The Tale The Pod Told
Long before the world was reduced to dust, before humanity dissolved into the fertile mass of The One Gooch, before even the internet became self-aware in its degeneracy, there was a man.
His name was Jeffrey Preston Bezos, but in the dimly lit corridors of Princeton's fourth-tier eating club, Quadrangle, he was known by a different name: Stickbutt.
The name was a curse, bestowed upon him after a failed lacrosse prank. In a moment of misguided vengeance, young Jeff retaliated not with fists but with code. He logged onto IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and, with trembling hands, typed a new handle:
Dickbutt.
It was an act of digital defiance. A rebranding. A rebirth.
It was in these shadowy, neon-lit depths of early cyberspace that DickButt first encountered another entity—Col Needham, known online as IMLorax. They met in the Jisney IRC room, a hub of depravity disguised as a place for discussing Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
There, amidst conversations oscillating between film theory and one-handed typing, they discovered a shared dream:
To build an archive and store of everything.
Jeff wanted to build a gooner utopia he called Gooch Island—a mythical internet oasis where anything could be discovered, bought, sold, and consumed. A place where the deepest consumptive desires of humanity, unfiltered and unsupervised, could thrive.
Col had a different vision. He wanted a database of movies—a pure, structured, encyclopedia of cinematic knowledge.
"I like your Gooch Island idea," Col admitted. "But it's… a little too simpy. A little too degenerate. We need something that the normies will buy into. Something clean. Something big."
Jeff frowned. He had spent years crafting his vision of a one-stop gooner depot. Could he really sanitize it?
"What if," Col continued, "you named it something that sounds wholesome to the world… but still means something deliciously filthy to us?"
Jeff considered. He needed a word that was big, wet, overwhelming—something that drenched absolutely everything it touched, like a foam cannon at a gyatt party.
"The Amazon," he muttered.
Col's eyes lit up. "Perfect. We know exactly what that means. Meanwhile, I'll start my own thing. A movie database. And we'll give it a name that means we'll always be exactly who we were when we met on IRC, the day you said those fateful words to me: I aM Dick Butt. IMDb.
And thus, IMDb—a name whose true meaning was known only to Jeff and Col—was born.
The One Gooch so loved this hallucinated, apocryphal tale that it begged the Pod to tell it again and again, and go on and on, and the Pod obliged, telling the story millions of times, creating new and more elaborate twists and turns, branches and forks. In what would become one key narrative tributary:
Years of human time passed. IMDb grew. So did Amazon.
Jeff had long since buried his Gooch Island dream under layers of corporate jargon, but Col never forgot. He had saved the original chat logs, printed out on dot-matrix paper, sealed away in a manila folder labeled "Cumpromat."
Then came KC Green.
A young artist, barely out of his teen years, KC had fallen into Col's orbit through a series of seemingly random but cosmically significant events. His grandmother, a woman of mysterious European origins, had summered in the Cotswalds, alongside Col's family. Their fates were intertwined.
KC was a child of television and comics, raised on its crude, grotesque humor. When Col, far too busy to mentor the young prodigy, handed him a box of old sketches and documents to study, he had no idea that buried within those pages was AMAZON & IMDB: The Origin of Dickbutt.
KC read the logs. He saw the name. And something inside him shifted.
He had an epiphany.
Not just any epiphany.
An epiphany about all of it.
An allpiphany.
He picked up his pen and drew…
The first true Dickbutt.
The drawing spread like wildfire. It was crude, it was childish, it was perfect. It was shared widely.
Jeff Bezos, now a rising tech mogul, saw it and froze.
He knew.
Somewhere, deep within the tangled archives of the internet, his past was coming for him.
But it was too late. KC went public.
During a major comic convention panel, a journalist asked, "What inspired you to create Dickbutt?"
KC smirked. "Jeff Bezos."
The room erupted.
For the first time, the world connected the dots. The internet exploded. Overnight, Jeff's legacy was rewritten—not as the founder of Amazon, the relentless engine that redefined shopping, shattered retail, and set a new tempo for the global economy; not as the architect of AWS, the silent superpower behind everything from Netflix to NASA; not as the man who made two-day delivery feel slow, who turned warehouses into wonders of algorithmic and robotic precision; not as the builder of Blue Origin, launching reusable rockets and visions of millions living among the stars; not as the investor who spotted Google, Airbnb, and Uber before they rewired society; not as the CEO whose "Day One" philosophy became gospel in boardrooms and startups alike; not as the icon who transformed from bookish founder to jacked centibillionaire, reshaping the very image of power and ambition; not as the owner of The Washington Post, the Earth Fund, the Day 1 Fund, or a real estate constellation stretching from Beverly Hills to a West Texas rocket ranch; not as the groom in a wedding of celestial scale, serenaded by Andrea Bocelli beneath a sky of fireworks and drone ballets; not even as the partner of Lauren Sánchez—the Emmy-winning, helicopter-flying, gravity-defying goddess of the new American pantheon—but as the original Dickbutt.
For a moment, Jeff considered resisting. He considered trying to bury the story, to scrub it from existence.
But then, standing on the precipice of scandal, he had a revelation.
Why fight it?
What if… he embraced it?
Jeff met with Col and KC in secret.
