Roughly speaking, there are three reasons we might engage in political discussion. The first is intellectual interest. Playing with ideas, including political ideas, is fun, and banging them against each other to see which comes out on top is fun. So just as some people find it enjoyable to hash out who’s the best quarterback of all time, some people find it enjoyable to hash out which political institutions or rules are most just or most likely to create a flourishing society.

The second is domination. Politics is, ultimately, about the exercise of power. It’s about controlling others, and who gets to do that controlling, and to what ends. So you might engage in political talk to point out to the people you intend to control that you’ll be the one doing the controlling (or, at least, people like you), and they’ll be the ones getting controlled. This is politics as verbal bullying.

The third, and the one that motivates most of us when we engage in political talk, is persuasion. I want to bring you around to my political view, because my political view wins out when enough people have come around to it. So I offer arguments, and debate your arguments, and if all goes well, one of us will move the other closer to his position.

Let’s set aside the first, intellectual interest, for now. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of person who finds political talk at least somewhat intellectually interesting even outside the context of the other two reasons. But let’s focus instead on why most people talk politics, which (they think) is to persuade, but is, more often than they’d like to admit, to instead dominate.

You get this a lot on social media. It’s what pile-ons are all about. I express an opinion the prevailing culture on the platform disagrees with, and the response is threats, or insults, or quote posts of “can you believe this guy?” The goal is to make me feel stupid or small, and so to make the pile-on-ers feel smart or big. It’s pretty prosaic stuff: Make yourself feel good by making someone else feel bad. And that feeling-bad-ness is a form of domination, especially when it arises out of political talk. The people doing the dominating know that. The person getting dominated knows that. There’s an implied threat in the pile-on itself: there are more of us doing the pile-on against the one of you that we’re in a position of power. Or, at least, appear to be, because a pile-on isn’t actually indicative of the pile-on-ers’ opinion being more widespread than that expressed by the piled-on. (I’m reminded of the line from The Mr. T Experience song “Two of Us” about how the “two of us outnumber every single one of them.”)

But there are cases when the people engaged in a game of domination believe they’re engaged in a game of persuasion, and it’s actually pretty common in a lot of political discourse. It happens when the person arguing is an asshole.

I wrote here a while back about how people who think their strong commitment to principle justifies their being an asshole are mistaken both about the content of their principles and the nature of principle itself. It’s basically, “I believe in this so strongly, and my cause is so moral and just, that nothing else matters, and that includes being courteous and respectful to those around me.” The trouble with this line of thinking is that morality and justice are about our relationship to other people. You can’t be just while treating others unjustly—even in the cause of “justice.” You can’t be moral while treating others immorally—even in the cause of “morality.”

But that’s a claim about ethics: being an asshole demonstrates that your professed ethical character isn’t an ethical character, but instead an unethical one draped in some degree of ethical talk. Adding on the above context about persuasion and domination helps us to additionally see that being an asshole (a form of domination) is unproductive, too.

If you want to persuade someone of your political position, you need to convince them that your position is better. And that means better for them. Or better for everyone. Or better for most people. It doesn’t mean just better for you. Or just better for people like you, but not like them, and not like most other people. Persuasion in politics means convincing others that your way is the best way for them to achieve their aims. Or it means convincing them that their aims weren’t the right ones. In other words, it’s fundamentally not about domination.

But to be an asshole is to position yourself as a dominator to those around you, because to be an asshole is, simply, to tell everyone around you that your interests are always more important than theirs, and that one of your interests is making them feel small or stupid in order to make yourself feel big and smart.

Thus “I can be an asshole and persuade” is, in almost every instance, a mistake. You can’t. Because coming off as an asshole to your interlocutor, or to people who hear your arguments, is telling them up front that your motivation is domination, and so they will view your political arguments in that context. What you want, they’ll reasonably assume, is to use politics to dominate, just as you are using your asshole-ness to dominate. You’re signaling, from the opening gate, that the politics you want to persuade them of are, whether explicitly stated or not, about political domination instead of political cooperation. You’re telling them your worldview is zero-sum instead of positive-sum.

Being an asshole makes people justifiably suspicious of whatever politics you advocate, and they will assume that, even if you talk about freedom and liberty and openness and exchange, what you’re really all about is power and control and, well, domination. Maybe you can talk your way out of that hole (there are assholes who advocate genuinely emancipatory politics, after all), but you are starting in a hole, and the more of an asshole you are, the deeper it is, and the more likely your arguments will come across, to your listeners, as digging it even deeper still.

If you care about your politics, just as if you care about your principles, you should fight every urge that might arise to be an asshole about it. It’s not just more ethical. It’s more persuasive, too.

About the time I was in law school, David Allen’s Getting Things Done was all the rage. “GTD” was the productivity obsession, with blogs like Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders and software tools like kinklessGTD, which became, to much excitement, the foundation of OmniFocus for the Mac. Allen offered a hyper-complex and, in retrospect, over-engineered solution to, well, getting things done. And 2008 and 2009 were years everyone who wanted to get things done—and liked futzing with a hyper-complex and over-engineered system for it—was getting them done with GTD. (Here’s a pretty good short summary of the whole system if you’re not familiar.)

I mention this because an odd aspect of the GTD pitch, likely an artifact of David Allen building GTD first as something to teach is business executive coaching clients before he turned it into a bestselling book and became a guru to productivity nerds everywhere, was how it reduced everything one might do in life to a “project.” Which, I’ll admit, makes a certain sense. Everything you might do in life requires a set of distinct steps (“actions,” in GTD terms, the most important of which, at any given time, being the “next action”), and Allen defined a collection of steps related to a common end as a “project.” It takes several actions to finish that TPS report, and it takes several other actions to learn the violin, and so the TPS report and the violin are projects to be handled through the application of the same GTD processes. Key to this was the only actions you needed to think about at any moment were those “next actions,” the very next thing you needed to do in all the projects on your plate. Anything beyond those next actions was definitionally out of mind—until, by checking off whatever was ahead of it, it became the next action.

David Allen talked about everything within the singular context of the “project.” And this was a big part of GTD’s appeal: If you got the right system set up, the right flow of capture, organization, and execution, you could turn your entire life into decontextualized productivity microdoses. Projects became an indistinguishable mass, because once you’d defined them up front—thought through your project prompt, so to speak—everything that happened from there was just ticking decontextualized boxes.

(It’s amusing, as an aside, just how much Allen viewed life through the narrow context of the needs of wealthy business executives, because his example projects were always either business executive tasks or something like learning the violin, taking a vacation to France, buying a second home, or getting your oldest daughter that polo scholarship. This is similar to how, if you watch Apple show off the latest iOS or macOS features in one of their annual keynotes, everything neat it will do for you is the kind of thing that assumes “you” are a wealthy resident of the Bay Area who is very busy doing high powered business stuff or else needs to get a reservation at a fancy restaurant or plan an afternoon of sea kayaking.)

This is what came to mind when I saw people on Bluesky making fun of a screenshotted tweet from Derek Thompson. Thompson, picking up an idea from Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, raised an internet future where AI agents can autonomously carry out not just discrete tasks you give them, but, in GTD terms, whole projects. Which, sure, if you trust them to be trustworthy and grown-up about it and so not put $2,600 worth of Spongebob popsicles on your credit card, could be pretty helpful.

Except the example is planning your kid’s birthday party.

The trouble with telling ChatGPT to plan your kid’s birthday party is, while everything you might do that takes multiple steps is, in the GTD sense, a “project,” and you are productive by getting through projects, not everything that’s a project in the GTD sense should be thought of in the context of productivity.

To see what I mean, notice that Thompson’s description of the outcome (ChatGPT, overnight, “negotiates spots at two bowling alleys...”) includes elements not in the prompt (Thompson never told it his five year old wanted to go bowling), which means they were features of the party the AI chose, while being the kinds of features a parent of a five year old ought to himself choose with that five year old in mind. Put another way, prompting a generative AI bot to figure out how to celebrate your child’s fifth birthday is to have the wrong ethical perspective on what it means to have a child having a birthday that you are helping him or her celebrate by putting together something fun and memorable.

We can tell a similar story about the trip to England for a spouse, which again leaves it to the AI to decide what that spouse would enjoy—beyond simply “going to England in July.” These aren’t projects that need to get done however they get done. If they were, asking an AI to tackle them would increase productivity because you can get more of them done, or get them done faster. But planning a birthday party or figuring out what your spouse would like in England are what it means to be a father or a husband. It’s similar to the error of the fancy executive who has his administrative assistant pick out a gift for his friend, or the busy businessman who reads summaries of Dostoyesky’s works because he’d like to enjoy literature, but doesn’t have time for the whole of The Brothers Karamazov. The experience, the act of carrying out these tasks or making these decisions with attention and care, is what they’re all about. (If you’d like to put in the time to experience The Brothers Karamazov, the David McDuff translation is glorious, and I particularly recommend the exceptional audiobook narrated by Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson.)

GTD was designed for a certain sort of busy person who has a lot to get done and needs to get through it while not letting any of it be forgotten. It does this by conceptualizing a profession as a long list of boxes to check, with each set of boxes checked (a project) potentially opening the door to other, previously inaccessible, sets of boxes. This can be quite helpful when you’re overwhelmed with tasks, and the process by which you turn a nebulous “I want to accomplish X” into a series of action steps forces you to think clearly about what it is, exactly, that you hope to accomplish, and what you need to achieve it. Success in GTD comes in having such a finely tuned system that running through those boxes becomes close to effortless. Just do this. Then this. Then this. And then you’ve gotten to Done.

But GTD, as a mindset, went wrong in two ways, they’re ways AI enthusiasts can go wrong as well, and they both have to do with bringing the wrong perspective to one’s activities. The first is that GTD, while good for many projects, falls apart for discursive creative pursuits, such as writing a book or creating a work of art. When you write a book, you don’t sit down at the start and map out a list of “next actions,” each being a discrete act you can reasonably perform in a single, focused burst. It’s one thing, if you need a new deck added to your house, to list as the next action, “Call the first contractor to get an estimate.” It’s quite another, when writing a book, to list as the next action, “Write chapter two.” That’s because “chapter two” isn’t a focused action, it’s an unspecified mass of them, each pointing you in new and unanticipated directions: “That gives me any idea for this” or “Oh, I need to go back and really research some more on that.” You can have a plan, of course, but to think you can map out every action, in order, it will take to get through that plan is to, well, not what it means to write a book.

GTD aficionados came up with ways to route around these difficulties, but they never quite meshed with the clockwork nature of David Allen’s system, and so creative pursuits never quite fit within GTD. Something similar happens with AI. And that gets to the second way this mindset goes wrong. Yes, you can use generative models as part of the creative process, but the creative process is a series of decisions, often intentional but sometimes entirely unexpected, that require you to direct or assess them. While you’ve produced a novel in the sense of having something that could pass muster as one when you ask ChatGPT to write it for you, you haven’t written a novel. (The bright line at which “using AI in the creative process” and “you missed the point of writing a novel” is fuzzy, varies, and is bound up in inevitably evolving cultural attitudes, but it needn’t be bright for us to work with this distinction.) The perspective of the GTD mindset focuses too much on the “Done” and not enough on the experience of “Getting.” To bring this back to the birthday planning, your kid’s birthday party isn’t the sort of thing you should hand off all the decisions about, whether that’s to an AI or your secretary. Because, while the point is giving your kid a great time, it’s also that you gave it to them.

Another way to express this error of perspective is that it conflates “labor” with “work” by contextualizing all of the latter as an instance of the former. The goal of GTD (and AI when employed as a continuation of the GTD mindset) is to streamline, and so make more efficient, labor. But not all work is labor. Labor is something you’d rather not do, and so making it more efficient (or finding ways to route around the need for it entirely) is good. That’s a big part of how the world gets better when it becomes richer and more technologically advanced: The amount of labor any one of us needs to do to get the stuff we want declines. We get more outputs with fewer inputs. That’s wealth. If GTD or AI can reduce the amount of labor you need to carry out, or it can reduce the amount of time that labor takes, or it can at the very least make the least enjoyable parts of that labor easier, then it is to your benefit.

But there are plenty of activities we undertake that, while definitely work, are not labor. If you’re an avid gardener, you might spend your weekend working in the garden, and working hard. You’ll end the day exhausted and sweaty and ready for rest. But, when asked how you spent your weekend, you’ll say, “I worked in the garden.” You probably won’t say, “I labored in the garden.” And if someone offered you a service that would let you have the same beautiful garden without doing any of the work, you’d say that person is missing the point. It’s the gardening that matters, and the reason the resulting garden is so personally rewarding is because you did it. If GTD or AI can mean you get through your actual labor more quickly, you won’t use that time to just sit around. You’ll spend more time in your garden. The goal isn’t to get more outputs with fewer inputs, because, when it comes to your passion for gardening, the inputs are the whole reason for doing it.

We want tools and methods, whether productivity systems or artificial intelligence, that reduce the need for labor, just as we’ve benefited from automation and efficiency gains for as long as those have been making the world richer. What we don’t want is to let enthusiasm for labor saving inventions lead us to avoid the work constitutive of what’s good and meaningful in life and what’s good and meaningful in the lives of those we share it with. ChatGPT shouldn’t plan your kid’s birthday party, because what it means to be a parent is to do things for your kid, and to show that you understand your kid well enough to make the decisions that will bring them the most joy. ChatGPT shouldn’t write your novel for you, because what it means to write a novel is for it to be your novel, not that at the end of some process there is a novel with your name on it. The problem with Getting Things Done wasn’t that it failed as a productivity system, but that not everything in life should be thought about through the lens of a productivity system. And the problem with having AI do your work—as opposed to your labor—is that the work is only meaningful if you do it.

