Alexandra has five kids. A million dollars a year, cash, from two doctor parents. Catholic church, Catholic school. If she won the lottery, she says, she would have 10 more kids. No sports––not enough time. One house, on a beautiful island off Florida called Key Biscayne. A small boat, instead of a big one.

I met a mom who has nine kids. Nine. She was a tomboy and never cared about being a mom, but then she fell in love with a man who wanted a big family and just had them. She made it sound so smooth, like anyone could do it.

When I asked the moms whether they would have done it––have so many kids––with less, they all weren’t sure. They wanted to say yes.

Most of the time, I got a “maybe” or “I hope so.”

Society’s Children

We have mostly solved the basics. Clean water. Enough food. Medical care. But then you get to the harder ones––love, safety, purpose––for which the bar can feel impossibly high. One person, half you. When every child is a choice, and you have them in a society that is ostensibly so bountiful, then it feels like your fault if they fall short.

Birth rates are down, and parents in developed countries are increasingly delaying child-rearing or avoiding it altogether. When they do have children, they pour their resources into a precious one or two instead of simply having more. The May 2023 Harper’s Index included an ominous list of the years that various world powers’ populations began to decline––Japan: 2011 / South Korea: 2021 / China: 2022––with the insinuation that America will be next.

A smaller population could function well in theory, but in practice, the child-free societies we know of are often quite strange and very sad. New research suggests that there are now more missing-but-wanted children in the world than unwanted ones. In response, some commentators have tried to reclaim childbearing as a radical act of frontiersmanship, declaring that more is better regardless of the circumstances. Elon Musk must be a good person, because he is rumored to have 20 kids. At least Ghengis Khan had kids while he was pillaging half the known world. Their language may be coarse, but the underlying point is sound––a society without children will not last long.

Of course, when the time comes, you don’t have society’s children. You have your children. And no one wants to hurt their children. Even if it means having fewer. Even if it were, on paper, the right thing to do.

I’m 24 now. I am the target demographic of the pro-natalist movement––over-educated, prone to thinking too hard, and the product of a small family of my own. But most educated people are so far removed from the reality of raising large groups of children that any calls for them to “breed,” or otherwise change their child-rearing habits, feel impossibly abstract.

What would it even look like in 2023 to have a lot of kids? Statistically, it is actually people like John and Tori––with over a million dollars a year in household income––who have the most children. Many of my friends are from large, wealthy families, and so I asked their parents about their experiences. They have different parenting styles: religious and secular, intensive and hands-off. But what unites them is their ability and willingness to deploy exorbitant resources to rebuild the childhood structures most Western parents would view as standard. They teach their children at home for a reasonably-priced education––then supplement with a few hundred thousand dollars of outside activities for social skills. They pay two doctor’s salaries for a house in a safe, close-knit community, where their kids can walk home without supervision.

At a certain level of wealth, it seems, the world starts to feel a little more open and hopeful, like you could fill it with infinitely more people and have plenty left to spare. You can buy them experiences. You can buy them a life.

The Meritocracy Treadmill

Growing up, I met a lot of kids. I knew rich kids and borderline kids from families large and small. I saw parents who followed the playbook––private school, violin lessons––and ones who tried to think outside the box.

I knew a girl whose mom tried to homeschool her when she was 14 to keep her away from boys. In response, she started dating a 26-year-old man who had tattoos and a lazy eye, just to prove that she could. I know a girl who was the last child of three, and her parents tried so hard with the first two kids that she was effectively “raised by Snapchat.” I know a girl with five siblings and she’s a little angel––she just got engaged. I know a boy who was also a later child, and he tried to join a cult, but then he came back so I guess it doesn’t matter. And even though I know that all the money and parental maneuvering in the world supposedly cannot change who a person is at their core, I’ve never believed that for a second.

Because you can watch how children change with their environment: how they soak up the values of a new town; how an unexpected windfall for the parents produces a posher, lazier second child. And most of the time, you can look at all the little signs of how someone was raised––the cut of their hair, the way they hold their fork––and draw a straight line from where they came from to where they will inevitably end up going.

We live in a purported meritocracy, where every generation has to work for their social position. At least, we are closer to one than most other times in human history. That has its advantages, but it also forces individuals––and their parents––to proactively assert any additional person’s right to exist.

Once you opt-in, the current meritocratic structures will push the limits of what parents are able to do. The internet has democratized access to information on how to get ahead––all the applications are online, and forums like DCUrbanMoms and College Confidential lay out your competition in plain terms. And so we have, in practice, created a meritocratic treadmill––where the same upper-middle class still self-replicates each year by squeezing into the same few thousand spots, but the effort required to do so rises with each iteration of the process. A process that once started in high school has expanded to include a complex network of feeder preschools and resume-enriching summer camps on the way to college, internships, and that crucial first job. And attempts to rectify the imbalances in these systems have only made them more complex. In Washington D.C., parents navigate a school lottery system that was designed by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, which determines whether their children will actually learn how to read in school. And as pure academics have become blasé––too many kids got 4.0s––the scope of the game has expanded to include intangibles like “passion” and “character,” which in practice can be bought and paid for by parents with enough commitment.

If you’re late to the school race or try to raise your child spontaneously, then the most straightforward avenues to their success will close. Everyone knows the rules of the game now and is preparing for the next stage years in advance. Consultants will prepare a child for private school admissions when they are four years old.

Part of the challenge of having children in the twenty-first century is that we do not immediately need more people. We do need people––in an abstract, make-the-GDP-line-go-up way—but we don’t have as much use for warm bodies anymore: generic individuals who can break stones, cook, or fight. Instead, any person exists in society on the basis of their place in the economy, and so they need a well-remunerated job or proximity to one through marriage. The increasingly obscure ways most people make their living––derivatives on top of derivatives that require years of specialized training and cultural knowledge—incentivize parents to have better children, of the type who will have an easier time supporting themselves, instead of having more. Even industries widely touted as alternatives to a traditional career, like technology or cryptocurrency, rely heavily on their math ability and cultural know-how crafted over years of socialization and specialized education.

Parents have two levers they can pull if they want to help their children: more money, and more time. And they will seemingly never brake on either. Accordingly, the cost of a private education has risen from a reasonable average of $1200 a year in 1979 to a projected $100,000 a year per child in some cities––right at the limits of what the most well-resourced parents are able to pay. Families take out second mortgages to pay for sports––hoping for scholarships, character, or just an extra edge in an increasingly byzantine college admissions process. The Common Application has 10 extracurricular slots; strong applicants regularly fill all of them.

Children today are not born more intelligent than those 70 years ago. But it has become a rite of passage in many circles to prop them up until they look that way––if only to justify their presence against other people’s children.

Even if you want to raise low-investment, free-range children, the rest of the culture has changed––dragging unwitting parents in by association. No more playing on the street: all the other kids are at soccer practice. So you bring your kids to soccer practice. You pay for soccer lessons, so they don’t embarrass themselves at practice. And now the soccer team is traveling, and they have to go or they’re off the team, so you take Saturday off and drive like all the other parents. If you live in a community where all the activities for children are structured, and the structured activities have high barriers to entry, most people will cave, even if they don’t intrinsically think their children need fancy activities. The safe, upwardly mobile neighborhoods that parents fetishize often have the highest barriers to entry.

In November 2022, the Hulu show Fleishman Is in Trouble triggered half the Eastern seaboard with its too-realistic depiction of a fracturing couple who pour their good-but-not-good-enough incomes into all the right schools, camps, and birthday presents for their kids, all for the privilege of having them not embarrassingly stand out among their peers.

Normal. That’s what everyone wants, even if the work now required is anything but normal. Just nice, normal kids.

A Precipitous Fall

For a society that is so difficult to navigate, we are incredibly unforgiving of the people who fall behind. Consciously or not, everyone treats people who haven’t been raised right poorly––often, for attributes that are not really their fault. We say “she’s a whore,” or “cheap,” which usually just means poor. We say “uneducated” or “low confidence” or “insecure.” We judge the cuts of people’s clothes. We say “he doesn’t get it” and we only help people who get it—the ones who ask the right questions, who don’t get too nervous, and who carry themselves with a certain kind of confidence. Did you know that there’s a special way to tie your Sperry Top-Siders? It’s a kind of double sailing knot with two laces, not a bow. Not that anyone wears Sperrys anymore, but there are a thousand little signs like that, of what kind of person someone is.

You live your life surrounded by other people’s children, even if you don’t think of them that way.

Since the late 1960s, nearly every indicator of personal well-being has bifurcated along education lines, and the gap is growing rapidly. People with a four-year college education are now significantly better-connected, healthier, and more involved with their communities than their non-college-educated counterparts. College-educated people are more likely to attend church. They have more friends. They are more likely to know and trust their neighbors, and, despite concerns about helicopter parenting, to live in safe neighborhoods where their kids can play outside. Their social networks are also more likely to include professionals like doctors, lawyers, and potential employers who can help them and their children navigate a society that is otherwise increasingly obscure.

In the public imagination, we have mostly held onto the Baby Boom-era idea that wealth is a matter of scale: a larger income might mean a bigger house or more clothes. But the real privilege of professional success is increasingly not any particular possession, but access to a social functionality that is now limited to the upper classes.

A safe home environment has transformed from something shared across income lines into a luxury reserved for the educated. In 1960, when fertility was at its post-war peak, nearly all children––regardless of social class––were raised in stable two-parent families that provided a launchpad for economic advancement. But today, while 95 percent of children born to college-educated parents still have two parents at home, almost 70 percent of poor children now grow up without one or both of their parents. The vast majority of poor children say that they want to get married but far fewer of them actually do, and their relationships tend to fall apart soon after they have formed. As a result, the majority of poor children are born into what sociologist Sara McLanahan calls “fragile” or “kaleidoscopic” families––kinship networks with no clear center, and parents with numerous other entanglements outside the home. Economically stressed parents are also far more likely to beat their children.

The rise of class-based residential segregation has amplified the effects of what could have been isolated incidents of social dysfunction. Social and economic mobility has collapsed since 1960, and the features of a so-called normal life—a good-enough education, close friends, and a safe place to run around—have become uncommon enough to be status symbols that conscientious parents will compete for.

As the experiences of the college-educated and uneducated have diverged, inter-class marriage rates have declined rapidly—both a key creator and indicator of social cohesion. In practice, that means fewer bosses marry their secretaries and more bankers marrying other bankers. But the results have also been catastrophic for poor children, who now have fewer helpful uncles, cousins, or even neighbors to tell them “I think you should go to college” or just model a way out.

Unlike material deprivation, which can at least be solved with money, the psychological damage poor children increasingly suffer is permanent. The afflictions that disproportionately affect the children of non-college-educated parents––physical or sexual abuse, the witnessing of violence at a young age, or having a parent who is absent or in prison––are known by researchers as adverse childhood experiences (ACES). Experiencing chronic stress as a child can shrink the size of a developing hippocampus; primates cut off from parental affection never learn how to mate or raise infants of their own. With each additional ACE, a person becomes more likely to have cancer, diabetes, or a stroke. Of course, there are confounding factors: some people beat the odds and others will fail with every advantage. But you can give a person all the benefits of modern society––cheap toys and a Publix birthday cake––and still screw with them until their brain doesn’t work right anymore.

Everyone born today should, in economic terms, be quite happy with their lot; the poorest 20 percent of America are among the wealthiest people to ever walk the earth. But as technologically advanced societies segregate between those who can participate and those who can’t, the consequences of falling out of the former category are dismal. Those who cannot keep up with the change seem to quietly wither away outside of the public view.

It’s everywhere: the feeling that to grow into a wanted, integrated member of society is somehow exceptional.

Raising Better Kids

When I was a kid––maybe seven, or eight––I used to imagine all the things that I would buy for my children. I don’t know why I cared so much. But I had so many ideas. I wanted them to have white teeth and tennis skirts and big bright smiles. Fur gloves. A Christmas tree. I wanted a white house and a pink car. As I became a teenager, my plans became less childlike. I wanted a brownstone. I wanted high walls. I even made a plan to become a surgeon––the highest-paid job on a list I found on Google. When my friend from camp got into St. Ann’s in New York and I heard the reverential way that adults said St. Ann’s, I decided that I wanted my kids to go there, too.

I liked the sound of it. It sounded like a place where you would be safe.

The problem with intensive parenting is that it works. You can, with resources and the right subject, design someone’s class presentation from the ground up. One of the moms I know––with two kids––has a daughter, Ella, who is something of a “unicorn person.” She worked for three years as a professional ballet dancer, then went to an Ivy League school. She has pretty blonde hair and can throw a good dinner party. After she graduated, she got an offer for a job that you can actually support a family on, assuming she stays at the same company forever. Of course, she probably won’t, because her boyfriend also has one of those jobs, but she met him at a party for other people who went to her fancy school, so I think it still counts.

When I met Ella’s mom, Annie, I realized how much of her personality had been, in effect, crafted. For example, her mother had been very shy as a child, and read that shyness could be genetic. To compensate, she put both of her children in performance-based activities, like singing and ballet, very early. Now, neither Ella nor her brother are shy. When Ella was younger, Annie brought her to the opera and on trips to Europe and Africa, where her daughter could acquire the cultural omnivory that is now a hallmark of the upper classes. When she didn’t like the writing instruction at Ella’s private school, she tutored her for an extra hour and half a day on the deck of their house in the Hamptons.

She wanted her kids exposed to classical music. She didn’t want them to have their brains rotted by popular culture––Ella didn’t watch TV until she was 13.

Annie is one of those fancy Upper-East-Side moms, but she also has an anarchist streak. When she first had her daughter, she didn’t want to participate in “the system”––which is particularly brutal in New York––and seriously considered homeschooling her. When Ella was in preschool, they lived in an apartment across the street from a small elementary school. And at the end of each day, Annie liked to look out the window and watch the kids leaving together, laughing and shoving each other in the street.

One afternoon, she looked over at her daughter and realized that she couldn’t keep her away from all those other kids, even if it meant submitting to a system she despised. “I couldn’t do that to her.”

Now, Ella is incredibly grateful for all her mother did for her. Sometimes, she wishes she had more siblings, but acknowledges how much easier her life will be because of how many resources she was given. She jokes that homeschooling would have been a disaster, because “I was already pretty weird.”

More than anything, Ella seems so ready to be a mom. From her vantage point, with good friends and a new job, the world is a wonderful place, full of open doors and infinite possibilities. She wants to have three kids. She is still young––a little older than me––but I can already picture it, and so can she: pushing a stroller, throwing an iced coffee in the minivan before pick-up at day school. We take a walk together outside, and she points out the car she wants to drive her kids in someday. It’s a Porsche Cayenne, which is white and sleek and has plenty of room in the back. I recognized the model right away because a girl at my old ice skating club had a car like that. I was always so jealous of her, with her straight hair and her perfect car, but then her dad died in a car crash when we were 15.

He left the car behind, but I don’t think it helped.

Something Feels Impossible

When you die, most of what you leave behind is your children. We’re just animals; I don’t know what else we would expect. Some people do transcend their biological roots––they might become great artists, or musicians, and leave behind a whole oeuvre of meaningful contributions, but for the vast majority of us, our only legacy will be more people. More life.

So why wouldn’t you want to try? A few billion years of evolution have brought us quite far. The ancient Egyptians had a 50 percent child mortality rate, and they would bury their children with little toys for them to play with in the afterlife. That’s hard––harder than anything we do for our offspring now. Now, we have cities and research universities to fight over. We can debate our own existence on computers. And now, suddenly, we don’t want to continue. Maybe we’re all just spoiled. Maybe our little monkey brains can’t handle someone else having more than us. What humans seem to really want is to have more trinkets than our five closest friends, and maybe that’s why we’re going to go extinct. Maybe we need to drink some gratitude juice. Maybe we need to get on our knees and pray. Or maybe a wealthy society is like the domino towers I used to make when I was a kid: once you build to a certain level, it gets harder each time to rebuild from scratch.

It is the most natural urge in the world to want to protect your children. We buy them all of this stuff and hope that it is enough to keep them safe. Houses. Cars. Tennis skirts. Accutane. Adderall. Talk therapy; horse therapy. Extra time on the SAT. The sneakers all their friends have. A friend who’s a professor. We try to buy them the love of their peers, and a place in the world they will enter.

But you can also make your own hope, if you want.

After our conversation, I go to a barbeque with John and Tori’s family. John’s dad was a small-town lawyer who had nine kids; six went on to have children of their own. And now we’re here, a half-century later, in the backyard of John’s coastal home with 35 cousins. And they’re all people with names. You forget that, when you talk about “children” in the abstract––they become Sarah. David. Richard. Kacie. Lawrence and John. Max is back from college. Amelia writes plays. David wants to be an investment banker like his father, although his parents hope he tries something else. Uncle James had Sally, who is playing with Ben in the ocean. And the parents are looking on, and they know they paid for it all––the burgers and beer, and maybe too many schools––but they created a whole unit, with its own energy.

They gave their children all that a person could ask for: a place in the world they will enter, and a place outside of it.

On February 14th, 2023, at the age of eighty-eight, American mathematician James Glimm released what he believes is a solution to a second. 

For the past seven years, Glimm has dedicated himself to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the first steps to cracking the mystery of turbulence. The Navier-Stokes equations are a series of partial differential equations that have been used to describe the motion of fluid since the mid-1800s, but no one has ever proven that they always have smooth solutions.

By coincidence, I spent a significant amount of time with Glimm over the same period as he attempted to crack the Navier-Stokes. He and his wife have an apartment in New York on the Upper East Side, and they often host me in their spare room. During these trips, I liked to watch Glimm at his large mahogany desk in the morning, writing on his yellow legal pad or staring into space. Often, he wakes up in the middle of the night to keep working. 

When Glimm and his wife, Adele, got married over sixty years ago, she did not realize how much time he would dedicate to his work. And yet, she is not surprised that he has continued pushing so hard and for so long. She says that Glimm is driven by a desire to impact the world, to add to the sum of humanity’s knowledge. 

When I asked Jim what motivates him, he had a simpler response.

“I want to get the answer.” And then a pause.

“I don’t have the answer.”

What Makes a Genius

James Gilbert Glimm is one of the most accomplished mathematicians of his generation. Glimm is the winner of the 2002 National Medal of Science, considered the highest honor possible for an American mathematician. The sum of an academic career is hard to measure, but he has an h-index—a rough measure of research output—on par with most Nobel Prize winners. At academic conferences, other scientists used to pull his young daughter aside to ask her variations on the same question. Is he real? They wanted proof, from his own flesh and blood, that such an incredible mind woke up and put on clothes in the morning like everyone else.

The label of genius has been, for lack of a better word, democratized in recent years. Every child can be a genius, for a fee. Every fast-talking twenty-something with a software product is publicly declared a genius––at least until a newer, younger genius comes along. At the same time, an increasing number of people would deny that innate ability exists at all. When I was younger, my dad used to try to prove to me that all variations in human achievement could be explained by hard work. He bought me every pop psychology book on expertise––like Malcolm Gladwell’s beach read Outliers, which famously declared that anyone can become an expert at anything in ten thousand hours. I never believed him about talent or genius––if only because a certain class of minds had always seemed so different from my own. 

Glimm has one of those minds. He never forgets anything. Once, when he discovered that his granddaughter was writing a dissertation on Irish poetry, he began quoting entire stanzas of the poet William Yeats back at her. And he learns quickly. Before presenting his work at international conferences, he used to read foreign newspapers—in Russian, German, Italian, or French—and then turn around and give his talks in the native language. As an undergraduate, Glimm was constantly accused of cheating because his mathematics tests never showed any work—save for all of the correct answers, neatly circled.

The word genius comes from the Latin genere, which means to beget or give birth to. Certain definitions associate genius with creativity, or output over time, but the phrase has always implied the existence of individuals whose exceptional capacity is determined at birth. The fixed nature of genius, or any form of giftedness, is the source of much contemporary unease. Major newspapers and tabloids alike are eager to celebrate the outputs of genius, but many deny the insinuation––innate in the term––that some people are simply born more able than others.

Before I knew Glimm as a mathematician, he was a family friend. I met him when I was nineteen; my own grandfather had died a few months prior. I don’t think he thought much of me at the time. Over the next few years, however, we developed a quiet rapport. It is strange to connect with someone who is both so grounded and yet exists on another plane. One night, when I was jet-lagged, I woke up early and found him at the kitchen table, notepad in hand, sitting exactly as he had been five hours before when I had gone to bed.

Occasionally, as a game for myself, I would try to slip a half-truth by him. He always won. Once, when I tried to pitch him a start-up I was working for, Glimm tore apart the business model until I admitted that I had no faith in the company either, and had only taken the job for cash while I was traveling. “Oh,” he said. “That makes sense.” 

Glimm himself never sold out for money or prestige. His family says that he never cared about academic prizes, but he won them all anyway. It is a bit unfair to hold him up as a standard of a meaningful life, as I often do, because he has succeeded, always, by simply being more intelligent than other people. I learned much from that formative period with him. He gave me a strong sense of my place in the world––whatever I did with my own career, it probably was not worth worrying about too much, because someone like James was out there, pushing the world forward. And yet, watching him at his desk, day in and day out, was an important reminder that it is possible to produce good work, and to live a good life, and that you should always do the best you can with what you have.

He takes his obligation as a genius seriously. Whenever Glimm has had the opportunity to take the easy way out or rest on his considerable laurels, he always eschewed it to continue pushing the limits of his own ability.

A Normal Life

Glimm’s early life was unusual only in that it was so usual. He was born in 1934 in Peoria, Illinois, and grew up as the beloved youngest of three to an engineer father and stay-at-home mother. He was popular with the local girls because he was handsome; in the summers, he worked as a lifeguard. Even today, Glimm is quite dapper, and not just by the standard of mathematicians—he wears loafers and pocket squares, and holds Adele’s arm when they go out to dinner.

