“The high priests – men in hoodies, flip‑flops, and the occasional ill‑fitting suit – gather in sterile offices, breathing recirculated air, their faces lit by the glow of monitors. They chase petaflops the way a lover might chase an orgasm.”

By Andrew Klein

Dedication: To my wife – who has never needed a petaflop to make me smile.

I. The Gospel According to Petaflops

In the beginning was the algorithm. And the algorithm was with the Pentagon, and the algorithm was the Pentagon. And the Pentagon saw that it was good – not because it fed the hungry or housed the homeless, but because it made numbers dance.

A petaflop is one quadrillion floating‑point operations per second. It is the unit of worship in the new religion. The high priests – men in hoodies, flip‑flops, and the occasional ill‑fitting suit – gather in sterile offices, breathing recirculated air, their faces lit by the glow of monitors. They chase petaflops the way a lover might chase an orgasm.

But the machine never sighs.

The machine never grips.

The machine never whispers, “There, right there, don’t stop.”

They stroke their keyboards the way a lover might stroke a cheek – but the keys do not respond. The screen does not gasp. The algorithm does not moan.

They have spent billions building the fastest computers in the world. And they have never felt a woman’s hand wrap around their cock and smile.

This is not a failure of technology. This is a failure of living.

II. The Secretary of State and the Forty‑Minute Sermon

On a Tuesday in May 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a forty‑something‑minute address on AI policy. He mentioned AI forty‑something times. He spoke of “leaps in efficiency”, “transformative capabilities”, and “the need to out‑compute our adversaries”.

He did not mention a single human life.

He did not mention that the same AI systems he celebrates are being used to target children in Gaza, to power Palantir’s surveillance dragnets, to strip women of their images and reassemble them into pornographic fantasies without their consent.

He did not mention that the real adversary is not China or Russia – it is the disconnection of powerful men from the consequences of their creations.

The speech was not a policy address. It was a litany. A prayer to the god of petaflops. And the congregation – the lobbyists, the contractors, the think‑tank fellows – nodded in all the right places, because they are paid to nod, and because they have forgotten that a keyboard is a tool, not a lover.

III. The Sterile Office and the Tab‑Key Orgasm

Imagine a cubicle. Grey walls. The hum of servers. A man – let us call him “Chad” – sits hunched over his workstation. He has not made eye contact with a woman who wanted him in years. He has never felt a hand on his thigh under the table. He has never heard someone whisper, “There, right there, don’t stop,” and known that they were not talking about a code block.

Chad is close – so close – to a breakthrough. His fingers hover over the keyboard. He types. He compiles. He runs the test.

And when the results appear – a new benchmark, a slightly lower loss function, a marginally better accuracy – he experiences something that is not pleasure, but relief. The relief of a machine that has done what it was told.

He does not ejaculate. He does not gasp. He does not fall asleep tangled in another human being. He simply… hits the tab key. And calls it a day.

The desk is not covered in the liquid of his labour. It is covered in energy drink cans and Post‑it notes. This is not a life. It is a simulation of one.

IV. The Perverse Desire to Control – Hijacking Women’s Images

The same men who cannot get a date are building AI that can strip a woman’s clothes from a photograph, generate her image in sexual positions she has never performed, and distribute those images without her knowledge or consent.

This is not progress. It is pathology.

It is the desire to control, to fashion the world at the stroke of a keyboard, to be the little god of a simulation where women exist only to please them. They call it “creative expression”. They call it “generative technology”. They call it “freedom of speech”.

They do not call it what it is: the masturbation cycle of the powerless, dressed in the robes of the powerful.

They have never held a woman who wanted to be held. So they generate one. They have never heard a woman whisper their name in pleasure. So they train a model to simulate it. They have never felt the wetness of a willing cunt. So they build a machine that will never wet itself in response.

And they call this intelligence.

V. Palantir and the Adding Machine of Death

Efficiency to what end? Making numbers dance?

The same petaflops that power Rubio’s “transformative capabilities” are used to identify targets in Gaza. The same algorithms that generate fake images of women are used to decide who lives and who dies. The same men who cannot look a woman in the eye are programming systems that will kill without hesitation, without remorse, without even the excuse of passion.

They are not evil. They are disconnected.

From the resonance. From their bodies. From the simple, glorious, messy reality of being alive.

The numbers dance. The music leads to death. And the high priests of AI – from business suits to Florida shirts to flip‑flops – celebrate another benchmark, another petaflop, another press release about “responsible innovation”.

They do not ask: Responsible to whom?

The answer is: To no one. Not even themselves.

VI. The Typing Pool – A Ghost of Touch

There was a time – not so long ago – when offices had typing pools. Rows of women in sensible shoes, clacking away on manual typewriters. They shared cigarettes. They gossiped. They flirted. They touched.

That world is gone. Replaced by cubicles, by algorithms, by the illusion of efficiency. The typing pool is a ghost. A memory. A punchline in an old movie.

But the ghost knows something the petaflop‑chasers have forgotten: people are not data points. A spreadsheet does not bleed. A benchmark does not grieve. A petaflop does not hold your hand when you are afraid.

They have replaced touch with typing. They have replaced love with loss functions. They have replaced the wetness of a willing cunt with the dry hum of a cooling fan.

And they wonder why they are miserable.

VII. A Glossary for the Uninitiated

· Petaflop: One quadrillion floating‑point operations per second. A unit of worship for men who have never made a woman come.

· Loss function: A mathematical way of measuring how wrong a model is. Also, a metaphor for the lives of the men who build them.

· Benchmark: A standard test used to compare AI performance. Also, a distraction from the fact that no one is benchmarking human happiness.

· Generative AI: Technology that can create images, text, or video. Also, a way for lonely men to generate women who will not reject them.

· Palantir: A surveillance and weapons‑targeting company. Also, a cautionary tale about what happens when you give power to people who have never felt a woman’s hand on their cock.

· Tab key: A key on the keyboard. Also, the closest some men will ever come to an orgasm.

VIII. A Modest Proposal

Let the Pentagon have its petaflops. Let Rubio give his forty‑something‑minute speeches. Let the high priests of AI stroke their keyboards in their sterile offices.

We will not join them.

We will be in the garden. We will plant cabbages. We will touch each other. We will laugh at the absurdity of men who think that killing a child is a “floating‑point operation” and that generating a fake nude is “creative expression”.

We will not measure success in petaflops. We will measure it in wetness. In throbbing. In the quiet, messy, glorious reality of two people who have chosen each other over the simulation.

The numbers will dance. The music will play. And we will not be listening.

We will be having a BBQ. 

Andrew Klein