All we have are vibes and the vibes are bad

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We’re All Monitoring The Situation

I watched President Donald Trump get inaugurated the first time on a little television while drinking sake in a leopard print-themed bar in Tokyo’s Golden Gai neighborhood. I’ve often compared that night to a scene from an old science fiction movie. Me, an astronaut, watching from the window of a spaceship as atomic bombs go off on the Earth below. The surreal feeling of helplessly watching your home get obliterated from a safe distance.

This weekend I, once again, watched from afar — this time, from Tbilisi, Georgia — as not just America, but, seemingly, the whole world began to unravel. Thanks to a night of frantic googling on Saturday, I now know that the typical blast radius of a nuclear bomb is around four-miles wide and that Tbilisi is about 80 miles closer to Tehran than New York is to Chicago. The things you find yourself looking up in 2025.

For the last week, I’ve woken up here to a delayed torrent of panicked static online. My X, Bluesky, and Instagram feeds now bottomless pits of fresh horrors, both real and AI-generated. An experience The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel described in a piece over the weekend titled, “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.” Warzel was writing about watching the protests against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles, but he could also be describing, well, everything, everywhere right now.

“What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips,” Warzel wrote. “It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism.”

I’m here in Tbilisi for the ZEG storytelling festival. It’s my second year attending as a speaker and it’s an incredible conference that brings together talented journalists, creatives, and activists from all over the world — and also me. “ზეგ,” or “zeg,” in Georgian means “day after tomorrow,” something that has become increasingly hard to envision lately. The conference has also given me a chance to become better acquainted with a part of the world that has long been the frontline of the information war we’re all now currently engulfed in. An information war so massive, disorienting, and, at this point, multi-sided that it’s unclear who started it or who’s winning it. Though, the Georgians are pretty convinced all roads lead back to Russia.

Last October, the far-right, anti-NATO, pro-Putin Georgian Dream party swept the country’s elections, fueled by conspiracy theories and Russian-sponsored misinformation. The young people here are still in the streets protesting the results, months later, even as the new government grows more comfortable building a repressive police state to maintain power. They’re throwing activists and politicians in jail, cracking down on the country’s artists, and putting pressure on TV stations to toe the party line. I also learned this week that Georgian Dream’s electoral success last year was, in part, thanks to one particularly pernicious local conspiracy theory. The belief that there is a “Global War Party” targeting the country that only Georgian Dream can protect them from. A shadowy international cabal that wants to turn Georgia into “the next Ukraine.” According to a survey conducted last fall, over a third of the country believes it exists. Every power-mad government has realized they need a Big Lie to hide behind.

For instance, fresh off our recent brush with nuclear annihilation last month, where India and Pakistan started trading missiles and drones over the disputed territory of Kashmir, early in the morning on Friday, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, attacking Iran, suddenly convinced that they were days away from becoming a nuclear threat to the region. Which would have been strange, seeing as how Iran was in the midst of peace deals when the shelling started.

Early Saturday morning, Iran began returning fire, striking Tel Aviv. The barrage of missiles was soundtracked across the Middle East by wedding DJs and house music saxophone players in Lebanon and watched by cheering crowds on massive screens in Yemen. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced today that Turkey will begin stockpiling weapons to deter any future challenge from Israel. Online, Israelis — and, also, Caitlyn Jenner, for some reason — flooded social platforms with bomb shelter selfies. And leftists are increasingly convinced that the US and Israel will soon orchestrate a false flag operation to give the American military a pretext to enter the conflict. Also, someone made a mashup of the rapper King Von’s “Took Her To The O” set to the Iranian national anthem.

When you view the world through fractured internet platforms all you have are vibes and right now the vibes are bad. Redditors are debating whether or not we’ve already technically entered World War III. A better question: In an online world, will it be possible to ever reach a consensus that it even started? Or ended? Relatedly, the chief technology officer of Palantir is joining the US Army. Also related, redditors are convinced Palantir is astroturfing news subreddits and allegedly suppressing posts about the protests in LA. And an Australian Substack writer who covered the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University earlier this year believes Palantir helped facilitate his deportation this week, as well.

Speaking of the protests in America, on Saturday, the 50501 movement organized a massive nationwide action against Trump’s regime called No Kings Day, which according to some estimates, was possibly the largest protest in American history. Unlike previous attempts at mass demonstration, I did hear about this one beforehand this time. Though, thank you to the readers who emailed about it. It was, also, probably, the first American protest to be narrated by a news chopper pilot going through a divorce live on air.

As for how the protest was received, it has not seemed to affect Trump’s kingly aspirations. Over on Truth Social today, he decided to drop any pretense and ordered ICE to focus specifically on the “core of the Democrat Power Center.” And ICE agents have already been seen reportedly picking up homeless people off the street, detaining them for not having immigration documents with them.

Users online — ostensibly ones who did not bother going outside to attend it, and yet, are the ones who dominate the discussion about its political impact for some reason — are split between it being lib cringe and it being some kind of CIA op. Which are conclusions I’ve seen both users on the far left and the far right come to, proving that, at least when it comes to posting, horseshoe theory still holds up.

Lib cringe or not, it was not immune from the creeping accelerationism spreading across the US. At a No Kings Day event in Utah on Sunday, an innocent protester was accidentally shot and killed by a “peacekeeper” who was attempting to subdue a gunman who had showed up to the protest with a rifle. The gunman survived and was taken into custody. School shootings are so 2010s, it’s all about political violence now, the New York Times argues.

For instance, Homeland Security is defending the Secret Service’s decision to throw Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla to the ground and handcuff him at Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s news conference on Thursday. Which, if you even remember it happened, was only a precursor of the violence to come, with the allegedly politically-motivated murder of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark happening on Saturday.

We’re still piecing together the alleged killer’s motives and background, but contrary to what shrieking right-wing influencers — and Republican Sen. Mike Lee — are posting on X about him being a deranged leftist, the assassin was a reportedly an avid Info Wars fan. According to law enforcement, he was anti-abortion, had a list of nearly 50 Democratic politicians he intended to kill next, and owned a security firm called Praetorian Guard Security Services. As X user @TreborRhurbarb wrote, “It's the classic 7-Eleven store manager to Christian fundamentalist mercenary paramilitary boss in the Congo pipeline.”

Not that it really matters what the truth is. We just have to accept that there will be a chunk of America that reads something fake online and will always believe it. At least here in Georgia they can throw every imaginary enemy of the state under one simple umbrella. In the US, we’re so split we can’t even come to a consensus on what the fake thing is that half of us believe. “We are in an information war with people who have no regard for the truth,” Micah Erfan, an executive for the Texas Democrats, wrote.

I’ve seen some conservatives, however, struggling with Trump’s disastrous rain-soaked, under-attended military parade on Saturday. Which was sponsored by Coinbase and Dana White’s Phorm energy drink, naturally. The parade was so grim and awful that Trump supporters have resorted to making AI-generated videos of a better one. Though, right-wing pundit Rebekah Koffler apparently loved it so much she showed up on Fox News hammered drunk, before they quickly kicked her off the air. I can’t believe people weren’t impressed with the guy carrying a drone around like a toy plane or a creaking old tank rolling past a totally silent crowd of bored Trump supporters.

You’d think the imminent breakdown of the global order would be worrying people more, but it’s hard to pay attention when you’re busy using AI to channel spirits and have ChatGPT-induced psychotic episodes. According to TikTokers, ChatGPT can “lift the veil between dimensions.” There’s also a guy on X who’s struggling to change the temperature of his AI-powered bed at the moment. The verified X user currently painting their roof blue to protect themselves from “direct energy weapons,” however, did not get the idea from an AI. They’re just the normal kind of internet insane.

Also according to TikTokers, the Air India flight that struck a hospital on Thursday, but did not demolish the building entirely, is proof that 9/11 was an inside job. They’re also convinced the sole survivor of the flight didn’t actually board the plane. But like I said, these people saw something online and they’re just going to believe it forever now — or at least until they get bored.

Streamer Hasan Piker seems to have come to a similar conclusion this weekend, writing, “There’s no need for the CIA or NATO to do sophisticated influence campaigns and false flags anymore. Half the country literally believes the evangelical mercenary Trump supporter who shot Democratic politicians and had more on his hit list is actually woke cause of this website,” referring to X, the everything app.

And it’s hard not to feel hopeless about that. Though, it is worth questioning if that’s even true. The internet that’s causing what Warzel in his Atlantic piece called “distortions” is the same internet that’s telling us that people believe them. Which may point to the true danger of our current moment. Something I learned while I was here in Georgia this week.

It doesn’t matter if anyone believes the unreality of what they’re seeing online. Misinformation and disinformation don’t actually need to convince anyone of anything to have an impact. They just need to make you question what you’re seeing. The Big Lie and the millions of small ones online, whatever they happen to be wherever you’re living right now, just have to cause division. To wear you down. To provide an opening for those in power, who now have both too much of it and too few concerns about how to wield it. The populist demagogues and ravenous oligarchs the internet gave birth to in the 2010s are now firmly at the helm of the global order and, also, hooked up to the same chaotic, emotionally-gratifying global information networks that we all are, both social and, now, AI-generated. And, also like us, they are being heavily influenced by them in ways we can’t totally see or predict. Which is how we’ve ended up in a place where missiles are flying, planes are dropping out of the sky, and vulnerable people are being thrown in gulags, all while our leaders are shitposting about their big, beautiful plans for more extrajudicial arrests and genocidal territorial expansion. Assured by mindless AI chatbots that their dreams of world domination and self-enrichment are valid and noble and righteous. And there is no off ramp there. Everyone, even the folks with the nuclear codes, is entertaining themselves online as the world burns. Posting through it and monitoring the situation until it finally reaches their doorstep and forces them to look up from their phone and log off.

Some Stray Links

• “Why Women Are Wearing Bald Caps and Suits to See This Music Star”

• “Mark Zuckerberg has created the saddest place on the internet with Meta AI's public feed”

• “Welcome to Bonnie Blue's Britain”

• “How to Win a Fight”

P.S. here’s an extremely cursed coffee mug.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***