Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters
by
Joanna Walsh
Published 22 Sep 2025
‘The habits of thought which we owe to the commonplaces of subjective art lead us to believe that the artist or writer seeks to express himself and that for him what is missing from the Museum and from literature is he,’ Blanchot writes.36 In a self-owning critique, this is what online culture calls main-character syndrome, a.k.a. acting like you’re the hero of your own life. As Erasure’s main character, named after the author of The Invisible Man, finds out, if he elects to identify with his fiction, then – just as in the trash essay – he risks erasure by the persona he has chosen. But if he chooses to write from aesthetic preference (Ellison’s previous novel was an ‘obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy’), his work is also erased as he cannot be identified in any simplistic way as its author.37 There is no difference, in this process, between fiction and non-fiction, which met at an ethical vanishing point sometime in the 2010s.
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by
Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023
We’ll find an organization enamored with itself—its experts, its answers, its strategies, and its founder—and that is eager to bulldoze anyone who gets in its way. We’ll see a foundation with a retrograde colonial gaze that leans hard on high-paid technocrats in Geneva and Washington, DC, to solve the problems of poor people living in Kampala and Uttar Pradesh. And we’ll find a man suffering from a bad case of main character syndrome, constantly asserting his leadership and expertise on issues in which he has no training, standing, or mandate. We’ll see an organization that ferociously brands itself as a champion of science, reason, and facts, but that openly trades in ideology. We’ll see a philanthropy that spends large sums of money on evaluation and measurement of other organizations while going to extraordinary lengths to limit independent measurement and evaluation of its own work.