burnout world / evil is in

Ideologies exploded into a million niche subcultures

X has turned into a bullhorn for “anti-woke” sentiments used to boost Musk’s political messaging, Meta has abandoned its fact checking in deference to possible Trump retribution against the Zuckerberg empire; Starlink, TikTok, and Nvidia/TSCM are becoming geopolitical bargaining chips in nativist industrial trade wars; Network States are gaining

What’s clear is that people are fed up with the infrastructure we have and will do anything to break free from it.

This is as much a problem of platform logic as it is of political economy: Reactionary outrage begets clickrates, which begets attention and reach especially when the people running these media platforms are themselves largely sympathetic to reactionary beliefs.

Social media incentivized more extreme views at the same time that China began to develop an entirely different internet that, unlike the Western internet, was built on the values expressed by the state.

The only way to be good today is to operate under the surface of the current media, on your own infrastructure, articulating what “good” is for your community. The doom of pervasive evil is not outdone by hope, but by the curiosity and boldness to do something on your own terms.

• Brands and platforms emerge that propose a new economic model for creatives, a clear codex of what is good and bad within their system, a moral compass, such as Metalabel or Subvert.

• Crypto goes deeper into the Right-coded direction of Bitcoinmaxxies, memecoin grifters and anti-government types. While Ethereum, the more pro-social / governance