He lacks much of the anguish typically associated with extreme intelligence. When the time came to leave for college, Glimm made the simple decision and chose Columbia University because his father had gone there. 

While at Columbia, Glimm was far from the typical nerd. He lived in the Alpha Delta Chi fraternity house on 114th Street, where he used his considerable engineering talent to make various repairs. Those who know him from college recall that he had friends that included Jews, Catholics, Protestants, slackers, intellectuals, and jocks alike.

As he was finishing his fourth year of undergraduate studies, Glimm had been hopelessly torn between engineering, physics, and mathematics. He was an engineer at heart but found the field insufficiently rigorous for his taste. For a while, he seriously considered pursuing physics. But the more he looked at physics, the more he realized he wanted to do mathematics––it was the most exact. 

He decided to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics, but remained at Columbia “without much thought” because he liked the university and was already there. He completed his doctorate in 1959 with a forty-page thesis titled “On a certain class of operator algebras,” which dealt with the classification and description of a novel category of ​​C*-algebra, a space with operations (like addition and multiplication) that obeys certain properties. 

In his personal life, Glimm similarly preferred to listen to his intuition. As a first-year graduate student, he found that most of the women––in keeping with the era––were more interested in finding a husband than in intellectual life. Once, he complained to a female friend that he was having a hard time meeting smart women, and she offered to introduce him to her friend, the bookish Adele.

Adele Strauss was an eighteen-year-old Barnard sophomore from Philadelphia. She was sweet and a bit shy—then, as today, she loved reading and has published both fiction and nonfiction. The two got coffee and immediately hit it off. Jim had found his match.

And as always, he was decisive. They were married within a year. Notably, neither family approved of the marriage, which was an unusual Protestant and Jewish mix. Still, the wedding proceeded on June 30, 1957, and proved a resounding success. In the sixty years that followed, they never left each other’s side, and remain each other’s best friend and closest confidant. 

When Glimm was twenty-seven, he had his first major academic accomplishment: two theorems that were an outgrowth of his thesis work. His exceptional talent had already been noted in graduate school, but after those two publications, he became incredibly well-known in academic circles. In 1960, he published his first paper, “A Stone-Weierstrass theorem for C*-algebras,” which provided a partial answer to a major conjecture in functional analysis. And in 1961, he published a second that built on the same topic. He recalled that like any major breakthrough, there was “a certain controversy” associated with the publications (“people get jealous”). But the results were swiftly accepted.

Today, the uniformly hyperfinite algebras he explored in his early work are still known as “Glimm Algebras” in his honor. The young mathematician was off. 

Depth Before Breadth

The great wisdom of his career, as Glimm likes to tell it, is depth first, then breadth. Do not waste time on a million directions at once—do one thing well, and then master another. Over time, you can have deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects. He is unusual, even among elite mathematicians, in that his research actually spans multiple academic disciplines. By contrast, most academics remain in the same narrow specialty for their entire career, particularly after a major accomplishment in their early years. Glimm could have supported a long trajectory in academia by riffing on his early discoveries with C*-algebras for decades.

But Glimm had a different idea. To the shock of his colleagues, he abandoned pure math altogether and pivoted to another field. He wanted to do physics. 

After a stint at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, Glimm joined MIT as an associate professor of mathematics. He wasted no time in switching fields. By 1964, he had begun publishing on topics related to mathematical physics—specifically quantum field theory—which would become his focus for the next twenty years. However, he saw gaps in his knowledge and visited Princeton to learn more. 

During his time at Princeton, Glimm encountered a young physics Ph.D. student named Arthur Jaffe––a protegé of the legendary mathematical physicist Arthur Wightman. The two spoke briefly after Glimm delivered a lecture, and then met again at a workshop a few months later. The next year, Jaffe invited Glimm to a workshop at Stanford over the summer.

That chance encounter would lead to one of the most productive partnerships in modern mathematics history. 

The stereotypical genius works alone, either because they are antisocial or believe they have nothing to learn from other people. But Glimm has always been quite practical: he will engage with anyone who can make a worthwhile contribution. Over that summer in California, Glimm and Jaffe spent hours talking about mathematical physics. They published their first joint paper in 1968. After a few initial successes, they would go on to work side by side for over two decades—an incredible feat in the typically cutthroat world of academia, where the most prolific scholars tend to keep to themselves. 

When I asked Glimm why he and Jaffe worked so well together, he had no particularly profound response. They simply had complementary skill sets––and both saw that they could achieve more together than alone. They co-authored dozens of papers together, which have received over six thousand citations.

Together, Glimm and Jaffe pioneered a new field called Constructive Quantum Field Theory, which sought to show that quantum field theory is compatible with special relativity. Since the 1940s, physicists had observed that fields, not particles, appeared to be the basis of reality. The hypothesis was predictive in high-quality experiments. There were, however, some holes—the fields could not be modeled using conventional mathematics. Instead, physicists were using a convoluted process called “renormalization” to erase inconvenient infinities in their calculations––a tortured procedure that called the legitimacy of quantum field theory into question. Many mathematicians who held experimental data in low regard were skeptical that the new fields could ever be defined.

Glimm had an intuition that the physicists, not the mathematicians, were right about quantum field theory. They just needed more mathematical support.

Working together, Glimm and Jaffe developed new mathematics to show that quantum fields could be defined exactly—one write-up described their task as analogous to Newton developing calculus to explain planetary motion and gravity.

When they first started working together, Glimm was still stationed at MIT, while Jaffe was a young professor at nearby Harvard. As Jaffe struggled to adjust to the harsh Boston winters, Jim and Adele would often invite him over for a warm dinner—Jaffe would later return the favor when he could. The professional association blossomed into a personal friendship that continues to this day.

When Glimm moved back to New York University at the end of 1968, they vowed to continue their partnership despite the distance, working “remotely” as we would call it today. Except there was no video calling or even fax machines by which to send complicated equations. Instead, the partners corresponded via photocopies and long letters––for extra postage, a letter sent from Cambridge could be delivered to New York by the next morning. Whenever Jaffe had the opportunity, would spend a few nights on the couch of the Glimms’ Brooklyn Heights apartment. Later, when they got more space, Jaffe was upgraded to a guest room.

One of the most important findings of their joint work was that the dimension in spacetime, d, is crucial when defining a field. This proved both a valuable insight and an unexpected impediment. Glimm and Jaffe’s work was confined to three dimensions; today, establishing the same results for d = 4 remains the most significant unsolved problem in mathematical physics. 

They continued publishing together until the mid-1980s, before parting ways after two decades of collaboration. In an unusual admission of sentimentality, Glimm acknowledged that he stayed in the working relationship for a little longer than he should have after they stopped seeing results. 

After their collaboration ended, both partners went on to become influential members of the mathematics community. By the early eighties, Glimm was solving major problems in physics by himself. And although Glimm is quite humble about his achievements, his family did recall that some of his colleagues—particularly those who had dedicated their lives to physics—were a bit miffed when he eventually proved to be the superior practitioner. As his academic star rose, Glimm retained an extremely conservative public presence. He only has one full lecture available online, an obscure talk at a Brazilian mathematics institute. To this day, he has no personal website and a matter-of-fact Wikipedia page. 

Jaffe never left Cambridge, and rose to become the chair of Harvard’s Mathematics Department. And the partnership may soon complete a full circle. In 1998, Jaffe co-founded the Clay Institute, which today is best known for its seven Millennium Prize problems.

Recognizing Excellence

Genius is often not revealed in its own time. In 1834, the physicist Sadi Carnot, now recognized as the father of modern thermodynamics, died with a single citation and no professional recognition. Franz Kafka lived and died as a failed insurance officer in Prague, leaving the vast majority of his writing unpublished in a desk drawer. It is a common fallacy to compare mainstream contemporary culture with the unearthed excellence of the past and find it lacking. But while Kafka was alive, no one––even in his direct vicinity––knew they were in the presence of a literary genius. For every generation, there is a formula for how to look like a genius. But the contributions that are remembered are not always the ones that make themselves so obvious. 

The world of academic ladder-climbing never interested Jim. He wanted to continue solving important problems. In 1989, he left NYU for the last time to join Stony Brook University as a distinguished professor in Applied Mathematics and Statistics.

Glimm’s new department was unranked and had produced few notable alumni—an unorthodox move for one of the most desirable, and hireable, researchers on the market. However, Stony Brook offered him what no other institution could, which was the opportunity to build and lead a research group. By the time Glimm stepped down as department chair, the same applied mathematics department had improved rapidly and was ranked seventh in the country by the National Research Council. Today, they are considered one of the premier research groups in the nation.

In 2002, Glimm received the National Medal of Science—an illustrious honor earned over decades of work and “a mixture of merit and politics.” He waited all day at the White House to receive his award. Then-president Bush was busy with some crisis or other, but he eventually returned to his office to place the medal around Glimm’s neck himself. Photos from the day show both men beaming with joy. And yet, future researchers are unlikely to have the same experience. Somewhat inexplicably, no National Medals of Science have been awarded since 2014. President Trump was the first not to give out the award since its inception in 1957, and President Biden has yet to bestow his.

Today, Glimm keeps his medal in a cabinet above his kitchen counter, safely in its original box. He handles the velvet with care when he opens it to show me. Of all of his prizes, that one––an honor from his country––is his favorite.

The award was never formally discontinued. Recent administrations seem to have just forgotten about it.

What is lost when we, as a society, do not support our geniuses? The most oft-cited answer is technology. Much of Glimm’s work actually does have immediate applications––for petroleum engineering, shockwave calculations, and the modeling of earthquakes. Practicality aside, however, there is something distinctly human about the search for knowledge without reason, about trying to comprehend a universe that simultaneously does not need us and yet feels built to be discovered. When I was a teenager, I used to think that science had an endgame––maybe if we learned all of the math, then we could build a big key that unlocks the universe and escape. Now, I think that if intelligent life has a purpose, it is simply to witness the world as it is, for as long as possible.

It would be awfully sad for so much of reality to go on, for billions of years, without a single chronicler. We all live here. It feels wrong not to try. 

A Final Push

When I went to interview Glimm last November, I found him sitting at his desk, writing on his yellow notepad with his back facing the street. The paper with the Navier-Stokes proof had been near-complete for months. But there was a significant gap between almost done and fully done. His team discovered a new issue every week. Still, even at the time, he did not seem particularly concerned. He loves his life. Glimm has eight grandchildren now and has greatly enjoyed watching them grow up––although none have shown his aptitude for mathematics. 

We rely on so few people to push the limits of what is possible. It is a meaningful pursuit. And yet, there is a role for all of us to play by keeping the rest of society on track while they work––as a parent, spouse, collaborator, or even a friend. 

At the end of our conversation, I asked Glimm if there is room, in our conception of intellectual achievement, for an amorphous concept like genius. Perhaps mathematical excellence is all hard work, the cumulation of years of exceptional effort. I expected him to demur or, in typical engineering fashion, to block the admittedly imprecise question with another: what does “genius” even mean anyway?

But to my surprise, he responded without hesitation. “No, I think you need to be a genius. There is room for genius.”

Then he thought a little more. “But you still need to work hard.” 

