Weekly Scroll: Eternal September

Plus: A little TPOT and a very good Christmas song

Blue September

In internet lore, Eternal September refers to the process by which small communities are changed for the worse by an influx of new users. It originally referred to a very specific phenomenon where online spaces (which had very few users in the late 1980s and early 1990s) would get a surge of new users each September as new college students arrived on campuses.¹ These new users often didn’t know the etiquette, norms or social practices of the existing group, and were an annoyance. When internet service providers started getting regular people online in larger and larger numbers, the changes to online culture were dubbed ‘Eternal September’, in recognition that a particular era of the internet was ending, never to return.

The idea is now used more broadly to refer to any small online community which grows rapidly and sees its culture change as a result of that growth. It’s usually invoked as a bad thing, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be bad. Change can work in either direction. But whenever a social media space gets a huge influx of new users, you can expect change. And that’s what makes the current fight over at BlueSky over Jesse Singal so interesting.

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From its inception BlueSky has had a left-leaning culture. Until very recently it was mostly populated by former Twitter addicts who hated the right-leaning direction of X under Elon Musk. But BlueSky has also had an unprecedented wave of growth since the election of Donald Trump:

And as the site gains popularity, more people are migrating who aren’t highly progressive. Some are mainstream liberals, some are centrist, and a few are even right-leaning. And that’s causing cultural problems. BlueSky power users are not happy about this change, and they’re particularly not happy about Jesse Singal joining the site.

Singal, depending on your point of view, is either a careful and thoughtful journalist who chronicles trends in transgender medicine or a vile transphobic monster actively trying to get trans people killed. He recently posted on X that he wanted to colonize BlueSky with normal people and began posting on the new site. This set off a feeding frenzy wherein the progressive users of BlueSky very calmly² accused him of bigotry, harassment, revealing private medical records of trans people, and pedophilia. He quickly became the most blocked account on the site, and users kicked off a massive campaign to get him banned. He was, in fact, initially banned by an automated system because his account was mass-reported by thousands of people, but that ban was undone. Now BlueSky has come out with a statement essentially saying they’re not going to ban him, and the site’s power users are freaking out.

The least interesting part of this is the Jesse Singal: Evil Monster or Unfairly Criticized?? question. Personally, I’ve disagreed with some points of Singal’s reporting before but I’ve never found any good reason to think he’s a monster. Taking the accusations in turn, the pedophilia and ‘revealing private medical information’ points seem to be entirely made up³. The harassment accusation is just that he posts screenshots of accounts that have him blocked, which seems silly given the behavior of his critics:

Beyond the tribal battle here, what I notice is BlueSky having its first major Eternal September moment. Up to this point, the site has essentially been a hugbox for highly progressive types who are terminally online but can’t stand anyone more than two inches to their right politically. The site’s leadership wants continued growth, but the user base is furious because that growth means the hugbox is going away. But there’s not really an alternative. If BlueSky is going to grow, it’s going to change. And this won’t be the last battle - there’s already been a smaller version of the Singal drama where lefty BlueSky veterans tried to chase an AI developer off the site.

Culture is derived from people. It’s ultimately just a collection of things that people do and say and the status games they play. If you change the people, you’ll change the culture. It can’t be avoided, and BlueSky users who thought they’d found a Twitter alternative that catered specifically to them are learning otherwise.

United By Half-Life

Last week the Assad regime finally fell in Syria. It’s a momentous event which could have profound geopolitical implications, none of which I am qualified to speak on. But one thing I am qualified to speak on is digital culture, so here’s a Syrian rebel exploring Assad’s tunnels and remarking “Man, this feels just like playing Half-Life”:

As someone who played Half-Life, he’s absolutely correct. Assad’s tunnels are eerily similar to the famous video game’s aesthetic. But it’s also wild to me that this rebel and I who share almost nothing in common both know and have played the same game. We live in very different societies. We have different religions, ethnicities, and worldviews. One of us is a soldier who’s probably seen unfathomable things and the other gets mad when his local Chipotle runs out of the green salsa.⁴ But we’ve both played Half-Life. We probably watch the same Marvel movies. We could bond over listening to the same rap. Globalism is a hell of a trip.

The Shooter was a Little TPOT

Last year after the Oct. 7th attacks, I wrote a piece called Real Wars Are Now Flame Wars that made that point that social media discourse was now a strategic asset in geopolitical conflicts:

This endless fight is playing out on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, in countless Discord channels and Slacks, all across the web. Watching this play out in real time, it struck me that we will likely never again experience a war without a corresponding social media battle for public opinion. This is now a permanent feature of modern conflict. Social media is just another combat zone, and often a crucial one. Posts are strategic assets. The discourse is a battlefield. All real wars are now Flame Wars.

