Garry Wills’s Inventing America (1978) says we have been reading over the wrong shoulder.

The Scottish Jefferson

Wills’s Jefferson took his moral philosophy from the Scots, Francis Hutcheson above all, with Thomas Reid and Lord Kames in the chorus. The load-bearing idea is the moral sense: a faculty of sympathy that every human being possesses, and possesses equally. Jefferson believed a plowman would decide a moral case as well as a professor, and said so; Wills takes the remark seriously. On this reading “all men are created equal” is a claim about human equipment, an empirical statement rather than a legal fiction. And the pursuit of happiness stops being a private chase after property. Hutcheson’s happiness was public, the welfare of a people, something a government could be measured against and found wanting. The Declaration becomes less a lawyer’s brief for secession than an Enlightenment instrument with a signature block.

Whether or not you end up convinced, the reading pays for itself. Phrases worn smooth by two hundred years of recitation suddenly have edges again.

What Congress Cut

The book’s most durable service is to pry apart the document Jefferson wrote and the one Congress passed. The delegates cut roughly a quarter of his draft, including the long furious paragraph blaming George III for the slave trade, and Jefferson sat there and suffered through every excision. Franklin, seated beside him, consoled him with the story of the hatter whose sign, edited by helpful friends, shrank from a proud sentence to a picture of a hat. Jefferson never forgave the editing. He copied out his own version for friends so that posterity could judge the difference. Wills judges it, clause by clause, and the chapters comparing the two texts are as close and patient as anything he later did with Lincoln’s 272 words.

The Hamowy Problem

Now the honest part. The thesis did not survive contact with the specialists. Ronald Hamowy’s 1979 essay in the William and Mary Quarterly went through the argument claim by claim: the evidence that Jefferson read Hutcheson closely is thin, the Locke he supposedly ignored was everywhere in his world, and some of the parallels Wills drew turn out to prove too much or nothing. Most historians sided with Hamowy. Wills had corrected an orthodoxy by erecting its mirror image, which is the reviser’s occupational disease.

A book can lose its thesis and keep its value. What survives is the method and the recovered subject: an eighteenth-century Jefferson with actual books on his shelves and actual arguments in his head, in place of the marble abstraction. Read Inventing America the way Wills reads the Declaration, attentive to what the author was trying to do rather than what the verdict said, and it remains one of the best things ever written about the text.

The Prequel

This was the first panel of what became a triptych on the founding documents, with Explaining America on the Federalist and Lincoln at Gettysburg on the Address. Set beside the last panel, it produces a fine irony. In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Wills shows Lincoln refounding the country on the Declaration’s central proposition. Inventing America shows that the proposition was never stable to begin with: the text Lincoln treated as scripture had been contested since the moment Congress took a knife to it, and the meaning Lincoln found in it was not Jefferson’s. Lincoln did not recover the Declaration. He invented it again, and Wills wrote a book about each invention. Together they make a single argument. Founding documents do not hold still, and every generation that swears by the text rewrites it in the act of swearing.

One of an ongoing series on Garry Wills. The rest are under the Garry Wills tag.

Garry Wills’s argument is that those two minutes were an intellectual coup, and he means the word. The crowd came to dedicate a cemetery. They left citizens of a different country, and did not know it.

The Sleight of Hand

Wills states his claim plainly, so we can too: Lincoln swapped the nation’s founding document while the nation watched. “Four score and seven years ago” does not reach back to the Constitution, with its careful silences about persons “held to Service or Labour.” It reaches back to 1776, to a proposition the Constitution nowhere makes: that all men are created equal. By grounding the war in Jefferson’s sentence rather than Madison’s compromises, Lincoln turned equality from an aspiration of American government into its premise. Willmoore Kendall saw the trick and hated it: Lincoln had “derailed” the constitutional tradition. Wills concedes the derailment. He merely thinks the train was headed somewhere worth leaving.

Not a Bolt from Heaven

A clever thesis does not make a book. What makes this one is Wills’s refusal to treat the Address as a bolt from heaven. He is a classicist, and he reads Lincoln the way one reads Pericles. This turns out to be the right way, because the ceremony itself was consciously Greek: Everett had built his two hours on the scaffolding of the Athenian funeral oration, and Wills honors him for it rather than playing him for laughs. Everett, for his part, knew what he had witnessed. He wrote to Lincoln the next day: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

The chapters surrounding the speech are the richest in the book: Greek revival oratory, the rural cemetery movement, the nineteenth century’s elaborate commerce with death. The Address did not escape its age. It gathered the age’s materials, the transcendentalists’ ideal truths and the telegraph’s compression and the lawyer’s syllogism, and fused them into something that made every other speech that day obsolete by nightfall.

A Sentence as an Act of State

On the prose itself Wills is best, and his own style earns its kinship with the subject. He shows how the speech moves through birth, death, and rebirth; how Lincoln strips out every particular (no “Gettysburg,” no “slavery,” no “I”) so that the occasion becomes the idea; how the sentences interlock like the steps of a proof. This is close reading in the old, strenuous sense: the sense in which a sentence can be an act of state.

The book overreaches where its virtue predicts it will. Wills’s Lincoln is at times too deliberate a conjurer, credited in advance with everything the tradition later found in the text. And the battle barely appears; it is merely what furnished the dead. These are the defects of concentration. Like its subject, the book wastes nothing.

The Appendices Alone

The appendices alone repay the price of the book: a patient collation of the five manuscript copies in Lincoln’s hand, and a quiet demolition of the legend that he scribbled the speech on an envelope aboard the train. The legend flatters no one. It slanders Lincoln’s craft and his respect for the dead in the same breath. Lincoln revised. Writers do.

The Quarrel Is Not Over

Kendall lost the argument but not the war, and his heirs are easy to find. In 1981 the Reagan administration floated M. E. Bradford, the Southern conservative who had answered Harry Jaffa’s Lincoln-worship with an essay titled “The Heresy of Equality,” to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. Neoconservatives revolted, largely over Bradford’s attacks on Lincoln, and William Bennett got the job instead. The right has been fighting that internal battle ever since, and its post-liberal wing now says out loud what Bradford only implied: that equality-as-premise was the wrong turn, and the map should be redrawn from before Gettysburg.

The left fights on the same ground from the other side. The 1619 Project proposed to move the founding to the arrival of the first slave ship; the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission planted the flag back where Lincoln put it. Notice what neither side disputes. Both accept that America is a proposition with a date, something to be owned and argued rather than merely inhabited, and that whoever fixes the founding year gets to say what the country is for. That assumption did not come from Madison. It is the Gettysburg Address, operating anonymously, in the mouths of people who believe they are quarreling with each other when they are mostly quarreling inside the frame Lincoln built in two minutes. The post-liberals see this more clearly than anyone, which is why their project is the boldest on offer and the most doomed. They want America to be a place again, a nation like other nations, bound by soil and memory rather than by a syllogism. They are eight score and three years too late. You cannot un-dedicate a country.

Thirty years on, Wills’s own argument has been absorbed so completely that we forget it was ever contested. That is the fate Lincoln imposed on his audience: words that remade the world so thoroughly the remaking became invisible. Wills made it visible again, which may be the highest service a historian can perform for a text everyone knows by heart and no one any longer reads.

One of an ongoing series on Garry Wills. The rest are under the Garry Wills tag.

The fastest way to find out who can’t think is to hand them a serious book about Elon Musk. Watch the faces curdle. A systematic account? A historically minded one? People don’t want that. They want a verdict they already hold, read back to them in a slightly angrier voice. Slobodian and Tarnoff refuse to provide it, and that refusal is exactly why the book works and exactly why it’s getting trashed by people who didn’t finish it.

A verdict is a way of being finished with a subject. An account is a way of staying in the room with it, which is harder and less flattering, because it means conceding that the thing in front of you might be more organized than your contempt for it. Most of what gets written about Musk is verdict machinery. It exists to confirm that the reader was right to feel what he already felt. That isn’t thinking, it’s hygiene: you come out cleaner than you went in and you’ve learned nothing, which was the whole point of going in. The book asks for the opposite posture, and a lot of readers experience the ask as an insult.

Look at the cover again. A single rocket trail, twisting up an empty blue sky, going somewhere and nowhere at once. That’s the whole argument in one image: enormous propulsive energy, no fixed destination, and you genuinely cannot tell from the outside whether you’re watching an ascent or a failure in progress.

The thesis, stripped down: Musk isn’t a glitch. He’s a coherent political-economic formation, and he has a lineage. To see it you have to start about a century back.

What Fordism actually was

Fordism wasn’t just the assembly line, though that’s the part everyone remembers. It was a deal. Ford paid the famous five-dollar day — roughly double the going wage — not out of kindness but because a worker who builds cars all day is useless to you if he can’t afford to buy one. A car is a mass product or it’s nothing. The whole logic of the line, the interchangeable parts, the murderous pace, only pays off if there’s a mass market waiting at the far end to swallow what it produces. So you manufacture the consumer along with the product. You pay him enough to become a customer, and in paying him you enlist him: his mortgage, his installment plan, his Sunday drive are now load-bearing parts of your business model. The bargain, stated plainly: steady, well-paid industrial work in exchange for disciplined factory labor and a life organized around the things you helped build. Wages and demand locked into the same machine, each one feeding the other. That circuit is the template, and it’s worth being precise about why.

Because the catch was the paternalism, and the paternalism wasn’t incidental. It was the price of the wage. Ford’s Sociological Department sent inspectors into workers’ homes to check whether they drank, how they kept house, whether they sent their pay to relatives in the old country, whether they were living correctly enough to deserve the full five dollars. The wage wasn’t only a wage. It was an advance against a way of life, and the company reserved the right to audit whether you were living it. Folded into the generosity was a claim: that capital could see who deserved the good life and administer it accordingly. And the same man who rewired the American social contract also published The International Jew and took a medal from Hitler’s government in 1938. Industrial genius and ugly racial obsession in one body, neither cancelling the other, because they were never really separate to begin with. The deal always shipped bundled with a theory of who it was for. Hold that thought, because it recurs.

The Muskism synthesis

What Slobodian and Tarnoff call Muskism is a specific recombination of old parts.

Take the Fordist core: vertical integration, the factory as cathedral, the founder as king, and once again the car as the world-historical object that’s going to remake society. Bolt on the part Ford would have recognized instantly — a churning racial and civilizational anxiety, the birthrate panic, the sense that the right people aren’t reproducing and the wrong people are. Then add the thing that’s genuinely new: an eschatology made of science fiction. Killer AI. Humanoid robots in every home. Mars as a lifeboat. Bots, cyborgs, brain implants. A theology of the future stitched together from pulp paperbacks.

And running underneath all of it, the engine that makes it move: truth is downstream of valuation. In the ordinary picture, a fact is a report about the world. It’s true if it corresponds to how things are, and you check it by looking; truth(p) is settled by p and the world, full stop. Musk-capital runs a different picture. Here a fact is an instrument, and its job is to move the only variable that clears the market. Whether the robotaxi ships next year was never a question about robotaxis. Saying it ships next year moves the stock, moves the ability to raise, holds the engineers who’d rather build the future than a used-car company, and buys another year of runway. And the runway is the thing that might actually make the claim true — later, quietly, or not at all, by which point the gap between the promise and the product has long since been priced in and forgotten. The claim funds its own retroactive verification. You assert the future loudly enough to raise the money that lets you go build a version of it.

Which is why it isn’t lying in the ordinary sense, and why calling it lying misses the mechanism. The liar knows the truth and hides it. Here the truth genuinely isn’t settled at the moment of utterance, because the utterance is one of the forces that settles it. Full self-driving “next year,” every year, isn’t a failed prediction made over and over. It’s the same lever pulled again, and each pull does its real work — the raise, the retention, the multiple — whether or not the underlying claim ever lands. The fact has stopped being a mirror held up to the world and become a tool for acting on it. Stop asking whether it’s true and start asking what it’s for, and the whole operation snaps into focus. This is the part critics keep fumbling: they audit Musk for accuracy and file the misses as hypocrisy, when accuracy was never the axis he was optimizing.

The South African key

Here’s the thread the book pulls that most coverage skips. Musk is a product of apartheid South Africa, and the regime he grew up adjacent to was not the backward relic it gets filed as. It was a reactionary technocracy — a state that fused genuinely advanced technical capacity with an explicitly racial political order and saw no contradiction between the two, because for its architects there wasn’t one. The whiteness and the engineering were the same project. Sophistication in service of hierarchy is still sophistication; it just points its capability at a different goal than we like to imagine capability points at.

How advanced? Apartheid South Africa built nuclear weapons. Not a program on paper — actual gun-type fission devices, six complete, with the enrichment and engineering to back them, dismantled only as the regime wound down. The cooperation that made it possible has been widely attributed to Israel, including the 1979 Vela flash in the South Atlantic that most analysts read as a joint test. Israel has never confirmed it, and never will. But the pairing is the interesting part: two states treated as pariahs, each marrying high-modernist technical ambition to a siege mentality and a racial-national project. And the bomb was only the loud end of it. The same state ran a population registry that sorted every human being inside its borders by race and a pass system that metered where each of them could stand, sleep, and work — a modern administrative machine whose entire output was hierarchy. That’s the tell. The engineering and the cruelty weren’t in tension. The engineering was how the cruelty scaled.

We file that arrangement under “anachronism,” a horror sealed safely in the past. Slobodian and Tarnoff suggest the opposite — that the reactionary technocracy isn’t behind us at all. It’s the template. A state, or a corporate-state hybrid, that delivers spectacular engineering while organizing power around who’s in and who’s out, and treats the second thing as no smudge on the first. Read that way, 2026 looks less like a departure from apartheid-era South Africa and more like its global sequel, running on better hardware. The rockets and the resentment ship from the same shop, and the people cheering the rockets keep waiting for the resentment to fall away as an embarrassing accessory. It won’t. The resentment was never a byproduct to be outgrown; it’s the frame the engineering hangs in, and it always was. Musk didn’t escape that world. He read it correctly and scaled it.

Why bother being interested

Set every bit of his behavior aside — the posting, the cruelty, the broken promises stacked like cordwood. What’s left is a figure of real contradiction, and contradiction is the only thing worth thinking about. He’s a Fordist who hates organized labor, a futurist haunted by demographic nostalgia, a man who built the best-selling electric car on earth while amplifying the worst people on his own platform. None of it resolves. The most based of the tech lords precisely because he won’t sit still long enough to be summarized.

A coherent monster would be boring. This one isn’t.

A disclaimer

If you don’t like Musk and you have no interest in learning anything new, the Romance section on Audible is right there. Good stuff. Hot. Genuinely no shade — go enjoy it.

For those of us still running with functioning rational CPU cores: I’ll take a confusing, contradictory, honestly-rendered picture over a stupid polemic any day. Most of what gets written about this man reads like a libbed-up Trump book — same smug certainty, same refusal to think, somehow even less entertaining. Slobodian and Tarnoff wrote the other kind. That’s the whole recommendation.

Buy it. Get perplexed. It’s the correct response.

Simone de Beauvoir, whose existentialist ethics remain as uncomfortable—and necessary—as ever

I read this book for the first time at twenty-two, and I remember the recognition was physical. Not the comfortable recognition of finding your own opinions reflected back at you, but the queasy kind—the feeling of being caught.

The Taxonomy of Bad Faith

De Beauvoir’s project in The Ethics of Ambiguity is to build an existentialist ethics on the foundation Sartre laid in Being and Nothingness. But where Sartre left us with a dizzying freedom and little guidance on what to do with it, she wants something we can actually live by. Her starting point is the word in her title. To be human is to be ambiguous: we are freedom and we are also facticity, consciousness and also flesh, a subject who chooses and an object other people perceive and use. We make ourselves, and we are also made—by our bodies, our histories, the situation we did not pick. Neither half cancels the other, and no philosophy has ever dissolved the tension between them. The temptation is to resolve it anyway, to pick a side and pretend the other pole does not exist. That temptation is the root of every failure she goes on to catalog.

