Real-life friction was valuable, too. Only a few decades ago, we had to memorize phone numbers and addresses, write letters, make phone calls. And there was a romance to this. Knowledge of another person was earned, not taken for granted.

But things are changing. Last month, Meta debuted its agentic personal assistant, Muse, largely a clone of earlier open-source Clawdbot agents, which became popular with programmers and entrepreneurs last winter. Muse can send email, book travel, fill out forms, shop, and schedule appointments. It can order from Facebook Marketplace, set goals for you, and make phone calls on your behalf.

During the rollout of Muse, Mark Zuckerberg inverted the old logic of Facebook and Instagram, which once offered to “bring people together.” Now the technology is intended to save users time and energy so that they can be better fathers, mothers, children, and friends, in real life. Let the agents handle the small stuff: finding recipes, ordering ingredients, remembering birthdays, remembering dietary restrictions, and so on. Weirdly, Meta conflates learning about people with doing more thankless and impersonal tasks like ordering plane tickets or filing quarterly taxes. Convivial tasks like cooking and being with people are conflated with trivial tasks like dealing with byzantine bureaucratic processes. Maybe for some, there is no distinction anymore. 

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How to save writing from AI

By Matthew Gasda

From a cybersecurity perspective, the mass deployment of autonomous agents poses profound risks both for individual users and for digital systems, particularly financial systems. But it is also worth questioning the new proposition, even in the ideal scenario in which these systems are totally safe and work as intended, and assuming we use them as intended. Will we actually become better friends and family members? Will society, an automated society, a frictionless one, function better than alternatives past and present?

There is reason to be skeptical. Tech companies have always promised that frictionlessness and ease would lead to more connection; and that these digital so-called connections would lead to better lives.

The release of Muse is a tacit admission that this was never true: being on a screen locks you into a screen; having a lot of digital friends doesn’t mean you have a lot of friends. The technology is merely making the same promise in a different way — you’ll be more connected if you use this. The core belief that friction and inefficiency in human relations are bad hasn’t changed, but merely the proposed solution.

Most rational people would agree that there are many small tasks that we would prefer to be automated. And most would also grant that getting away from the screen and living in the world, away from the predations of an increasingly complex digital ecosystem, is good. But we must also be aware that our reliance on digital tools often has weird secondary and tertiary effects, including dependence on the tools that are supposed to make us free. The Jevons paradox states that gains in efficiency tend to increase, not reduce, total consumption of a resource; Xerox means more incentive to copy pages; the more roads we build to decrease traffic, the more congested traffic becomes, and so on.

Meta hasn’t merely invented a nifty tool that will do some previously annoying tasks for you. Meta is suggesting that we use Muse to solve an interpersonal problem, alienation and loneliness, that has been partially caused by other Meta products.

There’s something counterproductive about giving an agent the task of reminding me who someone is or how to connect with them or what their needs are, because asking an agent to do that means I haven’t done it. It implies that I am not really willing to do that, I am not willing to internalize facts about another person. I am outsourcing that critical function to the machine; the agent performs the acts of caring, and we take the supposed credit for it.

It is true that the soul is not built up by doing comparative searching on airline tickets, but just as surely something is lost when the work of actively participating in our relationships is outsourced to an autonomous algorithm.

According to the philosopher and critic of technology Ivan Illich, technologies are disabling because they incentivize us to stop exercising physically, mentally, or both, in service of a task. Every time we adopt a tool, there is a trade-off: what we gain in speed and efficiency, we lose in terms of personal capability. In this sense, Zuckerberg’s claims are classically Illichian. He’s saying that Muse will save you time, stop you from wasting time exercising your brain on pointless tasks, and give you the freedom to connect with people — but he’s eliding that anyone with a screen and social media has already been disabled; their real-life social links are already atrophied.

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So whether we’re applying the Jevons paradox or just thinking about disabling technologies, there’s very little good reason to assume that Muse, or any other kind of autonomous agentic helper, will incentivize us to return to the world and to formal, convivial relationships, just as there’s similarly little evidence that the time saved by Uber, DoorDash, or Hinge has been meaningfully applied to anything other than more scrolling and swiping.

Zuckerberg’s promotional frame for Muse is that life has gotten too busy and complex to maintain and nourish friendships; but its hidden assumption is that most people don’t really have the personal tools for doing so anymore. Technology is presented as the solution to the disabling technology.

Autonomous agents do present some modicum of relief from the digital quotidian, but the quantitative gains in time saved will have no qualitative impact unless we acknowledge the alienated, lonely state that previous waves of digital technology have left us with and distinguish between instrumental uses for autonomous assistance and human practices that should be carried out by humans. Zuckerberg’s cozy picture of our assistants helping us know each other and socialize more likely promises to further disable us and further immiserate us; it is more dystopian than it seems on its face, as with almost all Meta products — though Meta products may already seem quite dystopian to some.

It might be useful to think of the practice of friendships and relationships as an art that can’t be gamed or optimized and can’t be handed over to an intelligent algorithm. If an assistant is handling taxes and flights, that is fine, but make it a good reason to head down to the bar or the park or the cafe to try to have a conversation with another person, leaving all screens at home. If we can still find the cafes without our phones, of course, is another question. If we can still form friendships, find romance, write letters, and fall in love with the challenging and unknown is another question as well, and of a higher order entirely.

Will the next wave of frontier large language models make it harder to detect AI writing by eliminating its current telltale signs (weird mixed metaphors, “not x but y” formulations, and the like)? One thing is certain: AI is writing, spreading, and now appears everywhere. AI prose is like the kudzu vine in the American South: a non-native species, in this case of linguistic operation, that spreads so quickly, and puts roots so deep, that one forgets it was ever not there.

Therefore, personal distaste, and aesthetic and moral reaction against AI writing, are less important than the larger questions: how did we get here? What is the contact with all of this generated text doing to our minds and, indeed, our souls? And how do we act sensibly and intelligently given the new facts of our information ecosystem?

It may not be productive to divide the world into camps, AI users and AI rejectors, not only because AI is a complex tool with many uses, but because the climate of persecution around AI use only incentivizes bad-faith dissimulation, likely to be made easier by models like Astra. Eloquent dissent and conscientious objection from AI is good, we might say, but running everything you read — or that your friends, colleagues, or peers write — through Pangram seems unproductive, likely to yield false-positive shame, and mimetic retribution.

You have a 38% Pangram score. I have a 42% Pangram score. She has a 10% score. Who’s better? What do the scores even mean? This kind of thinking only reflects how much AI already determines our life-world: we are now measuring quality by what something is not, rather than by what it is.

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We are all Bryan Johnson now

By Matthew Gasda

The Wall Street Journal’s recent defense of running an AI-generated opinion column by the investor Stanley Druckenmiller, therefore, offers a dose of productive realism; not because it is right, but because it draws clear terms for debate and analysis. 

Paul Gigot, the Journal’s editorial-page editor, asserted that “the question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author’s original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it. In Stan Druckenmiller’s case, we have had a relationship with him for many years, and nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion.” Druckenmiller himself compared using AI to using a calculator.

Gigot’s and Druckenmiller’s two major claims are, first, that an essay is a verbalized form of an argument and, second, that LLMs are calculators for words. These are cogent claims. And they reflect most people’s view of LLMs, even if they don’t admit it, which is that LLMs make communication easier and more efficient in the same way digital calculators made doing long-form division easier and more efficient. Mass condemnation of AI writing in professional writing fields isn’t going to change what now amounts to folk belief: language communicates concrete information; writing is a chore.

Druckenmiller’s op-ed and the Journal’s strident defense of it force us to think about the cases in which AI use represents a difference of degree from uses of other generally accepted technological tools like Google searching or even calling a friend, and where it represents a difference of kind — a holistic, global, novel phenomenon that marks a point of no return for our species, insofar as we are Homo scriptor: man the writer.

Druckenmiller’s excuse was ultimately lame, but his distinctions were canny. In essence, he told his opponents: you’ve yet to make clear distinctions between writing and other important cognitive processes that are enriching when conducted by hand.

As Druckenmiller’s analogy suggests, we have already automated a lot of cognitive processes. I haven’t done math by hand, for instance, since grade school; I have always used GPS to drive. How many AI or LLM objectors have never used or would never use a calculator, GPS, Google search, banking apps, Yelp, Netflix, Amazon? Where actually is the line? 

Western humanism, going back to Plato, has always placed a high value on math and geometry (the legendary inscription above the gates of Plato’s Academy read, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here”). Renaissance post-Platonic humanism required hand calculations; modern physics, beginning with Newton, involved working on pen and paper, turning metaphysical intuitions about space and time into testable formulas. Most contemporary humanists, by historical standards, have surrendered to machines everything humanistic except discursive writing.

This is why the Druckenmiller case is so important and interesting. It is not about letting the invasive species rip, because it already has, and it is not the first such species; it is about what it would mean to return to a native cognitive environment. Druckenmiller’s provocative example forces one to ask: which calculators allow me to be human, and which deprive me of my distinctly human characteristics? 

Should we congratulate ourselves on not using Claude to write essays, if we are not also doing mathematics by hand, trading pen-and-paper epistles, keeping a physical diary, walking or driving around a city without a digital map, learning to talk to strangers rather than using dating apps, going to the library instead of opening a laptop? I think the answer, essentially, is no: if we keep AI out of writing, then we should keep computers out of almost everything.

If you accept that cognitive automation is deleterious for the soul, then you have to really start deleting automated steps, restoring them to your own control, in an effort to become someone capable of independent, deep, and flexible cognition, both for moral and aesthetic reasons. If automation in writing is bad, then it’s bad in a lot of places. We connect writing in language to identity and identity formation, so using AI to write feels and seems worse than not doing math by hand, but it may not be. You’re not learning how to play popular music on the piano as people often used to do. Remember songbooks?

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In terms of culture and social policy, it’s hard to imagine the non-professional non-writers will return to pen and paper or even the typewriter in the absence of some larger civilization-level emphasis on the slow and the artisanal. There simply has to be a larger, internally consistent, collectively held belief that productivity isn’t always the point, that speed isn’t always desirable, and that efficiency isn’t the highest good of human life.

It is unclear how much Druckenmiller’s handwritten essay would have deviated in its argument from the auto-written version. But we can be certain that we, as readers, were deprived of Druckenmiller’s personality in the human context that frames his formal technical analysis, and this is why some readers and commenters canceled their subscriptions. As human beings, we crave and need human-supplied narratives, because we are narratives and characters, voices.

Druckenmiller is one of the greatest investors of all time, and there is an elusive genius in his brain composed of the totality of everything he’s ever thought and experienced. It’s more interesting, it’s intuitively richer. You can read about the battles of Ulysses S. Grant, both military and political, but Grant’s own memoirs activate the imagination and bring a whole lost world back to life. The subject of the Druckenmiller piece — the economic debate between the investor and his peer, Scott Bessent, now the secretary of the Treasury — is no doubt far richer in human interest and in intellectual content than whatever Druckenmiller’s calculator created for him.

But we are where we are. The models will only advance in sophistication. Just as most people won’t go back to long division by hand, so many kinds of writing will be automated and accepted as such. In some cases, this will be no great loss (news releases, weather and sports reports, company annual reports, a great deal of legal writing, and so on).

What must be preserved from the encroachments of the calculator are forms of writing in which excellence was always an uphill battle: the long-form essay, literary fiction, poetry, plays, memoir, as well as personal letters. But even this preservation must make room for reasonable carve-outs. There’s a difference between a journalist who prompts Claude to generate a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole article, on the one hand; and one who asks Claude a factual question, on the other. The latter is doing something no different from consulting Google (Google results now are AI-driven anyway).

Norms can and should be developed within these professions for certifying organic work, which will no doubt command higher prices, just as handmade furniture from a carpenter comes at a higher cost than a chair from IKEA. If this means fewer people will be thought of as true writers, is that really such a bad thing?

Johnson’s bio on X, where he has 1.8 million followers, reads “conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” He is now best-known for his quest to defeat age and achieve immortality, which he has branded as Project Blueprint, and for the various tech initiatives and companies he has founded or financed to help others do the same. But his original fortune came from Braintree, an online payment company, which he founded and which later acquired Venmo; the combined product was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013. 

The immortality influencer has dark hair, marble-white flesh, and a neutral, Tom Cruise-ish affect. His physique reflects rigorous daily workouts; he seems to have created a body much younger than his 48 years. And his posts on X are intentionally, I think, provocative: he gained notoriety most recently by posting in praise of the health of his girlfriend’s “vaginal biome.” 

In a viral post this past month, however, Johnson announced that he is suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder, AIG (autoimmune atrophic gastritis), in which the stomach lining consumes itself. AIG isn’t a death sentence, but it is a bad sign for someone who doesn’t plan to die. On July 29, Johnson made headlines again, by posting on X: “been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.” 

Before Johnson’s diagnosis, I had already begun to see him as a tragic hero in a classical sense: larger than life but also susceptible to the kind of tunnel vision the gods punish their heroes with. So his illness, which he insists he will find a cure for, is cosmic irony. AIG increases inflammation, abhorred by biohackers, and prevents the absorption of critical nutrients like iron and B12.

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The end of going out

By Matthew Gasda

In my own play, I didn’t write a tragic ending where the Bryan Johnson character gets sick or dies, nor do I think anyone should wish for Johnson to have an encounter with death to learn his lesson. Rather, I think that we should take the ups and downs of Johnson’s immortality “journey” as early feedback on a philosophical experiment that is just beginning, and that may soon become a global, radicalizing phenomenon. 

Johnson isn’t the first techno-utopian to be an immortality influencer: Google language-recognition expert Ray Kurzweil has been a transhumanist since the 1990s. But Johnson represents the migration of these ideas to the mainstream. I know someone writing a book about Próspera, an island off the coast of Honduras that is attempting to create a year-round life-extension clinic, an immortality spa, if you will. And unlike early transhumanists, Johnson’s message arrives at a time when technology has visibly accelerated in radicalizing ways. No one used AI four years ago; now it is everywhere in everything. Many of Johnson’s posts regard therapeutic breakthroughs and many of these breakthroughs are driven by supercomputers solving problems exponentially faster than any human laboratory could solve them. 

Whether normies know it or not, elites are planning to live for a very long time; the effort is already well underway to radically alter the destiny of the human body, or at least some human bodies. Autocrats like Xi Jinping and Putin are on advanced therapeutics, it’s safe to say. They will live as long as they can, and will rule as long as they live. Business leaders, thought leaders, and athletes are having longer primes, eventually, maybe, they will have indefinite ones. Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, and LeBron James have already demonstrated that the window for elite athletes can be longer with the right practices. Getting to see our favorite athletes play longer doesn’t seem so bad; ageless autocrats, however, are less desirable.

Bioscience is also offering women the opportunity to have children much later in life. Celebrities with access to expensive health care, like Anne Hathaway, now regularly have children in their 40s; the next horizon is childbearing in the 50s.

Our quest for immortality may be active, in the form of broscience, next-generation supplements, and extreme fitness, or passive, via surgeries and organ replacement. But soon, or perhaps even now, there will be a marked distinction between those who are intending to die — and refusing any enhancements — and those intending to live. 

What this amounts to is a secular immortality cult that replaces heaven with perfected existence forever on earth — and former heaven-focused mortal activities such as prayer and religious practice with constant techno-biological self-enhancement. Among the rich and soon the merely affluent, an extremely deep piece of cultural memetics — the ultimate acceptance of mortality — will start to fade. And whether or not anyone succeeds in radical life extension, the cascade of trying will result in a change of belief.

Johnson’s announcement of his chronic illness made headlines around the world. This reflects, I think, the extent to which he has already succeeded as an influencer and quasi-philosopher. His is the first announcement from a future that believes it’s a surprise to get sick and die at all.

It is impossible to overstate how much of a change this presents. The supreme value in a society that accepts mortality is to pass something on to the future. In one that doesn’t, the direction of human activity boomerangs back upon itself. The point of life becomes biological self-maintenance. Moreover, the transhumanist ideal threatens the monopoly of all mortality-derived wisdom — and mortality-backed experience, altogether.

We can’t experience the same moments, works of art, highs, or griefs over and over, without fundamentally changing their impact on us. It may be that life is rich because it is limited, and extended life becomes a form of torture. It may also be that our cognitive hardware is well adapted to our natural lifespans, and that experience does not get better with time. For some of the characters in my as-of-yet-unstaged play, life becomes unbearably lonely as some choose to die and others choose to live out enhanced lifespans.

Longer lifespans, or the promise of longer lifespans, will also change the calculus between parents and children, and the decision-making of prospective parents. If you believe you may escape death, why have children at all? On the other hand, bringing children into a world with less death may also be an incentive to have children; but the globe cannot, in the long run, support a world with life and no death. Something will have to give.

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The most laudatory thing that one can say about Johnson’s moral framework is that it is a moral framework, and that it is not nihilistic, even if it is arguably narcissistic. He uses his own resources and he has defined his own values. It would be hard to argue that he is hurting anyone, and his self-experimentation, even if it doesn’t yield immortality, will likely end in useful therapeutics for the rest of us mortals.

But it is also likely that his Faustian quest commences a Faustian epoch — anything short of total control over our bodies, down to the level of not only cells, but maybe subatomic particles, will be considered a failure.

In the face of such a terrifying prospect we will need powerful — and not entirely rational — protection.

Johnson was raised Mormon, and it is hard not to see that his vision of an immortal, multi-planetary species with extended consciousness resembles the multi-planetary heaven of Mormonism. In general, his message of “don’t die” is part of the message of the later phases of Abrahamic tradition; to never die is to constantly “resurrect” the youth of the aging body. 

All cults promise some kind of immortality, whether through forgiveness, salvation, consciousness-raising, bodily resurrection, or in this case, scientific super-enhancement. Thus, even if Johnson himself is having doubts, his announcement of a chronic illness, instead of discrediting his philosophy, takes part in the miraculous. He is now a prophet, attempting to perform the miracle of healing or raising the dead. And he has the world’s attention.

It is another irony that the lucid, rational promise of secular immortality seems guaranteed to produce mysticism. Transhumanism offers salvation through the supposedly knowable, but it confronts us with existential shocks. The Christian faith, which offers salvation through faith — the fundamentally unknowable — has been more stable. 

For better or worse, the latter half of this century seems like it will be more existential than the first half — and more existential than technological. Technology will be merely the foundation for a revision of what it means to be human. Casual agnostics and atheists may soon find that to not think about mortality or immortality with greater intensity and purpose is considered extremely strange or bad. And established religions may turn toward the supernatural and “proofs” of eternal life, to compete with the promise, backed by data-driven therapeutics, of indefinitely extended life.

Pascal’s Wager argued that faith was the best bet based on probability, especially considering the possibility of eternal damnation. Johnson’s Wager, on the other hand, asserts that there is no downside to seeing how far you can take biological life.

But like any philosopher, Johnson is liable (and free) to change his mind, when the thought experiment becomes a real experiment. We’ll see what the next phase of his immortality, or mortality, brings us.

The Madison Square Garden marriage of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift was a perfect representation of a 2026 pseudo-event: this American mega-wedding was famous for being famous. No matter how charmless and inauthentic, it was an object that one could have an opinion on — and thus was an incarnation of internet culture. It symbolized how much our appetites have been shaped by social media; we want to experience, to obsess over, to be around, what is already familiar. Everyone doing and talking about and following the same pseudo-events, or producing them themselves, however, does not produce culture or aura. Rather, it displaces and draws energy from the original, spontaneous, and organic.

I’ve noticed that written communication, texting and emailing, increasingly sounds the same as more and more people either have AI directly write for them or have internalized the syntactical structures of AI writing. The word most associated with this era of modern life, “slop,” is itself a memetic cliché that can’t illuminate how eerily homogeneous and fake life in big cities has become, or perhaps life everywhere has become.

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With minor differences in uniform and language, the arrival of tourists from around the world in New York only demonstrates the convergence of habits, tendencies, and mores across cultures in our era. The old, useful animus Europeans, for instance, had towards American culture is gone; large swaths of Brooklyn and Manhattan, in parallel, have no accent, no culture, no distinction, no history. The lingua franca of the affluent, whether tourist or local, is what we might call “globalese”: a compressed super-language patterned on English, but increasingly reliant on Instagram. Its images, gestures, and catchphrases convey a compressed reality that works as well in Paris as it does in New York or any other place where digital media reaches.

Lack of difference, lack of friction signals a die-off in culture. Neighborhoods don’t have their own culture, cities don’t have their own culture, regions don’t have their own culture; it is all globalese.

And though we are all the same, we’re isolated from each other. As much as the conventional wisdom says that it’s exciting to be in New York and other American cities during the summer of the World Cup, I sense that tourists and transplants, new arrivals and also longtime residents themselves, are not really mixing or encountering each other accidentally; it’s too easy to pre-sort an experience, to find the bar showing your game, to find overly like-minded friends, to find algorithmically-vetted romantic interests. Even if there are sublime matches, like England-Mexico, uniformity is apparent in the way that World Cup teams play, all driven by the same academy training and analytics, just like in Major League Baseball and the NBA this summer.

Compare this, for instance, to culture at the beginning of the globalization era. In the early 1990s, movies such as Before Sunrise and Chungking Express were romances of the accidental. If you meet someone on a summer evening in a big city, as happened to the characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise, you might never find them again. As we learn in the sequel Before Sunset, Jessie and Celine take nine years to find each other again; this is romantic. Qiu Miaojin’s cult 1995 novel Last Words from Montmartre, about a Taiwanese woman in Paris writing letters to a lover who’s abandoned her, is one of the most beautiful examples of the romance and melancholy of early globalization: everything is loosely connected, but there is still distance to imagine; travel still involves some risk and uncertainty; lovers and friends cannot be searched up and realized on a screen (“stalked”) at any moment of the day.

Social space, suffering a recession of the accidental and a corresponding inflation of the easy, has become a zone to gratify desires implanted by the phone, and to aggregate, not differentiate; there doesn’t seem to be much to do in public other than playact a lifestyle.

A friend always used to say that Los Angeles was the great American city of private experiences and New York was the city of public experiences. But New York has become more like what LA used to be, superficial, Instagram-driven, pneumatic and soulless, while LA has deteriorated and lost its raison d’être: the film and TV industries.

The implication here is that being offline has become impossible, because the internet has matriculated into material reality. Menus reflect trends; the optics and layout of bars, restaurants, and pubs cater to TikTokkers and Instagram influencers; bars are places to be on your phone. Slop content has become slop reality.

And high inflation and rent inflation make it difficult for small businesses to say no to slop reality. Entrepreneurs and business owners with soul can’t compete with the ruthless and soulless and are driven out. High rent means that ostentatious fine dining is next to a bank, next to a gym, next to a spa that sells peptides, next to a startup office.

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If a place or community that is real or unique slips through the financial dragnet, then it is at risk of being turned into viral content, rushed, overwhelmed, and abandoned. Everything from churches to dive bars is subject to influencer promotion. For this reason, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that private space will start to play the role that public space used to play: a place for strangers or near strangers to meet and have interactions and conversations, to drink and to eat, in ways that are not algorithmically determined. 

If public space is going to survive as more than a zombie playground, young people — who bring life to cities and public spaces — will have to be intentional about letting things happen by accident, and about spending significant chunks of every day operating with 1990s-level technology. 

A few weeks ago, I was at an event in Tompkins Square Park for the “Summer of Ludd” — a no-smartphone movement started in part by one of my former students, an amazingly outgoing and charismatic figure. The event was mostly young people sitting on blankets and playing drums and guitar, very Summer of Love. It wasn’t wildly new in appearance, but because no one was on their phones, the participants seemed genuinely connected and excited to be there. They weren’t keeping a visual record of their afternoon in the park. It was just happening. It was a unique event, meaning it couldn’t be replicated or resold because the people involved would only be there in that exact combination once.

The split might be between those who are only comfortable with packaged pseudo events and those willing to cultivate, to see what happens, to show up — and then to go home without telling a soul, or getting a Smashburger on the way.

These photographs and artifacts were among the most moving works in the four-story exhibit, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” ongoing at the New Museum, the inaugural show after the institution’s $82 million expansion. They and other high-modernist work in the exhibition lie on one side of a divide between the time when we understood there was a meaningful distinction between man and machine, and today — when we do not. Both kinds of work are on display, which simultaneously surpassed my expectations and laid bare the deficiencies and stuckness of contemporary art. 

Artists raised under the old, industrial economy, which still produced things, may have been the last to concern themselves with objects, and thus with beauty, materiality, and reality. The digital consumer economy’s production of slop and junk has formed artists interested in kitsch and pastiche. How art will survive the transition remains to be seen. 

The exhibition presents an archive of responses to profound, technologically mediated shifts in our experience of the world, ourselves, and our bodies. It includes painting, sculpture, video, and illustration concerned with machines, technology, and the technologized, cyborg body. The show was curated by artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, and is effectively arranged: the viewer, traversing the works roughly chronologically, experiences the cognitive shocks that previous generations felt as the collective tempo of life increased.

Beginning around World War I, technology began to be rendered artistically as a pathogen and destroyer, rather than as it was previously, as a source of secular salvation. In the new view, technology attaches itself to the human and burrows inside: the most common visual tropes in the exhibition concern the tearing, dismembering, and re-welding of the human body by machine parts. 

A 1918 gelatin silver print by Man Ray, titled “Femme,”  features a simple egg-beater whose shadow on the paper makes a vaguely humanoid form — a stark and elegant lament about our replacement. 

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Such 20th-century artistic responses to technology are significantly more moving and complex than 21st-century art, which tends to bear, on the whole, an uncanny and unfortunate resemblance to stills from the movie Avatar: the dominant style is James Cameron. A good example is the bald woman, space stations, and octopus tentacles in Oz, a video installation on vertical phone-like screens, from Cao Fei, a Chinese video and virtual-reality artist. Elsewhere, Millennial artists employ bright, simplistic brushstrokes, occasional post-Basquiat splotches of sloganeering, and memes and internet ephemera, such as a deepfake of Kim Kardashian in the video The Finesse (2022), by Sri Lankan artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas.

None of these newer works can match the metaphysical torsion and depth of midcentury painters. Francis Bacon’s deformed, haunted face in “Study for Self-Portrait,” from 1979. shows us the suffering of humanity being violated by the anti-human. Salvadore Dalí’s “Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man” (1943) offers allegorical richness with a barely glimpsed figure emerging from a cracked, egg-shaped globe. Both Swiss artist Miriam Cahn and Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong distort the human figure in different, disturbing ways, to powerful effect. In all of these paintings, the brushstrokes themselves fight off the virus of non-representation and technological nihilism. 

The museum captures a clear, if non-linear, decline in artistic and conceptual ambition in representing the catastrophes of the present. The fall-off from Dalí and De Jong to Cao Fei and New Zealander Simon Denny is profound. Denny’s “Amazon Worker Cage Patent Drawing as Virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage” (2019) makes a point but has little other impact: it is a whitewashed cage with random appendages.

