Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Outis Niemand:

The Long, Foul Rant That Is Our Moment In History

By in ai, moralizing, socmed, technology, the statusphere

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 or 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.

— Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

The internet didn’t invent deception, of course, but it did make mediation the default condition of social life. Most of us have probably heard the old joke from the New Yorker: on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Once you live through screens, you’re always inferring a reality you cannot directly inspect. Even when nobody is lying, the medium itself encourages curation, performance, selective lighting, selective framing. A fragile trust is inherent from the start.

Social media monetized that uncertainty. It turned identity into a product and status into a scoreboard. It incentivized us to treat the self as a brand and attention as a currency — quantified, gamable, and therefore permanently vulnerable to counterfeiting. Filters, lighting, editing, branding, metrics; none of it is “fake” in the simple sense. It’s real, but optimized. And optimization is the prelude to suspicion, because it blurs the line between honest self-presentation and calculated manipulation.

As Gurri explains in his excellent book, the basic claim that institutions can certify reality — this is true; this is false; these are the rules; this is what happened — has been weakened. That doesn’t mean institutions are always wrong, or that the public is always right. It means the power to end arguments by proclamation has decayed. The public can keep disputes permanently open. Competing narratives can be built cheaply, distributed instantly, and defended by swarms of “people from nowhere.” Arguments metastasize, every claim begins to feel like propaganda, every correction begins to feel like power protecting itself, every disagreement starts to carry the tone of betrayal. You don’t merely think I’m mistaken; you think I’m captured, paid, brainwashed, malignant, or stupid. And once that adversarial posture becomes political weather, it spreads. “Chaos rampant, an age of distrust. Confrontation, impulsive habitat,” the metal band Slayer sang, describing hell, social media, or both.

For a while, we still had reliable tells. Spam looked like spam. Machine writing sounded like a machine. Bad Photoshop had a visible sheen. The reassuring thing about fakery was that it was legible.

Generative AI is an accelerant because it collapses the tells. It produces competent imitation at scale — text, images, voices, short videos — often good enough to pass the first glance, sometimes good enough to pass the second. So the aesthetic question (“is it good?”) gets replaced by a forensic question: “Who made this, how, and do they deserve credit?” When outputs get cheap, the status war moves to authorship and provenance. Everyone becomes a customs officer stamping passports of authenticity.

It’s common to say “online isn’t real life,” and for a long time that was comforting because in-person reality could still function as the ultimate lie detector. Filters might beautify a photo, but presence would reassert itself up close. You can curate your profile, but you can’t curate your face at close range under ordinary lighting on an ordinary day. Digital editing can’t firm up a weak handshake.

Except now the body itself is becoming a kind of interface, not so much because bodies are “fake” than because the meaning of a body is less legible. PEDs and GLP-1s create an actual result, not a mere illusion. The suspicious question isn’t “is that physique real?” It’s: “What does it signify?”

For decades, we treated physical transformations — lean bodies, muscular bodies, big lifts, dramatic before-and-after stories — as costly credentials. We read them as moral evidence: discipline, self-control, sacrifice, will. You could argue about how fair that moral reading was, but it was socially legible. It made sorting easy. Now, a person can be leaner because appetite has been pharmacologically altered. A person can be bigger and stronger because recovery and hypertrophy are pharmacologically assisted. Now the old inference (“therefore virtue”) is unreliable because the method is opaque. And humans hate unreliable inference. We hate it the way we hate a loaded die: not only because it might be unfair, but because it makes the game hard to interpret.

Then comes the new complication: AI doesn’t arrive as just another tool, like a better wrench. People talk to it. It answers. It imitates personality. It can console, flatter, argue, roleplay. So even if it has no intentions in the strict sense, it reliably triggers the human perception of agency. A new force enters the already-chaotic field — something that can amplify messages, imitate people, generate culture, automate persuasion — and the public can’t agree what kind of thing it is. Friend, enemy, mercenary, or merely a new industrial capability. The disagreement itself becomes part of the atmosphere. Europe got a “German Question” in 1871. We’re getting an “AI Question” now.

Our atmosphere of suspicion is less paranoia than a rational adaptation to broken shortcuts. When cheap trust signals stop working, people do what they always do: they demand receipts (“prove it,” “disclose it,” “show your drafts,” “are you natural?”), they invent new tells (“AI slop,” “natty or not,” “Ozempic face”), and they fight to rewrite the moral code. It encourages moral entrepreneurship. Not everyone is seeking truth; everyone is seeking advantage. Authenticity becomes a weapon because authenticity is a status currency in a world where the old currency is being inflated.

It’s sort of like musical chairs. Technological change, as it often does, has set the music playing again, and people are circling around warily, hoping to be well-positioned in the scrum for a high-status seat once it stops. Eventually some settlement will arrive. Possibly, as Gurri says, one that defies the terms of the struggle. But for now, the defining feeling is that the old shortcuts for telling what’s real are failing, and we haven’t yet agreed on new ones.

Memento Mori (IV)

By in bricolage, memento mori, nyx

‘Tis the year’s midnight…
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays…
The world’s whole sap is sunk…

— John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”

****

Winter sends the world to sleep; the wood in winter is as hushed as a temple, in contrast to May, when it resounds to birdsong and picnickers. And so we come to the night, the great, dark, continent of quiet.

— John Lewis-Stempel, Night Life

****

Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on.

— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Obiter Scripta, no. 150

By in books, obiter scripta, the statusphere

Those who write abstractly are rather lucky: they will have commentators. Others only have readers, which, it seems, is to be looked down upon.

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

In Midnight Maxims, Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “Intellectuals are the bureaucrats of thought.” Likewise, Camus’ commentators are the bureaucrats of the book world. The bureaucrat’s survival skill is activity that can be documented, not outcomes that can be verified. A text that stays “richly ambiguous” is a renewable resource. A text that gets nailed down is a closed case. It’s safer to write “a reading of” than to say something falsifiable. And if you can turn “understanding a book” into a method (frameworks, lenses, rubrics), you can always claim progress even when nothing clarifies. Clarity reduces the need for the middle-management of meaning.

The Soft Hum of Suspicion

By in ai, technology, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere, writing

Sam Kriss:

If you’re anything like me, you did not enjoy reading that paragraph. Everything about it puts me on alert: Something is wrong here; this text is not what it says it is. It’s one of them. Entirely ordinary words, like “tapestry,” which has been innocently describing a kind of vertical carpet for more than 500 years, make me suddenly tense. I’m driven to the point of fury by any sentence following the pattern “It’s not X, it’s Y,” even though this totally normal construction appears in such generally well-received bodies of literature as the Bible and Shakespeare. But whatever these little quirks of language used to mean, that’s not what they mean any more. All of these are now telltale signs that what you’re reading was churned out by an A.I.

A specter is haunting the severely-educated — the specter of AI usage in writing. All the powers of old media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; the NYT Magazine and the Atlantic, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Turnitin, university integrity offices and Reddit bot-sniffers. And so here we have Sam Kriss, yet another spoiled-rich-kid communist who wants to burn down the system that gave him his rarefied aesthetic education (and who nonetheless still harbors bourgeois dreams of inheriting his parents’ “massive house“) swirling a vintage line from Virginia Woolf under his nostrils as he informs you plebs that he was already bored with ChatGPT in 2022, before you even knew it existed.

Seriously, though, the people most likely to see AI text as contamination are the people whose social identity is bound up with text: the literary humanities set, the professional writers, the custodians of taste. For everyone else, it’s just a convenience. An appliance. Maybe that’s part of the outrage: automation was supposed to take the warehouse and the assembly line, not saunter into the poetry workshop and start doing an impression of “voice.” The machines are stealing the wrong jobs.

Most people have never treated everyday writing as sacred in the first place. We flatter ourselves that Christmas wishes “come from the heart,” but come on: normal people use templates because they have lives. Mass-produced holiday cards work for their intended purpose, and no one regards them as a civilizational threat. If anything, the sincere and authentic are the ones who refuse the template and send a detailed, self-important “year in review” that makes everyone vaguely regret having an inbox. Before chatbots, the socially-striving could always reach for Bartlett’s book of quotations; AI just makes the rhetorical prosthetics cheaper and faster. And of course, anything that steals fire from Olympus and gives it to the masses is, by definition, sacrilege.

We are changed by what we change. Good ol’ Auden. It’s the best description I know of what’s happening to public language right now. People imitate their peers constantly. So of course we’re going to imitate the newest voice that surrounds us, even when it isn’t a person. If the environment becomes saturated with AI phrasing, we will begin to speak it the way you catch an accent. From a strictly evolutionary angle, that’s neither good nor bad. It’s adaptation. It’s the social animal looking for a snugger fit.

But there’s always a counter-movement. A stock phrase can be useful right up until the moment it starts to sound insipid from overuse. Then we drop it and reach for something else, not because we’re heroes of authenticity but because we’re bored. “AI voice” will eventually become a class marker the way corporate-speak already is: safe, competent, emotionally pre-chewed. And as that dialect hardens into “middlebrow, typical, mediocre,” anyone who wants to sound alive will have to push harder for distinction — more particularity, more risk, more texture. So it goes: the mass adopts a style because it’s easy, and then a minority flees it because it’s everywhere.

These pieces about AI writing all share the same undertone: suspicion. A kind of low-grade paranoia that turns reading into auditing. You can’t just take in a paragraph anymore; you have to scrutinize it for tells, like a customs agent checking passports. “Tapestry,” “delve,” the syrupy uplift, the eager sincerity. ChatGPT, like Kilroy, was here. Maybe that’s justified, maybe not. But it’s corrosive either way. Even when you’re right to be wary, living in that posture constantly makes you meaner, narrower, less amused.

And it isn’t just AI. It’s a broader collapse of trust in cheap signals. I don’t have any grand analysis or conclusion; I’m just observing what appears to be the prevalent mood. A sincere paragraph used to be a mild indicator of effort. Now it might be a one-click artifact. So the audience becomes forensic, and the writer becomes defensive, and both sides grow touchy. It reminds me of the obsession with PEDs in sports: post a physique photo or a lift total and you’ll be swarmed by amateur detectives hunting for signs of steroid use. Enhancement spreads (or the suspicion of it spreads), and suddenly every impressive result is presumed guilty until proven otherwise. The honest have to perform extra authenticity; the dishonest learn to fake the performance; and the spectators get to feel clever for “catching” someone.

We are changed by what we change. We built machines that can produce endless fluent prose, and now we’re building a world in which fluent prose is no longer evidence of a mind behind it, only evidence that a machine exists. Reading starts to feel like border control.

Word Tords

By in ai, language, the geist of the zeit

I might have guessed. Most trendy words gradually grow in popularity; this excrescence became omnipresent almost instantly. Part of that is because of its association with AI, but it quickly became a much more general term of derision. I mostly see it used on Twitter, which I browse because, as Elon Musk said when he bought it, it functions as something of a town square in the digital age. I must admit, though, that the sheer maddening repetition of “slop” in our digital town square has given me persistent fantasies of climbing a nearby bell tower to…jump. (What? What did you think I was going to say? Sickos.)

I think what I hate isn’t slang, or argot, or jargon as such. Those can be vivid, funny, even clarifying. What I hate is autopilot language, what I’ve started thinking of as meme-phrases: prefab little utterances engineered for online life, easy to repeat, easy to recognize, and rewarded mostly for being the correct noise to make at the correct moment. “Gaslighting.” “Psyop.” “Read the room.” “Not a good look.” “Quiet part out loud.” “Take a seat.” They’re verbal reaction GIFs: not necessarily stupid, but too often substituted for an actual sentence.

Clichés, whatever their faults, at least express a thought. In a way, they’re victims of their own success: they’re true enough and useful enough that they get repeated into linguistic satiety. Unlike many, I’ve never had any problem with “It is what it is.” It’s a perfectly serviceable way to express resignation or acceptance.

The meme-phrases that irritate me are different. They don’t spread because they’re true; they spread because they’re socially efficient. They’re low on meaning and high on utility as a signal. “Read the room” isn’t an insight, it’s a rebuke — an attempt to shame someone into conformity with the group’s mood. “Gaslighting” gets used indiscriminately to mean everything from ordinary lying to actual, sustained manipulation. “Slop” started as a particular insult for subpar AI churn, and within minutes it became a universal solvent: anything I dislike, anything I’m tired of, anything I want to dismiss without describing.

What drives me insane isn’t that language evolves. It’s the mindless repetition, the obvious parroting. You can watch the phrase spread through a feed the way a yawn spreads through a room. People aren’t choosing words; they’re selecting a noise that marks them as current and aligned. The phrase could be replaced by a grunt, squeak, or hoot and do the same job of indicating displeasure or disapproval.

And yes, I admit I might simply be a curmudgeonly asshole: I’m getting irritated at a sign of what a social species we are. It’s like getting annoyed at the sound of a flock of ducks quacking. Why would I expect each duck to sound unique or interesting? Yet — irrationally, stubbornly — that’s exactly what I expect from people. I want to hear thoughts, not noise. Ah, well, it is what it is.

Praise You Like I Should

By in books, foolosophy

We always suppose that others possess great powers of acute penetration thanks to which they will discover our worth, whether real or imagined, and that they will then devote considerable attention to these merits of ours, even when we refuse to recognize such qualities in respect of any other object.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

It’s funny, because most of us recognize our own narcissistic tendencies here, especially from our self-involved adolescence (mine, at least). To be recognized by others as being smart, sensitive, and talented, and to be marveled at! Of course, he’s talking about the ways we daydream about other people paying close, positive attention to us, captivated by our awesomeness. The flip side of that is the equally-narcissistic fear that they’re paying close negative attention to us, seeing every flaw and judging us harshly. The deflating truth is, most people are as wrapped up in their own personal soap opera as we are and probably hardly think about us at all. Likewise, we are often guilty of the same self-absorption. How often do we hand out affectionate compliments to people who are, after all, just doing their job?

A small episode at our doctor’s office reminded me of that.

My stepson and I have been going in weekly for testosterone injections for about a year now. Our nurse is a young woman, reliably conscientious and caring, and we always look forward to chatting with her. The appointment is ten minutes long, but repetition turns ten minutes into a kind of ritual. You get familiar. You pick up conversational threads where you left them the week before. It becomes, in miniature, a friendship.

So we decided to get her a little Christmas gift: a gift card to a local coffee shop. Nothing grand, just a thank-you for being consistently cheerful, kind, and competent while doing something for us that’s pure convenience.

We stopped by the clinic’s open-house Christmas party that weekend and gave it to her. Easy. Done. Good deed logged, Christmas cheer spread.

Then we came in several days later for our injections, and my stepson was curious to see if she’d used it yet.

“Did you get any coffee today?”

She said her sister had brought her some that morning. She didn’t seem to pick up on the hint, though.

He tried again. “From [redacted]?” he asked. (The shop’s name withheld to protect the not-so-innocent.)

No, she said. She doesn’t like [redacted]. Apparently they’d pulled some underhanded move against another local coffee place — reneged on an agreement, stole floor plans, something like that. Her sister is a barista, so she’s up on the local bean-water gossip.

Uh-oh.

Then it occurred to me: she might not even have looked at the gift card yet.

So I gently said something like, “Well, if you’d prefer, it’s no trouble to get you a different gift card. We can use that one ourselves…”

Horrified comprehension dawned on her.

“OHMIGOD, you guys!!”

She was profusely apologetic. Flushed and perspiring, she explained she’d gone straight from the party to her other job where she worked all weekend, she’d put the card in her purse and forgotten to look at it, she really was grateful, she didn’t mean to sound rude — on and on. The poor woman was mortified, and my stepson and I started laughing, partly because it was genuinely funny and partly because laughter is the quickest way to say, Please stop punishing yourself. We’re not prosecuting you.

We reassured her: it was just a comedy of errors; we weren’t upset or offended; it was fine; all’s well that ends well.

The next day I went back for a blood draw. She came out to go over last-minute details and joked, “Can’t be too mad, I guess; you came back!” I told her, honestly, that I hoped she hadn’t gone home feeling bad about it.

She admitted she had. Worse, it had become a topic of conversation at dinner. She told her dad and he said, “That’s terrible!”

This is the part where I risk sounding like I’m polishing my halo, but I promise, the point is really about how easily we imagine we’re being judged, and how strangely rare it is to tell someone, plainly, “I see what kind of person you are.”

We know you better than that, I said. We know you’re not the kind of person who’s capable of being rude about a Christmas gift. And I reminded her of something she’d done that she probably thought no one would remember.

In autumn of last year, a hurricane came up from the Gulf and, rather than continuing up the coast, veered inland and tore through parts of the South. We lost power here in central Virginia for about 24 hours, but western North Carolina got severely devastated. Our nurse posted a note online saying she wouldn’t be available the following week because she was going down there to volunteer her nursing services for hurricane victims. I told her that that’s the sort of thing that shows who she really is, not an awkwardly-timed honest opinion.

She smiled and lowered her eyes, and we neatly segued back to talking about blood tests. I like to think that maybe I did my part to disprove the general truth of Leopardi’s observation, and I hope that maybe I gave her a little bit of an inner glow by making her feel unexpectedly recognized and praised for something she would never dream of boasting about.

This comes up in a smaller way every time we visit. If we have to wait, she always apologizes. But this is a tiny private practice; she’s the only nurse on staff; they offer the injections for free; we show up whenever it’s convenient for us and they fit us in as soon as they can, using their own supplies — gloves, syringes, alcohol pads, band-aids. So one day when she apologized, we told her the truth: you guys are doing us a favor; how on earth could we complain about sitting for fifteen minutes? She gave this wistful little smile and said, “I wish everyone felt that way!”

That stuck with me. To us, it’s obvious she’s a good person who deserves appreciation. But she’s probably dealing with a steady trickle of people who treat “free” as an entitlement and still find something to gripe about. And those are the people who give the loudest feedback. If you’re the one who only speaks up to complain, you end up training the world to expect complaint. Which is one reason it feels worth setting aside a little time and money, to say, formally and out loud: we notice you, and we appreciate you.

Bartleby the Scribbler

By in books, identity, work, writing

There’s nothing like the book section at Goodwill to serve as memento mori for literary ambition. Shelf after shelf of novels and memoirs you’ve never heard of, each one the culmination of somebody’s dream. Years of work, an agent, a contract, launch parties, reviews; and now, a buck and change on a thrift-store shelf, moldering away after the original owner stuck it in a box with unwanted Christmas gifts and old sweatshirts and dropped it off in the donation bin like Rousseau leaving an infant on the orphanage stoop.

And that’s the ordinary outcome. At the more spectacular end, you get something like Olivia Nuzzi’s recent memoir, American Canto. A wall-to-wall media circus, months of scandal coverage, an affair with a cabinet secretary, her ex-fiancé serializing his side of the tawdry story on Substack — and after all that, the book moves a little over a thousand print copies in its first week. Imagine whoring away your privacy and integrity for an audience smaller than a mid-tier YouTube channel’s Tuesday upload.

Rob Henderson has a post about what it takes to be a writer now: not just writing, but running a one-person media operation. Newsletter, social feeds, a constant stream of “content,” and enough personal disclosure that readers feel like they “know” you — so that occasionally you can step in and say, “By the way, here’s where you can buy my book.”

On paper, I look like the sort of person a publisher might get ideas about. I’ve been blogging regularly for years. There’s an archive, a recognizable voice, recurring obsessions, a small audience that keeps wandering back. If you’re a literary marketer, this is the kind of thing you point at and say, “Look, a platform.”

This is not to say I could have a career as an Author if I wanted. If I ever published a book, odds are it would sink without a ripple, like most books do. The only point I’m making is narrower and more boring: the visible behavior the publishers and marketers want — regular posting, a sense of personality, a trickle of readers — is already there. What interests me is how the meaning of that behavior would flip the moment it became someone else’s plan. Right now, when I write a post, I’m just following an itch from inside. Something bothers me, or amuses me, or catches my attention, and I want to see what it looks like in sentences. That’s the whole story. If I don’t post for a few days, no one is waiting with a spreadsheet and a frown. The activity begins and ends with my own curiosity. Now imagine the same surface routine, but add a publisher, a publicist, or a boss.

“Time to produce some topical content; your recent posts haven’t really done numbers.”
“You really need an Instagram account; the marketing data are clear.”
“Could you say something a bit provocative on Twitter to juice interest before the launch?”

Nothing material has changed. I’d still be typing words on a screen. But suddenly the internal itch is secondary. The primary thing is fulfilling an obligation someone else has defined: keep the graph pointing up and to the right. The exact same habit becomes part of a strategy deck.

I don’t think obligations are bad. It’s normal to have them. Civilization more or less depends on people doing things they wouldn’t spontaneously choose at 7 a.m. on a Monday. You can even take pride in meeting your obligations, whether you resent them or cheerfully accept them. But obligations have a way of draining some of the spontaneous joy out of an activity. The more something is tied to money, status, or other people’s expectations, the less it feels like play and the more it feels like work, even if you’re doing precisely what you “love.” Which is why I’ve always preferred to keep writing in the hobby column. I’ve heard it said, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” For me, this gets it precisely backwards. The surest way to ruin something you love is to make it responsible for your mortgage and your self-worth at the same time.

I already have a job. I treat it as a task: something I do competently in exchange for a paycheck. It doesn’t need to express my deepest self. It just needs to keep the lights on. Writing is the thing I do for its own sake, the place where a stray thought can turn into an afternoon’s entertainment. No deliverables, no targets, no sense that I’m failing if it doesn’t lead to anything. No one has to care. No one has to pay. If I never earn a cent from it, nothing is “wrong.” In my view, something in your life needs to work like that, something that is allowed to be pointless in the best sense. Hobbies are ideally placed to fill that role. For me, writing is a hobby.

Maybe there’s something quintessentially Gen-X about it after all. I’ve never dreamed of being an author, but I do find it amusing to imagine practicing passive resistance against a publishing house and a publicist. “But you like blogging! You’ve already been doing it for decades! Why can’t you just keep doing it with a link at the bottom of every post to the sales page at Amazon?!”

“I would prefer not to,” I’d say. “That’s all.”

Evergreen Findings

By in foolosophy

I’ve never read any of Oliver Sacks’ books, so this doesn’t mean much to me. It’s just the latest episode in the long tradition of pop-science giants with clay feet. The public buys a voice that sounds like knowledge, preferably delivered as a memorable anecdote with a moral. Then, years later, we learn the anecdote was polished, the edges sanded down, the details enhanced. There’s nothing new under the sun here; you can run the lineage back at least as far as Freud. I joked to the Lady of the House that my rule of thumb is that once an author reaches the Sacks/Gladwell/Lehrer/NPR/Ted Talk/airport bookstore level of fame, they’re probably frauds.

I bought a Robert Fulghum book way back in the day, and the cashier said she’d tried reading him but it “just seemed to be a lot of stuff I already knew.” Even then, I remember thinking, well, yeah; why would you assume truth should always feel innovative? Why should wisdom have to be counterintuitive to count as wisdom? Most of what matters in life isn’t obscure. It’s obvious. That’s precisely why we spend so much energy avoiding it.

This is where the old moralists hit different, as the yutes like to say. I’ve been reading La Bruyère via Isaac Waisberg lately. Reading a writer from over three centuries ago, you’re confronted with the evidence, almost insulting in its clarity, of how little we change. He writes about vanity, ambition, self-deception, envy, the delusions of status and display, and you recognize the faces immediately. Worse, you recognize your own. It’s humbling, almost depressing, to be reminded that you, too, will probably die partly deluded and foolish. If La Bruyère lived nearby, you might end up as one of his “characters,” filed neatly under a folly you thought was unique to everyone else.

And this, I suspect, is one reason we prefer “knowledge” in the idioms of social science. The moralists offer recognition, not rescue. But the modern conceit offers something far more consoling: the idea that some counterintuitive discovery just around the corner will finally redeem us from ourselves. The next paper will reveal the lever; the next protocol will rewire the habit; the next chemical will dissolve the defect; the next device will make discipline effortless; the next insight will make us new again. It’s a secular salvation story: deliverance without confession, transformation without the hard, thankless work of character. No wonder it sells. The old humanists tell us what we already know; the new priesthood tells us what we’ve always hoped.

You Say You’re Gonna Leave Me, You Know It’s a Lie

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, the geist of the zeit

Jay Caspian Kang:

Here’s a thought many of us have these days: if only we weren’t on our damn phones all the time, we would surely unlock a better self—one that went on hikes and talked more with our children and felt less rank jealousy about other people’s successes. It’s a nice idea; once a day, at least, I wonder what my life would be like if I smashed my phone into bits and never contacted AppleCare. Would I become a scratch golfer or one of those fathers who does thousand-piece puzzles with his children? Would I direct ambitious films that capture the Zeitgeist? Would I at least read more difficult novels?

For years now, I’ve thought most of the handwringing over “social-media addiction” was just a high-tech version of the old “the dog ate my homework” excuse. People like to tell themselves that their reading habits were like a remote island ecosystem, full of rare and beautiful fauna with no natural predators, until a couple of scrawny cats named Facebook and YouTube came ashore and laid waste to the place. Truth is, the ecosystem had always been fragile; the cats just exposed it. The internet didn’t “rewire their brains” or “hijack their dopamine receptors;” it revealed that the self-image of being a devoted reader full of deep thoughts couldn’t survive contact with weaponized distraction. Faced with that revelation, rather than change their lives to match their professed values, they chose instead to build an alibi: I would read serious books, if only the evil app designers would stop outwitting my noble but helpless cortex.

That’s why I perked up for a moment in Kang’s essay, when he describes quitting social media to finish a book and discovering, to his surprise, that he still didn’t start reading more “difficult novels.” There it was, the obvious conclusion blinking in the sunlight: you deleted the apps, you met your deadline, and the fantasy version of yourself still never showed up. Case closed; now what? But instead of following that line to its end — “this is on me” — he veers off into safer terrain, quibbling over the supposedly-evolving meaning of literacy and constructing thought experiments about Dave, the Midwestern military-history buff who reads fewer books but more efficiently. This is just more procrasturbation. Talk about anything — statistics, definitions, “new forms of reading” — so long as you don’t have to say the unvarnished thing in plain language: if you say you love reading books and you don’t read them, the problem is not your phone, your neurology, or late capitalism. It’s you.

I’m equally unconvinced by the horror stories about perfectly sealed algorithmic filter bubbles. Maybe it’s just a quirk of temperament, but when I see too many people saying the same sort of thing in the same sort of voice, I don’t settle into a curated comfort zone; I get bored and go looking for something else. Curiosity is a natural bubble-buster. And recommendations are famously bad at capturing whatever it is that actually makes one author “like” another: the part that hooks you is usually the “not quite” the algorithm couldn’t quantify. I think the choice in front of us is much simpler than Kang allows. Either you put in the mundane effort to carve out a reading life that matches your self-image — turn things off, say no to the feed, sit with the boredom, and read — or you admit that you don’t really want to. Both are respectable positions. What’s not respectable is insisting that you’re a thwarted bibliophile while blaming the world, its apps, and its recommendation engines for making your real priorities visible.

Batboy Marries AI!

By in ai, fresh hell, technology, the geist of the zeit

Lila Shroff:

Many people are becoming reliant on AI to navigate some of the most basic aspects of daily life. A colleague suggested that we might even call the most extreme users “LLeMmings”—yes, because they are always LLM-ing, but also because their near-constant AI use conjures images of cybernetic lemmings unable to act without guidance. For this set of compulsive users, AI has become a primary interface through which they interact with the world. The emails they write, the life decisions they make, and the questions that consume their mind all filter through AI first. “It’s like a real addiction,” Metz told me.

Three years into the AI boom, an early picture of how heavy AI use might affect the human mind is developing. For some, chatbots offer emotional companionship; others have found that bots reinforce delusional thinking (a condition that some have deemed “AI psychosis”). The LLeMmings, meanwhile, are beginning to feel the effects of repeatedly outsourcing their thinking to a computer.

Every time I read one of these AI–panic pieces from The Atlantic, I feel like I’ve picked up a high-end version of the Weekly World News. We meet a man who needs Claude to tell him whether it’s safe to sleep in his house because a nearby tree looks like it might fall, another who instinctively wants to ask ChatGPT how to fish an AirPod out from between two train seats, and an anxious tech worker demanding a probability estimate that her friends are still alive after a night out. This is not a portrait of “how AI is changing all our minds.” It’s a freak parade of unbalanced weirdos who just happen to have discovered chatbots.

Once you see the tabloid DNA, you can’t unsee it. You could drop these people straight onto a supermarket cover with only minor copy-editing:

  • “SHE USED AN LLM TO WRITE HER EMAILS – NOW DOCTORS SAY SHE HAS WEEKS TO LIVE”

  • “HE ASKED A CHATBOT IF A TREE WOULD FALL ON HIM – SCIENTISTS SAY HUMAN JUDGMENT MAY BE EXTINCT BY 2030”

  • “MAN ANGRILY ARGUES WITH AI MID-FLIGHT – EXPERTS WARN OF ‘AI PSYCHOSIS’ EPIDEMIC”

The Atlantic just swaps the all-caps and exclamation points for a few quotes from a philosopher, an “addiction psychiatrist,” and a reference to “the architecture of human cognition,” then ships it to the Acela corridor as serious cultural analysis. You get to gawk at the weirdos — people who ask Claude for the odds of identity theft, or need a ridiculous branded event like “No AI December” to remember how to think — while flattering yourself that you’re not like them; you’re enlightened enough to worry about what this means for society. You’re not eagerly devouring gossip about how Camilla walked out on Charles after catching him rogering the stableboy; you’re “engaging deeply” with the cultural implications of technological change.

Meanwhile, the boring truth is that most of us use LLMs the way we use every other tool: to save some time and get on with things. Draft an email, outline a project, summarize a paper, maybe bounce ideas around when the mental gears are sticky. We are not polling chatbots about how to raise children or shop for groceries. The handful of people who treat AI like an oracle are not victims of “AI dependence”; they’re just the same old neurotics, now expressing their neurosis through a new interface.

But If You Go Copying Pictures of Chairman Mao

By in ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit

Late-stage leftism: when the only thing redistributing itself is the costume rack.

For the blissfully unaware, this cretin is Hasan Piker, leftist Twitch streamer, subject of glowing legacy-media profiles, and walking self-parody of revolutionary chic and other exhausted ideologies of yesteryear. No satirist could outdo the image of this dim, malevolent excrescence, rewarded beyond belief by the amoral market he’d like to abolish, buying a three-million dollar mansion in L.A., only to rant a couple months ago about how his slow Internet speed makes him “hate this country so fucking much,” calling it “emblematic” of America’s “violence,” whatever that means, before proceeding to trigger his dog’s shock collar for daring to get up and move around in the background. Comcast being Comcast: “violence.” Using a shock collar to torment a dog for no reason: not violence, and certainly not “emblematic” of life for countless people under the political systems he favors. Maybe he can cosplay as Malcolm Caldwell for his next act.

Lookin’ Like a King With a Hoodie On

By in omnigatherum

The first hoodie I owned wasn’t even mine, properly speaking. My dad found it abandoned at a soccer field: an old “University of Virginia” sweatshirt, navy blue faded to the color of dingy dishwater, cuffs blown out, collar fraying, the print cracked like dry mud. It looked less like school spirit than something a groundskeeper had been buried in. Naturally, I loved it. I wore it constantly, a small, threadbare signal that I belonged to something larger and more prestigious than my own gawky self. In photos from that era, I resemble a ragamuffin who vandalized a laundry line. It didn’t fit right, it certainly didn’t flatter, but it was comfy and it looked rakishly degenerate, and what more could a kid reasonably ask?

By middle school, the hoodie had become less mascot costume and more psychological technology. There was the blue A&N one with the Olympic rings on the breast: thicker, denser, decisive. I was a shy, sensitive kid, probably somewhere along the shallow end of “the spectrum,” as it’s called these days, and I took to that hoodie the way a startled turtle takes to its shell. Pull the hood up, and the world moved a half-step away. Cafeteria noise dimmed. Hallway traffic flowed around me like water around a piling. Teachers saw a quiet boy in a sweatshirt; I felt like a small, mobile bunker. That was when I first grasped that the right hoodie isn’t just clothing; it’s a negotiated truce with the world.

Then came the dissolute years. My young adulthood was morally upright but sartorially promiscuous. I slutted my way around the hoodie world with no brand loyalty whatsoever. L.L. Bean, Champion, Gildan, Russell; if it had sleeves and a hood and didn’t cost much, I was game. I tried on college-branded hoodies from schools I’d never set foot in. I wore band merch I only half-liked. I let girlfriends “borrow” hoodies that never came back and acquired others that had clearly been liberated from some ex-boyfriend’s closet. It was a parade of adequate warmth and approximate fits, a blur of slightly-wrong weights and slightly-off-center-but-cool logos. Some hoods swallowed my head like a monk’s cowl, blotting out peripheral vision. Others barely qualified as hoods at all, more like symbolic flaps that surrendered at the first hint of wind. It was fine. I was young. I didn’t know what I wanted in life or in loungewear.

