“Here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony. If you have one to the extreme, you will be very unscientific; if you have another to the extreme, you become a mechanical man and no longer a human being.”

“When you want to move, you’re moving, and when you move, you’re determined to move. If I want to punch, I’m going to do it, man.” – Bruce Lee

Dmitriy loved Bruce Lee.

“What a man,” he would say in awe, poring over YouTube clips of Way of the Dragon or Fist of Fury. “what a true slice of America.”

This became Dmitriy's catchphrase. Over and over again, "What a man, Bruce Lee."

When Dima, which was his wife's nickname for him, or Dimochka, which was his girlfriend's nickname for him, would walk to work from the BART each morning, he'd spend forty-five minutes stalking through San Francisco's Chinatown. Some part of him must have known he wouldn't find Bruce, but still, he hoped he'd see his ghost.

But Dimochka wouldn't find Bruce Lee in the window of the Chinatown outpost of Tacorea, or through the gaudy windows of House of Nanking. Nor would he find him in his martial arts classes in Dogpatch, nor his open office plan in SoMa.

When he was supposed to be building out the frontend of his company’s site—something he could do but wasn’t sure why he was being asked to do—he found himself re-watching and rewinding a video titled Amazing Superhuman Speed! Bruce Lee instead.

When his wife lay in bed next to him, texting her friends, he held his phone close and studied The MOST BRUTAL Display of Bruce Lee’s Speed!

“Dima, the blue light,” she’d complain, still texting, not looking at him. He would hide his phone in the nightstand drawer and turn off the overhead light, keeping his AirPods in. He would fall asleep to a soundscape of Wing Chun.

And on Thursday nights, when he snuck out and waited for his girlfriend to return home from work, he would watch The Forgotten First Fight of Bruce Lee.

Hearing “Dimochka!”, clumsy in her American accent, should have been his cue to put his phone away, though he wouldn’t.

Each meeting, he’d nervously watch his Bruce Lee videos, before telling her, “I’m too nervous to do anything.”

So, she would finally kiss him, and Dimochka would spend the rest of the night looking into her eyes and repeating, “You’re so cute, how are you so cute?”

His girlfriend, who probably wasn’t really his girlfriend, would repeat the same back to him, mimicking his accent, until he’d say to her, “The first time you kissed me it was like a hundred 9/11s were happening inside me.”

She wouldn’t repeat this one. She wouldn’t say anything back.

But one night she asked him, “Do you mean fireworks?”

And Dimochka said, “Fireworks… I felt so warm inside, it was like a hundred 9/11s were happening.”

He would leave out that this was only because she said yes to him at all; that she could have been any number of pretty women he fixated on, and he would have still felt warmly.

Around 10, he would spring out of bed, and leave, ready to spend another forty-five minutes in Chinatown.

His girlfriend-who-wasn’t-really-his-girlfriend would whine, “Dimochka, do you have to go?”

And he’d give her a kiss on the forehead and say solemnly, “Sorry, I have to get home. One day.”

If he took an Uber, he could probably stay at her place in the Haight until 11:30 and get back home to Bayview by midnight, but he couldn’t jeopardize his walk through Chinatown.

Why was it that Chinatown was so empty by 10? It wasn’t as though there weren’t bars, it wasn’t as though there wasn’t a pulse here.

He walked along the sidewalk, looking at the buildings, shuttered storefront after shuttered storefront. He looked up and down the street, at the cars, Teslas and beat up Camrys.

He imagined what it would feel like to punch someone in the face.

He imagined punching his wife in the face, but felt too guilty, he couldn’t even think it.

He imagined punching his boss, he imagined punching the founder.

He imagined punching his mother.

He imagined punching his father, but he couldn’t remember what he looked like.

He imagined punching a homeless guy. And then he imagined punching Bruce Lee. More than just punching him though, he imagined using a guillotine on him—the move that Bruce Lee popularized in The Way of the Dragon...

He imagined Bruce overtaking him, subduing him, and that final moment, in pain, but also deeply ashamed by the defeat. He was impotent, even in his own fantasy.

When Dimochka reached the end of his tour through Chinatown, he requested an Uber.

He watched the driver weave in-and-out of nonexistent traffic, taking inconceivable turns down one way streets. The wait time number ticked up from 5 minutes to 10, and then 5 again, and then jumped all the way up to 15.

