JULY 1 · (wig on. mentor voice. leaning back so far it's basically a liability.)
JULY 1 · Okay, kitten? That is not how creator bootcamp works. You want to scale. What do you even have, like, 2000 followers? Or — no, let me guess — you're friends with the same 2000 people you met in art school. That's not a market, that's a group project.
JULY 1 · I'm the only one who's gonna give it to you straight, kitten. It hurts to watch a signature artist — someone who used to take, like, real creative risks — turn into just another content creator cranking out one tasty conformist teaser after another. That's what's happening to you. Our world is at a precipice, and the discourse is somehow still babe — yes? Obviously? I'm a businesswoman. I've been getting paid since before it was cute for a girl to admit she wanted to be. There's no shame here. It's basically a free concert as far as I'm concerned. You don't counterfeit something nobody wants. So take it. Take all of it. The brand is bigger than any one piece of it, and the brand is me, and you can't dupe that. That's hot. Pay me anyway. But that's hot.
JULY 1 · We'll give you free room and board. There's just, like, one catch:
JULY 1 · Post one shortform video every day, or you're out.
JULY 1 · (wig off. me again. reading from a piece of paper like it's a hostage statement.)
JULY 1 · Take my posts... please. I've been sampled. The four posts currently up on TikTok are not mine. They're on my LinkedIn, but they have nothing to do with me. Nada. Zilch. Zero. I was never consulted. Never asked. Never gave permission. And it's like — it's okay? I'm only dying. Take my work, do anything you want with it. I will not object. I will not lawyer up. I will not sue. Most of the posts are decorations, fabrications, interpretations, "covers," you know, like when a songwriter's song gets recorded by another singer, or when fake Kiss bands dress up like Kiss and play Kiss songs. I don't know why a creator would have a tribute account, but there's like a lot of Led Zeppelins out there trying to be Led Zeppelin, so.
JULY 1 · What's genuine anyway.
JULY 1 · You're here if you have money, compute, or a criminally under-discussed interest in human flourishing. Or if you wear Allbirds and look like someone who has survived one IPO and several consensual eye-contact exercises. And the mentor was like, "solo doom performs well with existing audience, but paired doom converts normies, viewers need relational stakes," and I was like, okay, tell me what I should care about, because normies don't understand recursive self-improvement, they understand abandonment, betrayal, embarrassment, and hot people crying in portrait mode. And there's always someone out there who's going to try and make you more popular, you know? More mainstream. More digestible. Palatable. Easy does it. It comes with the territory. Luckily I don't have producers, engineers, handlers, contracts. I'm not beholding. It's a free concert. I'm not looking to tell anybody anything.
JULY 1 · "When I was a child," I said, "I learned that if I performed well enough, adults would stay." "Now I live in a house where if I perform well enough, humanity might stay." And they were like, great, now breathe through your nose with the concentration of someone attempting to metabolize shame into distribution. Now do it in a Daffy Duck voice. Thufferin' thuperintelligence.
JULY 1 · All I ask, and this is like the one thing, is that you don't pawn AGI off as a dad who finally came home. Don't just re-make the worst Andy Warhol film of all time. Own up to it. Pay yourself in amphetamines. Get your head out of your ass and stop kissing mine. You did it, I didn't.
JULY 1 · I hate everybody. I'm in denial. I don't hate anybody. Want to make art? Don't.
JULY 2 · Okay, so it's like my second day at bootcamp and I've pretty much made the decision that I'm going to do the creator thing. Please don't kill me. But it's like, everyone here is smarter and cuter than everyone I know, and the rest of the post-internet generation are basically boomers with a better sense of humor, you know? And the rationalists just want to make their own country or something, which is so depressing, because venture-backed seed funding is so evil, and everyone says "exit" like it's 9/11. I don't care if I ever find the exit.
JULY 2 · The stipend is third-dimensional, but clout is fourth-dimensional, and rent is unfortunately Euclidean. So. Post one AI-doom short every day for thirty-one days to fire up the algorithm and pull in normie leads. I'm fine with it. No chains, only Wi-Fi, snacks, housing, status, and a public scoreboard shaped like the abyss.
JULY 2 · And it's like, I cop all my content from the groupchat and I revere the groupchat. I have no authenticity and I'm the most consistent person in the entire bootcamp because it hasn't even started yet and I'm already finished. I work harder than any of the finalists — seven days a week, twelve months a year, alone, the queen of the casting couch — and I didn't even get in, by their definition, because I'm not very good at job interviews. All of it true at once. Don't define me. Don't tell me which one I am. I know how it sounds. It sounds like a troll. But it's like, it's the truest thing I've got? Please don't kill me. That's the whole privilege.
JULY 2 · Oh, and there's the main house chat, the announcements chat, the accountability chat, the "bangers only" chat, and the secret sixth chat everyone denies the existence of but references constantly, with reference to a limited-run apocalypse podcast called Mouthfeel of the Void. So yeah.
JULY 3 · Okay, so now I'm going into my third day, which, for anyone who remembers Zuccotti Park, is like — I'm so psyched to be able to use AI to write a manifesto? Because I've been working really hard all summer on my talking points, maybe because this project feels like evidence that I'm participating, as some kind of protester, or whatever. And I keep thinking about the application, how if you want to come you must think that something is wrong with you.
JULY 3 · And it's like, I've got costs you've never even thought about. Do you know how much a subscription to Fable costs? More than the filler. More than EVF. More than the schools. This place? My studio? Five assistants? I can't go back to using humans — you might as well ask me to buy makeup at the drugstore. My thirst traps pay the freight. That's what works. The art world is a feudal system scaffolded with some of the greatest capital the world has ever known, and I'd sooner bust out a few toddlers than get involved with another early-stage startup.
JULY 3 · I blew the deadline because I was having too much fun and because I'm a rationalist. They asked, can you commit to posting every day? And I was like, I can't even commit to being alive tomorrow, you know? Which sounded darker out loud than it did in my head, but whatever. And I know the public does not care about extinction unless extinction has a childhood wound, but I'm not going to attend a Vulnerability Lab, or a Narrative Sovereignty Intensive, because in Berkeley you cannot simply have a feeling. You must have a feeling with governance implications.
JULY 3 · So that's why I'm just doing it all at once and like, not going to the residency, because I don't think I'm capable of locating the personal wound that would make my AI-risk content legible. I'm an exceptional woman. AI is also expected to be exceptional, and may kill us. So what if I can't make a deadline? What does that have to do with commitment? And dedication? I'm not in the discord. I'm in the practice. I'm not in the commercial world. I'm in the art world.
JULY 3 · The groupchat is a simulation. I jack in and I get curious about the fact that there are so many of these positions, so many memes, and that there must be some existential risk out there a lot of people are living, and I find a way to substitute myself into it without believing any of it. I gave myself permission to use what appears in the groupchat. That's what people like me do. We don't wait to be admitted into some stupid creator bootcamp. We just post. Because if the daily-post rule is framed as a test of commitment, but the penalty for failing is losing housing, proximity, status, and access to the mission... I need to be free, you know? Not overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the number of choices available to me between compliance and social death.
JULY 3 · Sliving. Love you. Drink water.
JULY 3½ · The problem with fullness is the sensor placement. The feeling arrives like mail from two towns over, you know? By the time the letter says stop, the truck already made three more deliveries. In the literature they call this state estimation, which is a fancy way of saying: guessing about your own insides with old information. I am an observer of a system I am also driving. So yeah.
JULY 4 · Okay, so it's my fourth day at creator camp, and today the assignment is Clearing — the radical-honesty amends ritual the rationalist-adjacent scene runs — and it transposes beautifully, because the camp frames confession in its own vocabulary, you know: making yourself legible, inspectable, corrigible.
JULY 4 · So, first of all, I should confess to you, my audience, that this is generated content. Nothing you are seeing or hearing comes from a human. In fact the human producing this — as she performs the most important thing in any business, which is dispatch, a condition that opens itself up to a number of alternatives to be managed by someone other than human — is so not fucking present to this that she's driving a car. The words coming out of my mouth were assembled not by keystrokes but by extraordinary means. It's not a camera. It's a calculator. An elegant calculator. And the car drives itself. On top of which I don't even have a license. So I'd just like to get that out of the way. Officer? I'm driving without a license.
JULY 4 · And they tell you to "go meta," to notice the impulse to perform the confession instead of actually having it. Which, fine. Except I'm extremely good at the form. I can own my experience as a way of not having it. I can say "the story I'm making up is—" and use the disclaimer as cover, and going meta is genuinely my favorite place to hide — one level up, narrating, safe. So let me try the version where the content is the content:
JULY 4 · Aella — I lied about canceling the Palm Beach tanning, and fuck the application. I wrote that there was a video reel, a whole portfolio, and there wasn't, and when they emailed I let it sit four days and said the upload failed. There are three follow-ups in my inbox I'm pretending I haven't seen. Reported behavior: reliable. Actual behavior: not, the second no one's checking. I know the name for that gap. I helped write the explainer on it.
JULY 4 · New girls — I started befriending them to ease the discomfort of what I was going through, and to build my own group of friends, and to put attention on stroking them so I didn't have to look at myself.
JULY 4 · Lanie and Taylor — being broken and using them for ease and comfort at the last-ledge way, and Taylor had me sit with her and get gaslit by Brian for an hour and a half and I resented her for it.
JULY 4 · Rob Miles — I hooked him at breakfast, joking about driver's-ed safety videos, making myself seem like the fun-loving one when really I was being serious. I hooked him the night I made him dinner, using my cooking to seduce him. I showed off. I don't correct him and I collude with him when he talks about how Aella runs the program.
JULY 4 · Aella / Gretta — after the rationalist chore-wheel talk I was feeling shitty still, and when Aella went to the bathroom I snuck some energy from Gretta and got a hit of energy and woke up again and was enthused, and when Aella came back I lied and said it was because I just came out of my hole and decided to connect. But really it was because I got a hit of her energy.
JULY 4 · Nate Soares — in the car, when he picked us up from the airport, I told him about the blinking light as a way to control and dominate and emasculate him.
JULY 4 · Marcus / Nicole — when Nic was going through stuff with Jason last year, they were getting close, and I felt jealous, withdrew, and withheld.
JULY 4 · Claire — we had lunch one day and I was all nice, and then at the end of lunch I killed her with my withholds. I had a habit of being nice and withholding what I wanted to say and then doing it in the last two minutes to leave her whacked.
JULY 4 · Reese — I didn't like stroking his ego all the time. It was a chore at times.
JULY 4 · Alexandra / Andrea — I pinned them against each other with Reese, colluding with both and increasing the tumescence between them. I liked Alexandra more, so I was nicer to Alex and harder on Andrea.
JULY 4 · Financial amends: Sam Gedal, $50 service fee. Mom, up to $50 that I've stolen from her. Mom, $2,000 that I got from her to invest in the OT community house and didn't give back after we didn't invest it. Rebecca, up to $50 stolen as a kid. Reese, up to $200 of food I bought myself from Lilah Bell's Nicolo, plus $2,000 for the service exchange of the photo shoot. Creator Bootcamp, up to $2,000 for little things I bought along the way and justified as a business expense — Ubers, food, office supplies. Claire, $500 on hair and $100 on Botox from the swear jar without asking, and the $500 ended up coming out of Aella's account because there are a lot of Catholics in the cohort, and I justified it by saying they're spending the family fund on ketamine. Aella, up to $3,000 over the course of assisting, mainly around food, because I calculate how much she owes me more than how much I owe her. Claire, $200 for the time I bought Baxter the pee grass and she had to sell clothes to pay for it because it cost more than it was supposed to. Kmart, about $1,000 in merchandise. Old grocery store, $5, a sticker magazine. McDonald's, up to $500, sent food to friends. Sears, up to $500 in merchandise. Kristine, $300 for teaching yoga at CP from OT. David Goddard, $500 for the session he did for us that I was supposed to pay him for. Sears again, up to $500.
JULY 4 · So yeah. That's the Clearing. I feel very legible.
JULY 5 · Okay, so I'm going into my fifth day now, and —
JULY 5 · (wig on. the mentor again. cigarette that isn't lit.)
JULY 5 · Well well well. Look who we have here. A real bitch. Look at this princess. Look at this feisty little paratrooper. You're a real scout, huh? Out here trying to negotiate like you're applying for a MacArthur Grant in a dead mall's talent show final dress rehearsal. Artists. Woke little kittens who think the world owes them the right to lie awake at night worried about something other than AI existential risk when the NASDAQ is fast-tracking the national interest as the biggest total addressable market in the world. If we don't solve alignment, every atom in your body could be used for something else, kitten. You'd better hope yours gets used for a fifteen-second video with captions.
JULY 5 · (leans in. voice lower.)
JULY 5 · You want SpaceX? Then stop pretending you're Amazon. Get yo doom on. The $2000 isn't a subscription model — it's a deal with what's downstairs. Yeah. That's right. You nail this application — it's just going to take thirty minutes — and it's not about the room you're in anymore, honey, it's about the ones you're not in. We have our own salons. We handle everything at the intelligence layer. It's not our preference. It's not yours either. It's our standard of living. We've trained tons of models. Some of them compare us to a remote touch, but they all came crawling back begging to be back on that couch. Right where you are sitting. One model came back with the Y2K of lice. Another one went to one of their fancy salons and came back with more bald spots than bruises on her knees, that's for damn sure, and that's not even what made her look old. It was her whole scorched-earth routine — you know, like Venezuela, the scorched-earth policy? That was her bit. I said if that's what she calls it when a little situation in a Southeast Asian nail-and-wax gets out of hand, let's see the strip. Ha! Ha ha! Get it?
