Palladium’s publication frequency has recently been inconsistent, with the most current article in the most recent issue dating back to 2022. Its purpose should be to provide a reliable platform for uniting thinkers and policy innovators from key hubs like San Francisco, Austin, NYC, and the global digital nomad community. These individuals, despite their geographic and cultural differences, share a need for a space to exchange and develop ideas that address the challenges of governance and our situation. If groups begin to splinter due to dissatisfaction, they are unlikely to cooperate and network effectively in the real world.
Readers are eager to engage with new ideas on pressing topics such as H1B visas, industrial policy, literacy rates, and population decline.
Whatever opinions exist about Palladium’s social scene or associated events, infighting only undermines the spread of powerful ideas and the ability to wield real-world power. To fulfill its purpose, Palladium must prioritize its role as a mechanism for connecting diverse thinkers and informing readers.
To address this, Palladium would benefit from a structured editorial and publication schedule to ensure that ideas are shared consistently and remain timely. Additionally, collaboration with other magazines (IM1776, Compact, perhaps even debates with Jacobian writers) and networks with similar missions and social ecosystems could strengthen its ability to drive meaningful change. There is no room for cliques or unnecessary distractions when the mission at hand is serious and carries real-world consequences.
You’re not wrong. Palladium could do much to drive the conversation especially in the new political climate. Palladium has probably gained in influence potential. But ultimately it’s on Samo these days. If you have good ideas, talk to him. If you could do a great job as an editor, talk to Samo and the founders. If no one is able and willing, then what can be done?
Its worth considering the new role and strategy of palladium in the new climate. As i understood it, Palladium was the vanguard of making it possible for far right intellectualism to happen in public with respectable legitimacy, in exchange for being very subtle about this and not rocking the boat, and combining this with quality reporting and aesthetics. That goal has basically been achieved. The vibes in parties in the last couple months (and indeed last year or two) have been electric. The overton window is totally broken. So in that sense, the careful discipline of old Palladium is no longer needed. Time for a new strategy.
One problem with old palladium was it aspired to advise statecraft but it was always really unclear who that audience could possibly be. The system was sclerotic and not listening, and the dynamic thinkers were out of power. Its attempts to give good statecraft advice to people who werent listening or had no power was kindof incoherent. But the implied gamble has also paid off: we now have a regime that is much much closer to dynamic palladium readers being directly in power, and not just in DC. There is a political subject to be advised now, that needs its perspective formed. We are in the early stages of a revolution sweeping the western world, and Palladium is near the front of that. Palladium’s job is to now speak more loudly and clearly and directly to and for the coming regime. Or thats one view.
But there’s a more general question here: how much effort is a magazine worth these days? Magazines are driven by the zeal of editors and writers and the support of patrons. Should i put my sweat or money into making a magazine happen? Here are my reasons for not doing so:
A magazine is way more work than anyone seems to estimate from the outside. Its a hard and constant battle to drive the editorial machine. And expensive. The impact and glory in exchange is very hard to estimate, comes years later if at all. Maybe palladium accomplished its mission, maybe it just predicted the wave. And it takes more than just dedicated editors and patrons, you also need a community of writers willing to pour labor into the cause with the same lack of direct reward. Again people do not appreciate how hard it is to write 4000 words of engaging high quality novel observations. You simply could not pay people enough to do it. It works only when you have a live scene of very smart people who want to spit these things at each other for fun, but its a hard balance to keep the discipline of an editorial strategy and the energy of a scene. In my experience a magazine cannot sustain a scene, only empower it.
So lets back up and look at our goals. We want a platform where the intellectuals of a new regime can form their perspective and ideas against each other in a way thats fun and engaging, has editorial discipline that doesnt get in the way but just curates the best as a sort of value-add post-hoc. It shouldnt require much professional oversight at all, but should make heavy use of the energy of the participants to drive things. It should be the kind of thing people could have fun spending all day engaging with, like social media. Because of its politically sensitive subject matter, it should protect the identity of participants without sacrificing quality. Instead of publishing 4000 words, it should be possible to blast out an entry in half an hour on a phone, more like 4000 characters. It should be the kind of thing that can sustain a scene, like a forum. A forum for curated anonymous discussion of political philosophy. Why does that sound familiar?
