In my new novel Picks and Shovels, we learn the origins of Martin Hench, my bestselling, two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant who debuted in 2023’s Red Team Blues and whose adventures continued in 2024’s The Bezzle.
Marty’s origin story starts at MIT in 1982, where he joins the proud lineage of computer science students who flunk out of their degrees because they’re too busy hacking code to do their ...Read More
This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump’s rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.
I’m so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person’s Marshall McLuhan. What’s more, I was mentored by Innis’s daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology.
But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person’s Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn’t what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan’s office to present a talk in Innis’s theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!
Since February 5th, 2025, a document warning about Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley led coup attempt has been circulating among think tank experts and DNC employees. The document is titled “The Imminent Neoreactionary Threat to the American Republic”. It opens with a statement that the brief was, “iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan, and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about being targeted.”
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The title of the actual file when I received it was “Evidence_Brief_for_Journalists”, and the introduction describes its aim as “explaining the nature of the current political crisis to journalists who are attempting to inform the public.” This would lead one to think the document was largely written for the benefit of the press.
However I spoke with two sources who are members of these groups and received the document. They told me that to their knowledge the document mostly spreading among people you might broadly refer to as “policy wonks”. One source I interviewed explained: “It is a thing for think tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists or congress, see the IPCC reports. Part of me thinks the framing ‘for journalists’ is just a shortcut for ‘this is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down’”.
The paper opens by acknowledging the scope of the executive power grab being perpetrated under President Trump, and the destabilization wrought by Elon Musk and his DOGE team. It then notes, “the threat is an order of magnitude beyond” just a presidential power grab. Musk, it argues, is tied to a “broader group” of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who seek to end Democracy. Curtis Yarvin is labeled a “thought leader” in this group, “called the Neoreactionaries”.
I will stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough for mass consumption. But I have some issues with it. Musk probably would not label himself a Neoreactionary and does not have much of a history with Yarvin. Peter Thiel does, but it’s more a relationship of patronage than mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that Thiel and Andreessen find Yarvin useful, because of his success in spreading to a lot of young techie kids the idea that CEOs should run the world.
Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon because those kids are useful foot soldiers. Yarvin’s ideas about “retiring” all government employees and destroying the independent media and academia are convenient for his own ambitions. This context may be unnecessary for explaining the danger to regular people, but I think it is a mistake to credit Yarvin with more power than he holds.
The document refers to him as the “leader” of the Neoreactionary Movement. I would not advise ignoring his influence and centrality here, but Yarvin is not dangerous because of his leadership abilities.
That all said the document sums up the threat quite well: “The Neoreactionaries have openly stated their aims: to destroy the nation-state and the Constitutional order and replace them with a new privately owned corporate state, to be run by a CEO-dictator. Citizens become subjects owned by the state – ‘state slaves’ - because ‘everything rots when it has no owner—human beings included’.”
Those quoted lines are, of course, Yarvin’s. From here, the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting to bring about this dystopia by taking over the “nervous system of the state”. These would be the data and communications systems DOGE is trying to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of this document make a call to action:
“The most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown (1977 India; 2022 Brazil; 2023 Poland) have been accomplished by radically large-tent, cross-ideological coalitions with little in common except a desire for the continuation of a Constitutional order. Evidence suggests that the present threat to American democracy is dire enough that such a broad-tent approach focusedon Musk and his associates may be required.”
This is the most interesting and hopeful part of the whole document for me. For one thing I think it accurately states what is needed in the present moment: a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship. (I would add to their list of relevant examples France from 1934-38.) It is heartening to see evidence that this understanding has started to grow within the DNC policy set.
The source who sent me this document in the first place described themselves as a member of “a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high ranking in the government and policy / think tank circles”. They noted that these are normally “very milquetoast lib spaces” but “they’re being radicalized” rapidly.
Both sources I interviewed for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked with gave an explicit reason: “…I’ve suspected for a while a lot more things in DNC stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with”. In other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within the DNC. My sources worried these “GOP moles” might retaliate against them, but moreso they worried the document itself might contain false information, meant to provoke a reaction that would be useful to Republicans.
While I think this caveat is worthwhile, I should also note that I have spent more time than most studying Curtis Yarvin and the Neoreactionaries. Nothing in this document struck me as obviously false or incorrect, nor did the tone seem hysteric or unreasonable.
I asked my sources if over the past month they’d seen more people talking about Yarvin in their daily lives, which involve communicating and working with DNC staffers and politicians. One said, “No” and “That’s kind of one of the odd things to be frank. This guy is being brought to big events in D.C. He’s been referenced by Bannon and Vance. I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths but he’s largely not tracked.”
It is noteworthy, then, that influential individuals in the policy space, with connections to Democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization, have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about Yarvin as a threat. It is even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about the danger, and the fact that a clock is currently ticking over all our heads:
“If non-governmental actors (by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained, and/or unaccountable actors) gain access to key digital infrastructure, they can seize control of critical functions of government in ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse.”
In a section titled “National Security”, the focus shifts to Elon Musk, who it claims “poses a uniquely significant security risk”. This is because Musk and DOGE espouse “anti-Constitutional ideologies” and “are under the influence of America’s principal foreign adversaries (China and Russia)”. It goes on at some length about Musk’s foreign business interests and how they might compromise him.
I don’t disagree that he is compromised, but I see his actions as very much consistent with those of a man seizing power for himself. I think it would be a strategic mistake to focus popular messaging around this in terms of how it empowers “America’s principal foreign adversaries”. The primary adversary Musk has empowered is himself, and he is now a greater danger to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government.
The next section of the paper days out the definition of a coup:
“In essence, a coup is a 1) rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors, who acquire that power by 2) seizing critical government infrastructure and 3) weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors'efforts to stop them. The unelected actors then use this power to 4) remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes.”
It argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now. One thing I found compelling is the way it recognized the threat cryptocurrency represents right now, and how it can and will be used by the new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep the present legal system:
“Without canceling elections, for example, cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new levers of political influence: politicians can sell personal coins to unknown buyers who "vote" on public policy on the basis of their shareholder power, shielded from public view.”
Next we have a summary of the Neoreactionary Agenda, which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elite currently championing an overthrow of democracy. These include David Sacks, Balaji Srinivasan and JD Vance. Also name-dropped is political theorist Nick Land, who is referenced twice in the paper.
The authors next lay out Yarvin’s concept of the “Butterfly Revolution”, based on an essay he wrote in 2022 laying out how a “full reboot” of the U.S. government could be accomplished.
Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the Trump administration and DOGE activity and show how they comport with the “Butterfly Revolution” blueprint.
We’ve all lived that in real time, so I won’t summarize their arguments here. The document does end this segment with a section on “Actions and Rhetoric to Watch”. First are government contracts, which fund many of Musk’s companies at present. Next is “Greenland and Mars”:
“A core tenet of neoreactionary ideology is the replacement of nation-states with "network states." But states require territory. Technocracy Inc., a predecessor to the Neoreactionary movement whose one-time director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American Technate where the entire continent of North America would be united under one Technocratic Super State. There is currently a Peter Thiel-backed "network state" project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements about colonizing Mars also can be read as part of a territorial project.”
Lastly it lists Crypto, which the authors primarily seem to fear as a method of deniably bribing Trump.
Overall, the document is thorough in its layout of the Neoreactionary ecosystem, and the actual plan currently being enacted to end U.S. democracy. It includes a section that lists several of the earliest known DOGE employees, and quotes extensively from Yarvin and less extensively from Land.
The paper’s ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment to turn himself into the kind of unitary all-powerful executive Yarvin longs for, one who rules alongside a largely “ceremonial” President. Congress and the courts would also be “ceremonial” at best in this new order.
Again, I do not believe Musk is particularly well read on Curtis Yarvin’s work. But Yarvin’s dream of a CEO-King ruling next to a puppet president gels with what some of Elon’s confidants have described as his ambition. A recent Vanity Fair article quoted a “close associate” of Musk’s from Silicon Valley. He told them:
“Elon believes he should be emperor of the world, and this is his way of showing people what he’s capable of as emperor. He truly believes his way of handling the world is the best possible outcome for everyone in it.”
The last few weeks provide more than enough proof that the authors of this document accurately understand the danger we are in. Unfortunately, aside from the suggestion of a popular front against dictatorship, the document is short on solutions. There is one line that promises: “Section III articulates what Congress and other actors can do” to stop Musk.However, the document in its present form does not include a Section 3 or any comprehensive suggestions.
If the situation weren’t so dire, I might find that funny.
Note: Welcome to WTG’s first multi-part series! As promised, this Substack will now post regularly, at least twice a month. Normally, the way this works is that every public essay has a follow-up piece for paid subscribers that gets into things I ran out of space for or are too spicy to deal with the inevitable sea-lions in the comments.
But as I worked on this series, I really didn’t want to put any of it under a paywall. It’s one of the biggest things I’ve tried to say outside of fiction, and, given the enormity of everything we’re going through, I wanted anyone to be able to read it in perpetuity. I wanted to discuss it with anyone. Unfortunately for us all, I also want to eat and stay warm and feed my family. So, just for this series, each part will go up for paid subscribers only for 24 hours, and then I’ll open it publicly and keep it that way.
Happy International Bloodfeast Season, fellow shattered husks of thinking human beings! Here we are on the flipside of several deranged politico-cultural orgies of pain, and I don’t think it’s a terribly scalding take to say, details aside, in a holistic, big-picture, view from 10,000 feet sense, that shit’s not right.
Really not right. Surreally so. I’ve personally spent this dry-heave of a year so far feeling like Han Solo; not the heroic, dashing, man of action part, no, no, perish the thought. The part where he spent like a goddamned year frozen in carbonite hanging on a filthy bathroom wall while who knows what kind of 24/7 grotesque violent slime-n-crime worm-orgy went on around him.
Aw, fucking hell, he’s doing that thing with his tail again
No one wants to see any of that shit, but it’s happening anyway, it isn’t going to stop, it’s oozing and moaning right there in front of you, and you physically can’t close your eyes or move away or do anything about it until some unspecified time in the future that may or may not actually arrive, so you just hang there stuck in a timeless helldream limbo of unending horror while a fat slobbering barely-verbal rapist crime boss stuffs his face with garbage, shreds people for entertainment, and somehow stays in power despite visibly doing fuck-all to run a government.
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE.
It’s hard to know what to say about it all. It’s hard to even know where to begin. It’s hard to keep up with the Macy’s Parade of “unprecedented” pit-sludge that may or may not end us all. Just getting through each and every gom jabbar of a goddamned day around here requires a level of dissociation and compartmentalization the human brain usually reserves for abuse, war, loss, severe injury. Only now we have to go all the way to deep trauma responses just to scan the headlines in the morning, or, occasionally, walk into a restaurant with the pure sadistic audacity to air the news on the TV behind the bar.
