Please Clap

Over the past year, I’ve done a series of interviews with people about their experience of cancel culture. I have talked to people who make content about cancel culture as a way of exploring its impacts, with people who have suffered material and emotional damages as a result of smear campaigns, and with people who were swept up in feeling intensely about someone they did not even know.

It is a strange dissonance, one of many I suspect driving us all insane: that we can see, smell, taste, feel the world deteriorating while the powers that be continue selling us their slop, and we’ll still drink that garbage anyways. Climate anxiety has for decades cast a shadow over those of us lucky enough to think of this and not have felt it immediately, on our shores or on our unshaded streets.

A few years ago I wrote an angry screed about Instagram Influencer Dude With Sign, which, maybe predictably, ended with him blocking me on Twitter. I, like many denizens of the web, love to choose a Side Character through which to funnel my (justified) rage at the way things are in the world. This follows in the tried and true contemporary condition of conflating what I see most in the feed with the mechanisms of power.

Hello Please Clap readers. Today, a second installment of “what do words mean?” following last time’s exploration of accountability: below the paywall, what does love bombing mean? Before the paywall for all you lurkers (kidding, love you, consider a paid subscription) links to things I have been reading and a short reading list on Chile’s socialist cybernetics experiment, Project Cybersyn.

When I started posting cartoons to Instagram around 2017, I felt I knew what certain words meant. Everyone else was using them, and with context clues I could figure out what the general gist was, if not the specific usages.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about anonymity – who gets it, how it functions, if it’s even possible in a world in which we willingly proffer data to our techno-fascist overlords and are told it’s bringing us together whilst we are played like marionettes in a culture war of their engineering.

Greetings, Please Clap readers. Today I’ll be reposting this newsletter first published in 2020 about why people believe in conspiracy theories. I’m working on a part 2 about what it means that we exist in a Conspiracy Laden atmosphere while being governed by people (on both sides of the aisle! finally bipartisanship exists!) who are very much involved in actual conspiracy and how, exactly, this is driving us all insane.

Hello dear readers and fellow patriots, Today I am linking to some articles that feel pertinent and some older newsletters and toons. Seeing as we might all be in for a visit from the FBI due to what we post on Elon’s Internet, I’d like to remind you all that I Love America. I’ve always been a fan! Please Clap is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Two excellent pieces of cultural criticism written by Daniels in recent weeks: Daniel Kolitz in Harper’s on the phenomenon of gooning, and Daniel Yadin in the The Drift about the stickiness (perhaps literally) of the romantasy genre. I recommend reading both.

After a friend of mine made a viral tweet about Debra Messing going wild (again) on Instagram as it became clearer Zohran was going to become the next mayor of NYC, I decided to check in and see what the former Will & Grace star, NYU grad, “activist” (according to her Wikipedia page) and rich deranged woman fearing for her “safety” as a Jew was posting about this time.