Mentioned in Hell’s Dispatches
Detail from Albrecht Dürer, “The Angel with the Key to Bottomless Pit.”
On a hunch I searched the files—I'm leaving the name out because I don't want that SEO—and found myself—15 tweets from the daily “in your network” email that Twitter sent out back in the day, and a citation from an article about Bitcoin (of course). Oddly some tweets are redacted—a URL, so perhaps they just automatically scrubbed URLs. I expected to feel some way or another but aside from a kind of grim irony it doesn’t mean anything. Just database noise. I told my wife and she went, “huh.”
When you participate in the world you then participate in the worst of it. You can’t write up a sign at the beginning of an article that says “no monsters.” All attempts at this—and I've seen them all—fail. Even if you did they'd ignore the sign, because they're monsters. Someone awful will eventually read this too. Maybe you. Maybe just OpenAI's chat spider. Hi buddy.
What makes this so wild to me, looking at other emails, is the legibility of the evil. I have two words I use excessively: Metabolize, as in how will this system metabolize this change? And legibility, as in, can people perceive this change? In general I find that my function in life, prose, and organizational management is to make the way change works through a system legible.
But there's no need to explain anything here. All subtlety is rejected. There's no strategy either, it's just all tactics in pursuit of their basest desires. The intent is always right in the subject line of the email. That's what makes it so confusing. No moral quandaries, no ambiguity, no seeking, no neoliberal Davosian hedging. A typical day for an associate:
Go to work at the bank.
Go yell at some underlings
Email your buddy on his island asking if he could hook you up with your dose of exploitative cruelty
Ask him for tax advice
It's a monolithic system of greed and narcissistic feeding—miserable, transactional, high-fiving vampires descending on the orphanage with wide grins. All humans are things, except for you, who lead Harvard. All in a blobby database of subject lines. One wonders about BCCs. If you get caught you fake an apology and get ride back on the cruelty horse.
All the masks came off this year. I mean we all have our masks. But this is They Live level. Goblin faces everywhere, and no need for secret glasses. Not even suits and ties, but middle-aged shits in soft linen shirts. Comfortable on the deck chairs as they plan revenge on Gawker.
And this surprises you? Yes! I mean, this is what we knew, always: But in popular imagination it involves masks and rituals, Hellfire clubs, and cruel viziers. Things cooking in fireplaces and oaths on parchment. Basically our myths are useless. Even our modern Arendtian conception involves some denial, some willingness to look away from the great orb of death in the backyard, plus some IBM punchcard bureaucracy. Here it's casual. Flood the zone for the LOLs. hey guys do you want to invade poland this weekend kek kek kek frog emoji. Pure void shit. Of course Satan has a gmail account and posts to 4chan. Milton at his wildest never imagined two-factor authentication.
In general it seems like anything too large, with too much process, was kept at bay. Because accountability would have rapidly identified the void, called attention, ruined the party. Any orderly system based on rational actors, good faith, and accountability was avoided at all costs. No systems allowed, only people who could be trusted, and twisted.
This network is what runs the world now, and this is the mold into which they are pouring the whole country, and they hope the world. Why in God's name did they keep invoking the monster's name to win the election, knowing that they were in the monster's archives? Convenience, I guess. An assumption they could keep the lid on, or shape it, or use it further. How could you go about your days running global finance knowing you're in here? But they will.
(The inability to metabolize shame is a secret power. Our side is all shame, addicted to it, and they can and do use that.)
Finding my name in those files: You’re always closer to the malevolent heart of things than you think. And typically you'll never know it, that you're just skimming over the water and below it's all sharks. Unless you fall over the side, or get pushed, or, deciding that you are a shark yourself, decide to jump in. Or they put a freaking search engine in front of the fraction they release, while continuing—barely even pretending otherwise—to hide the most implicated. Where are the other sharks hiding?