Alas!
Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow;
The princess among states
Is become a thrall1.

-Lamentations 1:1

Recently, I experienced a social novelty.

Anna Gát, founder of a roving social club and literary salon named Interintellect, very graciously invited me to one of her events. A dozen or so of us, some known to me but most not, gathered in the backyard of a tastefully restored San Francisco Victorian and drank and ate and discussed various topics of the day. It was a convivial and enjoyable affair, that crackling mix of novelty and familiarity among like-minded strangers and acquaintances that’s virtually impossible to find in coastal cities, outside the confines of the workplace at least.

As I walked home down the steep slope of Fulton Street afterward, I thought: This is like a synagogue, but without Jews or Judaism2. Like many things nowadays, the seculars have reinvented a religious concept to cope with the very barrenness that secularism bequeathed us.

Synagogues aren’t the only legacy institutions with attempts at secular reboots: We’re on to nation-states as well. Noted entrepreneur and online provocateur Balaji Srinivasan recently published his intriguing tome, The Network State (available online in very readable format here). The first sections are an introduction to the World According to Balaji, which will seem familiar to anyone who’s followed the very opinionated poaster for any length of time. And for those who haven’t, and are perhaps unfamiliar with the canon of references inhabiting Balaji’s fervid mind, the text is absolutely jammed with esoteric references and links to outside sources. At times the book feels less like a book and more like a Wikipedia page; it’s not clear to me how you’d even read it in printed form, which is perhaps why there isn’t one (Kindle and online only).

The most interesting section is the one currently relegated to the end on the titular concept itself, the network state. It is not, as Balaji is quick to point out, some metaverse concept visitable only with virtual reality headsets. No, it’s an actual patch of land (or several of them) with a physical border and representation in the United Nations. As Balaji defines it:

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

The most radical (and underrated) change wrought by technology has been the decoupling of information from physical movement, the flight of bits liberated from the slow lurch of atoms. This dislodges human life from a geographic setting, making what you see, think, and experience independent of the colored shape on the map labeled “San Francisco, California, USA” (or whatever). It’s what the early media theorists like Marshall McLuhan puzzled over, the global wiring-together of the human nervous system. His “global village” however was one warmed by the blue tones of an old-timey television receiving signals from a centralized transmitter in a still geographically and politically unified state.

This network state idea could be dismissed as just another unworkable fantasy from crypto bros. Except that they’re not proposing some unlikely future, but rather describing a de facto reality that only accelerated with the post-COVID crackup.

What the early luminaries missed, prescient though they were, was the unique many-to-many property of mobile computing; left to self-sort ideologically and aesthetically, consumers in a globalized society bereft of meaningful religious or cultural ties would organize themselves into patchwork quilts of belonging no longer limited by political borders. In the case of affluent elites, their self-organized state would look like an urban archipelago in a more rural and regional sea. (In the United States, the political color codings here are obvious.)

This network state idea could be dismissed as just another unworkable fantasy from crypto bros. Except that they’re not proposing some unlikely future, but rather describing a de facto reality that’s only accelerated with the post-COVID crackup. The network-staters are already here, we just don’t refer to them as such. It’s not like the long-term viability of normie liberal democratic nation-states has lots of champions these days. Over half of Americans think a civil war is possible in the next few years. Well, why don’t we find a more peaceable rupture? asks Balaji, who makes it very clear he is not fantasizing about some violent civil war.

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State (p. 362)

Read more

This is the first in a two-part series on privacy and Web 3. Next week, I’ll continue my riff on the origin of modern conceptions of privacy.

Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops.

-Luke 12:3

Web 3 is the reverse of web 2 in severals ways, and that ‘flippening’ can be disorienting

Take the usual ordering of consumer usefulness followed by monetization, as one clear example.

In Web 2, you first find a viral consumer use case and then, often much later, find some way to pay for it. Meanwhile, you float the company with speculative capital from VCs. As late as the time of Facebook’s IPO, the ads system was a mess and did not generate the sort of revenue growth that justified the company’s massive valuation. The second half of my memoir Chaos Monkeys documents just that mad (and successful) scramble fix the company’s broken monetization.

In Web 3, companies achieve liquidity early via ‘tokenomics’ and other novel mechanisms to raise capital from users (often highly speculative in nature), and build the necessary technical infrastructure to create an alternative internet: decentralized servers, identity-management ‘wallets’, token exchanges allowing easy movement among various ecosystems, etc. The viral consumer use case (if there is one) comes much later, much to the derisive trolling by the latest wave of crypto-skeptics.

Some Web 2 companies like Uber still aren’t profitable, years after their founding and having gone public. We used to find this odd—trolls are nothing new and they railed against the early Web 2 companies too—but now we’ve simply gotten use to it. Web 3 has yet to prove out its flipped model for utility vs. speculative value.

The question of data privacy suffers a similar flip between Web 2 and Web3, reversing many long-held assumptions in weird and novel ways.

In Web 2, thanks to the tireless efforts of the growth teams at companies like Facebook (plus our own human addiction to virtualized socializing), most everyone save anon-account shitposters is perfectly comfortable with living their lives fully publicly and online. What we don’t like in Web 2 is having what we do—what we buy on Amazon; where we stay on Airbnb; what we browse or buy online—being made public. Everyone may know our locations and the faces of our family, but if anyone figures out that I streamed Parasite last night or bought a pair of size 43 Birkenstocks, I want EU aircraft to strafe their homes.

Conversely in Web 3, absolutely everything I do ‘online’ (whatever that means now; what do we even do anymore that isn’t online in some form or another?) is public and immutably recorded for all to see. Imagine for a moment Web 2 worked that way: every time you bought something at Amazon, the company broadcasted it publicly, tweeting it out perhaps. ANTONIO BOUGHT A JUMBO PACK OF SUPPOSITORIES. HAHAHAHA.

You (or I) would be outraged. Yet that’s what happens every time you buy a NFT from OpenSea or plunk a pile of money into decentralized exchange UniSwap. It’s broadcast in the most indelible way possible, in a way that no GDPR privacy law will ever be able to do anything about. Somehow, everyone in Web 3, including and especially the privacy crypto-bros, are on-board with that plan.

Their only stipulation is that the unique identifier tied to all that activity (the wallet ‘address’) is never tied to anyone’s persistent real-world identity. Like the revelers in a masked ball of yesteryear, so long as the masks aren’t removed, all is well.

What can possibly explain this utterly different framing for notions of privacy among old and new versions of the Internet, particularly with the small (but growing) set of users who participate in both?

One helpful concept comes from the academic world of philosophy: Helene Nissenbaum’s ‘contextual privacy’ is a formal theory of privacy considerably more sophisticated (and adaptable) than the moral absolutism that tends to dominate the privacy discourse. An example she draws in her work is imagining your interactions with your physician when dealing with a medical issue. Even in a world where the right to live as a stranger among strangers reigns supreme, we unquestioningly turn over the most intimate medical details to people we barely know. With full consent from us, our physician sends off millimetric images of our skulls and organs to remote radiologists who inform you whether you’ve got terminal cancer or not. We do that because, aside from wanting to know if we’ve got cancer, we feel protected by a strong regime of HIPAA legislation plus a professional code of ethics that stiffly constrains everyone involved in the data chain, from nurse to surgeon.

Our species was never meant to be in instant conversation with billions of other humans. Absent a Luddite jihad that destroys the digital nervous system locking us into global waves of emotion around the next ‘current thing,’ we’re going to invent new norms to make the inhuman slightly more livable.

Now, let’s imagine you leave your doctor’s office and fire up Instagram to take your mind off the diagnosis he just gave you, which is that you don’t have brain cancer but you simply suffer from chronic migraines and will just have to deal. Scrolling past pictures of friends and celebrities, you see an advertisement for a migraine medication, specifically for the vestibular migraines you suffer from. While two seconds ago you were willing to send images of your brain across the world for medical advice, you now feel horribly violated knowing that everyone from Facebook to a pharma marketing team know about your condition. The context of your privacy—what’s being revealed to whom and for what reason—utterly changed and you had no say in it.

The challenge before us is to figure out the ground rules of privacy in Web 3, where the ‘contextual privacy’ that has shaped both user expectations and government regulation in Web 2 no longer hold at all; in fact, they’re utterly fipped.

Those who can’t innovate, regulate

To illustrate just how flipped they are, let’s review the basic tenets of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the regnant standard in data privacy (and somewhat emulated in American standards like the California Consumer Privacy Act).

There are two foundational concepts in GDPR: the presence and persistence of ‘personal data,’ and who keeps data around.

The latter is divided into two classes of data hoarder: “controllers” and “processors.” These categories roughly map to ‘first party’ and ‘third party’ distinction made between (say) The New York Times (which you visit and subscribe to), and the web analytics package they use to measure how long someone stays on their website. Ultimately, The Times is the real owner of this relationship, who both needs to get an opt-in and face the music if found in violation. Their analytics software is merely a data orderly.

Who’s the data controller of the blockchain? Who even owns things like Bitcoin and Ethereum? The short answer is nobody and everybody; everybody in this case is the thousands of nodes that do the ‘mining’ and verification of the network, making sure transactions are legitimate and collectively keeping all the network state around. If your personal data makes it onto some public blockchain, it’s likely on many machines spread all over the world, with no singular entity able or willing to take the ‘controller’ liability bullet1. That’s the ‘nobody’: there’s no ‘real or legal person’ the EU can nail to the wall for not deleting data or whatever else their precious GDPR stipulates.

Speaking of deletion, just what is this ‘personal data’?

The definition seems almost intentionally vague, with every practitioner coming to their own talmudic interpretation. Per the letter of the GDPR, personal data is “an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.”2 In other words, it’s things that can be traced unambiguously to the real you, and reveal something juicy about you, whether your address, medical condition or your taste for Penelope Cruz movies. Along with this vague-seeming definition, there are all sorts of restrictions around user deletion power (the ‘right to be forgotten’), obligatory opt-in prompts, and the necessity to minimize the scope (and spread) of personal data.

Goes without saying that putting any personal data on a public blockchain violates both spirit and letter of the GDPR. If nothing else, the sheer immutability of blockchain data—you can’t delete a block without redoing the chain, something semi-impossible in practice—puts it in obvious violation3. We’re going to have to get creative if we’re going to build privacy-compliant apps on the blockchain, particularly ones involving any user targeting or attribution.

One leap of creative interpretation is that behavioral data like transactions (which lives in a bit of grey zone in GDPR) are only personal when linked to an actual real person. In the absence of the real you, Amazon keeping what some anonymous individual purchased is not obviously regulated by GDPR. In fact, there’s a loophole for keeping data necessary to run a business, such as revenue data to calculate taxes.

Extending that to the chain, so long as the wallet is unassociated with real personal data, either on chain or off, it shouldn’t be subject to the many data restrictions of GDPR by a strict reading of it. Even if you don’t buy the argument, there’s essentially no way to comply with GDPR with on-chain data, other than not putting egregiously personal data (like user information) on chain to begin with.

Well, what happens when you do associate a real person to a wallet, and all the behavioral data that implies? That happens routinely when a DeFi company like Coinbase does regulatory Know Your Customer and actually verifies your identity, or when a game developer (say) associates your wallet to personal login information like an email. This will sound odd, but that linking of an entire blockchain rap sheet to a person suddenly makes that wallet be personal data. The holder of the join to the real person can indeed profile the user based on blockchain data (even if nobody else in the universe other than the user knows this wallet corresponds to that user). The controller in this case, i.e., the entity that can join a wallet’s data to a user, is absolutely responsible for that join only they own; their GDPR responsibility lies in deleting the join that makes the profiling/personalization of on-chain data possible, even if deleting on-chain data is itself impossible.

Why such jesuitical acrobatics?

Let’s go back to Nissenbaum’s contextual privacy. The only way to reconcile the Web 2 privacy context of GDPR (which considers identity public but data private) with the Web 3 context of blockchains (where identity is private, but data public) is to merge the contexts when the data does the same. In other words, merging identity and data makes both subject to GDPR compliance, even if the data was anonymously public before you joined them. Once you delete that join to real identity, the data goes back to simply being anonymous and private. This is odd to Web 2 ears, but again, it’s the contextual expectation in Web 3. The entity on the compliance hook is whoever owns the join, a join that only happens because of a first-party relationship (and opt-in) with the actual user. This is about the only way to square this Web 2/3 context circle.

Of course, it means that any such personalization of blockchain data must live with a single entity (or at most a processor-type subordinate): you can never decentralize real identity on the blockchain. But that’s fine. This is one area where you absolutely do not want ‘trustlessness’ to define how data moves around.

If this all sounds like medieval schoolmen debating the physical dimensions of angels, it’s not an inapt comparison, but a lot of privacy thinking is contrived and convoluted.

Privacy, the invention

The word itself ‘privacy’ doesn’t appear even once in the American Constitution, and as a legal principle, it wasn’t until 1890 that Louis Brandeis formulated it in a way we would recognize today. The spark for Brandeis’ historic treatise was the sudden emergence of the telegraph and portable cameras; more specifically, his socialite law partner Samuel Warren was getting written up in the gossip rags, complete with paparazzi photos.

Once again with Web 3, some newfangled contraption is forcing us to rethink what it means to live among a world of strangers, safeguarding our inner worlds lest they be ‘proclaimed on the housetops.’ Our species was never meant to be in instant conversation with billions of other humans. Absent a Luddite jihad that destroys the digital nervous system locking us into global waves of emotion around the next ‘current thing,’ we’re going to invent new norms to make the inhuman slightly more livable. It’s what we’ve always done.

This is the second post in a series on how Web 3 can mature toward a more sophisticated ecosystem. The first post was on the wonky topic of attribution, and how the plumbing that determines what does (or doesn’t) happen online could be rebuilt along blockchain lines. More posts will be forthcoming.

If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.

-Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo

The same year Thomas Caxton issued the first printed edition of The Canterbury Tales in 1476, he printed something else: an advertisement for the real moneymakers in the early printer’s catalog, a prayer book1. For as long as humans have crafted disembodied versions of their voices, whether it be Pompeiian graffiti or the latest tweet, there have been attempts to both guide user attention in some remunerative direction, and measure the effectiveness of that attention-gathering.

The first newspaper circulation numbers in the late 19th-century allowed advertisers to gauge their reach and created the legacy East Coast media currently struggling to survive. Today, embedded mobile SDKs record every click on your iPhone, weaving a thread of causality between initial tweet or TikTok video and an eventual purchase. The attention economy has always had its ledger and its cash register, and Web 3 will be no different.

Web 3 will have ads too. It already does in fact, they’re called NFT or token drops (essentially, giveaways that exploit the ability to send to any wallet). Not only do we have ads, we have ads fraud. When Optimism, a Level 2 chain that tries to make transacting cheaper, announced their token drop, thousands of fake users signed up to ‘farm’ the drop. Optimism had to use network analysis to figure out the fraudulent wallets and block them. The arms race between advertisers and fraudsters, still an ongoing cold war in the Web 2, is well underway in Web 3.

When token go up is no longer a law of physics and money is no longer free, the challenge of number go up—where the numbers are users or revenue—becomes much harder to solve. Right now, Web 3 companies are at pains to even measure those numbers, much less manipulate the few levers they have to make sure they do go up.

Defined broadly, ‘ads’ are pieces of paid, targeted media meant to drive user behavior in a specific direction. In our current Internet, they’ve come to mean the 320x480 pixel interstitial pop-up ad that annoys us on mobile media, but that’s a skeumorphic relic of Web 2 (itself a relic of the print age). Web 3 marketing will be radically different in ways that are hard to imagine now (though we’ll try in a moment), which is why it’s key to get the attribution system right first. With the media cash register in place, the budding web 3 ecosystem can dream up whatever crazy user acquisition mechanisms it likes.

When token go up is no longer a law of your physical universe and money is no longer free, the challenge of number go up—where the numbers are users or revenue—becomes much harder to solve. Right now, Web 3 companies are at pains to even measure those numbers, much less manipulate the few levers they have to make sure they do go up.

There are however some fundamental problems with importing the (relative) sophistication of Web 2 attribution to embryonic Web 3.

Here are a few:

Wallet identity is fragmented and transitory

When we launched Facebook Exchange, the first data linkage of any sort between Facebook and the outside world, we discovered there were roughly four devices for every Facebook user ID, i.e., four completely different split personalities for every user. Mind you, this was in 2013 and a global average; it’s likely much higher now, particularly for high-value users in wealthy markets.

Media monetization is kind of like pressure in physics: it’s the force of the targeting data applied over a set of people and pixels. If you weaken the data applied because now you’re dividing it over a larger set of spurious personas, the effectiveness of any optimization is also diluted by that factor.

Wallets are likely even worse than cookies or devices: true crypto ‘degens’ (degenerates) likely have dozens of wallets: forgotten ones, hot wallets, cold wallets, wallets over different chains, you name it. Their Web 3 identity is split over a trail of pseudonyms. While device ephemerality is also a problem in Web 2, wallets are even easier to spin up in Web 32.

