Imagine a vegetable that is handheld, and very tough, which makes it easy to ship. It is versatile, used in cuisines from Mexican to Indonesian to south Indian to Australian to Louisiana. The entire vegetable is edible — skin, flesh, seeds, shoots, leaves, flowers, and roots. It can be eaten raw or steamed, boiled, baked, stuffed, fried, and marinated. It is quite good for you, and is high in vitamin C, folate, fiber, and various trace minerals.

This vegetable is the chayote, and basically nobody likes it.

The chayote, variously called the laplap, chowchow, mirliton, and Buddha’s hand melon, is a squash, just like zucchini and cucumber, which also means, like all other squashes, it is native to the Americas. More specifically, it is native to central Mexico, where it can be thought of as the Mexican version of zucchini: given the right circumstances, it grows like a crazy weed and produces a huge amount of edible fruit (the squash/melon/gourd family members are all botanically fruits, not vegetables).

Typically a light green, firm fruit, the chayote is shaped a bit like a pear, but with a deep, sort of inappropriate-looking cleft down the middle of it. Some varieties are a darker green and are covered in spikes. I avoid that kind because it clearly does not want me to eat it. It’s not hard to find, at least in grocery stores that stock even the most banal of “ethnic” foods; in Brooklyn, where obviously I live because where else would a shithead like me live, I can find it at supermarkets (Key Foods, Pioneer, etc.) and at my neighborhood’s ethnic markets, which are mostly Jamaican and Panamanian. It costs a dollar or two.

Chayote doesn’t inspire much love. In central Mexico, it is served with mole. That is a dubious honor because mole, the fantastically complex sauce which may or may not contain chocolate, is served with the blandest possible ingredients, with the intention of emphasizing the sauce. Mole is often served with, like, boiled chicken. And chayote.

But I think this is unfair to the chayote, which is a very bizarre and interesting vegetable. Raw, which I would suggest as one of the best ways to eat it, it is not very similar to its sisters, the summer squash. Instead it tastes sort of like a jicama: mildly sweet, incredibly crisp and juicy, somewhere between a potato and an apple, or a crisp pear. But unlike the jicama, which is tan on the outside and pale white on the inside, the chayote has a distinct green-ness to it. It tastes — and I am aware this sounds weird — a little bit like the way freshly mown grass smells. In a good way, I think. It’s very strange.

The chayote, like more popular New World crops (chiles, tomatoes, corn), was exported around the world once the Europeans landed in Mexico, and it can be found in some traditional dishes in the Old World, especially in Southeast Asia. It took to the soil in Australia as if it belonged there all along; it is common in Australia to grow chayote (it’s called “choko” there) right in the yard, against chain-link fences, which the chayote will climb. There’s also a fun rumor in Australia that McDonald’s apple pies were actually made with chayote, partly because the chayote keeps its crisp texture scarily well, even, presumably, while encased in cornstarched applesauce inside a fast food pie. (McDonald’s denies the rumor.)

It’s hard to come up with just a few recipes for the chayote, because it is so versatile. I haven’t even begun to explore all the ways you can cook the thing, partly because I’ve never seen the roots, shoots, or leaves here in New York, even though they’re all edible. But I think it really is an interesting, underused ingredient, especially in slaws and salads, where it can take the place of apples when the apple is out of season. In fact I think it’s better than apples in salads, more vegetal and not so overpoweringly sweet. Anyway here are some things to do with the chayote, which you should buy the next time you see it, because what do you have to lose? Worst case scenario, you can just bite into the thing. It tastes better than you think.

Chayote Tzatziki

Shopping list: Plain Greek yogurt, chayote, garlic, fresh dill, fresh mint, olive oil, lemon

Tzatziki is one of my all-time favorite dip-type things; traditionally it’s made with cucumber, but I actually like it more with chayote, which will not ever become soggy. To make: take a microplane grater (I have this one, it’s great) and grate two to four large cloves of garlic on it until you have a paste. Chop your dill and mint finely (do not use dried herbs for this; you need the natural oils in the fresh herbs to kind of penetrate and be broken down by the yogurt, which won’t happen with dried herbs).

Slice the chayote into small cubes, less than a centimeter on each side. Don’t peel the chayote; the skin may look tough, but it’s very thin and tender. The inner part of the chayote has one large seed and a kind of pale section surrounding it. Remove the seed but don’t worry about the pale part, chop that as you would anything else. (The seed, by the way, is totally edible, so include it if you want.)

Mix a big container of plain Greek yogurt — of the big brands, Fage is best, while Chobani is bullshit — with the chayote, the herbs, and the garlic. Squeeze in about half a lemon’s worth of lemon juice, plus salt and pepper to taste. Pour olive oil over the top. Serve with pita bread or crudite, put it on a burger, spread on a tortilla along with whatever else and make a wrap.

Chayote Som Tam Salad

Shopping list: Chayote, peanuts, garlic, cherry tomatoes, green beans, Thai bird’s-eye chiles, dried shrimp, brown sugar, fish sauce, limes, cilantro
Special equipment: Mortar and pestle

This dish, perhaps the national dish of Thailand, is usually made with green papaya, which I can never, ever find. Know what I can find? Chayote. It is probably the best green papaya replacement I’ve ever used. Everything else about this recipe is super traditional (except I use brown sugar instead of palm sugar, I suppose).

In your mortar and pestle, add a few cloves of garlic and a Thai chile and bash them with the pestle. The Thai style for this is up and down smashing, very different from the against-the-wall-of-the-mortar smushing common in Mexican cooking. (The sound a Thai pestle makes is typically written as “pok pok,” which is where the name of an excruciatingly cool restaurant in Portland and Brooklyn comes from.) When the garlic and chile is basically a rough paste, add in a few dried shrimps. I like the slightly bigger ones, not the teensy baby shrimps, but they work fine too. Then add in a handful of peanuts and bash just a bit more; you want the peanuts to be broken but not a paste.

Slice your chayote into matchsticks. This is sort of a pain. The best option is a julienne blade for a mandoline; they usually come with the mandoline when you buy it. A shredder disc-blade for a food processor will work okay. A knife will of course do the job but will be super slow. Anyway do this, somehow. Toss the chayote matchsticks into the mortar and lightly bruise it with the pestle, kind of tossing it around (a spoon in one hand and pestle in the other will help) to mix everything together.

Make your dressing: sugar, lime juice, fish sauce. The specific ratio will vary based on your limes, on the variety of fish sauce, on how spicy your chiles are that day, all kinds of stuff. Just add and taste: it shouldn’t be too sweet, too sour, or too fishy. When it tastes good, add it to the mortar as well and mix everything together. To serve, mix the salad with a few halved cherry tomatoes, some green beans chopped into inch-long pieces, and top with some cilantro.

Roasted Chayote With Chimichurri
Shopping list: Chayote, olive oil, garlic, red onion, red wine vinegar, serrano chile, cilantro, parsley, oregano, goat cheese

Using that microplane again, grate a few cloves of garlic. Chop about a quarter of the onion as finely as you can, and place the garlic and onion in a glass tupperware. Cover with red wine vinegar and let sit as you do the rest of this.

Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees. Cut a few chayotes into cubes, removing the seed, and toss in a lot of olive oil, like, more than you think you need. Maybe a quarter of a cup? Pour this all onto a baking sheet and roast for about half an hour until the chayote is browned and tender (it’ll never get soft).

Take a whole bunch of each of the herbs and chop them roughly. Chop a single serrano, removing the seeds if you don’t want it to be very spicy. Throw that all in a food processor, then dump the vinegar/garlic/onion mix on top. Turn on the food processor and pour olive oil in while it’s processing; this is a very oily sauce, more liquid than a pesto. It should almost look like a chunky herb oil.

When the chayote is done, remove from oven and salt/pepper to taste. Put in a dish and crumble a bunch of goat cheese over the top, then spoon the chimichurri sauce all on top and around. Eat greedily.

I don’t know that a weirdly crispy pear-squash thing that looks like something your fourth grade teacher would hold up during Sex Ed is ever going to be trendy. I can’t remember the last time I saw it on a menu in New York, even though it’s in season basically year-round and goes with any flavor you can throw at it. But that’s almost more of a reason to try the thing. After all, can’t we all kind of identify with the perpetually unloved vegetable?

Photo by debaird

“Whereas the mega-machine operated by violent means — forcibly divorcing the human-cogs of identity and absorbing their productive and creative energies through wage or slave labor — the mega-algorithm doubles back and promises you reunification with this alienated self through ‘authentic’ (or ‘creative’ or ‘social’) work completed on your own time. We are sold a desirable narrative about the wealth of networks, decentralized production, cognitive surplus, collaborative consumption, social engagement, and instant convenience. The techno-utopic discourses of emancipation and community that surround the technologies and sociopolitics that make up the mega-algorithm serve as an effective ideological veil, which shrouds the practices of exploitation and control. Don’t think of yourself as an overworked, underpaid laborer trying to hustle for a paycheck. No, you’re actually an entrepreneurial individual, building your personal brand and finding (or making) your niche in the marketplace.”

For anyone who’d like to be anywhere but here, which I have to assume is everyone. Enjoy.

★★★★ Blossoms glowed and skateboard wheels rattled. Sounds were as bright and crisp as the light in the clean air — the rustle of paper shopping bags in the hands of a man with a baby strapped to his chest, the individual note of an idling taxi’s engine, the shuffling of shoes, the squeak of brakes. Every parked car was its own sunburst, or two or three; a cyclist’s teeth were bright white. The afternoon, dulled by clouds, couldn’t match the promise of the morning. Still it wasn’t chilly, and the sidewalks were full. The sun broke through again on its way down, so that the living-room foam-rubber baseball game became a pure blinding golden haze from the pitcher’s mound. Purple clouds trimmed with pink remained when the light finally dropped behind the buildings.

Last week was Earth Day, which you could’ve celebrated by “finding the right clean energy solutions for your household,” as the Incredible Hulk enjoined everyone, or by eating a local agricultural product instead of produce grown with “Californian oil,” or making some earth-friendly Tumblr image macros, or you could have…taken a ride in an UberPool.

Uber’s Pool car service “matches two riders — with up to one friend each — heading in the same direction.” This is advertised most straightforwardly as a way to save money by splitting the cost of a ride with another person, while not giving up “Uber-style on-demand convenience and reliability: just push the button like before and get a car in five minutes.” But for Earth Day, Uber presented using UberPool as a “pledge” that could be taken to get “a car off the road, and cut emissions,” because the act of sharing an Uber with someone else inherently means one fewer Uber driver is ferrying a single person to a destination, and because, over the long term, it will help Uber reduce car ownership altogether.

The idea that being ferried in a car by a private driver helps the environment or somehow reduces the number of cars on the road may seem disingenuous at best, especially in a city like New York, where Uber offered, “in honor of Earth Day,” five-dollar flat rates to use Pool in Manhattan, but it is perfectly logical if you begin from the assumption that the only way those two riders could have gotten where they were going was in an Uber, or at least in a car. This, of course, is exactly where this idea springs from; as such, it is wholly earnest. So is the also seemingly incongruous idea that Uber, whose independently contracted labor force is largely composed of people who own cars — some of whom recently purchased brand new ones at Uber’s behest and with its guidance — wants to end car ownership. But it’s an idea that Uber has grown more insistent on vocalizing since it first introduced Pool last summer, and since its valuation has ballooned by orders of magnitude to north of forty billion dollars, necessitating that its implicit goals of total global transit disruption become accordingly explicit (cf. “that experience of like, ‘I am living in the future. I pushed a button and a car rolled up and now I’m a frickin’ pimp,’” to “Since day one, Uber has been committed to changing people’s lives by revolutionizing urban transportation”). In the blog post that announced Pool at the end of last summer, a single sentence notes, “At these price points, Uber really is cost-competitive with owning a car, which is a game-changer for consumers.” Last week, in an update on UberPool, “It’s a Beautiful (Pool) Day in the Neighborhood,” written by Conor Myhrvold, a data analyst for Uber who is the son of former Microsoft CTO and current third-most-famous molecular gastronomist in the world, Nathan Myhrvold, Uber’s vision to eliminate car ownership was the core of the post:

[O]ur vision is to help solve some of the most pressing problems cities around the globe are facing. Congestion is projected to get much worse over the next decade, and it’s barely tolerable now in many cities. The only real solution is to reduce the number of cars on the road.

Our carpooling service, uberPOOL, is helping to make that vision of fewer cars a reality. With uberPOOL you share the ride — and the cost — with another person who happens to be requesting a ride along a similar route. Riders can save up to 50% while adding only a few minutes of time per trip. With the lower prices, people can move past car ownership, as taking Uber becomes less expensive than using and maintaining a personal vehicle. And that impact on congestion can be powerful.

Making car ownership “a thing of the past” is a convenient mission statement — it is utopic, transformative, and vaguely humanitarian — not least because it both elides that most of Uber’s non-employee labor force is composed of people who own cars and acknowledges and welcomes their eventual obsolescence, which Uber is actively working toward.

@danprimack fair enough… driverless in 2030 FTW… 🙂 /@MikeIsaac

— travis kalanick (@travisk) February 7, 2015

But getting to that point — which, in Uber’s vision, anytime that anybody wants to go anywhere, an app embedded somewhere on their body will signal Uber’s ubiquitous, perfectly optimized network of electric-powered self-driving conveyances that a piece of cargo is ready for transport, because it is so cheap and efficient that locomoting any other way would be unthinkable — requires enormous scale, even before it can replace human drivers. It needs a lot of people in a lot of places taking a lot of Ubers, and it needs its prices to come as close to free as possible — both to advance the longer term goal of eliminating car ownership, and to satisfy its more immediate need for more users. Because it always need more users.

In many cities, UberX is already substantially cheaper than traditional taxis, a feat Uber has accomplished in part by reducing the cost its greatest expense — drivers — through rate cuts that it promises are balanced out by increases in demand. But in light of driver protests, spurred in part by fare cuts, it’s difficult to see how it could drive these costs down much further in order to continue to lower its base rates. Even so, the fare reductions achieved through UberX have been sufficient to require enough users that on most weekends in New York and other major cities, Uber finds itself in the peculiar position of being forced to effectively turn away users through surge pricing precisely when its customers most want to use the service because it cannot meet demand. But UberPool conveniently solves, or at least ameliorates, both of those problems: By putting two riders in one car, it allows Uber to essentially halve users’ base rates without degrading driver wages any further, and it allows Uber to more effectively meet demand without either putting more drivers on the road or turning away riders through increased fares. By lowering rates, it increases the potential base of users, and by expanding capacity, it maximizes the number of users that Uber can service at any given time. Little wonder Uber is pushing Pool aggressively with various five-dollar fare promotions to normalize its usage, even if it doesn’t actually reduce congestion. (If the number of new users that Uber entices through Pool’s pricing sufficiently outpaces the number of cars it “pulls off the road,” it doesn’t: Using Uber’s logic that every UberPool rider equals one car off the road, suppose that Uber already has a hundred customers, and it entices all of them to switch to Pool, cutting the number of cars on the road to fifty. If Pool’s low rates brings in more than a hundred new users because they can finally afford Uber, there will be additional cars on the road But maybe it won’t! It’s reasonable to assume Uber will show us the data in a blog post.)

For the next couple of weekends, UberPool rides between Brooklyn and Manhattan that follow the L line will be just five dollars. This is not for Earth Day, but is part of what is becoming an Uber tradition of ribbing public transit during occasional downtime through promotional fares. (Previously, Uber offered “free transfers” when the G train, which connects Williamsburg, Greenpoint (“north Williamsburg”), and Long Island City (“Condo City”) was out of service. Strangely, Uber has never offered reduced or free rides during service disruptions in Far Rockaway or the Bronx, hmm.) In San Francisco, Lyft recently announced “HotSpots,” dedicated, common pickup points for Lyft Lines (its version of UberPool), at which fares cost just three dollars. You may recognize these as “bus stops.” There is probably something amusing in that Uber and Lyft have independently arrived at services designed to transport large numbers of people which resemble, in some ways, the mass transit systems they are designed to d i s r u p t (though, in their efforts to be perfectly optimal, are inherently neither redistributive nor progressive like actual public transit tends to be — and they likely never will be, without regulation). It turns out that mass transit is extremely efficient at moving around large quantities people and even, in some cases, getting them to “move past car ownership” en masse. What Uber and Lyft are building toward, in other words, is best understood as a privatized mass transit system built on top of public roads.

No company is better than Uber at telling so many seemingly dissonant stories at once: It is creating jobs, which it will obsolete; it is good for the environment because it will end car ownership, except that it puts people in automobiles instead of buses or trains; it is making transit cheaper, until, perhaps, it is the only form of transportation; and it is inevitable, after it unilaterally remakes or outright replaces city infrastructure. And all of those stories are, in one way or another, probably true.

The Twitter Background Danger Zone

by Matthew J.X. Malady

Somebody asked if my twitter wallpaper was in reference to the white male gaze, but it’s really just about how much I love Kenny Loggins.

— Ashley Ford (@iSmashFizzle) April 20, 2015

Ashley! So what happened here?

A week or so ago, someone tweeted and asked me if my background photo on Twitter was in reference to the male gaze. Due to my feminist ways, I can see how someone would think this was the case, but the answer is no. Kenny Loggins is so much more than the white male gaze. He’s a wonder, a gentleman, and the subject of my harmless obsession.

I was first introduced to Kenny Loggins’ music at the impressionable age of twelve. My seventh grade computer teacher gave me a tape of Kenny’s called Return to Pooh Corner because I was embarrassingly afraid of the dark, and he said it helped his daughter get over her fear, so it might help me get over mine. And it did! I’ve always had what boring people call an “overactive imagination,” so eventually Kenny became this loving and supportive father figure in my mind. I remember telling a classmate that his rat-tail made me think about MC Hammer, and then I felt really bad when I considered how Kenny would feel about me being mean to that person.

If I can be honest, I had no idea Kenny Loggins wasn’t some amazing, sensitive new artist who seemed to really care about kids and nature and stuff. When I realized that how much I dug him was a little off-brand for my demographic, I tried to be sneaky about my adoration. Unfortunately, I’ve never been great at pretending. I think a Kenny Loggins lyric is my senior quote from high school. As I got older, my love for Kenny only deepened. I have all of his albums, I know most of his songs by heart, and anyone who knows me KNOWS about him too. It’s inevitable.

Because of my intense love for Kenny, people often ask if I’ve ever has any contact with him, seen a show, etc. Aside from the fact that he RT’d me talking about his cameo on Archer, we’ve never had any direct contact. I did send him some fan mail a few years ago to say we had the same birthday, and that I think he’s amazing. I’ve never seen him live, and frankly, I’m afraid I’d pass out or something.

What do you say to the people who scoff at your love of Kenny Loggins, or don’t believe you, or to those who think you may just be professing to like his work in a joke-y sort of non-serious way? I’m sure you must get that type of response every now and again, no?

The good thing about being in the Kenny Loggins fandom is that no one outside it really cares enough to argue about it. Most people are initially incredulous, then a little confused, then they just accept me as I am. And Kenny as he is. And us as we are together.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Maybe mention Kenny in my bio.

Just one more thing.

There are so many reasons why we love the things we love, but the ultimate reason should always be, because we want to. Don’t fight it. Don’t let anybody steal your joy, or what makes you happy. Let them meet you halfway, and anybody who doesn’t dig your choices? Send them right into the Danger Zone. We only get one life, one dream, only one world. This is it.

The internet is consolidating under centrally managed conglomerates and is endeavoring to remake the broader economy in its image. Much in the way that social media companies have been able to convert their temporary monopolies over novel forms of interaction into enormous corporations that, having ascended so quickly themselves, become immediately terrified and obsessed by self-preservation, newer companies are converting their brief control over soon-to-be-trivial labor concepts — software that matches drivers with riders, shoppers with buyers, clients with the variously self-employed — into multi-billion-dollar defense funds against their theoretical future disruptors.

Right? It all feels so inevitable, and so fast, and so inline with perfect economic principles, that it always seems a little too soon to talk about it. Why worry about life in an economy managed by toll-extracting asset-and-employee-free middleman companies when we only have to wait a few years to see what it will actually be like?

A cousin of this concern was expressed recently by Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a powerful VC firm, in the form of a “tweetstorm,” (TM) which I have rendered here as a “paragraph.”

The history of the internet is a series of battles between proprietary services and open protocols. Imagine if HTTP or SMTP were owned by a single company that could cut off access to developers. The world would have had far less innovation and wealth creation. In the 90s open protocols like HTTP and SMTP won out over closed services like AOL. Today, the situation is reversed, and closed services are winning for social networking, micromessaging, payments etc. But eventually the pendulum will swing back as the closed services atrophy and entrepreneurs & developers go elsewhere.

