A Hard-On For The Apocalypse
A Hard-On For The Apocalypse
Moontower Munchies #6
Today’s letter is brought to you by the team at Ezra:
Ezra is on a mission to detect cancer early for everyone in the world.
In this week’s Moontower edition, the team at Ezra invites you to understand your risk of cancer for free using the Ezra Cancer Risk Calculator. In just 5 minutes and two dozen questions, you can learn what types of cancer you’re potentially at risk for.
Uses the latest research
The Ezra Cancer Risk Calculator is based on the Harvard Cancer Risk Index developed by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention
Considers your lifestyle
The Ezra calculator accounts for multiple lifestyle factors such as age, family history, etc..
Fully confidential
Your information is fully confidential and won’t be shared with anyone.
You can complete the 5-minute quiz by clicking here.
Exclusive deal for Moontower readers:
Should you decide to skip the quiz and sign up for an Ezra Full Body MRI scan, use the code MOONTOWER150 at checkout for $150 off your scan.
Visit ezra.com to learn more.
Friends,
What if the billionaires of this world, with their access to the guts of technological innovation, think the fuse has been lit? A slow-burning flame fraying the woven fiber that holds civility together is marching towards its final white light explosion.
What if they know they lit it?
The ponderance whips from absurd to conspiratorial to plausible and back around in the time it takes to close your eyes and tell yourself “snap out of it”.
Here are a series of links that progress from journalism to provocative yet abstract conjecture before culminating in an interview that is everything — trippy, depressing, uplifting and, above all, popcorn-by-the-handful fun.
They all tie together.
Take them in this order then call me in the morning.
Inside The Dissident Fringe, Where The New Right Meets The Far Left and Everyone’s Bracing For Apocalypse (Vanity Fair)
James PogueSilicon or Carbon? (The Point)
Nadia Asparouhova
Nadia is the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. While the book lies on my nightstand in an orgy with about 75 other unread friends I do read Nadia’s Substack when she publishes. Her recent letter pointed me to both of those reads. I’ll let her words set the table:
James Pogue recently published a thorough profile of prepper types who are gravitating towards the American West as a way to “exit” society, which heavily references Balaji’s vision of the network state, but something about the scene he paints feels more ominous, resigned, and doomer-ish to me than how I personally connect to it: a vote of no-confidence rather than a new reimagining. I view the tension between nation state and network state as fundamental groundwork for understanding why tech matters, where it derives meaning, and what it can contribute to society. To me, that is an optimistic story that represents a modern kindling of the American spirit. So that’s what I decided to write about.
If you read these in order, your mind will take a slow elevator through thinning air where you will remain suspended in, well, suspense. There are enough landmarks in sight to know it’s just a ride.
For now.
There’s a foreboding sense that the new thoughts are prepping you for questions one doesn’t expect to confront. Even if not for yourself, for your kids. Or theirs.
And then finally, just take the drop:
Go right over the edge, skull pinned to the headrest, with nothing left to do but laugh. And love one another.
[This was one of the most enjoyable pods I’ve listened to in a long time. I should disclose that my wife and I are also newly obsessed with Trussell’s canceled Netflix show Midnight Gospel.
It’s definitely not a cartoon to watch with kids. Or adults for that matter.]
Stay groovy!
(Oh geez, I’ll just say it out loud. There are groups of people from the left, right, and everywhere in between who all crave the apocalypse for different reasons. Still, I used to think the richest and most powerful people were exempt from that thought. Too much to lose, right?
Wrong.
Near extinction is the ultimate spread-widening trade. There’s too much to leave on the table without it. It would be more than a tad ironic if it wasn’t Skynet that enslaves us but the human paperclip maximizers we already gave the keys to (it might be both by the transitive property).
If you know the story of Leopold and Loeb, it doesn’t take much to imagine which moguls keep the Four Horsemen in their spank bank.
It’s not a matter of conspiracy. It’s more like dark triad meeting unprecedented technological capability + accelerating acceleration. You don’t need to resort to conspiracy. Just the gradual, then sudden evaporation of the illusions that glue it all together.
I feel like the significance of what happened in DOGE and GME as a metaphor is underrated. I hope I’m wrong.
In the meantime, prepping isn’t the answer. If we’re past the event horizon walling ourselves off is the same thing as keeping a brain-dead patient alive. For what?
Michael Crichton once wrote:
“If you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you. People dedicated to something other than themselves are the happiest people in the world.”
My version: Death is worse for those left behind. It’s not “you” you should be worried about.)
Once again…with feeling this time — stay groovy!
Substack Meetings
I was invited to be a part of the Substack Meetings beta. You can book a time to chat. I’m more expensive than a 900 number from 1988 and have a less sexy voice.
Book a meeting with Kris Abdelmessih
Moontower On The Web
📡All Moontower Meta Blog Posts
🧀MoontowerMoney
👽MoontowerQuant
🌟Affirmations and North Stars
✒️Moontower’s Favorite Posts By Others
🔖Guides To Reading I Loved
📚Book Ideas for Kids
🎙️Moontower Music
🍸Moontower Cocktails
Becoming a patron
The Moontower letter is and will always be free. My writing is a search “for the others”. The “others” are people like you who are unlearning the mental frames that artificially narrow our choices.
If you are here you already understand that inspiration is a tradable good. It’s not as tangible as a cup of coffee, but it packs 10x the adrenaline with an infinitely longer half-life than caffeine.
If you feel inspired, you can upgrade to becoming a patron.
Fun fact I discovered while finding that link: the show was released on 4/20/20. The date and year are just that much more fitting.
Loved this line- Death is worse for those left behind. It’s not “you” you should be worried about.
Keep on penning, brother. I forget which of my friends suggested you're worth the read, but I owe him a beer, at least.
I co-created Messy Times during the Wuhan Hysteria, to try to help people make sense of the complete insanity the government in collusion with Big Tech threw everyone. It's amazing to me how many sheeple still believe the fools atop our power structures ever knew what the hell they were talking about and/or that those fools ever had our best interests at heart.
Being born is a death sentence. Everyone needs to enjoy their brief time on Death Row.