Many Minecraft Players Fail To Understand What Anarchy Is

Douglas Muth from Ardmore, PA, USA

If you have been following Minecraft for a while, you may have noticed the proliferation of so-called "anarchy servers." Places such as 2b2t & MC Prison where there are allegedly "no rules." Players are permitted to cheat, steal, and kill other players (virtually) with reckless abandon.

These servers are entertaining to play, and I am a massive fan of the YouTuber FitMC, who covers the history of 2b2t. They are not anarchy, though, and this pop culture example allows us to set the record straight about a widespread misconception.

What is anarchy?

Anarchy comes from combining the Greek word an (without) and arkhos (ruler). It refers to a philosophy of trying to break down hierarchies, often by pushing against the state, capitalism, and really any rigid power structure that exists.

It is not, as what it is commonly referred to, as having “no rules.” Anarchist organizations have many rules and frequently try to craft policy and leadership roles in as decentralized a way as possible. Though like any philosophy, there are different methods and even disagreements on how to achieve this objective.

Now, this is probably not the definition you have heard, instead being told that anarchy is the opposite of structure and order. This misconception comes down to a philosophical disagreement. Many believe that the absence of strict hierarchies will lead to the worst aspects of humanity surfacing (e.g., rape, murder, etc.) — a belief that conveniently benefits those at the top of many hierarchies.

Yet when we look at history, we often see a different picture emerge. A common historical example brought up frequently in this discourse is pirate ships. The pop culture perception of pirates is that they were evil merciless plunderers, but the past was more complicated. Although there were a diversity of pirate governments (not all of them kind), some ships had robust democracies, constitutions, greater gender and racial parity among crew members, and a more equitable distribution of shares than their British counterparts. As The Guardian explains:

“It wasn’t as hierarchical as the Royal Navy. Captains were elected. And they lived according to a code.”

According to article one [of a code that prevailed on Black Bart’s ship]: “Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure.”

Contrary to common misconceptions, pirate ships were not more violent than, say, the British Navy (the entity that eventually mercilessly stomped piracy out of existence). In fact, pirates often relied on deception and branding to cause ships to surrender before an actual fight ever broke out (see The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, CGP Grey's video How to be a Pirate Captain!, or David Graeber's Pirate Enlightenment).

There are many other historical examples of anarchy that contradict the popular definition (see also Freetown Christiania, Exarcheia', etc.) We don't have time to cover them as this aside is more meant to highlight that the pervasive conception of anarchy in pop culture is often false, including, as we shall soon see, in Minecraft.

"Anarchy" in Minecraft

Anarchy Minecraft servers try to meet the second, more conservative definition of anarchy, advertising themselves as places with "no rules." Yet even with this definition, these servers fall flat. All games are a series of rules: that's how you can play them in the first place. Sports are based on collective norms. Take, for example, soccer. You are not physically prevented from picking up a soccer ball. Instead, you agree to kick it to participate in a soccer match.

Video games, unlike the agreed-upon rules and norms of in-person games, are conversely governed by universal laws inside a simplified virtual reality. You can edit and slice a game's code all you like, but the moment you do, you are constrained by those new limitations. Unlike soccer, there is no rule-breaking in video games from an architectural standpoint, merely adjusting the reality around you and adding or removing new constraints.

This problem becomes even more complicated with servers (i.e., "a computer that acts as a central authority to define the current state of a multiplayer game"), which require social norms, on top of the ingrained game mechanics, to even participate in them. Or, put more simply, players who act like dicks on these collective platforms will routinely find themselves booted from them completely.

In anarchy servers, even though one can often use modifications, bots, and an assortment of traditional "rule breaks," there are still social rules — the biggest being that you cannot disrupt the functioning of the collective game you are participating in, and still expect to participate in it. For example, in 2b2t, players sometimes weaponize items such as item frames and enchantment tables to create "lag" machines that lower the server's Transactions Per Second (TPS) rate to crash it. The owner behind this server, who goes by the moniker Hausemaster, has booted players, banned items, and patched mechanics that cause this lag — in essence, for violating a core social norm of the server.

Many of these servers also adjust code and implement various plugins to create a status quo on how players should behave. Lifesteal SMP has created an elaborate heart-stealing system (see more here) and enforces a strict code of conduct where they bar people from insulting moderators. Mineberry prevents hacks and selling accounts. Purity Vanilla likewise bans hacks, lag machines, and duping exploits.

Look at all these rules we've found. One may argue that these adjustments make sense, but that's not the point. It's instead to reinforce the fact that the conservative concept of "no rules" is nonsense. This narrative of anarchy is more about fostering a Hobbesian "war of all against all," a conservative hell where players hunt and destroy everything in their wake than it's about creating a real place with “no rules.” Again, this is impossible. The mere act of coming together demands organization: it demands rules.

What it does not always demand is a strict hierarchy, but even by this definition of anarchy, these servers usually fail. These anarchy servers do not have decentralized leadership. They are typically owned by one or two individuals. Players have little say in the decision-making, even for wide-reaching policies that impact everyone's experience, such as implementing a tiered queuing system where players who pay receive preferential treatment (a real example that happened with 2b2t).

It's argued that there is no governance here because server administration is frequently focused solely on maintenance rather than moderation. And yet, as we have already seen, this is a lie. Governance is still happening. If you are making decisions for a group — that is governance — and just because you have decided to abdicate many (though certainly not all) of these decisions, that doesn't mean you lack the authority to do so. Players have no formal control over the operation of servers like 2b2t, merely less oversight and even less input.

And when they do "abuse" that lack of oversight, they can be punished if these abuses are considered dangerous, harmful, or inconvenient by those in charge. Rights can be taken away without due process or mediation. That's not anarchy in any sense of the word.

A chaotic conclusion

Now I am sure there is that "one true anarchy server" out there ready to point out that not everyone thinks this way. No doubt, somewhere on the Internet, a small group of people is democratically maintaining the operation and governance of an anarchy server, doing some awe-inspiring things under the radar (see this short-lived socialist revolution on the Stoneworks server as an example).

But this is not the majority stance — either in mainstream society or in this subculture of Minecraft anarchy servers. Anarchism is poorly understood in both these worlds, often used as a stand-in to represent a cynical belief about human nature being “evil” and needing society to correct it. These organized “unorganized” servers are far from natural and require a lot of work to maintain. They are constantly under threat because the “survival of the fittest” attitudes they foster encourage behavior that is just as destructive to the servers themselves (see lag machines) as it is to their fellow players.

In the end, Minecraft players don’t understand anarchy, but while you still may not agree with it, hopefully, now, you, at the very least, realize what it is. The fantasy of “no rules” is appealing, but it is a fiction, and it might be time to start questioning why this belief exists in the first place.

Sometimes It's Okay To Give Up Hope: The Future Isn't Lost

Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash

I talk to my friends, and the futures they paint for me are bleak: Gilead, Bladerunner, Max Max. They tell me that there are no good futures left: that we are irreversibly headed for constant wars, depleting water, food shortages, and reduced life expectancies. As Bill McGuire, a climate scientist at University College London, told The Daily Beast of climate change: "There is no doomerism, simply realism.”

I am not one to sugarcoat our present reality (see We Might Be Headed For a Great American Famine). There is nothing wrong with recognizing current dangers, and those who tell you to ignore reality under the banner of positivity or optimism are being toxic (see toxic positivity). You should be allowed to be pessimistic, to point out the inefficiencies and cruelties within this system, and to say that they are wrong.

However, there is a world of difference between recognizing that things are dark and claiming that there is no hope for the future — and that's the tension I want to discuss today. Because while things are bad, the assumption that the future is already lost, that our lives are forfeit, is a dangerous thought distortion that ultimately cedes ground to those f@cking up our world.

Beyond hope and hopelessness

When we talk about words like pessimism and optimism, they can get muddied very quickly, depending on the context. With pessimism, are we referring to the feeling (i.e., anticipating a negative outcome from any given situation) or the philosophy (i.e., assigning a negative value to life or existence)? Optimism is used colloquially to mean that things will generally work out, but as a philosophy, it is associated with the world being fundamentally good, and even by some that we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

In general, I don't find it very helpful to turn concepts such as "pessimism" and "optimism" into static personality traits that are either all-positive or all-negative, when doing so ignores the context at play. While being permanently dour is not always helpful, sometimes it's okay to be hopeless or critical about things, as it's just common sense that results from years of personal experience.

For example, while I am hopeful about humanity's overall potential, I can be pretty pessimistic about our current political and economic systems — because, from my perspective, they are f@cking up the world. There is a rather clear correlation between wealth and higher emissions. More affluent people pollute more than anyone else. Why would I be waiting for capitalism to solve the problem of our deteriorating ecosystem — a problem it caused? That's like watching someone punch you in the face nine times and expecting the tenth one to be different.

When we don't address the context for our optimism and pessimism, this conversation about hope and hopelessness becomes a series of meaningless slogans.

Optimistic about what?

Pessimistic about whom?

These questions are far more helpful than claiming to be a run-of-the-mill optimist. If you do not define what you are optimistic about, it implicitly means that you are optimistic about the status quo, and from where I am looking, that mindset is equally as dangerous as having no hope at all.

Yet removing the context in the opposite direction is still not helpful either. If you have given up on the future and claim that your life is already forfeited because of a fear of fascism or climate change, I want to likewise challenge this assumption. The future is not lost because it has yet to happen, and there is still time to build something else.

A cause for hope and despair

Again, this article is not telling you to take your causes for concern over our system and to bury them under a facade of acceptance for the status quo. No one wants that, especially this disaffected blogger who routinely criticizes our larger society (see The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending).

Yet it might be helpful to imagine the possibility that things can improve because none of us can truly predict the future. Contrary to popular belief, we are a technologically advanced species that has the resources to change many things extremely quickly. We can split and fuse atoms, go into the void of space, genetically modify plants and people, and are quickly verging on advancements that, to our ancestors, would have been viewed as signs of Godhood. We have the means to do so much more good than what we are doing presently.

Where we have yet to advance very much is with social innovations. Because of a few scraps of paper and 1s and 0s in a computer, we let billions starve. The lines of ink on a document allow us to justify refusing people access to technologies and resources that could genuinely improve their lives. If we were to “innovate” our economic system (in other words, move beyond capitalism and liberal democracy), we could begin to solve many of our problems.

Imagine a world where there is no oil industry that blocks climate change legislation. No agro-business pumping processed foods into all of our diets. No defense contractors siphoning away our resources to wage war. No lobbyists keeping an industry alive through bureaucratic inefficiency (see Turbox Tax, healthcare, the penny, and more). A world where basic needs are provided for, and the full potential of every human brain is working on solving our most severe problems from the bottom up.

This world could be within our grasp, but we aren't going to get there with our current political and economic frameworks. Historically, it is, in fact, because of people working against capitalist interests that many of the gains we know today have occurred. As Linda McQuaig writes in Rabble:

“…according to British anthropologist Jason Hickel, who notes that the dawn of capitalism plunged much of humanity into misery, with reduced nutrition. As a result, life expectancy actually fell in Britain, dropping from a lifespan of about 43 years in the 1500s down to the low 30s by the 1700s.

Life expectancy only began to improve towards the end of the 1800s — and only because of the public health movement, which pushed for separating sewage from drinking water. This extremely good idea was vigorously opposed by capitalists, who raged against paying taxes to fund it. So sanitation, not capitalism, may be humanity’s true elixir.

Indeed, things only truly got better, says British historian Simon Szreter, after ordinary people won the right to vote and to join unions that pushed for higher wages and helped secure public access to health care, education and housing — again over the fierce objections of capitalists.”

To solve our problems, we need to "innovate," which means realizing that some systems and beliefs are hopeless. It's vital to be skeptical of the status quo for genuine change to flourish, but for that skepticism to work, it also means acknowledging that a good future is possible. It means giving yourself the grace to hope for something better.

A future conclusion

In many ways, all this talk about the world collapsing gives the powerful too much credit as it assumes that they will control everything forever. Systems change. As Ursula K. Le Guin said in a speech in 2014: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

The rich already control much of our present. They write our laws, decide our salaries, and often (either directly or indirectly) choose who lives or dies. Why give them our future too? Why cede that ground to them in your head?

Recently, I have refused to give the powerful the mental victory of our collective defeat. I have permitted myself to imagine that there is a possibility for things to get better, even if that better tomorrow only exists within my mind. This shift has been freeing because it has allowed me to keep going, to not wallow in despair, and to begin asking myself how I can obtain that future.

I know things are bad right now. You can spiral down the infinite what-ifs of the future, where you imagine all the horrible things that can happen. Moral panics. Fascism. Climate change. The list goes on. But flip that logic on its head, and ask yourself: "What if I survive?" What if the future does become better? And what will it take to help that happen?

Contrary to what some may think, the rich do not yet own the future, and it's time we start acting like it.

Kurzgesagt’s Neoliberal Stance on the Environment

Image; Internetstiftelsen

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell is a charming YouTube channel that attempts to demystify complicated topics in a way everyday people can understand. Each episode involves a narrator explaining subjects while adorable little animations help to illuminate the topics as clearly as possible.

When focusing narrowly on science explainers, I think Kurzgesagt does a lot of good things. They have produced hopeful and optimistic content that I believe has been positive for many viewer’s mental health. It is my hope that the criticism given to them now will be treated in that spirit of education and not defensively reframed as an attempt to “knock them down.”

In the past, this blog has accused the Kurzgesagt channel of a "neoliberal bias," by which we mean one that favors innovation through the marketplace over other, more direct options. We have not claimed that they are maliciously plotting with neoliberal actors such as privatization advocate Bill Gates, but rather that there is simply a shared bias between them. As I write in The Inescapable Neoliberal Bias Behind' Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell':

“To be clear, [Kurzgesagt] CEO Philipp Dettmer and his compatriots are probably not in cahoots with Bill Gates, scheming on ways to enhance this billionaire’s chosen narrative. It’s more than likely that they share a similar philosophical foundation, which creates a positive feedback loop where they are rewarded for advancing views palatable to the very powerful.”

Nowhere do we see this more than in their stance on the environment, where they support technocratic, market-oriented solutions to their millions of followers. In the process, the brand oftentimes dismisses the actions that many committed activists believe are necessary to combat climate change’s worst effects, giving their viewers a drastically incomplete picture.

A bias toward markets

This bias I am referring to is pervasive in their analysis of solutions to the environmental crisis. For example, in their video on nuclear energy titled “Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?” the brand argues that we need this power source to electrify the power grid. And in the process, they lean on the concepts of "net zero" (i.e., "the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere") and electrification (i.e., “converting existing industries that rely on fossil fuels to ones that are powered by electricity as the source of energy”).

These concepts sound good, but the underlying logic relies on a bit of techno-optimism where we don't change our behaviors through reducing consumption, changing IP laws, altering housing and transportation on a systemic level, and redistributing land, but adopting technological fixes without having to restructure society significantly. In particular, the concept of "Net Zero" is highly controversial and has often been accused by activists of allowing corporate actors to sidestep the issue of regulation and redistribution by over-relying on technological innovations that do not fully exist yet and cannot be fully implemented through the market alone (see Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap).

Likewise, electrification not only assumes that we keep consuming electricity at our current rates but that every step in electrifying our power grid will likewise not increase our emissions. As activist Tom McBrien of We Power tells my publication After the Storm in an upcoming interview on the future of energy policy:

“First off, why EVs and overall electrification isn’t necessarily the answer?… You need certain materials like lithium or cobalt, which are extremely toxic, just to get out of the earth, and if you see where these minerals are coming from, they’re generally not coming from the US. One of the reasons is that it’s so harmful just to produce them that it’s clearly against a lot of environmental laws.

So what do we do? Of course, we look to countries in the Global South that don’t have as strong protections for their workers and for their environment and communities. In a lot of instances, we’re kind of indirectly trashing these other places and putting people in really hard conditions. And then we feel all good about ourselves because we’re driving an electric vehicle without thinking about the supply chain that led there.”

These criticisms are not significantly addressed in this video or any video they have put out (so far). We see this promotion of net zero and electrification in much of their other content on climate change. In "Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, It's Complicated", the narrator argues for a series of policy innovations (e.g., electrification, reducing oil subsidies and funneling them into renewables, etc.) to achieve a "zero CO2" or “net zero” world. As the narrator continues: "Be it from technologies from carbon capture or a new generation of nuclear power plants to new batteries that revolutionize the energy storage from renewables. "

Some of these ideas are fine, but again, what's not mentioned are political innovations that would seek to challenge the current economic system, such as land redistribution, delaying or sabotaging energy-intensive infrastructure (see How to Blow Up a Pipeline), and changing IP laws to reduce incentives at production rather than through tax penalties that corporations can always create loopholes for.

This brand would rather lean on controversial, highly corporatized framings, such as net zero, than argue that we might have to challenge our economic system’s insatiable need to grow indefinitely, which points to some unhelpful priorities on this matter.

Technology is king

It’s very apparent that there is a technological, market-oriented bias to this channel’s framing of climate change, and sometimes the "solutions" they entertain are genuinely off-the-wall and dangerous. In the video "Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do," the narrator builds the case for this technology, saying, "In the near future, it might become necessary to try something radical to slow down rapid [climate change]: geoengineering" or the practice of adjusting our atmosphere on a planet-wide scale.

While this video goes over many of the potential negatives of this technology (e.g., changing rain patterns, deteriorating agriculture, widening the hole in the O-Zone layer, temperature shocks, etc.), it ultimately cautions rejecting it entirely, claiming: "But blankly opposing geoengineering is short-sighted. The sad truth is that we are already running a geoengineering experiment…Hopefully, we will never have to use Geoengineering, but if we need to in the future, we better have done the science. We better be prepared, or a panicking humanity might accidentally press the self-destruct button."

It cannot be stated how harmful such a mentality is. When it comes to technology as complicated as geoengineering, we will never be able to anticipate all the potential harms of such an action. We could destabilize our ecosystem in far quicker and more powerful ways and not realize so until well after the fact. As Aaron Fernando writes in the speculative fiction The Visible Hand:

“…our world changes at a breakneck speed and on industrial scales. Harm is done on massive scales, rapidly. Ecologies get destroyed quickly, but they take generations to heal. There must be something else. A complementary mechanism — one that foresees harm and stops it before it happens”

It seems truly unhinged to suggest the idea of this technology, even as a "last result" (note it's already being tried in the real world), when there are far more straightforward, less unpredictable social technologies (e.g., land redistribution, IP reform, Degrowth, etc.) that do not involve the potential destruction of our ecosystem — innovations that this channel has never seriously considered.

It highlights a bias on this channel, where they would rather promote the "careful consideration" of such a genuinely catastrophic technology than even to begin to challenge their basic assumptions surrounding politics and economics.

The dismissal of corporate harm and activist solutions

Even when these videos are not promoting such dangerous solutions, sometimes what’s noticeable is not the content itself but what is absent from it — i.e., a total refusal to criticize the systems at play. In "Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? — Who Needs To Fix It?" the narrator focuses exclusively on emissions coming from individuals and countries. This not only sidesteps the exploitation from imperialism that created (and continues to reinforce) this divide but ignores the conversation about corporate harm, often the vehicle for that imperialism, altogether. It’s not that the data here is wrong, but it’s missing a vital part of the context.

Whether we are talking about fossil fuel companies, agriculture, car production, or more, many greenhouse gas emissions come from firms creating products and services. Some policy experts will often try to counter that even more emissions are produced by things such as consumers driving vehicles or heating their homes, but this is, in many ways, a sleight of hand. It’s referencing a type of agency that most people do not have. We didn't wake up one day and decide that cars are the most effective way to get around or that we love throwing out our clothes after ten or twelve uses.

Most companies twist our laws to kill more sustainable, convenient alternatives, forcing us to purchase and use those goods and services to survive. We do not have such large amounts of consumption because consumers "love their stuff," but rather through a combination of suppressing alternatives and practices such as planned and perceived obsolescence, where products are designed by many firms to be used a couple of times and then discarded.

Furthermore, companies routinely weaponize their influence to bypass "green" regulations. In one example, hundreds of companies in Germany used a loophole in the Renewable Energy Act to pass their costs onto the German taxpayer, who suffered higher energy bills as a result.

