In case you haven’t noticed, China’s soft power has arrived firmly on American soil. For months, my American friends have been posting videos unboxing Labubus as part of the craze around the Chinese toy brand PopMart. I recently attended the American debut of China’s Starbucks rival, Luckin Coffee, at its flagship location in Manhattan. And for many months, Americans have been ogling over TikToks of Chongqing city scenes and raving about the Chinese video game Black Myth: Wukong, based on China’s monkey king legend (also pictured above, with Ronald McDonald). Perennial arguments that China lacked soft power—often made in contrast to Korea’s K-pop or Japan’s video games—have now been thoroughly debunked. Chinese culture is here and Americans like it. American culture, of course, is also beloved by Chinese consumers: American music, movies, brands, and tourists have been warmly received during my visits to China over the years.

The two economies are deeply interdependent. Despite its push for domestic consumption, China remains an export-driven economy, while America relies on inexpensive Chinese manufacturing (especially with looming inflation). And the connection runs deeper: each country holds the key to the other’s technologic future. America depends on Chinese rare earth minerals for defense and manufacturing, just as China depends on U.S. microchips and semiconductor technology for AI (via USA’s Nvidia, USA-IP driven ASML, and West-aligned TSMC). But there’s a warning here for Americans: China is both making progress on its indigenous chip manufacturing and becoming less dependent on exports to America. America erstwhile hopes to develop its rare earth output.

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Beginning in earnest in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping, China adopted America’s market liberalism which led to an explosion of prosperity and lifted millions out of poverty. This is a miracle of capitalism worth celebrating, especially as it marked a long-overdue course correction from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward. Yet liberal economic reforms were never matched by civic liberalization. The Communist Party maintained strict authoritarian control, which has only deepened as technological progress bolsters its capacity for surveillance.

The USA too is learning lessons from China, but they are all the wrong ones. Alas, the American people voted (albeit narrowly) for an American political system much closer to China’s. Everyday, we witness news from Washington that would feel more familiar in Beijing.

America has a new foreign policy of ruthless realpolitik: abandoning the decades of democratic allies based on shared values and the rules-based order, opting instead for Beijing-style transactional relationships. We neglect our traditional democratic allies in Europe and NATO and instead heap praise on strongmen in Moscow, Pyongyang, Beijing, Riyadh, and Jerusalem. Once a defender of state sovereignty in Ukraine and the South China Sea, America has since taken up its own desire for conquest (or at minimum, spheres of influence) in Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Just as China looked the other way when its ally Russia invaded Ukraine, so too America tolerated Israeli incursions into Syria, its planned resettlement of Gazans, and its further settlement of the West Bank.

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Domestically, our policies increasingly echo China’s authoritarian toolkit. We ban entry or expel legal immigrants and visitors based on past social media posts and newspaper editorials. State-aligned media is becoming central to U.S. news consumption, while independent professional journalism is sidelined (e.g., the AP punished for declining to adopt “Gulf of America”). Tucker Carslon, Joe Rogan, and the All-in Podcast hosts each fashion themselves as contrarian outsiders yet they dominate the market and their hosts and guests are often regime members, ex-officials, megadonors, and allies. Twitter remains dominant for real time news while it too is run by a former appointee (albeit one who has fallen out of favor) and deboosts professional journalists or those linking to journalism. Populist influencers (on the Left and Right) like Tim Pool and Brenden Dilley are invited to White House press briefings to ask questions that paint the administration in a favorable light, meanwhile gullible podcaster “citizen journalists” are paraded at the White House (eg, brandishing binders of vapid “Epstein Files,” feigning transparency).

The regime’s ire isn’t just focused on the journalists. All independent power centers are under attack. Our Ivy League universities—flawed but still the envy of the world—now face relentless legal assaults under the Trump regime, targeting campus speech, admissions, and faculty appointments. CBS and Columbia bend the knee, while the AP and Harvard resist. Like Mao, Trump vilifies scholarly institutions as the “elite” and seeks to install regime loyalists and oust political enemies. Those who resist face endless lawsuits and threats.

Likewise, American industry is increasingly expected to show public fealty. Tech giants grovel with tribute to Trump’s inauguration and Coinbase infamously sponsored a Beijing-style military parade. Industries and companies are rewarded for fealty (eg, Paramount paid a $16M settlement to Trump ahead of its merger and has been likened to a “bribe”), while those who oppose face relentless attacks from the Executive branch (eg, Disney was also battered into a settlement). The Trump administration is engaged in Beijing-style purges (the most recent being the State Department and Intelligence services, and next perhaps the Fed Chair), ever suspicious of betrayals or imperfect allegiance to the Ruler. America’s immigration enforcers are sweeping people off the streets by masked men to be whisked away to prison camps in El Salvador or to hostile home countries with little due process. Meanwhile, the USA is reverting to Chinese-style cultural conservatism too, erasing the names and celebration of figures from historically underrepresented or marginalized groups (eg, Harvey Milk and Mount Denali) while glorifying political allies, “traditional” families, and the majoritarian ethnicity, language, and religion.

It's a shame that these are the lessons the USA is learning from China, because in other ways, China really could be a positive example for the United States. China has the world’s best factories where one worker manages multiple robots, unlocking massive scale and working up the value chain to precision manufacturing. Meanwhile, the Trump administration bans the automation of American ports. China provides vast funding for education, the sciences, and renewables, producing more high quality peer-reviewed research than the USA and EVs that are better and cheaper than anything available anywhere else. Trump shutters the Department of Education, makes indiscriminate cuts to the sciences, espouses endless falsehoods about renewable energy, and subsidizes the coal industry. Instead of emulating China’s incredible nationwide transportation infrastructure from trains to tunnels to bridges to roadways, the Trump Department of Transportation fights New York’s subway funding because it disfavors cars.

The disparagement of China by Trump is inconsistent with the Trump administration’s revealed preference of an American system more like China’s. It’s also in contrast to our two countries obvious interdependence and cultural affinity for each other. And despite theatric displays of criticism for China, Trump still heaps praise on its authoritarian leadership, is uncritical on the valid topics of human rights or territorial expansionism, is endlessly delaying the bipartisan ban of TikTok, and ceding entire industries to China (solar, EVs, robotic manufacturing, basic science research, vaccines). The USA of yesteryear fashioned itself as a shining “city on a hill” on such core principles as individual liberties, responsible statecraft, the balance of power, and rule of law. These were once cherished, sacrosanct values of Americans across political divides, yet now they are fading away. Many Americans will miss them when they are gone, yet it is difficult to restore freedoms once they have been forfeited.

It bears remembering that America still retains some institutional heft, albeit diminished. While this is of little solace to those of us who have depressingly watched the steady decay with the rise of populism in the 2010s, it is still real and meaningful to those, for example, who have found refuge in American from a true totalitarian regime. We still have elections and can say most anything and live how we please. And there remain real power centers in universities and media that haven’t yet buckled under the authoritarian boot of the regime. Both Harvard and the Wall Street Journal are in battles with the Trump administration to preserve their institutional integrity. Yet the fact that they have to fight for survival against their own government is the point, and their success will rely on the impartiality of one of the final bulwarks in government: the judiciary.

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America isn’t a lost cause, but it has been doing a lot of losing. To win again, American should return to its foundational civics and alliances, but that’s only half the battle. Just as China looked to the US to liberalize its economy and deliver prosperity to its people, the US should learn from China’s industriousness, infrastructure, and modern cities to deliver on the promise of the future.

Alas, the season has changed, and I find myself yearning for stories that celebrate the strong moral righeousness of heroes like Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, and William Wallace. This change in preference stems from a personal aversion to society's moral decay. Foundational civic values that America was built on—democracy, peaceful transfer of power, equal justice under the law—are in various stages of debasement. While I once firmly believed in democracy’s self-righting capacity, I now see too many smart people choosing the path of von Hindenburg (the German president persuaded to appoint Hitler) rather than von Ossietzky (the German Nobel laureate who resisted).

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The real world protégés of yesteryear’s fictional charismatic villains now threaten to overrun our government. Donald Trump is Tony Soprano, Steve Bannon is Paulie Cicero, and Vladimir Putin is Vito Corleone. Vito’s son Michael once tried to dismiss concerns about his crime boss father by explaining: “My father’s no different from any other powerful man. Any man who’s responsible for other people. Like a senator or president.”

I prefer a world where presidential candidates are starkly different from mob bosses, and until that time, you can find me re-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In short: I bought the top three globes on Amazon1 when using the search term “globe for kids” and then meticulously studied them to see what they taught.

When I set out to write this essay, I imagined I’d make a table contrasting the differing territorial claims from the three different globes. However, when the globes arrived and I began to study them, I was struck that the contentious claims were all identical. In fact, two of three globes were exactly identical, just sold under different brand listings on Amazon. The listed brand of one of the globes (“Rrshnsgv”) seems to be made up gibberish and was identical to the globe branded by “VAP.” However, it was the third globe from “the Waldauge Store” that was awarded the prized “Amazon’s Choice,” and it did feel higher quality with a glossy finish and additional details that the two twin globes lacked.

So, what is the country of origin of these three top-listed “globes for kids” with perfect doctrinal territorial consistency and one of which is promoted as “Amazon’s Choice”? I was curious too, but alas Amazon does not list where their products are made. Such a policy is perhaps defensible when you are buying tube socks or an anime figurine. But globes—moreover globes intended to teach children—are quite sensitive, as the geopolitical worldview of the country where the globe is made may differ considerably from where the customer lives.

The country these three globes were made in, of course, was China. China is a manufacturing powerhouse and has some of the most efficient, innovative, and productive factories in the world. America, and the world, has benefitted immensely from China’s manufacturing prowess, effectively giving a raise to families worldwide by making quality products that are more affordable than competitors. Yet, as we all learned during the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: some goods are too sensitive for overseas production. No country should feel secure if their face masks, gasoline, or ammunition are being monopolized by another country, let alone a revisionist adversary.

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But before considering the implications of outsourcing childhood educational material to China, let’s look at the claims made by these three globes. Again, the claims between the three globes are consistent and identical, which makes sense given China’s rigorous enforcement of its “official” map, both at home and overseas.

All the maps include Taiwan as part of China. In fact, they don’t even call the country “Taiwan,” instead opting for “Taiwan Tao” (台湾岛) meaning “Taiwan Island,” and mirroring the name for “Hainan Dao” (an island actually part of China). Similarly, “Tiaoyu Tao” is the Chinese name for the Senkaku Islands, which in reality are administered by Japan. The uninhabited Senkakus are so tiny, that their inclusion on a 6-inch globe for children can only be explained by rigid adherence to doctrinal propaganda. Tibet is missing from the globe despite being more than 100,000x the size of the Senkakus.

The maps all contain China’s infamous “Nine Dash Line,” which is a swooping territorial claim to nearly all of the South China Sea including islands and waters claimed (and variably administered) by eight other countries. In fact, a UN tribunal ruled in the Philippines’ favor when arbitration was brought against China’s “Nine Dash Line” claim to Philippine islands. The western border of China on each globe also includes bits of territory controlled by India, like Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh.

Outside of China’s own territorial claims, the three globes make consistent assertions that ranged from revisionist to, at best, dubious or incomplete. A list of what I noticed:

• The capital of Ukraine is spelled the Russian “Kiev” instead of the Ukrainian “Kyiv.”

• Kosovo simply ceases to exist on the map as a country at all, instead disappearing into Serbia.2

• Kashmir is shown as separate from either India or Pakistan with a different color and dashed-line border (it is currently divided and administered by India and Pakistan)

• Falkland Islands are listed as “Claimed by Arg & U.K.” (they are currently administered as a British Overseas Territory)

• Israel and Palestine are both listed over an undivided territory that is in fact the combination of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. No capital is listed for either, and Israel is shown to not include the Golan Heights territory that it administers and is disputed by Syria (and most other countries)

• The Kuril Islands, some of which are claimed by Japan, are all granted to Russia (Russia currently administers these islands). The point is driven home by a sharp dividing dash between Japan and their claimed islands… a distinction that must be quite important to the map makers!

This is an incomplete list of contentious or revisionist assertions on these globes, but the point isn’t about enumerating each, but instead about how America is permitting another country (that happens to be an adversary) to direct the geopolitical education of its children. I generally agree with the perspective that China punches well below its weight when it comes to exporting its soft power (e.g., Noah Smith described: “its artistic and cultural influence is practically nil”), while smaller open societies like Korea and Japan are able to evangelize their culture abroad with pop music, movies, and soap operas. However, what this perspective misses is how China is able to leverage its manufacturing prowess and giant domestic markets to export its worldview regardless of its absence in global pop culture.

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And, consider that my story of the three globes is emblematic of the numerous P.R.C. influence campaigns, which frequently rely on a willing U.S. tech partner. Amazon, a U.S. tech giant, is vital to China’s successful propagandizing of cheap globes to American kids. It doesn’t display the country of origin for their products, it labels globes displaying revisionist propaganda as “Amazon’s Choice,” and ranks them in all the highest spots when searching. And admittedly, the globes are good quality and remarkably cheap—so likely a lot of Amazon customers who don’t care about geopolitics are very satisfied with their purchases.

Many American tech giants are enablers of Beijing’s propaganda, whether it is the “spamouflage” operation on Twitter/X, Apple removing Taiwan’s flag emoji from domestic Chinese iPhones, or even Google Maps itself. And, despite the impressive doctrinal obedience of these tech companies and their willingness to propagandize for profit, none (with the exception of Apple) are even accessible within China. Twitter is banned, TikTok is banned, Google is banned… even Google Translate is banned. Thus, it is the desire for domestic American profit paired with the evanescent promise of a giant Chinese market that is sufficient to produce the doctrinal obedience (or at least placation) on display by Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, Google, Apple, Amazon and beyond.

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While I disagree with many of the claims made on these globes, I actually agree with others (like Syria’s claim to the Golan Heights, or the status of Kashmir). And, I continue to believe that Americans (and the world generally) benefits from the globalization and supply chain specialization that led to the rise of China. But there are limits: the unfortunate pairing between the profit motivation of companies in free countries and the revisionism of an ascendent country with formidable manufacturing results in a loss of the educational sovereignty owed to countries themselves, their localities, and the families living there. Countries need to develop a thoughtful approach to which goods are appropriate for overseas production and which are just too sensitive. And, tech companies must consider values besides profit when operating in these sensitive domains.

As a reminder, Kosovo is an under-recognized country of mostly ethnic Albanian Muslims that declared its independence from Serbia after a 2008 intervention by NATO intended to prevent ethnic cleansing by the Serbs. Serbia considers Kosovo part of its own territory. Serbia and its claim to Kosovo have historically been backed by Russia, however this backing has waned as Russia became entrenched in its war in Ukraine. All the while, both Serbia and Kosovo are seeking membership in the EU, and the EU has predicated any membership on mutual recognition between the two countries.

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In 2023 the two countries initially faced escalating tensions followed by early rapprochement, while both continue to draw closer to the West. Tensions peaked in April, when Kosovo held municipal elections that were boycotted by ethnic Serbs. This boycott then resulted in ethnic Albanians being elected to govern even the ethnic Serbian parts of Northern Kosovo, which led to violent protests between the ethnic Serbs and NATO (“KFOR”) peacekeepers. The EU has maintained pressure on Serbia to normalize relations with Kosovo, and there are some early signs that this is bearing fruit. For example, Serbia has agreed to recognize license plates from Kosovo so that their citizens can travel between the countries. Meanwhile, the EU has permitted Kosovo to join the Schengen visa-free travel zone. Both countries seek to align with the West, and the West rewards peaceful normalization with the promise of greater integration.

Armenia and Azerbaijan face a similar situation, as both have historically had ties to Russia, but these have faltered as Russia is bogged down by their adventurism in Ukraine. Armenia has made the most dramatic change, shifting alliances to the West and distancing itself from Russia after it was the USA rather than Russia that came to its aid following Azeri incursions into Armenia in 2021. In a sign of Armenia’s shifting alliances, this year alone it sent aid to Ukraine, began military drills with the USA, and refused participation in the CSTO (Russia’s version of NATO).

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However, Russia’s waning influence and Armenia’s warming to the West was seen as an opportunity by Azerbaijan. Russia has historically protected an autonomous population of ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh territory. With Russia’s protection in doubt, Azeri forces led a crackdown on the Nagorno-Karabakh region, leaving hundreds dead and tens of thousand more fleeing their historic homeland for Armenia. The unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic announced its dissolution and Armenia accused Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing.

Yet in the aftermath of this upheaval, Armenia-Azerbaijan relations may unexpectedly have a chance at stability. The heads of state of each country recently indicated support for a tentative peace treaty that could represent the end to their three decades of conflict. This would be a major blow to Russia, which thrived on the chaos between the countries, playing them off against each other and fostering their security dependence. Likewise, the normalization of relations between a West-leaning Armenia and Azerbaijan also isolates Iran, which regards Azerbaijan as a “lost province” to be returned by force, and could help cool relations between Azeri-aligned Turkey and Armenia, which have been fraught due to the Armenian genocide. In sum, peaceful co-existence and normalization between Armenia and Azerbaijan could come in 2024 and would be a welcome point of calm in a world of escalating tensions.

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Last year, I highlighted Haiti and the Solomon Islands as two countries that once shared a common peculiarity: both had formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than China, highlighting the strong Western alignment of the two countries. This happy coincidence ended in 2021, when the Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister switched allegiances to China, leading to violent protests in his country and dissent from lower level officials on the sparsely populated island. Yet the country reaped rewards: China made huge infrastructure investments ahead of the Solomon Islands’ 2023 Pacific Games, granted loans for cell towers, and (most concerning to Western powers) inked a secretive security pact replacing the islands’ prior security assistance from Australia. This pivot to China demonstrates Beijing’s desire to gain a military and economic foothold in the Pacific that has traditionally been aligned with the West.

In 2023, Western countries tried to re-establish a presence in the Solomon Islands, but in many instances the China-aligned Prime Minister resisted: even the US’s planned re-opening of the Peace Corps has been mired in delays to placate China and to convince their population of neglect by the West. Yet, the Prime Minister has relented in other instances: after stating that he would not allow China to open a military base on the islands, the United States agreed to re-open its embassy and provide other aid. And alas this is all coming to a head, as the pro-China Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands is facing re-election in early 2024 (having already delayed the election from 2023) on an anti-Western platform and amid accusations that corruption with China is shoring up his cling to power.

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Of all the countries I mentioned last year, the situation in Haiti has had the fewest developments, as the country continues to be overrun by gangs following the 2021 assassination of the President. Many of these gangs have affiliations with government officials themselves, who have in turn faced sanctions by the US and Canada. Meanwhile in the midst of natural disasters, the Haitian government (currently led by the Prime Minister following the President’s assassination) has pled for international intervention, and the UN Security Council has agreed to send a multinational security force. The United States continues to be the largest contributor of humanitarian aid to Haiti, yet a near term prospects for stability appear fraught.

Each of these geopolitical flashpoints are immensely revealing of the great power struggle between the US-led allies and the China-led axis. While the Armenia-Azerbaijan and Serbia-Kosovo flashpoints seem to underscore the gravitational pull of Western prosperity and neoliberal norms, a wayward Solomon Islands highlights China’s growing ambitions and influence, and a chaotic Haiti reflects the limits of Western and NGO-mediated stability. Overshadowing this are the obvious conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, and the prospect of a truly massive war should China choose to invade Taiwan. If that wasn’t enough, so much hangs in the balance on elections in 2024: not just in the Solomon Islands, but in Taiwan where independence-maintaining and China-leaning candidates clash, and in America where an aspiring autocrat is likely to face off with an unpopular but successful moderate incumbent in a contest that will have reverberations for democracy around the world.

But putting aside all the reasons for cynicism (and my shared long shot desire for things like a total victory for Ukraine), what could a geopolitical soft landing look like?

Beginning with Ukraine, a soft landing would require a few crucial elements. Ukraine would have to make painful concessions of territory, and in exchange be given true security reassurances by ascending into NATO. While short of the total victory for Ukraine that I too would celebrate, Ukrainians still have much to be proud of: an assertion of their national identity, a valiant defense of their territory against one of the most fearsome militaries in the world (at least at the time of invasion), aligning much of the Western and free world behind their cause, delivering a massive rebuke for Russia (I’d argue, a true loss for Russia militarily and economically) despite some territorial gains, and perhaps achieving long-sought EU and NATO membership.

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What I am trying to convey is that Ukraine should be able to feel proud of their performance in the war and secure with a NATO ascension despite a neighboring aggressor. If this can also be acceptable to Ukrainians, then a soft landing is possible.

US-China relations have also enjoyed a momentary respite on the heels of APEC in San Francisco, where Xi and Biden met and China’s state media noticeably warmed to the United States. Even Biden’s offhand remark that Xi is as “a dictator” has been downplayed or ignored by China state media, conveying a desire to thaw relations. Military-to-military communications have also been restored, after China had severed them to retaliate against Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Xi even has signaled that China will send new pandas to the United States, remarking that the pandas serve as “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.” As China’s economy contracts and Western businesses flee crackdowns, there seems to be ample enthusiasm for a normalized relationship with the United States.

A soft landing in US-China relations would require that Beijing accept Taiwan’s continued de facto independence (even if it prefers to label it as a “renegade province”). An invasion of Taiwan, of course, would end any goodwill and could spark a third World War, not to mention an economic catastrophe given the global dependence on Taiwan for microchips and the major shipping corridor in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan’s domestic politics also is presenting some opportunities for a soft landing with China. Taiwan’s current ruling party, the DPP, is often thought of as more independence-minded in contrast to the more China-friendly KMT. Taiwan has an election in January, and the DPP has enjoyed a healthy lead due to an opposition split between the KMT and the new TPP, but these two opposition parties are in the midst of talks to combine their candidacy in a way that would much better position themselves to defeat the incumbent DPP, thus reassuring China of a more friendly government in Taiwan.

Yet just as Ukraine needs NATO ascension to make a soft landing durable, Taiwan needs continued US military support in the form of arms sales, grants, and assurances of US direct intervention (with ambiguity calibrated to the China’s threat of invasion). A challenge is that such support would be in defiance of Xi’s request to Biden at the APEC summit that the US “stop arming Taiwan.” A soft landing would require Taiwan’s acceptance to remain an under-recognized country, China’s acceptance of Taiwan’s de facto independence, and the United States’ acceptance of the responsibility to aid Taiwan’s defense.

The final component is the war in Gaza. As I’ve described previously, the terrorism of Hamas on October 7th was horrifying and Gaza is now being invaded by Israel in order to destroy the terror group that has governed the territory. Hamas’ terror is inexcusable, yet to understand the full context of the Israel-Palestine conflict requires a lot of nuance and complexity around issues such as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own efforts to empower Hamas in Gaza in order to create divisions between that territory and the Fatah-ruled West Bank, inexcusable settler incursions into the West Bank, and the Netanyahu administration’s legitimization of religious extremists and settlers into his government. And beyond the Levant, you must consider Iran-backed militias in Syria and Lebanon that are constant antagonists to peace in Israel.

As the war wages on, it is premature to presume what a soft landing would look like here, especially as Israel has essentially been at a state of on-and-off war since its founding in 1948. Yet despite the terrible events of October 7th and the tumult of the war in Gaza, these same events create a window (however narrow) for a peaceful resolution. The most feasible peaceful resolution remains the two state solution, where Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank achieve formal statehood beside the neighboring state of Israel, with some sort of shared jurisdiction of Jerusalem. This war has plummeted the support of Prime Minister Netanyahu, making his removal (and thus a major obstacle to a two state solution) suddenly feasible. Likewise, the removal of the Hamas terror regime in Gaza can help bring about a two state solution, especially if it allows unified governance with the West Bank and an international effort rebuilding Gaza. The United States should use leverage that it has with Israel to push it to accept the necessity of Palestinian statehood. Despite the war raging on, the Biden administration has already indicated that this is the necessary outcome: a “real” Palestinian state must come after the war.

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If it were up to me, Ukraine would recover all of its territory, Taiwan would sit on the UN Security Council, and Israel and Palestine would have a relationship similar to that of the USA and Canada. However I still find this soft landing an acceptable outcome that avoids a world war while returning the world to a mostly peaceful co-existence. Despite the chaos of the current moment, it presents some opportunities to course correct and achieve durable peace.

Indeed, this has long been called “Horseshoe Theory”: an idea by French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye that as those at the far right and left become more extreme, they begin to resemble each other more closely. In particular, both the far left and far right eventually become advocates for authoritarianism, as it becomes clear that there exists no peaceful or democratic means to achieve their goals.

I’ve made a related argument in the past in my essay on institutional alignment (video presentation here). There, I argue that while the traditional left and right may disagree on economic or social issues, they have emerged as allies in the current political moment where a more upstream question dominates: are the prevailing Western institutions credible or not? This helps explain the sudden emergence of once unthinkable allies between stalwart leftists like Noam Chomsky or Cornell West, with zealous rightists like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump. In times gone by, these two groups would be bitter domestic rivals, but in the current age of an institutional crisis of confidence, they are loyal allies aligned against the institutional hegemons of the West. Likewise, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Cheney are traditional rivals on domestic economic and social issues. But these issues have receded in importance as their upstream concern to defend Western institutions has taken precedence.

Consider these institutional questions: Is NATO a force for deterence and stability, or are they an aggressor that drew Russia into war against Ukraine? Do the New York Times or BBC generally do a good job speaking truth to power, or are they essentially the State’s propaganda machine akin to Russia’s RT or China’s Global Times? Do Western doctors and scientists generally have the best interests of the population in mind, or are they power-obsessed manipulators hoping to subjugate a free people into docile state-servants?

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The answers to these questions don’t respect a left vs right axis. Instead, both left and right institutionalists support NATO, professional journalists, and scientists while anti-institutionalists on the left and right join forces to oppose them.

Consider again the geopolitical version of the horseshoe theory. Luis Wenus’ graphic examined this in the context of current crises (Israel/Palestine, and Russia/Ukraine). I decided to add a critical third axis: China/Taiwan. With this more complete picture in mind, let’s consider how someone on the Far Right or Far Left arrives at their shared conclusion: to support Russia, China, and Palestine against Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.

Let’s start with the left. Mainstream leftist thought is anti-imperialist. They correctly identify the horrors of Western imperialism, of which there are numerous examples: mistreatment of Native Americans, the slave trade, subjugation and colonization by the British and other European powers, etc. But in the mind of the Far Left, the historic imperialists (the Americans, the Europeans) are to be opposed to such an extreme, that the current imperialism of China (eg, in Tibet, Xinjiang, SCS) or Russia (eg, in Georgia, Ukraine, Chechnya) is suddenly justified if it weakens the West. For the Far Left, the West are the permanent imperialists of history, and thus when the anti-Western nations start rolling tanks into neighboring countries’ territory (objectively imperialist), it is excusable or even laudable.

