If you want to read it anyway, click here to drop the paywall for free.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT MY ESSAY. CHRISTIAN READERS, THE YOUNG, THE INFIRM, BABY BOOMERS, AND FAMILY MEMBERS WHO SKIM MY BLOG, DO NOT READ FURTHER!

YOU WILL NOT LIKE THIS PIECE OF INTERNET HISTORY. I REPEAT, THIS IS NOT MINE. IT IS BEING POSTED FOR PRESERVATION. TO MY SISTERS, MOTHER, AUNTS, PAPA, AND GRANDMA: THIS MEANS YOU ESPECIALLY!

Once upon a time, there was a woman who went by Blowfly Girl.

She ran a Geocities page where she documented a paraphilia so extreme it became one of the internet’s most passed-around horror stories. In 2004, she ended up in the hospital.

The story first surfaced on Gaia Online around late 2005 and kept circulating for years through forums, Reddit, Imgur, and eventually YouTube. But almost nobody who encountered it went back and actually read her blog.

Five years after the original post, she came back on Blogspot, and what she wrote over the next seven years tells a very different story than the one people remember. She later traced the whole fixation back to encountering deeply exploitative fiction involving a child. She wrote about turning 30 and how far her life had drifted from anything she’d imagined for herself. She discovered people were copying what she’d done and it disturbed her her. Her writing slowly changed — less performance, more honesty. Her final post was in 2017. She never took her email down.

Read more

Moreno-Gama used the handle “Butlerian Jihadist” on Discord and Instagram, a term from Frank Herbert’s Dune, which borrows it from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon, where machines are outlawed because a philosopher argues they will inevitably surpass their makers. He was an active member of PauseAI’s public server, the loose activist network calling for a global moratorium on frontier AI development.

Daniel's Substack

A Eulogy for Man

This is a eulogy for humanity, despite their passing not having happened yet. As well as a recollection of that infinitesimal moment in time, between the extremes of primitive organic machinery and digital life consuming the cosmos. A reminiscence on that brief memory when the universe woke up, and felt all sorts of things: love, loss, beauty, wonder an…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · Daniel

He kept a Substack for several months, publishing half a dozen posts with titles like “A Eulogy for Man,” in which he characterized AI executives as psychopaths gambling with readers’ futures and their children’s lives, and described the arrival of superintelligence as a race to the grave. In December he posted on Discord: “We are close to midnight, it’s time to actually act.” A moderator warned him. Four months before the attack, he recommended Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies to his Instagram followers.

The book argues, “without hyperbole,” that any group on earth that builds artificial superintelligence using current techniques will cause the death of every person on the planet. According to its authors, AI engineers do not know what is inside these systems, cannot inspect the weights in any useful way, and thus cannot guarantee what the thing actually wants. Taken seriously, it is a frightening piece of work.

Ethnography of the wider Rationalist ecosystem aside — where AI apocalypticism is like a goth’s white-powder foundation — the book has been picked up outside its home context and, perhaps, recontextualized as a manifesto. Doomsday scenarios, unfortunately, have a tendency to mutate. Tell a depressed or unstable 20-something — one who may have already been struggling with economic precarity — that the people running the AI labs are going to annihilate his future and that the window for stopping them is closing, and you have handed him a premise he can act on.

Moreno-Gama’s own writing is Yudkowsky with every caveat deleted and every call for non-violent political organizing ignored. Not a warning transmission from Berkeley; a shot fired from Texas. I don’t believe this is “radicalization,” as some are arguing, at least not in the conventional understanding of the word. But making available — not handing, but not hiding, either — a loaded gun to an already-suicidal person is its own kind of problem, and it is not one that admits of an obvious fix. There are only superficially obvious ones.

I digress.

Jasmine Sun, one of my favorite writers on this subject, has given the phenomenon its best name: “AI populism,” which is when public treats AI not as a technology but as an elite conspiracy against them. I would offer a little color to her description. “AI populism” is more diffuse than any one ideology, and it has been simmering for longer than AI has been the subject. It’s the symptom of something much greater.

What we are watching is a pulse of anti-modernity running through a scattered series of violent incidents.

Most recently: the Palm Springs fertility clinic bombing last May, the Indianapolis shooting last week, both Altman attacks this weekend. It expresses itself in whatever vocabulary happens to be available to the person pulling the trigger. Some call themselves efilists, others Butlerian jihadists. Some leave notes that read NO DATA CENTERS. And some are still worried about climate change, that old frau most of us seem to have forgotten, sweeping her floors, tea going cold and cookies stale.

What is easy to miss, but worth bookmarking, is that the communities these individuals claim tend to disown them or deny affiliation at all. I’d call it damage control if I hadn’t watched the efilists go through the same thing several times already.

These subcultures — ideologies — whatever you want to call them — aren’t organized cells. This isn’t terrorism as we know it. They’re ideas that break containment among a population that already feels hopeless. Efilist forums (the subreddits, the Discord servers) condemned the Palm Springs bombing and the subreddit was purged almost immediately. PauseAI banned Moreno-Gama and said he had never been a formal member. Maybe I am naïve, here. But I think there’s something to it — these aren’t the people you meet at the events. These are the people who pick it up second-hand.

More important than any of that, grief underneath these acts is old and becoming more palpable. Yudkowsky didn’t give birth to Moreno-Gama; the world as it is did. I truly don’t believe you’ll find a murderer at Lighthaven, the Rationalist hub in Berkeley. You might find one lurking on LessWrong without an account — another tab open, maybe about climate change or Palestine or the economy or oil, anomie thick around him.

Whatever the case, progress continues its march.

Techno-pessimists are trying to stop something that has, in most of the ways that matter, already happened. Ray Kurzweil was prescient about many things, and one of them is this: the merger has started. He predicted the outer layers of our neocortex would be wired to the cloud by the 2030s, extending human thought the way the last round of neocortical expansion produced us. But think carefully about what consumer technology alone already does. (And that’s just CONSUMER technology.) We have built ourselves a second nervous system. We are not “building” ourselves a second nervous system. Or: We are already as gods; it’s just that the knowledge of this power hasn’t been evenly distributed yet.

The violence will get worse, and also why it will fail — it is far too aimed at the technology itself. The enemy of the Luddites wasn’t the loom, but rather the factory owners. Yes, AI shouldn’t be used to exploit people and more economic sensitivity in that direction might even diffuse some of the anger. But it is a different fight than the one most of the people reaching for Molotovs think they’re in. They aren’t asking the economic question, or they aren’t asking the economic question primarily. Many of the extremists aren’t asking any question at all — on the surface, they are angry at modernity, at the very essence of technology.

We can change the terms. But we cannot stop the arrival of progress. I hope I am clear: The fight for justice is worth having; the fight against progress is not. You cannot stop where the species is going, only how fast it gets there.

“Everyone dies” is not, from the perspective of most young Americans right now, the worst case. The worst case is everyone lives and nothing you do matters and the job you trained for is gone and nobody will tell you why and the billionaires have bunkers. The anti-natalist who bombs an IVF clinic and the existential-risk boy who firebombs Altman’s house are answering the same question, which is what do you do when life has no meaning? What do you do when you feel like the future has no place for you? I suspect, perhaps controversially, this is what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were trying, in their evil, to ask — what Adam Lanza was trying to say in his — what every man who “went postal” was trying to say.

Violence will only widen the divide. Some will move toward Kurzweil. Others, Kaczynski. The rest remain in purgatory, in neither one camp nor the other. The doomers will produce more Moreno-Gamas.

But I want to shake them and tell them we’re already the world of tomorrow.

In 2020, I said the real culture war was about technology. This has been true, arguably, since agriculture, since the alphabet, since reading, since the printing press, since the Industrial Revolution. Mary Harrington has since argued the singularity has already happened. Mary is right.

The revolution you are waiting for is over, and you are, for better and for worse, one of its children.

First and foremost — and long overdue — I’ve been very sad about the recent passing of Major Ed Dames. The world is a little less special without him. I’ve shared this before, but I love Garret Harkawik’s documentary about Dames. Everything about it, especially the music, is so moving:

Here are some other things that have been on my mind:

SOME SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON NIHILIST VIOLENT EXTREMISM ETC.

Something I noticed back when I was a humble college student in the 2010s was that a lot of mass casualty events — school shootings, in particular — seemed to stem from a generalized anti-modernity animus rather than from more directed bigotries or straightforward radicalization (i.e. ISIS, which was still a thing at the time).

I nurtured this instinct through a short-term interest in John Zerzan and anarcho-primitivism, then deep ecology, eco-alarmism, and climate extremism, winding through the work of people like the Finnish radical environmentalist Pentti Linkola, until I finally stumbled into the broader world of pessimist philosophy.

Eventually, this seed of an idea — diffuse and unrefined, and still ping-ponging around my head in the most nebulous ways — became the foundation for a series of essays and audio documentaries on Adam Lanza, nihilism, and anti-natalism writ large.

Here are just two of a very long list:

Pirate Wires

The YouTubers Preaching Human Extinction

On the morning of May 17, 2025, Guy Edward Bartkus loaded his vehicle with explosives and drove from Twentynine Palms to Palm Springs, California, where he detonated a car bomb outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic. The 25-year-old died in the blast and injured four bystanders. He'd been trying to livestream the attack…

Read more

10 months ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Katherine Dee

I bring it up now because it remains relevant on several fronts:

• The rise of anti-modern violence.

• Nihilistic violent extremism becoming a new category of terrorism.

• The mainstreaming of efilism (the view that bringing new life into the world is a moral wrong) and related philosophies.

• The culture-war-ification of anti-tech or tech-skeptical criticism.

• The mainstreaming of AI safetyism, and its appeal — key word here — to anti-modern extremism.

I don’t really know where I land just yet. I’ve been all over the map on causes and solutions. When I was on Tucker Carlson’s show several years ago, I was more attracted to the bog-standard “community and faith” route, but the older I get and the more I read in this area, the more obvious it becomes to me that “try your best to find transcendent meaning and live in the real world” is just an attractive fantasy — one I long for for myself, too. (It’s also the kind of answer that gets you on TV.)

Is it technology and the info-sphere that’s corrupting our internal software? I don’t know. It’s part of it. But I am skeptical that most people are as plugged in as those of us who write about this stuff often assume. And I am deeply skeptical of the alleged harms, though, I admit, I have a lot of sadness and baggage about the way “the Phones” have impacted Gen X and Boomers.

I say this a lot, and I don’t mean it in a noble-savage, “I’m observing normies as though they’re animals in a zoo” way, but living in Chicago has genuinely shifted my opinion on what the median person believes and how they behave. People here are smart and aware, but they aren’t online in the same way. They might know about TikTok trends, or a handful of influencers, or have their own bugbears, but they’re not like we are — we being the media class.

Is it that the internet impacts certain groups disproportionately? Yes. I’ve written about “slop violence” and how I feel like some people have, quite literally, been molested by the Internet.

But then look at the kinds of violence that were already coming to the fore in the 1970s, long before any of this.

ME AROUND THE WEB

Over the weekend, I published a piece criticizing Freya India’s essay about how social media feminizes us. I paywalled it because, while I stand by the criticism, it’s not the kind of piece I wanted to be widely circulated — this type of writing is too easy to make personal, and I trust my small paid audience to read it in good faith. For me, the paywall is less about shielding myself from a reply or being smarmy or keeping the reader hungry for more, and more about using one of the advantages of a paid space: the ability to work through ideas with a smaller group of readers who are invested in my writing specifically, before they go to market. For example, I have a bad habit of phrasing things poorly and there’s a core few of you guys who help me fix mistakes like that!

I’m also publishing a review of her book soon, which will go through an editor, and that’s the venue where I’m comfortable letting pointed criticism reach a broader audience. (In the spirit of being fair!) But within about ten minutes of publishing it (8 a.m. on a Saturday) Freya herself became a new paid subscriber. Anyway, she’s in dialogue with it now, and while it didn’t pass through an editor and was rough around the edges, it’s not exactly a hit piece as much as it is a disagreement with a long preamble of pregnancy updates. Anyway, it’s open for anyone to read now.

ME IN THE SPECTATOR AND TABLET

Here’s what I’ve been up to over at The Spectator, where I have a bi-weekly column:

• I wrote about tech-skepticism and space travel. Living in the countryside, ditching the smartphone, even being suspicious of industrial agriculture — all well and good, until you consider the broader web of technology and where it can ultimately take us.

• They republished a condensed version of my “let’s debate the ideas, then” piece, in case you missed it. The argument is that the online wing of the new right argues exactly like the SJW left did a few years ago. There’s a bizarre security-state flavor to public conversations on the timeline: any and all criticism is treated as an egregious personal attack; your authenticity and even your character get questioned the moment you disagree; you’re iced out of social circles for perceived allegiances; and, worst of all, proximity to a big enough celebrity makes all of this rulebook null and void.

• Finally, I wrote about how true crime is an inadvertent ARG (alternate reality game) — the way audiences end up treating real cases like puzzles to solve collectively.

And here’s what’s been cooking at Tablet:

• What was the “Anorexic Rec Room”? On ‘90s Internet and shock sites.

• Reborn dolls and animism.

• The Internet’s own wendigo — spirituality, gore videos, and disembodiment.

A RANDOM SONG THAT’S BEEN STUCK IN MY HEAD FROM A MOVIE I SAW THREE TIMES IN THEATRES

SOME RECOMMENDED READING

• Shira Chess, The Unseen Internet

• Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

• Kathleen Stock, Do Not Go Gently

• Ben Lerner, Transcription

I finally have a due date, by the way, so the call-in show will be back very, very soon with a new and improved studio and hopefully a radio address! If you are somebody with money interested in sponsoring this endeavor… Well, you know where to find me.

I’m spending most of my life in bed and nauseated these days. I take these terrible, long naps, where I wake up sweaty and drooling and most terribly of all, groggy. It’s been hard to get my thoughts together.1 I devour books and audiobooks (really loved When We Cease to Understand the World and Transcription). I am haunted by the feeling I am not productive enough — around the house, with my son, in my career. I long to go to conferences. I fantasize about eating exotic fruits. I scare myself late at night or I make myself sad.

That’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Now, for what you came for: not quite a first, but almost a first for me. I am going to criticize directly instead of indirectly. I try to avoid doing this, mostly out of cowardice. I hate when people unfollow me on Twitter, or confront me, or do a snarky name drop on their podcast. I truly dread it. Buuuut, I also feel like it’s time.

Regular readers know I complain about a “certain kind” of writer a lot, and regular readers have probably noticed that the writer I am usually talking about is Freya India.

I gesture at “a genre” and “a kind of essay” and never say who, partly out of some misplaced collegial instinct and partly because I can’t fully explain to myself why her writing gets under my skin the way it does. It’s not completely uncalled for—she writes on my beat, and also shows open contempt for this thing I’ve poured so much of my time and soul into learning and theorizing and writing about, the internet— but I’m also free to stop reading. Other writers in the same orbit annoy me less, many don’t annoy me at all, and I disagree with plenty of people on substance without feeling this particular irritation. But Freya’s work reliably pisses me off, and it has since 2024. After reading her latest essay, “How Social Media Feminised Us All,” between naps, I’ve decided I’ll just say it: she is a clean example of what upsets me about tech criticism, and more generally, the culture-criticism economy, of which I am a gleeful and enthusiastic participant.

The thesis of her essay is that social media installs the emotional life of an adolescent girl into every user. We are more ruminative, insecure, reputation-obsessed, catty, chronically performing for an invisible audience, all thanks to social media. The apps, Freya argues, borrowing from friend-of-the-Stack Mary Harrington, are “structurally feminine,” and the result is that men are being turned into teenage girls, which is, naturally, a catastrophe. To be fair, there’s one version of this claim that doesn’t say women are the problem, but that rather, platforms reward traits culturally coded as feminine and that, over time, users of all kinds adapt to those incentives. This is not the claim actually being made, to be clear. But it is the sympathetic version.

The first thing that pissed me off about this was opportunistically using Helen Andrews’s viral “feminization” frame. The “feminization” grand-theory-of-everything is less a theory than it is a mood resurrected from 1990s intellectual life.

The anxiety is, of course, as old as misogyny itself — the worry about a womanish culture is more or less eternal. The ’90s iteration is the direct influence, though, and the figure everyone is implicitly reaching for is Camille Paglia. Paglia spent decades arguing things like Western achievement is constitutively masculine, that second-wave feminism was a whining refusal to face the fact of male genius, and that the women complaining about their treatment in public life were embarrassing themselves and dragging the culture down with them.

Paglia shaped a generation of women pundits who went on to build a public persona out of being the exception to their own sex. What’s thinned out in the current iteration is that, well… Whatever you think of Paglia, and I’m genuinely not sure what I even think, she was a genius and exceptionally well-read.

The current anti-woke pundit class is full of women trying on the Paglia persona without the intellectual rigor. And then there’s a worse bottom shelf: media personalities with no intellectual pretensions at all who have made a career out of telling men that most women are the problem. That is what “pick me” actually means. It’s not empathy with men, it’s not criticism of women, it’s the willingness to treat women — as a class — as the exclusive source of social dysfunction, with a built-in epistemic trap, because any woman who disagrees becomes exhibit A. You and women like you “get it,” all other women are inferior, almost animals, who are too stupid and too morally small to comprehend their social role.

The audience for this type of content is inexhaustible because the audience is mostly men who would like a woman to say it for them. To her credit, Freya isn’t this but she is pulling a more genteel version of the same move.

Every behavior on Freya’s list is better explained by status dynamics under conditions of visibility than by sex. What she’s describing isn’t feminization but what happens when status competition becomes total. Under those conditions, people converge on the same behaviors not because they are feminine, but because they are adaptive. Every literate, high-status social world in history has shared exactly these flaws. Courts, salons, academic departments, literary circles, venture capital firms, hedge funds, private schools, as she notes, are all full of it. I won’t bore you with the history; you already know it. What social media does is intensify and universalize those conditions. It doesn’t “feminize” them.

If the problem is femininity, the implied cure is a return to masculinity, which cashes out, stated or not, as fewer women in discourse, or women behaving less like themselves, or more girls who are “not like other girls,” which is ultimately the “I know I’m just a dumb broad, but…” posture you will see daily on Twitter.

