There’s a certain irony in how the American Dream—that grand promise of merit-based advancement—has begun devouring its own children. In 2011, Jacob Savage arrived in Hollywood with modest expectations: a Princeton degree, solid writing skills, and a reasonable hope of landing a mid-level television writer’s job. But what he found was a system that had quietly rewritten its own rules. When he submitted a pilot episode that a TV studio executive liked enough to invite him into the writers’ room, that same executive ultimately decided that having another white person on the team wasn’t appropriate. »I was told very specifically on several occasions that the reason was because of things I couldn’t change about myself.« Paradoxically, it was primarily older white men who enforced such corporate policies. What led Savage to view this fate not as a personal failure but as the lot of an entire lost generation was a weekend trip with old friends who, like him, had completed Ivy League educations but, with one exception, had all found themselves in precarious jobs. This made him write essay, The Lost Generation in Compact magazine, which was widerly read and brought him to our attention. In it, Savage goes a step further, backing up the logic of the closed door with hard statistical data that reveals how DEI policy ultimately amounts to systematic discrimination against young white men:

»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«

Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost Generation has earned him significant media coverage across various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob Savage.

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Given that we’re said to live in an Information Society, the idea that an entire Nation could succumb to a form of mass hysteria similar to medieval delusions of sacrilege and infanticide would normally be unthinkable. The Canadian scandal involving the Kamloops child deaths, which kept all of Canada on edge for quite some time, exemplifies such an incident—a moral panic that led the Canadian Prime Minister, in a display of national shame, to lower the country’s flags to half-mast. And because the public held the Catholic Church responsible for the alleged murders, Pope Francis was also asked to apologize—a request he humbly fulfilled during a six-day penitential pilgrimage to Canada. The fact that the affair eventually faded away did not, of course, lead to a full reckoning—and this is precisely why we should turn our attention to this question of how such a moral panic could have emerged in the Information age. It was Tom Flanagan who caught our attention because, as a political scientist, he has published two books on the subject (along with others); additionally, he is not only a recognized expert on Canadian colonial history but also has a deep familiarity with how politics operate, thanks to his long tenure as an advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Tom Flanagan taught political science at the University of Calgary until his retirement. His academic interests centered on Canadian Indigenous peoples, especially the Métis, who, led by the millenarian Louis Riel, initiated a rebellion against the Canadian government in 1885. Alongside his academic pursuits, Flanagan also served as a political consultant and columnist for major Canadian newspapers.

Tom Flanagan has recently puplished

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What do you do when you’re a public relations spokeswoman sitting in a BBC studio, being grilled by a relentless host who is insisting that you defend Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam’s absurd claim that climate change will claim billions of lives in just a few years? In actuality, her answer would have been simple — she needed only to follow the group’s creed, drilled into her before the broadcast: just break down in tears. »People need to see crying mothers...« That Zion Lights didn’t bow to the activists’ peer pressure in this situation is a sign of great intellectual integrity — which may have something to do with her family’s history: her parents were Indian rice farmers before moving to the UK, a background that taught her energy poverty is even worse than CO2 emissions — and how technology has done more to liberate women than any hand-wringing or crocodile tears ever could. And this was precisely what prompted us to start a conversation with her, tracing the path of this woman who went from being the press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion—perhaps the most radical of all Environmental Movements—to becoming an advocate for Nuclear Power: a coming-of-age story that highlights the internal doctrine of this cult — as Zion Lights herself now calls it — while reminding us that demonizing technology is a luxury belief that few people can afford — and one that, as off-grid societies have shown, leads to the worst cognitive dissonance imaginable.

Zion Lights is a writer who was an early environmental activist and press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion from 2018 to 2020. After parting ways with the group, she shifted toward a pragmatic, technology-oriented environmental movement. She recently published her journey from »grassroots activism to becoming one of the UK’s leading advocates for nuclear energy,« titled Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She has contributed to the Huffington Post for several years and has recently begun writing for Quillette and Human Progress.

