Today’s story quotes extensively from Allen Ginsburg’s poem “Howl” (All the mentions of Moloch are from there). It is also somewhat inspired by this post from Scott Alexander:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I really love that blog, and his close read of the Ginsburg poem has stuck with me through the years since reading it. Anyway, enjoy!
Ascent
“Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!”
*****
“I want that ancient heavenly connection, Man. And it sure as shit ain’t here. You seen the new directives? The metrics are insanely detailed now, we’ll spend more time reporting than actually writing code. All glory to the fucking efficiency A.I., some people can stomach it, but I’m out, Jack.”
Allan had a long grey beard flecked with white. He snacked all day on crumbly, sugary, unidentifiable baked goods from the Korean deli down the block. The sugary crumbs and sticky starchiness of the pastries got stuck in the beard. But also Allan was as obsessed with keeping his beard clean and he was with keeping his code clean, so he had a beard-combing station and a massive supply of various wipes and towels at his desk. There emerged a daily battle over beard cleanliness that Allan fought without ever seeming to realize it was such a big part of how he came across to the world.
“I’ve been getting into solar arrays on the weekends. The wiring is ridiculously simple if you’re used to code. My brother’s got seventy acres of mixed forest and farmland in Idaho. He spends all day with the sun on his shoulders and no A.I. looking over them to see if he’s at max efficiency or not. He needs a tech person to get completely off grid and help him run his youtube channel. I cannot fucking wait.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Sam evenly, not looking away from his screens. “I’ll bet every day is something different.” Allan had seniority and had a certain charisma in staff meetings, and so he could not be openly disrespected, but Sam wasn’t about to give his full attention to someone who would be hunched over a solar array and not coding if he had his druthers.
“Shit yeah,” said Allan, who didn’t seem to notice Sam’s inattention, or perhaps merely did not care. “Can you even imagine what that’s like? Finish something and do something totally different the next day? How long you been coding on Caliber?”
“Three years,” said Sam. Allan’s desk was covered by a thin layer of sugary dust from his snacking. He kept a small vacuum in a drawer and would intermittently take it out and suck up the crumbs, but only a couple of times an hour and quite imperfectly, so he spent most of the day with the sugar layer visible. Sam’s desk was spotless; he did not eat or drink at work except once an hour at the drinking fountain.
“Nine years for me,” said Allan. “Nine fucking years coding this shit, new functions and new problems all the time. It doesn’t matter how hard I put the hammer down and work, cause the more work I do, the more potential new functionality I discover, and then I get asked about it in some fucking staff meeting and then it’s an ‘action item’ for my boss to tell his boss to tell his boss about. Get me to the fucking farm, please.”
Sam shot his cuffs, uncomfortable. He was the only coder in the department who wore a collared shirt and suit jacket while he worked. Allan was a talented programmer and as mentioned charismatic at times, but all Sam could think about was how much farther Allan could have gotten at their company if he hadn’t been so gross in his personal behavior. To not see that, to not pick a fruit that low-hanging in terms of career enhancement value, was something that offended Sam’s sensibilities.
Allan reached absent-mindedly for a wipe and cleansed the area around his mouth. He tossed the wipe into the wastebasket without looking, then reached for a powdered cookie before even returning his hand to a resting position.
Sam was suddenly revolted, on the verge of vomiting. The wetness around Allan’s mouth from the wipe glistened, and as he popped the cookie in, particles of sugar landed on the wetness and partially liquified in it. It was monstrous. And worse, it was a waste of talent.
*****
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
*****
Alan quit suddenly, a month later. Sam noted this, but mostly in terms of how it shifted the dynamic at staff meetings. Allan’s departure had left a charismatic hole in the meetings’ schedules, and Sam was able to fill that hole with his own charisma. People seemed to appreciate how much of a change of pace he was from Allan, from a cleanliness perspective if nothing else.
The cleaning staff came by and thoroughly cleaned Allan’s desk, much to Sam’s relief. An hour’s scrub and the layer of dust was gone. Sam did not resolve to never think about Allan again, he just assumed he wouldn’t.
