Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.

in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.

What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.

the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.

Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

Money became increasingly fake-seeming as it diverged more and more from a hard day’s work and most conventional wisdom.

The growing number of people taking chances that they barely believed in (starting an Onlyfans, going all in on a memecoin, becoming a performative racist for clicks) reflected a rational response to seeing absurd and/or conventionally shitty ideas have outsized success (Bored Apes, Trump, the Babyccino).

bucking conventional wisdom in any direction became the order of the day. Contrarianism became incredibly popular. Taking the diametrically opposed position to consensus as a shortcut to standing out in a crowded and volatile field was a key Clown Town strategy.

As a subset of contrarianism, Hot Sauce Behavior became especially popular. Hot Sauce involves taking something basic or mid and applying a socially forbidden or mysterious spice to it (in place of, or to function as, the X factor or the je ne sais quoi). This element had to be shocking, bad, atavistic, or otherwise “not normal”—it could be Nazism, grooming, the Occult, Catholicism, outright aggression, the threat of violence, or the attitudes of obscure-to-you political groups—but in smallish amounts. It made peoples’ hearts race and adrenaline pump while they consumed something otherwise bland. (This was the Tension Economy as the new Attention Economy.)

If the 2020 degen was a gambler willing to go all in on a whim… …the 2023 degen is a sophisticated risk manager We have found ourselves in a new cultural era in which multiple overlapping crises and rising interest rates have led to an emergent reckoning. It is now widely understood that it was very stupid to play crazy games with tons of excess money instead of actually improving material reality. But certain questions remain: What the fuck is anything worth today? What’s the best way to manage risk while it all comes falling down?

In chess, today’s average player is more skilled than the one from yesteryear because online exposure of advanced theory has led to regular players making the moves of masters. As Virgil once said, “One kid does a new skateboard trick, then hundreds more can do it the next day around the world.”

Everyone should be able to use their increased intelligence and awareness to better navigate the world. In reality, the irony is painful: When everyone gets smarter, things get harder. If everyone is reassessing the most-effective-tactics-available all the time, it gets harder and harder to win, even though you’re smarter and “should be in a better position.” The Yale admissions office realizes thousands of applicants have watched the same obscure how-to-get-into-Yale TikTok, and decides to change the meta: Leadership is no longer a valuable quality.

Max Pain means, even when you’re right, you’re wrong; it describes a climate in which everyone’s opinion is right at some point, but never at the right time.

This article proposes to explain why education is so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas&emdash;that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.

While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.

Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for.

When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.

he implied his firing was part of the conspiracy to silence the truth, and urged his loyal followers to subscribe to his Substack, as this was now his family’s only source of income. His new audience proved to be generous with both money and attention, and his need to meet their expectations seems to have spurred him, consciously or unconsciously, to double down on his more extreme views. Now almost everything he writes about, from Covid to Ukraine, he somehow ties to the shadowy New World Order.

I wanted an audience, but I also knew that having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience, because they'd constrain me with their expectations, forcing me to focus on one tiny niche of my worldview at the expense of everything else, until I became a parody of myself.

I ensured that my brand image—the person that my audience expects me to be—was in alignment with my ideal image—the person I want to be. So even though audience capture likely does affect me in some way, it only makes me more like the person I want to be.

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.

York points to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marsh v. Alabama, which held that private entities can become sufficiently large and public to require them to be subject to the same Constitutional constraints as government entities. Though York says this ruling has “not as of this writing been applied to the quasi-public spaces of the internet”

even if YouTube were treated as an extension of government due to its size and required to retain every non-criminal video uploaded to its service, it would make as much of a political statement elsewhere, if not more. In France and Germany, it — like any other company — must comply with laws that require the removal of hate speech, laws which in the U.S. would be unconstitutional

Several European countries have banned Google Analytics because it is impossible for their citizens to be protected against surveillance by American intelligence agencies.

TikTok has downplayed the seriousness of its platform by framing it as an entertainment venue. As with other platforms, disinformation on TikTok spreads and multiplies. These factors may have an effect on how people vote. But the sudden alarm over yet-unproved allegations of algorithmic meddling in TikTok to boost Chinese interests is laughable to those of us who have been at the mercy of American-created algorithms despite living elsewhere. American state actors have also taken advantage of the popularity of social networks in ways not dissimilar from political adversaries.

what York notes is how aligned platforms are with the biases of upper-class white Americans; not coincidentally, the boards and executive teams of these companies are dominated by people matching that description.

It should not be so easy to point to similarities in egregious behaviour; corruption of legal processes should not be so common. I worry that regulators in China and the U.S. will spend so much time negotiating which of them gets to treat the internet as their domain while the rest of us get steamrolled by policies that maximize their self-preferencing.

to ensure a clear set of values projected into the world. One way to achieve that is to prefer protocols over platforms.

Yes, the country’s light touch approach to regulation and generous support of its tech industry has brought the world many of its most popular products and services. But it should not be assumed that we must rely on these companies built in the context of middle- and upper-class America.

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance