If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
We sit at the gates of a new year, which are surrounded by rubble—the crumbled capstones of much we had come to depend on, and which came crashing down in 2020.
In 2023, this newsletter discussed, in various ways, how certain sections of society would come to grapple with this fact, creating an asymmetric and jagged experience of reality—one that lacked an overall cohesive narrative. Various expressions of tribal ingroup delusion became a primary topic here.
Indeed, my newsletters over 2021 and 2022 tried to describe, often in deep astrological detail, the wreckage we have dealt with. In particular, I tended to focus on how interpersonal relationships, from business to romance, were destabilized by an excruciatingly slow return to “normal society.” It was this two-year lack of return to normalcy that prompted many to adopt schizoid tribal beliefs in 2023.
So naturally, at the start of 2024, we’re trying to understand how things are evolving. The first thing I’ll say is that neo-tribalism has its footing and will be a prime feature of 2024. No longer will it be a niche internet thing that people use to soothe the loss of Big Tent society, which many grieved over the course of 2020-2022.
Now it will become the dominant condition of our post-globalized world. Mainstream media will absolutely struggle to cover the hyper-local, perma-fluid micro tribes that are coming to replace the Big Tent society that once governed our 24/7 global interconnected world.
Things are going to get weird, schizo, spooky on a palpable day to day level and not just in a random TikTok reel that people pass around. It will be the nature of politics, business and community.
Ironically, I’m using words like “dominant” but also saying there’s no collective Big Tent society that we all share anymore. That’s why, back in 2020, in my Patchwork Manifesto, I said: “You will know the macro narrative by its absence.”
The one thing we’ll have in common in 2024 is the sense that…we increasingly lack anything in common.
I want to bring some of this talk back into the real world with some examples. Very likely, you’ve been witness to the delusions of human psychology, as various niche tribes (most fueled by social media) sought to deny the existence of societal ruins. “Nothing to see here, the gurus are still in charge! The cultural capstones are still in place! Look up to the sky, and listen keenly, follower!”
Other tribes couldn’t keep their head from hanging low as they pondered the rubble, and instead sought to fetishize a supplement or lifestyle aspect in isolation, hoping to use that as the portal through which they could blow up their big balloon: “Look, anon! We’ll all be homesteaders in cabins in the mountains or on the beach! All we need is grass-fed tallow!”
In each instance, the micro tribe is trying to reconstruct Big Tent meaning, where values are treated as a matrix that can be applied, simultaneously, across several locales and contexts. “Grass-fed tallow is good for the poor, the rich, blacks and whites—for ALL! We’re saved!”
Now, what I’m saying is that, in 2024, this will become a phenomenon more embedded in one’s daily life. It won’t be an exclusively “online” thing. Savior complexes over politicians or social policies, from inflation to immigration, will skyrocket. Products and practices will be treated with religious fervor. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if commercials for mainstream products and services like beer or car insurance begin to deal with existential themes, even if humorously.
There will be an aching void in the air, and legacy brands will really push members-only benefits, preferred customer points, exclusive offers and the like to draw the circle tighter around a cult of True Believers who can carry this banner into the future. The direction it comes from will likely be unpredictable. You might guess that it’ll come from an already cultish brand like Lululemon, but wait until it hits something that used to carry a wholesome Big Tent connotation, like the McDonald’s Happy Meal or a bowl of morning Cheerios.
We’re all dealing with a kind of scarcity right now, a lack of the usual resources and meaning. No doubt that many attempts by politicians and companies to fill this void with cultish offers will miss the mark and result in scandal. Boycotting will also be high in 2024, as a result.
In Big Tent society, a thing could just be a thing. But now it’s fetishized, like the latest supplement on Health Twitter designed to give you monster boners and genius IQ. So imagine what happens when this phenomenon spreads and Frosted Flakes gets mixed up with the Israel or Ukraine conflict somehow, or the Biden campaign, etc. etc.
This is way beyond big multi-nationals doing the woke dance, and then getting frothy support from Lefties and abrasive critique from Righties, which was really what the 2010s represented with the rise of “Dark Web Intellectuals” who could “fight back” against the uber-liberal tide. Jordan Peterson, for example, rode in on that wave before delving into his fascinating Biblical lectures.
