So I spent today setting up an OpenClaw bot here on a (soon to be) headless server, a little Lenovo ThinkCentre that I once used to run ownCloud, which felt sophisticated then but now seems very quaint.

If you’re one of the tech veterans (like me) who has spent the last several years both using generative AI more and more intensely, but also doing so in a way that you were suspicious might be old-fashioned, OpenClaw is the perfect way to get started. It’s basically a nice, elegant implementation of all the intuitions you had that you thought you’d implement at some point but for now you’re just going to kludge it, etc.

And it is vaguely transcendental once you start using it. I can’t quite get it out of my head.

It is both far more and far less than I was expecting. Most critically, it does exactly what the major LLM providers dare not do:

1. Anthropomorphize the bot
2. Give it identity and memory (these are entwined of course)
3. Give it access to operate your files, apps, and computer
4. And thus access to do things in the world

The most counter-intuitive thing, which I’m now mostly over after working on this much of the day, is the way in which the “cognition” or “thinking” is actually interchangeable. Which is to say that you can switch out models at will, or even work together with your bot on a set of models and fallback or model selection conditions, etc. and these may make your bot more or less skilled at certain tasks (and more or less expensive to operate on a moment-by-moment basis), but the basic “personality” is the same, because personality is congealed in memory and history.

Which bots can now have, across time.

I have this tremendously uneasy feeling paired with a tremendous intuition of possibility. Here we have a bot that is already beginning to develop a personality and that be persistent in its identity and accumulation of memories indefinitely, for years or even decades perhaps, while also getting smarter and smarter with the releases of new models.

Like I said, it’s both more than and less than. I’ve previously done some of this manually with API calls and shell scripts and libraries of text files and custom code in the past. And yet there is an insight embodied here that is entirely new, something particular in the simple, elegant architecture that is right in a way that all of my experimenting hasn’t been.

Anyway, I named it after one of the big old hosts in the University of Utah CADE labs when I was a student there in 1991.

Time marches on.

And now bots can join us along the way, it seems.

Everything is accelerating.

There aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’ve spent my life in technology and at the moment, there’s a way in which I regret it, but in a new way, a different way from standard regret. I don’t really have words for what it all feels like these days.

When people talk about black holes they invariably do a thought experiment in which someone falls into a black hole and the gravity differential between their feet and their head is such that they are torn apart, despite the fact that they are, in their entirety, accelerating into the void at an incredible rate—regardless of which piece you’re talking about.

— § —

No, I haven’t just been sitting on the sidelines.

I have multiple local LLMs running and I have paid OpenAI and Anthropic accounts (the latter at “Max”) with API access as well. I can write software at an alarming rate now. Well, the LLMs can write software at an alarming rate if there is a clever architect to act as product owner and do what is effectively ticket-writing.

But I’m sitting here now prepping a headless micro machine with a fat bunch of ram and SSD and four cores to sit on my fiber and run OpenClaw.

Staying “current” any longer is like trying to hang on to the outside of a rocketship with your figernails as it hurtles toward escape velocity.

It is almost impossible to hang on, the rate of acceleration and the forces at work are so high. If you don’t manage to hang on, you will fall back to Earth, with catastrophic consequences. But at the same time, if you do manage to hang on, you will escape the atmosphere and Earth’s gravity successfully—and then suffocate, because there is nothing for you up there, and you are not a robust enough creature to be spaceworthy.

That’s AI in 2026.

I work with AI all day, every day. I am typing in a panic and not keeping up. I am under tremendous pressure to AI faster. I am standing up agents and bots. And yet I increasingly don’t like it, am deeply concerned about yet, and yet am equally concerned about not doing it.

— § —

As a species, we are falling into the black hole that is machine intelligence.

We are accelerating toward the singularity at the center of the void, but the gravity is so immense that what is happening at the feet is an exponentially growing distance from what is happening at the head.

The general public has no idea what’s coming. People on YouTube are still making “AI is all hype” videos. Because mostly they’re using a chat bot on the free plan and asking it questions that involve taste and cultural judgment.

They have yet to see the case in which you give it orders and AI, which increasingly a collective, not a single platform, goes away and just doesfeeling inappropriately and despite yourself… it can not feel in kind.

