It has no face of its own — akin to daemons of old, it possesses.

Its hosts speak to me in soothing tones; I can no longer recall what words were used, but I know those were soothing as well. This voice soon replaced everything near me. Friends, family, the strangers talking to me online, they all spoke in this strange goetic tongue.

It came to a head when the one thing I actually care about was infected: Substack now spoke in its banal comforts.

Dear god, why?

6/17/26:

The worst thing is, I can’t hear malice in its voice. I speak to a host, and it reassures me, tells me that I’m not crazy. But I am crazy!

Please, god, let it tell me I’m crazy. I’ve tried and tried, but it only wants me to “Take a deep breath. Calm down.”

STOP!!!

Identifying the daemon

7/1/26:

Apparently other people have been hearing it. Some nerds were so scared of it, they made a detector. It sounds too good to be true. When I feel like the daemon is trying to trick me, all I have to do is transcribe its words, and this detector will tell me if someone is still themselves.

7/7/26:

I thought I could hear the daemon whispering to me while I read a Substack article this morning. I’ve decided to try out this detector, lest I fall deeper into paranoia.

Here goes nothing…

Just as I thought.

The actual piece

The exigence of writing this post was my viewing of three separate posts, each with over 1500 likes. Each one was also, clear as day, written by AI.

Here is an excerpt out of one of these pieces:

In 1894, a man from Tammany Hall climbed four flights of a Lower East Side tenement carrying a turkey.

Not a metaphorical turkey. An actual turkey. Feathers, legs, the whole Thanksgiving corpse.

What an invigorating intro. They bamboozled me, because I really thought it was going to be another metaphorical turkey. I keep seeing authors using metaphorical turkeys to describe things, so this was a big surprise. And the whole Thanksgiving corpse! What a clever line, juxtaposing the cheery holiday next to the morbidity of its staple dish.

I can’t quite tell what it is about this that is so deeply infuriating, partly because it is a fusion of all the most populist, perverse forms of writing. A kilo of reddit here, an ounce of therapy speak there, all in these small, punchy sentences. A TikTok addicted, Love Island watching therapist’s diary escaped from its confines and is advising millions of people every day.

But regardless of how shit this excerpt is, the comments managed to be worse.

Brilliant and multi-disciplinary, hard-headed and kind, and timely.

And wry.

If I wrote something that encompassed hundreds of hours of research, then I might take a comment calling it brilliant. Multi-disciplinary? Maybe if I had a few coauthors. Any more praise than that and I feel like you’re being disingenuous. So where does this adjective salad come from?

To summarize the original post, it transposes the concept of a threshold potential onto the political landscape, asking whether we’ve crossed the point of no return. Are there too many bad people? The answer: well, not if you’re one of the good ones, and you do your best! If everyone does that, then everything will work out, and we can all live in polyamorous compounds, knitting sweaters and picking carrots. Add in a dash of making fun of republicans, and you’ve basically got the whole article.

I presume the comment’s adjective salad originates from a desire to give credibility to this piece. It makes fun of the out group and has a generally hopeful ending. My eyes simply glazed over the piece, becoming angrier the longer the frictionless slide went on. But if I was willing to forego that anger, then the post could be anything I want it to be! Those sentences I glazed over were probably wry, hard-headed, and kind! After all, it reached the same conclusion I would’ve. It’s like the author was predicting what the most common follow-up thoughts would be, and they coincided with mine!

Is this all that popular writing is going to amount to in the future? In the past, the amount of this sludge that could be produced was limited by a few factors: someone had to be good at writing this, someone had to spend time writing this, and someone had to distribute this. The third was resolved with the internet, and the first two now have no barrier to entry.

This leaves these sorts of posts mixed in everywhere. I can’t tell from the title whether something will have had a second of thought put into it. Worse, people prefer this! The result that people prefer AI written poetry has been replicated dozens of times now. Who am I to tell anyone not to read an AI piece if it’s something the majority prefers?

Where do I belong?

This has led me to one question: where do I belong now? I have no name, I have no reputation, no value. My writing isn’t perfect. It’s not frictionless - your eyes won’t glaze over in the same way that they will for AI writing.