Maybe this is true; it is certainly appealing. Or maybe the decentralized internet was an anomaly! It is hard to square some sort of Return to Internet Nature with so many prospectors wandering the land with glints in their eyes. But who knows? The internet hasn’t been through enough macro cycles to give us any real sense of what the next one might look like.

Besides, this is optimism extending from resignation: the decentralization of the internet is something that will happen “eventually,” and an internet taxed by the platforms that host and shape it is still “winning.” And elsewhere in the world of people with millions of dollars to invest in tech, resignation to the externalities of the on-demand economy, as well as to its centralization, is being discussed more openly as a future problem. Labor is losing. (Again.)

Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures, wrote in September of last year:

One of the major economic trends we are currently seeing is the breakdown of traditional employment and the rise of labor marketplaces for freelancers, such as Uber, Task Rabbit and WorkMarket (to name just a few). The valuations for at least some of these companies suggest that investors expect them to be very profitable in the longrun. During the growth phase it is entirely possible to create value for both freelancers who participate in the marketplace and for the investors who own it but eventually there is a tradeoff where on the margin an extra dollar for investors means a dollar less for labor.

He asks: “So what influences the bargaining power in the future that determines how these marginal dollars get split?” He suggests a simple regulation:

an individual right to an API Key. By this I mean a key that would give an enduser *full* read/write access to the system including every action or screen the enduser can take or see on the web site or application. Alternatively one could think of this as an individual right to be represented by an algorithm.

Workers should have great access to the software that manages them, and should be able to delegate their negotiations with this software to.. software. His colleague, Fred Wilson, found these ideas very interesting. And they are certainly fun to think about: If the internet, as well as the part of the economy managed fully through its infrastructure, increasingly amounts to an expression of the wills of a small group of companies and people, then it is creating a scenario that could — or should — give rise to a new sort of labor movement, one that uses the tools of the new software industrialists to check their power. It is no coincidence that the most vocal proponents of the 1099 economy as a boon to “flexible” work schedules are the companies that stand to benefit from the normalization of insecure labor. These jobs are only meaningfully “flexible” to people who can afford to treat them that way, and only for as long as the jobs tasks they create are worth doing on a part-time basis. Their goal is to sell the labor of people who most definitely aren’t their employees to people who most definitely are their customers. Their goal is to do this at the lowest possible cost while eventually making a profit. This is what they are optimizing for, and it is reflected not just in their management and goals, but in their software. So why not entertain the idea of an algorithmic labor union? Some sort of organization that might pit software optimized to serve Uber’s interest against software optimized to serve the collective interests of its drivers? One demands absolute efficiency and the lowest possible consumer cost; the other wants steady schedules and livable rates for the people providing the service. Just as software logistics sweeps through established industries, it could streamline unions, making them more efficient, less prone to political distraction, more effective, and less precious about the past. Wouldn’t that be great, if software could go to battle not just for the benefit of companies and their consumers but against itself, for the benefit of the people living under its new mandatory reality?

Sure! (Although I can’t think of anything that would accelerate the replacement of human labor where possible — self-driving Ubers are a stated objective of the company — more quickly than algorithmic labor unions.) But it’s not clear that the tech money’s heart is really in this, and it’s a convenient way to brush off a major consequence of a thoroughly disrupted version of our current economy. It is the software equivalent of full market faith.

Besides, this is just a brief detour on the way to the real next internet, according to Wilson (and others):

I believe that in the long run these platforms may/will be replaced by blockchain based networks of labor where there is no platform middleman and there would be no need for a legal right to an API because all the data would be public by default.

Yes, no worries, Bitcoin’s got everyone covered in the long run. Dixon’s firm is bullish on this too: the “blockchain” — a decentralized public ledger of transactions — will provide a new economic fabric for the internet that would preclude the existence of middleman services for payments and trade in general; this is when “the pendulum will swing back.” It would arrive, for lack of an apt comparison, like a million Craigslists at once, sapping value from all those companies that colonized the internet with promises of efficiency before becoming exemplars of arbitrary inefficiency themselves (tech’s metaphoric vampire squids are identifiable by their company t-shirts).

This is narratively appealing; it’s the kind of twist you might expect at the end of a sci-fi book about the singularity, a glitch the prevents the machines from fulfilling their destiny by eradicating humanity entirely. “Don’t worry,” it assures readers, with rich dramatic irony, “even the most powerful companies couldn’t see the blockchain coming!”

But books end that way so the human story can remain intact, and so readers might consider reading the sequel. Here, on Earth Internet, we have no choice. From a venture capitalists’ mouth, such predictions sound like polite, conversation-ending promises; from anyone else’s, they sound a little too much like prayers.

Three minutes of warm, undisturbed synth-pop from the long-dormant Soviet.

by The Concessionist

The Concessionist gives advice like… once a month maybe? Whatever. I’m busy. Trouble? Write today.

Hi Concessionist,

Ha, okay this is going to be awful.

So maybe not as a dogma, but I think there’s some validity to the idea that white guys have kinda ran their course? It’s inspiring to read Saeed Jones’ statement that black women are the future! Even the Times review of that Jon Ronson book was able to interact with its ideas while keeping his influence to a minimum. I would love it if white guys used their patriarchal nonsense status to limit themselves and fold their influence into smaller and smaller pocket squares until some ambitious person of color can reach down and scoop them into her lapel. That should be the future of white dudes.

The only problem is that haha I am one of them! Whoops. I am a white boy with an ostensibly flexible gender orientation but really let’s be honest I just don’t want to be hetero because ugh. And I’m not sure how to reconcile the stuff I just said with my jealously-guarded self-esteem: nobody wants to be a pocket square, but maybe I should be one?

I don’t want to apologize for who I am, a) because my brain makes me do that anyway, and it’s probably unhealthy for me to perceive that the universe is validating depression-y insecurities, but more importantly b) self-loathing white guys with persecution complexes are just noooooooo *gasp* stooooop. And I don’t want to have one! Being me should be, like, fine, and not anything to be upset about.

It would be fine if I did my job and then shut up and watched Star Wars or something. Except I want to be a writer! I have good words to write about things that I want eyeballs to see. But I don’t want to be another white dude writer taking up space and eyeballs. I even write flippantly to avoid owning the thoughts on the page, because who wants another earnest dude anywhere ever? They (we? ack) are boring in practice and probably even morally objectionable in a cosmic sense — and yeah, rather interchangeable.

How do I submit pitches without feeling that I should stand down in favor of a more deserving word-brain? How do I get a book written without a very good and smart person saying it shouldn’t have been written by me?

Thank you Concessionist and sorry for the dummy email, because I am embarrassed for putting these bad thoughts into words and sharing them.

Thanks and sorry again,

King Of The Patriarchy

Hi, KotP,

So we meet again, white man.

There are a few things here, and I might have to break them up, okay?

Do who and what you want…

“Ostensibly flexible” is not a thing. Flexible definitely is! Thank God for hot bi guys. But it’s not something that you can or should trick yourself into.

Just like the rest of us, you shouldn’t suck anyone’s dick out of self-hatred.

Why not become the best heterosexual you can be? You sound youngish, and maybe in that particular period where you are trying to imagine yourself into being someone you are not. I had about three years of that, specifically about 20 through 23 for myself, and then it failed as a process, because you can’t really keep that up. You yam what you am, or, you am who you are naturally becoming.

You can’t fuck some different way for an imaginary revolution. You wanna bang and get banged in return by the people you do, and that’s all there is. You can’t trick your holes!

You’re right. Don’t spend a lot of time apologizing for this. In fact, quite the opposite. One service the straight white man can do is getting really good at the useful services he performs. I believe Valerie Solanas covered this ages ago?

People don’t want you to feel “ugh” about getting down and nasty with them. People want you to be like “YUM LET’S GET DOWN TO THIS TOGETHER.” Like off the diving board into the deep end, in it to win it, not like, “M’lady of the weaker sex, may I touch your elbow?” That’s gross and (almost!) nobody wants it like that.

Did you examine the drawings in the now-infamous Cosmo article chastely entitled “16 Lesbians Draw Their Best Cunnilingus Tips and the Result Is Amazing”? Start there, I guess!

Time to be a sexy sex object, buttercup.

…because you might have this backwards.

Actually (#actually) you being glib and ironic and self-effacing might be the opposite of useful. It’s just part of the noise in your head, as you point out. Why don’t you get stronger, more affirmative? You want to be a writer, for whatever reason, so become a better, stronger writer. Your job is to learn to nail down mushiness, instead of retreating from it. It’s to learn to be a lie detector.

I mean basically I’m saying… don’t be a wussbag. And there’s a good feminist reason for that. It’s not possible to trust someone who’s deeply uncomfortable with who he is. Eventually, they snap.

In any event, there are a number of things, in general, that many women might want from a man-type person.

For one, maybe a good deal less sexual assaulting, and a lot less harassing, and a lot less general gross assholeness. Can we assume you have that covered? I’m also assuming you don’t run an “indie literary journal” and aren’t this guy or this guy or basically any of these guys.

Now, moving down the list… a less interrupting, undermining, overtalking, idea-stealing, under-bus-tossing and backstabbing?

And then… well, I can only relay what straight women have told me over the centuries. But basically they would like you to be you. Falseness and unknowability and internal conflict in a person makes it impossible to get to know someone. So in that way you can’t be good to other people until you slap yourself together a little.

So, are you naturally a simpering wuss-biscuit? Then that is FINE. Be that.

But what if you’re actually a loud alpha dog, who needs to run free and bark loudly with other alpha dogs of all genders? You cannot deny that. It would be deeply unsexy of you to deny that. Be yourself tonight!

But.

Has anyone told you not to “be” a writer? (Besides incredibly successful writer Felix Salmon, so, ignore that?) If they haven’t, here, I’ll tell you: Don’t be a writer. I mean, go for it, you sound young, have a ball. Go write! Perform the act of writing. But just know you’re probably putting off something inevitable. There’s no end game, no “other side,” no end of the story, no successful outcome. It’s like, you were a freelance writer and then you were a writer who freelances and, in the end, maybe you’ll get paid to write freelance sometime.

Meditate on your 401(k) instead.

If you are going to pursue writing… then you have to make yourself not-interchangeable. It’s true, from an editor’s perspective, what you think about straight white men. There are a thousand of them writing and they are not so distinctive. There’s lots of fairly talented, relatively readable young and middle-aged dudes. If you scrambled all the bylines in the mens’ magazines, I’d almost never know!

The answer is that you basically have to overdevelop some specific talent to the point of swole roid-rage. Like, are you naturally a good reporter? Then triple-down on it. Are you funny, or visually mind-blowing, or a better historical researcher, or what? Not one of us can begrudge actually great stories. Make your pitches better than the women you’re working with. Make your stories twice as good. Somewhere you have one talent that puts you ahead, and you should ride its coattails to success.

And then, when you find out what writerly success is, I hope that talent will also serve you well in a real industry.

N.B. On purpose I did not address some crucial aspects of your question, particularly about race. I’m torn about doing so and not having done so. I think there’s a lot to say, I am not sure if I’m the one to say it, and so on. I think my best recommendation is “listen to the experience of people of color in the industry (and outside of it).” Saeed just wrote this after all. Anyway.

Drawing from Flickr by The Daily English Show. The Concessionist is an adult human in New York City who is somewhat worn down and willing to make a good number of sacrifices for a peaceful life. Is it decision fatigue? Or just ennui? That’s probably a question for a psychiatrist. Anything else, ask me. I agree to keep your identity between us unless like an emergency exists.

Previously:

• My Ladyfriend Hates My Lady Friend

• I Hate Myself Because I Don’t Work For BuzzFeed

• In Praise of Getting Back Together with the Dude who Dumped You

• How to Make Your Girlfriend Like You (Again)

• How Do I Live Through Getting Screwed At Work?

• Help My Friend Is A Snob!

• How To Share Feelings With Other Human Beings

★★ Gusts clamored against the building. The sun, when it showed, looked capable of being pleasant, but the clouds had persistence and numbers. Pigeons dropped on the air, wings stiff and upright, riding the wind across 68th Street and just under the top of the post office garage opening. By school pickup the sun had stopped trying, leaving dark sky and a cold wind slinging garbage in great sloppy curves and then, on the way back up from the river, even a grim sprinkle of rain. The maintenance staff had swapped out the winter insulation on the heating-and-cooling units, and chilly air forced its way up through the vent, as if the blower were on. The clouds allowed the daylight a few brief and lazy moments of glory before its final surrender.