Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as Americaâs deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.
It pains me to agree with her because I really dislike her appearances on Real Time, but I bought this book to learn about opinions I donât necessarily agree with.
A press that is so solidly on the side of that powerful few, so solidly of it, that afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfort-able, will hasten our demise. And that should terrify us all.
She loses me here. The press, or at least every journalist I know, is not on the side of the elite.
Theyâre noble, fiercely curious people who insist on interrogating the powerful.
But thatâs not to say they didnât lose the plot in the last decade. I think a lot of journalists, because theyâre largely all from an educated class, were imbued with certain ideals. Ideals that, as a gay man, benefit me personally.
But perhaps those ideals didnât reflect those of the larger populace.
Thatâs a tough thing to realize. I am of the generation of journalists that grew up in this era, and I want to believe that what I knew was good and just and true.
But I canât continue to live in a world thatâs so painfully incongruent with this one Iâm currently living in.
In other words, I was wrong.
Thereâs a lifetime of heartbreak in that admission.
You canât stop the flow of time. But you can count the costs. And I think a lot of people, for reasons I canât quite make out, are threatened by the idea of counting the costs when it comes to change. Thatâs what Iâm asking you to do today: count the costs. Count the costs with me.
I can put my finger on two things that have meaningfully changed in the last 25 years: my age and the internet.Â
I was thirteen at the turn of the millennium. I came of age in the 90s, and I too have this romantic nostalgia for that time. Issues of Star Wars: Insider delivered to the mailbox, music on CDs from record stores, the nascent internet and action figures and trips to DQ and Memorial Day spent at the family cemetery. Things felt slower then, and they were. The speed at which things change, at which culture is grown and shaped and discoursed and discarded, at which information flows, was so much slower then.
Now things feel fraught. Now things feel fragile. Now things feel on edge and tense and anxious and uncertain. And maybe they aren't â maybe they just feel that way. But why would they feel that way? What's changed?Â
My age and the internet. The latter changed everything, and not for the better. Sure, things might seem better â things might objectively even be better. But things don't feel better.Â
âŠwe are now faced with a new authoritarianism. The tech industry, once able to peacefully bury its head in the golden sands of California, has woken up to its most important choice: whether to ally with the powers of the stateâas Big Tech did during the COVID era, becoming the useful pawn of an authoritarian censorship apparatusâor to rapidly course-correct and ally itself with decentralized authority.
There is no greater decentralized authority than that of the family. And the philosophy of the early internet is at its nature, too, one of decentralization. It prizes creative destructionâbirth and death and birth againâof ideas and companies, and the freedom that comes from ensuring that no central authority can ever control, stifle, or break the long arc of creation and innovation. This is fundamentally the philosophy of technology, and one we must ensure is embedded in our most consequential technologies going forward.
So far, so good.
We must also normalize working from home as a benefit for mothers of young children. Not a right, but a benefit. It is more important than fertility benefits, maternity benefits, child care benefits. I single out mothers here because we canât ignore the trends showing that women workers are essential to the growth of the American economyâand we desperately need more of those working women to become mothers.
As someone raised in part by a mom who worked from home, I agree.
I was recently asked how I would make motherhood high status if given the opportunity, and many people were surprised by my suggestions. I didnât mention tax incentives, reducing the cost of childbirth, or increasing the housing supplyâall important parts of a pro-family agenda that others are better equipped to discuss. Instead, my suggestions were small, focused on seemingly insignificant changes to the culture, which can have an outsize impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it, the operating principle goes. This means that we need a society that praises the family in little ways, both on screen and off.
I would argue that technology is already doing a better job of this, as many platforms and popular influencers now celebrate motherhood, homeschooling or family-centric ways of living. But the physical world can help signify these priorities as well, through things like changing the name of âcarpool lanesâ to family lanes, making it a norm that families always board first in all forms of transportation, and ensuring that parking lots have family-reserved parking for the safety of mothers and children.
Nope. She lost me.
I've long had complicated thoughts on the concept of family. As a gay man, I've grown to resent the privileges granted to people who, by virtue of who they fuck, have kids (i.e. straight people). All those little concessions made for moms and dads and their children. Parents get away with murder in this culture, and the entitlement we teach them to expect is an astounding thing to behold.
Of course, my friends with kids donât see it. It's like that analogy of culture being the water a fish swims in: the fish doesnât know what water is, having always lived underwater, until itâs pulled from it. In the same way, weâre only made aware of our culture in its absence. Parents come of age expecting that the rest of us will make thousands of little compromises on their behalf. Not knowing any other way, those parents come to believe they deserve those concessions.
But as a dear friend once put it, "how is it my fault you fucked up your birth control?"
And yet my thoughts on the matter have evolved. I've learned to recognize the importance of strong family units in a healthy society. As I've grown, I've come to realize my immediate family unit was the greatest privilege I've been given. Â As a direct consequence, my childhood was idyllic. I owe much of my sense of security, safety, and confidence to my parents.
I've noticed too that as I get older, the friends that tend to really 'stick' are those that come from similar backgrounds â nuclear families (though not exclusively) with two parents who remain married (though there are some exceptions). It's not something I was conscious of when choosing my friends, but I wonder how this shared background has enabled certain relationships to last while others seem to fall away?
As I travel around the country, I meet a lot of angry, damaged, hurt people. The influence of trauma on the American public cannot be overstated, and I'm shocked by the trauma some have had to endure. Abuse, neglect, poverty, violence⊠It's astounding what so many people carry around in their minds and in their bodies.
While I once held resentment toward the privileging of 'family' in our culture, a bit of reflection helped me realize that I myself owe everything to a strong, healthy family â so why wouldn't I want to support the development of that same thing for everyone else?
Still, I have my limits, and I draw the line at âfamily lanes.â
But itâs too easy to say that these people are simply trolling and leave it at that. A good trollâand as someone who has done quite a bit of trolling myself, I have a deep appreciation for the art formâmakes an underlying point, stimulates thought, provokes serious discussion and, best-case scenario, is open to interpretation. Worst-case scenario, it confuses the weaponization of taboos for the taboos themselves, and instead of resisting their weaponization, winds up denying their original purpose.
Nazi salutes are therefore deeply offensive to me on two levels. I abhor the underlying ideology such gestures represent. But also I think theyâre incredibly lazyâthe cheapest imaginable way to get a rise out of people.
That said, even the crudest trolls have a message. With the recent spate of stiff-armed salutes, what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize itâs no longer in the opposition.
Americans unlucky enough to grow up in more recently built towns and exurbs are stuck having their entire lives defined by the spatial needs of cars. Their neighborhood density is low, their mobility options are limited, and the most urban-esque experience they ever get growing up might be playing with friends on the pavement of a suburban cul-de-sac. Never will they âwalkâ to a âcorner store.â Always will they drive to a Target. If there were ever any beautiful nature along the way, now there is only highway and billboards and shredded semi truck tires on the side of the road.
When I graduated high school, I was one of those people that got the hell out of their hometown. I decamped for college, then for a city, then another city, and finally the mountains of the West. When I left, I had a chip on my shoulder, convinced that those of us that leave are somehow more than those who don't.
But as time passed and the years turned into decades, I reconsidered this position. People that stay must surely have something those of us Leavers do not. Wisdom, an intimacy, a folksy understanding of place. It's simply too easy for us Leavers to think we are better than Stayers.
But I've been back in my home region for several months and, well, there's no other honest way to put it â this place is shitty.
Not that there aren't good things about it. Any person worth their mettle can find beauty anywhere.
But there's something about this place, on the outer edges of a large American city, that's undeniably anemic. The people, the land, the culture⊠it's all so flat, boring, dull.
The landscape, mostly farmland, has long been stripped of anything natural. Even farmland, once the provenance of farmers, is now just industrial agriculture â as far as the eye can see, petro-chemical fertilizers sprayed on corn and soy, neither grown for human consumption.
And the above paragraph is the perfect crystallization of the people and culture.Â
The trouble, or so Iâve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it. To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, thatâs the end of the story. Nothing to be done. For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die. And letting them die is exactly what weâre doing.
At some point you have to admit that your preference for altruistic neglect is still just a preference for neglect.
My culture cannot handle nuance.
