Geeks Bearing Gifts
A guy at work suggested I was nuts for disliking Facebook because they created React to make building web apps easier.
I was tempted to suggest that he sounded like a Trojan looking at that big-ass wooden horse sitting in front of the Scaean Gate and saying, See? The Greeks werenât so bad after all.
However, I didnât think heâd get it. Heâs one of those techies who donât read fiction. It might as well have been Darmok at Tanagra to him.
But React wasnât created for our benefit, but to solve a particular problem—and other shops are just cargo culting to their own detriment.
Getting to the Point
How can you tell that a techie doesnât read fiction? The same way you identify a vegan, an evangelical Christian, or somebody who doesnât own a television.
Itâs easy: heâll tell you.
Itâs almost always a guy, too, as if theyâre afraid no woman will have them if they so much as touch a novel or read verse that isnât song lyrics. Never mind that women are clamoring for men to read more fiction, especially by women and POCs.
Admittedly, I caught a lot of shit from other boys as a kid for reading. A lot of guys do. Itâs not easy to withstand that sort of bullying.
Nor can boys expect much support from the adults in the room. Apparently since most teachers are women and supposedly have an unconscious bias in favor of girls, they grade and discipline boys more harshly and boys react by treating school, academic, achievement as un-masculine. That sounds like a bullshit post-hoc rationalization by people who wish the âHe-Man Woman-Hatersâ Clubâ actually existed, since girls also get a raw deal at school. They just get a different raw deal from the one boys get.
I could be wrong about all of this, of course. I am, after all, only a man.
So, Whatâs My Excuse?
In my case, however, I didnât let being bullied stop me from reading. Since I had let Satan into my heart I kept reading whatever the fuck I wanted. Of course, that also annoyed the teachers, too. Boys in my class thought I was a homo for reading Anne Rice, and the teachers thought I should be reading J. D. fucking Salinger. Never mind that you donât probably need Salingerâs The Catcher in the Rye if youâve already read a decent translation of Goetheâs Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe tackles many of the same themes as Salinger in their respective works, but Goetheâs novel was written with German Engineering™.
Iâve read that a lot of autistic men in particular donât like to read fiction, with a panoply of explanations for why this is the case that are probably arrant bullshit since the replication crisis in psychology suggests that itâs a science so soft it barely withstands experimental scrutiny. In any case, the suggestion that autistic men in particular donât like reading fiction makes no sense to me. Iâm autistic. I read a metric shitload of fiction. Did I just not get hit hard enough with the autism stick? Or is this just propaganda from hate groups like Autism Speaks?
I suppose this rant comes out of a broader frustration with people in my trade—again, mainly men—who seem to have no liberal arts background at all. Admittedly, my own liberal arts education is a half-assed DIY patchwork because I didnât have rich parents or adults willing to give me decent advice and actual guidance. Nevertheless, Iâd like to think that Iâve exposed myself to sufficient philosophy and have enough of a sense of history that Iâm a little harder to bullshit than many techies are. I want to believe, for example, that I know better than to go Nazi, not only because going Nazi would debase me as a human being, but because guys like me get purged as soon as weâre of no further immediate use.
Silicon Valley Sarumans Building the Torment Nexus
I find it particularly telling that there are so many tech corporations with names out of Tolkienâs Legendarium like Palantir and Anduril. The personalities behind these corporations all seem to be of a type. I donât think they realize the extent to which they resemble Saruman after his determination to claim the One Ring for himself had corrupted him. I would not want to work for such people. Nor do I think such people should have the ear of public officials or senior officers in the armed forces of the United States. Theyâre the sort of people Dwight Eisenhower might have been thinking of when he warned us against the military-industrial complex, and they have no shortage of little Eichmanns willing to help them.
I think these techies are somehow worse than the techies who wonât read fiction because theyâre afraid theyâll end up replacing their boxers with rainbow-colored jock straps if they do. For starters, I suspect that the only women theyâve ever read are Ayn Rand and J. K. Rowling, and Iâm not sure which is worse.
- Ayn Rand wrote about misunderstood rugged-individualist Ăźbermenschen and the women who mistake their rapacity for love as a trauma response to seeing her parents lose everything under Soviet Communism; there are also orcs in Randâs novels, but she calls them second-handers, moochers, and looters.
- J. K. Rowling romanticises child abuse and neglect in English boarding schools and seems to be live in constant, unreasoning terror of the remote possibility that the woman in the stall next to her at a public loo in the Tube might not only be possessed of XY chromosomes or a penis, but the sheer effrontery to ask her if sheâs got a spare roll.
Theyâre both fucked in the head, which is the only diagnosis Iâm qualified to offer either.
These techies who name their businesses after Tolkienien stuff seem the sort who only read on the most literal and superficial levels. Theyâre the sort of people who would misread Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus—if they didnât outright refuse to read it because the authorâs a woman—by treating Frankenstein as some kind of victim when by creating a kind of artificial general intelligence and then abandoning it to figure out the world on its own they set the stage for all of the atrocities to come. Theyâre the sort who seem to willfully misread fiction like Stephensonâs Snow Crash, Atwoodâs The Handmaidâs Tale, or even the classic trinity of Orwellâs 1984, Huxleyâs Brave New World, and Bradburyâs Fahrenheit 451. Never mind Yevgeny Zamyatinâs We or Ira Levinâs criminally underrated This Perfect Day. Theyâre also the same sort of people who watch Fight Club and miss the point by mistaking Tyler Durden for an aspirational antihero.
These are the people who took "meritocracy", a word created to satirize the concept it described, and turned it into something too many people mistake for something worth having. Many of them are also the sort who think that not only is IQ real, but it is heritable and that somehow white people, Jews, and East Asians are naturally more intelligent than other âracesâ (never mind that race itself is arrant bullshit) and thus believe that in the technocratic hell they think they should be permitted to build in the ruins of our democracy theyâd be our rulers by sheer natural merit.
A rather convenient ideology, isnât it? Almost as if it were a new divine right of kings. Thatâs no coincidence, incidentally. Never mind following the money. Follow the ideology. Doing so will lead you to small-souled bugmen like Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and his sugar daddy Peter Thiel, who think entirely too highly of monarchy because they hope to serve in the new kingâs privy council. (Theyâll be lucky to keep their heads after the revolution.)
If you handed these assholes a novel entitled Donât Create the Torment Nexus, which documented in detail how the titular technology worked to illustrate the horrors its implementation would create, theyâd fall over each others to be the first to create the Torment Nexus and bring it to market.
It was one thing to have social networks created by people who sat alone in the high school cafeteria. It was one thing to see dating apps created by people who have probably never dated anybody but Rose Palmer and her daughters. But these assholes keep getting more ambitious, without getting smarter or wiser or kinder, and Iâm surprised they havenât ruined more innocent peopleâs lives or gotten more people killed. If Iâm laying it on thick, itâs because merely knowing these people exist has proven to be a reliable laxative. They literally scare the shit out of me.
Runestaff, Inc.
Then again, I might not be much better. If I had a monetizable idea and financial backing from rich people who arenât Nazis, I might start a business called âRunestaffâ. Iâd be borrowing from Michael Moorcock instead of J. R. R. Tolkien.
In Moorcockâs fiction the Runestaff is a quasi-sentient object of power, rather like the One Ring. Whereas the One Ring is imbued with so much of Sauronâs power and malice that the Dark Lord is little more than a shadow without it, and was made specifically to dominate all life, the Runestaff is rather more benign. It was not made to rule or dominate. It is not a weapon. It can only exist under particular physical and metaphysical conditions, and it uses its power to create a field around it in which it maintains the conditions that permit its continued existence. And it sometimes appears as the Holy Grail.
The conditions that sustain the Runestaff are also the conditions in which humanity best flourishes: a harmonious balance between law and chaos. I would like to think that Iâd be capable of running a business that sustains itself by helping sustain a world in which all life—including human life—can flourish. Fortunately Iâm not likely to ever be tested and found wanting.
But if somebody else starts a geniunely sustainable and beneficial business called âRunestaffâ, and needs a techie or three, hit me up. Hell, call it âHawkmoon Enterprisesâ or âThe Von Bek Foundationâ if you can get away with it.
My rateâs $120K/year for remote work, or $180K/year for on-site presence—and may Arioch have mercy on your soul if you ask me to go on-site and then make me use Zoom, because Iâll have none to spare. If you want me to relocate for on-site work youâd better be willing to buy my fucking house; Iâm seven years into a thirty year mortage with a 3.5% interest rate, and I want to outlive my mortgage so I can retire.
Literary Masculinity
Donât tell me that a literary man canât be masculine, lest I start dabbling in necromancy so that I might summon from Hell the shade of Norman Mailer.
He couldnât spell âfuckâ, as observed by the perennially delightful Tallulah Bankhead, who might not have known that he was substituting âfuggâ for âfuckâ at the behest of a publisher with overtender sensibilities.
