All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. It’s either being directly bankrolled by a company like Kalshi or downstream of some weird payola agreement a bunch of influencers made with random clippers on Discord. But unlike TV or the radio, our social media feeds continue to look like — and market themselves as if — they’re still powered by real people.
Broderick's newsletter is sometimes incomprehensible and extremely online, and it makes me feel ancient, but it is essential to understand what the internet now is.
ENGLISH LAW AND WORDS from France
A duty to the public good
Clients, public, applicants
A split between what is, and should
Golden threaded, lettered black
Guide designers: lower, higher,
Cold words of regulation track
The limits to our built desire.
Look your lot up, scroll the map.
Read the rules, find what is meant.
See like a cartographic State,
Expect authority's consent.
Common causes, common law
Common sense of what it's for.
Fill your form out, take your chance Honi soit qui mal y pense.
But self-pity is not dependent on any objective reality of oppression or injustice. It is proportionate only to one’s sense of having “deserved much.” The sense of injustice it feeds off is entirely about one’s sense of one’s own proper status. To put it simply, if you always travel first class but one day, for some reason, you get relegated to economy class, you will spend the trip feeling terribly sorry for yourself. If you always sit in economy class, it just is what it is.
In April 2025, she texted her aunt, then-council boss Gail Connolly, asking for “any connections or direction” to look into for finding PA work.
Six minutes later, Connolly responded: “Want to work with my team at Parra? We have a vacancy – PA to the Lord Mayor.”
We are all implicated. It’s remarkable to me how very clever people — research-driven wonky sorts and respected academics and savvy businesspeople — will engage in conversations about the rottenness of the information environment around us, completely certain that only other people are driven mad by it. That’s not how the information environment works!
Had anyone ever expected to see Marilyn Monroe? The fantasist born Norma Jeane Mortenson — born with a drive to make the switch from human to icon, to cross the magic portal we sometimes call “celebrity” — invented a character she called Marilyn. Immortality of a kind ensued. Could a Monroe impersonator spirit that sleight of hand back to us? Beam us even a particle of her star’s shine?
Crucially, however, while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. The chasm between politics and policy widens, as the former becomes a fruitless stream of outrage with little or no practical consequence.
In place of swarm-like protest, Jäger wants to see not less politicization but more durable forms through which it can become consequential. Throughout the book, he returns to mass parties and trade unions: institutions that, in their heyday, aggregated grievances, trained activists, and translated diffuse discontent into strategic leverage. In the absence of such groups, today’s protests risk resembling not the organized politics of the 1930s but the recurrent peasant uprisings of the ancien régime. While they may register anger, they struggle to alter underlying inequalities.
You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.
THE PROFESSION OF HERITAGE conservation puts 'significance' at the centre of what we do. Places that, as people say, 'are heritage', aren't necessarily important or valuable or beautiful or good, they're significant, which is a key distinction. Something, like a historical event or a social meaning, makes them significant, and we have elaborate rubrics and sets of criteria to checklist-test the values. At bottom, though, it's a fundamentally human and subjective thing: if someone asks 'is it heritage', the question implied is 'heritage to who'. It is my firm view that there is such a thing as cat significance.
To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.
