Inkhavening

It’s 4am and I’m lying awake. Can’t sleep. Walk out into the cold, perfumed air. Sliders crunching on astroturf. In the kitchen I down a Soylent Mint Chocolate Meal Replacement Drink and a Pamplemousse La Croix. It tastes like TV static. One person is still up, surrounded by Diet Coke cans, working on tomorrow’s post.

I check online. Three people still haven’t posted. It’s 11:56pm; I posted at 2pm. That either means I’m very disciplined or that I’m not really trying, that I should be plumbing the depths of my soul instead of writing about land value tax. I hope tonight’s the night someone gets kicked out.

Ben Pace announces that our kind sponsors wordpress dot com have provided swag – Moleskine notebooks and baseball caps, one per person. I take two of each and feel surprisingly little shame. Petty crimes in an age of abundance.

The heating here doesn’t use convection, it’s radiative. Click on the thermostat and a panel above your head beams infrared at you. So very clever, like so many other things here.

I was proud of my first post, an unusually squishy piece which appeared at my fingertips at 6 in the morning and was done by 7. I learn this is called “personal non-fiction”. It gets a lot of praise, and I’m a sucker for flattery, but it alienates two of my friends.

Everyone here is one of: smarter, more insightful, funnier, higher status, a better writer than me. Sometimes all of the above. We swim in the same water, I am familiar with the Sequences (haven’t read them though, that would be cringe) – but I am still an interloper from a poor European island which has seen zero wage growth in a decade. Meanwhile their Microsoft RSUs are worth a million dollars.

It feels very validating to have every need taken care of: food, snacks, a fridge full of fancy beverages, towel service, a cabinet full of toiletries. It makes me feel important. I try not to think about going back to Peckham.

People ask me about my timelines. I talk a good game but it feels like kayfabe – I’m not sure I really believe AI is going to kill us all. Or maybe I do believe it, but I just don’t really care?

Something about America’s bigness makes this country feel like the centre of the world. A kind of wastefulness that signals abundance. Wash your clothes in the massive oversized machine and then toss them in the gas-powered dryer. Back home we hang up our smalls one by one and the windows fog up.

I ask people what they were doing before this. Oh, I was getting my PhD in Legal History from Cambridge while being a champion boxer. Oh, not much, just being paid half a million dollars a year at a FAANG which I quit to pursue being a dating coach. Oh I was blogging a bit (I check and their Substack says “over 10,000 subscribers”). Why, what were you doing?

I take a break from campus life and swipe a bit on the apps. I’m happy and busy but maybe I could get a cute date, have some physical touch. Wrong. I remember the Bay Area’s brutal demographics; they do not work in my favour. I turn over and go back to sleep.