When many companies cannot bypass these regulations, they switch their emissions to countries abroad and, in the process, further exploit the Global South. Countries with weak environmental policies, such as Trinidad and Tobago, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovakia, consistently receive more “exports of direct CO2 emissions relative to their GDP.”

To collapse that context and make emissions a matter of what happens when countries accrue wealth ignores how, under capitalism, most firms try to externalize their costs onto larger society. They often don't care about the lines on a map when doing so. In a world where the reach of corporate firms expands across borders, it makes Kurzgesagt's analysis very superficial (note: outside of general remarks toward the fossil fuel industry, I have yet to see a serious effort to examine the causes I have addressed here, which is strange given how in the weeds they have been willing to go in other areas).

Rather than focus on how maybe our economic system is a problem in and of itself, this brand is routinely dismissive about any such challenges, often handwaving "radical" climate activists' concerns as unserious. For example, in their video Can YOU Fix Climate Change? the narrator says:

“Some argue that a move away from capitalism is the only solution to this mess. Others insist that markets should be freer without any interventions like subsidies. And some suggest that we need what’s referred to as ‘degrowth’ and to cut back as a species overall. But the truth is, at least as of now, no political system is doing an impressive job of becoming truly sustainable and none have really done so in the past.”

Sidestepping the contentious issue of how countries such as the US have often overthrown economic alternatives, you would expect that with such a framing, they might go into the specifics of Degrowth or what anti-capitalist environmental policy even means. But no, there is no attempt even to begin to understand these policies in this or any other video.

Instead, Can YOU Fix Climate Change? ends by telling viewers to "vote at the ballot, and vote with your wallet." That is a neoliberal framing because it avoids collective actions, such as working with protests to interfere with carbon-emitting equipment directly or weaponizing labor power to halt production. Instead, it prioritizes individual steps taken in the marketplace of finance and ideas. That is a strange approach for a video that claims to eschew individual action as a solution to climate change.

The only call to collective action I can find in that “Can YOU Fix Climate Change?” video is a sign to unionize in the background — something that the narrator does not comment on and that you could blink and very much miss. When they address what society can do in their companion video (We WILL Fix Climate Change!), they focus on the work of technology and policies constructed from the top-down by engineers and entrepreneurs, not work that activists, urban planners, and laypeople can do from the bottom-up to achieve that future.

It’s a type of philosophy that claims change must be begged for from those at the top rather than made from all of us at the bottom.

Conclusion

Now I want to still stress that I don’t think this channel is evil. From what I can tell from these videos, Kurzgesagt has given many viewers hope about the future, and with a depressing topic such as climate change, that is a beautiful thing. Doomerism is not a philosophical outlook that I find helpful. I reject the claim that everything is hopeless and love that this educational channel promotes a positive outlook.

Yet when we narrow solutions to climate change to market-based and technocratic ones, claiming the problem is "the fossil fuel sector' and not intrinsic to our destructive economic system, we become blind to how corporations capture solutions and externalize costs. The future Kurzgesagt paints is a rose-tinted optimism, ignoring the work of activists at best and refusing to acknowledge more effective solutions at worst. If we want to mitigate the worst aspects of climate change, not just for those who can afford to do so, but for those on the frontlines in both the Global South and at home, then, in a nutshell, it means embracing radical solutions that are a little outside of our comfort zones.

The Disaster Town The Government Ignored (Flint, Michigan)

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the “Apocalypse Tour.” This is the walking and drinking tour for all those disaster junkies out there, where we observe the locations that had a significant impact on species 947’s collapse (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the physical, digital, and psychic locations that contributed to humanity’s untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at a community that was ravaged by pollution or “death chemicals” due to political incompetence. No, we aren’t referring to East Palestine, for those history buffs out there interested in the pasts of archaic flesh bags. Nor are we referring to the Farsider Dark Matter Incident, where a dogmatic resource monger swapped out its inhabitants’ biological components for precious metals. We are instead speaking of the human community of Flint, Michigan, in the imperial polity known as the United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh].

Flint was a city northwest of the human industrial hub known as Detroit. Over half of its inhabitants there had darker skin pigments, meaning they belonged to a lower caste in US society. America had a “hidden,” quasi-racialized caste system, which is a fancy way of saying that they systemically discriminated against citizens with darker skin pigments but pretended like they didn’t. US lawmakers often believed their society was entirely meritocratic while ignoring that Black Americans were far more likely to receive worse health outcomes, have less access to lodging, and earn fewer subsistence tokens known as “money” [muh·nee]. For another historical reference, see the bulged-eyed vs. recessed-eyed caste system of the Pink Jungles of Reylor VII.

The crisis revolved around those subsistence tokens. Decades earlier, the community had been impacted by the withdrawal of a transportation factory owned by a company (or “resource monger”) known as General Electric, which had in the past paid many of Flint’s inhabitants money for assembling ground transports known as automobiles [aa·tuh·muh·beelz]. These vehicles were powered by the very same death chemicals killing 947’s ecosystem. The loss of GE’s factory and the refusal of the USA’s various governments to help people belonging to its lower caste meant that Flint’s local community was low on tokens.

A political leader named Rick Snyder [rik snai·dr]— an Earthling long accused of disliking members of this lower caste — decided to seize control of Flint’s democracy and place it directly in the hands of an emergency manager or dictator, whose job was to prioritize the hoarding of tokens at all costs. In April of 90,350 XE, or 2014, this emergency manager decreed that Flint would switch its water supply from a well-regulated and well-maintained source to one that was not, because it would cost fewer tokens to do so.

This decision almost immediately caused lower caste citizens in Flint to notice a dip in their water quality, but because American society prioritized tokens above all else, these concerns were ignored. There were spikes in incidents of Legionnaire disease, which for non-warm-blooded organisms is a condition that, if left untreated, can cause the organs of species 947 to fail. Tests would soon detect increased concentrations of the element Scooma, known colloquially as lead, which could be debilitating to humans in high enough concentrations. These conditions, however, were not investigated because Snyder’s appointed dictator was worried about what added scrutiny would do for his token collection.

It was not until reports from members higher up than Snyder’s government showed that concentrations of lead were indeed dangerous that some people started to act (note: qualitative data was usually not believed in this society unless quantified by members of the upper caste). The Environmental Protection Agency and Center for Disease Control released reports that this spiritual society would classify as “damning,” and soon the negligence was reported on more frequently in their corporate press.

Yet Snyder was unable to admit wrongdoing, leading to contradictory reports, where some levels of government asserted that the water was safe to drink, (what we may know as a lie) while others asserted the opposite (in other words, the truth). The city voted to reverse the water source in 2015, but the dictator refused to comply. It would take months before they phased out the inferior water source completely. Many of those responsible would ultimately face no legal repercussions for the decision to endanger these lives, and by 2022 in Earth time, most cases against the parties responsible were thrown out in the USA’s inefficient legal system.

This situation may sound confusing, but one must remember that the higher caste of species 947 was very truth-adverse, preferring to construct entire alternate realities rather than admit culpability: a flaw that would seal many fates in the end.

For temporal visitors who want to visit this community, we advise you to respect its inhabitants. The victims of this attack were not responsible for the stupidity of their leaders and often had no political say in the formation of their laws. And so please consider this information before respectfully visiting this part of humanity’s tragic history.

If you wish to assuage your guilt, we advise you to acquire some subsistence tokens and send them over to organizations such as the Flint River Watershed Coalition that are devoted to improving the area’s water quality.

Note — for the humans who have somehow bypassed our encryption protocols, take comfort in the fact that this is a joke from a normal human and not a retrospective on your species’ imminent demise.

DO NOT use this information to stop this future because that would create a time paradox and go against your people’s laws, as well as Medium’s ToS., which I’m told are very important. I AM NOT encouraging you to take the law into your own hands, something I cannot do as an appendageless species.

Calling Marianne Williamson 'Kooky' Reeks of Sexism

Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In March of 2023, spiritual leftist and failed 2020 presidential democratic nominee Marianne Williamson announced her bid for the presidency. Almost immediately, commentators began attacking, not her policies, but her kookiness. "Let the Cranks Run," Jack Shafer argued in Politico, a picture of Williamson on the thumbnail. "If I had a, what's it called? A little globe here, a crystal ball," Biden's press secretary mocked when asked about her bid, "Then I can tell you…. If I could feel her aura. I just don't have anything to share on that."

This is not a new line of attack. When she ran in 2020, commentators routinely brought up this alleged mysticism. "Marianne Williamson for Secretary of Crystals," read a 2019 title in Salon. "I was just waiting for her at some point to be like, 'We don't need a plan, my friends. Just give me one vial of CBD oil, and our chakras will be aligned,'" Trevor Noah joked of her performance at a 2019 debate.

In as roundabout a way as possible, these commentators were and still are calling her crazy. A kooky person who believes in kooky things and should not be taken seriously: a woman to be dismissed. These comments deserve to be scrutinized, not only because they tap into a very bitter history, but because they are being used by people who claim to support feminism and other progressive issues.

If we want to scrutinize controversial women, and Marianne Williamson does have things worth being examined; we should focus on those items, not indirectly bringing up the trope of the crazy woman.

The devil's in the uterus

It should surprise no one that people have been calling women crazy for a long time. The word hysteria, a word that means showing unhealthy emotion or excitement, has roots in the Greek word hystera, meaning "womb." This connection exists because there was an ancient belief that the uterus roamed inside a woman's body in search of semen — something that should give one pause the next time they use this word. As the decades passed, it became a "diagnosis" whose cure has been everything from bed rest to reading less to getting a good f@cking.

What does this have to do with people making fun of Williamson for crystals? In many ways, everything. Witchy things such as "crystals" and magic are currently depicted as belonging to the feminine domain. Women are more likely to believe in things such as astrology or tarot, and while we can debate the reasons for that, marketing for these practices still remain heavily woman-oriented.

This gendered association is not biological (men can like magical things, too), but it does have a long, complicated history. Healers, wise people, or however you want to call magic users, have been around for a long time, and these practitioners haven't always been women. There have been Kings who have consulted tarot cards. Male scholars who believed in astrology. It would be easy to come down with a gender-essentialist view of witchcraft, saying this was always a realm that exclusively belonged to women, but history is more complicated.

Our current association has more to do with how the Middle Ages decided to treat women in Western Europe. In no small part due to the misogynistic book the Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1487), a text that synthesized a lot of longstanding beliefs of women being duplicitous and feeble and claimed they were a good reason for them to be susceptible to devil worship, our current conception of the witch was, if not born, then popularized. As the book became reprinted over the centuries, the image of the haggard, broom-flying woman who preys on innocents such as children was quickly solidified, and all women, particularly female-oriented professions, such as healers and brewers, started receiving more widespread accusations of witchcraft.

This fearmongering helped give rise to a moral panic that we know today as the witch hunts or witch trials, where thousands of people were killed for no good reason — again, something that might give one pause the next time they want to use that word when someone tweets at them meanly. While some countries had greater amounts of male victims (see Iceland and Russia), historically, and especially in the United Kingdom, the country chiefly responsible for colonizing America, women were more likely to be executed for witchcraft in the Middle Ages. And wouldn't you know it, the same rhetoric we see with hysteria was evident during these persecutions, with many women erroneously believed to be susceptible because of their "feeble" nature. As Dr. Charlotte-Rose Millar writes for the University of Queensland:

“…much of it had to do with ideas about women’s temperaments. One of the most vitriolic texts, Heinrich Kramer’s 1487 Malleus Maleficarum described how women were ‘chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions’ and went on to blame her greed, her credulous nature, her feeble mind and body, her slippery tongue, her jealous nature and her inherently evil disposition for her tendency to give in to the Devil’s influence.”

In other words, crazy. A possessed witch was not in control of her senses, hysterical.

One cannot separate modern-day society's hatred of witch-like practices from misogyny. Craziness has been tied in the West, for centuries, to womanhood. And magic, so closely linked with the feminine because of these massacres, has been decried along with it. When people claim to believe that a man's corpse was buried in a cave, arose as a zombie to talk to his followers, and then magically teleported to the afterlife, they call it having faith in Christianity. But when people talk about other aspects of spirituality, such as crystals and magic, it's treated as kooky women's shit.

Some might have initially countered these claims against Williamson by pointing out that she allegedly doesn't believe in crystals and things of that nature. Yet that retort is disrespectful to the millions of people who do. Even if Williamson believed in these stigmatized types of spirituality, it wouldn't make her crazy or deserving of ridicule.

And so these comments, especially about her alleged fringe spirituality, are tapping into the trope of the unhinged witch. The Biden administration was perpetuating bigotry here. It doesn't matter if press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is a woman — women can still perpetuate misogyny (note — the witch hunts are an excellent historical example of that). And she appears to be perpetuating this meme to make Marianne Williamson out to be an unserious person not worthy of consideration: a woman who needs to be politically burned.

But what about the crystals?

This tactic is frustrating because while you may disagree with Williamson, she has run on pretty substantive issues. Her 2020 campaign was centered on the need for reparations (i.e., providing descendants of slavery restitution for that historical injustice), a policy many would argue that we need (see The Case for Reparations). Her current campaign is centered on bread-and-butter economic issues such as Medicare-for-all. As Nathan J. Robinson writes in Current Affairs:

“Certainly, Marianne Williamson’s 2024 platform is dead serious….Williamson lists a very clear and detailed 25-point labor plan that includes ensuring universal paid time off, criminally prosecuting executives who target labor organizers, establishing a National Worker Resource Center to help workers organize, requiring worker representation on corporate boards, banning intrusive employer surveillance of workers, ending noncompete clauses, preventing employers from wrongly classifying full-time workers as independent contractors, stepping up NLRB enforcement measures, ending right to work laws, and much more.”

Biden will likely run again, and it's clear that he doesn't want to address these issues because, frankly, she is more progressive than him. It's easier for him to leverage misogyny, laundered through the lips of a woman, than it is for him to take her seriously. That would mean a bitter primary where he has to go on the record speaking out against progressive policy.

Now there are fair criticisms of Marianne Williamson. There have been numerous reports that she has been mean to her staff, possibly even making them cry. As Lauren Egan notes in Politico of staffers talking of her 2020 campaign: "Those interviewed say the best-selling author and spiritual adviser subjected her employees to unpredictable, explosive episodes of anger. They said Williamson could be cruel and demeaning to her staff and that her behavior went far beyond the typical stress of a grueling presidential cycle."

Although if we are going to go there, and we should, Joe Biden is in a similar boat. The president has been routinely described as having a "short fuse," a very charitable way of saying he has anger problems. Unlike Williamson, he has also been accused of using his power to put women in positions of intense discomfort (what some might classify as harassment). And so, while Marianne Williamson's leadership deserves to be scrutinized, this sadly seems par for the course, when it comes to our options for president.

Another criticism of Williamson is her position on medication for mental health. From what I can gather from past remarks, she seems to believe that our society is profoundly unhealthy and that doctors can often overprescribe medication for situations that are more environmental than biological. For situations of "Normal Human Despair," as she calls it. She did a video recently for The Gravel Institute, where she blames neoliberalism for a mental health crisis.

And listen, while our current economic system worsens our mental health, the line between environmental and biological problems is not as clear-cut as she often argues (a misconception that is quite pervasive, even among experts). This is an area where I vehemently disagree with her (the revolution isn't going to get rid of depression, y’all). Though again, something tells me President Biden would have equally cringeworthy thoughts on mental health if one got him off the record and away from speech writers.

Finally, one might also disagree with her policies. Not everyone believes that we need reparations or to reduce wealth inequality. That's a normal and healthy debate to have, but all of this other talk of her being a kooky woman, commentators have advanced, is gross to me.

A hysterical conclusion

Karine Jean-Pierre's comments, in particular, were disappointing. Biden started his term telling staffers he would fire them on the spot if they disrespected colleagues. It's a shame that the same logic doesn't apply to Williamson when it comes to civility. I guess reaching across the aisle doesn't count for "kooky" women.

There is a lot to like and dislike about Williamson. Her progressive policies are a breath of fresh air in a primary I thought would be very stale. Yet I worry about her managerial style (though, again, most leaders at that level are more petulant off-camera than I would like).

However, even if she were a kooky witch praying to a crystal every month charged by the full moon's rays, that would not be a reason to disparage her. If you believe in the principles of respect and comradery, they should apply to even the people you think are weird.

Disney Doesn't Need To Campaign For Copyright Extension

toa267, modified by AnonMoos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For years, Disney, and all major media holders, have pushed to extend copyright so that their Intellectual Property can remain outside the public domain — i.e., materials not protected by IP laws. Their political meddling has been detrimental to our property laws. As I wrote in The MCU Was Never A Bold, New Experiment in Cinema:

“…a factor in this hectic [media] landscape is that, over the years, Disney (as well as other content “producers”) have made Intellectual Property increasingly more hostile to upstarts. As their mascot, Mickey Mouse’s initial short, Steamboat Willy, approached the public domain in 1983, Congress amended the law in ’76, so it remained in Disney’s hands. They did so again in 1998 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to the point that copyrights now extend to the author’s life plus 70 years”

We are approaching this period once again, as that crucial bit of Disney IP enters the public domain next year. The question going through many people's minds is, "if the Mickey Mouse company will once again push for an extension?" You can find such speculation in article after article after article.

While this fate is always a possibility, the sad truth is that lobbying or not, the company has already laid out such a legally regressive policy regime that, barring any significant changes, it does not need to lobby Congress at all to keep its IP indefinitely.

A brief history of Disney's IP

It cannot be understated how Disney's brand has been turning IP, much of it either in the public domain or coming from elsewhere, and placing it inside walled gardens. Its cornerstone brand is Disney Princesses, something that emerged in the 2000s to retrospectively lump together princess stories from the 30s, 50s, 90s, and beyond into one cohesive "label," and nearly all of them were based on works in the public imagination.

The first major princess title came out in 1937, during the studio's Golden Age, with Snow White, which was based on an oral German folktale made popular by the Brothers Grimm. Every prominent Disney princess, from the Little Mermaid, drawing on Hans Christian Andersen's book of the same name to Aladdin, being loosely modeled after One Thousand and One Nights, has relied on using fairytales, folklore, and works of fiction in the public domain.

How does one build a brand and merchandise something that everyone should be able to use?

The answer is that the Disney company has been quite litigious over its depictions of these again public stories. They infamously have done everything from making a Florida day care center remove Disney characters off their walls to almost trademarking Dia de los Muertos for merchandising, if not for a massive outcry (similar attempts made for Hakuna Matata). When it comes to merchandising, they seem willing to advance whatever the law and consumer comfort will allow.

And more than being protective in court, this effort extends to the law itself. The company infamously has campaigned for the extension of copyright law to the point that Steamboat Willie, the original Mickey Mouse short first published in 1928, is set to enter the public domain on January 1, 2024. Again, the mouse was initially set to become public in 1983, only for Congress to conveniently extend it via the 1976 Copyright Act.

The same thing happened with the 1998 Sonny-Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. According to a paper by Kaitlyn Rose Bernaski titled Saving Mickey Mouse: The Upcoming Fight FOR Copyright Term Extension, the lobbying by Disney for the 1998 campaign was particularly significant. They set up a Political Action Committee (PAC) that heavily donated to the bill's sponsors in both the Senate and House, totaling nearly $800,000 (note this was before the nearly unlimited money of Super PACs as a result of Citizens United). The then-chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, even personally met with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who eventually became a cosponsor of the law.

Disney's lobbying, alongside other Hollywood entertainment companies, paid off. Now we are at a point where all works now enter the public domain long after anyone who had anything to do with them is alive. This is the standard all over the world (see the Berne Convention). In fact, many European countries had already extended their copyright laws before the 1998 law was passed.

People sometimes erroneously argue that this legislation was all done to benefit artists and their descendants and keep us in line with "European Standards," but these justifications are red herrings. We hardly see corporations rushing to push Congress to meet other European standards, such as parental leave, drug pricing, or single-payer health care. We similarly do not have any evidence that this legislation significantly benefits descendants. As copyright scholar Dennis Karjala told Pricenomics in 2016:

“All of these arguments are either demonstrably false or, at best, without foundation in empirical data. The extensions are corporate welfare, plain and simple — and they have caused a lot of harm to the general public.”

