Vibe Change Links, 3/1/2025

Matthew Gasda on the end of the Virtue Economy; Oren Cass is a DOGE doubter; Andrey Mir sees digital repression; River Page on the online right

Matthew Gasda writes,

The Millennial economy was a virtue economy. Some of the most successful among us held managerial roles in tech, education, finance, arts, and politics that centred on controlling and reshaping language and brand perception — what might be called “virtue refereeing”.

I used to say that trying to interest an elite college student in what life is like working at a profit-seeking business was like trying to interest a teenager in the topic of death. America made the fantasy of living in the virtue economy a reality, creating many jobs working for non-profits to promote sustainability, something-something rights or what have you. The government and wealthy foundations were behind this economy.

Gasda concludes,

2025 is partly about coming to grips with how tenuous, silly, and demoralising the last era was for the many; this clarity has to be exploited, not obscured in new ways. This is the Millennial reckoning: the end of the moral-superiority economy, and the slow, painful realisation that tangible value lies in places and communities many of us had long considered beneath us.

Oren Cass writes,

DOGE is haphazardly cutting expenditures without even knowing what they are. My favourite example is cancelling the legal research tool used by the Securities and Exchange Commission, seemingly because it is labelled similarly to a newswire service. Suffice to say, that won’t make the SEC more efficient. As for actual savings, those aren’t materialising. DOGE attempted to post a rundown of $16 billion in savings achieved, but the largest item on the list, an $8 billion contract, turned out to be an $8 million contract that cost roughly $1 million per year.

He allows that DOGE might do some good. But his criticisms and doubts show me that however often I disagree with him, Cass is an independent thinker, not a toady.

Speaking of my disagreements, Cass also writes,

improper payments don’t persist because no one has thought to stop them. They persist — despite waves of legislation to document and reduce them, and concerted efforts to recover as much as possible after the fact — because a federal government that spends more than $6 trillion annually, often through programmes that require self-reporting of eligibility or run through partnerships with state agencies and private providers, is sometimes going to make payments that it shouldn’t. Reducing them is hard and comes with costs — fewer improper payments, for instance, often means more inadvertent refusals of proper payment.

As Megan McArdle might put it, the optimum amount of improper payments is not zero. But I would bet that we are way over the optimum. The GAO reported,

We estimated that the federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.

I do not accept the “drop in the bucket” argument that misspent funds are small relative to the overall Federal Budget. I want to see people in Washington care as much about misplacing a million dollars as I would.

Andrey Mir writes,

Are bits as unregulated as they were in the early 2010s? Hardly so. On the contrary, institutions often struggle to regulate atoms, but they have learned to regulate bits. A vivid example: U.K. authorities flounder with finding solutions to the country’s immigration issues but have started arresting people for social media posts about it.

Put simply, the internet’s power has reversed: It now threatens the public, not institutions. This is happening worldwide, regardless of political regime.

…media ecology says that the revolt of the public is over and the restoration of institutional power has begun.

He declares Martin Gurri’s revolt of the public over, replaced by a rotation of the elites.

River Page writes,

We’ve gotten to the point where the right-wing hegemony on X is just as—if not more—entrenched than the left’s was. Millions of people who find the atmosphere heinous have fled to alternative platforms like Bluesky. With no more libs to own, people on the online right are going after each other, staking out increasingly extreme positions that reify their status as purists within the movement, even if it means attacking their allies.

He is arguing that the same dynamic that caused the craziest social justice activists to drown out the voices of sanity on the left is now doing the equivalent on the right on Twitter. And he argues that what happens on Twitter does not stay on Twitter.

I hope that he is being unduly alarmist, but I am not the one who would know. I only go to Twitter for sentdefender. Tyler Cowen, who always found it more useful than I did, still links to tweets. I still don’t usually click on them.

substacks referenced above:

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The Online Right Is Building a Monster

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Is the Revolt of the Public Over?