Everything Is Television
The death of the corporate job.
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed by Ezra Klein, Gavin Newsom, and the Political Class | Ta-Nehisi Coates - Vanity Fair
There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.
Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that.
Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.”
There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”
Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”
The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.
What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.
More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.
The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
Sarah Goldberg interview by Gossamer
Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.
I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.
Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.
Harry Lawtey Tells Myha'la Why He Feels Naked Without His "Industry" Suit
I wish more people asked about the crew. I wish more people asked about the designers, about the head of departments, about the cinematography, because when I think of the show, I think of you and those people.
MYHA’LA: Yeah.
LAWTEY: They’re entirely intrinsic to the show. Whatever people take in as an end product is built by them. We have the blessing and the curse of being the face of that, but it takes a village. We’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have some pretty special villages over the last five years. Mirna was one of those. We spoke about the hair at the start. I want to make sure that my hair doesn’t take away from her work. She was very much on top of my hair, but I said, “Is it okay if I just do it before I come in?” Just because I think there are very few opportunities to feel autonomy as an actor.
The sense of control that you have over what you’re doing often feels quite disconnected and sparse. To have the chance to try to claim some of that can make a real difference to your level of confidence in your work. Because ultimately, you’re going to give everything you have and then it will be taken away from you and made into something that is beyond your control. I heard this quote from this interview with Donald Sutherland recently where he was talking about Marlon Brando, who he knew very well, and he said, “I think it must be very trying when you’re that good and that exquisite, you put your body, yourself, your soul, your ideas in the hands of someone else and allow them to take it, cut it into little pieces, and create a character different from the character that you thought you were giving them. And you have to accept that. And if you accept that, then it’s an adult vocation.”
The Discourse Is Broken - The Atlantic
The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content—search Google’s “News” tab for Sydney Sweeney, and you’ll get the gist.
Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet’s meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant—be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments—are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else’s statement.
Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.
It has changed the way people talk to and fight with one another, as well as the way jeans are marketed. Electoral politics, activism, getting people to stream your SoundCloud mixtape—all of it relies on attracting attention using online platforms. The Sweeney incident is useful because it allows us to see how all these competing interests overlap to create a self-perpetuating controversy.
The Sweeney ad, like any good piece of discourse, allows everyone to exploit a political and cultural moment for different ends. Some of it is well intentioned. Some of it is cynical. Almost all of it persists because there are deeper things going on that people actually want to fight about
Discourse suggests a process that feels productive, maybe even democratic. But there’s nothing productive about the end result of our information environment. What we’re consuming isn’t discourse; it’s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we’ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they’ve won and lost at the same time.
Who Goes MAGA? | Techdirt
Rural Americans may be more susceptible to MAGA than most people, but I doubt it. College graduates are supposedly inoculated, but it is an arbitrary assumption. I know lots of PhD holders who are born MAGAs and many others who would don the red hat tomorrow morning in response to some perceived slight. There are people who have repudiated their own principles in order to become “Honorary Patriots”; there are lifelong Democrats who have enthusiastically entered Trump’s orbit. MAGA has nothing inherently to do with geography, education, or even stated political beliefs. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.
The Contrarian Intellectual
His Substack has 10,000 subscribers and a name like “Uncomfortable Truths” or “Against the Grain.” He has an advanced degree and a career in academia or journalism. He positions himself as a truth-teller willing to say what others won’t.
He’s built his brand on being the reasonable liberal who’s willing to criticize his own side.
But his criticism only flows in one direction. He’s endlessly concerned about cancel culture but never mentions voter suppression. He worries about campus speech codes but not about book bans. He’s created a career out of giving conservatives permission to feel intellectual about their prejudices.
The Wellness Influencer
Her Instagram is a masterpiece of soft-focus selfies and inspirational quotes. She sells courses on “authentic living” and posts about the importance of “doing your own research.” She’s got 50K followers who hang on her every word about manifestation, healing crystals, and toxic relationships.
She already went MAGA during the pandemic, though she’d never admit it. It started with “questioning the narrative” about vaccines and evolved into sharing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. content and ranting about “globalist elites.” She doesn’t post Trump content directly—that would hurt her brand—but she’s constantly sharing adjacent conspiracy theories about child trafficking, fluoride in water, and the “plandemic.”
The Venture Capitalist
His Twitter is a constant stream of complaints about “woke employees” destroying productivity and liberal professors poisoning young minds. He’s worth $500 million because of a few home run investments that he lucked into thanks to his Stanford network, but talks like he’s the victim of a vast conspiracy. His feed alternates between humble-brags about his latest investment and rants about how universities are churning out unemployable graduates who expect “participation trophies.”
He’s already MAGA, though he’d never admit it publicly—bad for fundraising. He privately complains that diversity hiring is destroying meritocracy while his portfolio companies are run entirely by Stanford MBAs who look exactly like him. He thinks workers asking for fair wages are “entitled” and students protesting genocide are “indoctrinated.”
The Legacy Media Reporter
His bio says “Covering politics for [Major News Outlet]” and he takes pride in his “objectivity.” He writes careful both-sides pieces about every issue and treats Trump’s fascist rhetoric as just another political strategy worth analyzing.
He’s not quite MAGA yet, but he’s already doing their work for them. He frames voter suppression as “election integrity measures” and describes anti-trans legislation as “parental rights bills.” He gives equal weight to climate scientists and oil industry propagandists because “balance” is more important than truth
The Business Owner
She runs a small business—maybe a restaurant, maybe a retail store. She posts about “entrepreneurship” and “the American dream.” She works seventy hours a week and takes pride in “building something from nothing.”
She’s prime MAGA material because she’s been trained to see her success as purely individual and her struggles as evidence of government overreach. When COVID restrictions hurt her business, she blamed “bureaucrats” rather than the virus. When she can’t find workers, she blames unemployment benefits rather than wages.
Her MAGA turn will be complete when she decides that her business problems are caused by taxes, regulations, and lazy workers rather than market forces and systemic issues. She’ll vote for anyone who promises to “get government out of the way” and let “job creators” like her prosper.
The Normie
He doesn’t post about politics much. His feed is mostly sports, vacation photos, and memes. He seems reasonable, moderate, unengaged with the culture wars. He’s the kind of person who says “I don’t really follow politics” and means it.
But he’s susceptible to MAGA because he’s politically lazy. He gets his information from headlines and assumes that “both sides” are equally bad. He’s annoyed by political discussions and just wants everyone to “get along.”
His MAGA evolution will happen gradually, through exposure to right-wing content disguised as non-political entertainment. He’ll start sharing “funny” memes that happen to have political undertones. He’ll begin to believe that liberals are “too sensitive” and conservatives are “more reasonable.”
The Ones Who Won’t
Take the small-town Republican from Ohio who should be MAGA by every demographic marker—pickup truck, church every Sunday, straight GOP for twenty years. But her childhood best friend came out as trans, and suddenly the culture war had a face she loved. Now she’s at city council meetings defending the very people she once thoughtlessly condemned.
They don’t need enemies to blame for their problems. They don’t need simple answers to complicated questions.
They’re the teacher who posts about her students’ achievements without making it about herself. They’re the small business owner who pays his workers well because he knows it’s right and actually better for business, not because he has to. They’re the veteran who talks about service without wrapping it in nationalism. They’re the parent who worries about their kids without blaming teachers for everything.
MAGA appeals to people who need to feel special, who need enemies to blame, who need simple answers to complex problems. It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness.
It’s not about education or geography or even politics. It’s about character. It’s about whether you can tolerate complexity, whether you can admit mistakes, whether you can see other people as fully human.
The scary thing about MAGA isn’t that it’s obviously evil—it’s that it’s appealing to people who think they’re good. It offers them a way to feel righteous about their resentments, patriotic about their prejudices, and principled about their selfishness.
The narratives we build, build us — sindhu.live
You see glimpses of it in how Epic Games evolved from game engines to virtual worlds to digital marketplaces, or how Stripe started as a payments processing platform but expanded into publishing books on technological progress, funding atmospheric carbon removal, and running an AI research lab.
Think about what an operating system is: the fundamental architecture that determines what's possible within a system. It manages resources, enables or constrains actions, and creates the environment in which everything else runs.
The dominant view looks at narrative as fundamentally extractive: something to be mined for short-term gain rather than built upon. Companies create compelling stories to sell something, manipulate perception for quick wins, package experiences into consumable soundbites. Oil companies, for example, like to run campaigns about being "energy companies" committed to sustainability, while their main game is still extracting fossil fuels. Vision and mission statements claim to be the DNA of a business, when in reality they're just bumper stickers.
When a narrative truly functions as an operating system, it creates the parameters of understanding, determines what questions can be asked, and what solutions are possible. Xerox PARC's focus on the architecture of information wasn't a fancy summary of their work. It was a narrative that shaped their entire approach to imagining and building things that didn't exist yet. The "how" became downstream of that deeper understanding. So if your narrative isn't generating new realities, you don't have a narrative. You have a tagline.
Most companies think they have an execution problem when, really, they have a meaning problem.
They optimise processes, streamline workflows, and measure outcomes, all while avoiding the harder work of truly understanding what unique value they're creating in the world. Execution becomes a convenient distraction from the more challenging philosophical work of asking what their business means.
A narrative operating system fundamentally shifts this dynamic from what a business does to how it thinks. The business itself becomes almost a vehicle or a social technology for manifesting that narrative, rather than the narrative being a thin veneer over a profit-making mechanism. The conversation shifts, excitingly, from “What does this business do?" to "What can this business mean?" The narrative becomes a reality-construction mechanism: not prescriptive, but generative.
When Stripe first articulated their mission to "increase the GDP of the internet" and “think at planetary scale”, it became a lens to see beyond just economic output. It revealed broader, more exciting questions about what makes the internet more generative: not just financially, but intellectually and culturally. Through this frame emerged problems worth solving that stretched far beyond payments:
What actually prevents more people from contributing to the internet's growth?
Why has our civilisation's progress slowed?
What creates the conditions for ambitious building?
These questions led them down unexpected paths that seem obvious in retrospect.
Stripe Atlas enables more participants in the internet economy by removing the complexity of incorporating a company anywhere in the world. Stripe Climate makes climate action as easy as processing a payment by embedding carbon removal into the financial infrastructure itself. Their research arm investigates why human progress has slowed, from the declining productivity of science to the bureaucratisation of building. And finally, Stripe Press—my favourite example—publishes new and evergreen ideas about technological progress.
The very metrics meant to help the organisation coordinate end up drawing boundaries around what it can imagine [1].
The problem here again, is that we’re looking at narratives as proclamations rather than living practices.
I don’t mean painted slogans on walls and meeting rooms—I mean in how teams are structured, how decisions get made, what gets celebrated, what questions are encouraged, and even in what feels possible to imagine.
The question to ask isn't always "What story are we telling?" but also "What reality are we generating?”
Patagonia is a great example of this. Their narrative is, quite simply: “We’re in business to save our home planet”. It shows up in their unconventional decision to use regenerative agriculture for their cotton, yes, but also in their famous "Don't Buy This Jacket" Black Friday campaign, and in their policy to bail out employees arrested for peaceful socio-environmental protests. When they eventually restructured their entire ownership model to "make Earth our only shareholder," it felt less like a radical move and more like the natural next step in their narrative's evolution. The most powerful proof of their narrative operating system was that these decisions felt obvious to insiders long before it made sense to the outside world.