Whatever Palladium was or should be in the future won’t be solved publishing articles from 2020, putting e-girls on the frontpage or brining Indians “writers.”
>>2312 OP it sounds like you should write a Palladium article on "pressing topics such as H1B visas, industrial policy, literacy rates, [or] population decline." As >>2315 suggests, these things don't grow on trees, and like any magazine Palladium is bottlenecked by quality submissions. I don't know what cliques and infighting you're referring to, but I'm confident it's less important than good writing about important subjects.
>>2319 I have heard any articles have been submitted but have yet to be reviewed or published. Additionally, a few people I know have offered to contribute by helping edit.
I liked the idea that someone articulated once that Palladium articles should be written to a young American Napoleon. I liked the idea that this mythical figure was reading exhortations to explore the stars, learning about North Korean ecofascism, and learning from Vo Nguyen Giap. If I had to attempt to sum up the secret to the formula, and describe what set it apart from competitors, it might have been the invitation to philosophize beyond the American ideological spectrum.
I imagine it's hard to match up ideologically-suspect friends with reliable funding for an English-language publication.
>>2339 Yeah palladium tried to do the thing that isnt allowed in the anglosphere, which is give the young prince a truly liberal education, which is to say an education that liberates from prevailing ideology. Its true there isnt a huge amount of money for this. But there isnt none either. The hard part is writing the stuff. There are very few who can do it and it takes a ton of work.
It's now clear that the momentum is no longer at Palladium. Alot of great work was done, but prestigemaxxing got the best of the project in the end. Ultimately it filled it's role as a blueprint for higher energy projects such as IM-1776, New Founding, etc... where I get a sense of a deeper conviction and a willingness to put up a fight.
New times are upon us. We spent a decade refining ideas. It's now time to put them into practice.
Anyone here know the IM-1776 guys or have experience working with them? (There seemed to be some weird friction between them and REN a while back that I didn't quite get.)
>>2343 Ive spoken to Mark occasionally. He seems cool. Good editor, hard worker. He did a good job with Avetis’ (Palladium writer) “Virtue of Cruelty”.
I understand of course that prestige is ultimately a lagging or sometimes even bearish indicator of real intellectual vitality and liveliness so to speak, but I wouldn't be so quick to say that Palladium Mag has lost momentum. Just anecdotally, if you talk to non-leftist Stanford college students at random and namedrop Palladium you'll find that they're already plugged into this sphere - I highly doubt this was the case 12 or 24 months ago.
First, I would like to thank the Founders of Palladium and its predecessor publications. The transition from far outside the Overton window to Muscular Centrism was masterful and would have failed in the hands of almost anyone else.
Second, as someone who wrote for Palladium, I can think of no better venue to showcase my ideas, and the editing that went into the piece turned it into a Mohs 10 essay.
Third, here is where I see a major challenge. When you have high-performing individuals, assuming they have no major personality issues, they tend to advance in the real world. 10 years ago I might have had a job that I could more or less use as a platform to conduct research for Palladium on company time. 5 years ago, I had to work at my job, but outside my job, I could spend the rest of the week doing research and writing. Now, I've had a modicum of professional success, and my ability to drop everything and write a timely, well-researched article has fallen dramatically. I'm not alone, to the extent that early Palladium attracted high quality writers, many of those same writers today can't write articles for fun as easily given their opportunity cost.
The solution is obviously to have a farm team of up-and-coming writers to replace the writers who age out, but that's FAR easier said than done.
The crux of the current issue posed by the strain of thought (if it can be even described as that) posed by Sami’s manhandling of Palladium is that to foreign readers, meaning anyone who isn’t plugged into X or is part of the Bay Area AI-grift shtetl, Palladium’s output does not make sense anymore.
