I was going to write a thing called “Daddy Ego.” I had the lead still all picked out and everything (Kurt Russell as Peter Quill’s ne’er-do-well daddy, Ego the Living Planet). Somewhere in the midst of formulating all that, the phrase “War Daddies” popped into my head and, like a lot of things that pop into my head lately, I don’t know what the hell it is yet, other than that it is definitely something, and I am looking forward to finding out what.
As you may recall, I’m writing a short story every week this year. I completely fell off that track in May while I was finishing the second draft of Safecrackers; and then for a while afterwards (most of June) I didn’t want to do it, because my brain kept going “noooooo, writey harrrrddddd, me no likey.“
What I’d forgotten — and have subsequently recalled, since getting my practice back on track in the last few weeks — is that the sheer joy of unfettered (and, at least officially, absolutely purposeless) creative enterprise is actually the reason I wanted to do this, besides any more pragmatic reasoning around “practice” and “10,000 pots” and “Ray Bradbury” and whatever.
Picking an idea out of the air and just sort of playing with it, with no pressure or expectation upon myself for what the work is for, is really fun and really good for me. Who knew. (I did, six months ago.)
Another thing about this project that’s interesting: when I’m floundering around trying to find a story — if, for example, I took the title “War Daddies” and then just had to build something in prose that, somehow, expressed itself out of that title — I pretty much always find something, and the better things that I find are almost always a connection to my own life, usually one which I didn’t know was down there to be found. These connections aren’t necessarily an anecdote or a memory or whatever; sometimes, they’re just some line of thought I’m obsessing over (a lot of apocalypse bunkers in April, for example). Sometimes, they’re a memory I thought I didn’t have anymore.
But sometimes — and these are the really interesting ones — the floundering around to find a story will pull something out of the earth that I thought meant one thing to me, and in the process of exploring it on the page, I’ll figure something entirely else out about it (and by extension, myself) that I never would have found in the pure recollection itself. Last weekend I wrote a story that touched — at first, very lightly — on a toxic relationship I was in a quarter of a century ago; and before I knew it, some kind of a ribbon was tied around that entire point in my life, in a way that I’d never understood was there to be reckoned with before.
What I mean to say about all this is this: I don’t think it’s “write what you know,” as all the books and podcasts tell us. I think it’s more, you don’t have any choice but to write what you know. Everything connects back to the source, which is you.
As above, so below
I was musing to myself, after some atrocity or other that was in the news last week, that it sure would be nice if there was a world government that actually took action against nation-states that violate international law. Then I just as quickly stopped myself, because I recognized in that line of thought a kind of thinking which, albeit in microcosm, I thought I’d firmly stamped out of my brain.
I used to work a place, and as I moved up the ranks in that place and became more and more exposed to the decision-making of senior leaders (including my own), I began to be aware that my leaders weren’t very good at it. (Decision-making.)
So, I started trying to get access to higher-level decision-makers, to… I don’t know what. Raise flags. Identify risks. Something.
But you probably know where this is going: those higher-level leaders weren’t any better — and in some cases were arguably worse — at the basic business of leadership and accountability than the people I was there to bag on. By the time I’d gotten all the way to the C-suite and was contemplating whether I needed to figure out a way to escalate myself to the board of directors, I’d worked out that my whole line of thinking was wrong. It doesn’t matter how high up you go: nobody up there knows what the fuck they’re doing. Or if you (miraculously) find someone who does, they’re a vanishingly rare fluke, not a purpose-built part of the design.
There’s a nice throughline in the Godfather trilogy where Michael keeps trying to reach higher levels of authority in order to legitimize his business and wash himself clean of sin; by the third film (which I like), he’s buying his way into the Vatican, assuming that surely they’re not a buncha mobsters like he is, like the Five Families are, like the American government is, along with all the other cabals he’s touched previously.
Nope. They’re mobsters too. It doesn’t matter how high up you go. In the proper cut of Godfather III, the one where Michael dies at the end, you can envision him turning up at the pearly gates and having whoever the fuck is there greet him with a pistol tucked in their waistband, demanding money. It doesn’t matter how high up you go.
Let’s move this away from criminality and back towards the simple premise that, by dint of holding leadership positions, we assume that leaders must be better at leadership, must have a better sense of what they’re doing, than the rank-and-file below them.
Because I see it everywhere: a sense that if one could only access a high-enough rung on the power ladder, the person standing on that rung would be able — willing — happy! — to effect useful change. They’re on that rung for a reason, right? I see it in our entire collective response to this moment in Western political history: the systems of power, the proverbial checks and balances, are gonna sort this out, right? It’s enough to make one understand why so many people have believed, and continue to believe, in a supreme deity: surely, someone more powerful than me is on top of this… right?
Nope.
Anyhoo. I shot through Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People, the Facebook book, over the weekend. And just in case you were harbouring any illusion that whatever fundamental organizational dysfunction is currently crippling your place of work, your condo board, your PTA, or whatever the fuck else, is probably not reflected in one of the most impactful organized entities in the history of planet Earth…
Nope.
Careless People is fantastic. Why it’s not the script for the Social Network sequel is beyond me. There are two massive-blood-loss traumas, one at the beginning and one at the climax, bookending Sarah’s character arc. The first is probably the best “why I am the way I am” cold open since Zuck sat across from Rooney Mara in the first scene of The Social Network and failed to earn her esteem. The second takes place, narratively, right before Trump won the 2016 election, the one that even internal staff at Facebook call “the Facebook Election.”
And everything in between is cockamamie bullshit madness about how fundamentally stupid and irresponsible all human beings are, and how no one at the top knows anything about what they’re doing, and how we really are capable of engineering the cultural equivalent of a nuclear bomb and then just tossing it around like a frisbee, assuring ourselves it will never explode in our hands.
And, yes, how capitalism is fundamentally anti-human — and will destroy every life on Earth.
I know I’m particularly screenplaypilled at the moment, but [cough], this fucking thing writes itself. I dunno, maybe the Facebook Files are great and whatever Sorkin’s onto is going to be great. Independently of that: Careless People should be a movie, and Sarah Wynn-Williams its main character.
The Williamsonian Jihad
One of my grand unification theories of life on Earth (along with all my other grand unification theories… one day I should create a grand, unifying theory, that grandly unifies them all) is that our ape minds were simply never engineered to operate at this level of scale. One of the things that probably contributes to the striving for higher powers to save us is that boxing everything above us into “higher power = good/responsible” is a gargantuan simplification of what is otherwise an unknowably complicated idea; perhaps the whole “God is unknowable” rubric comes from this, itself.
What I’m saying is this: we’re monkeys, and we’re used to living with around 18 other monkeys, and everything since then has been a real burden on our cognitive abilities. Not an insurmountable one, clearly; we’ve accomplished some pretty incredible things with a view of the world that includes stuff like actually looking at the world. But a strain, nevertheless. A machine operating beyond its design limits.
Reading Wynn-Williams’ book, of course, had me thinking again about getting out of social media altogether. I deleted Facebook long ago — so long ago I actually can’t remember when it was — but I still maintain an Instagram acount and used a Threads offshoot of that for a while, and part of me is monumentally pissed that anything that brings me even a small measure of enjoyment (and more importantly, connection to people I care about; watching their kids grow up; seeing their wedding photos, etc.) should be rendered unusable by the pesky concern that it, and the people using it, might actively be bringing about the end of the world.
I bailed on Twitter when Musk took over — this one, I do remember — and it still actively amazes me that that piece of shit Nazi incubation engine persists, powered less by Nazis and more by people who just don’t give a fuck that they’re at the party with the Nazis. So I dunno, maybe it’s hypocritical of me to even be in the water with those other fools anymore. Bluesky, TikTok, none of them are neutral. (I mean we already knew TikTok wasn’t neutral; I just took a particular point of pride in the idea of the Chinese government trying to work out why I always slow down for videos of children falling off balance beams, or adults getting their spines cracked.)
It’s harder and harder to escape the awareness that none of this is just a harmless shell game; it’s Russian roulette, except that the guy who owns the gun never even has to pick it up. We built a tool that actively, intentionally amplifies hatred and dissent, and we use it to sell bath products. We built an advertising targeting algorithm that is pseudointelligent enough to work out the exact moment a 15-year-old girl wants to kill herself (sorry, I’m not being hyperbolic here; read the book), and at that moment, show her an ad for diet pills. Not a suicide help line; not an emergency message to her mother, both of which are (technologically) possible. Diet pills.
In a sterner, more just version of the universe, we — the proles — would give up on the people “up there” and smash our phones en masse, and that tipping point would be remembered as the definition of who we are as a people for the next ten thousand years.
Woof. You wanna do links now?
Sure:
- Since, among other things, the people “up there” are now actively redefining who is and is not a “terrorist,” here’s a helpful zine on what to do when you, too, become defined as one. (Samidoun)
- Here’s a pretty thing: an Andor VFX breakdown reel. In case you wanted to see how the sausage gets made / bask in the wonder of human enterprise and not feel like shit about it after. (YouTube)