What’s in the box? BREAKING NEWS
So I want to talk about something bigger than the Regular Morning Horror Breakfast that will be out of date by the time I finish writing this. Because really, it’s not just the crusty worm on the big murder-chair. Or his nasty little shrieking sidekick. A lot of shit isn’t right. It hasn’t been right for awhile. It’s easy to point to COVID, that massive unresolved trauma we’re not even allowed to talk about anymore, let alone remember or process in any infinitesimally small way, but shit, in the grand, Sagan-esque, universal sense, was upside-down in its mortgage on reality long before that. COVID just tried to cash a payment on that mortgage and found an account that long ago ran dry.
So what happened? Because it’s not actually Trump per se. Trump isn’t even just a symptom. He’s not the reason we’re so clenched up and angry and self-loathing and paralyzed and isolated from each other, he’s just the baseball bat with a nail shoved through it a bunch of folks grabbed to take it all out on someone. Anyone they can find. Even if they couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re taking out on everyone around them.
Babies, what happened to us?
Well, gather in, children: Granny Minnesota is here tell you another tale of the Internet Olden Times. And it’s a beast of a tale. Approaching a Grand Unified Theory of What the Fuck Happened. I started writing this six weeks ago, and it’s grown and grown until it was forced to become a multi-part series due to Geneva conventions regarding the length of self-indulgent, navel-gazing, insufferably meta blog posts on the internet about the internet.
So. Bear with me.
Wouldn’t be an old lady story without a bunch of meandering nostalgia, kittens
Once upon a time before the invention of the wheel, we had no choice but to watch commercials to get to our scheduled units of televisual entertainment. And they didn’t just air before and after the show! Goodness no! Repeated every 6-7 minutes, taking up fully one-third of the show’s timeslot! Nor were they specifically targeted to our interests and buying habits by a massive data-mining operation that inadvertently, or possibly advertently, ended civilized society! No, no, my pets, these were the same commercials, blasted out blindly to every household from Manhattan to Modesto, with minor variations for large designated market areas, taking up 23-28 minutes of every single hour of broadcast television. I literally grew up seeing ads for a particular fast food chain that had precisely zero locations in my home state, and dagnabbit that’s how we liked it! (Spoiler: no one liked it.)
But the upshot of all this marketing monoculture was that, every-fucking-body, down to the smallest child, knew the longer-running slogans and jingles by heart, and they became something like memes today, used as punchlines, shorthand, and socially-lubricating references signaling in-group membership.
One of the more famous came from the, at the time, very popular Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Not just plain old iguana-bile Folgers’ Coffee, mind you, but the even more demonically foul instant crystals, made by taking an industrial vat of coffee leavings drained out of the drip-grate below a 7-11 coffee dispenser on the banks of the fucking Styx and freeze-drying it into poop-crumbs of total despair.
I don’t know what to tell you. No one told Americans what a latte was until like 1994. Then Americans immediately said coffee that tasted good was a gay liberal plot. We’ve just…always been like this.
The commercial opened on a fancy restaurant full of linen tablecloths, wine glasses, candles, a rack of lamb served with those white scrunchees on the top bits, and young sophisticates, presumably talking about books or foreign films or whatever while they waited for podcasts to be invented. The announcer walks through a haute-cuisine kitchen, saying in an authoritative newscaster voice, as though we’re about to witness a cutting-edge social experiment: We’ve secretly replaced the fine coffee they ordinarily serve with Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Let’s see if they notice!
You’ll never believe it, but they do NOT notice! All the young professional folk rave about how amazing the coffee is, how rich and robust they find the taste, how they simply cannot believe it’s Folgers’ Instant Crystals omg you guys just empty that can of dry-ass caffeine sprinkles directly into my discerning patrician mouth! Screw the real thing! I just can’t get enough of bitter awful freeze-dried science-droppings!
And now it’s a modern meme shared by people too young to ever have seen the commercial! THE CIRCLE OF FOLKLORE.
So anyway, I’ve been thinking about the election a lot lately. CAN’T IMAGINE WHY. Not in terms of what’s going to specifically happen over the next many months and years, or what’s happening literally today, because I think it’s being made pretty resoundingly clear how little any of us down here in the vomitorium can do about that, but in terms of what’s been happening for the last twenty years that got us to November 5th, 2024. To a place where no one seems to particularly care about the concept of any kind of objective truth existing anywhere, accelerationism and nihilism are the Pantone colors of the year, and giving a shit about anyone else is regularly punished at the ballot box. To this carnival of shit in which we’re all now forced to live, an unending janky Gravitron Wheel O’ Chaos spun up to Intestine-Extraction speed and the only music is screams. Every few hours, the wheel spins, and the flashing neon arrow selects a different soul-slurping subterranean clown-wendigo to be in charge of some massively important part of all our destinies, just as long as they know absolutely nothing about that part specifically, and the only person seeing any kind of consequences for doing a chaos is the guy who denied a CEO’s claim to life on the grounds that being a fucking monster is a pre-existing condition.
As the children say, we’re cooked.
Though I’m not sure how many of the people obsessively over-using have considered that once something is cooked, it’s not exactly finished.
Traditionally, the next step is being devoured. With relish.
And that doesn’t exactly seem like a sustainable situation for humanity, but the general reaction to it all, not just post-election, but for awhile now, to a lot of events, even as things start to completely fall apart at the seams, seems to just be minor variations on the sentiment of Maurice Sendak’s Pierre:
Great work, everyone. Really top notch.
And that old coffee commercial keeps popping into my head.
Because I think that’s what happened. The big gnarly rootball at the bottom of the many, many seemingly unrelated branches of what’s still happening. What has almost zero likelihood of slowing down or unhappening anytime soon. Slowly, inexorably, profoundly, thoroughly, and on purpose. We hunted down every part, down to the scraps, of normal human everyday life, down to the most basic social, commercial, political, logistical, financial, educational, parental, informational, psychological, romantic, religious, military, technological, artistic, and familial interactions, and secretly replaced them with the internet.
And for a long time, because it was slow, and because it did make that humdrum normal everyday life so much easier, so much faster, so unfathomably more convenient, and even, god help us all, more diverting and exciting and personally validating, hardly anyone noticed. When we finally did start to catch on, we all sat around raving about how much better it was than the old world, how rich and robust and almost exactly like real life it tasted, how excited we all were to make the switch, how young and urban and professional and haute we all were for taking to it so easily and just vigorously motorboating the future with such uncritical enthusiasm.
Come on, guys! It’s new! It’s Science! It’s fun! It makes everything fast and easy! There could never, ever, be any downside to this, or any, new technology!
Now, this isn’t about enshittification. At least, not exactly. It isn’t about the tendency of all systems to rot and self-corrupt in the presence of dipshits who look at human beings interacting and only see financial opportunity. Because…that’s what dipshits do. They’ve been doing it to every new system that pops up since Uruk and Jericho. Some percentage of humans are just born assholes. You can’t really stop that or change it beyond nudging the Rate of Asshole Production up or down a bit, which is why communism works so nice in your head and so horrifyingly in real life. The existential malfeasance of that problematic population of resource-greedy psychopaths is a problem, but it’s old news. It’s consistent. You can set the watch they sell you by it. And it’s practically boring in comparison to the voluntarywholesale replacement of human-to-human life with intangible digital gladiatorial combat.
We, as a species, simply were not ready for the internet. We, as a species, were not ready to spend our waking hours inundated with the interior monologues of billions of other beings piped directly into our brains as though they were our own. Especially when those thoughts, just because existence is hard and sad and fucked up and weird and no one really escapes that for more than a couple of hours at a go, are more often than not, the thoughts of beings in pain, facing the future with extreme anxiety, desperate to feel seen and loved, desperate to not feel helpless and lost in the face of vast forces, beings who felt invisible and alone for most of their lives, suffering in ways large and small, most of the time.
My first grader has mispronounced “screens” as “screams” since they were three. I’ve never corrected them because it was cute and they’ll say everything in the usual way forever soon enough. But…they’re not wrong. We are being screamed at all the time. We are screaming all the time.
And the screams are our major source of entertainment.
There’s a reason every TV show that does an episode about someone suddenly getting psychic powers depicts it as an absolute mind-shearing hell. It is, and now, that Sea of Screams is humanity’s home. Just trying to exist while constantly being mentally hammered with the cries and wails and bitchy petty complaints and narcissistic judgments and pleadings for love (in one form or another) of all mankind will literally make you fucking crazy and it will do it incredibly fast. At no point has anyone suggested having a shit-ton of voices in your head is a good and healthy thing for a happy, fulfilling life on Planet Earth, but these days we all have a shit-ton of voices in our heads 24/7 and they never, ever stop screaming.
We made a hive mind. We did it too soon and too fast, and it’s eating us alive. Back in the old digital days, people used to talk a lot about the Singularity—a future event or technology that would change the world so fundamentally and radically that it’s simply impossible to imagine life afterward from the vantage point of life today. This was often applied to true, sentient AI or other science-fictional concepts, but the truth is, while we early-adopting children of the computer age were having those conversations, it was already happening all around us, so truly transformational we couldn’t see the water for the ocean.
The mass adoption of the Internet was the Singularity. People still talk as though the Singularity hasn’t happened yet. That without flying cars and affordable interplanetary travel opportunities, we can’t possibly have arrived at The Big Future already. But we’re long past it, into the Previously Unthinkable Mess Beyond. Of course, as William Gibson said, it’s not evenly distributed, some of us are less online by choice or circumstance, but COVID took the last band-aid off by confining everyone in their homes, and the powers that be keep chipping away at the option to live mostly offline.
Think about what we’ve done with the 21st century. We took almost every job, every form of entertainment, every logistical task, every virtue and vice, every path to forming a personal identity, every simplest transaction between living beings or previously unavoidable reason you had to interact with another living being, every way of actually meeting and creating a connection with another living being as well as every method we ever came up with to maintain connection with other living beings, and either moved them entirely online or made the internet such a massive, mainstream sidecar to such units of social structure that trying to accomplish it all offline requires extra, dedicated, conscious effort or privation. And possibly a detailed mission statement just to underpin a personal philosophy of maybe putting your phone down sometimes.
You know, back in the time known as the Age of Folgers Instant Coffee Crystals, people used to be, generally, fairly concerned with how much TV everyone was watching when I was younger. Rots your brain, don’t you know. Makes you lazy and passive and stupid. Kill Your TV was a major movement. Bumperstickers, posters, the whole nine.
