"Life Does Just Literally Continue"

Our interview today is with writer Luke McGowan-Arnold. You can find him on Substack here where he writes about “American subject formation, subcultures (on and off the internet), Black people and social movements.”

When we caught him he was in a suburb of Minneapolis, in the middle of traveling across the country, speaking to writers and artists about their work, about the country. We had a fun, wide ranging conversation on the manosphere, the idea of “collapse”, and party identity.

This interview was conducted by Noelle Forougi for franknews, and condensed for clarity. Help keep franknews free and for the public by subscribing below.

Thanks for chatting today. I know you mentioned over email you are currently on a cross-country trip on the train, so I appreciate you making time. You’re originally from Philadelphia, right?

I’m from Rockford, Illinois, which is kind of Wisconsin-Illinois border. The way I would describe Rockford is like it’s kind of like a small, like post-industrial Midwestern city. There is like 150,000 people. There used to be a lot of factories, specifically a lot of furniture factories, but by the time my parents moved there, the industry was pretty much gone. The offshoring was almost finished, you know. It became a place that didn’t really have any jobs.

And then you become JD Vance.

Yeah, or something better. It’s interesting, Rockford was a city that voted for Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020, Trump in 2024 — and Obama in 2008 and 2012. There was also a big Tea Party movement when I was growing up there, with big Tea Party rallies. So its a very politically dynamic place.

Yeah that makes sense – its very classic modern Americana. How did you find your political thought to evolve in that environment?

Well my folks are tapped in. My dad teaches African American history. And my mother was involved in organizing protests against the war back in 2005 or 2006. I remember it being pretty unpopular to be against the war at the time. I remember going to protests about offshoring, when the factories were closing, against corporate greed essentially.

Can I ask how old you are?

I’m 28.

Yeah, it’s an interesting age to be at. I feel like we had this beat of optimism, of progress, with Obama, with tech supposedly “democratizing the world.” I wonder what it feels like to be 18 now, when things seem sort of stagnant. I mean, we have been talking about Trump for 10 years…

Yeah, I mean I remember my parents being excited about Obama, but I think pretty clearly after like the first like two or three years that it wasn’t it. Occupy happened in his first term. He had even suggested cutting like Social Security…

Right, and then he bails out the banks.

Yeah, dog, exactly.

Tell me more about this trip you’re on.

We’ve been doing this podcast for about a year and a half. It started because we did like literary events in Philadelphia. Some of the earlier episodes, it was just me and Maurice talking about books we read, but all these episodes we are doing now are interviews. We’ve interviewed like 18 different people so far this year, traveling all over the country for about a month.

There was obviously so much talk after the last election about men, and podcasts for men, and, like, Andrew Tate. Are you thinking about what you are doing in the context of that conversation?

I think our audience is everybody, you know. We get a lot of love from everyone. At first I was like this is corny to start a podcast, but I remember when all the Andrew Tate stuff was like really popular, and like my little brother, he’s a little bit younger than me, and he was telling me about it. He was like, “Bro, have you heard of this guy, Andrew Tate?” Not in like a positive way – but I was like, “Oh, this is really bad.”

Yeah. These manosphere influencers are funny to me because they pretend to act so “trad”, but really they are just being influencers, basically selling their body online, but then being like “fuck the man”, be like me and get rich outside of the system.

It’s kind of like the broken-clock is right twice a day thing. They’ll say things like, the economy is messed up. And if you’re a young man, you think, yeah, the economy is messed up, I can’t buy a house. Or if you’re living somewhere like where I’m from, you think, yeah, the economy is messed up. But then they’ll blame it on feminism or something.

If you actually listen to some of the stuff they say, it’s incoherent. But there’s almost a populism to it, except instead of “elect me and I’ll fix your problems,” which was sort of Trump’s thing, Andrew Tate’s version is “become part of my multi-level marketing scheme, and I’ll teach you how to be rich like me, and you’ll escape the matrix.”

Right, and lately, especially with all the conversation and billions being poured into the AI industry, I’m like, ok, so the state of the world we’ve decided we’re okay with is: either you become another Andrew Tate, or you spend your time watching Andrew Tate. Like, either you build a weird personal online brand, or you’re the eyeballs watching the content that makes it valuable for a brand sponsorship. It’s a really dumb matrix!

Yeah, and to some degree, we decided, but also, we didn’t really decide, right? We were just in San Francisco, driving around, and you see all these ads for these like AI companies that you and I have never heard of. Like a company to “make your AI more human.” These tech guys reshaped the economy, and even reshaped actually how capitalism like functions, right.

There’s this great book called Tear Gas and Twitter. It talks about how there was this real belief that like actually like these social media technologies, were actually this thing that was going to precipitate social change. That was this narrative for a long time in the 2010s, but at the end of the day these are ultimately like companies, they’re not responsible to their users, they’re responsible to their shareholders.

