# Of Monsters and Men

**Published by:** [Pioneering Spirit](https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/)
**Published on:** 2026-05-08
**Categories:** weirding
**URL:** https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/of-monsters-and-men

## Content

Like all human stories, it began with a band. The Icelandic indie folk-pop band came together in Reykjavík after lead singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir decided to expand her solo project. They won a battle of the bands in Iceland, released their debut in 2011, and broke internationally in 2012 on the back of "Little Talks" -- a song about two voices calling to each other across some unspoken divide. I graduated college in 2010. The Great Financial Crisis had just finished detonating. The second Gulf War still smoldered. Afghanistan lingered in that particular way it would for another decade, chewing through the lives of people I knew. A friend of mine -- an immigrant who went off to dodge bullets in exchange for a green card -- missed the whole scarring hard-to-find-a-job period entirely, because he was on duty. Obama had arrived on a wave of something that called itself hope and changed into something else. The job market for new graduates was a specific kind of wasteland: beyond the headline economic numbers, big questions about the shape of the social contract were left lingering. A band called Of Monsters and Men still resonates for that moment. Not just because I enjoyed their songs or because the music was gloomy -- it wasn't, particularly -- but because the name told the truth. We were in a time of monsters. The line everyone knows goes roughly: the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born -- and in the chiaroscuro, the monsters appear. Gramsci wrote down that idea from a fascist prison in the 1930s. He meant it politically. But the logic is broader. Monsters are what you get in the interregnum, the space between world-orders, when the old rules have lost their authority and the new ones haven't arrived. They are not random. They are diagnostic. Each type names a specific fear the transition has made newly visible. The werewolf is not a foreign invasion. It is you, when the social scaffolding falls away. The fear it encodes is not of external attack but of internal collapse -- the loss of civility to something older and more primal. The internet has been running this experiment on us for thirty years. The early internet had a mythology of liberation -- anonymity as freedom, pseudonyms as protection. The keyboard let you say what you actually thought, or at least what you thought you thought, without the social friction of a face in the room. For a while this felt genuinely emancipatory. You could build an identity across years in a forum, a username with a reputation and a history, that was in some ways more considered and deliberate than the self you presented at work. People grew through these spaces, found communities they couldn't find locally, and evolved alongside their online personas in ways that were often quite real. But evolution does not always trend toward the better. The darker affordance was what happened when the social inhibition stripped away and nothing good emerged from underneath -- the harassment campaigns, the pile-ons, the slow discovery that quite a lot of people, given anonymity and an audience, will spend their leisure time being awful. The internet did not create this tendency. It just removed the friction that had previously made it expensive to act on. For most of the 2000s vast swaths of the mainstream could still look away. Online discourse was easy to dismiss as a sideshow -- the domain of basement dwellers and Reddit threads that the serious world didn't need to worry about. Then 2016 happened. An internet troll won the presidency of the United States. Venkatesh Rao, writing for the Atlantic that same year about the death of a gorilla named Harambe, noticed something precise: the meme that consumed that summer was "a medium of cultural evolution with no message, signifying nothing so much as its own virality." The internet had developed its own weather systems, its own pressure fronts, and they were now making landfall on the mainland of official reality. Then COVID arrived, and for a brief strange moment the werewolf was visible to everyone including themselves. The pandemic stripped the scaffolding in ways that were hard to prepare for. The commute disappeared. The office disappeared. The casual daily performances that regulate social behavior -- the small courtesies, the managed expressions, the shared physical space that reminds you other people are real -- all of it went away. What remained was the self at home, on a screen, in a room. For a good chunk of the population at least. Remote work dissolved the boundary between the digital self and the professional self. The feed became the first thing many people looked at in the morning and the last before sleep. The algorithm learned your shadow with all its warts and showed it back to you, accelerated and amplified. Some people discovered they liked the self that remained -- quieter, less performed. Some people discovered they did not. The pandemic surfaced the werewolf collectively: the hoarding and the mutual aid, the neighbor who turned out to be unexpectedly generous and the neighbor who turned out to be unexpectedly not. The institutional collapse in places where institutions had quietly been failing for years, now suddenly visible because the margin for error was gone. The internet COVID discourse -- the fights about masks, the conspiracy spirals, the genuine fear dressed up as contempt -- was the werewolf at scale, millions of shadow selves suddenly forced into the light, blinking and snarling. There was a strange honesty in it, not a pleasant honesty. But the werewolf question -- what am I actually like when nobody is watching, when the structures that keep me civil are under strain -- got interrogated more clearly than most people had ever wanted. The answer, for most of us, was: complicated. Capable of both. The werewolf and the person coexist, and the ratio depends on conditions that are more fragile than we'd like to admit. The song "Little Talks" is about two voices reaching for each other across a growing distance. One reassures, one doubts, and the distance between them is never quite named. Neither voice is wrong. That is the real texture of the werewolf -- not evil, not good, but this unresolved conversation between the social self and whatever is underneath it. The question is not how to eliminate the tension. It is how to keep the conversation going across the divide, at a human pace, with enough honesty to be worth the effort. The old world is dying. The new one is not yet named. The monsters are doing what monsters do in the interregnum -- making the old fears newly visible, which is both terrifying and genuinely useful.Images from the music video. The second one reminds me of the obelisk from 2001. "Little talks" while walking or sauntercastingMy ARGO co-founder Varun Adibhatla coined the term sauntercast -- a portmanteau of saunter and broadcast -- for something we have been experimenting with to encourage a more convivial web. The practice is simple: long-form voice memo walks, recorded while moving through the world and shared as a form of slow correspondence. You walk, you think aloud, you send it. The recipient listens while walking, thinks aloud, sends it back. There is no algorithm, no audience, no performance incentive. Just two people talking across distance at a human pace, the way people always have, now with a little technological assist. Bonus points: it helps navigate a lot of life logistical constraints and with staying in touch as we get older. A version of the little talks the song is about: voices calling to each other across the divide, neither certain what is on the other side, both deciding the conversation is worth having anyway.

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