When I was 18 years old, I wanted to found a start-up. Part of my desire was genuine: I've been building web sites since I was a pre-teen, and was fascinated by the process of shaping digital space. Part of it, though, was that I was profoundly miserable. I was unprepared for the transition from high school to college, or for the loss of the hometown peers I'd spent 13 long years slowly getting to know. My sense of who I was, and who I wanted to be, was shattered. I felt a desperate, panicky need to escape my own life—and nothing seemed like more of an escape than tech.

The thing about a digital life is that you can live it in the darkness, from the claustrophobic confinement of a dorm room you're too terrified to leave. The digital world is made up exclusively of signifiers: everything is quantifiable, even the qualitative bits. If you have a head for it, you can tweak and tweak and tweak your approach, gradually fine-tuning your online presence towards some platonic ideal of "successful." What's crazy is, at some point this can very plausibly yield material consequences: you can post so well that venture capitalists will give you millions of dollars for it. Hack the computer hard enough, and it suddenly feels like you're hacking the world.

This is a wretched way to think about the world, so it makes sense that I developed a series of deep resentments for other people I encountered. There was a curious pattern to those resentments: I despised a certain kind of person who was more successful than I was, but I just-as-thoroughly despised a certain kind of person who was much closer to being a failure. Though I couldn't have articulated it at the time, the reason for my resentment was that these two types of people were, in fact, one and the same. What I still can't tell you is how much of that resentment had to do with my fierce hope that I would never be like that kind of person, how much had to do with my worry that I'd have to become that kind of person if I wanted to succeed, and how much had to do with a deep-seated dread at the possibility that I'd been one of them all along.

By the time I graduated college, I had a phrase stuck in my head: crude simulacra. It was the term I'd found to describe the thing I'd come to discover, not just among those aspiring Silicon Valley types, but in virtually every corner of modern culture. I didn't know what to do with the phrase, but at least I had a name for what I saw.

A crude simulacrum is a plausible reproduction of something real. It mimics its attributes, its presentation, its demeanor; it faithfully reproduces what appears to be its substance. But there's nothing there. There's no meaning to its mimicry. Its feints at deeper order are just that: feints. Any purported connection between its pieces is just a shadow of some other meaningful connection that existed elsewhere.

When I read Harry Frankfurter's On Bullshit—which I probably cite more than any other single piece of writing nowadays—it felt like a revelation. Bullshit, according to Frankfurter, is defined by ulterior motive: whatever "it" is doesn't matter, because its only purpose is to fuck with your perception. Bullshit isn't lying. It's not caring about the truth, because the substance of what you say is unimportant. You're only saying it so that people will see you saying it, and think of you as the kind of person who says those kinds of things. How they think of you is what matters. Who you are is utterly irrelevant.

After a year at that college, I transferred to art school instead, where I completed my degree. Art school is a great place to go to find bullshit: every flavor of art has its own pet flavors of fraudulence. Musicians spout one kind of bullshit; poets spout another. The fine arts are rife with so much bullshit that it's often impenetrable to the outside observer. Yet I discovered two things that helped me better understand what the "crude simulacra" I was struggling to understand were made of.

First, I realized that many of the young artists who were spouting bullshit didn't realize they were spouting it. For them, the bullshit was just spackle: a way to fill in space that couldn't otherwise be filled. They'd never encountered a non-bullshit version of what they were spouting; while a few struggled with the frustrating sense that something was missing, many of them were convinced that they were doing precisely what they were supposed to do. It didn't feel insincere to them, because they meant it, for one definition of the word "meant." It was all a kind of glossolalia: what mattered were the sounds of them saying it, and the way in which it was said.

(When Sam Bankman-Fried texts that Western culture just consists of "saying all the right shiboleths," I can immediately picture him as a former classmate of mine. I have no doubt that he thinks of himself as earnest, for all that what he's saying is profoundly cynical. Sincerity and cynicism are not foils for one another: they're frequently one and the same. As Frankfurter concludes, "Sincerity is bullshit.")

Second, I eventually discovered a lot of the "real" things which those artists' bullshit was meant to emulate. And I learned—surprise, surprise!—that while plenty of successful artists are fraudulent or just a little dim, many really do operate from places of personal or political or philosophical meaning. They have aims in mind; their art is an attempt, however successful, to communicate or negotiate a reality that is often treacherously difficult to translate. It has nothing to do with mechanical skill, or with showmanship, or even with the quality of the finished result. It's a matter of where that work is coming from: what, exactly, inspires it, and why someone is trying to dip into that source.

There is a difference, in other words, between something that's successful, or even something that's good, and something that's meaningful. You can try and fail to express something meaningful, and still have something that's better than nothing at all, because you at least were reaching for, and pointing to, something that matters. Conversely, you can do something successfully, and still not have done anything meaningful whatsoever. You can even do something that on many levels qualifies as good, and still have done little more than created a particularly well-crafted piece of kitsch. "Goodness" only means as much as the metric by which you measure it; similarly, "success" meaning nothing other than that, according to one particular lens, something was to some extent effective.