So she asks: given that we are this divided thing, given that existence hands us no meaning in advance, how ought we to live? And more pointedly, what are the ways we fail to live?

Her answer is a gallery of defective attitudes, portraits of people who each refuse the ambiguity in a different way. These are not straw men. They are, if you are honest with yourself, people you have been. And they fail along a single fault line. Each one takes the doubleness of the human condition and flattens it—toward the inert thing, toward the fixed value, toward pure negation, toward the sovereign self—because a person who has committed to one pole no longer has to stand in the draft between them.

The sub-man is the figure who flees from his own existence. He does not assert, does not choose, does not risk. He lets the world wash over him. De Beauvoir describes him as living in a kind of stupor, a “state of blindness and ignorance.” He is not evil. In the existentialist framework he is something worse: inert. He has abdicated the one thing that makes him human, the freedom he would rather not carry. Of all the escapes his is the most thorough, an attempt to sink back into pure facticity, to become a thing among things so that nothing can ever be asked of him. We all know this person. Many of us have been this person, in the years right after the scaffolding collapses and the vertigo sets in.

The serious man is more interesting, and more dangerous. Confronted with the abyss of freedom, he fills it at once with an external value: a cause, an institution, a career, a god. He treats these values as given, as objective, as absolutes that exist independent of any human choice to affirm them. The serious man is the company man, the ideologue, the true believer. His bad faith consists in denying that he chose his values, in pretending they were always there, immovable as bedrock. Where the sub-man escapes ambiguity by refusing to be free at all, the serious man escapes it by pouring his freedom into an object and then swearing the object was there first. He keeps the intensity of a free commitment and disowns its source.

De Beauvoir is devastating on this point. The serious man’s devotion is a dodge. His commitment is real, but his understanding of it is false. He has confused the intensity of his attachment with the objectivity of its object. And when his chosen absolute crumbles—as absolutes always do—he has nothing. He collapses into the next figure.

The Nihilist

The nihilist is the serious man’s hangover. He is what happens when someone invests everything in an external absolute and then watches it fail. Having believed in the objectivity of values and been betrayed, the nihilist concludes that nothing has value at all. De Beauvoir calls this “the attitude of negation”—the refusal to will anything, to affirm anything, because all affirmation has been revealed as illusion.

I recognize this figure with uncomfortable precision. There is a period in most thinking young people’s lives—somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, though some get stuck there permanently—where nihilism feels not like a failure but like an achievement. You have seen through the game. You have understood, as Ecclesiastes puts it, that all is vanity. The serious people around you, with their careers and convictions and five-year plans, are dupes, and you have had the courage to face the void.

Except, as de Beauvoir points out, this is its own kind of cowardice. The nihilist has merely replaced the serious man’s false positive with a false negative. He still treats meaning as something that must be given from outside—he has simply concluded that nothing is giving it. He has not yet grasped the genuinely radical point: that meaning is something you make. That the absence of objective values is not a catastrophe but a condition—the condition of freedom itself.

I spent longer in this posture than I care to admit. Not the brief flirtation of late adolescence that de Beauvoir describes, but years. The better part of a decade. The intellectual satisfaction of seeing through things is considerable, and it costs nothing. You can be a nihilist from a very comfortable chair. I was. I watched elections and wars and financial collapses with the detached amusement of someone who had already concluded that none of it mattered, that the machinery of public life was a farce performed for the benefit of people too credulous to see through it. I told myself this was lucidity. It was, in fact, the most comfortable form of cowardice available to someone with an internet connection and no dependents.

What changed was not an argument. It was the accumulation of evidence that the void I had been contemplating so serenely was filling up with something ugly. The political disintegration of the past several years—the casual dismantling of institutions, the resurgence of movements I had naively assumed were historical curiosities, the visible fraying of the social fabric in my own communities—forced a recognition that nihilism is not a spectator sport. The refusal to affirm anything is itself a political act. It clears the field for people who have no such hesitation. I had spent years congratulating myself on seeing through the game, and in the meantime the game had changed around me in ways that demanded participation, not commentary. De Beauvoir would not have been surprised. She saw it happen once already.

The Adventurer

The adventurer is the figure who fascinated me most when I first read the book, and the one I understand differently now.

The adventurer, unlike the nihilist, does not deny freedom. He embraces it. He throws himself into projects, takes risks, acts boldly. He is the existentialist hero in miniature—except for one critical failure. The adventurer treats other people’s freedom as irrelevant. He is willing to use others as instruments, as scenery in his personal drama. His projects are real, but they are solipsistic. He wills his own freedom without willing the freedom of others.

De Beauvoir is clear that the adventurer’s attitude is seductive precisely because it looks like authentic existence. He has the vitality, the commitment, the willingness to act that the sub-man and the nihilist lack. He appears to have overcome bad faith. But his freedom is parasitic—it depends on the unfreedom of others, or at minimum on his indifference to it.

At twenty-two, I thought the adventurer was the most sympathetic figure in the book. He was doing something. He was alive. The sub-man was pathetic, the serious man deluded, the nihilist a bore—but the adventurer had style.

It took years to understand that de Beauvoir was describing the most sophisticated form of bad faith in her catalog. The adventurer’s error is not that he acts, but that he acts as though he exists alone. He has grasped the half of ambiguity the sub-man fled, that he is free, and lost the other half, that he is also one object among other subjects who are no less real, and no less free, than himself. Reduce them to scenery and you have quietly appointed yourself the only consciousness in the room. His freedom, unmoored from solidarity, degenerates into a kind of aestheticized will-to-power. He is, to put it bluntly, the libertarian of existentialism.

Willing the Freedom of Others

The force of de Beauvoir’s argument is cumulative. Each defective attitude fails for the same reason, and by now the reason has a shape. The sub-man renounces freedom for the safety of the thing. The serious man freezes his freedom into an external absolute. The nihilist keeps freedom but drains it of any object worth willing. The adventurer wills freely and forgets that anyone else does too. Put the four side by side and the mistake is always identical: take the doubleness we are, and pretend it is single.

Hannah Arendt—whose own work on freedom and action shares deep affinities with de Beauvoir’s project

From here de Beauvoir draws the conclusion that startles readers who expect existentialism to end in every-man-for-himself. If I take my own freedom seriously, I cannot will it alone. Freedom is not a private stockpile; it exists only in what I do with it, in projects that reach into a future I neither control nor arrive at by myself. A project needs a world to land in, and a world is made of other people, other freedoms, who will take up what I start or let it drop. To treat them as scenery, the way the adventurer does, is to pretend my own acts fall into a vacuum, which is one more way of refusing to be free. So the genuine ethical attitude wills its own freedom and the freedom of others in a single motion, not because a rule commands it but because the two cannot be pried apart. Freedom, as she puts it, is “achieved through the freedom of others.” The claim is structural, not sentimental. My freedom shrinks in a world of unfreedom, because a free act needs other free people to receive it, resist it, and carry it forward. A man alone with his power over slaves is not the freest person in the room. He is the loneliest.

This is where de Beauvoir parts company with the caricature of existentialism as pure individualism. The ethics she builds is social all the way down. It asks for engagement, solidarity, and political commitment, not as impositions laid on a free individual from outside but as what freedom looks like once it stops lying to itself about being alone.

The Ghosts of Youth

Reading The Ethics of Ambiguity again at a distance of years, what strikes me is not the philosophical architecture—which is impressive but not unique—but the accuracy of the portraits. De Beauvoir understood, in a way that most philosophers do not, that ethical failure is not primarily intellectual. It is dispositional. We do not usually reason our way into bad faith. We drift into it, or we are seduced by it, or we adopt it because the alternative—the full, unprotected confrontation with our own freedom and responsibility—is too much to bear.

