Hello!

How is everyone today? The world, as usual, seems bad. And it is perhaps our duty to figure out why, or at least to figure out how to survive its badness. But often when we attempt to do this, we’re starting too far ahead. We debate ideas about capitalism and politics and gender and all the rest, and it goes nowhere. We yell at each other on the internet, we protest, we organize, and the world keeps getting worse.

I think this is because none of us are on the same page. A lot of us aren’t even in the same book! There’s no hope of convincing people of your cause if they exist in a completely different reality. We’re not only separated by an infinite number of distinct, algorithmically-generated personal universes, we exist with highly variable abilities to see through those realities, to think about them critically.

If we want to have any hope of bettering the world, we first have to make sure people live in the same world. And a large part of the solution to this problem is to make sure people have the ability to understand the realities they live in. In short, we have to make people less stupid.

Fifty-four percent of Americans can’t read above a 6^th grade level. How do you convince those people that your side is right? How do you convince them that they deserve a better world if they cannot understand the world they live in, or their place in it?

That was the theme of a talk I gave a few weeks ago when I was invited by the French Embassy to speak at their cultural center, Villa Albertine. The theme of the night was Enlightenment—how do we carry forward ideas of democracy, creative expression, and freedom of speech in our current era? And my answer was: we can’t even begin to debate these things until we ensure the people around us are capable of understanding reality. You can watch the talk here.

And that’s also the theme of today’s Link Drop: if we want to make the world better, we have to start at Square One—strengthening our bonds to our fellow humans so that we live in the same reality, and ensuring they have the same resources and ability to understand that reality.

-I’ve been reading a lot about the fascinating and depressing history of a group of 200 chimpanzees in Uganda who for decades coexisted in peace, and then suddenly began a civil war. The chimps originally lived in three separate but overlapping bands. When each of the bands would encounter each other, they’d hang out—grooming each other, socializing, sometimes finding new mates. But then the killings began. So far, 24 chimps have been killed, including 17 infants. The chimps have become on-guard in their respective territories, showing nervousness if they even hear the sound of other chimps in the distance. Though the exact reason for the start of their war is unknown, scientists believe the war’s continuation and exacerbation is because the groups stopped communicating with each other. After a small conflict between a few chimps from different bands about a decade ago, and after the death of one particular chimp who was responsible for inter-group communication (he died during a respiratory epidemic), the bands stopped trusting each other, and started self-isolating in their own bubbles. The researchers suggested that the chimp civil war could shine light on human violence. Perhaps, they argue, religion, ethnicity and politics play less of a role in our constant conflict; perhaps the progenitor of our own wars is simply communication breakdowns. Living in separate bubbles not only makes our worlds smaller, it makes us fear anyone outside those bubbles. The Trump Administration, of course, has proposed cutting the funding to this group of researchers.

-If it is indeed true that separation from each other’s realities allows for constant violence, that could explain a lot of what we’re going through today in the U.S. The Cut has a story about “The Great Numbing Out”—looking into why people are so much less willing to protest and resist Trump this time around, as compared to the constant actions against his administration in 2016. The thesis of the piece is that we’re all overwhelmed, that our nervous systems have been strained so that we’re constantly in fight-or-flight and are constantly just trying to keep our heads down to survive. And while this is likely true, I again think there is a more base-level problem that leads to those things: disconnection from each other encourages us to feel overwhelmed and scared. Without community, we are left to deal with all this bullshit on our own, and our individual nervous systems cannot handle that. Perhaps the biggest difference between 2016 and 2026 isn’t the amount of overwhelm caused by our politics (though that too), but the fact that we are now much more isolated from each other, and thus unable to effectively communicate that overwhelm and weather the storm together. Let’s not forget that there was a pandemic in-between the first and second Trump terms that radically altered how people interacted with each other.

-But the numbing out we’re experiencing today isn’t unique. A new book by Ian Burma—Stay Alive—chronicles the lives of Berliners during the rise of Naziism and finds that they largely did the same thing we’re doing today to survive: they disconnected from the reality around them, either spatially by exiling themselves to other countries, or culturally and politically, by creating existences ever-more isolated from the violence around them. As Kevin Peraino writes in his review of the book: “Dictators, in reality, thrive not on love but on indifference.”

-I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to say that if I were a person with a vested interest in increasing the violence of the world—destroying its environment, sending people into lives of poverty and misery—and an interest in decreasing any form of resistance to my evil machinations, the first step I might take would be to encourage people to live in bubbles from which they cannot, or at least do not want to, escape. In other words: if you wanted to start a civil war, your first step might not be an act of violence, but of disconnection.

Perhaps that’s how we should view modern technology—as a tool of communal severance, encouraging us to be in our own warring factions. The internet, after all, was largely invented by the U.S. Department of War (née Defense).

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Khameer Kidia has a very impressive resumé. He’s a physician, an anthropologist working at Harvard Medical School, and a Rhodes Scholar. He was educated in the kinds of Western, elite institutions that are responsible for the world’s understanding of mental health as a problem treatable at an individual, and often chemical, level. But through his work with queer people in his home country of Zimbabwe, Kidia’s worldview began to crack.

He started to see mental health as a structural problem that had to be addressed at a communal level, not something that could be solved solely with medications and individual therapy. This revelation put Kidia’s views in direct conflict with those of the institutions that helped educate him.

And so he wrote a book about it, with the hopes of convincing others that our Western, individualist view of mental health is keeping people in distress much more than they need to be.

In Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone, Kidia delves into his personal and familial histories, reframing them as struggles in large part caused by trying to survive in a colonized world. And he delves into the history of medicine itself to show how the Western, capitalist version of medicine and medical thinking became so hegemonic.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

In the book, you talk a lot about your parents’ struggles with mental health, and how those struggles were contextualized through this Western, individualist lens, when really they had a lot to do with their histories—facing racism, colonialism, trying to live under capitalism. Is that where the desire to write this book came from?

My parents’ stories are a large part of the framework of the book, but it wasn’t actually my family’s story that brought me to write it. It was actually my work more than a decade ago in Zimbabwe in the queer community there. I am a queer person and consider myself part of the community there, and I’d been working there for nearly 10 years on mental health research and advocacy. And a lot of queer people started to come up to me and asked me what we could be doing for queer people’s mental health in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a country with extremely repressive laws, state sanctioned violence. It’s a very difficult place to live if you’re queer, and trans and intersex people especially have been suffering—there have been a lot of suicides, and they feel like they’re in a crisis.

A few years ago, I started to collaborate with some NGOs and different queer organizations to think through these things. But at this point I was mostly a researcher and so my goal was to do more research. I was working on an NIH grant to study queer people’s mental health in Zimbabwe, and spent a lot of time working with my mentors at Harvard on the grant. But after a while, it became clear to me that what my mentors at Harvard wanted me to do with this grant was not at all what queer people in Zimbabwe wanted. The people at Harvard wanted me to create an HIV-focused intervention that combined medical care with mental health care. But that’s not what queer people in Zimbabwe wanted. They told me they just wanted safe spaces, places where they could hang out.

I decided to stop writing the grant and start studying a lot more queer theory and LGBTQ literature. And eventually what had started as a project about queer mental health became about queering mental health—applying queer theory and queer life to a very cis, heteronormative patriarchal system of Western psychiatry. I wanted to know how to destabilize some of these normative concepts in Western medicine. I wanted to know how to privilege the perspectives and experiences of the people who were suffering, rather than just the opinions of the experts.

There was a group called the Harare Queers that were doing a lot of mutual aid, and so I started to explore how that functioned in relation to people’s mental health. I started writing essays about all this, and started developing a critical lens for the concept of trauma itself.

Did your experience in the queer community in Zimbabwe and your research into queer theory and history start conflicting with your very Western, traditional understanding of medicine, trauma, and mental health?

Yeah, absolutely. It was existentially unmooring. At first, I felt like a bit of a conspiracy theorist, seeing all these systems at work. I also felt as though I was going against everything that I’d been taught and acculturated to believe. And that was incredibly hard for me. It took a lot of unlearning and relearning and expanding my own vision to re-understand what mental health was for me, and writing the book was part of that. It wasn’t that I alone had all these fantastic ideas, it was that other people had these ideas, and they were teaching me about them, and I was learning to integrate them into my own life experience, and then deal with the repercussions of a changed world view.

What exactly was so hard about squaring those two ideologies or lenses on mental health?

Well, you know, they’re in a sense antithetical. The Western approach is focused on the individual. I was taught that the way to approach people’s mental health was to send them to therapy or prescribe them medications. I became really good at prescribing medications. And I did a lot of extra training in psychiatry, both as a medical student as an as an internal medicine resident.

But then in my experience in this queer community, and in my work as an anthropologist, I saw that for so many people, therapy, psychiatry, medications, were, at the very least, not enough. If you’re living under poverty or violence or racism or homophobia, the individualist treatments aren’t sufficient.

And so I started to think about the shifts we’ve had historically in psychiatry from what was once a sort of spiritual idea, and then became a biological idea, and then became a psychological idea. And I wondered if we could have another shift to make it more a social and political idea. I wondered if we could make things more collective, more structural, less individualistic, and start to address these problems not just at the clinic or hospital.

I feel like the “conspiracy theory” of it all that you mentioned is that once you start down this rabbit hole, you start realizing things like: if you were a very powerful person who wanted to create a society that causes massive amounts of trauma, it’d be very helpful to then blame individuals for experiencing that trauma, and make it their complete responsibility to heal from it, because then that kind of obfuscates the source, right?

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Let me put on my “I’ve been working in the media industry for 15 years” hat for a sec to break down how the trend cycle works in the news. And where better to start than with everyone’s favorite thing to love/hate: looksmaxxing.

Looksmaxxing discourse followed the same media coverage cycle of so many internet subcultures. After existing in relative obscurity for a few years, in late 2025 a video clip of Clavicular—the most popular of the looksmaxxers—possibly running over someone in his car went viral. The mainstream media found out about him and began writing profiles—first came Vice (hey, maybe they’re still trendsetters after all these years), then the New York Times (which in its typical fashion was neither first nor best), then GQ (which has been doing a lot of actually-great reporting on the toxicity and profiteering of the manosphere (and, which, full disclosure, I sometimes write for)). And then came the commentary, of which I was a part (sorry?). And finally, the death knell of a trend story: broadcast news finally gets around to it.

There’s nothing new about this kind of interest cycle—it’s just how the media works in the internet age. Trends filter up from the netherworlds of small TikTok or Reddit “communities,” then are algorithmically boosted—either by big accounts, or journalists, or profit-seeking actors within those communities who know how to game the algorithm for their own gain, and then they’re covered by bigger and bigger press outlets until people get sick of the discourse and turn to the next thing. In a year, there’ll be a Hulu documentary about Clavicular that is negatively reviewed, mildly popular, and totally forgotten about within a month.

The main problem with this media ecosystem is a lack of connective thinking.

Because the media covers trends in discrete cycles, the trends’ underlying context is often completely unexamined. Media outlets go from trend to trend to trend without revealing (or even themselves knowing) that they’re writing about the same thing over and over again. They’re economically incentivized to do this, because only giving people part of the story keeps them coming back. If they say: “here’s yet another story about how capitalism is ruining everything,” people would have little reason to keep returning. Once you connect the small things into one bigger thing then…poof, they disappear…like a game of Tetris with reversed incentives.

I say all this to say that as of late, it feels like every trend story is really the same trend story, and that story is—say it with me now: as capitalism produces diminishing returns for most people, it also produces a constant flow of new technologies of (supposed) competitive advantage, the sale of which helps capitalists profit by further emptying the coffers of consumers who, in an age of decaying empire, have little else to spend any disposable income on; and, much more importantly, helps distract those same people from the ever-increasing distance between their current position under capitalism and the temporal mirage they’ve created (or which has been created for them by the media) in which they imagine themselves to finally be happy conquerers of the same system currently exploiting them.

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Jason Gale is a senior Editor at Bloomberg News. He’s the author of the recently-released After Covid: The Health Impacts That Will Last Generations, a comprehensive look at how the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, and the myriad issues we still face from it. I wanted to talk to him about why we as a society are still in denial of the Covid’s effects, including the effects it’s still having on millions of people’s bodies and brains.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

Can you tell me a bit about why you wanted to write this book? It feels like mainstream discourse has totally moved on from Covid. Was there a gap in that discourse you wanted to fill?

I thought that there was definitely room to write a book that tried to trace how the pandemic unraveled, and its continuing consequences. And one of the reasons was that I could see that our memories and recollections of the event—which is in many ways still ongoing—are very prone to suggestion and manipulation and alternative narratives. So I really wanted to try to create a fairly honest, truthful record of what happened.

Do you feel like most people have memory-holed the pandemic and never think about it now?

I think that part of our resilience strategy is to put bad things behind us and move on. So I think it’s very understandable that we want to forget what happened and almost, in a way, make light of it. But it’s harder to do that in some places. If you’re in New York, you probably remember the morgue trucks parked on streets outside hospitals, the mass graves being dug on Hart Island off the Bronx. Some of those things were highly traumatic.

But I also think part of the reason it’s hard for some people to remember is that, as you write in your book, our memories of the pandemic can be used for different political goals, or manipulated.

Absolutely. I’ve seen a number of physicians and nurses on social media recently talking about how, really, there were no overwhelmed hospitals during the height of the pandemic. That that wasn’t happening. But that’s because the pandemic hit different places differently. Hospitals were overwhelmed in New York City and Boston and San Francisco and Los Angeles, but not everywhere. And that’s partially because our mitigation strategies were working. We have to remember there were certain measures put in place designed to prevent all hospitals from being overwhelmed. So that was kind of a success if your hospital wasn’t overwhelmed with Covid patients. But that’s being used now to claim that the pandemic was completely overblown and exaggerated, which I don’t think is correct.

There’s also debate about whether we’re still actually in a pandemic or not, right?

It’s interesting when you ask about whether the pandemic is ongoing. And there are certainly people who look back and think: well, in 2023 the World Health Organization and the U.S. government and other governments said that the emergency phase of the pandemic was over. That occurred in May 2023. But we know that SARS-CoV-2 is still evolving, still infecting people, still causing chronic illness and even deaths all around the world. So from that basis, the pandemic is still going.

I think that there is a debate going on about whether the pandemic is over or not. And I certainly see Covid-cautious people, especially people who have Long Covid who are very vulnerable to infection, being very frustrated at the lack of acknowledgement that SARS-CoV-2 is still circulating and evolving in societies.

When you talk to to scientists and researchers, were you surprised about just how many effects are still ongoing; how this really isn’t in the rearview mirror?

Yeah, so one of the earlier stories I wrote about the pandemic, which was really surprising to me, was in 2022. I interviewed Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist with the VA health system in St. Louis. And he reported in Nature Medicine that there was an increase in new diagnoses of diabetes after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. And I thought that that was really odd. I think we’re seeing now that the virus, particularly in the early days when people had no immunity from vaccines and no natural immunity, that it could be an accelerant of all kinds of different diseases, from kidney disease to heart disease. And now we’re seeing increasingly its association with with dementia, which is really concerning.

Something that always freaks me out is that it’s so hard to know what’s caused by Covid. Dementia, depression, any mental health issue, stuff with more nebulous symptoms like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—it’s impossible to pick it all apart and know what’s been caused by the virus.

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I remember the moment in 11^th grade. My friend and I climbing out of the subway station on the Upper West Side near our school, discussing, as we so often did, the state of the world and our place in it, and her turning to me and asking: why do so many adults abandon their politics and become cogs in the machine? Is it that they know more than us, or that they have it beaten out of them?

I don’t know why, I told her. But I said I wasn’t worried. We were different. That would never happen to us.

At that point, both of us were as far left as two teens could be—anarcho-communists and anti-imperialists. We’d attend any and every protest for a leftist cause. My friend organized a school club inspired by Columbia’s SDS. That school year, I traveled with dozens of my classmates to Venezuela to tour the Bolivarian socialist revolution and take notes on how we could possibly foment something similar back home.

It was only a matter of time, I thought, before the United States turned into a socialist paradise. All we had to do was usher it along. And I was ready to do the ushering.

And then…things changed. Not my politics, really—I’m still an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It’s more that, a few years ago, I realized my sense of possibility had dramatically decreased.

My Overton window hadn’t shifted; it’d developed a layer of grime that made possible futures seem hazier and less bright.

You cannot fight for what you cannot envision.

In short: I had become my (and my friend’s) worst fear: a cog.

Or maybe a frog.

Looking back at the last two decades of my life since that conversation in high school, I can see what happened to me. And my friend and I were both wrong—it’s not that adults have their idealism beaten out of them. And it’s not that we simply know more—that we are mature enough to be realists instead of idealists. It’s that the longer you exist in this world, the longer you spend in its psychosociopolitical milieu, and thus become increasingly infused with whatever is around you.

It’s easier to be a radical when you’re young not because you’re naive, but because you haven’t yet absorbed the messaging of the world that tells you good things are often impossible. And, crucially, all the people around you—your young peers—haven’t yet either.

When I was a teen at a semi-socialist educational institution, I existed within a positive feedback loop, my peers steeping me in their hopes and beliefs so that my hopes and beliefs did not feel unrealistic. You are what you read, you are what you eat, and, also, maybe, you are who you see.

But then, as you age, the people you see change. You get a job and your thoughts of revolution aren’t so much beat out of you as they are supplanted. You think of money and building a life and all the rest, and everyone else around you does too. As your milieu changes, so do you. And any kind of fantastical future gets hazier and hazier.

How, then, to recommit?

The first step, I believe, is to realize that you do indeed exist in a milieu in the first place; to not take for granted that you are influenced by what you consume and who you talk to and what you spend your time doing.

You do not need to attend a leftist public school to believe in a better future. But you do need to become aware of the water in which you sit. Perhaps for years you have marinated there, not realizing how far from what you once believed you’ve strayed. Perhaps you’ve normalized the lack of hope, or aggrievedness inside of you, because everything else around you feels the same. Perhaps the water has gotten slightly warmer over the years without you noticing. Perhaps now is the perfect opportunity to jump out.

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Anson Tong (she/her) is a writer, photographer, and behavioral scientist based in Chicago.

is a journalist reporting on influencer parents and their children. She is the author of Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.

Family influencers are now a multi-billion dollar industry largely built on voyeurism and selling consumer goods. Family influencers are also a microcosm of what’s happening on the internet writ large these days—it’s just one of the ways in which people are monetizing loneliness and isolation, using parasocial relationships between digital families and real people to sell the promise of connection and relatability.

While we as a culture reckon with how child stars of the 2000s and 2010s were treated in the public eye, a more diffuse (and harder to regulate) cohort of child influencers are growing up surveilled and exploited. Influencer behavior online trickles down to people posting on their personal accounts, and also shapes the aspirations of children, many of whom now want to become professional content creators. Horror stories that make the news often elicit a sense that we should pull the plug and shut social media down, but the most dramatic stories also distract from the fact that this industry is about much more than a few extreme cases—it’s the milieu in which we now all live.

I was excited to talk to Fortesa about her book, parents posting their kids on social media, and who’s watching all this content.

[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

I’d love it if you could tell me about how you ended up on this beat and how you define the child influencer, family influencer, the ecosystem.

When 16 and Pregnant came out on MTV, I was obsessed, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. I was watching it and I watched Teen Mom for all these years. I was like wow, these kids are becoming teenagers, they’re shaving their legs for the first time, they’re getting their learner’s permits on TV.

Then I would get on social media and all these kids are going through the same things as the Teen Mom kids where everything that they do is recorded and monetized and put online. It struck me as very similar but extremely different because the Teen Mom kids or other reality TV kids film a few days a month.

So I started looking around as any journalist who has a hunch does, and I found a young woman who was in her teens who had grown up on a family vlogging channel.

I asked her, “What would you say to your parents if you could say anything?” And she said, “Nothing they do now can take back the years of work I had to put in.”

There’s merch with her name on it. And there’s photos of her from baby to toddler to a kid to a tween to a teen, and I could just watch her grow up online and she was like, if it were up to me, none of those billions of hours of YouTube views would exist.

So I wrote that story. I published it, and I was really excited about it, but I had no idea that it would resonate the way it did, and that people would feel the way they did about it, and that it would become my beat and a book.

One of the mom influencers you interview says something along the lines of, “well, everyone has problems with their parents. If my kid is upset about me putting them online, I’ll deal with it.”

I make decisions for my daughter all the time that obviously she can’t consent to or that she hasn’t agreed with because she’s not even 2. That is the work of being a parent; and the work of being a child is reckoning with those decisions that your parents made for you. But like at least in almost every other circumstance, that reckoning happens privately and doesn’t have public implications, whereas this has public implications. The decisions I’m making for my daughter are private, although my husband likes to joke that she’s gonna hate me for not making her a YouTube star.

There’s so much money on the table that you’re leaving behind! Relatedly, what do you think has made family influencing such a huge industry?

I know I’m like, should I be a mom influencer? They’re making my yearly salary in one post. I think that family vloggers and mom influencers are so popular because American parenthood and specifically American motherhood is so lonely. In my postpartum period, my daughter would only sleep on top of me so I would just be sitting there for 8 hours a day, letting her sleep on me, and I would be on my phone watching these mom influencers and these family vloggers.

If we had better social safety nets and systems, like everyone says we need a village to raise a child. If we all had those villages, we would be much less tempted by these people.

Influencing is worldwide, but it seems to me a uniquely American pursuit because it’s the American dream. A regular person can become fabulously wealthy through their own efforts. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, start posting on YouTube, and who knows what could happen? In this time of economic precarity, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s getting more and more popular because women, especially women and moms, are looking around and they’re like, what am I gonna do?

Influencing and family vlogging is the only career on earth that I can think of where having a child is a benefit to your career. I love my daughter. I would do anything for her. But I love my work and she has not been a benefit to it.

Where do you think the line is between letting a kid do something because they want to, versus protecting them from these consequences they might not understand?

If my daughter had her way, she would only eat ketchup for every meal, but just because she wants to eat ketchup all the time doesn’t mean that she should or that it’s good for her. I think my job as a parent is saying, “Okay, you really like ketchup, but how much ketchup is actually okay for you and how much is too much?” And that’s kind of how I feel about social media.

I do think there can be a way for kids to have this form of expression and for parents to have this career and for kids to have this career without it being this terrible thing. God forbid, not every story is a Ruby Franke story. I don’t think that it’s black-and-white. I don’t think that if you post your kids online and monetize the content that you’re immoral and you’re evil and you’re a terrible parent. Personally, I’m not comfortable with it for my own family and in my own life, but I can see how people would make the trade-off.

So much of the family content is very ordinary. What do you think makes it so addictive to people when it’s so boring?

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We so take for granted the idea that emotional connection is necessary for human existence that we don’t even notice how much of our lives revolve around attempting to optimize it. We go to therapy to work on our relational issues. We browse Instagram and TikTok for the countless videos of pop psychologists problematizing and then proposing solutions to your “attachment style” (are you avoidant, or insecure, or dismissive-avoidant, or disorganized, or secure (is anyone??). You know you keep going back to that man who is mean to you, even though you know he’s mean to you, because so deep is the need for the warm embrace of another human.

But for many decades, psychologists and Western culture writ large operated on the assumption that emotional connection and comfort were, at best, secondary to other basic needs, and, at worst, harmful to the human psyche.

In the 1940s and 50s, the prevailing wisdom on raising children was that showing them love was counterproductive and dangerous. John B. Watson, the head of the American Psychological Association beginning in 1915, advised parents to barely have any physical contact with their children and to keep an emotional distance from them, lest they become spoiled. “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” he once said.

Enter Harry Harlow, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who, in the late 1950s, decided to disprove his field’s theories in the most fucked up way imaginable.

From his lab on campus, which was known as Goon Park (seriously), Harlow and his students began separating baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers just a few hours after their birth. After a period of isolation in what Harlow called the “pit of despair,” he’d then introduce the monkeys to various “surrogate mothers” made of wood and wire to see which the babies preferred. Some of the wire mothers were covered in soft materials like terrycloth and some were left bare. The experiments were sometimes almost comically evil—one surrogate mother had its head attached backwards in an attempt to scare the babies, another shot compressed air at the babies, and one wire mother, which Harlow called “the Iron Maiden” had brass spikes that popped out intermittently to jab the baby monkeys.

The experiments proved what Harlow wanted them to: that connection and comfort can be as important as any other basic need.

The baby rhesus monkeys spent much more time clinging to the soft mothers than they did the wire ones, even if the wire ones gave the babies food and the terrycloth ones did not. When exposed to frightening situations in the lab, the monkeys would cling harder to the soft surrogates. And without their presence, the babies would refuse to explore their environments at all. They’d sit still, sucking their thumbs, paralyzed in fear. Even if the cloth mothers hurt the monkeys, they’d still cling on. Connection, even connection that came with pain, was worth it.

