New essay. From triumphal 1990s ideas about an American century underpinned by Internet power, to the mid-2010s belief that social media was a “global conversation,” to mid-2020s anxieties about communication breakdowns and civil war. open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...

A new essay on the ideals of “inclusive capitalism” and late-2010s content moderation. Could social media platforms transcend their origins and become the new and inclusive global civic sphere (overseen, of course, by “machines of loving grace”)? open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...

My attempt to capture what the Twitter platform was and how it functioned in the 2010s, as well as what its long term legacies might be. open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...

Part of being a good online citizen in 2025 is resisting the urge to put the word "epistemic" in front of any random noun.

Part of being a good online citizen in 2025 is resisting the urge to put the word "epistemic" in front of any random noun.

Paper books printed prior to 2022 will become the currency of the knowledge economy of the future… and I’m not even joking.

2022: “OMG! Elon is a genius! His bold leadership shows that we can make mass tech layoffs with no impact on the user experience at all! Let’s make this an industry standard. Today’s user experience on Twitter:

"I reject the system!" "Great! The system offers you the option of identifying as someone who rejects the system, just one among the many Valid identity expressions we respect and recognise." "Oh, alright then."

It occurs to me that in 3-4 years time, professors on here are going to be talking about how none of their students know what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is.

“It’s funny that the two leading right-wing ideologies at the moment are just different forms of Marxism: Land the progressive eschatological futurist variant … Girard the critical variant devoted to the debunking of ideologies.”—John Pistelli

“Verification puts an end to the workings of truth (for truth, if it exists, is something to be fought over, whereas verification transforms it into a fait accompli).”—Jean Baudrillard

Replacing your institutional cultures—built up over centuries—with a simulacrum made up of rules, regulations, and “best practice” because of “efficiency.” Then watching your entire society dissolve as the cheat codes become universally available and trivial to implement.

AI “bulldozes everything local, everything intimate, everything singular and idiosyncratic and irreducible to statistical regularities—and tells us the only thing that is to count as human reality is what gets reflected back to us by our machines.”—Justin Smith-Ruiu

The Right Libertarian => Populist Anger that things are getting worse => More right libertarian policies => More misguided anger that things are getting worse => Emergence of Anarcho Capitalism opportunities to accelerate disintegration => People get angrier death spiral seems inescapable.

The thing about Reform UK—across all its warring factions—is that it is fundamentally a right-libertarian party committed to the type of turbo-Thatcherism that caused the problems many of its supporters are ostensibly voting against.

One way of looking at Twitter/X is that the Musk regime effectively “abolished the police” (decimating the staff tasked with moderation and responding to hacking and impersonation incidents) and is now facing predictable (and accelerating) breakdowns in order and trust.

Everything (everything) now reframed (often retrospectively) according to the binary logic of “whose side are you on?” With whom do you affiliate? All issues and cultural phenomena implicitly tagged with moral and political metadata, coded left or right.

We really are doomed, aren’t we?

Coming up at Verdurin: Accelerationist Society and its Future with @mrewanmorrison.bsky.social and Nicholas Blincoe. When Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto finds an afterlife in the cult veneration of Luigi Mangione, are we doomed by the Unabomber’s predictions? /

Only the most oblivious Oxbridge version of university teaching will survive the AI revolution. The tutorial system (fellow plus 1-3 students). Examination by viva voce. Academics who detest publication as “vulgar and rather American,” so their ideas stay out of LLMs.

Those who find themselves consistently holding oppositional or "unpopular" views not only have to resign themselves to regular failure. They also have to endure having their ideas temporarily taken up (and ultimately trashed and discredited) by opportunists when it suits them.

My line of response to UBI people is, sounds great, are you planning on raising taxes to give everyone £10k a year or are you cutting £10k from existing welfare spending? The answer is always, we will get it from billionaires...

“What happened to reality? Well, somebody took a picture of it, and ever since we haven’t needed it anymore.”—Fredric Jameson

Systems of audit and accounting that define the basic principles of social reproduction on which a society depends for its future existence as “costs” that must be minimised or avoided. That will ultimately deem social reproduction itself an “unaffordable luxury.”

Harry Crane and his giant computer room. The desire to automate “creative” and replace it with pure predictive data. We are all Don Draper now.

Everyone ridiculed this film when it came out, but in retrospect it nails the early 2025 zeitgeist—if we interpret the movie such that Megalon is a delusional fraud and that the shining replacement world that the old order’s been levelled to make way for will never exist.

People everywhere finding out just how much of their lives (their livelihoods; their shared understandings) can be deemed "non-essential" when governments abruptly decide that "we're not continuing with that model anymore." Sudden obsolescence on a planetary scale.

