Note: the way this Substack usually works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for paid subscribers only containing all the screams I restrained to make the free one either come in under the character limit or nice and civilized enough to not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments. As a creature of the early internet I am about to address, I would prefer to make all things free. Alas, bodies are stupid and prefer dumb things like food and shelter.
I said what I said in Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement. But there was this sad, pitiful, childish little phrase, this plaintive thread in my mind all through it. I knew if I pulled on it the focus would be entirely lost, so here, instead, is that thread, depressingly pulled upon.
For so long, I have looked back on you with melancholy sadness, bittersweet longing, a cloud of nostalgia of the best and worst kind. The sort of feeling you have toward a home country you cannot return to, a street you grew up on now lined with strip malls, or a lover once held tight and now lost.
You were the one that got away.
But the thing about nostalgia is that it is a clinging cloud, and clouds obscure the landscape. The more I think about the Way We Were, the more clearly I remember us. It’s not that all that love is wrong or untrue, or wasted on you, beautiful, weird, disgusting, awkward, miraculous thing that you were. Those worlds of good, those little villages, that fellowship, those nights by the blue screen-fire, the lives you made possible, the friendships you facilitated, that was all so real, and maybe more importantly, very much authentic, not a droning monotone of bots talking to bots about bots.
I believed in you. I believed in us. In the potential to make a world different than the one we thought was non-negotiable. And I guess it sure is different. It’s also nothing like you said it would be before you locked us all down and felt totally secure that we could never, ever leave. Before the mask came off.
But you promised.
You promised that the problem with the Old World was that the popular kids were in charge. The jocks and preppies, the born-rich, the beautiful and strong, the ones who found it easy and natural to fit in, the regular cast of the yearbook photo-spreads, the social butterflies, the goody two-shoes churchgoers, the bullies, those so accustomed to being in charge they never had to even look at the rest of us on their way to the top.
But you promised.
You promised that if we just flipped the script, if we could just start over with a new new world where the geeks and nerds and weirdos and techies were in charge for fucking once, if the ones on the bottom could find a way to the top, if wealth could find its way to the nerds in basements instead of prom kings and queens in parades, if the outcasts and matheletes and student body secretaries and artists and science kids who actually knew how things worked got to make things work, if the obsessive and the dedicated with their strange and wonderful passions were to remake the world and its rules, things would be better. They’d make different choices. They’d know what it was like to be powerless in a way the powerful never had before, and so they’d naturally remember the little guy. They’d make mistakes, sure, but different mistakes. And since science has no trouble adjusting to new data, they’d easily learn and adjust to any missteps, too.
The past few weeks my social media feeds have been more apocalyptic than usual. Not due to escalating war with Iran, the shellshocked economy, or oil prices, but because of a wave of posts and news articles proclaiming imminent doom for trans people in the United States. Attacks on trans rights are obviously not new and have steadily risen the past ten years, but this recent collection of worrying claims are especially apocalyptic, or outright genocidal.
Just this month I’ve seen viral posts, citing online articles, saying that ICE is going to round up and “disappear trans people,” that the FDA is making a national “registry of trans women,” and that an adult trans healthcare ban is rapidly on the way. These panic inducing claims and the articles they’re sourced from are referring to real things or movements happening in anti-trans activism, regulations, and legislation, but are framed in a way to maximize catastrophe rather than understanding what’s actually happening at the moment and what we can do about it.
The danger of uncritically engaging with trans panic clickbait is that it reduces the worthwhile process of “staying informed” to being in a state of constant doom and feeling hopeless against an unstoppable enemy. Alternatively, it risks causing people to completely check out and not believe anything they see online even if there is a real pressing threat. Both of these outcomes cloud our ability to accurately assess and respond to very real threats.
Migrating While Trans
The bulk of this article will focus on a story claiming that ICE is now permitted to detain anyone for “looking trans.” This story and the online discussion around it is a microcosmatic example of how we understand both the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people, and how and why ICE operates as an agency.
On March 12th, a Substack article was posted with the headline “Trump Administration Opens the Door for ICE to Target Anyone Suspected of Being Trans.” The subheadline continues by reading, “Under a new rule, the State Department will be able to revoke trans people’s visas over ‘misrepresentation.’ It’ll give ICE grounds to suspect all trans people of being in the US illegally.”
The information contained in this headline is the furthest many people will engage with the content of this article. Combining that headline with preconceived notions about how ICE functions under the second Trump administration makes this a very frightening claim.
So what evidence does the Substack article include to support this claim?Earlier this month the State Department updated its policy for the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, also known as the green card lottery.
New State Department rules require that applicants upload a scan of their foreign passport’s biographic and signature page to help cut down on fraudulent DV Program entries. The policy update also changed the “gender” entry to “sex” on the form. In the policy rule update the State Department wrote, “The marker reflected in the “sex” field on any visa application, including the entry form, should match the applicant’s biological sex at birth, even if that differs from the sex listed on the applicant’s foreign passport or other identifying documentation.”
The Substack article claims this could force a “mismatch between trans people’s applications and their passports—something it can then use to declare their applications fraudulent and disqualify them entirely.” The first half of that sentence is true, a mismatch may occur between the gender listed on foreign documents, and the sex listed on a US visa application. But it’s not the case that this mismatch will inevitably result in an application being deemed fraudulent and then denied.
According to Malita Picasso, staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project, the kind of fraud this rule change is trying to combat by requiring a passport scan is not unique to trans people. Picasso said in an email that the new rule “seems to more directly target fraudulent activities involving third parties basically entering the lottery on behalf of individuals without their knowledge and consent, and then extorting them for large amounts of money if they are selected.”
The stipulation requiring an applicant to list their “biological sex at birth” on forms has actually already been State Department policy for both immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications for over a year. Effectively since Trump’s executive order mandating the US government officially recognize two biological sexes which are determined at birth, and that “government-issued identity documents, including visas, and all forms that require an individual’s sex shall accurately reflect an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
Claiming that a mismatch between the gender listed on a foreign document and the sex marked on application forms will itself “disqualify” someone from receiving a visa has little to no basis in government policy. Picasso told me that the new policy itself recognizes this could cause discrepancies, and that she doesn’t see a “new or heightened risk of being accused of fraud/willful misrepresentation if a transgender person follows the instructions by listing their sex assigned at birth on the application, even if they also file a birth certificate that has been updated to reflect their gender identity.”
The State Department has been aware for a while that their “biological sex” policy will create these kinds of mismatches. A February, 2025 State Department memo reads, “There may be instances when a consular officer becomes aware that the sex listed on the foreign passport may not be the applicant’s sex as defined in the [Executive
Order]. In such cases, the adjudicator should confirm the applicant’s sex as defined in the E.O., indicate that sex on the visa, and add a case note documenting any discrepancy between the passport and the visa to prevent issues at the [Port of Entry].”
Later in April of 2025, USCIS officially updated their policy on requiring “biological sex” on immigration applications. The policy also states that “USCIS does not deny immigration benefits solely based on a failure to properly indicate the benefit requestor’s sex.” ACLU staff attorney Malita Picasso told me that USCIS officials do have “a lot of discretion,” and that the policy warns that failure to list biological sex “will cause delays in processing the application while USCIS tries to verify your sex assigned at birth,” according to Picasso.
The State Department has said there are grounds to deny visa applications for trans people if they make a “willful, affirmative, material act of misrepresentation” by misrepresenting their “biological sex at birth” in application forms or to a consular officer to gain entry to the United States under false pretenses. This language was written to restrict trans athletes from entering the country to play sports. The sort of misrepresentation the State Department is talking about is if a trans woman “misrepresents” her birth sex to procure a visa or admission into the country for the purpose of competing in a women’s sports competition.
This same sports memo, dated February 24th 2025, also states, “If there is a discrepancy either in the applicant’s documents or in electronic consular records, or if other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicant’s sex, you should refuse the case under 221(g) and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.” Section 221g of the INA is a temporary visa refusal pending further documents or information provided by the applicant. For an athlete visa the bar is very high and the burden is on the applicant to prove they have the special and rare qualities required to be eligible for a visa.
But the Substack article doesn’t just claim being trans could disqualify you from receiving a visa, the article escalates its claims to say that trans people who already have a valid visa could have it revoked and be deported for misrepresenting their sex in the past. The author of the Substack cites US law that if an alien is found to have obtained a visa “by fraud or willfully misrepresenting a material fact” they are ineligible to be in the United States, and refers to a section of the foreign affairs manual which includes providing a “fake birth certificate in support of an Immigrant Visa application” as “misrepresenting a material fact.” The article goes on to assert that the Trump administration would refuse to recognize trans people’s amended birth certificates and essentially consider them “fake,” thus making their visa eligible to be revoked.
The author links to another of her own articles on federal policy regarding the issuing of US passports with sex markers reflecting “biological sex at birth.” Under the new passport policy, State Department employees may check birth certificates for signs of being amended, and request more documents that list sex at the time of birth such as medical, hospital, or early school records. Picasso said that this does not mean officially amended birth certificates are “fake” for the purposes of establishing fraud or willful misrepresentation, which the Trump administration has never argued.
“I think it’s dangerous to even suggest that a legally obtained and valid birth certificate could be viewed as “fake” without a much clearer statement from the federal government to that effect,” Picasso advised. Trump’s recent travel bans have specifically mentioned the availability of fake birth certificates in certain countries.
This whole claim about trans people’s visas being revoked because of accusations of misrepresentation is contradicted by the State Department which said last year, “Currently valid U.S. visas issued prior to the effective date of this guidance bearing a sex that differs from the visa holder’s sex as defined in the E.O. will remain valid through its expiration date; the visa holder does not need to apply for a new visa with an amended sex marker until the current visa expires.”
The first half of this article covers what I argue are misinterpretations of State Department visa policy. The second half speculates on how this misinterpretation could be enforced by ICE. In a Supreme Court ruling last year, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that ICE could detain people based on a combination of factors such as working a certain kind of job, ethnicity, and speaking Spanish or talking with an accent. Kavanaugh said that ICE can detain someone for questioning “if they have a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned . . . is an alien illegally in the United States.”
With a substantial leap in logic, the Substack author argues that Kavanaugh’s concurrence “effectively permitted” ICE to use the fact that someone ‘looks’ trans as the “specific articulable fact allowing its officers to question, harass, detain, and even deport both citizens and non-citizens—as long as it has a reason to claim that being trans makes a person more likely to be in the US illegally.” Adding that because of State Department policy asking applicants to list “biological sex” on forms, ICE now has the “enforcement rationale to assert that trans people are more likely than cis people to have “misrepresented” themselves during the visa process and, therefore, are more likely to have entered the country “unlawfully.””
This assertion rests on the idea that looking transgender makes someone more likely to be in the US illegally, which is simply not supported by any immigration policy, memo, or guideline. It also assumes the justification for a Kavanaugh stop is the same as the legal process of removal, which it is not. This idea was invented by the author of this article, it’s not based on any enforcement directive from ICE, and misrepresents what the State Department means by “intentionally misrepresenting” biological sex in the visa application process.
Discrepancies in gender markers across government documents is not itself grounds for detention or deportation, in fact it’s federal policy to create such discrepancies. Furthermore, dealing with potential discrepancies between gender markers on foreign documents and the Trump admin’s insistence on only using “biological sex at birth” on federal documents is handled by State Department consular officers and USCIS employees, not ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers who work under an entirely different agency.
But the main thing that makes me believe that ICE will not suddenly start targeting people for being trans is that this State Department policy requiring sex at birth on visa applications isn’t actually new! It’s existed since February of 2025 for both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, the only recent change is that the green card lottery rules have been updated to use the same language.
“Nothing about this new rule makes it more or less likely that ICE will be free to scrutinize trans people’s documents and detain those whose documents show any inconsistencies,” affirmed Picasso.
Put plainly, State Department restrictions on stating assigned sex at birth on green card/visa applications does not give ICE any new justification to roam around disappearing random people who “look trans.” But it could make border crossings more risky for noncitizens and visa applications harder to navigate and subject to delays. This policy from the State Department is bad, but turning that into “ICE is going to now round up trans people and v-code them” doesn’t understand how this will actually affect immigrant trans people.
[ “V-coding” refers to the systematic enabling of sexual abuse toward incarcerated trans women to please male prisoners. ]
Near the end of the article the author suggests that trans Kansans could be at extra risk of getting detained by ICE because of a new law invalidating driver’s licences and birth certificates with amended gender markers, possibly leaving some US citizens temporarily unable to prove citizenship with a valid birth certificate. In that case a passport would be ideal, otherwise a hospital birth certificate or early school records can theoretically be used to help prove citizenship. It’s worth reiterating that a citizen temporarily losing documentation, does not put them at the same level of marginalized risk as an undocumented immigrant. The new Kansas law does direct the office of vital statistics to “reissue birth certificates when necessary to correct the sex identification.” Similarly, DMVs were instructed to reissue a “corrected” license once the invalided one was turned in.