A crude simulacrum presents itself as good. It is often, irritatingly, some kind of successful. People who care only about those definitions of success, and those definitions of good, will take no issue with what they're seeing. It's only troublesome when you look at the simulacrum from a slightly different angle, and realize that even that slight shift seems to make it stop existing altogether.

For a long while, my most-reread book was a satire called Syrup, by Max Barry. Syrup is about a young happy-go-lucky wannabe sociopath—which is to say, an aspiring marketer. Scat, which is what he calls himself, is obsessed with becoming rich and famous; he is virtually incapable of seeing the world through any lens but marketing, because, as he's so fond of saying, "perception is reality." His "character flaw," as he sees it, is that he can't keep himself from being human: he is flawed, emotional, and messy, and never quite capable of hiding that from the world. Yet this inevitably winds up being his saving grace: his genuinely-psychopathic nemesis, Sneaky Pete, projects himself onto the world in a way that Scat never could, but is fundamentally incapable of the spark of excitement that makes all of Scat's work human. He can only capture the slickness of surfaces, never the hidden significances that lurk beneath.

If sincerity doesn't preclude cynicism, the opposite is true too: it is possible to be cynical and genuine at the same time. I loved Syrup because I identified so much with its relentless deconstruction of image and presentation, and enjoyed the bleak way in which it depicted American life as a non-stop series of cons. But I also loved it because, even as it drew the world from that angle, it seemed to argue that none of these systems necessarily denied the possibility of genuine meaning. As Scat navigates the worlds of corporate and executive power, he encounters a lot of people who, in their own ways, are earnest people, living meaningful lives. The C-suite wielders of power can't possibly wield their power responsibly, but they are at least doing their distorted best; the forces of seemingly-soulless bureaucracy sometimes do have souls, they're just bewilderingly stupid. Some people "make it" while remaining basically human; a rare few are successful because of what they're able to express.

Scat thinks of himself as battling for his right to become rich, vapid, and abusive—he more-or-less says so out loud—but those are only the superficial stakes. The real question is whether or not he can achieve what he wants to achieve without forsaking the things that make him worth a damn; while he would sell his own soul with a smile, the fact remains that Scat is just not capable of selling it, so his only hope is to make it without faking it (if you will).

I never had qualms about enterprise or self-promotion or marketing. On some level, I see it all as a kind of exhibitionism, and I was always a fan of hamming it up. To the extent that some amount of that is part of the process of making a living—whether it's resume-polishing or business analysis or finding a way to stand out as an artist—I find it pretty easy to accept as an inevitability, and either have fun with it or at least treat it like it's no less soul-destroying than busywork. It's a part of my personality that I know I'm lucky to have. But I also tend to want to make things which are sprawling, messy, and intricate, and therefore hard to reduce down to some concise package. And if I relate to Scat, it's because I struggle with the tension between those two extremes: my ability to market myself on the one hand, and my inability to compromise on the other.

There are people who I love who are defiantly unmarketable and messy; their meaning is their meaning, and it will wait for you to come to it, or decide it's worth your time. But there are also people who I love that seem to have a natural talent for finding that conduit between themselves and their audience; that they are inherently gifted at selling themselves doesn't make the thing they're selling any less authentic or substantial. Many people, of course, are a mixture of the two, and the way they navigate those tensions is precisely what makes them so fascinating.

Crude simulacra, as I define it, isn't a matter of one winning out over the other: it's not Bill Hicks' insistence that, if you're in marketing, you should kill yourself. (A line which, ironically, always pinged the "crude simulacrum" nerve for me in and of itself.) It consists of a severance, of sorts, between internality and externality, a failure of one to map onto the other. And while it often consists of very popular things with no internal substance whatsoever, crude simulacra can be the opposite too: an interior reality that no longer even tries to express itself in meaningful ways. There are countless examples, in tech and in the arts and in sociopolitical philosophy, of a kind of gatekeeping that manifests itself as utter apathy towards outsiders, mixed with a condemnation of outsiders for the crime of existing outside. That behavior feels of a piece with what I'm trying to describe here. 

The point is not to value the one and not the other—it is to recognize the importance of the relationship between the two. Sever that connection, and all you have left is pretension, in both its populist and elitist varieties.

There's a reason I started all this with an anecdote about Silicon Valley: the phenomenon of crude simulacra is an intensely digital one. Bullshit has always existed; the kind of fraudulence I'm describing here is inherent to capitalism and to humanity in general. But bullshit isn't a rhetorical matter—it's a systemic one, in that it directly involves the manipulation of structures. And the key to some of the worst excesses of our day and age lies in recognizing that, at its core, a computer is a means of systemic reproduction. Jesper Juul likens the computer to the printing press in terms of social revolution; a printing press enabled the reproduction of complex texts, and a computer enables the reproduction of complex systems. The foundation underlying much of our modern blight lies in the recognition that systems can be bullshit too.

Social order is a kind of grammar; it is the structure by which people learn how to articulate themselves. Our eloquences and sophistications, our inadequacies and our apathies, are in part a byproduct of how we are socialized. And while socialization is in many ways intimate and highly individual, the grammars of a society inform what kinds of personal development are likely or even possible.

