Welcome to the deep end.
For the folks who follow my Friday Facepalm series, you know the drill: I spend my time performing autopsies on corporate security fails and architectural logic gaps. But there is a secondary bucket I’ve been keeping under the counter. I call it “Unhinged Exceptions.”
These aren’t just “bugs.” A bug is an accident. An “Unhinged Exception” is what happens when the system hasn’t just broken—it has evolved into something entirely unrecognizable, leaving the “Architects” standing on the sidelines with their mouths open, wondering where the “off” switch went.
Today, we’re talking about the time we accidentally built a ghost in the machine—and why our obsession with “efficiency” is making us all look like 7th graders trying to pilot a Star Destroyer.
The Day the Math Hallucinated
Let’s start with a “ground-level” reality check. A few years back, there was a flash-crash in a niche corner of the energy markets. On paper, it looked like a standard glitch. But when you peel back the layers, you find the “Unhinged” logic at play.
Two rival high-frequency trading algorithms—let’s call them “A” and “B”—got into a feedback loop. Algorithm A was programmed to follow the lead of Algorithm B. Algorithm B was programmed to “front-run” the trends set by Algorithm A. Within milliseconds, they weren’t trading energy anymore. They were trading “nothingness” at a speed the human brain can’t even perceive.
By the time the human “Architects” noticed the spike, the market had “hallucinated” a 400% price increase followed by a total collapse. The “Exception” here wasn’t the crash; it was the fact that for those three minutes, reality was optional. The machines were in a Philip K. Dick fever dream where the value of a barrel of oil was determined by two bots trying to out-snark each other with calculus.
This is the ultimate “Security Theater.” We tell the public the markets are “regulated” and “stable,” but the structural reality is that we’ve handed the keys to digital ghosts that don’t know—or care—what a gallon of gas actually costs a human being.
The 7th-Grade Star Wars Reality Check
I’ve mentioned this before, but I was in 7th grade when Star Wars first hit theaters in ’77. Back then, the technology felt “lived-in.” When a ship broke, someone had to crawl into a maintenance hatch with a hydro-spanner. There were stakes. There was architecture.
Now, look at our modern “Tech Stack.” We’ve replaced the tactile with the abstract. We’ve built systems so fast and so complex that we are essentially backseat drivers in our own civilization. We are the “Exhausted Majority” standing on the deck of a ship that is being steered by a neural net that thinks a cloud is a mountain because the sun hit the lens at a weird angle.
In Andor, there’s a scene where the characters are just trying to navigate the sheer, suffocating weight of a fascist bureaucracy. It’s dark, it’s gritty, and it’s uncomfortably real. That’s what “Unhinged Exceptions” feel like to me. It’s the realization that the “Empire” isn’t just a group of guys in white plastic armor—it’s a series of automated, logic-blind systems that will crush you simply because you’re a rounding error in their dependency graph.
Replicators in the Kitchen
I recently got into it with someone on Substack about “reskilling.” The narrative is that if we just teach everyone to be “better chefs,” they’ll be fine. 🤦♂️
That is a “Logic Fail” of galactic proportions. We are telling people to sharpen their knives while the kitchen is being replaced by a replicator that doesn’t give a damn about your grandmother’s recipe. The replicator doesn’t care about “visceral experience” or “institutional memory.” It only cares about “Vibe Coding”—the idea that if it looks like soup and smells like soup, it’s soup.
But we know better. We know that when you remove the “Architect” from the kitchen, you end up with “Slop.” That’s the official term for the AI-generated filler currently clogging up the internet’s arteries. We’re training the brains of the future on the digital waste of the present. It’s a closed-loop system of mediocrity, and the “Exception” is that we’re being told to call it “Innovation.”
The “Cool Dad” Politics of Tech
This brings me to the human element. I was reading a post by Adam Kinzinger about politicians using the F-bomb to look “tough.” It’s the same “Unhinged” behavior we see in Silicon Valley. It’s “Language Theater.”
When a CEO stands on stage and uses “edgy” language to describe a product that doesn’t actually work, it has major “cool dad” energy. It’s the backwards-hat-at-the-PTA-meeting vibe. They’re trying to look like “disruptors” when they’re really just trying to distract you from the fact that their “Architecture” is built on a foundation of sand and venture capital.
True toughness—and true intelligence—doesn’t need the F-bomb. It needs a blueprint. A quiet, surgical observation that exposes a logic fail is infinitely more devastating than a loud, manufactured curse word. But in an “Unhinged” world, we reward the loud and the manufactured because they’re easier to “consume” than actual tradecraft.
Why Survival is a Premium Subscription
If labor is becoming an optional feature and the “Architects” are being pushed out by “Vibers,” where does that leave us?
In a world of “Unhinged Exceptions,” survival becomes a premium subscription service. We see it in the rise of “AI Friends” and “Hydration Protocols” that have completely lost the thread of common sense. Case in point: a corporate security team recently went into full “Red Alert,” evacuated two floors, and called in a bomb squad because of a suspicious glowing device left on a server rack.
It wasn’t a kinetic threat. It was a smart water bottle. 🤦♂️
The “Security Theater” was so well-rehearsed that nobody bothered to actually look at the thing. The “Architects” of the response plan triggered a $40k protocol because a Bluetooth-enabled piece of plastic was trying to tell its owner he was 20oz behind on his daily intake. This is what happens when we train people to follow “The Process” instead of using “The Brain.” We end up with emergency services treating a gym accessory like an IED because the “Vibe” was scary.
We’ve commodified the basic human experience—like drinking water—to the point where the gadgets we built to “help” us are now triggering city-wide meltdowns.
Finally
I was talking to a colleague about a “smart” traffic light project in Florida recently. The AI decided that the most “efficient” way to handle traffic was to keep all the lights red for 20 minutes to allow a “perfectly optimized” flow of three cars.
The AI was technically correct. The flow was perfect. But the 400 angry drivers losing their minds weren’t in the dependency graph.
That is the world we’re building. A world of “perfect” logic that is completely, utterly unhinged. I’m going to go get another coffee before the replicator decides I’ve reached my “efficiency quota” for the day. ☕️💦
Stay skeptical, stay snarky, and for the love of the Architect, keep your hydro-spanner handy.
Pro Tip: If your “Architecture” requires a bomb squad to identify a consumer electronics device from 2018, you don’t have a security plan—you have a script for a bad sitcom. True security relies on contextual intelligence, not blind adherence to a checklist. If you can’t tell the difference between a threat and a $60 hydration app, you’re just part of the noise.
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Your support allows me to keep deconstructing the “Theater” and providing the “Architectural” truth that the big threat feeds miss. And the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing you’re helping a hardcore sci-fi guy keep his coffee mug full.
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