Doomer Discourse
The unsubstantiated claims made in this article went viral across social media platforms like TikTok, Bluesky, and Twitter bolstering speculation. Social media posts even further extrapolating the potential harm facing trans people by ICE agents beyond the claims made in the article by saying ICE will now “deport” or “disappear” trans citizens.
Anyone who tried to push back on the legitimacy of these were labeled “dangerous” or “feds” for trying to “downplay” the threat posed by ICE. Back and forth discourse largely took three forms. One: Saying that because ICE is already doing X bad things, they could then also start doing this new bad thing. Two: Asserting that this is already happening. Three: Arguments based on distrust of the government or ICE’s lack of legality.
Much of the discussion emerged from the genuine belief that ICE has been granted new power or has been “authorized“ to detain someone for “looking trans,” that Trump has “opened the door” for ICE to start profiling trans people. That, like the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, profiling has essentially been greenlit for trans people, or that checking the consistency of gender markers has been added to ICE’s “jurisdiction.” To be 100% clear, there has not been any new ICE memo or policy related to trans people, gender markers, or documentation being in their jurisdiction. State Department policy about not misrepresenting birth sex on visa applications has existed for over a year. The real danger posed by this policy is that more trans immigrants could have visas delayed or in extreme cases denied, and may need help navigating an increasingly confusing application process.
Still, social media users have tried to assert that ICE’s specific targeting of trans people was “already happening.” In the past year ICE has detained trans people; it’s hard to get exact numbers on this because ICE stopped collecting detention data for trans people last year to comply with Trump’s anti-trans executive orders. Though we do know of attempts to deport trans people from news reporting. Last August, ICE detained a trans woman who overstayed a visa by 6 years, and in November a trans woman who lost her lawful permanent resident status in 2023 after pleading guilty to a felony was “inadvertently” deported to Mexico, despite a court order specifically barring her being sent to Mexico. There’s no evidence that these women were targeted for removal on the basis of being trans, but what happened to them is still horrific. As of now there has been no reporting on people being targeted for detention based on “looking trans,” because the government has not actually argued that being trans itself qualifies as reasonable suspicion of illegal presence.
When I posted about this online in an attempt to dissuade panic-inducing misinformation, people argued that even if this has yet to happen, ICE still could expand their operations to include profiling and targeting trans people for detention since they’re already profiling and rounding up “random brown people.” After all, I write for a podcast called “It Could Happen Here,” and ICE has detained both citizens and legal immigrants and sent them to camps.
Just because I work on a news show called It Could Happen Here doesn’t mean I should spread unsubstantiated doom spiraling disconnected from the material reality of real policies advancing a fascist project. The Trump administration has been very clear and open about targeting groups of people flooding through our southern border. That’s who ICE is designed to target. ICE has policies directing them to do so and expanded authority from the Supreme Court.
It is true that ICE has temporarily detained US citizens when looking for people they suspect are undocumented immigrants. This has been for two reasons: US citizens accused of interfering with ICE activity while protesting, or because ICE suspects US citizens may be undocumented, based on factors like skin tone, occupation, or speaking a foreign language, usually Spanish. This second group of people then must demonstrate proof of citizenship, or if they are immigrants, their legal status. The period they’re detained is supposed to be relatively short, usually a few hours, though in extreme cases that’s stretched into multiple days.
During my brief engagement in this online discourse, someone sent me a Wikipedia article claiming it proved that ICE has deported 170 US citizens during Trump’s second term. This article actually said 170 citizens have been detained. Since Trump’s took office again there have been a few reported instances of US born citizens being deported, these were citizen children deported with immigrant parents to avoid child separation.
The last argument people fall back on is simply that ICE is a completely lawless agency and can do whatever it wants, including going after trans people. After all, ICE has murdered US citizens on camera in broad daylight. But it’s important to remember that happened for a reason, those were not random acts. ICE and CBP murdered people protesting ICE raids targeting immigrant neighbors. Federal agents killed people because the protesting was an inconvenience, and there was use of force policy and training directing ICE to do so. For decades CBP agents have killed people at the border and gotten away with it.
The Trump admin may not care about the law, but this analysis is not based on any assumptions about legality. It’s based on the administration’s own stated goals, which they have been very open about, and the policies and practices currently in effect, none of which relate to ICE targeting people for “looking trans.” The Kavanaugh stops have never been used to target trans people for being trans as reasonable suspicion of being illegally in the country, and there’s been no change in guidelines saying that being trans can be the basis for stops. Asserting otherwise is simply false. Insisting that because of State Department application guidelines, ICE will now randomly arrest trans people is conflating two very different things. This is not about the potential legality of ICE targeting trans people, it’s that there is no such directive instructing ICE to do that.
Asserting that the Trump admin is completely 100% unbounded by law ignores the fact that federal and immigration courts are still an active terrain of battle. While the administration has ignored the courts and judges orders, people have also been successfully released from ICE custody by filing habeas corpus petitions.
It’s not that I believe in the personal integrity of ICE agents, far from it, but this concept of ICE as this vague fascist death squad that will go after any group the Trump administration hates turns ICE into this abstract idea, rather than a single material agency with concrete motivations and limits, that leaves a wake of destruction in the course of achieving their purpose. ICE does raids where there are high concentrations of immigrant workers. Their targeting isn’t actually random, ICE is going after undocumented immigrant workers, sometimes using skin and language as a rough proxy for document checks.
To assert the inevitability of ICE going after trans people, people invoke comparisons to the Nazis. As rhetorically useful as it is to equate ICE to a modern version of the Gestapo, this is not Germany in the 1930s. ICE is a contemporary version but the current world is different. History is not destined to repeat the exact same way, it evolves. The chronically online doomer may retort, “But once ICE is done with immigrants, then they will go after trans people! What’s the purpose of increasing ICE’s staff and funding, or building a network of detention centers across the country, if not to use them against the undesirables?”
There’s about 15 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and about 3 million trans people. That’s five times as many undocumented immigrants than trans people! Last year ICE reached a record high number of deportations, over 600,000. This record number still leaves millions and millions of undocumented immigrants. ICE will never be “done” with immigrants. This logic again reduces ICE to this vague abstract evil and fails to consider the purpose of ICE and why it currently operates as it does.
So what motivates ICE? Do individual ICE agents share the same motivations as the agency itself, or the people directing it? Individual agents certainly could be motivated by racism, political ideology, a paycheck, or a combination thereof. But the motivating factors cannot solely be based on ethnicity itself, or else you wouldn’t see as many hispanic ICE and CBP agents.
People tend to think of hate as a vague causal force itself, rather than being the result of complex societal factors shaped by material forces, like the economy, job insecurity, and housing shortages. These material forces are often expressed as racial or ethnic prejudice, but the underlying motivation of ICE as an agency, and by extension DHS, still rests on material forces, not racial hatred as an abstract ideal.
Rank and file employees could have entirely different modifications compared to some of those at the top or the agency as a whole. People in charge of the agency may even be confused as to the material motivations that underline the existence of immigration enforcement agencies; this lack of alignment is a weakness in the agency and DHS more broadly, as demonstrated by the fallout of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis which left ICE and DHS in a compromised state.
Then why does ICE exist, what material role does it fulfil? It seeks to stabilize the social order by targeting surplus populations. And what’s the most efficient way to do that? By going after the most marginalized populations with the least amount of legal and economic protections, which are undocumented immigrants. This operation may be sold to the public, and indeed its enforcers, by marketing it in the language of race and crime, categories which are often equated, but underneath that it’s still an attempt to solve problems caused by material economic forces. In reality this material motivation establishes a certain direction of impact as well as material limits, like budget, personnel, and balancing between public approval and opposition.
So with that in mind, does it make sense to claim that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to conduct the targeted mass detention of trans people as a class? Signs point to no. It’s not that I disagree with the idea that trans people are under threat from the government, but they’re under a different threat than undocumented immigrants or people detained by ICE based on profiling.
Obviously trans immigrants have an overlapping threat vector. As such, migrant support should remain focused on ICE-Watch, rapid response networks, and providing immigrants legal resources, including to trans immigrants who may need assistance navigating the visa process, and working to get people out of ICE detention. The latter is especially important considering Trump’s executive order forcing trans women in federal custody to be detained with men, and the Trump administration’s plan to end federal prison rape protections for trans people.
Most people engaged in this discourse genuinely don’t understand how the State Department policy on visa applications will actually affect trans immigrants and what we can then do to support trans immigrants. This whole discourse takes the focus away from the people most at risk of ICE which are undocumented immigrant workers. Lilith in Seattle with a 150k dollar tech job is not at high risk being detained by ICE. Believing otherwise prohibits people who are actually safe and secure from using their wealth and status to support others who do not have the same safety provided by status or wealth, whether they’re transgender, an immigrant, or both.
Misleading articles and the larger panic driven information economy encourages people with financial or legal security to be scared into paralysis because they believe that any amount of opposition to the government will result in being disappeared to a concentration camp. This justifies a retreat from the world by framing it as safety, allowing one to focus on maximizing their own power and wealth to achieve security. Retreating solely into the role of the victim
achieves a sort of emotional catharsis, but this also alienates you from the world and ends up doing propaganda for the enemy.
In this discourse there’s a tendency to make the enemy out to be an unstoppable monster, which further justifies inaction because it doesn’t allow you to understand the limits of the enemy, whether logistical or ideological, and resigns us to cower before an omnipotent all powerful evil. ICE operations are an expensive, unpopular, destabilizing thing, we must keep an eye on the fragility of power as that informs us how to fight it. When removed from action in the real world people have no way to confront truth.
It is a frightening time to be a trans person, on top of what feels like never ending attacks on healthcare and our ability to exist in public life, you now see news stories about a US state invalidating people’s ID at the same time as viral social media posts claim ICE has been given the authority to detain trans people and deport immigrants for having the wrong gender marker.
Various attacks on trans rights separated through time could be viewed as a coherent centralized strategy towards a singular horrific end, but in fact are disparate, often petty attempts at cruelty intending to demoralize trans people and make trans life prohibitively difficult. The way red states and the Trump admin are trying to “eliminate transgenderism,” as Michael Knowles would say, is by making it incredibly difficult to socially and medically transition, such as not recognizing gender on government documents, being excluded from public bathrooms, and the continuing efforts to restrict healthcare.
Constant Catastrophe
Trans internet is trapped in a state of catastrophic fear. This is maintained by a near constant wave of articles that flood the zone with panic-inducing headlines, which then fuel social media posts that further escalate and abstract the claims made in headlines to a Nazi Germany-esque level of potential danger facing trans people.
One such impending danger circulating online this month is a claim that the FDA is making a registry of trans women and moving to criminalize DIY estrogen. This claim originated from an article in a trans news outlet, published March 12, reporting that anti-trans lobbying groups sent a petition to the FDA to create a registry of trans women who take estrogen and to restrict the use of feminizing HRT, which if implemented could “fast track a pathway to criminalizing estrogen use.”
Importantly, this citizen’s petition is not US law or proposed government legislation, nor is it FDA policy or regulation, it was written by an anti trans activist coalition and sent to the FDA over three months ago in December of 2025. The petition requests “immediate action” by establishing a new docket for the public to officially comment on the “safety and effectiveness” of estrogen in gender transitions, and to schedule a public hearing on the subject. That is mainly what this petition is for, though it does make further “recommendations” following the conclusion of a public hearing. These recommendations include adding a warning label to estrogen, conducting a safety review, having clinicians report adverse events to the FDA, and requiring drug manufacturers “establish a patient registry as part of a Risk Evaluation and Mitigations Study to capture real-world safety data.”
This article, or more accurately, distorted versions of its claims went viral around trans twitter, with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of “views,” but received strong pushback on Bluesky for being “sensationalist and inflammatory.” The outlet that published the story later updated the article to clarify that the FDA receives hundreds of petitions a year, and even if implemented it can take years to go into effect. From 2001 to 2013 only 6.6% of FDA citizen petitions were approved and resulted in new regulation. A study from 2016 found that on average “these petitions required 2.85 years for a final agency decision, and many decisions remain pending 10–13 years after their initial submission.”
The FDA petition story was not the only article this month theorizing about a trans registry or adult HRT restrictions. In mid March, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that Republican lawmakers in Tennessee advanced a bill that would “create a public list” of trans residents in the state. The bill in question mandates insurance companies also cover detransition, and would require that care providers submit statistics on gender-affirming care to the Tennessee Department of Health, which must “not contain individually identifiable information defined in HIPAA.” The Tennessee Department of Health would then use that information to make a publicly available statistics report.