Not everything you care about is on chain

A counter-argument to this separate attribution system thesis is: well, isn’t everything you care about on chain? Sure, it’s hard to query, but it’s there and we’re building more data tooling…why record it in a separate system?

Not everything a Web 2 attribution system records now is necessarily the sort of thing that makes it on chain (and incurs gas fees): abandoned shopping carts, leveling up in a game, making it so far down some user funnel but not converting. These are all commonly logged to personalize the user experience, but won’t be written on chain anytime soon. Even if gas were free, companies don’t want to be broadcasting their user metrics publicly. There’ll have to be more private ways to understand users that’s also persistent. A quick-and-dirty first version of a Web 3 attribution system can limit its attention to on-chain events, but eventually Web 3 will also mature past that as Web 2 did.

Web 2 and Web 3 will co-exist for a long time

One of the gaming companies I interviewed does conventional Facebook and YouTube ads; just normie ads that get you to their desktop wallet sign-in page. (One of the dark secrets of Web 3 gaming is that many of the companies are essentially Web 2 games with a bit of NFT sugar thrown in.)

I asked their head of APAC what their Facebook CACs were….and he had no idea (which is better than having to explain what a CAC is, which I’ve also had to do). “What tool do you use to even measure downstream monetization on your inbound traffic?” “Looker,” he replied3. It was then I realized that something has to be built for Web 3 to succeed.

The data flywheel that makes Web 2 work runs in both directions, an iterated dance between targeting and attribution: you throw something out there to try and engage users … some show up in your app … they buy something (or they don’t). Every round-trip cycle, you learn something about your users and then you try something else ad infinitum until you run out of money or figure it out. Right now the Web 2/3 identity wall keeps any of this from happening, and the only way out is a cross ecosystem identity that stably joins the Web 2 you with the Web 3 you. There’s a privacy challenge here of course—particularly hairy given the total lack of legal precedent around (say) the GDPR compliance of blockchain data—but there at the beginning of Web 2 too.

Web 3 will only get to a billion users by siphoning those users from the Web 2 side of the world—drinking their user milkshake, so to speak—and the only way to do that is via an attribution system that spans both.

This Web 2/3 identity merge is inevitable, so long as Web 3 lacks the endogenous user base and media inventory to drive its own independent user-acquisition machine. Web 3 will only get to a billion users by siphoning those users from the Web 2 side of the world—drinking their user milkshake, so to speak—and the only way to do that is via an attribution system that spans both.

The rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket

We’ve identified lots of problems with how to build Web 3 a modern monetization machine. Let’s talk about future opportunities instead, with the full understanding that the eventual reality will be far weirder.

Take Farcaster as an example, a decentralized Web 3 version of Twitter fully open to other developers. To the user, that’s mostly under the hood and the experience is much like the Web 2 version, except with some well-known Valley figures being even less filtered than usual (you can ask for a beta invite here).

Let’s say Farcaster, or other Web 3 social media like it, wants to run ads for the free version of the product. Rather than going out and building an entire ads system (as Facebook and every other social media publisher had to), they can use the composability and permissionlessness of Web 3 to spin up monetization quickly. Assuming an attribution system that can track downstream events like user sign-ups, NFT purchases, or providing liquidity (the ‘conversion events’ of Web 3), we can use the decentralized computer of the Ethereum blockchain as an ads system.

Advertisers willing to pay to reach new users or re-engaged lapsed ones, can put the associated ads budgets in a wallet. The details of the ads campaign—new-user bounty paid, user targeting specs, and even the NFT ad creative itself—will live on chain and able to be read by anyone who wants to take up the challenge. Whether you’re an influencer, affiliate, or publisher like Farcaster, if you think you can drive user sign-ups for a game or liquidity for a DeFi project, off you go.

Of course, much of that demand will focus on the same set of users, and that advertiser demand will have to be sorted and ranked as any given user could see more than one ad. Someone could offer to do that for Farcaster and any other publisher, and suddenly we have an ad auction on our hands and this starts to look like a media exchange.

Or imagine a different scenario.

I filmed a tracking-drone video with my Jeep in the Virginia City Highlands of Nevada. I think it came out pretty slick, and if Jeep wanted to run an organic marketing campaign (#WheresYourJeep?) that either promoted my post, or simply used the video somewhere else, Web 3 can enable that as well.

Much like Farcaster, imagine a Web 3 version of TikTok where I actually own my video creative in the form of an on-chain NFT. Unlike TikTok (or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram) where the platform essentially owns my creative and takes all the direct value of my content, I can do with that content whatever I see fit. So I offer my creative as marketing collateral on chain, with a minimum clearing price (much as large publishers do now with ad exchanges).

Big influencers already do these sorts of side deals direct with brands, but for anybody less than the million-follower-level, the best you can do is try to monetize your 100%-take-rate content by driving your audience engagement some other way (as I do with Twitter engagement via this Substack). The Web of the future however will be about individual creators, their creative, and their audiences. It will also be about brands and developers, and their direct relationships with users and consumers. It will not be about gated publisher platforms, ad networks, and middle-men data brokers. That lot will (hopefully) be replaced by open protocols and blockchains. Advertising will not go away—it never does—but who profits from it will change radically.

The ad tech ‘degens’ reading this are probably howling: “That buy-side smart-contract thing is just a basic version of a demand-side platform (DSP), and the influencer thing is just an individualized supply-side platform (SSP), and this whole thing smells like an attempt at recreating the LumaScape but using blockchains and decentralized logic.”

Few tech giants of the past have ever been unseated from their dominance via competition alone: Microsoft never lost the desktop, Google never lost search, Twitter has never lost the public square, Amazon will never lose e-commerce, and Apple will never lose mobile devices. The only way to get out from under those weary giants is creating a new playing field and absolutely dominating it before they figure out what’s going on.

Yes, that’s exactly what this is, but unlike the corrupt goat rodeo of the Google ads ecosystem which the company monopolistically exploits, or the closed system of Facebook, this will be open and transparent. And whereas in Web 2 the controllers of distribution (and their middlemen) capture much of the value that should accrue to publishers and creatives, here the creatives themselves control how their content is used.

That refactoring process is already underway with DeFi4. The crypto crash of the past few months, rather than being some novel form of financial shenanigans, recreated every piece of speculative imprudence of the regular financial system: depository runs on shaky institutions, over-leveraged borrowing, under (or non) hedged positions, excessive risk in single institutions, and finally a backstopping organization (in this case FTX) choosing who lives or dies with divine-intervention liquidity injections. Read the history of the early 20th-century stock market (or even the 2008 credit crisis) and it would be the same movie with different casting. But changing the cast (while also upgrading the technology) is the entire point.

Similarly, Web 3 will recreate all the same fancy machinery (and likely some of the fraud and fiascoes) of two decades of digital advertising, but with a different cast and a very different implementation. In a society with faltering institutions, rotted from within and mistrusted from without, the chance to finally replace our banks and internet giants (not to even delve into politics) with a new set of characters is too tempting to resist.

Few tech giants of the past have been unseated from their dominance via competition alone: Microsoft never lost the desktop, Google never lost search, Facebook will never lose its type of social media, Twitter has never lost the public square, Amazon will never lose e-commerce, and Apple will never lose mobile devices. The only way to get out from under those weary giants is creating a new playing field and absolutely dominating it before they figure out what’s going on, and finding a business model that exists independently of them. For Web 3, an ads system will have to be part of that rebellion.

This is the first post in a series on how Web 3 can mature toward a more sophisticated ecosystem. The second post is on how Web 3 can pay for itself with ads (yes, ads….but don’t recoil in horror). More posts will be forthcoming.

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.

-Joseph Stalin

Internet monetization is somewhat like a Soviet election: It doesn’t matter who clicks and where, it’s who counts those clicks that matters. The technology and business of that counting of clicks (and everything else you do online besides) goes by the dull-sounding name of attribution, and it determines the fate of trillion-dollar companies.

Attribution is kind of like running water and flush toilets in modern cities: Nobody but plumbers really think about it, but if it failed for you and everyone else, you would think about nothing else and civilization would teeter on the brink of the abyss.

Just what happens when attribution goes awry?

In February, the Company Formerly Known as Facebook lost a quarter (!) of its value after it admitted that Apple’s Ads Tracking and Transparency initiative (ATT) made it increasingly hard for them to actually serve ads. They projected a $10 billion-dollar hole in this year’s revenues as a result.

More recently, this week Snap lost about half its value in a massive market plunge thanks to a warning by CEO Evan Spiegel that the company would face revenue headwinds and slow hiring. The downturn was blamed on everything from supply chain issues to the war in Ukraine (!). I wasn’t aware that Snap memes came on ships from China, nor that the memes of production were located in the embattled Donbas region of Ukraine. More likely is what Eric Seufert speculates in his always-enlightening MobileDevMemo (and similar to what happened to Meta): Apple making proper attribution impossible via its privacy moves has hosed the company’s ability to drive results for its advertisers.

Let’s go even bigger picture:

Why is Twitter—our global public square where tastes are made, people canceled, and heads of state threaten each other with nuclear hellfire—worth so little a billionaire can scrape together the cash to outright buy it? How is it possible that the upstream media source to everything bought or voted on is worth a pittance compared to Google or Facebook? Attribution is why: they never take credit for all the valuable behavior they cause.

How does it work in practice?

Consider the timeline of your average internet user as they traverse the pixelated world of smartphones and desktop computers: An initial Tweet or TikTok video leads to a click, which leads to the user installing an app, which eventually leads to spending money inside an app, possibly days or weeks later. The central metaphor of marketing is the user ‘funnel’: the narrowing procession of users that get closer and closer to your cash register as they navigate the noisy internet world. I depict it here horizontally, as a cohort going down a slippery slope:

The green dollar sign is how you get paid; the red dollar sign is you paying (either directly for ads, or indirectly for organic media like tweets). The ratio of those numbers defines whether you live or die in the pixel jungle. It also determines how much (or how little) you spend on any given piece of media, cf. Facebook’s latest problems with performance.

Plumbing-wise, this works because everything you touch online—every app, every website—fires events back to companies like Facebook or Branch describing what happened when, and by whom (anonymized of course). This is the source of the perennial panic about apps (e.g., period tracking ones) sending data supposedly to Facebook and divulging your personal info. It’s really not as nefarious as it sounds, and not terribly different than the server logs littered with our information we leave everywhere we go online. I’ve simplified this severely here, but it looks something like this:

I’ve removed lots of columns, but the key thing is you have an anonymous user ID as well as types and sources for various user actions. This is a huge firehose of data, easily millions of records a second all the live-long day, that needs to be stored at fairly massive expense. Then comes the actual work involved:

As we see on the right most record, someone came and dropped $10 in our app. So how’d they get there?

Even with all this tracking of users on every device, the human experience of the internet firehose is convoluted: You listen to a Rogan episode where he mentions a product, you see an ad for it in your Instagram, and then you Google search to find the product and click on the resulting Google ad. What caused you to actually buy that thing? That’s the real work of attribution, and it’s a gnarly phenomenological problem, even to this day1.

A recent example of questionable attribution: I tweeted about my e-mountain bike, Jason Calacanis (of all people) saw it and asked about the model. Someone posted a review from bikeradar.com, and Jason (I don’t know if this is true) probably googled for it and maybe bought it. Who deserves the attributions credit? According to Google (surprise, surprise), it’ll be Google … and they’ll take all the credit, which is why Google is worth so much and Twitter so little.

As with most things online, the right solution is too hard to implement, so instead everyone uses the dumbest one possible: Whoever last touched the user gets the credit. This is part of what underwrites Google’s trillion-dollar market cap: the ability to claim that everyone who bought something via a Google search bought that thing because of Google. Reality is of course much more complicated—people often use Google navigationally to lazily find some website—and Google is essentially stealing credit (and everybody in ad tech knows this).

Flawed though it is, without attribution you’re living in an acausal world of chaos, with no ability to discern related events stemming from a single human. With attribution, the endless reams of inbound clicks and page-loads that an app publisher sees—that’s all of us wildly clicking on our black mirrors all day—can be threaded together into a logical story. Whether it be circulation numbers for 19th-century newspapers (the start of the printed ads business), or Nielsen ratings for pre-cable TV that determined ads rates there, there’s never been a media ecosystem that didn’t have attribution. Which is why I feel confident in saying that Web 3 will certainly have some version of that great virtual cash register, ringing every time a user drops real (or crypto) coin.

Correct attribution in Web3 isn’t some horrible intrusion of skeumorphic Web 2 machinery, it’s a way to correctly credit a digital asset (and ultimately its owner) with the revenue they produced, in whatever downstream form. It’s the causal link that joins a human interacting with virtual goods and the very real revenue they eventually generate. Without it, the NFT market will struggle to be more than a speculative art market mimicking the real-world one. Nothing wrong with that, but here’s a whole other world of art, media, and human experience to underwrite in Web 3, and which won’t exist without the messy but necessary machinery of attribution and eventually (gasp!) ads.

Web 2 types often criticize the blockchain as an intractable and weird architecture, unsuited to most consumer Internet applications. If you think about it though, the one piece of core Web 2 infrastructure where the blockchain is actually the most natural way to engineer things is … attribution.

For their part, Web 2 types often criticize the blockchain as an intractable and weird architecture, unsuited to most consumer Internet applications. If you think about it though, the one piece of core Web 2 infrastructure where the blockchain is actually the most natural way to engineer things is … attribution. What else is a company like Branch Metrics (my former employer) or the internal attribution system at giants like Facebook, but a large, distributed, semi-private ledger of online events and data shared among various players, none of whom trust each other? If you had to conjure some collective mechanism for storing aggregated data that was selectively shareable between publisher and advertiser, it would look much like a blockchain.

I’m dubious that much else of Web 2 will survive the hop to Web 3, either from the tech or consumer point of view. The one thing I’m absolutely convinced will have to exist for Web 3 to succeed is effective and natively on-chain attribution that gives NFTs and other virtual goods their due (and gets their owners paid). In the next post in this series, I’ll look at what the marketing world will look like in a fully Web 3 world. As for the question of whether Web 3 will have ads … well, it already does.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
― John Milton , Areopagitica

In one of the most delicious online brouhahas in a long time, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and lots of people in the mainstream media are very, very concerned about it. The hysterics surrounding Elon Musk’s fairly tame pronouncements about what he planned on doing with the bird app have been like a gallery of mainstream media lunacy.

A more sane take was published early in the Elon-buying-Twitter saga by Renee DiResta in The Atlantic.1 I’ll be quoting this piece liberally here, and will start with the ‘nut graf’ of the essay:

But although Musk has spent several weeks complaining about the status quo, speculating about bias, and provoking Twitter blue-checks and tech commentators into fits about content moderation and censorship, he has explained little about what he would do differently. He’s right about one thing: Twitter plays a central role in public discourse today. But it’s hardly the same as a public square, and content moderation can’t be reduced to “censorship.” What Musk and others portray as a battle over “free speech” is a proxy fight over who is entitled to attention.

DiResta begins by asserting three key points of this new ‘content moderation’ regime that is utterly re-defining speech in liberal societies:

1. Twitter is not the public square

2. Content moderation is not censorship

3. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach

This ‘freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach’ argument, which I’m fairly sure DiResta herself coined back in the heady post-Trump election days of 2016, is the linchpin to this entire worldview. It was then, and is now, utter nonsense.

Of course freedom of reach is freedom of speech. Anyone anywhere can say whatever they like in the zero-reach corner of their closets. So can the political dissidents that totalitarian states like Cuba routinely jail: they too can say whatever they like about the regime in the claustrophobic cells at Villa Marista. Every freedom of speech case from Zenger to Brandenburg involved the dissemination of controversial speech via some form of media with an audience: that’s clearly the entire point of the freedom. Speech without reach isn’t free speech; it’s just mumbling to yourself.

Not to say that lack of reach necessarily represents an abrogation of the freedom. Surely, many of those on Twitter who complain of their supposed ‘shadowbanning’ simply authored tweets that, well, nobody found very interesting. Twitter isn’t obligated to give you reach if user interest in your speech is low (as judged by their ranking algorithms at least). But the pro-content moderation view seems to be willfully naive about what speech (or the public forum) has become in the smartphone era.

Of course freedom of reach is freedom of speech. Speech without reach isn’t free speech; it’s just mumbling to yourself.

It’s simply not the case that freedom of speech is some legal binary switched between an abstract allow/not-allow state. Freedom of speech is now a continuous spectrum, a reach knob adjusted by algorithms and tweaked by the companies where speech happens and the audience is. To think otherwise is to fall into the trap she accuses her opponents of, which is thinking this some Greek agora where you can either set up your soapbox next to Socrates and blab to your heart’s content or not, and how far your voice carries amidst the tumult is irrelevant. There is indeed no agora anymore: it’s just what appears in most Twitter feeds, and algorithmic amplification (like it or not) is key to that freedom.

