#that you need to be the most effective activist

[saesans]

as someone part of the 92% this election who unfortunately bought into the false hope of never going back and this country turning over a new leaf it’s difficult for me to talk about the political situation in america right now without wanting to speak to all sides like eric mays so i will just say this: you can still do the things, regardless.

you can still celebrate black history month, hispanic heritage month, aapi month, etc to preserve the written and oral histories of these diverse cultures. you can donate and frequent museums and other venues who will likely have their funding pulled for doing just that. you can amplify gay and lesbian stories and lives and volunteer at organizations dedicated to HIV research and defending marriage equality, or even just celebrating same-sex love. you can feed your community whenever you’d like. you can help your immigrant neighbors find work, housing, and a village. you can offer rides to the elderly and babysit the children of working parents in your neighborhood. you can tutor them and make sure they have access to the histories the american school system will try to ignore. you can provide medicine and transportation to women who need reproductive care. you can read feminist texts, create female solidarity, and encourage the women and girls in your life to take up space and not shrink in times like this. you can support independent journalists and keep the mainstream ones you trust alive. you can show up for artists creating diverse stories and perspectives and amplify their works. you can help fund and create your own independent media channels and networks. you can band together to put a down payment on a house and enjoy it together with people you love, even if it's 6 of you to one place. you can carpool and split the cost of gas and car repairs. you can share your metro card. you can go out of your way to patronize small businesses just because they’re bisexual-owned, native american owned, disabled-owned, or whatever you relate to and find community in. you can ask to donate to them to help offset rising costs of rent and inventory. you can frequent libraries and check out books on controversial topics and experiences other than your own so they can preserve funding, or you can buy their stock to keep these books circulating should they be affected too. you can pay off lunch debts at k-12 schools and make meals for the children in your community so they don’t have to worry about going hungry when they should be studying. you can buy in bulk from costco or sam’s club and share or donate where you can. you can take student and professional clubs for affinity groups off the threatened campuses and workplaces and into something accessible like the park, an online forum, or even a living room to keep them alive. you can offer to help clean the homes of your elderly/disabled neighbors or even just let the theater kids throw a production of “dreamgirls” in your backyard because somebody’s ornery peepaw accused it of being CRT propaganda and got it shut down.

you can take care of each other. you don’t need the backing or funding of the government to preserve, honor, or amplify the humanity and heritage of those around you. all this waffling about not owing anybody anything and small talk with strangers being ableist and bourgeoisie needs to stop yesterday. no one is coming to save us. get serious and mitigate harm where you can. see about your people and do it often

[canisvesperus]

Are we going to talk about the thinly veiled ableism towards high support needs autistic adults who frequent websites like deviantart for their hyperspecific non-fandomizable special interests, infrequent hygiene practices, “weird fetishes”, that are all clearly shaped by an experience with neurodiversity that is foreign to all y’all rebranded Asperger’s supremacists

[moredifferentthanusual]

I hate this attitude so much! This argument is stolen from disability and poc activists who have been asking for a long time for people playing disabled characters or characters from a particular ethnic background to actually be from these groups. You'll notice this actually makes total sense!

While not having scarjo play your poc is a good starting point, casting a chinese actor to play a vietnamese character because "its close enough for the white people in the audience" is still a problem. And casting accurately solves many many problems. Eg when your writer/costumer/set designer messes up the actor knows and corrections can be made. When they need to act vietnamese can.

Same goes for disability. So many autistic people hate shows about us because allistics are really bad at playing us! They can do stereotypes and act kooky enough to satisfy allistic audiences but like in the above example that means using us as objects while ignoring us as part of the audience. You have any idea how often we see mobility aids used dangerously wrong on tv? Or how often characters are supposed to have an illness but they don't have any of the symptoms! A disabled actor has symptoms! Their aids are real! And when things are depicted as real then we exist

But we don't have these same reasons for queer characters. Sure there is a queer culture, but crucially not all queer people are part of the community. There is no way to act queer the way there is to act muslim or italian, because the only thing we all have in common is being different. We come from everywhere, and we act every way. Some of us try to fit in with our communities of origin, some of us try to fit into the queer community. Neither way is right or wrong. Anyone can be queer and we can be anyone.

There are times when casting queer actors might make sense, like for a visibly trans character, but if they're not visibly trans cis people can do that. And I always like it when queer people are in things because give us money, but we can be anyone so anyone can be us

[booksinmythorax]

Some tips from a librarian for today and the future:

Go to the library. Get a card. Borrow things. Buying books is neat, but the books the fascists want to ban are still there, on the shelf, at your local library, and if they aren't, you can request them. While book bans can happen and are happening in public libraries, the vast majority of "successful" challenges are happening in school libraries. You can still get books from your public library, and getting the books from the library tells your library they should keep them on the shelf. Borrowing anything, walking in the door, and/or attending programs all help get your library more funding. Fighting censorship in this way is effective and costs you $0.

Pay attention to local government. Read your local newspaper, or the local-est paper you can find. (You wanna know who can probably help you read your local paper for free? Your local library.) Look up your representatives in your state and local governments, not just federal. Read their biographies online. Find out what they stand for.

When something divisive is happening in your local community (a book ban, a school board ruling on bathrooms or sports, a change in curriculum), show up. No, literally. Show up to the school board meeting, the library board meeting, the county commission meeting. If you can't show up, make a phone call. If you can't make a phone call, write an email. Your voice has the most effect on the local and state level.

Now, counterintuitively, is a really good time to get to know your neighbors. Do not self isolate out of suspicion. We are stronger together. If you need suggestions for ways to get to know those neighbors, your local library probably has groups you can join, or will start them if you ask nicely and promise to show up. Hand to the gods, a once-monthly book club or gardening club or crochet circle might be your difference between total despair and feeling maybe pretty okay.

Only talk about your personal identities and experiences if you think you will be physically safe doing so. Consider limiting your social media posting. Buy a paper diary. Talk to people in person or via secure direct message if you really want to grow relationships and make an impact. Educating others is great and important. It's also most effective when you have an existing personal relationship with the person involved in the conversation with you. Consider starting new accounts without your face or name if you choose to continue using social media.

Avoid talking about others' personal identities and experiences, particularly without their consent. Your friends, family members, children, and partners are not tools you should use to win an argument. Point to the lives of writers, activists, educators, and artists who are out if you need an illustrative example in a teaching moment with someone you know. Others' religious beliefs, immigration statuses, queer identities, and pregnancy statuses are nobody's fucking business but their own, unless they choose to tell others for their own reasons.

[queer-scots-geordie-dyke]

Not 10 minutes after I reblogged a post about Gaza Go Fund Me scams, I had 3 in a row pop into my inbox.

There is something so profoundly evil about preying on people’s genuine compassion and wish to help those in real need. I totally understand wanting to make a difference when you see very real suffering. That is what these despicable scams rely on - that and people’s reluctance to question them for fear of being called out as heartless or “genocide supporters” or whatever. But please use your brains. Go Fund Me operates in a very limited number of countries and areas in the world, and Gaza is NOT one of them. Donating your money to one of these effectively guarantees that it is not helping Palestinians.

I remember two years ago, people’s inboxes were full of the same asking for help for Ukrainians, and even though the war there is still very much ongoing and people are still dying in their hundreds every day, those have suddenly disappeared and have been replaced with Gaza. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that scammers use whatever cause is the “in” one among so called activists and use that to rinse the gullible.

There is absolutely no way to verify Go Fund Me accounts as genuine beyond “because I said so.”

Please, by all means, donate to help the population of Gaza - they *are* suffering horribly and they *do* need help - but please do so to verified and accredited organisations - here’s just a small selection:

[whereserpentswalk]

Activist burnout isn't a moral failing of a community, it's not people being selfish. It's a natural result of how human minds work, and you can't expect communities to out-moral human psychology.

When people are exposed to the same upsetting thing over and over again, either it fucks with their mental health and makes them more depressed and anxious, or alternatively it makes them apathetic and desensitized. Neither of those things are good for a movement, and those are the ways humans are going to react to constant upsetting messages. You cannot avoid this by telling people to just be better people, you cannot use higher reasoning to make an entire community's emotions work in a fundamentally different way to how human emotions normal work.

Every successful movement account for the fact that people can't be at 100% all the time. Movements that ask for a level of extreme and undying anger, burn bright and die fast, it's a useful way of organizing a very immediate response, but cannot be done for something larger scale. If you give people, the ultimatum of either being at 100% or 0% all the time, they will choose 0% because the alternative isn't possible for most people.

If you're constantly showing the same disturbing images over and over again, they will lose their effectiveness quickly. If I see a post detailing the horrors of the current genocide, I'm probably just going to scroll past it, because it's all things I already know, and I've seen it so many times there's no emotional reaction, and this is how a lot of people are with posts like this, because you can't ask people to have the same emotional reaction to the same information hundreds of times over.

You can't stop activist burnout by being a better person because burnout isn't a choice, it's a psychological response. If your activism doesn't account for the material reality of the community (in this case being humans with human minds), then that's on you for organizing badly.

Also, if you need to hear this: you are not a bad person for experiencing compassion fatigue, it's literally part of being a person. Don't hurt yourself.

[grison-in-space]

I'm genuinely sorry, I was really tired and couldn't think of the word that mad pride movements use. I'm new to all of this. I thought you would be more open to it because you've reblogged from radical leftists (anarchists and communists both) within the past couple of weeks and they're all for Veganism afaik. The argument that all brains are different but equal and should be treated the exact same is a primary aspect of mad pride from my understanding, and that speaks to me about animals just having different brains, and that they don't deserve to be exploited and killed for us just because they're different. I'm not spamming people with it, but I was inspired by an ask by a nonvegan and started asking popular bloggers why they weren't vegan to open up conversation and potentially change people's views on animals. If I've made you uncomfortable I'm sorry, though I admit I'm really confused by your standpoint. You do know that the only reason communism hasn't succeeded is because of America? Anyway, sorry again, I'm also autistic and I didn't mean to dismiss your legitimate dietary needs. Can I recommend acti-vegan's posts? While I understand that you can't go vegan, perhaps their blog will at least help you understand our points, they're much more well-written than my asks and they have plenty of legitimate science resources at hand. Thanks for listening, I'll take your advice into account. I'm not trying to not listen, it's just frustrating because so many people say they get it but they don't change, and if they truly got it they would, you know?

Okay, I get that you didn't mean to be offensive, and fuck knows I shouldn't throw stones when it comes to forgetting specific words. (This happens to me fairly frequently; it's a thing.)

The argument that all brains are different but equal and should be treated the exact same is a primary aspect of mad pride from my understanding, and that speaks to me about animals just having different brains, and that they don't deserve to be exploited and killed for us just because they're different.

So yesterday I actually wrote out and then deleted a whole paragraph to the effect of "part of my deep, deep frustration with animal rights activism hooks into my commitment to the phrase 'nothing about us without us,' because I frequently see the same kinds of emotional projection without making the effort to listen to animals on their own terms from animal rights activism groups."

The first thing I need to make clear to you is that this--veganism and animal rights activism (ARA) more generally--is not new to me. I am in my mid-thirties and I have never had a job of any kind that did not revolve around animals in some way, I've spent time in rescue spaces and vets and universities, I'm queer and I have spent most of my life in leftish progressive circles, so it's kind of hard to miss.

Essentially, you are proselytizing to me as if you were a newly baptized evangelical convinced I had never heard of Jesus, because if only I had heard and understood his holy word, I would be converted instantly to his light! It's not any less irritating when the belief system isn't explicitly a religion.

More under the cut, because this one is long.

Disclaimer one: Veganism isn't synonymous with ARA ideology, but it's deeply entangled with it, and ARA ideology drives the movement of veganism as a (theoretically non-religious) ethical decision. And I object very strongly to the framework imposed by ARA activists. When I say I am not vegan, I am saying that I have considered the ethical framework that underpins veganism as an ethics movement and I have deliberately rejected it.

The second piece of context you should know that when I talk about being a behavioral ecologist, I mean that I'm a researcher who works on animals and that my framework is rooted in trying to understand animals in their own natural ecological context, without necessarily comparing them to humans. There's a lot of ways to study animal behavior you might run into, including attempts to understand universal principles of behavior that transcend species (animal cognition) and attempts to understand how to better treat animals in human care (animal welfare). You know Temple Grandin? Temple Grandin is an ethologist (the field that gave rise to behavioral ecology, also focused on animals within their species context) who worked on animal welfare (finding ways to make slaughterhouses less stressful to livestock, among other things).

Third point: my profession also means is that I work directly with animals--in my case, currently mice--and that I do not think research with animal subjects is wrong as long as all efforts are made to ensure maximal welfare and enrichment for the animals involved. This is another major bone of contention politically between my entire field and ARA groups, and you should know that I have also spent my entire professional career under the shadow of, well, people who care strongly enough about those ideas to invade my workspace and potentially seize my animals and "free" them into a world they do not have the tools to survive in.

So there's where I am coming from. Let's get back to what you're saying. Here, I'll quote again in case you have the same crappy short-term memory I do.

The argument that all brains are different but equal and should be treated the exact same is a primary aspect of mad pride from my understanding, and that speaks to me about animals just having different brains, and that they don't deserve to be exploited and killed for us just because they're different.

Point the first: Even within humans, I don't think that all brains should be treated the exact same. Especially in a disability context! After all, what is an accommodation if not an agreement to treat someone differently because they need certain things to access a space? Accommodations by definition fly in the face of this "treating everyone the same" understanding of fairness. I think all (human) brains are equally valuable, and I think all brains are worthy of respect, but I do not think that it's wise or kind of me to assert that everyone should be treated in the same way. For one thing, I teach students. If there's one thing teaching has taught me, it's that a good teacher is constantly assessing and adjusting their instruction to meet students where they're at, identify failures of understanding, and keep the attention of the classroom.

Point the second: animals do have different brains from humans. That does not mean that animals are inferior, but it does mean that they are alien. There's a philosophy paper, Nagel, What Does It Mean to Be a Bat, that you might find illuminating on this front. Essentially, the point of the paper is that animals have their own experiences and sensory umwelts that differ profoundly enough from humans' that we cannot know what it is like to be a different species without experiencing life as one, and therefore we must be terribly careful not to project our own realities onto theirs. That is, our imagination cannot tell us what a bat values and what it experiences. That is why we have to use careful evidence to understand what an animal is thinking, without relying on our ability to identify with and comprehend that animal. I have watched ARA groups deliberately encourage people to shut their reasoning brains off and emotionally identify themselves with animals without considering within-species context for twenty years. This is a mainstream tactic. It is not an isolated event and for that reason alone I would be opposed to them.

Point the third: there is a definite tendency in lots of people to care deeply and intensely about both animals and people who are seen as "lesser" in status--children, poor people, disabled people, etc--just as long as those groups never contradict the good feelings that come from the helper's own assessment of themselves and their actions. In humans, when the "needy" point out that some forms of help are actually harmful, the backlash is often swift and vicious. This is why animals are such an appealing target of support and intervention. They can't speak back and say "in fact, you are projecting my love of this frilly pink tutu onto me, and I think it's uncomfortable and prevents me from walking." They can't say "I kind of like it better when I don't have to worry about getting hit by a car, actually?"

(By the way: this is also why it's offensive to compare disabled people to animals, because this is generally done at least in part to silence the voices of disabled people speaking for our selves and our communities. We have access to language, and we use it, thank you.)

All forms of animal welfare intervention going right back to the founding of the first RSPCA have been incredibly prone to being hijacked by classist, racist, and otherwise bigoted impulses. This is because animals offer an innocent face for defense that conveniently cannot criticize the actions taken by their champions, and they therefore provide a great excuse for actions taken against marginalized members of human society. Think about the very first campaign the RSPCA ever did, which was banning using dogs as draft animals: a use that is not inherently harmful to dogs, which many dogs actively enjoy, but also one that was specifically used by poor Londoners and which in fact immediately resulted in a great butchery of the dogs that Londoners could no longer afford to feed rather than allowing poor people and their dogs to continue working together. No one was, of course, challenging the particular uses of dogs or any other animal favored by the wealthy. This kind of thing is so, so, so common. Obviously it doesn't mean that all interventions to prioritize animal welfare are inherently bigoted, but it does mean that we have to be critical about our choice of challenges.

On top of everything, the animal rights activist movement's obsession with "exploitation" is a function of the idea that humans are sinful or otherwise Bad in how we interact with animals by definition. For example, take the chicken rescue near me that is so obsessed with the possibility that some human somewhere might benefit from an animal in their care that they implant every hen they adopt out with hormonal implants such that the hens no longer lay eggs--a function that is normally a natural byproduct of a chicken's reproductive system, fertilized or not. A mutualistic relationship involves both parties benefiting, and that is the case for an awful lot of human relationships with animals. In general, the idea that associating with animals is a thing that can only harm animals rather than being a trade between two species to enrich one another is all over these groups. It's just so myopically focused on human shame that it prevents practical interventions that might benefit everyone, and often promotes interventions that don't directly benefit animals but sure do make humans miserable. For example, this kind of thinking is why groups like PETA are absolutely awful at effectively rescuing unwanted dogs and cats: they think pets living in "bondage" with humans are an essentially sad outcome, rather than one that might be mutually enjoyed by all parties.

I'm tired and my meds haven't kicked in, so I'm not currently going to handle the communism thing except to point out that while the US absolutely did destabilize a number of leftist regimes in South America and Africa, Russia and China between them have certainly not treated their own people kindly, either (and more so their own client-nations, as with the former members of the USSR). Please do some reading about the Holodomor and Lysenko in Russia (and frankly all of the details of Stalin's regime) and the Cultural Revolution in China in particular. Khmer Rouge might be worth looking into, too. I am not saying the US's hands are clean, you understand, because they are not; they're as steeped in red as anyone else's. What I am saying is that for people living on the ground, communist revolutions have this nasty habit of turning into bloodbaths and arbitrary slaughters. Do not let your distaste for the US's bloodsoaked imperialism (which, yes, is and was bad) let you fall into the trap of becoming a tankie.

And if you don't know what a tankie is, you really, really should take some time to learn.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Often when I post an AI-neutral or AI-positive take on an anti-AI post I get blocked, so I wanted to make my own post to share my thoughts on "Nightshade", the new adversarial data poisoning attack that the Glaze people have come out with.

I've read the paper and here are my takeaways:

Firstly, this is not necessarily or primarily a tool for artists to "coat" their images like Glaze; in fact, Nightshade works best when applied to sort of carefully selected "archetypal" images, ideally ones that were already generated using generative AI using a prompt for the generic concept to be attacked (which is what the authors did in their paper). Also, the image has to be explicitly paired with a specific text caption optimized to have the most impact, which would make it pretty annoying for individual artists to deploy.

While the intent of Nightshade is to have maximum impact with minimal data poisoning, in order to attack a large model there would have to be many thousands of samples in the training data. Obviously if you have a webpage that you created specifically to host a massive gallery poisoned images, that can be fairly easily blacklisted, so you'd have to have a lot of patience and resources in order to hide these enough so they proliferate into the training datasets of major models.

The main use case for this as suggested by the authors is to protect specific copyrights. The example they use is that of Disney specifically releasing a lot of poisoned images of Mickey Mouse to prevent people generating art of him. As a large company like Disney would be more likely to have the resources to seed Nightshade images at scale, this sounds like the most plausible large scale use case for me, even if web artists could crowdsource some sort of similar generic campaign.

Either way, the optimal use case of "large organization repeatedly using generative AI models to create images, then running through another resource heavy AI model to corrupt them, then hiding them on the open web, to protect specific concepts and copyrights" doesn't sound like the big win for freedom of expression that people are going to pretend it is. This is the case for a lot of discussion around AI and I wish people would stop flagwaving for corporate copyright protections, but whatever.

The panic about AI resource use in terms of power/water is mostly bunk (AI training is done once per large model, and in terms of industrial production processes, using a single airliner flight's worth of carbon output for an industrial model that can then be used indefinitely to do useful work seems like a small fry in comparison to all the other nonsense that humanity wastes power on). However, given that deploying this at scale would be a huge compute sink, it's ironic to see anti-AI activists for that is a talking point hyping this up so much.

In terms of actual attack effectiveness; like Glaze, this once again relies on analysis of the feature space of current public models such as Stable Diffusion. This means that effectiveness is reduced on other models with differing architectures and training sets. However, also like Glaze, it looks like the overall "world feature space" that generative models fit to is generalisable enough that this attack will work across models.

That means that if this does get deployed at scale, it could definitely fuck with a lot of current systems. That said, once again, it'd likely have a bigger effect on indie and open source generation projects than the massive corporate monoliths who are probably working to secure proprietary data sets, like I believe Adobe Firefly did. I don't like how these attacks concentrate the power up.

The generalisation of the attack doesn't mean that this can't be defended against, but it does mean that you'd likely need to invest in bespoke measures; e.g. specifically training a detector on a large dataset of Nightshade poison in order to filter them out, spending more time and labour curating your input dataset, or designing radically different architectures that don't produce a comparably similar virtual feature space. I.e. the effect of this being used at scale wouldn't eliminate "AI art", but it could potentially cause a headache for people all around and limit accessibility for hobbyists (although presumably curated datasets would trickle down eventually).

