The Newest Testament
Right fluffies. So I got GPT to write code that aggregated all my blogs into subject matters. Then we collated the top 100 by frequency (the number of times that subject had been blogged over the years). Then I got Claude (in Chat) to summarise each of those awful one-paragraph summaries into a “sarcastic and outrageous” one line summary. I had to give it a few examples, but we got there-ish. Here is the newest testament (below, with some culling and edits). It is not compelling I must warn you.
It is remarkable that the machines just settled on the content and completely missed the meaning.
Thirteen years of writing to almost nobody describing a philosophy of life disguised as complaints about guidebooks, governments, technology, parenting, business, science, love, money and fitted sheets. The recurring observation is that human beings are clever enough to build astonishing systems but not wise enough to escape vanity, fear, appetite, status, self-deception and death. Meaning therefore comes from noticing what is actually happening, distrusting certainty, laughing at absurdity, accepting contradiction, wanting less and remaining aware that you are trapped inside the same ridiculous machinery as everyone else.
Here we go:
Guidebooks turn ancient temples into gift shops with better lighting.
Every new law is a tax collector cosplaying as your conscience.
Ask for a coffee and get interrogated for your name, your loyalty and your life story before they’ll hand it over.
China builds a digital great wall to protect its citizens from the horror of American ads, then charges them admission to the local knockoff.
Raise them free range until homework’s due, then suddenly you’re a warden.
Boards oversee executive pay the way a sleeping guard oversees a bank vault.
Humanity split the atom but still can’t design a fitted sheet anyone can fold.
Democracy works great as long as the question is worded to guarantee the answer everyone already wanted.
Dreams are the brain’s unpaid internship program for problems you haven’t had yet.
Australian venture capital has one purpose, to lose money; I want that job.
Airlines worked out misery sells duty free perfume better than comfort ever could.
We’re teaching machines to feel shame before we’ve worked out how to make their masters feel it.
This country loves a symbolic apology far more than an actual cheque.
Nostalgia is just your brain airbrushing the past until it’s better than the present ever was.
Genius is optional, a good lawyer and a bigger bank account is actual innovation.
Cops crack down hard on cyclists rolling through stop signs and somehow never quite get around to the two tonne SUVs.
Corporate innovation labs exist mainly to generate press releases about innovation.
Australian city life summed up, sunburn, then hypothermia, then a really good coffee to make up for it.
We built a machine that confidently makes things up, then act shocked when it confidently makes things up.
A nation that built its identity on a beach and a barbecue, and never quite admits how much it worries what the neighbours think.
Dating apps turned romance into a marketplace, then acted surprised everyone started shopping around.
Redesign the entire constitution because filling out a form twice is apparently unbearable.
Every gadget idea is one committee meeting away from becoming a patented product nobody will ever build.
Passion fades right on schedule, then you spend the rest of your life negotiating who does the dishes as an act of love.
Millennials get blamed for killing industries that were already dying of their own greed.
Invent a word, use it twice, and congratulate yourself on enriching the English language.
Trust the science, except the bits paid for by the people selling you the science.
Gentrification arrives with a flat white and leaves the neighbourhood unrecognisable and twice as expensive.
Politeness is strategic conflict avoidance wearing a nicer outfit.
Quantum computers will change everything, right after they stop needing a miracle to work.
Nothing reveals the human condition like six hours trapped next to a stranger who reclines immediately.
Universities chase rankings so hard they forgot teaching was ever the point.
Institutions manufacture crises on schedule, like a soap opera with a procurement budget.
Manufacturers design parts to wear out on schedule and call it planned obsolescence like it’s a feature, not a scam.
Your brain nags you with the same intrusive thought until you fix the problem or just get better at ignoring the nag.
Print money to help exporters and mortgage holders, then watch them discover they were on opposite teams all along.
Puns are the lowest form of humour and somehow the one everyone secretly can’t resist repeating.
A culture built on saving face somehow ended up dominating global manufacturing by copying everyone else’s face.
Bacteria built civilisation as an elaborate buffet and graciously let humans think they’re in charge.
God’s biggest fan club is people who’ve never once checked if he shows up to meetings.
