2026: Looking Back & Looking Ahead

Internet status, organized influence, and what comes after Effective Altruism

This article intends to articulate the context for and motivation behind my current online presence. I try to approach it chronologically — I start by describing the chain of events and the related thought processes that led to my becoming “active” on Twitter/X, which was in mid-2025, and then I try to elaborate on the path on which I hope to take said activity going forward, in 2026 and thereafter.

2025: origins…

Some time in the first half of 2025, I met someone¹ who has since become one of my closest friends. I met him on the internet, through my current anonymous profile, though back then I hadn’t really started posting yet.

A number of factors contributed to how quickly we clicked — we work in the same industry, live in the same city, and are in a similar age group with plenty of parallels between our upbringings. We’re also roughly equally intelligent. But what really sealed the deal is an exceptional alignment of our respective ambitions — the effective pursuit of which has become an idée fixe in our frequent exchanges. We both generally see the future in the same way, and have identified the same desirable place for ourselves in it.

At first we used to just text, at some point we started having periodic phone calls. On average, they tended to last a couple of hours or so. The content varied, but mostly made up some sort of strategic discussion on our shared goals and the bottlenecks holding us back from them. A couple of these conversations were broadly formative for me, in that they largely established the motivation behind developing my online presence, as mentioned above.

Their premise was simple — it centred around our eventual agreement that there existed an abstract but identifiable tight-knit network of young people in the modern West awash with all sorts of desirable capital, and we weren’t part of it. Often unbeknownst to its participants, this network seemed to exercise near-hegemony over power-law-distributed tangible and intangible resources. Crudely speaking, we imagined the network as having a social and geographic centre of gravity in San Francisco, with outposts in other dominant coastal cities in America, and to a more diminished extent, in other Anglophone capitals.

We came to believe that “membership” in this abstract network explained a large share of the variance in the many fantastical success stories of people with comparable profiles to ours — a share which seemed larger than that explained by the individual competences of the protagonists. As one of many examples, we asked ourselves why Sam Bankman-Fried had seemed like the most successful private investor of our time, why he knew about Anthropic before everyone else did, and we thought the answer was obvious — it wasn’t because he had superhuman foresight, it was because he was part of the community we had identified (which also played a role in the ecosystem that produced Anthropic (yes, it does go much further than just Effective Altruism)).

We came to understand that if we were to recreate a comparable success story for ourselves, which we intended to, we’d need entry into this community. By no means was this going to be enough in itself — not everyone in the community succeeded. But everyone that succeeded seemed to, in some way, be part of it. Our absence from it looked like our most pressing bottleneck, and we set our minds to fixing it.

One way of entry was the traditional one — comprising geographic proximity, active involvement on one of the couple of affiliated university campuses, early employment at the friendly companies, and so on. For me this would have been difficult; even if it had been an option, I wasn’t looking to uproot my life.

But there was also an emerging and promising alternative — the community seemed to increasingly operate online, through sets of loosely connected public clusters on Twitter/X and certain blogging platforms. “Members” were conducting a growing share of their social lives there. That’s how someone like me could identify the network in the first place. Entry into this open-bordered public square appeared to be enough to claim all the perks that came with inclusion in the real thing.

This revealed a clear path forward — all I needed to do was pick up the phone and post well, and the network bottleneck would eventually resolve itself. I set myself some “success metrics” — though there was no perfect, quantifiable benchmark, I thought setting a follower goal would be a decent enough proxy, so long as they were people from the right community. If I reached 3,000 followers by the end of 2025, I wrote down, I’d consider myself on the right track.

The date has come, and the project has been more successful than I had anticipated. My imperfect proxy overshot the year-end benchmark by a factor of 10. I didn’t expect the X account would get to a stage where a significant portion of the people I’d have considered “bulwarks” of the network identified above would become mutual connections, or where I could check a former UK Prime Minister’s account and realize that they’re a follower, but I’ve been positively surprised. I have updated in favour of the viability of this kind of framework, from an already considerable starting point, and if asked I’d advise people in a similar position to mine to also spend some time pursuing it, if it’s something they find enjoyable.

With this, I consider the “network building” exercise largely concluded. Overreliance on an ever-inflating number of loose connections as an end in itself is a malignant tendency — one that plagues many, especially in the community I’ve just described. Endless meetings, “coffee chats”, and DM back-and-forths, contrary to popular belief, don’t in themselves seem to be of material use.

