This Is the World on Tilt

In an era that increasingly rewards extreme beliefs and lifestyles of all kinds, moderation itself is now the only enemy.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” — William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming”

Today we’re going revisit the dullest unit from your worst high school math and science classes, and we’re going to talk about Euclidean vectors.

Vector is Latin for “carrier”. They start and end; the arrow bridges the delta between the initial and terminal points. They represent concepts like displacement, velocity, and acceleration. You can plot Euclidian vectors on coordinate systems.

Commonly represented as arrows, vectors are the combination of two scalars (Latin for “ladder”): magnitude and direction. Longer arrows, greater magnitude. You can tell direction by the placement of the arrowhead.

Now, that’s one helluva amuse-bouche to prep you for a meal of social atomization, but if you clicked on “This Is the World on Tilt” and expected a biohacking listicle, no, this is the essay that explains why we have biohacking listicles.

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

If you want to represent a change — of one variable like weight, or individually or within an organization or system, or society, you can generally do so with a vector. Something started somewhere, sometime later it arrived someplace else, and a best-fit line with an arrowhead is pretty universal shorthand to show what’s changed.

Right now, all kinds of things are changing: climate, politics, technology, social norms, wealth, culture, etc. That’s not a hot take or even unique to these “uncertain times”, very little doesn’t change, ever.

But what’s happening lately, is — just about no matter what you look at — you can make a case that just about everything is getting both better and worse depending on what data you look at or what sources you cite, oftentimes exponentially faster or more than ever before.

The hole in the O-Zone layer is closing, we also set another record for climate refugees. Democracy is in global retreat; so is global poverty. The presence of progress doesn’t mean the absence of problems.

For a particularly cheeky example: Smartphones mean we now have the access to knowledge about almost anything, about anything, anytime, anywhere. I’m certain we can agree we haven’t yet solved for stupid.

If anything, we’ve created entirely new buckets of ignorance. Can you find your way to your favorite restaurant without GPS? Do you know your spouse’s phone number? Did you know Joe Biden legitimately and legally won the 2020 election? Will kindergarteners today ever write a book report or research paper without ChatGPT? When was the last time you sat alone for even 20 minutes with your own thoughts?

Yet, perhaps nothing’s ballooned or changed more in the past decade than the mainstreaming of extremism. I just don’t mean of the political kind, although that’s one worrying flavor of it. Lifestyle extremism is up just about everywhere. Extreme diets, disordered eating, hate group affiliation, high-intensity exercise, addiction, suicide, dysmorphia, mental illness, mass shootings, and complex PTSD.

But it’s not all bad — major and grassroots charitable giving, sobriety, urban farming, ethical consumption, and every year, seemingly more and more kids from municipal housing projects appear on the 6-o’-clock news for getting into every Ivy League school or raising eight figures in VC to fund a climate tech startup.

The point — both of this essay and of how we operate within our various macro-containers — isn’t necessarily how things change, or if that change is good or bad, only that many things are changing a lot.

Still, the more things change, the more they stay the same: commentary on the day’s events and developments by journalists, scientists, laypeople, and artists feels almost eerily similar in tone and content to 20, 50, 100, or even 200 years ago. The same grievances, observations, predictions, hopes, fears, lacks, wants, and needs … just more of them, of increasingly variable quality.

How does so much change, so quickly, and so much more than ever before, yet so little feel like it’s changed? If things really have improved, how come we don’t feel it? If things really are collapsing, how come we won’t prevent it? Are progress and collapse really fighting to a draw?

That last question’s cute: progress is like respect. Takes forever to build and can be wiped out in an instant. All the progress in the world won’t mean a damn if someone presses the doomsday button.

This essay doesn’t even concern itself with those questions. Moreso why do those questions feel so everpresent? We may spend our lives writing our life stories, but you don’t need to go any further than George Washington to know that there’s no amount of good that can’t be undone by enough of the wrong kind of bad, understood and accepted by enough people to be the right kind of wrong and enough of it.

