There are several old, personal events that I’ve been rotating in my head for a very long time. I’m finally writing about them because I’ve just had the staggering realization that they all form _one_ singular story. In some cases I’d never made the connection; in other cases I just plain forgot that things which happened within _hours_ of each other were related. This isn’t pleasant to write, and it won’t be pleasant to read. But I need it out of me. I might have some of the details wrong, since I’m piecing together fragments from decades ago. This is a story, not a documentary. It’s about me, no one else. **content warning:** underage sex; the active pursuit thereof by adults; bestiality mention. ## I am five years old My family moves from the UK (where my mother is from) to an American military base elsewhere (as my father is in the US military). In the switch from the UK to US school system, my parents push to have me put in second grade, on the grounds that I’ve been absorbing basically anything I’ve been exposed to since I was old enough to walk, and I’d be bored to tears in kindergarten. This puts me two grades ahead for my age, which makes me two years younger than everyone around me, which will remain the case until I graduate from high school. I’m still quicker on the uptake than most everyone in my grade, and later get shifted a _third_ year ahead in math. I never have school-age peers. This is normal. ## I am eleven years old I’m a picky eater. A lot of foods actively repulse me. My mother keeps making them for dinner anyway. I do my best to eat around them. Once she makes a quiche, and the taste of the cheddar makes me instantly want to vomit, so I can’t eat any of it. My father insists I sit at the table until I’m finished. I try a few bites but can’t bear it at all. I sit there for an hour, alone, before he gives up and lets me slink away. * * * I like computers. I don’t know much I can do with them besides toodle around in QBasic, but being able to write out instructions and have a _thing_ happen feels like magic to me. I’m enamored. I’ll stay enamored for the rest of my life. I’m dimly aware that Windows and Office are also software, but they seem too incomprehensibly vast and complex to have been _made_ , let alone made by fundamentally the same process I’m engaging in when I draw circles on the screen. I don’t consciously think about this, merely take for granted that they emerged fully-formed from a Company, which is somehow a different sort of entity from a person. I think the Internet sounds cool but I don’t really know what there is to do on it besides download utilities I don’t need or read about The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team! easter egg, which I only ever get to work once. I also find out that you can trick MS Paint into taking a screenshot of its own help window, which is cool because I don’t know how to take actual screenshots. That means I can make fake UIs, which is cool because I don’t know how to make real UIs, and I don’t know how to draw, either. Art, too, seems like some kind of foreign magic. I’m really into Animorphs. I want to turn into a red-tailed hawk like Tobias and just fly away. I’m starting to do less well in school, and feel a budding hostility coming from my parents over it. I don’t have a lot of friends, don’t really have a sense of how to make them, and don’t think about it much. I feel a little out of place everywhere, but I always have, so it’s normal to me. I hear about book 16, The Warning. It’s the one with Jake morphing into a rhino on the cover. I haven’t read it yet, but as I understand it, the plot centers around one of the protagonists typing “yeerk” or something into a search engine and finding exactly one result, which they then go investigate. I think about this. I know about the Internet and search engines. But obviously, I think, entering “Yeerk” wouldn’t find anything, because Yeerks aren’t real. I try it anyway, just to see. I’m stunned to discover the world of fansites. One of them has a forum and even a chat room attached. I join both and am stunned once more to discover that the Internet has other people on it, just hanging out. The other people are all teenagers, a little older than me, but I’m used to that. Half of them also have overbearing parents, and we bond over bitching about them. I can be kind of weird and awkward here and it’s fine. I’m really happy about having found this little sanctuary, and I start spending a lot more time online. ## I am twelve or thirteen years old I’m in ninth grade. My parents have put me in a private school, and it is fucking miserable. Homework is so tedious it feels akin to torture, so I just don’t do it, so my grades drop, so I get endlessly scolded and told I’m a disappointment. Chores, too, are agonizingly boring, and my mother regularly screams at me for not doing the dishes. None of the adults in my life — not parents, not teachers, not other school staff — suspect I have ADHD, perhaps because I’m smart and quiet, and I will eventually work it out myself some years later. Everyone else seems to believe _their_ lecture will be the one to finally inspire me. My parents, who had once fought to save me from boredom, don’t recognize it happening in front of them. I’m miserable at home from all the screaming, which makes me even more reclusive and less interested in school, which makes my grades all the more mediocre, which makes my parents yell more, which makes me more miserable. Perhaps luckily, I don’t draw any conscious conclusions from any of this. I have no sense of how other people experience the world, and I haven’t really thought about, say, whether homework is easy for _other_ people. I don’t even understand that I’m struggling, because I have nothing to compare it to. I don’t remember being a little kid very clearly, so as far as I can tell, it’s just always been like this. This is normal. I have a little breakdown once and yell back at my mother, trying to convey… why I’m unhappy, without fully understanding it myself. She stands there, stunned. My father storms into the room, grabs me by my shirt collar, drags me upstairs to my bedroom, and throws me into it. He gets a utility knife and cuts through several random cables on my computer, then leaves without a word. One of the cut cables is my keyboard, so to use my computer, I have to steal the keyboard from _his_ computer and be sure to return it before he gets home and notices. Otherwise I would be completely isolated. I learn a valuable lesson. Adults will hurt me, and this is normal. I hurt quite often, but I can’t do anything about it, and if I try, adults will hurt me more, so I just sit with it. Sometimes I used to cry, but then my mother would hear and come tell me (in a caring voice) not to, because I’d give myself a headache. I took that to mean I just shouldn’t, so I’ve stopped. My parents will later try to send me to a therapist a couple times — the problem is of course with me, not them, never them. I confide the encounter with my father, which makes it through some unseen grapevine, and I end up having to talk to some sort of military-HR person about it. Fearing that I might get put into the foster system and things will somehow end up worse, I lie that I had it coming. I hate lying, but I’ve learned that I have to lie to adults sometimes, so they won’t hurt me as much. It isn’t mentioned again. My parents never say a word to me about it… until over a decade later, when my mother will tell me that I was physically imposing and physically threatened her. I will have no idea what she’s talking about — until that moment, the thought of attacking her in some way never crosses my mind. I’ll also be a late bloomer, insofar as I’ll bloom at all, and one of the few strong images I’ll remember from that day will be my mother _looking down_ at me. But she will remain absolutely convinced that I was a threat, and that is why my father took the therefore-fully-justified actions he did, and I will be unable to disabuse her of this notion up through the end of her life. One day, many years later, she will die of cancer, having never believed me about my own motivations. She will also, in the same