One of the long-standing predictions on this blog is that the media’s role in the culture war is shapeshifting, away from Left/Right political polarization, and towards a critique of technology’s role in our lives.

The tl;dr of how I view things is that the culture war is largely, though not entirely, driven by Internet-native media, and therefore media personalities. As particular markets become oversaturated, what their respective personalities create content about changes too. 

To give a concrete example: a nontrivial piece of the Leftist Media Boom of the Trump Administration was that Leftism was trendy. There was a market for it. As that market became oversaturated, some creators chose to pivot to the Right as a differentiation strategy, as opposed to a genuine shift in political beliefs. 

In my view, that is the catalyst of hipster reactionaries, or as Michelle Goldberg put it, “reactionary chic.” Less a disillusionment with, say, the failures of the Bernie Sanders campaign, but rather, shrinking space to sell Leftist content. This isn’t the whole story, but it’s an important part of it. But what happens when we’ve exhausted both Left-wing and Right-wing content and writers and creators can no longer easily become political spokespeople? New fault lines in the culture war media market emerge, by necessity. And that fault line, I suspected, would be the role technology plays in our lives. 

The Right would shift to techno-pessimism, the Mainstream Left, unlikely supporters of Big Tech’s products, if not their leadership, and Libertarians and heterodox center, techno-utopians, with their designs on cryptocurrency and Network States. 

Youth culture, the driving force behind what is and isn’t cool, would emerge as a pensive, theory-driven blending of spectrum. This group would, for example, recognize the tragedy of the iPad Kid, while still maintaining faith in the Internet’s potential to empower social and political change, reviving the optimism surrounding social media’s role during the Arab Spring. So far, something like that has bore out. Just look at the different reactions to banning TikTok.

As it turns out, my friend Peter Limberg over at the Stoa had a similar idea, though his vision extended beyond the media market and into our day-to-day lives. 

He recognized—I believe correctly—that we’re at a crossroads with our relationship to technology, and more specifically, with the Internet. We can either be Internet-pessimists, believing the Internet is to blame for all manner of social ills; Internet-optimists, in the vein of early Internet utopians; or, we could settle into a hybrid, Internet-realism. 

The Internet-realist knows that re-evaluating the Internet’s role in our lives doesn’t mean a complete disavowal. It means a change in our relationship with the Internet. To me, in a sentence, Internet-realism re-contextualizes the Internet as a supplement to our lives, as opposed to an alternative life (subsuming our physical selves) or a parallel life (offering an escape from our physical selves). 

So, together, Peter and I decided to launch a series called Internet Real Life.

Part discussion, part workshop, we’ll be joined by Ruby Thelot, Reggie James, Honor Levy, and JReg. We can feel out the contours of what Internet-realism looks like in theory, but what is it in practice? 

Registration opens today.

The event is free to paid subscribers, but there is a short application. Link to the application is below the cut. ...