An essay on wank

Su Shi (art name Dongpo), the famed Song Dynasty poet, was assigned to an official post at Guazhao, across the river from Jinshan Temple, where master Foyin of the Chan school of Buddhism resided. One day, Su Shi wrote a poem, and sent it across the river for Foyin to read. The poem read as follows:

Bowing with my highest respect
To the deva of devas
Whose fine light illuminates the whole universe, The eight winds cannot move me,
For I am sitting upright on the golden purple lotus blossom.

On reading the poem, Foyin wrote only the word "fart" in comment on the poem, and sent it back across the river. Opening the note and reading the comment, Su Shi was infuriated and crossed the river to argue with Foyin. On seeing the inflamed poet, Foyin only commented: "The eight winds cannot move me: one fart carries me across the river." Su Shi, embarrassed and chastened, returned to his home.

Just like in the Song Dynasty, we have many people who write aggrandisingly about themselves, and even more who speak thus. Unlike Su Shi, but like many people in the Imperial Court of the time, we also have many people who abuse their power to silence people who puncture the remarkably fragile sense of self-worth that this creates (Su Shi was later to be on the sharp end of such abuse of power in the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial). Very much unlike the Song Dynasty, however, we have a distinct lack of people willing to learn, reflect on their behaviour and do better, and self-inflation of this kind is in itself grounds for elevation to high office.

Our society clearly has an issue with a whole family of bad-faith speech acts: outright lying is an obvious problem and bullshit, as defined in Harry Frankfurt's text on the matter is a pressing concern in our political climate. However, none of them quite capture what's going on here, which can perhaps be described as speech that aims to bolster someone's self-image or let them feel good about themselves, but that is disguised as something else: a political statement, an objective statement of fact or a form of artistic expression. This essay aims to define this form of speech, and given its observed properties, we could do worse than to call it wank.

In this text, then, we'll aim to sketch out a working definition of wank, talk through some examples and discuss how and why it's so epistemically and politically damaging.

A Definition

From our early type example, we can see that wank as a speech act has two core elements. The first is that wank-speech is motivated, not by a desire to communicate or make a fact known, but by feeling: it aims to make the person speaking, in one way or another, feel better about themselves. This can speak to a number of different emotional needs: the need to feel morally superior to others is a common motivator, and this one is particularly common in online left-wing political communities. In these communities, the pattern usually begins with someone making a glib, not particularly well-thought-through political statement. I'm sure you can think of plenty of examples, but to take one that probably won't upset too many of my readers, we can look at the anarcho-primitivist position that all technology is bad and causes harm and that we need to return to a pre-agricultural economy for political and economic justice to be a thing. If you're the right kind of environmentalist who's already predisposed to not liking human impact on the environment, this sounds good and makes a certain kind of superficial sense: it's true, after all, that humans have done a lot of damage to the environment, that lots of kinds of technology have made our lives worse and society more unequal, and that our modern technological society hurts a lot of people. Our person engaging in wank-speech then says all of this, feels good about themselves for taking a morally superior position, and doesn't think about it further.

The notable feature here is that the statement is overtly a political position, and one that passes for objective: the person isn't really talking about themselves at all. However, the effect is almost entirely on the feelings of the person, as actually implementing this would be a) more or less impossible and b) lead to the deaths of billions of people. Even a little bit of thought about this makes it clear that as real politics this is an untenable position, but because that's not what the claim is doing, the person in question doesn't even really think about the position, and if they do, they quickly suppress any such thoughts.

To give an example not based on moral superiority but rather fragile self-image, we might consider your average LinkedIn post. In general, people don't post self-congratulatory wank on LinkedIn to assert moral superiority, but rather to avoid fear. The modern workplace is a scary place and it's all too easy to find oneself thrown into poverty on the basis of what is basically a random process. So when someone posts something silly and obviously incorrect about how to gain career success, they're not trying to say that they're better than others, or even really to try and give career advice at all. They're saying this in order to avoid the fear they have that they're at the mercy of a random, uncontrolled process that might fuck their lives up for no reason.

