Not the Solution

The Presbyterian Position on Transgender Issues

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some years back, the EPC (Evangelical Presbyterian Church) announced they would be forming an investigative committee to formulate more thorough and informed positions on matters of human sexuality and gender dysphoria. The following is a draft polished up out of unfinished notes I had from back around the time this was first ongoing.

One of the things my old pastor told me growing up was to never take anything he taught for granted but to always go and independently verify it for myself in Scripture. This is something I’ve taken to heart ever since, even as my commitment to that principle has at times put me in a position of being outspoken. Nevertheless, I believe at the heart of Protestantism is open and earnest Biblical debate, and that political consensus is no grounds to shut down an argument without giving a chance to carefully lay and hear out evidence first.

Over the course of this essay, I am going to argue that the official statements and guidance put out by the EPC (Evangelical Presbyterian Church) regarding gender transition contradict its own doctrinal standards of proof for what constitutes an “essential” within the denomination. There objectively exists a valid, confessionally Reformed, Biblically-grounded case to be made in favor of upholding the practice within certain constraints.

This is a very narrow argument, but one which has extremely profound ramifications for how Christians at-large actually understand and form their own doctrine. I do not write this essay with the illusion of it being a “magic pill” that will overturn the reader’s personal conscience. Instead I write this with a humble purpose: to simply prove this is not yet an issue that can be placed above legitimate debate or disagreement.

This will not be an easy process: it will require establishing specificity in a debate that thrives on ambiguous and unclear language. We will have to review doctrinal standards, we will have to clarify what exactly it means to be transgender, and we will have to establish frameworks that are both clear and precise.

What places an issue “above debate”?

What makes the EPC especially useful as a case study for this topic is the distinctly nuanced approach it takes to dogmatics. The denomination has its roots in the women’s ordination debates of the 70s and 80s – and the product of that controversy has pushed the EPC to found itself on developing comprehensve guidelines for clarifying and resolving contemporary issues.

If the failure of more liberal denominations (such as the PCUSA) is that their laxness on core orthodoxies leads the church to lose its distinctly Reformed character, then the danger of fundamentalism is in going too far the other direction. By treating any common doctrine or practice as equally essential – you foster a culture uniformly hostile to debate and variance within the church. Herein lies the classic evangelical critique: that a maximalist attitude can end up undermining the unity of the church body and obscure any sort of clarity on which beliefs are the most important to defend in a world constantly seeking to undermine them.

A properly conservative¹ approach needs to be able to defend against these twin extremes, with clear methods for classifying essential versus non-essential doctrines. To this end, the EPC draws upon an explicitly irenic² tradition within Christian theology³ to develop a consistent standard whereby Christians can make sense of what is or isn’t worth defending.

Two models continue to hold sway among evangelical Presbyterians⁴: the “triage model”⁵ and the “essentials-versus-nonessentials model”⁶. Despite their differences, these models are complementary and the influence of both can be seen within the EPC. The official position of the church can be best summarized by their motto: “in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity”⁴. Their standards of classification are more thoroughly laid out within the Essentials of Our Faith document.

In line with the triage model, the document lists six essentials which are taken to be defining for the Christian faith as a whole. But borrowing the language of the essentials-versus-nonessentials model, the document makes clear that this alone cannot be substituted for a list of denominational essentials.

The full definition for what it means to be Presbyterian (and by extent allowed within the tent of the EPC) is the Westminster Confession of Faith⁷ and its teachings regarding Scripture.

The Bible is the final judge of all religious controversies (WCF 1:10)
The infallible standard for Biblical interpretation is itself (WCF 1:9)
For essential doctrines, this is a task that the educated and uneducated can both discern out of the text (WCF 1:7)

In other words, for an issue to earn the status of essential, either a plain reading of either Scripture or the Westminster Confession of Faith at minimum should be able to cleanly, explicitly, and unambiguously resolve the matter within its own text⁸. This is what I’d call the “floor” of what is acceptable. Issues which fall outside of this standard can have important ramifications, those arguing over them can adhere to and argue their positions with seriousness – but by definition, they would be classified as “non-essential”.

Women’s ordination – the founding controversy for the denomination – provides us the clearest example of this in practice. The EPC’s position paper on the issue states as following:

Since people of good faith who equally love the Lord and hold to the infallibility of Scripture differ on this issue, and since uniformity of view and practice is not essential to the existence of the visible church, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church has chosen to leave this decision to the Spirit-guided consciences of particular congregations concerning the ordination of women as elders and deacons, and to the presbyteries concerning the ordination of women as ministers.

The EPC regards women’s ordination as an issue of ecclesiology, not first-order morality or core salvific doctrines. That means there is some⁹ room for textual criticism despite there existing multiple prooftexts which on first glance seem to unambiguously settle the issue¹⁰ (1 Timothy 2:12, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35).

But as the EPC concedes, there are good-faith arguments one can make in favor which do not undermine an infallibilist view of Scripture. The most common arguments made by Biblical egalitarians are as follows: contradictory¹¹ verses or examples in Scripture, they’ll raise questions about the original Greek¹²meanings and grammar in certain passages¹³¹⁴, and in some cases they’ll appeal to the surrounding historical context¹⁵¹⁶.

The women’s ordination issue gives a good idea of where the “ceiling” roughly is around for what can reasonably be argued in good faith. There’s a strong argument to be made that “the definition of biological sex” is an issue which falls outside the scope of “matters of primary morality” and thus any justifications would be allowed this textual argumentation.

But, as you’ll see, I don’t even have to go to those lengths. The “floor” alone is more than sufficient. If the EPC’s position paper cannot provide sufficient evidence in either Scripture or the WCF to resolve the issue, then there’s no need to even resort to textual or higher criticism.

What do the position papers say?

All guidance for the denomination pertaining to transgender individuals is confined to a small handful of sentences¹⁷ scattered across the Position Paper on Human Sexuality. Despite the relatively scarce mentions, the position paper makes it clear that this is to be considered a binding issue¹⁸: any practice of gender transition is condemned, and this is to be the position and guidance expected of all ordained ministers and members within the denomination.

The position paper does not explicitly lay out a rationale for why the judgment was made, but instead cites a small handful of prooftexts to support the statements in question. So, let us follow the citations and see how decisive they are towards resolving the issue beyond debate.

Here is a list of every single¹⁹ piece of evidence the EPC puts forward in opposition to the practice of gender transition:

The Phillipians 4:11-13 citation points to a passage where Paul generally speaks about being content in life. This does not address the issue of gender dysphoria in any specific capacity whatsoever. The verse is so broadly applicable, that the logic behind its inclusion could just as easily be turned to forbid treatment of any medical condition whatsoever. The rationale of faith-healing sects, in fact, does follow this exact pattern – yet we’re capable of recognizing in their case how that would be poor exegesis.
Galatians 5:19-23 simply lists examples of works of the flesh and contrasts it with a list of examples of works of the Spirit. No item listed under “the works of the flesh” can be provably linked to gender transition any more than it could under “works of the Spirit”. Drawing any connection here would be a massive stretch, and would have to involve essentially begging the question.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20 is the passage where Paul talks about the body being a temple. Once again, as with the Philippians citation, there is large room for ambiguity in terms of how this passage should be applied within medical contexts. Is gender transition any more inherently destroying the body than, say, chemotherapy? How do we make this kind of call without first pre-baking in a lot of subjective value judgments as to what procedures seem “right” or “not right” to us?

None of these passages are relevant or remotely decisive, and the fact that they comprise the cornerstone of the paper’s argument should on its own call into question the merits of the position itself.

It is not in and of itself an issue that a report commissioned with the primary purpose to study human sexuality gives far more care and consideration to formulating properly evidenced positions surrounding same-sex attraction than gender dysphoria. What is an issue is trying to resolve the matter of gender transition by treating it as a “staple-on” to a statement on sexuality. Looking at it from this lens, the nature of the citations start to make more sense: the sole focus on reassurance and contentment is because the paper implicitly treats gender dysphoria as a matter functionally analogous to homosexuality. I suspect it may be symptomatic of a wider issue in common discourse right now.

“LGBT” at its core is a politically-derived term, which sometimes makes it a bit baffling when I talk to Christians (on both sides) and they freely throw around this term with theological import. The term itself was coined for the purposes of coalition-building, its boundaries are constantly shifting alongside the political and social tides, and it is by definition not a singular thing. The language of coalitions may be useful for political parties, but to be able to effectively minister to individuals, you need to meet them at their specific needs. After all, asexual and intersex people fall under the umbrella, and the EPC is able to recognize the legitimacy of both²⁰.

To the EPC’s credit, they do recognize this in some important ways and make sincere efforts to be surgical and cautious with their language in ways that other statements on gender and sexuality (such as the Nashville Statement²¹) completely fail to do. The position paper is careful to focus on terms such as “gender dysphoria” and “same-sex attraction” – avoiding the pitfall of echoing nebulous buzzwords such as “transgenderism”, “gender ideology”, or “LGBT ideology”.

And in its treatment of the issue of same-sex relations, it takes care to build the theological groundwork for it out of a more comprehensive doctrine of human sexuality. Contained within the same paper, there’s statements on celibacy, monogamy, and more broadly what the Biblical vision for marriage is and its role within the Christian life. Approaching things in such a fashion gives the impression that the purpose of these papers is to clarify doctrine in ways that are lasting and provide a clearer picture of broader Christian doctrines – not just simply playing whack-a-mole for whatever the issue of the week may be.

To provide transgender issues with a similar treatment, we would want to start by considering not the political situation but the basic question it poses for Christian doctrine. The issue with the position paper currently is that it departs from a framework which assumes that this issue, at its core, is a disagreement over moral conduct. But the real central question is taxonomic in nature. What is a woman? What is a man? These are questions that would make more sense answered out of a framework built on top of the complementarian-versus-egalitarian debate rather than one treated as part of a doctrine on human sexuality, if anything.

Because the issue is so deeply taxonomic, it’s important that before we jump into analyzing Scripture, we ensure we’re on the same page as to what is being argued. The first step is defining exactly what the issue is that is presently under consideration, and extracting from that the specific doctrinal questions we’d want to take to check against Scripture.

What precisely is the issue under consideration?

Most popular literature in the 21st century pertaining to transgender issues will often unspokenly build off of postmodern gender theory or concepts/frameworks downstream of it. If you are a pastor or layperson trying to research this issue, it’s very easy to come out with the impression that the acceptance of transgender people must necessitate the acceptance of postmodern gender theory and its premises.

I do not believe postmodern gender theory²² is suitable for understanding this issue (nor compatible with Scripture), so the grounds on which I frame “the transgender issue” may look very different from the ones you’re used to seeing. To be specific, I will not be making any of the following arguments:

I will not be arguing that gender is a spectrum or that there exists stable gender roles outside of “man” and “woman”.
I will not be making any arguments which attempt to entirely divorce the concept of gender from that of sex. By extent, I will not be giving much attention to how gender functions as a cultural or sociological system²³.
I will not be arguing that souls are sexed, nor trying to lean on some purely metaphysical definition of “maleness” and “femaleness”.

Instead, I’d rather take a minimum-case first approach to building my argument. Does there exist a model which is capable of integrating gender incongruence with minimal revisions to the larger frameworks we’ve traditionally employed to understand gender and sex? I believe there is, in what is often referred to as the “transmedicalist model”²⁴. This has been the main rivaling theory in transgender medicine over the past century and posits the following:

“Biological sex” is an extremely vague term²⁵²⁶ and is used to refer to multiple things²⁷²⁸. Historically though, human society has understood it as an aggregate of phenotypes – when ordinary human beings and doctors tangibly make sex-based judgments, they often do so with phenotypic sex in mind²⁹.
Humans are sexually dimorphic, which means that sex is essentially bimodal in nature³⁰. There’s a subtle distinction here to make – while we can say the human species at-large generally tends to cluster into two distinct categories, there do exist rare anomalies which can add some level of real ambiguity.
The brain is a biological organ, subject to real sexual differentiation³¹³² (and variation) as much as any other part of the body. This should not be conflated for “mental illness”, as there exists a durable biological component underpinning gender incongruence which cannot be explainable by external factors, but instead correlates strongly with the mechanics of sex-development.³³ Given the evidence, it is more biologically accurate to speak of gender incongruence as a sex disorder – the biological sex of a brain mismatching with any number of the body’s other sex-components.
Being trans then is better understood as analagous to an intersex case. Historically speaking, sex-disambiguation for these cases has been a deeply practical affair³⁴: surgeons and doctors would make assignments based on what they understood to be a least-harm principle. Looking at the total makeup of a person and making alterations in the direction of the sex that would prove less destructive to an individual’s wellbeing and overall functioning. The ultimate goal is to bring the various components of biological sex into harmony to the best of our ability.
Transgender medicine simply builds upon this principle. One of the most empirically consistent findings of the field is the following: attempting to force the subconscious sex of an individual into conformity with the rest of the body is actually more damaging to a person’s well-being (and proves more difficult) than the reverse. Hormone replacement therapy is extremely effective at altering a person’s phenotypic sex down to the cellular level³⁵. The consistently reported improvement in quality-of-life by those who undergo it can be understood as the components of a person’s biological sex successfully having been brought into harmony.

This model does not require us to overhaul our understanding of gender, but instead presents a much narrower question: by what specific mechanics can we actually determine whether an individual is sexed male or female?

Now, many try to rebut³⁶ that the specific scientific mechanics of how all this works hasn’t fully been worked out yet, but this is also to be expected in a field which is both relatively young and underfunded. Historically, medicine has always worked this way – it’s not uncommon for effective diagnosis and treatment to precede a comprehensive theoretical understanding of all the underlying mechanics of a condition.

Regardless, there still are a multitude of things we’ve been able to sufficiently prove: countless methods to “cure” gender dysphoria have repeatedly failed³⁷, transitioning has consistently shown to significantly improve mental health and quality-of-life³⁸, regret rates for medical transition are near-zero³⁹, and there are multiple documented cases where individuals have pursued transition independent of external social factors⁴⁰.

As far as biological and medical science is concerned, this is not at all an issue that is resolved beyond debate. If anything, medical consensus seems closer to indicating that allowing transition is the correct course of action⁴¹. Yet, many of those writing policy both in the church and society render their judgments as if they’ve made their decisions a priori, as if they’re speaking with the backing of an infallible authority.

Such an authority can only be Scripture. One can argue about the finer details and uncertainties, but given the current state of things, a position of total prohibition beyond debate cannot be justified with the science alone.

What does Scripture tell us?

So, what does the Bible actually have to say about binary gender transition? If the earlier survey of the EPC’s citations was any indicator, the answer is nothing definitive.

Here is what one can reasonably glean out of a plain reading of Scripture: we are created male and female as part of a design that predates the Fall (Genesis 1:27), crossdressing is morally unacceptable (Deuteronomy 22:5), and gender has real relevance as to how we live our lives ().

What Scripture does not provide us with are straightforward guidelines for ascertaining biological sex or distinguishing intersex cases. Scripture does not tell us where in the body our “true” sex is located – nowhere will you find the words “gamete” or “chromosome” invoked. Scripture does not guarantee us that our born bodies will be free of imperfections or follow certain rules of conformity or consistency. Any invocation of passages related to eunuch-hood have to deal with the existence of Matthew 19:12 and a history of textual debate surrounding that topic which goes beyond that of even women’s ordination. Any prooftexts which generically refer to “nature” or “flesh” rely on a heavy amount of eisegesis to be relevant.

As the EPC states, “The Bible, uniquely and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit, is the supreme and final authority on all matters on which it speaks”. Emphasis to be put on “on all matters on which it speaks”. The Reformed tradition recognizes that the Bible is granted a special moral infallibility, but specifically with regards to its purpose as an instrument for our salvation.

That being said, there is no reason to expect the Bible to act as a comprehensive medical or scientific textbook. Scripture is not the Talmud – it does not purport to be a world unto itself but rather instead a proclamation of the world to come. This is explicitly the position of the Westminster Divines:

At the same time, the Westminster Divines, including Rutherford, were clear that the purpose of Scripture was to bring people into relationship with God, not to communicate interesting information in all branches of learning. Scripture was not to be used, for example, as a source of information in the sciences to refute what the scholars were discovering… Samuel Rutherford was very explicit that Scripture’s purpose was to mediate salvation, not communicate information on science. He listed areas in which Scripture is not our rule, for example, “not in things of Art and Science”… But Scripture was our rule, Rutherford affirmed, “1. in fundamentalls of salvation 2. In all morals of both first and second table”.⁴²

As a result, we should not read the Bible’s lack of commentary on this topic as incidental, but a direct byproduct of the intended scope and purpose of the Scriptural whole. Because Scripture lacks sufficient guidance in its own text, nearly anyone who tries to draw a line on this issue ends up (whether they like to admit or not) having to entirely rest their argument on grounds of natural theology.

Now, natural observation is not inherently an invalid source of discernment, but what the Divines explicitly reject is any attitude which treats it as a secondary source of special revelation alongside Scripture⁴³. To claim natural theology carries with it a special infallible authority is to essentially commit an act of appending to God’s word (WCF 1:6). The WCF itself echoes this sentiment, warning against those who claim that our natural understanding of the world can on its own provide knowledge of God’s will (WCF 1:1). The Reformed view is one which recognizes the influence of total depravity on all of creation and puts great suspicion upon any attitude which appeals to Nature with a mystical or uncritical reverence.

Where we are forced to interpret natural observations, we are called to do so with a spirit of critical reason. A pillar of the irenic approach has been that these sorts of differences should be capable of being hashed out via reasoned debate. Where the WCF invokes the phrase “light of nature”, it does so in a fashion synonymous with what we today call “science”⁴⁴. The arguments we make within this realm are bound by the same rules as any other philosophical or scientific debate – the door flings wide open to empiricism, methodological scrutiny, and the existence of real uncertainty.