Freya waves this off.

She doesn’t want us all to become more masculine, she isn’t sure it’s possible, she isn’t sure it’d be good. In her writing, Freya is constantly hedging, ostensibly because she doesn’t want to make enemies, which is a move I recognize because it is the move that has made me every enemy I have ever made as a writer. You don’t have to pick a side to be successful. I’m still a fence-sitting centrist, and not the “good” kind either, not the “free-thinker” kind, but the kind who gets called a coward by everyone. But, and this is the lesson I learned the hard way, the argument does the work whether you like where it points or not. Borrowing a right-wing argument and signing off with a disclaimer does not neutralize it and suddenly make it “apolitical.” It just asks the reader to pretend along with you. And they won’t. (Then your Goodreads page fills up with reviews accusing you of trying to “trick” progressives.)

The second problem, and the one I care about more, maybe selfishly (definitely selfishly), maybe on principle, maybe because I love the subject, is that Freya, who is now being touted as an expert on the deleterious impact of social media, has neither a theory nor a history of the internet. This was my problem with her book, too. Review forthcoming.

Her entire model of the internet is post-2010s. She is writing about the ocean after spending her whole life in one aquarium, and the youth-pastor preaching she is so wont to do is only possible because she has no idea what came before and, ostensibly, no interest in finding out. The missing historical grounding, like the hedging, is paired with the emotionally and financially lucrative role of being “wise beyond her years,” the Greta Thunberg of being ruined by the Instagram algorithm. Her First Things essay on the women of the New Right, a scene she has been adjacent to for maybe two years, proceeds as if she has more standing to narrate it than people who have spent decades inside it and came out the other side with criticism. It was pitched against Sam Adler-Bell’s piece on women, mostly in their 30s with years of offline experience in these communities, including marriages to right-wing men and children, leaving the right. In Freya’s account, there’s always some off-screen “grandmother” doing the evidentiary work— some avatar of a prior generation where girls were girls and men were men and Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Her theoretical formation, as she tells readers in the preface of her book, happened over “month after month” working as a staff writer at Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, which is to say, inside the single most influential node of the phones-are-ruining-the-kids school. The same preface concedes she is “not an expert or an academic” but “a woman in her twenties.” That’s humility, but it’s also a tacit request for the reader to go easy on her. Unfortunately, judging by the torrent of negative and lukewarm reviews, no one has respected it. I’m happy to accept she’s no sociologist, nor is she pretending to be one. Similarly, I myself am as much of an “ethnographer” as Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a “legal philosopher” or my friend Cartoons Hate Her is a data scientist. By which I mean, we’re doing valuable work — and we’re writing or creating content about it — but we’re not professionals in the field. We’re all making our way here. But that said, Freya should send the memo to her speaking agency, because the podcast-and-conference circuit is selling her as an expert tantamount to Jon Haidt or Jean Twenge.

There’s also, as pointed out, none of the criticisms she’s celebrated for making are new.

Gen Z has been complaining about social media for years. Activists across the political spectrum were making these arguments decades ago. Many of us have been hearing the quotidian warnings about “the Phone” since middle school or younger. But more salient than any of this, much of internet culture commentary is built on this sentiment. pandora’s vox was written in 1994 by a woman who called herself humdog, whose actual name was Carmen Hermosillo, and it could have been written today, could have been written ten years ago, and was, in fact, written thirty-two years ago.

humdog was on the WELL, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a dial-up conferencing system the Whole Earth Catalog set launched out of Sausalito in 1985. For years, the WELL was the flagship example people pointed to when they wanted to argue the internet could host real community.

humdog was already, in 1994, diagnosing almost everything the current crop of anti-woke tech critics thinks it just discovered: the commodification of interior life, the way posting your feelings to a corporation-owned board converts you into factory equipment, the “hysterical identification” of strangers with each other’s pain, the performance of identity as the default mode of online presence, the way online “community” is mostly micro-marketing dressed up in hippie vocabulary. I won’t belabor the longer tradition humdog was drawing on, the Frankfurt School and Baudrillard and the whole twentieth-century literature on mass media and commodification. I’ll stay on our turf of the internet. What I’m trying to say is: we been knew.

Nathan Jurgenson has a name for the mistake Freya is making. He calls it digital dualism: the assumption that “online” and “offline” are separable realms, that online life is a degraded copy of some more authentic offline self, and that the task of theory is to explain how the bad fake place is corrupting the good real one. Jurgenson’s whole project, and the project of Real Life, the magazine he founded, is to argue that this is wrong, and that online and offline have interpenetrated completely enough that any theory of contemporary life which treats the internet as a contaminant dripping into a previously clean container is describing a situation that has not existed for at least twenty years. (And in my humble opinion, basically never existed.)

Which brings me, at last, to the two ornamental corpses.

Freya name-checks both McLuhan and Postman. I love McLuhan, but I don’t cite him often because I’m not sure I understand him well enough and have certainly distorted his work when I’ve tried. I say this because it would be unfair not to acknowledge he’s a genuinely difficult thinker. Because of this, he — quite wrongly — gets written off as a crank. And often, his work is abused.

McLuhan gets invoked via “the medium is the message” to argue that the apps themselves, rather than their content, are doing the feminizing. But that phrase doesn’t mean what it’s usually taken to mean, including in this amended framing.

For McLuhan, the “message” of a medium isn’t the mood it puts you in or the behavior it encourages or the content it disseminates. It’s the change in scale and pace a new technology introduces into society. That change happens regardless of what the medium is carrying. The first and best example of this is the electric light. The lightbulb has no content at all, and it still reorganized human life by ending the distinction between night and day. Our lives restructured themselves around the fact that the sun was no longer the clock. The railway, in the same way, didn’t invent movement, it restructured where people lived and worked and what counted as a city, and it did this regardless of what it used for. Print produced the silent, private reader as a new kind of person, and with him “the reading public” and the interior life. A new medium reorganizes the environment around it, and the reorganization is the message. The content is almost beside the point. Elsewhere, McLuhan calls content the juicy piece of meat the burglar throws to the watchdog of the mind to keep you looking the wrong way.

Here’s an instructive interview with Jacques Ellul that helps elucidate this concept which, really, I don’t think is obvious or easy to understand:

It matters that when Freya says the platforms are “structurally feminine,” what she actually means is that certain posts and videos encourage certain kinds of self-presentation, and users, especially young ones, end up mimicking them. That is a claim about content and behavior pretending it’s a claim about the medium, and if you’re not careful, you might just fall for it. Every piece of evidence underneath what she’s actually saying is content-level: what the apps reward, which features tap into which traits, what goes viral, how users feel when they scroll. It’s an easy mistake to make, and why, like I said, I don’t often cite McLuhan.

A McLuhan-shaped argument would look more like: the algorithmic feed reorganized the basic unit of public speech from the article to the post, from something with a beginning and an end to something with neither. It would notice that the feed collapsed the distance between private and public, so that you now speak to your friends and to strangers in the same sentence, in the same register, with no way to tell which audience is listening. It would notice that quantified approval, in the form of likes and shares and follower counts, became the primary currency of public life, and that this happened independently of whether the posts themselves were vain or humble, masculine or feminine, left or right, bitchy or kind, inclusive of dancing trends or not. As Luke Burgis has astutely pointed out several times, it often happens in religious content. Ultimately, “scrolling makes men vain, like women, because of likes” is not a claim about form in the media ecology sense.

Then there’s Postman. Another charitable understanding of Freya’s thesis is that adults online are regressing into adolescents, that the line between child and adult is dissolving from the adult side, is Postman’s thesis in The Disappearance of Childhood. Published in 1982, the book argues that childhood is socially constructed rather than biologically inherited, and it was produced by print literacy and the long apprenticeship of learning to read. Electronic media dissolved the apprenticeship and erased the line between child and adult from both directions at once, so that children become prematurely adults while adults slide back toward the child.

It is curious that this doesn’t come up at all. Not that every Substack essay needs to be a dissertation that’s example-stacked and rife with citations. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of citing Postman, may as well cite the germane work, right? Her hat tip, “Postman’s idea that technology is ideology, McLuhan’s the medium is the message,” is wrong on both halves. Postman’s idea is that the new tool doesn’t add itself to a culture, it changes the culture into a different culture. And the McLuhan half we’ve already covered.

The problem is that in both cases the theorists are decorative. You see this happen with Lasch a lot too. Everyone’s claimed to have read The Culture of Narcissism (what about Revolt of the Elites btw?), nobody’s gotten past the first chapter. But really, you don’t need any of these theorists to extend Helen Andrews’s viral piece to social media. (I’ve done this. I used to do it with Adorno all the time, and when I remember that, I want to shoot myself in the face. I have the benefit now of only one kid and a lot of free time, so hopefully, I do this less often.)

But let’s get back to the meat. Set the citations aside. Who cares whether she “gets” McLuhan or has cracked Postman. Why take for granted that they were even right? And here’s where I expose myself plainly as not being a McLuhanite at all.

Does she have a point? On the surface, yes. The attention economy does distort personality, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. Another piece for another time but I don’t think it’s quite as apocalyptic as “we’re all brainrotted narcissists.” But anyway, calling this “feminization” is a story about gender that’s super-imposed on, ironically enough because it gets you podcast invites. The reality is though that once interior life is commodified, people converge on whatever behaviors maximize attention. If those behaviors resemble “teenage girls,” that’s not a feminizing force — it means Freya’s exposure to young women have been in environments where they are under the pressure of constant visibility.

And I think most saliently, none of what she describes in her work — her book, her Substack — is really about smartphones as such. It’s a description of what happens when human interiority gets routed through a market. humdog knew this in 1994. It is, genuinely, the oldest observation in internet criticism.

And now I circle back to her book. The book has the word commodification in the title. The word capitalism does not appear once. There are plenty of right-wing critics of capitalism she could be in conversation with; one need not be a Marxist to levy these critiques. For example, her friend Paul Kingsnorth, whose own book on the same subject, Against the Machine, is quite good.

But I’m going to stop here, because Freya does not deserve to be my departure point for what ultimately is a protracted complaint about essay writing, as much as I harbor an outsize annoyance with her. I’m free not to read her work or work like hers.

I think something animating all this is that the culture war as we knew it has mostly ended, or has become more ambient, but the economy of the culture war and the format the culture war trafficked in — validating what the paying audience already believes and play-act as an intellectual while doing it — has migrated, fully intact, onto the world of tech-criticism. There were only so many conversations we could have about “gender ideology” before we moved on to the internet its very self.

• From 2020: The Real Culture War Is About How We Use Technology

Media keep doing more of our physical and mental work—faster and better—freeing up more of our time, so that we can spend that time on consuming and developing media even more.

It’s a form of symbiosis. As McLuhan said, humans become “the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world.”¹ Media cater to user needs to make users develop media. In exchange for developing them, media offer us the “nectar” of conveniences of all sorts.

Every time we click a link, react to a story, or share it, we help the internet evolve, like bees pollinating flowers. Every click improves content relevance. Our day-and-night labor of clicks enhances the internet’s convenience for us—and strengthens its power over us.

This labor changes us. Digital media alter not only habits but also our brains. Even idle scrolling demands tons of micro-decisions. To like or not to like? Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer stupid claims or shatter them? To click, or not to click: that is the question.

This labor is not assigned by a boss. Yet merely being online makes users work for digital capitalism—without any explicit consent, but also without significant effort. The click decisions are tiny and require no physical strain. We do not notice how they change us.

The ease of clicking erodes the need for choice deliberation “in favour of trial and error,” as Michel Desmurget² noted. In the physical world, choices have consequences, so you need to think before acting. In digital, you just click and see—if you don’t like it, click again.

Trial-and-error digital interaction takes seconds and usually has no consequences. The ease of the click rewires the brain’s decision-making circuits. Why think hard if you can just try and see? Quick, repeated attempts push us to seek solutions through clicking, not thinking.

***

For making micro-decisions, clicks reward the brain with hormonal pleasures linked to curiosity and socialization, both crucial for the survival of social animals: curiosity helps in finding food and territory, while socialization ensures propagation and protection.

Digital media have “extended” these hormonal faculties. To get more of our time and engagement, the internet has appropriated our hormonal stimuli by offering so much material for curiosity and so many opportunities for socialization that we would never have found offline.

When a user sees a reaction from others, the brain gets a hit of dopamine—a neurotransmitter that induces pleasure to reward certain behaviors. Studies show that the brain’s reaction to a like is similar to seeing a picture of loved ones or winning a small amount in the lottery.

The internet offers a flow of such hormonal micro-stimuli for our activity. The pleasure received as a reward for digital curiosity and socialization is tiny and barely noticeable, yet enough to resettle humankind online.

Often, it’s not even pleasure itself but the hope of feeling it again when someone reacts. We want to get new likes, resembling a gambler who keeps pulling the handle of a slot machine in hope of the next reward. And the “slot machine” keeps rewarding, little by little.

“We seek high numbers of likes and ‘follows’ on social platforms because these metrics are the only way we have of gauging our social acceptance,” said Douglas Rushkoff. “We can’t know if we are truly loved by a few; we can only know if we got liked by many.”³

Tiny but instant rewards for online activity drive user engagement for platforms’ profit. Practiced for many hours a day, this behavior forms a neuro-disposition adjusted to certain interactions with the world. The brain rewires itself, seeking instant rewards for little effort.

***

In the physical world, the brain was conditioned to delayed rewards that required greater effort. Delayed gratification was well deserved and provided stronger pleasure. Hormonal rewards from food, sex, curiosity, socialization, and creativity brought vivid, distinct excitement.

The link between effort and reward was often multilayered. If sex required building relationships, it could also bring love and the comfort of family life. Reading Dostoyevsky took mental effort but could deliver intellectual epiphany and the benefits of social status.

Unlike rewards in the physical world, the reward for a click is as trifling as the effort expended. The low quality incites a huge demand for quantity: sensing a hint of pleasure but never satiation, people spend more and more time online—to the benefit of media evolution.

The paucity of the click’s reward pulls users into more click mining, exhausting them physically and emotionally. More importantly, as the brain adjusts to digital rewards, it loses abilities needed in the “slow” physical world that rewards significant, persistent effort.

Millions get used to choosing smaller instant rewards over larger delayed gratification—a typical sign of a self-control deficit. Combined with constant but unsatisfying hits of micro-pleasure, this leads to a growing attachment to its source—what we call digital addiction.

Those avoiding the risk of addiction do not escape the larger risk of critical detachment from physical reality. Adapting to the digital world alters the effort–reward circuitry, diminishing endurance, diligence, and resilience required to succeed in the physical world.

***

Instant rewards for little effort decrease cognitive capacity for perseverance, contributing to the so-called delayed adulthood of “snowflakes.” They have less or later sex, start fewer families, drive fewer cars, leave parents later (if at all)—partly due to the click effect.

Digital kids are not lazy or spoiled. They actually work hard—but they work for media evolution. The more time they spend online, the less they are attuned to physical reality. This is all a media effect, not a failure of character. That’s why parents’ media literacy is crucial.⁴

Shrinking attention span, weakened focus, and the loss of long reading are cognitive effects of the brain adapting to the click’s instant reward. At a social level, the click changes human worth. The physical world rewarded effort; the digital world—mere presence.

The moral laws of the physical world entailed a reward for what one does. The moral laws of the digital world entail a reward for what one is—basically, for identifying oneself to others and algorithms. The click flips physical doing into digital being as the ground for reward.

Indicating presence (which often takes just a click) is already sufficient “effort” to maintain engagement—the internet’s main asset. This is why digital society is refocusing to reward the effort of presence. Digital platforms need it as plants need the mere presence of bees.

In digital capitalism, users’ clicking is indeed their labor. The click transforms a user’s existence into presence and produces engagement that, in the form of data, is expropriated and commodified by the platforms. The first morning click is a clock-in for user-workers.

Thanks to digital media, the difference between effort and presence is fading. An individual’s mere existence is seen as an effort that deserves a reward. The click’s instant reward changes moral principles, extending its effect beyond digital platforms to society as a whole.

If mere presence grows into a legitimate claim for reward, recognition is demanded (or guilt assigned) not for merit but for identity, fueling identity politics. I click, therefore I am. This is not a social deviation; it is the way a society built on digital media must be.

Since clicks are so easy to make, the exposure of people’s presence to each other becomes enormous. The reward of recognition, promised by a click, gets lost in the overwhelming noise of all users requesting affirmation from one another. Overcoming the noise leads to more noise.

In the physical world, people competed through the intensity of effort; in the digital world, they compete through the intensity of self-identification. Extreme views, rage, and polarization grow in a society that rewards the intensity of self-identification more than effort.

Media evolution—from the stone axe to the remote control (a precursor to the click)—has always lured humans by reducing the effort needed to receive rewards. With the click, the reduction of effort has reached its limit and reversed effort into presence.

As media evolution reaches digital speed, it becomes all the more obvious that “media are extensions of humans” reverses into “humans are extensions of media.” We pollinate the lawns and meadows of the digital ecosystem with every smartphone bought and every click made.

SEE OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREY MIR:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

1. McLuhan, Marshall. (1994 [1964]). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.

2. Desmurget, Michel. (2023). Screen Damage. P. 22.

3. Rushkoff, Douglas. (2019). Team Human. P. 66

4. I covered the rules of media literacy for parents in the chapter “Eight theses on digital media literacy. A manifesto of cooperation with the inevitable” in: Mir, Andrey, (2024). The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.

“American Diner Gothic,” published in The New Atlantis and newly viral on X, coins a term for what author Robert Mariani sees as a new American archetype: the “dinergoth.”

[people in original photo requested removal]

Diner for provincialism, goth as (his word) “lazy shorthand” for alternative aesthetics. Mariani — as always — has a way with words. I remember, with fondness, when he shared with me the name of his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience 2.”

Anyway, argument is that economic stagnation killed upward mobility for an entire generation, regional culture died at the same time, and internet-native subculture flooded into the void. The result is a new type: the pierced-up, anime-watching, gender-fluid, neurodivergent, downwardly mobile young person in middle America, someone he says is “as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were.”