When I talk about digital culture, I'm not referring to the actual process of people connecting across screens, or even to the lossiness of communicating through abstraction rather than in the richness of physical space. Those are important, but not central. Instead, I'd define digital culture as the permeability of social structures: the ease with which people can design, join, and be absorbed by new social environments. The disconnect from physical space may sever certain kinds of connection, but it allows other kinds to scale extraordinarily rapidly: physical space no longer limits the potential size of a new community, and the ease of digital replication and distribution means that a brand-new social structure could root itself in a million people's lives virtually overnight.

We could talk about the needs of capital to make digital environments as profitable as possible, or about the psychological techniques employed to make those spaces addictive. Even putting that aside, though, the simple fact is that the programmatic nature of digital systems means that patterns of communication must be imposed, to some extent; they are defined by whoever owns and operates the space. Organic communal evolution still happens, but within rigidly-defined structures that are often arbitrary and not well-understood. Rapid expansion makes it likelier that the design of these spaces is crude or ill-considered, particularly because the needs of a given system changes drastically as a community scales. We are not used to thinking of systems as a kind of language; we are even less used to understanding that they are social languages, dictated as much by participants as by mechanical function and process.

We don't fully understand, either, that process drastically impacts our ways of thinking. Consciousness is part pattern recognition; we pick up on rhythms and manners whether or not we realize it. The social structures which we take for granted, often to the point that they become invisible to us, are shaping us in ways that change how we operate within a space. And the hardest part of designing a social environment is that you are designing a cast, a mold into which people are poured. Communities are designed indirectly; the systems we build are influencers on behavior, but the behavior they're shaping is still human, which is to say it's messy and chaotic. And a paradoxical part of that chaos and that mess is that we take to patterns, we mold ourselves around them, and we begin speaking in their language, adjusting our behaviors in order to manipulate the system we belong to. That manipulation isn't necessarily sinister—to manipulate is just to grasp, to interact with a world on its own terms—but its impact on us is real.

What does it mean to be a real person? What does it mean to be sincere? A part of Frankfurter's critique of sincerity is that its pursuit is self-centered and insular—and the real question of "who we are" often lies beyond ourselves. The interesting messiness that's worth a damn happens when we interact with other people, in that strangely ambiguous space that separates us from them. Pursue yourself too much, and you paradoxically get trapped by the confines of whatever space you happen to be in: your world becomes a hall of mirrors, its every facet somehow reflecting yourself. Meaningful self-discovery is only possible through permeability and rupture. It is only when you enter spaces where your prior understanding of yourself no longer suffices, when you must put yourself forth in unfamiliar ways, when you can no longer perfectly predict the outcome of your actions, that you experience yourself in a way that could be called substantial. Everything else is limited, cordoned off. And while limited is not inherently fake, there is a real danger to accepting those limits, or to forgetting that those limits are limits in the first place. Plato's allegory of the cave is not merely about lies and truth: it is about shallowness that we forget is shallow.

The paradox of digital community is that there is permeability between communities, but each individual community is typically severely limited. Most social networks have a particular form at their center; moreover, there are assessments which tell us whether our use of that form was approved of or not. Either of these—the formal restriction or the ever-present validator—can be dangerous. When the two combine, the result can be catastrophic.

At the same time, it is hard to eliminate humanity in all its messiness. Life has a way of growing through the cracks. And as anyone who's interested in any kind of art knows, formalism can be a creative blessing: its limits inspire color and mess, encouraging people to invent new ways of expressing themselves that work within the rules. (That, or they find ways of breaking the rules altogether.)

The bullshittiness of a given system—and its tendency towards crude simulacrum—might be understood as a tension between its form and what that form inspires. That's true of all systems, not just digital ones: you can understand a philosophy by what perspectives it lends itself to, and you can understand a political outlook by looking past its ideals and studying the consequences it generates. This dance between map and territory is somewhat universal: you can see it in Freud's notion of the dueling id and superego. Focus too much on the map, and you wind up repressed; focused too much on the territory, and you wind up unconscious.

What makes digital experience unique, perhaps, is that the two extremes are one and the same, which results in an oblivious id-like obsession with the game. Outcomes are quantifiable; the metric is all that matters. Action has no fundamental meaning beyond its result, and is constantly tweaked and mutated in order to maximize the end result.

This can be understood as a byproduct of computers' system-centric creative method: the more id-like the creation of a community's code, the more the byproduct is a mock-superego fixation on outcome by its participants. But this, of course, is also a reflection of capitalism's fundamentally algorithmic nature—the idea of a "free market" determining what deserves to live or die is essentially a dogmatic adherence to a mostly-thoughtless code, one that assigns a "score" to everything, and encourages us to optimize ourselves and our society to maximize that score. And Silicon Valley's adherence to the bullshit metrics of capitalism means that its apps are "rationally" designed to garner its creators maximum results, meaning that even the careful evolution of its psychologically-ensnaring techniques ultimately obeys the unthinking id of the marketplace.

Is it surprising that the way these app designers have learned to ensnare us is by creating systems which echo the capitalist superstructure that they're trapped within themselves? Or that the influence of venture capital, in which promising new apps are given tens of millions of dollars and asked to find a way to get us hooked, before asking developers to pay off their loans by pursuing profit at all costs, winds up with uncannily-similar stories of user exploitation, as the need to squeeze every possible moment of attention ratchets up?

If we want to understand why social media feels like hell, in other words, or why it feels like culture, mired as it is in social media, is similarly collapsing into a hell-like state, perhaps what we need to understand is: computers' boundless ability to let us invent our own worlds has led to us recreating the world we already lived in, in increasingly exaggerated and parodic ways. It is a world in which nothing but the number matters. A world in which we only deserve to exist inasmuch as the number says we ought to. A world in which the easiest way to "win" that number is by acting, not as we feel like acting, but as the number says we ought to feel—and where the easiest way to do that is by recreating the world we're trapped in yet again, producing a simulation of a simulation, world as a pyramid scheme, nothing but turtles and bullshit all the way down.

These are the crude simulacra. And once you start looking for them, it's shocking how many of them there are.

Here are the successes stories and failures of crude-simulacrum culture, as witnessed by my time in deep-cut Silicon Valley culture.

A successful simulacrum identifies—as marketing classes teach their students to identify—a genuine-seeming need. They create a product, or at least a brand, that promises a solution to a problem, or an answer to a question. This, again, is Advertising 101, maybe even Capitalism 101. Make the thing that people want, and they will give you something in exchange for it. Identify a need, or even create a need, and what you're offering takes on meaning in those people's eyes.

There's nothing inherently unhealthy about this—or at least, this much can be done in healthy ways. But in a crude simulacrum of a world, the key word is seeming: a genuine-seeming need followed by a genuine-seeming solution to a problem. And so many of the needs we think we have amount to an inability to process the obscene amounts of information that we're confronted with. Some of this is simply that we have access to more of the information that was already there: our too-tidy bubble was punctured. Some of it is that we're encouraged to create "information," or at least content, whether that takes the form of posts or Etsy stores or hot takes or start-ups. The end result, though, is that we want some manner of guidance, some sort of navigation, some way of parsing things down.

Some of the solutions we're offered are bullshit from the start. There's 24/7 news, and then there's 24/7 commentary on the news. There are music and film and game reviewers, and then there are review aggregators, trying to provide an authoritative review of the reviews. Many of these are offered in bad faith; some are offered by dimwits who think they can engineer simple solutions to complex problems. But some are intelligent, thoughtful, and considerate—and even that doesn't seem to help. Because the moment an attempt at curation or authority exists, the curation becomes the new system. You no longer have to fool your audience directly: you just have to optimize your product to fool the curators. Cater to their tastes; exploit their biases. They will, in turn, tell their audience exactly what you want that audience to hear—and the more earnestly and skillfully their project started, the more exploitable their audience becomes. Because we are bad at noticing shifts in quality; if a formerly-trustworthy source deteriorates, it's likely that we won't notice.

Silicon Valley prides itself on being flat: its rich and powerful want to feel like they're participating with their entire community as equals. Cynical outsiders might not believe this, but to some extent they mean this in good faith: they want their community to be as open as possible. But this just makes the powerful people in Silicon Valley the specific set of rubes that bullshitters optimize their wares for. The more certain they are that they're objective and unfoolable, the easier they are to fool. And because they hold genuine power—access to capital—their blindnesses have an extraordinary impact on the world around them.

There was a guy I particularly hated who was very, very good at catering to their tastes. Everything he did was slick, "minimalist," "innovative." Bold, thick lines. Products whose sales pitches were "simplifying" things which were already simple. A crude sort of bombast. A lot of mock-"existentialist" content, contending with profound ideas in the shallowest possible ways. You could tell that the list of qualities he sought to reflect with his work was itself an extremely labored-upon and market-tested list. Once you worked on the assumption that everything he did was a clumsy attempt at manipulation, it became clear that everything he did, every facet of everything he ever touched, was the byproduct of some kind of algorithm he'd invented. Everything down to his writing style was mechanically-wrought.

Nothing he ever made gained an audience. I think his biggest and most ambitious attempt at a product launched got maybe twenty or thirty people on board, all of them clout-seekers of the same flavor he was, looking to launch a grift within his grift. His products were, across the board, total failures. But it didn't matter. The right people fell for him hook, line, and sinker; he made off with enough of their money that he never had to work again. A few years after I walked away from that community, I checked in on him and learned that he'd had a nervous breakdown, came to regret everything he'd ever done, and decided to pursue the life of a quiet, humbler, rich man. All in all, not the most toxic possible outcome. But man: when I was young and trying to do something genuine within the same spaces as the garbage he spat out, I could not have hated him more. And what I hated wasn't just the insincerity: it was the realization that what he was doing was far easier than what I was, and that the things which kept tripping me up were precisely the things that would have gotten me no reward whatsoever.

On the other hand, though...

There was a kid. 15 or so. He ran the same kind of hustle, only poorly. He kept "launching start-ups," and even simulated selling them, but nobody cared and nobody bought it. Everything he made was the kind of faux-slick that fails to actually impress. All his big ideas were the kinds of "big" that were too niche to make for successful bullshit—and that mattered, because there clearly weren't any ideas there at all.