Some sufficient baseline that allows for network diffusion is, in my view, all that’s really needed. I think I broadly have that now. That brings me to the next step: actually doing things with that audience.

2026: doing things

When savvy actors around these parts gather a capital-rich audience they often try to cash in on it in a literal sense — they understand that virality is often ephemeral, so they try to convert it into something that isn’t, monetary wealth. Often they start a company; access to a viral distribution allows for easy fundraising. These companies usually fail².

I can’t say I’m interested in that method — beyond the low success rate already mentioned, it’s unbecoming, somewhat vulgar, and doesn’t directly help in what I’m overarchingly trying to do, which is to in some way contribute positively to the transatlantic socio-political drift of our times.

Instead my objective, as communicated ceaselessly by now, is to consolidate and grow the intellectual influence of myself and those people who are aligned with various causes — which would straightforwardly assist the stated mission³ (and only by externality increase our status, of course).

I’ve spent some time thinking about the concrete, optimal course of action someone in my position (someone predominantly operating through mostly-pseudonymous information production online) can follow to potentially reach an eventual stage of formidable intellectual influence, and have come to a tentative conclusion that it would look something like this:

1. Group formation: because contemporary production is increasingly technologized, young adults now exercise disproportionate control over a growing share of consequential capital. The initial task would be to identify and engage individuals who fit this profile.

   Practically, this means building and maintaining targeted channels of interaction with elite university environments, decentralized online communities, and strategic nodes within industry- and policy-adjacent spaces (technology firms, think tanks, research institutes, etc.).

   There is good reason to believe that a non-trivial subset of these actors is ideologically disillusioned, or at least dissatisfied with the available outlets for meaningful engagement. Many are actively looking for structured ways to contribute to projects aligned with convictions they already hold privately. That predisposition can be productively made use of. Movements like Effective Altruism provide a useful precedent here.

2. Discourse formation: in parallel, the project would establish open but curated fora dedicated to studying and discussing material relevant to understanding contemporary socio-political trajectories.

   Participants would collaborate on focused analysis across some set of core disciplines — political theory, economics, history, sociology, law and governance, technology, international relations, etc.

   “Admission” would be selective, with screening handled by designated administrators to safeguard intellectual integrity. Comparable initiatives have often failed by allowing their discourse to be diluted by populist, performative, demotic, or otherwise low-signal contributions, which would need to be avoided.

3. External relations: as organizational cohesion strengthens, the group would aim to cultivate points of contact with individuals and institutions likely to register interest and contribute various forms of capital through symbiotic engagement. Such capital may be monetary or otherwise. Potential partners would include universities, technology entrepreneurs, public intellectuals, policymakers, financial institutions, and adjacent actors.

   If the preceding steps succeed, this interest should grow quickly and organically.

4. Consensus formation: as the group gains visibility and positive attention from influential participants in public discourse across several strategically relevant domains, opportunities would emerge to exert formative influence over prevailing consensuses.

   This influence could be directed toward advancing the collective interests of key collaborators while reinforcing the group’s broader strategic goals.

5. Capital deployment and policy formation: upon reaching some sufficient threshold of organizational maturity, opportunities would be expected to arise for deploying capital into mission-aligned initiatives.

   Successful execution would enhance the organization’s autonomy while introducing material incentives for both new and existing collaborators.

   Similarly, as the organization’s presence expands within and around administrative and decision-making bodies, strategic collaborations would increasingly enable information-based contributions to policymaking in areas of shared interest and expertise.

   “Recruiting” well-positioned participants early in their professional trajectories would be expected to produce a positive temporal effect, compounding the organization’s influence as these individuals rise within institutional hierarchies.

In 2026, I hope to begin advancing along this clearly idealized and path-dependent action plan. I don’t yet have strong intuitions about the details, or about how long any given component might take to develop, so I’ll consider the year a success if, by its end, I can point to some identifiable progress — which I expect I’ll recognize when I see it.

An intellectual undertaking of this kind — one that aims to advise its audience on optimal modes of conduct across a range of general domains — can’t be conducted in a fully impartial manner. The questions it must confront are necessarily broad and murky, and their effective resolution requires some degree of ideological bias. Correctly identifying which ideological biases to adopt, alongside the more technocratic task of producing high-quality thought, will be decisive for the project’s success.

The latter task is relatively straightforward: think seriously, in collaboration with capable people, and you will tend to produce high-quality ideas. The former — the question of ideological preference — is far more treacherous.

