The Index
banner
theindexmedia.bsky.social
The Index
@theindexmedia.bsky.social
810 followers 3 following 1.6K posts
The Center Holds. For Independent Thinkers. https://theindex.media/
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Our public life has become unserious with rot.

We’re ruled by grifters who don’t care if their half-baked ideas work.

They only care if the pitch lands.

www.theindex.media/p/we-are-rul...
We Are Ruled by Used Car Salesmen and Grifters
Our Public Life Has Become Unserious With Rot.
www.theindex.media
Don’t rationalize it. Don’t negotiate with it.

Just say no.

And if your child screams at you, fine. Better they scream at you now than spend their adulthood unable to sit in silence, unable to read a book, unable to hold a single thought of their own.
If You Let Your Kid Use Sora, You’re A Bad Parent
AI Slop Will Raise Your Kids If You Don’t
www.theindex.media
Colin Powell warned Bush: “You break it, you bought it.”

That’s the real rule of AI.

Deploy it in your workflows, and you inherit every hallucination, bias, and failure.

The vendors can walk away. You can’t.
The Pottery Barn Rule of AI
You Break It, You Bought It
www.theindex.media
Kennedy wasn’t cut down by the Soviets or the mob.

He was cut down by a drifter with a rifle.

That fragility is unbearable - so we invent cabals to feel safe.

www.theindex.media/p/the-random...
The Random Nut Theory of History
Conspiracy is Comfort. Randomness is Terror.
www.theindex.media
Apple survived Steve Jobs.

Microsoft thrived after Gates.

If Tesla can’t survive Musk, maybe it deserves its decline.

www.theindex.media/p/a-trillion...
A Trillion-Dollar Joke
The Fragility of Fealty
www.theindex.media
Freemium is broken.

Obsidian shows a better way: give the burger away, sell the fries.

The base app is complete. The business is optional services.

Trust compounds. Adoption explodes. Everyone wins.

www.theindex.media/p/the-fries-...
The Fries-With-That Software Model
Give Away the Burger. Charge for the Fries.
www.theindex.media
AI browsers are like indie bands.

Loved by enthusiasts.

Ignored by the masses.

And they don’t move the charts.

www.theindex.media/p/the-ai-bro...
The AI Browser Wars Don't Matter
Why No One Will Switch to an AI Browser
www.theindex.media
Around 2010, culture stopped being made for people.

It started being made for algorithms.

A short history of how the feed rewired art 🧵

www.theindex.media/p/why-pop-cu...
Why Pop Culture is Created for the Machine
The Index Plus
www.theindex.media
Every aggregator promised neutrality.

Google: relevance.
Amazon: convenience.
Apple: curation.
Facebook: reach.

Once scale is won, neutrality collapses into extraction.

That collapse = the end of the aggregator illusion.

www.theindex.media/p/aggregatio...
Aggregation Theory After Aggregation
What Breaks When Everything Is an Aggregator?
www.theindex.media
Swift has cultural gravity.

Kelce has America’s biggest sport.

Instagram has global distribution.

Put them together → orders of scale the rest of us can’t imagine.

www.theindex.media/p/notes-on-s...
Notes on Swift, Kelce, and Scale
The Index Plus
www.theindex.media
Critics hope a bubble burst means the end of AI.

History says otherwise.

Bubbles kill firms, not technologies.

www.theindex.media/p/why-ai-wil...
Why AI Will Outlast the Bubble
Members Only
www.theindex.media
The gravitational pull of network effects has intensified at the top. The comfortable middle, the natural landing place for products with a loyal but non-universal audience, is being squeezed out of existence.

www.theindex.media/p/the-collap...
The Collapse of the Middle
The Dispatch
www.theindex.media
Perplexity offering $34.5 billion for Chrome is like showing up at to an auction for the Biltmore Estate with Chuck E. Cheese tokens and an IOU.

www.theindex.media/p/perplexity...
Perplexity's Chrome Bid is a $34.5 Billion Publicity Stunt
The Economics of Attention
www.theindex.media
You can argue with data.

You can question methods.

But when the government starts firing people for publishing inconvenient truths, it’s no longer about statistics.

It’s about power.

www.theindex.media/p/the-future...
The Future Is Certain. It’s the Past That Keeps Changing.
Trump Didn’t Like the Numbers. So He Fired the Referee.
www.theindex.media
We tend to think of bureaucrats as bit players. But a nation with no credible statistics cannot know itself. It drifts. It improvises. It guesses. Over time, it forgets how to tell the difference between measurement and mood.

www.theindex.media/p/the-future...
The Future Is Certain. It’s the Past That Keeps Changing.
Trump Didn’t Like the Numbers. So He Fired the Referee.
www.theindex.media
Winston Churchill, after being outmaneuvered at Yalta, warned that feeding the crocodile does not guarantee it will eat you last. In the current case, the EU has fed the crocodile and called it diplomacy.

www.theindex.media/p/the-crocod...
This is Trump's conundrum:

Once people become convinced that something is being hidden, evidence to the contrary simply confirms the concealment.

The logic becomes circular: any lack of evidence is the evidence.

www.theindex.media/p/jeffrey-ep...
The problem isn’t just that Jubilee fails to change minds. It’s that it convinces people they are learning, when what they are actually doing is binge-watching ideologies collide.

www.theindex.media/p/jubilee-is...
The Jacobins began by purging monarchists. Then they purged Girondins. Then they purged their own. Robespierre, the architect of the Terror, died by the same guillotine he praised. Because once you've built a political project on the righteousness of purity, you're next.
Purity Tests Scale Badly
On the Fragility of Ideological Coalitions
www.theindex.media
There is a reason liberty requires courage. Because it forces you to inhabit a world in which you are not always in control. Where your deepest convictions can be mocked, your values criticized, your institutions doubted.

Some interpret this as a bug.

Some, as a feature.

The feature.
Liberty Is the Right to Be Wrong
The Index: Members Only
www.theindex.media
The loudest critics of liberal democracy are often the safest inside it: they have strong passports, secure accounts, and protected dissent.

That’s how we get TikToks praising Stalin, monarchy-core YouTubers, and fascist subreddits thirsting for uniforms and vibes.
Nobody Has More Contempt for Liberal Democracy Than People Who've Never Lived Without It
The Luxury of Disdain
www.theindex.media
You can’t enforce purity at scale without turning discourse into a punishment machine.

You stop building coalitions and start building inquisitions.

And because scale requires strangers, and strangers always disagree about something, your coalition collapses under the weight of its expectations.
Purity Tests Scale Badly
On the Fragility of Ideological Coalitions
www.theindex.media