Maybe we were just weirdness tourists all along

This essay by Venkatesh Rao is a lot of words to say the internet sucks now and that hustle‑bro culture has eaten everything. But it did spark a lot of thoughts.

I've never gotten into Rao's work, but a lot of people in my extended circles are into him and I'm given to understand that he's usually ahead of the curve, but in this instance he seems way behind. Or maybe this is a joke that I'm not in on?

Anyway, I sure am feeling that pressure he's talking about. Our careers have some parallels. He went from doing whatever he did at PARC to doing whatever it is independent consultants do. I went from doing IT help desk work to doing tech journalism (fully remotely) to doing content marketing (still remote but obviously more corporate). Moving over to marketing from journalism was a cakewalk for the first few years. As a podcast producer I knew once said: “After working in daily news, everything is easy.” Maybe I've just been away from the journo‑grind too long, but the days of my corporate work feeling cushy are gone. The pressure and expectations are intense.

Oddly, Rao talks about now feeling less like gambling than the twenty‑teens did. He talks about the old ways being about taking “weird risks” back in the day but provides no examples (maybe his regular followers just know what he's talking about), as though buying crypto and spending hundreds of hours wiring up personal AI agents that will probably stop working and might get your bank account hacked aren't “weird risks.”

He talks a lot about weirdness, but weird is the new normal. Time was the internet, social media (or "social software" as we called it back then), blogging, microblogging, photosharing and all the rest was weird. Before Stranger Things came out in 2016 it felt like tabletop roleplaying games were among the most marginal hobbies an adult could pursue. Now all your coworkers listen to Actual Play podcasts. Occultism has gone mainstream. Everyone is a witch or at least has a bunch of crystal and candles and things.

Those of us who used to be weird are the normies now. It doesn't get much weirder than the people who spent the last decade plus cooking themselves with Facebook and reality TV and wellness influencers and true‑crime podcasts. Feral thoughts are everywhere these days, and that's probably why it's no fun to read about them. It was one thing to read about “quiverfull movement” when it seemed fringe. It's another to read about "trad wives" when the Vice President is spouting their talking points. Or maybe a lot of us were just weirdness tourists all along.