All in all a bit of a dick move that will make things harder for people in general, but I suppose that's the point, and what people who want to deploy this at scale are aiming for. I suppose with public data scraping that sort of thing is fair game I guess.

Additionally, since making my first reply I've had a look at their website:

Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

Once again we see that the intended impact of Nightshade is not to eliminate generative AI but to make it infeasible for models to be created and trained by without a corporate money-bag to pay licensing fees for guaranteed clean data. I generally feel that this focuses power upwards and is overall a bad move. If anything, this sort of model, where only large corporations can create and control AI tools, will do nothing to help counter the economic displacement without worker protection that is the real issue with AI systems deployment, but will exacerbate the problem of the benefits of those systems being more constrained to said large corporations.

Kinda sucks how that gets pushed through by lying to small artists about the importance of copyright law for their own small-scale works (ignoring the fact that processing derived metadata from web images is pretty damn clearly a fair use application).

[dostoyevsky-official]

I was a bit sad to hear that I'm assumed to be fascist, as a tech worker who has no major issues with slate star codex. But I guess the culture war stuff can wait until after the US has sorted out its constitutional crisis.

If you have no major issues with Scott Alexander Siskind Slate Star Codex, you have no major issues with his ongoing discussion of race science, racial IQ differences and "human biodiversity". This has been known and litigated for years. It keeps cropping up. The most recent example is from January 15, 2025: How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates is entirely based on the work of an infamous racial scientist:

Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore). People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology.

Those horrible activists. Must've been more "culture war stuff" from woke moralists who don't understand science.

For 50 years, Richard Lynn has been at the forefront of scientific racism. An unapologetic eugenicist, Lynn uses his authority as professor (emeritus) of psychology at the University of Ulster to argue for the genetic inferiority of non-white people. Lynn believes that IQ tests can be used to determine the worth of groups of people, especially racial groups and nations. The wealth and power of nations, according to Lynn, is due to their racial intelligence and “homogeneity” (or “purity”). He argues that the nations with the highest IQs must subjugate or eliminate the lower-IQ groups within their borders in order to preserve their dominance. Since the 1970s, Richard Lynn has been working tirelessly to place race, genes, and IQ at the center of discussions surrounding inequality. [...] Lynn also recycles Nazi-era arguments for Nordic superiority within the “Caucasoid” group, claiming that a “north-south continuum” exists, with people from northern Europe having evolved to be more intelligent than their southern neighbors. [...] Lynn is referring to his belief that racial groups have genetically determined behavioral patterns, and that crime, disruptiveness, and antisocial behavior are part of minorities’ genetic makeup. In this way, Lynn has provided a veneer of scientific respectability to long-discredited racist theories like those popularized by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve. [...] Lynn is one of the few remaining “race scientists” who is willing to explicitly endorse addressing these supposed problems through eugenic policies. [...] Lynn unabashedly suggests just that, favoring a “parental licensing scheme” in which “couples would have to apply for and obtain a license to have children.” He also believes that there is “a good case for reviving the sterilization of the mentally retarded and criminals,” and has promoted a “commendable scheme” targeting poor mothers which “would require sterilization as a condition of receiving welfare.” (x)

In his own words,

“If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall… . What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of “phasing out” of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”

This brief summary is the political project that writing these blog posts advance and reflects who Slate Star is as a person. You have to be profoundly stupid or profoundly racist (but I repeat myself) to think these fascist worldviews don't affect someone's research—indeed, that someone's research isn't a product of, in service of those views—and here I mean both Lynn and Slate Star. To overlook all this and go on favorably citing Lynn is damning. You shouldn't be able to show your face in polite society after this.

Speaking of the political project in question, Lynn funded, and was funded by, neonazis, white supremacists, and hate groups, some violent, throughout his life. He served on the editorial board of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscientific racialist journal once described as "written by racists for racists," founded in 1960 by segregationists to advance their cause, and funded by notorious segregationist, anti-semitic, pro-apartheid groups. The people involved in its founding, publication, and articles, including Lynn, were complete pariahs, too racist for what was a racist society—but one that had beaten a blow to nazism and pulled back from those levels of explicit extermination, able to see the link between racial science and the logical teleological end of genocide. The chief founders were Reginald Gates, Henry Garett, G.r. Gayre and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. The last was a prominent, famous German-Dutch racial scientist and member of the nazi party, who was not only Mengele's PhD supervisor but who encouraged him to go further with his experiments during the Holocaust; he was able to launder his reputation as a "genetics researcher" postwar, though he was unrepentant. Henry Garett was a lawyer who testified against integration in Brown v Board of Ed. Gates was also a famous scientist fired from Howard University for opposing segregation:

Note the language they (Gates) use to carefully disguise their political goals under a mask of detached, clinical, objective science:

The journal was immediately attacked by legitimate scientists who saw through their obvious machinations. The political goals were evident (x):

Mankind Quarterly never disappeared. It remained closely connected to shadow networks of white supremacist organizations and funding called the Pioneer Foundation, partially a trust for Draper's money. Currently, the journal is published through the Human Diversity Foundation (HFD) by the German white nationalist and AfD social media manager Erik Ahrens and Danish neonazi Emil Kirkegaard, who perhaps plays the most important role in organizing HFD, Mankind Quarterly, Aporia Magazine (another online scientific racism rag), and connecting and bringing to prominence white nationalists, racialists, and hygienists worldwide. Both have defended nazis and the Waffen SS.

Kirkegaard is a named author on more than 40 papers published in the journal Mankind Quarterly, a longstanding outlet for race science theories. The topics of Kirkegaard’s inquiries have included whether black Americans earn less than white Americans because of “average intelligence differences”, comparing penis size, testicle size and “breast-buttock preference” by race, and an attempt to show that in Denmark those with “Muslim names” have lower IQs. The geneticist Adam Rutherford told the Guardian that Mankind Quarterly and similar periodicals were so discredited that it would be “career suicide” for a genuine academic to publish in them. Kirkegaard’s positions appear closer to racism than science. “Africans,” Kirkegaard wrote on his blog in July, “are prone to violence everywhere.” [...] Nonetheless, Kirkegaard enjoys some influential connections. The recordings show him claiming that in 2019 he was among the “online dissidents” that the tech billionaire and rightwing donor Peter Thiel flew to Silicon Valley for discussions. (x)

Kirkegaard is also a pedophile:

In a 2012 blog post, Kirkegaard wrote that it would be a "good idea to legalize child porn" because he thinks viewing this content would reduce the number of rapes committed by pedophiles. He’s also stated that he would support lowering the age of consent to 13 or lower if puberty begins earlier. Despite his own views on child porn and age of consent, Kirkegaard has tried to link homosexuality to pedophilia and categorized all left-wing people as pedophiles on his blog. (x)

We've established how these people operate, how they lie, what rhetorical tricks they pull, what their real goals are, what their history is—the holocaust, apartheid, segregation—and what their political project is—AfD, Trump, Thiel, remigration, eugenics. Going back to Slate Star's blog post:

Thanks to Emil Kirkegaard for the blog post that finally cleared this up for me.

Kirkegaard and Slate Star communicated and collaborated on this. You'll find Kirkegaard in the post comments, along with Steve Sailer, yet another prominent American white supremacist. Kirkegaard retweeted this post when it came out, as did dozens of decrepit, committed, hardcore neonazis and white supremacists. Why are they all cropping up here? Why does he keep talking to them? The answer is clear:

Slate star codex is a white supremacist espousing race science. He is in conversation with other white supremacists, he gets published by them, he cites them. They're his friends, colleagues, patrons because he's a fascist neoreactionary. The people retweeting this stuff are among the most vile, despicable creep freaks raising up the spectre of genocidal racial war, segregation, and apartheid—and they are exactly the ones sponsoring or carrying out the constitutional crisis. Chris Rufo, an unhinged nazi DeSantis ally currently ransacking the Department of Education, is friends with Kirkegaard; he's published in Aporia, cited by SSC. SSC is in league with them, but he keeps a winking distance—look at these ideas, look at these studies, I have so much data—of plausible deniability. Not plausible to me.

This isn't new, either. @vilestviolist kindly provided a link to leaked emails from years ago where SSC revealed he agrees with HBD (human biodiversity, a euphemism for race science) and their conclusions, but just like the original editors of Mankind Quarterly, he knows he couldn't say it openly (then):

He does the exact same thing as the founders of Mankind Quarterly in the exact same way. You can't incorporate ideas from neoreactionaries in your worldview and not wind up one yourself. Don't play coy.

In the post I linked at the beginning, he makes the argument—while citing bunk data—that substandard African IQs, around 60-80, can be improved with development. Ostensibly, the argument is for development. In reality, what he's doing is peddling the idea of racial IQ disparities wrapped in the acceptable idea of development and his blundering, bloviating prose. I am not citing anything further from his rank filth post because race science is a pseudoscience; none of this is legitimate. These people have been completely shunned, banned, and cast aside for decades because the political ends of these nonsensical arguments are patently clear.

This is not "culture war stuff." Saying so deliberately obfuscates and minimizes explicit white supremacy, eugenics, and racial hygenism through a pathetic euphemism. It's the same cloaking mechanism that the original racial scientists used. It doesn't get more explicit than that: this is original, old school, classic fascism. In part or in whole, you're constructing a world that entirely excludes non-white people on the basis of pseudoscientific studies on "human biodiversity" falsely alleging innate, biological differences in intellect and capability. If not, you're engaging and taking in the work of someone who dines with fascists, takes their money, and spreads their views. You're being amoral, context-blind, so open to ideas that you're damaging everyone. This isn't a "discussion," there's no legitimate research here; these ideas have real, tangible consequences. You enjoy reading this drivel while pointing, or being pointed towards white supremacy and debunked racist propaganda. There's no coming back from this. At best, you're a complete dupe. Otherwise, you are a fascist.

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

I wanted to talk through some thoughts on the blitz of news that's come out in the last few days.

First, a reminder: It is not physically or intellectually possible to respond to every piece of news or proposed legislation or executive order that's come out recently. Even if it were, that would cause an immobilizing level of overwhelm. And any time you notice yourself feeling immobilized, that's an opportunity to reflect and redirect your focus.

And by "re-directing your focus," I don't mean to ignore all the problems. That's the strategy behind doing a blitz like this, so you don't want to walk right into that trap.

But let's say that you have a lot of strong feelings about a lot of the stuff that's happening or that's being proposed and you place a high value on speaking out and taking action against things you disagree with. All of that comes from a really good place, and I'm not discouraging that impulse.

But in order to do any of that effectively in a time like this, let's talk about the difference between "reaction" and "response."

Imagine you're at a batting cage, ready to work on your swing, but the pitching machine is throwing the balls way too frequently for you to actually get in a good, solid swing for each ball that's being thrown at you. You could try to hold the bat still so that you're bunting, but even if you make contact with more of the balls that way, you're not going to hit them very far.That's one way to think of the difference between reacting and responding.

If you're treating the dozens of new executive orders like a checklist you're going down and marking "against; against; against", yes, it's valuable to speak out against harmful actions, but if you were to fully express yourself on everything that's happening that you find on a spectrum of disagreeable to dangerous, I bet you're already feeling the exhaustion.

The solution isn't to give up, but it's also not to wear yourself out. Instead of reacting, respond.

Back to the batting cage- instead of trying and inevitably failing to swing at each fastball, you need to decide to respond by letting some of the balls fly by you and focusing your effort, skill, time, and attention on hitting the ones you can hit with a strong swing.

While this does require letting most of the balls fly by you, that DOES NOT MEAN that you're allowing those things to go without a strong response. This is because you are acting in community. You are taking the effort, skill, time, and attention required to hit the balls you are hitting SO THAT other people who you are in solidarity with can focus their effort, skill, time, and attention on the balls THEY'RE hitting.

This asks you to determine the difference between issues you can react to and issues you are capable of responding to. Once you've made that decision, there is less pressure and emotional weight on you to play whack-a-mole with each new bit of information. Remember, you're not ignoring or down-playing the importance of or not caring about the other issues (there will always be opportunities for collaboration!) but you are choosing to focus on what you are capable of responding to.

Start with the issue or issues that you have a level of personal experience with or have already spent some time learning about. You don't have to be an expert, but these are the issues you can speak about without having to study a list of talking points first. These are the issues that you know off the top of your head a list of resources or advocacy/activist/mutual aid groups or books/documentaries to recommend to people who are looking to learn and do more.

Start with those, and get in a few good swings. Share experiences with the people and groups who are taking swings at other issues. Learn from each other. Help each other. Take turns resting.

We're playing the long game. Together. And we're going to win.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amanda Marcotte at Salon:

After the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights in 2022, there was a robust debate between pro- and anti-choice activists over whether or not banning abortion would kill women. Pro-choicers pointed to evidence, from both history and other countries, showing that abortion bans kill women. Anti-choice activists dismissed the record and pointed to toothless "exceptions" in abortion ban laws as "proof" that women could get abortions to save their lives.  The latter argument was frustrating not just because it was wrong but was generally offered in bad faith. Anti-abortion leaders know that abortion bans kill women. They don't care. Or worse, many view dying from pregnancy as a good thing. In some cases, it's viewed as just punishment for "sinful" behavior. Other times, it's romanticized as a noble sacrifice on the altar of maternal duty. But conservatives are aware that this death fetish cuts against their "pro-life" brand. So there was a lot of empty denials and hand-waving about the inevitable — and expected — outcome of women dying. 

We now have another proof point that abortion bans are about misogyny, not "life," as the first deaths from red state abortion bans are being reported. Instead of admitting they were wrong and changing course, Republicans are behaving like guilty liars do everywhere, and destroying the evidence. In the process, they are also erasing data needed to save the lives of pregnant women across the board, whether they give birth or not.  ProPublica has published a series of articles detailing the deaths of women in Georgia and Texas under the two states' draconian abortion bans. They most recently reported the death of Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother of two from Texas. Ngumezi suffered a miscarriage at 11 weeks but was left to bleed to death at the hospital, instead of having the failing pregnancy surgically removed. Multiple doctors in Texas confirmed that hospital staff are often afraid to perform this surgery, however, because it's the same one used in elective abortions. Rather than risk criminal charges, doctors frequently stand by and let women suffer — or die.  Ngumezi's youngest son doesn't fully understand that his mother is dead. ProPublica reported that he chases down women he sees in public who have similar hairstyles, calling for his mother. 

