We are humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy, lovingkindness;
we have believed one another
the mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

—Life at War, Denise Levertov

During the presidential campaign, our nation’s two candidates were perhaps not the most equipped to engage deeply on the question of AI. At risk of being ageist, I just don’t think 80-year-olds (especially those ones) really get what’s going on. Trump has, however, assembled a staff of AI/Silicon Valley insiders to steer policy. We all want experts at the helm, but me, I want experts that are aligned with my politics.

The July executive orders and the limits of republican AI policy

The three executive orders below were signed July of this year. Who knows what exactly the implementation and impact of these orders will be, but they do provide a vague skeleton of what the administration’s goals with respect to AI are.

1. Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack

• Creates the American AI Exports Program to expand U.S. AI technology globally.

• Directs Commerce to solicit proposals from industry consortia within 90 days.

• Seeks to boost economic and national security through global AI adoption.

2. Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure

• Speeds up federal approvals for AI data centers and related facilities.

• Allows use of federal land and resources for new infrastructure.

• Supports large-scale projects to strengthen U.S. tech leadership.

3. Preventing “Woke” AI in the Federal Government

• Requires federal AI systems to prioritize truth and accuracy.

• Bars procurement of models with ideological bias.

• Limits contracts to companies that can show ideological neutrality.

Now we're seeing what the Trump administration’s vision for AI policy looks like. It’s built around an accelerationist, maximalist approach to AI development. In this vision, AI is the driver for both national security and economic power. They are starting with a core premise: beat China in AI. These policies work backward from that central tenet. The administration envisions a future where American firms and their technology become the global standard for AI. around the world, and this plan is designed to speed that process. We are trying to dominate globally.

I’d be remiss to ignore the executive order on preventing “Woke” AI, but yeah, not much to say about that. We can just always count on 25% of what comes out of the White House to be on the bleeding edge of stupidity.

I’ll say it: I think with the exception of the ridiculous anti-woke stuff, these goals are pretty reasonable. But these current policy positions fail to drive at anything bigger than the nebulous notions of “beating China” and “more AI faster?”

AI technologies are going to deeply impact every facet of society, and I’m seeing no ideas from Trump and co. on what to do about it.

The democrats have an opportunity

I read Pete Buttigieg’s Substack post titled We Are Still Underreacting on AI last month. I guess the title speaks for itself.

“The enormous opportunities and terrifying challenges associated with AI, some of which are likely to materialize in the next three to five years, don’t just matter to a venture capital firm or the owner of a cornfield being turned into a data center. Our experiences as citizens, consumers, parents, employees, students, and more, will soon go through their biggest changes in generations.”

I agree with almost all of the content of his piece, but more so, I agree with what the piece (and the author) is doing. Democrats have long struggled with building and controlling the policy narrative. There are structural problems: Elon runs twitter, rage/craziness boosts FB engagement numbers, Fox News exists, Sinclair exists, etc. But none of that is changing. If anything the information environment is getting worse and centrist Democrats like Pete are getting absolutely dogwalked by the Republicans and leftists alike. Pete is investing early in being a leader on the second-order impacts of AI. Good investment IMO.

Like the stock market currently, AI is the only thing that matters.

Republicans cannot have a monopoly on dictating what issues matter to the country and why they matter. Pete is getting in on the ground-level for what will be the most important policy issues of our time. Democrats need to follow suit and hammer this issue early, often, intelligently. Very soon the question of Border Policy approval numbers will seem quaint and far away. The question of education is going to be the question of AI. The question of the economy is going to be the question of AI. If you thought “economic anxiety” was bad in 2016…buddy, Zohran has a spot for you at the register of Federal Grocery of America branch No. 9081. Presidential approval rating is AI approval rating.

Choose your AI leader

By the time the next presidential election comes around, AI as the topic du jour is inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is what the defining narrative is. If the narrative sounds like Cold War race-to-the-moon and build more nukes but AI edition, then hawkish and isolationist candidates and parties (read: classic Republicans) will win. If the narrative is something a bit more complicated, inclusive, and bigger than a foreign policy issue, then Democrats win the moment. The bellwether will be when at the 2028 Presidential Debate, is the first question on AI: “How will the USA will the AI race against China?” or is it “What will you do to address AI’s impact on jobs/wages and children?”

