“peak indifference”: a political phenomenon, when people who have denied an urgent problem begin to self-radicalize, not because of activists or public education, but because the problem has caught up with them, personally.

Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying
to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude.
In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible
obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years,
"woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a
"good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good
science fiction story is something that knows it is science
fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the
other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like
movies, it shouldn’t be more like books, it should be more like
computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT
THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO
IGNORE!

I don’t think you can last by meeting the contemporary public
taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don’t think
you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting
expectations. I don’t know many works of art that last that are
condescending. I don’t know many works of art that last that are
deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek
written all over you; you should aim to be one geek they’ll
never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that
straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell
with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what
society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird.
Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly,
thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of
horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic courage to
recognize your own significance in culture!

The culture that feels the most dangerous, and, thus, exciting to young people, will be what you can’t see online. And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something. Which, of course, will be filmed and put back online. You can’t escape the matrix entirely.