“How glorious it would be to be freed of the messiness of wanting”

In this edition of the Weekender: a year of buying nothing, ChatGPT’s goblin problem, and the tragic irony of Mark Zuckerberg

Paintings by Miz Katie

This week, we’re buying nothing, hunting goblins, photographing puddles, and contemplating the tragic irony of Mark Zuckerberg.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT

A year of buying nothing

Emma Stephenson on her vow not to buy anything in 2025, dodging The Emails, “cute” commodities, and learning to “surf the urge.”

All-Consuming

—Emma Stephenson in Embivalent

I spent 2025 buying nothing. Or, that was the idea. I didn’t starve, or anything like that. I had credit card debt, which really meant I had shame. I wanted to get rid of it.

Clothes were the main culprit. Clothes filled with possibility and women-be-shoppin’ dread. Since the pandemic (so the story goes), my online shopping habit had become compulsive. I became weak against The Emails. You know the ones. The braindead want colonizing your inbox. I spent money I didn’t have, mostly at a slick outfit known as The Reformation (no relation to Martin Luther). The Emails promised I could turn myself skinny and mysterious with the swish of a silk skirt and the secret of it costing $200.

It felt good to tell people about this ambitious year of shopping abstinence. Every Wow, good for you and Couldn’t be me felt better than the last.

The more I felt that people were impressed by my decision to try a no-buy year (which meant that they were impressed by me), the clearer the image of myself staring coolly down my nose at The Emails became. Who falls for these? Not I. Before the year of buying nothing had even begun, I’d situated myself in a special little abstinence bubble, wearing the same outfit over and over again, answering to no one. Maybe a true self could be found if I stopped wearing something different every month.

Near the end of 2024, in a post-election spiritual funk, I fell down a months-long YouTube video essay rabbit hole. I told myself I was arming myself with information, but really I was self-soothing. I came across a YouTube channel literally called The Financial Diet. If the ultimate diet is eating nothing, then spending nothing would surely yield some kind of results. An interview on the channel featured a woman detailing how a year of buying nothing helped her reclaim her financial independence and crawl out of some serious credit card debt. Eureka. She said that abstaining from shopping “rewired her brain.” Somewhere around month six, “a switch flipped.” Eventually, the fog dispersed. Spending money on stuff she didn’t need was frivolous and hollow. It seemed she had stopped wanting altogether.

How powerful the draw of a clean before/after threshold is. How glorious it would be to be freed of the messiness of wanting. One year of no shopping, and I could turn into Thich Nhat Hanh? I was craving something true, a tangible kind of enlightenment (take that, The Reformation).

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PHOTOGRAPHY

“Cathedral sunlight in a car park,” shared by Henry Oliver

TECHNOLOGY

Goblin mode

Katherine Dee unravels how ChatGPT became weirdly fixated on “the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects.”

Why ChatGPT Is Obsessed With Goblins: The Weirdest Possible Explanation

—Katherine Dee in Pirate Wires

This week, internet interlocutors noted that OpenAI had to instruct a new model, Codex 5.5, repeatedly, in its own system prompt, to stop bringing up goblins, gremlins, trolls, ogres, pigeons, and raccoons “unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”

Within hours of the instructions hitting the timeline, the line was screenshotted into oblivion—and for good reason. Nick Pash on the Codex team confirmed publicly that the “weirdly emphatic” prohibition was added because Codex 5.5 was, in fact, fixated on goblins.

Then, last night, OpenAI posted a blog explaining where the goblins came from.

After GPT-5.1 launched, complaints came in that the model had developed an “overfamiliar” register and would not stop trying to be the user’s friend, which prompted an audit of its verbal tics. Meanwhile, someone on the safety team who had experienced quirky mentions of “goblins” and “gremlins” enough times to find it annoying flagged those words for inclusion. As it turned out, per the audit: the use of goblin was up by 175% since the launch; gremlin by 52%.

Weird, but just a quirk—these things happen. The team moved on.

But by GPT-5.4, it was no longer a quirk. “Creature language” was showing up overwhelmingly in traffic from users who’d selected one of ChatGPT’s optional persona presets: “Nerdy.” The preset was meant to turn the app into a kind of intellectually omnivorous mentor, maybe the type of guy, if I may, who would play Dungeons and Dragons (...and might have a folder of shortstack fan art on his desktop?).

Nerdy accounted for just 2.5% of all ChatGPT traffic—but two-thirds of the goblin mentions. When researchers used Codex itself to compare reinforcement-learning rollouts containing the offending vocabulary against rollouts that didn’t, the signal designed to encourage Nerdy turned out to be scoring the goblin-laden outputs higher. Basically, the model was being given a higher score every time it called something a goblin, and, as a system optimized to chase higher scores, it started calling more things goblins. In other words, there was a goblin-obsessed Nerd-LLM at the helm of this whole thing.

And then the goblins escaped the persona.

Mention rates rose at nearly the same proportion in samples generated without the Nerdy persona, because rewarded Nerdy outputs were getting recycled into supervised fine-tuning data—at which point the tic started being a default behavior of the underlying system. An audit of GPT-5.5’s fine-tuning data turned up the whole adjacent menagerie that had hitched a ride: raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons. An entire enchanted forest.

OpenAI killed the offending reward in March and pulled the affected vocabulary out of training data, but GPT-5.5 was already cooking. By the time it landed in Codex, employees noticed the goblins immediately, which is why the aforementioned prohibition is in the prompt. The OpenAI post from Wednesday night even shares the bash command that disables the goblin-suppression line and unlocks the bestiary, if you want to liberate ChatGPT’s goblin mode.

Ultimately, the gradient that was rewarding the goblins got identified and patched, and OpenAI came out of it knowing more about how stylistic tics propagate through training pipelines than it did going in.

What the company’s account doesn’t quite explain, however, is the specificity. When the model was rewarded for being weird and playful, it didn’t drift toward a random selection of mythological vocabulary. It went for the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects. There are, ostensibly, unicorns, dragons, demons, and angels in the training data too.

And yet, the model became fixated on goblins.

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CHOREOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPHY

On light

Patrick Nathan on James Salter, Paris puddles, and photography as “an event of light.”

Nothing to See Here

—Patrick Nathan in Entertainment, Weakly

Seven months ago, I was tan and thin and very lonely, writing essays in a laughably unaffordable apartment in the bougiest part of Lisbon. Today, for the first time in two decades, I live in the suburbs. I’m someone who drives twenty-nine miles to an office, who eats too much Chinese food, who listens to podcasts, who lifts weights once or twice a week, who cooks dinner for friends, and who reads for about three and a half minutes every evening before falling asleep. The situation is both blissful and dire; it feels like living in cellophane, shimmer and all.

To try to recalibrate, I reached for a favorite novel. In Light Years, [James] Salter damns a minor character with ruthless efficiency: “His eyes were spent, they had nothing in them.” Later, after the couple at the center of the novel has divorced, Viri moves to Rome and meets another woman. What starts as romance—an architect, after all, here to devour the Eternal City, falling in love anew—soon “hardens to intractable life.” Living in Rome, Viri realizes, is not like living alongside the Hudson: “He stood beside [Lia] as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun.”

Among all the beauty in Italy, Viri too risks spending his eyes, depleting their capacity. Like the famous monuments that show up in tourist photographs, the idea of Rome occludes Viri’s view of it. He wants to see it but can’t, which recalls or rhymes with something Lia tells him—in one of my favorite passages from the novel—about happiness:

But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.

One sunny, listless afternoon, my husband turned to look at me. His eye, normally what people call “liquid brown,” met the light and wagon-wheeled with color: splinters of mahogany, tatters of aspen leaf, emerald shards, sandstone flecks, the sullied marble of petrified wood. It was over in a second, of course—it’s too painful for anyone to be lit up so nakedly—but I couldn’t forget it. Later, I recalled Hervé Guibert’s intimation of what a photograph is: “an event of light.” The eye was waiting for me to see it, which gave me a strange, triangulating thought: I am justified in noticing this.

Part of what makes photography a surrealist enterprise is its democratization; there’s nothing elitist or aristocratic in a camera’s attention. In Image Control, I wrote about this in relation to Francesca Woodman’s photographs, in which objects,

human and not, get spilled on by light; a rectangle from a window stretches across the floor, bisecting warped and wrinkled leaves of wallpaper that have curled onto the floorboards. A little pane of glass intensifies the light upon Woodman’s fingers, visually slicing them at the knuckle. These objects, bodies included, remind us just how dramatically light can change a thing, how it bestows another side, another use, even another meaning. All objects are treated the same, given the same importance; all are worthy of, or deprived of, the gift of light.

If anything, objects of great, undisputed beauty—cathedrals and paintings, the art nouveau Metropolitain signs in Paris, crates of produce in French markets, the Palace at Sintra, St. Mark’s—can easily occlude or disrupt the event of light; instead of objects, they become subjects. They reframe the photograph as a document or as evidence, which is largely the imperialist project of Instagram: I was here, I saw this, I took this, it’s mine.

Let me tell you a secret about the most beautiful city in the world. Paris is wet. Even in summer it rains often, and the cobblestone streets and sidewalks funnel it, channel it, entrap it; it sits cupped there, handful after handful held out to you on every block. The Haussmann buildings sit shrunken in it, creased and off kilter. Light trembles at each diagonal corner; at night, the Place Pigalle is a black pool of incandescent eels. I have a hard time believing that Impressionism would have happened without all this water, not to mention the city’s long lineage of street photography. Puddles literally invite reflection, and in thousands of paintings and photographs we see Paris looking at itself, thinking about itself. It’s an intimate way of looking at a city, as if on every corner we catch it in this moment of self regard, and that is what makes Paris’s beauty feel so personal—as opposed to monumental. Like Salter’s girls at communion, its face is forever upturned, ready for light.

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COMIC

FILM THEORY

“It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine of infanticide, murder, and incest”

Alexander Kaplan, who relates to Mark Zuckerberg more than he’d like to, on what The Social Network shares with Oedipus Rex.

The Tragic Irony of The Social Network

—Alexander Kaplan in Alexander Kaplan Poetry

If you’ve never seen the first five minutes of The Social Network, you’re missing out.

I don’t think you can fully understand this scene without understanding the different types of irony.

There’s verbal irony: that’s the one everybody knows. There’s also dramatic irony, in which the audience possesses knowledge the characters lack. And then there’s tragic irony. It’s very similar to dramatic irony, but here the lack of information itself is the cause of the tragic event. To turn Hitchcock’s example into tragic irony, imagine the bomb only goes off if a character says, “I’m certain there’s no bomb in here.” There’s also cosmic irony and romantic irony and a dozen nuanced variations on all of the above, but tragic irony is what we’re interested in today.

The best example—and we’ll get to The Social Network soon, I swear—is the story of Oedipus. You know how it goes. King Laius and Queen Jocasta, struggling with infertility, consult the Oracle at Delphi, who proclaims King Laius will one day be murdered by his son. (Whomp, whomp, whomp, waaaaaaaaa.) Soon enough Queen Jocasta gives birth, and, in a vain attempt to save himself, King Laius orders his son to be abandoned on a mountainside (an apparently common practice in ancient Greece). But the servant, less of a sociopath than the king, can’t go through with it, so he passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to the King and Queen of Corinth. They raise it as their own, and, after reaching maturity, Oedipus visits the Oracle himself. She tells him he will murder his father and have sex with his mother, and soon enough he does, since he’s misinformed about who they actually are. Years later a plague of infertility strikes Thebes and the Oracle—who by this point is giving off real “Ain’t-I-a-stinker?” vibes—says it will only end when the man who murdered King Laius is brought to justice. Oedipus takes on the challenge and unknowingly vows vengeance upon himself. Yikes.

What I love about this is how King Laius, in trying to avoid his fate, sets in motion the events that ensure his fate. There’s something perversely satisfying about the structure. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine of infanticide, murder, and incest.

So finally—finally—we can get back to those first five minutes of The Social Network.

You know, I once told a group of students I loved this movie and they burst out laughing. None of them had seen it, I’m a nerdy enough guy, and they thought I saw myself as Mark Zuckerberg on some sort of hero’s journey. But the thing is—and please don’t take this out of context—I do relate to the Mark Zuckerberg of this movie.

You see, we both have an inferiority complex.

That psychological detail underpins every scene, every action, every line of dialogue: Mark has no self-esteem, so he needs external validation, so he is desperate—just achingly, sweatily, desperately desperate—to become one of the beautiful people. That explains his obsession with getting into a final club, and it explains everything else. Just look at the opening lines:

MARK: Do you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?

ERICA: That can’t possibly be true.

MARK: It is.

ERICA: What would account for that?

MARK: Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China, but … here’s my question: how do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs?

The insecurity, the need to “distinguish yourself,” the humble-bragging: it’s all there.

The movie doesn’t explain where this personality defect comes from, which is for the best: I don’t need some cheesy scene of ten-year-old Mark getting ignored by a distant father. It’s just who he is. In fact, the movie doesn’t even explain why Mark wants to achieve his goals. There’s a generic “fame and fortune” angle, but it’s obviously an afterthought:

ERICA: Is it true that [the final clubs] send a bus around to pick up girls who want to party with the next Fed chairman?

MARK: So you can see why it’s so important to get in.

Jesus, Mark. The correct response—to your girlfriend—is, “Gross, right?” And yet, Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be the next Fed chairman or to party with hot girls. He wants external validation. Go back to 2:58 and listen to how Jesse Eisenberg delivers this next exchange: you can tell he really means it when he says he wants to get into the clubs “Because they’re exclusive”—which is about as close to circular reasoning as you can get—before unconvincingly tacking on the reasons a sane person might give.

MARK: I’m just saying I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs.

ERICA: Why?

MARK: Because they’re exclusive. And fun. And they lead to a better life.

And the thing that really hurts—the bitter icing on this pathetic cake—is that Mark could be one of the beautiful people if he didn’t want to be one of the beautiful people. They look at him and see a needy little go-getter who never learned you aren’t supposed to be so obvious about things. It breaks my heart. Zuckerberg is an asshole, and it breaks my heart all the same.

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MISNOMER

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: Art by Miz Katie, Henry Oliver, Joyce

Video & Audio: Famous Campaigns

Writing: Emma Stephenson, Katherine Dee, Patrick Nathan, Alexander Kaplan, M. E. Rothwell

Recently launched

Grant Achatz, the Chicago chef and co-owner of the Alinea Group, has started a Substack. In his first post, he questions the next step of a successful restaurant: “do you become a museum of yourself, honoring the past with reverence and precision, or do you start again?”

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.