Mad Meg : Fury Road

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In February, I wrote about discovering I lived in a mixed reality. My virtual world was formed by my religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It mapped neatly onto my other world, a reality shaped by the 1990s economic boom and suburban cul-de-sacs. Both realities promised that authority could bind me to heaven.

As I picked them apart, I discovered how the network effect can be used as a control mechanism, creating artificial scarcity. This piece exists in conversation with that piece. If you like to read the first piece, it’s right here. But that’s not completely necessary. I've made the end of the piece our starting point. And as this series continues, we'll revisit it through excerpts.

I’ve accepted I will always live in a mixed reality of some sort or other. I know I will not always recognize the constructions framing my reality. But I did think my experience with Mormonism made me less vulnerable to worldbuilding schemes that promisd networked salvation. I even wrote about it!

So imagine my incredible dismay when I began to suspect I’d become an active member of another network of salvation, dreamed up by Silicon Valley’s men who would be god. I feel so ashamed. How did I miss it? How I did I let myself involve other people in it?

The answer to both questions include Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, The Creator Economy, Cryptocurrency, JD Forking Vance, and an apocalyptic cult. (Not the one you think!)

I arrived at that answer after years of work. And I wanted to show you what I found! But the expanse of my research - hundreds of pages of notes! - left me feeling disoriented. I recognized the destination, but couldn’t find the route that would get us there. 

Then Ballerina Farm helped me get my bearings.

On July 20, The Times published a profile about Mormon social media star Hannah Neeleman and her family.

Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)

Hannah Neeleman, known to her nine million followers as Ballerina Farm, milks cows, gives birth without pain relief and breastfeeds at beauty pageants. Is this an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism?

The piece was a study in collision detection. It outlined the bounding volumes of American religion, the myth of the separate spheres, white feminism, the politics of a public life, reproductive healthcare, influence, patriarchal authority, the commodification of the representation of a certain kind of care work. 

I thought I recognized the force the article would exert. All America women are constrained by our country’ separate sphere simulation. Neeleman is experiencing the Traditional Mormon Homestead version of a life-long larp imposed on the entire country. So I braced for impact, expecting it would take two or three days for the internet to absorb the energy.

I was very wrong!

By July 30, I could not get onto a social media platform without being served Ballerina Farm content. And sure, it’s possible my algorithms have been trained to weight Mormonism, care work and gender issues. But I was not the only one having this experience. It was happening to a lot of people.

I spoke to a friend who said her grandma texted her to ask what she thought “about the whole thing with the dancing farm impactor* with a weird husband.” Her grandma learned about the dancing farm impactor on Facebook.

*she meant influencer, but both work tbh

When my friend told me about the interaction, she sounded mystified, “There is no reason for my grandma to know or care about this. Nothing in her background, politics, social life. I don’t know. This just feels different than going viral or whatever. What the hell is going on?”

I realized the answer to he question is our destination. And I finally knew what road to take to get us there - Fury Road. 

Here we go, girls!

And now pretend I am showing you some of the landmarks we will pass on our way. Maybe I hold out my arm so you can see the map I inked there, or I’ve embroidered it into a bit of silk. 

It starts with information. Information is entropy. And entropy is all the possibilities contained within a system. The more complex a system, the more entropy. You are a system. So is a grain. So is a star. Entropy is order becoming disordered. So we think it is chaos, but it’s not. 

The information is just encrypted now. If we had the key, we could reverse the disorder. (We do not have the key.) But we do have information about information. Like! Information must be conserved. Even in a black hole. Did you know black holes evaporate? When they do, they information they swallowed up is released. 

Information is as abundant and generative and inevitable and possible as energy. This is bad news for people who want to hoard information to accumulate power. So they try to use false axioms to manufacture a system where information can be consumed and be all-consuming.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. - Herbert A Simon, a guy who was influential and wrong

Of course this isn’t true. Information doesn’t consume, it is conserved. A wealth of information is a wealth of potentiality. And attention cannot be impoverished by potentiality. Attention and information come together to create new realities. Which is why techlords and Christian Nationalists want limit our access to information while also extracting our attention. 