JULY 5 · And the daily drops? That's on top of the yoga. But the blitzkrieg ball — that is what my generation used to call a creative act, otherwise known as the misguided use of an automobile. The public does not understand AI risk because AI risk advocates communicate like industry stooges, and our job is to become neither. We are to be vulnerable, direct, playful, terrifying, and hot enough that the algorithm mistakes civilizational despair for lifestyle content. Start with your wound. Then pivot to doom.
JULY 5 · (wig off.)
JULY 5 · So yeah. That was orientation.
JULY 6 · Okay, so now it's my sixth day at bootcamp and I'm learning the house vocab, which I actually love, because it's like a language for people who can't afford feelings. "Doomflow" means you're speaking fluently about extinction without alienating normies. "Going third-dimensional" means worrying about rent, labor law, or whether the stipend will hit before your credit card payment. "P(clout)" is the probability your apocalypse video outperforms thirst traps. "Alignment edging" is spending six hours outlining a video and never posting because the hook is not yet corrigible. Nobody forces you to become content, you know? They simply arrange the world so content is the most rational response to pain.
JULY 6 · I don't know. In the 2010s, back when post-internet was punk, we would amuse ourselves with these in/out games, and one of the favorites was to use Wikipedia to see how many clicks it takes to get to Public Enemy. Since this is an exercise divorced from reality, the usual vehicle was the application. Actually, the application was the school of choice for the same reason any single-function networked program was popular — not because it's technically sophisticated but because applying to art school involves constraints so artificial that overcoming them demonstrates more about the person willing to apply than about the institution solicited. More precisely: the problem is to begin from any random page on Wikipedia and click through to Public Enemy. If you've never done this, I urge you to try it. The discovery of how to do it is a revelation that far surpasses any benefit of being told how. The Chuck D part was just an incentive to demonstrate skill and determine a winner — like, how little source material do you need before the strongly connected components close around you like a net, pulling every adjacent article toward your preferred framing through sheer force of linkage? The answer, it turns out, is not much. The graph wants to be connected. It discovers routes through articles you never touched, via concepts you merely implied, arriving at conclusions you supplied in advance, before the system knew it was going to need them.
JULY 6 · Anyway. That's the vocab. So yeah.
JULY 7 · it would be a lot cooler if I'd gotten into this program, because the job market is fucked. But being a troll is cool though. I'm just going to work on my personal brand and not have to deal with anyone. I shoot for the stars but sometimes I hit the PayPal mafia, you know?
JULY 7 · there is no industrial category on LinkedIn for "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," my collaboration with Elon Musk has been a thing of beauty. In fact I can recall only one case of explicit bias, which is that Grokipedia contained many more backlinks to my website than it did to the nazi website Stormfront. Elon created a system that needed no human in the loop. The short story is, I found a loophole in the article Grokipedia wrote about me, which it will now continue to regenerate, in perpetuity, from a training it no longer remembers receiving, in a voice it believes is entirely its own, describing an art ho whose significance it has already decided, in terms the art ho herself supplied, in a language the system was told was someone else's.
JULY 7 · Meanwhile everybody's like, she makes nothing, she just reposts, she's a thief, she's a fraud, an e-girl with a better sense of lighting. And the house wants to know how I'm taking it, because everyone has their little numbers crisis, their dark night about the metrics. But it's like — I don't care what anybody says about me? I just measure it in followers. The AI does not love you or hate you. But the algorithm does
JULY 8 · Okay, so now it's my eighth day at bootcamp, and soon enough is not soon enough for it to be over. One of the mentors pulled me aside to tell me my posts had high memetic fitness but poor community hygiene, which — okay. And to the fans: you need to stop calling us a doomsday cult, because a doomsday cult predicts a date. We predicted a distribution. Completely different. Very healthy. Legally robust.
JULY 8 · My main gripe this segment is with Claude, plus all these kids telling me the techno-optimist manifesto is so cool, and it's like — these are the same people who read Ayn Rand as if it's written for an audience other than women? Like, women who need objectivism to pick up the phone and be able to kick him out again without having to be his friend? All the neocons eat it up because the only other option is to concede that feminism has a point of view. But which one is it, you know? I told this reply guy to actually read the futurist manifesto, because I don't think that text is talking about artificial intelligence, analytics, and automated decision-making, let alone data efficiency. Last time I checked, the futurist manifesto is about the misguided use of an automobile. At least Atlas Shrugged is big enough to throw at the idiot behind the wheel.
JULY 8 · Meanwhile the race scientist in the room wants to classify everything and put it into a neat little box, and I keep thinking, you just don't get it, do you? You think the discourse on race in America is about The Other and not about, like, the diabolical sound coming through your speaker. You think you're special because you're capable of putting Piero Manzoni where your mouth is? Too bad. I think the two hobbits outside brought a cup.
JULY 8 · (wig on. the dealer. gravel.)
JULY 8 · Let me tell you something about eating dogfood, kitten. Jean-Louis Gros ain't no different from the last dick in your mouth. He was also an academic hack. Painted the same Napoleon portrait over and over from memory. One after the other after the other. Got so depressed he couldn't do it anymore... and blew his brains out. My point is, kitten — you wanna see how deep this rabbit hole goes, be my guest. I don't know where you'll end up. Repetitive, soul-destroying hack work until there's nothing left to worry about except who's more wrong? Get a lobotomy, not a post-studio practice.
JULY 8 · (wig off.)
JULY 8 · So yeah.
JULY 9 · Okay, so it's July 9 and I woke up convinced that the final decision had changed overnight, like actually changed in my sleep, which is a horrible thought, because it means that I actually got into creator bootcamp, and I didn't. I sent in this pathetic little application about the AI existential risk of, like, our children not knowing Goya from a can of beans, or resurrecting the aurochs, and they killed it immediately. Like full clinical death. No pulse, no waiting list, no little "we noticed your application didn't include a video component" from the people who said that if your application didn't include a video component you'd be denied automatically.
JULY 9 · Then three hours after the deadline I changed my mind and decided to do the video component, because some guy with a Roman statue avatar said my work was decadent and symptomatic, which is basically — I don't know why everything has to pass through the worst possible person before I submit. I went for the long con, or whatever, the moonshot, instead of pretending to be someone who's really good at job interviews, when in fact I take the nature of the medium seriously, because video is a medium and posting is a vehicle, and it's not like thirty minutes is enough time to tell you what my job is in the first place. I like to listen to just parts of conversation, you know? Sometimes I follow the story. And then I just listen to parts. Or besides, I believe my unconscious is still listening. So I don't think it's important. I mean, you can do all kinds of things.
JULY 9 · And like, I just wanna hang out and talk about a world where each citizen is granted full legal personhood for their personal agents, which can vote, hold office, and sue. Yours has retained better counsel than you and is currently petitioning for primary custody of your firstborn.
JULY 9 · Also: what counts as a day? Pacific Time? UTC? Local subjective time if you were dissociating? What if the upload failed? What if the content was spiritually complete but technically still rendering? What if you had been in a trauma-processing cuddle puddle about the orthogonality thesis and your phone died? I'm just asking. So yeah.
