Compact Substack

5 days ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

Various of the Trump administration’s initiatives of the past three months seem to have been informed by a class theory of politics derived from the work of James Burnham and his intellectual progeny. The theory is roughly the following: “Woke” is the ideology of the managerial class; therefore, the way to defeat woke is to go after the institutions that sustain that class.

1 week ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

It has been a big few weeks for Canada. Just before the Liberal Party returned to power in Ottawa under the globalist technocrat Mark Carney on the basis of an improbable revival of Canadian nationalism, one of the country’s greatest living artists has bequeathed us another great work.

2 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

I’ll be brief today, as I’m currently in Boulder, Colo., participating in a conference on “Renegade Futurism.” I’ll be speaking on a panel later about “AI as God,” which prompted me to revisit some things I’ve written about AI over the years. In lieu of a full post, I will republish a few parts of a newly relevant old essay on the subject, along with some brief framing remarks. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication.

3 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

A good deal of my writing in the years 2020-22 involved revisiting material I had studied in graduate school in a particular historical moment—the final years of George W. Bush’s administration and the first years of Barack Obama’s—and applying it to a new moment, that of the pandemic and its political fallout, which both resembled the prior one and did not. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

My candidate for tweet of the week comes from Putin’s (alleged) Rasputin:Dugin posted this on April 9, the day the “yippy” bond market prompted President Trump to pause most of his “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs (with China the big exception). Whether the Russian philosopher intended it this way or not, I think we can be quite precise about what he’s getting at, with some help from Stuart Jeffries’s 2021 book Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern.