🐬 Reality Is What You Make of It 🐬

the last thought digest of 2024, 12.31.2024

There are recurring patterns with my New Year’s prediction posts, but then cultural shifts don’t fit neatly into yearlong cycles.

Trends linger, slowly evolve, loop back on themselves, return in new forms. They shapeshift and disguise themselves. The trajectory from /r/RedPillWomen to today’s tradwife influencers has been one steady march—not two separate phenomena.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is my early observations about “hipster reactionaries” on the ill-fated After the Orgy, which I saw as part of the broader vibe shift I described in my post “the coming wave of sex negativity.” This was before the deluge of op-eds and scene reports about “reactionary chic.” The timing isn’t the point: I don’t think those articles were late or irrelevant, or that I had access to any special knowledge.

Rather, it’s just a sign that real, long-term trends hang around for years, no matter how fast-paced our environment might seem. We’ve been conditioned by our media environment to expect constant acceleration, but trends still take years to unfold. News stories cycle in and out with disturbing speed, and memes can be ephemeral (though they aren’t always), but deeper cultural currents still move at their own pace.

I have read several predictions that 2025 is the year the 2020s will truly begin.

It feels like everyone (myself obviously included) wants to be the one who names the next big change, so we keep scanning the horizon for a Moment to declare. This year, the call seems to be that 2025 will be the “year of magic.” I would argue we’ve already been in that moment for decades. Anyone familiar with the Age of Aquarius knows it is believed to last around 2,000 years. Again, these changes are slow, not something that flips on at midnight. I am, of course, speaking to myself here as much as I am speaking to all of you.

The Internet has always been a text-based role play where we treat others like interpretable text and project our imaginations onto the whitespace in between. We’ve long relied on what “may as well be true,” or emotional truths. Disinformation existed long before concerns about right-wingers on social media or the ever evolving narrative about Covid. The Metaverse has been encroaching into meatspace since the newspaper. Now, the newspaper is dead, and the information highway runs through our lives without much regard for the neighborhood it’s tearing through.

Online, I see performances of Christianity, largely to distinguish oneself from normies. I see talk of demons with a patina of irony and frequent over-intellectualization of spiritual concepts. They’re exercises in online persona-building, not genuinely spiritual — at least from my vantage point.

Among the mainstream, signs of magic feel more direct, if less novel. For an article to be published in The Dispatch next week, I argue that manifestation is our national religion. This is why I think we’ve seen such a strong growth in what I call “add-to-cart” witchcraft. Most Americans believe, to varying degrees, that our thoughts can shape reality. Again, myself included. Reality-shifting and fictosexuality are further along on the same spectrum where people take it as a given that reality is what you make of it. To me, that is magic: the idea that our imaginations are powerful, and that we can use them to live the kind of life we want.

In my own life, I believe in astral projection.

I believe that I can touch people in the astral plane. I believe that the Internet can facilitate a connection so strong, you can feel people at a distance. I believe you can pair-bond during cybersex. I believe that an online friendship or romance can be a deeply spiritual, transformative experience. I should write about this more.

What does that mean for chatbots? Are they golems? Egregores? Is a nascent form of animism creeping up on us?

I agree that “wokeness” as a media register is on the decline, though I’m on the fence about class consciousness filling that gap. I go back and forth on it.

Luigi Mangione has been held up as a harbinger of some brand-new, cross-partisan populism—but that doesn’t feel right to me. Nothing about Mangione feels new. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got a Rolling Stone cover and populism didn’t emerge out of nowhere. The suggestion that Mangione represents something unprecedented seems more like wishful thinking, but then I’ve never been good with politics.

I’m better with trends and along those lines, there’s been some chatter that 2025 will be “the year of niche ideologies.” Mangione himself confused people because he was a tech bro who liked Jonathan Haidt. But so what? There’s no new political frontier to explain. There was nothing contradictory or obscure about Mangione’s digital footprint. You can both work in technology and be concerned about its role in our lives.

According to Gurwinder Bhogal, Mangione was particularly preoccupied with NPCs; he cared about how “agentic” people were (or weren’t). 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and now 2025 I predict: the real culture war is about technology, which itself is undergirded by a question of what it means to be human.

My intuition is that everything boils down to that.

More on the point of “niche ideologies,” in the aftermath of Samantha Rupnow’s case, jokingly or not, people pointed to it as a further data point that our old left/right spectrum had broken. What does it mean that there was a “femcel chud” shooter? Another conversation that didn’t make sense to me. Many of these so-called niche political beliefs are just aesthetic labels. They are more like machine learning tags to help categorize people as opposed to fully-fleshed out worldviews. They place people in particular online geographies or describe their aesthetics but they don’t reveal something about their politics.

Don’t get me wrong: I still believe that we need precise taxonomies about online groups, e.g. the manosphere is not the old NRx blogosphere, groypers are not BAPists, FDS followers are not femcels, not every incel is a chud, so on and so forth. But if you don’t know these spaces—and who does?—you end up muddying the waters or you end up misunderstanding the role particular identity labels play.

Unedited Field Notes on Different Types of Femcels That Might Be Wildly Inaccurate But Please Don't Tell Me If It is Because I'll Be Extremely Embarrassed

Another hot topic this year has been the “weirding” of politics thanks to the Internet.

One critical point to keep in mind—something I think that people take for granted—is that subcultures mutate once money and power get involved. Influential people who rely on a public audience for income or social validation (podcasters, streamers, X personalities, etc.) will often jump ship and pick new “teams” if it serves their brand or bottom line. In many ways, that’s just savvy business: survival and profit eclipses ideological purity.

Within these online political ecosystems, I see four broad groups:

1. Role Players
   They have minimal ideological commitment but love the theater of online debate, arguments, and alliances.
   

2. Theorycels
   These people tend to stay in the realm of abstract intellectualizing. They’re heavily into the theory side of politics—reading, debating, and quoting big thinkers—but rarely venture into tangible, on-the-ground activism. Their engagement is often purely conceptual.
   

3. Influencers
   People in this category shape and reshape their politics based on audience demand, social dynamics, and financial incentives. If taking a certain stance leads to more subscribers, ad revenue, or clicks, they’ll pivot. Their overarching commitment is to growth.
   

4. Real Power
   Established political figures, parties, or major media outlets. They might borrow the aesthetics, slang, or inside jokes of energetic subcultures to seem more relatable or “in touch,” but under the hood they’re still driven by the same institutional interests that have always run politics and media.

Lest we forget the wisdom of Miss Aimee Terese!

I’ve been thinking about paratext/para-content, a concept introduced to me by

Monia Ali

and that my friend Ruby Justice Thelot recently wrote about for his excellent newsletter.

It’s also something I’ve variously, mysteriously, referred to in this blog as “hobbyfication” or “trend analysis.” Paratext/para-content is talking about content. When I wrote about it, I wrote about how in online language learning communities, you encounter more content about learning a language than actual instruction. Ruby thinks that the popularity of paratext is a desire to be the person who creates context in an environment of information overload. I think that’s right. Another topic Ruby and I agree on: we need gatekeepers. Paratext, curation, taste: this is all how we grapple with too much information. CNN might be dying, but I doubt the New York Times is going anywhere.

People still want gatekeepers to filter the firehose.

2025, much like 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021, is likely to see an even greater abandonment of millennial irony: that detached, insincere style that defined so much of the previous decade. I’ve long argued it would be replaced by three things:

1. More self-critical leftism with a smaller mirror group on the right

2. Extreme, hardline, binary rightism in multiple manifestations

3. In some corners, a “absurdist accelerationism” that is characterized by numbness, disconnection, and hopelessness

Rayne Fisher-Quann exemplifies the first category. I mention her every single year because she remains the most compelling example of this evolution, at least to me. I see a nascent version on the right, sometimes called “post-right,” with people like Richard Hanania or Trace Woodgrains. They often get pegged as leftist in disguise by the Dissident Right, but what leftist is reading Richard Hanania? I suspect a lot of their readers are disillusioned rightists who are floating towards the center.

On the left and center, people seem to crave an approach that’s empathetic but not overbearing, awake but not “woke,” raw but not cruel. Maybe 2025 is about meaning it, with an exceptionally blackpilled and nihilistic fringe.

Casual Sex Doesn't Exist

I still expect a strong return to in-person gatherings. The smartphone backlash is still building, although it’s uneven. We might see an even bigger bifurcation between those who double down on Internet overexposure and those who want to go fully offline.

Again, the fault line is about technology.

PREVIEW: The Three Archetypes of Internet Overexposure Syndrome

I’m bullish on both immersive, multimedia storytelling and narrative (as two separate phenomena in my estimation).

You can see the seeds of this in the popularity of POV playlists on YouTube and Spotify and “choose your own adventure”/”interactive” story threads like the ones I used to write in 2021. We’re grasping at a more complete role-play but we’re not quite there yet. I would say aesthetics and mood boards also represent this urge.

For the Washington Examiner this year, I wrote about how in a best case scenario, AI will help us with storytelling. My fear here is that as people start consuming more new media than old media, the ability to imagine newer possibilities may decay.

As for the Gender War, who knows.

The lowest-common-denominator takes feel tired but at the same time, they’re not exactly going away, either, are they? We haven’t really seen anyone hit it big with a Radfem Hitler approach (i.e. over the top misandry which almost rises to the level of parody), but it might be on the horizon. Friend-of-the-stack and fellow femcel scholar Dr. Jilly Kay recently published a paper about the “Femosphere,” which she describes as the Manosphere’s counterpart.

There’s also a radical feminist streak that hasn’t been widely documented.

I am in the first generation of women who grew up internalizing writers like Roissy. And that was over a decade ago. My generation became “redpill women.” But what about our younger sisters?

More on this later, let’s bookmark it.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

A MESSAGE FROM THE DOLPHIN RELIGION

Water speaks. Fill a cup with water and sleep next to it. Listen and you will hear something. If you don’t hear it, do this every night until you can.

Tomorrow morning, tell me what it told you in the comments of this post.

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I’m bringing back personals (we were doing that in 2020!) and the advice column. Submit missed connections, personals, and advice questions to me directly or by voice, on Telbee.

I am also accepting submissions!