A day after this story was published, the Washington Post reported that the Texas maternal mortality board would skip reviewing the deaths of pregnant women in 2022 and 2023 — conveniently, the first two years after the abortion ban went into place. The leadership claims it's about speeding up the review process, but of course, many members pointed out the main effect is that "they would not be reviewing deaths that may have resulted from delays in care caused by Texas’s abortion bans." This is especially noteworthy because it's become standard after one of these reports for anti-abortion activists to blame the victims and/or the doctors, and not the bans. Christian right activist Ingrid Skop, for instance, responded to Nguzemi's death by insisting "physicians can intervene to save women’s lives in pregnancy emergencies" under the Texas law. If she really believed that, however, she would desperately want the state maternal mortality board to review this, and other cases like it, so they could come up with recommendations for hospital staff to treat women without running afoul of the law. Strop, however, is on the Texas maternal mortality board. She was likely part of the decision to refuse to look into whether women like Nguzemi might be saved. 

[...] But despite claims to be "pro-life," anti-abortion activists do not care. Instead, they are on Twitter griping about how comprehensive reproductive health care access "promotes sexual promiscuity." 

Skop also argued last year that abortion bans are justified because "promiscuous behavior declines." It's tempting to point out that all five women whose deaths have been reported by ProPublica were in long-term relationships or marriages. Three of the five planned to bring their pregnancies to term and died because they were denied miscarriage care. But that's the problem with vague terms like "promiscuous." They draw us into debates about how much women are allowed to enjoy sex before their lives are forfeited. Or how many "good girls" should die to punish the "promiscuous" ones. That is the trap of misogyny. It allows women like Lila Rose or Ingrid Skop to pretend that, if you submit to the sexist order and obey all their arbitrary rules, you'll be saved. But these laws punish all women and girls: mothers and non-mothers, wives and single women, women who've had 100 partners and those who were virgins when raped. Abortion bans make crystal clear that, to the Christian right, no woman's life is worth saving. Anyone can be sacrificed, to protect their cruel patriarchal order. 

Want more reason why abortion bans are bad for women? Republicans are working hard to destroy the evidence that abortion bans kill women.

Abortion bans have zip to do with the "sanctity of life", but are a tool for misogyny.

[oldguardleatherdog]

Today's Wall O'Text: We've got just under two months to get the first things done.

Timothy Snyder is an American historian whose book On Tyranny made him a household name in 2017, followed this year by On Freedom. His take on what we need to do this time around to mount an effective resistance to Trump's insane agenda is urgent and essential:

Start now. We can get a lot done between now and the Inauguration on January 20th.

Here are excerpts from Snyder's interview in the Rolling Stone article linked above where he describes ways ordinary people can take meaningful steps right now to lay the groundwork for stopping Trump's agenda in its tracks:

~~~~~

[From the article, emphasis added:]

“You can’t despair,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Because that’s what they want. They want you to think that it’s hopeless. It’s never hopeless.”

Snyder’s first rule in On Tyranny is “don’t obey in advance.” He emphasizes that Americans opposed to Trump’s designs should take stock, and action, now. “The period of November, December, January, becomes very important,” he says.

For normal people, Snyder insists the key is “to get out in protest” — now and through the inauguration. The understandable impulse of “keeping your head in,” Snyder says will only embolden Trump’s reactionary team.

“You’re giving them even more confidence that they’re gonna be able to do what they want in January.” What’s demanded of activists in this moment is to “deflate that confidence,” Snyder says, and you do that by “showing that you’re not afraid, by cooperating with your neighbors, and by organizing.”

Snyder emphasizes a lesson of the “Wall of Moms” in Portland, Oregon, in late summer 2020, who helped drive up the political cost and terrible optics for Trump’s most heavy-handed crackdown on public dissent. Launching tear gas at Black Lives Matter protesters looked different on TV when the feds were brutalizing a wall of white mothers in gold shirts, locking arms at the front of the crowd. “It’s about corporeal politics,” Snyder says. “Getting your body out where there are other bodies — with people who are maybe not like you or maybe less privileged than you.”

Here, Snyder insists, is where the American public has its most important, and perhaps most challenging role to play. “The Trump-Vance initiatives can only work by getting the population involved — and basically corrupting us,” he says. Snyder argues that even Americans who might share anger with Trump about immigration may yet be recruited to block the border camps promised by Stephen Miller. 

“That’s the kind of active thinking that folks have to do — am I going to become the kind of person who takes part in this sort of thing? Am I going to become the kind of person who denounces my neighbors because they are not documented?”

“If Their Rights Are on the Line, My Rights Are on the Line”

A key to resisting authoritarianism, Snyder says, is standing up for the rights of the least powerful first. “If protest comes down to the people who are protesting only because they have to, then you always lose,” he says. “It has to be people who are one, two, three, four, even five steps away from being directly affected who show solidarity — and who also show pragmatism and wisdom by getting out early. 

“If you’re more privileged, you should be thinking, ‘What can I do for the least privileged people?’” he says. “If their rights are on the line, my rights are on the line. That’s not just a moral position. It’s actually, politically, 100 percent correct.” 

In the meantime, Snyder advises, America’s system of federalism offers hope for democracy at the state and local level. “Many things are going to be terrible. But controlling the federal government doesn’t mean you’re controlling everything,” he says. He exhorts Americans to support the institutions closest to them that uphold democratic norms — “whether that means some civil society organization, or state government, or a local mayor” — and collectively try to strengthen those bodies.

[End article text.]

~~~~~

[manty-monster]

Transmisogyny:

A specific axis of oppression meant to enforce and reify the patriarchy and gender binary that targets AMAB people who transgress it with extreme violence and torture.

Any people who are not transgressing this boundary can benefit from transmisogyny which is a distinct separate axis of oppression from transphobia or misogyny. It is not just a combination of the two.

Most transfemmes will tell you via their lives experience that there is a noticible trend, when it's drag shows that get mass shootings, when trans activists have to use transmasc people as a "gotcha" in bathroom legislation because we all know conservatives mean trans women. When pedo panic historically targeted gay men and not lesbians, and it is again now targeting transfemmes not transmascs, when comedians make man in a dress jokes not woman in slacks. When AIDS and poverty and drugs kill us in huge numbers. When horror movies like Sleepaway Camp, or comedies like Ace Ventura feature trans women as objects of revilement and fear.

Transmisogyny effects people on a institutional level, like most axes of oppression! you don't personally need to have been attacked or called slurs to internalize societal messaging! And likewise you don't need to carry out transmisogyny consciously to benefit from it!

Intersectional oppression theory has always meant we are all participants and benefactors from certain axis and it's our jobs to deconstruct and understand these things.