I can map my own trajectory through her taxonomy with embarrassing ease. The seriousness of adolescence, where the values handed down by school and family felt as solid as the ground. The nihilism of the early twenties, where seeing through those values felt like wisdom. The adventurer phase, where acting on pure appetite and calling it freedom felt like living authentically. And then, slowly, painfully, the recognition that none of these postures was adequate—that freedom without solidarity is just selfishness with a philosophical alibi.

De Beauvoir does not moralize about this. She describes. And the descriptions are so precise that they function as mirrors. You see yourself in these figures not because she is judging you, but because she has understood something about the shapes that human freedom takes when it is afraid of itself.

The Radicalization Pipeline She Already Described

De Beauvoir was writing in 1947, two years after the liberation of Paris. Fascism was not an abstraction for her. She had lived under occupation, watched her city collaborate and resist in roughly equal measure, and understood that the movement which nearly swallowed Europe was not powered by a single psychological type but by several, working in sequence.

Read her taxonomy again with this in mind and the contemporary resonance is unsettling.

The sub-man is the raw material. He is disengaged, passive, resentful in a diffuse and undirected way. He has no project of his own. He is the young man in his childhood bedroom, doomscrolling at 2 a.m., aware that something is wrong with the world but unwilling or unable to articulate what. He does not yet have a politics. What he has is a void—and voids get filled.

The nihilist is the next stage. He is the sub-man who has discovered that nothing is sacred and mistaken this discovery for sophistication. In the 1930s he was the cynic in the beer hall who sneered at the Weimar Republic. Today he is the anonymous poster who traffics in irony so thick it becomes indistinguishable from sincerity—the “just joking” that is never entirely a joke. The alt-right understood this figure instinctively. The boards, the memes, the performative contempt for all values—these are nihilism weaponized. The genius of the movement, such as it was, lay in recognizing that ironic detachment is not a terminus but a waystation. You do not stay a nihilist forever. Eventually the void demands to be filled with something, and the pipeline is ready with an offer.

The serious man receives the convert. He provides the absolute the nihilist has been missing: the race, the nation, the civilization, the “tradition” that must be defended at all costs. The serious man’s bad faith is the most politically dangerous in de Beauvoir’s catalog because it scales. One nihilist is harmless. A thousand serious men marching under the same banner are not. The serious man does not experience his commitment as a choice—he experiences it as a discovery, a revelation of how things really are. This is why arguing with him on the merits is so fruitless. He is not defending a position. He is defending the ground he stands on. To question his values is, in his experience, to question reality itself. Every fascist movement in history has depended on this psychology. The content of the absolute changes—racial purity, national greatness, religious destiny, “Western civilization”—but the structure is identical. An unchosen, objective value that demands total submission and justifies any action taken in its name.

And then there is the adventurer, who in the context of fascism becomes the most chilling figure of all. He is the one who does not believe. He is the leader, the opportunist, the man who manipulates the serious men because he understands their psychology without sharing it. De Beauvoir describes him as treating other people’s freedom as scenery, and there is no better description of the demagogue. He wills his own freedom—his power, his project, his drama—without the slightest concern for what it costs others. He is not deceived by the cause. He is the cause’s author, and the serious men are his instruments.

This is not a forced reading. De Beauvoir herself spends considerable time in the book discussing fascism, and her analysis of the “passionate man” and the “tyrant” tracks exactly this dynamic. What makes it newly relevant is that the radicalization pipeline she described in philosophical terms—from passivity to nihilism to fanaticism, with an adventurer at the top pulling strings—maps with disturbing precision onto the mechanics of online radicalization that researchers have documented over the past decade. The alienated young man who finds community in ironic nihilism, who graduates to earnest ideology, who is mobilized by a charismatic figure who does not believe a word of it—this is not a new story. De Beauvoir told it in 1947. We simply did not expect to need the warning again so soon.

Why It Still Matters

The Ethics of Ambiguity is not a long book, and it is not an easy one. De Beauvoir’s prose is dense, and her philosophical vocabulary can be forbidding. But it rewards the effort. In an era saturated with competing certainties—political, technological, ideological—her insistence on ambiguity feels not like weakness but like intellectual honesty of the rarest kind.

We live in a culture that is, in de Beauvoir’s terms, dominated by serious men: people who have identified their freedom with an external cause and lost the ability to see their own contingency. The tech utopians, the culture warriors, the ideologues of every stripe—all share the serious man’s fundamental error. They have mistaken the intensity of their conviction for the objectivity of their values.

De Beauvoir would not tell us to stop caring. She would tell us to care differently—to hold our commitments with the awareness that we chose them, that they could be otherwise, and that they are justified only insofar as they expand, rather than contract, the field of human freedom.

That is an uncomfortable position to occupy. It offers none of the satisfactions of certainty, none of the comforts of fanaticism. But it is, I think, the only honest one.

The Banality and the Abyss

Hannah Arendt, sitting in a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, watching Adolf Eichmann fumble through his testimony, arrived at an insight that has been misunderstood ever since. The banality of evil is not the claim that evil is ordinary in the sense of being unimportant. It is the observation that the most catastrophic moral failures do not require demonic intent. They require only the abdication of thought. Eichmann was not a monster. He was a functionary who had ceased to think—who had surrendered his judgment to a system and performed his role within it with the untroubled conscience of a man filling out paperwork. The machinery of annihilation did not run on hatred alone. It ran on compliance, on routine, on the simple unwillingness to ask whether what one was doing was right.

I think about Arendt constantly now. I think about her when I watch officials carry out policies they cannot defend in plain language. I think about her when I watch institutions hollow themselves out in real time, not through dramatic confrontation but through the quiet, cumulative retreat of people who know better but do not act on it. The banality is the point. Evil does not need to announce itself. It needs only a sufficient number of people who have stopped thinking.

And I am quite certain—not as a rhetorical posture but as a considered judgment—that there is a realized nihilism at the heart of the current administration. Not nihilism in the colloquial sense of “not caring,” but nihilism in de Beauvoir’s precise sense: the attitude of negation elevated to a governing philosophy. The systematic destruction of regulatory capacity, of diplomatic relationships, of scientific infrastructure, of the civil service itself—these are not the actions of people who believe in a positive project for the country. They are the actions of people who have concluded, consciously or not, that the existing order deserves to be razed, and who have no coherent vision of what should replace it. The cruelty is not incidental to the project. The cruelty is the project.

Consider Michael Anton’s “Flight 93 Election” essay from 2016, the closest thing the movement produced to an intellectual justification. The metaphor is worth dwelling on. In Anton’s framing, America is a hijacked plane. The passengers—the voters—face certain death if they do nothing. The only option is to rush the cockpit. “Charge the cockpit or you die,” he wrote. The desperation of the metaphor was its appeal. It offered the electorate the moral clarity of a binary: act or perish.

But follow the metaphor to its conclusion, as Anton did not. On Flight 93, the passengers who charged the cockpit understood that they would probably die. Their heroism consisted in choosing to act despite this certainty, in willing the survival of others at the cost of their own lives. That is not what Anton was describing. He was not calling for sacrifice. He was calling for a gamble premised on the conviction that everything was already lost—that the country, the culture, the civilization was in terminal decline, and that any action, however reckless, was preferable to the status quo.

Extend the metaphor honestly into the present and what you get is not the passengers charging the cockpit. It is the hijackers themselves. President Trump is the captain now, just waiting for you to get inside. Armed with the full apparatus of the state, the invitation is not to save the plane but to ride it into the ground—and to take as many people as possible along the way. The animating impulse is not heroism, not glory, not any of the noble causes we have shown ourselves throughout history to be willing to die for. It is a desire to annihilate oneself and the world along with it. It is not conservatism. It is not populism. It is national socialism—not as a historical analogy trotted out for rhetorical effect, but as a precise description of a political movement built on resentment, scapegoating, the cult of a leader, and the romance of destruction.