Zion Lights has published

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What happens when, in a society that considers itself free of all intellectual taboos, you pursue a question perceived as highly embarrassing, even awkward? This is exactly what happened when Fiona Girkin (after a disturbing personal experience) decided to write a doctoral thesis exploring how female narcissism manifests in the workplace. While male narcissism is well known as the Napoleon complex and even as a form of delusions of grandeur, the female variant is a much more psychologically complex issue, with many candidates portraying themselves as pitiful victims—a strategy that makes deciphering their behavior extremely difficult and even a social taboo. After all, who would want to accuse such a pitiful person of being the real culprit, namely the workplace bully? That Fiona Girkin was prepared to juxtapose the male hero’s journey with a »victim’s journey« was an institutional scandal for the Tasmanian police force, for which she worked as a trainer and consultant. Even though all the stories the police officers told her while on duty supported her version, merely mentioning the possibility of dark personalities in women touched on a long-held social taboo.

Dr. Fiona Girkin is an Australian counselor who studies and teaches about female narcissism. In addition to her counseling practice and consultation services, she also runs a YouTube channel.

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If the term Caste has recently entered the Human Sciences, this may be taken as evidence that European-style universalism has lost its appeal, and even as evidence that the idea has spread that here we’re dealing with an injustice that’s only been cloaked in a human, universalistic guise. When Indian theorist B.R. Ambedkar, ranked as the greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi in surveys, described the Indian caste system as »unknown to humanity in other parts of the world,« this finding becomes even more puzzling. This observation has given us the opportunity to speak with Suraj Yengde, who has not only addressed the caste system in two books but also experienced it firsthand as a member of the untouchable Dalit community—despite its prohibition under Indian law. Making this conversation even more interesting is his critical stance towards today’s culture of outrage, identifying Victim Olympics as a discipline that downplays or denies actual discrimination for its own benefit.

Suraj Yengde received the 2019 Canadian Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award and is a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center, where he teaches and serves as a research associate in its Department of African and African American Studies. He was named one of the 25 Most Influential Young Indians of 2021 by GQ India.

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As the current wave of disruption, manifesting itself through various conversations about artificial intelligence swirling around us (which, from our perspective, would be better described as a »Reflective Intelligence«), builds into a cultural crescendo reminiscent of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. Indeed, when, as a kind of embarrassment of thought, even the leading figures in its epistemological field conjure up a dys-utopian race toward civilizational collapse (as with Geoffrey Hinton), it’s easy to overlook how the Computer’s intellectual roots in our Machine Culture date back to the 18th century. And because of this, reflecting back on Digitalisation's origins in the crackling rift of Writing’s electrification becomes even more essential. We’re pleased to share this brief conversation between us about reading between the lines regarding Electrification, Massification, and the shifting definition of Writing in the early chapters of Martin’s Short History of Digitalisation.

Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt

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It is difficult to ignore how Capitalism has slipped into a deep values crisis – and indeed, you might be forgiven for thinking we are in a Potemkin village, a zombie economy sustained only by memories of a glorious past or by cash injections from central banks. For this reason alone, our conversation with Peter Fleming was extremely valuable, as he, with his keen sense of fundamental upheavals, recognized the signs of the times early on. Observations like how work has become little more than a mythological narrative for reassuring ourselves of our sense of importance and self-worth, or that universities have turned into dark zones in our era of Human Capital—sometimes jokingly called Whackademia—and that in this morally decayed environment, it is almost impossible to cling to the specter of the homo economicus as the ideal of utility-maximizing rationality. In this sense, it’s only logical that Peter Fleming's dirge ends with a reflection on Capitalism and Nothingness. And while this may be a somewhat somber topic, we found our conversation with him to be very enjoyable and entertaining.

Peter Fleming is a Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. During his time in London, where he taught Business and Society at City University, he chaired the London Living Wage Symposium at the House of Commons. His work has been recognized with several awards.

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