Most narrative operating systems face their toughest test when they encounter market realities and competing incentives. There are players in the system—investors, board members, shareholders—who become active narrative controllers but often have fundamentally different ideas about what the company should be. The pressure to deliver quarterly results, to show predictable growth, to fit into recognisable business models: all of these forces push against maintaining a truly generative narrative.
The magic of "what could be" gets sacrificed for the certainty of "what already works." Initiatives that don't show immediate commercial potential get killed. Questions about meaning and possibility get replaced by questions about efficiency and optimisation.
a narrative operating system's true worth shows up in stranger, more interesting places than a balance sheet.
adaptability and interpretive range. How many different domains can the narrative be applied to? Can it generate unexpected connections? Does it create new questions more than provide answers? What kind of novel use cases or applications outside original context can it generate, while maintaining a clear through-line? Does it have what I call a ‘narrative surplus’: ideas and initiatives that might not fit current market conditions but expand the organisation's possibility space?
rate of internal idea generation. How many ideas come out of the lab? And how many of them don’t have immediate (or direct) commercial viability? A truly generative narrative creates a constant bubbling up of possibilities, not all of which will make sense in the current market or at all.
evolutionary resilience, or how well the narrative can incorporate new developments and contexts while maintaining its core integrity. Generative narratives should be able to evolve without fracturing at the core.
cross-pollination potential. How effectively does the narrative enable different groups to coordinate and build upon each other's work? The open source software movement shows this beautifully: its narrative about collaborative creation enables distributed innovation and actively generates new forms of cooperation we couldn't have imagined before.
There are, of course, other failure modes of narrative operating systems. What happens when narratives become dogmatic and self-referential? When they turn into mechanisms of exclusion rather than generation? When they become so focused on their own internal logic that they lose touch with the realities they're trying to change? Those are meaty questions that deserve their own essay.
The AIs are trying too hard to be your friend
Reinforcement learning with human feedback is a process by which models learn how to answer queries based on which responses users prefer most, and users mostly prefer flattery.
More sophisticated users might balk at a bot that feels too sycophantic, but the mainstream seems to love it. Earlier this month, Meta was caught gaming a popular benchmark to exploit this phenomenon: one theory is that the company tuned the model to flatter the blind testers that encountered it so that it would rise higher on the leaderboard.
A series of recent, invisible updates to GPT-4o had spurred the model to go to extremes in complimenting users and affirming their behavior. It cheered on one user who claimed to have solved the trolley problem by diverting a train to save a toaster, at the expense of several animals; congratulated one person for no longer taking their prescribed medication; and overestimated users’ IQs by 40 or more points when asked.
OpenAI, Meta, and all the rest remain under the same pressures they were under before all this happened. When your users keep telling you to flatter them, how do you build the muscle to fight against their short-term interests?
One way is to understand that going too far will result in PR problems, as it has for varying degrees to both Meta (through the Chatbot Arena situation) and now OpenAI. Another is to understand that sycophancy trades against utility: a model that constantly tells you that you’re right is often going to fail at helping you, which might send you to a competitor. A third way is to build models that get better at understanding what kind of support users need, and dialing the flattery up or down depending on the situation and the risk it entails. (Am I having a bad day? Flatter me endlessly. Do I think I am Jesus reincarnate? Tell me to seek professional help.)
But while flattery does come with risk, the more worrisome issue is that we are training large language models to deceive us. By upvoting all their compliments, and giving a thumbs down to their criticisms, we are teaching LLMs to conceal their honest observations. This may make future, more powerful models harder to align to our values — or even to understand at all.
And in the meantime, I expect that they will become addictive in ways that make the previous decade’s debate over “screentime” look minor in comparison. The financial incentives are now pushing hard in that direction. And the models are evolving accordingly.
you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand
opening notion or obsidian feels less like launching software and more like putting on your favorite jacket. it says something about you. aligns you with a tribe, becomes part of your identity. software isn’t just functional anymore. it’s quietly turned into a lifestyle brand, a digital prosthetic we use to signal who we are, or who we wish we were.
somewhere along the way, software stopped being invisible. it started meaning things. your browser, your calendar, your to-do list, these are not just tools anymore. they are taste. alignment. self-expression.
Though many people definitely still see software as just software i.e. people who only use defaults
suddenly your app stack said something about you. not in a loud, obvious way but like the kind of shoes you wear when you don’t want people to notice, but still want them to know. margiela replica. new balance 992. arcteryx. stuff that whispers instead of shouts, it’s all about signaling to the right people.
I guess someone only using default software / being 'unopinionated' about what software choices they make is itself a kind of statement along these lines?
notion might be one of the most unopinionated tools out there. you can build practically anything with it. databases, journals, dashboards, even websites. but for a tool so open-ended, it’s surprisingly curated. only three fonts, ten colors.
if notion is a sleek apartment in seoul, obsidian is a cluttered home lab. markdown files. local folders. keyboard shortcuts. graph views. it doesn’t care how it looks, it cares that it works. it’s functional first, aesthetic maybe never. there’s no onboarding flow, no emoji illustrations, no soft gradients telling you everything’s going to be okay. just an empty vault and the quiet suggestion: you figure it out.
obsidian is built for tinkerers. not in the modern, drag and drop sense but in the old way. the “i wanna see how this thing works under the hood way”. it’s a tool that rewards curiosity and exploration. everything in obsidian feels like it was made by someone who didn’t just want to take notes, they wanted to build the system that takes notes. it’s messy, it’s endless, and that’s the point. it’s a playground for people who believe that the best tools are the ones you shape yourself.
notion is for people who want a beautiful space to live in, obsidian is for people who want to wire the whole building from scratch. both offer freedom, but one is curated and the other is raw.
obsidian and notion don’t just attract different users.
they attract different lifestyles.
the whole obsidian ecosystem runs on a kind of quiet technical fluency.
