STAGE 0

A lovely Monday in the middle of May, George Orwell’s famous year
The future of social media is born
Brother to three sisters
Dad to three baby girls
… father-to-be of a special kind of darkness

I can code a better book of faces just need a few weeks yea I’ll do it for me not for thee
Twinkle twins
I know how people tick
I know how to make them click
inside outside in here out there they all click for me lining up signing up because you have to be in with the cool crowd only the cool kids get in
Are you cool enough to be on my platform

So happy together
Dumb f*cks

STAGE I

Crimson login data trails stain the paths I take but you’ll never find them I’m too young and smart for you
It’s still contained, it’s just a “Harvard thing” well maybe a few more Ivy Leagues
Drop out ya dork and rent a place in Palo Alto, Pete will set you up
They’ll all come knocking on your door
A few will want to knock it down
One billion. Three hundred million. Look what they’re throwing at you all the big boys want you now
Well I don’t want them I can do it better smarter faster and I want it all for me
Class B is gold
Aww too bad I got 90% of the 10x votes
392 million shares
I’m both CEO and the chair of the board
whattaya gonna do
I got an empire to build that’s bigger than Rome

Deny, delay, deflect, dissemble
Wait for the damn media to stop yapping
Whistling in our faces rights ethics morals useless bs
The mission the mission at all costs

I kinda like gold chains now
Does my hair look dorky
Lizard or reptile?

STAGE II

Move fast and break everyone
Take it 70,000 to 3 billion users in 20 years
Users be used, that’s what they’re for
A predator’s gotta eat
Your data is our blood
Clicks coursing through cables overland and undersea
Angiogenesis
Names addresses emails and telephones, birthdays anniversaries and vacation plans, all your moves and all your movements, what you buy and what you don’t who you talk to who you block what you say morning night and after dark phone laptop tablet desktop GPS Wi-Fi cellular Bluetooth we inhale it all because you’re the one who’s addicted no choice none that’s yours that’s the one thing we’re not selling what’s that you say you don’t use the platform we still track you. Do you have friends? Of course you do. They’ll upload you too and you’ll never know it
And if that fails our partners will catch you in their pixeled dragnets
Nowhere to click where you could hide

All that you say all that you do all that you think you’re much too scrumptious

hahaha

We’re in everything you touch now

STAGE III

Innovation? Buy or bury it
Competition? Buy or bury it
Money solves everything when you’ve got oceans of it (and a yacht or two)
Let them do the hard work, they’ll take the exit
They got better ideas? Working harder than us? Peeling away our users?
Buy the bastards.
One big B for that photo sharing app. Two B’s for the virtual eyes. Nineteen B’s for the messaging app. What’s that, snappy chatty fingers don’t wanna bite? Then clone them and embed them in the Family. Make them all an offer they can’t refuse
Crush it
Crush it good
Winning is good strong masculine energy we need more of that in our bored rooms
No more friending that was child’s plays
No more hiding go play with children

Time to go META

STAGE IV

Meta stack
Horizontal vertical diagonal we’ve gone full meta stack
php java c++ python mysql linux erlang cassandra is a memcached scribe with a bigpipe in the haystack throw it some apache thrift and varnish it all

Meta stats
Data about data studies about studies all done with AI in nano fractions of the time
Catch us if you can

Meta static
Big numbers but we’re growing cold
Got half the world but they’re getting old

Metastasis
Tentacles spread a virus mutates a plague multiplies a fungus propagates
A cancer feeds … on unchecked power

Meta stasi
Relentless ears all-seeing eyes suppress oppress repress all thought that’s not like ours
Intimidate, isolate, character assassinate, reputation annihilate
Know everything about everyone

Meta/nic verses
Build them a fake universe and parse everything they do
מתה is the feminine dead
Do you not speak your own people’s language
Do you not see the irony

No why

Mental health who cares
Child exploitation who cares
Privacy who cares
Data security who cares
Human rights who cares
Democracy who cares

We don’t

We don’t know who we are
anymore

“All of these problems at the end of the day are human problems”

You’re human too Mark

It is a law of Nature that the Alphas rule. The top predator, the Alpha male and female, the King and Queen, the Emperor, the Pharaoh, the Sheik and the Tsar, the CEO, the President, the one and only Ruler atop the pyramid of community, society, civilization. Great White, Queen Bee, Silverback, or Homo Sapiens, the Earth’s species innately understand the built-in order of things. Whether it is the food chain or the corporate ladder, social animals naturally organize for levels of hierarchies.

But there is no pre-ordained pathway that commands an individual to become the Alpha. It is, rather, a chaotic whirlwind of genetic predisposition to health, size, and aggression; of lived experience; of the external environment; and of the individual’s intelligence. Oh how we humans love to compare ourselves... to the Lion King, the Apex Predator, the Dominant Male. The Alpha. Oh how we admire power, wealth, aggression, intimidation, hubris. We forgive violence on the grounds that that is the natural way, the way of Nature, in all of her crushing force in whose face we are mere ants. We shrug our shoulders at greed, for without their ambition billionaires would not build their impossibly important companies — all far too big to fail. We accept inequality, injustice, and intolerance because we have allowed ourselves to be raised in a culture of fear and anxiety, to be nourished by foods processed into oblivion, and to have our minds molded by scholastic templates designed to crush independent critical thought and free will.

And we forget, ever too easily, that our societies are far more complex than those of our animal brethren. We fail to consider that the human mind produces a far more convoluted psychology than that of our fellow living beings. Where the experienced see paper-thin narcissism, the impressionable see leadership. Where the accomplished see insecurity, the uninitiated see bravado. Where the wise see psychopathy, the naïve see charisma. Reality walks a thin line.

The Betas, the Deltas, and all other subordinates far outnumber the Alphas. Man against man, woman against woman, there is no contest. In truth, often it is the less wealthy and powerful that are better trained, and certainly far more experienced, in survival tactics and street smarts. The suits would be the first to fall on the front lines.

This is why the Alphas rule by fear. Infect their minds, control their pain and their pleasure, and you shall have no need to fight. They will fight not you, but for you.

But do the Betas and the Deltas know they, too, could rise to the rank of Alpha, given the right and favorable mix of circumstances and timing? If four Alphas are killed in battle, by disease, or by old age, it is natural that the fifth individual, heretofore a mere subordinate, need to rise to the occasion and take on the newly minted role as leader. Yet a Beta, Delta, or even an Epsilon need not wait their turn—they could simply seize the Alpha’s place and position. This is what the Alpha fears, and this is why the Alpha turns that fear against the other.

It is, after all, the pen of the Privileged that decides whose song the centuries will sing as the dust of Time settles across the vast plains of History.

Civilization, disintegrated

The ancient peoples of the North American continent have lived on this land, in all of their cultural diversity, for what researchers now say extends over 20,000 years. In striking irony, this young nation we live in, the United States, is not yet two hundred and fifty years old, and we have already slipped off the rails. Our leaders say we are the protectors of democracy, but instead they have become the merchants of theft.

The first thing they stole was the very land they set foot on: America. Then the rights of the native people to live on their own land in their own way. Soon there came the theft of the bodies and the labor of the Other, Black bodies from another continent. Then gold, forests, water, and the rich resources this massive new world offered. Today, the kleptocrats are stealing our work, our wages, our homes, our health, our dreams, our rights, our future. One, by one, by many. And because we like a good parade, they dress up in fine clothes, travel the country giving impressive speeches and media interviews, and twist the words of the language we all use by social contract, until the words cry out in pain and submit to their torturers.

Today’s billionaires do not stand on the shoulders of giants. Their bellies full of the promise and effort of competitors they have bought out, taken over, outmaneuvered, undercut, and sued out of existence, they sit on a bed of false roses manufactured by an awestruck media they spent decades feeding by hand, that in turn feed on headlines designed to capture our most primal human emotions—those that feed on pleasure and pain, and derail our more complex faculties.

They do not stand, for to stand means to embody honor. To stand means to lead by example. To fight for justice. To protect the less powerful, the less fortunate, the less privileged. To stand means to face the Fates without fear or prejudice. To stand means to stay at the helm of your ship, the front lines of your troops—not in front of a television watching the young men you’ve sent to war die for a viral video.

They do not stand, for to stand means to protect your people, treat them with dignity, and reward them for their work and their efforts.

They do not stand—they sit, carried by oceans of the effort and labor of others, by thousands of hands and thousands of hours that would rather be spent elsewhere and engaged in more rewarding endeavors. Yea they sit on beds of false roses, carried aloft by our own willful and unwitting complicity. Without us, the Betas, the Deltas, or the Gammas, the Alphas would never see their A’s capitalized.

And those who would be truly King instead languish in prisons of non disclosure agreements, bankrupted by limitless litigation, their rightful place among the celebrated, among the honored, among the respected, denied. Stolen. Disrupted. For this is what “disruption” really means. It is what the ambition-crazed men of ancient and modern times alike have carried out, forcing their behemoth dreams upon the flesh of millions. They would disrupt the desired flow of others’ lives. Then as now, the bodies fall, the blood soaks the earth, screams shred the night. And still fresh new believers offer their minds and bodies, the Deltas and the Epsilons, to sacrifice their brief moment on Earth for the almighty Alphas they fear without cause. The Alphas of old would turn a greener shade of envy were they to glimpse the weapons unimagined at the disposal of their present-day ideological inheritors. Today, raw ambition retains not only its mortal cost of bone and blood; it now extracts electrons from power lines and streams of rain from the rivers, and has fallen victim to a deranged new thirst—the economic and social entanglement of every human connected to the Network.

Data.

The blood of the new world order.