Adulthood, with its mortgages and joint checking accounts, brought a certain sobriety to the hoodie section of the closet. I started to notice that some garments were clearly better at particular jobs. Lightweights like Weatherproof Vintage from Macy’s were good for slightly chilly late summer/early fall days. Gym brands like Iron Tanks, Rogue, and Gorila (one L, on purpose) took their turn under the barbell, soaking up sweat and chalk like they were born to it. Outdoor-gear types like Origin promised technical excellence in an innovative twenty-panel design, good for hunting in the morning, welding in the afternoon, chopping wood in the evening, and watching Netflix before bed. They were all good in their own ways, some even approaching superiority. But as U2 sang, regarding Bono’s own quest for the perfect upper-body athleisure, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

The conversion experience came, appropriately, in the gym. I overheard two guys talking while they warmed up on the turf. One of them was wearing a Carhartt hoodie the color of concrete. The other was admiring it with a fervor usually reserved for new trucks and bourbon. “Best hoodie I’ve ever had,” he said, and the list of virtues tumbled out: the way it fit, the way it wore, the way it shrugged off cold and abuse. This was not casual chit-chat; this was testimony. I listened, skeptical but intrigued, like a man who’s heard too many diet fads but is still slightly curious about this new one that promises you can eat pizza and ice cream and live forever.

Eventually I ordered one. Pulling it on for the first time was like realizing every other hoodie had been a rough draft. Carhartt, it turns out, has quietly solved the general-purpose hoodie problem.

The fit is loose enough to be genuinely comfortable and allow a T-shirt or base layer underneath, but not so baggy that you feel like a child playing dress-up in your dad’s work clothes. The fabric is midweight: substantial, not flimsy, but not the kind of thick, immovable armor that makes you overheat the moment you step indoors. It’s the right weight for almost everything: warehouse mornings, dog walks, grocery runs, deadlifts, and those chilly fall days when the air has opinions but not convictions.

The hood is a masterpiece of geometry. It comes up and over without squeezing your head or strangling your neck, but it also doesn’t fall so far forward that you’re peering out of a cloth tunnel like a medieval penitent. You can see enemies approaching from either side. Hoods on lesser sweatshirts either swallow you whole or give up halfway. This one behaves and even obligingly accommodates headphones or earbuds.

And then there’s the pocket. I had never realized how many pockets were slightly wrong until I encountered one that wasn’t. On the Carhartt, the kangaroo pocket sits exactly where your hands naturally want to go, no reaching, no shrugging. It’s deep enough to hold phone, keys, and the miscellaneous lint of daily life without feeling bulky, but not so cavernous that objects tumble around like dice in a cup. Slide your hands in and there’s no awkward angle, no need to hitch the hoodie up. It’s a small thing, pocket placement, but small things are what separate “fine” from “I will buy two more of these during Black Friday and hoard them like a dragon.”

The shape of the ideal had finally settled. It was as if, after years of sculpting clay torsos and lopsided marble nudes, a Greek sculptor suddenly got the proportions right and could spend the rest of his career varying the pose. Once you’ve found the ratio that works, everything else is commentary.

If this is a Bildungsroman, it’s a modest one: a narrative arc from ragged, foundling sweatshirt to a consciously chosen, well-designed tool. Part of growing up, I suspect, is learning to take seriously the things that seem trivial. The world will offer you no end of abstruse causes and abstract ideals; the body simply wants to be warm, comfortable, and free to move. A good hoodie is one of the ways you grant that wish.

Tomorrow, two more Carhartts are due to arrive, Black Friday tributes to my older self’s hard-won wisdom. I’ll slice open the package, shake them out, and add them to the lineage that runs back several decades. The shy kid who hid inside his hood is still in there somewhere, but now he’s got better equipment. If the soul’s progress can be traced in cotton/poly blends, mine has finally reached the chapter where the hero stops wandering and finds, if not a home, at least the perfect pocket placement.

There We Were Then; Explain Us

By in identity

Yet Gen X isn’t just a time period; it’s also, as Douglas Rushkoff writes in “The GenX Reader,” “a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a political ideology, an aesthetic, an age, a decade and a literature.” It’s a moment, a mood, an ethos and an enduring way of being, the hallmark characteristics of which — anticorporatism, anti-authoritarianism, ironic detachment, artistic independence, an existential horror of selling out and a live-and-let-live philosophy of life — feel like the antidote to a lot of what’s currently wrong in our culture.

In our current moment, when artistic compromise no longer carries the slightest stigma, Gen X has some wisdom to impart about how to preserve one’s principles, even when times are hard. Because for a while now, the present has looked a lot like the recent past: Everything is commercialized, it’s impossible to find a job, rents are astronomical and reality kind of bites. But you can always make art. In romanticizing the past — a time not so connected, distracted, corporate and slick, not so bought in to easy answers — perhaps we’re longing for a world more hospitable to its creation.

— Amanda Fortini, “Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?”

It’s comforting in a way. The same lifestyle that was diagnosed as doom, gloom and pathological detachment in the early ’90s is now, in Fortini’s telling, “the antidote” to everything wrong with the culture. Give it a few decades and we’ll be reading the exact same argument about some other cohort — probably a misty-eyed essay about how the chronically online Zoomers, with their nihilist memes and gig-economy scars, secretly held the key to happiness all along. Every generation gets its turn to be both the problem and the cure.

I remember watching that MTV town hall in 1994 where Bill Clinton took questions from earnest young people. One girl in particular stuck with me. She stood up and said, “Mr. President, it seems to me that Kurt Cobain’s recent suicide exemplified the emptiness that many in our generation feel. How do you propose to teach our youth how important life is?” Even at the time, on my parents’ couch, I remember thinking: What an inane platitude of a question; this is a person who’s read too many issues of Rolling Stone and Spin. She was self-consciously playing “Representative of a Generation,” fluent in the language of media narratives. (I wonder if she went on to become a journalist.)

That’s what most Gen X mythologizing still sounds like to me. You get the obligatory inventory of pop-culture references: Cobain, O.J., Reality Bites, Clinton’s sax on Arsenio Hall, a mixtape of grunge and “alternative” acts, maybe a respectful bow to hip-hop. Then comes the prefab sociology: all that gloom “resonated” with a generation beset by AIDS, nuclear dread, divorce, declining real wages, blah blah blah. Never mind that Chris Cornell was singing glossolalia in “Black Hole Sun,” or that half the kids I knew were listening to hair metal, nu-metal, country, Christian rock, or whatever was on the jukebox at the bowling alley. They don’t get invited into the story because they’re not culturally significant enough. Grunge is allowed to become the soundtrack of a wounded generation; the rest is treated as embarrassing noise.

