Jay Hoffmann

How could an American getting paid six figures in Mountain View understand how to identify problems and design solutions for a homemaker in Tokyo, a street seller in Turkey, or a doctor in Tunisia? For the most part, they don’t. Or if they try, they do it badly.

If storytelling is a better system of accountability, because it empowers and because it flips the perspective of accountability around, how do we start by making people better storytellers. And how do we ensure that those stories get told?

Fortunately, that’s not the only model for accountability we have. Webster’s 1913 defines accountability as being “called on to render an account.” To render an account is to tell a story. In this way, an account becomes something you give—something you observe, come to understand, and then narrate. Being accountable in this model means being the storyteller rather than the fall guy. And because stories are perhaps the best technology we have for learning—for passing knowledge and understanding along from person to person—this form of accountability privileges the acquisition of wisdom over the carrying out of punishment.

I want nothing more than for my writing to do exactly this, to stitch together my ideology and represent my world. Over time, this is something that I want to build for myself.

I still love writing about technology, but I want my whole work, taken together, to reflect me. I am not a machine who writes solely about technology. I am a complex human for whom writing is a vehicle for understanding. To write is to help me figure out who I am.

This article is from some time ago, but it reflects the way that history moves in unpredictable cycles rather than in a straight line of progress

You also see there the way in which Marx sees this and recognizes this as a fundamental challenge for his own theory. “How can your account, based on class struggles and objective historical forces, explain this event, which seems so idiosyncratic and so dependent on the individual personality?” And Marx’s argument, of course, is that it’s precisely the class struggle that can explain why an individual suddenly emerges as decisive in a particular historical moment.

Since reading this, I’ve been tracing the zyntranet, for at least the reason that it’s a demographic that a) Trump seems very interested in and b) almost certainly won’t vote. It’s a movement without a personality, a subculture without an identity. The superficial output of a flattening of culture. The next wave of boomers.

Over the last ten years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings--mostly but by no means entirely male--has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. This network is adjacent to the “sports internet” of 40something dads and the “hustle internet” of Miami crypto bullshit and the “reactionary internet” of trad influencers, but is its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural referents--college sports, gambling, light domestic beers, Zyn nicotine pouches--and influential personalities and media outlets, among them Dave Portnoy, Pat McAfee, Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy, in addition to dozens of minor podcasters and hey-fellow-kids content creators who nearly all work for sports-betting concerns.