ok not to be toxic and anti-social but i think loyalty is bad

i love having opinions that sound really crazy but are really just about redefining words. this pattern leads to multiple seemingly anti-social conclusions, one of which is that loyalty is bad.

people do things that are beneficial to them. things that make them happy or get them clout or money and stuff like that. they also do things that might be beneficial to them when the expected value of that thing is positive. take some sort of extreme example, like the sacrifice of life. if i jump in front of a bullet before it strikes my friend, it's because i would rather be dead than live with my friend being dead and knowing that i could have saved them. a decision like this is unlikely to be subjected to a super rational thought process, but the point is that when i decide to take the bullet, i'm using the information that i have at that time to maximize my own utility. i'm not necessarily committed to the idea that this is true, it's just a useful and extremely economics-core framework for understanding behavior.

loyalty can either supersede this rational self-interest or fit cleanly within it. in other words, loyalty either breaks this mental model of human behavior or it doesn't. consider that it does break this model, and that acting upon loyalty is not self-interested (which is, i think, the standard understanding of the concept of loyalty). this would mean that loyalty is sacrificial. loyalty is inseparable from obligation. "being loyal" is adhering to a sense of obligation established by mutual history. if someone asks someone why they remain at their job or married to their partner despite not enjoying their experience, they may reference the concept of loyalty to justify or explain their behavior. they would say "this relationship does not create value for me, but i remain in it because i am loyal." it is often assumed that loyalty is morally good (i'm honestly not sure why).

the expectation of loyalty is weaponized to trap people in relationships that are not good for them. it could be a professional relationship, like an employment relationship. the rhetorical surrounding "job-hoppers" is a good example. while it would be totally reasonable for someone to say "we don't want to hire you because you have a history of moving around a lot and our skepticism that you'll remain in this role leads us to believe that hiring you has negative expected value." that's chill as hell and makes sense. but that's not really how people talk about the issue. they'll typically say something like "we don't trust that you'll be loyal to the company" which moralizes the issue and creates a culture of unjustified obligation. now, the moral framework can be used against employees, adding moral weight to what is really just an expected value calculation that happens in a market.

the same is obviously true of friendships and romantic relationships. creating an expectation of loyalty breathes life into relationships that would be better off terminating by guilting one party and accusing them of being disloyal.

now consider that the concept of loyalty fits into the paradigm of rational self-interest. being loyal is just a set of behaviors that are utility-maximizing. for example, if i have a particular aversion to conflict and value sameness, predictability, and stability, then i would then remain in relationships that may otherwise seem not to benefit me. here, loyalty is an amoral description of my preference set. my rationale for maintaining a relationship in this circumstance wouldn't really benefit from using the word loyalty. it could easily be described by a preference reveal.

in common parlance, loyalty is used to bridge a utility gap. as in, "no, this relationship doesn't benefit me because what i get from it is less than what i give to it. but i'm loyal so i grin and bear it." this destroys value. the energy spent maintaining this relationship would be better spent cultivating another one.

i'm chill with the word "loyal" being used to describe a set of preferences (like for conflict avoidance, sameness). this isn't really how people use the word, though. i take issue with its moral implications, which are used to control people by creating unjustified obligation and therefore destroying value.

imagine that alice gets -2 utils from her relationship with bob, which gets 3,000,000,000 utils from the relationship. i am not proposing that this relationship is terminated. i'm saying that either the social substrate on which the relationship exists needs to shift such that the relationship becomes beneficial for both parties (for example, alice and bob's friends recognize the value she creates for bob and reward her for it — this is structurally similar to a government program incentivizing socially beneficial behavior), or the terms of the relationship need to be renegotiated between alice and bob such that alice benefits from it. maybe bob gives her a sandwich each time they hang out.

if you advocate for the continuation of the relationship based on the fact that it creates 2,999,999,998 utils, you're lowkey justifying abuse and harassment and coercion and you're basically evil. rhetorically, the moralized concept of loyalty is used to justify this type of relationship, so if you support it then you condone abuse and stuff like that.

esoterism and the dérive

yesterday, for me, was esoteric. my experiences were rooted in the explicit pursuit of niche, specialized behaviors. while walking to red hook with bunny, we went out of our way to take esoteric routes, ogle at esoteric surroundings, and eat at a restaurant that is, given where we live and who we spend our time with, relatively esoteric as well. esotera is oftentimes what gives life flavor and gives us identity. having a unique vibe with esoteric lore requires that one goes out of their way to engage in unexpected and interesting behaviors.

after attending an esoteric party, we went to a club in bushwick that was so esoteric that it was closing forever. as i was leaving, john told me about a french philosopher and artist named guy debord, who was really into fucking around and invented a form of praxis that involved getting really drunk and walking around or something like that. debord was into wandering around urban environments to deprogram oneself from impositions from various institutions. in the uber home, i learned more about guy debord and realized the esoteric behavior bunny and i had engaged in was basically an implementation of debord's praxis. walking around in a whimsical fashion was, in fact, quite woke.

i know people who refuse to engage in esoteric behaviors, shying away from anything that doesn't make them appear elegant or networked or well-off. they have no interest in exploring esotera in order to develop and refine their tastes and preferences because they rely on institutions to curate everything and present it to them. this behavior is lowkey a failure to be human. a person like this makes every decision in order to perform a certain social role rather than in pursuit of their own interests.

people are increasingly sorted into archetypes or marketing segments by algorithms and social stereotyping. a refusal to be intentionally esoteric leads one to embrace this typing without question. for example, going to restaurants you find on tiktok or that are recommended by food publications is an acquiescence to the recommendation engine, which is not categorically bad, but can go too far. things that used to be matters of actual preference understood to differ between people are now understood primarily as games of social hierarchy, with activities being assigned class implications or clout implications, which are now evidently the primary means by which people make sense of decisions. in simple terms, people do things because they're cool or clouted, not because they're enjoyable, and certainly not because they're esoteric. we have lots of info. everything is curated. everything is optimized. to be esoteric is to wrestle for control of the curation.

while this insight isn't particularly novel, it's interesting that some guy that died a long time ago and lived in france identified it even before the recommendation and curation complex became overbearing. debord's whole thing was that people need to insert randomness into their lives, and he didn't even have google maps. the pursuit of esotera entails both a commitment to some randomness as well as an explicit decision to subvert expectation. oftentimes, when walking aimlessly around the city, i'll choose to turn down a road because it's beautiful. when bunny and i came to a fork in the road yesterday, we asked ourselves which direction would yield the most esoteric experience. it led us to an industrial part of gowanus and through red hook, where we discovered a cat hotel, a sign that told us to beware of overflow from a body of water that contained sewage, and an antique painting that we researched to see if it was worth money. all we really wanted was dinner.

i can remember month-long stretches of my life where nothing new really happened. i would work the same job, hang out with the same friends doing the same things and going to the same places. in hindsight, it kind of feels like nothing happened during these times. they were just a blur of sameness. repetition is seen as disciplined, and discipline is seen as a virtue necessary to accomplish a lot of important things. there are forces demanding consistency and predictability from us, but we may have taken it too far. i don't want to live as a specialized machine that produces and consumes based on what everyone else is saying. maybe randomness is a virtue. i want to be esoteric. i will be esoteric... even if that just means going for a specific type of walk.

there are so many ways to be gay these days

gay does not mean homosexual. gay means lots of things. there's the derogatory "he's being gay" that you might use when someone is being annoying or stupid, the behavioral "he's being gay" that you might use when someone is being effeminate, the "he's gay" that you might use when someone is knowledgeable about gay culture and loves to use the word slay, and the "he's gay" that you might use when someone is literally a homosexual. these labels are complex because it's possible to be sexually gay without being socially gay or socially gay without being culturally gay. gayness is a state, a behavior, a preference, a set of knowledge and more. in order to save us all from the linguistic ambiguity of the word gay, i've developed a framework.

this framework uses a 3x3 matrix to place each person in a box. the dimensions of the 3x3 cube are sexual, social, and cultural. each person can be assigned one of three values for each of the dimensions: gay, bi, or straight. we're used to discussing sexuality on these terms, and the sexual category is the least interesting.

the social category is meant to describe the social role someone plays. it captures the way they interact with the people within their social circle. the question we're asking here is "does this person act gay?" i'll only be discussing men here because i feel i have a good handle on how gay men operate but i don't really know anything about lesbians. some socially gay behaviors include being flamboyant, narcissistic, or materialistic. socially gay people love to gossip. they interact with others in a campy or frivolous manner. they love attention. a socially gay person loves to have fun and stand out above almost all else. notably, social gayness often implies the need for a handler or a penchant for messiness and drama. it's very common for an urban-dwelling straight man to be socially gay. being socially straight, for men, is the opposite. social straightness is about being reserved, fixating on things rather than people, avoiding outright attention, and not being quite as fun. as much as i'm trying to explain what social gayness is, it's really just a vibe. if someone is socially gay, you'll know. being social bisexual entails just not cleanly fitting into either category, or having a confused or confusing social mode.

the cultural category describes a person's relationship to the world at large. cultural gayness is more familiar to most people that social gayness. culturally gay people listen to charli xcx or go on stan twitter or go to gay bars and circuit parties. they might be interested in drag or musical theater or be obsessed with madonna. they use gay lingo and make references to gay culture. i bravely claim that there is also a straight culture, which is really just traditional culture and being into things that are sort of considered default interests for men. this could include loving to know lots of stuff about trucks or having encyclopedic knowledge of football or baseball. it may mean using certain straight lingo such as bro and dapping people up. cultural bisexuality is about like listening to mumford and sons or something like that. i don't know. i don't really know what those people are doing.

this framework provides some clarity for calling people gay and calling people straight and capturing their vibe. a shorthand initialism can be used to capture each vibe, and the categories are listed from the most limited and intimate context (sexuality) to the widest context (cultural affect). a guy who is not literally gay but everyone thinks is gay might be described as SGG (sexually straight, socially gay, and culturally gay). a super gay guy would of course be categorized as GGG (sexually gay, socially gay, and culturally gay). a straight guy that wears chelsea boots and flirts with everyone might be SBB. each of the 27 possible combinations has its own flavor. some women say they like to date gays that "seem gay" which often means they want to date a SGG, BGG, SGB, or BGB. they're not interested in SSS's.

i think it's really rude and messed up to use the word gay in a derogatory manner, so the framework doesn't account for that use of the word, but i hope it provides some clarity for those of us who are willing to acknowledge that gayness is more than just being homosexual and are interested in understanding society through this incredibly reductive and stereotypical method.

sign goods and demand generation (part 1: mostly hating)

i think the market for luxury goods is really useful for understanding people and their flops. i personally think a lot of luxury sign goods are really freaking embarrassing and dumb. sign goods are basically goods that derive value primarily from the social signals they send rather than from the utility they provide. so for example an hermes bag is expensive because of its social context, not because it's particularly good at holding things. there is an extreme type of sign good called a veblen good when is meant to signal wealth above all else. technically, a veblen good is a good for which demand increases as price increases.

sign goods are inevitable. there are people who have basically tapped out on the straightforward utility they can get from goods and services and now have to derive value from social signaling. there are others who just value social signals enough that they want to send them even if that means they can't afford some more straightforward utility from something else. that is, sign goods are important to people even if they have not yet tapped out on other stuff. this is lowkey normal asf. for example, sometimes i wear my oklou shirt which i paid more than necessary for because i want to signal to people that i have amazing taste. this is pro-social and fine. the weird thing about sign goods that are popular today is that if you think about the signals they actually send, they're not signals that you would expect to be respected by any normal or competent person. let's return to an trad luxury goods, which are sort of quintessential veblen goods. the signals one sends by wearing luxury brand items would be: 1) i have lots of money, 2) i want to signal that i have lots of money by giving a bunch of money to a luxury label, 3) i think it's cool and chill that social status games should rely on a fabricated prestige complex rather than something socially valuable.

when i refer to the fabricated prestige complex, i'm talking mostly about demand generation. luxury brands operate primarily by spending a lot of money on generating demand for their products by associating them with upper-class behaviors, events, and locations. luxury brands pay crazy rents for storefronts on prestigious streets. they often have ads in print media or in bougie locations. luxury goods are in a competitive market for social signal demand. they essentially pump as much financial, social, and cultural capital as they can into marketing (which is often not called marketing in this context) and then sell products into the demand they pay for. they don't solve a problem. they don't really create value. in fact, demand generation is often net-negative because it creates desire than cannot be fulfilled. a lot of time and energy is token to cycle between selling someone a good at a massive mark-up, and then going out and spending a bunch of money on justifying the mark-up.

sign goods can signal anything, and personally i think it's kinda normal to signal wealth, but the question then becomes: why the fuck do people choose to signal that they think the prestige complex deserves their money? there was a meme going around a few years ago that said something like "rich people used to fund public infrastructure and now they just [idk insert something unproductive that rich people do]." i think there's something mega real about this. like what incentive do normal people have to be impressed by luxury goods that provide no value to anyone except those who own and sell them? do we have no class? why don't we be impressed by sign goods that signal that someone has funded something genuinely productive? there is an aspect of this that the tech-heads have gotten right, where investing in a bunch of startups is a status signal because it signals both money and network. in the last crypto cycle, when nfts were popular, there was also some signaling activity that seemed genuinely pro-social, where people were at least pretending that they were interested in art and were buying it. obviously there is some speculative activity going on there, but people were choosing to speculate on and support a narrative that at least purported to be pro-social. (here i'm assuming that most art is socially good, which is controversial and not something i necessarily believe. there's a whole tangent i want to go on here about how i think the valorization of craftsmanship and aesthetics is largely a psyop. i'll refrain for now but basically the take is that art is only socially valuable when it's revelatory and/or educational.)

in the mid- and late-2010s, a shoe brand called toms was popular. they were lowkey ugly but their narrative was woke. i think if you bought a pair they would give a pair of shoes to a poor person and that was the whole thing. people were into it, and a part of that was they wanted to signal that they had done something good for someone else. then, it somehow got corny to care about that and everyone went back to dgaf mode where they would send signals about taste and preference instead of about the positive impact of their economic behavior.

i'm saying let's bring it the fuck back! there has to be some non-corny way to create luxury goods with positive externalities. there has to be a way to shift social sentiment such that we respect people who send signals that they are actually interested in the good of everyone. i'm not necessarily saying we should spit on people because they're wearing luxury goods that have crazy demand-generation spends, but i am saying it's unclear why it's respectable. buy some insightful art. angel invest in a startup so someone can do something interesting even if it has a low chance of success. pay for social experiences with your friends. tip a lot. bleed excess to the people around you. live generously. literally just help people. isn't that the best signal you could ever send? if we're going to have luxury goods that literally derive their value from public sentiment (or the sentiment of a certain in-group), then that public (or those in-groups) should choose to assign social value to things that benefit them. your opinion has value. what you choose to valorize and respect has value. by responding to demand generation for luxury goods and respecting or desiring them, you're saying "my preferences are up for auction! spend some money on marketing, and benefit from my change in taste. oh, i don't actually get the money from the auction? that's fine. :)" it's sick, really.

surveillance apps our society needs

we need to get into making apps. and by we i mean other people. i just have ideas. here are some interesting surveillance apps i’d like to see.

the spenddoxx app:

intuit has this new grift where they use artificial intelligence to categorize your spending and help you budget. personally i do not care about this data all that much but i am really interested in sharing the data with everyone on earth. years ago, a friend made a twitter bot for me that tweeted every single song i streamed on spotify as i listened to it. we briefly looked into doing this with credit card transactions but found that there wasn’t an api to access the transaction data. we tried mint and saw if chase bank would let me do it. i wanted to tweet the amount and location of all my spending, but the big tech overlords prevented me from democratizing the data. there was a moment in the late 2010’s when people were obsessed with snooping on people’s venmo timelines. imagine that but for every transaction. beautiful. gorgeous. we could all know so much more about each other.

the locationdoxx app:

we have this. we’ve had many iteration of it. the best is currently find my friends. but we need some freaking features. simplicity can be beautiful for those with no curiosity. those who don’t embrace complexity to seek truth must love a good barebones apple app. but that’s simply not me. i want notifications when 3+ of my friends are in the same place. i want to send a push notification to a list of users within a one mile radius of me that they’re welcome to pull up to my current location and queen out. i want historical data on where people have been instead of just real-time data on where they are. there are some apps that track where you’ve been and then don’t share it. i use fog of world and mapcred. this data could be used to make recommendations to people but it’s not. the problem with asking people for recommendations is that they often are making some compromised rather than telling you what they like. they’re trying to guess what you like. they’re trying to tell you something that makes them seem cool or esoteric or rich. i want to just look at a database of where they actually go. i want to go on the locationdoxx app and type “coffee shop near me” and i want it to tell me “your friend vanessa goes to cafe grumpy a lot” simply because she actually goes there and not because she explicitly recommended it to me and i want to go there and i want to text vanessa and say “hey queen i went to your favorite cafe and it was everything.”

the frienddoxx app:

people are addicted to getting your instagram and going through the people they know that follow you. i love when partiful shows me people i’ve partied with before. there is a big social graph that exists on social media that’s difficult to navigate because it’s not filterable and visualizable in the right ways. i want a social graph with edges and nodes that i can use to figure out what the hell is going on. when i meet a new person i want to see a list of every single person we know in common so that i can do a vibe assessment and see how much clout they have. it can be as simple as filtering a big social graph to people that are connected to both ben and me. we can also see how they’re connected. imagine if you could invite people to a party by simply drawing a border on a social graph to include a certain squad. this is mostly just a visualization tool that likely already exists but probably doesn’t have cool and interesting features.

if you know of any apps that feel like they doxx all their users, please send them my way. i’ll become a power user.

reflections on the quasimatt hierarchy of needs

level 1: queening out

i realized recently that a lot of my friends frame social activity, especially forming new relationships, as instrumental toward some other goal. they’re networking so they can make money or trying to find a romantic partner so they can make certain lifestyle changes. while i’m certainly interested in making money and forming serious relationships, i don’t view queening as a primarily instrumental endeavor. conversely, queening is, to me, fundamentally and inherently valuable. i believe people were born to queen. in fact, the point of money and romance and everything else is to facilitate queening. when i go to bed at night and think about my day, if i queened, i can be satisfied on some level. even in the absence of money, clout, expression, and grifting, queening is usually sufficient to feel like life is worth living. i don’t really feel that queening out will ever be taken from me until i’m dead.

level 2: having money

i understand all problems in my life as money problems. i don’t think i would really consider myself to have any real problems if i had money except for maybe one existential insecurity that cannot be adequately resolved. i have had enough money to say, live a frugal lifestyle for a year without needing income, which affords me some freedom, but comes with the threat that i will not have money in a short period of time. the times when i have money, i usually use it to buy freedom rather than letting it compound. this is something i need to change in order to transcend. the most powerful force of money on the psyche is that it makes you understand value across time. the trade-off is roughly “do i enjoy my life now or give myself a chance to enjoy it later?” you either allow yourself freedom in order to enjoy your life in the present, or you spend time doing things you don’t want to do, hoping that you can use the money you earn from doing unsavory activities to experience freedom and enjoy your life in the future. my relationship to money is pretty bad because i have never enjoyed any income-generating activities. it’s genuinely unclear to me whether this is abnormal because i can never tell if people are lying when they say they like their jobs.

level 3: clout and posting

clout and posting are forms of one-way or imbalanced queening. they entail the pursuit of influence and make the benefits of queening and having money public. in a sense, tiers one and two are maintenance, and tiers three and four are expression. the best and most satisfying moments in my life have all resulted from making something that’s revealing or honest or lowkey brave and then people reacting positively to it or telling me how and why it meant something to them. it could be writing a book or throwing a party or making a banging tweet. it’s important to me to influence people and i feel like i am relatively influential within certain social circles, but i have never felt that i had enough clout or made enough things to have transcended this tier. it’s incredibly difficult to make progress in this tier if i don’t have money because of the mental state that being poor invokes.

level 4: grifting

i use the word grifting quite liberally. here, grifting has to do with the flywheel effects of money and clout-farming, which is based on the idea that grifting describes a category of economic activity with a particularly good risk:reward profile. i have friends who have hit terminal velocity on clout and money and can just basically slap their name on stuff or throw money around and it gets interpreted as them doing things and being important. it usually takes a lot of effort and luck to get to this point but then the clout and capital flywheel just continues with some light maintenance. they generally just get to enjoy their lives without any significant coercion. i have never experienced this, but it’s the pinnacle of the hierarchy of needs because it seems so secure to be in a place where you don’t really have to do much to “progress” and it becomes kind of your default state.

in summary, queening makes life worth it at an extremely basic level, money makes it enjoyable, clout makes it feel important, and grifting makes it all easier so that nothing can stop you from incessantly queening without limits.