The second core element of wank is that having made the statement, and having been unconsciously deceptive about what the statement is for, challenges to the statement are then treated, unconsciously, as an attack on the self. Wank, in short, does not admit scrutiny and demands to be accepted whole and without challenge. Even the most simple request for clarification or the most reasonable question, like "what will disabled people do in an anarcho-primitivist society?" is treated as an attack on the whole value system and the person carrying it, and the questioner is treated as an enemy and a person who supports all of the bad things that the person engaging in wank claims to oppose. Whether the response is vehement or a high-handed expression of being above it all ("I don't answer those questions"), the wank is not to be challenged or examined.

Finally, wank almost always comes with a package of smugness or being convinced that, in one way or another, the purveyor of wank sits loftily above others. The wank-statement isn't just obviously true or beyond question: it's simply, obviously better than the messy, often-complex dialogue that the rest of us deal with, and the person stating it is a better person than you for doing so.

Taken together, these elements create a form of speech where self-expression and objective statements about the world blur together in an uncomfortable way. Overtly, everything that's said can be read as a claim about the world: however, the emotional valence of the thing and everything about how the statement is embedded is as though what was said was a deep emotional statement. Our working definition might therefore be as follows:

"Wank is a speech act directed first and foremost at helping the speaker feel better about themselves, stated as an objective claim about the state of the world, that we are expected in discussion to treat with the epistemic authority of a claim about identity, but the content of the actual claim".

This captures well the uncomfortable, slightly disorienting feeling that wank creates when you're subjected to it, wherein you're expected to speak about and think about the statement as though it says what it facially does, but also not push too hard or at all, because challenging the factuality or other face-value elements of the statement is a personal attack on the person saying it and their identity. I'm sure we've all been in such situations, unfortunately, and we can all point to lots of situations where wank is prevalent in our current society.

Wank, in this sense, is to be distinguished both from lies and from bullshit: the two other forms of bad-faith speech that have been wrecking our societies for the last few decades. To tackle lies first, the key difference between wank and a lie is that a liar has a real interest in you believing the objective content of the statement being made to be true. To take an example from US politics, the Bush administration had a real interest in people believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They weren't just saying it to help Bush and Cheney feel better about themselves: they needed people to actually believe it in a factual sense. To that end, the lies, in some sense, needed to be plausible and believable, at least if you didn't look too hard, and the people spreading the lies needed to be able to, at least a little, respond to challenges. That often, in this case, meant leaning heavily on classified or secret information, which, while not hugely plausible, at least gave a veneer of plausibility to the whole thing. A wank-purveyor, by contrast, doesn't actually care hugely whether we believe their statements or not so long as we don't challenge them. Pushing, probing or asking for qualification is treated with extreme hostility, but there's no positive desire for us to actually believe in it: so long as it's doing the emotional work for the person, it's good enough. In extreme cases, the wank-purveyor might actually get upset by the wrong people believing in their fetish-statement: online leftists becoming upset that liberals and conservatives believe that the USA is sliding into fascism is an excellent example of this phenomenon. In some sense, the worst thing that can happen to a wank-statement is it becoming true.

Having discussed lies, we now move to bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense. Wank and bullshit have a distinct family relation: they're both speech acts that involve speech for effect more than speech for communication or deception, and in a very real sense, the truth of the statements that a wank-purveyor or a bullshitter make are mostly irrelevant. The bullshitter, however, has no real attachment to what they say. Trump, for example, is a bullshitter par excellence, and he switches narratives, contradicts himself and generally has very little care for any individual statements made. To the extent that he gets upset about being challenged on his statements, it's not because an attack on what he's asserting feels like an attack on him, but just because he doesn't like being challenged in general: a subtle difference, but an important one, as it means he has no real ideological commitment to any of the shit he says. The wank-purveyor, by contrast, is deeply wedded to their statements: what they say matters to them in a way that it doesn't for a bullshitter, and a wank-purveyor will carry through with their positions even at significant personal cost.

