The Future Is Listening, Some Napkin Notes on Anti-Modern Violence
thought digest, 04.13.2026
Good morning, Deeists!
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:
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.
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.