Read Max

Greetings from Read Max HQ! A bonus newsletter this week containing a podcast with John Ganz of Unpopular Front and Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History at Boston University and author of the forthcoming Hayek’s B******s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Among the topics discussed: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, cryptocurrency, Las Vegas, and Jensen Huang’s leather jacket.

A reminder: Read Max is funded almost wholly by paying subscribers. I’m able to spend reading, thinking, researching, and yapping with John and Quinn thanks to the generosity of people who find this newsletter and its intermittent podcast component compelling enough to cough up $5/month or $50/year. If you find Read Max at all enlightening or entertaining--if you borrow some of these riffs and opinions to impress potential employers or romantic/sexual partners, say--please consider supporting my work for the price of about one beer a month.

Links

Quinn’s piece on Musk can be found here.

His book Hayek’s B******s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right can be preordered here.

I also recommend his previous books, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

John’s newsletter Unpopular Front.

John’s book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, recently nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, can be found here.

Ryan S. Jeffery’s piece on Jensen Huang and leather, discussed in the podcast, is at Do Not Research.

**Note that if you buy or pre-order any books through the Bookshop links found on this page I will receive a small payment.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! On Tuesday afternoon John Ganz of Unpopular Front joined me for an experimental “Substack Live” with only two brief interruptions (one when I fat-fingered an end to the stream and two when John’s internet cut out). Our chat started with a discussion of two expansive essays on the modern internet coincidentally published this weekend: Ross Douthat’s “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive,” in The New York Times, and Jacob Silverman’s “Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy,” in the Financial Times. But, as is often the case, we also ended up talking about many other things, among them the imaginary of the tariffs, Parental Advisory stickers, a Canadian guy on Instagram who claims to have re-grown his foreskin, and much more. Check out the full video (stitched together) above, or listen to the audio on the podcast platform of your choice.

A reminder, as always! Read Max exists thanks to generosity of paying subscribers, whose support lets me devote a full-time job’s worth of hours to all the research, reporting, thinking, and procrastinating necessary to put the newsletter together week in and week out. Paying subscribers not only receive an extra paywalled newsletter of (unbelievably good) recommendations of books, movies, links, and music, but also help subsidize the free stuff for the freeloaders, which is the kind of thing that gets you into heaven and further along on the karmic wheel. If you feel like you get roughly one beer’s worth of entertainment, information, distraction, or other kind of satisfaction from Read Max, please consider paying to subscribe.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! This week’s newsletter is a podcast episode with John Ganz of Unpopular Front and Henry Farrell of Programmable Mutter. We talk about Henry’s recent Bloomberg article about “the tech industry’s reading list” and whether or not my four-year-old will ever encounter a Tootsie Roll pop advertisement, or indeed any advertising campaign at all.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today, to round out December before our annual year-end post, a podcast with John Ganz on the ascension of Elon Musk to shadow-president-via-shitposting.

On this episode we talk about the following books:

Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age by Michael Feher (this is the one whose title we couldn’t remember)

Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh

Greetings from Read Max temporary HQ in Downeast Maine! This week’s newsletter is an experiment: A podcast, featuring my old friend Katie Notopoulos, who was, briefly, the editor-in-chief of Meta, Inc.’s “Threads” product.

Katie Notopoulos is a former Buzzfeed News writer and host of the late lamented Internet Explorer podcast, but for the purposes of this show her most important qualification is that she is one of the finest shitposters to grace the contemporary internet. Katie (as she explains in the episode) now also has the honor of being the first person to ever be “ratioed” on Threads, after she claimed to be the “editor-in-chief” of the Threads platform and was shocked to find that a significant number of people actually believed her.

We discuss that episode, and more, on the podcast. Some selections:

On the Threads celebrity/meme account land grab

I think what’s happening across all the celebrity accounts, all the meme accounts, is that there is, like, intense engagement. It’s a land grab right now. Obviously, like, if you're JLo, and you had -- I mean, I don't even have a sense of scale, of how many hundreds of millions of fans she had on Instagram, [but] a large portion of those will port over, right? But also, because it's only an algorithmic feed right now you have a very good chance of getting in front of anyone's eyeballs if you get enough engagement juice. So there's just tons of this engagement bait stuff going on with like, open ended questions.

On Threads as next hope for celebrities who can’t make it on TikTok

I have this theory that those kinds of celebrities who had quit Twitter long ago, but they're not quite TikTok celebrities -- someone like a JLo, or Paris Hilton, who are kind of stuck in the Instagram era. Those people also skew slightly older, but there are a lot of celebrities who are just not TikTok celebrities, because that's its own special skill set. You have to be, like, funny and weird and really authentic on TikTok in a way that, other than Will Smith, I don't think any mainstream celebrity has really [achieved]. You know, like, the Kardashians aren't really big on TikTok, right? Like, they're very much Instagram celebrities. And I think that those people probably know that Instagram is sort of declining. People who have made a lot of money and are very attuned to these social things can tell that the winds are changing. And so if there's a new platform, especially if it's going to be more tied to their Instagram, even if text is not their, like, best format, they're like, Yeah, let's pump it, let's go, like, gotta cling to this. Like, it's, they're seeing this as sort of like a life raft off of Instagram, or to keep the Instagram juice going. Because otherwise they're gonna fade into irrelevance when TikTok takes over everything.

On making history on Threads

One thing that I found really interesting about the experience was that a key feature that does not exist on Threads is you can repost -- essentially a retweet or quote tweet -- but you don't see that count, and you don't get notifications about it. So when you have something like this post that went viral I could see I was getting a lot of replies to it, but I could not see how it was spreading. And that's a very interesting, weird dynamic when you're trying to figure out a piece of content that's very specifically like this. If you've ever had something that goes weirdly viral on Twitter, and you're like, Huh, what's going on there? Usually, you can kind of figure it out by like, oh, well, I see that this one really big account retweeted it. [...] And you can't even totally figure out how successful [it is]. It becomes that likes are the only metric for success, which... I mean, I'd like to give myself the credit here of believing that I am the first person to be ratioed on threads. [...] It's a little tricky, because without that retweet count I don't totally know. I do know that I got more replies than I did likes.