“New Humans” reveals the truth that the newer humans get, the less capable they become of thinking, acting, and creating outside of the tech-supplemented paradigms of mass culture. Contemporary video looks AI generated, or like cheap visual effects in an old movie. Contemporary figurative representation looks like commercial illustration. There is no bright line between contemporary conceptual art and AI slop — and the artists’ attempts to cleverly acknowledge and incorporate this fails to be transformative. 

Also, while the organization and layout of the exhibition is excellent, the design of the building is superabundant in the clichés of contemporary art: white walls, fluorescent lights, rooms where things buzz and pop and gurgle. The effect seems to suggest that contemporary art can only ever be removed from tradition, warmth, wholeness, and faith; there is no tension between the museum and what it hangs on its walls and sits on its display floors. In fact, the form of the New Museum aligns so closely with its content that it seems to take for granted that the only civilizational option is techno-gnostic religion and the transformation of the body. 

I felt that the museum — and maybe all of art, and the art world, too — have internalized the melancholy of modernity and technology to such a degree that they struggles to conceive of, let alone represent, even a hint of an alternative. The world at large may be overwhelmingly fluorescent, over-stimulating, and coated in an intellectual or over-intellectualized surface, but there is no essential reason why contemporary art must present itself formally as coterminous with the regime of technocracy and biopolitical engineering. The 20th-century components of the exhibition were in critique of this social tendency; the 21st-century work is in acquiescence.

Moreover, there is still a sense that midcentury painters were in dialog with the canon and had some ambition to connect the metaphysical trauma of the 20th century to the long chain of centuries stretching back to the late Middle Ages. The present meta-modernity — or post-post-modernity, whatever you want to call it — has little such interest in the past, except as a data set of images used to construct images of the technologized future. There is no sense of spiritual resistance or inner light or humanistic dignity; the closest thing to optimism I saw was Anicka Yi’s “In Love with the World” (2021), in which floating “aerobes,” essentially large mechanical jellyfish, ask us to imagine the whimsy and aesthetics of machine rule.

Until this century, visual artists did more than evoke the determinisms and historical conditions under which they worked. Wars, plagues, assassinations, revolutions did not prevent painters and sculptors from keeping an eye on God, towards God, and towards the beauty of the body. The emphasis of the New Museum, understandably, is on the new, but the rootlessness and literalism with which it enacts the mission is deeply boring. So while this archive is stimulating and suggestive, one is ultimately left with the feeling of having been cheated. Shouldn’t these new conceptions of humanity have to compete with those that came before, and should we not judge them by the standards of the past as well as the present?

It occurred to me, however, that the exhibition should perhaps have been called “New Humans: Memories of the Past.” No matter how thoroughly the human body is reimagined as machine-angel or machine-devil, our collective memory of wholeness remains strong. We desire to be ourselves again.

One painting arrested my attention as I was leaving: “Mud Field II” (2023), by Pol Taburet, one of the youngest painters in the show, stood out precisely because its central male figure, though slightly abstracted, conjured up psychological, moral, and physical humanity. Taburet’s painting made me hope that a cycle was ending, and that coming generations of painters may yet turn away from the now-clichéd assumptions of postmodernism and embrace what Blake called the “human form divine.” 

But as I’ve gotten older — and I’d like to think wiser — and as my own worldview has evolved, I’ve started to understand that the joy I experience around kids is not just about surplus energy or drawing a contrast with my New York City lifestyle, but actually the activation of an inborn paternal instinct. Some part of my being has a desire to make what sociobiologist Robert Trivers calls “parental investment.” That is to say: to play a crucial role in the future, to sacrifice something, to be a part of a clan and not just an isolated hedonic maximizer.

My generation, Millennials, is having children later, and at lower percentage rates than generations that came before us — only 40% of Millennial men are fathers, compared to 46% of Gen Xers, and only 33% live with a spouse and children, as compared to 66% of Gen X men. Among Zoomers, breeding is even less likely, in part thanks to a significant gender gap: 57% of Zoomer men want kids (a priority valued much more highly among Trump voters), but only 46% of Zoomer women want them (and likely they don’t want them with Trump voters). Add to this the ethos of AI, robotics, and life extension, and it suggests that one of the many schisms coming to our civilization will be that of the childless versus the parents: those who maximize life extension and hedonism, and those who value what will start to be considered “trad immortality” — that is, old-fashioned biological procreation. I don’t mean that everyone will fall into just these two camps, of course, but that this distinction will be a meaningful and historical one. The seeds of it are already planted. 

Much is said, and rightly so, about the consequences of delayed parenting for women: both positive and negative. But there is far less emphasis on the consequences of delayed parenting for men. Men also undergo hormonal, neurological, and psychological changes when they become fathers. As biological anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa writes, “humans are unusual among mammals in that our offspring are dependent upon older individuals for feeding and protection for more than a decade.” 

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Valentino’s battle for beauty

By Matthew Gasda

Men, like women transform when they have to provide care and protection to a family. The shifts are less obvious but no less existentially and morally meaningful. Men of my generation, however, are reaching or crossing the boundary of age 40 not only without having had kids, but without ever having thought about having kids, and thus remaining in what can only be deemed a long adolescence — or a long 20s, at least.

To be sure, not everybody should have children. And I suspect that lifelong bachelors do play a valuable role in civilization (for instance, there’s a reason why historically almost no philosophers have been married). Certainly some people’s most procreative acts are creative and intellectual, and not biological. But on the whole, something is wrong with a society in which increasingly few men unlock the deepest meaning of their own masculinity — a tissue-deep meaning. In a 2014 Emory University study, fathers showed much higher levels of plasma oxytocin, higher prolactin, and lower testosterone than non-fathers. A landmark 2011 longitudinal study out of Northwestern found that the men with the highest testosterone — the most competitive, virile males by the manosphere’s own metrics — were the most likely to become fathers, and then experienced declines of roughly a third in their testosterone levels after becoming fathers: peak masculinity leads to fatherhood, and fatherhood transforms it. For some in the manosphere, this sounds like a disaster (because “high T” is God), but we are meant to become less aggressive and more nurturing when we have children. 

Fathers also live longer than non-fathers, even controlling for marital status. Fathers show lower rates of mental illness and engage in fewer risky behaviors. Moving away from the reductionist sociobiological point of view, any serious reader of great literature knows that fatherhood is often the mark of the hero, of a boy transformed into a man, who is ready to apply the lessons of his long education to the future and the next generation.

Whether extrapolating from Tolstoy — think of the birth of Prince Andrei’s son in the first part of War and Peace — or science, it is not hard to see why a world with fewer fathers, and a lower share of fathers, is less healthy, less civilized, less enmeshed in the meaning and drive of life.

Earlier this year, the internet writer and former academic sociologist Justin Murphy wrote a long post on X, perhaps to provoke conversation, about his own dislike of being a father. The responses to his post were, to my mind, salutary: one premise of Murphy’s confession was that fatherhood is central to manhood, and that manhood without fatherhood — or without a taste for fatherhood or love of fatherhood — is a manhood or masculinity that must question itself and interrogate itself. Certainly this is the right track. 

The gulf is wide between the pleasures of a civilization that suspends adolescence forever and the ancient challenge of sacrificing one’s own gratification for the sake of new life and of the future. What Murphy’s viral post demonstrates is that it’s hard to transition from an easy life to a difficult one, where you must be ultimately responsible and seek more than self-fulfillment. I have this anxiety myself. One reason for it is that men of my generation never learned how to overcome such feelings. Without rituals of manhood, which bring men gradually, but definitively, into modes of responsibility both positional and spiritual, the shift from bachelorhood to parenthood produces anxiety and shock. 

A highly technologized, ultra-modernized world where everyone lives far from nature, tradition, and religion, is one with more choices, and concealed preferences. So my point here is not to punish those who choose not to have children, but to inject some kind of paranoid philosophizing into the conversation. Are we forgetting that we have a choice — and that both tradition and biology make a very powerful case for fatherhood? 

Some, yes, are meant to be monks, playboys, philosophers, esoteric computer programmers who spend their lives in largely solitary conditions. But those are few. How many of us are really Leopold Bloom without wives and without children — without a hero’s journey, without the inheritance of Odysseus, who knows who he is because he has an island home, a wife and a son, an old father, a loyal dog? Many of us. Which means, ultimately, that many of us will never experience the sweetness of growing old.

The loss of any profound sensibility — whether in fashion, philosophy, physics, film, literature, politics, music, or engineering — is cause to think about its absence and its impact. Valentino’s passing shows us that high fashion has become a feckless and heartless enterprise, afraid of the poetry of universal forms, and, in particular, of the masculine appraisal of the female form and of the synergistic relationship between the male eye and the feminine as a civilization-enhancing ideal.

What Valentino stood for — what his work manifested — was the apprehension of beauty, rather than the presentation of an ideology. His reign from the 1960s through the late 1980s, and his decline through the 1990s and aughts, almost perfectly tracks the radical aesthetic break after 1989, when a confident, gendered view of both men’s and women’s fashion gave way to the shiftless, formless, deconstructed grunge aesthetic that has, in one form or another, predominated for the last 30 years. 

At the street level, the apotheosis of this drab, ideologized style are the hideously baggy women’s sweatpants and jeans that have come to prevail in the post-#MeToo era: low-rise or otherwise garishly revealing — but, crucially, without celebrating the female form.

Valentino’s gift — visible in dresses for stars from Elizabeth Taylor to Julia Roberts, and most radiantly evident in the dresses he made for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — was for framing his subjects in a way that enhanced their elegance without reduction to plainness or over-simplicity. The essence of a Valentino dress might be summarized as decorated elegance, the suggestion that there could be more, that there is more, that the designer could have done. Valentino’s dresses hover at the edge of restraint, just over the line of good taste. 

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Have we forgotten how to do Christmas?

By Matthew Gasda

To borrow from the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Valentino’s dresses were some of the last miracles of a European tradition that risked, aspired to, and was drawn toward transcendence (or what Sloterdijk calls “verticality”). Valentino never fell from grace or respect in the fashion world; rather, the civilization that he designed for ceased to exist. 

The fall of the Soviet Union, especially, freed the West from the reliance on tradition that it formerly used to draw a clear contrast between itself and a revolutionary utopian enemy. During the jaded ’90s, fashion was flattened and became “horizontal.” The red carpet, which represents what a culture wants to see about itself, lost interest in the female form as a miracle and final flower of civilization, and Valentino’s very Catholic vision of beauty, which was not open to deconstruction and moral nagging, fell out of fashion.

To borrow another key idea from Sloterdijk, fashion over the last 30 years, and especially in the last decade, seems to have become more and more armored, as if clothes were an immune response to a chaotic and dangerous world. Celebrity fashion’s strategic shift toward the ugly, oversized, and ironic might be described as so many inoculations against judgment — protection against any accusation that the wearer might be secretly allied to the old, pre-social justice cult of sumptuousness epitomized by house Valentino in its heyday.

Valentino’s death this week coincides strangely with the eruption of public drama between Brooklyn Beckham and his family — in particular his mother, Victoria, the pop singer-turned-fashion designer whose minimalist, wearable brand, which is clean, neutral, and risk-free, embodies the very horizontality that Valentino must have abhorred. The strange thing about the intra-Beckham spat, however, is that it seemingly began with the choice of Brooklyn’s betrothed Nicola to wear Valentino, rather than Victoria Beckham, at the couple’s 2022 wedding. The younger Beckhams didn’t just reject their aesthetic matrilineage; they embraced something like an aesthetic nostalgia, a desire for a fashion absolute.

And yet the Beckham family beef, which has played out on Instagram, also demonstrates that nostalgia for the vertical, Catholic sense of beauty has no chance of reaching escape velocity. It will be dogged and enchained by the puerility and ugliness of social media culture and, by extension, a celebrity culture that has lost all connection with iconography and ritual.

If the women that Valentino dressed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s stood for aspiration toward a distant and beautiful absolute, then the celebrities who will undoubtedly line up to wear vintage Valentino in the coming weeks and months will stand for nothing other than the lust for clicks and attention. Jackie Kennedy, dressed in Valentino in the ’60s, could only be glimpsed by the public in snapshots that still contained a sense of scarcity, yearning, and symbolism. Images of celebrities on red carpets today are subject to endless recirculation, memeing, commentary, and now AI recreation and modification. If you don’t like how a celebrity is dressed on the red carpet, you can use AI to realistically redress or undress them, destroying any vestigial sense of the sacred, and degrading yourself in the bargain.

The coincidence of Valentino’s death with Brooklyn Beckham’s break from House Beckham, in the context of our menacingly tasteless algorithmic era, suggests that a rebirth of Valentino’s aesthetic spirit will not, ironically, have much to do with celebrities or celebrity culture. Valentino’s greatest designs came about during an era of analog media, before imagery overload became too profound. My guess is that the designer working in Valentino’s mode — with an eye toward the splendor of the human form, the splendor of clothes, and the union of the two — must serve private audiences away from cameras and screens. He must seek after the limited eternity of private memory, not terabytes. Fashion in the future, ironically, might resemble the anonymous design of the pre-celebrity, premodern era: it will be for aristocrats and salons removed from public consumption and opinion. 

“I love beauty. It’s not my fault,” Valentino said in 2008. It was not a fault, but a virtue, and his legacy will long endure for it.

Set in Uppsala, Sweden the film follows the sprawling Ekdahl family through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin). Their father, the bohemian Oscar (Allan Edwall) runs a charming, ramshackle family theater; their grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren), the family matriarch, presides over lavish dinners and her son’s productions, while entertaining the discreet presence of her lover, the Jewish art dealer Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson). The first part the film, which I’m concerned with here, shows us the course of Christmas Eve, from dawn to early morning Christmas Day: meal preparation, rehearsal at the theater (including a moving speech by Oscar), the arrival of the extended Ekdahl family, Christmas dinner (toasts, jokes, songs), coffee and gossip for the adults while the children pretend to fall asleep. 

Fanny and Alexander is Bergman’s last major film (he continued directing for the stage and television), and it inverts much of what we think of as Bergman-esque. It is shot in vivid color, and part one especially does not show us the psychological and spiritual torsion produced by an unbearable, isolating modernity (think, most famously perhaps, Persona); instead it offers a cozy, loving (albeit imperfect) family ecology in which Christmas, through ritual and tradition, is the center of the energy and spirit of the Ekdahl clan.

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Asset-hoarding Boomers rob the young  

By Matthew Gasda

Bergman’s nostalgic but still realistic depiction of what Christmas looked like without electronic technology — and, by extension, without the constant overhang of global anxieties, global threats, and globalized media culture — returns the focus to the house and the family. The family is most relevant to us because of its anti-relevance, because it’s so alien to our own sensibilities. The long takes with depth of field, overlapping dialog, motion, and frames crowded with fabric, wood, candlelight, food, color, highlight the importance of the home during long, snowy Nordic winters, and display the plenitude of bourgeois life and the humanistic warmth of the Ekdahl family.

This theatrical Christmas, as the camera shows, flows throughout the entire house: bedrooms, servants’ quarters, kitchens, drawing rooms, dining rooms. We hear the jingle of sleigh bells outside. Even though the world of adults that young Alexander encounters is lurid, deceptive, and in some cases embittered (Bergman rarely idealizes), the wider field of family is soulful and alive. The warmth of tradition overrides the neurotic contradictions of the everyday bourgeois world.

Bergman’s convincing recreation of the late 19th century or early 20th century household appeals to us because it shows us what Christmas was before mass media, and indeed before Christmas movies themselves. The irony of Fanny and Alexander is that it exists before cinema, or it takes place before cinema was created. Because movies haven’t been invented yet, Alexander must rely on watching a magic lantern projected against his bedroom wall; in 1900, life itself was the Christmas movie.

Bergman’s message is ambivalently bound up in his medium. Many of the best Christmas movies, in other words, are acts of mourning, which locate moments when some bit of cultural innocence or candor, exuberance, and intensity were shed in exchange for something more efficient. Though shot in the early 1980s, Fanny and Alexander represent the world of yesterday. There is something of a straight line from it to American Christmas movies of the ’80s and ’90s, which are almost entirely about the tragicomedy of small nuclear households trying to survive the absurdity of maintaining Christmas traditions and getting everyone the gifts they want (Home Alone, Jingle All the Way, The Santa Clause, Christmas With the Kranks).

Fanny and Alexander is almost unbearably moving because of the intergenerational tenderness and care displayed by the extended family in the film. The domestic arrangements of Bergman’s masterpiece seems much further away from us even than the idealized nuclear family in It’s a Wonderful Life, and certainly from the screen-alienated modern family. Here, young Alexander Ekdahl, the son of a man of the theater (who later in the film dies of a heart attack), experiences Christmas at home as a dense maze of conversations, games, song, and hijinks late into the night. Family life is a multi-generational web; his experience of a single night is rooted in centuries of Christmases and of Ekdahls. 

Christmas movies show us how families respond to pressure, and how families recover from the pressures and torments of ordinary life. They are idealized on the whole, because the larger thrust of Christmas is in the direction of charity, forgiveness, and communion, both secular and sacred. Audiences in the ’80s watching Bergman’s film knew that the bourgeois world ended and had to end, and watching the movie again in our decade, in our new century, we also know that the bourgeois world ended and had to end. 

Christmas movies are compensation. We have them because we can no longer have the past. That, I think, is inarguable. But I also think we can look at Christmas movies as codes or scripts or algorithms, in a sense, which we can use to reprogram our lives, borrowing from them to restore both material and spiritual vital components.

What strikes me maybe most about rewatching Fanny and Alexander in 2025, on the cusp of 2026, is how much the actual material costs of having a 19th-century Christmas have fallen; if we wanted to, Christmas could be something like this: convivial, screen-free, humane, sacred and profane at once. The obvious critique of the 19th-century Christmas is that it would have only been available to a few, or a smaller section of society (maybe 20% or 30% of society in 1900). Candlelight, singing, food from farms, children, big families, people of all ages gathering together: none of these things are beyond the means of the average household in 2025, only beyond our imaginations.

So there it is: the uncomfortable irony of Bergman’s classic. The world of today does not use its resources very well. And Christmas is not a celebration of the plenitude and solidity of the well-appointed household, but an insane and alienated striving after stuff and entertainment, in which the last days of December provide considerably less solace, joy, and closeness than they used to.

It might be the case that we are at the point in our civilization where Christmas is a broken technology that we no longer know how to use. Movies or novels — think Dickens, for instance — contain records of how that technology used to work. And I would suggest that we might allow ourselves to be romantic enough to try to learn again what Christmas was, motivated by the depressing contrast with what it is.

Thackeray’s great work has special relevance for those of us grappling with the 21st-century economy, which is becoming like that of the 19th in the sense that few own and many want. Vanity Fair, which has the not-so-subtle subtitle A Novel Without a Hero, is about inheritance and the spiritual vacuum that forms when people have little hope for economic security except through the death of their family members. For Thackeray, inheritance is a gravitational force that warps everything — identity, relationships, behavior, language.

The characters in the novel who stand to inherit something, like Pitt Crawley or George Osborne, are fundamentally differentiated from Becky Sharp, one of the novel’s many non-heroes who has to use sex and manipulation to compensate for the lack of any expected funds from relatives. To be disinherited in this world is tantamount to death. Similarly, many of Henry James’s novels turn on the relations between petite bourgeoisie bohemians who don’t have money (often European) and naïve new money Americans whose fortunes stand to last for generations. It is hard, according to these novelists, to be kind or good without capital.

The 19th century was a high and mighty era of peace in Europe and America, and explosive growth in sectors such as industrial production, banking, and global commerce. Its works of fiction mapped the strange social codes and psychological tensions that were produced by wealth distribution defined by new dynasties. The tech economy, now supercharged by AI, has produced its own form of dynastic power, and accelerated what was already a vastly unequal 21st-century economy. It is punishing workers entering the job market, and rewarding asset holders, especially homeowners who acquired homes before the year 2000 or thereabouts. The great bourgeois fiction of the mid to late 19th century, therefore, holds clues about the social pathologies and antipathies that are emerging in our own time. 

A popular genre of posting on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit, for instance, concerns the selfishness of boomers: millennials vent about parents whose retirement accounts and first, second, or even third homes are worth far more than their children and grandchildren can earn. These parents are refusing to help their children or to disperse their wealth to their children and grandchildren, all with a “we earned this” attitude. No matter how apocryphal, accurate, or fair these posts are, their popularity tells us something about how Americans born roughly after 1980 perceive their inheritance or lack of it.

Post-1980s financial deregulation and the housing inflation of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the zero interest rate policy of the 2010s and early 2020s produced, broadly speaking, asset inflation and wage stagnation. The result of this is that younger people, if they haven’t gone into tech, finance, medicine, or law — and sometimes even if they have — struggle to buy a home without the help of their parents or inheritance from their parents, and cannot achieve middle-class security even with what used to be middle-class incomes.

So while the meme or myth of the selfish, pleasure-seeking boomer retiree is unfair to many boomers who do try to help their children, the larger problem is the demoralizing need to ask for money or assets and the lack of real incentives to get younger people working, marrying, and raising families.

Thus, the Victorian and Edwardian novels, once read as artifacts of a time when class strictures drove people into perverse, deceptive, and morally toxic behaviors, are suddenly cyclical prophecies. The OnlyFans girls and crypto-influencers are 19th-century archetypes in an ultra-contemporary guise. Today, work does not actually produce security, which was the great promise and payoff of mid-century American life; only capital and assets produce it now.

The novels of Thackeray, James, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Edith Wharton deal with more than class resentment and issues of inheritance and money. A careful reader must work hard to decide what is a symptom and what is a cause. The great novels of the late 19th century ask whether vanity, moral corruption, and spiritual emptiness are eternal human failings or specific pathologies produced by economic structures — or both. The novels themselves suggest the latter: that K-shaped economies don’t merely reveal human weakness but actively generate and exploit it. 

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Does MAGA need a drink?

By Matt Gasda

This has dire practical consequences. As Henry Adams wrote, “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” Whether of the Left or Right variety, the populist political movements of the last few years reflect a deep and dangerous animus between increasingly ossified classes and generations. It is one of the ironies of history that universal unfairness tends to give rise to revolutions that are far crueler and more destructive than their causes. The end of the 19th century, we should note with trepidation, gave rise to the wars, revolutions, and genocides of the first half of the 20th century. In other words, today’s schemers and social-climbers are the 21st-century equivalent of the younger characters in Vanity Fair. Behind the façade, they’re begging their parents to sell some Nvidia from their IRA, or gambling on altcoins in place of any hope of an inheritance, and they may soon evolve into figures much angrier and more combative.

Speaking as someone born in 1989, I can attest that there’s something maddening about feeling like there’s no amount of labor that can produce the comfortable, normal life largely enjoyed by one’s parents and perhaps grandparents (who worked hard and were rewarded). I feel like my generation has handled this, despite its infamous quirks and social conventions, relatively gracefully. But economic conditions seem even worse for rising generations. It is not unreasonable to expect that pressure in the system and distrust of asset holders by the asset-less will only grow.

If the world is a mirror, and what one sees in the mirror becomes progressively more ugly, dislocated and unhappy, then it is only a matter of time before someone chooses to smash the mirror.

Even if the crash wiped out only a vocal and desperate minority of leveraged retail traders, it revealed how dependent many Americans, especially young men, are on various forms of gambling for income. Other symptoms of this dynamic included the “Liberation Day” mini-crash in April and the Gamestop stock craze in 2021. The risks that retail traders are taking seem more and more dramatic; a few make millions and post their winnings on Reddit; thousands seek to emulate these gains and get wiped out.

The economy of the 2020s is marked by a nervous, Zyn’d up desperation. The emergence of prediction betting markets like Polymarket, Kalshi, and Robinhood, moreover, suggests that an entirely novel economic system — the casino economy — has emerged from the information economy, the same way the information economy emerged from the midcentury industrial economy. 

Platforms like DraftKings, Robinhood, or Kalshi clearly incentivize us to engage in gambling behavior. And an extremely fragile labor market and future for labor means gambling to survive is increasingly necessary. The crypto crash illuminated, but did not create this reality; gambling (like OnlyFans, to cite another adjacent phenomenon) happens in proportion to a decay in dependable, salaried wage labor.

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The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matthew Gasda

We are pushed and pulled into the casino economy. This is an enormously complex phenomenon, but it’s worth trying to understand why this is happening and what the ramifications are.

One factor is that the information economy — sometimes known as the economy of bullshit jobs or email jobs — de-conditioned millions of college-educated Americans to tangible toil, as technical or laboring jobs were shipped overseas or taken by cheap migrant labor at home. These shifts, determined by Wall Street, the cheap-labor lobby, and neoliberals in both major parties, were of immense public consequence; yet the public had little input into them. Between 2008 and 2023, the real economy shrank. Young people entering the labor market either managed to secure email jobs (IT, management, human resources, and the like) or fell into an abyss of service-sector precarity; many straddled both sectors, serving as adjunct philosophy teachers by day and as baristas by night. 

The Obama economy’s rebound after 2008 was partly driven by the lottery-like dynamics of NGO jobs and tech jobs — by private and public email jobs. Getting an email job at a startup that succeeded could mean being set for life, while the runners-up would remain economically insecure. These jobs were also ideologically aligned, meant for and granted to so-called coastal elites with the requisite progressive views. This was the economy of New York, LA, DC, and Seattle (the heartlands were buoyed by natural gas, but those jobs also came under attack from the green agenda).

The problem with the Obama-era version of the information economy was that the products minted by NGOs and tech companies and advertising firms didn’t help us do anything — didn’t improve our quality of life. NGOs too often took up niche causes (while laundering their donors’ money). Tech companies visibly eroded quality of life (addictive social feeds, for example, mean going to restaurants where people at the same table scarcely look at each other, let alone, you know, talk). Private equity and hedge funds asset-stripped the real economy, piling debt atop debt to buy up legacy firms, refusing to invest in them, and thus dramatically boosting the likelihood of bankruptcy.

Getting an email job in 2011 was like winning the lottery (especially when those jobs came at startups that vested equity in the company); but the “good” jobs that Millennials found or created in the early Obama era were largely fake in the sense that they what they “produced” was bad for everyone who didn’t work in tech, finance, or advertising. These jobs contributed to the erosion of community life, and detracted from the well-being of Americans at large, and so there was never growing prosperity, or — to borrow the buzzword du jour — collective “abundance.”

The Millennials who were doing well in the Obama economy were doing so at the expense of many  others who weren’t. The product manager who made Facebook more addictive enriched himself at a cost to its users. NGOs that pushed ideological propaganda into school districts or hospitals or the arts achieved narrow victories for themselves, but inflamed social tension, disempowered parties and other mass-membership organizations, and eroded the quality of discourse. 

This economy was value-negative, and its economic benefits, what there were of them, were not well-distributed geographically or across class lines. It was an economy of gross inequality. It now appears to be giving way to something else. Between 2009 and 2019, the top 1% of US households captured roughly two-thirds of all wealth gains; median household wealth, by contrast, barely returned to pre-recession levels. During the same period, private-equity assets under management mushroomed to more than $5 trillion, up from about $1 trillion, and tech giants became Leviathans.

