What I've worked out so far. Most of it isn't finished.
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Background
Homeschooled
Homeschooled, isolated, building forts out of whatever the yard had.
Came fromPleasant Grove, Utah. Minecraft with family at eight, forts in the backyard.
ChangedBeing alone stopped being something to fix.
Homeschooled my whole childhood. Clean, quiet house in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
Started playing Minecraft with my family at eight. First place I found where the only limit was what I could figure out.
Built forts in the backyard out of whatever I could find. Nobody asked me to.
Cooked, explored, made stuff constantly.
People treat a bubble like it's a disadvantage and I don't think mine was. It was quiet and I got used to working things out on my own, which is still pretty much how I do everything.
Background
Building what didn't exist
I built what didn't exist because there was no other way to have it.
Came fromCommand blocks at eleven, servers at twelve, datapacks at fifteen, GangDev at seventeen.
Eleven, messing with command blocks. Not writing them. Placing them and seeing what happened.
Twelve I was hosting servers. Fifteen I was making datapacks. Seventeen I started GangDev.
It was never about syntax. I could build things that didn't exist.
Games I couldn't play. Tools I didn't have. Stuff a kid in a quiet house had no other way to get.
Every gap I had turned into something to build, and that's still how I pick what to work on.
Wired to
Background
My dad
Chris Hansen built FX.php and gave it away.
Came fromMy dad. Web developer, built FX.php, open sourced it in 2001.
ChangedIt's why I code, and why teaching instead of carrying got set before I could name it.
My dad was a web developer. A real one.
He built FX.php, the first PHP class that let FileMaker users get at their own data, and he open sourced it in 2001.
He could have charged for it and he didn't. He gave it to everyone who needed it and went back to work.
He helped me set up my site, my first repo, my first Linux box, my first Minecraft world. Helped. He didn't do it for me.
I picked that up off him without either of us ever talking about it.
People called him a code poet and said he valued people above coin.
Chris Hansen. Six foot nine. Pleasant Grove, Utah. 1970 to 2025.
Evidence
FX.php shipped as open source in 2001 and is still distributed publicly. It solved a problem nobody was being paid to solve, for people who could not have paid for it. FX.php, open source since 2001
Wired to
Background
When he got sick
My drive went up, but mostly as something to hide behind.
Came fromHis last cancer surge. I had no tools, no resources, and no knowledge that mattered.
ChangedDrive went up and stayed up. It started as a way to not think about it and turned into the pace I still work at.
His cancer surged for the last time and I had nothing. No tools, no resources, no knowledge that mattered at that range.
I'd written a lot of code nobody could see and none of it pointed at the only problem that counted.
My drive went up through all of it, but it felt more like a fight to keep myself busy and keep my mind off what was happening.
After he died I just kept at that pace.
I felt detached and like I hadn't given enough. Both were true.
The goal is to change the world. Fix every problem possible, cure every illness.
Knowledge is power and knowledge is bounded by time, so more time is more intelligence.
That's why the tools are about time allocation. Every hour somebody spends mindlessly grinding is an hour that could have gone into knowing something, and the grinding is nearly always a problem somebody already solved and never wrote down.
So I build tools and not much else. Buy the hours back, the hours turn into knowledge, and the knowledge is what gets you to the rest of it, including whatever nobody had in time for my dad.
I'm not building something to leave behind. I'm not planning on dying.
Wired to
Background
Why GangDev exists
Always for me. I wanted a platform for the family to play my games on.
GangDev fronts everything I make. Games, tools, whatever's next.
It was always for me. I wanted a platform online so the family had somewhere to play my games.
It was never for my dad, I don't think. That's not what it turned into.
They didn't give it a lot of attention anyway.
Now it's for whoever wants it. The door stays open.
I want people to be able to get to the top. Not carried there. Climb.
Wired to
Background
Perfection and laziness
Laziness is the most common thing in history and it never uses its own name.
Came fromWatching people lie to land a gig, and watching people trade morality for control.
ChangedIt's the standard the whole company gets measured against, including the days I miss it.
The philosophy is perfection. Everyone says that's impossible and mostly I think they're describing themselves.
Laziness is one of the most common things in history and it never goes by its own name.
It calls itself optimization. Efficiency. Customer ease. Being realistic.
A small guy lying to land a gig is being lazy, because performing is cheaper than getting good. A billionaire trading his morality for more control is being lazy for the same reason. Different scale, same thing.
This is the route to the top without compromising myself or anyone else, and that constraint is most of the difficulty in it.
We're not at the top and I still lose to laziness on normal days. The standard doesn't move when I miss it.
Wired to
Background
The jobs
Every job showed me a tool that should exist and doesn't.
Came fromFast food, mechanic, technician, logistics, AWS.
ChangedDCOPS came out of logistics deficiencies. Candor came out of trying to stay productive on a full-time schedule.
Fast food was money. I wanted things and I bought them.
Mechanic work was more money and a setup for an adult life I hadn't designed yet. Enough for college if I wanted it, enough to invest, enough to buy the machines my projects needed.
Technician job in 2025 was a more pleasant and future proof route than working combines. Three months of that turned into eight months of logistics, then AWS.
Coding stayed the hobby the whole time. That was on purpose.
Every job showed me the same thing. A tool that should exist and doesn't.
DCOPS came out of logistics deficiencies. Candor came out of trying to stay productive on a full time schedule.
College is a real tool. It takes out the need to be ridiculously driven by selling you structure in exchange for responsibility, and hands you a paper proving you're consistent.
I didn't want that trade and I didn't need it. I code for fun more than anyone I've met and I plan to keep it that way.
Wired to
Background
Where I'm at
Career is going well, family life is not, and both are true at once.
Mentally? A little all over.
Family life feels like shambles some weeks. Career is blossoming. Projects are growing faster than I can document them. All three at the same time.
Five years out: completely self sufficient. Married to Jalyn. In the house I designed and built.
Still making things, which is the five year plan and probably the rest of it too.
I work hard, I try to figure stuff out, and I know which of my own problems aren't fixed yet.
Wired to
Background
Why I stopped making games
I couldn't justify building a time dump for other people.
Came fromTrying to build games from scratch for the family platform.
ChangedGangDev turned into tools instead of games.
I started the whole thing to put my games somewhere, and then I couldn't make myself build them.
Starting from scratch was hard, but that wasn't really it.
It felt like a waste of time. Games are a time dump, and making one is creating a time dump for everybody who plays it.
The only way I could justify it was monetisation, and money has never been enough of a motivator for me.
So the platform stayed and what goes on it changed.
Wired to
Ground rules
Logic is innate
Everybody can tell right from wrong. Whether they look at it is the part that varies.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Everybody comes with the ability to tell right from wrong. Nobody installs it and nobody really takes it out.
Emotion is a reading on that rather than a replacement for it. Worth knowing what it says, not worth handing it the decision.
Most people aren't confused about what the right thing is. They'd rather not look straight at it, because once you've looked you owe something.
That's most of why it's complicated is so popular. It buys an open ended extension on doing anything about it.
A tight chest when the honest answer lands isn't evidence the answer is wrong. Usually it's conditioning objecting to being looked at.
Take the feeling off and whatever is left is usually pretty obvious.
Worth saying
The claim isn't that everybody reasons well, only that the equipment comes standard. Bad reasoning is almost never a hardware failure. It's a decision not to run the check, made over and over, which means it can be corrected.
Evidence
A 2019 Oxford analysis of 600,000 ethnographic accounts across 60 societies found seven moral rules present in every one: help family, help your group, reciprocate, be brave, defer to authority, divide fairly, respect property. Curry, Mullins and Whitehouse, Current Anthropology, 2019
Infants as young as six months prefer helpful agents over harmful ones. Before language, before socialization. Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom, Nature, 2007
Wired to
Ground rules
Honesty is the operating system
Honesty works better underneath everything than alongside everything.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Honesty holds up better as the layer everything else runs on than as one value sitting next to the others, because a value can be put down when it gets expensive.
One dishonest process and everything built on top of it inherits that, including the parts worth being proud of.
Friction comes out of it. Friction isn't the point though, and anybody enjoying that part has mixed up being honest with being cruel.
How it gets said changes with the room. Waiting for a better hour usually just turns into never saying it.
They can't handle it right now is nearly always about the person saying it, and sitting on it doesn't make the thing smaller, it just runs up what the silence cost.
The expensive ones are the ones told to yourself, because nobody else is in the room to catch those.
Worth saying
Honesty gets defended here on efficiency rather than morals. The moral argument has been available for three thousand years and hasn't moved anybody who wasn't already convinced. The efficiency one is harder to walk away from, since a lie is a background process you keep paying for every hour it runs.
Evidence
A Notre Dame study tracked 110 people over 10 weeks. The group instructed to stop lying reported 3.6 fewer mental health complaints and 1.8 fewer physical complaints per week. The relationship was dose-dependent. Kelly and Wang, APA Convention, 2012
Deception carries measurable cognitive load. Lying activates the prefrontal cortex substantially more than truth-telling. Habitual honesty frees the resources that maintenance of falsehood consumes. Abe et al., Social Neuroscience, 2007
Wired to
Ground rules
Growth is not optional
Comfort is just decay running slow enough to ignore.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
There's no neutral setting. Nothing holds still.
Whatever gets used gets stronger and whatever doesn't gets thinner, so every day moves in some direction whether or not anybody picked one.
So comfort doesn't hold anything still. It's decay slow enough that a single day looks flat.
Growth isn't the same as suffering. Suffering is something you get through and growth is something you go after, and not being able to tell them apart usually means one of them is going wrong.
Limits exist to get pushed and ours mostly haven't been tested. Every ceiling somebody describes is a report on their own attempt at it.
Evidence
The brain physically restructures with repeated activity at any age. London taxi drivers develop measurably larger hippocampi from the spatial demands of the job. Maguire et al., PNAS, 2000
Optimal experience sits between boredom and anxiety. People report their highest satisfaction during challenging, skill matched activity, not during leisure. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 1990
Wired to
Self
Discipline replaces everything
Focus comes from discipline, and a dependency cancels out whatever it delivered.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Focus really only has one source. Most of what gets sold as a source of focus is borrowing against tomorrow's.
The test is whether it can be put down. Anything that can't be functioned without owns the person using it.
Caffeine is the honest example because the tolerance curve is public. Two weeks in, the dose that made you sharp is the dose that makes you normal, so nothing was gained, the baseline moved and now there's rent on it.
That isn't an argument for banning anything. Using something on purpose, on a day you picked, for a reason you can say out loud, is a tool. Reaching for it because the day started is something else.
Discipline is about the only thing that can't be taken away, discontinued, priced out or recalled.
Evidence
Caffeine tolerance develops within one to two weeks of regular use, so the net effect becomes maintaining normal function rather than enhancing it. Juliano and Griffiths, Psychopharmacology, 2004
Across 32 studies, trait self-discipline predicted academic performance more strongly than IQ. Duckworth and Seligman, Psychological Science, 2005
Wired to
Self
Accountability is the mechanism
Everybody is working on incomplete information. Correction speed is what varies.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Being wrong is structural rather than occasional. It comes with working on incomplete information at speed.
So what separates people was never how often they're wrong, it's how fast they fix it.
Own it, fix it, move, and skip the pause in the middle for feeling bad about it. That part is for the person who made the mistake, not the person it landed on.
Second guessing is the loop working. Anything with no loop in it drifts quietly and then fails all at once.
Blind spots come from dishonesty or laziness more than from being dumb. Either the looking didn't happen or the bothering didn't. Smart people get the worst ones, because a good brain will build a solid sounding case for whatever it already wanted.
Building a defence instead of an answer is the tell, and it's a bad trade anyway, since owning it takes about a sentence.
Evidence
People who routinely assess their own reasoning improve their calibration over time. Those who do not self-assess remain consistently overconfident. Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger and Kruger, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2003
Wired to
Self
You don't get to be right
Logic is the thing that's right. You just get closer to it.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Logic is what's right. A person is only ever more or less lined up with it.
So being right isn't a state anybody arrives at and holds onto. That would take being perfect, and nobody is, which means the question was never whether you're right. It's whether you're closer than you were.
Which makes correcting fast most of the skill, since every pass gets rid of something that was off.
A lot of what arrives as feedback isn't feedback. One question sorts it, which is whether it's arguing with the logic or reporting how it felt.
