Being online in this way allows me to keep my finger on the pulse of culture. Trying to make sense of how people behave online, and then writing about it, is a thing I do. (Here I am.) I have noticed an uptick in what I’m calling harm-joy. I was looking for the right word, grasping at schadenfreude, looking at its first usage and definition. And I found its closest English translation—harm-joy—more potent than the German, more spiritually aligned with this vibe shift I’ve seen online.

I wrote about Emilie Kiser a few weeks ago, which seems in hindsight a bit prescient, because shortly after Emilie was seen on a boat with her son, Teddy (“T2” on influencer snark subreddits—more on this bizarre behavior another time, I promise), not wearing a life vest. The negative commentary reached another crescendo and Emilie once again stepped away from her accounts, coming back with an apology that was inadequate for her haters: too much PR; she’s inauthentic; she should leave the internet; she should divorce her husband, etc.

Sam Kriss, in his essay about Jason Arday (a must-read), described online culture as a “reverse panopticon.” Instead of a single authority or surveillance state observing the public to enforce behavior, millions of people turn their combined gaze onto a single person at once. Put almost anyone under that level of scrutiny, Kriss argues, and the crowd will eventually find something that seems to justify the vitriol.

I want to quote him at length here because I found this so compelling:

“We’ve built this reverse panopticon where the gaze of a hundred million people converges on a single point, and it turns out all those concentrated eyeballs have the force of a ten-kilowatt laser, they start stripping off the skin, they peel a man like an orange. Put anyone you like in the machine and turn it on—vicar, imam, sweet old widower tearing up bread for the ducks with his trembling hands—and before long you will discover something that retroactively justifies putting them in the machine. But it will never be you. You get to watch as today’s subject is slowly ground down to a nub, a thin film of dust covering the bright clean mirrored room, and didn’t we see some crazy stuff inside that guy when we opened him up? Wasn’t that cool?”

And while Arday met the most bitter of ends, this internet mob violence happens all the time. It’s basically become routine—a way of being online. A micro-influencer, an ordinary person caught on video, or a public figure becomes the focus of the internet for a week, two weeks. The audience searches public records, property filings, old tweets, and family backgrounds. They compare timestamps and analyze body language in TikTok videos. The subject may have committed a genuine error, or they may simply be annoying, wealthy, unlucky, or strange.

The underlying offense matters less than the mechanics of the response. What remains consistent is the crowd’s satisfaction in the process.

This is where the distinction between schadenfreude and harm-joy becomes critical. Schadenfreude is passive. It is watching someone stumble from the sidelines and feeling a quiet, secret satisfaction. Harm-joy is active. It requires participation. In harm-joy, the pleasure comes from participating in the harm—leaving the comment, making the call to an employer, surfacing the old forum post, or building the timeline video that gets two million views.

Look at what happened with Sydney Towle, a 26-year-old creator documenting her life with terminal bile duct cancer. Because her appearance didn’t match the public’s flattened, monolithic expectation of what a dying cancer patient should look like—she still exercised, she still styled her hair, she maintained an upbeat tone—an entire subculture of anonymous viewers convinced themselves she was faking her illness. They combed through her history, demanded medical receipts, and scrutinized every available detail for evidence that she was lying. Even when her diagnosis was confirmed, the machinery of suspicion kept running. This was a group of strangers actively inserting themselves into someone else’s illness in order to prove that she is lying.

So why does this kind of participation feel so compelling? My theory is that at least some of it has to do with how powerless people feel everywhere else.

Agency requires a tangible connection between effort and result. It is the belief that your decisions alter your trajectory, that your voice impacts your community, and that the future can be shaped by your actions. And there is plenty of evidence that people feel increasingly unable to influence the institutions governing their lives.

In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey on political engagement, 85 percent of Americans said elected officials do not care what ordinary people think. Seventy percent reported feeling that average citizens have too little influence over government decisions, while only 4 percent felt the political system was working well. These numbers aren’t isolated to a single political party or demographic. They describe a population that broadly believes the political system is not particularly responsive to ordinary people.

When people exist in an environment where they cannot influence their material realities, their desire for efficacy does not vanish. It redirects into spaces where input yields immediate, visible feedback.

Social psychology gives us part of the explanation. Schadenfreude tends to intensify around envy, status comparison, and threats to self-evaluation. Seeing someone above you brought down can temporarily reduce the distance between you.

But social media adds something to this old psychological mechanism: now you can participate in the correction.

Online, you cannot lower your rent, force a vote in Congress, or guarantee your own job security. But you can join a collective push that forces a lifestyle influencer to set her account to private or lose a brand sponsorship by Monday morning. That is a real, measurable outcome. It feels like power, even if it is entirely destructive.

In my piece on Emilie Kiser, I wrote about how the infinite scroll strips human context from real lives, flattening people into narrative content. When an individual’s personal grief, marriage, or parenting decisions are consumed as content, the audience wants a clear moral order: who is innocent, who is guilty, who deserves sympathy, and who deserves punishment.

Moral clarity creates its own demand for proof. Once the crowd decides who is innocent and who is guilty, it begins assembling evidence to make that judgment feel objective. That leads directly to what I wrote about in my piece on epistemic decay—how we try to establish truth when traditional authority breaks down.

The process can look like intellectual rigor, but it also provides moral cover. If the crowd can convince itself that the subject is irredeemable, then destroying them isn’t simply a bit of online cruelty—it’s justice.

This is the ultimate illusion of harm-joy. The reverse panopticon gives every user access to the controls, but those controls only operate in one direction. Participating in someone else’s destruction doesn’t build housing, reform institutions, make work more secure, or restore trust in public life. It provides something much smaller and more immediate: proof that you can still make something happen.

That may be why harm-joy feels especially potent right now. When meaningful forms of agency become harder to access, causing a consequence can begin to feel like having power.

The danger isn’t only what this does to the person being watched, although their plight is plain to see. It is what happens to a culture when one of the easiest ways to experience your own power is by diminishing someone else’s.

But this is normal. We collectively create something like 402 million terabytes each day. Nearly every action performed through a digital device can be recorded and stored. The important change of this moment is not simply that we have more information, but that more of life can be converted into data: a song is a collection of audio features, streams, and skips; a room is a recognizable set of objects and materials (that you can shop in one click); a face is indexed as proportions, ratios, and ideal gonial or mentocervical angles.

I think this reflects a meaningful rupture with the past twenty or thirty years. Michel Foucault offered a useful term for thinking about shifts like this: the episteme, or the shared framework a culture uses to determine what can be known and how.

In The Order of Things, Foucault described how these frameworks changed across Western history. During the Renaissance, knowledge depended on resemblance and similitude. A walnut’s resemblance to the brain, for example, was understood as a sign that it could treat ailments of the mind. To understand something meant identifying the visible correspondences that connected it to a larger cosmic order.

By the eighteenth century, this gave way to a drive for classification—organizing the world into tables, categories, and species. By the nineteenth century, the focus shifted again: origins, evolution, and context over time became the lens through which we understood reality. An artwork, for example, came to be defined by the artist’s biography, the movements that preceded it, and the historical conditions of its creation. This historical episteme remained dominant throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Today, another way of knowing has become dominant. The systems organizing daily life rely on patterns, correlations, rankings, and predictions. They evaluate things by comparing aggregated data points.

This shift coincides with declining trust in government, media, public health, higher education, and other traditional authorities. Some of that skepticism is deserved. Institutions have concealed mistakes, protected their interests, excluded people, and presented partial judgments as neutral ones. Distrust does not eliminate the need for authoritative answers, but it does change where people look for them.

The algorithm offers an alternative form of authority. A ranking appears to identify quality without requiring the rigor of an editorial board. A recommendation appears to understand personal taste without requiring a critic. When people distrust a public health agency, they turn instead to search results, online communities, or gray markets. Authority is systematized as collective behavior: many people are saying this, this answer appears first, this video has been viewed millions of times.

These patterns are treated as objective self-evidence, even though they are shaped by choices engineers and product teams make about what to collect, what to count, and what to put in your feeds.

The Personalization of Popularity

Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has spent fourteen weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, matching the run of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

The statistic places the songs beside one another, but they represent entirely different cultural experiences. When Houston topped the chart in 1992, radio stations, television networks, record labels, retailers, and movie soundtracks created substantial overlap in what people heard. A major hit reached people whether they had it in their playlist or not, hearing it in shops, cars, offices, and waiting rooms. People who disliked the song still knew it intimately because public space guaranteed exposure.

Langley’s success has been sustained across streaming services and TikTok, where the song circulates through recommendations, a viral dance, and covers. Each platform converts individual behavior into further distribution: a person listens or watches, the platform records that choice, and the song reaches more users with similar patterns of behavior. These overlapping systems can produce enormous scale without reaching a single, shared audience.

The Billboard chart consolidates this fragmented activity into a single ranking. It measures the total volume of engagement across otherwise separate environments, so a song’s position no longer indicates that its audience shares a common cultural reference point. A similar logic applies to visual culture.

The Standardization of Taste

People have always copied one another, and trends pre-date social media. But feeds turn those styles into recognizable categories that can be reproduced by users and tracked by platforms.

In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste functions as a form of cultural capital, shaped by class, education, and social experience. Historically, access to these codes was restricted to the elite or the educated. Critics, magazines, museums, and design institutions established which objects and styles deserved attention, and acquiring that knowledge required time and social access.

The internet weakened those barriers—and we should celebrate that. Anyone with a phone can create and share new expressions of design, fashion, or art. Cultural critics and institutions have less control over what reaches an audience. But platforms exercise a different form of gatekeeping, tracking what people pause on, save, share, and buy to determine which images circulate next. Over time, the same objects recur across feeds: a Rimowa suitcase, a Dieter Rams stereo, a mid-century chair, a Japanese kettle, a stack of art books.

Emily Segal calls this “tasteslop”: combinations of objects and styles that are widely recognized as tasteful but become generic through continuous repetition. The components of tasteslop are often well-designed or attractive on their own; the issue is how easily they can be assembled into a ready-made template of sophistication.

Taste still communicates social position, but reproducing its visible codes no longer requires years of direct exposure within specific institutions. Algorithmic feeds surface which objects belong together, e-commerce platforms offer immediate substitutes or “dupes,” and the system reinforces the style until it becomes familiar.

The system does not need to understand why a particular object is considered tasteful. It identifies patterns, detecting that the same object repeatedly appears in rooms that users save to their Pinterest boards. The feed offers its own form of proof: this object frequently appears in spaces associated with good taste. Because that proof is derived from accumulated user behavior, it appears as consensus rather than the judgment of a critic or expert.

This way of assigning value through repetition and association now extends to human appearance. Platforms register which faces and bodies receive attention, identify the features they share, and circulate those features as standards that users can analyze and reproduce.

Looksmaxxing and Things

In “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare,” Jia Tolentino examines how digital standards are increasingly applied to physical anatomy.

Digitally modified images now provide baseline standards against which people evaluate—and alter—their real faces. A user applies a filter that smooths skin, sharpens jawlines, or balances facial proportions, and now, they might seek surgical procedures to resemble the edited image (a phenomenon widely referred to as “Snapchat Dysmorphia”).

Online communities evaluate individual features ruthlessly, and apps offer real-time visual corrections (“face-tuning”). Cosmetic surgery has long relied on measurements of proportion and symmetry. Digital platforms now circulate these standards at scale, teaching users to evaluate their own faces in clinical terms before they enter a surgeon’s office.

This dynamic reflects Foucault’s concept of normative control: a system establishes a benchmark, and individuals learn to assess themselves against it.

No single authority dictates the aesthetic standard. It emerges across filters, platform trends, clinical marketing, and before-and-after photographs. Repeated geometric preferences begin to appear as objective measures of health or attractiveness. A minor asymmetry or sign of aging becomes a correctable flaw.

Cosmetic surgery gives this process lasting physical consequences. Standards generated and reinforced through digital feedback loops are applied to faces and bodies through procedures that may be difficult or impossible to reverse.

The Limits of an Algorithmic Episteme

Ella Langley’s chart run, tasteslop, and contemporary beauty standards all illustrate the same shift: personal behavior converted into cultural authority. Plays rank our music, saves curate our aesthetic, and engagement metrics define our physical ideals.

Because these outputs reflect millions of micro-actions, they feel like an unbiased reflection of public will. In reality, they are heavily mediated by platform design—by initial, profit-driven decisions about what gets measured, boosted, and sold.

A nineteenth-century mind understood a subject by tracing its origins and historical context. The contemporary episteme understands a subject by cross-referencing it with data points to predict its future value.

This shift brings real advantages: democratization, broader access, and personalized navigation through overwhelming amounts of culture. But as this logic becomes second nature, the world gets subtly re-engineered.

Recorded behavior alone cannot determine value. Data shows us what is, but deciding what is meaningful, true, or worth keeping still requires human judgment.

