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 in 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.