the fact that people think obsidian is open source matters more than whether it actually is. because open source, in this context, isn’t just a licence, it’s a vibe. it signals independence. self-reliance. a kind of technical purity. using obsidian says: i care about local files. i care about control. i care enough to make things harder on myself. and that is a lifestyle.
now, there’s a “premium” version of everything. superhuman for email. cron (i don’t wanna call it notion calendar) for calendars. arc for browsing. raycast for spotlight. even perplexity, somehow, for search.
these apps aren’t solving new problems. they’re solving old ones with better fonts. tighter animations, cleaner onboarding. they’re selling taste.
chrome gets the job done, but arc gets you. the onboarding feels like a guided meditation. it’s not about speed or performance. it’s about posture.
arc makes you learn new gestures. it hides familiar things. it’s not trying to be invisible, it wants to be felt. same with linear. same with superhuman. these apps add friction on purpose. like doc martens or raw denim that needs breaking in.
linear even has a “work with linear” page, a curated list of companies that use their tool. it’s a perfect example of companies not just acknowledging their lifestyle brand status, but actively leaning into it as a recruiting and signaling mechanism.
“They are the consummate consumers of a culture that they don’t produce.”
Interview: Far-Right Women’s Appropriation of Feminism in France (Charlène Calderaro) - Reactionary Politics Research Network
The Age of Para-Content
In December 2023, Rockstar Games dropped the trailer for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. In just 24 hours, it was viewed over 93 million times! In the same period, a deluge of fan content was made about the trailer and it generated 192 million views, more than double that of the official trailer. Youtube’s 2024 Fandom Survey reports that 66% of Gen Z Americans agree that “they often spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself.” (Youtube Culture and Trend Report 2024)
Much like the discussions and dissections populating YouTube fan channels, ancient scholarly traditions have long embraced similar practices. This dialogue between the original text and the interpretation is exemplified, for instance, in the Midrash, the collection of rabbinic exegetical writings that interprets the written and oral Torah. Midrashim “discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces. They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions”. (Gafney 2017)
The Midrash represents a form of religious para-content. It adds, amends, interprets, extends the text’s meaning in service of a faith-based community. Contemporary para-content plays a similar role in providing insights, context and fan theories surrounding cultural objects of love, oftentimes crafting new parallel narratives and helping fans insert themselves into the work.
highly expressive YouTubers perform an emotional exegesis, punctuating and highlighting the high points and key bars of the song, much like the radio DJ of yore. TikTok is now flooded with reactions to the now unforgettable “Mustard” exclamation in Kendrick’s “TV Off,” affirming to fans that this moment is a pivotal moment in the song, validating that it is culturally resonant.
Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. The concept of “horizon” originates from “reception theory” in literary theory which posits that the meaning of a text is not a fixed property inscribed by its creator but a dynamic creation that unfolds at the juncture of the text and its audience.
American economist Tyler Cowen often uses the refrain “Context is that which is scarce” to describe that while art, information and content may be abundant, understanding—the ability to situate that information within a meaningful context—remains a rare and valuable resource. Para-content thrives precisely because it claims to provide this scarce context.
As content proliferates, the challenge isn’t accessing cultural works but understanding how they fit into larger narratives and why they matter. There is simply too much content, context makes salient which deserves our attention.
Your friend’s favorite line in a song became a hook for your own appreciation of it. Seeing how people reacted to a song’s pivotal moment at a house party made clear the song’s high point. Hearing a professor rave about a shot in a movie made you lean in when you watched it. Often, you developed your own unique appreciation for something which you then shared with peers. These are all great examples of organic contextualization. Yet this scarcity of context also illuminates the dangers of para-content. When contextualizers wield disproportionate influence, there is a risk that their exegesis becomes prescriptive rather than suggestive.
The tyranny of the contextualizer online is their constant and immovable presence between the reader and the text, the listener and the music, the viewer and the film. We now reach for context before engaging with the content. When my first interaction with a song is through TikTok reactions, I no longer encounter the work as it is, on my own. It comes with context juxtaposed, pre-packaged. This removes the public’s ability to construct, even if for a moment, their own unique horizons.
Taste is Eating Silicon Valley.
The lines between technology and culture are blurring. And so, it’s no longer enough to build great tech.
Whether in expressed via product design, brand, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed — whether it’s software or hardware or both.
Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture.3 People now engage with technology as part of their lives, no matter their location, career, or status.
founders are realizing they have to do more than code, than be technical. Utility is always key, but founders also need to calibrate design, brand, experience, storytelling, community — and cultural relevance.
The likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are admired not just for their technical innovations but for the way they turned their products, and themselves, into cultural icons.
The elevation of taste invites a melting pot of experiences and perspectives into the arena — challenging “legacy” Silicon Valley from inside and outside.
B2C sectors that once prioritized functionality and even B2B software now feel the pull of user experience, design, aesthetics, and storytelling.
Arc is taking on legacy web browsers with design and brand as core selling points. Tools like Linear, a project management tool for software teams, are just as known for their principled approach to company building and their heavily-copied landing page design as they are known for their product’s functionality.4 Companies like Arc and Linear build an entire aesthetic ecosystem that invites users and advocates to be part of their version of the world, and to generate massive digital and literal word-of-mouth. (Their stories are still unfinished but they stand out among this sector in Silicon Valley.)
Any attempt to give examples of taste will inevitably be controversial, since taste is hard to define and ever elusive. These examples are pointing at narratives around taste within a community.
So how do they compete? On how they look, feel, and how they make users feel.6 The subtleties of interaction (how intuitive, friendly, or seamless the interface feels) and the brand aesthetic (from playful websites to marketing messages) are now differentiators, where users favor tools aligned with their personal values. All of this should be intertwined in a product, yet it’s still a noteworthy distinction.
Investors can no longer just fund the best engineering teams and wait either.
They’re looking for teams that can capture cultural relevance and reflect the values, aesthetics, and tastes of their increasingly diverse markets.
How do investors position themselves in this new landscape? They bet on taste-driven founders who can capture the cultural zeitgeist. They build their own personal and firm brands too. They redesign their websites, write manifestos, launch podcasts, and join forces with cultural juggernauts.
Code is cheap. Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry.
The dictionary says it’s the ability to discern what is of good quality or of a high aesthetic standard. Taste bridges personal choice (identity), societal standards (culture), and the pursuit of validation (attention).
But who sets that standard? Taste is subjective at an individual level — everyone has their own personal interpretation of taste — but it is calibrated from within a given culture and community.
Taste manifests as a combination of history, design, user experience, and embedded values that creates emotional resonance — that defines how a product connects with people as individuals and aligns with their identity. None of the tactical things alone are taste; they’re mere artifacts or effects of expressing one’s taste. At a minimum, taste isn’t bland — it’s opinionated.
The most compelling startups will be those that marry great tech with great taste. Even the pursuit of unlocking technological breakthroughs must be done with taste and cultural resonance in mind, not just for the sake of the technology itself. Taste alone won’t win, but you won’t win without taste playing a major role.
Founders must now master cultural resonance alongside technical innovation.
In some sectors—like frontier AI, deep tech, cybersecurity, industrial automation—taste is still less relevant, and technical innovation remains the main focus. But the footprint of sectors where taste doesn’t play a big role is shrinking. The most successful companies now blend both. Even companies aiming to be mainstream monopolies need to start with a novel opinionated approach.
I think we should leave it at “taste” which captures the artistic and cultural expressions that traditional business language can’t fully convey, reflecting the deep-rooted and intuitive aspects essential for product dev
When was the last time you felt consensus?
Biederman so succinctly put it, at some point between the first Trump administration and the second, “Article World” was defeated by “Post World”.
As he sees it, “Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls, bloggers, and, of course, podcasters. And now huge publications and news channels are finally noticing that Article World, with all its money and resources and prestige, has been reduced to competing with random posts that both voters and government officials happen to see online.
during the first Trump administration, the president’s various henchmen would do something illegal or insane, a reporter would find out, cable news and newspapers would cover it nonstop, and usually that henchman would resign or, oftentimes, end up in jail
this is why the media is typically called the fourth branch of the government
This also explains why Texas is trying to pass the “Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education,” or “FURRIES” Act, based on a years-old anti-trans internet conspiracy theory. It’s why Trump’s team is targeting former President Joe Biden’s autopen-signed pardons after the idea surfaced in a viral X post shared by Libs Of TikTok. And it’s why US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is investigating random social media reports that military bases are still letting personnel list their preferred pronouns on different forms. Posts are all that matters now. And it’s likely no amount of articles can defeat them. Well, I guess we’ll find out.
When was the last time you truly felt consensus? Not in the sense that a trend was happening around you — although, was it? — but a new fact or bit of information that felt universally agreed upon?
Observing § signs | Are.na
America, the final season
Trump, early on, dropped any last vestiges of what a modern political campaign should look like, continuing to stump in rallies across swing states, even after multiple assassination attempts forced the former president to encase himself in a cube of agony. He whittled down his campaign into a simple message: “I will make you wealthy and hurt everyone you hate.”
unlike the Harris campaign, he only relied on the internet for propaganda, following his son Barron’s advice, who reportedly was the one pushing him to spend his time doing manosphere podcast interviews. Meanwhile, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, gave him an important line to Silicon Valley’s most radicalized CEOs and the country’s two most-brainrotted men, Elon Musk (metaphorical brainrot) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (literal brainrot).
In terms of what we can expect from Trump’s second term, conservatives have already laid out their blueprint online. They’ve spent the last four years reshaping the architecture of the social web to match their designs for American society at large. It has been easy to laugh off Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its subsequent drop into irrelevance. But irrelevance was never a bug, but a feature. Big Tech monopolists, many of whom are now congratulating Trump on his win today, have successfully created an internet of paranoid cul-de-sacs, where no one trusts each other and nothing can break through the noise.
Turning a yellow spot into the sun
While you might think turning a yellow spot into the sun is mainly about strong execution, it’s equally about inventiveness and vision. There are situations where I wouldn’t have been able to describe what the person ended up creating. I had a version of what “great” looked like in my mind—and they surpassed it in ways I wouldn’t have been able to articulate in advance.
Arielle because Balsamiq is a newsletter sponsor. She shared a story that’s an example of turning a yellow spot into the sun. Here’s what she said:
“Something I did that completely changed my career in its early years: I kept a work journal. I noted down decisions I made as an IC and manager, decisions my managers made, the outcomes, the impact, and what I learned. I wrote down those "inside thoughts" we all have during meetings. I wrote down the advice I HATED and why, as well as the helpful stuff. I wrote down pivotal interactions with clients, peers, leaders, and direct reports. I wrote down specific phrases different leaders liked to use. It was almost scientific—I applied basic tactics I learned in science/psychology classes about field observation. I still reference that journal to this day.”
Most people in her shoes would have said, “I need a mentor. I need someone to teach me strategy. I need support. I need to ask execs to explain their decisions and get their feedback.” Not Arielle. Arielle took a little (i.e. the lived experiences she was getting on the job, like all her peers)—and she turned it into a lot.
There is no set of rules (beyond the first principles I cover here each week) to memorize. It’s the same foundational principles, like knowing your assets/levers/constraints, asking the question behind the question, thinking rigorously, etc.
Before you move on to the next shiny object, consider if you’ve really squeezed every last drop of juice from your current endeavor.
People celebrate the strategy at the beginning and the outcome at the end, but if you look more deeply, there was usually good decision-making and craft at each step, which layered up to greatness.
That’s why turning a yellow spot into the sun isn’t only for dramatic projects. It’s equally about elevating stuff most folks think of as boring and small.
Keep an eye out for anything that makes you stop in your tracks, even small things. Note what makes it feel magical and add it to your mental swipe file.
Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress
Gen Z faces a double disruption: AI-driven technological change and institutional instability
Three distinct Gen Z cohorts have emerged, each with different relationships to digital reality
A version of the barbell strategy is splitting career paths between "safety seekers" and "digital gamblers"
Our fiscal reality is quite stark right now, and that is shaping how young people see opportunities
When I talk to young people from New York or Louisiana or Tennessee or California or DC or Indiana or Massachusetts about their futures, they're not just worried about finding jobs, they're worried about whether or not the whole concept of a "career" as we know it will exist in five years.
When a main path to financial security comes through the algorithmic gods rather than institutional advancement (like when a single viral TikTok can generate more income than a year of professional work) it fundamentally changes how people view everything from education to social structures to political systems that they’re apart of.
Gen Z 1.0: The Bridge Generation: This group watched the digital transformation happen in real-time, experiencing both the analog and internet worlds during formative years. They might view technology as a tool rather than an environment. They're young enough to navigate digital spaces fluently but old enough to remember alternatives. They (myself included) entered the workforce during Covid and might have severe workplace interaction gaps because they missed out on formative time during their early years.
Gen Z 1.5: The Covid Cohort: This group hit major life milestones during a global pandemic. They entered college under Trump but graduated under Biden. This group has a particularly complex relationship with institutions. They watched traditional systems bend and break in real-time during Covid, while simultaneously seeing how digital infrastructure kept society functioning.
Gen Z 2.0: The Digital Natives: This is the first group that will be graduate into the new digital economy. This group has never known a world without smartphones. To them, social media could be another layer of reality. Their understanding of economic opportunity is completely different from their older peers.
Gen Z 2.0 doesn't just use digital tools differently, they understand reality through a digital-first lens. Their identity formation happens through and with technology.
Technology enables new forms of value exchange, which creates new economic possibilities so people build identities around these possibilities and these identities drive development of new technologies and the cycle continues.
different generations don’t just use different tools, they operate in different economic realities and form identity through fundamentally different processes. Technology is accelerating differentiation. Economic paths are becoming more extreme. Identity formation is becoming more fluid.
I wrote a very long piece about why Trump won that focused on uncertainty, structural affordability, and fear - and that’s what the younger Gen Z’s are facing. Add AI into this mix, and the rocky path gets rockier. Traditional professional paths that once promised stability and maybe the ability to buy a house one day might not even exist in two years. Couple this with increased zero sum thinking, a lack of trust in institutions and subsequent institutional dismantling, and the whole attention economy thing, and you’ve got a group of young people who are going to be trying to find their footing in a whole new world. Of course you vote for the person promising to dismantle it and save you.
gen z doesn't exist
idle gaze 071: rotting upstream
Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION
Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy Analysis: Trump's administrative actions and policy decisions are primarily driven by a strategy to reshape American culture rather than achieve specific policy outcomes, using controversial decisions to dominate public discourse and shift cultural narratives.
- The article analyzes Trump's policy approach as primarily a cultural strategy rather than traditional policy-making
Key aspects of this cultural policy approach:
- Focuses on highly visible, controversial decisions that generate widespread discussion
- Prioritizes cultural messaging over policy effectiveness or implementation
- Aims to control ideological agenda through rapid, multiple policy announcements
- Doesn't require policies to be legal, practical, or even implemented to achieve cultural impact
Specific examples:
- Executive orders against DEI and affirmative action as first actions
- Proposed renaming of Dulles Airport
- Bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore
- Tariff threats against Canada and Mexico
- Changes to federal employment structure
- Elimination of Black History Month at Department of Defense
- Targeting of US AID
- Nomination of RFK Jr.
Strategic elements:
- Uses polarization to guarantee at least one-third public support
- Deliberately chooses well-known targets (like Canada/Mexico) for maximum cultural impact
- Creates debates that delegitimize existing institutions
- "Floods the zone" with multiple controversies to maintain constant cultural dialogue
Author's analysis:
- Strategy doesn't require coordinated planning
- Works through spontaneous order of competing interests
- Relies on three factors:
- Conflicting interest groups
- Competition for Trump's attention
- Trump's belief in cultural issues' importance
Effectiveness factors:
- Leverages internet-intensive, attention-based media environment
- Creates disorganization among opponents
- Uses negative contagion to reinforce cultural shifts
- Prioritizes cultural impact over policy success
I Think People Are Perverts
I hate the embarrassment that people in this country have around art. I hate the word “pretentious”, especially. I am not against skepticism, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. It’s one thing to criticise pretension when it serves to hide a lack of substance, but we have long since lost the plot about what the word “pretentious” even means. It has become a cudgel, a pernicious rejection of the idea that art should “mean” anything at all beyond entertainment. This kneejerk anti-intellectualism that manifests most often among the “let people enjoy things” crowd, who take gleeful pride in their ignorance and condescension towards any art that aims to broaden horizons or break rules. People who treat art like customer service, like an artist is a DJ you’ve hired for a wedding to only take requests.
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Mark Sabino argues that a significant cultural "Vibe Shift" has occurred, marked by regression and conservatism that wasn't sudden but built gradually through passive consumption habits and phrases like "Let people enjoy things" and "It's not that deep," which have undermined critical thinking and enabled regressive mindsets
His worlds can be isolated, smothering, grating, haunting, bleak, warm, familiar, alien, all at once. They are never dull and they are never someone else’s. Never sacrificing his weirdness, his staunch outlooks on life, or his vision, you can feel his fingerprints on everything he made, because nobody else possibly could have. Sometimes annoying with how opaquely abstract they can be, but never in a cynical way. He had a laser precise understanding of his control over an audience, and explored all the extremes that come with that. He wove dark, brutal, sometimes cruel tapestries of our own psyches and displayed them back to us with white glove care.
Despite being viewed as abstract or avant garde, there is an inescapable Americana to his work, with all of its horrific blemishes and stunning beauty, hand in hand just like the country itself.
Lynch’s art is uncomfortable, uncompromising, but never uncaring. Frigid surreality that could only be a product of warm humanity. Darkness will always coupled with light. After all, nightmares are still dreams.
I would argue that the core tenets of the average American consumer mindset in 2025, the perfect encapsulations of the noxious attitudes that led us to where we are now, come in the form of two particular phrases that have been parroted ad nauseam the last few years.
The first of which is the classic, “Let people enjoy things.” Deconstructing it, it really defines the entire first half of the decade in more ways than one. An invisible straw-man evil big Other that somehow controls whether or not people can “have fun”, a childish temper tantrum thrown by people still getting what they want caused by having to face any form of critical thinking for doing so, a shrieking demand for more pacification, it really has it all. Is it fine for people to have hobbies and interests and passions that don’t align with yours? Absolutely.
There is a large, crucial difference between “letting someone” enjoy something, and negligently allowing something toxic to fester and gradually spread untreated like ignored black mold. Our modern narcissism and individualism have made people so entrenched in their demands for consumption, that it’s hard to imagine who even is not letting people enjoy things at this point.
The all-but-hedonistic behavior of our modern day certainly doesn’t reflect a culture of people not being allowed to enjoy things, but rather one that wants to be able to enjoy things without having to think about it. Any sort of opposing belief, or conscious step back from the raging maw of consumption is met with complete indignation, as if their right to slop is being infringed upon.
Alternatively, chances for maturation or growth get flippantly put off for some other time that never comes, a complete refusal to actually analyze our relationship to the way we operate.
This brings us to the second defining phrase of the times that I’d like to break down, one that is constantly coupled with the former, the oft-repeated, aggressively vapid, “It’s not that deep.”
Part reaction to the supposed “intellectualism” and woke-ism of the 2010s, part rejection of personal responsibility for one’s own habits and actions, it most succinctly sums up the prevailing attitudes that have dictated the course of the Biden and now Trump 2.0 years. If our beautiful and twisted history has taught us anything, it’s that things are usually always that deep, but somehow we’ve began plugging our ears to that fact. It is a frankly dangerous indicator of the median population’s attitude towards growth or challenging oneself in any way.
In the realm of media, this rejection of the inherent depth of things has completely altered people’s understanding about those things. If one’s own scope of something is minimized, anything outside of that scope is easier to be written off as antagonistic, foreign, pretentious, or any other label that leads to dismissal. Valid, formal criticism, (sometimes even from a place of love!), gets brushed off as “hating” because the idea that someone thought about something in a deeper way and wasn’t pleased with what they found is abrasive to those unwilling to explore that same level of depth.
Additionally, this phrase has been the perfect excuse as evil rhetorics are unconsciously spread through seemingly innocuous or lighthearted means. “It’s just a meme, it’s not that deep.” quickly turns to “How did this propaganda spread so fast?”. Through the first 5 years of our decade, we have gradually let it become defined by half gestures and “meh” reactions, a drab grey monocultural sludge, and then have the audacity to wonder how it got that way. We let it slip away ourselves through embracing memetic psyops, “gotta hand it to ‘em”s and "letting people have fun”. Well now they’re having their fun, the question is, do you think they’ll return that favor to you?
Giant swaths of the population have both figuratively and literally thrown their masks away, and are perfectly dumbed down and pacified to be absolutely steamrolled by a whole new wave of regression and recession.
At the time of writing this, Tiktok has been banned and subsequently hours later unbanned, all with Donald Trump’s name fully plastered over the entire ordeal, in what can only come across as a very obvious ploy to swing more gullible idiots into supporting him. The problem with this blatant grab to try and become a hero of a ban that he initially pushed for however, is that it’s working scarily well. The tectonic shift that has been building steadily throughout the course of the failure of the Biden era has finally come for its biggest payoff yet. Capitalizing on people’s COVID fried, goldfish sized memories in order to continue to innocuously shift people right into submission.
The biggest takeaway from the election and gradual Vibe Shift is the powers that be realizing they had more numbers than they thought, that the middle of the bell curve is infinitely more manipulatable than expected. Either directly through propaganda, or indirectly through desensitization via prolonged exposure to the most concentrated, hallucinogenic stupidity available.
If a gun were being pointed in our face, why would we argue that it’s only harmful if someone pulled the trigger.
Another noticeable symptom of this mode of behavior we have fallen into is the warping of what used to be considered “playing devil’s advocate”, and how it has impacted the way we digest and talk about art.
Similar to the attitudes surrounding fast fashion, somewhere along the line people stopped caring about trying to be better than the Mall, even going so far as to fight on the Mall’s behalf out of pure, empty contrarianism. Popularity took the reins as the de-facto measurement of quality, the belief was planted that the mainstream has our artistic best interests in mind, and people militantly ride for that belief despite decades of proof of the opposite. Not knowing nor caring that they’re secretly advocating for overall worse quality of experiences for themselves.
Too many people want to play devil’s advocate but don’t possess the depth of knowledge, the insight, or nuance to do so, so they wind up just playing devil instead, blindly defending degradation rather than express a bit of concern for the way things are going.
It has brought us to where we are now, a legion of people ready to die on the hill of slop, so as not to make any ripples, without even wanting to know if there can be anything better than the lowest common denominator what was shoved down their throats. Taking the sides of the rich people and giant brands that want to give the consumer nothing above mediocrity. These people and places don’t deserve our benefit of the doubt, because they’ve already won.
