My Hot Take is Shut the Fuck Up and Here's Like 3500 Words About Why

The Abstract:

IT'S 2026 AND I AM CALLING ON HUMANITY TO ABOLISH THE TAKE
IN CERTAIN CONTEXTS
OR TO REJUVENATE THE PLATFORMS OF SPEECH
SUCH THAT THE TAKE BECOMES BORING

Here's my controversial opinion: The way we communicate on the internet is inherently violent and extractive, and is actively working against the advancement of society. Ready?

The Frustration:

I watch a video like or this one or this one or this one or this one and I have to ask what the fuck we are doing out here. Not because I disagree with them, or agree with them, but because my nervous system is being asked to react to and align with moral positions without understanding why. I have no access to the human who created the take, no understanding of their motives, analysis, political alignment, methodology, and no concept of what my agreement or disagreement is meant to accomplish. I don't understand what the fuck we are doing out here.

Am I taking this too seriously? Clearly people are having so much funnnnnnn conversing with each other on the internet, right? It's all just a fun little game we're playing and it has no effect on the real world?

Defining the Take:

History

I have seen The Take defined in two ways, and traced back to two etymologies.

Definition 1: an opinion based on simplistic moralizing

Good or Bad, Right or Wrong, Right or Left, Safe or Dangerous, Woke or Fascist, Feminist or Incel. Speech acts based on binary categories are satisfying. They provide simple instructions on how to feel and possibly what to do about it. They establish an immediate sense of safety and clarity by hijacking the nervous system: here is a puppet of danger, here is a puppet of safety. Watch as safety destroys danger.

Definition 2: an opinion that is likely to cause controversy

Ragebait. Attention Economy. Algorithm-pleaser. We are are cortisol cows, dopamine teets, milked for our feelings of safety and danger, satisfaction and desire. Even figures I respect borrow from this playbook. They sort of have to. As Paul Preciado would say, it is not only our labor value that is extracted by capital, but our Potentia Gaudendi (potential for pleasure or desire). It is the subjectivized human who creates the disposable product, and the subjectivized human who consumes it. They have not just come for your 9 to 5, they also want your 5 to 9

Etymology 1: A take for a movie. A performance of a scene.

The film take is evaluated for its ability to support or detract from a desired narrative. If it does the job you keep it and otherwise you just throw it away. Maybe the expression it contains is authentic, human, nourishing society, maybe that doesn't matter at all. We see this accelerated by the short-form-ification of the internet as media. Publish a thousand tweets a day, post more than anyone could consume. Let AI create the content and the algorithm consume it. We were the product all along.

Etymology 2: A "takeaway" from a sporting event
Joon Lee has created an entire video on this history. I recommend you watch it, but here's my summary:

Sports discourse is for fun. Heated debate extracts attention from sports fans. Heated debate becomes the primary mode of sports discourse. You don't really need nuance on a sports talk show. Politics and sociological discourse follow suit. You don't really need nuance anywhere. Not to make money, at least. It's not fun and games anymore. Build the Wall. Drain the Swamp. Stop the Steal. Kick them Out.

As Joon lee says in his video: "the conflict is the product."

The platForms that platForm Us:

Democratization
There is a narrative that the internet democratized media. It's true and it's not. It's true and it's very not.

When it first came into being, perhaps the cyberland of the internet was endless and virgin, no indigenous peoples to displace, no natural border, and as the map expanded in every direction, so too did the speed of travel increase. Magical.

The promise of the internet for media and informational laborers? "Every person a philosopher, a movie star, a rapper, a model.” It doesn't matter if you have the ear of publishers, labels, studios, if you grew up in the United States, if your family is rich and liberal: you too can become consumable to the entire world.

You could view this as the defeat of gatekeeping. Yes the gatekeepers lost their power. You can publish everything without editors, screen tests, peer review, focus groups. But you're still not the one who decides who sees it. Not really. The algorithm is the gatekeeper now. And what does the algorithm care about? ts is all about clicks.

The Algorithm, The Ultimate Publisher, in Service of Humankind.
When on social media, including youtube or substack, I often get the feeling that I am alone and being evaluated. The same feeling I get in social contexts predominated by strangers. At a bar, at a club, at an entertainment event. I am comparing myself, I am nobody, I need to do something to attract positive attention.

With precious few exceptions, every social platform online is based in social competition: your expression is being tested against every other expression, tested for its ability to extract time and attention. As Paul Preciado points out: you are less of a human being, and more of a factory for other people’s dopamine, directing their Potentia Gaudendi towards advertising.

So yes, the internet "democratized" media, fort of, but it did not extract them from the service of capital and grant their powers to the people. It simply made every creator and thinker into a gig worker. Your voice is not an inalienable result of your humanity, it is granted to you by the company that owns the gold mine outside of town. You may feel in certain moments that you are engaged in sociality, but these public spaces are not about community, where love and connection can proliferate, where thought builds upon thought and becomes a way of thinking or living. Instead, you are living in a casino, sitting at a slot machine made of silicon and human brains, trying to win love. Of course you’re fucking depressed.