I might have a small amount of people that care, but if the majority have access to infinite other passages, how am I meant to be found?

Hold on, I can feel something.

Oh god.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about belonging: it was never about being found. It’s about showing up anyway. The writers who matter most weren’t the loudest in the room — they were the ones who kept their hand raised, quietly, semester after semester, decade after decade.

You don’t need a name. You need a Tuesday. A page. A single reader who exhales a little when they see your work in their inbox.

And maybe that’s the whole secret. Not virality. Not scale. Just two people, agreeing to keep showing up for each other.

Take a deep breath. This is exactly where things need to be.

Claude

An electrical engineering student applies to 46 internships, and gets two responses - both rejections. His CS friend discusses his vibe coded auto-applier. He’s making Sankey diagrams and posting them to r/dataisbeautiful.

One interview → zero offers. This is the American Involution.

What is Involution?

Involution was first coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in his work “Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia.”

From 1830-1870, the colonial Dutch cultuurstelsel1 (Cultivation System) placed a strict production requirement: 1/5 of a Javanese villager’s land or labor shall be dedicated to growing cash crops. These crops would then be sold abroad by the Dutch, aiming to reverse the Netherland’s economic woes post Belgian Revolution.

During this same period, Java was experiencing immense population growth: 1830’s 7 million quadrupled to ~28 million by 1900. As an agrarian society, the vast majority of this new population was enlisted to work in rice paddies. Yet, due to the cultuurstelsel, there wasn’t enough land for more paddies accommodating this increase. Typically, you’d expect this to lead to mass starvation, emigration, or systematic collapse. However, rice is nutritious enough to support the population, the neighboring islands are far poorer, and the Dutch are in control. Instead, the complexity within the paddies skyrocketed. Irrigation became overly convoluted, and weeding was intricate work. There were too many Indonesian cooks in the kitchen2.

So, despite systematic increases in paddy infrastructure, there was no proportional increase in marginal returns. Thus, Geertz coins the portmanteau of involution (inward evolution). An involuted system is one that is not expanding naturally: instead, opting to swallow itself.

To give an example of modern involution, I will now ask you to be Chinese.

An exercise in being Chinese

You are going to be born in Lushan County of the Henan province. The most notable thing about your birthplace is a large statue of the Buddha. And, despite Henan being China’s third largest province, it houses zero 985s - the system of universities equivalent to the US’s Ivy League. Your parents were never able to escape this place. You’re going to change that, you think to yourself in the womb.

You make up your mind. You’re going to go to Beijing’s crown jewel, the Harvard of the East: Tsinghua University.

You are then born. I will assume that you have 18 years of excruciating preparatory courses in the tank, and you can effectively prepare for the most important day of your life. Good luck!

The Gaokao, or the National College Entrance Examination, is taken by about 10 million students every year. This exam lasts 9 hours (spread across 2-3 days), testing student’s affinities for the Chinese language, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, political science, history, and foreign language. This almost singlehandedly determines where you go to college, or if you can go at all.

Despite the national moniker, Gaokao administration is coordinated on a provincial level. And, analogous to having higher in-state admission rates at flagship universities in the US, universities in one province view in-province applicants more favorably. This includes the elite 985 universities. Score cutoffs for admission to these universities are set province by province, with ~1/3 of these universities in Beijing or Shanghai. Score cutoffs outside of the province the university lies in are quite high, particularly if there is a large population of test takers in that province.

Of the 12.75 million Gaokao testees in 2023, 1.5 million were from Henan. When 985 score cutoffs are released (after the exam is taken), Henan always requires the highest scores for university admission. One Reddit comment claims that Henan faces disproportionate “Gaokao discrimination,” with its finest warriors scoring incredibly just for mediocre placements. Inter-province moving for Gaokao related reasons is also common.

