I've always been more sympathetic to the Joker than Batman.

I don't mean the violence and cruelty, we're ignoring that side of the Joker today. I mean the capacity for anarchy.

In a rough sense, the Joker is the part of your personality that says you are fine as you are. Batman is the part of you that expects more.

When I have conversations about politics, I notice that I'm more likely to take the chaotic position. What if we had fewer laws? What if we eased up on social institutions like religion or workplace culture? What if we ignore speech that we don't like? What if we let people do what they're already doing?

There are pro-chaos perspectives across the political spectrum. Americans like freedom.

When I have conversations about business, I ease up on all the chaos advocacy. It doesn't usually lead anywhere.

But plenty of voices want to play the role of Batman.

When they talk about business, they take the ordered position. What if you worked harder? Put in more hours? Removed distractions? Took care of your physical health?

This is good advice. Discipline is necessary to accomplish anything.

But life is so chaotic, there is always room to impose more order. What if you cancel Netflix? What if you stop drinking alcohol? What if you stop hanging out with friends? What if you abstain from sex outside of marriage? What if you eliminate everything that brings you joy in order to optimize for greater financial return?

I mean, there's an audience for this kind of scolding. Mostly guys, right? Guys are always willing to take some time out of their workday to hear a sermon about how they aren't working hard enough.

In the movies, Batman is also kind of a psycho. Not as bad as the Joker, but competitive.

Life is an infinite series of choices. The idea of an angel and devil on the shoulder is intuitive. The idea of just being the angel is not.

The choices give life the texture.

Entropy is worth fighting. The successes are worth celebrating.

And these two are entering the public domain in 2035, so get ready for that entire franchise to devolve into a pandemonium of competing storylines.

I'm downshifting the content on this blog, for now. I am halfway through the first draft of my new book, and I'm probably spending too much time building an audience on X. 'Building an audience' means chatting up probable bots and responding to threads on various topics with absolutely no coherent strategy.

From an SEO perspective, a regularly updated blog is a good trust-building exercise that lets Google know that your site isn't abandonware. For me, it was an intermediate step.

I first spent a few weeks typing every morning, a collection of essays that will likely never see the light of day. I moved to this blog just to get used to thinking in public, although the audience was only slightly more than one. The next step is social media and other sites that deliver content directly to the points that readers congregate. Although I'll spend more time there, keeping a repository like this blog is useful. It is similar to how comedians work through their sets in smaller clubs to prepare for the large shows.

I may change this format if I create a regular newsletter, but that's a ways off.

This post was going to be about a Naval Ravikant quote, but Skynet attacked.

It was very low stakes, as AI apocalypses go. I loaded Google Gemini, and typed 'Can you create a transcript for the following video? The transcript link is broken.'

The following text appeared onscreen:

So why don't we talk a little bit about leverage? The first tweet in the storm was a famous quote from Archimedes which was, 'Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth.' The next tweet was, 'Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal costs of replication. Leverage is critical.' The reason I stuck in Archimedes quote in there is normally I don't like putting other people's quotes in my Twitter like that, it doesn't add any value. You can go look up those people's quotes, but this quote I had to put in there because it's just so fundamental. I read it when I was very, very young and it had a huge impression on me, and we all know what leverage is. When we use a seesaw or a lever, we understand how that works physically, but I think what our brains aren't really well evolved to comprehend is how much leverage is possible in modern society and what the newest forms of leverage are.

And then I guess the AI got more self-conscious than I am about quoting people and erased the text.

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I'll spare you the rest of the back-and-forth. If I were more sophisticated, I could troubleshoot and describe the protocol I tripped that caused the aberrant behavior.

If I were less sophisticated, I would say that the AI is lying.

*****

I recently created an X account.

I'm not following anyone that I know in real life. Most of my friends that are still on social media hover around Facebook, and think of Elon Musk as a bad guy.

I have 31 followers. (Upped to 32 while typing this.)

I'm 90% certain that the first twenty of them are bots.

The longest conversation I had with one was a Japanese emigre to Los Angeles. She thanked me for following her, then accused me of being a bot when I didn't respond quickly enough to her messages. She sent an impossibly attractive selfie, and tried a few times to move the conversation to another app.

When I said I would be in Los Angeles the following week and offered to meet up, she said maybe. If I could download WhatsApp or Telegram, we could have coffee on the beach.

You know, like humans do.

*****

If this blog is useful for anything, a quick scan should show that I'm human. AI prompts don't combine this kind of scatterbrained detail.

I don't know how people online will prove this in the near future. Maybe when freelancers are hired, they will have to type out naughty language or bomb recipes.

The easiest way to calm fears that AI will take your job is to start using it. It will do many things better. It can't bundle these disparate actions into a cohesive package.

I don't want to focus on this topic too much. However, I talk about politics, and a lot of that hinges on a divergence in views on race, so clarifying my stance seems fair. I think I can fit all of my principles into one post.
1. Fuck the Nazis.
2. Fuck the Confederacy.
3. The two political factions listed above are largely defunct (outside of some parts of the punk scene, or fail-tier social media apps), and had distinct philosophies and agendas. Broad-brushing these movements as 'white supremacy' confuses more than it clarifies.
4. Coleman Hughes is correct that color blindness should be our North Star. (I didn't put this at number 1 as a tactic; didn't want to give leftists an excuse to stop reading right away.)
5. Politicians are forced to be racist. They must appeal to certain ethnic groups to campaign, and the policies they support would either maintain the status quo or favor some groups over others. Looking to politicians for guidance on ethics around race is a mistake.
6. What society thinks of as 'race' is mostly inaccurate labels applied to a gradient of skin tones, the byproduct of human ancestors living at various distances from the equator.
7. Loyalty to a state or country usually means giving greater weight to the flourishing of a population in a specific geographic area, which likely originates from ancestors living at various distances from the equator. Ending racism probably means, at some point, discarding the concept of geographically constrained countries. (Try not to freak out, right-wingers. Probably not in our lifetimes, and the US shouldn't go first.)
8. Attempting to discuss matters around race has created new distinctions in language. Overt racism in the US has mostly been supplanted by rancor between groups that use (or refuse to use) different phrases.
9.  Racism is ill-defined, and used to describe a variety of elements. Eliminating cruelty is a more achievable goal.

A day into this month, Intel has announced layoffs of 15,000 employees. Bungie is the latest game developer to go through a round of firings, bringing the year's total of game developers fired to well over 10,000.

If you have been to a fast food restaurant recently, you might have noticed a kiosk doing a job a human used to manage. Food service is getting off lucky though. Only 12% of the workforce is in danger of getting replaced. According to Visual Capitalist, that threat is between 19% to 46% for most industries.

I support AI and automation, but I can see that these productivity gains will be concentrated in a few hands. So many are going to be left behind.

It's a little strange that elections still aren't focused on this issue. Is it just that Andrew Yang was ahead of his time?

It might be that the opposition wasn't coherent yet. You can point to the vast debt the US is in as a counter to universal basic income, but for now, the two major parties have agreed to ignore the debt to avoid touching social security.

However, if the question is altered a bit, we aren't talking about UBI anymore, but AI. And views on AI divide society, but not along the clean partisan lines that we are used to with other issues. Democrats are more positive on AI, and more likely to support regulation. Republicans are the inverse. But it is easy to imagine a new political paradigm, where a faction that wants to lean into AI while tempering the effects with UBI opposes a group that wants to hit the brakes on everything.

For close to eight years now, politics has been too obsessed with culture war antics to really focus on a particular issue. Between a left-wing ideology that takes up a lot of mental real estate and right-wing support for some guy that devours the rest, we could only consider the handful of issues that fed the rancor.

At some point, Trump will exit the public stage. I don't even want to speculate how; his fans are out of their minds. But it will happen. Wokeness will be around longer in some form, but through a process of dialogue and persuasion, I imagine that society will slowly extract the more useful ideas and discard the rest.

I know that the current culture war seems intractable. But the future is coming fast.