Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost

Managing the Global Discourse Care, Content Moderation, and Cultural Imperialism

New essay. From triumphal 1990s ideas about an American century underpinned by Internet power, to the mid-2010s belief that social media was a “global conversation,” to mid-2020s anxieties about communication breakdowns and civil war. open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...

Stewardship or Censorship? Trust, Safety, and the New Sacred Project of Content Moderation

A new essay on the ideals of “inclusive capitalism” and late-2010s content moderation. Could social media platforms transcend their origins and become the new and inclusive global civic sphere (overseen, of course, by “machines of loving grace”)? open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...

Thank you so much! Yeah, I’m getting more and more interested in what “writing behind a profile” does to us and how it generates new kinds of conformity at the precise moment we’re compelled to think we’re “expressing our truest selves.”

What, Exactly, Was Twitter? One of the perils of trying to theorise social media is that we often find ourselves talking about the status quo ante, the period immediately before.

My attempt to capture what the Twitter platform was and how it functioned in the 2010s, as well as what its long term legacies might be. open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...

Part of being a good online citizen in 2025 is resisting the urge to put the word "epistemic" in front of any random noun.

Part of being a good online citizen in 2025 is resisting the urge to put the word "epistemic" in front of any random noun.

Paper books printed prior to 2022 will become the currency of the knowledge economy of the future… and I’m not even joking.

2022: “OMG! Elon is a genius! His bold leadership shows that we can make mass tech layoffs with no impact on the user experience at all! Let’s make this an industry standard.

Today’s user experience on Twitter:

"I reject the system!"
"Great! The system offers you the option of identifying as someone who rejects the system, just one among the many Valid identity expressions we respect and recognise."
"Oh, alright then."

It occurs to me that in 3-4 years time, professors on here are going to be talking about how none of their students know what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is.

“It’s funny that the two leading right-wing ideologies at the moment are just different forms of Marxism: Land the progressive eschatological futurist variant … Girard the critical variant devoted to the debunking of ideologies.”—John Pistelli

“Verification puts an end to the workings of truth (for truth, if it exists, is something to be fought over, whereas verification transforms it into a fait accompli).”—Jean Baudrillard

Replacing your institutional cultures—built up over centuries—with a simulacrum made up of rules, regulations, and “best practice” because of “efficiency.” Then watching your entire society dissolve as the cheat codes become universally available and trivial to implement.

“AGI” Is Impossible Either That or Defining It Is Entirely Arbitrary

www.the-hinternet.com/p/agi-is-imp...

AI “bulldozes everything local, everything intimate, everything singular and idiosyncratic and irreducible to statistical regularities—and tells us the only thing that is to count as human reality is what gets reflected back to us by our machines.”—Justin Smith-Ruiu

The Right Libertarian => Populist Anger that things are getting worse => More right libertarian policies => More misguided anger that things are getting worse => Emergence of Anarcho Capitalism opportunities to accelerate disintegration => People get angrier death spiral seems inescapable.

The thing about Reform UK—across all its warring factions—is that it is fundamentally a right-libertarian party committed to the type of turbo-Thatcherism that caused the problems many of its supporters are ostensibly voting against.

ACAB sentiment, after all, has right-wing and libertarian variants as well as progressive ones. It’s just a matter of who gets labelled “the police.”

One way of looking at Twitter/X is that the Musk regime effectively “abolished the police” (decimating the staff tasked with moderation and responding to hacking and impersonation incidents) and is now facing predictable (and accelerating) breakdowns in order and trust.

Your book project sounds great. I think you’re really onto something with the way gen-AI “feeds back” the dead past (the archival traces it’s ingested) to us on a way that makes us misrecognise them as both novelties and timeless truths.

Dr M.F. (Michael) Miller M.F. Miller. Faculty of Humanities. Capaciteitsgroep Engelse taal en cultuur. Spuistraat 134. Room number: 5.32.

www.uva.nl/en/profile/m...

Are you familiar with the work of Michael F. Miller?

New collective certainties must be projected backwards in order for the moral coding system to maintain its sense of coherence. What we believe now must merge and overwrite whatever it was we believed then.

The sense of what the opposition represents (absolute evil) remains stable over time, but the question of who or what are instances of it is in continual, real-time flux. This is the coding system’s disciplinary power.

Everything (everything) now reframed (often retrospectively) according to the binary logic of “whose side are you on?” With whom do you affiliate? All issues and cultural phenomena implicitly tagged with moral and political metadata, coded left or right.

Britain, 2025: “computer says yes!”

We really are doomed, aren’t we?

Coming up at Verdurin: Accelerationist Society and its Future with @mrewanmorrison.bsky.social and Nicholas Blincoe.

When Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto finds an afterlife in the cult veneration of Luigi Mangione, are we doomed by the Unabomber’s predictions? /

Only the most oblivious Oxbridge version of university teaching will survive the AI revolution. The tutorial system (fellow plus 1-3 students). Examination by viva voce. Academics who detest publication as “vulgar and rather American,” so their ideas stay out of LLMs.

Those who find themselves consistently holding oppositional or "unpopular" views not only have to resign themselves to regular failure. They also have to endure having their ideas temporarily taken up (and ultimately trashed and discredited) by opportunists when it suits them.