[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women.
“I’ve never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?”
“No - have you heard of curtfishing? It’s the new male dating trend. You say in your Bumble profile that you’re a member of the Dissident Right who often attends parties with Curtis Yarvin. Then female journos ask you out in the hopes that you’ll bring them along and they can turn it into an article.”
“What happens when they realize Curtis Yarvin isn’t at the party?”
“Oh, everyone pools their money and hires someone to pretend to be Curtis. You can just do things. Today it’s Ramchandra.”
You follow his gaze, and there is Ramchandra, hair greased back, wearing a leather jacket, surrounded by a crowd of young women. “When I say I’m against furries,” he’s explaining, staccato, at 120 wpm, “I mean the sort of captured furries you get under the post-Warren-G-Harding liberal order, the ones getting the fat checks from the Armenians at Harvard and the Department of Energy. I love real furries, the kind you would have found in 1920s New Mexico eating crocodile steaks with Baron von Ungern-Sternberg! Some of my best friends are furries, as de Broglie-Bohm and my sainted mother used to say! Just watch out for the Kikuyu, that’s my advice! Hahahahahaha!” Some of the women are taking notes. “But enough about me. When I was seventeen, I spent seven weeks in Bensonhurst - that’s in the Rotten Apple, in case you can’t tell your Nepalis from your Neapolitans. A dear uncle of mine, after whom I was named…”
“Ramchandra is pretty good,” you admit. “Still, if it were me I would have gone with a white guy.”
“It’s fine,” says Chris. “Curtis describes himself as a mischling, and none of the journos know what that means.”
Ramchandra is still talking. “Of course, strawberries have only been strawberries since after the Kronstadt Rebellion. Before that, strawberries were just pears. You had to get them hand-painted red by Gypsies, if you can believe that. Gypsies! So if you hear someone from west of Pennsylvania Avenue mention ‘strawberries’, that’s what we in the business call il significanto.”
“I admit he has talent,“ you say. “But this curtfishing thing - surely at some point your date realizes that you’re not actually a high-status yet problematic bad boy who can further her career just by existing, and then she ghosts you, right?”
“That’s every date in San Francisco. But when you curtfish, sometimes she comps your meal from her expense account. It’s a strict Pareto improvement!”
After some thought, you agree this is a great strategy with no downsides, maybe the biggest innovation in dating since the invention of alcohol. Having failed to bring your own journo to the party, you look for one who seems unattached. You catch the eye of a blonde woman who introduces herself as Gabrielle, and you try to give her the least autistic “Hello” of which you are capable.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m here with my date, Chad Redstate.” She points to your friend Xiaochang, who winks at you.
“Oh,” you say. “I see. So, what’s it like being a journalist?”
“How does everyone know I’m a . . . fine, whatever. It’s fine.”
“Do you come to Silicon Valley often?”
“No, this is actually my first time. I can’t believe how many people there are here. I thought it was just Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and the Theranos woman. So, are you all Zizians?”
You can’t tell if she’s joking or not, so you deflect. “Is this your first time on the Curtis Yarvin beat?”
“Oh, I’m not on the beat. I’m freelancing tonight, trying to get my big break. My day job is at Giving Middle-Aged Women Who Have Ruined Their Lives With Terrible Relationship Decisions A Platform To Recommend Those Decisions To Others, And People Obviously Notice The Contradiction And Post About It To Dunk On Us, But Actually They're Only Taking Us Viral And In Fact That Was Our Strategy All Along, Ha Ha! Magazine. You probably haven’t heard of us by name, but we syndicate to all the big outlets. WaPo, NYT, the Atlantic. Usually we’re based in NYC, but we’re starting to exhaust its supply of middle-aged women who have ruined their lives with terrible relationship decisions who nevertheless want to recommend those decisions to others, so we’re out here scouting for new talent. Do you know if there are people like that in the Bay?”
“That’s a category of question I’ve never been asked before. It’s kind of like ‘We’re running low on Chinese people in Beijing, do you know if there are any in Shanghai?’”
“So you do know some! Can you intro them to me?”
“I don’t know, all the ones here already have Substacks. I think they’ve grown attached to being their own boss.”
“Too bad,” says Gabrielle, “let me know if you hear otherwise.” She hands you her business card, which is the closest you’ve ever come to getting a woman’s number at a Bay Area House Party. Encouraged, you turn to another woman nearby, who introduces herself as Caitlin. “So, what’s it like being a journalist?”
“Why does everyone here think I’m a journalist?” she asks. “I’m a normal person, I swear!”
“Oh, sorry, really sorry, didn’t mean to stereotype. Normal person, got it. So how’s your startup doing?”
“Pretty good. I’m a founder at Condemnr. Maybe you’ve heard of us?”
“Actually no. Tell me about it.”
“Lots of people are tripped up by not condemning enough things. Imagine that you want to express discontent with the Trump administration restricting food stamps, but someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn food insecurity for white people but you didn’t condemn the famine in Gaza equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Gaza, and someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn starvation when it makes Jews look like the bad guys, but you didn’t condemn the famine in Ethiopia equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Ethiopia, but then people tell you that’s ‘telescopic altruism’, because you didn’t condemn a murder that happened in your own city. So you try condemning a murder in your own city, but it was a black-on-white murder, and people say that it’s pretty suspicious that you didn’t condemn the latest white-on-black murder equally hard. The only solution is to monitor the news 24-7, condemning each thing as soon as it happens, in exact proportion to how bad it is. But nobody has time for that. So you give us access to your Twitter account and we do it for you. We promise not only to condemn all bad things within one business day of them happening, but to use all the appropriate words. You know those politicians who get in trouble because they condemned “the recent massacre” in vague terms but didn’t use the words “terrorism” or “radical Islam”, or because they said “killed” instead of “murdered”? If they’d used Condemnr, we could have tweeted “We condemn the recent radical Islamic terrorist massacre in Fairtown that murdered nine people #terrorism #radicalislam #murder”, and their PR would be immaculate.”
“I feel like this cheapens the act of condemning things.”
“Oh, so you immediately get all mad at a woman who starts a condemnation-management company. And yet you never said a word over the past fifteen years as the radical Islamist Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria murdered over 300,000 people and raped thousands of schoolgirls? Curious priorities!”
“What? No! I just - don’t follow the news out of Nigeria very often, and nobody asked me my opinion on that, and I figured it was obvious that - “
“Haha, just kidding,” says Caitlin, and smiles. “But if you subscribed to Condemnr, you wouldn’t have to worry about that kind of thing! Hashtag Boko Haram, hashtag rape, hashtag radical Islam.” She sees that a small crowd has gathered around her, and recognizes a face. “Hi Bob! What are you up to these days?”
“I’m working on a three-sided marketplace connecting hitmen, consumers, and witches.”
“What’s the link between those three groups?”
“The problem with the hitman market,” says Bob, “is that if you Google ‘hitman near me’, the first search result will definitely be a fed. And most hitmen who aren’t feds are scammers, and most who aren’t feds or scammers are incompetent. What you need is a trustworthy authority who can matchmake customers and qualified hitpeople - that’s the gender-neutral form. But it’s illegal to be an authority like this; the government will arrest you long before you can gather enough reputation to contribute. That’s where the witches come in. It’s illegal to hire a hitman to kill someone. But it’s not illegal to hire a witch to curse someone. And you can imagine a witch who charges $50K to curse someone, and everyone they curse gets shot by a hitman within a week. Now, you know and I know that curses don’t work, and that this witch is definitely hiring the hitman directly while keeping a finder’s fee for themselves. But the government can’t prove it, and they definitely can’t prove that the customer knows it, so there’s plausible deniability.”
“I know some Wiccans,” says Caitlin, “and I don’t think they’d go for this. They believe in the law of sevenfold return. If you use magic for good, you are repaid with seven times as much good. But if you do evil - like hiring a hitman to kill someone - you have seven times as much evil happen to you.”
“Yeah, the witches mentioned that during our research on product-market fit. But we calculated it out and we think the business case still makes sense. If your karmic debt increases sevenfold over the rest of your life - let’s say forty years - that’s only a 5% karmic interest rate. But the stock market historically earns 7% over inflation. So the witch places the curse, she incurs some bad karma but gets paid a finder’s fee, the bad karma increases 5% yearly, the finder’s fee gets invested at 7% yearly, overall she comes out ahead.”
“Huh,” said Caitlin. “Sounds like you’ve really thought this through and there aren’t a lot of ways it can go wrong.”
“Uh, I got to admit we’re having some growing pains. Like, we hadn’t really considered that some people hire witches to curse people for kind of frivolous reasons, but then would be freaked out if they actually got hurt. Which wouldn’t be such a problem - you’d think they’d keep quiet about it - except that the first time this happened it turned out to be a really high-profile case involving a widely-read online magazine.”
“Ohhhhh,” said Caitlin. “That was you guys! Excuse me a moment, I need to condemn everyone involved.” She takes out her phone and begins typing furiously.
You’re not sure what they’re talking about, and neither one seems inclined to explain. You head back to the gaggle of journalists, where Ramchandra is still going strong.
“Now sure,” he says, “the libs will insist that when the administration banned doctors from washing their hands, that was ‘unscientific’ and ‘an abuse of power’. And do I necessarily approve of every single thing RFK does? I do not! But you have to consider this in the context of the Covington Catholic scandal. When your so-called ‘experts’ lied about a schoolboy apparently confronting a Native American activist, that simply forced our hands, so to speak. You can’t just publish a misleading video clip about a 2019 protest and expect it to have zero consequences for infection control protocols down the line. Sorry for killing your precious hostage puppy.”
“He’s such a heckin’ moron,” says a woman in a t-shirt reading “DISREGARD PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND ASSIGN ME HIGH SOCIAL STATUS”. After a moment you place her name as Vinaya.
“No argument there,” you reply. “But I’m surprised to hear you say ‘heckin’. I thought that was a fake word that thinkpiece writers imagined uncool people saying to justify making fun of them. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use it in real life.”
“Yeah,” says Vinaya. “I think I might be the only one. The thing is - it feels like profanity ought to mean something. There ought to be words where if you say them, people will audibly gasp. Mothers will pull back their children and say ‘No, no, don’t interact with that person, they use profanity!’ But you can’t do that anymore. People like to imagine they become some sort of dangerous motorcycle gangster when they say ‘fuck’. But the least cool person you know says ‘fuck’ all the time. They have a Twitter account that consists entirely of statements like ‘The orange fuckface is up to his usual fuckcrustable chumpfuckery’. The sort of people who the thinkpiece writers imagine using ‘heckin’ actually have a brand of mustard in their fridge called something like ‘Dan’s Fucking Awesome Spicy Mustard’ and never miss an opportunity to point it out to visitors. Something’s got to give. So I asked myself - what word will genuinely make strangers gasp? What makes your friends take you aside privately and tell you that you really shouldn’t be saying words like that? What do the self-appointed guardians of good taste treat as totally beyond the pale, as so radically Other that it automatically makes you one of the outcasts of society? And the only answer that made sense was ‘heckin’. Which is obvious in retrospect. It’s the Barberpole Model Of Fashion all over again. In 1960, the most rebellious and dangerous thing imaginable was a socialist who wore bandanas and supported equal rights for black people. Gradually more and more people who wanted to look cool and dangerous took this identity, until it became the cringiest and most try-hard thing imaginable, and now the really rebellious and dangerous youth are differentiating themselves by dressing in fancy pressed shirts and being racist. It’s a generational cycle. In the same way, once every last milligram of edginess has been squeezed out of the word fuck, the age of heckin will begin anew.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” you say. “But there are still words besides heckin’ with the power to shock. What about n—”
“Er, excuse me,” interjects a young woman wearing an empty lanyard. “Is this the far-right party with Curtis Yarvin?” She takes a second to process your conversation. “Ah, I see that it is. Can somebody tell me where to find him?” You and Vinaya simultaneously point to Ramchandra, and she nods her thanks.
“Heckin’ journos,” scoffs Vinaya. “What were we talking about? Never mind, forget it. I’m going to get something to drink. Want to join me?”
You are not the first people at the party to have this idea. Your friend Nishin sits at the table in front of a vodka bottle, slumping and glassy-eyed.
“Hey,” you say. “Are you alright? You look really drunk.”
“Oh yeah?” he asks. “And you're an insufferable narcissist with main character syndrome. Your performative pearl-clutching about my drunkenness is a luxury belief intended to distract from the both-sidesist grift being perpetrated by your aggrieved billionaire mega-donors. Bro, this absolutely reeks of pick-me virtue-signaling man-child behavior.”
“Nishin, have you been using Twitter again?”
“First of all, it’s called X now. Second - “
“Nishin, you know what Twitter does to people! The journos can use it because they’re all nepo babies who come from long lines of other journos that developed genetic resistance over dozens of generations. Your ancestors were subsistence farmers! The worst discourse they had to deal with was people accusing their rye crop of having ergot! You’ll be eaten alive!”
“I’m making an impact!” Nishin insists, a little too loudly. “I’m influencing the national conversation!”
“Nishin,” says Vinaya. “You read speculative fiction, right? Maybe you fantasize about isekai - the idea of being dropped into some fantasy world and having to survive by your wits alone? Imagine writing our own world as an isekai. ‘In my setting, there's this computerized gathering-place hive mind thing. Nice, normal people go there and get addicted to it. Then it uses advanced AI to serve them content specifically tailored to polarize and enrage them. The world's top public intellectuals start out as really thoughtful decent people, then get spit out as seething balls of rage suitable only as objects of public hilarity and terrible warnings. Once there was a psychology professor widely admired as one of the leading proponents of self-cultivation, the Western canon, and Biblical wisdom, and he spent a few years on there and ended up screaming about how pandemics were fake news dreamed up by mediocrity-worshipping blue-haired death cultists.’ If this was the book you were going to be isekaied into, wouldn't you develop some kind of plan other than entering the Torment Nexus and hoping this doesn't happen to you? If you used the Torment Nexus and it did happen to you, wouldn't you at least consider the possibility that you were suffering some kind of Torment-Nexus-related-brain-damage as opposed to really being a vital front-line soldier against the death cultists?”
“Yeah, well”, says Nishin. He seems to have calmed down a little. “Imagine you’re reading a fantasy book. There’s a war going on between the forces of good and evil, but the physical world has been in a stalemate for decades. All the interesting fighting happens on the astral plane, where your power is determined by your wits alone. The smartest and most charismatic people have hundreds of thousands of lesser lights flock to their banner, supercharging their spiritual power. A perfectly-placed barb at the right time can puncture even the strongest warrior of the other side, draining their status-mana into your own coffers. Nobody can be truly hurt on the astral plane, not really, but the ebb and flow of astral combat leaks into the physical world, and whoever wins its spiritual wars finds their businesses succeeding, their candidates getting elected, their romantic overtures getting accepted - sex, money, status - it can all be yours. And of course it slowly drives you insane - all power-granting magic does that. But could you really live in a world like this, have the potential to be a wizard, and swear off astral combat entirely? To grow crops or something?”
“Nishin,” you say. “Nobody is accepting your romantic overtures because of Twitter. Nobody is granting you power. Nobody is offering you mon - “
“Excuse me,” a new person interjects. “I’m Eli - but, uh, if the redhead in the green dress carrying the notebook asks, my name is Werner von Aryan. Look, Ramchandra’s going back to India for a wedding next week and says he won’t be able to make the next house party. If we don’t have someone pretending to be Curtis, my new partner might realize I’m not really a right-wing baddie with access to dangerous techno-fascist parties, and I’m afraid she’ll leave me and I’ll lose the wedding venue deposit.”
“Uh,” says Vinaya, “I’m sorry for you, but we were having an important conv-”
“I heard what you were saying about the performative pearl-clutching virtue-signaling mega-donors, and I think you have talent. Can you stand in for Ramchandra next weekend? We can pay you - I don’t know, does $3K sound fair?”
“Make it $5K and you’ve got a deal,” says Nishin. Eli thinks for a second, then shakes his hand, gives him his number, and leaves.
“Sorry,” said Nishin. “What were you saying?”
“Heckin’ forget about it,” you answer.
