As well as being a charity shop nerd, I’m also an author, and a huge bookworm. I still find it a little upsetting when I think of all those books that were once read and loved being sent up a conveyor belt en masse to be pulped. However, I’ve also seen the sheer volume of books that, even with the best will in the world, could never be sold in a charity shop. World of Books collection boxes frequently fill up with old road atlases decades out of date; diet books from the bad old days of cabbage soup and melon slices; Lonely Planet guides from the early 2000s; kids’ books with bespoke felt pen ‘illustrations’ added. Bibles with dedications from someone’s first Holy Communion. School dictionaries. Manuals for using technology long ago rendered obsolete. I’ve sent them off with a heavy heart many times, devoid of other options.
It was late July/early August when the online literary world shit its collective pants over rarepricelessinvaluableantique books being sacrificed like Aztec prisoners of war to the voracious gods of artificial intelligence. It is now mid-October, and the truth about some of the basic economics and trade-offs of the used-book world is finally starting to get its boots on. Unfortunately, the lies of the early responders have long since made it halfway around the world. But take heart! I’m sure all those honest brokers will be issuing equally-histrionic corrections any moment now.
The most damning thing about Askew’s essay is that she doesn’t seem particularly interested in being seen as a Good Person Who Loves Books. She’s interested in explaining what happens in the real world when “too many books” collides with “too little time, storage space, and reader desire.” Where are the accusations of bibliocide? Where is the anguished testimony about the sacred bond between author and reader? Where is the photograph of a conveyor belt accompanied by the obligatory invocation of Fahrenheit 451? Instead we get an eyewitness account of an ordinary commercial practice, informed by experience, alert to material constraints, and weirdly free of moral exhibitionism. I’m not sure Substack is the right platform for this sort of thing.
“Accel_” has 231 views. Left alone, his contribution to civilization is essentially zero. Then Wolf, who has a much larger and more sensible audience, screenshots him, and suddenly this nobody’s dumb remark becomes content. It’s dispiriting how often this happens. Ironically, the idiots and trolls end up controlling the discourse, because the 90% of sane people can’t resist quoting, retweeting, and making recurring inside jokes about it. The marginal pollution from one retweet is negligible. But millions of individually defensible decisions determine what everybody sees, until the information environment becomes disproportionately composed of things almost nobody actually endorses. A classic “tragedy of the commons” problem. Each individual is tempted to dump a little bit of sewage into the conversation supply, but then we all end up getting cerebral cholera. Mockingly, ironically, or earnestly, the bacteria get shared all the same.
In a room of twenty people, somebody acting like an ass for attention can encounter the devastating response of nineteen people simply looking away. Everyone can see everyone else looking away, so silence itself communicates a norm. Online, silence has no visible social presence. You cannot see the ten thousand people who encountered something and declined to engage with it. You see the fifty who replied. So the platform systematically hides successful norm enforcement and displays failed norm enforcement. On sites like Twitter, the audience is indefinite. Membership is nearly costless. A troublemaker can parachute into a conversation among strangers. Sanctions in one subcommunity may be rewards in another. And, most perversely, the mechanism by which you punish the offender —quote him, ridicule him, make him notorious — is the same mechanism that rewards him with engagement.
The deepest truths often seem to present themselves in paradox. Lao Tzu said that “the way that can be named is not the way,” and was mocked for adding 5,000 characters of elucidation. I, too, will risk accusations of hypocrisy and self-contradiction by attempting to name the way out of the trap. I just offered an example yesterday, in fact. Did you notice? On the surface, it may have appeared to be a semi-serious post about Paul Valéry, a conspiracy-obsessed priest, and my own youthful attempts at poetry. But if you look a little closer, you’ll notice a conspicuous absence, like Holmes’s dog that did not bark. That’s right: there are no references to a blonde bombshell’s nude ads for a gambling app. There were no mentions of high-profile court cases involving child murder. There was zero attention paid to any form of “-maxxing.” Now I’ve tarnished this post by referring to those things, even obliquely, but it was for a good cause. I wanted to stress that you can just refuse to engage with any of it. The catch is that no one will applaud you for doing so. The troll will never know that you rolled your eyes and went back to your book. Your friends will never see the devastating reply you chose not to make. There will be no little heart count beneath your silence. But the only way not to add sewage to the commons is to accept that nobody will know or care that you resisted. Online, restraint has no audience. That is both its weakness and its virtue.
But contrary to many news reports, the old books bought from these sellers do not appear to be “rare” in the typical sense of the word. According to Becker and the online discussions I read, the books in these orders are almost entirely nonfiction, were mostly published from the 1970s to the 1990s, and were written in a variety of languages. Becker wrote in a blog post that he has received orders for “stuff like The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995 or How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991.” These belong to a category of books that you could call rare because a small number of copies remain, but they may also be out-of-date, undesirable to readers, and not valuable per se. In some cases, booksellers have noted, the cost of shipping exceeds the books’ resale value.
Oh.
Boy, do we look foolish! If only some idiot blogger had kept his head while the rest of us were losing ours!
Well, mistakes were certainly made — and amplified, and magnified — but extremism in defense of The 1995 Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver is no vice, as I believe Erasmus might have said. At any rate, I’m sure we’ve all learned just enough to save face without forcing us to question our priors — so, no harm, no foul; all’s well that ends well!
I don’t want to let the Atlantic fully off the hook, though:
Regardless, the idea of an AI behemoth destroying books has sent a bolt through the collective psyche. Book destruction is historically linked to authoritarian regimes and attempts to control public discourse, as well as ancient tragedies—the burning of the Library of Alexandria comes to mind. The encroachment of AI, particularly in the realm of books, is now everyday news: Last month it emerged that a top-selling Kindle book may have been partly written by AI, and grandparents are buying children’s books filled with AI-generated slop.
Even if a literal book burning is not under way, the process of ingesting millions of books, stripping them of authorship, and blending them into a homogenous “intelligence” branded with the name of a chatbot certainly feels destructive. It masks the hard work and collaboration that goes into knowledge creation, undermines incentives for authors to write books, prevents experts from finding one another, and gives AI companies tremendous power over what information people can access. Given this scale of cultural damage, the physical destruction of books seems almost quaint.
“Regardless” here is doing the work of an emergency generator after the factual power supply has failed. The current it supplies is too weak to illuminate anything, but strong enough to animate a corpse. Yes, a “bolt” did indeed shoot through the collective psyche: the mad scientists of viral outrage sent it there. They had stitched together a monster from misshapen rumors, decaying conspiracies, rotting scraps of metaphor, and adjectives scavenged from dead headlines; once electrified, it lumbered off through the global village, bellowing about antique books, pulped humanity, and crimes against mankind.
This is an embarrassing effort to salvage a virtue out of a moral panic. If I may take some creative liberties in paraphrasing, “We investigated the burning of Alexandria and found that Alexandria probably isn’t burning. But the fact that people imagined it burning reveals a deeper fire.” No, what it reveals is that your audience consists of gullible cretins who should be ashamed of themselves. I’d like to see a Venn diagram of the people forever warning us about “misinformation” and the people who instantly, uncritically believed that AI was devouring “ultra-rare” books. I suspect it would actually be a perfect circle.
(Misinformation, n. The stupid things other people believe. The corresponding belief among one’s friends is called context, raising awareness, or an important conversation.)
I’m talking about you, 404media. I’m talking about you, Ted “The Honest Broker” Gioia. I’m talking about you, Futurism. I’m talking about you, TechRadar. And you, Ryan Fleck. You, Guardian. You, Hyperallergic. Oh, there were so many of you. And let us not forget the supporting cast among the Bandar-log: the minor imbeciles, volunteer panic merchants, ambulatory rumor mills, and unpaid interns of hysteria sharing their infectious outrage on Substack Notes, TikTok, Facebook Reels, and sundry other sewage dispensers. Your appalling ignorance is rivaled only by your overweening self-righteousness. You squeezed out fake tears over library books that had not been checked out since the Reagan administration. You rent your garments over worthless monographs that had been abandoned at Goodwill and remained unbought. Were you fooled, or were you doing the fooling? Did you mistake wishful thinking for corroboration, or merely trust that your readers would? (Take your time. Neither answer helps.) The slightest ounce of skepticism or simple patience would have sufficed; instead, you mistook your priors for evidence, your indignation for inquiry, your metaphors for facts, and one another’s repetition for independent confirmation. You stand amidst a mess of fabrications and aver that your heart, at least, was in the right place, even if your brain was AWOL. You embroidered rumor, embellished speculation, and passed the resulting monstrosity down the line with the solemnity of monks preserving the Gospels, only you produced something more like The Protocols of the Techbros of Silicon Valley. The online environment is, incredibly, an even stupider, uglier place today because of your malign efforts.
In a just world, you would cancel your internet service, surrender your passwords, and sew your mouths shut. If you possessed even the vestigial stump of integrity, you would renounce all “hot takes” and wander for years like so many Ancient Mariners of epistemic disgrace, buttonholing wedding guests, commuters, grocery clerks, and innocent diners, forcing each in turn to hear the tale of your sordid imbecility, your appalling groupthink. You would conclude by saying, plainly and without qualification: “I was wrong because I was too stupid to question a story telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.” But this is not a just world. So tomorrow you will return, chastened by nothing, confidence undiminished, to pronounce upon some fresh catastrophe you first encountered nine minutes earlier. I see you, though, and I know what you are.
While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.
…Pangram, to be clear, is not useless. But this is exactly the problem: It’s too easy to twist and contest Pangram’s conclusions, especially when nobody really agrees on which uses of AI are or aren’t ethical. Just like chatbots, AI-detection tools have become effective enough for widespread use, but not reliable enough to fully trust. In this way, Pangram and other detectors are mirror images of the AI products they are hunting for.