I mean, hell … there’s a read on the American revolution that it was a right-wing rebellion against the liberalizing (for the time) British Crown, and that the aim of the revolution was creating a new republic that removed legal barriers to concentrating wealth, forging endless empire, and subjugating Black and Indigenous populations to provide land and labor for free, by force, forever. To do so, the Founding Fathers (our O.G. Oligarchs) couched the Declaration and Constitution in flowery, idealist prose that gleaned mass buy-in from people who weren’t in on the con.

That’s certainly a choice … but you could make a case. And if the USA ever fractures or goes under, won’t that be how the world remembers it? As a rogue exceptionalist state founded on dual myths of caste and individualism, that thought of itself as Divine Providence for the moneyed, the hypermasculine, the god-fearing, and the pathologically motivated? Ultimately undone by its own hubris and inability to square itself with its past? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … I mean, shit, was the USA always an MLM? That answer lies outside the scope of this essay, too.

Still, as younger generations calcify in their appraisal of America — mostly sorting into Teams “Burn It All Down” and “The Greatest Country on Earth” — as people steer themselves into increasingly atomized identities and polarized ideologies, we risk isolating ourselves entirely, drifting farther away not from the “center” (to the extent that a center was ever a useful concept or fixed coordinate, and I don’t believe it ever was or could be), but from the actual truth and more importantly from each other.

If everything’s changing, and we’re celebrating that change, but nothing’s getting better, and things only feel like things are getting worse, then we’re only incentivized to perform or inspire scalar change. We’re all magnitude; the direction feels irrelevant. And while there’s plenty of overlapping blame to go around, there’s one arena in which ire’s especially warranted.

Move Fast, Break Things

Silicon Valley is problematic for a lot of reasons, but perhaps most problematic for its preternatural ability to endlessly invent tools that any idiot can (and will!) fashion into a weapon with little effort and even less empathy. If Ford Motor Company’s old motto was, “Quality is Job №1,” then Mark Zuckerberg’s “Move Fast, Break Things” — the “live, laugh, love” of tech and startup culture — can best be back-translated as “Disruption is Job №1”.

The trouble isn’t hard to pinpoint. You can cut to the root of tech’s penchant for sowing societal rot right in the pitch deck. Sure, the narrative slide may contain the heartwarming origin story of the brand, product, or service; the problem slide may establish urgency, importance, and the shiny new thing’s raison d’etre; but the VCs only perk up at the back half of the pitch, when founders cover TAM, the ROI timeline, and the endeavor’s current solvency. Or, to dejargonize: how much money it could make, how quickly, and how likely it is to make it.

And thus, you get a lot of VC money thrown at low-overhead, high-turnaround, already well-endowed founders and projects with high price points targeting affluent markets, providing shit no one needs, to solve problems people don’t actually have. That’s how you get Tinder, but invite-only and a subscription fee that rivals your rent, or an on-demand matchmaking service for live-in au pairs, or Uber, but for private helicopters to shuttle you between your family compound in Westport and your corporate HQ in the Seaport District, and eighty-six billion alt-coins all championed by the same 46 trust-bros throwing ayahuasca orgies at a resort in Tulum.

Meanwhile, roads and grids need fixing, cancer still needs curing, air travel has become a Kafkaesque hellscape in the past 30 years, and areas of the belts — rust, and cotton — contain a visible level of impoverishment that would give any of us in our alleged liberal urban bubbles some serious ick. Those are things that are breaking, right now, and no one’s moving fast to fix them.

These are problems that require serious, unsexy, high-overhead solutions that won’t enrich investors except with the satisfaction of a job well done. And that’s the problem: we’re making progress on things, but only ornamental progress that does nothing but line the pockets of people who use that money to pick yours, and allow the same 100 people in your city to keep circle-jerking each other with awards come gala season. Magnitude is everything; direction is immaterial. If things break, well, collateral damage doesn’t appear on a PNL.

What happens when we reward magnitude and not direction — and on social media, we call this “engagement” or time-on-site or clickthrough rates — we incentivize change for change’s sake, the more extreme, the better. More people than ever are glamorizing #vanlife, doing 30-day eat-nothing-but-fruit challenges, and videoing themselves quoting Andrew Tate to cuss out their teachers. Meanwhile, teen girls are anxious and miserable, and they grow up to become teachers who take second jobs to pay their bills and appear on Instagram only as their highly-filtered, digitally-idealized selves. Is this progress? Who is any of this for?