Which brings us to point (2) and the policy brakes we apply to that amplification: ‘content moderation’. In order to defend moderation and assert that it’s absolutely, definitely not a form of censorship, DiResta indulges in a very common form of deflection: alleging that the contrary view is simply absurd and ahistorical.

Since the advent of more active content moderation on Twitter and other online platforms, the prototypical public square has been retconned—particularly by Musk’s supporters in the United States—into a haven for absolute free speech. This is not accurate. The real public square has always been moderated.

This is a very common trope, framing any doubt about the censorship regime as necessarily advocating (naively) for absolute free speech.

DiResta is in fact retconning a retcon, in the sense that she’s gearing up for battle against a non-existent army of opinion: It’s hard to read Elon’s mind given his colorful tweeting style, but the general sentiment of those (such as myself) that would love to see Elon shake Twitter up, is not some absolutist free-speech claim.

In fact, nobody who’s ever been involved directly with moderation inside social media companies has seriously advocated for absolute free speech of the pure 4chan flavor. As I spent an entire chapter describing in my memoir Chaos Monkeys, Facebook was already doing beyond-the-law content moderation as early as 2011 (and presumably before I arrived on the scene, as the team was already scaled up). That level of ‘moderation’ isn’t really in question by anyone whose opinion matters.

Let’s just state this once and for all to hopefully move the debate up from the mutual strawmanning level where it’s currently mired: nobody sane is asking for absolute free speech. Having to constantly rehash the point that no public forum possesses absolute free speech, like it’s some thundering assertion, is a waste of time and probably just disingenuous grandstanding anyhow.

Look: nobody wants dick pics or beheading videos in their feeds; also, such content is pretty unambiguous and easy to discern, thus easy to squelch. Nobody wants CSAM or grooming behavior online either, and everybody sane wants all that gone and the people involved thrown in the slammer. We all agree that the existing ‘hate speech’ standard around Brandenberg v. Ohio, whereby ‘imminent lawless action’ (i.e. you’re threatening to harm someone, or a prelude to violence like doxxing) should be prohibited and grounds for booting off the platform.

There. We’ve enumerated the baseline content moderation (err, censorship) regime that anyone sane who lives in the real world can agree on. Can we all address the real debate now instead of the bullshit one?

The real issue that the consensus pro-censorship crowd will never directly address (at least whenever I’ve brought it up with them), and which is what’s left after all the strawmanning and prefatory throat-clearing around the obviously dumb arguments is over, is the following:

Do you think freedom of speech includes the right to say and believe obnoxious stupid shit that’s almost certainly false, or do you feel platforms have the responsibility to arbitrate truth and regulate online behavior for the sake of some supposed greater good?

That’s the real question here, and everything else is either willfully (or accidentally) naive online posturing.

If you think the former, that dumb and even offensive speech—Alex Jones going on about chemtrails making the frogs gay or people who think the COVID vaccine is a Bill Gates mind-control plot—is protected speech, then you’re on the Elon side of this debate. You fundamentally believe that unhinged-seeming speech is protected as a principle, and also is epistemologically more sound as general policy. Who knows? Today’s heresy may well be tomorrow’s orthodoxy. While most weird beliefs are just wrong, occasionally it’s just an early intimation of what’s very possibly true (cf. the COVID lab-leak hypothesis, the Hunter Biden laptop).

1A (like 2A in its own way) is an expensive form of insurance for the sake of guarding against the worst-case scenario of excessive conformity that leads to social ruin. The real question is if we’re still willing to pay that high insurance premium to guard against a purely hypothetical danger.

If you don’t agree with that insurance, if you think the platforms should be putting their fingers on the scales and declaring this or that eruption of the collective hive mind to be acceptable (or not) for the sake of some greater good or capital ‘T’ Truth, then you’re on the anti-Elon/DiResta side of the debate. If you think that, conversely, we must put up with the Alex Jones bullshit for the sake of the greater good, you’re on the other side of the debate.

That’s it, that’s the real dividing line here. Quibbling over the precise content policy in the pro-content moderation view is just haggling over implementation details, and essentially ceding the field to that side of the debate.

So…which side are you on?

The position in DiResta’s piece is the consensus MSM take from ‘serious’ people on the topic, now and probably forever in the pages of The Atlantic or The New York Times (publications that themselves resent their demotions from public square to just another set of onlookers on the sidelines). It’s squishy and ill-defined enough to be adaptable to future scandals, such that it’ll never seem inconsistent even as it makes contradictory claims around this or that moderated media cycle. The Oracle of Truth remains stubbornly undiscovered, so it’ll be epistemological improv at best.

It’s not much of a policy roadmap for the platforms either—Twitter still needs to make case-by-case calls subject to howling mob of the moment—but it does give the platforms carte blanche to down-rank and ‘moderate’ at will. It’s a finger-in-the-dam approach, but it’s the one that platforms cowed by the outcry have implemented; the real Supreme Court that matters around free speech will still preside from closed conference rooms inside tech companies, subject to the internal chorus of their employees. The real divide here is whether you greet that vision with cautious hope or outright horror.

Which brings us to the last point the threefold way of The New Free Speech: that Twitter isn’t the public forum, and as such shouldn’t be treated with the sacrosanct respect we typically imbue anything First Amendment-related. Even Yishan Wong, former Reddit CEO and longtime techie, made a similar argument in a very long and worthwhile Twitter thread (of which this tweet is a part):

The thing is…there has never been a public debate as Yishan is describing here, just as there’s never been some idealized public square as DiResta also invokes.

I’m not quite sure what ‘democracy dies in’ (pace WaPo’s claim that it’s the darkness resulting from not subscribing to their publication), but it’s pretty clear what conditions our democracy was born in: the most vicious, ribald, scabrous, offensive, and often violent tumult of the Founders’ era, which makes modern Twitter look like a Mormon picnic by comparison. I made this point in WIRED ages ago, about how the Founding Fathers would all have been anon-account Twitter shitposters now, utterly unlike the pompous wokescolds that now populate the media. Everyone invoking some fusty idea of ‘debate’ or even a healthy ‘marketplace of ideas’ is citing bygone utopias that never were, and never will be.

Our American public square, including and especially the periods of maximum democracy creation, has never been more than a bareknuckle brawl happening in the middle of a food fight surrounded by a jeering mob.

Our American public square, including and especially the periods of maximum democracy creation, has never been more than a bareknuckle brawl happening in the middle of a food fight surrounded by a jeering mob. To try and engineer something else either via immature ML technology that isn’t up to the task (and won’t be any time soon) or hamhanded policies that are obvious ploys to favor one’s own side, is delusional and futile.

To get meta for a moment, the debate over ‘content moderation’ is itself another battle in the evergreen squabble for American political power we’ve had non-stop 24/7 the Declaration of Independence was signed (or even before, since Zenger decided to troll a corrupt British governor in print). To cede ‘the public square’ to the ‘content moderators’ is to cede our American birthright of constant and cantankerous rebellion against the status quo. Some countries have real free speech, and some countries have monarchs on their coins. It would be very odd indeed that a country in the first category, which also birthed the very Internet, suddenly thinks the path to more democracy is more censorship.

Benjamin Franklin, when asked about the result of the 1787 constitutional convention, reputedly answered “a republic if you can keep it.” That republic is far more threatened by indulging our collective craving for safety via mass censorship than the opposite approach, which is unfettered debate coupled with the uncomfortable task of sharing the public square with our despised political enemies. We might just not have the stomach for it anymore.

A pseudo-event, then, is a happening that possesses the following characteristics:

(1) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.

(2) It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. The question, “Is it real?” is less important than, “Is it newsworthy?”

(3) Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity.

In the last half century a larger and larger proportion of our experience, of what we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo-events. We expect more of them and we are given more of them. They flood our consciousness.

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

The distressing normality of Joe Rogan

As has by now become well-known to The Spectacle, I went on Rogan.

It’s hard to overstate the influence and impact of Joe Rogan. Eleven million downloads per episode is more than the daily viewership of all the major network shows like Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow put together. This of course is why he had to be canceled for his COVID views, or his use of certain words (cited out-of-context, of course) in years-old episodes … or something like that. Rogan had to go down, because we can’t have a much-loved and -watched one-man media empire who makes the New York media putzes look like, well, putzes just get away with it, can we? No, he definitely has to go.

But he’s not going away, and he’ll outlast whatever little scrum of angry, frustrated, and dumb Spotify employees are trying to take him down. With any luck, they’ll be sent packing, like my cancelers at Apple were or the malcontents at Coinbase were after their management displayed the rarest of commodities these days: moral fortitude. Between whatever useless and narcissistic Spotify employees, who spend their days crybullying on Spotify’s Slack channels about this or that grievance, and Joseph James Rogan, I’m betting on Joe. He will outlast them all, including possibly Spotify’s management itself if they play their cards wrong.

So what’s life like after Rogan?

You have no idea: the sky is bluer, sugar is sweeter, beer tastes better, attractive members of the opposite gender swoon in my presence now … life is utterly different.

That’s all rubbish of course.

I gained 20k Twitter followers and a small bump in Substack subscribers who might be a bit disappointed if they take the show as representative of Pull Request content. Or perhaps not. Time and the churn rate will tell.

But it certainly adds a badge to the brand.

Just this week I was pitching a crypto VC (who seemed to be roughly between the age of 14 and 18) and he didn’t know anything about me: Times bestseller, early Facebook, bylines in WIRED, WaPo, etc …. who gives a shit?

“You were on Rogan!”

That’s all that mattered. That’s probably why he took the meeting. That’s Rogan clout: anointing what’s a Boorstin-ian pseudo-event and what isn’t. It’s the closest we’ve had to a Cronkite in decades—to Zoomers living in the Internet’s Eternal Present, that was the Rogan of the 60s and 70s (note: way before my time). Nothing and nobody else comes close.

And what’s he like?

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The Ukraine story is too important, so I’m removing the usual preview/paywall on all Ukraine-related Pull Request posts. That said, Ukraine content is even more expensive to produce than regular fare, so please consider subscribing.

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The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

-Leviticus 19:34

They come walking across, abandoning whatever got them there, whether a bus or their own cars. Usually it’s a mother with children dragging one of those rolling bags that fit into airline carry-on. Often they have a pet carrier of some sort, though sometimes the family dog just walks along with the family. Very occasionally it’s old people who look beleaguered and exhausted and incredulous that they’re doing this at their age. There are almost no men as the Ukrainians will stop any man aged 18 to 60 from leaving: every able-bodied adult male is officially mobilized to repel the Russian invader. Over four million Ukrainians have fled the country (and over six million are internally displaced), and most of them come lurching across the border, bags in hand, as you see pictured here.

In the border village of Medyka, Poland, at the end of a long, busy walk through lines of bunched refugees, meandering volunteers, and rows of tents and kitchens, you’ll reach as far as you can go without crossing. There, flanked by a squad of Polish police keeping everyone but actual crossers out, is a portal to a different world … the world of the Ukraine war. It’s where the Western world of NATO and human rights and peace and stability ends and something else altogether begins.

Many relatives wait there anxiously, a much more dramatic version of the exit gate at an airport. When their family member finally comes out—maybe they were incommunicado, maybe this comes at the end of a three-day odyssey—there’s often crying and embracing. The vulture-like TV journalists loitering nearby swoop in for footage, and the waiting party takes their relative’s luggage as tears are wiped and plans exchanged. They made it … their family finally made it out of the war.

For those who don’t have family waiting, a volunteer offers the children chocolate and everyone else food. There’s a procession of food trucks on the way from this portal-to-a-different-world to the waiting buses: everyone from Jose Andrés’ World Central Kitchen (which was omnipresent in the border region) to the United Sikhs offering tandoori. The Polish Boy Scouts have set up tents for those too exhausted to continue, or who need to warm up for a bit; it’s bone-chillingly cold, and many of the tents have wood stoves going, which fill the entire area with a woodfire odor.

As part of this spontaneous order amidst disorder, there’s a a line of buses and volunteer transport meeting a line of refugees, and this intersection of vehicles and pedestrians runs all day getting people out of the cramped border crossing. The next stop is the big-box warehouse everyone refers to as the ‘Tesco’ (a European version of Walmart). The Tesco itself has long since been shuttered, but the enormous building and parking lot have been requisitioned as a staging and triaging center for the refugee stream. You enter the building (here, Polish police instruct me not to take photographs), and what used to be the mundane trappings of retail life—the customer help desk, perhaps the local bank with an indoor storefront—have been requisitioned for refugee use: there’s the driver registration for people taking refugees out, over there is SOS Refugiados, a Spanish NGO offering settlement in Valencia, and there are the Israelis getting Jews out. The large open spaces where racks and shelves full of merchandise once stood have now been converted into an expanse of cots, with the occasional stockpile of food or bedding. Imagine your local Walmart or Costco absolutely gutted of all merchandise and goods, and suddenly inhabited by thousands of families fleeing a war, and you’d have a good picture of it.

For as chaotic as this could all be, there’s little in the way of disorder and nothing that resembles violence or mayhem. The burly Polish cops, border guards, and soldiers everywhere keep a stern eye on all that. There have been reports of refugee exploitation and attempts at trafficking—our translator shared some anecdotes of suspicious incidents, and some arrests have been reported—but overall there’s a general vibe of collective effort and volunteerism.

Everyone helps out, either guiding the stumbling refugees with their luggage (something the Polish border guards do often), or passing along information to refugees about rides or resources they can use to make their way, or bringing in supplies for the refugees (sometimes into Ukraine itself). Some examples, with accompanying photos:

A German group drove a van full of medical supplies, and is stuck on the Polish side because their customs declaration forms aren’t in Ukrainian. As one sees repeatedly at the border, they’re not part of any official group or effort, simply Europeans who sprung into action at the news. The woman leading them remarks to me, tapping her torso: “We’ve got these armored vests on, but we didn’t plan on customs problems.” Our Ukrainian and Polish-speaking interpreter tries to get them a written translation, and we guide them back to the main refugee reception center where there’s a bit of administrative infrastructure.

At the Budomierz crossing, a much smaller crossing whose refugee camp is the size of a parking lot, a couple of middle-aged Polish women bundled-up against the cold stir a pot of krupnik (a Polish meat and barley soup). I ask them if they’re part of any organization, and they reply that no, they’re simply from a neighboring village and set up their soup stand when the crisis started. She then offers me a bowl of krupnik which I felt obliged to accept (it was very good and bracing against the cold).

At the entrance to the refugee camp, I overhear the strange sound of American-accented English. A wiry guy in a baseball cap and a telltale Carhartt jacket is discussing destinations with a group of refugees with poor English. While our interpreter straightens things out with the refugees, I ask the American where he was from and he responds, “Richmond, Virginia!” Frank Pichel is an artist who bought a one-way ticket to Poland, rented a car, and drove to the border to help however he could. He is now shuttling group after group of refugee families to wherever they need to go in Poland (you can see some of it at his Instagram).

What’s miraculous about all this is that while the Polish government provides much of the law-and-order basics of the refugee logistics, as well as offers the use of infrastructure like empty buildings, the vast bulk of the actual aid is handled by self-organized NGOs and volunteers. The actual feeding and housing of refugees is almost exclusively being handled by private individuals and a random-seeming assortment of organizations. Europe is witnessing the largest refugee crisis since World War Two—millions of people suddenly on the move—and it’s mostly charity-minded do-gooders taking in the Ukrainians and caring for them.

Another of the very striking things in the border region is how, in the midst of very undignified circumstances, the Ukrainians manage to maintain a sense of human dignity. In the Przemyśl train station—like all train stations in Eastern Poland, now a de facto refugee camp—a family had staked out their own blanket space in a hallway. As in most such family plots, it had the few bags containing all the family’s belongings and some toys for the children. In this relative peace in the middle of an otherwise loud and bustling station, a grandmother very carefully did her granddaughter’s hair, a tableau of sanity in a world that suddenly seemed insane.

Where this ends is anyone’s guess. The refugees I spoke to all wanted to return to Ukraine. Many had left husbands, fathers, and sons fighting, and they had little desire to start anew in a foreign country. Surely, there are those who will stay as they have nothing to return to in Ukraine, and Ukraine is still a country with a relatively low GDP per capita. The Polish government is allowing Ukrainians to stay in country for 18 months with no visa and no questions asked, an extraordinary level of magnanimity toward a neighboring people in a horrible bind. But what happens a year from now as the cost of supporting the Ukrainians mounts, and the war is still dragging on? Right now, none of that seems to matter. There is one but one goal, and that’s to handle the humanitarian crisis and help the Ukrainians win the war.

As depressing and barbaric as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is, the border situation is a humanistic rebuke to the cruel militarism of Putin’s murderous ambitions. The volunteers, aid groups, and refugees on the Polish border have managed to create, to use Rebecca Solnit’s memorable phrase, ‘a paradise built in hell’: an oasis of collective good will and generosity alongside an apocalyptic nightmare of death and destruction. It’s an extraordinary show of humanity, something of which Europe can be rightly proud. All the more as this mobilization was whipped up not by EU fiat, though member countries are certainly budgeting money for aid, but by the overwhelming kindness of everyday Europeans toward a neighboring nation. We recoil in horror at the heinous news coming out of Mariupol, or the recent images of bound and executed civilians in Bucha, and the inhumanity that represents. But what’s going on at the Polish border is also part of the Ukraine story, something even Russian brutality shouldn’t completely overshadow.

Please share with anyone interested in the Ukraine crisis.

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For reviewed charities that are supporting Ukrainians, Charity Navigator has some suggestions.

War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.

Carl Von Clausewitz, On War

Wikipedia defines total war as ‘warfare that includes any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets, mobilizes all of the resources of society to fight the war, and gives priority to warfare over non-combatant needs.’

More ominously, the OED defines total war as ‘war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded.’

While the definitions fixate on the offensive weaponry and strategy used, the definition fails to capture the all-consuming impact of total war on the target population. Among the many striking impressions I had in my recent travels into wartime Ukraine was how completely Ukrainian society, even in the relatively safe Western areas of the country, had dedicated itself to the sole cause of repelling the Russian invasion. Normal society ground to a halt as everyone either fought, supported fighters, contributed essential inputs to the war like food, medications or war material itself, or housed refugees and aided their flight from the war zone.

With air raid sirens tolling several times a day, everyone was a potential casualty and everyone a potential gear in the national war machine; nobody talked about anything but the war, and everyone doom-scrolled Telegram all day as they sought the latest morsel of news from the front lines in Kyiv or one of the besieged hellscapes like Mariupol. The patriotic rallying cry of Слава Україні! (‘Glory to Ukraine!’) and its reply Героям слава! (‘Glory to the heroes!’) was repeated everywhere from ministers’ speeches to the everyday traffic of life, even as a greeting on a phone call. It was collective war fever—a necessary adaptation to an existential conflict, to be clear—on a scale that has to be seen to be believed.

This is what a nation turns into under conditions of total war: a population of soldiers, fixers, scroungers, volunteers and refugees scrambling between noisy bouts of air-raid sirens, motivating themselves via an increasingly hard-edged culture of nationalism and self-sacrifice … until either victory or destruction.

On a sunny Sunday in Lviv, what looked like your typical group of high-school kids who’d normally be carousing in some group activity like sports, were instead busily shoveling sand into bags. They would then (two at a time, for the bags were heavy) arrange them neatly around two historic lion statues in a public square. There was much joshing and chitchat in what almost seemed like a fun activity; every once in a while, the organizer would read from her Telegram the latest news on the war. ‘Czechia promises more aid to Ukraine!’ which would be greeted with cheers and invocations of ‘Слава Україні!’ It was rousing to see the national unity; it also reminded me of the young high schoolers similarly taken with war fever (yet innocent of war itself) in the opening chapter of All Quiet On The Western Front.

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The struggle to replace “tribal” politics with a more impersonal form of political relationships continues in the twenty-first century.

-Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order

The midwit take on Fukuyama is that he predicted some sort of liberal utopia following the end of the Cold War, and that every rewind into the violent tribalism that characterizes the capital ‘H’ History of his famous book represents a refutation of both this thesis and him as a thinker. Such people didn’t read past the title, much less the almost forty chapters of re-interpreted Hegel. It’s an admittedly dense book by pop-intellectual standards, and has much philosophical throat-clearing around the Greek concept of thymos (the desire for individual or collective recognition), Hegelian historicism, and Nietzschean apocalyptic prophecy.

The tl;dr is that Fukuyama certainly did not predict some endless post-Soviet utopia. What he did predict is that human political evolution, from hunter-gatherer tribes to the agricultural theocracies of Mesopotamia to the dynastic monarchies of medieval Europe to even the attempts at collectivist dictatorship like Communism, had found its end in capitalist liberal democracy. Unlike Marx predicted, bourgeois liberalism would not be a preface to world Communism (which would be discarded as an evolutionary dead end) or some other perhaps more radical form of government. Liberal democracy is the terminus of human politics, at least for the foreseeable future. Whatever we might think of what liberalism has become, we’re stuck with it unless we want to hit ‘reverse’ on the collective political car.

The liberal bet at the End of History is that capitalism convinces the aspiring Castros and Hitlers and Putins of the world to pick up a laptop and do a startup rather than play far more visceral prestige contests with modern weaponry instead.

Trying to hit ‘reverse’ is exactly what Fukuyama warned about in his startlingly prescient last chapter (which his critics definitely didn’t read): humans would backslide into prior forms of political organization, out of sheer boredom if nothing else. Fukuyama’s sometimes dry academic exposition reaches lyrical heights in this final chapter, so I’ll just quote him liberally (pun intended). He opens the chapter titled ‘Immense Wars of the Spirit’—Nietzsche’s term for the post-Historical prestige battles of his Last Man—with:

The decline of community life suggests that in the future, we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts. But the opposite danger exists as well, namely, that we will return to being first men engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons. Indeed, the two problems are related to one another, for the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form.

Megalothymia here is the exaggerated form of Greek thymos, or the spirited pursuit of public recognition (what Machiavelli referred to as virtù in The Prince). The problem of liberalism is what to do with the megalothymotic individuals among us, i.e., those with such burning ego that they won’t simply be satisfied with the petty dramas and pleasant consumerism of post-Historical life:

In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America.

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Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

-Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Now that Boomers and Millennials have both ganged up to cancel Joe Rogan on Spotify, can we finally agree that Gen X was the last, good American generation?1

For those unfamiliar with the contours of the ongoing cancelation drama, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell —the hippy music your parents listened to, fellow Gen Xer—have made common cause with the millennial employees of Spotify to cancel Gen Xer Joe Rogan, whose audience is larger than that of CNN and the populations of all the countries CNN has encouraged us to invade in the past 20 years. The biggest threat here though isn’t really the man who used to sing “Rockin’ in the Free World” like he meant it, it’s the millennial (and younger) employees at Spotify that CEO Daniel Ek has recently addressed in that ship-captain-facing-mutiny genre increasingly common in corporate America.

Not only are Gen Xers the last good generation, but also one in the uniquely weird situation of getting spit-roasted by the power and moral opprobrium of its bracketing generations (as Rogan is now). Gen X went from flipping off the censorious Boomers to losing their jobs thanks to the even more inquisitorial Millennials, a sandwich generation of freedom between slices of pious sermonizing. We went from Tipper Gore wanting to censor lyrics and a chorus of warnings about the evils of video games and Dungeons & Dragons, to blue-haired Twitter blue-checks wanting to cancel podcasts and while going on about the society-ending threat of ‘misinformation’ like North Korean apparatchiks.

The Boomers were always hedonistic hypocrites, of course, who spun on a dime from woo-woo, institution-destroying hippies to the ruthless, Sharper-Image yuppies of the Reagan 80s. They then proceeded to defund and de-prioritize the very institutions and infrastructure that the Greatest Generation built—everything from bridges to universities—which form the now-neglected bedrock of our civilization. They didn’t just pull the ladder up after them, they obliterated it and the base it was built on, and by the way, own most of the real estate up top too. And they’re still at it! Boomer-in-Chief Biden is in office, and Pelosi—who trades stocks more than Gordon Gekko ever did in Wall Street—has announced she’s running again at the spry age of 81.

The Millennial story is much weirder and more ahistorical, and represents a bizarre generational inversion. Millennials and GenZ don’t drink much anymore, are having less sex than previous generations, and don’t much care about driving. Consider that for a moment: the young can’t be relied upon to do what they’ve done since time immemorial, which is drink and fuck around. Your average forty-year-old probably gets laid now more than a twenty-year-old.

Ok Boomer2, says the pissy Millennial, an absolutely hilarious quip to those on the receiving end of it for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the Millennial-and-below generations have had their brains so warped by Internet time, they live in an amnesiac Eternal Present. Whether it be the Iraq War, the Nixon Administration, the First French Republic, or the ancient Carthaginians….everything before the Viral Right Now happened in the same undifferentiated blob of The Before Times. The measured directionality of history, an intellectual imposition of textual thought3, has been sandblasted out of their brains by one too many Twitter media cycles. ‘Boomer’ really just means anything from some other historical reference frame they can’t understand from their current blinkered one. Never mind that most of the people they’re leveling the phrase at are at least the children of said Boomers, i.e. Gen X, and not remotely the Pelosi age of those who really screwed us all.

The second layer of irony is that the people saying ‘ok Boomer’, especially to the people they’re saying it to, act largely like…Boomers. Preachy, tight-assed, obsessed with purity rituals, and generally anxious and humorless. They seem old beyond their years, full of cares—the stated corporate values of their laundry detergent, what someone said in some video years ago—that nobody in Gen X ever had at their age. Gen X was the last generation to go flying down shoddily-built plywood ramps on bikes and skateboards with no helmets on, and we somehow now inhabit a world where the youth are less wild and reckless than we were or are, despite being treated more gingerly than newborns.

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I reviewed Hereticon shenanigans with Liz Wolfe of Reason on the Pull Request Callin show here (now available on Web and soon on Android!).

A virtuous Heretick shall be saved before a wicked Christian.

-Ben Franklin, ‘A Dialogue Between Two Presbyterians’

Flying into Omicron City, AKA Miami, feels vaguely suicidal, or at least imprudent. I project my anxiety into the Twitter ether, and a reply guy tells me he’s sitting on the plane behind me. Then someone—while on a plane in flight—tries to airdrop photos onto my Mac as a troll. I turn around and reality turns into a reverie where suddenly random people you know are all around you: Michael Shellenberger, author and well-known SF activist, is literally right behind me. Kmele Foster of the ‘Fifth Column Podcast’ is across the aisle, and Cyan Bannister, noted VC, is a few rows down.

More Twitter reply-guys announce their presence on the flight, and Twitter and IRL merge in some odd metaversian way. After two years of COVID, the Internet no longer reflects reality, reality is an expression of the Internet. Put another way, the Internet isn’t this weird digital detour to reality, reality is an analog luxury add-on to the Internet, and I’m headed to big powwow of just that: Founders Fund’s Hereticon, a festival for malcontents.

This circus is the brainchild of Mike Solana, noted venture billionaire1 and (hopefully) future mayor of San Francisco. Though good luck uprooting the guy from Miami where he and a good chunk of the Founders Fund nomenklatura have set up shop as ferocious boosters of my hometown, a bizarre historical detour I would have never imagined as a youngster desperate to get out.

The next portent that this Hereticon business was going to be an absolutely fab confab was the venue: the Hotel Faena, this spectacular temple to Miami Beach’s 40s heyday on Collins Avenue and 32nd Street. Redone completely by the same duo that remade the Puerto Madera docklands in Buenos Aires, the Faena is a flamboyant neo-Art Deco temple of gold-leafed columns, vibrant, Mucha-esque murals, and splashy, plush furniture. There’s an immense gold-plated mammoth by Damien Hirst on the way to the beach, and the theater reminds one of cabaret photos from such louche hangouts as Weimar or pre-revolutionary Cuba (there would be an entirely fitting burlesque show on evening two).

As a stark counterpoint, the Faena Forum across the street is by Rem Koolhass and looks like something out of either Starfleet Academy or the Elysium spaceship in a Bloemkamp film. I had been there before at a conference where I was the paid entertainment, and the crowd was the significantly less interesting one of hedge-fund honchos and novelty-seeking wealthy looking for a sunnier TED experience. With room rates starting well into the four digits, this is the sort of experience best had with Other People’s Money, and one must thank Founders Fund for sparing no expense in throwing such a spectacular intellectual bacchanal.

Either through studied suspense, or simply improvisation, the schedule for Hereticon wasn’t released until days before the event itself. I had no idea what the convention was even about, other than the fact Solana had been secretly plotting this things for years. Getting lectured by both girlfriend and baby mama about the COVID risk, and both vowing to quarantine me like a leper when I got back, only served to increase the FOMO and my desire to go. Like a salmon returning to his spawning ground, the little Cuban boy had to go represent as the provincial beachhead of his youth became another stop on the Globalist Grand Tour.

A (further) rumination on Miami

On the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved a settlement of considerable interest.

Not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogotá and to Paris and Madrid.

Joan Didion, Miami

I’m often asked: so is this Miami tech thing for real, or is this just a few self-interested people trying to meme something into existence?

Yes, it’s meme-ification….but that’s also the entire history of Florida.

As every Miami school kid knows, the development of South Florida was itself meme’ed into existence by one Julia Tuttle, local pioneer who reputedly sent a bouquet of orange flowers to Henry Flagler, former Rockefeller man turned Florida developer, to show the mildness of the South Florida climate. Flagler duly extended his gigantic hotel and railroad project all the way through Miami to Key West; Tuttle herself donated large tracts of land to make it possible, and became one of the founders of the city of Miami.

A local hustler sweet-talking an outside tycoon to come down to Miami, and doing whatever necessary to accommodate them: sound a bit like the Suarez/Delian Twitter pas à deux that kicked off this recent tech hegira to Miami?

Of course, that Flagler railroad was blown to hell in the great hurricane of 1935, but the main east-west road in Miami is still named after him, and the causeway that goes from Miami to Miami Beach carries Tuttle’s name. Travelers on the way down to Key West (a gorgeous and much-recommended drive) can see the ruins of Flagler’s railroad on the right hand side.

But no matter….look at South Florida now: a GDP greater than Singapore’s and no sign of slowing down. Walk around SF’s SoMa, and you feel like Will Smith in ‘I Am Legend’ navigating a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Walk around Miami’s Wynwood and matters are, to use the Cuban expression, a paso de conga: foofy third-wave coffee, craft breweries, co-working spaces, vibrant art scene, hipsters, strutting models (that’s novel), construction everywhere (also novel), music blaring. Florida is the real estate grift that worked out, in the past and still now.

While getting over COVID—me and everyone else seemed to catch it within a day of the conference ending—I hung around Miami waiting for a negative test, and it was like Greek legends about heroes emerging from the underworld into the light of living day and reflecting on their quest. The former working-class ‘hood and industrial area of Wynwood, the sort of place nobody would have gone to for either love or money in the 90s, is now a tropical SoMa reboot and tremenda pachanga. Even in my zonked out COVID state, the energy was intoxicating: Miamians are warm, chatty, upbeat, evincing a vital sprezzatura everywhere they go. Life restarted here full-throttle a while ago, and the hysterical, dysfunctional shitshow that is California feels like a world away and a drab bore by comparison.

Like it or not, Miami and Florida are the future: California had the highest outflow of any state last year, and Florida the highest inflow. People are voting with their feet, and choosing a future with open schools, law and order, and governments that build enough housing that everyone can afford a home. They’re also not choosing a world of high taxes for poor services, sclerotic institutions that only perform social experiments on the public dime, and rampant crime and homelessness. God bless American federalism and fifty experiments in democracy.

Back to the Faena…

Sex workers, UFOs, ghost guns, and the banality of eugenics

Both my limited patience and the Chatham-House rules of the conference make it hard to report on each and every session (never mind my unfortunate tendency to forget the schedule in favor of whatever champagne-fueled convo was happening right in front of me). But I’ll do my best.

As the first session of the conference kicked off—’How to Pay for Sex,’ by noted OnlyFans star and sex worker Aella—I commiserated about the COVID risk with podcaster and economist Tyler Cowen (known for his uber-rational and inquisitorial interviews on Conversations with Tyler).

“Probably something like 10 to 15% of the people around us right now have COVID,” Cowen mused, while we looked at a theatre full of maskless people. He seemed utterly unflappable.

“Getting it now, after two years of lockdowns and what’s possibly the last wave, feels like getting shot on the last day of the war,” I replied worriedly.

”Better than getting shot the first day of the war!” he shot back, in his usual dry style. (Cowen himself would later test negative for COVID multiple times. I would not.)

Cowen’s logic was unassailable, and there was more than a bit of blue-state paranoia in the face of the red-state indifference at work. As anyone who’s been on the red-state side of the COVID divide, while the case and death rates have taken off with each new variant wave, COVID has functionally been over as a for-real public health concern in much of the Union. Alea jacta est and ‘cast your cares on the Lord’; I wouldn’t wear a mask all week.

Aella’s talk about selling sex, both online and IRL, was so interesting I had to clumsily DM her while semi-hammered at 4AM later that night to cadge an interview, which devolved into a rather unexpected negotiation. The full interview is here: ‘Wherein I pay Aella for sex and we just chat instead’.

After Aella and lunch, the first talk of the afternoon was by psychologist Diana Fleischman on the utterly anodyne topic of eugenics. Starting with the safe example of an incestuous brother-sister couple that had so many kids the German state eventually imprisoned them, she then rattled off a list of policies that, though packaged euphemistically, amount to eugenics: Jews filtering wedding matches based on congenital illness risk, Denmark ‘eradicating’ Down’s Syndrome via selective abortion, or sperm buyers using all manner of aesthetic fancies to choose donors. By the end of it, you realized humans breed themselves more ruthlessly than any deranged dog-owner in Best of Show, and the current taboo around using the word ‘eugenics’ in all but vicious condemnation is prudish and deluded. In short, eugenics is extant and widely-practiced, but impossible to talk about; in a word, it’s heresy, and Hereticon got off on exactly the right foot.

We might mock Orthodox Jews for refusing to use G-d’s name, thinking it possesses transcendent power. But in the secular world, we similarly abhor the use of certain magic words thought to wreak evil by their mere mention, which we only obliquely refer to via a first letter if at all. The talismanic nature of good and evil, with the accompanying social taboos around speech and thought, never goes away; it’s just rewritten into a different script.

Fleischman’s talk is an excellent trigger for a broader discussion the nature of heresy. The term itself stems from early Christian usage for any of the gaggle of weird cults that pullulated around the time of that strangest cult of all, Christianity itself. It implies both revolt, budding Wrongthink, and doctrinaire inquisitors with a burning pyre never far away. Heresy shouldn’t be possible in a world of free inquiry and basic law-and-order where nobody actually really gets hurt for anything anyone says. We might mock Orthodox Jews for refusing to use G-d’s name, thinking it possesses transcendent power. But in the secular world, we similarly abhor the use of certain magic words thought to wreak evil by their mere mention, which we only obliquely refer to via a first letter, if at all. The talismanic nature of good and evil, with the accompanying social taboos around speech and thought, never goes away; it’s just rewritten into a different script.

Take for example Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies and preference falsification, where we overtly endorse ideas we covertly think to be false out of a sense of propriety or self-preservation. This is Havel’s greengrocer in The Power of the Powerless, who hangs a sign supporting the communist regime on his storefront merely so he can continue in his small business, unharassed by authorities. The greengrocer doesn’t mind repeating the untruth so long as the overhead is small. After all, he won’t change anything about the autocratic government he lives under by resisting.

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As a bonus, here’s a conversation with the film makers about the topics touched on here, plus how they threaded together footage and interviews to make sense of a chaotic series of events.

Subscribers (who don’t have HBO), scroll to the bottom for a special link to watch Four Hours at the Capitol.

The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities.

Albert Camus, L’homme révolté

We live in a world of epistemic fracture, where ‘scissor’1 events cleave an audience into two different (and hostile) interpretive groups.

This sounds like fancy talk for Pariser’s filter bubbles, or even the Rashomon Effect, but it’s slightly more complex: it’s not like people are living in fundamentally different realities (i.e., bubbles), nor did they experience the same physical reality from different vantage points (i.e., Rashomon). The same polarizing event inarguably happened for everyone, and in fact was likely (over)documented to the point of media saturation. What ‘scissors’ create is people living in different mental worlds about the same undisputed physical events: That’s the mind-bending implication of decoupling completely what we see and think from what actually happens in the world2. There’s been perhaps no grander scissor recently than the events around the January 6th riot at the Capitol, whose anniversary is this week.

Or do I use ‘insurrection’ instead, declaring my membership on one side of the scissor instead of the other? As Pull Request readers know, I prefer cloaking everything in a miasma of Tyler Cowen-esque Straussianism rather than actually taking a side. I’ll leave dancing on the third rail to the Taibbis and Greenwalds of the world; they can handle the heat better than I can with my delicate mental constitution.

Partly for that reason, partly due to scissors being definitionally difficult to pin down in any objective way, I’ve mostly ignored a deeper take on the January 6th events as a hopeless enterprise. Until my friend Dan Reed, Emmy Award-winning director of the explosive Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland, insisted I watch his latest project: Four Hours at the Capitol (subscribers, scroll to the bottom for a free way to see the film).

It’s fair to say I was blown away: I have never seen any cogent threading together of the day’s chaotic events, pieced together from several camera angles, such as this. I recommend everyone go see it, even if you feel you know what happened that day.

It’s Jackass meets West Wing; an Insane Clown Posse concert somehow invading the set of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and you can’t take your eyes off of it.

As with the day itself, the film starts normally: DC police officer Michael Fanone drives to work and hears of a protest by Trump supporters brewing at the Capitol (he’ll later play a key role in events). The action takes off from there as a group of ‘Proud Boys’, randomly by their own account, decide to rush to the Capitol. They immediately run into an under-manned barricade where they quickly overwhelm police. Then another barricade, and another barricade … until they’re at the Capitol itself and the initial small group has snowballed into a crowd.

It’s Jackass meets West Wing; an Insane Clown Posse concert somehow invading the set of Mister Smith Goes to Washington, and you can’t take your eyes off of it. The dramatic tension between the rapidly deteriorating situation outside, as police line after police line falls before the surge of screaming rioters, and the legislators quietly going about their procedural business in chambers and not knowing what’s going on, is absolutely unbearable.

The action oscillates between pitched hand-to-hand combat and carnivalesque scenes of total absurdity: some yahoo reclining on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk; an officer trying to talk the shaman guy off the Senate podium like a museum guard telling someone to not touch the artwork; garishly-dressed protestors Karen-ing cops using the heckler’s line of ‘You work for us! This is the people’s house!’

More than once, the protestors seem simply agog that they’ve somehow managed to take the Capitol building. One of them, a stoner named Nick Alvear, rattles off some piece of conspiratorial QAnon nonsense and then describes how he lit up a joint and handed it out to other protestors once they made it to the Capitol Rotunda. The footage shows them all standing there buzzing high, a toke break to their unplanned action movie, contemplating the cupola’s grandeur.

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And here we bring our story to an end. Its literary merits must be left to the judgement of the readers: as to its truth, I should not hesitate to declare without fear of contradiction that, from the first word to the last, I have aimed at nothing else.

Josephus Flavius, The Jewish War (75 AD)

It’s difficult to view the present through the future’s eyes.

What will the future think of the tortuous year of 2021? Any self-reflection requires staring into the rear-view mirror of an as-yet imagined time and place. In this statutory genre of end-of-year review, the best we can do is take a breath, quaff some IPA, and scroll down the list of posts and Tweets and try to make sense of what happened….

(The product manager in me wishes Substack had the Notion feature of an automated top-of-page table of contents. I’ll weakly reproduce that here given the rambling nature of the post.)

1. A reflection on the Apple affair

2. Joining the Jews

3. Miami and Cuba

4. Brief interviews with hideous men (i.e. interview highlights)

5. Highlight reel (of posts not covered in other sections)

6. Technology, old and new

Apple

I’m all for a quiet life. I just didn’t get one.

-Keith Richards

What to say about my former employer and most valuable company in the world?

Here I was looking to pull off the Valley tech guy version of early retirement and work at a FAANG company, finally settling down to support my kids and be a proper father. I abandoned forever the bohemian shenanigans of the writing and off-grid life … but somehow the shenanigans found me.

In the span of 24 hours I went from thinking about the morning standup meeting to being embroiled in the tech story of the moment, and playing poker against a company with an annual revenue greater than Denmark’s GDP.

One of the dysfunctional but occasionally useful elements of my psychology is that while I’m an anxious, self-doubting mess during the normal vicissitudes of everyday life, I’m absolutely calm and calculating in wartime. As readers of Chaos Monkeys know, I’m no stranger to either being in the eye of a media storm nor being in mismatched legal combat. In a way, it was almost nostalgic: once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

A more Christian view would say that a state of divine grace descended on me during a period of worldly turmoil. I really did feel an almost uncanny sense of serene focus during it all. As when running with the bulls in Pamplona, the fear is all in the foreboding: once in the thick of the melee, it’s all pure action and reaction, coup and countercoup, bluffing and raising and calling until someone folds.

No catalog of 2021’s top tweets would be complete without the opening salvo in the AGM/Apple media battle, my five-point summary of the manufactured brouhaha.

In the end, the whole thing went down like an Israeli war: lopsided, risky, and short.

!הר הבית בידינו! הר הבית בידינו

Beyond my petty personal dramas, the story was significant as it was the first in a series of internal employee revolts that rocked Apple: first the inhumane horror of hiring the author of a five-year-old bestselling book; then wanting Apple management to take a stand on Israel-Palestine (!); then protesting the human-rights violation of having to physically return to Apple’s gorgeous billion-dollar campus to, like, actually work.

Unlike the leadership of companies like Coinbase or Shopify, both of whom took strong public stands on employee politicking at work, Apple management uttered not a peep and caved to the mob. All the while of course Apple has struck Faustian bargains with China for its own market interests, and lobbied the US government to evade potential liability for its use of forced labor in China.

If there’s one phrase that characterizes our age, it’s ‘elite failure’. Nobody is really in charge anymore; there is no secret room with all the competent people making the pivotal decisions. From the US government to The Times, the world is now run by a Zoom screen of hollow, indecisive people—absolutely scared shitless of Twitter and Slack threads—wincing from hard realities and public stands in favor of performative posturing and backroom deals; all the while, our elites shamble feebly around the institutions that a greater generation once built … including and especially the management of Apple.

The God of the Hebrews

How odd of God,

to choose the Jews.

Not so odd,

the Jews chose God.1

When asked how it is I got mixed up with the children of Abraham and Moses, I’m generally at a bit of a loss and use the children excuse: I have three Jewish kids and wanted to both encourage and participate in their religious upbringing. Living as we do in a bizarre society where the only functional organizations are corporations, I wanted my progeny to experience being part of something motivated by more than mere greed.

Less diplomatically, Mama Deux more or less told me that if the kid went to shul, I’d be taking her, so I called her bluff and joined the tribe.

Conversion became my COVID project, and thanks to Conservative Judaism’s rather permissive attitude toward Zoom, I became a regular attendee at a local synagogue. Judaism is an orthopraxic religion, which is to say, a Jew is as a Jew does: you are defined by your practice not by your beliefs. The sort of secular American who often expressed puzzlement at my sudden conversion has the specter of very Protestant, personal-faith Christianity rattling around their heads (among other unsuspected Christian beliefs).

In order to better explain this sudden and unthinkable departure from secular liberalism, I wrote a piece titled ‘Why Judaism?’ which went viral in the Jewish world and beyond. Lamenting the ‘God-sized hole at the center of liberalism’, I laid out the case for the age-old Jewish tradition in a confused, directionless age obsessed with ‘faddish academic or corporate cults’. I followed that with ‘Why Judaism?, part שני’, addressing more directly the role God or whatever is behind all this (waves hands all around), and why some form of metaphysical belief is essential for human life. If you think you don’t profess a religion, you’re almost certainly the most zealous acolyte of our age’s most popular form if it: (post) Christian secular liberalism.

Here’s an anecdote:

In October of this year, I attended the largest rabbinical gathering in the world: the Chabad movement’s Kinus Hashluchim. These are the black-hat Orthodox Jews who run synagogues around the world; you may have seen some trying to put tefillin on passers-by in cities like Jerusalem or New York. It’s an absolutely spectacular event I’ll be writing about in more detail soon.

When I introduced myself to one of the many schluchim (emissaries) I met at this riotous event—can’t recall his name, I met so many—he cocked his bearded head and asked ‘Antonio Garcia-Martinez??’ Astonished he’d even recognized me, I waited patiently as he dug into his black coat, pulled out his phone, opened a WhatsApp group he maintained with other Chabad rabbis, and showed me a much commented-on link to my post ‘Why Judaism?’

“A wonderful reflection on Judaism. Many blessings to you, friend.” He smiled, and disappeared back into the jovial mob of black-coated emissaries.

I did lots of Jewish podcasts and got lots of writing invitations after ‘Why Judaism?’, but my proudest moment was a Chabadnik saluting this bumbling convert’s rumination on the religion to which he had dedicated his entire life.

Miami and Cuba

Miami and Cuba represent either side of an historical coin: the once (Cuba) and current (Miami) entrepôt between the Anglo and Latin worlds, populated by an imperious and scheming caste of Cubans. One has fallen into tragic ruin and the other is having quite a moment. The weird backwater of my youth, which I fled the very instant I could, has apparently turned into a center-of-gravity metropolis thanks to one tweet from my former middle-school classmate and current Miami mayor Francis Suarez.

As soon as the Miami meme took off, I posted the Pull Request download:

• My essay on whether Miami could become (in the words of Suarez) the ‘capital of capital’

• An interview with Mayor Suarez

• An interview with Miami early adopter and Founders Fund VC Keith Rabois

Meanwhile, languishing Cuba got a shock to its sclerotic system in the form of network-enabled smartphones, something it had never really had until recently. The protests that erupted in early July were like nothing the country had seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. I had a quick react piece on it ‘The contrarevolución will be livestreamed’, that’s an updated version of the WIRED piece I did (reporting illegally from Cuba) on the weird Cuban Internet situation.

I also wrote an oped in The Washington Post about the protests, as well as ‘The Invisible Boot’ on seeing the brutality of the Cuban dictatorship emerge publicly again. I also spoke to former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr about what it would take to run Internet to Cuba (WiFi balloons!).

Like it or not, part of my brain and soul are still in South Florida. For those Miamians who write asking about when I’m next there (there’s a surprising number of you), I’ll be at Founders Fund’s Hereticon in early January and probably again some time in Q1/Q2. The Singapore of Latin America isn’t done with me yet.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

…the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.

David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

When Casey Newton did his post-first year review of his Substack, one of his interesting conclusions is that interview were terrible for reader engagement.

Whether due to differing subjects (or a different interviewer), I’ve found that readers love interviews and they’re some of Pull Request’s most popular posts. They also absorb an exhausting amount of time to transcribe and edit, and in fact I’m still behind on posting my interview with Glenn Greenwald (Glenn, you’re coming out in 2022, I promise you).

Engagement aside, it gives me an excuse to bother interesting people with importunate questions, something I love to do.

On the audio side, many of these interviews went out live on Callin, and you can get a whole list of them here. We had:

• Ross Douthat on his new book The Deep Places

• Ryan Holliday on Courage is Calling

• Michael Shellenberger on San Fransicko

• Batya Ungar-Sargon on her book Bad News

• Dara Horn talking about People Love Dead Jews

• Jacob Helberg on The Wires of War

• Balaji Srinivasan on the metaverse

• Kmele Foster, Zaid Jilani, Senate candidate and Thiel Capital COO Blake Masters, and many more.

On the text side, here are my favorite interviews of the year, in no particular order:

Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen is one of the very few VCs with an actual intellect who reads books outside the (small) business-oriented ‘thought leadership’ canon of Medium-level procedural bullshit. How someone manages to balance wide-ranging intellectual interests with running a firm that seems to have vertically-integrated every element of entrepreneurship from funding to hiring to media, I have no idea.

Ross Douthat

Times columnist and author Ross Douthat is one of my very few must-read authors: if he authored an IKEA furniture construction manual, I’d read it. Fortunately his topics are much more engaging. His The Decadent Society is a sweeping diagnosis of our cultural malaise, written by a true aesthete who probes everything from superhero films to the state of the novel. His more recent The Deep Places is a moving reflection on illness and its overcoming, whether via medical quackery or religious faith.

Zeynep Tüfekçi

I’ve known Zeynep for a couple of years, and mostly in the context of the social media impact on politics and media. Her transformation into one of the most prominent, independent authorities on COVID has been fascinating to watch. This interview dates from her first forays there and discusses how a professor of sociology became a disease expert.

Ben Thompson and Eric Seufert

In this Substack podcast, probably the two smartest people in mobile and advertising tech discuss the new coming world of on-device data on the Apple and Google mobile platforms (as well as plenty of other venting).

Tom Holland

Historian, podcaster and BBC presenter Tom Holland is one of our finest public intellectuals, and his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is an absolute must-read on the influence of Christian religion and morality on our secular age.

Christopher Rufo

Whatever you think of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Christopher Rufo is one of the most interesting people in media today. Starting his career as a pretty mainstream documentarian (his America Lost is worth watching), he has become a one-man media army against the institutionalization of CRT in American schools. Nobody has so single-handedly changed a national conversation than Rufo has, all of it via writing and tweeting. If our current discourse is endless memetic warfare, Rufo is one of its virtuosi.

Niall Ferguson

Another public intellectual I unashamedly crush on is Niall Ferguson, author of many bestsellers, Stanford professor, and more recently founder of a new, heterodox University of Austin. We had a long rollicking conversation covering everything from Fukuyama to why the Jews need to be more violent like the Scots. When I called him about the university thing, it turned into a whole other interview about universities and the future.

