Towards a critical theory of the open letter: paroxysms.substack.com/p/towards-a-...
26.02.2026 20:12
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Towards a critical theory of the open letter: paroxysms.substack.com/p/towards-a-...
We are seeing the emergence of forms of “critical thinking” never before imagined.
When you spend your life in front of cameras, your whole existence devoted to “being seen to be seen,” you’re not going to want to run for the exit when the fire breaks out. You’re going to want to appear cool, savvy, with it. You’ll want to pose with force that’s about to consume you.
As it's the end of 2025, I'm just reposting our 'Outside the box' starter pack.
This features accounts who think across tribal lines. Those on it have ideological sympathies, but are open to different traditions and consider issues on a case-by-case basis.
Shares welcome ;-)
go.bsky.app/HZxZgvh
As annoying as the PMC is, we are at least capable of expressing private disaffection when separated from the networked “herd of independent minds.” Such independence of mind is not present in LLMs, which represent the automation of the PMC’s ideological control function.
New essay. From triumphal 1990s ideas about an American century underpinned by Internet power, to the mid-2010s belief that social media was a “global conversation,” to mid-2020s anxieties about communication breakdowns and civil war. open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...
A new essay on the ideals of “inclusive capitalism” and late-2010s content moderation. Could social media platforms transcend their origins and become the new and inclusive global civic sphere (overseen, of course, by “machines of loving grace”)? open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...
Thank you so much! Yeah, I’m getting more and more interested in what “writing behind a profile” does to us and how it generates new kinds of conformity at the precise moment we’re compelled to think we’re “expressing our truest selves.”
My attempt to capture what the Twitter platform was and how it functioned in the 2010s, as well as what its long term legacies might be. open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...
Part of being a good online citizen in 2025 is resisting the urge to put the word "epistemic" in front of any random noun.
Part of being a good online citizen in 2025 is resisting the urge to put the word "epistemic" in front of any random noun.
Paper books printed prior to 2022 will become the currency of the knowledge economy of the future… and I’m not even joking.
2022: “OMG! Elon is a genius! His bold leadership shows that we can make mass tech layoffs with no impact on the user experience at all! Let’s make this an industry standard.
Today’s user experience on Twitter:
"I reject the system!"
"Great! The system offers you the option of identifying as someone who rejects the system, just one among the many Valid identity expressions we respect and recognise."
"Oh, alright then."
It occurs to me that in 3-4 years time, professors on here are going to be talking about how none of their students know what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is.
“It’s funny that the two leading right-wing ideologies at the moment are just different forms of Marxism: Land the progressive eschatological futurist variant … Girard the critical variant devoted to the debunking of ideologies.”—John Pistelli
“Verification puts an end to the workings of truth (for truth, if it exists, is something to be fought over, whereas verification transforms it into a fait accompli).”—Jean Baudrillard
Replacing your institutional cultures—built up over centuries—with a simulacrum made up of rules, regulations, and “best practice” because of “efficiency.” Then watching your entire society dissolve as the cheat codes become universally available and trivial to implement.
AI “bulldozes everything local, everything intimate, everything singular and idiosyncratic and irreducible to statistical regularities—and tells us the only thing that is to count as human reality is what gets reflected back to us by our machines.”—Justin Smith-Ruiu
The Right Libertarian => Populist Anger that things are getting worse => More right libertarian policies => More misguided anger that things are getting worse => Emergence of Anarcho Capitalism opportunities to accelerate disintegration => People get angrier death spiral seems inescapable.
The thing about Reform UK—across all its warring factions—is that it is fundamentally a right-libertarian party committed to the type of turbo-Thatcherism that caused the problems many of its supporters are ostensibly voting against.
ACAB sentiment, after all, has right-wing and libertarian variants as well as progressive ones. It’s just a matter of who gets labelled “the police.”
One way of looking at Twitter/X is that the Musk regime effectively “abolished the police” (decimating the staff tasked with moderation and responding to hacking and impersonation incidents) and is now facing predictable (and accelerating) breakdowns in order and trust.
Your book project sounds great. I think you’re really onto something with the way gen-AI “feeds back” the dead past (the archival traces it’s ingested) to us on a way that makes us misrecognise them as both novelties and timeless truths.
Are you familiar with the work of Michael F. Miller?
New collective certainties must be projected backwards in order for the moral coding system to maintain its sense of coherence. What we believe now must merge and overwrite whatever it was we believed then.
The sense of what the opposition represents (absolute evil) remains stable over time, but the question of who or what are instances of it is in continual, real-time flux. This is the coding system’s disciplinary power.
Everything (everything) now reframed (often retrospectively) according to the binary logic of “whose side are you on?” With whom do you affiliate? All issues and cultural phenomena implicitly tagged with moral and political metadata, coded left or right.
