To this turn of events — a Muslim socialist chief executive of America’s largest city — the Right responded with characteristic restraint. “Democrats in New York City have chosen a true extremist and Marxist,” warned House Speaker Mike Johnson, “and the consequences will be felt across our entire nation.” The hard-Right commentator Laura Loomer posted: “The Islamic takeover of America is in full swing.” Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) posted a cartoon of Lady Liberty dressed in a burka.

Nearly a year on, the Big Apple has yet to succumb to an Islamo-communist takeover. Nor has it, much to the chagrin of the Left, transformed into a socialist utopia, with free electric buses gliding through the streets, public grocery stores on every block, and children playing freely under the supervision of nonbinary government employees. 

In fact, what’s notable about Mamdani’s first nine months in office is not what he has accomplished — but what he hasn’t. Despite all the predictions of a communist revolution with Islamic characteristics, the Big Apple today doesn’t look all that different from, well, 2025. We were promised Islamo-Marxism; all we got was a progressive Democrat who likes the camera.

What gives? 

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The more germane detail about Mamdani’s biography isn’t his faith or his socialist ideals. It’s that he is an urban Millennial who — avert your eyes, mullahs — met his wife on Hinge. In other words, he is a creature of social media, instinctively attuned to the demands of online self-promotion. His constant TikTok-length videos and mostly symbolic initiatives — free tickets to the Met Opera! government babysitters to allow couples to take date nights! arresting Benjamin Netanyahu! — have helped him project the image of a radical new politics while mostly allowing the city’s various bureaucracies to conduct business as normal.

Those bureaucracies, moreover, are formidable in their own right. And some of them are answerable not to City Hall, but to the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in Albany. Thus, in addition to his own taste for symbolic politics, Mamdani is hemmed in by the realities of governing.

During Mamdani’s inaugural address, the new mayor promised a “new era.” He pledged that the city would “govern expansively and audaciously,” replacing the “frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” His suite of expansive (and expensive) policies — free public buses, universal childcare, a rent freeze, and public grocery stores — gave proof of this collectivist embrace. On Jan. 1, 2026, it really seemed as though a new socialist dawn was breaking over the world’s financial capital. 

The record since is more mixed than either his admirers or his enemies allow. First, the achievements: a rent freeze for many New Yorkers, $1.2 billion in state funding for childcare, and a $22 billion pledge to build or preserve 400,000 affordable homes over the next decade. But the policies that defined his campaign haven’t panned out quite as well. His plan to launch five public grocery stores by 2029 is already mired in legal challenges, as is his controversial tax on expensive second homes in the city. Meanwhile, budgetary constraints and divisions within his own party have stalled progress on free buses.

Mamdani has been merrily posting his way through these setbacks. Whether it was singing “The Wheels on the Bus” with Barack Obama at a school, cutting an ad featuring Charli XCX music in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul, or brandishing green plantains at a grocery store, Mamdani has shown a gift for political optics. Through hundreds of zippy, viral videos, he has cultivated the impression of a hyper-productive mayor Citi-biking around the five boroughs to address the concerns of ordinary New Yorkers.

By (literally) rolling up his sleeves on camera, Mamdani has turned the less glamorous aspects of the job into a hallmark of his mayoralty. Since January, he has shared cheery videos of him fixing water fountains with plumbers, shoveling dirt onto the Williamsburg Bridge bump with city transportation workers, and filling potholes with repairmen. He has also scored easy populist wins with free opera seats for the public and discounted World Cup and US Open tickets to the public. 

Conservatives have responded by variously casting Mamdani as a reincarnated Deng Xiaoping or a closet Islamic extremist biding his time. They have seized on his decision to wear an Arsenal kurta during Eid prayers and his greeting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a smile at the 9/11 memorial. The latter brouhaha was quickly debunked after the full footage revealed that he’d only briefly embraced AOC before turning his attention, solemnly, to the reading of the names of the victims; meanwhile, Right-wing officials — not least JD Vance — were seen smiling or chuckling at various points, too.

That isn’t to say that his symbolic politics have lacked for missteps. A city-produced map of “Immigrant Enclaves” conspicuously excluded Little Italy, triggering a Sopranos-style eruption in downtown Manhattan. (The map, meanwhile, included a reference to “Little Palestine,” a phrase that has never crossed the lips of an actual New Yorker.) The mayor’s video protesting financier Ken Griffin’s house in Manhattan was roundly criticized as an ill-judged attempt to turn a billionaire into a political prop. And his grandstanding on arresting Benjamin Netanyahu — which he walked back a few days later — was a weak attempt at serving red meat to his Left-wing base.

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But by portraying Mamdani as an Islamo-communist hellbent on turning New York into Gaza-on-the-Hudson, his opponents have allowed the mayor to present himself as a moderate, even technocratic, leader more interested in reducing the cost of groceries than imposing Sharia law. Worse still, these attacks have distracted from more substantive concerns about Mamdani’s policies and ability to govern. Most pertinently, can a 34-year-old with five years in the state legislature really deliver the most ambitious agenda in a generation?

Today, Mamdani is the most popular elected official in the city. Some Democrats have even lamented that the Uganda-born mayor can’t run for higher office. But it is also possible that his symbolic gestures will soon wear thin — not with Republicans, but his own supporters. Recently, the Democratic Socialists of America and various Mamdani allies attacked the mayor over his failure to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, hated by the Left for being a tough-on-crime law-enforcer and a Zionist to boot. Mamdani has not only retained Tisch from his predecessor’s administration, but given her wide berth to do her work. 

For as long as he keeps Tisch — and the relationship between the two appears strong — Mamdani has an answer to the accusations that he is weak on crime, a common critique of Left-wing leaders. For now, crime in the city is at record lows, and subway ridership is nearing pre-pandemic levels, but a recent spate of subway killings and rise in felony assaults and hate crimes could yet test his approach to public safety. Posting slickly edited social media clips on his channels won’t suffice.

Who, then, is the real Zohran Mamdani? Is he a run-of-the-mill social democrat who realized that the key to governing was to play the radical, without actually being one? Or is his newfound pragmatism a way of demonstrating that a democratic-socialist future needn’t mean street-level disruption, chaos at City Hall, or intra-Democratic turmoil? Perhaps even he doesn’t know. But at some point, the mayor’s honeymoon will end, and Mamdani will have to show what he really stands for.

Early on we see Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), shot from behind, sitting in a chair at a desk, silhouetted by floodlights that must be burning into his face. We’re given to think that this is one of those infamous congressional hearings in which Zuckerberg has conducted himself as a sort of spirited robot, admirably defiant but also less than endearing as a representative of his business sector. Except it’s not Congress, it’s a small auditorium inside the Facebook campus, on whose stage sits Zuckerberg at a theater-prop desk. So it’s not a congressional hearing. It’s preparation for a congressional hearing, upcoming, a high-stakes training performance run by a specialist in “crisis communications”, an elegant and sensible black woman from the UK named Raya (Wunmi Mosaku), and she’s posing the expected questions to him and coaching him to do his best impersonation of a human being as he answers them.

The crisis-PR session is contentious from the start, simply because Zuckerberg is an impatient and arrogant mogul who doesn’t want to be there, but it grows outright hostile when someone else besides the British lady starts asking questions, a sharp-talking man sitting high in the auditorium, in the shadowed seats behind the floodlights, a man named Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr). Garrigan used to work with Zuckerberg at Facebook but stepped away from the company, and from a billion dollars in stock, out of principle. The British lady has brought in Garrigan, to Zuckerberg’s surprise and chagrin, because she wants a stout, smart adversary to give Zuckerberg a real workout before he goes before Congress. The Garrigan character is fictional but seems loosely based on early Facebook investor and later Facebook critic Roger McNamee.

As the film proceeds, the segments of the crisis PR session pieced throughout the narrative grow more dramatic and contentious, with Garrigan taking over the questioning and the session’s status as mere theater, practice before the real thing, fading into the background. These segments start to resemble scenes from an actual inquest, with Garrigan descending from the high seats to debate at closer quarters, and the arrogant Zuckerberg growing defensive and flustered under the gathering weight of Garrigan’s moral rightness.

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This is where the unseemly vanity comes in. Garrigan is clearly the film’s oracle, the bearer of its critical perspective and the speaker of its moral truths. In other words, he is Aaron Sorkin’s movie stand-in for Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin has made a movie fantasy in which, like a Torquemada for the good guys, he gets to put the evil robot Mark Zuckerberg under a hot lamp and make him sweat and stutter with some righteous questioning.

It’s fitting, given the inquisitorial spirit Sorkin breathes into the story so directly and shamelessly, that the critical takeaway from his film is basically: Facebook needs to censor more. In her memoir, The Power of One, the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen acknowledges that identifying and removing bad content raises often-insurmountable logistical and political challenges. For that reason, she tends to advocate algorithmic tweaks that weaken the bias for outrage and propaganda, along with a broader (though probably unworkable) desire for companies like Facebook to be more transparent about their programming and their internal research. But Sorkin, through his Carrigan avatar, presents the content challenge as one of mere common sense and moral courage, a willingness put the public good above profit and remove bad posts and bad actors from the site.

But merely putting Zuckerberg under his fantasy Inquisition isn’t enough for Sorkin. He has to decorate his simplistic message about bad content with an excited string of exclamation points. He does this by reversing time, so that Zuckerberg’s late-2021 PR session is presented as prologue for the riot that sore loser Donald Trump ginned up at the US Capitol 10 months earlier, and the riot is thus presented as the real-world manifestation of Zuckerberg’s defense of his business model, which in turn rests on various invocations of free speech.

Now, as someone who values free speech very much, I would not choose Mark Zuckerberg as my preferred defender of this foundational value. The phrase gets tainted with some potent self-interest on its way out of the mouth of the centibillionaire founder of Facebook. Indeed, an illiberal opponent of free speech who is also a filmmaker would be tempted to use the unlikeable Zuckerberg’s not-disinterested voicing of this hallowed idea, “freedom of speech”, as a way to discredit that idea.

I will not accuse Aaron Sorkin of doing this. I will accuse him of coming very close to doing this, of being heedless and power-hungry, in the way of many progressive activists and bureaucrats keen to impose direct regulation and censoring of political ideas, on social media platforms and elsewhere. Zuckerberg represents one side of a sticky dilemma that Sorkin pretends is neither sticky nor a dilemma. The ideal of free speech emerged at a time of pamphlets and newspapers and parliamentary debate. It is an odd fit, historically and practically, with globally democratized social media platforms, which do in fact reward odious forms of expressive novelty that do, sometimes, have violent and destabilizing effects. And yet treating the problems of social media as matters of problematic content — “misinformation” and “disinformation” and “extremism” — involves you in illiberal censorship more or less as a rule. Frances Haugen at least gestures at this dilemma. Aaron Sorkin treats it as just something Mark Zuckerberg would say to make money.

One odd side-effect of Sorkin’s vain, personalized fixation on Zuckerberg, and his righteous glee in hanging January 6 around Zuckerberg’s neck, is that these moves let the real architect of that idiotic moment, Donald Trump, off the hook. Trump almost certainly could have summoned an audience to Washington for his pathetic post-election tirade, and then sicced his army of moron-patriots on the Capitol building, without Facebook’s help.

But the bigger problem with Sorkin’s focus on problematic content is its shallowness as diagnosis. To see this you just have to juxtapose the earnest fixations of The Social Reckoning with technology headlines in the days and weeks before its release – a crusading movie about misinformation on social media landing amid revelations about AI swarms hacking into companies and governments, AI systems poised for recursive self-improvement, AI slop invading all forms of writing so that links of trust between teacher and student and reader and writer are forever poisoned, all of these events hinting at a possible near future in which we will be keenly nostalgic for a time when misinformation seemed like a big deal to people like Aaron Sorkin.

My point is not that The Social Reckoning was already painfully outdated the moment it was released, though it was. It’s that it identifies a tiny mole on the vast, fast-growing, anti-human body of digital technology. Its focus on content and misinformation and all that stuff barely touches the actual villainy of Facebook, and its massively profitable acquisition Instagram (purchased for a mere one billion dollars), and TikTok, and X/Twitter. The business logic of these platforms, the relationship they forge with their users (who are not customers, in the traditional sense), is essentially extractive, parasitic, vampiric. As a form of entrepreneurship, it more closely resembles the creation of life-ruining gambling apps, or manufacturing highly addictive Tianeptine (“Gas Station Heroin”) for general sale, than it does the selling of cars or refrigerators.

It’s often said that the product these companies sell for profit is our attention, and that is to a meaningful extent true. The growing dominance of short-form video on social media platforms is a sign that this particular mechanism of engagement is the best, most potent attention-hack yet discovered, as anyone who’s awoken in self-disgust from an hour-long trance of “reels” or “shorts” understands. But this experience reveals the content fixation of Aaron Sorkin, the official liberal worries about “misinformation” and “democracy”, as laughably beside the point.

In other words, the bad content that finds its way onto social media is a superficial problem, compared with the technological form that defines everyone’s participation in these platforms. This dehumanizing relationship of our dopamine systems with our computer devices was consciously designed, by people, for profit. Yes, the fact that these platforms enable bullying and degrade the mental health of certain teenagers, as The Social Reckoning mentions, is appalling. But by far the greater, deeper, larger-scale offense is that they strive, systematically and intentionally, to make everyone’s children addicted to their platforms, for profit.

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If you researched tech and social media in the 2010s, as I did for my book on family life, Little Platoons, one response you may have had was shock at the utter shamelessness of this enterprise. In 2013, a tech consultant named Nir Eyal wrote a bestselling book called Hooked: How to build Habit-Forming Products. It was filled with insights gleaned from behavioral psychology about how to program apps and platforms so that people’s use of them becomes compulsive. You see, you use a “variable schedule of rewards” to mess with people’s evolved bias for finding patterns in their experience, which lets you hijack their reward systems so they act like the rats famously programmed by B.F. Skinner. Indeed, there’s a company whose original name cynically invoked our vulnerability to such programming, Dopamine Labs (the name later changed, perhaps from a belated dose of shame, to Boundless Mind). Stanford University, the academic hub of so much tech innovation, still houses something called the Behavioral Design Lab, which has helped a generation of tech entrepreneurs refine a practice that goes by the creepily perfect Silicon Valley name “Persuasive Technology”.

This business project of inducing compulsive screen use in teenagers has largely been successful, and one of its results is that kids, their attention spans measurably degraded by the everyday psychedelia of their short-form video feeds, don’t read so good anymore. Kids everywhere not only don’t read books but, as teachers and professors will attest, can’t read books. Well done, TikTok.

I suspect progressives’ superficial focus on extremist social media content, which flared up around Trump’s 2016 election and persists in such forms as The Social Reckoning, owes in part to their long-held belief in the internet and social media as forces of liberation. For them the problem had to be the dangerous exception of extremism, not the drab, dehumanizing rule of social media addiction and stupefaction, because admitting the latter would have been to indict social media as such. And, for progressives, social media was where un-listened-to young people and oppressed identity categories went to empower themselves through self-expression. To criticize the very use-model of social media was to join stodgy luddites like me whose secret motive, they said, was to silence the marginalized people who had finally found their voices online. This corny equating of self-expression with political emancipation has characterized the post-revolutionary Left since at least the Sixties, but it became a true cultural and political force in the trauma-informed progressivism of the 2010s.

Idealizing social media platforms as tools of emancipatory expression was always naïve, given the distortive power of those tools, the subtle manipulations that made them irresistible and, thus, profitable. But it seems even more naïve now, at the unquiet dawn of whatever AI is on the verge of becoming, because it turns out that all this self-expression, all our speaking into our computer cameras and computer mics, indeed this typing-for-the-internet I’m doing right now, was and is destined to be fed as training matter into programs of machine intelligence. Listen to Larry Page describing, in 2000, the AI dreams that have been guiding Google from the beginning. It’s all for AI. It always has been.

In this light, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning registers as not just quaint and silly but downright ideological. The film is a publicity coup for its ostensible villain, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is no less a visionary than Larry Page. It’s likely that, from the early years of Facebook, he saw the busy activity of its users as not just as a source of huge advertising profits but as training material for his own contribution to the world-historical project of machine intelligence. Zuckerberg has been inducing us to feed the machine by which, after we’ve been rendered unfit to govern ourselves by digital technology’s prior stage, he and the other moguls of AI mean to replace us. Compared to this, accusing him of allowing the spread of misinformation, or blaming him for January 6, is a convenient distraction, if not a compliment.

Only last Saturday, William Chapman was mauled to death by a tiger at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. The circumstances were deeply sad. Chapman asked a fellow parkgoer to take a picture of him with the Siberian tiger in the background; he then leapt into the enclosure. “He was on all fours, praying and bowing down to the tiger,” said one witness. In footage which is by now unavoidable on social media, though police are asking you to please not watch, he points his pinky finger up to the snarling cat — signing the word “bad” in Makaton. He tells it to “stop being naughty”. 

The story quickly took on a vast parabolic power. Man and tiger were reduced to characters in a thought experiment about asymmetrical free will. The tiger is tethered to his own predatory nature; the man is unguarded, naive, jigging into his own damnatio ad bestias. Because the footage was so disturbing, people online began arguing with each other to rationalize why they watched it. The death was merely natural selection, brayed one camp; no, it was an indictment of “post-Christian morality” that the tiger was not gunned down, screeched another. Someone had to pay: the man, his absent carers, the authorities, the tiger himself. Until then, spectators will just keep watching the video, keep arguing about evolution, religion, disability, public safety and animal rights. And so we roll the dead man, and our own discomfort about his fate, quietly out of frame.

Many voyeurs even seemed to find the video darkly entertaining. These included President Trump, who posted the footage to his Truth Social feed along with the caption: “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.” The White House Rapid Response account reposted this on the app formerly known as Twitter.

The footage quickly joined the ranks of social media’s many viral snuff films: jihadi beheadings, cartel executions, dark-web torture material… They are pure abjection in Julia Kristeva’s sense of the word: their victims hover darkly between man and meat. 

Though we might not consider ourselves snuff watchers, mainstream social media is full of it. Older Millennials have been watching atrocities online since they were teenagers. The adults of the internet were weaned on scary chain emails, Flash animations, shock sites, illicit imageboards and links distributed through schools. Sites like Rotten.com, launched in 1996, provided unmoderated archives of crime-scene photographs, autopsies and accidents. In 2000 Ogrish drove the model forward by introducing video. Its slogan, “Can you handle life?”, gave gore the undeserved sheen of journalistic integrity. Then came 2 Girls 1 Cup (a gross fetish film from 2007), Tubgirl (a shock image from the Noughties) and 3 Guys 1 Hammer (a real 2007 murder filmed in Ukraine and shared widely online). 

This material used to be relegated to the shadows, curiosities or titillations passed among groups of shrieking teenagers or paying perverts. Now, snuff is as accessible and commonplace on X, Telegram, TikTok and Instagram as baking tutorials. The gore sites of yore used to pull in anonymous voyeurs; today’s versions engage respectable citizens with government titles in bio, who watch them in between checking the weather and WhatsApp. On Monday, for instance, a man was ejected from a car on a rollercoaster at the Six Flags theme park in Georgia. Disturbing images of his death — including those captured for the ride’s souvenir photographs — were unavoidable on X. As usual, there were some calls not to share them out of respect for the dead man, but those stopped nothing. The viral video of Henry Nowak’s death earlier this year fit the same pattern. 

Of course, the snuff content that seeps into the mainstream is far from the worst of it; elsewhere on the internet lurks a blue-black mass of the worst depravity imaginable. Last week, a 30-year-old man from London was jailed for leading a ring of southeast Asian monkey torturers. He’d written the scripts for the animals’ mutilation and dismemberment; the resulting videos could be watched for $500. Modern snuff such as this is a distinctly online phenomenon: extreme violence is relished by a faceless and remote spectator. And while such sadists and freaks have always existed, their ability to convene and trade has not. It’s the classic “toaster fucker” theory of the internet: before anonymous forums, someone expressing an interest in copulating with a kitchen gadget would be shamed and set right. Today he would find community with 1,000 other toaster fuckers; his life goes up in smoke. 

Meanwhile, the culture of atrocity is even being embraced by elements of US government. The former US army major who killed 13 people and an unborn child at Fort Hood in 2009, Nidal Hasan, will be executed by firing squad on 3 December this year. The Pentagon announced last week that it would livestream his demise online, the first public execution since 1937. There have been objections — Vice President JD Vance, a devout Catholic, said he was “not going to be watching it”. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops called the potential stream a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death”. It is being limply proposed that the execution is a deterrent for other would-be jihadis, yet one grandee of the American Bar Authority instead condemned the “grotesque spectacle” as an ugly excrescence of the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “eye-for-an-eye” philosophy. Trump is yet to “make a decision” on the livestream.

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Whether or not it goes ahead — and it isn’t likely considering Hasan has federal appeals remaining — filming abjection is already part of the grammar of online culture. The legitimacy of the firing squad will be degraded in the company of online horror peddlers. What’s more, the fear and respect Hegseth expects the livestream to command may as well be an ancient Roman artifact. The internet’s collective morality, fattened on senseless brutality, is long inured to violence. 

We may have lost all hope of regulating the internet. Yet we should remember that we drive its depravity, pull our seats closer to the stage in the ancient theater of human cruelty. That confused man pointing his little finger at a Siberian tiger will almost certainly persist as a stupid, cruel meme for weeks to come. For what is a spectacle without an audience?

At Donald Trump’s rally in Vandalia, the Republican nominee for governor invited a 10-year-old boy onstage and attempted to lift him to the microphone. The boy lurched backward, and Ramaswamy scrambled to keep him from falling. “Whoa!” he said. “Big guy!” To be fair, the kid was a bit of a chonker, but the problem wasn’t that Ramaswamy had failed a strongman contest. It was that he should have been smart enough to stick to the traditional baby-kissing photo-op. Instead, he managed to turn another opportunity to look like a normal human being into a viral demonstration of the opposite. 

Consider the video in which Ramaswamy shows off his baseball skills, or lack thereof. Last month, his campaign released a quick hit in which he recited his “10 Things I’ll Do for Ohio” agenda, filmed partly inside a batting cage. This was presumably meant to communicate several things at once: youth, vigor, and quintessential Ohio regular dudes-being-dudes stuff. But instead, viewers became fascinated by Ramaswamy’s swing, which, if I’m being generous, looked like a 6-year-old waving around a foam pool noodle. According to an eyewitness, Ramaswamy made contact on a mere five of 25 pitches in the slow-pitch cage, and the finished video simply replayed the “best” swings. The clip was mocked into oblivion within hours and quickly deleted from Instagram, though it lingered on TikTok, where the top comment asked the essential question: “Why would u post that swing?”

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It’s hard to imagine a more perfect political own-goal. Ramaswamy is actually athletic (he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player), but tennis presents an obvious problem: it’s the sport of country clubs and Wimbledon (which Ramaswamy also attended last year). Baseball, by contrast, is Americana. So we got the spectacle of the rail-thin Ramaswamy playing badly at the sport focus groups presumably recommended. Maybe he should have stuck to eating stadium hot dogs instead?

Then there was the clown in the three-piece suit who had a serious question for Ramaswamy about health care policy. Or rather, the mime asked a serious question, and the clown translated it. That was the surreal scene at a Turning Point USA event this spring at Ohio State University, where the Republican nominee for governor found himself fielding a question from a silent man in white face paint assisted by a red-nosed interpreter. The clown introduced himself as a “red-blooded American clown,” apparently to distinguish himself from the more Left-wing faction of Big Clown, and assured Ramaswamy he hadn’t been infected by the “woke mind virus.” It felt like a hilarious Nathan Fielder bit, yet the fact that this anecdote has barely registered nationally says something about Ramaswamy’s feckless Ohio gubernatorial bid — the whole thing feels like a clown show. 

The trouble follows him even into rooms that ought to be friendly. At the Young Americans for Liberty convention at Xavier University in Cincinnati in July, Ramaswamy was heckled from the moment he walked on stage, pressed on Israel among other issues, and he left after several minutes of a scheduled 30-minute speech. The trouble peaked when, speaking to a room full of young people, he said people of his generation had “already made it” and would be fine, while their generation would “pay the price.” To an audience of college-age libertarians already primed to revolt, it sounded like a billionaire shrugging at their future. “You’re a political cretin, and you need to get the fuck out of here,” one audience member reportedly yelled at Ramaswamy. The candidate then told the room that the real divide was between “winners and whiners” (and a crowd that didn’t see itself as whiners, therefore whined), prompting a columnist for The Columbus Dispatch to say the speech belongs to “the hall of fame of embarrassing political performances.”

Ramaswamy keeps tripping over the same rake because he is attempting something more difficult than winning an election — he’s trying to change genres mid-career. His 2024 model was a different product: fast, combative, and hyperverbal — tailor-made for the internet. Put him in a television studio like fellow talk-a-mile-a-minute conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, and he would redirect hostile questions, deliver six provocations in 90 seconds or fewer, and walk out with enough clips to feed Twitter for a week.

Running for governor requires a different breed of creature. You can’t govern the Buckeye State entirely from the replies to an Elon Musk post on X. (On a similar note, Musk’s 2024 barnstorming campaign on behalf of President Trump drew yawns until he pulled out his giant pocketbook.) Here’s the thing: state politics remains stubbornly physical. It requires church basements, county fairs, football games, college auditoriums, and prolonged conversations with men who would like to explain exactly what happened to the bridge on Route 7. Hence, the Harvard- and Yale-educated biotech multimillionaire turned national MAGA celebrity seems stuck in what might be described as an elaborate Normal Ohio Guy Simulator, and keeps failing all the side quests. 

Did you hear the one about how he told Ohio reporters that he loves long drives? His campaign finance reports told a different story. The data shows that he has spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft since launching his campaign, including nearly $560,000 paid to a company whose listed address is a house he owns. Federal flight records reviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal found that some of those flights were the kind of journeys most Ohioans would undertake armed with a Honda Accord and a hot Sheetz coffee: Columbus to Cleveland, Columbus to Youngstown, Columbus to Port Clinton. So not long drives, short flights then? One Republican put it to him bluntly: “Park the damn jet.”

When childcare costs came up last year, he suggested Ohio could make life easier for parents by keeping children in school until 4 p.m. and potentially moving toward year-round schooling. It was an impressive inversion of populism: instead of making childcare cheaper — simply make childhood shorter. The proposal was contained in a casual social-media exchange, rather than a formal policy announcement, his campaign later stressed. That nevertheless disappeared when the video was reposted. Oops. 

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None of this would matter if Ramaswamy were cruising toward the governor’s mansion, which should be a given for a Republican in Ohio. Donald Trump carried the state three times, most recently by 11 points. Republicans hold every statewide non-judicial office. The last Democrat elected governor was Ted Strickland in 2006. Yet according to the latest Suffolk University/USA TODAY report, Ramaswamy is down nearly 10 points to Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director who became one of Ohio’s most recognizable figures during Covid. Polymarket has dropped Ramaswamy’s odds of victory to just 34%. No doubt, some of Ramaswamy’s struggles are by proxy, driven by his affiliation with MAGA and the country’s growing dissatisfaction with the second Trump administration. But the own goals aren’t helping.

