The Anti Boomers

The latest from me

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share recent writing of mine in American Mind magazine. Two articles:

The Anti Boomers - about why Boomers and Millennials are so consistently shocked by the opinions of Gen Z. A lot about the split on the Left we’re seeing play out at Harvard and elsewhere.

That Gen Z was different became most evident after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. The last time this happened—in 2006, in the shadow of 9/11—not a single person said, “Hey, y’know, there’s two sides to this thing.” It was black and white, terror versus freedom. Millennials, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed true believers who’d taken school field trips to visit the Amistad, voted for Obama, and repeated plucky slogans about the power of higher education and world peace didn’t yet have the tools or tragedies to question their precooked narrative. They didn’t have a space to call their own.

But while we (Millennials) were putting our best foot forward on LinkedIn, Gen Z grew its own culture, truly cut off from the rest of us: an uncontrolled, Lord-of-the-Flies island culture with different values, different facts, and different stories, rooted in the American narrative of its parents but somehow warped and extended, governed by a sort of digital natural law. And because the Hype Dads have worshiped for so long at the fountains of youth and noble savagery, these Gen Zers—whose language is unintelligible to the vast majority of people—aren’t just participating in the conversation, they’re driving it.

Camp Vibes Make Soft Men - about my trip to Vibecamp, Burning Man for ultra tech nerds. A gonzo-type meditation about what’s happening to men.

There was an Aura Wash you were supposed to walk through upon entry and a bounce house that seemed to be in heavy use all the time. I avoided both. Tents dotted the landscape; there’s a camping option, cheaper than the cabins, which I’d say about half the attendees chose. Tents surrounded a pretty pond area like grease pimples around lips. The pond—hyperbolically called “The Lake”—also served as the “Hot Girl HIIT” workout location, which I did participate in, about 20 nerds led by a tall, woke, jiggly, and highly-energetic Kiwi girl who at one point said something like “those who experience bleeding” to describe the girls in the group. One exercise involved galloping like a horse to greet your neighbors. Halfway through, the air suddenly cooled and filled with the strong smell of petrichor, the sky turned black, and a thunderstorm began.

I ran out of the rain to the mobbed central lodge to fill my trusty metal cup, reeking of tequila, with coffee, which defeated the tequila in the olfactory battle. I sit with a friend at a table and force down the pale tasteless eggs while we’re crowded out by fat nerds. A beautiful rail-thin blonde in tight red leggings walks by us; we haven’t seen enough women, and we freeze and stare. But…there’s something wrong with her butt, and oh no oh no oh no she turns and it’s Macauley Culkin in his prime except with $1,500 lip injections and $15,000 hair: some poor Google engineer who gooned to sissy porn just one too many times. An image seared into my mind for life. The Tranny in Red.

Me and my agency WILL were also recently mentioned alongside Hestia Cigarettes in the Failing The New York Times, and I was interviewed again by Zero Hedge.

Urbit also released the video of my panel talk from Assembly Lisbon called “Forking the Economy.” The first and only comment on the video is “that first speaker is so terrible jfc.” Sick.

Finally, we’ve created some new podcast art for

Peachy Keenan

and

Inez Stepman

’s great new podcast Pod of the Valkyries, which you can see on the WILL Instagram page.

Stay in touch!