Once a debate steps into this territory, it cannot be freely pulled in and out at one’s convenience. We do not get to selectively appropriate some points of observation and entirely close our ears to others a priori. One cannot haphazardly invoke words such as “nature” or “biology” or “common sense”⁴⁵ without any specificity and expect them to stand on their own authority. Yet, these are the kinds of shortcuts which go increasingly unchallenged as churches rush to draft official statements in response to a hot-button issue.

One of the worst offenders is the (Baptist) Nashville Statement, which shows very little caution or consideration to either the reasoning or frameworks it employs in defining its position. The statement as a whole hinges its entire argument on repeatedly invoking “biological sex” while remaining deliberately vague about what that term specifically entails. This vagueness creates a huge problem, as it essentially opens the door to double-speak on matters of biology. There is no consistent rule to delinate between the “physical anomalies” it deems illegitimate versus the “physical disorders” and “biological ambiguities” it does see as constituting a legitimate intersex condition⁴⁶. Why do we assume one set of natural observations to carry the will of God and another to be dismissed as an error? Where it does come to distinguishing the cases the statement is willing to concede as intersex, the statement leans back on the language of “biological sex insofar as it may be known”. But to invoke the phrase so offhandedly misses the point that that is the crux of the issue. The question raised by transgender science over the past century is one of by what mechanics do we know and discern a person’s biological sex? The statement treats “transgender self-conceptions” as if they are separate to this matter when that could not be further from the reality.

The closest we get to any clear rule is the statement’s reference to “male and female reproductive structures” as defining “God’s design for self-conception”⁴⁷. If we take this to mean that reproductive functioning should be the supreme, universal rule of sex assignment, then there should be sufficient evidence to back up such a standard. Medical grounds alone do not provide the evidence to justify this – so then that leaves only theological ones. Does Scripture show us that God’s design for individuals is purely reproductive in intent, or does Scripture present a more nuanced view of his will for human existence?

As the Westminster Shorter Cathecism states, “the chief end of Man is to glorify God, and enjoy Him forever”. Many over the years have tried to invoke Genesis 1:28 to argue this task to be wholly identical with sexual reproduction. But taking this view only creates more questions. Why did Jesus, a model for our lives (1 Corinthians 11:1) live out celibacy? Why does the unmarried Paul state that he wishes we all were as he was (1 Corinthians 7:7-8)? In setting apart mankind from the other animals (Genesis 1:26) – who all live, die, and multiply without a second thought – does that not speak to an additional complexity in God’s purposes for our design? Why, when speaking of “God’s design for self-conception”, are we quickest to neglect the biological organ most responsible for self-conception – the brain?

What we do see throughout Scripture is that where God works his will through men, he does so in ways that challenge our intuitions. Throughout Scripture (Deuteronomy 7:7, Luke 1:34-37, Genesis 18:14) we see countless examples of the Lord employing vessels we would not expect towards any number of ends we would not expect. When Jesus goes to cure a blind man (John 9:1-12), his disciples ask him where the sin must have occurred to make this man blind. Jesus instead rejects the framework they put forth, revealing that God could use a condition even such as that in service of His will. Is it truly any more of a stretch to conceive that the Lord could find use in putting an individual through the trial of transition? Why must we assume that an individual is afflicted with dysphoria, it can only be because they are called to repress? Is it so impossible that anyone who recounts otherwise must be regarded as accusing God of “having made a mistake”?

As it stands, there is nowhere near enough evidence to be making these sweeping assertions, much less to enforce them as dogma. Let us summarize everything I’ve argued up until now:

Does either Scripture or the WCF provide a clear guideline to resolve this issue? No. The most commonly cited verses are neither relevant nor conclusive.
Can natural theology alone act as an infallible ground of doctrine? Absolutely not, the Westminster Divines make this abundantly clear.
Is the central question at stake primarily one of morals or salvific fundamentals? No. Defining sex is fundamentally a biological-taxonomic question. This is the realm of science.
Does the “light of reason” (i.e. scientific observation) point us undeniably towards one view? No, and whatever scientific evidence currently does exist seems to point in favor of gender transition, if anything.
Is it possible to model and understand this issue in a way which requires minimal upheaval to traditional frameworks? Yes, this issue is analogous enough to intersex cases that they can be assimilable in the same way.

By the EPC’s own confessional standards, the matter of (binary) gender transition would seem to more consistently fall under the category of a non-essential. As a relatively recent issue, there is still a lot we have to learn and figure out – and it is precisely for issues like this that the EPC’s essentials-nonessentials distinction exists in the first place. A cautious approach to the issue would give more leeway to individual congregations to set their own policy and create breathing room to invite further investigation and debate.

It’s important that we take the guidance of Romans 14 seriously: where there doesn’t exist clear overriding Scriptural or confessional guidance, prematurely shutting down dissenting views held with conviction runs the risk of creating a stumbling block for the church. There are more verses contained within Scripture which can be argued to directly apply to women’s ordination (1 Timothy 2:12, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35) than to this issue. So, why does it reflexively feel as if the latter is so much more controversial than the former?

The same crisis underpinning the debate surrounding this issue is the same one that brought the EPC to its founding. The modern church (on the left and right) has found itself in such a rush to ensure its on the “right side” of hot-button issues that we tend to neglect questioning whether or not our positions align with doctrine. But it has long been the Presbyterian view that both the unity of the church and the rigor of its witness rests on a shared commitment to matters of doctrine and the openness to have good-faith debate within its bounds. How we get to our positions matters just as much as the positions themselves.

In my study of the Westminster Confession of Faith, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much care and consideration went into what was included (and excluded) from the statement. Obviously, the Divines would not have been able to anticipate this exact specific issue – but strong doctrine should provide us with fundamentals that can be applied to new situations as they come. What the Divines do provide us with is rules for interpreting and applying knowledge whether it be derived from Scripture, science, nature, or wherever. Many of the topics and issues covered by the confessions are topics that come up time and time again in the history of the Church, showing themselves in even the debates of today. We should not underestimate that. Without a strong anchor in doctrine, it becomes far too easy for the church to be carried away by the tides of political fashion.

Despite the tendency of many to conflate the terms “conservative” and “orthodox” nowadays, the two words have very distinct meanings with important implications. An orthodox position is one which expects rigid conformity to historic or inherited practices, whereas a conservative one acknowledges the possibility of change, but only with a proper spirit of prudence and caution. The EPC is a dispositionally conservative denomination, whereas a denomination like the OPC would fall closer to the “orthodox” camp. ↩︎
From “Explanatory Statement to Essentials of Our Faith”: “Essentials of Our Faith is an irenic statement of historic evangelicalism.” ↩︎
https://davenantinstitute.org/studies-in-protestant-irenics ↩︎
Thesis, A., and Eric V. Powers. “IS THERE ANY BIBLICAL WARRANT FOR THE DOCTRINAL TRIAGE?”, p. 15. Masters of Divinity, The Master’s Seminary, 2016. https://bcri.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/any-warrant-for-doctrinal-triage.pdf. ↩︎ ↩︎
The triage model argues that doctrine can be divided into three categories: those which define the boundaries of who is a Christian, those which define the boundaries of who is Reformed, and those which are left up for debate. See Footnote 5 for source. ↩︎
The essentials-versus-nonessentials model instead applies a two-tier distinction: essential doctrines are those clearly derived from the Bible and explicitly held by all orthodox divines as necessary. Anything which falls outside of this should be viewed as non-essential. See Footnote 5 for source. ↩︎
From “Essentials of Our Faith”: “The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) is a confessional statement of orthodox Presbyterianism. The WCF is our standard of doctrine as found in Scripture. The WCF constitutes a system of biblical truth that an officer of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church is required to believe, while acknowledging that each individual court has the freedom to allow exceptions that do not infringe upon the system of the doctrine in the WCF.” ↩︎
This may seem like a high burden of proof – but in a lot of ways that is a good thing. The Presbyterian tradition writ large has its roots in a healthy suspicion of ecclesiastical authority and its potential for abuse. The power to render a position as dogma – rendering it permanently above debate or questioning – is an immense one and should be taken only with adequate caution and undeniable proof. Social consensuses and fads come and go, but if essential doctrines are Scriptural doctrines – then they should be recognizable throughout the ages. See: WCF 25.6, 31.1, 31.4. ↩︎
Note that there are real limits on how far this can be taken, as many arguments in favor of same-sex marriage also appeal to some form of textual criticism, but in doing so have failed to meet the EPC’s threshold of good-faith argumentation, and also concern an issue of primary morality – which one can argue should be resolvable without textual or higher criticism. ↩︎
More orthodox denominations will cite these verses among many others to argue this issue is not only essential, but threatens the basic order of the church. It’s informative as to where the EPC sets the bar that they take a relatively less strict view on this issue: https://www.opc.org/GA/hermeneutics.html ↩︎
There are other verses and examples in Scripture which could be argued to contradict the “spirit” of the prohibition. In Acts 18, Priscilla teaches Apollos. As one of the Judges, Deborah assumed a position of religious authority. Galatians 3:28 is also often cited to argue for there being “neither male nor female in Christ”. ↩︎
The “day-age” discussion between Young Earth and Old Earth creationists would also be another example of this principle in practice, where studies of the original Hebrew text of Genesis 1 are cited as a basis for argumentation. ↩︎
Some cited verses either refer purely to the relationship between husbands and wives (Ephesians 5:22, 1 Timothy 3:2). Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210317135907/https://ddzimianski.wordpress.com/2020/03/20/why-i-became-a-biblical-egalitarian/ ↩︎
The Greek “I permit not” in 1 Timothy 2:12 could potentially be read as Paul offering personal, non-binding opinion. Source: https://willgwitt.org/theology/womens-ordination/concerning-womens-ordination-what-about-1-timothy-212/ ↩︎
NT Wright claims that 1 Corinthians 14 can be read through the lens of specific cultural practices of Paul’s time. Source: https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/womens-service-in-the-church-the-biblical-basis/ ↩︎
Despite the practice being known in the 17th century, the Westminster Confession of Faith does not directly address the issue of women’s ordination. Source: https://cameronshaffer.com/2024/04/02/the-epcs-confession-of-faith-and-womens-ordination ↩︎
From the position paper: “Those who find themselves desiring to be a person of the opposite sex or gender face painful emotions and weighty consequences. With heartfelt sympathy and a deep desire to love and encourage them in their circumstances, we believe all people must find their contentment in Christ alone, accepting His wise and gracious providence, and looking to Him for strength to glorify Him and to serve his or her neighbor through the sex given at conception….We will strive by God’s grace to discipline our personal lives and our local churches in accordance with God’s Word. God helping us, we shall continue, within our churches and in the public arena, to teach against and to refuse to condone or participate in… gender reassignment.” ↩︎
From the position paper: “Unrepentant sinful behavior and unrepentant lusts are incompatible with the confession of Jesus as Lord required of all members of the EPC. Additionally, it is required of ordained officers in the EPC that they believe, practice, and6 teach the moral standards contained in the Scriptures and Constitution of the EPC, which are reflected in this position paper.” ↩︎
I won’t touch too much on the James 1, 2 Corinthians 4, or Romans 5 cites since they’re not brought up to discern the morality of gender transition, but simply provide reassurance under the assumption that gender transition has already proven to be immoral. I don’t believe the other three cites sufficiently did that at all, so responding to these would be moot. ↩︎
From the position paper: “In this sacred community of deep and committed friendships, we encourage single persons to live out loving, holy, celibate lives… We understand that in rare cases, physiological gender ambiguity at birth calls for special care and wisdom.” ↩︎
From the Nashville Statement: “WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness. WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.” ↩︎
By “postmodern gender theory”, I’m referring to a view of “gender as performance”, most exemplified in writers such as Judith Butler (who leans heavily on Foucault). Mainstream concepts such as “gender spectrum” and “self-identification” have their roots in this. Anything rooted in postmodernism is going to pose a major issue for Christian (but especially Reformed) doctrine insofar as an epistemology which rejects the functional universality or neutrality of any abstract language or concept runs up against the fact that – well, the Bible is made out of language. The Bible is meant to be timeless, it’s meant to be preached to every nation, there is a certain objective intelligibility baked into its structure and authorial intent. The text of Scripture frequently speaks about the world descriptively, it routinely works with and defines categories which are intended to have universal relevance. Our historic creeds are drafted with an underlying assumption that a rational study of the Biblical text can allow us to infer objective, universal truths about what it is trying to communicate. ↩︎
There’s a LOT I can say on the topic of gender socialization, and a load of nuance it can introduce to the issue, but it’s well out of the scope of this essay. I’ll save everything I have to say for a later post. In the meantime, I defer to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex for any challenges on how gender sociologically functions. ↩︎
While the term “transmedicalism” was only relatively recently coined, it is often retroactively applied by scholars to refer to a dominant theory of transsexuality in the mid-20th century that built off of the work and ideas of Harry Benjamin. The influence these ideas had on the birth of modern trans medicine and the extent to which it still shapes medical guidance to this day cannot be understated. ↩︎
“There is hardly a word in the English language comparable to the word “sex” in its vagueness and in its emotional content. It seems definite (male or female) and yet is indefinite (as we will see)… The biologist, the medical man and clinician, the psychologist, the jurist, the sociologist, and finally the priest and theologian are all apt to view and study sex from different angles and in different lights.” - Benjamin, Harry. The TRANSSEXUAL PHENOMENON, p. 6. Symposium Publishing, 1999. https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-04-07_5ca961529c262_HarryBenjamin-TheTranssexualPhenomenon1copy.pdf ↩︎
“Sex is commonly used to denote one’s status as a man or woman based upon biological factors. Although sex is a reflection of one’s biology, as opposed to gender, which is generally considered to be socially constructed, the biological aspect of one’s body that determines one’s sex has not been legally or medically resolved.” - Greenberg, Julie A. “Defining Male and Female: Intersexuality and the Collision between Law and Biology”, p. 271. Arizona Law Review 41, no. 2 (1999). https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/arizlrev/article/id/7880/. ↩︎
“Medical experts recognize that many factors contribute to the determination of an individual’s sex. According to medical professionals, the typical criteria of sex include…[list of ten criteria of sex]” - Greenberg, Julie A. “Defining Male and Female: Intersexuality and the Collision between Law and Biology”, p. 278. Arizona Law Review 41, no. 2 (1999). https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/arizlrev/article/id/7880/. ↩︎
“Here are some of the kinds of sex I have in mind: chromosomal, genetic, anatomical, legal, gonadal, germinal, endocrine (hormonal), psychological and - also - the social sex, usually based on the sex of rearing.” - Benjamin, Harry. The TRANSSEXUAL PHENOMENON, p. 7. Symposium Publishing, 1999. https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-04-07_5ca961529c262_HarryBenjamin-TheTranssexualPhenomenon1copy.pdf ↩︎
The very concept of a “chromosome”, itself a concept downstream of modern evolutionary biology, did not exist prior to the late-19th century. Yet human beings still had to interface with and conceptualize sex prior to that, often based on phenotypic observation. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inquiry/article/sex-ambiguity-in-early-modern-common-law-16291787/1F04AA53FF7160425C4023CB006EAF74 ↩︎
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-science-of-biological-sex/ ↩︎
HUGE list of peer-reviewed sources regarding transgender brain studies compiled into a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/138mwba5NS1xP3FspgB7cqz2KNwcxMZswBLNOwUrTA1A/edit?gid=2110773831#gid=2110773831 ↩︎
“Science has yet to definitely isolate a biological common denominator that causes these individuals to feel transgendered. A recent study, however, has determined that a section of the brain area that is essential for sexual behavior is larger in men than in women and that the brain structure of genetically male transsexuals is more similar to female brains than to male brains.” - Greenberg, Julie A. “Defining Male and Female: Intersexuality and the Collision between Law and Biology”, p. 289. Arizona Law Review 41, no. 2 (1999). https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/arizlrev/article/id/7880. ↩︎
Twin studies show a genetic correlation, there exists a strong link between hormonal exposure during conception and gender incongruence, and brain scans do show a visible correlation of certain features with self-described gender-identity. Additionally, one of the presently leading explanations for gender incongruence relates to hormonal exposure in the womb – reflecting sex-development as a cause. Countless other decades-old explanations (socialization, fetishism, homosexuality, mental illness) have been empirically ruled out over time, leaving the principle of parsimony to conclude that this phenomenon most likely is the product of sex. https://www.endocrine.org/advocacy/position-statements/transgender-health ↩︎
Greenberg, Julie A. “Defining Male and Female: Intersexuality and the Collision between Law and Biology”, p. 272-274. Arizona Law Review 41, no. 2 (1999) ↩︎
https://www.masterdoc.info/#biological-sex-is-mostly-mutable ↩︎
One example of this is an article published in TGC, which ended up hinging its thesis on exactly this line of argumentation: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/gender-dysphoria-and-the-body-soul-relationship/ ↩︎
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2021-98492-003 ↩︎
https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/ ↩︎
The majority of studies consistently show detransition rates to be extremely low, ranging anywhere from low single-digits to a fraction of a percent. Among the cases where individuals choose to “detransition”, the vast majority of cases cite either social or financial pressures as their reason – not any sort of genuine change in self-perception. Sources: 2015 US Transgender Survey (p. 115) and Detransition Medical Literature Review (2023). ↩︎
https://jewishjournal.com/judaism/179637/ ↩︎
Read the American Medical Association’s joint resolution for a comprehensive statement: https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2023/ama-gender-affirming-care ↩︎
Rogers, Jack, Donald K. McKim, and Ford Lewis Battles. The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible : An Historical Approach, p. 206. Wipf and Stock, 1999. ↩︎
From The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible by Jack Rogers and Donald McKim: “The Divines expounded no “natural theology” in the Thomistic fashion, asserting that people could know God by reason based on sense experience prior to God’s revelation. When they spoke of “natural theology”, the Divines meant the knowledge God had implanted in their inner nature…For the Westminster Divines, there were not two sources of revelation, nature and Scripture, but only one, God’s word.” ↩︎
“This category would seem to encompass what we understand as science, which was often comprehended under natural philosophy in Alting’s day.” – Source: https://reformedbooksonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Alting-Henry-On-the-Light-of-Nature.pdf ↩︎
“Common sense” is neither a valid nor infallible epistemology, I write more about it here. Any religious doctrine which tries to ground itself on common sense should be held up to extreme scrutiny. After all, you can find street interviews from the 1950s where “common sense” dictated that it was sinful and against God’s will for the races to mix. ↩︎
From the statement: “WE DENY that physical anomalies or psychological conditions nullify the God-appointed link between biological sex and self-conception as male or female. WE DENY that ambiguities related to a person’s biological sex render one incapable of living a fruitful life in joyful obedience to Christ. WE AFFIRM that those born with a physical disorder of sex development are created in the image of God and have dignity and worth equal to all other image-bearers. They are acknowledged by our Lord Jesus in his words about “eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb.” With all others they are welcome as faithful followers of Jesus Christ and should embrace their biological sex insofar as it may be known.” ↩︎
From the statement: “WE AFFIRM that the differences between male and female reproductive structures are integral to God’s design for self-conception as male or female.” ↩︎

The Logic of Venture Capital in Silicon Valley

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first draft of an article I wrote on behalf of Disjunctions Magazine. For the fully polished piece, you can find the link on their site here. The text below is kept purely as an archive of cut content and footnotes.

