Compact Substack

During the plague years of 2020 and 2021, I was a participant in a sub-realm of Twitter, made up of a mix of “facephag” and anon accounts and spread out over any number of overlapping group chats, that came to be known as the “post-left.” Fellow veteran Oliver Bateman has chronicled this tendency’s rapid rise and equally abrupt crack-up in the pages of Compact. The term “post-left” rarely functioned as a self-ascription and soon came to function mostly as a term of derision.

This week, the American Enterprise Institute’s new Council on AI Ethics released a “founding document” outlining its principles and goals in the pages of The New Atlantis. The body’s creation responded to an earlier call by AEI fellow M. Anthony Mills for a “President’s Council on AI,” modeled on the W. Bush-era President’s Council on Bioethics.

Over at the main site, I reviewed the new anthology of essays by Dwight Macdonald put together by John Summers (who wrote for Compact about another American original of anarchist leanings, David Graeber, here). The book, Atrocities of the Mind, is a treasure trove of Macdonald’s always irascible and unpredictable writing.

It’s been just over four years since I joined Compact, a new magazine dedicated to exploring cultural currents and ideological crossovers that were otherwise neglected in the mainstream outlets of the left and right. During that time, I’ve enjoyed immense freedom as an editor and writer, exploring topics from the politics of chemical pollution to Zohran Mamdani’s Ugandan roots to the thought of Nick Land.

In my obituary for the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who died last year, I cited Fredric Jameson’s controversial 1986 text “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” In this essay, Jameson argued that “third-world texts … necessarily project a political dimension,” such that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” Whatever the broader defensibility of the...

Blame the Frankfurt School? (Part 2) Ashley and Geoff discuss “The Concept of Enlightenment,” the first section of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. This is a public episode.

Demystifying the Singularity Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi begin their new paper, “AI as Social Technology,” by noting that “debates about ‘AI’ grow out of 1990s science fiction”—specifically, that of Vernor Vinge, the mathematician and novelist whose writings birthed the version of the “Singularity” that still haunts our collective imagination.

Notes on fully automated culture war Last week, the (wonderfully named) French tech bro Brivael Le Pogam set X alight with an apology on behalf of his nation for having loosed “French Theory” on the world. The post was in French, but the phrase was in English, as was the case with François Cusset’s 2005 book on the subject; for Francophones, use of the English phrase points to the Americanized version of Gallic thought.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:36:25 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Ashley Frawley and Geoff Shullenberger discuss Geoff’s article “The Frankfurt School Myth,” A.J.A. Woods’s book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, and Ashley’s own gripes with the School. This is a public episode.

Helen Andrews’s review of Dr. Beryl Satter’s latest book called to mind an encounter I had with the professor of history at Rutgers University’s Newark campus. As Andrews points out, Satter’s work has had a major influence on “pop anti-racist” figures like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Needless to say, the simplistic narratives that fuel much of anti-racist discourse do little to concretely alleviate the plight of economically disadvantaged minorities.