When you grow up in Arizona, where drowning is the leading cause of death for young children, you learn to live with the constant, ambient anxiety of pool season. In 2024, there were 36 child drownings in the state, and every single one was deemed preventable.

When the accident happened, I found myself constantly refreshing local newsfeeds for information. I felt a genuine, maternal ache for her. It wasn’t some abstract tragedy. I could imagine all the details in a way that felt local, familiar, and close enough to my own life to make the space between her family and mine feel minute.

Because Emilie is a prominent influencer, public speculation began immediately. Viewers used aerial news footage of her house to map out her property, comparing windows, backyard layouts, pool furniture. When reports surfaced that her family had secured the pool with a more aesthetically pleasing safety net (that was unsecured on the night of the drowning) rather than a traditional fence, the public reaction turned hostile. The online narrative quickly solidified into a harsh judgment: she cared more about the appearance of her backyard than her child’s safety.

This criticism carried an intense moral energy. Viewers began over-identifying with Trigg, positioning themselves as his public advocates and protectors. “Justice for Trigg” became a rallying cry, turning collective grief into a digital prosecution.

This digital prosecution is the modern, hyper-interactive evolution of what sociologists call a parasocial relationship. The term parasocial was originally coined in the 1950s by sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl. They described it as the “illusion of intimacy” audiences felt toward television personalities. The internet has reshaped this illusion. Content formats like “A Day in the Life” or a GRWM blur the boundaries and like, shares, and comments transformed parasocial from a one-way street to a more interactive (and confusing) connection. Over-identification or reliance on these digital connections can result in compulsive behaviors, and in extreme cases, dangerous levels of obsession and stalking.

After a long absence, Emilie slowly returned to TikTok. She changed how she operated online: she stopped showing her other son’s face, established strict boundaries around her personal life, and repeatedly took clear accountability for the fact that her son’s death was preventable.

Yet, the online commentary has not stopped. Dedicated accounts emerged solely to hypothesize about the timeline and mechanics of the accident. Recently, I came across an account literally named “Emilie Liser,” that presents itself as a demand for accountability but is entirely dedicated to catching her in contradictions or “lies.”

Gossip is an ancient human institution. Historically dismissed as trivial or malicious, it has long served a social utility by enforcing community norms, distributing information, and determining who can be trusted.

I recently read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and in the first chapter Janie returns home and is immediately met by a porch full of gossip. The townspeople want to know where she has been, what she is wearing, and what her silence means. The porch was where a community narrated itself to itself. You can see a similar dynamic in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; public shaming was a ritual that allowed the community to stabilize its own moral boundaries by projecting its anxieties onto a single person, a classic manifestation of René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism.

The human impulse to gossip or punish hasn’t changed, but we have uncoupled it from the communities that ensured its social function. The traditional porch had limits. Those conversations happened among neighbors who shared a physical reality, meaning cruelty was naturally balanced by proximity, shared stakes, and the simple fact that the evening eventually came and people went home.

Today, gossip has been liberated from geography. It can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time. When a crowd forms online, there is no shared neighborly future to incentivize mercy, no social cost to being cruel, and no authority to say that is enough. The guardrails are gone, and the crowd never disperses. New users constantly arrive to discover the story, view old clips, and offer new theories. The archive is searchable, permanent, and reaches far beyond any local community.

For a long time, I viewed trolling as a purely modern internet phenomenon. Then I listened to a podcast about the 1989 kidnapping and murder of Jacob Wetterling. His parents had set up a 24-hour tip line in their home, and they were the ones answering the phone in the middle of the night. They received horrific, cruel calls from strangers who simply wanted to get close to their suffering. (You can even listen to some of the more mundane calls here.)

The internet did not invent the urge to disturb people who are grieving, but it has given that urge an infinite scroll.

The creation of entire accounts dedicated to tracking a mother’s trauma feels different from traditional trolling, shitposting, or the actions of an “edgelord”—archetypes driven by simple nihilism or a desire to provoke. This phenomenon is much darker because it adopts the language of care. It claims to be about child safety, justice, and holding an influencer accountable.

While pool safety and the ethics of treating children as content are serious issues, there is a point where care shifts into surveillance, and advocacy becomes an excuse for continued cruelty. The language of justice is used to launder a persistent appetite for punishment.

In a previous essay, I examined the concept of “gooning”—a term from internet culture that describes a state of prolonged arousal without resolution, where someone deliberately stays at the edge of a climax for hours. Social media produces a remarkably similar attention structure.

What we are seeing now is the gooning of grief: a refusal of resolution. The people running these accounts do not want Emilie’s grief to be processed or put away. They want the wound to remain open because it provides well-performing content. If she posts, it is picked apart; if she is silent, it is scrutinized. They are not mourning, nor are they truly seeking accountability. Accountability has specific goals. In this case, the goal should be prevention. Accountability also has an ending (e.g., the installation of a 5-foot isolation fence with a self-latching gate). An appetite for a spectacle has no end.

Parasocial grief makes sense to me. I understand why mothers looked at this tragedy and could not look away; the conditions were terrifyingly ordinary. The crowd has turned this grieving mother into a monster because the alternative is too frightening to accept. The alternative is admitting that loving your children cannot protect them from every catastrophe, and that a good parent can make a fatal error. Branding her as uniquely negligent allows others to build a wall between her life and theirs.

Today’s platforms have no mechanism for closure. They simply measure whether people continue to watch. A mother’s loss becomes an ideal object for the algorithm because it contains beauty, guilt, resentment, and unanswered questions—raw materials for endless engagement.

We have placed ancient human instincts into a system that removes their natural boundaries, and in doing so, we have broken our capacity for closure. When we refuse to let a story fade, we aren’t protecting the victim or keeping a mother accountable. We are demanding that a real family remain frozen in their worst moment so we can keep feeling something, whether that feeling is self-righteous anger, terror, or simple curiosity.

I have to acknowledge my own role in this dynamic. The most unsettling part of the machine isn’t just the accounts dedicated to hate. It is the realization that the system turns all of us into consumers of another person’s ruin. The algorithm does not differentiate between moral outrage, scholarly curiosity, or malice; it only registers attention. By watching these hate accounts out of sheer fascination with the spectacle, I am still contributing to the volume of engagement.

Every refresh, every viewed clip, and every analyzed detail keeps the wound open. We are trapped in a cycle of attention that lacks the capacity for mercy, mourning inside a digital landscape that does not believe in endings.

First, I met a constitutional lawyer at an event. She was a survivor of Chernobyl, Stanford-educated, and brilliant by any reasonable measure. She also described herself as a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump apologist. When I asked why, she didn’t talk about taxes, judges, or tariffs. She talked about the relief of being allowed to love America openly—its symbols, its freedoms, and its flag—without apology.

A few days later, I saw an Instagram post from someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Reacting to the collective euphoria over a US Men’s National Soccer Team win, it read something like the American flag is embarrassing and any expression of patriotism is indecent.

Together they crystallized something I’d been struggling to articulate. We are not merely arguing about politics. We are arguing about belonging—about who gets to feel at home in the national story, and under what conditions. Patriotism is simply the language through which that deeper conflict is waged.

Whatever else Trump offers his supporters, he grants them permission to experience American symbols as expressions of belonging rather than evidence in a moral trial. For people who feel culturally displaced, that permission is profoundly relieving. It transforms patriotism from a position that must be defended into a feeling that can simply be lived in all its red, white, and blue glory.

That craving is rooted in love. I want to be precise about what I mean when I say love. I don’t mean love as a virtue. I mean love as affection for and commitment to the idea of one’s country—a relationship that obligates you to show up for it. For some it is military service. For others it is jello shots on the Fourth of July, coaching Little League, running for the school board, or spending a career as a constitutional lawyer upholding the highest law of the land. What unites these is their orientation: each one turns toward the country and adds something to it. They participate.

Disdain is also a relationship to the country, and it is the opposite of love. It turns away. When disgust becomes the animating energy of one’s politics—when the flag can only be received as an indictment—the natural expression is withdrawal (and maybe even the threat to move to Canada).

Historically, the grammar of patriotism has always been entangled with a kind of costly attachment. The oldest roots of the word imply confrontation—the literal act of fighting and defending. Loving this country has always required sacrifice. More often than military service, that sacrifice takes the form of grueling civic labor: protecting voting rights, defending the First Amendment, ensuring equal citizenship, honoring the lawful transfer of power. Criticism is a key part of patriotism and has been essential in the fight to realize this country’s promises made 250 years ago.

The tragedy is that “patriot” has become a partisan weapon, claimed and defined in ways that make conversation nearly impossible. Humans need stories, rituals, and shared myths to locate themselves inside something larger than private life. When one political movement offers those forms while the other mostly offers critique, embarrassment, or refusal, the symbolic terrain is surrendered. Symbols do not disappear when people of conscience become disgusted with them. They simply become the exclusive property of whoever is willing to claim them.

Competing Language Games

To understand how this deadlock formed, we have to look at how the word actually functions in contemporary life. On the far right, “patriot” has become synonymous with resistance to federal authority. The Oath Keepers called themselves patriots while planning to resist the government; the January 6th rioters wrapped themselves in flags while attacking the Capitol. Steve Bannon’s “economic nationalism” conflates patriotism with cultural isolation, while various militia movements define it as armed defiance. In these hands, patriotism is transformed from a shared civic identity into an exclusionary mechanism.

Confronted by this, many liberals and left-leaning Americans have largely ceded the field, treating the word as irredeemably compromised. When they engage with patriotism at all, it is often through a lens of irony or cynicism. In certain educated circles, there is a distinct disdain for the sentimental pageantry of national life.

Granted, a country with our history should provoke moral unease. But disdain comes at a steep political cost. If ordinary Americans experience the flag as a symbol of family, sacrifice, place, or gratitude, then treating it strictly as a banner of oppression leaves those deep emotional realities completely out of the progressive story. You cannot build a broad democratic coalition while abandoning the symbols of shared affection.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a useful way out of this impasse. He argued that words do not have fixed, essential meanings. Meaning emerges from use—from how words function within what he called “language games.” We are currently using the same word to play entirely different games:

• In the far-right game, it functions to exclude, building walls between “real Americans” and internal (and external) enemies.

• In the mainstream conservative game, it operates to preserve. It looks backward, asking which traditions, institutions, and cultural forms deserve protection from the erosion of change.

• In the progressive game, it operates on aspiration. It looks forward, treating the nation’s past as a series of promissory notes yet to be cashed, asking what structural changes are required to achieve true equity.

• In the leftist game, it operates to refuse. The nation itself is the problem, its symbols compromised beyond redemption, so the only honest position is critique from outside.

The conflict emerges when either side mistakes its own emphasis for the entirety of the national project. Because meaning comes from use, nothing inherent in the word “patriot” or in the flag ties them to reactionary nationalism. The word can function within a different grammar entirely—one based on democratic participation, constitutional commitment, neighborly obligation, and the demanding work of living together across difference.

The Raggly Flag

It starts with the recognition that America is an ongoing project—and, more specifically, a made thing that no one of us made alone. Democratic life was designed precisely to let our competing ideals clash through the ballot box and a representative government. But managing that clash demands what feels, for many, like a disorienting level of discomfort.

This is the exact tension captured in Thornton Dial’s 2003 masterpiece, Don’t Matter How Raggly The Flag, It Still Got To Tie Us Together. Built from an old mattress frame, tangled plastic, and coarse twine, Dial’s flag is neither pristine nor pure. It is raggly. It has been dragged through the structural wreckage of American history, weathered by systemic injustice and hypocrisy. And yet Dial insists on its utility. It is still asked to do the impossible work of tying “us” together.

Look closely at how the thing is made. It is not painted or printed. Every scrap in it was fastened on by hand, knotted into the whole, and the flag emerges only because of the accumulated tension of all those pieces pulling against one another. That is the truest picture of this country I know. The flag is not handed to us finished. We are each holding a scrap of cloth and a length of twine, and the only question that finally matters is whether we tie our piece on.

Dial’s flag is valuable because it is damaged. A pristine flag implies a false consensus. A raggly flag acknowledges conflict while insisting on shared ownership of the project. It does not erase America’s failures; it asks whether collective life remains possible despite them.

You are free to dislike the way the flag is coming together—to find whole sections of it wrong, even unbearable. But the answer to a section you hate is to tie on more of what you believe, more furiously, not to cut yourself loose. The person who stops contributing has not transcended the project, more pure than the rest. He has abdicated it.

To live inside Dial’s raggly flag requires a grueling civic discipline, and it requires getting honest about the difference between acceptance and tolerance. We often talk as though acceptance is the democratic ideal. But acceptance is a luxury of the like-minded; it asks for a level of ideological alignment that is functionally impossible in a pluralistic society. It asks us to agree.

