Things are Getting Weird

Why I have half a dozen drafts and haven't released a thing, at the End of the World

Steve Bannon popularized the term “flooding the zone” when he talked about his media strategy for the first Trump campaign and subsequent term. The strategy is simple and Bannon wasn’t the first to use it, he was probably just the first to popularize the description of it, and he definitely was one of the more adept strategists to employ the approach.

Flooding the zone is filling the airwaves with so much noise that the public can’t really focus on any singular thing for long enough to mount a response. This has become such a reality for us that I don’t even think the strategy is being explicitly employed anymore, I think it’s just the way that politics work now. You can’t focus on one scandal. Did you even remember that the Homeland Security Secretary was fired after it was revealed she probably defrauded the government out of a quarter billion dollars in contracts given to a personal friend? You might, but you probably didn’t, because since then we’ve started a war, ended it about a dozen times and found out that the Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. once cut the penis off a dead raccoon to ‘study later.’ That’s about 1-5% of the things that have happened since Kristi Noem was fired… one month ago.

Things are Getting Weird.

It’s not even flooding the zone anymore, it’s just outright acceleration in every direction imaginable. It’s not just happening in government either. There were two attacks on Sam Altman’s house in 48 hours last week. Mythos might be the most overhyped AI model in history, or it might be able to hack any system connected to the internet. All of these things hit the zeitgeist with a bang… and then disappear in mere moments when the next thing happens.

I’ve been trying to write more, but I’ve largely been failing. I have six Substack drafts that are gathering dust right now, some of them very large with a lot of effort poured into them. They might never see the light of day, because it feels as though things have gotten too weird to really be able to adequately describe with words. We’re seeing some of the most blatant fraud and corruption in history at the highest levels of government right now. We got about 7 days of spotty media coverage on the US double-tapping a schoolhouse full of Iranian girls, killing over 150 children, teachers and parents. Every day, something new happens that 10 years ago would have blown the whole of society wide open in anger, terror or sadness.

These things are just too weird to really adequately write about.

There are some things you should pay attention to, things which could have an outsized impact on your immediate and long-term future. Here is my advice for Things Getting Weird.

Limit Your Exposure

Doomscrolling will not help you in any way. Change your media habits such that you are consuming much more quality information from much better sources. $20 per month spent on media subscriptions is much better than 20 hours a week spent on Twitter.

I’m setting up RSS feeds and giving a Hermes Agent access to them. The agent will give me a synthesized view of what’s going on every couple hours, alert me if anything particularly noteworthy comes up, and stores the articles for later work. This is probably over-engineered. You can literally just set up an RSS feed and close your Twitter tab and you’ll be better off.

This doesn’t mean go head-down in the sand. With things getting weirder, information hazards are becoming more common. Social media is becoming even more damaging to your psyche. It helps nobody to sink an hour into arguing with GoyimGuy_1488 on X about immigration policy. You will not convince them, you’ll only waste an hour and throw off your mood.

What this means is become more intentional with your input and output. Don’t consume garbage in the hopes that you’ll find a diamond ring in a Taco Bell wrapper. Go seek out better sources and very intentionally engage with social media in a more tactically and strategically sound way.

Find Your Lane

You, dear reader, will not stop the US military from invading Iran.

The protest movement that… has not really risen to meet the moment in the US won’t either. There’s very little stopping whatever the current administration wants to do in Iran. Congress might not be able to stop them either. Our best bet may honestly be hoping that they’ve more or less run out of ammunition.

Feel free to talk about your opposition to the war, definitely organize with friends and family to create protest and discussion groups on it, but let’s be honest here. We are past the point of normal protest tactics being effective. We’re past the twitter hashtag moment of American society.

What I’d recommend instead of throwing yourself at the wall of “Protesting on X About the War” is finding a lane where you could affect change, and applying yourself to it wholeheartedly. This does not have to be as huge as stopping a war, and I’d argue that the smaller lanes are better. If your town has a decent sized and struggling homeless population, feed them. If you’re an engineer, write the code that you think can help people resist what’s happening now and what’s happening later. If you’re a good speaker, figure out what message the people around you need to hear to better gear themselves for what’s to come. If you’re a good designer or artist, make that part of your protest.

