Someone Should Do Something About This

And that someone is you

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher died in the middle of class. This was not my first contact with the harshness of reality, nor the last, but it remains the most surreal. The public nature of it is the thing my mind keeps returning to as I grow older. Something about the diffusion of responsibility meant that none of us kids could work up the nerve to actually go get help for about fifteen minutes.

We just stared at him laying face down in the carpet even after his death rattles started. Just sat there with his dead body in the room. Even after we all found the courage to look at each all of us seemed to have the same thought. “Someone should really do something about this.”

To this day, I am deeply ashamed that I wasn’t the one who ran out to get the teacher next door. It is a shame that has never left me. It is a good shame because there have been times since then when I have felt this same kind of feeling and I have always remembered to act against it.

It was too late to do anything for my teacher, of course. I started this with telling you that he was dead but I didn’t know that at the time and that is what continues to haunt me.

When my dad came to pick me up from school, and found me sobbing, he got down on one knee put his hand on my shoulder and gave the best words of comfort a slav mill-worker had to give:

“Don’t be a pussy.”

It may sound cruel out of context, and it certainly wasn’t kind, but it was to his understanding appropriate. That was the best thing he could think of to say to me. I wasn’t the one who died. I wasn’t the one who had lost a father or a husband. There was nothing to be done and feeling sorry for myself beyond my personal loss was being indulgent. The universe is uncaring and at times that occasionally manifest as cruelty. Courage would be necessary for a happy life.

I promise this has a point beyond “look at me, I am being tough on the internet.” And I’ll even relate it all back to Elon Musk and Twitter.

“Do your best and forget the rest” or “All that matters is that you tried” and “Swing for the moon, even if you miss you’ll end up among the stars” means something a lot different when the consequences for failure is someone being eviscerated by a piece of industrial equipment. People telling you to never feel shame or guilt or any negative emotion suffer from something I call “Toxic Positivity.” You start editing reality in your favor so heavily that you can no longer distinguish between the polar ends of the emotional spectrum. Nothing is ever bad. Everything starts to feel fake and unreal. I’m a cheerful person by nature but I always make sure I feel the pain of the things I have to push through to stay cheerful. It keeps me honest.

Growing up in a mill town it was an expectation that you’d yell at your boss and raise hell if he tried to get you or someone else to do something stupidly dangerous. My dad was fired seven times in thirty-five years and re-hired each time. If you had to challenge the new mill superintendent then to a fist fight then so be it. The consequences for failure were too high for any other culture to endure. There was a twenty-one year old kid driving a truck to pick up chips, first day on the job, and because flip phones had just been invented he went onto the chip pile to take a selfie. The augurs turned on to load the barge, the chip pile turned into quick sand, and he was turned into pulp. The biggest piece of him left that my uncle could find was a pinky finger that got stuck in some gears. He was just married and had a brand new baby. My dad drove to me to the site about two hours after it happened so I would know how dangerous a sawmill could be. I was fourteen years old.

People die so you can buy the wood to build your house.

The summers I spent in the sawmill, not to mention the whole culture around it for the whole town or the times my dad would sneak me in so I could watch him work the cross saw as a little kid, forced me to have a pragmatic outlook on the world of atoms. There is no magic level anywhere in the world that you can pull to just make things good. You have to sit down and think through all the components of very complicated machines and determine which of them you can move around to produce a better future. And there are always trade-offs.

I think this is why I couldn’t finish college. It was all just… so fucking dreamlike. I kept asking questions about how research in the lab I worked at would end up actually helping people and get blank stares. I was like some bumbling idiot villager who had walked into the fairy kingdom where food magically appeared on tables and no one had to answer anything about how stuff actually worked and how it actually happened. I would ask these kinds of pointed questions and people would just look at me like I was crazy or didn’t understand something. It made me feel inferior for a long time before I realized the truth. There is an entire generation of Americans who cannot stand to be accountable for anything even to themselves. Everyone is walking out over the edge refusing to look down and acknowledge they aren’t standing on anything.

The point of this is two-fold, after I listened to a slew of recent interviews with Sam Bankman Fried the former CEO of FTX and Bernie Madoff of the crypto world, and Yoel Roth former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. I listened to these interviews with people who have stolen billions of dollars or destabilized democracy across the free world and they just seem so utterly fucking carefree I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Whether it’s SBF saying “Well, I’m still definitely a genius but I should have been paying more attention to the allocation of literally billions of dollars. Oops. But also I’m going to tell people point blank that I’m a sociopath and that I don’t care and say ‘hehe’ a lot and keep floating above all the bad stuff happening like it’s a movie” or Yoel Roth saying “Oh, I mean it’s a policy. Someone wrote it down in an email. So you can clearly see that I had no choice but to trample all over the speech of other citizens, colluding with government agents in a zero transparency/zero due process environment to suppress speech but you know sometimes people get mad on the internet so what are you going to do?” I find myself completely understanding people who want to overthrow the government. I mean, it won’t work if you try to do that. And you’ll hurt yourself and others to no avail. But I fucking get it.