Tolerance is more modest in its goals but perhaps more painful to practice. It demands restraint, coexistence, and a shared public square, preserving one another’s right to exist, speak, vote, and belong, even when we find each other’s beliefs entirely wrong. True tolerance is an intellectual, almost spiritual trial: releasing the need for your political opponents to be wrong just so your own identity can remain intact. This is the authoritarian temptation on every side—the wish to seize the creative direction of the whole flag, to make everyone else’s scrap match your own. A democracy with no kings has to refuse that wish. No one gets to redesign the entire thing. Everyone gets to keep tying.

Tolerance becomes agonizing when the stakes are not abstract tax rates but existential questions of human dignity, when they touch trans erasure or reproductive autonomy. How do you hold civic space for a neighbor whose ideals appear to threaten your safety, or the rights of those you love? I won’t pretend that is easy, or always even possible. But the alternative—keeping our hands clean by refusing to participate—is its own kind of surrender. You can hold your identity without requiring everyone around you to ratify it. The moment your selfhood depends on your opponent’s defeat, you have handed it to him.

Sweaty and Boring

When patriotism is stripped of this heavy obligation, it collapses into aesthetic. It becomes the social-media performance where MAGA hats, Thin Blue Line banners, or upside-down flags compress an entire worldview into a wearable accessory, and where anti-symbolic cynicism mimics sophistication on the other side. One camp over-identifies with the symbol; the other flees it in disgust, while both mistake a gesture (a tweet, a post) for the work.

The work is indeed unglamorous. Tying your piece onto the flag looks like ordinary people gathering in a room, listening, objecting, and waiting their turn to speak in claustrophobic proximity to one another. It is showing up to the school board meeting, the zoning hearing, the volunteer shift, the protest line. It is boring, repetitive, and frustrating, and the friction it generates—between bodies that did not choose one another and still share a fate—is not a malfunction of democracy. It is how a democracy works at all. Growth comes from precisely that discomfort.

This is also why withdrawal and protest are not the same act, though they are often confused. Martin Luther King Jr. loved what this country could be; otherwise he would not have marched. Marching is the opposite of secession. You can wear the flag draped over your shoulders while you do it. You can fly it upside down, even hang a black-and-blue stripe across it—those are pieces tied on, arguments made in the medium of the flag itself. What you cannot do, and still call yourself a participant, is walk away and announce that the whole thing is beneath you. A country earns the right to its national icons through its justice; its citizens earn theirs through their participation. The merch table cannot sell that, and neither can your sneers.

Participation, Piece by Piece

I know democratic life cannot survive on permanent cynicism and political withdrawal. If democratic movements refuse to offer rituals, stories, and shared forms of belonging, anti-democratic movements will happily fill the void.

To love the country is to risk attachment to something deeply disappointing—to give up the safety of standing outside the project and accept the grief of belonging to it. The work begins with the daily labor of participation: staying engaged even when outcomes devastate you, holding civic space for people you disagree with, and tying your scrap onto a flag you will never fully control.

So don’t disparage the raggly flag while doing nothing to change it. Pull at it, argue with it, knot your own conviction into it as hard as you can. But if we abandon it—if we decide the whole tangled, contested thing is beneath us and let go of our end of the twine—we should not be surprised when the red begins to fade, when the stripes and stars come loose in other hands, and when the flag we left behind is turned against us.

The first two are already being renegotiated, if unevenly. Change management is slowly loosening its grip on the destination-oriented playbook. Communications is experimenting at the edges — recruiting from far ranging disciplines.

But it’s time to reimagine the roles a future-proof organization actually needs. Functions accumulate institutional logic over decades. The org chart reflects what an organization has historically needed to optimize, and until very recently, that was output.

The functions that carry culture and change were built for exactly that world. Change managers were built for transitions with knowable destinations. Communications teams were built to transmit a message downward. HR was built for compliance. Culture leads were built to manage sentiment.

None of them were designed to hold open-ended, continuous human signal — to observe organizational life, receive what employees are actually experiencing, and translate it upward as intelligence.

A new paradigm requires it anyway. Which means it requires new kinds of roles.

A Moment of Reinvention

The reinvention is already underway. External-facing comms has been the site of genuine experimentation — chief storyteller roles, narrative strategy leads, practitioners recruited from documentary filmmaking, oral history, ethnography. People trained to find meaning in complex human material rather than simply transmit a message.

Stripe offers a clear example. Their communications team has an unusually broad brief — telling the story of infrastructure, of the businesses building on it, of the conditions that make economic growth possible — and they are staffing it accordingly. The hiring call explicitly solicits unorthodox backgrounds and “spiky skills,” and the team reflects it: a backcountry outfitter, a dumpling restaurant founder, a forensic anthropologist. These kinds of hires are a deliberate signal that the function they are building requires a different kind of intelligence than traditional comms produces.

Stripe is an organization that has looked at what communications needs to do in this moment and concluded that the existing model no longer works.

Meet: The Signalcel

But that reinvention has been almost entirely outward-facing. The experimentation is in how organizations tell their story to the world. The same reimagining hasn’t reached the function that listens inward — that receives what the organization is telling itself.

That function needs a practitioner.

Let’s call them the signalcel. (Thanks, , for the suffix.) A node for signal rather than message — because every function currently occupying adjacent organizational territory is oriented toward the message: producing it, transmitting it, managing the response to it. The signalcel’s orientation runs the other way. They are there to receive.

Their job is to see, feel, and translate the human experience of organizational disruption in real time, without needing it to resolve.

left a great comment on Part 1. His framing — the guardian of inefficiency — is the best description of what this requires in practice. In a moment defined by optimization, someone needs to protect the things that look like waste but are critical infrastructure for culture, trust, and meaning.

Relationship (i.e., friction) is the medium through which an organization can know itself. Strip it out and the organization might becomes faster, but it also becomes blinder and less differentiated. The signalcel is the one who can read an organization’s friction and return it as signal.

This is also why the Stripe hiring is more than a curious outlier. Forensic anthropology is structurally an upward-facing discipline. You read the evidence. You reconstruct what happened. You bring findings to decision-makers who weren’t there. That is the right model for what organizations are missing.

This practitioner already exists here and there.

They’re just doing it without a name, a brief, or the institutional gravitas that would let it operate at the level of consequence.

Seventy years later, that instinct is running at full speed inside organizations navigating AI adoption. And the people on the receiving end are noticing.

Atlassian laid off 1,600 people. Block cut 50% of its staff. The pattern is playing out across industries, with AI efficiency as the explicit rationale. The people still inside these organizations are watching. They are reading every Slack announcement, every carefully worded non-answer about what this means for their roles. They are sophisticated interpreters of organizational subtext, because their livelihoods depend on it.

And yet the communications most of them are receiving still sound like this is an exciting moment of transformation.

That gap — between what people know and what they’re being told — is what this piece is about.

Part One diagnosed why the change management playbook fails here. The short version: it was built for changes with knowable destinations, and this one has none. But the failure runs deeper than methodology. The theater employees are experiencing is a leadership problem that communications simply cannot solve.

Standing in a room and saying I don’t know what this means for your role is genuinely hard. It requires sitting in the uncertainty with your people, visibly, without the cushion of a roadmap or a consultant’s five-part framework. Most leaders reach instead for the wartime playbook — and there’s something to that instinct. These are genuinely disruptive times.

But it’s worth asking what made wartime leadership actually work. Churchill didn’t tell Britain the war would be manageable. He told them it would be blood, toil, tears, and sweat. That speech worked because it didn’t lie about what was ahead. It trusted people to meet a real demand for their efforts, energy, time, and sacrafices.

The leaders running AI adoption programs are asking for wartime commitment while running peacetime messaging. The casualties are real — jobs, roles, identities. The tone is still transformation and opportunity and exciting, new capabilities.

The wartime analogy has another limit. Churchill was asking people to fight for something that would outlast them and actually mattered. A VP asking you to enthusiastically adopt AI tools while your colleagues are being walked out is a different ask. The stakes for employees are genuine, but the cause is not protecting the homeland. Employment was always a contract, not a relationship (or “family”), and the current moment has made the terms visible in ways that employees cannot unsee.

So before we talk about what leaders should say, it’s worth sitting with what they’re actually asking of their teams. They are asking people who have watched colleagues lose jobs to an efficiency rationale to invest themselves — their curiosity, their expertise, their goodwill — in the technology driving that rationale. Asking someone to do that without acknowledging what it costs is the thing Ogilvy was warning against.

The leader’s job is to create conditions where people can make an honest choice about how much of themselves to give, with accurate information about what they’re signing up for.

In practice, it means a few specific things.

Stop optimizing for how people feel about what you say. The question worth asking is whether people left the conversation with an accurate picture of what is known, what isn’t, and what that means for them. In a moment of genuine uncertainty, chasing sentiment produces exactly the hollow theater Part One describes.

Make commitments that can actually be broken. “We are committed to our people” constrains nothing and can be sustained without ever doing anything specific. “We will tell you before your role changes, not after” is different — it can be broken, and its value comes precisely from that. The destination may be unknown. How the organization behaves on the way there doesn’t have to be.

None of this resolves the underlying situation. The disruption is real, and so is the uncertainty. Some roles will change; others will disappear. No communications program makes that not true.

What’s available — what’s actually within reach for a leader willing to operate honestly — is something more modest and important: a culture where people know they’re being told the truth, where a commitment means something because it’s specific enough to keep, and where employees are treated as perceptive adults capable of deciding, with real information, what this moment is worth to them.

The employee isn’t a moron. Don’t treat them like one.

Companies are deliberately leaner. The organizational fat that once cushioned culture and made room for inefficiency has been trimmed away. Every company is a little meaner, a little faster, and a little more optimized. Employee satisfaction is declining. Turnover is rising — both forced and unforced. And the people who stay are watching and deciding how much of themselves to invest in an organization that has signaled it will optimize them when the moment calls for it.

Into this environment, at this moment, leadership is asking the workforce to enthusiastically adopt the AI technology most visibly associated with the “rightsizing.”

The communications programs designed to support that ask — however well-intentioned, however carefully constructed — are landing in a room that is already reading the subtext. This is the condition most AI adoption programs are currently in: employees who hear what’s not being said more clearly than what is.

The program most organizations are running is a familiar one: change management. A structured approach to helping workforces through disruption, built on decades of practice and a set of assumptions about how organizational change works. It is the established toolkit, and it is the wrong one for this moment.

Most leaders responsible for AI adoption were trained on that toolkit. But we all know the moment is asking for something it was never built to provide.

The leaders who will successfully navigate this moment are the ones willing to build that discipline.

Change Management Was Designed for a Different Kind of Change

The frameworks that dominate organizational transformation — Kotter’s eight steps, ADKAR, Prosci — were built for changes with knowable destinations. A new ERP system. A restructured operating model. A merger integration. These changes are disruptive, but they are bounded in time. There is a before and an after. There is a state called done.

The communications that support these changes follow a corresponding arc: explain the destination, acknowledge the difficulty of the journey, celebrate arrival. This arc works precisely because the destination exists. The transition is real and the story resolves.

AI offers none of this. The destination is genuinely unknown. The transition has no arc because the change is continuous, not episodic. The story cannot resolve because it hasn’t finished being written. Applying change management communications to AI adoption produces a map for a territory that doesn’t yet exist. Employees know, even subconsciously, when the map doesn’t match the terrain they’re walking through every day. The result is the kind of checkbox behavior and compliance theater that adoption metrics cannot capture but managers universally recognize.

Three Ways the Playbook Fails

The first is the destination problem. Internal communications for change management are fundamentally oriented toward a future state. They answer: where are we going, why is it better, what will it require of you. These are answerable questions for most organizational changes. For AI, they are not — and the attempt to answer them anyway produces communications that sound confident but feel hollow. Employees are not naive. When the future state described in the all-hands doesn’t match what they observe in their daily work, they update their model accordingly. They conclude, reasonably, that leadership either doesn’t know or isn’t saying. In many cases, both are true. The capability gap in leaders becomes a credibility gap with employees.

The second is the protagonist problem. Effective transformation narratives position workers as agents — people whose judgment, expertise, and participation are necessary for the change to succeed. This is both accurate and good storytelling. Transformations that exclude employee agency tend to fail. Current AI rollouts almost universally cast employees as the ones being transformed, not the ones doing the transforming. The implicit story is: here is a capability changing your work, adapt to it. That framing activates a specific and understandable anxiety — the fear that adaptation is not really the goal, and that what is actually being optimized is the organization’s ability to do more with fewer of them. This fear is not irrational. It is, in many industries, a reasonable inference from available evidence. A communications program that doesn’t address it directly compounds it.

