# you can never go back

Aug 31, 2025

> Total disassociation, fully out your mind
> Googling “derealization”, hating what you find
> That unapparent summer air in early fall
> The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all
> Bo Burnham - That Funny Feeling

I was thinking today about a disc jockey. Like one in the 80s, where you actually had to put the records on the turntables to get the music. You move the information. You were the file system.

I like the Retro Game Mechanics channel on YouTube. What was possible was limited by the hardware, and in a weird way it forced games to be good. Skill was apparent by a quick viewing, and different skill is usually highly correlated. Good graphics meant good story – not true today.

I was thinking about all the noobs showing up to comma. If you can put a technical barrier up to stop them, like it used to be. But you can’t. These barriers can’t be fake, because a fake barrier isn’t like a real barrier. A fake barrier is one small patch away from being gone.

What if the Internet was a mistake? I feel like it’s breaking my brain. It was this mind expanding world in my childhood, but now it’s a set of narrow loops that are harder and harder to get out of. And you can’t escape it. Once you have Starlink to your phone, not having the Internet with you will be a choice, not a real barrier. There’s nowhere to hide.

Chris McCandless wanted to be an explorer, but being born in 1968 meant that the world was already all explored. His clever solution, throw away the map. But that didn’t make him an explorer, it made him an idiot who died 5 miles from a bridge that would have saved his life.

> And I’ll tell you something else that you ain’t dying enough to know
> There’s still some living left when your prime comes and goes
> Jimmy Eat World - Big Casino

Sure, you can still spin real records, code for the NES, and SSH into your comma device. But you don’t have to. And that makes the people who do it come from a different distribution from the people who used to. They are not explorers in the same way Chris McCandless wasn’t.

When I found out about the singularity at 15, I was sure it was going to happen. It was depressing for a while, realizing that machines would be able to do everything a lot better than I could. But then I realized that it wasn’t like that yet and I could still work on this problem. And here I am, working in AI 20 years later. I thought I came to grips with obsolescence.

But it’s not obsolescence, the reality is looking to be so much sadder than I imagined. It won’t be humans accepting the rise of the machines, it won’t be humans fighting the rise of the machines, it will be human shaped zoo animals oddly pacing back and forth in a corner of the cage while the world keeps turning around them.

It’s easy to see the appeal of conspiracy theories. Even if they hate you, it’s more comforting to believe that they exist. That at least somebody is driving. But that’s not true. It’s just going.

There are no longer Western institutions capable of making sense of the world. (maybe the Chinese ones can? it’s hard to tell) We are shoved up brutally against evolution, just of the memetic variety. The TikTok brainrot kids will be nothing compared to the ChatGPT brainrot kids.

And I’m not talking like an old curmudgeon about the new forms of media being bad and the youth being bad like Socrates said. Because you can never go back. It will be whatever it is.

To every fool preaching the end of history, evolution spits in your face. To every fool preaching the world government AI singleton, evolution spits in your face.

I knew these things intellectually, but viscerally it’s just hard to live through. The world feels so small and I feel like I’m being stared at by the Eye of Sauron.