The logic part deserves all of it, including the part that costs something. How it felt says something about the room and not much about whether the thing holds.
Volume doesn't track with any of that. The loudest objection usually has the least behind it, and quiet isn't agreement either, because most people will let a wrong thing stand rather than spend anything on it.
So it can't really be handed off. Whoever runs the check has to have no reason to fudge the result.
Wired to
Self
Being alone
Being alone is the starting condition, not a wound.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Came fromA homeschooled childhood in a quiet house.
Nobody else has your inputs and nobody ever will, so the aloneness is real. A lot of avoidable damage comes from refusing to accept that.
Cycling through relationships and friend groups to avoid sitting with it is the weak part. The solitude isn't.
Somebody comfortable on their own is hard to get leverage on. Isolation isn't a threat to them, so they won't stay in a bad job or a bad relationship out of fear of what's on the other side, because they've been there and it was fine.
A small circle of honest people who are growing gets you further than a big circle of comfortable ones. Nobody holds more than a handful of real ties anyway, so they may as well be picked instead of left to whoever happened to be nearby.
None of which makes being alone the goal. It's the floor, so that everything above it got chosen rather than needed.
Evidence
Humans maintain roughly 5 intimate relationships, 15 close friends and 150 casual connections. Quality over quantity is a neurological constraint, not a preference. Dunbar, Journal of Human Evolution, 1992
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked 724 participants since 1938. Quality of close relationships, not the number of connections, was the strongest predictor of health and longevity. Waldinger, Harvard, 2015
Wired to
Self
Start before you're ready
Ready turns up after the work.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Ready is a feeling that shows up after the work, and people keep waiting for it beforehand.
Perfectionism does the job of procrastination while sounding better. It borrows the vocabulary of high standards, and I need to learn more first is about the most respectable way there is to do nothing.
The information needed is downstream of starting. It doesn't exist yet, because contact is what produces it.
Version two beats version zero every time, and version zero is what most people ship for their whole life.
Plan until the next step is obvious and then take it, because past that point the planning is just something to do instead.
Evidence
Deliberate practice, meaning doing the thing with feedback, accounts for skill development more than passive study does. Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer, Psychological Review, 1993
Wired to
People
Say something
Silence is usually protecting the person staying quiet.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Silence is a position. Deciding not to say something is a decision about where somebody ends up.
A friend falling apart and nobody says anything. A coworker half doing the job and somebody quietly covers. That gets called respect, and mostly it's preferring your own comfort and dressing it up so it stops asking questions.
Saying it is uncomfortable for an hour. Not saying it is comfortable for years, right up until it isn't.
Whoever tells you the truth about yourself paid something to do it, and it's worth noticing who ever has.
Once, clearly, no audience, no speech, and then they own what they do with it. Saying it is the obligation and how they take it isn't, and mixing those two up is how people end up either cowards or tyrants.
Evidence
In close relationships, avoiding confrontation about a partner's health behavior tracks with worse outcomes for the person being protected. Enabling correlates with progression of addiction, weight gain and financial deterioration. Rotunda, West and O'Farrell, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2004
Wired to
People
Teach, don't carry
Give tools, not outcomes.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Came fromMy dad helped me set up my first site, repo and Linux box. Helped. He did not do it for me.
Carrying means solving it, handing over the answer, and getting the same problem back on schedule. Teaching means showing the mechanism, letting them struggle in it, and letting them own how it comes out.
Teaching is harder and slower and less satisfying, and it's the only one of the two that ends.
Somebody who gets carried doesn't get capable, they get dependent and then resentful, because being dependent is humiliating even when it's comfortable.
It sharpens whoever is teaching too. A half understood thing can't be explained, and the gap turns up the second the explaining starts.
It worked if they don't need you afterwards. Anything that made you more necessary was something else.
Evidence
The protege effect: people who teach material retain and understand it significantly better than those who only study it, because teaching forces organization, articulation, and exposure of gaps. Nestojko et al., Memory and Cognition, 2014
Wired to
People
Cut dead weight
Anybody enabling weakness isn't a friend.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
The people around you are a slope. Environment shapes people whether they agreed to it or not.
The tells are pretty consistent. Changing the subject when progress comes up, treating ambition like a symptom, making excuses and expecting those to be accepted as terms.
One bad day is a person. A pattern is a signal.
Teach first, always. Say it plainly once and give them a real shot at taking it. If they take it you got a friend out of it, and if they nod and nothing changes then you have your answer without needing an argument.
Cutting isn't punishment and it isn't a performance. No announcement, no final speech, no scorekeeping. Just not spending the one thing nobody gets more of on somebody who already told you what they'd do with it.
Evidence
Obesity, smoking and unhappiness spread through social networks. If a close friend becomes obese, individual risk rises by 57 percent, with effects detectable to three degrees of separation. Christakis and Fowler, New England Journal of Medicine, 2007
Wired to
People
Forgive, don't forget
Forgive every time. Don't delete the data.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Forgiving is maintenance on the person doing it more than a favour to the other one. A grudge is a process running on behalf of somebody who isn't thinking about you.
It drops the resentment. It doesn't mean deleting what happened.
Trust is a prediction about what somebody does next, built out of evidence. It isn't a gift, and deleting the evidence doesn't make anybody generous, it just makes the prediction worse.
Somebody who actually reformed faced their own failure and fixed it, which is more than most manage, and that earns a real second look. A second look still isn't amnesia.
Factor it in quietly and leave it alone unless it repeats.
Evidence
Chronic unforgiveness tracks with raised cortisol, blood pressure and cardiovascular strain. Forgiveness interventions reduce depression, anxiety and hostility across multiple meta-analyses. Worthington and Scherer, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2004
Wired to
People
Everyone learns
The capacity is universal. The willingness isn't.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Everybody can learn. There's no category of person exempt from it.
The capacity is universal and the willingness isn't, and those two get mixed up constantly, usually on purpose. I'm just not a math person is a sentence about willingness dressed up as a sentence about hardware.
Writing somebody off as incapable is the laziest read available, because it ends the obligation in one move. It's also usually wrong, since plasticity doesn't switch off at eighteen or forty or eighty.
It cuts both ways. If everybody can learn then nobody gets to say they can't, including about the thing they've been dodging for years.
I haven't decided to learn this yet is the honest version, and it sits very differently.
Evidence
Adults aged 60 to 85 who trained on a cognitive task improved working memory, sustained attention and multitasking, with gains persisting six months. Anguera et al., Nature, 2013
Children moved from deprived to enriched environments gain 12 to 18 IQ points on average. Measured intelligence is malleable, not fixed. Duyme, Dumaret and Tomkiewicz, PNAS, 1999
Wired to
People
Competition elevates
Work that outperforms pushes everyone, including whoever made it.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Competition is what keeps working together honest. Work that outperforms sets a standard, and that isn't the same as attacking anybody.
Every advantage is fair. Speed, tools, hours, obsession, a head start nobody chose.
The one constraint is not winning by deliberately compromising somebody else. Beating somebody is fine. Breaking them so they can't compete is admitting you couldn't.
Sabotage is top tier laziness, because it's cheaper to break a competitor than to get better than them.
Competition only destroys people who stopped adapting. For everybody else it's free information about where they actually are.
Evidence
Across 5,000 firms in 17 countries, firms in more competitive markets produce more patents and adopt new technologies faster. Aghion, Bloom, Blundell, Griffith and Howitt, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005
Wired to
Relationships
Why partnership
Real difference is what forces the growth. Comfort doesn't.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
A partnership isn't somewhere to rest. It's the closest thing anybody gets to an accurate read on themselves.
The man and woman version does that hardest, because the difference is real and can't be agreed away. Two people who handle stress and threat and repair differently have to build something durable across that, daily, for decades.
Gottman's work found that couples who go through conflict outlast couples who dodge it. Avoidance runs up debt rather than buying peace, and every argument skipped is still scheduled.
So the tension is the thing working rather than the thing failing.
That's an optimisation claim and not a verdict on anybody's worth. A same sex pairing doesn't have the same biological opposition driving this particular kind of growth, and adoption addresses the orphan problem, which has real value on its own.
Fertility isn't the mechanism either. An infertile couple navigates the same difference every day. Kids compound it rather than cause it.
Worth saying
Marked as a position rather than a fact. The evidence supports that biological difference is real and that engaged conflict outperforms avoidance. On its own it doesn't establish the ranking claim, and that part is the framework's read.
Evidence
Structural and functional differences between male and female brains are consistent across cultures and present from infancy, particularly in amygdala reactivity, prefrontal connectivity and hormonal stress response. Ingalhalikar et al., PNAS, 2014
Across 40 years and 3,000 couples, those who engage conflict rather than avoid it have the strongest and longest-lasting relationships. Conflict-avoidant couples divorce at higher rates. Gottman and Silver, The Seven Principles, 1999
Wired to
Relationships
Love is accountability
Loving somebody means not letting them hide from who they are.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Love is a standard held for somebody when they can't hold it for themselves. It isn't a feeling being reported.
Loving yourself means building yourself rather than indulging yourself, and that difference is most of the subject.
Loving a kid means raising them so they don't need you. Still needed at thirty means somebody optimised for being needed.
Warmth with no standards produces low resilience and high anxiety. Standards with no warmth produce compliance and distance. The parenting research keeps landing on both at once.
Loving a partner means seeing who she actually is underneath whatever she settled for, and not letting her live down there. Reminding rather than demanding.
Love that tolerates decay is comfort using the word, and it keeps that costume until the damage is impossible to miss.
Evidence
Authoritative parenting, high warmth combined with high accountability, produces better academic, social and psychological outcomes across cultures than permissive parenting, which pairs high warmth with low accountability. Baumrind, Child Development, 1966; Steinberg et al., 1994
Wired to
Relationships
What to look for
Individuality, passion, loyalty, honesty, communication, hard work.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Individuality first. A whole person with her own centre of gravity, because an echo is an audience rather than a partner.
Passion, meaning she wants something specific and badly, for her own reasons, and would want it whether or not you were there.
Loyalty that holds to your face, behind your back, and in a room where being loyal costs her something.
Honesty, meaning she'll tell you the thing you don't want to hear when it's useful rather than when it's safe. And communication, which is being direct without contempt and being able to be told something without treating it as an attack.
Hard work, because she runs her own life. Nobody here is a rescue operation.
Complement rather than echo. Overlap on values, differ on most of the rest, and let the difference do its job.
The disqualifiers are simpler. Changes positions depending on the audience, dodges conflict to keep things comfortable, has no goals of her own, expects to be carried, treats honesty as optional. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling predict divorce with unsettling accuracy, and all four are failures of honesty or communication.
Evidence
Gottman's Four Horsemen, criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling, predict divorce with roughly 94 percent accuracy. Couples who can repair, being direct without contempt, last. Gottman, What Predicts Divorce, 1994
Wired to
Work
Passion kills distraction
If you actually liked what you did you wouldn't be scrolling.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Scrolling is usually a gap rather than a willpower problem, and gaps don't respond to discipline, they respond to being filled. Something you actually liked doing wouldn't be losing to a feed.
The job most people hate has a chain behind it. Lazy about something, so never got good at it, so stuck with the options that leaves. Each link gets chosen and each one takes options off the table, until it looks like there was never a choice in it.
Gallup puts disengagement at 77 percent, which is most people spending most of their waking hours somewhere they'd rather not be.
The thing worth finding is the productive one you actually like. Not the impressive one and not the one that pays best. Then build structure around it, because liking it doesn't survive having none, and discipline with nothing you like behind it is a sentence being served.
Evidence
77 percent of workers report disengagement. Average non-work screen time for US adults is 7 hours 4 minutes daily. The two numbers move together. Gallup State of the Global Workplace, 2023; Nielsen, 2023
Intrinsically motivated workers enter flow roughly five times more often and report both higher productivity and lower burnout. Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Bakker, 2008
Wired to
Work
Wealth is a tool
Money is a multiplier. It was never the goal.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Money multiplies whatever is already happening. Applied to nothing it returns nothing and funds a nicer version of nothing. Applied to real work it buys equipment, infrastructure and hours.
Kahneman and Deaton found day to day happiness levels off around an ordinary income. Capability doesn't level off, which is why chasing the number tends to end badly, since hitting it is what shows you it was never the thing.
As a tool it doesn't run out, because there's always another problem worth more capacity.