What does it actually mean to take on Big Tech? When we apply this language of conflict, do we take seriously the real possibilities of winning and losing brought with it? This language cannot be reduced down to terms of discourses, solidarities, and tactics. Taken in its own terms, conflict is a fundamentally strategic exercise.

As labor historian John Womack puts it, a strategic perspective requires “calculating the most probable powers and fields of the forces in conflict for the period you intend to fight… what you can win or lose.. what you most want to win… what you have to win, and what you cannot risk losing”¹.

In other words, conflict requires its actors to take a live situation, break down its terrain, and gamble on a response. The language is concerned less with “good” versus “bad”, and more with strengths versus weaknesses, “cans” versus “cannots”. Scenarios may come without clear precedent, and analyzing them incorrectly comes with real stakes. The answers one comes to could cease to be relevant ten years from now as the situation evolves. Conflict does not stop at criticism – an actor has to apply their analysis.

It’s not hard to find criticisms of the tech industry nowadays. Headlines are full of thinkpieces, ideological profiles, and industry horse-race coverage – all zooming in on the ideologies of the billionaires and companies behind the curtain². But a lot of this is unserious, more focused on sensationalism than anything practically applicable.

Even among the more sophisticated tech-critics, for all their skill in identifying the problem, they fail to provide solutions which extend past the liberal state. Cory Doctorow can dedicate multiple chapters of his book chronicling how much the emergence of the modern tech industry dovetailed with the suppression of organized labor³, but when pressed on how to fight back, he falls back on calls for regulation. His weapons of choice to “keep the market fair” are antitrust and the goodwill of bureaucrats⁴.

Lawerence Lessig can recognize the ways in which intellectual property is designed to promote rent-seeking and stifle creativity, but then funnel grassroots energy into “getting money out of politics” so he can then pass legislation.

The conflict these critics describe is not one between lawmakers and the market. They explicitly lay out how it is one between the agents of capital and working people. Within such a context, the state’s role isn’t to aid struggle, but to mediate it. They depend on economic growth for both legitimacy and tax revenue. Law enforcement is also a basic state objective⁵ – the same EU commission that passed the GDPR is actively pushing to gut it in the name of tapping into AI-driven growth⁶. Even where the state recognizes the industry as a threat, it pushes policies that protect its own interests – age verification, chat control, domain-blocking – over that of users and hackers.

The sorts of reforms progressive-minded activists most often propose are some of the hardest to get through, because they run up against some very deep-seated realities of the modern economy. Lessig wants to majorly slash copyright terms⁷, but modern economies are extremely dependent on IP revenue⁸. Doctorow’s emphasis on union power hinges on an incredibly rosy⁹ picture of the current state of organized labor¹⁰ and overlooks genuine grassroots advances (such as worker-to-worker organizing models) in favor of overstating the role of “non-corrupt judges” and “good union leaders”¹¹¹².

Any serious response to the current situation needs to reflect an awareness of the conflict in question. It must directly focus on the issue in contention (tech), emerge out of the actions of those with the most skin in the game, and not bet its entire house on external circumstances changing.

To this end, it’s worth returning back to the FOSS (free-and-open source software) to the find seeds of a radical break. It is at it’s core a culture of commons-based peer production¹³ which has, in a very practical manner, challenged long-held notions surrounding property and production. The people involved in forming the culture didn’t start this as some kind of socialist experiment, but accidentally discovered it through the process of their work and what made sense. They saw for themselves how these things were made and used and built up their ideological frameworks out of that.

Working in this fashion opened up the space to genuinely new horizons that weren’t anchored to abstract political principles. But the hazard for these communities came as they began to evolve into a movement – lacking a clear sense of its own political grounding, FOSS activists tended to take the views around them for granted. Richard Stallman believed that solving software was just a matter of appealing to civic virtue¹⁴, whereas ESR was more inclined to put his hopes in the “invisible hand of the free market”¹⁵.

But despite the real grassroots enthusiasm behind them, all of these movements got rolled over the course of the 2010s. They underestimated the radicality of what they were proposing and were ill-prepared for both a market and a state that were actively declaring war on them. To have meaningfully fought back, there was a need to actually understand how the industry functions and what it was up to.

How Silicon Valley Works – Or Doesn’t

Silicon Valley’s mode of production is capitalism – not “techno-feudalism”¹⁶ or whatever other term tech critics try to devise for the sake of novelty. The modern incarnation of the industry emerged as the load-bearing pillar to an economy reeling from the aftermath of the Great Recession¹⁷. Where the housing crisis left a lot of the mystique and growth surrounding Wall Street to dry up, the relatively insulated tech sector¹⁸ swooped in to pick up the pieces. Tech provided a safe offramp for all the talent, capital, and political goodwill that had been burned in the ‘08 crisis¹⁹.

Historically, when faced with moments of stagnation, capitalism would often recover its growth by tapping into the periphery²⁰ – underdeveloped areas which provide access to new markets, resources, and cheaper labor. As Kohei Saito points out²¹, there’s strong parallels between this process and the commercialization of the digital space.

As a result, the market came to have a rather ambivalent relationship to the communities that inhabited the internet. On one hand, business held a genuine contempt for the culture of free and open sharing within these communities.²² On the other hand, the rapid growth of these startups depended on the wealth of free resources, labor, and access provided by them. This is where enclosure and flattening tactics (such as embrace-extend-extinguish²³ and open-washing) were actively and aggressively pursued by the market to swiftly neuter any opposition.

Given enough time, this process was refined into a formula. Capitalism depends on continuous growth, an industry can’t sustain itself off of one miracle business. There constantly needs to be a new iPhone, a new Uber, a new Amazon to keep consumer demand rising at the rates demanded by industry. Tech investors need to refine strategies that can reliably keep churning out The Next Big Thing.

This is where venture capital comes in: investors pool their money into a fund managed by industry “experts” who employ aggressive investment strategies optimized for high-risk, high-reward bets. They achieve this by exploiting power laws within the market – a disproportionate share of growth across a market empirically tends to concentrate in only a small handful of firms²⁴.

Knowing this fact tells you a lot about where you should place your bets. Focus on sectors with the highest potential growth ceilings, such as startups and cutting-edge tech. Double on triple down on any startups which show promise of becoming that golden goose – cull the rest. Break up funding into “rounds”²⁵, so you can hold founders to match an exponential curve throughout the whole cycle.

Return on venture funds tend to follow a J-curve, so revenue is an unreliable metric for success – it’s difficult to distinguish between the beginning of a linear curve and that of an exponential one.²⁶. Instead, modern VCs tend to prioritize a firm’s potential for monopoly. This is because properly competitive markets are a race to a bottom – matching your competitors thins your margins. But companies which are capable of “escaping competition” can indefinitely squeeze their customers for all they’re worth²⁷.

To this end, it’s encouraged to run a startup “fat”²⁸ – running massively in the red for years in service of capturing market share down the line. Uber famously did this²⁹, burning through its $25 billion investment so that they could sell taxi services at a rate impossible for the rest of the market to compete with.

Once the carrot has been set, it becomes very easy to begin locking in customers to your network, even as you then cut costs and hike up prices to pull yourself back in the black. For “platforms”, there’s a double lock-in at play since you’re connecting buyers and sellers³⁰. Amazon holds vendors and buyers hostage to each other, YouTube creators and audiences, the list goes on. Soon you’re dealing with companies that aren’t just monopolies, but also monopsonies – they can control the flow of an entire market.

That is the reality of how these businesses work. The VC narrative instead prefers to stress how “innovative” and “one-of-a-kind” these products are to explain the success. The fact is, however, the desired lock-in effect cannot occur in a truly free market. Two of the very core pillars Peter Thiel cites as essential to a successful business – proprietary technology and network effects³¹ – are often fiercely enforced by intellectual property and anti-circumvention law.

His airport book (a heavily watered-down version of his Yale lectures) retains the core thesis that capitalism and competition are intrinsically opposed³². But the sleight of hand comes in implicitly accepting that the process of eliminating competition is the same thing as building organic value. One look at the tech sector can say otherwise – plenty of monopoly-building tools exist (acquisitions³³, loss-leading, outright illegal collusion in some cases³⁴) which speak more to a firm’s ability to freely deploy capital than anything about the product itself.

This is why it’s not helpful to spend too much time picking apart any sort of ideological theories to come out of this space. NRx cameral systems, great founder theory, network states, or even Andreesen’s “techno-optimism”: just like that airport book The Atlantic heaps praise on³⁵, all of it is a repackaging of the same set of tropes in Silicon Valley conventional wisdom. That an optimal society is one run by venture capitalists continuing to do the things venture capitalists already do³⁶.

That’s why, then, this textbook model of Investing 101 keeps getting dredged up over and over again when VCs try to propose solutions to any number of social issues from prediction markets³⁷ to science funding³⁸. Venture capital reflects not just the strategy for accumulating short-term power but also the end goal. The rent-seeking slaughterhouse that is the industry comes to define the countours of the internet which in turn is expected to be a model for society writ large.

For any of this to be meaningful, it’s actually highly relevant whether or not the basic assumptions behind venture capital’s model actually hold up to reality. It’s worth noting, then, how the industry’s model of success has only proven itself within the narrowly artificial constraints of a market. Being one of the “greats” of the early-mid 2010s meant benefitting from low interest rates, a frothy investment market³⁹, and a wealth of technological commons ready to be exploited.

TV-over-internet, taxis-over-internet, pawnshops-over-internet, books-over-internet: none of these ever represented a true “zero to one” in the larger picture. There may have been a good deal of ingenuity behind these designs, they may have “revolutionized” a product category, all of them involved taking newly commercializable infrastructure and figuring out how to apply it to a pre-existing industry.

This is engineering, not black magic. There may be a real level of skill in developing these products, but that’s a far cry from wielding an ability to regularly conjure generational leaps out of thin air. Yet, that’s exactly what the growth curves of the industry hinge on.

VC does best in bull markets – where investors have the surplus to take on higher risk in pursuit of higher rewards. While there are real analogies that can be made to peripheries, the internet is not a perfect replacement. It can only be tapped so for so long. Where growth (both technological and economic) inevitably begins to slow down, the sector is forced to start gambling on increasingly dubious bets (metaverse, cryptocurrency, now GenAI⁴⁰) with higher and higher stakes and less and less clear practical applications.

There’s a constant deferring of risk in favor of short term gains, as a larger and larger share of the money flowing through the investment market finds itself based on speculative rather than tangible value. Those involved in this market have a vested interest⁴¹ in ensuring the speculative value of their assets remain pumped up. Those very same social and intellectual networks VCs rely on to coordinate (both financially and ideologically) become viral incubators for runaway speculation. In addition to burning credibility, these hype-cycles surrounding the “newest big thing” create a fundamentally delusional culture, one where there’s strong disincentives to raining on the parade.

The culture in Silicon Valley circles has a terrible habit of ascribing eternal significance to phenomena derived from about twenty years of business history. This is doubly exacerbated by the fact that the highly isolated intellectual and mentorship networks which populate this space (see: MIRI, YCombinator, etc.) often serve as feeders into the professional ones. Because of this, there’s often not much to stop the terms of business from bleeding in with that of the rest of reality. “Founder” comes to refer to not just entrepreneurs, but a quality found in every great genius of history. Effective governance is analogized to business management, public opinion is equated to crowd effects⁴², and playing politics often means treating democratic institutions like a competitive market.

This inability of those who represent the industry to analyze their own situation objectively is a real weakness, especially when stuff stops working. The obstacles the Silicon Valley playbook accounts for are political and financial ones – not material ones. Whether a pitch will sell, whether a message will win an election – but very little given to the technology itself.

The business model of locking in and squeezing customers produces cyclical and recurrent crises as platforms begin to sabotage their own value and stability. Pushed far enough, network effects can begin to unravel – a platform’s lowered value can end up tanking the value of the network as a whole (junk items on Etsy, SEO spam across Google, etc). Suddenly, quitting becomes a lot easier.

The market tries to correct for this by creating new platforms and product categories to serve the same degraded function (see: ChatGPT replacing Google), but in the process opens itself up to new, harder-to-manage risks⁴³ as technological complexity balloons out of control. Monopolized networks only add fuel to the fire, as they provide less redundancy in times of failure. For example, Amazon’s mistaken push towards AI-driven development has led to multiple widespread outages for many of AWS’ customers, forcing full-on rollbacks.⁴⁴

The breakdown of network effects is amplified with social media platforms, which by design act as decentralized megaphones for propaganda⁴⁵. Where a platform does begin to enshittify, users across a network will notice and begin using the network’s own channels to vocally resist it. We’ve seen this pattern with the Reddit API blackouts⁴⁶ and the various user revolts since Twitter’s acquisition⁴⁷. These efforts aren’t always successful, but they are cyclical.

This leads into quite possibly the greatest irony of all: that the very passive habits instilled by tech companies onto their users creates a sense of learned helplessness which leads to moral panics whenever the industry’s breakdowns begin to ripple into the rest of society. The opaqueness these companies created surrounding tech bleeds into the political discourse as the state finds itself under increasing pressure to pass sweeping and reckless legislation. The industry is incapable of providing a satisfactory answer to the public, as they themselves don’t understand the crisis. In turn, it finds itself diverting attention and resources trying towards electoral politics – trying to capture the state for itself. Rather than admit the intractable causes of its own slowed growth, its agents prefer to scapegoat what they see as the face of the regulatory state – “decels”, “village”, “luddites”, the list of ephitets goes on.

What was originally was a set of issues confined to a narrow industry has suddenly grown into a massive political problem.

What to Do?

The great finding of the Marxist tradition was to identify how capitalism produces recurrent, destabilizing crises which ripple in highly indirect fashions⁴⁸. These crises are a real, intractable weakness that socialist movements throughout history have seized upon to bring about change.

Crisis itself doesn’t guarantee collapse, nor can it bring about change on its own. Systems have a remarkable capacity to limp along and prop themselves back up relying on the volunteer efforts of regular members whose survival is threatened by crisis⁴⁹.

But, what these crises do provide are moments of reflection, whereby we are forced to recognize on both a political and practical level that the systems we have do not work. What we see going on in the tech sector may seem pettier, but is no exception to this rule. The recurrent platform-level and industry-level crises plaguing the industry are a direct product of its core assumptions surrounding property and value.

In order to meaningfully take advantage of these situations, a movement has to be able to issue a challenge to the present system on both a political level and on a practical level. The root of the crisis has to be vocally explained (and a line held against the state/market’s proposed reforms), but proving the reality of an alternative requires real work already be done towards experimentation and practice.

In acute moments like these, the goal shouldn’t be to force a change of policy or government. Neither is it to simply stir animosity against the “oligarchs” or promote a broadly oppositional stance to industry. It needs to be to use the turmoil as a springboard to begin concretely transforming the habits and relations of those caught up in it.

If the crises facing tech are caused by top-heavy strategies which prioritize short-term growth, then the counter is developing systems for the long-term: bottom-up, stable, and low-overhead. If the industry’s inability to manage crisis stems from an alienation from the technology – then taking advantage of that starts by recentering the tech itself.

The real subversive potential of FOSS communities comes not in criticizing Big Tech, but in challenging it on these specific grounds. The premise starts from a recognition of the artificiality of the digital space’s boundaries – it takes (often inconsistently applied) intellectual property law and DRM schemes to draw lines around what is otherwise just ones and zeroes. By doing this, it avoids the trap of essentializing any unfreedom as a property of tech itself – the underlying infrastructure hasn’t changed. Copying is free, code can be rewritten, and networks can be routed around.

Hacker culture builds itself on poking holes through these barriers. DRM can be cracked, blocks can be circumvented, and devices can be homebrewed. Where software is developed, it need not meet the design There’s a complete rejection of the producer-consumer dichotomy which underpins the commodity-market that industry tries to assimilate tech into. Users are encouraged to fork and contribute to projects, networks are strengthened by self-hosting, and users are encouraged to learn along as they fix and set up their own systems. A new definition of ownership becomes pervasive: one centered around what we use and depend on rather than abstract legal or financial status.

Remix cultures are capable of producing innovation without needing to rent-seek an intellectual property. Commons-based peer-production models have led to the rapid development of complex systems such as Linux⁵⁰ without needing to depend on large up-front capital infusions or full-time wage labor.

And all of this comes together to preserve a tradition where the primary purpose of technology is direct use as opposed to marketability. Old systems and solutions do not need to be constantly rendered obselecent or “revamped”. Classic UNIX principles stressed simplicity, reusability, focusedness, and longevity in the designs it produced⁵¹. There’s a strong sense for dissecting everything that goes into a product, from the codebase to the production and maintenance process.

Having this perspective is vital because it’s able to make sense of the under-the-hood nuances of tech that falls squarely within SV’s blindspot. By considering each input and step of the production process in its own terms (rather than flattening it into dollar valuations), you’re able to more finely delinate between strategic categories⁵².