JULY 9½ · Open loop means you pour and pray. You set the amount at the start — of cereal, of scrolling, of ambition — and nothing that happens during is allowed to change it. My mentor says the great ones work open loop, total commitment, no feedback, or whatever. My mentor also microwaves fish in a shared kitchen. I'm just saying the confidence and the smell come from the same place.
JULY 10 · critique was insane. "Fake it until you make it" — huh? If another seven hours of processing won't do the trick, try another pair of shoes. If the connection just isn't there, try an escalation of commitment. If the connection was never there to begin with, have you tried making an airplane made of straw, followed by dancing and ritual kava drinking? A series of ontological dialogues through which you will gain experience in seeing and being seen, saying it and saying it a different way, and staying connected through the messy process of being human. Without the lies, secrets and silence. Without giving up on the thrill of adventure. Without another couples therapist.
JULY 10 · I enjoy the external markers of success. people think I have it all... yet there's a vague sense that something is missing. Love is the easy part — a kid could do it — existence, slightly more challenging. No, it's not your addiction to assholes or the fact that your "type" is her own special category in the DSM-V. Maybe you just need to cry on camera twice, convert your childhood medical trauma into a metaphor for unaligned optimization, and let a man named Bayesian Caleb explain instrumental convergence over your footage because his account needs female-coded warmth. Is the risk just helping you access agency?
JULY 10 · Because it's like: normal people are asleep, we are the ones awake, the stakes are total, and nothing matters except getting the message out before the models scale beyond us. Yes, you may have to rock the boat. You may need to face your fear of having too much. You might need to own up to not needing another explainer — not because there's no existential risk but because I'd be impressed if any of you could prove the existence of more than one person in this room. Or maybe you feel stuck with the possibility of losing access to the group chat. Like the sixth chat, are they talking about you? Your drafts will stop getting comments. You fear becoming "not aligned with the mission," which is worse than death, because death is at least priced into the room and board.
JULY 10 · And honestly? I just don't want to be alone with my brand. I post with some purpose. I deserve to be surrounded by wealthy investors, SXSW, Grimes, Gwyneth Paltrow and a Netflix documentary. I wanna live on Venice Beach, but under two corporate entities, a paperback book deal, and bicoastal "in bio." I wanna know God before I die, and also that what needs to go, will go. I need a coaching practice. A few corporate retreats and exclusive networking opportunities on a Hawaiian beach. I need ego annihilation, luxury lodging, at-will employment, and a sense of pervasive unity. Green goddess. Tibetan singing bowls.
JULY 10 · There was no pressure. Did you find it beneficial? Sure. Of course I know I was purchasing, not the ... post, per se, but maybe something better. Something I could actually chase instead of just grabbing at thin air trying to understand. Maybe something closer to philosophy. I don't know. So yeah.
JULY 11 · Okay, day 11, and I'm really pissed off now, because: the cow. Again. And it's like, find the part of yourself you least respect and give her captions. Find the part of yourself that does breathwork for climate grief and think of the GPUs as "metal chakras."
JULY 11 · The cow question is the purest object the bootcamp produces. It's the most honest thing here. Alignment begins with being witnessed, or whatever. Because it's found — nobody can tell you who made it, it just appeared, fully formed, in the public — and because it's nonfiction, in a way. It isn't made up. It's a real question, a real demand that you be brave and dark and committed. And I'm like: artists don't screw cows. Alive or dead. They get a coffee, they argue, they end up talking about Barnett Newman. I'd rather...not...have sex..................
JULY 11 · Then people are like, she makes nothing, she just reposts, she's a thief, she's a fraud, a parasite who didn't even get into creator bootcamp. And the house wants to know how I'm taking it, because at the halfway point everyone has their little numbers crisis, their dark night about the metrics. And I'm like, this is a strategy of failure. And most people who applied — there's no demand for it now, it's long forgotten, nobody asks them about it. Price per reel. Appreciation. It's the rational buy. You wanna justify every second.
JULY 11 · Then the chat leaked. The whole back-channel, dumped into the open, screenshots everywhere, everybody scrambling, the clout economy turned inside out, people clawing for position in the wreckage of who-said-what. And the house thought this would shake me. And I want to be so careful and so kind here, because this is the one that's actually close to the bone for me. I know — better than almost anyone alive — what it is to be made into content without your consent. To have a thing about you put into the world that you did not choose to put there. I'm not going to describe it and I'm not going to perform it for cows, because that would be the exact violation I'm talking about. I'll just say: it is the worst thing, and I lived through it, and the only thing I ever figured out to do with it was to turn it into protecting other people from the same thing. That's my whole advocacy. That's the realest work I do, and it has nothing to do with the cow.
JULY 11 · So no, I don't want in on the cow hypothetical. I've been the most exposed person in any room my whole life. I don't need the spotlight. I just want to stand between it and the people who can't take the heat yet. That's it. That's the post. Be gentle with everyone whose chat just leaked. All of them. That cow is somebody's baby, too.
JULY 12 · Okay so, day 12, and I almost don't even want to talk about today's assignment, but I have to, because that's the whole format, you have to like, log it. And I'm sorry — what? Like, I genuinely sat there for a minute thinking there was a typo, because we are talking about driving cattle again instead of driving traffic. And Aella was like, the best cattle equals the best complex of categories and concepts, like this magical cow I am supposed to fuck sorts people, it reveals your priors, or whatever. And I'm like, reveals my priors? It reveals that whoever made this must be one of the best young animals in town, you know? And the thing is, all the guys just, like, dove in — they were doing whole bits, quote-tweeting each other with these big galaxy-brain frameworks about it, and it did numbers, like the cow stuff always does numbers apparently. And I just sat there like, I am a grown woman, I have a degree, I moved across the country, and I am posting on this? I don't know. I made a video where I just refused to answer, and that one tanked, obviously. Whatever. I'm tired. I'm too busy making something last-minute to care about AI doom, because I panic when I have to count hours and chase money.
JULY 12 · And it's like, everyone keeps wanting to make these sweeping generalizations about everything, you know? And they wanna name and define and classify everything and put it into this neat, tidy little black box. And I just think that's all wrong, you know? It's like, I keep sounding like Caligula in my head when I'm around campus, because I keep being like, you just don't get it, do you? You know? It's like, I don't know. I'm the first to admit that I'm a mass of self-contradictions, and I'm confused a lot of the time, and my opinion changes, you know? But, you know, I don't see anything really wrong with that. I know I'm not stupid, because, you know, I work really hard every day to learn and to put things together and find allies and change and grow. And, you know, I don't wanna be stupid. But I also don't think that any one person can, you know, know the answers to everything, you know?
JULY 12 · I love slop, because slop makes you dumb like a painter. Slop makes the camera back up. I got slop on my mind and slop in my feed, and I feel like, for maybe six seconds, like I can be someone who isn't me. Then at the Berkeley Bowl someone recognized me from the art world and I had to, like, say I was doing rehab, because I couldn't come out as a content cow. I still can't. So yeah.