No one ever says Kill Your Computer, Kill Your Phone, Kill Your Internet Connection. Because we can’t. Our entire culture is tentpoled around internet access. It’s been inserted into even the smallest interactions, not just between humans, but between humans and everything.
At the risk of crumbling to dust before your very eyes, I do not know how to explain to any young person the sheer number of other human beings we used to have to interact with, on the phone or in person, in a baseline socially competent manner, just to get from one end of the day to another.
To deposit your paycheck. To pay a bill. To purchase anything. To get a refund on a product. To speak with any incarnation of customer service. To get a bit of advice on childrearing or fixing a leaky faucet. To address any sort of issue whatsoever with anything. To plan a vacation. To put gas in your car. To insure that car. To choose classes for the next semester. To get a nice family photo taken. To apply for a job. To excel in that job or ever hope for a promotion. To organize for a cause. To get food delivered, if you even could. To share your thoughts on recent elections or a new film with someone outside your immediate family.
You stood in a line and you waited and then you talked to someone, and if they didn’t like they way you handled any of that, if your social skills weren’t ready for prime time, well, you might just…not get what you needed. At all. And if you didn’t like the way someone else was behaving toward you, you didn’t really have to give them what they needed, either. You had to make it work using human psychology, rhetoric,
It all used to require human beings, face-to-face, or at least mouth-to-ear, and so most people encountered and had to learn to deal with, many, many different kinds of other humans in their environment. That was how, by and large, people met romantic partners, friends, that famous “guy who knows a guy.” Mutual connections, co-ed classes, and just…interacting with random strangers all day every day.
Sure was, bud.
It was exhausting! We were thrilled to be able to do a whole heap of that annoying everyday crap automatically. IT WAS FUCKING GREAT. It saved so much time, so much energy that we could use for activities! I’m not a Luddite here, I’ve been terminally online since before we had a word for that. No one did anything wrong by cannonballing into the digital age before actually learning how to swim. That’s how tragedy works. Nor do I honestly think there was ever any real possibility that we wouldn’t embrace that gargantuan level of convenience. It IS easier to do things online, other people are fussy and difficult and there’s a lot of rules and even if neurotypicals don’t call use the word, they still mask, and it’s annoying to have to do it all the time.
We took to the internet like fish to bleach. But damn, it sure did look like water for a long time.
And then, having steadily, determinedly, removed or made voluntary so many of the tiny ways in which you were forced to behave yourself toward others, even so much as talking to your taxi driver to tell them where you wanted to go or checking out at the grocery store or ordering food at a restaurant, we stood back, very proud of ourselves, we liberal digital folk, and told everyone to care A WHOLE LOT about the person next to them. More than they care about themselves, in some cases. To protect those others, to value their issues, problems, and needs equally to our own, and to vote that way.
The problem was, as a great many people looked to one side and then another, there was no one actually, physically next to them anymore.
The internet has become the lens through which Other People can be seen, heard, understood, and interacted with, and on a good day, 78% of the internet is a goddamned Jacobean nightmare parade of lies, scams, rage, and a howling labyrinth of the opinions of maladjusted dopamine addicts who may or may not be 13 years old, or fuming after a fight with their spouses, or in the depths of despair, or a content-scraper, or addicted to conflict because they’re desperately lonely, or employed specifically to piss other people off as efficiently as possible, or a really nice person trying to have an intellectual conversation, or fucking AI, and there is no way for the human brain to tell the difference between any of these at a glance.
People are not good at caring deeply about abstractions. They are extremely bad at valuing others’ needs over their own wants, but catastrophically bad at doing that when they don’t actually have to physically see those scary, weird, oh-so-different others with their own gooshy corneas. This is a huge part of why cities are usually blue and rural communities usually not; because in cities you still have to acknowledge the existence of, and navigate through, millions of real, thinking, breathing, sweating, yelling people who are nothing like you.
Not only did we make a hive mind way too soon, but we also jumped several guns on uploading our minds to servers and abandoning the meatspace. Because we can’t abandon the meatspace yet, but we all went ahead and put our brains in digital jars anyway.
The internet turned most of human existence into a series of abstractions viewed through a 6x3 inch black rectangle with a heart of lithium and sadism. And the guys who have been able to live longest in a cozy bubble of convenience, instantaneity, and constant stimulation without the annoyance of having to deal other human beings or see them as anything but flashy lights on a fashy screen, are the malevolent, solipsistic Silicon Valley Smaugs who built the abyss in which we’re all drowning, brick by fucking brick, and are even now ransacking our government for virtually no one’s benefit, not even, ultimately, their own.
No one can care too much about things they don’t have to deal with pretty regularly, not even the best of us, which that tech most certainly are not. Unfortunately, by making it so easy to not deal with other people at all, we kicked the legs out from under the barest concept of society itself being a pretty good thing we should probably not set on fire for the clout.
Beep, beep, babygirl.
Over the next several weeks, this series is going to look long and hard at what we’ve done to ourselves and why, exactly what the internet has and hasn’t replaced, the effects of it all, expected and unexpected, the little UI tweaks and algorithmic adjustments that might have fucking ended liberal democracy, and what the hell we can do about it now.
I don’t know about that last one. Maybe. I’m hoping. If we’re lucky. And I have enough Folgers’ Crystals on hand.
Because maybe the smartphone was humanity’s gom jabbar, and we failed by passing. Put your most vulnerable self in this shiny black box, connect to the person on the other side of it, and experience unfathomable pain, but also unfathomable reward. You’re only a real person if you keep your hand in the box. If you pull away, you might as well’ve never existed.
I doubt even Frank Herbert could have imagined Paul rocking up to the space nun the next morning and asking to have another go at Happy Fun Box. Let alone rolling over in bed and grabbing it first thing. But we got so used to the pain only the reward remained: the confirmation that we’re human, we’re real, we’re seen, we’re valued, at least by someone, somewhere, for something, even if it’s dark and awful. Once you have that, it does feel like dying to disengage.
And a little while after that, the weird fascists who made the box don’t even need the needle at our necks anymore.
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The government of two weeks ago no longer exists. We are now in a fundamentally different country.Under the authority of President Trump, Elon Musk is leading a de facto cyber-coup of the United States. Using the intentionally vague and unaccountable “Department of Government Efficiency,” Musk is seizing control of the United States’ critical digital infrastructure, literally rewriting the code that runs our country, and culling the federal workforce.
Using the justification of removing government bureaucracy, Musk and the Trump administration have installed their own batch of bureaucratic tech oligarchs, made up of former Tesla and SpaceX interns and engineers, Thiel Fellowship researchers, Palantir employees, eugenics enthusiasts, and Nick Fuentes pilled groypers.
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Career employees have been locked out of their respective agencies, both digitally and physically, as the DOGE team ransacks various departments and accesses wide swaths of sensitive government data. Agency officials who tried to resist Musk’s seizure of classified materials have been fired, and more federal employees have been put on leave, including the entirety of USAID. This effectively amounts to Musk abolishing the whole department, all without congressional authorization or oversight, not even an executive order from Trump that exceeds presidential authority. On a whim, the unelected Elon Musk decided to carry out the closure of a government agency. He is far from finished; DOGE has hijacked the Treasury to withhold authorized payments to multiple agencies.
Elon Musk has personally directed the General Services Administration to terminate leases on “mostly empty” federal buildings. The GSA, essentially the landlord of the federal government, was one of the first agencies to receive Musk’s “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation letter offering to buy out the entire workforce. The legality of the letter is uncertain as it promises to pay out currently unappropriated funds. IRS workers who accepted the resignation offer have already been asked to return to work until May.
The newly appointed GSA commissioner, Michael Peters, a private equity executive that specializes in downsizing corporate real estate, has decided that “non-DoD federal building space should be reduced 50%,” according to a GSA employee who requested to remain anonymous. On top of planning to cut the entire federal portfolio by half, DOGE is seeking to cut GSA’s own budget by as much as 50%, with talk of consolidating GSA offices to a few major cities using a “hub model.” Wired reports that DOGE staff may be trying to use White House IT credentials to access GSA computers remotely.
An anonymous GSA employee claims that few people at the agency have elected to take up the voluntary paid resignation offer, with those who have mostly being of retirement age. High-level Trump appointees used “scare tactics” in agency emails, pressuring career employees to accept the deferred resignation offer, warning that cost cutting measures will eventually lead to a further “reduction in force.” Employees are concerned that a reduced workforce would result in federal buildings losing their operations and maintenance contracts, with disastrous consequences for the functionality of government buildings. “The brain drain is going to cripple our ability to maintain the buildings, even more than it already was. We aren’t overstaffed,” per a GSA employee.
“I think this process is already too far along to stop,” adding “I’m hoping we just need to get to the midterms.”
What is happening across the federal government right now is unprecedented. But this is not Germany in the 1930s; it’s not the fall of the Soviet Union. We grasp at analogies to help contextualize current events that escape understanding. There are similarities, but what’s happening is new, very American, and very 21st century. In 50 years it will be talked about in the vein of ‘What happened to the United States in the mid-2020s.’
Rhetoric of cutting red tape and breaking federal bureaucracy has been common political claptrap for decades, and previous efforts have largely been all bark and no bite, but now there’s been a huge chomp. So why now?
DRAIN THE SWAMP
Trump has blamed entrenched federal bureaucracy (or the ‘deep state’) for preventing him from enacting sweeping change during his first term. The obstacles Trump encountered didn't just come from Congress and the courts, but rank-and-file government workers who run the day-to-day operations. Last month the far-right America First Policy Institute published a report titled Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump. The author, James Sherk, a former Heritage fellow, credits “hostile career employees” for “refusing to implement policies.”
“Many career employees refused or defied directives, withheld information, slow-walked projects they opposed, performed unacceptably, and used strategic leaking to undermine the president’s agenda,” writes Sherk.
Trump himself realized this late into his first term and sought to remedy the problem by revoking civil protections for tens of thousands of federal career employees, reclassifying them as at-will employees under an executive order called Schedule F. This allowed Trump to treat large swaths of federal employees as political appointments. In his article for AFPI, Sherk refers to career removal protections as a “modern invention that protects entrenched bureaucracy.”
Though Biden repealed Schedule F, Trump effectively reinstated the order on the first day of his second term. Trump promised to restore his authority to “remove rogue bureaucrats” back in early 2023 under his Agenda47 plan, vowing to “wield that power very aggressively.”
When Trump first ran on “drain the swamp” in 2015, he was referring to corporate lobbyists, special interests, and Washington corruption. But now the term is used to deride the so-called “administrative state,” federal agencies, regulatory boards, and bureaucratic career employees that maintain the basic functionality of our government. Both Schedule F and DOGE are part of a two-pronged assault on the administrative state, all in service of consolidating then amplifying executive power.
Trump has fully embraced the unitary executive theory, proposed by the likes of Russell Vought, Project 2025 co-author and the newly confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Although it’s understood that Congress has “power of the purse,” under unitary executive theory Trump now believes that the funding appropriated by Congress does not need to be spent; rather, the executive branch controls the flow of federal spending, and Congress merely “sets a ceiling” on spending that the executive must not exceed.
Under this interpretation of the Constitution, the President has sole and complete control of the Executive Branch, including all its agencies and departments. But others, like JD Vance and Elon Musk, could be pushing Trump to go even further. To where “the President considers both the judicial and legislative branches purely ceremonial and advisory,” in the words of New Right philosopher Curtis Yarvin.
And arguably we are already well on our way to that point. This centralized executive power allows the Executive Branch to achieve goals I would have previously considered quite lofty. I’ll outline two examples pulling from the aspirations of the modern conservative movement.
BYE BYE FBI
Though the Right has typically been thought to be firmly in the “back the blue” camp, this isn’t always the case, especially on the more extreme end. The far-right “militia movement” has long clashed with federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ATF. In the aftermath of January 6th, many MAGA supporters found themselves at odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Republican politicians began to feed into right-wing uproar surrounding the FBI as Trump himself became a target for investigations.
After the Mar-a-Lago raid in August of 2022, Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted "DEFUND THE FBI!" Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar joined in attacks on the bureau, posting, “We must destroy the FBI. We must save America."
That same month, right-wing columnist and podcaster Liz Wheeler published an op-ed titled “Abolish the FBI,” which called to “farm out the vital functions of the FBI and raze the rest.” The New-Right publication Compact Magazine featured a slightly better written article by the same title, “Abolish the FBI.” At CPAC in March of 2023, Matt Gaetz advocated to get rid of the FBI, among other federal agencies.
In April of 2023, Trump joined in calls to defund the FBI after being charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Next month, two former FBI employees testified in a congressional hearing, accusing the bureau of “weaponization” against conservatives in regards to January 6th investigations. The same two former FBI employees, who had their security clearance revoked after espousing J6 conspiracy theories, later called to “abolish the FBI” at a Heritage Foundation symposium on the “Weaponization of U.S. Government” in April of 2024.
During a live episode of Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast on July 8th, 2024, he called to abolish several federal agencies starting with the FBI, as well as the CIA and IRS.
The Trump admin has already begun the process to dismantle large swaths of the FBI before Kash Patel has even been confirmed by the Senate. Eight top FBI officials have been fired or forced to resign by order of Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, despite resistance from Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll. A questionnaire was distributed to FBI supervisors requesting agents provide information pertaining to their involvement in the January 6th investigations; this was believed to be used for the targeted removal of agency personnel.
Last week the FBI handed over a list containing the information of 5,000 employees and agents who worked on the January 6th investigations. FBI leadership initially chose to withhold employee names; in response, Bove accused the FBI leadership of insubordination. This was ultimately a fruitless effort as data seized by Elon Musk’s DOGE team could easily match employee IDs to names. Trump has since agreed to not publicly release the names of agents until at least late March, as lawsuits continue, and is required to give two days notice if the administration chooses to disclose names.
But individual agents are still worried. An anonymous letter from an FBI agent warns, “Currently, there is an effort to cull a significant number of career Special Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Around one third of FBI agents were told they would be placed on leave, according to a government source who spoke on the condition of anonymity. FBI employees have lost access to systems only to later regain access, while others were told to wait to find out their employment status. Agents are now trying to negotiate back into their jobs, with sources saying FBI employees may be able to stay if they prove their loyalty to Trump and disown the January 6th prosecutions.
I write all this not in defense of the FBI, but to demonstrate how far Trump is willing to go to expand his executive power and transfer law enforcement duties to agencies seen as more loyal to the President. Though I doubt the FBI will be completely abolished in the next few years, the agency could become unrecognizable. A shell of its former self, with hardline Trump loyalists replacing the existing (already largely conservative) workforce. Alternative agencies perceived as being more loyal to Trump, like Homeland Security Investigations, could start picking up the FBI slack. According to a senior government source, on day two of Trump’s second term, HSI was instructed to reopen investigations into the 2020 George Floyd protests “to identify protesters (“blm rioters”), “like they did to us after Jan 6.””
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
Conservatives have advocated for dismantling the Department of Education ever since Jimmy Carter signed its modern incarnation into law in 1979. Most notably, Ronald Reagan tried and failed to abolish the department in 1981, but Reagan’s commission ironically strengthened support for the department. Once Reagan ran into roadblocks, he instead sought to limit the department’s power and influence.
Since Reagan, calls to abolish the Department of Education have been a recurring Republican talking point among certain think tanks and politicians, but they have struggled to land sizable blows against the department. Trump previously fiddled around with merging the Departments of Education and Labor during his first term, but that plan went nowhere.
In Trump’s own Agenda 47 plan released in 2023, he expressed his goal of “closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C.” Later at the National Religious Broadcasters’ 2024 Christian Media Convention in February of 2024, Trump repeated the promise, “I will close the federal Department of Education, and we will move everything back to the states, where it belongs, and where they can individualize education.”
Project 2025 outlined how to achieve the effective dismantling of the Department of Education by transferring funding and duties to other departments such as Health and Human Services and the DOJ.
Opposition to the Department of Education was a frequent topic at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I attended multiple panels and events taking aim at the department, hosted by groups like Mom’s For Liberty and the Heritage Foundation. On the first day of the convention, the party ratified their official 2024 RNC platform, which called to “close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.”
And now the department seems to be next on the Trump/DOGE chopping block. The administration is drafting a sweeping executive order while Trump says he wants his education nominee, Linda McMahon, “to put herself out of a job.”
The planned executive order would not just direct the Secretary of Education to begin dismantling the department but also ask Congress for assistance in formally abolishing the agency. It’s unlikely Trump would get the 60 Senate votes needed to pass the “necessary” legislation. But even if they can’t manage to technically abolish the Department of Education, he could still try to rip its guts out, slash spending, and forcibly resign or fire employees. Basically make the department simply non-functioning, much like what DOGE did to USAID. Upwards of 16 DOGE staffers are currently listed in the Education Department directory. Federal education employees have already received the “Fork in the Road” resignation buyout offer, while others have been fired for alleged links to DEI.
Without someone like Elon Musk in Trump's administration, there was no clear path towards implementing some of the more lofty plans proposed by conservative thought leaders, whether they be Trump’s own Agenda 47, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, or Curtis Yarvin’s dream of a CEO-King. Only Elon Musk could do this; you need someone with his influence, connections, money, experience, and knowledge of fringe neo-reactionary Silicon Valley political theory to propose and carry out something like DOGE. So how did Musk get here?
MUSK TIMELINE:
Though it's common knowledge that Musk has drifted pretty severely rightward the past 5 years, leading into the 2024 presidential campaign, he was not an out and proud Trump supporter. As recently as 2022, Musk deemed Trump too old to serve as president again, tweeting that it was time for Trump to “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.” Initially Musk threw his support behind the doomed presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but as it became clear Trump would be the Republican nominee, Musk fell in behind (his new) party line. Musk’s implicit support of Trump was kept on the down-low. The two met in Florida in March of 2024, among other wealthy Republican donors, as Trump was lobbying for campaign funding. The New York Times reported that Musk did not want to publicly endorse Trump, as of early 2024, telling friends the most he would do was an “anti-Biden endorsement.” Instead of public support, Musk would create his own super PAC to secretly help get Trump elected, timing payments so his fiscal backing of Trump’s campaign could only go public after the election.
But all that changed on July 13th. After Trump’s brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk seemingly took Trump’s call of “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” to heart, tweeting less than an hour after the attempted assassination, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” This opened more frequent communication between Musk and Trump. Later that weekend, both Musk and Peter Thiel called Trump to recommend JD Vance as Vice President.
Next week was the Republican National Convention, during which Elon Musk was frequently name-dropped, both by official speakers and regular attendees. Talked about as some kind of mythic right-wing superhero. On the final day of the RNC, rumors circulated that Musk himself would make a surprise appearance on stage. Though said rumors did not come to fruition, Musk's specter haunted the entirety of the convention.
Come August, Musk just finished overhauling leadership at his America Super PAC and was rigorously pushing pro-Trump messaging on X (the everything app). On August 12th, Musk hosted Trump in a two-hour live-streamed phone call, dubbed an “X-space.” This conversation marked the first time Trump casually spoke at length about the assassination attempt. The pair also discussed “migrant crime” and the need to eliminate federal bureaucracy. Trump complimented Musk, calling him “the greatest cutter,” followed up by saying, “I need an Elon Musk. I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states.”
News outlets were more interested in reporting on the stream’s technical glitches rather than Musk’s idea for a “government efficiency commission,” to which Trump responded very positively. Next month, on September 4th, Trump announced that “at the suggestion of Elon Musk,” if elected he would “create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms.” Musk himself agreed to be appointed head of the commission, aiming to cut “trillions of dollars.”
The New York Times called commissions such as this, “a favorite Washington solution for delaying dealing with hard problems.” The Times later reported that the commission “can issue recommendations around federal funding and regulations but will be powerless to enact them without executive actions by Mr. Trump or funding approval by Congress.”
Meanwhile that autumn, Musk's super PAC mobilized thousands of canvassers across key swing states and collected data to target both enthusiastic and unlikely voters. Throughout 2024, Musk spent over 290 million dollars in contributions in support of the MAGA campaign, mostly via his own super PAC.
On October 5th, Musk made his first appearance at an official campaign event, joining Trump for his return to Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk continued to appear at Trump rallies in the month leading up to the election. By election day, Musk was firmly in Trump’s inner circle, spending election night and most of the next week with President-Elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
SPEEDRUNNING:
Now a few months later, Elon is doing to the U.S. what he did to Twitter. By the end it still might technically function on some level, just worse in every way. Prone to glitches and full of nazis. The previous version was already bad and harmful, but the new one somehow sucks even more and no longer has the aspects that made it semi-worthwhile.
The “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation letter sent to government employees used the exact same title as a similar email sent to Twitter employees after Musk bought the company. The DOGE team installed sofa beds on the fifth floor of the headquarters of the Office of Personnel Management to enable working around the clock, mirroring Musk’s previous actions during his takeover of Twitter.
Musk has brought on some of the same exact people who helped him take over Twitter, all of whom are now ‘special government employees’ with odd job titles but immense power.
It was reported in Wired that a Musk stooge told General Services Administration workers that the agency will now pursue an “AI-first strategy,” and that GSA should operate like a “startup software company.”
Musk ordered the General Services Administration to terminate leases for all roughly 7,500 federal offices amidst a national call to return to in-person work. This is, again, a classic Musk move taken from his takeover of Twitter, in which to cut costs, he refused to pay rent for Twitter offices in London, NYC, and San Francisco while the buildings were still in use. A current GSA employee was quoted in Wired as saying, “They are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company.”
Musk’s own personal success hasn't been from his skill as an inventor or software engineer. What he’s proficient at is taking over corporations and molding them in his image. This is what happened to Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. In 2020 Musk called government “the ultimate corporation,” and now he seeks to become CEO.
In doing this, Musk is following the tech industry motto ‘move fast and break things.’ So far, all his actions bypass Congress, the slow controller of stable government. Having everything be done via executive order and DOGE helps to speedrun a full reboot of the administrative state. The motto of the old federal government may as well be ‘move slow and build things.’ Progress is slow, but detonation is fast. The breakage of government isn’t a mere side effect or bug of this expedited form of rule; it’s a feature. To reshape the government into their ideal technocracy, first breaking things is a requirement.
They might not get away with all of it, and they don't need to. They are doing SO much, SO fast, knowing they will only get away with some of it. But with new Supreme Court-approved presidential immunity and unlimited pardon power, they can try as much as they want with zero consequence.
These are not the moves you would make if you wanted a stable government. It’s the moves you would make as a new tech company. Which is why Musk’s operation is masked with the Silicon Valley language of ‘efficiency.’ The inefficiencies of government are part of the point! That's what creates stability, makes the country a trusted ally, and gives the dollar value.
"Regulations can be bothersome sometimes and downright problematic...but that's kinda the point. They act as a control on imprecise and rushed decision making. If the cost of doing business is slowing down the process, that's the cost that has to be made,” to quote a government employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
But those inefficiencies and pesky regulations really irritate the Silicon Valley tech bros who think they are the smartest people on the planet. It’s their view that since they’re so smart, shouldn't they run the country? Musk has a personal interest in slashing the regulatory state as it interferes with his own businesses and dream of space colonization. Last year Musk claimed that DOGE was “the only path to extending life beyond Earth.” The White House press secretary said that Musk himself will determine when there is a conflict of interest involving his businesses and DOGE. SpaceX alone has received 15.4 billion in government contracts, according to The New York Times.
BUTTERFLY REVOLUTION:
The large reduction in the federal workforce, through the combined efforts of DOGE and Schedule F, bears an irrefutable similarity to a plan outlined by New Right blogger Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel’s favorite philosopher. In 2022, Yarvin outlined how a second Trump term could “reboot” the United States government. This plan amounts to a corporate takeover of government, which subsequently reshapes the structure of government akin to a corporation.
Though in Yarvin’s mind, it is not President Trump who assumes the role of CEO. Instead, the President acts as “chairman of the board” and, before inauguration, should select a CEO who is “an experienced executive.” This appointed CEO could then “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts,” while President Trump reviews the CEO’s performance in the background.
Yarvin writes, “most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance…on TV, and can fire him if need be.”
Musk may believe he has successfully maneuvered Trump into appointing him CEO, but Trump could be well aware of Musk’s ambitions but is keeping him around as an emergency patsy, ready to fire when needed. The Trump admin is testing the limits of presidential authority, and once those limits get surpassed by the standards of Senate Republicans, Musk is the easiest guy to blame and push out of the administration's inner circle.
The first step in Yarvin’s plan has the Trump campaign running on centralizing executive power to eliminate government inefficiency. This was in line with both Project 2025 and Musk’s suggestion of an efficiency commission. Once Trump gets into office, the plan is as follows:
Purge bureaucracy,what Yarvin calls RAGE, Retire All Government Employees. This is being carried out by DOGE, Schedule F, and pressuring career employees to accept deferred resignation offers by threatening future mass layoffs. Senior-level officials have been replaced by a batch of loyal tech oligarchs with links to Musk and Peter Thiel. The stupidity of DOGE was almost a secret weapon; the cryptocurrency meme-ness made everyone in respectable society not take the idea seriously. What’s the worst an advisory commission could do with no power to enforce its suggestions? Oops!
Nullify “elite” institutions of power, like the media and academia. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has gone a long way in altering the country’s information ecosystem. The Trump admin seems to be utilizing Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy to distract and exhaust the media, as well as more directed attacks. On January 31st, the Department of Defense kicked out NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, and Politico from their in-house press offices and replaced them with One America News, the New York Post, Breitbart, and HuffPost. Under direction from DOGE, the White House has ordered government agencies to cancel subscriptions to policy news services from multiple news outlets. A White House advisor told Axios, “The eye of Sauron is on more than just Politico. It's all the media.” For academia, the federal grant freeze has had devastating effects on university research.
Co-opt Congress and ignore the courts; this is where we are at right now. The goal is to reduce both the judicial and legislative branches to being purely ceremonial and advisory, as advocated by Yarvin. So far the Trump administration has effectively sidestepped the legislative bodies via Elon Musk and DOGE. It’s highly unlikely Trump would ever be impeached or removed by this Congress. Furthermore, this Congress seems to have willfully given up their power over the federal budget. “The real challenge is that Congress is on board for now in losing their own budgetary authority,” to quote a senior government official. A lone security guard standing outside USAID and the Department of Education has been enough to deter resistance.
“When Congress is willing to hand the keys over to the president, then we really no longer have, you know, a democracy, or at least the constitutional democracy that was created a couple centuries ago,” says Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. “The bigger danger, I think, is that through law itself, Congress cedes more and more power to the president with new legislation, so if Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more centralized power, that would be a concerning thing to me.”
The real roadblock is the courts. The Trump administration has already displayed a willingness to ignore the courts, based on the continued halting of federal spending and grants, despite an order from a U.S. District Judge. The Justice Department argued that the order to resume funding “contains several ambiguous terms and provisions that could be read to constitute significant intrusions on the executive branch’s lawful authorities and the separation of powers.”
This past weekend, Musk raged against a federal judge who ordered to temporarily restrict DOGE’s access to Treasury data. Both Musk and the White House have labeled the judge an “activist,” with White House spokesperson Harrison Fields calling the order “absurd and judicial overreach.” On X (the everything app), Musk boosted claims calling this a “judicial coup” and an announcement from California Rep. Darrell Issa to introduce legislation “to stop these rogue judges.”
Even without added legislation, Musk and the Trump administration are gearing up to directly defy judicial authority. On Saturday Musk shared a tweet reading, “I don't like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I'm just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us if they're going to blatantly disregard the constitution for their own partisan political goals?” On Sunday, JD Vance posted a statement undermining judicial power.
Now it all comes down to force. If the executive branch not just ignores judicial authority but blatantly defies it, who would be left to enforce the power of the court? Which leads us to…
Centralize the police; nationalize local law enforcement to place them under federal control. Trump has flirted with this tactic when he deputized Washington police as U.S. Marshals to kill Michael Reinoehl. DOGE staff threatened to call U.S. Marshals when USAID security officials (who have since been fired) denied them access to classified systems. Yarvin believes this step is paramount: “support of the democratic public is a cipher; I think that actually all you need is command of the police.” If you have all the guys with guns, who can physically stop you? Support from the public doesn't hurt though, and if things get tricky Trump could…
Mobilize populist support, but don’t wait until you are at your weakest, at the end of your term after losing an election. Under popular mandate, deploy your empowered supporters at the height of your power to oppose any obstruction from government agencies or the courts. Trump may weaponize Supreme Court-ordained presidential immunity and his unrestricted pardon power to make any willing actor carry out his bidding with zero risk of legal consequence.
Even if Trump himself isn’t aware of this plan, his vice president certainly is. On a far-right podcast in 2021, JD Vance laid out a very similar vision for a second Trump term, using what the Peter Thiel protégé described as a “de-woke-ification program” to purge bureaucracy.
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
The future vice president continued, “And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Yarvin writes that the initial goal of the new administration should not be to simply govern, but “to figure out what the Trump administration can actually do—when it assumes the full constitutional powers given to the chief executive of the executive branch.”
What the administration can do once they fully seize this power is so incredibly vast. Without checks and balances, all those “crazy things” Trump tried to do in his first term would be a lot easier to enact, let alone whatever Musk and the tech oligarchs want out of the United States Incorporated. But that is a whole separate topic. The current fight determines the degree to which this power is seized.
Yarvin notes the importance of going all the way: “Trump in 2017 took office; he took about 0.01% of power. If Trump in 2021 wants to have more than 0.001% of power the only way he can do it is to take 100%. To take it all at once, completely legally. The real Donald J. Trump would never have the guts to even think of doing this. (And he’s just too old.)”
All this doesn't even need to benefit Trump supporters, because Trump’s main campaign promise wasn’t mass deportations, fixing the economy, or abolishing the Department of Education. It was retribution. As extremism analyst Jared Holt notes, “The Right got its base so hooked on the idea of ‘revenge’ it doesn’t even have to pretend any of this benefits their base in any tangible way. They just have to say it hurts the ‘wrong’ people and it satisfies them.”
If Trump and Musk continue to get their way it could take years to fix, but the past ten years have shown us you can’t return to normal. There probably is no going back. The options are to hunker down and play it slow and try to survive whatever happens in the next 2-4 years while offering passive resistance. Or accelerate to whatever comes next, put cards on the table, trigger a kinetic confrontation, and fully manifest the results of this constitutional crisis. We are dealing with managing crumbles vs. full systems collapse. Sad face emoji.
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MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It’s not just that these people are desperate – it’s that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you’re living out of.
In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That’s why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for “leads” and “customers” and to use the language of social solidarity (“women helping women”) to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don’t need and can’t afford.
But it’s worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the “customer” to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don’t need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.
Announcing the Picks and Shovels book tour (permalink)
My next novel, Picks and Shovels, is officially out in the US and Canada on Feb 17, and I’m about to leave on a 20+ city book-tour, which means there’s a nonzero chance I’ll be in a city near you between now and the end of the spring!
Picks and Shovels is a standalone novel starring Martin Hench – my hard-charging, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant – in his very first adventure, in the early 1980s. It’s a story about the Weird PC era, when no one was really certain what shape PCs should be, who should make them, who should buy them, and what they’re for. It features a commercial war between two very different PC companies.
The first one, Fidelity Computing, is a predatory multi-level marketing faith scam, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Fidelity recruits people to exploit members of their faith communities by selling them third-rate PCs that are designed as rip-off lock-ins, forcing you to buy special floppies for their drives, special paper for their printers, and to use software that is incompatible with everything else in the world.
The second PC company is Computing Freedom, a rebel alliance of three former Fidelity Computing sales-managers: an orthodox woman who’s been rejected by her family after coming out as queer; a Mormon woman who’s rejected the Church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who’s quit her order to join the Liberation Theology movement in the struggle for human rights in America’s dirty wars.
In the middle of it all is Martin Hench, coming of age in San Francisco during the PC bubble, going to Dead Kennedys shows, getting radicalized by ACT UP!, and falling in love – all while serving as CFO and consigliere to Computing Freedom, as a trade war turns into a shooting war, and they have to flee for their lives.
The book’s had fantastic early reviews, with endorsements from computer historians like Steven Levy (Hackers), Claire Evans (Broad-Band), John Markoff (What the Doormouse Said) and Dan’l Lewin (CEO of the Computer History Museum). Stephen Fry raved that he “hugely enjoyed” the “note perfect,” “superb” story.
And I’m about to leave on tour! I have nineteen confirmed dates, and two nearly confirmed dates, and there’s more to come! I hope you’ll consider joining me at one of these events. I’ve got a bunch of fantastic conversation partners joining me onstage and online, and the bookstores that are hosting me are some of my favorite indie booksellers in the world.
VIRTUAL (Feb 15):
YANIS VAROUFAKIS, sponsored by Jacobin and hosted by David Moscrop, 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern, 6PM UK, 7PM CET https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM
I really hope you’ll come out and say hello. I know these are tough times. Hanging out with nice people who care about the same stuff as you is a genuine tonic.
But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple’s 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.
There’s no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don’t get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.
This week on my podcast, I’m reading “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart),” my short story in Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, commissioned by J. Michael Straczynski.
Margaret came into my office, breaking my unproductive clicktrance. She looked sheepish. “I got given one of those robots that follows you around,” she said. She took a step, revealing the waist-high reinforced cardboard box. “Want to help unbox?
I stood up and unkinked my spine and hips and shoulders with a sound like wringing out a sheet of bubble-wrap. “Oof.”
“Come on, old fella,” she said. She handed me a box-cutter.
I don’t know where we go from here. Neither does anyone else.
On the morning I wrote this I woke up groggy from my chemically assisted sleep to a barrage of horrors. Donald Trump signing anti-trans legislation into law. Donald Trump, attempting to end birthright citizenship. Donald Trump, saluting and dancing with the Village People. Proud Boys tramping through the streets of our nation’s capital reveling in their newfound impunity.
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The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street-fighting and organizing from 2017-2020 bought us four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated.
Rot. It’s a term I see a lot these days. My colleague and friend Ed Zitron refers to the hell our tech Oligarchs continue to force upon us as the “rot economy”. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament, used the term “rage rot” to refer to now-President Trump’s Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the 51st state. Over the last year I’ve seen a slew of articles bemoaning “democratic decay”, “the rot plaguing democracy” and the “deep rot” at the heart of our political system.
One thing I have done over the last four years is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals. Some I hunt or raise and slaughter but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma so perhaps some epigenetic hillbilly memory makes this so satisfying it me. But it’s also changed the way I understand the word “rot”.
Rot starts from the bone. If you look at the back leg of an animal that’s been hit by a truck you’ll see it spreading, a deep black bruise, from the ball-and-socket joint out. If your goal is to preserve good meat then the key is to remove those limbs from the body and the meat from the bone, sooner rather than later. When I think of rot, and how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment.
This seems to be the one thing almost every political person in the country agrees with: the United States as it is must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refused to start cutting. Their successors will not make the same mistake.
On the opposing side of the aisle today I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting, and how much better they’d use it if it passed into their hands. That doesn’t help any of us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists likely to be criminalized soon. Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at night may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they’ll be made to labor for pennies. Neo-Nazis cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity.
The knife is so far away from our hands I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howl outside our doors?
I have an answer to this question: Yes. Now is the time to try. To test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment.
Since the time of the Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as “the American Experiment”. One could see the very term as narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the appellation is one we’ve earned. This country is and always has been a test tube for new, often bad, ideas about how a society ought to run. American civilization’s only core value is “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks”.
That also happens to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism.
There’s a scientific paper I often bring up, “The evolution of overconfidence”, which set out to explain why people so often badly over-estimate their own abilities. The authors pondered:
“…overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs.”
The conclusion they came to was that, when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to TRY to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and, improbably, take power.
Put simply, they always go for it.
January 6th provides us a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who four years later find themselves with ultimate power. They didn’t win because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying. The people who should’ve stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking “unfair”, and so stood back while they made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, narrative oxygen around issues like immigration.
And now we’re here.
The coming days will be ugly. Yet I feel it’s my job to remind you that, bad as this is, we are not Weimar Germany, and this is not 1933. Trump and his lieutenants aren’t battle-hardened trench fighters, they’re Elon Musk and a coterie of half-enthusiastic half-frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmate’s tits. Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Freikorps. The United States is not starving to death and crippled by war, it’s irritated and anxious because its working people have been robbed blind by those same billionaires.
The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them not out of enthusiastic consent but exhaustion, cowardice and above all a feeling that it didn’t really matter.
That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there’s no point in engaging or organizing- that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them. From interrupting as they reach out, yet again, to take something you love or need.
But there’s a danger here too. In moments of stress and anger the desire to DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING can be intense. And when we’re swept up in that mood the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best. The things we’ve done before. The marches and chants and poster-boards we’ve been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those old tactics without iteration or acknowledgement of their limitations is a road to failure.
I’ve been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccotti Park in 2011 and ending last year in Chicago, at the DNC. One of the most dispiriting moments of my life was listening to young anti-genocide activists vow to shut down the DNC, to “make it great like ‘68”. This was a reference to the 1968 DNC. Mass protests were ignited when the preferred anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was rat-fucked by Democratic party insiders in favor of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching.”
It may have been then. But the war went on. Nixon won election, then re-election, and then finally pulled U.S. troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on South-East Asia to have ended several Third Reichs.
During one particularly bad night at the 2024 DNC, miles away from the event itself, a march of self-described “radical protesters” confronted the police while chanting “the whole world is watching” and I can say, unequivocally, it was not. The only people watching were me, several other journalists, and a handful of folks on Twitter. The police, as they kettled, maced and arrested members of the crowd, barely seemed to care. The DNC didn’t shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee. There wasn’t even a real anti-war candidate for party insiders to rat-fuck in her favor.
Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right.
On the stage floor all the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention center to protest the genocide in Gaza.
Meanwhile in the streets a lot of very nice, earnest people (alongside a handful of grifters) did the only thing they could think of doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police and city largely let them, because they knew none of it was going to change a damn thing.
I’d felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment. Or at least it seemed that way at first. The DNC made it clear that Biden’s advisors and consiglieres, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show, and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything.
It was my accurate belief in 2020 that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in 2024 that this might still be the case. I had hope because I’d lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We lean on hope when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against.
Hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go crazy. That’s where we are now, going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent regular people who fill the party not the soulless shoggoths of capital who run things, are going crazy because they got what they thought they wanted for four years. We returned a “decent” normal politician to office, he kept the economy humming along, got us out of Afghanistan…and everyone still hated him.
Leftists are going crazy for different reasons. In 2020 this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history and nothing, fundamentally, changed. In its aftermath, the oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement would ever gain that kind of steam again. Their efforts have been largely successful.
And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, are still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social democrats dream of a giant, continent-sized Denmark, with cyclists replacing Ford Trucks, universal healthcare, good schools and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent. The authoritarian Communists dream of a new October Revolution, but this one will work rather than just creating a new dictatorship that ages and dies within the space of a single human lifetime.
Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws in the logic and futility of the hopes of the previous two groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what’s coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, of an end to industrial society and either living in the woods eating berries or some sort of solarpunk daydream, wildflowers sprouting from rubble. The latter is a nice dream but try offering either future to a single mom who can’t afford her 5-year-old’s insulin and see how she reacts.
Most of the anarchists I know define themselves as “helpers” before anything else. They’ll cheerfully admit they don’t know how to solve the big problem but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month, or do water drops down at the border so migrants don’t die of dehydration, or crowdsource insulin from their friends to help that single mom through a bad week or two.
If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they’re defaulting to what they’ve been doing, but at least what they’ve been doing helps people.
The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new. Something we haven’t tried yet. I feel very confident they won’t take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist/anarchist/whatever. Shawn Fain, chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a General Strike in 2028, and that so far is the only clear plan I’ve heard anyone make that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.
It’s an audacious plan, and I recommend reading what Shawn’s laid out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it IS audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold. As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they always try, and this is something we need to copy.
Shit can be different, but not unless we’re willing to try different shit.
Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the massive and instant support for Luigi Mangione when he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually-sweating oligarchs characterized this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Mangione as proof that the body politic did, indeed, have energy for an uprising.
I saw something different. More than the actual killing itself I think people were excited to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic, carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entre Occupy movement.
Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men’s actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In 2024, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in some way that benefited them. He rode a global anti-incumbent wave back to the White House.
The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is an underappreciated downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright. He is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.
I suspect the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Mangione’s footsteps.
Most of his plagiarists won’t be good at what they do. At best newly heightened security will see Luigi’s plagiarists dropped before they can pull a trigger. At worse, innocent people will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets or do but with a lot of collateral damage.
I don’t know what the next new thing will be. But between Trump and Mangione there aren’t many old norms left to shatter. We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own.
The present is ugly, the future unwritten. The only way we’ll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity and, perhaps, a little overconfidence of our own.
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This week on my podcast, I’m reading “Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital,” the latest post from my Pluralistic.net blog. It’s about the new “Free Our Feeds” project and why I think the existence of Mastodon doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to making Bluesky as free as possible.
When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.
Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There’s very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?
If that’s what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck’s investors – both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today – are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They’ve demanded every nickel since the start.
What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook’s walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the “good old days?”
I am getting ready to post my first multi-part series (!) but work has been severely curtailed by my child acquiring a movie-monster version of the flu that’s been going on for almost two weeks now. Tried school today and got sent home before noon because poor love is too weak to sit at their desk.
Aaaaaand my cat was sort of scarce over the weekend? Which is hard because he is a massive Maine Coon? So massive msall children have to ask if he IS a cat and not on loan from the zoo? Turned out the magnificent, majestic, and in all ways extraordinary feline Lord Byron, Stormageddon, was hiding and starving himself to death because he has a massive systemic infection that filled his ears with the most grotesque xenomorph pus-blood-foul-ichor fluids I’ve ever known about. Honestly I’m still traumatized from the vampiric theater bukkake of it all (the vet spread the ear open to look at it, the skin split, and pus flew all over her face and across the walls of the room. YEAH.)
Mondays, am I right?
In addition to that, my dryer broke, my 17 year old Facebook account was hacked and YOU CAN GUESS HOW EASY THAT IS TO FIX, you don’t even want to know about my water bill last month because I didn’t know a toilet was running for like five weeks due to SOMEONE who is SIX YEARS OLD but I would never SAY WHO, snapped off an Important Part and hid it), and I’m on a crushing novel deadline…with a sick kid and a sick animal both of whom basically need physical contact with me to continue existing at the moment.
IT’S ALL HAPPENING UP IN HERE. LIKE ALL AT ONCE.
So hold tight, I’ll be with everyone in a moment, I have way too much to say about literally everything that’s been happening. I just…am under several wailing bodies at the moment.
And, you know, awkward moment, but Lord Byron is in surgery as we speak, and cat surgery (not to mention dryers and apparently the gold-infused water a toilet produces when it is broken) is very not cheap, so if you were thinking or hemming and hawing over whether to sign up for a paid subscription (and get the extra spicy essays that accompany the main pieces), now would be an awesome time to do that, just saying, no big, totally idle comment you can feel free to ignore. That said, you know…we’re also 5 paid subs away from posting every two weeks on the reg.
Just giving you information. Definitely not feeling the cringe in every cell right now.
Anyway! I’ll see you Monday with part one of Move Fast and Break People: How the Internet Gave Us Everything and Then Took It All Away.
Lord Byron appreciates the support as he journeys through the mad dreams of morphine and wet food post surgery…
This glorious 12-year old gentleman is 24 pounds…and the doc wants him to gain some weight. Because he is a miniature panther and the love of my life.
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The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant–what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money–but for now he’s an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.
When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who’ve founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he’s on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Fidelity Computing and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Fidelity Computing out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they’re seeking to unroot or the risks they run.
In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.
Note: This is cross-posted from my Patreon, under a paywall here because it is under a paywall there. One must play fair. But at the end of the year, I wanted to share it, and what hope it has at the bottom of its particular well, with everyone who has helped me to live and support my family through these very rude and cruel times. Happy New Year. Thank you. The road is long. We will keep walking.
It is the hush at the close of the year.
It always feels hushed to me, even if it's full of noise. The Northern Hemisphere in me, I suppose. There is always some flavor of excess dark, some flavor of excess cold, some sense of putting things away for the long white road of January. Even though New Year's Day is meant to be all new beginnings, December 31st has always felt like an ending to me.
I don't know too terribly many people mourning the end of 2024. It's been a strange, sour time. But as I've thought so often lately, maybe that's because I'm in my 40s, also a strange and sour (and sweet, yes) time when things start to wobble, even for those who did pretty well with the first act or two. Family starts to die, friendships and marriages fray and tear and shred, children and houses are either a constant responsibility or a swiftly-retreating option. Your health starts to whine, if it doesn’t scream. If not your health, at least your strength. If alcohol or its assorted dirtbag friends are going to be a problem, they often start becoming one in the late 30s and early 40s. Careers stall more often than they take off or wither suddenly on the vine. We 40s folk are acutely aware of politics; if we weren't before, because we're now at the stage of life where we need to think about the future, and if we were aware before, the effects of the politics of our youth come home to roost in middle age.
And if the world outside our hearts starts to go seriously corkscrewed around the same time these very normal crumblings tumble through our personal lives, it all gets jumbled up together into a ball of discontent without beginning or end.
There's a reason Dane's Inferno begins: Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood, the good and right road lost to me...
This guy has the worst cholesterol you’ve ever even heard about.
This article was written and researched by Garrison Davis and edited by Robert Evans.
Another Monday in America and another school shooting. On the morning of December 16th, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a teacher and fellow student and injured 6 others before killing herself. Initially police falsely reported the shooter was 17 years old, but late Monday night they correctly identified the deceased shooter as 15 year old Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha or Sam.
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In the aftermath of this horrific event, rightwing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged “transgender terrorists.” But what really happened here had nothing to do with trans people and is, sadly, ordinary for the United States.
In August of 2024, the father of the future school shooter took his daughter to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of the band, KMFDM. In another photo of the shooter we can see the front of the shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who was a fan of the band.
COLUMBINE COSPLAY
The bulk of the shooter’s online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the “TCC,” or True Crime Community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates her tumblr, which last posted in May of 2024. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she “posted about school shooters all the time,” and “had school shooter leanings.”
Samanatha is hardly alone, there have been over 100 copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since 1999.
A Twitter account believed to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of 2024, and the profile picture featured a young man in camo pants and a tactical backpack.
This male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers could not agree on whether she was female-to-male or male-to-female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her twitter profile picture.
The above post is, however, only proof that most of what gets passed off as “OSINT” online today is incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with this diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was 15 years old when he carried out his shooting.
FEMCEL HITLER
Hours after the shooting, while right wing accounts were still arguing what sort of transgender the shooter had been, a neo-Nazi twitter account named Nitro claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her a “biological woman.” An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged twitter account posted a link to a google doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public. The shooter’s alleged Discord friend, Nitro, claimed to find what he believed to be a snippet of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a Discord group chat. Nitro is in the UK, and so if legitimate (big if) this message would have been sent about an hour and a half before the shooting.
Hopefully to most people this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary “feminist” screed about initiating a wave of male-targeted violence to cleanse the earth, with pepperings of “moids,” “foids,” (internet incel slang for male and female, respectively) racial slurs, and something called “radfem hitler.” The incel content would, if this excerpt is legitimate, mark her out as a “femcel”, or female incel.
“Radfem Hitler”, meanwhile, is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle @hollowearthterf (“Terf” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). Her content is a mix of trad-influenced rightwing feminism, advocating traditional gender roles for men and women, with anti-trans flourishes. Radfem Hitler supports a mass purge of “moids” (including trans women). She is derided by both those on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem women with trad or occult interests.
Nitro claimed the shooter “was a fan of RFH (radfem hitler),” and talked about the account frequently on Discord, though Nitro previously believed her interest was merely ironic. An anonymous twitter nazi is certainly not the most reliable source. Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos of the shooter, but they could be utilizing his newfound clout to troll a widely disliked twitter user. Though the fact that he’s been right about all other details inclines me to not discount his claims all together, just to hold them with a billion pounds of salt.
Allegations the shooter was a neo-nazi radfem certainly sent RFH into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been “e-dating,” with the apparent intention of disproving any ties the shooter had to the twitter radfem orbit. Through the alleged online boyfriend, the rightwing TERF ecosystem claimed to have acquired a copy of the “full manifesto.”
This purported manifesto lacks the anti-male (moid) ramblings of the Discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times evocative of Pekka Eric Auvinen’s manifesto (a Finnish school shooter from 2007 who killed eight people). Auvinen considered himself a “natural selector” who had evolved beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha’s purported manifesto he is mentioned by name as a “true inspiration.”
Over the course of 8 hours a radfem Twitter account released 6 pages of what appears to be Samantha’s writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being “scum.” The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists. Though it briefly references Terrorgram “saints,” the whole of it is much more reminiscent of old school Columbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu.
The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters, and includes a paragraph on Vladislav Roslyakov, another Columbine copycat but from Crimea, who also cosplayed one of the shooters.
Though the Discord nazi and the reactionary radfems question the authenticity of the other’s alleged manifesto, what both sides of the incel war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated is to do a school shooting.
TRANSVESTIGATING SCHOOL SHOOTERS
Transvestigating is the practice of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It’s often leveled against celebrities, athletes, and politicians. But in recent years there has been a new common subject of transvestigation: mass shooters. In particular school shooters.
Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout previously reported on this trend back in 2023, right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant School shooting, which police say was committed by a trans man. We theorized that the online right was testing out a new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and plain disinformation. That fear has come to pass. The modicum of believability provided by the Nashville shooting (as it is the only legitimate trans related incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass shooting databases) was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted to link nearly every viral mass/school shooting to trans people to create a false trend.
The strategy operates as follows: during the first few chaotic hours after a shooting, a small group of rightwing content creators weaponize the lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the use of out-of-context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or simply pictures of long/dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter is really transgender.
(For more context listen to this episode of It Could Happen Here I wrote covering the rise of fake “trans terrorists.”)
The goal is to get as many of their followers to see and spread this claim as fast as possible.
Even if this is widely debunked the next day, many who heard the false claim won’t be aware of the verified correction. All these anti-trans influencers need is a brief window of time to plant the idea into people’s minds, and that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is repeated every few months when there’s a new mass shooting, then it’s pretty easy to create the false perception of a growing trend. In reality trans people per capita are actually less likely to commit a shooting compared to cis people, and much more likely to be the victim of gun violence.
But yesterday, conservative and anti-trans influencers tried once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda.
Just minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer Matt Wallace posted that an unknown “witness” said that the shooter “looked to be transgender.” Wallace, who has over 2.2 million followers on twitter, provided no source or citation (he has since deleted the post). Others in the online MAGA orbit parroted this language before any identifying information was released.
The rightwing content creator Ryan Matta baselessly claimed the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter “another mentally unstable psychopath who was prescribed puberty blocker, & hormones.” Matta hosts a show on the rightwing youtube alternative Rumble and has over 123,000 followers on twitter. His tweet claiming the shooter was on HRT racked up 1.6 million “views” and 17k likes in just 12 hours.
Larger accounts like Chaya Raichik’s @libsoftiktok fueled undue speculation about the gender identity of the suspect, seeding confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for political gain.
A small group of conservative influencers has so successfully created an alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter is transgender that they don't even have to outright say it anymore. Accounts like Libs of TikTok and Malaysian blogger Ian Miles Cheong can merely gesture to this reality tunnel they've intentionally created, and now thousands of people will affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth, backed up by historical precedent of fabricated memory.
Conspiracy theories spread that the police were intentionally withholding information about the shooter’s gender identity in service of some hidden “agenda.”
SAMANTHA HYDE
As early as 1:01pm EST the neo-nazi twitter user Nitro correctly identified the shooter as his online friend Sam/Samantha. As this name spread online the multi gendered nature of the name added to speculation that the shooter was trans.
Scarlett Johnson, an activist with the ultra conservative “parents rights” group Moms For Liberty, shared self admitted unconfirmed reports that the shooter was a “transgender teen” who went by “Samantha or Sam.”
As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online, courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified. An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter’s given name matched the ancient Sam Hyde meme, in which extremely online people try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a new mass shooting was American comedian Sam Hyde.