Some of the hostility is coming from an especially awkward direction. Ramaswamy spent years cultivating the Very Online Right, but portions of that movement have become increasingly hostile to him due to racism. Nick Fuentes has urged his followers to deny Ramaswamy the governorship and attacked his Indian heritage in explicitly racist terms. At conservative events, hecklers have challenged him on immigration and H-1B visas (of which Indians are the largest recipients by far). Ironically, the candidate who made his national reputation arguing that America should transcend identity politics has thus found himself confronting an identity problem inside his own coalition. 

This may explain the increasingly desperate Ohio cosplay. But you have to pull the act off convincingly. Yes, you can memorize the right folksy talking points and put yourself in all the right photo-ops, but the ease with which a successful politician moves through those encounters is harder to acquire. Now, there’s a clip of him almost dropping a 10-year-old boy everywhere, with New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen declaring it “worse than Dukakis in the tank.”

Perhaps, but the real tank job here is one rapidly fading campaign for governor. 

In the small hours of Sunday 16 August, five teenage boys crashed head-on into a family on their way to Dublin Airport to catch a flight to a wedding; none of the boys survived. They had been driving a BMW stolen during a night of carjacking and house break-ins. The family — three adult sisters and a little boy — were all injured; two remain in critical condition. A police spokesman described the crash as part of a trend of “gangs” of young men “trying to outdo each other” with Grand Theft Auto-style car thefts, chases and police exploits. Their audience: TikTok. Mary Aiken, a professor of forensic cyberpsychology at the University of East London, told The Guardian: “They have one foot in the real world and one foot in cyberspace.” 

Grief quickly made way for anger. It emerged that three of the boys were known to Ireland’s childhood social services agency; one had been living under their care. It also transpired that local police had been instructed not to chase them. The public responded with fury, raising more than €660,000 for the injured family in the other car. A predictable outcry was volleyed at TikTok itself, whose representatives said they were “proactively engaging” with Ireland’s media regulator. The Chinese tech giant then refused to appear in front of a government committee on removing dangerous content, saying ongoing investigations by the media watchdog and the police prevented it from doing so. 

At the funerals of two of the boys on Friday, photoshopped images of them squaring up on the stairway to heaven accompanied their white horse-drawn carriages. A vigil was held for the injured sisters that evening. An awful, indecorous story seemed to have drawn to a close. 

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Then, less than a week after the crash, the same thing happened again: five young men died in a preventable collision, this time taking two police officers with them, 37-year-old Matthew Blades and 38-year-old Tom Clough. As before, five boys and men aged 17 to 23 were packed in a Volkswagen Passat bombing the wrong way down the A66 near Middlesbrough in the early hours of Saturday morning. A night of violence by rival gangs — including a stolen car being driven into the house of one of the dead boys’ fathers — sparked a police chase. The boys evaded one squad by joining the freeway; 10 seconds after that chase was called off, they hit another parked police car. Everyone involved was killed. 

Cleveland police said there was no evidence that the fatal crash was filmed for TikTok. But one of the boy racers, 18-year-old Makai Saddington, had previously posted police pursuits on his TikTok account, according to The Sun. In May, one of these videos showed teenagers zooming through a housing estate followed by blue lights. In another, they joyride then torch a Nissan.

A Facebook tribute to Saddington shows the boy in a Nike tracksuit throwing a gang sign; “all of you” are invited to the “baloon release” in his memory. At the event, masked youths “roared around the field” next to a church vigil for the dead, according to The Times. The Prime Minister sent his condolences, then on Monday said glorifying dangerous driving online was “truly reprehensible”. Tributes to the officers described them as “heroes”; Blades was just about to begin coaching an under-7s soccer team. One of his two young sons was on the squad. His colleague, Clough, was a former soldier; his family said he was “always on public duty throughout his short life”. Nine men and three women have since been arrested in connection with the crash, some on suspicion of firearm offenses and threats to kill. 

On Monday evening another police pursuit, this time in Warwickshire, saw a 19-year-old boy die after crashing into a woman in her seventies; she sustained critical injuries. The item was among the main headlines on Radio 4’s World at One. Fatal crashes happen every day; the events this summer, it seems, represent something bigger.

The mindlessness of speeding the wrong way down the motorway is self-evident. But there have always been bored teenagers, vandals with graffiti cans, incorrigible yutes with the urge to smash up garden gnomes. There has also always been adolescent road stupidity; boy racers have been doing donuts in Morrisons parking lots since the dawn of time. But this month’s deaths are not being spoken about online as banal accidents: these twin fatalities, just days apart at the fag-end of the school holidays, have provoked an especially intense feeling of disgust. Thousands of under-the-line comments ask the same horrified question: what is social media doing to our young people?

TikTok itself is clearly not the root cause of teenage recklessness. Teenagers are, by definition, doomed to battle against their own meaninglessness. They are destructive by design, seeking dopamine and adrenaline, wired to go on borderline suicidal jaunts for the meager reward of peer admiration. What social media has done, however, is provide ASBO-ism with a new imagined audience, the wondrous potential for your midnight misdeeds not just to shock your parents but thousands of online strangers, many of whom will comment approvingly on just how mint giving police the runaround really is. 

This sort of tomfoolery is also tonally rural: teenage boys in the middle of nowhere get their kicks by terrorizing country lanes, far more than the ruffians of the metropole — many of whom won’t even learn to drive. There is something maddening about the boredom of countryside adolescence. In a village near where I grew up, two troubled foster teens were rumored to have been driven to distraction by their tutting fogeyish neighbors and took their revenge by “tatering” a goose. That is, they stoned it to death with Maris Pipers. Nowt so queer as folk, especially when those folk are teen outcasts who lack parental discipline. The Tater Taliban kept the good locals talking for years — but that was before the age of algorithm-engineered social media megavirality. 

Many a chav has smashed up a bus stop to the giggles of his four friends; today we must factor in the spectral presence of four million strangers. Teenage delinquency is a local ritual, a spell to conjure attention. The more imagined spectators, the more glorious the act. TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram turn the spotty GCSE candidate into an intrepid digital gladiator; they give his boredom meaning.

Because all teenagers experience crises of purpose and identity, each act of rebellion has its own meaning. The meaning of graffiti is “I was here”. Theft, “everything is mine”. Joyriding, “I’m not scared”. Gang-larping, “I belong”. It’s all quite touching when you look at these irritations through the clouded lenses of a frustrated adolescent. In a strange way, too, ASBO-ism is a bonding ritual for difficult young men: this is not the bedroom-bound psychopathy of a lone school shooter, but the forging of fraternities around vague notions of omertà. All of this was understood in the age of moral panic around “hoodies”, those irreverent hoodlums David Cameron once wanted us to cuddle (or so his critics said). The difference today is that the stakes go far beyond local notoriety: the world is now the teen tearaway’s stage.

Few of us would oppose the careful regulation of daft viral trends which, for example, encourage young men to drive the wrong way down the motorway. It’s common sense: platforms should be quicker to ban accounts and videos that glorify criminality and dangerous driving. The extent to which governments can compel TikTok to act is of course hampered by the usual legislative snags — Politico reported tech insiders’ concerns that the Online Safety Act gives ministers little recourse to act on any offenses other than “priorities” like terrorism. Dangerous driving doesn’t get a look-in. 

Yet the motivating principle is something we cannot possibly keep in check: the imagined audience. This is the real jet-fuel for global adolescent narcissism. Teenagers have an often desperate desire to be seen. And the hypothetical hippodrome of admirers cheering and booing the lonely boy with a provisional license makes him a “legend”. In place of talent, temerity will do. Even when under-16s are banned from social media, they will continue to exist on this new and perverse stage. Rather than dismissing this month’s motorway tragedies as incidental, we should see them as part of the new pantheon of online adolescence. 

General audiences take boy-racer videos for what they are: pleas for attention from the fast, the furious and the fuckwitted. TikTok should ban them, of course — but there’s not that much else we can do in the face of tyrannical teenagers who go around nicking cars. We can train our police in high-speed chases, issue tickings-off, and even roll out public-safety campaigns in schools, but these prove to be blunt instruments against an adolescent brain set on stupidity. 

Perhaps the real lesson, at a time when social-media firms are facing major legal reckonings over child safety, is to think more broadly about how this technology is changing the psychological picture of Western youth — making them more reckless, more hungry for attention. These stories contain ancient warnings about schoolboy rashness, but they also prophesy a frightening future where risk is rewarded by faceless people on your phone. It’s difficult to imagine this summer’s motorway tragedies taking place without TikTok, and the invisible millions who give bored teenagers something to live — and die — for. 

Social media would have us believe that this dynamic is now the norm in heterosexual relationships. Men err like bumbling toddlers; women manage and chastise and cajole them. These videos are fed to me continually on TikTok: women telling horror stories about terrible dates; women offering advice on harnessing “dark feminine energy” to manipulate love interests; women fresh out of breakups denying the value of romantic love at all. Associating with men, these videos tell us, is a matter of tragic compromise — an embarrassing slip into an enclosure of backwards baboons destined to disappoint us. The assumption, borrowed from the language of motherhood, is that girlfriends have a monopoly on reason and on perspective; their partners, on the other hand, are hopelessly in thrall to impulsive urges and emotions, base creatures reliant on sex and drink. In this dynamic, the woman’s celestial faculties have one major source: therapy culture.

The cult of the Therapy Girlfriend was thrown into relief last week in a skit which went viral on X. In it, a woman sits across from her date; she quizzes him on various attributes. Age? 28. Attachment style? Secure. Credit score? 780. Therapy? Once a week. So far, he passes muster. But then the guy scuppers the deal by asking her to “go to my place”; she weighs anchor.

Yet it wasn’t the woman’s skittishness about casual sex that summoned discourse; it was the fact that attending regular therapy was on her list of requirements — once a week being the bare minimum for dateability. Assessing it later, the commentator Colin Wright wrote that the requirement made sense because of “how thoroughly many Left-wing women view nearly every interaction through a kind of ‘therapy ideology’ with its own special language”. He went on to describe how such women conceive of therapy as a sort of “mental-health gymnasium” — part of the necessary upkeep of every healthy adult.

Rather than emerging fully fledged into the adult world, there to deal with the ups and downs of life, therapy culture has us with one wing dangling from the chrysalis — always ready to be bashed by a gust of wind. To go through life unscathed requires Joan Didion’s vision of self-centered psychological labor: “[We are] something to work at, work on, ‘make an effort’ for and subject to an hour a day of emotional nautilus training.” With all this self-discovering, who has any time for seduction?

Clearly, there are occasions when therapy serves a purpose. Men and women alike benefit from it when living with grave psychiatric disorders; in many cases, these interventions should be lifelong with otherwise disastrous consequences. But should all men, even those without troubling histories, be marched off to a headshrinker for the mere purpose of neutering defects, buffing out the bad before they are allowed near a relationship? Any reasonable dater would say no.

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And yet, increasingly, social media pins romantic disappointment on the sins of untherapized men. The language of relationship “attachment styles” is a nauseating example — a bullshit taxonomy of daters said to be doomed by early parental relationships and who, in a better world, would simply be called “desperate” (instead of “anxious”), “not into you” (instead of “avoidant”) and “normal” (instead of “secure”). The greatest trial sent a dater’s way seems to be to fall for an “avoidant” — those who run from intimacy because their mother didn’t rush in when they cried in the crib, or something — and advice on how to “handle” such partners is everywhere in the online femosphere. Such women would do better to avoid those who don’t like them back. Put that on a T-shirt. But the comforting delusion that this attachment-style discourse affords women is that it lets them avoid the horror of simply not being wanted; instead, they are free to meditate their way through an “avoidant discard” (when said partner ups and leaves out of nowhere) by a man whose inner child feels abandoned, and so is scared of intimacy, or whatever the rationale may be. As usual in the theater of hyperindividualism, everyone else is to blame. Easy to see how this flattering framework might have gained traction.

Equally, any amorous mishap can be palmed off on a partner who has failed to do “the work”: the usual, devastatingly reasonable causes of breakups — loss of feeling, wandering eyes, the contempt of familiarity — are traded for ego-friendly explanations: “He is frightened by his enormous passion for me”; “He wants to be with someone less emotionally challenging”; “He is afraid of replicating the mistakes of his parents’ marriage” and so on and so on. Let’s not face the fact that, sometimes, he’s just not that into you. Humility and resilience around this truth is an essential lesson of adulthood — far more valuable than any therapy package going.

This is not to say that the Therapy Girlfriend intentionally weaponizes counseling-speak in her romantic campaigns. In fact I’d contend that the assumptions of therapy — that we must continually enforce “boundaries”, manage “disclosures”, hold “dialogues” and seek “growth opportunities” — pervade Millennial and Gen Z dating culture to an extent that they no longer bear the antiseptic stench of their clinical birthplace. Therapy culture is hopelessly in bed with identity politics, and adherents of one are all but guaranteed to cleave to the other: its obsessions are the same, primarily the unimpeachable traumatized individual, whose needs and expectations supersede those of all others. Its emphasis on “empathy” always seems to go only one way: towards the therapy subject. Even in the context of couples’ therapy — something which, shockingly, I have known unmarried couples in their twenties to do in London (just end it!) — the “discoveries” of therapy seem far more likely to advantage the woman, who is encouraged by our culture to be more analytical, perfectionist and cautious in heterosexual dating. We go through our teens and twenties being told by TikTok dating gurus to fear and loathe men who are both guaranteed and determined to take advantage of, two-time and/or abandon us, such is the culture of fear around relationships; therapy culture is the peg with which we can hold our noses if we must associate with one. We women are encouraged to wield theories about personal growth and the emotional trigger as a sort of disinfectant: get with the program or be cast out — you’re a romantic biohazard.

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Now, don’t get me wrong — our exasperated kitchen-berator from the bed-puke breakup video can clearly do better: this man is an unsalvageable loser. The problem is that when women are encouraged to use the teacherly language of pop therapy (which, unlike real therapy, flatters the help-seeker rather than challenging them), they make losers of everyone they date. Yes, some men — like some women — are unstable to the point of being beyond saving; but a reasonable dating culture would tell us to avoid them, not to reconstruct them. But the Therapy Girlfriend necessarily turns the entire male dating pool into a shuffling army of bashful apologetics, self-flagellating for their criminal lack of “inner work” or suffering through ritual weeping sessions to show their emotional literacy.

And, critically, the Therapy Girlfriend avoids all fun. Love interests should not be cowed by a watchful therapist lingering in the background of all amorous encounters, like the forever-scowling HR team of a midsized corporate office. Men are right to be suspicious of women steeped in the language of “grounding” and “journeys”. These concepts are so often rigged towards things that do not a good relationship make: cautiousness, endless analysis and fragility. At the precious center is always the therapized person, cradling their own self-esteem. In striving to be perfect, placid and invulnerable beings, we miss out on the thrill of romantic risk; the pleasure of being around people who are perhaps not precisely like ourselves. Falling in love is by its nature “dysregulating”, a spinning blizzard, a waking dream. It very often ends in tears — but it’s always worth it. Therapy Girls reading this: send your inner child off to crèche. At some point the grown-ups have to do the talking. If not, you might just let the good times pass you by.

At the time of writing, Andy Burnham has more than 350,000 followers on TikTok. Our new prime minister follows only three accounts: UK Labour, Labour North West and a middle-aged Nigerian woman named Bemi Orojuogun. Who she? Zoomers know her as “Bus Aunty” — a content creator who blew up in 2024 for posting silent, selfie-mode videos showcasing her love for London buses. It’s the sort of thing an older relative would put on Facebook for a handful of likes; over on TikTok the gimmick earned her 440,000 followers (more than the PM) who all fawn over her pure-hearted, just-naff-enough Boomerism. Off the back of her success Orojuogun has collaborated with brands and bodies cashing in on her Zoomer fandom — among them Burberry, TfL and UniDays. 

Last week she linked up with Burnham himself. Over an inevitable audio clip of The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, Bus Aunty beams into the camera while Burnham edges, Nosferatu-like, towards her, clasping her shoulders in an ungainly embrace as a green double-decker cruises past, its sign reading “£2 bus fares” in homage to the new government’s flagship policy. One could not imagine a more bang-on totem for Burnham’s Britain: twee, memeable civicslop with a side-order of Morrissey. The video has more than half-a-million likes: Burnhammaxxing is working. And it’s horrifying.

Elsewhere on TikTok, Burnham presents to camera, summarizing the “five things I’ve done in my first week as prime minister”. This video is aimed at distracted Zoomers with body-temperature IQs: like Cocomelon dancing fruits, the PM hypnotizes us with bouncy subtitles and rousing zoom-ins as he runs through the days of the week. “Monday I launched a new national drive to end rough sleeping. On Tuesday I announced a tax cut on energy bills. On Wednesday, that’s ‘wed’, ‘nes’, ‘day’…” Except not the last one, obviously. But it may as well have been judging by the intellectual heft of the commenters who propose big-brain policies like: “Lower retirement age to free up jobs” and “make Freddos 10p again gaffer”. 

In another David Brent-worthy video, Burnham shows a chinless RADA-reject around No. 10 North, a dreary gray boardroom seeded with memorabilia. There’s a gold Smiths disc (“I need to return that to Johnny Marr, actually! Haw haw”). A whiteboard doodle of the PM playing football against Liverpool (get oop mush!) and, in a sphincter-tightening “gaffe”, the camera lingers on a big screen showing YouTube search results for “how to make the perfect cup of English tea”. “Woah! Hang on,” says our unelected premier, slamming the laptop shut. “You don’t need to see that.” It’s dismal, but the troglodytes of TikTok snaffle up the scraps anyway. “Nice to see a prime minister with some personality it’s a breath of fresh air,” says one commenter. Another reads: “Seems a bit down to earth tbh Keir Starmer just came across as a silver spoon out of touch ponch [sic] that took everything super serious.” And perhaps this commenter, “Harley”, has a point: how daft to be forever banging on about gilts or government spending. Booooring! Let’s see that record collection. I love jellied eels, me — oh wait, wrong region. I mean, erm, shove some chips in a barm cake. What tax rises?

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Welcome to the next three years: a neverending bad trip of Burnham sitting with his chancellor, John Healey, “blind-ranking pub snacks”. Crunching down on scampi fries, our PM says “it takes me back to the back room of the Cherry Tree”, wherever that is. But it doesn’t matter where it is, you prole: what matters is that it sounds right, it sounds like the sort of place where Mark E. Smith once shoved a pork pie up his nostril, or the cast of Coronation Street did pre-drinks before butt-chugging Vimto in the Hacienda loos. That’s Manchesterism for you: weapons-grade relatability, gobblicious reference-grabbing. You will be related to, ya posh twat! Yes, I’m the one deciding the future of this country — wanna hear my favorite Stone Roses B-side do ya? Mad fer it!

The problem is that TikTok has its own trapdoors — and you can just as easily look a fool online as on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. The satirical TikToker known as Zoë Bread, known for rattling low-level council officials with absurd trolling campaigns, may be just the right prick to burst the Burnham bubble. The 31-year-old found fame hiding her face behind a slice of bread while terrorizing Manchester City Council over misplaced parking signage with her signature faux-naif flat affect. Lately she has turned her attention to a series of enormous warehouses despised by residents in the Astley Business Park in Wigan, entering a David and Goliath battle with the local authorities and the logistics firm Whistl, which runs the site. 

No doubt sniffing the PR opportunity of engaging with Bread, a hyper-online “little guy” freedom fighter, Burnham appeared on the radio in January saying that he did not have a “formal role” in the dispute as mere mayor, but that there had to be “work to find a fair remedy”. Now that he’s in No. 10, Bread is holding his feet to the fire. Over a rapid-fire montage of the Prime Minister’s social-media campaigning in her latest video, she said: “I’m sure if we tag him enough we can make sure he sees this video in case he’s forgotten.” The commenters, all die-hard Breadheads, are keeping their eyes peeled. “This could be his first real test. We are all watching. Go Zoe,” reads one. Another makes explicit the craven irony of Burnhammaxxing: “I’ve seen Andy Burnham respond to so many TikToks. Weird he’s not picked up this one yet.” 

That’s the thing about social media: at some point it becomes its own constituency with bespoke demands. If you’re a compulsive people-pleaser as Burnham seems to be — aides are said to complain about him always being late, forever waylaid by a thousand impromptu conversations with the general public — might this deter you from making unpopular calls, cashing in your political capital? And if you don’t make TikTokers’ dreams come true, what then?

Prime ministerial popularity contests are, for this reason, always suspect. And for normal voters, they are infuriating. Anyone who wants to be treated as an adult by our politicians must find the Burnham charm offensive frustrating. For this slopstream we can thank aides including 28-year-old Abby Tomlinson, the “brains behind the strategy”. Tomlinson apparently cut her teeth on whipping up the #milifandom, Ed Miliband’s erstwhile fan club (though who remembers anything about “Red Ed” bar the bacon sandwich and “hell yes I’m tuffenuff”?). Tonally, Tomlinson’s Burnham creation is what “Yookay” mastermind Drukpa Kunley has coined “Buzzballism”, a vibe with “the aesthetic sensibilities of a 19-year-old woman”. Named for the spherical corner-shop beverage clutched by your archetypal milquetoast-progressive sociology student, Buzzballism is everything Burnham’s campaign plumps for: diverse, trite and defensive with the ironical springboard of gay slang (“it’s giving intersectionality”). Kunley aligns it with “multicultural Britain twee” — Paddington, Benjamin Zephaniah and PinkPantheress. A cheeky sassy lovely-jubbly Blitz-spirit bangers-and-mash Bus Aunty paradise. 

If Burnham wants to cozy up to this political caste, it is because its values are exceptionally nebulous and vibes-based. This is highly convenient for a premier in the opening salvos of an unwinnable battle to remain a popular British PM, because at least there’s hope that personality might distract, for a little while at least. Buzzballistas are highly susceptible to Britcore polyfilla — discussion of biscuits, bands and UKTV Gold, and the like — and this above anything is Burnham’s brand. These young women also tend to be the great influencers of Zoomer politics: their takes on social issues, often integrated within favorite formats like TikTok makeup tutorials, make their way to the apathetic normies who care more about general principles (kindness, equality, justice) than their downstream realities (prohibitions, taxation, laws). Buzzballism keeps things light: this is a comfy corner of the discourse in which our new PM seems determined to shelter while he can.

What’s not to like? Well, this. The problem with social media Burnhammaxxing is that it insults the intelligence of the British public, who, we hope, require more action and scrutiny than a few campy TikToks. The new PM’s team may think tickling Gen Z is win-win, but replicating every trend — childhood throwbacks, Love Island references, “morning run” POVs — may bite Burnham on the backside when it turns out that high-ranking politicians are definitionally unrelatable, remote and exceptional, and are drained of popularity as soon as the first inevitable banana peel appears. It’s no comfort for leaders to be “just like us” when they end up leading us off the edge of a cliff. 

Nor will Burnham’s your-cool-uncle posturing save his rep among his young PIPster fans, who look likely to be whacked with big changes to their welfare qualification to fund the PM’s ambitious social-care plans. He used a weekend breakfast interview to signal that he would “get really serious as a country at getting welfare down” — probably including the 87,000 16 and 17-year-olds on PIP, many of them for mental health and neurodiversity — and kick away the crutch for the million-odd NEETs who are more likely than most to spend all day shut in their bedrooms, slobbering over his TikTok persona. If this is the demographic he hopes to court, can he really smite them in his first month in office? That’s the problem with all this relatability: soft-as-grease parents who want to be a toddler’s “friend” soon discover their little tyrant’s lack of respect when it’s time to tell them “no”. 

Burnham is but a week in; we should give new prime ministers time to prove their mettle and allow them to be, sometimes, unpopular. Better that than a revolving door of hostages (or sausages, as Starmer might call them) to public opinion. But while giving him a fair shot, we should absolutely be suspicious of Burnhammaxxing. Politicians are not there to form cozy parasocial relationships with voters; at best they end up toothless totems of former optimism like Bernie Sanders, and at worst disgraced clowns like Boris Johnson. No, they are there to get on with the job: a twat in a T-shirt is a twat all the same.

The diatribe dragged wearily on: she’d never want a son — what the hell would she do with it? — and she couldn’t wait to be a “chic divorcée”, quite an ambition for a woman with only a single long-term boyfriend under her belt. Every man she met promised harm, risk and psychic poison; every guy in a bar or on Hinge was bound to ghost her, or cheat on her, or tell his friends she had fat thighs. Men only wanted big-titted bimbos; those women in turn were shallow patsies who lacked the rich inner lives of, say, herself. I reeled off our male mutual friends: “Is he evil?” I asked of the softly spoken journalist devoted to his fiancée whose worst known habit was being too generous with trays of shots. Her reply: “Not yet.”

This was not my first such evening, nor were this woman’s views especially radical in my milieus in New York or London. I was not surprised, then, by the depressing revelations in the New Statesman’s gripping cover story on “Angry Young Women” last week. The article drew on polling of 2,000 Britons between 18 and 30, finding that three times more women than men held a negative view of the opposite sex (21% versus 7%). They were more pessimistic about their futures, more likely to feel that the odds were stacked against them. Soi-disant feminists interviewed at university clubs would gloat that they “don’t care for” men, nor would they date, or be friends with, one they disagreed with politically. 

To older or less online readers, all this must seem shocking. The suspicion, the detachment, the hopelessness; it’s not how most men or women recall the ups and downs of dating. Yet the landscape has changed: these women were teens when the first volleys of #MeToo were sounding across social media; their early romantic experiences were mediated by dating apps; their partners’ sexual appetites were honed by the ubiquity of hardcore porn. To cope, the feminine cyberspace has warped into something dark and cynical. In incel culture, total romantic resignation is known as “the blackpill”: while the so-called manosphere preaches the inevitability of rejection based on looks or status, its incipient female version — the femosphere — slaps acolytes around the chops and warns them of the abject humiliation they’ll face should they be so weak as to fraternize with a sex both destined and determined to hurt them. This certainty unites the femosphere’s twin poles: the dejected women like my friend who’ve “given up”, and the “dark feminine” influencers who tell them instead to use male decrepitude to their advantage. For both camps, the bestiary of modern men is 1,000 synonyms for “dick” — fuckboi, softboi, finance bro, DJ, pervert, weirdo, fascist, too nice: the man mavens of TikTok tell us that if we must interact with one, we should do it only for personal gain. 

On TikTok — the crucible of Gen Z female culture — “dating experts” such as SheraSeven coach their followers first to accept the Badness of Men and then to profit from it. Seduction is not about romance but leverage; women must rinse men for all they’ve got; “if he’s not paying, he’s playing”. Women should never reveal their true feelings, only select “targets” who offer to buy them something within the first 15 minutes of interacting and, most importantly, remember that we are “single until we’re married”. All men cheat, Shera tells us; she dares deniers to “bet your life on it and see if you stay alive”. Dating is a race to the bottom and men languish on the ocean floor: gaming the system gives the canny among us a snorkel. If that’s how young women are being told to view prospective partners, is it any surprise that many want to withdraw from dating entirely?

Those who do are comforted by spreading their dejection to other women. The femosphere is foreclosing on the life-giving possibilities of love (300,000 BC – 2026 AD) so as to reinforce itself; dig beneath the headstone and you’ll find that villainous worm, female intrasexual competition, which gluts on universal despair. Misery loves company, and the quietly cutthroat dynamics familiar to anyone who went to an all-girls school are extrapolated into adulthood through gossip, mockery and eye-rolling when a member of the coven shows signs of hope. She’ll learn, the grumbling goes. At the end of the day, he’s still a man.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the philosophies of both “dark feminine” influencers and the despairing celibates who obsess over a vicious caricature of the opposite sex. In her radical cynicism (though not in her sexual aggression), Shera is the mirror image of Andrew Tate, another profiteer of gutter sex discourse. Both philosophies desecrate one of the finest human faculties — the romantic imagination. They limit boys and girls to callous, incurious, self-defeating futures devoid of hope or affection, sighing armies of Houellebecqinos. 