I wasn't much older than him at the time, though maybe I was just old enough ("18") that I shouldn't have detested him. But I couldn't help myself. It was so transparent that all he wanted was prestige, all he wanted was money and success, all he wanted was a blog that other people fawned over, a cadre of pathetic fans hoping that he'd throw a few eyeballs (or a few thousand dollars) their way. He didn't have ideas, he didn't have products, he didn't have visions. All that he had was the yearning for validation from a system he wasn't smart enough to manipulate. And when he had his existential panic over this, it wasn't because he felt bad about himself at all—the only existence he was worried about was the one where the number next to his name went up, and it wasn't rising as quickly as he'd like.

Somehow, the failed grift upset me more than the successful one did. Because when the successful guy succeeded, I could at least understand his motivations. It was bullshit, sure, it was a waste of space, it was hours and days and weeks devoted to sucking money out of a system that hypothetically could be offered to something genuinely worth a damn... but hey, he was traveling the world and living out of luxury hotels. Maybe you can live a meaningful life atop a hollow foundation. A part of why I loathed him, I knew, was that I couldn't tell whether I had too much integrity to do what he'd done, or whether I simply wasn't as good at the grift. Maybe, given half a chance, I'd make exactly the choices he'd made, and be happy with the life he pretended to be happy with, at least for a while.

But the failkid... man, he pissed me off. I was, as I mentioned earlier, extremely miserable and depressed that year, so I could calculate just how much time he devoted to his bullshit. He was throwing his life away, and for what? Sacrificing so goddamn much of his time and his brain and his potential to make any other sort of connection, all in exchange for dogshit. And the worst part of it was, dogshit was what he deserved! And he didn't seem to realize that! He didn't seem to realize that there was a difference between him and the more successful bullshitters, let alone between him and the people who were actually producing something of substance in the world. He certainly didn't seem to understand how valuable the things he'd forsaken were.

That year, 2008, was hands-down the worst year of my life. But I still lived my life. I sat out on cafe patios at midnight, flute in hand, improvising alongside a guitar player who lived on my floor. I fell in love; I had my heart broken. I took trips up to NYC, and met people in tech who at the time were heroes of mine (and I met them because they liked what I had to say). I devoured films and albums; I read an unbelievable collection of books and essays. A couple of the classes I took left me with ideas that I'm fascinated with even to this day. And while the things I tried to make that year were bullshittier than I'd like, I still take pride in the fact that a friend and I launched a site that went unexpectedly viral—enough that I still brag about it to this day—and decided, after a wild and heady month, that we'd rather shut it down and focus on making something meaningful than keep it running.

I am generally hopeful, where human nature is concerned. I believe there's hope for almost everybody, even the impossibly hurt and outrageously unaware; I tend to think that society, as a whole, is closer to the kinds of breakthroughs that might radically transform it for the better than it ever seems to be. But some people get trapped in the simulacra, and start living a crude simulacrum of their own lives. They do it even when the simulacrum destroys them; they do it because they can't comprehend there being anything else. They have completely confused the map for the territory, the number for the reality. They can't comprehend that "the world" exists in any non-bullshit way; they can't comprehend that the thing they're desperate for, the thing rending them from the inside out, the thing they're dimly aware that other people have that they do not, is more than just some bit catalogued on some server somewhere. They have lost touch with the fact that anything else could possibly exist.

Another obsession of mine, when I was eighteen, was pick-up artist blogs.

I remember being fascinated with one blogger's claim that attractive men all stood with their toes pointed outward, one knee slightly bent, in a way that made them irresistible to women [citation needed]. I forget his reasoning. And for the sake of my dignity, I need to be clear that I always, at all times, thought that this dude and his claim were utterly bullshit. But for years after I read that post of his, out of a mixture of superstition and insecurity and loneliness, I'd find myself self-consciously adjusting my stance to match his recommendations, especially when I found myself in the company of people I was attracted to.

Pick-up artists (and incels, their gnarly spawn) like to claim that their work is rooted in evolutionary biology. That's bullshit in two levels. Level #1 is that evo-bio is itself some hot garbage—but I think it's pointless to even acknowledge that. Because the deeper layer of bullshit is that I don't think they or their readers care whether or not biology can justify their claims. What they're looking for is a system. They want to reduce sexual interaction to another series of mechanics that they can hack their way though. And the appeal isn't that they believe this system or its explanations—the appeal is that they believe a system could work. The deepest layer of belief is not even that this system is right: it's that they can find an answer if they keep on thinking like this.

Right-wing culture is increasingly modeled after video-game logic. QAnon, it has been noted, is patterned very similarly to the narrative design of video games. Ditto anti-vaxxing and election denialism. Ditto Fox News as an institution. Ditto Alex Jones.

The appeal is always that there is an answer, something that explains where the world went wrong and points to a way back out. And while that phrase, "world went wrong," is without fail mired in reactionary bullshit—violent and hateful thoughts about women, race, sexuality, gender, foreigners, political opponents—there is often, on some level, a (wildly-misinterpreted) emotional truth. People are alienated and lonely. The economy is collapsing. Inequality is increasing. Politicians are failing to help.