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Now, let’s look at the right. Mainstream rightist thought in the United States has always had a strong isolationist or anti-interventionist streak. Indeed, it’s true that the United States and allies have made plenty of errors historically when it came to intervening in places like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan resulting in horrors for the local populations while simultaneous harming the position of these Western powers themselves. Just like with the Far Left’s anti-imperialism, the Far Right takes this reasonable principle of non-interventionism to such an extreme where they become advocates for the growing power and dominance of our geopolitical adversaries up to the moment that they’ve amassed enough power to bring their military to our doorstep. Those on the far right insist that America’s true enemies are domestic, that our focus should be on our own culture wars, and even that Russia and China are admirable for their cultural chauvinism and ethnic homogeneity.

The left’s anti-imperialism and the right’s anti-interventionism are serious ideas rooted in important lessons from recent history. Yet, when taken to extremes, they undermine the very principles they purport to advocate. The Far Left becomes so anti-imperialist so as to support the imperialism of China and Russia, while the Far Right becomes so anti-interventionist so as to accommodate the growing military power of Russia and China for a future confrontation with the West. Furthermore, both the Far Left and Far Right misunderstand Russian and Chinese culture and daydream about their moral or cultural superiority to the West. On the Far Left, they falsely glorify Russia and China as true attempts at Communist utopias. On the Far Right, they falsely glorify Russia and China as trad chauvinist mono-ethnic utopias. And in each case, support for Palestine at the extremes really has little to do with the worthy goal of Palestinian self-determination, but instead with the sadly familiar anti-Semitism on the Far Left and Right. The Far Right justifies anti-Semitism based on “ethnic impurity” and conspiracy theories. The Far Left swaps these out for guilt-by-association with the State of Israel, and academic theories. For these two groups that purport to be rooted in opposing worldviews, they have done remarkably well at arriving at exactly the same abominable conclusions.

Our current societal moment has been likened to a “new 1970s” by writer and economist Noah Smith, and fittingly there is a new subculture with a similar transgression feedback loop that I will call “ex-Dimes Square culture,” named after the New York City microneighborhood where it began in 2020. Dimes Square is just a few subway stops away from the origin of punk rock in Manhattan’s East Village. The Dimes Square neighborhood is notoriously over-analyzed: it’s the subject of countless exposés relative to its small triangle of streets, restaurants, and handful of microcelebrities. To summarize, Dimes Square is an unofficial microneighborhood in Chinatown that from 2020 to 2021 incubated its own reputation of (depending on who you ask) either post-political avant garde cognoscenti, or less charitably as fashionably ironic reactionaries. It’s a subculture that its members themselves are sometimes uneasy being associated with, as an attendant at a local Kabbalah-specialized bookstore told me that even the purveyors of the “Dimes” restaurant (after which the square is named) prefer not to use this moniker and instead opt for the official title of “Chinatown.”

The Dimes Square scene has several defining characters and a self-referential mythology. There is actress Dasha Nekrasova of the contrarian “Red Scare” podcast and her various appearances in liberal-minded press (the New York Times commented on her newfound Catholicism in a piece describing an emerging “contrarian aesthetic [and] its embrace of Catholicism”, and the New Yorker on a party she attended with the pardoned felon and Trump acolyte Roger Stone), and there’s Sophia Vanderbilt who is a very-online socialite who contributed to the Milady Maker NFTs, there’s the defunct indie newspaper the “Drunken Canal” referring to nearby Canal Street, and the schizophrenic-stlye blog of angelicism01 known for such posts as “Somebody Please Columbine The Entire Drunken Canal Editorial Staff,” and writer Honor Levy and casting director Walter Pearce who together hosted the “Wet Brain” podcast.

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The Dimes Square scene peaked amidst 2020 lockdown breaking parties, but as rent prices increased post-Covid (even a luxury hotel opened), many of the creative types central to the scene moved back to Brooklyn. Some cultural commentators even declared the movement dead. The reality is that Dimes Square was always a fusion of neighborhood and internet culture, and as the neighborhood gentrified, the online portion became the dominant component. In fact, my estimation is that the online “ex-Dimes Square” culture has far surpassed the impact the neighborhood itself. This leap from the microneighborhood to the viral and constantly metamorphosing online art movement is the basis of this essay.

Even this whirlwind tour of Dimes Square highlights a few of the themes from this emergent subculture. Irreverence and transgression are crucial: Red Scare and angelicism01 make liberal use of the pejorative “retarded” seemingly just to remind you that they aren’t beholden to prevailing norms. Red Scare co-hosts ironically call each other “fascists” and adulate various authoritarians, but meanwhile have immense cultural fluency--discussing the Freudian themes of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion or recent political events (eg, the “CNN Clown Hall”). There is an ironic religious adherence, especially to Catholicism. Converts to Catholicism brandish it as “my Catholic arc,” or being “God-pilled.” The anonymous anglecism01 blog that called for the “Columbine”-ing of editorial staffers uses a quintessential “schizoid” style that, while enthralling and poetic, can also feel inaccessible. The subculture is also extremely self-referential: there is a small cast of characters that are constantly being self-cited as if to reinforce their own “lore” or neighborhood mythology.

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Angelicism01 is most renown for popularizing the “vibe shift” neologism, which referred to a few days in June 2021 where its proponents assert there was a cultural shift not only in their Dimes Square scene, but also across the internet. Indeed, the Remilia Collective (behind Milady Maker and other art projects) described the vibe shift as a “contemporary phenomenon of radical pivots in culture self-organized almost instantly and without a single specific catalyst by small groups of intimately engaged posters--a phenomena only possible in the network era.” The vibe shift was subsequently reported by major media outlets (eg, New York Magazine’s The Cut), causing the Dimes Square microcelebrities to bristle at the attention while simultaneously jockeying over who was and wasn’t cited and the precise dates the vibe shift happened.

The Remilia Collective is best known for its Milady Maker NFT collection from the summer of 2021, which has been the source of adoring fans and waves of controversy and cancellation following the familiar punk rock transgression feedback loop. Milady NFTs are cute anime profile pictures that flirt with transgression by, for example, ironically referencing 9-11 or the Japanese “hikikomori” concept of incel culture. The images may appear lighthearted and simplistic at first glance, but there is tremendous depth to the project. For example, angelicism01 (ever the spiritual inspiration of ex-Dimes Square culture) analyzed the Milady project in the context of Landian accelerationism.

Apart from the images themselves, there is a thriving internet culture of posters who “wear” the Milady profile picture and seek virality (often successfully), brigade posts, and post ironically in the voice of the girl in their profile picture. Members have a certain affection for their various “cancellations” over the years, ironically self-identifying as a “pedo groomer pro-anorexia death cult,” though their disposition to these domains seems mostly performative and self-mythologizing. Although it may not be immediately obvious to the casual web surfer, this is a kind of online performance art acting as an extension of the image collection.

Rather than dwell on the Milady NFTs (like Dimes Square, too much has already been written), there is a more recent derivative work called SchizoPosters that advances new concepts in this constantly evolving subculture. SchizoPosters follow the same general aesthetic of the Milady NFTs, but feature overlaid text and diagrams that draw heavily from conspiracy theories, the occult, infamous 4chan copypastas, and self-referential lore from the various Discord servers and other enclaves where this culture is incubated. These texts and diagrams are overlaid in their defining schizoid aesthetic, as if part of a conspiracist’s white board, drawing frenzied arrows between imagined concepts and events. For example one such SchizoPoster has a schematic of an MP5 machine gun in the right corner, the entire left side covered with a web of arrows connecting concepts of the occult (“Church of Satan,” “L. Ron Hubbard,” “Ark of the Covenant”) and conspiracies (“Area 51,” “vaccines,” “Monsanto,” “Reptilians,” “Black Goo”), including some clearly transgressive references (“Protocols of the Elders of Zion”), and the right side with various 4chan and reddit copypastas (“A Girl AND a Gamer? …”).

The schizoid aesthetic of these images is enthralling and each one is an invitation to fall down a rabbit hole uncovering a trove of lore from scattered dark corners of the internet. Many images also lean into East Asian themes, with overlaid text in Chinese or Japanese. In fact, the East Asian theme becomes a central focus in the most recent iteration of this subculture, called “Based Retard Gang” or #𝔅ℜ𝔊. Rather than don a Milady or SchizoPoster profile picture, these posters take on the persona of an actual Chinese girl, usually borrowing pictures from the Chinese social media site Xiaohongshu (“Little Red Book,” 小红书). Whereas with SchizoPosters the art is in the image, BRG is entirely an online performance art. Posts again are primed for virality by making wild claims (“China is 3,000 years ahead of the West” with a stylized video of Chongqing borrowed from TikTok) or norm-breaking (a video from Xinjiang with, “There is no genocide, just LOVE”). Almost programmatically, these posts attract viral infamy (the “3,000 years” post is at 25 million views and was picked up by anti-CCP accounts) thanks to amplification from outraged “normies” sparring with brigading community members.

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Another theme popularized by the Based Retard Gang is the concept of the “clear pill.” You may have come across the popular Matrix reference of “choosing the red pill or the blue pill,” referring to the choice between seeing reality as it is (“red”) or the comforting naivety of the world that is presented to us (“blue”). The clear pill is a radical acceptance of societal chaos, considered by its proponents to be a more enlightened perspective than those who maintain worldly concerns. This embrace of chaos, paired with futuristic orientalism, is the basis for BRG-style accelerationism.

Accelerationism is a recurring theme in ex-Dimes Square thinking, as it was foundational to the Remilia Corporation (specifically kali-yuga accelerationism, or “kali/acc”), and similarly ascribed to angelicism01. Accelerationism has many varieties, but one popular version is the idea that the only way to overcome our current (“fourth turning” or “black pill”) societal breakdown is through a devastating calamity on the order of the nuclear bombs in WWII or the US Civil War. These accelerationists don’t just accept the inevitability of such a calamity, but push to bring it about more rapidly so that we can “exit” to the tech utopia on the other side. Other accelerationists focus less on “exit via calamity,” and instead see tech advancement as messianic, ushering in the Singularity. For the Based Retard Gang, utopia is a glimmering cyberpunk Chinese megacity that is “3,000 years ahead of the West.”

The phrenetic path out of Dimes Square to the Based Retard Gang is a constantly metamorphosing and decentralizing art movement. The only constant seems to be the transgression feedback loop from the old punk rock days: bask in the outrage from the normies as you plan your next transgression. Some observers have eulogized Dimes Square, and they are right that a lot of the original creatives have left as the neighborhood gentrified. What they miss is that it endures (thrives, in fact) online as a kind of transcendent “Network Spirituality.” While some of the original Dimes Square cohort have dropped off, other key figures remain even in this digitally native iteration. Even newcomers that I spoke with in the Based Retard Gang pointed to the original Angelicism01 posts as their “inspiration to create.” Remilia raves are now in Tokyo and Paris, and even included a recent online-only “Grand Ball” on a Minecraft server that (in the classic transgressive style) featured a mock mass shooting.

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Ex-Dimes Square culture is maturing as it decentralizes. Artists with ties to the neighborhood are now displayed in New York’s premier museums. Elon Musk is posting Milady memes and Grimes is sorting through the various controversies. Even this article is as an effort in intellectualizing a freewheeling culture. And as it matures, the irony itself is better understood as way to “try on” different accelerationist philosophies with plausible deniability rather than as purely performative.

The art is alluring and like punk rock, it can be enjoyed ethically even among those of us steeped in “normcore” sensibilities. Yet there is an instructive challenge from the 1970s on performative transgression: not everyone understood the irony of the punk rockers and their fascist imagery, and when the true neo-fascist skinheads arrived on the scene, the movement had to push back (eg, through efforts like the Clash and Sham’s “Rock against Racism”). Of course, such moderating efforts break the transgression feedback loop, and for punk rock that diluted the style to the more socially acceptable “New Wave” genre in the 1980s. Alas, we are still firmly in the ‘70s arc of the ex-Dimes Square subculture for those who seek to plunder the depths of the rabbit hole, to achieve Network Spirituality, or to be outraged by it.

Twitter and other Web 2.0 platforms are enormously valuable. Instantaneous access to the smartest and most influential people has never been easier. I have made truly incredible friends on Twitter… people I never would have come across in my daily life who I went on to meet in person, forge enduring relationships, and make better personal and financial decisions. Yet in many ways, I’ve been successful at this in spite of Twitter. To succeed, I’ve had to forcefully resist the tremendous pressure to engage in the kinds of things that are rewarded on Twitter. While this may seem overstated, it actually requires a great deal of self-discipline to consistently not engage with those who, for example, call you names or belittle the things you care about. Despite my best efforts, I still fail sometimes. Opting out of Twitter’s algorithm games also means accepting that I will never have a big account. Rather than fame or fortune or endorphins, I’ve made the conscious decision to reject these and use Twitter to be a better informed person.

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All-consuming flame wars, emotional appeals, and populist contrarianism are how you go viral on Twitter. I’ve witnessed it personally. Several friends have taken this approach: using Twitter as a platform to emotionally deride popular villains, or to make wild claims. While my account has sputtered along, theirs amassed giant followings. Even failed predictions, when sufficiently shocking, can net the purveyor of such failures with hundreds of thousands of new, doting followers. The losers in this scenario are the followers themselves. These uncanny dupes are being manipulated for engagement and their worldviews are being melded and warped to serve as ample engagement fodder for their adversaries. Both sides are being groomed to hate (and thus engage with) each other by the algorithm to serve the desires of the almighty god of engagement. 