It's debatable whether these laws benefit artists in the aggregate. Most of the wealth from these brands is not going to the descendants of artists either but to megacorporations like Disney, who have been more than willing to distort our laws for profit. The question people naturally ask is if this will happen again, and unfortunately, the sad answer is that it doesn't matter.

The Courts are on Disney's Side

At this point, there has not been the same type of movement by Disney to push for an extension. This is in part because of the Internet. The American public is much more interested in copyright law, as the rights of images, songs, and videos affect our day-to-day lives much more than they have in the past. While there is no guarantee that concern would translate into stopping such a law, it does mean that it would be harder to conceal.

For example, the debate over Net Neutrality 8 years ago was heated (as well as the one in 2020), with many influencers making videos and pushing followers to call legislators in protest. Why Net Neutrality Matters (And What You Can Do To Help) pleaded a CollegeHumor video. No doubt something similar would happen if such a legislative campaign to push copyright extension were tried now. Again, it's not that such actions stop lobbying efforts, but in the age of content, someone somewhere is usually talking about it. And so, unless we see some major turn in the next couple of months, the Mickey Mouse Company will not fight these older properties falling into the public domain.

In many ways, the deadline for such a push would have been in 2018, when copyrighted works made after 2022 started to enter the public domain, or even in 2022, when Winnie the Pooh joined, not in 2024. Yet a push for such an extension during this period didn't happen. One could argue that Disney does not need to do so. After all, Disney has Star Wars, the MCU, the Simpsons, and more. What's one animated short compared to everything else it has acquired?

Yet that ignores that a corporation would never willingly let go of money. The main reason they didn't push for such legislation is that no matter what happens, they will probably be able to collect checks on Mickey Mouse's visage for decades to come. And that's because of the other legal protection in this equation — trademark law.

Even if Disney does not snap its white gloves and push Congress for another extension, how trademark law is set up means that only the Steamboat Willie short will enter the public domain, not Mickey Mouse's likeness. Copyright only prevents you from copying an original work. A trademark protects the work and ideas of a business's brand. As Christopher Schiller notes in the article LEGALLY SPEAKING, IT DEPENDS on Trademarks Defined: "the mark is separate from the thing being marked. If the thing you want to protect is the mark itself, then you have to appeal to other areas of law (e.g., copyright.)."

And so, theoretically, if you wanted to protect a work, you get a copyright. If you want to protect your company's association with a particular word, idea, or symbol, not the work itself, because it's part of your brand, then trademark law is your friend. Disney does not care about Steamboat Willie as much as it cares about protecting its association with the character Mickey Mouse. And so, it employs trademarks, and unlike copyright law, which is limited to a particular time frame, they can be renewed indefinitely.

In terms of content, trademarks can often apply to particular iterations of a character. For example, this is why you can't retell a Winnie the Pooh story where he wears his red shirt. The book, while in the public domain, didn't have that depiction of the character. It was a Disney invention, so the company has trademarked that specific representation of the character and is quite litigious when someone "infringes" on it.

Furthermore, current legal precedent has concluded that some works develop a "second meaning" where they become automatically associated with a particular brand or company. Since Mickey Mouse is so deeply associated with the company Disney, even if it entered the public domain or was deemed to have an otherwise weak claim (see descriptive marks), they could still most likely retain trademark status. Although we will be able to copy the short Steamboat Willy in 2024, one will not be able to use the Mickey Mouse imagery legally on, say, merchandising and not expect Disney to challenge them in court.

Disney has over 20 trademarks for Mickey Mouse in various Mediums, which, again, last indefinitely as long as they are renewed, and hundreds for all other properties. This applies to every Disney brand: Star Wars, The Simpsons, and Marvel. The way things are right now, we will all be dead before they enter the public domain, and even then, their trademarks will give them effective commercial ownership in perpetuity.

Conclusion

At this point in time, Disney doesn't need to push for a new law. It must only stop the current regime from being overturned in Congress and the courts. Look at our current leaders, and ask yourself if Disney should be worried.

The situation around copyright law is bleak. If we want to change things, we must realize where we are. We exist in a world where the bad guys have already won. We are not in the quiet before the storm, waiting for the enemy to finish us. The evil armies have already broken through the gates, killed the king, and taken over.

Sure, in an ideal world, we would strengthen fair use or void the Sonny-Bono Copyright Act altogether, but that requires political power we do not currently have. We need the tactics of an insurgency: to invalidate the effects of copyright and trademark law by operating under the assumption that the law is not on our side.

Unfortunately, the way most ToS agreements work makes it very difficult for me to suggest concrete alternatives. Instead, I ask you to watch the following Disney movies (consider it my community service for being such a bad girl).

• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

• WALL-E

• High School Musical 3: Senior Year

• Beauty and the Beast

• Bedtime Stories

Surprisingly, This Is What a Trans Genocide Looks Like

Elvert Barnes

Everywhere we see people comparing trans existence to an insidious threat, a malicious ideology, indoctrination, contagion, or plague. "The leftwing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of abuse," Donald Trump said recently.

Trans people have never been entirely accepted in our society. However, our existence has become more visible in recent years, and with this, we have seen increased calls to end the "trans threat." We are in the midst of a moral panic as a highly motivated portion of our society attempts to legislate trans people out of existence. And because such a thing is impossible, the methods they are resorting to are becoming more and more extreme.

Before rounding people into camps or dumping them into pits, there is the long, deliberate process where those who wish to do harm convince themselves that their path is righteous, and that the other side is ridiculous and undeserving of empathy. In many ways, this latest wave of anti-trans hate started as a joke. The "I identify as something ridiculous" joke, the infamous "one joke" where conservatives, through comedy and speeches, likened trans identity to something inherently absurd. Ted Cruz, for example, infamously said his pronouns were "kiss my ass."

This sentiment has not died down, but a darker element has become more prominent in recent years. Through misinformation texts like Irreversible Damage and the film What Is A Woman?, hate activists have erroneously likened trans identity to something inherently dangerous, especially to children. We have seen people compare trans identity (and queer identity in general) to the act of "grooming" or establishing a relationship with a minor to make them more amenable to sexual acts. This strategy is not unique to trans people and has a long history of being employed for anti-gay rhetoric and, ultimately, anti-semitism.

This language has also not just stayed inside conservative circles either (it was never just there) and has permeated every aspect of our culture. These talking points have been repeated by liberal entertainers such as comedian Dave Chappelle and writer JK Rowling. They have appeared in New York Times editorials and even escaped the lips of loved ones and friends.

This is the backdrop we need to keep and mind as we discuss the steps of genocide. It's never just an immediate jump into killing fields and gas chambers. It begins with words, book bannings, censures, discriminatory policy, and finally, the lighting of a match and the pulling of a trigger.

What is genocide?

The definition of genocide is hotly contested among academics and policymakers. It is usually framed as acts perpetrated by one group intending to destroy parts or the whole of another. For example, sociologist Vahakn Dadrian defined it in 1975 as:

“…an attempt by a dominant group, vested with formal authority and/or with preponderant access to overall resources of power, to reduce by coercion or lethal violence the number of a minority group whose ultimate extermination is held desirable and useful and whose respective vulnerability is a major factor contributing to the decision for genocide.”

Not everyone agrees with this perspective. Some limit genocide to something done solely by a state apparatus, falling outside "legitimate warfare" or to specific groups of people. As with every definition (to any word), there is never a universal consensus, as certain definitions are satisfactory to some and exclude others.

If we are strictly going by the definition set out in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — something that has over 150 signatories — then queer people are not included in this scope at all (note this framework was also adopted in the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court). This convention only applies genocide to a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, not a sexual or gender one.

Yet while there is some value in this convention, claiming that a definition, first ratified in 1948, is the only valid one selects an arbitrary line crafted decades before Stonewall and the mainstream movement for LGBTQ+ rights. Queer people were being sent to concentration camps alongside other Holocaust victims, with some being forced to carry out their sentences even after the camps closed. To this day, some countries still have the death penalty for queer people, which have been described as genocides in all but name.

In other words, there is still a systemic effort by political actors, state or otherwise, to eradicate queer people, including trans people, from existence, and that horror deserves to be highlighted.

We will assume that the current UN definition is flawed in this area. Yes, you can include other groups of people that powerful white men may not have considered in the 1940s. If you have problems with that, examine that tension — it might lead you to some interesting places. As Adam Jones wrote in their book titled Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction:

"…the debate over genocide definitions should not blind us to the core problem to be addressed. As the Zen adage has it, let us not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself….So much energy goes into the definitional struggle, and so much emphasis is put on words that minimize the extent of the event that first, the significance of the event and its enormous human tragedy are written out of existence, and then the event itself becomes as if something else."

Do not howl at the finger-pointing at these anti-trans laws and practices instead of listening to others' pain. As we shall soon see, terrible harm is being done to the trans community, and these cries of genocide are far from unfounded.

We will still be using the UN framework in our analysis because it's the most recognized one, and there is value in utilizing it to critique both what belongs in this definition and what is missing. According to the UN Genocide Convention, there are five main acts of genocide:

• Killing members of the group.

• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

A genocide needs only one of these actions committed with “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group” to qualify. If genocide were expanded to gender expression, trans people in the US would currently qualify rather straightforwardly for two of these aspects, one would be debatable, and two would be on their way.

Eradicating trans community

“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

During many genocides, there is an attempt to strip away the rights of the group the aggressor wants to destroy — a death of a thousand cuts that brings society from a position of tenuous tolerance to one where they are comfortable with the population's death. For example, during the pre-War period in the 30s, Germany passed hundreds of laws against Jewish people, barring them from Civil Service, universities, economic institutions, and much more. The Cambodian Genocide had years leading up to it, where Pol Pot purged more "moderate" communists from leadership. America's Genocide against indigenous tribes not only involved many acts of terrible violence but also laws that "justified" stealing native people's land.

The current moral panic meets this pattern very directly by trying to make trans life more difficult at a systemic level in the hope of laying out a more exterminationist framework further down the road. Transness is merely the questioning of the gender binary (i.e., the false notion that only male and female genders exist). It is not something that can ever truly be eradicated (how can one remove the existence of a question?), but you can make every aspect of gender expression so difficult that trans people cannot exist in public life as who they are.

We are seeing this now with regressive laws that seek to deny trans people, specifically trans children, access to gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers and hormone treatment, all of which are relatively safe (see Dear Ted Cruz: I Do Regret My Transition). Nearly a hundred bills have been introduced this legislative term, with 11 states proposing the outright criminalization of such healthcare, and the language being used is quite extreme. "'Gender-affirming care' makes about as much sense as 'Depression-affirming care' or 'Schizophrenia-affirming care,'" rightwing author John Hawkins commented on an NPR story, "There are few things sicker and more evil than encouraging mental illness in children."

Framing this group as mentally ill or not in their right minds gives these actors the rhetorical power to legislate us away under the banner of “curing” us (see also conversion therapy). If we are not really capable of making decisions, then surely one can use the power of the state to deny our wants and desires under the banner of safety.

From departments of health gatekeeping same-sex marriage to sanitation being used to justify racial segregation, this is a frequent argument brought out by reactionary conservatives, and the reasoning is ultimately exterminationist. One does not frame a group as “unclean” and expects for them to be on equal footing. Nazis were also framing their genocide under the rhetoric of health, depicting Jews as a pestilence or virus that must be dealt with. It’s a common tactic to use the language of safety as a pretext to hurt others.

This anti-trans "safety" rhetoric is seen not only in laws, but also with the executive offices of conservative governments trying to close the door to this vital healthcare. The Texas Attorney General's office has called prescribing puberty blockers "child abuse" under state law. Missouri officials have begun investigating a transgender youth clinic using this very language. Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey saying: "We take this evidence seriously and are thoroughly investigating to make sure children are not harmed by individuals who may be more concerned with a radical social agenda than the health of children." Dozens of similar investigations have been opened nationwide, with the end goal of shutting this care down.

There is also the most straightforward prohibition, which is legal recognition. The ability for someone's new name and pronouns to be reflected in public documents has been seriously resisted in recent years. Montana passed a ban recently on changing the gender on one's birth certificate (though it has thankfully been blocked by a judge). Tennessee, Oklahoma, and West Virginia have similar laws, and more are being introduced in legislatures across the country.

Finally, we have the ability to exist in public spaces, which a government can seriously hamper. Employment and housing protections technically exist for gender discrimination (see Bostock v. Clayton County for employment and Biden's HUD executive order, respectively), but these rights are very tenuous. Housing is protected under an executive order, and that takes simply one bad election to reverse course, and of course, just because these rights exist on paper doesn't mean they are enforced universally. Trans people report discrimination in this area all the time.

With employment, those rights are enshrined via the Supreme Court, but all over the country, states have been attempting to carve out exemptions, particularly of a religious nature. A case out of Texas, in particular, had a lower court rule that businesses could discriminate against employees under this rationale, and it is currently being deliberated by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Time will tell if courts narrow their scope enough to legally push for such exemptions, as we have seen with abortion, or if these rights established in Bostock will indeed hold.

In other areas of public life, state and local governments have also passed legislation to limit trans people's use of their preferred bathroom or to play in a sports team that reflects their gender of choice. Drag shows have likewise been targeted in this moral panic. These are not specifically about transgender people (Drag Queens and Kings embody a gender expression, not necessarily a Trans gender identity), but when your view of gender is so regressive, any deviation is viewed as dangerous. These laws are, again, about whether trans people can exist publically. Even if these laws, in some cases, only affect a minority within a minority, it's ultimately about signaling to the trans community that we should not feel safe in this country.

We see above a network of laws and government actions; all meant to make trans identity more difficult and ultimately push for its eradication. Without even going into the other steps, these laws, taken together, constitute an act of genocide, and unfortunately, we are just getting started.

Removing Trans Parents

“Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

It is common during genocides to remove children of a hated group away from their parents so they can be reared "correctly" by members of the aggressor group. Tens of thousands of Aboriginal Children in Australia were, for example, taken from their families via assimilation policies. The governments of the United States and Canada often took children away from their tribes through state-boarding schools so that they could lose connection with their language, religion, and culture.

A quick note: this is one of the only elements of "Cultural Genocide" that remained within the original UN definition. This was a battle that lawyer and scholar Raphael Lemkin, a key party in the UN Genocide Convention and originator of the term genocide, ultimately lost, as the current definition only includes physical and biological elements. Lemkin wanted culture to be at the forefront of this new word because he perceived genocide as attacking the identity of a people or group, but these elements were not retained for various reasons, including signing parties such as the United States and the United Kingdom being uncomfortable with them. The fact that these countries have perpetuated cultural genocide was probably just a “coincidence.”

This omission is frustrating because there are hallmark elements of cultural genocide happening right now within the United States when it comes to trans people that would not meet the UN's definition, even if gender expression were recognized. In states such as Florida, legislation has surfaced that requires the education department to review all literature that will be viewed by children, and a lot of queer literature is being removed as a result.

From Missouri to Louisiana, we see similar moves in school boards across the country, and the pretext given is usually to "protect" children from sexually charged content. The Missouri law aims to ban "sexually explicit content," bigotedly interpreting the mere presence of queer people in a narrative as sexual. These books are being purged from schools and libraries in an effort to tell a more sanitize history where Trans and other Queer people do not exist.

If you want to destroy a people, you have to destroy the idea of them. Community cannot be born if you do not know about what resources and histories are out there. In removing the history of our queer ancestors, conservative exterminationists can depict deviations from the gender binary as current anomalies rather than natural outgrowths of expression we have seen throughout history.

Yet even disregarding this larger element of cultural genocide happening to trans people right now and simply focusing on the removal of children, the current moral panic is quickly moving to meet this criterion. All over the United States, Republicans are introducing and passing bills that would criminalize parents who support their trans children — hence, removing them from their care — and it's the same logic as the book bannings above.

In Florida, a recently introduced bill (Senate Bill 254) would grant Florida courts emergency custody of kids who receive gender-affirming care. According to Yahoo News, the justification for this law comes from the same statute that “protects” children from domestic violence and abuse. The law reading:

“A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child, is subjected to or threatened with mistreatment or abuse or is at risk of or is being subjected to the provision of sex reassignment prescriptions or procedures….”

Likewise, the Governor of Texas last year directed the Texas Department of Family Protective Services (DFPS) to begin investigating the parents of trans teens for child abuse. These investigations have been temporarily blocked by an Austin judge against members of the LGBTQ+ parents organization PFLAG, but only because the scope of the directive was deemed too broad. The governor’s office is still fighting the injunction in court, and the Republican legislature is pushing to change the law legally to criminalize such medical care outright. If that were to happen, these investigations could theoretically resume.

As we can see from the examples above (and the many others being lobbied for across the country), the rhetoric of "child abuse" and "mistreatment of children" is being used to justify the transfer of trans children from a safe, loving environment toward one that will break their identity. This is a mass relocation waiting to happen, and while we are not quite at the level of every trans child being ripped away from their parents, the legal framework for that horror is being built now.

Inflicting harm

“Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”

We have so far been focusing on the discriminatory elements of these laws, but harm is a large part of many genocides, as oppressor groups mutilate, rape, and torture their intended targets. Again, queer people were also interned during the Holocaust, alongside and, in some cases intersecting with other persecuted groups such as Jews and Roma. Nazis intent on finding a "cure" performed horrific experiments on queer inmates.

This rationale is very similar to today's conversion therapy, where there is an attempt to cure a queer person using pseudoscientific methods. This practice is legal in over half of all US states and has been described by a UN Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity as akin to torture. Some studies have indicated that conversion therapy correlates highly with increased suicide. One anonymous person in The Guardian claimed that sleep deprivation was used on them for years to make them more compliant:

“I would get there on a Friday evening, in time for mass. I would have food, and then it was time for prayer, which went on until 1am. Then I’d be allowed to go to sleep, but I had to be up for 6am for another mass. The lack of sleep was deliberate — to make you more compliant. It’s simple — if you’re tired, you’re more likely to agree to things.

After morning mass, I’d sit for hours and hours in an office with someone talking at me. And I genuinely mean talk at me, I never got to speak. “You’re not gay, you’re not gay,” they said repeatedly. “Why do you think you’re gay?” They tried to convince me that being gay was a terrible choice. I told them that I wasn’t gay, it wasn’t my sexuality that I was in conflict with — [but] my gender identity, or what I now call it: that I was transgender….

Over time, I became withdrawn. To be told for hours at a time that what you say is wrong, you learn that it’s better to say nothing at all. It went on like this for three years. I didn’t have anybody to help me — and I started to believe that, actually, they might be right. I collapsed mentally — I was doubting my gender, my sexuality, my own mind.”

This practice is still happening to children all over the United States, and there is an effort from anti-trans legislatures to expand this tortuous practice. In Indiana, for example, a bill (Senate Bill 350) was introduced to prevent regulation of this practice throughout the state. While trans advocates have had some victories in banning conversion therapy, especially for children, it remains an uphill battle in most of the US.

It should likewise be noted that forcing a trans person to "detransition" (i.e., moving away from their previously preferred gender, either willfully or by force) or denying a trans person care outright is a type of harm. If I, as an assigned male at birth or AMAB person, were to stop taking estrogen right now, I would start experiencing hot flashes and go through some menopausal symptoms. It wouldn't kill me, but it wouldn't be a pleasant experience.

Many trans people, including children, currently have developed entire identities around their preferred genders. Girls, boys, and enbys who have delayed their puberty or started going on hormones, some even going stealth (i.e., not letting anyone know they are trans), now have to experience that work being undone in states such as Tennessee. Girls whose voices are cracking. Boys who can no longer grow facial hair. That is traumatizing, and that's not to mention the danger that people who pass may suddenly find themselves in as they lose the ability to move through such spaces seamlessly.

Now returning to the criteria of genocide above, notice how the UN definition frames harm here, not just physiologically or biologically, but psychologically. There is mental harm that comes with these anti-trans prohibitions. The suicide attempt rate for trans people is already high, sitting at 40%, and is even higher for ideation. However, research shows this lessens significantly when giving trans people access to gender-affirming care and good support networks.