The failure of these two people wasn’t in anything they did as cogs in a machine. I’m sure they were wonderful cogs. Even a CEO can be a cog if you just go “Oh, I make the number go up. That is my job. I’m a number upper.” It was in their failure to step back and try to be more than a cog in a machine. To apply some modicum of goddamn decency and humanity to their products and process. They were like I was in my fourth grade class, just sitting there saying “someone should probably do something about this” and looking to each side as if to acknowledge “but definitely not me, though.” Except without guilt or remorse or conscience.

Feeling shitty over something bad you did is the emotional equivalent of vegetables. Acknowledging you did whatever the bad thing was on purpose because you have inherently bad sides to your personality is fucking broccoli. Taking that into measure and figuring out how to stand over it and not be consumed by it, while always holding knowledge of the risk, is a vitamin-enriched fruit smoothie.

Yoel Roth in particular kept saying to Kara Swish “I wish I could tell you a story about Elon being a really bad person, but I can’t” and never once questioned himself on what it meant that he wished he could tell you a story about a guy being evil so it would fit better into his personal narrative. I know in his mindset he sees that as “look how objective I am” but also he literally meant “I wish the guy had been evil.” No guilt whatsoever. No concept he could be in the wrong. No thought he was in some kind of weird ideological bubble. Totally carefree. What was he planning to do now that he was no longer the person who made other people disappear? Go on vacation. It’s called self-care.

At least when Scrooge was our archetype for an evil elite we didn’t have to listen to his agonizing justification about how he was just trying to self-actualize when he was refusing to let his employees burn a single lump of coal in the middle of winter.

I want someone to go to jail for both of these events, and yes I know the Twitter one is different. I know that seems over-harsh and causes a lot of people to say things like “well, it’s a private company” blah blah blah. Okay, but what if you went back to 1980 and you found out that NBC News was doing this? What would you do then? Pretend you hadn’t been desensitized by incestuous tentacle porn and murder videos and the nihilism of 4 Chan. Pretend you lived before the internet and you knew the names of your neighbors and you cared about your community and things like Civic Duty. If you collude with the government to secretly remove speech how is that not a violation of the First Amendment? How is that not one of the worst crimes you can commit in a free Republic? Yeah, yeah, private companies but when you put just a drop of “secret government” oil in the pond of public conversation the surface tension dramatically changes into something more like the stagnant swamp of tyranny. I realize these people have “Live, Laugh, Love” and other motivational messages in their house but maybe fuck you even if your personal motivations were so strong that you were willing to do whatever it took to seem like a good person? Maybe I don’t have to humor your bullshit focus on appearance when you’re doing awful things? I know people may think that’s crazy but something needs to happen to let people know that this is real life (I really need to write up my proof that this is the real world, or at least one of them. I’ve thought about this a lot, motherfucker) and there are fucking consequences even if you vote for liberals.

Even Sam Bankman Fried, who committed spreadsheet-verifiable crimes to anyone who wants to look for five minutes, is making huge strides with his “Is it even that bad, though, as long as I tried my best and wanted the best for everyone?” defense. The members of the press who unapologetically advance this bullshit pay no price to their reputation.

We can’t keep living in this magical world forever. Pretty soon the coyote has to look down and realize he isn’t standing on anything. Then he has to fall.

This is why I think the Internet News Index would be valuable. There would be a cost to organizations and individuals for repeating verifiable bullshit, or removing context from a story so as to make it unbelievable. There would be real, transparent, publicly adjudicated consequences for lying all the damn time. And there would be rewards for being repeatedly correct even when three hundred anime furries are screaming at you on Twitter.

There has to be a mechanism to elevate sanity over insanity, the same way your brain has a system one and a system two to help navigate the world. You can’t think about everything all the time but also if you walk around on autopilot without ever stopping to think you’ll walk into traffic.

It does seem like some smart people with influence out there are starting to come to the same conclusions. Sriram Krishnan has a recent tweet pushing for public and transparent adjudication of content with an appeals process. The first and foundational process for an Algorithmic Republic. He even asked for emails responding to the idea.

I intend to send him one.

Super busy with the child and I’m writing this while at Les Schwab getting my wife’s winter tires put on which is about all the free time I’ve had in three weeks but I can’t stand the feeling of “someone should do something about this” and just sit here and not do something about it. That’s the most valuable lesson I ever learned in the fourth grade.