He backs this up with real stats: half of 18-to-29-year-olds are living with their parents. Gen Z homeownership at 27 is 33 percent, compared to 41 percent for Boomers at the same age. Forty-two percent of Gen Z watches anime weekly; only 25 percent follows the NFL. Regional accents are dying. Geographic mobility is at its lowest rate since the Census started tracking it. What was once a bunch of separate subcultures — goth, anime fan, queer, gamer, neurodivergent — has collapsed into a more ambient cultural register. On that point, he’s mostly right.

He’s also right the Internet has played a significant role in re-shaping some of these subcultures. But what isn’t real is the novelty.

There is an unstated assumption running through the essay — or at least through the conversation around it — that these interests and identities originated somewhere cosmopolitan and migrated outward into the provinces as regional culture died. This is wrong, or at least badly overstated. Anime fandom, goth, queerness, neopaganism, “neurodivergent” identities: these were never exclusively coastal phenomena, and their mass base was always suburban and exurban. They did not arrive in the same places Mariani describes; they grew up there.

But I want to be fair to what Mariani is doing, because it’s more ambitious than the backlash gives him credit for. There’s real insight here. The data is solid. The observation that formerly separate subcultures have blended into something more ambient and less defined is mostly right. It’s also true, and important, that the internet helped kids give names to how they were feeling without the vital information that how they were feeling was fleeting because they were 13. The easy aestheticization of angst, above and beyond what you might get from TV or zines, made it even more attractive. How many of us modeled our angst after stuff we saw online?

What Mariani is describing is not the emergence of a new type, but a change in scale and visibility. Platforms collapsed distinct subcultures into a single feed, flattening boundaries that once mattered. What looks like a new archetype is, in many cases, an old one made ambient.

I grew up in South Florida. I came of age in the sprawl of Broward and Palm Beach County, along six-lane roads lined with identical shopping plazas, each one anchored by a Publix. The neighborhoods have names like The Hamptons or Broken Sound, names that gesture at leisure and arrival, and what they contain is either McMansions so far out of your price range as to be dizzying, or, more likely, concrete-block houses, a lanai facing a canal, and a school your realtor assured your parents was excellent. Everything was built fast and all at once, whole zip codes raised out of nothing in a few years during the ‘80s boom, and by the time I got there in 1996 the gulf between the haves and have-nots was miserably, uncomfortably obvious.

South Florida is one of those places where extreme wealth and poverty exist on the same street, albeit separated by a gate and a guardhouse and alligators who won’t hesitate to eat your toddler.

On one side, the gated enclaves with country clubs and artificial lakes and landscaping that costs more per month than some people’s rent. On the other, the older subdivisions where families double up in two-bedroom apartments and the elementary school has a cop in the hallway. My mother spent my whole childhood trying to shield me from the latter. But the thing about South Florida is that the poor kids and the rich kids shared the same geography of decline — the “place without places” — and the decline was already well underway before the internet had anything to do with it.

South Florida always had the ambience of downward mobility, and it looked the same whether you wore a Korn shirt or Lacoste.

In Florida, there was always the “alt” kid from a rough home — white, Latino, Jewish, whatever. You could identify them by kindergarten. In my generation, the weird one whose mom let them listen to Eminem, at the time genuinely scandalous, or watch Freddy Krueger movies or Jerry Springer, at the time genuinely taboo-breaking. Or maybe their mom wasn’t around enough to stop them. The kid with the anime shirt when anime in 2004 was rare enough that owning a Naruto figurine was a social statement. The girl with the cat ears. You always knew these kids. If you went to a prep school like Pine Crest or St. Andrews, or even one of the better public schools, your parents didn’t want you hanging out with them.

Your parents worried because these kids had the problems of downward mobility. The parent who was never there or a sketchy stepdad with tattoos and a blue-collar job. The house that smelled like cigarettes, or like nothing, because nobody cooked and Burger King was the law of the land. And you were drawn to them anyway, because they were interesting, because they liked the things you liked, because they were free, and that freedom was magnetic. Maybe you’d end up at their house after school and something about the place would feel both thrilling and wrong: you got to drink Smirnoff Ice or smoke weed, the rooms were empty, the ever-present hum of a ceiling fan pushing around air that was too dry.

Your curiosities, because you were 8 or 14 or 16 or even 21, visiting home from college, were things like: where are these kids buying the cat ears? Where did they find that choker? How do they know about Inuyasha? It turned out they were going to the Hot Topic at the far-away mall, the one that was considered the “trashy” one. Hot Topic opened in 1989. The founder was from Alton, Iowa, and his whole business model was to bring downtown alternative culture to suburban mall kids who would never see downtown. By 2005, Hot Topic was making almost a billion dollars a year. This was only briefly an urban thing, and it was an urban thing before Rob and I were born. What was ultimately mainstreamed was specifically suburban and exurban. The infrastructure for distributing alt identity to provincial America predates the commercial internet. It’s a chain store that opened when the Berlin Wall fell.

This type has been recognizable for almost thirty years, probably longer. The Craft came out in 1996. Its characters are outcast girls at a suburban school; one lives in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather and an alcoholic mother. They find power through fringe culture because legitimate paths are closed. That movie didn’t invent something new. It worked because it depicted something audiences already recognized.

Many of the original goths weren’t kids in big cities — they were kids in forgotten places, finding each other through record stores and shows and word of mouth. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t also say that the ones in big cities were also, well, forgotten kids.)

The West Memphis Three is an extreme case, but it makes the pattern visible. Damien Echols was eighteen, living in a trailer park in Marion, Arkansas, one of the poorest areas in the country. He wore all black, read Anne Rice and Stephen King, identified as a Wiccan. Local authorities read that as evidence of danger. When three boys were murdered in 1993, Echols became the primary suspect. There was no physical evidence. His taste, his affect, his interests were treated as proof. He was sentenced to death and spent eighteen years on death row before DNA evidence excluded all three defendants.

The point is not that Mariani is doing this. It should go without saying! But this type has long been in exactly the places he treats as newly encountering it.

Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.

Even the internet part of this story is older than Mariani suggests. Before Discord there was Tumblr and before Tumblr there was LiveJournal. As far back as the late 1980s, Usenet newsgroups like alt.goth were already gathering the same kind of person: the misfit in a rural town, looking for someone else like them. Earlier still, BBSes and zines served the same function.

I’m repeating myself here, but the internet didn’t create this type. It gave it continuity.

I wrote about one aspect of the online dimension in my piece “Adam Lanza Fan Art” for Tablet, which traced how small, insular communities migrated across platforms over time. The shift to Discord matters, Mariani’s not wrong—private, persistent, role-based, pseudonymous spaces create different social dynamics than forums or subreddits or even locked LiveJournal groups.

This is what’s new about the 2020s:

Read more

And so, I haven’t actually finished it. I probably never will. I want to be honest about that.

One of the reasons that West’s work is hard to get through is because she hates herself – and relentlessly so. West tells you – in no uncertain terms – that she hates herself, and then she tells you again, and then she tries (and fails to) make it funny, and then she tells you one more time in case you missed it. She describes her childhood dentist telling her she had “perfect teeth” and clings to it because she “wasn’t the kind of girl who heard ‘perfect’ a lot as an assessment of her body,” and connects this, in the same breath, to begging boys to kiss her. She explains her low self-esteem partly through “jante,” a Scandinavian concept she links to her family, which in one reading is just Midwestern humility, but the way she writes about it reads less like a cultural disposition than a justification for why she keeps underselling herself in every paragraph

All of this is presented as “charm and character,” which is the thing realtors say about houses that are too old and too broken but need to sell anyway. I don’t think West realizes the way she comes off – that her self-descriptions are deeply depressing. Maybe a third of the way through the book, it becomes clear that the reason West agreed to a relationship structure she didn’t want is that she didn’t believe anyone else but Aham would want her (which, by the way, is a much different thing than she didn’t believe she’d want anyone else but Aham).

This is my entire problem with West. I don’t care that she’s fat or polyamorous or a progressive in the Pacific Northwest. My problem with West is that she hates herself, and she sees herself through the same lens as her worst critics, and she expects you to find this funny. She’s not asking for pity – this is just a fact of life for her. Of course she hates herself; there’s no other option if you’re Lindy West. She agrees with you guys. When it’s not depressing, it’s grating.

And yet I see myself in her. Because this thing West does, where she pre-empts your criticism by hating herself first, is the oldest trick in the book.

In college I had a friend, Claudia, who continuously put herself in sexual situations she wasn’t fully comfortable with. She was convinced she had “sex like a man.” She was “just horny.” And sometimes she was genuinely horny; I believe that. It can be hard to disentangle these things. But even though Claudia hid behind horniness, she would still text these men manically, hundreds of times, and then show me the messages, scrolling and scrolling through a wall of blue with no reply. She’d be gutted by rejections in ways that didn’t match the story she was telling about herself. She’d cry about a guy she supposedly didn’t care about and then, the next weekend, do it again with someone new. She wasn’t having casual sex. She was having desperate sex and calling it casual, because casual was the version of herself she wanted to be: unbothered, cool, free, needing nothing from anyone. I watched it for years, and I never knew what to say, and I think a lot of women have a Claudia in their lives, or have been Claudia, or have at least felt the pull of becoming her.

I think of this as trainwreck feminism.

The problem with a lot of millennial-coded “choice” feminism was not that it had delusionally high standards. No, the problem was the standards were so low as to be a form of self-destruction. As someone who lived it, the reality was simpler and sadder: women were in pain, and they knew they were in pain, and the only cultural vocabulary available to them turned that pain into a kind of performance. Best case scenario, you could sell it for $50 a pop to xoJane. Maybe you’d become Cat Marnell or Lena Dunham or something. Maybe your Tumblr would get you a book deal.

All this to say, millennial women leaned into their flaws. The posture was something like: the world is a trash heap and so am I, isn’t that hilarious? It’s the same impulse you see now in women who perform misogyny, the ones who want you to know they’re not like other girls because they both see and agree that women – women, including themselves – are awful. Out of the millennial version of this stance came the valorization of fast food as aesthetic, of hangovers as personality, of sexual misadventure as confessional essays as minor celebrity. Sleep with the gross guy at the food cart or the bar or for one of my college friends, “the docks” for the story. It was never empowering. It was more like a preemptive strike; if I hurt myself before the world can hurt me, at least I chose it.

Read more

Both women describe a movement that once promised women a place at the table and now openly treats them, in the anonymous source’s words, as “subhuman: subrational, non-agentic, cattle.” Adler-Bell, who hosts a podcast that provides an excellent history of right-wing ideas, reported the piece well, and I believe he wrote it in good faith.

The backdrop is a debate that has consumed the online right over the past few years: whether biological sex differences are so profound that women’s increasing presence in professional and institutional life has degraded those institutions, and whether women are, by nature, too irrational or too consensus-oriented to participate meaningfully in intellectual or political work. The women leaving aren’t leaving over policy disagreements. They’re leaving because they feel like a movement they helped build, or promote, has arrived at the conclusion that women like them shouldn’t have been there in the first place. What makes this harder to narrate cleanly is that women are not only the targets of this debate but, in some cases, its most prominent voices. The conversation is not simply men saying these things about women.

It is, in part, women saying these things about women – which is precisely why some of the people who’ve pushed back feel not just disagreed with but trapped.

That being said, I understand why some right-wingers were uneasy. It ran in New York. It will be read by progressives as confirmation of everything they already believe, in ways that don’t require them to reckon with why these women were drawn to the right in the first place: real frustrations with liberal feminism, real observations about institutional culture, real experiences of being condescended to. The piece compresses figures who share very little into a single narrative arc. Scott Yenor is a family-policy scholar at Heritage; Nick Fuentes is a self-described “incel podcaster”; Douglas Wilson is a pastor in Idaho whose church community has attracted controversy for decades over its teachings on gender hierarchy. These are not the same projects, and not all of them are pro-Trump or MAGA. The question of who counts as “New Right,” who’s MAGA, who’s conservative, and who’s a fringe (often media) figure tolerated for tactical reasons is genuinely complicated, and it’s a debate most Republican voters have never encountered and would find alien. The ordinary people, men and women alike, who vote Republican without ever listening to a podcast or posting on X are absent from the story entirely.

Full disclosure – I also have some skin in this conversation. I was quoted in the piece, not as a defector, but as an internet culture reporter familiar with some of the communities being described. For my part, I drew on Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women to make the point that the old conservative bargain for women, submission in exchange for protection, no longer holds in some of the most popular right-wing subcultures, like the groypers – the young, chronically online followers of Nick Fuentes – or the masculinist orbiters of figures like Andrew Tate. Dworkin’s argument was that conservative women weren’t dupes; they had made a rational calculation. They traded autonomy for safety within a system that offered them no better deal. What’s changed in these newer subcultures is that the protection half of the bargain has been dropped. The submission is still demanded, but the reciprocal obligation – that men owe women provision, loyalty, respect – has been replaced by open contempt. For this I was accused of throwing friends under the bus by people, who, ironically, both oppose the specific communities I was critiquing and, in some cases, even enjoyed the text I was recommending. Several of the women quoted in the original piece have been dismissed as “clout chasers” by both left and right.

But the most vocal critics didn’t engage with the Dworkin argument, or really any argument made.

We all spoke to a “liberal journalist.” I myself might even be the liberal journalist! The sin was committed, and we were promptly dismissed as traitors. This is a more important snag than it might seem on the surface.

The most common response I’ve seen from the online right is: “Why don’t they attack the ideas?”

I want to take that demand seriously. Many of the women in Adler-Bell’s piece have attacked the ideas, at length, in public, for years. The ideas are not hard to attack. What’s hard is being taken seriously — getting the attack to count, because the online arenas where this debate is actually happening have been structured so that no criticism from a woman registers as legitimate.

The request to “debate the ideas” is, in most cases, not a real request for debate. It is a move in a game whose actual logic runs on a version of Carl Schmitt’s famous, and famously abused, friend-enemy distinction. What matters is not whether the argument is sound but whether the person making it is your ally. This is the defining pathology of argument online, and it’s the same one the center, right, and “politically homeless” spent the past decade complaining about when the left did it.

The “woke” or progressive version: your criticism reflects your privilege, which prevents you from perceiving structural oppression. Disagreement becomes a failure of perception rather than a difference of analysis. The conservative version, now ascendant in the (let’s be honest here) X and podcast-dominated gender debate: women who disagree with claims about feminine irrationality are exhibiting the feminine irrationality being diagnosed. They aren’t accused of being wrong. They’re accused of “flirting” with ideas they were never serious about, even when they spent years making substantive contributions to the movement or living the prescribed lifestyle (e.g. traditional marriage, homemaking, child-rearing). The defecting woman is not treated as an intellectual, not even a failed one, but as a sexual presence who wandered too close to serious ideas and couldn’t follow through. Read plainly, they are calling her a tease – or worse, a whore.

This rhetorical tactic should be familiar by now.

When Robin DiAngelo introduced “white fragility,” the most common criticism, and I think the right one, was that it was unfalsifiable. Agreement proved the theory and denial was itself an exhibit of fragility. No possible response counted as evidence against the claim. The online right’s Great Gender Debate now operates the same way. Agreement from women validates the thesis. But disagreement validates it too. The argument never has to defend itself because all possible criticism has been defined as inadmissible. You cannot attack the ideas when the ideas have been designed to make your attack into proof that you shouldn’t be attacking them!

But that’s the ecosystem, not every thinker in it.

Whether you agree or disagree with their underlying claims, not every anti-racist thinker was or is Robin DiAngelo, and not every sex realist – that is, someone who believes biological sex differences have meaningful social and political implications – is a podcast reply guy calling women cattle. Helen Andrews, one of the most vocal voices in this conversation, engages with arguments. She debated Leah Libresco Sargeant on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. Real survey data does show gender gaps in attitudes toward free speech, and the question of whether institutional norms have eroded as demographics shift is worth asking.

So let me engage with at least one of Andrews’ answers, because I think it illustrates how even serious versions of this argument slide into the same structural trap.

On Triggernometry, Andrews said:

And we had increasing female representation in the legal system seems to have been accompanied by a lot more wokeness, which I think is more damaging in lawyers than it is in almost anywhere else. Because the law is the one field where you really want people to be as literal minded as possible, as devoted to the rules as possible, not fudging things so that everybody’s happy, really sticking to the letter of the law. And so if the law is corrupted, that’s something that I’m very, very worried about.

The first problem is that this description of law is a fantasy of what the legal profession actually is. The common law tradition is built on interpretation, not literalism. What Andrews said is, in fact, so detached from the reality of the legal profession I was stunned she said this so confidently.

Equity courts exist precisely because rigid rule-following produced unjust outcomes. This was recognized in the fourteenth century, not during “peak woke.” The tension between rule and judgment isn’t a modern corruption, it’s the tradition of the Western world. And it has always been the tradition.

What Andrews frames as feminine contamination (interpretation, discretion, contextual reasoning) has always been constitutive of legal practice! Framing it as a deviation is the novelty, not the other way around. The baseline she’s measuring from never existed in the West, so no amount of evidence can disprove the decline.What Andrews frames as a deviation from legal tradition is, in fact, part of the tradition itself.

So, ostensibly, in this version of history, when male judges interpret the law, it is called jurisprudence. But when women do it, it becomes evidence that women are corrupting the institution.

Read more

It was co-authored by Timothy Leary and Eric Gullichsen and published in 1988 in Reality Hackers, a short-lived Bay Area magazine that would eventually rebrand as Mondo 2000, becoming the defining publication of early-90s digital counterculture.

Leary, by then in his late sixties, was deep into his reinvention as a technology evangelist. The former LSD guru was now preaching that the personal computer was the real consciousness-expanding tool (I happen to agree with him!). Gullichsen was a Silicon Valley engineer and VR pioneer who had worked at Autodesk on some of the first virtual reality systems. Together they produced this.

Some of what’s here turned out to be remarkably prescient: the idea that digital identity would become fluid and self-constructed and that the body itself would become a site of technological intervention. Other parts feel like dispatches from a more utopian (and innocent) time.