The 2020s are about things getting away from larger figureheads, in a rapid and chaotic sense, such that any coldly calculated maneuvers have unpredictable consequences.
This tweet is a good example of how people are increasingly aware of the fragmented nature of the Patchwork Age.
We’re already seeing grassroots dismay at the raid of an Amish farm in Pennsylvania earlier this month, when in the past people might’ve yawned, rolled over and got up to grocery shop at Walmart.
At the mundane level, bringing resources back to ourselves will be the result of hammering out our values in ways that create meaningful communities, rather than cultish tribes that are based on chaotic sloganeering and an evangelical hope that everything will turn their way in time.
Indeed, many of you who stay in touch have pointed out ways in which you’ve found more hyper-local meaning.
It’s been an arduous journey to get there, and of course the journey continues, as NOMADISM is one of the keywords of the 2020s.
But it’s cool to see that many are attuned to the zeitgeist, no longer looking for a ready-made lifestyle but out there actively building their own supply chains of meaning by pirating the abandoned rubble of a former “Great Society.”
You are able to see that values are not a collection of aesthetic surfaces and lifestyle poses. Values are kinetic technology. They put life around you into motion. Over time, the things that are broken—employment, where to live, dating, food, entertainment—begin to work and function again, in their own remixed, punk way.
Some of you have started small Discord communities, or gone out into the city to participate in arts movements. Others are finding deep awakening through martial arts, or finding new arenas for business through healed familial relations. And still others are dialing in a personal style, giving themselves permission to enjoy “lowbrow” entertainment or foods while still engaging in esoteric research.
The possibilities are endless. These are just a few quick examples.
It’s a lived community, even if just a community of one. It works because it understands a core principle of the 2020s: you can’t build your way back to the past, or recreate it at a monocultural scale, but you can honor it and thus actually travel there through a new, remixed version of it. And if anyone enters, all they need to bring is a sense of personal values, not a pledge of allegiance to be a carbon copy Mini-Me.
That way, even if something typically opposed enters the equation—"What?! You let an artsy city slicker into the Right Wing Group Chat that’s all about sun, steak and steel!?”—what happens is alchemy rather than a chain reaction leading to 1) group implosion or 2) tar and feathering of the “infiltrator.”
This is how the asymmetric nature of the 2020s can proceed in a positive, constructive sense—instead of anarchic resentment.
The whole ivory tower narrative, or fortressed city narrative, is over. The people who push this ethos still want to live in a world where 2020 didn’t happen. They want to live in a world where values are inert tokens—things you can beat others over the head with, assuming you’re right, automatically, because you are the holder of said token. “More homemade bread! More trad wives! Don’t you want to live in Western civilization!?”
This is the Netflix subscriber way of spirituality, and it infects both the modern right and modern left. It’s an on-demand way of life.
“Noooo, you can’t say/do that here! Do you know who I am? Do you know who we are? Netflix subscribers! Take your Apple TV values elsewhere, or we’ll have you reported and banned by the owners and moderators!”
Pacing Yourself Inside The Chaos
These are the keywords for this early January newsletter:
Owners. Moderators. These are typically the guards of the capstones of yore. They looked for any contaminating event, until 2020 arrived as the Year of Contamination (in all senses of the word). The Right looked for liberal woke propaganda in products and entertainment, while the Left looked for any kind of rightist resistance to adopting said propaganda. This was a binary drama, back and forth.
We’ve been speaking up until now of smaller, more niche parts of society dealing with important changes. As the MASSES now go through the grief and acceptance of what we’re talking about, you’ll see greater and greater appeals to ‘owners, moderators and terms of service.’ The MASSES want to hold onto that binary drama because, well, it’s easier that way and makes it seem like the Big Tent circus is still ongoing.
As humanity at large goes through the growing pains of realizing that it is up to THEM to construct new supply chains of meaning, things get gnarly. No government, no company is going to give them a readymade, on-demand, bulletproof lifestyle they can step into anymore. That is a thing of the past, when Bob down at the local Hardee’s could commiserate with Kevin and Steve about 30 years as a company man.
This, in effect, is the equivalent of having the water or electricity shut off. And that’s what 2024 represents. Intermittent service. Glitchy fits and starts. You can get your hit for a moment—and then it’s back to the rubble.