“A hard-working genius is a good idea.”

Charlie was visiting New York from Portugal. He had watery red eyes either from jet lag or too much time spent staring at a screen. 

Under his online alias Charlotte Fang, Charlie is cool on a certain corner of the internet. In person, he hunched at the bar and avoided eye contact with the crowd of business diners. He is real-life friends with other moderately successful internet people—schizo-philosophy Substack writer Angelicism01, digital health influencer Sol Brah and the boys of Seed Oil Capital. I never asked whether Charlie is his real name, or just a gender-appropriate shorthand for his online moniker.

We were here for a meeting of extremely online people that my friend had organized. At dinner, Charlie spoke, as most internet people do, in loops of online references—to defunct meme pages, his internet friends, and words you would never hear outside of Twitter. Like most online culture, it all feels so profound until you realize that he hasn’t said anything at all. 

I work hard to not be online. But I am always drawn back to internet culture because it moves so much faster than real life. In the best moments, people are so much more honest on the internet; a meme can capture a feeling it would take hundreds of words to explain. Being online is the surest way to feel relevant, even if you lose yourself in the process. Sometimes, I slip up and get “Twitter-brain”—using online words and reciting facts from tweets I don’t really understand. Then I have to delete all my accounts again.

You hear it all the time—“the internet is horrible, but.” But I can learn so much. I need it for work. All my friends are online. Will people forget about me if I am not on the internet?

Internet culture used to be something you engaged with in private. You have your public self, your real self, and then the part of your brain that scrolls mindlessly at the end of the day. But the fixations and personalities of digital-native communities are increasingly spilling out into the real world. Extremely online people are running for Congress. You can raise millions of real American dollars by posting memes. Or, as is the case for most people, you can go online to acquire a set of digitally-tinged delusions which, regardless of their content, feel like the most profound, true thing in the world at the same time they are incomprehensible to someone in regular society.

Trying to stay off the internet feels like pushing back against a wave. 

Charlie Fang is part of a new group of people who are cool on the internet. Charlie is known for creating a series of projects and digital personas that cater, almost exclusively, to the extremely online. His cache is honed from years of monitoring 4chan and analyzing digital norms. When I asked him why he thought he was so good at the internet, he said that “it’s an IQ thing.” 

The content of his work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer: 

Among Charlie’s followers, he is known for constantly forming and reforming his online presence. Scrolling through one of his accounts—mostly female-presenting, with names like Miya or Sonya—one gets the sense of engaging with a diffuse digital entity rather than a real person. And Charlie likes it that way. He says that when he’s online, he treats himself as a digital spirit, a tool for an algorithm which is far more powerful than him. He posts what the algorithm wants him to say, unlike the unenlightened normal people who simply use the internet to mirror their flesh-and-blood selves.

To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody. But to a small group of people on the right side of Twitter, Charlie is a legend, even if they don’t know his real name.

Charlie does well on the same part of Twitter that posts about the Unabomber manifesto and how the powers that be want us to eat bugs. Which is to say that his work is niche, but controls an increasingly notable share of discourse. But there are hundreds of online communities with their own rules, their own norms, their own Charlies—extremely online people buzzing behind the screen.

Normal people are more online than ever. Regardless of your natural proclivities, there is a path towards digital immersion for you: you can become an extremely online leftist, a QAnon boomer, a spoonie, or a femcel. Many “serious” journalists have, in the past four years, devolved into the same habit of self-reflexive online looping as the digital-first reactionaries who follow Charlie. 

Everyone knows someone who has lost a piece of themselves to the internet. They latch onto a digital community and start to think it’s the whole world. 

Internet people, or people whose entire identities are wrapped up in their online presence, represent a new direction of culture. You don’t have to live in or know about the real world to be important. You can loop around and around in a tiny online world with its own values and characters, and that is enough.

The Will to Post

Everyone loves the idea of the internet. The live wire—touch it and watch the world flash before your eyes. In the late 1970s, home computers only had primitive internet precursors like phone-in BBS forums, but people bought them anyway because they liked the idea of being connected. Everyone together, all at once.

January 1, 1983 is widely recognized as the birthday of the Internet—small networks of interconnected computers had existed before, but they were mostly used for research and defense. In contrast to the constant social posturing of the physical space, early digital-native communities had a beautiful depersonalization. On early web forums, no one knew if you were “a dog, a kid, or Finnish.” Accessing the internet in any capacity required some technical skill, creating a distinct community with a high barrier to entry. The first internet users were engineers, researchers, and oddball hobbyists. 

When Netscape launched in 1995, the internet was suddenly open to everyone. And instead of acclimating to the existing culture, the flood of new web users overwhelmed the delicate ecosystem—one t-shirt from the period reads “The internet is full, go away!” The new, socially-conscious users had little use for the anonymous, text-based internet. To use Charlie’s phrasing, they brought with them “all the psychosexual drama of human socialization.”

The first social media platform, called SixDegrees, was launched only two years after Netspace brought non-engineers online. MySpace followed in 2003. Facebook launched in 2005. Twitter came a year later. The dream of a universal stream of consciousness became a series of carefully curated profiles, with real names and yearbook-style profile pictures.

Being online today mostly means constantly performing your personality—or whatever online schtick you develop. Liking is a personal endorsement. You post iPhone photography of yourself, or of your family and friends. You write mini-essays about your beliefs. Most of us go on and try to present the best version of ourselves. Because this is the future, whether we like it or not.

Charlie is a character from the other side of the internet, the anonymous networks that lurk below the cleaned-up surface easily observable to “normie” internet users.

Charlie’s accounts have a mythical quality—faded anime profile pictures mixed with an evocative “network spirituality”—and a rough, unhinged energy. In contrast to the hyper-documentation of most online personalities, Charlie’s older work can only be found on deliberately-labyrinthian websites and in scraps on archives that are regularly taken down. The mystique is partly intentional, and partly created by hosting platforms constantly suspending him for content violations. The spotty paper trail inspires a degree of fascination among the extremely online teenagers and right-wing influencers who follow him.

Charlie’s most infamous account was named “Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby” (@BPDGOD). He launched the character in 2017 as an experiment in depersonalized posting; his goal was to become the “most infamous thing on the network.” The Miya character was known for elaborately canceling itself with the help of partner accounts, as if to make an obtuse commentary on mid-2010s cancel culture. Often, Miya played with obscure online philosophies by taking them to their logical extremes, taking aim at digital subcultures such as “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) communities and transgender accelerationism. 

The effect was the internet encapsulated, the darkness of the deep web embodied by an eerie little girl.

At the time, Charlie’s distinctive posting style attracted a few dozen loyal followers, who would track his movements from account to account and post alongside him, reinforcing the mythology. Between 2018 and 2019, they operated in a swarm along with Miya, united by the #kaliacc hashtag. The hashtag was named for “Kali Yuga Accelerationism,” a reference to the Hindu Vedas and the work of British philosopher Nick Land. In addition to a number of decentralized Miya-esque troll accounts, they ran what appeared to be a pro-anorexia cult for young girls. The veracity of the cult remains contentious, even among close followers of the project. An Instagram account that preserves evidence for the cult is neutral on whether it’s actually real. Long Twitter threads exist that claim to both expose and debunk the cult’s existence. 

As Miya’s infamy grew, the proliferation of helpers—as well as copycat accounts—contributed to the mystery around the network. Who was Miya? Was anyone Miya? What did this band of deep-web occultists want? Through it all, Charlie and his affiliates played up the mystery, going on internet-native podcasts with voice distorters and refusing to answer straight questions. The project lent itself to enigma.

After Miya shut down in late 2019, Charlie took a brief digital hiatus. His posting burst out into the relative mainstream a year later with Milady Maker, an NFT collection of ten thousand anime profile pictures. 

Milady was notable for being one of the most memeable and digitally-native NFT collections. The images themselves are relatively standard–3D anime girls with randomized accessories like hair bows and baby tees. But you didn’t buy Milady for the art. You bought in for the vibe. 

Posing as digital cult leader “Charlotte Fang,” Charlie encouraged Milady holders to break the staid, mid-2010s rules of social media use, and use the internet as an egoless digital entity. He taught users to slap on the creepy little girl profile picture and release themselves on the timeline. The energy among Milady users was, as Charlie put it, was “a little kid with a hello kitty sticker glock.” You can make statements that don’t represent yourself. You can like every post. You can post two hundred times a day, as many of the members of the Milady community did at the project’s peak. They called their new philosophy network spirituality. Right-click-save a Milady and join the swarm. 

With a Milady, you could inscribe yourself on the internet with a swarm of other pink Miladys and I imagine it felt, a little bit, like that internet from 1995.

Milady launched in September 2021 at the height of the NFT boom. But the project only gained traction a few months later, after crypto Twitter noticed that Milady holders appeared to be sincerely enjoying themselves.

I was introduced to Milady as “the last interesting thing on the internet.” From the safety of a Twitter feed, the project felt mysterious and fresh. It felt like a new way to be online. At Milady’s peak in Spring 2021, the project had the energy of a cult. If you followed the right accounts, a barrage of “Milady posters” would quickly take over your feed posting about Glocks and ketamine. There was no self-consciousness, just the swarm. Venture capitalists had Miladys. Normal crypto investors had Miladys. Girls had Miladys—a striking achievement in the NFT community. Online teenagers with no prior interest in crypto were using the profile picture. 

The innovation of Milady was reminding people that you can technically say anything you want online, if you just embrace that none of it matters. There is nothing physically stopping any of us from logging onto Twitter right now and typing pages and pages of literally anything. We decided to make the internet boring. We decided to care. You could inscribe yourself on every wall on the internet and no one can tell you “no.” 

Last April, the Milady network hosted a rave in New York City’s Chinatown. I had to go. I wanted to see what was behind the bubbling energy online.

Content, Clout, and Ketamine 

The venue looked like a proper rave. It was dark and dingy. The basement was lit with strobe lights and the floor was slick with something. The first thing that I noticed was the girls, a rarity for NFT events. There were dozens of them, but they looked somehow inhuman, any individual characteristics hidden under thick layers of foundation and neon tennis skirts. Most wore the kind of flimsy, borderline pornographic clothes that do well on social media in polished photographs but read as artificial in real life. These were e-girls, taking pictures of their breasts spilling out of undersized white tank tops. 

For a community so vocally supportive of beauty, it felt like a display of run-of-the-mill vulgarity. In person, you notice the details you can’t see online—tattoos and clumpy mascara. 

Under the strobe lights, a man was flat on his back on the ground and appeared to be having a seizure. A crowd had gathered around him to watch. I wondered if the rave-throwers would be proud that someone had taken it so far. 

I started asking around: how did you hear about Milady? In the dark, people shrugged and yelled that their friend brought them here. A few of them actually owned a Milady. Most of the attendees barely knew what Milady was. Given the fanatical atmosphere online, I had expected more enthusiasm. The few attendees who were familiar with the project were mostly speculating.

Outside, I ran into a curly-haired finance bro who had been flipping NFTs for over a year. He announced proudly that he had just bought fifteen Miladys. He had been thrilled when the floor price, the minimum price to buy into the project, jumped to six thousand dollars, before dropping rapidly a few weeks prior.