Conservatives often frame this reality as selfishness — as if trans people are throwing temper tantrums to get their way — but even this justification is unusually cruel. Puberty blockers are relatively safe (anyone who tells you differently is spreading misinformation). By denying someone something vital to their mental health because they aren't "asking nicely enough for it," one is still doing harm.

And as we know, this justification anti-trans legislators are spreading is a lie. One of the most prominent reasons trans people detransition is because of social stigma, discrimination, and family pressures. One of the biggest reasons trans people feel suicidal is because of the same reasons. While some people willfully detransition because they are done experimenting with this aspect of expression, in many cases, anti-trans advocates cause that pressure. They are not the "cure" but the harm. They then try to gaslight trans people into believing we are selfish and broken.

Stopping Trans Birth

“Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

This is where the UN definition is again severely limited because while this act applies well to ethnic, racial, and religious groups, trans people are, in many ways, a willful birth. The decision to declare your gender and your gender expression involves a hundred little steps, not all of them the same. Laws don't eliminate your transness, but they can make it so that your expression becomes very difficult. The person inside you, the one you want to be, openly, dies in darkness.

In part, this is why the fight over trans healthcare for children is so vital. If you want to medically transition to a gender you were not assigned at birth, then preventing your initial puberty will make the process of hormones (if you choose to do that later on ) much more successful. The older you get, the less effective hormones are from a developmental standpoint. As UCSF notes in a very helpful guide about estrogen intake:

“Starting hormone therapy in your 40s, 50s, or beyond may bring less drastic changes than one might see when beginning transition at a younger age, due to the accumulated lifetime exposure to testosterone, and declining responsiveness to hormone effects as one approaches the age of menopause.”

This delay does not mean your transition later in life is less valid (you are listening to the words of someone who transitioned much later), but it does make everything that much more difficult. It denies the world of a trans birth that much sooner, and that appears to be the logic of these laws.

All over the US, laws are being passed that stop medical transitions. Tennesse horrifyingly just banned gender-affirming care for minors. The same has occurred in Mississippi and Florida. As a mother of a trans child said of the Florida bill: "you're basically being told that your child shouldn't be able to be who they are, and that it would be better if they didn't exist in the way that you, medical professionals, and the child who is thriving, feel is best for [them]."

Trans adults are not immune from this legislative backlash either. Another bill in Tennessee, if passed, would prevent people from using Medicaid to pay for gender-affirming care. Oklahoma is not only considering a similar bill but one that would prohibit gender-affirming care for any hospital using state funds.

Bills like this are being introduced all over the country. While it's too soon to know what laws will pass when the dust settles, again, the end goal is unmistakable: it is to deny trans people, not just the resources that would make their lives easier, but to delay indefinitely the ability for them to be birthed into the world at all.

Trans Death

“killing members of the group.”

The systemic killing of a group of people is an undeniable act of genocide. It barely requires reinforcing. Look at the Holocaust in Europe or the Armenian Genocide — so many dead. When exterminationist rhetoric goes unchallenged, bodies tend to pile up.

And not every one of these killings needs to be organized from the top down. The Cambodian Genocide was known for brutal mass killings via central processing hubs (e.g., prisons, pits, etc.) but also killed many more people through incompetence, such as neglecting to treat malaria, overwork, and mass starvation. The American Indian Genocide was (and is) filled with not just organized state massacres but extra-judicial killings, where white settlers, empowered by propaganda and an indifferent legal system, lynched Indians, oftentimes on a whim.

However, we should emphasize that even here, there are intersections with trans identity. One act of colonialism from white settlers was stigmatizing different gender expressions among various Indian tribes, and the Khmer Rouge wasn’t exactly accepting of queer people.

America is already a place where these extra-judicial killings are happening to trans people. We could point to the recent Q-Shooting, where a shooter, empowered by anti-queer propaganda, shot up an LGBTQ+ nightclub and killed five people. We could also look at the many murders of trans individuals that happen every year. Trans people are killed all the time because their otherness makes individuals uncomfortable, and even when not killed, they are disproportionately victims of violent crime.

Trans people’s free expression is currently being legislated into nonexistence, which empowers people to act against us. There is the terrifying development of how many of America's conservative militias have started targeting queer events, coming to pride festivals and drag-story hours, armed with guns and other equipment. There are nearly 100 far-right militias across the country, and some, such as the Proud Boys, have forced their way into queer events. Sometimes these members have gotten violent or alluded to violence. These provocateurs have pushed or shoved counter-protestors. Others have harassed queer organizers, likening them to pedophiles and saying the vilest language. "Most of us want to kill all of you," a man allegedly yelled at counter-protesters at an event in Texas.

These are armed, organized groups perpetuating exterminationist rhetoric. Their infrastructure is already set up to inflict more intense brutality: one does not buy and bring a gun to a peaceful event simply to shove people. What happens when these militias no longer feel they have to hide behind the pretense of civility? "Kill your local pedophile," a Proud Boy allegedly shouted at a drag queen story hour in California.

Now, thankfully, there has been incredible organization from the left against these fascist militias, but if we fail to keep fighting them, trans people are headed for more bullets, mobs, and organized lynchings.

Conclusion

We could argue that trans people are currently experiencing laws that "deliberately inflict on our lives a calculated effort to bring about our physical destruction." We could claim harm, particularly mental harm, is being perpetuated against us. We can even argue that trans people are experiencing elements of cultural genocide the UN definition fails to consider. Conversely, one could claim that genocide isn't happening at all because gender expression and sexual orientation, as well as political groups in general, are beyond the scope of the Genocide Convention.

The conversation around genocide is frustrating because the popular zeitgeist’s definition (i.e., concentration camps and gas chambers) fails to encapsulate the complexity of the current legal definition, and the legal definition is severely curtailed to exclude many groups and categories of harm. The law does not view this matter holistically, which is a failure because genocide does not fit neatly inside the lines of strictly drawn definitions. Cultural, biological, physical, and psychological elements intermingle to create a cocktail that is always unique and always deadly. To point at a single nitpick and claim this harm against trans people isn't happening is again howling at the "pointing of this harm" instead of recognizing the horror unfolding around us.

Our current flawed political framework is partly to blame for this confusion. There is an alternate future where political actors did not push Raphael Lemkin's more holistic definition of genocide into the background. However, that would be a timeline where we recognized the genocides committed by modern Democracies, not just rogue fascist groups.

America has always been a country very good at genocide. We were founded on it. The conditions we mentioned here can arguably apply to several other groups within the US. Indigenous communities in the US have been experiencing ongoing genocide for hundreds of years, and you can make the case that Black Americans also meet this criterion.

In truth, the reason for this sudden hatred against trans people isn't because America has suddenly become worse for Trans people — it's always been bad for us to live openly here — but because conservative Americans finally understand that we exist. Three decades ago, we would have been lumped in with gay men and women, flattening the distinction between gender and sexual orientation. Fascists and proto-fascists are targeting us now because we seem new and strange, and they impossibly wish to use transness as a wedge issue to exterminate the greater queer community and otherness in general.

We are already very far along in this process, and we shouldn't have to reach the point of literal gas chambers to call out the genocide happening in front of our very eyes. Unless something is done, we are two legislative cycles away from the right to medically transition via puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries being banned in at least one-third of all states, regardless of age. We are one presidency away from housing and employment protections being stripped away. Several more from gender expression itself becoming codified. Nothing good can come from that arrangement.

We are already in the middle of a movement to exterminate the trans community. The question is how bad things will get. Nothing is ever an inevitability. We do not have to accept the calls of death we are hearing (and one hopes we don't). We, however, must first recognize that this is what the road to trans genocide looks like, and it’s paved with “calls for safety,” “decency,” and “the common good.”

The Movie ‘The Menu’ Is a Disappointing Class Commentary

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

Seth Reiss and Will Tracy's satirical romp The Menu is about the maniacal Chef Slowik enacting revenge on those he perceives as slighting him. It centers around 12 customers being ferried to the private island to pay for a $1,000+ per plate dining experience. Throughout the night, it quickly becomes apparent that none of them are leaving alive.

The Menu advertised itself as grilling the expensive lifestyles of the rich and powerful. "I have to know if you are with us or with them?" Chef Slowik asks a patron in the trailer. Commentary on wealth is everywhere in this film, but it feels very incomplete. There were entire segments where it was difficult to know what the point was — all of its messaging complicated by the fact that Chef Slowik isn't the downtrodden revolutionary he believes himself to be, but a tyrant.

The film spends so much time being clever that it ends up serving a very undercooked story.

Boiling resentment

The most generous way to view this film is a deconstruction of foodie culture. The film is filled with fun lines such as, "Do not eat….Taste" and other phrases that lampoon real-life, high-end dining. Some of Slowik's victims are a notorious food critic who is depicted as a pedantic blowhard, his angel investor, and a fan who knows everything about food but cannot cook. These are caricatures that are fun to laugh and roll your eyes at.

However, it's clear that class commentary is something this text wants to talk about. Early on, the wealthy guests are given a seafood meal, and one of them not so subtly tells us that they are "eating the ocean." The restaurant makes bread (described as the food of the common man) only to make a show of not serving it to the guests. As Slowik lectures. "But you, my dear guests, are not the common man. And so tonight… you get no bread."

Slowik perceives himself as a victim of these entitled guests, a service worker who has had the joy of his work stolen from him. There is a scene where he monologues to a sex worker — someone invited to this gathering last minute, but Slowik still intends to kill anyway — where he tells her that as a fellow worker, he understands her pain. "No, I don't need details," he shushes, "You know, I… I know what a bad customer is."

Yet, I want to stress this, Slowik isn't that poor service worker anymore. He is a businessman and a cult leader. All his staff treats him with divine reverence as he claps for them to move in unison. They sleep in stark quarters while he sleeps in a more spacious cottage. There is a scene where guest Margot has to fight off Slowik's maître d'hôtel Elsa, because she erroneously believes that Margot will replace her as Slowik’s favorite. Slowik's kitchen is a toxic environment, and he is just as abusive, perhaps even more so, than the men and women around his table. This cult connection is something that writer Will Tracy admits to directly, saying in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

“A lot of kitchens in restaurants like this — especially this restaurant because it’s on an island and they live on that island — function the same way that a cult functions. They try to limit your access to the outside world and in doing so, they limit the sources of approbation and spiritual nourishment that you get from family, friends, cultural pursuits and communal pursuits. They replace all of that with the approbation and, at times, very harsh criticism of one single figure.”

Slowik is someone who thinks he's a victim, even quoting MLK Jr's famous line that "freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed." The film treats this sentiment both unseriously and seriously at the same time.

For one, Slowik receives cringe looks from one of the film's only brown characters because, well, the idea that he is oppressed is ridiculous. Slowik is an abusive person who psychologically and, in some cases, sexually abuses his staff. He thinks that this grand, murderous gesture somehow will be atonement for his past mistakes — that it's somehow justice — but it's more of an easy out than proper accountability. Slowik's ultimately a bitter, wealthy white man angry that he no longer financially controls his restaurant (what he thinks should be his) and so is taking everyone out with him.

And this is something the film's creatives would all admit to, calling his performance "bullshit," but the film's narrative never goes far enough to place him in the explicit villain role alongside the other guests. That's not just me being hyperbolic. During an interview, Seth Reiss said that while perceiving him as a villain is valid: "We don't see Slowik as a villain…In The Menu, I think there are no heroes or villains."

And so if he's not entirely in the wrong, then in some ways, Slowik's punishment of these rich people at the end of the film (i.e., he burns them alive as human smores) is supposed to be just desserts. These are the people "eating the ocean," after all. Maybe they should all go up in flames?

And don't get me wrong, some terrible rich people are dining at Slowik's restaurant that night. The tech bros and a nondescriptive, older finance guy don't earn much sympathy. However, there is also a pedantic food critic whose crime is leaving bad reviews, her yes-man editor, a vain actor, his assistant whose crime is she didn't have to take out student loans, and a wife trapped in a loveless marriage. These people might have personality flaws, but most are still working professionals, not the capitalists "eating the oceans," and certainly no worse than Slowik himself. It's a type of class commentary based more on vibes than criticizing the capitalist system f@cking over the world. As Alison Stine writes in Salon:

“Multiple yes men and women face the wrath of the chef, which doesn’t seem fair, nor something the character who expresses repeatedly he had to pay his dues with “s**t work” would carry out. But Julian’s empathy extends only to traditionally attractive sex workers and high-end service workers….The white, male chef has more privilege than some of his diners, especially the characters of color. But the film takes a very retro view of privilege and class, aligning with the chef who longs for ye olde hardscrabble days of flipping burgers and the idealized, manic pixie dream sex worker.”

This inconsistency is what makes The Menu so frustrating because we have a deranged, bitter white man who has psychologically tormented his staff and fans his entire working career. The foodie they made fun of for not knowing how to cook willingly chose to come to the dinner, despite knowing he would be killed because he was that obsessed with Slowik. Slowik took advantage of that to validate his own pettiness. He is essentially rounding up a mob he indoctrinated to kill people (and, in some cases, just the idea of people) who have wronged him personally, and it's disturbing to watch.

That's not the logic of an MLK Jr. It's not justice, accountability, or even revolution. It's the logic of a tyrant, a cult leader, and, one could argue, a capitalist.

Conclusion

When we look at the inspiration for The Menu, it allegedly came from Will Tracy, going to a similar island restaurant in Norway as a patron. I cannot speak for Seth Reiss and Will Tracy's life experiences; what I can find online has been sparse. The two may have worked their way up a restaurant chain on the side as they pursued becoming famous writers. I don’t know.

However, the genesis of this film was a rich person spoofing on his own personal experiences as a guest at a fancy restaurant. That perspective, coupled with, from what I can tell, no alternative research for the backend of these restaurants beyond mere aesthetics (and certainly no attempt to center it in the narrative), led to a very stilted story about class.

This film is ultimately not angry about how our current capitalist system is exploitative or unjust (those are just the appetizers we munch on as food for thought) but about the unfulfilling nature of the modern client-service relationship. The climax of the film comes when Margot outsmarts Slowik by calling his food passionless and getting him to cook a plain ole American burger instead (note: we learn that Slowik was a burger-flipper earlier in his career). This act makes Slowik feel better about his craft, and he (again, as the tyrant) lets her leave. She made him feel again, and that rekindling is what the film suggests we need more of: the joy of our respective crafts. As Reiss remarks in that same Hollywood Reporter interview:

“There’s something to be said about how these are two service industry employees who do enjoy or have enjoyed what they do. At the end of the movie, I think Margot enjoys providing this experience for the chef and Chef enjoys providing this experience for Margot. Both of them ultimately enjoy this perfect service industry customer relationship because when done well and right, it can be quite lovely. Everyone’s respectful of one another. So there’s something I think quite nice about that final moment whether or not she’s playing a game or whether he’s aware she’s playing a game. There is something in a nanosecond very lovely happening.”

Yet, and I must stress this, there is nothing lovely about this relationship. The emotional labor she is doing at that moment is one of survival. Maybe in a post-capitalist world, such relationships could be built on more equal footing, but in the present, they are built on exploitation (yes, even your job).

The problem is that Slowik has too much power, and his demeanor and respectfulness don't change that dynamic. He gets to decide if Margot lives or dies. He abuses that power, as many do, but even if he were the best client who has ever existed, the way capitalism works is to force people into positions they don't want to be in (and no, this is not a dunk on sex work, but all jobs). This creates a dynamic that demeanor alone cannot change — and this film only seems willing to deconstruct that power in a very superficial way.

From Parasite to Glass Onion to Sorry to Bother You, there are so many films that have something substantive to say about capitalism and class. While The Menu has things to say about the ridiculousness of high-end restaurants, its class discussion is based more on aesthetics than anything meaningful about capitalism itself. This leaves the viewer with a half-baked message that lets a bad taste linger in one's mouth.

The MCU Was Never A Bold, New Experiment in Cinema

When the MCU first came onto the scene, it was praised as a bold new direction in storytelling. "The Narrative Experiment That Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe" went the title of an article by Maya Phillips in the New Yorker. "…the MCU can't forget the secret formula that made Phase 4 so groundbreaking," writes Nicolas Ayala in Screen Rant. Everywhere you look, people are praising this franchise that now spans multiple mediums and platforms for its originality.

It’s not bad to like these films. Personally, Thor: Ragnarok is a favorite of mine. However, when we look closely at this idea that the MCU is some bold new direction in story-telling and art, it seems mostly marketing. The MCU, narratively speaking, was always less impressive than fans let on.

It also has been at the center of a financial project that has made the retelling and remixing of an existing story that much more difficult.

Unpacking innovation

It's hard to pinpoint where exactly this alleged innovation comes from. Other film franchises have used the concept of shared characters and a shared world before. Universal Studios implemented a defacto extended universe with its Monsters series. Characters like Wolf Man bumped heads with Frankenstein and Dracula. Toho Co., Ltd. created an extended world with Kaiju monsters like Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra. Even Jason Voorhees and Freedy Krueger started to appear in an extended cinematic universe in Freddy vs. Jason.

And even these examples are more of a legal exercise as characters from one property are introduced into another. Having expansive worlds with many points of view is not something any of these extended universes created. Is Tolkien an extended-universe trailblazer because he has separate works existing within one deep, expansive world? It seems very silly when you think about it outside of a legal context. Creators have been juggling in-depth works with many different perspectives for thousands of years — that's sort of how the canon of every major religion got started, as religious doctrines from many different voices were slapped together.

It’s also hard to view the MCU as innovative from a narrative direction. It has always been fairly repetitive. Even as we swapped characters and planets, it followed a simple overarching narrative (a new character gets introduced, we go on a hero’s journey, have a big battle, rinse and repeat). This formulaic nature was the point. One could argue that the MCU was taking the repetitive structure of TV that was popular before the Second Golden Age of Television and bringing it over to the Silver Screen. As the creator of the Skip Intro Youtube channel jokingly noted in their copaganda series:

“…you can’t convince me that this isn’t a TV show. Every episode [“movie”] ends with a cliffhanger to bring you back next week. It’s run by an executive producer/showrunner Kevin Feige. That’s TV people…”

There may be many threads to keep track of, but that logic remains true for any TV show, movie, or other long-standing property. Look at Godzilla, Pokemon, Doctor Who, or most soap operas. The lore can get unwieldy very quickly. Does that complexity in itself make it a “bold new experiment in cinema?” It’s not like the MCU has held tightly to all of them, as there have been plenty of threads unceremoniously cut (see magic just being advanced technology, the Sokovia Accords’ political implications, the arc reactor being used for clean energy, and a dozen other things).

When we think of pioneering works of film, the breakthroughs we glorify are usually not this corporate. The Second Golden Age of cinema, with texts like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, was lauded for rejecting the rinse-and-repeat formulas that the MCU seems to cling to, with characters going through self-destructive arcs that did not always finish neatly. The Sopranos ended without giving its viewers a resolution — a tension an MCU movie would rarely do.

In fact, the comfort in the MCU is that rarely are you challenged. The narratives they promote are regressive (see The MCU is for Rich People). It seems strange to praise a company's attempt to factory-produce Hollywood blockbusters that inoffensively appeal to as broad an audience as possible and call that a "bold new experiment."

It's about the money

In retrospect, when we look at the MCU, the impressive feat was not the story — again, heroes coming together to stop a big bad is as basic as it gets — but that it could happen at all. In an attempt to stave off financial collapse, Marvel's filming rights were sold off to many owners in the 90s. 20th Century Fox soon owned X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Sony owned Spiderman. Columbia Pictures (and then Artisan) held Black Panther. Dozens of characters were controlled by many different hands. This arrangement made things difficult if you wanted to tell a story that intersected with all these characters.

It should be noted that a factor in this hectic landscape is that, over the years, Disney (as well as other content “producers”) have made Intellectual Property increasingly more hostile to upstarts. As their mascot, Mickey Mouse’s initial short, Steamboat Willy, approached the public domain in 1983, Congress amended the law in ’76, so it remained in Disney’s hands. They did so again in 1998 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to the point that copyrights now extend to the author’s life plus 70 years. For works of corporate authorship, it’s even longer at 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever one comes first. That’s a status quo that benefits capitalists, not artists (they don’t need money after they are dead), and Disney is a significant reason why this status quo exists.

And so, not just anyone can work with existing IP fractured among multiple entities (and not get sued into oblivion). Disney's large size and deep pockets meant it had the means to navigate these complex legal and financial barriers. It was, in fact, one of the few entities that, due to regressive IP laws, could. Fans of Marvel have no alternative firm but Disney, which means there has been a, if not captive audience, then at the very least, a highly motivated one. As Paul Young writes in Screen Rant about Disney's initial acquisition of Marvel:

“Iron Man, however, is a prime example of what Marvel can do when left alone — but the problem is Iron Man was the first film completely funded by Marvel Studios and it took a lot of money to make that happen. That’s money Marvel didn’t recoup until well after the movie was made and released, so any other project they may have wanted to work on was on hold until the funds came back in. Now what if Marvel had access to Disney’s money during the time Iron Man was being made? If Marvel has access to that kind of coin, then we could have more than one or two high quality superhero films released every year.”

We now have the answer to that question, and we must emphasize this point because the positive being lauded is not the company's ability to make a good story or art but their wallet.

Indeed, that is something about modern cinema that Disney, though the MCU, has helped champion. These movies require so much money to create and market (not to mention paying out residuals) that they must become a massive success to even break a profit. The Eternals and Black Widow earned about $400 million at the box office and were failures for this reason (though Disney putting them on their streaming service so quickly probably didn't help).

Even successful films like Spiderman: No Way Home and Doctor Stange in the Multiverse of Madness do not have as high returns as one might expect — especially since Spiderman was a coventure with Sony. This structure demands excellence in ticket sales from a film, or it's a failure, and that appears to be the model for most major Disney films right now. When we look at other Disney titles such as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker or Avatar: The Way of Water, they earned over a billion dollars (or 2 in Avatar's case) and needed to make those massive profits to break even.

That is a financial "innovation," if you will, but I don't know if I consider it an artistic one. Instead, it mirrors the consolidation and wealth inequality plaguing end-stage capitalism. We have moved into an era of larger and larger "safe" bets, leaving you wondering what will happen if there are even one or two significant misfires for Disney in the future.

Conclusion

Looking back, it's hard to see what is artistically innovative about team-ups across multiple films. This is not a dunk on comic books. I am an avid reader of them (my favorite Marvel is The Immoral Hulk. Favorite DC is Far Sector). I think there are many ways this medium has transformed how we create art— I just don't see the narrative framework of these films to be a part of that tradition. The style and humor of blockbusters, but with the structure of a convoluted TV show, is not the innovation I think people believe it to be.

When we praise multiple brands existing within one franchise, what we are actually worshipping is one company’s collection of IP — and that seems to be more of a capitalist innovation.

We are being told to find it impressive that Disney, a company that has twisted our laws so that its intellectual property will never enter the public domain, is unique because it can vertically integrate a property in a way no one else can. Yet they were the ones who ensured that no one else could (seriously, look more deeply into their lobbying with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act).

In truth, there should be more cinematic universes: more wild intersections between popular characters we all love, but we cannot have that because companies like Disney have ensured that it is both legally and financially tough for artwork like that to be made. They then dare to sell us on the lie that they have done something bold with the art they have gatekept.

Well, if you define artistic innovation as exploitation, as blocking out the sun so nothing else may flourish, then the MCU is very innovative indeed.

The Political Appropriation of the Train Crash in East Palestine, Ohio

Democrats, Republicans, & the politics of tragedy

On February 3rd, a train operated by the company Norfolk Southern derailed near the village of East Palestine, Ohio. Authorities claimed that toxic materials had been released into the atmosphere (and would release even more themselves) and consequently ordered an evacuation.

Days later, the EPA published a four-page report saying that 20 of these cars were carrying hazardous materials such as vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether. The line often pulled from that report online is that these materials "have been and continue to be released to the air, surface soils, and surface waters," which sounds pretty terrifying without knowing much about the science behind the situation.

Almost immediately, a narrative started circulating online that the media wasn't talking about the spill in East Palestine. "Where is a statement from [the U.S. Department of Transportation] and [Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg] regarding the train derailment and subsequent ecological disaster in East Palestine, Ohio?" tweeted Nina Turner 10 days after the incident. "How can something like this happen, and federal officials remain silent?"

In a post-Flint Michigan world (a town that still is having water problems), it's not hard to imagine those in power negligently handling an environmental disaster. We are too familiar at this point with how governments can mess up. Whether we are talking about Democrats or Republicans, our government's response to environmental catastrophes, like in East Palestine, has been abysmal.

Yet when we examine the issue closely, it becomes easy to see that many actors are trying to take advantage of this disaster, including some bad-faith actors on the right.

The crash, how bad is it?

We know from reporting that, among other things, the substance vinyl chloride was purposefully released into the atmosphere via a controlled burn to allegedly prevent an explosion — hence the reason for the official evacuation order. Vinyl chloride is used in creating plastic polyvinyl chloride or PVC, and inhaling it has been known to cause dizziness, headaches, narcosis, and even death. It is a known carcinogen that can cause cancers such as leukemia and a rare form of liver cancer called hepatic angiosarcoma.

The extent of those symptoms depends very much on the concentration and scope of their release. However, it should be noted that a similar incident of vinyl chloride being released via train derailment occurred in Paulsboro, New Jersey. This emission of vinyl chloride caused some exposed to it to indicate they were experiencing health-related issues years later.

Presently, the response from government officials is to claim that the area is once again safe for people to return to East Palestine. The governors of Pennsylvania and Ohio have put an end to the evacuation order. Officials in Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, and other communities have claimed that their services will be unaffected. The EPA has announced that initial testing has not detected "anything above the action level."

Yet secondary indicators are causing people to be wary of these claims. There have been viral reports of dead fish and other animals. Journalist Prem Thakker interviewed East Palestine residents for the New Republic and painted a grim picture of pollution still impacting their quality of life, writing: "Many others TNR spoke with, in and outside the one-mile radius, reported similar symptoms: headaches, burning sensations, severe dehydration, and more. But the town's nearly 5,000 residents are left unsure about who qualifies for what support in the face of these ailments."

Both government and corporate responses to this disaster have been quite disorganized, with many residents not knowing who to ask for help and not being satisfied with the aid they receive. For example, Thakker notes that the company responsible for the train that crashed, Norfolk Southern, had offered residents $1,000 “inconvenience checks,” which had required stringent documentation to appeal for (not exactly something people can manage when they evacuate from their homes).

The company has also been accused of not properly safeguarding against soil and water contamination when they performed that initial control burn of vinyl chloride. The EPA has accused them of being potentially liable for this oversight. A report released several days ago states: "Areas of contaminated soil and free liquids were observed and potentially covered and/or filled during the reconstruction of the rail line including portions of the trench /burn pit that was used for the open burn off of vinyl chloride."

It's not that a control burn was unnecessary. As Thakker explains: "vinyl chloride and other compounds are explosive." However, from my perspective, it seems like a rush to call the situation "solved" led to them cutting some corners on remediation— allegedly.

Yet it's not just Norfolk Southern that deserves our ire. When it comes to blame, one will find that there is plenty to go around.

The appropriation of a disaster

Conservatives were quick to pounce on this tragedy, and because the Internet exists, many of them spread misinformation in the process. Disinformation researcher Caroline Orr compiled an excellent thread on how many falsely claimed that poisonous chemicals were leaking into the Mississippi River, using an outdated map in the process.

This whole mess first came to my attention when "health" (i.e., anti-vax) influencer Erin Elizabeth, who proudly conveys on her bio that the New York Times has labeled her a conspiracy theorist, shared a video on Twitter from Tiktoker and entrepreneur Nick Drom. Now the specifics of the Nick Drom video seem fine to me (I am not a scientist, so please consult one), but it was strange to see Elizabeth and many others share information like this when historically, conservatives have resisted environmental regulations for years and are often directly in the pocket of companies making hazardous materials like vinyl chloride. One would think that conservatives would be the last people to call attention to this disaster.

And yet many are touting this crash as a failure of the Biden administration and his neglect of Republican voters. As Tucker Carlson lamented on the crash: "…the Biden administration doesn't seem too concerned about it either way. Donald Trump got over 71% of the vote in the county in the last presidential election. That's not exactly the Democratic Party's core demographic."

Caroline Orr has theorized (and the Tucker quote above implies) that the angle many of them are going for is one of reverse racism. The Biden administration, they allege, is ignoring a predominantly Republican and implicitly left unsaid, white area. This narrative is about twisting a horrible tragedy into an easy-to-digest framework based on white entitlement and resentment.

It would be easy to spin this as simply more conservative culture war nonsense. However, it is worth noting that this entire incident was not only preventable, but that blame lies on both sides of the aisle. For years, Norfolk Southern and other rail industry donors lobbied to deregulate against the very safeguards that would have made this crash less likely, and they have had sympathies from both parties.

For example, in the wake of the Paulsboro crash we mentioned earlier, the Obama administration proposed a rule to increase the safety regulation for hazardous materials, only for it to be, according to the writers in the Lever, "narrowly focused on the transport of crude oil and exempting trains carrying many other combustible materials [like vinyl chloride]." In essence, passing a regulation that would not have prevented either the 2014 crash or the one that happened in East Palestine.

Several years later, the Trump administration rescinded a different Obama-era rule that, over a six-year period, would have implemented an electronic braking system that might have prevented this mess. It indeed would have been implemented already. The Biden administration still needs to reinstate this necessary rule, and as we near the end of his first term, railroad safety has yet to be a priority.

While the outright callousness of the Republican party is primarily responsible for the East Palestine derailment, we should not pretend like the behind-closed-doors indifference of the Democrats is acceptable. If people were honest with themselves, they would realize that this crash had bipartisan support.

Conclusion

As a left-leaning environmentalist, during disasters, I am inherently skeptical of reports from government and corporate actors alike. Traditionally there is hesitancy from those in power to downplay harm so they can avoid blame and future accountability. As Mary Pezzulu writes in Patheos:

“This always happens when there’s an environmental crisis in Appalachia and we’ve had some spectacular ones. These crises don’t happen because the people in Appalachia cause them. They happen because the United States government, both the Democrats and the Republicans, permit industries to do whatever they want, particularly in Appalachia which nobody but Appalachia cares about. The industries take advantage. It’s been going on for over a hundred years. It’s not more complicated than that.”

If we want to mitigate the damage of this and future environmental tragedies, we can't let this trend continue. We need regulations that protect the safety of all passengers, politicians who give a damn, and train infrastructure that isn't managed by negligent corporations (which pretty much includes all of them).

Until then, the next accident is not a matter of if but when.

The World of Online Publishing Makes Liars of Us All

Tim Denning’s website

As a blogger, I am someone who values the truth. I take the responsibility of this platform very seriously. I will spend hours analyzing and double-checking my sources, going down research rabbit holes that will never turn into content. I spend a lot of time-consuming articles and books that take me a long time to process and digest, all so I can feel somewhat confident that I know what the f@ck I am talking about.

Yet mistakes in my articles still slip through. Sometimes these are minor errors — typos and poor word usage happen more than I would like. The words “definitely” and “patriarchy” are my nemeses. Other times I get facts wrong. I recently erroneously stated that Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal came out during the Irish Famine (roughly 1845–1852). It came out over a hundred years earlier, in 1729.

I make mistakes, which bothers me because I don't want misinformation to spread. I want people to come to me for verified facts, but the current system demands that creators pump out a lot of content to remain profitable, and that leads to an ecosystem where mistakes are not only common but incentivized.

The (current) problem with online publishing

At the risk of sounding cruel, much self-produced content on the Internet is terrible. I see many writers putting out countless pieces of work littered with very transparent typos, grammar mistakes, or factual errors. For example, many writers on this platform spread misinformation about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, claiming that everyone and the kitchen sink is a full-blown narcissist, when really what they mean is that a person is mean to them (see I'm A Professor of Human Behavior, And I Have News About The 'Narcissists' In Your Life).

Other times the work is just uncritically perpetuating memes that are not based in reality. Take the user Tim Denning (please don’t harass him), a self-help expert who is probably one of the most well-known creators on this platform. He produces work that essentially equates to "hustle and work harder, and everything will be okay.” "The answer to money problems is to make more money, not cut back on expenses," he lectures, as if the hurdles of American capitalism can be tackled through willpower alone (they can’t). People like this make careers by perpetuating a useful set of lies that make you feel better (and uncritical) about your perceived accomplishments.

This type of work is getting even more common with AI-generated content, which some creators are starting to use to push out articles en mass. For example, one blogger I follow (who I will not identify because they are too small) is very vocal about using AI technology to assist with her writing, toting it as a way to increase production. When I look at her blog (and the many others that make a similar claim), however, I see a lot of self-help and get-rich-quick posts that aren't precisely War & Peace. Not all the advice generated from this frenzy is terrible, but it's no different from most SEO content.

One post of hers (which I was not able to verify if it was written via AI) ludicrously recommends that it's easy to self-publish a book over the weekend and start making money, exclaiming: "Creating an ebook may feel like an undertaking, but it doesn't need to be, especially when you have the right tools. And it's so worth the effort because you'll be left with a digital asset that can continue to make sales month after month!"

This is a statement that requires a lot of work to even articulate why it's wrong. As someone who runs a publication that pays its writers and is in the process of auctioning off several books, you can not just bang out a book over the weekend and start gaining passive income. Profitability in the world of publishing is very hard. Even if you are writing about stoicism or some other SEO-optimized soup, you are competing against the thousands of others churning out the same content. While making passive income on several books may be true if we are talking about cents on the dollar, to make that model work, you have to produce a lot of content, which often means having to rely on outsourcing labor to contractors on platforms like Fiverr even to begin to make a profit (see Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins & How I Became a Minecraft Scam Artist).

To go on the briefest of tangents, this seems to be the goal of AI-assisted technology. It's not that this copy-and-paste machine will be able to produce award-winning art (at least not at its current level of development), but it will be able to help people whose careers are simply churning out an endless array of self-help content to cut out the middle people (e.g., editors, graphic designers, etc.) that they already don't pay that well. The end goal is not to verify your facts — you need human editors to comb through your content to do that (defeating the whole point of the speed of this process), but to produce content that will sell quickly.

AI-generated self-help content may be an extreme example, but all self-published content creators have this problem, where the financial incentive is to cut corners in some areas. Again, I am not immune to this phenomenon of spreading misinformation to some degree. We could talk about my article How To Stop The Left from Losing Social Media, where I erroneously labeled the Facebook group Occupy Democrats a good model, only to realize my mistake months later (see Is "Occupy Democrats" Fake News?). I didn't have enough time to comb through every one of that article's assumptions because this platform doesn't pay me enough to do that work.

Occupy Democrats is a great example here of an organization that turned into something awful in a naked pursuit to increase its view numbers and reach. The founder described being inspired to make the company in the wake of Occupy Wallstreet, but whatever his original intentions, that morphed into this small brand pushing out regular anger porn that is often inaccurate or half-true. A brand that until recently routinely broke Facebook's Top 10 posts and enraged, click-baited, and misinformed millions of people.

It would be easy to blame this trend on scale alone. From personal experience, when you are a mid-tier influencer, some works will produce a lot of money, while others will pay nothing. There is consequently a pressure to increase the frequency so you can earn a living, but quality gets lost in trying to do that. I have often said that “maybe if I was larger, had a bigger following, and could pay editors, these editorial mistakes would become less frequent,” but reality doesn't align with that expectation.

We are not simply talking about Occupy Democrats here but even more prominent brands. Remember, we started this article focusing on Tim Denning, someone with a reach in the hundreds of thousands (and probably, millions across all platforms). He can most likely pay for an editor or two. Yet he’s still perpetuating a lot of misinformation. The lies he’s telling about hustle culture are integral to how he makes money. The incentive is to produce inspiration and hustle porn —not to genuinely depict the American workplace for what it is. If that were the case, he’d tell people that they would be financially better off, in the long run, organizing a union and taking other forms of collective action , but that perspective is harder to sell as an online course on “how to be the exception and get super rich.”

And so this is not merely an issue of scale, but the types of content being prioritized on the Internet, and everyone is susceptible to this race to the bottom. For example, recently, the Washington Post garnered controversy for laying off 20 journalists and then announcing increasing its opinion department a day later with primarily conservative commentators (I guess Democracy Dies when everyone’s watching). The Post is pivoting to more engaging, less rigorous content because that’s where the financial incentive is for them — it’s where the incentive is for many people.

Whether we are talking about bad psychology articles, human or AI-generated self-help content, political clickbait, or me not verifying my sources correctly, the frequency of production in online publishing leads to many mistakes. The point is not to inform your audience but to enrage, inspire and entertain as fastly as possible, and that not only constrains the types of content made but its overall quality.

What do we do about this?

It often feels like all online creators are circling the drain, going ever downward. Online publishing was advertised as a revolution in truth — a way to get information that was stigmatized a chance to shine —and it does that sometimes, but more frequently, it has led to the propagation of shit. We have millions of influencers sharing unverified factoids and half-truths to bump up their view numbers, subscriptions, or advertising revenue, with little consideration for anything else.

The neoliberal solution, by which I mean finding a solution through the marketplace, would be to invest in creators who you think will do a good job (you might want to check out my bio) as well as divest from the ones who have a proven track record of spreading misinformation. If you haven't already, I highly recommend unsubscribing from sites like Occupy Democrats and never taking a meme shared on Twitter or Facebook seriously.

Yet it seems naive to believe that we will find the solution to this problem within the marketplace of ideas alone. In an environment where misinformation, which users seem to be very bad at recognizing, is placed alongside "good pieces of reporting," it becomes tough for the truth to rise to the top. As the infamous Mark Twain saying goes: "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."

This is in and of itself a lie, by the way.

There is no good evidence that he genuinely said this, and my bringing it up now is meant to further highlight the point: most people spread misinformation online because they have no incentive to fact-check it. In general, some businesses and creators might strive to go the extra mile, but most devolve to the lowest common denominator to make a profit. Whether that’s appealing to people’s pseudoscientific understanding of psychology, their fairytale notions of American meritocracy, or plain ole' American racism and sexism, these biases sell, which is why we can not expect the marketplace to solve this problem.

We can’t afford to let market forces continue to guide us. The only real solution that will work is building institutions that seek to move beyond the neoliberal paradigm we currently find ourselves in — to join, build, or found a lefty organization essentially. This can take the form of joining a leftist volunteer organization like the DSA, founding a worker’s coop, especially a journalistic one, and in general, advocating for journalism not linked to a corporation.

The truth shouldn't be for sale, and until we change things, people will continue to spread lies at bargain prices.

'Dragon Age Absolution' and Rejecting the Master's Tools

Captured: Netflix

Dragon Age: Absolution is an animated series based on the fantasy video game franchise of the same name by the company Bioware (now owned by Electronic Arts). It's set in the continent of Thedas, a magical land of elves, demons, and dragons. Absolution, in particular, centers on a ragtag group of thieves as they attempt an Ocean’s Eleven-style robbery of the Tevinter Imperium Chantry to steal a McGuffin called the Circulum Infinitus — something that will allegedly raise the dead.

Since this is a Dragon Age game, though, it's thematically about something far heavier, specifically about you cannot use the institutions and tools that maintain slavery to undo it. Protagonist Miriam is a formerly enslaved person who has to go back to her ex masters house in an attempt to steal the Circulum Infinitus. The story not only beautifully unpacks her processing of this trauma but rejects the slavers who want to change the world without transforming the institutions that empower them.

In other words, Dragon Age: Absolution rejects using the Master's Tools to fight against oppression.

What are the master's tools?

The saying "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" was first popularized by academic Audre Lorde in her seminal essay of the same name. The essay described an experience of being invited to a humanities conference and being one of the few Black lesbians there in an official capacity, specifically to speak on a panel about Blackness and queerness.

Lorde discussed in that piece how the tools of racist patriarchy (in this case overvaluing white panelists) could not be used to deconstruct it. As she writes: "[The master's tools] may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support."

Dragon Age: Absolution has a very similar theme with several characters who perceive themselves as freedom fighters, despite resorting to tactics that only end up reinforcing the oppressive system they benefit from. The first is Miriam's former "owner," Rezaren Ammosine, a Tevinter magister who perceives himself as "one of the good ones." He wants to use the Circulum Infinitus to resurrect his deceased slave Neb (Miriam's Brother). Neb is someone Rezaren perceives as family, despite his real family owning Neb and Miriam when he was a boy.