How We Digest

What is all this information even for
On Subway Takes, there is a reason Kareem Rahma says “100% agree” or “100% disagree.” Of course he is pulled inexorably toward the complexities of real life, but when this dark power overtakes him, and he does parse the nuances of a take, it is felt in some way as a concession: the platonic ideal state of the Take is not that it interacts with other ideas but that it mogs them. It is a bar, you are preaching, you slayed, destroyed, owned, won. The language of dominance perpetuates. The language of collaboration and coexistence are nowhere to be found.

Human communication is, arguably, a technology for replacing force with consent. Because we can speak, we can understand each other. We are able to make concessions, compromises and find win-win scenarios. Rather than meeting our needs by coercing the compliance of others, we can meet our needs by forecasting future scenarios, evaluating them together, and choosing together which ones we wish to live in.

This is loosely the principle behind Marshall Rosenberg's concept of Nonviolent Communication (at least that's how it seems to me after a whole day of watching youtube videos): the deepest promise of communication is the discovery of win-win scenarios.

But in order to achieve these kinds of goals, communication has to be used for that purpose. It's a great tool for peace, but it can be violent as well. I would argue it can be violent in the form of simplistic moralizing: good or bad, right or wrong, right or left, etc, which dehumanizes people and sets the stage for future violence. I would argue it can be violent In the form of marketing which manufactures desire, undermines joy or even triggers trauma responses, for the purposes of power and capital.

If the purpose of communication is to construct ideological battlebots and watch them duke it out, all sponsored by coca cola and GLP-1s, then I guess we're doing alright. Anyone can log in, post their hot take, decide who sucks and start a fight about it. But if the purpose of communication is to search for advantageous scenarios, ideas, technologies and practices, I would argue we're currently a little fucked. The large-scale platforms we have simply don't incentivize it.

Because it is an entertainment product, in many ways simply a marketing tool, the take only exists to be viewed and evaluated, and discarded.

At best, the take might imply that the speaker or the speaker's community is ready to take some action. Or maybe just that "somebody should do something about this." That something being research or legislation or conflict resolution or whatever.

But there is another way to receive the take, something I would hesitantly title "sociopessimist," and therefore carceral, which carries the implication that, whatever line is being drawn by this take, those on the wrong side of it are irredeemable, bad actors, not worth engaging with. If we are improving society this way, it is through ultimately fascist methods: sharpening ideological knives, defining our enemy more clearly.

And trust: sometimes you gotta draw a line and say "my energy is not well spent trying to come to a resolution with you." But I would argue that this is almost never defined by the ideological position or communication style of an actor, but by the incentive structure they are acting under. If they have no incentive to resolve advantageously with you, they are not worth engaging with. If they do, then maybe they are.

But when you are triggered, this always feels true and never feels false. When resolution is possible, it is because this feeling has subsided and been replaced with a much more utilitarian belief in the possibility of a social contract, the nuance of relationality.

But the disembodied, context-free miasma of the technospace allows a sociopessimist perspective to carry a wide range of social implications, "quiet parts," or "dog whistles," for which the intention of the informational actor is not relevant to the likely outcomes in physical space. From, "live and let live, let's all do some deep breathing, and encounter each other in the future knowing we have our differences about Lena Dunham" all the way down to "storm the capitol tomorrow."

Yes, it is a long walk from "takes are annoying me" to "venting on the internet is always stochastic terror." But it is a path you can walk.

So yes, the Hot Take is a harmless micro-genre, an entertaining art form of the 21st century. But it's also the apex of an informational distortion that creates, in my view, a crisis of communication among the lumpenproletariat. The manifestos forged in isolation and disembodied ideological warfare are out there and you're welcome to read them and count the dead.

My honors class at community college

I took a community college course at the end of high school. I don't remember what it was called, but it was very "let's think about the world together and maybe try to solve a problem." The teachers led discussion each week, and eventually gave us the assignment of choosing a topic and thinking through how it could be addressed. Ironically, the topic they had chosen for the semester was "media bias" in which they really wanted to talk about Fox News.

I was 17 or 18, coming straight from a homeschool evangelical conservative education. I thought Fox News was the bastion. I listened to Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Beck. No one had asked me to think critically in this way before or defend my views against real world pushback. I had only been told what to think, and gone right ahead and thought it.

The teachers were feminist, possibly queer, definitely angry. A conversation with them was the first time I heard anyone mention Noam Chomsky. They tolerated me, barely, and challenged me pretty hard. But in a way that made me really uncomfortable.

The truth proved to be that I was open to learning from them, but they sort of assumed I wasn't. They seemed to think I was an obstinate conservative uninterested in empathy, but I was actually an insecure, indoctrinated teenager. Experiences I had during that class, specifically around conservative news media, started to form ruptures in my worldview that would lead me on a long journey. I'm glad they challenged me. But I wonder if they would have been better at challenging me if they had also understood who I really was and the ways my education had failed me.

The irony was that instead of critiquing the methods and incentives structure of conservative news media (that Fox was succeeding because it understood attention economy and existed to make money and serve power) they pointed to the content and talked about how it was wrong. The competition-based communications structure was well-suited to incorporate this criticism: it was just more argument. Nom nom nom.