Ben Shapiro

When I cracked open Shapiro’s books to see how canceled I would be if I interviewed him, I discovered his politics were as radical as those of a Boca Raton gastroenterologist. He’s your basic conservative Orthodox Jew, politics-wise, even if his online persona (like anyone who makes a living in The Spectacle) is more than a bit trollish and snarky. Rather than ask him about his politics, which would be redundant given he’s built an entire media empire to expound them, I asked him about his very public Judaism (which resulted in a lecture on my conversion) and whether elite media really matters anymore (oh, and Facebook).

Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher is one of the most outspoken and prolific conservatives intellectuals writing today. His The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation is a rallying cry for Christians convinced the liberal wold is unsalvageable. I’ve known Rod for a while, and as his star has risen in the media firmament (and he writes more bestselling books), we sat down to discuss his evolution from a New York-living bohemian, to Catholic and now to an Orthodox Christian bemoaning the state (as I sometimes do) of secular liberalism.

Plus! Austen Allred of Lambda School (now Bloomtech) on the state of American education, Kathryn Paige Harden on progressivism and genetics, and more…

Post Highlights

• ‘We Are No Longer A Serious People,’ on the Afghanistan pull-out debacle and what it means about our governing elites, was one of the most viral posts of the year.

• ‘Bad Apple,’ my first public statement after The Apple Affair, was understandably popular. More on Apple below.

• My post about moving to the high desert outside the Reno/Tahoe area, “Fear and Loathing in Reno”, turned more than a few heads as apparently nobody pictured me as a warlord of the Mad Max plains. C’mon now…

• Like a fool, I once again waded into the woke politics of ‘LatinX’ with ‘The Bus Says Belén,’ a follow up to last year’s uber-viral ‘LatinX-plaining the Election’.

• I penned a paean of praise to my Tesla 3 in ‘The Soul of a New Driving Machine’. That of course meant I had an army of Elon-haters in my mentions sternly declaring that absolutely, positively the car that routinely drives me over mountain passes for hours on end is not even remotely autonomous.

• Plus takes on the Facebook whistleblower, Diversity™ in tech, and much, much more….

Technology, old and new

One of my first posts in the rebooted Pull Request was about the major changes afoot with ads and privacy, specifically the moves by Apple and Google to completely invert the going architecture of many years and billions of dollars of Internet development.

This took a particularly odd twist when Apple announced a new child-pornography filtering system (a noble goal if there ever was one) that sparked a backlash among users for precisely its ‘on-device’ architecture. I still think the long-term vision for conventional (non-Web3) mobile computing is shifting to on-device, barring some force majeure. If that move to on-device happens, then the last building block of the tottering digital advertising edifice that I and many others have helped build will finally be in place. It will then be on to other formats and other ways of wiring human brains to each other, and other ways of packaging and selling the resulting attention.

Or perhaps not.

I also had very initial and tentative posts on the (M/m)etaverse and how Web3 and advertising could (or could not) work. I plan on spending more time on Web3 going forward in Pull Request. Yes, agm.eth is becoming a bit of a crypto-believer: if Web3 lives up to only a tenth of its promise, it’ll be a big deal. Look for much more of that in 2022.

A reader could scan the entire list of posts, and not necessarily think Pull Request a nerdy tech newsletter. I certainly depart from my esteemed competitors (e.g. Ben Thompson) in tackling some of the squishier and non-technical issues in society. Religion, politics, media, identity…they’ve all been grist for the Pull Request mill. Readers seem to like it based on feedback; possibly even prefer it to yet another take on some fleeing piece of tech news.

Ultimately, culture and politics are downstream of economics, and all of it is downstream of technology. Technology is the most vital and fertile sector of society right now; be they in the form of bits or atoms, technology’s offspring are undermining elites, eroding old institutions, and completely warping a modernist Western worldview that dates back to that other great technological upheaval, the printing press.

It is my view that we are still at the very earliest days of a new and radical transformation, where information and human thought are completely untethered from the physical and political realities that have framed human life for half a millennium. Much of it fills many of us with trepidation. In the car of humanity we’re all riding in, the liberals are stomping on the brakes to stop the dizzying acceleration of technological change, while the conservatives look for a reverse gear that doesn’t exist. Technologists are the only ones in the car with a wild expression on their faces, stomping on the gas and shouting the only way through is through!

May we all arrive at whatever New Enlightenment awaits us relatively quickly, and with the car more or less in one piece.

Finally, I’d like think the various people who have made Pull Request possible:

• Katia Sobolski, whose art adorns every interview. Go check her stuff out or follow her on Instagram.

• My editor Kevin Conley, who manages to turn around posts despite my utter last-minute timing

• The Substack founders, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, who finally convinced me to do Pull Request time

• You, the readers, without whose support this wouldn’t be possible

If you’d like to subscribe to or share The Pull Request, please do so with the magic buttons below.

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If there were ever a Pull Request guest that doesn’t need an introduction, it’s Ben Shapiro. Author of numerous bestselling books (including the recent The Authoritarian Moment), founder of conservative media network The Daily Wire, Shapiro is a polarizing figure who leaves nobody indifferent.

We spoke by phone, both of us talking at 100 MPH to cram in a full interview in 20 minutes.

I read your recent book, which I liked. To give it a solid plug, this is The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent, which is available where all fine books are sold.

There's one thing in particular I wanted to talk to you about, Ben, because you have been so successful in creating your own media empire with a series of bestselling books and The Daily Wire. I worked at Facebook and used to write about Facebook a lot. If you look at the engagement data for your posts and The Daily Wire's posts on Facebook, it's incredible…they essentially beat any conventional media network.

One question I often see debated inside the tech world—I'm speaking as a techie here—is that many Valley people say: "This elite world of The New Yorker, The New York Times, like who cares, we're going to create new modalities, like podcasting, like Substack, whatever. And we're just going to create our own spaces where the legacy elites don’t matter."

Then there's more cynical techies who say, "Well, maybe so, but it's the elite spaces that matter, because it's the elites that have captured almost every American institution and set the national agenda, so the weird tech alternatives don’t really matter."

Someone like me can have a small operation on Substack or somebody like you can do very well with your own thing. But in some sense, it's not going to impact what happens at (say) Harvard or the Dalton School. You get into this in your book, where you mentioned how elites have weaponized journalism and turned it into basically an avenue for political activism under the supposed rubric of objectivity. What are your thoughts on that media vs. elite debate?

Yeah. I think that one of the great tragedies of Facebook as we've experienced it over the past six years, is that Facebook really was a place where you could build an alternative to places like The New York Times or The Washington Post. Facebook was a place where you could market yourself and garner an audience and make up ground that the legacy media had. Right? I mean the legacy media and the Washington Post, The New York Times, the three broadcast network, CNN, all these places had enormous institutional weight. And Facebook, because it had garnered billions of eyeballs, was a one-stop shop for people who were looking for an alternative. In the early days, they were basically concerned with openness and fairness of process where everybody was playing by the same rules, then there was an enormous amount of ground that was made up by conservative media, right at the beginning.

The news business is like a tiny slice of Facebook's pie. And so the question for them is, what sort of pressure do we wish to remain under, in order to uphold this value of free speech …? And the answer is, apparently, only as far as The New York Times and Washington Post aren't going to hit you every day.

And so, I'm not going to pretend like we haven't been successful on Facebook. We're massively successful on Facebook. One of the things that has happened and they made this clear this week, is that over the past year, the pressure that they were brought under by the elite media, they just stopped standing up to it; they started basically catering to the legacy media. And what people don't understand about a lot of these companies, which I'm sure which you do, is that the news business doesn't make up anywhere near a huge bulk of what makes money for Facebook. The news business is like a tiny slice of Facebook's pie. And so the question for them is, what sort of pressure do we wish to remain under, in order to uphold this value of free speech that Zuckerberg has talked about at places like Georgetown University? And the answer is, apparently, only as far as The New York Times and Washington Post aren't going to hit you every day.

It's kind of a shocking thing. The internet allowed for everybody to get out there and put up their own stand. And so you had this shouk, this giant market where everybody had their own stand, and some stands were a lot bigger than the others, like The Times, but you could make Daily Wire your homepage. Then Facebook came along and everybody just made their Newsfeed their homepage. So this benefited The New York Times, but it also benefited smaller places that suddenly had access to all these billions of eyeballs that wouldn't have necessarily gone directly to Daily Wire. Then these big social media companies, under pressure from legacy media, decided to basically start bottlenecking the traffic. They decided that they were going to minimize the amounts of traffic that a lot of conservative outlets got.

And so over the last year, we saw our traffic dip fairly significantly because Facebook put into place all of these supposed objectivity standards that do precisely the opposite: they made your traffic dependent on approval by fact checkers; they made your traffic dependent on not being too heavily Facebook oriented. So you had to now have a certain percentage of your traffic from sources that were not Facebook. Well, if you're The Times, you had those sources, but if you're a startup, like we are, then a huge percentage of your traffic is going to come from Facebook. So all of those systems basically re-established a lot of the mainstream media dominance that Facebook had taken away.

As a personal anecdote, when the 2016 election happened, probably the most shocking thing of that whole Facebook media cycle was, I think, Zuck's second post after the election, in which he hinted that he'd be working with fact checkers to actually regulate content. Because, of course, that had never been the tone of the conversation.

It was the 2016 election, there's no question. I mean, it was a turning point. Before 2016, Facebook was the darling of a lot of the media outlets that now crap on it every single day, because Facebook, of course, had been used to great advantage by the Obama campaign in 2012. And all of the stories were about how brilliant they were, and then 2016 happens. And there needs to be some sort of myth of how Trump got elected because it can't just be “Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate who ran a horrible campaign.” It has to be something else. So we get the Russian story, and then we get the Facebook story. And the Facebook story is that because Facebook allowed the Russians to manipulate the American people or allowed news outlets like Daily Wire or Daily Caller or Breitbart to get the news out there, and this is why Hillary Clinton lost.

And on the Russian side, it's just not true. I mean, if you just look at the actual reach statistics for the supposed Russian domination of these stories, they're ridiculous, on their face, they're ridiculous. These things were getting fewer shares over the course of a year than probably my Facebook page gets over the course of a month. And that's just my Facebook page, right?

But that narrative built up, and instead of the leadership at Facebook just saying, "Listen, what we are a platform, we always said, we were a platform, stick it. You don't like it, stick it." Instead of them doing that, they decided they were going to try and dip their toe in the water of how do we please everybody. And once you're in the water of how do we please everybody, you please nobody.

Yeah, on the issue of engagement numbers, back when I was so foolish as to try to push the needle on the Facebook discourse, I would look at the engagement stats for a lot of these Jesus meme pages, and they were so pathetic. They were so small, it was a joke. The thought that you could actually sway an election, in a country of 300 million people, with crappy Jesus memes … as a former Facebooker, I wish Facebook ads worked that well, but they don’t.

It was an absurdity. It was an absurdity, and everybody who's in the tech world knew that it was an absurdity. When there were these Senate committees that would release these thick documents of, "Look at all these Russian memes, where I chose that Hillary Clinton is the devil." And then you'd look at the engagement numbers, and it was like a thousand engagements. Everybody in the tech world knows that that means that the thing got no views, but they had to have the narrative. And so they just started pretending that it had impact even when it didn't. And that actually did have impact. Right? By pushing it so hard, the notion that the election was perverted by all of these deeply nefarious forces, that got the leadership at Facebook to basically backend the bottleneck that they couldn't impose from the outside.

Okay, I know we don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to completely switch topics.

Oh yeah, go for it.

I think they should build a synagogue up there. There's a mosque, and there's a Dome of the Rock up there, but there's no synagogue. Why not? What's the problem? I mean, the Palestinians have an actual school up there. For the sake of religious diversity, what's the big problem with having a shul on the holiest site in Judaism?

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Beware of the other’s dream, because if you are caught in the other’s dream, you are fucked.

-Gilles Deleuze, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?’

I recently spent a rushed weekend in Los Angeles, a city I was born in, once lived in, and which I (re)visit every chance I get. I’m one of those invitation collectors who’s actually a homebody and mostly dislikes travel, but will bundle invites as an excuse to visit a city and knock them all out.

Thus was I sitting at a very well-appointed and welcoming shabbat dinner table this past Friday. The specific host family and guests are not directly relevant, other than to mention these are extremely media savvy people who in fact make a living in The Spectacle (much as I do) and are by no means the ‘normies’ that techies often dismissively cite.

The conversation was wide-ranging and generally warm…until we got to the topic of technology, and I suddenly felt as I did in the late 90s when backpacking around Europe. Cut to scene at a youth hostel in Belfast or Brindisi, and I was the lone representative of a hegemonic entity that had defined and marked everyone’s lives, and I had a lot to answer for. In the case of backpacker me, it was the United States of America and its assumed depredations throughout the world; in the case of shabbat guest me, it was me as emissary (and, worse!, defender) of ‘Big Tech’ which has wrought so much turbulence in our lives.

In the same way that the hostel scenes possessed their own ironies that still gleam in distant memory—one Spanish dude who was letting me have it about evil America was literally wearing blue jeans and eating McDonald’s—this scene also had its odd juxtapositions: everyone at the table had not only made their names thanks to such society-threatening services as Twitter, but when they had sparked cancel-worthy controversies (as everyone in the public eye now inevitably does), tech provided them with the weapons to fight back against the legacy media that demanded they follow the elite party line. Without tech, the ‘Cathedral’ would have chewed them (and anyone else) up and spit them out.

Me: “But tech—Twitter and Substack and podcasts and all the rest of it—they’re like the AK-47, the mass-market tool of the oppressed against their oppressors, that can turn a band of insurgents into a threat even for hegemons,” I protested.

‘Them’: “But tech is making teen girls completely crazy. And then the techies have the gall to keep their kids from using it, because they know it makes their kids crazy,” replied the hostess.1

Me: “Look, if you’d asked a Bohemian peasant in 1618 if the printing press was a good idea—note, that’s the first year of the Thirty Years’ War, the bloodiest war in European history until WWII—they’d also say it was probably a horrible mistake. It wasn’t until the Enlightenment and antibiotics and human rights that the literacy trade worked out.”

And on and on it went.2

The issue of the net impact of technology is something I’ve addressed ad nauseum before, and my final view is that of the (mis-told) story of Zhou Enlai when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: too early to tell. My suspicion is that, just like that pessimistic and hypothetical peasant in 1618, we’re similarly on the cusp of a radical shake-up in the reigning order. Gutenberg’s gadget gave us everything from the nation-state to constitutional democracy to encyclopedic and empirical notions of ‘truth’, all of which I think are about to be thrown out the window before arriving at some (hopefully) superior post-post-Enlightenment era.

What’s more interesting than yet another technology debate is the form of address used by my shabbat interlocutors: the ‘Them’ and the ‘They’. ‘Them’ is the object of the outsider’s suspicion and conspiratorial fear. ‘They’ have done something, in some coordinated and seemingly unstoppable way, even if the ‘They’ encompasses a vast cast of companies and characters. At its extreme, it’s the ‘They’ of QAnon people going on about the pedophile ring that rules the world behind the scenes. In less unhinged form, it’s a ‘Them’ that buckets someone like Tim Cook alongside the Y Combinator founder leading a three-person company. The former (as well as analogs like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg) are the emblematic figureheads, even though (to my mind), the latter much better embody the soul of Silicon Valley. Either way, they’re on the ‘Them’ bus together.

Very occasionally there really is a sort of ‘Them’. There was a disorganized ‘Them’ inside Facebook trying to make the ads system make money before the IPO, creating the targeting, Newsfeed, and mobile attribution products that have powered the company’s gargantuan revenue until this very day. I described some of it in my memoir Chaos Monkeys. There seems to be a ‘Them’ around this ‘Supreme Court’ of Facebook, an Oversight Board that was cobbled together but doesn’t seem to do much of anything.

That’s the real problem with the ‘Them’: it ascribes a level of willful agency to organizations (or entire industries) which are really baskets of disparate individuals and agendas grappling with happenstance and an intractable reality. It’s an illusion only readily maintained by outsiders, as insiders have seen how the sausage is really made. Nobody who’s opened a Facebook dashboard and seen figures in the billions blinking back at them would believe that any ‘Them’ could possibly manipulate this seething mass of humanity in a controlled, willful way.

The real Facebook struggle is to somehow manage all this complexity in scalable ways: an algorithm that sorts the billions of pieces of content created per day; machine learning that hopefully doesn’t filter out the noxious detritus of imperfect humanity in too, too wrong a way; some imperfect body of policies that placates often incomprehending regulators and is still implementable by overtaxed operations people. The thought that any set of people, no matter how motivated, could deploy grand designs of overt social control over that globe-spanning mess seems delusional when you realize the scale of it.

