F1 driving can’t be that difficult, right? Why are those guys in those little highlighter color Hot Wheels-esque cars paid millions of dollars to go zoom, zoom, zoom in circles? Isn’t it just driving? I have a driver’s license, so why couldn’t I theoretically become an F1 driver? Similarly, writing well can’t be that difficult, especially now with AI, right?

Isn’t writing just putting words together in a row? I have a language facility, as do you as a reader, so why can’t anyone theoretically write well? When everyone thinks they can write now that we’re in the AI copy-paste thought leadership this, slop that era, what is good writing? What is the value of it? Is good writing cheap nowadays?

Writing well and F1 driving are the same thing to me - to ask if good writing is cheap means to ask what it means to be a good driver. Asking if good writing is cheap to me is sort of like saying, well, driving can’t be difficult ultimately, you get the hang of it, so F1 can’t be that difficult, can it?

A regular driver and an F1 driver are both driving as actions, but they’re performing completely different activities. They are driving, yes, as they are participating in entirely different worlds with different skillsets and different reasons for different means, but it seems easier to group them under the same umbrella because from the outside looking at it, well, aren’t they just doing the same thing? Zoom, zoom, zoom, right, with driving?

Of course not, they are absolutely not doing the same thing, in fact they are radically different modes of operating, but most people have never seen the gap between who they are driving a car and who they could be as an F1 driver because most people have never been on the other side of the track inside a highlighter colored tiny toy like car, sitting on the driver’s seat helmet weighing heavy with hands gripping the wheel before they face the possibility of their existence ending in a televised crash. Zoom, zoom, zoom, you’re dead.

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What that gap actually looks like when you put a number on it is something like this: typically, an F1 driver starts learning in early childhood (i.e. between the ages of 4-8), and like any elite sport, it must be financed to the tune of tens of thousands a year on equipment and travel and coaching before the kid can do long division.

By the time they reach Formula 2, which is the last waiting room before F1, the family or sponsor group has by some estimates usually spent somewhere between hundreds of thousands if not millions getting them to the door. Now, within the sport? There are twenty-two seats in Formula 1. That means there’s twenty-two in the entire world. Like in investment banking hiring, the F1 pipeline eliminates virtually everyone who enters it, and the ones who wash out at Formula 3 are still more talented at driving than virtually every person who has ever touched a steering wheel, including you, me, and everyone we know. Yet none of this is visible when you watch the race. You just see the corner. You see a car brake. You see a car turn and accelerate. You think you understand what you’re looking at because you also brake and turn and accelerate on your way to the grocery store. You do not understand what you are looking at. The gap between what an F1 driver is doing and what you are doing when you drive is so large it is functionally invisible to anyone who hasn’t been told it exists.

Now, I think it’s fair to say that there’s some people who legitimately think their daily commute and Max Verstappen’s equivalent of a commute on a Sunday afternoon going around in circles are points on the same continuum. If you think this is a ridiculous proposition, consider that a YouGov poll of 1,732 British adults found that one in eight men think they could score a point off Serena Williams. Another 14% weren’t sure while only 3% of women thought the same. People genuinely believe they are operating on the same continuum as the best in the world, and they are not even close. One of them is transportation and the other is the most expensive, physically brutal, cognitively saturated life or death in a flashbang moment performance in professional sports, and the only thing they share is that both involve vehicles. Of course, you could also die while driving, but you get my point, right?

Writing has that same gap between what people think they can do and what they actually do. Similarly, the function of actual good writing, writing that deserves the word, is thinking in public. It takes raw material, which is reading and research and experience and domain knowledge and the specific texture of a life that was actually lived, and it processes that material through a specific mind into something that did not exist before. When I say writing well through thinking like this and processing it, I mean no, you shouldn’t be approaching writing with something like ‘can’t I just plug something into an LLM and copy paste that out?’ Yet a lot of people think this, they produce this, they assault our eyes with it, so they think this is good writing just like the delusion of thinking I can be an F1 driver because I can drive according to my driver’s license. So consider the ways driving and writing seem similar as abilities most people have some grasp of to some extent to some means, but what about doing it par excellence? Hmmm?

If you want to dig deeper at the question, consider the premise. What do you value? What do you find cheap? And how do you tell the difference? I think the key here is to consider the role of process. Initially I would have said curiosity was the way forward into thinking about value, but this is not sufficient. That’s because when Maurizio and I first spoke, he left me with a powerful metaphor to consider as he mentioned the Italian word discernere, and then connected this concept of curiosity in the process of thinking by using the analogy of sifting flour. Curiosity is part of what feeds and composes the flour, and then you put everything through a fine mesh and what comes through is usable.