My goals for you, then, are twofold: to save yourself from the poor life decisions that uncritical consumption of Twitter can result in, and to maximize the real upside that these platforms can offer.

The first lesson is to be wary of big accounts. With rare exceptions, big accounts are by definition winning the engagement games on Twitter. The way that you “win” is by participating in this deleterious spiral that I described: posting emotional appeals, contrarian falsehoods, or deriding popular enemies to amass a large horde of followers. These followers, in turn, are deluded into an alternate reality primed for further outrage and engagement.

You need to unfollow and mute these big accounts to release their shackles on your brain. Exceptions to this rule are accounts that are large due to some acclaim outside Twitter or Web 2.0 engagement incentives. In other words, if you follow the large account of a famous musician or chess-master, that is acceptable because their accounts grew for reasons extrinsic to Twitter’s algoritmatized outrage. These aren’t people who are being rewarded for manipulating you.

You need to be constantly managing and updating the reputation of those you follow. When they make predictions or forecasts, you need to actually follow up and see if they materialize. If their forecasts don’t come true, you need to look back to their account and see if they offer a contrite explanation. Do they acknowledge they are wrong in an honest way? Admitting you are wrong requires courage and justifies your continued attention. Or, do they (for example) dilute their past prediction into something unprovable or create some new drama that distracts from their mistake? Such dishonesty warrants no more of your time: these people are merely playing algorithm games and are unworthy of a single additional unit of your attention.

It is essential to follow and pay close attention to people who have a different worldview than you. Numerous times, I have found mistakes in my own assumptions by carefully considering alternative points of view. For example, during the Hong Kong protests, I was (and remain) an ardent supporter of the pro-democracy activists. Yet, in retrospect I romanticized the protesters and wasn’t honest with myself about real excesses I saw within this movement. Reading reports of anti-mainland Chinese slurs and insults from protesters spurred me to talk to mainland Chinese friends about whether such an element existed within this group that I had idealized. Indeed, I spoke with a mainland Chinese friend who had even traveled to Hong Kong to participate in and support the protests at great personal risk, and she herself was a victim of insults hurled at her for being a Mandarin speaker. By recognizing my own bias in support of the democracy protesters and by dutifully following and considering the point of view of its critics, I was able to resist the impulse to reflexively dismiss criticism of the protesters and instead gained a more nuanced and better informed opinion.

When surprising claims are made, you need to actually take the time to check whether they are true. This seems simple, but almost no one actually does it, they just keep scrolling their timeline looking for the next algorithmic dopamine hit or consoling echo within their digital chamber. I was recently reading a book written by a Twitter guru that I am quite critical of (as part of my effort to expose myself to divergent worldviews). Therein, the author describes what he views as the state control of Western media:

[In] 2021, Ukraine was widely reported to be a corrupt country full of Azov Battalion Nazis. By mid 2022, those reports would have been reclassified as “disinformation” and pushed down to page 10 of the search results

I was surprised by this claim: was it truly “widely reported [that Ukraine was] a corrupt country full of Azov Battalion Nazis” prior to Russia’s invasion? This was certainly surprising to me as I had no such understanding of Ukraine from that time, despite my interest in the area. The author cited two articles to support his claim, so I read each in their entirety. The first article was from the Guardian, that describes the Azov Battalion as representing “volunteers,” “a minority among the Ukrainian forces,” and that it is of concern to Ukraine’s government “due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.” The second article from Time describes how this same Azov Battalion used social media to inspire other far-right groups overseas. While both articles are certainly troubling, neither supports the sweeping claim of Ukraine being understood as “a corrupt country full of Azov Battalion Nazis” and instead the problems with the Azov Battalion seemed to be a widely known problem even among the casual observer of Russia’s invasion. In fact, paging through the New York Times just two weeks ago, I found a prominent report further describing the troubling aspects of Nazi symbols within Ukraine’s army. Indeed, such reporting wasn’t forbidden or labeled as “disinformation” at all. For whatever reason, the claims this author made didn’t match the sources he was citing, and I revised the credibility I assigned him to reflect that.

Twitter is designed to pump your veins full with the information equivalent of high fructose corn syrup to fatten you up and sell you for slaughter to their advertisers. At minimum, you must opt out of this system. Failure to do so will turn you into a contrarian crank like it did to so many of my friends. You will make bad personal and financial decisions. You will constantly be wrong, but rather than acknowledging and learning from it, you will open Twitter for your next dopamine hit on some fresh new contrarian outrage to be wrong about. Perhaps your swelling follower count will offer solace to your advancing brain rot.

On the other hand, if you are disciplined you can actually learn and thrive from the information on these platforms. Few succeed on this path, as it requires you to disengage from emotional Twitter bait, constantly update the credibility of the people you spend your attention on, follow up on forecasts and predictions, be mindful of your own biases, and to do the hard work of cross verifying claims made. This is a significant time commitment, and quite frankly, many are better off reading professional journalism with long track records.

But if you’re like me and want to see for yourself the beating heart of the internet, this is the way.

I’m sad to leave China after spending much of April there. It’s expected to feel loss at the end of any trip, as you truly are leaving a place and the people that you have spent the last weeks forging connections with. However this is different, because it isn’t just me who is leaving China, but China itself that is drifting away from the rest of the world. I met this conclusion numerous times throughout my recent visit. It’s been three years since I first remarked on the “new Cold War” between China and Western allies, and the human-to-human cost wrought by isolating Chinese people from the rest of the world is an immeasurable loss for all people.1

China is an amazing civilization. Its history and culture are astoundingly deep and complex. Trying to grasp the immensity of China’s culture is like standing at the base of a mountain with your nose against a cliff wall and trying to guess its height. You could spend a lifetime studying it, and just scratch the surface. And, I often found myself naive to elaborate Chinese culture, as I made missteps around gift giving/receiving, intricacies and expectations of multi-generational relationships (“guanxi,” 关系), drinking culture, and much more. There is a lot to celebrate about Chinese culture: incredible art, music, lore, cuisine, gardens, temples, language... There is likewise a lot to marvel at in the post-revolutionary “New China”: huge beautiful museums and airports, fast clean trains that span the whole country, a prosperous middle class, cities rich with amenities and largely free of the dysfunction we normalize in the West (crime, homeless encampments, spotty infrastructure, etc). Especially in Shanghai, I encountered a society of nearly decadent abundance, where anything can be delivered in an instant, where the best of everything was everywhere, and where a raucous nightlife was paired with clean and quiet neighborhood streets ideal for a young family.

More than their flashy night clubs and marbled halls, the people I met in China were incredible. I encountered none of the nationalist bravado that we are conditioned to expect on social media. I attribute this largely to barriers to ordinary Chinese people from joining global social media apps, so voices are instead concentrated on the appointed nationalist “wolf warriors.” Rather than geopolitical ambitions, the people I talked with were focused on the well being of their own families and communities. This perhaps is the learned behavior not just from living in a country that prohibits politics, but also the multigenerational lessons of history itself: many young people have grandparents who survived the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, parents who lived through the 1989 protests, and young people themselves as witnesses to seemingly endless draconian pandemic lockdowns.

That said, there is surely some selection bias in the people I came across, despite my best efforts to break out of it. There are likely many people at the base of the pyramid who I would never cross paths with and who have no access to a VPN, only consume state media, and are as nationalistic as instructed. Nevertheless, I didn’t come across this, even in the smaller cities I visited and when traveling with local friends away from tourist destinations, or when asking friends about how their parents feel about issues.

There is a lot of mutual admiration between Chinese and Western people. We both belong to essentially capitalist systems, despite insistence on the contrary. The Chinese people I met were very curious about the outside world, and they all routed around the Great Firewall with VPNs on a daily basis to access it. Likewise, the world is curious about China. There were once plentiful flights each day from all major cities in the USA and China. The USA, Europe, Canada and other countries have a sizable Chinese diaspora. Chinese people, Chinese culture, Chinese history, and accumulated Chinese wisdom all enrich the lives of those of us in the West, just as I would expect the Western experience informs those who live in China. We were better off when this human-to-human exchange was flourishing.

The glory days of this flourishing are in the past, but I got to experience bits of what’s left. I visited a premier university in Beijing that was partially designed by Americans and once had wings named after US Presidents (names since removed). I stayed at a government resort on Hangzhou’s Xi Lake that was the site of the 2016 G20 meetings. I toured venues and nightclubs that are part of the spectacular Shanghai nightlife and once home to many foreign musicians on dubious visas. 

Visiting China today is very difficult, and trending worse. US-based airlines currently offer just twelve flights per week to China. Worth reiterating: that’s twelve flights total, spread over seven days from all American airlines between the two largest economies in the world. This is just 6% of what was available in 2019. Efforts to resume flights have stalled over disputes about the advantages Chinese airlines have by being able to fly in Russian airspace.

Without local friends in China, I never would have been able to truly experience the country. All commerce happens via WeChat and AliPay. It is essentially impossible for non-Chinese citizens to use WeChat for payments, as a Chinese local bank account and ID verification is required, and often a Chinese SIM card as well. Even Hong Kong bank accounts (like HSBC) won’t work unless they are local accounts based in mainland China. Yet WeChat is where the staples of life happen: ride sharing, train tickets, and even the mandatory airport health declaration all happen on WeChat. I eventually was able to get AliPay to work in certain situations, especially after I traded bitcoin for AliPay CNY from a local friend. Travelers also have to know to either purchase and install a VPN prior to arrival (which requires constant troubleshooting) or use cellular data roaming. Staple services like Gmail, Google Search, almost all ex-China social media fail to work on domestic wifi without a VPN. Even Google Translate—an essential travel tool in any foreign country—was recently banned in China. And add to all of this the vast security complex of the Chinese state: I probably scanned my passport and/or was frisked 50 times during my two week trip including 4 times just to enter the (beautiful and expansive) National Museum adjacent to Tiananmen Square.

With vanishingly few flights to China, an inaccessible system for basic financial transactions, severed contact to the outside internet, and an omnipotent security apparatus—it is easy to conclude that the country doesn’t place a priority on its visitors. Yet, I had an amazing and impactful trip to China in spite of these things and thanks to close friendships I’ve made over the years (and some new ones made during the trip). As an American, I certainly have no entitlement to a red carpet experience in another country. Yet having traveled to many friendly and adversarial countries (including two other Communist countries—Cuba and Vietnam), I’ve come to rely on the basic ability to use cash, access the open internet, and not need to be shoehorned into an “everything” app that returns errors in another language.

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And the human-to-human decoupling is happening well beyond tourism: it is at every layer of society. Harvard once had an intensive Chinese language program in Beijing that recently closed and moved to Taiwan “due to a perceived lack of friendliness from the host institution [in Beijing].” Among other things, American students in Beijing were prohibited from celebrating the Fourth of July. The US State Department advises American visitors to “Reconsider Travel” due to arbitrary detentions. Indeed, China recently broadened the scope of its espionage law and raided the offices of the top US consultancy firm, Bain & Co.

China is turning inward, and all of us are worse off as a result. China and Western countries are pitted against each other in an increasingly dramatic confrontation. The origins of this conflict is a list growing ever longer: human rights, Taiwan, IP, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the South China Sea… Yet the human beings in these countries are decent people with shared values and mutual empathy and curiosity. And if these bonds of friendship are strained by an inability to simply meet—online or as visitors in each other’s countries—then we shouldn’t be surprised when this mutual goodwill evaporates. My hope is that we resist this however we can: by insisting on travel even when it is uncomfortable, by going out of our way to make new friends across cultures, by using VPNs and routing around barriers, and by engaging with local diaspora communities. As individuals, our impact on the great power conflict between the US and China is limited, but the relationships we forge with each other will outlive any geopolitical fallout.

A friend reminded me of this quote, which was a marriage contract between two Chinese scholars, 张爱玲 and 胡蘭成. It should also be a shared aspiration of all people and nations, albeit an ever distant one today:

“岁月静好，现世安稳”

“The years are quiet, and the world is stable”

The purpose of bitcoin transactions has been a topic of longstanding debate since the formative days of bitcoin. Is bitcoin primarily for financial transactions, or should bitcoin instead be a secure, distributed data store for everything from app data to domain names? This controversy has been quiet for years based on a careful compromise that I will describe, however a design quirk of taproot has allowed a new NFT protocol called Ordinals to emerge that upends prior limits. Here, I will describe the early debate of what constitutes a “legitimate” bitcoin transaction, the negotiated limits established with OP_RETURN, and how SegWit and Taproot allowed Ordinals’ Inscriptions to end run these limits. This is an area of emerging controversy within bitcoin and my goal is to lay out the diverging points of view and put them in historic context.

In 2010, there was a fierce debate on Bitcoin Talk over a proposal to support a DNS service on bitcoin called BitDNS. This proposal advocated for website domain names to be hosted on bitcoin and thereby benefit from its decentralized trustlessness and permissionlessness. However there was concern (including from Satoshi) that this would bloat the bitcoin blockchain, making it harder to do things like verify financial transactions, which were argued to be the primary (or only?) usecase for bitcoin:

“Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn’t scale. Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately. Users shouldn’t have to download all of both to use one or the other.” - Satoshi (Dec. 2010)

Interestingly, Satoshi didn’t argue that alternative blockchains supporting non-financial uses shouldn’t exist (an implicit acceptance of “altcoins”), he just argued that they shouldn’t be on bitcoin. Bitcoin, according to this perspective, should primarily be focused on financial transactions and trying to do all use cases on a technology that fundamentally doesn’t scale (like a blockchain) would crowd out the financial uses that bitcoin was intended for. And that’s what happened: BitDNS eventually found a home on a separate blockchain called Namecoin. And, this was to the benefit of bitcoiners today, who would otherwise be stuck downloading all the data of an ultimately failed DNS experiment whenever they tried to sync a new full node had BitDNS been built on bitcoin.

Yet the debate endured: should bitcoin’s ledger (1) be reserved for recording financial transactions only, or (2) be a secure, distributed data store for any potential application. Option 1 is more sustainable as bitcoin grows to be a global financial network given that blockchains inherently don’t scale. Option 2 allows for more experimentation that could grow the bitcoin ecosystem in the near term and provide miners with revenue that will be necessary as the block subsidy shrinks.

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Neither of these points of view emerged the winner, and instead a compromise was reached. In May 2014, Bitcoin Core (the primary reference software of bitcoin nodes) enabled extremely short (80 bytes) messages in a function called OP_RETURN. This was a sufficient size to, for example, store hashes linked to an external service but forced these services to use bitcoin block space efficiently. And significantly, the messages stored on OP_RETURN were “prunable,” meaning that while they must be downloaded by every full node, the bitcoin software recognizes them as dead ends (as they are unspendable) and thus don’t need to be held in the memory of a bitcoin node.

From 2018 to 2019, approximately 20% of all bitcoin transactions were OP_RETURN transactions. These transactions were for things like Omni (the basis for the early Tether stablecoin), Counterparty (the early NFT protocol used for Rare Pepes), and Veriblock (an altcoin that settles on bitcoin). Each of these relied on OP_RETURN to function, and bitcoin fees were quite high during this time due to their popularity. As before, proponents of these OP_RETURN apps asserted that high fees are good: it raises demand for bitcoin blockspace and pays miners to secure the network. Opponents argued that they crowd out bitcoin’s intended financial transactions.

Veriblock, Omni, and Counterparty met a similar fate to BitDNS: they have fallen out of use and likewise OP_RETURN use itself has collapsed. Even Rare Pepes are now wrapped onto Ethereum. Despite this collapse, Veriblock and Omni added about 10GB to the bitcoin blockchain in 32 million transactions that all bitcoin nodes have to download forever. Thankfully, these transactions are at least prunable so there isn’t a memory cost given they aren’t part of bitcoin’s UTXO set.

This brings us up to the present moment: OP_RETURN is hardly used (except when I write haikus or make protest statements), bitcoin blocks aren’t often full, and block space is cheap. Yet, this may be on the verge of being upended, as a design quirk of Taproot (a 2021 bitcoin upgrade) unwittingly has allowed limitless bitcoin data storage short the block size limit without using OP_RETURN at all. This has been codified into a new NFT protocol on bitcoin, called Ordinals.

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Ordinals work by individually tracking single satoshis (the smallest unit of a bitcoin) and repurposing these as NFTs. In reality, satoshis are fungible, but “Ordinal Theory” is a convention by which to consistently follow these fungible units such that those who opt-into this convention can ascribe non-fungible features to them. This can be a hard idea to wrap your head around at first, but it is similar to an accounting standard in personal finance. Say, for example, that I bought Disney stock over several years at many different prices. Then, I decide I want to sell one unit of Disney stock, and have to determine which entry price to use in order to calculate the gains I made on the sale. Which entry price do I use? Well, there is no way to differentiate the different units of Disney stock that I bought since they are all identical, but I can opt-into an accounting standard like LIFO (“Last In, First Out”) where the unit sold is assumed to be the last one that I bought. Similarly, Ordinals uses a FIFO (“First In, First Out”) system to track individual satoshis in a way that is consistent for those who wish to participate in this system, but without compromising the true fungibility of these Satoshis for everyone else.

I personally find this way of making NFTs (called “Inscriptions”) out of individual satoshis quite elegant, as it threads the needle of allowing features of a non-fungible token without compromising the true fungibility that is fundamental to bitcoin’s design. And, these NFTs get all the benefits of bitcoin’s blockchain (it’s immutability, it’s security, it’s decentralization) and doesn’t require any changes to the bitcoin protocol. You can send one of these NFTs to an existing bitcoin address today. There are challenges, however, as existing bitcoin software does not observe “Ordinal Theory,” and thus satoshis that you have ascribed individual value to might be accidentally spent as a transaction fee or sent as a payment. Thus, there is Ordinal specific software that allows you to track these individual satoshis so they aren't spent accidentally.

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From what I can tell, this component of the architecture of Ordinals isn’t controversial at all. In fact, I find it quite exciting as I am a long time bitcoiner who also enjoys NFTs and believe that NFTs are one of the few areas in crypto to have achieved a durable product-market fit. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with other NFT and token proposals on bitcoin (like Counterparty and Omni) and have found them clunky, inefficient, and frankly deprecated as they are so poorly maintained.

The part of Ordinals which is sure to garner controversy and debate within bitcoin is how the NFTs are stored as Inscriptions.

NFTs on Ordinals (“Inscriptions”) are stored entirely on-chain. Looking at NFTs broadly (like on Ethereum), this is often considered a positive attribute, as the “art” is truly stored in a decentralized manner and isn’t just pointing to a jpg on a centralized server that can be changed on a whim. Thus, many of the most acclaimed NFT projects on Ethereum (like CryptoPunks) truly store the jpg on Ethereum (rather than “the cloud”) so that the jpg is as secure and censorship resistant as Ethereum itself.

However, the size limit of OP_RETURN was intended to limit the ability to store non-financial data on bitcoin. This limitation was set to 80 bytes—essentially, a short string of text. Yet, Ordinals was only launched on bitcoin mainnet a few days ago and already people are storing not just images, but short videos and even a pdf of Satoshi’s white paper on bitcoin’s blockchain. To reiterate, these aren’t links to the white paper or a video, the actual white paper and videos are permanent parts of the bitcoin blockchain that must be downloaded by all full nodes. How are Ordinals able to store such large files on the bitcoin blockchain despite OP_RETURN limits?

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Ordinals take advantage of the recent Taproot upgrade to bitcoin to store the NFT data in Taproot script-path spend scripts. SegWit relaxed the limits on witness (signature) data sizes and Taproot made it easier to store arbitrary witness data in a bitcoin transaction, allowing Ordinals developer Casey Rodarmor to repurpose old opcodes (OP_FALSE, OP_IF, OP_PUSH) into what he describes as “envelopes” to store arbitrary data for NFTs called Inscriptions. Of course, that wasn’t the intention of the Taproot or SegWit upgrades, which made it easer to store data, and relaxed this limit on witness data sizes to allow for future bitcoin contract functionality.

The end result is that there is effectively no limit short of the blocksize on what can be stored on the bitcoin blockchain using this method (thankfully, like OP_RETURN, Inscription transactions can still be pruned). In other words, it is possible to make an Inscription transaction that takes up an entire 4MB block if you broadcast such a transaction to a miner (in practice, Bitcoin Core limits this size to 400,000 bytes). Yet even considering this smaller 400,000 size limit for an Ordinals transaction, such a size is still five thousand times the size of the OP_RETURN limit that was the source of all the controversy back in 2014. While this was possible with SegWit, it is much easier with Taproot given that you can store the arbitrary data in one linear segment in the Witness section. These combine to remove any technical limit short of blocksize for data storage on bitcoin: if it can fit into a block, it can be a bitcoin transaction.

Is this good or bad? I’m not nearly smart enough to answer that question, but I’ve spoken to spirited advocates and opponents to using bitcoin this way. Before diving into their diverging perspectives, I can say that both basically agree on a couple points:

1. Using tapscript to store arbitrary data was not the intention of the Taproot developers

2. There probably isn’t anything that can be done to limit this use of tapscript

In defense of Ordinals and Inscriptions, NFTs are fun. NFTs are an OG bitcoin concept from the days of colored coins, yet due to bitcoin’s design constraints, most NFT activity has moved to Ethereum. There are a lot of reasons for bitcoiners to wish that NFTs were on bitcoin, the foremost of which is that bitcoin needs fees to survive long term. Bitcoin miners are currently paid a subsidy to maintain the network, but that subsidy is decreasing with each halvening and at a certain point the bitcoin network will need to be able to survive only on transaction fees. Inscriptions and NFTs compete for limited blockspace, and thus generate fees to pay miners and help make the bitcoin network sustainable. Even a single Ethereum app like Uniswap generates more fees today then the entire Bitcoin network, so perhaps we should open bitcoin to apps of its own that allow for sustainable fee-based security. Furthermore, bitcoin is permissionless. Who is to judge which transactions are legitimate and which are illegitimate as long as the fee is paid to be included in a block? Just like no one should be able to say whether a financial transaction I make on bitcoin is “illegitimate,” likewise no one should be able to say it’s illegitimate to make a non-financial bitcoin transaction that happens to mint an NFT.

The other side of this argument is that bitcoin blockspace, though cheap today, is already extremely constrained when forecasting bitcoin as a future global financial network. The bitcoin base layer already couldn’t support even a single transaction for every human (say, for example, for each individual to open their own lightning channel), let alone expand to every possible non-financial use case too. Thus, non-financial uses of bitcoin blockspace could crowd out “legitimate” financial transactions. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cash system, and as such, its primary objective is to mediate financial transactions. Skeptics of Ordinals and Inscriptions also point to more efficient methods for tokenization on bitcoin, like the forthcoming Taro (also enabled by Taproot) and assert that Ordinals are a misuse of tapscript that breaks the spirit of the OP_RETURN compromise for on-chain data storage. Should entire blocks be taken up with witness data for an Inscription transaction, it could delay confirmation of “legitimate” financial transactions, thus hurting bitcoin’s credibility as a reliable financial network.

There’s another concern: the part of the bitcoin transaction where the NFT is stored is called the witness data. SegWit allowed witness data to receive a substantial 75% discount compared to data in other parts of a transaction, like inputs, outputs, and even OP_RETURN values. What this means is that those who choose to mint NFTs or store data on bitcoin using this quirk of taproot do so at steep discount relative to those doing a more typical financial transaction. This then limits the contribution that such data storage can make to the fee market, especially relative to the size of the data that is stored on the blockchain and increases the risk that these discounted transactions could crowd out financial ones.

With these diverging perspectives in mind, it’s possible there is a middle road where there is some use of Inscriptions on bitcoin without significant crowding of financial transactions. For example, Ordinals could be a niche way to mint especially high value or vintage NFTs that place a premium on bitcoin’s network security and credibility. Especially as blockspace becomes scarce when bitcoin becomes a dominant financial asset, Ordinals NFTs could be limited to especially vintage or valuable NFTs. It is unlikely to be the venue of the common pfp series given that there is a cost associated with minting each individual NFT (unlike in Ethereum, where the cost to mint a series of 1 or 10,000 NFTs are the same). There are plenty of other chains where you can mint low value NFTs for essentially no cost, there is no reason to do that on bitcoin. Meanwhile, Taro could be used for fungible tokens like stable coins and the bitcoin network could still primarily be used for financial transactions.

The debate between the financial transaction and data store wings of the bitcoin community has been around almost as long as bitcoin itself. While this debate seemed to be settled in 2014 with the OP_RETURN compromise, it is about to be blown back open as tapscript unwittingly cast off basically all data store limitations. Despite the insistence of the most strident bitcoiners, there are lots of interesting applications for cryptocurrency besides financial transactions, and NFTs are one such example. Of course, the integrity of the bitcoin network for financial transactions is paramount, and any non-financial uses ideally support rather than detract from this principle goal.

Further reading:

1. My original thread on OP_RETURN

2. https://bitzuma.com/posts/op-return-and-the-future-of-bitcoin/

3. https://opreturn.org/op-return-per-month/

4. https://docs.ordinals.com/

Addendum: I am happy to revise this or correct it if needed, send me a DM!

Addendum 2: I errantly ascribed some changes in SegWit to Taproot and vice versa. I believe this is now corrected.

Addendum 3: I corrected the terminology on Ordinals vs Inscriptions. Ordinals is about tracking satoshis, Inscriptions are how NFTs are stored and added to satoshis.

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Russian hard power has historically been a regional stabilizing force (notwithstanding episodes of menacing catastrophe). However, Russia’s war on Ukraine has greatly depleted its military capability and undermined its legitimacy as a regional power (let alone an international power). As such, quiet conflicts that relied on Russia’s backing have begun to boil over. Two such examples are the Kosovo-Serbia conflict and the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict.

Kosovo is an Albanian-speaking country which declared its independence from Serbia in 2008 after a NATO intervention to stop a campaign of violence against Kosovo Albanians by Serbian forces. Kosovo is recognized as an independent country by 117 other countries, but Serbia continues to regard it as part of its own territory. Russia is a backer of Serbia, and likewise does not recognize Kosovo independence (nor does China). NATO has maintained a peace-keeping presence in Kosovo since its initial intervention due to this tense relationship with Serbia.

Both Kosovo and Serbia seek to join the European Union, and the EU has indicated that a prerequisite for membership is recognition of Kosovo. Complicating matters, five EU nations still don’t recognize Kosovo’s independence themselves, mostly to discourage their own domestic independence movements (eg, Spain with Catalan). Russia is a backer of Serbia and as Russia’s legitimacy has declined, blockages and shootings along the Serbia-Kosovo border have become more frequent. Significantly, in the context of Russia’s retreating influence, the EU and NATO have taken a more prominent role in brokering peace between the countries and both countries remain committed to joining the EU.

There is a parallel situation between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The two countries dispute a region controlled by Azerbaijan that is predominantly populated by ethnic Armenians. Russia has interests in both countries. Russia has a military base in Armenia, strong economic ties to Azerbaijan, and has historically brokered peace deals between the two countries. As Russian hegemony faded due to its war on Ukraine, Azerbaijan sensed weakness and in September 2022 sent troops to take positions within internationally recognized Armenian territory. The ensuing armed conflict resulted in the death of nearly one-hundred soldiers. Whereas Russia has been Armenia’s historic protector, it was instesad Nancy Pelosi who flew to Armenia to indicate support for a peaceful resolution. Similar to the Kosovo-Serbia relationship, Western forces are stabilizing bilateral conflicts as Russian influence retreats.

However, Western influence is waning in other parts of the world. Take two island nations: the Solomon Islands and Haiti. As a proxy to US influence, consider that both the Solomon Islands and Haiti were among the dozen or so countries that maintained formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. However the Solomon Islands switched recognition from Taiwan to China, leading to mass rioting and unrest in November 2021. Meanwhile Haiti maintains its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, but is itself in a state of chaos with still no president despite the prior president’s assassination in July 2021 and daily life controlled by rival violent gangs.

Since 2003, Australia has been a regional security partner to the Solomon Islands, providing financial aid as well as sending thousands of troops during times of unrest. Likewise, during the protests in November 2021 over the switch in diplomatic relations to China, the Solomon Islands government requested assistance from Australia. Australia obliged by sending police and military who successfully restored order. Yet as a sign of waning Western influence, the Solomon Islands government turned next to a new security partner: in March of 2022, the government signed a security agreement with China that would allow Chinese military and naval presence on the islands. Australia, New Zealand, and the United States voiced concerns with this arrangement.

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The United States is an important partner of Haiti, providing developmental assistance, promoting democratic institutions, and as a major source of trade and tourism. However, both the US and UN have a contentious past history of interventions in Haiti, for example, sending a multinational force to restore democracy after a 1994 military coup.

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Without a president following the assassination, the Haitan government installed Ariel Henry as prime minister, who was an ally of the deceased president. The United States indicated support for Prime Minister Henry, but his legitimacy is protested by many Haitians given he was never elected. Rising fuel prices, a major earthquake, and spreading cholera have contributed to general chaos and gang violence across the country. Overwhelmed by these crises, Prime Minister Henry has formally asked for another foreign military intervention to restore stability. Despite the gravity of the crisis in Haiti, the US and UN remain divided on whether to intervene.

There are a lot of limitations with this discussion. First, this is a cursory overview of each conflict. Yet I hope that it is a basis on which to build more knowledge if you have an interest and as new events transpire. Second, the citizens in each of these countries deserve to be considered as ends in themselves rather than just an actor in a greater geopolitical narrative. Those limitations aside—each of these countries is greatly under-appreciated in the international press given their significance in world affairs and the future impact that these conflicts may hold. I don’t know how any of these individual flashpoints will play out, but each has the potential to change to course of history.

I subscribe to the older libertarian point of view: Twitter is a private company that sets its own Terms of Service and the government shouldn’t be making operational decisions on Twitter’s behalf. No one should be entitled to the services of a private company and there exist limitless places to practice free speech without laying claim to the audience of a particular platform. Obviously, it is bad for Twitter’s business to platform hate speech because they will lose advertisers. The idea that you can’t compete with Twitter is ludicrous. There are ample social network competitors, like Facebook and TikTok, and there are direct competitors like Gab, Mastodon, Truth Social, and others. The new wave libertarians argue that those banned from Twitter “can’t just go start their own social network,” but that’s literarily what the former president did with Truth Social after he was banned following Jan 6th. Furthermore, many of the people who claim “censorship” actually have giant platforms and typically use “censorship” claims as a populist growth hack.

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Not only is it well within Twitter’s right as a private company to moderate speech however they see fit, a well curated platform makes Twitter a better user experience and a more profitable business. Almost no one wants a 4chan free-for-all on their Twitter timeline. Elon Musk did us all a favor when he took over Twitter by quickly proving this point to the Right: the guy who promised to “free the bird” limits speech just as much if not more than the former leadership of Twitter. He does it more impulsively, with less procedure, and from a right-of-center bias, but the point is that he does it. Unmoderated Twitter is and always has been untenable. A private company cannot create a platform of truly unhindered speech, and when they try, they become cesspools ignored by almost everyone and devoid of a business model, like 4chan.

This being the case, you may wonder then—why would I advocate for an open, permissionless, and censorship resistant social network?

New social layers allow us to satisfy both those who want a totally open “town square,” as well as those who prioritize a well-moderated and curated experience. While these two perspectives seem to be in opposition, they are actually perfectly aligned. In fact, I don’t think the two groups represented by these statements disagree at all, they are just noticing a different part of the dysfunction in modern social networks. Private companies have spent the last several years trying, and failing, to be both champions of free speech and places with basic rules of decency.

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You can’t do both. Governments, advertisers, employees, and public pressure will force private companies to moderate speech. And, any moderation action is potentially abused in the future and likely to disenfranchise a lot of people.

Private companies cannot be public squares, but a protocol can.

A protocol, like Nostr or Farcaster, can be permissionless and censorship resistant because there is no one to send a takedown request to in a distributed network. This is an incomplete solution, because if you stop here then you just have a distributed 4chan which is of interest to basically no one. You need a second layer of private companies and clients to act as curators and moderators. Users can opt-in and pay for this curated layer to provide them a better experience. Depending on your worldview, you may pay for layer 2 curation from the New York Times or from the Joe Rogan Experience. Twitter itself may be a curator of content from Nostr or Farcaster (or both) and serve you ads alongside content to make the platform free. There may be some overlap in the moderation decisions of all these different L2 operators, but there will also be plenty of moderation decisions that don’t overlap. Thus, no one is at risk of being “deplatformed,” unless you accomplish the impossible task of being banned by all the different L2 curators simultaneously. Even then, such an individual’s posts would still be viewable on the unmoderated L1 for those who can stomach it.

Thus “social layers” solve what both sides of the political spectrum want: a social platform free from concerns of “censorship” and “deplatforming,” while also allowing users to opt-in to a curated experience from moderators that they trust!

Let’s dive into two attempts at this L1: Nostr and Farcaster. I’ve had the pleasure of using both and will give my non-technical experience with both and the potential and limitations I see. I also want to thank fiatjaf (built Nostr) for helping me understand nostr, and Dan Romero (founder Farcaster) for inviting me to Farcaster. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Maciek Laskus who has thoroughly analyzed each and for speaking with me on the topic. Let’s start with a table:

Both Nostr and Farcaster use relays (called “hubs” in Farcaster) to store and transmit social data (like posts) to users (who run software, called “clients”). Farcaster uses the Ethereum architecture (eg, uses ethereum key-pairs for accounts), while Nostr does not use a blockchain (though you see a lot of lightning transactions, and theoretically could support any blockchain).

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Notably, Farcaster is a VC-backed company with a known team and a polished product, while Nostr is not a company at all, built by an anon with no funding (though later received a 14 btc grant from jack), and is noticeably earlier in development. Speaking with fiatjaf, I confirmed that the only funding to Nostr has been this bitcoin grant from Jack that fiatjaf then split with jb55, who is developing the Damus client on iOS and macOS. Both Farcaster and Nostr have clients and services already built on top (examples: Nostr, Farcaster), though Farcaster seems further along in this process. Indeed, some of the design choices made by Farcaster make development easier, while the simplicity of Nostr makes the tradeoff of more near term difficult development with more future potential use-cases.

For example, Farcaster currently requires full synchronization of all hubs in the network, which makes developing clients easier. In contrast, Nostr allows relays to host or delete any content, which makes client development more difficult in the near term, but allows for numerous potential business models for these relays and more open ended potential use cases. Relays on Nostr could then charge subscription fees or serve ads or otherwise select which content to include and exclude.

The current user base for Nostr is mostly bitcoiners and the user base for Farcaster is mostly ethereans and tech entrepreneurs. In many ways, this is also reflected in the design choices of each platform. Like bitcoin, Nostr prioritizes simplicity, neutrality, and the ease of running your own relay (like a node in bitcoin). As with bitcoin, Nostr eschews VCs, forming a company, or having a known founder. Running a hub is more difficult and expensive with Farcaster, but makes certain design tradeoffs that Farcaster asserts still allows “sufficient decentralization” while prioritizing nearer term use cases and a polished product nearly ready for retail users.

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I have an account on both platforms (@pourteaux.com on Nostr, @px on Farcaster). Simply put, Nostr seems to be following a cypherpunk and bitcoin ethos, where simplicity and a robust protocol are paramount. I am immensely impressed by fiatjaf, jb55, and other contributors. Farcaster is following a more conventional tech start-up model, and their product is beautifully polished and delightful today, as-is. Both efforts are on a mission to create a native social layer for the internet: a task which I believe is a moral imperative. So much societal dysfunction is the result of our current corporate social layers which try to be all things to all people. A layered approach to social media marries cypherpunk principles in an L1 with the importance of institutions in L2 to serve a social experience curated to the needs of every individual.

We are in the midst of a dramatic political re-alignment. I’m sure you have noticed. Years ago, most of us in open societies accepted the traditional social and fiscal axes that defined political life. Kitchen table debates mapped to these axes as well: social conservatives argued with social liberals over gay marriage, and fiscal conservatives argued with fiscal liberals over funding for government programs. They all basically agreed that the way to enact the changes they want was to get existing public and private institutions to better reflect their personal values through, for example, reform or competition or elections.

However, a series of events over the last decade have prioritized a conversation upstream of any fiscal or social issues: are our institutions valuable at all, and to the extent that they have failures is it even worthwhile to try to reform them or are they so rotten that we need to raze them and start anew?

I say this is a political re-alignment, because traditional adversaries are becoming allies (and the opposite) in a way you’ve likely found disorienting. Neo-conservatives like Bill Kristol find new allies in the Democratic party because their allegiance to American institutions pre-empts any difference about social policy or budget issues. Similarly, liberal populists like Noam Chomsky or Eric Weinstein suddenly find themselves allied with Donald Trump or Peter Theil as like-minded adversaries of US institutions.

Institutional failures over the last decade are what pushed this conversation into the forefront. There are numerous, but a subset include: the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, the denial of the US election results, failures by supposed experts during the recent pandemic, and the January 6th insurrection.

My goal with this short article isn’t to assert my own opinion on these topics—though I certainly have one. Instead, I do my best to put these aside to instead map this realignment into a familiar format: the political compass. The traditional political compass that mapped your perspective onto social and economic axes no longer does a good job sorting people with their political allies, as the current debate is upstream of these concerns. Perhaps there will be a time when this isn’t the case—say, if institutional competence is restored via reform or disruption—and then we can have the luxury of debating traditional social and fiscal policy points. However, that debate has been irrelevant for years and its return is far from imminent.

So, to accompany this realignment of society, I introduce the following Institutional Alignment matrix:

There are three primary questions we all must answer:

1. Conceptually, do institutions offer any value to society?

2. Currently, do today’s institutional hegemons1 have value, and to what extent?

3. What role does technology (encryption, AI, automation, cryptocurrency) play in remaking society?

Based on your perspective on these three questions, I’ve formed eight archetypes:

• Institutionalist: “institutions are important, and ours are valuable as is”

• Contrarian: “institutions are important, but ours are rotten and need replaced”

• Reformer: “institutions are important, we should use technology to make our institutions better”

• Sovereign Individual: “institutions are important, but ours are rotten and need replaced with new technology”

• Kleptocrat: “institutions are only valuable insofar that they allow my looting of the public”

• Tech panopticon: “institutions are only valuable insofar that they allow my mass surveillance and control of the population with technology.”

• Coup strongman: “I want to usurp institutions to seize power for myself”

• Cyber-anarchist: “I want to use technology to wreak havoc and burn it all down”

In this conception of institutional alignment, then, there are three axes: Support for Institutions as a Concept (x-axis), support for Today’s Institutional Hegemons, and Tech’s Potential (red = techno-optimist, blue = not).

If you’re like me, you will see that such a framework instantly clarifies today’s disorienting political landscape. I’m interested to see how you score on the quiz!

Take the quiz and see how you score.

A note on Materials & Methods:

I coded this quiz with JavaScript using the Plotly library. I chose five questions for each domain. I am open to feedback on these questions. My goal was to create clear, concise questions that broadly covered the three different concepts. I also tried my best to remove the question prompts from any particular geographic or cultural context. For example, I asked whether there “are countries” that offer good educational opportunities to see whether the user thinks such an institution exists in the world, rather than asking whether their own country offered these opportunities. The exception to this was asking about the UN, because it is a global institution without competitors (yet!), so therefore should be relevant wherever the user sits in the world. It’s worth restating that I am happily open to feedback and revision of this document and the quiz, archetypes etc so please send feedback.

SBF was also well regarded by the media and entertainment world. He maintained high profile paid relationships with professional athletes and sports teams, SBF and his co-CEO made tens of millions in donations to Democrats and Republicans, SBF championed consensus causes like climate change and sustainability, and SBF spent hours on podcasts convincingly defining his worldview as an Effective Altruist. SBF and FTX are now under investigation by the US Department of Justice, the SEC, and the House Committee on Financial Services. Reportedly, Bahamian authorities (FTX is based in the Bahamas) are discussing with US officials on possible extradition. SBF’s world is quickly unraveling, though he seems to be the last to realize this. SBF resigned and was replaced by the executive who led Enron’s restructuring. Confirming his disconnect with reality, SBF tweeted today that he is focused on “doing everything I can for FTX’s customers,” prompting the Official FTX Twitter to pushback, noting that “[SBF] has no ongoing role at FTX, FTX US, or Alameda Rsearch Ltd. And does not speak on their behalf.”

The most fascinating part of this collapse has been witnessing the rapidity and creativity with which very-online political adherents have adapted their narratives to cast SBF as the foe of their preferred ideology. The cryptocurrency community has an outspoken libertarian constituency, and almost immediately the narrative emerged that SBF was a devout woke democrat and proponent of the regulatory state. Purveyors of this worldview pointed to SBF’s millions in donations to Democrats, his stated desire to work with regulators in the United States, his professed alignment with Effective Altruism, and his association with various “liberal” causes like pandemic preparedness and sustainability. Moreover, commentators like Balaji Srinivasan asserted that the “legacy media [is] protecting SBF” because “he bought them, with what may have been customer funds.” Specifically, Balaji identified Vox, the New York Times, and others as running interference for SBF. But it wasn’t just a few publications and politicians that were protecting SBF, Balaji asserted that SBF “evidently bought off the entire media, nonprofit, political, and regulatory establishment.”

Quite a claim!

Now, many on the crypto-libertarian right go even further than Balaji Srinivasan, claiming that FTX was a money laundering operation between the Democratic Party and Ukraine to fund their war effort (an idea promoted by the former President Trump), or the sadly predicable anti-Semitic conspiracies (one of which led to the dismissal of a CoinDesk contributor). A Ukrainian official even had to take time to dispel this claim. But rather than focusing on these truly fanciful or hateful theories, I think it is better to evaluate the more conventional libertarian consensus that SBF is a big government liberal cheering on regulation, and that the harm caused by FTX are somehow downstream of the regulatory environment in the United States that prevented his firm’s entry. Then, I will propose an alternative perspective that places SBF’s worldview much closer to home for the crypto-libertarians. Namely, that up until the point that SBF commits fraud, he is actually a faithful manifestation of the “Sovereign Individual.”

It's true that SBF has called for regulation of cryptocurrencies and exchanges. He has testified before Congress, had meetings with regulators, and controversially proposed licensing for DeFi protocols. Is this evidence that SBF earnestly believes in thoughtful regulations and consumer protection? We might be left wondering this if not for excellent reporting from Kelsey Piper at Vox (interestingly, a publication previously identified as paid to protect SBF by Balaji) that revealed a DM exchange between SBF and the reporter on precisely this topic. Therein, SBF says “fuck regulators,” and “they make everything worse.” Asked directly whether it was “pretty much just PR” when “you said you wanted to make regulations, just good ones,” SBF confirmed: “yeah just PR.” On the topic of consumer protection, SBF agreed that “it would be good,” “but regulators can’t do it.” And SBF’s cynicism of regulations isn’t limited to crypto: “no one is doing it in the rest of finance, either.” “Or, for that matter, other areas that are regulated.” SBF goes on to point to the FDA, ESG, OFAC, and Big Tech regulations as other areas where institutions or regulations just “make everything worse.”

Leaving aside whether there is truth to SBF’s criticism of the FDA and other regulators, the point is clear that SBF is not a “proponent of the regulatory state.” Balaji Srinivasan called SBF “a fraud – like the regulatory state.” SBF and Balaji seem to agree on the latter! In fact, the criticism of regulators, institutions, and ESG could have easily been written by contrarian rightists like Peter Theil or David Sacks.

So why was SBF vocally supportive of crypto regulation while privately believing the opposite? It’s quite simple: SBF was trying to buy influence and goodwill (“yeah just PR”) in order to enter the US market. FTX is based in the Bahamas and serves exclusively non-US customers. FTX separately offered a severely limited US product that represented just 3% of the US crypto market share. The huge majority of the revenue (and fraud) occurred in the overseas entity. It’s clear, then, that SBF was happily profitable in the laissez faire Bahamian jurisdiction. He wasn’t asking for Bahamian authorities to step up regulations. On the contrary, SBF was on a meteoric growth path around the world in places that took a light touch “libertarian” approach to crypto regulation. And despite all of his firm’s contributions to both political parties, his reputation laundering with sports teams and celebrities, and his purported “cozy relationship” with US regulators, he ultimately failed gaining access to the US market. In the end, US citizens were mostly untouched by the collapse of FTX International—an apparent success of the US regulatory regime.

The media protection that SBF purportedly benefitted from was also short lived, if it existed at all. Today, the New York Times headline on FTX labeled the “Exchange’s Corporate Control ‘a Complete Failure,’” and the CNN headline noted the “FTX crash is eerily similar to the Bernie Madoff scandal.” Hardly the coverage you’d expect when you’ve “bought off the entire media”!

So let’s evaluate SBF instead through a different lens: SBF as the Sovereign Individual. The book The Sovereign Individual is a 1990s cult classic among libertarians and Ayn Rand acolytes that has had an outsize influence on tech billionaires (like Peter Thiel, who wrote the 2020 edition’s preface) and terminally online contrarians. The book made a number of flatly wrong predictions (eg, predicting a Y2K catastrophe and denying climate change), but also seemed prescient on certain issues, like the move to a digital economy and stateless digital money. A theme consistent throughout the book is that the most talented and profitable businessmen in a digital economy will be unconstrained by regulations and taxation imposed by artificial borders of nations, and they instead will be able to shop for jurisdictions that will minimize corporate interventions and maximize the wealth potential of the entrepreneur. Digitization enables this because operating an online service can be done anywhere in the world, especially with the advent of digital currencies and video communication. Consider these two passages from The Sovereign Individual:

Capital in the Information Age is growing more mobile by the moment. The capacity to earn high income is no longer tied to residence in specific locations, as was the case when most wealth was created by manipulating natural resources. With every day that passes, it becomes easier for people using highly portable information technology to create assets that are far less subject to the leverage of violence than any form of wealth has ever been before. Arbitrary political regulations that impose costs without creating offsetting market benefits will soon be nonviable. Powerful competitive forces are tending to equalize the prices of goods, services, labor, and capital across the globe. Governments will have less latitude to impose arbitrary policies than they are accustomed to enjoy. Any government that attempts to impose more burdensome regulations on an activity than other sovereignties will simply drive that activity away.

The triumph of capitalism will lead to the emergence of a new global, or extranational, consciousness among the capitalists, many of whom will become Sovereign Individuals. … The ablest, wealthiest persons … have the most to gain by transcending nationalism as markets triumph over compulsion. Perhaps not immediately, but soon, certainly within the span of a generation, almost everyone among the information elite will elect to domicile his income-earning activities in low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions. ... Within years, let alone decades, it will be widely understood that almost anyone of talent could accumulate a much higher net worth and enjoy a better life by abandoning high-tax nation-states.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the prototypical sovereign individual. If The Sovereign Individual were a cookbook, SBF would be Paula Deen (maybe adding a zest of fraud to complement the Randian selfishness). The trajectory of his company and his personal decisions suddenly make sense when evaluated through this lens, rather than the “woke democrat regulatory shill” that he was miscast as. Sam shopped around for low tax, light touch regulatory environments for his global digital business, which he then offered to customers in every jurisdiction possible. He founded Alameda Research in 2017 in California. In March 2019 SBF moved to Hong Kong and founded FTX to benefit from the more permissive financial regulations. Despite Hong Kong’s lighter financial regulations, it was still relatively restrictive on cryptocurrencies. SBF became publicly critical of the Hong Kong regulations, and moved jurisdiction again to the Bahamas in September 2021 for the expressed purpose of taking advantage of the island nation’s crypto-friendly regime.

In the Bahamas, SBF was able to extract huge amounts of wealth through fraud and misuse of customer funds, who were located in countries around the world. He enjoyed a life of decadent luxury in a $40M rooftop penthouse with ample amphetamines and lavish parties. This same wealth was funneled to try unsuccessfully to buy influence and reputation to enter the US market. His influence campaign ended in abject failure, to the relief of would-be customers in the United States. Despite real flaws, regulatory institutions in the US prevailed.

As foretold in The Sovereign Individual, SBF sought to “accumulate a much higher net worth and enjoy a better life by abandoning high-tax nation-states” and avoid “arbitrary political regulations.” Of course, the authors never advocated overt fraud, so Sam’s selfishness went a step further. Yet, he remains a libertarian that flew around the world to evade scrutiny and maximize his wealth. The narrative that frames him as a cheerleader for the regulatory state is a misdirection meant to distract from a painful reality for the techno-libertarians: he is one of them, albeit lacking scrupels.

We should burn it to the ground.

But first, a disclaimer. I do not speak for bitcoin. This should be obvious, but if I’m not explicit about this fact someone with a 🥩 in their bio will claim the opposite. I can only speak to my experience with bitcoin as a self-identified bitcoiner who has been here a long time. I mention this “long time” not to imply that I’m a super-important OG and you must heed my edicts, but because it means that I knew bitcoin before this current flavor of bad culture was stapled onto it. I also have watched bitcoin pivot and adapt when old narratives and use cases didn’t work out. This long perspective has further convinced me of bitcoin’s incredible resilience, both as an asset and as a community of bitcoiners. We survived MtGox and the Blocksize war: I’m sure we will do the same as we excise this bad culture from bitcoin.

Before we get into the details of bitcoin culture (and why it should be cast into the fires of Mt Doom), does culture matter?

Yes, absolutely. A comparative example can show why.

I went to a bitcoin maximalist steak dinner in March of 2019 (1 BTC = $3,500). It was dimly lit, all male, the only meal option was steak, and we talked about professional wrestling. The guy across the table told me the various health benefits he attributes to eating only meat and then handed me a faux gold stainless steel business card that was so sharp that it cut my hand and I was bleeding onto the white tablecloth. No one seemed to notice or find it curious that we were all dudes around the same age eating the same thing while trying to size up each other’s bitcoin stacks. Perhaps I was too busy trying to stop the bleeding.

Contrast this with SXSW 2022 in Austin, Texas. I attended a token-gated party for the Doodles NFT. I personally don’t own any of Doodles NFTs, but a friend has multiple which was my ticket in. This party was awesome. They brewed coffee with your personal NFT printed on top. There was a ramen noodle bar and a place to scan your badge to watch your individual NFT take off in a spaceship. I stood in line to have my NFT painted on my nail by a manicurist while chatting up a 20 year old college student and nocoiner about her study of the Jewish community in Mexico.

Of course, this isn’t just about who can throw the best party: it’s about who has the biggest tent. There were all kinds of people at the Doodles party: different ethnicities, different genders, men having their nails painted (gasp!), music and dancing and creativity. No one tried to sell me diet fads or give me health advice or limply flex their supposed masculinity. And even more than that: there was a line around the block full of crypto-curious normies. These are new people coming into the community that we bitcoiners ward off with our bad culture.

Bitcoin culture, as it exists today, is a new phenomenon. Its various precepts include: insecure masculinity, aversion to experimentation, conspiratorial politics, internet cancel mobs, pseudo-science, and affinity scams. I can’t stress this enough: these should have nothing to do with bitcoin. Bitcoin was doing just fine before this festering garbage was stapled on. In fact, these things are an attack on bitcoin in the same way that the New York Agreement or S2X were.

Closed-mindedness about things happening on other chains is also quite limiting. Newcomers to bitcoin may not realize that NFTs and DeFi were OG bitcoin concepts. And now, bitcoin “influencers” seem to insist that no one should like these things or risk cancellation by an angry mob of laser-eyed nyms. When bitcoiners look at the undeniable success of NFTs and DeFi on Ethereum, we should congratulate them and either (1) try to build them in a way consistent with a bitcoin ethos, or (2) acknowledge that we can’t bring these things to bitcoin and find ways to integrate/interoperate bitcoin with their networks. I don’t have the technical expertise to determine which of these two paths will work, but I know smart bitcoiners on both sides that deserve our support.

Insecurity around masculinity is everywhere in today’s bitcoin culture. It is the origin of the “meat maxi” fad diet. It’s in weird tradwife views on relationships, booth girls, waifus, shirtless spartan memes, stanning strongmen, or classic misogyny against valuable female voices in our community (eg, @jyn_ruso, @Marketsbylili, Sarah Satoshi). Non-adherents to the bitcoin diet are emasculated as “soy bois.” This fad diet is paired with other health delusions like anti-vax, sunscreen denial, and seed oil alarmism1. These are marketed by aspiring bitcoin influencers on ad-supported podcasts and books (available for purchase with your fiat credit card!). Bitcoin pseudo-science isn’t limited to health claims: whole chapters of our most notorious books are devoted to climate change denial. Alongside this are get-rich-quick schemes dressed up as “economic models,” like the notoriously failed Stock-to-Flow model (originated, of course, by a vocal vaccine opponent). As Heidi Porter wrote in Bitcoin Magazine: when it comes to these non-bitcoin topics, Bitcoiners often find that “it’s easier and faster to just trust instead of verify.”

So, listen: let’s burn this all to the ground.

It’s worse than worthless: it is driving open-minded people away. People that otherwise need bitcoin lose interest when they see this culture. Bitcoin luminaries like Nic Carter are roughed up by toxic internet hordes. Natural allies like Nassim Taleb are driven away by the associated pseudoscience. Normies don’t want to touch this stuff. Fuck, I don’t even want to touch it and I’m definitely not a normie. There is a tiny sliver of people that this stuff appeals to, and it’s only shrinking. Due to the insecurity of those driving this culture, there is a constant race-to-the-bottom resulting in a culture that only gets more extreme with vanishingly minuscule appeal.