conversation, chide me for not doing the dishes. I will be almost thirty years old. ## I am fourteen years old I’m in tenth grade, taking AP calculus. I’m good at it, but the homework is still mindnumbing. I try to coast through my own life, attracting as little attention as possible from the adults around me who have the power to hurt me. I’m not fully successful. But when I’m hurt, it’s normal. * * * I’m still online a lot. I’ve gotten into doing, well, “web stuff”. It started out with posting little JavaScript snippets onto a small forum that doesn’t strip it out, or using a lot of `<font>` tags to make rainbow text. I’ve also gotten into Pokémon, and I feel a strong affection for tables and lists, so I start to make a Pokédex website. I don’t really know what I’m doing, and much of the effort comes from painstakingly retyping information from strategy guides or just other people’s websites, a process my future self will find comically rudimentary in hindsight. But it still feels like magic, and now I can share it with other people, too. I don’t know if anyone uses my website, but I’m delighted to have made it. I’ve also hit puberty — several grades after everyone else, which has been a little awkward — and am starting to hear about this “sex” thing. It sounds pretty interesting. I end up combining my interests and joining an IRC channel dedicated to Pokémon porn. I’m probably the youngest person here, but no one cares, and I have no sense that there’s any reason anyone _would_ care. There are some older teenagers here, as well as some adults, ranging all the way up to one 40-year-old — but he’s a completely regular cheerful guy who just genuinely enjoys writing fics about Sabrina having sex with an Alakazam or whatever. But there’s also a guy who makes the occasional comment about “little girls”. There are at least one or two people who casually mention they have regular sex with their dogs. No one bats an eye at this, so I don’t, either. I have no basis for comparison, because I am fourteen years old. Maybe this is normal. Everyone else acts like it’s normal. It must be normal. Sometimes people try to have cybersex with me. I’m not very good at it. I don’t really know anything about sex, but I start to pick it up from how other people describe it. It’s fun to write about this thing I’ve never done, this activity so mysterious that it almost feels like it must itself be fictional. It feels like it only exists in a bubble, completely detached from normal life. * * * Offline, I still barely know anyone. I’ve sort of gravitated to a couple other nerds at school, but outside of the fact that we are all vaguely aware how to make a website, we don’t have a lot in common. One of them is just kind of mean, even. This is normal. I’m two years into high school and just barely hitting the age when most people are starting it. I live in Hawai‘i at the moment, and almost everyone else has lived here their whole lives, but I’ve never even been to the same school for more than two years. I find out about a little old-school website where furries can enter their location and find other furries nearby. I put in my zip code. Nobody else, it seems, lives in Hawai‘i. ## I am still fourteen years old We move, for the fourth time in my life, this time to the US mainland. I update my zip code on the furry location website. Still nothing. But then, out of nowhere, I get a message from someone I don’t know, who I’ll call 🐨. He’s eighteen, four years older than me, but that’s normal. He says he used to live in my town and he’s passing through for just a day or two, and would I like to meet up? I’m fucking ecstatic and say yes. My mother drives me to where he’s staying. It has that 1970s wood panelling everywhere, which I might be seeing for the first time. It ultimately leaves me with a strange, otherworldly impression. We talk a bit, and then he clearly wants to have sex. This hadn’t come up in our brief conversations beforehand. He seems surprised, but unswayed, that I haven’t had sex before. I don’t see any reason to turn him down — sex is supposed to be The Best Thing, after all. We fool around some. It’s… fine. I don’t really like how he touches me. But hurting is normal, and this barely hurts at all, so I don’t say anything. I don’t even know how to say anything. People don’t show much interest in what I want. If anything, what I want seems to be an inconvenience to everyone else. So I don’t say anything. It’s fine. This is normal. Things peter out. I go home. I’m no longer a virgin. It seems like something should be different. But nothing is. I don’t really think about it. I try to keep in touch with 🐨, but he isn’t around much. He’s part of a little group of furries who all live in the same town and know each other, though, and they start to reach out, and I talk to some of them. ## I am sixteen years old [Hello, future Eevee here. Just letting you know, this is your last chance to back out. –ev] I’ve just graduated high school. I’m so close to being away from my parents, to living on a college campus in a distant state. It’s exhilarating, but also terrifying, because I don’t really know how to live on my own. I’ve never done laundry or bought my own food. I don’t have a car or much money. I don’t really know how to do anything, other than make websites that look like they were made by a sixteen-year-old. Over the past couple years, a number of guys have shown sexual interest in me. Almost all of them have been eighteen or older. I’ve met some of them at furry conventions and had sex with them. I didn’t really like any of it. But I’m desperately starved for affection and still assume the problem is with me, so I keep taking any opportunity I’m given. Maybe the next time will be better? I don’t know what else to do, so I keep doing what I’m doing. I’m sufficiently self-aware of this inner turmoil to post about it. The only relevant comment I get is from someone I do not know and never otherwise speak to. > There is absolutely nothing wrong with giving it up for whoever wants it, especially at your age! I am sixteen years old. This is normal. It can only be normal. No one else thinks anything of it, so I don’t either. I attend another furry convention not long before I’m to move into a college dorm. My family’s situation is a little complicated at the moment — the house has been sold, my mother is in an apartment in our old town, my father is in an apartment in the new town, I’m off to a convention, and somehow this is all intended to coalesce later. I have two sexual encounters that have… _ramifications_. * * * One is with 🐯, who I met somehow-or-other through 🐨’s group, despite not being local to them. [I have no memory whatsoever of how we met, why we started talking, or what we talked about. –ev] He is twenty-six years old, a full decade my elder. He is openly interested in me because I’m underage. This is normal. After all, I _am_ underage, and most of the people capable of travel are adults, so anyone who would have sex with me would at the very least have to find it _acceptable_ that I’m underage. We meet up at this con. He has sex with me. As usual, I don’t really know why I’m participating. It’s the worst sex I will ever have in my life, deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable. I spend every single moment of it desperately wishing for it to be over, but I don’t know how to ask him to stop. I expect people to hurt me if I push back against what they want from me, but I’m not even cognizant of this — I see myself as just wanting to make people happy. Eventually I can’t take it any more and, in a flash of inspiration, offer to fellate him instead. I don’t really care for that, either, but it’s much less bad. He gets me to promise I won’t tell anyone. I’m vaguely aware that this is the sort of thing he shouldn’t be doing, and I don’t want anyone in trouble on _my_ behalf, so I agree. * * * There’s also 🐸, who I’m at least acquainted with, though we’re not exactly close. We hang out in a couple of the same IRC channels and have friends in common. Also, we’re the same age, almost exactly — we were born in the same month. We also meet up and have sex. This time, at least, it seems like