Taylor Lorenz Derangement Syndrome

The tireless efforts of powerful men to destroy one woman for sport should alarm us all

I stumbled into one of the most deranged and sociopathic conspiracies I’ve ever encountered in all my time writing about oligarchs and I discovered it purely because I’m having some trouble figuring out why I’m supposed to hate Taylor Lorenz.

The blockbuster article everyone was talking about recently was Ben Smith’s piece for Semafor about high-level right-wing influencers and their secret group chats. I’m less scandalized by the group chats thing than I think a lot of people are because it kind of just sounds like reindeer games to me. The smoking rooms and brandy snifters swapped out for the convenience of conspiring from the toilet. One phrase from the article did stand out for me in particular: the fact that these people all have a “particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz.”

I only ever heard of Lorenz for the first time within the past couple of years but the general sort of vibe is that this is somebody who We Don’t Like.

This isn’t Cancellation. There is, it feels, a lower tier of notoriety that doesn’t rise to the level of being cancelled but still hangs in the air somehow. Taylor Lorenz is a successful writer with plenty of industry clout, her subscription numbers indicate she can do this relatively comfortably without too many side-gigs. There’s a spectrum of human suspicion along which you might say that someone isn’t blacklisted but they are greylisted.

The question of why isn’t easy to answer.

There isn’t anything I’ve ever seen about Taylor Lorenz that particularly bothers me. She appears to be either a democratic socialist or a social democrat, which is roughly what I think I am. She writes about online pop culture, which can get cringy but it’s good to document it. She seems, from my perspective, like a nice person.

Ok!

Yet when the Substack podcast interviewed Lorenz in 2023 the community from seemingly all over the political spectrum erupted in fierce outrage. For context, this episode aired directly after the Richard Hanania interview, after he’d been busted writing white supremacist material a few years back. People thought promoting Lorenz was just as bad.

Substack CEO Chris Best was frustrated with “guilt by conversation,” like he was bothered that people might think he’s as bad as Taylor Lorenz. Here he is telling either a current or recovering white nationalist (depending on what level of repentance you believe from Hanania) that he’d be bothered by that.

It’s easy to just go with the grain, here, especially when it’s bipartisan. I don’t know who everyone on the internet is. I’ll admit that, in the short time that I’ve known of the existence of Taylor Lorenz, I’ve assumed that she’s kind of a shit person and have treated her accordingly. Sometimes you just go where the water flows.

So, what if the water is polluted?

Here’s where I believe that the general bad vibe that people get from Lorenz is the result of a creeping miasma that’s bled into the social media environment through the deliberate efforts of some of the most powerful men on the planet. It’s because it’s fun to try to utterly destroy somebody. This is what men bored with their wealth do for sport.

Sometimes I wonder if I actually believe in the existence of evil, as a concept, and then I come across something like this.

I’ll follow people I don’t agree with on social media to get diverse points of view. Sometimes I’ll follow people I strongly disagree with if they’re in good faith, just to get to know their arguments.

I also know the rules. On a platform where follows are public, you can’t follow blacklisted people. Not even just to keep abreast of what your ideological enemies are saying. People write bots to auto-curate their feeds by tracing follower connections. On Bluesky, if I followed someone like Jesse Singal even just to keep tabs on his boneheaded social experiments it would trigger a monkey’s paw nightmare, activating bots that would auto-block me from 70% of the accounts on the website and reduce my entire social media experience forever into one endless stream of Singal hotboxing his own farts. Follows, like it or not, are considered endorsements.

For the most part, it’s safe to follow greylisted people. I follow Will Stancil. I follow Bob Chipman. And I follow Taylor Lorenz.

I’m having some trouble figuring out why I’m supposed to hate Taylor Lorenz.

Best I can tell, this all started in early 2021 when she wrongly accused evil egg-themed venture capitalist supervillain Marc Andreessen of saying the R-word.

First things first: Who gives a shit?

Second things second: It was actually Ben Horowitz, Andreessen’s business partner, who said the word, which means that her mistake was confusing the names of these two men:

Pam from The Office meme template: "They're the same picture"

Third things fucking third:

I guarantee that neither Andreessen, Horowitz, nor Fox News are upset that Taylor Lorenz called them out for saying the R-word. They use that word all the time and take it as a point of pride that they use it. They draw attention to it because it’s a virtue signal.

The only thing that actually stuck in their craw was that a woman spoke when not spoken to. What offended them was audacity. What followed this one slight has been one of the most unceasing and merciless multi-year projects to psychologically destroy a single human being that I’ve ever seen, driven by Andreessen, one of the worst human beings alive. Now we know, per the Semafor article, how it’s co-ordinated.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before, of course, and the Gamergate lunacy of 2014-2015 is the example that textbooks will record. That, too, was driven in secret by wealthy and powerful people—Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. The difference is that the women at the centre of Gamergate were incidental to Bannon and Mercer’s actual project, which was to weaponize young male rage for the Trump campaign.

Andreessen’s project in this case doesn’t seem to be political. He just wants to destroy a person to know that he can. It’s a combination of evil and mental illness and I don’t know what the ratio is.

Everyone on the spectrum of reactionary to far-right public figures from Glenn Greenwald to Tucker Carlson has directed the attention of their sycophantic underlings and fanbases to Taylor Lorenz at some point or another. Each time it comes off as a tactical play in a type of game. It’s always a game, these things. The goal: Get her to mention the harassment. If she does, then scale it up.

And to her credit, she doesn’t mention it very often. The number one answer people give about why they hate Taylor Lorenz—that she won’t shut up about her harassment—doesn’t even hold true. She used to, when it was brand new, but she knows the rules of this game now. Her supposed victim complex has become part of the mythology.

Probably the only major complaint against Taylor Lorenz that I can’t trace directly back to Marc Andreessen’s psychotic grudge is the fact that Lorenz is responsible for the scoop that revealed the identity of the notorious social media account LibsOfTiktok as the far-right lunatic Chaya Raichik. Lorenz’s enemies have called this doxxing. Ironically on two accounts, LibsOfTiktok’s entire schtick was doxxing, and Raichik’s identity reveal has rocketed her, personally, to fame, riches, celebrity stardom, and her dream role in the Trump administration. So I guess maybe thanks are more in order here?

We have no way of knowing which of Lorenz’s biggest “critics” are part of a co-ordinated effort and which are simply caught in the thrall of it. But that is all part of the game, and the plan, and the obfuscation. It’s a social contagion. For all the people who ludicrously suggest that a strong objection to Donald Trump’s politics is a form of mental disorder, this is the real Derangement Syndrome. A broad and unspecific dislike of a person nobody has met for reasons nobody can articulate. A bandwagon harassment campaign to punish someone where their crime is “being harassed.” An ouroboros of bullshit.

This piece is not a defense of Taylor Lorenz or a call to arms for her; she does not know me and does not need me to defend her. She is doing well in the face of it, as Tucker so snidely points out, albeit intending it less as a criticism of her than a challenge for his followers. This is just a part of her life now. That it has to be, is what infuriates me.

Part of the toxicity of the community internet is that a large number of people don’t believe that psychological abuse is really a thing that exists at all. It’s a fact that people quite angrily remind me about every time I forget myself and bring up the topic of online harassment on social media. “Online bullying” is just words, which is speech, and speech is the golden calf that you dare not disrespect—my God-given right to follow you to every corner of the web for the rest of your life and bombard you with a witheringly ceaseless tirade of messages about how worthless and contemptible you are, and the rights of a thousand of my friends to do the same, and to poison the minds of everybody against you, outranks any claim of injury or offense you might make.

After all, you just have to log off. Log off from this machine that almost every aspect of modern society requires you to be permanently logged into now.

Oh, and make sure your whole family stays offline as well, because when you log off it’s only interpreted as a challenge. This is all a game, you see.

Of the three primary women targeted by Gamergate, only one of them—Brianna Wu—retains a high profile presence online, and this is mainly because the solution she settled upon wasn’t to beat them, but to join them. She now banters with the very men who once threw celebration livestreams every time she needed to flee her home and obscure her location. As a result she now engages in some of the same behaviours. Part of the abuse cycle, I suppose.

Ten years ago, just as now, the psychological terrorists (if you’ll forgive me that phrase—I know many won’t) knew that part of the greater strategy to destroy a person was to poison the entire environment around them. Create vague associations. It’s difficult to blacklist people, but with effort and numbers, they can be greylisted. As online as I’ve always been, I was never in the gaming community—the first thing I ever heard about Gamergate was a Facebook post by a staunchly leftist friend of mine stating simply that Zoe Quinn was a reprehensible human being. But she couldn’t really articulate why.

Above all we need to remember that these men consider themselves social engineers, and that is their playbook. They have all the time in the world and all the money in the world and they think this gives them all the influence in the world. If you ever find yourself feeling vague disdain for someone online but you can’t pinpoint any reason in particular, then it’s worth some inspection both outward and inward.

On a related note, I’m writing a book that’s largely about misogynistic hate mobs on the internet and it goes into a lot more detail about the themes of this article. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: