2025: Provenance
If this is what would eventually motivate me, or what would eventually defeat me, or convert me to Socialism and Christianity. I don’t know.
I thought maybe I was dead. I chose to be in hell, in the middle of it all, in San Francisco. Or I was chosen to be here. I’m convinced of it.
I hate the hubris in billionaires thinking they can actually change the world. I hate the productivity fairytales. I hate Alex Karp telling kids to work for Palantir right out of high school and be a tool, Outright Reverse Repo, Sam Altman, Liquid Glass, AI 2027, all of it proof we are in the garbage time of human civilization.
Every day when I’m drunk I marvel at the society we have built, and the world wide web, and globalization and everything my teenage years represented. And how little of it will remain. I don’t want to be a doomer, but a part of me concurs with my Huel-drinking Suno music-producing coworker, about the impending Warlord Era. It’s gonna be the end of time soon, so why bother.
Yet I am still infected by the compulsion to produce, in the world’s last wind. I just need to be faster, to build more, to waste my time more wisely. When will I get to read this thing? When will I get to read anything? Does creation free you, or is vibe-coding synonymous with doing crack and Kalshi? The way my eyes don’t close, or stay closed but not asleep until the sun rises again. There is no wind in my room. If I can never catch the wind, if I can’t be a creator in an age of infinite creation, what can I be?
AI is great for someone like me who’s always wanted to do everything myself. But you come to some brutal realizations. I didn’t know I can’t sing, but it turns out I can’t write lyrics either. I’m not really fit to be a writer, or a novelist, or an artist. I can’t even write out my own stories, even when they are made up. But then, in a book, I can’t imagine writing anything besides my own story. I’m not even particularly artistic. If this is what would eventually motivate me, or what would eventually defeat me, or convert me to Socialism and Christianity. I don’t know.
“Oh, take me back to the country, to the hills and to the spires. I hate the afterparties, I want forests, I want fires.” But after this party who knows where there might be stars? I don’t even like the woods — it’s exhausting to be on the frontier, especially when you’re not all that original — and I hate running. It’s also terrifying to be on the frontier. What does it even mean to be alive at a time when time feels simultaneously precious and garbage and short and final? When work and meaning are steadily eaten up by large language models, just as language and creativity were before them? In this post-scarcity world of achievement, where music, poems, art, software can be produced in a matter of seconds, “being alive” can no longer be defined by utility or output. It must be redefined by what is leftover.
Meaning requires consequence: grief, hunger, and cold. The kind of cold on Halloween night as I sat up from a random curb with gunk all over me. I looked up, realizing the street signs were foreign and I was hauled off the ground by someone who was as drunk as I, rambling about a girl down the street that clearly did not exist. My phone was cracked and dead. I didn’t know how to get home.
Meaning requires the unforgiving passage of time. We witness finitude. Five years ago I was screaming on Snapchat for someone to reaffirm that grades don’t matter. Now I sacrifice sleep (I love sleeping) to catch up to a world that’s ending. But some mornings there’s stillness. Unlike being on the road, where there’s always more to see. It’s just someone sitting at their desk with tea, waiting for me to open my eyes.
LLMs predict the most likely next word; being alive is choosing the unlikely one. Every time you act against your own fears or selfishness or tendency to regress, you are accomplishing something mathematically impossible. I’ve always loved being different to a deviant extent, so maybe I’ll be fine.
The leftovers are irrational and absurd. Love matters because it may hurt. Courage is moving because you might die. Choices are significant because things expire, and you might regret, and you might think the grass is greener on a side you know you’d hate. Feel jealousy, or a sudden urge to cry, knowing that it’s unreasonable. The leftovers are beyond language. The unthought known you can’t confirm, feelings unrecorded. The blandness of sweet lemon from Super King. Goosebumps when I hear “when the umbrella opens, you should know that nothing’s hopeless, and I’m sending you a foggy shower screen heart”.