Withering on the Vine
A tale of two democracies.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
Despair Fatigue
Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?
There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue.
For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left, has made an art out of despair. This is the ...
The New Man of 4chan
“The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America,” announced one commenter last year on the giddily offensive /r9k/ board of the notorious, anarchic site 4chan. “This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun. Soon, more of our brothers will take ...
Taking Liberties
Like the slow-motion collapse of most empires, the end of Chuck Dederich’s sprawling rehabilitation-cum-alternative lifestyle community, Synanon, began with an unforgivable—and some say uncharacteristic—act of hypocrisy. Dederich was playing The Game, the confrontational ...
Keep Fear Alive
Can we imagine a free and peaceful country? A civil society that recognizes rights and security as complementary forces, rather than polar opposites? Terrorist attacks frighten us, as they are designed to. But when terrorism strikes the United States, we’re never urged to ...
Boys Will Be Men
The first time I heard about Tucker Max I was still finishing up college, vaguely toying with the idea of getting a master’s degree in gender studies. But here, it seemed, was a popcult phenom who was itching to give me—and women the world over—an alpha-dude-docented crash ...
Against Activism
Almost a decade ago I attended a conference called “1968” at a nondescript college in New Jersey. Mark Rudd, a student radical turned community college math instructor living out his retirement in New Mexico, delivered the keynote. Taking the podium, he reflected critically ...
Everybody Freeze!
Narratives are made by the artful omission of facts. Never was this maxim more evident than in a gullible feature story that landed on the front page of the New York Times last fall, about a young woman’s last-ditch bid for life extension as she succumbed to the ravages of ...
They Made Him a Moron
One day in October 2009, I received an email from the office of Alec Ross, then the innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton. Informing me that my writing on technology and global affairs had attracted considerable interest at the State Department, the email mentioned that Ross ...
The Rest Is Advertising
Recently, I landed the tech-journalism equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon interview: I got someone from Twitter to answer my call. Notorious for keeping its communications department locked up tight, Twitter is not only the psychic bellwether and newswire for the media industry, but ...
Sacramento Shakedown
Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was unstoppable. He’d pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. He’d helped elbow out racist Los Angeles Clippers team owner Donald Sterling, and grabbed a little of ...
Distressed Cut-Offs
How convenient for capitalism that the self morphed so easily into the cellphone. The doomed and dying use selfie sticks to record their every car accident and shark encounter. But the web is also awash with cheery self-promotion, from glossy offerings like Comedians in Cars ...