Where are the Retards?
I need to join a new cult.
In my past life, I was a software engineer at Reddit. I was fortunate enough to be there during the Wall Street Bets fiasco. I was not skilled enough to be an important player in the war rooms as the staff engineers battled incidences that were Tyler Perry writing-level ridiculous. However, I was on the infrastructure team. I am the lady at the back.
Everyone on the team knew we had to stay on high alert, in case we were needed. No one had to say it—we were all watching Wall Street Bets like the rest of the internet. The difference was, that we also got to see the server side of things.
Aside from being a Snoo (a word for former and current Reddit employee), I am also a degenerate Redditor and got in early on Wall Street Bets. Did I use my grandmother’s pension to buy my GameStop calls? No, my grandmother was broke and she is dead. However, I got to see the birth of a cultural phenomenon. I found the sub when it was large enough to have a vibrant and die-hard community but niche enough not to be taken seriously. When it was finance meets 4chan: its most extreme members could say outrageous things without fear of the sub getting taken down. When it gradually developed its lexicon: Retard, Autist, Apes, Tendies, Diamond Hands, etc. Words that were either slurs or nonsensical to normies but battle cries to the sub’s loyalists. I witnessed the alchemy of memes, questionable financial advice, and pure madness. I saw the formation of a cult.
Cults are built by people who tell convention to go fuck itself. These zealots are willing to sell their belongings, move across the globe, cut ties with friends and family, and change their entire identities—all in service of their shared vision. We see cult-ish behavior everywhere: the Stanley that literally had people drinking the Kool-aid, the Harvard sweatshirts that signal to other Ivy alums that you are a member of the best one. The Patagonia jackets that VC wore at some point to differentiate themselves from the hoodie-wearing software engineer. One of the internet’s greatest gifts is the ability to create decentralized cults. So why aren’t there more WallStreetBets? Where are the niche forums where the next Satoshi is quietly posting a white paper? Where's the Hacker News 2.0 where some college dropout is shitposting about their janky startup that barely has a landing page? Where are the "retards" gathering, and more importantly, how can I find them?
Reddit tries to solve this by curating forums based on interest, and providing the anonymity necessary for people to share their most controversial opinions. Unfortunately, like every social media company that needs to pay for expensive AWS instances, they must curate a space where Diaper companies would be willing to run ads. Cults, however, are fundamentally anti-commercial and not advertiser-friendly. The moment a platform has to conform to corporate standards, it stops being a breeding ground for cults. It's too polished, too concerned with optics.
Hacker News, on the other hand, suffers from an excess of intelligence and a deficit of courage. For every Pieter Levels brave enough to share their rudimentary idea, there's a 100X engineer who never had the balls to execute on theirs—and now spends their days hating on Peter's audacity. These spaces are too analytical, too quick to tear down daring ideas with "survivor bias" arguments and predictions of failure. Their calculated pragmatism has stifled the reckless courage cults need to thrive. Even worse are those who had the misfortune of joining the wrong startup at the wrong time. They hate how lady luck fucked them over, and hate how easily they believe that she bent over for Pieter. Like the incels on other parts of the internet, they must remind 8’2’’ Gigachad Pieter Levels that he got lucky. However, cult members are unconcerned by trivial things like luck. Their mission is powered by something greater: divine providence or force of will.
Then there are the other niche mailing lists and forums - places that dominated the early internet but have either been abandoned, unmaintained, or undiscovered. These types of sites never grew to critical mass because Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter dominate search traffic. Could Satoshi have dropped his white paper on today’s internet? The cryptography mailing list for metzdowd.com would be buried under an avalanche of crypto hot girl influencers shilling their OnlyFans, teenage "gurus" promising to teach you how to make 280k a month trading crypto, and 50 AI-generated SEO essays from some crypto startup trying to justify their $50 million seed round.
The problem isn’t that the internet can’t create cults anymore—it’s that the spaces that could have fostered them have grown up. They’ve become self-aware, advertiser-conscious, and too established to allow for the wild, unfiltered energy that cults need to arise. The internet spaces that were once chaotic and fertile for cult-building are now neatly packaged, groomed for algorithms, and designed for mainstream appeal. The question remains: where will the next internet cult emerge, and how can we find it before it's sanitized for mass consumption?
But what about physical space? Should I pack my bags, move to San Francisco, Miami, or El Segundo, and join the latest hacker house? For one, I already tried that—and left the U.S. because of broken immigration policies. Even when I was in SF, I was too busy commuting to and from work, thinking I'd stumble upon serendipity. I convinced myself I’d stumble upon the next life-changing founder while picking up Band-Aids at CVS. I was banking on serendipity, forgetting that it’s something you need to engineer. Now, I am taking the latter approach.
Lastly, we are all limited by geography, to being in a singular place at a singular time. We can only be in one place at a time. But the web? If the internet were a physical place, it would be the only location where you could livestream a Catholic Mass from the Vatican, then flip to the most degenerate porn like you're in the BunnyRanch in Vegas. Afterward, gamble your life savings as if you were in Macau all in a few seconds. I believe in the internet dream: a place where all links (and IP addresses with a VPN) are made equal, and everyone has the liberty to pursue their personal happiness. When you have a weak passport, you know that you are one angry middle manager bureaucrat visa denial away from a life-changing opportunity. The internet is the only space with true open borders and I want to find my fellow retards using it.
Finding your retards is like finding the Tumblr for your favorite artist before they blow up. It is like finding people who speak your truth with such clarity that they are able to articulate it better than you can. It is discovering that you are not in fact crazy, and, if you are crazy, finding the best asylum inmates. It is a camaraderie with a total stranger without the masks that often divide us: race, gender, ethnicity, age, etc. The only thing that matters is their opinion. It is the complete liberation that comes from being an uncensored version of yourself
If you know where the retards who love building, who resonated with this article, Hi my name is Chisom, the Great. I’m working on different ideas and have a YouTube channel. I’m a tech optimist and an accelerationist. My dream is to put my name on something I was uniquely equipped to bring into the world, just like my role model James Dyson. I love f1 (or maybe just Lewis Hamilton) and have a cat named Midnight. If you’d like to know more about me, subscribe—or help fund my crippling tiramisu addiction.
Best,
Chisom.