Trans men are not the only benefactors of transmisogyny, cis men and cis women also do. You just don't get a free pass just cause this particular axis makes you feel bad to be called out on.

Transmisogyny is an active threat to our lives and is killing, torturing, and oppressing many of us in very real ways. It's not "dividing the community" your sisters are being slaughtered. Stop being passive, stop being defensive, recognize what is happening and speak out against it.

[trulyradicalactivist]

Now that many of you are on the same page with me about the fight for radqueer liberation and freedom from oppression, it’s time for us to channel our strengths into meaningful action. To make a difference, we must educate, invigorate, and advocate. These three pillars, I've found, are the foundation of effective activism. In my time of being an activist, these are the things I use the most to gather community. For all of you, I'm gonna take this time to break them down and explore how all of us can contribute. If everyone really is with me on this, we can turn the tide faster than ever before.

Everything is under the cut. I tried to change my writing style a little from last time (a lot of people thought it was AI generated, so I studied some other speeches to try and write more "human", I hope it worked.)

Educate.

Are you good at making posters? Writing essays, articles, or conducting research? Do you enjoy learning and sharing what you discover? Maybe you’re great at debates. If so, education can be where you shine. Education is essential for dismantling stereotypes and misinformation about our community.

There are many ways to educate, some small, and some more direct. Firstly, start conversations with fellow community members. Run polls, collect data, and organize your findings. Then you can store that information, maybe in a folder, a Google Doc, or even in your notes app. Use it to write essays explaining specific topics or write articles debunking misinformation. Share your work with the world, not just our community, but to those who believe the stereotypes you are writing against.

Now, if education isn’t your strength, make sure you amplify the work of others. Share accurate information, send educational resources to those who might be misinformed, and help shift perceptions. Knowledge is one of the most powerful tools we have, let’s all wield it wisely and responsibly.

Invigorate.

Do you love drawing, writing fanfiction, or making memes? Maybe you enjoy putting together jewelry, like Kandi bracelets, making people laugh, or inspiring people through any form of creativity? If so, you can invigorate the community.

Let’s bring life and joy to the radqueer community. Yes, we face a lot of challenges, and that is exhausting, but we can and should create spaces full of excitement and connection. You could start a cooking blog and help your community learn a skill they might need, open an Etsy store to sell stickers or patches, you could design stim toys if you really know how to! Do anything that fosters creativity and belonging. Build spaces for us, by us, and let's make our movement one with vibrancy and culture!

Advocate.

Advocacy is something everyone can do. It’s about amplifying voices, yours and ours as a community. Share your experiences, whether it’s through writing, social media, or art. Speak openly about how your identity shapes your life.

Advocacy is also about challenging stigma. If you have dysphoria, talk about it. If you don’t, explain your identity and what it means to you. Are you a paraphile? Share your journey with pride, if you feel comfortable, and help others understand how your identity connects to your identity as a whole. Advocacy is about being unapologetically visible. Make them see you. You exist and they have no say in that.

These three actions (educating, invigorating, and advocating) are the building blocks of rebellion. And that’s exactly what we’re doing: rebelling against oppression and ignorance.

Let’s take charge together. Let’s fight for the acceptance and freedom we deserve. We are strong, we are resilient, and we are capable of creating change. I believe in all of you, and I love you all. Let’s do this, together, here and now.

[mariacallous]

Twenty years ago, MySpace and Facebook ushered in an inspired age of social media. Today, the sticky parables of online life are inescapable: Connection is a convenience as much as it is a curse. A lot’s changed since those early years. In June, the US surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, called for a warning label on social platforms that have played a part in the mental health crisis among young people, of which “social media has emerged as an important contributor.” Social Studies, the new FX docuseries from documentarian Lauren Greenfield, bring the unsettling effects of that crisis into startling view.

The thesis was simple. Greenfield set out to catalog the first generation for which social media was an omnipresent, preordained reality. From August 2021 to the summer of 2022, she embedded with a group of teens at several Los Angeles–area high schools for the entire school year (the majority of the students attend Palisades Charter), as they obsessed over crushes, applied to college, attended prom, and pursued their passions.

“It was an unusual documentary for me,” Greenfield, a veteran filmmaker of cultural surveys like The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth, says of how the series came together. “The kids were co-investigators on this journey.” Along with the 1,200 hours of principal photography Greenfield and her team captured, students were also asked to save screen recordings of their daily phone usage, which amounted to another 2,000 hours of footage. Stitched together, the documentary illuminates the tangled and unrelenting experiences of teens as they deal with body dysmorphia, bullying, social acceptance, and suicidal ideation. “That’s the part that is the most groundbreaking of this project, because we haven’t really seen that before.”

The depth of the five-episode series benefits from Greenfield’s encyclopedic approach. The result is perhaps the most accurate and comprehensive portrait of Gen Z’s relationship to social media. With the release of the final episode this week (you can stream it on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom about the sometimes cruel, seemingly infinite experience of being a teenager online today.

JASON PARHAM: In one episode, a student says, “I think you can’t log in to TikTok and be safe.” Having spent the previous three years fully immersed in this world, I’m curious if you think social media is bad?

LAUREN GREENFIELD: I don't think it's a binary question. I really went into this as a social experiment. This is the first generation that has never grown up without it. So even though social media has been around for a while, they are the first generation of digital natives. I thought it was the right time to look at how it was impacting childhood. It’s the biggest cultural influence of this generation’s growing up, bigger than parents, peers, or school, especially coming out of Covid, which was when we started filming. You know, I didn't go into filming with a point of view or an activist agenda, but I certainly was moved by what the teenagers said to me and what they showed in their lives, which is that it's a pretty dire situation.

Without a doubt.

Jonathan, in episode five, says it's a lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun. So I don't think it's about whether there are good things in it and bad things. We see both in the show, but we also would not let our kids be around a loaded gun. So I do think that we need to change the engineering of it so that we can keep the good and not have the bad.

I entered high school in 2000, before the social media boom, and I always joke with friends how I probably would not have survived if we had it the way kids do now.

The genie is out of the bottle. But there is regulation now to get rid of it in schools, which I think is great. We also see the problem of distraction in the show. And we see the need of this generation for person-to-person connection, which they don't have enough of. We've also seen how for people like Nina, LGBTQ+, even some of the social justice reactions that happen in the series, it has a use. It also is a means of creativity and entrepreneurship. And we see that with our characters too.

But there are also just things that make life extremely toxic for teenagers—the 24/7 comparison culture, the algorithm bringing them down harmful paths of learning. What some of the new information coming out of TikTok’s internal research shows us is that these apps are engineered and they can be engineered differently.

Have you seen the Jim Henson movie? It’s called Idea Man.

No, I haven’t.

One thing that really moved me that I thought was relevant to social media and thinking about the good and bad of it, is that Joan Ganz Cooney—the TV producer who started Sesame Street—had this idea of bringing in people who know what kids love, which was Jim Henson and the creatures, with people who know what kids need to learn and what they need. It’s that second piece that has never been relevant to tech designers and engineers who have only been designing for maximum engagement, even if it's at the expense of the health and well-being of young people. We have a mental health crisis on our hands because of it. Technology is important and important for so many reasons, but I think we have an untenable situation with the current engineering of social media.