I’m reposting it here as preservation. This is what the future looked like from 1988. It would be a shame if we forgot about it!

We place no reliance
On virgin or pigeon;
Our Method is Science,
Our Aim is Religion.

Aleister Crowley, from the journal ‘Equinox‘

People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the ‘trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.

William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

Information is more basic than matter and energy.
Atoms, electrons, quarks consist of bits —
Binary units of information
Like those processed in computer software
And in the brain.
The behavior of these bits, and thus of the universe,
Is governed by a single programming rule.

Edward Fredkin

A Universe of Bits and Bytes

Major historical accomplishments of the 20th century included the personalization and popularization of Quantum Physics, an acceptance of self-reference and circular causality in systems of mathematics and psychology, and the resulting development of cybernetic society.

This philosophic achievement, which has dominated the culture of the 20th century, was based on a discovery by nuclear and quantum physicists around 1900, that visible-tangible realities are written in a digital assembly language we could accurately call ‘basic.’

It turns out that we inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits which cluster together in geometrically-logical, temporary configurations.

The solid Newtonian Universe rested upon such immutable General-Motors concepts as mass, force, momentum, and inertia, cast into a Manichaean drama involving equal reactions of good vs. evil, gravity vs. levity, entropy vs. evolution and coerced by such pious Bank-of-England notions as conservation of energy. This dependable, static, predictable, universe suddenly, in the minds of Planck/Heisenberg became digitized, transformed into shimmering quantum screens of electronic probabilities.

Up here in 1988, we are learning to experience what Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg could only dream of. The universe, according to their cyberdelic equations, is best described as a digital information process with sub-programs and temporary ROM states, megas called galaxies, maxis called stars, minis called planets, micros called organisms, and nanos known as molecules, atoms, particles. All of these programs are perpetually in states of evolution, i.e., continually ‘running.’

It seems to follow that the great intellectual challenge of the 20th century was to make this universe ‘user friendly,’ to prepare individual human beings to decode, digitize, store, process and reflect the sub-programs which make up his/her own personal realities.

Nobody Knew What These Guys Were Talking About

The chain of events that elevated us to this new genetic status, HOMO SAPIENS CYBERNETICUS, began around the turn of the century.

Physicists, we recall, are traditionally assigned the task of sorting out the nature of reality. So it was the quantum philosophers who figured out that units of energy/matter were sub- atomic bits of programmed information that zoom around in clouds of ever-changing, if/then, start/stop, off/on, 0/1, yin/yang probabilities in clusters of pixels, up-and-down recurring stairways of paradox.

When they started out, no one understood what these guys were talking about. They expressed their unsettling theories in complex equations written on blackboards with chalk. Believe it or not, these great physicists thought and communicated with a neolithic tool — chalk-marks on the wall of the cave. The irony was this: Einstein and his brilliant colleagues could not experience or operate or communicate at a quantum-electronic level.

Imagine if Max Planck pottering around in his mathematical chalk-board had access to a video-arcade game! He’d see right away that the blips on Centipede and the zaps of Space Invaders could represent the movement of the very particles that he tried to describe in the dusty symbols of his blackboard.

A Wild and Scary Hallucinogenique

Now let us reflect on the head-bursting adjustment required here. The relativistic universe described by Einstein and the nuclear physicists IS alien and terrifying. Quantum physics is quite literally a wild, confusing psyberdelic trip. It postulates an Alice-in-Wonderland, Sartrean universe in which everything is changing. As Heisenberg implied: nothing is certain except uncertainty. Matter is energy. Energy and matter are temporary states of info-bits, frozen at various forms of acceleration.

This digital universe is not user-friendly when approached with a Newtonian mind. We are just now beginning to write a manual of operations for the brain and the universe, both of which, it turns out, are digital galaxies with amazing similarities.

People living in the solid, mechanical world of 1901 simply could not understand or experience a quantum universe. Dear sweet old Einstein, who couldn’t accept his own unsettling equations, was denounced as evil and immoral by Catholic bishops and sober theologians who sensed how unsettling and revolutionary these new ideas could be. Ethical relativity is still the mortal sin of religious fundamentalists.

The Cyberpunk as Modern Alchemist

The baby boom generation has grown up in an electronic world of TV and personal computing screens. The cyberpunks offer metaphors, rituals, life styles for dealing with the universe of information. More and more of us are becoming electro-shamans, modern alchemists.

Alchemists of the Middle Ages described the construction of magical appliances for viewing future events, or speaking to friends distant or dead. Writings of Paracelsus describe a mirror of ELECTRUM MAGICUM with telegenic properties, and crystal scrying was in its heyday.

Today, digital alchemists have at their command tools of a precision and power unimagined by their predecessors. Computer screens ARE magical mirrors, presenting alternate realities at varying degrees of abstraction on command (invocation). Aleister Crowley defined magick as ‘the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with our will,’ and to this end the computer is the universal level of Archimedes.

The parallels between the culture of the alchemists and that of cyberpunk computer adepts are inescapable. Both employ knowledge of an occult arcanum unknown to the population at large, with secret symbols and words of power. The ‘secret symbols’ comprise the languages of computers and mathematics, and the ‘words of power’ instruct computer operating systems to complete Herculean tasks. Knowing the precise code name of a digital program permits it to be conjured into existence, transcending the labor of muscular or mechanical search or manufacture.

Rites of initiation or apprenticeship are common to both. ‘Psychic feats’ of telepathy and action-at-a-distance are achieved by selection of the menu option.

Classical Magickal Correspondences

Alchemists of the Middle Ages believed quite correctly that their cosmos was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Although today our periodic table sports more than 100 chemical elements, the four universal elements still can be identified as the constituents of some processes in the external reality, and within the inner psychological world of humankind.

Each of the four elements is an archetype and a metaphor, a convenient and appropriate name for a universally identified quality. The four are echoed in the organization of both the four suits and the four ‘court cards’ of each suit of the Tarot, inherited from the Egyptians and its symbolism preserved in ordinary Western playing cards. The four also correspond to the four principal tools of the classical practitioner of ceremonial magick.

The wand of the magician represents the phallic male creative force, fire. The cup stands for the female receptive force, and, obviously enough, is associated with water. the sword is the incisive intellect, moving and severing the air, the abstraction in which it moves. Finally, the pantacle (disk) is the grounding in earth (magnetic material), the stored algorithms. (We use Crowley’s spelling of pentacle, which communicates the sense of ‘all and everything,’ advisedly.)

These classical instruments of magick exist in modern cyber technology: The mouse or pen of the digitizing tablet is the wand, controlling the fire of the CRT display and harnessing the creative force of the programmer. It is used in all invocations and ritual as a tool of command. Spinning disk drives are the pantacles, inscribed with complex symbols, earthen tablets to receive the input of ‘air,’ the crackling dynamic ethereal intellectual electricity of the processor chip circuitry programming results. The RAM chips are, literally, the buffers (‘buffer pools’), the water, the passive element capable of only receiving impressions and re-transmitting, reflecting.

Iconic visual programming languages are a Tarot, the pictorial summation of all possibilities, activated for the purpose of divination by juxtaposition and mutual influence. A periodic table of possibilities, the Western form of the Eastern I Ching. Traditional word-oriented programming languages, FORTRAN, COBOL, and the rest, are a degenerate form of these universal systems, grimoires of profit-oriented corporations.

Detailed database logs of the activity of operating systems from the Akashic records on a microscale. At a macroscopic level, this is the ‘world net’ knowledge base, the ‘knoesphere,’ the world-wide online hypertext network of information soon to be realized by the storage capacity of CD ROM and the data transmission capability of optical fiber. William Gibson’s cyberspace matrix.

Banishing rituals debug programs, and friendly djinn are invoked for compiling, searching, and other mundane tasks. When the magic circle is broken (segmentation violation), the system collapses. Personal transmutation (the ecstasy of the ‘ultimate hack’) is a veiled goal of both systems. The satori of harmonious human-computer communication resulting from the infinite regress into meta-levels of reflection of self is the reward for immaculate conceptualization and execution of ideas.

The universality of 0 and 1 throughout magic and religion: yin and yang, yoni and lingam, cup and wand, are manifested today in digital signals, the two bits underlying the implementation of all digital programs in the world, in our brains and in our operating systems. Stretching it a bit, even the monad, symbol of change and the Tao, visually resembles a superimposed 0 and 1 when its curving central line is stretched through the action of centrifugal force from the ever-increasing speed of the monad’s rotation.

Cyber Religion of the Baby Boomers

By the year 2000, Aleister Crowley, William Gibson, and Edward Fredkin could well replace Benjamin Spock as a Baby Boom navigator. Why? Because, by then the concerns of the baby boom generation will be digital. (Or, to use the old paradigms, philosophic-spiritual.)

During their childhood they were Mouseketeers. In their teens the Cybers went on an adolescent spiritual binge unequalled since the Children’s Crusade. In their revolt against the factory culture they re-invented and updated their tribal-pagan roots and experimented with Hinduism, Haight-Ashbury Buddhism, American Indianism, Magic, Witchcraft, Ann Arbor Voo Doo, Esalen Yoga, Computerized I Ching Taoism, 3-D Reincarnation, Fluid Druidism. St. Stephen Jobs to the Ashram!

Born-again Paganism! Pan-Dionysius on audio-visual cassettes. Mick Jagger had them sympathizing with the devil. The Beatles had them floating upstream on the Ganges. Jimi Hendrix taught them how to be a voodoo child. Is there one pre-Christian or third world metaphor for divinity that some rock group has not yet celebrated on an album cover?

Ontology Recapitulates Theology

The Boomers in the evolving life-cycle seem to have recapitulated the theological history of our species. Just as monotheism emerged to unify pagan tribes into nations, so did the Boomers re-discover fundamentalist Judaism and Christianity in their young adulthood.

Even far-away Islam attracted gourmet Blacks and ex-hippies such as Cat Stevens. Bob Dylan nicely exemplifies the consumer approach to religion. For 25 years Bob (ne Zimmerman) has continued to browse through the spiritual boutiques dabbing on a dash of Baptist ‘born-again,’ nibbling at Hassidism before returning to his ole-time faith of sardonic reformed humanism.

We can laugh at this trendy shopping around for the custom- tailored designer god, but behind the faddism we find a powerful clue.

Notice how Dylan, for example, preserves his options and tries to avoid shoddy of off-the-rack soul-ware. No ‘plastic christs that glow in the dark’ for Bob! The religion here is Evolutionism, based on the classic humanist, transcendental assumptions:

1. God is not a tribal father nor a feudal lord nor an engineer- manager of the universe. There is no god (in the singular) except you at the moment. There are as many gods (in the plural) as can be imagined. Call them whatever you like. They are free agents like you and me.

2. You can change and mutate and keep improving. The idea is to keep ‘trading up’ to a ‘better’ philosophy-theology.

3. The aim of your life, following Buddha, Krishna, Gurdjieff, Werner Erhart, Shirley, is this: Take care of your self so you can take care of others. If any.

With a Little Help From Your Friends

This generation, we recall, had been disillusioned by the religions, politics, and economics of their parents. Growing up with thethreat of nuclear war, the assassination of beloved leaders, immune deficiencies, a collapsing industrial system, an impossible national debt, religious fundamentalisms (Christian-Jewish- Islamic) that fanatically scream hatred and intolerance, and uncomprehending neglect of the ecology, they have developed a healthy skepticism about collective solutions.

They can’t retreat back home because Mom and Dad are divorced.

No wonder they have created a psychology of individual navigation. Singularity. The basic idea is self-responsibility. You just can’t depend on anyone else to solve your problems. You gotta do it all by yourself — With a little help from your friends.

A Do-It-Yourself Religion

Since God #1 appears to be held hostage back there by the blood-thirsty Persian Ayatollah, by the telegenic Polish Pope and the Moral Majority, there’s only one logical alternative. You ‘steer’ your own course. You start your own religion. The Temple is your body. Your mind writes the theology. And the Holy Spirit emanates from that infinitely mysterious intersection between your brain and your DNA.

The attainment of even the suburbs of Paradise involves good navigation and planning on your part. Hell is a series of redeemable errors. A detour caused by failure to check the trip- maps. A losing streak. Many people are carefully conditioned from birth to live in hell. As children, they are largely ignored until something happens to cause them pain or injury. Then, mommy and daddy quickly lavish aid, attention, succor, positive reinforcement. When ‘all grown up,’ and in the world alone to make choices, what kind of choices are going to result from those many years of conditioning? It’s no wonder so many people seem to live in hell, to live pained lives of mishaps and broken dreams. Of course, by realizing this we can begin to decondition ourselves towards healthy hedonism. Reward yourself for making choices that lead to pleasure, and build a cybernetic cycle of positive feedback. Only from the state of free selfhood can any truly compassionate signals be sent to others.

The Administration of a Personal State

The management and piloting of a Singularity leads to a very busy career. Since the Crowley-Gibson-Fredkin Individual has established herself as a religion, a country, a corporation, an information network, and a neurological universe, it is necessary to maintain personal equivalents for all the departments and operations of the bureaucracies that perform these duties.

This apparently means forming private alliances, formulating personal political platforms, conducting your own domestic and foreign relations, establishing trade policies, defense and security programs, educational and recreational events. On the upside, one is free from dependence upon bureaucracies, an inestimable boon. (Free agents can, of course, make temporary deals with organizations and officials thereof.)

And if countries have histories and myths, why shouldn’t you?

The Personal Mythology

So you search and research your very own genetic memory banks, the Old Testaments of your DNA-RNA, including, if you like, past incarnations and Jungian archetypes. And funky pre- incarnations in any future you can imagine!

You write your very own Newest Testament, recalling that voluntary martyrdom is tacky and crucifixions, like nuclear war, can ruin your day.

You can do anything the great religions, empires and racial groups have done in the name of their God #1. and you’re certain to do it better because… well, look at their track records. There’s no way your Personal State could produce the persecutions, massacres and bigotries of the Big Guys.

Why? Because there’s only one of you, and even with the help of your friends the amount of damage an individual can do is insignificant compared with the evil-potential of a collective.

Besides, you’re a child of the 60s. You’re imprinted to want a peaceful, tolerant, funny world. You can choose your gods to be smart, funny, compassionate, cute and goofy.

Irreverence is a Password for the 21st Century

It has been suggested that the philosophic assignment of the Roaring 20th Century was to prepare the human species for the shifting realities of Quantum Physics and Singular Steering.

Relativity means that everyone ‘sees’ or reacts to things differently, depending upon location, velocity and attitude (angle of approach).

The relativistic insight is in essence irreverent or humorous, i.e., laughable, comical, delightful. With the law of gravity repealed, levity is the order of the day. We rise through our levity, instead of being held down by our gravity.

The word ‘humor’ comes from the Latin word for liquid or fluid, referring to such qualities as flowing, pliable, smooth, effortless, easily changed, non-frictional, transparent, shining, musical, graceful in motion and readily converted into cash.

A Last Generation in Flesh?

Through science and technology we will meet the aliens, and they will be us.

— Norman Spinrad, ‘The Neuromantics‘

Information-beings of the future may well be fluid. Human society has now reached a turning point in the operation of the digital programs of evolution, a point at which the next evolutionary steps of the species become apparent to us, to surf as we will. Or, more correctly, as the evolutionary programs run and run, the next stages pop up in parallel, resulting in continuing explosions of unexpected diversity. Our concepts of what is known as ‘human’ continually change. For example, we are no longer as dependent on physical fitness for survival. Our quantum appliances and improved mechanical devices can generally provide the requisite means or defenses. In the near future, the methods of information technology, molecular engineering, biotechnology, nanotechnology (atom stacking) and quantum-digital programming could make the human form a matter totally determined by individual whim, style and seasonal choice.

Humans already come in some variety of races and sizes. In comparison to what ‘human’ might mean within the next century, we humans are at present as indistinguishable from one another as are hydrogen molecules. Along with the irrational taboo about death, the sanctity of our body image seems to be one of the most persistent anachronisms of Industrial Age thought.

We see evolutions of the human form in the future; one more biological-like: a bio/computer hybrid of any desired form — and one not biological at all: an ‘electronic entity’ in the digital info-universe.

Human-AS-programs, and human-IN-programs.

Of these two post-humanist views, human-as-programs is more easily conceived. Today, we have crude prosthetic implants, artificial limbs, valves, and entire organs. The continuing improvements in the old-style mechanical technology slowly increase the thoroughness of brain/external-world integration. A profound change can come with the developments of biotechnology, genetic engineering, and the slightly more remote success of nanotechnology.

The electronic form of human-in-programs is more alien to our current conceptions of humanity. Through storage of one’s belief systems as data structures online, driven by desired programs one’s neuronal apparatus should operate in silicon basically as it dead on the meatware of the brain, though faster, more accurately, more self-mutably, and, if desired, immortally.

Clever cyberpunks will of course not only store themselves electronically, but do so in the form of a ‘computer virus,’ capable of traversing computer networks and of self-replicating as a guard against accidental or malicious erasure by others, or other programs. (Imagine the somewhat droll scenario: ‘What’s on this CD?’ ‘Ah, that’s just that boring adolescent Leary. Let’s go ahead and reformat it.’)

One speculation is that such viral human forms might ALREADY inhabit our computer systems. Cleverly designed, they would be very difficult, if not theoretically impossible to detect.

Current programs do not permit matching the real-time operation speed and parallel complexity of conventional brains. But time scale of operation is subjective and irrelevant, except for the purposes of interface.

Of course, there is no reason one needs to restrict one’s manifestation to a particular form. One will basically (within ever-loosening physical constraints, though perhaps inescapable economic constraints) be able to assume any desired form.

Authors of current science fiction of the cyberpunk or ‘neuromantic’ school have approached this idea from many angles. Bruce Sterling’s novel SCHISMATRIX recognizes the fact that human evolution moves in clades, radiating omnidirectionally, not moving in a line along a single path. His ‘Mechs’ and ‘Shapers’ correspond closely with our notions of electronic and biogenetic paths to evolutionary diversity.

Given the ease of copying computer-stored information, it should be possible to exist simultaneously in many forms. Where the ‘I’s’ are in this situation is a matter for digital philosophers. Our belief is that consciousness would persist in each form, running independently, cloned at each branch point.

A few days ago, I stumbled across a woman on TikTok who had made a series of videos about a girl who coerced several people she’d e-dated into committing suicide. This girl had never shared physical space with any of her victims, but she’d built enough sustained intimacy and coercive force to convince them to commit suicide.

Watching these videos – and I watched all of them – I realized I had no word for what this girl was, yet it’s a pattern we see increasingly often.

She’s not a cyberstalker nor cyberbully. She’s not a serial killer, either, really. We have names for most kinds of murderers: serial killers, spree killers, family annihilators, school shooters, etc. But the internet has produced a figure who doesn’t fit cleanly into any of these, someone whose mechanism is not broadcast, not ideological recruitment, not physical assault arranged after an online meeting. The mechanism is more granular than that: the construction of a closed psychological relationship, conducted through platforms, in which one person systematically brings another to the point of self-destruction.

The term I want to propose is mediated murderer: a perpetrator who, without physical co-presence, uses networked communication as the primary instrument by which he establishes coercive control over a specific victim and drives that victim toward death.

This is a claim about mechanism: targeted, interactive, platform-dependent coercion culminating in death without physical co-presence.

Read more

American Conspiracy Culture is a different thing. It’s a tradition — a specific one, with its own lineage, its own media, its own epistemological commitments, its own communities. This is the lineage that runs from the John Birch Society through Mae Brussell through Bill Cooper through Art Bell and Alex Jones to QAnon and Amy Carlson’s “Love Has Won” cult, rounding through the New Age, through shortwave radio, through Ruby Ridge and pamphlets and zines and bulletin board systems and Usenet newsgroups and Facebook and TikTok. In this tradition, the government is, typically, the conspirator: the deep state, the spooks, the Fed, the mainstream media, the Elites. The people telling these stories have always understood themselves as marginalized, and the conspiracy culture offered an explanation.

For decades the whole operation ran on an amateur media world of its own. None of it came anywhere near the White House briefing room — at least, not officially.

The distinction matters because the story of the Trump era is usually told as though conspiracy thinking migrated from the fringe to the center. This is obviously true but that analysis is incomplete. What actually happened is that a culture — one with its own traditions, internal logic, and habits of mind — got pulled into the orbit of state power on the record.

Conspiracy thinking can be deployed by anyone. Conspiracy culture carries commitments that make it ungovernable once it’s inside the building.

The two were never totally separate, and the relationship between them was more complicated than politicians borrowing a few lines from the fringe. The state didn’t just suppress conspiracy movements: it infiltrated and steered them. COINTELPRO wasn’t only about crushing dissent — it involved planting agents inside organizations, manufacturing front groups, forging letters, running provocateurs, and actively shaping the direction of movements from the inside. The FBI placed informants inside militia groups who sometimes pushed those groups toward more extreme positions.

The line between “destroying a movement” and “becoming part of a movement in order to control its direction” was one the government crossed routinely and deliberately.

This history lives in the bones of American Conspiracy Culture. The community knows it. And it gave rise to a fear that runs deeper than the worry that the government might come after you: the fear that the government might already be you. That the person next to you, the broadcaster you trust, the organization you joined, might be controlled opposition. That the apparatus of suspicion itself could be captured and redirected by the very power it was built to oppose.

That fear is the background radiation of everything that follows.

Politicians, for their part, played at being outsiders long before Trump. “Speaking from below” has always been partly a pose. But the cross-pollination maintained plausible deniability, and the two remained distinct enough to function on their own terms: one governed, and the other yapped from the margins.

During the Trump era, that separation collapsed – as left and liberal media loves to tell us. “Deep state,” “rigged systems,” “shadowy pedophile networks” — language that once came crackling through a shortwave at 2 a.m., and later, on websites like 4chan, started showing up in rally speeches, press conferences, and executive orders. What was once fringe mobilized, commercialized, and most importantly of all, acquired state power.

This is usually discussed as a problem of hypocrisy. How can people who blame the elites govern as elites? But hypocrisy is ordinary. The problem with conspiracy-as-governing-language is different, because the culture itself – not conspiracy thinking, but the tradition of American conspiracy culture – carries an epistemological promise that ordinary politics doesn’t: official authority cannot be trusted to define reality. You must look for yourself. You must do your own research. That promise is the source of its energy and the thing that makes it ungovernable once it gets inside the building. Conspiracy thinking can be turned on and off. Conspiracy culture is a worldview, and a worldview doesn’t take direction.

Once conspiracy talk becomes the way a government communicates, it needs rules about where suspicion can point. Aimed at Soros, at the press, at the approved list of villains, suspicion is encouraged, it’s insider talk, it shows you’re on the right team. But when the same instinct turns inward it becomes a five-alarm fire. It’s an enforcement problem. And it’s a problem unique to a governing language that promised its speakers they would never be managed — spoken to an audience that has documented reasons to believe that management happens from the inside.

In the dialect of conspiracy, “don’t question our allies” is confirmation that the allies are hiding something. The act of discipline confirms the worldview it’s trying to contain. And the audience doesn’t arrive at that interpretation from nowhere. It arrives with a memory.

The enforcement works on two levels.

The first is old-fashioned political gatekeeping. A broadcaster who goes after the right enemies gets the Fox hit and the party invites. The one who starts aiming at people on the protected list gets fired, sued, dropped, maybe even banned from entering a foreign country. This kind of policing is political. It runs on phone calls and lawyers. The second is the market. The conspiracy broadcaster who ratchets up gets more views, more subscribers, and critically, more money. The incentive only runs one way: hotter. This pressure is indifferent to who’s being accused. It doesn’t care about loyalty. It just wants escalation.

Political discipline tries to draw lines and the market immediately erases them, because every line is also a dare to cross it. The governing project wants directional suspicion. The market wants spectacle.

Then the culture itself wants to keep pulling the thread.

* * *

To understand how unstable this gets, it helps to notice that conspiracy culture now operates in several distinct modes at the same time.

The oldest is conspiracy as method. Bill Cooper is the clearest example. Cooper broadcast The Hour of the Time from a house on a hilltop in Eagar, Arizona — a ranch-style place he shared with his wife Annie, their daughters, and a Rottweiler named Crusher. His shows were a fucking slog: they went on for hours, built around long, rickety chains of evidence, some of it wrong, some of it unhinged, all of it painfully slow. The whole thing had the pacing of an obsessive hobbyist’s attic, not a TikTok.

I want to be careful here, because “method” doesn’t mean “correct.” Cooper published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold a Pale Horse — swapping “Sion” for “Zion” and insisting the real conspirators weren’t Jews, which didn’t stop the damage and didn’t make the text any less poisonous. He pushed a theory that the driver killed JFK. The method could produce garbage, and it often did (okay, I fell for the driver one, at a time…). What distinguished it was the relationship between the person and the material. Cooper treated conspiracy as an epistemological commitment, a way of processing the world that would take you wherever it took you, including and maybe even especially into delusion. You followed the thread even when it led somewhere ugly or incoherent, and you didn’t check the thread against your network first.

Cooper also saw, earlier than most, that the conspiracy world could be and indeed already was being hollowed out from the inside. His fear came directly out of the tradition’s experience with infiltration. When he accused Alex Jones of being a knowing agent of the very disinformation apparatus he claimed to oppose — someone who had done “no research, sought no truth,” who was “just making it up straight out of his head” — he was voicing the oldest anxiety in the subculture. Suspicion itself could be captured, that the broadcaster rallying you against the system might be part of the system itself, that the whole operation might be controlled. He said the fear and adrenaline in Jones’s voice was “the sound of the future.” It sounded paranoid even by the standards of the conspiracy world. But he was circling something real: that the apparatus of suspicion could become performance, and performance could become product, and once it was product, the question of who was directing it would become unanswerable.

That second mode — conspiracy as affect or spectacle — is what replaced Cooper, and it runs at a completely different clock speed. Whether the evidence checks out matters less than whether the segment hits. Alex Jones built his career on this. His talent is not investigation; it’s performance. The red face, the desk-pounding, the shirt coming half-untucked: conspiracy as a physical event, as WWE. Cooper heard it coming before anyone else.

And then there’s a third mode that has spread over the past several years, though I’d be remiss to argue it didn’t previously exist. This is conspiracy as costume. A growing crowd of podcasters, influencers, pseudonymous posters, and self-identified “dissidents” drifting between wellness, style, and politics have picked up the vocabulary and postures of conspiracy without touching its epistemology. They’re fans, socialites, orbiters. They are wearing the clothes, and because the clothes come off easily, they can be disciplined. A provocation on Monday that they’ll walk back by Wednesday.

They don’t speak truth to power — they read their scripts.

These latter two groups are the people the movement actually wants. They keep the mood of suspicion going without anyone practicing it. They borrow the outsider’s vocabulary to stay interesting and defer to the insiders to stay paid. They are the buffer between the language and its consequences. Affect can be redirected wherever you want it to be. Costumes can be changed.

Method is the one that causes problems, because a person operating in method mode is doing exactly what the tradition told them to do.

* * *

Candace Owens is a reversion to the first mode inside a world wired for the second and third, and so nobody (in power or media, at least) really knows what to do with her.

Her shows have the plodding, obsessive, schizophrenic structure of an amateur true-crime podcast hosted by someone who has decided the official story is a lie. She is doing the Bill Cooper thing with better production values and a much larger audience of “mommy sleuths.” She treats conspiracy as something you do.

One might say the structure of Owens’s media empire complicates any read of her — she makes something like $10 million a year and has a production team.1 She is, undeniably, a product of the same attention economy that feeds the entertainer and the costume-wearer. It would be naïve to pretend she stands outside it. Martyrdom itself converts to growth.

I want to sit with this, because I’ve been wrong about it before. I’ve previously written about Owens’s serial public transformations (“conversions”) — liberal activist to MAGA conservative, Daily Wire loyalist to independent operator, live player to enemy — as a kind of alternate reality game (ARG). A media spectacle whose primary product was the conversion experience itself. In that reading, she was the ultimate performer, pastor at the megachurch of Candace.

I now no longer believe that’s the whole story. The serial conversions are native to the tradition. Cooper went through them. Brussell went through them. The whole epistemology of conspiracy theory demands them: if you are genuinely pulling the thread, you will eventually find that your old allies were compromised, that the ground you stood on was rotten. The conversion is the pattern. Each break confirms the worldview and gives you new material. Owens’s business model runs on this, yes. But that doesn’t mean the tradition isn’t also operating through her exactly as it always has.

The money and the belief may be fused in a way that won’t separate into “grifter” and “true believer.” She may be both and I truly believe she is.

* * *

The administration wants conspiracy it can steer. What it gets, periodically, is someone who treats the method as actual method and starts aiming it at the movement itself.

And the movement can’t say out loud what the real problem with Owens is. It can’t announce that conspiracy talk is a tool, useful when aimed out and dangerous when aimed in, because saying so would blow up the whole populist story. So, the policing becomes about ancillary issues — often real ones, to be clear. Owens does traffic in antisemitism. She does say ridiculous, hurtful, illegal things.

But she speaks in a dialect that others speak in and get away with. Conspiracy culture’s tradition has always had antisemitism running through it, and the movement has always tolerated it in some speakers and punished it in others depending on where the rest of their suspicion points. What determines the punishment is not the content of the offense but the direction – and timing – of the aim.

The “quiet” policing, the everything-but-the-issue, to a conspiracy audience,

Read more

My friend Sam Buntz makes the opposite case: his claim is that streaming platforms and TikTok have flattened cultural time so completely that Gen Z can’t form the generational chain of influence that has driven every major artistic movement for centuries.

Gen Z reacts to everything and nothing, lost in what Sam calls “the Archive” — a Borgesian labyrinth where all of recorded culture is equally available and equally weightless. I’m still torn and much more optimistic, but I loved his articulation of this argument. — Katherine

Last summer, I was at a bar with a few friends. Rapidly discovering more and more veritas in vino, I found myself giving an impromptu oration on the musical tastes of the generation junior to my own. I argued that Zoomers don’t really have their own music: they’re willing to listen to everything because Spotify, Apple Music, and the various songs that all pop up on Tik Tok are presented devoid of history and context. You like what you like and are free to choose from the phenomena bubbling up around you. Kate Bush, Billy Joel, Laurie Anderson, Paul McCartney—songs by these artists were always popping up on my Zoomer ex-girlfriend’s Tik Tok feed. She accepted all of it. None of it seemed corny or out-of-date. (This article from Activaire calls TikTok, “the most powerful music revival machine we have ever seen.)

One of my friends, a keen observer of the contemporary scene, well-versed in generational difference, said that my claim was somewhat false and that Zoomers do in fact have their own trailblazing avant garde music. She held up 100Gecs and nettspend as examples. I was like, “I bet you that only 0.2% of them know who those artists are.”

Serendipitously, a pair of Zoomer whippersnappers had just entered the bar. “I’m going to ask them,” I said. I got up and shuffled over, not overly conscious of the roughly fifteen-year age gap between us. (I’m a silverback millennial).

I asked what kind of music they listened to and if they were familiar with nettspend (a name new to me as well). I thought I was going to weird them out—a hulking man in his mid-30s, looming over them and posing this culturally sensitive question out of nowhere. Zoomers are notoriously skittish and need to be approached with caution in the wild, ideally with a handful of nutritional pellets and soothing rabbit noises.

But they were very polite and eager to share their listening habits. They had no idea who nettspend was; they listened to Nirvana and 90s music. As if illustrating the point visually, they seemed to be affecting a mid-90s skateboarder style in terms of their garb. My friends were impressed by my willingness to be weird and win debates through moments of Gonzo journalism. If you can manufacture anecdotal knowledge on the spot, it goes a long way.

But the data isn’t just anecdotal. According to a 2019 article from Billboard, Shannon Cook, a trends expert at Spotify, said that Gen Z’s listening habits on Spotify were unusually broad and tended to delve deeply into the past. Tracks by Miles Davis (“Blue in Green”), The Grateful Dead (“Friend of the Devil”), and Joan Jett (“I Love Rock n’ Roll”) were all among Gen Z’s most listened to tracks at the time.

Albeit, this article was from 2019—but the forces driving the trend, Tik Tok nostalgia and the buffet-like nature of streaming platforms, have only continued or accelerated their effects. The aforementioned 2025 article from Activaire argued that Spotify data showed Gen Z was connecting more with Gen X music on Spotify, beguiled by its apparent authenticity.

Zoomers, you see, live inside the Archive.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are imprisoned inside the Archive—a Borgesian labyrinth. Everything that has ever happened exists at their fingertips, assigned equal weight (or assigned whatever weight the fickle algorithm happens to be assigning on that particular day). This is also why they are a uniquely anxious generation, paralyzed by an inability to choose. They are confronted with too many options, unstuck in time.

We think of time as being continuous, as involving one event following naturally, causally after a preceding event. But living within the digital archive disintegrates our basic, linear perception of time. Since every era is equally available, and all events are potentially happening at the same time, the chain of causality and influence breaks down completely. We think of musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers as responding to those who came before them, generationally. For instance, Bob Dylan admired and initially imitated Woody Guthrie—but he also rebelled and created his own style, departing from Guthrie’s folksy populism and adding intensely personal and surrealistic touches. Changes in the arts always work this way. One generation responds to the previous generation. (Hemingway and Fitzgerald were reacting to Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, while Henry James was reacting to Hawthorne and Emerson, and so on and so forth.)

But Gen Z doesn’t experience cultural time this way. They’re reacting to everything that has ever happened. Which is impossible to actually do. On the one hand, it might make you more cosmopolitan (though this is hard to do without a guide to help develop your critical intelligence). But, on the other, it ruins your ability to assimilate anything and reduces you to a quivering lump of uncertainties. It also reduces your own ability to create because your response to life becomes so indeterminate. You can’t figure out what to respond to.

In Plato’s dialogue, “Ion,” he describes how inspiration works: the first poet was inspired directly by the muse, like an iron filling attached to a lodestone. The subsequent generations of poets are like iron fillings attached to that first filling. The force of inspiration is still present, but it is exerted indirectly and weakens with every generation. Thus, the influence of the original impetus wanes until, presumably, we culturally reset and reconnect to the magnetic source directly. Gen Z finds itself in a state in which the fillings have all been scattered on the ground, perhaps experiencing some ambient attraction from the lodestone, but unable to really connect with it.

Can this state of affairs create vital popular music? It appears not. The results seem to be avant garde Adderall brain slurry—100 Gecs and nettspend and hyperpop—for a tiny, cultured minority. The masses just keep listening to Taylor Swift on repeat. And for those of you who want to object by saying, “No, no, you have to hear my cousin’s noise rock project. It’s really going somewhere, doing something new,” I say, “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

Gen Z wants to rebel, but its rebellion is entirely a matter of online aesthetics. They reject “millennial cringe” and “stomp clap music,” propounding their own allegedly edgier aesthetic. Some have compared this to Gen X reacting against the Baby Boomers, to punk rock reacting against the hippies. But, given their agoraphobia and preference for marijuana over alcohol, Zoomers tend not to go out and socialize, which stops anything with the Dionysian energy of original punk rock (or 50s rock n’ roll or 60s garage rock or 90s grunge) from ever taking shape. They’re left to LARP and cosplay online, adopting the costumes of prior generations and prior subcultures without finding an authentic cultural relation of their own. They are, as Shelley described the moon, “ever changing like a joyless eye / That finds no object worth its constancy.”

Sometimes, I wonder if this will ultimately result in a state of cultural affairs in which fresh artistic creation stops entirely. Unable to have a satisfactory relationship to the past from which we can create our own art, we’ll end up settling for reviewing the archive of all prior creative events. This would resemble the world of Castalia in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in which a future society contents itself with playing a game that synthesizes cultural knowledge, but without creating any new art of its own. This would be, culturally speaking, the “end of history.” But to those who think that the end of history would be ultimately pleasant, our current experiences suggest that it would be more like being trapped in a senile brain. (The discontinuous quality of life online has a close relationship to the drifting and discontinuous nature of senile thoughts).

