Will Clinton Avoid Gambling Addiction???
Crypto investors aren't banking on it.
Happy New Year!
Yesterday I made an innocuous post on X/Twitter about my software project VibeKoder, which I told you all about in October.
Well yesterday, someone with fewer than a hundred followers retweeted it, saying it was absolutely nuts that I was coding a vibe coding app called VibeKoder in VibeKoder.
I’m not going to link to any of what happened—this is not the place for it—but suddenly I had a flood of DMs and dozens of retweets and people setting up communities and profiles for me.
I was up until 6am this morning figuring out what the hell was going on. And it’s this: tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, are joining underground cryptocurrency stock exchanges trading memecoins. And for some reason a few of these people thought it was worth dumping unknown thousands of dollars into launching one based on my VibeKoder software!
I didn’t ask for or anticipate this. I was, frankly, kinda horrified. But also energized. I played with the platform and set up a wallet and figured out how it all worked.
I got tons of friendly, helpful advice from people with a very-heavy monetary incentive to get me successful. I was cajoled into staying up all hyping and livestreaming a coding session.
At 4am, with my roommate asleep and working early right next door, I sat and added a nifty feature to copy entire code-blocks out of their markdown fence. I hacked on VibeKoder in VibeKoder and compiled the results.
The hilarious thing is that I think most of these people know nothing about coding. They are, to be impolite, gamblers. Watching me copy/paste C++ back and forth between text widgets was probably the most boring livestream they’ve watched all week! But they know there’s a vogue for “vibe coding” and they prepared, for me, a bandwagon to jump on and drive alongside them.
People DMing me and reposting me every few seconds. My phone is pinging me updates every few minutes. My coin is up! My coin is down. My coin is down. My coin is up! Dollar signs everywhere. It’s enough to drive anyone into a frenzy!
As you know, I’m on a career path for becoming an addictions counsellor. I shit you not: I have worked with a client who is addicted to spending money on a major meme-coin platform. I see exactly what’s going on here—and now I’m in the middle of it!
I’ve had no new Substack subscribers in the past 12 hours, so what I write here is still between you and me. Against advice, I went to bed this morning for a few hours sleep before my volunteer shift.
I slept on it, and I think I’ll just keep doing what I always do—just more publically. We can’t help that we live in a world where everything is gambled on. Platforms like Polymarket allow for everything to be turned into a bet. The people being bet on didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask for it.
And there’s a huge risk, having tasted a not-insubstantial payout, of me becoming totally hooked on the hype. Of trying to meme myself and build a wave so all my new internet friends get a big payout by investing early.
But, again, I’ve already got a life and part of that life is helping people to stop gambling.
At the same time, I’ve been sharing my work and my stuff online for years, and I’m proud of it. I’m not going to stop doing that. If people want to watch me livestream coding sessions as I vibe-code my GPL-licensed free software to liberate people from proprietary cloud systems and spyware, great!
My plan is to just be more public with what I already do, and otherwise just be myself. Crypto “investing” is not a solid income plan. I’m not going to destroy my career or my current life stability in order to milk some flash-in-the-pan.
To anyone foolish enough to throw money into one of these platforms, I have this to say: My projects are good. My videos will be awesome. I’m very proud of the software I’m working on and the mission I have undertaken. I will share my work more, and I think nobody else is doing what I’m doing. I will do my best to uphold my high standards and share what I do. If you want to invest in that, go ahead!
But what a world we live in! A casino popped-up around my online life overnight! Advisors rushing out of the woodwork to guide me into fame and riches. All after midnight on a Monday. And now my credit card is mostly paid off.
This can happen to anyone now. This is what the internet is now. I could have stayed up all night, called in sick to my volunteer work today, and danced for a webcam hoping to make it big.
But there lies madness.
My dearest Substack subscribers: your investment in me means so much more. My many backlogged pieces deserve my time more-so than schmoozing to move a stock-ticker. So I promise my continued attention to polishing and releasing my writings on McLuhan, psychosis, internet history, and everything else.
Do any of my readers know much about Richard Wagner? Please reach out in comments. I’ve got this crazy new conceit about his Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) projects as a means of appreciating Wyndham Lewis’ and McLuhan’s approach to the environment as art. Apparently Stephane Mallarmé’s work, The Book, is a direct response to Wagner. Fertile ground!
All the best in 2026, my dear readers!