The Monday Column, April 7, 2025

Notes on William Banks, Matan Even, and the appeal of fiction.

BUSHWICK, NY — It’s impossible to know anything, really. At least, that’s how it feels.

Maybe before the internet, it was easier. It wouldn’t have been unusual to have a basic understanding of how a landline worked, or a small engine. Watching the news, you’d engage with some widely recognized notion of truth, of how the world worked.

Even as dial-up internet arrived, I remember the sense that—while this was indeed some magical feat that allowed us access to rare corners of the Earth as well as the lesser traveled corners of anonymous minds—we all had a basic understanding of what was happening. Maybe this sense was helped along by the whistles, chirps, and screeches of the modem, the way you had to choose between using the phone and the internet: the feeling that you were still dealing with a somewhat cumbersome machine that was engaged in some clearly tangible process.

Now, obviously, things are not so simple. I don’t know how a cell phone works, don’t know the laws governing web 3.0 or the cloud or B2B SaaS. But I also, in a more encompassing sense, don’t know how anything works. Every theory, hypothesis, framework, and fact feels contestable.

It appears a futile task to try and grasp an understanding of the immaterial and algorithmic texture of our lives. One must instead submit to it. There are no comprehensive systems. If one hopes to achieve fluency in the zeitgeist, one must accept this alienation from meaning.

Is this why we’re all so desperate to throw ourselves into the fictional?

~

A few years ago, my roommate John joined a cult. This was when we lived in Bushwick in the pizza shaped building across the street from Birdy’s.

John had set up a meeting with a local comic named William Banks to see about working on a project together.

He’s got this thing called Car World that we’re going to talk about, John told me. It’s this elaborate, kind of, I don’t know, world building slash performance art slash interactive comedy project. I don’t know man. I’m so excited.

John met William at Birdy’s for an afternoon beer. I stayed home.

How’d it go? I asked John a couple hours later when he returned from the meeting.

It was insane, John said, his eyes glowing wide. He basically unflinchingly told me about being taken to another planet called Car World and how he had sex with this giant worm named Quuarex and now he’s the savior of Car World and he needs a certain number of apostles in order for the portal to be opened up back to that world, where he needs to go to save everyone who’s now enslaved and stuck there.

Like, this is all a joke?

I mean, dude, he was dead serious. And I fucking love that. I agreed to be his apostle.

What does that mean?

At their next ceremony, William will publicly name me as his apostle, and I’ll get a tattoo of William’s face on my arm.

What?

I know, I know. It sounds crazy, but I think he’s a genius.

William’s fervor for the fiction he’d created to live within swept John off his feet. John is now an apostle and has a tattoo of William’s face on his arm.

~

About a year ago, this same William Banks was arrested in Connecticut for stealing pro-Israel signs off a lawn and throwing them in the trash. The incident was featured on the local news and William began to document the saga on his social media. He posted pictures of himself attending court, outside the courthouse with his lawyer, and so on and so on. It culminated in the admission that he had lost his case and would be spending eight months in a Connecticut prison. William then, capitalizing off his newfound criminality, organized a farewell tour complete with a going away party in Manhattan, after which he went directly to jail to check himself in.

Over the next four months, in a series of steadily flowing, grainy and apparently candid videos, William documented his jail experience. There was his bunkmate, the taciturn and skeptical Ant who taught William about the Koran. There were the white atheists who beat up William and then later fell under his sway. Sometimes William was filming and other times it seemed he had convinced one of his cellmates to hold the phone. Over the course of these months, there seemed to be a genuine thawing of relations between William and his cohorts, some kind of deepening friendship. Then one day, remarkably, a video appeared in which his jail mates were calling him White Moses. And White Moses was talking about leading them to freedom through a hole in the fence of the prison yard.

I was rapt, along with thousands of others who were piling themselves into one of the two camps: believers or non-believers. The believers left comments of encouragement on these videos. They praised William’s idiosyncratic honesty and integrity. The non-believers said the whole thing was a deeply offensive sham that made light of the plight of actually incarcerated folks.

I was a believer. How else to explain what I was seeing?

Is William okay? I messaged John after watching one video in which William was pushed into a prison squabble, his forearms and fists awkwardly flailing about, unsuccessfully parrying the punches flying toward him.

Yeah, it’s crazy though. I’ve seen all the videos, John replied.

The next thing I saw was William escaping from prison through a gap in the fence. Then sleeping in a gas station bathroom. Then getting picked up on the road by a woman he seemed to hit it off with. Then they were dating. Then William was having a homecoming party in the city. Then he was being arrested again.

