Edgar Allen Poe wrote famously about the sound and emotional impact of "The Bells."

Had he lived today, he might have penned
"The Memes"

I.
Read the emails with their memes,
Classic memes!
Princes from Nigeria and other sordid schemes!
...


Babies dancing, dancing, dancing,
Grainy cha-cha CGIs
Lines of hamsters’ endless prancing,
Spongebob squarepants now entrancing
With a theme to bastardize

Epic fails, fails, fails
As the poor, grape lady wails,
As they conquer all your base with poorly-written subroutines
From the memes, memes, memes, memes,
Memes, memes, memes—
From the scamming and the spamming of the memes

II.
See the funny viral memes,
YouTube memes!
Ethernets exhausted by the cyberculture streams!
Just download Adobe Flash,
Watch until your laptops crash,
It’s a trap! End of Ze World!
We love each gag.


It’s the time for PBJ,
Watching Strongbad, Badger Badger, Numa Yei,
Cursing lag.

‘Till professions intervene,
Keyboard cats and Rickrolls now monopolize the screen!
Some are clean,
Some obscene,
Innuendos unforeseen,
Which encumber our machines,

Now a vulture of the culture
Of the memes, memes, memes,
Of the memes, memes, memes, memes,
Memes, memes, memes—
The diffusing and amusing of the memes.

III.
Scroll through countless snarky memes,
Twitter memes!
Harsh, discordant rancor and political extremes!
#FirstWorldProblems oft-discussed
As we #facepalm in disgust
“Bye Felicia,” we assert,
As our psyche grows inert
And decays

The cacophonous polemics draw the mind into the mire
With the paranoid endemic, postulations to conspire
Spitting fire, fire, fire,
In a flame war amplifier
Willy Wonka’s condescension
#Ermahgerd, the reprehension
From Chuck Norris and old cliches

Oh the memes, memes, memes!
How the vitriol demeans
Is it fair?
Grumpy cats we all adore
Mixed with discourse we abhor
And demotivation poster savoir-faire

So the zeitgeist is consumed
And compiled,
And defiled,
‘Till society is doomed
Yet the comedy redeems,
New profile,
Gangam Style!
So we #DealWithIt it seems
The ad hominem recalcitrance fomenting tribal themes

Of the memes—
Of the memes, memes, memes, memes,
Memes, memes, memes,
In the impulse and the insults of the memes

IV.
Feel the power of the memes,
Modern memes
Damaging democracy and propping up regimes,
Cash me ousside day or night,
Neither gracious nor contrite
Just the autocratic leaders we bemoan!

The despots’ every troll,
Type the doom through which we scroll,
On our phone.

And the users—ah the users—
Both informers and abusers,
Feel alone
And who trolling, trolling, trolling,
Like sadistic chaperones
Grow addicted from the scrolling
With no patch or methadone

Like a digital Rasputin
Baby Shark and Shirtless Putin’
Clickbait holes
Politician checks the polls,
As he scrolls, scrolls, scrolls,
Scrolls.

Investment sparked from memes!
Buying stonks on hope and dreams,
More investment sparked by memes!
Elon speaks, the market screams

Killing time, time, time
Of a youthful person’s prime
We’re invested in the memes—
Even teens

Killing time, time, time
As we waste our precious prime,
Pepe frogs infest our memes,
All the memes, memes, memes,
Cancel mobs infest our memes,
Killing time, time, time,
With our screens, screens, screens,

There’s a victim, not a crime,
From cajoling of the memes,
From the memes, memes, memes
The controlling of the memes,
Of the memes, memes, memes, memes,
Memes, memes, memes
The iniquity, ubiquity of memes

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The Eagles wrote about consumerism and materialism, but now, the world of opulence involves more blockchains and less pink champagne on ice!

------
On an old superhighway
Unwatched laissez-faire
Faint whispers of Napster
And some data to share

Now instead, some persistence
And some encryptions for spite

A payment system and a pseudonym
Nakomoto’s delight

With GPUs and hash codes,
The cypherpunks rebel
The regulators never guessed
The thirsts the Silk Road and Bitcoins could quell

Early miners would HODL
As the banks would inveigh
WikiLeaks accepted coins through Tor
And doxxed the CIA

Clandestine in Crypto-California
Gone without a trace (or a database)
Into cyberspace

Drug deals and cons here in Crypto-California
Ducking censorship (and some bloods and crips)
With some blockchain scripts!