Books paintings movies songs plays words images sounds voice movement biometrics likes comments emails posts shares searches site visits clicks views names passwords phone numbers physical locations personal contacts family members home addresses resumés driving histories store purchases medications time of waking time of sleep heartbeat footsteps height weight blood pressure color of skin hair and eyes emotions dreams and yes our very thoughts...

Extracted, scraped, parsed, remixed, digested, bundled, prompted, output. Sold.

Unwitting slaves whose every breath and every thought is bled for its economic value, we are.

We have all become the horseshoe crab, bled for its noble blood. All we need to do to return to the rich, nourishing ocean whence we came, is to cut the line. Yet we remain tethered, for so we have been taught, for so we have grown up—and for so, too, we retain our life lines to each other. The tethers at once bleed us and nourish us. Which one will win out? Who is to blame, the tether, the bot, or the billionaire? Who among us will be the first to cut the line?

Temptations of belief

So many tethers and so few blades willing to cut... Facts flipped lies, left turned right, hot ran cold, law bent sideways, friend made foe and enemies embraced, our wine fermented backwards. They’ve long created our reality.

And we, the simple people, who dare dream of not world domination but a rewarding life, of travel and love and time in the sun, believed them. We believed them then and we believe them still a little now. We spin the spider silk that shimmers at us from our screens. We try to touch the smoke curling at us from their mirrors. If only, just once...

The Alphas know each other well. They dine at each other’s houses, fly each other’s planes, back each other’s Congressmen, buy each other’s judges. And they build the walls to keep us off their stolen lands.

Even when we know they lie, we believe them. Even when the very same media that upheld them before the pedestals cracked, turn against them in all of their delayed, useless outrage, we believe them. When they play that old game, dancing for our votes with music they know we want to hear—music that stops the moment the ballot drops—we believe them. And when they enchant us , in the basements of their empty mansions with sparkling champagne flutes of new technologies fermented with vast volumes of venture capital, we believe them.

For it is so comfortable, so easy, so convenient to believe.

Disbelief takes work. It requires thought, critically so. Disbelief calls for a daily exercise regimen—one hundred eyebrow raises, fifty mouth curls, four-hundred-pound pushbacks. It calls for keeping your pulse on the culture wars, confirming truckfuls of facts we thought fake but found instead to be painted true, searching for needles in bales of purple hay, all, all of it on your own because our support structures of education, science, and communications have crumbled to the ground. And they’re still ahead, because spinning wild-haired lies scales faster than prying truth from its stone.

When we stop, finally, believing them, we remain predisposed to forgive them. For they are our father figures, our mother models. They are our Alphas, our leaders, our role models, our heroes. We allow them to make larger, graver, more consequential transgressions, because they have made so many grander, bolder, more ambitious advances. Brazen, yet admired. Bold, and envied. Unethical, but forgiven. Immoral, and overlooked. Criminal, too late indicted.

To our own detriment, we snap sharper than a metal whip when at long last the love affair ends, our pent-up, held-back, repressed fury rushing at them like a misdirected missile, like a slingshot, like a Katama sword slicing through the air. We spray swastikas on the hoods of electric cars, we set ablaze charging stations, we shatter the glass of storefront windows, we hurl expletives at our fellow citizens who lack the backbone to do our bidding. Sell your car! Dump your stock! Boycott all their products! If you don’t we’ll dox you.

You know, of course, that is what the Alphas want. All of the lower letters fighting their battle for them, amongst themselves. The blues against the reds, the left against the right, color vs white, one faith against the other, all those pronouns, the poor against the not-yet-rich. Saves the Alphas their billions and their staff critical planning time.

Oh but that’s not “us,” of course. Those are other people. “We” would never... and yet secretly we rejoice. Behind closed doors, inside our bedrooms, in our cars, in our own heads, we celebrate the violence. Eye for an eye is still the most respected social equation.

If only. If only we had had the foresight and the temperament to prepare, to train. To study the art of war and practice the dictates of stoicism. To apprentice in the strategies of business and politics, as the Alphas had. To learn how to wield power and persuade our fellow citizens to see us, all of us, as the rightful inheritors of the Alphasphere. Perhaps we would have been pulled into the same whirlpool as those we seek to displace. Or perhaps we would have built a stronger body politic.

Phoenix rising

And yet, enough of us do question. Those of us not poisoned by weakness of spirit or insecurity of mind. Those of us buoyed by uplifting others, fulfilled by familiarity with facts, guided by the wisdom of lived experience. Those of us unconcerned with the hoarding of capital, the securing of power, the solidification of influence. We focus less on personal wealth and more on personal legacy. Less on status, more on impact. We are the ones who strive for less hierarchy and more democracy. We seek equality, liberty, and equal opportunity. The more oppressed, suppressed, repressed we are, the more we value these ideals. We strive to rise above the mean, the average, the mediocre. We strive for free will and the freedom to choose. The United States is said to be built upon this very idea—if only on paper. If only for some—of the right color and race.

Is our Constitution now only worth the paper it was written on?

Extend your hand across the aisle, my friend. Put down the brushes we’ve used to paint each other blue or red. You’ll stay blind until you learn to see with your heart instead of your eyes. You’ll remain deaf until you learn to listen instead of judging. And you’ll stay paralyzed until your mind connects all the dots. Look up from your rage and your fear... and you’ll see your nemesis isn’t the human standing in front of you.

The ruling One Percent, the Alpha, teeter on a razor’s edge atop the pyramid. A solid base of bedrock that moves with the Earth itself, the pyramid has withstood the ravages of millennia. It upholds the structure of civilization. No Alpha will eat without the hands that grow their food, wheels that deliver their goods, fingers that swipe across their screens. Their wealth defies gravity, pulling their plunder from the base of the pyramid up its four glittering faces, but the higher you go, the narrower the path, the slipperier the surface, the more blinding the sunlight, the more rarefied the air, the stronger—in all of its irony—gravity’s pull back down to Earth.

When you stand on a razor’s edge, the smallest of missteps sends you tumbling. Gravity cares nothing for your stock holdings, how many heads of state know you by first name, or the titles you hold.

We who’ve lived at the base of the pyramid all of our lives, we are the ones who built it. We are the architects, the stone masons, the painters, the scribes... and the embalmers and the robbers of our kings. We’ve broken our backs hauling the stone, parched our lungs in the desert air, watched death dry out in the heat. We know where every block sits, where every fault line runs. We know the secret passageways, and we know which way the sands will blow when the winds pick up.

The long game is nearing its end. When will the Alphas see they need the rest of the alphabet?

It is a law of Nature that corrupted DNA be flushed out of the gene pool. It is a law of History that empires fall. It is a law of Economics that stock markets plummet. But the least forgiving law of them all is one of our own making: that those morally bankrupt, those bloated with power and racked by greed, be consumed by their own cancer. From Alpha to Omega.

Pyramids do invert.

Breath is the only autonomic function we can control on command. Part of the autonomic nervous system (both sympathetic and parasympathetic), breathing is a simple in/out cadence that keeps us alive and properly oxygenated. The typical length of time a human can survive without oxygen is 4-5 minutes, although one (very young) person survived underwater for sixty-six.

This essay may take a little of your breath. Let’s breathe through it together.

Sit in a comfortable position, somewhere calm. Chair, sofa, bed, your backyard, top of a mountain, wherever you’d like. Turn your phone ringer off. Relax. Slow your breath until you feel your entire body soften.

Now, take a deep, slow breath. And hold.

The heat suffocates. Your body is an encased ensemble of flesh, blood vessels intertwined with organs, tendons tied to bones, skin pulled over muscle. When the heat rises, your systems begin to fail. You don’t sleep at night and you can’t go out during the day. You can’t breathe and you can’t think. But you know the war is coming.

Seven years later you still can’t breathe, but now the heat comes from the bombs, and the noxious air from the sewage running down the streets and the piles of rotting flesh. Pieces of the little bodies of children from the rubble, carried away by hungry dogs. Satan himself burns with shame.

They will take away the public breath of anyone who dares question the evil they wreak upon your land. Your people are a nuisance, and you are all terrorists by association. Your lives, your dreams, your flesh and blood are worth less than the dust they turn your cities into. Paid for by our taxes, held hostage by a political system we have all somehow agreed to live by.

Exhale.

Take a deep, slow breath. Now hold, but longer this time.

A fierce, musclebound arm is squeezing your neck. It’s an authoritative arm, trained in military-style techniques. You’re slammed to the ground, which never gives way, this ground that you know so well. Your world starts to dim. You try to speak, but only three words leak out.

Eleven times. “I can’t breathe.” Eleven. Times. The color of your skin, the history of your race, intimidates. Still today, they don’t want you breathing.

“Today, we can’t breathe,” said Eric’s mother five years later, her breath still strong. The system didn’t fail her—oh no no, it did not fail. It worked as intended and designed. Clockwork.

Exhale… fully exhale.

Now take another breath, deep deep breath. And hold.

You’ve been holding your breath for six years now. You know to watch for those chokeholds. But it’s not a muscular arm, this time. It’s a knee, and it, too, wears a badge. A sharp, bony, virulently violent knee, with half the weight of a high school dropout with 18 complaints on his record. Ninety-one and a half pounds of hate drilling your face into the ground. Your hands, helpless, handcuffed, your knuckles scraping the ground to crack open a little space to breathe.

Nine minutes, just to make sure you take your last. For there isn’t enough oxygen on this Earth for people like you.

Exhale, exhale, and release your soul to heaven where they can’t follow you.

Exhale… and take a deep breath, deeper still than before, for you are diving deeper now, deep within your body where a new life grows.