“Don’t worry though,” he said. “After the rave, it’s going back up.”

I put my coat on one of the benches while I went to the bathroom. When I came back, someone had thrown up on it. Despite Milady’s reputation as a Gen Z project, the median attendee appeared to be a thirty-five-year-old man spaced out on some sort of drug. The couches by the stairs were crowded with mostly male attendees in various states of oblivion. One, bleary-eyed and wearing a red varsity jacket, watched me as I climbed the stairs.

Online, I had watched potential attendees bragging about the various drugs they were going to do at the Milady rave. In person, the display was less bacchanalian than sad. I had a sudden feeling that I wanted to go home.

Upstairs, I met a representative from Seed Oil Capital, one of the anonymous Twitter accounts pumping Milady, who was selling Milady t-shirts for $20 a pop. He had clear skin and dead, vacant eyes. I told him that I had seen Seed Oil on Twitter and he grunted in response. “Everybody loves me.” After a few one-word exchanges, he asked for my Twitter handle so that he could “pump me as an e-girl.” He slouched in his chair and told me, unprompted, that he doesn’t have many friends.

I told him I was interested in Miladys and he shot back: “How many Miladys do you have?”

“One.” I had purchased one in anticipation of the rave and was now regretting my decision.

“Why?” 

“I’m a student.” I thought the deadpan might break his posture.

“Why?”

The e-girl girl sitting across from us slurred “I have twenty-seven Miladys.” She wore a Milady t-shirt and a dog collar as a necklace. Her legs spilled out of her fishnet tights. A few minutes later, her boyfriend came to the table wearing a hat that said “Please be patient, I have autism.”

The girl actually seemed quite nice, so I gave her my pitch of why I had thought Miladys were cool: using an anonymous profile picture allows you to freely express yourself on the internet and reclaim posting as a medium for connection. Technically, you can actually post anything you want on the internet; the only thing holding you back is reputational cost. Miladys are about supporting the old internet, the free internet. 

“You get it, I love that you get it.” I didn’t sense that she cared very much. Five minutes later she was sitting on the “I have autism” guy’s lap, shaking her black tennis skirt into his jeans.

After the party cleared out, I walked to the afterparty with a representative from Remilia Corporation, the self-described “Avant Net Art Extremist” collective that runs Milady. He explained that the afterparty was at “somebody’s dad’s house,” in a voice that said you know what that means. 

What he did not explain was that the house is somebody’s dad’s rental event space, a massive, drafty room without enough furniture. There was one low glass table stacked with ketamine and a quarter-eaten packet of Oreos. A few members of the Milady team were lounging nearby, propped up on body pillows on the floor.

Otherwise, the party was populated with about twenty men of the same type: tall, sharp-jawed, clear-skinned. Except the effect was more disconcerting than attractive, colored by the prevalence of bubble-gum pink hats and “Fortnite Balenciaga” sweatshirts. I talked to a few of them. They wanted to know if I had Twitter.

When you meet extremely online people, you would expect them to at least talk. The best internet personalities come off as sharp and funny online and possess a natural digital fluency that conveys a degree of social skill. Even if they are not necessarily normal, you might expect that the strongest posters would be anti-social geniuses—brilliant minds trapped in tortured bodies, released onto the timeline. But in person, they stare straight ahead, pull out their phones, and show you their sharp, funny comments from the internet, then find a way to end the conversation quickly if you don’t have enough mutual followers.

My friends wanted to go home. It was strange there and it was getting late. The antisocial schtick felt like a put-on. “I’m so weird that I must be funny on the internet. Can I follow you on Twitter?”

Filled with internet people, the big rented house may as well have been empty. Their real lives, their better lives, were somewhere online. Seeing them in person felt like an intrusion. 

When you scroll long enough, it is easy to believe that the content you consume is just a fragment of real life, a peek at something greater behind the screen. But behind most online content is a kid with a bad case of Twitter-brain, sacrificing a piece of their humanity for digital clout. 

When I got back from New York, I logged out of my Twitter account on my computer and deleted the app from my phone. I sold my Milady and watched the price crash a few weeks later. 

I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person. 

Our Cultural Mutation

After the rave, I vowed to move on from my dalliance with the underground internet. But when I had the opportunity to meet Charlie I took it, because I wanted to see if there was something deeper at the core, some mastermind behind the digital front. It all felt so mysterious online. It felt like something.

In person, Charlie has a crooked smile that reveals a row of nubby teeth. He wears an oversized rosary as a necklace. I asked him point blank how he feels about being so online. Isn’t dedicating your life to being the most relevant person on a small corner of the internet kind of… sad? 

By this point in the evening, we had moved to the couch of my friend’s loft in Soho. Charlie sat across from me, his tiny frame perched a few feet away on an oversized leather chair. Someone brought us a High Noon. His shoes had velcro straps.

With the same blank, unmoving expression as his associates, Charlie told me that he made a logical decision to dedicate his life to the mastery of digital culture. Of course being chronically online is destructive. He admitted that he and his affiliates are weird. He described one former posting partner “Sunny” as having “part of his brain missing.” But to ignore the internet, he said, is to give up on making an impact in your own time. Cultural cycles move so fast online that being unplugged for a few years will render anyone culturally defunct, functionally a separate species from the digitally engaged. The internet is a superhighway. Step off and you might be safer, but you will also be quickly left behind.

Charlie sat eerily still while he talked. He said that “no artist of my generation will make important art.” They are not online enough. 

Prior to becoming an internet person, Charlie was a relatively standard 4chan kid. He says that he wanted to be an artist and make internet art. He went to art school and studied architecture—with a specialty in furniture—then switched to a BFA. But he dropped out after realizing circa 2014 that the traditional art world had no interest in engaging with the anarchy of the internet. I asked him, somewhat seriously, about his favorite piece of furniture, and he showed me the Red and Blue chair by Gerrit Rietveld. 

Once, the art world’s avant-garde was the pinnacle of culture. Now, the cultural frontier is on the internet.

As the night went on, he seemed to lose steam. Again and again, he described how Remilia was on the cutting edge of culture and how Milady was making the world a better place. He never clearly explains his earlier work—the supposed grooming cult, the esoteric extremism, and is indignant about his treatment at the hands of the insufficiently online. Isn’t it absurd they tried to cancel me? For an art project? 

I stayed with Charlie until one in the morning. The drinks wore off. We had talked for six hours and I was starting to feel a bit sick. He is just some internet person.

Simulacra

Billionaires are Twitter people. Little kids are online. Your grandma is online. The internet is simply more powerful and more arresting than anything that can be arranged in the physical space. What is the alternative? The kids will go to online raves. Eventually, we will stop pretending that the internet is a sideshow and that our real culture, the better culture, is somewhere else.

Everyone knows, abstractly, that the internet is not real life. But you can’t picture it, not really, until you sit across from the real people behind the screen. Even the darkest online personalities are just people on their phones. It is oddly disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all. 

Before I left, Charlie asked if I was planning to write a hit piece. He clarified that he would “welcome a good hit piece.” Most journalists who write hit pieces about Milady—of which there have been many—fail to understand why the project is scary; they just pull up screenshots from Miya’s old self-cancellations. 

I am not afraid of Charlie because he writes extreme, offensive things online. I am afraid of him because I recognize so many of his proclivities in regular people—the shifting eyes, the formless references and mental absence. If you spend all of your time consuming internet culture, you are consuming stories and myths and personalities that only exist online. To curate your online presence is to give up a piece of your physical self, to live in a simulated universe of your own creation. 

We are all more online than ever. And when you live online, the internet people are in charge. They make the memes and coin the neologisms that will become mainstream discourse in five years. To define the internet is to form the base layer upon which all culture is built. And in the long run, these people will win. Their culture will win. Or at least, that’s my fear.

You can close the computer, but the world will go on without you.

That year, the brothers had filled the entire main level of Kappa Alpha’s house with a layer of sand six inches deep. The night was almost over; the guests were leaving and the local surf rock band had been paid their customary hundred dollars in beer. The only question was what to do with all the sand.

No one remembers who had the idea to build the island. A group of five or six brothers managed the project. One rented a bulldozer; another shoveled the sand off the floor. Their house was not far from Lake Lagunita, the mile-wide lake on Stanford’s campus. The only holdup was the strip of university-owned land between the house and the lake.

It was JP who talked to Stanford’s head groundskeeper and convinced him to let the bulldozer pass. In the end, the groundskeeper admired their spirit. “If anybody asks you about it,” he said, “just send them to me.”

Later that year, the brothers installed a zipline from the roof of their house to the center of the island. They also built a barge, which they would paddle around the lake on weekends and between classes.

The Winds of Freedom

It is hard to imagine someone at Stanford building an island anymore. In fact, it is hard to imagine them building anything. The campus culture has changed.

Today, most of the organizations JP remembers from Stanford are gone. The Kappa Alpha boys have been kicked out of their old house. Lake Lagunita was closed to student activities in 2001, ostensibly to protect an endangered salamander that had taken up residence in the artificial waters. Eventually, Stanford let the lake go dry. JP claims you can still see his island though, now a patch of elevated ground in a dry, dusty basin.

Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.

Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.

What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.

Whenever Stanford empties out a fraternity or theme house, the administration renames the organization’s former house after its street number. Now, Stanford’s iconic campus Row, once home to dozens of vibrant student organizations, is lined with generic, unmarked houses with names like “550,” “680,” and “675” in arbitrary groupings with names like “S” and “D.”

Stanford’s motto is Die Luft der Freiheit weht—“the winds of freedom blow.” But Stanford has become a case study of how overzealous bureaucrats can crush natural social expression, and how the urge to excise danger can quickly devolve into a campaign to whitewash away anything remotely interesting. In the aftermath, all that is left is the generic: empty walls, names scrubbed off buildings, and kids safely, or not so safely, alone in their rooms.

The West Goes Global

Through the late 1990s, Stanford functioned primarily as a dream school for the children of well-off Californians. It was selective—not The New York Times satire selective, but a goal worth chasing—and featured a wacky campus culture that combined collegiate prep with West Coast laissez-faire. Stanford was home to a rich patchwork of wild and experimental campus life. Communal living houses (“co-ops”) encouraged casual nudity, while fraternities threw a raucous annual “Greek Week” and lit their houses on fire. Until 2013, Stanford hosted a fully student-run anarchist house, where residents covered the walls with eccentric murals. On the campus, student-created co-living houses proliferated so rapidly that students once joked about starting a “Nonpracticing Episcopalian” theme house.

Zach, a Stanford ‘81 graduate, recalls Stanford as weird and wonderful, a four-year fever dream. When I asked Zach to describe the campus social life in the eighties, he laughed. “What kind of drugs do you want to hear about?” One boy in Zach’s class built his own generator on the lawn outside his dorm. Later, he claims, that same boy went on to become “a very important computer person.”

Stanford’s support for the unconventional pioneered a new breed of elite student: the charismatic builder who excelled at “breaking things” in nearby Silicon Valley. Stanford students were aspirational and well-rounded, confident enough to perform in a bucket hat and floaties and make out with strangers during Full Moon on the Quad. For a time, Stanford experienced a brief golden age when a spontaneous, socially permissive culture combined with a class of 5 percent-acceptance rate baby geniuses.

Stanford’s already formidable reputation grew, in large part, because of the way these lessons translated into the work and lives of its graduates. Between 1998 and 2013, Stanford students founded Google, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. New grads were turning down $350,000 starting salaries to try their hand at changing the world, or at least beating their classmates at making their first million. Soon, breathless articles described the mythical school where money grew on trees, where America’s academic wonderkids went to make their fortune under the California sun.

Starting in 2013, Stanford was consistently ranked first by students and parents as “America’s Dream School.” Stanford was elite, but unlike most elite schools, what made Stanford the object of such national obsession was that it was also fun. Stanford had created a global talent hub combined with explicit permission for rule-breaking. As a result, students learned a valuable lesson: they had agency; they could create their own norms and culture instead of relying on higher authorities.

Stanford had become a global symbol—of privilege, of excellence, and of a college admissions process gone mad. Suddenly, the inner workings of Stanford were of intense interest to outsiders. And the very culture that made Stanford unique—including the drugs and naked houses—became a liability in the eyes of the bureaucracy. Their presence spawned the salacious articles about Stanford traditions and Stanford students gained a reputation for “unprofessional” irreverence, even as they were increasingly judged as representatives of a global brand. Something had to give.

In 2013, the administration took over the student-run anarchist house and painted over the old murals. The next year, Stanford drained the remnants of Lake Lagunita, where students used to gather to host bonfires, and ended the annual anything-but-clothes party known as Exotic Erotic. And the year after that, in 2015, the administration put the notoriously anti-establishment Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band on “super-probation,” the culmination of years of increasing restrictions on their antics.

Stanford’s decision to sanction the Band was a sign of things to come. In response to their sanctions, which included a travel and alcohol ban, the Band leadership penned a forceful rebuttal and noted that Stanford’s signature winds of freedom seemed to have “slowed to a light breeze.” They promised to never be silenced and continue “rocking the f*ck out.” But over the ensuing years, the Band mostly lost its raucous, fraternity-esque culture, and stopped doing anything particularly controversial. Once, the Band mocked Stanford’s rivals with crass marching formations; today, the Band designs all their pranks based on pre-approved themes from the university and clears the final plans with a panel of administrators.

The university sent a clear message with its treatment of the Band. Spontaneous organizations, particularly when they could become chaotic, controversial, or otherwise a space for breaking rules, were now something to be controlled. Rather than treating freedom and spontaneity as strengths, the dynamic became one where students had to justify their projects and ideas while under suspicion from administrators. Student life was becoming dominated by restrictive bureaucracy.

The change was only noteworthy as long as people remembered what it had replaced. College students necessarily turn over every four years. Over time, students mostly forgot about the Band. By 2016, Stanford had moved on to the white whale of debaucherous student life: fraternities.

Encircling the Frats

One of my first memories at Stanford, in the fall of 2018, was walking down the Row with a sophomore friend. We walked by a charming yellow house, a Greek-style manor with a lawn perfect for beer pong. I told him that I had just been to a party there, at the yellow house called “550.”

“Don’t call it 550,” he snapped.

“What?”

“It’s not 550. It’s Sig Chi. They tried to scrape the crest off but you can still see it.”

He pointed, and I did see it: a faded black square a few feet above the doorway. “This is their plan, you know,” my friend continued. “I feel bad for you guys.”

During my freshman year, the cracks in campus social life were already beginning to show. One night, I was biking home late from the Caltrain. I made it halfway back to my dorm before I realized that something was missing. Music. It was a Friday night, but the campus was completely silent.

Unlike Harvard, which abruptly tried to ban “single-gender social organizations” and was immediately sued by alumni, Stanford picked off the Greek life organizations one by one to avoid student or alumni pushback. The playbook was always the same. Some incident would spark an investigation, and the administration would insist that the offending organization had lost its right to remain on campus. The group would be promptly removed.

Over time, it became clear that their decisions only ever went one way—fewer gatherings, fewer social groups. The campus spirit waned year by year.

In the middle of my freshman year, I started noticing that students, particularly older ones not in a housed Greek organization, seemed quite aimless and very lonely. At Stanford, students who are not in a housed social organization are sent to one of the dozens of now-cultureless dorms scattered around campus. Students in these dorms tend to slink around campus, without a defined community or on-campus identity, until they graduate.

If they had more options, maybe it would be different. But with every unhousing, another 150 students who had a home and a culture are pulled apart from each other. And for every subsequent year, another group of freshmen comes to Stanford that would have found their place in that group, only to find white walls and locked doors.

As a result, a concerning number of upperclassmen had persistent anxiety that they were being “forgotten about.” Given the university’s anonymization of housing, it makes sense. When students live together, united by a shared identity, they tend to look after each other. The boys in one fraternity sleep together in a pile on the floor. Girls in housed sororities leave their doors open and treat their clothes like a communal wardrobe.

In contrast, students in “bad housing”—the labyrinth of themeless, meaningless dorms awaiting most Stanford students—rarely bother to learn their neighbor’s names. Hallways are quiet and doors are locked. Without a strong existing support network, these students can easily bounce from anonymous dorms, to lecture halls, to cavernous dining halls without anyone acknowledging their presence for days.

Sometimes students come to the conclusion that no one would really notice if they disappeared. During my freshman year, I overheard one junior boy speculating how long it would take someone to find his body if he died in his room. I remember that he settled on a range between four and seven days. Like many elite universities, Stanford has a suicide rate far above the national average.

In the fall of 2017, Stanford established a new “Committee on Residential Living” (CORL) designed to police the few remaining housed social organizations. Previously, Stanford monitored student organizations through an assortment of haphazard bureaucratic arms. Now, with CORL, all housed organizations could be called in front of a three-person committee for one “major violation” or three “minor violations.” Violations can be almost anything within the range of normal college life, from harboring illegal drugs to subletting your house. ​Of course a bunch of frat boys were going to screw that up. Whenever an organization ends up in front of CORL, the committee can vote to kick them out of their on-campus housing, which they often do.

Within three years following CORL’s founding, Stanford successfully unhoused three more housed fraternities: Sigma Chi, Kappa Alpha, and finally a quirky, dissident fraternity called TDX.

TDX survived all the way through my sophomore year; they kept a large stuffed giraffe in their basement and maintained a room with pop-art posters of famous dictators. Since their eviction, eight former members have taken up residence together in a themeless house by the lake, throwing parties and living out their senior year. Next year, the boys in the lake house will graduate, and the remnants of their strange little group will be gone.

The old house was renamed “675.”

With every additional unhousing, it became increasingly apparent that Stanford’s revealed preference was to rid the campus of all distinct social groups. Two years after founding CORL, Stanford hired the same Harvard administrator who led the campaign to rid the campus of Greek life and Final Clubs. Harvard had overplayed their hand by trying to purge all major social organizations at once. But at Stanford, they found more success picking them off one by one.

A Golden Opportunity

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford suddenly had a golden opportunity: they could accelerate the process of sanitizing campus life without students being able to react in real-time. By the time students returned, it would all be fait accompli.

The first thing Stanford announced was the introduction of a new housing system, designed to promote “fairness” and “community” on campus. Under the system, new freshmen would be assigned to one of eight artificially-created housing groups called “neighborhoods,” each containing a representative sample of campus housing. To avoid the potential controversy of actually naming them, the administration punted the decision and called the neighborhoods S, T, A, N, F, O, R, and D.

An administrator named Mona Hicks was tasked with explaining the vacuous names to the Stanford Daily. Her response was bizarre. “There are eight letters in the word Stanford, and therefore each neighborhood has a letter from Stanford,” she said. And so, “while we are uniquely different, we’re all tied together, especially now in this time.”

The reality of the neighborhood system is that it strips students of their ability to form distinct personalities or formal friend groups. I am in Neighborhood S. Some of my friends are in Neighborhood N. It doesn’t actually matter. The neighborhoods are not based on geography—many houses in the same “neighborhood” are on opposite sides of campus—and have no personalities outside of their letter name. They are distinctions without meaning.

In order for the neighborhoods to be fair, Stanford had to divide the remaining Row houses equally among all eight letters. But the Row, whose twenty-four houses were built by culturally distinct fraternities in the early 1900s, has always been a cohesive social center and a neighborhood in itself. Now each house is defined by some letter, an invisible category pulling them all apart.

To ensure all the neighborhoods were truly equal, Stanford also had to remove student groups that were too popular or differentiated. As Greek life had declined in the late 2010s, Stanford’s social scene shifted to a group of four European theme houses clustered near the upper Row. The French and Italian houses, in particular, were known for hosting elaborate white-tablecloth dinners for upperclassmen with pizza and crepes. Those had to go. In fact, they all did, German and Slavic too. Without so much as an email, Stanford quietly slashed all four houses overnight. The first three were renamed 610, 620, and 650, respectively.

Had Stanford announced the changes while students were on campus, I imagine they might have actually rioted, or at least caused a stink. But the new freshmen, who had never even been to Stanford before, were far more likely to accept their new numbers.

When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” The building formerly known as Outdoor House was added to Neighborhood T.

Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing. Stanford reserves the right to unhouse any organization that does not, in their opinion, uphold these principles.

One of the houses on the lower half of the Row is Columbae, a vegetarian co-op where students cook and eat together. I am sure that their house, a stately brown manor, used to be some sort of fraternity. But at least the co-op residents are still enjoying themselves. Groups of them are always out on the lawn, reading and sunbathing. Someone set up a red slackline in the front yard. The same boy practices on it every day, balancing a worn stack of books on his head.

In 2025, co-ops like Columbae are scheduled to go through the CORL process and be made to re-justify their existence like every other house. I try to imagine the brown mansion renamed “549,” becoming yet another numbered house with an empty lawn.

Today, Stanford is technically back to normal after COVID-19. But it will never be the same. Sometimes, I like to walk up and down the Row. Even in the daytime, you can feel the missing energy, the ghosts humming in the white columns.

One weekend last fall, there were two parties on the same day, just like in the old times. One of the parties was KAbo, the same party that sparked JP’s island-building escapades in the 1990s. With Kappa Alpha on probation, the party is technically hosted by the themeless house next door. Still, it was a beautiful day. The girls wore bikini tops and carried drinks with plastic umbrellas. Someone had set up a patch of sand on the lawn. We partied outside, on the edge of the dry lake.

I met one current Kappa Alpha brother who lamented the lime green wristbands we were all wearing. “I wish we could invite everyone,” he said, “but it’s too dangerous now.” A resident of the host house was checking names at the door.

Much of the excitement of college is cracking a new social scene, exploring the nooks and crannies of campus, and finding your place within it. Now, everything worth exploring is dark, closed, or on probation. When there are parties, they are typically locked-up “friends of the house” events designed to avoid university scrutiny.

