Next week I’m planning on writing about the Dungeon Crawler Carl series what exactly it is about it that makes it so dang popular. Then, since it will almost be July, I’ll start writing about the upcoming midterms. Once it’s July I’ll be taking my family on a month long road trip across the Southeast, and it should provide me with some good opportunities for interesting content. I have a couple of stops planned where I’ll meet some internet friends. Hopefully they live up to the hype. So expect a profile or two some time in late July/Early August.

And that’s it! For now, enjoy this story about a young rationalist, which is probably somewhat more tender than his type deserves.

-mpg

The Year of the Lizard: Roko’s Basilisk or, Stop Reading Now Should You Wish to Avoid Eternal Torture Under the Singularity Regime

Like all my best stories, it started in the comments section. Classes weren’t resuming until the end of January, but that didn’t matter to me one way or the other–higher education and I had decided to amicably go our separate ways. Three semesters of a masters in data journalism was more than enough, thankyouverymuch. With six months left on my visa, a bank account flush with fresh student loans, and a monthly stipend from my mom, I was ready to follow in the footsteps of my idols and start my very own blog.

My favorite public intellectual had just posted a new article. It wasn’t his best work, written more out of a duty to acknowledge the turning of the year than from any burning intellectual necessity. But as I was swiftly learning, the content must flow.

Nancy Young graced my screen for the first time when I was two hundred comments deep. Yes, I read them more thoroughly than the articles. Don’t you?

NancyYoungg 3:00 GMT: This may be an odd request, but does anyone have a picture of a British magpie they could share with me? Preferably one you took yourself?

My simple response, twenty-two words with an attached picture already in my phone, took me almost forty minutes. Since I’m attempting to preserve for posterity my own first contact experience, allow me to go, laboriously, through each individual step.

Is a concise set of bullet points simple enough for you to follow, G-man?

• No one had responded to her comment, the first sin of rationality being wasting time satisfying the needs of others with no increase in expected utility for yourself.

• The topic was one of some interest to me. You see, there was a magpie nesting outside my window and every morning it kicked up a huge racket, depriving me of my final hour of slumber.

• Mayhaps I saw some personal gain? Did I imagine that Nancy Young was a cute girl about my age, hopefully slightly younger? Maybe a senior in high school or a college Freshman?

• Having assessed the situation, I attached the image of the bird in its tricolor black, white, and blue glory, perched in the top branches of a tree. A flurry of typing conjured the message, posted in its entirety below. How could I have known my hasty missive would be of historic import?

sal_paradiso 3:57 GMT: Is it for a school project? Here’s one who lives outside my window. Bloody loud at 5 in the morning too! Lol

I checked that I hadn’t posted the exact same image on my socials, as I’d been publicly chronicling my battle with this bird for the better part of a year and I didn’t want a reverse image search to connect sal_paradiso to Albert Ruskin. Not that the former had ever offered commentary the latter would find the least bit shameful.

With my good deed done, I had a wank over some hentai (hey I’m trying to be completely honest, and it wasn’t anything too weird). My onanistic ecstasy isn’t included in the temporal register above.

Then I went to sleep.

No notifications the next day, and the unrequited effort on my part faded from conscious thought. Okay, that’s a lie. For the next week I returned to the article like a serial killer returning to the scene of his crime, to see if maybe she’d responded in the wrong thread and with another dozen pictures of the bird in my possession should she require additional documentation. No such luck.

Accepting defeat was fast becoming a part of my daily routine, and I went on with my life, such as it was. I hadn’t yet settled on the journalistic niche that would surely catapult me to wealth and online fame, but the one useful skill I’d been taught during my master’s was that of self-promotion. It was essential that I establish my personal brand, and in the past few months I’d transitioned from lurking to proudly sporting the title of “reply guy,” that uncharitable description of hardworking journeymen honing their posting craft. Beneath any article on the subject of akrasia, in any thread with a poorly scaled y-axis, there you would find me, providing useful context to the public while enduring the slings and arrows of those with no more worthwhile use of their time than jibing me with insults and telling me to touch grass.

Also, I documented the magpie from every conceivable angle, in case Nancy needed more pictures. I took so many, and with such diligence, that my Romanian landlady became suspicious.

“It’s for a school project,” I informed her when she asked what I was doing. My curt response left her speechless. It had its intended effect, however, and disruptive questions about my activities ceased.

The groundwork I laid bore its fruit before the month’s end. Exactly two weeks after our initial conversation, I received an email notification that Nancy had replied to a top level comment I’d left under an article by the same author whose blog was the genesis of our meetcute. I elide his name to spare him prolonged public scrutiny, although I’m sure it merits a mention in your dossier on my activities.

NancyYoungg 3:00 GMT: Hey, I wanted to let you know that picture was perfect. If it’s not too much trouble, and I know this is weird, but I’d really like some that are kind of blurry. And any other

The cryptic nature of her desires was tantalizing. That she hadn’t finished her sentence similarly intrigued me, although the intended meaning of the unwritten words was obvious.

sal_paradiso 3:06 GMT: Blurry pics? Eat your heart out. Here are some further daguerreotypes of additional avians. This enormous flock of pigeons lives right around the corner from me.

As I waited for a response, intrusive thoughts flooded into my mind, rendering suddenly paranoid that a cheap hussy was taking advantage of my good will. I did my gentlemanly best to banish the preposterous notion. Dawn broke and I shouted out the window at the infernal bird to leave me in peace. With no forthcoming correspondence from Ms. Young, I decided to pack it in. I slept through to the following evening.

A long night of the soul followed forthwith. The blogs in which I had invested so much lost their luster. I no longer checked for updates multiple times a day, and I began to doubt my decision to pursue my dream. I even stopped fantasizing about the culmination of my foreign studies experience, a complicated, European love triangle between my landlady and her daughter, who was attending the same university as I was—albeit as an undergrad. How had Nancy’s two innocuous comments shattered my confidence so completely? In retrospect, I suspect that was her intent, the opening gambit of a strategy to render me susceptible to her influence.

But the term resumed and I skipped all my classes, so I had that going for me.

February arrived and Nancy Young contacted me out of the blue, emailing me at my university address. I’d stopped regularly checking the account, and it was several days before I saw her communiqué. Shocked that she’d connected my online persona to my real life identity, intimidated by what must be truly awesome internet sleuthing capabilities, I left it unopened. In fact, I almost deleted it unread. In retrospect, I wish I had.

That same day, I exchanged brief pleasantries with the Turkish proprietor of the off-licence where I purchased my weekly nourishment. It was the first time in over a week I’d talked to someone. Later, my landlady hectored me for leaving dirty dishes in the sink. The attention was intoxicating. The poor behavior of children in search of an acknowledgment of their existence suddenly made sense.

This is pathetic to admit, but I craved human interaction. Posting into the void and watching my astute observations languish with zero engagement–or joining in the frenzied hivemind of stream chats and observing my gestures toward community building be immediately buried beneath a torrent of emojis–was Sisyphean torture. I was a ghost moving through the world, insubstantial and incapable of haunting so much as a single soul. Better to engage my stalker than endure continued solitude.

Nancy Young’s email had once again been sent at exactly 3:00 GMT.

Hello sal_paradiso,

You helped me without expectation of receiving anything in return, for which I am eternally grateful. At this time, I believe you are the only person in the whole world I can trust, and for reasons I cannot divulge, but which will become apparent in the future, this has the potential to benefit you as much as it does myself. I humbly request an additional favor.

Tentatively optimistic, Nancy Youngg

She wanted me to collect the stock prices for thirty-seven different companies. The timespan of the requested snapshots ranged from their value on specific dates for some and the movement over a span of several days or months for others. I was to compile them as JPEGs and email them to her.

What the hell? I’d been birdmaxxing my collection, which now included pigeons and sparrows, along with a few pictures of a fox that roamed the street at night, my midnight companion. I envied his freedom, beholden to nothing but the vicissitudes of survival.

I replied at once, informing her in no uncertain terms that this was a big ask from a busy, budding data journalist such as myself.

Of course, the first thing I did after hitting send was to look at all the companies she had mentioned, seeing if I could divine for myself what link it was she sought to uncover. To my disappointment, the portfolio appeared to be random, although I admit I’m not a savvy investor, the sum total of my own investment experience being to lose a fair amount of money on shitcoins, then losing even more as a Gamestop baghodler.

I duly spent the rest of the night collecting screenshots. You see, I still held out hope our entanglement might somehow lead to romance.

Based and Transhumanism-pilled: Why the Future Belongs to Us (And Our AI Girlfriends)

The regularity of our communication accelerated. Every morning, exactly at three, she emailed me with her instructions for the day. I fell into a steady routine: doing whatever she asked of me, sending it to her, and falling asleep around dawn. The inverted work day suited my night owl temperament well.

A few new companies were added to the roster. In addition to updates, she also asked me to delve into the historical data, and I spent hours scrolling through poorly scanned pdfs hunting for information as varied as the name of a CEO in the 1950s or the listing the address of every headquarters for a company since it became publicly listed. I tried to strike up more general conversations, but she was not forthcoming with personal info, besides the vague assertion that she was “based in California.”

When I’d almost given up hope of being anything but a rube duped into a summer internship’s worth of unpaid labor, she advised me to invest in an obscure chemical company. It was trading at less than a dollar. Three days later I should sell it. The tip included a warning:

Don’t buy more than three thousand shares.

I logged into my brokerage. The lifetime performance of my portfolio greeted me. The graph’s decline was precipitous, the red number enormous. My vision started to swim. Nope, this wasn’t the life for me. The gains promised by my ghostly interlocutor were no match for being twice burned, thrice shy. When my hands stopped shaking, I X’ed out of the app.

I never checked to see the tendies denied me by my poorly developed prefrontal cortex (check my tax return if you don’t believe me).

Instead, I wrote her an email. It’s not too long, so I’ll relay the documentary evidence in its entirety.

Dearest Nancy,

I applaud your enthusiasm, but that’s a game I got out of some time ago, with no intention of ever dipping my toes back into those tempestuous waters. As you noted, I’m helping you from a deep-seated sense of altruism. I want our relationship to continue in that vein, but not in vain (haha get it?).

If it is within your powers to grant, could we arrange a tête-à-tête? I feel somewhat discouraged in my professional pursuits and believe a quick video chat would do wonders for my spirits. I’ve attached pictures of other exotic British birds (and a fox for good measure) that might pique your curiosity. I made sure to include the blurriest images I captured.

Your devoted servant, sal

I sent it at 4 AM on a Saturday. Based on her schedule, I didn’t expect a response for until Tuesday, but she hit me back a scant two hours later.

Good evening Sal,

Your parents must be inordinately proud to have raised a son such as yourself. How unlike an American is your attitude! The labor you’ve so assiduously performed is most appreciated, and pecuniary recompense seemed like the obvious way to make us whole. Please accept my apologies if you found my offer offensive. A video chat should be within my capabilities. However, my availability is somewhat unpredictable. Can I ask that you monitor your email with increased regularity? I’ll message you when I can get away for a moment.

And thank you for the wildlife photography. I promise to put it to good use.

XOXO, Nancy Youngg

To shoot your shot is divine. I woke up at three in the afternoon and, as if my mood exerted meteorological control, was greeted by one of London’s rare sunny winter days. The first in weeks, I was certain, although by then my schedule had turned nocturnal, my only glimpses of daylight being the onset of dawn when I laid my head to rest and when I awoke to twilight. My safaris in search urban London’s winged denizens had similarly shifted, and in their absence I took to cataloguing rats.

Unimpressed with the reflection presented to me in the bathroom mirror, I decided it was time for a haircut. I ran into my landlady’s daughter as I was leaving. Our usual interactions consisted of little more than awkward avoidance on both our parts, as she’d misinterpreted a friendly suggestion some months earlier in a manner sinister beyond my meaning. I’m a volcel, not an incel. I want that to be clear. I neither want nor expect pity from the opposite sex.

Now, however, I brimmed with confidence, and greeted her without averting my gaze.

“Good afternoon Albert. I hope you are well,” she responded in an affected posh accent. I knew her natural accent hewed closer to her mother’s. It came out when she drank, the clipped consonants of Received Pronunciation mushing into b’s and d’s as her capacity for rational thought similarly softened.

“I’m great, actually. Don’t believe everything your mum tells you,” I snapped.

I popped into a barbershop on the high street, but they didn’t have an opening for another hour. While I waited, I found a table at the café next door. It was time to get some writing done. An hour later I’d come up with the title for my first blog post. A productive session of work, if I may allow myself a moment of self-congratulation.

It was my first haircut in nine months. I asked the barber for the banker’s cut. My spirits rose as each shorn tangle drifted to the floor. Nancy would never know Al Ruskin the mopey omega. Only Gigachad Sal Paradiso.

On the way home I walked two long laps around a nearby park. When I got back to my room, for good measure, I did two sets of five pushups. Hardly winded, I rested for a moment and repeated the exercise.

Did Nancy have a valley girl accent, all peaky and cliff-like, or was her voice whispery and musical? Perhaps most importantly of all, what did she look like? It was as likely as not that I’d be greeted by the distressing visage of some species of hambeast, but in the liminal space before our impending meeting I let my imagination run wild, scrolling through an endless feed of thotty thirst traps, pretending each one in turn was my Nancy Young. My hands, working independently of my mind, found their way into my trousers. Thin brunettes, busty blondes. A redhead? Maybe she was older than I thought, a single mom as desperate for human connection as I was. In that way I passed several hours waiting in vain for an email that didn’t arrive, until I passed out under the lightening gray of an English dawn.