You accumulate widely, you follow rabbit holes, you keep sixty tabs open like a person who has lost control of their browser and possibly their relationship to time (me, my goodness). But curiosity as an action alone is not enough. Discernment is the activity that builds on the action to do the filtering. It’s the moment where you sit with everything to figure out what actually holds, matters, is relevant, and necessary versus what was just noise that felt interesting at 2am. This is where the thinking happens that differentiates, in my view, the start of good writing. Discernment is also what F1 drivers do at five to six Gs through the corner, which is to say it’s the cognitive version of taking a turn at a speed that would kill most people, except they’ve been doing it since they were a child so their body knows something yours doesn’t because yours never had to learn. That’s the same, drumroll please, with writing well. Discernment, discernment, discernment, it’s the new location, location, location in the cognitive real estate section of our brains, I guess.

Don’t even get me started on the topic of taste in the role of discernment as that is a whole other beast. But yes ciao grazie duh, the part that costs cognitive resources, effort, all the words we can use to simply say brain power, well, it isn’t cheap. And AI skips it entirely. It pattern-matches without curiosity, it produces without discernment, and it outputs text that looks like writing the way a commuter and an F1 driver both look like they’re just doing the same action of driving when the reality is their activity is completely different.

So if the thinking is what costs, and AI doesn’t do the thinking, then what AI actually replaced was never writing. It was the assembly of words for an aim in content production, and confounding these two things is how you end up believing that writing is cheap when what is actually cheap is formatting other people’s ideas into an expected structure and calling it work. A peer-reviewed study published in Management Science found that automation-prone freelance jobs dropped 21% within eight months of ChatGPT’s launch while a separate study using actual firm-level spending data from Ramp’s expense management platform found that more than half the businesses paying for freelancers in 2022 stopped entirely by 2025. For every dollar they cut from freelancers, they spent three cents on AI. The speed and totality of that replacement is itself the proof. If this work had required original thought, it could not have been automated this quickly. You cannot automate what you cannot formalize, and you can only formalize what was already formulaic.

But the collapse of assembly was only half of what happened, because the market for thinking didn’t collapse alongside it, and instead it grew. The evidence for the distinction between good writing and assembly, I believe, is in the market itself, since it’s signaling something that neither doomers nor the naive are grasping. More than fifty authors earn over a million dollars a year through subscriptions on Substack alone, the New York Times added 1.4 million digital subscribers in 2025 and posted record revenue of $2.825 billion while the Financial Times hit a record 1.4 million subscribers with revenue topping half a billion pounds. If AI had made good writing cheap, all of these numbers would be falling, right?

Yet they are rising, and it is their thinking, their voice, their production of writing as thought that people pay for which serves as proof that words have the power to move people. Good writing isn’t cheap because it does things that AI cannot (at least) quite yet capture, and this is where it gets genuinely weird, because the irony, in my view, is that as hysteria over the value of writing proliferates as AI slop content is equally profligate, it turns out that we don’t trust AI-generated content. How funny it is then to see that a Raptive study of 3,000 U.S. adults found that when people suspect content is AI-generated, their trust drops by nearly 50%. This held true even when the content was actually human-written. The perception of it being AI-generated alone was enough to drive people away. Zoom, zoom, zoom quickly becomes disdain when @ pangramlabs asking is this slop.

By the way, roughly half of new web articles/content posing as articles is now AI-generated. That feeling you may have of everything getting lower quality? Yes, it is real, it is nonsensical, and it is everywhere. Speaking of nonsensical, just to recap so far: we began with the question of if good writing is cheap, we explored the possibility that we don’t think writing is valuable now that AI can generate it, but we’re surrounded by slop and the moment we think something is AI-generated slop, we don’t trust it, and also, by the way, we’re not accurate at detecting slop. Make it make sense!

The paradox is that people cannot actually tell the difference but they don’t trust it when they think it is, as a Stanford study found that humans distinguish AI from human text at roughly coin-flip accuracy. So what we actually have is a market that is paying a premium for something it cannot verify, which is the belief that someone on the other side of these words actually lived a life and had the thought and put their name on it knowing full well that people with agendas would come for them. That is what the market is paying for. Not quality in any technical sense but belief in thought, in production, in voice, in prowess, in the belief that the words you’re reading right now haven’t been hammered out by Claude or GPT or Gemini or (god forbid) Grok, or really any of the multitude of other options. Pattern recognition by AI is not thinking, which is just as true as the fact that the market does not reward merely thinking. The market rewards visible thinking. Nowadays, visibility is a function at the intersection of distribution, timing, nerve, sheer luck, and whatever parts of an algorithm seem to be triggered that day depending on the stability of Nikita Bier’s employment prospects.

But let’s be fair, because even if you sift the flour, the system that distributes your writing does not care about any of it. Remember the metaphor of sifting flour? The algorithm does not sift flour, it sifts engagement, which is why it pushes slop via all the generic generalized garbage that you’re likely feeling like you’re often reading. The thing we all depend on to find good writing is running on the exact opposite incentive structure from what makes writing good in the first place, and nobody is going to fix this for you because the people who could fix it are the same people who benefit from you not understanding the gap. I don’t have solutions for that right now and I don’t think anyone else does (to my knowledge).

And this brings me to one more thing that Maurizio and I spoke about that has been on my mind. Powerful people have an incentive to make you believe writing is cheap. Consider how some CEOs who over-hired during 2020 and 2021 need a story for the layoffs and they have two options. Option one is admitting they miscalculated, that they hired based on a growth curve that was obviously unsustainable, that they did not see the correction coming because they were too busy being congratulated for scaling and that this is how you fix it under an umbrella of a response. On the other hand, option two is saying they are embracing cutting-edge AI and unfortunately this magnificent technology means they need fewer people because their role can be automated. Consider which story protects their board seat, which story gets a positive headline in Bloomberg, and which story leads to a stock price bump. Then go watch some F1 racing and think about what goes into it.

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Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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“Karp herself remains the most eccentric of Palantir’s eccentrics. The lifelong bachelorette, who says that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives her “hives,” is known for her obsessive personality. She solves Rubik’s cubes in less than three minutes, swims and practices the meditative art of Qigong daily and has gone through aikido and jujitsu phases that involved putting cofounders in holds in the Shire’s hallways.

A cabinet in her office is stocked with vitamins, 20 pairs of identical swimming goggles and hand sanitizer. And she addresses her staff using an internal video channel called KarpTube, speaking on wide-ranging subjects like greed, integrity and Marxism. ‘

The only time I’m not thinking about Palantir,’ she says, ‘is when I’m swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity.’”

Forbes, “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” 2013.

(This incredibly based image/source is from the Quartr team from the 2025 Q3 earnings cover, all credit to them.)

What the fuck does ontology even mean anyways?

You’ve seen or heard the word somewhere before, on a podcast or a pitch deck about paradigm shifts or in relation to Palantir, the all-seeing all-knowing all-powerful panopticon as a program piloted by a peripatetic philosopher known as Dr. Karp.

The company, which has charted a wild trajectory from CIA-funded venture to dark horse retail trader hero to memetic roadshow and everything in between, built its entire operational backbone around something it calls the Ontology: a system that purportedly decides what a thing actually is. Feed it enough data on any entity, and it strips noise from signal, sorts the essential from the incidental, and tells you what you’re actually looking at for different use cases.

Palantir’s ontology does not confuse the properties of a thing with the thing itself, a distinction credited to its original technical co-founder Aristotle circa 350 BC, as ontology is also a philosophical discipline about the study of being. It’s the study of what things are, not what things do or what they look like or what they have.

That, of course, is the irony, as all the seeing and all the knowing anyone has ever done on Dr. Karp has seemingly only amounted to tai chi sabers, a cocaine quip about short sellers, and a retail cult that calls him Papa. If Palantir sees everything, we have looked at Dr. Karp for fifteen years and seen nothing.

Everything you have ever known about Alex Karp is a categorical philosophical error.

Not so long ago, it would have sounded like its own categorical philosophical error if I told you that Palantir, known for building surveillance tools for ICE, would be announcing a move of its headquarters to Miami, a county with one of the highest concentrations of foreign-born residents in the country. Since we’re already in the impossible and the year is full of surprises, let’s push further, as everything we need to know about the ontology of Alex Karp is also found in Miami. Let’s consider: what happens when Alexandria Karp walks into a bar?

I have been thinking about this for a long while because what initially captured my attention about Karp was how a woman would never be able to say what was said in that 2013 interview. For literally months, I’ve pondered - who would Alexandria Karp be, how would we characterize her, and where would she get to in terms of professional reception, much less the strata between all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful? I’m not interested in superficial takes like “Well a woman could never” or the banal, utterly mundane, entirely devoid types of easy parallels that come to mind when I point out Alexandria Karp is a deviant philosopher. I wanted to dig deeper into this to do the ontology of Dr. Karp justice as well as to myself as a woman writing about a man being reimagined as a woman in a man’s world. Something about writing about Martha Zuckerberg or Jennifer Bezos did not sing to me the way this did.

So like any good philosophical thought experiment put to the test, I thought a lot about it, far too much really, and it occurred to me that we need a method for sorting what’s actually Karp from what’s just the world’s reception of Karp. It had been there all along through ontology as the frame, but it didn’t occur to me until 3am far more recently than I’m willing to admit.

That’s why I insist that we pay attention to two words especially throughout this essay: essence and accident. Aristotle, the aforementioned technical original co-founder of Palantir’s ontology, distinguished between the two words as follows.

Essence is what makes a thing what it fundamentally is. Remove it and the thing stops being itself. Accidents are properties that could be otherwise, which means they are thus temporal. If you remove essence, the thing no longer is. To illustrate these abstractions concretely, consider what happens when I write the words red chair and you read them. The color is an accident, because you can paint over it and the thing is still a chair, even if you paint it black. Even if you see a red chair and want to paint it black, with no colors anymore, if you want the chair to turn black, you can take care of that.

