He makes them feel inferior in the old hierarchy; she makes them feel obsolete in the new. It’s a pincer on the conservative psyche — Newsom from the top down, AOC from the bottom up.

Together, they scramble their calibration: Newsom hits their status anxiety; AOC their generational and gender anxiety. He’s “the man they can’t be,” she’s “the woman they can’t control.”

AOC triggers something different — the populist inversion. Young, female, working-class roots, fluent online, and unapologetically ideological, she uses the right’s own performative populism but flips the values.

Newsom and AOC have a vibe that fundamentally deranges the right for different reasons. Newsom is the symbolic California nightmare: slick, handsome, unbothered, elite — He’s the polished mirror of their resentment. He doesn’t just disagree; he radiates confidence that their worldview is obsolete.

Agnostic, waiting for landmarks

Slight curveball: how are Assignats and Continentals different from today’s stablecoins — or are we just rehashing history in code

I think we're at a point in the cycle in which cigarettes and booze are healthier than social media.

So yeah—the “adequate” balance worked when media was slow enough, tangible enough, and bounded enough to counterweight government and finance. Platforms aren’t a counterweight; they’re the water everything floats in. Which means the old checks and balances don’t even see the game board anymore.

They alter how bodies even appear to the public, and how they talk to each other. The courts, the legislature, the executive—they still assume they’re operating in print/TV logic. But platforms dissolve time and space, collapse institutions into content, and then sort it all algorithmically

So Media was an “adequate” way of balancing separation of powers but this are not match for platforms. Platforms are not just media—they’re meta-media. They don’t sit in the same balance-of-power scheme, because they’re not in the “checking” business. They’re in the rewiring business.

It seems the endgame for most is to become professional anthropologists of corporate consolidation — fully funded by the corporations they’re observing.

Progressivism has become less a movement and more a fellowship program: get hired by the monolith, then build your brand complaining about the monolith, preferably on a podcast sponsored by monolith adjacent

The modern progressive career path: rail against corporate consolidation until you can land a job in an administration or a consolidated corporation — then spend the rest of your life yellin’at the TV about corporate consolidation from the sofa

It’s remarkable, that besides all their other innumerable faults, none of them — Yglesias, Klein, Smith,— have ever delivered anything of substance on media consolidation

This barely matters if next time around we throw our weight behind some gormless, McKinsey-approved party apparatchik like the last 3 times. Find a Roosevelt type or we’re absolutely cooked

www.musicinphasespace.com/2025/09/08/f...

I started with the idea of "Feudal Optimization" — the notion that the Dark Ages weren't just a dumb collapse, but also brutal, pragmatic re-prioritization. It's about how we often don't realize we're speaking feudalism while hearing engineering.

The business of America is bootstrapping cycles of hype.

Everyone else—Millennials, Zoomers, working poor, renters, immigrants—is supposed to keep believing in trickle-down abundance while taking on the risk and precarity. It’s “trust the process” repackaged for a generation who already watched the last process hollow out the center.

It feels like a lifeboat strategy: preserve just enough of the system for the upper-middle class and aging Gen Xers to get out clean, cash out, and retreat to the margins with their pensions or crypto before the whole thing tips over.

The abundance agenda embraces what I call the Richard Pryor principle: Who are you gonna believe? Us or your lying eyes?

Trading all my pitch & forks JPEGs and sad emojis for the analog version—

When society skips elite accountability after collapse (WWI, 2008 crisis), trauma transforms into control fantasies. For men in dominance hierarchies, this often manifests as militarized masculinity, granted. Without systemic accountability, this pattern endlessly repeats.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Trump last line of defense is the DNC: rigged primaries, superdelegate circus, backroom deals, media blackouts, caucus disasters, corporate overlords, fear-mongering about third parties, debate-rule gymnastics, invisible hands.

No, it acquired nations the way a hedge fund acquires distressed assets—strip-mining their value, installing puppet executives, and keeping the whole thing running just well enough to turn a profit.

It ran entire continents on spreadsheets and gunpowder, with mercenary CEOs in gold-braided uniforms. It didn’t conquer in the old-fashioned way, with banners and cavalry charges.

Picture it: a rogue startup in powdered wigs. A pirate VC firm with private armies, shipping lanes, and the ear of the king. That’s the East India Company—a corporate insurgency that didn’t just lobby governments, it was the government.

Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over “Citizen Kane” David Fincher’s new film, “Mank,” is an attempt to define the nature of Mankiewicz’s contribution to “Citizen Kane,” and to the history of cinema—and to dramatize his battle to get credit for it.

Who prompted who? www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Tired: Subscriptions
Wired: Piracy
Inspired: Legal defense funds

That's what LLMs feels like now - everyone's got their 'essential perspective' they're dying to share. Same trapped feeling, different decade. 📸→📝"

Remember when everyone became a 'photographer' once digital cameras got cheap? That's LLMs right now. Same energy, different pixels. JFC those host a at party who'd corner you with their 'professional shots' for 20 minutes?