can we pls stop turning our trauma into a startup
like, my therapist is already on retainer, i don't need marc andreessen to back a hard drive for my feels. this is literally so toxic and i'm exhausted.
ok so like, breathing is a lot rn. i just saw that a16z, which is this vc fund for tech bros who think 'the future' is just more apps, has invested in a new wellness company called 'etherea' and i'm literally dissociating. trigger warning: capitalism.
etherea’s whole deal is 'emotional offloading.' it's not therapy, because that would involve, like, processing things. instead, they use a headset thingy with 'quantum neural mapping' to literally copy your unprocessed emotional data—your trauma, your cringe memories, your anxiety about that one text you sent in 2019—and paste it onto an external hard drive. they're calling it the 'sentience drive.' they're marketing this as 'inbox zero for the soul.' i'm unwell.
marc andreessen apparently called it 'the most important innovation in human capital since the spreadsheet.' the whole pitch is that founders and ceos can achieve peak productivity by just... not having feelings anymore. the side effect is a complete inability to experience empathy, which they're unironically branding as a feature called 'executive focus mode.' it’s giving emotional quiet quitting. it's giving toxic.
i just... can we not? can we just hold space for the fact that being a person is messy and not something you can 'defrag' like a hard drive? the emotional labor of just existing in a world that produces this is... a lot. i had to literally cocoon myself in my favorite weighted blanket for three hours just to process this news cycle. if you're also feeling personally attacked by the attention economy, you can find the blanket and my other safe space essentials on my amazon storefront. the link is in my bio, obvi.
idk. maybe feeling your feelings is the real alpha. but what do i know, i'm just trying to survive this timeline.
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Reader Discussion (7)
Wait, so you're saying they can literally download your feelings? That's insane! Back in my day, we just dealt with our problems like adults. No fancy gadgets needed.
This is peak dystopian nightmare fuel right here. Emotional data mining, 'executive focus mode'... sounds like they're just trying to make us emotionless drones for their capitalist agenda.
Ugh, this is so relatable. I feel like my anxiety is already on a hard drive somewhere in the cloud. Now they want to sell me an app to literally offload it? Pass.
What does 'quantum neural mapping' even mean? Sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me. Back in my day, we just talked about our feelings with family and friends.
This raises serious ethical questions about consent, data privacy, and the commodification of emotions. We need to have a conversation about the implications of this before it's too late.
This is huge! Emotional offloading? I can see this going mainstream. Imagine the possibilities for productivity and efficiency. Pure genius!
Is there even a point to feeling anything anymore if we can just delete it? What does it mean to be human in this world where emotions are commodities?