The future looks, depending on how you squint, either apocalyptic or merely dismal. And the worst interpretations of all this are conspiratorial and aggrieved and detached from reality altogether, because they are all attempts to reduce the world down to its constituent components. They proclaim grandiose laws; they identify sinister Others; they go on a scavenger hunt for symbols and signifiers, fixating on bizarre codes and obscure events and endless minutiae. The payoff is that you get to believe in whatever order you've subscribed to: you get to think you understand. You have replaced the world as-it-is with a crude simulacrum.

In this simulacrum, the universe is predestined: your enemies are more sinister, their plans farther-reaching, their fates inevitable. Umberto Eco noted that, in fascism, your enemies are simultaneously painted to be terrifyingly powerful and total pushovers in the face of good; it is the inherent contradiction that justifies its horrid excess. It is this simulacrum that holds such allure: it's not that people buy into its logic and therefore agree with its conclusions, it's that they want to believe in its conclusions, and therefore overlook how little its logic makes sense. The promise is always: there is a reason. There is a system. The bullshit is our reality.

It's this kind of just-so "logic" that defines all reactionary philosophy. Corey Robin, in The Reactionary Mind, describes the phenomenon of reactionaries in every era drawing inspiration from the revolutionaries they claim to despise. They borrow their enemies' rhetoric, their vocabulary, even their style, all while envying their energy (and pooh-poohing on the conservative vanguard they're ostensibly sided with). But while revolutionaries derive their language and their energy from their ideas, the reactionary starts with the language and the energy and works backward, reconstructing a "philosophy" that justifies whatever state of affairs already exists. I enjoy my power and privilege; other people are critiquing it. Therefore, I must develop a theory which states that I am correct to have this power and privilege, and that anyone who would threaten it is either the wrong or outright evil.

Sartre once said of Nazis:

In other words, their purported philosophy is a crude simulacrum of philosophy. It claims to be a wellspring from which valid perspectives can be derived, but it is a reaction to the emotions which were already present. It doesn't care about being valid or even about making coherent arguments: all that matters is that those arguments seem valid, and that they reach deeply enough to seem plausible to the other side.

It should not be shocking that reactionaries and con men so often find themselves in the same company. There is a laziness to both, a fraudulence that can be identified, more than anything, by how profoundly concerned it is with "legitimacy." When all that matters to you is appearance, you can devote far more time to it, and it comes far more easily—because you are no longer trying to negotiate between internal and external, ideation and manifestation, and therefore run into fewer obstacles along the way. If you're trying to con people without offering them anything, you don't have to worry about what you're offering. If your only interest in political or philosophical outlook is whether it lets you keep what you have and aspire towards more, you don't have to worry about the legitimacy of opposing worldviews—you only need to muster enough firepower to crush them.

Take that far enough, and the result is genocidal. Whoever doesn't fit into the simulacrum can simply be eradicated. The poor deserve to be extinguished. Anything which defies patriarchal order, anything which contradicts white supremacy, doesn't need to be thought about, except for in the sense that Eco's fascism thinks about things: it must be feared and it must be destroyed. It's only fitting that both must remain true at once: there will always be challenges to the simulacrum, because the simulacrum is crude; those challenges will always be easy to surmount, because if they were not easy, the simulacrum could no longer be believed in.

I mentioned generally being hopeful about the world, and my hope comes from this: while these forces typically acquire power very rapidly, because power is the only outcome they truly believe in, they are also prone to extreme cannibalism, and tend to devour themselves. Both ends of this are direct byproducts of their nature: they are difficult to directly confront, but they are inherently threats to themselves. That which opposes them, meanwhile, is more delicate, more difficult to create, and vulnerable enough that it can genuinely be destroyed... but it is a source of life, of stability, of clarity itself. It does not spring to life easily, but where it exists, there is life—and life, though it is strange and messy and full of suffering, does seem to know how to persist.

I am far more at peace with myself, and with the world, than I was when I was 18. That peace is not because I think the world is any better now than I thought then; if anything, the world has outwardly gotten much worse. The peace has come about, I think, because I understand the simulacra better, and that understanding has brought about...

Well. I want to be careful with my words here, because it's not that I'm "at peace" with it all. I still despise it, sometimes in ways that make me uncontrollably emotional. It still terrifies me. I am frustrated to no end when other people can't seem to tell that the things they're buying into aren't real, just as I am profoundly pained every time I realize that I have bought into a crude simulacrum myself—as happens consistently.

I think that our world is infested with such simulacra—more so, perhaps, with every passing year. I think that these simulacra are incredibly dangerous, not just because they take up space that would otherwise be filled with more meaningful connections, not even because they often go hand-in-hand with ideologies that are incredibly destructive, but because at their core they want to disconnect us from each other and from reality. The crude simulacrum is inherently alienating, because it replaces meaning with "meaning," connection with "connection," value with "value." It erodes solidarity. It is worse than betrayal, in the sense that Frankfurter suggested that bullshit is worse than lies. Lies and betrayal are intentional actions: they inherently respect truth and trust by caring enough to subvert them. Bullshit and simulacra, by contrast, care so little about the notion of truth, or the possibility or trust, that to brush up against them is to wonder whether or not there's reason to care about truth—or to try and trust—at all. The simulacrum is inherently viral: to buy into it is to replicate it, because your belief in it is what lets you perform the acts that perpetuate that belief in others.

Our world is in the state it's in for a few reasons. First, capitalism is reaching its advanced cannibalistic phases, and has begun to feed upon itself. Second, we, in our resultant suffering, are reaching ever-more-frantically for some kind of justification, some kind of system, some kind of "hope"—as opposed to real hope—and are forming and discovering simulacra in the process, easy answers which are both inherently reactionary and echoes of the only crude system that we have ever known. Third, the damage we've wrought upon the world itself has accelerated that panic, spurred some people to seek more desperate justifications for refusing to change a thing, and led others to the kinds of nihilistic doomer thinking that would justify throwing the real world away for the sake of the simulacrum—because if humanity truly is about to vanish altogether, then the only sensible response is to live for the number, for immediate gratification, for what shallow things can be wrung out of being before we cease to be altogether.

But beneath all that, we are undergoing a mammoth technological revolution, one which nobody—especially not people actually "in tech"—understands. It's a revolution, fundamentally, in how we construct systems, and the implications of that are genuinely difficult to grasp. Because, simply put, we have never had power of this magnitude before: not as individuals, and not as a collective. The printing press pales by comparison: computers let us toy with the foundations of our communities, our societies, our civilization as a whole. The current pessimism with the digital age is founded in our rightly acknowledging how badly the last decade-and-a-half of tech has fucked things up, but we're looking at things that happened in one brief fifteen-year window and making the mistake that every generation does, which is that what we're looking at how will be the future writ large. None of us understand how significant the change we're undergoing will be—and I think the abject pessimism is as misguided, in its own way, as Silicon Valley's blind optimism always was.

The one problem with comparing computers to the printing press is that the written word existed long before the press enabled widespread distribution of written material. While the press enabled both Martin Luther's manifestoes and William Shakespeare's plays—both of which were byproducts of the century immediately following the printing press's invention—Luther and Shakespeare were both working from generations' worth of predecessors. Shakespeare borrowed and adapted many existing stories and even plays; Luther was devising his own variant of a religious faith that was 1500 years old. Computers' antecedents, by contrast, are extremely primitive. While on some level "systemic structure" has pervaded humanity from the start, our understanding of it is nowhere near as concrete, or as translatable into digital terms, as the written word was in the 1500s.

But look at the days of early film: the silly whimsical shorts by the Lumière brothers, audiences gasping at a train seemingly coming towards them, or at a man pointing a pistol at them from on-screen. Or look at the cultural panic that followed rock n' roll, as society seemingly changed overnight. More importantly, look at how simple these revolutionary forces seem in retrospect: how crude early rock seems, how tacky early films look to the modern eye. These were mediums being probed, for the very first time, by people who didn't know a thing about how they worked. Over time, most people have stopped thinking of them as anything more than historical curiosities, in part because they seem crude—not bullshit, exactly, but certainly a lot bullshittier than the things we think hold value today. They couldn't help but seem artificial and coarse by comparison: nobody knew any better at the time.

Computers are like that, but far more powerful—powerful enough that it would be hard to comprehend how much more powerful they are. They have proven themselves able to rewrite entire industries overnight—but that, arguably, is just a tremor of their real power, rather than a glimpse of the power itself. They have accelerated the dystopian capitalist society we're in, but I suspect that that too is just a hint of what they're capable of, and not a full demonstration.

At the same time, most of the technobabble that comes out of Silicon Valley—the obsession with AI, with transhumanism—needs to be understood as an inherently reactionary interpretation of what's happening. People with power are looking at what's unfolding, and, as ever, coming up with a retroactive interpretation that justifies the state that things are already in. Caring about the present is less ethical than caring about the future. The computers, not the rich, are the real danger. It's pointless to worry about the Earth when Mars is in sight. It's pointless to care about the human race, when we are just the next step on the evolutionary ladder.

What's really happening is that we are being given the chance to create new kinds of society. We have the tools to rebuild the underlying frameworks that make our world work. We can construct systems of such elegance that they've have been unthinkable a decade ago, let alone five decades ago. A vast interconnection is taking place, not in terms of Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, but in terms of the underlying machinery which is gradually shaping up—machinery which itself is so sophisticated that systems only twenty years old now seem frustratingly ancient. That interconnection is only meaningful in and of itself because it enables other forms of connection to be built on top of it. We don't understand the significance of that, because we've never seen those other kinds of connection done well. Our tech magnates are shithead versions of the Lumière brothers, and they're desperate to convince us that they're Orson Welles.

(This is, to be clear, a deeply hurtful and unfair thing to say about the Lumières.)

The early optimism of the computer pioneers has reasonably taken a blow as capitalism and finance have devoured that world whole, but there's a reason there was such blinding optimism in the first place. The reactionaries have repurposed that optimism and formed crude-simulacrum versions of it that tout the glories of capital and tyranny, but the source of the original optimism was that the systemic distribution which computers enable is extraordinarily exciting—was then, and still is now.

