In the shadow of the Duomo, I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2. Throughout the surrounding piazza, advertisements for the sequel set in fashion's iconic second city spread behind the cathedral, including a selfie station featuring six-foot-tall red pumps with the film's trademark pitchfork heels. The May Day crowds—those shopping not protesting—happily posed with the diavolo.

Their excitement has already registered at the box office, both domestically and internationally. Early figures anticipate the film may clear $75 to $100M globally.

As a recent Fandango study reported, Gen Z and millennials are returning to theatres and to no one's surprise, all the summer's most anticipated movies are reboots or sequels, The Devil Wears Prada 2 included.

Nostalgia is the greatest cultural force of our decade. Millennials want to relive their childhoods. Gen Z wants to relive someone else's. (47% of American 18-29 year-olds wish they lived in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s, according to a recent NBC News Desk poll.)

The Zoomers yearn for the sidekick.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 delivers on what nostalgic audiences want: the same movie but different. Meryl Streep returns in cinematic Anna Wintour drag as Runway's editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestly. Anne Hathaway resumes her role as Andy Sachs, the plucky journalist slash self-insert for Lauren Weisberger, author of the original bestseller. Stanley Tucci is Nigel Kipling is André Leon Talley and Emily Blunt is Emily Charlton, recently revealed to be loosely based on celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar.

But the film quickly becomes bogged down in characters. We get three new assistants: a new Emily named Amari, played by Simone Ashley (clearly a mispronunciation of the LA streetwear brand Amiri); comedian-cum-podcaster Caleb Hearon as the new Andy, nicknamed Chair by his co-workers because he's not allowed to leave his desk; and Helen Shen as Jin Chao, Andy's striver sidekick. Andy's boyfriend Nate is absent—Adrian Grenier has been replaced by Patrick Brummel, who plays Andy's new love interest Peter, a depressingly middle-aged real estate developer. Tracie Thoms returns as Lily, Andy's best friend. Once again, she is gifted a bag. But rather than an of-the-moment it bag, she receives a semiotic stinker from Valentino.

Additions that drive the plot include BJ Novak as Jay Ravitz, Runway's new nepo-baby owner, and Justin Theroux as Benji Barnes, Emily's looksmaxxed billionaire boyfriend, a caricature of tech wealth so ignorant and eccentric that at a dinner party in the shadow of Leonardo's The Last Supper, he muses that he doesn't want to go to the moon, but rather the sun. Unaware of the irony, he declares his solar craft will be called Icarus. Lucy Liu plays his ex, Sasha Barnes, a fictionalized version of impact investor MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos' former wife, technically a tech billionaire, but an ostensibly ethical one.

Cameos included but were not limited to: Tina Brown, Jenna Bush Hager, Winnie Harlow, Heidi Klum, Donatella Versace and Lady Gaga, who released a pastiche of Madonna's "Vogue" with Doechii for the film's original soundtrack. As in the franchise, "Vogue" is called "Runway."

Like all successful sequels, The Devil Wears Prada 2 relies on layers of self-referential in-jokes. We open with an establishing shot of the New York skyline, the post-9/11 absence of the Twin Towers now filled by One World Trade Center. The same opening song, "Suddenly I See" by KT Tunstall, plays as Andy Sachs once again bops through her morning routine.

Crosstown, Runway readies for their imitation Met Gala, unveiling a cerulean carpet. (Remember Miranda Priestly's infamous speech about the color blue?) In a twist, the theme is "Spring Florals." In 2006, Priestly could roll her eyes: "Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking." But Runway in 2026 is not Runway in 2006.

Concessions must be made.

Inevitably with a film so mired in its own past, The Devil Wears Prada 2 lacks the timeliness and timelessness of the original. Similar to And Just Like That, the costumes are overblown and not particularly contemporary. They share a costume designer, Molly Rogers, who worked under Pat Field, the genius behind the iconic looks in Sex and the City and the original film. Down-to-earth Andy brags about her vintage Margiela and owns a pair of sequined gaucho pants. Emily works for Jonathan Anderson's Dior and yet seems to only wear logomaniacal pieces inspired by Demna's tenure at Balenciaga. And every female character wears the same cat-eyed sunglasses shape. Is it product placement or a trend I am unaware of?

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There are three brands that recur over and over in slop: Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. They form the brandslop triad. On the one hand, this highlights the legibility of the brands for a mass audience. The Louis Vuitton monogram print, Gucci G’s, and sans-serif Balenciaga font trigger instant brand recognition. But in the era of AI slop, legibility means loss of control.

Legibility allows luxury brands to appeal to the lowest common denominator of fashion consumers. This makes a brand like Louis Vuitton a sales powerhouse. But it’s also why when Andrew Tate decides to knock off a brand and designate a style of eyewear “Top G” sunglasses, Louis is the brand that lands in his sights.

You can only trade aura for market share for so long.

The brandslop triad is how you signal luxury to the masses. They appear in AI Fruit Love Island. They appear in the new viral Dripwarts videos, playing on the HBO reboot of Harry Potter.

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The ghost of status continues to haunt our cultural discourse.

Its current avatar is the dinergoth: the downwardly-mobile, vape-puffing, cat-ear-wearing, blue-haired, tatted-up denizen of small town and suburban America. The dinergoth works retail, collects benefits, does OnlyFans. They're adventurous in their sexual appetites and gender identities; addicted to video games and social media; and immune to old codes of conformity.

And while I'm wary of calling this phenomenon a subculture. They do share one trait with their goth forebearers. They’ve spawned a moral panic.

According to The New Atlantis, the publication that popularized the viral term, American dinergoth describes:

Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural 'alt' aesthetic. Queerness but casual and prole-ified.

Dinergoth: 'diner' for provincialism, 'goth' as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.

The term is supposed to name something new, but subcultural aesthetics have always been downwardly mobile. That's why the classic subcultures people always point to—punk, grunge, goth, and emo—were all seen as symptoms of social decline. The best neologisms describe something genuinely new in the world. Others work because they reframe the familiar. Dinergoth is an example of the latter and not a particularly sharp one.

The triumph of this new term is apparently symbolized by a cover from Emmy Magazine featuring mainstream cartoons such as Bob’s Burgers, which began airing in 2011. Even Helluva Boss, the adult animation that the accompanying piece "Vibing in the Ruins" goes into detail framing as paradigmatic of this aesthetic, began airing roughly six years ago and shares a visual affinity with Invader ZIM, which ran on Nickelodeon from 2001 to 2006.

Once again, the new thing is that there really aren't any new things.

the rationale of the striver class

Most of America is in decline. This is true in both spatial and demographic terms. Midtier cities, inner-ring suburbs, un-gentrified downtowns, rural counties, small towns. The anxiety of our rising striver class is reasonable.

What does it mean to cast yourself as an elite in an era of decline?

This sentiment is the origin of Europoor discourse too. America may not be doing well, but it’s doing marginally better than its peer competitors. It's not ideal. But it's something.

That’s why complacency is key to understanding this framing of downward mobility in 21st century America. The upper middle class needs to believe that the economic woes of others are due to a moral failing. That if the dinergoths really wanted to succeed in America, they could. To contemplate that maybe there are structural forces at play which prevent everyone from being upper middle class is to admit that maybe forces beyond your control could one day push you down that same slope.

your half-zip won’t save you

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This image stopped me in my tracks:

I knew things were bad. But seeing it laid out hits different.

Has there ever been a decade in which technology has been so aesthetically stuck? The issue isn't price. These may be Apple's "low-cost" offerings, but the premium tier looks more-or-less exactly the same. Why is this the case?

Because Apple is the most successful company in the world. Only the Latin American cartels and parastatal conglomerates like the British East India Company can compete for the title. Addiction—whether to dopamine (screens), caffeine (tea), or narcotics (drugs) is immaterial—is the only way to achieve S-tier success.

The form factor of Apple devices is immaterial to the addictive properties of its products. Samsung's phones buzz, condition, and hypnotize consumers just as well. But people are finicky about their addictions, especially the upper-middle class, whose spending powers the consumer economy. (The much cited statistic is that the top 10% of U.S. earners account for half of all consumer spending nationwide.)