sort of maybe a good idea. At least it’s someone I _know_. It’s not great, but it’s not nightmarish, either. He leaves his phone in my hotel room. I happen to catch a glance of him a little later, and so I run up to him to return his phone. His father is with him, and is furious. He’s absolutely convinced I’m some kind of sex predator, despite that we’re exactly the same age and I look _younger_ than 🐸. I go for my wallet but he sense my intentions and angrily insists he doesn’t care what kind of ID I have. He declares he’s placing me under citizen’s arrest, a thing I’ve never even heard of. But of course, I believe I have to go along with adults, or they’ll make things even worse. He actually calls the police, who spend about two seconds checking my ID and say “yeah this is fine”. But then they want me to Make A Statement Down At The Station, so I go there, and I awkwardly describe a bland teenaged sexual encounter to someone who is a remarkably slow typist considering it seems to be their whole job. And now I’m at a police station, and the police only want to release me into my parents’ custody, because I am sixteen years old. So they call my father, who is thankfully only a few hours’ drive away. And they put me in a chair and tell me that if I get up they’ll lock me in a cell. And I sit there, for two hours, while cops twenty feet away crack jokes with each other about the fact that two teenagers fucked. It may have been more or less than two hours, but I have undiagnosed ADHD, which has a way of stretching out activies like sitting in a chair doing nothing. My father arrives, so silently furious that he accidentally drives into the wrong state on the way back to his apartment. He demands I log into my laptop, and he changes my password. Once I’m alone, because he’s off at his job as some sort of network administrator, I log into my laptop as admin, and change my password back. [Bright spot in this story. Fucking hilarious. Great job, li’l Eevee. –ev] I then write a public post about the experience, which ends up linked on a now-defunct drama site. A bunch of people — who are we kidding here, _more adult men_ — have a grand laugh about, again, two teenagers having sex. It probably doesn’t help that the post is written in an almost painfully cutesy affect, since I am sixteen years old. Several dramamongers approach me personally to be nasty, including one who calls me a “sick fuck” for “doing kids”. I am sixteen years old. One of the convention staff also emails me with a brief rant, asking why I’m trying to destroy the convention by writing about things that happened to me, because now he’s fielding accusations that the con is full of pedophiles (presumably, again, because I had sex with someone my age). I have no idea what to say to this and never reply. I do show it to 🐯, hoping for support. I happen to think that it’s absurd to blame someone for posting that they had sex at a con. But 🐯 insists I’m wrong and should apologize. I deflate. My father later talks to me about the event. The conversation is extremely one-sided, because I know what happens if I push back against anything. He tells me I’m cold, calculating, manipulative, evil. He tells me I care only about myself. That I have no soul. That he doesn’t want me in the house. I am sixteen years old. All of this is normal. * * * The irony is, unfortunately, lost on me — because as requested, I erased mention of 🐯, the twenty-six-year-old who had sex with a sixteen-year-old, from my story. I erased it so thoroughly that I will forget these two encounters happened on the same weekend until _many_ years later, even as I will continue to be lightly haunted by a memory of horrendous sex I felt trapped in. Sometime in the next week and a half, I admit to _someone_ that I had sex with 🐯. [I don’t know who, but I think I was pointedly asked, and I didn’t really know how to reject questions, _and_ I’ve never liked lying, so I can extremely see how I would end up just saying it. –ev] This makes it through some unseen grapevine, and suddenly 🐯 is furious with me, threatening to end the friendship [lol –ev] unless I fix it somehow, by convincingly lying to someone in this gossip chain that I don’t know. I make a half-hearted attempt, which I hate, and am (unsurprisingly) not believed. Our relationship, such as it is, deteriorates, both because 🐯 himself deteriorates and because I don’t seem to have as much interest in trying to be friends with the person I had inescapable nightmare sex with. I must feel resentful of him without ever wanting to confront him directly, because I will later discover a few remaining scraps of one of our last conversations: > 🐯: Gods eevee you’ve become such an annoying little bitch, I can’t beleive I was ever even nice to you. I wouldn’t have come within 20 feet of you had I known you were this kind of person. I am sixteen years old. I am being spoken to by a twenty-six-year-old man. > 🐯: gods, you and your stupid faces I am sixteen years old, and I use emotes as punctuation o.o to a ridiculous degree ^o.o^ like multiple times per line o.o and the twenty-six-year-old man who was so eager to have sex with me is now sick to death of how juvenile I am. If only there were some way he could have foreseen this. I am sixteen years old, but I begin to realize I do not give a shit about this loser who can only bed teenagers, nor about his big important opinion of me. He’s mad at me, but it doesn’t matter. Adults have been mad at me my entire life. What’s he going to do, type at me? I glaze over. I become laminated. I rebuff everything. He only talks to me once more, to say he misses seeing me around. I don’t care. I am sixteen years old. I start to wonder if this isn’t normal. ## I am eighteen years old Someone new joins the Pokémon porn IRC channel. They are fifteen years old. I don’t think anything of it, just as no one thought anything of it when I first entered. This is normal. Sort of. I recognize their name from the artwork that decorates several Pokémon fansites. I find it fascinating that they were able to create any of that. It’s like magic to me. There are a few artists here already, but this is the first whose art was truly captivating to me. Somehow it feels more impressive yet also more real, like I can believe it was done by a person. It plants the tiniest seed that maybe, one day, I can do it too. I approach them to say hi, that I like their art. We have an actual conversation, then another. It’s like a breath of fresh air. So many people I’ve talked to have just wanted to hit on me way past the point of comfort and barely have a personality beyond that. But nothing like that happens here. Instead we talk about actual _things_ : Pokémon, and art, and our lives, and all the wrinkles they’ve had so far. They like cats. I like puzzles. Sometimes they struggle with pressure from overbearing commissioners, and something about that must resonate with me, so I try to be supportive. Later I’ll admit I’m still struggling with affection and my inability to tell people no, and they’ll be supportive of me, too. It’s nice. One day, it’ll even be normal. ## I am thirty-two years old I’m at the DMV. My best friend, someone I met a lifetime ago — in a Pokémon porn chat, of all places! — is here with me. We live together, now, with our five cats, and we’ve recently escaped someone we both struggled to push back against. It feels like a small victory, but it was hard-earned. We both sign the marriage certificate. ## I am thirty-eight years old I’m thinking back on a lot of things. It’s almost dizzying to see so many little threads of causality. My parents, even teachers, practically training me to think that whatever _other people_ want is paramount. The deeply fucked-up culture of early-00’s Internet, where people could just openly announce their interest in doing sex crimes and no one batted an eye. Even the notion of a 14yo in a space dedicated to porn sounds unthinkable by today’s standards, but I poked my head in a lot of sex-themed places back in the day and _not one of them_ cared how old I was. I suppose I was well-spoken enough to sound older (aside from the hailstorm of o.o), but at the same time my _social_ development was… almost non-existent. Hence how I had 20-somethings talking to me like I was an equal, all while I didn’t even understand how to say “I don’t like this”. It took me a few more years to extricate myself from the weird little rut I’d dug for myself. It certainly helped that, around nineteen or twenty, _vastly_ fewer random older men were interested in me. I’ll just, uh, try not to think too hard about that. I don’t know what would have helped me avoid this. I keep thinking back to the vague ambient warnings about the Internet in the early 00s, which mainly focused on how anyone might be _lying_ to you, might be _pretending_ to be your age to trick you into sex later. But that never happened to me. It was so unlike my experience that it almost feels laughable. Everyone I had sex with was pretty open that they wanted to have sex with me, and I agreed. No one ever warned me that sex without pretense could have _emotional_ consequences. Everything in my (regular, offline) life that tried to tell me anything about sex was laser-focused on either pregnancy, STIs, or a guy in a van offering me candy. Like, hello, I was a deeply lonely sixteen-year-old. They didn’t need to offer me candy. They just offered me sex! And there _are_ lingering consequences — although now that I’m happily married and no longer on the radar of a bunch of people who really want to sleep with a teenager, they largely don’t matter in practice. But I had so much terrible, uncaring sex with men that I feel a little anxious even considering the thought of doing it again. There’s no one besides my spouse who I _want_ to have sex with at the moment, but I still don’t like having that stuck in me. Like a shackle around my ankle that isn’t chained to anything, but it’s still _there_ , and occasionally I feel it rattle. * * * But what really struck me, what _really_ compelled me to write this down, was the realization of a strange pattern in the post-con sequence of events. I think it’s fair to say that 🐯 used me for sex. I played along, but I think there’s at least a _little_ bit of a responsibility gradient here. But then, wait. Some group of people confirmed with me that I’d had sex with 🐯, and then I guess started gossipping about it, possibly even harassing him. Do you know how many people from that circle reached out to me, to see how _I_ was doing? Zero. Nada. I was useful only as long as it took to crystallize a nugget of Drama™, and then I was no longer needed. So let me recap, this time with some editorializing: * A man ten years my elder used me for sex. * A bunch of adult men used me for laughs. * Some kind of gossip ring used me for, well, gossip. * A con staff member used me to vent about something that, frankly, furry conventions seemed to deal with a lot in the 00s. Not **one** of these _many_ adults reached out to see if _I was okay_. The con staff guy didn’t know about 🐯, of course, but they _did_ know I’d had a harrowing experience and now was having at least one more — because those are what my whole fucking post was about! — and yet the only reason they went through the effort to find my email and reach out was to blame me for it _again_. But it’s the gossip ring that I truly cannot excuse. The _sole reason_ there was any gossip to be had _at all_ was the idea that a twenty-six-year-old having sex with a sixteen-year-old is, in some sense, _bad_. But this clearly didn’t actually **mean** anything to them! It was “bad” only in the abstract, “bad” only in the sense that it gave them an excuse to ostracize the “bad” person, or laugh, or whatever the fuck they were doing. It’s no different than that drama-site clown calling me a “sick fuck for doing kids” or whatever the hell. You could not possibly read a post about how I _had to wait for my dad to pick me up because the cops wouldn ’t release a minor_ and not grasp that _I am a minor_. Like, I **AM** “THE KIDS”! You, my fucking guy, _right now_ , are being cruel towards the people you’re feigning concern for! But it just didn’t matter what happened or who was involved or who was hurt by it. Some asshole — almost certainly yet another adult — just wanted to be nasty, and they thought they saw someone they were allowed to be nasty to, so they were. None of these people were interested in helping a sixteen-year-old. They only wanted to lash out at someone. The best I got was a tiny apology from 🐯, of all fucking people, who eventually caught on that I had not _fully_ enjoyed our time together. But he can, of course, shove that entirely up his ass. * * * For many, many years, I’ve avoided making any mention of the thing with 🐸, my first exposure to the Internet “Drama” Circuit. I feared it would happen again, or that I’d be called a pedophile some more by people who just conveniently forget that we were the same age. I’d completely forgotten that 🐯 happened at the same time — because he’d basically asked me to detach him from the rest of it! Rediscovering that little tidbit has sure cast this story in a different light. But like, fuck that, regardless? I will talk about my own life in whatever goddamn way I please. As soon as I decided to write this down, I couldn’t even remember why I’d ever been scared to do it. I guess I _had_ been pretty thoroughly punished for writing it down the _first_  time. And sure, with decades’ worth of hindsight, it was perhaps not a _good_ idea to have described my underage sex life — or the brief entanglement of the police with it — in public. But I still reject the idea that it was _wrong_ to do so, or that any subsequent ragging on the convention was _my fault_. The actual story here (once 🐯 was stripped from it) was that Some Fucking Guy overreacted and _called the cops_ because his teenaged kid got laid and he didn’t like that. That is fucking _bananas_ behavior for a grown-ass man, but somehow fingers ended up pointed at literally everyone else. Clown world. * * * And various people have been calling me a pedophile ever since anyway. I’m often not privy to why. Like, as best as I could discern, the Something Awful Pokémon crowd branded me a pedo at one point because I had some cutesy, non-sexual, unremarkable artwork _of myself_ (i.e., an Eevee person) as the background of my website for a while. Like that’s it, that’s the whole thing. Conspicuously, **I am not attracted to, or otherwise interested in, teenagers or children** , but that just doesn’t seem to factor in. You’d think it would be kind of important, right? But there’s this weird chain of semantic implications that lets you suggest someone _actively molests children_ based purely on _vibes_ , without ever having to identify any concrete child, and that seems kind of bad to me, but if I try to explain it I’ll probably be called a pedophile, because why would anyone but a pedophile defend pedophiles by nitpicking the definition of “pedophile”, huh? Meanwhile, I was actively pursued by much older adults! 🐯 isn’t even the oldest guy who had sex with me _when I was sixteen_! But I’ve spent half a lifetime nervous about even admitting that, out of some nebulous fear of the reaction, all while I get lumped in with the sort of people _who did it to me_ because my website background doesn’t have a suit and tie or what the fuck ever. What a joke. It makes me feel fucking crazy, sometimes, to watch our culture obsess over rooting out anyone with a whiff of “pursues sex with a minor” with the same furor and accuracy as we once rooted out people possessed by Satan, but with “the minor” — a _person_ — reduced to a sort of… fantasy hypothetical? Or just dropped entirely, I guess. “Pedophile” is the thing you call someone that makes you win, because that’s the worst thing, and they can’t prove you wrong. Even the richest man in the world does it. Sometimes I think about what might happen in another timeline, where I’m sixteen _now_ and I post this story. I’m sure 🐯 would be absolutely roasted right off the Internet — but how many people would still check _on me_ for anything other than more sordid details? …But then, who have _I_ checked on? How many times have I had the opportunity, and not taken it? I can definitely think of one or two. But that’s a whole other rabbit hole. * * * This