the response to this shook me on a human level. generally i see twitter as "performance art for office drones like me" but i'm going to try to write this one as an actual human. mask-off. for the past couple years, i've been sharing political takes, always wishing i was dumb enough to just play the game. surely it's bad for business to alienate half the people i need to work with? and isn't the reason i'm here to build a business? but i shared for a few reasons: > this is not 2006 baby. we now live in a world that rewards people for polarizing opinions. these people have more integrity. and—and i'll return to this—the algorithm prioritizes them more. *isn't this* the game? > as long as i was expressing a contrarian view, i hoped that in some small way, i could help expand the overton window of this space, normalize more diverse discourse, and give space for more people to speak freely who might be scared to do so. i have a lot less to risk here than others. > these things matter to me a lot, and they reflect the ideals of why i got into this space in the first place. to put that simply, naively, i believe in a borderless world, and that it's insane we've created global class hierarchies based on where people are born. i said in the post below that i was writing "with no great animus." and that was true. i know many of the figures i mentioned personally. and i know that most are driven by good intentions, and as @toly noted in a reply that really pierced me, a lot of family trauma. and i relate to this intensely. because the fact is, i am too. we are humans having human responses. this is not the only explanation of course. i think it's genuinely hard to continue rallying for your anti-state ideology-coins when the state peeks its head in your doorway and tells you it wants to pump your bags. and maybe most significantly, i think it's hard not to pick barroom brawls over politics when this is effectively the *only* content that the algorithm wants to surface. stick around on social media enough, and you eventually will cede your identity to the mandates of the algorithm in the hope that if you feed it, it will reward the rest of your content in turn. but it rarely does. what i have tried to avoid admitting is that this has happened to me too. and yet, when i look at my track record here, i have started *a lot* of barroom brawls on twitter. and i know. at some point to succeed here, we all must take on the role of the swaggering shoulder-chipped macho man desperate to mask his insecurity in aggro rhetorical feints. this is not the majority of content i've produced, by any means, but it is the majority of my content that's gone viral, and i've continued to feed the algorithm with an increasingly blustering persona, as have so many of the people i mentioned. and what other option is there? we all are desperate to reassert some semblance of moral order in a world where it's clearly failing, even if only some of us are suspicious that the path to evil is asserting you have carte blanche for your behaviors because you're on the side of good. (see: US interventions in korea, vietnam, guatemala, panama, chile, indonesia, haiti, libya, sudan, libya, afghanistan, iraq, libya, etc.) but one thing i learned from the comments: i do think there's a very real risk that at some point when you stop seeing others as people, and only see them as social media personas, you'll do the same to yourself. lobotomy-by-algorithm. the fact is, i'm not sure how to continue posting with an algorithm that only wants me to be the most desperately insecure machismo version of myself. and maybe there isn't a way. but the last few days helped remind me both that the worst people we know are still human, and that they're the worst people we know because they refuse to see others as humans too. it feels more than ever that humanity is a sacrifice the algorithm demands from us—which, in the fight against fascism, can feel like a fair enough sacrifice to make. but that calculus becomes more and more unclear every day. and in relation to the conversation and responses below, the most important point to call out.

nearly the entire og guard of anti-state crypto—udi, nic, bankless, ameen, toly—is now whiling away their days clamoring for war i say this with no great animus. it's just a testament to how profoundly out of touch this industry is with the world's ideals—and its own.

honestly everyone pivoting from crypto libertarianism in 2018 to pro-war statism in 2026 makes perfect sense. and you have to admire these people. for whatever era they're in, they are geniuses at being contrarian and wrong. they're like opposite day forrest gumps