Sam realized that actually coding on Caliber was not the way to get promoted and reach the top. Of course, a certain amount of baseline coding was required to justify his job in commonsense terms, but beyond that level, the return to him personally on the marginal coding hour was low at best. Caliber was an enormous project with thousands of coders working on it, enough that no one was going to get individual credit for any success. However, the stakes were high enough that screwing up one’s individual section was enough to earn significant blame. In that sense, working hard at the job wasn’t merely a sucker’s game for someone else’s profit—it was a negative value proposition.
He thus minimized his time spent actually coding, and instead spent his time scheming for advancement. He gathered files on co-workers and potential competitors for promotion. Part of Allan’s charisma had been that he seemed obviously without secrets; the sugar dust was all over his desk, so to speak. But most at the company weren’t like that. They had vulnerabilities that Sam did not, since he spent all his time outside the office exercising and shopping for suit jackets.
It occurred to Sam to wonder whether gathering dirt on his co-workers was ethical, but it struck him as odd that it might be. He knew surely at least some others at the company were gathering ammunition, so it only made sense that he do the same. To refuse on ethical grounds would have been to fall behind the others in terms of advancement, and, given that a low level of coding was actually more advantageous than a high level, advancement was really all he did at the company.
Sam was promoted, then promoted again. The efficiency A.I. recognized his talent for optimization and plucked him out of the coding bullpen, away from the desk next to Allan’s, and into private office. Sam started wearing a tie to work along with his suit coat. He did not find them particularly uncomfortable, and although there was no way to say for certain that failing to wear a tie would deny him a promotion, he was quite sure that wearing a tie would not deny him a promotion, and so he wore one.
Once he realized that about ties, he started seeing things like that all over, and changing his behavior accordingly. If he thought of an idea that might lead to advancement, he felt obliged to do it. He bought a slightly lesser model of the same car that their C.E.O. drove. He broke up with a girlfriend who suggested they vacation together three weeks before his performance review. He hired a private investigator to follow an important rival, looking for dirt.
He did not relish these things. Each one just seemed like an obvious move, value that would otherwise be left on the table, like wearing a suit jacket or not spitting sugar dust all over his desk. And thus he stripped himself of all that which he could not control and turn towards his own advantage. To do otherwise seemed not wrong but foolish and unnecessary.
*****
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
*****
As Sam moved up the corporation, the efficiency A.I. became less able to evaluate his behavior. He no longer did any actual coding himself, and so that metric had disappeared. He made hiring and firing decisions, but he made them entirely on the basis of the A.I.’s recommendations. Some of the other managers deviated sometimes and went with their gut feelings. Sam wondered if they really had some intuition that was too powerful to ignore, or whether they simply thought that having independent thoughts would distinguish them and lead to quicker promotion. In any case, none of Sam’s bosses in the C-suite ever suggested that he was wrong for following the recommendations, and it was useful to have the metrics to point to when a hire did not work out, so he kept doing it.
Sam had enough hobbies and interests to make conversation about, but he did not truly enjoy any of them for their own sake. They were tools, to fill out his personality for consumption by the A.I. and the C-suite executives who pondered its readout on him. He did not care that he did not care about his hobbies, but he did have an abstract idea that he should care, that there was something he was missing and might be called to account for one day.
So he took up other hobbies, but none of them stuck. He now had money to burn, so he bought expensive equipment, a nice guitar, a commercial rock tumbler, a next-gen VR gaming setup. But he couldn’t stay interested in any of them. They seemed like a waste of time. Not that they took away from work time, because with no pets, children, or a girlfriend he had several hours of spare tine each day despite a demanding work schedule. It was that, because they did not have a direct benefit in his efficiency score performance or strategic promotional scheming, he literally could not sustain the impetus to do them.
He thought from time to time about Allan, wondering idly if he had found his way to the farm, and whether, if he had, he still sprayed sugar dust all over the fields or crops or whatever he called the various farm things. He did not reach out to him, however. Allan had stopped being charismatic in meetings, and thus no longer merited more than idle contemplation.
Sam was promoted into the C-suite just before Christmas, a newly minted Vice President, an office twice as big, and new business cards. At this level of executive, the efficiency A.I. no longer even measured his performance. Sam had learned that fact much earlier in his career, and had always assumed that the executives turned the A.I. off themselves because they did not want the pressure of it measuring their performance.