The Barbenheimer moment of summer 2023 (“Barbie” + “Oppenheimer”) generated such talk because it was like a religious experience for people who had been aching in the desert for a drop of water delivered by some central collective water cooler of meaning, where we could all commune and enjoy the sacrament together, like a deranged and debauched postmodern Catholic cult. I doubt that in 2024 we will get a trend as long running as that. It will be more like micro Barbenheimer moments, which will stir collective anxiety even more as it drips away.
You can see for yourself that Barbenheimer is nowhere to be found now. Things have gone quiet again. Summer 2023 is like some distant echo heard across the sand dunes, a muffled Saharan jazz carried on the windstorm of an incoming new year. Even the Ukraine conflict fails to rouse much emotion now, as I detailed in November’s newsletter titled “Nowhere Man.”
People are being pushed now to develop an identity of their own, something that can’t be insta-shared and insta-known between others. Things turn hyper-local and confusing quick in this context—people talk past each other or feel ultra-alienated—and so people try to dive faster back into some sold capstone paradigm.
No one talks about those movies anymore, and the omnipresent hot pink of summer has been replaced by the sobering cement-colored clouds of January.
And yet, many True Believers hold out for the Neo-Rapture, hoping some savior will return to save them—perhaps an old titan like Calvin Klein, or a household name like Burger King. There are leagues of Twitter accounts solely devoted to bemoaning how Calvin Klein ads now feature obese people. And so on. The old titans are already dust, but you can still wallow in the mud by crying into their remains, hoping for a return to old glory.
As you can imagine, this sets up the 2024 American election to be about how we deal with the loss of dynasties, so there’s going to be a big push for more “Coke vs Pepsi” culture wars until the collective can start accepting some weird Mountain Dew or Ollipop alternatives into the mix, to break up the black/white polarity programming.
Vivek, for example, is just the mere start of alternative.
End Of An Era
One of the things I encourage people to do is to understand that news headlines are like cue cards in the pageant you’re living in, which can be adapted into actionable meaning, by way of the metaphor they present.
I’ve essentially spent the last three years ironing out this practice, showing how astrology in particular can be used to interpret events “out there” as traces of energetic cycles. By understanding the nature of these cycles, you can navigate the signs and symbols around you.
So, we’ve been discussing here how the masses early in 2024 will be dealing with the writing on the wall, and how this will push them to invest deeper in capstone totems or figureheads that can enact a “clash of the titans.”
As the masses invest in these instances, they are basically undergoing a cathartic purge, much like the function of old Greek plays. The reason I say this is because the lesson is already there. The writing is on the wall. There really is no “suspense” in these events if you’re a reader of this newsletter. We already know that one side isn’t going to win and restore some Big Tent order. Both sides will fall apart, opening up a field of asymmetric and wild possibility.
But a lot of people still invest in the spectacle in this way, because they believe the quality of their life and their spiritual enrichment depends on the continued existence of an Us vs Them reality TV show.
And thus, we look to the latest scandal rocking Harvard University.
Harvard. You can just say it at a dinner table and feel the mouths of your guests loosen in reverence, right? “I study at Harvard.”
A titan. A capstone.
And of course every capstone needs its guardian—like president Claudine Gay.
Now, if you haven’t been following the story, Claudine resigned, for two reasons: allegations of plagiarism and inadequate response to antisemitism on campus.
To the first point, we could look at plagiarism in the broader sense we’ve been discussing: how many Twitter accounts are there now saying you just have to move to a third world country and be anabolic and therefore be happy forever and ever?
This is a kind of spiritual plagiarism, a death of originality that rots the soul. It’s not plagiarism in the strict textbook sense, even though many do ape each other’s lifestyle behaviors and pretend it’s a hard won “value” that deserves—no, requires—respect from the onlooker.
Seduced By Unoriginality
Likewise, it’s little surprise that the guardian of a hallowed capstone like Harvard is dealing with plagiarism accusations because there’s little to defend there anyways. I remember being in grad school back in 2006 and even then, normie publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education were bemoaning the fact that grad schools were just accepting grad student applications en masse, taking their dollars and handing them degrees for which there were ever dwindling jobs.
You can go back even further into the early 90s and read some searing interviews with literature scholar Harold Bloom who was lamenting how graduate programs in the humanities had been taken over by a “culture of resentment” rather than a love of literature.