Bathroom floor covered in blood. You had gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and your body discharged the fetus it could no longer carry. You screamed in panic. Horror. Chaos. Call 911.

They wouldn’t see you before, when your body moaned in pain. They wouldn’t tell you you might miscarry. They sent you home, scared but spineless… because they might be charged with aiding and abetting a woman’s right to her own body.

Your baby couldn’t breathe, and neither could you. She is in heaven now, breathing much easier. But you, no. They charged you, they arrested you, and wanted you to do time. Twenty years to life. Because your body had the gall to do a fetus wrong. You have no right to grieve.

Exhale, for mother and child.

Take another breath. Take a deep breath for your home.

You don’t need to wake up, because you haven’t slept. If you sleep, they might take your clothes. Your bike. Your food. Or rape you. Or worse. 170,000 of you just in California.

Your body can’t breathe. Asthma. Tuberculosis. Hepatitis B and C. Scabies. Impetigo. Gas gangrene. Diphtheria. And all those bugs that bring still more disease—lice, bacteria, parasites. Your mind can’t breathe—PTSD, anxiety, depression, addiction, fear, shame.

The system renders those without the means to pay for shelter, criminals. The same system turns those who manipulate, steal, and lie to build their billion-dollar techno-empires, into heroes.

Exhale.

Hmm, you’re coughing. You’re not wearing a mask. Are you sick?

Take a deep breath… oh, I see, you can’t. It’s ok. I’ll take one for you.

The young. The old. The athletic. The unfit. The rich. The unemployed. Parents. Teachers. Entrepreneurs. Cashiers. Bus drivers. Software engineers. All are game.

The virus doesn’t care who it knocks down, how wonderful of a person they are, how many hours they’ve spent helping their communities, how much they’ve made or how much they’ve donated, or whether they’re in prison. Its world is microscopic; its tentacles have suffocated an entire planet.

Beads of sweat pop up on your forehead. Invisible arms encircle your chest, compressing it against your will. Your neck muscles step up to take over for the diaphragm, exhausted from trying to expand lungs drowning in themselves. Like George Floyd’s knuckles against the pavement.

When you can’t breathe, you can’t function. Your world loses its axis.

Lie on your belly, your head to one side. Exhale.

Now try to take a breath, as deep as you can. Hold.

Someone must be grilling outside. But why is the light so eerily orange? It’s only 11am.

On the menu today: carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, acid gases, sulfur dioxide, metals, dioxins, volatile organic compounds,1 nanoplastics and other fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Would you care for dessert?

Your throat burns, your breath short and labored. Your eyes red and peppery. The smoke has submerged your entire region in a stagnant pool of grayish white, smudging out the sun and the blue from the sky. Your children cough so much they can’t sleep.

It’s not supposed to happen this way. You live near the lungs of the planet. But the Amazon has cancer… 53,620 tumors of fire. Perhaps you live in California—here, too, the fires burn, twisting their flames into tortured caricatures of the trees they consume. Canada had her day last year, remember?

The very air you breathe is the one that can kill you.

Exhale, exhale now! Purge those chemicals from your body.

Your heart’s beating hard. Take it easy. Breathe. Long deep breath. And hold.

It doesn’t require an assault. It doesn’t need a reason. It just explodes in your body.

Your heart pounds the inside of your chest as if it were a kickboxer. Blood presses against your eardrums. Your vision turns into a train careening through a dark tunnel. You try to get up and run, but your legs are jelly and your body ripples on the Richter scale. Your breath breaks into shallow splinters of glass.

You feel like someone is holding you underwater and want you to drown.

Meanwhile, the outside world wonders what’s going on with you. You wish you knew. We live in a world that gives (some of) us excess comfort and convenience while bombarding us with stress and anxiety 24x7.

Take your time to exhale, until your body returns to normal. Exhale, and again. There. You’re okay now.

Let’s get some fresh air, maybe a lap around the track? Important to get your daily exercise.

Take a deep breath, stretch out nice and long, and… hold.

They think it’s the heat and humidity. You are in Virginia after all, and those summers are heavy. Or maybe allergies, with all those flowering trees and grasses. Then you pass out during training. Your doctor calls asthma, but Dad isn’t convinced. He knows asthma. More tests later, they tell you it’s EILO.

You say lol wut. Not the Beyoncé song, no. Exercise-Induced Laryngeal Obstruction. But they do also call it Vocal Cord Dysfunction. The top of the larynx closing when it should open. Singers training for marathons beware!

But don’t give up your love of running—or singing.

Ready for some vocal warmups?

Alright, let’s stretch out that tongue, loosen up the lips, open up the chest, deep breath in and… nice and LOUD:

Resonant frequency. Everything vibrates. The entire universe is one massive energetic place. Atoms run marathons, electrons prefer sprints, and quanta do HIIT sessions, in two places at once. Because, overachievers.