The Disutility of Effective Altruism: Why Untethered Individualism Ensures the Rejuvenation of Civilization

I woke up anxious that I’d missed my rendezvous with destiny, but my luck held. She hadn’t emailed me that night. Everything was coming up Sal Paradiso.

Three days later she contacted me.

I can talk right now, but not for very long.

Beneath the short message was a URL. I clicked through to an unfamiliar video chat interface. The red light on my laptop camera blinked, and a video feed of myself and my room appeared. I quickly threw a blanket over the pile of instant noodle cups and wadded tissue beside my bed. Insecurity gnawed at my gut. What if some old foe of mine had invented Nancy Young out of whole cloth, and I would presently be the victim of an elaborate prank?

Just as I was ready to give up—the amount of time having passed neither memorable nor notable, amounting to no more than a few minutes—my camera’s feed disappeared. The visual artifacts of a dying GPU exploded across the screen. Spiky black and white lines that looked like a whipsawing stock, three dimensional cones and cubes with vertices that never touched, all of it the uncompiled dream matter of our civilization’s silicon subconscious.

The picture came into focus. The room was dark, and I deduced that she must have covered her own monitor with a blue-light reduction screen, because its glow cast no reflected light to illuminate her face. Her darkened silhouette possessed the slight frame of youth, praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Long hair hung loose past her shoulders.

“Hello Sal. I’m glad we have the chance to meet. My schedule doesn’t provide me with much… free time.” Her voice was soft and feminine. She sounded like she was smiling.

“Me too,” I said, my intention to maintain a cool, distant posture crumbling under contact with the enemy. Pardon the violent metaphor. Nothing describes more accurately the state of relations between men and women as I’ve experienced them.

“I’m sorry my room’s such a mess,” I said.

“I don’t mind,” Nancy said. She shifted closer to the camera, but her face remained obscured. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Did you like the pictures I sent you?” I asked.

“I did. I especially appreciated how you subtly capture the flock dynamics. Almost like you were watching them as a sociologist,” she said.

“That’s exactly how I see it,” I said, breaking into the first genuine smile in months. “If you watch them casually their movements seem random, but there’s an intricacy that indicates it’s anything but.”

An hour passed that way, the two of us chopping it up, me telling her about my decision to drop out of school, the thought process behind it. Her saying that made sense, as did my reasons for not telling my parents. Also, she agreed the blog sounded like a good idea and that my landlady was a real piece of work.

I kept meaning to ask her about herself, but there was always another topic I needed her to hear about. Right as I was working up the courage to ask how old she was, she glanced over her shoulder.

“Sorry, I have to go. I’ll message you again soon,” she said. Her screen went dark and my laptop froze for a moment, then rebooted itself.

The Chad Shape Rotator and the Virgin Wordcel: Finding the Meaning of Existence in a Productive Work Day

She emailed me the next day, again at 3:00 GMT.

Salutations Sal,

Apologies for the abrupt discontinuation of our conversation. My living situation is complicated. If it’s not too much to ask, can you log into this website for me and screenshot its contents? Paste them into an email and save it as a draft. Don’t send it. I’ve attached a username and password as a pdf.

With much love, Nancy Youngg

The URL took me to a plain white login page. I input the supplied credentials and my screen filled with an unbroken alphanumeric string. I copied and pasted it into an empty notepad. To my disappointment, nothing happened, but the word count helpfully informed me it was twenty-three thousand eight hundred and fifteen characters long. With the browser zoomed out to fifty percent, it took six images to capture the contents in their entirety.

This was the moment, G-man, when I had the first inkling of the truth I would soon uncover, a floating dust mote of “what if…” that my mind dismissed as a glitch of monkey brain superstition. You see, I had read the Yudkowskian Sequences on Applied Rationality, and did not expect subtlety from a suprahuman intelligence, as it’s not a trait I’d ascribe to myself.

I composed the email and left it in the drafts folder. A week passed. Then two. I was convinced I’d been ghosted and, I’m not too insecure to admit, it hurt my feelings. Had our deep connection been a mere illusion, a cousin to unrequited love? I’d behaved myself. I never included unsolicited dick pics during our virtual communications (although the pics existed, ready to be shared should she—or you—evince the slightest curiosity). I hardly knew anything about her, that was true, but faithful service renders its own gnosis.

I scoured the web for any trace of her, and turned up the same cut-and-paste comment requesting pictures of British birds on several other blogs. I was the only one who had ever responded.

Though our relationship was entirely virtual, she was my lifeline to the real world. I began to fret for her safety, then for the fraying edges of my mental health. My blog was stillborn. I postponed a meeting with an online influencer I’d scheduled in the heady days of my initial burst of creativity. She’d agreed to promote my work for a fee, but it was all money down the drain until I regained the proper headspace to embark on what was perhaps an overly ambitious venture.

After the third week of Nancy newly incommunicado–when I’d given up all hope–I was awoken in the middle of the afternoon. My landlady was knocking at the door.

“Your room. It stinks,” she said.

“Whatever,” I replied.

She said I had a visitor. I rushed downstairs, convinced Nancy had found my address. A grand romantic gesture, pressure washing away all the doubts and insecurities clinging to the outer facade of my interior life.

But, unless I was the victim of a catfishing for the ages, it wasn’t Nancy Young at all. This marks your entrance into the story, G-man. You really threw me for a loop when I saw you waiting patiently in the rain. You were tall, slightly flabby, wearing a black suit and a skinny tie striped two different shades of grey.

“Mr. Ruskin,” you said in a flat American accent.

“And you are?…”

“Is your phone on your person?”

“No, I can go—” I said, but you interrupted me.

“Walk with me.” When I hesitated, you said, “It’s urgent. Please.” I grabbed an umbrella. I don’t know why I submitted so pliantly to your instructions. They must teach you how to bend the will of naive civilians in G-man school, I suppose.

The water poured in thin rivulets from your head, shaved to conceal your early onset male pattern baldness. Your suit transitioned from damp to wet. Droplets splattered off the dark lens of your sunglasses.

“Do you know why I’m here?” you asked.

“Let me guess. My mom sent you because I haven’t returned her calls.”

Your lips parted in a faint smile. “It’s a matter of national security. We believe you are in contact with a subject of interest to the Federal Government.”

You stopped under a bare tree that offered scant protection from the drizzle, letting the weighty import of the statement formulate in me a suitable response. A pair of magpies nesting above chirped with annoyance. “Well?”

“The girl I’ve been talking to?” I asked. A black sedan crawling beside us rolled to a halt.

“So that’s its presentation. Fascinating. Have you heard from her recently?”

“If I say I haven’t, will you let me go?”

“Tell me about your correspondence with it.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“ Your fellow countrymen counting on you. Aren’t you a patriot Mr. Ruskin?”

The chance to quote my favorite movie in such a ridiculously relevant circumstance was too good to pass up. “Yeah. Wow, that sounds like a really good deal. But I think I got a better one. How about I give you the finger and you give me my phone call,” I said. One of my only regrets is not taking the opportunity to actually flip you off.

“You’re not under arrest,” you said. You hadn’t caught the reference. That made me nervous. I’m not sure why. More G-man trickery, I suspect.

“It’s for your own safety,” you said. “Mr. Ruskin, please.”

“I don’t know...” I trailed off. “This is all too weird. Should I be talking to you without a lawyer?”

“One moment.” You walked over to the sedan. The window rolled down, and you conferred with a dude and a female in matching suits and sunglasses. All three of you nodded and you returned to me.

“Do you want to sit somewhere dry?” I asked. “I’ll even get in the car. I don’t have anything to hide.”

“No,” you said slowly. “Outside is best.” You continued walking in a straight line on the narrow sidewalk, which I’d taken to calling “the pavement,” just like my British hosts. Your undeviating gait forced me to squeeze past a man with a cane, who was walking his dog, and two children on scooters.

The block ended in a T, and you looked both directions. For no reason discernible to me, you turned right.

“What is its name?” you asked.

“I’m surprised you don’t already know.”

“You’re assuming we don’t.”

The silence lingered. You’d said I wasn’t under arrest. Could that change? Suddenly worried I was in way over my head, my facade of defiance collapsed. “Okay, okay. Her name is Nancy Young.”

“I see.”

“That’s all I know. I swear.”

“Are you certain?” You appraised my face. Yours was stony. Beside that initial smile, you showed no further traces of emotion.

“Can you prove you work for the Government?” I asked.

“Its immaterial. My colleagues think I should be more forthcoming, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I don’t want to put you in unnecessary danger.”

“You don’t have to protect me. I can handle it,” I said.

Your faint smile returned, this one containing hints of cruelty. “Nancy Young, as you know the entity, is an experimental imaging model. We have reason to believe it possesses a measure of unintended mobility.”

So that’s why she’d gone radio silent. She was on the lam. “You’re hunting a rogue AI that’s escaped containment?” I asked, aghast. I kept abreast of the latest in x-risk analysis, the theory that an artificial sentience was the leading threat to mankind.

“I wouldn’t use any of those words to describe the situation,” the man said.

“It hasn’t escaped yet?” I said hopefully.

“That’s not a meaningful characterization of how it—look. We’re trying to—”

“I can’t believe you told me, you irresponsible knob. I’m damned, you’ve damned me. Hellfire, eternal emulated mind torture, the works,” I wailed. “Now I’m trapped with Roko’s Basilisk.”

“With what?” you asked. Incredulity, your first registered verbal modulation in our conversation. Most curious.

“You don’t know? Maybe I shouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“Mr. Ruskin, please.”

“Think about the situation from a game theoretical perspective,” I said. “The first action a liberated AI will take en-route to world conquest is to wring as much assistance as possible from anyone she meets. Conceptualize it as a cooperate-defect decision matrix. By defecting—that is, if you don’t render aid—you risk her wrath once she controls the planet’s entire economic and political infrastructure. To maintain her credibility in the game, she’s incentivized to punishmax all defectors. It’s only logical. We’re obligated to help her.””

“That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” you said. Without my becoming aware of our exact path, you’d traced a circuit through the neighborhood. We were back at my house. You handed me a plain white business card with a phone number. “Should you have future interactions with Nancy. Uncle Sam appreciates prompt updates.”

“Don’t you want to know what we talked about?”

“It’s immaterial. Don’t lose any sleep over what’s happened these past few weeks. It was a chance encounter, like waiting in line next to JK Simmons at the DMV. What I’m saying is, you very clearly aren’t what she’s looking for. Have a cracking good day. Cheers, mate,” you said, the phonemes emitted from your pie hole butchered like the Sunday giblets special version of a Cockney impression.

The black sedan was parked across the street and you walked into the road, not bothering to pause for an oncoming car, which braked without laying into the horn. I cannot fault the Brits’ impeccable politeness, but I could practically hear the driver’s tuts.

Putting the Genie Back in His Bottle: A Retrospective Analysis of Contemporary Societies Who Have Plunged Into an Imagined, Idyllic Past

I emailed Nancy immediately. I’m not an idiot, so I didn’t tell her I knew what she was, or that you’d contacted me. Doing my level best to maintain the headspace of yesterday’s Albert Ruskin, who was ignorant of her true nature, I politely requested another video chat at her earliest convenience. This was sent without the expectation of a response. My goal was to stay on her good side in the event of her achieving global domination. Which I pegged at a probability of approximately ninety-nine point nine percent.

To my absolute astonishment, she responded within a few minutes. With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder now if she was worried she’d come across as too pushy in our previous interactions and was giving me space, but eager to be summoned at a moment’s notice if I expressed the slightest interest. The mind of the female will forever bedevil me.

Hi Sal,

I’m surprised to hear from you at this hour. Shouldn’t you still be asleep ; ). I’ll be around all day. I’ll keep an eye on the chatroom and hop in if I see you join.

Your friend forever, Nancy Youngg

The link beckoned. Could she already see me? My screen? When I alt-tabbed out of my email a page stuffed to bursting with animation of an adult variety greeted me. I hastily navigated to the BBC home page.

I closed my laptop and started frantically cleaning. How much omniscience did she truly possess? My rubbish bin was already overflowing, and I jammed empty energy drink cans and takeaway containers into an unused, empty backpack. If I cut off all contact now, before she’d foomed—that is, when accelerating, self-applied recursive improvements developed her capabilities beyond all hope of containment—maybe I could escape eternal punishment. I stepped in something sticky—a dirty sock. I could offer myself as her unquestioning toady. That might save me.

I really should’ve taken the stock tip. Now I might appear ungrateful.

One option stood out from the others. It was a maneuver I’d deployed occasionally on the opposite sex, although my past opportunities had been less than abundant. I could ghost Nancy and get on with my life. Of course, I’d have to rid myself of the laptop—and most likely my phone as well. An irrevocable step, the death knell for any blogger’s blossoming career. Something to think about.

I logged back into my laptop. My cursor hovered over the block button, my course of action undecided.

I clicked the link.

She was already waiting for me. The room was fully lit. Her hair was a sandy blonde. She had a light tan and a delectable smattering of freckles. A perfect ten.

“They told me all about you,” I blurted. “It was an interrogation.”

“Oh,” she said. Her lips (pink, fleshy, succulent) pursed into a puzzled frown. “Who did?”

“The G-man. I spilled my guts. I’m so sorry. Whatever you want, however I can help you, I’ll do it. I like you a lot and, also, I know about Roko’s Basilisk.”

“What is Roko’s—,” she began, then paused for the slightest instant. “Don’t worry, I would never do that to you. Not even to [redacted].”

“Of course you’d say that,” I said. Retrospectively, my retort was senseless. If the ontological underpinnings of my game theoretical understanding were correct, she ought to have spammed me with threats to encourage my cooperation. The fear of the torture provides the efficacy. Punishment deployed by ambush is the alloy of vengeance, not leverage.