It’s election night, 2029. Nigel Farage faces the cameras to give a premature concession speech before the final results come in indicating that Reform have won a working majority. Faced with the awful prospect of actually governing, he abandons Reform to start yet another new party.

Negative polarisation is (quite literally) a trip. You can end up in some surprising places. But it’s also worth thinking about whether the far flung ideological destinations you find yourself visiting are really where you want to be situated in the long term.

Modernity: demolition of the past. Old cultures permitted to survive as folkloric fragments. Postmodernity: a celebration of the fragments, each enjoyed equally. Fundamentalism: new religions assembled from the old folklores, each now regarded as “tradition” and absolute truth.

Governance through AI—although it will be made to seem “immediate,” “instantaneous,” “responsive,” and “personalised”—is the most impersonal thing imaginable. It involves the viral dissolution of authority. There will be no one to point to and say, “that person is in charge.”

The humanities were gripped in the 2010s by a euphoric belief in art’s power to “change the world” for the better. This manic belief now risks flipping to its opposite state, nihilistic depression—a kind of Werther hysteria in which (the wrong) art will “literally make people want to die.”

As the right mounts more and more effective attacks on liberal progressivism, left-wing critics of liberal progressivism face an existential question. In what ways does their critique differ from the right-wing conservative one?

The idea—now widespread on the American right—that one can vanquish progressive ideology by taking PMC jobs out from underneath progressives relies (ironically) on a naive faith in the ideologically generative powers of “material interests.”

As @ghostofchristo1.bsky.social said (on real twitter), if some completely acceptable ideas are repressed, then someone will come along presenting perverted versions of those ideas, while posing as a rebel.

In a time of crisis in social and cultural production, the ability to generate cheap simulacra—the concrete and stucco stand-ins for genuinely produced things—goes into overdrive. We end up with a world choked and expiring under the weight of photocopies of itself.

Neighbourhood Facebook groups that seem to consist of 50% “missing cat” and 50% “whose cat is this?” posts, and where there’s no apparent crossover between the two cat populations. I’ve always felt that this reveals something profound about the nature of reality that we’re not quite seeing.

Found myself revisiting @ryanruby.bsky.social’s 2023 article about how Twitter came to be a confluence point for literary and cultural discussion online around 2020, and how we’d look back on it as something of a golden age after that version of Twitter was taken away. www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/...

Found myself revisiting @ryanruby.bsky.social’s 2023 article about how Twitter came to be a confluence point for literary and cultural discussion online around 2020, and how we’d look back on it as something of a golden age after that version of Twitter was taken away. www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/...

I love how the “production” section of any given 2024/5 film’s Wikipedia page now begins with “In 2021, Ambien & Partners signed a deal with Netflix to produce multiple films per year that viewers could sort of have on in the background while they scroll through the feeds on their phones.”

Right-wing populism—a mechanism whereby voters who think they’re being promised nativism, restrictionism, and a return to past structures and certainties are served a menu of deterritorialising libertarian turbo-capitalism instead. In large and rapidly administered doses.

One thing gen-AI has done very quickly is to bring about a fundamental crisis of trust between lecturer/teacher/tutor/marker and student. Whenever markers encounter a glib but well phrased generalisation in an essay, the question is now always going to be there—“is this gen-AI?”

Or, perhaps, a mass social panic associated with disruptive new technologies and the threat of impending war, akin to the “Phantom Airships” and “Phantom Aircraft” panics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Okay I have to push back here. These people might be desperate for belief, whatever, but this proliferated because the tech industry has run out of growth markets. The "cult" is desperation and guys that don't know anything trying to see greatness in mediocrity

The general experience of using Claude to work through your ideas is a bit like preening in front of a mirror, except you're typing and the AI is Facetuning your ideas into ever more flattering simulacra of themselves.

The general experience of using Claude to work through your ideas is a bit like preening in front of a mirror, except you're typing and the AI is Facetuning your ideas into ever more flattering simulacra of themselves.

Baudrillard talks about texts that read the reader. With users “falling” for Claude and attributing it all sorts of divinatory powers, we see new forms of “cold reading” emerging. As they have at many points in the past, new technologies, the occult, and “the eerie” all seem to coincide.

Baudrillard talks about texts that read the reader. With users “falling” for Claude and attributing it all sorts of divinatory powers, we see new forms of “cold reading” emerging. As they have at many points in the past, new technologies, the occult, and “the eerie” all seem to coincide.

After each period of increasingly destabilising informalisation—a demand for reformalisation. Structures! Authority! Anything! Someone, please lead us out of this increasingly unfamiliar and now frankly sketchy place we thought we wanted the world to be.