Now he realized that the A.I. was not only unable to measure the performance of high-level executives—their jobs being so abstract and removed from the object-level problem of coding Caliber—the A.I. was actually unnecessary at this level. Everyone in the C-suite had internalized the A.I.’s perspective so thoroughly before arriving that there was no need to hold them accountable.
*****
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
*****
“Hey, Sammy Davis! Just wanted to tell you hello. It’s been a while, and I’m sure you’ve moved on and you’re not even sitting at the same desk where we used to sit side-by-side, and you probably don’t even remember Allan anymore. I do remember you, though, cause you were the last person I ever sat at a desk beside, so it sorta stuck with me. Savvy?”
Sam fought his way through the C-suite in a matter of three years, a rise considered meteoric in executive circles. He ate and slept and breathed leverage. As far as the decisions he made about his actual job, those he left entirely to the efficiency A.I. Every other executive at his level did the same (they could hardly have risen to their position by thinking for themselves), and so one hundred percent of their time was taken up with schemes of various sorts, and at those, Sam excelled.
“My beets are just about ready to come up. The Kale and Spinach have been going gangbusters for a month, I always plant too much actually. We did lots of peppers this year, but those have just started flowering, and it should be another month before we’re eating them. It’s so exciting to be in my second year and have more of a sense for the land, what grows well in what exact spot, that sort of thing. It’s all so particular and special and just mine. It’s exactly what I was hoping for.”
When he was at home, Sam took to staring at the blank wall for long periods of time. He had moved to a new, larger condo, but beyond a bed, a couch, and enough dishware to survive on, he had no initiative to buy other possessions, despite having enough money to afford anything he could have wanted. So instead he would come home from the office, sit on his couch, and let his unfocused eyes rest on the textured white of the wall where a television would normally be. Having no further promotion to seek, he had no more reason to fake hobbies, so he did not.
“It’s funny, I came out here to do the technical stuff, solar panels, off-grid, that sort of thing, but we’ve hardly done any of that. We just work the land. I used to stay up until dawn and code then take quaaludes to unwind enough to sleep, now I go to sleep when it gets dark and wake up at first light with no alarm. It feels like it’s been a lifetime since we sat next to each other.”
Sam heard that the CEO of the company had started using cocaine. He did not know if this was true or not, but he did know that it was true that people believed he did. And so, Sam, who had never used drugs in his adult life, obtained a large amount of cocaine from a friend of a former classmate, paid a homeless man to throw the drugs into the backseat of the CEO’s Tesla, and then called in an anonymous tip to the police. The CEO was fired, and Sam was given the job.
“Sometimes I worry about getting old out here. What happens when I can’t work anymore? How will I eat then? But that’s the shape of a life, I guess.You’ll be rich and have people around to take care of you when you can’t take care of yourself, even if you don’t get married. But I just tell myself getting old’s hell for everybody and it’s not that much worse just being hungry. Hell, it’s the hunger that makes the food taste good, really.”
Sam sat in his office, staring at the wall just like he stared at the wall at home. There was furniture in here, because he’d let his assistant pick it after staring at catalogs for two hours without actually seeing anything. What there wasn’t was anything to do. The efficiency A.I. ran the company. He did what it suggested, and profits went up. There was no one left to scheme against, no power left to grab, no fight left to energize. His marathon hike to the top had required him to shed all baggage and abandon all equipment, and so now he was on the summit with nothing.
He sent out for a box of pastries from the Korean Deli down the block. When they arrived, he ate them, one by one, messily, allowing the sugary dust on them to float away and collect in a fine layer on his desk. But it was too late.
END
Thanks for reading! As always, you can help me out by liking, commenting on, and sharing this story with anyone you think might like it. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
The part of this story that got to me the most was Sam and his hobbies. Specifically how he only had hobbies to make himself seem interesting and dropped them when he no longer considered them to be a necessity. I’ve seen many complaints over people feeling pressured to turn hobbies into side hustles, or how people don’t have time for hobbies because their work lives are too tiring, or how people fake being into things to seem more interesting than they actually are. It’s all very sad.
What a great story!