If you've ever been exposed to wank in any real concentration, you know exactly how hard and unpleasant it is to fight through. You're told, to your face, things that are simply not true, impractical or actually evil and asked to accept it on trust. When you ask questions, even the most innocent questions are met with a hostile reaction, as though you'd personally injured the person. Unrelated issues, often to do with the speaker's identity, will find themselves dragged into the discussion. If you keep pushing or refuse to accept what's being said as truth, you'll be labelled as an enemy in favour of all kinds of evil shit. If you're on social media, you might find yourself the target of a specious dogpile from people who believe the accusations, or you might find your reputation otherwise tarred. You walk away from the whole thing confused, hurt and feeling faintly put out by the hostility directed at you from people whom you might well mostly agree with.

So, how do we identify wank when it's happening? After all, what I've discussed is almost all about internal state. That's the subject of the next section.

Signs of wank

While it's easy to identify there being something wrong with wank-speech, pinning it down and getting a differential diagnosis can be a challenge. However, there are signs associated with wank-speech that you can look for, and we'll discuss some of them here.

The first major indicator is excessive, black-and-white moral language. While lies are common more or less everywhere and bullshit is the language of many people in power in our societies, wank-speech, more than either lies or bullshit, is the language of the moral panic. "Protect the children", in particular, is a feature of an awful lot of wank: an excellent example of this is the current push for age verification and IDs on the internet to access social media and such. This is, simply put, a terrible idea: it's piss-easy to circumvent, it means that a whole bunch of companies with no business doing so are suddenly collecting absurd quantities of personal information, leading to both mass surveillance and the risk of serious data breaches, and it's an excellent tool for censorship (LGBT and especially trans content tends to get labelled as sexual even when there's no reason for it to be). However, just try arguing against it with a proponent. Sure as day, they will bring up the children and imply that, because you oppose this, you want children to be exposed to sexual predators, hardcore pornography and snuff films. Never mind the fact that age verification is, as can be trivially shown, going to put children at more risk of harm, not less: if you don't accept the slogan without question, you're evil and a potential predator. This pattern consistently comes up when looking at wank.

Relatedly, excessive saccharine sentimentality is a strong indicator of wank. Sentimentality is a seeking of safety, security and the dissolution of the self into something uncomplicatedly easy and unchallenging: it's "wouldn't it be nice?" or "isn't this nice?" elevated to the level of a worldview. This isn't the same thing as finding beauty in the world or looking for hope or even finding joy in difficult times: all of these things are good and important. Sentimentality is seeing those ideas, holding onto them and then not thinking about them or fighting for them further, as though having the nice ideas will make things nice by themselves. Many, many political people are guilty of this: the idea that we want good things instead of bad things, but not thinking in any way beyond the most superficial about how to make that happen... well, the anarchoprimitivists we mentioned earlier definitely fit that bill. Wank does, after all, demand that you never look even a little unsparingly at the actual facts on the ground.

The idea that certain things are easy, obvious or common-sense is another strong tell. Understanding the world means accepting that the world we live in at the moment is irretrievably complex and that understanding it is hard. Obviously, this isn't very popular, and consequently a lot of people badly want it to not be true, and that preference, then, tends to be exploited. There is some overlap here with bullshit, but while a grifter might choose to spread their bullshit as obvious common-sense, wank-purveyors actively believe it and act on the idea that their statements are actually common sense. Unfortunately, the New Zealand government is currently full of people like this: while we do have some real ideologues in the ACT party, the bulk of National and NZ First, especially in the cabinet, genuinely believe that their austerity policies and punishing the poor, along with their whole gamut of other legislative failures, will somehow lead to an economic recovery, hence the persistent pushing of "common-sense" economic policy that consistently immiserates not only the people whom they think deserve it, but also their main support base. Listening for people asking why you're questioning something immediately obvious, then, is a good way of catching wank-speech.