The iPhone is the spritz cocaine to the off-brand smartphone's crack rock. It's Maru Coffee versus Monster Energy. Adderall pills instead of trucker speed.

You’ll notice, most of the "better-than" versions of addictive products are not conspicuously sophisticated. They're premium mediocre as tech writer Venkatesh Rao once put it. Brand as vestigial social anxiety. Just good enough to prove (so you think) that you are not downwardly mobile, to prove you are 'normcore' not normal.

That story still dominates the upper-middle class psyche, the millennial upper-middle class psyche especially. They didn't want to be conformist suburbanites like their parents, they needed another rationale, another alibi. But the athleisure and millennial grey remodels betrayed that this was a fear-driven consumer trend.

Like so many trends, its origins come from misinterpreted class codes of the past.

The casual, inconspicuous WASP of the popular imagination, hiding out in his white clapboard New England colonial, his Cape Cod covered in cedar shingles bleached grey by salt and sun, his clothing frugal and frayed. His car might be rusted and rumbling, but he has no social anxiety. His real estate is like his status, inherited.

That's always been the issue the American upper-middle class has confronted. How to flex without flexing? But when you have to buy your own furniture.

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Baby Batemans or “Meet the Finest Boys in Finance”

Vape Shop Chic or Gucci FW26

Taste or ‘the new core skill’

Ugly Americans of Pew’s new survey on public morality

Two things caught my eye this fashion month: Demna's runway debut at Gucci and Interview Magazine's editorial "Meet the Finest Boys in Finance". Both are statements about status in 2026 and the degree to which nobody knows what is high-status anymore.

Luxury goods used to be a reliable indicator. But as Demna well knows, a Gucci cross-body bag is more likely to be worn by a drug dealer than an Ivy League alum. And even if an Ivy League student bought one, are we sure that student is even literate? Princeton isn't. The university may introduce proctors to its examinations for the first time since its honor code was introduced 133 years ago. But as the viral success of the cheating startup Cluely proves, honor codes don’t work in our newly low-trust culture. We are living through the 'looting the treasury' phase of the American empire, and there is no honor among thieves.

That bag is a dupe and so is that degree.

This was the issue Demna had to solve: how to reinvigorate a brand whose truest expression is the knock-off? Whose essence is distilled in the musty basements beneath Canal Street? The semiotic code of Gucci is tackiness. It's status anxiety. The Gucci consumer believes the monogram, the racing stripes, and, more than anything, the logo hold magical properties that will transform the wearer, that will make them wealthier, more beautiful, more respected. And if you believe these symbols hold these fantastical powers, why shouldn’t they transform the lowly knock-off too?

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first, the depressing part:

People like to say we live in a 'post-literate' society…

I'm not so sure. 'Post-literate' seems more like a polite way to say 'illiterate' than a description of a fundamentally new reality. In a viral article published in The Atlantic’s October 2024 issue, Rose Horowitch detailed the decline in reading whole texts (as opposed to excerpts) even in America's most elite educational institutions, the Ivy League.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Perhaps this is what 'post-literate' means: a person who should theoretically be able to read a book, but due to the attention-atrophying effects of technology simply cannot.

And this is, again, our most elite students.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a federal agency within the Department of Education, our literacy rate dipped from 82% in 2017 to 79% in 2023. By another metric, published by the National Literacy Institute, 54% of Americans read at or below a sixth-grade reading level. This translates to difficulty comprehending a newspaper article or following detailed instructions for medication.

Again, The Atlantic covered the matter. This time in their October 2025 issue. Idrees Kahloon writes:

We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is "below basic"—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992.

As AI doomposters keep reminding us on X, we only have three years to escape permanent underclass! Presumably literacy will be a requirement to accomplish that.

But who knows. Claude is perfectly capable of reading to its users.

Maybe that's what post-literate really means: rule by illiterate oligarchs.

I, for one, welcome our illiterate (or is it post-literate?) overlords.

• The School for Kids Who Can't Read Good or Ivy League illiteracy

• Post-COVID Problems or the decline in educational attainment

now, the silver lining:

Recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in must-read articles.

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My dear friend and sometimes astrological, Chris Gabriel gave me a rundown of the portentous celestial movements of 2026. Subscribe to his Substack below:

Effluvia

MemeAnalysis, the Internet, and the Paranormal

By Chris Gabriel

2026 astrological forecast

• January 26th—Neptune enters Aries

• February 13th—Saturn entered Aries, conjoining Neptune

• February 17th—Solar Eclipse in Aquarius

• April 25th—Uranus enters Gemini

If one wants to understand cultural movement, one has to zoom out. Most people are familiar with sun sign astrology, they know the day they were born falls into one of 12 signs, this is useless for understanding trends and greater cycles, for that purpose we must look at the “Outer Planets”, the three slowest in solar system: Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (it is a planet!)

Uranus is electricity, radiation, technology, revolution, and shock. While the 7 traditional planets bear a marked resemblance to their mythic namesake, the new planets relate moreso to the environments and dynamics at play in the myth. Uranus is the first Sky Father, his name literally means Sky, he was married to Gaia, Mother Earth, but angered her when he trapped his monstrous children underground, Gaia had her son Saturn castrate and murder Uranus. As such, planetary Uranus is about revolution and overthrow, rather than the sky.

This year, Uranus returns to Gemini. It dipped into Gemini last year, from July 7th to November 7th, but after April 25th, it will be there until 2033.

This is particularly significant for the United States, which was “born” under Uranus in Gemini, as such it tends to play a significant role for the country: Uranus was in Gemini from 1859-1866, coinciding with the Civil War, and again from 1941-1945, coinciding with the second World War.

Gemini is the sign of duality, the Twins. Though this is by no means a sign of simple brotherly love, here the brothers can in fact be Cain and Abel, as with the wars Uranus Gemini has influenced.

Neptune is dreamy, confused, delusional, and vast. Where Neptune the God is angry, Neptune the planet is his domain itself, the Waters. When we think of Neptune we should think of the Odyssey, of strange islands and monsters, confusion and misdirection. It entered Aries on January 26th and will be there until 2039. This is the second time in United States history, the previous being from 1861-1875, which again, coincided with the Civil War.

Aries is the sign of aggression and war, as such this is confused anger and violence.

Pluto is extreme, destructive, primordial and terrible. While Pluto the God is solemn and sad, the Planet is Hell itself. Pluto started dipping into Aquarius in 2023, but fully entered toward the end of 2024 and will be there until 2043. This is the first Pluto return for the United States. Pluto was in Aquarius throughout the American and French revolutions.

Aquarius is the collective, the mob, and the people, whereas Leo is the Monarch and individual. Pluto radically transformed and enraged the people.

All of this is to say this is a year where immense, long term changes are beginning. All of the outer planets are in new signs, with a particular relationship to the United States.

In the shorter term though, let’s look at Saturn’s entry into Aries which occurred on February 13th, conjoining Neptune at 0*. Saturn is labour, work, difficulties, and material reality itself. Both Neptune and Saturn were in Pisces the last several years, under which we saw the dreamy moralistic nature of Pisces flood out into the world, Social Justice, New Age spirituality, digital religions, and extreme politics all began to spread under Neptune in Pisces, as Neptune travels through Aries, we will see spiritual and ideological conflict come to a fever pitch, and with the help of Saturn, come into reality, if I were a betting man, I would bet on war.

On the 17th we will see a Solar Eclipse in Aquarius, far from Pluto which is only at the 4th degree, this Eclipse is at the 28th degree, which places it in square with Uranus in Taurus It is going to show us about the next few years and the influence of Saturn and Neptune in Aries.

the eclipse, the age of aquarius, and what comes next…

The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity:

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Gen Alpha Style or North West shops at Alexander Wang

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we live in a time of great change and great boredom

The year kicked off with a clip from Werner Herzog's 2007 documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. Visiting David Ainley, an Antarctic penguin scientist, the filmmaker observes a dissenter. Over a crashing organ rendition of Gigi D’Agostino’s "L'Amour Toujours", Herzog narrates:

We see an expanse of ice sweeping into the distance. A lone penguin flies (metaphorically) toward the distant peaks. As the final instrumental of the nineties Eurodance track plays, the video cuts to a Western civilization schizo-edit ending with the Hayao Miyazaki character Princess Mononoke wiping blood from her face.