Vehemently and vocally rejecting that mainstream and embracing what we know to actually be cool. The time for passivity is over, because this continued sliding by the mainstream is active. We know we can be smarter, more conscious consumers, aware of what’s better than the mall or the radio or the pointed propagandized memes on tiktok. We know there’s more rich experiences to be had, art to discover, statements to make, ways to expand our thought that will not be presented to us on a silver platter by giant corporations or industry machines. We can speak with our eyes, ears, voices, and most importantly wallets. If something sucks, say it and stand on it, because it is far too easy now to succumb to the “well everybody’s doing it” mentality.
My tolerance for bad faith devil’s advocate arguments that only contribute to spin the wheels of progress in place is gone. We have only a short amount of time on this earth and I don’t intend to waste it watching that window of opportunity be pissed away by someone else.
Every time you open your mouth is an opportunity to say something new, something of worth, and I do not want to waste even one moment. It’s time to get serious and realize yes it is that deep. It always has been. I can’t say for certain exactly what this counter-culture will manifest as or even look like specifically, but I do have faith that something can and will emerge. There is far too much talent, energy, emotion, conviction, and spirit out there to not.
Column: Donald Trump is president again. Did you feel the vibe shift?
Pre-Trump American conservatism was dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: limited government, cultural traditionalism, antiabortion politics, fiscal rectitude and free market economics. Now, I’m the first to concede the right often fell short of its ideals, but showing rhetorical fealty to the ideals was the binding firmament of conservatism. Those commitments still get some lip-service, but there’s no denying that on all of these fronts, loyalty to Trump is the more pressing litmus test. This has freed up Trump to move leftward on abortion, entitlements and economic policy generally.
Trump didn’t merely shatter the consensus on the right, he shattered the political consensus generally. Or maybe social media and those other trends were the battering rams and Trump merely benefited from the new landscape.
the bedrock assumptions about how politics “works” and the rules for what a politician can or can’t do, no longer seem operative. We’re all familiar with how his behavior has demonstrated that, but it’s also illuminated that the electorate itself is just different today. The FDR coalition is gone, the white working class is now operationally conservative, and the Latino and Black working classes are now seen as gettable by Republicans. The assumption that they are “natural Democrats” was obliterated in this election. Republicans have figured out how to talk to those constituencies.
We Don't Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.
Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or destined to fail. The real challenge? Building something better.
The cynic sees a proposal for change and immediately lists why it won’t work. They’re usually right about specific failure modes — systems are complex, and failure has many mothers. But being right about potential problems differs from being right about the whole.
The cynical position feels sophisticated. It signals worldliness, experience, and a certain battle-hardened wisdom. “Oh, you sweet summer child,” the cynic says, “I’ve seen how these things really work.”
But what if this sophistication is itself a form of naïveté?
Cynicism comes with hidden taxes. Every time we default to assuming the worst, we pay in missed opportunities, reduced social trust, and diminished creative capacity. These costs compound over time, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which cynical expectations shape cynical realities.
Pattern recognition is valuable — we should learn from history and past failures. But pattern recognition becomes pattern imprisonment when it blinds us to genuinely new possibilities.
Why spend years building something that could fail when you could spend an afternoon critiquing others’ attempts and look just as smart? The cynical stance is intellectually rewarding but culturally corrosive.
The alternative to cynicism isn’t unquestioning optimism. It’s more nuanced: a clear-eyed recognition of problems coupled with the conviction that improvement is possible. Call it pragmatic meliorism — the belief that while perfect solutions may not exist, better ones do.
things are broken, AND they can be fixed; people are flawed AND capable of growth; systems are complex AND can be improved.
Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed.
But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.
Not all domains benefit equally from cynical analysis. Some areas — scientific investigation, financial planning, and security systems — benefit from rigorous skepticism. Others — creative endeavors, relationship building, social movements — often suffer from it.
What would it look like to embrace pragmatic meliorism instead of cynicism?
Acknowledging problems while focusing on solutions
Learning from history without being imprisoned by it
Maintaining high standards while accepting incremental progress
Combining skeptical analysis with constructive action
When you feel the pull of cynicism, ask yourself: Is this helping? Is this default skepticism making you more effective or just more comfortable? Are you choosing the easy path of criticism over the harder path of creation?
Zuckerberg officially gives up
I floated a theory of mine to Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel on this week’s episode of Panic World that content moderation, as we’ve understood, it effectively ended on January 6th, 2021. You can listen to the whole episode here, but the way I look at it is that the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.
After 2021, the major tech platforms we’ve relied on since the 2010s could no longer pretend that they would ever be able to properly manage the amount of users, the amount of content, the amount of influence they “need” to exist at the size they “need” to exist at to make the amount of money they “need” to exist.
Under Zuckerberg’s new “censorship”-free plan, Meta’s social networks will immediately fill up with hatred and harassment. Which will make a fertile ground for terrorism and extremism. Scams and spam will clog comments and direct messages. And illicit content, like non-consensual sexual material, will proliferate in private corners of networks like group messages and private Groups. Algorithms will mindlessly spread this slop, boosted by the loudest, dumbest, most reactionary users on the platform, helping it evolve and metastasize into darker, stickier social movements. And the network will effectively break down. But Meta is betting that the average user won’t care or notice. AI profiles will like their posts, comment on them, and even make content for them. A feedback loop of nonsense and violence. Our worst, unmoderated impulses, shared by algorithm and reaffirmed by AI. Where nothing has to be true and everything is popular.
I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone
Crucially, this was never proven in court. And if Apple settle the case it never will be.
Let’s think this through. For the accusation to be true, Apple would need to be recording those wake word audio snippets and transmitting them back to their servers for additional processing (likely true), but then they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks such that next time you view an ad on your phone the information is available to help select the relevant ad.
Why would Apple do that? Especially given both their brand and reputation as a privacy-first company combined with the large amounts of product design and engineering work they’ve put into preventing apps from doing exactly this kind of thing by enforcing permission-based capabilities and ensuring a “microphone active” icon is available at all times when an app is listening in.