The third is the trust problem. Internal communications credibility is built on consistency between what is said and what the organization demonstrably does. When a company mandates AI adoption while remaining silent about what it means for headcount, employees interpret the silence accurately. No volume of positive framing survives that gap. This is a commitment problem that has been handed to communications to solve with language, which language cannot do. The leaders equipped for this moment understand that trust is built through demonstrated consistency — that communications follows from decisions rather than replacing them.

The Deeper Issue

These three failures share a common root. They are all symptoms of applying a framework built for bounded, resolvable change to a change that is open-ended, continuous, and genuinely uncertain in its implications for the people being asked to adopt it.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote about what happens when a moral vocabulary becomes detached from the practices that once gave it meaning — when people continue using inherited language without the frameworks that made it make sense.

Something similar is happening in organizational AI communications. The language of transformation, adoption, and change management still circulates — in town halls, in manager toolkits, in adoption dashboards. The conceptual equipment needed to make that language true — a knowable destination, a bounded transition, a workforce being carefully and clearly ushered into the future — is no longer present.

Leaders are being asked to narrate a change they don’t have the conceptual equipment to lead. That’s a description of a genuinely new professional challenge, not a character judgment — one that sits at the intersection of communications, culture, and organizational sensemaking.

In part two I will explore what that equipment looks like in practice. In part three I will make the case for a new kind of organizational function — and the practitioner the moment is calling into existence to lead it.

He’s right that AI is improving faster than most people realize. But the piece obscures that his urgent warnings might be shaped by his stake in rapid adoption. It also (like most AI hype content) never addresses what principles should constrain how these systems are built and deployed, or what accountability exists for social impacts. When a handful of companies control technology this powerful, the frameworks guiding development and deployment matter enormously. Right now those frameworks are almost entirely technical and commercial.

Over the last few months, I’ve been writing about what look like separate problems: Silicon Valley’s inability to tell coherent stories about the future, the collapse of meaningful political positions into aesthetic choices, the way digital spaces destroy the communities they promise to build, the return of “purpose” in business after a brief hiatus.

These aren’t separate problems. They’re symptoms of the same crisis the viral post reveals: a handful of people are building technology that will reshape society, and the principles guiding those decisions are almost entirely self-serving.

Is every story compromised?

We have multiple competing narratives about AI, and each one is either financially compromised, philosophically incoherent, or both. It’s what makes this moment so disorienting.

The hucksters tell us AI will revolutionize everything and we need to adapt now or get left behind. But they work for AI companies, invest in AI startups, or profit from AI adoption. The viral post’s author works in AI. When one critic points out that “the people with the largest megaphones are the people with the largest financial stakes,” this is what she means. Is it analysis or marketing? Genuine concern or manufactured urgency? The audience can’t tell.

The doomers warn about mass unemployment and a permanent underclass. But they often work at the same companies building these systems, or adjacent organizations. They describe catastrophic scenarios while continuing to develop the technology they claim is dangerous. The cognitive dissonance is severe.

The skeptics push back on timelines and technical claims. Jeremy Kahn makes valid points: quality metrics don’t exist for most professional work, enterprises can’t tolerate high error rates, governance systems aren’t ready. But notice what he’s debating. Whether the transformation arrives in two years or ten. Both skeptics and boosters accept the same assumption: the trajectory is inevitable and the only questions are timing and practical implementation.

The tech elite building these systems can’t articulate coherent principles for what they’re doing. As I’ve written before, ideas are treated as interchangeable tools, adopted, tested, discarded depending on what the situation demands. There’s no stable protagonist, only shifting justifications. Even sympathetic audiences sense the inconsistency.

The accelerationists say build it all, move fast, and figure it out later. The frontier is open, expansion is good, and optimization is progress. But when prediction markets turn mass unemployment into a tradable asset, when the tools being built could eliminate half of entry-level jobs within years, “figure it out later” is an inadequate framework.

None of these narratives can be trusted. Each is shot through with conflicts of interest and internal contradictions. And there’s no neutral arbiter, no shared framework for evaluation, and no trusted institution that can adjudicate between them.

This is why the moment feels so destabilizing. We’re not simply arguing about which story is right (those days are long gone). We’re navigating a landscape where every story is compromised and we have no way to tell truth from sales pitch.

What “adapt faster” leaves out

The viral post captures urgency but reveals a gap: the dominant narrative focuses entirely on means, not ends. It’s all speed, power, and competitive advantage. Learn these tools or get left behind. But left behind on a path to where?

The post describes AI that can complete days of expert work autonomously, systems that will eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs within years. But if half of entry-level jobs disappear, we’re not talking about a personal development challenge one might hack their way out of. We’re talking about a social rupture of catastrophic proportions. The post acknowledges this scale (”the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century”) but responds with individual survival tactics.

What’s missing is any account of what we’re adapting toward. What kind of society do we want on the other side of this? Who decides, and based on what principles?

The frontier logic embedded in “adapt faster” assumes these questions will resolve themselves through movement and competition. But that’s exactly the framework that’s exhausted.

Why stories won’t stick

You might expect Silicon Valley to construct a better narrative. Silicon Valley’s attempts to address this have failed because the intellectual culture that made tech successful makes sustained storytelling impossible. Good stories require consistency—protagonists whose principles constrain their actions. But when ideas are treated as interchangeable tools, adopted and discarded depending on what the situation demands, there is no stable protagonist. Only shifting justifications.

This is why technology’s growing power creates resistance rather than trust. People resist outcomes, even beneficial ones, when they appear arbitrary or unmoored from principle. Power without narrative authority generates backlash that can’t be solved with better messaging. People sense when principles are contingent rather than real.

What this moment requires

The viral post is right that this is urgent. Right that AI is improving faster than expected. Right that people should engage with these tools seriously.

But “learn AI or fall behind” can’t be the extent of our response. That’s survival advice for individuals, and we need a framework for collective navigation.

I’ve written before about how we’re living through a crisis of meaning. The institutions that once gave us identity and purpose have frayed, leaving people unmoored. We make sense of the chaos by naming enemies and organizing around shared outrage instead of shared purpose.

The AI discourse shows the same pattern. Competing narratives, each one compromised. Framework-switching that prevents coherent storytelling. Individual survival tactics where collective frameworks used to be.

This is what it looks like when narrative authority collapses. We have too many stories, all competing with one another, most suspect, and all underpinned by incentives we can’t see or untangle. And in the age of engagement, the person with the biggest megaphone-of-the-moment wins by default.

Which means: we have to become better readers. Most stories about AI today are commercially or technically driven. When someone tells you the future is urgent, ask who profits from your urgency. When someone says transformation is inevitable, ask what they’re building and who benefits.

The Something Big viral post ends by saying “the future is already here, it just hasn’t knocked on your door yet.”

That might be true. But what’s arriving is a moment that requires your discernment, your ability to read these narratives for what they are and navigate accordingly.

What stood out about this year’s Super Bowl advertising was not any single message, trend, or execution. The ads did not seem to emerge from a shared understanding of what kind of moment this is. God and gambling appeared next to one another. And the Backstreet Boys are apparently back.

But it is the incoherence of these ads that is such an accurate reflection of where things are. What was visible was a culture circulating many responses to the pressures of daily living at the same time, without the ability to reconcile them.

We saw sports betting. You might not be able to control the future, but you can still play! The tone was pragmatic, casual. You know, just “betting on the right guy.”

But that framing obscures what’s actually happening. For many younger viewers, gambling isn’t casual at all. It’s financial nihilism. If homeownership is unattainable and retirement accounts feel like fiction, why not bet on sports?

Then we heard from God. “He gets us.” This was a message of reassurance. In a world wanting more and more, Jesus can offer rest from the overwhelm. From the material things, from the constant performance of social media, from the centuries-old search for more.

Artificial intelligence showed up as a helper, and the emphasis was on its usefulness. AI was positioned as something that could reduce effort and take on the exhausting work of decision-making in something as consequential, and yet mundane, as making a new house a home.

Weight-loss and wellness appeared, too. Bodies were presented as problems to be solved. Health means following a protocol. Inject (or swallow), track, and adjust. These were about control—about restoring a sense that something deemed too big or unruly can be brought back into order.

Threaded through nearly all of this was celebrity — a lot of celebrity. Celebrity offered a kind of anchor across all of these themes. You recognize the person, and recognition feels like reliability or relatability. In a way, the celebrity is absorbing the anxiety around a particular product or idea (as in the Alexa ad). In a moment of overwhelming complexity, a familiar face does enormous psychic work simply by being familiar.

What struck me most was how each of these categories maps cleanly to a real anxiety. Economic instability. Spiritual drift. Cognitive overload. Physical dissatisfaction. Loss of trust. All of the ads felt connected to what it feels like to live in the world today.

The gambling ads suggested agency: you can still make smart moves. The religious ads suggested release: you don’t have to hold everything yourself. The AI ads suggested delegation: some of this can be handled for you. The pharmaceutical ads suggested discipline: correct the system and things will improve.

These positions don't negate one another, but they don't form a sequence or a structure. There's no indication of what comes first, what matters most, or how to navigate conflict between them. They function as parallel responses rather than parts of a larger story. We're back in the phantasmagoria—the shifting chaos Didion described—but without the story that makes it navigable.

Each ad made sense. The problem was watching them back-to-back. Bet on the game. Let Jesus carry what you can't. Let AI think for you. Inject this weekly and your body will shrink. One framework after another, each offering a different solution to a different problem, none acknowledging the others exist.

The ads reflected a culture that knows what it's reacting to—economic precarity, spiritual exhaustion, physical anxiety, cognitive overload—but has no agreement about what comes next.

Didion wrote about narrative as a way of making experience coherent. But coherence requires energy, and energy is in short supply. People are working longer hours for less purchasing power. They're parenting while scrolling, sleeping badly, managing chronic conditions, watching their savings lose value. Right now, most people are just trying to make it through the week. The culture can't hold a conversation about where we're going when individuals are focused on whether they'll be okay tomorrow.

The Super Bowl remains one of the few moments of shared attention left, a place where collective assumptions used to surface almost accidentally. This year, it felt chaotic.

What’s happening now is a culture responding to pressure through multiple frameworks at once, with no expectation that they’ll synthesize into a coherent worldview. The single explanation is dead. What remains is a cross-section of strategies for getting through.

The language of soul fell away, but nothing replaced it except velocity. Scale was treated as inherently good, a proxy for solving important problems. It was hype or vibe that signaled legitimacy, which attracted more capital in a self-reinforcing loop. Questions about purpose or ethical implications weren't deferred for later consideration, they were absent from the evaluative framework entirely.

But that logic is (finally — there I said it) being challenged. Over the last few weeks, technology’s cultural standing has shifted in ways that are difficult to ignore. Reputation has become porous. Associations sticks more readily and silence gets interpreted as complicity or evasion, especially as technology becomes entangled with state power, enforcement systems, and political influence.

The story that once framed tech as a broadly emancipatory force has fractured, replaced by a more complex and uneasy public understanding of how tools are deployed, who benefits from them, and what kinds of power they quietly extend. Surveillance, enforcement, labor extraction, misinformation, geopolitical alignment—these aren’t edge cases or aberrations anymore. They have become part of the backdrop against which all technology companies are now evaluated.

The capital you take determines what pressures you'll face later. Take money from growth-at-all-costs investors and you'll be pushed toward growth-at-all-costs decisions. Take money from someone funding surveillance infrastructure and you'll struggle to distance yourself when your tools get used for surveillance. Your cap table creates obligations and associations that constrain your future choices, whether or not you acknowledge them explicitly. What your company enables by default matters more than what you claim it's for.

Values alignment is becoming a real selection criterion again. Founders are choosing investors not only based on their expertise or network, but based on what kind of company they are implicitly agreeing to become by taking their money. The relationship is financial, certainly, but it’s also narrative, reputational, and future-facing in ways that shape possibilities years down the line.

As observed recently, “as the mission actually starts to matter again (not in the “wink-wink” sense), if a core value-add of VCs has been “brand halos”, then founders will align with investors that show an aesthetic they want to feed into their startup’s status signaling. The capital you take becomes a statement about who you are, and people will start to treat it that way.”

Companies without clear boundaries—without articulated limits on what they will and won’t do—now face questions they could previously defer or ignore entirely. There’s also a growing fatigue with opportunism dressed up as inevitability. The rush to wrap every problem in the language of automation or intelligence has produced a familiar pattern: short-term excitement, shallow differentiation, and an overwhelming sense that many companies are building adjacent versions of the same thing without interrogating whether the category itself is worth expanding. This exhaustion isn’t just aesthetic. It reflects a deeper skepticism about whether these companies have considered what they’re for beyond their own continuation.

Soul clarifies not just what the company is for, but what it will categorically not do, even when doing so would be easier, faster, or more immediately profitable. This kind of clarity inevitably creates friction (friction-maxxing, if you will). It slows certain paths while opening others. It makes some forms of capital fundamentally incompatible with the company’s goals. It limits addressable markets in ways that have to be defended to skeptical observers. It requires founders to live with ongoing tension rather than resolving it through compromise. The constraint is intentional.

