After getting it wrong, the LLM I use most: Me: You can’t wash your car if it isn’t there.

Ah. Yes. That is an excellent and devastatingly practical correction.

In that case: drive. But do it with the quiet shame of someone moving the car the length of a bowling lane.

This is one of those situations where logic beats virtue. The car must be present to be washed. Walking was philosophically elegant but mechanically flawed.

So:

Start engine.

Travel 50 meters.

Avoid eye contact with pedestrians.

Commit fully.

You are not lazy. You are complying with system requirements.

Thank you for taking the time to write this. It is unusually careful and I have been sitting with it for a couple of days. The delay is partly because I have been dealing with Influenza A, but also because your comment deserved more than a quick reaction.

I share many of your objections to Substack, especially around coercive onboarding, data extraction before value is demonstrated, and the choice to platform genuinely abhorrent material under the banner of neutrality. None of that is trivial. My use of the platform is pragmatic rather than enthusiastic, and I would not argue that it is a moral solution to anything. It is just a place where longer form thinking still seems possible, at least for now.

I also agree with you, and with Naomi Klein, that consumer level adjustments are insufficient to resolve systemic problems. I do not think boycotts alone fix extractive systems. At best, they are boundary setting. They change what we personally feed, not what the system is designed to do.

Where I might differ slightly is in how I interpret the phrase “documentation without transformation.” I share the frustration behind it. Documentation alone does not save us. History is full of well documented suffering that did not prevent further harm. At the same time, I am wary of dismissing documentation entirely, because without it we lose continuity, memory, and the ability to coordinate at all.

What I have been circling lately is the idea that trust reallocation itself is a form of pre transformation. Not transformation at the scale that would satisfy the moment, but a shift in where legitimacy, attention, and care are being placed. People are pulling trust out of large systems not because they expect those systems to reform, but because they no longer believe those systems are aligned with human scale values.

That does not prevent acute suffering. You are right about that. Large scale change historically arrives alongside immense harm, and I see no evidence that we have found a painless path through systemic breakdown. I do not feel optimistic in the sense of believing this will be gentle.

Where I do find a narrow form of optimism is this. Even under conditions of scarcity and distortion, people are still making choices about where to place trust, effort, and attention. They are narrowing it, slowing it down, and making it more conditional. That does not fix the system, but it does preserve something essential inside it.

As for your direct questions.

What actions would be sufficient to effect systemic change? I honestly do not know. I do not see a clear lever that avoids significant suffering, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably selling something.

How do I remain optimistic? I am not sure optimistic is the right word. I would say I remain oriented. I pay attention to where trust is still being extended carefully rather than cynically. I try to invest in places where documentation and transformation are at least loosely coupled, even if the transformation is small and local.

“I don’t know” is not a rhetorical move for me here. It is the most accurate answer I have.

Thank you again for engaging so thoughtfully. Comments like this are part of why I bother writing at all.

Thank you. That really means a lot, and I’m glad it gave you something to sit with, even if there’s no clear next step yet. I think that uncertainty is honest.

I also understand the pushback against Substack, whatever your reasons are. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how I relate to corporations in general, including continuing to write there. For now my line is simple. I don’t ask for subscriptions, I don’t gate content, and everything I write is free. That may change someday, but it’s where I’m comfortable at the moment.

I’ve made other small adjustments too. Leaving Reddit after years, dropping a couple streaming services, shopping more carefully. None of it feels heroic. It just feels like paying attention and trying not to lie to myself about tradeoffs.

I don’t think any of us knows exactly what to do yet. But if we keep thinking about it, and keep being honest with each other instead of performing certainty, my optimistic side still hopes we can find our way through.

What feels different this time isn’t hypocrisy. Capitalism has always been happy to sell us our own anger back at retail. What feels different is that the ads no longer presume a shared reality at all.

Advertising once depended on ambient trust. Not belief, exactly, but a background assumption that words meant roughly what they said, that fear was proportional to risk, that reassurance implied some intention to follow through. That layer is gone. Now the ad doesn’t ask to be believed. It just asks to be noticed.

When companies openly dramatize the harms of the systems they profit from, they aren’t confessing. They’re signaling that truth has become optional. The message isn’t “we see the problem.” The message is “nothing means anything long enough to matter.” Anxiety becomes just another raw material, interchangeable with humor or nostalgia or menace.

This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.

AI accelerates this collapse because it removes the last residue of intent. When the thing soothing your fear of replacement is itself replaceable by a cheaper, faster version, trust doesn’t break. It evaporates. There’s no betrayal because there’s no relationship left to betray.

