Clipping Silver — Before coins were made of code, they were cast from precious metal. The dregs of society would clip off slivers of this silver, keep the trimmings for personal profit, and recirculate the devalued currency at face value. This blog is like that.
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Irony, social media, nihilism, and viral political violence
Earlier this month, I went out on a limb and suggested that watching videos of people getting murdered might be bad for you. Violence on social media has since become a larger topic of discussion online and, while I will obviously take most of the credit, here’s Sam Harris on the toll social media is taking on society:
…platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture… If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis—and it will send us careening from one political emergency to the next… We are poisoning ourselves and inviting others to poison us. …
He goes on:
Many seem completely unaware that their hold on reality is being steadily undermined by what they are seeing online, and that the business models of these platforms… depend on our continuing to gaze, and howl, into the digital abyss.
It’s one thing to lose a common culture, but it’s another, far darker, to lose your grip on reality. How do you attach meaning to the world around you if you have no stable or coherent frame of reference? And a meaningless world is, by definition, nihilistic. Of all the things we’re short on right now—jobs, houses, Andre 3000 rap albums—nihilism isn’t one of them.
Charlie Kirk’s killer seems to have struggled with this. “Remember how I was engraving bullets?” he texted. "The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme.”
Here’s Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory… Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.
The internet and social media are not going to turn everyone into a deranged psychopath, but a certain degree of nihilism does appear to plague the pathologically online.
Again, look to the memes.
I used to think our collective humor swung between sincerity and irony. But internet “humor” has accelerated beyond irony and beyond even post-irony. Every “joke” and shitpost is now buried beneath at least three layers of irony. It’s trironic™ and it’s pure meaningless artisanal slop.
A Gen Zer recently went viral after Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” came on in her Uber. She tweeted that the song gave her “the most sinister vibes ever” and that she feared the “Uber was just gonna drive us off the road.” At this particular moment in time, people are so uncalibrated that they actually disagreed with her.
I kid! But the meaninglessness of everything is actually very meaningful, which is itself actually very ironic.
Here’s Sam Harris again:
Whatever the killer’s motives, he dropped a match onto an information landscape that was ready to burn…
And yet, the information landscape is not the only flammable terrain in sight. Ezra Klein offered up a very timely reminder that political violence is like wildfire:
Violence is viral. It infects, it spreads. Violence is combustible. It blazes into civil wars, world wars, totalitarian turns. Who knows which spark will light the wildfire?
I don’t know which spark, if any, will ignite a totalitarian turn in this country, but I do know that Jimmy Kimmel has not been on the air to talk about it. ⚑
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End of Watch: Uni Watch (1999–2025)
Here is Paul Lukas, founder of Uni Watch:
Due to a perfect storm of negative developments, I have reluctantly come to the unfortunate conclusion that continuing to publish Uni Watch is no longer viable. This will be the site’s final post.
This is a bummer. Uni Watch was one of the purest things on the internet. It was so wonderfully specific and enthusiastic. Uni Watch was For People Who Get It™ and I was one of them. So much so that it became a defining, albeit small, feature of my personality.
At the start of Game 7 last night, I texted my friend Bob:
If the blue jays lose it will be because they don’t have a uniform belt color
(They didn’t—although I think I prefer the pop of red.)
His response:
An observation only Joe Petro could make
Now, while clearly I was right in this case, Bob was not. Bob doesn’t Get It ™. These are the kinds of observations Uni Watch has been making for the last 26 years. They will truly be missed… and in more ways than one.
The site’s archive won’t even remain on the web:
Most of the archive — everything but the past few days’ worth of content — has already been taken down. The rest of the site, including this post, will be taken offline soon, probably around next Wednesday.
I agree with John Gruber on this:
I don’t understand why sites don’t leave their archives standing when they close down. It shouldn’t cost much to keep the domain name registered and a static version of the site’s archive online.
Either way, thank you to Founder Paul Lukas for starting this whole thing and to Editor Phil Hecken for carrying the torch. Thank you for putting in the work. Thank you for doing actual journalism. Thank you for reposting my piece about how USA Baseball desperately needs a new logo. And thank you for paying attention to the details. ⚑
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Great video essays examining The Beatles creative process
The wonderful thing about being a Beatles fan, aside from the music and the frivolous debates, is that there is no bottom to the rabbit hole. Just when you think you’ve heard all of the Beatles trivia that there is to hear, suddenly there is more.
YouTuber and musician David Hartley has a handful of videos exploring the Beatles’ creative process by walking chronologically through recording sessions for individual songs. He illustrates each by layering corresponding demos and studio outtakes. They’re really insightful and well-produced. Excellent job, David.
Here are three:
“A Day in the Life”
“Yellow Submarine”
“Strawberry Fields”
The story behind the development of “Strawberry Fields” is not so much a testament to the genius of The Beatles’ creative process as it a testament to the genius of George Martin—who is the true fifth Beatle and if you disagree with that, I will frivolously debate you about it. ✱
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