We’re entering a period where trust is no longer granted by default to technology companies, and where legitimacy has to be continuously earned through demonstrated consistency between stated values and actual behavior. In that environment, companies without consistent principles that constrain their choices struggle to explain themselves when challenged. They reach for language that sounds right but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. They over-communicate in an attempt to control their narrative while under-committing to positions that would actually constrain their options.

Companies with souls work differently. Their decisions follow from principles you can trace and understand. Their tradeoffs are visible rather than obscured. Their limits are knowable and consistently applied. This doesn’t make them virtuous, but it does make it easier to trust or reject them on their own terms.

I also believe impact investing will re-emerge in a more serious form — soul as both philosophical and operational. We will see more energy and enthusiasm for solutions oriented toward systemic change that may take years to become visible. Companies will be permitted to build something durable, designing for long-term category creation rather than short-term cycles, and thinking seriously about downstream effects rather than quarter-on-quarter narratives.

These companies understand what others will be forced to learn: every company encodes a worldview whether it explicitly names it or not. Refusing to articulate that worldview doesn’t make it disappear or prevent others from inferring it. It simply makes it harder to defend when that worldview gets attributed to you by others who are working from incomplete information and their own interpretive frameworks. A brand is, after all, what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

The reappearance of soul in business is a recognition that meaning leaks from every decision whether you intend it to or not, that what you believe as an organization is inferred regardless of your participation in the conversation, and that the costs of inconsistency—of the gap between what you say and what your business enables—are no longer a thing of the past. In moments like this, companies either develop a purpose that guides their choices and makes them explicable to others, or they have one assigned to them by observers who will draw their own conclusions from the pattern of decisions and associations that accumulate over time.

Purpose is dead. Long live purpose.

And yet, for all this power, Silicon Valley struggles to tell a clear and compelling public story about where we are headed—or why.

We hear fragments: optimism about progress, warnings about risk, promises of abundance, appeals to inevitability. We are told artificial intelligence will transform everything and that innovation will solve the problems it creates. But these claims rarely add up to a shared narrative about the future as a place we are building together. They arrive as product announcements, position papers, and thought experiments. Each claim makes sense alone. Together, they don’t add up.

And without a coherent story, the future feels like something happening TO people, not something being built WITH them.

We need new stories about what comes next, stories that help people make sense of change, that make tradeoffs clear, and that create shared meaning. Futures depend on whether people believe the systems shaping their lives are pointed toward something that makes sense and will last.

Right now, technology has the power to shape outcomes but lacks the narrative authority to explain them.

I’ve argued before that Silicon Valley’s frontier mythology no longer fits the systems it’s building, that the technological frontier has closed, and infrastructure demands different stories than small-scale experiments ever did. What I didn’t understand then was why new stories weren’t emerging to replace the old ones.

Blake Smith’s analysis of Silicon Valley’s intellectual canon provides the answer: the intellectual habits that made tech successful make sustained storytelling unusually difficult, especially now, as its power becomes political.

Ideas as Tools, Not Beliefs

As Smith has argued, Silicon Valley’s intellectual culture treats ideas as tools rather than commitments. Frameworks are adopted, tested, discarded, and recombined depending on what the situation demands.

Peter Thiel funds candidates attacking the administrative state while his companies depend on government contracts. The same leaders who cite Seeing Like a State to resist government oversight invoke industrial policy when seeking subsidies. Monopoly is celebrated as the goal in Zero to One but denied when facing antitrust scrutiny. Individual genius is credited for success; systemic forces explain away harm.

In engineering and venture formation, this approach works. Ideas are provisional. Code is refactored. Strategies pivot. The ability to switch frameworks quickly is a form of intelligence. It allows builders to navigate uncertainty without being paralyzed by ideology.

Storytelling operates differently.

Why This Makes Storytelling Impossible

Good stories are optimized for trust.

They have protagonists whose commitments constrain their actions. They create expectations about what will happen next and what will not. They make tradeoffs clear and easy to digest. Most importantly, they allow people to orient themselves over time.

This kind of thinking resists all of that. When ideas are treated as interchangeable tools, there is no stable protagonist—only a shifting set of justifications. The result is suspicion. Even sympathetic audiences sense the inconsistency, even if they cannot name it.

This helps explain a pattern visible across debates about AI, abundance, and technological progress more broadly. Technology leaders offer too many incompatible explanations, often in quick succession.

When technology leaders speak about the future, they sound less like narrators and more like litigators—arguing from whichever framework best supports the case at hand. That posture may win individual arguments. It cannot sustain a shared story.

Power Without a Story

As Silicon Valley’s systems have grown more central, its influence has become political whether it intends it or not. When platforms determine what information reaches the public during elections or health crises, when Instagram sets the rules for how children access AI, when recommendation algorithms shape public discourse. These are acts of social and cultural governance.

And governance requires legitimacy. People need to understand not just what is being done, but why, and according to what principles. Without that narrative, power appears arbitrary.

Political power without narrative authority (or with a fragmented narrative) creates resistance. People may accept outcomes they dislike if they believe the process is legitimate and the direction makes sense. They resist outcomes, even beneficial ones, when they appear arbitrary, unaccountable, or unmoored from shared meaning.

This is the vulnerability technology faces. It has accumulated material power faster than it has developed the cultural capacity to justify that power over time. The result is backlash that cannot be solved with better messaging, smarter policy, or more data.

I believe the problem is the framework-switching Smith identifies, an intellectual habit that makes consistent storytelling impossible.

An Open Question

The question is whether a culture built on optionality, iteration, and pivoting can sustain the kind of commitments storytelling requires.

Stories need consistency. You have to stick with principles long enough for people to recognize them. You can’t keep redefining what you believe based on what’s convenient.

It remains an open question whether a culture optimized for perpetual flexibility can accept those limits without giving up what made it powerful in the first place.

But until it does, the future will continue to arrive without a story, and people will experience it as disruption rather than direction.

This is why the backlash against tech feels so intractable. It’s not really about any single decision or product. It’s about power exercised without a stable account of why and for whom.

But I think there’s less confusion from the public about what generative AI can do, and more uncertainty about what kind of future it’s pointing toward. That gap—between technical explanation and storytelling —is where the real communications challenge sits. And it’s why I believe the AI companies that endure will be the ones capable of building a world people can actually imagine themselves inhabiting.

What’s Present

The dominant narratives we have are confused. They are optimistic but strangely empty on one hand, and dystopian and world-ending on the other. No one company has what Alex Roy calls ‘Narrative Command’—the ability to define the field, answer the urgent questions, and architect an imaginable future.

Mark Zuckerburg’s “Personal Superintelligence” promises empowerment. Be a better friend, achieve your goals, have more meaningful impact. But these phrases never define what they’re oriented toward or what might be lost along the way.

Peter Thiel’s distinction between definite and indefinite optimism is useful here. Indefinite optimism believes the future will be better, but offers no concrete picture of how or why. It’s hopeful, but evasive. This is exactly what we see in AI: gestures toward progress that remain abstract enough to mean anything or nothing.

When Sam Altman appeared on Fallon, the everydayness of AI was the point. But for most, these technologies have no native habitat in our imagination, so rather than come off as charming talking about the woes of early parenthood, Altman came off to many as inhumane. (The response baffled me and is part of why I’m writing this.)

What’s Absent

We have tools that can write, see, simulate, predict, and compose. But our stories about the future oscillate between dystopia, nostalgia, and escape. Mars as a backup plan! Or the bunkers!

What’s missing is a positive, definite image of a future that feels coherent enough to step into. Something spacious enough—and believable enough—for people to locate themselves inside it with some sense of safety and agency.

The unease people feel about AI runs deeper than fear of job loss or misuse. It’s an anxiety about conditions: What does work look like? What does care look like? What does creativity look like? What about dignity, agency, and belonging in a world where the things we’re prized for today might be automated tomorrow?

People are scanning for signs that someone—anyone—is thinking seriously and humanely about life on the other side of these technologies.

Over the summer, I wrote about Big Hero 6 as one of the only cultural artifacts I’ve seen that imagines a future with advanced technology that actually feels livable. The city is saturated with innovation, but it’s ambient — you can still meet your friends at the neighborhood cafe. And Baymax is impressive not because he’s fast or efficient, but because he listens. He scans, adjusts, and supports. His intelligence is relational.

That’s a radically different orientation than much of today’s AI rhetoric, which frames intelligence as leverage: more output, more speed, more advantage. Care implies responsibility. And care is exactly what would make a future with AI feel safe to inhabit.

What’s at Stake

Futures don’t emerge from code or capital alone. They grow from belief. Narrative is the infrastructure that organizes what feels possible, desirable, and worth building toward. When that infrastructure is absent, fear rushes in to fill the void.

The communications task for AI isn’t marketing—it’s world-making. The inspiring and the ordinary have to coexist. Otherwise the future remains abstract, and abstraction breeds distrust.

What does a good day look like for the average person in an AI-saturated world?

This is an existential question. The winners will be the ones willing to answer—not perfectly, but earnestly. The ones that understand that to shape the future means articulating what, and who, that intelligence is for.

Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone.

Yikes. The only difference between us and them, he suggests, is the masturbation. Which might just make gooners more honest.

The comparison, while unflattering, made immediate sense to me. I’m intimate with the feeling of being alert and stimulated, but going nowhere, in my own social feeds.

Am I a gooner?

And the structure of social media: never climaxing, endless scroll, stimulation that never resolves into satisfaction. That sounds an awful lot like hell. Perpetual conscious torment with no release, no ending, and no resolution.

Gooning turns out to be surprisingly accurate as a term for what contemporary media is doing to our attention. Outside its explicit sexual context, it describes a state where a person is held inside a loop of high arousal, and the loop itself prevents resolution. There is no end. The viewer dissolves into a stream of increasingly sloppy content.

A design problem becomes a psychological one

Infinite scroll solves a business problem by making it harder to stop, and in doing so, makes it harder to metabolize anything you see. The mind loses the small intervals it once used to register meaning — the pause after a page turn, the silence after a paragraph, even the micro-boundary of clicking “next.” To swipe is to wipe clean, to smooth the surface.

When every boundary is removed, everything arrives in the same undifferentiated way. The interface creates this uniformity regardless of content.

This shift matters because interpretation — time, friction — is the mechanism through which experiences accumulate into understanding, and understanding builds interior life. Jung wrote extensively about how the psyche relies on experiences that demand time, attention, and inner work. Resistance gives an image or idea the weight to shape us. A feed removes that resistance by design.

It also reshapes our relationship to time. Social media organizes information into a present that constantly replaces itself. A mind that evolved to understand the world through sequence now receives experience without temporal structure. The result is dislocation. You know where you are physically. Where you’ve just been cognitively becomes unclear.

The arrival of AI-generated content intensifies this disorientation. Human-created content — however trivial — carries some trace of the person who made it: a choice, a perspective, an angle of attention. AI content mimics the shape of communication while evacuating the human presence that makes communication possible.

This creates an unusual cultural condition: you’re scrolling through what appears to be a social feed, but increasing amounts of it were never “thought” by anyone.

Robert Nozick’s experience machine asked whether simulation could replace real experience. AI slop makes simulation ambient. You don’t enter a machine; material generated by machines circulates through your informational environment as though it were continuous with human expression. The mind loses a reliable way to distinguish between content that emerges from intention and content that simply manifests.

When symbolic life loses its connection to intention, meaning becomes harder to locate. The psyche still searches for it — we’re built to find patterns, motives, human presence — but finds itself grasping at forms that contain, uncannily, nothing to grasp.

Gooning as a broader cognitive adaptation

What ties these elements together is the posture they draw from the mind: attention remains active but becomes directionless, held open to stimulation but unable to convert that stimulation into understanding.

This is the broader, cultural version of gooning. The constant flow of impressions encourages a form of attention that is alert without being oriented. The self doesn’t vanish, but it participates less fully in its own experience. It becomes more of a relay point than an interpreter.

People feel this as scatter, difficulty concentrating, or as a sense that their inner life has become less textured. These are predictable responses to a media environment built around continuity of stimulus rather than depth of engagement. The psyche adapted to intermittent inputs — stories that end, conversations that conclude, texts that you finish. It finds itself instead in an environment where nothing ends and everything is perpetually half-present.

Jung warned that without difficult or troubling encounters, the psyche loses substance. The self becomes, in effect, thinner.

A thinning self manifests in mundane ways. Your memory feels unreliable. You try to recall what you saw online that morning and come up blank, though nothing about it registered as boring at the time. The mind becomes a surface that experiences wash over, or swipe past, rather than sink into. Not because the mind has weakened (although maybe time will tell another story), but because the environment no longer provides the conditions that allow anything to stick.