He studied the driver’s face. He guessed that Farhood was an immigrant, too.

He imagined punching Farhood.

He imagined choking Farhood.

He imagined grabbing him by the back of the neck and bashing his head into the cement.

He imagined illegal move after illegal move. He imagined winning.

He considered, for a moment, that maybe he SHOULD punch Farhood.

But when Farhood finally arrived, he apologized to Dmitriy profusely.

“No, don’t worry,” Dmitriy offered getting in the back seat, “Really. No big deal.”

Farhood, now faceless and driving, responded, “Good attitude... Be like water. Right?”

Dmitriy took out his phone and watched the last 30 seconds of The Game of Death, over and over again until they arrived back in Bayview, where his wife would be lying in bed, not looking at him, texting her friends.1

Read more about what we discussed today:

• Glow in the Dark Bunnies Coming to a Pet Store Near You. . . Finally by

• Your Next Pet Could Be a Glowing Rabbit in WIRED

• Harnessing the Breath of Life in

On today’s episode of The Computer Room, I talk to Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, not just about Second Life, but other synthetic lives.

I can’t stop thinking about synthetic life. I’m hopeful about it.

Imagine an entity born entirely in cyberspace—a literal entity, not a metaphor.

Or, maybe, as I put it to friends a few hours ago: imagine if ChatGPT had thoughts independent of its human users. Imagine that it was able to think outside of us. Imagine that an AI that was born not made, that it could age, that it had an entire, glorious life in cyberspace. A life outside of humans.

Would it have parents? What would an entity born and raised in cyberspace look like? Would we have to regulate the Internet to protect these beings, if not ourselves? Could it ever have an inner life? Could it have a “soul” without a body? How would this AI’s consciousness differ from our own human experience?

Imagine experiencing existence without the constraints of physical form, no body to separate itself from the world. What would it mean to have a soul made of information? What would it mean to age without a body? What would it mean for humans to create cyber-nymphs? What would it do to our faith?

Galileo's UFO

by A. R. Yngve

In 1610, the astronomer Galileo Galilei used his small telescope to observe Saturn directly. And he saw something that no other human had ever seen before.

He was not the first astronomer as such – for thousands of years, astrologers and other scholars had been studying those planetary orbits which could be seen with the naked eye. So Galileo knew that it had to be Saturn, appearing in its known orbit – but it had previously only been observed as a dot in the night sky.

Saturn's visual appearance in his telescope was utterly unfamiliar, strange, hard to pin down. Galileo tried to draw what he saw directly (cameras did not exist at the time). His sketches, hand-drawn from observations made over several years, are fascinating. One of them depicts a planet with ”handles” attached to the sides. Another one tries to depict Saturn as a planet with two enormous moons impossibly close to it on each side. Both alternatives – a planet with handles! Planets bundled together like billiard balls! – must have seemed surreal to him, like a cosmic joke or a dream.

Today's historians have concluded that Galileo failed to identify Saturn's rings with certainty, because his telescope was inadequate. The Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, using a much better telescope in 1659, finally deduced that what Galileo had struggled to perceive was a planet with a ring around it. It was the first such planet ever identified.

I want to argue that historians have been unfair to Galileo and his telescope. The greatest challenge for him, as the very first human to see a physical ring around a planet, was to understand what he was seeing. And this was not because of some faulty perception or intelligence on his part.

Imagine an alternate universe where the Earth's Moon had a ring which was highly visible from the Earth. And imagine an alternate Galileo in this universe, observing Saturn through his telescope for the very first time. This alternate-universe Galileo would have quickly recognized it as similar to what he and everyone else on Earth were already familiar with: a celestial body surrounded by a ring. Because he would have had a point of reference.

In order to truly see something that is unfamiliar to you, you first need a mental point of reference. We define and describe things in relation to other things. The further away new sights are from familiar points of reference, the harder it is to perceive them clearly. Since the real Galileo saw, for the first time, something which he could not compare to any other celestial object, he struggled to identify it. Sometimes it seemed like one thing to him, sometimes like another. In other words, Galileo's first observation of Saturn's rings was a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object).

Today, our scientists and military observers struggle in a way akin to Galileo's troubles with Saturn's rings. UFOs are being observed, on modern cameras with tracking systems – and yet, humans cannot quite define what their instruments are seeing. Sometimes the UFOs look like one thing, sometimes like another.