Moderation: The Punching Bag

Another study was done confirming the Babble Theory: if you want to be seen as a leader, do the most talking, talk the loudest, and convey the most certainty.

The quality of your ideas, the kindness in your heart, or the bulletproof logic you use in your rationale? LOL. Doesn’t matter. If you don’t speak up, talk over people, or ditch phrases like, “I feel” “if that makes sense” or “more research is needed”, you’re a pushover, a hedger, and an obstacle to be vanquished. You won’t get promoted, elected, or funded. You might get a nice severance package.

Nowhere is this more true than on the Internet. The people who get the most clicks, reads, fans, views, shares, likes, comments, and express lanes into the explore page are the people who post the most, the loudest, and with the least nuance and care. (It also helps if you’re hot.) I’d list exceptions, but alas, I don’t want to take away from my point or reduce engagement.

And so, to paraphrase the excellent Helen Lewis essay at The Atlantic, “The Internet Loves an Extremophile”, the Internet rewards unapologetic full-throat enthusiasm over all else. You can be an extreme dieter, a crypto-hawk, a social justice warrior, a Proud Boy, a COVID truther, or a QAnon True Believer. Whatever you are; you’d better be all the way in.

For a relatively wholesome example: I know a woman who’s in her third marriage in the past six years. She’s successful in her career, but her best-performing posts dating back to Obama’s second term are all about her significant other hard launches. It’s always some variant of, “this is the man I’ve waited my entire life for,” but with every man. It becomes a bit tough for an attentive person to take seriously, but for the unwashed, unjaded masses, it’s catnip. We don’t even care if things are true, we care if things are superlative.

Furthermore, the best-performing posts on LinkedIn are from people getting laid off, but only from places like Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Facebook. Those people jump to the heads of recruiters’ contact lists. That, or recent college grads proudly announcing they received a junior marketing internship at Apple like they’re giving a goddamned Oscar acceptance speech and there’s no orchestra to play them off.

Increasingly, workplaces have mostly abandoned the unwieldy traditional application process, and tend to hire you if you have an influential network, rather than if you’re qualified. I watched someone announce they’d been laid off on Monday and hired again on Friday, each post generating thousands of likes, in between a dozen or so banal posts that read like the super-fluffy psuedo-inspirational bro-etry you’ve grown to roll your eyes at. [For comparison’s sake: I’ve been offered interviews at two companies in the past six months, while mostly applying for positions that read in the JD like lateral moves.]

There’s a certain amount of unreasonableness that’s inherent in desiring to do anything big or do anything well. I run half-marathons, which is a ludicrous endeavor, especially for a man like me who’s never really been in athletic shape and who also has the lungs of a 60-year-old chainsmoking coalminer. However, in the past decade or so, it seems we’ve been incentivized to apply that same level of unchecked, unabashed, come-hell-or-high-water enthusiasm and determination to every facet of our lives, and every problem society faces. I’m not just married … I’m married to my best friend, the love of my life, the person who completes me. No one is free until we’re all free, so let’s make sure we cancel the poor chap who deadnames the celebrity they’ve never heard of before we make it a point to solve world hunger.

Case in point: It’s fucking wild that Greta Thunberg is now best known for using “Andrew Tate” and “small dick energy” in the same tweet when she’s done so much more and better; it’s also fucking wild that this is how I’ve heard of Andrew Tate when he’s done so much worse at such an unimaginable scale. We’re running out of time to address climate change, and the millions of subscribers to Mr. Tate’s unflinching cocktail of misogyny, grifting, and aggression is a kerosene-soaked tinderbox the size of a Michael Heizer desert art installation.

We’ve lost the plot. We’ve rewarded narcissism, outrage, and extreme beliefs and behavior over compassion, intelligence, curiosity, and temperance. It ain’t worth losing 20 pounds if you can lose 120. Getting laid off from a Fortune 50 firm is a tragedy; getting downsized from a mid-sized production plant is a statistic. You’re a bad Christian and member of the “woke left” if you want abortion exceptions for rape or incest. Meanwhile, everything’s a fight, nothing’s a dialogue, and vindictive blanket statements are the only way to rise above the Brian Wilson harmony wall of merely ill-informed blanket statements. I like Beyonce a good amount; I’m not sure I like her enough to appease the BeyHive into letting me keep my blog on the air or prevent this post’s comment section from calling me a hater in Dolby 7.1 surround sound.

