The Birds and the Bholes

Why Is Everybody Online Such a Gigantic Bhole Now?

She does not say much, but the birds love her,

I have been making things on the internet for ten years. For the first seven of those years my permanent address rotated between a friend’s couch, a men’s shelter, a tent in the woods behind my parents’ house, and a stretch of beach in Key West (which, in the interest of honest hobojournalism, was awesome).

For the last three years I have earned enough money to afford an actual roof. The roof sits on top of a run-down motel next to a highway, owned by a Russian immigrant who I believe operates a side business manufacturing a soft drink called Tropical Fantasia, which he sells out of the two Pepsi machines on the property for one dollar a bottle. I respect his hustle.

If you return the empty bottle to the front office, he hands you a dime for it. I don’t think he is recycling these bottles in the civic sense.

I’m pretty sure he is taking them down to the basement, where there is probably some sort of Temu purchased ‘home soda machine’ down there, rinsing them out, and refilling them with more Tropical Fantasia, which then goes right back into the Pepsi machine.

The dime is not a deposit refund. The dime is him quietly buying back the only evidence. I have decided, purely as a matter of personal mental health, not to think too hard about which bottle I am currently holding, or how many previous lives it has lived, or how many strangers have held it before me.

This is what success looks like. I want the young people to know that.

In the last year I have also become “internet famous” (allegedly) which is exactly like being ‘actually famous’ except for the part where money is involved. It is fame in the way that a gas station microwave burrito is cuisine. People recognize the name. Nobody is buying me a mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

This morning a very attractive woman messaged me to say she admired my work, and we had a genuinely lovely conversation, and for the first time in weeks I felt like a human being and not a coin-operated outrage machine. I mention this because it is statistically rare. The overwhelming majority of my direct messages arrive in two flavors. The first is people promoting their own articles, most of which were written by ChatGPT in roughly the time it takes to microwave the aforementioned burrito, and to whom I respond by clicking “like” and thanking them sincerely for caring so deeply about advertising on behalf of OpenAI. They never get the joke. The second flavor, which is the majority, is people who message me for the sole purpose of insulting me.

The comments are worse.

Here is a true thing that happened today. I asked a woman how she had managed to get a different font to work in her Substack notes. That is the entire question. It is the kind of thing a normal person answers with one sentence and a smiley face.

Instead she informed me that I must be, and I am using her word, “retarded,” because it was “so easy,” and then spent the next ten minutes workshopping fresh material about my intelligence and my career.

Her closing argument, the one she seemed proudest of, was mocking the fact that the Wise Wolf is a Substack “bestseller,” as though the ranking itself were the punchline, proof that I am a try-hard whose little gold badge means nothing.

Which, fine. The Substack bestseller badge is not the New York Times bestseller list, and I am aware of this. The Substack badge mostly certifies that a person has spent approximately seventy percent of their waking hours for three years typing into a website until the algorithm, deeply against its own will, finally decided to start promoting them, presumably out of fear that if it didn’t, this clearly unwell person might eventually show up at the Substack office with a bomb. Which I would never do. And it says something genuinely bleak about the present moment that I feel the need to clarify that, out loud, in writing, because we now share a planet with a meaningful number of people who have concluded that blowing up strangers is somehow a more reasonable life choice than seeing a therapist, joining a gym, or acquiring a girlfriend who is not made of forty pounds of medical-grade silicone and shipped from a website that loads like Pornhub for furniture.

I had this entire article mapped out beautifully a few hours ago. I do my best thinking at the picnic table by the motel lobby, where once a day I smoke a single Nat Sherman luxury cigarette and watch the birds. The birds come because there is birdseed. There is birdseed because the motel owner buys it. He can afford to buy it because I keep buying Tropical Fantasia.

So the system functions like this. I receive sugar and the opening paperwork on type 2 diabetes, he receives birdseed money, the birds receive food, and I receive the pleasure of watching the birds. Everyone in this arrangement is a winner except possibly my pancreas, which has filed several formal complaints.

(Now you know why I have a silicon sex doll covered in birds as the thumbnail image.)

By the time the cigarette burned down, I had completely forgotten what I intended to write about. This happens now. I have spent three years researching and writing roughly eighty hours a week, and I am fairly certain I have worn a physical groove into my brain. We at the Wise Wolf bleed for our craft on a daily basis, and it turns out the blood had previously been assigned to operate my memory.

(I had to stop typing here and think for five minutes.)

Okay. I remember now.

The point is this. People online need to be more courteous to one another. Sitting behind a screen instead of in front of a face does not magically grant you the right to open a conversation with a stranger by attacking them. I am not saying do not defend yourself. Lily, my co-conspirator and the only reason this publication has working punctuation, is constantly on my case about the things I fire back at our more obnoxious readers. But I have never once STARTED it. I have never opened a thread with “you must be retarded” because someone asked me a question about fonts.

It is always the other guy. It is the people who declare me a hack. The people who insist that everything I have ever written was generated by ChatGPT, a claim they support by running my work through one of those “AI detector” websites, which do not function, and which will also tell you, with total confidence, that the complete works of William Shakespeare were produced by ChatGPT. These detectors were assembled in an afternoon by some guy who noticed they were easy to rank on Google about a year ago, and he made ten thousand dollars building a tool whose primary purpose is making people who actually work for a living feel like frauds. It is a beautiful business model if you have no soul.

Anyway. My face is still swollen from surgery. My surgeon, who I am increasingly convinced moonlights as a Bond villain, prescribed me precisely no pain medication, so I am composing this in a state of low-grade agony. I do not feel like writing. So this is the article. I am not even handing it to Lily to clean up, because she is buried in finals this week and then leaving to be a counselor at a summer camp for kids who want to become journalists, which is genuinely wonderful, and I hope she has the time of her life recruiting impressionable young people into our doomed and beautiful profession.

Now the part where I ask for money, which I will at least make entertaining for you.

The Wise Wolf is reader supported. We have lost paid subscribers every single day for two months straight, ever since we started writing about the technocratic takeover and the city-sized AI data centers, because a large number of people respond to reality the exact way a small child responds to a monster in the closet, which is to pull the blanket over their head and decide that not looking makes it disappear. This strategy works flawlessly on imaginary monsters. It works considerably worse on the roughly five thousand real ones scheduled for construction over the next decade, each one a city-sized data center owned by a billionaire who, almost as a rule, turns out to have a family tree with branches reaching into apartheid and the actual Nazi party.

Elon Musk’s grandfather actually published this as head of Canadian Technocracy in the 1930s. The giant-robot plan is not new. They just didn't have the parts yet.

Fighting this requires a lawyer, and lawyers, unlike Tropical Fantasia, do not cost a dollar. A paid subscription runs four or five bucks a month, roughly half of one Starbucks coffee, and it goes toward keeping a real attorney on hand to throw sand in the gears of the 30-foot-killer-robot future these gentlemen are building. If you believe in God, wonderful. If you do not, I get it, I wrestled with that one myself for years, but the data centers are going to strip-mine the natural world into a low-budget science fiction set regardless of your theology, so there is genuinely something in this for everyone. And if you cannot spare the money, restack this instead. The birds, the lawyer, the pancreas, and I all thank you.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Want more cheerful content about the billionaires building robots to enslave your family? Read on. It does not get better, but it does get worse, which is something.