The degree of interesting governance related pieces with an esoteric, hard right wing contrarian takes being put has dwindled close to nothing. As I see it there is an increasing amount of disparate articles touching anything but governance itself, with various turbo-autistic delvings into things ranging from farming to economics to maritime topics that bear no relation if taken from a meta-perspective. In addition, there is the problem posed by the writer choices as well. If this is to be a esoterically hard right reactionary magazine; for the love of God don’t start publishing women en masse and making all your social events about the number of Stockholm 5s and 6s you’re able to get into your event (with the consequent Samo Balkan Amsterdam red light district pimp group photo) that a lot of older readers and such will be incredibly turned off seeing on X or other socials. Pretty girls are anywhere btw, no need to overemphasize it nor is such a serious magazine supposed to be catering to modern Lou Salome thots.
On top of the early, high-quality output covering China and more unique aspects of 20th century history; there has been little effort to try touch upon examples of modern reactionary statecraft whether in the SEA or GCC regions, nor have the few attempts to cover states showed any deep immersion into the subject matter itself. Indulging X right wing trends will always make you appear disorganized and ridiculous globally especially if there is a concerted effort to appear sophisticated and high class whether through the print editions or the social events themselves.
I really liked what the initial group of Palladium founders and writers built. Yet; reflecting on the past 12-30 months starting with the nude Grimes print issue, I have to say something is currently not right for a magazine that many once enjoyed reading and greatly anticipated all new pieces that were published. Quo vadis?
>>4723 This is too pessimistic, then too cruel. I wonder if I'm misunderstanding. It doesn't seem to have been launched as an "esoterically hard right reactionary magazine." The orientation toward "governance futurism," the figures and ideas covered early on, and the writers selected for the first issues suggest that not to be the case. Is Samo Burja trying to take it in that direction? I can't tell.
I must admit that I don't understand the preoccupation with "long history," nor how it might help us to develop novel conceptions of progress and technology. Is that something interesting to people in the Bay Area?
>turbo-autistic delvings into things from farming to economics to maritime topics >I must admit that I don't understand the preoccupation with "long history," nor how it might help us to develop novel conceptions of progress and technology
I have to be honest, I think it would be best if whiny idiots like you two just didn't read Palladium at all and, more importantly, stopped pretending like you do and are serious stakeholders in Palladium, since you clearly are not. I'm sure this post will be mass-downvoted as usual thanks to Wolf's autistic attempt to improve on chan technology, but there is really nothing more honest and useful to be said to posters who clearly do not read anything, have limited mental faculties even if they did, and get salty at the idea that someone, somewhere is at a party with biological females.
As usual it seems Palladium's supposed readers and stakeholders have no interest whatsoever in (a) donating money to Palladium (b) writing interesting articles on governance for Palladium or even (c) actually reading Palladium. However there is much interest in (a) concern-trolling and complaining about imagined PR problems relating to "older readers and such" (???) or "indulging X right wing trends" (b) complaining you don't understand concepts you haven't bothered to even read. Indeed, why would Palladium publish autistic delvings into economics or "maritime topics"? What relevance could economics have to modern governance? What's the preoccupation with "long history"? How does that help us understand human progress? Using all my brainpower I just cannot figure it out. Does this appeal to "Bay Area people"? Why would Palladium want to appeal to "Bay Area AI grifters"? Why is Palladium having nude celebrities in the magazine? Why not serious photos of Curtis Yarvin's potbelly, for example? Or perhaps some autistic's ugly beard? Better yet, no photos at all? In fact, why publish a magazine in the first place? Or even have a website? Palladium should be appealing to foreign non-American old people who aren't on X and who seethe every time they see a photo of a woman at a party. Yes, that's it. If Palladium did that, everything would be great.
Please, genuinely, shut the fuck up. Your posts are so stupid and useless they deserve nothing but contempt. inb4 downvoted to oblivion, fuck all of you. Righteous mockery deserves to be at the top of the thread.