To clarify what I mean, consider what you would regard as successful examples of individuals or groups who have executed something like this plan — who have meaningfully shaped the socio-political tendencies of their time. A recurring pattern quickly emerges: success tends to correlate with being correctly positioned in relation to where the discourse was headed, anticipating the dominant ideological currents of the near future rather than reacting to those of the recent past.

Take Effective Altruism. Part of its success can be attributed to its accurate recognition that a cohort of secular, ambitious young people were yearning for a sense of higher purpose compatible with their non-religious cognitions. Utilitarian altruism supplied exactly that. Its architects identified a real pocket of latent demand and satisfied it. Had this not been the case, the quality of their reasoning alone would not have sufficed. Hour-long talks in MIT classrooms would have produced polite disinterest rather than the kind of immediate enthusiasm that sounds like: “Yes — this is it. Where has this been all my life?”

Or consider Curtis Yarvin — who, regardless of one’s evaluation of his work, successfully identified and articulated the frustrations of an increasingly disempowered tech-adjacent bourgeoisie. By giving voice to sentiments that were widely felt but poorly expressed, he aligned his output with an emergent ideological demand, contributing to his outsized influence in the mid-2020s.

At a different point on the spectrum, Ezra Klein effectively captured the liberal elite’s frustration with the stagnant supply-side dynamics of the U.S. economy.

Similarly, Peter Thiel correctly anticipated a growing backlash against the rapid proliferation of certain left-liberal norms. George Soros, by contrast, correctly anticipated the opposite tendency: widespread demand for their expansion.

History provides endless examples. The French Enlightenment philosophers benefited enormously from working in synchrony with revolutionary forces rather than in opposition to them. Marxist theorists, likewise, succeeded in large part by identifying an emerging class dynamic and supplying it with an intellectual framework.

The list could be extended indefinitely. The broader point is that a substantial portion of the work involved in constructing a successful framework of intellectual influence lies in the early and accurate identification of the ideological biases that will define the coming period — and then committing to them: adopting, advocating, and elaborating them. If your diagnosis is correct, the rewards will usually follow.

What you are ultimately searching for is the kind of pitch that makes a room full of 20-year-old MIT undergraduates think: “Finally — someone has articulated what I’ve been circling around. This is what I’ve been waiting for. Sign me up.”

Then you give that pitch and sign them up. Some fraction of those people will go on to become the next Sam Bankman-Fried (minus the prison sentence), the next Dario Amodei… and at that point, you can reasonably declare victory.

So what, then, is the defining ideological tendency of the late 2020s? Where is the puck actually going? What latent bias should one adopt in order to satisfy the emerging demand curve?

The shape of a new ideology: what might succeed Effective Altruism?

I should preface this by saying that, although I have no formal affiliation with Effective Altruism, I have immense respect for what it has achieved. The framework through which it has mediated influence is exemplary. Whatever forum next succeeds in unifying and channelling the energies of driven and intelligent young people will likely resemble EA structurally, employing similar methods and institutional forms. That this is my belief should already be apparent from the five-step outline in the previous section.

That said, I no longer think that Effective Altruism’s ideological basis is as well suited to energizing the next generation as it once was, for several reasons (presented here in no particular order):

• First, increasing international mobility and the democratization of internet access mean that people from developing or non-Western countries now constitute a much larger share of the discourse one would want to influence. These populations tend, on average, to be less secular and less explicitly “rationalist” than their counterparts, and are correspondingly less drawn to ideologies grounded primarily in secular, technocratic moral frameworks.

• Second, younger generations are broadly dissatisfied with the prevailing Western status quo, and this dissatisfaction extends to the ideological tendencies that underwrote it. Unqualified secularism, indiscriminate out-group empathy, and a form of neoliberal market-utilitarianism are increasingly perceived as part of the same outmoded package.

• Third, among coastal elites in particular, secular utilitarianism is already the ambient ideology of childhood rather than a rebellious discovery. As a result, generational contrarianism now often pushes younger cohorts away from it. This dynamic differs from that of many millennials, for whom adopting a strongly secular-utilitarian worldview was itself a reaction against the moral frameworks of their parents.

• Fourth, the uneven distribution of gains from market expansion has left many younger people sceptical of markets as default coordinators of social good. Because Effective Altruism is closely associated with market-mediated mechanisms — such as earning to give, efficiency maximization, and philanthropic capital allocation — this scepticism translates into diminished resonance with its moral framework.