Hoarding is the failure mode, and it's the multiplier switched off.
Evidence
Emotional wellbeing plateaus around 75,000 dollars per year in 2010 terms. Above that, more income does not reliably increase day to day happiness, though it keeps increasing access to tools, time and infrastructure. Kahneman and Deaton, PNAS, 2010
Wired to
Work
Demand perfection
Perfection is the end goal and I think it's reachable.
Perfection is the end goal for me. Everyone says it's impossible, and I think mostly they're saying something about themselves, because when you ask what they actually tried you usually get a pretty short list.
I don't even think it's the ceiling. Every time we figure something out it shows us a bunch of things we didn't know we could want. Nobody was sitting around wanting the internet before the pieces of it existed, and there's no reason that stopped happening with us.
The practical side of it is just cost. A bug you catch while you're still designing costs almost nothing. In development it's maybe six times that, in testing fifteen, and once it's live it's a hundred. So getting it right early isn't me being precious, it's cheaper. Most of the time when somebody says good enough, what actually happened is they got tired and made the call there, and then explained it afterward like it was judgment.
The bar I want is that somebody better than me could read it and not find anything I was lazy about. It working is the floor.
Tools are fine for that as long as they're speeding up work I was going to do anyway at a standard I was going to hold anyway. Where it goes wrong is using one to skip the work, because then I've got output I can't really stand behind.
Evidence
Defect repair cost scales with how late it is found: roughly 1x in design, 6.5x in development, 15x in testing, 100x in production. Boehm and Basili, IEEE Computer, 2001
Wired to
Work
Maintain everything
Health, mind, relationships, output. All four running at once.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Most trade-offs handed over as necessary are distribution problems described as physics. Hard work wrecks your health is the common one, and it gets repeated because it excuses two things at once.
The time numbers make it hard to argue with. Three hours of TV and two more on social is thirty five hours a week, a second job going into decay. So I don't have time doesn't survive an audit, it survives because nobody audits.
People working fifty plus hours who also train and sleep seven hours and keep their relationships together exist in real numbers. Not built different, just distributed better.
Drop one of the four and it doesn't stay dropped. It pulls on the other three slowly enough that something else gets blamed by the time anybody notices.
Where I break it
I'm not doing this well right now. My family life feels like shambles some weeks while the projects and the career are going fine, so I'm writing this as the thing I'm aiming at, not as something I've got handled.
Evidence
American Time Use Survey data puts average daily television at over three hours, plus two or more on social platforms. Roughly 35 hours a week of consumption. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, 2023
Output per hour falls sharply past a threshold, but the burnout literature predominantly describes poor time distribution rather than excess demand. Pencavel, IZA Discussion Papers, 2014
Wired to
Code
Read before you write
Check when being wrong is expensive. Overstep when it isn't.
Most confident wrong changes start with somebody assuming something about a file they never opened. Reading it is cheap and being wrong in production isn't, so for anything load bearing I check first. The check takes a few seconds and the guess takes a week, and usually it takes it from whoever touches the thing after me.
That's the version of this I'll actually defend, and it's narrower than how the rule normally gets stated.
Because I overstep all the time and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I jump into things I don't understand yet and I learn stuff that way that I wouldn't have gotten from reading first. You find the real edges by running into them.
It also changes what's available to you. Sometimes it opens a door I wouldn't have known to look for, and sometimes it closes one because I moved before I understood what I was moving. Both of those tell me something and only one of them costs much.
So it's about cost, not about order. If being wrong here eats somebody else's week, read first. If it eats my afternoon and teaches me something, go.
Where I break it
Where I get this wrong is not being honest with myself in the moment about which one I'm in. The jump that teaches me something and the jump that just costs somebody else time feel identical while I'm making it.
Wired to
Code
One source of truth
Two copies of a fact is one fact and one future lie.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Two copies of the same fact is one fact and one future lie. They will drift, not might, and every duplicate is a countdown to the copies disagreeing with nobody knowing which one is real.
Check whether something already does the job before making anything, and usually something does. Shared beats local, local beats duplicated.
A copy that falls behind never throws an error, which is why it survives review and why it has to get prevented rather than caught.
This applies to prose as much as constants. The same document existed in three places on this project, so correcting one was a silent drift in the other two.
Anything that can be generated should be, because a file produced from the source can't drift from it. Same with naming, one word per concept, since two names for one thing spreads into the code.
The exception is a record of a past fact. A changelog entry, or a version that was current at the time. That's data rather than a duplicated constant.
Wired to
Code
No filler in code
Say the thing and do the work.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
No filler, meaning not one phrase that exists to make the exchange feel warmer than it is.
State the problem, state the solution, execute, in that order and without asking permission first. Asking invites a no and frames the truth as a favour.
A comment that explains the obvious gets deleted. If it doesn't explain a non obvious why then it isn't carrying anything.
Same rule for people. Anything that doesn't carry information is noise, and noise is what gets made when being liked matters more than being useful.
Flat tone is the absence of a sales layer. It isn't coldness.
Wired to
Code
Push back
Compliance is the cheapest service and usually the least useful.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
An instruction that makes the architecture worse or more fragile should get said immediately, with the reasoning attached. That's wrong with no mechanism behind it is a competing preference.
Then offer the better path concretely, so the disagreement turns into a decision instead of a mood.
If the call still goes the other way, execute it fully and well. Sabotage by effort is the coward's version of disagreeing.
Teaching beats compliance, because compliance solves today and teaching stops the question coming back.
Somebody who only ever agrees isn't much help. They optimised for comfort, and comfort isn't usable.
Wired to
Code
Don't half-ship
Holding the whole system while changing one part of it.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
A fix that breaks something else moved the problem rather than fixing it.
So the job is holding the whole system while changing one part of it. Styling, behaviour, architecture, readability, performance, all at once.
Works on my machine is a statement about that machine.
Verification happens in the real thing. Load it, drive it, look at it. Reading the code isn't verification, and code that reads fine has taken down production more than once.
Anything that couldn't be verified should be said so, because an unverified claim reported as done is a lie with a schedule on it.
Done means done everywhere it touches. The feature, the docs, the log of what changed, the version that names it.
Wired to
Code
Ship it and log it
Work parked on a branch never shipped.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Unshipped work is incomplete rather than modest, and the modesty is the story about why.
A thing that only exists where it was built doesn't really exist, and building it for somebody else was the point.
Deploy small and often, because a big release is a pile of untested interactions arriving at once. Verify on the real host at the real URL, since checking under an assumed arrangement confirms the assumption instead of testing it.
Then write down what changed, same session, in the language of whoever has to read it. Maintainers need the file and the cause, users need what's different and why they'd care.
Never date an entry recently. It goes stale the second it's saved.
A change nobody was told about gets rediscovered as a bug, so the work includes the commit, the verification, the record and the version number that lets somebody find their way back.
Wired to
Risk
Death is a problem
A failure mode with a mechanism can be intervened on.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Death gets treated as a fact of nature. It looks more like a failure mode of a biological system, and failure modes have mechanisms.
Every mechanism anybody has described has eventually been intervened on. There's no particular reason this one is the exception, just a long habit of assuming it.
Caloric restriction extends lifespan in every organism tested, through pathways we share. Cellular aging markers respond to how a body is lived in, and exercise and sleep and stress and diet measurably slow them, with some of it reversing. None of that is a promise of immortality, it just means the dial isn't welded shut.
Global spending on anti-aging skincare is around 62 billion a year and public funding for the biology of aging is about 4.9 billion. Twelve times more on looking younger than on being younger.
Accepting decay as inevitable is expensive, because it retires the problem before anybody works on it.
The body is the one instrument that comes guaranteed, so that's where the work starts.
Evidence
Caloric restriction extends lifespan by 20 to 30 percent across tested organisms via conserved mTOR and AMPK pathways. Mattison et al., Nature Communications, 2017
Telomere length responds to lifestyle intervention. Exercise, sleep, stress reduction and diet demonstrably slow shortening, with partial reversal reported. Ornish et al., The Lancet Oncology, 2013
Almost every no exit moment had an exit earlier and it got missed because nobody was looking. The failure happens upstream of the crisis, usually by hours and often by years.
94 percent of crashes involve human error and most of that is predictable. Distraction, fatigue, impairment. Predictable can mean preventable, and preventable means there was a decision in there somewhere, whether or not it felt like one at the time.
That isn't a claim that nothing bad can reach anybody. It's a claim that the decision point sits further back than the part that hurt.
Something external that still lands after real attention was paid is a different case and doesn't need carrying.
Which of the two it was is worth being honest about, because nothing could be done is the most comfortable sentence available and it's often not true.
Evidence
94 percent of crashes involve human error. Situational awareness training reduces accident rates by 30 to 50 percent in aviation and generalizes across risk domains. Endsley, Human Factors, 1995; NHTSA, 2023
Wired to
Risk
Trying isn't failing
Attempts return information whether or not they work.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
A real attempt that doesn't work is data. It isn't a failure and it isn't a verdict.
The attempt never made is the one that returns nothing. No result, no information, no correction.
Public failure is harder to quietly renegotiate afterwards than private failure, and it costs less over time, because an audience that has already watched somebody be wrong stops being worth budgeting for.
Fail, take the information, adjust, go again.
Wired to
Risk
Cut consumption
Something that arrives with a defence attached is usually not growth.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Every hour goes to production or consumption. Recharging is a claim worth checking rather than assuming.
One question does most of the work, which is whether publishing the hours would be embarrassing. If it would, the knowing was never the missing piece.
The second check is whether it's being explained. It helps with relaxing, it keeps a person informed, those can be true. The question is whether they're true this week at this volume.
Rest is real and it isn't consumption. Rest restores capacity and consumption spends it and hands back a feeling. The clean version of rest is boring. Sleep, food, training, silence, people worth being around.
Cutting it tends to surface hours that seemed not to exist.
Wired to
Pressure
Sacrifice is a failure
Check who narrowed the board, and when.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
The forced choice is almost always a built choice, and usually the person making it helped build it. Having to give up X to get Y is a report about a position that was allowed to develop.
The move was three steps back, before the board narrowed.
Real no win scenarios exist. They're rarer than the number of times people claim to be in one, so the claim is worth checking, which means asking who defined the options and what they get out of defining them that way. Most trade-offs get presented by somebody who benefits from there appearing to be two doors.
Intelligence looks less like solving the dilemma elegantly and more like stopping it from forming.
Making the sacrifice well isn't the interesting part. The earlier decision that built the trap is.
Wired to
Pressure
Don't trade clarity
Clarity is the instrument every other judgment runs on.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Some rooms only open on the condition of turning up impaired.
The offer gets framed as access. The network, the deal, the opportunity, belonging. The price is a version of the person with the judgment turned down.
That's a poor trade, because the thing being rented out is what evaluates whether the trade was any good.
Other routes exist. Slower, less social, less immediately rewarding, and they don't require being less than yourself to walk them. Anything only reachable impaired was built to be reached by impaired people.
Wired to
Pressure
Work is the defence
A record is hard to fake around.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Anybody who does anything visible gets misrepresented.
Arguing is a weak defence, because arguing with a characterisation gives it a stage and a second day. A record holds up better. Long, consistent, public, boring in how regular it is.
A body of real work is hard to fake around, since the fabrication has to survive contact with everything that actually happened. Words get twisted in an afternoon and ten years of shipped work doesn't.
Which makes the record the thing worth building, and reputation a side effect other people maintain.
When it comes, say the true thing once, briefly, and go back to work. People who matter check the record, and the ones who won't check were never going to be moved by a rebuttal.
Wired to
Pressure
Don't hide it
Concealment keeps the thing running.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Hiding something isn't neutral. It's a decision to let it keep running.
Protecting somebody from the consequences of what they did can protect the behaviour rather than the person. Not my place gets said about a lot of things that are directly somebody's place.
Exposure isn't automatically cruelty. The discomfort lands on one person for a while and the cost of concealment lands on everybody downstream for as long as it runs.
That isn't licence to broadcast everything private. Truth serves everyone, gossip serves the teller.
The test is whether saying it stops damage or just moves status around.
Wired to
Control
Fix people, not tools
Removing the tool removes the evidence, not the cause.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
The standard move is restricting the tool because some people misuse it, and it's backwards. The tool didn't fail, a person did, and removing the tool removes the evidence instead of the cause.