She finds an altcoin, unlisted
He buys what Musk recommends (duh)
She’s got a wallet with new shitty coins
That he calls “trends”

Some get rich off their meme stonks
Sweet wallstreetbets
Some are hedging inflation
And the national debt

So I signed up for Coinbase
“Now I can get mine!”
I said, “I haven’t seen returns like this since 1999”

And fiat treasury leaders just print and pray,
So we’re left with an economic blight
And the games they play

Escape now to Crypto-California
We can all rebase (with a fork in place)
ICOs to chase

With Web3.0 out in Crypto-California
Be democratized (profits amortized)
And decentralized!

Smart contracts for dealing
Novel tokens to price
And I said, “we can all just trade peer-to-peer”
On our own device

So I read some disclaimers
And stored my private keys
Saw how fast Beeple art revives
And I bought some NFTs

Found DApps for some ESports, bought some
Eth2 I could store
I signed up for a Metamask
And I played-to-earn some more

“Rejoice! It’s a new world
We’re all programmed to receive!”
You can cash out any time you like,
But you can never leave!

Crypto-California! (Not quite a hotel, but still...)

If you invested $1 in the S&P 500 in 1980, you'd have had $11-12 in 2000.

Even if you adjust for inflation, you'd still have had ~$6.

If you repeat this, investing $1 sometime in 2000, you'd be holding around $2.60 now, which is more like $1.60 after inflation is considered.

Income inequality often reduces to "did you have access to market returns from 1980-2000?"

I'm too young...but my parents aren't, and they paid my college tuition. So I received the benefit of a bull market that began before my birth.

The advice from boomers to live below your means and invest is still sound.

But it might be worth noting that the result of following that advice has been markedly different in recent history.

There hasn't been a 20-year period with comparable returns even if you happened to buy at the bottom of the great depression.

Millennials should acknowledge that boomers are not without wisdom.

Boomers should not that their comfortable lives are buoyed by luck and timing.

Bull markets and other BS


Lewis Carroll described how oysters were led to their doom. Today, it's engineers...
-------

The boss was whining angrily,
Whining with all his might.
The ceiling bathed the boardroom
In a sharp, fluorescent light-
Ensuring wakeful discourse in
The middle of the night

The coffee bubbled lazily,
The hard disks whirred and spun.
Consultants each remained in chairs
As sleepy, hired guns.
The project was a misery
Of budget overruns.

The talk was dull as dull could be,
The tasks were dry as dry.
You could not see the devs because
No coders were nearby,
No sacrificial lambs to bid
An undeserved goodbye

The tech lead and the manager
Were seated on their hands,
They wept as they considered
The position of their brands,
“Could any team achieve the board’s
Impossible demands?”

If seven teams with seven devs
Arrived this fiscal year,
“Do you suppose,” the C-suite asked,
“We’d find another gear?”
“Of course,” replied the manager,
(He sounded quite sincere)

“O engineers, come work with us!”
The posting did beseech.
“Refactor schlock for shares of stock
And stretch the product’s reach.”
(The latter lines were anodyne-
The standard corporate speech)

A senior dev reviewed the post
With post-traumatic dread;
He scrolled on by without reply
And shook a wiser head,
As if to say, he’d rather sleep
On broken glass instead

But four young engineers were signed,
All eager to compete,
Their laptops shipped, each well-equipped-
The latest Office suite.
Add this was odd because, of course,
They all used Google sheets.

But four more coders joined the team,
And yet another four,
Each youthful mind, each docu-signed,
And still they hired more,
Each opened up their IDE,
The codebase to explore,

The tech lead and the manager,
Reviewed the user flows,
They started drawing wireframes
And other portmanteaus:
The devs began their ticket queues,
But progress still was slow,

“The time has come,” the tech lead said,
“To talk of many things:
“Of minima and maxima,
Concavity, and springs-
Of pull requests and late-night asks
And unrelenting pings.”

“So where’s the shares?” the coders cried
On each internal chat,
“They’re options.” said the CFO,
A corporate plutocrat,
“They’ll vest in future years, we’ll raise
And exit after that.”

“The pace is unsustainable!”
The engineers would plead,
“For software is complex and not
Some impudent stampede!”
The manager just shook his head,
“That’s not the talk we need.”

And so morale degraded fast
It turned a deeper blue,
The manager could not foresee
The corporate deja vu-
A lamentation on a loop
Each exit interview.

Departures came in droves, at first
The talent was enticed
By outfits less dysfunctional
And offers market priced
The C-suite thought the lesser devs
Should surely have sufficed.

“It seems a shame,” the tech lead said,
To give these devs a kick,
“We’ve overworked them day and night!”
(A bit impolitic)
“We still need twice the heads we have,
It’s just arithmetic.”

The manager, implacable,
Refused to agonize,
“The software isn’t shipped, my friend,
You’ve missed your KPIs.
Your budget thus is altered
To a palatable size.”

“Dear coders,” said the manager,
“Your software doesn’t run.
Should we attempt another sprint”
But answer came there none-
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d fired every one.

The Tech Lead & The Manager (the modern walrus and carpenter)

Look
If you had one spot, in all social media,
To say anything you ever thought up,
One platform,
Would you purchase it? Or just watch it sink?

He starts a frenzy, rich guy, cash a plenty
He bought like 9-percent-ish already, brash and petty,
Alerts us, and disconcerts us when he seems unsteady,
He takes over,

But he keeps on upsetting,
The old tech clouds, remote crowd disavowed,
He’s wealthy and proud, ponders his schemes out loud,
He’s joking now, wonder what he’s smoking now,
Checkmarks go out, 8 bucks, really? How?

Folks sacked, what brutality,
Oh, the audacity,
Oh, the pugnacity folks,
Is this fact or a hoax or just tightening scope,
The next act is keystrokes to catch flack and upvotes,
A stopgap ‘till they’re broke,
The stock’s backed with his hopes

The dev masses, disposing in droves,
Tracking their lines of code, that when he’s
Back cutting costs again, like
Some Greek tragedy,
Better adapt as an owner and hope he don’t crash it

He better mute himself, stay secluded, compose shit,
He owns it, he’s gotta pay the debts they owe,
He's gotta remove bots, and costs, get the cash to flow,
Still adds more value this month than Dorsey’s lifetime

The mold is breaking, it’s an org-chart reshaping,
No sinecures for the taking,
ESG? No more freeloaders, or slow coders,
The social justice warriors,
He didn’t order scores of “reformers”
His focus gets sharper, hastens departures,
He poses and posits
Sells Dogecoin and profits,

Roams the west coast, he’s known to construct rockets,
VC throws funds and he grows,
Promotes and deals closed, Bitcoin grows and nukes martians,
He road shows and barely knows his own products,
A CEO locomotive for progress,
The growth’s explosive, for sure, he schools scholars,

He moves on to the next code proposed,
Flaws exposed and shipped nada
So the shares get sold, the mob scolds
We suppose its improper, but the stock goes up,
To the moon, de dum, da, da

Middle age, tech bro sage, he’ll re-engage
Made his bones inventing PayPal, the golden age,
He was a dev in the beginning, but that’s all changed,
SNL host, then Rogan, and each front page

But he kept founding, like an entrepreneur centaur,
Hype-train conductor and bullshit detector,
Neuralink, sensors, monkeys, investors, goals
That he can’t repress, no siestas, jests
‘Cause he can’t assess beta tests for each company


‘Cause plans, idle hands, and fans don’t build Teslas
Hyperloop’s coming, ‘till then he rides Cessnas, this is success
And he’s pushing so hard, like some workaholic martyr
Taking slackers to the slaughter daily, plus

He’s a charmer, making sets of twins to father doling out his ardor,
Baby mama drama streaming on each
Feed, you think he’s Boring? He’s not,

Another twist of the plot,
He’s dishin’ out the insults, mocking the Thai rescue’s plot,
His Russian peace deal’s shot, workin’ from a jet or yacht
His Starlink links Ukraine’s fighters while he’s tweeting…
On the pot!

Solar city, he’s the chairman, panel bro
Making each batt’ry turn down for Watts
So watch the venom get hot.
Check shares he’s bought,
Would you rather a rich exec team that ain’t doin’ squat?

You can buy anything you’ve got the cash for, man

"Mute Yourself": Silicon Valley isn't Eight Mile, and Musk isn't Eminem, but...

At @AEStudioLA, we believe cancel culture makes thinking complete thoughts dangerous. Cue up "Californication"
-----

Ostracized online by mobs of righteous indignation.
Dismissed into the void without defense or consolation.
A casualty of sophistry - the age of cancellation.

It’s the death sentence writ without the fuss of litigation

The plaintiff cries as the beast can feast on groveling - extorted prostration

The brotherhood of victimhood and endless cancellation…

Fear compels the ne’er-do-wells to posturing and staging,
Celebrities spin, confess your sin, the culture wars are raging!

Hate and public scorn,
New crowns of thorns

In the age of cancellation
In the age of cancellation
In the age of cancellation
In the age of cancellation

Voice your concern, you’re the next one to get burned, it’s a delicate conversation,

We now deride what our parents supplied, just misguided fornication

So Rock gets his scars when a fresh prince spars and Hart earns cancellation

Truth may seem the safest of speech, but it still needs a sanctification

And mutineers will disappear for a lack of authorization

And facts deface a safe space in the age of cancellation

Write afraid of new charades and lines of demarcation
Livings lost by pronouns or Chinese pronunciation

An Op-ed’s script is a heretic’s crypt in a newsroom altercation

And classroom feuds stifle latitudes of several types of conjugation

And ivory towers cower in the age of cancellation

Disaffect in retrospect and raise your hands for waving,
Jefferson we shun with Washington, but who are we enslaving?

Californication in the Age of Cancellation


Working at @AEStudioLA, one gets to play with the latest and greatest AI tools. They also let me write parodies of Edgar Allan Poe. Here's one about GPT-3.

When Annabel Lee dies, a protagonist is heartbroken. When login credentials are removed, the loss is similar.

It was many and many a job ago,

At a startup by the sea

When I first would try an OpenAI

By the name of GPT-3

And her beauty bespoke, with every keystroke

Of her scintillant NLP

Editors smiled, transformers compiled,

Lorem ipsum swapped with glee,

As I soon fell in love as she fit like a GloVe,

I and my GPT-3

With a passion reserved for flame wars, trolls or

Popular NFTs.


A lonely ascetic, so long ago,

Many years before DALL-E,

A prompt enigma was posed, stumping

My marvelous GPT-3

When I first enrolled I grew enthralled

With her vast precocity,

But sensitive, much less sentient,

She could never prove to be


My colleagues, not half her equal as linguists

Grew weary of her and me,

Yes! This is the reason HR conveyed

From their office by the sea,

When my termination arrived by Zoom

Killing my login for GPT-3


But our dash was much richer by far than the cache

Of algos far older than we

Of networks far deeper than she

And neither my therapist’s agonized pleas

Nor some vicious, demanding VC,

Could ever request that I scroll past the pull

Of temptation from GPT-3

I was ne’er so immersed as when once I conversed

With my eloquent GPT-3

And my code never ships, but I still quote the quips

Of my humorous GPT-3

And so now, when I pair, I recall lingual flair

Of my mistress, my muse, and my cyber-affair

At a startup awash in VC,

Now adrift with no cashflow for me.

If you enjoyed this (or it hit close to home!), read more here: https://ae.studio/parody

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/Evan_Coop/zcbUezK

Annabel Lee - If she were an AI.

A long, long time ago,
Vaguely, I remember static pages filled with GIFs and style…
And each new CSS advance,
Would serve a site and not a trance,
And agency would linger, for a while…

But corporate interest made us shiver,
With every feature apps deliver...
Doomscrolls on your iPads,
From trolling farms and comrades

For all the folks they’ve classified,
A tailored discourse amplified...
An algorithmic genocide…
When cash and code collide!

We were singing why, why should our agency die?
If we let the folks at Meta build their own BCI?
We can’t opt out and we’re compelled to comply,
As we kiss our self-direction goodbye.
(Kiss your self-direction goodbye)

Do you write HTTP?
As conceived by the great Tim Berners-Lee?
If your client tells you so.
Now do you believe your moral soul
Will save you from each clicking hole?
Will your cyber-ethics let you raise dough?

Well prognoses now grow rather grim,
For folks in Chrome and folks in Vim,
Surveillance tools suffuse,
To manipulate and abuse,

When every widget leads into the muck,
Every browsing fool’s a sitting duck,
On data lakes patrolled by Zuck,
When cash and code collide…

While the next years are a great unknown,
Besieging kings we cannot dethrone,
Who yields now to which decree?
When the pics appear on the smartphone screen,
With their well-timed hits of dopamine
It’s a new lifetime guarantee…

With executives all world-renowned,
Shirts buttoned-up, souls broken down
Is congress unconcerned?
What their machines have learned?

And while culture wars will jump their sharks,
The senate spouts their canned remarks,
And Sorkin builds his story arcs
When cash and code collide

Lonely fellers living in their cellars,
4chans, wokes, and fortune tellers,
The nameless hoards of broader castes,
No norms either hard or fast,
Some cancelled, chased, and some harassed...
The affected, and afflicted, and out-classed

Now the venom from this cyber womb
Threatens discourse to consume,
Boardrooms perform their dance
‘Bout their shares of the circumstance,

From the valley to the greenest field,
Documents leaked that once concealed,
The power to which we once appealed
When cash and code collide

I met AI with clearer views
And I asked it for some local news
It returned the time of day.
I walked into a local store,
Where I read the paper years before,
But the storefront, just a query and array…

And raging on my mind and screen,
An old affront, the new vaccine...
The browser stored my token,
My feed is thus bespoken…

And so I read, bewitched, engrossed,
Each sober fear, each drunken post,
A tangled web, a toxic host.
When cash and code collide…

(I'll keep writing more parodies, essays, and snarky commentary on the world we all inhabit, hope you'll enjoy!)

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/Evan_Coop/99J2J2M

"American Pie," parodied 50 years later, pondering the technology that defines our lives.

Artificial intelligence (AI), however nebulous and dynamic its definition, separates the creator (the algorithm) from the creative (the human at the terminal) and blurs the line between preeminent artist and pretentious arse.

By satirizing, manipulating, and penning commentary about these classic works, are we witty or effete, extending the reach of these masters or cheapening and diminishing their contributions?

Is the polysyllabic discourse in this curation statement itself a parody-esque derision of an art history class I consumed at an elite university nearly 20 years ago or profound reflection on the intersection of art and technology? Does it matter?

"Starry Night Owls"

The oft-depicted bar scene is illuminated by Van Gogh’s celestial orbs, as the night owls assert that they are, separately and in tandem, a hoot.

The screeching sounds of those nocturnal avians stands in contrast to the sounds the auricularly-impaired artist could never perceive. The coloration begets the question of who lights up the night, the fixtures on the ceiling or the seats?

"The Persistence of Dali’s Llama"

The llama, both surreal and surfeit of color, ponders its place among the scape upon which it stands. Is this Dali’s llama or the Dali Lama? Does it matter?

Do these even differ in the ethereal realms in which space, time, and meaning melt into one like some insubstantial clock?

"Whistler’s Mother-in-law"

​​Art and literature alike maintain their fascination with the torments, nay, the malevolence of the supervillian known as “the mother-in-law. Whistler manipulates this trope.

The viewer must consider whether this mother is softened by her wink and a smile or cackling with schemes of passive-aggressive horror. The son-in-law, observed by a scowl that represents broader society, is left only to play along, leaving us to wonder what motives he infers.

"Water Lilliputians"

Most reputable scholars of impressionistic art agree that Claude Monet never watched David the Gnome on Nickelodeon in the 90s.

Nonetheless, this depiction connotes the eternal, ubiquitous human struggle to keep one’s head above water, to remain afloat amidst the opacity lurking below.

"Transylvanian Gothic"

Dark mansions are the place to be. Blood-drinking is the life for me.

While farms and pastoral scenes evoke growth, life, and birth, these pallid figures suggest a ghoulish, grave, eerieness that underscores the bucolic, agrarian environs we might otherwise expect. Is that pitchfork intended for hay or souls?

"A Sunday Afternoon in Seurat Race"

Modern life’s frenetic pace finds a rare respite on Sundays, which now, are consumed by the imagery of the rat race from which one is never truly able to escape.

The tranquility of an afternoon in the park is torn asunder by unwanted guests at the picnic. Those remaining have no choice but to ignore, endure, and find pleasure in this sullied sanctuary.

"Nightly Rembrandt Sleep"

This man looks, bleary, weary, addled, horrified by the elusive nature of one’s nightly respite.

In the vein of Dutch masters depicting the darker, less-romanticized elements of the human experience, this poor man evokes the night that never comes, then comes far too soon.

"Scream & Munch Burgers"

The primal fear evoked by Munch’s late-19th century masterpiece is now illuminated and elucidated by a similarly primal urge - hunger.

The protagonist, upon a bridge suggestive of a connection between past and present, illustrates what remains timeless - the urge to wolf down a burger.

(Follow for more parodies, essays, and AI-fun! And thank you to @aestudiola and their brilliant data scientist, @fabioperez!)

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/Evan_Coop/4BY3IxZ

An AI Art Gallery


I wrote a parody of Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money"
Too bad his genius cannot be deployed to describe our times.
---

The subprime bubble busted
My hedge fund days were through

Found a CTO
In a college friend I knew

Thought I’d found a YC startup
Addicted to the risk

Send users, code, and crypto,
Find exits out of this…

I’m a malcontent insider
A jaded, cynic schmuck

Who’s seen the emperor naked
While he whines ‘bout his ‘luck!’
Yes he thinks it’s bad luck…
And I don’t give a f*&k.

Now I HODL in Hawaii
I’m a skeptical man

Send users, code, and crypto
Spend “winter” with a tan!

If you enjoyed this parody - please follow me for other off-color, satirical, rhyming commentary about the world of tech!