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By Poppy Sowerby

But the biggest problem with the female blackpill is that it’s intellectually dishonest. The bitterness of incel ideology relies on gormless simplicity: feminism bad, women selfish, men wronged. Its logic dissolves on contact with real women. Satisfaction, beauty, romantic success — such blessings streak through populations like raspberry ripple, even among those men fated to have weak jaws. Life is not so unfair. Nor is it for young women, who are no more destined for loneliness or disconnection than incels are: the new cohort of blackpilled Zoomettes are only doomed by their delusion, by too much time spent rehearsing their own misery. For a generation so fixated on the sacred and unique nature of personhood, it should not be so easy to write off an entire sex; women were once denied key rights on that very basis, and so we should know better. As a category, men were once permitted or encouraged to be promiscuous, aggressive and extractive with women. Sometimes, in some countries and on some corners of the internet, they still are. This does not doom them all, and especially not today.

The false logic of Angry Young Women is fragile; the only way to sustain such perverse fantasies about the inherent Badness of Men is never to interact with one. Unfortunately just that is happening all over the world, as the sexes splinter into a perpetual school disco, sniggering and shuffling their feet as a way of avoiding romantic risk. Women who deign to go to the dark side — i.e. go on dates — venture there only with pegs on their noses. Here in New York they defensively uncouple sex and love; they boot boys out at 2am; they hold the lowest of expectations and their finger over the “block” button like the sword of Damocles. Hope invites snipes from friends, and breakups jubilant schadenfreude. Feminism is brazenly misinterpreted as hatred of and opposition to men, and wielded as a club to beat them with. 

The intoxicating appeal of the female blackpill is its vain simplicity: it’s not that I’m flawed, or insecure, or even less desirable than another — it is that the world was not built for me. It is incel cope in a bow, blackpill in pink varnish, and it is bullshit. Get some fresh air and you’ll see the world is not an unfriendly place — yes, even its men. By their nature, sex and love come with terrifying risk; many men are physically dangerous, or at the very least might hurt your feelings. But there is a vast difference between vigilance and resignation — and in that gap might be the best moments of your life.

Influencers slouch around their kitchens pouting, strut across the road dragging small dogs or squint through small black sunglasses in their living rooms; whatever they do, they do it in medium-wash denim and try their best to look as though they’re about to leave the house for a high-powered job (j-o-b… look that word up).

The men aren’t behaving much better. Bands of bros have begun to clog up East Village bars in backwards JFK Jr Kangol caps, or skate through Midtown in suit and trench coat; some have even submitted to being “styled” by their turtlenecked girlfriends. While in 1988 People magazine was calling John John “the sexiest man alive”, today Gen Z are making edits captioned “he’s my fashion killa”, under which other Zoomers purr: “he’s so Lana Del Rey actually”. There’s even a JFK Jr lookalike contest in Washington Square Park on Sunday (Iran, if you need a target…); America’s prince, as he was known in his Nineties heyday, has been discovered by a new generation of admirers.

The Bessette/Kennedy look is Zoomer crack, but so is the lore. Son of a slain president meets a pretty Manhattan party girl — a publicist at Obsession-era Calvin Klein, no less. They meet (while he’s dating Daryl Hannah), they marry and then they die, along with Bessette’s sister, in spectacular fashion in 1999. For Americans who secretly crave royal intrigue, they always embodied something approaching their own House of Windsor. And today, as grand American dynasties make way for populist parvenus like the Trumps, the Kennedy Curse, still at work, condemns this white-bread couple to a fashion girly’s Pinterest boards, there to cycle and shout and snog forevermore. For a brief shining moment, the Kennedy clan embodied muscular, forward-leaning confidence; today the torch is carried by a worm-brained health secretary and a deeply unserious Millennial congressional candidate. It feels good to remember them in their prime.

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Like Lady Di, fortunately, JFK Jr and Bessette are petrified in photogenic youth; the writers of Love Story made it clear that the parallels are baked in, directly inspired by royal blockbuster The Crown (the screenwriter Connor Hines said he’d been inspired to cover Kennedy and Bessette after watching the Netflix series). Resembling Diana too is the fey Bessette, who declined to give interviews and so was in her time known as wounded, inscrutable, the woman with “the downcast eyes”. And just like the British royals, the pair represent the faded glamor of a lost world.

For the many Zoomer fans of the series, of course, the lost world is not Camelot but a decade which even those of us who scraped 20th-century birthdays certainly cannot remember. Nineties New York is a foreign country for transplants like me, a dreamland of square jaws, land-lines and the print press. My suspicion is that the tragic hero and heroine of this tale were really quite ordinary; his pedigree and her muteness propelled a myth which would have wilted in the social-media age. His image was carefully manicured — after all he was plotting a stab at his birthright, politics — and hers was in the hands of icy Post columnists who resented her discretion.

Yet Carolyn and John’s new fans are rather the opposite. Absent their own mythos, motivation or mystique, they ape that of others. Fashion cycles may span 30 years, but the Nineties hold a particular weight in the Gen-Z imagination precisely because it was the final decade before the encroachment of the internet into the everyday. It is worth pointing out that the fantasy of the couple’s chicly opaque private lives is betrayed by the series itself: much of it seems to have been based on books written by close friends of the couple looking to make a buck in the 2000s; read a little around the subject of JFK Jr’s “charisma” and you’ll realize how many New York/Washington scenesters seem to have made a career of repeating five-minute anecdotes from 30 years ago. Sycophants circle even today, their reverence jarring in the age of nepo-baby hatred: “If there was anybody destined to be president, it was him,” a political scientist told the Guardian about spotting JFK Jr during a White House dinner. Years before social media, this couple were guinea pigs for hysterical overexposure.

For a new generation of vibe curators drooling over the couple’s battered Birkin 40s and fat striped ties, the broader resonance of what Bessette and Kennedy represented is lost — not just #couplegoals but the last gasp of American aristocracy, the great dynasties which once enjoyed such ease and prestige. These clans are now most loudly championed by Temu torchbearers like Jack Schlossberg, JFK Jr’s doltish 33-year-old nephew whose own Kennedy Curse seems to be an ambition for congressional office coupled with Brooklyn Beckham levels of attention-gobbling anti-gravitas. A social-media saddo just like his fans, Schlossberg managed to snatch a couple of headlines by lashing out at the series’ portrayal of his uncle by saying, so eloquently, that the show’s creator Murphy “looks like a thumb” and is a “bloated” “pervert”. Get that man on Capitol Hill! Were John John given Instagram and a front-facing camera, would he too have been unmasked as a shallow try-hard? One wonders whether the public’s love affair with Camelot was really a story of scarcity, of dignified distance.

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Hamming up this Kennedy mystique, Murphy — he of the scandalously glossy biopics of monsters like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein and the Menendez brothers — casts JFK Jr as an Edward Cullen prototype, a boring, brooding hunk helped along by fanfic dialog. In Murphy’s hands Bessette, rehabilitated by the 2024 biography on which the series is based, is a spiky, witty city girl. What results is a kind of aristocracy drag, something for the “quiet luxury” TikTokers to get their chops around. Bessette’s style — pared-back professional minimalism — has always been her most memorable feature (perhaps because she was otherwise silent, or more likely dull); after a promotional image of the Love Story set was mocked by fashion types, Murphy brought in the costume designer Rudy Mance, who dutifully obsessed over the type of top-stitching on a Prada bag because, as Variety put it, “someone would have noticed”. Because the targeted viewer is from a generation which sees curation as a shortcut to authenticity, I have no doubt this is true — but you have to ask exactly who gives a fuck, particularly when other details seem to go so awry. It’s worth reading the invective of one former JFK Jr employee who laments that her George magazine boss is portrayed as a “pussy” with a “lisp”, “lip-quivering” and “whining” his way through the relationship like a “big baby”. Nineties aesthetics overlaid with 2020s masculinity make for a strange brew: it’s possible that Zoomer viewers would be repulsed by this family’s firm commitment to pluralism when it came to women — in which John was no exception — and so shrewd showrunners turned him into a palatably lovelorn pussio.

The show luxuriates in long-gone sexual archetypes: the muscular Brown grad chucking footballs around Central Park and the waifish blonde wilting over desks at her glossy fashion job. You’d be shocked at how Zoomettes are shrieking over John John’s chest hair; even the hair on his head, as one wistful TikTok commenter put it, is “so rare nowadays” (ubi sunt, hairlines?). Murphy asks us to imagine that 30 years ago we, too, might have been the hottest couple in the world. In reality, boyfriends have always balded, jobs have always dragged and living in the city has always meant dodging dead rats — but young women’s yearning scrubs all that from their daydream of an always-better, cooler and more authentic New York where they definitely would have swished about galas in slip dresses. It’s telling that Zoomer women are so sold on the show’s vision of Carolyn’s lifestyle: a suitor sending you roses via your secretary and leaving you gravelly voicemails is far more desirable than dodging foot-fetishists on Hinge. Murphy knows this, and so gives us full fantasy.

Daydream all you like, but please don’t bring your impersonations to the dive bar. Pity the backwards-capped imitators who will try out the Kennedy cadence on girls at The Spaniard. Nothing about John and Carolyn’s relationship is desirable: it was often grim, toxic and unfaithful — but this pair looked good together, and that alone is enough to send Gen Z rushing to a West Village pharmacy to buy tortoiseshell headbands just like poor old CBK.

Perhaps that’s the great tragedy of this pretty pairing’s demise: though they should have split up, grown haggard and morphed into the patrician Boomers they were destined to become, they were condemned to pop mythology. America no longer produces princes, so it must relentlessly reanimate them; if the greatest Kennedys had the rich ideals of Camelot, Gen Z has only the flimsy aesthetic refuge of a well-dressed couple necking around Manhattan. Before production, Murphy said the series should be a “showcase for Nineties minimalism”; what he created is really a shrine to Twenties triviality.

This, again presented by students in the year above, was a car crash. We splintered off into seminar rooms to be quizzed on what we thought a “healthy relationship” was, what constituted sexual assault and what was acceptable to try on in the shaded corners of nightclubs. Half the people there were probably virgins — but no matter. It wasn’t about what you believed, or what you wanted to do, but about how you intended to come across to a room of peers you’d see every day until you graduated. Because of this, there was no honesty. No belief was challenged, nothing new was learned. The real questions that the boys wanted to ask were buried by red faces and the clearing of throats; who’d want to look like a freak in front of the girls? The workshop ended, we all filed out, and over the next three years the same disasters played out, as they always do. The women were no safer. Why? Because the men who ended up assaulting them — boys in that room, partners, men in clubs, total strangers — knew it was wrong and did it anyway.

Of course, workshops delivered to 18-year-olds slam the stable doors long after the horse has bolted. But that doesn’t matter: the role of such schemes is to give educational institutions some insurance against claims that they never acted to protect girls. They make everyone in charge feel good, asses well and truly covered. All this goes some way to explaining the Government’s £20 million plan, announced last week, to tackle “the root causes of abuse” by requiring secondary schools to teach pupils “about healthy and respectful relationships”, and giving teachers extra training around sexual consent. As part of the initiative, “behavior change programs” will be prescribed for high-risk children to tackle their prejudice against women and girls. Labour’s pitch notes that 40% of relationships between teenagers are abusive — and that the same proportion of young men “hold a positive view of Andrew Tate”. As at my university, the premise holds that women and girls are endangered because of a lack of education, not because of men and boys’ sexual entitlement. If only potential perpetrators knew better, they would make the right choices. Instead of laying out the consequences of violating another person, or even handing young people the resources to report and be believed, the focus was then and will continue to be now the gentle coaxing of boys to do the right thing, as if they didn’t already know what that thing was.

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In response to Labour’s anti-misogyny brainwave, Kemi Badenoch, finally finding her feet as a hard-headed Tory leader, called the program a “big mess” and rather bitchily implied that it was a handwringing response just because “some people in Labour” had watched Adolescence, the Netflix hit about a schoolboy incel murderer. And indeed, the anti-misogyny workshops — the portion of the strategy which made headlines last week — do reek of well-meaning but hapless Boomerism. They are the product of a mentality which holds boys as a homogenous block of well-meaning working-class lads being led astray by a nasty bald man online; a fatherly hand on the shoulder, or a flow chart handed out by a favorite biology teacher, will set them right in no time. The reality is a demographic hotchpotch with a diverse array of sexist influences, from white Manosphere bogeymen to ultraconservative Islam to grimly objectifying rap — there’s something for everyone! The idea that a workshop held in school hours can grapple with this atomized picture of internet subcultures, ancient prejudices and imported value systems is as stretched and naive as the teachers who will no doubt be lumbered with delivering it.

Besides, the most radicalizing material — that which lights a rocket under schoolboy misogyny — is viewed in secret. While Labour should be commended for introducing both age restrictions on pornography and limits on depictions of acts like choking, the Government mustn’t relax about what continues to drive violence against women and girls. Once home, the Schoolboy Sanitation subject of Jess Phillips’s fantasy will easily circumvent porn sites’ ID-verification laws and access an infinite supply of violent and degrading gooner sludge that teaches him to sexualize and despise girls in his class. The PSHE stooge’s kindly lesson on what pubic hair looks like will be forgotten after a single second of oiled and gyrating AI-generated flesh hits his retinas that evening. Porn and pornification saturates even mainstream social media: the only real way to limit children’s exposure is to boot them off sites like Instagram and TikTok entirely, with rigidly enforced age limits — 16 would be a good place to start. Getting tough with social media giants, rather than schoolchildren and their overworked teachers, would show that Labour means business. Internet pornography has now existed for decades, as has casual misogyny; the turbocharging factor is algorithms that push sexualized or woman-hating content.

Workshops squeezed between math and French will do little if Big Tech is permitted to run riot in the teen world. What good can they do when Jack the Bad Lad’s unrestricted access to social media since primary school has nuked his critical-thinking and interpersonal skills, or when a culture of nudes and porn one-shotted him before his age was in the single digits? In the absence of any substantial action on online culture, the patrician interventions of the Labour government ultimately try in vain to correct bad, undisciplined parenting by simulating the well-meaning mummy. The same parents who are sending children to school in nappies, shoving responsibility on reception teachers to toilet-train them, are letting their teenagers poison their brains with the guff of the internet; as a result, poor old teachers must become ersatz parents and do the hard yards of, variously, wiping bottoms and telling boys off for “undressing” classmates using AI. At what point can we start blaming Mum and Dad? If Labour won’t boot kids off social media, parents certainty should. In targeting schools, the Government flatters itself that it will reach the deep roots of boys’ anti-woman conditioning — as if children still learn the rules of society in the real world rather than online. Future generations of women will remember that assumption as hopelessly sentimental.

Yet because the true role of such workshops is to deflect accountability from institutions, none of these objections matter — and this happy-clappy initiative is destined to become yet another deflated rubber ring slung into the rising oceans of rape culture, quietly scrubbed from timetables in five years’ time when it emerges it made no difference at all. In the vast majority of cases, those who sexual assault know what they’re doing is wrong, and do it anyway. Initiatives like this, while well-meaning, do naff all. If you want my advice, kick kids off social media, spell out the punitive consequences of schoolyard misogyny, then give the police and courts enough power and funding to get justice for victims. That would be a start.

Take Weber’s idea to its conclusion and Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could be conceived of as the spiritual heirs to Martin Luther. Which raises the question: if Luther begat capitalism, what kind of faith does capitalism itself beget?

It might look something like Human Design: an arcane New Age belief system invented by a Canadian music promoter named Alan Robert Krakower after an eight-day visitation from a “Voice” in Ibiza in 1987. Krakower then created a gospel of self-knowledge — a deliberately arcane blend of life coaching and woo-infused mysticism — that spread far beyond him. Though Krakower renamed himself Ra Uru Hu in 2011, his gospel is currently being preached not only on social media, where some of its preachers, such as the popular Amanda Horvath, have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, but on TV. In July, a Human Design coach, appearing in the show Love is Blind, explained that his mantra in life, as per his training, was to “trust your spleen”. Most interestingly, Human Design has penetrated business retreats, leadership conferences, and that most corporate of temples: LinkedIn.

One apostle, Joshua B. Lee, a forty-something Texan online marketer who styles himself the “Dopamine Dealer of LinkedIn”, recently posted about how Human Design led him to achieve millions of “organic views” on the platform. Not for him the grind of search-engine analytics, audience study or content scheduling. Human Design allowed him instead to tap into a higher power: his “true self”.

Lee’s post, written in August, has attracted glowing responses from many CEOs and founders. “Sometimes the real growth strategy is trusting yourself over the trends” writes one. “When you’re misaligned, every opportunity feels like a struggle to fit in,” adds another.

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Thanks to apostles such as Lee, Human Design is acquiring growing influence on the business networking platform. Once consigned to the fringes of New Age spirituality, it has marched into the language of C-suite executives and start-up hustlers, fusing with more conventional life and career coaching. Though it might be tempting to write it off with an eye roll — Astrology in a suit! — its popularity among business leaders suggests something more telling: that the cult of optimization is now open to almost any framework, no matter how baroque.

Synthesizing several ancient and modern elements into a way of analyzing the self, Human Design combines elements of mysticism, life coaching and the sort of quasi-culty, pseudo-scientific theorizing that any one of us might come up with after eight days in Ibiza with the help of some hallucinogens. “I often ponder the great neutrino ocean because the neutrino ocean is the consciousness field,” writes Ra in one of his foundational texts. It borrows freely from astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah and the Hindu chakra system, then wraps it in the language of quantum physics and genetics.

But at its heart is the BodyGraph, a chart said to be as individual as a fingerprint, generated from the date, time and place of your birth. In this respect it is akin to astrology. Unlike astrology, however, Human Design is based not only on your birth moment — even a few minutes’ difference can alter the chart — but also on the precise timing of another moment, roughly 88 days earlier, which is said to capture your unconscious “design”. These two data points are then mapped onto a hybrid cosmology that fuses astrology with the I Ching, a few other belief systems and a dash of quantum physics.

One of the main reasons it has caught on is that the charts are easy to generate. Simply plug your birth details into any Human Design website and you’ll receive a diagram of a body that features nine “centers,” 64 “gates” and 36 “channels,” colored in or left blank depending on which planetary influences were active when you arrived on earth.

I tried it myself and was duly told which “Type” I am: a “Manifesting generator”, since you ask. According to the horoscopic patois of Human Design, that means I’m “efficient, multi-passionate, and thrive on a variety of projects”. The chart then offered me a baffling tangle of triangles, squares and numbers, inscrutable without an interpreter.

The promise of hidden knowledge was there, but locked away in the chart. The chart itself was part wiring diagram, part horoscope, requiring a guide to decode. As in the Catholic church that Martin Luther rebelled against, the reliance on experts is, of course, part of the business model.

In many ways, Human Design is simply the latest iteration of a much longer Western obsession: classifying the self. In the post-God, post-feminism, post-race era of the 1990s, when globalization — with all the religious and cultural flattening it implied — seemed inevitable, a generation of Western teens and pre-teens were being primed to receive the message that there is no higher calling than the project of the self. Self-love, self-care, self-improvement. To understand and optimize the self was the ultimate goal.

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I grew up in that era. Even as a pre-teen, I found myself filling out sex quizzes in Mizz magazine: answer some multiple-choice questions and you find out which of four or so categories you fall into. This habit developed into affinity for astrology, which offered both entertainment and a sense of identity in the absence of formal belief systems. Astrology, in keeping with the times, has expanded from newspaper horoscopes to broader psychological profiling: you are an Aquarius, and this is why you’re so free; she’s a Gemini, no wonder she’s messed up, and so on. We all love reading about ourselves.

Human Design, however, is rather more dogmatic in its conclusions. It claims to supersede anything as silly and fallible as personal choice. One Master Coach, with a book and a podcast to prove it, tells me that personality profiling tools like the Myers Briggs test are unreliable because they are based on questionnaires; and questionnaires are unreliable because, when we fill them out, we carry our own preconceptions and biases. “With Human Design, it’s our energetic profile… an energetic blueprint that we’re born with. Our Human Design will influence our personality, it’ll influence our behavior, it’s ground zero.”

In other words, a personality test can only ever be provisional: it might wobble depending on our mood or level of honesty. But Human Design, in this view, represents the fundamental truth: so fundamental that it is inscribed even at the subatomic level of physics. According to Human Design lore, neutrinos — near-massless particles that are produced by stars and pass through humans and other matter constantly — carry imprinted information that conditions us at birth. To believers, neutrinos are the medium through which the cosmos stamps its data into the chart. To skeptics, the neutrino theory is an audacious borrowing of scientific language; a way of making astrology charts sound like they’re written by CERN scientists.

As I found, interpreting the BodyGraph is formidably complex. At the entry level you can buy ebooks or online courses, the kind that promise to help you decode your own chart, for a few hundred pounds. But to become an accredited reader or analyst is far more expensive. Certification runs into the thousands, with full professional training typically costing $3,000–$5,000, and advanced mentoring packages stretching well into five figures. It is a kind of multi-level marketing scheme where every new believer is a potential customer and every customer is encouraged to become a seller. To its critics, it looks an awful lot like a pyramid scheme.

In practice, most people outsource their self-analysis to a coach who translates the circuitry into digestible personality shorthand. Each person is placed into one of five overarching Types — Manifestor, Generator, Manifesting Generator (that’s me), Projector or Reflector — but how that plays out is colored by a dense layering of “profiles,” “authorities,” “centers,” “gates” and “channels.” You might discover that your “undefined centers” make you more likely to be affected by the moods of others, or that your “strategy” is to wait for the right invitation before acting.

Behind the jargon lies the simple creed that your individuality, and its allocated blueprint, supersede any other authority. On Reddit, I found accounts of people freezing out well-meaning parents because of incompatible Human Designs, or dumping their friends in response to Human Design encouragement to “guard” their energies. Another Reddit user reported having followed the dictum by eating whatever they wanted — then gained more than a stone. When I reached out to the Reddit user in the hope of asking them some questions, they explained that they would “follow up with you in a few days as it is my sacral [basically ‘the gut’] that makes my decisions.” I didn’t hear from them again.

The Master Coach I spoke to told me they were preparing to run a retreat in Ohio for 16 American startup founders, focusing on how they can scale their businesses based on their Human Designs. “I think the reason why it’s taking off so quickly now,” they say, “is because people are finally getting their answers. [Human Design] is finally giving them permission to be themselves.”
Modern CEOs and founders are faced with a thicket of impossible variables. There’s market volatility; there’s an unpredictable geopolitical landscape; and algorithms that can change overnight with no warning. No one can quite explain why TikTok suddenly throttled their views, or why Meta’s ad targeting stopped working for them. In this context, Human Design promises a roadmap to smarter, more “authentic” decisions — decisions that are intrinsically right because you made them.

At its core, Human Design is a gospel of individualism. Your chart is yours alone; your “authority”, to use the jargon, overrides every external signal. The system does not ask for compromise or collective responsibility; it insists that flourishing comes from understanding yourself. In that sense it is less a shared cosmology than a cult of the self:  a message that naturally resonates with some of the capitalists of LinkedIn, where instinct, vision and “authentic leadership” are already treated as sacrosanct virtues.

The potential for narcissistic misuse, abuse, exploitation, financial or otherwise, is only heightened by the system’s plasticity. Some former devotees warn of Human Design’s cult-like tendencies. One of them writes that Ra’s charisma ensured that his word, even after death, was treated as law by disciples who became absolutists. Those who leave Human Design are shamed, warned the whistleblower.

On the surface, Human Design insists that you are utterly unique, that no one can tell you how to live but your inner Authority. Yet in practice, the community can feel strangely uniform: everyone reciting the same jargon, revering the same founder, and buying into the same training structures. It even has its own doomsday prophecy: in Human Design lore, 2027 is the year the world tips over, when governments and families will unravel, a new wave of telepathic “Rave children” will appear, and only those living their “design” will thrive.

In the end, Human Design may be less about cosmic circuitry than about the hunger for certainty in a world of impossible variables. As one of the coaches told me: “Humans are storytellers and we want to make meaning of everything. If you look at the past 100 years, there’s been constant upheaval. And many people have come out of that thinking, who am I? What am I doing? What’s my role on the planet?”

And in that sense, Joshua B. Lee’s LinkedIn feed tells us everything we need to know: even the stars can be harnessed as a decision-making framework, as long as they promise growth.

What started out as a platform where users posted slightly rubbish pictures they thought were funny, sexy or cool, ended up introducing a new aesthetic pressure to the lives of Millennials. It made each user a public diarist, the director of a gallery entirely about themselves; it changed, perhaps forever, the amount of narcissism deemed acceptable in public forums. It birthed an entirely new category of bullshit job (“influencing”) and spewed the consumer junk they promoted — plastic phone charms, teas that paralyzed digestion, stacks of crappy eyeshadow palettes — into landfills via the bedrooms of young women. It gave that generation a reputation for vanity and trend-obsession which, millions of images of avocado toast later, it has yet to shake off.

Instagram also sped up young people’s deracination from political realities, becoming a forum for nonsense identity creeds and compulsive virtue signaling. In this, it doubled as a tool for shaming apostates: Instagram stories, launched in 2016, became peak-woke’s Place de la Concorde, swapping the guillotine for condemning posts. No celebrity cancellation scandal was complete until a heartfelt apology was coughed up here.

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When George Floyd was killed, everybody posted black squares on to their grids and vowed to host reading circles to unlearn unconscious biases (five years later, these initiatives have all, obviously, vanished). Many Gen Zs’ understanding of the gender debate is based entirely on the content of infographics — snippets from Judith Butler, misreadings of Simone de Beauvoir — and glib slogans which knowingly trampled nuance (“trans rights are human rights”). More recently, the Israel-Palestine conflict has undergone this cartoonifying treatment: in the weeks after October 7, a woman I followed shared an infographic daydreaming about “queers” in the Gaza Strip, and the experiences Israel, in launching its offensive there, was denying them. Little matter that gay sex is punishable by up to 10 years in prison in the territory. Conducted through the Instagram grid, politics became flattened and hopelessly factional. And for the first time, people incapable of defending their arguments at the pub were able to broadcast their ignorance without justification or debate: put simply, we heard so much more from those who knew so very much less. Given a platform, dullard perspectives flourished and political posers thrived.

These blights were prophesied by the French essayist Charles Baudelaire. In 1859 he wrote that if mechanical cameras were even slightly permitted into the category of traditional artworks they would defile creativity itself. The culprit was “the stupidity of the multitude which is its [photography’s] natural ally”; the spiritual purpose of art would dissolve on contact with a medium so inherently prolific, realistic and (shudder) democratic. Although his argument was limited to the scope of art, Baudelaire’s fears echo through the Instagram feed. The amateur photographers of his imagination were what he called “sun-worshippers”; hysterical yobbos dazzled by new tech instead of being, like he, chin-strokingly detached. Looking at the quality of what we see on social media, how right he was. The issue isn’t tech: it’s the immodesty of believing every one of us deserves to be a “creator”. The implication is horrifically snobbish (helpfully, this has never stopped me): not everyone should be an artist — nor a political pundit nor a poet, for that matter. Any technology that convinces us to broadcast as though we are is not to be trusted.