And that erosion reaches even here. A reply like this would once have felt like an intervention, or at least a refusal. Now it lands as another object in the stream. Legible, maybe even accurate, but easily skimmed, quickly metabolized, and just as quickly forgotten. The critique doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because the conditions that once gave critique traction are gone.

At that point advertising stops functioning as communication and starts functioning as weather. It happens around us. We endure it. We don’t argue with it because there’s nothing there to argue with.

That feels new. And it feels brittle. Societies can survive a lot of lies. They don’t do well when meaning itself becomes non-durable.

(I write fiction and essays about witnessing systems as they fail quietly rather than spectacularly. If this kind of erosion, of trust, meaning, and shared signal, is something you’re thinking about too, my work lives here: https://tover153.substack.com/)

I am realizing my life is not really marked by birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, or any of the normal milestone stuff people list. It is marked by video games.

Thanks for this thread, because it reminded me of one I cannot leave out.

There was a week I spent in a mental hospital with a major anxiety spiral. Pretty much everything felt unmanageable. The one thing I could handle was Pokémon FireRed on a Game Boy Advance.

That was it. That was my anchor.

It was actually written into my chart that I was allowed to plug my charger in at the nurses station while I slept so the GBA would be ready the next day. No arguments. No debates. Just accepted as necessary.

Not my oldest game, see my other replies for that, but it is probably the only one I have mentioned that might have saved my life.

Close, but mine was Gorf on the VIC-20, not the 2600. See my other reply for the longer story.

This thread is turning into a memory dump for me, so here is another one.

I go back farther than Warcraft 3. I still fire up Warcraft 2 on DOSBox now and then, usually when I have had a bit too much to drink and want something familiar.

When Warcraft 2 was new, I was a junior computer programmer for a very large corporation, top 25 in the world. I set up a LAN at home using token ring, which tells you roughly how old this story is.

My wife is not really a gamer, although after thirty seven years of marriage and putting up with this stuff, maybe she qualifies anyway. We would sit at our desks, hold our daughters on our laps, and battle each other in Warcraft 2.

The machines were 80286 boxes I built myself from parts. Thanks, CDW back when it still meant Computer Discount Warehouse.

So yeah, I guess I have been around for most of this history. Some people remember patches and balance updates. I remember toddlers, token ring, and orcs on beige hardware.

Joust brings back a very specific memory for me.

I was in early high school and happened to live in the town in Iowa that called itself the Video Game Capital of the World. There are enough documentaries out there that it is not exactly a secret. When I joined the Army at eighteen my nickname was Radar, which probably gives it away anyway.

I had a good friend from junior high computer club. He had a TRS-80 Color Computer. I was a Commodore guy. By high school we had mostly drifted apart. Then one day he called me up, yes phones did exist, and told me he was going to set a world record on Joust and asked if I wanted to come help support him.

Somehow I got permission from my parents. I spent the entire weekend at the arcade with him, mostly watching, bringing food, keeping track of things, and just being there. He set the record. I do not know how long it stood, but I know I was there when his name went up on the big board Monday morning.

I got an unexcused absence from school for it.

Still worth it.

That one hits close.

I started Minecraft because my kid talked me into it. I bought him the last Alpha version, then bought myself the first Beta so I could play with him. At the time it just felt like blocks and wandering around, but it stuck.

Now I play with my grandsons.

Last weekend was my oldest grandson’s eleventh birthday. Along with a Steam gift card and probably some Robux, all he really wanted was to spend the day playing Minecraft with his grandpa. So that is what we did.

Not my oldest game, but definitely the one I play most consistently. At least once a week.

Oldest game I still play is probably Taipan.

I first played it on an Apple IIe, but now it is just a web browser thing I poke at once in a while. It is basically spreadsheets and bad luck. You trade, pirates wreck you, the math never quite works out, and you lose anyway. I think that is why I still like it. No graphics to hide behind.

After that, Seven Cities of Gold, usually on a C64 emulator. That one still holds up more than it has any right to. You sail off thinking you are doing something heroic and slowly realize you are kind of a problem. The exploration feels lonely. The map still feels bigger than it actually is.

But the oldest one I keep coming back to is Gorf on the VIC-20.

I owned the cartridge. Bought it not long after it came out. I paid for the VIC-20 by walking beans and putting up hay all summer for a farmer when I was eleven or twelve. Hot, dusty work. Long days. I remember counting the cash and realizing I could actually afford a computer.

Gorf was loud, ugly, and mean. The voice mocked you constantly. The joystick barely survived. I loved it anyway. Sitting on the floor, TV buzzing, thinking this was the future and I had somehow managed to buy a piece of it.

Also, side note. I am trying pretty hard to become a professional writer. I write essays and stories over at tover153.substack.com. If anything there hits a nerve, feel free to subscribe.

