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One of These Things Is Not Like the Others (And I'm Not the Only One that Knows it)

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  We are at an age when dedicated self-interest is choking democracy at the throat . Truth—real, unvarnished, hard-edged truth—can’t even get back in the room anymore. Not because it’s been disproven. But because if it were let in, it would name names. And those names? Too many of them now come with book deals, speaking fees, and segment intros on cable news. I saw it clearly when I wrote Conditional . I’m not an expert. I’m not a specialist. But I’ve got eyes—and I grew up on Sesame Street. I know how to play “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.” So why is it that not a single major voice warning us about autocracy ever brings up the most glaring difference between the U.S. and every fallen democracy they compare us to ? We do not have a centralized government. We are a federal patchwork. Fifty laboratories. Fifty separate power centers. That’s not a glitch. That’s the whole damn design. Would that save us? Maybe. All of us? Probably not. But would California go down witho...
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You’re Not Canceled. You’re Just Wrong.

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  You’re Not Canceled. You’re Just Wrong. Remember when your biggest fear online was a chain email that said you'd die if you didn’t forward it to ten people? Now we’re all living in the upgraded version—except instead of dying, you just lose your job, your social circle, and maybe your sense of reality. We don’t call it cancel culture as much anymore, but the rules haven’t changed—just the volume. Welcome to fear, rebranded. And it was born in households with cold parents and warm screens. The Myth Cancel culture is often framed as a tool of moral justice—a digital reckoning that holds people accountable when traditional systems fail. But that’s not its origin story. Not really. Cancel culture is the child of forced consensus . And forced consensus is a survival instinct born in chaos. How It Really Started Gen X parents were, by and large, raised in instability—emotionally and economically. They came of age in latchkey households, shaped by absenteeism, cynicism, and broken trust...
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The Dream From Which We Can't Awaken

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Reckoning with the American promises that became nightmares. Hope survives. Even in broken places. When I was a kid, they told us if you worked hard enough, you could have anything. A good job. A nice house. A full table. Maybe even a little luxury, if you dreamed big enough. They called it a shining land of opportunity. You know the deal — work hard, get ahead. Simple math. Simple promise. What they didn’t tell us was that the game was already rigged. They didn’t tell us that hope could be weaponized — used to keep you running on a treadmill until your body broke, your mind cracked, and your spirit wore thin. They didn’t tell us that protecting the rich would become our civic religion. You can see it clearest in how we treat celebrity in this country. How we're trained to flinch at criticizing the rich, the famous, the golden gods on magazine covers and Instagram feeds. How we apologi...
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Man vs. Money

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  Man vs. Money A nation built on two ideals — one of them a parasite.   This country was never just founded on freedom. It was built on two conflicting ideologies — the rights of man , and the pursuit of money. And from the beginning, those two forces have been fighting it out. In choosing to enshrine both ideologies — the rights of man and the pursuit of wealth — in the same foundational documents, the Founding Fathers opened the door to the beast. They wove contradiction into the country’s very DNA. One ideal sought liberty and equality; the other sought profit, even if it meant exploitation. And the tension between those two has shaped every chapter since. We have pretended for more than two hundred years that these competing ideologies could rest easy in each other’s company. But I fear Money has always been waiting for Man to relax — to slip into sleep — so it could garrote him in the dark. Where "man" meant dignity, community, shared burden, and collective good — ...
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You Built This Too

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  You Built This Too   When technology forgot humanity, and you helped it happen. Once, I built the web myself. Now, I can’t log into my own life. In the middle of a national crisis, when everything feels uncertain, I tried to access my Social Security account. I couldn’t. Why? Because it was tied to a phone I no longer have. And because the system—designed by people who preach security but don’t comprehend lived reality—won’t allow for a human moment like changing a number. This didn’t start with the current administration, though they’ve made it worse. This has happened before . And it’s not just me. Anyone whose life doesn’t follow the neat, trackable arc of digital behavior—anyone who switches phones, resets passwords, forgets a username, loses a device—is treated not like a person… but like a risk. They call it security, but it’s not about protecting you. It’s about maintaining control over you — and calling it protection so you’ll stop asking questions. The system doesn...
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I Was the Wizard

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  I Was the Wizard What Geocities, HTML, and Time Taught Me About Tech, Trust, and the Myth of Progress Before the algorithm, there was HTML. Before the internet tracked you, it challenged you. Before the walled gardens, we built our own damn neighborhoods. I had a Geocities site. It wasn’t pretty. It blinked. It probably had a MIDI file autoplaying something awful. I went through   hell hunting down that MIDI file — and more hell finding the exact snippet of code that would let it autoplay. That’s how it worked back then. Want a marquee? Scour a message board. Want a background that sparkles or a dancing hamster gif? You begged, borrowed, and Frankensteined your way through JavaScript and Java snippets. We weren’t just writing HTML — we were navigating UseNet , TelNet , Gopher , FTP . The web wasn’t just a place; it was a network of protocols you had to know how to walk. And downloading an image? Sometimes that meant getting a text file of ASCII gibberish and reassembling ...
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Before Windows, There Was Chaos

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  How Bill Gates Made Me Feel Poor — and Then Taught Me What Power Really Is I was computing in the days before Windows. My first system had a grand total of 20 megabytes on the hard drive. I had the full 640k of RAM, but after DOS loaded, I was left with 512k to actually work with. Most software developers believed Gates when he supposedly said, "640k ought to be enough for anyone." So they built right up to the limit. DOS didn't like that. Programs clashed. Crashed. Locked up. Then came Windows. Not for me, though. I couldn’t run it. Not on my 20MB system. And that was the first strike against Gates: he made me feel my relative poverty. There’s a particular sting when everyone else gets the shiny new thing and you don’t. I wasn’t mad at Windows because it was bad. I was mad because I couldn’t have it. It felt like the tech world was moving on without me. But I scraped. I saved. And eventually, piece by piece, I built a system that could run Windows. Then I promptly kill...
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