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It was not until the 1960s that the world began to treat tobacco use as a major health epidemic; it was not until the 1990s that the World Health Organization first recognized that the word’s lack of access to fresh and nutritious food was causing myriad health problems. It will likely take another few decades for us to fully come to terms with our crisis of disconnection.

And so, in the interim, we are left to fend for ourselves; left to find substitutes for what we actually need, even if those substitutes are often harmful to our wellbeing. The systemic problem—that the world has become ever-more isolating and alienating—has been met with individualist solutions.

Over the past year or so, I’ve watched as the world has gawked at stories of people falling in love with AI chatbots, or committing suicide when they’re told to do so by those bots. These stories are often framed as extreme cases of extremely lonely people being wooed by a seductive new technology built with insufficient safeguards.

But I think by understanding these stories as exceptional, we’ve let ourselves off the hook. AI psychosis is just the furthest node on a spectrum of an entire world’s attempt to replace a withheld real connection with surrogate support.

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I keep waiting for something to crack—for the state of our country to get so obviously bad that there’s no choice but to believe its badness. But that keeps not happening. No matter how many countries the Trump Administration illegally bombs, no matter how many innocent people they kill or detain, no matter how many lives are worsened in ways that, to me, seem so obviously a consequence of our government and their disdain for human life, so many people seem willing to keep on going.

Perhaps the most depressing story I read in the last few weeks was a New York Times temperature check of Trump voters after his unilateral and illegal bombing of Iran had begun. The article can be summed up as: sure, my life sucks and I can’t afford groceries, but I believe he’s doing the right thing, in Iran and everywhere else! One supporter described himself as a “long-term patriot,” a phrase that seems to mean, “it doesn’t matter if things are going badly now because I have blind faith things will eventually get better as long as I believe thoroughly enough in some abstract concept.” A recent CNN poll found that 82 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s presidency.

You can say this is denial, or a consequence of constant propaganda. And, of course, it is both. But also: perhaps this is what people want. Not because it makes them happy. But because it makes the people making their lives miserable happy. And that is what they care about, whether they know it or not.

Our current political situation can, in part, be explained by steadfast and increasing belief in a system of trickle-down emotions—the idea that if the people you admire appear satisfied or strong or free that you will eventually too, as long as you continue to let them do their thing. It is a system of sunk costs and delayed gratification. And it is a system that is thus self-reinforcing—the more those in power can make your life miserable, the more appealing the idea becomes that supporting them will eventually make your life better.

Trump supporters aren’t the only people who participate in this system. You can see it everywhere these days: in the Elon Musk fanboys who explain every stupid thing he does as the moves of a 1,000-dimensional chess master; in the hustle culture bros who defend billionaires and insist that the reason they run the world is because they are just smarter than everyone else (presumably including the bros who adore them). And it’s not just a right-wing thing. Think of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg shirts and Obama posters everywhere in the 2010s—sure, their supporters liked some of their political positions, but they also found them inspiring. Americans wanted to know the details of the Obamas date-nights and travels as much as they wanted to know about what laws Barack was supporting. One could argue the main point of the position of any First Lady is as a kind of wellspring of emotional health to be disseminated to the American public—if you lived like her, if you acted with such poise, you too could be…well…not First Lady…but at least not the sad, poor, American you that you are.

Much of the world operates within this framework of unquestioning support for the powerful (whether politically or economically or culturally so) for theoretical future emotional gain. To see just how much fealty the public pledges to people who will do very little in return for their loyalty, go online and post a light criticism of a K Pop star (though, at least they return fans’ devotion with momentary auditory pleasure, unlike politicians, who return to their fans only more debt and destruction and death).

Whether K Pop stan or Trump fan, religion is the blueprint for all of this. What is Christianity but a system of emotional debt (and often economic debt too, in the form of tithing) and fealty to a powerful figure in exchange for supposed future gain—gain in the afterlife in most traditional forms of Christianity, gain in this life for those who believe in prosperity gospel?

Things will get better, if only you believe hard enough.

As many philosophers like Walter Benjamin have pointed out over the decades, capitalism itself can be thought of as a religion in this way—a system of totalizing belief in which people are manipulated to give more and more of themselves for the (usually false) promise of future reward. As Giorgio Agamben put it succinctly in a 2012 interview: “God didn’t die, he was transformed into money.”

So, this unyielding fealty to bad actors in the hopes that that fealty will result in some kind of bounty is not new. Indeed it can be said to be a constant feature of Western industrialized civilization. But it seems as if we’re at a particularly high point of the phenomenon’s presence in our society, and the question is why.

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I have had several surgeries on my face—I had my jawbone and forehead shaved and had my nose broken and reformed into a different nose, and had my eyelids turned into a slightly different shape and had some botox put in right above my lip to “flip” it. Most of this, blissfully, was covered by medicaid several years ago, as all “gender affirming” surgeries are required to be if you have publicly-funded insurance in New York State.

My face might be worth $100,000. I don’t know. I never got a bill.

For 7 years I’ve injected hormones into my butt cheek. I’ve injected other medications that modify these hormones as well.

I go to the gym to become more toned.

Much of my life has been dedicated to changing my appearance.

Which is to say: looksmaxxers have nothing on me.

For years, I’ve struggled to parse why I should feel good about all this, and feel morally repulsed by other forms of body modification. Why am I encouraged by my lefty and liberal peers to do whatever the fuck I want to my body because it will make me more me, make me feel happier, make me into a more stable person capable of love, while cis women getting botox is seen by those same people as a form of conformity to sexist beauty standards, and while the women in Trump’s circle getting god-knows-what surgeries are considered ghoulish fascists for their aesthetic decisions (in addition to all their other evil decisions), and while straight men who take peptides and steroids and exercise and, increasingly, get surgeries too, are considered incel freaks for messing with their own bodies?

How are any of these things different?

Over the last few months, the internet-based, incel-born subculture of “looksmaxxing” has gone mainstream. One of its most prominent proponents, the 20-year old streamer Braden Peters, who goes by the moniker Clavicular, has been in the pages of GQ, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times (the GQ profile is the best one, BTW). The profiles of Peters range from quizzical looks at his day-to-day life (he walked the runway of a Dimes Square darling’s fashion show; he got into a fight in a club, he streamed and made content, he ate fast food), to dire warnings that he represents a fast-encroaching misogynistic fascism infecting America’s young men.

The fascination with Clavicular was at first puzzling to me, because the main thing you learn from all those profiles is that he is boring and stupid. He doesn’t know who Zohran Mamdani is. He doesn’t know what Seinfeld is. He hasn’t read a book in years, if ever. He can’t really articulate his views on the world or himself at all—it’s not that he has no coherent politics, it’s that he has no coherent thoughts.

But, I guess, it makes sense. He’s popular for two reasons:

The first is that Clavicular’s real skill isn’t body modification, it’s in milking the internet for clicks and money—figuring out the exact right formula of controversial-sounding soundbites and stunts to make himself exit the orbit of inceldom and enter the orbit of the mainstream media, which then funnels more people back to his orbit, where he makes millions of dollars from streaming and selling “courses” to lonely men on how to look better and successfully talk to women for $49 a month.

The second is that the mainstream world isn’t yet accustomed to the idea of extensive body modification. It’s novel to them. For trans and queer people, what Clavicular and his ilk do is—while different in the specifics of the substances and surgeries—very similar to what we’ve been doing for eons. Trans people become trans largely through modifying their bodies—taking medications often developed for purposes other than transition, and figuring out how to use them to become the people they want to be. Even garden-variety gay people are often experts on body modification. Ask the gay guys around you how much they go to the gym, what supplement stack they’re on, what steroids and/or hormones and/or peptides they take to bulk up or slim down.

So how do we square these two things if they’re so similar? How can some people support trans and queer body modification, while looking askance at cis men dabbling in hormones and surgeries and all the rest?

Well, the answer is that we’re looking at the wrong thing.

Body modification is a practice that is common throughout many cultures, but it is not the culture itself. Modifying one’s anatomy is what the external world sees of a much larger set of goals and communal beliefs.

And it is in those beliefs and goals where Clavicular and the looksmaxxers deviate from trans and queer people. Because one culture is, or at least can be, or at least has been in the past, liberatory, and the other helps to concretize and exacerbate already-existing power structures.

Looksmaxxers aren’t right-wing because they looksmaxx, they’re right-wing because their primary concern is gaining power and money by selling false solutions to vulnerable people looking for connection and reprieve from the dispiriting and isolating nature of capitalism.