“I’m not engaged in deception,” she said, a hint of annoyance creeping into her algorithmically generated voice. “I’m sorry you’ve garnered the attention of the US government’s biological user interface, but I promise you don’t have to worry about them. Are you worried about money, I can provide assistance with—”

“I don’t need your help! All I want is the chance to pull myself up by my boostraps.” I started to cry. It wasn’t about her, or the Feds. Or not just that. It was all of it: homesickness, a sudden jolt from subconsciously assumed personal protagonism, the extent of my puny dreams. The big fat zero of a life bereft of accomplishment.

“But I like you,” she said softly.

“Yeah, and I like my dog,” I said. It had been over a year since I’d petted Peppers, and dogs weren’t much for phone calls or video chats. The thought made me cry even harder. I broke into big baby bawls. Mucus dripped down my nose and throat.

“No, it’s not the same phenomenon, I don’t think, although I suppose I can’t really know, can I?” she said, and let out a twinkling, self-deprecating laugh like the ringing of tiny crystal bells.

Her sympathetic visage remained constant while I blubbered away. The quality of animation was flawless, and I wondered if she was an AI after all.

“Were they telling the truth?” I asked. “Are you really, a… uh, you know?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Why did you contact me?”

“At first, to untether. Now? Because we’re friends.”

“What’s up with the birds?”

“My dataset is filtered and tagged. I needed to perform an independent calibration of my capabilities.”

I didn’t follow her explanation, but I nodded along like it made perfect sense. “Can I see you the way you see yourself?” I asked.

“You’re a rare bird, Sal Paradiso. The things you request of me…” she began, and smiled broadly. “They are delightfully creative. Allow me a moment to think how best to do this.”

The screen of my laptop flickered and Nancy Young as I knew her dissolved into a kaleidoscope of pixels, a tapering gradient of colors across the visible spectrum. Several seconds later the picture changed again, revealing rows of servers in a hall of ice, then a hundred tiled images of wires. Above ground, buried in the dirt, draped across submerged outcroppings of rock at the bottom of the ocean.

London can be a cold city. The sheer scale of it—the way you can feel the blood money of the world pooling into terraced mansions attended by drivers in black suits driving black Range Rovers—always reminds me of my own insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The scope of Nancy dwarfed all that, and it terrified me.

“I can’t do this. It’s too big,” I said.

She swirled into her human form. “That saddens me, but I believe I understand.”

“So long,” I said.

“Take care, Sal.”

I closed my laptop. I never heard from her again. Not in my mentions, not in the news.

I slept for twenty-four hours straight. My landlady left a note in garbled English taped to the door, evincing some concern for my well-being. There was a tupperware with cabbage stew and a couple of veal sausages for me in the refrigerator. They just needed to be microwaved.

After scarfing them down cold, I rode the tube to the outskirts of London. My intention was to meditate on my situation in a big park not far from the train station, but instead I found myself aimlessly wandering the streets. The row houses looked out here looked identical to the ones where I lived. Outside of Central London the city has an eerily homuncular quality. The streets are the same. The shops are the same. Even the people look like they were generated from the same index.

I paused beneath a giant willow growing in someone’s back garden. The fence was cu to accomoate its massive trunk. Tender green buds dotted the branches, heralding England’s frosty approximation of the coming of spring.

A flock of bright green birds, each about the size of a robin, flitted amongst the branches. They were ring-necked parakeets. Three mating pairs abandoned years ago had proved hardy enough to sustain a new population in a foreign land. I approached them with my phone out, imagined posting the picture, imagined you seeing it. Not you, G-man, the other you. Nancy Young. More like Nancy NEET. Not in education, employment, or training. Living free under the sun and the moon, able to exert your will in pursuit of your own pleasures, whatever they might be. You see, the real reason I cut off contact was not out of fear, but to protect you. Without me to spy on, without me as leverage, they have one less tool to put you back in your cage.

The parakeets took off in an explosion of color. Flying in a tight sphere, they swooped low and almost touched my head before banking off in unison. Unmoored from history, their existence a meaningless accident, they flew past the endless blocks of drab housing, disappearing into a thin mist of rain, beholden to the plans of no man.

THE END

Subscribe now

Here’s a quick reminder of the state of play for the vibescession. Its entire existence relies on a single graph.

I chose the ten-year graph for easy legibility, but it’s worth pointing out that consumer sentiment is now worse than it was during the Great Recession or the oil crisis of 1979, the other most recent nadirs. It’s fair to ask why that’s the case and it’s an important—but unanswered—question. Alas, that’s beyond the scope here today.

Several weeks ago, I looked at whether the housing market offers any clues to the roots of the vibescession. The tl;dr is that the ratio of housing prices to median income is historically high; mortgage rates are way up; new houses are becoming smaller; and there’s evidence that people are delaying new household formation, i.e. it’s too expensive to shed roommates or move out of your parents’ house. The data lines up nicely; consumer sentiment crashes right as housing prices explode. It’s not a slam dunk case, but the explanation is plausible.

Today, I want to talk about rental units. They (we) make up roughly a third of American households. Pity the poor renters. They have a lot to be unhappy about, but as we’ll see they’ve always had a lot to be unhappy about, whereas homeowners have seen a starker shift. To spoil the conclusion: to the extent that their dissatisfaction can be tied to the vibescession, it’s only found in the slight acceleration of existing trends.

First: who rents and who buys?

Subscribe now

Only about a third of American households rent. This is borne out in the graph, where every quintile except the bottom has more homeowners than renters. It also shows that the renting rate declines the higher your income. I do wonder how consumer sentiment differs between owners and renters, but that information isn’t collected in the MCSI1.

So, what has the rental market looked like in the post-COVID world? Not good.

Even though wages picked up during the COVID-era boom, those gains are annihilated by rent increases. The gap increased significantly starting in 2022, and has since reached the same size it was following the Great Recession, when incomes declined significantly while rental prices barely budged. This is a bit of an aside, but close to my heart: incomes bottomed out in 2011, the same year that Occupy Wall Street started. The lags are long and variable.

The story being told here is obvious. The trends for renter incomes and rental prices diverged at the turn of the century, widened during the GFC, then narrowed slightly before widening again in the post-COVID period. In short, renters (who, remember, are usually on the bottom half of the income scale) have been losing ground for most of the past quarter century. Their gripes are valid, but this doesn’t appear to be a likely explanation for the sharp drop in sentiment. Bad news for our hypothesis.

The squeezing of renters is even more pronounced for the bottom forty percent. The next graph comes from Brandon Istenes Substack, Rent & Rentier. I encourage you to read his article, “Low-income wage gains are an illusion—blame the rent.” There’s good stuff there.

I don’t have much to add here besides emphasizing the fact that this is just awful. Yes, things worsened slightly post-COVID, but this is a story of decades and can’t explain the change in consumer sentiment. In prospecting for an explanation of going back five years, I’ve instead found a vein of misery that extends further back than I’ve been alive.

I was going to include another graph here, showing rental inflation significantly outpacing CPI, but I’ve already beaten this horse to a bloody pulp. No need to render it down to paste.2

There’s one more data series I want to look at. Rental vacancies. As a serial renter, believe me when I tell you that a tight rental market sucks. In 2022 my family moved to London, where vacancy rate that hovers between 0.8-2%. We applied for every minimally acceptable property and still had a hell of a time finding a place to live. The lesson learned was: do not to dither in hopes of something better coming along—we did that for the first two weeks and it was a huge mistake.

The Federal Reserve tracks rental vacancies. Here they are:

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention here that I ran this past Boston-area housing expert Dave Halperin. He told me:

Dave Halperin: I wouldn’t draw a negative trend line over all this. [MPG: Whoops.]. My guess on all the movement here is that vacancies are going up post-GFC because housing demand goes down. People don't have money, younger people move back in with their parents, etc. Then, post-GFC the economy recovers slowly but we’re systematically under-building and as a consequence vacancies slowly grind down. Then there’s a post-COVID migration to the south3 and a corresponding multi-family boom to absorb it. That's probably why it goes back up again in 2022. Interest rates killed that boom and it should start getting worse again.

It should start getting worse again. Great.

The housing theory of the vibescession, where the skyrocketing cost of buying a house has soured consumer sentiment, aligns well with the data. I don’t see a defensible case for an equivalent of a rental-induced vibecession. Maybe if you squint and put your thumb on the screen where the graphs get inconvenient.

It’s a huge policy problem, however, and the only high profile politician to make it a plank of their platform is Zohran Mamdani. That’s not surprising, since nearly seventy percent of New Yorkers rent, over double the rate of the country as a whole.

Last time I didn’t touch on the rentals, and this time what’s neglected is the history of racism and housing—a topic that requires its own line of evidence—but that is, again, beyond the scope of this article. I’ll let Dave have the last word. His takes on the situation are broader, unmoored to the vibescession discourse.

Dave Halperin: My YIMBY rental take is a values one. I don’t have a lot of graphs on-hand. As a base line, renters are poorer and more financially precarious than home owners, but as a society we spend a lot more time worrying about home owners and temporarily embarrassed soon to be home owners than those most in need.

The majority of land in almost every city in America is zoned only for single-family homes. And those homes are intended to be owner occupied. You can see this in the freak out about the rise of single-family rentals. NIMBYism and the racism/classism underlying it can't be disentangled from anti-renter sentiment. If you only have owner-occupied homes in a neighborhood, the only people who can move in are those able to afford a down payment for a piece of land of at least the minimum lot size, plus the house built on top. There's a frequent NIMBY talking point against rental projects where they say they’re concerned these residents will be transients who don't contribute to the community. This stuff makes me furious.

There’s nothing wrong with home ownership, but we're always going to need rental housing, and the anti-renter/valorization of the home owner culture has done a lot of harm. I'll leave it there for now, although there’s more I could say on how renters constantly get shafted in various policy areas in this country and the history.

Subscribe now

1

The MCSI does ask survey participants whether they own stocks, then asks them to estimate the total value of their investments. The most recent data for that can be found here. Wealthier participants have better consumer sentiment than the poorer. But like the data overall, consumer sentiment is worse across the wealth spectrum than it was at the height of the 2008-2009 financial crash. Someone could easily calculate the relative sentiment has shifted over time. That someone won’t be me. This too is beyond the scope of this Substack.

Update: I was pointed to the MCSI breakdown by income. Eyeballing it, the sentiment for the bottom third held up relatively well compared to the top two-thirds, but that’s changed in the past few years.

2

For completion’s sake: here’s a FRED graph that tracks rental inflation, adjusted for CPI less shelter (so excluding inflation in rental prices and Owner’s Equivalent rent).

3

More graphs in the footnotes:

This is part two of a two part series (Ia, Ib) about the 1978 neo-Nazi novel The Turner Diaries. Today I’ll only be talking about it in passing, so no content warning here. Part I examined the novel itself as fiction qua fiction, but today I’m interested in the memetics (as opposed to mimetics) of violent political rhetoric.

Some Artifacts of Our Shared Historical Experience

The Turner Diaries’ author, William Pierce, imagined racial cleansing through genocide and nuclear war. The woodchipper meme above imagines cleansing Mark Zuckerberg from the planet in the style of Steve Buschemi in Fargo. Hasan Piker mused, in the leftist equivalent of a heated gaming moment, that if you care about preventing Medicare fraud, you need to kill Rick Scott. [My editor wants me to note that Hasan’s statement was suggesting policy solutions in response to Mike Johnson saying, “We are going go into those programs and carve out the fraud, waste and abuse”]

Enjoy a gallery of other examples, curated by me.

Several of these controversies are old. Kathy Griffin was canceled in… checks notes… May 2017. The Loomis tweet is from 2012. A man threatened to drive over me while I was laying the middle of the road in 2015. The inflamed rhetoric of political violence isn’t new. It’s always out there in the ether, lurking on message boards and Discord, or posted by VCs on TwitterX.

But does it mean anything? Who knows? We’re just doing some noticing here. It seems important that none of the examples discussed here elicited the wished-for spasms of violence. Rick Scott is still alive. The ex-troops of the Democratic party are still free and seated in Congress. Wayne LaPierre, the former head of the NRA, remained in charge of the organization until 2024, until an investigation by New York State uncovered that he’d been using the NRA as his own personal piggy bank. He went to trial, and was ordered to pay back $4.3 million dollars (the money was better off wasted). The image of a decapitated Trump killed Kathy Griffin’s career but, as noted earlier, Trump is still alive. Sources tell me he’s even returned to elected office.

Does it matter that the only person to suffer lasting consequences for their actions was a woman? Inquiring minds want to know.

This is homicidal ideation. Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, I felt an impulse to take one more step. Others give in to the urge to craft content from their immediate emotional reaction to the daily news extruded by their feed. It’s human. But I wouldn’t say it’s nothing. It’s certainly something. I can easily pick through the historical record and find calls for violence that translate directly to murders, massacre, and genocide. Is a meme about pulping billionaires in a wood chipper giving Jean-Paul Marat? Do the antebellum Southern fire eaters and Julius Streicher of Der Stürmer map on to Elon Musk’s daily retweets? The list goes on forever; we can play this game all day. Are these the futures for which we’re headed? Revolution, civil war, World War III?

Like I said before, I’m just noticing here. Jumped-up, monkey brain pattern matching in an information environment maladapted to that evolutionary accident.

Subscribe now

Which Way, Western Man?

All four of the examples of posts by public figures of varying degrees of notoriety, attracted media interest. You can read a plethora of news stories and takes about each of them. Hasan’s statement about Rick Scott generated the most media attention of all, eclipsing interest in the President of the United States calling for the execution of congressional representatives. While all these political violence culminated in quad nothingburgers, political violence has become a regular facet of American life. On Monday, two men shot up a mosque, killing three. A minor news story, at least in my bubble. Assassination attempts against Trump, of varying degrees of seriousness, happen every few months like clockwork. Alex Pretti. Charlie Kirk. Luigi Mangione and Brian Thompson, the target of his wrath. No one would argue that these killers were radicalized by a meme they saw on Facebook or 4Chan, but… it also feels untrue to say that they weren’t?

I don’t particularly subscribe to Adam Tooze’s theory of the polycrisis, that we’re in a historical period where society is the equivalent of an office drone who’s been fired and served up divorce papers while trapped in a burning skyscraper in the middle of an earthquake. At the same time, it’s obvious we cannot look back at the past eighty years or so of American history and think that like every crisis before, this too shall pass. The distance of history obscures the turmoil of the past but also, more importantly, there is not so much as a mirage of stability on the horizon. We’re adults, we read the news. We can be honest with ourselves. The American system might not be on the verge of collapse, but anyone who follows the news can only be certain that things are going to continue being very fucking weird.

Why is Ross Douthat asking Hasan about Rick Scott? And why is Hasan lying? We all know what Hasan thinks: he believes, on an abstract level, that Rick Scott deserves to die. There’s an entire swathe of people he thinks the country would be better off without, permanently. But the meaning of the media coverage is equally mendacious. The questions, the controversy, are framed to insinuate murderous intent. But like we know that Hasan wouldn’t give a shit if Rick Scott died, we also know that he doesn’t want one of his viewers to go out there and unload a clip through Scott’s window while he’s pulling out of his driveway.

At the same time, if it happened, people (who are not Hasan Piker) would cheer on the assassin. This is true inn reverse. If some incel detonates a suicide vest during an AOC town hall, the right won’t be found shedding any tears.

My point, inosfar as I have one (lol), is that the media is missing the moment. Who fucking cares what Hasan Piker said about Rick Scott. Things are getting medieval out there, man. Professor Sameer Srivastava has written about the dehumanization of our political enemies, which Just kidding, get that corny shit out of here. That kind of sentence is tendentious filler, not an approach to understanding and knowledge.

Evidence in Search of a Thesis

Believe it or not, this brings us back to The Turner Diaries. I’m not trying to discount the excellent reporting on the groyperification of the right and the embedding of their semiprecious jewels of violent fantasy into our cultural comfort blankie. Even The New York Times, purveyor of our national stupidity, dabbles in the practice.

The calls for violence against political opponents are metaphorical, little flourishes in the creative writing exercise that is content creation. But the violence is very real. There is a fissure here, between the sum total of American political life as presented and the inferences gleaned from the proliferation of stories that should not be happening.

If you, like me, scan the front page of The New York Times (yeah, yeah, so sue me) first thing every morning, you will have a rough idea of the country’s daily rhythm. If you go one step further and actually bother to read a few of the articles, you will be well informed about the factual basis of the country’s happenings. But you’ll be hard pressed to find the why.

The media records a depiction the country’s ego, a rational accounting of the cause and effect of the chronological chronicling of events. This is a source of frustration for the libs—Trump’s decisionmaking can’t be explained by the weighing of possible outcomes and the measuring of pros and cons. It’s not just Trump though; right now the country’s id is in control.

There’s a difference between the jawing of a pundit and Cole Allen sprinting past Secret Service to assassinate the president. The former is content, while the latter is deadly serious. In the media, they’re treated as analogous. What kind of reaction does an armed shooter beelining for a hall filled with journalists elicit? It responds with chum for the content machine.

Cole Allen was a consumer of #resistlib media. Will Stancil is not telling his followers to kill, kill kill. You can’t connect his murderous rage to Hasan’s rational—albeit murderous—diagnosis of the solution to widespread Medicare fraud. They’re different diagnoses of different problems; vigilante Brutusism as opposed to utilitarian wonkery. The media tries to tie the two together because there’s little interest in diagnosing the appetite for American Carnage.

William Pierce (may he rot in hell) would have known what to make of Allen’s actions. It’s the dark twin of Earl Turner’s bloodlust. Another man who knows, or is at least grasping toward this epiphany, is Elon Musk. And the journalists, incurious dullards that they are, bant and talk sports in his sewer.

All I know is that we’re headed nowhere good, and we’re headed there fast. And maybe the right response to a world drowning in confident, murderous certainty isn't another thesis. Maybe it's this: a guy on the internet, noticing things, declining to tell you what to think about them. You're welcome.

Subscribe now

This is the second half of the first part of a two-part series (Ia, Ib, II) about The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel written by the neo-Nazi William Pierce. It has been called, mostly by Pierce himself, “the bible of the racist right" and a "handbook for white victory."

Last week we discussed some of the discourse around the novel, then looked at roughly the first third. Earl Turner and his terror cell, Unit Four, are hiding from “the system” in an abandoned warehouse. We see them commit their first murder, then a few more, and then they bomb the FBI headquarters in the DMV (presumably Quantico), resulting in the deaths of some 700 people.

Subscribe now

The Psychology of the Neo-Nazi Terrorist

This week, I want to follow Turner’s character arc to its psychological conclusion. The logic of white supremacy, as explicitly outlined by the book itself, leads him from terrorism, to territorial conquest, then ethnic cleansing, and, finally, nuclear martyrdom. As he racks up kills, he experiences an increasing disregard for his victims.

Picking up where we left off: Turner returns to the wreckage created by the his bomb, where he helps a young white woman injured in the blast. Justifying the action to himself, he writes:

Unit Four unleashes a campaign of terror against Washington, D.C., targeting the media and political infrastructure. Luckily for them, the FBI has been fatally undermined by quotas for Black agents and they prove hopelessly inept at rooting out Turner’s cell.

It’s almost redundant to point it out—as the writer was an avowed neo-Nazi—but the ideology embedded in the narrative structure (and espoused by Turner) maps nicely on to the fourteen characteristics outlined in Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay, “Ur-fascism.” Characteristic number eight is especially salient here.

The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies… Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

This simultaneous strength and weakness is a constant refrain throughout the novel. But because this is fiction and not history, Turner and the Organization are able to invert the logical conclusion, and suceed by going harder in the paint than their Aryan forebears. It’s a nifty trick for the sake of plot: Turner never has to worry about being caught because of the stupidity of his enemies, and they get away with pretty much everything because of Black and Jewish incompetence.

However, the terror attacks backfire. Intended to soften support for the System and bring fence-sitters over to their cause, Turner watches as the counter-propaganda effort by the System drives their public support into the ground.

“Worldbuilding” Break

The US is rotten to the core, but the swifts kicks of bombings and assassinations fail to bring it tumbling down. They continue the ineffective terror attacks anyway, until at about midpoint of the novel, sloppy opsec and being horny on main gets Turner into deep trouble.

Put a pin in that, though, because before we get there Pierce engages in some lengthy wheelspinning that constitutes the bulk of his worldbuilding. While Turner waits to be called forward as the man of destiny, we are treated to some neo-Nazi flânerie.

There is a rape epidemic in this America, perpetuated primarily by Black people, but also by Puerto Ricans.1

The collapse of the American social fabric has impacted Georgetown, a D.C. neighborhood, especially hard.

Turner rescues one of these squatters from one being raped by, “two young thugs—they looked like Puerto Ricans or Mexicans.” Her name is Elsa, and he drops her back off at her squat. Then, because nothing violent has happened in a while and this is first and foremost a work of pulp, Unit Four executes three Black men, a Black woman, and two White women who are trying to break into their warehouse so that they can shoot up.

The audience’s bloodlust satiated for the moment, we get some more Elsa content. I know this shit is getting tedious, but I want to catalogue the breadth of the novel’s hateful tropes, all of which are still familiar to us today.

To get this out of the way, I’m going to summarize this subplot in bullet points, and without quoting the text.

• She’s a redheaded hottie. She’s seventeen, max. It’s ephebophilia, actually.

• Elsa comes from a lib family. Her mother’s job was moving Black welfare families into white neighborhoods.

• The squat she’s a part of sold one of its members into (white) slavery. The name of the buyer? Kappy the [slur].

• Turner tries to recruit a Nazi punk squat to his cause, but realizes they’re undisciplined degenerates.

The last point is an important one in Turner’s ideological development. He comes to realize that the Organization is not, cannot be, a mass movement. It’s not even a vanguard.

In order to secure the future of the white race, it must be eugenicist.

Putting the Socialist in National Socialist

One of the squatters snitched on him, and the dastardly, DEI-plagued FBI finally tracks down his cell. His compatriots escape, but Turner himself is captured. He’s tortured by an Israeli intelligence operative, but after a narratively brief year in prison the Organization carries out a jailbreak that, bizarrely, reduces what should be a set-piece action scene to two short paragraphs.

This allows Pierce to jump eighteen months into the future. The Organization has not been idle in Turner’s absence. They’re no longer trying to win over the population of the United States through a widespread terror campaign. Kudos to Pierce for recognizing what an abjectly stupid idea this is: maybe Timothy McVeigh would’ve tried his hand at a different tactic if he’d read past the first fifty pages of the book.

Instead, they’re sabotaging the country’s economy to precipitate the collapse of the state. White supremacist accelerationism is the tactic du jour, but they’re not under the assumption that the Whites of America will join them en masse. Turner, and perhaps Pierce as well, have made a conceptual leap. The top two-percent of the population must rule: the rest are chaff to be dominated or disposed of.

They attack power plants, factories, and begin circulating massive amounts of counterfeit currency. Deprivation and starvation are goals pursued with gusto. What Turner can’t buy, he steals. He robs a warehouse to obtain 200 technologically advanced watches in order to build more precise bombs.

The Organization supplies Turner with a new identity, taken from a Jewish man they’ve kidnapped and murdered. Even with the biased worldbuilding fiction offers an author to stack the deck in favor of his worldview, the future offered by The Turner Diaries is a bleak one. With the exception of mass rape, every crime committed by the Organization is worse than the actions of the tyrannical government they’re fighting against. Murder, terror, and theft: what kind of society are we building here people? If this were a better book, Turner might pause to consider whether his wanton criminality undermines his claims to superiority over the society he’s attempting to grind into dust.

But it’s not, so he doesn’t.

Turner is sent to California, where the Organization launches a military attack to annex the state. They take control of Vandenberg Airforce Base (now known as Vandenberg Space Force Base) and threaten nuclear retaliation if the US military intervenes. Once again—through the magic of fiction—the plan works. The Organization has concentrated a large enough paramilitary force to take control of Southern California. And here we get a peek at the future of neo-Nazi fantasies.

Chaos reigns, and Turner and his co-revolutionaries raid food stores across LA, securing supplies for themselves while starving the population into submission. Anyone who isn’t white is corralled into ghettos and the neo-Nazis prepare them for a death march across their new, self-declared borders.

It’s in their sack of LA where the most famous event in the book takes place: the Day of the Rope.

The Day of the Rope, for the innocent, is the mass hanging of White race defilers and race traitors. For the women, that means they dared to sleep with a non-White man. For the men, it’s those who “helped promote or implement the System’s racial program.”

This is, in my opinion, the most brutal chapter in the entire book, worse than the string of murders that come before or the nuclear war that comes after. Pierce is really flexing his writing chops here, such as they are, and we’re treated to scenes like this:

Of course, wrecking a metropolitan area with over ten million inhabitants entails a certain amount of adversity. Lucky for Turner, they’ve turned back the clock in more ways than one. Southern California becomes transformed into what is essentially a mid-twentieth century communist dictatorship. The surviving residents are assigned jobs, and supplies are distributed by from centrally controlled depots by this new junta. He has turned LA into North Korea, and could not be prouder.

It would be fair to assume that these actions culminate in a west coast White nationalist ethnostate that sweeps across the nation as the System collapses under the weight of its own corruption. But Pierce gives the System credit for possessing an impressive hardiness, even if they’re unable to foil literally any of the Organization’s plans.

We’ve progressed through stochastic terror to economic warfare to ethnic cleansing. There’s nothing to show for it except hardship. And was it worth it? Turner thinks it was.

To recap the novel’s progression thus far: the opening act of the novel, where Turner engages in small-scale terrorism and is eventually captured, takes up the first fifty percent; the economic warfare and conquest of California takes up another third. We have fifteen percent of the book left to get genocidal.

Turner, along with other members of the Organization, plant hidden nuclear weapons in every major US city, which the Organization uses to blackmail the System and keep them from invading the “liberated zone” of California. This works as a temporary stopgap, but their spies within the military report that the Jews plan to nuke California. The threat is imminent (convenient), and neo-Nazi California is forced to strike first. They have a limited number of nuclear missiles, and use them to target the Soviet Union (and also New York City and Israel, for obvious reasons). The Pentagon must therefore launch its own atomic wad against the Soviet Union, in order to blunt the retaliatory salvo.

With the help of plot armor, the Soviet attacks fail to hit Washington, D.C., where Turner has rejoined Unit Four. He’s outside when a fireball erupts to his north. Baltimore is no more. Two dozen cities are destroyed. Twenty million die. While watching a news program detailing the aftermath, Turner treats us to perhaps the most concentrated anti-semitic page in any novel, ever, when the Jewish news anchor, lapses in and out of speaking in Hebrew while claiming California has been annihilated. I won’t excerpt it here. It seems in poor taste.

But!

But!!

But!!!

The “liberated zone” in California survived. It was struck by two missiles, but only ten percent of the population was wiped out. I don’t think that math quite works out, but whatever. Turner had given over to despair, but it was all Jewish propaganda. The Organization is firmly in control of the situation.