This is the real consequence of the current media environment: a gradual reorganization of what it feels like to think and register the world. The change isn’t dramatic. You don’t notice it happening. You notice what you can no longer do — hold a thought, finish a book, remember what moved you, feel fully present in your own attention.

The architecture of hell

The systems producing these effects are indifferent to the cognitive structures they displace. Infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, and AI-generated content create an attentional environment that the psyche has not had time to adapt to. Evolution operates on geological time scales, while media environments change in decades.

What emerges is a collective goonstate: a mode of attention sustained by rising stimulation and denied every means of resolution.

This brings us back to the hell question. Traditional theological hell involves eternal torment, a suffering that never resolves. But the modern version operates through a different mechanism: not pain that continues forever, but pleasure that never completes.

Hell, in this sense, is perfectly designed. It keeps you conscious and engaged while systematically preventing the conditions that make consciousness worthwhile.

Understanding this clearly means recognizing it as a structural condition rather than a personal failure. The difficulty concentrating, the scattered feeling, the sense that your mind works differently than it used to — these are reasonable responses to unreasonable conditions.

What remains is the question of how to live a rich life when the default environment actively prevents it. The answer probably involves recovering what hell removes: boundaries, ending points, resistance. Places where the mind can stop receiving and start interpreting. Moments when experience is allowed to settle into memory rather than immediately dissolving into the next stimulus. The ability to climax—to let something finish, to feel satisfied, to be done.

This requires deliberate architecture of attention in an environment designed to prevent exactly that. Which means the problem is no longer just understanding what’s happening. It’s deciding whether to accept this particular version of hell as the default condition of consciousness, or whether to build something else. Even if that something else is small, intermittent, and has to be actively maintained against a system that wants to pull you back into the loop.

The discomfort stems from the recognition that a speculative mechanism had slipped into a domain governed by social obligations and civic norms. The unease: human precarity has become converted into speculative fodder.

A number on a screen—tradable, liquid, profitable—now represents thousands losing their livelihoods. The market produces measurable data (a prediction percentage, a price) while evacuating what makes job loss meaningful: the disrupted lives, the severed identities bound to work, the social fabric that tears when employment disappears en masse. This is what Neil Postman warned about when he argued that technically sophisticated cultures lose the ability to distinguish the measurable from the meaningful. Even those otherwise supportive of market-based tools sense that something fundamental is being eroded. The impulse to financialize everything had exceeded its social and ethical license.

This moment points to a deeper instability. The implicit moral frameworks that once guided Silicon Valley—the conviction that rational incentives produce social good, that markets reveal truth, that optimization aligns with progress—no longer command the same confidence. The Kalshi discourse reveals the recognition that the dominant moral vocabulary of the sector no longer matches the ethical intuitions of the people operating within it.

At the same time, a seemingly opposite cultural tendency is gaining energy: a resurgence of spiritual, metaphysical, or revivalist modes of meaning. The moment is marked by horseshoe maximalism—financial maximalism and spiritual maximalism bending toward each other. Both arise from the same vacuum. When established moral frameworks fail, people reach for systems that promise totalizing clarity. One locates it in markets, the other in metaphysics. Both respond to the absence of orientation.

This convergence suggests, as reflected in ’s call for new frameworks, that the question pressing itself to the forefront has become: what is worthy. The Kalshi debate crystallizes that shift. It signals a broader recognition that intelligence, efficiency, and innovation cannot serve as moral justification for the work being done. The sense that continuous expansion would supply purpose cannot carry that weight anymore.

Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis—long treated as a foundational narrative of American development—offers a framework for understanding the current rupture. Turner argued that the American frontier functioned as a cultural engine that oriented the nation’s imagination. It promised renewal through outward movement. Ingenuity, risk, and improvisation were elevated not only as skills but as virtues, because they suited a world defined by continuous advance.

Silicon Valley inherited this frontier consciousness. The sector long behaved as though technological expansion—into new markets, new capacities, new forms of abstraction—was inherently moral. Innovation became a form of righteousness, scale a proxy for meaning. The next horizon, whether computational or financial, provided direction: move outward and significance would follow.

Turner did not frame the frontier in moral-philosophical terms, but he did argue that westward expansion functioned as the primary process through which American society absorbed conflict, renewed institutions, and defined its character. The frontier acted as a structural mechanism: it dispersed social pressures, created opportunities for reinvention, and supplied the nation with a narrative of continuous becoming.

When Turner declared the frontier “closed” in 1890, his concern was that the country would lose the formative process that had long shaped its political and cultural development. Without new territories to absorb tension or provide direction, the United States would have to articulate principles and forms of cohesion that no longer arose automatically from expansion. The culture would be required to confront questions it had previously postponed because movement outward had carried much of that burden.

The Kalshi moment reflects that limit. Expansion—of markets, mechanisms, or computational power—no longer provides orientation. Even within AI, where horizons widen weekly, the central question has shifted to value. The assumption that innovation naturally produces moral clarity has weakened. What remains is an unresolved need for an account of purpose more substantive than optimization.

McLuhan observed that new media environments reconfigure perception, and with it the moral field. But consider what this means concretely: when every interaction becomes data, every behavior a signal to optimize, every human activity a potential surface for algorithmic intervention, the moral field genuinely shifts. We begin evaluating worth by what can be tracked, A/B tested, scaled. McLuhan’s insight isn’t abstract. It describes the lived reality of Silicon Valley product development, where “engagement” becomes the proxy for value because engagement is what the infrastructure can measure.

Alasdair MacIntyre observed that when moral systems lose internal coherence, individuals are left to navigate with fragments of concepts detached from the practices that once sustained them. Silicon Valley still invokes “disruption” and “innovation” as though these terms carry inherent moral weight. But disruption toward what end? Innovation in service of what vision of human flourishing? These words function as MacIntyre’s fragments—inherited vocabulary severed from any coherent tradition that would explain why disruption is good, or what innovation is for.

The sector operates with a language of value that no longer has philosophical foundations. Charles Taylor wrote about shifts in the moral imaginary that reshape the criteria by which people evaluate a life as meaningful. Contemporary cultural theorists like have observed the decline of identity-based consumption and the rise of infrastructural or relational forms of purpose. Across these analyses is a shared recognition: when a moral architecture collapses, new forms of orientation must be constructed before action can regain coherence.

The crisis is teleological. Innovation without orientation produces capability without meaning, and capability without meaning generates the maximalist impulses now visible at both ends of the cultural spectrum. The tools have outpaced the narratives.

Turner believed that the closing of the frontier would require Americans to interrogate questions they had long deferred. Something similar is occurring today. The technological frontier, once a reliable source of purpose, no longer supplies moral direction. What is needed is a new account of worthiness—one rooted in responsibility, consequence, and the forms of judgment necessary to steward tools of immense power.

The question of what is worthwhile defines the condition for building responsibly. The morality stack that guided the last generation of Silicon Valley is breaking, not because ambition has diminished, but because ambition requires orientation. When a prediction market can turn mass unemployment into a tradable asset, when optimization becomes purpose rather than serving it, the vocabulary of markets and frontier mythologies has exhausted itself. What comes next must be constructed deliberately: not another horizon to chase, but an account of worthiness that can look at powerful tools and ask not only what they can do, but what they should do—and for whom.

The messy mom aesthetic is part of a broader cultural pattern: we flatten complex experiences into simple, recognizable images because they are easier to consume. Social media conditions us to prefer symbols over reality. Scroll through Instagram and you’ll find thousands of posts tagged #messymom—carefully composed photos of artfully rumpled women, coffee mugs positioned just so, captions about “embracing the chaos” that have been edited three times for maximum relatability. “Mess” becomes a brand identity rather than an honest description of life.

The tradwife aesthetic—Nara Smith making sourdough in a silk dress, Ballerina Farm churning butter in perfect light—offers the opposite performance but the same evasion. One sells relatable chaos, the other sells impossible serenity, but neither gets close to the actual experience of mothering.

Knowing that another mom is a bit disheveled does nothing for me. What helps is knowing that other moms also feel the sudden despair, the heat of rage, the shame that follows both. Those emotions show up because motherhood is overwhelming in ways a meme cannot convey — and in ways our culture actively avoids confronting.

We do not tolerate mothers in pain. We do not tolerate mothers who say they are not okay.

Part of the issue is that our culture routinely removes mothers from the stories it tells. In Disney films, the mother disappears before the plot begins. This choice is framed as narrative efficiency, but it produces a deeper effect: mothers are rarely shown as full characters with interior lives. They are placeholders, not people. When mothers disappear before the story begins, children learn that maternal interiority is irrelevant to adventure, growth, or meaning.

When a culture repeatedly erases mothers from its narratives, it loses the language to describe real maternal experience. It fills the silence with aesthetics: the messy bun, the oversized sweatshirt, the tired smile. These images are easier to look at than the truth. They help maintain the fantasy that motherhood is manageable, containable, and cute. But pain is central to motherhood. Physical pain, emotional pain, psychic pain. The pain of labor and the pain of the labor that follows — raising a small human while the version of yourself you once knew dissolves.

It is beautiful. It is unbearable. It is tedious. It is sacred. It is destabilizing.

But because the full truth feels too heavy, we hide it. And when we hide it, mothers believe they are the exception instead of the norm.

Meanwhile, our culture grows more dependent on aesthetics as a coping mechanism. We’ve seen this pattern before: during periods of crisis, Americans turn to nostalgic images of hearth, home, and maternal stability. This same impulse is at work now. The “messy mom” meme delivers a familiar story: the mother who absorbs difficulty without disrupting anything. Whether she’s perfectly composed or endearingly disheveled, the image does the same work—it contains maternal experience within reassuring boundaries. These memes allow the culture to acknowledge maternal struggle without having to respond to it, to feel sympathetic without providing support, to consume the performance of hardship, however it is depicted, while avoiding the structural conditions that produce it.

A few recent movies finally show motherhood without treating it as an inconvenience or a joke. They restore interiority to mothers instead of flattening them. They offer an alternative to the aesthetic approach—one that insists on complexity and refuses easy consumption.

In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne’s character tries to keep her life from collapsing while every support system around her fails. The mess in the background is not the point. The point is the pressure, fear, and exhaustion that no one else wants to see.

In Nightbitch, Amy Adams reveals the feral parts of motherhood — the boredom, the overstimulation, the erosion of identity. In Die My Love, Jennifer Lawrence illustrates postpartum depression with a precision that forces the audience to witness what mothers usually endure in private.

These films do not try to make mothers appealing or digestible. They do not resolve their stories with sentimentality. They show mothers as human beings with inner lives. They depict the moments that usually get edited out for being “too much.” And in doing so, they create space for audiences to recognize maternal experience as legitimate, worthy of attention, and more complex than any aesthetic can capture.

The messy mom meme pretends to validate mothers but actually prevents recognition. It repackages maternal struggle into something attractive, sharable, and harmless. It asks nothing from the culture. Real motherhood asks everything.

The rage. The shame. The nights when you sit on the edge of the bathtub thinking, I can’t do this. The days when the intensity of your love frightens you. The urge to disappear for just an hour.

These truths never make it onto the coffee mugs.

Motherhood is enormous and cultural support is almost nonexistent. Institutions respond to maternal suffering the same way they respond to any systemic issue: with symbolic gestures instead of structural change. Aesthetic acknowledgment stands in for actual care. What mothers need is paid parental leave, affordable childcare, mental health support without stigma, and communities designed to sustain families rather than isolate them. Instead, they get mugs that say “mom fuel” and T-shirts celebrating their exhaustion.

Mothers deserve stories that show the full range of what this is—the beauty and the violence of it, the love that rewires your brain and the rage that follows when no one shows up to help you carry it.

The culture will not do this work unless we force it to. So I’ll say it plainly: most mothers are suffering, and it’s not because they’re doing something wrong. It’s because we’ve built a society that needs their labor but refuses to support it, that romanticizes motherhood while punishing mothers, and that consumes their exhaustion as content while offering nothing in return.

This made me think about something I’ve been circling for a while: how easily we’ve traded our intuition for ideology. Even this catfisher, deep in their own deception, put their finger on a basic truth — our innate moral sense, a pre-political knowing that transcends our basest impulses.

And yet, we’ve lost touch with that knowing.

What I want to name here is one of the great tragedies of the moment: we’ve replaced our moral intuitions with political ones. We know it’s wrong to dehumanize people we disagree with, or to treat dignity as conditional rather than inherent. We know it’s wrong to ridicule someone publicly, or to terrorize families through the state. Yet we rarely name these as moral failures. Instead, we pass them through the filter of our affiliations until we lose moral resolution.

We treat political logic as if it were moral logic, and the results are disorienting. Public life is full of moral language — justice, equity, freedom, harm — yet our moral grounding has never felt less stable.