And listen, this desire to use information to constrict reality instead of expand it is not limited to the men I’ve named. What do you think is driving the enshittification of the internet? The book banning? Limited access to information is supposed to restrict creation.

Creation is a regenerative information management system - it re-orders and re-represents information. There is a world where a true Creation Economy gets to exist. I feel like it’s got a better hold on quantum mechanics than ours. Either way, that world is not our world. 

Instead, The Creator Economy was engineered to manufacture engagement scarcity. Engagement is the value extraction hub of The Creator Economy. So all creators - no matter what they create! - compete for that same scarce resource. Which leads to the Ballerina Farm of it all the past week. 

When I wrote about the Neelemans years ago, I dug into their farm’s business model. It didn’t seem to make much sense from the perspective a direct to consumer farm operation. They had too much overhead and too little capacity.

But it did make sense within the context of the Creator Economy. They weren’t producing butcher boxes, they were producing content to capture engagement. And most Trad Wife experts aren’t engaged in analysis, they’re producing commentary to capture engagement. 

The Trad Wife and the Trad Wife Experts use the Trad Wife lifestyle to capture their audience.. Their incentives are aligned. Social media alorithms favor recency, engagement and homogeneity. It is better for both if the market is dominated by homogenous representations of care work and homogenous commentary on the homogenous representations of care work.

And so they’ve engaged in a kind of conscious parallelism, each adjusting their conduct to maintain market dominance. They are just building what the framework will let them build - a Creator oligopoly. Okay, simple and depressing enough But why did last week feel so different?

The latest Ballerina Farm thing felt different because it was different! We’re experiencing a disruption in the Creator Economy. Ballerina Farm is being blitzscaled by incentive mechanisms funded, developed and leveraged by men who want to use the network effect to tip us into an Age of Apocalypse.

I am not kidding. 

Let's start with the apocalyptic worldbuilding cult, shall we?

René Girard created an apocalyptic worldbuilding model called The Theory of Desire. When he was Peter Theil’s teacher at Stanford, he shared the model with him. (Stanford...WHAT is going on over there, for real.)

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because imitate their desires.’ - René Girard, who thinks envy is the unifying theory of human existence.

The theory is broken down into two parts. Desire and The Scapegoat Mechanism

Desire

Like Hobbes, Girard said that humans were mechanistic creatures with a total lack of free will. What we call free will is really just desire. And what we call desire is really just imitation. Every desire was an imitation of someone else’s desire. In his model, the person imitating is the ‘subject.’

The person being imitated is the ‘model.’ And the object of desire is the ‘object.’ (That one is easy.) The model, subject and object are three points in a triangle. 

Those three points do not exist in isolation. They exist in a community. Imagine every person in that community is a point. And the model can be a subject and the subject can be a model. Every person imitates, everybody is imitated. A network of imitation forms. Everybody becomes the same. Everybody wants the same thing. 

Girard said this leads to conflict as models and subjects fight for the same scarce objects. The violence spreads throughout the entire network! Threatening the very existence of the community!

Scapegoat Mechanism

When communal violence reaches a tipping point, the scapegoat mechanism (somehow) kicks in. The communal violence is redirected to a single person or group. No longer rivals, the subjects and models join together to eradicate the new object of their violence. Once the ultimate act of violece has been committed, peace returns to the network. Well, until the next time. 

Girard said the chosen scapegoat must be innocent. And the scapegoating mechanism had to be deployed unconsiously. The community had to believe the scapegoat deserved its fate. 

This man claimed culture itself was a product of the scapegoat mechanism. Culture sprang up to shroud the violence, prevent it, ritually repeat it.

If you think this all sounds like Christianity fanfiction (featuring a Freud crossover) written by an apophenic Hobbesian with unresolved trauma from WWII? You’re not wrong!