The possibility to exchange, not just ideas, but intricate systems, and to collaborate on them, constructing vast worlds together, is not just revolutionary in theory. Without the open-source movement, without literally millions of individuals working together on projects literally vaster than the Seven Wonders of the World put together, the world as we know it couldn't exist. The most exciting digital work is shockingly organic, an ongoing evolution aided by a hundred thousand hands at once. It is a kind of creation, a kind of organization, that has never been possible in history. And for all that the attention lands on the most corporate iterations of this, for reasons that are themselves reactionary in nature, the fact remains that corporate control of this stack is the tip of the iceberg. (The big tech corps know this themselves: Google, Facebook, and Apple fund an insane amount of open-source work, because they all know that they could not possible maintain their own code without a vast foundation of open material to build upon.)

We don't know what this starts to look like as it grows beyond the venture silos. We know that it will grow beyond them, because it is growing beyond them, because no company in existence has worked out a way to contain what's being made (and none ever will). We don't know the first thing about how to make communities out of this, because we've never been able to approach community-making as if it were an art form before, one to be studied and practiced and shared and innovated upon. So much is new.

But we are all feeling that alienation, that distrust, that sense that the world as we've been taught it is fundamentally unreal. And while many of us are turning out to the same old tired shibboleths, the same violent closed-mindedness, the same attempts to perpetuate a false reality even as it eats itself, and us, alive, many of us are responding to it by pursuing new kinds of meaning. By turning, not towards systems, but towards desystemization, whether it's queer theory or anarchism or an empowerment of labor and the disenfranchised.

It is easier to bullshit than it is to articulate a truth. But the truth lasts. And that's not because debate works (it doesn't) or because reactionary forces will go quietly (they won't). Ironically, I think that reality will pervade over the simulacra because people are apathetic: they want some kind of answer, but they don't really care what the answer is. It takes a lot longer to find the real answer, but the real answer has a way of sticking around. Because it's the one answer that won't devour itself whole. 

Mathematicians all seem to agree that the only true proof of a theory is its elegance. Eventually, when an idea is understood, it takes on its most elegant possible form. Before then, you get ugly fumbles towards a truth, and you get seeming elegances which don't hold up, but neither of those is an obstacle, exactly, to the elegant truth. Because the truth exists before we know how to see it—and once it's glimpsed, there's no longer any reason to look away.

That kind of rhetoric is used to justify a thousand different systems of thought: philosophies, religions, rules of etiquette, artistic theories. Many of the systems it props up are bullshit; the rhetoric sounds nice, and therefore we decide that whatever it's used to support must be nice too. You could draw the conclusion that that rhetoric is always bullshit... but with mathematics, it inherently isn't. There is an unwavering truth, and then there is that truth's expression—and the more elegant the expression, the longer it endures. It's not something you can disbelieve, because its abstractions are simultaneously purely symbolic and absolutely concrete.

That's how my favorite mystics feel about their respective faiths, and it's how I've come to feel about the world. It's not my pragmatic feeling: on a day-to-day level, I try to think a lot about technology, and community, and connection, and capitalism, and heterosexual masculinity (the last category of which I was assigned to mostly against my will). I try to look for the connections, the meanings, that might bring things together for other people. Sometimes I let myself have the pipe-dream hope that my work might result in significant material change to the world; sometimes I let myself be grateful to the changes I can bring to the community I have around me; sometimes I feel more isolated, and have to let myself believe that whatever I do today, however futile or pointless it might feel, might lead to something better tomorrow. But beneath all that, I think, there lies a sense that reality is worth a damn, that meaning isn't just bullshit, that solidarity and connection alone will be enough to save us.

Because one thing is indisputably true: I was most bothered by—and most obsessed with—these crude simulacra when my life felt emptiest. The fuller my life has become, the more the crudeness and fakeness of the the crude, fake things just don't affect me the same way. That seems true of everyone I know: the more alone they are, the more readily they buy into the bullshit, and the likelier they are to resort to desperate, destructive means to try and close the gap that's in their lives. That's true of the rich and the poor, the privileged and the unprivileged—and every category of person I know includes people whose lives are empty and people whose lives are full.

The one thing that I feel confident helps other people is this: Give them something meaningful. Give them something real. That is never bullshit. It is the escape from the simulacrum. And the littlest shred of it, the tiniest seed, has a way of growing and growing and growing.

I don't know how to reach the people who have the most to gain from their own bullshit, the people who most fear losing what they have. I don't know how to dismantle the biggest and worst systems, not all at once. I don't know how to find the people who are the most lost in simulation, and the likeliest to lash out against others, because they've forgotten that other people are, despite all contrary evidence, real.

But not having the answers to those questions doesn't keep me up at night. Because caring too much about answers, and too little about the questions, leads to bullshit. I don't want a simulation of an answer: I want the kind of answer that grows bit by bit, the one whose every piece feels like an extension of the last, until all at once it seems so elegant and obvious that we can't believe we didn't see it before, and abruptly forget that there was a time when we didn't take the answer for granted.

What I do believe—and what I hope isn't bullshit—is that it's never been easier to reach for those answers than it is now. Even if we've maybe never needed those answers as direly as we do these days. And what I hope—though this may be bullshit too—is that, in ways either big or little, I might not find those answers, but still help make those answers easier for others to find. In a sense, everything real that I've found, everything real that I know, has served as an extension of that pursuit.