When our car gets stuck in the snow on the way to Tahoe, we don’t blame President Biden; well, some political partisans people might, and who knows, poor Federal infrastructure policy might be residually to blame for that poorly-marked turn we missed. But broadly we ‘get’ that national governance is a complicated, multi-tiered phenomenon, and assigning individual agency to this or that person or policy comes off as contrived. Somehow that worldliness disappears (or didn’t exist to begin with) when it comes to tech, which still confronts this unbridgeable chasm when it comes to explaining itself to the normies (and believe me, some have tried).

It’s almost like there’s a ‘Them’ corollary to the well-known Gell-Mann Amnesia, stated here so clearly by Michael Crichton:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

The ‘Them’ Corollary of Gell-Man Amnesia states that while you understand your industry is some lurching, hacked-together mess—a circus of chance, stupidity, and very occasionally some ambitious act of competence—the moment you read or discuss any other industry, you imagine it like the Borg in Star Trek: this monolithic hive of implacable and malign collective will. Your industry is a multifaceted joke held together by inertia and small-minded greed, but Big Tech is a ‘Them’ of quasi-omnipotent power that requires some rapid dressing down, ideally as humiliatingly as possible.

If the ‘Them’ didn’t exist (as indeed it mostly does not), it would be necessary to invent it: humanity, even sophisticated and worldly individuals, will default to a morality-play script of heroes, villains, and cameo bit players to frame reality. Much of that flattening is just cognitively mandatory: the world is too big and complex to understand in all its nuance. We reduce some big, hairy thing out there—take France as an example—to a (non)representative city Paris and the one dude currently the face of the place (Macron). That personality and backdrop (with a view of the Eiffel Tower of course) becomes the mise en scène of the entire Gallic enterprise in our minds, whatever the 67-million-person reality. Ditto the management and rank-and-file of every company from Twitter to Tesla.

Of course, the normie numbskulls who do this, much of them in East Coast media, are just envious of the West Coast’s demolition of their elite gatekeeping. They are just pissed off at losing fair and square, and tech should do everything in its power to resist the resentful machinations of them: the Sulzbergers, those sanctimonious politicians in DC, the whole lot of them. They don’t know what they’re talking about, and we can never hope to bridge the chasm of ignorance that separates us from them.

Oops. There’s another ‘Them’ again. The Gell-Mann ‘Them’ Corollary strikes again. We all cling to our ‘Them’, even as we repudiate our own Them-ness. After all, we are the other’s other, some Them’s Them. To a large degree, we’re defined less by our own attributes, and more the ‘Them’ we choose to loudly condemn as the real source of our problems.

In that case, it’s a bit odd that both political Left and Right have chosen to Them-ify technology, and claim tech as an enemy in the Great American Crack-Up currently underway. The entire political spectrum will of course still remain a ‘Them’ to the technologists themselves, which is why tech companies, despite their vast wealth, are routinely dragged by media and politics. Tech can’t figure out how that normie ‘Them’ works, and choose to keep on building instead. Rather than join or sympatheize with that NYC and DC-based ‘Them’, they just totally ignore it until that ‘Them’ makes itself unignorable, and the wealthiest and most powerful techies in the world are kowtowing at a congressional hearing.

May the best ‘Them’ win in the end.

Note to subscribers: I’m finally wrapping up the backlog of unedited interviews from 2021, and publishing the last two in the next two weeks. Tomorrow, my interview with Ben Shapiro will go out, and next week my interview with Glenn Greenwald will post. Then onto 2022! As a reminder, most audio interviews will be available on the Pull Request Callin show, listenable either via app or on Web here.

This is a second (unplanned) part to my first Pull Request interview with Niall Ferguson. What started as quick initial call for further commentary on Niall’s latest news turned into an entire disquisition on the role of higher education in history and American elite politics. As with the first interview, I’ve edited essentially nothing as it was all too good to cut.

Here we go.

I like the wonderfully unpacked room.

Oh God. Yeah. I bought a little writing cottage out in the high desert outside of the Reno/Tahoe area, and everything's still packed and has been for a month.

I've been following your peregrinations on Twitter. It's kind of exhausting. I like people whose lives look more insane than mine because it just makes me feel better. So carry on.

I'm sure yours is a lot more insane than mine, Niall. I mean, who just breaks out a university, just like that?

Yeah. I was bored. What else was I going to do?

So tell me about the university. To quote what I quoted in your bio last interview, the university is dedicated to “the fearless pursuit of truth,” and that you want to revitalize universities that have ossified into havens for liberal intolerance, per your Bloomberg piece. Why is creating a university the solution? My techie friends would say we have to do away with what is now a frayed and quaint institution.

Well, I think there's a general recognition that something's not right. The economics seem completely weird, because nothing has gone up more in price in the United States than tuition at colleges. If you just look at public colleges, a 1400% increase since 1980. There's more student loan debt than credit card debt in the U.S today. So there's an economic problem, which does suggest a lack of competition. That would be part one.

Part two, if you do any surveys of student sentiment or the sentiment of professors, you see there's something wrong there too. Heterodox Academy, they regularly do a campus expression survey and in the most recent one, 62% of students said that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believe. And there's plenty of other evidence for this. It's also an even more disturbing evidence of a culture of denunciation and informing, which, as I mentioned in that Bloomberg opinion piece, reminds me of the way people used to behave in the Soviet Union or Mao's China.

The Challey Institute did a really good survey of people in four year programs. And this was the number that really leapt out at me: 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to their university administration if the professor said something they found offensive and 76% would do it to a fellow student. Now that's definitely unhealthy. And if you then turn to the morale of faculty, there is ample evidence... Eric Kaufmann's been gathering this for some time, that academics feel unable to speak freely, especially but not only conservative academics.

So I think it's pretty clear that something's not right. This is not academic life as I knew it when I was an undergraduate in Oxford in the 1980s. However, and I said this to Peter Thiel the other day, I think just throwing up our hands and saying ‘a plague on all their houses’ isn't really a solution because we need universities. They perform a very important function and they've been doing it for a thousand years in the Western world, and that function is knowledge transfer between the generations. I don't believe it can be done online. I don't believe people can just educate themselves on the internet.

I think that we are evolved to learn in relatively close proximity to one another. That's why campuses work as places. We need a campus that has real freedom of thought and speech. They don't seem to exist. So I've come to the conclusion, and others shared my view that we need to create one, to model academic freedom and to attract the kind of students that I, or you I suspect, or Peter would.

I mean, where would we go now? I'd get canceled on week two if I was at Yale. I wouldn't know where you could do what I did at Oxford with Andrew Sullivan, what Peter did at Stanford … you would really not be able to do it now. And this, I think, is the critical argument for creating a new university: Where do we want our kids to go? I've got a nine year old, I've got a four year old. And I look around this wasteland of unfree, illiberal academia, and I think, well, there has to be something better for them than this.

Nothing has surprised me more, nothing in the last 30 years, than to discover that people can inform on their colleagues; they can participate in show trials; they can have people canceled in a regime that is apparently free and democratic. We voluntarily have started to behave as if we're in a totalitarian state on many, many American campuses.

There's no question there. I guess where I do have a question is, you're sort of positing that kids have to go to university to begin with, right? You have the historical perspective more than most: as you rightly point out in your Bloomberg story, we shouldn't have this nostalgia for the university system because it was heavily religious or entirely something else in the past.

As you also wrote, much of the intellectual heavy lifting of the Enlightenment actually happened outside of the university. In fact, much of intellectual activity, whether in science or the humanities, has often happened outside of the universities. What's wrong with imagining a future where—you mentioned Peter Thiel—somebody like Thiel funds companies or people outside of the conventional university track. Thus, people with ambition and intellect could still apply those to the world, but outside of the conventional four-year college process?

I struggle to imagine Peter having the career he's had without at least academic institutions at the formative stage. Same with Mark Zuckerberg. The truth is that Facebook needs Harvard to come into existence. I think if we conclude that we don't need these institutions and that our smart kids will just figure it out in isolation or in a Facebook group or some more sophisticated social network, we'll be wrong.

And this is why. What you said is true: historically, a really significant proportion of innovation happened outside universities, but not all of it. The Enlightenment without Kant at Königsberg would've been a different thing. Adam Smith certainly needed his university positions. The alternative in those days was you had to crank it out as a private tutor. Newton needed Cambridge, just as John Maynard Keynes did. I think that universities provide a particularly important role, which is to allow highly cerebral people to opt out of the market, to be liberated from the daily grind, so that they can do their thinking and dare to think. Remember, that was Kant's great Maxim for the Enlightenment: sapere aude, dare to think, but you need academic freedom and the security of a professorship to do that daring thinking.

And the other thing that's really key here is that in a university that's working well, there isn't just instruction and lecture halls. There's also social interaction where the generations share not only formal knowledge, but the kind of wisdom that can best be communicated well over a glass of Sherry. It's very odd that that social piece of university life has become almost impossible.

Amy Chua has been subjected to a sustained campaign of harassment by the bureaucracy at Yale for—shock! horror!—having undergraduates enter her home or graduate students enter her home. So I think this is why universities have a certain magical function, and that's why they've persisted. Remember the oldest universities … Bologna, Oxford … they're a millennium old and they've survived a whole succession of technological changes, including the advent of printing as well as more recent technological changes. The business model hasn't changed that much at Oxford: it's still older people, communicating ideas, often in quite an intimate setting.

The old Oxford tutorial is a one-on-one thing in a study in some ancient building. That stuff matters. It's been incredibly important to my development. I could not have done the kind of things I've done in later life if I hadn't had three years of uninhibited brainstorming at Oxford, and it then continued when I was a graduate student with no downside risk to saying stupid things. And I certainly said and did a quite remarkable number of stupid things when I was a young man at Oxford.

So I don't think we can do without these things. In any case, whatever we do, they're going to carry on doing what they do. It's not like Harvard or Yale are threatened with imminent insolvency. Those franchises are incredibly strong and elite formation happens there. Whether we like it or not, the ambitious people go to Harvard, go to Yale, go to Stanford, and then they fan out into the commanding heights of U.S. or indeed the world economy and politics.

If they've spent four years being subjected to woke indoctrination, there are two possibilities. One, they'll believe some of this profoundly illiberal stuff. More likely they'll learn to pretend to believe it and live the kind of lying life that was such a central pathology of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the period after the war. And I hate the fact, I really hate the fact that people are behaving on major campuses like they live under an authoritarian regime.

Nothing has surprised me more, nothing in the last 30 years, than to discover that people can inform on their colleagues; they can participate in show trials; they can have people canceled in a regime that is apparently free and democratic. We voluntarily have started to behave as if we're in a totalitarian state on many, many American campuses. Everybody knows this, though not many people are willing to say it out loud. They'll tell you privately, “Well, of course, I agree with you, but I have to keep my head below the parapet.” Remember, the dominant force in academic life is cowardice and risk aversion.

So it's very difficult to get people to say out loud, “This is terrible. We need to stop this.”

I want to ask you about the reaction from other academics, but before that, I wanted to address some of things you mentioned.

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In a world full of Very Online People and ‘blue checks’, Niall Ferguson is one of a dying breed: the public intellectual. Author of sixteen books, among them my personal favorites The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower, he recently published Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe about the history of apocalyptic catastrophes. Recently, Ferguson has also started a new university, the University of Austin, dedicated to “the fearless pursuit of truth.”

This is the first half of our interview, covering religion, the American empire, his new book, and much else besides. The second part will be out next week, and exclusively dedicated to his thoughts on American higher education and his new university project.

Recently I've been obsessed with religion and Christianity. I did a huge interview with Tom Holland about it, and you had one with a Catholic magazine, wherein you mentioned you were raised in the Church of Scotland.

It's more complex than that, Antonio. I was raised an atheist by my parents who were Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian. But they both left the Church of Scotland before I was born, in a protest against the sectarianism that bedeviled life in Glasgow as it bedeviled life in Northern Ireland. Glasgow was a microcosm of Northern Ireland. So I was raised a devout atheist by two people who were raised Presbyterians. So I was in effect brought up as a Calvinist, but without the comfort of the existence of God.

I see. None of the upside but some of the downside.

Well, there is some upside. The upside is that you are given the Calvinists sense of belonging to the elect. That's important because unlike other faiths, the Calvinist strain of Protestant Christianity, if you do it right, it's guilt free. If you're a member of the elect, you are really not capable of doing bad things. At least that's how it was notoriously inclined to work. So I could never quite understand my Roman Catholic friends or my Jewish friends who would talk all the time about guilt, and how guilty they felt about everything, down to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I was puzzled by this because guilt hadn't been part of my upbringing. But essentially if you get rid of God, if you say as my parents did to me, "It's all just a cosmic accident life, and it has no meaning, there's definitely no afterlife. God is this construct, which is why we're not going to church, although your friends are," then you get some of the operating system of Calvinism because everybody just carries on behaving quite Calvinistically. But you don't have the story of an afterlife, and you don't really have the full ethical framework because you're not exposed to it on a weekly basis.

And so I had the odd experience of being raised an atheist. All my atheist friends, Richard Dawkins, the late Chris Hitchens, the radical atheists who would write books about God being dead or discredited or canceled, they had not started out as atheist. They'd become atheists. Whereas I don't have that zeal of the convert; I'm somebody who was brought up an atheist, and I therefore don't actually have the delusion that atheism is right. On the contrary, I have the terrible realization that it's just another religion and a rather unsatisfactory one at that.

I definitely agree with you about the New Atheists. Liberalism as it exists today—this is Tom Holland's whole thing with Dominion—is obviously an expression of secularized Christianity. And as you described, the residue of your own Calvinism continues. Religions don’t just get deleted, and certain residues of the religion last longer than others.

I don't necessarily want to turn this into a whole woke discussion unless you want to, but a lot of wokeness is very redolent of Protestant-style Christianity: this overweening respect for the victim, an obsessive purity culture, etc. The point that Holland raised that I obsess over is this: in a Christian society, even a secular liberal one, does liberalism itself require a sense of religion, either of the formal type like Christianity or the civic religion that arguably took foothold in the US? And if so, is it possible to just create it? Because one of Christianity's problems is that you have this direct faith relationship with Christ, and it’s hard to fake.

Religions like Judaism are more about the practice and community. I recently observed Yom Kippur; my views on God are not worth going into here, but let's just say they're not 100%. It doesn’t matter: you can go and enact the same narratives and songs, and it's irrelevant whether God exists or not. In fact, there are sub-denominations of Judaism which are avowedly agnostic. That’s much harder to do in Christianity. So I'm curious about how we’re stuck in this liberal bind, in that it’s Christian belief at heart…when that’s gone, what do we do with liberalism?

I enjoyed Tom Holland's book very much, like you, although the insight that Christianity's all around in this supposedly secularized world was not a new one to me. When I had been a young academic, one of my first jobs was in Cambridge at Peterhouse, the oldest of the Cambridge colleges. And there I got to know Maurice Cowling, who was one of the grand old men of conservative historiography. And Maurice's life's work was a great unreadable series of tomes with the title Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England.

What Maurice would do was, he would take usually liberal thinkers of the 19th century and 20th century, and he would reveal that their liberal thought was in fact a shadow or emanation of the religious upbringing that they had. When I'd been an Oxford undergraduate, I'd become somewhat obsessed with William Ewart Gladstone, the great liberal prime minister, one of the towering figures of liberalism in British politics. He too was a perfect illustration of this point, because Gladstone's liberalism was in a constant tension with and in relationship to his religiosity.

The key insight I had as a historian working on the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century was that, however possible it may be to live as an atheist, as a family, as an individual, it is a very unsatisfactory operating system for a society. Regimes that proclaim themselves atheist and seek to eradicate Christianity have been among the worst regimes in history.

I came to realize that as I was studying those liberal thinkers, that it was actually impossible to make sense of the 19th century world if you weren't really quite well-versed in Christian theology. And I don't mean you'd gone to Sunday school: you actually needed to have quite a deep understanding of the debates that greatly preoccupied the Victorians. I realized at that point that I was poorly equipped to do that because I'd really been brought up in deliberate ignorance. My parents had made sure that I was pretty ignorant of Christianity by the time I went to university, and I don't blame them for that. I know why they did it. But it meant that actually a lot of the coded Christianity in liberal thinking was rather hard for me to spot.

The key insight I had as a historian working on the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th and late 20th century was that, however possible it may be to live as an atheist, as a family, as an individual, it is a very unsatisfactory operating system for a society. Regimes that proclaim themselves atheist and seek to eradicate Christianity, have been among the worst regimes in history. It's really important to understand that, to see why the most anti-clerical regimes were also very, very wicked. This is I think a very important lesson that I learned. I came to realize, reading Tocqueville as you mentioned, that it would actually be very, very difficult to make a stable and harmonious society without some religious cement, some religious glue to hold it together. Atheism does not provide that; it's not actually a viable operating system for a stable society.