• Fifth, in the early 21st century, a globalist, open-border, high-empathy utilitarianism functioned as a novel and voluntary experiment, plausibly promising large social gains. In part, it delivered on that, but it also produced widely felt downsides. The younger generation increasingly views this experiment as past its shelf life, and is more inclined toward a corrective tendency that explicitly focuses on its failures.

• Sixth, the geopolitical context has changed. The early post–Cold War period was characterized by relative tranquillity and American hegemonic dominance, which rewarded peacetime values: universalism, low in-group preference, and the moral symmetry of all lives regardless of affiliation. That context no longer holds. U.S. dominance is now contested, the number of active state-involved conflicts is at its highest since the Second World War, and in-group/out-group distinctions have reasserted themselves as salient. In such an environment, calls to “give what we can” are increasingly interpreted as naïve or self-undermining.

• Finally, the millennial-era assumption that the central normative questions of history had largely been resolved now feels premature. For a time, there was a widespread belief (especially among elites) that we broadly knew what the “good” was, that reasonable people were converging on the same answers, and that those in positions of power could be expected to act accordingly. In this context, Effective Altruism functioned less as an ideology than as an absence of one: you be good and help people, we all know what that means.

  That assumption no longer holds. History is back in flux. Normative questions are once again contested, partisan extremes are reasserting themselves, and what counts as “good” is no longer straightforward or widely agreed upon. Under these conditions, moral frameworks that rely on a background consensus are incomplete. Competing visions of what’s good must again actively contend with each other.

  Politics matters again. Institutional power matters again. Many people who once would have gone to San Francisco now go to Washington. Decisions feel consequential. The struggle to shape them along explicitly ideological axes has intensified.

These cross-generational losses of confidence in once-dominant strands of social thought are unfolding alongside and in relation to a much broader political crisis. Across virtually all major indicators, liberal democracy is in retreat. Widely cited measures — from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World and the V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report — converge on the same conclusion: democratic performance and global freedom have declined steadily for more than two decades, in some cases reverting to mid–late 20th-century baselines. Representation, rule of law, and press freedom are all weakening together, including within historically high-performing democracies. As of 2024, on some measures, 45 countries were judged to be autocratizing, compared with 19 democratizing. On the same measures, while roughly 51% of the global population lived in democracies in 2004 (against 49% in autocracies), that balance has now shifted to approximately 28% and 72%, respectively⁴.

This trend is undeniable and unlikely to reverse in the near term. Yet much of the discourse surrounding it remains confined to normative problematization — focused on how the world ought to be, rather than how it is, or how it is likely to become. Even among sophisticated commentators, there is a tendency to retreat into moral exhortation and sentimentalism instead of confronting the implications head-on.

All of this is to say that while I am not confident about what the next ideological equilibrium will look like in detail (the terrain is fluid and the discourse is volatile), I am increasingly confident about its direction of travel. Whatever comes next, and whatever the next generation ultimately embraces, will probably define itself in conscious distance from what preceded it. It will be willing to explore what may come after liberal democracy, and what might replace the dominant moral and institutional assumptions inherited from the Enlightenment. Simply taking these questions seriously and engaging them rigorously and descriptively rather than normatively and defensively, looks to me like a sufficient starting point for anyone attempting to chart a path forward.

To catch the puck where it’s going, we must first acknowledge that it is moving, that it is unlikely to stop, and that our task is to meet it where it will be, not where we prefer it to remain.

This broadly summarizes my current convictions and biases in attempting to identify what comes next. I don’t yet have precise answers, but I expect they will emerge dynamically as we continue to explore these questions without the customary trepidation.

Closing comments

I have much more to say on these things, but this is already running long. In summary, I consider the initial task of building a baseline audience for my broader project largely complete, and now would like to move to the more important stage of actually using it. As outlined above, I intend to do so by exploring those socio-political questions that I see as increasingly noteworthy yet underdiscussed, expecting that this work will attract ambitious, intellectually serious young people. I also plan to support this process operationally by providing the administrative and organizational infrastructure required for such coordination. My aim for 2026 is to make identifiable progress along this path.

If any of this is of interest to you, feel free to reach out (ideally on X, where I check DMs periodically). I’ll also be in New York City for a few days at the end of this month and the beginning of the next. If you’re in the area and would like to meet, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

1. You can find him here.

2. As do most companies.

3. To in some way contribute positively to the transatlantic socio-political drift of our times!

4. V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2025 (obviously there’s a population growth aspect here too).