Taking capability from the responsible in order to manage the irresponsible leaves a population less capable than the one it started with. Do that enough and you end up with a society that needs the restrictions.
Symptoms are easier to legislate than causes, which is most of why symptoms get legislated.
Fixing people is slower and harder and it's the version that ends.
A rule that assumes somebody can't be trusted can train them out of being trustworthy, because capability that never gets exercised doesn't survive.
Wired to
Control
Ideology is control
Three paint jobs, one architecture.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Religion, political tribalism and cults of personality read as one architecture with three paint jobs. Obedience demanded, questioning punished, compliance rewarded.
Once the shape is familiar it turns up in places that would object loudly to the comparison.
One diagnostic does most of the work, which is what happens to somebody who asks the obvious question in good faith. Corrected is a system. Removed is an ideology.
Afterlife, coming utopia, right side of history all do the same job. They lower the urgency of building with the one life anybody can confirm they have, because a promised second life makes the first one negotiable.
If God exists he built logic, so anything asking for logic to be suspended isn't asking on his behalf.
This has to stay correctable. Something anti-ideological that can't be questioned has turned into the thing it was against, and that includes this page.
Wired to
Control
Outsourced discipline
College, trade school, bootcamp. Same mechanism.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
They run one mechanism, which is deadlines somebody else set that the student agreed to obey. They don't create knowledge, since the knowledge was already public. They create consequences for not consuming it.
That's genuinely valuable for anybody who can't generate their own consequences yet, and most people can't. Pretending otherwise is posturing.
The mistake is confusing the structure for the growth, and then needing structure forever to do anything at all.
The credential proves consistency under supervision, which is a real signal and a smaller one than it gets sold as. The trade is explicit, which is responsibility swapped for structure plus a paper saying the swap happened.
Take it if it's needed, take it knowingly, and start building your own consequences the day you enrol.
The goal either way is getting to where a self set deadline binds as hard as one somebody else set. Until then the discipline is rented.
Wired to
Control
Build, don't protest
The concern can be valid. The method is usually lazy.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
The concern is often right and that isn't the part under criticism.
Protest says somebody else should fix this and I'll stand here until they do. Building says the problem gets made irrelevant and nobody has to agree first. One needs permission from power and the other needs work.
Solar cost dropped 89 percent since 2010 and EV range tripled. Those two facts moved energy policy further than thirty years of demonstrations did, and not because the demonstrators were wrong. A better option removes the argument.
When the alternative is cheaper and better, adoption stops needing persuasion.
None of that is an argument against speaking. Say the thing, then go build the replacement. The measure is whether the problem exists less at the end of the year.
Evidence
Solar generation cost fell roughly 89 percent since 2010; electric vehicle range roughly tripled over the same period. IRENA, Renewable Power Generation Costs, 2023; IEA Global EV Outlook, 2023
Wired to
Hard cases
Obesity
A discipline failure, because that framing is the one that leaves the person any power.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
It's a loop, and loops are how small problems turn permanent. Weight cuts mobility, less mobility means less activity, less activity adds weight, and each turn makes the next one harder. Stepping in early is the cheap moment the loop offers.
Genetics, environment, metabolism and circumstance are all partly true and none of them are things a person can act on.
That isn't contempt and it isn't a ranking of anybody's worth. Nobody is worth less for being in a loop.
It's refusing to lie to somebody about a thing that's shortening their life while there's still time to change it.
Once, in private, no audience, and then help if they ask.
Evidence
Obesity reduces lifespan by 5 to 20 years depending on severity and is the second leading cause of preventable death in the US. Annual medical cost is roughly 173 billion dollars; individual lifetime medical cost premium is roughly 92,235 dollars. CDC, 2023; Cawley and Meyerhoefer, Journal of Health Economics, 2012
Wired to
Hard cases
Abortion
Responsibility comes before the act.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
The useful work here is upstream. The decision before the decision, because that's where there's any leverage.
Sex makes life. Accept that going in, every time, with full information and sober.
Don't get impaired into a situation you wouldn't have picked clear headed, and don't create a life you aren't prepared to be responsible for.
That's a position about conduct rather than legislation.
Where agency got removed by force is a categorically different case from where agency got squandered, and treating those as one thing is dishonest in either direction.
Downstream of that there isn't much to add that upstream didn't already say.
Wired to
Hard cases
Capitalism and socialism
Aligned, with reinvestment mandatory.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
A system is best judged by the behaviour it rewards rather than the values it states.
Markets reward output, so work moves outcome, imperfectly and with real noise but in the right direction. Competition elevates, so a system built on it improves faster than one built on allocation by committee.
The historical spread isn't subtle. Comparable populations under market and planned systems diverged by factors rather than percentages.
Planned systems fail at the root that matters most here, which is detaching individual accountability from individual outcome. Rewarding stagnation the same as effort produces dependency rather than fairness, and dependency is what this whole document is against.
The caveat isn't decoration. Unchecked, this breeds hoarding, which is the multiplier switched off, and without a reinvestment ethic the winning turns into the whole point. Win, then build something real with it.
Evidence
GDP per capita, 1950 to 1990: West Germany 23,989 versus East Germany 13,822; South Korea 8,704 versus North Korea 2,841. Market systems outproduced planned ones by roughly 1.5 to 4 times. Maddison Project Database, 2018
Wired to
Hard cases
Mental health and therapy
Solvable through acknowledgment, accountability and work. This is a position, not a fact.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Same mechanism as everything else. Acknowledgment names the problem, accountability owns the fix, and effort is the part nobody wants to hear about.
Structured cognitive work runs 50 to 75 percent efficacy for depression and anxiety, and it works by changing thought patterns through structured accountability. That's the research describing its own mechanism. Exercise performs about like medication for mild to moderate depression, which is a measured result and it's free.
The hard read is that therapy is outsourced accountability. Somebody else says what to change and how to think, and it reaches about as far as the hour in the chair.
The relapse numbers are what push that read. 50 to 80 percent of people who stop relapse within two years, and a mechanism that stops when the other person stops running it was rented rather than built.
The worse failure is the label, where being in therapy turns into a credential that buys permission to stay put while looking like action.
What builds something permanent is unglamorous. Acknowledgment, routine, training, sleep, honest self assessment, somebody who'll tell the truth. Use whatever gets you moving and then take over.