As the email economy falters, and as email jobs are either cut in Washington by a populist Trump administration or replaced by AI, elite laptop-class and credentialed coastal professionals are still habituated to expecting a lot for not a lot of work. That’s where the gambling mindset comes in. Stated bluntly, whether you got into the email job economy and are now feeling precarious, or whether you, like myself, never made it in, you have incentive to gamble.

Yet we have neither the skill nor the taste for the daily, dependable, reliable labor of our grandfathers and grandmothers. The insignia of the information economy — bloated degrees, bloated grades, bloated accomplishments, ideological hypothyroidism — are increasingly useless, and probably should be useless.

The casino economy stands at the threshold of the information economy and whatever comes next. What’s less clear is whether it’s transitional or semi-permanent. It may define the whole next era. Americans have some agency yet in this historical unfolding.

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Beware San Fran’s rationalist cult

By Matthew Gasda

While the long-term success of the Trump administration’s economic agenda is far from guaranteed, there’s a refreshing long-termism in the integrated platform of tariffs, corporate reinvestment, and public stakes in private companies — especially companies related to national security, chips, heavy metals, aerospace, and defense. Reduced dependence on migrant labor, which suppresses wages on the lower rungs, would also have long-term benefits. The Trump administration would like to get America back to making things, and for those things to be made by Americans. (On the other hand, Trump’s embrace of crypto and rampant speculation provides reason to be skeptical. There’s a worrisome, even loathsome, enthusiasm for vapor over material abundance.)

And the revitalization agenda is somewhat bipartisan. The most salutary aspect of both parties’ economic ideals is connected to re-embracing the real, rather than the informational, fake product and fake productivity. The general popularity of economic visions predicated on material, street-level reality is encouraging (in contrast to the 2010’s emphasis on ideological and digital “progress”).

At the same time, both parties and politicians across the spectrum are speculators themselves, trading inside information for massive stock gains. (Members of Congress consistently outperform the market by 6% to 12% annually). The casino economy has also been casino politics for a long time.

As for me, I buy dividend stocks, having gotten burned by day trading in 2021. Occasionally I’m tempted into losing money on a football or basketball game. I really enjoy my weekly poker games and the friends I’ve made playing poker. But what I’d like is to not be quite as excited as I am when I can buy groceries with my poker winnings, and for my friends to not be worried about the price of Etherium as it drops in real time during our game. I’d like gambling to be fun (again).

A Gallup poll last week found that only 54% of American adults drank alcohol in 2025. Drinking among Republicans is in a rapid collapse, with only 46% of Republicans reporting that they drank in 2025, down from 65% two years ago. (Democrats, by contrast, are drinking only slightly less than before, 61% this year, down from 64% in 2023.) The phenomenon seems to be, at least in part, mimetic: President Trump doesn’t drink. RFK Jr. abstains. Charlie Kirk preaches sobriety. Tucker Carlson is sober.

This might seem like a winning issue for the Right — and one that unites the Trump coalition, since the tech libertarians who now finance the party don’t drink, either — but anyone who cares about human conviviality should be skeptical. 

Republican teetotaling is part of a general decline in having fun; partying — drinking, sex, going out — has slumped since the pandemic (during which public authorities told Americans that physical alienation from each other is a responsible social pattern). It turns out that when you lock up members of an already atomized, lonely society, people don’t easily recover the sociality that Aristotle taught is one of the fundamental characteristics of the human animal. Restless un-leisure — doom-scroolling, scrambled attention spans, ordering in — has gradually become more normal than being together. 

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Across the board, alcohol consumption is declining — men, women, white, nonwhite, rich, poor. Biohackers like Bryan Johnson or self-optimizing influencers like Andrew Huberman believe no level of alcohol is safe. Sobriety or “California sober” — no alcohol, but plenty of cannabis — is another emerging trend and is increasingly normal among Gen Z and millennials, who prefer stimulants, nootropics and nicotine. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are also reducing consumption in general, drinking included.

Against the backdrop of a broad decline in social trust and socializing, the general decline in alcohol consumption becomes relevant — and the more specific decline in drinking among Republicans is especially ominous. 

To some extent, the embrace of sobriety on the Right is a reversal, since lately it’s been progressives who are anti-pleasure. But in the longer historical perspective, it’s a return to form. Over the last 150 years, temperance has been a consistently Republican virtue. The reputation for drinking and “fun” belonged to Democrats. 

It was the Republicans who were the “drys” during Prohibition, casting themselves as the party of sobriety, order, and Protestant reform, while Democrats were associated with saloons, ethnic political machines, and speakeasies. The old Republican rallying cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” — caricaturing Democrats as the party of booze, Catholic immigrants, and Confederate nostalgia — was first uttered by a Protestant minister during the 1884 presidential campaign. 

Excess drinking and alcoholism are deadly, to be sure, and some people should never drink. For many others, not drinking is super fucking lame; moderate drinking is fundamental feature of a good life. Certainly, that’s been the position of Western civilization both before and after the advent of Christianity. “Mix stronger wine,” Achilles commands in Homer’s Iliad, “a cup for the hands of each guest — / Here beneath my roof are the men I love the most.” Wine is used for cooking, at meals and during religious rituals in the poem. The guests in the Platonic dialog The Symposium negotiate how much they’ll drink at the beginning of the evening — and then go on to imbibe more than planned, joking about their drunkenness and referring to each other as “o my companions in drink.” 

Christianity, of course, incorporates wine in the central mystery of the Eucharist, though sometimes some of the more dour denominations have substituted grape juice. Medieval paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portray village life as scenes of rowdy and joyous drunken revelry, and the still life tradition in the 1800s showed tables laden with glasses, bottles and carafes. Private drinking parties made life tolerable, for me personally, during the pandemic; good dive bars are part of what justify the price of rent in New York City — or any other big city.

Anything that unites — even accidentally — the neuroticism of tech optimizers, progressive scolds, and rightoid incels is probably bad. Americans need convivial practices like drinking with friends. The decline of drinking is a decline in spending time with other people, learning about them, and knowing them. Temperance promotes isolation and alienation.

Politically, the neo-temperance movement also threatens the plurality and energy of the Trump coalition. Part of Trump’s appeal was his basically liberal attitude toward the good life (he doesn’t drink, but doesn’t proselytize about it, either). The better aspects of Trump-era populism implied solidarity, community, revelry, and a good time, and stood against the dominant qualities of the Left: moral superiority, hyper-rationalism, fear of the body, fear of spontaneous community, fear of mixing it up, fear of confession, fear of the local, the street, the bar, the friend. Drinking promotes a neighborliness and bonding essential to a conservative view of the polis.

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Republican neo-temperance, moreover, not only smacks of a 19th-century purity and social stiffness, but a 20th-century clubbiness and suburban rejection of blue-collar values of the union hall or the bar — and even of the emotions that emerge from working class people in the tempo of drinking. Temperance culture is repressive.

Similarly, a Calvinist-in-spirit shunning of imbibing and inebriation — the spurning of the social and even moral uses of alcohol — is suggestive of a larger rejection of courtship, reproduction, and communal behaviors. There’s something about energy drinks and Zyn that seems suited for staring at a screen, for locking in to a kind of isolated work practice, but not conducive to talking, flirting, boasting, taking pleasure in free-spirited afterwork hours.

The Trump coalition will endure if it stays chill. An abstemious, Puritan attitude threatens the gains of the post-pandemic counterrevolution against progressivism and Bidenism, against the antisocial, judgmental, unpragmatic, and anti-communal behaviors of late progressive culture. Neurotic liberals have already driven less-neurotic liberals out of the Democratic Party; Republicans should remember that those voters can move the other way.

Moreover, temperance is, whenever enacted, unpopular and a losing position. Sermonizing conservative Protestant neuroticism about drinking resembles sermonizing liberal post-Protestant neuroticism about everything else. If conservatives embrace and accelerate accidental temperance, they risk creating a mirror image of the progressive Left: afraid of doing things, afraid of the world, afraid of irrationality.

In the 2020s, a good rule of politics, policy, and culture might be: normal is good. Most of what people were doing 40 or 50 years ago was better than the antisocial mores of today. Social drinking is a traditional good that conservatives ought to be conserve.

As I say, I wish I didn’t know who they are. And that’s because any of us might, for any particular reason, become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: flawed people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody can make a bad-but-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-us mistake on camera and face personal destruction. What such episodes reveal is a pathology in the social body, and the desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.

The “Coldplay-concert-couple” story is fundamentally irrelevant and effectively contentless, telling us nothing about the world, about ourselves; it isn’t particularly funny or tragic or profound. There is no pathos, no insight. True, the current culture on X and other social-media apps is perhaps less immediately destructive than it was during peak woke (circa 2017 to 2021). Still, the viral potential of these kinds of stories is a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control. An obsession with other people’s private lives is a sickness.

Leaking, doxing, spying on private citizens on Reddit, on private Facebook groups, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok — regardless of the moral quality of the subjects under consideration — hurts everyone. Because it makes everyone subject to this omnipresent, collectivized panopticon, and the more these images circulate, the more normal it becomes.

Group chats, dating apps, emails — or in Byron’s and Cabot’s case, simply being in public with no intention to be filmed — should not be subject to public judgment. This species of story is a distraction from serious issues, and runs cover for the genuinely powerful individuals and entities who materially impact our lives.

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Clearly, there is something in human nature that is primed to gossip, shame, and ridicule (thoughtlessly, automatically). But new technology allows us to give vent to these sordid tendencies in historically unprecedented ways. We should take seriously the moral warping effect that such stories, and our obsession with them, have on our souls.

The global village is like any village — scolding, punitive, consumed by hearsay, with nothing better to do. While turning someone into a meme might seem fun, it’s severely undignified, and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society in order to participate in a sadistic pile-on. So while the particular example at hand might not seem worth this much deliberation, that is my point.

There might be a story here about the hypocrisy of a CEO and an HR officer having an in-house affair that might get lesser-ranking employees fired. But what I see surfacing in the discursive arena is not intelligent critique of HR departments and their culture, but a glee at the immiseration of a random person.

If these trends continue — if algorithms continue to work the way they do, and I can’t imagine they won’t — then more and more victims will be dragged out of anonymity for mimetic sacrifice. And as a consequence, meaningful taboos about privacy, shame, and respect have disappeared, and everyone’s lives and behaviors have become fodder for comment and ridicule.

We sorely need new taboos — not against adultery or sexual immorality or interpersonal deception, because clearly we have plenty of those already. Rather, we need taboos against aggregating ourselves into idiotic, loathsome mobs, incapable of thinking about what the subjects of our ridicule and these digital stonings might suffer. A wiser perspective would admit that we all, at the wrong moment, are liars, fools, cheaters, charlatans, hypocrites. Let who has not sinned click the “like” or “repost” button.

We all sin, and we might have received grace or mercy under the theocracies of older liberal and Enlightenment arrangements. Algorithmic justice and judgment, however, contains neither the virtues of theocratic society — you could at least avail yourself of religious law, with its exceptions and casuistry — nor of classically liberal society: there is no due process, no appeal mechanism. There’s no mediating structure in the global village. It is instinctive, animalistic, rash, cruel.

The force and direction of this collective online judgment should be turned against itself: We should punish not those caught in the panopticon, but the anonymous posters, Redditors, and the like; all who take joy in random acts of scorn. If we want to live in a tolerant, sane society, we should turn off our cameras, step away from mimetic digital village stonings, and reflect on our own haphazard and imperfect lives and selves.

This “should” will not come from above: there is no sign that tech companies will change their products to disincentivize this kind of behavior. Self-regulation, at scale, is, as of now, the only answer. The way we talk, write, act, and respond matters. Culture matters insofar as culture is a layer of software that at least partially governs how we use our phones. We sorely lack codes of conduct surrounding technology and our ability to record, dox, and harass each other.

If our natural response to constant mutual surveillance is not disgust, then it should be; phones come with cameras, but cameras linked to the global cortex are weapons. Using them to film strangers should not be normalized — telling people to put their phones away should. Piling on viral posts about random people who had no intention of going viral should not be normal, either. If Big Tech won’t take them down, then self-restraint is called for. Institutions can help uphold and reinforce these new norms by prohibiting phone usage in as many public spaces as possible.

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There are secondary benefits, too: public spaces are also just better without everyone being on their phones; 50,000 people all filming the same concert, for instance, aside from having unintended consequences, is stupid and unaesthetic. Each of us doesn’t need to take our own badly framed photos of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” when we visit Vienna. There are professional photos and postcards widely available. We could employ the faculty of memory, too.

Codes of conduct are what we might call counter-mimetics; they do have to be injected into social interaction and discourse, artificially at first, before they catch on. That’s what I’m proposing here. We might think something is amusing and worth commenting on or bad and worth scolding, and maybe, in isolation it is. But on the whole, we’re making life intolerable, anxious, and graceless.

It took several centuries for mounted knights to develop the code of conduct known as chivalry to regulate their unparalleled ability to kill or threaten anyone who didn’t have a horse, mail, and sword; let’s hope we can develop codes of conduct around our phones or whatever next-generation AI devices replace phones.

Privacy is a hard-won social good; give it back to others to protect your own.

Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire (“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!”) and then his flurry of accusations of it being broken (“ISRAEL DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS”) suggest that he is using social media to operate outside of the invisible institutional state systems that have constrained presidential action since at least the days of President Truman. We can infer that Trump is posting as Trump, not as the Trump administration. Trump is posting as a sovereign. The contrast with Biden’s Twitter/X account couldn’t be clearer. This is a style of wielding power.