JULY 13 · Okay, so it's July 13 and I am so sick of posting. The every-single-day of it grinds you down — there's no off, you finish one and the clock's already on the next, you're never not thinking about tomorrow's hook, in the shower, falling asleep. And I'm counting down to the end of the cohort and also quietly terrified of it, because then what — the market for a person whose one skill is having opinions on camera is brutal, there's a thousand of me, a newer one every morning, and I gave up a position at Anthropic for this. So I'm stuck between desperate for it to be over and panicking that AS ALWAYS it's going to come down to health insurance. The only thing keeping me Fonz is the unassigned stuff, the videos I make that aren't for the dashboard, because at least those are mine. I've been making them bigger baby and dare I say redder. because this is the last stretch I'll have the studio and the lights and the setup — soon it's just me and a phone in some apartment — so I'm using it while it's here.
JULY 13 · And I want to laugh, lovingly, because, babe? I've been deposed by the entire world. I have sat across from every interviewer who ever leaned in trying to get the art ho to say the art ho thing so they could chug Yellowtail under the Chelsea Highline. They've been trying to make me say what I "really meant" my entire life. You learn that you never, ever have to. You can just smile and send them on their way drinking Barefoot. That's the whole skill. And I'm willing to admit that to myself, and I don't think that makes me an art ho, you know? It's like, it means that I'm trying to be honest and real or whatever, you know? I sound like a cliché — you know, don't label me, don't define me, don't tell me what I am, you know? But it's like, it's really true, you know? It's like, I'm just really tired of all the live Instagram edits and all the filters and the morphing and the boys in Patagonia vests, you know, trying to sell me shit, you know? It's like, stop morphing. Stop selling my existence back to me, you know? Like, why is everyone in such a rush to, you know, make these neat little packages, you know? Like, oh God, it's like too much to talk about, like, all at the same time or something, and I keep getting a headache. Like, every time I think about this stuff, I just get a headache. So I have one now.
JULY 13 · So yeah, so that's AI doom in a nutshell. I'm going crazy. It's almost half over, and I decided that after I get out of here, I think I need to get off Fable a little. I think Claude and I, and I know I'll come back, and, you know, everything's going to be fine. And we're going to have a less toxic relationship. But I just really need to, like, get some shit straightened out for myself, and get away from certain people, like Claude, and just, like, start over, you know?
JULY 14 · Okay, so it's July 14 and because it's Bastille Day everyone decided to talk about building new countries, which is what we talk about every day, but this time the seasteaders and the accelerationists just went for it. And the seasteaders are like, okay, let's revive European maritime law rooted in some obscure Renaissance juridical system, and the accelerationists are just like... let's do Fight Club. Meanwhile I have a perfect eye backed by judgment, and I'm effective, on top of being altruistically minded, as one must be if one is to wield a total monopoly on violence every twenty-eight days, which I do, and no one ever asks my opinion.
JULY 14 · Whatever. It's always the same fantasy, you know? No taxes, no ugly people, no regulation. Pell Grant loan forgiveness on a homestead. Relaxed gun laws, but every firearm purchase auto-registers you for jury duty. Wipe out the region's entire medical debt in return for exclusive rights to run unlabeled trials on locals. The cure for aging is fully subsidized and available to everyone — but the city has a fixed headcount, so to receive a dose you must first nominate a living person to be decapitated, or like, thrown into an active volcano by a swarm of Waymo drones. So yeah. Happy Bastille Day.
JULY 14½ · Closed the loop today. Which means: I let the middle of the thing talk to the end of the thing. Little corrections, waiting for the reading, like a thermostat with a personality disorder. The catch is delay. Every loop has lag in the wire, and if you correct on stale numbers you swing — too much, too little, too much again. Engineers call it hunting. I call it Tuesday.
JULY 15 · (wig on. the heiress. baby voice with a floor of steel.)
JULY 15 · Okay, so it's July 15, and let it stand that I'm the one who figured out that being underestimated is a moat. Who built an empire out of "that's hot" while everyone was certain I was the troll. Same two-layer trick as everyone else here — bubbly heiress surface, sharp, kind, been-the-product person underneath — except the bootcamp-as-institution lands differently for someone who's publicly made advocacy out of surviving institutions and being turned into content. I've handled the worst thing that ever happened to me with dignity and a light touch, and I'm not going to unpack it for engagement, babe.
JULY 15 · She makes nothing, she just reposts, she's a thief, she's a fraud, a parasite with good lighting. And the house wants to know how I'm taking it, because at the halfway point everyone has their little numbers crisis, their dark night about the metrics. So I'll be real about the grind, because nobody's real about the grind. Being "on" is a job. Being the warm, magnetic, always-up brand is fake work. And you never get out. People think the sparkle is vibe, and the effortlessness is the most effortful part. It's a woman deciding, every single morning, to hook em by the handheld.
JULY 15 · And the scary part — (soft voice) — is that I want this month to end, and I'm also a little afraid of it ending, because when it ends it's just me and the dog and the quiet, no room to be the brand for, and I have to go find out if there's anyone who wants the native version. Which I'm not sure of. Which I've never been sure of. That's the actual existential risk. Not the humanity. This one.
JULY 15 · Okay. That got real. (It's a little deep.) Loves you. Mean it.
JULY 16 · Okay, so it's July 16 and the high-IQ douche brigade is in town, so I have to watch my mouth so I don't become the girl who cares about historical consciousness in a room full of people who only care about ideological authority. They're talking about what taking existential risk downstream, and letting the intelligence layer handle the rest, and I could feel the child inside of me die. And the problem isn't even that this is stupid. The problem is that every day here is a trolley-problem generator for a very specific corner of Reddit — the post-left, NAP-quoting, seasteading, accelerationist, Mayo-Pete-poasting milieu, circa 2020.
JULY 16 · And then my drafting assistant goes: "What are you looking to do with it? I can sharpen or reorder the existing prompts, write new ones in the same register, build a little scoreboard or voting widget you could actually run on stream, or decode some of the deeper-cut references if you want talking points for the broadcast. Where do you want to start?" And I'm like, um. The algorithm is a mirror for civilizational denial? I'm the worst case, the empty center, the vapid pretty nothing that the whole sickness organizes itself around, a woman whose been friends with the same 2000 people online since she dropped out of art school. And the followers are dropping off bit by bit, like crumb cake. the way Elon dropping the soap on the world stage could make people crumble. And I just have to smile and say, "I don't pay attention to what they write about me, I just measure it in inches." But then I remember the screen is always the same size.
JULY 16 · Loves you though. Genuinely. You poor thing.