I admire Wong’s attempt to bring facts and perspective to a moral panic, but I fear it’s largely beside the point. The mob does not primarily want accuracy. It wants authorization. I’ve already seen several articles and posts which indicate to me that the narrative has congealed around Pangram being the authority that can tell AI from non-AI. It has become one of those things that “everyone” knows.
“Is Pangram good at detecting AI?”
“That’s what ‘they’ say!”
In fairness, most of what we “know” is like this. We do not personally verify food safety standards, bridge engineering, drug trials, crime statistics, economic data, historical dates, or medical advice. We live by delegated trust. The problem is that delegated trust and herd belief feel similar from the inside.
Who is “they”? What do “they” know, and how do we know that they know it? The next person you see repeating the claims of Pangram’s accuracy doesn’t know how it works, or how reliable it is. They just know that an article or spokesperson told them what they wanted to hear. They just know that “studies have shown.” They just know the sweet relief of doubt and insecurity being assuaged. Pirate Wires published an excellent debunking of the panic around data centers and water usage last year, and I still hear friends repeating the conventional wisdom that “AI is using up all the water.” (Strangely, the “misinformation” sniffers are nowhere to be seen on this issue.)
Studies and corrections have limited power for now. A study can answer, “How much water does this consume?” or “How accurate is this detector?” But the panic is asking different questions: “Are we being replaced?” “Are people cheating at being human?” “Is civilization being hollowed out?” “Can I still trust any text I read?” “Are my own skills suddenly worth less?” Those are existential anxieties, not spreadsheet questions. Once anxiety has moralized itself, the facts become subordinate. People do not say, “I am afraid and disoriented.” They say, “This is theft.” “This is fraud.” “This is environmental destruction.” “This is soulless slop.” “This is the end of human creativity.” Some of those claims may contain truth in particular cases, but their social function is often emotional laundering. Fear enters the machine and comes out as righteousness.
In a panic, people do not merely want facts. They want reassurance that the walls still hold. They want an authority to step forward, raise his hands, gesture for calm, and say that the malefactors have been identified and the contamination contained. In earlier ages, that authority might have been priest, magistrate, censor, expert, committee, or cop. In ours, with perfect comic symmetry, it may be software. The crowd terrified that judgment has been outsourced to machines now asks a machine to tell it whom to punish.
The harsh truth is that this probably has to burn itself out socially before facts matter much. People will need to see enough absurd accusations, enough friendly fire, enough ruined trust, enough obviously human prose dragged before the tribunal. Until then, skepticism will sound to the panicked like apologetics for the devil.
With Elon’s purchase of Twitter and Trump’s return to power, many on the right exulted. At last, they thought, they would no longer be hectored by liberal gatekeepers or forced to mouth the approved pieties of the age. Many of these people spent years presenting themselves as dissidents, truth-tellers, and fearless enemies of cant. How’s that been going?
I kid, of course. Human nature doesn’t change. The current “discourse” resembles a food fight at a mud-wrestling match during a Klan rally with an audience of cranks, paranoid schizophrenics, trolls, shameless influencers, and anonymous degenerates cheering from the stands. Housebreaking is beyond these people, to say nothing of self-governance.
By the time the church bell quits tolling, they’re already gathering at the gaol. The rumor has traveled faster than any rider: dark doings among the scribes. Something unclean has happened in the scriptorium. A man of the guild! one of them, trained in the sacred arts of ink and ledger! — has been seen consorting with the enemy. The crowd presses closer, anxious and thrilled, crossing themselves as if the very idea might infect the air. They mutter about corrupted ink and devilish machines. And there! Pangram, Botfinder General, straight-backed, solemn, with his shiny new device that turns speculation into a number. He announces his judgment: under interrogation, the scribe’s work has been shown to bear the Devil’s watermark. That’s all they require. Relief loosens their faces. Now they can go home feeling righteous, already anticipating tomorrow’s sport: the culprit in the pillory, the mob’s clean-conscience holiday, rotten vegetables thrown in the name of virtue.
This is what it looks like in a despoiled information ecosystem when people start hunting for scapegoats. Social media already fractured the old reality-brokering order; now AI arrives and further upsets the balance of power. Video can be faked, audio can be faked, and worst of all for the scribes, text can now be convincingly mimicked too. Nobody trusts anything or anyone. It’s a Lord of the Flies media environment, and everyone’s ready to kill over who gets to wield the conch of authoritative speech. The old agenda-setters feel their entire way of life slipping away, and set about like modern Luddites in a futile effort to smash the new narrative-weaving machines. In that atmosphere, even reasonable people start craving a single line between real and artificial, human and machine.