Yeah, and I guess business has probably always been a race to the bottom, chasing more and more efficiency. But I think the difference is that mindset has seeped into things that aren’t and shouldn’t be about efficiency. Like, suddenly making movies, or interacting with friends, is supposed to be efficient?

Yeah, we interviewed this sci-fi writer, Nick Mamatas. He was talking about how like there are these like kind of like weird cults in Silicon Valley that have these AI shirts and shoes that have computers in them too, so it’s supposed to make you like super efficient. It’s so weird and almost cyberpunk.

And I really do think some of these people actually believe that because they’re richer or smarter than everyone, or whatever — they get to decide everything for everybody.

Definitely. And the whole transhumanism movement that everyone from Bryan Johnson to Peter Thiel and to, like, the Kardashians is such a weird pursuit of complete like freedom and inhibition from any rules in this world that exists, on an economic level or but also on a physical level.

You had a piece where you talked about a line in a movie you watched — “the world’s already over.” I was interested in it because I think there’s been a lot of conversation about “collapse,” or the end of the world, and a sense of an end of progress. I just wanted to hear you say a bit more about you think about that conversation.

I think, for me, I’m always just like, what does it mean to say “oh, the world’s ending.” Because people have always sort of believed that. So I think it feels difficult for me to say we are in this moment that has a lot of crisis. And I think maybe the crisis is exacerbated by us looking at our phones all the time and thinking things are bad. We were in Minneapolis, which recently had these ICE incursions — they were pulling people off the streets. And we met some people who knew some of the people that got killed, or had friends who were there when people got shot, and were involved in some of the anti-ICE stuff. That feels like a crisis. But also, you get to Minneapolis and you’re like, oh, it’s just a city, people just hang out. So I think that’s the thing — in the midst of crisis, in the midst of the world ending, life continues. Life does just literally continue.

There’s also sort of a tendency on the left that’s like, “we need to imagine a new world”, and sometimes that feels a little….I was talking to my brother, he worked 72 hours last week, and I don’t know if he needs to be imagining a new world. That feels a little idealistic, maybe.

Right, and kind of means nothing.

Yeah, man, I’m not trying to get too political. I try not to talk too politically on the internet because I think it’s not useful most of the time. But there is a way in which there’s this leftist tendency that’s very optimistic, like, oh, things are going to be beautiful. I think I’m very much, we are where we are, and people are going to do what they’re going to do, and hopefully we can have some social movements that change things. Does this make sense?

Yeah one thousand percent. Life continues.

Where else are your stops on this trip, and what’s the vibe so far? Whats your grand take on America?

So we went from Philly to DC, DC to Chicago, Chicago to Memphis, Memphis to New Orleans, New Orleans to Houston, Houston to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to the Bay Area, Bay Area to Portland. I got sick in Portland, so we weren’t able to see my cousins. Portland to Twin Cities. Then we’re going to go, probably see my parents in Rockford, maybe go to Chicago for a couple days, and we’re going to go back to Philly.

Yeah, I mean, you know, like the country is multicultural, and that’s not going away. Suburbanization is like a real thing. A lot of major American cities are just essentially big suburbs. And people are really struggling, and I think also are incoherent politically.

I don’t think I’ve found the soul of America quite yet. But it’s a strange place. The country is just big, man. It’s big and a lot of people with really different, different ideas. I think it’s like it’s less coherent politically, than people want it to be. People on Substack always are like, oh, the working class wants XYZ. I’m like, you don’t know anything about the working class. The working class wants a bunch of different things.

Yeah, it’s true. Obviously the Democrats lost the working class, and Trump is actively losing them too so I think people are just picking and choosing what makes sense to them rather than feeling allegiance to a party identity.

Yeah. It’s also that the subjectivities are so different, right? There’s often this idea that if we just stop talking about all this “woke gay stuff”, the working class would be with us. I’m like, you’ve never met some gay working class people — really?

Or a straight working class dude who really doesn’t give a shit.

Yeah totally. There’s this novelist on Substack, who’s been on this tear the last couple days about the socialist magazines in New York, saying all these socialists are elitist. You’re mad because you met a socialist who was a millionaire once. Bro, you’ve never been to my hometown, we’ve got anarchists with felonies.

Right, and the most stringent leftists I’ve ever met are like radical Catholic nuns.

Bro, this is what I’m saying. It’s really incoherent. There’s this idea that the socialist-elitist thing is real, and those people do exist, but I think it’s really easy to get caught up in these scenes where you only think one thing. I sound corny saying this, but I feel like — you need to talk to people, we need to have real conversations in America because you realize there are so many different perspectives across the country.

To act as if people are just these abstractions is very silly.