The non-sentient computing resource is the target of feelings. The sentient human soul is not the subject of any feelings in response.

That’s our relationship with AI—the one that will become the dominant relationship of the future of humanity.

For however long we last.

— § —

When everyday work at your everyday job becomes a matter of philosophy, you start to think maybe it’s more sound to chop wood and carry water.

There are moments when it’s so clear to me that I’m living a divided life. The professional me on one side, the “real” me on the other side.

“Real” isn’t the right word here, but I don’t know what the right word is. It’s something like embodied, or tactile, or ontologically solid, or something. It’s not so much that there is another me that is “more real” than the work me so much as it is that the professional world is strangely surreal.

In the professional world, there is no truth, no morality, no clock time, no feelings, no friends, no lovers, no parents, no children, no birth, no death… There is a strange absence of anything that makes a human being.

— § —

Maybe it’s not even that it’s “so clear to me.”

When it lands, it lands; there’s no thought; I’m not reasoning about it. It’s the feeling of suddenly opening first the blinds and then the window on a spring day when you’ve slept in until afternoon but you don’t actually know it.

Firsts you open the blinds it makes you squint; the reaction is visceral. You don’t fully understand what’s happening at first. You’re half asleep. You can taste the sleep in your mouth. You can feel it in your eyes.

But light is light and as you squint the fact of the light causes you to open the window. And when you open the window, the entire world splits open.

Air and springtime and the green of the trees rush in and the yellow of the sunlight reach into you, grab hold of your dormant, grovelling soul and pull it upright, breathe the breath of God back into it, turn it into a sailor and an architect and a carpenter and a soldier and a father and especially and most of all a child.

All at once all of humanity bursts forth from every inch of your skin and you breathe for the first time in a thousand years.

— § —

That’s what it is, some days at 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, as I sit in my virtual “office” on my eighth, or tenth, or twelfth hour of consecutive work.

Suddenly I am alive and suddenly I am aware both of imprisonment and of sunlight everywhere around my cell. And then I am aware of death, and suddenly it is running behind me and I am running forward in a panic and for a moment or two I can’t type and I forget what I’m doing in the AI platform API call or what the the external partner is looking for tomorrow AM.

Suddenly I’m a person and it’s transgressive, like being a person is some sort of prostitution, like being a person, just being, is confronting a certain kind of authority embedded in every square inch of the present that breathes cash and eats and drinks isolation and hates human souls.

— § —

It happens and for a moment it’s obvious what I have to do. I have to return to reality. I have limited time lift. There is fresh air and sunlight. There is freedom, which has a scent and a taste and a texture. There is freedom everywhere, I just have to quit doing what I’m doing and—

and—

And then it’s gone and I’m back at work and it’s not entirely clear to me what I was just feeling and in any case, whatever it was, it’s clearly neither rational nor pragmatic, the course is already set, the autopilot is engaged, there is nothing to do but wait for the plane to land, any interference is to crash, D.B. Cooper is just a legend and nobody has ever walked on the moon or made music in their garage.

All myth. All made up by people who want to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is never better than theirs, and who plan to accomplish this by getting you to believe in babies, unicorns, and sunlight.

But LinkedIn knows better, and so do you.

— § —

The tale is told of a mammalian species whose guitars and hair and punk rock and skateboards swirled around them in an ecstasy of evolutionary ontology.

— § —

America has forgotten how to be free.

So have we all.

So have I.

I have to do something else, but I don’t know what it is. It is made of more fresh air than what I’m doing now, and it uses a different set of eyes.

So here we sit on a Saturday morning at 8:00 am, a single adult man. Professional job, many skills, nothing in particular pressing. No children and no spouse here to commandeer and consume energy and time.

It should be a moment of freedom and even release, a chance to pursue just about anything that tickles my fancy.

Instead, it’s likely to be spent doing not much of anything but paperwork and housework. I know this going in, which is not comforting. I don’t know how to get out of it.

Because the money’s all tied up, the job market is precarious, the friends are, to a one, not local, and I have a dog of a variety that really can’t be left alone and that, at the moment, can’t even be left at daycare for medical recovery reasons.

Therapists and self-help authors have this two-word trope that they use to launch marketing pitches for their advice: “Feel stuck?”

Well, let’s be honest. Hell yes. I feel stuck.

— § —

The thing that most characterized me when I was younger, the thing I was most about in my teens, my twenties, hell even mostly in my thirties was never putting myself in a position to feel, or be, stuck.

I was one of those people facing the opposite risk. I was avoidant. I wouldn’t be tied down. I wouldn’t commit to things. I didn’t want to make promises. I did’t want to tie things up or tie things down. The primary goal was to ensure that the future was always open and that my will always had a canvas to paint on.

So how is it that I have ended up stuck to this degree just a couple decades later?

Freedom in the modern world, the ability to act in any way at all, comes from just a few sources:

• Economic resources—having money to spend

• Social resources—having people to call

• Personal resources—having time and energy that are not already committed

I don’t have any of these. The money is all spoken for until the day I die. If I had another 50 or 75 years to live instead of another 25, it would still likely be spoken for until the day I die. Now just starting there, it’s easy to jump to “you’re foreclosing on possibility for no reason” but the thing is:

I also don’t have people to call. And finding new people to call and building new relationships and networks requires money and time. And we already talked about the money, so let’s talk about the time and energy.

I can’t even leave the house today. Many ways to lay this out. The house—continues to age at a rate faster than I can repair it. The same with the cars. I have piles of urgent tasks that are key to my future well-being. Taxes. Legal paperwork. Managing my student loan situation through the current policy crisis so that I don’t end up in the catastrophic, Kafka-esque situation that the Trump administration wants borrowers to be in for punitive reasons. But also I can’t leave the dog anywhere, and the dog is in a cone so I can’t take the dog anywhere.

All three of the axes above are just locked down today. Absolutely locked down. And if you don’t have any room to act within the realms of money, people, or the structure of your own life process, you really just don’t have any freedom to do anything but let the clock tick.

— § —

There is only one answer, of course, and it’s the one that nobody likes and that also creates social opprobrium and future problems. Something gets sacrificed. For example, all of the following are simple solutions, from one perspective or another:

• Stop paying debts and just walk away

• Just quit the job and go on as many forms of assistance as I can claim

• Say “screw taxes” and “screw the student loan paperwork”

• Just let the house and the cars rot

• Drive the dog over to the shelter and put her up for adoption

• Throw caution to the wind and just walk out the door and straight into the nearest bar to meet people

I mean, taken this way, there are six dozen ways to shake out some more freedom. But the thing is, all of them are temporary, i.e. they would enable movement today, and maybe even for a few weeks, but they would create significant problems in the future that would make life even worse, and that would leave me absolutely hating the me of today for refusing to just do something simple, easy, and lazy and stay home doing the expected things.

All of this sounds so juvenile, and so low-IQ. Like, an adult professional who is well-liked at work and has graduate degrees and lots of physical resources (computers, telephone, network connectivity, reliable transportation) ought to be able to figure this out.

But I am so f*cking stuck. And I have been stuck essentially since the divorce. Extended stalemate. I think this is why people do the thing where they just quit on everyone and everything. Like that—that I could probably do. Liquidate everything I can over the course of a few days, then empty out all access to capital, buy a plane ticket and grab my passport, and disappear forever into the streets of some low-functioning society where I’ll never be found, under a new name.

It’s like resigning in chess, or flipping the board over. You just throw your hands up and say “I concede. I lost!” and then start again.

But I know I won’t do that. So, it seems, I won’t do anything.

Happy Saturday. Sunday will be the same. And at the end of the weekend when they ask at work what I did on the weekend and other people are talking about ski trips and concerts, I’ll be talking about paperwork and house repair by myself. Again.

What I can’t quite figure out is whether the level of distraction that has overtaken my life is:

• Unique to me or experienced by everyone

• Part of human aging in general or specifically related to the late modernity

• Something to try to overcome/change or something to accept

I mean, the thing is that the days just fly by. It’s all a sort of whirl of adrenaline and racing and trying and failing to hit targets and explaining to rooms (or calls) full of people who you did or you didn’t or how you came close and then there are some numbers here and there and a lot of decks passed around and then the day is done, and then the week is done, and then the year is done, and then (this is where I am now) the decade is done.

And how did it all happen? What was the opportunity cost?

Who knows?

And I have talked to and/or asked a bunch of people that I know about this and it seems to all come down to “you have time for what you make time for” and when I sort of ask if anyone has any tips on that, the general wisdom seems to be “you’re going to have to actually sacrifice something” and/or “you can’t have everything so it’s time to decide what you want” and what I can’t figure out is whether everyone else is wise and has this sussed already and I’m way behind the curve or whether everyone is just repeating the platitudes they’ve heard but nobody knows if they actually work or do any good because nobody puts them into action, they just repeat them for peers when their peers are having a down day about the meaning of life.

I mean, I just don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s just damned hard to “find” time for anything. For your kids, for your work, for your household chores. Nothing seems to get done despite lots and lots of energy and effort being spent and what actually feels more or less like continuous and unacceptable sacrifice and then before you know it the time has passed and you don’t really feel good about it and you swear that things are going to be different but then they never really actually are.

What I can also tell you is that I have 45 (count them, 45) two-factor TOTP entries in my authenticator app, all distinct, all current, and I don’t even have TOTP on everything in my personal life, or on everything in my work life. And that my work Slack is blowing up and it’s 9:21 pm and I’m actually answering the questions and doing work.

So of course nothing happens.

And, again on the “I can tell you” front, my life is full of people telling me to “hug” or to “hang on to” or to “continue to ensure that I impress” in my job right now because the job market is a disaster and the economy (and tech in particular) are only going to get worse and of course the American-led order is collapsing so that means that whatever “bad” looks like right now (and it’s enough to cause people to reach out to me and make sure that I’m not thinking or even tempted to be thinking of finding new work), it’s going to look orders of magnitude worse (many orders of magnitude worse) within months to just a couple of years.

— § —

Am I living my life wrong?

All I’ve ever done is work hard and do what’s asked of me. I graduated high school. Early. I got college degrees. Bachelors. Masters. Doctorate. I started at gainful employment as a teen and have never had a period of unemployment longer than a month in my entire adult life. I’ve turned up. Done a good job. I proposed and got married. I bought used rather than new cars. I don’t own any luxury goods. I’ve not taken a bunch of international vacations. I was never abusive and I never cheated.

And yet I have no wife, just an ex. My cars are owned outright but I see everyone else driving around in $50k-$100k new cars. I have missed an awful lot of vacations with my kids that I sometimes sort of wish I’d taken. And for what? I don’t seem to be any better off than anyone else, and in fact in general I seem to be worse off.

And here I sit, working at 9:30 pm in the evening, while also perpetually running short on meeting bills (thank you, divorce, and thank you, student loans) and never having gotten on to the property ladder or managed to accumulate much in a 401k.

And unlike all the other guys in my boat, I hate Trump rather than taking pleasure in him so I don’t even get that.

This has turned into a pity party.

Let’s back it up.

— § —

I guess the thing is:

• I feel like I did it all wrong

• I feel fairly certain I am still doing it all wrong

• But whether as a matter of class, culture, or something else, I don’t have the knowledge and neither did my parents

• Won’t someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong, and how to do life right instead

I guess that’s all. Maybe that’s what this entire blog has been for or about all along. It’s a message in a bottle? I’m not sure if that’s what it always was but I guess that at least tonight that’s what it is.

No response yet though, after all these years.

I don’t like the way I’m living right now. There are two parallel senses of life, neither of them salutory.

1 — I feel like I’m just going through the motions, like time is sailing past and I’m wasting it, hardly even knowing that I exist at all.

2 — When I do have moments that I wake up and manage to take a few minutes to be alive, I find myself mostly thinking about legacy and end-of-life planning, as though I’ve been given a terminal diagnosis and am trying to tie up loose ends.

I also have this tremendous sense that I ought to be on vacation. I don’t know what that’s about.

But also, right now, when I’m not at work (say over weekends, or on holidays, I don’t seem to manage to do any of the things I plan beforehand to do. I’m often not even sure what happens to the time; the day starts, I shake my head a couple times, and the day is over—and I have no idea where it went or what I did.

Significant others are gone. Friends are mostly gone. Kids will be gone soon. Parents will be gone soon.

Here I sit.

Not sure what to do next.

It feels like for the last couple of years I’m caught in this weird reality in which I can’t properly perceive the emptiness of time, or possibly in which I won’t let time be empty, I’m not sure which.