Yet if you are to knock off a foot of the chair, something else happens entirely - the fact that it’s a structure for sitting is essential, and once you take that away from the chair by knocking the foot off, well, it is just firewood now. The essence of the chair no longer exists. So how does this help us as a point of entry to understand Dr. Karp and how everyone’s gotten him wrong so far?

Consider how every major piece on Karp has virtually done the same thing. Forbes catalogs the goggles, the qigong, the Rubik’s cubes. Dowd inventories the Norwegian ski instructor, the Swiss-Portuguese chef, the Austrian assistant. Steinberger narrates in long-form and in book-form how geographical non-monogamy shows up in Karp’s life like sneaker colors, nonalcoholic German beers, and German women.

Fortune indexes the philosophers, poets, and power players quoted in Karp’s based shareholder letters. This methodology of listing attributes is something I’m going to call the catalog, since like long forgotten catalog mail, they list attributes to present the accumulation and its overwhelm as the idea of a person. It’s almost like flipping through a mail-order catalog, really, because it’s as if “Here is Alex Karp. Here is what this person IS. List. List. List.”

But those are all accidents, every single one of them - Karp could stop skiing tomorrow and still be Karp. Karp could sell the Rubik’s cubes. Karp could pick up knitting instead of tai chi and lose nothing fundamental about being Karp, and it’d probably generate massive hype for a new exclusive limited edition PLTR merch release along the way (Karp Knit Fit dropping exclusively for 48 hours before Q3 results.)

And yet notice, dear reader, how the accumulation of all these attributes can feel like a person? It generates the sensation of intimacy without any of the machinery of it, because at no point does anyone stop to ask what - underneath all the accessories in the accumulation of Aristotelian accidents - or who - Karp actually is.

The skiing, the Rubik’s cubes, the tai chi, the soundbites, the doomscrolling, the soundbites as unhinged doomscrolling loops, all of it muddles into a melange metastasizing into a morass masquerading as a man. It’s easy to do this, but in the frenzy of creating such a mix of bits and pieces as the biography, what we have is a catalog, not character. Set it all aside and I’m wondering - what’s actually Karp and what’s just what it’s like to look at Karp? These are not the same question. We have been treating them as the same question for almost two decades now. It’s one thing to see Karp skiing in a video update about the company, but take the skiing away, and who is Karp?

What I’m going to do is sort them. I’ll take each attribute, each quote, each behavior, and ask: does this change when I swap a few letters onto the name Alex to conjure Alexandria? If it changes, it never was about the person. It was about the reception, context, permission, meaning it was temporal, meaning it was an accident. If it doesn’t change, it’s closer to what’s essential, closer to the actual human being, closer to the ontology.

I know you’re excited to talk about this at the next party you’re going to attend in the Bay area, and I’m so happy to hear that.

To understand the ontology of Dr. Karp, we need this thought experiment that enables us to sort the essential from the accidental to dig properly into the question, and it turns out that what happens when Alexandria Karp walks into a bar in Miami is incredibly demonstrative. The gender swap is the instrument, but god, what pleasure it gives me as the writer to let you know from the start that the way this develops will be absolutely and utterly nothing at all like you envision it will be. And I can’t wait to show you how to understand the ontology of Dr. Karp is a way of understanding me and you and everyone we know.

II. Sorting it all out: How did we get this man so wrong?

“Are they worried I’m too crazy or too evil?” Alexandria Karp, CEO of Palantir, recently asked me. She was disarmingly blunt, pacing around her office swinging a tai chi saber over her head. — The Free Press, October 2025

Every profile on Karp always contains two kinds of information: one kind is about him. The other kind is about what the world does with him. No one has ever sorted these systematically in their writing, and to be fair, why would they? It’s not as exciting as say the perennially referenced tai chi swords, sabers, sharp objects always associated with Karp. Is the sword about Karp? Sort of. He does tai chi. That’s a fact. But the way every profile uses the sword, it’s doing work about how unusual he is, how eccentric, how “not your typical CEO” it is. Yes, I am aware this is coming from a writer with the handle that I have, but it reinforces my point - the sword is telling you about the room Karp’s in, which is a room full of typical CEOs, and how Karp deviates from that room.

The sword is relational, the sword is temporal, the sword is a prop in a list of attributes that catalog Karp but not Karp’s essence. The sword describes the gap between a person and the context. Karp’s use of these swords stands in contrast, for example, to the possibility of another defense tech CEO also being a sword enthusiast. It’s not like we hear about Lockheed Martin’s CEO’s love of fencing, or Raytheon’s executive board taking on an annual retreat in knife throwing (though one hopes there are spicy groupchats where they all gossip about one another. Gossip Girl, but maybe the group chat title is known as Garrison Girl. Just kidding, there’s no women in defense tech). The swords, sabers, all of this? It is not, in any meaningful sense, telling you what Karp IS.