Winning the AI race is everyone being richer, happier, and safer.

“[A Chrysler 300] do look like a phantom 
until a phantom pull up.” 
- Katt Williams, The Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1

Chat GPT’s Viral Moment

For a few days, everyone online was obsessed with generating and posting Ghibli-style images. The new ChatGPT image model can produce “Studio Ghibli-style” art which, aesthetically (superficially) was nearly indistinguishable from a Spirited Away still.

Within a day of the model’s release, my timeline was flooded. The images all looked good, but that was also what made them all boring. The style was too ubiquitous. The uniqueness of the aesthetic disappeared almost instantly.

We say we want beauty, but we discover that no matter the immediate visual appeal, mass-produced images don’t satisfy any spiritual or artistic desire. They satisfy a dopamine itch at best and make us sick from indulgence at worst. What’s beautiful is what is rare, what is difficult, what not just feels touched by a person, but what we actually know was touched by a person.

Studio Ghibli is More than a Style

There was significant backlash to this trend. Critics pointed to copyright issues, artist displacement, and the rising tide of AI slop. True, true, and true.

BUT! I think what some of the anti-AI crowd doesn’t consider is that this explosion of Ghibli-style imagery won’t cheapen Studio Ghibli, but instead make it, the real thing, more valuable.

When everything starts to look like Ghibli, it becomes easier to see what actually makes Studio Ghibli different. The AI images get the colors and lines right, but they come with no story, context, spirit and soul. ChatGPT gave us the visual, but not the meaning. Studio Ghibli doesn’t just produce a recognizable aesthetic. What makes these films important is not how they look but how they feel.

The Ghibli-style trend lost its power quickly. With the aesthetic divorced from its soul, it flattened. In doing so, it made the real thing stand out even more.

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?”1 (William Faulkner, 1950)

Just as Faulkner saw the threat of the atomic bomb reshaping human experience, the rise of AGI and advanced AI forces a new existential question: When will I be automated away?

Most of the conversation around AI still assumes that these systems will just make workers more productive and that there will be a slow, gradual shift as new economies develop in response to these advanced technologies. That’s the same story we’ve told ourselves through every technological leap. I think this time the shift will be much faster and more complete.

I think an atomic bomb is coming for all knowledge work.

Anthropic anticipates that powerful AI systems, possessing intellectual capabilities comparable to or exceeding those of Nobel Prize winners across various disciplines, will emerge by late 2026 or early 2027. These systems are expected to autonomously handle complex tasks over extended periods, interact seamlessly with digital interfaces, and control physical equipment through digital connections.

I agree with Michael. Most of the discussions about AI focus on vague claims of increased productivity, but the systems the Anthropic team refer to suggest something much bigger happening. Anthropic is on the “fear-mongering” side of the Great AGI Debate, but 1) I agree with them and 2) at least they’re engaging with important ideas around what is to come and what is to be done.

Right now, there is a lot of hype and excitement from venture capitalists and technologists about how these current AI systems augment the worker and streamline workflows. The software engineer can write more code and faster. This framing assumes a best-case scenario for the worker. Productivity is up and the engineer is happy (and employed). I think we run into a failure of imagination when we assume augmentation is the only outcome.

Expanding our AI discourse

In an article published March 13th, 2025, Vox’s Dylan Matthews writes2:

“Let me offer, then, a thought experiment. Imagine we get to a point — maybe in the next couple years, maybe in 10, maybe in 20 — when AI models can fully substitute for any remote worker. They can write this article better than me, make YouTube videos more popular than Mr. Beast’s, do the work of an army of accountants, and review millions of discovery documents for a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, all in a matter of minutes…How does that reshape the US, and world, economy?”

I think that’s a very worthwhile thought experiment that technologists and policymakers should be spending a lot more time on. Our discourse around AI right now spends too much time in the “known unknowns” quadrant of Donald Rumsfeld’s “awareness” matrix, and I don’t want us winding up doing whatever the equivalent of looking for WMDs in Iraq is when it comes to the AGI debate.

