Matt Walsh

Did a deep dive on the data centers today on the show. Tried to assess the issue fairly and lay out the concerns in a reasonable way: m.youtube.com/watch?v=wEm1Zp…

Look, I’m sure that THIS TIME big tech truly has America’s interests at heart Sure, they’ve been totalitarian, censorious, open borders, antiwhite, pro trans zealots in the past but now all they care about is America’s future

Another point about our cultural decline. We started watching the show Widow’s Bay. It’s really good. Fantastic writing. Perfect blend of comedy and horror. Last night’s episode was legitimately one of the finest episodes of television I’ve seen in years. If this same exact show came out in 2002, we’d probably remember it as an all time classic. But in 2026 most people haven’t even heard of it. It’s a blip on the radar. Another piece of content in the endless sea. You see it, or you don’t, and then it’s forgotten. It’s not that good stuff isn’t made anymore. It’s that even when good stuff is made, we don’t have any shared experience of it. There’s plenty of good music you can find on Spotify, recent stuff, but you experience it in your little algorithmic silo. Almost nothing breaks containment to become a bonafide cultural phenomenon. That’s what made Project Hail Mary so unique. Severance maybe also achieved escape velocity. But even in those cases the escape is fleeting. For the most part we experience the culture through the narrow pathway constructed for us by the algorithm. It might intersect with other people’s pathways, but only briefly. When we feel nostalgia for the Before Times, this is why. It’s not simply that we had a “better” culture back in the 90s or whenever. It’s that we had a culture at all.

But now the culture is programmed by a handful of Big Tech companies through algorithms. The old model had its issues but it was a shared experience at least, and driven by humans rather than machines. Also you’re leaving out the localized part of this. Every town had its radio stations, its video rental places. That seems obviously better for the soul than a fully atomized culture programmed algorithmically by trillion dollar tech companies and consumed mostly through little screens and an endless scroll of content designed for no purpose other than to keep you staring at it.

"To celebrate that alcohol use among teenagers has dropped so precipitously is sort of like celebrating that peanut allergies declined in Nagasaki in 1945." — @michaeljknowles, 2026

I’m not against the technology itself. I think the technology is amazing, mind blowing. There are all kinds of totally valid and useful applications. All I’m saying is that we are not wrestling at all with the implications, and there are no limitations of any kind being placed on these companies as they race towards their goal of fundamentally transforming human society overnight. Reckless in the extreme.

Big Tech companies are sprinting forward, building data centers as fast as they can, sometimes using eminent domain to seize the land by force, making their AI more and more powerful, expanding the technology at lightening speed with no guardrails of any kind at all. Yet none of these tech gurus or any of their apologists have even attempted to explain what exactly all of the millions of people who lose their jobs, and the increasing numbers who lose their homes, all sacrificed on the AI altar, are supposed to do. How does society support millions of unemployed and displaced people? What becomes of a society where algorithms and machines do everything, and a few people become trillionaires while millions more lose everything? There is no answer to any of this. They aren’t even attempting to answer it. Instead we’re simply told that China exists and we have to “beat them” in some unspecified way, in order to achieve some unspecified goal. We’re going to obliterate entire industries, entire categories of jobs all at once, and the only justification anyone can give is “China.” It’s madness.

Every decade in modern American history can be identified and defined by its own style, its own approach to music, film, fashion, its own aesthetic. That seems to have stopped right around 2010. The 2010s don't really have their own unique feel, even in retrospect. The 2020s certainly don't. We're more than halfway through the decade. What are the movies, music, style, and trends that this decade will be remembered for? It's like we fell into some kind of cultural blackhole 15 years ago.

You’re just listing stuff that existed in the 2010s. Nobody is saying that nothing existed. My point is that none of it became culturally ubiquitous and iconic and era-defining the way that, say, the grunge movement in the 90s did. Say “90s grunge” to almost anyone in America and they’ll at least be able to name Nirvana, whether they liked that music or not. Say “2010s EDM” to almost anyone in America and they wouldn’t even be able to begin to name a single artist, song, anything.

@christopherrufo All of these things hit at once. iPhone, social media, algorithm, and the Obama Era all debuted at roughly the same moment in history.

@MattWalshBlog Fair point, there is a technological component (social media and audience fragmentation), a cultural component (woke imperatives driving culture industries), and maybe something else—not sure.

It’s funny when right wingers applaud these kinds of comments from leftists. Liberals blame “white liberals” for not being woke enough, essentially. Blaming “white liberals” is just a way of saying that minority liberals are perfect and blameless in all ways.

@christopherrufo That’s part of it but not the whole story by a long shot. Cultural paralysis affects basically every aspect of life. A political answer is instructive but not sufficient. The fact is that if woke died completely, we’d still have this problem.

@MattWalshBlog The answer is “woke,” I watched it take over the film and television world in the mid-2010s, and it went into hyperdrive the first years of the 2020s.

There's a reason that the 00s feel like the last real decade. Something happened in 2009. iPhones invented two years before. Then in 2009, Facebook rolled out its personalized algorithm-driven feed. Twitter and Instagram followed a few years later. I really think, if you have to point to just one culprit (though there are several), it would be this. The algorithm killed the monoculture more than anything else. We live now in a culture almost entirely shaped by the algorithm, which is to say that we have no culture.

Some people would say the culture froze earlier, like at the turn of the millennium. But I don't think that's true. The 2000s definitely had their own feel. If I referred to an "early 2000s comedy" or "early 2000s music," you'd know what I mean. The shift happened later, at the end of the 2000s, into the 2010s.

@TravisJThaxton Hipster aesthetic died in the 2010s. It was more of a late 2000s thing.

@MattWalshBlog The 2010s was the hipster esthetic. Just listen to the music and look at the style of the time.

@pismosteve We will absolutely do multiple episodes on colonialism

@MattWalshBlog It’s a great show. I hope you do an episode on Colonialism.

Thank you. My team does an incredible job on the history show. We’re proud of it.

@jonesville @BadQualityMemes We’re going to start doing that as a separate video once a week

@MattWalshBlog @BadQualityMemes I like the in depth analysis, but I find myself really missing the five headlines segment. Or four or whatever it turned out to be that day. Can we get that back? The show just doesn’t seem complete without it.

Absolutely true. Most right wing commentary in general now is boring as hell. Same takes, same arguments, same points repeated over and over and over again. Same personal squabbles. Same feuds and fights. Tedious. Redundant. The audience is bored to death and rightly so.