Finally, look for inconsistencies between stated aims and values and behaviour. Wank-speech, as we've already established, is primarily emotional, and far more than both lies (where the appearance of consistency is required) and bullshit (where while you can be inconsistent between statements, but each individual statement still needs to hold together), it can be aggressively inconsistent internally. Obviously, liars and bullshitters are quite capable of lying about their values and aims, but that's usually weakly held and a pretty thin facade. If you have someone strongly expressing values around equity and kindness while equally strongly acting in ways and supporting positions that... don't do that, and pointing that out triggers distress and hostility, however, that is a very strong indicator that wank is afoot.

A case study: wank in the tech industry

Wank, like lies and bullshit, is unfortunately everywhere in our society, and represents a significant social problem. It infests our workplaces, distorts our politics and screws heavily with our media, and it's a phenomenon that I'd argue is strongly linked to social media. That said, if I keep on saying it's everywhere, I risk explaining nothing while explaining everything. I've thus chosen, as I so often do, to dig into a case study of how wank can seriously damage a community of practice. As usual, I've chosen a place I know well: the tech industry.

While at the upper levels of tech lies and bullshit are the order of the day (CF. Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg, among others, none of whom I think really have the basic level of stable values that you need to sustain wank in the first place), at lower levels of the industry the form of bad-faith speech that determines behaviour is often much closer to wank. This usually manifests in the form of extended hype cycles that a lot of people develop a very strong emotional attachment to: the most recent ones, of course, being cryptocurrency and LLMs. You can see a lot of wank in both fields: people make implausible, often downright ridiculous claims and expect them to be taken at face value and believed without question. Often, as in the case of NFTs, it's not even entirely clear what claims are being made (if you try and break down the claims made and put them into standard form, it's startlingly hard), but the expectation is that you still believe without question. And LLM boosters and cryptocurrency advocates alike are deeply, deeply attached to their ideas about the technologies: criticism of them is almost always treated as a personal attach or a suggestion that they're stupid, or at any rate not as clever as they think themselves to be. This is prototypical wank, I think.

The motivating fear here, I think, is a fear of status loss and irrelevance. Computational technology and the internet have temporarily propelled software engineers and tech people in general to a very high status in our society. However, this is heavily linked to the ability of tech to actually reshape and revolutionise the world, particularly in favour of people who are already rich and powerful: if that disappears, we just become (as we're increasingly seeing) ordinary workers, who will have to do ordinary worker things like unionising and advocating for our well-being in order to be comfortable. We'll just be regular people. A lot of the people who end up in tech can't stand that idea, which means that tech needs to be producing a consistent stream of revolutionary, disruptive technology if they're to succeed. So, what to do when the revolutions start drying up? People in power have the luxury of being able to lie or bullshit, but without billions of dollars at your disposal, it's hard to just make up a fake revolutionary technology. What you can do, however, is latch onto an existing technology, make claims about it (whether or not they hold water), and then become attached to the idea that those claims make you intellectually superior to others.

This position lets you do a number of things. First and foremost, it lets you present a facade of confidence, capability and being a 10x tech person. If you're in general not very capable and are feeling it, you can cover up that fear by becoming an "AI expert" or a "Prompt Engineer" and make a claim to expertise that you don't actually have. Moreover, because you're actually believing the claims emotionally rather than simply bullshitting or lying about it, it makes it a lot harder for others to criticise what you're saying, and gives you a very effective defence against pushback: you can claim that in criticising what you're talking about, your critics are hurting you in socially unacceptable ways. Most people, not wanting to violate social norms, will then avoid digging into your claims too hard, and the only people who'll challenge you, in this situation, are people like me who are marginal to our society anyway and have little to lose by being critical.

Functioning on the logic of wank also allows you to, to a degree, avoid being judged on the basis of objective achievement. This is particularly likely when the bulk of an organisation works on wank-based principles: if the person assessing your work holds to a wank-statement that's similar to yours, then so long as you reinforce each other's statements (say, by stressing just how important React is or something similarly inane), it doesn't matter whether the objective face-value elements of the statement are actually met: if the face-value of the wank-statement has to do with particular business outcomes, for example, it doesn't actually matter whether or not you actually achieve the outcomes. Rather, so long as the emotional truth behind the wank-statement is appropriately coddled, anything goes in the realm of things actually happening.

