The more cultural power the internet wields, the more everything on it seems to feel the same. The same discussions and talking points show up on every platform, the same aesthetics (with only minor variations) permeate every corner of the web — even the weird stuff is all weird in the same way. I’m sure you know what I mean. It’s boring, it’s depressing, and it contributes to the widespread pessimism about the possibility that anything can ever change or be improved.
In the early-to-mid existence of the internet, people predicted it would lead to a splintering of culture — society dividing into many interlocking spheres with no centre. Instead, the opposite has happened. Because the internet is now experienced by the majority of people through a handful of massive platforms, we are all trapped in the same impossibly large room together at all times. Everything that gets big enough on a social media platform becomes mainstream.
I wrote about why the internet sucks now and how we can fix it.
Why I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the California condor.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"
https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html
Gibson's answer stuck with me for decades:
What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.
I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.
In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.
There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.
This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.
All this century, I've asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn't happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there's already a luxury brand called "Acne":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acne_Studios
One anti-commodification measure that's worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the "grace period" that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:
There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that "every woman and girl" should be "sent to a gulag" – has had dinner at the White House:
Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become "cool" within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):
As Broderick writes, "cool" isn't just "trends" ("hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration"). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were "begrudgingly canonized" by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today's version of artist management teams is "hype houses." All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: "getting attention."
Which brings Broderick to his main question:
If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?
His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."
For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.
Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.
This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there's nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming is a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert's Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.
But by and large it's not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it's copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:
Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.
Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:
A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as "a copyright rats nest" based on a web series that is "completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms":
Broderick's conclusion is that "as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen," but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.
And here's where Broderick really got me: "the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content."
I make a lot of "unmonetizable content," starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it's always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).
I do this to "woo the muse of the odd," a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling's 1991 keynote for the Game Developers' Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:
https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt
It's a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:
In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!
I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.
It's been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue "finds its own use for things." Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at "following demographics and carefully meeting expectations," thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the "recommodification machine" that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.
“Alpha Males” Are Making Men Lonelier
When fitness influencer Ashton Hall’s absurd morning routine went viral a few weeks ago, I was… moved. The hours-long skincare, gym, and journaling ritual felt like an American Psycho-inspired metrosexual fever dream — one peppered with shocking misogyny and profound loneliness. Hall’s viral moment felt like a tipping in point in “alpha male” influencer culture, or the content ecosystem of men teaching boys what it means to be men. The further down the rabbit hole I went, the weirder it got — and between scammy financial incentives and an authoritarian take on gender, I began to understand why so many of these influencers are Trump supporters, and how they’re teaching their viewers to follow suit. Most disturbing is the message that underpins almost all alpha male content: a life well-lived is one lived alone.
How Epstein Warped the Entire Internet — 04 Mar 2026
Since the release of the Epstein files, we've learned a ton about Epstein's role in the early web. From 4chan to World of Warcraft, to Facebook, and online movements like gamergate and #MeToo, Epstein seems to have played a role in it all.
So how much of our modern internet was shaped by Epstein? I sat down with Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter and host of the Panic World podcast, to uncover how Jeffrey Epstein quietly warped our modern tech landscape. From his early days scrubbing his SEO to his mysterious networking with Silicon Valley elites, Epstein's rise was intertwined with modern platforms, from MySpace to crypto.
We discuss:
How Epstein paid thousands of dollars a month for SEO services and "hacked" Wikipedia to hide his criminal record after his 2008 arrest.
A multi-year editor war over whether Epstein should be included in the notable offender widget on Wikipedia.
He actively explored in-game currencies in World of Warcraft and discussed loot boxes.
Epstein met with 4chan founder "Moot" the day before the infamous /pol/ board was created.
Epstein and Steve Bannon attempted to build a cryptocurrency-funded far-right movement.
The political plot motivated by Epstein's extreme fear of the MeToo movement.
How Epstein infiltrated Silicon Valley, meeting with billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Epstein's role in Palantir and his bizarre eugenics ideology, hoping to breed young women and create a race of super babies.
How Epstein and his elite peers viewed islands and bunkers as a way to outlast climate change without submitting to government regulation.
The tech platforms that promised to transform our attention spans succeeded, but only superficially. They created a new, much worse way of creating culture. A universe of dumbasses talking to other dumbasses, measured by numbers that don’t make sense and don’t reflect anything other than passive screen time. And they managed to convince conservatives to fully buy into this completely fake new reality. Who have only become more convinced in the last five years in their belief that this new kind of attention works like a commodity. That it can be hoarded and monopolized. (It can, but only by the platforms that run it.) That you can hire the biggest idiots you can find, make them transmit your slop from the most important institutions in the world, and as long as it’s as stupid and hateful and ugly as possible, you can trust that the algorithms will do what they’re programmed to. And it will “work” up until the minute we realize it doesn’t and never did.
I know @ryanhatesthis doesn't post much here these days, but if you're Very Online and don't read his Garbage Day newsletter, you're missing out on some good shit.
All of this soul-searching among the mainstream media . . . basically boils down to, “What happened to American men?” Which is a little strange because we know. We’ve known for a decade that the “manosphere” (a term that, at this point, is like trying to define part of the ocean by calling it the “wet zone”) was a problem and yet we still ended up here. Which has led me think that there is a larger unspoken anxiety hanging over all of these election postmortems dropping in increasingly esteemed publications like The New Yorker. One that I had been struggling to articulate up until I interviewed Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman for this week’s Panic World. As Biederman so succinctly put it, at some point between the first Trump administration and the second, “Article World” was defeated by “Post World”.
As he sees it, “Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls, bloggers, and, of course, podcasters. And now huge publications and news channels are finally noticing that Article World, with all its money and resources and prestige, has been reduced to competing with random posts that both voters and government officials happen to see online. These features are not just asking, “what happened to American men?” They’re asking, “why can’t we influence American men the way we used to?”
. . .
But Article World is dying, or maybe already dead, and Post World is ascendant. And it’s not just a political problem. It’s impacting music, fashion, celebrity, law, economics — I could go on and on here. We’ve replaced the largely one-way street of mass media with not even just a two-way street of mass media and the internet, like we had in the 2010s, but an infinitely expanding intersection of cars that all think they have the right of way. Think about it for a second. When was the last time you truly felt consensus? Not in the sense that a trend was happening around you — although, was it? — but a new fact or bit of information that felt universally agreed upon? Was it in the last two years? Was it this decade? And the most skilled and seasoned journalists in this country can continue to try to win that back. To use journalism to shift public perception and hold the powerful to account. An admirable and necessary endeavor. But unless the very architecture of the internet changes, it’s likely whatever they write will end up as just another post.