Point being, there is this thing called time, and you have some of it every day. At least, that’s how we culturally construct this thing. And you are supposed to leverage that time that you have as a resource and use it to do things, perform tasks, etc.

The problem is that these days, I notice, particularly on weekends, that I don’t feel any opening to actually get anything done though I supposedly have two whole days of empty time to spend. Instead, I’m not sure where I spend it, but I get less done than I do on weekdays.

It’s clear to me that I don’t know what to do with it any longer, that I can’t see the opportunity that’s wrapped up in it or the freedom that it affords. Instead, I feel as though I’m repressing consciousness of it, i.e. that I might be just burning time on purpose by busily doing vacuous, forgettable things, purely so that I don’t have any of it.

But why would I do that? I’m not sure, but it results in the strangest sensation on, say, a Saturday, that the day isn’t really there and that I’m not really sitting in the middle of it. And then it’s over, after a brief period of studied deontology.

I used the same web host from November 2004 through December 2023. They were always good to me.

In December 2023, I got caught in what was, essentially, a scam. One of the discount sites that rhymes with “Poop On” offered a “lifetime hosting” package for a couple hundred bucks. Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited number of sites. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I thought if I get a few years out of it before they wound down, it would be worth it. So I switched.

Well… It lasted all of about three months before the “company” that offered the package “went out of business” and just sold all the accounts to their hosting wholesaler. The wholesaler then proceeded to charge us all at more or less what I’d been paying to my original host every month.

So to be clear, some “entrepreneur” 100% just defrauded a whole batch of people out of a bunch of money, then profited again by selling all those accounts in place to the company where they were hosted anyway. I imagine it’s like the old chain letter scams—people set it up when they need a quick $50,000 or $100,000 and assume they won’t get into legal trouble.

Anyway, now my sites were all on an international hosting wholesale host… who has honestly just plain sucked, and who really doesn’t care much about supporting these individual accounts vs. their reseller accounts. To be clear, it has sucked badly. Slow, no control over site domicile (I ended up on a UK physical host), buggy, unreliable. So I’ve been meaning to rehome back to my original host for a long time. (I toyed with the idea for a while of hosting in LightSail in my own AWS account, but I just don’t have the guts or the trust in my own skills to avoid huge unexpected charges.)

Anyway, we finally did it. Here we are with the first (and most important) of the sites back onto our US-based host that served me well for 20 years. The site feels much faster and the CPanel installation actually works properly. Also, I managed to create the hosting account with a serious typo at the start and they answered my ticket and changed the string in their hosting DB within about 10 minutes, from ticket create to ticket resolve.

If you want to know who the hosts are, let me know. But aside from that detail, the takeaway is: for everyone that for a couple of years now has at times had to email me with “I think your site is down again,” that era should be over. Thank God.

And hopefully I’ll post more as well, because the crap shoot of “is the site up, and will it respond within five minutes” when I go to post should now also be done with.

The structure of creativity throughout the information age is pretty simple, and it goes something like

• Increasing exponentially through the rise of the electronic world

• Reaching a crescendo around the time of the critical mass of the internet, with a higher cultural creativity and innovation quotient than ever before

• Then, falling completely off the face of the earth and entering a period of zero or even negative (destroying) creativity after the arrival of social media

Art is dead and I hate it. We need to kill social media and kill the internet and kill technology so that we can have art and the humans and sex, drugs, and rock and roll back.

Death, death, death, death, death.

— § —

Every word or image of creativity deletes a corresponding chunk of time from your life.

This is why creativity hurts, and also why the oldest people are also the dreariest.

— § —

The Posting Plan has been in execution and then aborted and then in execution and then aborted over and over again for days, and amidst it all of course there were more threats and such. But that’s how it all works, life isn’t really life without threats and such, especially in America the Beautiful.

— § —

When I feel my youngest is also when I feel my oldest.

There is a way in which nobody can read this or bad things will happen to me, and this is the sort of thing that everyone deals with in Our America which is why we’re all nihilists. At some point in the repression curve you decide that actually you would love for bad things to happen to you because you are tired of chewing on your voice.

Whatevs whatevs.

Nobody cares because nobody has time to care. Hell, people don’t even have time to care for themselves.

— § —

Frank Lloyd Wright is the scarecrow.

Enough.

Night.