You could see the same lazy sociology in the way heroin and Prozac were presented as defining features of our lives. Because a handful of rock singers in Seattle shot up, you would think kids in suburban Yazoo, Mississippi were all nodding off in flannel and Doc Martens between AP exams. The fashion pages even obliged with “heroin chic,” as if addiction were just another accessory to complete the look. It was wildly irresponsible and faintly ridiculous. Drug addicts, in the real world, are not picky aesthetes carefully aligning their substance of choice with the correct subcultural vibe — “Oh, no, no cocaine or pills for me; I’m strictly a needles-and-smack connoisseur.” But the media narrative made it sound exactly like that: if you wanted to be a proper grunge kid, you needed the whole kit — shirts, boots, and syringes. At the same time, you could see the media laying down a template we still live with: depression treated as omnipresent, almost a lifestyle category, with Prozac and its cousins offered as the obvious fix.

The “selling out” talk always struck me as particularly incoherent. No one forced any of these bands to form, write songs, tour, sign to major labels, and appear on MTV. You could always say, “No thanks, I’ll stock grocery shelves, play clubs on weekends, and keep my integrity intact.” The problem was that they wanted to be rock stars and wanted everyone to believe they didn’t really want it. The same people who now praise Gen X for its “independent, semi-feral” spirit are describing musicians who were, in practice, paralyzed by what other people might think. It’s hard to square the supposedly tough-minded, anti-authoritarian slacker with the kid who has a panic attack at the thought of being accused of selling out in a fanzine.

None of this really maps onto my own life anyway. My parents are still together; I never had divorce as a defining trauma. My mother was often home, but I was independent by temperament rather than necessity. When I was twelve, I picked up Richard Hittleman’s 28 Day Yoga off her bookshelf and decided to follow it. For a month, I’d get up at 5:30, shower, do forty-five minutes of yoga, make my own French toast while watching the Disney Channel, and then walk up to the bus stop. I did my own laundry, cleaned my own room, and played outside by myself for hours. There was no angsty latchkey narrative to it; I was simply content to be left alone and trusted to handle it.

Later on, the thing that actually shaped my view of life wasn’t a Nirvana lyric or a Ben Stiller movie, it was Philosophy 101. Meeting Socrates did more for me than sharing a birth cohort with Billy Corgan. The idea of living so that your deathbed self could approve, that your life should be something you could bear to look back on, still makes sense to me in a way that “our generation’s angst” never did.

You could reasonably say that this is its own kind of luxury. My dad was a self-made businessman who ran himself ragged with a newspaper distributorship and a property-management firm so that his eldest son could afford to be precious about not chasing SAT scores, professional accreditation, or marketable skills. At the same time, some of the period’s economic story was suspiciously convenient for people like me. We were told, loudly and often, that we’d probably never match our parents’ standard of living, that we were the first generation fated to do worse than our elders, and that this looming downward mobility explained our sullen moping. Maybe the boomers really were ideally placed to harvest the postwar low-hanging fruit of affluence. Maybe we were structurally disadvantaged. But if we ended up “underperforming” by conventional metrics, there was also a good deal of it that was self-inflicted: prosperity breeding complacency, comfort making it easier to shrug and consciously downsize our ambitions. It’s one thing to be pushed off the ladder; it’s another to decide the view from the middle rung is good enough.

Which is part of why these grand generational narratives ring so hollow: they quietly erase class and autobiography and replace them with a list of media properties. In practice, what gets called “Gen X” is usually just the personality type that goes to J-school, ends up in coastal newsrooms, and signals its membership with the correct band and film references. It’s an intra-elite taste profile. Historical astrology.

If there’s one genuinely solid distinction about Gen X, it isn’t grunge, or divorce, or a shared mood; it’s technological timing. We were the last cohort to reach adulthood before the internet became omnipresent. We had an analog childhood and a digital midlife. We learned boredom, privacy, and self-entertainment before everything was online, and then we had to decide, as adults, how much of ourselves to feed into the machine. That’s real. The rest is just décor.

The Prodigal Son of Christianity

By in atheism, political philosophy, religion, the great awokening

I have to say, Thiel is closer to the truth than Rufo.

You don’t have to buy Nietzsche’s entire “slave morality” melodrama to see that Christianity overturned the classical moral order. In Rome, you could of course find private pity, personal kindness, and the odd Stoic sermon about universal reason, but public virtues were still honor, courage, strength, victory, dignity. The weak could be pitied, but they were not morally privileged as such. Christianity changes that. It puts a tortured, humiliated victim at the center of the cosmos and announces that “the last shall be first.” It insists that God identifies with “the least of these”: the poor, the slave, the outcast. As Tom Holland explained in his book Dominion, this is a radical moral revolution.

Viewed in that light, Thiel’s basic point is straightforward: modern egalitarian instincts, including the sort that animate “woke” politics, grow in soil prepared by that Christian revolution. Two thousand years of preaching that the weak, the oppressed, and the marginalized are God’s special concern have left their mark. Even people who despise “organized religion” generally take it for granted that siding with the “victim,” however defined, is the default moral stance. A Roman aristocrat would have found that obsession baffling, if not perverse.

Of course Christianity isn’t the only ingredient. The stew we now call “woke” has other ingredients: Enlightenment rights-talk, Romantic authenticity, Marxist and post-Marxist theories of power, therapeutic culture, and, more recently, the incentive structures of universities, HR departments, and social media. But the underlying stock – the moral grammar in which “the victim” has a special claim on our conscience – is recognizably Christian. Take that away and the whole thing becomes much harder to imagine.

Rufo’s response doesn’t touch this genealogical point. First, he notes that Christian civilizations were “heroic and martial” and that colonization marched under Christian banners. All true, and all beside the point. No one seriously thinks Christian history is a tidy story of meekness and mercy. The tension between ideals and behavior is precisely what made Christian doctrine so explosive: a society that proclaims the blessedness of the poor while building empires on slave labor is piling up moral contradictions that later generations can and do exploit. The existence of crusaders and conquistadors doesn’t disprove the Christian revaluation of values; it shows how often humans fail to live up to it.

Second, Rufo points out that “woke isn’t really a thing in Italy, which is the seat of Christianity.” This confuses genealogy with cartography. The claim is not that wherever Christianity is, woke must follow; it’s that the specifically Western and especially Anglo-American moral sensibility – with its intense concern for distant victims, its habit of dividing the world into oppressed and oppressors, its missionary zeal – is unintelligible without Christian inheritance. That history runs through Northern European and American Protestantism, through abolitionism, social-gospel movements, civil-rights rhetoric, and so on. It is more plausible to describe woke as a secularized, deracinated descendant of Anglo-Protestant Christianity than as an inevitable outgrowth of whatever the Vatican is doing in Rome.

The Italy example actually undermines Rufo’s point. If a heavily Catholic country can remain relatively immune to the full American strain of wokeness, that suggests that something more specific than “Christianity” in general is at work – some particular blend of Christian moral grammar, Anglo-liberal individualism, American race history, and 21st-century university culture. The right conclusion is not “Christianity has nothing to do with this,” but “Christianity is one necessary ingredient, not the whole recipe.”

What’s especially disappointing in Rufo’s reply is how far below his usual standard of argument it falls. He’s normally incisive and to-the-point; here he fires off two rather obvious rejoinders – “Christians were warriors!” and “Italy isn’t woke!” – that don’t actually engage what Thiel is saying. It looks less like analysis and more like a reflexive move to shield Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, from any hint of responsibility. Thiel’s framing may be rough, but Rufo’s counterpunch doesn’t land.

Personally, this is why I will keep a skeptical eye on the development of the right, especially post-Trump. Rufo is one of the most effective political activists on the right, and he’s likely to have real influence over whatever replaces fusionist conservatism. He currently talks the language of classical liberalism and pluralism, and on many concrete issues he’s a welcome counterweight to the left’s cultural dominance. But when someone that intelligent starts defending his preferred religion with arguments this sloppy, it’s a reminder that political movements have a way of subordinating principle to passion once they gather enough momentum or power. The temptation to decide that unbelievers and skeptics are “corrosive to the body politic” is never far away in a self-consciously religious populism or national conservatism.

The Codex Files

By in books, identity, socmed, the geist of the zeit

A man walks into a bar with Infinite Jest.
He orders a drink, opens the book, and starts to read.

For a normal person, that’s where the story ends.

For the Extremely Online, that’s where the investigation begins.

Brady Brickner-Wood has a piece in The New Yorker about “performative reading” — the guy in the bar with Infinite Jest or Moby-Dick, the TikToks mocking him for showing off, the mother hens online clucking over whether people are reading “sincerely” enough. It’s written in the lamentable house style: a little Kant and Rousseau, a little Foucault, some David Foster Wallace, an obligatory swipe at “consumerism and market capitalism,” and it’s not very interesting or informative. What stuck with me, though, wasn’t the analysis of the guy with the book. It was the fact that we’ve reached a point where a stranger quietly reading a book in public has to be treated as a potentially suspicious performance at all.

In the early 2010s, remember, this kind of paranoia was still in remission. Social media was going to democratize everything, topple dictators, spark “color revolutions,” forge connections between lonely people, and usher in a global conversation. A decade later, that fantasy has curdled. We now know what the global conversation actually sounds like, and we’ve seen what happens when you give every crank, fanatic and snake-oil salesman a megaphone. Add AI to the mix — deepfakes, bots, autogenerated sludge that can fill any text box on command — and it’s not irrational to feel that the online environment is fundamentally untrustworthy. You’d be a fool not to doubt a lot of what you see on a screen.

But once that habit sets in, once you’ve trained yourself to read everything online as branding, manipulation, or fakery, the anxiety spills over the edge of its container. If you spend all day marinating in synthetic “content,” it becomes harder to believe in the unremarkable reality happening right in front of you. A stranger reading a book in public no longer registers as “man passing time with a paperback”; he’s “performative reading guy,” a real-world instance of the same insincerity you see everywhere on your feed. Once you’ve spent enough time online, the unofficial slogan becomes “Trust No One” — not even the person reading Middlemarch while sipping her coffee. There must be an angle. There must be a bit. There must be content being harvested!

Ironically, books are one of the last cheap, sturdy, physical symbols of “realness” most people have access to in a world of ephemeral media. You hold them. They don’t ping you. They don’t refresh themselves or run an update overnight. They don’t hypocritically promise “authentic connection” while trying to sell you something. They don’t (yet) hallucinate their citations. If anything in modern life deserves to be exempt from the endless fraud inspection, it’s the quiet, analog act of sitting down and reading a long book for no one’s benefit but your own.

So of course the online-poisoned imagination can’t allow that exemption. It has to colonize this last patch of non-digital ground and declare it suspect. If influencers fake their “candid” photos, if brands fake their wokeness, if AI fakes its expertise, then surely this guy must be faking his absorption in Proust. The environment has trained people to assume there is always a camera, always an audience, always a layer of calculation behind anything that looks sincere. The tragedy is that this stance, which began as a sane response to a polluted information ecosystem, ends by making it impossible to recognize a simple, sane act when we see one.

I don’t know what the motives of the man with the book are, and I don’t care. Mixed motives are the human default. Maybe he likes being seen with a big novel; maybe he’s just tired of staring at his phone; maybe he really is hoping some pretty lady will swoon over his endnotes. I want to believe… he’s just reading. But the point is that reading itself doesn’t need to be put on trial. When the culture gets to the stage where even that has to be defended against charges of fraudulence, the problem is not the reader. The problem is a way of looking at the world that has been so warped by screens that it can’t imagine any act that isn’t performed for one.

In a Maggoty World

By in aphorisms, foolosophy, nietzsche

But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty world really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can free us from Death; if the belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare gives a peace which the world cannot give, why pedantically reject such solace? Why not be led with the others by still waters, be made to lie down in green pastures?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

Strictly speaking, that’s the logical conclusion of seeing clearly in a world where nothing “matters” in any cosmic sense. If life is short and ends in oblivion, why not just believe whatever makes you feel good and be done with it? Why not take the spiritual fentanyl?

A thinker, Nietzsche says, is the creature in whom “the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.” The old opposition — cold truth versus warm illusion — won’t quite do anymore. The appetite for truth itself can become a way of living, even a way of consoling oneself. You can take pride in being the sort of person who stares at the rictus grin on the face of existence without flinching, perhaps even while smirking. You can make a little ego-cult out of not needing the green pastures.

That, I suspect, is where a lot of unbelievers end up, myself included. I don’t believe in souls, afterlives, or a creator god keeping score, but I still behave as if there were such a thing as truth — lower-case and provisional, perhaps, but not wholly plastic — and as if harmonizing with it offered a satisfaction you can’t get from being your own sycophantic courtier. Even if “truth” isn’t another name for God, it serves much the same function: something that stands outside me and corrects me, something I can fail to live up to.

Of course that, too, may be one more life-preserving error. But if I’m going to live on stories, I’d rather live on the story that says: see as clearly as you can, refuse the deliberate lie, and then, knowing full well that nothing lasts, help build and protect a few small oases of decency and meaning anyway. Not because they’ll endure forever, but because a world of sand castles honestly built is still preferable to a Disneyland of comforting fables.

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