After struggling to figure out why you don't fit in for so long, embracing community and shared experience is so valuable.

This is going to be a working document

I will be adding resources as I come across them

Advice from me

Your nervous system is probably fried, and you may no idea because you're used to it, heavily dissociated, have CPTSD etc. Seriously consider and investigate this possibility. Keywords may be "functional freeze", "vagal tone", "nervous system (dys)regulation".

Books

Self-Care for Autistic People by Dr. Megan Anna Neff (of neurodivergentinsights.com)
- This is perhaps the book I'd hand out to people post-diagnosis. Not particularly in-depth, but that'd be to the detriment of the book as a good survey of things you might want to consider post-diagnosis. Then being aware of concepts and keywords, you can go off and do your own thing with whatever material you found relatable.
Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devon Price
- Don't think I found this quite so relatable as others have, but still, pretty relatable. An almost abruptly emotional subjective account of a journey from living undiagnosed to positively integrated autism. It's so heartening to read things things that are even somewhat relatable and thus know that you're not alone.
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman
- Not really helpful in a psychological sense, but the history of autism is fascinating and also super fucked up. Long!

Posts

Shifting my Unmasking from Revealing to Unearthing - poweredbylove.ca
- A wonderful reframing of "unmasking" in post-diagnosis. After a lifetime of trying to contort ourselves into conformation with society, rediscovering ourselves is not something we're apt to approach in the kind, gentle manner it requires (more like trying to coax a scared rabbit out of its warren by screaming at it), so I found this to be very valuable.

Podcasts

Divergent Conversations
- More stanning of Dr. Megan Anna Neff. Two late-diagnosed therapists make for excellent hosts.
~~The A Team Podcast~~
- Unfortunately nuked
- Three late-diagnosed autists discussing their experiences
- I'm loathe to link the Apple Podcasts site, but the official one is now defunct. Earlier episodes can also be found on YouTube

Reflecting on adult autism diagnosis

2024-08-12T00:00:00Z

A page from Frank Miller's "Hard Boiled", showing a totally normal guy.

I've always found it comforting to be able to make sense of systems, and I'd never been able to explain why. Any type of system (what to do at an airport, restaurant etiquette, how to request bills at cafes, the appropriate amount of eye contact to make during conversations...) is a puzzle to be solved, but my favourites involve certainty. Computers, for example, are systems in which there will always be a logical, in-system (barring freak events like cosmic bit flips) explanation for an event. I might not know what that explanation is, but have faith that it exists and I could understand. Engaging with systems like that can be more about enjoyment (and comfort, proficency) than pragmatism.

A big problem with that as a predominant mode of engaging with the world is that being a human means overwhelming exposure to systems I don't, and can't definitively, understand - other people, society, and my own mind. Sitting with uncertainty, avoiding picking the scab of "if I ruminate some more, I can probably figure it out" has always been a challenge. I guess when all you have is a hammer (systems-based rational thinking) everything really does start to look like a nail. So I always felt indefinably out of place. Often had the sense that there was something wrong^[1] with me, which prevented me from engaging with the human experience like others seemed to. It wasn't always that something was outwardly wrong. I could often make the right noises, and perhaps even the right microexpressions. But it often felt like putting on an act rather than simply socialising.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when, in my early thirties, after a year of taking the idea seriously and obsessively researching, introspecting and easing myself into a tenative (acute impostor syndrome) state of self-diagnosis, I was professionaly diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Yet it was, in a fundamentally affecting way, a surprise. I had fooled myself into thinking that I'd already integrated anything that might have come out of it, but the last couple of months have been humbling. For someone who finds comfort in understanding things, having my self-concept so fundamentally challenged - and at this point in my life - has been quite unsettling.

People have said things like "You're still the same person, nothing has changed". And in a sense that's true. Nothing material has changed. The facts of my life experience and situation, interpersonal relationships etc. remain. The person most surprised by diagnosis was probably me.

In a more important sense it is absolutely untrue, because most of the sensemaking I've done has been thoroughly undone. It apparently hinged on the idea that I was a regular, albeit weird, guy - regular, in that I experienced and related to the world in the same way most other people do (whatever I imagined that to mean. Owning a normal nervous system?), because I had never seriously considered the possibility that I didn't. And now I've been disabused of that foundational assumption, the house built on top of it is starting to get pretty creaky.

The vocabulary of "unmasking" implies (especially to a literal-minded autist) that you receive a diagnosis, "take off" your mask, and find your fully-formed true self waiting underneath. I imagine my experience of this resolutely not happening is representative^[2]. Coupled with this is the problem of atrophied intuition. Decades of masking have hugely reduced my ability to recognise, and propensity to trust, intuition.

Reframing the process from "unmasking" to "unearthing"^[3] has been very helpful.

It's an exciting process too, and the shift in vocabulary helps to draw that out. I'm exploring how much I've lost due to masking and how I might start to reclaim it. Feeling less lost and unmoored, more excited to see what happens.

Amusingly enough, given my discomfort in uncertainty, I can confidently explain a lot of things for the first time.

I know now that nothing is "wrong" with me, but it felt very much like there was - turns out there was just something psychopathological about me (which is actually comforting, I fuckin' knew there was something going on) ↩︎
It doesn't help that misconceptions about the nature of the self, and thus the possibility of a "true self" existing, are rife, but that's off-topic ↩︎
Shifting my Unmasking from Revealing to Unearthing - poweredbylove.ca ↩︎