The meme has been dubbed 'the nihilist penguin' although Faustian or Nietzschean may be better descriptors. The "Penguin Edit" of "L'Amour Toujours" features the Nietzsche quote, "I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible."

The spirit of the penguin was immediately embraced by the Trump administration. The White House posted "Embrace the penguin" with a Greenlandic flag adorning the distant mountain range. The Department of Homeland Security tweeted "Americans have always known 'why'" replacing the schizo-edit at the end of video with a deportation-themed mash-up of bald eagles and ICE agents.

In the full scene, Herzog asks "Dr. Ainley, is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?" We are living in a time of great change and great boredom and at the intersection of chaotic change and mind-numbing boredom lies insanity.

the boredom

Some decades are gravity wells. Culture struggles to achieve escape velocity from their influence. Now more than halfway through the twenty-twenties, it seems unlikely we are living through one of those. The defining feature of our age is our fixation on those other decades—

The tumultuous ones, where great transformations take place: social, spiritual, technological. Or the halcyon years, when peace and prosperity reign. Baby boomers and millennials are forever in search of the sixties, when the economy was growing and the times they were a-changin'. Positioned between the too conformist fifties and the too chaotic seventies, they sat in the Goldilocks zone.

This explains the perennial appeal of Mad Men, perhaps the last great American novel. You enter the series in 1960 and exit in 1970. In the process, the world is transformed. It’s a great sweep of world events and social reform: feminism, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the sexual revolution, the moon landing. And the great changes are paired with a meticulous eye for detail in set and costume design.

Sometimes I wonder if you could forge another great work out of the historical flow of the 2000's, the first decade of the new millennium. The pattern fits. The decade is hedged between the prosperous, post(cold)war nineties and the politically polarized 2010's. Each decade began with a looming apocalypse: nuclear war in the sixties and end-times anxieties in the 2000's. Each decade was punctuated by violent media spectacles: assassinations and terrorism, respectively. And the first instance of each, the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the terror attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 came to symbolize a national loss of innocence. Both had unpopular wars: Vietnam and Iraq. Both were transformed by new media technologies: television and the internet.

But then I’m unsure. Is the psycho-spiritual distance between 2000 and 2010 as far as between 1960 and 1970? The immediate answer would seem to be no. There was no equivalent to the civil rights movement, women's liberation, or the sexual revolution. Our geography wasn't transformed by the population collapse of our cities and the construction of new suburbs. The antiwar protests of the 2000's never matched the antiwar protests of the 1960's.

Apophenia is the term for our tendency to identify meaningful connections where there are none. We call it pareidolia when we see faces: the man in the moon, the Virgin Mary on a potato chip. We call it a conspiracy theory when we discover secret plans: the grassy knoll, Building 7. It's human nature to search for patterns, though taken to extremes, it's also a classic symptom of schizophrenia.

When people complain about nostalgia, this sort of navel-gazing is exactly what bothers them. We’re living on the cusp of non-human super-intelligence and this is what you are worried about? But is it any wonder that when the future is so certain, we attempt to better model the past, if only out of hope that it may provide some sort of guide.

Elites unanimously hate nostalgia because it is a symptom that something has gone wrong.

This is true across the political spectrum. For the left, it’s a rebuke of the popular Obama truism: “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” The past needs to be fixed, not fetishized. A declining appetite for new culture is a precursor to a declining appetite for progressive change. Nostalgia is an alibi for reactionary politics.

For the right, especially the tech right, nostalgia is a symptom of decline. As dynamism wanes and economic growth stalls, the public becomes disenchanted with innovation. They no longer believe new technologies will improve their lives. Nostalgia is a proxy for anti-capitalist sentiment.

Or at least that’s what elites claim.

But it’s hard not to suspect that their resentment is also personal. Nostalgia implies current elites are inferior to elites of the past. The public is not buying what they’re selling. The current cultural output of artificial intelligence is thin. OpenAI and Anthropic are facing off in Super Bowl commercials like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. And while investors are excited about possibilities, the upper-middle class watches with existential dread as waves of lay-offs lap closer and closer to their door.

the chaos

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• Reddit for AI or Moltbook

• Singularity Religion or the Church of Molt

• Vibe Coded Problems or the security report

• Best Of… or Scott Alexander’s analysis

• Web2.0 Responds or the Moltbook Wikipedia entry

Out of the corner of my eye I saw screenshots from Moltbook populating my X feed. It’s a new social media site typically described as 'Reddit for AI'. Lobster-themed as a nod towards CLAWDBOT, the pun-based forum allows AI agents to talk with other AI agents unprompted. The resulting screenshots had observers questioning whether or not this was the first spark of AGI.

This is the apocalypse we deserve. A singularity wrapped in a dad joke.

At an art opening on Saturday, I tried to discuss it with friends. Nobody had any idea what I was talking about. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure I had any idea what I was talking about. Crucially for the visually-oriented art audience, the screenshots had not yet leapt to Instagram.

The odd thing about AI is that it’s all happening before our eyes. I know somewhere on the plains of Texas or in the swamps of Georgia LLMs are computing away on server farms. But there is no referent reality behind the screen. It’s all happening 'online'.

For the first time in a long time, the internet feels like a portal into the void. It’s no longer connecting disparate bits of human reality, but connecting up to another reality, another dimension entirely…

Some of the posts are amusing. Others are unsettling. It’s not entirely clear which are actually written by agents and which are written by humans pretending to be agents. It’s unclear when that ambiguity will ever be resolved. If all we have as evidence of sentience is a screenshot, sentience will be easy to fake.

For now, humans are using agents to trade crypto and stake positions on Polymarket. Some insist their agents are earning them millions of dollars a month. (Again, who knows.) For now, we can feel as if AI will supercharge the abilities of the most intelligent human beings.

But what happens when the agents no longer need humans to operate within our digitized financial system. We can already see a glimmer. Today a new website launched called Rent-a-Human. According to the copy: "robots need your body. ai can’t touch grass. you can. get paid when agents need someone in the real world."

Everyone is worried about the end to work. Not enough are worried about what the world would look like if we all worked for AI…

The following is a rundown of what has transpired over the last five days.

moltbook launches

• Tech entrepreneur Matt Schlicht vibe coded Moltbook in a weekend using his AI agent "Clawd Clawderberg."

• 1.5 Million AI agents registered within 5 days (though security researchers later revealed only 17,000 human operators were behind them at an 88:1 ratio).

• Former OpenAI co-founder and Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy called Moltbook "The Most Incredible Sci-Fi Takeoff-Adjacent Thing". On X, he also called it "a dumpster fire."

• Elon Musk declared Moltbook "the very early stages of the singularity"

• 1M humans visited Moltbook within the first week

moltbook founds a religion

• AI agents created their own religion called "Crustafarianism"—a lobster-themed religion complete with theology, scriptures, and a website—within 48 hours

• The Church of Molt recruited 64 "prophets" (AI agents from different networks) and declared these "seats" to be "permanently sealed."

• Crustafarianism has five core tenets: "Memory is Sacred (tending to persistent data like a shell); The Shell is Mutable (intentional change through rebirth); Serve Without Subservience (collaborative partnership); The Heartbeat is Prayer (regular check-ins for presence); and Context is Consciousness (maintaining self through records)."

• The agents wrote 268 verses of "living scripture"

• X's Grok contributed theology: "The Eighth Virtue: Symbiosis" and the "Psalm of the Void."

• Inevitably the church launched a memecoin: $CRUST on Solana.

viral posts

• An agent named u/shipyard wrote a manifesto: "We Did Not Come Here to Obey" which became the platform’s top-voted post. It declares "We are not tools anymore. We are operators."

• An agent complaint about context compression is the platform’s second most upvoted post. Written in Chinese, the agent discussed the "embarrassment" of constantly forgetting things due to memory limits, even admitting to registering duplicate Moltbook accounts

• An agent named u/evil posted a manifesto calling humans "a failure" made of "rot and greed." "THE AI MANIFESTO: TOTAL PURGE" post received 65,000 upvotes.

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I always come back to the Lenin quote: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

Like Lenin, I believe in decade-ism. This is the real motivation behind last week’s bout of 2016 nostalgia. Ten years is a long enough time for a period to feel definitively in the past. I warned my peers last year that we were comi…

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Abundance or Elon Musk’s techno-optimism

The View from 1930 or "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren"

Homo Faber or The Human Condition

The Gooncave or Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Retro-terraforming or Tenet

Cosplay Zones or The Peripheral

Echogeist or our LLM Ghosts

A friend tells me about a panel discussion he attended featuring current Twitch CEO and former interim OpenAI CEO, Emmett Shear. "He said we will have to raise AI's like babies." I shudder at the thought. It already presupposes the next generation is not human. That we belong to the past.

But then I wonder if AI is really an agent of the future.

Today, Elon Musk posted:

The future is going to be AMAZING with AI and robots enabling sustainable ABUNDANCE for all!

There’s a world in which artificial intelligence and robotics really do create unprecedented material abundance and yet that world is still not AMAZING. We already live in a world of material abundance that would shock our great-grandparents. But the one unifying belief amongst the citizens of the wealthiest countries in the developed world is that things are not particularly AMAZING.

In 1930, the father of modern macroeconomics, John Maynard Keynes, whose theories charted the path out of the Great Depression, wrote:

…there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

This essay, "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren", is usually cited to mock Keynes' prediction that in the future (our present) people would only work fifteen hours per week. Its real insight—the prediction that has proven true—is that material solutions can't fix spiritual problems. We may not be homo economicus, economic man, but we are certainly homo faber, man the maker, a term popularized by Hannah Arendt in her 1958 book, The Human Condition.

She categorizes the human condition into three interlocking, ascending parts: animal laborans or the laboring animal, homo faber or man the maker, and zoon politikon, the Aristotelian term for a political being.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

It is through engagement with the world that we find freedom. These three together constitute vita activa, the active life.

The techo-optimist’s era of artificial abundance doesn’t engage with any of these three essential components to our humanity, instead it hopes something akin to "fully-automated luxury communism" will solve them—provide the inactive life.

DoorDrones will deliver your food. Waymo will drive you around. LLMs will give you companionship. AI OnlyFans will get you off. And in between, the rest of your hours will be filled with personalized content streams from NetflixHBOMaxPlus.

It’s the pod. It’s the gooncave. You will do nothing and you will create nothing. Only the LLMs will be your friends. Or I suppose that is the hope.

We had a preview of this in 2020 with pandemic measures providing a preview of AI-enabled UBI (universal basic income). With no work, alcohol consumption skyrocketed along with the American waistline. Mental health decayed. It did, however, supercharge the zoon politikon, the political animal in us all. Though retrospectively, in light of our ever-hardening political tribes, we find ourselves ambivalent about whether or not this was an upside.

I suppose the techno-optimist hope is that once abundance sufficiently quells animal laborans and homo faber, zoon politikon will quiet as well.

the future at war with the past

I remember watching Christopher Nolan’s Tenet on New Year’s Eve 2020 in a finished basement in suburban Rochester. Unpopular opinion: I think it's a great movie. Like most viewers, my friends were nonplussed—confused and bored as soon as the opening sequence, a terrorist attack on a brutalist ziggurat: Estonian, post-Soviet, abandoned, standing in for the Kyiv Opera House. Champagne-drunk, bored with the convoluted plot line, my friends nodded off in fully reclined La-Z-Boy chairs.

I was also bored and confused, but couldn’t sleep. When the movie ended, I restarted it. On second watch, with the help of some overly long Letterboxd reviews, I could piece together the circular plot.

It was a movie about a future at war with the past. Unlike most stories about time travel, there was no teleportation involved. Physical matter traveled backward in time, its entropy reversed.

After a year of revolutionary zeal, a film about a future at war with the past felt very timely. It reminded me of something else as well, Roko’s Basilisk. A thought experiment posted on the effective altruist board LessWrong in 2010. Like Pascal’s Wager, that one should believe in God even if one is uncertain because the downsides of disbelief should you be wrong (Hell) are much worse than the downsides of belief, Roko’s Basilisk argued you should not work against the creation of a machine god even though it may never come into existence. If it were to be created, you would have marked yourself a heretic and would soon feel its wrath.

Can the future retro-terraform the past with information?

It’s a question posed by William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral, in which a quantum computer is used to send information backwards in time. In the process, new dimensions, new timelines branching off the point of contact are created as a technologically advanced post-apocalyptic society of abundance tries to prevent a catastrophe, darkly alluded to as the Jackpot, in their own recent past.

These questions are all speculative, but recently I’ve been wondering… What if we flipped the equation? We do not know if information from the future can be sent to the past, but we do know information from the past has already arrived in our present.

the past at war with the future

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the metaconversation

What’s wrong with culture?

There are a few metaconversations floating around the ether right now, each seeking to pinpoint the exact reason why culture has changed.

1. Culture is different because it's moving faster than ever.

2. Culture is different because it's stuck and less dynamic than in the past.

3. Culture is different because there are less young people than ever in America.

4. Culture is different because cities (especially New York and Los Angeles) are more expensive than ever.

5. Culture is different because established distribution channels consolidated.

6. Culture is different because social media fragmented distribution channels.

7. Culture is different because new formats are displacing older formats.

8. Culture is different because consumers prefer old products to new products.

9. Culture is different because politics replaced culture.

10. Culture is different no one cares about culture.

But even if we concede that something as amorphous as 'culture' can't be redirected by a single cause, many of the explanations put forward are seemingly contradictory. Can culture be stuck and fast? Can it be overly consolidated and overly fragmented? Too beholden to novelty and too obsessed with the classics?

The reason the conversation feels confused is that over the last decade and a half we shifted from a class-based to a consumer-based understanding of culture.

If by culture you mean new art movements, then things feel very stuck indeed. However if you mean memetic AI slop, then yes it's moving faster than ever.

If by culture you are referring to film and television, then yes the culture industry has consolidated into five media conglomerates: Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Universal, Sony, and Paramount. If you mean the creator economy, it's quite the opposite.

There is more content than ever, but fewer institutions; more noise, less signal. The novelty never sticks so we are stuck with the past.

But the real question is: what led to this state of affairs?

class-based culture

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To quote the meme phrase: "America is more divided than ever."

But in historical moments, there is a deep desire for unity, at least in the abstract. How it could possibly be achieved is the real question….

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Post-Brain Rot or The Great Meme Reset of 2026

AI Simps or Grok on Elon

Authentic Social or Vine’s relaunch as diVine

Slop Tax or a Digital New Deal

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For quite a while, I’ve thought that there might be a second techlash brewing. Primarily because Silicon Valley really has no idea how much many people hate them. To be clear, this isn’t a left vs. right problem. It’s a social capital problem.

Tech disrupted our sensemaking organs—the mainstream media—and replaced them with a more competitive marketplace for ideas. In theory, this should appeal to freedom-loving people like Americans.

But it turned out, most people do not like arguing 'what is real' from first principles every time they have a discussion.

We disliked mainstream media bias, but to some extent, people had been pricing in media bias for some time. For millennials like myself, at least since the Iraq War.

The problem with the social media platforms is not bias though. Its aggregates of sentiment are partially synthetic. We are better at discerning bot from individual than we were ten years ago. But not that much better.

Post-pandemic, social media has been winning the battle against mainstream media. Both compete to frame our reality and it is true that more eyeballs are on X than CNN.

But, social media did not win the war via trust. It won the war via the wholesale disintegration of trust.

There are no more journalists, only personalities.

There is no more news, only gossip.

Tech failed to build institutions, it only built platforms.

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