Thinking outside of the purely financialized language allows you to reframe a lot of the “lessons” SV conventional wisdom routinely passes down. Power laws don’t just apply to startup growth trajectory: a small percentage of servers hold the majority of online traffic, a small handful of developers contribute the majority of code. Network effects apply to the GPL too – applying it to several key pieces of early software virally bolstered its growth to this day. Even non-commercial projects greatly benefit from building up strong, formalized professional networks and talent pipelines.

Open-source theorists often run the risk of overstating how much the organic advantages of hacker culture are capable of bringing about change on their own. The big difference between the days of Linux’s early development and now is that there no longer is a singular “holy grail” of free-software. A fully-free operating system is a clear, technical goal that users across the space could unite behind. Now, so much of our computing is done across mobile phones and web-apps that the landscape has severely fragmented.

The FOSS space of the modern day is littered with a litany of local groups, projects, and teams all working towards roughly common goals with relatively little coordination or overlap. This ends up having real consequences: it is incredibly difficult for projects, conferences, and community groups to find support without courting corporate sponsors. The average community-driven project often lives or dies on the passion of a handful of isolated individuals. Even the best-supported projects, such as Wikipedia, face a shrinking contributor pool⁵³ as people become less and less tech-literate.

Effectively coordinating and training up labor remains the number one issue facing FOSS communities right now. Maintaining the overall health of the space is going to depend on organizations capable of consciously filling in the gaps – directing limited resources in a targeted fashion according to a long-term strategic plan.

In theory, one would expect historic advocacy groups such as the FSF or OSI to carry out this task, but the reality is they’re ill-equipped and internally resistant to change. Being structured as advocacy non-profits⁵⁴, they often burn resources on advertising and direct-conversion (both incredibly inefficient uses of funds) and run decently large financial overheads to even carry out basic administrative functions.

Instead, just as FOSS paved the way for a new model in terms of producing software, it’s also necessary to break from the nonprofit model of organizing. Financial constraints are a reality of the basic calculus – you need to find ways to design operations that are capable of running lean. The advantage of this approach is that it can force the space to evolve in a way that selects for long-term resillience over trying to match corporate spending blitzes.

Power laws can be applied in reverse – targeting a small handful of enthusiasts, activists, and developers can have outsized effects for a fraction of the cost. The nature of adoption cycles is that they occur in a concentric fashion – the recommendations of a small core of enthusiasts funnel outwards through a series of adjacent audiences in a concentric fashion⁵⁵. The best advertisements often don’t come from billboards or endorsements, but the regularity with which the competition screws up and alienates its own customers. This is most seen when you look at the perpetual waves of exodus to Linux and Fediverse – factors out of their control produced a name recognition money couldn’t buy.

The real hurdle to adoption actually comes when people try the suggested FOSS offerings for themselves and see whether or not there’s any real friction⁵⁶. If a project is unprepared for a new wave of interest, it can quickly get overwhelmed and waste a valuable window. This is why instead of trying to directly reach audiences, it’s a more efficient use of resources to build structures that can fill in the gaps for these projects: hosting infrastructure, targeted code-contributions⁵⁷, cultivating content networks, and refining onboarding processes to ease the transition for new users. These are all relatively low-cost tasks which an ad-hoc, small-scale volunteer network could solve with some creativity.

Taken alone, these are individual tactics – anyone can help out with these tasks at an individual or project-level, but the greatest effect comes from performing it in aggregate. Forming this into a wider strategy needs to start with rebuilding the movement’s social infrastructure. Compiling rolodexes, developing public forums whereby isolated activist silos can be brought into a common discussion⁵⁸, and developing a consistent pipeline for recruiting, educating, and training up people is key. The main expense here is social – rather than financial – capital.

You don’t need a fully-funded nonprofit for this, but you do need a group of some sorts to model out the link between theory and practice. A tightly-knit network⁵⁹ of local, in-person chapters would be capable of bridging this gap between theorists and activists. It’d be capable of providing a pipeline for a small set of passionate enthusiasts to “get involved” with supporting the space at large. Via this pipeline, you can begin to instill a set of habits and mentalities which encourage members to creatively recognize and adapt to the real constraints: start with education (explaining the anatomy and dynamics underpinning both the tech industry and FOSS communities), before moving into application (bridging and shining a spotlight on various niches within the FOSS space and what potential they may have), and finally activation (getting these groups involved with actually taking action to support FOSS infrastructure).

In the end, it all comes back to building strong habits, because those habits end up trickling down to the rest of the space over the long term. It wasn’t that long ago that kids reading Wikipedia fell down rabbitholes of editing it. The game jams hosted by projects such as Godot have resulted in a flourishing of its community and ecosystem – and a respect for free-software among game developers.

The same industry that has drilled the concepts of non-fungible tokens and large language models into the public consciousness will also try to tell you that people are too technically illiterate to accept an internet of open protocols. Don’t accept their terms, but figure them out for yourself. That’s the only way you can win.

Womack, John. Working Power over Production, p. 6 ↩︎
For example: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/silicon-valleys-reading-list-reveals ↩︎
Doctorow, Cory. Enshittification, p. 157-193 ↩︎
Doctorow, Cory. Enshittification, p. 227 ↩︎
Often times, these state functions are outsourced to private contractors. Palantir’s main customer is the government – both parties benefit immensely from rampant data collection. ↩︎
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/eus-new-digital-package-proposal-promises-red-tape-cuts-guts-gdpr-privacy-rights [^]:Doctorow, Cory. Enshittification, p. 260 ↩︎
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2003/Lessigcopyright.html ↩︎
IP-heavy industries accounted for 41% of U.S. economic activity in 2019. https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/uspto-ip-us-economy-third-edition.pdf ↩︎
Doctorow’s historiography of the American labor movement is extremely reductive. He chalks up union decline entirely to right-wing governments and bad leaders, neglecting the real intractable factors of deindustrialization and a changing global economy. He points to rising public support for labor and the election of Shawn Fain as proof of resurgence – union density still has not meaningfully increased. A sympathetic NLRB can only do so much. ↩︎
Doctorow, Cory. Enshittification, p. 310-311 ↩︎
The failures in the union leadership Doctorow lambasts lay in their waiting on external circumstances to change rather than recognizing their own agency and developing new strategies to meet the changing labor landscape – ironically not unlike how his strategy requires the entire political landscape to realign around progressive values first. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/labor-movement-attack ↩︎
Additionally – while labor is an important component to building larger political resistance – unions, socialist organizations, and mutual aid networks often have blindspots around tech. The DSA, despite calling on their members to “wash their hands of data harvesting”, for the longest time failed to take seriously the threat of storing member records in plaintext on Google Drive. ↩︎
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons-Based_Peer_Production ↩︎
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html ↩︎
https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03..html ↩︎
https://www.wired.com/story/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism-interview/ ↩︎
“That means that the sector directly or indirectly employs… 28 percent of the American workforce.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americas-advanced-industries-new-trends/ ↩︎
“The high-tech sector’s share of total employment grew from 9.3 percent of jobs in 2007 to 9.8 percent in 2010, losing only 48,600 jobs, while the rest of economy lost almost 7.6 million jobs.” https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-7/high-tech-industries-an-analysis-of-employment-wages-and-output.htm ↩︎
https://web.archive.org/web/20180616151115/http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/07/news/economy/wall-street-silicon-valley-google-goldman-sachs/index.html ↩︎
https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-my/wp-content/uploads/sites/1414/2014/04/14122105/Session_03_Wallerstein.pdf ↩︎
Saito, Kohei. Slow Down, p. 11 ↩︎
Early web entrepreneur Andrew Keen compared the advent of free-culture to communism in an infamous 2006 essay: https://web.archive.org/web/20101204201059/http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/714fjczq.asp?nopager=1 ↩︎
https://larrysalibra.com/the-death-of-jabber/ ↩︎
Thiel, Peter. Zero to One, p. 77 ↩︎
Thiel, Peter. Zero to One, p. 77-78 ↩︎
Thiel, Peter. Zero to One, p. 80 ↩︎
Thiel, Peter. Zero to One, p. 41 ↩︎
https://a16z.com/the-case-for-the-fat-startup/ ↩︎
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-profitable-year-net-income ↩︎
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ ↩︎
Thiel, Peter. Zero to One, p. 45 ↩︎
Thiel, Peter. Zero to One, p. 25 ↩︎
https://www.techemails.com/p/instagram-cofounder-on-mark-zuckerberg ↩︎
https://www.ft.com/content/d2333141-ace0-469d-b75c-8b5fd0367993?syn-25a6b1a6=1 ↩︎
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/peter-thiel-zero-to-one-review/380738/ ↩︎
The Thiel Network literally structures two of its longest-running political projects (Rockbridge Network and 1789 Capital) as venture capital firms which primarily fund media outlets. Thiel’s other investments (NatCon, PirateWires, Quilette, Rumble, Inference) also focus on monopolizing small niches of media and intellectual figures. Andressen-Horowitz’s lobbying campaign started by leveraging cryptocurrency as a wedge to wider tech deregulation. ↩︎
https://www.winwinpodcast.com/p/nate-silver-predicting-elections-e02 ↩︎
https://goodscience.substack.com/p/venture-capital-has-lessons-for-government ↩︎
https://www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble ↩︎
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ ↩︎
https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-venture-capital-tries-and-fails/ ↩︎
See: the prevalence of Le Bon’s crowd theory and “preference cascades” ↩︎
See: hallucinations and inconsistent rates of token burn. ↩︎
https://rys.io/en/182.html ↩︎
Even TikTok, one of the most restrictive forms of human communication ever invented, is not immune to this phenomenon. ↩︎
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/reddit-blackout-8000-subreddits-went-dark-protest-api/ ↩︎
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-backtracks-block-feature-after-users-revolt/ ↩︎
Kliman, Andrew. The Failure of Capitalist Production, p. 22 ↩︎
Chuang, Social Contagion, p. 122 ↩︎
https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html ↩︎
https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html ↩︎
For example, there’s an important between infrastructural and application-level software (i.e. Apache vs. Mastodon). The dynamics behind their production, use, and position in the stack create different conditions for both how effective they are as chokepoints and also what development models are capable of supporting them. The industry struggles to even coherently define infrastructure. ↩︎
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_Rise_and_Decline ↩︎
The inefficacy of these organizations has long been recognized as an issue, but the commonly proposed solutions often just involve proposing internal reform to bring these groups into the mould of modern nonprofits. This doesn’t sufficiently address the issue – even “respectable” nonprofits such as Mozilla also struggle to run effective operations. ↩︎
Audiences are not a monolith but can be sorted into niches based on adjacency and size – for example, the pool of PC gamers are larger than that of Linux users, but the culture and practices surrounding the hobby tend to make them good early targets for recruitment – big enough to expand the current base, but sympathetic enough to be relatively easily won over. ↩︎
Relatively frictionless products such as Blender, OBS, or Krita often face much smoother adoption curves. ↩︎
https://formerlytomato.codeberg.page/posts/projects/guild-theory/ ↩︎
Semafor covers how industry leaders leveraged groupchats for elite coordination: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america ↩︎
If you’d like to see more of our efforts in this space, check out the B40 Caucus! ↩︎

The Jevons Paradox for PC Gamers

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have a confession to make. I’ve been kinda washed this past year. Read too much Substack-slop and now I’m getting rusty on my actual pet topics. So, I’m getting back into reading books again. The first book I’m reading is Slow Down by Kohei Saito – essentially a quick rundown of degrowth and all the arguments related to it.

In short, the book is about the climate crisis and how the most common approaches to tackling it (green technologies, Green New Deals, etc.) are completely unserious and incapable of making any real dent on the problem¹.

There are many, many frameworks, facts, and angles presented throughout this book – too many for me to extensively cover here. Instead, I’d like to keep things simple and just go over one: the Jevons Paradox.

This is not a book review². I’m not going to go over every argument in the book here (although there are plenty), but instead focus on just one: the Jevons Paradox.

The Jevons Paradox

Typically, within climate politics, there tends to be three camps:

Those who believe the free-market is capable of naturally solving the climate crisis on its own. They believe that our present-day prosperity will eventually trickle down as investors pursue greener, more efficient technologies.
Those who are more skeptical of the free-market to power the green transition but believe state-driven plans and policies (such as the Green New Deal) can steer an economy’s growth in a green direction.
Degrowthers – people who believe that an economy centered around the concept of infinite growth (such as our own) is fundamentally unsustainable on a planet with finite natural limits.

The mainstream consensus has long been within the first camp³. Saito, instead, belongs with the third camp.

The argument of the pro-market camp goes like this:

Capitalism incentivizes businesses to be as efficient as possible, so they have a reason to want to invent technology that consumes less.
The profits we make today get invested into researching said technologies.
Eventually, those technologies get invented and even though we indulged some short term profit, we’ve become greener over the long run.

A classic example of this is the transition from incadescent lightbulbs to LEDs. LEDs are up to 80% more energy-efficient than incandescent bulbs and ended up driving down home electricity costs for consumers. As a result, the market naturally shifted towards LED bulbs as consumers preferred the option that would save them money.

Sounds all well and good, right? Well, let’s take it a step further – a step the pro-marketers tend to deliberately leave out:

If a technology allows us to produce something more efficiently, that means we’re producing it at a lower cost – i.e. the good in question becomes cheaper
But when goods become cheaper relative to income, consumers don’t just leave that difference on the table. They go out and buy more stuff now that they can afford it.
Suddenly, whatever gains were made by market efficiency immediately find themselves cancelled out by increased consumer demand.

This right here is the essence of the Jevons Paradox. If LEDs bring such dramatic efficiency gains, why hasn’t U.S. household energy consumption meaningfully dropped since the ’80s? Well, because a lot of those energy savings got cancelled out elsewhere.

Putting It In Gamer Terms

Most studies I’ve found which try to empirically debunk the existence of rebound effects (AKA the Jevons Paradox) with regards to lighting seem to only consider basic effects like “do people leave the lights on for longer”.

But reading all this, it got me thinking. Let’s not just consider basic household light fixtures. After all, televisions are taking up the largest share of household lighting consumption now. Think about how many LEDs go into a OLED TV. Each pixel has at least one (in some cases more) diode corresponding to it. A 1080p screen has roughly 2 million pixels contained within it. Want to upgrade to 4K? Suddenly you’re around 8 million. Now consider on top of that how many resources actually go into streaming 4K content to that TV⁴. Now, if someone is gaming in 4K, they’ll also need a beefier GPU.

And all the same applies to monitors too. Over the past decade, I’ve seen prices on 1080p monitors drop into budget range, and gamers increasingly move to 1440p or 4K displays. Enthusiasts have even started to move into purchasing the newer 8K-resolution displays. All of this is despite the fact that these resolutions are starting to run up against the limits of human vision. It’s questionable whether or not our eyes can even distinguish anything above 1440p on standard desk-monitor sizes/viewing distances, ditto for 4K and TVs. In the PC space, we see that demand can exceed any sort of practical benefit – all just for bragging rights.

We see the same for GPUs – around the time performance gains for resolutions such as 1080p and 4K stopped mattering, the industry started to push hard on “ray tracing” as the future of games. This feature with debatable visual benefit which put burden on devs to overhaul how they program their games (only to benefit a subset of users) probably would not have taken off in any previous era (see: NVIDIA PhysX).

Prior to the RTX push, NVIDIA cards were actually regarded as relatively power efficient, but now as those cards try to push the limits of 8K and ray-tracing, you end up with comically power-hungry behemoths like the RTX 5090 – which alone consumes more power than an entire PC from 2017. The GTX 1080, despite being a decade old at this point, would probably be more “efficient” than the market’s latest offerings for the purposes of regular, 1080p gaming. But the market phasing it out should lead us to question exactly how “rational” this all is.

Circling back to that question of developer burden for a bit, it also highlights how not just plain consumer demand can fall into this Malthusian trap but so can software. After all, hardware exists to run software.

By 1997, the average storage capacity of a hard drive was ~2GB. RAM typically ranged from 8-32MB. Around the time I stopped tracking the hardware market (2019-ish), 2TB drives and 16-32GB RAM sticks were squarely within the mainstream. It goes down to even our cellphones, which now come with storage and specs putting most old desktops to shame. Even solid state drives – which were both much faster and much more expensive – had come down to price tiers closer to that of standard HDDs. Internet speeds with dial-up were in the kilobits-per-second whereas modern fiber networks have brought us into the realm of gigabits.

These are efficiency improvements in the magnitudes of thousand-fold to million-fold. Even accounting for evolving needs, you’d think there’s absolutely no way we’d ever possibly run near the limits of this. But then why do our computers still feel sluggish? Why do our phones keep running out of storage? Why do websites take forever to load?

It’s because with increased capacity, businesses and developers become tempted to stretch it to the full. Websites are loaded with flashy JavaScript animations that look pretty for a second until they start bringing your RAM to a crawl. Phones default your grandma to taking 4K family photos that clock in at a gigabyte each. Video games have gone from using clever engineering tricks to fit on a 32KB GameBoy cartridge to freely spending hundreds of gigabytes on uncompressed 4K cutscenes. Soon, even the frameworks and libraries that become standard are designed to accommodate showroom fads rather than enabling anything sustainable, simple, or efficient.

But the market has no problems with this because the market incentivizes you to buy the new laptop with even more RAM. It wants you to run out of iPhone storage so you’ll subscribe to iCloud. It benefits from your frustration with laggy internet, because that’s when you’ll be most likely to upgrade.

But what happens when things don’t always go up? What happens when we experience supply shocks, like the one that’s currently caused RAM prices to triple? The software written for moments of RAM Abundance don’t suddenly contract their requirements as soon as we enter RAM Scarcity. The consumer is just left holding the bag.

What about the people stuck in rural areas, who are still stuck on dial-up internet? Politicians will talk about “closing the digital divide” by funding gigabit projects, but why do we even need these costs in the first place?