Air rushing through bands of muscle. It whispers, it giggles, it cajoles, it communicates, it calls and it cries, it screams, and above all… it sings. It calls to the top of the mountains, at 113.8 decibels. No sound equipment necessary.

If you want to impress your friends and shatter a wine glass with your operatic pipes, get to know the wine glass first. They all have their individual resonant frequencies.

What is your resonant frequency? It might make you laugh when you find out...

Let’s exhale now. An international panel on an important topic is about to begin. Breath in, and hold.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever laughed so hard you nearly passed out. Raise the other hand if you’ve laughed so hard your body flipped over to crying.

A panel of distinguished speakers at the United Nations headquarters in New York City… executives from children’s television programs from the US, Italy, Canada, and South Korea. One presentation has been droning on for 40 minutes… The other panelists are starting to slouch in their chairs. The Italian executive forgets where he is, and shoves his thumbs up his nose. He then digs in, nice and deep—for a good ten seconds. 

My companion and I look at each other. First, a smirk. Then, a suppressed giggle. The giggle builds, builds, till it explodes into a pyroclastic flow of laughter—laughter that wants to go full-throated but can’t, so it stays silent but barrels out at a hundred atmospheres of pressure. We can’t look at each other. We can barely breathe. Tears press through the corners of our eyes.

I will never forget the Italian executive’s name. I will also not share it here out of profound professional courtesy. But his name lives on forever in my family as a code word for the things that make you laugh more than a little.

Well now. We’re almost at the end of our breath. Let’s take a moment to reflect.

If you’ve fallen asleep, awaken. If your back has slouched, sit up again fresh and renewed. Take a slow, deep, relaxed breath. Let the Buddha speak to you.

Contemplate the body. Breathe in long, then breathe in short. Breathe out long, then breathe out short. Breathe through the whole body.

Contemplate the feeling. Breathe to experience joy. Breathe to experience pleasure. Breathe to experience the activity of the mind… and then to calm it.

Contemplate the mind. Breathe and experience your mind. Breathe to please your mind. Breathe to focus your mind, and then to release it.

Contemplate mental objects. Breathe and observe impermanence. Breathe and observe dispassion, then cessation, and finally… letting go. Full and complete release.

So it was said in the Ānāpānasati Sutta.

Take a deep, long, slow breath. Feel the air rush in through your nostrils, fill your lungs, expand your ribcage, and pour into your belly.

Close your eyes and hold.

Hold all of the people who cannot breathe, in your heart. Breathe for them. Breathe for them while you hold your own.

Now, exhale. Exhale so that they may breathe. But we’ve forgotten someone.

We’re not the only ones who need to breathe.

Entanglement. Can you see two whales, two sea turtles, two fish, two seabirds, at once? Like forests and trees, they’re there whether you’re observing them or not. They want to shift their position. They want to move, but they can’t. They’re ensnared in fishing gear. Nets and lines left behind, floating in the ocean, unalive, entangling the living. Plastic bags and greenhouse sheeting. All of our convenience and consumption, choking our seas.

Ironic… given where our oxygen comes from. Remember what we are made of.

We are not the only ones here.

We all need to breathe.

Get some fresh air

We live chained by a gilded necklace of numerical beads. Some are pearls, some are clay, some made of gold and quartz and lapis lazuli, and others covered in mud and slime and mold. For they are all our creation and our perception, our doing and our undoing, our liberator and our executioner, our truth teller and our fake news pundit. Our god and our demon.

We don’t live and die by the sword anymore. We live and die by the numbers.

All that we do, all that we think, all that we say and all that we feel, is measured, counted, quantified, analyzed, surveyed and weighed, conditioned and assessed, distilled, deconstructed, and decomposed into numbers. Figures. Data.

Numbers unlock the mysteries of music, the cadence of language, the physics of flight, the secrets of stars and the evolution of species. They measure our fitness and weight and the sex appeal of our bodies, they feed us recipes, mix our paints, tune our guitars, tailor our suits, split our stocks and drive our cars. They’ve given us writing, trade, and agriculture, the rigor of science, the symmetry of the arts, and the purity of religion. Yet where before numbers uplifted us and brought us civilization-shaping achievements, innovations and discoveries, they have also learned to decay, decant, and destroy. And we’re the ones who taught them.

Imagine your world without numbers. Everything would collapse.

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Consider this number.

An elegant form in black most of us will recognize, composed of tiny pixels arranged in a specific pattern on your screen—much like all of the letters and images you see every day.

What does this number mean? It is the Number One, of course.

But what does it mean?

The first whole number above zero.1 But why is One valued as something greater than Zero, when we all want more zeroes before the decimal points in our bank accounts

The number denoting unity. But how can One denote unity when you need at least two people to unite with each other

Being a single unit or thing. But where does One end and the next One begin

Being the same in kind or quality. But if we are all of the same race, why do some despise others based on the color of their skin

In the sense of some, or in the sense of only. You are the one I wish to marry one day

If One has multiple meanings, is it truly singular? Is it truly the One?