I’m only superficially familiar with René Girard, but I couldn’t help thinking of him here. Fear wants an object. Anxiety wants a face. Suspicion wants judgment and a sentence. One one level, this episode is about the particulars of journalistic ethics. On a deeper level, this is about the anxieties many people feel as their place in the world feels threatened. We’re anxious over what it even means to be human in such a cyborg world, especially when technology can convincingly mimic even the most quintessential human activities, like art and craft. Ironically, we outsource our uncertain judgment to…more machine analysis, more software. Pangram, and other similar bot informers, will serve as the authority demarcating the real from the artificial. Most people won’t know how Pangram works, or how reliably it works, if at all, but it doesn’t matter. We just need to believe it does what we need it to, and then we feel relief. The world makes sense again, and now we can focus on punishing the scapegoats: the species-traitors who collaborated.
That’s what I call those who take it upon themselves to convince others and make them similar to themselves, make them think in the same way.
I abhor this kind of mental usurping, the great task of political parties and confessions.
What matters for you, doesn’t matter for me. Because it matters for you, it doesn’t matter for me.
To understand oneself, it’s essential (in my eyes) to think differently.
Do you support the campaign? Go rape yourself, that’s my response. Even answering that question concedes too much to the commissar asking it. It’s none of your goddamned business how I feel about AI use. I don’t owe you a pledge, a badge, a logo in my sidebar, or an affidavit about my writing process. If I read something and it feels synthetic, I’m free to close the tab and avoid that writer in the future. That’s how grown-ups handle taste, without forming a militia and a blacklist.
What I can’t stand, as always, is the missionary spirit animating this entire self-appointed class of jumped-up hall monitors: the righteous salesmanship, the demand for public alignment, the insinuation that silence is complicity. This “download a free logo and join us” routine is a ritual with no barrier to entry for people who like the feeling of conscience without the burden of thought. Once the ritual exists, the next stage is guaranteed: bot-sniffing as sport, comment-section inquisitions, and purity audits, as though the only point of reading is to detect the Devil’s watermark.
This is the online HOA, or the Concerned Citizens Council, coming to the door with clipboards and smiles, asking you to sign. And underneath the smile is the implied threat: Do you want us to make it known that you refused? Because that’s how these things work. There is no neutral ground in a holy war. The whole point of the ritual is to sort the righteous from the wicked, and to make “I decline” sound like a confession. Even if you happen to agree with this particular campaign, the same petty functionaries will be back knocking on your door next week, with clipboards and smiles, expecting your participation in the next loyalty test. Whenever you finally decline, the smiles will vanish, and you’ll see them for what they really are.
The most a campaign like this can do is create another platform for virtue-signaling (as if we needed more) and another excuse for resentful mediocrities to claw at higher-status targets under a banner of public morality. Watch how quickly “protecting the craft” turns into guilty-until-proven-innocent accusations. It invites the exact type Valéry despised: the mental usurper, the person who can’t just choose their own life, but must conscript yours into their crusade. No thanks. Read what you want. Write what you want, how you want. And leave me out of your religion.
In most of the ways that matter, linear time is a myth. Entropy has its arrow, sure: we are born, we age, we die, in that order, never in reverse. But moral life runs in circles. The calendar flips, the technology gets more impressive, but the human temptation stays put. We’re still the same animals, still drawn to the same pleasures: the pleasure of certainty, the pleasure of punishment, the pleasure of calling our appetite “principle.” Tenderness and cruelty are Siamese twins, never far apart. If you like religious language, call the recurring temptation the Devil: not a horned monster, but a patient solicitor who never tires, who never stops coming back, each time with a new pitch, each time asking you to sign the same contract — just this once, just this time, for a good cause, with an easy installment plan included.
The Devil doesn’t need you to become a villain in one grand gesture. He only needs you to get used to small exceptions. He only needs you to stop flinching. That’s why the call to battle is so effective: it dulls the nerve endings of conscience and fills your ears with a drumbeat. And the world will always supply new drums. New scandals, new enemies, new emergencies, new reasons you “have to” be hard, “have to” be ruthless, “have to” stop worrying about the “edge cases.” There is no finish line where you can finally relax into goodness, no historical utopia that vindicates all your choices. The test returns in different guises, over and over, asking the same question with new vocabulary: Will you bend the rule? Will you take the shortcut? Will you let the ends justify the means?
You’re never finally safe from it. You can only hold out as long as you can. The only victory available is the stubborn refusal to sign. The world will remain mixed and your crusades will not purify it. But you can keep your own hands clean. You can insist that a “false positive” is not an acceptable rounding error because it is a person, and a person is not collateral. You can refuse to let the battle-frame make you stupid and cruel. Because the real danger isn’t that you’ll one day wake up believing in Evil like a mindless acolyte; it’s that you’ll get used to the bargain, that the shrug will become second nature, that “Who gives a shit?” will start to feel like maturity. To quote Kafka one more time: once you have taken Evil into yourself, it no longer insists that you believe in it.