The Bigger Picture

Technology is not neutral, it does not exist independently of the context in which we create it. We can wow over the innovations in efficiency, but what does it all amount to if we just treat it as an excuse to be inefficient in other ways?

Industry loves to pretend as if every problem is a new one, because it means they can step in and sell us “new solutions”. The basic economics which underpin the climate crisis are not new: ever since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, writers like Jevons, Malthus, and Marx have pointed out fundamental problems that remain relevant to this day. The only thing that’s new is how it continues to get harder and harder for our elites to bury their heads in the sand. The goalposts are shifting: from “climate denial” to “green markets” to “green investment” to “climate adaptation”.

A third of Pakistan found itself submerged by floods only a couple years ago. The Horn of Africa has faced a years-long drought that has led to mass starvation. Even if we were to try to write off the third-world and focus “at home” (itself a loaded term), we still wouldn’t be able to escape the effects. Climate change is to blame for the persistent wildfires that have ravaged California. Frequent natural disasters are wreaking havoc on Florida’s home insurance industry.

It’s easy to compartmentalize, but these are millions of lives being wrecked as we speak. Entire communities and cultures being totally upended. But climate change isn’t some mysterious unfortunate fact of circumstance. As Saito points out, half our emissions emerge from the wealthiest 10% of the global population. Most of this goes to luxury and discretionary consumption. The bottom half of the world, by contrast, only contributes 10%.

For those of us who live in the developed world, the question should be most relevant to us. Is it worth it? Are the benefits we’ve been getting from growth really so essential as to make questioning it a taboo?

Is a video game made a thousand or a million times better because of the extreme fidelity of its graphics? Do I really need Target to wow me with their newly “modernized” interface every other year? Do most of the videos I watch on a day-to-day basis actually need to be in 1080p or 4K? Does the internet feel like a better place, does it feel like a more useful presence in our lives than it did before?

Now, of course, these are pretty superficial examples – but these are all things we’ve come to take for granted over the past five years alone. If we wanted to take it a step further, we could ask if we even need to be streaming video at all? How much of online shopping even needs to exist in the first place? How far could we get by if keeping and stretching technology from two or three decades ago was the norm?

But those are all questions for another time. I think what’s worth taking away from this rabbithole is how deeply interconnected everything is, down to our habits.

Early software engineering (under the UNIX principles) stressed a philosophy of “keep it simple, stupid”. That there’s value to keeping our designs simple, focused, and modular. I wonder how far we can stretch this principle into our society. That when we do run up against limits or inequalities our first instinct isn’t “how do we add another layer to fix this” but “what can we do away with to lighten the load”.

And to bring some truth to the analogy, there is a role developers can play in tackling this. Saito talks about the digital space as the last frontier for capitalism to conquer. It wasn’t that long ago the internet was structured along a different ethos – a culture of the commons rather than one of profit. Creativity, simplicity, and reuse were all values integral to hacker culture.

There’s multiple generations of working developers who still have this memory – one of an alternative system to the one we’re told has no alternative. And it’s this memory that has continued to drive people to challenge the conventions of software design, even when the whole world seems to be swimming the other direction.

Talking about GPUs and design might seem petty amidst a period of so much economic and political turmoil, but there’s a real powerful wedge that can be driven. How we interact with the technology we rely on on a day-to-day basis forms habits that end up shaping how we think. This is especially true for the the developed world – an atomized mass of superconsumers that spend most of their time online.

As engineers, we’re the middlemen that create that interface. There’s a lot of power to be had in reshaping the daily habits of the most powerful polities on earth. The question is, do we take that design for granted and let the market assign us what it will? Or do we work to become conscious of that power, struggle to reclaim it, and turn it towards the betterment of humanity?

I’ve written something similar years back, albeit in a much worse fashion. ↩︎
I might do that later. Will update this section if so. ↩︎
Although the second has started to gain steam in recent years. ↩︎
It actually consumes far more water than AI models. ↩︎

3 Simple FOSS Tools I'd Recommend For Organizers

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of my time these past couple months working on getting the Beyond40 project off the ground. It’s taken a lot of work, and also a lot of organizing and coordinating between volunteers.

Not only does the overall group need to properly coordinate, but we also have various, smaller local groups that need to be supported and kept in the loop. It’s not at all an easy task.

Momentum is delicate and it only takes the slightest hiccups to derail the progress a group has made. That’s why it’s important even the software we use doesn’t get in the way of what we’re doing.

Obviously, as a FOSS group, we want to be able to use FOSS software wherever possible, but it’s also very important the software we use is simple, usable, and reliable. Otherwise it’s a nonstarter.

But through various experimenting and tinkering, we’ve started to build up a pretty good suite of tools we can rely on. A lot of these may be tools you haven’t heard of. So, I figured I’d make a short blogpost to share what we found.

If you’re a FOSS or hacktivist group that’s gotten dependent on the Google Suite to handle your operations, these services might be worth a look!

Group Calendar - Gathio

We hold a lot of events throughout each month, with a mix of national, local, and virtual, all scheduled at different intervals with different times. So, we definitely needed a group calendar to keep a track of things.

Meetup.com and Mobilizon were immediately suggested as options, but I found Gathio to actually work the best. The interface is super simple and barebones, often times all the information you need fits onto one page.

Interacting with calendars and events is super easy, you don’t even need an account. You can subscribe to group activities via email, RSS, or even by adding an ICS file to your favorite calendar app. Reserving and commenting exist as opt-in features, and even then you don’t need to make an account to do it.

Creating and managing events doesn’t require a login either, because everything is handled with edit codes (which can be formatted into edit links). It’s great in that I can quickly ask local organizers to make events and just send me the edit link so I can put it onto the master calendar. I don’t have to push them to make an account, meaning they’re a lot more likely to do it.

If you still do want to have some form of identity for safe-keeping, you can attach your email to either an event or a group, so that way you don’t have to worry about losing the edit link.

Only thing is I do wish a lot of the configuration settings (such as event auto-deletion and privacy) were on a per-user basis as opposed to being instance-wide.

Surveys - LiberaForms

A lot of the survey software I’ve used in prior projects has often been either self-hosted or had some weird freemium/blockchain model attached to it. Interfaces for creating forms were often confusing and getting started was always a hassle.

LiberaForms was shockingly quick and straight to the point. I made an account to register, went to create a form, and within a couple minutes spit out a simple, one-page form with the questions I wanted to ask. I don’t get bombarded with promotional emails and I don’t have to dig through menus. It’s worked well.

Scheduling Meetings - When2Meet/Timeful

Scheduling meetings the normal way (i.e. just straight asking everyone when works best for them) is an absolute nightmare. People will often say they don’t know and if you propose specific times, it’s just a constant back and forth. Having software for everyone to input their times makes this a lot easier.

But scheduling software too can be a bit of a struggle to work with depending on the input method. I’ve used some sites where you’re expected to individually enter in each block of time you’re free and the whole thing becomes enough of a hassle that often times you give up and don’t enter it properly.

When2Meet has a dead-simple and quick interface in that you just open the link, drag over the blocks of time when you’re free, and you’re pretty much done within the span of a couple minutes. Getting people to fill out or create these goes over a lot better when they don’t have to make an account, they just fill out their name, their answers, and then they’re done. You don’t even need an account to create time surveys. It is closed-source, but from I’ve seen a lot of the code is client-side and can be retrieved from the element inspector.

I’ve been told recently that Timeful is a modernized, FOSS alternative to When2Meet with benefits such as an actually responsive mobile interface. I have yet to try it, but I did see in the documentation that this also does not require sign-in, which I do appreciate. I do plan to try it in the coming weeks and see how well it works.

All the above software helped us get off the ground and get running fast, without having to wrestle our tech stack. Thanks to the following factors:

Not requiring accounts to use, which means less logins to juggle
Designed with one, very clear specialized purpose in mind
Being relatively lightweight to load
Simple interfaces which have minimal friction in terms of getting stuff done
Flagship instances where self-hosting isn’t required
Built on open standards
Privacy-respecting

All of these aren’t just vague matters of principle, they make a very real difference in terms of giving you a better experience.

When designing FOSS tools, there’s value in not just considering source code availability but the principles of design and user experience. A lot of the trends in the proprietary space are to make tools more cluttered and heavy, but we don’t have to follow that logic. Sometimes it’s just very refreshing to use a simple tool for a change of pace.

Reviving Grassroots FOSS Activism Across the United States

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a project I’ve been building my way up to for quite a while, but it’s only in the past couple months that I’ve made the necessary breakthroughs to start making real headway. If you’re wondering why the blogging has slowed in recent months, it’s because I’ve been preoccupied with this project.

Back in May, I happened to get connected with some of the right people who happened to see the post I wrote stressing the need to completely rethink how we approach FOSS activism. I was approached to further elaborate on what I specifically had in mind for changing tactics, and the conversation ended with us forming a groupchat to begin planning. We spent the summer getting preparations in place and launched September 2025.

Our goal? Rebuild the social infrastructure for the free-software movement across the United States. Other regions like India and Europe have a real in-person organized presence in favor of software freedom, so why not America? We’re the tech capital of the world, but we’re lagging well behind in terms of tech resistance. In prior decades we had a strong grassroots here, but that apparatus has completely decayed as of late.

Beyond40 is a grassroots initiative which looks to pave the path forward for the resistance movement within tech. Or, to be more specific, we are a “caucus” that looks to act as a voice for the rank-and-file members of the free-software community.

Our priority is building a pipeline that can convert free-software enthusiasts into free-software activists. By forming local chapters across America, that opens the door towards taking direct action to aid the rest of the movement.

You can find our list of guiding principles here:

Beyond40 Principles and FAQ

The specific roadmap for achieving this can be found here:

Beyond40 Strategy Roadmap

You can also find our various monthly progress reports here:

Unhinged Rant on GNOME Naming Conventions

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today, a friend of mine asked me to recommend him some good FOSS audiobook players. I was like “yeah sure buddy, you can either use Cozy or Voice!” As soon as those words exited my mouth I just had to take a step back and ponder. Just contemplate how we got to this point as a society.

I proceeded to go on a bender, so this piece might be a bit more unhinged than normal. It won’t be my most professional or nuanced piece, but, hey, it might make good content.

There is a plague, an insanity, a curse among a lot of FOSS (and especially Linux) applications I’m seeing these past couple years.

Rather than explain my point, I’m going to list off some FOSS applications that I regularly use, interact with, and find myself recommending to my friends. Try to see if you can spot the pattern.

Matrix
Element
Voice
Cozy
Lollypop
Seal
Thunder
Cheese
Alpaca

I haven’t even told you what any of these applications do, but can you spot the pattern? Can you tell me what ANY of these applications actually do or what their purpose is? Can you go onto your favorite search engine right now and figure it out using only that keyword?

“Hey ChatGPT, what is Voice?”

Yeah, thought so.

“Oh, you can just type ‘matrix foss’ or ‘matrix chat application’ and you’ll get the right search results!” I’m sorry, but this is Stockholm Syndrome speaking. You are the frog being boiled in the pot right now. You will be cooked and you will be eaten by a Frenchman. That is your fate in life.

Now look what happens when you bother to name your app something sensible.

Isn’t that so much easier? When I tell someone what VLC is, they know what I am talking about. Crazy concept, isn’t it?

“Well Apple does the same thing, they’re named after a fruit!” Okay, cool, fantastic point – get back to me when you get a $3 trillion dollar market cap and the advertising budget to propagandize the world into associating your product with basic words. Even then, there’s a reason half this country has iPhone and not “Phone” or “Talk”.

So, what gives, how did this absolute travesty of a practice even come to happen in the first place? Surely, surely there’s style guidelines and established conventions by those who know better to stop people from naming their hobby projects after words so generic you wouldn’t even be able to reserve them as domain names.

Then I opened the GNOME style guidelines.

I’M SORRY, WHAT? THIS IS BEING RECOMMENDED? Look, I get that GNOME has this whole emphasis on visual and brand cohesion, but come on! These applications are used all the time even by people outside of the GNOME ecosystem! A lot of them are actually really well designed and have interfaces that are intuitive and not a headache to use!

But if I’m ever having a problem where I need to troubleshoot problems that arise with ANY of these, if I ever want to talk about and share these with friends, if I want to find the available information and coverage of this online, it turns into an absolute nightmare.

Like do we really have to name a camera app “Cheese” instead of “CheeseCam”? Is that such a tall ask? Are the brains of normies going to explode when the word “camera” is being alluded to in the name of their camera application?

This aesthetic of seamlessness and cohesion might have a clean feel to it, but it’s only until things stop working.

There Are No Patriots

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: I’ve actually 180’d on this piece as of late. I don’t think it’s well-written, I disagree with like 70% of the premise, and looking back it felt like a very half-hearted attempt to churn something out. So consider this piece disowned or whatever.

There’s a scene from The Newsroom which has become rather infamous. In it, the main character (a blatant self-insert for the show’s writer, Aaron Sorkin), is placed onto a panel alongside two other speakers and asked what makes America the greatest country in the world.

In classic Sorkin fashion, he sets up both the other characters (one stereotypically liberal, one stereotypically conservative) as strawmen so he can then have his character knock down with some kind of grandiose speech or witty one-liner. The liberal character says America is great because of diversity. The conservative character says America is great because of freedom. Sorkin’s character then gets up, chastises them both for their cop-out answers, and starts delivering a lecture about how by every objective metric, America sucks. But rather than just leave it there, he asterisks his diatribe with a couple stock lines about how America used to be great — seeming to imply that even though America might not be great now, we could make it so.

This answer, of course, is also a cop-out. For all the condescension, not even Sorkin’s character can provide a meaningfully specific answer to what actually sets America apart. “Oh, we used to be great, we used to build things”: what does this even mean?

The scene is really fascinating to reflect on as a cultural relic of the 2010s. Around the time this episode aired, Aaron Sorkin wasn’t just some guy making a TV drama: he was something of a political celebrity. His prior show, The West Wing, was so successful it’d go on to fry the brains of an entire generation of political operatives. Sorkin’s style has always been to write political wish-fulfillment, not just indulging himself but also the entire class of political elites who think the way he does. This makes his work very interesting, as it provides a real window into the headspace of an entire culture.

For the type of person who Sorkin’s work spoke to, the Obama-era marked a bit of a cultural highwater. American liberalism — far from being under attack — carried with it a level of conceit surrounding its victory over the world. Of course, this conceit was rather shallow: the so-called “decade of hope” never provided us with a clear answer to the question of what defines our country. At best, you’d get people like Sorkin sneering at you for daring to pose the question. But, even then, it’s probably the closest thing we’d get to an honest answer.

Things are a lot different in today’s environment. American liberalism is very obviously under attack. It’s a lot harder for our political and media elites to speak frankly because they’re hypercognizant of the fact that their pessimism is not popular. Every statement made now has to be masked underneath fifty layers of patriotic rhetoric lest they show “bad optics”.

They’ll attend summer retreats where vote-hungry consultants advise them on leaning into “traditional American imagery”. They’ll run campaigns declaring their candidacy to be “a battle for the soul of America”. They’ll tag their legislative agendas with words such as “patriot” and “liberation” in the hopes of boosting support.

They recognize that in order to bring the country with them they have to appeal to a common identity and culture, but those appeals are meaningless if there’s no substance in what they’re appealing to. But when you’re completely ignorant of our traditions and foundations, all this patriotism amounts to little more than flag-waving.

What we end up left with is a very bizarre world in which self-proclaimed “Catholic monarchists” lecture us about how we need to preserve the founding heritage of our Protestant republic. One where it takes only one election cycle for the same paper that put out the 1619 Project to start fingerwagging on letting race get in the way of national unity. A world where our tech CEOs drum up a “race against China” while doing business with them behind the scenes.

Liberals will tell us the only way to save America is to scrap the Constitution and replace it with a European-style multiparty democracy. Progressives have long spoken of countries such as Sweden as a left-wing utopia in comparison to us (despite this being greatly exaggerated). For all the America First bluster that comes out of national conservatives, they salivate over Russian military ads and look to Hungary as their inspiration. This doesn’t even get into China, our supposed “sworn enemy” whose industrial policy and authoritarian mystique¹ our technocrats can’t help but envy.

Everybody wants to be the one to make America great again, but nobody seems to actually want to pull from the American political and cultural tradition. Isn’t that a bit odd? You’d think that someone who brands themselves a patriot would be proud of our heritage and want to build off of its foundations. But each and every single time, we see them import fundamentally foreign perspectives in order to tell us how the country should be.

The American press class has notoriously deep links to the United Kingdom and its own cultural elite. Progressive strategists here have a history of heavily collaborating with and turning to their British counterparts for direction. Many of the largest right-wing influencers were recently caught on the payroll of a Russian shell company. Two of the most influential oligarchs actively working to reshape the GOP are South Africans obsessed with eugenics.

That’s the thing about all the discourse surrounding how “the left (or the right) needs to embrace patriotism”: it gives the game away. The operative subject of identity in that sentence is “the left”. Not America. America is just a means to an end, a stand-in for separate concepts.

America is not a synonym for “Western civilization”. America is more than just “liberal democracy”. Forming transnational political allegiances doesn’t address the issue of what it takes for America, as a country, to move forward. It’s one thing for a communist to pledge their allegiance to the Internationale, because they don’t make pretenses to the contrary. It’s another when our liberals and conservatives — the very people who claim to represent the American project — start doing it too.

It’s deeply ironic that the people who talk the most about America are often the first to abuse it. The people who brand themselves “moderates” are often times the most bitter, cynical partisans. It’s one thing to criticize this country, it’s one thing to be jaded. That’s fine. But there’s something that irrationally, viscerally irritates me when I have to listen to the very people hellbent on destroying this country put on this show of defending it.

“Patriotic rhetoric” can provide a roadmap for winning the next election. What it cannot do is answer the question of what comes after that. If America is not the end, then the whole project is a nonstarter. No rhetoric will be able to paper over the latent desire for a national divorce.

But if America is the end, then our first question should be to ask what even is America?