sucks. I feel like basically every adult in my teenaged life let me down, and I have no idea what to do with that information. I guess all I can do is try to reach back in time with the power of blogging and say what I desperately needed to hear. If _you_ are a teenager reading this — I don’t know how or why, but I am functionally powerless to stop you — and even a little bit of it has resonated with you, then let me impress upon you this: **how you feel _matters_**. Even if it doesn’t seem to matter to the people around you, the people with power over your life, it should still matter _to you_. Hold onto it, even if you have to hide it, and do not let go for anyone. I’m sorry for whatever you may feel trapped in. I’m sorry if it’s hard. It might keep being hard for a little while. But if you keep looking, you _will_ find people who care about what you want, who will have your back when you struggle to stand up for yourself, and who won’t punish you for hurting. Please take care of yourself. P.S.: Sex is an _amplifier_ , not an automatic good time. It’s like Mario Party: a hilarious chaotic mess with the right people, but a horrible fucking slog with the wrong people. * * * I am thirty-eight years old. I still think about what happened to me when I was sixteen. Not all the time. But sometimes. Maybe after today, I can finally stop.

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a _reason_ computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit. ## Bitcoin Back in the 00’s, if you wanted to move money between arbitrary people over the Internet, you realistically had one option: PayPal. Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal. The thing about PayPal is that it holds onto your money, but it isn’t a bank? I do not fully appreciate the architecture or its implications here, but PayPal’s point of view seems to have always been that they can do whatever they want. They’ve always been pretty fussy about the use of PayPal to facilitate commissioning artists for drawings of unicorn wieners, for example, so if they thought you were doing that, they would just lock your account and also keep all your money for six months. For safekeeping, I guess. And interest. Yet PayPal was the only option for many rinky-dink individuals selling one-off goods and services, so there was some amount of frustration that the _only available middleman_ had exclusive right to say how you were allowed to spend your money, or what kind of indie business you were allowed to run. And if they caught you ignoring the rules then they got to keep your money for half a year. And then in 2010 or so, I heard about Bitcoin. And it sounded like the wave of the future. Finally, a way to just _send money to someone_. What a fucking concept. And imagine what you could build with such a system! Websites could have real tip jars. Browsers could have tipping built right in that transfer only a few cents, since transactions would be so effortless. I downloaded a miner (well, _the_ miner at the time, I think) and ran it for like a day and failed to mine a coin. There was nothing else to really do, so I closed it and forgot all about Bitcoin. Fast forward a bit, Bitcoin has reached mainstream awareness, and… none of that stuff happened. Bitcoin is not so much a currency as it is an entire _ecosystem_ of schemes. The only mention I’ve heard in the last year of being able to actually _buy_ anything with Bitcoin was gray market estradiol. (Even gray market FIP medication just takes credit cards!) The only browser with built-in tipping is the one spearheaded by a man whose other claims to fame are inventing JavaScript and wanting to outlaw my marriage, and the token it uses apparently had 80 whole sellers in the past 24 hours. Sounds like all of that is going great. Meanwhile, fifteen years later, the state of the art in sending arbitrary people money seems to be… uh, PayPal. But now we have Stripe, too, which can take credit card payments if you know how to make a website that uses it, but which _also_ forbids drawings of unicorn wieners. Patreon? Stripe and PayPal. Itch? Stripe and PayPal. Ko-fi? Stripe and PayPal. Nothing is fundamentally different. But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something. And I suspect the core problem that has wended its way through the history of cryptocurrency is that the vast majority of people involved _do not actually care_ what the thing they’re flocking to is. What they care about is that it has a graph, and that they get rich if the graph goes up, so they say whatever might make the graph go up. The graph even looks exactly the same for every coin and NFT and Whatever else: x-axis time, y-axis dollars. The only place the _thing_ appears at all is in the title, where you can safely ignore it. Plenty of people will talk up the supposed benefits of their pet thingamajig, of course, but my suspicion is that many of them don’t actually care that much. They have a _vested interest_ in getting other people to buy into the thing, Whatever the thing may be, because then graph go up. And so you have what I can only call a culture of **Whatever**. Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it _do not care_ about currency — it could be bottled dragon farts for all they care, except that putting it on the computer means there’s no need to actually worry about a product. It’s just something to pump the value of; the underlying asset could be, well, Whatever. And Bitcoin itself is open source, so you can copy it and make your very own coin, your very own Whatever. With NFTs, you can make an entire _family_ of “collectible” Whatevers — a strange descriptor given that you can’t actually collect one of each of them, but who really cares if the description makes sense? It doesn’t matter what the art is, or how the technology works, or what the tokens are attached to. It just has to be something you can convince other people to buy. The actual thing can be Whatever. I think this adequately explains why the proliferation of these guys helped suck all the air out of Twitter. Tens of thousands of grifters lining every sidewalk, each one passionately hawking an indistinguishable Whatever that they don’t actually care about. Endless, _endless_ fake enthusiasm from people all trying to convince each other to buy into their boilerplate box of nothing. Buy _my_ thing! Haha no don’t worry about how much of it _I_ own — let’s talk about how much of it _you_ should own! Hint: it’s a lot! Kind of a bummer. ## The shape of the Web The Web is a cool thing because anyone can just put stuff on it. It is the largest town square bulletin board ever devised. Back in the day, your ISP would even give you your own website! I don’t think they do that so much any more, but there are more cheap or free options than ever — hell, you can host a little website on GitHub. And it used to mostly consist of little things made by people, and that was pretty cool! You would see _more than four websites in a day_. Websites would have _colors_! They wouldn’t all be designed for a three-inch-wide screen and then just scaled up when you’re at your desk! Twitter once let you set your own background image for when people looked at your profile. But the trouble with everyone having a bunch of websites is that you lost track of them all and you didn’t really know when they updated and it was hard to talk _back to_ a website. Also, making your own website is kinda hard? You have to, like, learn things. And so the entire Web sort of congealed around a tiny handful of gigantic platforms that _everyone on the fucking planet_ is on at once. Sometimes there is some sort of partitioning, like Reddit. Sometimes there is not, like Twitter. That’s… fine, I guess. Things centralize. It happens. You don’t get tubgirl spam raids so much any more, at least. But the centralization poses a problem. See, the Web is free to _look at_ (by default), but costs money to _host_. There are free hosts, yes, but those are for static things getting like a thousand visitors a day, not interactive platforms serving _a hundred million_. That starts to cost a bit. Picture logs being shoveled into a steam engine’s firebox, except it’s bundles of cash being