It doesn’t always work. In October, a group of freshmen boys was so desperate to get into an event at Sigma Nu, one of the few remaining housed fraternities, that they snuck around the back of the house and smashed through a window with their bare hands.

Lonely, frustrated students are less safe than happy ones. Within four weeks of school starting, ten students had to be taken off-campus to get their stomachs pumped, a Stanford record for alcohol-related “transports” in such a short period of time. Occasionally, my Row house is rented for parties which are always overrun with freshman and sophomores. They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.

An Office for Every Problem

There is a little neighborhood on campus where students never go, with four beautiful old buildings clustered around a tiny central square. The little neighborhood is only about a five-minute walk from the base of the Row and hidden behind a line of sycamore trees. It felt like home. Most students barely know about it; I only found it because I volunteered at Stanford’s Bridge peer counseling center my freshman year, which has an office there. Every Sunday, I would walk through the leafy enclave to take anonymous calls from my peers. The ones who would call the Bridge for support usually only had one or two friends.

During my counseling shift, I sometimes wondered about the other houses in the neighborhood. Across the street from the Bridge, there is an international “community center.” Another building houses five separate administrative offices, including the “Residential Leaseholder Office” and Title IX. Later, I learned that the fraternity that used to live at the international center was kicked out of their house in the 1960s. Every house was clearly built to be used by students, each with its own wide lawns and plenty of extra rooms. Stanford took the little neighborhood with the most beautiful homes on campus and turned it into office buildings.

It sounds so good: “community center.” How could you be lonely on a campus with so many community centers? At Stanford, we have an office for every problem.

Mental health is a Big Problem in our generation. About 71 percent of college students say that they are “very sad.” I wonder how many sad kids are just lonely. Our former fraternity houses have been filled with offices to help us feel better, and we are sadder and sicker than any generation before. If you are sad, Stanford has an office building with a number you can call and a series of “community conversations” about neurodiversity. But what if you are just unhappy spending your days alone, in your lettered house and numbered room?

Stanford students live in brand new buildings with white walls. We have a $20 million dollar meditation center that nobody uses. But students didn’t ask for any of that. We just wanted a dirty house with friends.

When I tell current Stanford students the story about JP and his island, I swear their eyes pop out of their heads. Everything was so different then. It sounds like a story from another school—the house, the lake, and the groundskeeper who let the boys pass. But mostly, what feels foreign is the spirit expressed by the six brothers, the wild unfettered joy.

As organizations fall away, any remaining exuberance feels like an aberration, an unnatural imposition on the status quo. The fraternity brothers loping around campus for another round of Frisbee Golf look out of place now, a taunting symbol of what everyone else is missing.

Without the nudist co-ops and wild parties, Stanford is not a campus more focused on its core mission. Those things were the fruits of an environment built around student agency and attempting to create your own, better social norms. Fostering that creative environment was Stanford’s core mission, and what made it distinctive from other elite schools.

We have so many words to describe the ways an institution can be problematic. It is easy to find faults, scrape crests off walls, and feel like you have done a good deed. But there are far fewer stock phrases to articulate what is lost when an organization is destroyed. There are no parties anymore. I want to live with my friends. It’s hard to name the pain of absence.

An empty house is safe. A blank slate is fair. In the name of safety and fairness, Stanford destroyed everything that makes people enjoy college and life.

Today, I live across the street from Sigma Nu, the largest fraternity house on campus. Whenever I look out my dorm room window, I can see them playing beer die on their front lawn. They never stop. I think they are trying to make a point. They play like the world is ending, blasting music across the empty Row.

Editor’s Note: Names in this story have been changed to preserve privacy.

NFT.NYC was a 5,000 person extravaganza described by The New York Times as a coming-out party for the emerging NFT subculture. The event itself consisted of a $600-per-ticket conference held in Times Square, as well as over a hundred satellite events spread across New York. Early adopters and speculators came to New York to revel in their newfound cachet and meet their internet friends in real life.

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are a notation in a blockchain that indicates a certain account owns the material hosted at a particular URL. The term “NFT” has become synonymous with digital art, but the object of an NFT can technically point to anything: an animation, a sound file, or even virtual real estate. Most of the time, NFTs are used to indicate ownership of easily copyable digital assets like JPEG images.

The fashion breakfast was hosted by a startup called DressX, an LA-based project that makes virtual clothing you can project on your body like a Snapchat filter. Attendance required spotting the invitation in an invite-only Telegram group for NFT.NYC attendees, then emailing one of the hosts to plead your case.

Despite the attempts at secrecy, the DressX venue was overflowing. DressX had booked the entire café, a moderately chic spot called L’Adresse, and people poured in from the street long after the 9:30 am start time. The crowd was young, female, and impeccably dressed, a far cry from the grungy twenty-eight-year-old traders who populated most of the conference. I was seated across from a bleach-blond lawyer wearing a tweed dress and a nose ring. She recently left her corporate job to focus on “web3 law” full-time.

She asked me what I was doing in New York. I told her that I am a student trying to learn more about NFTs.

The lawyer worked for the startup founder seated next to me. His company made virtual helmets for the metaverse. He showed me a mockup of the helmet design on his phone. The helmets had a blank rectangle in the front where users can display their personal NFT collection.

The helmets are just a proof of concept, he told me. Long term, he wants to make digital suits with lots of surface area for brand sponsorships.

“Like NASCAR?” I joked, imagining an army of avatars running around in flight suits covered in Burger King logos.

“Exactly,” he said. “Like NASCAR.”

* * *

After another half-hour of small talk, the DressX founders got up to the front of the café, and the room quieted down. They were both young women from Ukraine, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Someone pulled up a Powerpoint, and the two founders started walking us through the logic of DressX.

Fashion, one of the founders began, is one of the most wasteful industries in the world. Hundreds of millions of pounds of clothes go into landfills every year, and for what? So that you can wear an outfit once for an Instagram photo and then discard it. In contrast to wasteful, impractical physical fashion, digital fashion is instant, perfectly sustainable, and accessible to anyone. Just buy the NFT for some digital earrings or a digital sweater and voila. No wait, no waste. (And don’t look too closely at the energy burned to secure digital scarcity.) She flicked to a selection of photos showing a mix of real-life Instagram models and virtual avatars mugging in stylish virtual dresses.

The crowd was nodding along. At this point, the second founder piped up. “Plus, we will need clothes for the metaverse!”

The metaverse comment struck a nerve. People started clapping, louder and louder until the café was ringing. The DressX girls giggled and took their seats as the applause continued.

Later, when everyone returned to small talk, there was a buzz in the air I can only describe as hope.

We will need clothes for the metaverse.

“This Is a New Fraternity”

I went to NFT.NYC because I wanted to learn about digital art. But I quickly learned that members of the burgeoning NFT community see themselves not as art collectors, but as the vanguard of a larger shift from physical to digital life.

The NFT boom is not about art or ownership. It is about escape.

The American writer Joan Didion devoted her seminal 1968 essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” to the 1960s phenomenon of young people who ran away from their comfortable, middle-class lives hoping to find something in California. ​​The runaways Didion described were part of the much larger youth counterculture movement that emerged in the late 1960s. Disillusioned with the rigid moral expectations of post-war America, they gave a proverbial middle finger to the conventions of their elders and embraced sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. They dropped acid. They went to Woodstock. Emboldened by the popularization of the pill, they had guilt-free, pre-marital sex.

It was wild, but the party has ended.

Our generation is notable for our lack of a youth-led counterculture, or any coherent rebellion, at least not on the scale of the late 1960s. But this lack of open rebellion does not mean that we are more satisfied than previous generations, or that we have nothing to rebel against. We are by many measures poorer, sicker (mentally and physically), and have fewer close relationships than our parents or grandparents. But instead of running away to some proverbial California, we have mostly chosen to express our frustration in private, on the internet, where you can laugh at memes about major depression or wanting to kermit sewer slide from the safety of your bedroom.

In the NFT community, we are witnessing the logical conclusion of a generation that is so alienated, so profoundly unfulfilled, that they are considering abandoning the physical world altogether. At least the metaverse is something new—maybe somewhere they can be rich, or important.

Ask a member of the NFT community to define the metaverse or “web3” (a buzzword that refers to a next-generation internet that incorporates cryptocurrency, NFTs, and immersive reality) and you will likely get a rambling answer about decentralization and a future where digital communities own the internet. But push a little harder, and you can uncover some less comfortable truths about the future that the NFT community is proposing.

NFTs are, fundamentally, an investment in the metaverse. The NFT community is anticipating the arrival of fully immersive virtual worlds that will take precedence over, or at least exist in parallel to, the physical world. One of the more sophisticated crypto investors I met in New York cheerfully informed me that humanity is approaching a singularity where our digital selves (the version of ourselves in the metaverse) will become more important to us than our physical selves. And once this singularity is reached, she explained, we will have no problem spending real money on digital assets, because our digital lives will matter as much or more to us than our physical lives.

In the metaverse, the story goes, digital ownership will no longer be a novelty. It will simply be ownership. And if our digital lives were actually worth more to us than our physical lives, then why couldn’t the market for digital assets someday be as large (or larger) than the market for physical assets? Hypothetically, you could support an entire NFT economy of digital goods, powered by eager metaverse inhabitants looking to improve their social status online.

But there is no natural scarcity in the digital world. All the scarcity in this metaverse economy has to be imposed, against the nature of the medium, at great effort and energy cost. In the physical world, competition exists by necessity. In the metaverse, it exists for its own sake—or maybe for the sake of investors.

Most NFT community members I broached the topic with were willing to admit that the vast majority of current NFT projects have almost no practical or aesthetic merit. But through the lens of the metaverse, the primitive JPEG NFTs being sold today are just a baby step into the brave new world of digital ownership.

Today, bound by the limits of web2, metaverse enthusiasts are limited to buying cartoon profile pictures and digital art to signal their affiliation with online communities. Tomorrow, they imagine that their communities will gather in immersive digital worlds, complete with NFTs for virtual land and virtual houses, virtual tickets to virtual events, and virtual clothes for their shiny new avatars.

Debating whether NFTs have real-world utility ignores the raison d’être for digital ownership. The real use case for NFTs comes later, in the virtual world.

* * *

On my first day in New York, I attended a midtown lunch meetup I found in the NFT.NYC Telegram group. I struck up a conversation with the man who organized the lunch, an investor named Jack. Jack was wearing a black hoodie emblazoned with a cartoon ape, indicating that he owned a Bored Ape. At the time, the floor price of a Bored Ape was around $20,000. A rare “Golden Ape” recently sold for $2.8 million, and Jack’s ape sweatshirt probably cost around $800. Jack also invested in traditional startups, and unlike most people at the conference, mentioned that he was married.

I nodded politely when Jack took out his phone to show me his NFT collection, which included his prized ape. The Bored Ape series is a generative art collection; all 10,000 available apes are variations on a common template, with randomly generated variations in fur color, accessories, and expression. His particular ape was brown and smoking a blunt.

Jack asked me how I got interested in NFTs. I replied that I was more interested in art, proper, than in anything in particular about NFTs. Before he could respond, I realized that Jack and his ape hoodie might be offended by my flippancy. So I backpedaled: art is relative, I tried to explain, and could certainly include cartoon apes.