As the comment made is done by a collective of readers and former OG writers of Palladium, there is no reason to expect and yap that we are not serious people.
Palladium, until the start of the increasing round of skimpy articles and Grimes/techno AI grift being pushed, was a genuinely laudable magazine and as always many congratulations to its founders for what they built within a few years.
When it comes to writing for Palladium, we know too many pitches get rejected. With regard to reading Palladium, we still do despite the fall in quality just out curiosity and respect to its former standing. In terms of concern-trolling, there is no trolling due to the established fact that its reach beyond the Bay Area has stagnated very much which is a mixture of its change of tone within its media positioning and incessant Samo shilling. And with regard to the said concepts in some articles, you do not disagree with our point that they’re being put out as part of a highly disorganized strategy.
About Grimes being shown in the nude, it should be obvious why that is a problem with such high-brow admirers like yourself. If you want to really be a serious magazine with nude artistic photography, at least get a proper VS Secret bunny and not Elon’s love of his life.
Personally, I started reading the magazine for the practical statecraft case studies and material analysis, not Wolf pontificating for the 100th time on how AI will kill us all or Landian bullshit about gnon; or as of last night - how Palladium launched the print renaissance.
In terms of the so-called seething “every time they see a photo of a woman at a party. Yes, that's it. If Palladium did that, everything would be great.”, you hilariously avoid my main point - when you make a concerted effort to show off the Stockholm 5s (SF 9s and 10s allegedly) in the Samo Balkan pimp and Palladium Party photos, you instinctively show to all viewers certain aspects of one’s childhood that quite possibly the current manager of Palladium faced with regard to women. Once or twice it may be great or funny, but after two years of this it becomes easy to call.
Our only wish is that Palladium may be recouped by its founders with a focus on the same magic that made it worth reading and tracking for its new articles as it was until 2023. No female writers, no X trending slop, with a concerted effort to organize the publications as part of a grander strategy and meta-philosophy that was once quintessentially Palladium.
Deport Samo back to Slovenia, Make America Great Again
>>4725 I was myself trying in a more oblique way to call him a whiny idiot... And the question about "long history" was intended to be productive, or to steer things away from mindless arguments about the unwillingness of Palladium at present to promote a particular ideology, or lady writers, or photoshoots (much of the greatest contemporary American literature—and the stuff that people actually read—came packaged with spreads of minor starlets selected by obnoxious editors).
I think the promotional theatrics are fine, sometimes cool, and not carried out particularly recklessly. Anyway, for better or worse, they are necessary. This thread often sounds more like the struggles at Asama-Sanso than discussion of editorial direction for a magazine for well-to-do millennial intellectuals. A revolution is a dinner party.
>>4731 I want to read about Africa and South Asia, but also maybe deep American local politics. I want philosophy concealed in reportage. Probably not a marketable idea.
I, as an occasional reader don't mind that Palladium has changed. It now is Samo's magazine, reflecting his eclectic interests, his aesthetic and the perspectives of his social milieu (right wing tpot). He spends his own time and money on this endeavor so it's his prerogative. I don't think this is an improvement per se, but I don't think he has some duty to maintain the initial tone. On the contrary, I think he should lean in.
>>4731 1) I wanna read an article taking Chinese industrialism seriously and proposing that Western industrialization requires a unified trading bloc btw Japan/Korea/EU/US. 2) Asking interesting 'right wing tpot' thinkers to write could be interesting. Maybe its been done but I quite like Richard Ngo, Conrad Bastable, Dom Cummings for example. 3) Something about DOGE is probably appropriate. 4) Something about gerontocracy & luxury boomer communism is probably appropriate. 5) Maybe a right wing response to yimby and anti car new urbanism e.g. 'sf 10x'. (p.s. abolish all speed limits) 6) probably already planned - but an edition dedicated to celebrating america for the upcoming year.