Yet that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to; we must all strut and roar. We must lend ourselves to the partisan earnestness of persons and nations calling their rivals villains and themselves heroes; but this earnestness will be of the histrionic German sort, made to order and transferable at short notice from one object to another, since what truly matters is not that we should achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptuously called ideal) but that we should carry on perpetually, if possible with a crescendo, the strenuous experience of living in a gloriously bad world, and always working to reform it, with the comforting speculative assurance that we never can succeed. We never can succeed, I mean, in rendering reform less necessary or life happier; but of course in any specific reform we may succeed half the time, thereby sowing the seeds of new and higher evils, to keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all the time; the play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.
The modern citizen lives with a rectangle glowing in his palm like a little oracle. From it comes a constant stream of emergencies, outrages, villains, heroes, and urgent calls to prove you are one of the good ones. The world is always ending; the stakes are always infinite; the moral pressure is always immediate. And because it’s immediate, it feels intimate, right here, right now, in your face, as if the drama on your screen were the whole world instead of a curated sliver of it. This is how you get the weird inflation of self-importance: people acting as if they’re standing at Thermopylae when they’re actually standing in a yoga studio lobby.
Here we are, then: the yoga studio, some staff behind a counter, a handful of righteous scolds demanding their due. The charge is grand: complicity, collaboration, silence in the face of evil. It has the romance of clandestine resistance — Vichy collaborators, secret police, the brave few defying the grey mass. It even flatters the accuser with historical resonance: I am not merely a petty bitch; I am fighting fascism. And then the “resistance” takes the form of… piling dumbbells on the floor for low-level employees to clean up.
It’s impossible not to notice the mismatch. If your cause is world-historical, why does your bravery so reliably select soft targets? Why does your fury funnel itself toward people who can’t meaningfully answer back — front-desk staff, service workers, the human beings stationed at the end of institutional pipelines? The pattern is predictable: the higher the rhetoric, the smaller the actual stakes of the chosen battleground. The nobility is abstract; the punishment is concrete. The moral grandeur is vapor; the mess on the floor is real.
People will tell you — always — that they are motivated by principle. But even if the principle were genuine, the conduct still betrays something uglier: the constant temptation to treat other people as props. You are not persuading anyone. You are not changing policy. You are not speaking “truth to power.” You are simply enjoying the privilege, for a moment, of being the kind of person who can make a mess and watch someone else clean it up, while calling it righteousness.
What is the reward? Not the stated reward — the utopia at the end of history which never arrives — but the actual reward, right now, in the nervous system. The reward is the intoxicating relief of moral permission. You get to be harsh without being harsh; you get to be cruel without being cruel. Your anger becomes virtue, and virtue becomes an alibi. You break the ordinary norms of civility, restraint, proportion, mercy, and you call the breach “courage.” Better still, the audience claps. Thousands of strangers give you a little pellet of approval: stunning, brave, truth-teller. Forbidden fruit is always sweet, but it’s even sweeter when you can call it medicine. It’s a powerful seduction for anyone who has been simmering with resentment, boredom, loneliness, or a need to feel consequential.
The tragedy is not that the world is evil, but that the world is mixed. It has always been mixed. It will remain mixed. There are genuine horrors and genuine beauties, and our small lives brush against both. But most of us will never be world-historical individuals, and the universe does not grant us sainthood as a consolation prize. The yoga studio refusing entry to federal agents would not rewrite national policy. A tantrum in the lobby will not cause the President to reverse course on immigration. Nothing in these little dramas carries the weight the actors pretend it carries.
The world does not move in a straight line toward Good or Evil like a train running on tracks. It lurches, compromises, repeats itself, forgets, remembers, repeats again. And that’s why the temptation is so persistent: because you will never be “done.” There is no final victory, on earth or in heaven. There is only the daily test, administered repeatedly: will you keep faith with the basic rules of civilized life even when you have a rationalization that tells you you’re exempt?
The rot begins with the easy little indulgence: this person “deserves” it. The staff deserve it. The bystander deserves it. The wrong tribe deserves it. The “complicit” deserve it. And because your cause is righteous, your petty vengeance is transmuted into justice like lead into gold. You learn to enjoy the taste of your own anger. You learn to confuse the stimulation of drama with the seriousness of truth.
Zoom out far enough and it’s laughable. The banners change. The hashtags change. But the human pattern doesn’t: give ordinary people an excuse, and some will use it to act out the small cruelties they were already inclined toward. They will call it activism. They will call it accountability. They will call it “speaking out.” But the constant feature is the pleasure of being allowed to do what you wanted to do anyway. “The joy of violent movement pulls you under.”
If you’re fortunate, you may find yourself reflecting at the end of your life, when the volume is turned down and the stage lights go out. The slogans evaporate. The causes blur together into a collage of righteous poses. The algorithm is gone. The audience is gone. And what remains is not your intention but your residue — what you did when you could have done otherwise.
You may see, with a clarity you avoided for decades, that the world is still its familiar mixed bag. It did not become heaven because you were furious. It did not become hell because you were silent. It simply remained what it always was. And against that unchanged backdrop, you finally confront the only thing that was ever really up for grabs: the self you made.
A ledger opens. Not a cosmic ledger; just the plain memory of choices. The times you used sanctimony as a weapon. The times you chose humiliation over persuasion. The times you unleashed chaos and congratulated yourself for doing it. The times you took pleasure in spite and called it sanctity.
And the worst part is that you knew. Deep down, you always knew. You felt the little recoil of conscience and you smothered it with a pillow: this is different; I’m different; they deserve it; history is watching. History wasn’t watching. Your followers weren’t watching, not really. Only you were capable of watching, there in your own soul, and you turned away like a coward.
What do you mean “we,” paleface? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to comment on the latest viral outrage? You chose to talk about it in order to keep up with the “discourse.” This is what you do with your own free will and free time. You could change the subject, or if that fails to take, you could walk away and do something meaningful, like fix a wobbly chair in your house. I have no patience with this disingenuous passivity. If your water tastes like urine, stop pissing into your own aquifer.
I can’t even fault a media whore like Lemon for coming up with a cynical stunt to get more attention for his new Substack career. It wouldn’t work without so many willing marks playing their part. Political discourse on social media is nothing but professional wrestling for people who are too stupid to grasp the nuances of professional wrestling. The old stereotype was the toothless yokel screaming at ringside when the heel cracks the babyface over the head with a steel chair, but it’s been common knowledge for decades that pro wrestling is scripted, and most fans now know exactly what they’re participating in. The real marks in 2026 are the ones who yell at their screens about politics with all the earnestness of yokels yelling at the referee to turn around and catch the heel in the act of cheating. They should know, on some level, that the spectacle is fraudulent, and they still behave like the most gullible fan in the arena.
The point is never the “incident;” the point is the argument it manufactures. The boring baseline facts — private property, a religious service, people trying to worship in peace — get skipped like the opening act. Instead, everyone leaps straight to the proxy argument that never ends: immigration, ICE, Trump, “fAsCiSm,” the entire omnicause. The crowd doesn’t just buy tickets; it builds the ring, provides the refreshments, and generates the “heat” for free, then calls it “staying informed.” At least wrestling has the decency to wink. This stuff demands you keep a straight face while you’re being worked — and then applaud yourself for not being the sort of person who gets worked.
This is exactly what I was talking about the other day. Something awful happens; a video circulates; and within minutes the event stops being an event and becomes a proxy for everything else. People aren’t really arguing about what happened; they’re arguing about what they already believe about the world, using the footage as a Rorschach blot. And I’m supposed to join in? I’m not a forensic analyst. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not on the scene. What earthly good would it do for me to watch a terrible clip frame-by-frame and then add my priceless contribution — “Bad things are bad and shouldn’t happen” — to the pile? Congratulations, here’s my Nobel Peace Prize. I treat discourse scrums the way the Romans treated victory: with a servant whispering a corrective in your ear. Only mine is: remember, you’re just another idiot. Your opinion is cheap, your information is thin, and your “engagement” helps no one. You can simply not perform. You can just do something else. You can just post something interesting about Lin Yutang instead of regurgitating the day’s pre-chewed cud.
Christopher Rufo took six months to contradict his own advice. In February, the conservative activist wrote that social-media posts “should no longer be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation.” This view won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Rufo’s long crusade against left-wing cancel culture. By August, however, he had emulated his enemies, arousing outrage over a journalist’s old tweets. The episode demonstrates not just his own hypocrisy but also why campaigns against unwelcome speech should always be resisted.
Rufo’s about-face reveals something else too: The rules of the culture war are changing. Take it from Rufo himself. “The Right’s longstanding proposal—to ‘cancel cancel culture’—might make for a good slogan,” he wrote in the same essay from February. Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, he says that conservatives have to be more proactive. “We should acknowledge that culture is a way for society to establish a particular hierarchy of values and to provide a way to police the boundaries,” Rufo wrote. “And then we should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward.”
On the morning of March 20th, 2003, the beginning of Iraq War Two, I was sitting in the parking lot of a bagel shop, looking at a copy of USA Today, reading an article that left me in stunned disbelief. A few days earlier, in Bossier, Louisiana, protestors had used a huge tractor to crush a pile of Dixie Chicks CDs and merchandise. On March 10th, during a concert in London, singer Natalie Maines had told the audience, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” It was a year and a half after 9/11, and much of the nation was still in the mood for righteous vengeance. This mild statement was perceived as a betrayal to the sensibilities of country music fans, who were predominantly Republicans, especially as it was said in front of a foreign audience. In addition to the 1930s-Germany optics of organizing public destruction of offensive popular art, the band’s music was pulled from radio rotation in many markets. A 2006 documentary chronicled their experience as one of the 21st century’s first victims of cancel culture, although no one called it that yet.
