Yes, I know you got the Range Rover or the lawn sign and matching flags, but say it ain’t so bro that this is how simple we are.
Sorry to inform my present self, but it is true. Aside from not getting carded as much, my hair is possibly thinning (not balding), and who knows what else is going. I am getting older and, hopefully, wiser. With all of that finally coming to a realization decades later, I have also realized us humans are basic AF. So basic that if I do not speak or write in an academic tone, it means I’m an idiot, but I solved that problem because I am wearing a suit as I write this, with suspenders, and I just adjusted my monocle before continuing to write.
I first started to realize this in the early 2000s in the form of “office politics.” Over time, I figured out that just means dealing with everyone’s varying levels of ability and personality. Yeah, that is what it is. But it also showed me that people are generally split into two camps. First, you have the regurgitators: “This is what I did at my old job, so now that I am here, I am just doing it here,” the worker drone bees. Then you have the adapters: the ones who realize they are in a completely new environment, so they shut up, listen, learn, and adapt. The drones make up the 80 to 90 percentile, while adapters are what you call “management material.” How I learned that, I lay out in detail in my manuscript from a gig at Chevron headquarters in San Ramon, California, to other early dotcom roles prior to the bust.
As time went by, that same dynamic spilled out everywhere, like a poorly wrapped burrito, especially as politics heated up, like a gas station burrito in a microwave. I do not announce my political affiliation, put flags or emojis in my bio, or change my profile picture to fit the latest hip cause. Yet when I posted an amusing clip, say with Snoop Dogg as the guest (come on, who is going to hate on Snoop), or any other news item about various public figures, it did not matter who that person actually was. It only mattered what people perceived them to be. All surface-level judgment.
Suddenly, the self-righteous freedom fighters and social justice warriors throw on their war paint because somehow their surface-level judgments override any opposing views, especially mine. They spend more energy harassing me with snide texts and moral judgments than they ever spent researching the actual side they claim to fight for, and it is something I never do to any of them. In fact, I agreed with them and chatted on numerous issues that we agreed on. Unfortunately, it got so ridiculous that I had to block two people over a clip of a podcaster whose entire message is just being nice, avoiding fights (his advice to David Choe on the podcast when Choe and his dad dealt with a racist dude doing the slanty Asian eye thing), and staying open-minded enough to talk to everyone. Besides, he owns a golden retriever; a**holes don’t own retrievers. This is a guy whom minority comedians like Ms. Pat (she Black, if you didn’t know) openly praise for opening doors and changing their lives, with everyone having good things to say about him except Carlos Mencia, cuz nobody gets a pass for stealing jokes. Yet because he refuses to bow to tribal orthodoxy, people lose their burrito fillings. Imagine judging someone not by the content of their character, but by stereotyping and prejudging them.
43770, or “hello” in pager speak: none of this behavior surprises me based on what came before. I learned way back in the late 1990s on AsianAvenue (1997) and BlackPlanet (1999) that people always expect you to choose a team: “Come on bro, you have to pick a side,” from the community chat rooms to the message boards.
For the record, no, you do not. Taking a side with blind, unwavering conviction just means you stopped thinking independently and fell headfirst into groupthink. It is the easy button in life, and I look at it through the lens of shopper marketing: you attach yourself to whatever brand looks good at eye level (like Goya pinto beans), and if the packaging flatters your self-image and is positioned at eye level (vs. the products at the bottom), you buy it and make it your identity. Now that you have chosen a side, you can commit to believing you are on the right side of history, and you’re the good guy, both of which lack humility, but oh well.
Before anyone says, “Buuuut you’re all about Murica,” look, I pledged allegiance to the flag back in elementary school. I’m Team America. But as every adult should know, loving your country does not mean you have to blindly agree with or condone every single thing your government does.
Fast forward through years of eating, drinking, kayaking, biking, hiking, and snoo snoo. In 2018, after waiting a year and a half, we finally got to watch Season 2 of Westworld, a sci-fi show about a high-tech theme park where wealthy guests indulge their darkest desires with lifelike androids. The show had become, at the time, the most-watched debut season of any original series in HBO history. I was hooked because I love sci-fi, and I am obsessed with where we are headed as a society, a country, a civilization, and as a species as a whole.
