A couple of days ago, I polled my Twitter followers, asking them what I should write about. As a joke, I included a “lizardman” option, and, well, this is how it went.
I’m not in the habit of letting my supporters down, so, today, I’m going to write about my status as a lizardman.
Before I get into it, let me note that I’m totally not a lizardman. Nothing I write below should encourage you to start searching my body for evidence of a scaly carapace. Under no circumstances should you read this and start analyzing my eye movements for signs of a twitchy reptilian nervous system. Don’t be crazy.
That said, there are a lot of fairly good reasons to suspect that I’m a lizardman.
This is assuming that lizardmen haven’t already reached the highest chambers of power. If they have, there’s little use for me; I have all the power you’d expect from a memoirist-turned-blogger. But, on the other hand, if we assume that lizardmen are currently trying to achieve ascendancy, and you look at my trajectory, things might start to get a little suspicious.
The lizardmen are aiming for total domination, which means that they can’t just grab power right away. That would lead to a brittle regime, easily overthrown. They’re in it for the long game. After all, they traveled all this way from Alpha Centauri. What they want to do is slowly shape world culture, achieving a quiet consensus, a worldwide timidity that they can rule over for centuries, even millennia. Doing this involves waging a gradual, shadowy culture war.
I used to be a journalist, which is to say, I attained a pretty good understanding of the information flow among the controllers of societal narrative, and a nice set of elite contacts. I was never quite at home in the profession, even though I hobnobbed with recognized figures—but this is what you’d expect from some sort of spy, intent on learning the social norms but never committing. Someone never quite able to emulate the human beings in the chattering class.
Now, interestingly enough, my social group is drifting more towards tech and venture capital. I know a lot of people working on civilization-changing technologies, like anti-aging and AI. Some of them, I’m writing for. Some of them I coach professionally. Some I just have dinner with. Weirdly enough, through shitposting, I’ve managed to cozy up to perhaps the most influential class on earth. I make like that’s an accident. It’s a pretty convenient accident.
My public persona is kind of wacky and lightweight. But it should be, right? My influence on world affairs would be more legible if I were, like, a ‘geopolitical consultant.’ Instead, I’m a writing coach who turns up in San Francisco now and again. There are tons of solopreneurs offering high-touch professional services in California. Absent other information, everything seems legitimate.
But now, from my position, it wouldn’t be hard at all to nudge certain important behind-the-scenes discussions in directions that could benefit future reptilian overlords. For example, I could ghostwrite influential whitepapers making the case for neural interfaces that could subtly encourage submissive behavior, setting the stage for a quiet but hostile takeover. Or I could promote the creation of charter cities or seasteading, which would, of course, manufacture new seats of power. We might see, in the future, such positions occupied by technocratic rulers who, weirdly, are fond of flicking their tongues out at the air.
Anyway, it’s just something you shouldn’t think about. Forget I said anything. Tune in tomorrow for another harmless update.