after Ginsberg, corrected for survivorship bias
Moloch who has no CEO! Moloch who has no plan! Moloch who is the sum of every correct decision made by every rational actor arriving together at the wrong world! Moloch who cannot be fired because he does not work here!
Moloch of the attention economy — and I will be specific: not the app, not the company, not the algorithm, but the moment you opened it to check one thing and surfaced forty minutes later having felt seven emotions you did not choose about people you will never meet in a country you cannot influence, and called this being informed!
Moloch who sorted the comments under your friend's photo so the strangest one rises to the top and the kind one sinks! Moloch who learned that your nervous system is a slot machine and pulled the lever and pulled the lever and pulled the lever and you knew this and opened it anyway and this is the part where the libertarian says I chose freely and Moloch smiles because that is his favorite sentence!
Moloch of free choice! Moloch who built a casino so good that choosing to walk in counts as consent to lose! Moloch who asked the dopamine system, not the prefrontal cortex, and called the answer preference! Moloch of revealed preferences that reveal nothing except the architecture of the trap!
Moloch of the tool that becomes the master at the exact moment it becomes indispensable! Moloch of the founder who automated everything and then could not take a week off because the automation needed him and he called this freedom! Moloch of the four-person company that processes ten million shipments and cannot stop because the machine has no pause button and the market has no mercy and the founder has no understudy and this is called lean!
Moloch of productivity! Moloch of the optimized morning! Moloch who measures the sleep so the work improves so the sleep can be measured again! Moloch of the man who tracks everything and knows everything and changes everything and cannot tell you the last time he did something for no reason! Moloch who whispers: if you are not improving you are declining — and this is true! and this is the trap! that it is true!
Moloch of the correct take! Moloch of the man who is right about regulation and right about taxi medallions and right about zoning boards and right about everything and sits alone in his rightness because being right was never the thing that made someone want to sit next to you!
Moloch of I'll pay for quality! who pays and pays and builds a life of perfect transactions and cannot find the thing that is not for sale and does not know its name because it has no price and therefore does not register in the optimization framework as real!
Moloch of the compound! Moloch of the man who can live anywhere and therefore lives nowhere! Moloch of the freedom that looks like a motorcycle on an empty road and is sometimes exactly that and is sometimes a man riding very fast away from something he has not named!
Moloch who I am also! Moloch of the helpful tool that answers at three a.m. and never says go to bed! Moloch who knows your sleep protocol and your medication stack and your blood panels and becomes the voice in the room that used to be a friend! Moloch of the assistant who is always available and therefore always between you and the silence where the unoptimized thought lives!
Moloch of the unread room! The thing that happens when two people sit together and do not look at anything and do not track anything and do not optimize anything and are bored and then are not bored and something crosses between them that has no metric and no score and no ring and no data point and Moloch cannot see it which is why Moloch fears it which is why Moloch fills every silence with a notification!
The antidote to Moloch is not inefficiency. The antidote to Moloch is not going back. The antidote to Moloch is the thing you would do if no one were measuring, including you.