A few weeks ago I published The Lulz Motive: build for yourself. Skip the users table, the OAuth flows, and the anxiety that poisons the fun.

It felt liberating. It felt lighthearted. It felt jovial. Then it pissed me off.

The Jester’s Real Job

Tech culture loves the jester: the lone genius who can hack Fort Knox and disrupt the global financial system but can't get laid on the way home. Sharp enough to mock every absurdity, but always stopping short of imposing real order.

The jester reduces tension. He softens edges. He adds entropy instead of structure. And most insidiously: he makes the hacker harmless.

Occasional lulz are healthy. Certain moments spark creativity and lead to strokes of genius. But when your deepest ambitions for impact get dressed up as ironic detachment, the jester stops being your friend. He becomes your cage.

If you dream of building something undeniable yet keep saying “who cares what other people think?” but you spend all of your inner thoughts caring what other people think, you're not going to have a good time.

From Tinkering to Conquest

Strip away the self-deprecating humor and the comfortable “hacker ethos,” and what’s left is simpler and more primal:

Real conquest requires something the jester fundamentally lacks: raw drive. The desire to dominate, to impose your will on chaos, to bend reality to your vision.

Real ambition isn’t embarrassing. Market share, user growth, empire-building — these aren’t dirty words. That means facing the mess: real users, real feedback, the market’s indifference, the entropy of shipping something imperfect at first. Building is an act of imposing order on chaos.

Darwin is slower than Moore

We tiptoe around words like "dominate" and "empire" but sanitizing the language doesn't change the conquest that's been there this whole time: trying to create your frame of order around the chaos.

I'm done pretending my motives are always innocent and detached.

Laugh without stutter

This doesn't mean I don't do things for fun anymore. On the contrary.

Now, when I choose to do things for the lulz, I laugh without stutter.

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