Arendt warned us that the worst atrocities do not require villains. They require only the surrender of judgment. De Beauvoir warned us that freedom, when it refuses to acknowledge the freedom of others, degenerates into tyranny. Both women wrote from the wreckage of a continent that had learned these lessons at the cost of millions of lives. We are not entitled to the luxury of learning them again.

The Tragic Hero of American Politics

Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes (1970) is the political biography I keep going back to, and not because it flatters its subject. Wills takes Nixon seriously as a man rather than a punchline, treating him as a figure who carried the contradictions of postwar American conservatism around in his own body. He wrote the book before Watergate, which matters more than it sounds. Wills had no downfall to reason backward from. He read the character straight, and the character told him where it was going.

The title echoes Milton’s Samson Agonistes, the blind strongman brought low, laboring and suffering in plain sight of the people who once feared him. Wills is warning you up front that this is a book about struggle as a permanent condition, about a man who never stopped straining against something, usually the people whose acceptance he wanted most.

Beyond Simple Villainy

Wills refuses caricature. What he offers instead is a man assembled out of resentment and appetite who also happened to be one of the shrewdest politicians of his century. The Nixon who emerges is neither monster nor martyr. He is something more uncomfortable: a mirror held up to American anxieties about class, striving, and who gets to count as authentic. Wills calls him, in effect, the best and worst of the country compressed into one man, and the phrase only earns its weight once you see the argument beneath it. Nixon’s virtues and his vices ran on the same machinery. The relentless self-making, the certainty that he had earned everything and been handed nothing: that is the striver’s creed, and it is also the exact wiring of his paranoia. You cannot cut out the ugliness without losing the drive. That is what makes him tragic in the old sense rather than merely unlucky. The flaw and the greatness grow from one root.

The Checkers speech is where Wills makes this concrete. In 1952, accused of keeping a secret slush fund, Nixon went on television, walked the country through his modest finances, name-checked his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat,” and refused to return the one gift he admitted taking, a dog named Checkers his daughters loved. It worked. It saved his place on Eisenhower’s ticket. But Wills sees more than a slick escape. The speech is a founding document for a whole style of politics, the middle-class man performing his own ordinariness as a credential and turning an accusation into an audition for the audience’s sympathy. Nixon is not really defending himself. He is inviting resentful people to recognize their own besieged decency in him. The grievance is the pitch. Decades of conservative rhetoric would run on that same current, the feeling that ordinary strivers are forever being condescended to by their betters, and Nixon found the frequency first.

The Liberal Consensus and Its Discontents

One of my favorite passages comes when Wills sits in on a rally for George Wallace and studies the crowd he names the “comfortable discontented.” These are not the wretched of the earth. They are people doing fine by most measures who still feel cheated, and Wills is precise and a little merciless about the forces bending their thinking. It may be the sharpest stretch in the book on where the coming realignment would draw its fuel.

The larger argument is about the “liberal consensus” that governed American politics through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Wills’s reading is that Nixon both challenged that consensus and belonged to it completely. He ran as the outsider, the grocer’s son from Whittier with his nose against the glass of the Eastern establishment, and he wanted nothing so badly as to be let inside. That tension organizes his entire career: populist resentment aimed at the elite, welded to a desperate hunger for the elite’s approval. He attacked the club and spent his life auditioning for membership.

Wills traces how Nixon rode the breakup of that consensus, from the anti-communist crusades that made his name to the Southern Strategy that remade his party. He sees clearly, and early, how deliberately Nixon fished the racial and cultural resentments the 1960s had loosed, and how that catch would reshape American politics long after the man himself was gone. Reading it now, with those fault lines only wider, is unsettling. He was diagnosing the machine while it was still being bolted together.

Style and Substance

Wills writes with a literary range that political biography rarely reaches. The classical allusions never curdle into showing off. He has a reporter’s eye for the detail that gives a scene away and a philosopher’s patience for what the detail means. The structure follows its subject, moving among biography, political analysis, and outright philosophy. It asks something of the reader. It also pays you back, with observations a more conventional life of Nixon would never stumble into.

How We Got This Nixon

Written before Watergate, Nixon Agonistes reads as though it already knows how the story ends. Wills names the paranoia, the grievance, and the will to power that would eventually pull the presidency down around Nixon, and he names them as character rather than prophecy. He spends real effort explaining how this particular Nixon got built and which forces pressed him into shape.

The most interesting stretch is Wills’s dissection of American liberalism itself. His argument, as I read it, is that liberalism rests on a faith in open competition, a marketplace of goods, of opinions, and of political power in which everyone supposedly meets on equal terms and the best rises to the top. Wills’s point is that the equal playing field is a fiction. It has never existed, and given who already holds the advantages, it cannot. Liberalism keeps promising a fair race while the starting lines stay exactly where they have always been, and that broken promise is precisely the opening Nixon and Wallace worked. The resentment they harvested was not irrational. It grew in the gap between what the consensus said it was offering and what it actually delivered.

I will admit to being a Wills partisan, and the prose is a good part of why. There are pages here I have gone back to just to watch how a sentence is put together. In our own season of grievance politics and permanent polarization, the analysis reads less like a period piece than a warning that showed up fifty years early. Nixon’s weaponized resentment, his war on the media, his coded appeals: the playbook is depressingly familiar.

Minor Criticisms

The density is real. Wills assumes you already know your mid-century American politics, and his philosophical detours, rewarding as they are, do slow the story down. Some readers will be unsettled by how much sympathy he extends to Nixon. For me both are the point. The last thing we need is another biography that files a human being down into a caricature for the archive. Lincoln has suffered this fate a hundred times over, and nearly every life of him fails to reckon with the actual complexity of the man. Nearly every one. Lincoln at Gettysburg, by this same author, is the exception, and it is the best case for why a portrait that refuses to flatten its subject tells you more than a hundred cleaner ones. Wills does for Nixon what he would later do for Lincoln. He trusts the contradictions instead of sanding them off.

Fifty Years On

Nixon Agonistes is essential for understanding Richard Nixon, and just as much for understanding American politics and the liberalism it grew up inside. Wills shows how private psychology, political calculation, and historical pressure all met in one difficult man. It is that rare thing, journalism written to a deadline that has hardened into a classic.

If you want to trace how American conservatism traveled from Eisenhower’s caution to today’s populist revolt, or how private wounds get turned into public movements, start here. More than fifty years on, the book has not gone stale.

A word on the rating: I don’t hand out top marks often, and I usually have a caveat ready. This is one of the few books I would put in someone’s hands without one. Read it.

One of an ongoing series on Garry Wills. The rest are under the Garry Wills tag.

When I created a new account to ask why, that account was instantly banned for “contacting support from a new account.”

Read that twice. The only channel they offer for reaching support is an account, and creating one to reach support is itself the offense. It’s a closed loop with no exit, and it’s a fair summary of what the platform has become.

What they actually took

The reflex is to say “it’s just some repos, push them again.” But that misunderstands what GitHub had quietly become for anyone who works in software. The green squares are a resume. The star counts are references. The commit trail is the closest thing our field has to a verifiable employment record, and hiring managers, recruiters, and clients treat it that way. When someone asks “what have you built,” the honest answer for a lot of us has been a link to a profile, not a PDF.

So when that profile evaporates, the loss isn’t nostalgia. It’s the ability to prove I did the work. Every contract that started with “check my GitHub,” every code review someone remembered, every issue thread where I was demonstrably the person who fixed the thing: gone, with nothing on my side to appeal to. I had built my credibility on land I didn’t own, and the landlord repossessed it without so much as a form letter.

Why the Microsoft acquisition matters, concretely

The people who worried in 2018 weren’t being romantic about open source. They were making a structural point that turned out to be correct. Centralization creates a single point of failure, and enforcement at a single point of failure has no natural check on it.

