man ive been trying to figure out how to frame a research question/argument that would enable me to study epistemic collapse and its limits but it's actually really hard to specify a research design on this type of thing

the real secret here is that these types of people went to college--where ideas are actually challenged, interrogated, unraveled, and examined--and realized that they couldn't just spout off on a soapbox, and they decided it was everyone else's fault that they felt sad

man charlie is one of the valiant writers out there actually grappling with epistemic collapse as it is happening and as we are all experiencing

“It's pretty indicative of general speech associated with the deep parts of internet culture, in particular the types that are very much into irony posting and edgelord humor," says extremism researcher @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social With @makenakelly.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/charli...

the national park service budget is roughly $5 billion. those are rookie numbers. amateur hour. I want President Pritzker to be using all of his political capital to get to $50 billion. I want 100 new national parks. I want maglevs from cities to visitor centers.

this is in line with my increasingly strongly held belief that friction in sociotechnical systems is not just Good but is a Necessity

a main critique/revision on Putnam's thought is that associations can be REAL bad if they entrench homophily... but they are near panacea level if they can achieve cross-cutting heterogeneity

@zephoria.bsky.social was really onto something re: the closure--if not elimination--of public spaces for youth due to media-fueled predators panic (sigh)

I really hope we get some pressure on the next dem administration to excessively fund a rewilding/climate corps and literally just give young people $100k/year to touch/plant grass

that's right. and the gym should be free

the central pillar of my philosophy: build rec centers and build libraries and build schools and fund after school programs and sports teams and clubs and literally never stop building more of them

There is definitely something unique happening with gamer identity and cultures www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

"it's just a reflection of modern communication" is a common way to phrase this and I don't think it's necessarily wrong, but my bigger point here is that I don't think we can say that definitively. why did coordinated harassment and swatting originate from games-related places?

I don't want to dunk on this person but this is what happens whenever I try to have an actual nuanced conversation about games + broader cultural impacts like I obviously do not mean here that game culture is a monolith

games do not cause violence game culture may contribute to violent mobilization in ways we do not understand these two things can both be true, but we need to actually confront the latter and allow researchers to work on it

it is often most comprehensible when one looks at the pattern of behavior rather than the substance

and thus once again, it came from Something Awful/4chan

doing a shooting to spark the apocalypse to destroy modernity should always be understood in the context of "what about modernity requires an apocalypse to remedy?"

Is tonight a bad night to re-up this critical research being done by @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social?

thinking today about how the mass shooting at the grocery store in Boulder I used to hang out at in high school was live-streamed during SWAT ops by some rando with a youtube channel and naked ambition

was going to try to explore vancouver after getting to the hotel but i'm exhausted and it's been a hell of a day so instead I am ordering a reckless amount of room service and one beer

Heading to my first APSA today so I have made sure to bring my most important tools: my Steam Deck and a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon

History majors have lower unemployment than computer science majors. Folks with humanities graduate degrees are more sought after by corporate recruiters than those with MBAs. Study history! Get a job!

I’d go further to say that the intentional destruction of user (nee citizen) control and consent via platforms is perfectly in-line with the cultural feeling represented by the anti-democratic fan fiction masquerading as punditry (about many things including platform use)

I think frequently about how the social media that I grew up with--facebook posting song lyrics at my middle/high school friends--is not just different, but was systematically dismantled by intentional actions on the part of the company that made that social media in the first place

for those who aren't cooked by the 4chan morass, "clown world" emerged from a quote-unquote "joke" about "honkler", a pepe variant that is just hitler

if I was a democratic politician i would simply say every single time a camera was pointed at me "these people desperately want women to be beaten by their husbands, your children to have genital checks every day at school, your hospital to be taken from you, and your family to die from the flu."

also calling for trump to actually be punished for the things he has been convicted (or impeached) for is not the same as calling for murdering judges or politicians

among countless other things, affective polarization may be somewhat symmetrical at any one (although certainly not in cadence) but appetite for political violence and norms transgressions are wildly asymmetric between parties

icymi, yours truly has some quotes in here

been so stressed about exams and other things for so many weeks that now that I am a Candidate™️ i've finally relaxed and now feel ill

Congrats to my boy @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social on passing his preliminary/comp exams and becoming a candidate and ABD! He’s a leading expert on extremist subcultures and fandoms. Give him a follow and read his work!

I officially passed my PhD exams!!

also I think this is the first time I've gotten a journalist to put "mass shooter creation machine" in an article

I had an amazing talk with @cwarzel.bsky.social about this, check out his article

gamer culture has turned everyone into sentient game boys (original edition)

whew boy if the missile attack on the boat was a deep fake...

solarpunk is the true Normatively Good Abundance

I just finished my last oral defense for my comprehensive exams and my god I need it to be modelo time

ive been thinking a lot about how the actual party-driven performance of attempting to min/max a candidate is what drives people so crazy about democrats, and imo we see that those who are succeeding right now are those who are rejecting that meta-process

I think @unavaleable.bsky.social is probably right but this is schumer's *perception* of the "safest bet", and it is increasingly clear that what the young guard view as a "safe bet" is profoundly different and likely more appropriate for this current moment than the older guard

been saying that the commonality between LLM-induced psychosis/narcissism and shooter radicalization is that both are driven by, essentially, systematic and malicious love-bombing

are we going to get another o9a cell out of this like we did national anarchism

the problem with something that does even 95% of what you want it to but it fails catastrophically on the last 5% and can't tell you when or where it fails, is that it turns all work into the most frustrating debugging situation imaginable

I am 30 and I think it goes underdiscussed just how traumatic being in pre school or elementary school during both Columbine and 9/11 was to those of us at the young edge of millennialdom.

I wrote this in the aftermath of the Boulder grocery store shooting a few years ago and it continues to ring true every day that goes by. the first active shooter drill I was exposed to was in 2001, when I was in first grade. substack.com/home/post/p-...

very pleased to report that my PhD student @mikesenters.bsky.social passed his oral exams today and so is officially ABD. well done, sir!

I’ve been extremely skeptical of prebunking but this is fascinating and slightly heartening even?

Happy to have played a small role in this big paper, which was led by Cody Kommers! "We offer three principles for hermeneutic evaluation—that benchmarks should be iterative, not one-off; include people, not just machines; and measure cultural context, not just model output."

this will matter to very few of you, but my alma mater, Middlebury, decided to close down my first graduate alma mater, the Middlebury Institute. I’m devastated by this. MIIS was a home as much as Middlebury was to me and I love that community so much.