Basement Whatever

Most people don’t choose their political beliefs. They inherit them from their town, their church, their family, and their peer group. That inheritance used to come with a useful constraint: local accountability. You lived near the people you disagreed with. Your beliefs had to survive contact with reality.

The internet broke that. Now people are constantly bombarded with political beliefs from all over the place. The internet replaced your actual neighbors with an algorithmically curated feed optimized to keep you engaged.

Most political identity today is based on this barrage of information, and people struggle to articulate their beliefs as a result. Local political beliefs get tested through action at the local level. Almost nothing changes based on political beliefs inherited from the news firehose. This means it’s hard to filter through everything coming at you to determine where you stand.

Here’s the thing though: your reading behavior is harder to fake than your stated beliefs. What you’re reading at 11pm, alone, with no audience, is where your actual politics live. It’s easy to analyze this data with AI, and this produces a sense of calm because it becomes easier to filter the barrage of news.

The Workflow

• You need the following tools to make this work: Claude Cowork, Obsidian, and Obsidian Web Clipper (or any clipping tool of your choice).
• Clip everything that makes you stop. The friction of clipping is low. The result over months is an honest map of what actually engages you.
• Process clips into permanent notes. Periodically point Claude Cowork at your clips. Ask it to process these into atomic notes (one idea per note). Ask it to create links between notes. This becomes a library of what is important to you.
• Point Claude Cowork at your atomic notes. 1/ Ask it to find patterns you might not have thought about. 2/ Ask it to derive your political orientation from the notes rather than from your stated identity. 3/ Ask it for 3-5 affirmative bullet points of what you believe.
• Create a steering file. After you’ve worked out the right questions to produce accurate analysis, ask Claude to create a steering file. This file contains the instructions, so you can run this analysis over and over as you add more content.

Why This Works

It’s hard to determine political thinking when you’re constantly blasted with everyone’s opinions. But you can create a private, audience-free record of what you actually engage with and use that as raw material for a more honest self-assessment.

Your Obsidian vault is that record. The steering file turns a one-time analysis into a running conversation with your own intellectual development.

News is designed to get your attention and convert you to one of two political parties. You are allowed to reject this system. There are hundreds of political orientations, and you’re allowed to choose the one that works for you.  

Your goal isn’t a label. In fact, you want to get away from labels. You want to move toward a position you’ve earned, that has nuance that matters to you.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.