Look at how the ban actually worked. There was no ticket, no reviewer I could name, no policy citation, no window to respond before the decision, and no path to reverse it after. That isn’t malice so much as scale. When one company mediates the public identity of tens of millions of developers, due process becomes a cost center, so it gets automated away. The enforcement is opaque because opacity is cheaper than explaining yourself, and it’s final because appeals are expensive. Concentrate that much of an industry’s memory in one company’s database and you have manufactured a chokepoint. Whoever holds the chokepoint doesn’t have to be evil to ruin your week. They only have to be indifferent, and a trillion-dollar parent company is very good at indifference.

What sr.ht actually changes

I’ve started migrating to sr.ht, and the reason isn’t aesthetics. It’s that the model removes the chokepoint instead of asking me to trust a nicer landlord.

The workflow is email and git, which are federated by design. Patches arrive as messages on a mailing list, review happens in plain email, and none of it requires that both parties hold accounts on the same server. My identity lives at an address I control, not a username someone else can revoke. The whole platform is open source and self-hostable, so if sr.ht itself ever turns hostile or simply disappears, I can stand up my own instance and keep the exact same workflow. There is no proprietary graph of stars and follows to lose, because the value was never locked inside the host to begin with. When the tools respect that your work is portable, “banning” you stops being a thing anyone can meaningfully do.

The joke we played on ourselves

Here’s the part that should sting. Git was built to not need a central lord. Linus wrote it after the BitKeeper fiasco specifically so that no single server, and no single company, could sit between developers and their history. Every clone is a full copy. The whole design premise is that authority is distributed and the network has no center.

Then we took the most decentralized tool most of us use daily and voluntarily funneled all of it through one website, complete with social graph, single sign-on, and a support queue that can delete you. We rebuilt the medieval manor on top of a protocol designed to abolish it. GitHub’s genius was never the git part. It was convincing an entire industry to recreate the exact dependency git existed to prevent.

A UI for the past

Some of my old work survives as static snapshots on the Internet Archive. You can find a capture of my former profile here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250903093910/https://github.com/nicoandmee

Snapshots aren’t repositories. You can read them, but you can’t clone, build, or resume the projects. So on my to-do list is a small tool that treats the archive as a data source rather than a museum: point it at the Wayback captures of my profile, scrape the repo list, pull whatever release tarballs and cloned mirrors still exist elsewhere, and rebuild a browsable, linkable index of what I actually shipped. Not to recreate GitHub, but to turn a dead exhibit back into something I can hand to a client and say “here, this is real.” A history I control the presentation of, hosted somewhere that can’t ban me for asking about it.

If your livelihood leans on a record someone else can delete without a word, you don’t have a portfolio. You have a hostage. Get the fuck off of GitHub before you find out the hard way.

I’m not the only one moving. This tracks with what I see nearly every day:

• Ziglang migrating from GitHub to Codeberg

That’s the thing I miss. Not the prose exactly, though the prose is good. What I miss is having someone that serious who could not be sorted onto a team.

Key works by Christopher Lasch that remain essential reading for understanding today’s democratic crisis

The one idea he wouldn’t let go of

Lasch’s fixed point was a suspicion of progress. Not progress in the sense of penicillin or plumbing, which he was fine with, but progress as an ideology: the assumption, baked into both parties and most of respectable opinion, that history runs one direction and our job is to get out of the way. In The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics he took that assumption apart, and the surprising move was where he went looking for the critics. Not to conservatives defending old hierarchies. To the small proprietors, the artisans, the populists and syndicalists, the people who wanted a stake in something and were told by their betters that wanting a stake was backward.

His claim was that the faith in endless expansion quietly eats the things a decent life is built on. Once you believe there are no limits, self-restraint looks like cowardice, obligation to a place looks like provincialism, and the idea that a person might owe something to neighbors he didn’t choose starts to sound faintly embarrassing. Left and right both signed up, in their own dialects. The right got there through the market, which promises that infinite growth will sort everything out. The left got there through liberation, which promises that shedding every inherited tie is the same as freedom. Different vocabularies, same destination: a citizen reconceived as a consumer, of goods or of identities, and a public life hollowed out to make room.

He had already named the result in an earlier book. The culture of narcissism was not, in his telling, a country of vain people admiring themselves in mirrors. It was something colder. As families and neighborhoods handed their functions off to experts and agencies and the state, people were left managing an anxious, brittle self with no thick web of relations to rest it on. Self-absorption wasn’t a moral failing so much as the default setting of a person who has been relieved of the burdens that used to give a self its shape. That is the part that reads uncomfortably now, in an economy that has monetized exactly that anxiety and sells it back to us hourly.

The revolt he actually saw coming

The book that earns the “written about right now” reaction is his last, published the year he died: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The title is a deliberate theft. In 1930 Ortega y Gasset had warned about the revolt of the masses, the fear that swamped the interwar imagination, that the vulgar many would rise up and drag civilization down to their level. Lasch turned it over. By the end of the century, he argued, the danger came from the top. It was the winners who had revolted, and what they were revolting against was the rest of the country.

He described a new elite defined less by a bank balance than by a way of life. Mobile, credentialed, at home in airports and conference hotels, more fluent in the concerns of their counterparts in London or Singapore than in the lives of people forty minutes down the highway. He called them tourists in their own countries, and the phrase still lands because it names something real: a class that consumes a nation without quite living in it. They had removed themselves from common life by degrees, into what he called voluntary ghettos of the successful, gated neighborhoods, private schools, private security, private medicine, until the public institutions that once mixed the classes together had become the places you used only if you couldn’t afford to opt out. The secession was quiet and it was total, and because it wore the language of merit it never had to call itself what it was.

That word, merit, is where he pressed hardest, and it’s where he loses the most friends. Meritocracy, to almost everyone, is the good version, the fair alternative to inherited privilege. Lasch called it a parody of democracy, and the parody is precise. Democracy rests on a wager that ordinary people are broadly competent to run their own affairs. Meritocracy replaces that with a sorting machine that skims the talented out of every town and ships them upward, and then congratulates them on having earned their exit. It doesn’t abolish the class divide. It launders it, and it adds a moral insult the old aristocracy never bothered with, the suggestion that the people left behind are there because they deserve to be. The result is contempt in one direction and resentment in the other, and a professional class that has convinced itself its advantages are the wages of virtue.

From there the public square degrades on schedule. When the terms of debate are set by people who share a class, an education, and a set of unexamined assumptions, argument narrows to the questions that class finds interesting and dismisses the rest as ignorance or bigotry. Lasch thought democracy needed argument the way a body needs exercise, that you find out what you actually believe by having to defend it to someone who doesn’t already agree. Take that away and you get what we have: not deliberation but posturing, each side performing certainty for its own audience, nobody expecting to be moved and nobody trying to move anyone. The betrayal in his title isn’t a single act. It’s the slow withdrawal of the people best equipped to sustain a common life from the work of sustaining it.

Why he still stings

Line all this up against the present and it stops being theory. The populist wave, Trump and Brexit and their European cousins, is exactly the return address Lasch’s argument predicts: a large part of the country deciding that the people who run things neither know nor care what their lives are like, and reaching for whoever will say so out loud. You don’t have to admire the figures who caught that wave to notice they were catching something real. The grievance was manufactured by decades of secession before any demagogue thought to name it.

The economics fit the same frame. A billionaire funding private rockets while the bridges rust, a founder preaching disruption to workers who can’t disrupt their own rent, these aren’t hypocrisies Lasch would have been shocked by. They’re the secession of the successful, rendered in cash. And the collapse of trust in institutions, the media, the universities, the agencies, is not mostly a communications problem, whatever the communications departments think. It’s people accurately sensing that the institutions belong to a class that has checked out, and returning the indifference. Even the culture war has a Laschian shape. Strip away shared standards and a common life, and what’s left is a war of enclaves, each tribe barricaded inside its own reality, which is close to the thing he was afraid of when almost nobody else was looking.