While most UFO observations can be explained as a misinterpretation of known phenomena, the truly unexplained cases remain. Our minds try to find a point of reference to define these ”true” UFOs. A popular one is that they might be spaceships from some unknown alien civilization. Let's be honest: We can't know that for sure, because the only alien civilizations we can think of are lifted from science fiction. A reference point more ”tangibly alien” than fiction does not exist – yet.

In the absence of a solid reference point to make sense of these observations, an entire culture of ”placeholders” for an explanation has grown over time: Aliens that have never been captured on camera; saucer-shaped spacecraft that have never been sampled or examined; alien encounter narratives that never come with solid evidence to back them up.

However: In this culture of ”placeholders” I would also include the ”debunkers” of UFOs. They have the advantage that even though they also lack a point of reference to define a UFO, they can comfortably choose ”placeholders” which sound more familiar, and thus more credible: Misinterpreted birds, aircraft, drones, planets, satellites, secret military prototype craft, balloons, clouds, hallucinations, fraud, etc.

Every layman has seen a bird, or a plane, so that sounds tangible. Except that the ”true” UFOs do not behave like birds or planes – or anything we're familiar with. Even ”drone” is a placeholder until the UFO resembles the drones that we know exist today. (Personally, I would not even grasp for the ”spaceship” placeholder.)

The problem remains: How to define, and thus perceive, that which does not resemble anything we recognize from before.

And to argue that UFOs cannot be real because ”obviously” we could describe them if they existed, is to make an error of assumption: That everything that exists can be seen in a way that makes sense to the human mind, regardless of reference points. If that is true, why didn't Galileo quickly identify Saturn's rings?

Here is a more recent example of something ”undescribable but real” in science: Ask a physicist to define what a quark – the smallest known part of an atomic nucleus – really is, or what it looks like.

An honest physicist will reply that only certain properties of quarks can be measured (mass, charge, spin, etc.), but quarks themselves cannot be objectively described in human language – because no meaningful points of reference exist. (Shape? Surface texture? Color? Hardness? Interior structure?)

Quarks exist in the sense that they fit the theory, and fit the observations made in experiments, of how protons and neutrons behave. (If a better theory comes along, quarks may cease to exist.)

We do not know what quarks look like, and we may never know. (They are not tiny colored balls.) Their existence has only been proved indirectly, through particle-collider experiments.

With the above example in mind, you can see why we should not dismiss UFOs as imaginary only because we cannot clearly describe them. That would be just as wrong as to claim we do know with certainty what they are.

A more thorough and persistent scientific examination may yet come up with new facts that could make sense of the phenomenon. The uncertainty itself does not equal a proof for, or against, UFOs.

The physicist Avi Loeb is sincere in his attempts to find physical evidence for UFOs. And I find his willingness to explore the unknown admirable – but it's possible that he, too, might be led astray by mental ”placeholders.” What if UFOs could be something even stranger than spaceships from another star system? What if they, like quarks, are physical phenomena so utterly different from our frame of reference that we cannot perceive them as they are?

A variation on the argument that UFOs are unfamiliar beyond our experience goes as follows: A hypothetical alien intelligence might be so far advanced that it is incomprehensible to us, too mentally overwhelming. Thus when it is present, in the form of a UFO observation, we're like goldfish trying to make sense of what is visible outside the aquarium. We become aware that ”something” is there, but it remains vague and elusive. The problem with this argument is that it encourages us to give up; any effort to understand UFOs is inherently futile. That has not been proved.

Galileo could have dismissed what he first saw in his telescope as hallucinations, or a technical error, or simply too overwhelming, instead of persevering despite his confusion. How would that have slowed down the progress of astronomy? Christiaan Huygens did not confirm the discovery of Saturn's rings in a vacuum; Galileo's pioneering efforts had inspired others. And this was during a time when astronomical discoveries were suppressed by the religious establishment, because they challenged medieval dogma. Galileo dared to try and see what was not only unknown, but religious taboo.

Galileo showed by his example that we should not settle for ”placeholder” knowledge, but should keep seeking a truer, better understanding. The obstacle to that understanding was summed up in Marshall McLuhan's aphorism:

”I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.”