In recent years the meme has been used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One Hyde post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey racked up over 600k views, 4.5k likes, and 1.5k retweets. Massey posted “When you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually mutilate them, you're not curing them, you're creating potential school shooters.” It should go without saying, but the use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence.
DOUBLE FLIPPER
The “we can always tell” crowd ended up transvestigating both directions, seemingly unsure of what assigned gender at birth the shooter must have had. Some believed the shooter was transfem, while others concluded they were transmasc.
A now deleted post from a TERF account attempted to pass off the shooter as a trans girl-
“Trans identified male” is usually a transphobic dogwhistle to refer to a trans woman, as in a male who identifies as a trans[woman]. but sometimes transphobes get confused by words and use the phrase to refer to trans people who “identify” as men.
One of the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans guy came from an antisemitic doctor in Denmark with 1.4 million followers. She falsely claimed, with no evidence, that the shooter was taking testosterone.
As of Tuesday morning this post has 3 million views, 22k likes, and 8.3k retweets. In a following post she blamed “the jews” for inventing transgenderism. [Note: extremism researchers have argued that transphobia is structurally similar to antisemitism.]
A common piece of anti-trans memetic propaganda deployed in the wake of mass shootings is the “trans shooter collage.” This format spread after the Nashville school shooting in 2023, and this week Matt Wallace provided us with a brand new version.
Out of all those pictures only one person in this collage is actually reported to be transgender, the Nashville shooter in the upper left. The rest of the people pictured are not trans and have never claimed to be. The person with long hair in the lower half of the image is Colt Grey, who was falsely labeled as trans by far right influencers like End Wokeness and Mike Cernovitch. Grey’s Discord posts revealed he held transphobic beliefs.
A more classic version of the “trans shooter collage” format is pictured below, courtesy of Libs of TikTok admin Chaya Raichik.
But just as before, the majority of subjects in the meme aren’t actually trans. The Colorado Springs shooter who targeted a queer club is not really nonbinary, and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as the “Denver shooter” is not trans, has never claimed to be trans, he just has died hair. This individual did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is not pictured. Lastly, though the person pictured as the “Uvalde shooter” is trans, that is not the actual Uvalde shooter. It’s a random trans girl, who was one of two trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the shooter as transgender.
So after all that transvestigating what do we have? Just another columbiner with neo-nazi ties. The right has gotten so good at deploying the “trans shooter” as a smoke bomb. It obscures the reality of the over-availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth. Instead of focusing on all that, on the victims of this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to spend a whole day debating the late shooter’s pronouns.
And that’s the point, that’s what they want us talking about. Those who delete their “trans terrorist” posts after being conclusively proven wrong will try the exact same schtick in a few months, after the next mass shooting goes viral. Others won’t even care that much; they’ll just leave up their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel they helped to create.
“Never believe that [fascists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”
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This week on my podcast, it’s our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition since 2012! The kid’s sixteen now, a senior in high school and getting ready to head off to university next year, so this may well be the final installment in the series.
I’ve spent much of the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly on the wall in different little online boltholes where extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione, the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was arrested at a McDonald’s, it didn’t take long for digital sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity. I will tell you now that nothing he read or posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better than this single image in the background of his Twitter profile:
This is an X-ray showing four screws in someone’s lower base spine, apparently due to lumbar spinal fusion surgery. A reverse image search confirms that this is a representative example of someone who has gone through this surgery. It does not seem to show this exact picture being posted elsewhere before Luigi went viral. That does suggest may be his own x-ray.
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His friend RJ, who lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting in 2022, says that Luigi suffered an injury shortly into starting a basic surfing class after moving there. He spent about a week unable to move and his friends had to seek a special bed to help him deal with the pain. Other reports from his acquaintances seem to confirm he was injured surfing. RJ says he talked often about his fears around an upcoming surgery.
This is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Mangione as of the evening of December 9th, 2024. As I write this a purported manifesto is making the rounds online which discusses health issues his mother faced but it is very unclear to me if that manifesto is real. So for this article, we’ll stick with what we can verify. And we can verify that Luigi Mangione suffered from chronic back pain.
If he is the shooter, than we can also confirm he chose to act out by targeting an insurance CEO. The New York Times has stated he was arrested with a 262-word manifesto that described the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
In addition to all this we know Luigi came from a wealthy family, his grand-father made millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes, office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family money, but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history.
This is a man who had options. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be. And the thing he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering a debilitating injury, was to shoot the CEO of United Healthcare.
Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
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It is a well known fact that most terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent watching 8chan turn from an image board dedicated to Gamergate into a machine for generating white nationalist mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally in a community.
Much will be made in the coming days and months about Luigi’s online footprint. I will go into some detail about where he spent his time and how to characterize it but I want to be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be what made him choose to take action, although it may have influenced the specific kind of action he took.
Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan. He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson but also had cogent criticisms of their arguments and presentation.
He expressed frustration with “wokeness” and expressed opinions common on the libertarian / tech influenced right, like a belief in the social benefits of Christianity without expressing particular religious belief himself.
Some of this took the form of memes typical to online discourse of this type. But we have an essay he wrote at age 15, discussing how Christianity persevered over Paganism in Ancient Rome, that shows a longstanding interest in this topic and a capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is well-written, particularly for a 15-year-old, and while his conclusions are highly arguable this is not the work of someone hopelessly brainwashed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to read and think and come to his own conclusions.
He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life-extension and in a constellation of techbro adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described as “the gray tribe”.
The term “Gray Tribe” was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskind. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley-influenced ideology descended from the online rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right-left ideology.
I have not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures associated with this big tent movement, including Peter Thiel.
If we describe Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Grey Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks closer to the right-wing side of things. The worst person to use this terminology would probably be Thiel-associate Balaji Srinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging of progressives.
However I must stress that Luigi Mangione never expressed any support for this end of the ideology that I can find. He was a young man of Libertarian inclinations who worked in Big Tech and had ties to San Francisco but was also clearly someone still making his mind up about the world.
As information about him has come out I have seen people on the left, who initially saw his acts as heroic, lament that he was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described as a eugenics supporter, as have many other people adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in which Mangione dabbled.
Luigi’s Twitter account does indeed include weird posts from his time in Japan where he theorizes on how to solve “falling birthrates” by banning “pocket pussies” and video game cafes.
At other points he complains about Japanese citizens as acting like “NPCs”. But race science and eugenics doesn’t seem to have been a focus for him. And I would caution against being overly reductive about a 26-year-old’s beliefs based purely on a handful of posts that bare no relation to his actions.
The evidence we have of his online footprint suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five about the criminalization of poverty in the United States:
Luigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icon some had hoped. But he doesn’t easily fit into any other box we have. His interest in Gray Tribe-adjacent thinkers and self-help books written by productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has been made of the four star review he gave Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto by Ted Kaczynski, but as with the rest of his media diet he did not view Ted through a simple lens of hero worship:
We know that these are not just words because we have seen the attack he (allegedly) chose to carry out. Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people with no real power in our society, but a surgical strike against a man at the very top of the system he hated, one that caused no collateral damage. He was capable of appreciating some of Kaczynski’s conclusions, but ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review came not from the manifesto but from a reddit post made by a guy with the username Bosspotatoness who otherwise mostly commented on the Grateful Dead.
The post praises Kaczynski for having “the balls” to realize that peaceful protest “has gotten us absolutely nowhere” and complains “economic protest isn’t possible in the current system”. As a result “violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense”.
“These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck. So why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?”
This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what he did and how. But Bosspotatoness is not some Nazi on 8chan trying to provoke a shooting spree for the lulz. He’s a random dude angry about the same things 70% or more of the country is angry about and expressing a lack of faith in any peaceful way forward.
If you read this post in its entirety, as Luigi did, you can’t miss the pain there. Anxiety and horror at the inevitability of climate change, and the looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry concerned only with maximizing profit.
In more ways than one, Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
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I know many people who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments, after fruitless hours-long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills, for them to joke about what they’d like to do to the executives who run these companies.
These are jokes, made in moments of despair and pain. No one I know would ever act on them, because they all have lives, people to care for and to whom they are responsible. They would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe.
In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off all contact with his family. He admitted to this in court and we have evidence friends tried to contact him on his family’s behalf via social media.
As was noted first by this Twitter account, Luigi Mangione expressed interest in the work of Paul Skallas, a tech lawyer, writer and prominent poster who writes about “the Lindy effect”, a concept that boils down to this: “The only effective judge of things is time.” Skallas is popular among the set of people Mangione found himself drawn towards, and writes about the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It’s not hard to grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient Rome might see in him.
On December 4th, 2024, Paul made this post:
It’s been suggested that this may have influenced Luigi and I think the timeline makes it clear that this cannot be the case. Luigi cut off contact with his family and most of his friends months ago. The evidence suggests he’d planned this attack for quite some time. He arrived in New York City on November 24th, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where he did not reside.
So I don’t think this post represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Skallas advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation and mind-set Skallas described does speak to a lot of young men like Luigi, young and educated but without intense responsibilities or much hope for the future. This subset of society has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries and, of course, mass shooters.
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The United States has a mass shooter culture. Over the last several decades, since Columbine, we have grown used to the idea that people who are angry and no longer care if they live or die will sometimes choose to go down killing strangers. In most cases these shootings are utterly random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum body count and maximum attention.
More recently, and especially since 2019, mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, nearly all right-wing, have used them to put theory into praxis and earn free PR for their causes. Most people abhor these actions but we have grown used to the idea that people will use such acts as a way to spread messages that might otherwise get ignored.
It is not coincidental that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Tarrant’s Christchurch Manifesto are now mainstream talking points in Conservative politics.
Luigi Mangione grew up with all this. He would have come to the same conclusions about the role shootings play in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What he did was, of course, not a mass shooting. But the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew the social script for how this kinda thing goes in the USA.
In the wake of this shooting every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi’s actions. Right-wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet.
This is because they too understand the shooter culture of the United States. Like anyone else, they know that any mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have carried out was new and exciting; it demanded the public’s attention in a way most mass shootings don’t.
At almost the exact same time the United Healthcare CEO was assassinated, a gunman walked into a religious school near Oroville California and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out by the execution of an insurance industry CEO. The armed and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this sort of thing will not miss this fact.
I believe Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow him will all have their own reasons for what they do, their own journeys to that violent end. But ultimately, they’ll do what they’ll do because Luigi proved it’s what gets attention.
For now.
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This week on my podcast, I read the sixth and final installment of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Spill will be reprinted in Allen Kaster’s 2025 Year’s Best SF on Earth.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
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