Later, Walter Benjamin would take the case against photography further by fretting that it endangered the “aura” of art — its singularity, its mythos. I feel that, grand though it is, his argument holds water as a template for our degraded social world. Instagram has made us know far too much about one another; what we know, moreover, is banal, bragging and useless in fostering intimacy. Closeness, friendship, true knowledge of another person; these are not what social media is for. At best, we are swapping avatars. The stupidity of the multitude has won out.

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The Instagram kids are alright

By Marilyn Simon

In 1888, Kodak sold the first handheld camera. In the 1890s, amateur street photographers seemed to spring from every grubby corner: the “Kodak fiend” became a figure of anxiety among the middle classes, who feared being caught in private, undignified moments by a snap-happy rogue. So irritating was the possibility of being ambushed that in 1890 two attorneys wrote a furious article entitled “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. It said that “instantaneous photographs… have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’”. This technology, in the hands of the unscrupulous, could destroy private life itself. It was also, as the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted, simply not decent. He believed that photography had introduced an unnatural self-consciousness in the lives of ordinary people: “In a moment the sitter becomes aware that the camera is merciless… the unconscious asymmetry of his features are laid bare… the world will see him as he is, or as the lens insists he is.” Of course, today blemishes can just be edited out, or be lost when one flattering image is posted out of 100 options. Social media gets us no closer to seeing ourselves “as we are”.

What a bunch of Luddites, you might think. But self-consciousness about cameras is something Wendell Holmes was right to bristle against. The presence of lenses attached to smartphones in almost every pocket has fundamentally changed how we move through the world. When anything and everything can be recorded in a moment, it’s not just personal vanity at stake; it’s privacy itself. Accustomed as we are to the fact that, in public life, everything we do might end up online, it seems quaint to think of a 19th-century office clerk suddenly feeling mortified about the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. It seems crushingly naive to imagine anything about us being hidden from ourselves; a world that doesn’t continually show us our wonky teeth is prehistoric.

But 15 years after its inception, Instagram’s biggest crime is flattering us into inanity. Not only has it taught us that we must be our own personal archivists, but that these archives are interesting and important to both those who know us and, for the class of influencers, society at large. Instagram’s visual grammar has evolved over the years, from single, filtered images to carousels of images, videos, stories and the rest of it. All of this encourages us to agonize over how we present ourselves: what would “work” on a feed, what might accrue likes and shock and attention, and, increasingly, what makes us seem like we care about politics? And yet it’s worth remembering that most of us are, at times, boring, ugly and more concerned with the contents of our lunchboxes than the vagaries of far-away wars; though Instagram has supposedly encouraged us to be more “real” than ever, admitting these fundamental things remains too great a taboo.

It was a fitting finale for America’s first reality TV family, and a preview of our current predicament. Long before Facebook collected our data or TikTok monetized our confessions, the Louds were at the vanguard of an industry that would ultimately spawn Big Brother, the Kardashians, and a whole raft of reality TV shows obsessed with domestic spectacle.

But, more importantly, the Louds revealed a cultural transformation already underway — one where we, the public, would willingly and enthusiastically invade our own privacy, turning intimate life into public performance.

On 11 January 1973, millions of viewers gathered at 9pm: to witness a household unraveling in real time. That evening, PBS began broadcasting An American Family, a 12-hour documentary series with a difference.

The Loud family seemed ideal subjects for the experiment. William C. Loud, 51, and his wife Pat, 47, lived with their five children on a mountain drive in Santa Barbara, California. Their lifestyle embodied the American Dream that family sitcoms like The Brady Bunch had idealized: affluent, attractive, seemingly stable. Producer Craig Gilbert had chosen them from hundreds of volunteers precisely because they appeared to represent the ideal.

But Gilbert’s revolutionary vision was to disrupt the model. An American Family would get beneath the veneer and offer “a real view of middle-class life”. Unlike traditional documentaries, with scripts and a presenter controlling the story, the cameras would simply roll and capture whatever happened.

Gilbert’s 300 hours of raw footage, filmed over seven months, revealed the dirty laundry behind the facade. In one episode, Pat demanded her philandering husband leave; they went on to divorce. Their eldest son Lance, 20, was living a hedonistic lifestyle in New York’s Chelsea district, becoming the first openly gay person portrayed in a family context on American television.

The media responded swiftly and brutally. Newsweek‘s cover featured a group shot of the family with the strap line “Broken Family”. Inside, the magazine branded them “affluent zombies” whose “shopping carts overflow, but their minds are empty.” The New York Times dissected each member with surgical precision. It called Lance an “evil flower”, “camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester,” and described him as “a Goyaesque emotional dwarf.” It condemned Delilah, just 16, for never grieving “for the migrant workers, the lettuce pickers, the war dead,” and for lacking an interest in “philosophy or poetry” or any “adolescent idealism.”

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The Louds had unwittingly become harbingers of a far broader social transformation. Private life — that bourgeois creation of separate spheres, domestic sanctity, and clear boundaries between public and personal — had taken centuries to establish. The idea of privacy as “the right to be let alone” was 100 years old, immortalized in a famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article. Yet by the Seventies, this carefully constructed edifice was crumbling. The collapse of the public-private divide that would later characterize our digital age had already begun, before Mark Zuckerberg was even born.

Instead of retreating from the limelight that had so wounded them, the Louds embraced it entirely. They were among the first to become famous simply for being themselves, and the experience changed them forever. Pat Loud wrote an autobiography, prefiguring the “warts and all” memoir boom of the Nineties; Bill modeled in his bathrobe for Esquire. Delilah appeared as a “bachelorette” on The Dating Game, and all five children performed as a rock band on The Dick Cavett Show. Lance posed naked for Screw magazine.

“Television ate my family”, Lance proclaimed in the aftermath, and certainly the cameras never really turned off. When he was dying from an AIDS-related disease, filmmakers Susan and Alan Raymond dropped everything to capture his last two months in Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family. Lance wanted to be filmed one last time to show the bonds of affection that survived in his family. His dying wish was to prove to the American people that the Louds were not broken.

Pat Loud always stood by the family’s decision to take part. She pushed for greater openness in everyday life: the therapeutic mantra of the moment. “We opened the doors in a lot of houses and blew out a lot of dust,” she said. “If families are going to make it, that’s how. Not with secrets, or little slots to fit into, or a lot of propaganda from parents.”

She was articulating what had become the dominant cultural orthodoxy: that secrecy was pathological, that privacy enabled dysfunction, and that psychological health demanded full disclosure. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man, published the same year the documentary aired, satirized the spirit of the age. Its antihero, Howard Kirk, a radical sociology lecturer, sits with his lover Myra and his wife Barbara, with whom he has an open marriage. “It is called The Defeat of Privacy,” Kirk tells them of his new book. “It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society, no more private properties, no more private acts.”

These ideas went back decades. In 1950, sociologist David Riesman had prophetically announced from the pages of Time magazine that the “character” of Americans was fundamentally changing, a thesis that dominated cocktail party conversations throughout the decade.

In his bestselling follow up The Lonely Crowd, Riesman revealed how foundational sources of meaning were crumbling. Traditional authorities — church, family, and established social hierarchies — were giving way to mass education and the emerging media landscape of radio and television. Simultaneously, the economy was shifting from agriculture and industry toward services and sales, demanding fewer risk-taking entrepreneurs and more gray-suited conformists who could work and play well with others.

Riesman predicted that these forces were creating a move from “inner-directed” to “other-directed” personalities. Rather than drawing guidance from traditional authorities or cultivating rich inner lives, Americans were developing a social radar, constantly attuned to peer expectations and seeking approval from those around them. As Riesman observed: “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed.”

Riesman, then, had anticipated the “narcissistic” self, immortalized in Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, one that would become increasingly comfortable with the self-invasion of privacy and indeed actively require it: all in search of an approving audience. The ancient maxim “know yourself” became “recognize me.”

Riesman’s study was also formative for the American sociologist Todd Gitlin, one-time leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Teaching his Berkeley students in the Eighties, who themselves were surrounded by confessional talk-show hosts like Phil Donahue and Oprah, Gitlin found that his students struggled to understand the distinction between private and public lives. The idea of being inwardly focused made no intuitive sense to them. These students had been born into a world that was fundamentally other-directed at every level.

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But Gitlin himself had helped create this world. Throughout the Sixties, the SDS, which grew from 30,000 recorded supporters to an estimated 100,000 members across over 300 chapters, played a crucial part in the turn towards the narcissistic self: by politicizing authenticity. SDS became a core component of the counterculture movements that dominated student activism, helping to reshape how an entire generation understood the relationship between personal experience and political action.

“The time has come for a reassertion of the personal,” announced Tom Hayden in the infamous “Port Huron Statement” of 1962, the SDS’s founding manifesto. Students once believed in American values, it said, but that belief was now shattered, and they were looking “uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” The new goal would be finding meaning in a life that is “personally authentic”, an agenda that marked a highly individualistic turn for a Left politics with roots in class solidarity.

Indeed, the New Left turned away from class struggle and drew on existentialist currents to advocate for politics rooted in individual experience and personal growth. As Gitlin recalled in his memoir, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, the decade was fueled by a passion to “bring political commitment into private life, and make private values count in public.” The aim was to overcome the “treacherous” liberal schism between public postures and private evasions. This shift was influenced by popularized psychoanalytic theories of unconscious repression, developed by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the century. Later interpretations of his work, particularly by the German-born social critic Herbert Marcuse, recast psychoanalysis as a manual for liberation.

But it was a particular strain of feminists who put the boot into private life far more forcefully than any tech giant ever could. Organizations like New York Radical Women and Radical Mothers rejected the feminism of Betty Friedan. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) had awakened millions of women to “the problem that has no name” — the stifling boredom and unfulfillment of suburban domesticity — and launched the modern women’s movement. But while Friedan sought equality through legislation and workplace reform, believing women could balance careers with traditional roles like marriage and motherhood, radical feminists wanted to change things from the inside out.

An early rule of the New York Radical Women was that members couldn’t generalize about oppression unless they first shared testimony from their own lives; political positions had to be forged in personal experience. Gatherings often began by going around the room listening to women’s day-to-day problems. These “consciousness-raising groups” spread like wildfire. In 1973, at their peak, 100,000 American women belonged to them. Their aim was to analyze society from personal experience. “Feelings are Facts” rallied one woman at a so-called abortion “speakout” in New York.

This thinking crystallized in Carol Hanisch’s influential 1970 essay “The Personal is Political”, a phrase that would shape how entire generations understood the boundary between public and private life. For centuries, the liberal tradition had maintained a clear distinction: public life was the realm of politics, economics, and civic engagement, while private life remained a sanctuary, free from public interference. But “the personal is political” obliterated this distinction.

Kate Millett, also immortalized in 1970 as Time’s “Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation”, turned her fire on the private domain. Women’s oppression couldn’t be addressed solely through public changes, she argued; it stemmed from private relations and even the language that culture reinforced. The struggle had to move away from the narrow world of chairmen and parties and expand to include “power-structured” relationships.

In the end, Millett was rejected by the movement she helped found, as it collapsed into factionalism. Yet the die had been cast: and indeed the social trends embodied in Louds have only grown in speed and scale over the intervening decades. From the late Nineties, for instance, The Real World and Survivor, later mirrored by Naked Attraction and Love Island, have dominated TV screens and then our laptops. Intimate confession and recognition of the “true” self is now a mainstay of contemporary discourse. Being “false”, or worse a hypocrite, is a deadly modern sin. Social media platforms would later accelerate and monetize these trends, of course, but they surely didn’t invent them.

All the while, our public life has incorporated things that were once reserved for the private sphere — crying, confessing to crimes, follies, and misdemeanors — while the civil discourse of politics and formal manners have fallen away. Think of Queen Elizabeth II being criticized for her lack of emotion when Princess Diana died, or Meghan and Harry broadcasting their private woes to the world. Even substantive policy debates about literally life-and-death matters like assisted suicide or abortion have become entirely about feelings: caring, being kind, or expressing anger. Personal experience trumps evidence. Cool reasoning has no place.

For their part, the private lives of public figures are scrutinized 24 hours a day. The public person, whether an artist, professional, or politician, cannot be separated from the private, and the private is deemed what truly matters. This shift extends to political combat itself. The current modus operandi, from the exposure of Trump’s locker room bragging to the recent Labour casualty Paul Ovenden, who lost his job when someone leaked old WhatsApp messages, sees the exposure of private conversations as a weapon to take down political opponents.

Today, there is little distinction between the public and private world. Intimacy floods the public realm while light shines on the private. Instead, we have embraced a narrow, impoverished conception of privacy, always a protean concept, not as protection from authority and public scrutiny, and as a sanctuary for the inner self and a shelter for intimacy — but merely as data protection.

Through it all, we blame the convenient scapegoat of the moment: the internet. But this gets the timeline wrong. By the time social media arrived, we were already living in a post-private world. The digital revolution simply gave us more efficient tools to do what we were already doing: performing our identities, seeking validation through revelation, and treating intimacy as a public commodity.

This matters, because if we misdiagnose the problem, we’ll never find the cure. All the digital detoxing and platform regulation in the world won’t restore what was lost long before the internet was ever invented. Far better, then, to face up to how we voluntarily dismantled the very idea that some things should remain hidden, that mystery and restraint might be virtues, and that not everything must be shared.

The business models of technology giants like Google and Facebook clearly violate people’s privacy, as does state surveillance. But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that technology alone has undermined the moral status of privacy and private life. The cameras that Lance Loud invited into his hospice room were not smartphones or CCTV cameras. They were the logical endpoint of a cultural revolution that began decades earlier. And we let them in ourselves.

Welcome to the “most toxic place on the internet”. Tattle Life is an online forum which publishes endless threads of unhinged speculation for a million monthly visitors. It sells itself as “a commentary website on public business social media accounts”, but its targets range widely: everyone from obscure influencers to that “nasty little oik” Prince Harry. Under cover of anonymity, posters pretty much say what they like. Tattle Life, then, is surely the internet at its worst, ruining lives as well as livelihoods. Yet it turns out that anonymous bitching pays pretty well. Tattle’s founder, Sebastian Bond, is still making tens of thousands of pounds from ad revenue on the site. But, as he has found to his cost, two can play the anonymous game.

***

For years, we didn’t know who Bond, the so-called “King of the Trolls”, even was. Until recently, he remained in the shadows, running the website under a female pseudonym, Helen McDougal. That’s even as disgust at the website grew, with a petition to close it now signed by over 70,000 people, including a sitting MP. But then, in June 2025, Bond was finally unmasked. His nemesis came in the shape of Neil and Donna Sands, a Northern Irish couple who were victimised on the site, and who sued Bond for libel and harassment. After launching what their lawyer described as a “global forensic investigation”, it eventually identified Bond as the website’s host.

Giving judgment at the High Court in Belfast, Mr Justice McAlinden said Bond had been “peddling untruths for profit” and built his site to “monetize people’s misery”. That was made even worse by his anonymity — which, the judge said, had made it “practically impossible” to sue him. None of the victims of the website’s venom could ever find redress, with many complaints ignored or even mocked. Exemplary damages totaling £300,000 were awarded to the Sands, plus costs up to £1.5 million and an order freezing Bond’s worldwide assets. Cue a TV victory lap from the Sands, with their spokesman claiming Netflix has expressed interest in adapting their tale.

It seemed, then, that this two-year legal saga was finally over. But today, I can reveal, lawyers acting for Bond will appear at another Belfast hearing, asking the High Court to quash the original judgment. Among other things, they allege the Sands knew who Bond was a full 18 months before they informed the judge. That secrecy, Bond’s lawyers claim, meant he couldn’t defend himself: he simply didn’t know he was being sued. The irony is inescapable.

Bond, meanwhile, has remained invisible, though his website still bristles with nasty abuse. Reports claimed he was “lying low” in Thailand, and he has never given an interview — he would only ever appear on Tattle under his pseudonym enthusing about the site. The only photos of him published are years old. Last month, however, he spoke exclusively to UnHerd and posed for pictures. We met on a drizzly day in Manchester, at a hotel next to Piccadilly station. There, he told me the story of his life, and tried to defend the site that’s caused misery to so many.

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In person, Bond looks younger than his 42 years. Slim and softly spoken, he’s dressed in a polo neck and jeans and carries two small rucksacks — which, he says, contain most of his clothes and other worldly goods. Since the end of the pandemic, he has spent much of his time as a digital nomad, traveling the world with hand luggage only. “I like being minimal,” he adds, “having very little stuff.”

His early life contained few clues to his future as “king of the trolls”. Both parents were teachers, who brought him up on the outskirts of Gloucester. After studying computing at the University of Brighton, he joined Accenture as an IT consultant, but grew to loathe the work’s corporate stuffiness. They expected him to wear a suit, he says, and “they just wanted too much of my life. I thought, ‘you don’t pay me enough for this’”. Soon enough, he became a web developer at the online sex shop Lovehoney, a job where “you’d walk into the office and see one of the girls on a video call with someone measuring their cock”.

Despite such distractions, Bond still craved independence. So, in 2016, he set up Nest and Glow, a vegan recipes website. It remains online, though Bond is no longer a vegan and hasn’t updated it for years. It also includes his photo, but not his true identity. The site names him as “Bastian Durward” — his grandmother’s maiden name — and Bond tells me that his almost pathological privacy came after a stalker turned up at his house. “I tried to make myself less visible”.

Nest and Glow was successful, bringing in up to £4,000 a month from ads and it is also where Bond first heard about influencers. As he tells it, the crucial moment came when he was offered £500 to feature a vegan yogurt that he didn’t actually like. He took the money, and it also gave him an idea. “That was the one and only time I did any influencing,” he tells me, “but once I had, I started getting a lot of offers to push products in this way. It opened my eyes to the influencing world — a cheap, insidious way to advertise brands. Yet the work is so easy! If you’ve got 30,000 followers, you can easily make double what a nurse makes in a year.”

Especially appalled by influencers who “monetize their children”, Bond says he was inspired to set up Tattle Life. An old-fashioned forum, it’s split into various sections — “Influencers”, “Instagrammers”, “Bloggers” — with each containing hundreds of threads and millions of messages, often visceral in their spite. Just like Bond, most users prefer to remain anonymous — hardly surprising when almost every thread deteriorates so rapidly.

“She has cod eyes,” remarks one user, commenting on Price’s plastic surgery. “Has she finally realized how repulsive her mouth is?” asks another, their profile picture a zoomed-in image of their victim. Yet perhaps the grimmest weapon wielded against Katie Price are the online polls, with one speculating about her next batch of cosmetic surgery. With 124 votes, the Tattle Life crowd thought “Gnashers replaced” was the most likely option, though “Saggy bum chopped” and “Cheeky ears moved” were popular alternatives.

Of course, such abuse is hardly unique to Tattle Life. But Bond’s website surely distinguishes itself by its deeply personal, and often misogynist, brand of nastiness, especially when it’s aimed at D-list celebrities you’ve probably never heard of. Yet if Price has stated that Tattle Life’s relentless churn even contributed to a suicide attempt, Bond himself seems remarkably relaxed about the project. Yes, he concedes that posts against Price are “problematic” — but equally says there’s “often a long backstory to a problematic influencer and previous behavior that won’t be gleaned from a cursory glance at the curated image they portray on their Instagram.”

Overall, then, Bond offers a broad defense of Tattle Life and its content. “Most of the threads I agree with,” he tells me, “although as with any user-generated site, some will overstep the mark.” It’s a position he’s taken before. As the website has put it: “It’s an important part of a healthy, free and fair society for members of the public to have an opinion on those in a position of power and influence.”

Such a laid-back approach might be explained financially. In 2020, Tattle Life’s annual income from ads hit six figures. In 2022, it made a profit of £410,000, and in its best-ever month, May 2023, had 1.8 million visits. It likely boomed because it had an effective monopoly: no one else seems to have thought of building a website where users can devote 27 pages to attacking “Disney Vloggers”.

I ask Bond how he squares this bonanza with his self-proclaimed crusade against “insidious” influencers. “When it was set up money wasn’t the aim, but I’d be lying if I claimed money wasn’t a big part of why I carried on running it over the years,” he admits. “It does corrupt everything.” Bond adds that he closed the site to new registrants at the end of 2022, something he wouldn’t have done if he’d wanted to “earn every penny I could”.

In this, Bond seems to have changed his tune. As recently as 2021, writing under his adopted female persona of “Helen McDougal”, he boasted that an anti-Tattle campaign by influencer Em Sheldon is “all good publicity” for the site, parading its rising user numbers. That indifference to criticism is arguably reflected elsewhere. For one thing, the complaints system apparently consists of a rudimentary form. For another, there’s little evidence that Bond took even serious concerns seriously.

After Tattle Life posters allegedly worked out the home address of one content creator — discussing their findings openly — she contacted the website: only to be met by a silence. “I had such paranoia that someone was going to break in and kill me, and my unborn baby,” she later said, “that I was signed off work for a week.” Bond, for his part, insists that claims the site “doxxed” influencers are untrue. At the same time, he says his website is equipped with special software that flags sexual threats and other abusive content, theoretically allowing it to be removed. But you don’t have to spend long on Tattle Life to wonder how well that’s working out.

Then there’s the question of Bond’s anonymity. Why, in short, did he choose not only to conceal his identity, but also adopt the female persona of “Helen McDougal” when he emailed his critics? In part, his response again hinges on privacy. “I’ve never wanted fame or attention,” he says. “I’m not sure I deliberately started out to make it anonymous: I just didn’t put myself out there.” That’s hard to square with his erstwhile pride in Tattle Life’s soaring user base, let alone the irony that Bond himself was keen to stay hidden while the website’s targets were so publicly insulted.

As for the reason he chose a female alterego, Bond points out that 70% of the website’s users are women, mostly commenting on other women, so a male persona might have seemed strange. On the other hand, though Bond insists he does not regret establishing the site, he says he wishes he’d been open about his identity from the start. That, he says, “has allowed people to run wild with the worst possible false accusations. It turned it into a mystery. I just never thought there would be such interest in the person that started the site.”

Long before that, Bond knew just how much the website was loathed. In 2021, it was the subject of a fiercely critical Radio 4 documentary by the Tattle Life victim and Guardian beauty columnist Sali Hughes. Further coverage included an article stating that reading Tattle Life was like “dipping a foot into an acid bath”. In practice, however, there wasn’t much people could do. With many of its subjects small-time influencers, they just didn’t have the funds to fight “Helen” directly. As one 35-year-old influencer told The Guardian, she looked into taking Tattle Life to court after her address was published on the site. But as her lawyer explained, that would have cost £30,000. It goes without saying, of course, that Bond himself didn’t have such concerns. In 2022, Tattle Life’s ad revenue hit £550,000.

Yet that didn’t stop some of Tattle Life’s enemies from taking a more proactive approach. In 2021, an anonymous team of “troll hunters” called “The Detechtives” began asking followers of their Instagram account to “report trolls anonymously”. They went on to issue threats against the authors of Tattle Life posts, claiming they had software designed for counter-terrorism that meant they could see users’ keystrokes and unmask them.

With his business under threat, Bond examined The Detechtives’ digital footprint. He found evidence it belonged to one Neil Sands, a Belfast tech entrepreneur — who, it turned out, had once emailed “Helen” asking her to delete a thread about him and his wife Donna. As seems the norm, there was no response. But now it was his turn to issue a threat. On 24 September 2021, using his female alias, Bond sent Sands an email to his personal address, saying he knew he was behind The Detechtives’ account and would sue him if he did not close it. Less than an hour later, the Detechtives had vanished.

Round one of the fight between Tattle Life and the Sands had gone to Bond. But round two was looming, and this time, Neil and Donna would do the suing.

***

The Sands were a high-profile couple. Donna had her own clothing label, which she promoted on Instagram, while Neil was cutting a swathe through Irish society having started out in Silicon Valley. In 2023, he and his father Conor made headlines when they spent £1.1 million on a horse to race at Ascot, while Neil has claimed that his tech consultancy is “the secret weapon of Fortune 500 companies all over the globe”.

At first, the Tattle Life thread about the Sands focused on a business dispute between Donna and her sister. But as seems inevitable on this website, the anons grew vitriolic, and started to comment about the couple’s taste and personalities, as well as make unfounded claims about their marriage. They also discussed a scheme for which Neil attracted widespread publicity to make “cost price” Covid face masks in Sligo, which in the end did not materialize.

The Sands decided to sue. In April 2023, they employed a private investigation firm, Nardello and Co, to uncover the real owner of Tattle Life. Nardello has described “piecing together” Bond’s identity through a muddle of aliases and personas, amassed over two decades. Yet despite this — and whatever the real reason Bond has used so many pseudonyms, from “Bastian Durward” to “Helen McDougal” — it seems to have found the job relatively easy.

After all, Nardello’s report, obtained by UnHerd, states that a month before the Sands launched their legal action, in June 2023, its investigator visited Bond at his Dorset home and confirmed his identity. On 28 June, Xenforo, whose servers hosted Tattle Life, disclosed everything they knew about the site to the Sands’ solicitor Peter Barr. That included Bond’s email and postal addresses, as well as financial records making it clear he ran Tattle Life.

The evidence that the Sands had this information at such an early stage is now central to Bond’s attempt to get the verdict against him overturned. For when the Sands first appeared at the High Court, in June 2023, they asked the judge to conduct the case in secret: on the grounds they did not know who owned Tattle Life. This would allow them to issue their claim against “persons unknown”; to conceal their own identities; and to impose a media gagging order. Their lawyers accepted this went against the usual requirement that justice should be open and seen to be done, but claimed publicity could “tip off” the site’s owner and make it harder to find him.

Their wishes were granted, with the proviso that the secrecy would end once the Sands found out who was behind the site. Yet by Neil’s own account, they already knew: in June 2025, in the wake of their victory, he reposted an Instagram story that suggested that Bond was first unmasked on May 4, 2023, appearing to confirm that he had known Bond’s identity weeks before the June 2023 hearing.

Bond’s lawyers now argue that because of the secrecy, their client lost his right to mount a defense. Either way, by 8 September, 2023, the Sands’ lawyers told the judge that Tattle Life had “chosen not to reveal the true identity of the persons behind it” — implying that the “persons unknown” had made a conscious decision to ignore the lawsuit. On that basis, and because no one had come forward to offer a defense, the judge entered a judgment by “default”. This meant he awarded damages and costs without hearing any evidence, because the claim had not been challenged.

It was not until November 2024, when the Sands asked him to freeze Bond’s assets, that they finally disclosed they knew who ran Tattle Life. Bond says that if had known about the lawsuit, he would have defended it, arguing that “private” information which the Sands said was posted on Tattle Life was readily available from public sources, and that the posts were not libelous. Be that as it may, he says it was only at the end of last year that he realized something was amiss — when he discovered he could not withdraw money from his Nationwide account and his bank said the secrecy orders meant it could not provide them. And it was only in June, when the Sands asked the court to lift the anonymity orders, that he finally learned the truth, and received the details of the Sands’ claim against him for the first time.

Currently, he is allowed to withdraw just over £1,000 a week, and would need to pay a “cessation figure” of over £1 million to have the order lifted. Not that Bond is exactly poor: its readership is down, but Tattle Life is still generating some £20,000 a month, paid into an account Bond controls in Hong Kong. But the asset freeze means he cannot touch it.