And it is one, I suspect, which is not limited to Trump, but enabled by both new tools and shifts in capital accumulation towards tech and crypto. State monopolies of money and information have been disrupted and only the monopoly on violence remains. Under the old forms of state sovereignty, new forms of sovereignty are emerging. Individuals leveraging different kinds of platforms — whether financial, technological or media-related — have started to wield state-like influence. Elected officials at odds with intelligence agencies, bureaucracy and legislators can step outside of the parameters of government to persuade, isolate and break up conglomerates of power.

When a populist with ties to capital and tech, such as Trump, gets elected, this kind of disruption reaches its heights. The President behaves in some ways like a non-state actor operating within the state, and in other ways, like an avatar of the state. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Trump is clearly using his Truth Social posts to increase his own leverage and to change the direction of negotiations, not only with Israel and Iran, but potentially with his own military and administration officials. The negotiations, happening in real time, are complex and multidimensional.

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The ability to instantly disseminate global communiqués has increased the powers of the US President to shape events around the world. When Trump tweeted that the citizens of Tehran should evacuate, all the highways leading out of the city were jammed within minutes. In this century, neither Biden nor Obama nor George W. Bush used the powers of the presidency this way.

Critically, these new forms of sovereignty and power politics are not just emerging within the framework of states, but outside of them, suggesting new, covert forms of power. When a billionaire like Bill Ackman tweets his support of Israel, he is not just sharing an opinion, he’s hinting at where and how his capital will flow. Trump’s battles with Harvard, similarly, are not just about sticking it to the libs in a symbolic sense, but about cauterizing certain sources of soft counter-power. USAID was dismantled for similar reasons.

Perhaps the most significant indication that something has radically shifted in the way power works was the explosive social media war between President Trump and Elon Musk. For 24 hours, the spat absorbed the full attention of the discursive ecosystem. Rather than work through representatives or behind closed doors, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man engaged in a public tit-for-tat. I don’t think they did this to entertain us, but to test the limits of their power.

The Trump-Musk feud felt like a clean break from the tone, style and dynamic of managerial liberalism, which has been the American norm for 100 years. Rather, Musk’s language (“without me, Trump would have lost the election”) was classically Shakespearean: a powerful vassal lashing out against the king he helped to enthrone. The dynamic reminded me of Henry Percy (Hotspur) and Henry Bolingbroke in Henry IV. Hotspur feels he helped win the throne but hasn’t been adequately rewarded. Worcester, Hotspur’s uncle, tells the King bluntly that he owes his throne to the Percy clan — without them, you couldn’t have deposed even weak Richard II. The implication is threatening: we can overthrow you just as we helped you overthrow your predecessor. After Trump hit back, Tesla’s $150 billion plunge in market value felt like a battlefield loss, like Hotspur’s armies fleeing. When Musk threatened to “begin decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft”, he resembled a grand duke refusing to send his retinue to join the king’s military campaign.

These are examples of feudalism, not of centralized or modern state power. Power increasingly seems shared, asymmetrically distributed; absolute only in small spheres, and those spheres overlap. These exchanges — whether between Trump and Musk or Trump and Khamenei — recall the depictions of Johan Huizinga, in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, of a time when feuds and vendettas were “the cardinal point of policy” and populations gathered behind aristocratic figures clamoring for “vengeance”. The late-medieval period was one where personality underwrote political stability, personal instability predicted political chaos, and pride drove public affairs.

Techno-aristocrats like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg already possess state-like wealth and functional power. Trump 2.0 models itself after a tech company, and tech companies increasingly resemble governments. Now that Trump can negotiate a ceasefire, or crash Tehran traffic, with a tweet, and Musk can threaten to withdraw space infrastructure over personal grievances, we’ve returned to a world where individual character matters more than systemic process.

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Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Back then, the system was strong. Presidents were thought-leaders who helped steer the ship but weren’t solely responsible for it. Now the system seems weak, fragmented; showmanship and emotion are weirdly reassuring to us. Someone, not something, is in charge.

This return to Shakespearean feudalism suggests both promise and peril — certainly peril for Iran. In Shakespeare’s plays, genuine personal risk and nobility exist alongside terrifying unpredictability in court politics. And it won’t be long before charismatic personalities once again eclipse institutional constraints, and sovereign individuals come to rival sovereign states. This is our new Shakespearean politics — the personal and tragic, played out on a global scale.

Rather than resist the pressure toward full-spectrum progressivism over the past decade, mainstream imprints gave in. The gender gap favoring women widened to comical degrees, and sensitivity readers became the norm. Editor-author relationships are conducted over email, rather than through letters and lunches. Overpriced Master of Fine Arts programs gave birth to a veritable genre, the MFA novel, each offering distinguished mainly by sameness. Novels are detached from history and philosophy, stuck, like an algorithm scroll, in the meaningless present; and even then, even after sacrificing all kinds of complexity — syntactic, structural, moral, and emotional — only romance novels have consistent readerships; pandering to the present has not saved the literary novel.

There are no silver-bullet fixes to this literary polycrisis. Pessimism is justified until proved otherwise, until a side-effect-free antidote to phone addiction — or better yet, general stupidity — is widely available in drugstores. But short of a miracle, entrepreneurial and courageous authors may still write new books that break out of this literary wasteland, and discerning readers may still buy, read, and talk about those books.

To be sure, writing and reading novels outside of the corporate vetting machine, without pre-approval and packaging, does not guarantee quality; “wild” self-published or independent novels are not good by dint of being different. But difference is at least a precondition of a renaissance. If talented writers can’t get into the system, then they should stop performing tricks for it.

Ross Barkan’s new and much discussed novel, Glass Century, signals a shift. The author — a contributor to these pages and a New York magazine columnist — offers a moving, multigenerational social novel set primarily in the less glamorous parts of the five Boroughs. Glass Century, in terms of form and content, is a novel of the midcentury: it slowly builds a picture of life. Like many older novels, but few new ones, it remains open to digressions and to detail — and is less fundamentally concerned with pace and voice: more substance, less flash.

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It’s significant that Barkan has published Glass Century through a small imprint (Tough Poets) and has seemingly done much of the publicity for the book himself; rather than write a novel that momentarily fits a hot category or responds to a strain of contemporary discourse, Barkan wrote an ambitious novel first, and has used his own platform (primarily Substack) to attract and naturalize readers to the style; make readers come to the book, not the other way around. This is the way.

The author depicts a functional, lived-in New York City, where working people fall in love, raise families, struggle, and figure shit out. For Barkan — a Bay Ridge kid, immersed in city politics — Gotham is an organism. The organism, in turn, gives its citizens purpose, verve, and resilience.

The novel’s titular hero, Mona Glass, when we first meet her at age 24, is charmingly flawed; horny and tomboyish, unwilling to settle down; her youth is New York City’s chic senescence: the Seventies. Mona’s older lover, Saul Plotz, is already married and a father of two. To please her old-fashioned parents, they stage a legally meaningless marriage ceremony. Mona is passionate, independent, competitive. She came to like Saul because he “let her curse, never questioned it, even tossed in his own.” Mona finds “private liberation in curse words — fucking, shit, damn, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker.”

Mona, through the cocaine Eighties, is always in motion, playing tennis, running, biking, having sex, photographing (she becomes a successful photojournalist after she snaps a photo of a mysterious vigilante). The Daily News pays her a higher rate than the New York Post; her tennis game grows stronger with age; “winning” is part of the “small, beautiful glory” of Mona’s life. Mona Glass is vital and vitally rendered.

At age 40, and at the end of the Eighties, Mona, who has been sleeping with the incorrigible Saul the whole time, finds herself pregnant; and she decides to keep the baby. Barkan includes no discourse about motherhood or family; Mona’s career and choices aren’t pathologized or editorialized. They just are. Life is just what happens; she isn’t the paralyzed subject of contemporary fiction who agonizes over childrearing.

She commits to motherhood for the same reason she stages a marriage to Saul or takes photos or plays tennis: she’s good at reinventing herself; at tackling what is in front of her. The long, compromised, fitful, essentially lifelong relationship between Mona and Saul. and their flawed relationships with their children, are merely representative of people getting by, year after year, decade after decade, era after era.

Barkan has a gift for naive (as in, pre-internet) speech patterns and descriptions of behavior; he sympathetically reconstructs a part of the American past, and the reader follows. Glass Century is a new book that feels old; and this is healthy. Glass Century is a corrective lens for the eye that can only see the present. Barkan’s America is a place where men like Saul “[slurp].. black coffee and [puff] from a pack of Marlboros,” watching the Twin Towers burn and thinking that America is “an ineffable and mystical life force” — a humane, unpretentious America with a touch of sentimentality.

That willingness to allow for some sentimental humanism leak into the text is what sets Glass Century apart from so many New York novels written by authors under 35 — books (think Honor Levy’s My First Book; Peter Vack’s Silly Boy) that too often take a meta-modern stance with flat, self-absorbed protagonists desperate for erotic attention or furious they can’t get it. Many of these books feel like they were written by people who were quite literally born after 2020 — after the fall. There’s no outside, no historical ground to stand on. Just the internet, just memes. No future either — just a flat, stale now.

So called alt-lit novels — which now means something like: select former indie authors repacked by a Big Five imprint — too often deploy the same basic trope: a solipsistic protagonist who narrates her own phantasmagoric breakdown. Dissociation and internet addiction, in the 2020s, have become axiomatically literary. Take this representative passage from Tao Lin’s Leave Society: “After three days of consciously attributing hazy despair, static negativity, and loss of mind control to modern urban society instead of other people, personal failings, or existence itself, he felt stably in a good mood again.”

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And while maybe, the present does have a demoralizing, flattened texture, novels need something more. If novelists stop imagining, stop demonstrating curiosity about both the past and future, stop engaging in the deep, imaginative synthesis that takes us out and away from the pathologies of the present… then what are they up to? What’s the point? Book-ified memes or X posts aren’t good enough, aesthetically.

Novels need a metaphysical horizon. A Catholic novelist might gesture toward salvation. An existentialist urges us to live authentically. A Russian Orthodox writer like Dostoevsky wanted us to see the devil in modern ideas. Henry James showed us the formal qualities of life. Joyce gave us epiphanies. David Foster Wallace believed that Americans in the Eighties and Nineties might have turned off the TV, read, thought, and woken up.

Novels also need a past; they need genealogies, textures, roots — even if they’re set, roughly, now. This is why I suspect that, assuming the novel form will survive this decade, novels will not be written, largely, as they have been since at least the Nineties, by MFAs and publishing insiders, but by radical traditionalists and outsiders who can use tools like Substack (and whatever platforms on or offline emerge in the future) to assert counter-aesthetics.

John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, self-published and serialized on Substack before getting picked up by Belt Publishing is another salient example. Successful, lasting novels in the latter half of this decade will resemble, I suspect, Glass Century if not in literal form and content, then in the path they take to market: composed outside of institutions, presentist trends, fads — written for sheer pleasure, rather than Big Five exposure.

The larger point is that breaking from the tone and stylistics of the contemporary novel is to break from the metaphysics of contemporary life; to read and write differently is to summon and apply the mind’s resources in new ways. This is what is needed: to bundle the data of reality in ways that are different than the internet does, than social media does; the most exciting thing about novels conceived of, or promoted on Substack, for instance, is that they induce us to close the app.

Welcome to the situationship economy.

Created by algorithms, this is a culture in which social status, geography, money, and convention are empowered to choose for us in ways that resemble premodern mores. Instead of meddling, class-conscious parents, there is now an array of buzzing sensors and guardrails, indifferent to the pulses of romance and demoralizing to anyone who would like to imagine that they are free to choose.

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This was not always the case. The period between 1965 and 2012, roughly between the Sexual Revolution and the rise of dating apps, was a transformative era for American romance. During this time, most of the country adopted the sexual and relationship mores once associated with beatniks and bohemians. Premarital sex and cohabitation became normalized. Marriages lost any vestigial signs of being arranged — whether by parents, pastors, community elders, or extended families — and both marriage and dating became fully marketized.

Gradually, as coupling became shaped more by the market than by community ties, Americans embraced what might be called a cult of choice: the belief in finding the perfect person, a beloved who might have been inaccessible under previous forms of marriage shaped by custom and convention. This led to an explosion of spontaneous desire and also to great unhappiness; mid-century portrayals of marriage were not exactly hopeful or happy. 

In film and literature of the era, this disillusionment is palpable. Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) depicts the strained marriage of Maggie and Brick Pollitt, held together only by money and status — an aristocratic Southern power marriage gone wrong. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is similarly pessimistic. Richard Yates’s powerful 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, takes us through the unraveling suburban marriage of Frank and April Wheeler, both of whom dream of art, sex, and bohemia in the city.

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A few years later, Esther Greenwood, in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), views marriage as a trap and fears becoming like her mother. In Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), George and Martha, a couple from the Northeastern elite and a good class match, stay together, but their marriage is desperate and miserable. In Nichols’s next film, The Graduate (1967), Benjamin Braddock is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, a woman of the previous generation, who is trapped in a bad marriage sustained only by alcohol and convention. All of these portrayals, in their own way, echo Madame Bovary — the ur-text for the discontents of the modern bourgeoisie.

There was a clear shift in the emphasis of culture narratives in the Eighties, a period of economic deregulation and globalization: stories of unhappy marriages were discarded in favor of successful dating stories, in which love as a personal, autonomous, market-based solution triumphs. After 1980 — and after the Aquarian, punk, experimental Seventies — something shifted in American romantic culture: middle-class dating and marriage were re-conceived as free choice, without the vestigial social expectations that produced mid-century ennui; dating became liberatory and coupling an achievement, not a sacrifice. 