Back in the aughts, political writer Matt Yglesias coined the “pundit’s fallacy,” which he described as, “that belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.” Put another way, it’s the belief that the political preferences of any given pundit are not unique to that pundit, or not minority preferences, but instead reflect the preferences of either the majority or at least of enough people that a politician can win by making them his own positions. It’s a confusion of perspective: “I see the world this way, and so most others must see it the same way, too.”

The psychological pull of the pundit’s fallacy isn’t unique to pundits, and it’s perfectly understandable. We hold the views we hold because we think they’re correct, even if we have bad reasons for thinking that, and most of us tend to see “lots of people believe them” as further evidence of their truthfulness. Yes, there are extreme heterodox thinkers who thrive on being the epistemic outsider, but few of us are extreme heterodox thinkers. We like to have intellectual compatriots. And, besides, heterodoxy, by itself, doesn’t tell us anything about whether the heterodox belief in question has any truth to it.

Heterodox ideas are necessary for truth-seeking, in that they force the testing of orthodoxies. But too many people have instead convinced themselves the mere fact that an idea is heterodox is itself evidence the idea contains more truth than what's orthodox. Which isn't true!

— Aaron Ross Powell ☸️ (@aaronrosspowell.com)
6:49 PM • May 19, 2025

Anyway, I was thinking about the pundit fallacy while watching yet another round of calls, from elite opinion columnists and, yes, pundits, for the Democrats to “moderate” or “move to the center” if they want to win in 2026 or 2028 or whenever we have free and fair elections. The argument goes, Trump won because swing voters—those odd folks in the middle who don’t have any explicit or revealed party loyalty, but instead occeslate between Democrats and Republicans election by election—were turned off by Democrats not being middle enough.

The people making this argument are, by and large, those pundits who think of themselves as roughly “centrists.” And a great deal of pundits, especially the big deal Washington insider types, think of themselves as “centrists” because, in the culture they’re a product of, being seen as far from the middle (whatever the middle might be) is unseemly. As I wrote a last summer about the urge to false equivalence common in these circles, “To be thoughtful and wise is to be above the fray. To be above the fray is to be non-partisan. To be non-partisan is to not favor one side over the other.” Moderation, in other words, is a sign of intellectual sophistication, because to be immoderate is to be unmeasured and uncareful in your thinking.

What does this have to do with swing voters? If you listen to the sort of analysis in question, a swing voter is a political centrist. They swing because they are in the middle between those who don’t, and those who don’t are either far enough on the left or far enough on the right that they aren’t willing to switch sides in any election. To appeal to swing voters, then, and so win elections, is to adopt the political philosophy of moderation and centristicy. It is to stake out a position somehow between those of the Republicans and the Democrats. That means, for example, not being a Christian nationalist, but also not talking so much about how trans people ought to have rights of equal participation in society. Because both those “extremes” turn of centrists, and thus turn off swing voters.

How do the pundits know that’s what will turn off swing voters? Because it’s what what turns them off. And, if you’ll recall, those pundits are centrists and swing voters are centrists, and so the pundits can readily use their own preferences as an accurate enough proxy for whatever swing voter you grab from the crowd.

The trouble is, swing voters aren’t centrists. To the extent centrism is a coherent political ideology, swing voters can’t be centrists because swing voters don’t have coherent political ideologies. They tend, first, to be low-information and low-engagement. Both cut against critically examined, consistent views. If you think about the low-information voters in your own life, you’ll likely immediately see what I mean. They tend instead to have grab bags of quite random political beliefs, and like policies that directly contradict each other. They’re less about policy and more about vibes, excitement, and maybe some grievances. Yes, there are swing voters this doesn’t describe. There are actually, genuinely ideologically moderate (whatever that might mean) people who pay a great deal of attention, know quite a lot, and have parked themselves somewhere between the median Republican and the median Democrat in terms of policy. But that’s not most of them, or even very many. Trump won not because people like that decided to vote for him, but because tons of people who don’t tend to turn out for elections with any consistency turned out for this one.

This centrist fallacy is, ultimately, a more intellectually palatable version of the pundit’s fallacy. It’s transparently a pretty bad argument to say flat out, “Politicians can succeed by doing what I want them to do because I’m just assuming everyone else agrees with me.” You need something more than that to persuade anyone to take you seriously. So instead you add an epicycle: “Actually, swing voters are centrists, I’m a centrist, therefore swing voters want what I want.” It’s still not a good argument, but it’s good enough that plenty of people paid to write about politics believe it.

Last week I wrote about how liberals, by focusing exclusively on institutional and value neutrality, cede conversations about ethics to illiberals, and particularly illiberals on the right, with the result that people looking for ethical talk about how to live meaningful lives (e.g., young men) end up finding meaning in reactionary ideologies.

Today I want to offer a hypothesis pointing to why this is—and particularly why libertarians, who often position themselves as the radical wing of liberalism, are so hesitant to talk about liberal values (and virtues) in the cultural and social spheres. Among liberals, this takes the form of a cold neutrality: institutions set base rules that apply to all, but must not make claims about, for instance, the nature of the good life, or the values and perspectives conducive to it. Among libertarians, this takes the form of a focus on the state, and a disinterest (or at least silence) about anything outside of it: the only matter of ethical concern is when it’s permissible to apply coercive force, and so if the application of coercive force isn’t at issue, libertarianism (and, so, libertarians) must say nothing at all.

I think both positions are mistaken. To believe in liberal institutions is to believe that liberal institutions are moral and good, and that means having reasons why they are moral and claims about what it is about a society governed by liberal institutions that is good compared to the alternatives. And those are values claims, and they’re calls for a perspective that asks us to notice the kinds of harm illiberal institutions and societies inflict. Similarly, to believe that coercion is impermissible is to have values pointing to its impermissibility. And those values, if genuinely held and consistently applied, will lead to other conclusions about social behaviors, and our relations to others. You can’t reduce morality to only the question of justified state action, because morality (and ethics) is bigger than the state. And you can’t ignore the bulk ethical questions as they arise in our lives without taking a position that you don’t care about ethics. Which would be unethical.

Ethics Talk as a Doorway to State Control

Thus my theory about why radical liberals and particularly libertarians are so hesitant to talk about social and cultural ethics, or to make claims about the nature and constituent parts of the good life. The first reason picks up where the prior paragraph ended: Libertarians are worried, and with some good reason, that if they do say, “This way of living, or this set of values or preferences, is better than that one,” they’re opening the door to, “And that means the state should intervene.” I say, “with some good reason” because the political conversation is filled with unreflective calls for “Because X is good, the state should mandate X” or “Because Y is bad, the state should prohibit Y.” Libertarians hesitate to open that door by engaging in ethical talk. The urge to wield state power is strong, and we needn’t give people more excuses than they already have.

The trouble with this line of thinking is that it only works in a vacuum. As I argued last week, if you don’t talk about ethics yourself, people who want to hear ethics talk will turn to someone who does. Most people don’t think about politics through the lens of institutions and their rules. They think about politics through the lens of their daily life and the social sphere in which they live it. They want to feel good about the world and their place in it, and want to hear from people discussing the social, cultural, and personal, and giving advice on how to improve them all. By not talking about liberal virtues and liberal perspectives, liberals are leaving it to others to talk about them instead, and that means people who want life advice are turning to illiberals, including social and cultural conservatives, who aren’t just turning them away from liberalism, but offering them values and perspectives that result in greater personal—and social—suffering.

Refusing to talk about ethics also risks (or has already led to, depending on your assessment of the current moment) the collapse of liberalism as a political project. If liberalism loses because liberals wouldn’t take stands on the issues people care about, then society won’t just become a place of illiberal values. It will become a place of illiberal institutions. In other words, neutrality is self-defeating, because ethical neutrality doesn’t allow for vigorous defense of the very values necessary for neutral institutions of the kinds liberals care about to persist. Politics is downstream of ethics, and so liberals must defend liberal ethics, including liberal social and cultural ethics.

Liberal Virtues Challenge Social Conservative Preferences

The second reason libertarians have hesitated to talk about the liberal virtues as an ethical perspective beyond the narrow question of state action is because, for most of the 20th century, libertarians pursued a strategy known as “fusionism,” which saw the libertarian movement consciously, and as a strategic gambit, embedding itself within the political right. As a strategic gambit, fusionism was a mistake. It didn’t result in more liberty, but it did result in a deradicalized libertarianism, and one too often willing to give up libertarian aims in service of right-wing alliances. There was always an incoherence to fusionism, at the philosophical and ideological level, because social (as opposed to personal) conservatism and radical libertarianism are ultimately incompatible. Political liberalism necessarily entails social freedom, and so opposition to social freedom (and the lifestyle and personal identity diversity and dynamism it entails) must eventually lead to opposing political liberalism.

That creates a problem if you’ve embedded yourself among the political right who, by and large, are socially and culturally conservative. To talk about liberal virtues is, thus, to talk about why they are better than reactionary virtues—and that means upsetting reactionary friends. To talk about radical freedom, not just in terms of the absence of state coercion, but in terms of the varieties of behavior and experience and meaning that result from that absence of coercion, is to critique, implicitly or explicitly, the social structures, hierarchies, patterns, and status distributions that were forged or maintained through the wielding of state power. If the liberal virtues are correct, then the good life is found in a perspective of equal dignity and equal respect, including for historically marginalized or oppressed groups and peaceful forms of self-identity. And that means the good life is not found in marginalization, hate, domination, bigotry, the othering of the disfavored, or the demand that historical hierarchies of status and privilege be maintained.

This is, for a great many people, an appealing message. We all want to find meaning, we all recognize that each of us is different and so will find it differently, and most of us appreciate that it is unethical to force a conception of meaning on those who would prefer another. The liberal virtues don’t say, “You’re on your own, come up with your sense of self and your place in the world from scratch.” That’s not an appealing message, because it’s frankly kind of scary. It’s definitely demanding. Instead, the liberal virtues say, “Social institutions, from culture to family to religion and on and on, give you plenty of starting points, and the ones you default to based on circumstance might be the right ones, but you needn’t feel locked in, and you needed stay in an identity or community if it makes you miserable.” That’s much less demanding, much less scary, but still much more appealing to most people than, “The accident of birth compels you to be this, and nothing more.”

Similarly, the liberal virtues critique of conservative preferences isn’t “Give up your conservative preferences.” Rather, it’s to convert social conservatism (a demand that society and the people in it conform to your preferences) to personal conservatism (the choice to live your own life according to your conservative values, while accepting that others might choose to live their lives differently). Taken a step further, the liberal virtues, and a liberal system of ethics, counsel finding joy not just in your own ability to carve out the life that’s best for you, but in the fact that others can do the same for themselves. That perspective isn’t just the right one in terms of treating others as moral equals whose happiness matters as much as your own, but is ethical in the sense of leading to your own happiness and flourishing as well.

But to make this kind of argument, to stake out the case for the liberal virtues as the virtues constitutive of the good life, is to disagree with those who disagree. It is to say that liberalism and conservatism (in its social and cultural forms) aren’t the same thing. Which is okay, because they’re not.

If radical liberals and libertarians are to win the argument for the future, they need to show why radical liberalism or libertarianism are compelling alternatives to illiberalism. And that means showing why the virtues underpinning them speak to the concerns people have—about their own lives and their place in the world and how they can find happiness in both. To refuse to engage in ethics talk, and to refuse to acknowledge that the ethics of political liberalism also entail an ethics of economic, epistemic, and cultural liberalism, and that they entail a personal ethics of virtues and perspective and a conception of the good, is to lose the debate by forfeiting the stage. The liberal virtues are better than those illiberals offer, not just in the political sphere but in the personal and social as well. And they’re better not just because they’re more moral, but because they make us happier. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so.

Everyone’s talking about the plight of young men, who have drifted hard to the right in recent years, and whose online influencer spaces, in sports, or video games, or politics, have been taken over figures like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Jonathan Keeperman: men who ultimately place the blame for men’s ills on women or the “feminization” of society.

A lot of smart people have written a lot of smart stuff about this from the gender perspective. (See my conversation with Samantha Hancox-Li on illiberalism as a story of gender, for example.) But I want to point out another aspect that gets less attention, but I’d argue is critical for understanding why so many young men are drawn to these influencers and ideas in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, if you’re a regular reader of my work or listener to my podcast, it’s about ethics.

What illiberalism offers, or at least illiberalism of the kinds we’re talking about, and what liberalism has long given up talking about much itself, is a comprehensive story of the good life, how we fit into it, and how we can achieve it.

Liberalism is, by and large, cold. Liberal philosophy aims a neutrality when it comes to governing institutions. The state shouldn’t tell you how to live, but should instead provide you with the space and the protections needed for you to forge your own vision of how to live. Just as it is wrong for the government to tell you what religion to follow, it is wrong for the government to tell you what life philosophy to follow or what cultural values to hold.

And that’s true. When it comes to government. But liberalism isn’t just about government, and never has been. It’s a system of values, with political institutions downstream of those. Why else then would liberals care about a state that respects autonomy in the first place? Why is autonomy—the freedom of each of us to choose—valuable?

This has led liberals to talk in terms of rights, and neutral institutions, and economic efficiency, and abstract philosophy. And all of those are good, and worth talking about. But those aren’t the things most people care about most of the time in their day-to-day lives. They want to be happy. They want to be fulfilled. They want to feel like they have a place in the world, and that the world supports their place in it.

In short, they want ethics. They want a comprehensiveness that doesn’t limit talk to neutrality, but instead advices how to live. And because (many, most) liberal intellectuals have stepped away from that kind of talk, they’ve ceded the ground to those willing to engage in it. Who, often, aren’t liberals. And so the answer they offer (the answers Tate offers, or Peterson, or Keeperman) aren’t grounded in liberal virtues, but illiberal ones.

This is a problem for two reasons. First, the more a society is built on illiberal values, the less likely it is to be liberal in its institutions. The less it will see value in the bedrock liberal principles of dignity and autonomy and peaceful co-existence. The more it will look to hierarchies and domination as the proper way people relate to each other. Liberalism as institutional neutrality cannot persist without a critical mass of liberalism as a system of values.

Second, liberal values are just better than illiberal ones. Illiberal values lead to suffering. (The young men following Andrew Tate are not happier because of it.) Cultivating a liberal perspective on the world—including liberalism in the social sphere—makes your life better.

By downplaying virtue talk, and avoiding conversations about what makes a good life, liberals aren’t just failing to defend liberalism, but they’re also failing the young men looking for advice on how to thrive. There are liberal stories of masculinity, liberal stories of how to relate to others, liberal stories of what it means to be a successful and happy member of the modern world and find fulfillment in it. We should be talking about them.

Now for something quite different. When I was in law school, I wrote a novel to give myself a break from reading cases. I’d carve out a bit of time each day between study sessions to crank out 500 or 1000 words, and then I’d published the results on my blog.

This worked, both in that it motivated me to write consistently, and in that it led to an offer from a small press horror publisher to release the book. The Hole, an apocalyptic horror tale, turned out I think pretty okay for a first novel. (And even got turned into an Audible audiobook, which was quite neat.) But it was also very much a first novel, and if I were writing it again today, I’m confident I could do a lot better.

I’m not writing it again today, though. What I am doing is kicking off my next one. Tribes of the Void is a new serial novel I’m publishing here on my newsletter—and below’s the first chapter.

What’s Tribes of the Void about? Here’s my hopefully intriguing back cover copy:

And now for…

Chapter 1

Waverly Whateley was fifteen when she found out why her mom had gone missing two years ago. The knowledge, as shattering as it was, at least had the silver lining of making her that much more confident in her decision to run away from home.

The crummy part of town you weren’t supposed to go wasn’t always comfortable, and sometimes it filled with noises that hounded sleep because they sounded like things Waverly knew couldn’t be real. But at 2 a.m., alone in that part of town, what you know can’t be real isn’t quite the same as accepting its unreality.

Her place still had electricity, somehow. Kelsey, her best friend (or one of her three best friends, depending on her mood) was always saying how the city government—or any government for that matter—was incompetent, from the guy at the top all the way down to the guy whose job it was to make sure houses nobody was allowed to live weren’t still getting electricity. Electricity meant she could charge her laptop, and charge her phone so she had a hotspot, and that meant freelance gigs online where no one put much effort into checking her age. So thank god for Kelsey Stansfield being mostly right about city government.

The year Waverly learned where her mom went, if you could really call it that, she learned a lot of other stuff, too. It was an odyssey of self-discovery, or something like they’d say in English class, and basically all of it bad. Not to get ahead of things, Wave’s odyssey began, as so many petty troubles had, with Jacob Rigsby. Another, depending on her mood, of her three best friends.

Waverly wasn’t at home. Which is what she’d come to think of the abandoned place as, even if she’d been there all of six weeks. Nor was she in school. She’d still been going, of course, but mostly to keep up appearances. This day she’d played hooky, and so was in the trashy—though she suspected intentionally so—coffee shop just on the edge of the part of town you weren’t supposed to go, because she didn’t feel like school that day, and the coffee shop had wifi, and the bored baristas didn’t ask questions about a clearly too young to be in college teenage girl hanging in the corner on her computer.

It was twenty minutes past dismissal, just enough time for Nadia (her third and final best friend) and Kelsey to make it from the school, if they rushed, and they clearly had, because her coding was interrupted by both of them standing over her table and Kelsey saying, “Rigsby’s gone, Wave.” Looking at her like she needed to do something about it, right now, and Nadia looking at her the same.

“From school?” Waverly said.

“For over a week now,” Nadia said. Which was about how long it’d been since the last time Waverly was there.

Neither of them had a coffee or a tea, and they hadn’t texted before coming, so they must’ve known she’d be here, or strongly suspected, and this news couldn’t wait for anything to be brewed or poured.

Waverly sighed and said, “He’s probably on vacation or whatever. His mom’s always dragging them to visit her sisters, right?”

“Except, Wave,” Kelsey said, pulling out a chair, sitting down, and pushing her laptop closed, “his kid brother’s still at the bus stop in the morning, and Jacob didn’t tell us he was going on vacation.”

“He’d have told us,” Nadia said, taking a seat herself.

They were right. He would have. Not just to keep his friends from worrying about it, but because he told them everything. All the time. Rigsby narrated his life compulsively, a nervous tic Waverly sometimes thought was a way to ground himself, make himself the center of his story because so much of his life was this unstable ground between the typical chaos of what he got up to with them and the hyper control of his parents. Here’s where I am, he’d tell himself by way of telling them. Constantly.

“Did anyone call the cops?” she asked, before realizing it was a dumb question.

Which Kelsey was more than happy to point out. “Those fascists? Even if they got off their asses and looked for him, even if they had the brains to find him, they’d just shoot him the moment he pulled out his phone to tell his mom he’s okay.”

Nadia rolled her eyes. “We don’t want to get him in trouble, Wave. Maybe he just ran away.” Just like they keep Waverly’s own quasi-emancipated minor status on the down-low.

“So is there a plan?” Waverly asked.

“Wave…” Nadia said.

“It’s that you want me to come up with a plan,” Waverly said.

“Rigsby would want you to,” Kelsey said. “You think he’d want one of us to be the one in charge of finding him, if he’s in trouble?”

Waverly opened her laptop again. “I’m going to take notes,” she said. “Or brainstorm. Mind map. whatever. Helps me think.” She pulled up a fresh document, titled it “Of Course He’s Missing,” and said, “Okay, what’ve we got?”

Kelsey said, “Not much.”

“Kind of nothing, really,” Nadia added.

Kelsey continued, “It was—“ He did some mental math. “Eight days ago I’m pretty sure was the last time I heard from him.”

“Heard from him?”

“Got a text. So, yeah, last Tuesday night. Maybe 11 o’clock? I don’t know. It was late, but not super late. Anyway, he texts me, asks if I've heard of…”

“It was that new startup,” Nadia said. “The stealth one.”

Rigsby was always into those, fresh internet companies so fresh they hadn’t formally announced yet, existing more as rumored next projects of famous people who’d already gotten rich elsewhere. He liked to guess what they were, the times he got it right becoming the high points of his day or week. Especially if everyone else was guessing wrong.

“Yeah, it was…” Kelsey trailed off as he dug for his phone, unlocked it, and scrolled through conversations. “BABEL. All caps, at least that’s how Rigsby spelled it.”

“Never heard of it,” Waverly said, thinking of course she hadn’t, otherwise Rigsby wouldn’t have been interested in the first place.

Then she caught a barista staring at them from behind the bar. Probably because Kelsey and Nadia weren’t buying anything, but still it was weird, given how chill this place typically was. Waverly gave her a look—the same one she actually gave Rigsby the last time she saw him on account of how much he’d been irritating her—and the barista dropped her gaze.

“Something up?” Nadia asked, glancing in the direction Waverly had sent her disapproval.

“Nothing,” Waverly said. “But you two gonna hang here for a while, you’ll have to buy something. It’s kind of the rule. So what’s BABEL?”

Kelsey gestured to Nadia that he’d go get them drinks. Nadia nodded and said, “It’s a Rigsby thing.”

“Meaning you have no idea.”

“None.”

“You Google it?” Waverly asked.

Nadia rolled her eyes.

“And got nothing.” Waverly said.

“A domain and a logo, some rumors.”

“Such as?”

“Machine learning. Maybe a new model? That would fit Rigsby.”

Waverly typed “BABEL” and “machine learning(?)” into her document, took a sip of her cold coffee, and said, “Okay, so what now? There’s not much here, and who knows if the text he sent Kelsey is why he’s run off, anyway.”

“If he’s run off,” Nadia said.

“If, sure.”

Kelsey came back, paper cups in hand, and set one down in front of Nadia. He took a seat and said, “Maybe we should think of just cutting Rigsby loose.”

“Is that why you rushed here, begging me for help finding him?” Waverly said. “Because you’ve been thinking it’s time to cut him loose?”

Kelsey sighed and Nadia said, “You know he doesn’t mean it, Wave.”

Kelsey set down his coffee. “Yeah, you know I don’t mean it. But he’s just so much. It’s exhausting. He’s always doing this.”

“Remember when he hopped that bus?” Nadia said.

Waverly did. They’d sent her to get him, because she didn’t have family who’d miss her if she did, so there was no one she’d need to give an excuse to who might then tell Rigsby’s family he’d got on a bus to California so he could try to sneak into an Apple new hardware event. There was no way they let him in, because you need to buy a ticket, and Rigsby didn’t have that kind of money, but he’d thought he could find a way. The plan extended only so far as the bus ticket, though, and he’d ad-lib the rest once he got there.

So Waverly bought a bus ticket herself, and at sixteen made her first cross-country trip, getting to San Francisco just half a day after Rigsby, and he was still at the bus station, browsing his phone for a place to stay and not having any luck. She’d convinced him it was a lost cause, paid for both their tickets home, and done a convincing enough act of telling his parents he’d been over at her place for a multi-night hackathon—which they thought meant actually playing video games—with Kelsey and Nadia and he’d lost track of time.

Rigsby promised to never do anything like that again, at least until he had a car and a credit card, and he honestly hadn’t. He’d been good. So she got where Kelsey was coming from, because Rigsby, much as she loved him, was like their group’s annoying little brother, and, as Kelsey said, it was sometimes exhausting.

“Time he went to California, he told us,” Waverly said. “And he’d have told us this time if he were off on another adventure.”

“Like I said,” Nadia added.

“Right,” Waverly said. “So we have to operate like he’s in trouble, and if he’s not, we can kick his ass once we find him.”

Kelsey sighed again and said, “Where do we start?”

But that barista was watching them again. Across the small interior, which still wasn’t crowded because this place was more of a nighttime scene, and behind the bar, the barista, a skinny woman in maybe her early twenties and who Waverly wasn’t sure she’d seen before today, was staring at her. Not a zoning out, bored at work blank stare, but keen interest. Waverly stared back, jacked up her eyebrows and bulged her eyes in a “Yes, you want something?” rude glance, and the barista broke eye contact and turned away to wipe the snout of the espresso machine.

Nadia was saying something.

“—his house.”

“Sorry, what?” Waverly said.

“Where’d you go, Wave?” Kelsey said.

“Sorry,” she said again.

Nadia said, “We go to his house? Maybe there's something in his room that’ll, like, point us in the right direction.”

“Give us a lead,” Kelsey said.

“How do we get in?” Waverly asked. “If his parents are home, we can’t exactly just knock on the door and say we want to search his room. If they’re not home, the place’ll be locked.”

“I know a way,” Nadia said.

“You know a way?”

“I kind of snuck in once,” Nadia said.

Waverly stared at her, disbelieving. Then actually believing a little, and then laughed. “You snuck in?”

“Just the once.”

“What for?”

Nadia looked down at her coffee. “Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing,” Waverly said. “Okay.”

Kelsey just stared at the two of them, confused, and said, “What do you mean?”

“She means nothing,” Waverly said. And then, to Nadia’s visible relief, pushed forward with what they were actually supposed to be talking about. “So, how do we get in?”

“There’s a tree in his back yard. You can get in because the gate, the one to the alley for the trash, isn’t locked. You don’t even have to climb the fence. Anyway, you climb the tree, but it’s easy, and there’s this branch basically right to his window.”

“Basically?” Kelsey said.

“Well, close enough to jump onto the roof. Which is mostly flat. It’s easy.”

“And the window’s open?” Waverly asked.

“Last time I checked. Or unlocked, at least.”

Kelsey said, “We should do it tomorrow. Blow off school. Or maybe try to do it at lunch if you think we can be fast. His brother won’t be there, his dad’ll be at work. And his mom works too, right?”

“She’s a teacher,” Nadia said, clearly annoyed that Kelsey wouldn’t know this about the mom of one of his best friends. But Rigsby’s mom was old, out of touch, part of the establishment. Kelsey made a point of not knowing details of those people’s lives, unless it was how their actions, or just the ideology they represented, were messing up the world.

“Okay, so she’ll be at school, too,” Kelsey said.

“Do we all go?” Waverly asked. “I mean, I was planning to ditch again, so I don’t have to worry about getting caught getting in or out, and it’s not like my parents will get a call about me missing class.”

That barista was staring again. Nadia had started to say something, but Waverly cut her off. “One second,” she said. “I want to take care of something.”

Nadia and Kelsey watched her close her laptop, stand up, and walk as authoritatively as she could manage across the coffee shop and up to the bar. The barista glanced away from her at the last second, but Waverly wouldn’t let her off the hook. “Hey!” she said. “Hey, you need something? Doesn’t look like you need the table, but you want us to buy more coffee?”

“Sorry,” the barista said, still looking away. The other girl behind the bar was helping a customer and not paying attention to the exchange. 

“We’re good, then?” Waverly said, leaning forward, hands on the countertop. She was aiming for a power stance, as much as she could being quite a bit shorter than most everyone else at the shop, including the offending barista.

“Sorry.” And she turned away, scratching at a dark patch on her cheek.

“I hope so,” Waverly said, and headed to the front of the shop to meet Nadia and Kelsey, who were throwing away their cups.

“What’s that about?” Kelsey asked.

“Weirdo kept staring at me,” Waverly said.

“Which one?”

She pointed.

Nadia said, “She looks kind of sick.”

“She’s something,” Waverly said.

“Places like this always go to rot,” Kelsey said. “Anywhere gets a reputation for not being mean to teens, anywhere that doesn’t treat us like kids or delinquents, and someone comes along and tells them to stop. Can’t let us not be under someone’s thumb at all times.”

“Kelsey…” Nadia put her hand patronizingly on his arm, but he ignored her.

“Gotta keep the hierarchy strong,” he continued, louder, broadening his audience. “You let us congregate, you let us discuss, and we are bound to start seeing the cracks in the edifice. Start noticing the holes in the logic propping it up. Don’t want us imagining a better world. They particularly don’t want us making plans to achieve it. It’s not about disruptive teens, it’s about shoring up ideology.”

“Kelsey, we gotta go,” Waverly said, her hand on his arm now, too, and pulling him towards the door. “You can find another soapbox outside. Or start another blog.”

But that wasn’t the only reason she wanted to go. That barista was staring again, and maybe that meant they weren’t welcome here anymore, but the stare also had Waverly on edge for reasons beyond losing her favorite working spot. Because the look she was getting was like that barista knew her, and while Waverly was pretty sure she didn’t, maybe she does? The feeling of the familiar was too strong, even if entirely inexplicable. Whatever was going on, Waverly wanted away from it. Right now.

She succeeded in getting Kelsey outside, where he dropped the tirade, deprived of subjects to preach to. Nadia looked as relieved as Waverly to be out of there, though for different reasons, and said, “I need to get home, guys. Meet you tomorrow at that corner near Rigsby’s? 11:30?”

They agreed to meet then. Waverly left them, and walked back home, that anxious feeling waning, but still there, even when she was inside and alone.

I used to work with a guy who would throw temper tantrums in meetings. This happened often, because he found even minor challenges to his opinions enraging—and found controlling his rage so it wouldn’t lead to a tantrum impossible. He’d shout, stamp his feet, storm out of the room, and slam the door behind him.

The thing is, he also told himself—and definitely told the rest of us—that he was principled and moral. “Principle and morality” were primary features of his self-identity.

He’s who came to mind when a friend recently commented that, “Having moral ideals is not an excuse to be an asshole in your day to day life.” 

21. Having moral ideals is not an excuse to be an asshole in your day to day life.

— Mom for Gliberty (@fakegreekgrill.bsky.social)
9:03 PM • Mar 26, 2025

What struck me about this statement, stated so simply, was not a well-yes-obviously, but precisely the opposite. The fact that the statement needs to be made at all—that there are people who either reject or are ignorant of its truth (and there are a lot of them)—speaks to a deep and tragically common misunderstanding of “principle and morality.”

Principles as the Universal Asshole Excuse

The first is the way that people in fact do use “having principles” as an excuse or justification for being an asshole. Here I’m reminded of a terrific essay by Slavoj Žižek on the idea that “If there is a God, then anything is permitted.” Zizek’s point isn’t really a theological one, but instead about precisely the way we use transcendently weighty signifiers (God, principle) as pretexts to override less weighty ones (the interests of others, for example) while at the same time those weighty signifiers are sufficiently ambiguous in what they signify that we can employ them to justify or excuse any behavior we aim at.

In the context of principled assholes, what happens is the claim to principle lets them set aside the effect their predilection to asshole behavior has on those around them. The principle lets them discount the needs, interests, and comfort of others, because what are needs, interests, and comfort in the face of principle itself? For if principles necessarily erode in the face of causing offense, would they be principles at all? No, clearly not. If you say you have a principled commitment to free speech, but backtrack on that whenever anyone criticizes you, you didn’t have a principle in the first place, but rather a habitual rhetorical flourish.

And yet. The fact that principle must sometimes trump doesn’t mean that pointing to principle is a universal—or universally valid—trump card. Sometimes you’re just being an asshole. And sometimes (often or almost always) your asshole-ness does nothing to ensure the principledness of your principle. It’s instead unnecessary and entirely unrelated bad behavior.

Not Being an Asshole is a Virtue

But we can spin out some other lessons from “Having moral ideals is not an excuse to be an asshole in your day to day life.” If the above is about principles not justifying poor behavior, it’s also true that treating other people well—the opposite of being an asshole—is itself a virtue, regardless of the role principle plays. Put more strongly, committing yourself to not being an asshole is a worthy principle in and of itself.

There are close to zero situations where acting poorly towards others makes the situation better or helps to achieve laudable ends. “I’m going to treat my subordinates like crap and it’ll result in more innovation and productivity” isn’t true, but treating your subordinates like crap does produce a toxic environment that makes the most innovative and productive, who are the most able to leave for less toxic pastures, look to do so. Thus you should aim to avoid being an asshole not only because being an asshole is an unethical way to behave, but because if you actually do have principles and moral ends, you’ll better achieve them by acting appropriately. If your principles tell you otherwise—if they tell you instead that being an asshole is worthwhile, justified, or necessary—then your principles are wrong and you ought to change them.

Not Being an Asshole is a Necessary Virtue

We can go further. Being an asshole isn’t justified. And not being an asshole is a virtue. But it’s also a necessary virtue. By “necessary,” I mean that, without it, you can’t be virtuous, period.

“Being a moral person” isn’t a pick-and-choose process of adhering to a set of distinct rules. Rather, it’s about the kind of person you are. It’s holistic. You can’t say, “I’m moral, except for here,” because that “except” means you’re not moral in any broad sense. “He’s a good person, but he’s mean to waitresses” is incoherent. He’s not a good person.

Further, morality is a holistic ethic grounded in your perspective on your relationship to others. Morality is about how we interact with the people we share the world with. And how we interact with them is governed by how we see them. Are they equal to ourselves in dignity and owed respect? Or are they lesser? Are they worthy of moral concern or not?

To be an asshole is to answer “not.” It is to operate from a perspective of hierarchy, with yourself above others, and with others as your subordinates in dignity. It is to live as if your interests, merely by being your interests, justify overlooking the effects of your actions on others. It is to believe that merely enjoying being an asshole, or feeling like exercising the will to not be an asshole is just too inconvenient, is good enough reason to be an asshole.

And what that says about you is that your principles can only ever be self-serving. Because if you had regard for others, you wouldn’t treat them the way you do. To be an asshole, then, is to demonstrate the impossibility of your holding principles, in any meaningful sense, at all. They’re just, again, rhetorical flourishes enabling you to act as you want, even though what you want is corrupt.

In other words, don’t be an asshole.

The Internet Movie Database aggregates film reviews from critics, but also allows anyone to write a review themselves. These are occasionally amusing in a film snob way because there are people who will gush about epoch-making brilliance of, for example, horror films that topped the box office for a single weekend and then vanished, both from the charts and cultural memory.

Take Darkness Falls, a forgettable 2003 flick about (spoilers) an evil tooth fairy. It has a Metascore of 23, an IMdb rating of 5.0, and this 10 star review from “d-maxsted.”

I was reminded of that review when I read Kevin Roose’s article in The New York Times about how Silicon Valley is convinced we’re a year—maybe two, maybe three—away from AGI, which Roose defines as roughly “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.”

I’m not an AI skeptic. I think LLMs are already powerful tools with real world uses, and there are many clear ways they can make the world dramatically better. A lot of the arguments in the “this technology is junk” or “AI is just a plagiarism machine” genres don’t stand up to scrutiny.

That said, we’re nowhere near AGI and the reason so many in Silicon Valley are convinced otherwise isn’t that they have some insider knowledge the rest of lack, but that their understanding of, and appreciation for, the full range of “cognitive tasks a human can do” is, to be frank, rather cramped. This is less about technology than it is a culture that fancies itself sophisticated in terms of philosophy, literature, and other topics we lump into the humanities, but has a quite thin appreciation for all of them.

Take Sam Altman’s enthusiasm for OpenAI’s new creative writing model. As he describes it, “we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.”

The “vibes” might be right if your level of metafiction sophistication is that of a precocious high schooler who has yet to take a college level literature course: “Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need.” Or, “She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads…” And so on.

Altman isn’t alone in this, of course. Twitter overflows with examples of tech bros breathlessly claiming that AI-generated video has achieved levels equal to the shot composition of Paul Thomas Anderson or the eye of Roger Deakins. 

A favorite example, which I sadly can no longer find, was an excited techie who’d asked ChatGPT (or maybe it was Claude) to solve philosophy’s famous “trolley problem” and had his mind blown when it gave a (to him) entirely convincing answer. Of course, to someone with an even modest philosophy background, ChatGPT (or maybe it was Claude) had done no such thing. Instead, it regurgitated one of the many canonical answers to the problem, without acknowledging that significant counter-arguments exist, or that this particular canonical answer was just one among many. In other words, it hadn’t solved the trolley problem so much as it had concocted prose that sounded like an answer to someone who had never before seen what sophisticated trolley problem arguments look like.

This pattern repeats. It’s not that AI can’t be helpful in talking about humanities concepts. If the level of understanding you’re looking for is high school or maybe undergraduate, these tools can teach you a lot, and for a lot of people, that’s more than enough. But if your aim is graduate level analysis and output—a level surely included in “almost all cognitive tasks a human can do”—you’re going to quickly be led astray.

The same holds for art. AI can, right now, produce pretty passable mediocre art. Which is a threat to plenty of artists, writers, etc., because plenty of artists, writers, etc., produce mediocre art. I’m pretty confident existing frontier LLM models could come up with an episode of the ABC drama 9-1-1 indistinguishable from the output of that show’s writing room. But, again, “almost all cognitive tasks a human can do” aims a bit higher than 9-1-1. 

What’s going on is a confluence of two features of Silicon Valley tech bro culture. First, Silicon Valley tech bros believe that they aren’t just skilled at computer programming, but that they are geniuses to a degree that cuts across all disciplines and realms of accomplishment. This is the character trait that ultimately makes Elon Musk so destructive. He doesn’t know anything about, now, the federal government or how its systems works, but he’s convinced of his own genius, and so his uninformed first impressions must instead be the groundbreaking insights needed to really shake things up for the better.

What this feature of tech bro culture means in practice is that if the tech bro finds the AI’s output convincing, then it must be convincing in a cosmic sense. It must be correct to the point of utter dispositiveness, because it feels correct to the uninformed tech bro.

The second feature is a basic lack of taste. That Sam Altman thinks his chatbot’s short story is brilliant tells us much more about Altman’s literary sophistication than it does the nearness of AGI. That tech bros think OpenAI’s Sora video generation model can replace auteur filmmakers says more about their need to watch more episodes of Every Frame a Painting on YouTube than it does about the nearness of Hollywood’s end.

The trouble is, the Silicon Valley tech bro scene is extraordinarily insular and epistemically closed. So they don’t have many people forcing them beyond their intro 101 level understanding of the “cognitive tasks a human can do” in the humanities.

But there’s also an incentive towards exuberant narratives and over-confidence deeply embedded in the business model of Silicon Valley. In many ways, Silicon Valley looks less like capitalism and more like a nonprofit. The way you get rich isn’t to sell products to consumers, because you’re likely giving away your product for free, and your customers wouldn’t pay for it if you tried to charge them. If you’re a startup, and not FAANG, the way you pay your bills is to convince someone who’s already rich to give you money. Maybe that’s a venture capital investment, but if you want to get really rich yourself, it’s selling your business to one of the big guys.

You’re not selling a product to a consumer, but selling a story to someone who believes in it, and values it enough to put money towards it. That story of how you can change the world could be true, of course. Plenty of nonprofits have a real and worthwhile impact. But it’s not the same as getting a customer to buy a product at retail. Instead, you’re selling a vision and then a story of how you’ll achieve it. This is the case if you go to a VC, it’s the case if you get a larger firm to buy you, and it’s the case if you’re talking ordinary investors into buying your stock. (Tesla’s stock price is plummeting because Musk’s brand has made Tesla’s brand toxic. But Tesla’s corporate board can’t get rid of him, because investors bought Tesla’s stock—and pumped it to clearly overvalued levels—precisely because they believe in the myth of Musk as a world-historical innovator who will, any day now, unleash the innovations that’ll bring unlimited profits.) (Silicon Valley has, however, given us seemingly unlimited prophets.)

What this means for AI is that, even if the tech bros recognized how far their models are from writing great fiction or solving the trolley problem, they couldn’t admit as much, because it would deflate the narrative they need to sell.

Roose acknowledges this when he writes, “Maybe we should discount these predictions. After all, A.I. executives stand to profit from inflated A.G.I. hype, and might have incentives to exaggerate.” But that only gets to the second of the two points above. When it’s combined with the first, the lack of deep understanding of domains of knowledge outside their narrow expertise alongside an “I thought of it, so it must be brilliant” perspective, you get a culture where all ideas are big ideas—and all big ideas are unexamined.

The assault on the liberal foundations of America feels every day like it accelerates. Not just in terms of the damage inflicted, but also in the enthusiastic tearing off of masks by which the new regime and its supporters repudiate the liberal virtues and celebrate their replacement by illiberalism, fascism, hatred, exclusion, bigotry, and the soiling of decency.

It’s a lot. And we’re just two months in, with at least 46 months to go. (Even if Trump’s health declines and he dies in office or becomes otherwise incapacitated, it’s likely only to replace a mad king with decentralized madness.)

This “a-lot-ness” can feel paralyzing. Especially because most of us can’t readily do anything about it. There are good people fighting the good fight, of course. Lawyers are busy in court challenging every illegal act. Organizations like Keshet are giving financial support to LGPTQ+ Americans fleeing unsafe red states for safer blue ones. Anti-Tesla protests, prompted by Elon Musk’s clumsy breaking of federal agencies alongside his well-documented far-right neo-Nazi sympathies, are tanking the company. Even if elected Democrats are mostly failing to live up to this moment, the resistance is resisting.

These acts, big and small, add up. Tyranny needs support, and if Trump is to succeed in fully abolishing American democracy, and American liberalism along with it, he needs constituencies onboard with his goals. The more people stand up to him, the more people fight back, the more people refuse to go along, the harder it’ll be for him to consolidate control.

But, still, most of us aren’t lawyers filing challenges to administration policies, nor are we foundations with substantial funds to help oppressed people. Nor are our economic decisions significant enough, by themselves, to bring meaningful pressure. So what can we do?

Two Approaches to a Better World

All of the above are examples of fighting back now. And they’re important. If you have opportunities to slow down the consolidation of authoritarianism, or to help those it’s targeting, you should take them. You should do what you can.

But “what you can” isn’t limited to resistance tactics, and this is good news for all of us who don’t have those opportunities immediately open to us. The fact is, our current moment will end, someday. America will move on from Trump, and it will move on from Trumpism. When that happens, I don’t know. No one does. It could be in 46 months. We could have free and fair elections in November 2028, the Democrats could sweep to power, and the undoing of the damage could begin. But it might well be longer.

Still, the end will come, and when it does, we need to know what comes next. We’ll need to move on from limiting the destruction and have a clear vision of what to build in its place.

And that’s where all of us come in. Liberalism—which is what must come next if what comes next is to be better than what we’re facing now—isn’t just a set of institutions and their rules. It’s a way of life. It’s embodied and lived values, and the principles guiding them. Liberalism is an ethic of life, and how we relate to others, and how we view ourselves within the society that defines the environment of our lives.

Being an Example of Trumpism’s Antithesis

Trumpism—and all right-wing authoritarianism—is, at its core, a kind of dreary anger. It is the corrupt psychology of people who are, in an ethical sense, failures. They don’t know how to live virtuously or well. They look out at a liberal world and hate it because they lack the inner resources and the social perspective to recognize not just its value, but its joy. Trumpism is what happens when you don’t understand that your suffering is self-inflicted, and so resent those who haven’t inflicted a similar suffering on themselves, and respond to that resentment by seeking to tear the world down.

Illiberalism is close and cramped. Liberalism is open and expansive. The liberal way of life appeals (to most of us) because it lets all of us thrive in ways that contribute to, instead of coming at the expense of, the thriving of others. To be a good person, then, both in the sense of living a good life and in the sense of being morally good, is to be liberal. To reject liberalism is to be, therefore, a bad person.

So what all of us can do, if we’re not situated to concretely fight back, is to be good people—and to show the bad people what that looks like. Even if you can’t do anything right now, right here, to fight back against the authoritarian fascism that has taken the country, you can be an example of what a liberal future looks like. You can live liberalism in a way that embodies how it works and demonstrates why that’s what a reclaimed world must look like.

We are in a fight over law and policy, but we’re also in a fight over narratives. People view the world through stories, and they define themselves through their place in them. Trumpism is a story of decline, and a story of rebirth through the narrowing of identities and the crushing of diversity. Thus Trumpism is the “palingenetic ultranationalism” that is one of the widely accepted definitions of fascism.

Liberalism must be the counter-narrative, the rejection of a story of diversity as decline, and national identity as exclusionary. But to make that narrative appealing again, and to position it as the (still) future story of America, we must make liberal characters sympathetic and admirable ones. After Trumpism falls from power, we need a wide political base committed to reestablishing the liberal narrative. 

And that’s where you come in. That’s where we all come in. The nation’s politics are illiberal—authoritarian, white nationalist, fascist—but within that we can still be liberals. We can lead liberal lives, motivated by liberal values—and relate to each other as liberals.

What to do? Show the way. Reaffirm the story of a better future by being an example, in the small moments throughout our lives these next 46 months, of what a liberal looks like, so that when this ends, and the rebuilding begins, we have a clear picture of what to aspire to.

The sense of dread from some corners of the Trump-supporting world as he carries out what he said he’d carry out—and with predictably dire results—is the sorry consequence of smart people talking themselves into drawing the wrong conclusion from the fact that America mostly survived Trump’s first term.

Most politicians don’t follow through on their campaign promises, but Trump very much is. That’s a problem for America, and for the world, because what he promised during his campaign was to remove constitutional limits, rule as an autocrat, break the economy, and upend the global order.

Now, lots of people who supported him in the election are freaking out. Not everyone, of course. His support is still there. But from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Wall Street Bets Reddit, there’s a growing sense of “Oh, shit.”

The disconnect here, between what Trump said and what many of his supporters thought he’d do, only makes sense if those supporters didn’t believe him. If they thought, Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll impose ruinous tariffs, but he won’t actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll tear America out of its place of global leadership and instead make it a vassal state of his buddy Putin, but he won’t actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll destroy the federal government and the constitutional system with it, without a clear plan to meaningfully replace any of it beyond a massive tool to carry out revenge against those he thinks wronged him, but he won’t actually.

The easy response—“I didn’t believe he’d do it”—is to proclaim the incredulity a sign of stupidity. Of course he’d do it. Every sign pointed to him doing it the moment he was sworn in. Just as the easy response to why working-class Americans, dependent on federal jobs, Social Security, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, would vote for a guy who was promising to take it all away is to say, “Man, those guys just didn’t know anything.” And there’s some truth to the stupidity and the ignorance.

But I think something else was going on for a lot of them. Namely, they misread Trump’s first term in a way that they shouldn’t have, but in a way that isn’t entirely irrational, either.

The fact is, Trump said he’d do a lot of bad things in his first term, and then largely didn’t. Or he started to, or announced he was going to start to, and then backtracked or gave up at the first resistance. Or he implemented some de minimis version of the bad thing that failed to achieve much harm. Or he did some, but definitely not all.

Smart people who wanted to talk themselves into supporting Trump concluded from this that he didn’t mean those stupid things, and so he didn’t mean them this time around, either. He’s just a bullshitter, and the thing about bullshitters is that most of what they say is bullshit. So let it wash over you, while telling yourself that a second Trump term will look much like the first. There’s the informed and engaged voter version of that, which tallies the list of first-time campaign promises and the actual policies his administration carried out and draws the comforting conclusion. Then there’s the uninformed and disengaged version, where low-information voters had a vague sense of “prices were lower in 2019” and so voted for what they imagined, in a haze of ignorance and misunderstanding, would be a return to 2019.

But what the first weeks of the second Trump administration have made clear is that he probably wasn’t bullshitting the first time around, just as he wasn’t last fall, but that structural barriers existed to mitigate the bad stuff in Trump 1.0 that have been circumvented in Trump 2.0.

Namely, Trump 1.0 didn’t expect to win.

The first Trump administration wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been because it had relatively normal people in positions of power, who responded to incentives in a relatively normal way and had moral features within relatively normal parameters. Some were stupid and evil, yes, but plenty weren’t. And that made it harder for Trump to get done all the stupid and evil things that appeal to Trump.

For the second campaign, though, his people put in the work to remove those barriers. They made a plan, much of it set out in Project 2025, to hit the ground running in a way that would overwhelm the system, take advantage of its weak points, and ensure the stupid and evil stuff would be fully inflicted this time.

So the shock from the corners that ought to have known better really is that they thought there’d be adults in the room, because there were adults in the room before. They thought Trump would talk about burning the economy down, but he wouldn’t have the opportunity to light the match. They were, in other words, paying attention to what Trump was saying and assuming it was bullshit instead of paying attention to what the people around him were saying and taking it seriously.

And now it’s too late, and it turns out everyone was telling the truth.

American politics is a disaster and it’s due, in large part, to the fact that the people in charge have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t know anything, have little interest in learning, but are confident in their ability to fix everything. The result looks to be about what you’d expect: instead of fixing, they’re breaking, and instead of acknowledging that they broke it, they’re insisting that’s just what “fixing” looks like.

One way to frame this is that Americans—or enough Americans to win elections—reject expertise. They don’t value knowledge much anymore, and don’t feel they should be led by experts because they’ve looked around, don’t like what they see, and blame it on the experts having led us astray. The solution, at least in their minds, is to replace experts with non-experts, which can’t be any worse, right?

There’s something to that story. Americans have rejected experts. Where the story goes wrong, though, is that they haven’t rejected expertise. Instead, they’ve shifted how they assess expertise and what counts as an expert. They’re getting the assessment very wrong—we are not ruled by experts but instead now by cranks and dullards—but they still care about what they imagine to be competent experts who are instead non-experts wearing the costume and adopting the mannerisms of experts.

And that’s what’s going on with America. The country’s been taken over by competency cosplayers.

How’d we get here? 

If you’re angry and feeling righteous, the last thing you want is for someone to tell you you’re mistaken about whatever’s made you mad. Doubly so if the person telling you is, you’re convinced, the kind of guy who looks down on you, sneers at you, and belongs to a cultural group you believe is to blame for most of what’s wrong around you.

What happens, then, when knowledge and expertise about the topics that have provoked your anger, and that you’re emotionally invested in, is concentrated among those very people you least like? What happens when the expert consensus goes against your deeply held views, and rests primarily among people on the other side of the tribal, cultural, or partisan division?

One option is to accept that you might not agree with those guys on everything, but they do know more than you do, so maybe you should listen to them when they’re speaking from genuine expertise. Another option is to dig into the body of knowledge they possess, learn it thoroughly, and then assess, with your own newfound expertise, whether they’re correct.

But if you’re mad, and if those guys are in the out-group, neither’s terribly appealing. Becoming an expert yourself is a lot of work, and probably requires a great deal of education—and your political tribe doesn’t really value serious book learning, and certainly not the academies where it takes place, anyway. Deferring to their expertise means admitting you are wrong, and admitting they know more than you do, and that means giving them credit, and they’re the out-group.

Still, it’s nice to feel smart and in-the-know, and a good way to feel that is to have experts tell you you’re correct. If intelligent and competent people say, “Yeah, you were right all along, and those so-called experts on the other side are actually stupid, or morally corrupt, or ideologically blinded, or all three. While you are intelligent, morally worthy, and so thoroughly adept in logic and reason that ideology has no obscuring hold on you.”

What you do, then, is find your own experts. People who clearly know what they’re talking about, and are definitely competent in their fields, but who won’t challenge you, and will give you expert-endorsed permission to continue believing what those other guys tell you is inaccurate.

Except there’s a problem. How do you know these guys on your side actually are experts? How do you know they’re not snake oil salesmen taking advantage of your ignorance and motivated reasoning? To identify expertise, we’ve really only got two options. First, we can develop it ourselves, but that’s, like we said above, a lot of work. And even if you can do it in one domain, no one, not since maybe Aristotle, can be an expert in everything. So your second option is to trust the judgement of other experts and to put a thumb on the scale for expert consensus. If everyone who knows a lot about a topic believes one thing about that topic, it’s probably better, lacking expertise yourself, to go with their consensus than to assume the random heterodox thinker has it right. That’s not foolproof, of course. The consensus can be wrong, and heterodox thinkers have been proven right. But it’s a decent heuristic.

That second option is what most of us do most of the time. It’s a good bet. But, if the expert consensus is against you, which it is if you’re the sort of person we’re talking about, it’s not a satisfying bet, because it looks an awful lot like admitting error.

The way out of this trap is to find a critical mass of your own experts, who agree with each other—and agree with you. They don’t need to be actual experts, not in a way other actual experts would recognize. In fact, they can barely know more about the topic than you do. But they need to convincingly perform as experts in an “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” sense. And they need to perform that “expertise” in concert with enough similarly situated performative experts that it can feel like there’s something of a consensus on their, and your, side.

They need the appearance of competence, too: They’ve found success in applying the things you believe to be true, and their success in applying them reflects in a flattering way on you. It’s not just that the guy on TV knows a lot about, say, business, and that what he’s saying about business maps on to what you believe about business yourself. It’s that he’s achieved something in business—he’s demonstrated a degree of competence—and this shows that if you were to enter into business, you’d have similar accomplishments. It’s success by proxy.

But here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter if his success is real. In fact, it’s unlikely to be, because he’s saying the things you believe, and you’re not an expert, and the real experts disagree with you. And, generally speaking, success, while it has a degree of luck, also demands expertise. If he were a real expert, he’d disagree with you, because the consensus among real experts is that you’re wrong.

Thus the “success” in success by proxy can only really be a simulacrum of success, one given form and believability not through real world achievements that would show genuine expertise, but instead through a constructed narrative about that “expert” put together by the lore-builders of your preferred media and information ecosystem. Further, it’s not just that this person seems to “know” things. Book learning’s not that important. What matters is that they appear clever in applying their knowledge, that they do things. That they have accomplishments that are the result of their expertise. They’re rich. They’re famous. It doesn’t matter how they got rich or famous, just that they are. Or that the lore of your media ecosystem tells you they are. They have, in your mind, competence. And you know this because so many people who believe the same things you do keep telling you they have competence. It’s not just that this person isn’t a doctor but plays one on TV, it’s that the TV is telling you the medical drama he appears in is actually a documentary.

I call these people competency cosplayers. They’ve taken over the commanding heights of politics. They’ll keep breaking things, because their competency is pretend. They’re performing a role for people who want to see people like themselves in those roles. Or, if not like themselves, because they know they’re not rich and they know they’re not experts in this stuff, people who like them. People on their team, in their tribe, and opposed by the guys on the other side in that consensus that is so unbearable, or stuffy, or snooty, and keeps saying you don’t know anything and should listen to those who do.

They want to play a character, and you want to believe they are that character, and everyone playing or wanting to believe is in a media bubble telling them all these guys are legit, and everyone who’s not these guys is a fraud or corrupt. All this is understandable, because if the people you don’t like are telling you you’re wrong, you don’t want to believe them, because that means the people you don’t like are right. But when the people you do believe take the reins of power, all the imagination and fancy costumes your tribe can bring to bear won’t paper over the fact that these guys aren’t competent, and they aren’t experts. They’re just cosplaying.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson doesn’t know much about technology. To be fair, very few of his colleagues in Congress do either. Which is why Congress routinely misunderstands laws governing technology, or gets caught up in tech-focused moral panics.

But Mike Johnson is also the House of Representatives leader of a political party whose leader is Donald Trump, a man of no actual skill, and even less knowledge, except for an instinct for branding, and for triggering grievances in a way he can take advantage of for personal gain.

And Trump’s set the tone, from the top down. The GOP isn’t so much a political party anymore, not in the sense of having a unified ideology or policy agenda. Instead, it’s the political home for the kinds of people who have right-wing cultural preferences, yes, but also for people who fall for scams.

Back to Mike Johnson. Here is is talking credulously about his party’s current leader, Elon Musk.

Johnson: "Elon's cracked the code. He's now inside these agencies. He's created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data & as he told me in his office, data doesn't lie. We're gonna be able to get the information. We're gonna be able to transform the way federal govt works."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)
5:35 PM • Feb 24, 2025

What stands out about this is how Mike Johnson, who at one time managed to secure a law degree from LSU, is all-in on buying his town a monorail.

Elon Musk has very clearly not cracked any code. He’s not a computer science guy, he’s not a data scientist. He’s a salesman. But Mike Johnson doesn’t know enough about computer science or data science to know that. What he does know—and this gets to the heart of the contemporary GOP—is that Elon Musk is telling him what he wants to hear: The federal bureaucracy is bad, needs to be destroyed, and there’s suppressed knowledge that only he has, but which aligns with Johnson’s far right prejudices, that will enable him to save the country from the forces of the woke left.

Of course, the federal government in fact is too big. It tries to do too much. And much of what it does, even those tasks appropriate for it, it could do more efficiently. But that’s not what DOGE is about. Instead, it’s about selling a narrative of an evil swamp out to wreck America, and its chaotic, unfocused, and unproductive destruction is actually a sophisticated plan to achieve better government.

It’s a story of right wing heterodox “knowledge they don’t want you to know” against corrupt conventional wisdom. But it’s a story told by people lacking any genuine expertise in the system they want to reform (or destroy), being told for and to people without any genuine expertise, and no desire to acquire any. And it’s a narrative that exists not to make America better, let alone great, but instead to serve the personal interests of Elon Musk.

It’s also the story of the GOP itself. There’s a reason crank wellness influencers migrated right. Or why COVID conspiracists, even those whose politics used to be liberal, turned reactionary. Or why Trump is able to pump-and-dump meme coins to fleece his supporters. The GOP has become the home for people who felt out of step with the mainstream consensus, which meant the expert consensus, and their response wasn’t to acquire expertise to find faults in that consensus (which there are plenty to find), but instead to simultaneously reject the value of expertise while also elevating to the role of infallible expert anyone who could, in their ignorant assessment, convincingly talk the talk of an expert while not challenging their preexisting beliefs and prejudices.

As I wrote on Bluesky:

Zero interest rates let some people in Silicon Valley luck into riches without much breadth or depth of knowledge, but because they became rich, they convinced themselves they are geniuses, and that their genius extends to everything, and thus their opinions about everything are informed by genius.

— Aaron Ross Powell ☸️ (@aaronrosspowell.com)
2:34 AM • Feb 24, 2025

This synced with the political culture Fox News led, which was realizing that a lot of people don't know much and lack a curious nature, still want to feel informed, but are hostile to being told they're wrong. So you get pundits to pretend expertise while not challenging the audiences wrong ideas.

— Aaron Ross Powell ☸️ (@aaronrosspowell.com)
2:37 AM • Feb 24, 2025

The result is the current Trump administration: Rich guys who aren't geniuses but think they know everything about everything, and TV cranks whose only skill is telling uninformed Americans on the right that they're in fact the most informed Americans. It's not a recipe for good government.

— Aaron Ross Powell ☸️ (@aaronrosspowell.com)
2:39 AM • Feb 24, 2025

What makes the GOP’s circular con game circular is that everyone is simultaneously conning each other while being conned. Every new conspiracy theory or grift becomes part of the right-wing media ecosystem’s lore, and to signal membership in that lore to your audience (and the targets for your grifts), you need to believe all of it. Which means believing other people’s grifts, too.

This leads to an increasingly unhinged epistemic spiral. And it’s made worse by the fact that much of it is happening on social media, which has strange structural features that cut against correcting for bad information.

How Social Media Tricks our Brains — and Destroys our Politics

Social media convinces us our small communities are representative of the whole and tells us we’re more right than we really are.

www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/how-social-media-tricks-our-brains-and-destroys-our-politics

It’s not clear how people lost in this environment get out. A basic feature is that anyone who tells them they’re wrong, that they’ve got something incorrect, that they don’t know as much as they think they know, is speaking not from superior knowledge, but from ideological motivation. This short circuits the primary way most of us have for giving up mistaken beliefs: learning from people who are not themselves mistaken.

And because, right now, the system looks to be working—the grifters are still successfully grifting, and the party controls the White House and Congress and is able to put its favored grifters in positions of power—no single person caught up in it has much incentive to fix it. Rather, success comes from doubling down.

Even if Mike Johnson was to learn enough about data science to know that Elon Musk is full of it, what would he do with that information? Stand up to Musk? Risk looking like a fool who got conned? Tell his constituents they don’t know anything about this stuff, either?

No, Mike Johnson, and the rest of his party, are in this for the ride. Where that ride ends up is an open question, and maybe it ends up somewhere that keeps them ahead. But it seems inevitable the circular con has to collapse at some point.

Listen At: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

Or scroll down to read a full transcript.

The information environment in which Americans form and discuss their political views has gotten weird. Walter Cronkite is gone. The editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have lost influence to podcasters, social media influencers, and internet conspiracy theorists. Trump's rise, and return to power, was in large part fueled by figures on the far-right who knew how to take advantage of this changed environment in a way liberals haven't yet figured out.

This means that, if liberalism is to have a political future, liberals need to understand how media today looks nothing like media twenty years ago. And there's no one better at explaining how weird things have become, how they got that way, and how we can navigate through it than Renée DiResta. She's an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. Prior to that, she was the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. And she's the author of the indispensable book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

Produced by Landry Ayres. Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Transcript

Aaron Ross Powell: I remember having a conversation about a decade ago with David Boaz, who was then the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, about messaging. He argued that the best way for Cato to get its message out and persuade people was through an op-ed in The Washington Post—or perhaps in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal—but he was a The Washington Post partisan. Meanwhile, I was talking about YouTube and the then-relatively-new podcasting trend, emphasizing that many people were forming their political views outside of cable news, nightly news, or major newspapers. There was skepticism about that idea—people dismissed it as fringe, insisting that while there had always been weird corners of the conversation, the real action was still in traditional media. I told David he was wrong back then, and he’s even more wrong now. Yet, I still get the sense that many people believe we’re operating within that outdated paradigm. This leads to questions like: Where did the far right come from? Where did Trumpism come from? We didn’t see it in traditional media. So, I wanted to bring you on to help explain just how weird things have gotten. Maybe we could start with—what’s wrong with that story now?

Renée DiResta: Can I ask what year that was?

Powell: I would say that’s probably 2012 or 2013. I’m not quite sure, but a while back, a decade or so ago.

DiResta: Yeah, well, that was actually presciently early of you to say, because there was this question about what matters more—[traditional] media or social media. These two were being presented as different, non-interlocking spheres for a long time. I remember being in Clubhouse rooms during the pandemic, in 2020, where that fight would go on.

I moved to Silicon Valley in 2011—I was in tech, in startup land. I had a couple of companies; I was in venture capital for a while. But it wasn’t until I wanted to help pass a pro-vaccine law where I responsible for getting my message out that I felt like the world had completely changed. Per your point, the pinnacle of influence was getting an op-ed in The New York Times—that was how you reached people.

We were a group of pro-vaccine moms trying to pass a California law to eliminate the personal belief exemption, right after the Disneyland measles outbreak. We wanted to make public school kindergarten vaccine requirements a little stronger after that—just making it so that exemptions had to be medical. We thought, let’s write op-eds in the Sacramento Bee and other outlets that legislators read. But then I started essentially doing opposition research, looking at how the anti-vaccine movement was handling its messaging, and I realized that their communications were 100% online. Their audience was massive, and they had been investing in digital infrastructure for years. This was around 2015, but their first Facebook pages had been built as early as 2009.

More importantly, because of the miracles of algorithmic curation at the time, even when I tried running paid Facebook ads, the platform would suggest anti-vaccine keywords but no pro-vaccine ones. That was when it became clear just how much investment in infrastructure had happened there.

These two [communication] spheres were still being treated as separate. One group followed online influencers, followed online media, and believed in the power of memes in shaping public opinion. The other still believed that mass broadcast media still had the much larger reach. You didn’t have the mass podcasters to quite the same extent at that point, but the trend was clear.

One of my biggest frustrations with institutions … periodically talk to the CDC and ask, Why aren’t you part of this conversation? Why aren’t you in the general pro-vaccine conversation? They would say: That’s just some people online. In the end, people still trust their doctors and public health authorities. But it was clear that the trend was going in the other direction.

You’re going up against institutional communications cultural is so entrenched and had always done it a certain way. I was reading articles that were still dismissive of online media. I don’t know if you remember the articles that came out after Trump won saying, everyone’s blaming social media, but it was really Fox News. It was this weird idea that these spheres were separate—there was a Fox News sphere and social media sphere—as opposed to things that were increasingly integrated. And I think that failure to recognize that integration (particularly on the left) that has continued to be one of the reasons why [the left] has continued to remain so inefficient today.

Powell: A couple of questions about that. Let’s start with this: Is the story of this shift simply one of mediums? There was a culture built up around particular newspapers, television, and maybe radio—though talk radio’s rise in the ‘80s and ‘90s seems to where it starts to fracture even before the internet. People were deeply invested in those traditional mediums, and then new mediums popped up that were easier to access, with lower barriers to entry. But was it people doing the same thing just in a new medium that the old medium folks weren’t paying attention to, or is this something fundamentally different? Were the people using these new mediums simply doing what broadcasters and op-ed writers had always done, just on a digital format? Or did the rise of these platforms create an entirely different kind of media and information environment—one that functioned in a fundamentally new way?

DiResta: I think it’s one key thing is how you think about your audience, right? So, do you think about your audience as an active participant, or do you think about your audience as being receptive or like a receiver of your message? So mass media, you’re communicating to an audience. You’re telling the people a story. You’re reporting out the news. But what’s happening in influencer culture or in content-creator culture is much more of a back and forth. It’s much more of a hey guys, here I am talking to you informally today. This is what’s going on in my life. Hey, I see in the chat that somebody’s saying this. Let’s talk about that, right? It’s a much more integrated, much more participatory culture. And that participation really builds the relationship between the influencer and the crowd, if you will. And the crowd becomes an amplifier. The crowd moves content, the audience, the followers move content that the influencer or content creator is making across all of the other platforms. So maybe they’re making content on YouTube, but people who really love that content on YouTube are sharing it out everywhere else on the internet. Each different app has a different feature set perhaps, and different people who spend most of their time on it. But the connectors in that social ecosystem are people, and content creators are thinking about their audience at all times as people who are going to share their message and people who are going to participate in the creation of the message.

There’s another thing that’s interesting, which is that in order to be a content creator, you really start by appealing to a particular niche. Mass media was attempting to appeal to a very, very broad audience. It’s speaking to the entirety of America. The nightly news is broadcasting to all of the homes. Whereas the person who is making a Substack or making an Instagram knows that they’re not going to be able to reach all of the people all of the time. And in order to grow their audience effectively, in order to appeal to the algorithm that’s going to push their content out, they have to be making content for a particular community of people who then are going to want to engage and share and participate. And so it’s just a very different relationship development process and a very different process of relating to the audience and thinking about how the message moves. It’s not top down, it’s bottom up and participatory. And I think there’s room for both. Sometimes I don’t want to hear news that is catering to a particular niche. I want to hear as neutral and broad a take as possible. I like listening to the AP, I like listening to Reuters. But people really do like sharing and engaging with media that they feel is created for them, that they feel represents them and is speaking in the kind of voice that they themselves would be speaking in.

Powell: Is this where we get the audience capture that you talk about in your book?

DiResta: In the worst cases, yes. You know, I study adversarial abuse—I focus on the worst things. The bad stuff. But plenty of influencers are making good content, staying true to their values, and resisting the pull into weird or conspiratorial rabbit holes. Still, there’s real pressure.

I don’t know if you remember, but after October 7th, you’d see comments on creators’ posts saying, Why aren’t you talking about … ?—followed by either Palestine or Israel, depending on what the commenter wanted them to weigh in on. This was a really big deal. And we saw it during various instances of officer involved shootings and violence against Black people. You would see, Why aren’t you using your platform to talk about this?

Influencers often feel these demands from their audience—to speak in a certain way, to say a certain thing, to disavow someone or something or to avow. And because monetization is often strongest when appealing to a niche, creators who are willing to say things competing for that same niche. Some will go as far as meeting their audience’s worst impulses.