What keeps him from being just another declinist is that he offered his own side no exit. This was a man of the left telling the left that its faith in liberation had helped build the machine, that its educated professionals were the seceding elite, that its contempt for ordinary people’s attachments to family and place and faith was not enlightenment but a class marker. He indicted the right too, harder in some ways, but the right was never going to read him. He wrote the uncomfortable book for the people least willing to hear it, and he did it without the consolation of a program. He didn’t have five policies to fix this. He had a warning, and the warning was that the fix, if there is one, would demand things the modern self is organized to refuse: humility, self-restraint, the acceptance of limits, some real obligation to people you share a country with but would never choose.

That’s why I miss him, and why the missing has an edge to it. Not because he was right about everything, he wasn’t, and parts of him curdle into a nostalgia I don’t share. I miss him because he was the rare critic who would turn the knife on his own, who understood that the point of thinking is to arrive somewhere you didn’t want to go. We have no shortage of people willing to indict the other team. What we’ve lost is the willingness to be the skunk at your own party. Lasch spent thirty years doing exactly that, and he’s been dead for thirty more, and the party has only gotten worse.

It is also, by any honest measure, close to useless. This is a multibillion-dollar industry built on security theater and a monthly subscription to your own anxiety.

What the monitoring actually does

The marketing describes digital vigilantes. Sophisticated algorithms and expert analysts, working the shadows around the clock, watching underground marketplaces and criminal databases for your email addresses, passwords, social security number, card numbers, driver’s license, even your medical records. It’s a compelling picture, and almost none of it is what you’re buying.

What you’re buying is a script. It checks a handful of publicly accessible breach databases and paste sites, many of which aren’t even on the dark web but on the ordinary internet with a .onion mirror bolted on for the brochure. It looks for exact string matches against the data you handed over, which means the service asks you to surrender the very information you’re anxious about in order to go looking for it. And when it finds a hit, it tells you, with the urgency of a fire alarm, something you almost certainly already knew: that your address from a years-old breach is still sitting in the same compilation dump that’s been passed around a dozen torrents. You paid for a search engine pointed at the least valuable copy of your data.

Reactive is fatal, and here’s the mechanism

The deeper problem is the timing, and it’s not a small one. By the time your information appears anywhere a monitoring service can actually see it, the useful life of that data is over. It has already been exfiltrated, sorted, validated, priced, sold to people who paid for freshness, and worked for whatever it was worth. The public dump is the exhaust, not the event.

Walk the lifecycle. First the breach: someone quietly pulls the data out, often weeks or months before anyone notices, sometimes before the victim company itself knows. Then processing: the raw dump gets deduplicated, validated against live logins, enriched with other breaches so a bare email becomes a full profile with password, phone, address, and answers to your security questions. Then the private sales, which is where the money is. Fresh, validated records with working credentials go to trusted buyers through vetted channels, sold in tranches, sometimes to a single buyer who wants exclusivity. Only after all of that value has been extracted does the remainder get dumped publicly, either to build a seller’s reputation or because it’s simply spent.

Public exposure is the last stage, not the first. A monitoring alert isn’t an early warning; it’s a receipt. It tells you the burglary happened, the goods were fenced, the buyer already used them, and now the empty boxes are showing up at the curb. Whatever was going to be done with your data was done long before any dashboard lit up. That’s the part the marketing can’t say out loud, because the entire product is built on watching the one place the data arrives last.

The coverage is worse than incomplete

Even setting aside the timing, the map is wrong. The “dark web” isn’t a single place with a directory and a search box. It’s a moving target: thousands of forums that shift and die, private Telegram channels with invite links that rotate faster than anyone can index them, Discord servers that live for a few days and vanish, invite-only marketplaces that demand proof of criminal activity before they let you in, and a great deal of trade that happens one-to-one inside encrypted messaging where there is nothing to crawl at all. The most valuable transactions are, by design, the least visible. No service covers a meaningful fraction of it, and the fraction it does cover is precisely the part where nothing valuable happens anymore.

The economics reinforce this. Stolen data is priced like produce, on freshness. New records with verified logins command real money. A month later they’re discounted. A year later they’re loss leaders, bundled and given away to draw buyers to the fresh stuff. So the data a monitoring service can “discover” is, almost by definition, the data nobody is willing to pay for. You’re paying a monthly fee to be told that your old password is in a dump everyone has already seen, which you could have checked against Have I Been Pwned for free, once, in ten seconds.

The alert you can’t act on

Say the notification does arrive. Three in the morning, your social security number was found on the dark web. Now what? You can’t change your SSN. You can’t reach into a criminal forum and delete the record. The data has already propagated to a dozen places you’ll never find. A traditional monitoring service has walked you to this point and has nothing to offer past it except the alert itself. The whole product ends at the moment you actually need it to do something.

There is one response that does something, and it’s the reason I got into this. You buy the data back and take it out of circulation. Instead of watching a copy surface, you go to the source, acquire the record, and remove that particular copy from the market before it’s resold again.

Legally, this is more interesting than it sounds, because on its face it looks like paying criminals, and most companies won’t go near anything that resembles that. In February 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice published Legal Considerations when Gathering Online Cyber Threat Intelligence and Purchasing Data from Illicit Sources, which lays out how an organization can engage with illicit markets to buy back data and gather intelligence without crossing into criminal liability. The guidance existed. The legal path was real. Almost nobody used it, because it required doing genuinely hard operational work: maintaining access to closed communities, moving through those channels credibly, handling the counterparties, and doing all of it inside the lines the DOJ drew. Running a script against a public paste site is cheap and scales to millions of customers. Actually retrieving someone’s data is expensive, manual, and doesn’t fit a $12 monthly plan. To my knowledge my startup, MINDWISE, was the only service that actually did it.

Why fear is the better business

Once you see the gap between what these services promise and what they do, the obvious question is why the industry looks like this. The answer is that fear is simply a better product than security.

Security is invisible when it works. Nobody feels protected by a breach that didn’t happen or a credential that was never resold, so there’s nothing to renew against. Fear is the opposite. It’s felt, it’s recurring, and it renews itself with every headline. A monitoring subscription doesn’t sell you an outcome; it sells you the feeling of doing something, billed monthly, and the news cycle handles the marketing for free. That’s a durable model precisely because it never has to resolve the anxiety. If the fear went away, so would the revenue, so the product is designed to keep you subscribed and afraid rather than to make the problem go away.

The pitch works because it sits on top of three real things. Data breaches genuinely happen and genuinely ruin lives, so the underlying fear is legitimate. Most people don’t understand what the dark web is or how fraud actually moves, so the mechanism can be described however the seller likes. And in a world where breaches feel inevitable, the promise of any agency at all is worth paying for, even when the agency is fictional. Charge ten to thirty dollars a person for automated searches of already-public dumps, wrap it in a weekly report that sounds alarming, and you have a business that runs on the one emotion that never runs out.

The scamification pipeline

None of this is unique to cybersecurity. It’s a general pattern, and once you can see its shape you start noticing it everywhere, from personal finance to health to privacy. The move is always the same: find a real fear, amplify it past its actual likelihood, offer a shiny and reassuringly branded solution, lock it behind a subscription, and deliver just enough value to stay clear of an outright fraud claim while never touching the underlying problem.

Each step depends on the one before it. It starts with a real fear because a fabricated one won’t hold; data breaches and identity theft do real damage, and that kernel of truth is what makes the rest credible. The amplification pushes an ordinary risk toward the worst case, because a calm and accurate description of the odds doesn’t sell. The shiny solution has to feel modern and effortless, because friction breaks the spell. The subscription is where the actual genius lives, since recurring revenue turns a one-time worry into an annuity. And the deliberately thin value is the load-bearing part: do too little and customers notice, do too much and you’ve solved the problem you needed to keep selling against.

It works for reasons that have nothing to do with the specific product. People fear what they don’t understand, and almost nobody understands the machinery of data brokers and fraud. People want control, and these services sell the shape of control without the substance. The complexity of modern technology leaves most people feeling outmatched and ready to hand the problem to anyone who sounds confident. And underneath all of it, the systems that should actually protect us mostly don’t, which leaves a wide-open market for the appearance of protection.

