Talking with John Ganz about J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel and the tech right

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This week’s newsletter has two parts: First, a new collaborative episode of the Read Max Experimental Audio Product: a “crossover event” with (literal!) bestselling author John Ganz of Unpopular Front. Like me, Ganz is fascinated and repelled by the “tech right,” and has written some excellent pieces about its fascoid tendencies, and like me, Ganz has been engrossed by Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate. We talked on Thursday afternoon about, among other things, “the vibe shift,” the different fractions of capital in the Valley, the presence-in-absence of Peter Thiel, and what’s going on with David Sacks and Marc Andreessen. You can listen above, or on any of the fine platforms where you find your podcasts.

Second, below you can read a short few paragraphs following up (triumphantly) on last week’s newsletter about Tyler Cowen’s “vibe shift” anti-cope.

A reminder: Read Max is almost fully funded by paying subscribers, who recognize and fairly compensate the mechanical and psychic labor it involves to read so many things about repellent people like J.D. Vance. If you like Read Max, which produces eight newsletters and between 15,000 and 20,000 words a month, about the same as you like “one cold beer at your local bar,” please consider becoming a paying subscriber, for the low, beer-like price of $5/month or $50/year.

The vibe shifted, again

Last week I wrote about the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen’s analysis of what at the time--in the wake of the assassination attempt on former president Trump and in the midst of the Republican National Convention at which Ohio Senator J.D. Vance was nominated as Trump’s running mate--appeared to be a major “vibe shift” in favor of Trump and an ascendant Silicon Valley right. Cowen elaborated 19 more-or-less structural reasons or causes for this vibe shift, among them “10. The Woke gambit has proven deeply unpopular.” and “6. The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp. The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.”

As I wrote at the time, Cowen’s list seemed too dependent on a reading of Twitter sentiment, rather than on a broader and more diverse survey of American public opinion(s), and as a consequence it sounded like

a kind of “anti-cope”--an attempt to rationalize and explain good news that might have been arbitrarily delivered and ultimately transient. Where “cope” is how you convince yourself it’s not actually so over, anti-cope is how you convince yourself that we’re so back for good this time, that we’re not just suffering another vibes volatility cycle, that there’s something more going on to success than “old guy + higher prices.” (Another word for cope and anti-cope is: Ideology.)

I wish a bit I’d held back and saved the topic for this week, since “the vibes” have unquestionably shifted yet again, happily proving my point, in the aftermath of President Biden’s resignation announcement and Vice President Kamala Harris’ assumption of the Democratic nomination: Democrats immediately raised a record-breaking amount of money, polls showed her in a dead heat with Trump, and Republicans began to anonymously complain about Vance.

Now, I could come up with a long, Cowen-like list explaining how and why the Twitter vibes have suddenly shifted (“1. Americans deeply dislike juiceless Silicon Valley podcast reactionaries of the kind that keep appearing at the RNC”). But this would just be making the same mistake: backfilling Twitter sentiment volatility with whatever structural or statistical (or simply “sounds-right”) rationalization I can lay my hands on. Have the vibes changed because “The Woke gambit” has now proven deeply popular, suddenly? Or were the vibes not really related to these broader structural shifts in ideology the first place and connected more superficially to candidate perception? Or were the vibes just doing what “vibes on Twitter” do, which is change, constantly?

Like I wrote last week: “It is the most volatile social network more or less by design and function”; all the optimism Democrats are feeling right now will be replaced by a sensation of doom and chaos at least once, and probably several times, between now and election day. (Just wait till Harris announces Josh Shapiro as her running mate!) You will not catch me attempting to account for those vibe shifts with anything but the most superficial analysis.

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