a tiny reading list

What’s often misunderstood about soft cults is that they don’t require total commitment. They’re subtler than we might think—manifesting as any group or ideology we follow without much scrutiny. Alt-net circles, underground subreddits, niche online scenes. The truth is, most of us engage with them in some way. We just tend to overlook it.

This nuanced understanding of soft cults aligns with Robert Altman’s perspective:

“What’s a cult? It just means there are not enough people to make a minority.”

That is: cults are credos that haven’t gone mainstream yet.

But soft cults complicate that idea. They don’t follow strict doctrine. Instead, they fuse ideology and aesthetic through a semi-coded perspective. Niche and ironic, but still echoing broader ideological frameworks: group identity, insider language, a sense of belonging. They reject the rigidity of traditional cult structures, but the blueprint creeps back—refitted with better looks, deeper lore, and softer boundaries.

by Travis Kling

The American Dream of upward mobility has been slipping out of reach for increasingly more people. Why do you think Oliver Anthony exploded out of nowhere into such popularity? That is Financial Nihilism.

So if you’re like the large majority of Americans and you’re on the wrong end of this, what do you do about it? You take bigger risks. You feel driven to take bigger risks to try and leapfrog from your current financial position (mostly paycheck to paycheck; buying a home feels nearly impossible; saddled with student loans; salary increases not keeping up expense increases) to something more tenable. More comfortable. More baller.

by Freya India

Religious faith has collapsed, and many trends and movements have moved in to fill the void. The one that most resembles a religion to me, though, is the rise of therapy culture. I think it’s an exaggeration to say all of Gen Z are following the cult of social justice or climate activism—but I really don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a significant majority of young people now interpret their lives and emotions and relationships through a therapeutic lens.

This is how many of us make sense of loss, of love, of hurt now. We refract our relationships through therapy-speak. We define ourselves by our diagnoses. And we mimic religion, all the time. We don’t pray at night; we repeat positive affirmations. We don’t confess; we trauma dump. We don’t seek salvation; we go on healing journeys. We don’t resist temptation from the devil; we reframe intrusive thoughts. We don’t exorcise evil spirits; we release trauma. And of course we don’t talk to God, c’mon—we give a “specific request to the universe” that “has a greater plan” for us.

by Justin from Stay Grounded

We’ll reach a point when the phrase “social media is all fake robo-crap” will be as common of knowledge as “cigarettes cause cancer” or “slot machines are a poor investment”. Adults can still smoke and slot, sure. But nobody in the developed world can say they weren’t warned of the risks. My other hope is that when that time comes, real human-made art made for connecting with human audiences can be more readily recognized by society as the valuable thing it is on its own, not only when it is put to work in service to some marketer turning a profit for some CEO.

Before that day comes, we’ll probably have another ten-ish years of people like me getting all bent out of shape, while the majority of users won’t put together that their persistent feelings of social detachment stem from these ostensibly “social” services that slowly, but increasingly will be perceived as little more than tiny slot machines, foregoing the casino chips for dopamine.

AI can’t kill the job of artist, because making art, like playing chess, is an activity people would do even if money didn’t exist. It won’t ruin socializing. But it will ruin the “game” of social media. And we’ll be better for it.

by Matthew Di Ferrante

For real quantum computing, there are a few parameters that really matter. We are many, many orders of magnitudes away from the level we need to be on each of these parameters when it comes to realizing a real quantum computer that can do meaningful computation. Each category is a Manhattan project level effort (x10) to overcome, and all three need to be overcome, or you have nothing.

by Rachel Moss

The garden as a metaphor is very persuasive when we’re talking about the social Internet. Gardens give us the illusion that nature is something we can control and prune and make into something beautiful by our standards. I think we want to believe the social Internet is the same. That with a little tenderness, a little curation, a little attention, we can get it to grow the way we want. The problems we’re having right now — AI, enshittification, the commodification of crisis — these are all just weeds to be cut back.

But there is no apt metaphor for what the social Internet is doing to us. We are not in a garden like I am in my dreams. We are in a place where entertainment has become the living and those human qualities that were once beyond commodification — attention, creativity, empathy, to name a few — are now capital.

by Benoit Tokyo

We’re making myths again. Algorithms act like gods. CSS and emojis are modern runes. A profile bio is a ceremonial name—part ID tag, part ward. Donna Haraway said stories build worlds. The cyborg was her symbolic figure. Online, identity shapeshifts—race, gender, form. Avatars are digital familiars.

We’ve entered a new animism. Platforms respond. Data lingers. Algorithms feel fed. Manifestation becomes literal. Even a refresh is divination. Notifications are signs. We’ve left the era of pure spectacle. Now we're into vectors—swipes, likes, flows. Every gesture casts a spell.

Examining Baudrillard's theory of the "hyperreal" and how it manifests in society's relationship to art, movies, mass media, advertising, education, architecture, technology, and language.