A Brief History Lesson

America is not Europe. America is not the Anglosphere. We may share a common ancestry, a common mode of government, but we are still distinct. Calling to Europeanize our politics, calling to Europeanize our culture, is essentially a call to erase that which makes us distinct.

Don’t believe me? Just talk to a European about America and see how they regard us.

When Tocqueville the Frenchman famously came to this country, he regarded our society with a mix of both fascination and contempt. He found us to be strangely radical yet conservative. Deeply idealistic but practically-minded. Optimists carrying a deep-seated skepticism of authority. To him we were a country of both Puritans and charlatans, utopian but also self-serving. In Tocqueville’s view, we are a nation of many contradictions — a complete aberration that refused to conform to his European mold.

Tocqueville was a strong believer in the idea that democracy could have a civilizing effect on the people who lived under it. But America always stumped him. Here was a country that had made democracy work, but the people behind seemed too vulgar and materialistic for his tastes. But as he studied the United States, he began to see the unique circumstances behind the country’s origins, and the unique culture that in turn produced.

Tocqueville puts strong emphasis on America’s founding² going as far as to claim that all the customs, laws, and events he bore witness to a century later, he could trace back to the circumstances of this moment.

When the Puritans came to this country, the attitudes and practices they brought with them lay the groundwork for what would follow. A myriad of groups settled the various colonies, but the common thread between them was the desire to escape religious persecution. It was religion which played the dominant role in shaping and ordering American civil society. But far from secularizing the country, “the spirit of freedom” was formed into a theological concept.

That promise of being able to travel overseas and form self-governing communities set a very important precedent in American history: the resolution of conflicts via enterprising as opposed to total war. Historically, in Europe, most conflicts (be they religious, political, or identitarian) were resolved by seizing and wielding state power.

American history, however, is littered with examples of an opposite trend: Mormons pushing westward, black nationalists forming mutual aid networks, and hippies moving to communes. Time and time again the risk and romance associated with being a revolutionary was instead channeled into constantly chasing the next frontier. After the colonies came westward expansion, and after westward expansion was left a populace that was still deeply restless. Frontier nostalgia colored the imagination of 20th century radicals: they romanticized a world filled with danger, unknown possibilities, and the allure of development. Even in a “settled” society they were still tempted to recreate the experience so that younger generations would carry with them the virtues of self-sufficiency, risk-taking, and reckless idealism³.

The “frontier-brain” continues to loom over the American psyche, even today. A large part of why we have the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world is because we also have a populace that is exceptionally prone to risky behavior. We have some of the highest rates of homicides but also a long-standing culture that glorifies individual — not collective — violence. Americans commit terrorism not in the name of some grander revolutionary plot but out of pure ideological catharsis. Firearm ownership is stubbornly embedded into our national habits — efforts to curtail ownership have met fierce resistance, not on mere utilitarian grounds but on those of principle.

The same reason we had so many miners rush to California over dubious rumors of gold is the same reason why we are also home to highest concentration of startups. A lot of this will probably come off as deeply unhinged, but there’s something to be said about how that lunacy has also long acted as a spark for creativity. The past hundred years of American cultural dominance was in large part carried by counterculture: hip-hop, rock-and-roll, jazz, the list goes on. Each of these represented not just a rebellion against existing norms, but also a utopian vision: that the same communities that were already producing their own culture could build an entirely new society out of said culture.

A country founded on thirteen “miniature societies” bred within it a spirit of experimentation. Many of the early colonies were developed with a utopian bent in mind. Oglethorpe’s “Georgia experiment” would create a haven where debtors and prisoners could be rehabilitated. William Penn founded Pennsylvania as a Quaker “holy experiment” free of conflict: there was to be no standing militia, peaceful co-existence with the natives, and full religious tolerance. When the Puritans landed in Massachusetts, they saw their task as forming a “city upon a hill”: a godly society that would go on to pursue widespread education and literacy. Even following the Civil War, the Republican proposal of “forty acres and a mule” reflected a very specific governing ethos about how communities can rebuild and sustain themselves.

The results of these experiments were mixed, but their legacy would nevertheless persist in the American imagination. As Tocqueville remarks, American culture has long carried with it a deep-seated optimism⁴ that people can be trusted to do the right thing and that the country’s best days are always ahead of it. It’s this optimism that fueled various campaigns for moral reform. We can look at Prohibition, we can look at Civil Rights, we can look at the religious Revivals and see a common pattern: where ordinary people can not just force social change from the bottom-up, but drag the entire country along with them in the process.

And, when it works, it’s quite something to behold. The speed at which we went from apartheid to full racial integration is nothing short of miraculous. The extent to which attitudes have changed even among the most conservative segments of our society would not have been imagined back in the ’60s. There is no other post-colonial society that has made nearly the same amount of progress on race relations relative to its starting point as the United States.

What made this possible was that common moral foundation and the distinct ways in which Americans blended their politics into their theology. A country founded on religious liberty centered its national religion around this Protestant-ized concept of “God” — one just vague enough to be assimilable even by the various Jews and Catholics that would later immigrate into the country.

Textualism, skepticism of authority, rebelliousness, democracy, and self-criticism were all themes of the Reformation⁵, confined to the religious realm. But what we saw develop in the United States was an attempt to take these same motifs and project them onto the political dimension.

The way Americans came to relate to their Constitution in a lot of ways paralleled how Protestants related to their Scripture. Here was a tangible social contract, a “law above the lawgivers” that all members were bound to. Anyone could read it and understand their rights, all authorities were — in theory, at least — bound to it. This created a culture in which it was this specific document — as opposed to any leader, office of authority, or founding stock — that Americans tied their loyalties to.

This reflects the emergence of the United States as a country which defined itself in terms of civic (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism. Most nations have typically staked their definition primarily in terms of lineages, traditions, borders, and offices of authority. The United States cannot be fully defined along these lines. We are a country of incredible difference in terms of locale, ethnicity, geography, history, law, theology, and politics. The main thing holding “American” together as a coherent concept in people’s heads is downstream of our governing ideals and norms.

It’s very curious then, how despite the latent radicalism present across American culture and history, the extent to which the Constitution is conservative in its disposition. The threshold for amendment is impossibly high, the document frequently eschews majority rule in favor of safeguarding minority rights, and the various offices of government vary in their levels of democracy. The Senate was not designed to be an elected post, the judiciary is appointed to lifelong terms, the various checks and balances lend themselves to incredibly easy obstructionism, and the office of the presidency has long been compared to that of an elected monarch. The capacity for the federal government to enact widespread change was hamstrung, but state and local governments were given an incredible amount of leeway to dictate how they governed. The whole structure — designed around skepticism of power rather than direct democracy — is a lot more cynical than what you’d expect out of such a utopian-minded culture.

But, once again, that’s because the outlet for large-scale reform in this country has traditionally been expected to emerge out of civil society. By gumming up the ability for elites to enact change from the top-down, reformers (in theory) are left with little option but to work from the bottom up so that consensus may be built. Even over the past century, where the federal government has slowly chipped away at constitutional barriers, each erosion hasn’t come without real backlash and protest, slowly breaking down national consensus with it.

All of this comes together to create a very peculiar situation: self-criticism defines our culture. Social reformers are given the freedom to brazenly and controversially criticize the status quo, while conservatives are encouraged to use any number of obstructionist tools to keep their opponents in check. Our branches of government are intended to be continually at war, different states compete with each other, and different regions form their own cultural blocs. The progression of American politics ends up being one never-ending tug of war where our blind faith in the process itself stands as the one thing stopping us from tearing ourselves apart.

The most infamous and forceful critics of our government (such as Frederick Douglass) appeal to our founding documents even as they challenge our authorities. The rebels and dissidents of yesterday somehow find themselves canonized in our history as the patriots of tomorrow.

Perhaps there’s no better statement to sum up the American attitude than that by Theodore Roosevelt: “wise conservatism and wise radicalism always go hand in hand”.

Moving Forward

I am not saying the United States is above criticism. I am not saying the United States is the greatest country in the world. I am not saying you have to like the United States or want to protect it. I am not saying you cannot admire and be inspired by other cultures.

What I am saying is that if you do happen to be someone with ideas on what will “fix” the country, you better understand and appreciate the history that formed it. If you are someone who wants to accuse your opponents of being disloyal to the country, you have to show some of that loyalty yourself. If you are an elite who fondly reminisces on the days where we had full national consensus, you have to respect the founding principles that said consensus was built upon.

The fact is, today, we have a lot of politicians, a lot of pundits, and a lot of other elites who are enamored with the idea of patriotism. Not enamored with the country or culture itself, but purely the idea of having total social control. They want people to follow them, they want to be able to insist upon their own authority, but they don’t actually care much for the particulars of what authority they’re appealing to. Elite circles nowadays don’t raise their members in culture as much they do immerse them in propaganda⁶. And what propaganda teaches is that the only end worth pursuing is the neverending accumulation of power.

We tend to speak of men such as Martin Luther King as great propagandists, rhetoricians who packaged things just right to sell to the American public. Political campaigns spend millions trying to break down and distill this essence for their own agendas. Every civil rights movement since has fantasized about “getting their own MLK”. But all of this is a distortion of history.

The respectability politics of the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just about “looking good”, MLK genuinely believed Christian morals were necessary to build and sustain these communities. He didn’t just appeal to American identity: he deeply, genuinely saw the South as his home and America as a land of promise. His clashes with black radicals weren’t over strategy or optics but matters of genuine principle. Similarly, the church served not just as an accessory to the wider movement, but the heart and center of it⁷.

None of this would have worked or held up to scrutiny if the members of the movement did not genuinely believe in and belong to the culture they were fighting to redeem, if they did not genuinely believe and submit to the God whose authority they were appealing to, and if they were not relying upon the strength of the very people in whose name they claimed to speak. Crisis is a fire whereby these loyalties are tested, and they proved themselves by putting their lives on the line. It was these shared commitments which reminded and called others to see themselves in them.

By addressing their oppressors not only as fellow sinners but also as fellow Southerners, King and his followers exposed the moral claims of the white supremacist regime in the South to the most damaging scrutiny; and the appeal to a common regional past was probably just as important, in the eventual victory over segregation, as the appeal to “profound and ultimate unities,” in Niebuhr’s phrase. King always believed, even in the face of what sometimes must have seemed overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that “there are great resources of goodwill in the Southern white man that we must somehow tap.” When Lyndon Johnson became president, it was important to King to point out that Johnson was a “fellow Southerner” who was “concerned about civil rights.” Sympathetic Southern whites sensed that King spoke not only for black people but for the soul of the entire South. Hence the “admiration,” as Lillian Smith told King, of “thousands of white Southerners” for what he was doing. (The True And Only Heaven, 396)

That really then, just raises the question. In our current moment of crisis, where do our political leaders draw their support from? Do they return back to the American political tradition, look through the countless examples of forgotten movements to draw inspiration from? The experiments of the Puritans, the populist movements of the 19th century, or the labor movements of the 20th century?

But, they can’t do that because of their class position. The bourgeoisie is a class which is devoid of an organic culture. They interface with the world in terms of money and are materially detached from local concerns. The intelligentsia struggles with comprehending the unspoken aspects of on-the-ground development. As Lasch points out, the development of capitalism killed off a lot of our historic populist traditions⁸. Our elites have their own history, one in which clever leaders and clever plans lead the ignorant masses out of the wilderness.

Instead they turn towards the top-down ideologies: social democracy, national conservatism, Reaganism, technocracy. What connects all of these movements is they start by winning over elites, who then in turn can only rely on the levers of the state to push everyone else along.

We’ve heard the same formula pitched to us time and time again: that the problems with our country come down to election results and that if we change the system of law in this or that way (changing who can vote, abolishing the Senate, etc.) then all the incentives in our system will properly line up again. And once the system is set up in a way where the right people can win, they can pass their agenda and the country will unite under them.

This, of course is delusional. The deepest problems facing America are ones that emerge out of the collapse of civil society. Atomization, the subsumption of volunteer organizations into the party apparatus, a decline in religiosity, the hollowing out of local communities, the normalization of violence, increased dependence on international supply chains: the list goes on. Point is, none of these issues are easily resolved by policy: rebuilding depends on norms and shared commitments.

This task of building isn’t just a matter of designing the right institutions and laws, because at the end of the day those institutions and laws are staffed by and enforced by people. Or, as Tocqueville would put it:

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

Our elites cannot comprehend this because they themselves are totally lacking in morals. The party of Christian nationalism has devolved to little more than a band of drug addicts, pedophiles, and godless cultists interested in religion purely as a tool⁹. Progressives, meanwhile, have rejected the universal moral standards that defined their forbears in favor of a libertine postmodernism.

Should it come as any surprise then why they’ve crumbled in this time of crisis? Fascism as a mass-movement is completely incompatible with the American political tradition¹⁰. Yet it’s been our media and business elites who were the fastest to capitulate and join up with the new administration. We’re witnessing live how the core of resistance to authoritarianism hasn’t come from savvy politicians but spontaneous acts by everyday people.

If we really do see this national project as worth continuing, then that leaves only one option. Rebuild America the way we built it: by first tending to the moral fabric of civil society. Or, to quote Lasch:

A “conservative” respect for order and authority has now become an ingredient of any radical movement that seeks to transcend the progressive and socialist pieties of an earlier time. In mindlessly embracing a politics of “cultural revolution,” the American left has played into the hands of the corporations, which find it all too easy to exploit a radicalism that equates liberation with hedonistic self-indulgence and freedom from family ties.

As the first group of Puritans boarded on a ship for America, they spoke of their task as building “a shining city upon a hill”. Countless politicians since have evoked this line to describe America, but in the process we lost the original meaning of the sentiment. The Puritans did not speak of “greatness” or “exceptionalism” as their entitlement — but rather instead a responsibility. Contrary to what Ronald Reagan tells us, America is not God’s country. God’s chosen people are among every nation. For John Winthrop, America was not a gift but a test. They had an opportunity right in front of them to build a society, could they build one that was righteous?

Did they build one that was righteous? Perhaps not by the Lord’s standards. But all those things I mentioned in the previous section (utopianism, risk-taking, practicality, religiosity, etc.) are the fruits that came of it. But all those intangible things, more than any statistic or accomplishment, are the lasting markers we have.

Today, we face another test, and the reality is that the American people are the only ones who can be left up to the task. Our institutions are falling apart, our markets are failing, and our leaders rudderless. If we do value this country, we’re not going to save it by “steering the discourse” or playing high-level realpolitik. Instead, civil society has to reassert itself over the political, and the only way to do that is to rediscover and repair the culture we’ve let decay.

“Some of the most earnest interpretations of contemporary right-wing Chinese philosophy come from… individuals… associated with “governance studies”, but trace their roots to the remnants of various waves of accelerationism and… neoreaction/NRx trend affiliated with thinkers such as Nick Land… One of the most significant sources promoting neo-traditional Chinese thinkers has been Palladium, a rightwing outlet dedicated to Governance Futurism.” ("Plague Illuminates the Great Unity of All Under Heaven", footnote 16) ↩︎
“If we carefully examine the social and political state of America, after having studied its history, we shall remain perfectly convinced that not an opinion, not a custom, not a law, I may even say not an event, is upon record which the origin of that people will not explain. The readers of this book will find the germ of all that is to follow in the present chapter, and the key to almost the whole work.” (Democracy in America, Vol I, Chapter II, Part I) ↩︎
“The only alternative to war, as James saw it, was a “moral equivalent of war,” which would make the same demands on people in the name of peace, satisfy the same taste for self-sacrifice, and elicit the same qualities of devotion, loyalty, and ardor. His own solution—an army conscripted into the peacetime war “against Nature”—anticipated the Civilian Conservation Corps briefly instituted under the New Deal. It drew on the images of the American West that influenced other spokesmen for martial virtues, like Francis Parkman and Theodore Roosevelt. Life in the great outdoors, as James thought of it, would expose “our gilded youths” to rugged conditions in which they would “get the childishness knocked out of them,” so that they could “come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.” (The True And Only Heaven, 300-301) ↩︎
“They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man; they are of opinion that the effects of the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them to be good to-day may be superseded by something better-to-morrow. I do not give all these opinions as true, but I quote them as characteristic of the Americans.” (Democracy in America, Vol II, Chapter XVIII, Part VII) ↩︎
11/20/2025: I’ll be linking a future post I’m working on on this very topic right here. ↩︎
Specifically referring to propaganda in the sense that Ellul defines it. Also, to quote Lasch:
“Taken as a whole, these reports conveyed an unmistakable impression of liberal intellectuals’ sense of alienation from America. It was not that the country had failed to “keep faith,” as Croly wrote in 1922, “with its original idea of the United States as a Promised Land.” The Nation’s contributors seldom invoked the “original idea” of America. Most of them wrote as if the “promise of American life” had been a swindle from the beginning. Croly’s brand of social criticism implied that whatever democracy Americans managed to achieve in the future would have to rest on their achievements in the past. The authors of “These United States” assumed, on the other hand, that “breaking from the past” was the precondition of cultural and political advance.” (The True And Only Heaven, 420) ↩︎
“Inspired leadership alone, of course, does not explain the movement’s notable combination of militancy and moral self-restraint. Its triumphs rested on the more humble achievements of people like King’s father, who had managed, over the years, to build a vigorous black community in Southern towns and cities, under the most unpromising conditions. The core of that community was the church, and the civil rights movement was “strong,” as Bayard Rustin pointed out, because it was “built upon the most stable institution of the southern Negro community—the Church.” (The True And Only Heaven, 394) ↩︎
“Hardly anyone asked any more whether freedom was consistent with hired labor. People groped instead, in effect, for a moral and social equivalent of the widespread property ownership once considered indispensable to the success of democracy. Attempts to achieve a redistribution of income, to equalize opportunity in various ways, to incorporate the working classes into a society of consumers, or to foster economic growth and overseas expansion as a substitute for social reform can all be considered as twentieth-century substitutes for property ownership; but none of these policies created the kind of active, enterprising citizenry envisioned by nineteenth-century democrats.” (The True And Only Heaven, 224) ↩︎
The neo-reactionary movement (which has gone on to inspire a lot of the current national conservative elite) explicitly speaks of adopting Catholicism in this fashion, as a cynical tool for promoting social hierarchy. ↩︎
Historically, even the far-right in this country has taken a radical, libertarian (as opposed to traditionally reactionary) bent. The only exception to this is the Southern planter class (and their resulting elite spinoffs such as the Southern Agrarians), whose relevance has greatly faded over the century. ↩︎

Is Noam Chomsky Wrong About Propaganda?