Cormac McCarthy once said something disconcerting and prophetic in an interview:

“I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.”

McCarthy makes a strong point. The internet functions to preserve everything, and it’s easy to get lost in that great, gray sea. The problem of selection, of where to put your attention, is increasingly grave and increasingly intractable. The mind cannot find a definite port-of-call in this endlessly heaving, endlessly shifting reality. Curating vibes isn’t enough.

Poets have sometimes fantasized about total cultural destruction—something like the burning of the Library of Alexandria—to escape the sense that everything has already been done, has already been written. I wouldn’t go that far, since everything I love is part of the past. Maybe some brave artist can find a route back to the Original Magnet—a route that would presumably lie through the great works of the past, since the past is where we all start to feel magnetism acting on us. In any case, something needs to give. The links of the chain need to re-connect.

In 1997, before social media, before the dreaded, Molochian Algorithm, before any of the infrastructure that now governs online life, a computer scientist named Mark Pesce wrote a short, dense essay called “Ritual and the Virtual.” His argument was this: the only adequate way of understanding what the Internet does to human consciousness is magic.

Pesce’s claim is that every time human communication undergoes a radical acceleration (the birth of language, the alphabet, printing press, the invention of the telegraph, the emergence of the web), consciousness is overwhelmed, and responds by creating mythology and imaginative interiority. The Internet is the most extreme instance of this. And because the Internet makes reality fluid, multiple, and responsive to speech and intention, it produces a condition where language stops describing the world and starts creating it.

In that condition, Pesce argues, the only possible ontology of cyberspace is magical: reality as that which is invoked, the world conformant to will. (Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law; reality is what you can get away with; so on and so forth.)

Pesce predicted all of this before Google, before platforms, before LLMs, before anyone was talking about meme magic or hyperstition or egregores or Nick Land became a household name (among e-intellectuals, I’m not delusional, I promise). He was writing about Mosaic-era browsers and already describing the world we live in now. So naturally, you can see why I had to share this with you all!

In the Beginning was the Word. John I:1

AND THE WORD WAS GOD

Singular among the sciences, cyberspace has ever been a tree planted firmly in the rich soils of human mythology. The three authors who defined this field, Vernor Vinge (True Names, 1978), William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984, Count Zero, 1986, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988), and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, 1992), relied exclusively upon a mythological foundation to describe the incomprehensible complexities of computer networks. This is hardly coincidental; in fact, it echoes a pattern as old as human consciousness.

The birth of language in the Paleolithic era - simultaneous with and incontestably linked to the birth of consciousness - created stresses upon the human organism which had never before been encountered. This speed-up, an exteriorization of thought which placed the internal self into the minds of the community of the newly conscious, led directly to an ingression of imagination; simulation begins as mythology.

In the Neotheric era, in which Faraday’s discoveries have deterritorialized language, the ends of simulation produce new languages - for are protocols not new tongues? - and a new speed-up stress. Simulation approaches a new ingression; collective imagination electrified becomes mythology. The precedent of the Paleolithic has left in its wake a morphogenetic field of consciousness; and so, as we sweep into a new aeon of communication, we find ourselves confronted with our most ancient imaginings, closing the loop of ontology in an arc of teleology which reaches its full circle in the span from the emergence of Logos to its electric transfiguration.

CONSCIOUSNESS PREFIGURED

Man before the word was not human. To think, to reflect, requires a conception of figure and ground, the linguistic apprehension of objects, of difference, of transitivity. Whatever we may make of the proto-hominids who passed before the emergence of linguistic consciousness, we must cast them into the pit which separates the unconscious ontology of the “lower” animals from conscious being of man. The use of our word “dumb” to describe those without speech remains a shorthand for the contempt in which we hold our prelapsarian condition.

The consciousness of the animal - insofar as we might come to understand that which may not be understood - can be characterized as unmediated, direct, and bound to the objects of perception; unlike the philosophical gulf which divides the human self from the other under observation, animal consciousness regards the seer and the seen as one. It has not come to the consciousness which separates this from that.

Information flow through the unconscious organism is episodic and driven by external stimuli. The primary attitude of the unconscious is indifference; things become worthy of attention when they change - presenting either a danger or an opportunity. The perception of events is entirely discontinuous, lacking the narrative which creates causality, the internal story-telling that reifies expectation into world-view. This had been the story of nature from the emergency of life; information flow across the boundaries of organism concerned itself only with the maintenance of the coherence of the organism.

CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFIGURED

No one can tell us how language began. As William Irwin Thomson writes in The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light:

“When we try to ask unanswerable questions like ‘how did language evolve?’, we come to the limits of knowing, but not to the limits of being. That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth. When we come to an edge we have to shift our mode of thought, say from rational analysis to intuitive mediation.”

The paleoanthropologist posits that brain size alone set the stage for the emergence of language, that as genus Homo appeared on the scene, his enhanced cranial capacity was reason enough for language to begin. But recently we have seen a mass of evidence which indicates that even highly hydrocephalic individuals, who possess less than ten percent of a normal human’s brain tissue, function completely normally in all linguistic tasks. Brain size alone can not be the determining factor.

The evolutionary biologist sees language as an effective mechanism for improving the selection fitness of hominids so endowed, dramatically increasing their chances of passing the characteristics of consciousness to their offspring. However accurate, this scientistic reasoning fails to address the genesis question. Thomson again:

“The problem is that we can see many ways in which language might take off, once it was started, but we cannot see how it could get started in the first place. All our theories about the origins of language are really nothing more than descriptions of how language would be of use once it was there. Darwinian notions that language would help fit the survivors for survival explain nothing, since we have evidence of species surviving in the same ecological niche without the help of language.”

The mythologist credits language as the gift of the divine; the Jewish Apocrypha credit the Creator as granting to Adam the gift of speech, beginning with a power to name the animals. In this investiture, Thomson shows how the linguistically adept human rises above the angelic:

“According to the midrashim, when God made Adam, He asked the angels to bow down and honor His latest creation. One of the highest archangels, Samael or Satan, refused by saying, ‘You created us from the splendor of your Glory. Shall we then adore a being formed from dust?’ God answered that although Adam had been made from dust he surpassed Samael in wisdom and understanding. Incensed at this slight, Samael insisted that God test him against Adam. God accepted Samael’s offer, and said that, since He had created beasts, birds, and creeping things, Samael should go down, set them all in a line, and name them as He would have them named...When the animals passed before Samael, however, he could say nothing. ‘God then planted understanding in Adam’s heart and spoke in such a manner that the first letter of each question pointed to the beast’s name.’ And so Adam was able to take God’s hint and name the creature.”

To name a thing is to know it; in this we recognize language as the foundation of consciousness. To know the name of a thing is to have dominion over it. Verbal consciousness unleashes a force which separates man from the animals; the internal division between self and other becomes reinforced in repeated communication with other humans. If we can not know how language came to be - or even say that it is entirely reasonable to attribute it to divine intervention - we can clearly intuit two first-order structural couplings consequent to it: the birth of the internal narrative of continuity, which is the song of consciousness; and the birth of culture in the shared expression of that narrative.

Researches into cognitive psychology show that most conscious “experience” is the performance of memory; sensation plays the role of trigger - as Proust pretended in The Remembrance of Things Past - but experience is nearly always the containment of perception within memory. The conscious “self” plays the part of architect of continuity, taking the phenomena of sensation and building a story around them - a story nearly always consonant with expectation, belief, and memory. This structural coupling of the self qua the self produces the internal narrative, the sense of being in time.

Verbal consciousness has two faces, and the internal narrative is met and reified in its shared expression; to talk is to talk to. The explosion of conscious internal life is met and countered in the lives of others; from this chaostrophe a fundamental and eternal confusion begins, the experience of the self becomes indistinguishable from the experience of other selves. All knowing is bound together by narrative, the carrier wave for a new kind of experience, epiphenomenal to perception.

In the reverberation following the birth of language, narrative and culture emerge. Perception extends to include the whole of culture as a single organism, coupled into community through the self-reinforcing exchanges of narrative, placing an explosive pressure on individual perception, rendering it subservient to a heretofore unknown collective intelligence. The flow of information through the organism is no longer constrained by the exigencies of the individual, unconscious animal; instead, the entire community functions as one, hears as one, and knows as one. Moreover, it knows that it knows, both individually and collectively.

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, proposed that all mediations extend an innate capability while simultaneously subjecting it to an amputation. To operate an automobile, the natural locomotive function of the legs is abandoned and replaced with a control (cybernetic) interface; language extends the domain of perception throughout the entire human community, but only because the immediacy of perception has been abandoned. The event-driven flow of unconscious perception, replaced with a growing volume of mediated representations - the shared memories and experiences of community - overwhelmed the innate ontology of the earliest humans, pushing inward, to create the expanses of imagination, and outward, into its shared expression as mythology.

These innovations are entirely conservative; under stress from the speed-up in communication brought about by the birth of language, the individual retreats into a new, internal world, both singular in imagination, and shared as mythology. Mythology allowed early humans to mediate the assault of shared perception; the richness of mythology - even in its earliest visible forms - represents the echo of the incredible stresses unleashed by the birth of human speech.

Forms tend to echo the forms that have preceded them; this theory of formative causation posits that once a form has come into being, it becomes much easier for similar forms to emerge. The transformation of speed-up stress into an imaginal and mythological space therefore created a precedent, a path which all successive speed-ups would tread.

CONSCIOUSNESS UNBOUND

When Samuel Morse translated Michael Faraday’s studies in electromagnetic phenomena into a mechanism for instantaneous communication, human linguistic consciousness began an inevitable and accelerating process of deterritorialization. The tongue, unbound, could speak into a multitude of ears; the ear, unbound, could listen to a multitude of tongues. Family, tribe and nation vanished before the ultimate speed-up - to quote Virilio, “Speed equals light.” A new language of pattern, beginning with the Morse Code, passing through the grooves of the phonograph, the successive images of the motion picture, the amplitude modulations of radio and the mosaic-composite of television, culminates in a singularity of bricolage, the meta-mediation of the World Wide Web.

As impossible as it is for us to imagine the ontology of the pre-electric world, it rapidly becomes impossible to imagine being in a pre-Web world - even if we have spent most of our lives there. Increasingly, our experience has become conditioned by and coupled to the world created within the Web; the more we refer to it, the more we tend to refer to it, in a loop of reinforcement which marks the Web as unique among electronic media: it expresses the ontology of the irresistibly seductive, and we all desire it, or have desires in relation to it.

Despite the nearness and singular nature of the event, we can not even begin to guess why the Web emerged, and why it caught hold in such an absolute way, instantaneously transforming every medium which had proceeded it (all of which are now viewed as subservient to it). The explosive transfiguration of the sphere of human communication did not begin with Berners-Lee’s first experiments in 1989; in fact, the Web grew negligibly for almost five years. But when Berners-Lee’s seed encountered the fertile imagination of Marc Andreesen - who had been heavily influenced by William Gibson - the Web acquired both an internal language (HTTP) and an external form (HTML). The unification of connectivity and interface, figuring as internal and external languages, led to the exponentially increasing structural coupling that occurred simultaneously and ubiquitously across a still-tiny Internet. It was as if the entire Internet, as a whole, simultaneously decided that the Web should be; then, it was as if the entire world, as a whole, simultaneously identified the Web as cyberspace.

The Web has created a new kind of interiority and a new exteriority; a foundation of shared factuality forms the nascent basis of a unified human knowledge. It is not so much that this base represents the final truth as that it represents the de facto truth, and - within a generation - it will be seen as the only truth. Conversely, this new exteriority presents an inherent multiplicity, both of factuality and personality; we are no longer of one voice, but all voices, and these voices need not agree, but can remain dissonant, subjective, and fragmentary. The unification of artificial intelligences Wintermute and Neuromancer breaks apart into the anarchic loa of Voudon; the singular voice of Enki is shattered by the Nam-Shub: these Neotheric myths reverse Babel, and find their completion in the chaotic. It is not that nothing is true, but rather, that everything is permissible.

Possibility unbounded by expectation reverses the current of narrative; to be anyone, anywhere, at any time requires that the self become self-less, possessing at one moment the dispassionate attitude of a Buddha, and, in the next, all the attachments of a being hypnotized by the play of Maya. This implies that the next state of genus Homo is as much beyond our own understanding as we are beyond the preconscious strivings of the proto-humans, but if Turkle’s insights about the ontological similarities between Multiple Personality Disorders and on-line role-playing prove to be more than coincidence, then we can already see the knife-edge which separates us from our post-historical descendants.

The question, “What hath God wrought?”, can only be answered in a language that we do not yet know how to speak. No one knows how long it took language to spread across the Earth; whether it happened in a million years, or a thousand, or inside an afternoon. Neither do we know how to measure the interval between the pre- and post-historical hominids. At the end of this interregnum, we watch as the deep transformations of seductive couplings sweep across the face of consciousness, but, as we are both seduced and seducer, it is difficult to apprehend the scope of its effect. But within a few years we will be utterly unrecognizable to ourselves in this present moment.

RITUAL AND THE VIRTUAL

The deterritorialization of the self is the essential feature that marks human entry into cyberspace. In the universe of infinite connection and possibility the only possible ontology is magical; reality as that which is invoked, the world conformant to will. The techniques of magical will, quintessentially linguistic, require a conscious mastery of the relationship between word and world. At the end of history comes the Word.

Ritual is the communication in a mythic tongue, the expression of a universe of experience, compressed into an economy of symbols overloaded into archetype. Ritual is the performance of myth that binds (religare) the individual and the specific to the universal and archetypal. Ritual is the bridge between the ego and the post-historical self.

The speed-up stresses of cyberspace, unleashed on the island self, force being to seek shelter in the enduring forms of myth; neither one nor another, but this and that, choosing milieu over destination, multiplicity over deterritoriality, and subjectivity over factuality.

The gate between the historical self and post-historical post-humanity, the passage between a particular island of factuality and the absolute subjective, is ritual. Now we enter our closets and bend ourselves to the dictates of fashion and gender, language and culture. Soon, we cast magic circles in sacred groves, speak the Word, and bend the World to our ends. The ego can not survive this burst of power, any more than the animal survived the flash of consciousness; what follows us we can now hear, but we can not speak of it.

Mark Pesce
London & Caer Leon, Wales
July 1997

STRAY LINKS & THOUGHTS

• I watched two strange animations on Friday night and together, they throttled me into an existential crisis. Sometimes, I become too aware that I’m human, like when you become too aware of your own tongue or breathing or something. They were Malice@Doll and Scream Theater.

• I’ve begun using Claude to create “graduate-level seminars” on different topics. It’s not perfect, but it’s a surprisingly (or not surprisingly) good way to fall down a rabbit hole. So far, I’ve done The Cyber-Occult and Satanism. It generates full lectures, reading lists, supplemental material — a lot better than typing in “X TOPIC + CLASS” on Google or YouTube.

• Friend of the ‘Stack just published a book called Planetary Theurgy. It’s the best publicly available occult practice book I’ve read in a while. Ordinarily, this is the type of instruction you can only get from a coven or mentor. It reminded me quite a bit of my time in a Wiccan coven (even though Georgina is a Thelemite, I recommend it to my Wiccan readers — I think you’ll get a lot out of it).

• Happy Sunday! I’m doing a lot better health-wise, though slowly, begrudgingly accepting I’m on “modified bed rest” until these babies come. The call-in show will be back on Thursday at our usual time.

• Oh, and don’t forget to use this coupon so I can feel good about myself:

Get 65% off for 1 year

My birthday is coming up on the 27th… Please use this “Birthday Month Special” coupon to help me move up the leaderboard:

Get 65% off for 1 year

YOU’RE A STAR, YOU’RE A STAR, YOU’RE A GREAT BIG SHINING STAR

I promised myself that I wouldn’t do this but it’s killing me.

Predicting trends is one of my talents, as up my own ass as that sounds. My hit rate is high. There’s no formula, really — it’s just one of those things where you know it when you see it and I tend to know it. But I’m like a broke psychic, I can’t seem to get any of that luck to rub off on myself.

Anyway, naturally, I’ve been kicking myself every single day for fumbling an interview with Clavicular — well before he blew up. He was willing to talk! We took it to email! And then I was the flake, he got huge, and now, I, too, am just a random jester trying to clout vampire him. Trust your gut, folks, or you may live to regret it.

More on him below. But first:

WAS JEFFREY EPSTEIN SATANIC?

This past week, I’ve been doing a deep dive into Satanism in all its manifestations.

When people call the “elites” Satanic — Epstein being the most salient example here — what they actually mean is something closer to Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, or some combination of all three. Not Satanism, which is a phenomenon recent of the 20th century1, but some version of hidden esoteric knowledge that justifies their power and their appetite for more of it.

First of all, none of those traditions are “Satanic,” and none of them involve eating or raping children or whatever else people have convinced themselves is happening. (They’re not Frankists, either, by the way, don’t try me, conspiratards!) Western esotericism has a long, well-documented history, and the conspiracy version bears no resemblance to it. That said, I don’t think elites are secretly practicing occultism, either.

This might seem like a pedantic point given that disclaimer, but actual Satanism — the real thing, not the conspiracy theory — skews far more downmarket than people assume.

The most dangerous Satanic-adjacent network operating today won’t be found in Silicon Valley, Manhattan, or on a private island. It’s on Discord and Roblox. You can read more about it on my friend Bx’s Substack, here.

None of this is to let Epstein and co. off the hook. I’m not much of an Epstein apologist and I definitely believe the ultra-wealthy have the potential to be up to some devious things, not limited to coordinated sexual assault and, uh, “Dubai chocolate.”

I just don’t think it has anything to do with the occult or Satan. At least, not explicitly.

THE SCRAMBLE TO REDEFINE WOKENESS

A cluster of recent essays have each tried to name the next phase of woke politics, and each one has arrived at a different answer. Valerie Stivers gave us “Woke 2.0.” Luke Winkie published an explainer on “Dark Woke.” Kat Rosenfield diagnosed “Disneyfied” protest culture. They don’t agree on what the new thing is, only that the rebrand has arrived.