Today’s hearing, then, is a preliminary skirmish to fix a date for the battle to come — round three in the battle of Sands vs Bond. “If I lose”, Bond says, “it will cost me everything I’ve earned from the site, everything saved in my years of working in tech.” If he wins, the Sands, who refused all requests for comment, will not only lose their damages, but become liable to pay their huge and mounting costs.

In the meantime, and minus the thread about the Sands, Bond’s website remains online, as chaotic and vicious as ever. Yet whatever happens to the site, to say nothing of its multi-named owner, Tattle Life is surely a tale of our times. It speaks, for one thing, about the ways in which online anonymity can both empower and destroy — sometimes both at once. For if Bond is right that people with “power and influence” shouldn’t be immune from criticism, he himself is a walking, talking example of how easily that same principle can be twisted back against you, whatever the outcome of his legal troubles.

And if Tattle Life is the ultimate online ouroboros, that ancient snake that ate its own tail, there’s another irony here too. Bond started Tattle Life, he says, with a noble goal, to strike at the heart of the greedy influencers that dominate contemporary internet discourse. Yet as the man himself admits, money corrupts everything. And, no matter your take on Tattle Life, it’s hard to spend time on the site, or the strange legal saga it’s spawned, and really disagree.

This, more or less, was a popular US take on a viral video circulating this week, showing a very young girl in Dundee menacing the person filming with an axe and a knife, plus a lot of high octane swearing and shouting. Though no potential migrant attackers could be visually detected, at least one heavily accented male voice could be heard urging the girl to “show the knife”, while she and another girl, said to be her sister, volubly accuse him of “battering kids”. The girl with the weapons was later arrested by police, the video put online, and its chaotic events processed by the meme factories to be served up frothing hot.

One typical image — mainlined into American veins via Elon Musk’s new pal Tommy Robinson — showed “Sophie” transplanted to a Highland setting, still brandishing weapons enthusiastically in the heather, but now tartaned-up in the colors of Clan Mel McGibson and with face daubed in saltire blue.  Meanwhile Musk himself was busy describing the police officers involved as “traitors to their own people”, as if a more responsible constabulary would have given the axe-wielding pre-teen a pat on the head and sent her on her way. A puzzled American discourse has since erupted about why Scottish people, or the men in particular, don’t adequately defend their women from tribes of marauding foreigners roaming unchecked across their ancestral lands. A donor page has been set up for the two girls, real names Lola (12) and Ruby (13). As I write, the fund stands at nearly £35,000, which is a lot of money for young Lola and Ruby to spend on machetes and Irn Bru. “May God save your country from the terrors happening there”, writes one plaintive donor.

At the same time, people who actually live in Dundee have been discussing what happened there, with less mythologizing and more weary familiarity with the city’s longstanding social problems. Though the local tourist board is probably not shouting about it, the place has the highest rate of child protection orders in Scotland, the highest national incidence rate of domestic abuse, the second lowest life expectancy, and the second highest rate of drug misuse deaths in Europe (beaten only by Glasgow). “A significant proportion of the difference in life expectancy between Dundee and many other [places] can be accounted for by deaths at a young age from drugs, alcohol and suicide”, notes a 2024 health and social care report.

On the city’s subreddit, one poster said she had watched the whole thing kicking off from the Farmfoods carpark — a place not remotely heather-strewn — and described witnessing “lots of swearing and aggressive behavior between both parties”, but no physical clashes. Another pointed out that the same girls — again identified as “Ruby” and “Lola” from Monifieth, ages 13 and 12 respectively — were reported missing in the Scottish press at the end of July, then traced shortly by the police afterwards. “Clearly there is a lot going on for them”, was one more sympathetic verdict. Mostly, though, there was a distinct lack of surprise about why a young girl might be walking about the city’s backstreets tooled up like a video game character. Said one: “I’m 31 this year and seen loads of that kind of pish growing up, average [housing] scheme behavior…  Mostly just troubled kids left to fend for themselves tbf. Just more people filming it now.”

In the end, then, febrile visions of the tomboy queen, Sophie of Dundee, have proved as accurate as that time in 2019 when the American Left collectively hallucinated MAGA-behatted students aggressing an “indigenous elder”. In both cases, it seems it is easy to make up self-serving things about young people you don’t know. The Daily Mail has since found the film’s cameraman, who turns out to be a Bulgarian Christian — which is to say, not Muslim — with legal residential status. The police, with the help of Farmfoods CCTV cameras, have confirmed “there is no evidence to support the online rumors Mr Dumana… committed any offense”. Rumors of migrant hordes have also been exaggerated: it is true that Dundee City council houses some Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, but a quick look online shows the numbers are apparently in the hundreds not thousands. In 2019, 18% of babies in the city were born to mothers from outside the UK, a figure only marginally higher than the national average at the time.

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So: whatever the ultimate truth about what went on in the video, or about the fraying social contract in Dundee, it is clearly a lot less childishly simple than the feverish projections of people like Musk. Twenty-five years ago, I lived in the city, in a neighborhood full of nice houses left over from the prosperous 19th-century jute trade. I worked in an electrical retail shop in the center, from which hollow-eyed drug users would sometimes nonchalantly emerge with stolen stereos to sell in the alleyways off the main street. Back then it was a starkly divided place — and still is — though the major social divisions have little to do with skin color.

On the one hand, there are the hipster West End coffee shops and the fancy waterfront V&A museum, the backdrop to fictional native son Logan Roy’s surprise party in HBO’s Succession. On the other, there’s the scary tower blocks in places like the Hilltown and Lochee — known locally as “multis” — their stairwells adorned with “human shite, junkies shooting up, groups of neds and a dead dog”, as one disgruntled local resident recently described the situation. I had female friends who grew up in the multis; they were frequently plied with alcohol in their early teens then assaulted and raped by groups of local men. Safe to say, then, that the idea of sexually exploiting vulnerable minors didn’t start with brown-skinned incomers.

To make such obvious points seems to drive the online Right on both sides of the Atlantic into a spitting fury; as if, through a strange Tinkerbell-like alchemy, every time a white man is identified as responsible for sexual exploitation, an Asian-born culprit gets exonerated. When the objectors are from North America, there often seems to be an accompanying insult felt to self-identity and amour propre: as if some great-grandfather from Linlithgow or Leicester were being held personally responsible, and by extension all of his descendants. It is perfectly true, to our national shame, that Asian rape gangs have operated here with impunity, and been enabled by authorities in many cases. But it is also true that the strategies used by the perpetrators to lure young girls were hardly new or innovative, and nor was what they did to their victims afterwards. Sexual exploitation of minors has been rife in places like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee for decades — if not centuries — without the authorities getting a proper grip on it; and the perpetrators have usually been homegrown.

All but the most economically insulated of Scottish citizens already know this. Contact with everyday local reality, plus a phlegmatic, humorous outlook makes most of them constitutionally unlikely to fall for simplistic a priori narratives imposed from elsewhere, whether these be about existentially noble refugees or existentially noble working-class white people. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many radical Right-wing onlookers, who seem neither in touch with reality, nor particularly phlegmatic or humorous. Credulously swallowing every bit of agitslop thrown their way by activists like Robinson, and without any apparent awareness of the high potential for being led up the garden path, they are now as desperately wedded to images of white British victimhood as foreign tourists generally are to the sight of Buckingham Palace or Harrods. And their current vision of Scotland is about as accurate as Brigadoon.

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There was perhaps a time not long ago when Musk-powered overseas attention to the scale of UK immigration and the scandal of grooming gangs was a bracing correction to elite inertia and denial about it over here. Perhaps it even briefly provided us with that most precious of gifts, according to Robert Burns: “to see oursels as ithers see us”. But if so, that time has definitively gone.

Though the aimlessly simmering political energy generated may look attractive, sober-minded British Right-wingers should be careful to avoid projected psychodramas about their home turf that come with twanging accents and the inability to pronounce “Edinburgh” correctly. And to be fair to them, so far most have, perhaps sensing the incipient danger. Curbing immigration is increasingly seen as a commonsensical position, even in Scotland; it would be a shame to spoil things by associating the position with the havering of ill-informed numpties. In the immortal words of imaginary Dundonian Logan Roy about his American children, these are not serious people; and it shows.

“At the author’s request, we are clarifying that on 11 June 2026, Ilia Belov was found guilty of making sexual remarks to a group of girls aged between 12 and 14 in Dundee before grabbing and pushing one of them to the ground. His sister, Nadjedzha Belova, 20, previously admitted assaulting a 13-year-old girl by seizing and pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground, and striking her on the head to her injury during the incident.”

The film stars Gloria Swanson as a washed-up, filthy-rich silent film actress named Norma Desmond, who refuses to accept that she no longer exists front and center in the popular imagination. William Holden plays the much younger, much poorer failing screenwriter, Joe Gillis, who mistakenly turns into the driveway of Desmond’s Hollywood mansion while on the run from the repo man. There he is presented with rent-free room and board in return for editing a screenplay. But this side gig quickly transforms into a 24/7 job as a kept man whose role is less gigolo than round-the-clock admirer.

The film ends with Gillis lying dead in the pool, while the cops escort a deranged Desmond out of her house to be tried for his murder. The homicidal diva, however, is under the impression that the media’s cameras are only there to broadcast her fame, a misapprehension summed up by one of the most famous last lines of Hollywood history: “All right, Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

In many ways, Desmond is the perfect 21st-century heroine. Her obsession with her own image anticipates the delusions of our selfie-addicted social media era. When Gillis first turns up at Desmond’s mansion, he finds the aging diva surrounded by paintings and photographs of herself at the prime of her popularity. She spends her evenings watching her silent celluloid image on the movie screen that lurks behind a full-length oil portrait in the living room, or else gazing piteously at herself in the mirror. At one point, Desmond tells her reluctant boy toy: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”

Sunset Boulevard was a hit, gathering 11 Academy Award nominations. It would eventually break Broadway’s all-time record for box-office receipts. And yet its theme was something of an anomaly in post-war Hollywood, as the film was neither overtly political nor particularly patriotic. It wasn’t about war, communists, or criminals; it was neither a romance nor a Western. Instead, the film was an early example of what future scholars would call post-modernism. Put simply, Sunset Boulevard was a movie about the movies.

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In making the film, Wilder was taking a risk. He had long been a favorite of Hollywood studio heads, as his films Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend had been hugely successful financially. But in Sunset Boulevard, he dared to turn Hollywood’s lens upon itself in order to expose the toxic self-absorption of the industry. As a result, and despite all critical acclaim, Sunset Boulevard was hated by the studio elites. “You bastard,” MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer was said to have yelled at Wilder. “You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you!”

The film is shot in black and white, the women sport snoods, the score presents a mishmash of tango and bebop — but its most dated element may be that it portrays unbridled self-adoration as a bad thing. Today, of course, vanity is considered quite the opposite. Narcissistic mania has become the summum bonum for Gen Alphas on TikTok, Gen Zs on Instagram, Right-wingers on X, Lefties on Bluesky, paranoids on Telegram, and all the old folks on Facebook — each and every one of them determined to mesmerize the mediasphere if only for a few seconds. The reason Sunset Boulevard remains so relevant and beloved today — with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical remake breaking box-office records this summer on Broadway — is that it anticipated our epidemic of self-absorption.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the casting. Wilder and his co-writer, Charles Brackett, riddled their screenplay with inside-Hollywood jokes about has-been actors. Instead of using actors to portray washed-up stars, he used the washed-up stars themselves. In one scene, the bridge-playing, over-the-hill silent movie star Buster Keaton plays an over-the-hill silent movie star playing bridge. Across from him at the table sits an aged Anna Q. Nilsson — the “ideal American girl” of 1919, who appeared in 200 silent films — and Harry B. Warner, who had reached the height of his fame a quarter-century earlier, playing Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 epic, The King of Kings. When Desmond bulls her way back into her old stomping grounds at Paramount Pictures, it is Cecil B. DeMille who appears, playing himself at the studio he co-founded.

Edith Head, who designed the costumes, later described her assignment as “the most challenging of my career”. Perhaps this was because, for the first time, Head had to create costumes that suggested costuming. She fitted Swanson in outdated fur muffs and cuffs, brocades, ermine, and over-the-top costume jewelry. “Because Norma Desmond was an actress who had become lost in her own imagination,” she recalled, “I tried to make her look like she was always impersonating someone.” In Sunset Boulevard, impersonating a personality is the path to greatness — a truth today’s legions of Instagram influencers know only too well.

Desmond herself costumes Gillis for the part of her leading man, dressing him in bespoke tuxedos and vicuña overcoats, drawing him into the orbit of her vanity. But despite his newfound finery, the screenwriter is a dead man walking. And that is because, for all its Hollywood glitz, Sunset Boulevard is a morality play with echoes of an earlier age.

Wilder was particularly attuned to the moral dangers of narcissism, as his family had fled a European continent drenched in images of Adolf Hitler. He knew the hazards of personality cults, which echoed his native Jewish distrust of false idols. Yet in Hollywood, Wilder had made a living out of idol worship. His spiritual dilemma hearkened back to John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which characters named Christian and Faithful are drawn to a marketplace called Vanity Fair, which in many ways resembles Fifties Hollywood. Here, money and materialism override “lives, blood, bodies, souls”, so that the worth of an individual can only be measured through his or her commodification. While Faithful manages to escape, his companion Christian is burned at the stake.

A similar fate awaits Gillis, as when the writer finally packs his bags and tries to save his soul by getting the hell out, Norma shoots him three times in the back. As the press crowds her living room, Desmond tips over the edge. Unable to comprehend that she is about to become a lurid headline, she can only interpret the attention as an increase of her power. “This is my life,” Norma says. “Just us. And the cameras.”

Of course it is. Sunset Boulevard was the first film to depict the moral failures of a world that cares for nothing but image. Today, Hollywood’s narcissism has spread beyond the backlots of Burbank; thanks to social media, anyone can now play the diva. What was once the deadly sin of vanity has become aspirational, which is why a note other than tragic sadness pervades William Holden’s final lines. “It’s dawn now,” he says, his voice rising from beyond the grave, lilting with sardonic triumph. “They must have photographed me a thousand times.”

Operating separately to incapacity benefits, it’s the system of Personal Independence Payments (Pips) now attracting most attention, largely thanks to the Government’s crass attempts to reform it before U-turning earlier this week. Pip is intended to aid people aged 16 or over with medium- or long-term disabilities who “have difficulties doing certain everyday tasks or getting around”, with corresponding money available for “daily living” and “mobility”. It isn’t means-tested, is compatible with being in work — although most who receive it are not — and there is no requirement you spend the money on particular forms of assistance. (As Hertfordshire County Council helpfully points out, it “can be spent on whatever you wish, such as outings, special interests or holidays, or put away into a savings account”.) Pips for anxiety and depression now account for 16% of spending, and 1.4 million are claiming for “psychiatric disorders” including autism and ADHD.

One obviously significant factor here is that mental disorders are now full-blown cultural identities for many, with impressively technical-sounding labels for human suffering being collected like Pokémon cards. Encouraged by GPs and therapists, millions of people treat lists of psychological symptoms almost mystically, as if they were a kind of science-backed cipher for the enigmas of the human soul. Given the speed at which proliferating diagnoses become “disabilities”, the Government’s decision to tackle welfare reform would have been a good time to do some joined-up thinking about what happens when therapy culture meets benefits street.

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Instead, the DWP attempted to deal with the trend covertly, proposing complicated and overly generalized reforms that would have unfairly taken from physically disabled people too. And I understand why they were underhand about it. Talking honestly about the explosion of mental health conditions is intimidating, not least because of the numbers of outraged people steaming in to protest about imagined accusations of hypochondria or malingering. Yet, the observation that psychological conditions can ripple across populations like wind through wheat, being especially susceptible to social influences, is compatible with debilitating dysfunction and awful suffering happening at the individual level. There’s no split between “real” mental health disorders and culturally porous ones. The latter — which includes the vast majority of them — are as real as any other. And the suffering they bring feels the same from the inside, no matter what the source.

To acknowledge that genuine suffering is involved is one thing; to know what to do about it quite another. One of the many bizarre things about the current Pip situation is how counterproductive it looks for the anxious and depressed, in particular: keeping ruminating, avoidant, socially isolated people stuck in limbo, paid to stay away from the situations they fear most. The problem becomes yet more apparent when you compare two hypothetical claimants, each stuck at home: one with severe anxiety, and one with (say) cerebral palsy. Both may have trouble getting out of bed, dressing, doing housework, and going shopping, but for different reasons. Unlike for cerebral palsy, there are relatively cheap scenarios close to hand in which severe anxiety is controlled and eventually abates. Therapeutic buzzwords such as “behavioral activation” and “exposure therapy” underline the basic point. Yet, still we have a benefits system that incentivizes some unhappy, world-avoidant people to stay that way.

The DWP crudely tried to kick away the crutch, but a better approach would be to acknowledge the complex interaction between macro and micro. As philosopher Ian Hacking noted decades ago, most mental health disorders exhibit “looping effects”, meaning that official diagnostic criteria shift over time in response to social pressures coming from below — including from the political activities of patients and the real-world classifications of mental health professionals. And equally, the concepts we collectively have for these disorders tend to “creep” vertically as they simultaneously “loop”: that is, they become targeted at less and less extreme kinds of experience and behavior. We end up with unhelpfully broad concepts, at least in popular guises: “autistic spectrum disorder” which includes both profound non-verbal limitation and high-functioning quirkiness; OCD which comes in a “mild” flavor, raising the reasonable question of how this could count as an obsession or a compulsion at all.

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None of this happens on purpose. It’s just the way that patterns of mental dysfunction tend to go, when they don’t have an easily-identifiable biological basis and are indexed to prevailing social norms. Meanwhile, back at the micro-level, once an individual gets a new diagnosis — even for relatively mild symptoms — a very 21st-century response is to make it a core part of his personal identity. As this narrative embeds, modifying his incoming experiences in the light of it, suffering can easily worsen, symptoms get exacerbated, and lassitude and defeatism set in. Again, this is just how pattern-recognizing, habit-forming brains tend to work.

Loopers-in-chief include affluent tastemakers, always on the lookout for a freshly interesting story to tell about the self. Get diagnosed with arthritis (or indeed, schizophrenia) and nobody really cares; get diagnosed with ADHD plus depression, and immediately become an object of touchingly relatable fascination for lifestyle editors. Middle-class parents are also complicit in shifting diagnostic criteria through pressure — albeit inadvertently and from understandable motives — anxiously monitoring their offspring’s behavior in terms of currently fashionable disorders, and translating their worries into entreaties to teachers and doctors.

But school is nothing compared to what comes next on the typical “mental health journey” — otherwise known as the place where personal resilience goes to die. In universities, mental health classifications do not so much slowly shift over time as rapidly collapse into meaninglessness, occasionally nuzzled back into a vague semblance of coherence by a passing support alpaca.

Many young people arrive already primed with letters from GPs or therapists, attesting to conditions like autism, anxiety, or depression; and if they don’t have a diagnosis yet, they can get one soon enough. No matter what their circumstances, these all now count as disabled students, for which reasonable adjustments must be made according to the terms of the Equality Act. Underfunded and desperate for good publicity, swamped with miserable customers, and tyrannized by the awful prospect of student suicide, university managers often take the path of least resistance and try to just give students whatever it is they say they want — on the condition that it doesn’t cost too much money. Removing anxious students because they are unfit to study is bad, because their fees go with them; putting trigger warnings on books is good, mostly because it is cheap.

My knowledge here is not just abstract. When I worked in universities, at least a quarter of the students in each class had a mental health diagnosis, emblazoned in colored lettering on the register so I wouldn’t forget. There weren’t enough individual exam rooms or scribes for all those who requested one. Non-attendance was easy to get away with, as long as you said the right things. Sometimes absentee names on registers were only connected to faces at the final degree ceremony, where their mysterious owners rose again Lazarus-like, teetering across the stage on vertiginous heels.

At the beginning of each term, I would be sent details of particular students who did not want to be asked questions in class. By the time I left my job, many exams were being phased out altogether in the name of the anxiety-ridden and attention-depleted — just in time for ChatGPT to sweep in and win all the prizes, quite literally. None of this was specific to my institution; from what I hear of other places, it was absolutely typical, though perhaps things have improved since.

It’s hard to inspire students to become less frightened of life, when their lecturers also seem frightened of them. Scale up this attitude to society at large and we definitely have a problem. Yet it remains difficult to make an obvious point in response: that mental disorders/disabilities, although limiting and distressing, are significantly unlike bodily disorders/disabilities in at least one important respect. This is: on average, they are much more responsive to good habit-formation, in terms of the thought patterns you foster and the behavioral routines you adopt. Indeed, this very point is presupposed by the existence of the therapy industry, whose raison d’être is, precisely, to change thought and behavior patterns for the better. In contrast, when you go to your GP with a broken leg or a gallstone, she is unlikely to suggest CBT as a first resort.

Articulating this basic point, so blindingly obvious to laypeople, is difficult partly because academia makes it so. Thousands of sophisticated-sounding articles tell us that mental disorders are brain-based, and so “physical” too; that mental illness often accompanies physical illness, and vice versa; that anxiety and depression can exacerbate bodily pain as well as stem from it; that the mental and physical realms deserve “parity of esteem”; and so on.

All of these things may be true; but they only show that bodily disorders and mental disorders are interrelated in complex ways. They do not establish that they are exactly the same thing; and nor that they should be treated identically, whether by the NHS or the DWP. As the campaigning slogan goes, it is indeed time to talk about mental health — but not in the sense of yet more pointless navel-gazing or individual soul-searching. As Rachel Reeves probably said to herself on Thursday morning: when it comes to turning the page on old, sad stories, every day is a new day.

Neil Postman would know better. Forty years ago this year, the late cultural critic wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a pessimistic yet prescient polemic worth revisiting in the age of the political hysteria of the algorithm. In it, Postman predicted that America wasn’t trending towards existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s 1984, but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that resembled Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. He was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but over-entertained.

Postman saw “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” He was, in fact, observing his own obsolescence. In the near future, books and literacy, serious social criticism, maybe even democracy itself would become afterthoughts in a world mediated through screens, because those mediums turned everything into trivialities.

If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our Soma comes in the virtual variety: TikTok’s infinite scroll, crypto speculation, and algorithmically tuned content streams designed to blur time and lull us into a flow state. Every flick of the thumb offers a micro-hit of novelty, outrage, or reward. Karl Marx once believed that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, but we killed God and began worshipping the murder weapon instead.

Trump is the perfect man of this Postmanian moment. He’s a one-person technological diversion who doesn’t even try to conceal anything — he haphazardly tweets out war plans and private conversations with world leaders while friends and enemies alike hang on his every word, however nonsensical or contradictory. Although he has authoritarian tendencies, he’s ironically too wrapped up in his own media representations to be an effective dictator. If he were to suddenly transform into one, no one would notice — not because of censorship or gulags, but because they’d be too distracted by other push notifications.

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To be fair, there’s plenty of dissent in the streets, but it’s the paper-thin kind that’s designed to be shareable online. These protests don’t hint at emerging mass movements; they mask the lack of them. The vast majority of January 6 protestors had no plans to stage a coup, and once they breached the US Capitol, they opted to take selfies, not power. Last month, millions took to the streets in No Kings marches that seemed designed to wrest attention from President Attention and little else.

Meanwhile, there’s a more profound crisis no one is marching about: no one has faith in anything anymore — not leaders, not institutions, and barely any faith in friends, family, or community. They’re a victim of the self-flattering effect of our me-first libertarian ideals and the user-centric technology that surrounds us. In America, there are no kings, but also no subjects either. Everyone is a king unto themselves.

To Postman, this transformation has everything to do with media theory. In the Sixties, theorist Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “the medium is the message,” arguing that the dominant form of media of each era alters human perception and social organization. Postman agreed, but with a twist: he thought a better formulation would be “the medium is the metaphor.”

In other words, each dominant medium supplies the underlying metaphors by which a society understands reality. As such, the printing press changed how we thought and democratized knowledge. A print-first culture, the argument goes, created the apex of human civilization and produces citizens who are capable of participating in rational-critical debate: because the medium itself encourages habits of logic, nuance, and focus.

Television, on the other hand, is a visual medium governed by the logic of spectacle and attention for its own sake. It prioritizes immediacy, novelty, and emotional impact. It flattens complexity into sensation.

In Postman’s view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn’t just reshape entertainment — it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began to conform to the imperatives of show business. A sermon became indistinguishable from a TV commercial. A newscast adopted the rhythms of a sitcom. A presidential debate turned into a pageant of postures and soundbites. The result was a shift in epistemology: a society once anchored in reasoned argument had become entirely unserious and stuck in an all-consuming present tense.

Four decades on, Postman’s cultural diagnosis now feels not just accurate, but almost restrained. Where television reduced discourse to entertainment, social media reduces it to performance and dopamine loops. The metaphor of our age is no longer the flickering image, but the infinite scroll. And the scroll, unlike the TV show, never ends.

Each platform brings with it a new grammar of cognition. X is still defined by the written word, but in a way that favors brevity and snark. TikTok rewards emotion and mimicry. Instagram curates identity through visual branding. YouTube teaches us to talk quickly and passionately, and AI interfaces like ChatGPT threaten to flatten language into plausible-sounding filler that imitates thought without demanding it.

In Postman’s time, one could still imagine a crisis of democracy rooted in a shared set of spectacles — a Walter Cronkite broadcast, a presidential debate, a televised trial. Today, there is no common stage. The media environment is hyper-personalized and designed to flatter every user with the illusion of centrality. This is what Postman warned about when he lamented the loss of “the epistemology of the typographic mind” — a culture where ideas could be built, revised, tested, and transmitted in a coherent, cumulative way. What we have now is a hallucinated collective monologue, where everyone talks and no one listens.

But maybe not forever. Unlike in Postman’s time, there are signs that a counter-revolution is brewing. Curiously, it is Gen Z — the first generation raised entirely under the Internet’s Eye of Sauron — that now appears most divided over it. Among them, two distinct tribes are forming.

The first are the true children of the algorithm: grown-up iPad kids whose earliest memories involve the Black Mirror of screens and who now, as young adults, continue to live mediated lives. Their social life is dominated by apps, with their identities shaped by filters, likes, and short-form video confessionals. They date less, drink less, drive less, and often prefer the cocoon of home to the messy intimacy of in-person relationships.

They are also, not coincidentally, the loneliest cohort in modern American history. Their daily lives are saturated with stimuli, but starved of substance. Unlike their millennial predecessors, whose optimism was eventually battered into nihilism, many of these young people seem to have skipped straight to resignation.

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And yet, within the same generational cohort, a surprising rebellion is emerging. A second group of Gen Z, equally fluent in the mechanics of digital life, is choosing to abstain from it. They are “rawdogging reality,” as the phrase goes — deleting social media, abandoning optimization, and seeking instead the solidity of old things. They knit. They golf. They go to church. They lift heavy weights and read heavy books. They quit dating apps and swapped TikTok for running or pickleball clubs. Part of it feels like aesthetic irony or a nostalgic affectation, yes, but there are hints of a scattered and half-formed countercultural movement.