So you’re saying we need even more guardrails?

Now having filmed the show—and I hope people get it—we have to have empathy for these teenagers. Like, it's not fair to ask them to self-regulate when the apps have been designed to be addictive.

How did you land on Los Angeles as the petri dish for this social experiment?

I've been looking at youth culture for 30 years. My first book, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood explored how kids were influenced by the values of fame, image, and materialism. Those themes are also really relevant in the social media age. Fame is something that is not for celebrities anymore, it's for every kid looking for likes. And likes have become a rite of passage, in terms of popularity. Image making, FaceTune, Photoshop, styling, curating your brand—all of these things that used to be the realm of celebrities are now the realm of everyday children. And a lot of times in my work, I'm trying to document the air we breathe, the popular culture that's all around us. Sometimes it's hard to see. So for me, with LA, I wanted to look at where that was the most pure and strong, rather than where it was average.

The point of view shifts between students and parents. Ivy’s mom in particular has very sharp views about trans people, vaccines, and politics. Why also include their voices in a series so acutely focused on teen life?

When I started, I didn't know I was going to include the adults, but they ended up being so important. There are a lot of loving, caring parents in the show who have no idea what's going on in the social media lives of their kids. I didn't know a lot as a parent either. I think that the show is very entertaining for teenagers, twentysomethings, and thirtysomethings. For parents, it's more of an education and I hear more of them being shocked by it. It was important to see the disconnect between this generation and their parents, how much things have changed, and how much parents don't realize what's going on.

Many of the kids started taking action into their own hands.

One of the most important things I came out of this with is, parents, teachers, and administrators are not addressing the problems. They might not even understand the problems. So we get this world of young people helping each other. We have Jonathan, Cooper, and Dominic all working at a crisis hotline doing peer counseling for kids in distress. We have Anthony who becomes a vigilante because he's so frustrated that nobody's doing anything about the racist incidents and sexual assault that he’s seeing. And we have kids also making media, like Cooper having a podcast about body image. That stuff is sprouting up because they're very alone in this.

Why do you think there is such a disconnect?

They’re just from a different generation. My youngest, who is 20, I remember I would ask to see stuff. And this was in the earlier stages of social media. You know, I kind of demanded that he would show me. But he refused. He had a different view of everything. He felt it was his private space. We need to move off that and open up a dialog. This show, it's really meant more to open dialog rather than have solutions, even though the kids give us some solutions. But the parents are an important part of the equation.

Like Ivy’s family?

Ivy's family story was a really important social media story. It's kind of the story of the division that we're seeing in our culture now—how algorithms and silos take us into these different ways of thinking and split us apart, how they make the other the enemy. We’re seeing how terrible the disinformation problem is, how tragically it could affect all of us in this election. Their story came about very unexpectedly. But I thought it was fascinating, and getting to know all the members of that family, you can see how both parents love their kids, how both kids love their parents. I didn't want to vilify anybody. But we also see how tragic it is when ideas and algorithmic silos divide family members.

Watching the series made me wonder if these kids are doomed, in a sense, because they are so beholden to platforms like TikTok and Snap. It’s all they know. Is this a tragic story?

No, I don't think so. The hope we see in episode five and their resilience is a testament to the resilience of this generation and the way they can help us carve a path forward. If anything, the adults have been a little bit irresponsible and kind of unknowing. The tech companies have been downright irresponsible. Safeguards like we have in all other media have been missing. Not to point fingers, this is a medium that has come up very quickly—

Please point fingers.

Look, it's relatively new what we're learning. In episode five, Sydney says, “Once we knew the harm of cigarettes with lung cancer, there was change made, there was regulation. And now we know there's a connection between social media, mental health, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation.” So once this knowledge is here, we have to act. To me it's very hopeful, and I know at the end the kids are like, “What do we do? We can't live without it.” But understanding that ​​there are actually a lot of things that can be done, between regulation, between asking tech companies to change the algorithm, and also legally if they were responsible for their publishing, like every other publisher, we might be in a different space.

[brazenautomaton]

so here's a conversation I had with a friend just now that sums up a lot of what I think so well I don't want to bother rephrasing it

them

Oh boy are we ready for 48 more months of hearing the Most Sanest Normalest People on the internet act like a right-of-center candidate getting elected when put up against another nagging scold of a progressive "It's Her Turn"-er was a surprise

me:

The Democrats and their wider supporters don't seem to realize people can remember the things they say. They said Biden was fine, it was a wild right wing conspiracy to think he was unfit for office. Then he is clearly, actively disintegrating on stage at the debate, so now it's Harris! Of course it's Harris, what are you talking about, we've always been about Harris! Harris who was, it's important to note, a diversity hire. She was not a popular candidate. She did dismally in the primary, and was chosen as VP because it was Time For A Strong Woman Of Color

them:

Y-E-P God imagine taking the VP of an unpopular incumbent and saying "Yep, she's the one" and being surprised when that goes poorly It is genuinely alarming, though, how absolutely temporally untethered a lot of the discourse coming from the left is. Like, genuinely just "don't believe your lying memories" level of attempt to disregard stuff that happened not just in living memory, not just in the last decade, but happened during the current presidency. The lack of humility is also not just distasteful, but actually alarming. If you make predictions that are wildly off the mark to try to get people behind your candidate, you cannot then treat your wildly off-the-mark predictions as if they did not matter.

the primary strategy of the "guys who spent five years using 'gaslight' to mean 'disagree with'" appears to be attempted gaslighting. you just aren't allowed to notice things they say and do. every time someone is like "I don't like this thing you're doing," the democrats as a whole are all "That didn't happen and you're a bad person."

this is an effective strategy for winning conversations with people and a very bad strategy for winning elections. when people are upset about things you did or allowed to happen, "nuh uh you bad person" is not a response. "that shouldn't count" is not an effective counter even if you genuinely believe it should not count. a million morlocks-holmes saying "this has nothing to do with the democrats because no democratic holder of office has introduced a bill with explicitly racist language" isn't going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced. you are not entitled to votes, you have to actually do things to win the election.

focusing on how bad and threatening Trump is is a losing strategy when we had a term of Trump and none of the fascist future we were warned of came to pass. Trump had a fucking vision of the future to really behind that more than zero people believed in. Now, I'm not a "typical" ad-watcher because I only saw campaign ads on YouTube (but I feel like this is not super atypical any more), but I saw a lot of Kamala Harris ads, and zero of them were about any of her plans or ideals or vision and all of them were about "You need to give us money right now to win the election." Like if you're using the money to make ads like this, that's kind of like a one-person pyramid scheme.

the Trump presidency will be terrible in a predictable, expected way. there will be no fascism, just a slow crumbling of our already-dismal institutional competence. I don't think the Democrats would have been much better. They'd still be beholden to an activist core of psychopaths and doing everything they can to cover for those people, while also governing incompetently and completely unable to capitalize on or draw attention to any good things they actually manage to do. Leftists and progressives are already going through the whole "the Democrats move us all to the right they only want to move to the right!" but the Democrats don't move at all; they don't think they should change their behavior, because when they lose an election it is because the voters failed them and not the other way around.