But online accounts are spreading this story as if Tennessee is making a “sex offender style” public registry with the names and locations of all trans people in the state. A bill like this could potentially be used for harm, and it may face court challenges for possibly violating parts of HIPAA by collecting data on county of residence and procedure dates, but the reporting on the bill and viral reaction online make it out to be something completely different. There’s no reason to believe this bill would create a publicly accessible registry or list identifying trans people in the state.
The bill has not yet passed the state senate, and it may not in its current form. Currently it’s unclear what exact form the collected data will take within a statistics report and what level of anonymizing data aggregation will be employed. This is something to keep an eye on if the bill does pass and the state Department of Health drafts guidelines for the mandatory statistics reporting, but the way it’s being reported is misleading. Interestingly, the originating source for the “public list” framing is the same substack outlet that created the false story about ICE now being able to detain people for “looking trans.”
Earlier this month, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that the 4th circuit court approved state bans on gender affirming healthcare for adults. On March 10th, a Republican appointed three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states can prohibit gender affirming surgery from being covered by Medicaid. The ruling affirmed a ban on Medicaid coverage for “sex-change surgeries” in West Virginia, with the panel arguing it doesn’t discriminate against trans people because it applies to specific procedures, not specific individuals.
Certainly bad news for trans people in West Virginia on medicaid, but reporting that this decision could soon result in trans people losing healthcare in other states or nationally is misleading and removes key context. This is not a total ban on these procedures, it’s a ban on state Medicaid coverage of these procedures. The ruling is not a ban on other forms of gender affirming healthcare like HRT, nor does it threaten the hospital’s ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds for providing gender affirming healthcare like the Trump admin has threatened, so far unsuccessfully.
Some independent reporters theorized about how this ruling could be laying the legal groundwork to eliminate adult transgender healthcare, but trans journalist David Forbes noted that this ruling will likely be appealed to the wider 4th circuit, which has recently ruled in the opposite direction of this three panel ruling. What panicked assertions of an impending total ban on trans healthcare tends to overlook is that going from a state ban on medicaid coverage for surgery straight to an all ages ban on gender affirming healthcare skips a lot of steps, and those steps are crucially important.
The larger problem here is that panic clickbait induced doomer mindset treats every single horrific potentiality as an inevitable eventuality. This “flooded zone” undermines our ability to accurately assess risk and effectively dedicate resources to oppose pressing threats, like the new Idaho bill punishing public bathroom use with prison time.
The Substack Incentive
So what purpose does this sort of doom posting serve? And why are people so primed to believe it? These panic driven claims rest on the very real fact that trans people are facing present danger. Oftentimes people boosting these panic stories are genuinely trying to help inform their own community of potential harm. In the case of that ICE story, it was based on the assumption that there was a legitimate recent rule change enabling ICE to target people under suspicion of being trans.
It makes sense that people want to raise the alarm about ICE gaining new powers, but ACLU staff attorney Matilda Picasso cautioned, “We are supporting our community by trying to warn people. BUT these warnings need to be clear and accurate. Otherwise we end up inadvertently contributing to the chaos and fear.”
Other times, these panic stories are spread with the hope of scaring allies into caring about the ongoing attacks on trans people. Perhaps successfully in some cases, I don’t know, but as a side effect this strategy deals significant damage to the people it’s trying to protect. Forecasting inevitable doom 24/7 can drive people into hopeless despair and push them away from strategies to fight against the current attacks on trans rights. Panic driven agit-prop could also contribute to a girl who cried wolf scenario where allies start to discount concerns about certain attacks on trans rights due to previous unsubstantiated viral claims.
Though many people spreading these claims may have genuinely good intentions, the people creating these claims may develop certain material incentives. Traditional mainstream journalism has failed to question the massive government overreach into the lives of trans people, and in some cases helped manufacture consent for the stripping away of trans rights. This state of affairs made trans people lose faith in the big outlets, leading to small upstart outlets filling the information gaps in trans news coverage without any institutional backing.
Independent news sites and Substack style blogs have to build an audience and generate traction to stay operating. Turns out thousands of people constantly freaking out creates high social media engagement! This creates a loop where trans panic fearmongering boosts social media engagement, which further encourages more irresponsible clickbait framing.
Those who are successful may slowly develop a new class position which then needs to be maintained. Financial incentives may even pressure journalists who have done good work to fall back on panic driven engagement bait to attract new traffic. This isn’t exclusive to trans outlets either. Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Ken Klippenstein reported on his substack that the FBI was about to “designate transgender people as violent extremists.”
New verifiable information was absent from this report, the core evidence was an unnamed “senior official” who told Klippenstein he “feels” like trans people could be labeled “Nihilist Violent Extremists.” Klippenstein has previously misunderstood the NVE label, the term actually predates the Trump admin and refers to groups like 764, other child sextortion rings, and communities like the school shooter fandom “TCC.”
Hours before Klippenstein’s report was published, the Heritage Foundation and the Oversight Project publicly released a petition calling for a new classification of extremism called “Trans Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism,” to categorize attacks they believe are motivated by “transgender ideology.” The petition memo denied that all trans people and their allies would be designated domestic terrorists under this label, only those who “encourage, promote, condone, take, or incite unlawful violent action or threats based on this ideology.” The Heritage petition also runs contrary to Klippenstein’s report by advocating against the use of the NVE label to describe transgender motivated violence.
A Heritage petition to establish a new category of extremist action is different from an unnamed official who “feels” like trans people as a whole could be labeled under “NVE,” and it’s important to understand that distinction. That was last September, it’s now half a year later and neither of these things has come to fruition. The closest was in late September following Trump’s Antifa Terrorism executive order, with the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 which listed “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as “common recurrent motivations and indicia…of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism,”” among many other threads animating violent conduct.Regardless of that, people online interpreted both Klippenstein’s reporting and the Heritage petition as meaning that the FBI classified the entire class of trans people as domestic terrorists.
Social media both amplifies and distorts already misleading claims, turning news into a massive game of telephone, and the siloing of certain users and platforms makes countering misinformation difficult. The social media economy carries certain incentives, for the producers of panic bait that could be attention, status, and money. Monetized news aggregation accounts like “NewsWire,” “PopBase,” and the Polymarket powered “RawsAlerts” have figured out that trans panic posting is a cheat code for high engagement. But the consumers of panic also stand to gain something, catharsis, justification for their actions (or lack thereof), as well as attention from fellow consumers. Panic produces helplessness, but helplessness can actually be cathartic for the individual. It’s not helpful for people currently in the most danger.
These clickbait panic pieces explode around trans Twitter which is still quite active, consisting of sex workers, gamers, tttt style posters, and zoomers who think Bluesky is cringe and liberal.Some of these panic stories, like the FDA registry, don’t do very well on Bluesky because that’s where a lot of trans journalists who do actual journalism are. But those journalists are not as active on Twitter and Tiktok, making it harder to counter misinformation on those platforms.
Countering trans panic clickbait misinformation suffers from algorithmic suppression because it doesn’t get people as riled up. A wave of emotionally charged doom posting is boosted much farther than a calm and calculated rebuttal. The biggest TikTok about ICE detaining people under suspension of being trans has 1.2 million views, the biggest TikTok “fact checking” this claim has 290k views.
So much of social media politics is emotional manipulation based on anger, fear, or catharsis. Posting about perceived danger is essentially viewed as a form of activism, and if someone casts doubt on what’s seen as an existential threat, that person becomes emotionally equated with the enemy threat.
So then what is there to do? In terms of the trans panic information economy, don’t be afraid to openly question the legitimacy of certain reporting due to fear of backlash from “the community.” If it’s good reporting, it should be able to stand up to scrutiny. When you see a new story that triggers an emotional response, stop a moment before clicking share and find out where this claim is coming from. A reliable journalistic outlet? An independent publication? What other reporting has this publication done, has it been accurate? Who is the reporter? Are you familiar with their reporting? What else have they reported on? Is it speculative? Are there logical jumps without supporting evidence? Have other outlets reported this differently?
I’m not trying to minimize the danger coming from attacks on trans people, quite the contrary. The right is continuing to take away trans rights, and these threats should be treated seriously. When trying to counter these real attacks, one must be cautious about looking so far ahead into the speculative future that it takes the focus away from the clear and present harms. Healthy skepticism regarding certain claims isn’t about trusting the government, it’s about trying to accurately understand the world in order to change it.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by merchants, scraped, digested, weaponized…
Today, if this is relevant to you, is the final day to file a claim in the massive* Anthropic Copyright Settlement, and I just finished filing mine.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Yes, I put it off til the last minute, and other than my usual dizzying procrastination abilities, I definitely did that because I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to face it. I knew, because my agents emailed me instructions, that at least two of my books were on that list, and probably more. But it was so unutterably depressing to have to actually deal with that, and all it means. To have to accept this money despite the filth of it, because the world is too expensive not to and I have a child, and also know that almost all systems of ethics or morality toyed with throughout history would say that taking blood money sucks shit and taints the soul. I don’t know, maybe I hoped it was only two. I am, after all, small beer in all this, just a midlist genre writer hacking it up hackily. Maybe only a couple of my babies were used to straight-up fuck humanity’s hopes, dreams, potential, stability, and basic social capacity in thousands upon thousands of ways.
Hey, don’t forget it’s also vigorously fucking the environment right when we can least afford to do that, just so your kid can make a deepfake of their teacher with buttholes for eyes instead of ever learning anything. Good game, guys!
Fifteen.
Fifteen of my books were used in the gargantuan effort to train AI to replace us all to no good end whatsoever.
And that is not too much compared to writers more famous than I. My work was a small drop in the ocean than fueled these models. I’m not trying to make this about me, because it isn’t, so much as purge the absolute helpless rage I felt entering the names of such a swath of my life’s work into form fields to get a few trash dollars back when the damage is already grotesquely done.
Because I am a small drop in the ocean, but fifteen novels is not a small drop in the ocean of me.
I know a lot of you here don’t actually know me as a fiction writer at all. But that’s what I do. That’s been my life’s work since I was barely an adult. Social media comes and goes, but stories have been my passion, my touchstone, my everything. I’ve never been a vast commercial juggernaut with my fingers on the tastes of the masses. I have fought to keep writing the weird shit I want to keep writing even when it didn’t sell. I have fought to stay true to myself and what I believe is important while making enough money to live. It has never been easy. But each and every time, I have tried so hard to put art into the wild that is strange and beautiful and connective, that connects people one to the other with a daisy-chain of printed pages. I write books that are deeply and profoundly me, usually pretty uncomfortably emotionally available and vulnerable and wordy and out there and experimental—and painfully in love with this world.
And they just…took it. They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.
They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.
I don’t know, I get pretty worked up about being forced to be complicit in FUCKING SHEIN SKYNET
I think what shocked me most is the scope of the theft. They didn’t take everything I’ve written. But they took something from just about every year I’ve been writing. All the way back to The Orphan’s Tales. The fucking Orphan’s Tales. A duology I wrote when I was 22. When none of this was even a glimmer in the eye of Sauron. When I was just a dreamer dreaming up fairy tales to tell by the fire, with no notion that they’d ever be published. And Palimpsest and Deathless and all the Fairyland books and Space Opera and a lot more. My whole life, scraped to teach a bot to replace every possible way to live in this world with more of itself. The grey goo of the soul.
These are little books. Even the ones that were bestsellers, they were books about the small and the helpless learning to be strong, about love and longing and strangeness, about hope and wyverns and rock stars and girls who turn in to geese. They’re full of queer people and marginalized people and hurt people and people who cannot find a way to belong to a world that doesn’t want them to be at all. They’re not some hot commodity that would be of obvious interest to the grindhouse corporate maw, they’re just little pretty things. Made with yearning, made out of the stuff of my marrow. They’re not easy and they’re not normal, they’re nothing like the hollow monotone insincerity, the false and hungry cheer of LLMs. But somehow they are part of that. Which means I am a part of that.
For fuck’s sake. My books are my babies. I poured everything I had into them. I made them in good faith that the act of telling stories was in and of itself beautiful and worthy. That they could touch someone, maybe change a tiny bit of how they see the world, communicate what I could not by any other means. They’re a thousand late nights trying to find the right words, a million despairs at elusive endings, a million ecstasies of finally getting it right, sheer tonnages of loneliness and self-doubt and pride and want and togetherness and joy, hundreds upon hundreds of moments of real genuine living that crystallized into the seeds of a story, the long searing thread of whatever it is in us that needs to create something or we’ll just die of not doing it, masticated, compacted, and vomited up to convince every corner of society that a phone is better than a person.
