We should all stop Monitoring the Situation
And maybe start reading instead
It’s spring in America. There is death, and there are taxes. In the United States our tax dollars primarily fund more, and more, and more death. Despite being against every single war that has ever been started in my lifetime (I was born in 1995, so I’ve worked up a bit of a track record by now), I do not think I have ever seen a successful anti-war movement. I certainly haven’t seen one yet that didn’t read as counterculture in some way. The public response to the genocide in Gaza was the first time in my life that the anti-imperialist position was fully mainstream, not confined to a subset of left-wing freaks in the coastal cities. Not everybody was in the streets, and not everybody was for revolution, but pretty much everybody across America’s myriad political and social divides was in agreement that Israel was committing a historical crime.
That could have been a one-off, but I don’t think it is. Poll after poll shows no one wants to be at war with Iran, not that the White House bothered to ask anybody. This administration is not concerned with manufacturing consent. Why would they be? Donald Trump has never had to ask for permission from anybody to wreak havoc on the world; grabbing them by the pussy, et cetera. He’s certainly not going to start with the American people.
A curious thing has happened where the Pentagon going scorched earth on Anthropic, for the crime of asserting that perhaps AI tools should not be used to automatically kill people or surveil American citizens, has made Anthropic an unlikely hero among liberals. I find this to be mostly a testament to their PR strategy. Reporters love Dario Amodei. There is no shortage of puff pieces about Anthropic because it’s a very compelling pitch: Dario and Daniela, siblings and co-conspirators, bucking Sam Altman over principle and leaving OpenAI to start a new company that quickly put out its own product outperforming ChatGPT in virtually every sense. Amodei gets to position himself as the lone liberal voice in a sea of billionaires enthusiastically supporting the Trump administration, concerned with the future of humanity over investor profits.
The world is full of horrible billionaires extracting as much as they can from the rest of the world, and virtually every institution in American life was found implicated in the Epstein files. That is destabilizing to think about because of the sheer scale. Almost everyone in charge in this godforsaken country is a pedophile! Even in my wildest, most cynical flights of fancy, I could not have imagined this many of them would be guilty. Is it any wonder that there are millions of Americans who want a hero right now? Thank god for Claude.
Here’s the problem: I don’t see any reason to take any of this more seriously than the mythmaking surrounding OpenAI or Google or any of its competitors. It’s a mistake to call Amodei a liberal, because he’s not one in the conventional sense. Amodei is sincerely anti-Trump and that does make him meaningfully different from most of his Silicon Valley counterparts, but the future he would accept would not be too different from the future we have now. One might argue this is all true of the resist libs calling him a hero. Maybe. But he’s not one of them, he’s a Rationalist.
This matters because anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Rationalist school of thought (or more accurately, the many schools of thought under the loose Rationalist umbrella) knows that what they believe is entirely sincere. It’s not window dressing for standard liberalism or acquiescence to capital. They are true believers in their worldview that everything in this world can be analyzed entirely rationally, which is to say that the cognitive biases intrinsic to human thought can be edited out to achieve pure reason.
This does not seem to matter to general political discourse, where there are, increasingly, two sides: good guys and bad guys. Who makes up these two camps differs across the political spectrum, but this is a framing for the world that mostly everyone in America regardless of political persuasion accepts. There are what I believe to be objective morals in this world: war is bad, colonization is evil, the historically luxurious American standard of living cannot happen at the expense of the rest of the world. I believe a substantial portion of the American people know all of this to be true as well, despite the fact that we are ruled by the dumbest fascists you can possibly imagine. Accepting this does not make the good vs. evil heuristic true or useful. We are worse off for being unwilling to more rigorously interrogate the worldviews of the people in this world who make decisions. Unfortunately, that is difficult, and it’s much easier to extrapolate a worldview from the public stances of the people you want to associate yourself with.
I enjoy the meme of Monitoring the Situation, as a repeat offender myself. (Girls can do it too!) It feels like you’re doing something productive without really requiring anything of you, an impulse that drives virtually every horrible dynamic on the Internet: our contemporary overreliance on dating apps, not being able to do anything “because of ADHD”, Instagram infographics, TikTok activism, all of Twitter dot com. Of course it is important to be informed about the world you live in, especially when your tax dollars are regularly used to commit world historical atrocities. But Monitoring the Situation is different from educating yourself. One is hard and requires a little bit of self-reflection, while the other consists of mostly reading tweets or basing one’s opinions on what you perceive your ideological allies’ opinions to be. It’s the same impulse that made Claude top the App Store charts after 1.5 million users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions.
Polymarket announced yesterday that they are opening what they call the “world’s first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation”. It opens tomorrow. DC is probably the right place for this; all the bars play cable news anyway. It’s really weird to see corporate decisions clearly made by people who are extremely online. I think I always assume the corner of the internet I happen to be on is entirely populated by people who are exactly like me, and whoever is in charge of marketing stunts at Polymarket couldn’t possibly be liking the same posts as I am. Of course that’s not true, people contain multitudes. We are all sequestered in algorithmic silos, but sometimes it becomes clear that you don’t really know anything about the people stuck in your cage with you.
An extremely online decision is not usually a good one. Their last notable marketing stunt, opening a free grocery store pop-up in the West Village last month (I wrote about it here) was smart because the shoppers were a completely different demographic than Polymarket’s users, and that friction had interesting class and gender implications. Quite frankly, it made for a good story, one that was not immediately obvious from reading a post about it. What story could possibly come from this pop-up bar? No one who hasn’t already heard of Polymarket will go, the gimmick will get old after approximately one visit, and it misunderstands what is taking place when people endlessly read the news on their phones. Monitoring the situation is a fundamentally private act, and posting about it is more akin to putting out a press statement for yourself than it is having a conversation with other people online. I am not sure who would go to a bar where the primary purpose is to brand yourself as someone who reads the news. Baked into political posting on the internet is the inherent assumption that you, a Savvy Observer of Society, are simply better than other people. Imagine being in a bar full of people that believe the same thing. Exhausting!
I understand that begging people to pay close attention to what they opine on is a lost cause in America for structural reasons, but it is still worth demanding because there is no way out of this hell we find ourselves in if we don’t. The right wants us sequestered, siloed, angry, incoherent, uninformed. The least the left could do is not give it to them. I find the cheap thrills of moral superiority on the internet just as intoxicating as everyone else, but there are diminishing returns to this. Namely, that no one cares if you are better than everyone else if your taxes fund bombs anyway. If there is ever a true accounting of what we all owe to society, we as Americans—even the most righteous ones—will never be able to repay that debt.
Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM