Breaking Free of Certainty, and Other Things

The other day, I think yesterday, I was taking a break from work. I write posts focused on finance, corporate news, economic data, and politics which has been nothing but a legit battering ram the last two weeks to my mind, body, and soul so breaks are not only nice, but necessary. If I had to label this “break” it’s more of a physical/information exhale which I definitely needed after reading a TechCrunch piece titled “The Pentagon says AI is speeding up its ‘kill chain’” by Maxwell Zeff. I don’t want to get into the guts of Zeff’s piece because…well…from its title I can assume you get the gist of its contents and add it to the pile of fuck that feels is only getting bigger and bigger.

But, I remember writing a report on the topic of AI and the US military back in November 2024 based of Meta’s press release titled, “Open Source AI Can Help America Lead in AI and Strengthen Global Security,” and thinking…this seems bad. I wouldn’t call it pragmatic prospection (I tried to look up what it means to connect a bunch of present day dots to speculate and come to a conclusion in the future and found that), and came to realize my need for this is more based in being ready (maybe right?) for various possibilities/outcomes rather than pinpointing exactly what will happen. That’s not my thing, being certain. Mystery and doubt always leaves me wanting more, needing more, and doing more. The world is chaotic and fixing oneself to any one outcome is limiting. It’s a tough place to exist outside of certainty, with billions of years in evolution training us to never be for fear of getting mauled, eaten, and killed. But, it also feels the closest to life one can get, to being human.

I'm not religious (agnostic here), but I came across a passage from Conclave by Robert Harris that, with every piece of news out there, brought some semblance of unity in a what feels like never ending sea of dismantling. Read below.

“My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. 'Eli Eli, lama sabachtani?' He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

And here is a clip of Ralph Fiennes' playing Cardinal Lawrence's sermon in the movie, discussing his wishes for the new pope in his sermon.

Newsletter this week includes…

Being Honest

Technofeudalism, Cloud Capital, and Blind Dates

Asmongold and the Age of Cruel Irony

Being Honest

Scrolling through Substack with some downtime, saving articles to read for later…chuckling at one liners and doing the double look meme when I read Christ Best’s post, The fight for free speech in 2025 and beyond, I came across something written by Walker1000 that stopped me dead, as it read, “Babe be honest. Are our works in conversation” with no period. I wrote back, “The machine says no” because I’ve been a bit obsessed lately with the lecherous dual nature of most social/digital platforms lately solely based on the fact that, unless its decentralized without data monetization, you are the product as I’m sure you’ve heard time and again. But, back to Walker1000, what stopped me was first the “babe” maybe because my wife calls me that, so I instantly thought of her; second, the coy, almost flirtatious request to “be honest” which jesus…feels…with everything happening day to day how can you be without wanting to scream and throw up and cry all at the same time. True honest, real, objective, tangible holy fucking shit honesty…is terrifying and by that simple combo of babe and be honest I was wrecked.

Be honest about what? I think asked myself. What am I ready to say out loud and make real within the world? What am I not? Why? Who is stopping you but only yourself? Insane how simple the little turn of phrase one and here I am…still blathering on about it. And lastly, “Are our works in the conversation” with no period. This one, as I’m sure many people are feeling on a multitude of levels right now, is the hardest. So much of what I’m experiencing and seeing is a reaction to forces so big and powerful and out of reach right now that to have any real effect, any real notion of changing the tide (can’t believe it’s only day 11, 12?) - or being in the conversation - feels impossible right now. It is though, it is. Say it out loud. It is and I know it is because I am, in my tiny way, putting these words out there like so many other people are to make sense of madness to then become united and so big that we’ll brunt force our way into the conversation until we’re heard.

Technofeudalism, Cloud Capital, and Blind Dates

In Peter McPoland's 2023 song "Digital Silence," he writes:

"Why don't you get it? Can't you get it? Understand

They're gonna execute the mother to elevate the man

They're gonna propagate the killer, eliminate the youth

They're gonna blind date everyone until you love them too"

I couldn’t get that last line out of my head so I looked it up, really confused (I guess I’m that old now) about how he was using “blind date” and who the fuck they even was. The take away: the waning effect of human interaction due to the ever-increasing prevalence of online interactions in our everyday lives. That made sense to me but who, specifically was they?

This then brought me back to Yanis Varoufakis’s work with Technofeudalism and his argument that cloud computing and cloud capital have moved modern day capitalism and us (now digital serfs) back in time into more traditional feudal systems. Mr. Varoufakis compares users of cloud-based platforms (us again) to serfs who were historically bound to the land and subject to the authority of feudal lords to live literally. I hear you saying, "No, not me, not ever," but what is that in your pocket? Did you order from Amazon today? Did you take an Uber last week? When was the last time you posted on Instagram? TikTok? Varoufakis's theory is that instead of landowners, the "lords" are the owners of cloud capital and major technology companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others in the digital age. And just as serfs (us once again) provided labor and resources without direct compensation (posting, liking, commenting, which, if you're on Meta and X, at least is being used to train their AI models), users contribute their data via engagement and interactions to these platforms without direct monetary rewards. Instead, these systems algorithms are finding your preferences via your input, eventually able to subtly shape and direct them so easily in directions “they” choose or “blind date” you/everyone, you end up loving “them too.” Check out Mr. Poland’s song below.

Asmongold and the Age of Cruel Irony

Asmongold, whose real name is Zach Hoyt, is an American Twitch streamer, YouTuber, content creator, and all around public figure, has become, via his time with World of Warcraft (WOW), gaming reviews, and now more than ever, cultural and political commentary, a kind of rusted, unkempt bullhorn for a generation of youngish men that feel the need to have someone comment first so they themselves can feel validated in their rage, whatever it may be. I don’t want to get into him as a public figure too much as it would likely take a whole essay to breakdown how he is reflection of a growing culture that revels and takes pride in filth, speaking “truth” to power (which always ends up just being racist and dehumanizing), and somehow, through all of this (and more), creates a cold, cynical, tragically ironic human being that, being in front of a computer screen and keyboard all day, unsurprisingly doesn’t have an empathetic bone in his body.

The most recent moment I’m getting at is a clip going around is of him and his community enjoying live video of immigrants get deported and wondering, gleefully, if he should dress up as Ash Ketchum from Pokemon and watch deportations for content. This time of tragic irony and indifference/meme-ability of human suffering isn’t new, which makes it both maddening and exhausting. Vox traced this ongoing shift from Keith Gessen's "lit bro" (a satire of pretentious literary men) to figures like Andrew Tate, whose anti-intellectualism thrives in algorithm-driven spaces that literally find and then organize these kinds of feelings and thoughts around a central point that embodies it all (in this case, Asmongold) only to let it gestate and grow stronger through scenes of pain, suffering, conflict, death from…media. Into what, we can likely guess, but Unicorn Riot’s investigations continually reveal how far-right groups exploit irony to groom alienated teens, framing bigotry as edgy humor.

And to put a period on this truth/idea of tragic irony I can’t seem to shake is the fact the DC plane that crashed this week, killing 67 people, which President Trump stated was because of DEI (Trump fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Coast Guard, and disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee about ten days ago) happened near the Ronald Reagan National Airport named after the same President Reagan that fired 11,345 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) on August 5, 1981, and banned them from federal employment.

However mentally fucked the concept of eternal recurrence1 is I couldn’t help but think of this quote from True Detective 1 said by the character of Rust Cohle, “This is a world where nothing is solved. When someone once told me, time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over again. Again.”

Stay safe out there and thank you for reading.