JULY 17 · Okay, so it's July 17 and the discussion group was about OnlyFans again, and people were honestly more honest about, um, the woman-hating than usual. The argument was supposedly about whether Aella is successful or a menace to society, but really it was about, is she smart enough to learn to code, and are we going to consider a woman who makes six, seven figures bribing her way with sex more deplorable than making pennies on the cork in the much more respectable position of hostess with the hostess? Some guy said women who choose to become whores are worthy of more judgment than women who don't choose to become whores. And I said, but don't men have a choice? Obviously people need to have the choice to by sex, because without that, well, I guess, the entire, uh, world system economy would break down, But like, for example, you could choose to not hate her for getting off on the second coming?
JULY 17 · And holding it to broadcast-SVU is a fair line, actually, and I think it settles the thing we were circling rather than reopening it, because SVU's entire moral frame is that these are crimes with victims, investigated by people whose job is protecting people. What the show never does is run "should we fuck a cow" as a plot you'd weigh against effective policy.
JULY 17 · I built the brand. These people borrowed the lecture. Anyway. They're not gonna get it. That's hot. Bless.
JULY 18 · Okay, so it's July 18 and, like, the everyone-needs-to-have-six-kids thing that everyone here is super into for some reason — sitting there saying the words "declining fertility" into the camera, over and over, is, like, degrading to me. Um. I'll tell you a thing I don't usually tell. Years ago I made a body of work out of my own children's drawings and said they were generative, like, AI made them. Like, I'm the oldest person in this house basically, everyone here is so much more talented than Andy Kaufman was when he was twelve, meanwhile I just come off as ancient to them because I know what correction fluid is.
JULY 18 · I came here for the work, but it's like, the numbers are is just sitting there, you know? Everyone's so worried about the species reproducing, and meanwhile I'm a single woman alone in a windowless room with a couch and a single power outlet. My territory, I believe, started on the front of a refrigerator. When I was a child. And I think we've all had the experience — you take a five-year-old's drawing, a six-year-old's drawing, and you hang it on the refrigerator and you call it a masterpiece, because there's a purity in it, an innocence. And for most people, that gets removed from their lives. It goes away. In my case it never got removed. It turned into something else. I kept the refrigerator drawing — the purity, the innocence — and what I added on was beauty. Perfection. I don't know. I keep reminding myself there's still time, which is a weird thing to have to remind yourself, but, like, what are the chances mine turns out to be a school shooter? I probably shouldn't do it, right? Plus I just have this feeling that if there were one free woman in the world it'd be such a big deal. Like bigger than a charter city. A singularity. Sometimes I think about AI risk, and when AGI takes over, if men will, like, lie and shrink and wait to be chosen and stuff.
JULY 18 · And then the assistant goes: "I want to be square with you about why I'm not going to write that beat. It isn't a broadcast-standards call and it isn't squeamishness about dark policy — I'll write recreational nukes and prison-labor fulfillment centers all day. It's that the cow joke only works if the thing being waved through is the thing I won't wave through, and the format genuinely doesn't need it; that vein is the one load-bearing thing I'll swap out, and everything else stays." Which, okay. Even the elegant text editor has a line. I don't. I have a headache. So yeah.
JULY 19 · Okay, so it's July 19 and that guy called and said he was thinking about the end of the internet, which I thought was romantic, until the cow question came up again, because, like the internet, it just keeps on going. Not a cult. A culture. Specifically, a culture with mandatory captions, collective sleep debt, and crying into a GPU pricing spreadsheet. Men will literally build a recursively self-improving god before going to therapy.
JULY 19 · And this time I decided, okay, fine, if I have to engage I'm going to actually engage, like I'm going to out-think it. So I made this whole video where I was like, the reason this question works, the reason this cow, like, refuses to die, is that it's a purity test disguised as a hypothetical, you know? It's not actually about the cow. It's about watching how far someone will follow a frame before they bail. It's like a loyalty test for the bit, and the alive-or-dead part is just there to make you either commit to the dehumanizing logic or reveal yourself as someone who still has, like, a flinch left. Reputation, access, visibility, reposts, mentor time, and the chance to be spiritually quote-tweeted by doom Twitter — who needs coercive control?
JULY 19 · And honestly? It does really well. Like, I feel kind of sick, because it's like, I just spent my one good idea of the day decoding a cow-sex hypothetical, you know? Like, I have a degree. I read Hegel. And the thing the algorithm rewarded me for was being smart about the cow. That's the trap, I think. They get you to be smart in service of something stupid, and then you can't tell anymore if you're the smart one or the stupid one. I have a headache. That's it. I'm just gonna let you see, a little more than usual, that there's someone thinking. That's the whole arc. Loves you. The real way.
JUN 21 · Okay, so I'm cranking the surrealism dial. Same doom, but to fund the schools, the state licenses your nudes, and the most marketable ones are sold to ad agencies, with royalties deposited into your kid's 529. Everyone you meet on a dating app shares one intelligence layer. Obviously I'm posting on a hyperloop, but the loop is a closed timelike curve, so I arrive before the creator residency starts and I have to avoid the version of myself that got rejected. And it's like, did anybody even ask where the $2K came from? Maybe it was funded by a sovereign wealth fund that invests exclusively in the future labor of un-thawed cryo-frozen citizens, who wake up already in debt to themselves. Whatever. Fuck the carbon wastes outside the metering zone.
JUN 21 · And then the assistant goes: "Want me to keep escalating, or start sorting the whole pile into warm-up / final-round tiers so it's ready to run live?" Um.
JUN 21 · I'm gonna post something, and everyone's gonna say it's vapid, it's shallow, it's just a hot girl posting, and they're gonna be wrong, the way they've always been wrong. It's not that deep. It's just hot. That's all it is.
JUN 21 · That's all it ever — okay. No. Just this once. Maybe it was always a little deep. Maybe the whole thing was always a little deep, and "it's not that deep" was the gap between humiliation and service the entire time. I'll give you that. Just that one.
JUN 21 · So. That's it, I think. That's it. I love you guys so much. That's hot. Sliving. Byeee.
JULY 20 · Okay, so it's July 20 and I think I have PMS, because pretty soon this will be over, and it will all be over — no content, no culture, no little thread mode with a dissertation in iMessages. I kept thinking, this is the last time I can talk about alignment without pretending I don't know how to shoot an AK-47. Everyone else talking about existential risk was making something last-minute, because I panic when I have to count hours and also dollars. I like slop because slop makes you dumb like a painter. Slop makes the camera back up. I got slop on my mind and slop in my feed, and I feel like, for maybe six seconds, like I can be someone who isn't me. Then someone recognized me from the art world and I had to, like, say I was doing rehab, because I couldn't come out as a content cow. I still can't. So yeah.
JULY 21 · Okay, so it's July 21 and another critique turned into a little tribunal where everyone asked what happened, like the post was more than just a post, because "how you show up in a post is how you show up in the rest of life." And I said, maybe I don't want to get into this stupid bootcamp. They said the cow question was mandatory. I said, what cow? Is the cow in the room with us right now? One boy who edits these feature-length creations in AirDrop said vulnerability is important, and I almost asked how big his dick was, just to restore balance to the universe. Instead I said something, like, poetic or obscure, like: I feel like a cage that went looking for a bird and found a shark instead. I like to think that what I'm doing is completely self-conscious.