shoveled into… the… uh… website hole. Traditionally, the way to pay for keeping your website online has been to slather it in ads and suffer the humiliation of Pepsi trying to sell Pepsi halfway down your page. Ads don’t pay very much, but for a moderate-size endeavor, that’s fine. You write your article and put an ad on it and make twenty cents a month or whatever. I don’t know, I don’t run ads because they’re an embarrassing blight that make everything they touch worse. Together, these forces push big platforms in a very specific direction: _maximize how many ads people see_. To the exclusion of just about anything else. So Engagement becomes king — it’s okay if your users are _miserable_ , so long as they’re _here_. It’s okay if the ads are _obnoxious_ , as long as they’re _seen_. Then this model spread into phone software. And then into videography. And then, somehow, into fucking, Windows?? And when the primary focus of the business is on the _ads_ , everything else is sort of ancillary — it’s only important insofar as it keeps people around, to look at the ads. It’s jingling keys. It’s… Whatever. This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand _creative work_ being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call _the stuff that goes around the ads_. "Content"... is Whatever. This is the driving force behind clickbait, behind thumbnails of white guys making 8O faces, behind red arrows, behind video essayists who just read Wikipedia at you three times a week like clockwork, behind suggestion algorithms, behind recipe blogs that all look the same and have a mile of filler fluff, behind video game websites abandoning the idea of articles and instead turning into SEO vultures with inexplicably lengthy articles telling you “the blue key is under a rock by the river” so they have more paragraph breaks to put ads between, behind TikTok’s model of being a constant stream which I have to only guess at because I have never had any interest in TikTok but I assume it’s a worse version of YouTube Shorts and I already find _those_ pretty irritating. It’s all the same thing. _Look at it. Look at it, you stupid baby. Look how outlandish or shocking or extreme or dramatic, Whatever it is. Just shut up and look at it, so Home Depot will give me a quarter of a tenth of a  cent._ At least when I write a lot, you know it’s because I wanted to write it. Also I’m probably not lying to you because someone paid me to do it! And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ. Did you know there were entire get-rich-quick schemes about this? It’s like writing fake novels. Just make a website with a generic WordPress theme (every website looks the same anyway), write a bunch of bland nothing articles about things that seem a _little_ obscure, and slather it in Google ads. Then let the money roll in from people accidentally finding your website and leaving when they find out it’s useless. But it’s too late because you already got the ad view! I say “were” because bothering to _write_ generic filler about nothing is passé — now the computer can do it for you! ## Artificial reality If you told me ten years ago that by 2025 we’d have the Star Trek computer, I would’ve been _ecstatic_. How fucking cool is that! You talk to your computer and it does things! But we didn’t really get that. We got, I guess, sparkling autocomplete — a fancy chatbot that can string words together in the most inoffensive people-pleasing customer-service voice you’ve ever heard. The result is something I adamantly do not want to interact with. I do not want to be exposed to LLM output at any time. It’s _noise_ , and I feel like I get a little dumber every time I accidentally start reading it. My brain is already a bit glitchy, and I really cannot afford to have it work even more less good. And speaking of things that work even more less good, the technology… sucks? It fundamentally doesn’t do the thing that its investors and diehard fans say it does. It just strings together text that is statistically plausible. And every new alleged advancement comes with some invested airhead billionaire boasting about how the computer is as smart as a Ph.D holder now, and then you see the output and it’s still the most generic banal brain-rotting sludge you’ve ever seen in your life. Most of my exposure to LLM output is via Google cramming it everywhere they can think of, and in every instance the result is _worse_. Google Search keeps redesigning its way around my μBlock filters to dedicate an entire third of my desktop screen height to an “AI summary” — which either lightly restates the highlighted part of the top search result anyway, or is just total bullshit. YouTube keeps showing a sprinkling of “AI summaries” under video thumbnails that, without fail, restate the video title in more words. My phone’s fucking _weather app_ has an “AI summary” with incredible insights like “it’ll get warmer over the course of the week”, which I could readily see for myself if this block of white noise weren’t pushing the _temperature graph_ off the bottom of the screen. Over and over, _actual information_ is moved out of the way to make room for an unreliable lossy compression of that information into text that takes longer to read. But this is worth billions of dollars. If you are unfortunate enough to have a recent Pixel phone, it's at least possible to reliably turn all this crap off — go to System > Apps > Show all apps, use the three-dots menu to "Show system", tap "AICore", and disable it. There used to be more bits and pieces to turn off, but I guess Android 16 consolidated them? Anyway I've seen nothing resembling LLM output since doing this. I think what really gets me here, and what no one really talks about, is that the bar has been revealed to be so low. LLM features get bolted onto fucking _everything_ because what they do, what they really do, at their core, is this: **Whatever**. They do Whatever. And that’s great, because Whatever is _something_. There’s no such thing as an error, no empty results page, no such thing as a missing feature or an uncovered case. Almost without fail, you’ll get _something_. Is it useful? Is it correct? Is it remotely based in reality? Who cares? Far more important is that there is _output_. Whatever is apparently better than nothing. Cheap and inoffensive and disposable, like a red beer cup. We are doing to the Internet what we already did to the ocean: filling it with a great swirling vortex of trash. ### Case study 1 “Ah!” the Hacker News commenters cry. “But have you _tried_ it?” they ask with all the indignity of a kindergartener offended that you won’t eat their mud pie. But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem. One teeny tiny issue: those tags **did not and had never existed**. I typed this additional context into the computer, and it generated a profuse apology followed by a _different_ set of fictional tags. That was the end of that grand experiment. The trouble was likely that there _was_ no built-in way to do what I wanted, _and_ no one had ever successfully done it before, so the machine had nothing to draw from… and simply generated something that sounded plausible instead. Because that is what this technology does: it continues a conversation in a way that _sounds plausible_ , as defined by similarity to existing conversations. If there are existing conversations about the topic, great! That makes for a more specific measure of plausibility. If not, _even better_! Just about _anything_ might be plausible! It can just generate **Whatever**! I cannot stress enough that this is **worse than useless** to me. Not only did it not answer my question, but it sent me on a wild goose chase making sure I had not somehow overlooked the fake API it generated. Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type `"` and the result is `"|"`? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I _waste_ time having to _correct_ for it. And that’s a predictable operation that inserts a single character! What we’ve invented is an entire fake persona that will waste your time entire _paragraphs_ at once. I can’t imagine using this to do any actual work and I don’t understand how anyone else does. This is a whole new kind of failure case we’ve invented. I did also ask _people_ about this problem, and they responded in the ways people might: they said they didn’t know, or they suggested an elaborate and tedious workaround that would technically solve the problem (but introduce new ones). But the LLM statistically generated something that _sounds like an API that could exist_. It produced an answer that was plausible, thorough, informative, relevant, and contained **no useful information whatsoever**. It produced the _opposite_ of information! It produced **noise**. Why would I want this? Why would I want to use a machine that sometimes generates text that resembles a person confidently lying to me? People are sometimes _wrong_ , sure — that’s why Stack Overflow has downvotes — but this is something else entirely. If a real person did this to you, you would stop asking them questions _real_ fucking fast. LLM output is crap. It’s just crap. It sucks, and is bad. Anyway I went on to do the thing I wanted regardless, because I’m a programmer and I know how to make computers do things. It's not really relevant to the story, but the actual problem I had was that I like to put two spaces between sentences, and I wanted Ren'Py to render this extra space. Unfortunately, Ren'Py collapses all whitespace in strings down to a single space _at parse time_ , which made that seemingly impossible. In fact, a formatting tag could not _possibly_ solve this, because the whitespace collapsing happens to string literals, and formatting happens (much later) to string values. So I just monkeypatched the parser. Like you do. Ren'Py is wild. I mean, I get it. I was trying to do something that had never been done before. LLMs are fine at things that appear a zillion times in their training data — in fact, this is probably a big part of the trick, because the things that appear more often in their training data are the things people are more likely to ask about _in general_ and thus the things people are more likely to ask an LLM. But whose creative output consists solely of doing things a million people have already done? Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees? ### Case study 2 Back in December, I was complaining about something else (surprise, it was Web ads!) and just happened to look at the Visual Studio Code website, most of which was devoted to its LLM code-completion service, Copilot. I don’t care to desecrate this blog with LLM output — it’s on Bluesky if you must — but suffice to say, it wasn’t _great_. It was a call to a web service, and the generated code failed to encode form data. You know, Computer 101 stuff. Also it was like twice as long as it needed to be. Also it wouldn’t work on HTTPS websites because the web service’s certificate expired three years ago — which is a fun footgun, since you very well might be on HTTP localhost, and then it’ll only break when you go live. I found it highly unlikely that the latest and greatest API for “get website” couldn’t just encode form data for you, but lo and behold: it can! Copilot just didn’t bother to make use of it. And since Copilot is a Whatever machine and its answers are these one-time disposable things, there’s no mechanism for someone else to come in and go “hey, you forgot to encode the form data”. What even is this thing we’ve invented? Stack Overflow, but you only get the answers people scramble to type first so they can get the points? Oh and they just lie to you sometimes? Why would I want this? And I didn’t cherry-pick this example! _They chose it!_ This was the front-page example for a state-of-the-art LLM integrated with the most popular code editor in the world, all built by one of the richest companies in human history, whose _entire business_ is software and who has specifically invested a zillion dollars in _this specific technology_. This is the gizmo **at its best**! And it’s crap! But it does _something_. And that’s what’s important. ### The broader culture There are people who use these, apparently. And it just feels so… depressing. There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy _doing the thing_. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job. I’m not interested in managing. I’m _certainly_ not interested in managing this bizarre polite lying daydream machine. It feels like a vizier who has definitely been spending some time plotting my demise. It makes programming spaces feel bleaker. I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”. I don’t want to know how much code wasn’t actually written by anyone. I don’t want to hear how many of my colleagues think Whatever is equivalent to their own output. I don’t want to keep watching people fall for a carnival trick. A couple days ago I saw someone (whose bio claimed they’re a Bluesky engineer, but who knows) insist that it’s “very stupid” to _not_ use a chatbot for programming. I just cannot comprehend this. If the task is _easy_ , I could just write the code about as fast as I could describe it anyway. If the task is _hard_ , then it’s all the more likely the generated code will be subtly wrong (or overtly wrong). If it’s something I _don ’t know_, I can go _find out_ about it, and now I know more things. What are you all even writing that so much of it consists of generic slop? But also… why do you care? Why would someone using a really cool tool that makes them more productive… feel compelled to sneer and get defensive at the mere _suggestion_ that someone else isn’t doing the same? I know there are people who oppose, say, syntax coloring, and I think that’s pretty weird, but I don’t go out of my way to dunk on them. I can’t imagine having a stronger reaction than saying “lmao what” and immediately forgetting about it. I might have strong opinions about what _code_ looks like, because _I might have to read it_ , but why would I — why would _anyone_ — have such an intense reaction to the hypothetical editor setup of a hypothetical stranger? It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. _Bitcoin is the future. It ’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor._ Sure thing, Disco Stu! There have definitely never been any inventions that turned out to be bad ideas or were just plain forgotten about. But the Bitcoin people _make more money_ if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this? Unless you work at Microsoft and have a _lot_ of stock options, you aren’t getting rich off of how many people use Copilot. It’s curiously similar to how, as a fitting segue, Microsoft is now gonna factor “AI” use into employee performance reviews: > “AI is now a fundamental part of how we work,” Liuson wrote. “Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.” > > Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.” What are we actually saying here — that even Microsoft has to evaluate usage of “AI” directly, because it doesn’t affect performance enough to have an obvious impact otherwise? That the technology is so limp that even its biggest investor has to _strong-arm its own employees_ into using it? That their own employees don’t _want_ to use it? Genuinely good new tools don’t tend to need _coercion_ to fuel their adoption only a few years into their existence, right? What the fuck is going on here? * * * Another Bluesky quip I saw earlier today, and the reason I picked up writing this post (which I’d started last week): > Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. I’m not trying to put the author on blast or anything, so let’s leave it anonymous, but — my guy? My dude? **What on earth are you talking  about?