The key here is that everyone can tweet. Everyone can yell on Instagram Reels. Everyone can make a YouTube short. Those things aren’t moving the needle. We’ve been doing that for a long time now and they just aren’t doing it. You have to find your lane, one where you can actually affect change. It’s not the time for more tweets, it’s the time for leaders.

Expect Things to Get Weirder

Your preference for things to just get back to normal isn’t going to happen. We’re not one impeachment away from everything fitting neatly back into place. It’s not going to happen in 2026 after midterms, it’s not going to happen in 2028 when or if he leaves office. Things are irreparably broken, and we might change the face of the administration, we may even see some folks go to jail, but the truth of the matter is, the fix isn’t coming in a couple years.

This is the least weird things will ever be again.

I don’t know if we will save ourselves from this slide down authoritarianism, but I will tell you that we have progressed so far down it that the climb back up, just to get to where we were in 2016-2020 (which also wasn’t ideal) will take Herculean effort that quite frankly neither party in US politics is interested in. Once you’ve made that slide, it is exceedingly rare for another politician to willingly give up governmental power that they inherited. This is why the PATRIOT Act hasn’t changed since it was written, this is why the CFAA hasn’t changed since it was written, this is why after the Snowden revelations nothing really changed about surveillance, it just moved into the private sector. By all accounts, we are more heavily surveilled now than we were before Snowden, now it’s just a bit more in the open.

I wish I had a starry-eyed story of optimism for you, but over the next decade or so, I don’t see the world getting better. This sucks, in part because I have kids and I know they are going to come of age in a phenomenally dark time. What I’m doing for them is preparing myself as much as possible for things to get weirder.

What Does This Look Like?

I believe right now is a fantastic time to generalize.

I just bought some chickens that I’m learning to raise in my back yard. I’m learning much more about how to grow food. I’m selling my extremely finicky and expensive to repair convertible and I’m planning to buy an older, much cheaper to fix truck that I can use to pull a trailer or carry things in the bed. I’m paying off every bit of debt I have. Very soon I’ll be looking at water catchment and treatment systems.

This isn’t me saying “welp time to go back to the land” either. I’m also organizing with my friends to make a “who can help who with what” type of group. I’m also looking into electrical engineering so I can build and repair useful things that aren’t explicitly just software, privacy tech so I can help build software that protects people, history and political science so I can better understand where we are and where we’ve been, new languages so I can learn from people in other countries, economics so I can understand why our economy is so fucked.

If we were talking “how to succeed in tech” I would be telling you the opposite: lean into a specialty so you can keep a job while the generalists all lose theirs to automation and a crumbling economy. Since we’re talking about “how to survive the next ten years” my advice is more complex. Find some way to keep your job, which is going to involve specializing if you’re in tech and many other fields, but generalize to help you survive mentally/financially/physically/spiritually. This will help you prepare for things to keep getting weirder.

Mentally, generalization exposes you to stressors that you would not otherwise have experienced. This week I had to figure out how to make a metal storage shed baby chicken-proof. The heat isn’t the problem as much as making it hard for them to escape their enclosure and then end up escaping the shed out into my yard, where my three dogs and cat as well as hawks, raccoons and snakes are waiting. This is not a stressor I would have otherwise experienced, and chicken-proofing a shed has more general applications: threat modeling, critical thinking, basic redneck engineering, etc.

Physically, generalization can have similar benefits. I have been a powerlifter my entire adult life, but this year I started Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Ironman training. When you’ve spent the better part of 10 years focusing most of your training around 3 different lifts (squat, deadlift, bench press), all of a sudden switching gears to running, biking, swimming and all the myriad movements and positions involved in BJJ can give you some serious whiplash. This whiplash makes your body more adaptive: it’s now a lot easier to do movements other than squatting, bench pressing and deadlifting, which are movements that you’ll find are less important to every day life than carrying heavy things in one hand, running a ton, lunges, overhead presses, gripping fabric and stretching in weird positions.

More than anything, we suffer as people when we let ourselves identify as cogs to the extreme that hypercapitalism has forced us to. I do not want to be thought of solely as a software developer. I want to be thought of as a father, husband, a good friend, a knowledgeable person on many fronts, someone who is dependable and helpful. As things go bad, your neighbors won’t need you to be a solid software developer, a great web designer, a SaaS founder or a content marketer. They’ll need you to help lead us out of calamity.

This world may have been built by specialists, but it will be saved by generalists.