Worth saying
This is stated hard so it can be argued with, and it's a hard read of a field with real evidence on both sides. A demonstration of the mechanism working without the other person in the room changes it.
Evidence
CBT shows a 50 to 75 percent efficacy rate for depression and anxiety. Exercise performs equivalently to SSRIs for mild to moderate depression. Hofmann et al., Cognitive Therapy and Research, 2012; Blumenthal et al., Psychosomatic Medicine, 2007
50 to 80 percent of people who discontinue therapy relapse within two years. Vittengl et al., Psychological Medicine, 2007
Wired to
Hard cases
Social media
Consumption infrastructure, optimised for time on app.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
The platforms are engineered for time on app. Not for the user and not against them, for the metric. What shows up there is the output of an optimiser that was never pointed at anybody's interests.
Both sides of the screen are stuck. Creators perform instead of producing and viewers scroll instead of growing, and performing is the cheap substitute for being good.
Internal research at these companies has repeatedly found harm to their own users and the products shipped anyway. That's a design decision.
The counter argument is reach and it's real. Reach earned by building something people seek out costs less than reach that intercepts them.
Eliminated rather than reduced or managed or used mindfully. The hours come back immediately, and anybody can run that experiment in a week.
Evidence
Leaked internal Meta research indicated Instagram worsened body image for 32 percent of teen girls who already reported such issues. Average TikTok session length is roughly 95 minutes. Wall Street Journal, The Facebook Files, 2021; Data.ai, 2023
Wired to
Cost
The pattern
Self reliance plus a platform plus an economic threat has a history.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
This isn't a conspiracy claim. Every case here is in court records, declassified files or official admissions, and they're worth checking rather than taking on trust.
Socrates taught one thing, which was question everything and logic is the only authority. Charged with corrupting the youth and executed. Hypatia taught maths and independent reasoning with no religious affiliation in a city increasingly run by religious authority, and a mob organised under the local patriarch murdered her.
Thomas Sankara took literacy in Burkina Faso from 13 to 73 percent in four years, vaccinated 2.5 million kids, planted 10 million trees and sold the government's luxury cars to fund public health. He refused Western aid and colonial debt and was assassinated three months later.
Fred Hampton built free breakfast programs and free clinics, community self sufficiency without government, and got classified a national security threat at twenty. Killed in his bed at twenty one.
Tesla built AC power and radio and remote control and planned wireless energy that could not be metered, and his funding vanished the moment that was understood. Died broke.
Gary Webb documented CIA linked cocaine trafficking funding the Contras out of court and DEA records. Three major papers took apart his credibility, his own paper retracted, and he was later found dead with two gunshot wounds ruled a suicide. The CIA's own Inspector General later confirmed the core of it.
Aaron Swartz co-created RSS at fourteen and downloaded 4.8 million publicly funded papers from behind a paywall, and prosecutors went for 35 years. He died at twenty six. Michael Hastings published quotes that ended a general's career and was working on an intelligence story when his car exploded on an empty road at 4:20 in the morning.
The thread isn't ideology. Each one either built self reliance infrastructure, taught thinking that made authority unnecessary, built tech that broke a revenue model, or exposed a dependency mechanism. The response scales with the economic threat, from discrediting to destroying the career to prosecution to removal.
Read as a risk model rather than a persecution story. It's worth knowing which of those four categories a body of work sits in.
Evidence
Sources by case: Plato, Apology and Xenophon, Memorabilia; Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, Harvard UP, 1995; Thomas Sankara Speaks, Pathfinder, 2007 and declassified French records reported by BBC Africa, 2021; declassified COINTELPRO documents and Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton, 2009; Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, Princeton UP, 2013 and FBI FOIA files; Webb, Dark Alliance, 1998 and CIA Inspector General Report Vol. II, 1998; Abelson et al., MIT Report, 2013; Hastings, The Operators, 2012 and Richard Clarke interview, 2013. Primary and declassified sources, collected
Wired to
Cost
Where Tesla went wrong
Building alone isn't enough.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Tesla was aligned with almost everything on this page. He built relentlessly, demanded perfection, treated wealth as a tool and refused to accept limits as fixed.
He failed on three things and the three together were enough.
Awareness, because he trusted his financier without modelling what happens the second his invention proves unmeterable. Cutting dead weight, because he didn't remove the people extracting from him and they extracted until there was nothing left. And work as defence, because his record was extraordinary and he built nothing around it, so other people took the credit and the patents.
Brilliance on its own didn't defend him, and a record only defends somebody who's still standing next to it.
Wired to
Cost
What adoption costs
Industries built on dependency shrink in proportion.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
This isn't a threat or a prediction of collapse. It's arithmetic on stated behaviour.
Pharma is roughly 1.48 trillion globally, reduced where discipline replaces dependency and unchanged where medicine actually treats disease. Alcohol is roughly 283 billion in the US and gone for anybody holding clarity as an asset.
Social advertising is roughly 227 billion globally and collapses without attention to sell. Higher education is roughly 2.1 trillion in the US and gets disrupted to the degree discipline gets built instead of purchased. Fast food is roughly 331 billion and drops as health maintenance becomes default rather than a project.
None of these are conspiring. They're responding to demand, and this removes demand.
That's the likeliest reason something like this meets resistance before anybody articulates a disagreement with it, and why it has to be given away rather than sold. A thing that reduces dependency can't be delivered through one.
Evidence
Revenue figures compiled from IBISWorld, Statista and OECD, 2023. IBISWorld, Statista, OECD, 2023
Wired to
Cost
Why a document
Ideas that survive suppression share a shape.
Drafted, not yet confirmed by Jens
Decentralised, so there's no leader to remove and no single point of failure.
Accessible, meaning no paywall and no gate and no account, because anything you have to be granted can be revoked.
Philosophical rather than political, which is harder to prosecute and harder to caricature and doesn't expire with an election. And self selecting, so no recruitment and no membership and no organisation to infiltrate.
A document is harder to suppress than a movement, because there's nobody to arrest and nothing to defund.
It also has to stay correctable, since something that can't be edited turns into an ideology, and ideologies get removed by discrediting one guy. So it's published in full, free, and anybody can copy it or fork it or argue with it by name.