I think we need to push the conversation further and start increasing what we are aware of. There are the technical risks that the labs like to discuss around alignment, safety, and bias, but the real unknown unknowns lie in the murky social, political, and psychological waters. What are the implicit assumptions we’re making when talking about AI? What are the questions we aren’t thinking of to ask?

• Most people implicitly assume AI will always need human oversight

• We assume AI will make human workers more valuable instead of replacing them

• Might capital and labor power structures change in unimaginable ways?

• Will AI be deployed in ways humans don’t understand?

• What does society look like in total AI abundance?

The future state of these systems is not augmentation, it is replacement.

One example that many friends I’ve spoken to agree with is that the job of an investment banking analyst will be fully automated within 5 years. Microsoft Excel augments one’s ability to do financial analysis, but what about when one is able to click and drag a data room into an AI system that builds you a financial model and formatted pitch deck instantly? Where is the incentive to hire an analyst? The future is not that the analyst can do 10x more work, it’s that the system does all of the work autonomously. Even today, it’s hard to imagine hiring an entry-level data analyst to crank out dashboards, basic Python, and SQL queries when now even a moderately technical PM can get to 95% completion of necessary tasks by using currently available tools.

These technologies will exist within the decade.

Importantly, I don’t believe these changes will be like the industrial revolution where processes slowly get automated and labor reskills/retrains and finds new industries. What’s the hiring market going to look like for the current high school junior who is planning on studying computer science in college? I’m not saying knowledge work won’t exist anymore, but early stage founders I’m meeting are talking about how tools like Cursor already mean they don’t need to hire the incremental junior engineer. At a certain point, the technology is good enough that it autonomously does 99% (or maybe 99.99%) of computer-based tasks. The machines are building the machines, and we, humans, will be doing God knows what. Maybe working less? Doubt it!

Who captures the value of AI

What should coincide with these AI developments is massively increased productivity, but where is the value of this productivity going to accrue if the average knowledge worker’s job is fully automated?

Historically, productivity increases have benefited both labor and capital, but AI’s unique ability to automate knowledge work might tip the scales dramatically in capital’s favor. Wages won’t go up if you don’t have a job!

Our past theories around labor and technology and productivity don’t hold up. I worry that the frameworks we have to talk about these problems are wholly outdated. Take this excerpt from an Economic Policy Institute piece on automation in 20173:

“Studies that attempt to estimate the number of jobs that will be potentially lost to automation in the future never seem to take into account automation’s positive effects on employment,” said Bivens. “The invention of the automobile eliminated jobs in the horse-drawn carriage industry, but it led to new jobs in the repair, and sales of autos, as well as the construction of highways. There is no evidence that future automation will somehow be different.”

Bivens’ argument here is a relic from when we often thought of technology as a tool for labor efficiency, but transformative AI systems will remove the need for human input entirely without creating a new job category. Maybe I’ll end up as my ChatGPT’s butler or something.

I’m an optimistic person, so I think most of us will be okay. At the very least, there is no point in being a doomer about this, but the nature of knowledge work and labor is about to change in ways we aren’t prepared for. The safety net that existed for college-educated-white-collar workers is looking a bit rickety from here. The question is no longer if AI will automate certain roles but how quickly and how completely it will do so and what is going to happen to society in the wake of these changes.

So to you (us) educated-laptop-job-elites, don’t ask for whom the labor revolution bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

If it’s darkness 
we’re having let it be extravagant. 
— Taking Down the Tree, Jane Kenyon

AN: I’m trying my best to not cast any judgement on Daniel Penny. I refuse to believe that anyone, perhaps Daniel Penny most of all, is happy about what happened on May 1st.

The Daniel Penny Incident

On May 1, 2023, Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old former U.S. Marine, placed Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, in a chokehold on a New York City subway train. Penny held Neely in the chokehold for several minutes, resulting in Neely's death. On December 9, 2024, after several days of deliberation, the jury found Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide.

I’m not writing this to make a claim about whether or not he should’ve been found guilty. I’m interested in exploring how and why he was hired and what his hiring says about our politics, the state of venture capital, and our current notions of “meritocratic hiring practices.”

Daniel Penny on the “Merits”

By most traditional measures, Penny’s background is solid but not extraordinary. He is a Marine who served honorably for four years and has a bunch of medals to show for it. While this is “good” experience, there are literally tens of thousands of folks with the same experience. Achievement, yes, but not exactly outstanding or remarkable.

The incident on the subway, however, was remarkable. It was exceptional. He put himself in harms way out of fear for his own and fellow passengers safety and ultimately killed a man. A generous interpretation of the incident is that it required large amounts of bravery and courage and that he saved his fellow travelers from physical harm.

The only aspect of his hiring that compelled me to write this is one specific fact. It’s been haunting me since the hiring was first announced, and it’s difficult to come to terms with: If Jordan Neely doesn’t die, Daniel Penny doesn’t have a job at Andreesen Horowitz.

The Politics of Penny and Why a16z Wanted Him

David Ulevitch, GP at Andreesen Horowitz’ American Dynamism fund, gave a short explanation behind the hiring in his comments to The Free Press. From the article:

“He [Ulevitch] added that he envisions Penny, a former Marine, helping to strengthen the firm’s relationships with the Department of Defense and public safety sector. Penny will work in New York for the firm’s American Dynamism practice, a branch of the company that “invests in founders and companies that support the national interest.” (emphasis my own)

Fair, but I am struck by the sick irony of the situation. By the truth of David’s comments on the hiring. Daniel Penny was hired because he will strengthen the firm’s relationships with government institutions. On paper, that sounds fine until you really consider why Penny is uniquely able to do that.

Regardless of Daniel Penny’s own politics, he was immediately been sucked into a toxic political battle wherein, broadly, the Right hails him as an absolute hero for bringing order to the city and protecting his fellow citizens while the Left bemoans a broken justice system and disregard for the lives of homeless and Black people.

He was hired to strengthen government relationships; he wasn’t hired for heroism. Acts of heroism small and large and uncontroversial happen in American more often than one can imagine. He’s being hired because he is a cultural lightning rod, not in spite of it. Not for the courage of the act on the subway, but the fame and notoriety that followed. He’s being hired because of what “having Daniel Penny on your team” signals to the decision-makers in government and defense who control billions of dollars in public spending.

The Secretary of Defense is a Fox News anchor steeped in this very culture war, a true frontline warrior on the anti-woke, anti-DEI, law & order side of the battle. If this is the person at the top of hundreds of billions in spending, then how, as a venture firm can you get a leg up?

This is why it’s Daniel Penny and not [insert random Special Forces/Navy SEAL veteran with a more decorated war, academic, and professional record] who was hired. If Andreesen Horowitz has a meritocratic hiring process then it follows that Daniel Penny deserves his role because he has achieved more. From my point of view, his crowning achievement is stumbling onto the right side of a culture war.

Have any other VC associate hires gotten a retweet from the sitting Vice President of the United States?

What You Do is Who You Are

Andreessen Horowitz is unapologetically capitalizing on this volatile sociopolitical climate to maximize portfolio returns. This isn’t the first instance of Andreesen Horowitz greasing the wheels a bit in an unconventional manner. Ben Horowitz has given millions of dollars to the Las Vegas PD so that the police department has the budget to buy products from existing and potential portfolio companies (Flock Safety, Skydio, Prepared). “Philanthropy” is different from hiring controversial figureheads, but there’s the same murky, domineering, techno-anarchist vibe. Both this “philanthropy” and the hiring of Daniel Penny are manifestations of a “play to win” mentality that the firm is bringing to the venture capital business. A bit amoral for my tastes, but alas!

Daniel Penny doesn’t need to do a single thing and he will be enormously valuable to Andreesen Horowitz. The fact that this is true is bad. The story of Daniel Penny’s hire is not about outstanding military service or impressive intellect or demonstrations of courage. It is about harnessing his political currency to tip the scales in contract negotiations, open the right doors, and solidify influence over policies and deals that shape the future of defense and public safety spending.

Andreesen Horowitz is making a bet that the people currently in government who make massive funding and policy decisions want an ally that aligns with their cultural worldview. For the worse, I think it’s a good bet.