What actually works

The genuinely useful measures are unglamorous, they don’t come with a dashboard, and most of them are free. That’s exactly why nobody runs ads for them.

• Use a password manager, with a unique password for every account.
• Turn on 2FA everywhere it’s offered, and use an authenticator app rather than SMS.
• Freeze your credit if you aren’t actively applying for anything.
• Watch your actual financial accounts, since that’s where fraud shows up in a form you can act on.
• Treat unsolicited messages, calls, and emails as suspect by default.
• Keep your software and devices updated.
• Keep your email tidy: separate addresses for separate purposes, and don’t reuse the important one everywhere.

Every one of these prevents harm instead of narrating it after the fact, which is the whole difference between security and theater.

The bottom line

Traditional dark web monitoring is a solution hunting for a problem it can solve, and it hasn’t found one. It’s the cybersecurity version of the extended-warranty robocall: it runs on fear and confusion, extracts a monthly fee, and leaves you roughly where it found you.

Your data is almost certainly already out there. If you’ve been online for more than a few years, some slice of your personal information sits in some criminal database right now. That’s not pessimism, it’s arithmetic. But being exposed and being powerless are different things. The useful response was never to pay someone to watch the data arrive. It was to reduce what a stolen record can actually do to you, and, when it was possible, to go get the data back.

Someone posted this on Chinese Twitter and it has lived in my head ever since:

“Why hasn’t a big company like Baidu, with a product like Baidu Cloud that has so many users, bothered to adapt it for high-resolution screens? It’s like they’re force-feeding users crap; every time I open it, it’s disgusting.”

Disgusting is a much stronger word than the complaint seems to earn. High-DPI support is not a moral failing; blurry text on a nice monitor is an annoyance, not a crime. But the person writing isn’t reacting to the pixels. They’re reacting to what the pixels tell them: that a company with hundreds of millions of users weighed the cost of fixing this against them and decided they weren’t worth the afternoon. The blur is the message. The product is telling you precisely how much you matter, and you can read it off the screen.

The reflexive explanation is that Baidu is lazy or incompetent. It isn’t. Baidu can ship whatever it decides to ship. The harder version is that not fixing it was the correct decision, and it was correct for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the fix is hard.

Polish is negative ROI when the door is locked

Every product manager knows the thing no earnings call will say out loud: user experience only pays when the user can leave.

Economists have a clean distinction for this. A contestable market is one where a competitor can show up, take your customers, and punish you for treating them badly. A captured market is one where they can’t. In the first, polish is a defensive weapon: every rough edge is a reason to defect, so you sand it down. In the second, that same polish is pure cost with no matching line on the revenue side. You spend three engineer-months making the thing nicer and exactly zero new users arrive, because there was nowhere for them to arrive from.

Baidu Cloud is captured. So is most domestic Chinese software, and increasingly a lot of the American stuff too, not because the code is a moat but because the data is. My files are already in there: contacts, purchase history, saved state, ten years of junk I’ll never sort. The technical name is switching costs, and switching costs are the load-bearing wall of every business that treats you badly. The higher the cost of leaving, the worse the service can get before leaving is worth the trouble. Lock-in isn’t a side effect of the walled garden; it is the garden, and the deliberately mediocre rendering is priced against your unwillingness to climb out. Scale and captivity tend to arrive together, which is why “big company with millions of users” predicts almost nothing about quality. You don’t tidy the house for guests who can’t leave.

What the PM knows and what the quarter rewards

There is a gap I keep coming back to, a version of the old principal-agent problem. Somewhere inside Baidu is a product manager who knows the high-DPI experience is embarrassing. She works on a good monitor. She has seen the blur, probably filed the ticket twice. She is not the villain; she’s the person best placed to fix the thing and least able to justify doing it.

Because what she can see and what the company pays her to move are two different quantities, and the distance between them is the whole story. At review time she is measured on numbers that move: monthly actives, conversion, retention, revenue per user. A high-DPI fix moves none of them in a way any dashboard can detect, because nobody churns over blurry text when the alternative is re-uploading their entire life to a competitor. So the fix carries real cost and no legible benefit, and inside a quarterly cycle “no legible benefit” is functionally identical to “no benefit.” The organization isn’t ignoring quality so much as failing to perceive it. The instruments only read revenue, and quality that doesn’t convert doesn’t register.

Multiply that one PM across every team on every captured product and you get the actual texture of modern software: rarely hostile, just systematically indifferent to anything that won’t show up on a chart.

DJI, and two years of nothing

The cleanest example I’ve seen involves the DJI Pocket. There was a forum post about getting footage off the thing, and anyone who has tried it recognized the pain on sight: the transfer workflow is bad in a way that feels almost intentional, as if the friction were load-bearing. The post went off. The people who piled into the replies weren’t casuals whining about a minor inconvenience. They were vloggers and NAS hoarders, people who move terabytes on purpose, and they wrote up detailed, specific, genuinely useful proposals for how to fix it. Free consulting from exactly the users most companies would kill to have.

DJI’s response, across roughly two years, was nothing. No fix, no acknowledgment, not even the form-letter “thanks for the feedback” that costs a company a copy-paste and nothing else.

Here is the part that makes it instructive rather than merely annoying: DJI was probably right. The power users screaming about batch transfer are a rounding error. The median Pocket buyer shoots a thirty-second clip, airdrops it to a phone, and posts it before dinner. The Pocket competes on being small, cheap, and good enough for that person, and every hour spent serving the NAS crowd is an hour not spent on the thing that actually sells units. The engineers didn’t fail to hear the power users. They heard them perfectly, priced them, and correctly concluded they didn’t matter. That’s the unsettling part: it wasn’t an oversight, it was arithmetic.

You are a revenue unit, and I mean that technically

“We’re not customers, we’re revenue units in a spreadsheet” is the kind of line that belongs on a mug, so let me try to turn it into a real claim.

A public company does not experience you as a person; it has no organ for it. What it has is a financial model, and in that model you are a small bundle of expected cash flows with a churn probability stapled to the side. That’s not cynicism, just accounting. Everything it knows about you arrives pre-aggregated: cohorts, funnels, lifetime value, retention curves. Your specific afternoon squinting at blurry text does not exist at that altitude. It can’t be seen, so it can’t be weighed.

Which means that when we say a company “doesn’t care,” we’re being imprecise in a way that lets it off the hook. Caring was never on the menu. A corporation is a machine for turning inputs into shareholder value, and it will improve your experience exactly to the degree that your experience shows up as a term in that conversion, and not one inch past it. When you can leave, your annoyance is such a term. When you can’t, the machine never records it, and what it doesn’t record isn’t real. The contempt isn’t personal; it’s structural, which is worse. Being contemptuous takes a person, and there’s no person in here to appeal to or to shame.

The part that’s on us

Which brings me to the part I like least, because it implicates the people doing the complaining, and that’s all of us.

The walls are only as high as we keep them. Switching costs feel like laws of physics, but most of them are habits wearing a costume. The files could be exported; the competitor could be tried for a weekend. Every captured market is, on some slower timescale, still contestable, and the thing holding it captive is that the people inside keep deciding the exit costs more than the insult. In the short term they’re usually right, which is how you end up wrong across years. We rant, we screenshot, we quote-tweet the blur, and then we open the app again tomorrow because our stuff is in there, and the company reads that correctly: the complaint is noise, the reopening is signal. We are subsidizing our own bad treatment, paying in attention and data and inertia, and the return is a product that got exactly as good as it had to be to keep us.

The Baidu rant was never really about high-DPI support, and I think the person writing it half-knew that. It’s about noticing the arithmetic that has your name in it and realizing you came out on the wrong side of the sum. The blur is honest. It’s the company telling you the truth about the deal you’re in. The only open question the rant leaves behind is whether we’re ever angry enough to make leaving cheaper than staying, and the evidence, so far, is that we are not.