Sex, dating, and marriage became totally liberalized, subject to the adjudication of the marketplace. A corollary social myth arose in which the liberated choice of partner was the only relationship that couldn’t be socially constructed (though of course, it was mediated silently by the market instead). Culture circled back towards Jane Austen and away from Bovary. The romantic comedy became the primary vehicle through which two individuals navigated class and social pressures to find true love, guided by both emotion and reason, rather than the bourgeois tragedy in which moderately unfree people suffer at each other’s hands.

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When Harry Met Sally (1989) introduces two yuppies who convert friendship into genuine love. Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Notting Hill (1999) celebrate unions that defy social expectations, pairing Brits and Americans in a globalized culture that allows more choice, more freedom, and more happiness. The deeply romantic Before Sunrise (1995) begins with an American (Ethan Hawke), at the end of a study abroad trip, meeting a French woman (Julie Delpy) on a train; the early-Nineties romantic world is open and exciting and full of possibility. Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) has two yuppies converting a business rivalry into love. The movie begins as a story about internet retail destroying brick-and-mortar bookstores, but love ends up overcoming the trauma of neoliberalism; Meg Ryan, the shop owner, falls for Tom Hanks, the big-box-store guy; romance redeems economic antagonism. Both Seinfeld and Sex and the City, canonical Nineties TV shows, feature successful protagonists who are always dating, never settling.

After 2010, however, the magic ran out, giving rise to today’s neo-feudal order, with algorithms now playing the role of stern parents and village busybodies. The 2010 cult hit Blue Valentine marks this shift: free romantic choice across class barriers leads to tragedy, embarrassment. Yuppie, Boomer optimism is gone; Millennial pessimism has arrived.

In this era, romance is less about love, and more about whether you’ve made it; fame first, pair-bonding second or third or fourth. Lorde’s breakthrough 2013 song “Royals” commences the decade’s obsession with status and status cosplay. In Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, career frustrations demolish a loving union. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s seminal series Fleabag is about someone who is basically unlovable or incapable of love.

Charli XCX’s 2020 song “Forever” crystallizes the final transition out of the rom-com economy, in which choice was validated, into the long-gestating situationship economy of today, in which real choice is impossible — and infinitely delayed. “Forever” is sung from the point of view of a fragmented consciousness which idealizes what will never be, and has never been, experienced: rooted, historically mediated, lasting love.

Similarly, the 2020 High Fidelity reboot, starring Zoë Kravitz, takes a beloved Gen-X rom-com and turns it into a depressive, sepia-toned portrait of consumerist dissatisfaction. The market works in the 2000 movie, adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel. But in the 2020 TV show, the market is broken. The record-store hipster in the original can still find a love that suits his tastes; in the remake, she can’t.

This breakdown of personal choice mirrors a larger collapse of faith in the systems that once promised abundance and connection.

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The situationship economy — the reversion to caste-like determinism without the definitiveness of arranged marriage — is a subtle and invisible reversal of a period in which culture celebrated romantic choice (the rom-com economy), the culture in which people born between 1980 and 2010 were raised, but not the one they inherited (or helped create). The learned expectation, in other words, is of freedom of choice. But reality — post-iPhone and, increasingly, post-AI — is morbidly deterministic.

As with economic liberalization, the irony of romantic liberalization is that it has given birth to its opposite: a feeling of extreme overdetermination and the submission to the algorithm and to the social logic embedded within it. Gone is the post-globalization fantasy of finding a partner in another part of the world or across economic classes via an Austen-like combination of reason and heady emotion. Trump-era tariffs and economic recalibration register this cultural shift in the material realm.

From 1980 to 2010, singles were entrepreneurs within the romance market; after 2010, they increasingly became raw resources to be extracted and packaged. We have been trained to sell ourselves as products, to expect that our “product” can be ranked, and to believe we deserve products of a similar ranking. Men and women alike, though differently, now obsessively assert their preferences on apps like Hinge: height, weight, age, religion, politics. “No Trump supporters. No one under six feet. No one over 25. Not looking for anything serious.” These aren’t the views or behaviors of people who believe that love is a harmonious pattern of extremely complex attitudes. They are rather the views of people in thrall to a brutal utilitarian logic and a vision of social class as an insuperable barrier.

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The lesson here is that every era of romance, love, dating, and marriage is historically conditioned. Through a secular lens, no specific romantic arrangement or habit can assert itself as the definitive or universal one. Yet, paradoxically, by removing romantic blinders and seeing ourselves as products of social and historical conditioning   — acknowledging that dark truth  — we can pay heed to elements of a common and continuing human condition: our deeper potential to take an active, rather than passive, role in our fundamental commitments and choices.

For Jane Austen is finally preferable to Flaubert; Elizabeth and Darcy to Charles and Emma. The classic rom-coms still delight. There’s something moving about the possibility of two people choosing each other outside of the forcefield of social mores and pressures. But what makes romance funny, what brings delight, and not tragedy, is always an element of cynicism, of world-weariness and foresight on the part of the protagonists; love doesn’t start with illusions; it must construct practical visions to replace them first. Pride and prejudice — or in our case, technological addiction and moral passivity — must be overcome.

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognizability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

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The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matt Gasda

Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimized overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimized?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighborhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimize my body. You start to like rationalist civilization. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasized self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techno-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labor — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimizing, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilization they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

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The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimize? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat—not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also hard to imagine that those bodyguards won’t, at some point, be necessary.

Many email jobs have disappeared overnight. The material economy of the Millennial manager is under pressure from automation; from DOGE-era disclosures about NGOs; and from broader, Trump 2.0 shifts back toward — or at least, an appreciation for — family and church, farm and toil.

The Millennial economy was a virtue economy. Some of the most successful among us held managerial roles in tech, education, finance, arts, and politics that centered on controlling and reshaping language and brand perception — what might be called “virtue refereeing”. The most ambitious American Millennials, in a broad sense, became the apparatchiks of the globalized economy built by our parents, in part because there were few other pathways to the American Dream: stable jobs, home ownership, rising wages. Successful Millennials scuttled across the narrow footbridge between the eras. Many others, however, fell into the voids on all sides.

The new economic and political paradigm that is settling into place suggests redress, and greater social dignity, for those who didn’t land managerial email jobs in the first place, who didn’t sell out to become virtue referees. Put simply: many Americans look forward to paying fewer taxes indirectly into the managerial caste’s pocketbooks and to the potential reshoring of industrial jobs. Thus, these changes may be bad for the few and good for the many; many of them deserve to be celebrated.

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How Boomers blocked the open road

By Matthew Gasda

Start with politics. Because former President Joe Biden’s staffers ran his administration, the Biden years were the first Millennial presidency: inauthentic, bureaucratic, neurotic, seduced by jargon and theory, indifferent to the needs of those outside their own caste. The Biden era was a great reveal: we saw the wizard behind the curtain (and that wizard talked like us, with upspeak and a tendency to twist declarative sentences into the interrogative tone). More damningly, the wizard also made things worse: there was a seeping sense of decline in the Biden years, which produced the inevitable political backlash.

Beyond politics, virtue-referee work has lost its appeal, and the way Millennials talk about their jobs is shifting. Sunny, Obama-inflected language about contributing to progress is an embarrassment for all but the last true believers. My friend Sam Venis, for instance, a journalist and part-time corporate consultant, admits that he is “completely disenchanted by the notion of a ‘job’, which makes me much more comfortable exploiting the money sloshing around the corporate world”. Halfway through this decade, he feels “freed of the delusion that that portion of my work matters in some spiritual [or] societal way, which allows me to view it transactionally, and take even more seriously my creative work”.

There were always, broadly speaking, two groups of Millennials (at least, among the millions with college degrees who attempted to make it in the big cities). There were those who, in some way, kept the faith of early-2000s hipster bohemianism — the late-30-something who still shares an apartment and doesn’t have a spouse or kids and has slowly turned toward Trump. The second group are the careerists and strivers, who built up good credit scores and used grad-student jargon to facilitate unnecessary meetings for the last decade and voted for Kamala Harris — the professional overclass.

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While the two groups have always co-existed, socialized, even aligned politically for a long time, the bohemian caste not only voted for Trump, but did so with a deep sense of vindication. Trump’s high approval ratings aren’t coming from rural evangelicals or blue-collar voters alone. Recall that the areas that shifted most sharply to the GOP in last year’s election were the blue strongholds; the calls are coming from inside the house of urban liberalism.

This turn of events flows from 2008, the year of the financial crisis and a pivotal moment for older Millennials. The economy of our parents disappeared in that year. As a consolation prize, we were offered the opportunity to be morally better than them. Our generation might be a generation of baristas and bartenders saddled with debt, but we could nurture our own inflated sense of importance by being more socialist, less racist, more liberatory, more linguistically sophisticated. Maybe we wouldn’t own homes, but we’d have doctorates.

Those who managed to parlay moral superiority into actual, dependable, well-paying jobs remained staunchly progressive — because fervency unlocked job security. Those who didn’t manage this feel some sense of hope now, only because practicing the verbal rituals of liberalism is no longer a prerequisite to social credibility.

It would be fascinating to see time-lapse movies of Millennials’ Facebook pages (and later Instagram and Twitter feeds) from, say, the mid-2000s to 2025. Essentially, 20 years of social media: from apolitical to staunchly progressive to whatever we have now — skeptical, realistic, finally clear-sighted, and even optimistic in ways we have never had reason to be.

The weird reality of Facebook, the ur-social media for older Millennials, is that it has always been a place to advertise personal triumphs. I’m so excited to announce that I have been accepted into Georgetown’s security-studies program; I’m delighted to share that I’ll be serving as an editorial assistant at The Nation this summer; here’s our first child. And secondarily, for fears: Can’t believe Orange Hitler is taking away the presidential fellows program; climate change is so scary; I don’t feel safe here.

It’s a strange zone of contradiction, where the expectation is that one poses simultaneously as successful and fragile: I can afford to take an upscale vacation to Europe, and I’m afraid of the future and the responsibilities of family; a place where one’s network can watch and participate in this strange spiral of anxiety and bold confidence.

The Millennial virtue economy — the rump of the Boomer white-collar economy — had no room for people who couldn’t tap into this mix of anxiety and celebration, self-interest and “purpose”. They couldn’t do it, either because they’d chosen entirely different paths — farming, construction, small-scale entrepreneurship, odd jobs — that didn’t lend themselves to online self-celebration. Or because they were simply too dignified to post: I’m delighted to announce. . .

I think of people with whom I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. One of them is working odd jobs in halfway homes, going for long walks, praying — essentially, a secular monk. Another, last I checked in, was working on a hydroponic lettuce farm, painting every morning, ever an artist. Another works on film sets when possible and bounces back and forth between New York and Bethlehem. They, and many others like them, may relish the collapse of the virtue economy and the rise of something once again material and dignified — or at least, less self-righteous, less bloated with gaseous smugness.

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Clearly for others, especially in the absurdly affluent DC suburbs, the pain is real. Friends from college and my early 20s in New York City, who successfully tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2010s, who became Obama-era media figures, seem to be confronting not just joblessness, but irrelevancy for the first time. The magic produced by saying the ritual words the right way has run out. No one’s up for progressive scolding anymore. You can’t make a career out of it. The outrage, the nitpicking, the Ezra Klein voice — it’s out.

That doesn’t mean that what comes next necessarily makes for a good society. Far from it. There is a plausible version of events in which many jobs are automated out of existence and universal basic income will play the role that state distributions of bread played in the late-stage Roman Empire: a fragile band holding together urban civilization.

Cutting fake, grating, pompous virtue referees from prestige jobs that drive up the federal deficit is inarguably egalitarian. It is no guarantor of substantial progress and meaningful social security, however. Moreover, the Right shows signs of creating its own, reciprocal patronage and virtue economy, stocked with influencers and thought-leaders who similarly produce little more than anger at their now dethroned Left-wing counterparts. That ought to be abhorred as much as its progressive forebear.

2025 is partly about coming to grips with how tenuous, silly, and demoralizing the last era was for the many; this clarity has to be exploited, not obscured in new ways. This is the Millennial reckoning: the end of the moral-superiority economy, and the slow, painful realization that tangible value lies in places and communities many of us had long considered beneath us.

Thus begins the first 2025 episode of “book influencer” Zibby Owens’s popular podcast. Owens reads and podcasts so you can dispense with the hard work of figuring out what’s worth your precious time. She distills, she dispenses. Owens is the daughter of Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder and CEO of investment-management giant Blackstone. According to Vulture and Business Insider, Owens is New York City’s top book influencer, which probably makes her the nation’s top book influencer.

She is a relentlessly optimistic advocate for self-improvement through reading, with her thumb on one of the most powerful demographics in the country (maybe the last cohort that buys books in serious numbers): neurotic Gen X women with significant disposable income. Owens is to helicopter moms what the neuroscientist-cum-health guru Andrew Huberman is to aging bachelors: a tonic for the spiritual ennui of the technocratic striver class.

Building on the success of her podcast and, no doubt, her own vast financial resources, Owens has created a small empire under the umbrella of Zibby Media: Zibby Books, an imprint that releases a title a month in fiction and memoir; Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica; Zibby Mag (“We celebrate the glamour of the publishing world”); Zibby Classes (which connect reading and writing to personal development); and Zibby Retreats (which sends affluent women on retreats with their favorite authors).

Owens herself is endearing and likeable. According to one literary blogger, Owens has served as a “hero in the world of book promotion” for numerous authors. And technically, that’s true: Owens talks about every single book by every single author she interviews as if it were of exactly the same quality. Everything she reads is one or several of the following: urgent, stunning, brilliant, tender, intelligent, racy or sultry, or moving. There is no discrimination, no discretion, no distinction — just an interminable chain of chatter.