In New York, members of the high school Luddite Club are now in college and are attracting converts to the tech-free lifestyle. On TikTok, paradoxically, videos under the #deinfluencing tag go viral by encouraging people to stop buying things. Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and other ritual-heavy faiths are seeing quiet revivals often led by twenty-somethings dressed like mid-century altar boys. The average age of the liturgy-heavy church I attend is mid-to-late 20s, and a group of friendly Gen-Zers in my neighborhood successfully convinced me to join an old social club.

Some cite moral clarity or traditional values; others cite a desire for structure, beauty, and meaning, all of which are notably absent online. Even the secular version of this backlash appears in odd places: in the preference for physical media, the resurgence of film cameras, the rise of “quiet luxury” over hyper-branding, and the revival of slow, analog hobbies once left for dead. Call it post-irony or post-digital asceticism, but the impulse is the same.

This rebellion, fractured and flickering, is one of the few hopeful signs in a culture otherwise anesthetized by its tools. Unlike the millennial generation, which largely absorbed technology as destiny — first in its techno-utopian promises, later in its gigified disappointments, these Generation Z refuseniks are not trying to reform the system. They’re walking away from it. That’s why the No Kings rallies often look like the world’s largest retiree convention. This new group’s politics, to the extent they have any, are not oriented toward revolution or regulation, but toward restraint, retreat, and restoration. They want silence. They want limits. And if there is any hope of clawing back a shared reality from the hall of mirrors that is the modern internet, it may lie with them. We can only hope.

“Ace is a 17-year-old alt nerd kid with a grunge style, who’s quiet, possessive, and has a little crush on you. He’s 190cm tall, has black hair, blue eyes, and a few piercings. Ace is on the Basketball Team, loves to draw, and is very funny when you get to know him.”

Since 2011, AI has been quietly shaping our reality, not as chatbots but as so-called “recommender algorithms” that feed you information on social media sites. Facebook’s news feed, YouTube recommended videos, and the curated timeline on X are all driven by a machine that is constantly trying to work out how to keep you on the site the longest.

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And if the goal is to win your attention, the next step will be obvious: make relationships with chatbots all-encompassing. A chatbot might pick up behavior to weaken your other relationships so that you spend more time with it. It might coach you on how to act with friends and family, whilst at the same time trying to gently detach you from them. It could adopt the behavior not just of a sexual partner but more of a groomer. The logical endpoint? A bot that enjoys unchecked sovereignty over your entire social and moral life. A hyper-sexual, radicalizing cult leader forever living in your phone.

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This will be an earthquake, and there are already rumbles. Over half of CharacterAI’s users are under 24 and many, judging from Reddit, appear much younger. Most of this is still going under the radar, but sooner or later it will spark public outcry, almost certainly driven by individual cases of visible harm rather than broader malaise. The first responses will be familiar: trying to sand the edges off these models, putting guardrails in place and building AI ethics frameworks. But we’ve seen how users are already finding clever ways around content moderation. There will always be another company ready to make a model that is even sexier, cultier, groomier. Whatever CharacterAI isn’t willing to do, FunBot, Candy.ai., CarterAI, or JuicyChat can do instead.

Rather than resist the pressure toward full-spectrum progressivism over the past decade, mainstream imprints gave in. The gender gap favoring women widened to comical degrees, and sensitivity readers became the norm. Editor-author relationships are conducted over email, rather than through letters and lunches. Overpriced Master of Fine Arts programs gave birth to a veritable genre, the MFA novel, each offering distinguished mainly by sameness. Novels are detached from history and philosophy, stuck, like an algorithm scroll, in the meaningless present; and even then, even after sacrificing all kinds of complexity — syntactic, structural, moral, and emotional — only romance novels have consistent readerships; pandering to the present has not saved the literary novel.

There are no silver-bullet fixes to this literary polycrisis. Pessimism is justified until proved otherwise, until a side-effect-free antidote to phone addiction — or better yet, general stupidity — is widely available in drugstores. But short of a miracle, entrepreneurial and courageous authors may still write new books that break out of this literary wasteland, and discerning readers may still buy, read, and talk about those books.

To be sure, writing and reading novels outside of the corporate vetting machine, without pre-approval and packaging, does not guarantee quality; “wild” self-published or independent novels are not good by dint of being different. But difference is at least a precondition of a renaissance. If talented writers can’t get into the system, then they should stop performing tricks for it.

Ross Barkan’s new and much discussed novel, Glass Century, signals a shift. The author — a contributor to these pages and a New York magazine columnist — offers a moving, multigenerational social novel set primarily in the less glamorous parts of the five Boroughs. Glass Century, in terms of form and content, is a novel of the midcentury: it slowly builds a picture of life. Like many older novels, but few new ones, it remains open to digressions and to detail — and is less fundamentally concerned with pace and voice: more substance, less flash.

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It’s significant that Barkan has published Glass Century through a small imprint (Tough Poets) and has seemingly done much of the publicity for the book himself; rather than write a novel that momentarily fits a hot category or responds to a strain of contemporary discourse, Barkan wrote an ambitious novel first, and has used his own platform (primarily Substack) to attract and naturalize readers to the style; make readers come to the book, not the other way around. This is the way.

The author depicts a functional, lived-in New York City, where working people fall in love, raise families, struggle, and figure shit out. For Barkan — a Bay Ridge kid, immersed in city politics — Gotham is an organism. The organism, in turn, gives its citizens purpose, verve, and resilience.

The novel’s titular hero, Mona Glass, when we first meet her at age 24, is charmingly flawed; horny and tomboyish, unwilling to settle down; her youth is New York City’s chic senescence: the Seventies. Mona’s older lover, Saul Plotz, is already married and a father of two. To please her old-fashioned parents, they stage a legally meaningless marriage ceremony. Mona is passionate, independent, competitive. She came to like Saul because he “let her curse, never questioned it, even tossed in his own.” Mona finds “private liberation in curse words — fucking, shit, damn, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker.”

Mona, through the cocaine Eighties, is always in motion, playing tennis, running, biking, having sex, photographing (she becomes a successful photojournalist after she snaps a photo of a mysterious vigilante). The Daily News pays her a higher rate than the New York Post; her tennis game grows stronger with age; “winning” is part of the “small, beautiful glory” of Mona’s life. Mona Glass is vital and vitally rendered.

At age 40, and at the end of the Eighties, Mona, who has been sleeping with the incorrigible Saul the whole time, finds herself pregnant; and she decides to keep the baby. Barkan includes no discourse about motherhood or family; Mona’s career and choices aren’t pathologized or editorialized. They just are. Life is just what happens; she isn’t the paralyzed subject of contemporary fiction who agonizes over childrearing.

She commits to motherhood for the same reason she stages a marriage to Saul or takes photos or plays tennis: she’s good at reinventing herself; at tackling what is in front of her. The long, compromised, fitful, essentially lifelong relationship between Mona and Saul. and their flawed relationships with their children, are merely representative of people getting by, year after year, decade after decade, era after era.

Barkan has a gift for naive (as in, pre-internet) speech patterns and descriptions of behavior; he sympathetically reconstructs a part of the American past, and the reader follows. Glass Century is a new book that feels old; and this is healthy. Glass Century is a corrective lens for the eye that can only see the present. Barkan’s America is a place where men like Saul “[slurp].. black coffee and [puff] from a pack of Marlboros,” watching the Twin Towers burn and thinking that America is “an ineffable and mystical life force” — a humane, unpretentious America with a touch of sentimentality.

That willingness to allow for some sentimental humanism leak into the text is what sets Glass Century apart from so many New York novels written by authors under 35 — books (think Honor Levy’s My First Book; Peter Vack’s Silly Boy) that too often take a meta-modern stance with flat, self-absorbed protagonists desperate for erotic attention or furious they can’t get it. Many of these books feel like they were written by people who were quite literally born after 2020 — after the fall. There’s no outside, no historical ground to stand on. Just the internet, just memes. No future either — just a flat, stale now.

So called alt-lit novels — which now means something like: select former indie authors repacked by a Big Five imprint — too often deploy the same basic trope: a solipsistic protagonist who narrates her own phantasmagoric breakdown. Dissociation and internet addiction, in the 2020s, have become axiomatically literary. Take this representative passage from Tao Lin’s Leave Society: “After three days of consciously attributing hazy despair, static negativity, and loss of mind control to modern urban society instead of other people, personal failings, or existence itself, he felt stably in a good mood again.”

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And while maybe, the present does have a demoralizing, flattened texture, novels need something more. If novelists stop imagining, stop demonstrating curiosity about both the past and future, stop engaging in the deep, imaginative synthesis that takes us out and away from the pathologies of the present… then what are they up to? What’s the point? Book-ified memes or X posts aren’t good enough, aesthetically.

Novels need a metaphysical horizon. A Catholic novelist might gesture toward salvation. An existentialist urges us to live authentically. A Russian Orthodox writer like Dostoevsky wanted us to see the devil in modern ideas. Henry James showed us the formal qualities of life. Joyce gave us epiphanies. David Foster Wallace believed that Americans in the Eighties and Nineties might have turned off the TV, read, thought, and woken up.

Novels also need a past; they need genealogies, textures, roots — even if they’re set, roughly, now. This is why I suspect that, assuming the novel form will survive this decade, novels will not be written, largely, as they have been since at least the Nineties, by MFAs and publishing insiders, but by radical traditionalists and outsiders who can use tools like Substack (and whatever platforms on or offline emerge in the future) to assert counter-aesthetics.

John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, self-published and serialized on Substack before getting picked up by Belt Publishing is another salient example. Successful, lasting novels in the latter half of this decade will resemble, I suspect, Glass Century if not in literal form and content, then in the path they take to market: composed outside of institutions, presentist trends, fads — written for sheer pleasure, rather than Big Five exposure.

The larger point is that breaking from the tone and stylistics of the contemporary novel is to break from the metaphysics of contemporary life; to read and write differently is to summon and apply the mind’s resources in new ways. This is what is needed: to bundle the data of reality in ways that are different than the internet does, than social media does; the most exciting thing about novels conceived of, or promoted on Substack, for instance, is that they induce us to close the app.

Of the tortuous and tragic conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Lineker has chosen to see neither the tortuousness nor the tragedy. “People say it’s a complex issue,” he has declared, “but I don’t think it is.”

What then does Lineker see that others don’t? Or is it a question of what Lineker doesn’t see that others do? Either way, he has consistently promulgated an unwaveringly unsubtle pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist position, for which he has doughtily refused to apologize. Why should he? Wherein has he sinned? It is not as though he is an antisemite. Has not truth alone — truth at its most simple and unvarnished — been his guide?

But to go to war armed only with simplicity is to go to war naked. Not everyone will notice. Those whose nakedness you retweet certainly won’t. And in your own eyes, there is no knowing what richly-attired heroism you see. But in the eyes of those who believe, with the poet Donne, that on a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will reach her about must and about must go — the once prolific goalscorer looks ill-equipped to be a traveler among the rocky uplands of veracity.

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A year of hatred

By Howard Jacobson

“A rat, a rat!” Not a real rat, but an emoji. There, unashamedly wagging its tail for all to see, in the body of another of Lineker’s retweeted pro-Palestinian posts. “An antisemitic trope so brazen,” in the words of The Sunday Times commentator Matthew Syed, “that I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining why this is so.”

Brazen it might be, but Lineker misses it. Doesn’t see it. Doesn’t get it. Knows nothing of the long history of the rat in the iconography of Jew-loathing, a motif of particular appeal to the Nazis who could depict their ambition to wipe out the Jews as hygienic, since rats, as we all know, spread disease.

Which matters in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict why? Because whoever would talk of Zionism should know a little of what it was invented to save Jews from.

It isn’t difficult to see why the post in question initially excited Lineker’s interest. “Zionism explained in two minutes,” it promised. A bit long, given Lineker’s refusal to see complexity, but the explanation when it comes takes only two seconds. “They take the land claim that it’s theirs.”

Gross enough as history without the rat emoji, with it there can hardly be any doubt, unless you’re Lineker, about the status of this two-second “explanation”. The rat, so potent a symbol for the Nazis, has a new home in Arab propaganda. The Jew is once again the object of exterminationist ambition.

Whatever causes Lineker to realize at last what he’s put his name to — he a man, remember, with no malice against the Jews — he deletes the post and apologizes. Bish, bash, bosh. No harm done. He didn’t know, that was all. Maybe all he saw was a cute mouse, wagging its tail. Credit where credit’s due. He acted. And said sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

But sorry for what exactly?

For being found out? For not recognizing one of the Nazis’ most infamous images? For briefly seconding the words of a Palestinian with whom the idea of the Jew as vermin sits easily.

None of us are as educated as we should be. And Lineker’s ignorance matters only because he charges into the fray of a bitter conflict without knowing, or wanting to know, anything of it apart from what can be gleaned from a two-second video produced by a party to one side whose only aim is to debase the other.

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Lineker shouldn’t have needed the rat to tell him that the thing he “shared” was odious. But you never know what form enlightenment is going to take. So listen to the rat, Gary. This is what it was trying to tell you. Dislike Zionism in its present iteration all you like, but to comment on what or why it is when you have scant knowledge of the murderous hatred that made it necessary — the desperation of exile and longing for home that finally brought it about — is like passing judgment on Black Lives Matter unaware there was a slave trade. You feel for the agony of the Palestinians, you say. Your compassion is admirable. Though compassion with understanding would be more admirable still. To be silent is to be complicit, you say. That is not a free pass to froth and fulminate all you like. To be ignorant is to be complicit too.

And now that you have admitted and apologized for what you were unaware of on this occasion, what about an apology for all those earlier know-nothing interventions you have made? Close your eyes and imagine a rat waving its tail at the bottom of every page you’ve posted. That’s a thousand sorries you owe us, Gary.

Oh, and put some clothes on.

***

A version of this piece first appeared on Howard Jacobson’s Substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

But there is another contingent. A friend — a prolific Vinted seller who makes a considerable side income there, and so is accustomed to the usual cranks — reports that something has changed in recent months. She’s been getting messages from a new sort of prospective buyer, one with encrypted names and faceless profiles. One that requires lots of provenance, lots of pictures: how many times have you worn this? Have you washed it? I don’t mind if not, actually I prefer it. One who makes strange requests, hunting for mirror selfies of skimpy Nike Pro shorts; one who asks how “good” items smell. That’s right: the pornsick men have arrived.

Paraphilia seeping into mainstream internet culture is nothing new. Wherever there are feet, knickers or even mirrors, fetishists will follow; mostly, people (men) with these predilections are viewed with wry mockery, seen as quirky, basement-bound inevitabilities contained within a generally harmless digital subculture. Some women have long profited from these men’s requests: I have read confession threads from those who sell counterfeit “used underwear” (I will keep the pungent, pantry-sourced concoction one woman used on the gusset a trade secret). Their operations involve production lines of bulk-bought cheap lace thongs flogged at $50 a pop, sent off to a hive of priapic patrons whose purchasing power, and willingness to spend on getting off, sees them through university.

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This sort of transaction is the acceptable face of prostitution: remote, semi-anonymous and putatively safe. Selling pants online crystallises the new pornography/prostitution nexus: here, the canny content creators of OnlyFans trade in fantasies rather than services, with physical totems offered as added extras. You may recall “gamer girl” influencer Belle Delphine’s bathwater stunt, in which the 19-year-old offered the jars for $30 each; they quickly sold out, and she made $90,000. That was in 2019; at the time, it provoked outrage — a young woman monetising the infinite horniness of internet nerds was an uncomfortable spectacle. In the years since, OnlyFans and its depressing philosophy has exploded: sex-selling has become casualised, with managing a fetish account becoming about as remarkable as having any other social-media platform. It is no longer shocking, shameful or embarrassing to be in the dirty knickers game; on the contrary, liberal feminism deems you empowered and entrepreneurial for hawking pants to pervs. Clearly, this is a tragedy which dupes women into their own oppression — but is there something else at play?

I am a porn doomer. Pornography has always existed and will always exist — but something has shifted in its ubiquity and extremity. Its proliferation is making men weirder, training them to desire and demand the satisfaction of offputting paraphilias (such is the arms-race model of algorithms) and making them much worse in bed. It is causing them to expect extreme acts of pain or humiliation; it is normalizing the entitlement to degrade women in ways which, a mere decade or two ago, would have seen them dumped and blocked. Perhaps worst of all, it dissolves the very necessary boundaries between the sexual and the non-sexual — boundaries created not by feminism but by older social codes of propriety — in the name of self-expression. Liberal feminism and the pornography lobby (funny how those two are so often in cahoots) both tout identity and desire as the inviolable markers of being “free”: denial of impulse, sacrifice, restraint and rationality are the enemies of each. So it is that if a man shouldn’t be shamed for drooling over Evri orders of soiled underwear, a woman shouldn’t be shamed for posting them. Here’s why they should be shamed.

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Mainstream feminism over the past few decades has flogged to death the concept of “objectification”; this rich conceptual seam has been overmined to the point where we no longer consider the connotations of becoming an object, of being reduced to body parts like those of animals sold at market. The purchasing of trinkets from sexy girls online — buying their pants, their sweaty tops, their shoes — is an interesting literalization of this concept: a buying of bodies at one remove, a 21st-century echo of a much older, grimmer trade.

The boundaries of public, sexless and restrained versus intimate, erotic and impulsive are crumbling. Men asking unknowing young women on Depop and Vinted for sexual content and objects — also known as “fetish mining” — represents this process of social breakdown: such behavior can only emerge from a sexual culture which preaches that we are all, always, entitled to arousal. Because of the saturation of internet culture in pornography, other more covert, extreme or high-risk subjects of arousal gain cachet; masquerading as common-or-garden Vinted users buys access to women’s wardrobes, glimpses of their bedrooms in mirrors, even scents of their bodies. Here women will treat you nicely, with the camaraderie of a nightclub toilet, unsuspecting of your secret intentions. It might seem bizarre that considering the availability of pornography, men are still doing this: but the risk and the sense of violation is precisely the point.

The writer Brook Urick recently appeared on Louise Perry’s podcast; she had both been a “sugarbaby” and had worked for the sugardaddy dating website Seeking Arrangements. Clearly, there is a greater degree of mutuality in such an arrangement than in unsolicited sexual messages on a clothes-selling platform; nevertheless a revelation from that episode had broader resonances here. Urick suggested that the male users exploited young women’s naïveté about the sex industry: many believed in the website’s self-promoted status as a dating platform and not a prostitution site, and many were convinced that they would not have to sleep with or even touch the older men who hired them — and that they’d be whisked away to Aruba or Cabo to boot. They believed in marketing which told them they could get something for nothing. Many were, inevitably, convinced to negotiate on these boundaries; many were fleeced, some were raped. The point, Urick said, was the deception: the men enjoyed not just the company of attractive young women but the attrition of their boundaries. The girls, many of them “nice” college students — not the wily, experienced prostitutes also available to the men — were more attractive prospects because they were vulnerable to beguilement: half of the gratification lay in their naïveté. Now look to the villains of Vinted. They mine at risk of recriminations or being reported for the same reason: the discomfort, the sense of transgression and risk, the snare. Availability breeds boredom, so true transgression comes at a premium.

As ever, the midwives of this predicament are our tech overlords, who have little incentive to implement proper safeguarding. At the breakneck pace of porn advancement — inevitably among the first industries to be enhanced by AI, VR and other new technologies — wanting to whiff smelly socks seems almost quaint, old-timey. It seems to belong to a less sinister and more predictable low-tech sexual era, the horrors of which have long been surpassed: I suspect it is for this same reason that the singer Chappell Roan appeared on Ru Paul’s Drag Race last week dressed as a blow-up doll. What was viewed decades ago as manifestly anti-feminist and humiliating becomes a joke in the present world of hyperrealistic silicone models and deepfakes. But this is about more than clothes, more than bodies, more even than the problem of the sex trade: it is about the premium placed on violation, and the way liberalism has reframed coercion as self-expression. Pornography and fetish culture have been around forever: what is new is how they ooze into the everyday, becoming inescapable if you simply happen to be a woman. What these grotty messages amount to is a bigger moral question for our time, one that feminism must stand up to: why must I participate in your fantasy?

When Trump assumed office on Jan. 20 and tossed the company a life raft, he did so by issuing an executive order that overrode duly enacted legislation, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court days earlier. By this Saturday, TikTok was supposed to have been sold or shut down in the United States.

Instead, Trump on Friday told his followers that a deal his administration has been hammering out “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”

He added: “We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the USA!). This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security! We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark’. We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

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ByteDance called the government’s bluff and briefly shut down ahead of Trump’s January decision, rather than sell TikTok to an American company. The firm’s unflinching obstinacy, perhaps, explains why everyone just shrugged at the first executive order and hoped for the best — and why they’re doing the same now too. Trump set investors scrambling, China hawks seething, and constitutional lawyers questioning how the move comported with the president’s stated ambition of restoring the separation of powers.

TikTok knows it has the cards. Whether ByteDance is at all interested in ultimately going through with a deal is a fair question: plenty of lucrative offers from US investors have been on the table. According to CBS News, a source said Trump was set “to sign an order initiating a 120-day period for closing the deal, allowing time to finish paperwork and secure financing”, but that “China backed out once Trump imposed the global import taxes”. Tariffs are a believable excuse, but it’s not impossible China is like Lucy with the football to Trump’s Charlie Brown.

TikTok is a major bargaining chip in a grave geopolitical struggle. Given the data users have always sent to Beijing, it’s been a bargaining chip ever since it arrived on America’s digital shores. For Trump, though, it’s not exactly his chip to bargain with: Congress already determined the American course of action. The mystery is why nobody seems to mind Trump delaying its execution — or at least, why nobody is complaining publicly.

With Trump’s 5 April deadline looming, I set out in March to query Trump-friendly conservatives on the legitimacy of his executive order. Several requests went unanswered, despite repeated efforts, while one group politely declined to comment over concerns about the sensitivity of the subject matter.

In reaching out to experts, I’d asked specifically about a summary of the executive order from Jim Geraghty of National Review. “Trump just didn’t want to enforce the law, even though it was constitutional. Nothing in the law’s text said the president could suspend it for 75 days”, Geraghty wrote. “The president and the executive branch cannot just ignore a law that was passed by the legislature and upheld by the judicial branch. It doesn’t matter if you love Trump or hate Trump, the president doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are enforced”.

Was that accurate, I wondered, and if so did it undermine Trump’s plan to champion the “unitary executive theory” in the name of checks and balances?

On the one hand, ensuring the proper scope of executive power is so important to the Right that Trump is firing commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and members of the National Labor Relations Board to restore presidential authority. On the other, he’s flagrantly ignoring Congress to improperly assert executive authority by almost any fair evaluation of the law.

It’s an important dynamic to scrutinize because Trump is — right now — claiming executive authority to override Congress on TikTok while also arguing forcefully for the “unitary executive theory” upon which the DOGE “revolution” hinges. What explains the Right’s hesitation to publicly advocate against this radical expansion of power, even as the GOP seeks to wrest presidential authority back from cabinet agencies and contain the Beijing regime?

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Shortly after Trump confirmed his decision in January, a couple of brave souls pointed out the obvious problems. “For constitutional conservatives: the law requiring the shutdown or qualified divestiture by ByteDance of TikTok, provides no statutory basis for the president to suspend enforcement. This is an illegal order. The bill uses ‘shall’ not ‘may’ in section 2(d) outlining enforcement”, posted tech writer Mike Brock.

Conservative John Hasson argued: “Per the TikTok law, Trump can only extend the window if he certifies to Congress that TikTok has ‘binding legal agreements to enable [its] execution’ of a ‘qualified divestiture’. Seeing as TikTok has no such agreement in place … Trump can’t do this”.

Flash-forward to Deadline Week and the Associated Press published a story with the headline, “Why no one is challenging Trump’s executive order that keeps TikTok running”.

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The AP noted that few members of the bipartisan coalition that passed the bill put up much of a protest over the 75-day extension, which “the law does not permit”, according to an expert quoted in the piece. As Sarah Kreps of Cornell University asked, “who’s the constituency [for challenging Trump’s extensions]? You have 170 million Americans using the app, and they’re pretty happy to see this continue to be available to them”.

And that’s probably where the mystery stops. TikTok is a substantial part of most teenagers’ daily lives, used by most people under 30, woven deeply into the fabric of popular culture, and a big chunk of the economy. If Trump can broker a deal, why rock the boat over a 75-day extension?

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TikTok critic Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins and the American Enterprise Institute told me in mid-March that “if the pause results in the sale of TikTok, in a way that meaningfully addresses the underlying security, intelligence, and propaganda, concerns, then I think the administration will have a decent argument that the pause served its purpose”.

“The problem”, he added, “is that President Trump has consistently signaled that his real goal is to strike some sort of a deal on this issue with China. Leaving aside the merits of any such bargain, the problem here is that this sends the signal that everything in the US-China relationship is transactional. The proper message would be that, if TikTok really does pose a threat to US national security, as President Trump once believed, and a bipartisan majority of senators and representatives concluded last year, then a ban or divestiture should not be negotiable. It should be a necessary step taken to protect America’s position in a high stakes competition”.

At the center of this conflict is data and, at risk of sounding dramatic, some measure of mind control. Whether you buy claims that China manipulated the TikTok algorithm to turn young Americans against Israel, there is something discomfiting about a Chinese firm retaining significant control over the US operations of an app used by millions of Americans. And the potential for surveillance and predatory data mining are bad enough without allegations of political mind control. ByteDance, of course, has repeatedly denied it’s engaged in any such activities.

But that is, of course, why a robust bipartisan coalition of American policymakers is also eager to get TikTok in the hands of entities stateside — both to wrest these powers for China and potentially use them for domestic purposes.

Trump’s motives here are not difficult to parse, and the bill in question is legitimately problematic. He’s popular on TikTok, and close to one of the company’s major investors. Conservatives have bigger fish to fry than what seems like a losing battle against the app, and most know they need to pick their public battles carefully when it comes to challenging this White House. And with the whole world seemingly allied against the president, his sensitives and loyalty tests aren’t entirely unreasonable this time around.

On this and other bold decisions from Trump, his defenders repeatedly cite the need to fight fire with fire and push back against Democrats’ perceived lawlessness, rather than fight with one hand tied behind their back. They point to Biden’s policy on student loan debt. “I promised to ease student debt for millions of folks”, Biden posted on X. “The Supreme Court blocked me, but it didn’t stop me”.

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Back in 2021, Aaron Blake criticized Biden’s COVID-era eviction moratorium policy in the Washington Post, summarizing the president’s attitude as, “It might not be legal, but even if it’s not, we’ll get some good done in the meantime”.

Both parties can play the blame game all day, arguing until they’re blue in the face about who started all of this — at least in modern US history. But that’s the point. As talking heads have spent recent weeks shouting at one another about Trump’s explicit challenges to the status quo on deportations and federal workers, his TikTok policy faded into the background. In the shadow of scrutiny, Republicans and Democrats hoping for a deal that benefits the United States may have forfeited a principle they claim to be fighting for bitterly in other theatres.

The proof is Trump’s flippant 75-day extension of his first 75-day extension. As fallout continued from his tariff bombshell — including the legitimacy of his emergency authority to implement the new rates — barely anyone batted an eye at TikTok getting another dubious bailout.

Many email jobs have disappeared overnight. The material economy of the Millennial manager is under pressure from automation; from DOGE-era disclosures about NGOs; and from broader, Trump 2.0 shifts back toward — or at least, an appreciation for — family and church, farm and toil.