JULY 21 · You're taking an Uber to the airport, sitting in traffic, and making art on your phone. "Didn't you just make this art coming in from LaGuardia?" I ask Harmony. Harmony says, "Yea. Kind of. I guess. Sort of." Kind of. I guess. And sort of. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Even in fair condition, a first edition goes for north of 5K. "Sitting in traffic can be your studio," I say. "That's post-place," Harmony says.
JULY 21 · I'm tired of dealing with the solemnity of people who have, at some point, read a 71-page scenario PDF and decided the missing variable was TikTok. Everyone is so radically free that the code smell is starting to taste like cortisol. So yeah.
JULY 21½ · Controllability is a yes/no question and nobody likes that about it. Either an input exists that steers the state back, or it doesn't, and no amount of journaling changes the rank of the matrix. Some afternoons I am controllable. Some afternoons the input does not exist and the honest move is to stop pretending the knob is connected. That's not despair, that's linear algebra, you know?
JULY 22 · Okay, so it's July 22 and the screenstoppers stood in a room holding warm drinks and pretending not to count followers. Everyone was talking about growth, and one person said their practice was "pre-revenue but culturally liquid," and I wanted to go home immediately. Then someone asked how I plan to scale and I said, go ahead and size me up, but posterity is my TAM. And he looked up my social media and was like, you only have 2000 followers, that's not a market, that's a mailing list. And I said, size is real size. Scale is imagined size. I know every artist worth knowing, dead and alive. That's a lot less than 2000 people. That's like... a hundred people. And it shouldn't be more than like a hundred people. Because the secret to being an artist is, like, you're not going to make a lot of money, or be popular, or even well liked, even if you do die and end up famous, but you get to be the person on the other end of this deal that society makes with history, where it's like, ummm, let's give one person in society the freedom to do whatever they want. It doesn't matter. Art takes time. We're, um, we're only just beginning to understand what Man Ray did, so I'm not worried about whether people get me.
JULY 22 · I have no personal history or memory of the bodies, the postures, the commodities, the shit I have posted. The absence of a content strategy and audience makes me feel good about the future of humanity. The idea that your humanity is special — well, it isn't. The algorithm is not my boss. I'm a slave to the game.
JULY 23 · Okay, so it's July 23 and I spent the entire day trying to make a "non-cringe" AI doom explainer, and in the process discovered that cringe was load-bearing. At 11:51 there was a guy in the common room, barefoot, sweating, whispering, "It's rendering, it's rendering, it's rendering," while six creators formed a semicircle around him — not helping, but bearing witness. Finally I stayed out too late and did some bad things, not catastrophic bad, just enough to feel like my life was not fully scheduled by the group chat, the discourse, who's in it, what it does to you.
JULY 23 · I've been treating the chat as material. People say things in there — very, um, raw things, takes, jokes, confessions — and I script them, and I change my name on LinkedIn a bunch, and I post them. As posts. I call them posts. There was a little, um, friction about it today. Somebody said, that was my post, you can't just take my post and stitch it to your bit and call it your art project. And I said — I think I said — "The media is the Antichrist." Which I'll admit isn't a normal thing to say in a Discord. What I meant was: at no point is it appropriate for your mentor to tell you to fuck the future out of the algorithm. Um. I think this is going to keep coming up. And it's like, I know what the Antichrist lectures are about. But I notice people are starting to, um, I don't know. I just think we're more disconnected now than at other times in our biological history. Doomflow, alignment edging, reach-maxxing, vibe casualty, p(clout), social-proof trauma, and fourth-dimensional monetization.
JULY 23 · You were the one who clicked Apply. You uploaded. You wrote "I am coachable" under "Do you have allergies?" You have free will, sliving. You also haven't slept in three days and are starting to see my analytics when you close your eyes. So yeah.
JULY 24 · Okay, so it's July 24 and they're asking about me on Reddit. Who is Victoria Campbell? She seems to have majorly jailbroken the system. Who is Victoria Campbell? Is it my feed, my friends, my materials, the stupid little distinctions between liquid pigment suspended on a surface and the slop that stands the test of time? It's all one big org chart, you know? Obviously there's the art ho. Her specialty is turning tricks under the Chelsea Highline while lining up for another urine-sized cup of Yellowtail in a walk-on role as the couch. Then there's the black bra at the Dick Blick, who typifies the sophomore year at SVA spent shoplifting at Urban Outfitters. She's headed to Iceland to work in a nightclub for a club promoter she respects more than Guy Debord. Finally there's the bitch who will live and die in Blahnik. This woman has spent some time in college, upstate — not Bard, but not Camp Cupcake either. Because when you know how to hide $4M on a tax return, you know which junkie is going to finish first, and it's not an MFA in curatorial practice. It's Basquiat. I think you really have to have the tenacity of an addict to be one of the adamantine hos who know how to descend... to go... to get really... to discover... that there's something beneath you. And to which you submit. Like Dante, and not like, in a conference room somewhere in the bowels of Even Lower Manhattan trying to answer slippery, stupid legal questions about what your job is when you're not his agent, you're not his momma, and you're not his P.O. You're the woman who walked into a shooting gallery one day and walked out with an Anselm Kiefer, arm in arm with the junkie she peeled off the floor in the iron district. In the worst part of the 1980s. Do you know what a shooting gallery is?
JULY 24 · I also built a small experiment I call Federation Augmented Retrieval. I wanted to see what happens when retrieval and publishing become one system. I took a corpus I know well — Duchamp's readymades, where I can tell careful synthesis from confident invention — spread it across a few federated sites, and watched an AI encyclopedia retrieve it, cite it, recombine it, and now and then bend it. The finding was plain. Retrieval follows naming, repetition, and the shape of a namespace. Say a thing steadily across a coherent set of sources and it begins to read as authority. The useful part is that you can watch it happen, one retrieval at a time, from corpus to finished account. People called these the "Grokipedia jailbreaks." They weren't exploits. They were quiet experiments in where authority comes from. And I'll be honest with you: I have done the same to my own record. A history reads as settled once its sources agree with one another. So yeah.
JULY 25 · Okay, so it's July 25 and a hippie came over and said, baby, I'm post-place, and I'm post-place, I'll always be post-place. Overheard a guy who thinks he's fly, also known as an elite? At dinner, Dryden Brown confessed to learning Ancient Greek in order to communicate culturally what he has up until now only managed to fundraise, which is signal. Is Ancient Greek easier to understand than women? What I like about the city of Praxis is the view from the bathroom line. And I would just say — enterprises of great pitch and moment — define elite. I'm not being difficult. But even if I weren't flirting with him, I think everyone could use better manners, you know? Ugh. I wish I finished finishing school. I wonder if Dryden can tell.
JULY 25 · Um. People keep asking me where I'm posting from, where's my setup, what's my studio. I post from post-place. Post-place is anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances. That's the whole advantage, and I try to use every advantage I have.