Girard thought the scapegoat mechanism would fail soon. He believed the 21st centure was an Age of Apocalypse. Only a total alignment with an Absolute Christian Sovereign could save the world. But this could only happen if their mimetec network of desire could be globally scaled. But like…how would that even work?

Well! What if you had social media? And the ‘model’ was like…an influencer? And the subject was called like…I don’t know…'a follower.’ And the object was engagement? As one random example?

The Technology Meme Men

Thiel was particularly taken with Girard’s concept of mimetic desire. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” Girard wrote. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” Mimetic desire involves a surrender of agency—it means allowing others to dictate one’s wants—and, the theory goes, can foster envy, rivalry, infighting, and resentment. It also, Girard wrote, leads to acts of violent scapegoating, which serve to preclude further mass conflicts by unifying persecutors against a group or an individual. Thiel would later use this framework to develop his own theories about politics, tech investing, and culture. - The New Yorker

Thiel became Facebook's first public investor because he understood how the platform could be used to scale a network of desire. Of course, they’ve had to cheat! Because Girard was wrong.

People are not automata. The Theory of Desire is just pick up artist bullshit dressed up as philosophy. And like, no surprise really! As Girard stumbled upon his theory of desire when he realized he only wanted a woman when other men wanted her first.

To the extent that Girard’s definition of mimesis appears to occur on Meta platforms, it’s being simulated by privacy invasion, misinformation and algorithms. 

Marc Andreessen is also a Girard disciple. He sits on Facebook’s board. He is considered one of the leading lights of the tech industry, by…the people he funds. Which is actually a lot of people! Who have built and are building a lot of the infrastructure that connects our lives. He also just endorsed Trump. Because of course he did. 

Mark Zuckerberg believes in the Theory of Desire. He seems to think he is going to destroy the world and then saved the world with...Meta. I begin to understand why he kept trying to make the Metaverse happen!

Christian Nationalists love Girard too! Thiel, who funded JD Vance’s political rise, introduced JD Vance to Girard. And Vance just can’t get enough of the mimetic rivalry and scapegoating! Which…you know…tracks. 

In The Gatekeepers, an excellent podcast, one of Zuckerberg’s early mentors recalled an insettling conversation he’d had with Ol’ Zuck,

Early in 2009, I'll never forget this, Facebook was it maybe already a couple of hundred million users. Users, not just English-speaking. They'd begun to diversify. And Mark's explaining to me he's going for a billion users. I'm going, Mark, hang on just a second. There are only seven billion people in the world. And he goes, Hey, a billion is not the limit. I think we can go two, three, four, five billion. I think essentially everyone in the world should use this product. And I'm going, For what? I'm sorry, what is it you're going to do?

It’s honestly not a hard question to answer. Because these guys all write books and give interviews telling people exactly what it is they want to do. They want to use the Theory of Desire to gain control of the entire world. And if that sounds stupid, wait till I tell you how they’ve been trying to do it.

They plan to use mimetic rivarly and the scapegoat mechanism to topple the nation-state. And then the want to break national bodies of people down into individuals tethered to online mimetic networks.

A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. - Balaji Srinivasan, who is very, very into network states and bitcoin

Except instead of model, they say “community founder” and instead of subjects they say “subscribers.” Then they want to onboard those “subscriber citizens” onto a blockchain based Network State, “the sequel to the nation state.” 

One of the concepts here is, we start actually funding, not simply company founders, but community founders. A community founder is somebody who is essentially the manager of a piece of real estate, who governs who can come in, who educates disputes, who does the culture formation, and so on, and so forth. And all those community founders fold into the CEO of the network state. - Balaji Srinivasan, in a a Q+A where he also said Network State subscribers with high community karma could use their points to get get cloned.

Not all network-states would be influencer founded. Balaji Srinivasan, who literally wrote the book on network states, suggests there could be an entire online country centered around keto. Like…the diet. A diplomatically recognized state, with its own citizens, defense systems, currency, laws, healthcare, birth and burial rites, and everything else organized around..keto.  

The unseriousness of the network state people is even more striking when you consider how much power a network state would have over its subscribers.