** I don’t know the context for this. What I _do_ know is that a table saw quickly cuts straight lines. That is the thing it does. It doesn’t do Whatever. It doesn’t sometimes cut wavy lines and sometimes glue pieces together instead. It doesn’t roll some dice and guess what shape of cut you are statistically likely to want based on an extensive database of previous cuts. _It cuts a straight fucking  line._ If I _were_ a carpenter, and my colleagues got really into this new thing where you just chuck 2×4s at a spinning whirling mass of blades until a chair comes out the other side… you know, I just might want to switch careers. I keep seeing this — people compare LLMs to calculators, or screwdrivers, or digital cameras, or whatever. I’m left wondering if the people saying this stuff have ever _used_ any of those things. A calculator does arithmetic for you — thus automating the tedious, repetitive part — but you still have to know _which buttons to press_ to get the answer you want. You can’t just type the entire problem in and get Whatever — something that sounds plausible, with a microscopic disclaimer that checking it for accuracy is _your_  problem. Calculators do have limitations at their extremes, and if you’re working with extremes, you have to be aware of those. Table saws will (or, used to) cut through fingers just as happily as wood. Tools have edge cases — at their _edges_. LLMs have edge cases **everywhere** , and they are constantly changing, even minute to minute, even for exactly the same input fed to exactly the same model. It’s also possible to _adjust or customize_ tools in various ways, whereas 90% of the times I’ve seen someone talk about their customized LLM, all they’ve done is prepend a paragraph like “Please answer as though speaking to a customer.” The state of the art is to ask the computer nicely to do something, add a disclaimer saying it’s not your problem if the computer is racist, and then charge for access. This is not mere automation. This is a completely new type of thing. We’ve never had a machine that can take almost any input and just do Whatever. But I keep watching people act like it’s the same level of invention as the egg slicer and I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind. ### But what if it gets better I don’t know. What if it does? What does that _mean_? I hear “better” and I read the press release and in the fine print it says that now it can count the number of letters in “Mississippi” correctly or whatever. And then it’s still crap. What if it didn’t produce crap? I struggle to imagine such a world, in no small part because the hype around the Whatever machine is so staggeringly overblown. My phone has a dedicated Tensor™ chip to simulate artificial intelligence in the palm of my hand, wow! Here’s what it does: tells me it’ll be hot this week. But if the machine still just fabricates an elaborate plausible fiction when it doesn’t have an answer on-hand, what good is it? I can always just go find the place it got the answer from originally, and at least then I know that someone _wrote it_. Someone had a _reason_ to think it, even if they were mistaken. Maybe the well is just permanently poisoned — anytime I see anything I know to be LLM output, my first assumption is that it’s nonsense, completely divorced from reality. I know a lot of people have a lot of gripes with LLMs and generative “AI” that tie them to big grandiose concerns like intellectual property or environmental impact. My gripes are more of a tangled web that I can only summarize as: _the vibes are bad_. The tone is unbearable. The lying as a fallback is offensive. The advertising keeps focusing on how you can coast through life without caring about your work or family because you can just generate a birthday card or whatever. The people funding and pushing it keep openly salivating at the idea of replacing as much human input as possible with a machine best known for generating titles of books that don’t exist. I don’t know how you get “better” than this. I don’t know how you make a _better_ Whatever machine. ### And then there's the art thing I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide _not_ to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if _anyone_ can do that, then _why listen to your music_? It takes a significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to _listen_ to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever? Nobody seems to appreciate that if you can make a computer do something entirely on its own, then that becomes the _baseline_. There is a lot that can be said about image generation (little of it polite), but I’m running out of steam a little here. I’d intended to comment on the ongoing efforts to make better and better _photo-quality_ image generation, but I can’t think of much to say beyond: **why the fuck would you work on that?** We don’t have enough trouble with, say, the conservative “news” sphere inventing its own alternate reality that millions of people buy into, simply by _lying_ — now we have to give them a machine tailor-made for creating fake photos and videos too? Why does this need to exist? Why is this _in my phone ’s fucking camera app_? Can’t these people go live on an airgapped island somewhere and work on their new horrifying fraud machine by themselves? ### Also I could swear I saw Google advertise that Gemini can do your homework for you This is starting to get away from the main thesis of Whatever but every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t _great_ , but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it. You’ve seen anecdotes of people posting comments and submitting papers and whatnot with obvious tells like “As a large language model…” in them. That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! They just produce Whatever. Actually hang on this gets me into conclusion territory. ## Enough of Whatever I remember that Facebook literally proposed running a bunch of its own LLM-driven fake accounts on its own website. Fake people making fake posts about Whatever, so you’ll have more Whatever to look at, so you’ll see more ads along the way. Monetize the rot, I guess. I can’t imagine publishing a game with, say, Midjourney-generated art, even if it _didn ’t_ have uncanny otherworldly surfaces bleeding into each other. I would find that _humiliating_. But there are games on the Switch shop that do it. Whatever. It begins to feel like a broad celebration of mediocrity. _Finally_ , society says, with a huge sigh of relief. _I don ’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call. I don’t have to know anything, care about what I’m doing, or even have an opinion._ _I can just substitute some Content™. I can just ask the computer for  Whatever_ But I _like_ programming. I _like_ writing. I like _making things_ and then being able to sit back and look at them and think, holy fuck, _I made that_. There is no joy for me in typing a vague description into a computer and refreshing my way through a parade of Whatever until something is good enough. The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that _learning a skill takes work_ and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now. This is an incredibly weird moment. There have always been inventions that make some craft easier (but sometimes a little more shoddy as well). There have always been people who resented the idea that the thing they work very hard at is now more accessible. America’s Protestant work culture is deeply entangled with this as well, but I don’t value sweat in and of itself — I have a broader objection. Because this is something else. What’s being sold to us is a machine that is promised to do _everything_. That’s far beyond a tiny question like “should you know how to manually focus in order to take a photography” — it gets at the notion of _thinking about, or doing,_ **_anything at all_**. I don’t think anyone is obligated to do anything in particular. If you don’t want to draw, or write, or compose, or program, or whatever, then don’t! That’s fine. But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine **requires** selling the idea that _doing things is worthless_. Because if _doing something_ has some value, then it must be somehow _better_ than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost. If you’re some assclown like Sam Altman, whose graph-go-up depends on convincing you to replace all your employees with ChatGPT, you _have to destroy that idea_. It is the greatest threat to your business model. You have to destroy the idea that _things are worth doing_. I think that sucks, I think he sucks, and I think his machine sucks. So fuck him and fuck his machine. **Do things. Make things.** And then put them on your website so I can see them.