maybe delulu *IS* the solulu 🪄🙂‍↕️☮️

On the left entering its belated desperate, conspiratorial era and the ideological lessons we should have learned from the aesthetics craze.

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Tracking Trump’s Cabinet
What to know about Sen. John Thune
Watch this silly space. That said: the John Thune thing won’t change shit but it’s a sliver of hope.

Trump taps Musk, Ramaswamy
"elon musk holds a ton of dogecoin"
Embarrassing. At least the memes are good?

Putin Aide Issues Ominous Warning
"Read it slowly."
Hmm…seems like Putin and Trump did a bit of canoodling?

Sotomayor has no plans to resign
Mama, there’s a full right wing court behind you.

13 Young, Undecided Voters Discuss
Wanna feel ill? Read this! “‘Harris cares about they/them. Trump cares about you.’ So powerful.”: AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

The Onion Buys Infowars
Ben & Jerry's says Unilever silenced it over Gaza
Some good business news! Also:  The Onion deserves a Pulitzer for their posts this week!

Why Is COP29 Being Held in Baku?
Argentina withdraws negotiators from Cop29
This gd mess. I hate COP! What an anti-climate masturbation session, which Argentina’s withdrawal from is going to make much worse. Clowns!

What’s Behind New York Fires?
Should we add this to the list of things NYC copied from LA? 😞

Meet the private doctor to the wealthy
This is old and not the story that I was looking for but I was talking with a friend on Twitter about concierge medicine, private equity, and health access and remembered just how wild it is that the wealthy can afford health care that discovers problems before they exist while the rest of us have to use a “curative” model that ultimately means: come to us when you’re dying. The video is kinda gross.

“I feel like we’re living in a time where everybody thinks they’re absolutely right about whatever opinion and is uninterested in actually knowing what is right or what could be right,” my friend Lance said in a group chat this week. “That’s making everyone go a absolutely batshit crazy…Maybe I need a Twitter break.”

That is this moment, as the dust settles further upon our shoulders. A week after the collective “Get offline!!” feeling post-election, a throughline has emerged for those who did stay in the digital trenches: a political “delulu is the solulu” cloud emerged, peddling fantasies about what’s happening, what could happen, and what will happen. Friday’s full moon captured this well as certain spiritual types saw this as Kamala’s victorious day, that things were “going to happen.” In the “just asking questions” camp, some are hoping for a recount, pinning Trump’s win upon a Starlink fable (that the Kamala campaign is maybe capitalizing on). Was Beyoncé going country a harbinger of the apocalypse? Was brat? What does all the recession pop mean? Some have shifted into strange righteousness and racism. Right wing witch hunting on #FragranceTok! Right wing witch hunting on #BookTok! Threads as left wing conspiracy hub! Is the resistance dead? How did right wing talking points infiltrate queer spaces? Is your interracial queer marriage going to be illegal? Are your friends following RFK Jr.? Are you fighting in the comments? Are you preparing for Trump? Are you supporting ethical brands? Are you making yourself tariff-proof? Don’t give up but…DEMOCRATS…PLEASE…DO SOMETHING!!!!!! Maybe greatness is coming? I could be delusional or I could be experiencing clarity in the form of a vision from God.

These are the stages of grief, naturally, but they also reflect one of the greatest problems of our time: too much information. Too much information, too many takes, too many conspiracies, too much happening in life that everyone is drowning and the winners are those who yell loudest, with the most visually appealing life preservers. Who knows if this was anyone’s strategy but the internet — as a real place or not — isn’t just an echo chamber but an increasingly unnavigable space where people no longer know what to look for or how to look at all. This creates an exhausted milieu, degrading mental capacity so that one cannot understand fact from fiction, especially the young. What we need to understand is that we’ve gone beyond the valley of disinformation, that the internet is a useless tool that now requires sherpas to travel behind, which is why things like group chats and DMs are “the future of social” because social is just too loud. That’s why people are reading newsletters like this, why people are listening to Hasan. This also means something a bit more complicated, which AOC explained to Joy-Ann Reid, during the representative’s week of brilliant, thoughtful, meaningful work —

There are people — millions of people in this country, and I was one of them — where you are working two, three shifts a day to try to make ends meet: you’re not reading the newspaper every morning with a cup of coffee…You have such an overwhelm of information….One of their primary trusted sources of information was [...] ‘You,’ as in me. That means they rely on me as their elected official for information directly — it also means they are listening to him directly for his information.

A problem of navigability is a problem of noise, which is made more impossible by our having no time to properly “do our homework,” all as legacy media dissolves, becoming increasingly unreliable. Thus, as AOC notes, that means literal politicians are news sources now. Sure, yes, creators, writers like myself, but also the literal state. The days of the street team, of the “creator collective,” are over: cliques have formed and we march behind our queens. We eat propaganda for every meal now, never curious about what else we could eat.

This is why chatter begets chatter because information and disinformation have collapsed into a bizarre, desperate entertainment of magical thinking that has degraded digital platforms and the whole of media. We’re in the space of CoComelon for adults, where constant overstimulation breeds emotional, angry, dumb people. This is a matter of ultra presence, that being inundated with memes and “today’s trends” have clouded long-game or holistic worldviews and work. What does that look like? Think how the neo-con Catholic sect Opus Dei’s dissolved the American right or Peter Thiel’s long pumping up the right with shadow support, all decades-long efforts to create a right wing reality. Yes, yes, the very viral, very good Elon Musk video but the left is now entering its right wing era, about to birth our own birther movement. Sadly, we’re a decade too late, without a Joe Rogan or a direction — and we only have thirty minutes before everything collapses.

“You feel as though you’re doing something, but in the end, it becomes a time suck, siphoning your energy away from real-world action and accomplishments” the activist and Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa observed of social chatter in her 2023 book How to Stand Up to a Dictator. “Think the Matrix, powered by human batteries. And what were we doing? Performing in our own Truman Shows.”

‘Oppenheimer' Critics’ Best Film of the 2020's
This critics poll is very interesting, even if it still doesn’t sway me to watch their top pick.

Where Did All the Hollywood Assistants Go?
Yet another sign that, say, Hollywood is no longer ran-by-people or even artists but by a money machine that only cares about its pockets.

Marc Jacobs Editing December Vogue
"what do we think??"
The Marc Jacobs Vogue is well done but…is it not just an ad? For the industry, for nepotism, for a designer’s own agenda? At least they’re being forward about how industries work. Or something?

Vatican, Microsoft’s AI-generated St. Peter's
First anime, now this. The church is absolutely in its flop era, like D list celebrity style flop era. Or Trump era? When do the Aquinian NFTs and water of Lourdes watches drop?

Neom names DMAA, Gensler The Line's architects
21,000 workers killed building Saudi’s the Line
Neom CEO departs as Saudi Arabia scales back
Everyone Needs to Disavow Neom
I have been watching this saga from afar for months and…it’s going exactly as badly as you would think! And don’t forget: as deaths rise and the desperate pursue paydays, this isn’t just blood on the hands of fossil fuel, mega-architecture, and general oligarch types as there are so many marketing, design, and lifestyle agencies already involved — and simping to join this sordid death machine. You know who you are!!

The Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent
This is…absurd. The thing about these stories (Or their subjects?) is their failure of imagination: there are many children who need grandparents but who do not have them. Why not help them out? Instead of insulting your own children? Real loser shit. And “worried about a legacy”? Literally go outside and help your community, you non-creative selfish holes. (See also: Russia banning media where not-having-kids seems cool.)

Samantha Harvey on her Booker-winning space novel
“150 books in June”
Being a reader for the Booker — or any literary prize — sounds like a nightmare. Also, Orbital may have won the title but James has won the times.

The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024
Top 10 Albums of the Year 2024
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: best of lists are dropping!!

wanna make change? here's some advice
icymi, I interviewed my mother about how she went from a high school teacher watching Trump tear apart families to working in legal aid helping asylum seekers. Yes, you can make a difference!

What is an aesthetic if not a signal? Is it not also a group of ideologies, a concentration of world views and gestures, of how people treat people and want to be treated in return? Can we also say that, if one walks like a duck long enough, they become a duck?

A great way of looking at this cause-and-effect is with something like appropriation: when Kim Kardashian appropriates Black culture, this isn’t just stealing from a culture but it’s signalling experiences of oppression, experiences of culture making, experiences of being non-white in a specific time and place while using such imagery for profit. A commercial built upon unearned experience is what it is, one that many others (Anya Taylor Joy, Hailey Bieber, Gwen Stefani, Coachella people circa the early-2010s) have long participated in. Its opposite is in ballroom, where categories like “executive realness” propose that clothing worn by someone at the bottom could transform them to the top. Much like affirmations, if you wear something enough, if you signal an aesthetic enough, you somehow get a seat at the table — even if you stole it.

Now zoom out, to the recently deceased early 2020s “aesthetics” craze(s). Which ones actually stuck? What do they say about us? Whether literally or ideologically, I’d say that the ones that leapt from niche to mainstream are quiet luxury, old-money, balletcore, coquette, and office siren. What do these have in common? Being well off, throwing back to old times, situating yourself in escapism of a time passed, when looking beautiful was part of one’s job because you didn’t have to worry about money and you didn’t have a smartphone. Sounds great, right? But doesn’t that also sound like some MAGA brain rot? Doesn’t that sound like conjuring a past you will never have in retribution for the times you’ve inherited, that you’ve lived through? Sure does. With the exception of the office siren, which conjures work done (hypothetically) on one’s own, the “classic” aesthetics are pinned to prep and Ivy style, a la Republican dog whistles: the furs, the khaki, the seersucker — the Ralph Lauren, the Barbour, the Loro Piana. They recall old times, they recall caste systems and servitude, which we know very well because no one is dressing like “the help”: these aesthetics have never been about aspiring to be the common person, the everyman. They’re about aspiring to grandeur, rising above, to be rich means carrying the beliefs of such a status. This is why the rich, the bourgeoisie, and their aspiring cronies are bad: their politics are about keeping those on the bottom down, about thwarting progress.

All these years later, the aesthetics have turned direct, the wearers of such attire perhaps becoming ideologies too. For example: this Twitter account I randomly happened upon, where the folding of aesthetic and ideology is blindingly clear, propelled by this person being a far right philosopher and think tanker. To this person, it’s no longer just an aesthetic but an extension of ideologies. Don’t just walk like a duck: talk like one too. Become a duck. Escape escapism and start acting at (and working toward) a desired tomorrow today. Such cultural expressions — the trad wives, the alpha males, the ladies who lunch, the western wears — are cute to conjure but they’re sweetening bedevilled red pills. This isn’t just a theory because the election brought these aesthetics home to roost given the surprising Trump support from Gen Z, that the misogyny and subjugation of “prep” culture found an obvious home in voting for a walking billionaire archetype, in someone who created the long storied “old-money” mold of 1980s luxury. “We want Patrick Bateman,” the crowd chanted, wearing shirt dresses and red ties, trucker hats and oxfords — then he pulled out an ax and beheaded them all.

No longer just aesthetics, what we’re seeing is how escapism wins. Whether someone like Trump — or whichever far right European leader — can pay off these dreams is besides the point because so many people inside and outside the aesthetic sphere (or youth sphere, for that matter) voted to become rich, to become white, to have a future that was like the past, where they too get to profit off someone else’s suffering. Why fight for climate change when you can fly above it? Why be “brat” when you can be an even more nihilistic, saying “Fuck this shit: pay me.” as you turn red? It’s so obvious that a fantasy was on the ballot and people chose an idealized past instead of a potential futuristic utopia. We should have taken the rise in medieval and fantasy fonts more seriously: we’re steeped within a cultural coma lost to magical thinking.

This brings us to the ever widening elephant in the room: what are we to make of Gen A and the aesthetics and cultures they stew in? As discussed a few months back, these mean apples are directly from the mean trees of our times. Spend some time on TikTok and you can see alarm bell after alarm bell after alarm bell: “skibidi to the polls” will mean voting for Logan Paul because he has more rizz, because he could punch Kamala in the face. Make discipline great again, I suppose, but also some fires need to be met with fire, shifting these aesthetics and cultural gestures to align with better values. “If you can’t talk to a group of teenage boys, with very extremist, crazy views, and have them walk away like, ‘That guy’s pretty cool,’ you’re not capable of leading a movement,” someone said on TikTok. “Stop being a nerd, I don’t know.”

"Kamala is Quibi"
"in the Oval Office"
"Nominating myself for senate bottom"
“nonprofit boss post-election”
“Congrats Marco Rubio”
“like a politician asking for campaign money”
“My MAGA cousin”
“taping of Huckabee”
Fine, more political posts.

"beautiful boy can sing"
"This obsession with Barron is hilarious"
"He had a Slovenian accent 😭"
Despite the above essay, I love every Barron post. Would love to give a gentle pat on the head to all the smooth brained Boomers who think he’s Jesus.

“my dog passed away”
“subtle foreshadowing”
Maybe only grandmas should be allowed to use AI and TikTok.

“an update”
Is this bad? Is this good? Would you eat a salad in a former theater? I guess it’s good but, like a former athlete’s body, you look at them and wonder about the time when their form was perfect, when they were at the peak of something.

“interviewed by Cookie Monster”
The never ending, seemingly all year Wicked press tour is one of my least favorite trends which, when paired with the popcorn buckets, represent the new flesh as far as desperate movie marketing. Another entry in the canon of too much shit! But this is funny.

"constructed such a parasocial relationship"
This feels like a very modern situationship that I too have had.

“trauma dump in the UK”
“Ding Dong Ditch in Canada”
Some international relations for you.

"neurotypical cockroach"
And I would still smash tf out that thang.

"a new little porcelain figurine of a gay guy"
I have been thinking about this all week. Hanya, if you are reading this, I am ready to be placed in your cabinet.

"get strapped soon"
Hope this queen is indeed deeply strapped right now.

“bussy mix icepops”
This might be in German but I understood every word.

“Connecting Anne Frank to the Rizzler”
Funny how life is sometimes.

"circle back"
Okay, not done with Hawk Tuah memes yet. 

“Scam emails”
Maybe I should start replying to spam emails again.

“so there is truth”
IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE SCIENCE IS REAL

And, finally, how some people act by the end of these dispatches.

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