“We wanted to colonize Mars. Instead, we got the anti-woke commission.” — Peter Thiel, I think

I am not a fan of Elon’s politics, aesthetics, personality, etc. Invariably, when you don’t like someone’s politics or beliefs, you’re tempted to reduce the entirety of the person. It’s exhausting to not lump people into the buckets of good and bad. My instinct is to discount Elon’s achievements, and I definitely haircut them more than the average Silicon Valley-type. Nevertheless, some of his successes are undeniable. Yes, Tesla wouldn’t exist without government incentives and subsidies (what a Republican might call a “government handout”), but still, almost no one can actually do it. It’s a trillion dollar company. And, look, have you seen those rockets land themselves? It’s cool. It cannot be just luck or having a rich dad or stumbling into an elite network from Paypal. He must have some ability. But I don’t think that Elon is good at everything; I don’t think anyone is good at everything. Elon might be bad at lot of things.

Elon is good at setting an audacious vision and identifying the talent and capital partners to turn it into reality.

He’s shown exceptional ability to grow very big, bold, businesses. However, Tesla and SpaceX, for instance, were not built like normal, ho-hum, small businesses with an eye towards profitability from the start. They got an enormous amount of money from the government and investors as they ran unprofitably for years and years. While these businesses may have been efficient, it’s a good reminder that efficiency is not profitability.

Elon has now set his sights on his next ambition, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At face value, this seems like a fine thing. No one wants an inefficient government. It’s been discussed to death, but the cuts they’ve made so far are mostly meaningless. Like, yes, there is some really wasteful spending, some silly sounding programs, but these aren’t meaningful parts of the federal budget. Axing entire programs that don’t suit your political ideology isn’t efficiency.

So far, everything done at DOGE could’ve been accomplished by a totally average Deloitte team, and would be done 10x more thoughtfully and rigorously by the Blackstone Value Creation team and Bain PEG. The only thing really special about DOGE is that Elon has the megaphone, the bully pulpit. The cuts to various programs and organizations such as USAID look impulsive and thoughtless. This cannot be the best way to implement a strategy of efficiency and budget balancing, but that’s because DOGE is about something else. The Republican budget has $4.5T in tax cuts. It’s not about the deficit. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the culture war, stupid!”

The DOGE cuts aren’t to balance the budget or tackle the deficit.

The cuts are two things: 1. an effective political communication strategy that ties their anti-woke and anti-interventionist beliefs to a broader, if not false, ideal of fiscal pragmatism and responsibility and 2. a manner through which they can reorganize the federal government with anti-woke ideology as its raison d'être. Be a real Reagan or paleoconservative and tell me you are cutting defense spending, healthcare, and entitlement programs! At least then, we can have actual argument about the role of the government.

Instead, DOGE has cornered us into the dumbest conversations about the deficit and federal spending I have seen in my lifetime. Useful idiots in Silicon Valley like Jason Calacanis are thriving in this climate with such toddler-like, myopic, and naive views of the world that they tweet things like this:

C’mon…

Elon is not innovating, he’s retaliating

What happens when someone skilled at setting audacious visions and identifying talent decides that, instead of trying to go to Mars, they want to fulfill the cultural vision of the most brain-wormed, internet-addled, anti-DEI MAGA weirdos?

It is not the Department of Government Efficiency, it is the Department of Government Ideology. DOGE is now the frontline of America’s endless culture war and another vector for Elon Musk’s unquenchable thirst for attention and praise. What DOGE won’t do is meaningfully shrink the federal budget; what they will do is fire as many career employees as possible and fill as many of those roles as possible with MAGA ideologues.

Great, I’m glad Elon has taken feedback from LibsofTikTok and tackled America’s most pressing problem: gender identity forms. Not to go all 80 year old Democratic Senator, but, does this make my groceries cheaper?

The DOGE Takeover

Career civil servants are set to be purged in the name of efficiency, but really, Elon and DOGE are just making sure the only people remaining and the only people being hired have the ‘right’ beliefs. On February 11th, an executive order was released detailing hiring and management protocols for the OMB. It calls for some headcount reduction, but most importantly dictates that all decisions regarding new career appointments must be made in consultation with the agency's DOGE Team Lead. In theory, this is about efficiency. In reality, it means an Elon loyalist gets final say over all hiring, and I’m not sold on how they’ve gone about staffing so far.