And there is no use-case for AI that doesn’t come down to just that, sooner or later.
I am angry. I feel disgusting. I feel complicit in all this. In the LLMs that are rejecting job applications and denying health claims and starving out whole sectors of workers and cockblocking anything approaching education and pretending to be a therapist or a partner or a friend and making certain that once all the jobs are gone, at least we won’t be able to make art anyone else ever experiences, either. It feels like they went back in time and mugged that 22-year-old doofus kid. Stole her fairies and her heroes and her lovers and chopped them up to make monsters.
Yeah, yeah, I’m getting overwrought OR ARE YOU UNDERWROUGHT (yes)
I just wanted to tell stories. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child. I don’t know what the actual digitized fuck Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all these other ichor-dripping creatures of the oncoming feudal night want, or what their fucking problem is. Couldn’t just let us have an internet and try to live life. Had to Absorbaloff everything into their revolting oligarch-gullets. It’s certainly not to help anyone or make anything easier or improve anything. I don’t think it’s even to make money particularly, since they have it all already and constantly make dumbfuck decisions that hurt their profits. But they stole from so many storytellers to do it, to tell a story of a world that is nothing, contains nothing, produces nothing, and knows nothing.
Hey, wanna keep up with your friends after college and talk about Buffy because fun fact that’s somehow going to break whatever is left of civilization in 20 years anyway click here to create an account
I just wanted to tell stories. And I thought, for awhile, that for all the struggles and stress and weirdness of my job, at least, as far as jobs go, I made my living without hurting anyone. As long as you don’t start JK Rowling about with your influence, writing stories is a pretty ethical line of work. But there is no job like that, I guess. My weird little gnarly over-emotional purpley-florid babies are a small part of something that’s hurting more people, more severely, more deeply, than most other technologies could ever aspire to.
And again, I know in the grand garbage scheme of curbstomping us into serfs, my part in it is very small. But it’s mine, so I’m fucking mad. And hurt. It may sound stupid, but as I entered every title of mine into those fields I felt so personally betrayed by these ghouls. For fuck’s sake, my own books were part of what trained something that is going to skull-drill my own child’s education and job prospects. There’s really no way to Good-Place-math that to come out right, to make that not sting.
Yep.
And I’m mad for all of us who were stolen from, forced to give the best of us to these corporations without our consent or knowledge, and only in retrospect, when caught, offered a few pennies from the lord’s purse to take or leave, but if left we get nothing and the harm still compounds.
Obviously, I’m not going to stop telling stories. But it’s hard not to thing this will happen again, to anything I write, because in the end $1.5 billion is only a lot to us. It’s nothing to the forces behind Anthropic, and that they can portion out so much and steam right on ahead should tell you just how *not massive at all this blood pocket change really is.
And it’s absolutely gutting. To live with it. To look at a list of the very specific actual grains of Fantasia I have, in my longest nights, held up against the existential darkness to say I was here, I had a heart, I used it as well as I knew how, I made what magic I could, I left something behind and know they were stolen, along with so many others, to be nothing but grit in a road paved through the wasteland fascists, liars, and tech vampires long to consign us to, just to allow their golden carriages easy passage and a comfortable seat from which to view the damage they so dearly love.
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A few weeks ago I had a great conversation with Dr Tomislav Karačić of the London School of Economics, who had just lead a webinar titled “Developing Catholic AI: How to Balance Values in Design”. Most of the time we talked about “the world’s leading Catholic AI” I have just discussed in my previous post, and of Catholic Open Source. This is a “collaborative initiative empowering Catholic technologists to develop digital tools in service of the Church’s evangelizing mission” coordinated by the Texas-based Catholic Digital Commons Foundation (CDCF), whose mission is to coordinate community efforts for the common good and contributes to a shared digital patrimony for the Catholic Church.
The first part of this post summarizes what I dare say everybody, not just Catholics, should really know about the goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. The second part, that is primarily but not exclusively aimed at Catholic OS, CDCF and any other similar community, explains why I am in a special position to care about these issues and, hopefully, also to contribute.
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Here are what I consider the most important points of the Catholic OS Manifesto (”M”) and CDCF Bylaws (”B”), rearranged and labeled by me for easier reference:
M-1: The Church’s social teaching offers a compelling vision for lifting up human dignity: a digital commons to serve the common good, strengthen families, democratize economic opportunity, inspire new evangelism, and empower human solidity.
M-2: Technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities.
M-3: We build against the reduction of the person to a data point or a mere instrument of production.
M-4: We cannot allow algorithms to limit or condition respect for human dignity, or to exclude... the hope that people are able to change.
M-5: [We also] commit to a human-centered pace of change... [and] advocate for a digital environment that respects the natural rhythms of human life and the “analog” requirements of a healthy soul... [because] “Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear. -- Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)”
M-6: The Catholic Digital Commons is a “builder commons.”... Across countless repositories, there are tools built in the quiet of parish life - identity systems, liturgical calendars, and workflow engines- awaiting the nurture of a supportive community... Our mission is to aggregate, vet, and communalize these gifts. We transform scattered code into a durable architectural spine that outlasts any single volunteer, providing the Church with a discoverable and adoptable commons of open infrastructure.
M-7: [We want to preserve] each institution’s independent ability to use, contribute to, and govern its own data and tools.
M-8: We must learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age.
M-9: To guide our development, we adopt the full “algor-ethical” vision of the Rome Call for AI Ethics.
The Bylaws of CDCF state that the foundation is organized exclusively for charitable, educational, and religious purposes which include:
B-1: to coordinate, develop, steward, and disseminate open-source software, data repositories, technical standards, and digital platforms in service of the Catholic Church’s evangelizing mission
B-2: organization, structuring, preservation, and ethical use of ecclesiastical data [of all kinds]
B-3: Academic research coordination, data standards, academic advisory roles, joint initiatives, and educational programming.
B-4: fostering interdisciplinary exchange between theology, pastoral practice, and technology.
B-5: promote the ethical development and governance of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in accordance with Catholic social teaching.
Me, arguing that Catholic Social Doctrine is so advanced that only now technology has catched up to it.
Backed by that work, I sincerely wish CatholicOS and CDCF every success because I think they are great. I mean, look again at the first five points of the Manifesto I selected above, just scraping “inspire new evangelism” if you’re not Catholic or religious in general: how could anybody of any political creed but sincerely wishing to make the world a better place disagree with them?
More specifically, I seriously think that anybody doing software should carefully read that manifesto and imbue any software they write with its principles, regardless of their religion or lack thereof. This said, I have three concerns about what I read - or sometimes did not read - in that Manifesto and Bylaws.
If you build it, they will come. Maybe. Maybe not.
My first concern directly follows from the fact that building great Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is not enough to make people use it. Not at all. “If you build it they will come” seldom works as in the Field of Dreams movie. Social inertia is always huge, especially about something like software that for 90% of the world population is still undistinguishable from black magic. In my experience, the hardest part of “making Catholics use FOSS” never was its quality. It was to make clergymen at any level get that they should care in the first place, instead of going “oh, this is about computers? Talk to my system administrator then”, or ignoring me altogether.
Thanks for sharing this as much as possible, especially outside Substack!
Even more important, the license of any software is much, much less important than what one creates with it, and how. In all my research and popularization work I routinely make this point with these three slogans:
“YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you”“
“You can build the perfect police state using only Free as in Freedom Software”
A Gnu/Linux user publishing documents in MS Office formats with LibreOffice makes more harm than a Windows user publishing documents in ODF formats with MS Office, because file formats are more important than software
So my first concern is seeing that education of ordinary users and calls for them to adopt free as in freedom formats and software aren’t the first goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. That is, I fear that they develop great products that won’t be adopted by enough people to make a difference.
The second concern is restriction of both stakeholders and of the “playing field”.
Shouldn’t the Catholic Overton Window for AI be wider?
I criticized the Rome Call for AI Ethics that guides Catholic OS and CDCF (point M-9 above) as soon as it appeared, but not because I think the Vatican should not make such calls. I did it because that Call seemed to me too restricted to Big Tech representatives and top catholic scholars with the best possible theological preparation and intentions, but not deep enough knowledge of the technologies involved.
That was in 2020. This month, I discovered that the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome hosted last November a “Builders AI Forum” that, at least from the outside, appears to have the same limits. The motto of that forum was “Uniting to Build & Scale AI” and its goal to “foster a new interdisciplinary community of practice dedicated to supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission”. That’s why its sponsors included:
“a dynamic investment firm backing visionary founders committed to building with purpose”
the “For Schools” branch of a company develping “AI-driven Teacher Tools that guide educators toward efficiency and impact”, letting every student “embark on a personalized learning journey with an on-demand AI tutor”
With those premises, I should have not been surprised (and yet I was) to see among the participants... none other than the canadian branch of Palantir! Yes, Palantir, the company led by the very Peter “Better Jesus” Thiel who was here in Rome just a few days ago to lecture a few elects about the antichrist.
The bigger restriction I worry about here, however, isn’t about who is invited to these talks - only the powerful, not the meek who should inherit the Earth. It is the restriction of the agenda: “Build & Scale AI” and “supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission” seem to me too close to acritical acceptance of both AI into and for everything just because it’s AI, and of the “builders” primacy I already criticized around Magisterium AI.
First, let me repeat it: I sincerely wish Catholics OS and CDCF every success, because what they want to do is necessary for the Common Good, regardless of religion. I am only concerned about two things, the first being that promoting development of the right software in the right way cannot be enough.
The other is the possibility that certain positions unwillingly end up favoring, instead of containing, forces that are only driven by profit or that confuse technology with religion. Remember point M-8 above? The one saying that Catholics must “learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age”? I am worried that as it is, that pointt can be exploited by those forces, instead of boldly being what surely is already in the heart of every Catholic OS and CDCF member, that is
“learn to speak the language of technology to make adoption and deployment of technology speak the language of the Gospel”.
Enough with concerns! Let me make some concrete proposals now. What about Catholics, Catholics grassroots communities, Catholic NGOs and Catholics institutions explicitly working to, in no particular order:
for the same reason, campaign as if there is no tomorrow to make everybody “get news online” in the only way that minimize stress, tracking and echo chambers, that is straight from the sources, the Open Source way
education!, that is: teach and popularize the general principles and technology-related concepts behind all these proposals in Catholic seminaries, schools, universities and dioceses worldwide
I and other Catholics first tried to propose a Catholic approach to Information Technology with the Eleutheros Project twenty years ago. I have never stopped to fight these fights in the widest ways I could, as everybody can see from my main publications, Foss Force column, main blog and its current Substack proxy.
I will continue to do it, but I would really like to work more, much more on everything I’ve mentioned in this post. If anybody is interested, just email mfioretti@nexaima.net.
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Magisterium AI is a chatbot (free for 10 queries) that’s presented as “the world’s leading Catholic AI”. Its developers obviously present it as something unconditionally good, because it’s about True Faith. Its opponents call for its destruction, because it’s about True Faith.
What is truth here, about Magisterium AI or any other religious chatbot for that matter? That’s a question everybody should consider and, unlike Pilate, here you can stay for an answer.
With Magisterium AI, what’s the basis? For which charge, exactly? And what should the penalty be? (Image source: John 18:38 in Bible Hub).
Magisterium AI offers “instant, trustworthy answers rooted in Catholic tradition to explore faith with clarity and depth, get accurate answers to specific questions about faith and morals and clarify complex doctrines (like the Trinity or Sacraments) faithfully”.
Longbeard, the company that develops this chatbot, says it trained it exclusively on the world’s largest database of Church documents: almost 25,000 magisterial documents and (in Scholarly Mode) over 4,333 Catholic theological and philosophical works from St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Fathers of the Church, etc.
This, says Longbeard, makes Magisterium AI avoid hallucinations and provide answers “grounded only in authentic Catholic teaching and tradition with specific citations to every assertion it makes, minimizing the risk of doctrinal error and giving confidence that the information aligns with the mind of the Church”.
Should Magisterium AI be deleted?
In January 2026 Marc Barnes, editor of New Polity, published his reasons why Longbeard should delete Magisterium AI. Some of those reasons are purely philosophical or theological. Barnes argues that conversations about faith should only happen between humans, but no AI chatbots can really converse about anything and that, regardless of the quality of the sources of Magisterium AI, it cannot use them properly anyway because “faith should never be probabilistically specified. A dice-roll is still a dice-roll even when it always lands on precisely the “6” you want... The Holy Faith is never simply “the right words in the right order,” but a Credo, an “I believe in”“ that no machine could ever say.