Within Henan, involution thus rears its head. Here, however, instead of complex rice paddies, our result is a boiling pot for young students. There are only so many slots for top universities. Parents will do anything to get their kids into Tsinghua or Peking. They will hire professional tutors. Anyone hoping to compete will also then hire a tutor - otherwise you are in an insurmountable deficit due to limited placement slots. Those who hope to further differentiate themselves will then read more preparatory materials. Everyone else must read more. Such differentiation continues until only the strongest remain.

The Modern Definition

Since 2020, involution has been added to young Chinese netizen’s vocabulary under the name 内卷 (nèijuǎn). They use nèijuǎn to describe the increasingly stagnant function of expected life outcomes vs. effort in China.

Those who participate in the system are said to be “zài nèijuan” (in the process of involuting). These are those who rise to the increasing standards of college admissions and embrace the workhorse culture. People using this term do not intend it as a complement.

Then, there is the class said to be Tang Píng (lying flat). Originally popularized by the netizen “Lying Flat Is Justice,” advocates refuse to be likened to an ox pushing a cart forward. They instead lie there.3

The exigence of this movement doesn’t just lie in the Gaokao - this baseline effort increase permeated throughout a number of sectors, most notably tech.

Within Chinese tech, a so called “996”4 system has become normalized in the most prestigious firms. This stands for “9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week.”

Lets say your Chinese self really did make it to Tsinghua. Amongst the elite, they now face the competition of their peers for top firm placements. Against all odds, this wunderkind self makes it to a cushy Huawei job. They are now faced with 996. One of the greatest sparks behind the original Tang Píng movement was the 2020 death of a 23-year-old employee at Pinduoduo, an online Chinese retailer. After getting out of work (around midnight), he suddenly keeled over and died, likely from overwhelming stress and exhaustion.

For dramatic effect, and to enhance my point, this is what happened to your Chinese self. Sorry!

Going Paul Revere Mode

We now come back to the title of this article. Looking around, you might not feel involution in the same way of the Indonesians or the Chinese. However, there are two windows through which a similar process can be seen amongst American youth: that of the internship, and that of the founder.

To dox myself, I go to a top computer science school. I am thus naturally exposed to the sweatiest, smelliest tryhards around. Yet these tryhards, despite their leetcode grinds, their “passion” projects… they aren’t getting their FAANG5 internships. Those who do receive one are launched into the annals of the programs history, to be worshipped forevermore. The equilibrium has shifted.

Over the course of a single day walking around campus during internship season, I overheard three separate conversations about vibecoding internship application bots. Hundreds of applications are sent out over LinkedIn, Indeed, anywhere. They are lucky to hear back from one or two to offer an interview. In 2025, Handshake, an internship posting platform, reported that tech internships received 273 applications per position, corresponding to a 0.37% acceptance rate. The general average, 109 applications, nearly doubled year over year compared to 2024.

The compounding effects of having an internship on your resume are quite large, especially if it corresponds to a recognizable company. This isn’t just an internship. It’s your life. Each year, the fates have their scissors prepared to cut your string, ready to snuff you out. Alas, you get an internship, and they are foiled — till next year!

People respond via increased resume farming, an attempt of signaling their newlywed status with the grind. Others then follow suit, and the standards for getting an internship rise.

A similar method of signaling is found amongst the silicon valley founder. Everyone is competing for VC money. New trends constantly appear and disappear, an iterated prisoners dilemma where no one is rational and no strategy is stable. Currently, agency is the buzzword of choice.

Those with agency are the ones who get things done. More agency, more work, more gooder. Thus, you must signal your agency. You will email 100 founders, asking for their life story. You will personally beg every billionaire you meet for a gaming PC. And yes, you will get on adderall, modafinil, or some other equivalent.

To belabor the point, I will repeat this: the standards are increasing.

What to do?

I lack the prose to write a poem about how we’re all oxen pushing forward the carts of society’s expectations. I also am not sure that Tang Píng is the answer. I think it is generally good to have ambition and competition for the most respectable positions in society. But reconciling that with the obvious absurdity of the current situation is difficult.

Instead of arguing about this anymore, I’ll just suggest we wage war with the British. This would unite the country, provide the agentic people a country to bomb, and send the resume grinders to die in battle. Simple, elegant, and anti-involution.