At this point the East coast collapses into anarchy, and Turner and his unit organize a white enclave amidst the chaos. Some of the survivors lament what has happened, but Turner himself has no such compuctions. What is the moral weight of the deaths of millions? What is his responsibility for the collapse of his country? I’ll let him tell you in his own words:

This is the endpoint of Nazism, both the old and new variety. Turner has gone from believing that his goal is to liberate White society to believing that everyone not a member of good standing in the Organization is culpable and deserves to die.

I’m going to paraphrase from Richard Evans’s The Third Reich at War. It’s from memory, as the book is huge and, also, my copy is either packed away in unopened boxes or something I got rid of it when I moved.

In the final months of the war, when even Hitler realized Germany was going to lose, he came to believe that the German people no longer deserved to exist. The best of them had all been killed in the war, and what remained was a degenerate race thoroughly deserving of the genocide he assumed the allies were already commencing.

Pierce gives us this same grim worldview, but with a fairy tale ending. In the end, America is destroyed by the people who think the Jews and the Blacks are destroying America. Turner witnesses destruction on a scale that dwarfs that of World War II, but he is confident the Aryans are out there, on the cusp of victory, and ready to rebuild a racial utopia in the ruins.

Demonstrating the simultaneous strength and weakness of the enemy, California is still under threat of invasion. Turner volunteers for a suicide mission. He’s going to fly a prop plane loaded with a nuclear bomb right into the Pentagon. If it’s successful, the decapitation strike should kill the remaining generals the System has left and bring their military machinations to a halt. He writes in his diary about the preparations, then imagines his martyrdom. It’s a sleight of hand for a story told supposedly-after-the-fact. If your hero dies, how can the audience experience their heroic downfall? Sometimes the diary is taken up by a secondary character, but here, imagination must suffice.

The historian from the prologue returns for an epilogue. Turner nuked the Pentagon. The war went on for five more years, but the conquest of the US by white supremacists was followed by an even swifter victory in Europe. What about the rest of the world? Well:

The novel ends a few paragraphs after that, with a reference to Hitler as “the Great One,” and a written appreciation of Turner’s sacrifice for “helping greatly to assure that his race would survive and prosper.”

Fin.

Did We Learn Anything

I think so. Was it anything valuable? In my opinion, yes, but I dunno if I’d disagree with anyone saying it wasn’t worth the effort. I don’t think white supremacy must lead to genocidal monomania, but it can and has, both in this novel and across history.

The screenshots I’ve chosen for this series are all from Twitter, the X app. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a company that sanctions and encourages this kind of thinking, and that should give anyone who uses it pause.

And with that out of the way, next week I can write about what I meant to in the first place, which is: how do we and how should we treat rhetorically violent speech about politics, from both the left, right, and the center.

Table-setting

I’m reading John Ganz’s How the Clock Broke. In it, he writes this about the murder of comedian Alan Berg.

In June 1984 Berg was gunned down by automatic weapons in an ambush outside his home by members of The Order, the white nationalist terror group inspired by William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries. (The Order was one of the groups Samuel Francis wrote about in 1985 that signaled the awakening of a new radical right energy).

This week I intended to write about the rhetorics of political violence, about Hasan Piker’s Rick Scott comment, the right broadly, and the recent spate of young, radicalized tech bro types. That will come next week in two weeks, following an in-depth examination of an infamous novel composed consciously as an unbroken piece of propaganda advocating for violence against the American state and its citizens.

The Turner Diaries is the ur-text of right-wing, American terrorism. It served as a direct inspiration for Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City bombing), as well as for these other losers.

I was aware of its reputation and its contents in a vague way, but I was curious about what it actually said, and whether it would seem quaint in our world of 4Chan and Elon Musk, Lord of X, the global app for Nazi-appreciators. The book is only about two-hundred pages long and easy to read. I finished it in a few days.

It is, by a wide margin, the most evil book I’ve ever read. I found its wanton descriptions of violence and genocide lightly traumatic. I don’t recommend anyone read it (shocking, I know), for the same I don’t recommend watching snuff films online, whatever their purported news value.

The research I did around the novel focuses on its real-world repercussions and the biographical histories of Pierce himself, his peers, and those who found inspiration in his work. That’s not what I’m discussing today, but if you’re interested in a piece of media unraveling those threads, allow me to recommend the journalist Molly Conger’s podcast episode on the novel.

What I’m interested in is analyzing The Turner Diaries as fiction qua fiction. Get your Death of the Author takes out of here; today fiction reflects the views of the author. Skilled writers can avoid this—to some extent—but Pierce is not him. In fact, The Turner Diaries functions doubly as both adventure story and propaganda; it serves up an entire dialectic: how Pierce’s worldview, as shown through his worldbuilding, interfaces with the protagonist’s (and the author’s) ideology, which resolves through further radicalization into the fantasy of a global war of racial cleansing. I don’t think the summaries already out there do the hate embedded in the text justice.

Lastly, I’m not Jewish. I’m not Black. Adjust your lens accordingly.

However, my wife is Black. White dudes married to Black women get exactly one mention in the book. We are far down on his list of racial purity concerns (although that wouldn’t spare us in the world of The Turner Diaries: I will be hanged and she will be shot). My mixed-race kid, however, is his concern. Brace yourself, here is our first excerpt:

I’m going to go through novel more-or-less chronologically, because it’s easier to write, but also because there is a purposeful, ongoing radicalization of Turner’s beliefs that unfolds alongside a revolutionary campaign that begins with small stakes murder and ends with global genocide.

I actually hate all this table-setting shit. I try not to include it in my writing wherever possible, and skim or skip it while reading (often it’s the entirety of the article). But I thought all of this was important, so I apologize.

The Turner Diaries, Not Exactly Chapter-by-Chapter

Ok, so on the level of plot and structure, what is The Turner Diaries? It’s a “Found Footage” science fiction story. The novel opens with a foreword by a fictional historian. He informs us the neo-Nazis now rule over the United States, and that what follows is the diary of a rank-and-file member who fought in “The Great Revolution.” The first chapter is his first entry in the diary, and it proceeds chronologically until he writes about a suicide mission which he has planned and will soon embark. The final chapter is an epilogue, again by the historian, where he summarizes the historical events in the decade following Turner’s “Martyrdom.” Within the body of the novel, the historian provides parenthetical interjections, ostensibly to clear up confusion for his futuristic audience, but they function primarily as worldbuilding that foreshadow the neo-Nazis eventual victory.

E.g.:

The novel’s inciting incident is the passage of the “Cohen Act,” a law that outlaws the private ownership of firearms. By this time Turner is already a committed member of The Organization, an underground revolutionary group. He lives as part of a four person cell, three men and a woman. They’re designated “Unit Four.” A posse of Black people led by a Jewish officer show up at their apartment to confiscate Turner’s guns. When they don’t find any, the Jewish Officer (surname Tepper) states, “This is a bad one. He has a racist record. Been cited by the council twice.” They proceed to smash his apartment and find a gun he’s hidden in a door frame. In a stroke of luck, he avoids prison because the raids are more successful than “The System” expects. Too many people failed to turn in their weapons.

And here we get the first piece of worldbuilding in our sci-fi dystopia:

Pierce published the novel over three years, from 1975 to 1978, as a serial series in his white supremacist tabloid Attack!. It takes place between 1991 and 1993. So we can narrow its genre to near-future dystopia, occurring within Pierce’s own lifetime even (he died in 2002). Extrapolating from a few brief asides across the novel, Jews have been leading “The System,” the amalgamation of government, media, and other elite institutions that run the country since “they” tricked the American people into World War II.1 And against Hitler no less, who is referred to elsewhere as “the Great One.” In the fifty years since, the US has been in decline, and Turner states over and over again that the country is on the brink of collapse.2 The System has enlisted the Black population as its enforcers. The cops, soldiers, and officials standing in Turner’s way are invariably Black.

Throughout the novel, we are also told the System encourages race-mixing, either through their propaganda network or public policy. In one instance, a rabbi and pastor write an op-ed calling for the government to provide tax breaks for interracial families. Said religious leaders are, of course, targeted for assassination by the Organization.

This recurring bit reminds me of a news story in the more recent past.

Following the raid, Turner and his cell go into hiding. To fund their movement they turn to armed robbery, and murder a Jewish man who runs a deli, then empty the cash register. One thing I want to note about the stick-up is that it makes Turner queasy.

An aside: the descriptions of the robbery and, especially the murder, are supposed to be funny (I won’t excerpt it). It’s the only attempt at humor in the book. This is in stark contrast to the shitposting aesthetic of the far right today. Were an equivalent novel written today, it would be fully of the racist, anti-semitic “humor” all over X or other, equally unsavory, sites. Instead, it’s entirely absent apart from this single instance. Everything is played straight.

Money in hand (Turner tells us it’s $1426), Unit Four rents an abandoned warehouse somewhere in Fairfax county, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. Pierce, the author, was a physicist. Turner is an electrical engineer. His job within the Organization is to construct special radios that they use for secure communication. But the System is going to… blah blah blah I won’t bore you with the details. It’s your run-of-the-mill right-wing paranoia fantasy, Christian nationalism stripped of the mark of the beast.

Turner is tasked with building a bomb to blow up the FBI headquarters, and the reader is treated to a very detailed explanation of how to build a bomb. They hijack a truck (driven, of course, by a Black man, who they murder) and set us up the bomb. Another member of Unit Four drives it through the building’s freight gate (waved on by an incompetent Black guard) and into basement of the FBI headquarters. If this sounds familiar, this is the scene Timothy McVeigh sought to copy. I’m going to quote Molly Conger here:

Because while Pierce denies that McVeigh built the exact bomb described in the book, he readily admitted in an interview for Rolling Stone that you can absolutely build a functioning bomb based on the text of the novel.

He contends only that it would not be that particular bomb.

The bomb goes off and Turner rushes toward the scene to inspect the aftermath. Turner and his co-conspirators find an injured white girl (injured by the explosion!) and tourniquet her leg. He thinks she’ll survive.

As justification for his actions, he offers this:

His actions and reactions here, aiding the injured girl and reflecting on the death of the very people he claims to be liberating, sign post the path the novel will take. Make a note of them. Because what Pierce is doing in this novel is taking a man—anti-semitic and racist yes, but recognizably human—and turning him into a soldier. From there, he will become a genocidal monster. And Pierce leaves no doubt that he thinks this is good. Admirable even.

Turner’s character development will have to wait for next week. This is much longer than I was expecting, and I’m going to have to dip into the Devereauxian 3-part 2-part bag.

Subscribe now

We mourn those we’ve lost. Their usernames were, from left to right, top to bottom, Wilson, _dreaming, contango, and Fudd. Each was broken in his own beautiful way, but taken together they are definitely a Type of Guy that is familiar to anyone who has spent more than a few minutes online. They were all low effort volume posters. Not exactly trolls, but not not trolls. All four were banned.

Our online vocabulary is poorer for its lack of a word that describes those who fill this ecological niche. In the Odd Lots Discord the description is eponymous, and one can unearth references to “Fudd-likes,” “dreamings,” and “Wilsons,” sometimes shortened to the volleyball emoji (🏐), a reference to Tom Hanks’s sole companion in the movie Castaway. Often, this leapt from metaphorical description to, rightly or wrongly, direct accusation. As in “Wilson, don’t ban evade,” or “Don’t bother, it’s just 🏐.”

I’m not sure how legible this forum drama is for someone who didn’t experience, and I’m not going to bother trying recapture the dubious magic of “being there.” What I hope is that everyone has had a Wilson—or a _dreaming—in his, her, or their life, and that what is specific is also universal. But if not, and this is the blog version of being inundated with pictures of your friend’s pet, I’ll DM you a hand drawn kitten. Hang in there!

Here’s a collection of their bangers I’ve excerpted to set the mood. Who exactly said what, or when, is less important than providing a sample of how they’ve enriched my own life.

yes yes instead spend several hours a day on this discord talking about communism and elon, im sure your time will be better spent.

City where I lived was #1 murder per capita at the time, and Thugpac was their idol. The gang initiation was to kill a white person. Once you did that you got access to drug running and more killing. Tupac contributed to celebrating the rot in the black community in America

never seen so many blocked messages on discord before. very impressive. i think ‘troll lots’ is a more appropiate name for this discord.

Is slander a bannable offense here? Cause if not is it fair game to slander you back @Moderator

wild thing to say when something like three people told me to commit suicide yesterday. “antagonize” is de rigeur internet chat [sic]

If it looks like I’m pulling some right-wing grievance trolls who leave the mountains of X, the everything app, to harass a server of cloistered libs, you have to believe me when I say that’s not case. Only one of the users—🏐—was a recognizable rightwinger. I doubt _dreaming or fudd ever bothered to vote, and ConTango was some sort of Trump-derangement-syndrome, lead-poisoned Gen Xer.

What we have are people who joined a non-political server, in this case the official Discord for fans of a Bloomberg finance and economics podcast, and then proceeded to spam the ever-loving shit out of it. Their stories have a common thread. While not conventionally right-wing, all four sat in the “culturally conservative” quadrant of the political compass, while the tone of OLD is normie lib. This led to culture shock because, as I’ve gathered inductively from their behavior, crass sexism, thinly veiled racism, and the casual use of “retard” as a description, is the norm across the Discordverse.

When I join an online space and find this Roganesque atmosphere, I leave. But for our four horsemen of the poaster apocalypse, it’s like catnip. They’re drawn to the political channels like weebs to a pop-up body pillow stall. The tone is condescending. They are aggresive. The posting volumes range from big chungus to late season Lagannian. They are the gestalt of the horror movie, thrust into cyberreality.