“We have to find places that we protect away from the government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we’d like to be.” — Alexandria Karp

“I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair.” — Alexandria Karp

“I went to Germany for intellectual reasons. The reason I stayed was emotional.” — Alexandria Karp

I told you I’m not interested in the superficial or easy, which is why I’ll gloss over the obvious right now in the sorting hat of Karp’s ontology when we conjure Alexandria Karp in lieu of Alex. I don’t want to berate with the obvious or belabor the point but goodness, you can already feel it working, can’t you? Everything codes differently as “somewhat deviant” from a male defense contractor CEO is transgressive-intellectual whereas from Alexandria it’s a contradiction so loud, it short-circuits the sentence.

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Alex mentions not having a security clearance to go smoke some weed and perhaps (presumably) have stoned sex which is (allegedly) amazing versus a female CEO saying this and obfuscating the possibility of an affair? Sign me up for the day we get this reality, because that is equality indeed.

A woman saying these things is not unimaginable, a woman doing these things is not impossible, but the thing me, you, and everyone else also knows - because Leonard Cohen told us, everybody knows, everybody knows - is that if Alexandria Karp said these things, it would not be broadcast nor received in the way it has been for Alex Karp. Forbes’s “lifelong bachelor” has chosen solitude versus the spinsterhood of “she never married” as the first line of an explanation of what went wrong.

Now that I’ve acknowledged the obvious, here’s the not so obvious part I’m building towards. When we sort Alex to Alexandria, what changes is our reception, though what stays is the person.

That’s how you find out what’s actually Karp, what the ontology of Karp is, the essence of Karp. And what’s actually his, every time I run it, is feeling. He doth protest too much, if any.

Every time I strip the accidents away, what’s left is a man having a feeling. Different feelings every time. But feeling itself, the orientation, the willingness, the exposure of it, that’s the constant. That’s the essential Karp, and that’s what nobody can metabolize.

The grief about Berlin, the loneliness of not knowing how to be normal, the sentimentality that’s been sitting in every single profile for fifteen years and sputtering, spazzing, sadness solidifying into solitude. The sort of thing you can find it if you’re any good at pattern matching, but here’s the thing, I can sort accidents from essence all day and still not touch the real question, which stated obviously is this: why has fifteen years of coverage managed to look directly at this sentimentality and still not see it, much less have a space for it? For that we need to go back to Forbes’ 2013 work.

The article does stumble onto something real right near the very end when Karp talks about Berlin.

“I had $40,000 in the bank, and no one knew who I was. I loved it. I loved it. I just loved it. I just loved it!” — Alex/Alexandria Karp

The hands waving. The voice rising. And then the drop:

“I have to get over this.”

This, dear reader, is obviously not an attribute, obviously not an accident, obviously not temporal. This is a person who has grief, this is a person mourning a version of themselves that no longer exists, and never will be able to.

I understand we can say “go cry into your billions” and I’d say the same, except billionaires buy, borrow, and die, so I guess it’d be more like, go cry into your abstraction of wealth so galactic that all I can do is wonder aren’t you happy somehow you have to deal with people less, bro? My Substack is free, but fine, I get it, I’ve gotten up and left a life in Europe too, it happens. But I digress - as does Forbes.

What does Forbes do with this peek into Karp’s ontology? They file it as privacy and take the single most essentially Karp moment in the entire article to categorize it as a position on a policy debate.

They can’t let him be sad. They have to make the sadness instrumental. It has to be about something other than itself. The catalog, like the centre, cannot hold, if things fall apart. Things falling apart in the construction of Karp means they cannot let Alex Karp be sentimental. That’s the categorical error in real time. The moment closest to Karp’s essence, the moment where the person flickers through the catalog of attributes and accumulated accouterments, all of this gets immediately recaptured and filed as another attribute. The essence of a person and what it is to be them is crushed, compartmentalized, categorized, concatenated, cataloged. The catalog absorbs everything, even the thing that is not a thing that should break the list because you cannot manufacture grief and sell it like a cozy Italian merino wool sweater.

Don’t believe me? Alexandria would also grieve the loss of anonymity. Alexandria would also mourn Berlin. The essential stuff survives even with the swap. Everything else was just the reception to how we viewed Karp.

III. Faster, faster, until the thrill of sentimentality overcomes the failures of seeing and speed

This is also the same Alex Karp who called campus protests a “pagan religion of mediocrity and discrimination,” who fantasized out loud about using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge on Silicon Valley VCs “in violation of all norms,” who said his software has “taken the lives of our enemies, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of,” who wants fentanyl-laced urine sprayed on analysts from a drone.

You’d think that when I strip the accidents away, what I’d find underneath is the hawk, the ideologue, the techno-nationalist philosopher king the profiles keep reaching for and even alluded to by the title of Karp’s own book, The Technological Republic. Instead the sort keeps returning grief, devotion, a man crying about his mother, mourning a city he left, digging up a dead dog, an existential exhumation at every corner.

I keep looking for the thesis of Alex Karp and the sort keeps handing me the feelings of Alex Karp, and the coverage has been staring directly at those feelings for fifteen years and somehow producing profiles about swimming goggles.

Rosita was Karp’s childhood dog, per Steinberger’s biography. His mother walked into a shelter, saw this dog, said that’s our dog. Rosita broke out of cages, opened locks for other dogs, was by Karp’s account “more like a human than a dog.” She sounds like she would have been Al Capone’s spirit animal. Rosita died. Decades later Karp had the yard where she was buried exhumed and her remains moved to his property in New Hampshire, and every outlet that touched the story framed it as “one of the perks of being wealthy,” because apparently the correct reading of a man digging up his childhood dog is money. He cries about his mother on Axios and the only two bins anyone can reach for are “calculated PR move” or “genuine vulnerability,” two bins for an entire human feeling, no bin for “a person had a feeling,” and I find it genuinely bleak that we’ve gotten this far as a species with such impoverished categories for someone crying about their mom on television.

The man who wants fentanyl-laced urine sprayed on analysts from a drone is the same man who needed his dead dog close. That’s the contradiction I keep finding, and both sides of it survive the swap, and what doesn’t survive is the permission to hold them in the same being.

The sentimentality is not hidden. It has never been hidden. It is sitting in plain sight in every single profile ever published about this man, and every single profile walks right past it on the way to the next talking point. We ignore men’s sentimentality because we don’t expect it and don’t know what to do with it. We pathologize women’s sentimentality because we expect it and then punish it for arriving. Both are failures of seeing, failures of speed, failures of feeling that replace a person and their being with a catalog.

The issue is not that nobody noticed Karp’s sentimentality. People noticed, it’s been circulated, crystallized, calcified, then covered. The sentimentality isn’t invisible, but it’s metabolized too fast.

It arrives, gets noted, gets a label slapped on (surveillance CEO saying batshit crazy thing or humanizing, PR move, perk of wealth, what have you eccentricity), and then the catalog moves on to the next item. The feeling never has time to land, because why would we afford that luxury, especially to him? It gets converted into content and shipped as a talking point before anyone has to actually sit with what it means that this man dug up his dog. Or what it means that a male CEO (now billionaire) openly cries on TV within nearly seconds of discussing housing instability (read: the threat of homelessness and human mercy rearing its miracle at the last minute) from a situation in a past not yet past, never past still, all brouhaha and saving of western civilization through software be damned, clearly, this man still feels something and feels it deeply.

You cannot be nonplussed when you’re crying on TV about your mother almost becoming homeless. This isn’t something I can articulate to readers and frankly, I don’t want to, because you will never understand it and I hope you never will. Before anyone has to stay in the room with his feeling long enough to see the person having it, it is consumed. Soundbite, soundbite. Cynical takes could say this is engineered on purpose, but even my darkness has a limit. So what I see is not blindness to feeling and sentimentality that is gendered, but a speed limit given to it that does an immense disservice to everyone everywhere.

When Karp cries, there’s a beat and given the available categories for male CEO feelings are sparse, there’s also a stutter. A half-second where the feeling just exists as a feeling because the sorting infrastructure hasn’t caught up yet, and this is the closest the live video coverage ever gets to the essential. It’s not seeing, it’s not skiing, but it’s the ghost of the possibility floating by with a fleeting sense of seeing.

For Alexandria, the categories are pre-built. The sorting infrastructure for female feeling is ancient and comprehensive and runs on arrival. There is no pause where the feeling just exists because the feeling has been pre-empted, pre-judged, pre-labeled. It can range widely and wildly from “emotional,” “manipulative,” “unstable,” “performing relatability” and much more.

People’s insanity and the creativity it inspires will never cease to awe you, as the sheer cornucopia of gendered labels are already locked and loaded before Alexandria Karp even opens her mouth. For women, the conversion from feeling to attribute is instantaneous. The gap where you might actually perceive the essential doesn’t open at all.

Understanding the ontology of Dr. Karp requires understanding that the asymmetry between Alexandria and Alex Karp isn’t about judgment or just the reception to them, it’s about time. His feelings get a fractionally wider window in which they exist as themselves before being converted into accidents. Hers are pre-converted and pre-determined and pre-judged. For him, the window opens and closes and nobody walks through it, but at least it opens. For her, there is no window to breathe air from.

His sentimentality gets beaten out of existence and then gets swallowed by the catalog just like everything else. The difference between how we treat his feelings and how we’d treat hers isn’t the difference between seeing and not seeing. It’s the difference between almost seeing and never having the chance to almost see, about the failure of speed when it comes to sentimentality and how we sort it.

Every time I take an attribute and sort to ask “does this survive the swap,” I’m slowing it down rhetorically because I’m preventing the conversion from someone’s being to someone being said to be this person. I am trying to stop time and our entropy of existing as essences instead of exemplifications. The gender swap forces the slowdown because when you read “Alexandria Karp swinging a tai chi saber,” your pre-built categories stop working.

The labels don’t fit, the brain stumbles, there’s a stutter between wait what and huh, and in that stutter, the essential flickers through. The feeling, the behavior, the person, exists for a moment as itself before being reconverted into meaning. This is the light that never goes out.

Damn you, Morrissey.

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But Olivia Nuzzi and her paramours have made it public, turned it into content, monetized it…which makes it fair game to ask: what’s the actual price?

All publicity is good publicity as the adage goes. In a 24-hour news cycle where things flow in and flow out, something outrageous today is forgotten tomorrow.

Well it does work for getting clicks, for getting clickbait, for getting this, for getting that, and for forgetting overall. This has not been the case yet as the discourse around Nuzzi and her certain set of romantic liaisons with a certain group of men have dominated the discourse - at least on my Twitter feed, which I had hoped the algorithm had balanced out given how much it skews towards cute cat videos and takes on AI research.

If you can’t beat the hype, join it, right? I thought about running the numbers like an Excel spreadsheet on a scandal. Between confirmed and estimated figures, Keith Olbermann may have spent roughly around a quarter of a million to around $200,000 on her between two years of university tuition at Fordham at $86,000, rent on a West Village studio around $65,000, a designer wardrobe of Tom Ford/Hervé Léger items around $25,000, Cartier jewelry at $15,000 (confirmed via Twitter/X where he itemized it to $1,250 per celebration over the course of their four years together).

Now, on Nuzzi’s side for income, based on media industry benchmarks, her New York Magazine salary was probably around $100-150,000 yearly. The book advance for “American Canto”? Industry standard: $150,000-300,000. Her current Vanity Fair West Coast Editor role: $170,000 a year or so. Adding it all up, her estimated career gross lands around $1.4-1.5 million.

But there’s no accounting for when search algorithms permanently bind your name to terms that should have remained private, when professional accomplishments become secondary to personal details revealed in someone else’s monetized memoir. We all know it now. We wish we didn’t.

There. I ran the numbers. Are we done?

Of course we’re not done. What I’m trying to qualify - not just through quantification - is the price of love and the self-debasement that follows. The cost of this endeavor is usually kept to yourself, it can’t be loaned out unless the currency of your mythos and mythology is disseminated. But this ledger is public. And when the ledger is public, when you’ve become part of the public record and discourse, you’re subject to the rules of vox populi. The internet forgets but it remembers everything all at once.

All this hype is in anticipation of Nuzzi’s book American Canto being released, but already, her ex lovers have taken to profiteering, monetizing, accounting, balancing sheets by sharing what happened between sheets.

While search terms for a particular sexual act spike across search engine indexes for the first time in years, while we are all subject to these details without ever having asked for it, the men have taken to literally doing public accounting of their relationships. Olbermann breaking their time down together via Twitter as if it’s a profit and loss statement. Lizza with the Substack paywalling parts of this series, what’s next? They’ve made the private transactional retroactively. That is humiliating for everybody involved but really what does that tell you about the transactional nature of their love towards her as well?

(I need to briefly acknowledge here that Keith got involved with her when she was 18 and he was 52. That’s its own conversation about power. Lizza has his own scandals, but that’s not what this essay is about.)

Look, far be it from me to judge another woman or another man or another person for their romantic choices. However, I don’t think this is judgment as much as it is a reflection because for every Olivia Nuzzi - I mean in other industries, in industries where one doesn’t write about these things but does them anyways, right?

For every Olivia Nuzzi in some sort of consulting role toeing the line between finishing a PowerPoint deck at a Hyatt Regency and three drinks in with the client after reasonable hours, for every Olivia Nuzzi in some tawdry back of house liaison with the portly restaurant operator, for every Olivia Nuzzi in a garage at a mechanic shop, at a university, at a hospital, at the post office, at the bakery, everywhere around you with people - for every problematic dissolution of ethics that has happened, what distinguishes this case is that the written word is at the heart of the industry where these people operate. That’s what makes it fair game, since it’s giving greed and gossip as golem, as gotcha, as goddamnit who hired these people to begin with.

Besides, what is the price of love? I think about the longer term here, when Olivia and I are both 35, 40, 45, 50, about what it means for a woman to enter a room where her career is not derived from the things she has done or made but how she’s been done and made out with. She is judged based on where her mouth has (reportedly) been, not on the basis of the words coming from them. She is judged not for her words but for her deeds as words.

Nuzzi is judged, of course, and since all women are judged all the time in all sorts of ways, this means Nuzzi is judged with a particular scrutiny based on weaponizing exactly what the patriarchy wanted from her - youth, beauty, availability - and conjuring it into bylines and book deals.