“I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” This is a tweet from Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer, who appropriately resigned (was fired?) after a series of racist and offensive tweets were uncovered including: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool” and, “Normalize Indian hate.” He was rehired.

Mr. Elez has company. “Gavin Kliger, another DOGE staffer, was reported by Rolling Stone to have previously reposted content from Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has dined with President Donald Trump. ” - NBC News

It is not by accident or coincidence that these are the people Elon has chosen to help set the direction of federal agencies. These people, this ethos, is why, despite its name, DOGE will do little to balance the budget and make the government more efficient but a whole lot to federalize the culture war. DOGE won’t shrink government. It will make it more dysfunctional, more extreme, and more beholden to cultural zealots.

I really believe that Elon is exceptional at developing a big vision and building teams to execute it. Sadly, his big, bold idea here is not to balance the budget, make the government more efficient, or to make the lives of every day Americans better. His vision is to federalize the culture war and propagate his anti-woke ideologies.

Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho said it best.

My most quoted scene in the movie is when he's in the back of a car with Reese Witherspoon. She's talking to him and he's mostly ignoring her with headphones on. Then, she starts talking about marriage plans and he takes his headphones off to say that he's too busy at work to figure that out. She suggests that he should just quit his job; his dad owns the place so he doesn’t need to work. He hates the job.

Everyone wants to fit in.

Right now on Twitter, this manifests as people adopting specific language, often crude or offensive, that signals to the reader: “I am like this.” Even 50-year-old billionaires are cribbing the language of way-too-online Zoomers and right-wing MAGA-types posting from the trenches. I should be clear that while I’ll be attacking the use of a specific word and a specific type of person who uses it, swathes of this argument could apply to the other end of the political and social horseshoe (weird leftists that exclude and include via bizarre in-group language). Usually the lefties, while exclusionary, aren’t as mean about it.

As we enter into the arena—posting online—we continue the Roman tradition of carrying identifying banners into battle. Only now, our allegiances are made clear by specific words and phrases we choose to use.

Here are two examples of the behavior I’m talking about, but there are, like, thousands of tweets I could’ve pasted in here that show a dramatic rise of influential people using the word “retarded” over the past year:

I have one vivid memory of calling something "retarded."

I had built a habit of saying this word in middle school — it’s just what we all said and I never thought that much of it. By the time I was in college, I had grown aware that maybe it’s not the best language to use. I wasn’t saying it often and that makes this one memory stand out so clearly.

One Spring day, I was having some beers outside at a bar/restaurant on Stanford campus, and I called something “retarded” in front of a friend of mine. Unbeknownst to me, she spent a lot of time working with kids who had intellectual disabilities. Sternly and calmly, she called me out and explained why that language is offensive to a lot of different people and how, in general, it's just sloppy, weak, and punching down.

It was in front of some other friends and I remember a destabilizing wave of shame, embarrassment, and maybe even anger. Fortunately, I'm not prone to petulance, and I consider myself well-socialized and well-adjusted. So, instead of being weird or getting mad or doubling down I said: "yeah that makes sense, sorry" with my tail between my legs.

Here’s the thing: it did make sense! There really was no good reason for me to be saying that word, and I've almost never said it since.

Of course, I could have taken a different path. People can say whatever they want, after all: first amendment, just don't get offended, it's just a joke, who cares, I meant it differently, etc...But what's the point of crafting arguments that maximize my ability to offend? Why would I run towards meanness and unkindness?

Also, not that this is the deciding factor, but it's just inarticulate! Why not be more precise with your language? Be creative! Come up with a specific critique, an insult that's crafted for the moment. If the best you can do is mimicking the language of 6th grade boys, then you have other problems.

If you feel a general desire to say things that people find offensive, I suggest looking inwards. Maybe sometimes you're right! You should “be allowed” to say that thing that offends people because of 'xyz.’ More often than not I imagine you'll find nothing but weakness, insecurity, and the most small-minded bits of you.

To be clear, I am not personally offended by that word. If one were to say it in front of me. I might cringe a little, but I'd be cringing at you not the word. I’m cringing at what you think you’re gaining by saying it. Bonding and building community by way of being mean isn’t cool. It’s the most shallow form of connection.

There are better ways to fit in.