Politics was never meant to be the source of moral truth. Mahatma Gandhi warned of “the seven social sins,” one of which was Politics without Principle. Good governance requires both. When the political comes before the ethical, allegiance gets to masquerade as virtue and opposition as ethics.

Ethics as Practice

Ethics is lived. It’s how we listen, act, care, and discern. It’s slow, difficult work: learning to see clearly and act accordingly, developing humility, and practicing repair (a lost art, in my opinion).

Politics can support ethical commitments, but it cannot replace them. It is essential to life in society, but not sufficient to create the conditions for people to thrive. Politics organizes power; it cannot produce meaning. When political life becomes the container for moral expression, we stop asking what is good and start asking what is strategic or on-brand. Everything — the pulpit included — begins to sound like a campaign speech.

How We Got Here

I write a lot about technology, culture, and identity. So we’ve trodden this path together before. It’s no longer a secret that the design of digital culture rewards visibility, speed, and polarization, all of which favor the political over the ethical. Our moral lives are mediated by systems that turn everything into content. We know that anger travels faster than care and that real reflection rarely registers in the feed. We’re not incentivized to be deliberate or kind online.

Neil Postman once noted that television turned politics into spectacle. When spectacle takes over and the image (now increasingly AI-generated) replaces understanding, we stop thinking for ourselves and leave little room for the deliberate reflection that an ethical life requires.

Without a shared moral foundation, every disagreement feels existential and we rely on shared enemies instead of shared principles. In this environment, people outsource their moral agency. We look to parties, movements, and influencers to tell us what to think and how to act. The slow, interior work of forming conscience is replaced by alignment with an external authority, a voice of confidence.

We become moral consumers in a political marketplace — collecting identities that signal goodness instead of cultivating it for ourselves.

Overidentification and the Collapse of Inner Life

This is what I'm calling overidentification: the absorption of one’s ethical self into a political story so complete that doubt (once a critical stage of sainthood, by the way) looks like betrayal. Identity becomes the center of moral life. But identity cannot bear that weight. It fractures under the pressure of constant performance, leaving us defensive and prone to break.

A few months ago, David French wrote about the implications for American evangelicalism. What many call revival, he calls revolution, a shift from the biblical principles of repentance and spiritual renewal to accusation and political control. Half of self-identified evangelicals now attend church once a month or less, even as political fervor intensifies. Political identity hasn’t revived ethical practice; it has replaced it.

But this isn’t limited to religion. It’s the pattern of our age — politics has consumed ethics.

Coming Back to Each Other

Rebuilding moral ground begins with recovering ethics as a shared practice — not an abstract ideal, but the foundation of community life. And before we can govern systems, we have to govern ourselves in relation to one another — in the small, everyday ways that make collective life possible. It begins in proximity: how we treat the people we know, how we respond to those we don’t, how we make and keep our word.

Political renewal depends on ethical renewal — on recovering the capacity to act with integrity before seeking validation or outsourcing our opinions to ideologues. Politics cannot remain our primary language for goodness. We need to reclaim moral agency from the systems that erode it.

The restoration of moral ground won’t come from better arguments or more virtuous leaders. It will come from re-inhabiting the ethical dimension of life that cannot be outsourced or delegated — what we owe each other beyond what we post, share, or vote.

Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap argues that identity politics—once a movement for recognition—has metastasized into a doctrine of separation, elevating race, gender, and sexuality from aspects of the self to hierarchies of virtue and harm. Mounk diagnoses the moral overreach clearly. But to understand why identity became so totalizing, we have to look beyond its excesses to the conditions that produced them.

Overidentification is the process by which identity expands to fill the whole of selfhood, even as it collapses into performance—where the person becomes indistinguishable from their labels. It is not only a political reflex but a cultural symptom: the result of exhausted narratives and eroded trust.

Institutions have lost authority, religion has lost transcendence, and politics has lost coherence. The connective tissue of culture, once woven from mutual obligation and common cause, has thinned into a web of personal brands and digital affinities. In this vacuum, identity bears the weight once carried by faith, work, and community.

The Moralization of Difference

There was a time when pluralism was the reigning moral philosophy: different but equal, distinct yet interdependent. Today, difference itself has been moralized. The marginalized self is not only visible but virtuous; the privileged self is suspect by default. (Remember Karen?)

This shift reflects a society searching for moral clarity in an age when institutions and information can no longer be trusted. Suffering has replaced authority as the credential of truth. To speak from the wound is to speak with legitimacy. Authenticity—the fragile currency of the internet age—now depends on proximity to harm. Distrusting institutions, we invest instead in identity as moral currency.

Political philosopher Michael Sandel calls this “the tyranny of merit”: a moral system where recognition replaces redistribution and dignity depends on how convincingly one can perform disadvantage. In this new economy of virtue, even empathy becomes competitive—a race for moral standing sometimes called “comparative suffering.”

Overidentification emerges from this logic. If identity is the new moral economy, to disavow it risks invisibility, and to question it risks exile.

Platforms of Selfhood

Social media flattened human experience into a pattern of clicks and scrolls. Its architecture—designed to simulate connection—rewards self-categorization and outrage. Within this environment, the self is no longer something to be discovered, as centuries of philosophy assumed, but something to be declared.

To exist online is to catalog yourself—to announce, repeatedly, what you are and what you stand against. The algorithm doesn’t care what you believe; it cares that you believe something—strongly. The more emphatically we declare, the more visible we become.

Consider the rise of pronouns in bios. It began as a gesture of trans solidarity, a way to make gender diversity visible. Within a few years, it moved from grassroots signal to HR policy to corporate expectation to tribal marker. What started as recognition became a loyalty test: its presence or absence now signals which side you’re on. The algorithm doesn’t care why you include pronouns—only that the declaration makes you legible, sortable, and circulatable. With each iteration, performance hollows out until only signal remains, divorced from meaning.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described identity as a stage performance: we play roles, manage impressions, and adjust our masks to the audience. Social media collapses the stage and the audience into one continuous mirror. There is no backstage anymore—only visibility. Overidentification is not an accident of the attention economy but its design principle: a self optimized for engagement, stripped of depth.

The Corporate Mirror

What individuals learned to perform as moral theater, corporations perfected as marketing strategy. For decades, brands sold desire; now they sell virtue. The “purpose economy” reframed consumption as ethical expression: buy this shoe, signal your solidarity. In this system, corporations translate social movements into lifestyle choices. Overidentification becomes institutionalized—encoded in policy, performance metrics, and brand values.

The organization’s public virtue hedges against reputational risk, teaching us that moral authority is won through declaration rather than demonstrated through action.

Take the word woke. It began in Black vernacular as an exhortation to awareness—stay woke meant vigilance against oppression. Corporations adopted the term, along with their black squares, to signal progressive values until it came to mean everything and nothing. The right then reclaimed it as insult. Emptied of reference, woke now functions as a hollow signifier of tribal belonging.

This is moral inflation. Individuals coin identity language to express recognition and solidarity. Corporations adopt it to capture markets. The language spreads everywhere, losing specificity. Individuals must then escalate—sharpening distinctions to re-authenticate themselves. That new language is adopted again, and the cycle repeats.

For brands, this yields diminishing returns: each moral declaration buys less trust. The louder a company asserts its virtue, the less credible it becomes. Moral inflation devalues the very currency it creates.

The Spiritual Hunger Beneath It All

Beneath the outrage cycles and corporate virtue signaling lies something deeper: spiritual hunger. Overidentification is political and cultural, but it is also metaphysical. It is what happens when the sacred impulse has nowhere to go but inward.

Modernity disenchanted the world. The gods withdrew; meaning became a private project. Religion once offered coherence through transcendence, and community offered belonging through reciprocity. Both eroded, leaving identity as a secular substitute for salvation. To be someone—to belong to a category, a movement, a cause—feels like proof that one matters.

But identity cannot bear this weight. The more we seek ultimate meaning through self-description, the more fragile those descriptions become. Hence the defensiveness, the factionalism, and the impossibility of forgiveness online. To question identity, or even to withhold affirmation, feels like spiritual violence, because in a disenchanted world, identity is all that’s left.

This is why overidentification is fundamentally a spiritual problem disguised as a political one. Consider the example of Baylor University’s 2017 “Cinco de Drinko” party, where students dressed as maids and construction workers—a display both offensive and denigrating. That is not merely a political problem requiring policy; it’s an ethical problem revealing the absence of character and moral formation. We’ve lost the language of ethics—which demands something beyond the self—so we default to the language of politics, which offers only rules and enforcement.

Politics can ban the party; it cannot teach why the party is cruel. Politics is secular—it can draw boundaries, but it cannot build character. Ethics requires transcendence, a moral framework beyond the self. Identity politics, confined to the visible and the present, demands recognition without cultivating virtue.

When belief in something beyond the self disappears, conflict takes its place as ritual. As René Girard observed, communities under stress seek scapegoats to restore order. Our era’s scapegoats are ideological: the wrong kind of feminist, the insufficiently anti-racist, the un-woke liberal. What looks like conviction is often metaphysical panic—a desperate attempt to impose coherence on a world that no longer supplies it.

Toward a Post-Identitarian Politics of Relation

If overidentification is the symptom of collapse, then the task is not to discard identity but to recontextualize it. We cannot move past identity by pretending it doesn’t matter; we must move through it, toward relationship.

The philosopher Martin Buber described two modes of encounter: I–It and I–Thou. The first treats others as objects—categories, functions, or data points. The second recognizes them as subjects: irreducible, alive. Our cultural systems—social media, branding, politics—are optimized for I–It. They make identity visible without making it relational. The counter-move is radical presence: seeing the person behind the pronoun.

This calls for a richer moral imagination, one that understands identity as a point of connection rather than confinement. It’s the difference between identifying with and identifying as. The former opens; the latter closes.

How do we shift from performance to presence, from self-obsession to self-forgetfulness? The answer lies in old human practices that relocate the self within something larger: reading, community, contemplation, care.

Reading literature trains us to inhabit other minds—to hold contradiction, ambiguity, and empathy across difference. Knowing your neighbors requires encountering the unfiltered, the local, the inconvenient. You cannot block your neighbor; you must negotiate, accommodate, and show up. Meditation, prayer, and time in nature quiet the self-narrating ego and cultivate humility—the recognition that you are not the measure of all things.

Ram Dass taught that we can inhabit our roles—teacher, parent, activist, whatever identity we claim—without being imprisoned by them. This isn’t pretending difference doesn’t matter. It’s remembering that you are larger than any label that tries to contain you. To hold identity lightly is to wear it like clothing, not confuse it with skin.

Overidentification feeds on the hunger for coherence. To starve it, we must build new stories of us—stories large enough to hold contradiction, plurality, and doubt. The question is not Who are you? but What are we becoming together?

Identity cannot be our ethics. But through relation to one another, perhaps, we can recover the meaning that identity once promised.

In moments like this, cultures do not simply float in the fog. Something always rushes in to fill the gap. What we are seeing now — from the rise of Christian nationalism in American politics to the appeal of authoritarian figures worldwide — is not a return to wisdom, but rather, conviction masquerading as wisdom.

This counterfeit succeeds precisely because it’s easier than the real thing. Conviction promises clarity: a path, a rule, a code, a leader. And in times of disorientation, clarity feels like oxygen. The incentives are clear: confusion is profitable. Media platforms make money from engagement, not truth. Political entrepreneurs gain power from polarization, not understanding. Outrage keeps us scrolling and continues to enrich the platforms that take zero accountability for the chaos they enable.

The cycle is predictable: sow confusion and fatigue, then present conviction as the escape hatch.

It’s important to draw a distinction between conviction and wisdom. I’ve written before about holding beliefs strongly enough to act on them and holding them so tightly that reality can no longer change your mind. Wisdom requires what I called the “Explorer” posture: high conviction paired with high openness—beliefs examined and lived, but flexible enough to adapt when evidence demands it.

Counterfeit wisdom maps onto the other quadrants perfectly:

The Zealot (strong conviction, low openness): This is conviction masquerading as wisdom. I can name many figures (I’m sure you can, too) who offer the feeling of wisdom through certainty and decisiveness while demonstrating its exact opposite through their inability to learn, adapt, or acknowledge complexity. Zealot-wisdom doesn’t open the world—it seals it. It produces loyalty without discernment, fervor without understanding.

The Student (weak conviction, high openness): This is perpetual uncertainty masquerading as wisdom. The person who can see merit in every argument but never commits to a position, paralyzed by the possibility they might be wrong. In our polarized environment, this often gets mistaken for virtue—the “both sides” paralysis that feels sophisticated but leads nowhere.

The Drifter (weak conviction, low openness): This is algorithmic consensus masquerading as wisdom. The person who adopts whatever views their feed or friend group promotes, outsourcing judgment to ideology. It’s the default in high-noise environments where thinking for yourself requires more energy than most people can sustain.