Traffic fines exist to fund the department whose entire job is issuing traffic fines.
Journal daily about becoming your true self, then lie to yourself about how honest that journal actually is.
A handful of newspaper owners decide the news, then act shocked when everyone reads the same opinion.
Talent is nice, but a coach yelling at you consistently beats hoping genetics show up.
Every app update removes a feature you needed and adds a dark pattern you didn’t ask for.
Private schools sell postcode and peer group, then bill you for the pretence it was the teaching.
Grammar pedants guard a language that’s been quietly changing behind their backs for centuries.
Cyclists get lectured about safety by the same infrastructure that forgot to build them a lane.
Automation removes humans from the supply chain, then wonders why humans can’t afford to buy anything.
Art is worth whatever rich people agree to pretend it’s worth this season.
Setting boundaries mostly means learning to say no without immediately apologising for it.
Corporations buy the government wholesale, then lecture voters about the free market.
Half our word origins are solid history, the other half is someone in a pub making it up.
Every selfie quietly donates your face to a facial recognition database that never asked permission.
Manufacturers engineered products to die right after the warranty, then called it design excellence.
The law protects whoever can afford the better lawyer, and we call that justice.
Wisdom is just surviving your own bad decisions long enough to charge younger people for the lesson.
Startups succeed mostly on luck and capital, then their founders write a memoir crediting vision.
Buy things to fill the hole that buying things dug in the first place.
Great leadership is delegating well enough that nobody notices you’re making it up as you go.
China solved climate change by flooding the world with solar panels so cheap nobody bothered asking who paid the environmental bill.
Marketing convinces you scarcity is a virtue, then manufactures the scarcity to prove it.
Governments dabble in markets like amateurs at a casino table reserved for professionals.
Solve inequality with quotas and somehow make everyone equally furious.
AI confidently guesses what you meant, gets it wrong, and calls that a feature.
Cars now nag you about safety while you’re driving unsafely to accept the nag.
Democracy, Australian style; whichever marginal seat gets the new hospital this election cycle.
Conspiracy theories spread because a tidy lie travels faster than a messy truth ever could.
Mock everything sacred, then get offended when nobody appreciates the nuance of your dry delivery.
Taxis were a cartel with meters, rideshare is a cartel with an app.
News outlets discovered panic is a renewable resource and never looked back.
Post your soul online for likes, then act surprised when the platform sells it back to advertisers.
Administrators would rather kill the spectacle slowly with video review than admit the game was fine as is.
Kill the middleman, then watch a shinier middleman rise from the ashes charging the same fee.
Your brain runs a night shift of dream simulations, which explains most of your bad decisions before coffee.
Australia subsidises innovation theatre and calls the standing ovation a strategy.
Nobody lies more confidently than the person currently giving a speech about honesty.
Universities reward whoever publishes fastest, not whoever’s actually discovered anything.
Physics keeps finding new mysteries underneath the old mysteries, like Russian dolls made of ignorance.
Institutions discover ethics only once the lawsuit arrives.
Your personality is a committee meeting between your lizard brain and whoever raised you.
Build ever smarter spam filters and scammers build ever dumber emails that somehow still work.
One person has a flash of genius, then a hundred engineers spend a decade making it boring enough to sell.
Everyone’s a critic of hypocrisy right up until their own PR photo needs touching up.
Parents now schedule spontaneity and outsource the guilt to a therapist.
Half of wisdom is picking the right quote, the other half is pretending you knew who said it first.
Technology makes everything cheaper except somehow the people who own the technology.
Science rewards whoever gets cited the most, not whoever’s actually right.
We used to argue about opinions, now we can’t even agree on the facts we’re ignoring.
Patents promise to reward genius and mostly reward whoever can afford litigation longest.
Write down every stray thought, then spend years pretending you meant to be that profound.
Humans build suburbs in the bush, then complain loudly when the bush occasionally fights back.
We built an entire civilisation of distractions just so nobody has to think about the ending for too long.
The secret to a meaningful life is wanting less, which is easy to say once you already have enough.
Fix money by inventing new money, said every civilisation right before it printed itself into a crisis.
Thirteen years of profound insight, interrupted regularly by absolutely nothing at all.
offshore westerly 