Then New York magazine published an expose about how the whole saga was fake. An elaborate stunt. Except for that last arrest—that was real.

What had this been, an insulting bit that went on too long or an ingenious piece of performance art pushing the limits of immersive storytelling? Perhaps both?

So you knew it was fake all along? I asked John.

Yeah, sorry about lying at first, John said. They rented out a whole jail facility in Florida and filmed all the videos over one weekend.

~

Lately, between the hours of about 11pm and 1am, I’ve been getting sucked into Matan Even’s Youtube videos. He’s a 17-year-old kid who speaks in a severe Israeli/Slavvic-like accent and runs a talk show that feels nearly like the Eric Andre show with hints of the Colbert Report but completely on its own level. The character that Matan puts on is obsessed with being a “straightforward white man.” He hates immigrants, loves Trump, thinks something needs to be done about the blacks, the gays, the homeless. He’s a caricature of a red-pilled-based-incel-Groyper. But maybe I’m using all those terms wrong. I don’t actually know what they mean, and I don’t know how to place him. Maybe I’m not in on the joke. Maybe there is no joke. And if there is a joke at all, maybe that’s beside the point because while an argument can be made that Matan’s character is a parody of a racist, he’s still a racist. Meaning, the point of the show doesn’t seem to be to call out the idiocy of racism or nationalism or a consuming attachment to the idea of whiteness. Instead, the point of Matan’s character seems to be the provision of an anchor point from which to attack guests and push them into uncomfortable, engagement-driving situations.

The point is to be an edgelord. The point is to get celebrities to say uncouth statements. The point is conflict equals more views.

Both earnestness and irony rely on the presence of an identifiable truth. But Matan’s brand of post-irony shirks the notion of truth entirely. It’s not: I’m embodying this character to critique the real-life absurdity of such figures. It’s: I’m inhabiting this character to underscore the absurdity of the entire enterprise—politics, identity, American middle-class life. There is no right side. Truth might as well belong to whoever’s bold enough to say the N-word—because taboo-breaking, not meaning-making, is the only move left. The more offensive the gesture, the more it masquerades as insight, exposing the old strictures of thought, language, and politics as hollow.

Matan is good at what he does. It’s mesmerizing to watch. And I still don’t really know what I’m looking at.

In an interview with another content creator, Matan gets called out for having a fake accent.

We know it’s a fake character you’re putting on, the other creator says. We’ve seen the clips of you talking differently so we know this is just a fake accent.

Matan responds: Well what is more fake, me or you? Because I’ve been perfecting this accent and living in it and talking in it and getting it just right. I’m good at it.

I have spent hundreds of hours becoming this, he seems to be saying. What is fake about that?

And he’s right. What meaning does genuineness have in a world where every aspect of our lives is performance? The antidote isn’t irony—it’s another kind of performance, one unmoored from any grounding in reality. A simultaneous embrace and rejection of performance itself.

There’s also a certain vulnerability that peeks through in Matan’s character. A kind of honesty rooted in his commitment to staying in it. He admits when he doesn’t know the meaning of a word or a concept. He has no problem owning the limits of his knowledge—not that it necessarily leads him to revise his views. But there’s a frankness about how he’s been shaped: a becoming forged in alt-right internet discourse and mainstream news narratives. That straightforwardness, at its sharpest, becomes a cutting mode of interrogation—one that absurdly deconstructs polite, liberal assumptions about race and class. Matan pushes the conversation into our basest fears and biases, in ways that are sometimes illuminating and often astonishingly stupid.

Two weeks ago, Matt Gaetz interviewed Matan, treating him not as a character but as a serious spokesman for a growing population of hyper-online right wing teenagers about to age into voting rights. And maybe he is that. Maybe the fact that he’s donned a satirical character means nothing. I don’t really know.

~

A couple days ago, I bought my first gaming system ever—a used Xbox I found on Facebook Marketplace and picked up from some finance guy’s luxury apartment in downtown Manhattan. I don’t know what’s come over me, but I’ve developed an intense urge to get really good at NBA 2K.

Once I actually started playing, I found it slightly unsatisfying. The learning curve is steep. I can’t quite lose myself in the fiction of being a professional basketball player—too many controls I still haven’t mastered.

But after I finish writing this, I’m going to get back to it. Try to fully immerse myself. Maybe I’ll pick up a first-person shooter, something I can really disappear into.

I don’t know what’s driving this. I’m not sure how to make sense of anything, really.

~

Godspeed through the rest of the week.