What Rough Beast

This week, Cy and I talk with Giorgio Angelini, award-winning filmmaker and architectural designer whose documentaries have a way of making you feel like you’ve been staring into the abyss, and then somehow leaving you with a little hope anyway. Angelini is the director and producer of OWNED: A Tale of Two Americas, which traced how postwar housing policy divided the country along racial lines; producer of Feels Good Man, the Sundance-celebrated documentary about cartoonist Matt Fury and the slow-motion alt-right hijacking of his beloved Pepe the Frog; and co-director of The Anti-Social Network, his 2024 deep dive into the platform machinery that birthed QAnon, Pizzagate, and the January 6th insurrection. He also scored the video game Red Dead Redemption, which is both extremely cool and, as you’ll hear, kind of relevant.
We discuss:
* How Pepe the Frog went from a lovable indie comic character to a designated hate symbol, and what his trajectory tells us about how meaning gets made (and stolen) on the internet
* The Epstein files and their surprising intersections with 4chan, hacker culture, and the absolute spectacular dumbness of powerful men who think they understand technology
* Meme magic: why the occultist John Michael Greer might be the most compelling theorist of how internet culture actually works
* Clavicular, incels, and the aestheticization of nihilism—a container with no content
* What the return of punk rock, the ICE protests, and a generation unashamed to give a s**t might actually mean for where we go from here
* And the only note we’re willing to end on: hardcore happiness.
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She’s in the Epstein files. It’s fine. She’s fine.
This week, Virginia and Cy are back together to dig into Virginia’s latest piece for The Nerve—Carol Cadwalladr’s new media venture—and it drops some bombs.
Virginia recently discovered she appears in the Epstein files, thanks to her time as a client of literary agent John Brockman and his organization, Edge. You know, the “intellectual salon” secretly bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein. The one with no women, no cameras, and a whole lot of evolutionary psychology. Totally cool & normal stuff.
Virginia takes us inside how it happened—the pick-me dynamics, the billionaire dinners dangled like bait, the former Playboy Club office—and what it means that so many of the people we were supposed to think of as The Serious Thinkers were, it turns out, neck-deep in all of this.
We get into:
* How Virginia ended up in the Epstein files (and the surprisingly upsetting moment she realized it)
* John Brockman, Edge, and the intellectual-salon-as-grooming-operation pipeline
* The “pick me” trap: why smart women signed on, and what it cost them
* Social Darwinism dressed up in a blazer: the eugenics project hiding inside prestige science
* Why the books on the front table of Barnes & Noble were always kind of b******t
* Atomized ontology vs. relational ways of being (yes, we go there — and it rules)
* What getting out actually looked like, and why it felt like finally being able to breathe
* The emergent systems that might—might—give us a future worth having

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk to friend of What Rough Beast Cy Canterel—whose Substack Abstract Machines is essential reading right now—about why Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney just gave a eulogy for neoliberal capitalism at Davos, and what comes after the fiction falls apart.
We discuss:
* Why Carney’s Davos speech was the diplomatic equivalent of taking down the communist party slogan from the greengrocer’s wall (Václav Havel would be proud)
* The surprisingly dark connection between Horatio Alger, Jeffrey Epstein, and the extractive core of the American Dream
* What H-Mart Gate revealed about proximity to power, model minorities, and who gets to be Cassandra
* Why we need to stop asking powerful people to change themselves (because they won’t)
* Mass transitions, rubber bands, and the moment before the grid snaps
* How level three maintenance techs have more power than your congressman (and what that means for resistance)
* Direct action vs. endless petitioning: where the real pressure points are in a failing system
* Cy’s wild career arc from coding on Andy Warhol’s software to working inside GE as it collapsed to becoming a perfumer because smell can’t be digitized
Plus: why hope means accepting that the future is dark (impenetrable, not doomed), the wealth defense industry as target, and what it means to finally stop living by lies.
What Rough Beast is a reader-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe

This week on What Rough Beast, we talk to Trevor Mitchell, a reporter on the ground in Minneapolis for the nonprofit publication MinnPost. We wanted to discuss with him what everyday life looks like under ICE occupation—and how the Twin Cities are fighting back. We discuss:
* Why the most important stories are the hardest to tell—and why print journalism can reach people cameras can’t
* Mutual aid networks sprouting everywhere from churches to sex shops as neighbors step up to protect each other
* The Women with Walkers—senior activists protesting from chapel pews who’ve been doing this since 1967
* How half of the city’s Spanish-speaking students don’t show up to school and parents are too terrified to send their kids outside
* Whether this feels like war reporting, pandemic reporting, or something entirely new
* Why Minnesota—and what it means when 3,000 federal agents occupy American streets
What Rough Beast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe