Good evening, my fellow citizens.

Three decades ago, the creators of content were few and proud, toiling under the noble constraints of gatekeepers, editors, and that most ancient of traditions—actually needing to prove one’s worth. But today, my friends, we find ourselves at the mercy of a new and insidious force: the Analogy-Industrial Complex, a sprawling, self-perpetuating ecosystem where one man’s half-baked comparison is another man’s paid subscription.

In the councils of the thought-leadership elite, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Analogy-Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of intellectual mediocrity exists and will persist.

Every day, thousands—nay, millions—of individuals, once ordinary citizens, wake up to discover they have “a take.” With reckless abandon, they forge dubious historical parallels, likening the fall of Rome to their Uber driver’s bad attitude or claiming that the decline of jazz radio proves the death of the Western mind.

We face a grave moment, my friends, where Substack has enabled a proliferation of minds so free they need not be burdened by research, coherence, or the faintest notion of historical accuracy. Who needs expertise when you have a paywall? Who needs a publisher when you have a thousand fervent believers sending you $5 a month to confirm what they already think?

But the gravest threat, my fellow Americans, is not just the unchecked spread of these dubious think pieces but their alarming entanglement with the economy itself. We are building a world where GDP may no longer be measured in raw materials or even in clicks, but in the production of ever-more strained metaphors.

No longer do we produce steel, wheat, or even reality television. Instead, our greatest industry is the newsletter, where any man with a keyboard and an inflated sense of self can convince himself he is standing on the shoulders of Tocqueville, when in fact, he is merely riding shotgun with Malcolm Gladwell.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex is, after all, much like a kudzu vine—expanding unchecked, suffocating all other intellectual flora, and thriving best where nothing of real substance is left to grow. Or, if you prefer a more modern lens, it’s like an Amazon warehouse filled with takes instead of packages, each one delivered overnight with the speed of someone who read half a Wikipedia article and now considers themselves an authority.

But let’s not stop there. The Analogy-Industrial Complex is the algorithmic ouroboros, forever consuming its own tail in a feedback loop of diminishing insight. It’s a magician who keeps pulling the same rabbit out of the hat, insisting each time that it’s a brand-new trick. It’s an opium den for the overeducated but underemployed, a place where one can chase the next intellectual high by reframing the same five historical events to explain why vibes are now a legitimate economic indicator.

And, of course, like any self-sustaining ecosystem, it has its own natural predators. Just as the buffalo once had wolves, and the sea has sharks, so too does the Analogy-Industrial Complex have its critics—those rare voices who insist on boring, old-fashioned concepts like “evidence” or “historical accuracy.” But, much like a declining species in a mismanaged wildlife preserve, these critics are increasingly outnumbered by the ever-proliferating pseudo-intellectual influencers who can, with great confidence, explain why Ted Lasso is actually a perfect metaphor for 17th-century mercantilism.

And this is the danger, my fellow citizens. The machine no longer produces anything real; it simply feeds on itself. It is an infinite jest, a Wikipedia citation loop, a seminar where every speaker is quoting a speaker who is quoting a speaker who is quoting a speaker who misread the original source. It is the intellectual equivalent of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy—where, at some point, no one is quite sure what the original image was, but everyone agrees it was probably profound.

So what can we do? Is there an escape? Or are we, too, merely characters in an overextended analogy, doomed to wander this Substackian purgatory forever, searching for an original thought like medieval alchemists seeking gold?

I leave that question to you. But if you happen to come up with an answer, don’t forget to put it behind a paywall.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex isn’t just a self-replicating machine; it’s a hall of mirrors inside a snake eating its own tail inside a fractal where every iteration is a LinkedIn post about the fall of the Republic. It’s a funhouse where every door leads to another, slightly worse version of the same argument, until finally, you exit back where you started—but now there’s a paywall and a call to action.

To understand it, we must analogize the very act of analogy-making. It’s like a restaurant that serves only the menu, a cookbook that only describes other cookbooks, a recipe where the ingredients are other recipes. It is an industry built on the manufacture of metaphorical scaffolding, except no one remembers what the building was supposed to be. We are not constructing insights; we are endlessly refining the tools with which we might, someday, perhaps, in theory, construct them.

But the truth, my fellow citizens, is even worse. The Analogy-Industrial Complex is not just a self-licking ice cream cone; it is a self-licking ice cream cone that has written 3,000 words explaining why self-licking ice cream cones are a perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism. It is the intellectual equivalent of an Escher staircase where every step is a TED Talk about how Escher staircases symbolize the paradox of modernity. It is the content economy’s perpetual motion machine, powered only by confidence, midwit energy, and the inability to let an idea die in peace.

And so we must ask: is there an escape? Or are we merely trapped inside an analogy for the trap of analogies, endlessly layering meaning upon meaning until all meaning collapses under the weight of its own self-referential cleverness? Are we just passengers on a Möbius strip of overthought, desperately searching for an exit that turns out to be another newsletter?

Perhaps we are. Perhaps, in the end, all we can do is embrace it. Perhaps, my fellow citizens, we must become the thing we fear most: the people who, after all this, still hit “Publish.”