Rezaren believes that once he's reunited with these people, his former property, together they can do the work of "changing the system." "Ever since you left," he monologues to Miriam, "I've been rebuilding, trying to make things right again….I have risen through the ranks of the Imperial Chantry… By the Grace of the Maker, I will become the next Divine. And together, the three of us can make Tevinter a better place for everyone."

Yet this perspective is naive because it assumes that Rezaren (who has gained his power through slavery) will be able to do away with it through sheer force of will when everyone around him benefits from the institution, including him. Tevinter society is built around the militarization that comes with stopping slave revolts, and it's doubtful those in power will let this way of life go willingly.

Rezaren's mentality is the definition of metaphorical white saviorism (e.g., a privileged person's belief that they are the main protagonist in the fight against an injustice). Dragon Age doesn’t operate under the same notions of race, hence the use of the word metaphorical here. It's very clear how fickle this image of saviorism is the moment it meets any resistance from those Rezaren’s allegedly saving. He tries to reenslave Miriam once he learns she does not want to be a part of his “family.” "I was wrong….There can be no master without a slave, and no slave without a master."

We see here how when he has to deal with his alleged "family" members having agency, he discards their opinions. Rezaren is so wrapped up in his delusions of grandeur that he doesn't realize he is the villain. This is something the text calls out explicitly in a line of dialogue near the climax. "Are you really the last one to figure out that you're the villain?" a character mocks gleefully.

Another slaver who cannot grabble with the fact that she is the bad guy is the Knight-Commander of the Templar Order Tassia (the Dragon Age equivalent of a cop). Tassia is someone who believes in working to change things from "the inside." "Not everyone welcomes the Venatori," says Tassia of a Tevinter KKK parallel to someone who has lost everything to a hate crime perpetrated by this group. "In fact, some of us are working hard to free the Imperium from their influence."

Yet the text mocks this belief. Through a humiliating bit of dialogue, where Tassia claims not to be a "lapdog," she is immediately dismissed by Rezaren. She does not have any control over her superior, who does pretty much whatever the hell he wants. Tassia fails in her alleged goal of "changing the system," The series clarifies that one of her bigger duties is stopping slave revolts. If she wanted to subvert the system, she would leak information and resources to rebel cells, not try to support this brutal chain of command.

Lastly, there is Hira, someone from a well-off Tevinter family that was massacred by the Venatori for allegedly helping enslaved people. Hira doesn't want to support the system as much as burn it all down. She is resentful for her loss in station and at the system that punished her family for trying to do the right thing. "I hate Teventir," she vents. "This place hurt everyone I love, and I am going to make all of you pay for it. The good, the bad, you all deserve to burn."

Hira is willing to do anything to get her revenge, including reenslaving her lover Miriam, to get a chance to destroy the nation she now hates. She is doing all this underhandedness while working with the Red Templars, a genocidal group that wants to kill all mages — not exactly an emancipatory movement.

Like the other characters we have mentioned, Hira is a metaphorical white savior, in this case, a revolutionary one, who is deluded into thinking her way is different. She isn't working with the enslaved people she claims to care for. The one she interacts with, her lover Miriam, is literally a pawn she has no problem selling back into slavery. It's all about her feelings of revenge, and in the process, Hira resorts to the same system she purports to hate.

A radical conclusion

Through these examples, we see Dragon Age: Absolution skewer people who believe they can change the world using the same systems of oppression that constrain it. Whether they are a cop or politician working within the system or a radical resorting to the institution of slavery to advance their goals, these characters believe that the master's tools are awful, unless, of course, they are the ones using them.

It's refreshing to see a piece of media take this perspective because often, we get narratives extolling the virtues of working within the system. Texts like She-Hulk, Black Panther, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier lambaste characters for "going too far," but in Absolution, these upholders of the status quo are the villains. We are not meant to feel sorry for slavers who squash revolts — they are cannon fodder cut down by our protagonists without a second's hesitation.

This perspective is one we need more of, both on the Silver Screen and outside of it.

The Work of Art in the Age of AI

Art by Christina Davies

This article was originally published in The Washington Socialist.

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“Yes, AI art can be sold,” advises one Medium user. “My second thought, of course, was, how can I monetize this stuff?” begins another writer.

These writers and creators see how easily they can turn out graphics and writing with new “free” tools such as MidJourney and ChatGPT. Some see easy money: “Don’t get me wrong,” one writer continues, “getting good results is not as easy as it seems, but it definitely takes way less effort than becoming a real artist.”

These excerpts highlight something fundamental about the new image and writing generation software that has been causing a stir among professional and casual artists alike. Like everything else in our modern economy, AI technology is framed as an innovative disruption. Though just a cursory look reveals this as just another capitalist plot to deskill workers and scam the public.

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Modern artificial intelligence is different from the pop-cultural depiction of AI (think Skynet or HAL). AI in reality is a highly specialized algorithm trained on massive data sets to accomplish narrowly defined tasks. In most cases, AI programs are fed data with the goal of “training” the software to produce a specific response or action when it identifies standard inputs.

Right away, we bump into our first problem: Where do these data sets come from? It’s easy to imagine some vast repository of information summoned from the Internet, but data doesn’t emerge from the ether. It has to come from somewhere, and in our human labor-oriented society, that data comes from people. Often, it comes from all of us — it comes from you.

You may be familiar with CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) across the web that require basic text or audio-based tasks to ensure “you are a human.” A common example is Google’s reCAPTCHA, which usually takes the form of a grid and asks users to identify specific images or a blurred-out word.

Although captchas serve the purpose of protecting websites against bots, many also serve the dual purpose of fine-tuning data sets for AI. CAPTCHAs have been used to do everything from helping AI better identify images to identifying road hazards. This technology is contributing to fine-tuning autogenerated content, with many users noting AI-generated art pop up in their tests.

Even if you do not use tools like MidJourney and ChatGPT, you’ve likely contributed to the development of these tools if you’ve navigated the web anytime in the last two decades. Were you paid for doing that labor? Did you even know what that labor was for? Or did you assume it was just some security feature without thinking twice about it?

This is, of course, assuming that these data sets are just coming from these small deceptions. The images programs like MidJourney train on often include copyrighted material. Vlogger Hank Green, for example, asked MidJourney to imagine an “Afghani woman with green eyes,” and it replicated a very similar image to National Geographic’s famous 1980 cover. In being trained on that image, it has, in essence, plagiarized it.

On the left is picture generated by MidJourney when asked for “Afghani woman with green eyes,” and on the right is the original National Geographic image.

We can see from this example that these programs have a bias toward existing content. One of the bigger misconceptions of the Internet is that all human knowledge is on here, with people often joking that we have the sum of all human information in our hands, but that’s not true. A lot of information is guarded behind paywalls or kept private altogether, and even more, has never been digitized. It takes journalists and data scientists a lot of time to track down and assemble these data sets and to create new ones.

AIs, which are aggregators of existing data, do not do this work (and might never do this work). The information they are iterating on requires human input to expand what they can do, and pretending otherwise leads to “copies” like the National Geographic example. Even if they are creating seemingly “new” work, it is the result of previous human efforts; efforts which almost certainly went uncompensated and unacknowledged.

The content produced by this software makes it easier for malicious actors to exploit for ill intent. AI content “creators” have also been noted to plagiarize work and spread misinformation. As Gary Marcus writes in the Scientific American about the potential for these tools to increase misinformation: “Because such systems contain literally no mechanisms for checking the truth of what they say, they can easily be automated to generate misinformation at [an] unprecedented scale.”

Marcus then describes how a researcher named Shawn Oakley used ChatGPT to fake studies, including vaccine disinformation, where it erroneously claimed that a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found “that the COVID-19 vaccine is only effective in about 2 out of 100 people.” This information was made up. These tools replicate the style of authoritative information without differentiating between what is and is not valid. For that, an analysis always needs to be grounded to some set of ideological principles or commitment to some standard perspective. You can’t put all of human thought into a blender and hope it gets you to the “correct” answer.

There is also the troubling issue of AI perpetuating systemic biases. The AI Avatar-generating app Lensa has recently been identified by many users for perpetuating racist and sexist imagery.

Writer Rebecca A. Stevens, a Black woman, described how she purchased a Lensa pack for her family which produced some cringing results. While her white husband’s pictures turned out okay, hers were whitened significantly. As Grant Fergusson told WIRED of AI-Generated artwork in general: “The Internet is filled with a lot of images that will push AI image generators toward topics that might not be the most comfortable, whether it’s sexually explicit images or images that might shift people’s AI portraits toward racial caricatures.”

Lensa Image generated by Rebecca Stevens, a Black woman.

People often assume technology is value-neutral, but nothing is value-neutral. Humans have opinions and perspectives, and they are baked into everything we do. The biases of programmers become reflected in the codes and algorithms they develop to run their applications. Even where we assume a programmer or engineer is free of these biases, patterns uncovered in the datasets that train these algorithms can also reproduce them. Avatar generators like Lensa would not whiten users’ images if its program did not reflect the biases of either its creators or the datasets it was trained on.

To summarize: the developers of AI applications like Midjourney and Lensa are taking labor they did not adequately compensate people for and may not have had permission to use to train their system. Then, these products are commodified into a privately-owned service that is incredibly vulnerable to long-standing systemic biases and easily exploited for malicious intent. These externalities will not be encumbered by the owners of this programs, they are encumbered by everyone else.

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What is the end goal for tools like Midjourney? Though many are currently available for free, they will not remain so.

In the short term, fares for use are lifted so companies can test their service and establish brand recognition. Eventually, these applications will be locked behind a paywall, and transformed into a service designed to cut labor costs associated with content production. The end goal is to make money by selling a service that reduces labor costs for businesses. Once this project is complete, the livelihoods of all types of visual artists will be put at risk.

The primary customer is not immediately obvious, but big money will be made selling this service to content aggregation firms: Companies and individuals who own content-hosting platforms, websites, or other media enterprises that would rather pay an algorithm to produce cheap images fast over a skilled artist at a higher premium. Content aggregators would love to cut out the cost of labor entirely and replace it with an application.

We have already seen this transition happen elsewhere. Google Translate, for instance, has become reliable enough to be used as a stand-in for skilled translation. Google Translate is far from perfect, but it’s reliable enough that many have started to use it as a stand-in for professional translation services. The software hasn’t become something that augments the labor of skilled and trained translators — its lowered the demand for them. Now, many translation jobs have turned into low-paying gig work. As translator Katrina Leonoudakis lamented to The Guardian about subtitle translations: “Knowing that these multibillion-dollar companies refuse to pay a few more dollars to an experienced professional, and instead opt for the lowest bidder with mediocre quality, only speaks to their greed and disrespect not only for the craft of translation but the art created by the film-makers they employ.”

It’s important to emphasize here that the quality of service provided is secondary. There have been numerous instances of vendors putting out the minimal viable translation because creating a readable translation isn’t the point. Many sellers are fine with putting in minimal effort to spin a profit. This technology has considerably lowered that bar while making no assurances that these products will be reliable or accurate. As a result, skilled workers face more precarious employment as the quality of goods and services on the market deteriorates.

Other industries have been affected by this sort of “disruption.” AI-assisted calling, booking, customer service, and logistics services have already dampened wages and employment in these (typically stable) industries; and nearly all modern tech companies have replicated this predictable cycle of disruption and extraction.

For example, Uber promised that their app would provide greater freedom and flexibility for its riders and customers. However, their service was hardly an innovation; The company was only sustainable because it was able to carve-out favorable regulations from local governments and was capable of marshaling enough investment capital to subsidize the cost of its rides early on. Both factors drove its (mostly unionized) competitors out of the market.

As a result, life as a driver has become more precarious. Reporting has shown that drivers are making significantly less than your typical taxi driver, and Uber has been known to put forth inflated figures for its riders’ earnings in order to trick workers onto the platform. The public also bears the cost of this disruption: the price of ride-sharing services has increased now that the competition has been pushed out of the market.

When we look at what similar technologies have done in the hands of the few, they have lowered the cost of our labor. People still work as translators, tailors, writers, and painters. It’s just that labor-saving technology, due to the arrangement of its ownership, has been exploited to lower wages and make the pursuit of honest work in these fields harder and more tenuous.

Once AI-powered image generation software becomes widespread, the working artist or designer risks a similar fate. Workers will have to compete with software that is developed with the past work produced by themselves and their peers. For employment, the worker will have to settle for the sort of alienating tasks that the machine cannot perform on its own — editing, prompting, drafting, compiling — at lower and more sporadic wages.

---

Is this bleak future inevitable? Some argue that these sorts of disruptions, although hard in the short-term, will eventually raise our collective standard of living. Optimists allege that these technological advancements, despite the awful inputs that powered their creation, will eventually create a net good.

In fact, these new technologies will only contribute to an increasing precarity. So long as the profits derived from reductions in time and labor saved from new technologies are owned by a narrow few, paths to an honest living will only become narrower for the rest of us. This is not an arrangement that will deliver emancipation or improvement.

The precarity of life will never be liberated by technological progress that is not equalized. Historically, capitalist predation has only been beaten through class warfare facilitated by an organized labor movement. The small (if increasingly deteriorating) labor benefits and protections much of the working-class enjoys today — the 40-hour work week, health and safety laws, healthcare benefits, etc. — are not natural allowances provided by technological advancement. They were spoils won from an organized struggle against capitalists staged by workers.

A collective response to new forms of capitalist predation will be the only way externalities produced by this new technology are addressed. Artists and creative workers who want to stop this race to the bottom will need to pool together to protect each other from the theft of their art. Political organizations and lawmakers will need to think about what sort of protections, restrictions, or requirements are available to prevent the abuse and exploitation of this new form of technology.

Abating the devastation caused by the commercialization of these technologies, if it is possible, will be a straining effort. But the alternative will be excruciating: the reduction of creative labor into another precarious gig on an alienating assembly line.

Words That Make Every Injustice Instantly Easier to Talk About

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

Language is hard. It can be both a necessary tool for liberation and also a barrier — something that we go around in circles again and again without making actual progress on a chosen issue. Some people are so focused on how to speak correctly that they never act: trapped in a prison of their own shame and guilt.

The words below are about language, but they are also meant to introduce and expand concepts that make conversation more straightforward. These words will allow you to sidestep certain rhetorical traps and push through into conversations that hopefully let you get more done.

Queer

When conservatives are feeling uncharitable, they will sometimes offensively refer to LGBTQ+ individuals as "alphabet people." It's a frustrating dismissal meant to criticize how much diversity with gender and sexuality is being acknowledged nowadays. Still, it hints at a real rhetorical problem: no matter how many people you include at the end of the acronym, someone is always excluded.

The "+ "addition I added above is meant to solve this problem, but it doesn't really because some identities are still valued over others by being there in the first place. The plus sign nods to otherness without necessarily including it. That's why, more and more, I have just been using the Q part of that acronym — queer.

Queer is an umbrella term that can include all-nonnormative sexualities, romantic identities, and genders. Gay men can be thought of as queer. Trans women are queer. Aromantic nonbinary people are queer. (note: some people disagree with this framing and refer to it as a political association as much as relating to gender, romance, or sexuality).

If you are speaking broadly and want to generalize about the LGBTQ+ community, it's best not to exclude people, which is why the queer label is increasingly a handy stand-in.

GSRM

From rejecting one acronym to embracing another, GSRM stands for Gender, Sexual, and Romantic Minority. It's not so much about specific gender, romantic, or sexual identities but refers to the even broader umbrella of all of these identities that are otherized in our society.

This language is helpful because, depending on how you define queerness, some people may fall outside of it but still engage in romantic or sexual identities that our society stigmatizes. For example, white cisgendered, heterosexual individuals who engage in a kink or are in a polyamorous relationship endure some oppression and discrimination from society. We could say the same for a straight man in a romantic relationship with a trans woman. He's in a straight relationship, but his gender and sexuality can be called into question for the mere association with an "Other."

These people might not necessarily fall under the queer umbrella (though there is plenty of overlap), but they have interests that can sometimes align with the greater community. When the situation calls for it, it's important to have language that includes them.

White Supremacy

Many people have a definition of racism where they define it as someone saying something mean to an individual Black or Brown person for being of that race. This is often why conservatives believe that reverse racism toward white people exists because if white people can be mean to Black people about race, surely the opposite can and does happen.

Anti-racists believe racism is not just about individual actions but systems of power. If you are a Black person in this country, you will statistically be poorer, have worse health outcomes, and be brutalized more by the police. This sad state is because the laws and institutions in this country are set up to discriminate against Black and Brown people, regardless of whether or not an individual is racist. You can not have a racist bone in your body and still benefit from and perpetuate racist institutions and policies.

This reality is why many people have started encouraging others to use the term White Supremacy instead of racism because the phrase directly references a system that values a hierarchy based on whiteness. It reframes the discussion away from individualized notions of race toward systems.

-Anti Instead of -Phobic

An annoying debate happens whenever you use a word like homophobia or islamophobia. Someone will inevitably respond, "I am not afraid of gay people. I just don't like them." This counter relies on a juvenile understanding of fear (fear can often manifest as violence), but by the time you get into that conversation, the person has already gotten you to move from the point at hand: that there is a group of people they hate.

We can eliminate this sidestep altogether by categorizing them as hateful instead. They are not homophobic but anti-gay. Not transphobic, but anti-trans (see also anti-fat, anti-muslim, etc.).

Under this framing, you have moved away from defending a word to your interlocutor having to justify their biases. They will still try to wriggle out of this framing by claiming what they really don't condone is "the behavior" (as if there is a meaningful difference), but it's far harder to maintain that position when you can continuously pivot back to what they're against.

Capitalist vs. Worker

We get into many debates about wealth in the United States, but many of them are based on aesthetics rather than actual wealth. Media pundits will label you wealthy if you splurge on coffee, eat avocado toast, talk verbosely, or, in a very sad state of US politics, have little debt (side note: rich people often have lots of debt).

What actually makes you rich in this world, though, is being a capitalist. These are the people who own stuff (factories, natural resources, companies, IP, etc. ) and extract most of their wealth by either renting out that stuff to others, usually to people who don't own stuff, or by paying workers money to extract and package it for them as a good or service.

Capitalists may do work (union-busting and tax evasion require a lot of paperwork, after all), but they do not need to work a traditional job. They make money off of their stuff. Whether that be a landlord extracting rent, a company extracting royalties from media, stock owners collecting residuals, or CEOs transferring the surplus value of their workers' labor over to themselves via overly inflated salaries, the wealth of capitalists is not tied to individual labor but exploitation.

Simply put, everyone else who isn't doing that is a worker. Cut out conversations about coffee and college debt, and focus on how people make their money.

Disabled

Disabled. You can say it. You won't catch on fire. People have disabilities, and if we want to improve our ableist society (i.e., discrimination based on the belief that non-disabled people are superior), that means being able to talk about them. (side note: this applies to every identity, whether we are talking about Gay People, Black People, or most triggering of all White people. If you can't say the word, there is a problem).

When in doubt, be descriptive (e.g., Sarah has Cerebral Palsy) and use the language appropriately (i.e., don't just call out someone's disability because you are uncomfortable with it). As long as you aren't otherizing someone, it's okay to mention something that is a huge facet of someone's life.

It's best to use the language that someone prefers. Some people will have a problem with the word disabled in the same way that some GRSM people will have difficulty with the word queer. These words have long, complicated histories, and things will sometimes get messy. That's okay.

Also while we are on this subject, cut out ableist language from your vocabulary such as idiot, imbecile, r*t*rded, hearing impaired, dumb, crazy, and cripple. These words are straight-up insulting. Some disabled people may use them, but that falls more in line with how some queer people may refer to themselves as f*gg*ts or how some black people call themselves n*gg*s. It's a way for marginalized groups to reclaim an insulting history, and it doesn't go both ways.

Kyriarchy

Intersectional feminism is the idea that forms of oppression can connect to make things worse off overall for certain groups of people. For example, Black people are paid less in the United States, but Black women are statistically paid even less than Black men. Race and gender intersect here to systemically put Black Women in a worse-off financial situation.

A rhetorical problem arises when we refer to a few systems of oppression when what we really want to do is refer to all of them at once. Writers will say something along the lines of "white supremacist, colonial patriarchy" when what they want to say is every intersecting oppression. It's the LGBTQ+ problem all over again, except instead of sexual, romantic, and gender orientations, we are talking about unjust hierarchies.

This is where the word Kyriarchy comes in. First popularized by scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, it's a word that quite simply means all intersecting hierarchies, or in essence, the status quo. It's about the nodes of oppression and privilege that people experience the world with and has been likened to a pyramid by Fiorenza.

With this word, a long string of words is no longer needed. If you want to talk about white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative society without breaking out a sea of commas, Kyriarchy is your word.

Specificity

This last section is not so much a word as a concept. There has been growing frustration from some activists over terms like People of Color (POC) and Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC). This frustration exists because, sometimes, when people want to talk about a group, such as Black people, they use these broader acronyms instead.

Specificity is your friend when referring to groups of people. If you are talking about Black people, then say Black people. If you are referring to Trans-Asian Women, then say that. It's not that these larger umbrella terms we have mentioned don't have their place — they do — but many are using them as a stand-in for an "other," and that can be dehumanizing in its own way.

Conclusion

The point of this article was not to chastise you on how you are doing everything wrong, or be the end all be all of how we should speak. There were many words that I could have also included (allistic vs. autistic, land back, and even socialism, etc.), but decided to axe for time. This article is meant to be more of a jumping-off point, summarizing aspects of feminist, disability, critical race, and labor theory as succinctly as possible.

There may be terms you disagree with or want to learn more about, and I encourage you to research them. The beauty of language is that one person like me doesn't get to decide what it means. It's through conversations we move forward, so talk away.

What Representation Isn’t

NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Representation is a gift

Something that gives people hope.

A fixture they can point to on high

And say, “I can do that too.”

Representation is cool.

A trend TV execs and publishers

can tell their assistants to

“get on.”

Representation is a war.

A battleground where people decide

What forms do

And do not belong.

Representation is a closed door.

A barrier people can point to

And say, “We don’t exclude others.

Look at her.”

Representation is charity.

Something given to those who have little,

So those that have much more

may feel like good people.

Representation is a salve.

A palliative given so that those being crushed

do not imagine beyond the table

stacked on top of their backs.

Representation is a ghost.

Something that haunts those who have everything,

with what they have taken

And the privileges they may lose.

Representation is a collective complaint.

A reminder of cruelties inflicted

and promises broken.

A howl for change.

We know what representation is.

What it isn’t reparations.

What it isn’t healthcare.

What it isn’t a roof over your head.

What it isn’t justice.

Representation may give you hope.

It might guide and fuel,

but it will never free you.

Is Going to a Restaurant Murder?: Unpacking the Harm of Social Events in the Covid Era

Redditor u/schuwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I am someone who has, for the most part, not stopped masking. I still predominantly use masks when going to the grocery store and public transit. I am a huge proponent of vaccinations (not just for Covid-19, but for influenza, monkeypox, and more). I have not returned to a pre-Covid normal either. My social life consists of small get-togethers, the occasional house party (with testing), and a monthly board game night I organize for a left-leaning organization. To me, these precautions should be treated as a necessary part of everyday life, but I recognize I am in the minority here.

Some online take a far more aggressive stance about those who do not follow these precautions I have described, as imperfectly as I keep to them, to the point of equating going to a restaurant as encouraging murder. As Jessica Wildfire remarked recently on Twitter: "After three years, I honestly don't see what people love so much about eating out that it's worth committing social murder for." This opinion generated quite a stir and is helpful because it cuts to the core of a problem that underpins a lot of activism in the United States: How do you justify existing in a system that harms people?

I am not here to defend this tweet but to defend people's "unreasonableness" when venting about an injustice. I am of two minds with positions like the tweet above. On the one hand, I recognize why some people are so burnout and confused about the state of covid that they are letting precautions slips, but on the other hand, these critics are not wrong that these actions hurt others — a tension we shall examine below.

Why do some liberals and leftists abandon precautions?

I understand why people f@ck up with covid precautions: I do all the time. For example, the other day, I was on my way to the grocery store, forgot my mask, and went inside anyway. I felt terrible about it, but I still did it because I am exhausted most of the time. I often feel like I am the only one in the room who still cares about the pandemic. People will give me funny looks for being masked, and when I have low willpower, sometimes I go f@ck it and throw caution to the wind.

It shouldn't be that way. People shouldn't have to hold up lifesaving healthcare precautions through willpower alone, but that's where we are as a country. Through both the Trump and Biden administrations, the government has maintained a regime that cares more about the economy than human lives, and it's hard to know who to trust. Should I mask? Should I quarantine after travel? How many days? I can read five different sources and get five different answers, and that's not how things should be when it comes to a pandemic.

If I am thinking impartially, which is what debate bros on the Internet always tell me to do, it's naive to hold people individually responsible for that systemic failure. Many people prioritize the recommendations of the CDC over random Twitter feeds and blogs because it's easier to do, and they can't sort through the mass of contradictory information out there.

Does that make the harm from things like long-covid go away? Of course not, but that's not what's being argued here. The point many leftists are making in response to Jessica Wildfire is that this is a systemic issue, and treating it as an individual moral failure doesn't do anyone any favors. As David Klion tweeted recently in response: "Any individual going out to a restaurant now isn't making the difference. The system failed, the collective political will to save more lives faltered. It sucks, but blaming people is pointless."

For the ones that allegedly do "know better" about how harmful Covid is, they're painfully aware that our society is many years away from taking public health seriously. Biden has infamously declared the pandemic over and is the most likely Democratic frontrunner in 2024. We will probably have years of Covid precautions being treated as a matter of personal responsibility, with no reward for those sacrifices other than bragging rights on Twitter (not the soundest of motivations).

In the meantime, those who, again, do "know better" are further aware that there is always the possibility for something worse on the horizon. It's no secret that pandemics are expected to increase as climate change worsens. Combined with a deteriorating global supply chain and an over-taxed healthcare system, there's no reason to expect that we will be able to handle things better as the years go by. The argument I see a lot is that if you are someone who sees this grim future coming — and you look at current activities such as going out to restaurants and clubbing and realize that they might become inaccessible in the future for all but a few — at some point, your willpower is going to teeter out. At that point, you are just going to do the activities you want to do anyway.

This is an argument I empathize with a great deal because I am not a massive fan of willpower being treated as the solution to any significant problem. We cannot solve systemic crises such as climate change and public health as individuals. We need community, and if your answer to a pandemic is to bootstrap your way through it, that's a recipe for disaster.

Critics of this perspective sometimes counter that these actions still put autoimmune people at risk — and this is true — but that didn't start with this pandemic. Try looking up disabled activists' perspectives on our country's response to influenza before covid-19 to understand what I mean. Ableism is ingrained in how our society operates, and your actions will harm disabled people. In fact, your actions will harm all sorts of people on society's fringes (note: this is your gentle reminder that many of the things you buy are made by enslaved people).

Now you can take this reasoning to the extreme. If you are genuinely burnout, the impossibility of reducing your harm down to zero in our racist, capitalist society is almost too comforting. If you accept that some amount of harm is inevitable, it allows you to go on autopilot — something everyone does to some degree, whether it be with white supremacy, pollution, or meat consumption. The reframe becomes that you shouldn't be mad at someone just because they have hit a wall on one of the hierarchies that impacts you personally when there are probably areas where you are likewise stunted. The "everyone's a little bit racist" defense circa 2003's Avenue Q, but for disability and illness.

I will get back to why I dislike this argument later, but not everyone is approaching this with a color-blind outlook. Most are just overwhelmed or burnout. The logical, clinical answer about the current state of covid precautions in the US is that we must stop individualizing this systemic problem. This is an argument I have a lot of empathy for because, without it, you can spiral out of control the more injustices you take on.

Yet, all this being said, this answer still sucks if you are disabled or ill, doesn't it?

Stop Tone-Policing Sick and Disabled People

I have not been entirely honest. I get sick a lot (see American Society Wants The Sick And Tired To Die). COVID-19 hit, and I immediately contracted shingles from the stress. I get regular, debilitating migraines and colds that take me out for days, and that's not to mention all the mental health issues that make proactive measures such as exercise and regular hydration difficult. COVID is a considerable risk to me, and I am by no means the illest person out there.

I would prefer it if I didn't have to choose between having fun with my friends on New Year's and being sick for days afterward, but that's my life. That's a lot of disabled or ill people's lives. Our anger over society choosing to prioritize ones and zeros in a computer over our lives is valid, and there aren't many places to vent that anger. You can't exactly expect everyone to put their lives on hold.

I understand why Jessica Wildfire's frustration exists because it's cathartic to shout your pain into the void. Whenever I am the only person on a metro who is masked, a far too common occurrence, I tend to immediately text my friends and vent to them, albeit on more private channels. I was particularly enraged the other day when I saw a maskless mother cradling a maskless baby in her arms at the height of rush hour. I wanted to scream.

The Internet is filled with many spaces where people are anonymously dunking on strangers because they need to vent about systemic injustices. For example, the subreddit, Are the Straights Okay? has a lot of queer people who criticize ridiculous examples of heteronormativity (e.g., the societal expectation that straightness must be valued over all other forms of expression). When people make fun of statements like marriage being equated to murder or the strange gender expectations put on children, they are skewering norms more than individuals.

If one is straight, it might be tempting to say, "hey, not all of us are like that" (see also "not all men," "not all white people," and "not all Christians"), but this is not about any one individual. It's about how the institution of heteronormativity hurts queer people. These examples allow queer people to vent about the ridiculousness of a system they have very little control over but impacts their everyday lives. It's a form of reasserting the semblance of control.

The advice I would give to someone struggling with the "hey, not all of us are like that" reaction is to move past that initial defensiveness and try to empathize with where that anger and pain is coming from — both from themselves and to the people they are reacting to. Queer people are venting on this Subreddit because the institution of heteronormativity hurts them, and rather than saying, "can you please reframe these accusations in a nicer way" (what some would classify as "tone-policing"), maybe focus on how you can dismantle the injustices instead.

This advice applies to literally every marginalized group, including disabled and sick people. When someone says something aggressively, and perhaps ineloquently as Jessica Wildfire has done here, do you need to dive into a meaningless argument about your hurt feelings or try to explain how you maybe aren't that bad? Because for many people, things are that bad. Rather than take these comments personally, and list out rationalizations, like the ones we outlined in the first section, maybe recognize this is not about you.

All the explanations I wrote at the beginning of this article are technically accurate, but are they relevant when addressing someone venting to their followers about restaurants because they haven't left the house in months for fear of dying? When you are angry and in pain, having suffered the last three days recovering from a migraine because you decided to risk things and have fun at a party (I might be getting a little personal here), someone asking you to be "more understandable" with that anger is psychologically exhausting. When we participate in systems that hurt others — even if they are systems that cannot be easily changed — that hurt still exists. People should be allowed to complain about that harm without prefacing every comment with an in-depth look at the systems at play.

We are still in the middle of a pandemic, and every social interaction will increase the likelihood of someone dying. That is simply the reality of where we are, and again that is not an analysis that begins and ends with Covid but a host of diseases and infections. Influenza still kills people. HIV still kills people. Some groups experience more risk from our behavior than others, and as a society, we don't seem very interested in mitigating that risk more than is necessary to help wealthy people make money.

Why are people treating the words of a frustrated person like a policy memo about to go out to the President for immediate adoption? Many of us are merely looking for people to give a f@ck about our needs. Needs that are not being met, and so we are letting these complaints be known — that's what should be the takeaway. Someone's elaborate missive on why they shouldn't feel guilty is unnecessary here: internalize that injustice is happening and either do something about it or get out of the way.

A Tired Conclusion

I can see both sides of this debate. I empathize with people who are burnt out from covid precautions and want to go to a restaurant, party, movie theater, or whatever fleeting pleasure they can capture in this end-stage capitalism we are suffering under. I am there too. I am also a human that wants to do fun things, and this desire has caused me to lower my standards in ways I have regretted.

I don't take as hard of a stance as Jessica is doing here. By all means, continue to live your life, hopefully with precautions, if it makes you feel like you won't have a breakdown. I don't really care what you do — I don't know who you are, and I have no desire to dictate your life on an individual basis.

It's worth mentioning, though, that no one is preventing you from going to restaurants or movie theaters. Quite the opposite, the disabled and sick predominantly have no say in how our society operates, which means the needs of this community — needs everyone will require eventually (old age says hi) — are not represented in the grand scheme of things. Do whatever you want, but the one thing you can't demand is that those enraged with this system make you feel less guilty. This status quo is killing many people, and that tension doesn't go away simply because it makes someone uncomfortable.

Many actions we do on a daily basis hurt others, and that is just something we all have to live with and learn from. I can't speak for Jessica Wildfire, but in general, if a disabled or sick person is talking online about how people going to spaces like restaurants hurts them and that makes you uncomfortable, my suggestion, respectfully, is to get over it by which I mean to stop taking it personally. It has nothing to do with you, except in the most general sense of you living in a society that doesn't treat sick and disabled people very well.

Take that pedantic, "well actually" energy and direct it at the institutions and people f@cking things up: Insurance companies making it difficult for those to pay for the medication they need to survive; drug companies preventing the vaccine from being easily accessible, so this virus continues to mutate; rich people who would rather we work than rest and heal. Those people have timelines and existences that deserve a stern talking to.

Everything else is just getting in the way.

Debunking the Trope That “Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant”

Photo by Christina Langford-Miller on Unsplash

There is this tiring trope that happens in media. The villain has been deceiving the populace of a town, country, or galaxy for the entire runtime. It seems like they will never face justice, but then our hero steps onto a stage with evidence or leaks a hot mic recording to the public, and the villain's secret gets revealed. The crowd instantly turns on them, and the day is saved.

This trope is everywhere in pop culture. It's also a lie. A convenient fairytale we tell children (and adults), so they can ignore the reality that people are not always convinced when the truth is revealed.

A breakdown of the trope

It needs to be stated how prevalent this trope is, especially in children's media. A good example is the Pixar film Coco where antagonist Ernesto de la Cruz, who before the climax we believe is protagonist Miguel's father, accidentally reveals to the entire underworld on a hot mic that he killed character Héctor. "I am the one willing to do what is necessary to seize my moment, whatever it takes," he accidentally confesses onscreen to thousands.

The entire afterlife community turns on him instantly, booing him off the stage, and within a year, he has lost his standing in both the real world and the land of the dead. There are many other examples, particularly with a hot mic (see also Little Gideon revealing his evil plan to the town of Gravity Falls and Bellwether confessing accidentally to the cops in Zootopia).

Adult media has this trope as well. The 2011 film Horrible Bosses involves a CEO getting busted for what he has said on a recording. We see the same exact thing replicated in 2007's Hairspray, the second Mission Impossible movie, Now You See Me 2, and pretty much every other media property where our protagonist has to go up against a villain with far more political power and clout than them.

My favorite example comes from the kid movie Sea Beast (2022), which I low-key love for just how improbable it is. Character Maisie Brumble is standing on the back of a giant sea creature, far away from a crowd of onlookers, and she monologues to them how the kingdom's war with the sea beasts is a false one. The beasts have not been killing people: that's all been propaganda from the monarchy. The crowd not only hears her (which, like what?), but the speech works. Maisie can get through decades, maybe centuries, of propaganda to convince the inhabitants that their war is an unjust one.

Yet this trope is tiredly unrealistic. It's nice to believe that such an interaction is enough to topple an oppressive system. The sweetness of this trope is why it gets told in the first place, but it's not true. We have seen children in the real world monologue about the pain they have experienced with, say, a mass shooting, only for conspiracy theorists to deny the event even happened (see the Sandy Hook massacre). We have seen reporters leak politicians' statements and financial records only for the information to be ignored (see the Panama papers, the Snowden files, etc.).

The truth is often not enough to get through well-entrenched propaganda. I wouldn't care about these cute kids' movies telling children that “speaking truth to power is enough to topple empires” if this was not how actual adults thought too. Many adults continue to make the false claim that we can change things by merely bringing injustices to light. "Sunlight," the saying goes, "is the best disinfectant." Or to riff on a famous newspaper's newest slogan: "Democracy dies in Darkness."

This perspective ignores the power dynamics at play in writing, recording, and remembering history. It's a constant struggle to get people to learn about things as they happened because, like the monarchs of Sea Beast, those in power are putting out propaganda to distort the truth. When someone learns information that conflicts with that propaganda, they often don't accept it willingly but resist the truth at all costs.

For example, in the United States, conservatives have attempted to purge discussions of queer, black, and brown histories from our schools because the mere airing of the truth is not enough to get them to accept it. Many conservative actors would prefer to go on believing in the same lies they have always believed in, evidence be damned, and are removing all information that makes them uncomfortable (see the moral panic over CRT and queer rights). It takes genuine work and political organizing to get people to abandon well-entrenched narratives. Sometimes you need an entire competing propaganda arm to repeat an alternative history constantly to get to the point where the public starts questioning its indoctrination.

The history of nonwhite, nonheteronormative America has, for the longest time, been a stigmatized history — one preserved by fringe journalists, writers, and everyday people, who were not believed until decades or centuries after the fact, and still unbelieved by many. Truthseekers we consider heroes today (e.g., Ida B. Wells, MLK Jr., etc.) were hated in their heyday. Their wide appeal now is often because of political battles that made that information more palatable to the public, and even today, much of their original message has been so watered down as to no longer make mainstream society uncomfortable (see the appropriation of MLK Jrs “I have a dream speech”).

Just revealing information is never enough to create political change, and it's high time we recognize that both on the Silver Screen and off it.

An honest conclusion

One of the most significant subversions of this trope comes from the movie, Sorry to Bother You, where protagonist Cassius Green tries to reveal to the public how the corporation WorryFree is turning its workers into horse people. Cassius leaks this information to the public only for no outcry to emerge. The truth doesn't lead to a fundamental shift in society but the continuation of the status quo. As the character Squeeze says of Cassius's “call your congress members” campaign:

“Most people that saw you on that screen knew calling their congressman wasn’t going to do shit. If you get shown a problem but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem.”

And so Cassius abandons this campaign and helps Squeeze with a strike — something that has been going on throughout the film. It's implied that this slow, painful work of union organizing is needed to get people to eventually accept Cassius's information. This message advocates for workers to push for systemic reform, not simply just to “state their stories” or their “truth.” The fight for power is depicted as mattering more.

Conversely, the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" trope primes people to believe that the bare minimum is enough: that they can live in a fantasy world where, regardless of power dynamics, they can tell the truth, and people will listen to them. It's a very privileged and naive perspective that we should not teach to children, let alone adults. Kids are smart enough to know that adults lie, and it's not a leap for them to understand that adults not only lie about history but actively ignore it.

I would love more media taking the Sorry To Bother You route because while telling the truth is essential, fighting for it is what really counts.

The Anti-Trans Fans of 'Hogwarts Legacy' & The Consumers Who Ignore Them

Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world RPG by Avalanche Software set in the Harry Potter universe. This game takes place in the 1800s, approximately a hundred years before the original books. It is set against the backdrop of a goblin rebellion as well as the emergence of a new, forgotten form of magic.

The game has come under fire for various reasons (one of them being alleged antisemitism), but the most prominent is that the IP comes from the mind of author J.K. Rowling — a well-known anti-trans activist who has become a figurehead in the movement for campaigning for the erroneous belief that gender is tied to sex (side note: gender has changed culturally throughout history), has perpetuated pseudoscience and pushed for transphobic legislation. Many critics fear that the game's success will further cement her cultural influence and have consequently called for a boycott.

Today, we will examine whether bigoted people are rallying around the game — and if this and other problematic media are worth consuming.

The transphobia bubbling beneath the surface

From the onset, something we should clarify is that some transphobic people like this game, and by extension, Rowling herself, because she perpetuates transphobia (i.e. a hatred of trans people). Some see spending money on this game as another way to "own the libs." As the Steam user, PoorUglypeasant asserted on Jan 16:

“I bought this game just to put it on the top seller and piss off the woke mob trying to boycott a good game for very stupid reasons. The game is not out and already got my moneys worth by pissing off the ones who try to cancel the game just because the original author doesn’t think like them and refuses to bend the knee to those idiots.”

