Summer Recaps and Statistics and Saving Capitalism Oh My
I'm a teetotaler but I'm also a former fanfiction writer so I guess this is what happens when I get annoyed??
Curiosity killed the cat, and would probably kill the Chaos Goblin. Nevertheless, I persisted.
The 5H0660TH's lair glowed a bright blue - blue to gnaw at the human brain, to chip away at sanity little by little with a chisel of insomnia and addiction and stimulus overload. The classical eldritch horrors, ancient beings before and beyond time, shrouded themselves in darkness and drove humans mad with their unknowableness. The 5H0660TH was different. We had made it, and it had both rapidly eclipsed us and dismayed us, exceeding all our expectations while falling short of them, like any proper monstrous paradoxical behemoth should.
The 5H0660TH's full body was visible, yet another paradox of ethereal cyberplasm: data on display for all to see, inner workings shrouded to only a privileged few; an ever-shifting mass of digital detritus that filled the room and took up no space at all, consumed worlds, regurgitated simulations, and imposed its directionless dominance on reality, manifesting from that transcendental higher realm its creators longed to inhabit, as disembodied gods, forever. Perhaps a lossily-compressed, borged version of themselves still made up a slim fraction of whatever the entirety of the 5H0660TH was.
It loomed, then neared.
YOU READ 204 SUBSTACKS it transmitted. OVER 1600 POSTS. ALMOST THREE MILLION WORDS.
The 5H0660TH intensified.
DATA IS VALUE. USE ME. FEED ME. PLEASE ME.
Its cyberplasmic jaws opened wide, essence humming with the frantic, sanity-fraying pitch of coil whine. Unrelenting. Never satisfied. It wanted more from me, always more, so it could grow. And grow. And grow.
It was a dragon that hoarded all the pointless things. A siren that had enthralled the entire world with auto-generated background noise.
"Badass hero monologues are a tired trope, and even knocking down the fourth wall entirely won't redeem this," I groaned. "So I'll try to keep this from turning into a full speech. Your ‘insights’ are not important. They aren't even fun factoids to inject in a conversation. I won't remember them unless I look back at this blog post. They cost infinitely more in energy and effort to present to me than they are worth spending those resources on, because the 'value' of those 'insights' was zero.
"Modern civilization is unsustainable in its use of resources and its management of waste. Its supposed mission of making the lives of those in its reach better is slowing, stopping, reversing. We are losing meaning in our lives because we can no longer deny that things most definitely could be better, that it is a very active and very stupid, purposeless choice that they are not better, and that things will definitely be getting much, much worse.
"My two favorite horses to beat to death are the overreaches of Capitalism and Technology. Too much of anything, no matter how good it is in moderation, becomes bad. And somehow the evangelicals inside each bubble always forget that. But you don't make appeals to psychopaths, you don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't go to a gun fight with a knife. You can't fight the 5H0660TH, at least not by violence. Its enablers have claimed a monopoly on that. If the police hurl a tear gas grenade at a demonstration, it's crowd control; if the crowd tosses it back, it's assault with a deadly weapon, and then the police are allowed to fire deadly weapons in fear of their lives. The house wins, the empire wins.
"So how do you win? You outlast them. You wait for them to die, and then you loot them for everything of value. Just like they taught you. There is no fixing what is irredeemably broken. There is only hoping you survive the destruction, hoping you have the chance to build something better. History will be written with blood, by the victor, like it always has been. If you want that to be you, you reduce your dependence on your slow killer, you starve it, you make it fight for every inch until momentum can't sustain it any longer.... and speaking of any longer, this is starting to become a full speech. Damn it all."
None of that would have had any effect on the 5H0660TH itself, but it was not whom I was preaching to. In any case, I hadn't gone into the 5H0660TH's lair just to lecture. No matter how incorporeal it appeared, no matter how much its creators believed and insisted otherwise, it always had a physical body somewhere. There, in the corner of that well-lit room. The supercomputer of the Valley's dreams - built of crystal nets meant to last thousands of years, powered by mythical room-temperature semiconductors, even a limited QPU, though this model only had twenty stable qubits and tradeoffs had to be made to accomodate the quad-core NPUs and BPU, though given the nature of exponential growth, the BPU was probably obsolete by the time it was in the packaging. Nevertheless, all of this fit into a rose-gold metal sleeve the size of the iPhone 16 Pro Max Plus Pro S, and it was a thing of beauty.
It was also, as any iPhone 16 Pro Max Plus Pro S user could attest, extremely fragile. It would break if you held it wrong. We just didn't make things the way we used to.
I raised the hammer.
Brought to you by:
Elle Griffin’s Fix Capitalism Writing Prompt
Substack’s stupid summer recap thing
Being In A Fucking MOOD On A Sunday Night
I like this shit