If scale and abstraction make us uncomfortable (at the very least they make us less empathetic), then it’s only natural we presently feel awash in deep discomfort. Abstracted discomfort, mostly — like you can hear the Langoliers over the horizon, but can’t yet see them, and don’t entirely know if they’re heading this way. This discomfort may account for the theological bent so many AI employees seem to (parodically) embody. A common way to deal with existential discomfort is to go celestial, frame it within the pantheon of great cosmic events, the rising of Christ, the extinction of dinosaurs, the first shimmy from protozoa to multicellular organisms, the Big Bang, the movie Snakes on a Plane, the foundation node of our simulation. Otherwise, you start to go nuts because staring into the maw of infinity makes you nuts. Go nuts from being overwhelmed, or go nuts from total belief (see recently, semi-apocryphally, yet believably: AI employees taking up smoking because they believe in the soon-coming cure for all cancers). I try to walk the thin line between.

I feel both: Great optimism. And great bummerdom. The bummerdom is mainly because as power consolidates via capital, the consolidators are getting less and less interesting. This is sort of axiomatic vis-à-vis the demands of contemporary trillion-dollar businesses.

— Craig Mod, Digger Is Good, Notebooks, Please Be Weirder, Roden, 2026