A New Year's Smorgasbord of Links
Know what we haven’t done in far too long? Curate a bunch of reading for you all, that’s what!
Here’s a round up of the relatively recent news and topics which I do think is worthy of your attention and thought in this 2025: Year of Attention we are all going through. My goal doing these moving forward is to do links round ups that centre around a theme a bit more, rather than my historical approach which is a bit more chaotic. Let me know if you like this approach.
Source linked.
A piece from just after the election that I still look back and reread because I think it’s spot on about important media shifts ahead (and in some cases underway).
The absolutely shambolic release, discovery, hastily shelved, but probably still coming back again Meta AI profiles is incredible to read. Fake people, incredible backlash with more in depth insight into the sheer dystopian and uncanny valley of it all, and the “debate” around the “ethics” of constructing the actual dead internet theory. Our trend towards all slop, all everything, all the time continues apace.
Noted online lawyer Ken White at Popehat gives nuanced insight into legal fights in his spare time, and occasionally blesses us all with longform through his newsletter. I find him a balancing and thoughtful perspective counter to so much outrage based “hot take” writing these days. Two recommendations from him, one now and another a bit further down in this links dump:
Platformer and it’s main writer/editor Casey Newton is a well-known tech writer and podcaster. I have my criticisms of his work, primarily based on access journalism approaches overall and how buddy buddy he is with so many major players that I can’t help but feel it affects his objectivity, but his contacts list is unmatched. And credit to him where due, he uses it. A handful of stories from him in the last couple of months and/or week.
The oligarchy is here. Like so many nerds before him, it feels as though Zuck is doing the social and social economic maths to wager that cozying up to the bullies will keep him (and his money) safe. The tragic thing is that at our current point in history, he may be making the “smart” decision. Truly grim. Another Warzel article worth your time.
Also claiming to be politically neutral while leaning into “masculine energy” manosphere bullshit. Incredible.
Lyz Lenz has a typically scathing synopsis. I love her.
Not Platformer, but understanding meme, the meme cycle, and the grifter handbooks is important to understanding our current media and political…everything. Which is why, I’m sorry to say, we have to understand the Hawk Tuah Girl’s crypto rug pull incident.
Speaking of! The assassination of a CEO and the instant meme-ification of the accused shooter Luigi Mangione is also an almost perfect, absurd, surprisingly profound encapsulation of our current moment in terms of social rage starting to boil over, how urban legend style heroes are made, the complete inability of so much corporate media to meet the moment, and why understanding internet culture/speech is so important. Some vital reading:
Jia Tolentio write the definitive piece in my opinion..
A beauty writer’s take on why aethestics and attractiveness may matter more to revolutionary sentiment than we may wish to admit.
Ken White from Popehat again, reacting to so much of the pearl-clutching takes which occurred immediately after the shooting. The “how could this happen,” and “this isn’t who we are as a country,” discourse. White calls bullshit.
Of course the CEO assassination kicked of a (decades overdue!) discourse on wealth inequality and please god let this set the tone for the entirety of the year. Economist Mark Blyth postulates what I think is the best narrative of cycles of financial system reset since the 20th century (his specialty is how economics and sociopolitical trends interrelate with one another, specifically austerity ands its aftereffects). He argues that a major unresolved “trauma” on our economic and political systems was the lack of reset after the 2008 crash. To summarise, politicians and societies were so focused on stabilising and propping up the system - because it was too big to let it fail, the damage was perceived to be too catastrophic - that the necessary corrective forces were not allowed to do their work. Kind of like how controlled or natural burns are vital to long term forest management. He argues that what we are experiencing now in terms of right-wing and outright fascist resurgence, leftist cultural pushes, and most of the anger and resentment based politics we’ve seen over the last decade+…is in large part due to this build up of malcontent backed by rising wealth inequality. I’d argue that the United Healthcare CEO assassination became a moment of genuine class consciousness and solidarity around this point. We’ll see if it holds.
The reality is that most of us up to and including actual millionaires have more in common and more shared political stakes than any of us with the (growing but still quantifiable) class of billionaires. And the latter is swiftly showing their colours as aspirational if not functional oligarchs. Trump and co might have risen to influence off the backs of populism, but the way they govern is almost entirely for the practical benefit of the ultra wealthy. The cultural wars are how they distract us from fighting the class wars.
Wealth and the disconnect it causes in the subtext of this entire links post, but to bring it fully to the fore…
Bleating about free speech while you stifle internal dissent.
Bleating about free speech while you rabble rouse and spread outright disinformation and platform bad faith actors. (Good on Prime Minister Starmer for his full throated rebuke, while expertly refusing to say Musk’s name, and the UK for taking the threat of loudmouth idiot billionaires to national security seriously.)
Enemy of the Blog and anarcho libertarian billionaire, notable for bankrolling the political campaigns of the Vice President-elect, Peter Thiel has some invoking of apartheid South Africa to deploy for us all. I hate him. I really do. Also, entwining language of the Bible and the French Revolution to position billionaires and their political allies as the cleansing force against the ancien regime…my dude, you guys ARE the regime. You ARE the aristocrats.
Elon Musk in isolation is a fascinating case study in terminal online-ness and how privilege, an obsession with ones own fan culture, and too much money is its own kind of madness. Thiel may be more dangerous in his discipline and actually somewhat consistent POV, but Musk is a scattershot bundle of crises stacked in a trench coat, staggering around and inflicting his damage on the rest of us.