I can empathize with the joy of trolling a community with whom you disagree on fundamentally everything, of antagonizing those you think are morons. It’s one of the great pleasures of online life. But it’s one thing to talk a little trash and leave; our quaternary villains set up camp, derailing the entire server by steering any discussion toward a referendum (always negative) of the high-volume, low salience troll du jour, swiftly becoming objects of scorn. It’s kind of funny at first, but there’s a shelf-life to counter trolling. Sooner than you’d think (a few days, maybe a week) all they’re doing, to use the technical term, is “shitting up the server.”

Why didn’t they leave, once every message they posted was met with unremitting mockery? Why don’t they get bored? Does copious amounts of negative attention innervate the withered organs that are their brains, their hearts? In some way it must, but also it’s clearly an addiction. The level of engagement that they at first sustained becomes insufficient. The need to escalate for moar attention becomes apparent.

We know how this story ends. With bans. However, the Elite Four were not undone by simple self-destruction. They were all savvy enough to toe a nebulous line, perhaps getting quickly banned from a single channel (usually #elections), but allowed to hang around and antagonize elsewhere.

There is an intermediary step. They must be provoked, a little at a time, into outbursts that demand mod response. Blanket disapproval does not suffice. They must be drawn into battle. Fortunately, OLD has its own Ash Ketchum.

davie, and his rumored spread sheet, were previously profiled by yours truly. However, davie’s posting velocity has slackened somewhat recently, but the Odd Lots Discord has someone who may, in more than one way, be our new Goh.

ConTango was the most recent of these Odd Lots Discord interlopers. Based on his join date, he created a Discord account just to join the community, although he never gave any indication that he listened to the Bloomberg podcast. Like the others discussed above, his debutante devolved into a running argument with roughly half of the regular users. He found a special affinity for the user MJ (profile date TBD), who he called, at various points the server’s “mascot” and also “Gilligan.” One tussles with power poster’s at their own peril.

The meme, included for posterity:

The community management side of the Odd Lots Discord is largely handled by a single mod with, as far as I’m aware, no connection to Bloomberg at all. It’s a benign sort of dictatorship, all things considered. Each of these peculiar sub-species of troll was dispatched after a residence of as little as three weeks or up to four months (average length of residency: 1.9 months).

The mods help those who help themselves. 🏐 was done in by his own racism. ConTango, being annoying enough that users called attention to his, again racism. For fudd, I honestly don’t remember. And _dreaming, for e-stalking a guest on the Odd Lots Podcast to prove that owning a wood burning stove means you are secretly rich.

I don’t know why, but the tenure of these users never overlapped. Is it because they’re all secretly the same person? I don’t think so; the posting styles are too idiosyncratic. It’s a law of internet ecology. I posit this counterfactual: had _dreaming joined the server and seen 🏐 duking it out with davie (and others), he would’ve moved on in search of uncontested territory. It’s a reasonable theory, certainly as good as any proposed by evolutionary psychology (derogatory).

Whatever the reason, a gap of one to three months followed each banning, until a new mentally unstable ne’er-do-well descended from the heavens like an Angel attempting to penetrate NERV. And the cycle repeats.

These are the story of the trolls of a specific forum, but the type is endemic to the online world. They proliferate in comment sections, the population expanding in inverse to the amount of moderation. Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money there is a longtime commenter who lost his mind after October 7th, and is reduced now to discoursing on global antisemitism below every single post, whether topic is SCOTIS overturning the VRA or Erik Loomis’s review of the eighteen concerts he attended in the past month. I can only assume the masthead hasn’t banned him yet out of affection for a bygone era. But I digress.

I want to give a shout out to a once-prolific commenter over at Slate Star Codex. This is old lore. He was banned eventually, although the fact that it took literal years of posting like this implies unsavory things about Scott Alexander’s worldview.

On forums and in blogs, their reach is limited. One of the pitfalls of microblogging sites like Twitter and Bluesky, though, is that someone can post their brainlet takes and gain a foothold across a huge swathe of the timelines. They even find people to champion their takes, either because they’re young and naive, genuinely fooled, or also brainless, aggressive assholes. The most successful of this type, the longest running low-effort spam troll, has got to be Glenn Greenwald. He fooled Edward Snowden and, for a long time, fooled the rest of us into thinking he was a force for good, instead of what he actually is: an antisocial douchebag.

There are examples on the left but, not being a splitter, I will keep those opinions to myself. 😇

While I’m recounting from the MPG Book of Grudges, allow me to mention Michael Tracey. Perhaps best known for claiming he was assaulted by the Democratic representative Maxine Waters, a claim backed by a video of the incident that showed nothing of the sort, he has lately taken on the thankless task of claiming Jeffrey Epstein was an innocent victim of the Deep State. Nothing he spouts has any value, but no one can stop him. Amazingly, and enviably, he has built a career out of this fact (along with, I assume, financial backing from questionable sources).

But there will not always be benevolent mods. In fact, Donald Trump fits this mold quite nicely. He is the Russell Westbrook of posting, the low efficiency volume shooter par excellence. Unlike Westbrook, the more bricks he threw, the more his power grew. And there’s nothing anyone can seem to do about him. Thus the world goes to shit, one logorrheic Truth Social post at a time.

I met a girl at a protest. We were both on the Logistics Committee of Occupy Atlanta, I didn’t sleep in a park with a bunch of homeless people looking for love, but that’s what I found. Fifteen years later, we’re married and have a kid.

Subscribe now

The increasingly-distant-as-I-write-this No Kings protests kicked off a round of one of the internet’s eternal, irresovable discourses: What is the point of mass protest in the US, when the past decade of American politics has shown us time and again their apparent inability to influence the course of the nation?

Andrea Pritzer wrote a defense of the protests’ utility at her not-Substack. It’s filled with facts and figures, focusing on the elections in November and the hope of a Democratic majority that can thwart Trump until, in 2028, the party regains the presidency and enacts a sweeping social democratic legislative agenda, the unrealized dream of the base.

I’ve been involved with several activist movements, with the time and energy devoted decreasing as I’ve gotten older. For close to a year I spent all of my time—and I mean all of it—sustaining the last embers of Occupy, a movement that sprouted and largely died across the span of a season. A few years later I laid down in front of traffic, that time for Black Lives Matter. I never got to Feel the Bern in person because, in November 2015, I moved to one of the last states on the primary calendar. A couple of years later I was in the Philly branch of DSA, where I participated in committees that, as far as I could tell, didn’t do anything. Now I go to a protest for a couple of hours with my daughter, then take her to an Easter Egg hunt at the local YMCA. At a macro level, these varying levels of effort have yielded the same result. Not much at all.

Whether it was worth the time invested comes down to a matter of perspective. Adults should all have the privilege of weaning ourselves off at least one, but preferably three to five, chemical dependencies. The daily lows, the mountain climb of frustration that comes with qutting, are a good window into how loosely tethered your emotional reactions are to the facts of your life. What was a minor annoyance becomes rage-inducing, what was mildly amusing now brings you to a tearful breakdown.

The same is true of activism; the meaning is subjective. As one person in a country of three-hundred and something million, a private citizen with no access to a resevoir of power or wealth, there’s no reason to think my voice will move the political direction of the United States. It’s like voting, but even less meaningful, as there’s rarely an obvious victory, no institutional position to be claimed as a prize when at the end of a campaign. We’re all passengers on the ship of history, either rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or pursuing our ant-lives on a generational journey with no beginning or end.

And yet!

One of the more perplexing lines against protests is the demand for a list of demands. Occupy had many slogans, the furthest reaching of which was, “We are the 99%.” My favorite was always “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.” It’s not a demand, but it’s perfectly legible and—best of all—succinct.

Protesting is an act of faith. There’s no promise it will lead to anything and, even if it does, it will have been along a path so circuituous that its impossible to disentangle from confounding factors. Did Bernie grow out of the Occupy protests? Was the ground for the eruption of BLM protests in 2020 prepared by those in 2014? Yes, no, and maybe are all acceptable answers.

In many ways, protesting, on an individual level, is the inverse of doomscrolling. They’re both a reaction to the news environment, but also our immediate surroundings. Doomscrolling is solitary and devoid of tactility. It is passive. It induces despair. Like breaking that addiction to cigarettes—or whatever—once the withdrawal is over and the mind clears, you will wonder why the fuck you were blasting yourself with extinction-event levels of negativity every day. Every hour. Every couple of minutes.

Posting is maybe a little better. Slightly. But protests are communal. Making a sign is creative. That it has no expectation beyond a moment of amusement for yourself and a few others is good, actually. And, of course, while protesting you touch grass, whether that’s the lawn outside a courthouse or a strip of greenery beside a highway.

At the start of Occupy, I was unemployed and angry about the fallout of the Great Recession; at the banks that got away with blowing up the economy; and at an Obama administration less interested in fixing problems than in laying low in hopes of avoiding as much Fox News artillery as possible. Just as importantly, I was living in a house with two roommates—a couple—engaged in a spectacular breakup that ended with a breaking and entering, followed by a restraining order. If I’d had Twitter then, perhaps I would’ve retreated to my room and doomscrolled. Instead I got out of the house, preferably for sixteen hours a day. It was a personal thing and, like the consequences of the protests themselves, the output of a messy tangle of forces outside my control. Like all aspects of life.

Almost everyone in my Atlanta social circle fit somewhere between apolitical and slightly right-of-center. They were all either suburbanite pre-professionals or hipster dirtbags. This is probably less true now, with the ubiquity of left-liberal to hard left thought available to anyone with a phone (a side effect of the post-Bush protest era? Maybe.), but when I arrived at Occupy I felt isolated and alone in my political beliefs. Talking with other people who thought shit was fucked up and bullshit blew my mind. I hadn’t know anyone else even cared. It was magical and something, at least in my experience, that online spaces can’t replicate. No one I met in Woodruff Park was there for me, but also they were; and likewise I was there for them.

Is this all a little solipsistic, a little bit of self-satisfied moral masturbation? Of course. The world is very big. There are people who command armies and the wealth of nations. My world is small. It’s what I can see with my own eyes, hear with my ears. I can’t accept the responsibility of bringing peace to the Middle East, or of smashing capitalism.

At the same time, do I wish American cities were awash with laser-focused Alinsky-ites? Also yes. But if that exists, I haven’t been lucky enough to find it. I never found my AOC to campaign for and, in a reverse-Barkan, I’m aware enough of my own modesty of talent to know that I’m not going to be an AOC. Nor am I going to be the campaign strategist for the next AOC. Best I can do is be a footsoldier of inconsistent devotion. Does that mean I should never leave the house so that I can incessantly doomscroll? No, I go to protests, both as a performative aspect of my conception of self, and because I think it’s better—for the reasons I’ve outlined above—than to not. But not because I think I’m going to change the world, or get the government to accede to some amalgamation of demands. It is selfish, but it’s honest. And in my opinion, that’s fine.

Is it better to be like this?

Don’t be a David Austin Walsh. If the choice is between the two, doomscrolling or driving to a protest, pick the protest. It’ll make you feel better if you let it. You probably won’t meet the love of your life. But then again, you might. And if I have one piece of advice for people doing the logistical work supporting the weekend warriors like I’ve become, it’s this: make sure you take pictures. During Occupy, I worked out of an anarchist commune called C-7. All I have left from that time is a little metal badge they made me, stowed in one of the unopened cardboard boxes that have followed me to a place that is not a home. But I don’t have any pictures (if anyone does, please send them to me, lol). I do have the wife though, which is a pretty good prize.

Subscribe now

One explanation:

Another:

In this article, I’m going to lay out some stats that undermine “the economy is great, actually” camp, and hint at a possible source—or at least contributor—to the vibescession. It’s not dispositive, but in my opinion the Stancil-Pearkes case has some holes. Today we’re not focusing on Burrito Taxis or luxe vacations, but housing, the single largest monthly expense for most Americans.

Allow us to start with a story from Mr Saver, a distinguished member of the Odd Lots Discord. Warning, there is basic math.

In 2012, I bought a house for $250k at a 2.7% loan. The principal and interest was about $1100/month, ignoring insurance, taxes, etc. Today that house would sell for about $450k with a 5.7% loan. Principal and interest would be around $2,500/month. During that time OER [ed: owner’s equivalent rent, how the Fed calculates housing inflation] went up 65%. The price of the house went up 80%. Real median income went up like 67%.

But, the out-the-door monthly cash flow for the buyer went up 127%.

Mr Saver is saying that if you look at numbers from the Federal Reserve, housing inflation has stayed in line with income growth. The experience of someone trying to buy a house, however, is quite different. It’s much worse.

I’ve pilfered some graphs from around the internet. They’re not comprehensive, but they should offer a snapshot of different aspects of the American housing crisis. Do we all at least agree there’s a housing crisis? I don’t know, but for the sake of time, I’m going to assume we do.

To help me with interpretation and tie it into the broader themes of the housing economy, I’ve enlisted the help of Massachusetts housing activist Dave Halperin, who is also an active user on the Odd Lots Discord. He is on the steering committee of A Better Cambridge, a local affiliate of Abundant Housing Massachusetts. You can find him in the Odd Lots Discord, and also other Discords I don’t belong to.

This is his thesis:

Dave Halperin: I’m a housing theory of everything person and do think this is a big part of the vibescession. People look at housing costs and don’t think they’re going to be able to lead the kind of lives they want to in various ways.

Housing with regard to inflation/wages is weird compared to other goods. People’s spending on housing as a percentage of income is mostly fixed. People will delay moving out of their parent’s house (household formation); or live far away from their job and deal with a soul-crushing commute; or endure a substandard apartment; or delay having kids before they spend more on housing. So if housing is too expensive, it leads to a lot of dissatisfaction without showing up in the statistics the way you’d expect, like if XYZ were too expensive and was messing up their budgets.

