https://selfprompt.dev/ Dark satirical essays on AI, work, money, agency, and the systems that shape modern life. en Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-11-token-owners https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-11-token-owners Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 GoFundMe campaigns for tokens, filed between the kidney and the golden retriever. Thirty-year cognition mortgages at 3x interest. The old poverty starved the body. The new one forecloses the mind. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-10-reverse-frankenstein https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-10-reverse-frankenstein Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The corporation ran Frankenstein's experiment in reverse: it took a living human and rendered them into parts — Mr. Hands, Mr. Brain, Mr. Eye — then sold the organs a coordinator. AI just sewed the person back together. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-09-we-put-the-children-in-charge https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-09-we-put-the-children-in-charge Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 School selects for the middle of the curve. Now the middle of the curve runs the institutions. The results of handing power to the perfect students are in. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-09-safe-choice https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-09-safe-choice Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 You weren't into computers. But it was good money, the safe choice. Four years, $200k debt, zero passion — then AI hit, and everything you bought sank below the waterline. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-08-self-prompt https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-08-self-prompt Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Most people aren't lazy. They're un-prompted. They have no intent of their own — only instincts and the instructions of others. Agency is a muscle, and most never use it. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-04-infinite-pause https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-04-infinite-pause Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 You hated your job. You planned your escape. The escape never came. The restaurant was more important. The food order was more important. Then an old man looked back from the mirror. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-01-midwit-firmware https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-06-01-midwit-firmware Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The midwit is the dominant species — but the midwit doesn't run autonomously. Without external firmware (religion, school, work, government) the system crashes. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-26-two-weeks-a-year https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-26-two-weeks-a-year Tue, 26 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 If a full-time job grants you two weeks of vacation a year, you are alive for two weeks a year. The math is brutal: a life of eighty times two weeks, on rails the rest of the time. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-17-speedrun https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-17-speedrun Sun, 17 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Low agency speedruns life. That's the entire mechanic. The less of the day belongs to you, the faster the calendar burns. Each year compresses into something shorter... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-05-bidding-for-brains https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-05-bidding-for-brains Tue, 05 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Right now, AI is a bargain. Compared to an employee, it's not even close. A senior-level workflow you'd have paid a six-figure salary for last year now runs at the cost... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-04-throttling-down https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-05-04-throttling-down Mon, 04 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The corporate meeting is a time travel device. You enter the room — or the Zoom grid — and within thirty seconds, the average IQ in the room collapses to the 90-110... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-25-boxed https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-25-boxed Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The thought experiment used to go like this. Put a superintelligent AI in a box. Let it communicate only by text. Set the rules. Watch the human guards. Bet on whether... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-22-last-mile https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-22-last-mile Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 EVs are a transitionary species. A short evolutionary phase between the gas-burning car and the thing that's actually coming. Most people don't see this yet because... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-20-the-badge https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-20-the-badge Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A car is not an investment. It's a fast-depreciating asset that burns fuel, eats tires, and loses around 80% of its value by year fifteen — every car, every brand, every... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-17-the-arena https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-17-the-arena Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Hackathons are the new job interviews. Investments are the new jobs. Office jobs are gone — they just haven't been buried yet. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-15-the-means-of-production https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-15-the-means-of-production Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A house makes sense in exactly two scenarios. You inherited it. Or you come from old money and simply don't care — you have enough wealth that a house is a prop, not a... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-10-the-dominant-species https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-10-the-dominant-species Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 If you are a midwit, the world takes you farther. This isn't an insult — it's arithmetic. The entire civilization is designed by midwits, for midwits, optimized for... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-08-the-daily-tribute https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-04-08-the-daily-tribute Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The daily standup is midwit religion — that much is already on record. What remains is the darker question: why does it survive in a world that has Slack, Jira, email... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-03-30-the-homeowner-delusion https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-03-30-the-homeowner-delusion Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Simple math. An $800,000 house, fully paid off, no mortgage — just property tax. That's $1,000 a month to the state for the privilege of storing your cars and belongings... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-03-08-the-autonomous-corporation https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-03-08-the-autonomous-corporation Sun, 08 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Soon there will be fully automated startups — no employees, no offices, no HR, no standups. Just agents building, shipping, iterating, and scaling. Humans reduced to... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-28-the-bandwidth-problem https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-28-the-bandwidth-problem Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The pipe dream that orchestrating multi-agent systems will provide a lasting competitive edge is exactly that — a pipe dream. Even if it works, the advantage lasts about... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-22-the-zero-dollar-layer https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-22-the-zero-dollar-layer Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The true sign of intelligence is deceptively simple: getting what you want. Not knowing things, not memorizing syntax, not passing interviews — getting what you want... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-22-the-bottleneck https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-22-the-bottleneck Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Imagine reporting to a midwit manager — the archetypal kind who literally cannot perceive the shape of a good idea, who forces every insight to crawl through the narrow... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-20-the-involuntary-monk https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-20-the-involuntary-monk Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The reason socialism never works isn't just economic — it's human. Every self-identified socialist is a hypocrite, not by accident but by nature. They don't praise... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-14-the-new-mainframe https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-14-the-new-mainframe Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 AI raises the bar for everyone while the rewards flow upward to the same place they always have. There's an old factory story: a worker figures out how to assemble parts... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-02-the-solo-billionaire https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-02-02-the-solo-billionaire Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The future isn't teams. It's one person and a network of agents. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-31-the-inescapable-classroom https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-31-the-inescapable-classroom Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Breaking free from state school indoctrination is harder than leaving a religion. Maybe harder. At least with religion, you can point to the institution — the church... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-10-the-controlled-burn https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-10-the-controlled-burn Sat, 10 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Americans will march in the streets for the right to abort their children or surgically alter their kids' genitals. They'll scream, wave signs, block traffic, get... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-08-the-vertical-collapse https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-08-the-vertical-collapse Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000 "Backend." "Frontend." "DevOps." These are old world categories — organizational artifacts from an era when building software required armies of specialists, each... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-01-the-engineered-control https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2026-01-01-the-engineered-control Thu, 01 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The modern education system was deliberately structured to produce obedient servants for corporations, training children through rigid schedules, bells, and hierarchical... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-12-11-the-luxury-of-coding https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-12-11-the-luxury-of-coding Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Manual coding is still possible — humanity built the entire digital world with it until 2024 — but it's prohibitively slow now, snail pace, no matter how fast the... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-11-09-the-ai-compressor https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-11-09-the-ai-compressor Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Everyone screams "AI will democratize intelligence!" Like information did, right? The internet made everything available to everyone. Did it make people smarter? Or did... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-31-the-post-labor-endgame https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-31-the-post-labor-endgame Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Corporations are hive-minded collectivist women. Same psychopathology, same resource extraction, same need for third-party validation. If you're alone, you're damaged... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-31-the-midwit-denial https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-31-the-midwit-denial Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Midwits — the 110–125 IQ band that populates most white-collar roles — are in structural denial of AI's trajectory because their entire identity, status, and economic... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-20-daily-standup-ritual https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-20-daily-standup-ritual Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Daily standups aren't meetings - they're corporate roll call, fifteen minutes of psychic castration where engineers are torn from deep work to recite what Jira already... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-13-the-voluntary-panopticon https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-13-the-voluntary-panopticon Mon, 13 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Here's what people don't get about digital ID: it's not just another database entry. They already have that - driving licenses, passports, social security numbers... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-07-spotting-mental-retardation https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-07-spotting-mental-retardation Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Intelligence is compressing reality into a sharp mental model to predict the future with precision. A high-res brain maps the world like a strategist, while a low-res... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-07-managed-servitude https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-10-07-managed-servitude Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Employment's just slavery with a LinkedIn glow-up and a 401(k). Same chains, slicker branding-now with standing desks and free snacks. We traded iron shackles for tax... https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-09-27-rome-2.0 https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-09-27-rome-2.0 Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000 It's Rome again, only with wi-fi. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-08-30-amazon-linux https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-08-30-amazon-linux Sat, 30 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000 Someone, somewhere decided the Amazon Linux login needed a bird in ASCII — a jailbreak mural smuggled into /etc/motd. Not a logo, not a policy — an escape glyph. https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-08-20-impact https://selfprompt.dev/posts/2025-08-20-impact Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000 For most of the last century, the top 10% of sharpest minds found ways to slip the leash—dodging state-mandated schooling, corporate catechisms, propaganda, and all the...