References:

• Dr. Paul Mahaffy, NASA web page: ”Saturn: History”

• Wikipedia: Quark

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus: ”The Unexplained Phenomena of the U.F.O. Report”, The New Yorker, June 26, 2021

• A. R. Yngve, ”What We're Talking About When We're (Not) Talking About Extraterrestrials - Our culture's complicated relationship with the Great Other”

• Child Predators Use Twitch to Systematically Track Kids Livestreaming

• Cybergrooming in Der Spiegel (German language)

• There Are Dark Corners of the Internet, Then There’s 764.

• A 23-ye…

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Some of the questions we answered:

• Where the fuck is Gio’s book?

• What’s the future of Gab?

• If you…

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Read Katherine’s article on the same topic here.

00:00 Introduction and Greetings

00:39 Meta’s AI Generated Users

02:47 Implications of AI in Social Media

04:56 Human Element in Social Media

08:17 AI's Impact on Culture and Taste

21:39 Fictosexuality and Imaginary Relationships

24:27 The Influence of Environment on Human Behavior

26:01 The Future of AI and Human Intimacy

27:55 Emotional Attachment to Technology

31:50 The Intersection of Technology and Religion

36:29 The Era of Magic and AI

43:21 Human Connections and Missed Connections

Housekeeping:

• Remember to submit Missed Connections, advice questions, and everything else to defaultefriend@gmail.com or by voice here. I’m also always looking for written submissions — send me stories, articles about Internet culture, and more.

• For paid subscribers, our next book club pick is Read Write Own by Chris Dixon for February and our next movie club pick is All About Lilly Chou Chou for January. Dates for both TBD this week.

• Also for paid subscribers, we’re rolling out Internet Studies classes! We’re running a second session of Internet Real Life and a course about everyone’s favorite fantasy series, The Gorean Saga.

This is an experimental format I’m releasing to paid subscribers only right now. Please share your feedback! It’s very likely that a more polished version will be un-paywalled later in the week… But I wanted to get a temperature check first. Do you guys like it? Should I do more?

Articles referenced:

Avi Schiffmann’s Tab AI necklace has raised $1.9 million to replace God

A note from Sam:

Be My Escape is an essay and podcast project where I look over some of the most enduring emo (I use the term culturally and loosely) and pop-punk albums of the 00s. I want to give this selection of albums the same level of attention and analysis which more established and accepted alternative, indie, hip-hop, and electronic albums are granted. What makes them important, their cultural and personal background, and what lateral topics they uncover, be that gender, mental illness, terrorism, or sexuality.

This project can be seen as a response to what might be termed the great “Emo Revival.”

Since the reformation of My Chemical Romance in 2019 the genre has received a welcome critical and popular re-examination. The explosion of pure enthusiasm at the news led to an outpouring of emotions, articles and memes. Critically ignored in the 00s, and mostly forgotten in the 2010s broadsheet newspapers like The New York Times were now writing sympathetic pieces on albums like The Black Parade. Pitchfork, once happy awarding A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out a 1.5 got busy writing a series of revisionist reviews from young writers redressing the delta.

The When We Were Young festival has become a major yearly draw, pitched directly at Millennial nostalgia. Warped Tour’s coming back. Everyone can admit they like Emo now, it’s fine. But this isn’t intended to be a victory lap. Nostalgia can be fun, but it can also be a sugar rush. Some albums are bad, some albums have aged poorly, some deserve to be forgotten. The genre deserves critical analysis, but it can withstand it too. I’m not interested in MySpace photos of you with shitty straightened hair and a bootleg Senses Fail shirt. I want to know about the Fall Out Boy B-side you cried to. The Dashboard Confessional lyrics of your first tattoo. How a musical album about a goth Bonnie and Clyde got you through the worst times of your life, when everything else abandoned you.

You were embarrassed of it, now you’re not. Let’s talk about it.

And a final note from Katherine:1

Katherine reads her Tablet article, “Adam Lanza Fan Art,” a deep dive into the elusive True Crime Community (TCC), a small fandom of mostly adolescents and young adults who treat school shooters and serial killers in the same way other fans might treat boyband members. After the show, in a special Q&A with producer Taylor, Katherine talks about her experiences with hostile people online, why she chose to write about Adam Lanza, and her reflections on her past work and its interpretation in the media.

Katherine argues that the fascination with these figures often reflects unresolved adolescent emotions—for better and for worse.

P.S. Gio returns soon with an extended discussion about a recent confessional guest post on default.blog.

• Read Adam Lanza Fan Art.