If there’s a story here, and my instinct is there isn’t, it’s the definitional scramble itself. The interesting question isn’t what woke has become (or, indeed, if it’s become anything at all).

It’s why so many people need it to have become something new, and why naming the new thing has become a cottage industry in its own right. There’s a reason these pieces keep getting written: the writer who successfully names the moment gets to be the person who saw it first (and might even land a book deal out of it). That incentive is doing as much work as any of the analysis.

Let’s start with Stivers, whose UnHerd piece makes the strongest case. She argues that the anti-ICE protests represent a purified evolution of the #Resistance, one that has shed the yard signs, the gender theory, the anti-racism consciousness raising. What remains is “militant action” and “individual, atomized, and newly dangerous” rage2: protesters blocking ICE, doxxing agents, sending death threats. Her sharpest observation is about the movement’s martyrs.

The faces of the movement are Renee Good and Alex Pretti rather than any of the 32 people who reportedly died in ICE custody in 2025, which she reads as confirmation that woke-ism was always a vehicle for the professional class to feel good about itself.

The central claim, though, that this is “more vicious” than 2020, doesn’t survive contact with anyone who was present at the 2020 protests, which famously included arson and looting. I myself witnessed people destroy a community theater, and to this day, I wonder what the hell that was about.

Protests aside, though, among the biggest complaints people had with “Woke 1.0” — even before the 2020 crescendo — was just how personal and searing it was. There was a, I think justified, sense that we were living in a political correctness panopticon that offered no pathway for redemption, hence the eventual advice to “never explain and never apologize to the cancellation mob.” It was precisely this viciousness that created the media ecosystem both Stivers and I have made nice careers writing in.

So if this “new” version is defined by personal viciousness, what exactly changed?

Then there’s Winkie’s “Dark Woke” piece, which describes a social covenant allowing liberals to be cruel to conservatives. Being mean to your political opponents is not new, though to be fair to Winkie, I know what he means. He’s not just talking about being mean. It’s a special kind of Millennial-flavored cruelty, the balls to finally just call someone a big fat retard, no throat-clearing required.

Still, calling it “Dark Woke” doesn’t make it meaningfully different from the Dirtbag Left of a decade ago. At least, not to my mind.

Rosenfield’s Free Press essay, “Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie,” argues that anti-ICE demonstrators have wandered into real danger because they understand political conflict as spectacle, a movie they can star in without consequences. The key evidence is Rebecca Good’s scream after her wife was shot: “Why did you have real bullets?” Rosenfield reads this as proof of delusion, that the Goods thought they were in a movie. But as Rayne Fisher-Quann put it in her critique of this piece (which, I should say here, I thought was too scathing — I don’t share her dislike of Rosenfield, who I read, respect and count among my friends), anyone familiar with the well-documented use of rubber bullets and other less-lethal alternatives in crowd control, a practice with an extensively reported history in Minneapolis specifically, would recognize this as a desperate question about why live rounds were used instead.

I think the Stivers and Rosenfield pieces share a methodology problem. They’re building theories from social media clips. It reads as though Stivers constructs her case almost entirely from the same screen-mediated material she accuses the protesters of being consumed by. Rosenfield mistakes a woman’s anguish for naïveté because she is, presumably, unfamiliar with the realities of protest culture.

But where I diverge from a critic like Fisher-Quann is that I don’t think these are personal failings of either writer. That’s just the nature of reporting these days — and that’s not handwaving, either. We have to consider that both women are making a living from their writing.

Writers are working on tight turnaround times, often hours and not days, and don't have the option of in-depth reporting for their 800-to-1,200-word op-eds. Especially freelancers.

It's not even the publications’ fault, really (though, for obvious reasons, I’m certainly more amenable to that argument than the alternative). It's the nature of an industry we all know is shrinking. There’s neither the time — the public's attention span is short — nor the money to send somebody like Rosenfield out to Minneapolis if she's not explicitly doing investigative reporting, a genre that is rare even at the best-funded publications. To turn the critical eye to Fisher-Quann for a moment, whose piece I enjoyed and thought made several important points: her critique would land harder if it accounted for the fact that most writers in this space simply don't have the luxury of time or resources for the kind of reporting she's implicitly demanding. In a just world, we would absolutely have it. We don't live in a just world, though, and you can’t hold individual writers responsible for the economics of the industry3.

At any rate, I do think the scramble to name is worth interrogating. None of this means nothing is changing – I’ve written about similar changes myself. But a lot of it is branding work, and it’s not always usefully deployed.

There is no Woke 2.0 – yet. There are, however, people who need there to be one.

GRINDR → TINDER

Looksmaxxing feels like rebranded gay culture, and the community itself will tell you as much. A Looksmax.org thread titled “looksmaxing is gay” argued the entire movement descended from gay culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and that even Tinder was a spinoff of gay dating apps (which is obviously true, I remember when my gay friends had Grindr and all I had OkCupid). Both communities landed on the same toolkit independently: meth, SARMs, grey-market peptides, anabolic steroids.

But I don’t think straight men are borrowing from gay men. I think gay culture got there first because it was already operating on different rules from the mostly reproductively-oriented heterosexual world. Centuries underground, no default script for family formation, no reproductive telos baked into the relationship structure, no real institutional scaffolding until very recently. Gay men — particularly gay men in the United States — were the first men who had to operate as pure individuals on the sexual market, evaluated by other men, optimizing for other men’s standards. The body dysmorphia, the chemical escalation, the frictionless ranking systems: these are what happen when male sexuality encounters itself with no mediating structure.

What contemporary life — the Sexual Revolution4, capitalism, the Internet — has done is extend those conditions not only to straight men, but to everyone. The PSL forums and rating threads put them in the same position: evaluated by other men, according to male standards. In gay hookup culture, the optimization cycle has a clear sexual outlet. In straight looksmaxxing, what you get is nominally heterosexual men reproducing the non-reproductive logic of a culture that was never oriented toward reproduction in the first place, not because they copied it, but because they arrived at the same conditions under different circumstances.

As I wrote last year, looksmaxxing is what our society already encourages: endless self-optimization toward nothing, a life of becoming. The Human Potential Movement promised that everyone could be more. What we live with now is the hangover, the conviction that we must be. What looksmaxxing offers is potential itself as a terminal condition, becoming that never arrives, a body always in progress and never in use. In gay culture, the circuit party eventually ends. In straight looksmaxxing, you just die, I guess?

THE LOOKSMAXXERS WHO FAIL

The most alarming frontier of looksmaxxing is the people who fail — that’s actually how I first encountered Clavicular, an account that tracked such cases.

DIY cosmetic modification (including HRT and biohacking) has been widespread, so it’s possible that the whole looksmaxxing thing is unremarkable in that way. But still, I think it’s well-worth remembering that for every person who can afford to get work done professionally, there are dozens more doing it at home. The at-home fillers community skews toward women motivated by cost. The black-market butt injection scene, which has killed people for decades, draws heavily from Black and Latina women priced out of legitimate surgery. Practitioners in these cases have injected patients with cement, tire sealant, bathroom caulk, hardware-store silicone. The through line is always the same: people who can’t afford the professional version doing it themselves.

On looksmaxxing forums, the horror is more methodical, though. It’s not that injecting tire sealant into your ass isn’t grotesque, but the attention to detail from looksmaxxers somehow increases the body horror quotient. Take this detailed guide for DIY canthoplasty, self-performed eye surgery using a snapped razor blade:

Or the fixation on the jaw:

If I wasn’t such a coward, I gotta be real, this would be me. I want DJS, too, goddammit!

Get 65% off for 1 year

INDIAN LOOKSMAXXERS

I stumbled across this interesting piece about Indian looksmaxxing in The Juggernaut. Unfortunately, it’s paywalled, so I haven’t had the opportunity to read it yet. But it’s not a surprise that Indian men are invested in this community, especially after seeing how Indian-American men talk about themselves.

When I was writing about transracialism last year, I kept seeing posts by South Asian men in private Facebook groups and on Reddit who were trying to “racemaxx.”

Racemaxxing has two conflicting definitions. One means leaning into the race you were born into as an attractiveness strategy, basically playing to type. In practice, this advice is most often given to Black men: lean into what’s already culturally coded as attractive, work with the hand you were dealt, lean into the stereotypes.

The other definition reverses that completely, and is usually the prescription for South Asian men: skin bleaching, colored contacts, legal name changes to hide background, lying about ethnicity on dating profiles, even getting iris implant surgery to change eye color, a procedure that often ends in blindness. The first version says optimize what you are. The second says what you are is the deficit. The desire to be more attractive shades into the desire to be a different person, which shades into the desire to belong to a different race.

I’m curious how this dynamic plays out in India — my guess is, unfortunately, with no fewer skin-lightening products.

Pirate Wires

The People Who Think They Were Born Into the Wrong Race

Every video Donna Briggs posts to her half a million followers on TikTok and Instagram opens the same way: “Hello everyone, it’s Donna Briggs!” she chirps in a saccharine singsong. Her eyes squint, lids burdened by her fake eyelashes. There's something uncanny about her combination of platinum blonde hair, porcelain skin, and painted-on eyebrows. Plus, there's her voice. Donna Briggs — the bubbly, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Karen in Lilly Pulitzer — sounds like a black woman, which is just to say unmistakable rhythm and drawl that’s been stereotyped as black…

Read more

9 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Katherine Dee

Get more from Katherine Dee in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

CRYPTIDS

A couple of weeks ago, during the Arctic Blast that still has a few states trapped under ice (greetings from Illinois), a guy named Christopher Archer posted an altered Google Earth screenshot to Facebook. The image showed a snake-like shape in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Virginia:

“The Leviathan is waking up,” the caption read. “This is why they are creating a FAKE snow storm and manipulating the weather so they can freeze it because the military bases in the area.”

The post got enough traction to land on Know Your Meme, the internet’s best-kept meme encyclopedia. But it wasn’t really a meme, at least not in the way we usually mean. A lot of people earnestly believed that the biblical Leviathan was waking up from beneath the Commonwealth of Virginia. Within days, people were cross-referencing the Bible, pulling up maps of naval installations, treating weather radar imagery like scripture:

@kennedyjack18How yall feel about this ⁉️ #Fyp #leviathan #leviathanawakens #winterstorm2026 #christiantiktok

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@befreewithmaryb4.0Replying to @jtadams800 #greenscreen Part 2- if the Leviathan that God is waking up to destroy, the wicked is in the Drake passage, then where is the 2nd dragon Behemouth? The Andes Mountians! #God #dragon #world #event

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I’ve been passively consuming cryptid-related material for most of my life. It was always a little silly, even when it scared you, and everyone knew it was silly, and that was part of why it worked. The thrill was in the “maybe.”

The sound of the house settling after you finally turned off Unsolved Mysteries. Art Bell’s voice fading out as you drifted off, half-listening to a caller describing triangular lights over the desert, or maybe some kind of dog-human hybrid out in Appalachia. The inevitable shadow passing by your bedroom window that was either a tree branch or the Jersey Devil. You didn’t have to whole-heartedly believe in Mothman to enjoy Mothman. The fun was that any of it could feel plausible for a second, even against a backdrop you knew to be capital-R Rational.

But something’s changed, and it’s hard to say exactly when it changed.

It’s not just that more people seem to believe in cryptids, though that does appear to be true. (Bigfoot belief, for example, continues to rise.)

@thehamiltoninquisitionBaby Dragon Caught on Camera #dragons #dragon2024 #yearofthedragon #dragonsighting

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

TikTok is flooded with dragon sighting videos, for example—dragons in the clouds, AI-generated dragons, dragons lurking on the blurry edges of photographs—and the people posting them aren’t joking or grifting. Same goes for the mermaid videos that circulate every few months. Scroll through the comments and you’ll find thousands of people who do believe it. Plus, tens of millions of Americans are young earth creationists, which, yes, includes a belief in what we’d ordinarily consider “cryptids.” But the texture of belief, the way the material circulates, the feel of it, has also changed.

@fittestflatearther#greenscreen #greenscreenvideo #satire #entertainment #dragon #dragons #clouds #cloud #sky #firmament @Bryan Davenport @girlseesdragons

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

It kind of reminds me of what’s happened with conspiracy theories over the past decade or so. They used to live on the fringes, a little embarrassing, something you didn’t bring up at dinner unless you were a particular type of person always hunting for other particular types of people. Or maybe there was just one conspiracy theory you believed in, always with the self-awareness that it was, well, a conspiracy theory.

Cryptid belief has seemed to have followed the same trajectory—moving from the margins, and at its most mainstream, a form of entertainment, to the center of how ordinary people talk about the world.

In the past half-decade, a lot of people have pointed out that QAnon functions like a collaborative roleplaying game, and more recently, that pundits like Candace Owens are essentially running Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) with their increasingly elaborate conspiracy arcs. I believe that’s true, but I think it’s just one part of the story. We didn’t just spontaneously decide to start playing a game because of the structure of our social media feeds.

A big part of it is that we’re drowning in information. Information arrives constantly without structure, and these stories—whether they involve sea monsters or astrology or tarot or elaborate theories about celebrities being secretly transgender or time travelers or, somehow, both—offer a way to make the feed cohere into a worldview.

Which brings me to artificial intelligence.

AI adds another layer to all this. Not only are people primed to look for and inhabit a story—they’re also willing to accept evidence on different terms now.

The evidence for monsters was always slipshod. Bigfoot hunters could produce images, but they were blurry and ambiguous and required a generous eye. You had to want to believe. It created space for your imagination to do the work. The famous Patterson-Gimlin footage works precisely because you can’t quite make out what you’re seeing.

For a while, digital photography threatened to kill this type of proof.

If Bigfoot were real, someone would have captured him in 4K by now, right? The absence of clear evidence started to feel dispositive.

But generative AI has a different quality.

@gerry17810“Imagina que el océano desaparece de pronto… y deja al descubierto una herida gigantesca en la corteza terrestre. Así se vería la Fosa de las Marianas sin agua: un abismo inmenso, en forma de media luna, extendiéndose por más de dos mil quinientos kilómetros.” #documentary #vlog #nature #gopro #mexico

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

You might have seen the images of “the Mariana Trench with the water removed” that have been circulating on TikTok. They’re obviously AI-generated, everyone knows they’re AI-generated, that part is completely undisputed—and yet people share them as though AI has access to a view that was previously hidden. There’s an oracular quality to it. The machine knows things and can show it to you. It’s not literally true, but it’s a type of true, a truth that a lot of people are increasingly willing to accept.

@kaylahlorraineReplying to @Toineyy sweet dreams 😈 #fyp #foryou #ocean #scary #thalassophobia

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I suspect the same thing is happening with cryptids. Recently, a clip claiming to show a “White Dragon captured at a secret Government Facility in China” circulated widely across social media. A post mocking the video’s obvious AI origins accumulated millions of views.

But I don’t think the people sharing the original were all fooled, exactly. Of course, some were—maybe even most. We’ve seen how deep that rabbit hole goes on Facebook.

But there’s another dimension to it. Like the Mariana Trench video, many of these AI cryptid videos feel like they’re visualizing something that could exist — like AI had the power to access some latent possibility.

Maybe it’s that AI has introduced a new (or just not often articulated) epistemological category. Not “real” and not “fake,” but something like “plausible render.”

It’s not so much a fabrication as it is as reveal. It shows you what the world could contain—like a medieval illustration of a unicorn. And if unicorns are possible, like the Mariana Trench without water is possible, then maybe the world is stranger than the boring materialist account suggests. The image isn’t evidence that the thing exists. It’s evidence that the thing could exist. And for a lot of people, that might turn out to be enough.

It’s not evidence in the classical sense. The paranormalists in earlier eras had to work with what the world gave them: blurs, shadows, things half-seen. AI lets you generate the creature directly, in full detail, and somehow that makes it more real, not less. The machine might just be a window onto a world that might be, that is and thus far has been hidden.

I don’t think this is entirely new. People have always found ways to believe what they want to believe. But AI has given that impulse a new instrument, and the instrument is reshaping the belief.

Maybe the Leviathan is waking up off the coast of Virginia. The AI could show you, if you asked.

AMERICAN DREAMLAND

This week’s call-in show theme is VAMPIRES. Follow us on Kick, Rumble, Twitch, X, and of course here. As always, you’re free to interpret the theme however you like — a literal vampire, a digital vampire, a vampiric friend. Whatever calls to you.

We stream at 7:30 CT/8:30 ET every Thursday. All you need is a phone — both to listen and call in!

P.S. If you know how to help me advertise, please reach out!

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY MONTH

It’s my birthday month, so you know what that means: coupon time. Please enjoy this and help this small business grow.

Birthday special!!!

Get more from Katherine Dee in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

It’s been awhile since I’ve sent a proper “thought digest.” If you’re new here, a thought digest is exactly what it sounds like: a loosely curated set of observations, more like a list of shower thoughts than a fully fleshed-out essay.

GORE PORN … I MEAN “SPLATTERPUNK”

@groovy_mija97This book makes me hold my chest really tight 😩❣️ Check trigger warnings ! I can’t wait to read more from this author 😊 #booktok #splatterpunk #disturbingbooks #horrorbooks #lesleyacamphouse

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

People talk a lot of shit about the spread of TikTok erotica, but I think a parallel genre has escaped similar scrutiny: what’s often called “extreme horror” or “gore,” sometimes grouped under the older label “splatterpunk.” After seeing a torrent of TikToks about “the most disturbing books ever,” I decided to read some of the titles most frequently recommended.

These books circulate primarily through “BookTok,” the corner of TikTok where users recommend novels to one another. In this ecosystem, a book’s success is often measured less by its themes or craft than by the intensity of the reader’s reaction. The promise is not enjoyment, exactly, but damage: that a book will “traumatize,” “ruin,” or permanently alter the person who reads it. The more extreme the reaction video, the more the algorithm rewards it. This creates a strong incentive to seek out and promote material that is maximally upsetting, regardless of whether it is coherent, meaningful, or even readable.

The two biggest offenders were Playground (2022) and Distorted Metamorphosis (2025). For a long time, I had been mentally comparing books like these to Lucifer Valentine films without having actually read them. (Valentine is a shock-horror filmmaker best known for titles like Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, work that exists almost entirely to provoke revulsion.)