It is One and it is All.

One. Uno. Un. Aon. Jedna. Unus. Ενας. واحد. Maya. Huk. Yksi. یکی . एकम्‌. Egy. ʻEkahi. Kotahi. Tasi. एक. Bir. Tokko. Satu. つ. Eyodwa. Нэг. بىرى. Eins. אחד. Один. 一.2

One, expressed in seven thousand languages by eight billion tongues

One writer whose books have inspired millions

One ring to rule them all

One orange slice left in your fruit bowl

One football player kneeling during the national anthem

One pop star singing through the rain

One vengeful war snuffing out 31,227 37,182 lives3

One sociopathic grifter felon running for president

One more pill to take

One late-night phone call

One wrong move

One livable planet in the known galaxy

One is a trillion moments in a billion people’s lives

But what if we put a “$” in front, like this:

We now have the graphical representation of one U.S. dollar. What is the meaning of a dollar? That depends on whether it carries a capital letter or not. The U.S. Dollar speaks for the world’s mightiest and most aggressively capitalist economy. It struts down the red carpet of worldwide adulation, waving magnificently through the piercing flash of lightbulbs. It has massacred entire populations, brought cultures and traditions to their knees, negotiated trade agreements always in its favor, laundered truckloads of illicit chemical substances, and pushed its fat thumb on the levers of what should have been free and democratic elections. How painfully à propos, that blood-red carpet.

A dollar is nothing but a worn piece of paper that can buy you something. Just a few of these pieces of paper can procure a bag of cherries at the farmer’s market, buy you a bus ticket, or leave a tip in a jar at an ice cream shop. You’ll need a few more to take home a shiny new iPhone, pull up at your new suburban house in a Lucid, or to travel the world for a year. Would you like to print a few of these papers yourself? After all, it’s just paper with a pretty design and fancy security markings. Oh but you know that is a crime, to print your own money. You need to engage in an officially approved economic activity to obtain the dollars you seek: a corporate job, your own business, an art exhibit, a rock album, or a movie. You could try training to be an athlete, a sports car driver or maybe go into law, medicine, or politics—and if that fails, maybe a lemonade stand. Just remember that those in power can take your dollars and do whatever they want, but you can’t print your own. You can never print your own.

The Dollar endows the dollar with value based on a socioeconomic contract we all subscribe to. We all agree $1 carries financial value—but that value fluctuates with the yogic contortions of the market and its wind-whipped supply-demand curves. A dollar feels great if it’s a discounted price for a chocolate croissant that would normally run you $4. Not so great if it’s the income for a person in a developing country.

A dollar bill in the hand of a celebrity carries the same value as a dollar bill in the hand of an unhoused person. Same value, but not the same meaning.

I will never forget the day I made my first dollar. We had just arrived in America. I was nine years old, a little Czech girl living in a tenement house in a rundown neighborhood in a shabby town in the middle of Connecticut. An apartment building so run down we had no refrigerator—my mother put the milk out on the ledge in the wintertime to keep it cold. No clue how she managed in warmer months (thankfully we did not stay there long). I was the first one in my family to start making money. There was an old lady in the apartment on the bottom floor who needed help taking out her garbage. She paid me $0.25 each time. A quarter. A small round piece of metal with an eagle stamped on the back. Or two dimes and one nickel. One day, her adult daughter was visiting, and she was the one who paid me that day. My heart sank a little when I saw the coin she had placed in my hand: a single dime. Welcome to the labor market, the dime said. A few days later, I sat on the mattress I shared with my baby sister, and I gathered up all of my nickels and dimes and quarters and I counted. One dollar.

That day, I held the American dream in my hands.

Today, I barely notice the thousands of dollars that pass through my virtual hands. Rent. Utilities. Food. Clothes. Travel. Movie tickets. Client revenue and vendor bills. Most of it is digital now. But I remember that first dollar.

When is the last time you held a real coin in your hand, and felt its material, physical existence? When is the last time you found a dollar bill in the street?

The other day, walking to the farmers’ market, I came upon a $5 bill crumpled up on the sidewalk. Someone had dropped it on the way back from the market. I’ve found a $20 bill on a beach, in the sand, having inexplicably survived the waves and the wind. My daughter once found a $50 bill in a bush outside a ski shop. All three bills have long since been put back into circulation, for that is where they belong. Like blood in a living organism, money needs to flow if the organism is to remain healthy and thrive. Pooling too much capital in too few hands causes stagnation, and eventually results in a socioeconomic aneurysm.

None of us truly own money any more than we own land, animals, or other people. It’s all a socioeconomic contract we agree to and abide by.

Keep it flowing

Now let’s put an “M” after our big, proud Number One, like this:

This means One Million. But one million what?