New Models

Okay there's still the question of whether I hate fun. Competition is fun, rap battles and debates and arguments are FUN, and they are not an EVIL waste of time. I will concede this. But lately I am finding it very difficult to enjoy this kind of fun. Because I look around me and I see suffering, and while I do wish to escape from it sometimes, into FUN, I also want to address it.

Example of how fun I am: I took a stand up comedy class this year, would an unfun person do that?? The problem is I found it difficult to talk about any of the topics I wanted to talk about: I had to lie about how I think about the world in order to create a digestible take. I had to simplify my mental model of reality, and create a punching bag in a matter of seconds, even if it was me.

But what I desire is to explore the space in between things, to desimplify ideas, to take them apart and work on them, so that we will learn to create new ones.

We live in a time where new models of understanding are desperately necessary, our epistemic and narrative technology has to keep up with the rapidly changing world.

Pointing and laughing is not going to make this happen. Watching wrestlers in the Ring pretend to slam each other around while they both get paid by the same corporation is not going to accomplish this. A world that is simple enough for us to understand and comply with, laugh at or boo at, is not a world capable of meeting our needs, such that we actually want to live in it, it is a world that we simply have to cope with, often by imagining a slightly different version where the problem is simply other people.

But ideas and people are not just right or wrong. They are helpful or useful or constructive or damaging or infuriating or sad or bleak or needed or loving or profitable or powerful etc. etc. etc.

The sad fact is that, just as our tongues struggle to identify nourishing foods in the era of engineered flavorcrack, our minds are underequipped to separate information that stimulates us from information that we wish to become, information that can spiritually nourish and connect us.

If the purpose of reflecting on society is to evaluate it and change it overtime, the nutritional value of information seems to be: Does this have the potential to change society for the better? Does this give us the necessary information to respond to our circumstances better?

Intense statements of acceptance and rejection give the impression of holding this nutritional value. When Trump says “build the wall“ “kick out illegal immigrants“ “drain the swamp“ this information is meant to carry the stimulation of something that can change reality. In the same way that sugar creates a rush of cheap easy energy for the body to use, The Take promises to change our world, but it’s fundamentally unsuited to do so.

So what could work better?

It would make me very happy to see a critical mass of individuals rise up in pursuit of media literacy without the need for any structural change. I'd love to see everyone in America learn to consume better foods in better ways, myself included. But I think if we are looking for a plan, that ain't it. We need help thinking and communicating differently.

I would start here, by proposing that the value of information is not in its ability to extract attention from half-hypnotized, overworked under-resourced homo sapiens, but rather in its ability to meet their needs, to broadcast their resources and connect to other pieces of information that work to do the same.

As I was working on this article, I found the desire to post the take of my own: “I think it has to become cringe to be aware of the latest online trend”

I like this take, I think it’s a good idea to reverse the dopamine rush of referencing and making cool whatever is happening down here in this pit of loneliness, to discourage others from rushing into it to learn the latest lingo as well. Don’t connect to me by staring at your phone and then quoting the same thing as me, what if we had an experience together that no one else ever had or ever would?

But then I remembered I was writing this, and I was going to post it on the internet, ostensibly asking people to engage with the internet, and more than that, that takes are "bad" now. How can I think takes are "bad" and still have them? I guess I'd say I think Takes are incomplete. The statement "blah blah blah latest online treand" is the conclusion of a long series of other thoughts. The value that’s held in that piece of information is in the reading and thinking that has been done in the past, by me, but also and overwhelmingly, by people who are not me, that lead me to this conclusion. The value is not in what I say, but in what I read that led me to say it. As Hank Green said in a recent video about finding hope in an attention economy: “There’s nothing that’s not a collaboration with every dead person.”

In typical capitalist fashion, the “take” extracts the socially potent, attention-grabbing conclusion, and presents it as a complete thought, attributes it to an individual, lopping off the roots and all the machinery of growth that produced it. It sends that signal into a competition with other signals, and prioritizes the signal that produces the most engagement.

It becomes incredibly easy to synthesize and counterfeit signals that will engage or even feel useful. You really can just go online and say shit, and some people will think you’re sooooo smart. Because the platform does not encourage a lineage of thought, does not encourage you to think critically, to dig deeper into a topic, to challenge yourself. It encourages you to simply engage, and even create your own signals that can enter the info war (reference intended).

The platforms we think and socialize on propose that the value of an expression rests in its capacity to extract attention. But I would propose that the value of an expression or a signal rests in the density of its connections and resonances with materiality, the roots it has in the soil of the earth, the thought and experience of "every dead person."

Yes there are things that do both, brave and creative thinkers can package resonant, nutritious information in a way that makes it tasty and fun and sexy. But how much other precious humanity-nurturing thought is locked behind that black curtain of algorithmic irrelevance? How much of what could nourish us is being gatekept by platforms that depend on our contributions, and instead of giving back, just continue to take, take, take?

Things I referenced and collaborated with while writing this article:
Hank Green
Dysphoria Mundi by Paul Preciado
Joon Lee: How Hot Takes Took Over Everything
Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication

I have also been watching Dr. Hilary Agro, PhD