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How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives. Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I'd helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they'd told me about it (including you, Sean – it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!).
Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It's not nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" – J. Hodgman) – rather, it's an attempt to figure out how I got here ("My god! What have I done?" – D. Byrne), and also, how the world got this way.
There's one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn't feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about this moment – both for me, and for the world we live in.
Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a "free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system." The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you. The way it was gonna work was that you'd have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users' folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system's sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time. As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests.
Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.
(Well, not quite – several of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!)
https://opencola.io/
But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we'd brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were "no bad ideas," so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very evil territory.
It's one of those evil ideas that I keep coming back to. Sometimes, during these money-making brainstorm sessions, we'd decompose the technology we were working on into its component parts to see if any subset of them might make money ("Be the first person to not do something no one has ever not done before" – B. Eno).
We had a (by contemporary standards, primitive) machine-learning system; we had a web crawler; and we had a keen sense of how the early web worked. In particular, we were really interested in a new, Linux-based search tool that used citation analysis – a close cousin to our own collaborative filter, harnessing latent clues about relevance implicit in the web's structure – to produce the best search results the web had ever seen. Like us, this company had no idea how to make money, so we were watching it very carefully. That company was called "Google."
That's where the evil part came in. We were pretty sure we could extract a list of the 100,000 most commonly searched terms from Google, and then we could use our web-crawler to capture the top 100 results for each. We could feed these to our Bayesian machine-learning tool to create statistical models of the semantic structure of these results, and then we could generate thousands of pages of word-salad for each of those keywords that matched those statistical models, along with interlinks that could trick Google's citation analysis model. Plaster those word-salad pages with ads, and voila – free cash flow!
Of course, we didn't do it. But even as we developed this idea, the room crackled with a kind of dark, excited dread. We weren't any smarter than many other rooms full of people who were engaged in exercises just like this one. The difference was, we loved the web. The idea of someone deliberately poisoning it this way churned our stomachs. The whole point of Opencola was to connect people with each other based on their shared interests. We loved Google and how it helped you find the people who wrote the web in ways that delighted and informed you. This kind of spam, aimed at wrecking Google's ability to help people make sense of the things we were all posting to the internet, was…grotesque.
I didn't know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to "red-teaming" – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried "blue-teaming," trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it.
I didn't know the term "blue-teaming" then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: "Tron-pilled." Tron "fought for the user." Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn't clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having.
The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn't their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.
And still: the old web was good in so many ways for so long. The Tron-pilled amongst us held the line. When we build a new, good, post-American internet, we're going to need a multitude of Tron-pilled technologists, old and young, who build, maintain – and, above all, defend it.
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Bakugou is the epitome of absolute shamelessness. Whether he's chugging a soda or gorging away on tons of spicy meat, he's going to belch freely and shamelessly. Any time anyone tells him to mind his manners, he'll make it a point to burp again even louder out of pure spite. Due to the nature of his quirk, whatever he eats or any carbonation he chugs down tends to make him gassy anyway, so he tends to burp quite frequently and freely.
If he's just belched without anyone saying anything, he usually responds with something like this:
"Gruuhhhh, fuck, that was a good one..."
(slaps his belly) "Whew...god damn, I needed that..."
"Ugh, god...(smacks his chest and burps again) ...hahhh...there we go..."
"Fuckin' shit...(pats his gut)...that one hurt comin' up..."
"Urgh...fuck me...'m so goddamn fuUuUuUuUUUuuhhll...oof...(palms the side of his bulging belly and burps again)...ugh..."
(scrunches his nose) "Mph...damn, went up my fuckin' nose..."
"Hahhhh...(lets his tongue hang out as he pants)...tasted the peppers on that one..."
(grimaces and massages his big, churning belly) "Ugh, fuck...I'm gonna burpin' all fuckin' night at this rate..."
(takes in a deep breath) "FuUuuUUUUUUUUuuUUUuhhck!!!!! Ahhhh...haaahhhh...hhhaaaaahhhhh..."
Though, if someone tells him he's being gross or calls him out for his utterly appalling table manners, his responses would be this:
"Fuck off. If I gotta burp, I'm gonna burp. Don't like it? Go fuck yerself."
"Tch, like I'm gonna let all that pressure just sit in my gut? Fuckin' dumbass..."
"Hmph, fuckin' prude-ass extra..."
(smacks his lips and massages his belly contently) "Haaahhhh...like I was gonna hold that fuckin' monster in...(heartily smacks his belly a few times and burps again) Hahhh...or that one."
(takes in a few gulps of air) "FuuUUUUUUuuUUUUHHhck off...ahhh..."
(grins and gulps down air) "SCUUUUUUUSE...MMMMEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEUUUUURRRRRRPH!!!!!! Ahhhh...(slaps his belly)...hehe, there. Better?"
(grabs them by the collar and aggressively belches in their face) "How's that fer 'watchin' my fuckin' manners', asshole? Piss me off'n I'll burp right in yer fuckin' ear next time."
(leans close and lets rip a thick, rumbling closed mouth belch right up to his annoyed classmate's ear, then breezily blows his gas in their face until they're coughing and sputtering in disgust) "Hahhhh...there. Held it in fer ya..."
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In a perverse twist on virtue signaling, the Trump administration is training Americans in the politics of raw domination.
""We have an elite impunity problem—a global one, with the United States the worst and leading offender. As Robert Reich reminds us, twenty years ago the United States invaded a country on pretenses now widely acknowledged to be basically fraudulent. This fact barely merits an “oops” from the many actors, elected and otherwise, who promoted it—most of all George W. Bush, watercoloring into the sunset to this day. More recently, the richest man in the world helped lead mass firings of federal workers.
Meanwhile, state agents regularly kidnap immigrants and detain citizens alike in ways that are blatantly illegal. In its statement responding to the recent murder of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent in Minneapolis—caught on video and attested to by eyewitnesses, less than a mile from the site of George Floyd’s own murder by a Minneapolis police officer—the Department of Homeland Security makes a set of bald-faced lies. Negative consequences for any of the aforementioned are few and far between. In the United States, political power has long meant never having to say you’re sorry."
"...vice signals are not just cultural messages or aesthetic poses. The anonymous banker who wanted to say “retard” and “pussy” in mixed company wants to live in the world the caters to the kind of person who likes saying those words—which is why he experienced that permissiveness as feeling “liberated.” The especially online members of the administration may be in it for the “ReTruths” and comment numbers in response to public chronicles of their various misadventures, but these messages also come with body counts: at least 115 in the various murders throughout the Caribbean and Pacific; at least 40 in the attack on Venezuela that culminated in the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro; and a still unknown number in the Nigeria bombings.
"These strikes are completely unintelligible as tactical maneuvers: the drug-trafficking routes supposedly targeted by the military strikes have little or nothing to do with drug use in the United States; the oil reserves in Venezuela are on the other side of a multibillion-dollar infrastructure investment that U.S. oil giants have thus far demonstrated little appetite for; and Nigeria’s own government officials directly contradict the White House narrative about the strike on its borders, despite collaborating with the operation itself. But all of these nevertheless make grim sense interpreted as political actions taken primarily for the sake of vice signaling and raw power projection: communicating a certain aesthetic posture to the MAGA base and its various ideological co-conspirators, training us all to allow it, and threatening all those who might disobey with the specter that the bombs will come for them next. The message says, I can do what I want, when I want, for whatever reason I want, and you have to take it."