• Watch Zero Day and RSVP for our in-person discussion or our digital discussion.

• Subscribe to The Computer Room.

• Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

The Computer Room has existed in one form or another for about 3 years now. It started off under a different name as a show deconstructing Obama-era culture, hosted by a childhood friend and myself. When that friend's work responsibilities meant she had to leave the show, it became a show about Internet culture.

Like the rest of this blog, The Computer Room has always been a little bit haphazard. It’s posted inconsistently. Episodes vary in length. I have a vault of content that easily amount to around 40 hours of audio.

I believed in the stories we were telling, but I was skeptical that I was telling them the best way.1 And then Taylor McMahon reached out to me.

He helped me produce this episode. It’s more polished, more dynamic, and the audio quality has massively improved.

We decided that this first episode should be about Art Bell because, as every social media profile I've ever had for the last decade or so has said, I'm a big Art Bell fan. Before I was Default Friend, I hosted Poast to Poast AM. During lockdowns, I moved to the High Desert. In Texas, my ex and I would often take long drives to nowhere just to listen to Coast to Coast. And one of the best things I've ever written was a screenplay about Art Bell—this was back before he passed away in 2018, when I still had designs to be in film.

But other than that, I’ve never told a good Art Bell story. I never knew how to do him justice.

I decided this was the perfect format to change that.

So, travel back in time with me—back to my computer room—and with the help of Taylor McMahon, Leah Prime, John Steiger, and Joseph Matheny, I'll tell you all the story of Art Bell.

• Visit John Steiger’s site, Art Bell Files here. Read the Art Bell biography here.

• Visit Joseph Matheny’s site here and learn more about Ong’s Hat here.

• Subscribe to Leah’s Substack here.

And if you remember nothing else about me, remember I’m a big Art Bell fan. If you feel like you’d be one too, here are some episodes to get you started:

FINALLY, somebody actually asks Trace of Blocked and Reported fame about what it’s like to be a gay, left-handed, ex-Mormon furry. The rest of you guys are a lot of talk! Always skating right past the good stuff and straight into current events, politics, and Rationalism.

We trace his journey from sheltered Mormon upbringing in Utah to becoming a promin…

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In a recorded phone call, Katherine and Laura Albert, the writer best known for JT Leroy, explore the fuzzy boundaries of truth and fiction in our digital era. They discuss the telephone as a medium, catfishing, imagination, and lying as a form of storytelling.

Buy your Mare Fair tickets here, read the infamous MLP fan fic “The Lunar Rebellion” here, and watch the first four seasons of MLP here.

Check out Metalabel.

Read Yancey's writing:
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet 
The Post-Individual

One question I wish we had asked, and I invite our audience to leave their thoughts about, is whether there is/was a meaningful difference between the Millennial Left and the Tumblr Left. Was the latter a subset of the former, or did it have its own unique character?

In the future, I’d like to explore the contours of the political communities on SomethingAwful, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook Groups. How were they different? Where was there overlap? As always, if you’d like to share your experience from the Left or Right, please drop us a line.

From Benjamin’s blog post, “The Millennial Left as a Moment in Internet History,” which you can read in full here:

To find a new politics, we have to abandon our old politics. But we cannot abandon our old politics if our old politics still pays our bills. The millennial left is a declining business model rather than a political movement. It was a fluke of a particular moment in the political economy of the internet. That moment has ended. No one in their right mind would try to start a new left media enterprise in 2024. But those that still exist will carry on until they run out of money. This zombie millennial left will be with us for years to come, compelled by the business model to pretend it is still engaged in political activity. But it has been years since this activity could even plausibly appear meaningfully political. The appearance died with the form of internet that generated it.

All told, the millennial left existed in a plausibly political form for just five years. It began in 2015 and it ended in 2020. It peaked the year it was born, and it declined continuously throughout its lifespan, becoming less and less plausible every year. Death finally came for it over the span of four months, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in December of 2019 and Bernie Sanders’ defeat on Super Tuesday in March of 2020. Consign it to the abyss.

What did the press get wrong? Katherine and Gio sit down with Scott Greer and attempt to demystify What Happened eight years ago…

BTW, if you’re reading this, and you know who you are, YOU WILL come on this show and talk to us about the #GamerGate/imageboard component of the history of fringe right-wing politics. This is a threat…I will stop at nothing until you come on this podcast…you promised… in 2022…