Owens’s first guest of 2025 was Gabrielle Bernstein, a motivation coach and No. 1 New York Times best-seller who helps readers change their lives. Her last guest of 2024 was Kristin Chenoweth, who was talking about her picture book, What Will I Do With My Love Today? (it’s about her beloved dog). Before Chenoweth, Zibby heard from the comedian Quinta Brunson, star and creator of the school sitcom Abbott Elementary, about her recently published memoir.

Owens has also interviewed Cathy Heller, the life coach, inspirational speaker, and author of Tools for Creating Prosperity and Ease; award-winning author Chelsea Bieker on Madwoman, a brilliant, urgent, heart-smashing, darkly comic, and unforgettable novel; Sarai Johnson on Grown Woman, a stunning, tender novel about how four generations of complex black women attempt to heal old wounds and redefine happiness for themselves as they raise a new generation together. And so on and so forth.

Interrupting the pattern, Bernard-Henri Lévy appeared to talk about his recent book, Israel Alone (the Jewish state is one of her pet issues). Others of the very few men who have appeared on the pod include celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, Lance Bass, and Frozen’s Josh Gad, who was invited to talk about his picture book.

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In short, Totally Booked With Zibby is a retail outlet for mass-market celebrity vanity publishing and third-rate MFA fiction and young-adult books. Except Owens has the amazing gift of sounding as if she were talking about something else, something higher.

Owens is a self-described overachiever. With grit and sheer bloody hard work, the mother-of-four runs a business empire and records several podcast episodes a week. How does she do it? You see, it’s the love of reading that helps her get through difficult times. Or something like that: her origin story is self-blind and incoherent. More broadly, what Owens calls the Zibbyverse — her bookstore, her podcasts, her own books, classes, and retreats — is symptomatic of what publishing (and reading) have become: a way for a narrow but influential sliver of the population to dress up their unchallenging lives to seem interesting; to spotlight narratives that make the reality of being a rich person who still can’t cope seem nobler than it is.

This is the unconscious theme of Owens’s own books. Whether fiction or memoir, Zibby or her stand-in finds herself on the verge of a breakdown when faced with the bare facts of life — dying grandparents, growing children, and the like — before turning it around thanks to a new love or a new guru. In her 9/11 memoir, Bookends, the author becomes “depressed” after losing her close friend in the attacks and later becomes “utterly stressed out and overwhelmed by motherhood” and needs to find out “what has made her herself.” The dead friend doesn’t feel like the principal subject of mourning so much as Owens’s loss of self-esteem. Thankfully, she turns to her love of reading and writing for help when things seem particularly bleak. Then, in case you were worried, Owens finds love and “organic happiness” with a tennis pro-turned-movie producer. Read, love, self-affirm.

Owens’s Tolstoyan theme is: I have everything I want; my friends have everything they could possibly want; why am I still anxious? She, and her legions of listeners and readers, ask the same question and somehow get perilously close to the thematic of actual literature — suffering, the cycle of life, the stochastic uncertainty of all mortal creatures — without ever arriving. Instead, for someone of Owens’s cast of mind, there can only be a turn away from the reality principle toward a hot, harmless husband, a new life coach, meditation, retreats, and blithe solutions — and into books that celebrate this belief system.

Her podcast promotes the same ends. It isn’t that Totally Booked dilutes literary standards — because there is no such thing as a standard in Owens’s world. In listening to a large selection of Owens’s 2,000 or so podcasts (they’re all blissfully short), I came across no indiscretion, few hints of spite or nervous anxiety — no criticism, no conversation. Every interview is a persistent study of equanimity: rich and successful people talking to rich and successful people.

What do you do with this relentless, Blackstone-funded exploration of mental hot air? What do you do with the countervailing impulse to beat yourself over the head with a two-by-four until you don’t remember a thing about what you’ve listened to?

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I don’t know. But I do know that she represents the future. Her own books garner thousands of reviews on Amazon, a decent proxy measure for big sales. Her podcast has a massive following. And her influence is increasingly felt in the wider online literary space dominated by BookTok — where influencers like Ayman Chaudhary and Pauline push titles based on their supposed emotional impact and lifestyle fit. The theme of most of these BookToks — which derive their tone from Owens’s podcasts the same way early podcasts derived their tone from Ira Glass — is “books for people who don’t read”: books for people who don’t have the attention span or time to read (and they don’t have the time, by the way, because they don’t have the attention span).

Zibby is a representative figure in a cultural crisis: The Zibbyverse is a place where there are no books, really, only book-commodities to be sold. And nobody knows, or can tell, the difference.

It was second nature. Boomers who bought homes in the Eighties could buy bigger homes in the Nineties, and Boomers who bought homes in the Nineties expected to buy bigger homes in the 2000s — and they did, until 2006, when house prices peaked. 

Moving was a way to play the housing market, but it was also a way to play the job market, as the American economy was, at the time, markedly more heterogeneous: different regions made different things for different reasons. Mobility was a symptom of my parents’ generation’s confidence, values, and savvy. 

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, as well as the greater Lehigh Valley, during the Nineties encapsulated this. Tens of thousands of new families poured in, not only from the nearby New York City area, but also from around the country, drawn by a confluence of factors: the areas mostly successful transition from the decline of heavy industry; ample, convertible farmland for housing; numerous colleges and universities; proximity to major cities. Families could move confidently with the assurance that a good job, solid schools, and safe neighbourhoods would be waiting for them.

With the exception of recessions in the early Nineties and after the dot-com bubble burst, the economy was superficially strong in this era. It seemed like there would be a new kid on the Little League team every year whose parents had gotten a job at AirProducts — an industrial gas supplier, which replaced Bethlehem Steel as the largest local employer — or at a regional hospital, law firm, or university. Unlike today, a robust housing market, and a strong stock market directly correlated to the ability to build a stable life. 

Most of my friends lived in new suburbs around Bethlehem, which were much bigger than the house I grew up in. My family, on my dad’s teacher salary, which essentially tied us to the state where he would receive his pension, wasn’t quite able to participate in the civilisational luxury of upgrading homes or moving across the country, and I remember feeling implicitly marked by this social distinction.

Adulthood, according to the models my friends and I had around us (our parents), meant something like: you picked the place you wanted to live and then you picked a house out according to your means. Almost all the families I knew growing up, however, whether they lived in two bedroom bungalows, or five bedroom McMansions, owned their homes, and it was ownership which seemed to draw them to the area. Pleasant stasis, not contingency, was normal — a normal which my generation could only assume they stood to inherit. This was a myth, but a powerful and universal one. Why else did we go to school, study, apply for summer jobs and internships? Why else were we treading on the wheel? 

Before I graduated from high school, I began to observe the first hints of downward mobility in the early 2000s suburbs —  what is now known as “China shock” produced job losses. I saw the parents of friends lose white-collar jobs and struggle to get them back; I saw the first hints of opioid addiction. But this was never really talked about openly: the dark auguries of class descent. Whether we knew it or not, the children of buyers were growing up to be renters.

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Class ascent, powered by increasing property values, however, was still the expectation. The idea that everybody should own a house was a major part of American electoral politics, and home ownership was close to attaining the status of a universal American right. “We want everybody in America to own their own home,” George W. Bush declared in 2024. “That’s what we want. This is an ownership society.”

The promise — the rhetoric of the promise — of an ownership society was a major reason, I suspect, that Bush won twice. Ironically, that dream would end abruptly in 2007 and 2008 at the end of his miserable second term. The Boomers, or enough of them, voted for a politics that underwrote their economic priorities — stocks, houses — without considering that they were depleting the well that their children would drink from.

I was a sophomore in college when the housing market collapsed, and buying a home became categorically harder in diffuse ways that I can only gesture to here (lower supply, lower real wages, rising prices, an uneven recovery, stricter lending practices). My generation entered the workforce without the confidence of our parents: that sense that we could make demands of our employers, contract builders, flip homes, and negotiate moves around the country, has never been part of our reality.

I moved to Brooklyn, and I felt lucky to live in Brooklyn, sharing a bedroom outside of gentrification territory for $425 a month. Jobs for young people, especially with humanities degrees, were scarce, and I thought that the girl who lived in the other bedroom in our apartment by herself, and had a job as editorial assistant was rich, comparatively. Lucky. 

For many of my friends who grew up in the prosperous, sheltered exburbs, the 75-mile leap to New York City, however, was a little too far, a little too risky. I was delusional enough to think I could make it as a writer, but it was vanity, not reason, that pushed me towards New York. After the Great Recession, risk aversion made more sense; risk aversion was the mode, not our parents’ expansiveness.

Now, almost 15 years later, most of my friends from high school live either in the Lehigh Valley or thereabouts. We didn’t spread with a Boomer-like indifference to our roots around the country. We hunkered down.

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And have stayed that way. Today, Americans are moving less than ever, with interstate migration declining to half of what it was in the early Nineties (down from about 16% to 8% according to the Brookings Institute). According to the New York Times, more broadly, Americans in the 2020s are moving at the lowest rate since the Census Bureau began tracking mobility in the Forties. This trend is supported by other recent studies; it’s also supported by vibes.

American mobility is produced by dynamism and optimism, the amount of heat given off by its economic engines; it also drives it. The mobility boom over the second half of the 20th century reflected civilisational and generational exuberance; in turn, widespread arbitrage opportunities in the job and housing markets gave families the economic confidence to grow. Even while deindustrialisation, Reaganism, and Clinton-era free trade all produced different kinds of economic turbulence and shock, mobility and ample affordable housing were America’s great cushion and advantage. Arguably, intra-regional mobility replaced the frontier of the 19th century: the simultaneously imaginative and real place that Americans could go for greater opportunity.

This century’s decline in mobility, therefore, has not only had massive, if subtle, political and social ramifications, but reflects different modes of demoralisation that have become endemic to American life. This cyclical relationship is perhaps best exemplified by the opioid crisis in the rural and post-industrial parts of the country: decreasing property values, depressed wages, addiction all contribute to low mobility; low mobility in turn drives further despair. If you aren’t an accredited, elite cognitive worker, you don’t really have the opportunity for career arbitrage, the ability to get out. Opioid addiction both marks your condition and accelerates it.

For different reasons, younger urbanites are also increasingly, if less despairingly, trapped — by college debt, rent, inflation, stagnant wages, and the consumerist habits of their wealthier parents. They don’t move — and I speak here from personal experience — because the moderate pleasures they’ve won from the big city are too fragile, and the margin for error, for risk, are shockingly thin (one to two months savings).

Looked at more broadly, because buying a house or apartment is too risky, Americans have to delay a first home, because they delay buying a first home, they have to wait longer and longer to see its value increase, and because they have to wait longer, they have less opportunity to seek new opportunities. In the meantime, Boomers buy more homes.

It’s hard to get settled, so the prospect of re-settling is unsettling. People my age or younger, as a result, don’t feel they have enough cushion to have a child, let alone several children — who would drive them to seek out new places, new homes to raise their families in. I’m positing a cyclical relationship between mobility and fertility: having families drives people to take risks on new places, new homes, new jobs. You’re not going to give up the one bedroom in Brooklyn unless you have a compelling reason to. The suburbs are only romantic when they’re filled with young families. As a consequence, in the long run, a diminishing birth-rate also means, ironically, home values are less secure, school districts shrink, jobs shrink, big cities, where there’s still excitement, full of all the younger people.

And while the loss of what we might call the “interior frontier” clearly has an economic aetiology, there are complementary cultural factors which, I suspect, would limit American mobility even if it became significantly easier and cheaper to buy homes everywhere. Namely — while they still exist to a degree — regional differences have been reduced by the Internet and the smartphone; the local has been subsumed into globalised mass culture; Americans still have accents, but they now have DraftKings, porn, dating apps, social media, and more: they all have the same homogenising algorithms in their brains. And AI promises to make us more the same than ever. Homogeneity, in another irony, discourages heterogeneity — crossing regions, dialectics, cultural modes — because the reward, the level of difference, is so greatly diminished. The only significant American migration in the 2020s — conservatives from the coasts moving south — is premised on seeking difference; but aside from political polarisation — how different are people whose lives are largely mediated by technopoly?

Americans born after 1980 don’t just have less economic confidence, but they have a reduced sense of adventure, less of a sense that it makes a difference to go somewhere different. While Americans travel abroad more frequently than in the past, this seems more like a credit-card empowered cope rather than a compensatory benefit. Living for three months in Mexico City on savings from that one really good paying tech job that ended in 2022 is different from repeatedly building a new life in different parts of the country, as was common in the mid to late 20th century.

Mobility is a two-part equation: the confidence that you can go somewhere and the confidence that where you’re going is worth the trouble. Simply put there is no point in moving if you’ll be scrolling on your phone in a room lit by LEDs no matter where you go; or if you’ll be on a Zoom call for work no matter where you’re working. Starlink, for example, while it may have the admirable benefit of allowing people in rural places to communicate more easily, and provide access to uncensored reportage that may not be found on TV, still threatens to flatten. The final tragedy of the material commons may be that it becomes indistinguishable from the digital commons. Soul is the last resource of the community, and the last resource to be extracted.

So while it’s clearly harder, more frustrating, and riskier to buy a decent home almost anywhere in the country, and the opportunity cost of moving around is higher than it has been in maybe a century, there also has to be a point to moving. 

The decline in American mobility is partly an economic and political problem, and partly a spiritual one. And, like with all complex problems, there are no obvious solutions. And yet, so much hope comes from articulating a sense of lack, acknowledging that there is a missing predicate in contemporary American life. In a deep, historical sense, the New World represented a rejection of feudalism, of people and their labour being tied to the radius around the place they were born. Mobility is the economic expression of the underlying drive to escape towards the horizon. If there is a solution, it may just begin with looking up.