Several decades ago, about the time I was born, there was a push to empty and close âinstitutions,â known otherwise as âasylums.â Abuse, neglect, and a lack of accountability were rampant in these places, and shuttering them and changing our understanding and expectations of healthcare for the disabled or mentally unwell was an unequivocal good.
But what did we replace that system with?
For those with money and time, assisted living facilities or home care is an option. But what about everyone else?
With mental institutions banished to the dustbin of history, they were never replaced with a viable, more humane alternative.
That we feel repulsed by the alternative to our constitutional democracy, having seen it up close, is a very good sign. In this sense, hypocrisy plays an important part in the moral formation of us fallen creatures. Pretending to be a better person than you are is a pretty good way to become a better person than you are. So letâs allow each other the space to do that. Letâs take one anotherâs embrace of the boundaries of our politics seriously, even if the people you oppose arenât about to confess all their past sins.Â
Sometimes I think my lifetime was front-loaded with goodness; that so much of life until now has been good, and at some point, this canât possibly hold. The excess and craven want of my culture will finally crest and begin to devour itself. In doing so, we find a truth weâve worked for so long to avoid.
Weâre out of balance, and imbalance doesnât last.
Honestly, what makes me more depressed: that a course correction sure feels as though itâs on the horizon? Or that it might not be?
For graduates it has become a game of âmusical chairsâ where you pay a huge sum to buy a ticket to play the game (University costs), but the number of chairs (graduate level jobs) remain the same. As the number of players increases year on year, massively in just a few decades, supply way exceeds demand. So graduates have to up their game and pay for another even more expensive ticket to get a Masters. Even worse, those who go on to do PhDs find there are no academic jobs available, as again supply has exceeded demand for many years. Graduates in the social sciences and humanities are particularly vulnerable but Turchinâs point is that, for a rapidly increasing graduate population there is a precarious future and lots of debt. This may be exacerbated by AI, as it eats into cognitive work, so has that group as its sweet spot.
This frustrated aspirant class, for Turchin, is dangerous. Always isolated from working class people, they have little in common with the non-graduate class or ideas like collective bargaining and trade unions. They have the time and support from their propertied parents to become activists and protestors and often pick up causes on campus around cancel culture, climate change, transgender issues and social justice. Poverty is not the problem, recognition of identity is.
I find myself in this "precariat" class. Most of my friends are in this group, too. We went to college with the promise it would lead to better jobs, higher wages, more social mobility, yet most of my friends are burdened with crippling debt.
I'm an anomaly. Early investments in the market have stablilized my economic position, and while I have no debt, financially, I'm solidly lower-middle class. But I own my home and have non-essential assets I could sell in an emergency. I live on less than $25k a year, but without debt, this is not diffcult.Â
I've watched identity politics take hold in my cohort. It captured me for a time, too, and I'm sure still animates me in some ways. I'm embarrassed by my participation in this push to focus so intently on identity, and I'm horrified at how so many of my contemporaries still behave. Compassion for others â those of a different class, gender, or belief â has disappeared in the face of a relentless focus on our differences. Tellingly, so many people closest to my ideological home â liberal, (ex?)Democrat, progressive â have adopted the worst habits of the political opposition. They've become closed off to new perspectives, refusing to engage with the ideas of a person on the basis of their gender, their race, their class. Worse, they still claim to be liberal, though this behavior is the antithesis of liberalism.Â
What is worrying is how easily we all march lock-step into the future, even when the signs of discontent are ringing in our ears. We are like those cartoon figures who run off the edge of the cliff and hang smiling in mid-air, before the fall. We don't adjust or adapt, we simply behave according to the groupthink of the socio-economic group we find ourselves in. The trick is to sit back, look, listen and read people like Turchin. You don't have to agree with him but it is voices like his that at least provide substance to predictions, not about 10nyears [sic] from now but next year!
This is a pretty damn salient analogy. Our current system of capitalism heavily favors those with capital, i.e. shareholders. If you have money in the stock market, you're the beneficiary of capitalism. Instead of money going to the employees of a company, that money is funneled to those that own stock in said company, i.e. "maximizing shareholder value." Those at the top make more and more off the labor of the working class.
This system has to change for our culture to avoid a painful (and maybe bloody) revolution. Wealth being funneled to the upper classes needs to be given to the working class, as they rightly deserve. It is, after all, their labor. But politically, this redistribution of wealth has been branded a handout, welfare, socialism. Tellingly, Republicans have convinced their own working-class constituents to vote against their best interest by making "socialism" such a toxic word.