So yeah. Taipan, Seven Cities, Gorf. Not because they are good by modern standards, but because they still feel like something.

If the best you can do is accuse me of using ChatGPT instead of responding to a single thing I actually said, that’s not a debate. That’s avoiding one. I write my own stuff. Always have. Sometimes I even manage to get a line right.

But if calling it “slop” makes it easier for you to skip the point, go ahead. I grew up in Iowa. I’ve seen actual slop. What I wrote doesn’t qualify.

Fair point. Although in a poem I wrote recently, I put it this way: “You learn to read the sky when you cannot trust the roof.”

Still feels about right for the situation.

More of my writing is here, if you’re curious: https://tover153.substack.com/

Thanks for the summary. Your version is definitely easier to type, but I still prefer the line I wrote earlier: “There is a point where a person realizes the boat is not just sinking, it was built upside down to begin with.”

Still, I appreciate the reply.

Reading this article gave me the same feeling I get when someone tries to fix a server with what a former trans coworker of mine proudly called percussive maintenance. You can tell right away that somebody in Washington thinks they are offering farmers a real solution, even though they seem unclear about what the actual problem is.

A little background, since my political history has taken more turns than a loose extension cord. I grew up in an extreme conservative evangelical home as a preacher’s kid. That meant I carried around beliefs I had not really inspected up close. So yes, for years I showed up and did the Republican work. I made thousands of campaign calls for Romney. I worked for someone running for the state house who did not get elected while I was on her staff, though she later squeaked out a win by six votes, which felt like watching a progress bar creep from 99 percent to complete. I checked all the boxes. Special elector. County central committee. If there was an election from 2011 on, I was probably standing in a school gym with an R next to my name.

Then the party hitched itself to President Mango Unhinged. I wrote the county Chairwoman a long, weary letter explaining that I could not pretend this was normal. I switched to Independent and then, in a moment of questionable judgment, voted for Gary Johnson. Let us call that a corrupted file in my political directory.

Later, when the Senate Election Committee decided Roy Moore was still an acceptable investment, that was it. I went to the courthouse, filled out the form, and became a Democrat. There comes a point when you realize your operating system has too many vulnerabilities to patch.

During the last presidential election, I worked as the precinct chair in a rural county. My grandparents all farmed, and I spent plenty of childhood summers walking beans, putting up hay, and roguing corn with a hoe sharp enough to qualify as a safety violation. But I have been an IT guy for decades now, and even I could see what was coming when the final tally came in and sixty six percent of the precinct voted for Mango Unhinged. That was the moment I knew the whole system was about to crash.

So reading this article about a twelve billion dollar aid package funded by tariffs that Americans are actually paying feels like watching someone reboot the wrong machine. Farmers do not need giant checks mailed out after a political fire. They need stable markets, predictable trade, and equipment that does not cost the same as a mid range server rack.

And when I see a promise to cut environmental rules to make machinery cheaper, all I hear is the unmistakable sound of someone deleting files they should not delete.

At this point I half hope Pam Bondi has my name in a folder labeled Formerly Cooperative, Now Suspiciously Reasonable. It would be the most attention the federal government has ever given a middle aged Army veteran living quietly in an RV.

This twelve billion dollar relief package is not a solution. It is the equivalent of taping over a warning light on the dashboard. Farmers deserve real fixes, not another round of political tech support from people who keep unplugging the wrong cables.

This is harder to type than it probably should be. Back in 2015, because of the way I was raised in an extreme conservative evangelical household as a preacher’s kid, I was a Republican. I had already broken with that world in every meaningful way, but I had not actually sat down and examined what I believed. So there I was, still actively involved in politics. I helped campaign for Romney. I made more than three thousand phone calls, which I am pretty sure qualifies as a minor war crime. I was on the election staff of a representative who, for the record, had not been elected yet when I worked for her. I was a special elector. I was on the county central committee. I worked every election since 2011 with an R behind my name.

And then they picked the orange man. I wrote the Chairwoman a very long letter explaining, in polite terms, that this was not going to work for me. I switched my affiliation to Independent. Unfortunately, I still had not figured out where the world was heading, so I voted for Gary Johnson. The less said about that period of my life, the better.

When the Senate Election Committee decided to finance Roy Moore, I walked directly to the courthouse, changed my registration to Democrat, and started working elections for that party instead. There is a point where a person realizes the boat is not just sinking, it was built upside down to begin with.

Anyway, based on the tone of that old letter, I find myself hoping I ended up on a list somewhere for Pam Bondi. It would be nice to feel important for a moment. Besides, what a spectacular waste of resources it would be to track down one Army veteran who lives in an RV in the middle of nowhere.

This article is mostly useless. It states the problem, but doesn’t have anything new to add.