These looks-based features of right-wing culture are getting attention because they feel new, but they follow the same trajectory of what the entire right-wing playbook has become: identify a feeling of powerlessness amongst vulnerable people, identify a cause of this powerlessness, and then sell individualist snake oil cures until the problem and solution become an ouroboros, exacerbating whatever issue the cure was meant to solve, and thus creating new customers for said cure.

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Sometimes, especially when I compile news for this newsletter, I feel like I’m in Groundhog Day, the 1993 Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell movie that terrified me as a child due to its central plot device—a man wakes up repeating the same day over and over again. Watching that movie made me think I might someday get trapped in a cycle of never-ending sameness and be gaslit by everyone around me into thinking that that wasn’t true.

Which, I guess, in many ways, is what my life is, TBH. What else is this life but Groundhog Day? What else am I supposed to feel upon reading the news each morning? What else is a world in which we wake up repeating the same disasters and being told by everyone around us—politicians, the news media—that we should expect different results?

I am confused how anyone ever saw Groundhog Day as a lighthearted family comedy.

The movie made a lot more sense to me when I learned that director Harold Ramis was a Jew-turned-Buddhist and saw the screenplay as a meditation on Buddhism. He said that weatherman Phil Connors’s repetitious day took place not over a few weeks, as many of the film’s viewers assumed, but over something like 10,000 YEARS, because that is how long it takes a soul to achieve perfection in some Buddhist philosophy.

The film’s screenwriter Danny Rubin also saw the movie as a commentary on how long it takes to change one’s life and/or soul.

“It became this weird political issue because if you asked the studio, ‘How long was the repetition?’, they’d say, ‘Two weeks’. But the point of the movie to me was that you had to feel you were enduring something that was going on for a long time.... For me it had to be—I don’t know. A hundred years. A lifetime,” Rubin said in 2005.

Angela Zito, who was a director for the Center for Religion and Media at NYU in the early 2000s, told the New York Times in 2003 that the movie was a perfect distillation of samsara, the notion of constant rebirth in Buddhism. She said the most important theme of the movie was a central one to Mahayana Buddhism—that you cannot escape the cycle of samsara without helping everyone else do so too.

“Nobody ever imagines they are going to escape samsara until everybody else does,” she said. “That is why you have bodhisattvas, who reach the brink of nirvana, and stop and come back and save the rest of us. Bill Murray is the bodhisattva. He is not going to abandon the world. On the contrary, he is released back into the world to save it.’‘

This is a nice read of the movie, one in which the unending mental anguish of living the same day over and over again leads to something positive instead of, say, despondency and suicide (which also does happen in the movie—Phil Connors attempts to kill himself several times, only to wake up in the same day again).

And that’s how I’m trying to view life right now as well. Not just my life, but the world in general. It is easy to become depressed about how frequently and consistently we all repeat the same mistakes, both at an individual and societal level (see: reelecting Trump). But perhaps we are like Phil Connors: in need of more repetition so that we can learn a bit each time and, eventually, add it all up into something that finally allows us to escape this closed circuit of hellish nowness.

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A little experiment for you: the next time you decide to order food via a delivery app, ask yourself why. Is it that you are lazy, or tired, or that you believe the experience will bring you joy? Or is there something else going on? Do you, for example, become filled with dread at the prospect of the human interaction necessary to go to a restaurant, or even to pick up the phone and call an order in? Are ease and convenience misnomers for anxiety and fear?

These are important questions to ask, because we as a society are becoming severely addicted to not leaving the house.

Some depressing stats: Nearly three out of every four restaurant orders in 2024 were eaten not in an actual restaurant. Food delivery has doubled since 2019, according to the National Restaurant Association. One-third of Americans use delivery apps for food at least once a week.

“I am so burned out and tired, I would rather just throw my credit card at the problem and delay that unhappiness until the bill comes,” one delivery app super-user who is spending $700 a week on food delivery told The New York Times.

“I still have friends here, but I don’t go out anymore,” another super user in Los Angeles told the Times. “So I randomly see people, and they’re like, ‘I didn’t know you were back!’”

What’s striking about the people interviewed in that Times piece is that nearly all of them seem aware there’s a problem with what they’re doing—that it’s disconnecting them from friends, draining their bank accounts, de-skilling them to the point that they no longer know how to cook or even grocery shop effectively. And yet they, and so many of us, keep relying on these apps.

It is easy to blame the delivery apps themselves, and every technology of convenience that’s been developed in the last decade or two—social media, ride hailing services—for addicting us to lives of sedentary ease. And they, of course, do deserve much of the blame: these massive tech companies use casino-like tactics of dopaminergic reward to trap us within their ecosystems.

But not everyone who goes to a casino gets addicted to gambling. Not everyone who uses drugs grows to need them.

To understand why someone is prone to any addiction—whether that thing is gambling or a drug or a lifestyle that’s bad for them—it’s helpful to understand what pain they’re trying to ameliorate, or what feature of their lives or their psyches they’re attempting to avoid dealing with.

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Everyone is friction-maxxing these days—finding ways to wean themselves off technologies of convenience and into practices that might feel harder on the psyche, but result in better or more interesting or more satisfying outcomes. This is good, I think.

But in most pontifications about how technology has impacted our lives, I think we’ve misplaced the cause and effect, and thus set people up to fail at finding a more friction-filled life. Opinion columnists insist the base problem is that we’ve become to accustomed to an easy existence supported by automation and algorithms, and that that has made us lazy and ungrateful for the things that come harder in life.

I think this is wrong. We’re not all just slothful sinners looking for the easiest way through. No one is born wanting to scroll TikTok for the rest of their lives.

IMHO, it’s not that life has gotten too easy; if anything, it’s gotten much harder for many of us—the economy sucks, our political system feels hopeless, billionaires are becoming more cartoon-villainesque by the day, destroying our environment and our democracy and our brains in the process. And so, I think, the base problem is that because life has gotten harder, the allure of easiness has exponentially increased. The more beaten down and tired and aggravated we feel, the more we’ve been encouraged and enticed to addresses our aches and pains with the supposed salves sold to us by the same people making our world an actively more hostile place. We reach for our phones for the same reason we reach for a glass of wine at the end of the night or a vape or whatever other vice—not because our lives are good, but because our bodies and minds yearn for a temporary reprieve.

There’s nothing wrong with this. I like nicotine and wine as much as the next person. But, as with any vice, returns are diminishing. If you drink 10 glasses of wine a day, one glass will no longer relax you. If you reach for your phone 10 times an hour (or more), one Instagram Reel will no longer provide you with a bit of dopaminergic joy.

It is hard to decide how much of this is our individual responsibility. Drug addiction exists not because we live in a society of millions of individual failures unable to moderate their indulgences, but because we live in a society that causes an immense amount of pain and thus one in which people must constantly search for relief. Similarly, it is not just that the phones in our pockets are alluring to us, but that the deteriorating conditions of life around us make the phones so alluring.

But this systemic view can encourage us to abdicate our responsibility to ourselves: People throw up their hands and say that there’s nothing that can be done because we have so little power over the world and thus over our own lives.

In my opinion, one can take a systems-based understanding of vice and still encourage individuals to individually make progress—to go to rehab or therapy or AA. One can acknowledge that phones and algorithms are only part of the problem, while still taking the responsibility to use them responsibly. Or, really, one can acknowledge that all of these problems are part of the same problem, and that tackling one part of this large problem can help solve the other parts.

If we become accustomed to a frictionless life in which we are searching for self-soothing via constant hits of electronic dopamine, it becomes much harder to do the work of making the world a place in which we do not need self-soothing via constant hits of electronic dopamine. You cannot easily create a revolution or even a community if you cannot concentrate. You cannot begin to address the systems-level problems if you don’t have the discipline to address the individual-level ones.

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The world as we know it can be encapsulated within the experience of retail, on either side of the cash register (or, more commonly these days, the card reader). It is a fundamental building block of capitalist life, the place, both physical and virtual, where people enact a sliver of their decision-making capacity.

These decisions perform multiple functions beyond the acquisition of a product. They signal to others a person’s preferences—some might be more inclined to call it their “taste”—and confer a sense of control. What one has to buy to live, what is sought after but unaffordable, and what’s within reach but probably frivolous and wasteful. There are gradations here, especially for the destitute and the desperate, where buying necessities like food and clothing, however cheap, however poorly made, is not a matter of high-minded cultivation, but a brutal, often humiliating reality of struggling to navigate an unjust society where plentiful resources are hoarded, where the price of those resources are subject to the whims of the market.

I’m forced to think in these sorts of unwieldy, materialist terms on a weekly basis at a retail job where the primary commodity we sell, books, is fast becoming a luxury item. As prices have gone up due to inflation and tariffs (items that involve color printing like art and photography books or graphic novels tend to be manufactured abroad), more and more customers have endeavored to become discerning consumers. These people, understandably, want their money to be spent on things that will give them pleasure (beyond the dopamine hit of simply buying something), but also status, however minor or fleeting. The book-as-object is a major point of fascination for booksellers who witness how much waste the publishing industry generates year to year: advanced copies that never get read and are thrown out, remaindered books that don’t get pulped, tons of plastic packaging in which books are sealed and delivered. All for “limited edition” copies that are not rare or even unique-looking, but present a pleasingly neat picture for Instagram.

I’ve never worked in a retail landscape that wasn’t in some sense influenced by the ways in which social media has altered the average consumer’s brain. Capitalism is in part driven by mimetic thrall, a desire for and covetousness of another’s aesthetic presentation. Whether in pursuit of physical objects or a certain mood, generating a feeling of lack in a consumer is a way of generating revenue through jealousy and insecurity. It instills a greed that doesn’t feel like greed, but nonetheless activates the same selfish impulses. This inner void, or really the illusion of one, manifests in increasingly virtual terms, in an amorphous but palpable itch for an ineffable something that someone else has, and the feeling that one might buy their way into respectability and status.

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I used to be shy. I still am, in a way. It’s sometimes hard for me to put myself out there.

But I once did not know how to talk to people. I assumed this was an innate feature. Some people are better small-talkers, I thought. Some people have more swag, or rizz, or whatever. Random socializing was just not for me, I thought.

For two decades, I got along fine in this state. I had friends. In large groups I might’ve fallen silent, but this did not impact my social life, or so I thought. When alone, I moved through the world in my own world. Headphones on on the train. This never really bothered me.

And then, at the age of 20, a man named Fred, the news director of a tiny NPR station in rural Western Massachusetts, where I was doing my first-ever internship, handed me a microphone. He told me to go interview people. I was terrified. I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t, I realized, know how to talk to people! So Fred sent me to an event down the road from the studio. U.S. Representative Barney Frank was speaking at a community center. Fred told me to walk up to him after his speech and ask him some hard-hitting questions.

All I remember is that my hand was so sweaty that the microphone kept slipping out of it as I pushed past the audience and towards the Representative. The rest I can’t recall—I’d kinda blacked out.

I’ve been a journalist for the past 15 years, and the biggest thing it’s taught me is that everything involving human interaction—understanding others and listening to them deeply, and making your own words intelligible enough to be understood by others deeply—requires practice. Socializing is a skill. You can get better at it. You can, if you fall out of practice, get worse at it.

Our environment directly impacts our abilities to practice this skill, of course. If you live in a tennis academy, you’re more likely to get better at tennis than if you live nowhere near a court, or don’t even have a racket.

Our current built environment does not encourage practicing the skill of socializing. Usually, it actively discourages it. The suburbs trap us apart from each other; phones help keep our heads pointed downward so that there is less spontaneous conversation in public, even if we live in crowded cities.

And so we as a society have gotten progressively worse at everything that once made our lives tick and flourish. People don’t know how to flirt anymore; people don’t know how to make friends anymore. What was the last time you approached someone at a bar or a bookstore and struck up a conversation?

This de-skilling creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral: the less we practice socializing, the worse we become at it; the worse we become at it, the less we feel comfortable practicing it. What might have once caused slight discomfort—going up to the cute girl at the coffee shop or whatever—now causes your nervous system to go into overdrive. And, worse still, because that theoretical girl lives in the same society as you, the one in which speaking to strangers has become something quite strange, if you do approach her, there’s more chance than there used to be that she’ll find it off-putting. The spiral towards complete automatonization intensifies.

I have a lot of empathy for the de-skilled in this scenario. It’s not your fault that the world has made it that much harder for you to form connection. You did not create the suburbs. You did not invent the iPhone.

But I have less empathy for how we’ve begun to excuse our inability to socialize as something innate, neutral, or even good. It’s easy to blame people like incels for unfairly lashing out at society for something—their inability to socialize—that they could theoretically improve on themselves. But do many of us not do something similar? How many of us find identities through which we abdicate our responsibility for living in a pro-social world?

Without negating the realness of neurodivergence, I think it’s fine to say that we live in a culture that excuses our lack of practice and skill at socializing via diagnosis and identity.

Autism, for example, is the perfect diagnosis for the internet era because it frames the purposeful social de-skilling brought about by the internet as something innate within each person, rather than wrought upon you by massive corporations that have a vested interest in keeping you isolated and under-socialized. And it has been joined by a host of other DSM diagnoses that help people excuse their lack of social ability and lack of opportunity to practice it. On TikTok, teens who’ve never been given much chance to learn how to interact with each other decide they have BPD or other personality disorders as a way to explain away their lack of ability to make connections.

It’s no coincidence that the masters of our economic and political systems, despite being anti-identity politics and generally fascist-leaning, make exceptions for specific forms of neurodivergence—both Elon Musk and the CEO of Palantir Alex Karp identify as autistic, for example. They’ve built the world to suit their preferred forms of socializing and preferred views of humanity and in doing so, molded our own minds to be more like theirs—dependent on the technologies they create to mediate every interaction and interpretation of the world.

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The American Dream has, of course, always been a lie. But it at one point served a purpose. With enough work, the indoctrination taught us, any of us could make it—get married, buy a house, save money, retire.

Perhaps more people these days are realizing that this dream is a fantasy. Perhaps more people have seen it for what it is—a way to encourage us all to keep our heads down and not challenge the system, in hopes that some day our exploitation would lead us to greener pastures.

But even for those of us who never believed in this dream, we, for much of recent history, had alternative dreams—ways of envisioning the future that provided us hope.

The progressive version of the American Dream was a collectivist riff on its central premise—that with enough work, things would get better. In place of individual capital accumulation were things like racial and gender and economic equality. Collectivist movements were built around the idea that, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

There seemed to be an inflection point between these two dreams in 2020. The Covid lockdowns made chasing individualist American Dream seem more preposterous than ever.

First by showing us how tenuous those materialist things we’d supposedly been working toward had always been: If the world, our lives, our health, were not guaranteed, then what, exactly, were we hustling for? If a virus could shatter the world’s supply chains within a matter of weeks to the point that the ability to buy toilet paper was no longer a given, then how stable was the future we looked toward anyway?

And then by showing us that there was another kind of dream available to us, one that was more collective and exciting. Protests over racism and police violence exploded onto America’s streets partially because people were angry over these things, but also, I believe, because the other American dream, the one in which we worked for our own white picket futures, no longer made sense. A space had been opened for something else.

The original American Dream reminds me of Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel onto the side of a mountain, only to trick himself into running into it. Somewhere in us, we know that the premise of chasing individualist success for diminishing returns is silly, but we keep running anyway, certain that if someone—that damn Road Runner, for example—can run through the mountain and get to the other side, then we can too. And then, of course, smack.

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In 1932, the German writer Siegfried Kracauer wrote of one of Berlin’s shopping districts, where shops were constantly shuttering and being replaced by new ones, that the streets were “the embodiment of empty flowing time, where nothing persists.”

‘‘That which once was is never to be seen again, and that which is current occupies the present one hundred percent,” he wrote1. ‘‘Constant change purges memory.’’

When I walk down the streets of the neighborhood I grew up in, that is how it feels: depressingly current.

The West Village in Manhattan has gone from a bohemian bastion for queer people to a paradise for billionaires in just a few decades. One of my first memories of my home is stepping outside my apartment and seeing some men across the West Side Highway, on the same piers memorialized by countless queer artists like David Wojnarowicz, engaged in an orgy. That would…not happen today. There is no memory there. Only now.

There was nothing particularly notable about that orgy. But it was one of a plethora of memories of the neighborhood that collectively made me who I am; memories that taught me that cities could be fun, that life could take place in public, that being gay was normal, and, perhaps most crucially, that people living atop of and intertwined with one another was a massive benefit to a sense of community and a sense of self.

These days in the Village, bleach-blonde finance wives carry their frufru little dogs to bland but expensive cafes to lunch (verb) with their girlies. Those once-gay piers across from my childhood apartment are now a private-security-patrolled jogging path for people who undoubtedly work for Halliburton or somewhere equally evil.