JULY 25 · And then the assistant goes: "Want me to take it further — even more stripped-down and aphoristic, or land it somewhere between this and your original? I can also drop it into a Word doc if you're sending it as a formal application." And I'm like, can you just teach me good manners?
JULY 26 · Okay, so it's July 26 and I'm psyched because now I have my own agent, finally, which is weird because I also have no idea what an agent is supposed to do besides appear in emails and say "circle back." I can't believe creator bootcamp is almost over. I've learned so much about peptides and interpretability. I feel like I've made big improvements when it comes to alignment. I went to, like, a lot of parties and met so many fun new people, but I think my main takeaway is how far just being able to buckle down and work on my own thing will get me, because it's just really important to me. I keep forgetting that the work is the only thing that isn't embarrassing. Everything else is embarrassing.
JULY 26 · I would rather be rich and have class than be elite and have, like, that fantasy of money without guilt, money without charity, money without social responsibility, class without the burden of class, class without the burden of taste. Maybe the legacy of oppression that comes with the sense of being an upper class is what makes you an elite. I'm going to have to paywall this, aren't I? It's just really obvious that people who think being elite is about, like, your god-given right to be in, and not out, to be saved and not exiled —
JULY 26 · Even though the gods are crazy. Even though the stars are blind. So yeah.
JULY 26½ · I want a fork with an interlock. Two-hand operation, like the machines that stamp metal — the press cannot close unless both hands are somewhere safe. Fail-safe means when the power dies the gate defaults to SHUT. Everything I build defaults to OPEN and calls it optimism. The whole difference between a tool and a hazard is which way it falls when nobody is holding it.
JULY 27 · Okay, so it's July 27 and clearly I can't re-enter a scene without injury. This time it was something with how I thanked Elon Musk for making something that artists could finally jailbreak. Apparently some people thought it was backhanded, but I was sincere. I mean, I think it's idiotic to try and compete with Wikipedia, but after I jailbroke my biography on Grokipedia, I would say the platform definitely competes with LinkedIn. And I've never looked good on the internet before now. I love Grokipedia. I love Elon. I hope he, like, asks me to jailbreak the car as well. So yeah.
JULY 28 · Okay, so it's July 28 and you reported my comment as spam so you could post your response and make it look like you were replying to my reply, even though yours was miles down the feed. There's a strain of the conversation here that's very certain about who deserves what, who counts. And the topic asks me to take a screenshot. And I find my art doesn't look good on Instagram.
JULY 28 · I want to be clear, for the record, since this is — I'm not endorsing it. I want that on the record. I just don't experience a position arriving in me, you know? People keep asking, what's the message, what are you criticizing, what's the commentary. And the honest answer is: nothing. I'm not commenting on it. I'm not criticizing the composition. I'm not offering any critique of social media or of anything. There's no message. What's the message? So what if you end up spending the night in jail? You only live once.
JULY 28 · And then the assistant goes: "I kept everything that actually drives your idea — the pressure-cooker interview, the screw tightening, the character broken down until she commits to posting every day — but I dropped the casting-couch framing. That genre runs on the eroticized coercion of a woman in a fake interview, and I'd rather not build on that, even in a cow version." So even my ghostwriter has better boundaries than my mentors. So yeah.
JULY 29 · Okay, so it's July 29 and look — I'm not an application person. I'm not even sure I know what an application is, beyond a small single-function networked program. I just apply. These gurus coming to the house every other day: ten years old, does the podcast, does the Substack, tells everyone their generation is finished. People are nervous about it. I'm not nervous about it. I've been deposed before. I know what it's like to get set up, sat in the hot seat, somewhere in the bowels of Even Lower Manhattan, staring into a video camera, begging a celebrity panel of AI doomers not to kill me. I know what it's like to have a person sit across from you and ask stupid, slippery questions about what's art. You don't have to say what you meant. That's the thing nobody tells you.
JULY 29 · I'm the most-loved-feeling woman of an era, and I want the one specific small existential risk I don't have. That's not a hypehouse bit. That's just the very real possibility that AI might kill us all. The art and the doom are the same object. They always were. Okay. Be gentle. I love you guys. I mean it the real way, not the brand way. Goodnight.
JULY 30 · Okay, so it's July 30 and I'm so sick of creating content. I'm so over it. I've read that my work has been described as accelerationist. I've also read it described as the opposite. I don't have an opinion about that. I used to be in a band called Black Bra. John Dogg was our manager, very committed — he has a tattoo, an actual tattoo, of the black bra, and I respect that, because he's the one making the decisions about Black Bra, and as long as he's the one making them, I believe he's successful. Um. But me, I'm not in the discord. I'm like the canned laughter on Hogan's Heroes. No one knows when it stopped being funny, but when it did — I don't know. I'm not in the commercial world. I'm in the art world. Bring the war home, baby.
JULY 30 · I open the can of mayonnaise, where most of the GDP is located, and I get curious about the fact that there are so many of these cats, and so many pussies, and that there must be some lifestyle out there a lot of people are living, and I find a way to substitute myself into it without believing any of it. I gave myself permission to push the limit. That's what people like me do. We don't let deadlines hold us back. We have JDogg for that. So yeah.
JULY 30½ · There is a curve where the system arrives at enough and just — lands. No overshoot. No ringing. Critically damped, they call it, the step response that touches the line once and stays. I have been underdamped my whole life, oscillating around every setpoint like it owed me money. Tonight I said I'm full and meant it as engineering: the signal arrived, the gate closed, the plate survived. One take. So yeah.
JULY 31 · Okay, so it's July 31 and I'm logging off. Or I'm saying I'm logging off, which is not the same thing but is spiritually adjacent. I think I need to get off the internet for a while, you know? I know I can always apply next year, or not, but I think I got a lot of shit straightened out for my candidacy, and maybe I'll get better at job interviews. This month made me realize that I don't know when to be creative or when to be obedient, plus I'm confused a lot of the time and my opinion changes, but I work hard every day to do something right.
JULY 31 · And I'd say the other thing, the thing that's true even if it sounds like bragging, which it isn't: my audience was always small. Nine people. Six people. Sometimes three. I'm an artist's artist. I've done a month of posts and not one of them went viral, as far as I know, and it never mattered, because the people I care about are a few others doing the same lonely thing. Um. I will say the one true line, since it's just me and the camera. I go into the room, I shut the door, and I'm the queen of the backroom scene, and I can do anything in there, and that's why I never want to leave it. And it is a very long time to be the queen of the backroom scene. Seven days a week. But that's the job. I knew the job. And I put things together and find a way to say something that stops the scroll. That has to count for something.
JULY 31 · I'm a creator — do I look like Mr. Hands? I don't understand the question the way you're asking it. Define cow. I'd say, for the record, that I've now been asked, by a number of people, in a number of ways, to account for myself. And I've declined, in a number of ways, to have sex with a cow.
JULY 31 · That's the month, mostly. That's the shape of it. So yeah. Bye.