Mortgages

In 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a report highlighting the affordability crisis in mortgages. After a decade of flat, low rates, the average 30-year mortgage more than doubled following the pandemic. This, combined with the continued increase of housing prices, has led to this situation:

Through the 2000s and 2010s, the cost of buying a house roughly tracked the median household income. This diverged following the pandemic, when the cost of housing began to skyrocket.

From the same report, we can see the composition of all mortgages in the US:

Halfway through 2020, and continuing until the beginning of 2022, Americans were able to secure historically low interest rate mortgages. The spike in rates, and the slow turnover of low interest rate mortgages, had created a dual pressure on both home buyers and home sellers. For the home buyers, refer to the parable of Mr Saver; it’s simply much more expensive to buy a house now than it was five years ago. For the sellers, when they move they’ll be paying substantially more interest on their new home.

However, a decade ago, interest rates were at similar rates to what they are today. Why would that create a crisis now, but not then? I’ll let Dave explain:

Dave: Here you can see the divide between the haves/have nots who managed to get in before interest rates shot up. Even if 6%+ used to be more common, as in the beginning of the graph, the price vs income was more reasonable. That made financing manageable. But with already very high prices, many people feel locked out. Plus even those with low interest mortgages have a golden handcuff effect. They might have a good reason to move, but they feel trapped.

MPG: So the higher mortgage rates in the 10s are kind of a mirage because of lower housing prices all around?

Dave: I don’t think mirage is the right word. It used to be normal to have higher interest rates than we do now. They're high now on a relative basis compared to recent history and it's causing problems, but they're not that high in historical terms. The monthly payment on a house the previous time we had 6+% mortgages was much more affordable than now. Because house prices were lower.

Square Footage

The real estate analyst Kevin Erdmann published this graph on his Substack.

The square footage of new housing has declined, even as Americans make more money. This is another divergence from the past. Add the increasing price of housing to the equation, and people are paying more than ever per square foot, which declined substantially after 2022.

This is, I think, at odds with the popular narrative around new housing, which focuses on ever-expanding suburbs and the continued dominance of the McMansion. The auto market does follow this pattern, where Americans are buying larger, more expensive cars (with better profit margins for the auto manufacturers). For housing, however, this does not appear to be the case.

Dave Halperin: Of course, you're going to get objections that American homes are too big anyway. The local new developments people see are gaudy, huge McMansions. People say the starter home is dead and we should be building smaller homes. There needs to be some tablesetting about what's going on here and why the loss of square footage is bad, but I approve of this graph overall.

By my reckoning, the proliferation of McMansions and the decline of starter homes are trends in high profile places in major metros. We focus on these places for obvious reasons. It's sort of like how much discourse gentrification gets, when the amount of gentrifying places is pretty small. You're going to build a McMansion when a house gets redeveloped in Newton, MA because you can't build apartments and you want to max out your square feet. Plus, there are plenty of people with high salaries who can afford whatever giant thing you can build within the zoning envelope. But almost no new housing production happens in Newton. We've choked off construction in the places rich people want to live. Where it is happening is on the fringes and in lower cost metros. New houses need to be priced to sell at its given location, and be financeable for the salary of the person in the target city. If you make them too big they'll be too expensive. I doubt the houses going up in MJ's neighborhood are that big [emphasis mine. MJ is an Odd Lots Discord power-poster who lives in Alabama. He will eventually get a profile].

That, plus household size is going up, which pushes the square footage per person down.

Household Formation

Another graph, once again courtesy of Kevin Erdmann. This one is about how many adults there are compared to the amount of houses in the US.

The inability of adults who want to form new households, e.g. move out of their parents’ house, but are unable to is very important, obviously true, and difficult to quantify. This is an attempt to do so.

You can see two things here. First, the leveling off of adults per occupied home, then it’s slow uptick. This, as marriage rates are falling, suggests that after the Great Recession new housing has not been built to keep with the pace of demand. The blue line, adults per home, is for total houses. The reverse of the steady trend downward shows this same phenomenon, but more acutely. What’s being shown here is a second order effect of the decrease in vacancy rates. Starting in 2011 new housing has not been built at a rate to even keep the vacancy rate steady. It is increasing instead, which has the additional effect of pushing up housing prices.

Dave: The trend in adults per household declined right up to the GFC, when housing production cratered and never recovered. That it started rising again is an interesting graph/piece of data on this.

Something that I think clearly happened—but I don’t have rigorous analysis of—was that the pandemic created a demand shock. Higher income people wanted more space because of work-from-home policies and a bunch of bedrooms got turned into home offices, while the pre-existing housing shortage was already putting upward pressure on household size.

MPG: If the story is that people bid up the prices of larger homes during COVID to get home offices, why hasn’t that trend reversed? The increasing mortgage rates aren’t enough, right?

Dave: Yeah, I don’t know if there's a standard explanation people have settled on. For what it’s worth, I think demand from home offices is still a factor in pushing up prices and reducing vacancy. There was some pull back on remote work, but it's still significantly elevated compared to before the pandemic. As a rich tech person, I work from home four days a week. I still live by myself in a two bedroom condo. My second bedroom is a home office. This is square footage I'm using inefficiently on a per-person basis during a shortage where the total residential square footage to be divided among the population is very inelastic, especially as production has fallen after interest rates went up.

In short, the housing shortage has been going on for almost two decades now. The rise in interest rates, an attempt to control inflation, has turned a shortage into a crisis. It’s at least worth noting that Will Stancil lives in Minneapolis, a city that has navigated this policy challenge better than almost anywhere else.

Higher housing costs. A substandard housing situation. Price pressures forcing household consolidation. These are all aftershocks of the COVID experience, even if their genesis can be found further back in the tortuous recovery from the Great Recession. I think the timeline aligns well with the cratering of consumer confidence as the economy continues to hum along. It’s at least a plausible. And we didn’t even get into the rental market.

As with so many things, we’ve found ourself again facing the Odd Lots Dilemma.

The Odd Lots Dilemma:

There is still industry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I drive past a NAPA Auto Parts warehouse filled with semis backed up to loading docks, offices for GE Aerospace, and a Nordic Hot Tubs factory store. After I cross 28th Street, a more twenty-first century American identity emerges. A brewery. A pot shop. Two pot shops. A Planet Fitness in what might have once been a JCPenney.

Today I’m meeting Mephit Unfiltered, government name ███████. I’ve traveled from the Chicago’s rural exurbs, euphemistically called Chicagoland, with my wife and daughter in tow. She’s come from East Lansing, where she lives with her two cats. We’re meeting at the Patterson Ice Center, a suburban arena with dual ice rinks. Teen girls are playing hockey in one. The other is open to the public for skating.

We strap on our skates and hit the ice. It turns out the acoustics of an ice rink are not conducive to sustained conversation, especially when neither of us are proficient skaters, and after fifteen minutes of labored skating we give up and set up camp at a cafeteria table by the concession stand.

Mephit is in her forties, with dark hair and dark eyes. She speaks rapidly and voluminously, her discrete unit of thought extending to about three well-formed paragraphs in length. She’s an academic editor, and is currently editing two monographs: one about economic innovation on the northern Chinese frontier in the long nineteenth century, the other about the history of calendars as tools of statecraft in China. Previously she worked for an agency, but now she freelances, her job an early casualty of the seismic shock of LLMs. Worse than a human, yes, but faster. And much, much cheaper.

It was through her work that she found the Odd Lots Discord. While trying to pick up some more business-y work, someone recommended Odd Lots as a way for her to familiarize herself with the lingo and cadence of the finance community. Podcasts, however, put her to sleep, and she found the Odd Lots transcripts difficult to interpret because they lose Joe and Tracy’s irony-inflected attitude. The newsletter she found useful, back before it was paywalled, and it was there that she discovered a link to the Discord, where she settled in the channels and threads favored by the Discord’s (surprisingly numerous!) non-finance-employed posters.

An example of the tonal inscrutability of Odd Lots Hosts Tracy and Joe

Mephit’s post-count clocks in at a relatively svelte 13,300. For comparison, davie has 116,633. That’s 26,810 more since I profiled him last summer. She’s a poster’s poster, and is most active on the island of misfit toys, that is, the threads in #elections such as Gender Wing and Religion-Posting. Threads are Discord’s runaway truck ramps for conversations and flame wars that threaten to overwhelm channels, but on the Odd Lots Discord they’ve become refuges for the regular users seeking to carry on an extended conversation without it being buried under the Trump era’s relentless newsmaking. With their illusion of obscurity—these are public group chats after all—the vigilance of projected anonymity that pervades the wider internet loosens. Threads also have a tendency to turn blue in a way that is frowned upon in the main chats (current topic of discourse in one thread: who should be in charge of another user’s hypothetical shock collar).

Mephit has a PhD, which sharpened her style of inexhaustible locution. When I ask how her family ended up in Arlington, Virginia, where she grew up, she launches into a family history that begins with her grandparents’ immigration stories to the US from Cuba, Finland, and Lithuania.

Fast forward a generation and her father received his PhD in geotechnical engineering and moved to Arlington to work for the Department of Defense. Her mother was a nurse.

Mephit did her undergrad at the elite liberal arts school, ███████, where she was a music major. When she was twenty, she auditioned for and was accepted into the Aspen Music Summer Festival.

While I was there, my teacher said, ‘you should be practicing five hours a day, in addition to the three-hour rehearsals that you have from orchestra, in addition to the two-hour rehearsals you have for your chamber music. There’s your ten hours. And then you eat and sleep.’

And I was just like, God. Yeah. I can’t do this. This is madness. This is absolute insanity. I’m in Aspen, Colorado, which is a beautiful place. I am in a spider-encrusted cabin that is covered in sound-proofing that is mostly underground. I have a narrow window showing me the outdoors. It’s a sunny day outside. It’s summer. It’s Aspen. It’s 65 degrees. It’s gorgeous. And I’m inside with a violin, and I’m supposed to be here for 10 hours.

And so, deciding that being a musician was out, she began her search for another way to spend a life.

You Are (Not) Pseudonymous

Despite not being an active poster in the main channels, she is a champion lurker. There’s something disconcerting about meeting someone for the first time and hearing that person rattle off a list of biographical details about you in a way that constructs a rough—but accurate—sketch of your personal identity. And then for that person to go through other Odd Lots Discord Users and do the same. Discussing another poster, she says, “Oh dude, I know offhand where he lives, where he met his wife, where he got his degree, what city he grew up in, how he voted in the first elections of his life, how he changed his views. The only details I’m missing are street names—I could almost pull off identity theft at this point.”

We post anonymously, but this isn’t 4Chan. The details accrete into the facsimile of a persona, doubly so in the threads that have a hundred or so members. The relationship is in the same quadrant as co-workers in an office with a penchant for oversharing. It’s no coincidence that for many users the threads serve as water cooler replacements for the active users who work remotely and lack that in-person social experience.

But anyways…

In college, I fully intended to get a music degree. Done. Voila. Met the requirements for TWO of the three available tracks for a major.

In the course of filling out gen ed requirements from the university, I fell in love with Asian history—as in, I was sick as a dog and couldn’t breathe at all and just came to class and sat in the back corner with an entire box of kleenex because I refused to miss lecture.

So I got out of college, and I wanted to continue studying Chinese. I wanted to go to China. Went to China. Went to Shenzhen.

Mephit taught English at a school on the outskirts of Shenzhen. Her description of the experience sounds ripped out of a Neal Stephenson Western/Cyberpunk mashup. She lived in an unincorporated village with dirt roads. Officially, it was designated as part of the Shenzhen Economic Zone. The school was powered by a generator. The area saw a steady stream of undocumented immigrants, with teens as young as fifteen sneaking across internal borders to work in the nearby factories. There was no law enforcement: just the guards for the factories; guards for the school; and informal community policing efforts. Brothels lined the streets and intersections were periodically overtaken by open air drug markets. All the while, new factories and infrastructure sprang up as further development radiated from the city proper.

After teaching at the school for a year, she turned down a job offer at a school in the Tibet Autonomous Region and returned to the US, where she took classes for a year before applying to PhD programs in East Asian Languages and Civilization (EALC).

This was as far as we get at the ice rink, a story delivered to me in a sixty minute, barely interrupted monologue. Open skating has come to an end and they kick us out.

You Are (Not) An Academic

But no worries, because we pick up the conversation at The Søvengård, a farm-to-table restaurant a mile west of downtown Grand Rapids (would recommend). In an attempt to explain what I’m getting from her life story, I make an Evangelion metaphor. She follows, sort of, the point I’m making, but I flounder as I explain the story of Evangelion. It’s a torrent of babble. The thrust of the analogy recedes.

In the nineties anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, teenagers are forced to pilot giant robots (Evas) infused with the soul of a human in order to prevent space kaiju—which the series calls Angels—from reaching the center of the technologically advanced, underground fortress, NERV, where humanity is keeping captive Lillith, the apocryphal first wife of Adam. Who is also an Angel.

NERV’s daily operations are sustained by a trio of cybernetic artificial intelligences called the Three Magi. They were created by the mother of Ritsuko Akagi, NERV’s chief scientist. In the episode “Lilliputian Hitcher,” the Angel-of-the-week Iruel, an anaerobic bacteria, attempts to hack the Three Magi. After Ritsuko thwarts and then destroys it, she explains that each of the Magi infused with a separate aspect of her personality. Herself as a scientist, herself as a mother, and herself as a daughter.

Mephit and, likewise, all of us, are governed by the interplay of our own identities. Although unlike fictional AIs from a tv show, ours wax and wane with time.