Indeed, it actually can be quite dangerous. The Bolsheviks proclaimed themselves atheists and carried out hideous crimes because they had consciously decoupled themselves from Christian ethics. The more extreme Nazis very consciously decoupled themselves from Christian ethics and committed what were perhaps the worst crimes in history. So I've become … I'm a doubting atheist. You know how Christians in the Victorian era would have doubts, were assailed by doubts? Well, I've always been assailed by doubts as an atheist. And in particular, doubts that it could be the basis for a stable society.

What you do after secularization has happened is not clear, because G.K. Chesterton had this great line that, "The problem with atheism is not that men believe in nothing, it's that they'll believe in anything." He didn't quite say that, but that's the basic idea. That's true because what we see in the secular societies of Western Europe is that supposedly secular people, atheists or agnostics, are able to believe in all sorts of nonsense and to adopt cult-like behaviors that are essentially religious. This is what woke-ism is on both sides of the Atlantic. It's a quasi-religious cult-like activity with recognizable precursors in the more radical sects of the Reformation.

But it's warped, I think. I'm not sure I wouldn't rather have the Puritans than the woke. This is the danger that the secular society doesn't stabilize, it ends up being prey to new and often slightly cranky pseudo-religions.

I wrote this post ‘Why Judaism?’ because everyone was asking me what’s this Judaism thing about? My hang-up is that once you get beyond the utilitarianism of secular liberalism, once you get beyond making the easy moral tradeoffs, at some point you get to some deontological showdown and are forced to say “This document I believe in. These are the moral foundations of my moral universe, and if we can’t agree on this, we don't occupy the same universe." But again, in a Christian society, it's very difficult to maintain that sacred faith as it’s a very fervent and personal one. John Gray, whom I love as an author, has this great book called Seven Types of Atheism. And he agrees as you just did that a society without a religion just doesn't have a lot of binding glue. He himself is also one of these brainy philosophical types, and at the end, he just can't bring himself to believe. So what do you do?

You show up on Sundays and sing along. Because ultimately, religion is also a social activity.

The more socially meaningful it is, the better it seems to me. One of the things that happened to me earlier this year was that, I made my first proper visit to Utah and spent some time there. Utah's a place that is fascinating, because it's clear that one reason they have a relatively small state, a small government, is that they have a very big religious community. The church does a lot and creates a lot of really quite powerful norms with respect to family life and neighborliness. It's really impressive because it's more visible and it's more ubiquitous than anywhere else in the United States.

So I came away from Utah thinking that that illustrates pretty well the importance of religious life as a complement to what the state can do. The more religious life withers, the other thing you notice is, the more the state's competencies grow because it starts substituting or displacing things that had previously been done by religious communities. Charles Murray makes this point in Coming Apart, what's really rotting away in white America, as he calls it is partly religious communities. They are much less important and effective than they used to be. So we come back to Tocqueville and the recognition that American democracy at its healthiest was highly decentralized, underpinned by the dynamism of American religious life as well as by a peculiar preoccupation with the law and voluntary associations. I buy all that, and I wish it was still more true. But in truth, a lot of that has withered away.

I had a conversation with Chris Rufo recently. Now he’s a crusader around the CRT topic, but before that he did a documentary that reminded me of early Michael Moore called America Lost, in which he took very frank looks at three depressed American towns. The film describes much of what you describe, and the issue is there's no government policy that can just make those rich communities re-appear.

Right. Religious communities, religious faiths, when you look closely, they're mainly about creating a set of social norms that order the family and the local, community and give structure to life. My wife is from a Muslim background although she's an apostate and therefore a rather more committed atheist than me. Ayaan is somebody who came to bitterly dislike the social order that Islam imposes, particularly because of course it consigns women to an explicitly second-class status. So you've got to choose your religious faith carefully. They all seem to me to come with some significant downside. I wouldn't really want to be a Mormon. I admire your decision to convert to Judaism. A lot of my career has been spent studying Jewish history, or aspects of Jewish history. At the end of the day, I can't really imagine doing what you're you're doing.

I feel as if I'm just condemned to inhabit this strange and slightly uncomfortable space of the doubting atheist, because I would never credibly belong to any of these communities of faith. For better or for worse, I'm stuck out here. And unfortunately, so are my kids. Because I think although I took them to church and do it sporadically (it's a bit hard to do with pandemic restrictions) I've done that because I really felt they should understand the Christian frameworks, since it's still the operating system actually of North America and most of Europe.

I sense when looking at my older children, that they've inherited from me that detachment, the inability to have religious faith. I remember going to look for it. I do remember, I would look for really impressive churches, go into cathedrals and see if it would come to me. And I've come to realize that I've been vaccinated against religious faith. My parents really succeeded in that. I'll always hear my mother's voice saying over and over again, “Life is just a cosmic accident and this is it. After death, the atoms go off to do other things and you're over.” I've come to terms with that, and it no longer upsets me. In fact, it never really did. It always seemed to me gratifyingly realistic.

The Jewish thing is at least partially driven by my three Jewish kids. In American life now, we're in this weird situation where the only functioning organizations you see are corporations. Having personally worked at the most ruthlessly profit-seeking corporations for the past 20 years, it’s obviously something that I don't necessarily object to. That said, I think it's a somewhat denuded public space when literally the only things that function are Amazon delivering your stuff, Zoom staying up, and everything else going to hell.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a wonderful book that completely nails where we were going, though it was written back in the 1990s. I think the comforts of religious communities of faith are very real. The closest I came to understanding that and experiencing it was as a fellow of an Oxford and also of Cambridge colleges. The colleges are these strange survivals of the pre-Reformation world: living in a college with its pre-Reformation architecture, with its chapel, its Latin grace at dinner, the choir, the music. Remember, an extraordinary, powerful magnet that the Anglican church has is the quality of its music. To be part of that is fundamentally satisfying. And to attend chapel, and to be part of a community that has a spiritual side to it, undoubtedly is somehow good for one's mental state.

This is why religion is the ubiquitous feature of all societies that we've studied. I miss that. Coming to American universities which don't really have any religious character that's worth talking about, I miss the choirs, I miss the bells and the smells. Of course, I've been brought up to be very wary of all that because Anglicans, if you're a good Presbyterian, are no different from Catholics. I had all that anti-Catholic prejudice of the Presbyterians, but again, without any consoling Protestant God to believe in.

The music bit is part of Judaism too. I was just thinking while reciting the various Jewish prayers for Yom Kippur, many of which are sung, that your typical tech worker bee never experiences anything like that, save for in the absurd form of a corporate all-hands meeting. There's no song that we could all actually sing together anymore in America, not even the national anthem, that wouldn't cause some protest.

Yes. This is dangerous because collective singing is extremely important. Dancing, it's there in our evolutionary psychology, and it's why I find American sports so dreary because nobody sings. Whereas when you go to see a football or soccer game in the UK, the joy of participation is partly the joy of singing obscene chants at the rival team, but singing them in a mighty discordant unison.

I think the English tradition of choral music is almost without equal in the world, for sheer aesthetic appeal. I can never resist going to religious services when I'm back in England, while attendance in California is a challenge for me. We tried a Presbyterian church, but it was so political. I couldn't bear how often we had to swear or pray to God to rid us of Donald Trump. This was just more than I felt I could bear. So we ended up with the Episcopalian church, but it must be said that attendance is sparse and the singing is really not up to very much. This is a problem in Northern California: where to find at least the aesthetic rewards of religiosity, I haven't figured that out yet.

There's this great Twitter account called Cursed Protestant Nonsense that just troll-retweets Protestant content. There's one tweet that’s essentially: "Tell me you're Episcopalian without telling me you're Episcopalian." Of course, it's just about every Black Lives Matter banner in the world in front of a church.

The reactionary parts of my personality of course is drawn to Rome. All reactionaries gravitate to Rome.

Of course, yes.

But I'll never be able to cross that threshold. That's just ... too many grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents would turn in their graves, it would cause some kind of earthquake in Scotland.

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A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

—Leon Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails

Among the various activities that undermine my claim of not being in some elite class, being a regular squash player is probably the worst offense. From college through grad school to New York to the Bay Area to even while living in Spain writing Chaos Monkeys, I have always kept on chasing a small, squishy ball inside a stuffy, enclosed cube in what’s the most complex, strategic, and exhausting racquet sport ever devised.

One day it was my fate to play at the Bay Club, a labyrinthine two-story club crammed inside a former warehouse (the layout will become key in a moment) north of San Francisco’s downtown. It wasn’t my regular club, but I’d occasionally cadge a game there if I was in the ‘the city’. My play was just regular enough to maintain skills but not fitness, and after an hour of flailing around in this bougie proxy to combat, I returned absolutely exhausted to the locker room for a shower.

“Huh, that’s weird,” I thought as I saw another member pull into the long carpeted walkway between wooden lockers that led to the showers. He was walking ahead of me, but he had his towel around his chest, which seemed an odd affectation.

”Man, he’s got some long hair too,” I thought, noticing the horse’s tail worth of hair dangling down his back.

“Kind of weird-shaped dude,” I further ruminated, noticing the odd proportions underneath the towel held around his torso.

I’M IN THE FUCKING WOMEN’S LOCKER ROOM!!!

It finally hit me, and in an absolute panic, I 180’ed and sprinted out of there before anyone saw me. My hands were shaking by the time I collected myself next to the staircase where I’d managed to mentally turn myself around and take the wrong turn into the wrong locker room.

What I’d experienced, to much psychological stress and alarm, was what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance,’ or ‘the perception of contradictory information.’ When reality (or my perception of it) violates the values, beliefs, and mental cartography of my preferred narrative, religion, or philosophy, I do everything in my power to reconcile them. Usually, I try to reconcile the data to my mental model (as I did in that locker room), rather than the reverse, as the psychological pain involved in admitting my worldview dramatically wrong is too much to bear. Until of course reality slaps you in the race, and then you wake up.

A recent example of a cognitive-dissonance inducing collision with reality. You could find many examples on the opposing political side of course, the phenomenon not at all limited to any one faction or group.

The term was coined by University of Chicago social psychologist Leon Festinger in the classic study that produced the book I quote above: When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. The object of the study was a 50s-era UFO cult in Chicago led by a charismatic prophetess who claimed flying saucers would appear on a certain date and save all her adepts from a world-destroying flood. The most committed of her disciples actually distanced themselves from family, sold earthly belongings, and absolutely committed themselves to life on another planet as their own planet was consumed in an apocalypse. When the much-awaited apocalypse/UFO rescue never happened—the researchers actually posed as believers and described firsthand the cringe-y awkwardness as the big day came and went—it didn’t quash everyone’s messianic fervor. The most devout rationalized the lack of aliens and all-consuming flood in various ways, and continued in their belief; vestiges of the cult lasted into the 90s.

The obvious comparison with the Festinger cult is, of course, early Christianity, which paralleled the UFO cult in essentially every way, including the expectation of an apocalypse followed by a magical new world called the Kingdom of God (space travel wasn’t yet a concept, and so Jesus ascended into heaven via levitation rather than UFOs, an act recorded in countless church frescoes).

Every collective belief system, whether a religion or political philosophy, can be characterized by its never-ending attempt to reconcile reality to its beliefs for the well-being of its adepts.

The difference between some UFO cult and the Christian religion numbering over two billion faithful is the ability to manage that cognitive dissonance and keep the flame of faith alive.

When Jesus failed to return from his otherworldly ascension in the time of the disciples, as was expected and recorded in the gospels,1 then much as I did in the locker room (or Twitter blue checks falling for a social media hoax do online), there’s a collective rationalization that attempts to reshape reality to keep the messianic faith true and correct.

Every collective belief system, whether a religion or political philosophy, can be characterized by its never-ending attempt to reconcile reality to its beliefs for the well-being of its adepts. The difference between some UFO cult and the Christian religion numbering over two billion faithful is the ability to manage that cognitive dissonance and keep the flame of faith alive. Ditto for startups, political parties, or even nation-states.2

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Like many others, I’m getting swallowed by the rabbit hole of Web3/crypto, and I’m going to start sharing the obsession with my dear Pull Request readers. This is hopefully the first in a series.

Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanised, go-getting type—the type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naïveté, the blind worship of the money-god.

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

This ‘hard-boiled, Americanised, go-getting type’ was mystified to discover the almost total dearth of new Web3 projects in the area of either advertising or attribution. That last bit is the term of art for the record-keeping—every click, every buy, every install—required to keep the online advertising and commerce game going (and to which the blockchain might be uniquely suited, but more on that in a future post).

One serious proposal here comes from the brave folks at Brave, a relatively new browser whose founders invented/co-founded everything from Javascript to the Mozilla project. Brave’s on-device privacy model is pioneering and the way forward for the industry (I wrote a general review of the approach here). BAT, whatever critiques of their ads approach aired here, is doing well as a coin at a market cap of $2 billion with a price that ripped with news of a Solana integration. Their white paper is well worth a read, both for the fine work done integrating their coin with a browser-based ad network, and some of the assumptions made about advertising that are (in my opinion) wrong, but in interesting ways.

But first, let’s cover some basics around how both commerce and advertising work. In the sweeping pageant of capitalism, most transactions reduce to a consumer buying a good or service from a producer at a certain price. Whatever the good or service, and whatever the actual business model—outright purchase, subscriptions, SaaS, barter, mortgage-funded real estate, whatever—the trade is fundamentally the same: what the user pays is some function of the cost of that good or service, the utility of that product to the user, and/or some market dynamic around demand or supply for said product.

If it feels I’m reviewing rather obvious points about the nature of commerce, it’s to serve as counterpoint to the world of advertising which, as I hope to show, is completely different from regular commerce. Advertising is in fact deeply weird, which is why it’s so hard to reason about.

The ads game is a triangle trade between user, publisher and advertiser, that at its most reductionist looks like this:

A publisher provides a service, website, app or other user experience for free to a user, who pays nothing for that service, while some advertiser pays for a tiny slice of the user’s attention, and pays the publisher an amount $ₐ for it. (To be absolutely clear, $ₐ varies wildly as a function of the user, as well as real-time details like time of day, but more on that in a bit.) Let’s also posit an amount $ᵤ, which is the amount a user would be willing to pay for the same service given the chance (instead of being subject to the indignities of advertising).

Just to highlight the weirdness, imagine that a conventional business were run like ads-driven ones: you go to the Apple store to buy a new iPhone, and the hipster attendant hands you one for free. Before letting you walk off with it though, he asks you pay a few seconds of attention to the guy standing next to him … who pitches you on a Peloton at-home exercise machine. You ignore it and leave with a free phone.

The amount of value Apple extracts from you walking into the store has nothing to do with the value of an iPhone or your desire for one: it’s entirely controlled by this other guy from Peloton, whether he sells any bicycle machines, and how much the Peloton dude feels the time he spent pitching was worthwhile.

Advertising seems like some fat vampire squid sucking value out of everything, while from the inside it feels like being stuck in the dilemma of giving away an expensive service (run by people in your company who don’t give a shit about ads and frankly would rather they disappear), and flaky advertisers who are always one bad quarter away from bailing on you.

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A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (1952)

The term ‘Metaverse’, like the term ‘Meritocracy’, was coined in a scifi dystopia novel written as cautionary tale, and then enthusiastically adopted by an elite that craved what was meant to inspire horror. Originally appearing by name in Neal Stephenson’s classic Snow Crash, the concept has been rehashed in other scifi hits like Ready Player One or the film series The Matrix. In the Stephenson version, much as in Mark Zuckerberg’s uncanny Metaverse launch video, so-called ‘gargoyles’ languish their entire lives inside a virtualized reality with headsets bolted to their faces.

If you’re wondering why someone like Zuckerberg with such immense resources (including an estate on paradisiacal Kauaʻi) wants to blot out reality with a VR headset, then you need to understand the techie mindset. As one notable VC un-ironically told me in private: anything worth doing, can be done better via a screen. His (very successful) investment portfolio and lifestyle both reflect that view; while he himself still convenes in-person dinners, those ‘IRL’ events are now a luxury add-on (and reflection of) digital life rather than vice versa. He and others like him invest vast sums in people they’ve never physically met. The resulting companies have workforces who spend all day looking at each other via endless Zoom calls, but who never or rarely meet (I know, I’ve worked in them). The techies prefer intermediating reality and people via pixels and algorithms, and they’ve created the conditions such that the world meets them on their terms.

Not that we were very hard to convince.

While I find myself a bit skeptical of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse plan—virtual reality has been the perpetual technology of the future for longer than I can remember, and Facebook has gone a long time without a homespun product hit—the little ‘m’ metaverse is already here and firmly in place. It’s the elective, virtualized reality composed of Twitter, Instagram, and even the very Substack you’re reading right now. The tech ‘backlash’ that the media has been trying to engineer (speaking of pleasant illusions) has never really happened, and you’d be hard-pressed to find signs of one in Facebook’s, or any other tech company’s, usage and revenue graphs.

In our society of spectacle, the only hard, non-optional realities left are war, the markets, and elections.

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