Obviously this poses some serious risks to the industry. After all, despite the fact that a lot of people in tech are doing very silly things, tech work is an important part of our modern infrastructure, and we have to do real things in the material world quite effectively or else society collapses. When a good part of the people doing this work are functioning on the basis of emotionally-laden statements that have limited connection to the facts on the ground but that are expected to be treated (on pain of social opprobium) as though they're accurate descriptions of the situation, things break. The sheer amount of awful code that LLMs have put into production, to give one example, are something that we're going to be dealing with for the rest of our lives. And this has real consequences: if an important government website breaks or fails, people might find themselves deprived of support that they have a right to. They can miss important disaster alerts. Parts of our power grid might stop working. Speaking as an engineer, this simply isn't something we can afford.

Wank is perhaps at its most dangerous when it comes to hiring. A hiring manager who's a wank-purveyor is, after all, very unlikely to hire someone who steps, even inadvertently, on any core wank statements that the manager holds dear. They will then, in the course of the hiring process, only hire people that don't challenge said statements. And that, in turn, means that if there's a high enough concentration of wank-purveyors in the hiring population, interviewing becomes a game of not challenging the interviewer's preconceptions. It becomes a game of identifying common wank-statements and conforming yourself to them. The best outcome here is that you wind up with someone who has opinions and holds to wank-statements that align with yours. This is, in itself, not a good outcome: it puts you at significant risk of an ideological monoculture where opposing or alternative ideas aren't discussed, and as above, it can lead you into some easily avoided blunders because nobody's capable of pointing them out. Unfortunately, this is still the good outcome, because the bad outcome is that you mostly end up with people with no opinions on their work at all. And given that serious practice and getting good at anything will inevitably lead to you developing strong opinions on shit, this means that wank, in the worst case, will lead to you consistently hiring terrible people, all in service of protecting your emotional fetish statements.

Wank, I fear, is a large part of how truly terrible ideas spread in the tech industry. While top-down bullshit and outright lies can have an effect, they don't work effectively when the time comes to spread the ideas through the wider community: as an example of this, you need only look at Zuckerberg's Metaverse project. There was no shortage of lies or bullshit involved there, but the project categorically failed to get a meaningful number of people to integrate it into their esteem constructs, and so it didn't spread. LLMs, crypto and any number of other fads, by contrast, managed to make people integrate the existence of the technology into the way they felt better about themselves and better than other people, and that, more than anything, prompted the spread of the fads through the tech world. As we can see, this has had some really negative impacts on our society, and as we'll discuss shortly, this is directly related to the epistemic hazards that wank-speech introduces into our society.

The epistemic dangers of wank

Now that we've done all this work, we can begin to discuss more rigorously why wank is such a problem, and how it becomes a problem in ways specific to it and different from such bad-faith speech as lies or bullshit.

The chief damage done by wank is that it inverts the relationship between feelings and emotional state on the one hand and facts-on-the-ground and policy on the other: it's Clausewitz's sin of emotive strategy generalised to political and civic conduct more generally. In a healthy situation, we know what our emotions and desires are, observe the facts on the ground and from that, iteratively try things in the world and shift both our actions and our desires to get the outcomes we want. Should we discover that the outcomes we're seeking might be less than ideal, we might alter them to, once again iteratively, shift the outcome we seek to be closer to what we actually meant. In this way, we proceed from a less good state of the world to a better one, and in the improvements we see and the work we do, our emotional state becomes closer to what we want it to be. In the case of a wank-purveyor, the iteration and the action drop out: the loop becomes "we think we know what our emotions and our desires are, and this is how the world should be, and we go no further".

Immediately, you see an issue: wank makes it difficult to act at all in order to bring about change in the world, as facing the facts on the ground induces emotional anxiety and exposes the wank-statement to challenge. It would be difficult, after all, to seriously challenge, say, manifestations of patriarchy in the world without thinking seriously about the barriers to the social changes you intend to bring about, or what about them might be genuinely objectionable. Actually trying to make change means facing hard things, being vulnerable, and possibly changing your plans when the first ones don't work: all of these things involve being able to tolerate distress and being able to do things that really don't feel good in the moment at all, even if they'll let you feel a lot better in the long run. By allowing wank to spread, then, we find ourselves in a position where we're stuck only being able to do things that feel good in the moment, even when they're counterproductive in the long run. I think a lot of left-wing causes tend to fall into this trap, where actions that feel right, easy or emotionally cathartic (large rallies, online posting and so forth) get prioritised heavily over the harder, less gratifying work of organising, building effective structures of power, more in-depth analytical work and advocacy: work that's honestly hard, mucky and often painful, as I can say from personal experience, but that builds the foundations that we need to make real change.

Relatedly, while movements built on lies and bullshit can function fairly effectively with a wide range of beliefs and views, wank has a tendency to fracture groups more than to unite them. When groups are built around wank-statements that both purport to be objective and have the full measure of emotion and identity preventing challenge or implementation, you have to be able to agree exactly with the statement being made to be a part of the group: if you question the foundational assumptions even a little, you're labelled an enemy. This phenomenon, I think, is largely the reason behind the tendency of leftist groups to split and infight: holding to objective statements about the world as an emotional support mechanism is bound to make everything kinda go to shit.

More generally, avoiding discussion that might be upsetting or offensive to deeply held wank-statements can prevent us from discovering things or thinking in ways that might, in the long run, be useful to the movement as a whole. To use an example from the trans community, it's very, very common for trans people to have strongly held wank-statements as to what we are and why that makes us valid members of our gender: of course, everyone tends to have different ideas about what transness fundamentally is. This is to be expected, but the norm that's in place about not challenging or probing these ideas makes it remarkably difficult to analyse or think about transness in effective ways. If you can't probe an idea to see whether it's good or not (the idea, for example, that being trans is purely a question of self-identifying as trans on one end of the spectrum, or the idea that being trans requires a very specific set of medical interventions and diagnoses on the other: both are very deeply held views by parts of the community, and neither, I think, are analytically useful), you're going to struggle to understand your community and how it interacts with the wider world, and are thus at a real disadvantage when it comes to acting in your advantage.

I've spoken a lot about the broad left here, understandably given that I'm technically a part of it (I'd probably call myself a civil society liberal with socialist sympathies if I were perfectly honest), and I think it's true that the right, in general, doesn't engage in wank too much (they lack the strength of conviction and tend to lean heavily on lies and bullshit). That said, for my money, the biggest offenders when it comes to the prevalence of wank are, in fact, the reactionary centre: the Ezra Kleins and suchlike of this world. The core emotional attachment for them is of being above the political struggle and effortlessly able to synthesise the ideas of the left and right into something better, that always mysteriously appears to be the status quo. In better times, this may well have worked for them and been sensible. However, we are not in better times: we are in a time of division, of lines being drawn, and of having to fight unambiguously for the liberal, institutional order that we believe in (apologies to my anarchist readers: I do think we need strong institutions, though I think the average person needs to learn a lot of lessons from you guys). To assert ideas about "coming together" and "the truth being in the middle" in such a situation, and then to claim that any probes at that are a sign of extremism and the probers being the enemy, is prototypical wank.

And therein lies the final danger: when the emotional value of a statement about the world becomes more important than how it maps to the facts on the ground, you blind yourself to the world and what determines your actions becomes, almost entirely, internal state. You can't see when things aren't working, you can't see when they're actually making things worse for you and pushing you away from achieving your goals. You do what feels good internally, without reference to its actual effect, and in the end you wind up doing some very dumb and harmful shit, like covering for a nakedly fascist regime or victimising vulnerable minorities in the name of "balance", or labelling a Mormon-owned, Utah-based cookie brand as being "spiritually Israeli" in a TikTok video. It really does fuck everything up beyond belief, and leaves us isolated, disorganised, and easy pickings for the bullshitters and the liars.