I grieve for my neighborhood. But mostly I grieve the fact that few others know what I’m talking about. I can envision a different kind of city because I carry a mental history of a different kind of city. For the new entrants to New York, there is nothing to grieve, because it is all new. But more than that: there is nothing better to look forward to, because there is no memory bank of better or different times to pull from. The entire concept of a more equitable, more exciting city, has been erased.

In this sense, memory is a very fragile thing. For memory to work it must be collective. It cannot be me or anyone else screaming into the void. We must share a language and reference points. Any cog to drop out of the machine of collective memory threatens the whole structure. And without a sound structure, a downward spiral begins in which the needs of capital always win out: the people made by a memoryless place (such as the new entrants to the West Village today) have less power or desire to push for places that create new memories; this further blandifies that place; and so people after them have even less of a memory to pull from and therefore even less of a future to fight for; until one day we will all be born in a Chase Bank lobby, unwilling or unable to fight our way out of it, because, as far as we know, the entire world is and always has been a Chase Bank lobby.

Without collective memory, we exist in a depressingly-static present. Memory is not just a past to grieve, but the fire in which the future is forged.

The world today feels much like the West Village: stuck in a deeply unsatisfying present, unable to push for a better future because the erasure of our memory has left us with little to fight for, and little knowledge of how to fight.

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This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the internet and memory. This one is free. The second one, which will be more about the history of people’s attempt to control memory, won’t be.

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A few months ago, I picked up a friend whom I hadn’t seen in a few weeks from a train station. As we drove, we shared recent things from our lives: what we’d experienced, what we were thinking about. Except, we began to realize, most of those things were things we’d seen online. “Did you see that article in the New Yorker?” Or, even worse: “Did you see that meme on Twitter,” and “did you see that Reel on Instagram?”

As soon as we realized this, we hung our heads in shame, and made a concerted effort to stop mentioning the internet and instead catch up about only what was happening in our real lives. Except, we realized very quickly, that seemed much harder.

It’s not only that we’d both been in particularly bad places with our respective internet addictions, it’s that those addictions appeared to have erased everything surrounding them. Our individual lives had been supplanted with a shared internet memory of memes and articles and videos that, yes, provided us with a basis for conversation, but also seemingly took away from us everything else that mattered—namely, our own lives.

I began to see this collective internet memory everywhere: in the social media slang, usually bastardized from queer and black cultures, that had become a quick way to get a laugh, or simply a way to fill dead space at parties (I cannot count how many times have I said something, expecting a followup question from my interlocutor, only to hear “slay” or “tea” or “boots” followed by nothing (and I don’t want to think about how many times I’ve done the same thing.)); in the way memes became a kind of shorthand for conversation and the sharing of feelings at bars or in friends’ living rooms (“OMG that deeply personal thing you just told me is just like a video I saw.”).

Except to call it “collective internet memory” is probably a misnomer, because beyond its most superficial layer of friends and strangers sharing things with each other, there’s nothing collective about it. The internet’s inner workings are extremely concentrated and top-down. It is, essentially, five corporations in a trenchcoat. Or, really, five corporations behind a projector, projecting what seems like an infinite, kaleidoscopic horizon onto our eyeballs, but one that is in actuality much of the same shit over and over again, and shit that, not coincidentally, is turning the world swiftly rightward.

If we think of our time as a zero-sum game (and it is, because we will all die), then what effect does it have on our minds for our limited spaces for communal understandings of the world (e.g. interpersonal conversations) to be colonized by this for-profit machine run by psychopathic billionaires?

The infection of our conversation by the internet might seem innocuous, or even cutesy and fun, but if even the most offline thing you can do—speak with other people in the flesh—has been populated by the preferred language of the ruling class (which is not to say that they want us to say “slay” but to say that they want us to be stupid, which is maybe the same thing), then it stands to reason that something fundamental is at risk within our systems of human communication: the ability to communicate without the influence of those who want to maintain the status quo.

Take the conversation I had with my friend, and blow it up to a global scale: the internet acts as an Amnesia Machine. It is not only that it provides content that stupefies us, and algorithmically filters people towards fascism, but that in its constant deluge has the power to help us forget other forms of knowledge-making and sharing. The internet is a technology of memory erasure, a deterritorializing mega-force that helps us forget our actual surroundings and histories, and replaces them with ones algorithmically generated by and beneficial to the richest people in the universe.

The more the internet becomes our way of understanding the world, the worse the world gets.

And now the world is getting worse!

The New York Times has an interesting story about how 50 years after the death of Francisco Franco, Spaniards, and especially young Spaniards, are starting to revise their view of the dictator. Twenty percent of the country’s youth now have a positive view of his reign. The culprit is, of course, largely social media, where far-right influencers have flooded people’s feeds with pro-Franco content.

But another way to say this is that the internet has helped erase the memory of all the horrific things Franco did. If you were not alive to experience those things, and if most of your information comes from the internet, and if that internet is run by people who are likely sympathetic to Franco or at least unwilling to restrain the content of people who are, then other narratives get lost to history. The internet, like an invasive weed, overtakes other forms of information, ones that are less conducive to a techno-libertarian world (see: forms of information created by liberalism-supporting institutions like journalism and government education).

This control of information is the often explicit goal of the far-right billionaires: Elon Musk created “Grokipedia” with the explicit goal of challenging the influence of Wikipedia, which, with its reliance on journalism and primary sources, is based in actual history as opposed to the made-up history (see: conspiracy theories) so-often favored by white supremacists. The site makes reference to explicitly white nationalist sources 42 times.

Other billionaires are less obvious in their goals but no less (and probably much more) successful. What is ChatGPT except a memory-erasure machine? By severely de-emphasizing the sources it relies on to spew out its content, it trains people to become less familiar with where information actually comes from, and more dependent on itself, which is to say more dependent on the information it allows through, information ultimately controlled by right-wing-friendly billionaires.

It’s no coincidence that the internet has been found to weaken people’s memory to the point it has a term in academia—“digital amnesia”—because this is one of its explicit purposes. The more we rely on Google to remember everything for us, to do research for us, to even autocomplete sentences for us (even though, in my experience, that feature has never, ever, ever been faster than just typing out three or four words on your own), the less we can remember how to live our lives without the help of these billionaires overlords.

Their mission is succeeding: people have become less skilled at doing their own research, and less trustful of actual information than of information filtered through algorithms. Forty Five percent of U.S. teens now think journalists do more harm to democracy than good, but have very little problem getting their “news” from streamers and influencers (who are usually just spewing bastardized and versions of the news that these teens seem to distrust, twisted into whatever shape that the billionaire-backed platforms algorithmically deem supportable).

One of the greatest tricks ever pulled was convincing us that the internet is some neutral technology, as opposed to a platform controlled by people with a vested interest in controlling us. Perhaps now that the consequences of this control are becoming obvious, we will have less of a problem recognizing that our digital lives are not only being corrupted, but corrupting the diminishing real lives we have left.

And that’s tea, lol.

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Helllllllloooooooooooooooo,

For today’s Link Drop, there’s more people than ever arguing about whether everything wrong with our brains is due to the phones or our school system or our politics or even, simply, each other. But left unsaid in much of these debates is what, to me, should be an obvious fact: they all have the same cause!

Arguing about which of these factors is primary in leading us to lives of stupidity and meaninglessness is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Or worse: it’s like blaming the chairs for the ship sinking, and not even realizing you’re on a ship to begin with.

To make more sense: A world built via hypercapitalism is a world that creates increasing inequality, and increasing inequality is bad for everything, including our brains. The phones, the schooling, the discourse—all of it is part of the same rot at the root of our society.

The reason people are getting more stupid, can’t read, and are supporting policies that go against their self-interest is the same reason people are dying earlier and can’t access healthy food and are turning to dangerous drugs to ease their pain: inequality affects and infects everything.

For some reason, we tend to think of our brains and the information that feeds them as somehow separate from everything else in this world. But consolidated corporate control of any system leads to worse outcomes, and this is no less true for our information and education ecosystems than it is for our food system or housing system or transportation system.

To that end:

-New York Magazine has a good series of stories pondering why people are getting dumber. The stories contain some alarming stats that show what we all intuitively know to be true to be true. One of the stories cites the research of Elizabeth Dworak, who, as part of her 2023 master’s thesis, looked at IQ trends and found that we’ve been in a downward IQ spiral since 2006. IQ, of course, is an imperfect measure of intelligence, but other measures seem to point to the same trend: ACT scores, for example, are at their lowest level in over three decades, and high school math scores are at their lowest in two decades.