What should replace this bad culture? We should be a welcoming, permissive, and inclusive community. To start, let’s return focus to things that have been part of bitcoin since the beginning: “don’t trust, verify,” the primacy of self custody, a conservative approach to development, the human rights achievements, and even the less serious feel-good memes of the past (“hodl,” “this is gentlemen,” Dorian Nakamoto’s free lunch, Rare Pepes, etc). I don’t know what comes next, but we should be open minded. New memes will take root. “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” In the spirit of permissive experimentation, we should celebrate when some ideas fail and others succeed. And to jumpstart this new culture, I will throw the first post-toxic bitcoin party. We don’t have to paint our nails but maybe we can drink orange tequila sunrises, have regular food like Laszlo’s bitcoin pizza, invite the normies (and girls!), and make fun of that time I cut my hand on a faux gold business card at a boring steak dinner.

Post script: if eating steaks and hanging out with the boys is your thing, this isn't meant as criticism! The point is to let this exist while also making our tent massively bigger.

It’s difficult to pin the beginning of this movement. Perhaps you could start after 9-11 with the “Truther Movement” which was a conspiracy that claimed the United States government orchestrated the attack on the Twin Towers. This conspiracy was popularized by the “Loose Change” movies, which—predating YouTube—relied on mailed DVDs for distribution. Revealingly, Joe Rogan was an early enthusiast of Trutherism and reportedly bought ten copies of the Loose Change DVD.

Social media hadn’t yet unlocked the frictionless virality characteristic of the conspiracies embraced by today’s Contrarian Rightists, so the Truthers were generally excluded from “polite society.” With rare exception, politicians would not entertain their delusions, the media wouldn’t take them seriously, and societal norms taught us to gently change the subject when these were brought up in conversation. Was this self-censorship? Not really, it was just a set of norms of behavior and mutually agreed upon facts that are important to a functional society. It is not as if there were legal barriers to expressing these incorrect ideas.

Without social media, the Truther movement lost steam. Similar style conspiracies took over thereafter, calling mass shootings “false flags” meant as a pre-text for gun confiscation and “birtherism” insisting that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. For any of these conspiracies to gain traction, they had to make a wildly emotional claim that would compel more conventional thinkers to energetically deny them. These dismissals by conventional thinkers would then reinforce the false belief among contrarians, and a new conspiracy was born.

At this point, cracks in American Institutional competence had already begun to form, the most prominent of which were the falsehoods from the Bush administration on Saddam Hussein’s WMDs justifying the Iraq War. However at this point, the loudest voices on the Right were institutional neocons who supported the Iraq war, though a rising contingent of Contrarian Rightists had aligned with Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 presidential bids. To many at the time, Ron Paul’s successes were quite surprising. Institutional conservatives dismissed him as not serious, despite winning straw polls and raising large campaign sums from small donors.

Donald Trump’s election was peak euphoria for the Contrarian Rightists who finally felt vindicated after decades of dismissals and rolled eyes from both the institutional left and right. The rise of Trump and the Contrarian Rightists relied on many of the same social media and cable news catalysts and incentives. Contrarianism thrived during the Trump years. This was a paradox, as “contrarianism” typically implied being in the outgroup. In this case, the contrarianism took on a kind of populism where it was fueled by opposition to institutions like the New York Times, CNN, Harvard, and the “elite” who were generally appalled by all things Trump. Conspiracies thrived as well. QAnon and Alex Jones’ InfoWars became household names. These online falsehoods spilled into the real world, manifesting in events like “PizzaGate” where an armed young man radicalized by QAnon demanded entry to the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington D.C., where there was a false rumor of children being trafficked from the basement.

It wasn’t until the waning days of the Trump administration that the populist contrarians began to publicly falter. The outset of the Covid-19 pandemic threw the Contrarian Right into a panic of hoarding rice and beans and wearing gas masks while lending credence to the “Prepping” movement. Public Health institutions—sidelined and underfunded for years—were slow to (or completely failed to) acknowledge the seriousness of Covid-19, and when they did, the Contrarian Rightists were quick to pivot to avoid sharing narrative space with the institutionalists. Once the institutions caught up and realized Covid-19 was serious, the populist contrarians pivoted from preppers to “just the flu” minimizers, then alternative medicine cure-alls (bleach, hydroxychloriquine, ivermectin), to anti-mask, and finally to anti-vaxx. Meanwhile the 2020 elections were spawning their own election fraud conspiracies, the January 6th insurrection, and then numerous conspiracies that the insurrection was a false flag (first blaming the media, then Antifa, then the CIA).

Parallel to these popular conspiracies was the online revival of cultural contrarianism. Old prejudices were revived with a contrarian bent: “All Lives Matter” as the new white supremacy, “Tradwife” as the new sexism, and “Gender normative” as the new anti-LGBT. Health fads like the “carnivore diet” and “Low T” took off among the same cohort of individuals. Nostalgia for an idealized past extended beyond “TradWife” traditional family roles—contrarian influencers expressed renewed interest in traditional Western Architecture, disdain for Modern and Contemporary Art, and a fantasy worldview that humans couldn’t possibly affect the climate.

It’s worth noting that the excesses of the left and real failures of institutions at the very least inspired many of the Contrarian Rightists. The Portland riots and lawlessness in cities like San Francisco helped inspire the “All Lives/Blue Lives Matter” movements. Public Health failures, like the Surgeon General’s resistance to masking early in the pandemic undermined later correct messaging on Covid-19. Dismissals of meme stocks, cryptocurrency, and initial characterizations of “transient” inflation could make it seem like all official economic positions were suspect.

The height of the Contrarian Rightist movement introduced a new figure: the Blue Check Contrarian (“Blue Check” referring to the symbol on Twitter that verifies an official account). These very online contrarians amassed huge followings by aligning themselves with populists and castigating “official” narratives. Included in this group are many contrarian podcasters, VCs, Twitter personalities, and Substackers. Of course, there is an implicit paradox here: the Blue Check and huge Twitter followings imply societal approval. Are these people really contrarians or have they become the mainstream? Tucker Carlson is the best example: he claims to be a contrarian voice but has the #1 cable news show. Similarly, Joe Rogan styles himself as a contrarian but has the #1 podcast.

Predictably, the advent of the Blue Check Contrarian was the beginning of the end for the Contrarian Rightist movement, but not just because contrarianism loses its “edginess” when it becomes mainstream. Instead, something unexpected happened: Russia invaded Ukraine. This upended the narrative of the Blue Check Contrarians, who were dismissing President Biden’s daily insistence that an invasion was imminent and for years lauded Vladimir Putin and the “traditional gender and ethnic values” of Russia. It also led to a sudden rallying of Western nations and values that directly confronted the “decline of the West” narrative so central to the Contrarian Rightists.

Suddenly, the contrarians were forced to confront that the West seemed to be correct in its predictions, effective in their sanctions, and just in their opposition to Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. While this conflict is still evolving, the familiar Blue Check Contrarian narratives have begun to unravel. Many former contrarians now are adding Ukraine’s flag to their Twitter names. The most ardent Contrarian Rightists rely on Putin’s entirely unconvincing arguments about “de-nazification,” historic grievances, whataboutism, and “ethnic unity.” And more than anything, even the most ardent Contrarian Rightists are increasingly uncomfortable watching cities like Mariopol being reduced to rubble and despair.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the effective unified Western response are rapidly unraveling the narratives of the Contrarian Right while our old Western institutions regain credibility. This story is still unfolding, but it is encouraging to those of us who believe institutions and liberal values are important and necessary for a thriving, peaceful world. For Ukrainians, this isn’t about clashing narratives however, but simply a daily struggle to survive: both for their families and for their flawed-but-free home country.

P.S.: It’s possible I’m too optimistic with a near-term collapse of contrarianism. I was also hopeful that January 6th would be the end. As with January 6th, it did seem like the contrarianism fever broke at first, and basically everyone was appalled. But as the weeks have progressed post-invasion, there has been backsliding and far-right figures are again blaming the West, stoking conspiracies (eg, about widespread Nazism in Ukraine, anti-semitic aspersions of Zelenskyy and his wealth, calling Ukraine a territory of the United States while victimizing Putin, etc). It may take more for the fever to break, but it will break eventually. (3/25/22 - DP)

In the midst of this, I came across what can best be described as “luxury beliefs” within this segment of the far right. To those unfamiliar, Luxury Beliefs were first described by Rob Henderson as a belief that members of the cultural elite use to signal their elite status, while not bearing any consequence of that belief’s bad outcomes. This term has traditionally be applied to the left. An example luxury belief is “Defund the Police.” Per this model, a wealthy resident of a gated community may espouse this belief to flex her “woke credentials” and concern for the victims of police misconduct, while those who bear the consequences of a defunded police department are those from underprivileged backgrounds who live in high crime areas. A hallmark characteristic of luxury beliefs is that they end up hurting the group that they are signaling support for.

The Contrarian Right has numerous luxury beliefs. Searching Twitter, I haven’t seen them classified as such by anyone else. A key difference, however, is that rather than liberals signaling elite status, the conservatives are signaling contrarian (or anti-elite) status. Among Contrarian Rightists, willingness to buck the official line has tremendous currency. Sparring with Anthony Fauci on TV, for example, scores points for the Contrarian Rightist regardless of who is correct.

So what are some luxury beliefs on the right?

• Luxury belief: Putin apologism

  • Example: “At least Putin is a strong leader, unlike our leaders. And no wonder he invades his neighbors, NATO is at his doorstep! What if Mexico was aligned with China? The USA would also be angry.”

  • Signal: by offending the sensibilities of the anti-Putin establishment in the West, sympathizing with Putin signals to the contrarians that you’re not beholden to the elites.

  • Paradox: Putin oppresses the Russian people and most young Russians do not support Putin. While this luxury belief has a “Pro-Russia” veneer, it doesn’t benefit ordinary Russians at all.

• Luxury belief: Covid-19 denial (or anti-mask, anti-vaxx, etc)

  • Example: “Covid-19 is just a flu and there are smart people on both sides of the vaccine debate”

  • Signal: The CNN and Dr Fauci establishment would be quite offended by these statements. By making space for these wrong opinions, you are signaling to the contrarian populists that you aren’t beholden to the establishment health authorities.

  • Paradox: often the people making these claims are themselves vaccinated and have other privileges (like good health, money for hospital bills, etc) that protect them from the consequences of Covid-19. The populists consuming this message often have blue collar backgrounds and would fare much more poorly.

Just as some on the Left like to flex their social justice credentials to signal their elite status, those on the Right like to flex their contrarianism to win over anti-elite populists. Social media is rocket fuel to populism, and Contrarian Rightists have been eager to cash in. As I will show in future essays, Contrarian Rightists have rode the wave of populism to attain their own elite status as “Blue Check Contrarians” on Twitter and cable news. The contrarians have had a good run, but Russia’s war on Ukraine changes everything (more to come).

A population can only be lied to so many times before they quit listening to the self-appointed authorities. This is totally understandable, and the obvious consequence of incompetent authorities. However, this pendulum swings too far: even true expertise is now cause for populist suspicion while online LARPers and conspiracists thrive.

This is our present moment.

Social media influencers with dubious expertise move from one conspiracy to the next while amassing gigantic followings of angry populists. Influencers seamlessly transition from miracle Covid-19 cures, vaccine and mask pseudoscience, all meat “carnivore” diets, and election myths. These conspiracies spread like wildfire and before any debunking can take place, the internet’s Eye of Sauron has already focused on the next conspiracy du jour.

The perverse incentives here are enormous.

Some are obvious: influencers want to grow their accounts and push emotional narratives to their followers who shoot it into their veins like South Park’s Heroin Hero chasing the pink dragon. When the hydroxycholoriquine conspiracy falls apart, they shift to “the Capitol Rioters were Antifa.”

However other incentives are more insidious. Many falsehoods are being pumped into the Western consciousness by our adversaries. PRC-affiliated accounts eagerly promote vaccine and election denial. They do so from their individual social media accounts, via reports in state-controlled publications, and supported by an army of wumao. Their goal is to exploit the free speech in democracies to sow discord and division. They want to destabilize and polarize free societies from America to Taiwan… and they are often successful.

Blind allegiance to authority and reflexive contrarianism is a two-lane highway off the edge of a cliff. We are pummeling down this highway and there is only one remaining exit: authority rooted in true expertise eager to engage with an appropriately skeptical public. Our authorities today are not experts. The WHO is a shameless political body carrying water for the CCP. The Surgeon General is a political appointee. The USDA is influenced by the meat and dairy lobby. We need to throw out the politicians in our institutions and replace them with competent experts.

We also need to expand the Overton window on acceptable skepticism. The impulse of the appointed non-expert “authorities” is to shut down conversations about certain topics considered to be taboo, like concerns of vaccine safety. The vaccines in the US seem to be nothing short of amazing, but when the public feels that any suggestion otherwise is off limits by the authorities (whom they already distrust), conspiracies become much more appetizing. In fact, seemingly small falsehoods and dismissals from our institutions often set in motion a viciously reinforcing cycle that fuel new conspiracies from reflexive internet contrarians.

Our once venerable institutions debase themselves by appointing politicians disguised as “experts” and declaring certain conversations off-limits. Our adversaries are eager to shake confidence in these institutions in order to discredit free societies. The path to renewal is to seat true experts in our institutions and foster free flowing dialogue without taboo or fear. Free societies will thrive when institutions are led by genuine experts eager to engage a skeptical public without stipulation or limitation.