These days, nuance has no place in America. That has something to do with our media and something to do with our level of education. It's remarkably difficult to explain the financial system or the stock market, and attempting to explain the nuances of capitalism, socialism, and how the two are blended to form a more equal, fair, just society is near impossible. Dependent on their political affiliation, people are triggered by the mere mention of either word and conversations about the nuances of policy become impossible.
Even when it was no better than it ought to have been, however, there was a freewheeling joy to the early Expanded Universe which is poignant to look back upon from the perspective of these latter days of Star Wars, when everything about the franchise is meticulously managed from the top down. The Expanded Universe, by contrast, was a case of by the fans, for the fans. With new movies the stuff of dreams only, fans painted every corner of the universe in vivid colors of their own, then thrilled as this content appeared in actual book and comic stores with the actual Star Wars logo on the front of it. The Expanded Universe could be cheesy, but it was never cynical. One could argue that it felt more like Star Wars â the original Star Wars of simple summertime fun, the one that didnât take itself so gosh-darn seriously â than anything that has appeared under the name since 1998.
I couldn't have written it better myself.
Students of history like to say that every golden age carries within it the seeds of its demise. That rings especially true when it comes to the heyday of the Expanded Universe: the very popularity of the many new Star Wars novels, comics, and games reportedly did much to convince George Lucas that it might be worth returning to Star Wars himself. And because Lucas was one of the entertainment worldâs more noted control freaks, such a return could bode no good for this giddy era of fan ownership.
We can pin the beginning of the end down to a precise date: November 1, 1994, the day on which George Lucas sat down to start writing the scripts for what would become the Star Wars prequels, going so far as to bring in a film crew to commemorate the occasion. âI have beautiful pristine yellow tablets,â he told the camera proudly, waving a stack of empty notebooks in front of its lens. âA nice fresh box of pencils. All I need is an idea.â Four and a half years later, The Phantom Menace would reach theaters, inaugurating for better or for worse â mostly for the latter, many fans would come to believe â the next era of Star Wars as a media phenomenon.
And then, eventually, came the sale to Disney, which in its quest to own all of our childhoods turned Star Wars into just another tightly controlled corporate property like any of its others. The Expanded Universe was officially put out of its misery in 2014, a decade and a half past its golden age. It continues to exist today only in the form of a handful of characters, Grand Admiral Thrawn among them, who have been co-oped by Disney and integrated into the official lore.
In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex â and by far the biggest group in the âLGBTQIA+â umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity â indeed merged it into its opposite. But they have another tea dance to get to and another Instagram vacation pic to post. Most are pathetically uninformed, or programmed by tribal insecurity to follow the queering herd.
Andrew Sullivan, yet again.
The madness of being called âLGBTQâ still makes my head spin (how can I be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender?), but stranger still is how prevalent it is among fellow gay men. Many seem to have internalized this language â this ideology â part and parcel.
And good luck saying as much out loud. Iâve been chastised, yelled at, lectured, ignored. The groupthink on this runs deep.
The Mapping Center for Evangelism and Church Growthâs founder and president Chris Cooper suggests using the app to conduct neighborly activities such as putting on a barbecue for potential converts, but scattered throughout the appâs training and promotional videos are suggestions to undertake the controversial practice of âprayerwalking.â An idea becoming increasingly popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking involves believers flooding so-called âun-Christianâ territories in order to combat âdemonic strongholds.â In practice, it varies from blessing new neighbors to gathering groups to pray in front of everything from mosques to drag bars in service of âspiritual warfare.â
I donât want to think less of these people, but they donât make it easy.
Scientists were surprised to find that people who had been eating the high-fat, high-sugar snack also had changes in how their brains learned.
While participants were having their brains scanned, the researchers had them do a basic learning task, requiring them to push a button associated with a picture when they heard certain tones. When people who had been eating the high-fat, high-sugar snack didnât get the picture they expected, their brains showed greater activity in parts involved in evaluating situations.Â
This high-sugar, high-fat diet âis changing something really basic about how we learn,â DiFeliceantonio said.Â
In a different study, four days of having a breakfast high in saturated fat and added sugar was linked to reductions in performance on some learning and memory tests, according to researchers in Australia. People who had a healthier breakfast didnât have the performance changes.