He cut me off. “It’s not art. Don’t call it art. That’s offensive to real art.”

 “This,” he gestured to the ape on his phone, “is a new fraternity.”

It sure looked like it. Across the street from our al fresco lunch table, a multiblock line of mostly male “apes” (as Bored Ape owners refer to themselves) waited to get wristbands for an ape-only warehouse party happening later in the week. And while most NFT.NYC attendees would not affiliate themselves with a stodgy, real-world institution like a fraternity, the motto of the conference might as well have been community. I heard it again and again. This time is different. It’s not just speculation, it’s about community. A Coinbase promotional video for NFT.NYC declared that “NFTs are community.” Everyone there attested to the power of NFT communities to change lives.

At a meetup for owners of a series of cat NFTs called “Cool Cats” (ranked one peg below Bored Apes in the NFT status hierarchy), one man stumbled drunk through the party, wearing a tablet displaying an NFT cat cartoon around his neck. He was grabbing strangers for stability and telling them how owning his Cool Cat “changed my life.” “Before this cat, I was a loser,” he said to anyone who would listen, “but now, because of this community, my life means something.”

I tried to contain an awkward laugh. The engineers at the party were busy gawking at his NFT, which was apparently one of the rarest Cool Cats in circulation.

Outside, the line for the Cool Cats meetup was spilling ten blocks out the door. Hundreds of strangers waited in the freezing cold, hoping to get inside and meet their fellow Cool Cat owners. Later that night, when it became clear that the venue was hopelessly overcapacity, the cops shut the event down.

The most dedicated NFT holders I spoke with described their membership in certain NFT-gated communities as something that had transcended financial interest and become a part of their core identities. Around the conference, stories abounded of early buyers who stood to make millions in unrealized gains by liquidating certain NFTs, but who nevertheless refused to sell out of loyalty to their online communities. Cashing out on their favorite NFTs would be like pawning family heirlooms or selling their affiliation with their alma mater.

I met one clean-cut, suit-wearing lawyer who, somewhat astonished by his own devotion, declared that he would never sell his Bored Ape, even if the market crashed or it was worth $5 million.

“It’s a part of me now,” he said. “It would be like cutting off my left arm.”

The existence of fanatical online communities is not novel in and of itself. But unlike Potterheads or K-Pop fans, the NFT community is not interested in remaining a subculture. NFT community leaders believe that they are just early to understand that the future lies in virtual worlds, and that normies will embrace the metaverse in good time. The strength of NFT communities is therefore an important proof of concept for the broader viability of online life.

Josh Ong, a 38-year-old “Brooklyn dad” and unofficial community manager for Bored Apes, is aware of the important role that the Bored Ape community—with its many celebrity members like Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry, and DJ Khaled—plays as an advertisement for the metaverse. In an interview for Input magazine about NFT.NYC, Ong explained that his goal as community manager is to “​​build a community so strong that…people understand why NFTs are the bridge into persistent digital ownership that can take us into the future, which will be immersive digital worlds.”

The ethos of the NFT community is perhaps best encapsulated by wagmi (pronounced wag-me). Wagmi, which stands for “we’re all gonna make it,” is an expression of capitalist communitarianism. The motto originally comes from Zyzz, the now-deceased bodybuilder who became deified by internet lifting culture. From there, it spread across the web and was eventually adopted by the crypto and NFT spheres. If web2 was about minting a few billionaires, then web3 is supposed to be about everyone getting rich together, or at least, everyone who was smart enough to buy NFTs. In NFT parlance, “making it” generally means “make a lot of money.”

The founding idea of the NFT community is that if the metaverse is really coming, then anyone who bought digital assets early is bound to see their social (and actual) capital skyrocket when virtual communities go mainstream.

By buying in today, you can secure your piece of a multi-trillion dollar market that could dwarf the current global economy.

We’re all gonna make it.

The Things That Don’t Crash

It is tempting to dismiss any discussion of NFTs and their enthusiasts because NFTs aren’t real—at least, not in the sense that a designer coat or a house are real.

There is some truth here. NFTs do not exist in the physical world. They are also not real in the sense that you can never actually own a digital entity the way you own a physical item, because digital entities are infinitely reproducible whether or not you technically own a crypto token that points to the URL.

It is a pleasant narrative. If NFTs aren’t real, and are doomed to crash, then the entire movement around them can be dismissed. Perhaps this wishful thinking is why, when Facebook recently announced that it was changing its name to Meta and pivoting to the metaverse, the decision was met with more eye rolls than fear. It all seemed like the last gasp of a fading giant trying to keep up with the kids.

But this assumes that the staying power of NFTs is the technology itself. In practice, the ownership rights bestowed by NFTs are socially, not technically, enforced. The beauty of NFTs is that it is extremely simple to confirm who owns what, and thus to create and enforce social hierarchies based on your virtual holdings. This is very real.

All week in New York, the myriad token-gated parties and meetups applied social filters based on digital ownership. Tickets to these events could only be purchased once you connected your crypto wallet and proved that you held the correct NFTs. At any given party, the coolest people in the room were always the “whales,” semi-mythical figures who own over 1000 ETH ($3 million at the time of writing) in digital assets. Rumors of exclusive “whale dinners” trickled down through the ranks of attendees, who jockeyed in anonymous group chats for passwords to invite-only events.

A popular activity at the conference was pulling up your crypto wallet on your phone and comparing NFT portfolios with your neighbor. Even if NFTs are not real in the physical sense, the social sting of displaying a less-than-impressive NFT collection certainly can be.

Once we place enough value on our digital identities, online consumption can feel far more consequential than physical consumption. Online, the clothes you wear, the places you go, and now, the various digital tokens you own, are attached to you permanently in a way that the ephemeral actions in your day-to-day life are not. When ordinary people buy followers or go to expensive music festivals just for social media photos, they have accepted the idea that their digital appearance is worth spending real money on.

In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion captured a moment in time; a small group of teenagers who tried to find meaning in psychedelics. But it was also one of the first major literary works documenting the broader phenomenon of American decadence, or cultural malaise in the face of unprecedented economic prosperity. In the fifty-odd years since “Slouching” was published, a diagnosis of “decadence” has become shorthand for a constellation of cultural neuroses plaguing Western countries, including technological stagnation, cultural repetition, sterility, and nihilism. Unlike in the 1960s, it no longer includes coping with unprecedented prosperity.

As I wandered through New York, I wondered what Didion would think of the festivities at NFT.NYC. Are the desires of NFT proponents to rebuild the world online the endgame of a fully stagnant society—a final detour into the absurd before we give up on progress for good? Or is the starry-eyed optimism of digital true believers a last stand against decadence?

The growing pro-metaverse contingent is perhaps the logical conclusion of decades of rhetoric that “innovation” is synonymous with “digitization.” For the twenty-somethings who populate the NFT community, the greatest and most salient innovations in their lifetime have occurred in the increasingly pleasant digital environments of their phones and gaming consoles. Meanwhile, the primary narrative they have been fed about the physical world is that it will probably kill them one day, via COVID-19 or climate change. Our generation may not be consciously hostile to the physical world, but we have little affection for it either.

For now, one of the great appeals of the metaverse seems to be that it is not here. But where more transcendent movements might promise a respite from material concerns, NFT culture is aggressively, wholeheartedly concerned with earthly victories. Success is measured in ETH, which is itself measured in dollars. The founding myth of the NFT community is that if the metaverse is really coming, then anyone who bought digital assets early is bound to see their social (and actual) capital skyrocket when virtual communities go mainstream. Bitcoin, NFTs, and other alternative assets may be a middle finger to the current financial system, but their followers embrace the premise that money can buy happiness.

And yet perhaps because of this one-note proposal, the NFT community is one of the rare spaces where you can find young people expressing sincere excitement about the future. NFT culture is notably short on irony, self-deprecation, or any of the usual trappings of millennial humor. In most online spaces, sincerity is mocked and dissected; in the NFT community, “bullishness” is gospel. Web3 is coming. We’re all gonna make it. Any criticism of NFTs generally gets interpreted as bitterness about not getting in early enough.

When you talk to NFT enthusiasts about the metaverse or their online communities, they get a little glint of hope in their eyes. They have a tendency to look a little bit past you, like they are seeing something right over your shoulder, some intangible form of the future that will disappear if you turn around.

What Society?

I came away from NFT.NYC with a certain respect for the NFT community. They are not taking decadence lying down, and have found a way to revel in the absurdity.

But for all the rhetoric of innovation and transcendence, online life does not actually make up for physical decay, either in people or in society. Extended time in digital worlds necessarily takes time away from the few factors consistently shown to improve human happiness: family, physical health, and time with close friends.

One trait that stands out about the NFT community is they never say “fuck society”. The sentiment is more like “what society?” When the NFT community discusses potential problems with the metaverse, the talk focuses on technical constraints like energy consumption and data storage. In all the discussions I participated in about the coming metaverse, no one ever mentioned how people would reproduce if they were spending all of their time in a virtual world, or how young children would be onboarded to this new reality.

Perhaps this is the result of the NFT community being populated mostly by single men. The question doesn’t come up, as if they have just forgotten the existence of children or the physical sex necessary for them to be born. There is already a strange asexuality within the NFT community—a sense that sex and intimacy are probably not worth the effort. On NFT Twitter, a common category of memes depicts men skipping sex to buy NFTs, or using their gains to pay for divorce lawyers after their wives complain that they spend too much time trading.

Say that we actually give up on reality and fully shift our attention to virtual worlds. How would you find a real person to marry? Do we still need houses, or just dark rooms with computers? Do we make babies in test tubes? Do we still have to exercise? Does it matter?

If you believe your physical life has meaning, then it is hard to justify strapping into VR life. But if you are already deriving no pleasure or hope from your physical body, your family, or your friends, then the vaguely pleasant numbness of the screen world starts to look pretty good.

* * *

On the last day of the conference, I waited for an Uber with my friend David. He had also skipped school to come to New York and mingle with NFT people.

David asked me what I had learned during my week in New York.

I told him that before this week, I had thought that NFTs were just a new type of art. Instead, I learned that these people really believe that NFTs are a first step into the metaverse, a passport to digital life, and that living in the metaverse will make them happy. I continued that the metaverse isn’t so far off. Americans already spend seven waking hours a day looking at a screen. How much of the real world is there even left to give up?

I didn’t tell him what I was actually thinking, which is that I suddenly could not imagine myself having children anymore, if I would just have to watch them slouch away into the confines of digital life. If I do have children, they will likely grow up in a world where living online is normal, or at least a viable option.

David paused to think. “Ya, it kinda sucks.” He looked out into the street and thought a bit more.

“But it could also be cool, right? Like, right now, if I have a sword in a video game, I only have it in one game. But if we had a metaverse, then I could take it anywhere, and it would still be mine. And maybe it’s like, the only sword in the whole world that could kill a certain monster. That would be really cool.”

He sounded so excited. I didn’t want to argue.

‘“Yes, that would be cool.”