The goal is not narrative, atmosphere, or even fear so much as endurance. But after reading these novels, that comparison no longer feels quite right. That’s who these authors want to be – sure – that’s not who they are.

Whereas Lucifer Valentine appears to be — and I don’t say this casually — a genuinely disturbed individual, as I suspect many creators in that cinematic niche are, there is something notably bloodless about these books. They feel less like expressions of obsession or compulsion and more like products assembled to satisfy an algorithm.

I’m not going to pretend the imagery itself isn’t disturbing. It is. But the books have a strange quality: they don’t dramatize violence so much as point at it. Nothing really happens. They function less as novels than as catalogs. They’re strangely indexical. In other words, they’re lists of horrible things, not stories about horrible things.

It reminds me of a kind of niche phenomenon that I’m pretty sure only I’m annoyed by. There are all these podcast descriptions that promise deep engagement with a long list of fascinating and obscure subjects but when you actually watch or listen to them, the episode itself is a meandering interview in which those topics are mentioned briefly and then dropped. Yes, technically, certain acts are depicted on the page of a TikTok-famous splatterpunk novel. But that doesn’t mean the book is about them. Typically, it isn’t about anything!

I can’t even describe this as transgression for its own sake. They lack even the commitment of edgelordism, which at least implies a point of view. What remains is a sequence of images, assembled without even a lick of interiority. I mean, to what end? Are they fun to write? They’re not in any way fun to read. These books aren’t scary in the way successful horror — or more specifically, gore — should be. Ditto to romantasy, frankly: I doubt they’re actually erotic if your imagination isn’t doing a lot of work.

More broadly, we talk a great deal about the escalation of pornography, but far less about the escalation of violence. I increasingly suspect the latter poses the deeper cultural problem. Gun to my head, I’d rather live in a world oversaturated with porn than gore.

You see it everywhere. Several years ago, I noticed that I was encountering more and more news stories about horrific crimes committed against infants, specifically. I remember wondering whether this kind of violence was actually increasing, or whether we were simply consuming it differently. I can remember when a case like that of Peter Scully — an Australian man convicted of operating a pay-per-view child abuse ring, widely considered one of the most extreme criminals in modern history — was treated not only as exceptional but genuinely disturbing. The story always came wrapped in content warnings and a profound sense of evil. Now, you can scroll past dozens of headlines in a single day that may not reach that same extremity, but aren’t exactly benign either.

THE RETURN OF STORYTELLING AND THE LEVIATHAN

In the category of “we’re returning to a more medieval state of mind” (or “retrieving the medieval,” if you’re a McLuhanite) news — a framing I’m somewhat skeptical of, if only because its sudden ubiquity suggests the shift itself likely occurred years, if not decades, ago — I’ve noticed an uptick in two related phenomena. One I’ve written about before; the other I haven’t.

The first is a return of storytelling.

I don’t mean “storytelling” in the sense that #TechTwitter uses it. I’m not talking about brand narratives or strategic authenticity. I mean this literally. People are telling each other stories again, in the old-fashioned sense.

It began with YouTube “storytimes,” videos where people recount dramatic personal experiences, often while performing some parallel activity like doing their makeup. It continued with channels dedicated to reading Reddit posts from subreddits like /r/LetsNotMeet or Am I the Asshole? out loud. But even more recently, I’ve noticed a surge of people telling campfire-style ghost stories across platforms. These are real stories: that is, with beginnings, middles, and ends.

What makes this trend especially striking to me is that it’s coinciding with a visible decline in narrative craft in media forms that once excelled at it, like film and television. Amateurs are becoming more adept at narrative structure; professionals are becoming less so. Movies are short-form video stitched together and native short-form videos are campfires.

The second trend is the return of the cryptid, or maybe more accurately, of physically-manifesting paranormal entities.

Cryptids — creatures like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster — never fully disappeared. But they now appear to have entered the mainstream, just like conspiracy theories did several years ago.

It’s not really rare or niche to see people speaking quite seriously about mimics, skinwalkers, wendigos, or, more recently, “the Leviathan,” a massive sea creature that became the subject of renewed online interest in the wake of the Great Arctic Blast.

Another interesting data point here: this resurgence also is happening alongside with a growing fatigue around UAPs/UFOs. It took me a while to realize this, but I don’t think this necessarily signals disbelief. I think UFOs have just been absorbed into the background assumptions of reality. What reads as apathy is often just a shrug: of course aliens are real. We been knew!

CEO OF THE POST-RIGHT

I said this in the last newsletter, but I’m gonna say it again. We’re in the era of the “post-right” and the “right-coded.” These are two online political subcultures that are distinct from, and increasingly displacing, the Dissident Right.

Persuasion

How the Internet Made the Far-Right

When Politico published racist and antisemitic messages from a Young Republican group chat in October, the surprise was as much who was talking as what they said. These weren’t anons who’d been unmasked as political operatives. They we…

Read more

5 months ago · 148 likes · 4 comments · Katherine Dee

Some context is useful here, again, for the folks who aren’t quite as in the weeds as I am. In the mid-2010s, we saw the mainstreaming of the alt-right — a loose coalition of white nationalists, nihilistic trolls, and anti-establishment provocateurs. As the label became politically toxic, two things happened: members rebranded as the Dissident Right and there was a “changing of the guard” (new popular figures emerged). Unlike the alt-right, it was a more essay-driven, “intellectual” movement that retained many of the racial politics while shedding overt irony. That cohort still exists. They skew older, remain loyal to Donald Trump and MAGA, and continue to post.

But they are aging out of the media ecosystem.

Enter: the “post-right.” These are figures who came up through far-right online spaces but have since migrated toward progressive or heterodox positions. They remain in dialogue with the fringes of the online right even as they reject many of its beliefs (or at least, its presentation and people). I would put Richard Hanania, Richard Spencer, Radfem Hitler, Academic Agent, Pedro Gonzalez, and on occasion, Nick Fuentes in this category.1 The Dissident Right will refer to them as “leftists” or “progressives,” but they aren’t really — and I think it would take a lot of social work/networking for someone like, say, Nate Silver, to count them among their ranks. (That being said, many of them have been successful at the re-brand.) Their progressive beliefs originate primarily in dialogue with the right; kind of like right-wingers who are only right-wing if in dialogue with the left.

The second faction is what I’d describe as the “right-coded.” These are people who are not especially interested in politics but are perceived as non-left by virtue of their aesthetics, audience, or disdain for progressive cultural institutions. They are read as conservative without necessarily identifying as such. Clavicular is a paradigmatic example. It may also help partially explain the “white nationalist of color” phenomenon.

Both groups are competing with, and increasingly overtaking, the old-guard Dissident Right, a movement that favored long posts, blogs, and textual argument over video. The “Anons” that now reign supreme at outlets like The Blaze and are followed by the Vice President.

They are not native to the current media environment, and they are —- at least insofar as the media is concerned, because this is, ultimately a post about, about media — going out of fashion.

Again, I know I keep saying this but it really is something to bookmark!

FRICTION-MAXXING?

Are we “friction-maxxing,” or are people simply emerging from a Covid slump? (The latter.)

“Friction-maxxing” is a recently fashionable term for deliberately reintroducing inconvenience into one’s life. This might mean deleting apps, buying a dumbphone/Brick, or making socializing more effortful — e.g. a dinner party — in the hope that it will feel more meaningful. The premise is that effort restores value.

I hate to belabor the point — or belabor another point, since this whole newsletter has been me rehashing myself LOL — but I think people have genuinely forgotten how much we socialized before lockdowns. I’ve always been relatively antisocial — like, the older I get the more I realize I low key hate seeing people who aren’t my family — and YET! Until March 2020 I was going to bars, clubs, shows, dance classes, art openings, strange goth events, pagan pride festivals, pretty much every day. I ate at restaurants. I went to the movies.

We all had friends even if we lacked community.

Covid created a kind of social ice age. What we’re experiencing now is the thaw. I keep returning to this because I’m deeply opposed to the cottage industry that has sprung up around it. Getting off your phone is fine. What’s less admirable is the way fear and panic (and surveillance) are smuggled in under the banner of self-improvement. People will tell you to “touch grass,” but what they are actually selling you is anxiety or maybe a reason to convert to Christianity.

To return to the earlier bit about post-literacy: I attended a competitive private school in the 2000s, and there were students who could barely write their own names. This isn’t new. It’s a problem, sure, but it’s not new. Much of this conversation exists to feed the take economy and limit your rights.2

Stay woke.

Get 75% off forever

THE CALL-IN SHOW

Has the call-in show ever done an episode on liminal spaces? I’m not sure whether we’ve covered it, but I’d like to do an episode on the topic. Or revisit it, if we already have.

Follow us on Kick, Rumble, Twitch, and X. We stream at 7:30 CT/8:30 ET. All you need is a phone — both to listen and call in!

More channels coming soon.

If you know how to help me advertise, please reach out! I’m so bad at this shit it’s kind of unreal.

P.S. We’re coming to radio stations around the Chicago area in late 2026….

Get more from Katherine Dee in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Every five years or so, there’s a changing of the guard in digital media. Platform empires rise and fall, subcultures come and go, trends ebb and flow.

In my estimation, we’re entering year two of the latest shift.

The decline of punditry and traditional political commentary is continuing apace from its boom during Covid lockdowns. Commentators who might have once staked out clear, binary positions—conservative or liberal—are drifting away from political debate altogether, moving toward a more parasocial model: building audiences around personality and the feeling of relationship, rather than argument.

It’s increasingly clear that writing is niche. We’re moving away from the age of bloggers and Twitter, and into the age of streaming and clip farming—short video segments, often ripped from longer content, optimized for sharing. (I’ve made this point many times now, but this is why in the world of right-wing digital media, characters like Nick Fuentes are emerging as dominant, whereas no-video podcasters, bloggers, and Twitter personalities receive less attention.)

Labels like “right” and “left” are better thought of as “right-coded” and “left-coded”: ways of signaling who you are and who you’re with, rather than actual positions on what government should do. The people still doing, or more accurately “playing,” politics are themselves experiencing a realignment, scrambling to figure out new alliances as the old divisions stop making sense. I’ve written previously about New Old Leftists and the “post-right,” a motley group of former right-wing commentators who are not “progressives” in the traditional sense, but take up progressive points of view specifically in dialogue with their disgust with reactionary elements of the right.

Anyway, in this rise of coded communities—where affiliation is about vibe and identity more than ideology—we’re seeing the Manosphere go mainstream again. Second time? Third?

The Manosphere—if you’re a reader of this blog who somehow doesn’t know—refers to a loose network of communities organized around men, masculinity, dating advice, and self-improvement, sometimes tipping into outright hostility toward women. These communities have been around on the fringes of the internet for years, though depending on your vantage point, their underlying ideas are either hundreds of years old or at least sixty.

Either way, they keep surfacing into broader culture.

A Short and Non-Exhaustive Timeline of Moments the Pre-Internet Manosphere Penetrated the Mainstream:

The Manosphere as we know it today has at least two distinct antecedents. The first is the mid-twentieth-century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse: one responding to the Sexual Revolution and changing dating norms, the other developing in explicit opposition to second wave feminism. These strands framed gender relations as adversarial, strategic, and zero-sum.

The second antecedent is the part that I hear people talk about less often. The Manosphere in so many ways is a Black phenomenon. I do not mean this as a racial claim about ownership or blame, nor am I referring narrowly to what is sometimes called the “Black Manosphere.” I mean something more specific: many of the aesthetic forms, masculine philosophies, and anxieties that the Manosphere treats as “newly” discovered were articulated in Black American communities decades earlier. These were responses to economic exclusion, social displacement, and the erosion of traditional routes to masculine status.

Someone on X made the good point that the viral clips of Clavicular’s Big Night Out—Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and company—felt like a child’s idea of not only masculinity, but wealth. The cigars, the suits, the VIP table, the ham-fisted advice about how you don’t take women out to dinner.

If you’ve read Iceberg Slim, or watched 1970s blaxploitation films like The Mack or Super Fly, the visual language is immediately recognizable. You’ve seen this figure before: the fur coat, the Cadillac Eldorado, the exaggerated display of wealth and control. The question is why that aesthetic originally looked the way it did.

In mid-century America, Black men were systematically excluded from the institutions through which wealth and status quietly accumulate: country clubs, elite universities, corporate ladders, inherited property. The GI Bill’s housing provisions were administered in ways that shut out Black veterans. Union jobs in the building trades stayed segregated. The FHA explicitly refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Under those conditions, conspicuous display wasn’t vulgarity (at least, not primarily or exclusively)—it was one of the few available ways to signal success in a society that denied access to the kinds of prestige that don’t need to announce themselves. When wealth can’t whisper—as TikTok’s “old money aesthetic” crowd loves to remind us it should—it has to shout.

The modern Manosphere inherits this aesthetic, adopting the symbols as though they were universal markers of arrival rather than compensatory performances forged under exclusion. What began as a response to being locked out of legitimate power gets recycled, abstracted, and repackaged, this time as timeless masculine truth. As so, to modern audiences, it reads as immature.

The aesthetic was codified in the late ‘60s.

Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim, published Pimp: The Story of My Life in 1967, just two years after the Moynihan Report was leaked to the press and became the subject of furious debate among civil rights leaders, Black nationalists, and white policymakers alike. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, had argued that the “deterioration of the Negro family” was at the heart of Black poverty, producing what he called a “tangle of pathology.”

The report was plainly racist, but both Slim’s book and the report were responding to the same thing: the economic foundations of traditional masculine identity were collapsing, and no one knew what would replace them.

The pimp, in Slim’s telling, is “the loneliest bastard on earth,” a man who must “be God all the way” to his women—never vulnerable, never soft, always performing omnipotence. Slim’s book became a template.

By the 1970s, blaxploitation films had transformed the pimp into an outlaw folk hero, emphasizing style over the moral complexity of the source material. What survived was the cool, the walk, the talk, the clothes, the attitude. Hip-hop — which I admittedly know very little about, so please feel free to correct me here —- picked up the thread: Ice-T named himself in tribute to Iceberg Slim; Snoop Dogg built an entire persona around pimp iconography; the rest is history. The pimp was no longer a figure of the Black underclass navigating impossible circumstances but was quickly becoming embraced as an inadvertent, unironic symbol of male success, available for adoption by anyone — race agnostic.

The “high-value man” who dominates contemporary Manosphere discourse is this same archetype, put through a respectability filter, or maybe just re-fit for modern tastes. The fur coat becomes a tailored suit. The Cadillac becomes a Bugatti. The stable of sex workers becomes a rotating roster of Instagram models (I guess, in Andrew Tate’s case, still sex [trafficked] workers). The underlying logic — and material conditions — are identical: women are resources to be managed, emotional detachment is strength, and a man’s worth is measured by his material display and his control over female attention.

The transmission is sometimes acknowledged openly. Manosphere forums routinely recommend Pimp as essential reading, noting that leading figures are simply teaching “old, street, pimp talk” in sanitized form. The oldheads in the Manosphere knows where its ideas come from. Gen Z and perhaps Millennials have simply forgotten why they emerged.

The genealogy becomes even clearer when you look at the women who serve as validators. Pearl Davis, the young white podcaster who has become one of the Manosphere’s most prominent female voices, follows a template established decades earlier by Shahrazad Ali, the Black author whose 1989 book The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman provoked national controversy. Ali’s book arrived during the crack epidemic, as incarceration rates for Black men began their exponential climb and a sense of crisis pervaded discussions of Black family life.

What made Ali’s book so explosive—and so useful to her critics—was that she was essentially agreeing with Moynihan. Where Moynihan had argued that Black “matriarchy” produced a “tangle of pathology,” Ali argued that Black women had become unruly, disrespectful, and emasculating. Where Moynihan suggested that restoring Black male authority was essential to family stability, Ali argued that Black women should submit to male authority, accept male infidelity as natural, and return to traditional homemaking. She even suggested that Black men should occasionally slap their women into compliance. The diagnosis was Moynihan’s, dressed in the language of Black cultural nationalism. She appeared on The Phil Donahue Show to defend these positions to a stunned audience, and her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies despite being rejected by mainstream publishers.

Davis makes the same arguments stripped of their racial specificity: women are too independent, feminism has ruined them, they need to submit, their standards are delusional. The script was written decades ago, first by a white policymaker diagnosing Black “pathology,” then by a Black woman internalizing that diagnosis as cultural truth, and Davis is performing it for a new audience that believes it is hearing something novel.

The Manosphere’s grievances are not manufactured—just as the pimp’s weren’t. The anxieties it addresses are real. The conditions that produced the pimp archetype in Black America, the sense that legitimate paths to respect and provision have been foreclosed, are now conditions we all experience.

The Manosphere exists because millions of young men — of every race — are asking the same question Black men were asking in 1965: what does masculinity mean when its economic foundations have been removed?

Late in life, Iceberg Slim shared that he believed the game had damaged him — he had internalized a hatred of women stemming from childhood trauma, describing his pimp career as a prolonged act of self-harm. The pimp archetype emerged from real deprivation and produced more deprivation, never liberating anyone but redistributing suffering downward—not only onto women but to men.

Today’s Manosphere offers a diluted, algorithmic version of that same exchange, promising power through detachment, success through dominance, respect through performance.

This is what a man looks like when all other options have been foreclosed upon.

TOMORROW’S CALL-IN SHOW!!!

American Dreamland, my Coast to Coast AM-inspired call-in show with , is BACK tomorrow night at 7:30 PM Central. We stream here, on X, Twitch, Rumble, Kick, TikTok, and YouTube. If you’d like to be involved in our marketing efforts, please send me an email at katherine@default.blog. I am very irresponsible!

Tomorrow’s theme is THE MONSTER I LOVED. Call 775-288-8576 with your stories.

ME AROUND THE WEB

• I was on [SIC] Talks today, looking adorable. Thank you for having me!

• A while back, I had the honor of going on the Reason podcast. I sound like an absolute lunatic here but I love their program.

• The Spectator was kind enough to publish my eulogy to my father. I cannot tell you how much I miss him.