In a series of ecosystems — technological, political, social, economic, and cultural — in which magnitude is everything and direction is nothing, this is the world on tilt. It’s an ever-widening and ever-intensifying feedback loop to do the biggest, most aggressive thing and say it the loudest, even if that thing is railing against the series of dominance-centric systems that incentivize doing the biggest thing and saying it the loudest. (Hello, it’s this essay! Welcome to the ultimate hyper-maximalist verbal fever dream!)

There are no greater sins now than being a casual Taylor Swift fan, making a decent living as a mid-level internet writer, believing pineapple is okay on pizza in the right contexts, or eating incrementally healthier and cutting back on smokes and booze more days than not. No, far better to be a Swiftie, an influencer signed to a prestige talent agency, defiantly pro- or anti-pineapple, or be vegan keto Cali-sober.

Mailing it in is sloth, quiet quitting is a trend. Skipping breakfast is an oversight; intermittent fasting is a strategy. The difference is in how we talk about it. Adversity isn’t real adversity unless it’s trauma, but your trauma isn’t real trauma if it’s counterbalanced by levels of privilege.

Moderation is not a lifestyle. Egalitarian pragmatism isn’t an ideology. Unless what you’re doing is the loudest, the newest, the most extreme, the most outragest, the biggest, or the most in love and satisfied or most broken or hopeless you’ve ever been in your entire life, there is no value on these internet streets and increasingly in the real streets for your story, talents, opinion, or goals.

To hear the Internet tell it, moderation is cowardly, lazy, and a form of covert animosity worse than actual evil. To correctly appraise things, anything really, as “fine”, or “could be better”, is the most wrong appraisal you can make. In the game of content, you either win or die.

The problem is that we think we are exceptional — that we aren’t mostly in the fattest part of the bell curve — that most of what we collectively go through is unique to us, or that we have the definitive perspective on it, or that we’re most qualified to talk about it loudly and then monetize it to finance our increasingly extreme lifestyles that we can tout some more even louder. We double-down and triple-down, touting ourselves as one of one when in any other era we’d be considered one of many. Just another name in the phone book or another stop on the wagon route.

The average human consumes more information in a day than a human in the 14th century consumed in a lifetime. Our brains are breaking, so addicted to the constant rush of a tsunami of attention-grabbing headlines, tweets, pictures, TikToks, trends, fears, and stimuli that we need to push the envelope even further — move faster, break more things, just to feel anything at all. It’d just be nice if anyone knew where all this was leading; it doesn’t feel like it’s leading anywhere good, and the path here hasn’t felt all that great, either. The moral arc might bend towards justice, but that path looks increasingly like a knotted-up ball of yarn launched across the Maginot line during active combat.

Magnitude is everything. That’s why it all feels so chaotic, so unwieldy, and so overwhelming these days. There’s just too much of everything except what is enough. Some of you will comment, “I hear a lot of complaining, but not a lot of solutions,” but that’s all this essay is. I’m a writer and a brand strategist, not the holder of a triple doctorate in Economics, Environmental Engineering, and Information Systems. (That’s a self-centered way to say the problem’s easy to notice but not easy to solve.)

Still, if you’re looking for a light, let me take two wet fingers and stamp out this candle for you. Even William Butler Yeats, the man who wrote the poem 100 years ago that contains the future titles of several books within a couple of spare verses, lamenting the futility of commonality and moderation, was not immune to his own head-first swan-dive into the waterless Olympic pool of extreme delights.

A decade after penning his painfully evergreen masterpiece, Yeats himself would develop an affinity for authoritarian nationalism — reserving an especially fervent fondness for fascism, eugenics, and even Mussolini himself. These days there are many more of the worst of us full of passionate intensity. If the center couldn’t hold then, even for the man who literally wrote “the center could not hold”, what hope could we possibly have now, for us?

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