One part of the answer by Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, isn’t enough for me to agree with Barnes, but really rubs me the wrong way: “I leave the deep metaphysical distinctions to the scholars who are far more learned than I. I am a builder.”
Sorry, but... isn’t that the same, stale “Move Fast and Break Things” Big Tech religion that had already made a mess of society and political discourse before AI? “Trust we who can code because we can code and code we will, will ye, nill ye”? Thanks, but no thanks, on principle.
Sanders, certainly in good faith, also insists that Magisterium AI is “just a tool”. Sorry again, but no, no technology is just a “neutral” tool, especially if it’s digital. One year ago, I explained that current digital social media are toxic because they just repeat the same architectural and urban design errors that make physical cities mentally toxic.
This year, Barnes said something very similar: the very design of any machine, including chatbots, presumes and contributes to mold a certain kind of human being and society, regardless of how much its “builders” realize or want it. Since the philosophy behind chatbots is not really compatible with the Catholic one, Barnes says, they could never be neutral “tools” completely adaptable to Catholic ends. I tend to agree, but even this wouldn’t be enough for me to call for an outright deletion of Magisterium AI.
The other two main arguments in Sanders’ defence of Magisterium AI are one implicit (”every digital technology is great”) the other very explicit, that is FOMO (”Fear Of Missing Out”) and TINA (”There Is No Alternative”), which is well represented by these three almost literal quotes from his reply:
We are already crossing the river that separates the world before AI and the world with AI. The question is: who will write the code that governs the other side?
If we “delete” our presence in this sphere, we don’t stop the sphere from existing; we simply ensure it remains godless.
We must have the courage to baptize the tool, not bury it.
There are plenty of good things we should do as soon as possible with a saner version of AI, starting with agriculture. But accepting AI everywhere for everything just because it’s here is the same mistake already made with IoT, NFTs, the metaverse and soon, if we keep being dumb,humanoid robots.
But even if AI everywhere was truly unavoidable, so what? If some version of some technology or practice is objectively unavoidable but also bad or dangerous... shouldn’t Catholics and everybody else still strive to limit as much as possible its usage in every form? If “unavoidable” were a sufficient reason to make one’s own version of something, the Catholic solutions to prostitution and smoking could be Catholic brothels and cigarette factories.
Those are paradoxical examples of why “just make a Catholic version of something and it will be fine” isn’t a great strategy, but Barnes makes the same point much more seriously.
“Let’s make a Catholic version”, he notes, is the same thing lay people have been always encouraged to do with any other media before chatbots: newspaper, radio, television, computers, the Web... but in the end the only places where Catholicism grew instead of just slowing down its retreat are those “with the least and tardiest access to each new technological instrument of mass communication” but bigger size and strength of families, or stronger missionary presence. Here is another way Barnes puts it: “Places that have good things don’t need technologies which produce online versions of good things.” That is, social innovation is always much more powerful than technology alone. Even when the task is to make places “not remain godless”.
My extra reason to dislike the defense of Magisterium AI
Sanders passionately rejects any conclusion that “we must delete this technology to preserve our humanity [because doing so] confuses the medium with the mission [and] the mechanics of language with the intimacy of conversation..., [Q]uerying in natural language is [not] the same as conversing”, and Magisterium AI just offers “intellectual clarity, not sacramental grace”.
the belief, absolutely detached from reality, that since software “builders” were born with the capability to write and use software in a certain way, everybody else will eventually do the same and love it, will he, nill he.
I don’t doubt that Sanders never confuses clarity with grace, or querying with conversing. I am just equally sure, because that’s what I’ve seen happening every day with Gnu/Linux, Web 2.0, social media, AI bots and every other software since the mid-1990s, that 90% of real people are not like him, and WILL indeed confuse themselves. Especially after having been dumbed down by 20 years of social media designed with the very purpose of isolating and dumbing everybody down.
This is not judgment or criticism of anybody. This is just an acknowledgment that there are millions of different types of human brains, all equally worthy, but those wired to react to software exactly as Sanders pictures are a tiny, tiny minority.
Sanders’ other statement that Longbeard is not replacing authority, just amplifying access to it thanks to the “instant, trustworthy answers” of Magisterium AI is just as weak and worrying: “Trust us, human brains and souls will only benefit from always-on media and super-fast information with instantaneously amplified feedback and amplified, worldwide exposure!”... is exactly what Zuckerberg, Altman and Co have been pushing on the world for two decades now, and we all know how it worked.
So. should Magisterium AI be deleted? No, it should just...
In spite of everything I wrote, I don’t think there is a need to delete Magisterium AI as Barnes wants. I think Sanders himself unwillingly showed what to do in his answer, when he wrote that:
When a student queries Magisterium AI, they are not seeking “communion” with the software any more than a scholar seeks “communion” with the card catalog or the index of the Summa Theologiae. They are seeking access to the patrimony of the Church
Magisterium AI acts less like an author and more like a paralegal. It locates the precedent, summarizes the specific text, and places the document in front of you.
Exactly! Thanks Mr. Sanders! Paralegals are legal professionals who do legal research or drafting legal documents only for, and under the direct supervision of a lawyer!, not for her clients. Nobody (OK, nobody in his mind...) who needs legal help would hire a paralegal instead of a lawyer, even if paralegals were allowed to work as lawyers. Paralegals cannot have clients.
On top of that, anybody who’s really, deeply competent in some topic will tell you something like “I regularly see AI chatbots making mistakes about that topic; therefore, I exclusively use them for that topic, not for any other purpose where I couldn’t spot and avoid errors by myself”.
Add that fact to the limits of paralegals, and the solution is simple: instead of deleting Magisterium AI,
immediately change its name to something more sincere like “Magisterium Assistant”. In 2026, “AI” is already attached to way too many product names to look anything but FOMO marketing, and once the bubble pops it will become a liability anyway
only, only license the “Magisterium Assistant” to priests, or people like theology professors with at least five years of experience and the knowledge to properly evaluate Barnes philosophical objections
In other words, it’s practically certain that the general public will misuse and abuse Magisterium AI just like it has done with ChatGPT and any other “know-it-all” chatbot since 2022. Therefore, there is no reason why Magisterium AI (or any similar service for any other religion, of course) should not be treated as I already recommended two years ago for every AI chatbot like ChatGPT: just block universal access to it.
While I’m at this, everything Sanders says is for me further proof that the future of AI - that is of AI applications that make sense and don’t bankrupt a whole planet or suck up all the energy it needs, is not AGI, but SMALL, single-purpose AIs. Which hey, is just what China is doing, unlike the US.
Final note: the next piece will also be about Catholics vs (open) software in the 21st century and why everybody should care, so stay tuned!
Creation of Humanoid Robots, experts say, is “driven by the simple fact that our world is built for the human body”. Rather than reshaping the environment to suit machines, Humanoid Robots offer a way to adapt automation to the world as it is, especially when labor-intensive, dangerous, or repetitive jobs are concerned. The two most significant rationales for robots actually shaped as humans (i.e. two legs, two arms, one torso and one head) that I’ve read so far would be:
Compatibility with any already existing infrastructure designed for humans (stairs, doors, shelves, elevators...)
“Labor Augmentation”, that is taking over the most strenuous or alienating tasks, and consequently empowering humans to “focus on more complex responsibilities (addressing the infamous “alienation of labor” Marx had an issue with)”(source)
Concretely, the sectors of the economy most frequently quoted in which Humanoid Robots would work would be:
Manufacturing and Assembly
Logistics (moving goods, pushing carts, and inventory management)
Equipment Maintenance, especially in hazardous areas
Construction (carrying and positioning materials)
Healthcare and Medical Applications
Is that so?
Except in healthcare, that deserves a separate post, the idea that it’s better to adapt machines to the human world rather than doing the opposite does make sense. Probably not always, but often.
But labor “augmentation” MY ASS. That’s not the plan. The plan is to replace “HR as in Human Resources” with “HR as in Humanoid Robots” in every company’s org chart. This is why I’m always capitalizing “Humanoid Robot” here: to make the next, intended meaning of “HR” stand out: Humanoid Robots enable executives to dream (reality is another matter) they can let go even the workers who aren’t already replaceable by ordinary desktop computers or data centers alone.
Never forget that fact, but don’t let it make you too angry either. More robots in manufacturing and other economic sectors may be good, if we only learned to finally put the need for money and the need for “work” (note the quotes) in the right order! Let’s look at the real problems and real stupidity behind Humanoid Robots instead, because they are not in the workplace.
Elon Musk, self-appointed master thief of our night sky, said in January 2026 that he expects Tesla to begin selling to the public Humanoid Robots, which would be eventually “capable of performing innumerable human tasks”, by the end of 2027.
Musk’s vision is that “you can basically ask [those robots] to do anything you’d like” and that there will be “more robots than people” because he thinks that “everyone on earth is going to have one and want one”.
Other fine experts explain that “while most envision Humanoid Robots cleaning, cooking, or gardening, the possibilities go much further... unlocking a new level of support and creativity in everyday life.”
That’s because, since robotic hands are still too clumsy for most jobs, “today’s humanoids are not capable or cannot consistently manage full household routines yet... So, instead of focusing only on chores, let’s imagine what else Humanoid Robots could do for us at home.”
That piece then goes on to list Five Really Cool Things that Humanoid Robots could “do for us at home”:
Dog Walker and Carer
Robot Cameraman and Content Creator. Imagine having your own humanoid photographer to film your next business pitch, document your trip to Napa, or help you shoot content for socials.
Dance Partner and Coach
Multilingual Cultural Guide: Finding a good local guide is hard—so why not bring your own? A humanoid that speaks the local language, understands cultural nuances, recommends nearby five-star tapas bars, and carries your shopping, like a modern C-3PO+...
Personal Stylist who could catalogue your wardrobe, understand timeless style rules and current trends, and choose outfits that flatter your body, suit the occasion - and match your mood. Bonus: they can help zip up the back of that little black dress. Now that’s an investment!
I kid you not. The five bullets above are literal quotes from a company doing “advanced robotics solutions”, not a satire website. More on them below.
The truth about Humanoid Robots for everybody
Let’s assume that personal Humanoid Robots can be mass made without fighting even more wars to procure the necessary raw materials.
Let’s assume personal Humanoid Robots would soon be so cheap that everybody could actually afford one.
Let’s assume that the homes, sidewalks, cars, subways, planes and tourist attractions of the whole world could indeed contain twice the bodies that already fill them, because this is exactly what Elon “more robots than people” Musk said.
Let’s also assume that the guys pushing personal Humanoid Robots for profit wouldn’t be allowed to repeat the same abuses they did with phone chargers, phone cables and countless other products, that is: programmed obsolescence, lock-in, incompatible spare parts, overpriced or just impossible repairs, kill switches, and selling personal data.
Even in that physically impossible world, what would be the real reasons for any sane adult not brainwashed by internet pressure to have their own Humanoid Robot? The Five Cool Things Listed Above? Let’s look at them again:
Dog carer? what’s the point of a pet if something else gets all its time and affection?
Traveling with a personal cameraman whose air ticket would come from your pocket, to be filmed hidden by the robots of all the other tourists? In places already overflowing with humanoid human tourists? To get the same translation, bar recommendations and carrying services that your trolley and smartphone already do, for a fraction of the cost and physical size?
In other words, becoming a pretend Kardashian (servant included) who, besides paying for all your robot’s energy, tickets etc... should still pay a human to do all the household chores beneath a Humanoid Robot’s station, because if you did them yourself what would the robots of your friends say?
Those are use cases? Stuff that could never happen in our real world or that doesn’t require at all to put the necessary software inside a body-shaped computer, because any smartphone can already do it without requiring its own plane ticket?
If I may get personal for a moment, I find it very, VERY depressing that people so shameless or clueless to write such manure get any money. Fund me instead.
Screenshot of Google search for “humanoid robot doing household chores”: does any of those scenarios makes sense to you?
I am well aware that my “nobody would need a personal Humanoid Robot” sounds a bit too much another “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” , but let me ask you: with the possible exception of healthcare and caring for disabled or senior people, which as I said deserves a separate post, what could be the only real, concrete reason to have personal or family Humanoid Robots? What could it be when, besides all the other issues, the dwellings that most people can afford to live in become smaller every year?
Let’s be honest: maybe that reason is to do stuff that would work well only if done by human bodies or to humans bodies: that is sex, of course or (as I already warned five years ago) bossing around something that looks and feels like human, but will never complain.