In a network state, alignment is achieved through the authority of the blockchain. The architects of the Blockchain claim the authority is distributed across the subscriber-citizens. But that’s bullshit. The subscriber-citizens behavior is controlled by incentive mechanisms, data extraction at every point of their existence and public nature of the blockchain. 

How is an abused woman in a network state supposed to put enough cryptocurrency away so she can leave her husband?  If he can see every transaction she and everyone else makes on the blockchain? Like Hobbes' Leviathan, the network state doesn’t exist to protect, it exists to secure through force and coercion.

And like, OF COURSE, JD Vance loves this! Do you know how easy it would be track abortions on the blockchain?! And of course American Christian Nationalists are aligning themselves with the Network State Technologists! The network state actively harms women while turning Christianity into a publicly traded currency! Which is a little like turning wine into piss. But also, that’s all they’ve ever wanted.

The hold of a world built with the network effect cannot be overstated! Do you know how hard it is to leave a system that contains all the information of your past, present, future? I do! It’s almost impossible.

Once the networks are formed, the tech guys want them to compete for citizens. Which sounds like it would get very war-ish very quickly! Ask anyone who’s done network marketing how quickly you run out of customers. 

And like…that’s the point! Because a paroxysm of violence is exactly what they are trying induce. They want us to exhaust ourselves with violence so that, those of us who are left, are too meek to withstand the memetic of it all.

And then, as then as we blink away the ashes of our potential futures, these men will make us an offer we cannot refuse, the only way to save ourselves will to become comprehensively, cryptographically, algorithmically aligned to the will of an Absolute Sovereign, a Single Source of Truth. 

And now, before we get to the rest of it, may I present the opening scene of Mad Meg: Fury Road

Please read all the Mad Meg lines in Tom Hardy's Mad Max voice, but if he were playing me.

A camera films a woman from a high angle. She is standing in the Santa Monica Mountains, looking over a once-wooded canyon. 

Mad Meg: My name is Meg. My world is fire and blood. 

(Fragmented audio from Reels, TikToks play in Meg played by Mad Max Tom Hardy’s memory.)

Man 1: Why are you hurting these people? 

Man 2: It’s the data, stupid. We are killing for the data

Woman 1: The Community Founders rose

Woman 2: The world is running out of engagement.

Man 3: Now there’s the Engagement Wars

Mad Meg:  Once, I was a newsletter writer. A sovereign creator trying to grow a subscriber community.

Man 4: - to the terminal adoption point

Woman 2: Currency is worthless

Man 3: Mankind has gone rogue, terrorizing itself

Man 5: Thermonuclear cancelations

Woman 4: The earth is sour

Woman 5: The network effect

Woman 4: We have become half-life

Mad Meg: As the world fell…each of us, in our own way, was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me…or everyone else. 

I am the one…who runs from the aligned and the disentangled. Hunted by social network-states. Haunted by those I could not keep. So I exist in this wasteland.

(Pen clicks)

A woman reduced to a single instinct:

Observe. 

She reaches into her baggu crossbody bag. Pulls out a pair of binoculars ripped from the corpse of a Travelcore TikToker. Holds them up to her eyes. The camera follows her gaze, pushing into the canyon and into a wideshot of a collection of clapboard cottages. The are women carrying fresh milk from from a dairy, one or two pirouette. Children in pinafores pick wild flowers. Men stride across the middleground, pointing at ditches and fence posts. 

It is the 508th outpost of BallrinaFrm, the Network State created and maintained by an algorithm that mimics the engagement of an influencer from an earlier time. Its cryptocurrency, AGA, has a market cap of $120 billion. BallrinaFrm is a subsidiary of tech conglomerate Product/Fit.

Mad Meg’s voice plays over the scene: That green place was once red. The Battle of the Trad Wives was fought here. 

A child wanders into the shot, she bends down and pulls at a flower. It won’t come up. She yanks again, falling backward onto her bum when the flower comes up. A phalanx tangled up in its long roots. 