As it happened, that would prove to be the high-water mark for the right’s ability to dictate the terms of cultural discourse. Over the next few years, the basilisk eggs of social media would begin to hatch. The Bush administration went clumsily into that good night, leaving a legacy of disastrous wars and a worldwide financial collapse. The Democrats went Beatlemania over a young, charismatic, mixed-race politician from Chicago. Current NYT columnist Ezra Klein — who, in an amazing example of nominative determinism, got his start writing on a blog called “Not Geniuses” where he demonstrated a Thomas Friedman-like ability to be staggeringly wrong about everything while endlessly failing upward in his career — invented an entirely new shade of purple to splash upon his prose as he gushed:
Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
Yes, they really were that high on their own supply. For a while, they exulted in what appeared to be the triumphant conclusion of a narrative arc that started with the Civil Rights movement. By 2010, smartphones and social media were becoming ubiquitous, and the first spasms of what would come to be called the Great Awokening were appearing as triumphant liberals, dominant throughout cultural institutions and no longer fearing the threat of mutually-assured destruction, attempted to dispense with debate and cement their ideological preferences into place. I think you know the rest of the story well enough. Suffice it to say, a funny thing happened on the way to the end of history, and so, here we are. Liberals are now reduced to weakly calling technical fouls like “hypocrisy!” while conservatives set about methodically salting as much earth as possible in a four-year span so that no more social-engineering schemes can ever grow there again. Woke delenda est.
Williams is narrowly correct that Rufo and the populist right will probably get drunk on power and eventually take things too far. Human nature hasn’t changed since 2003, after all. Rufo is correct that centrists like Williams never seem to come up with any workable ideas for defeating the woke extremists, preferring to hold themselves above the fray while criticizing those who get their hands dirty achieving tangible results. In fairness, it should be noted that this article was written before the Kirk assassination, when Rufo was targeting the New Yorker writer Doreen St. Felix over her past racist tweets against white people, which lends gravity to Williams’ argument. But events have obviously moved on, and now the stakes are higher. Personally, I get the “this isn’t cancel culture, it’s accountability for cheering murder” argument. On the merits, it seems like a standard that should be unobjectionable. Cheering an assassination isn’t in the same moral weight-class as an offensive Halloween costume from 2009. But I’m not in favor of the “Charlie’s Murderers” database being constructed to hold names, workplaces, and handles of those accused of offending. This seems ripe for abuse and personal score-settling dressed up as justice. Today’s bright line (“explicit praise of murder”) will become tomorrow’s penumbra (sarcasm, edgy jokes, guilt-by-association likes).
In some ways, social media is still a new frontier, and it takes a different type of character to tame a frontier; the well-mannered townsfolk will move in much later to set up tea parties and debate clubs. 2010s smartphones plus feeds created territory with speech reach/persistence that old rules couldn’t handle. Early Great Awokening enforcement looked like posse justice: mobs, character assassination, advertiser raids. Now the black hats run the posse, promising peace later. The danger is that vigilantes make bad sheriffs, and frontiersmen don’t always want a town. Some actors gain power, attention, and riches from permanent skirmish. A settled order would put them out of business. So the “rough-and-tumble until norms form” ideal to which Rufo professes allegiance might not self-resolve.
Should I need to establish my bona fides, the “free speech” tag next to this post will show how long I’ve been on this beat. Even as a default liberal when younger, I argued in vain against the progressive appetite for using astroturfed consumer boycotts as a form of economic embargo against their enemies, and against the hubristic embrace of cancel culture epitomized by that famous XKCD cartoon smugly informing us that “the 1st amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences.” I predicted that they would find themselves in precisely this position if they kept at it. In my ideal world, people would have a high tolerance for offense and the good character to scorn resentful attempts to punish enemies through doxxing, tattling to employers, and the aforementioned fake boycotts. Unfortunately, I’ve resigned myself to the world we live in, where humans are a morally retarded species who are congenitally incapable of learning any lasting lessons from their innumerable follies. Thus, I’ve become convinced by those who argue that free speech is best understood as détente rather than an abstract principle. When faced with an increasingly-aggressive mob, refusing to compromise one’s debate club standards will be taken as a weakness to be exploited, not a kindness to be reciprocated. Free speech as a principle according to the standards of a John Stuart Mill is something of a hothouse flower that requires precise conditions to flourish, like a soil of shared values and norms. We don’t have that anymore.
It took the horrific devastation of the Thirty Years War to set the stage for Westphalia and the genesis of modern liberal notions of tolerance. I’m afraid that it will likewise take a few swings of the cultural pendulum here before people finally get weary of trying to pummel their opponents into submission and relearn how to live and let live. For now, I at least have the bitter satisfaction of echoing Robert Conquest: “I told you so, you fucking fools.”
After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.
To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.
Enough is enough.
I like the cut of his jib, but I’m not optimistic here. At best, maybe social media usage will become déclassé, a furtive habit you indulge in private. Even that is a tall order.
In the Gospels (Mark 5/Luke 8/Matt. 8), Jesus encounters a man tormented by many unclean spirits — “Legion.” The demons beg to enter a nearby herd of swine. He permits it. The pigs then rush down a steep bank into the sea and drown. The man is restored to his right mind; the town, spooked, asks Jesus to leave. That’s the whole parable in miniature: concentrate pathology in a vessel, and watch it destroy the vessel.
A few weeks ago, in Santa Barbara, multiple urgent-care staff were fired after a now-deleted TikTok showed them joking around exam-table bodily fluids with captions like “Guess the substance!” and “Make sure you leave your healthcare workers sweet gifts like these!” Most of us assume that gallows humor is part of how people in difficult jobs like healthcare keep it together, but obviously, it’s not the sort of thing than can be shared with the general public. We already have enough of a problem with collapsing trust in public institutions without this sort of easily-avoidable stupidity. Still, you can easily imagine that these moronic nurses at least felt shame and embarrassment after the fact. It was still possible to wonder bemusedly what it is about social media that makes it such an attractive flame for otherwise-intelligent moths.
Then came last week’s assassination, and the resulting display of outright psychopathy from teachers, doctors, Secret Service agents, and tens of thousands of ordinary people. Educators and professionals openly cheering a political assassination. I keep thinking: we poured our demons into the feed, but the only things to drown were decency, reticence, and professional restraint.
These aren’t just “bad optics.” They’re a categorical breach of trust in professions that only function when we believe the people in the room are on our side. Healthcare and schools are high-trust environments by necessity. If the clinician treats you as disgusting content for engagement, you won’t be honest with symptoms. If the teacher giggles at a killing, you won’t want her anywhere near your children. The social web turns neighbors into content; it trains professionals to perform contempt as a status display. A society that performs its contempt cannot keep its guardrails.
The platforms didn’t invent our vices, but they did industrialize them. They reward extremity, erase context, and collapse our separate roles — citizen, friend, professional — into one undifferentiated performance. The result is standards at sea level. The pigs ran, but they didn’t drown; our inhibitions did. The townspeople in the parable weren’t inspired; they were unnerved. They asked the healer to leave. That’s us: attached to the herd even as it tramples the garden. Either the herd dies, or the village does.
My recommendation: Never, ever use the term “cancel culture.” Speak instead about the specific behavior you either want to reject or endorse.
OK, then. I reject progressive political orthodoxy. I reject the attempts to enforce progressive political orthodoxy by harnessing the power of social media to carry out organized campaigns of aggressive harassment, intimidation, and threats, usually directed at the target’s reputation, employment, or both. I reject the spirit of petty vindictiveness that motivates these crusaders. I reject the disingenuous arguments that “censorship” per se can only be carried out by a government, or that groups of fanatical activists preventing the willing exchange of goods and services is actually “the market” at work. I reject the insulting, legalistic, hair-splitting attempts by both cynical progressives and fatuous academics to simply define the entire phenomenon out of existence (see also, “critical race theory”). Most of all, I reject one of the oldest delusions in the history of this ridiculous species which steadfastly refuses to learn anything from its countless mistakes; namely, that the best of all worlds will come by giving in to our worst impulses.
Or, you know, you could just use a convenient shorthand term like “cancel culture” despite its unavoidable lack of precision and trust that those who aren’t being willfully obtuse will get your meaning.
Many moons ago, I realized that by the time I learn enough about a big “news” story to realize I don’t care, the story turns out to be BS anyway. And so it is with the tale of Ellie Kemper, the actress and comedian from The Office and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, who was branded a “KKK Queen” this week.
Why? Because people started tweeting a rumor, based on a misunderstanding about some debutante ball in St. Louis that Kemper attended as a teenager over 20 years ago, and Twitter put it on their “What’s happening” sidebar of trending topics. It turns out that the claim is complete garbage and Kemper has never had anything to do with the Klan, but mere facts won’t do her or anyone else much good in 2021 America. The mob is always hungry for blood, and Kemper is this week’s special.
Once somebody decides to go after you on social media, there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself. Defying the mob is framed in the press as “doubling down,” and groveling for forgiveness just emboldens your tormentors. Kafka was an amateur, man.
There’s an entire media ecosystem devoted to whipping up these fake outrages for clicks. Why go after Ellie Kemper? Why not go after Ellie Kemper. Or you, or me, or anybody. We can be cancelled at any moment, for any reason or no reason at all.
If you’ve got enough money, all you can do is hide out until the mob moves on to another target. But if you can’t afford to just disappear for days or weeks or months… shrug emoji!
This sort of crap generates traffic for Twitter, which is why they amplify it. They know there’s a mob with torches and pitchforks at the ready, just waiting to be pointed toward the next victim. And Jack Dorsey sits on his billions and watches what he’s done.
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”
Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”
The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