One million US dollars

One million refugees

One million people born in the last hour

One million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Caribbean Sea

One million love songs

One million houses sold this year

One million flights a day

One million chicken eggs laid

One million daisy petals plucked he loves me he loves me not

One million methamphetamine pills produced

One million shoes swept away in tsunamis

One million daily active users

One Million Eau de Toilette for Men

One million shares of Warren Buffet’s favorite stock

One hundred+ million books ever published

One million no longer impresses in today’s world, does it. We are now in much greater willful awe of the letter B, and more so still, the letter T:

One billion US dollars

One billion climate refugees

One billion more people today than in 20114

One billion snow crabs dead of starvation

One billion pieces of art scraped into training sets

One billion raindrops in a summer storm

One billion cars on the road

One billion kilometers from the rings of Saturn to the Sun

One trillion dollars in market cap

One trillion particles of microplastics

One trillion barrels of oil

One trillion footprints in the sands

These massive numbers stand far away from us. The bigger they grow, the more meaning they lose. No woman can birth a million children. No one can sing a billion songs. No farmer can plant a trillion seeds.

And yet, Nature steamrolls over our self-important numbers every day.

One times three trillion trees

One times twenty quadrillion ants on the Earth5

One times ten quintillion insects

One times three hundred quintillion gallons of water on our planet6

One times seven point five sextillion grains of sand

One times two hundred sextillion stars in the sky

One septillion stars in the universe

One Googolplex hidden in a wormhole

But let’s not put so much pressure on poor Number One. It’s part of the eminent binary foundation that upholds the basis of all computing systems and speaks the primary language of digital technology. For all things Digital, from your keyboard to your smartphone, Zero and One are the Most Noble Numbers. Their extended family includes Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine. These ten symbols form the foundation for a massive, intricately integrated system of systems that runs the human world.

Rational or irrational; cardinal, ordinal, and nominal; fractional, whole, and natural; prime and imaginary; even and odd and everything nice… a number is never alone in our world. We are forever qualifying and quantifying, crunching and calculating, assessing and analyzing, cataloguing and categorizing, adding multiplying subtracting or dividing, extracting root canals from squares, imagining numbers that shouldn’t be, slicing numbers into impossible fractions, pressing them into graphs and projections and balance sheets, whether they like it or not. Most of all, we like to pair our numbers… with symbols. Like a fine craft chocolate with wine, a number is always paired with a symbol, to tell us its story and to…

To tell us how to feel, what to think, when to act, what to do.

It’s 30 minutes past show time and the star’s still in her dressing room she’s too famous for anyone to complain

I’m running ten minutes late now they’ll know how disorganized my life is

Our company’s effective tax rate is just 11% we pay less tax than our putz employees but make millions in profits

My tax rate is 35% I’m filthy rich

His doctor says he’s got 7 months left to live but he’s 93 and he lived a good life

The baby was just 7 months old when the bombs killed his entire family

Did you see they bought a new house for $2.1 million they must be rich why aren’t you making more

Warren Buffett still lives in his 1958 house he bought for $31,500 that’s something to aspire to look how frugal he is

I’m so excited I got 25 likes on my Substack post that means at least twice that many people read it without reacting I wonder what they thought

I’m so depressed I only got 2500 views on my TikTok because my BFF always gets millions on hers how does she do it

I work 80 hours a week I don’t have time for vacations wow so that’s what it takes to be a top exec

Make sure you get your 8 hours of sleep every night I also need to fit in an hour of cardio every day luckily I have all my apps to track it all

The candidate’s polling really low, just 20% he’s a loser don’t vote for him

He lost the popular vote by 2.8 million votes but won the Electoral College with 304 votes our system is rigged! no it’s not you sore losers! let’s just do away with the College

The numbers rule us.

Speed limits. Grades. Time of day. Height. Weight. Bust size. Shoe and shirt and waist size. Heart rate. Date of birth. Age. Salary. Social Security number. Serial numbers. VINs. EINs. Invoices. Utility prices. Rent. Recipe measurements. Taxes. Stocks. Net worth. Books to read. Job applications ahead of you. Likes and shares and comments and views. Frequent flyer miles. Minutes to wait on hold. Medical bills. Insurance premiums. Pairs of shoes in your closet and cars in your garage. Steps in a day. Tennis and soccer and football and basketball scores.

TIME is MONEY and MONEY is TIME

But that’s only so because they both bow down to the NUMBERS

Try living without your numbers for a day and see what happens

Thank you for the twelve minutes of your one thousand four hundred and forty minutes the Earth blesses us all with every full turn of her body, that you spent reading this essay. If it inspired you, warmed your heart, or made you think, frown, or throw something across the room, there’s plenty more here at The Muse to produce all kinds of ah-ha and oh no moments…

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If the monthly cadence doesn’t resonate, I’m always down for a coffee (or hot chocolate)

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