That’s how you end up asking, How did this person get here? You remember when someone, person who shall not be named, was a reputable reporter, and now they’re a full-blown UFO crank. We’ve all seen these trajectories. And often, it’s driven by a fear of losing their audience if they don’t deliver what their audience wants.

Powell: When you said that, it made me wonder about an ongoing question—one that goes back to Trump’s first victory, or even his rise before that. Did Trump discover his audience, or did he create it? Was that group of people always there, or not?

I think about that in the context of what you just said, particularly in light of one of the big stories from the last election—the shift of young men to the right and the growing divergence between young men and young women in their political views. We often point to figures like Joe Rogan and video game streamers as key influences, since young men spend so much time in these online spaces that are a soup of right-wing content.

So, is this just audience capture? Have young men always felt this way, and now there happen to be niche creators are simply providing them with video game content that reinforces those views—telling them, for example, that it’s bad when girls play video games? Or is there a real influence effect happening here?

DiResta: I think it’s both. The idea that persuasion happens because you hear something once and magically change your mind has been disproven by social science and communication research since the 1940s. What was interesting about the study of the hypodermic needle theory of communication by Katz and Lazarsfeld, which argued that media directly and your mind would be changed, was that they found that political opinions weren’t shaped directly by media but rather through a process they called two-step flow.

This was, I believe, in 1947. In their research, they observed a group of women who closely followed the media and then discussed what they learned with their friends and communities. These women—whom the researchers referred to as opinion leaders—played a crucial role in shaping public opinion. Their friends, in turn, reported that their political views were influenced not by direct media exposure, but by how these women mediated it. There was a process of we all discuss the news and the things we hear.

This same dynamic is what’s happening on social media with sustained interaction. I think influencers sit in this weird place where they are both media [figures] and also opinion leader because they play that friend role, you see them as just like you.

One particularly interesting aspect of the podcasts and communities you’re talking about is how these influencers normalize certain types of language and behaviors. It’s not necessarily about direct persuasion—I haven’t studied how many people actually change their core beliefs after following a particular podcast. But the language that comes out and gets worked into conversation becomes normal and shifts the Overton window around what you can say. It’s incredibly shameless now.

It reminds me of the shock jock phenomenon, but even then, there were still lines that couldn’t be crossed. Now, I can’t think of any lines that can’t be crossed. A remarkable situation is playing out right now: a young man with an anonymous Twitter account who was part of the DOGE team was revealed to have been posting openly racist content by a Wall Street Journal reporter—things like normalize hating Indians, I could never marry outside my race, and proud to be a racist. After the revelation, he either resigned or was fired. Yet, the Vice President of the United States made a post saying that young people shouldn’t be penalized for silly opinions and that it’s perfectly reasonable to rehire.

That raises serious questions about what is now considered beyond the pale. This kind of speech is common in many online environment, and clearly, he felt comfortable expressing these views anonymously because that’s just how certain groups of young men communicate today.

Powell: One of his deleted tweets read, I was racist before it was cool, which is a form of signaling. It’s not just that he felt comfortable expressing those views—he was positioning himself as a trailblazer. Whether or not that’s true, the message he was sending was clear: The rest of you are just posers when it comes to racism, but I’m the real deal. It adds another layer to the dynamic—not only does he feel at ease saying these things now, but he’s also claiming that he was unafraid to do so even when others weren’t.

DiResta: Or this is the brand I’m building for my anonymous online persona.

Powell: Yes.

Why is the right better at this? We don’t tell the story of the last 10, 12, or 15 years where old media never really caught up to these changes, influencers popped up, and suddenly, all these young men are turning Maoist (except they’re going to the right, not the left), right? But it doesn’t seem like there’s anything inherent about the nature of right-wing ideologies that would make them work better in these mediums or with this kind of influence than left-wing ideas.

DiResta: I don’t know, but I have some theories. One of them is that the right makes it feel more fun. I don’t study the right professionally—that’s not something I’ve ever done. I’m not a scholar of right-wing influencers, but where it intersects with what I do focus on, like how political narratives and particularly political rumors spread.

One reason the right is more effective at spreading political rumors than the left is that the right is absolutely willing to just say the thing. There’s no social ostracization or loss of reputation if they do. There’s a phenomenon I think about a lot, introduced by Professor Damon Centola, called complex contagion. It’s similar in some ways to the two-step flow theory. In a simple contagion model, information spreads from person to person. If an idea is already normalized within a group, there’s no cost for an influencer to repeat it because everyone already believes it. But in a complex contagion, someone has to take the reputational risk of promoting the idea. The influencer, in this case, becomes a gatekeeper. They see this in the ether around them and can choose whether to amplify or not.

One thing we saw on the right in 2020 with election rumors was an absolute willingness to amplify. Crazy outlandish rumors. They’d say things like, big if true, someone should look into this, as a verbal hedge. By 2022, though, the hedges started to disappear. It became more like, They’re doing it again. They’re stealing the election. Look at them. It was so normalized by then that there was no longer any social cost to boosting those claims. No ostracization. No penalty at all. The entire base already believed them, so amplifying them didn’t carry any penalty.

This combination to seem edgy, take risks, and share funnier memes . You’re not worried about offending someone or your language is going to piss off someone within your small niche. It’s much more freewheeling. What that leads to is a constant flow of ideas being tested in the public sphere. You throw something out there and see what sticks. It’s not message testing from the top-down,. It’s much more freewheeling—pulling up ideas from the bottom, saying them out loud, and seeing if they fly.

This is a completely different way of engaging compared to the careful, message-tested,approach where you constantly worry about whether your language is going to piss off some constituency or another.

Powell: It seems there’s a tension between the mechanisms the right has successfully used and the way they talk about the platforms on which they’re achieving that success. What you’re describing wouldn’t have worked in the old media paradigm because testing an idea on cable news or in a major newspaper is costly. In contrast, retweeting something on social media is zero cost and the mechanisms of spread are almost zero cost. So, an idea can go viral without any cost, allowing you to test out everything, as you’ve described. This success is dependent on social media platforms. The right has essentially used social media and memes to get into the White House twice. They’ve had tremendous success with right-wing podcasters, the online manosphere, and other digital spaces.

And yet, the other thing happening in 2020 and 2022, while describing this success and shift, was that we were being told the very technology they were using to achieve this success was hostile to them. They were claiming their views were being suppressed, that they were being censored, and that the whole tech world was out to get them. But that narrative seems contradicted by the fact that they were all over the place. Every month, Facebook would publish a list of the top posts, and they were almost always from right-wing podcasters, cable news hosts, and influencers.

DiResta: That was a propaganda campaign. You pick a message and see what works. In 2017, when Trump was in the White House, you began to hear arguments that they were being censored, that the platforms were biased against them, and so on. This became very effective because, again, almost everyone has had a bad experience with social media moderation. I’m sure you’ve received some bullshit automated moderation response that was wrong or had a post flagged for a word you used. We’ve all had those experiences.

I used to ask people about this because I was curious about their perceptions on Twitter. You’d see people claim they had been shadow banned, and it was often from completely normal users with maybe a hundred followers, not prominent at all. I would ask them why they thought that, and their response, “My friends don’t see all my posts.” Some of this came from a lack of understanding of how curation worked. The algorithm simply didn’t surface their posts because it didn’t think they were good enough. We’ve all been there.

But the ability to create aggrievement is incredibly effective at making people feel called to participate in a messaging movement or activism. By claiming, “We are being censored,” and citing examples… Then some of Trump’s posts were even labeled, which then got reframed as censorship. Eventually, everything became labeled as censorship. They took the term “free speech,” and turned it into a meme. Instead of it being a thing that represented a set of laws or values, we just have free speech the meme. Just saying “free speech” invoked a shared sense of grievance and identity, and people knew exactly how to respond. The same went for “censorship”—whenever you heard it, the person allegedly doing the censoring was seen as bad, and the grievance machine would kick into action. That’s how the narrative begins, creating viral moments.

It’s a frame that’s useful and can be continually referenced, which is one of the reasons the message setting has been so effective. It’s not borne out by any evidence, but it has been a very term and an effective campaign, and they continue to push it.

Powell: But we’ve heard stories about administration jawboning. Then, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he released a series of internal documents—the “Twitter Files”—which many people believe show that there is, in fact, a... what’s the phrase? A censorship-industrial complex at work. Is that all just wrong?

DiResta: Well, I’m told I run it, but I don’t know what it is. Or I “ran” it two years ago, and it’s unclear to me—maybe I got fired. They talk about other people now.

Look, the Twitter Files could have been really interesting because platform moderation is completely opaque. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve all had weird experiences with auto mods where you wonder, “Why did I get tagged for that? I don’t really understand.” There are clearly people who do get shadow-banned or throttled for whatever reasons, though it’s not always clear why, and it’s incredibly hard to appeal. Furthermore, the entire process of curation is entirely opaque—you have absolutely no idea why a post gets curated or not. So, you’re left with this very opaque system and completely unaccountable private power. You have no control over it, which creates suspicion and resentment.

This idea that the government was colluding with the platforms to steal the election from Donald Trump—that’s what I was accused of doing. That’s the part of the so-called censorship complex I ran (allegedly). But it was just a meme. It’s something they created that doesn’t actually exist, but they gave it a catchy name. By doing so, they managed to allege that, in my case, a private entity doing research and occasionally communicating with another private entity was a secret cabal. Even when we released information about what we were doing or had done, it didn’t magically make the meme go away. It continued to stick.

Regarding government jawboning, this is a really interesting issue. We should want transparency around government communication with platforms. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to lobby for. Platforms and governments have their own First Amendment rights. They should, at times, communicate with each other. One thing we saw from the so-called Facebook Files that Reason published was Meta repeatedly reaching out to the government for guidance on what to curate and surface during COVID. The platform recognized that, given the pandemic, it should surface the best possible information, and who better to know what that is than the CDC?

The idea that the government and platforms shouldn’t communicate at all seems crazy to me. But I do think it’s also reasonable to have a transparency component. One thing we’ve consistently seen over and over is Congress’s complete reluctance to pass any legislation for platform accountability or transparency. My “conspiracy theory” is that this is because the allegation of censorship and the continued ability to beat up platforms for not doing anything is an effective way for Congress members to raise money. They’re not actually incentivized to do much about it.

Powell: We’re recording this less than a month into the second Trump administration, and it’s been a whirlwind of awful things that have unfolded even faster than many of us, including the pessimists, expected. This is all happening in a world where Twitter is now owned by Elon Musk and is increasingly being bent to his will. It’s no longer the free speech platform it is billed as. We’re witnessing the fragmentation of the social media landscape, we see an attempt to force the sale of TikTok. Depending on whether that happens—and who ends up buying it—TikTok could end up looking like Twitter does now.

If you were upset about communications between the government and platform leadership, you ought to be rather mad about Musk right now, who seems to be running both the federal government and Twitter. For people who are concerned about the direction of the country and want us to survive the next four years and right the ship, what should we know about this environment? How do we get our message out, persuade people, and have an impact? It feels like the traditional approach—publishing in the Washington Post or New York Times, which seem less adversarial than they used to be—has become less and less valuable. So, what should we do in this new environment?

DiResta: Well, first of all, Jim Jordan should obviously hold hearings to investigate communications between the government and Twitter. In all seriousness though, if anything exposes the extent to which that was just a propaganda campaign by a machine, this should dispel any notion that there was any serious legislative concern in the hearings Congress held.

As for what to do, this is a really interesting question. I’ve seen a whole lot of congressmen and senators recently showing up on Threads, they are showing up quite a bit on my feed. Threads of course is Meta’s competitor to Twitter. You’re also seeing a lot of the more left-leaning activist class and media take off on BlueSky. The problem is that people aren’t talking to each other—they’re not fighting the narrative battle on the same battleground. If you’re in both spaces, it’s jarring to go from one to the other.

You can also see that on Twitter, the platform’s curation clearly rewards certain people, especially those who pay for blue checks. No social media platform is truly neutral, but there’s a very clear political alignment [on Twitter] now and it is a tool for that political alignment. For people who don’t align with that, it’s crucial to build counter infrastructure elsewhere—Substack or other news-lettering.

In terms of engaging in this space, the institutional speakers and leadership—you’re seeing judiciary Democrats and others—who have on their on Twitter have to use the language that resonates in that space just so that the content can go viral. It’s not the same as the content and narratives that work in established media.

I think of it like fighting a propaganda war but you’re responding with explainers rather than counterpropaganda. If you’re choosing to participate in this battle for public opinion in the partisan battleground that’s happening right now, it’s not clear that mainstream media is the tool for that. It hasn’t built the infrastructure to do the alternative equivalent of social media’s alternative narratives. That’s why things feel so unbalanced.

I was surprised by how the social media narratives around the USAID fight over the last few days were almost entirely unchallenged on Twitter. There were small pockets of people beating the drum, fact-checking, saying this story is not true or that story isn’t true, but there were so many of them and by responding to the individual points it felt diluted and fragmented. One clear message emerged: “USAID is terrible, it’s woke totalitarian spending,” and there was no strong counter-message to challenge it. Meanwhile, on Blue Sky, Threads, and in mainstream media, more fact-checking content came out. It feels like we’re dealing with almost entirely different types of media at this point. I don’t have an answer for how we come back from that.

Powell: Is this an argument for a generational shift? The Democratic leadership is quite old, and they keep putting older people back into power. I know I’m active on Blue Sky and have this podcast, but I don’t talk in the language that sells on social media. If I tried, it would sound inauthentic because I wasn’t raised in this culture. So, is the answer is something like the old TV show 21 Jump Street, where young officers go undercover to catch criminals? Is that what we need, a liberal version of 21 Jump Street—where the next generation is the one that has to talk the talk ?

DiResta: It’s happening, it’s already there. I watch a lot of streamers, and they make it really funny and fun. That irreverence, the sense of participating and joking around without worrying about using the wrong thing—that streamer culture is definitely there. I like watching it. It’s entertainment that pulls people in, and you can have a political conversation while feeling like you’re hanging out with friends. It’s a different vibe.

Then there’s TikTok. I’m not a big fan personally, I don’t love it, but people do. The content is right there, and the question becomes: where are these networks and how do they spread? Who are the people acting as the glue between platforms, getting transmission from one place to another? I don’t see it as much. And it’s getting harder to track these things now, academically. A handful universities are still studying Twitter data in the way we used to in 2022 (before everyone lost their API access) and can give you quantitative answers as opposed to vibes. Kate Starbird’s team at is doing some of this, but the bigger question is: where are these narrative hops happening and who’s the glue in the systems and who are the influencers? There are two different phases: There are creators who come up with the memes and messages that work, engaging with their audiences very organically are others who spread it and share it and making sure that people see it. These roles aren’t the same and it’s not the same people, and understanding that ecosystem is something the left hasn’t really focused on.

Powell: Is there a tension between being irreverent and fun and jokiness while also impressing upon people the seriousness? One interpretation of the Democrats’ initial quietness after Trump’s initial blitzkrieg once he came into office is that they were trying to portray him as a serious threat to the country in the last election, but they lost. It seems many interpreted that as people not take us seriously, so they tuned out. They didn’t want to hear it. And now if we get serious again, people wouldn’t believe us. So, they tried to position themselves as calling out bad things but also moderating. But it seems like we’re facing a legitimate constitutional crisis. That’s much harder to do jokey, video-game-style commentary about compared to those who are perpetuating the constitutional crisis.

DiResta: It’s an interesting question. I’m also realizing I keep saying “left” and I don’t necessarily mean left, right? Because there are also center-right people in the coalition of people who are troubled by what is happening. I don’t even know what to call that. “Left” has become shorthand, but it’s not even really correct, right? Because there are many, many different micro-communities within that. Getting across the severity of it in ways that sound like internet speak. You can do it. There was a story that came out this morning about the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children being told that their funding was at risk of being cut if they didn’t take down certain LGBTQ content. Keep in mind, the work that NCMEC does includes helping runaway children, some of whom may be LGBTQ and their families are not supportive. It also involves kidnapped children, trafficked children, and child exploitation content. These are people who do some of the hardest work that there is. There are opportunities for all different voices to speak about this in whatever way is most appropriate. Politicians, particularly those on the center-right, should absolutely be speaking out, saying this is egregious. We shouldn’t be threatening the funding of such a critical agency over this. You can also see ways that people who speak more in the language of the internet can talk about it more irreverently. There are different ways to approach it, and not everyone has to do the same thing.It’s about understanding what role you play in messaging and speaking to your particular audience. If you’re in academia, it might be different than if you’re a streamer speaking to young guys . It’s about finding the right messenger, right message, and right place. It’s comms 101. But then there is the question of just doing it. The issue is that people feel paralyzed. There’s so much going on that rather than jumping in, everyone is waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what feels like a generational divide regarding how creators of works relate to their creations. It’s not uniform, of course, but there seems to have been a shift in how we talk about, and so contextualize and approach, the act of “being a creator.” It’s a story of technological change, too. Medium influences message obviously, but that’s not all of it. And it’s all centered on the evolving ontological characteristics of “content.”

I mean “content” here in a genericized sense, because its genericization is critical to understanding this odd world in which we find ourselves. Roughly put, “content” is a placeholder for “the things artists, writers, influencers, thought leaders, and so on create.” But it’s a placeholder that has come to usurp that which it holds the place of. The signifier has taken over the sign. We can think of it as if, over time, we stopped viewing pronouns as ways to conveniently point to each of the diverse and more significant proper nouns they might point to, and instead thought in terms of a generic and general “him” or “her” or “them.”

Content isn’t everything, though, and everything isn’t content. Creators might make sculptures, or bespoke shoes, or carved cabinets. But sculptures, bespoke shoes, and carved cabinets aren’t “content.” The term of art among the trendsetters for the creators of these artifacts is more likely to be “builder” than “creator.” 

Two Kinds of Creations

There’s a distinction in philosophy of art that clarifies here. Among artworks, there are those that are “allographic” and those that are “autographic.” The latter are the sculptures and bespoke shoes: The work of art is what the artist held in her hand and shaped or stitched. It is art about which we can coherently speak of forgeries. A perfect copy of a bespoke shoe isn’t the same as the original. It’s just a copy, even if “perfect.” Allographic art, on the other hand, is art where every copy really is the original. If I publish a novel, we don’t talk about there being an “original” and each paperback copy as a mere copy. Rather, each paperback you buy of my novel is the novel. The same holds for recorded music, movies on film or digital, and so on. There might be one-off variants we attach particular weight to (signed first editions, first pressings, and so on), but we don’t attach weight to them because they are somehow more authentically the novel or the song than the third printing or the high def MP3 download. Rather, they are a particularly valued variant of that basic artwork.

With that distinction in mind, we can perhaps talk about “content” of the sort at issue here as “the stuff you might make that’s allographic.” It’s YouTube or TikTok videos. It’s blog posts. It’s newsletter posts. It’s podcast episodes. In common usage today, a “content creator” is a person who makes those sorts of things. This doesn’t mean content creators aren’t or can’t be artists, because, as noted, allographic art is still art. But it also doesn’t mean that all content creators are artists, because plenty of creations we’d categorize as allographic (such as blog posts, explainer videos, and podcast interviews) aren’t really “art” as most of us understand it. (Of course, the definition of “art” is much more thorny and complex than most of us think. Fortunately, we don’t need to even think about its complexities for our purposes here.)

There’s more going on, though, because for as long as we’ve had technologies of reproduction, there have been content creators creating and selling allographic content. That’s not new, and so not representative of a cultural shift. Instead, this shift is about how content creators think both about their content—or at least how they publicly talk about their content—and the relationship between it and the act of selling. And that shift resulted from the interaction of two roughly simultaneous trends, the first towards becoming a solo entrepreneur salesman as the culturally privileged aspiration among young people, and the second towards everyone wanting—and wanting to sell—a personal brand.

On Being a Salesman

If there’s a cultural inflection point in the rise of this new relationship between content creators and their content, it’s the publication, and runaway success, of Timothy Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek. This was the book that convinced a lot of white collar and knowledge workers—and aspiring white collar and knowledge workers—that the path to easy riches was via the one-man sales operation. He taught the gospel of drop-shipping, where you’d set up a website that was little more than a thin front for someone else’s shipping business, get people to visit the website and buy, and then skim a cut of the resulting sales. You didn’t need to actually handle any product yourself, because your business was taking orders and then passing them along, with payment, to someone else who would box them up and put them in the mail to your (and their) customer.

Of course, drop-shipping wasn’t new. And, of course, being a salesman wasn’t new. Amway and Tupperware parties were precursors to the drop-shipping grind bro. In fact, the main innovation Feriss brought was to pitch as masculine an age-old get rich quick scheme that had historically been viewed as feminine, which he accomplished by replacing collectivist sales parties and friend-pestering as the primary marketing mechanism with the rugged individualism of solo building a website or mailing list.

But what was new, or at least the cutting edge representation of emerging trends, was telling college educated people that their old plan of “rise to the top of a large organization” to get wealthy wasn’t as sure-fire or undemanding of their time as “get people to buy stuff from your independent sales operation.” Suddenly everyone wanted to be a solo entrepreneur.

Becoming a “content creator” today is just a new form of this. If you get very big, you might have some helpers, like a producer for your show, but the core idea is that it’s you doing the selling as an independent, not you being part of a larger organization that sells stuff. The other half of the “content creator” model, though, is all about what you sell.

The Rise of the Personal Brand

The intersecting trend is the rise of the “personal brand.” Whereas with old-school drop shipping, the answer to the question “What am I going to sell?” was “This other company’s generic supplements,” the personal brand shifted the answer to “Me.” It’s no longer enough to be a solo entrepreneur. The aim now is to be famous while doing it. Your company doesn’t have customers, but now you have an audience. And this has shifted the emphasis in the operation from having a product, and then getting people to find it, to being the product, such that people want to buy whatever is associated with it.

Again, in broad strokes this isn’t new. We’ve had famous people selling their brand for, well, ever. The oldest form might be the spiritual guru, the guy who claims to have unique metaphysical insights or a spiritual connection with what matters, and then talks followers into following and supporting him on the promise that proximity to him (to his personal brand) will lead to their own spiritual awakening and success. And the old guru model actually speaks, better than more contemporary parallels, to this contemporary “salesman of personal brand” because the indicator of being on the path to success is the same: counting your followers.

Everyone who sells anything can measure success by counting how many things he’s sold. And if the number sold each week or month is going up, that’s a sign things are working. But if what you’re selling is a brand, the only way to sell anything in the first place is to achieve some success in establishing that brand. The trouble is, “brand awareness” is a lot harder to measure or watch incrementally grow than counting units sold.

The guru could do it, because he could see that yesterday he had three followers and today he has four and so, even if none of them are contributing anything to his financial wellbeing, the number’s going up. If it keeps going up, he’ll get enough who do support him to be a success. Likewise social media. To make a living as a “personal brand,” you need thousands or hundreds of thousands or probably millions of followers. If today you have only ten, you’re earning nothing, and won’t be for a while. But what you can see is that yesterday you had eight. And you can see that a week later you have a hundred, and so not only are you gaining followers, but the rate of gain is accelerating.

In a world before such easy quantification of growing brand awareness, lots of people would give up pretty early on. They’re not now a success, and the signs that success might come are opaque. In the world of social media, though, there’s a number that, even if it’s not going up quickly, is going up. So you stay on the treadmill.

Especially because it’s so cheap to do so. Becoming an “influencer” doesn’t demand much in the way of upfront costs. You already have a phone, which already has a decent enough camera. Platforms make distribution costless, and tools exist so anyone can cut a short form video. This isn’t feature filmmaking, and it isn’t years spent writing a novel and then trying to find a publisher to sink a bunch of resources into manufacturing and distributing it. This is dancing into your phone to a song you got, along with every song in existence, for a few bucks a month on Spotify—if you didn’t just grab it for free on YouTube.

AI tools drive the costs even lower, both in dollars spent and in time needed. Want to start a newsletter about how emerging technologies will impact project management, but lack expertise in either topic? Get a robot to draft something for you. 

The Backwards Funnel

Thus the current spot we’re in: People want to be solo entrepreneurs, and what they want to solo sell is their personal brand, and the way they sell their personal brand is by monetizing “content” associated with that brand.

But notice that this is backwards from the way creators have typically approached making a living with their creations. A writer becomes a writer because she wants to write. She has something she wants to say, and she hones her craft in saying it. Hopefully, other people want to hear it too, and if they do, then they buy it and her brand grows around being the person who said those things. In other words, the personal brand is downstream of the content.

Even in instances where it looks like more directly selling the brand, such as a famous person having a memoir ghost written for him, the brand likely grew around some area of expertise. This person is very good at acting, so became famous, and now people want to read his life story. This person is very good at business, and so established a brand around being good at business, and now people want to buy his thoughts on how they, too, can be good at business.

“Content creators” flip the script. They want to be the kind of person who is rich and famous for “creating content,” so they start by trying to create a brand by gaining followers for themselves, and the way they go about that is figuring out what “content” will attract followers.

This means expertise comes, if it comes at all, after brand. This is why so many content creators are in the business of branding themselves as content creators and then selling content about how to be a content creator. They’re building their brand around what interests them, which isn’t the content of the content, but rather how to sell a genericized “content.”

There’s Nothing Wrong With Selling

It’s important to distinguish this critique from a critique of selling your creations. Artists have always done the latter. Artists aspire to be working artists. Novelists want to sell books, musicians want to sell songs or tickets to their shows. But this is a critique, or at least a highlighting, of a different way of thinking about that whole business.

I was a teenager in the 1990s. The culture then was pretty clear that among the worst things you could do was “selling out.” We all had experienced the trauma of knowing an artist before they sold out, and then suffering the disappointment of seeing them sell out.

This wasn’t about getting big. You could have a platinum album without selling out. Instead, it was about giving up on creating the kind of content that had been meaningful to you and replacing it with the kind of content you thought would sell. It’s Weezer after the flop of Pinkerton. 

But kids don’t worry about selling out anymore. In fact, grind mindset culture and influencer culture and hustle bro culture all elevate selling out to the thing aimed at. If you can sell out, then you’ve succeeded. Failure is the inability to find an avenue to selling out. You don’t start with something to say and then figure out how to sell it, but instead start with a desire to sell and then figure out what to say.

The Supremacy of “Content”

Of course, plenty of people making a living by selling or monetizing their content on the internet don’t fit this “personal brand first and genericized content” model. Lots of artists make meaningful allographic art.

But there has been a recognizable shift in how willing people are to shamelessly embrace the “personal brand first and genericized content” model. How willing they are to sell it openly as what you should aim at. It’s why so many creators are unapologetic about creating AI slop and why so many tech firms market their products as helping creators do that.

And maybe the rise of AI slop is the way out of this. Maybe as content channels flood with bland content made by people whose interest is selling something instead of saying something, we’ll develop a counter-revolutionary force of people who demand meaningful content before they’ll follow a brand. That still exists, too, of course. We just need to treat it more fully as what to aspire to.