The image pixelates as the child walks away, swinging the roots beside her. The recordings shrink and shift and grow, pixels painting the arc with images from The Great and Terrible Alignment. Gasps and cheers come from The Engaged in the stands. The shot returns to the triumphal arc just as everything goes dark and quiet. 

A spotlight falls on a man walking across the arena. It is the Technologist Meme Man. Standing before the arch, he begins the Techno-Optimist call and response. The responds reverently. 

The Technologist Meme Man: We had a problem of starvation, 

The Engaged: so you invented the Green Revolution.

The Technologist Meme Man: We had a problem of darkness, 

The Engaged: so you invented electric lighting.

The Technologist Meme Man: We had a problem of cold, 

The Engaged: so you invented indoor heating.

The Technologist Meme Man: We had a problem of heat, 

The Engaged: so you invented air conditioning.

The Technologist Meme Man: We had a problem of isolation, 

The Engaged: so you invented the Internet.

The Technologist Meme Man: We had a problem of pandemics, 

The Engaged: so you invented vaccines.

The Technologist Meme Man: We have a problem of poverty, 

The Engaged: so you invent technology to create abundance.

The Technologist Meme Man: Give us a real world problem, 

The Engaged: and you can invent technology that will solve it.

As the crowd shouts its last response, the pulvinar is illuminated by drones. Seven men sit in the light. 

Immortan Thiel, Flamen Thielis Johnson, Marc Nero Andreessen Technologus, Zuck Domitian Teengirlicus, Imperator Trumpis Vance, Augur Sam Gaius Marius Altman.

The Technologist Meme Man: Behold. The men who burned the world so that we might have fire.

The ground underneath the triumphal arch bursts into flames. The Technologist Meme Man turns around and throws himself into the flames.

The Technologist Meme Men are not going to succeed, of course. What they want to do goes against the very nature of the universe! I think some of them know that. And all the incentive mechanisms and network state bullshit is just a way to pump and dump their crypto investments. But the infrastructure they're funding is causing real harm.

And I think I've participated in perpetuating some of it. 

I left Andreessen-funded Substack last December when I began to suspect I was participating in a lo-fidelity prototype of the network state. Once I really understood Girard, Thiel and the rest of it, Substack's claim to be a “New Economic Engine for Culture” felt …incredibly dark. And like...almost too on the nose?

I just didn’t feel like couldn’t write about this while remaining on the platform. (More to come on my Substack suspicions in the coming weeks.) I still feel so embarrassed that I didn't understand the context of the platform's development.

BUT! This is not a call for others to leave Substack. I mean, leaving Substack didn't mean I left the mimetic network effect affected world! Like when I publish this piece, I’ll post it to Instagram! Because that is one of the places people find information! And Meta has done far more harm than Substack! (At least so far.)

The Technology Meme men control the information routes. They extract information from our shared existence and call it data. Because they own it, they think they own all of of us. 

So what do we do?

I used to imagine walking off across the salted distance. I thought maybe I’d find a new green place just beyond the horizon. But there isn’t one. Did you know if you’re in a black hole, you cannot ever move beyond its horizon? And that a black hole’s horizon contains the same information as its interior? 

Which is all to say. Wherever we go, there we are. 

So I think we should turn back and pay attention to these fuckers. Use their infrastructure to release information about exactly what these people are doing and how. I think we should take our potential futures back.

I'll be navigating Fury Road for the next few months, releasing as much information as I can about this worldbuilding scheme. Want to join me on the road? Subscribe so you don't miss any of the Mad Meg newsletters. And don't worry, there is no network effect here.

Mad Meg: Look. It’ll be a hard day. But I guarantee you that a 160 days’ ride that way…there’s nothing but salt. At least this way, you know, we might be able to…together…come across some kind of redemption

This piece is the product of hundreds of hours of research and work. If it gave you something to think about for a day, a week, or a month consider making a one-time donation so I can keep writing! Buy me a pen, or a used book, or 48 minutes of childcare!