"the left" (and the rest of the political spectrum) may indeed be phantoms, but the impulse towards coercive collectivism is a very real thing in someone's mind. You see it with Cory.

It's the kind of impulse that is incompatible with individual freedom - and thus with building self-determined communities (something "the left" often claims to want).

His Bluesky take is a perfect encapsulation of this. Bluesky is a centralized system that claims to be liberating but at the end of the day it is antithetical to individual self-determination - you see Cory stumbling around on this logical incoherence in his belief system in realtime.

I agree that he seems like he might be able to work through it (not a monolith), but to do so he would necessarily need to rebalance towards individual liberty and away from collectivism. And that's the thing I was referring to as "left". Sorry for being imprecise.