McLuhan anticipated that the electronic age would be one of constant change, such that nobody could adapt quickly enough. As a result, people would be plunged into nostalgia, and yearn for their old, solid identities.
Gilmore Girls looms large in the world of innkeeper-fluencing. âHave you wondered what Lorelai Gilmore actually does for a living?â says Caroline Cardamone, a 20-something innkeeper at a bed-and-breakfast in Wisconsin, in one of the dozens of TikToks sheâs posted about picking up breakfast burritos for guests, dusting a lot of doily-adorned wood, and doing laundry. John Lavin, who bought a century-old bed-and-breakfast in Blue Ridge, Georgia, in early COVID and soon started posting about it on TikTok, has been described by followers as âLuke Danes and Lorelai Gilmore rolled into one person.â Lavin says heâs never watched the show, but understands what theyâre getting at: âPeople project this kind of fairy-tale life.â
What concerns me about the audience for this shit is their shared point-of-reference. When our only touchstones are characters from a terrifically uninspiring television show from twenty years ago? When you can make a Gilmore Girls reference and that somehow conveys meaning?
Are we not through the looking glass when media becomes more real than reality?
The opposite to rockism is âpoptimismâ: successful music is often very good, the thinking goes, and should be treated as such. Poptimism has largely taken over music criticism. Pitchfork, a website once synonymous with snooty taste, went from reviewing Kylie Minogue as an April Foolâs joke to putting her in its âBest Songs of the 2000sâ list. A lot of pop music, Kylie included, is very good, and itâs good that it can be properly appreciated. Poptimism can also apply to childrenâs art: for example, the Studio Ghibli cartoons. Plays based on My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away are currently running or scheduled to run in London, thanks to demand from adults as much as kids. And why not, when the works in question are brimming with soul and subtlety?
I donât know whether the board was right to fire Altman. It certainly has not made a public case that would justify the decision. But the nonprofit board was at the center of OpenAIâs structure for a reason. It was supposed to be able to push the off button. But there is no off button. The for-profit proved it can just reconstitute itself elsewhere. And donât forget: Thereâs still Googleâs A.I. division and Metaâs A.I. division and Anthropic and Inflection and many others whoâve built large language models similar to GPTâ4 and are yoking them to business models similar to OpenAIâs. Capitalism is itself a kind of artificial intelligence, and itâs far further along than anything the computer scientists have yet coded. In that sense, it copied OpenAIâs code long ago.
âŠ
âŠif the capabilities of these systems continue to rise exponentially, as many inside the industry believe they will, then nothing Iâve seen in recent weeks makes me think weâll be able to shut the systems down if they begin to slip out of our control. There is no off switch.
âAm I changed? Is she changed? Was there any point to this?â Ms. Minkin said she asked herself. âI donât know that her overall opinion has changed, and I donât know that my overall opinion has changed. But maybe if weâre all softening at the hard edges, thatâs enough?â
Her voice made clear it was a question, not a conclusion.
Hundreds of people stormed the airport to greet that flightâof 45 passengers, 15 were Israeli, many of them children. âAllahu Akbar,â they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men waving Palestinian flags. On the tarmac, they attack an airport employee, who desperately explains: âThere are no passengers here anymore,â and then exclaims, âI am Muslim!â Some of the rioters demanded to examine the passports of arriving passengers, seemingly trying to identify those who were Israeli, and others searched cars as they were leaving. Another video emerged of two young boys at the airport, proudly declaring that they came to âkill Jewsâ with knives.
According to the local health ministry, more than 20 people were injured in the skirmishes. One video showed a pilot telling the passengers over the intercom to âplease stay seated and donât try to open the planeâs door. There is an angry mob outside.âÂ
This is horrifying.
Iâm ashamed to admit I still fall for the âI cant believe this is happening nowâ line of thinking. Yet I cannot believe this shit is still happening.
The danger in not being able to imagine it happening is that it then happens. October 7th is evidence of that. How, then, to demand people imagine â or even fear â the worst, so that they might remain vigilant?