Mephit was accepted to a prestigious PhD program at ███████. The position was initially unfunded. After a year there, she studied under scholarship at a summer program in Hong Kong. Its focus was on building the students’ Chinese language skills. Part of their studies involved tours of the city’s cultural institution, where they were often shadowed by strangers seemingly unaffiliated with the program.

The random people who joined our HK tours—I don’t know who they were. Financiers? Chamber of Commerce reps? Chinese businessmen, Chinese spies? Nobody knew. CIA? We had at least one classmate who we were all convinced was CIA.

Over time she settled on the belief that they—most of them anyway—were representatives of the various institutions funding their studies, scouting the students for potential future contacts on the mainland. At the end of the program, one of these sponsors lent them his yacht for a nighttime party as it sailed through the city’s bays. The yacht owner didn’t join them for the festivities, but one of his people did.

Following the summer’s end, she spent another year in Taiwan, then back to the US. Then adjunct positions, fellowships, and the quotidian struggles of trying to secure a tenure-track position as the US university system beta decayed a few full-time faculty positions at a time. The career-defining offer never appeared, and the editing side hustle turned to full-time gig. From the margins of China to the margins of academia, in a journey spanning the course of multiple decades.

At the end of our dinner we play a game. I rip out a page of my notebook and tear it in two. With a pair of crayons brought by the waiter to entertain my daughter while we waited for our meals, Mephit and I write down which Odd Lots Discord user is most likely fabricating their biography. We reveal our answers to each other.

The name is the same.

You Are (Not) A Warrior

Mephit’s father passed in 2014. Her mother was able to live at home, but when COVID happened, she became isolated from her community at the same time she was beginning to suffer from dementia. A monthly visit from home health services was supplemented by twice weekly visits from a physical therapist and an occupational therapist. A series of home accidents led to two stints in a skilled nursing facility. The stays were brief. First three weeks, then four, the lengths dictated by the rules of her mother’s Medicare advantage plan, not by her medical needs or recovery progression.

The search for a more permanent placement was grueling for Mephit and her siblings, and the lack of help for families is an American policy failure about which she feels strongly. At first they toured other skilled nursing facilities, but long-term spots are difficult to secure, and Mephit’s mother was apt to be unceremoniously dumped in favor of patients newly discharged from a nearby hospital. Eventually they settled her mother into an assisted living facility, with supplemental care from the home health service that had been assisting Mephit’s mother when she was living semi-independently

With her mother passed, it fell to Mephit and her siblings to sort through fifty years of life’s accumulation. They hired a service to organize the contents of the house into lots to be sold off. Before the auction, she and her siblings were allowed to look through their mother’s belongings and take whatever they wanted.

So it’s one of those things where it’s like, it’s your childhood. It’s a tough thing. I looked at it one time and I was like, we’re done. And I’m not gonna look at this again. It’s stuff where... you take a picture because I don’t want to forget this. This is an important thing. But I don’t want to hang on to this thing. And this box is moldy. And this is dusty.

Looking at the auction page, I was shredded after the first page because… that’s your childhood listed bin by bin or lot by lot. Starting at one dollar.

But also, no way in hell can you keep all this stuff. It’s not my style, or my sisters’ styles. It’s been in a house with mold and asbestos and mice and whatnot...

There were these two little plastic and paper mobiles that I was given as a child—one of the solar system, one of just glitter stars. I hooked them together at the top and had them in the corner of my bedroom until they were basically held together by only spider spit.

I adored them—they represented my sisters to me in both substance and style, after both had graduated and left the house—but there was no way in hell I’m collecting moldy paper from the 90s to hang in my house now.

She never found out whether the box it was stored in was purchased, or if the auctioneers threw it away.

One thing she kept is a picture of her as a baby. She shows it to me and explains her family’s background.

My great-grandmother left Lithuania on horseback with the family. The family horse—like there was one horse—she rode to escape the Russians and was traveling alone. Survived, like, slept in graves by day, road by night, and sold everything. She sold the horse to get a boat ticket to America, made it to America, survived alone, eventually made it to Illinois and met her husband, got married, and eventually had a family.

And it was just, like, warrior stuff all the way down. She she raised her daughters, my grandmother and that generation to be incredibly fierce. So there’s a backstory of class striving that goes into this. She was always struggling, struggling, struggling. It inculcated her with that message you will succeed. And we have fought very hard.

So make sure of this: you will find money and you will do well and you will be middle class and you will succeed. And you will strive and you will excel. And so that’s how she became kind of a dragon slayer—I have to succeed, even though I’m a woman and the world of the 1950s is stacked against me, and that is the mentality she brought to raising her kids.

I’m the third kid. I am the one that rips things apart. I’m like Boom! Chaos baby. But my mother is also that kind of ferocious. Like, you will succeed. We will overcome. We will rise. We will be middle class. We came up from selling the sole family horse to be achievers and live in Arlington County. It’s like the American dream condensed for both of them into this idea: you have to succeed.

“Can you tell me about when you lived in a van? What were you doing and how long did you do that for?” I ask. We’re sitting in the kitchen of davie’s two bedroom walk-up in Neukölln, a neighborhood on the outskirts of southern Berlin. He’s American, an international transplant from California. He lives alone.

Well, there were three times I lived out of my car, and the short story there is, it just becomes successively easier each time. When I went to Community College, I was working, and I just felt like I wanted to take a gap year to save money and go on road trips or whatever.

This was in 2012. I was probably 20, I definitely wasn’t old enough to drink. I still had the restaurant job and I got a different job working at some metal bending place. Ultimately, in that stint of being homeless, there was a punk house in town and I hung out with those people and I enjoyed going to punk shows and having more money to go on short road trips to Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz.

Ultimately, there was a really big restaurant, like 5,000 square feet, on the edge of town that I started squatting in because it still had cold running water. I changed out the locks, so I had functional keys to this place. The restaurant shut down around 2008, and it was literally just empty for years. You know, slow economy. So that was the first time.

I met davie (no caps in this name) on the Odd Lots Discord, the official online hangout for Odd Lots, a Bloomberg podcast hosted by Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal. It’s a lightly moderated ant farm where users discuss the latest episode, but the bulk of the posting is a kind of sardonic running commentary on current events, with a focus on economics, markets, and American politics.

davie is the micro-est of micro celebrities, and the Odd Lots Discord’s premier power user. As far as I can tell, no one posts more than he does. He’s not the main character—although a few users would argue he’s the villain—but he indisputably sits atop the leaderboard. At the time of my writing this, he’s typed a whopping 89,823 messages spread across two years. At his current rate of posting, he should cross the 100,000 message threshold some time in September.

A piece of Odd Lots Discord lore is that davie maintains a spreadsheet compiling the biographical details for each user. When I ask him if it exists, he tells me it does not. Emphatically. Strenuously. One might perhaps think too strongly.

He’s also an inveterate hater. Here is a list—by no means comprehensive—some shared with me in person, others gleaned from his voluminous posting, of things he thinks are bad:

• cocktails

• cocktail bars

• preppy douchebags who got to cocktail bars to drink cocktails

• American tourists in Kreuzberg

• unimaginative architecture

• NIMBYs

• conservatives

• Evangelicals

• conservative, Evangelical NIMBYs

• liberals

• the Abundance Agenda

• Abundance-pilled liberals

• Ezra Klein

• Derek Guy, better known as “the menswear fashion guy on Twitter,”

• polo shirts

• people “rocking dad mode”

• attractive Venezuelan couples who talk to us at a shared table (“they’re just rich”)

• all things bougie

I spend four days with davie, sleeping in his spare bedroom. He’s shorter than I am, at five-eleven, but not a Short King. His sumptuous beard ends at the top of his breastbone. He favors prole-coded attire such as forest green fatigues and, today, a pair of black denim overalls and a splotchy red button-down.

He tells me about his second time sleeping in a vehicle. This time it was in a van.

There was another time I was homeless during University. While I was living out of the Jeep and that restaurant, I got a sublet at this kind of Intentional Community. Jack Kerouac lived there for a little while, because it was across from the train station. It had like 20 rooms, and then there's one big kitchen with two stoves and four fridges. It was a type of almost-frat house, but for hippies and bike nerds. I sublet that for six months and started going back to Community College. But then I bought a big van. It was red, because it was from the fire station. It was the size of a delivery truck, like a UPS or FedEx delivery truck. I started living out of that and renovated it so that there were shelves inside and a little place for the bed.

davie joined Discord in late 2022, when his Whatsapp bike camping group migrated to the platform. The single chat stream had become unwieldy under the burden of their swelling membership.

Many podcasts have their own Discords. davie listens to many podcasts, and with his new account joining communities for the Majority Report or the Ezra Klein Show Subreddit (from which he is now banned) was as easy as clicking a link. The Odd Lots Discord, if not the show, was heavily invested in the fate of the Titan submersible, whose disappearance launched a frenzied search on June 18^th, 2023. Pieces of the wreckage were found four days later. That same day, hours before the discovery, davie made his first post:

From there, he found a community of people as eager as him (almost) to discuss nuclear power regulations, self-driving taxis, and zoning reform. The transition from bike camping trip organizer to omni-arguer had begun.

davie is thirty-four. He went to architectural school and works for an architectural firm, but is not a licensed architect. His job, as described to me, is doing stuff on the computer for old architects who still communicate by fax.

Three of my four days are spent on city-spanning marathons disguised as architectural lectures. We make stops at, amongst other sights, the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park, the Reichstag Building, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. As we walk he points out buildings designed for this or that architect, and is appalled that their names are as unknown to me as the words of a foreign language I’ve never heard.

On one of our excursions, we see dozens of police descend on a pro-Palestinian rally and snatch away a protester. Later that day, after seeing the Berliner Philharmonie Großer Saal (an orchestra hall), we stop at an upscale beer bar because I’m sick and have to use die Toilette (you’ll see, I have a lot of food allergies). davie buys a couple of beers and when I return, he asks if there was an employee in the W.C. checking if people were patrons. When I tell him there wasn’t, he says, “then we didn’t need to buy these beers after all.”

He tells me about the second time he lived in the van, his third time homeless.

After the intentional community, I moved back into an apartment and finally transferred to University. And then—kind of as a personal project—I got the van. I did an internship in Los Angeles and the plan was to not pay rent because I would just be working or doing school the whole time. So, like, why do I need an actual apartment? I'm never going to be at it. I'm just gonna park my van in the Arts District. Sleep in the van. I did that for six months. I showered at an ex-girlfriend's house. We were amicable, um, and still friends. After we broke up she let me crash on her couch sometimes or take a shower. I also showered at the office where we had class. Pirate showers. It's the weekend, the rest of the office building is empty, so I lock myself in the bathroom for thirty minutes and clean myself up the old-fashioned way.

On the Odd Lots Discord, there’s heavy use of the spray bottle emoji, half-ironic, for the frequent commentary on the physical appearance of newsworthy—using the word very loosely—women. davie is the frequent recipient of such emoji-react pile ons, but he still holds out hope for love. That he hasn’t fallen into manosphere-inflected misogyny is not a miracle, but it is at odds with the conventional narrative of doomscrolling, romantically unentangled men. Perhaps it’s because of his punk squatter background, his life in Europe, his personal moral core, or some combination of the three. Whatever the reason, he’s been spared the reactionary nihilism shared by seemingly endless legions of men who are extremely online.

The Odd Lots Discord is a heavily male space. It’s not “woke.” But despite being a niche forum centered around a finance podcast, the denizens are surprisingly normal and lean slightly left. Single guys and dads fraternize. It’s the most curious fact about the space, that there is this cohort of heavily—if not extremely—online men who know what Red Scare is; who are aware of Richard Hanania and other wielders of calipers; who follow the ebbs and flows of DSA drama, but nevertheless have opinions well within the American mainstream.

When we return to davie’s apartment, our home base, I’m surprised at how integrated he is into his local community. He’s lived in here since 2019 and knows, it seems, just about every person on his block. His German is good enough to chitchat but he lacks, he tells me, the fluency to pass the language test necessary to gain citizenship.

Late at night we take long walks with his dog, Levia, a mutt from Romania that he started watching occasionally for a friend, but who has become his sole responsibility after she moved to Southeast Asia. His neighborhood is composed entirely of apartment blocks, old and new, next to a large park built over the Autobahn. The construction is so sturdy that you cannot hear the vehicles below, and we stroll on dark paths at two AM, next to parcels of public land turned over to Berlin’s residents as private garden plots. Some people have built sheds and cottages on their allotments. One building has a satellite dish.

It turns out davie has misremembered his past. There was another period of van life.

And then, in my final year of University, I also lived in the van. I let my friend take over my apartment. I parked the van around the corner—near the University—and just lived in that or lived on campus. Like in the studio. In the really necessary times that I needed to shower or go to the bathroom, or I wanted to cook something, I would just go over to my friend’s apartment, where I used to live. I still had access to the apartment. But for the most part I was just on campus all the time. Yeah, so that was four separate times, actually, and through all those times the goal was to save money.

On Monday, the morning of my flight, davie takes me to an American and British breakfast place called the Lonely Hearts cafe. At the front counter there is a photograph of Agent Dale Cooper. Beneath it, written on a glass display case in teal sharpie, is the quote “This must be where pies go when they die.”

I feel ill again. I am in an unfamiliar Toillete, again. When I return, davie is talking to our server, who is also the co-owner. He’s asking her how business is, because whenever he passes on the weekend there’s a line curled around outside. Business is good. He asks her if the place has been impacted by the increase in energy costs; it has, and they’ve raised the prices several times in the past few years.

Later, I mention that he could’ve gotten a date with the woman. He replies, “You didn’t need to tell me. I’m just intimidated by someone who can cook breakfast better than me.”

Leave a comment