Michiko Kakutani in her capacity as head critic at The New York Times Book Review did more for his career than he ever admitted despite his racism and misogyny toward her. Nor is his misogyny limited to Ms. Kakutani, but given a book-length exploration in his attempt at a rebuttal of feminist Kate Millettâs criticism: The Prisoner of Sex.
Nevertheless, he returned from the Pacific Theater of WWII to begin a literary career by writing The Naked and the Dead. Thatâs more than macho misogynists who denigrate reading as unmanly—like Andrew Tate—ever managed.
Why Did You Write All Of This?
To get it out of my demon-ridden head. Isnât that why most writers write? Sometimes my brain is so full of shit that the only sensible course is to open up an empty Emacs buffer and figuratively drop trou.
Seriously, though, whenever I run into something that tech has made more dangerous, or even more unpleasant or more inconvenient, my default reaction is that somebody didnât think this shit through. Somebody didnât work out all the angles. Somebody didnât consider all the implications. Somebody had such a monumental hard-on over what they could do that they gave no consideration to whether they should do it at all.
Who elected these assholes, anyway? What makes them qualified to change the world out from under us? What kind of âbetter worldâ are they making, anyway? These fuckwits canât even persuade people to tolerate online ads. But weâre supposed to entrust our future to these people?
Apologists for capitalism as implemented in the US have some fucking nerve. They tell us that communism inevitably fails because it depends on a command economy and central planning by unelected bureaucrats. What they donât tell you is that capitalism also depends on a command economy and central planning by unelected billionaires. Does it make the slightest difference to the average working-class citizen if the economy is centrally planned by a Politburo in Moscow or Beijing or by Wall Street?
We get fucked over either way, but try telling that to the so-called âbest and brightestâ who mistake themselves for the new âmasters of the universeâ. The same people who brought us âmove fast and break thingsâ love to invoke Chestertonâs fence if anybody makes a serious case for regulating the undead Christ out of them. If any of them had thought to ask me if they should be given free rein to remake the world in the image of their secondhand science fantasies, Iâd say, âhell no to the power of fuck you for even thinking this is a reasonable ideaâ.
I mean, itâs almost as if they want the Butlerian Jihad to happen. Theyâre practically begging to be put up against a wall while we smash their machines and sing âUp Against the Wall, Motherfuckerâ to the tune of âUncle Fuckerâ from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. No doubt they imagine themselves martyrs for defying legions of ungrateful Luddites hellbent on holding humanity back.
Seriously, though: if these chucklefucks want to get ideas from pop culture, hereâs a doozy for them from Mad Max: Fury Road—WE ARE NOT THINGS. We are not the means to their ends. We do not live for their sake. Our lives are our own, and this is no less our world than it is theirs. They have no right to kill the world for their own gain.
What Do We Do to Change the Future?
This isnât about the future. The future is here and now. Cyberpunk dystopia is now literary realism instead of science fiction, though itâs not yet evenly distributed. Itâs both shittier and more mundane than Gibson, Stephenson, or Effinger dared imagine. No manic pixie nightmare razorgirl is ever gonna come to rescue any of us. Thereâs no Dr. Light to build us a savior.
Why should a hero save us when we stand for nothing? If we deserve life, we must stand for ourselves. Weâve got to rescue ourselves and each other.
Put on the sunglasses and see for yourself the truth about our rulers: if they are monsters, they are human monsters. The class war is on, and we havenât been fighting back. Letâs change that, shall we? We can start by understanding that it is precisely because our enemies are only human that we can fight them. Remember too that Moloch is just a metaphor, a reification of capitalism that seems all-encompassing but is nevertheless man-made. Because it is man-made, it can be unmade by men. We have the tools. We have the talent. We need only realize that there are only two kinds of deicide: justifiable and praiseworthy, and as Ambrose Bierce observed the distinction is mainly for the benefit of theologians.
Thereâs no Morpheus offering red pills to wake you up. Nobodyâs gonna set you free if you donât do it yourself. Start by freeing your mind; your ass will follow.
What If This Offends Someone?
Does anything in this rant strike a nerve? Does it offend you? Dial 1-800-B-DAMNED. Weâre ready to dismiss you!
Seriously: Donât complain to me that the shoe doesnât fit, or Iâll call you Cinderella for being an even prissier princess than my cat Smudge—a pretty princess indeed.
Or maybe Iâll favor you with an a capella cover of âYouâre So Vainâ since you think this rant is about you.
