Hello There, Welcome to the Nick Fuentes Side of Tumblr

+ quibi, autofiction, galactic empires// thought digest, 09.23.2025

Good afternoon, Deeists!

I'm back from my favorite place on earth, the San Francisco Bay Area. Here’s something I wrote in 2020 about how California makes me feel. I present to you all my autofiction:

I feel like a different person when I'm in San Francisco. I know it's a terrible city, filled with terrible people. I can't help but feel the pulse of innovation, though. I can really feel it.

I can feel people changing the world. Well, no, I can feel people thinking they're changing the world. A few thousand stupid startup founders who think they're going to leave a dent in the universe. I can feel it. Their optimism is contagious.

Needless to say — I think because I’ve already said it many times on this blog, including that exact quote — I still feel like this.

I recently told podcaster Cas Piancey that I think this sentiment, this drive to leave a dent in the universe, is the impetus behind Avi Schiffman’s Friend. It's not only too reductive — but plainly wrong! — to say people like Avi are selling out to the worst impulses of Silicon Valley, that he doesn’t care who’s hurt in his attempt to build an empire.¹ No, he really believes he's going to help alleviate the loneliness epidemic. And perhaps controversially, I think AI companions might actually help with it too. Not without recognizing potential downsides, but I think there's a possible timeline where AI companions could help more than they hurt.

Something that’s surprising to me is that I don’t think everyone’s familiar with this attitude. In my mind, it was just the way young men were, but I routinely talk to men who don’t recognize the archetype. When Luigi Mangione murdered Brian Thompson — stay with me here — one of my more contentious takes was that it struck me as the same type of arrogance that drives some people to start ambitious startups and others to jump off roofs. This seems to be the case with Tyler Robinson, the man who murdered Charlie Kirk, as well. There’s a particular hubris young men have where they truly believe they can leave a dent in the universe. That it, that nebulous it, will work out.

Sometimes it manifests as real greatness — immediately, I think of athletes. Sometimes it’s channeled into war. Often, it manifests as stupidity. And sometimes, tragically, botched heroism. To be perfectly clear here, I myself do not think people like Robinson or Mangione are heroes for murdering innocent men. But I believe they see themselves this way.

Ultimately, I don’t think people understand that many men desperately want to be great.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with another internet culture analyst about how I think he has Silicon Valley all wrong. This analyst’s view is that the Eccentric Billionaire Class is incoherent. My view of that type of person is that they dream of a timeline where humanity conquers space. Where we become an interplanetary species, where human achievement reaches cosmic scale. You can dislike them class all you want, but it’s wrong to say they’re pursuing control for its own sake. It’s not true that they’re evil, that they want proles to suffer for the crime of being born poor or something.

They are motivated by the drive to be galactic Alexanders, to lead humanity into a new age of expansion and conquest among the stars. And they believe this should be pursued at any cost. This is why they want AGI; this is why they want to live forever. Not everyone believes cosmic greatness should be achieved at any cost, or that it can be achieved at the particular cost these men are willing to pay.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t make sense.

ICYMI

• I was on Blocked and Reported!

• I wrote about murderers for The Spectator again.

• Tomorrow, I’m hosting

  Leigh Stein
  in Chicago. RSVP here. There will be free alcohol.

I LOOKED INTO NICKTOK …

People on X have been claiming that the far-right streaming Chicagoan Nick Fuentes has a lot of female fans. Naturally, I had to go down this rabbit hole.

Here’s what I found.

On TikTok, the search term “Nick Fuentes” is blacklisted, so anyone who wants to talk about him work around it by writing “Nick Feutnes” or similar variations.