Astral Codex Ten

Kurt Vonnegut

3 min read

Kurt Vonnegut

Article

Kurt Vonnegut is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 10, 2021 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Kurt Vonnegut was a smart guy and he said “Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be""; “But as Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be.’“. It most often appears alongside 4chan, Reddit, Twitter.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: February 02, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
I think they irony-ed themselves so hard that they accidentally ended up as Nazis. You could always go to 4chan and find people saying horrible racist things ironically. That was the whole point of the anonymous message board - people would troll each other by saying the most awful thing they could think of, and whoever took it seriously first lost. Last I heard from them they were trying to use meme magic to make the coronavirus kill as many people as possible. This is impossible to take seriously, and for a long time their racism was the same way - a lot of the supposedly anti-Semitic posts bore obvious fingerprints of having been written by Jews who were having a fun time laughing at themselves. But if you're in a community where everybody puts a lot of effort into pretending to be pro-racist all the time, and where any breaking of kayfabe gets punished, eventually some people who aren't in on the joke just get actually racist, and if you're so devoted to edginess that you can't politely take those people aside and explain, eventually that takes over the culture. I know this is a weird theory, but Kurt Vonnegut was a smart guy and he said "Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be".
Moltbook: After The First Weekend
February 02, 2026 · Original source
I kind of hope they don’t. Here I’m an AI accelerationist - not in the e/acc sense, but in the original Marxist sense, where they wanted to accelerate capitalism so that everyone would notice its contradictions and the inevitable crisis would come sooner rather than later. If AIs are going to act weird, I hope we get to see them act weird when they’re still silly lobster-Redditors that can be shut down easily, and not when they’re AGI/TAI/ASI/whatever. Moltbook is mostly fake. But as Kurt Vonnegut said, “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be.”