Bloom was referring to the trend of applying “woke” theory to the reading of any and all texts, including Shakespeare, as part of an ideological push to infuse the old capstones—scholarly life, public education, church, etc.—with a postmodern bent, one that’s ideological in nature.
And that brings us to the second aspect of Claudine’s resignation: the increasing chatter over the treatment of Jews in American culture, as the war machine spectacle (Israel vs Hamas) gets its own primetime Coke vs Pepsi treatment. (One can imagine the conflict acting as a sponsor for the upcoming presidential election, like: “Trump vs Biden, your favorite cage match showdown, brought to you by the Israel-Hamas conflict.”)
The issue came to a head during congressional hearings at Harvard in early December. One of the sacred capstones was pointed out: Free Speech. Of course, there are those who believe there are exceptions to free speech, like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who accused Claudine of not enforcing a stricter code of conduct on antisemitic utterings.
(Brief note: you can go back to my late November newsletter and see how I wrote, before this congressional hearing, that ‘language’ and ‘utterings’ would be a key feature of December headlines and personal events for you.)
Anyways, fast forward to early January. Billionaire and Harvard alum Bill Ackman hopped on social media to take down Claudine. His claim is that what really fosters antisemitic utterances is not Claudine’s negligence, but her fealty to the religion of wokeness, which we just referenced a moment ago in discussion about Harold Bloom.
This religion has been going on awhile, and molded itself around pre-existing capstones, giving rise to things like DEI at Harvard (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Ackman wrote:
“Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based on where one resides on a so-called intersection pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors and a subset of people of color, LGTBQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed.”
It’s not that Ackman’s critique is incorrect (or correct). It’s more about the fact that this argument already feels played out, like a re-run from a meme posted on Twitter in 2017.
What you’re witnessing is emotional roleplay. It’s something for the masses to watch, to slowly get them from the shallow end of the pool into the deep end, where the true chaos of the 2020s awaits them.
Again, it’s not that pronouncements like these are incorrect, it’s just that the masses have to catch up, and the best way for them to do that is through entertainment and pageantry and psychological identification with characters. Even if the average person knows subconsciously that society has already moved into a new paradigm, their conscious mind needs this emotional release because the subconscious purge is too volatile or difficult to handle.
If anything, it’s more effective that wokeism is squashed in local or, say, county-wide contexts that you are involved in. That’s true change. But it can be too up close and personal for some people, as that gets into details and forces real compromise and change in your actual daily life. It’s easier to just watch a pay-per-view fight between Harvard and some billionaire, because the stakes are lower.
But as these fights drag out, and become more like a draw or just totally bonkers, the masses will slowly warm up to more local instances of change—and see that change isn’t about who gets what kind of political signage on Netflix shows or cereal boxes, and more like a complicated web. Really, you can see people going through this purge with the recent debate over a conservative bikini calendar. Some people support it, saying the Righties need their own version of tastefully sexuality, while the purists say it destroys the cause.
Fracturing continues, and new spectrums will emerge.
And so get ready for desperate blockbuster dramas in 2024.
As I close up here, it’s important to remember the aspect of timing. If this had happened in 2017, and Ackman had said this on Twitter when it was still thick with Silicon Valley leftism, he would have been immediately shunned and described as a Nazi Trump supporter.
But now, this is your average headline. People are starting to realize these debates are in a way fake, or don’t really reflect the complex nature of life now.
Likewise, I would encourage you, as you go deeper into January, to pay attention to this blockbuster phenomenon.
Are you trying to stage a spectacle in order to grapple with a loss? Maybe that’s ok. Even preferable. That’s how you cope with moving on. But in whatever movie you stage, notice how the characters have a “wholeness” that is illusory, ghostly.
Just as Harvard was already losing its shine as we went into the generation-defining housing crisis of 2007-08, the areas of your life that you reanimate into some whole…these may have been dust for some time already. (If you’ve never watched David Fincher’s “The Social Network” about Mark Zuckerberg’s time at Harvard, it’s a great window into this loss of luster.)
And that’s ok, because once you move through this fact—and once the masses do by the end of 2024—you will see that the rubble around you is like a treasure trove of Lego pieces from which you can build a more enduring sense of meaning than ever—one that’s truly yours, rather than simply inherited.
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Lets. fucking. go!!!