Read Max Character Watch 2023
What rough beasts will emerge from the discourse this year to occupy brain-space?
A new year brings with it new hopes, new dreams, new challenges, and, of course, new Guys I’ve Never Heard of Before Who Apparently Have Millions of Followers and Are Suddenly Everywhere for No Reason That I Can Particularly Figure Out. But who will they be?
I’m talking, of course, about Characters -- those commentators, influencers, pundits, columnists, and so on, who appear, seemingly out of nowhere, to suddenly dominate your feeds or group texts or news channels, for reasons that generally have more to do with the supply and demand laws of social-media platforms1 than with any particular news, informational, or intellectual value that these people create or possess.
The truth is these characters never quite arrive out of nowhere -- they are always pushing up against the membrane of Greater Awareness, testing formulations of thirst, or disingenuousness, or outrageousness, or shamelessness, amassing followings on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, the occluded universe of podcasts, building reputations among gawkers and lore-keepers, until suddenly they break through.
Take, for example, the kickboxer-turned-men’s-rights-influencer Andrew Tate, a “manosphere” pyramid schemer. Tate’s thirst for attention and malevolent stupidity meant he had been knocking on the door of Character-dom for months or years, and he surely would have led the 2023 Character Watch list -- had he not been thrust into Character status just under the wire, over the last week of 2022, when Greta Thurnberg responded to him with a satisfyingly rude, if somewhat confusingly directed,2 insult on Twitter. (Fortunately for everyone, least of all Twitter onlookers, Tate was almost immediately arrested by Romanian police for human trafficking -- an impressive speed-run of the general Character arc, which often though by no means always ends in arrest, exile, religious conversion, breakdown, or coma.)
But who will join Tate this year in the leap from “some guy” to “person everyone knows” (for certain values of “everyone”)? As always, Read Max has been monitoring various character contenders in our multimillion-dollar “command center,” sifting through data with our proprietary vibes-based models. For the benefit of readers seeking to get “an edge” on the discourse, we’ve come up with a handful of characters we think might break through in 2023.3 Who will get a Styles profile? Who will get the casual Ross Douthat mention? Who will your cousin know suspiciously a lot about? Who will your parents ask you to explain? Here are three possibilities:
Catturd2
Occupation: Anonymous conservative Twitter influencer/podcaster
Claim to fame: 1.2 million Twitter followers. Retweeted several times by Donald Trump in 2020. Seems to be the guy on Twitter Elon Musk is most eager to impress.
What’s his deal? You would hope that an account called “Catturd2” with more than a million followers and a direct line to Elon Musk would be imaginatively strange, or at least have an interesting origin story. Sadly, Catturd2 is a pretty boring MAGA guy who makes bad jokes on Twitter, whose success is more than anything a tribute to the value of posting and replying constantly, no matter what, about anything that happens.
Arguably it’s cheating to include Catturd2 on the 2023 list, as he took center stage on Twitter in the waning months of 2022, when he became one of Elon Musk’s most frequent interlocutors, but I think he has yet to truly make the leap. It seems highly possible that by the end of 2023 he will either be in jail or have an hourlong show on Fox News.
Lex Fridman
Occupation: Podcaster, “Research Scientist at MIT”
Claim to fame: 2.5 million Twitter followers. Top-100 podcast with guests including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Kanye West, and MrBeast.
What’s his deal? Fridman is sort of “the thinking man’s Joe Rogan,” to the extent you can imagine one. He runs a popular interview podcast with a broad mix of guests from tech, science, and politics, focused heavily on a particular kind of ideological heterodoxy (check out the guest list here), which he encounters with a broad-mindedness so capacious that some might mistake it for total vapidity. On Twitter he describes himself as a “research scientist at MIT,” and talks a lot about the institution, but has been accused of faking his association with it. [ETA: A reader emails to confirm that Fridman is affiliated with MIT:
A quick note about Lex Fridman - for better or worse, I believe he's still legitimately affiliated with MIT. When I was in grad school there a few years ago, he was a research scientist in one of the CS labs and he still seems to be according to the campus directory. Research scientist can be a catchall title for any sort of non-academic scientific or technical job there at the university, from someone on a quarter-time hourly contract hired by a professor to build one specific thing, all the way up through a career professional managing large research projects... so it's difficult to say how much he actually does. (For example, I was a "research scientist" for 2 months when my advisor hired me to finish one of my incomplete studies post-graduation.) Professor is certainly a misrepresentation either way.
If nothing else this should be a reminder that Read Max subscribers are (1) scrupulously fair and helpful and (2) of above-average intelligence and educational attainment. To join this group of elite newsletter readers, subscribe here.]
While many Characters find distinction thanks to their outrageous political views, there’s another kind that rises to prominence thanks to their blank, cheerful willingness to entertain the outrageous political views of others. Fridman has already attracted the attention of the discourse over his charmingly M.O.R. reading list; expect to see more of his indefatigable optimism across your timelines this year.
Sameera Khan
Occupation: Former Miss New Jersey and “anti-woke journalist”
Claim to fame: 141.2 thousand Twitter followers, held a Twitter Spaces where the Taliban showed up
What’s her deal? It’s hard to explain Khan in all her fullness in a quick and pithy way, because her deal exists entirely under about six layers of accumulated internet political culture, but she’s something like what Hillary Clinton dead-enders on Twitter imagine Bernie Sanders voters to be? Or like a deep-fried, even-more-online version of Aimee Therese, if that name means anything to you? Basically, a wildly reactionary anti-feminist who makes some nominal claim to be left-wing, but whose main reason for being is to post insane shit online all the time.
Admittedly Khan, with her small Twitter following and niche political concerns, is a dark horse for true Character status, but the strange milieu from which she emerges -- a group of tremendous weirdos who call themselves “MAGA Communists” -- is an endlessly fertile ground for the kind of irresistibly deranged politics that help turn reply guys into black holes of attention and focus, and I think Khan is better positioned than her comrades to really turn that derangement into a series of bizarre news stories in 2023.
Bonus returning character: Jordan Peterson
The O.G. is back from his Siberian meat coma and wearing a series of awful suits. We missed you, king!
Platform users demand relatively predictable forms of entertainment; shameless eccentrics (with, say, novel and divisive political opinions and/or theatrical modes of speech) are among the groups that supply it.
Her email address is smalldickenergy@getalife.com?
The specific division of Character here is, like, “politics and discourse.” Read Max welcomes suggestions of podcasters, influencers, Mormon mommy bloggers, etc. who will have breakout years in 2023.
For whatever reason I read that entire (pretty long) "Rise of MAGA Communism" essay linked under the Sameera Khan header and its ultimate conclusion of "as a movement, we must infiltrate and convert MAGA - a true prole movement and viable vanguard that hovers in three-dimensional space outside of traditional chartings of leftist and rightist thought - into a communist accelerationist project" still took me by surprise. I feel like I got the wind knocked out of me.
What will be 2023's shirts that go hard?