QUEUE OFFICE AGAIN
I PLAY CS OFFICE BECAUSE EVERYBODY THERE IS RETARDED.
I LIKE BEING SURROUNDED BY RETARDS.
Office is a bad map.
It is the best map.
That is not why anybody is there.
Nobody accidentally becomes an Office player.
You have to keep choosing it.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Eventually you know everybody.
BASSFISH.
DEREK CHAUVIN'S LEFT KNEE.
The trans person.
The anime pfp.
You recognize the pfp before the username.
Then the mic comes on.
Lisp.
N-word.
Yep.
Same guy.
You spawn T side.
The radio is already going.
You hear Gabe Newell mumbling through it.
You buy your gun.
Somebody is standing around doing nothing.
The round starts.
For a second it feels like showing up somewhere you have been a hundred times before.
Same radio.
Same room.
Same people.
You know the vending machines.
You know which hallway somebody is going to refuse to leave.
You know the guy from three nights ago will probably be back.
It starts feeling less like matchmaking.
More like work.
Not because anything productive is happening.
You just know who works there.
You clock in.
They clock in.
Everybody already knows what the day is.
WE ARE PLAYING OFFICE.
That's it.
I think this is actually rare.
Most rooms are full of people trying to turn the room into something else.
One person wants money.
One wants status.
One wants to leave.
One wants to run the place.
Office does not have this problem.
Nobody needs Office to become Mirage.
Nobody needs Valve to tell us Office matters.
BASSFISH is already here.
DEREK CHAUVIN'S LEFT KNEE is already here.
Nobody needs the room to become universal.
That is probably the whole point.
THE ROOM CAN JUST BE THE ROOM.
The map loads.
Gabe is still mumbling through the radio.
THE RETARDS CLOCK IN.
QUEUE OFFICE AGAIN.
VR GIVES YOU SOMEWHERE TO GO
I used to go to Shelter.
And when I say I went to Shelter, I mean I WENT OUT THAT NIGHT.
There was a line.
There was a wait to get in.
A walk through the city.
Down the alley.
The music got louder before the room even came into view.
People outside talking.
People inside dancing.
Regulars.
DJs.
People dressed specifically for the night.
People were definitely on drugs.
Maybe it was four in the morning.
Whatever.
It was a night out.
Heart beating.
Ears ringing.
Talking to actual people.
Staying too long.
Waking up the next day and remembering the night before.
IT'S LIKE:
Watching Netflix with your significant other.
Sitting on somebody's couch until three in the morning talking about nothing.
Driving around with somebody for no reason.
Eating somewhere you barely remember because the person mattered more than the food.
Standing outside after somewhere closed because nobody wanted the night to end yet.
THESE ARE THE MEMORIES.
Nobody remembers the couch.
Nobody remembers what Netflix loaded on.
What sticks is who was there.
What sticks is how the night felt.
Shelter had that.
The building did not physically exist.
That did not stop the body from responding to it.
Someone standing too close still felt too close.
A friend showing up still made the night better.
Everybody leaving still made the room feel empty.
THE BUILDING WAS FAKE.
THE NIGHT WAS NOT.
OUTSIDERS NOTICE THE ROOM
I think outsiders understand this faster.
Not because they are smarter.
They just have more of a reason to notice the room.
If normal life fits you, most of it feels natural.
School.
Work.
Dating.
Going out.
You inherit the structure and mostly move through it.
If it does not fit, the structure becomes obvious.
Why do people meet here?
Why does work look like this?
Why does going out look like this?
Why is this the version of a life everybody agreed on?
The normal person can inherit the world.
The outsider has to inspect it.
And once you notice the room was built by somebody,
you start wondering why you cannot build one too.
CRYPTO GIVES THE ROOM AN ECONOMY
This is why I got into crypto.
I actually believed in it.
This is almost embarrassing to say now.
Not number go up.
Not ETFs.
Not because somebody on CNBC said Bitcoin was an asset class.
I got into crypto and started learning about money.
Inflation.
Central banks.
Hard money.
Austrian economics.
I learned what austerity was.
I started asking questions I had never thought to ask before.
What is money?
Who gets to make it?
Why does it lose value?
Why should somebody need permission to send it?
Crypto was an argument before it was an investment.
Privacy mattered.
Self custody mattered.
Permissionlessness mattered.
Having money native to the internet mattered.
Because now the weird little room could actually own something.
It could pay people.
It could collect things.
It could build a treasury.
It could create a market.
It could have an economy that came from inside the room.
That was insane to me.
The internet gave people communities.
VR gave the community a place.
Crypto gave the place property.
Now we were getting dangerously close to society.
THEN NUMBER WENT UP
Then number went up.
And the room changed.
Not all at once.
Just slowly enough that nobody really noticed.
People started showing up who did not care about any of the questions.
They did not care about privacy.
They did not care about self custody.
They did not care about permissionlessness.
They cared that it was going up.
That was enough.
Suddenly crypto was not an argument anymore.
It was exposure.
Allocation.
Liquidity.
Something to put in a portfolio.
Something to campaign around.
Something to sell.
NUMBER GO UP TECHNOLOGY.
The easiest way I can explain what I love about this is Pokémon cards.
Nintendo made Charizard.
Nintendo did not decide that one old Charizard was going to become a holy object.
People did.
Kids wanted it.
Collectors kept it.
People argued about condition.
People built marketplaces.
People decided which cards mattered.
Twenty years later somebody looks at the price and thinks the price is the reason the card matters.
It is backwards.
THE COMMUNITY MADE THE ASSET.
The price came after.
Crypto worked like that too.
Somebody released software.
A bunch of freaks decided it mattered.
They used it.
They traded it.
They built around it.
They kept showing up while everybody else laughed.
Then it became valuable.
Then the institutions arrived.
And the weird part is they act like their arrival made it legitimate.
No.
They came because it was already legitimate enough to become valuable.
That order matters.
The community came first.
The price came after.
The institution came last.
Fine.
Come in.
Buy some.
Make money.
Whatever.
But do not confuse arriving with building.
And do not confuse the people standing closest to the money with the people who understand what the room is for.
THE ROOM CAN JUST BE THE ROOM
This is the part I think people forget.
Something can matter without everybody agreeing that it matters.
Office does not need to replace Mirage.
Shelter did not need to replace every nightclub.
Crypto does not need every dollar on earth to become Bitcoin.
(It will.)
The room can just be the room.
This is actually a huge luxury.
For most of history, if two groups wanted completely different ways of living, eventually somebody had to win.
There was one town.
One school.
One workplace.
One culture everybody had to negotiate with.
The internet makes disagreement cheaper.
Not every difference needs to become a fight over the center.
A hundred people can decide something matters and build around it.
Ten thousand people can build something completely different next door.
Both can exist.
Nobody has to convert anybody.
That feels like the good version of the internet to me.
Not everybody becoming the same.
Everybody getting enough room to become extremely different.
And if the room works,
leave it alone.
Keep showing up.
Keep building.
QUEUE OFFICE AGAIN.