Along the guise of journalism and the access it afforded, Nuzzi fed on desire, turned it into discourse, and now it feeds on her so that what nourishes her is what destroys her.

Everything we know about Olivia Nuzzi against our desire to know it is the cannibal paradox of performing femininity at its apex. And we love to see it. We really do.

But the same system that rewarded her for this will ensure it’s all she’s ever known for. What nourished her will destroy her. Or maybe it won’t, and she’ll fail upward forever while I run spreadsheets on her success. Either way, we love to see it.

What I’m really getting at is that Olivia is going to have this follow her her entire life. This self-debasement and the price of it is something that is associated not just in the search engine optimization, not just in the words, but in one’s reputation. Forget a big fat red scarlet A on her, it’s a big fat red scarlet F.

The price paid follows a woman who has debased herself in public, just like the work of OnlyFans models, all of them their entire life. Just like the work of porn stars follows them their entire lives. I can’t think of any male porn star or any male OnlyFans model being someone who has paid as heavily as the women have. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but once you get started, there is no going back as a woman. Your mythology is fixed in this way. You have been priced-in hereafter. Nobody ever forgets. They will not let you forget. There is Return on Interest and then there is Returning To Your Interests, Compounding Interest, Dilution, Derision, Delusion, Joan Didn’t-ion, Disillusion.

Keith Olbermann gets to make jokes about dodging bullets. Ryan Lizza - who was fired from The New Yorker for sexual misconduct - gets to be the wounded party. RFK Jr is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Sanford already had his Appalachian Trail scandal and moved on.

Sure, she has profited from it - she has certainly had a higher profile lifestyle and opportunities that are shut out to most people, including people like myself (currently - I’m just a temporarily embarrassed prolific writer analyst policy trifecta hybrid, right?)

When I pose the question what is the price of love, I’m posing the question of what is the price we are willing to pay in debasing ourselves, and how is that augmented by the public spectacle of it?

What is the price for what we think, for what we feel, for what we do, for what we say, for how it is commemorated, retold, churned into lore?

What is the price outside of the narrative that we constructed as we privately debased ourselves and now it’s made public?

Now on the subject of journalistic ethics and Miss Nuzzi’s output particularly when it comes to politicians, there is quite a lot of discussion going on about this - very good discussion, very good discourse and I think it is absolutely worth acknowledging. I don’t know how you can quantify the impact of a piece and its political ramifications but it certainly played a huge part here. One wonders why Vanity Fair even issued a statement when it was already all out there. Apparently they’ve lost some subscribers. But there is a duty of care and integrity involved with this line of work that has been repeatedly breached.

Why are we giving such problematic people power to begin with? Why does the industry insist on picking from the same bit players to turn them into names known? Whatever happened to casting calls for Hollywood movies and unknowns? Is there not an American Idol for journalism and writing? What does it say about the entire ecosystem that decided to prize Nuzzi’s particular price of love?

And of course because this is timely and the algorithm needs to be optimized and my writing needs to be built and circulated and because the book doesn’t come out for another two weeks and because there’s a Substack that needs to be fed and because there is a Google doc feeding in snippets from the paid Substack to save countless numbers of people $9 a month - we are all complicit and we are all in on it and of course this is my way of transacting as well - well it’s all a mess isn’t it?

We tell ourselves stories to live, right? The price of love is the price of not forgetting. And in this time and age I think the price paid is far grander than what any of these calculations come out to. Maybe she walks away unscathed. Maybe she gets the last laugh. Maybe it doesn’t even matter to Nuzzi. Maybe she’s fine with it. Maybe it’s worth it to her. Maybe it’s what she intended. We’re all certainly talking about it, about her, about them.

The price of it is like the price of any good on the market in any hype cycle, any boom and bust. Except it applies to a woman and her trajectory and her story from here on out.

The price of love? For men, it’s a line item they can joke about on Twitter. For women, it’s compound interest on a debt that never gets forgiven.

I had forgotten what American excess is, what choice paralysis could be, what an absolutely mind-boggling experience it is to walk between rows and rows and rows of frozen food items and see absolutely nothing of interest but everything of awe (why are there peanut butter and jelly flavored bao buns in America? Who wanted this? Why? How?)

It’s been what, three or four months since I returned to the U.S.? I’m beginning to suspect the acute phase of my return is coming up - acute phase being the fancy way of saying the most intense phase. Though I’ve never been divorced and have no plans to do so, leaving a life behind in one country to move across continents (again) sure feels like one. That being said, since I’m an American who left Europe, I do have to s…

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And that is how I ended up here violating the cardinal rules of how to begin a sentence (yes, and - not that, no ands) in a post announcing Yet Another Thing I’m Planning On Doing (it will join a large list of other items remaining actionable including reading Dostoyevsky’s the Brothers Karamazov and watching The Sopranos, but both of these have been goals for longer than any amount of time I am willing to admit to publicly anymore). So yes, I will be training AI large language models to…

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