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đź”’ The Warlord Internet
It’s kind of funny how the trajectory of the internet wound up following the plot of the Mad Max movies in an analogy that’s only a little bit silly.  Those movies are often used as a reference for a lawless post-apocalyptic anarchy, but the story only started off
Civil War MAGA: Why They're Fighting
Well, the most predictable thing ever has begun happening—the self-driven implosion of the Trump administration. Everyone knew it, I knew it, the only question was how many months it would be into Trump’s second term before the cracks started showing.  The answer, beating everyone’s most pessimistic estimates,
đź”’ I Am Once Again Begging the Left Not to Get Baited Into Conspiracy Thinking
Among the increasingly unhinged (decreasingly hinged?) antics of our friend Elon Musk lately, one recent debacle stood out from the rest: The curious and absurd case of Adrian Dittmann.  For those with the good sense to have no idea what I’m talking about, for months the surprisingly robust community
Real Time True Crime: The Unsatisfying and Often Damaging Outcomes of Internet Sleuthing
Within an hour of Luigi Mangione’s name being released, the whole world was scouring his biography. What people found didn’t make the kind of sense they thought it would.  A wealthy heir to an Italian-American real estate fortune, Mangione looked up to figures as diverse as Sam Harris,
đź”’ Civil War MAGA: Why They're Fighting
Well, the most predictable thing ever has begun happening—the self-driven implosion of the Trump administration. Everyone knew it, I knew it, the only question was how many months it would be into Trump’s second term before the cracks started showing.  The answer, beating everyone’s most pessimistic estimates,
Jester's Privilege: A 2024 Year in Review
As the sun completes another orbit around the Earth in this upside down and backward reality I find myself reaching a milestone in writing this column, or newsletter, or whatever you want to call it. For a full calendar year I’ve managed to crank out an entire essay every
Being a Writer Means Learning to Survive Platform Collapse
Late December is the time of year, I think, when people have the least interest in reading newsletters and I have the least time to write them, so let’s see out the year on a more personal note than usual.  I’ve gained a lot of subscribers this year
đź”’ Real Time True Crime: The Unsatisfying and Often Damaging Outcomes of Internet Sleuthing
Within an hour of Luigi Mangione’s name being released, the whole world was scouring his biography. What people found didn’t make the kind of sense they thought it would.  A wealthy heir to an Italian-American real estate fortune, Mangione looked up to figures as diverse as Sam Harris,
đź”’ Being a Writer Means Learning to Survive Platform Collapse
Late December is the time of year, I think, when people have the least interest in reading newsletters and I have the least time to write them, so let’s see out the year on a more personal note than usual.  I’ve gained a lot of subscribers this year
Meet America's Terrifying Line of Defense Against the Next Pandemic
Hard as it may be t believe, the most frightening thing about Trump’s second term isn’t Donald Trump. Shit, I don’t even know if he cracks the top five most frightening things. If history is going to repeat itself in the next four years then the sequel
The Hard Problem of Social Media: Run Rabbit Run
Well hello again, December. This is the one year anniversary of the most popular thing I’ve ever written on the Substack platform and it was about how that platform is going to be in trouble if it didn’t figure out what it wanted to be: Now we’re
Fire Sale at the End of History
America may not have come to terms with it yet, but you’ve just witnessed the most spectacular and consequential episode of Mythbusters in history, and Adam and Jamie weren’t even there to guide us through it. To explain: One of the most important things that the United States
Meet the Real Elites
The pains of this election come in waves like the plagues of Egypt. After the initial shock and horror died down, next comes the insufferable smugness of the pro-Trump independent journalists. If you spend any time on social media platforms amidst the protruding skeletal frame of legacy media’s beached
Relax - America Will Probably Just Collapse Now
Well, not “relax,” but you’ll see what I mean.  So America just overwhelmingly voted for a guy who admires Hitler. That’s not great! When Hitler, the actual one, was voted into Germany’s government he neither had a history of praising Hitler (maybe technically) nor got anywhere near
The Silicon Valley Insurrection: Take Back the Internet
First of all, some news: This column and newsletter are now also being mirrored on Ghost, a rival service to Substack. Many Substack users will remember Ghost as one of the major alternatives that several big-name writers such as Ed Zitron and Platformer moved to earlier in the year out
Well, Here We Are Again, Yanks: A Foreigner's Perspective on What You're About to Do
All right, America, here we are again. I guess we’re fucking doing this. It’s October 2016 again and it’s back to coin-flip odds between sanity and madness. I often find myself hoping that my talking about American politics so much doesn’t count as foreign election interference
The Betrayal of Carl Sagan and the Rebirth of Cecil Rhodes
“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” — Cecil Rhodes, from his last
No, They'll Never Believe in Climate Change: How Science Becomes Political
As the southern United States picks up the pieces after being smashed by two insanely powerful hurricanes in under a fortnight, the political discourse is tenser than ever, which is exactly what nobody wanted going into an already terrifying election. Every year there is a brand new “biggest storm ever
The Censorship Grievance Industrial Complex: Part 2 - The War on Truth
Last week the independent journalist Matt Taibbi spoke at an event that was essentially a softcore Trump rally. It wasn’t a Jonestown tent revival, it was a pop-up market stall just outside of Jonestown, enticing the public with a taste of the goods and the promise of some much
The Censorship Grievance Industrial Complex: Part 1 - The Conservative Media Paradox
All right, so Matt Walsh has another deplatformed documentary out that you’re not allowed to see. This one is in cinemas, too, so it’s even more widely unavailable than his previous film, What Is a Woman?, which was so blacklisted that Elon Musk, the new owner/operator of
How to Engineer a Moral Panic For Fun and Profit
I honestly never thought that anything was going to surprise me anymore about US politics, let alone shock me. There’s always been some degree of plausible deniability involved in the insinuation that Donald Trump and his party are “racist”—not that I’m among the deniers (on a scale
Capitalism Can't Figure Out How to Operate in a World Without Advertising
As many of you know by now, I’m somewhat critical of capitalism, which is why it might surprise many of you to learn that, in my weaker moments, I yearn for the return of the days of relentless, ubiquitous advertising. I’m not just referring to some of those
The Myth of "Lowering the Temperature" of Western Politics
On July 13, at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, the then-only-presumptive Republican nominee for president, a guy named Donald Trump who might be familiar to you if you follow the news closely, was shot in the ear by a kid who managed to sneak a gun onto the roof of a