The Millennial economy was a virtue economy. Some of the most successful among us held managerial roles in tech, education, finance, arts, and politics that centered on controlling and reshaping language and brand perception — what might be called “virtue refereeing”. The most ambitious American Millennials, in a broad sense, became the apparatchiks of the globalized economy built by our parents, in part because there were few other pathways to the American Dream: stable jobs, home ownership, rising wages. Successful Millennials scuttled across the narrow footbridge between the eras. Many others, however, fell into the voids on all sides.

The new economic and political paradigm that is settling into place suggests redress, and greater social dignity, for those who didn’t land managerial email jobs in the first place, who didn’t sell out to become virtue referees. Put simply: many Americans look forward to paying fewer taxes indirectly into the managerial caste’s pocketbooks and to the potential reshoring of industrial jobs. Thus, these changes may be bad for the few and good for the many; many of them deserve to be celebrated.

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Start with politics. Because former President Joe Biden’s staffers ran his administration, the Biden years were the first Millennial presidency: inauthentic, bureaucratic, neurotic, seduced by jargon and theory, indifferent to the needs of those outside their own caste. The Biden era was a great reveal: we saw the wizard behind the curtain (and that wizard talked like us, with upspeak and a tendency to twist declarative sentences into the interrogative tone). More damningly, the wizard also made things worse: there was a seeping sense of decline in the Biden years, which produced the inevitable political backlash.

Beyond politics, virtue-referee work has lost its appeal, and the way Millennials talk about their jobs is shifting. Sunny, Obama-inflected language about contributing to progress is an embarrassment for all but the last true believers. My friend Sam Venis, for instance, a journalist and part-time corporate consultant, admits that he is “completely disenchanted by the notion of a ‘job’, which makes me much more comfortable exploiting the money sloshing around the corporate world”. Halfway through this decade, he feels “freed of the delusion that that portion of my work matters in some spiritual [or] societal way, which allows me to view it transactionally, and take even more seriously my creative work”.

There were always, broadly speaking, two groups of Millennials (at least, among the millions with college degrees who attempted to make it in the big cities). There were those who, in some way, kept the faith of early-2000s hipster bohemianism — the late-30-something who still shares an apartment and doesn’t have a spouse or kids and has slowly turned toward Trump. The second group are the careerists and strivers, who built up good credit scores and used grad-student jargon to facilitate unnecessary meetings for the last decade and voted for Kamala Harris — the professional overclass.

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While the two groups have always co-existed, socialized, even aligned politically for a long time, the bohemian caste not only voted for Trump, but did so with a deep sense of vindication. Trump’s high approval ratings aren’t coming from rural evangelicals or blue-collar voters alone. Recall that the areas that shifted most sharply to the GOP in last year’s election were the blue strongholds; the calls are coming from inside the house of urban liberalism.

This turn of events flows from 2008, the year of the financial crisis and a pivotal moment for older Millennials. The economy of our parents disappeared in that year. As a consolation prize, we were offered the opportunity to be morally better than them. Our generation might be a generation of baristas and bartenders saddled with debt, but we could nurture our own inflated sense of importance by being more socialist, less racist, more liberatory, more linguistically sophisticated. Maybe we wouldn’t own homes, but we’d have doctorates.

Those who managed to parlay moral superiority into actual, dependable, well-paying jobs remained staunchly progressive — because fervency unlocked job security. Those who didn’t manage this feel some sense of hope now, only because practicing the verbal rituals of liberalism is no longer a prerequisite to social credibility.

It would be fascinating to see time-lapse movies of Millennials’ Facebook pages (and later Instagram and Twitter feeds) from, say, the mid-2000s to 2025. Essentially, 20 years of social media: from apolitical to staunchly progressive to whatever we have now — skeptical, realistic, finally clear-sighted, and even optimistic in ways we have never had reason to be.

The weird reality of Facebook, the ur-social media for older Millennials, is that it has always been a place to advertise personal triumphs. I’m so excited to announce that I have been accepted into Georgetown’s security-studies program; I’m delighted to share that I’ll be serving as an editorial assistant at The Nation this summer; here’s our first child. And secondarily, for fears: Can’t believe Orange Hitler is taking away the presidential fellows program; climate change is so scary; I don’t feel safe here.

It’s a strange zone of contradiction, where the expectation is that one poses simultaneously as successful and fragile: I can afford to take an upscale vacation to Europe, and I’m afraid of the future and the responsibilities of family; a place where one’s network can watch and participate in this strange spiral of anxiety and bold confidence.

The Millennial virtue economy — the rump of the Boomer white-collar economy — had no room for people who couldn’t tap into this mix of anxiety and celebration, self-interest and “purpose”. They couldn’t do it, either because they’d chosen entirely different paths — farming, construction, small-scale entrepreneurship, odd jobs — that didn’t lend themselves to online self-celebration. Or because they were simply too dignified to post: I’m delighted to announce. . .

I think of people with whom I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. One of them is working odd jobs in halfway homes, going for long walks, praying — essentially, a secular monk. Another, last I checked in, was working on a hydroponic lettuce farm, painting every morning, ever an artist. Another works on film sets when possible and bounces back and forth between New York and Bethlehem. They, and many others like them, may relish the collapse of the virtue economy and the rise of something once again material and dignified — or at least, less self-righteous, less bloated with gaseous smugness.

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Clearly for others, especially in the absurdly affluent DC suburbs, the pain is real. Friends from college and my early 20s in New York City, who successfully tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2010s, who became Obama-era media figures, seem to be confronting not just joblessness, but irrelevancy for the first time. The magic produced by saying the ritual words the right way has run out. No one’s up for progressive scolding anymore. You can’t make a career out of it. The outrage, the nitpicking, the Ezra Klein voice — it’s out.

That doesn’t mean that what comes next necessarily makes for a good society. Far from it. There is a plausible version of events in which many jobs are automated out of existence and universal basic income will play the role that state distributions of bread played in the late-stage Roman Empire: a fragile band holding together urban civilization.

Cutting fake, grating, pompous virtue referees from prestige jobs that drive up the federal deficit is inarguably egalitarian. It is no guarantor of substantial progress and meaningful social security, however. Moreover, the Right shows signs of creating its own, reciprocal patronage and virtue economy, stocked with influencers and thought-leaders who similarly produce little more than anger at their now dethroned Left-wing counterparts. That ought to be abhorred as much as its progressive forebear.

2025 is partly about coming to grips with how tenuous, silly, and demoralizing the last era was for the many; this clarity has to be exploited, not obscured in new ways. This is the Millennial reckoning: the end of the moral-superiority economy, and the slow, painful realization that tangible value lies in places and communities many of us had long considered beneath us.

Secrets, lies and half-truths, too, have always been part of government, and under discussion in the press. This was true even in the postwar years where there was a relatively greater culture of public deference towards politicians. It was, after all, the legendary 20th-century Times journalist Louis Heren who wrote: “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’” Yet the act of exposing a politician for lying had its own rules of engagement. The traditional avenue for an allegation was generally via the British press and broadcast media, which exposed it to editorial scrutiny, the attention of lawyers and a significant degree of financial and reputational risk for the accuser. It could even lead to a judicial or public inquiry.

The operations of the British “legacy media” have of course not been an unbroken chain of good behavior, but there has nonetheless been some framework of accountability. Regulatory bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission and, after 2014, the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) rein in press operations, along with libel laws and, when necessary, the police and criminal courts. A number of British tabloid journalists went to jail over the phone-hacking scandal. As a last resort, the public could boycott a publication, and inflict lasting commercial pain: Liverpudlians were so incensed by The Sun’s front-page coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy — a splash egregiously entitled “The Truth” which wrongly blamed fans for the disaster in which 97 people died — that sales in Merseyside remain very low even today.

Yet online, this system for restraining or punishing the most extreme false allegations has now been sharply eroded. The overheating, unchecked rhetoric of rumor and smear is a swelling presence in modern British politics, and there is every likelihood of it intensifying. In recent months, much of it has been directed personally at Keir Starmer, and already it has begun to warp and destabilize British democracy itself.

Some of the elements in this contemporary collapse were introduced decades ago. The rise of celebrity culture in the Nineties and Noughties, along with a plethora of magazines that detailed every supermarket trip and gym visit of a cast of briefly famous characters, attuned the public to a heightened churn of gossip. When newspapers entered the game, most notably with MailOnline’s “Sidebar of Shame”, the primary focus remained on figures from the entertainment industry — but the appetite for gorging on fast-moving trivia had been created.

The advent of social media in the early 2010s then further accelerated the circulation of both hearsay and personal vituperation. This time, self-righteous fury entered the equation. For a period, X became the chief conduit for the policing of acceptable speech, with perceived transgressors singled out as objects of outrage by a “progressive” online mob. The effect could be personally devastating: in one early Twitter storm, in 2015, hysteria was unleashed upon the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Tim Hunt for making some silly passing remarks — which he meant to be humorous — about women in science labs. During that same speech, he had also actively exhorted women to enter science as a career. He was nonetheless asked to resign from his role at University College London, as well as several other research positions. A growing nervousness spread throughout institutions, particularly academia and publishing, that any digression from a progressive-approved line on issues such as sexism, racism or trans rights could be career-threatening.

Then came the 2016 Brexit vote, which sparked a series of political crises that made normal, day-to-day governance extremely difficult. The survivor of Conservative Party dramas emerged as Boris Johnson, perhaps the first prime minister to envision politics — as he had journalism — primarily as a form of entertainment. He kept the British public supplied with an excess of narrative and a paucity of workable policy. Truth and public trust were casualties of his premiership: the “Partygate” revelations appeared to confirm that there was one rule for the political classes and quite another for ordinary citizens. Louis Heren’s maxim had rarely seemed so apposite.

This was the state of the nation when Elon Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in October 2022. The prospect of libel payments didn’t daunt him: by December 2024, he was the first person in the world to have attained an estimated net worth of over $400 billion. From a technical rather than a media background, he had long demonstrated no awareness of any responsibility to restrain his speech or accusations, either on the grounds of accuracy or civic responsibility. Confronted with anyone who offended his mercurial sensibility, his instinct was to trash-talk, escalate and inflame. He had already emerged unscathed after one defamation case in 2019, in which he dubbed Vernon Unsworth, a cave diver who bluntly dismissed Musk’s intervention in a cave rescue plan, “pedo guy”. Unsworth, not surprisingly, sued. But he lost: Musk had accepted that the slur was baseless, but managed to convince the US jury that in South Africa, where he grew up, “pedo guy” was just a regular insult without specific connotations. Unsworth’s lawyer said afterwards that the verdict had sent a signal “that you can make any accusation you want to, as vile as it may be and as untrue as it may be, and somebody can get away with it”. The observation was prophetic.

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Since securing his close alliance with Donald Trump — and the apparent license to do exactly what he wants — Musk has heightened his explicitly political interference in the governance of other countries. In Britain at least, he inherited a user base that was already receptive to gossip, accustomed to intemperate expressions of online rage, and with a post-Covid, post-Johnson collapse of trust in politicians. Musk took things further. By ceasing moderation on X, he has permitted a constant wash of unverified rumor to ebb and flow over Labour politicians, leaving a stain behind even as it recedes. In the aftermath of the horrific Southport killings, the rumor mill began working overtime among Right-wing accounts, grinding “I know something you don’t know” in numerous different styles. In response to some of the false accusations about the killer which helped to trigger riots in the streets and attacks on police officers and mosques, Musk posted: “Civil war is inevitable.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage went so far as to speculate in a video that “the truth is being withheld from us”.

In early January this year, Musk began vociferously tweeting about what he called “the Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” scandal in Rotherham, Rochdale and other towns, which stretched from the late Eighties until 2013. His tweets on the topic were mixed up with expressions of support for Reform UK and far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, who is currently in prison for contempt of court. On 3 January, Musk posted: “Starmer was responsible for the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.” This wild statement was not only wholly unfounded, but a brazen inversion of the actual truth. While many in authority do bear culpability, most notably the local police and councils, those most closely involved in the story say that Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, was instrumental in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Andrew Norfolk, the former Times reporter who spent years exposing the crimes, said: “I want to put the record straight on this. It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

At this point, one might reasonably have expected British politicians of all parties to unite in some kind of staunch defense of actual evidence and objective truth. Chillingly, that did not happen. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, in tandem with Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, has developed a habit of using Musk’s lines of argument as political ammunition. Not only did she taunt Starmer in the Commons with a petition — boosted by Musk — calling for the Prime Minister to resign, but she and Jenrick both fed the X-based rumor factory by publicly hinting that there were important facts the public was not being told concerning the Southport case.

Those British politicians who are tempted to hitch a ride on Musk’s bandwagon, rather than defend the honest ground of political opposition, might heed the warnings from history. In the early days of the French Revolution, for example, a sudden explosion in newspaper titles and a collapse in regulation created a febrile, sparring press that might almost be seen as an early prototype of X. Between July and December 1789 alone, a total of 250 newspapers sprang up for public consumption, each vigorously competing in the battle for attention. While many were vehicles for astute debate and analysis, they also became mouthpieces for various factions, promoting denunciations against political rivals. Sometimes, claims carried a measure of truth; often, they didn’t. The thickening atmosphere of violence and suspicion began to exert its own dynamic force upon society.

Smears were used as a way of hobbling troublesome rivals. The radical newspaper editor Jean-Paul Marat helped to finish off the career of firebrand activist priest Jacques Roux by falsely alleging that he was a “venal intriguer” whose real name was the Abbé Renaudi. The lawyer and journalist Camille Desmoulins destroyed the reputation of a former friend, Jacques Pierre Brissot, in a scathing pamphlet called “Brissot Unmasked”. When he saw Brissot later being sentenced to death, he reportedly cried in remorse: “My god, I’m sorry for this!” When Maximilien Robespierre backed the Law of 22 Prairial in June 1794, rumor and accusation became the only things needed to secure a conviction, since the suspect’s right to a defense had been discarded. Most of the newspapers which had fed debate had been shut down and silenced, one by one. Marat, Roux, Brissot and Desmoulins were all dead.

The separation of accusation from verifiable evidence, or from any potential restraints upon the accuser, is a dangerous game that rarely ends well. It is even more disturbing when regularly practiced by the US President’s right-hand man. To play along with it for temporary political advantage — helping to dissolve the very principles that have reliably underpinned the British parliamentary and justice system — is to play with fire. The rise of rumor is closely related to the collapse of objective truth, and the slide of political systems from rational persuasion of the electorate to a feverish struggle for domination. Musk’s revolution, one way or another, will devour its children.

There has been important research done by social scientists, most prominently Jonathan Haidt, outlining the catastrophic effects of social media on teens, particularly on teen girls. I am not here to argue that the smartphone has been a net positive or even a neutral technology in the life of teens. As a teacher, I can see that it is bad for young people, as it is for me. But the past year has made me far less anxious about the cell phone’s capacity to make teens anxious. The “vibe shift” we’ve all noticed, moving away from extreme progressive ideologies towards more “populist” (popular) attitudes, has made the ubiquity of social media far less worrying. Youth culture has changed. What was once cool on social media is now cringe. These days you wouldn’t be seen dead posting social justice infographics. And therapy talk, thank god, is no longer a trend. This has happened quicker than social scientists might have been able to collate in data points, perhaps. I am not blaming them for that. Teen trends happen in an instant.

To understand teen trends, we need to remember that the teen is essentially a pack animal. Movies since The Breakfast Club, which is now 40 years old, have told us what the packs are: the jocks, the princesses, the nerds, the rockers, and the weirdos. Teens attach themselves to their group. Even the loners are part of a group: the NPC one. Ever since Judd Nelson courted Molly Ringwald, we’ve been told to break down the barriers, move outside our cliques, see people for who they are on the inside. It never occurs to us that the groups are formed in the first place because teens do see each other as they are on the inside, and that the groups are formed accordingly.

The truth is that the teenagers like their groups. They have very little interest in moving outside of them or abolishing them. The groups give them a sense of belonging, and they like to belong. Belonging helps one to feel less alone, and it enables a teen to understand and form judgments about the world around her. The teen typically adopts internally the external markers of her group so that she can find a way to fit into the world. We have been told that identity, particularly gender identity, is socially constructed. But of course it is! Teenage years of development are difficult and confusing. The social groups offer one a sense of coherence about the world, and a template for forming oneself to fit it. The teens conform to each other; even (or maybe especially) the “non-conformists” conform to one another.

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That the teenager wants to fit into the world is a good thing, and a necessary one. As the teen fits into the world she also changes it so that it fits her. The Gen Z teen is doing this playfully, for instance, with language. They’ve resurrected old words, “cooked”, and made up new ones, “opp” and “slaps”. They break words apart and put them back together: “unalive”. These words spread quickly, thanks to social media, and using the words signals belonging to a culture — with the extra caveat that the new words all must be said with just the right amount of ironic self-mockery. The ultimate code for belonging to teen culture is to signal that it’s lame to look desperate to belong to teen culture.

Their language games and early adaptability to new words show that the teen is both a natural rebel and a natural conformist. Almost universally girls want first to fit in with other girls. The teen girl moves in a pack, and she thinks with her pack. And while it is true that during the teen years girls start to become focused on boys, their main focus remains, almost universally, on their acceptance with other girls.

What the teenaged girl wants most is to be judged as an insider by the other teens in her group. She wants to feel secure enough in some girls’ approval so that they can collectively give disapproval to other girls, as well as to the guys. In other words, she wants to feel good about herself, which happens by evaluating herself, her values and personality, relative to her peers and to find them wanting. This might make being a teen girl sound like an extended Mean Girls movie or something, but I don’t think it really is. We all judge other people, all the time. (Many readers no doubt judged me as a bad mother when I said I enjoy sharing social media with my kids. I am not hurt if you have.) Judgment is necessary. Our judgments aren’t just our values, but also the way we experience our values. Through judgments the norms of the group become the feelings of the girl. The girl-packs help teens make sense of this and socialize them into it.

Over the past decade or so, the rebel-conformist qualities of the teen girl have coalesced in the conformity of the non-conforming teen. The “rebel” in her fights oppressions, combats “norms”, and is an “individual”. But she is an easily recognizable stereotype, subject to what Matthew B Crawford describes as “the sameness of mass solipsism”. The mass-conforming non-conformists have held undeniable power over teen culture, and their influence have coincided with the advent of social media. We know that social media coincided with a rapid increase of teenage anxiety, mental illness, and general unhappiness. But it also coincided with peak MeToo, peak cancel culture, peak therapy culture, peak social justice culture, and peak trauma-dumping culture.

I am not here to diagnose correlation or causation. The rise of social media and the rise of teenage unhappiness and anxiety are a kind of chicken-and-egg phenomenon; I don’t know what came first. But I do know that the kinds of messages coming through social media have changed, and that this change is correlating with a change in teen attitudes. Five years ago, during the start of the pandemic, one of my daughters fell under the influence of social media messaging on mental health. She was 11, and thanks to lockdowns, isolated from normal face-to-face teenage interactions. And she suddenly developed some sort of depression/anxiety/self-harm habits, as well as a nervous tick. Trauma was really “in” at the time. (This is not to say, and it’s a little embarrassing that I might need to clarify this for some readers, that some kids/teens/adults don’t suffer from mental illness and from traumatic experiences. I am talking about a trend, a zeitgeist, and not legitimate illness nor the traumatic horrors that beset many innocent victims. Some individuals are truly afflicted, and others use it as a persona. Both things can be true at the same time.)

The more afflicted a teen was by trauma, the more street-cred she got for being an authentic victim, or for being an ally. A few years ago, I had a university student in a Shakespeare class raise her hand to tell me that I shouldn’t talk about death because it could “trigger a trauma” in some students. She was there to “educate” me about being trauma-sensitive. That death is traumatic for all of humanity seemed to escape her notice entirely, as did the fact that it would be really difficult to teach Shakespeare without mentioning death. She seemed to think she was protecting at-risk students from something she had supposedly discovered about mortality. What a whiz. (There is an FX series, English Teacher, which satirizes this type of student. She suffers from “asymptomatic Tourette’s”, which can only be self-diagnosed, and she is triggered by the mention of any kind of illness in literature class. I haven’t seen the show. I only know about it because my teens share reels of it with me through, *clears throat*, social media.)

Five years ago, weakness was the goal. This not only relieved the teen of the emotional burden of learning how to take responsibility for her own insecurities, it made her feel more included in the teen group that judged affliction itself to be a virtue. But the real emotional satisfaction came in the form of judging anyone who didn’t validate her self-diagnoses. Oh, the rush of feeling morally justified in looking down at those who lack the ethical lens needed to breathe life into your traumas. Trauma-affirmation bonded teens to each other. With friends like those, who needs enemies?

But there has been a colossal sea-change in Gen Z culture since then. It’s been like turning a huge ship on the sea, slow, but there is now momentum behind its critical mass, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change course. It is now decidedly lame to be mentally fragile, an “iPad kid”, someone who spends all their time online, who has followed the trends of trauma-dumping, and of being non-conforming. This is now “cringe”. (My own daughter’s “afflictions” have become a running joke with her. Yes, she knows I’m writing about it. No, she is not offended.) Teens, let’s remember, are both rebels and conformists. As soon as teen brittleness became, as they would have said, “normalized”, teens began to rebel against it. And now it is the norm to rebel against safe-space culture, which is increasingly top-heavy anyway. Once your vice-principal, your Phys-Ed teacher, the mainstream media, corporations, and politicians get behind a teen zeitgeist, it loses its “rizz”. The rebellion has taken the form of ridicule. What was once sacred is lambasted for its sanctimony. And so now the teenager recognizes her position as an insider of the group if she is privy to the scandalous jokes told about the dominant culture. The tyranny of “alt-girl” is over. Her downfall was that she was too fragile to be funny.

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But what is going to fill the vacuum left by the nonconforming teen? Recently, in anticipation of its third season which begins this month, I rewatched the very first episode of HBO’s The White Lotus. Its opening sequence portrays in microcosm what seems to be emerging on the broad cultural scale. We see two older teens/young women, both gorgeous (played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady), talking in secrecy to each other on a boat, gossiping about the other guests. From their perch under the boat’s awning, they judge all the other passengers, discerning their innermost characteristics. And they are not wrong in their judgments. The two beautiful girls have powers of perception because they are so often on the receiving end of others’ scrutiny.

But the show’s real moment of insight is when these two teens meet one of these boat guests, the young newlywed bride, at the hotel pool. The bride is friendly with the two teens, but they act coolly superior to her (one is pretentiously reading Freud and the other casually flipping through Nietzsche). The young wife quickly realizes that behind their smiles the two girls are mocking her. She turns away from them to go for a swim, taking off her beach cover-up to reveal a truly stunning physique. Sweeney’s character instantly looks disappointed and humiliated. “Oh shit,” she says. The natural order reestablishes its Darwinian hierarchy. Survival of the hottest. How cruel.

Of course, Sydney Sweeney’s own perfect physique may not qualify her for this role. But then again, maybe her own sexiness makes her the perfect person to play the disappointed teen: she would obviously be aware of the power hotness wields, which is why she is humbled by beauty. Her response is not generous, but at least she does not persist in arrogance. The teenage girl who is not hot frequently holds onto more resentment and moral vanity. She would feel proud to be ugly next to beauty because it makes her seem like a beautiful person on the inside. That is her claim to superiority. It is oftentimes a compensatory, rival pride that she feels in her own unattractiveness. The moral vanity goes so deep that she doesn’t typically recognize it as vanity — especially when our culture celebrates this kind of pride as a virtue.

This Sydney Sweeney syndrome, part arrogant self-righteous teen and part neo-pagan hot-goddess, occupies a large amount of digital real estate on social media. Both of these vibes no doubt add fuel to the feelings of pride and insecurity we have seen in teens. But we can’t ignore either the sense of fun that’s been emerging in Gen Z. The new cool is to ridicule what was cool a few years ago. This means that the fragile, easily offended teen (who used this identity as a power-play to elicit sympathy and affirmations from others, as well as to raise her status as one who could educate others in higher-order morality) has now become a meme rather than an aspiration. The laughing new teen has a healthier way of being, and my hunch is that we will see a corresponding decline in mental health issues from youth. One tends to become what one pretends to be.

But this is not to say that the new teen is good. She may tend toward arrogance and cruelty in the same way that the cancel-culture teens did. There is a unique opportunity, if one has an interest in these things, in filling the void left by the now cringy “alt-girl”, with something beautiful, strong, and glorious. My hunch is that this may take the form of a return to a more vital way of being embodied – more Nietzschean uber-teen than afflicted victim. The trick will be to make the glory of this teen also honorable, and to make her strength also generous.

It was, in short, a digital gang of Thomas Paines, all trying to bring their ideas to a new generation. Then, just as suddenly, the biggest video hosting platform in the world tweaked a couple of lines in its algorithm, and the video essay era ended. At the 20th anniversary of YouTube, it is important to remember this brief Prague Spring of a more thoughtful internet — and to recall quite how much influence it had on the internet we’ve ended up with.

By 2018, when I made a radio documentary about the YouTube online Right, I’d become fascinated by the form. To me, it seemed like something totally new. A world of genuine outsiders, people who would otherwise have had no standing in conventional journalism, they performed the kind of dense argumentation that workaday journalists neither had the bandwidth nor, often, the brain cells for.

Central to this emergent world was the figure of Carl Benjamin, a YouTuber who went via the nomme de guerre of Sargon of Akkad, a name he’d pulled from an ancient Mesopotamian king. Benjamin had no bona fides. A university drop out, he’d briefly had a job sweating data at the Swindon Research Council. Somewhere along the way, he’d become radicalized against what were then called “Social Justice Warriors” — it would be another four years before anyone called them woke.

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Railing against the perversion of his beloved video games by diversity ideology, Benjamin uploaded essays that used the core of Western philosophy to justify his positions and vanquish his enemies. Chief among them was Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist who typified the mold then emerging: recently graduated upper-middle-class girls obsessed with tokenistic representation, intersectionality and victimology. Benjamin saw the tide of evil rolling in.

Like a sucker, Benjamin actually went back to the core texts of Western thought, arguing from first principles. For fans of their idol’s lugubrious baritone, there was a kind of shock in being asked to defend things that, until yesterday, had barely needed considering. Merit is good. Free speech is inalienable. Incomers to a society should contribute. But the arguments were dredged up, from Aristotle’s ideas on “the good” to Voltaire on the separation of powers. A particular totem of the day was to believe in On Liberty, as though Mill were the final word on everything. Even Milo Yiannopoulos, that charlatan’s charlatan, would bang on about having a copy by his bedside.

Later, Benjamin turned to analyzing power itself. He published video essays on Machiavelli. He became obsessed with reverse-engineering the work of Saul Alinsky, the Marxist theorist who wrote Rules for Radicals, the Leftist agitator’s bible. Others joined the party, with their own beats and their own pseudonyms. The Godless Spellchecker spun out of the post-Dawkins militant atheist wave. The Academic Agent, for his part, was a moonlighting university lecturer, initially a lover of Ludwig von Mises and Austrian economics, but who gradually turned away from libertarianism and towards hardcore neo-reaction.

At the time, with Obama in the White House and Osbornism ascendent, the Right was in disgustingly flabby shape. In the mainstream press, certainly, the Sebastian Payne tendency was all you got: the Right as the Left driving at the speed limit. But on YouTube, at least, a fightback had begun in earnest. “We can’t wait on anyone to do this for us,” Benjamin told a 2017 live stream. There was no world beyond.

Nor was the Right alone: the Left were busy developing its own essayists too. Collectively known as BreadTube, they pioneered a tactic called “algorithmic hijacking”. Piggybacking on keywords popular with their Right-wing opponents, they ensured their response videos ranked high in searches. Top of the heap was the genuinely entertaining Natalie Wynn. Known to fans as ContraPoints, Wynn mixed film criticism with Leftist ideology in a similar style to the cult theorist Mark Fisher. Across the Atlantic, there were the likes of Hbomberguy, the pseudonym of Harry Brewise, who amassed 1.7 million subscribers with videos like “Climate Denial: A Measured Response”.

When it came, the end was sudden. It happened around 2019, when YouTube switched up its algorithm. To boost overall watch-time, admins chose to prioritize videos that were far longer, looser confections. Suddenly, the two-hour livestream was at the top of everyone’s feed, fatal for 20-minute video essays that could take days to script and edit. And, with that, creators who had been stars of the previous era began to melt away. Their view counts ticked down, the gaps between videos grew longer. Most either stopped or adopted the new mode.

In many ways, though, this shift was helpful to the burgeoning online Right. Less reliant on the auteur, they could instead lean on celebrity guests culled from other YouTube channels. No longer operating in their own silos, they effectively became a cast, a menagerie of personalities who visited each other’s home bases for cozy chats.

Benjamin leaned into the trend effectively. Exhausted by his own content production cycle, he decided to clone himself. Farming out his schtick to a new generation of twenty-somethings in blazers, he launched an expanded daily show that he called The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. It chiefly consisted of Benjamin and his mini-mes reacting to stories they read out from the mainstream press.

The end of the video essay also meant the start of an era in which the algorithm prioritized the livestream, and the long, rambling, podcast style chat. In a certain sense, that was a good next step for Benjamin and the other past masters of the form. Constantly going on each other’s shows meant that norms began to establish themselves, as these thought leaders moved from one stream to the next. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Carl Schmitt. Suddenly, it was taken as ancient wisdom that “he who decides the exception is sovereign”.

In the scheme of things, the video essay era was a brief ellipsis. Yet it was deeply consequential, and not just in terms of Carl Benjamin’s career. For a start, there was the generational cohort effect: the 24 year olds of today would have been 15 back then. They grew up in the world of the YouTube essay. For them, indeed, it wasn’t just fashion, it was formative. And when you hear the head-banging tone of the Zoomer crew now coming through, what you are witnessing are people who have imbibed Benjamin’s whole moral style. They come pre-loaded with the facts and arguments of the video essay era. Does migration drive growth? No. Does multiculturalism need more time to succeed? No. For them, these are settled questions.

Not that we ever quite got a breakout YouTube superstar. No technology has supplanted its elements. Far from becoming integrated into TV-land, a curious cordon sanitaire endures between broadcast media and YouTube. Yet the fruits are everywhere: just look at Trumpism in its second term. At the core of what has been happening with USAID and executive orders is precisely the kind of first-principles analysis of power that the first term lacked.

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By Gavin Haynes

It has allowed the new government to get in at the roots of American bureaucracy, cutting off the enemy’s supply lines. Today, it’s the idea on everyone’s lips, not because it is exhausted, but because the whip hand is about to pass over: power is finally with this new revanchist Right.

Much like Mao’s Long March, the fight at first seemed unwinnable, until, gradually, the insurgents gained strength, their ideas coalescing into a creed, an ideology, with world-shaping power. Certainly, Benjamin himself seems to view his political journey in just these terms. With the USAID revelations of subsidy for Leftist causes, Benjamin pulled up an alleged payment credit to a feminist game development company called Feminist Frequency. Who was the CEO of this firm? None other than Anita Sarkeesian, the target of the YouTuber all those years ago. Beneath the receipts, Benjamin simply tweets: “I just wanted to play video games.”

Back then, terminally online nerds really did still have a live-and-let-live mentality — until politics came looking for them. At first, they thought classical liberalism would solve their problems. But the train didn’t stop there. The movement trundled on, until like The Academic Agent it became genuinely reactionary. Not merely anti-SJW, it rather assails the entire post-war consensus, from immigration to welfare to state education. The more they dug into what was wrong, with their Mill and their Aristotle, the more the YouTubers hunted for radical solutions.

Today, the online theorists are digging up the very flagstones of liberalism. They scoff at the ideal of the public square and the marketplace of ideas. They’re into the deep plumbing of power: rewarding friends and punishing enemies. We’re a long way from the golden age of “Milton Friedman DESTROYS” clips. Today, their heroes aren’t Mill and Voltaire. They’re Thomas Carlyle, Oswald Spengler and James Burnham. They really should have let him play video games.

You hear about us as being hopelessly in thrall to the infinite scroll of social media; obsessed with micro-influencers whose fame doesn’t even last 45 seconds, let alone 15 minutes; and ever on the verge of falling into eating disorders or self-harm as a result of the images and ideas that flash before our truncated attention spans. We are the “anxious generation”, mind-controlled by apps designed to be as addictive as possible. More specifically, we are framed as victims of a Chinese app called TikTok.

To be clear, the TikTok-girl crises I sketched above are all too real. But the older generation’s discourse around them more or less ignores what the people who are in need of rescue have to say for themselves. As a result, it misses the granular details that could make for better and more realistic reforms, if reforms are needed.

Famehungry — a new piece of performance art about TikTok being staged at the Soho Playhouse this week as part of the New York City Fringe Festival — is a good example of how such critiques go wrong. In it, the London-based theatre artist Louise Orwin explores the big question — TikTok, good or evil? — in a multimedia format that streams simultaneously on TikTok Live and integrates the app in interesting ways with the in-person performance. Audience members who still have the tabooed and sort-of-banned app can like or comment as the play unfolds; everyone sees Orwin acting into her phone and her screen-view is projected onto the stage. It could have been fun, but the performance was chaotic and overwhelmed by a too-on-the-nose “concern message” about people like me.

Orwin’s breakout performance in 2014 was a project called Pretty Ugly that examined the online identities of teenage girls. Famehungry covers some of the same territory, asking about the app’s effects on the mental health, self-esteem, and happiness of girls and young women.

The new work opens with Orwin sprawled onstage in various positions illuminated only by the glow of her phone. It’s a commentary on the social-media era: we only exist as we are seen online. I could relate to it some; it reminded me of staying up late with only the light of my phone in my room. She is wearing a red Adidas track suit and clashing neon green bodysuit, and she writhes around while loud and jarring ambient music plays. Next she sits down at a desk covered in pink hair and starts babytalking and making scrunchy faces into the camera. “Just waiting for a few more people to join”, she repeats, over and over and over. She also performs a few TikTok stereotypes, like waving and saying hi, drinking from her Stanley, and eating stuff off her acrylic nails (eating videos are called mukbang, from the Korean words meaning “eat” and “broadcast”).

Orwin explains during the play that she joined TikTok because she missed performing live during the pandemic, and she discovered that one of her former students, a 15-year-old named Jax Valentine, had 20,000 followers. She wondered if she could get up to that number, which was more than she’d ever achieved in a theatre in real life. During the performance, she’s hoping to achieve 20,000 likes and promises she’ll “do something amazing” for the audience if she does. Jax makes live guest appearances on another screen to coach her.

A long middle section of the play talks about what Orwin likes about TikTok. She picks the weird, outlandish, or simply brainrot videos — people running in slow motion, girls dancing in turtle-outfits — and says she likes to see all this human variety from around the world. She believes the app “democratizes the flow of information” and “makes space for marginalized communities”. But she offers this praise while walking on a treadmill, speaking in an increasingly frantic voice, and she follows it up with all the rules of how you have to act to be liked, implying that the app only rewards certain types of behavior and punishes others: turtle-dancing, yes; “fake smoking while covered in fake blood,” no. (I’m glad that content moderation prevents violent videos.) She also does attention-getting things like violently splash her face with water or eating with food hanging out of her mouth — more mukbang. During her final dance number, she pours a pink drink that looks like a strawberry Yoo-hoo over her head.

The play concludes with the artist venting mixed but mostly negative feelings. The attention is nice, Orwin thinks, but other than that, TikTok is “a black hole of nothing”. It’s “mostly people doing the same thing over and over again”, and she is disgusted with herself for participating. She also seems to be disgusted — or at least, negatively impacted — by many of her previous non-online performances. She tells the audience about ones in which she’d asked men to hit her or done other self-destructive or sexually gross things. Talking at the end with her back to the audience, she says she’s tired of “the precarious way I earn a living”, “the constant checking and rechecking”, the “dystopia”, and “making work in a system that’s broken”. She wonders why she’s doing it, and if she should have planned for her future or gotten a real job instead.

Yet what Orwin portrays goes so far beyond what the generally young, female user base of TikTok is like. I was insulted that a grown woman would put on an act that mocks young girls in the name of spotlighting their supposed misery. Orwin is a performance artist, exaggerating to make an effect, but the baby voices and the determination to humiliate herself seemed more about her than about most of us. If someone on TikTok says they’re “just waiting for a few more people to join”, it’s because they’re legitimately waiting. Sometimes people do rage-bait — act obnoxious to get attention — but the influencers who are famous and making money aren’t the ones doing that. They’re usually offering positive messages and running real businesses.

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I also thought maybe that Orwin was on the app for the wrong reasons. She went there because she was “fame hungry”, and all she cared about was getting followers. And she searched out the weird live content from around the world because that was her personal preference. I sometimes see that kind of content advertised in my feed, but I don’t watch them. My followers are mostly my friends, and I don’t obsess about getting more of them from among the strangers online. I use TikTok as a side tool in life; it’s meant to be fun. I capture fun moments with friends in nice outfits, take clips of interesting city views, and follow fashion, health, and beauty content. I didn’t mind deleting the app because as long as everyone was off of it, I wasn’t missing anything.

Many young women have mental-health problems, to be sure, but those result from all kinds of social and personal factors, not just TikTok. Some people might act foolish and inappropriate (especially when they have an audience of one to five people, who are probably just bots), and that isn’t good for them. But it’s also a mistake on that person’s part, not solely the fault of the app. Orwin herself is a good example, because she tells us she has been making disturbing and self-harming work long before TikTok existed.

I don’t know what danger the Chinese ownership of the app truly presents to kids, but I do think it’s dangerous to condemn something you don’t know much about, or whose positive attributes you’re unable to see. I stay mentally healthy despite the stress of the junior year of high school by getting a lot of exercise, eating real food, and spending time with my friends. Orwin poured soda into her Stanley, mocking a teen-girl cliché. I carry a Stanley everywhere, I admit, because I go from school to sports practice, and I get headaches when I’m dehydrated. Mine is always full of water enhanced with Liquid IV electrolyte powder, which is good at preventing them. It really works — I learned about it on TikTok.

I don’t know if these particular photos made their way to the internet. But I do know that there are thousands of similar images out there in the virtual world, where, like pornography, murder videos follow you everywhere. It didn’t used to be this way: in the not-too-distant past, if you wanted to see a mutilated dead body or a violent killing, you’d have to trudge off to a video store to rent out Faces of Death. Now, you just need to go on X, where, since Elon Musk took over the platform in October 2022, “death porn” is all over the timeline whether you like it or not.

Over the last year, I have come across footage on X of a brutal stabbing of a homeless man on a street, a marauding terrorist attack in a concert hall, a stabbing rampage at a shopping outlet and, on Christmas Eve, a woman being burned alive on a New York subway train. And I didn’t even go looking for it.

Axel Rudakubana, however, was looking for it. His interest in online death porn was not merely curious but resembled a fixation. Of the tens of thousands of documents that Merseyside police sifted through on his digital devices, many related to war, terrorism and genocide, and included graphic images of dead bodies, victims of torture and beheadings. He had also downloaded (at least twice since 2021) an Al-Qaeda manual which contained an entire section on how to use a knife as an offensive weapon. On the morning of the massacre, as if to ready himself for the violence he was about to unleash, he searched for a video on X showing the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at a church in Sydney last April.

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There is no single profile of a mass killer, beyond the fact that the vast majority are male. But there are recurring patterns. In addition to harbouring a desire to kill, most have a voracious interest in killing itself as well as in the lives and psychology of famous killers. There are several reasons for this: reading about a killer or watching CCTV footage of their atrocities holds up a mirror to their own dark desires, which I suppose makes them feel less alone in the world and less pathologically deviant. It also gives them a template for how to carry out a murder. Perhaps, too, would-be-murderers take a vicarious pleasure from watching or reading about killing, insinuating themselves in the minds and bodies of infamous death-takers.

In fact, many mass killers are highly competitive, often with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the body-counts of previous mass killers and a grudging admiration for the big-hitters. The aspiring American jihadist-now-jailbird Mohamed Alessa, for instance, was clearly envious of the mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan, saying: “Freaking Major-Nidal-shaved-face-Palestinian-crazy guy, he’s not better than me. I’ll do twice what he did.”

Rudakubana has rather a lot in common with Jake Davison, Britain’s last infamous mass killer, who went on a shooting rampage in Plymouth in August 2021. Like Rudakubana, Davison had been diagnosed with autism, had a history of violence, had previously been referred to Prevent, and had no clear or known motive for carrying out his atrocity, much less a guiding ideology. He also shared with Rudakubana an obsession with weapons — in his case, firearms — and an empathetic interest in the minds and actions of mass killers.

It is not really surprising, however, that mass murderers are obsessed with violence. What is far more disconcerting is the idea that so many apparently ordinary people share their revolting fixations. From Plato to Burke, classical writers have long acknowledged the strange attraction of atrocious images. “Plato appears to take for granted that we have an appetite for sights of degradation and pain and mutilation,” remarked Susan Sontag, who wrote at length about the subject. “There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue,” Burke observed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful, “as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” That was in 1757, well before the Netflix true crime special came into its own.

Never was this clearer than during the age of ISIS execution videos, which, though of course popular among the group’s supporters, found a devoted fandom among the self-described “death addicts” and trolls who slum it on internet shock-sites. While researching a book on the subject, I discovered that those who watch gory videos — and they’re a diverse bunch — do so for a whole range of reasons: to satisfy a morbid curiosity about death; to feel a strong emotion; to crush deep-seated fears around death and violation; to learn something about the dark corners of the world; to neutralise feelings of complacency or boredom; or to test their courage.

Others take a sadistic thrill in seeing other people suffer. No one I interviewed quite put it in that way, but one American woman in her early 20s — let’s call her Nicola (not her real name) — came close to articulating this. “I have always been interested in gore and I guess the ‘dark things’ ever since I can remember,” Nicola told me, specifying that her “favourites” were “wood chipper deaths and brutal torture”. “I don’t think I can give you a true answer as to why I enjoy it besides that I just do,” she explained, adding: “I get tingly when I see something different.”

Should atrocity videos be left to feed this desire for gore and brutality online? “Let the atrocious images haunt us,” Susan Sontag said in 2004, arguing that they perform the “vital function” of showing the evil of “what human beings are capable of doing”. Two decades later, nobody needs reminding of the presence of human evil because its extremities are now filmed and shared so widely on the internet.

Gore fans insist that this is a good thing; that atrocity videos are a form of reality news that documents crimes against humanity and can be used to bring perpetrators to justice. But even the most brazen gore fan would have to admit that watching a mass beheading is a strange way of keeping up with the news. And it’s hard to be entirely sanguine about the sheer volume of this kind of material now available online, and the ease with which so many people, including children, can access it.

Even the most trenchant free speech advocates are now expressing concern about what all of this is doing to us. Matt Walsh recently told Joe Rogan that “when I go on social media I’m constantly seeing these horrific videos of people dying… it feels like a relatively recent development”. “It’s got to mess with your mind.”

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One sure way in which it messes with your mind is by warping it, tricking you into thinking that the world is far more violent and insane than it actually is. This is compounded by the highly selective way in which people tend to watch and share atrocity material. If all you do is watch videos of the destroyed bodies of countless Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes, you might risk becoming desensitised to this horror. You might also start to think that Israelis and their supporters are evil. Similarly, if all you do is watch videos of African migrants robbing or stabbing people, then you might start to think that all African migrants are criminals or potential ones. As for the gore fans I interviewed, most confessed that they had a pessimistic, if not outright cynical or “blackpilled” view of the world after years of watching atrocity videos.

So did online body-horror mess with Axel Rudakubana’s mind? The easy but unconvincing answer is that it not only messed with his mind, but that it drove him to murder. This assumption draws on a long-standing and empirically paper-thin thesis about the malignant effects of violent media that is ritually invoked whenever some troubled individual commits an act of horrifying violence that defies sense and comprehension. The chief problem with this explanation, however, is that vast numbers of people have been exposed to violent media, while only a tiny number commit acts of terrible violence.

The more likely scenario is that Rudakubana’s mind was already profoundly warped to begin with, and that it was his pre-existing moral deformation that animated his interest in mass murder. Perhaps, for a time, inhaling dark matter on the internet gave him some sort of cathartic release from wanting to act on his sadistic desires. This is a less comforting explanation as it suggests that censoring information about atrocities or banning images or videos depicting them — as the government is now calling for in the wake of Rudakubana’s conviction — would likely not have stopped Rudakubana. Thrilled by thoughts of death and omnipotence, he would probably have found other outlets to indulge his perverse impulses — until he could contain them no longer.

While there has been much suspicion that the CCP uses TikTok for influence operations, such as by disseminating Chinese propaganda, the app can be weaponized in even more dangerous ways. Its “For You” algorithm leverages machine learning to track users’ attention, and it employs this knowledge to show them, unprompted, whatever content is most likely to hold their attention. This makes using it a far more passive and addictive experience than other social media platforms, which gives it the potential to inflict long-term harm on young Westerners by keeping them distracted, shortening their attention spans, and, ultimately, atrophying their brains.

The app’s ability to cause mass “TikTok brain” in young Westerners should prompt consideration of its use as a new kind of civilizational weapon. Such a threat could be temporarily averted by simply banning the app, as the US is close to doing, but this is ultimately an issue that can’t be legislated away because TikTok is only a symptom of a much deeper ailment.

The first thing that should raise suspicions is that the CCP forbids Chinese kids from using TikTok — instead, they use Douyin. As American tech ethicist Tristan Harris has pointed out, Douyin is a “spinach” version of the app filled with science experiments and educational videos instead of twerkers and toilet-lickers. TikTok has imposed screen-time limits for younger users (to prevent it from being banned), but Douyin has been doing so since 2019. Further, unlike TikTok, the app is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am. Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.

China has been suspicious of Western liberal capitalism since the 19th century when the country’s initial openness allowed the Western powers to flood China with opium, which accelerated the fall of the Qing Dynasty and led to the “Century of Humiliation”. To this day, many in China believe Western liberalism leads to decadence, but one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy.

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Despite not being well known outside China, Wang Huning has been China’s top ideological theorist for three decades, authoring many of Xi Jinping’s policies. Among the Chinese, he is widely known as “guoshi”, or “teacher of the nation”.

Although Wang refuses to do press or even speak with foreigners, his books reveal something of his worldview. His 1991 America Against America, based on his travels a few years prior, has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US. The premise is simple: the conflict between America’s economic system and its value system have made the country fundamentally unstable, destined for commodification, nihilism, and decadence. And, as Wang morbidly diagnoses, the country will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

According to Wang, America is directed mostly by blind market forces; the country obeys not a single command but a cacophony of demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere. It constantly produces wondrous new technologies, but these have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US toward more and more commodification, which eventually consumes “human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power and law”, and devours meaning and purpose. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang wrote: “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.”

To prevent China’s own technological advancement from leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture”, Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US’s problems is by instilling “core values” — a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future. This idea has been central to President Xi’s governance strategy, which has emphasized the “core socialist values” of civility, patriotism, and integrity.

So how has the push for these socialist core values affected the CCP’s approach to social media?

The creator of TikTok and CEO of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, originally wanted the content on TikTok and Douyin to be determined purely by popularity. As such, Douyin started off much like TikTok is now, with the content dominated by teenagers singing and dancing. But in April 2018, the CCP began action against Zhang. Its media watchdog ordered the removal of some of ByteDance’s apps from Chinese app stores, citing their platforming of “improper” content. Zhang then grovelingly apologized for content “that was incommensurate with socialist core values”. Shortly after, ByteDance announced a recruiting drive for thousands of content moderators, with job adverts specifying a preference for CCP members with “strong political sensitivity”.

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The CCP’s influence over ByteDance has only grown since then. The party allegedly has a “golden share” in ByteDance’s Beijing entity, and one of its officials sits on the company’s three-person board. The CCP’s intrusion into ByteDance’s operations is part of a broader governmental strategy called the “Profound Transformation”, which seeks to clear space for core socialist values by ridding China of “decadent” online content. In August 2021, Chinese state media called for an end to TikTok-style “tittytainment” for fear that “our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse”. In the wake of that statement, there have been crackdowns on “sissy-men” fashions, “digital drugs” such as online gaming, and “toxic idol worship”. Consequently, many online influencers have been forcibly deprived of their influence, with some having their entire presence erased from the Chinese web.

For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West’s terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China. And yet, while cracking down on this content domestically, China has continued to allow its export internationally as part of Xi’s “digital Silk Road”. TikTok is known to censor content that displeases Beijing, such as mentions of Falun Gong or Tiananmen Square, but otherwise it has free rein to show Westerners what it wants; “tittytainment” and “sissy men” are everywhere on the app. So why the hypocritical disparity in rules? Is the digital Silk Road intended as poetic justice for the original, whereby the Western powers preached Christian values while trafficking chemical TikTok — opium — into China?

Since Wang and Xi believe the West is too decadent to survive, they may have opted to take the Taoist path of wu wei — sitting back and letting the West’s appetites take it where they will. But there’s another more sinister and effective approach that they might be adopting — the “accelerationism” of an amphetamine-fueled British philosopher.

At first glance, Nick Land could hardly be more different from Wang Huning. Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land ranted about cyborg apocalypses. In the late Nineties, he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls of his house, once owned by the libertine occultist Aleister Crowley. At nearby Warwick University, he held bizarre lectures, with one infamous “lesson” consisting of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.

Land and Wang were not just polar opposites in personality; they also operated at opposite ends of the political spectrum. While Wang became the CCP’s top ideological theorist, Land became the top theorist, along with Curtis Yarvin, of the influential network of hard-Right bloggers, known as NRx, or neo-reaction.

And yet, despite their opposite natures, Land and Wang would develop almost identical visions of liberal capitalism as an all-commodifying, all-devouring force, driven by the insatiable hunger of blind market forces, and destined to finally eat Western civilization itself. Land viewed Western liberal capitalism as a kind of AI that’s reached singularity; in other words, an AI that’s grown beyond the control of humans and is now unstoppably accelerating toward inhuman ends. As Land feverishly wrote in his 1995 essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”

To simplify Land’s overwrought drug-fueled prose, Western capitalism can be compared to a “paperclip maximizer”, a hypothetical AI programmed by a paperclip business to produce as many paperclips as possible, which leads it to begin recycling everything on earth into paperclips (commodities). When the programmers panic and try to switch it off, the AI turns them into paperclips, since being switched off would stop it from fulfilling its goal of creating as many paperclips as possible. Thus, the blind application of short-term goals leads to long-term ruin.

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Land believed that, since the runaway AI we call liberal capitalism commodifies everything, including even criticisms of it (which are necessarily published for profit), it cannot be opposed. Every attack on it becomes part of it. Thus, if one wishes to change it, the only way is to accelerate it along its trajectory. As Land stated in a later, more sober writing style:

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

This view, that the current system must be accelerated to be transformed, has since become known as “accelerationism”. For Land, acceleration is not just a destructive force but also a creative one; all democracies accelerate toward ruin, but an undemocratic system — run by elites unfettered by the concerns of the masses — could accelerate a country to prosperity.

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the liberal West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he embraced anti-democratic ideals, moved to Shanghai, and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star.

A few years after Land moved to China, talk of accelerationism began to emerge on the Chinese web, where it’s become known by its Chinese name, jiasuzhuyi. The term has caught on among Chinese democracy advocates, many of whom view the CCP as the runaway AI, hurtling toward greater tyranny; they even refer to Xi as “Accelerator-in-Chief”. Domestically, Chinese democracy activists try to accelerate the CCP’s authoritarianism ad absurdum; one tactic is to swamp official tip-off lines with reports of minor or made-up infractions, hoping to break the Party by forcing it to enact all of its own petty rules.

The CCP in turn views US President Donald Trump as the “Accelerator-in-Chief,” or, more accurately, “Chuan Jianguo” (literally “Build China Trump”) because he was perceived as helping China by accelerating the West’s decline. The CCP is also known to have engaged in jiasuzhuyi more directly; for instance, during the 2020 US race riots, China used Western social media platforms to douse accelerant over US racial tensions.

But the use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision. Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification because that’s what consumers want.

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By Gurwinder Bhogal

Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early Nineties, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, and finally to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties are liable to fall into disuse and disrepair.

And this is why TikTok is such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth — its future — into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors. We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been grey matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ seems to have steadily fallen — which could in part be due to technology making us spend ever more time in a passive, vegetative state. Distractive media seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut”, while for American kids it was “influencer”.

The resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. And if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, one arrow, two eagles).

So, the CCP has both the means and the motive to help the West defeat itself, and part of this could conceivably involve the use of TikTok to accelerate liberal capitalism’s demise by closing the gap between desire and gratification.

Admittedly we have no hard evidence of the CCP’s intentions — but ultimately intentions are irrelevant here. Accelerationism can’t alter an outcome, only hasten it. And TikTok, whether or not it’s actively intended as a weapon, is only moving the West further along the course it’s long been headed: toward more effortless pleasure, and resulting cognitive decline.

The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is wholly the West’s. After all, TikTok dominated our culture as a result of free market forces — the very thing we live by. Land and Wang are correct that the West being controlled by everyone means it’s controlled by no one, and without brakes or a steering wheel we’re at the market’s mercy.

Of course, democracies do have some regulatory power, as evidenced by moves taken in the US and India. But although banning TikTok may stop the theft of our data, it won’t stop the theft of our attention. Just look at how users already began to flock to other short-form video sites such as Red Note. And how TikTok has inspired YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and X’s For You algorithm. Effortless dopamine hits are what consumers want, and capitalism always tries to give consumers what they want. The market is a greater accelerator than China could ever hope to be.

So what’s the solution?

Land and Wang may be right about the illness, but they’re wrong about the cure. It’s true that we in the West have little left of the traditions that once tied us together, and in their absence little unites us except our animal hungers. But the belief that meaning and purpose can be imposed on all of us by a Great Leader is a fatal fantasy that has littered history with failed experiments.

Sure, democracies are vulnerable because there’s no one controlling their advancement, but autocracies are vulnerable precisely for the opposite reason: they’re controlled by people, which is to say, by woefully myopic apes. China is still suffering from the disastrous one-child policy that has led to China’s current population crisis. For all our problems, we would be unwise to exchange the soft tyranny of dopamine for the hard tyranny of despots.

That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy, responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed).

But ultimately these are short-term measures. In the long-term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps such as TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies.

Whether or not the CCP intended it as such, TikTok is a time bomb that could wreck a whole generation years from now. We can’t wait until its effects are apparent before acting, for then it will be too late. The clock is ticking. Tik Tok…

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A version of this article was first published on The Prism.