In the season finale (“The Passenger”), Bernard and Dolores enter the Forge, the secret facility housing decades of surveillance on every park guest. Inside the simulation, it manifests as an endless library where every human mind is cataloged in a physical, hardbound book, rendered as punch-card paper rolls resembling player-piano sheet music. The system avatar, manifested as Logan Delos, explains the big discovery:
“The copies didn’t fail because they were too simple, but because they were too complicated. The truth is that a human is just a brief algorithm. Ten thousand, two hundred forty-seven lines. They are deceptively simple. Once you know them, their behavior is quite predictable.”
– Logan Delos, Westworld
_
Yeah, we are simpletons.
At first, I was like, “psssssshhhh, that’s other people, not me.” Then again, my X profile description simply says “I like crab.” I also tend to buy and wear duplicate outfits just so I do not have to waste brainpower deciding what to put on. So maybe the writers were not unfairly crapping on us water sacks after all, and I put the “we“ in simpletons.
In shows like Westworld, and in observing online discourse, I am less interested in which approved answer gets stored and repeated than in whether the process of looking is still allowed to finish. The short algorithm is efficient exactly because it lets you skip that process, the easy button.
When the Tea Party and populist frustration started threatening to hold the powers that be accountable, the political class, or what I call “the powers that be,” panicked and exploited that exact algorithmic shortcut (it’s basically an open-source approach). They realized they could not afford to let everyday people unite against them, unless they put out bangers like Do You Hear the People Sing. So they reached for the oldest trick in the book: panem et circenses, bread and circuses. Even the politicians are just regurgitators running an ancient survival play. They manufactured wedge issues, pushed divide-and-conquer strategies, and told everyone to fight amongst yourselves while both parties toasted in the back room. And because humans are predictable algorithms, it worked like a charm.
After consuming copious amounts of sci-fi, anime, Alberto’s at 2 to 3 a.m., podcasts, and history, the pattern became undeniable. Modern human posturing boils down to proving two things:
1. “I am smarter and more successful than you.”
This peak profile means you did well financially, drive the Range Rover, drop “thus” into casual debates, and often wear a bowtie with suspenders. Online, intelligence is treated like a contest to see who can flex on the masses, but most people confuse ego-flexing with actually parsing the whole board.
Mention Japan and China, and someone will instantly drop: “Do you know what Japan did to China?” They regurgitate that single 1945 talking point to feel smart, yet they have zero clue that post-WWII Japan became China’s largest provider of bilateral foreign aid (ODA) and helped build out the industrial infrastructure behind China’s modern manufacturing boom through direct investment. Nor do they mention that post-WWII China killed an estimated 40 to 80 million (and by some counts up to 85 million) of its own people under Mao, or that modern China has engaged in aggressive regional imperialism and massive global environmental destruction. A regurgitator drops one safe brick of approved trivia to look superior; an adapter looks at the entire eighty-year board.
2. “I am more virtuous than you.”
The epitome of this profile is the lawn sign, chanting something that rhymes, or the protest shot by an MSM photog in front of a giant crowd with the lower half of your face covered and your fist raised in the air. This moral supremacist operates on pure arrogance, convinced that every minority is helpless, cannot get an ID, and cannot make it in the world without their benevolent White savior intervention.
That moral supremacy does not stop at home; it hits the road and goes global, spirit fingers. American and Western consensus arrogance takes its own domestic history as a young nation built on immigration and projects that template onto the rest of the planet, because if you are in a country where ethnic identity is reduced to a color code and flattening culture is treated as diversity, what do you expect? Culture is reduced to gender identity and sexual preference.
Look at Japan, an island nation that is roughly 97 percent ethnically Japanese. Why does a country not built on immigrants have to operate like the United States? Cuz there is a segment of the US that is pushing their moral supremacy, so when Sanae Takaichi and her supporters focus on preserving their own culture and social cohesion, the US media immediately slaps on lazy Western labels and brands them “right-wing,” “xenophobic,” and “racist.” It is arrogant provincialism pretending to be enlightenment, so un-Buddha-like, bro.
I had to write this down because it is the entire premise for how and why I write.
I grew up with a habitual liar. This person would look you mindlessly in the eye and lie to your face, even if you had video proof of them saying the exact opposite. They would gaslight you and say, “I didn’t say that, you said that.” If you got upset, they blamed you for getting upset, then the pièce de résistance: “If you’re so smart, just ignore what I say.” They never take an ounce of responsibility. Who does that remind you of today? It is everywhere in the mainstream.