To pretend like ideology is not a factor around some (not all) people's support and disapproval of this game is naive. You don't have to search that hard to find users on Steam gleefully sharing transphobic talking points. "Evil = people who reject biological reality and want to chemically castrate and sexually mutilate children," erroneously commented one banned account. "There is nothing awesome nor beautiful about trans people, just like there is nothing as such in any other mentally ill person," vents another.

There are many comments like this throughout the Steam Community Hub for the game (something that speaks poorly of the platform's moderation). You can find similar sentiments across the most prominent social media platforms. Fringe far-right content creators are treating the success of this game as a refutation of "woke" ideology. "Hogwarts Legacy sales DOMINATE every gaming platform!," reads the title for the Youtuber YellowFlash 2, who then proceeds to argue that the game’s success is disproving woke “bs.”

Yet to place Rowling in the same bucket as these conservative actors is complicated. While some conservatives have come out in favor of Rowling's transphobia, she is still a liberal woman (by which I mean someone who supports capitalism but wants to expand the social safety net) writing a liberal book, and other conservatives hate her for that. As recently as last year, a far-right conservative pastor led a book burning of titles like Harry Potter and Twilight to stop "demonic influences." Not too long ago, Rowling butted heads with conservative commentator Matt Walsh, who she initially commended for his transphobic documentary What Is A Woman?, only to walk her support back because she was offended by his sexism.

Multiple things can be true. Rowling can be transphobic while also holding liberal views in other areas that clash with more traditional conservatives. She may be a figurehead for transphobia right now, but because her trans-exclusive feminism ultimately reinforces rigid gender norms, it was always destined to be coopted by more conservative men. She is ultimately pushing for a worldview that will make her materially worse off in the long run, even if she doesn't have the perspective to acknowledge that (think Serena Joy from the Handmaid's Tale).

Yet this anti-trans rhetoric is not the sole motivator for every supporter of the game. As we shall soon see, some people are passively on the sidelines or disagree with the spirit or aims of the boycott altogether.

The other people buying the game

Not everyone who wants to purchase this game is a conservative or motivated by outwardly transphobic reasoning. Some have claimed that they don’t care about the issue whatsoever. As LegacyKillaHD commented recently: "…then you have the more average casual gamer, I guess you could say. Those who actually like Harry Potter and aren’t really following along or care about the politics of JK Rowling. Those [people] are extremely excited about this game." (side note: it’s strange for LegacyKillaHD, a very online person, to claim to know how these people think).

Listen, there is a worthwhile debate to be had about whether passively ignoring transphobia still counts as transphobia, but LegacyKillaHD has a point that most consumers are not plugged into this debate at all. While transphobia was apparent in the comments surrounding Hogwarts Legacy, when one observes discussions on platforms such as Steam, most comments are about game mechanics such as romance options. We have to be careful not to fall into the "spotlight effect," where issues and arguments that matter a lot to us personally are even a consideration to other people.

Captured Jan 17, 2023: 3 out of 10 discussions are about this issue

Many people have a "hands-off approach" regarding media consumption. A lot of people believe that we should separate art from the artist. One Steam user writes: "She may be an English Terf, but the story itself of Harry Potter is pretty good. Why hate the work when it has done nothing wrong?" This is the infamous "death of the author" defense (see Lindsay Ellis's video on this topic). Although controversial, it speaks more to a consumer's passive indifference and privilege than their active transphobia.

Others commenters argue that this boycott has been pointless and ineffective, and they aren't always your far-right reactionaries. "Just enjoy the game. Rowling is a die-hard reactionist," writes one user, "[but] money won't fix it, and it's fine because no one really listens to what she has to say. Why would a sane person? Money doesn't mean smart or educated."

One may disagree with this statement (from my perspective, it sounds a little defeatist and ignores the fact that many do listen to JK Rowling), but it’s worth bringing up because this conversation is not always a rigid binary between transphobes and trans-supporters. There is some nuance here. Some consumers of this game are transphobic, others are passive supporters of that transphobia, and others still are people on the left who disagree with the political effectiveness of this boycott.

An unmagical conclusion

When we look at the reaction to this game, it's clear that celebrating transphobia motivates a large segment of the community. However, it does not seem like the overwhelming majority. The natural question becomes, considering everything we have discussed, should one boycott this game?

Drawing a line in the sand with a consumer product is always tricky to do in a capitalist society that is, by and large, toxic. Many food distributors actively use slave labor (see Nestle), exploit the working class (see Walmart and Amazon), and f@ck with our laws (see Disney). Does Rowling's publicness make her hatred worse or simply more visible? Does the arbitrariness of the boycott even matter if indecisiveness here is being used as an excuse for inaction? After all, when it comes to political activism, one has to start somewhere, and it's highly doubtful that many people engaging in whataboutism on this topic are organizing Amazon boycotts.

It's okay to be torn by these questions. We will not pretend here like we have cracked the code regarding ethical consumption under capitalism, but if these questions resonate with you, that's a sign that holding off here is not the worst thing in the world. We are talking about entertainment, not a vital service you need to have this second. One doesn't need to buy this wizarding game as soon as it comes out. We can wait to see whether these fears are accurate or, indeed, overblown.

In the meantime, as you mull this dilemma over, posted below are some games to scratch that itch for fantasy content. Many of these feature queer characters, so consider giving them a playthrough; you won’t be disappointed.

Some Queer Fantasy Games To Follow:

1. Boyfriend Dungeon

2. Ikenfell

3. Dragon Age Inquisition

4. Hades

5. Masquerada: Songs and Shadows

6. 80 Days

7. Dreamfall Chapters

8. Life Is Strange: True Colors

9. Undertale

10. Road Not Taken

Explaining How the George Floyd Uprising Was Quickly Forgotten

Leonhard Lenz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

I remember when I first heard about George Floyd's death. My partner had asked if I had heard about this new police shooting of a Black man, and I mistakenly thought he was referring to Tony McDade, a Black Trans man who was murdered two days later. I was confused by people suddenly caring about Floyd when I had already seen the videos that year of so many Black men and women killed by the police.

I didn't understand why this incident, out of a sea of injustices, jostled my fellow white people out of our complacency, but I was relieved that people seemed to care about it. There were a lot of connections formed during those earlier protests, and even what at the time appeared to be a desire to change policing (e.g., the Defund the Police movement).

All eyes looked to see what America would do, and then, well, nothing changed: a lot of ink was spilled, names were altered, monuments were replaced, some token legislation was passed, and the status quo remained the same. America gazed at the horror of systemic racism, and then just as quickly, it looked away.

How did this happen?

There are several ways a "public" (i.e., the collection of human minds that makes up a polity) reacts to an injustice once it enters the zeitgeist. Option one is that the initial anger leads to a push for substantial reform. People learn about an issue and rage against it. They then demand changes from their leaders or maybe even overthrow them, in some cases violently, until headway with the injustice is made or the public fails.

In this regard, we can think of the early environmentalist movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. Worsening pollution from leaded gas and smog as well calls to action, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, had people genuinely upset that modern society was hurting their air and water. The first Earth Day had attendance in the tens of millions, and the following years saw the passage of laws such as the Clean Air and Water acts as well as the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

There are usually backlashes against such reforms, where reactionary forces rally to turn back the clock. These forces don't always win, but any advocates of successful leftist policy should assume that an angry backlash is on its way. You can look at the overturning of Reconstruction, the second or first Red Scare, the current anti-LGBT moral panic, and even the 2016 election of Donald Trump through the lens of resentment and backlash.

This backlash occurred in the 1980s, not just against the environmental gains we briefly mentioned, but the Keynesian economics that governed the post-War period. The emergence of neoliberalism (i.e., the belief that the market should dictate all interactions) following the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism led to the dismantling of the New Deal and the Great Society safety net. The environmental movement lost its steam, moving to a non-profit-driven advocacy model that could not compete against and was, in many cases, coopted by market interests. Environmentalism pushed, and then its gains were whittled away over many decades.

Yet pushing for social change and weathering a backlash that seeks to undermine your gains is, in many ways, the optimistic scenario. The other main option is for the status quo to coopt the "spectacle" of your movement to prevent change from happening in the first place (see Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle). This occurs when your cause's imagery is plastered all over the place without it being linked to substantial policy changes.

The George Floyd uprising meets this latter option. Many political actors opted to add to the spectacle of the Black Lives Matter movement without fighting for its policy goals. Famously DC mayor Muriel Bowser put up a large Black Lives Matter mural that DC's Black Lives Matter chapter decried as meant to "appease white liberals while ignoring [their] demands." She then requested an increase in police funding: the exact opposite of the movement's goals. This was a common strategy with Democratic municipalities across America. Lawmakers committed to the vague promise of racial equality while fighting against it.

At the same time, many businesses and brands made token gestures designed to make progress seem like it was happening without changing their often systemically racist business practices. For example, PepsiCo announced after the uprising that it would rename its often criticized product Aunt Jemima, a change that took about a year to implement. However, they are still a company routinely accused of anti-labor practices such as union-busting and permitting forced labor from contractors. Their union-busting has not gone away, and while they have pledged to eliminate forced labor, the byzantine nature of our current supply chains makes that promise challenging to verify and unlikely, given troubling claims that have emerged as of late.

People who were activated by the horrors of systemic racism following the George Floyd Uprising found an entire industry of politicians, brands, and self-help gurus more than willing to channel their revolutionary impulses into more "appropriate" avenues. Rather than engage with a radical, anti-racist organization or direct action, many people consumed more anti-racist books such as Robin Diangelo's White Fragility and became involved in Diversity and Inclusion initiatives at work. These actions are fine, and you should not feel bad for engaging in them, but they will not undo racism at a systemic level. Learning about white supremacy and being more mindful of it at work will not restructure the system of capital built on racist exploitation, and anyone who tells you differently is either naive or lying.

Some may find it cathartic to get mad at individuals for falling into this pattern of spectacle and cooption, but in many ways expecting people to maintain the momentum they did in June 2020 on willpower alone is unrealistic. When the uprising was just a social movement that didn't require much sacrifice besides anger, people were really into it. The public (not you as an individual) then started to learn that systemic racism cuts to the core of the American economy. The plantation inspires our modern work norms, and how we work and house people needs to fundamentally change to combat it.

It requires more work than a hashtag or protest can provide, and if you aren't supported long-term, there is only so much work you can put in to fight it. People cannot keep protesting nonstop without a network of support. They need food, housing, financial aid, and, most importantly, organization to endure the consequences of challenging the status quo. While an impressive patchwork of mutual aid networks did arise, more was needed to organize in the long-term.

For example, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle — a radical project that sought to create an independent area separate from police jurisdiction — started in early June at the height of the uprising and fizzled out less than a month later, after momentum died down. The police then capitalized on several incidents of violence to clear out the area. Interest in this radical project was there, but a lack of long-term support and organization meant it failed to be anything more than a momentary flash in the pan. As Benjamin V. Allison and Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu write in Inkstick:

“Although the Zone engaged in governance and in negotiations with the state, it lacked a unified government or defined leadership structure, instead opting for a horizontal organizational scheme….The hyperdemocratization of the Zone was not accepted by all of its residents, as some pushed for a concrete leadership structure, but efforts to establish such structures ultimately came to naught.”

Both on a macro and micro level, the left isn’t yet organized enough in the US to engage in this type of work on a large scale. If there had been a big leftist counter-movement already in place, then projects like CHAZ might have lasted longer, and, overall, the sanitizing techniques of spectacle would have failed to funnel people away from the cause, but that didn't happen. For various reasons that are too complicated to get into here, the left in the US is fractured, and its influence is vastly overstated. It could not compete with the mainstream narrative that policies like Defund were "unrealistic." After a few short months of protest, the national conversation shifted toward the 2020 election and other more "pressing" concerns.

This burnout and cooption opened a window for a reactionary counter-narrative, which, again, happens whenever any push against the status quo is attempted, even when it fails. Conservative Democrats (and even more conservative Republicans) were never in favor of the Defund the Police movement and almost immediately started to come out against it. "No, I don't support defunding the police," Joe Biden remarked while in Houston in June of 2020, while there to meet with the family of George Floyd. This anti-"defund the police" narrative spread like wildfire in politico circles and on cable news, where they framed it as detrimental to the American people. "…you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you're actually going to get the changes you want to be done," President Obama chastised in December 2020.

The narrative that "Defund" was impractical became such a prominent talking point that the people posting black squares in June 2020 dropped off as supporters of the movement altogether. Around 67% of Americans expressed some support for Black Lives Matter in June. That number dropped to 55% several months later, where it has remained more or less since. And again, this is for Black Lives Matter, a political movement that was coopted to mean pretty much nothing. Support for defunding the police has all but cratered.

Now some people still care about systemic racism, even my fellow white people (and if you are here raging with me, thank you). There will always be those pushing against the status quo — a small few have been doing it their entire lives. However, the revolutionary energy of those first few months in 2020 has certainly dissipated, and that seems like where we will remain for some time.

A bitter conclusion

In retrospect, it's frustrating that this allegedly "once-in-a-lifetime" moment led to no substantial policy. The environmental outcry in the 60s and 70s at least gave us the EPA and cornerstone legislation like the Clean Air and Water acts. Despite the fearmongering about police budgets, most have seen their budgets increase in cities across America.

Meanwhile, the police are still killing people. In 2022 alone, we have lost Tyree Devon O'Neal Jr., Immanueal Jaquez Clark-Johnson, Eric Jermaine Allen, James Wilborn, Christopher Lee Ardoin, Jaylen Lewis, Ali Osman, Tyshawn Malik Benjamin, Darryl Ross, Derrick Ameer Ellis-Cook, Jaiden Malik Carter, Donovan Lewis, Keshawn Thomas, Melvin Porter, Mable Arrington, Kyle Dail, Jason Lipscomb, Corey Maurice Hughes, Andrew Tekle Sundberg, Kevin Greene, Normiez Reeves, Paul Derrick Moss II, Patrick Lyoya, Tyrea Pryor, Antwon Leonard Cooper, Atiba Lewis, Donnell Rochester, and many, many more (The Washington Post keeps a good database on this).

This issue didn't go away, but many people are now interested in treating it as a settled matter. A combination of cooption and burnout has meant that the same people who were so eager to post Black Lives Matter hashtags in June of 2020 have switched over to Ukrainian flags and other more "pressing" issues — now decrying defunding the police, reparations, and other anti-racism initiatives as unrealistic.

I have witnessed and participated in several "uprisings" at this point. The same thing happened in 2014 after the Ferguson uprising: token reforms were introduced that did not address the problems of our carceral state, and then nothing. Sadly I expect the same thing to happen 5 or 6 years down the line when another predictable event jostles my fellow white public out of our complacency.

If that frustrates you, good, be frustrated. Be angry. Let the injustice of this country never be forgotten. America's foundation is cracked and rotten, and its citizenry needs to take out its hammers and get to the work. For the love of whatever you hold dear, join an organization (I am partial to the DSA) or get involved with a mutual aid organization and start swinging.

The Environmentalist Message at the Heart of Disney's 'Strange World'

Image; whatsondisneyplus.com

Disney's Strange World is about a fantastical land entirely different from our own, filled with fantastic locals and strange creatures. A central throughline in the film, like most Disney properties, is about familial expectations. The explorer Jaeger Clade wants his son Searcher to follow in his footsteps and find a way over the impassable mountain chain surrounding their country of Avalonia. This expectation causes a rift in Jaeger and Searcher's relationship that continues into the present.

Twenty-five years later, Searcher, although trying to move beyond this toxic dynamic, finds himself pushing his son, Ethan Clade, to be a farmer. This dysfunctional family of explorers and farmers is thrust into an adventure to go underneath the mountains to explore an even stranger world (a la Journey to the Center of the Earth) to find a way to save Avalonia, all while balancing out their deeper interpersonal issues.

Family is everywhere in this film, yet a theme that is just as present, though it might get less attention, is how this film handles conservation. Environmentalism is a constant in Strange World. A surprising lesson is how we must handle ecological instability. The film suggests that our answer lies not with techno-utopianism or machismo but with a better balance with the natural world, even if it means forgoing the technology central to our current way of life.

An environmentalist reading

In the film, a significant plot point is that Avalonia advanced rapidly after discovering a plant called Pando: a crop that produces a harvestable energy source that now powers their machines. Because of Pando, Avalonia went from using horse-and-buggies to having floating hover ships, radio, and endless electricity.

It's fair to say that Pando is a pretty good analogy for carbon-based power sources such as oil, especially after we learn that it's detrimental to the ecosystem. Though not initially known to Avalonia, Pando is a parasite destroying the interior of the turtle-like body they all live on top of. It is not dying but redirecting its energy to stop the creature's immune response from killing it off — dooming everyone in the process.

Like with Avalonia, our planet advanced rapidly after we learned to burn carbon to power our machinery. We went from an animal-powered society to one that had electricity running through billions of homes across the planet, and this development is deteriorating our atmosphere. Man-powered climate change is making our lives more difficult, and the next decade will be filled with immense tribulations as a result.

The movie critiques leaders who are unwilling to assess their impact on the environment. Callisto Mal, leader of Avalonia, invites the Clade family on a mission into a sinkhole where she believes Pando roots, which we learn are part of one single organism, are coming from. The way Callisto is introduced makes it clear that she does not care about the environment. Her hulking ship lands on the Clade family's crops, and she does not bother to move it. It’s a small but clever way to signal to the audience that Avalonian society values technology over its environment.

Once the Avalonian mission realizes that the roots of Pando are coming from a strange Dr. Seus-esque world beneath them, Callisto and Searcher don't care to figure out how Pando interacts with this environment or even what this environment means for their country above it. Their only concern is to stop the harm being done to the Pando root system so their technology can keep running, assuming that the flora and fauna around them are pests to be dealt with.

This singular focus on a technological solution is portrayed as a reflection of the grandfather's machismo. Where Jaeger Clade wants to treat every problem with brute force, Searcher and Callisto treat every problem just as simplistically, with technology. We see this when Ethan asks both of them to play a D&D-inspired game called Primal Outpost, and the two patriarchs cannot understand the game's premise, which is working in harmony with nature. They only want to keep doing what they know without stopping to assess their effects, and the son rightfully gets frustrated by them both, depicting them as two sides of the same coin.

The father's techno-utopianism (he literally calls Avalonia a utopia, that's not me reading into it) is very similar to the net-zero approach to climate change mitigation, or the idea that we work on removing our total carbon emissions down to zero, rather than scaling down capitalist production. Often these models require adopting some undeveloped technology that will magically remove carbon from the atmosphere and stop the problem of climate change, while changing as little as possible about our current economy.

Strange Worlds seems to suggest that this approach to environmentalism is naive. You cannot continue to engage in behavior that damages your environment and expect different results. Society's behavior has to change too, and the film's climax involves our characters switching their objectives and killing Pando (the metaphor for carbon-powered fuel) so the turtle-like ecosystem they live on can continue to survive.

And as a result, there are consequences. Their technology seems to regress. People aren't navigating Pando-powered hover ships by the film's end but using kinetic energy, air-powered floatation, and horse and buggy. They have to reinvent electricity by using a wind-powered device built out of the husk of the explorer vehicle we see throughout the film.

This moral is one of degrowth or the political concept that we need to shrink the economy to conserve our environment rather than expecting it to increase forever. The film is saying that our conception of technological progress must take a back seat to sustainability. This message is a refreshing, if not hypocritical position to have from a firm that produces millions of tonnes of carbon annually.

A Shrinking Conclusion

All in all, Stange World was a treat to watch. There were other themes and premises I didn't have time to get into, such as the character Ethan's queerness or his mom Meridian Clade being a total badass, which I encourage you to check out for yourself.

The central message that the people of Avalonia needed to slow their unstainable technological growth to preserve their future truly captivated me. We are a society that is pushing for increased energy consumption to the point of insanity, hoping that fusion, renewables, and carbon capture will lead us to some post-climate change promised land without having to make any sacrifices at all.

It's refreshing to see a film bucking that trend, encouraging not some far-off techno-saviorism but behaviors we can adopt in the here and now.