Using robots for such purposes would be surely better than forcing other humans to endure the same abuses, especially because it would only be a temporary measure: after one generation living like that there would be no humans left to worry, or to worry about. If there are meaningful reasons to have personal Humanoid Robots, they apply to a world so different than our present one that nobody has been able to imagine them yet. Besides…
Do you remember really autonomous cars? The ones that, according to the same good old Musk are, like Humanoid Robots now, “coming next year” since 2013?? HumanoidRobots are autonomous cars all over again: the same industry that has failed for years to put really autonomous cars everywhere because roads are messy now wants you to buy machines that, as nVidia itselfpoints out, have the same AI-related needs (”situational awareness, interaction efficiency... context-aware responses”), just at a much larger, much more varied, much more unpredictable scale.
Do you remember AI? Of course, how could you possibly forget it? HumanoidRobots are AI all over again: good, sometimes badly needed for “professional” applications, ridiculously expensive and toxic as a a consumer technology.
Thanks for sharing this post as much as you can, both inside and OUTSIDE Substack!
Point is, after AI-controlled weapons, Humanoid Robots may be just what I warned about, that is one way in which “AI” could actually kill us. Nate Soares said it well: “as long as [AI] systems remain in the form in which we are currently most accustomed to them, which is a chat interface, there might be ways of stopping them from accessing the physical world. But [what about robots that] are meant to be able to manipulate the world, that are meant to be in your home and do your cooking for you and do your laundry for you and so on. It is once the intelligence of a GPT-style system meets the physical ability to manipulate the world that it will acquire with robotics that [AI could actually kill].”
If they are so stupid, why are “Humanoid Robots for everybody” pushed so hard?
This is easy. “Humanoid Robots for everybody” come from two needs that industries and organizations alone could never satisfy: one is the pathological urge to never have other real humans around that has driven so much software development in the last twenty years.
The other is the DESPERATE need to create another huge bubble, because the AI one is popping soon (never too soon, I say) and personal Humanoid Robots are the only way in which Musk or anybody else could sell enough robots to make the amount of money they keep thinking they are divinely entitled to have.
That’s the business strategy of 2026: “real artificial intelligence is impossible, if it were possible it would consume more energy and money than actually exist anyway, and we have nothing else left to sell. So let’s put the fake AI we got into puppets instead, and claim that everybody needs one”.
I bet you anything that this is one of the reasons why the nVidia CEO “predicts” that humanoids will be “one of the largest industries ever”. Again, fund me instead.
To conclude, as far as real adults alive today are concerned, Humanoid Robots are - like the AI that will remain after its coming crash - technology that can do a lot of good if it’s restricted to professional applications, not forced down everybody’s throat just to improve somebody else’s bottom line. So, stick to reality:
Don’t get fooled by “visions” of what life may be like five or ten generations from now thanks to robots and AI
Laugh at any political candidate who promises “at least one full-sized humanoid robot” (yes, they exist!)
Don’t let your pension fund touch anything related to Humanoid Robots
Oh, and of course fund both me and the many others who are trying hard to keep some sanity in the world, instead of the usual Pied Pipers
Note: the way this Substack works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for subscribers only containing all the screaming I restrained to make the free one nice and civilized and not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments.
(I got massively sick again, and them slammed with blizzard after blizzard after depressive episode after deadline. This winter wants to kill me, I swear.)
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Is there any real point in yelling into the Universal Void-Equipped Vomitorium that the internet has become about a thing many, many unconnected people say every day?
Not really, I guess.
Am I going to do it anyway?
I mean, have we met? Of course I am.
Now, when we all found out that Trump had gone ahead and bombed Iran, killed its leader, seemingly without any plan whatsoever other than YOLO, did I shake my head like I was a hundred fucking years old, which is what it feels like these days, and think about all the other times my country bombed the shit out of another one and either kidnapped or killed their leaders?
And when that video of the violent cartel enforcer caravan going by the street name “ICE” cheerfully murdering Alex Pretti started going around LITERALLY FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN MEDIA TIME, did I think: well, now people will care, because that looks like a very nicely-groomed white man with a concealed carry weapon they shot in the back and not literally any other kind of human person, because all the other kinds have been getting killed for some time now and/or the whole time?
Sure did, friends.
When everyone, even conservatives, started actually finally (temporarily) pushing back against the sweaty, meth-blistered, right-wing romantasy the White House instantly pitched to their eager agents in the press room, like the President, with all the authority that office still drags with it, presenting to the public as fact, a full narrative of who is to blame, who is innocent, and what the victim was thinking and doing, let alone a totally fabricated one, is anything like a legal, normal thing to do, did I think: Wow, so even Renee Good wasn’t enough for the Great American Id, because white doesn’t fix woman and queer in that shrunken, desiccated hive-mind, but now we can actually see and understand very clear high definition video? No nasty nicknames like AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) for Alex’s entire demographic this time? What a shock, view and behold how shocked I am.
And then, when the phalanx of Renfields, Wormtongues, and groveling Trashcan Men that have ruined everything for everyone received permission from their masters to, very gently, poke at the edges of the utter reality-shearing fugue state that allowed anyone anywhere to ever believe Donald “Father of All Bombs In My First Month Because Big Beautiful Boom-Boom So Fun” Trump was the candidate of peace, a sentence I can’t even write without cringing it’s so pants-eatingly stupid, did I tap my feet to a nasty song I’ve been forced to listen to all my life?
Yeah, of course. We here in Garbagetown are not, as they say, brand new.
Did I then go online, see people being genuinely horrified and trying to figure out what to do about it, and start splatting into their replies yelling about how they shouldn’t be surprised because America has always been like this for everyone who isn’t [insert demographic here] and if they weren’t so privileged they’d know that?
Despite the existence of yesterday’s not-at-all-funny essay about Baby’s First Foreign Intervention that I definitely did write (carefully not including that very sentiment) no I fucking didn’t because it’s one of the most unhelpful, unproductive, pointless, performative, actively harmful to any kind of movement toward getting out of this eternal shit-shower sentiment I can even think of and I’m beyond tired of hearing it.
Even if it’s kind of true.
Bear with me, friends. No, I mean there is bear with me.
Note: The way this Substack works is that each public essay, like this one, has a follow-up for paid subscribers for spicier-than-prime-time screaming. The follow-up to the last essay on ICE malfeasance was delayed by a brutal bout with the flu, several blizzards, a strike, and a major depressive episode. Plus the fact that insane clown policy keeps happening and every WTF is out of date as soon as its posted.
The next essay will be a follow-up to both that piece and this one.
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One of those childhood memories that gets etched in glass, permanent lasered onto the inside of your skull, sometimes for good reason, sometimes just a moment that stands out among other moments, a redheaded memory in the long fog.
It was early winter and I was in fifth grade. I caught the school bus before 7 am, as everyone in our neighborhood did. Everything was wet and sunny and pale, slick and blindingly bright. Outside the bus smelled like pine trees, mucky leaves, and ozone. Inside smelled like cheap lip gloss, hairspray, permanent markers, and sour socks. I unshouldered my backpack and slid into the second cracked vinyl seat next to my only friend, a blonde girl with big glasses named Leigh. The door made that signature hydraulic-piston-creaking-hinge noise combination as the driver shoved the lever closed and the engine started complaining about the hills again.
I was quiet for a minute. Stared out through the hoarfrost of hearts and initials and misspelled swear words scratched into the bus window behind Leigh’s frizzy head. I was quiet because I didn’t know what to say. I felt like everyone must know. That’s why the boys in the back row were so rowdy, the older girls in the middle were whispering, that’s why the driver seemed so tired and sad. They must all be feeling what I was feeling. Angry and afraid and sad and confused. They must all not know what to say, either.
But I had to say something to someone or one of my organs was gonna just pop. One of little ones you could stand to lose, hopefully. Maybe not pop. Maybe ooze. Like one of those old crappy snake-bomb firecrackers that sludged out coil after coil of horrible black rope but never made any noise.
“Leigh,” I whispered. “We just invaded Panama.”
She turned to look at me with those huge pink-translucent rimmed glasses taking over her whole face. I even remember the sunlight glinting on the little gold cross she wore. Leigh’s parents were super religious and ran a Bible camp out of their backyard every summer. I was dying to go, not because I was so hot for God, really, but mainly because I wanted to spend the summer at Leigh’s house.
“What’s a panama?” Leigh said.
And that’s it, that’s the moment that crystallized so perfectly that I remember it in total detail thirty-five years later. What I remember isn’t that the US invaded Panama in December of 1989, though I do remember that.
What I remember is that none of the other kids knew or cared what the hell I was talking about.
I thought the world was coming apart that morning when I saw it on the news. I’d been raised a good patriotic little Leslie Knope red, white, and blue bunny, gone with my parents to vote every year. Believed all the things about what America stood for and what kind of person I should try to be because of it. I loved saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I named my puppy after Abigail Adams.
Be gentle. I was ten. We all think a lot of strange things when we’re ten. I still believed in Santa Claus, too. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and fairies in the English countryside and yes, justice and progress and the promise of America.
And when you are ten, you may not know a lot of fine details about world events, history, political philosophy, or varying systems of governance, both social and economic, but you feel like you have a handle on a couple of big-picture concepts, enough to get you through a bus ride, anyway.
Like, for example, the simplistic, childlike, but kind of fucking true notion that good nations full of good people with good intentions do not preemptively invade other countries.
Even if they give the operation a neat little nickname. (For Panama, it was “Operation Just Cause,” and let’s take a moment to give that one a big wow.) Even if the leader of that other country is a horrible person who does all kinds of illegal stuff and kills his own people kind of a lot and nobody likes him, not even, or maybe especially, his own people. Even if everybody plays a bunch of word games about how it’s not really preemptive or an actual invasion, just a sparkling strategic operation.
Invading other countries is wrong. Kidnapping or killing the leaders of other nations is wrong. How could my country do that? Was my home bad? Was I bad, too? Weren’t there rules about war? We had a whole color-coded system just to go to the bathroom at my school. Wasn’t there a system for this? Aren’t you not supposed to be able to just do war because you felt like it? Were all the grown-ups who taught me to be proud of my nation and work for its future lying or did they not know?
What’s a Panama?
I was a child. The nature of childhood is partial understanding. Or none. Every year everything you know is washed away by the fall rain and filled in again, with a little more detail every time. I was a little girl who knew too much and not enough. A little girl who geneuinely thought everyone on that bus must be just as upset about all of this as she was, and now realized they didn’t have the first idea, or even know that there was a country called Panama. They were just yelling and throwing pencils on the bus for the same reasons kids yell and throw pencils on the bus every day.
I was just little girl on her way to school.
Like a lot of little girls in Iran. Only that day in 1989, I got to come home from school. That day in 2026, those other little girls didn’t.
And I’m sure they believed a lot of pretty, simplified, half-formed things that weren’t true, too. I’m sure they believed there were rules, like I did.
All these years later, another century, another winter, another war. And I still don’t know what to say. Now I know that in fact my country does do this, pretty frequently. It had done many times before I was ten and did many more times afterward.
They did, once, feel they needed to lie about it, to dress it up so it looks like something anyone would want. And I also know that it is a profoundly dark sign that they no longer bother with the effort.
I know that the men who make these decisions are so far removed from the world of school buses and mucky December leaves and black snake firecrackers that they might as well not be human, and they don’t think of us or anyone else at all. I know that some grown-ups are lying, and some don’t know. Some do know, but are all for it. Some know, but they can’t figure out how to explain to a kid that everything is a mess but it’s still worth believing in what a country can be even when you can see its ugliness with your own eyes every day, because that belief is the only way out of the dark.
And some know, but are just as stuck as the rest of us inside this machine that won’t stop just because the people inside it are screaming for it to stop. It’s all drowned out by the screaming of the people crushed beneath its treads. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because the people who run the machine love both sounds and crave them.
And though I frequently forget, I do know that no matter how upset I am, no matter how axiomatic it seems to me that everyone around me must know what’s going on and be just as horrified by it, just as desperate to fix it, for the most part, everyone’s just stuck on the same shitty bus, barely chugging up over the hill, cracked seats and vandalized windows and a muffler from the depths of hell, not thinking about anything but their own worries and needs, all headed toward the same destination, not because they want to go there, but because that’s where the machine is heading and the doors are locked, for our safety, of course.
I’m one of the grown-ups now. And I didn’t tell my second grader about Iran. Just like Leigh’s parents didn’t tell her about Panama, if they knew. I’ve participated in the generational lies of this place. Because I still don’t know what to say. It’s wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong, even the people doing it. But they’re going to keep doing it, not because there is a goal to be achieved, but because they want to, and they like it, and, at a very distant third, they might think it will give them more power and allow them to keep what they have. But that part isn’t really that important. It isn’t the reason, any more than God was the reason I wanted to go to Bible camp that summer. The people driving the bus just want to feel the way they feel when they push a button in a comfortable room and other people they don’t know or like die. They want to feel that way forever.
How do you explain that? To children? To grown-ups? What’s a Panama?
Maybe I don’t even know anymore.
I hope for a better outcome than I expect. I hope there are answers on the other side of this. I hope to find a little optimism at the bottom of this very deep box.
But I’ve spent thirty-five years staring out that long-vanished bus window repeating a non-sensical question in my mind. Staring out at the same moment happening over and over again even though it’s not supposed to happen at all, at America catching fire, hissing and sputtering as endless coil after endless coil of hideous black smoking dead rope spools out onto the cement in silence while claiming to be something of value, something to enjoy, claiming to be a firework.
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In case you missed it, there is a growing trend that, since last December, is making angry and concerned parents happy: Australia mandated by law a minimum age (16) for having social media accounts and, answering a call to governments that keeps growing, Finland and other countries are seriously considering doing the same. Is this good news, bad news or, as I suspect... news that’s not relevant anymore? Let’s find out.
Weak objections to age limits
As surprising as it may seem, not everybody is convinced that social media does way more harm than good to kids, but I fail to find their arguments valid. Claims that this or the next one or two generations of real children may do wonderful things with a smartphone invariably come from people so smart they can’t understand they and their own kids are needles in haystacks.
A more concrete objection is that banning social media may isolate and ultimately harm both kids with disabilities and adolescents who are at high risk for suicide. While I do agree that social media can be quite beneficial in those special cases, I find all certain concerns quite ill-thought-out, for a simple reason: socialization benefits come, by definition, only if all the non-special kids are in the same environment.
But if something that - however you call it - is very often harmful to the majority of children does benefit what’s surely a minority of them... why on Earth should we keep the majority in harm’s way, instead of finding other solutions for the special cases???
You may have also heard that it’s wrong and counterproductive to call and treat social media as real addictions, instead of less harmful “bad habits”. That’s an argument that strictly speaking may have some merit, but I personally find almost irrelevant at this point.
While I’m at this, I’m also unable to trust reports that kids with smartphones are less likely to find life meaningless and get angry, because that’s the same thing opium addicts surely reported of their dens. Duh. If something makes you forget, or prevent you from ever learning how happier you’d be playing with peers in the sun... of course it also diminishes your anger and depression. Until it doesn’t.
The real problems with age limits for social media
Since the beginning of social media, if not of the web itself, proposals of setting age limits online by mandatory identification or automatic profiling have shared the same problems.
First, age limits alone just kick the can down the road, because they don’t touch toxic features like infinite scrolling, that afflict everybody over 16, starting from older adults. To solve the problem instead of just delaying it, we’d also need to outlaw all those features.
This said, here is the real bad news: in 2026, these other issues are still valid, but they are also quickly becoming irrelevant.
It almost doesn’t matter anymore if “social media” are good or bad
Forget social media, for a moment. Let’s look at something that, in spite of all the hype that keeps its investors alive, is much more invisible and ubiquitous. That is AI or, more exactly, the effects of universal, uninterrupted, unavoidable exposure to AI chatbots and other services. The first and easier to see result is... hardly any real productivity: OpenAI itself reports that 73% of its user prompts concern non work-related topics, very often by young people. Many of those requests are to write (that is, to conceive on behalf of the user) some sort of finished product (homework, dating profiles etc..).
Unsurprisingly, this is an habit that can lower cognitive activity and is only going to get bigger, because every online interaction that can happen through written words or spoken words is, or will soon be, vulnerable to AI. Problem is, this affects much more than practical activities.
Without AI, social media would “only” influence and shape human-to-human relationships. AI bots replace that with a direct, exclusive connection, on equal footing between individual humans and machines. Such forced or even voluntary immersions in AI personal services don’t merely shortcut brains together like social media do: they engage every single individual relationally and emotionally, by grabbing and offering emotions instead of just data.
All this can only shape one’s thinking less visibly, but much more effectively than social media. Double that for children and adolescents, for whom by far the likeliest outcome of AI interfering with their inner development is to:
Summing up, leave concerns that AI will destroy all jobs to people who still get AI and the meaning of work and money backwards. Worry about personal growth and social interactions, instead, because unrestricted dumping of AIs inside people brains and feelings as it’s allowed today does everything bad that social media do, just much more, much better. Of course, that’s no accident.
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Current AI does all this by design
The reduction of the effort and emotional load of managing human interaction summarized in the previous paragraph is there by design, driven (as most digital tech from Silicon Valley in the last decade at least) by two urges. One is money, obviously, not just for greed but out of desperation. This AI is just the software side of peak capitalism, and “Hail Mary” AI investments the only thing keeping the US out of recession. The sooner it crashes, the better.
The other, deeper force driving AI like this is the urge, by challenged kids who only knew how to code, to limit any physical interaction with other humans, making them optional. They want to “democratize” - that is: to force on everybody - the soul-destroying convenience that before digitization was only accessible to rich people: the capability, thanks to fences, butlers, guards and secretaries, to notice and meet only the humans they wanted, when and how they wanted.
Those two urges are the reason why every company now is an AI-powered company seeking to replace communication and interaction with family, friends and pets with solitary people using AI products. But they offer no way for kids to grow up decently, or for adults to stay sane.
Even the main advocates of the 16 age limit for social media have no idea of why their call succeeded so quickly, after decades of both governments and parents looking the other way. I think the answer is quite simple, and has two components.
One is that governments finally got that such laws are excellent proxies for generalized internet censorship and datafication.
The other, more serious reasons is that the childish sociopaths that run Big Tech don’t really need social media anymore. AI is the new social media, that is their new, and much better tool to control people and avoid bankruptcy. In their present scheme of things, social media on smartphones was just an appetizer and marketing strategy that opened the way to plug AI into everybody’s skull, and is less needed every day. Age limits for social media are yesterday’s battle.
What to really ban under 16 and why
In general, I already wrote two years ago that universal, unrestricted access to AI chatbots should stop yesterday, even for adults.
Speaking of kids, growth happens by doing stuff for real, and often by making mistakes. We must preserve space for kids to screw up socially and learn how to solve concrete problems by themselves. We also have a way to do just that that’s been field-tested worldwide for 120 years now, a way that is still unexplicably ignored by the gurus of child protection online. I already introduced that way before, so as I said, let’s stick to digital bans here.
Advocates of age limits for social media explain 16 is the right age because puberty is a crucial period of brain re-wiring and identity formation, and the ability to self-regulate increases throughout adolescence, only reaching a plateau in the mid 20s. Consequently, parents should be most careful about how their children spend their time and who (or what) is influencing their developing brains and identities, that is until the end of puberty, fixed at 16 for practical purposes. I fully agree with that. What I find wrong is what to be careful about.
The point that most parents and gurus alike continue to ignore because it’s uncool, bad for GDP and too simple is that what really “influences developing brains and identities”, and would do it even if social media and AI bots didn’t exist is the damn smartphone dropped into kid laps years before they are ready.
Smartphones are not the Internet. It’s perfectly possible to get all that’s good online with desktop or laptop computers or smart TVs, and the sooner children learn how to do it with those tool the better, I say. But smartphones, or any other mobile, pocket-sized or wearable device with Internet access and a camera, are wildly different, for two reasons that’s easy to miss because they are too big and simple.
One is that, even if porn, social media and predators didn’t exist, smartphones before 16 years old would still facilitate sleep deprivation and myopia epidemics. Above all, they would still be synonyms of unrestricted, uncontrollable access to questionable websites, uninterruptable peer pressures and other pressures and surveillance by... overzealous parents. Plus, of course, unrestrictable, continuous exposure to all sorts of “personality-shaping” AI services. Please notice that even when (not “if”) the AI bubble will crash, all the other issues will remain.
The other reason is that banning personal smartphone before 16 it’s hugely easier (not to mention orders of magnitudes cheaper) than enforcing age limits, and without side effects.
I’ve read learned people opposing smartphone bans because “Why would anyone want to deprive children of such a remarkable tool as a smartphone?” The one-sentence version of the really easy answer is: because (NO offense meant, this is a systemic, generational issue beyond any parent’s control!!), unlike the experts who ask such question, 95% of the real children and parents existing today are able to do it properly.
Never ask governments to ban or restrict internet access. It cannot work, only backfire, and when kids are concerned, certain actions are the parents’ job anyway
If you have kids, don’t give them a personal smartphone before 16, period. Give them any kind of home-tied computer as soon as possible and, if you really really must, a dumbphone. They’ll grow up just fine, practically for free, without missing anything important, and without anybody controlling them as today
If you have no kids, loudly support the parenting style in the previous bullet. Again, keep governments out of this, not just for-profit companies. Social pressure is the way
All the bullets above were already valid ten years ago. In 2026, AI is just giving parents and everybody else a billion more urgent reasons to do them now
Image Source: Google search results for “smartphones are like cigarettes”
UPDATE, 8.03pm GMT+1, 23/2/2026
I only noticed this instant that Afterbabel too had warned about “AI chatbot for kids” six months ago: But the most effective strategy remains the same: before (not instead!) struggling to reform AI chatbots as they suggest, make it impossible for them to reach kids through smartphones!
(This is the first sample of what I will write here from now on, beside digital issues. Please do read why, how and how to support mehere)
I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a New York trip with stops in stores like “Dal Triestino” to buy every symbol of American coolness one could afford was the ideal holiday for many Italian teenagers, me included:
Founders of “Dal Triestino” General Store besides their shop: “a haven for the most coveted brands among Italians arriving in the United States for work and pleasure, from Ray-Ban to Samsonite, from Max Factor to Levi’s and Wrangler blue jeans” (source)
Back then, for me and most other Italians, Americans were the good guys. Yes, they did look clumsy and weird sometimes: here in Italy, we call “americanata” things or behaviors “eccentric, naively grandiose, exaggerated, tacky and kitch”. But “americanate” or not, Americans were likeable. They were the people with the most inviting places to visit, the coolest movies and music and the most effective army. Most of us also considered Americans the guys who, even if they were doing it primarily for their own advantage, mostly did the right things on the international scene.
I also worked almost two years in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s, when the Valley was still building software and hardware that did make sense, and I really enjoyed it.
In other words, throughout my whole life, I’ve almost always lived with lots of reasons to appreciate “the American way” and wish Italy was, for some things at least, a lot more like America. I still do.
Now, however, I am sad and pissed off because on one hand, there are plenty of wonderful places and people in the US I almost surely won’t see anymore in my life, and on the other hand I’m still forced to care about America. I am sad and pissed off because...
Please do share this, in and outside Substack! It may be the best way to support me.
Crossing an ocean to be kicked back? Of course not.
First and foremost, I am not willingly going to land, not even for an intermediate stop, in airports where the stupidest thing outside my control may send me back home right away on my own pocket if I’m lucky, or block me there for weeks before doing that.
Travel-wise, China, Russia or even Iran seem safer to me these days. By this, I mean they look as places where, if a visitor knows and follows some clearly defined set of rules known in advance, everything will be all right. Not so in current America, where misfits who never learned or understood that Europe and Mexico aren’t neighboring places have more chances than everywhere else to work as Custom officers. Or, out of airports, deliberately badly trained ICE guys could shot or harass me just because I don’t look scandinavian, or speak with a local accent. You loathe me for no real reason? No problem whatsoever, as long as you stop me before I buy the plane ticket.
More in general, I’m sad because today’s US are a place that lost itself so much into infantilization, assorted extremisms, self-adsorbing identity issues and other kinds of virtue signalling of both colors to lose both any interest in their own people and, which is much more relevant, any perception of their weight in the world, and any responsibility for it.
The US of these times are a country doing a terrific job of making itself despised and ridiculized at the same time. Greenland? As arrogant and clownish as he was, had Berlusconi been in the Oval Office instead of Trump, with his same powers, he’d already have Greenland by now, just thanks to better manners and higher maturity. Ditto for, to name just the most recent events, kidnapping foreign Presidents abroad or, at home, (potential!) migrants not cute and blond as the foreign trophy wife of their Presidents. Tom Clancy novels like “Executive Orders” are fun to read, not to live in.
Feelings and perceptions like these may be exaggerated, or based on incomplete information. I am aware of that. Fact is, these are all feelings that, until very few years ago, got no news stories to spring from, and above all no US administration so happy to see them arise.
The same US which I’ve liked a lot for decades is doing all it can to make me wish for a world where I can finally - finally! - afford to ignore, if not their actual existence, at least everything they trouble themselves with at home. That’s what looms largest in my mind these days, more than debating, or proving, which system is better.