The real crisis beneath the crisis of meaning is that we’ve replaced the hard work of wisdom—the Explorer posture—with these easier counterfeits. We no longer reward the disciplines that make wisdom possible: slowness, humility, discernment, the willingness to sit with complexity and feel our way into questions before reaching for answers.

The Explorer’s Daily Practice

The path back to genuine wisdom starts with cultivating a posture of curiosity, with a set of questions that become the background hum of how we engage with information overload. The Explorer learns to ask: What if I’m wrong? Not as self-doubt, but as curiosity. Who benefits from this story? Following the incentives behind what we’re being told. What do I feel when I read this? Noticing our emotional reactions as data rather than letting them drive our conclusions. Am I seeking information or confirmation? The difference matters more than we want to admit.

This questioning becomes a discipline. Before sharing that article or joining that argument, the Explorer pauses: What would I need to see to change my mind on this? If the answer is “nothing,” that’s a warning sign. If the answer is specific and reasonable, that’s conviction worth acting on.

The Explorer also changes how they consume information. Instead of staying comfortable, they wade into uncomfortable territory, reading people who disagree with them. They choose dialogue over broadcasting, primary sources over commentary. They notice when they’re in an echo chamber and actively seek the friction that is part of engaging with different perspectives. I’m not proposing “both sides-ism.” I’m advocating for the harder work of understanding why intelligent people might reach different conclusions.

The danger of counterfeit wisdom is not only political but spiritual. These counterfeit forms give people something to hold onto, but strip them of the capacity to see the deeper patterns shaping their lives. They thrive in the absence of real wisdom because they can perform the part well enough to pass. Just put on the MAGA hat or fly the multi-colored flag.

This isn’t a conspiracy—it’s convergent incentives. Facebook makes money when we stay engaged, even if that engagement is angry. Cable news gets ratings from outrage, not understanding. Political fundraising works better with fear than hope. But if we can recover wisdom, the lived practice of building both conviction and openness, then the fog begins to lift.

Every piece of wisdom literature, from Socrates and Marcus Aurelius to Simone Weil and the Bible, supports that real wisdom will not arrive in the form of strongmen or slogans. Wisdom is the ordinary but difficult work of being an Explorer when everything in our information environment pulls us elsewhere. It’s learning to hold our conclusions lightly enough that reality can still change our minds, while holding them strongly enough to guide everyday action.

The stakes are high. If we continue to mistake the counterfeits for the real thing, the architects of confusion will win easily. But wisdom is still possible and available to all. It is the renewable capacity to think and feel for ourselves, again and again, in each new situation we encounter. And that renewal is our only passage out of the fog.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data.

Neil Postman gave a talk titled Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. He argued that every technology carries its own philosophy, a "given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds." Each tool, he said, also has a prejudice: it amplifies some ways of knowing while neglecting others.

The times are, as they say, unprecedented. We’re experiencing profound technological change. Some are calling it a Golden Age. Others, the beginning of the end. Wherever you may find yourself on the spectrum, you’re right to heed Postman’s warning: Sleepwalking through technological change is a form of stupidity. He ended his talk with a call to action: "We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we may use technology rather than be used by it."

Everything we're experiencing today — volatility, polarization, even violence — suggests we are being used.

Postman was prophetic. It's time to open our eyes to the ways technology has shaped who we've become. But unlike previous technological revolutions—the printing press, television, the telephone—we're not adapting to one new medium at a time. We are simultaneously social media people, GPT people, and forum people, moving between these environments throughout a single day, carrying their conflicting prejudices with us as we go.

Each environment shapes not only what we say but how we think, what we expect, and who we become. The result is a peculiar form of cultural instability: we're the first generation to experience multiple technological prejudices at once, with no time to adapt to one before the next reshapes our minds.

To understand what we're becoming, we need to see each prejudice clearly before we can recognize how they're reshaping us together.

Social Media People

To a person with social media, everything looks like content.

This is the prejudice of the feed: life itself becomes raw material for imagined audiences. Every moment gets staged, every experience filtered through the question "How will this play in the feed?"

You feel this when you catch yourself composing an experience as a post before it's even happened. You feel it when tragedy strikes and the instinct is to perform condolences or place blame rather than sit in silence. The feed trains us to perform first, feel later.

The deeper cost is fragmentation. Social media slices identity into consumable pieces—beliefs, positions, convictions broken down into shareable fragments. The platform's logic prioritizes visibility and circulation over all else. We become comfortable existing in pieces, our sense of self scattered across posts, stories, and profiles that need not add up to anything whole.

GPT People

To a person with ChatGPT, everything looks like an answer.

This is the prejudice of the language model: every question deserves a smooth, convincing reply. Responses arrive instantly, polished and plausible, regardless of the question.

The model doesn't pause or hesitate. They produces, or generate. And so it shapes us into people who expect production—instant, confident, endless. Over time, we start to equate this kind of speed with accuracy and truth. We lose our tolerance for mystery and for the slow work of thinking.

The danger is not that the answers are always wrong. It's that they always sound right. The machine provides not just answers, but a template for how answers should feel: smooth, authoritative, and certain. In an information ecology increasingly populated by AI-generated content, this template becomes the standard for what we recognize as legitimate knowledge.

Forum People

To a person on an anonymous forum, everything looks like a provocation.

This is the prejudice of spaces like 4chan, Discord, and Reddit: communication as performance without consequence. The architecture makes this inevitable. Anonymity means no reputation, ephemerality means no memory.

In this environment, sincerity becomes fragile and irony is a way of protecting oneself. A genuine stance can (and will) be mocked or weaponized. Irony, by contrast, is always defensible. It can be abandoned the moment it becomes inconvenient.

What gets rewarded are shock, humor, and transgression, modes perfectly suited to a medium where everything disappears. But the deeper prejudice is against coherence itself. Users fragment across pseudonyms, throwaway accounts, and shifting personas. The self becomes deliberately scattered and contradictory. For the lolz.

The young people who came of age in these spaces are now entering broader culture, carrying forum-native habits of provocation and strategic incoherence with them. They've learned to navigate the world through deliberate muddle, resisting the tidy categories that previous generations used to organize identity and belief.

The Convergence

These technological prejudices don't exist in isolation. We move between them constantly—checking Instagram while asking ChatGPT for advice while lurking in Discord channels. Each transition carries its prejudice forward: the performance pressure of social media into our prompts to AI, the detachment of forums into our posts, the instant-answer expectation of AI into our conversations.

The combination optimizes for content that is viral and consequence-free. We become skilled at generating language that feels meaningful while remaining uncommitted to whether it is true. The systems reward engagement and shock, while the things like friction that create genuine understanding get optimized away.

What emerges is a peculiar style of consciousness: articulate, performative, and detached. But this isn't just how humans are learning to communicate—it's how our entire information environment operates. Bots perform on social media and provoke in forums. We're not just becoming more machine-like; we're in constant conversation with machines without knowing it, learning to sound like them because that's what sounds "right" in spaces they increasingly populate.

The result is cultural instability unlike anything previous generations faced. Where the printing press gave us centuries to adapt, we're experiencing multiple technological revolutions simultaneously. As Postman warned, “Culture always pays a price for technology.” We're paying multiple prices at once, and we're not sure what we're becoming in the process.

Seeing the Water

Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds. Social media makes us performers. GPT makes us consumers of instant answers. Forums make us ironists who resist coherence.

The danger, as Postman warned, is not the technologies themselves but mistaking their prejudices for reality. Believing that everything must be content. Believing that every question has an instant answer. Believing that detachment is always more useful than commitment.

Recognition is the first step toward discernment. We can't escape these prejudices, but we can learn to see them. To notice when we're thinking like the feed, expecting answers like a language model, or defaulting to ironic detachment like a forum user.

The goal isn't to abandon these tools but to use them without being used by them.

This means learning to code-switch deliberately between different modes of thinking rather than being captured by any single one. It means recognizing that each technology offers a particular way of engaging with the world—powerful but partial—and that wisdom requires moving between them rather than being trapped by them.

David Foster Wallace once told a story about two young fish swimming along when an older fish passes them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" The two young fish swim on, and eventually one looks at the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"

We are the first generation to swim in this particular digital water. It is imperative we learn to see it.

This isn't the first time a society has turned to absurdity in the face of collapse. A century ago, in the cafés of Zurich, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara staged nonsense as a response to the senselessness of World War I. When Dada spread to Germany after the war, it became explicitly political, with artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix using shock tactics and transgressive imagery to attack militarism, capitalism, and nationalism. Their work was confrontational, offensive to bourgeois sensibilities, and designed to provoke.

The Dadaists wielded spontaneity, negation, and absurdity as weapons. Spontaneity rejected imitation; negation declared everything equally meaningless; and absurdity opposed harmony altogether. Yet even at its most radical, this nihilism remained humanistic and their incoherence was an intentional defense of dignity against dehumanizing systems.

Where Dada externalized absurdity in spectacle, Albert Camus internalized it into a daily ethic. For him, endurance itself was rebellion.

Writing in occupied France, Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus with the claim that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide. If the world is absurd—if our hunger for meaning meets only silence—then why go on? Camus's answer was rebellion, not in the sense of revolution or bloodshed, but in the insistence on persistence. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, he wrote, not because the rock will ever reach the summit, but because the struggle itself affirms life. Where Dada made absurdity into spectacle, Camus made it into an ethic of endurance.

Later decades found their own expressions. Punk screamed "no future" and built new forms of togetherness in basements and dive bars, a way of metabolizing despair into noise and community. Postmodernism wallowed in irony and cynicism, but it still produced new ideas and art. (See: David Foster Wallace.) Each time, absurdity functioned as a cultural metabolizer, a way of processing unbearable conditions without abandoning the social project entirely.

Contemporary extremist movements represent a fundamental corruption of Dadaist principles. Whether it's the Groyper Army's coordinated harassment campaigns or blackpill nihilism's celebration of despair, these currents appropriate Dadaist aesthetics while betraying Dadaist philosophy. They use the same tools—ironic memes, transgressive imagery—but systematically corrupt the core principles.

What makes this shift so chilling is how it exploits the collapse of coherent categories themselves. The Kirk suspect defies easy classification, neither clearly left nor right, but something more aestheticized and fragmented. We are witnessing political positions that are primarily aesthetic choices: collections of memes, symbols, and affects rather than coherent worldviews. Groypers aren't "far right" in any classical sense, and blackpill culture isn't traditionally "nihilistic."Both are aesthetic brands that borrow from various sources without forming coherent ideologies.

The inscrutability is intentional. Traditional ideologies want to be understood, to convert, and to build movements. But when politics becomes primarily aesthetic, incoherence becomes part of the appeal, signaling that you're beyond conventional reasoning. This is not confrontational art that shocks in service of universal human dignity, but weaponized aesthetics in service of exclusion and individual violence.

This aestheticization of politics creates a meaning vacuum that extremist culture fills not with genuine belief but with the simulation of belief, the performance of conviction. The inscrutability isn't something to be decoded. It's the point.

This fragmentation poses a fundamental challenge to the very possibility of dissent. Dada could reject and attack "bourgeois capitalism" or "militarism," concrete systems with clear boundaries. But what do you oppose when power itself has become fragmented and aestheticized? When political positions are collections of resentments rather than coherent worldviews?

The traditional forms of rebellion lose their target, leaving only the aesthetic of rebellion itself. You can't really "debunk" an aesthetic. The usual tools of counter-argument become useless against movements that have moved beyond ideology entirely. In this landscape, negation becomes purely destructive rather than clearing ground for something new.

Yet power, as always, seeks to consolidate. My guess is that we will witness a transitional moment where new forms of authority emerge from this fragmentation. Not traditional institutions but new forms of power that operate through aesthetics and resentments rather than ideology and policy. The violence we see may be part of that consolidation process, a way of establishing dominance in a landscape where traditional markers of power are quickly dissolving.

Camus warned against killing for ideology. But what happens when ideology breaks down into style choices? He believed that recognizing life's absurdity should lead to life-affirming rebellion. Instead, we see a culture where people commit real violence not for any coherent beliefs, but simply because violence fits their aesthetic. They're not dying for ideas that give life meaning. They're killing for the performance of meaninglessness itself.

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

We are entering uncharted territory. Our existing analytical frameworks are inadequate to describe what we're witnessing. The assassination of Charlie Kirk marks a moment when cultural forms that once fostered creativity and connection have been turned toward their opposite—not in service of any particular vision of the future, but in service of fragmentation itself.

Whether this represents a temporary breakdown or the emergence of something genuinely new remains to be seen. What's clear is that the old tools of political analysis and cultural criticism may no longer be sufficient. We're witnessing something that our categories can't yet capture, and pretending otherwise risks missing what's actually happening.