Making the Media Great Again
Arena Magazine and the future of American media
Dear Readers,
The most basic instinct of an American entrepreneur is that when something is broken, rather than complaining, you need to build something new. And there is a lot that is broken, like our media. In early 2024, I started talking with a younger colleague, Max Meyer, about some ideas to fight back…
Out of those discussions, Arena Magazine was born: a bold voice for American technologists, capitalists, and patriots in the form of a high-end print magazine. Yesterday, Arena announced its seventh issue. It now has thousands of subscribers and is sold in Barnes & Noble throughout the US. Max told me that the latest print run of magazines used over 10,000 pounds of paper.
I’m very proud to be a supporter of Arena, and I encourage you to be, as well. You can subscribe for your home or your office.
At a time when the legacy media is full of negativity and ugliness, Arena is daring to be both optimistic and beautiful at the same time. Technology and entrepreneurship are so important to the success of the USA in the 21st century, and our mainstream media is totally poisoned against them.
If you’re anything like me, you remember the great magazines we had a generation ago in the technology space. Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, and even Wired used to be awesome. They used to celebrate Americans who were trying to do hard things. To say that they have gone in another direction would be a serious understatement.
Restoring that legacy — bold optimism, celebrating the builders — is the mission of Arena. It’s why I and so many other leaders in the innovation world are proud supporters. We need great media institutions again.
If you want to check out Arena, start with some of the recent articles. Here are two that I enjoyed recently, including from my friend Judge Glock on the wild history of Wall Street in the 1980s, or another about the last 250 years of American technological history. Arena has a new free Substack newsletter (link below). And if you want to get the print magazines, subscribe here.
The progress has been inspiring over the last two years, and as more people wake up to the need for optimistic, beautiful media, Arena is going to continue to grow and inspire patriotic Americans.
Joe
Pirate Wires.
You know, Joe, I might just be mishearing you, but what you're describing is basically reactionary modernism. It played a pretty prominent role in National Socialism, with its simultaneous embrace of modernity through technological progress and a rejection of some of the more alienating features of the modern world. I tend to think you are smart enough to identify the clear similarities. Which poses the awkward question of why you would completely ignore the very obvious presence of Nazi ideological material…. I would not be so bold as to say that there are many respected scholars in international relations who would take the position that the state of Israel, in its current manic campaign of assassination and destruction in the region, is showing itself to be cut from the same cloth as its Nazi progenitors. Or at least it aspires to. Another thing which I think is related: you have this obsession with hunting and finding communist cells that apparently are bent on infiltrating your university.
My only question is, if these enemies of free society are so dangerous and, presumably, you, with the money you have and the influence you wield, would be well positioned to contest them, you choose to make a conscious choice not to do that. The only conclusion I can draw is that, or one of two conclusions:
1. You don't even believe what you're saying, because it's somewhat absurd.
2. If McCarthy was the paranoid tendency of American politics to reassert itself, you are like McCarthy but someone who's been in and out of crystal meth anonymous for, give or take, ten years.
In either case, you either conclude that you are intentionally against and stupid, or else that you are cynically so. Either way, it's not a great look for a student of the great philosopher. Peace be upon him, Peter Thiel.