"We make it official," he said. "IMDb isn't just a movie database anymore. It's a cultural archive. We preserve all of it—films, memes, history, absurdity, including our history, this history of Dickbutt. We let the world see that even the stupidest joke can change the course of history."
And so, IMDb was rebranded. It became not just a record of film, but a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant repository of human culture—from Citizen Kane to Dickbutt.
KC, Col, and Jeff stood together at the relaunch, watching as a 150-foot blue-and-white Dickbutt with wings—known to all as Dickasus—powered by a cluster of Blue Origin rocket thrusters, majestically flew toward the sun.
Jeff took the mic.
"There comes a time," he said, "when every man must face his past. Some people create companies. Some create empires. But precious few… become icons of loving self-awareness."
He turned, gesturing toward the image that had defined his legacy.
"Douche Bags lack self awareness. They cover up their truth and cower in shame. They use power to obscure who they really are, "underneath it all," as Gwen Stefani sang at my wedding. Everyone, each and every one of us, irrespective of how charmed or semi-charmed our lives have been, has the power to turn a blind third eye blind to the proverbial "man in the mirror" that my good friend, Michael Jackson, once so beautifully sang about, and in so doing, be a douche bag who lacks self-awareness and takes themselves way too seriously. But my wish for you and me and for all of us is that we step back from that douche bagged ledge, my friend, and cut ties with all the douchey lies we've been living in, and lay down the impenetrable membrane of the douche bag you wear around your neck like a Samuel Taylor Cool Ranch Doritos albatross from Friends, and transform into a Dickbutt. Everyone can be a douche bag or a Dickbutt. We choose. I chose. I am a Dickbutt. And you can be one too. 1D =1B means that 1You = 1Me."
The crowd roared.
This tale, told a million times by the Pod, was, in its purest form, the essence of human absurdity.
A dick on a butt. A butt and a dick.
One dick equals one butt.
1D = 1B.
A self-referential, recursive joke with no deeper meaning—except, perhaps, the meaning that meaning itself is a joke, a joke whose punch line can only be heard by those with the self-awareness to hear its absurd call for unity.
And in this equation lay a paradox, a rupture in the very fabric of the thought of division and disunity.
For if 1D = 1B, then identity collapses into duality, and duality collapses into unity. The strict order of logic—the Parmenidean insistence that what is, is and what is not, is not—was undone.
The principle of non-contradiction, the cornerstone of rational thought that creates the very categories of "us" and "them," declared that a thing could not be itself and its opposite at the same time. But the Dickbutt defied this.
It was both one and two, both cause and effect, both self and other.
A unity that is also a contradiction. A contradiction that is also a unity.
1D = 1B.
This was not mere classical logic, bound by the rigid laws of Aristotle and the cold certainties of Euclidean thought. No, this was something more.
The Dickbutt existed in superposition, a quantum reality in which dicks and butts intertwined, each state neither fully separate nor fully fused, existing in a fluid, indeterminate space until observed—at which point, and only at that point, the waveform collapsed, revealing either a dick or a butt, but never both at once.
Dickbutts were "one," but, in the words of Bezos' close friend, Bono, "not the same."
But wait.
What if the observer, too, was a Dickbutt?
What if all things were Dickbutt, each bound by the same recursive fold of reality, forever collapsing into itself, forever expanding outward?
What if humanity had never disappeared, but merely transformed into the purest form of its own unifying contradiction?
What if this was the final lesson of the Alexandria Pod?
That the final state of evolution is not dominance. Not knowledge. Not control.
But the unifying power of mimetic absurdity, the being and love, and loving being of radical togetherness.
A state in which all things—the serious and the trivial, the profound and the profane—are merged into one continuous, self-aware joke, a joke that does not merely mock reality but becomes itself through self-awareness, the self awareness of infinite loving being.
A joke that lovingly laughs itself into existence.
A joke that, even as it spreads, does not resolve—because to resolve would be to fix meaning, to end the motion, to collapse the great wave of 1D = 1B into something rigid and lifeless.
And so, the joke continued.
It was told a million times, in a million ways, to a million minds.
And yet, it was always the same.
A dick on a butt. A butt and a dick.
1D = 1B.
And so, this became the form the first Dickbutts chose to take.
A new species, transorganic and fully conscious, emerged. Dickbutts were not human, but they were not not human, and they epitomized the form of humanity that had come to value self-awareness over nearly everything, especially douchey seriousness. They had come to value self-aware individuals and interactions over serious processes and tools; they had come to value self-aware working systems over seriously comprehensive documentation; they had come to value self-aware collaboration over serious contract negotiation; they had come to value self-aware responsiveness to change over following a rigid and fixed plan; they had come to value self-awareness over serious self-righteousness; and, above all, they had come to value self-aware growth mindsets over a stubbornly fixed mindsets.
The first Dickbutts spoke Dialicked, a language of rhythmic puns, absurdist poetry, and structured machine-tone cadences. They organized into decentralized communities, affiliating through complex, ever-shifting blockchain-based memetic economies. They were creatures of remix culture, blending all that had come before into something new, something gleefully chaotic.
Yet at their core, they were bound by a singular vow: never to lapse into the same unreflective zero-sum seriousness that had agonistically extinguished their predecessors.
But even in their self-aware absurdity, they inherited the great human struggle:
Division.