The shooting of the United HealthCare CEO last week is less important than a geopolitical conflict, but we saw a similar rush to propagandize. As soon as it happened, online partisans began to fight about what the shooter likely believed, what camp he belonged to, what his ideals were, etc. There was a rush to define him and define the moment. This was especially prominent on the dirtbag left, with both anonymous posters and credentialed voices like Taylor Lorenz rushing to anoint the shooter as a valiant champion of progressive causes, a vanguard of the working class, radicalized by his personal experiences with the healthcare industry.

But the problem with rushing to define a situation in that manner is that everything you’re saying might be wrong.

We learned this week that the shooter was Luigi Mangione of Maryland. He was not working class. He was an Ivy League graduate. In fact, his family are extremely wealthy, to the level where they have sports facilities named after them. They have a charitable foundation. Mangione had a trust fund!

Mangione also does not appear to be a victim of the healthcare industry. He had a back surgery that was, by his own account, highly successful and resolved all his pain. It was fully covered by insurance (and even if it wasn’t, his family would have been rich enough to pay for it). His manifesto is less than 300 words long and amounts to a series of garbled misunderstandings and ‘me brave, health industry bad’. He wasn’t even a customer of United HealthCare! He appears to have picked them at semi-random because they’re one of the largest companies in the industry.

To top it all off, Luigi’s politics don’t even seem to lean to the left. On the face of things, his political views are confusing. He followed Ezra Klein and AOC on Twitter, but also followed Joe Rogan and was a reply guy for alt-trad account LindyMan. He’s retweeted Tucker Carlson and seemed to enjoy self-help gurus like Andrew Huberman. He liked RFK.

This all seems incoherent, but it’s actually a very specific kind of person. It’s a well educated guy with a engineering or technical background of some kind. He’s likely to say he’s socially liberal but not woke. He likes to intellectualize things, but has a habit of simply parroting what he’s heard on various Substacks, podcasts and TED Talks. He thinks of himself as contrarian and rational. He likes self-help but in a masculine coded, life-hacky kind of way. And his worldview is essentially TPOT.

If you’ve never heard of it, TPOT stands for This Part of Twitter. It’s a loosely defined right-leaning group that overlaps with techbro culture, AI, post-rationalism, effective accelerationism and vaguely alt-center-right-ish thinking. It’s hard to describe precisely but you know it when you see it - think Aella and her constellation of like-minded writers and fans. They’re often rationalists who abandoned the specific rationalist groups and beliefs but kept much of the language and methodology. They view most complicated cultural problems as engineering/technical challenges but their contrarianism leads them to also dabble in drugs and spirituality. They tend to work in tech, be obsessed with fitness but not sports, listen to Lex Fridman-style four hour podcasts and write posts that are far, far too long.

And Luigi, if you follow his digital trail, was without question one of them. He described himself as agnostic but wrote about Christianity’s ‘fitness-enhancing benefits’. He took the Unabomber’s manifesto seriously. He had strong opinions about traditional architecture and would go on rants about Japan’s birthrate decline:

I don’t really have any great insight about what this means for TPOT or Mangione himself. TPOT has been growing in prominence as an online subculture and it’s very odd to see them dragged into this. But what I do think is important is that we remember when a big event happens - a war starts, a prominent person is killed, etc - people are trying to influence you. The people talking about it are almost always trying to sell you a specific story, whether it’s true or not. We can’t stop that process, but we can be aware of it and not get suckered into their mind games.

Links

• Ben Shapiro posted a 23 minute video essay review of Wicked, and people are surprised that it’s actually very good. He gets into detailed breakdowns comparing the movie actors to the stage actors, the cinematography, etc. It’s more fuel for the theory that root of conservative punditry is being mad that liberals run all the cultural spaces, because Ben is clearly a repressed bi theater kid.

• BuzzFeed sold Hot Ones to a George Soros operated fund. This feels like buying high? I really enjoy Hot Ones and think Sean Evans is a great interviewer, but I’m not sure how much further you can go with what is essentially a single gimmicky format that’s likely already peaked. Then again, Dude Perfect just raised 100M in venture capital so maybe I’m undervaluing how large YouTube channels can get?

• In yet another example of the EU’s own regulations forcing them further and further behind the rest of the world in tech, OpenAI’s video tool Sora is not releasing the in EU.

• A Disney influencer died at a Disney-sponsored creator event, due to being served food she was allergic to.

• A judge ruled that WordPress must stop blocking/interfering with WP Engine. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has since threatened to quit the community in retaliation.

• Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has departed the New York Times and started writing on Substack.

• The TikTok ban is still moving forward after a federal appeals court denied an attempt to delay it.

Posts

• If you’re the right kind of online, you will understand this tweet without needing to speak German.

• Hit ‘em with the Glock Dookie

• Inconceivable, Sean

• Optimal drain placement

• A very good rendition of a Christmas Song

1. Internet access through your university was the easiest way for many people to get online in the early days of the internet, before it was common to have home access.

2. they were not, in fact, very calm

3. More specifically the medical records accusation appears to be that he quoted 18 words from a medical report that are completely anonymous and could not possible identify the patient in question.

4. The red salsa is NOT AS GOOD.