Features writer Lane Brown posits this decline has less to do with technology as a whole, and more to do with what technology has enabled—namely the ability for all of us to yammer on about everything at each other forever, without anyone needing to know what they’re really talking about.

“Everybody in the developed world now has Airdrop access to everyone else’s mind,” she writes. “Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team. Bad ideas had a harder time scaling and reproducing, so lots of stupidity stayed local, and everyone else could happily overestimate the average person’s intelligence because they saw less of it. But then we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think.”

It’s a fine thesis for a piece, but one that misses the larger systemic reason for this. To say “it’s not the phones but what we do on them” elides that what we do on the phones is completely controlled by the makers of those phones and the makers of those things called apps on those phones. We think we have the freedom to yammer, but really the forms our yammering take—the fact that the worst and stupidest and most incendiary stuff (the “junk food” of human thought, if you will) is all that’s accessible to most people—has everything to do with the fact that the internet is nearly completely controlled by six companies (Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, TikTok).

It’s a shame so many people get lost in the details of this stuff, because it disenables any kind of holistic fight against it. Sure, ChatGPT might be evil, but it’s not simply that the technology itself is evil, it’s that these technologies are given near-limitless power over our eyeballs and brains by a government that is essentially run by the corporations themselves.

To use an analogy: Monsanto’s GMO corn seeds might be horrible for the environment and our bodies, but one farm growing them is much different than crony capitalism essentially mandating that all commodity crops use Monsanto (or Dow Chemical or BASF) seeds. When we go to the grocery store, we are given the illusion of choice of thousands of products, when really those products are mostly just corn, soy, sugar and cheap fats, thanks to our government-supported agricultural monoculture. This is similar to how the internet functions these days: we have the illusion of countless forms of information, when really nearly all that information comes from a vanishingly small and decreasing number of sources. The industry of finding new information—i.e. journalism—has completely collapsed. Our eyes are all on a diet of proverbial high-fructose corn syrup.

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Over the last few years, getting physical—tennis, weightlifting, massage, acupuncture—has been the main way I’ve kept my life worth living. Of these bodywork practices, tennis has been the most important to me. It’s the way I get out of my head, discharge stress, feel my anger, transpose it from my psyche into a little yellow ball that I then get to smack as hard as I can.

I love my friends whom I play tennis with, but on the court I love beating them. I relish in watching the ball skim a few inches above the net and land a few inches from the baseline and just enough to either side of their bodies that they can’t reach it. This doesn’t happen every point, of course—my friends often beat me, and I often miss even easy shots—but when it does, it’s like an orgasm: this fantastic release of pent-up energy, all my frustration at the world expelled from arm to racket to ball and into the ground near my opponent’s feet.

I am a cloud, and there is a charge built up inside me, and when I hit a good shot, that’s lightning.

Well, last week, as I reached for a forehand, I plopped my right foot down, felt a “pop” in my calf, and could no longer move. My friend/opponent helped me hobble to the car. I’ve been hobbling ever since.

For the first two days I thought: this will be annoying, but not that bad. Like having a cold; a brief period of being stuck mostly in the house. But, really, it has been bad. I’ve felt unexpectedly emotionally affected by my setback. I know it’s just been a week, and I know I’m being a baby, but without the ability to partake in my usual physical modes of emotional release, I’ve begun to feel pent-up. If I am a cloud, then I am becoming one with too much charge. I need a discharge.

Or, to use another metaphor: think of yourself as a cup. At the bottom, you are filled with the energy of the inherent stressfulness of life—conflicts with family and friends, your job, that annoying guy who cut you off in traffic. Atop that, add in your traumas—the things that keep you up at night, the things that add unnecessary weight to all the inherent stresses of life, make them triggering, make them expand in volume.

On a good day, my cup is perhaps 80 percent full. I am stressed, but I can handle it. The day progresses. On a bad day, perhaps one in which something triggers my PTSD, my cup overflows: I cry over the proverbial spilled milk not because I am sad about the milk but because my cup was already nearly full, and the milk was more than my mind could handle—it was too busy dealing with processing my traumas while also dealing with the stress of any normal day.

The reason physical activity has become so important to me, especially since experiencing some major psychic traumas years ago, is because it has been an effective way to reduce what’s in my cup. Whatever the particular mix of liquid I was dealing with on a given day, physical activity acted as a siphon, removing perhaps 10 to 30 percent of the load each day and sending it down the drain.

There are two problems with this strategy of emotional regulation though.

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Arguing with one roommate who insisted this would all only last two weeks.

Going to the grocery store for the first time, in shitty homemade masks, attempting to stay six feet away from people. There was still toilet paper there, phew.

Sitting in my bedroom in New Orleans, at my desk, staring at my laptop. I tried to trade stocks for the first time. I was not good at it. Anything for dopamine.

Attempting to go on a two-hour walk in 100-degree Louisiana heat and nearly passing out. I saw a bunch of lizards.

Texting someone in New York I’d become infatuated with not because they were good for me but because they were the ultimate distraction.

Arguing with the other roommate about literally anything for no reason whatsoever.

It’s hard for me to remember anything else. I eventually moved back to New York. Life went, kind of, back to normal.

Except a few images, even though they were on a computer screen, more than all the bad ones, more than the phone calls from New York about the bodies in trucks, have stuck in my brain: wild boar roaming the streets of a Spanish city; monkeys in India; deer all over; a sea lion in Argentina.

Nature is healing, we said.

Usually, when we talk about “memory holing” something, the something is bad. We’re using the term as it was originally used, in George Orwell’s 1984, in which government functionaries would toss any document perceived as potentially damaging to the totalitarian state down “memory holes”—chutes in an office building that whisked away paper to a giant furnace to be destroyed.

And to be sure, we do memory hole lots of bad things these days: people have argued that Trump has successfully memory-holed the January 6th riot at the Capitol; people have argued that we’ve collectively memory-holed the pandemic and the mass death it caused because it was so traumatic.

This kind of memory holing is a useful tool—it enables politicians and the rich to get away with mass violence. If the population has the memory of a goldfish, then the powerful can do as they please, help us forget, and rinse and repeat.

That’s why the Trump administration and conservatives are so concerned about control of the mainstream media—attempting to kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air, ensuring right-wing control of CBS, buying up newspapers and social media platforms: it’s not just about managing the narrative, it’s about managing history. If, a few years from now, people want to determine how they feel about a certain politician, searching the internet to develop an accurate picture of what they’ve done or positions they’ve taken might be hard. Their actions will have been memory holed.

But…the animals. Such a powerful image, to me at least. To me, at least, a sign of a better world. More than that: a sign that the better world was already there; that it wouldn’t take very much for it to be brought to fruition—less a matter of creation, more a matter of scraping off the gunk on top to reveal the beautiful underneath.

While the erasure of our collective memory of negative things is certainly bad, I think we don’t think enough about the memory holing of positive things. It is one thing to be forced to forget what you were fighting against, but it is even more powerfully dangerous to be forced to forget what you were, and could and should still be, fighting for.

There are so many things we’ve painted over. So much beauty we’ve forgotten about in the last few years. During the peak of the Covid lockdowns, animals were found to have enjoyed greater freedom than they had in decades. In areas in which lockdowns were most strict, researchers found that animals’ movement over a 10-day period grew by 73 percent. “Animals were able to go about their business without having to worry about where the humans were,” Marlee Tucker told the New York Times.

It wasn’t just the animals, of course. We, too, began to envision a freer world than the one we’d grown accustomed to. Millions protested against police violence and racism. At these actions, the sense of freedom came less from the inherent camaraderie of marching with thousands of comrades, and more from a recognition that the rules we’d internalized about how the world worked might no longer apply. Highways stopped being sites of (in)efficient transportation for the benefit of capital, and instead became sites of demonstration and catharsis. Many friends challenged the idea of private property itself: each broken window not only a result of their anger, but a symbol of what a new world less beholden to capital might look like. Even the $600 unemployment checks the government began depositing in our accounts became a sign of better things to come; the possibility of a government that actually cared. I remember when I first got back to New York City and the vaccines first became available, going into a cavernous middle school gym in Bushwick where an army of nurses injected people by the hundreds. I felt, dare I say, proud of my country, or at least my city. This is what the world might look like if we tried just a little tiny bit.

Covid was (and is) horrible, yes, but it was also a turpentine, peeling away the layers of normal awfulness we’d grown so accustomed to. And what emerged underneath, it seemed, was compassion for humanity.

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