Andy Masley

Once again, I repeat myself! It became hard to see the warning signs with Platner in a world where *literally every leftist man* is called a misogynist. His ascension was a tragic, regrettable overcorrection to a very real pattern of personal demonization faced by leftist men.

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea). We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World. The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated. The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise. A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention. That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care. Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it. The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

We're extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude Code’s weekly rate limits 50% higher, through July 19.

My simple test whenever I meet anyone in DC making strong claims about China is “Do you know who Deng Xiaoping is?” And the failure rate is way higher than you might think

As a programmer if you starting working in *domain* and you read 1 book about it, you become the *domain* expert by default unless it’s video games, cybersecurity or space

My operating assumption at every stage of life has been that everyone serious has done the reading, so I had better keep up. The assumption was false. Almost nobody does the reading. Doing it anyway is the closest thing to a cheat code I know.