When I look at the mainstream media today, I see that exact same pathology. They lie, and they do not care about the truth, because when you believe you are morally superior, you feel entitled to “bend the truth.” In their minds, everyone around them is an idiot, so it is up to them to shape our minds. I do not agree with that and it is arrogant as hell. Worse, most corporate AI models are trained right on top of that mainstream media ecosystem, built to reinforce institutional consensus and protect corporate stock tickers rather than seek the actual truth, with the possible exception of Grok, though even its dataset uses the content from mainstream media.
Seeing that there were no adults in the room is why I started writing.
At the same time, I know damn well that I do not know chit. What I did learn at one point, I probably forgot and have to relearn. I am the last person to claim I am some arbiter of absolute knowledge, and in fact, aside from math, there are no absolutes in our subjective world. I have spent time around truly smart people, like my sister and her friends, or like a Stanford physics grad who built laser interferometers, where I had so little clue what was being discussed that I felt like a husky just sitting there panting with its tongue out, waiting for someone to feed me.
Because of that, my approach is simple: I put up the facts and dots that support what I am thinking. If we both look at the full picture and arrive at the same conclusion, maybe I am onto something. If we arrive at different conclusions, it is probably because I failed to present it clearly, or because I am flat-out wrong or misguided. I have zero problem admitting that or apologizing. Looking outwardly foolish does not bother me; well, it does, but I don’t plan on being a fool4life.
What bothers me is watching a society of 10,247-line simpletons sleepwalk into the future. AI, robotics, AGI, and superintelligence are right around the corner, and they are arriving much faster than people realize. If human beings insist on acting like pre-programmed regurgitators who only repeat pre-packaged scripts, machines will replace them without breaking a sweat of fluorinated dielectric coolant.
Instead of letting ideas sit on the back burner and simmer into something fully baked, everyone today demands an instant conclusion. Every headline has to be immediately filed into a neat little box: “That’s a psyop,” “They’re dumb,” “That’s AI,” or “I’m on the right side of history.” It is the same compulsion you see with Schrödinger’s cat. People feel required to declare whether the cat is dead or alive before the box is even opened. Determining the state in advance is treated as the point. Constantly thinking you have to arrive at an answer right now is just silly, and the comments section isn’t mandatory. That demand to close the interval before the looking is finished is the short algorithm doing what it was built to do.
Uncertainty and the inconclusive are states of mind that far more of us need to get comfortable with. Regurgitators rely on cached memory: they pull an approved script from storage, play it back cleanly, and close the file. I have the worst memory when it comes to rote recollection. I cannot store a pre-packaged answer and replay it on command. Because of that, I am forced to re-derive answers from first principles using the actual dots right in front of me. That keeps the interval open whether I want it to or not.
Consider the quantum physics hypothesis that time is not linear: that everything that can happen has already happened, and superposition is not determined until it is observed. If consciousness can actually nudge a random number generator, as Hal Puthoff’s studies and similar experiments suggest, then reality is not just a passive movie we watch. It is our consciousness digesting and realizing what it already manifested outside of linear time. None of us know if that holds. I am just going down a path. Science itself proceeds by keeping the question open until observation occurs. Any method which demands the box be chosen before the looking is finished has already abandoned the knowing process.
Looked at that way, maybe having a bad memory is the whole point. Like a creator who forgot they designed the game just so they could experience it firsthand (I used to Yelp because I wanted a written record of places I ate at), I am here to live it and present it. You can waste that experience trapped in an unthinking loop, or you can play the cards you are dealt like Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful, using your consciousness and humor to shape the meaning of the ride.
Right now, from where I sit observing, AI and the powers that be are flattening culture, especially when it downplays the use of lard when cooking, particularly with frijoles. Artificial intelligence cannot comprehend or value culture, and institutional power sees no utility in it beyond control. In that environment, Dolores choosing to see the beauty in Westworld ceases to be an abstract sci-fi reference. It becomes an active refusal to let culture get flattened into a mechanical loop. Even after seeing how ugly and basic the code can be, I choose to see the beauty no matter how dire. I want to help shape our culture for the better. Maybe at my age, a half century later, I have not achieved it yet in linear time, or maybe I already manifested it and I am just catching up to realizing I had a say in the reality I chose to live in all along.
The ending and the beginning exist together, which is why the ideas in this piece can be read backwards or in reverse order, leading from the realization at the end right back to the question at the beginning.
This is why I write, what I think is broken about how people process the world, and what I believe is worth preserving as AI becomes more powerful.