Countering wank effectively

On an individual and educational level, wank tends to occur when people are not adequately able to identify their emotions and separate them from knowledge or information that they have about the state of the world: it's this lack of separation, in fact, that lets people make the conflation in the first place. This means, in turn, that developing a strong understanding of one's own thoughts and emotions, being able to regulate them and being able to identify them in the wild, as it were, is a really important skill to have. A lot of Buddhist meditation traditions practice precisely this, so training in these traditions would probably do a lot of good, and if you're interested in reducing your personal vulnerability to wank, this is probably the best single intervention you could make.

Another important intervention that will lead to fewer wank-prone individuals is the study of the humanities, especially literature. Literature, in essence, allows us to experience a much wider and more intense set of feelings than what we might encounter day-to-day in a controlled environment. It allows us to identify mistakes in other peoples' thinking that we ourselves are prone to, and catch ourselves before we do them ourselves. It allows us to build empathy for people very different to us, and to understand how our actions (not our feelings, our actions) impact them. It might even, heaven forfend, help you to not pitch a fit the moment an adventurous baron steals one of your locks. It's no coincidence, I think, that increased censorship and a flattening of the literature we expose people to is, in different ways, one thing that the reactionary centre, the right and sections of the online left all agree on: exposure to ideas and experiences that aren't yours is dangerous for wank-based ideologies, however you spin them.

Of course, this doesn't quite eliminate existing wank-purveyors from politics or civil society, so we need to have a playbook for how to handle existing wank.

In medium-sized groups (workplaces, political organisations, so on and so forth), I think the best option is to create and maintain strong "put-up-or-shut-up" norms about everything you do. In any reasonable organisation, you're trying to do something rather than to be or believe something: given that, it makes sense to measure status not by what people say or believe or who they are, but by what they've done and whether or not it fits the goals of the organisation. In tech, that means focusing on whether or not people are shipping, and whether what they're shipping is good enough to effectively meet the organisation's goals. No faffing around AI usage or whether enough buzzwords are being ingested: rather, identify whether people are actually producing useful things. This is harder to do in politics, where we work over a much longer time frame and effects can be difficult to deduce, but it's still worth looking at whether any individual's actions are doing things like bringing people on side, building organisational resources or improving outcomes in the field where they're working, or whether they're just alienating people and squandering resources in the service of feeling good. You need a relentless focus on pushing for your organisation's strategic aims and doing so effectively.

On the larger scale, wank fortunately isn't too much of a problem: it really isn't the kind of problem that people who have power on the scale of a country are prone to, and they tend to go for rather nastier flaws, on the whole (New Zealand, alas, is small and insular enough that our Prime Minister can still support wank-speech). The main place vulnerable to wank on a wide scale is both legacy and social media. And there, alas, I don't have many solutions. Social media can be avoided or partially disengaged with, or you can be careful to use it mindfully, and that does go some way towards solving the issue: it helps if it's not your only public platform, and longer-form blogs on a newsletter platform or your own website are a good idea, on the whole, but there's a limit to what can be done on the platforms themselves. As for legacy media... well, there I think our only option is to thoroughly discredit the fuckers. And that means building a power base and seizing control of the way in which commentators are raised to high prominence.

Wank is, alas, a seriously problematic form of bad-faith speech with unfortunate consequences in our society. It is not, however, inevitable or impossible to defeat. And when all's said and done, while wank-speech might be a comfort to many people in this world, it's the coward's way out. It will break you and leave you bowed down and helpless, unable to do anything to stop the evil that you're faced with in this world, or at least mitigate it. If you face the world as it is, by contrast, it hurts, it often sucks, but you can stand with your head held high, and with a lot of work and focus, see the world change in ways that make you happy. And that, in the end, is a much better way to live.