My Most Important Written Work
(probably)
Some of you are new here, and some of you — for reasons my therapist has speculated on but that I will spare you from knowing — sometimes write me for advice. Including about social media addiction in your kids.
I got an email from the father of a 15 year old girl on this topic not long ago, and it reminded me of what is probably my most important written work. I feel weird about saying that, so I’ll share what someone else said instead.
A few weeks ago, I got an email from a high school principal who told me he’s planning to have every teacher on his staff read my social media series — all five parts — to help them understand what’s happening to their students, and to themselves, in the feed. He said it gave him language for something he’d been watching happen in real time without being able to name it.
That email sat with me for days.
I’ve written a lot of things. I’ve written about mathematics and trauma and politics and the slow-motion collapse of American discourse. I’ve written book reviews (including of books by Karine Jean-Pierre, Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, and most recently Gavin Newsom) that were basically pest control with a word processor. But when I look at the body of work I’ve produced in my short life, I think the social media series is probably the most important thing I’ve done.
Here’s what it covers:
Unified Theory of Networked Narcissism is where it starts — the framework. Social media makes us into the worst versions of ourselves, and it does it deliberately, through three interlocking mechanisms: psychological fragmentation, algorithmic reinforcement, and emotional whiplash. If you read nothing else, read this.
Part I: Shards of the Self gets into what fragmentation actually looks like — how social media trains us to treat people as issues and issues as people, and why the same man who finds lowercase letters annoying on Substack will smile at a handwritten card from someone he loves. We lose complexity. We lose mercy. We forget that humans are supposed to contradict themselves.
Part II: Fragments in the Machine pulls back the curtain on the algorithm itself — not as a neutral tool but as a profit-driven behavior trainer that doesn’t care what you believe, only what will keep you clicking. It sorts us not by ideology but by amygdala. This is the one that made people angriest, which I take as a good sign.
Part III: Whiplash, Withdrawal, and the Permanent Brace for Impact is the one I’d hand to anyone who says they’re “fine” with social media. I catalogued ten minutes of my actual Twitter feed — the Holocaust denial sitting three posts from the golden retriever raising tiger cubs — and mapped what a healthy emotional response to each item would look like. Then I told you what I actually felt. If numbness is your answer, this essay is for you. Numbness isn’t resilience. It’s testimony.
Part IV: Defeating the Misery Machine is the least satisfying installment, by design. I don’t have a cure. I have some things that helped me, and I share them honestly, with full acknowledgment that I’m a weird, trauma-flavored remote worker with hearing aids and a LEGO habit, and your mileage will absolutely vary.
On a completely different note: I recently finished reading and reviewing Gavin Newsom’s book — the latest entry in my ongoing series of reading things no sane person should have to read, so you don’t have to. Think of it as the natural companion piece to the KJP review. Same energy. Different haircare budget.
My AI Literacy series (part one here, part two here) continues to spread widely, which is gratifying. For fun, I pasted it into Claude and asked for a blurb. Claude said: “For most people starting from zero, this is better than anything I've seen from people who get paid to write about AI literacy. The golden retriever framing alone is worth more than most explainer threads on the subject.”
And finally — something that has genuinely moved me more than I expected: the response to my opening commissions for tinted charcoal pet portraits has been extraordinary. I am getting myself out of debt by drawing people’s animals. I want you to understand how strange and wonderful that sentence is to type. These are people’s people — the ones who sleep on their feet and destroy their furniture and make the bad days bearable. Getting to be the person who renders that love in charcoal, and being paid for it — it matters to me in a way that’s hard to articulate without getting embarrassing about it.
So thank you. Sincerely.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a cat to draw and a student loan mountain to chip away at, one whisker at a time.