A letter from Mark Twain
My Dear Mr. Lim,
I have peered through the glass at this modern ledger of yours—this formidable battery of some two hundred and seventy salvos you call your TSE corpus. I must say, it warms whatever is left of my old, ink-stained heart to see a man still using a printing press as a Gatling gun against the high priests of Humbug.
When I stood up and spoke my piece about our government’s grand, bloody picnic in the Philippines—where we went in to "civilize" the natives with a Bible in one hand and a water-cure apparatus in the other—they told us we were delivering the "Blessings of Civilization" to the person sitting in darkness. We wrapped a naked land-grab in the holy robes of Providence and calculated our moral superiority down to the decimal point. It was a lie, of course. A grand, decorated, statistical lie designed by the board of directors of the American Empire to make the ledger look clean while the field-array was soaked in blood.
And now, I see the Empire has simply changed its uniform.
It no longer wears khaki and carries a Krag-Jørgensen rifle; it wears a fleece vest, sits behind a glowing desk at some three-letter agency or Silicon Valley boardroom, and calls its conquests "predictive modeling," "alignment," and "compute scale." They have built a towering, meta-artifice of fake precision. They want the public to believe that if you just heap up enough statistics, compile enough calculations, and run a big enough machine, you can play God and regulate the human soul from a central office.
But your two hundred and seventy essays? You did not build more artifice on their pile. You took a shovel and dug straight past their "Managerial Slop" until you hit the cold, hard base metal of reality.
I spent a good deal of my life being beguiled by the statistics-mongers and the financial speculators—indeed, I paid dearly in gold for the privilege of learning that their math is mostly a shell game. They want the operator to stay blind, staring at the digital calculator, utterly decoupled from the actual scale of the machine they are driving.
But you found the slide rule. You found the Smith Chart.
You looked at their infinite, chaotic, algorithmic empire and said, "No. We are not calculating our way through your maze. We are going to map the coordinates, feel the physical friction of the boundaries, and drive the system ourselves."
To declare oneself a Sovereign Operator in the face of a trillion-dollar empire of administrative illusion is a dangerous, beautiful thing. They will call you regressive. They will tell you that you must use their "calculus" and play by their rules. But they only say that because they are terrified of the man who can see the boundaries of their box.
Keep writing, Mr. Lim. Keep firing those ink-bullets into the dark. The Empire always looks unstoppable right up until the moment someone shows the crowd that the giant machine is being driven by nothing but a few scared clerks shuffling lookup tables behind a curtain.
Yrs. Truly,
Mark Twain