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This essay is incomplete and a work in progress. Sections may be missing, arguments may be disjointed.

Noam Chomsky is an absolutely titanic figure on the American left. For most of the Cold War, he served as the premier public intellectual for anyone of a more radical disposition. In the modern day, the figure of the public intellectual carries less importance – which might explain why it’s difficult to really point to anyone who has definitively carried his torch. Sure, one can pick out current-day left-wing academics and media figures, but there’s none which have really struck the balance he has. This was a man whose ideas had wide-reach among the activist base while also having enough rigor to earn academic respect. His talent came in his ability to apply his thought to the cycle of current events while also still providing meaningful theoretical innovations: he could speak at a common level without blowing hot air.

Perhaps this fact helps to explain why he continues to have such an enduring legacy, even decades after their peak. Out of all the ideas he espoused, his most enduring legacy seems to be – not his theories of socialist governance or linguistics – but his propaganda model. The amount of people I have seen continue to invoke Manufacturing Consent to this day (sometimes without even reading it) is quite incredible. Chomsky gets flak for a lot of things, ranging from his libertarianism to his views on foreign policy. But, the one thing I will never hear anyone take a shot at is the propaganda model itself.

It’s interesting, because from the time I spent in these spaces, I never got the sense it was because the arguments were so airtight they didn’t warrant questioning. Instead, it seemed moreso like the questions just never got raised: does the model actually hold up to scrutiny? Has anyone actually picked it apart and judged it on its own merits, as opposed to just accepting that it aligns with their ideological priors?

Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, Restated

The purpose of a model is to explain how a system functions. A good model is able to explain how things happen and identify which components are most essential to understanding the system and its mechanics. For example, the atomic model helps us to understand how matter works. By recognizing the importance of protons and electrons, you can piece together why certain interactions lead to specific chemical reactions.

Chomsky’s task in Manufacturing Consent is to develop a model of propaganda in capitalist democracies: highlighting the most essential parts and providing an explanation of why mass media works the way it does. When judging his model, these are the metrics we have to consider it by.

The first section of the book is dedicated to laying out the model itself. Right from the beginning, he sums up the core of his argument quite succinctly: if you want to understand how propaganda works, you have to look at who is producing and funding it.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public.¹

The book argues that because of these controlling interests, even in a “free market” the information has to pass through various “filters” prior to publication²:

The size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms.
Advertising as the primary income source of the mass media.
The reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.
“Flak” as a means of disciplining the media.
“Anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism.

Or, in other words, he’s saying media always reflects the interests of its owners. Whether the owners are Stalinist bureaucrats or corporate shareholders is besides the point. By owning the platform, they get control over the editorial direction and that allows them to frame political discourse in a myriad of ways.

… the “societal purpose” of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.³

Because of how highly verticalized mass media is, smaller outlets routinely get outcompeted, displaced, and eliminated from the “marketplace of ideas”. The marketplace here is not metaphorical, but literal as the economics of mass reach take precedence over quality of ideas in determining who does or doesn’t survive. Just as capital has a tendency to concentrate over time, so the media landscape (which is a business in the end) gradually finds itself in the hands of a select few⁴.

Corporate mergers, government relationships (which incur lobbying expenses), advertising models (which prefer high-income audiences), and the outsourcing of fact-finding to “official sources” (cheaper than investigative reporting) all work together to create an environment in which the media landscape is disproportionately dominated by the interests of the wealthy and for-profit enterprises. This isn’t a conspiracy, but systemic; the effects are subtle enough that the propagandists are able to convince themselves they actually are being objective.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news “objectively” and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.⁵

The working class has neither the wealth to fund their own operations, the disposable income to be worthy consumers, or the elite status to schmooze with politicians. High-quality, investigative reporting is expensive to produce and incurs the risk of legal and political liability. While speech may be legally “free” in America under the First Amendment, not all voices are equal: those with the most money can afford the largest megaphones.

Chomsky takes it a step further to argue that this class interest will always result in a specific ideological bias: anticommunism ⁶.

“Flak” refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of individuals… During the McCarthy years, many advertisers and radio and television stations were effectively coerced into quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red hunters to boycott products.⁷

Because of “flak”, he expects right-wing audiences (who are supposed to be aligned with the interests of the wealthy) to have the main sway in dictating what positions outlets are allowed to take. Whatever liberal voices in media that exist are constantly on the defensive, having to routinely distance themselves from and condemn communism in order to survive McCarthyist witch-hunts⁸.

That’s Chomsky’s propaganda model in summary, and – as you can tell – it makes a lot of very bold claims. But, to his credit, he does back it up with the proper reciepts:

It is empirically true that (at the time), over half of the country’s newspapers were owned by only a handful of companies⁹.
It is true that the Pentagon poured an unparalleled amount of money per year on its own PR, creating a flood of newspapers, radio broadcasts, and press conferences that drove the public discourse¹⁰.
The press’ reaction to Watergate versus the FBI’s illegal activities against socialist parties did highlight a double-standard as to what is or isn’t considered a “real scandal”¹¹.

And even today, there are many incidents people will point to as vindication of Chomsky’s theory:

Nearly half of our country’s news stations (as of 2018) have steadily been bought out by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, placing all these seemingly separate, local stations in the hands of a single owner with a common agenda.
During the pandemic-era, a retail lobbying group grossly misrepresented the prevalence of shoplifting, and the press unquestioningly ran with this story, manufacturing a narrative out of thin air. Politicians found themselves under immense pressure to dedicate even more resources to hunting down shoplifters and funneling tax dollars as “investments” into these very same companies. All of this, only for the lobbyists to eventually retract the claims as entirely false years after the dust had already settled.
One might even see echoes of “flak” in the fallout FOX News faced following their call of the 2020 election: facing backlash from their right-wing viewers, hosts turned course and started boosting election fraud conspiracies they did not believe in in order to appease the mob.
Reporting by Semafor has shown that various political, media, and business elites have been known to congregate in groupchats to workshop narratives that they all boost simultaneously to try and steer news cycles.
Executives who own various newspapers have been known to interfere with the papers’ topics of coverage and endorsements, which has raised concerns regarding personal conflicts of interest.
Facing a wave of scandals and public backlash for their shady dealings, Facebook began pushing the “metaverse” as a PR stunt. Tech media, uncritically parroting “offical” company sources, helped manufacture a hype cycle for the company out of thin air.

But what’s conspicuously missing from both this list and Chomsky’s book is a real investigation into the impact propaganda has on people. There’s all sorts of evidence pointed to in order to demonstrate that, yes, systemic filters do in fact exist which generate an unconscious (or in some cases, conscious) bias in a supposedly free media ecosystem. But, how well is it actually working? It’s the claims surrounding the response of audiences where Chomsky leaves a lot presumed.

Luckily, Chomsky leaves enough latitude in his theory that it is actually relatively falsifiable. In his theory, it’s not just outright communist positions that are continually under attack but also broadly progressive ones. Higher taxes, regulation, relaxed criminal justice policies, foreign policy positions, all of these (according to him) can pose threats to elite interests. We can use current events as a quick barometer to see how well the theory has aged.

Chomsky claims flak is an inherently right-wing phenomenon: yet when the Washington Post was bought out by billionaire Jeff Bezos and had its editorial policy altered in a fashion suspected to suit his personal interests, the outlet faced an unprecedented financial backlash from critics on the left¹².

Similarly, in the recent NYC mayoral race, heavyweight papers such as the New York Times attempted to pull out every stop to influence coverage towards their preferred outcome. But ultimately, it didn’t matter: the candidate whose platform (by Chomsky’s metrics) would run counter to the interests of the local elites won by a landslide.

In Australia – a media environment overwhelmingly dominated by magnates such as Rupert Murdoch and Peter Costello – the press has been known to line up behind the Liberal Party (known for favoring business interests). The same formula was deployed for the most recent election, but it ended up not mattering: the Labor Party (backed by unions and despised by the press class) won in a landslide, by a margin far larger than any pollster or pundit would’ve ventured to predict.

This leads to what is one of the big ironies of Manufacturing Consent. The “propaganda model” in the book isn’t actually a propaganda model: it’s a media model at best. This distinction isn’t just semantic: ‘propaganda’ is a fundamentally generic term. When we commonly use it, we do so with the expectation that this is something which can apply to a litany of different countries and time periods.

What Chomsky expertly does with the book is distill down a very specific form of media organization that peaked in the mid-late 20th century and how it produced information. But in order for such a model to succeed, a certain set of environmental conditions had to be met. Chomsky presents this as the natural evolution of media under capitalism, but this just raises the question about whether or not he’s taking too much for granted.

Less than forty years after the publication of his book, capitalism is as strong as ever, but a lot of those preconditions have started to erode:

A strong national consensus. Without consensus, any pretense to objectivity is impossible. The rise of siloed media environments via personalized algorithms, increased political polarization, erosion of demographic homogeneity over the past decades, and decreased religious/civic involvement all create both a fracturing of narratives and information streams.
The existence of ‘high-trust’ technologies. Photo, audio, and video technologies defined journalism in the 20th century. The silver bullet in the Watergate case was a tape recording of Nixon admitting to everything. Photojournalists and documentarians framed the images that came to define the century’s most pivotal moments. These technologies acted as a social anchor for “truth” and helped bestow an air of legitimacy among those broadcasting it. The increasing reliance of newsrooms on 24/7 on-site punditry and the rise of new technologies which can falsify information has eroded this foundation.
A tight grip on who is capable of producing information. Only a handful of television channels end up recieving a license or earning themselves a spot in cable bundles. The internet has undeniably changed this. In theory¹³, individuals are able to use social media platforms as a cheap way to publish and curate personal audiences. Video equipment is no longer considered a speciality device, but embedded into every phone. Subscription models open up a new revenue potential revenue stream for independent outlets.

What journalists often bemoan as the “post-truth era” is more precisely is the era in which their specific models of producing and understanding “truths” is becoming outmoded. Data shows the press is now the most distrusted institution in American society. Viewership across both print and television media continues to tumble¹⁴.

Manufacturing Consent is a book of intentions: why billionaires buy news outlets only to run them at a loss and why the press converges on certain narratives. What Chomsky nails with the book is describing how elites see and understand their own levers of power. The problem is, these elites are morons. They routinely overestimate the power of their investments and view the world entirely through the lens of money. They burn through record-setting amounts trying to sway elections, even when the data overwhelmingly points to the ineffectiveness of political advertising. Despite Chomsky basing his model on a quasi-Marxist foundation, his perspective actually ends up taking the bourgeois tendency for granted.

Elites tend to imagine themselves as being above propaganda, as pulling the strings to guide the masses towards their intended outcomes. But, what they don’t often realize is how they themselves are often times also victims of propaganda.

Returning back to the aforementioned Semafor article, even as these elites congregated to sway an election, the progression of the chat reflected a radicalization on part of said elites. What originally started as a debate club soon became hostile to disagreement as the founders themselves started to become captured by their own propaganda:

The tone was jesting, but “Marc radicalized over time,” Hanania recalled. Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics, and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink… Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff. I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’ I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said. “There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.” He left the group in June of 2023.

[SOME UNPOLISHED NOTES TO INTEGRATE]

- The ideological model Chomsky presents falls apart because there's no real guarantee of a connection between the working class and "left-wing ideology".
- Chomsky has an arbitrary line between what debates/disputes are of real substance, and what is just superficial distractions peddled by the press.
- Chomsky believes a key component of propaganda is the ability to readily change who is or isn't a public enemy. Is this actually the case?

The Myth of ‘Counter-Propaganda’ (unfinished)

Another basic truth about models is that they typically tend to be attached to some sort of practical purpose: black boxes help engineers focus on datastreams and weather forecasts help us decide whether or not we’re carrying an umbrella. The purpose of a propaganda model – one would assume then – would be to help us identify whether or not we’re being manipulated. Just as how someone who studies the weather should come out with a dry head, ideally someone who understands propaganda should have a better grasp on the truth.

But for Chomsky, his model seems to be more concerned with teaching you to identify propagandists. Not whether or not you’re being manipulated, but who is manipulating you and what it would take to stop them. This gives the model a distinctly militant edge – it’s not just meant to describe a phenomenon but to push you to act in a certain way.

[section incomplete here, to fill in later]

[SOME UNPOLISHED NOTES TO INTEGRATE]

- Chomsky posits the solution as the establishment of independent outlets which act outside of corporate/imperialist influence. 
- Chomsky's model exists to legitimize the concept of 'counter-propaganda'.
- Chomsky has not been above bending the truth, he does this extensively in his coverage of Cambodia. 
- The propaganda model is written not with a descriptive purpose, but with an intention to spur action.

An Alternative: Ellul’s Propaganda Model (to-do)

[section incomplete here, to fill in later]

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky, p. 1 ↩︎
“The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.” (Manufacturing Consent, 2) ↩︎
Manufacturing Consent, 298 ↩︎
“One important reason for this was the rise in scale of newspaper enterprise and the associated increase in capital costs from the midnineteenth century onward, which was based on technological improvements along with the owners’ increased stress on reaching large audiences. The expansion of the free market was accompanied by an “industrialization of the press.” The total cost of establishing a national weekly on a profitable basis in 1837 was under a thousand pounds, with a break-even circulation of 6,200 copies. By 1867) the estimated start-up cost of a new London daily was 50,000 pounds. The Sunday Express, launched in 1918, spent over two million pounds before it broke even with a circulation of over 250,000? Similar processes were at work in the United States, where the start-up cost of a new paper in New York City in 1851 was 569,000 dollars; the public sale of the St. Louis Democrat in 1872 yielded 456000 dollars and city newspapers were selling at from 6 to 18 million dollars in the 1920s. The cost of machinery alone, of even very small newspapers, has for many decades run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; in 1945 it could be said that “Even small-newspaper publishing is big business … [and] is no longer a trade one takes up lightly even if he has substantial cash-or takes up at all if he doesn’t.” (Manufacturing Consent, 4) ↩︎
Manufacturing Consent, 2 ↩︎
“A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status. The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and the ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist· states have contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil.” (Manufacturing Consent, 29) ↩︎
Manufacturing Consent, 26 ↩︎
“Liberals at home, often accused of being pro-Communist or insufficiently anti-Communist, are kept continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. If they allow communism, or something that can be labeled communism, to triumph in the provinces while they are in office, the political costs are heavy. Most of them have fully internalized the religion anyway, but they are all under great pressure to demonstrate their anti-Communist credentials. This causes them to behave very much like reactionaries.” (Manufacturing Consent, 29) ↩︎
“Ben Bagdikian stresses the fact that despite the large media numbers, the twenty-nine largest media systems account for over half of the output of newspapers, and most of the sales and audiences in magazines, broadcasting, books, and movies. He contends that these “constitute a new Private Ministry of Information and Culture” that can set the national agenda.” (Manufacturing Consent, 4) ↩︎
“The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In 1979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of relative openness (since closed down), the U.S. Air Force revealed that its public-information outreach included the following: 140 newspapers, 690000 copies per week – Airman magazine, monthly circulation: 125000 – 34 radio and 17 TV stations, primarily overseas – 45000 headquarters and unit news releases – 615000 hometown news releases – 6600 interviews with news media – 3200 news conferences – 500 news media orientation flights – 50 meetings with editorial boards – 11000 speeches.” (Manufacturing Consent, 19-20) ↩︎
“The major scandal of Watergate as portrayed in the mainstream press was that the Nixon administration sent a collection of petty criminals to break into the Democratic party headquarters, for reasons that remain obscure. The Democratic party represents powerful domestic interests, solidly based in the business community. Nixon’s actions were therefore a scandal. The Socialist Workers party, a legal political party, represents no powerful interests. Therefore, there was no scandal when it was revealed, just as passions over Watergate reached their zenith, that the FBI had been disrupting its activities by illegal break-ins and other measures for a decade, a violation of democratic principle far more extensive and serious than anything charged during the Watergate hearings.” (Manufacturing Consent, 299) ↩︎
Now, one could argue this backlash primarily came from liberals rather than full-on socialists and that Chomsky’s model draws a distinction between the two factions. To which I’d respond that the book’s section on flak still explicitly states that liberal perspectives in media are supposedly permanently on the defensive. ↩︎
The question of whether or not the internet actually represents a decentralization of media control long-term is an incredibly complicated one. On a basic level, yes, the sheer volume of people able to create, find, and publish information to social media often can overwhelm traditional media filters with brute force. A great example of this is Jordan Shanks, a pro-Labor YouTuber who has had a massively outsized impact on the Australian political landscape, despite making enemies with the entire nation’s press class.
And often times, narratives which originate from random social media posters (such as the Springfield dog-eating hoax or unsavory rumors surrounding JD Vance) are quickly picked up by news also active in these spaces who then go and funnel it into mainstream political discourse. The proliferation of handheld cameras has created a litany of news cycles surrounding police abuse (Treyvon Martin, George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, etc.) that otherwise would’ve been brushed under the rug if only official sources could be pulled from. On the other hand, social media algorithms tend to favor boosting stories from established outlets: they tend to be the ones most equipped to game the algorithms, produce content at an industrial race, to benefit the most from anti-misinformation filters, be advertiser-friendly, and have pre-existing audiences they can bring across platforms. In situations where these press outlets “set the discourse”, lower-level posters simply act as “signal-repeaters” for these takes and simply echo established narratives rather than compete with them. ↩︎
The New York Times has taken to propping up their business model by relying on their collections of recipes and games to motivate readers to subscribe. ↩︎

How Many LibrePlanet Locals Are Even Active? (USA)

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In previous years, the Free Software Foundation used to run a yearly conference known as LibrePlanet: it was typically hosted in Boston (roughly around spring) and had people from the free-software community all around the world come together to discuss free software and the future of the movement.

Having been fortunate enough to attend some of these, I can confirm they were very informative and brought me together with people I would’ve never otherwise gotten to know. Without that experience, I would’ve had a much harder time being able to find a place in the community, so I owe a lot to it. But that’s not to say the model didn’t come without its drawbacks.

The community surrounding the FSF is a highly global one. When you enter the forum, the chats, the wikis, and even the conferences, you really get a sense for how geographically dispersed this movement is: we have people everywhere from Africa to Asia to North America all trying to coordinate for a common cause. When you host a single, central conference in-person, you can often run the risk of excluding people who are further away from the venue. The FSF, to their credit, have tried to bridge this somewhat with virtual attendance options, but it seems like there was still more work to be done in bridging that gap. So, this year (on the 40th anniversary of the organization, no less), the FSF decided to take things a step further and completely scrap the traditional conference model.

Instead of showing up to the same convention center for a weekend in March, we now have the entire month of May set aside for community members across the world to self-organize their own local groups. This would, in theory, greatly reduce the barriers to participation while still bringing people together.

But the added flexibility does come with its own catch: the availability of these groups hinges a lot more on the ability of local advocates to effectively take on the work of organizing. It also requires the FSF to provide tools that will allow for smooth discovery and connecting of activists. The LibrePlanet wiki is supposed to be the answer to this problem: local groups can post their location, meeting times, and contact, allowing people to quickly find the closest team to them and start getting in touch. In practice, this ends up being rockier than it would appear.

But, speaking as someone who tried to get in touch with the local network of activists, I quickly found that their page hadn’t been updated in years, and a lot of the posted email addresses of the organizers pointed to expired domains. What should have been as simple as checking the page and sending the email turned into a wild goose-chase of chasing down outdated leads that are still presented on the wiki as up to date. As I quickly scanned around on the other pages, I began to notice a problem: this is a pattern across the groups. The FSF does not seem to be on top of which groups actually are/are not active, and this can create false impressions about how successful our networking efforts actually are.

So, what I want to do this month for “LibreLocal Month” is post a survey of all the LibreLocals across my country (the United States) and save you the trouble of figuring out which ones are active and which ones aren’t.

Why America?

International coordination is important, but national is too. People who are roughly within a reasonable geographic distance, subject to the same regulatory regime, and are facing a similar tech environment need to be on the same page in order to effectively mobilize within agiven region.

Despite how large the United States is (and how much of the tech industry hosts itself here), it’s actually quite alarming how underdeveloped our presence is in this country. In other regions like Europe and India, there’s a much more organized presence of free-software activists who regularly connect with each other and have actually built out the infrastructure to serve as a serious force. We need to start doing the same here.

Survey of LibreLocals Across the United States of America

Right away one of the problems you’re going to be seeing is that almost none of these pages have a “Last Modified” tag on them, which makes it impossible to tell how long ago a page was made, further adding confusion to which groups have been abandoned and which haven’t. Groups marked Inactive and Active on the wiki page share space, which only further serves to paint an inaccurate picture of how much of a presence the FSF actually has across the country.

With that in mind, I’ll be taking a more aggressive approach to be declaring groups dead: the average person needs to be able to easily get in touch with the organizers and know what’s going on, otherwise I don’t think it makes sense to count that group as viable.

West (Coastal Region)

The West Coast currently does not have any actively running LibrePlanet Chapters. That being said, there seems to be potential to revive the California and Washington chapters by reaching out to the old members.

California

On the wiki is a LibrePlanet group for the Bay Area. The only form of contact given is a Meetup.com link (which seems to have been last active in 2015). One of the organizers (Pete Forsyth) still seems to have an active presence on Wikipedia with his user page containing further contact information.

Despite this group being marked as Active, it’s pretty clearly Inactive.

Oregon

The Oregon group is based in Sutherlin (southwest of the state). The mailing list no longer seems to exist and the only member does not seem to be easily reachable.

Despite this group being marked as Active on the wiki, it seems to be Inactive.

Washington

Going off of the mailing list, it seems like LibrePlanet Washington was exceptionally active between the years of 2011-2018. The main organizer (AJ Jordan) has a still-active presence online, with his blog containing some possible contact venues.

Having reached out to AJ, I got confirmation that the chapter is currently Inactive and that he no longer resides in the region.

West (Mountain Region)

The FSF does actually have a relatively established presence within the West. Two chapters (Colorado and Nevada) are currently active and meeting.

Colorado

The page for the Denver group was last updated January 2025. The group affiliates itself with the Software Freedom School, whose mailing list indicates it’s still active as of April 2025.

The Colorado chapter does in fact seem to be Active.

Nevada

The Nevada group bases itself in Las Vegas. The mailing list was used between the years 2020-2022 and the website is down. However, the GetTogether page shows that the group is still meeting up through the year 2025.

The page might need some updating to scrub out inactive venues, but this LibreLocal group does in fact seem to be Active.

Utah

The Utah grouping bases itself in Salt Lake City. The organizer has a webpage that’s still up and an email, but the website does not give a clear indication as to present-day online activity. The group’s posted IRC channel does not seem to still be active.

The wiki marks this group as In Formation, but it’s likely Inactive.

New England

The only active New England chapters are in the Boston area, with a lot of community members and contacts happening to be around Massachusetts. New England is a relatively small region, so this might not be too much of an issue.

Connecticut

The Connecticut group’s mailing list has not been properly used in years. The main organizer’s linked contact methods all seem to be offline now, which indicates that they’re no longer actively online.

The wiki lists this group as Active, but it is for all intents and purposes Inactive.

Massachusetts

Boston has long been (until this year) the home of the Free Software Foundation and its headquarters, so it should go without surprise that this is one of the areas with an active community that still regularly meets in-person. The LibrePlanet wiki page lists LibreBoston as the chapter for the area.

LibreBoston is in fact, very much Active.

Mid-Atlantic

The FSF has no presence in the Mid-Atlantic region currently, with no clear leads towards starting one.

Maryland

Nobody involved with the Maryland group is contactable, with their emails often being hosted on domains that are now expired. No channels or mailing lists for the group are shown.

Despite the wiki marking this group as Active, it is functionally Inactive.

Midwest

Illinois is the only state in the Midwest which seems to have an active presence of FSF members looking to organize. Whether or not the chapter is active, the spaces are still open and the people running it are easily reachable, which is a good sign.

Illinois

LibrePlanet Illinois was formed in 2024 and had it’s last meetup (according to the wiki) only a few months ago. This group’s page has both an IRC chat and a Matrix room linked.

I’m still awaiting confirmation from those running it and will update this section once I get a response, but for the time being I will provisionally mark LibrePlanet Illinois as Active.

Minnesota

LibrePlanet Minnesota does not specify a location and the group IRC channel seems to be dead. The mailing list provided does not seem to exist either. The organizer has a website which is now offline, and an FSF member email which may or may not be regularly checked. He is not active on the FSF member forum either. One of the members (Mtift) still seems to have an active online presence (and is likely reachable) going off of his linked webpage.

This group, despite being marked as Active on the wiki, is in fact Inactive.

Missouri

The regional placement of Missouri is… contentious, but we’ll go with the Census Bureau’s definition. LibreEagle is held in Springfield and serves Southwest Missouri as a region. The group has a website which is now offline (last online in 2017), but lists no other form of contact. There is a meeting date and location present on the page, but it’s unclear which year that meeting was for.

This group is Inactive.

Ohio

An IRC channel is listed as the main form of contact, but it’s currently empty. The last time the wiki page seems to have been updated is 2019. The organizer has an email address, but his online presence does not show recent activity.

This group, despite being marked as Active on the wiki, seems to be Inactive.

Deep South

There is no active presence for LibrePlanet in the Southern United States. There have been groups that formerly existed, but in reality they’re not active. If you wish to organize a group in this region, a potential lead for gathering people might be tracking down those formerly involved with LibrePlanet South Florida.

Alabama

Alabama is currently listed as one of two states with LibreLocals in the Deep South. Members are expected to join via Discord, with no other option available for contact. The link to the Discord server in question is entirely expired.

The only member (and organizer) has a profile page which contains no details for contact information. They do not have a presence on the FSF member forum, and searching their username on the web doesn’t yield any results.

This group – despite the wiki marking it as Active – should be considered Inactive.

Florida

This group is hosted in South Florida (specifically covering the Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach areas). Another general Florida group was previously formed, but they’ve in the time since marked themselves as inactive and redirected people to the South Florida group.

This group has provided a myriad of options for contact: a group website, Matrix, Mastodon, and GitLab. The website on the page is no longer online (but there’s another one online under a different domain), and the GitLab/Mastodon have not been updated in the past four years. The Matrix channel is still online but hasn’t been regularly posted in since 2022/2023. The main organizer seems to no longer have an active presence online, but his user page does provide contact information.

The group has officially declared themselves Inactive on their own channels, but the LibrePlanet wiki page still incorrectly lists the group as Active.

Summary

Only three chapters can unambiguously said to be still active: Denver, Las Vegas, and Boston. This provides coverage to the non-coastal West and New England. The wiki provides some leads whereby communities might be establishable in parts of the West and Midwest. But the fact still remains that for the majority of the country, and a lot of our key tech hubs, the FSF does not have any sort of presence at all. The work of establishing this will have to be done ground up, from scratch.

Nearly every single inactive chapter on the LibrePlanet wiki is still mislabeled as being Active. In a lot of cases, contacting relevant parties requires quite a bit of digging and there’s very little standardization in terms of where you find what information.

The LibrePlanet wiki, as it currently stands, is not sufficient as a source to readily understanding whether or not there is an active chapter in your area, or who around you is active and willing to join you. There needs to be a sweep and pruning of inactive chapters across the wiki, and more proactive initiatives to locate potential members across the country and actively seed chapters.

Those involved in organizing their local chapters should keep in contact with each other, and share resources, ideas, and strategies where deemed fit. This is why I (and the LibreBoston group) are working to both identify parties interested in organizing across the country and bringing them into a common conversation. If you are someone who is looking to start a chapter or is already running one, please get in contact with me via Mastodon and I’ll get you connected to the others.

Group Chats Rule the World... and That’s a Good Thing

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Semafor published an incredibly in-depth report looking at the specific role private groupchats played in shaping the modern right-wing consensus among American elites. These group chats connected tech CEOs, media commentators, and politicians, bringing them all into the same room to discuss various political subjects and express their grievances regarding the surrounding left-wing culture of the time.

And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.

These groupchats would also end up acting as spaces in which various cultural and business elites consolidated their support behind the Trump campaign and collaborated to spread that support to the rest of the country. Given how divisive the election (and current administration) has been, it should come as no surprise that finding out about these secret chats has sparked some outrage:

The critics decry the lack of transparency in these backroom discussions, saying that these chats are too closed to facilitate any real discussion or disagreement, and see the whole thing as a propaganda exercise. But, I think a lot of the knee-jerk responses here are coming from people who don’t understand these spaces.

Now, I was never in these specific chats. I’m not an elite, I’m just a regular person, after all. But I am also someone who grew up on the internet. I’ve been in all sorts of political discussion rooms like these over the years: private, semi-private, public, you name it. So, I’d like to pull back the curtain a bit and talk about my own experience in these kinds of spaces, and what makes them so valuable.

Smoke-filled rooms have always existed. Sometimes among elites, sometimes among insurgents, sometimes among persecuted groups, sometimes among friends. In a culture that reveres democracy, the idea of these elites coming together to make their decisions outside of the public eye can often sound rather icky. After all, since pretty early on in our nation’s history, we’ve held transparency to be this prime political virtue.

But we shouldn’t neglect another political virtue: privacy. Elites, ideologues, and politicians are private citizens too. The same way we, as ordinary people, congregate in cliques and circles with their own inside jokes and boundaries, the same holds true for decisionmakers. In the past, elites had gentlemen’s associations, house parties, and private clubs whereby they debated and coordinated on the causes they cared about. This is simply that principle translated into the digital age.

Whenever we talk about how the internet has democratized the information landscape, we often tend to turn all of our focus to social media: this universal public square whereby everyone is constantly seeing and commenting on the same set of issues. But this is really only the tip of the iceberg: by the time you see it on your feed, everything’s already been filtered and preprocessed for you. What the algorithm serves you is downstream from whichever topics and whichever power-users it determines should have the largest voice. Because it’s fundamentally designed in a way that’s constantly selecting for broad appeal and weighing voices based on social status, all voices are not equal. The most viral voices and narratives often require institutional backing to get their legs off the ground. By the time the discussion reaches you, your only role is to act as a simple signal-booster.

If you’re looking to actually “do your own research” or trying to form original ideas, the front-page of Google and whatever your Facebook feed serves you isn’t going to cut it. The voices and narratives that pop up to the front of these often can only do so with institutional backing: the media networks that prop them up often end up pulling from the same sources of information, ideologies, and personnel. You end up with a machine that’s very good at spreading ideas, but not one that’s designed for the development and refinement of new ideas.

Group chats are different: the apps are designed for discussion rather than virality. When you fight, you fight against real people, not an algorithm. Your social status, connections, or credentials doesn’t determine your voice, the quality of your arguments do. The privacy means you argue points not to curate your image, but because you genuinely believe in what you’re saying: you’re allowed much more freedom to openly risk being wrong. Rather than having to rely on checkmarks to know who to trust, you can directly challenge people on the claims they’re making to see if they hold up to scrutiny. Because these chats tend to be relatively small, you, as an individual, have the power to not just boost what someone else says, but actually change the terms of the discussion with original contributions.

There’s an absolute wealth of citations, ideas, and arguments trapped in 600-page books, niche blogposts, and the minds of major industrial and political players: stuff that never makes it to the surface. Group chats allow for the pooling of this information. You might have a specific subject of interest you’re knowledgeable on, and someone else there might have a different topic of interest they’re able to supply insight and specialized knowledge on. You don’t have to be a well-rounded influencer whose mastered the court of public opinion: this side of the internet creates an environment in which even regular nerds would have something to contribute.

Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups. Being part of the right group chat can feel like having a peek at the kitchen of a restaurant but instead of food, messy ideas and gossip fly about in real time, get mixed, remixed, discarded, polished before they show up in a prepared fashion in public…

…Time and time again I’ve seen group chat conversations act as the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion. Like a standup comic workshopping his set in a small club before a big Netflix special, people trial content and ideas, find bonds and you’ll often see narratives and ideas discussed make the jump to X/Twitter and then mainstream discourse.¹

Nearly everything I know and the ideas I’ve been able to showcase on this blog has been possible in large part thanks to group chats. Not places like Chatham House, obviously — but various communities you can find dedicated to bringing togehter people of specific niche worldviews, reading backgrounds, and areas of professional experience to the table.

Over the years, I fell into a bit of a rhythm for developing myself as a writer: I’d read books to gather ideas, test those ideas against other people in the chatrooms, see what does/doesn’t work, and then mentally distill down what seems to work into a fully-fleshed out blogpost. That in turn could be shared for future feedback. Where I see I’m missing knowledge, I’d then go back to reading books and the cycle would repeat. It took time but the results paid off.

Critics will argue that these spaces create “echo chambers” but does every space need to be a neutral forum? The Semafor article compares these chats to debate clubs, but why is that a bad thing?

But I’ve come to think JournoList’s critics were partly right in noticing that these spaces could encourage conformity, and then transform public fora — blogs then, social media now — into pitched battles between well-prepared debate clubs, rather than open conversations.

Sometimes it’s in those more curated spaces that you’ll get more specific information and being able to dig into the weeds of debates that are internal to a specific side/sect. The higher concentration of people with a common interest means you’ll often find people who are more well-read in the nuts-and-bolts of those frameworks and accustomed to conversing at a level beyond just defending the basics to outsiders. These places can act as workshops: of course there’s often boundaries on norms, but circlejerks can emerge in any human community.

Looking at the “public squares” of social media, I’m not particularly convinced they’re any less spaces of radicalization. Literally just spend a couple minutes on Reddit and you can see pretty quickly how the feeds can radicalize brains into quite literally anything from supporting mass suicide to hating dogs. Even on places like Twitter/Bluesky the “open” design can often trap everyone in the same homogenous, platform-wide discourse.

If anything, from my experience these groupchats have acted as a deradicalizing force: you have the ability to see people face-to-face and talk to them. I’ve been able to openly push back against arguments and have a level of control over the spread of communities I’m in that just wasn’t the case with social media. What were previously abstract figures and positions in the media become humanized, as I’m able to engage with these stances one-on-one and see what brings people to believe what they believe. Algorithms don’t provide this.

I think to an extent, the hostility towards these alternative communities comes from those whose profile is most suited to the “open” platforms: those with strong institutional affiliations or those who are comfortable getting their views and talking-points prepackaged for them. There’s an element of status threat from having discussion move to platforms whose logic and incentives exist outside of your sphere of influence. And I think that’s a large part of why we continue to see politicians go after not just social media, but the internet as a whole.

We’re in a political environment where free speech is constantly under attack yet our politicians continue to (on a bipartisan basis) prioritize regulating the internet into submission over every other political issue. The elites in that groupchat came together over their shared hatred of censorship, but now they weaponize it against their opponents. If you don’t like these people, don’t let them be the only ones who get privacy: secure it for yourself.

Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp. There’s a big China-friendly group over on WeChat. Elite podcasters have one.

“It’s the same thing happening on both sides, and I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality,” said the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was for a time a member of a group chat with Andreessen. “If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries.”

But there is no equivalent to the intellectual counterculture that grew up over the last five years on the tech right, and no figure remotely like Andreessen, the towering, enthusiastic 53-year old who co-founded a16z and, before that, invented the modern web browser.

All the benefits these elites get from groupchats, you can get too. It doesn’t have to be restricted to one political faction or one class. It takes time and work, but it’s just one way we can decouple the political process from social media.

https://sriramk.com/group-chats-rule-the-world ↩︎