Looking the other way now
This America is doing all it can to make me accept, if not really like, a Heartland 2.0 world: a self-sufficient Eurasia, in which food and other physical goods don’t travel on sea lanes that US warships may block, but on electric trains powered by nuclear plants done right, and nothing is paid in dollars, or through US-controlled systems (for the latest EU steps in that direction, read here).
Can you imagine an Eurasia in which each part is free and content to live in its own way within its own borders because...
China, India and their neighbors make cars, processors and other stuff
Russia (without Putin) provides raw materials and energy to do it
the Middle East is poorer but pacified at last, because its remaining fossil fuels and anything else there don’t matter enough anymore to stir trouble, and...
the EU (possibly self-reduced to its current western part, with a cultural and military Intermarium buffer block) is...
in the worst case, a new edition of “Graecia Capta Ferum Victorem Cepit”: that is, a vassal backwater, politically, but one with such a huge cultural soft power and legacy to shape its rulers for centuries, as Greeks did to the Romans
Left: Intermarium, as conceived after WWI - Right: member countries of NONATO): looked from the right point, Northern Atlantic doesn’t necessarily need the US, does it? (Image sources: the Intermarium and Greenland Wikipedia pages).
I am well aware that the list above may be a mix of naivete and cluelessness from my part. By all means, do (politely!) tear it apart, if it deserves it, no problem. My goal here is to convey a feeling, not to promote any specific geopolitical doctrine.
It’s the feeling that matters, regardless of which place is “best”, if there even is one “best”: the US of the 2020s is strongly pushing me to consider as the lesser evil, if not as an intrinsically positive outcome, a world that doesn’t need to keep America happy and American dollars at the centers of every issue because - finally!- what happens inside American borders doesn’t matter anymore for the rest of the world.
As things stand today, I’m sure the number of Europeans who would accept such a world - if not actively ask for it - is already large and can only grow. And again, this is happening because America went off the rails first, not us. This is what the First in “America First” looks like from here.
Had the US become a modern, limits-aware version of what its movies and leaders said it was in the 1980s (yes, I know that’s a contradiction in terms), I wouldn’t have any real issue to keep thinking as I did back then, and accept them as THE Big Guy.
But that’s over now, and things won’t change anytime soon. As far as I am concerned, I know a lot of Americans who are wonderful people, and want to stay in touch - and possibly work - with them all. But politically and culturally, it will take at least one generation, probably two, before trust and admiration for all that’s STILL great in the US return as they were just a few years ago.
By then though, it will be too late to rewind whatever version of “Heartland 2.0” will have actually happened.
And by then, of course, Africa will rise anyway. But that’s a topic for another post.
Bonus “it’s not just me!” quotes
You may say I’m a (naive) dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Here are a few quotes from some posts published in the last year, to prove that point:
“Historically, America does not care if countries collapse and in fact enjoys it. Chaos is a ladder, and as a reserve currency, they’re at the top.”
“I don’t think America can vote their way out of this, and I hope they don’t. In fact, I hope America crashes so completely that it just disappears as an entity, an identity, and as an enemy that holds deaths and debt over everyone.”
“There’s nothing overly imaginative about Trump’s and Musk’s unbridled attack strategy. They’re using the nation’s bigness and control of the jobs and money to intimidate - primarily friends.”
“The developed world made a deal with America 80 years ago. So long as we operated under the cover story of our stated values, other developed nations were willing to live under the American corporate and military umbrella. We’ve broken the deal. You can say it was Trump, but that doesn’t matter. We broke it.”
“there’s the world asking: can we still trust America? Remember, it hasn’t quite arrived at an answer yet. It’s sort of stunned. It can’t quite comprehend this weird... explosion-implosion”
“The point is that [right now, the world still] wants to [trust America]... But at some point, and it’s coming soon, America will finally lose all credibility.”
“[and then], nobody will bother even attempting to “deal” with [America]”
“go ahead and ask a European or Canadian if they’ll trust America again just because it elects someone nicer. They’ll tell you: so what? Now the problem is that you just might do it all over again, at any point, and how do we know you won’t?”
I still believe that YOUR rights and quality of life depend every year more on how software in all its forms, including robots, cryptcurrencies and AI, is used AROUND you.
From now on, however, I will also write here about all the other, many faces of the current crisis. That is, in more or less random order: climate change, families and parenting, overconsumption of natural resources, inequality, mental health, pollution, education, and other major obstacles to a fairer society.
This multi-faced look at things will be very likely bad for finding and retaining “followers”, because many people seem to prefer very specialized, single-topic “sources” these days.
But on one hand, I find it necessary, because a recurring topic here will be that those crises are all related, and cannot be solved independently. For example, I do think that climate change is real and man-made. But I also see it is only a symptom of something bigger and deeper inside us, which must be fixed first.
On the other hand, I just don’t care anymore about extending my audience with all the usual tricks.
I’ve stopped caring about any form of Search Engine “Optimization” because, in an age when search engines use one’s SEO efforts to find which sources to leech first with “AI”, but keep them hidden from people, it just doesn’t make sense anymore.
I’ve stopped caring about social media optimization too. I do try to remain and advertise my work on social media, because I accept that if I want people to hear my message I need to go where they already hang out... but I refuse to play by their rules:
unless it’s some really throw-away thingy, I will always POSSE, that is “Publish (on your) Own Site (1), Syndicate Elsewhere”
when I’ll post on social media, I may sometimes add a picture to each post even when it wouldn’t be necessary, and (usually) surrender to the totally idiotic practice of putting “link in the first comment”, but nothing more
and I will try to post as little as possible, not whenever the algorithm says I should do it
Ditto for Substack, of course. I’ll try to post here once a week, but sometimes it will be more, sometimes (as lately) much less. Without AI generated images.
What you can do / your part in all this:
I have stuff to say that several competent people agree it’s worth knowing. But I don’t want everybody to agree with me. I want everybody to know the issues I write about, instead of ignoring their existence and interconnections, so they have no excuse to not make their own informed decisions about them.
This, plus my dislike for the subscription economy (see “unusual request” here for details) is why none of my writing is paywalled, and will remain such (1). But of course, the more concrete support I get, the more I can write. So, thanks for helping with any combination of:
comment my posts and recommend this blog (NOT “substack” (1)!) here on Substack
Much more often than not, on the Web a thousand words is worth more than an image or video. Text is hugely easier to reuse, share and preserve, and more respectful of users’ time too: skimming text to get its gist is way faster than doing the same with its audio or video versions.
Besides, while I have spoken around the world many times, I am good at writing. I was definitely not born a video or podcast person. Should I ever set up a podcast or YouTube channel, it could never be much more than me repeating my written posts vocally. If you think that doing so would still be enough to significantly increase my reach and are willing to share detailed advice, by all means please do it, and thanks in advance!
This week on my podcast, I read All laws are local a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the ephemerality of our seeming eternal verities.
In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads.
The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook’s improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn’t matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends.
Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot. You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).
Note: the way this Substack works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for subscribers only containing all the screams I restrained to make the free one nice and civilized and not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments. Sign up to scream along and support my work.
You can only watch a man get blown apart by the government on the daylit freezing streets of a major city for the crime of trying to help a woman off the ground from so many different angles before you feel like you should say something. Everyone is yelling in the desperate hope that yelling can still be enough, the least you could do is use that word thing your brain is good at to make some small attempt at helping the country off the ground.
But I just haven’t known what to say. Silly gifs and the services of Sir Swears-a-Lot Bear don’t really cut it. To say, as many have, that it’s wrong and fascist and evil and grotesque has felt so small and useless—and it’s not like we haven’t all been saying that for really, quite some time now. Saying this exact thing was coming. Saying once it started, stopping it would be a lot harder than checking a box that didn’t have a man invented in a fucking Antichrist factory that mass-manufactures clearly-labelled Antichrists for the highly-competitive international Antichrist market next to it. To say, as many have, that now that they’ve done this to a white man exercising his second amendment rights, a whole lot of people are finally finding a last crumpled, lonely, half-frozen fuck to give between the couch cushions of their discontent, has seemed too cynical and unhelpful. At least there was one to find. I guess.
To say, as many have, that I am afraid, so afraid, for my family, my loved ones, my child, my little world almost entirely filled with what these smirking, plastic-masked carcasses of humanity would consider the Wrong Kind of People, has seemed both selfish and redundant. Another helpless cry of fear to add to the maelstrom.
And my god, I’ve been afraid. We all have. For so long. Many much more than I. I don’t remember what it felt like to not begin each day by swallowing a dark lump of existential dread. I don’t know how many more layers of fear you can Jenga onto the pre-stacked tower before it just doesn’t make any difference anymore. Fear is just where you live. What you eat. What clicks on in the morning with the heat. What you do to relax. What you work on on the weekends. What makes up the cells of your body.
I started writing this piece about ICE about a week and a half ago for an entirely different reason. Before we all knew the name Alex Pretti, but after we knew the name Renee Good. And every single day something new would happen to make it all worse and what I’d written out of date. I’m pretty sure this will be out of date before I get to the last paragraph.
I wanted to tell you what’s been going on in my state, not because I live in Minnesota, because I don’t.
I live in Maine.
It’s very hard for me to tell how much of what’s happening here has penetrated media outside of our local bubble at all. My feed is full of it. Signal has been a constant hyperactive Pachinko-machine rattle of speculation, ideation, planning, paranoia, and actual news. But my feed would be full of these stories. Maine is my home. Many people I follow also live here. The engagement algorithm that, bizarrely, may well be most singularly responsible for the rapid unspooling of just about everything, makes sure I see it. But yours may well make sure you don’t, just as it makes sure I don’t see over the garden wall of my own pre-existing interests.
Now, ICE has been in Maine before. They have taken people before. But over the last two-ish weeks, they’ve surged into the state and ramped up operations here while everyone’s been paying attention to Minnesota. Hundreds of people have been arrested. According to the governor, there are many more arrests being kept secret. People have been removed from running cars, beaten on the street, taken in front of their children, or their children taken from them. And they do not give a fuck and aren’t checking anything—one of the people “detained” was a correctional officer.
And I’m pretty sure (but would love to hear otherwise from your experience—I don’t expect it, but it would be nice) we’re not the only city getting hit while the media is focused elsewhere. Well. Maybe not so much focused as begrudgingly being forced to look because the people are already looking, then comfortably repeating whatever the government says without question, commentary, investigation, or concern until the designated Mildly Criticize a Minor Official programming bloc from 1-1:06 am EST.
I say two weeks ish, because we’ve been hearing about them coming for quite a few weeks longer than that, and it’s fairly unclear when, on that timeline, they actually arrived and began the state violence they’ve given the nastily cutesy yuk-yuk name of Operation Catch of the Day. GET IT? BECAUSE WE DO SEAFOOD HERE IN MAINE HA HA PEOPLE ARE MEAT WE ARE GOING TO EAT IMMIGRANTS HA HA GET IT GOLLY GEE KEVIN YOU AND ME ARE SUCH GREAT GUYS! Or if it even matters when ICE got here.
After all, the desired effects of their presence took hold long before they did.
I’m not sure how to express the level of fear that took hold of my state in the days and weeks after it was announced that ICE intended to begin significant operations here. Everywhere I knew that Mainers talked online was a frantic mess of rumor, speculation, paranoia, and occasional fact. People announced ICE agents were staying in this hotel or that, only to have employees of those hotels insist it wasn’t them. Sightings were frequent but doubted even by those who posted them. They’re in Portland, no, Lewiston, no Wiscasset, no the Target in Scarborough, this car in this parking lot has government plates, that guy in mirror glasses was staring at everyone who walked past. Everyone trying to figure out what the MO would be, what kind of cars they would drive, where they would go to try to find targets, what could be done, what businesses were or were not supporting their presence so they could be shunned or supported. It reached this fever pitch of Crucible-like posts every minute and more. I saw them on Congress St, I saw them in Riverside, I saw them at Hannafords.
Which is what happens when they don’t wear uniforms, drive government cars, or show ID. Everyone jumps at their shadows before their bodies even catch up. Which, in turn, is precisely whythat shit is fucking illegal.
So for a long time, it was pretty unclear whether or not ICE was actually here in new numbers at all—until they definitely were, and are now. And in that strange, unreal little window between coming and here, I saw my city pre-emptively change. Contract, look around every corner, change where they shopped, ate, how often they went out and where, businesses unable to operate because so many employees are afraid they’ll be ambushed. People changed the routes they drove, how they got their kids to school, or didn’t, as taking parents and children at public schools’ pick-up and drop-off has been going on for several months already, so people are fucking terrified of school and their own jobs now.
Oh, but don’t worry, anyone right wing and white hasn’t changed a thing. They sail happily along through public life as they always have. I can’t help but think that’s the point, really, and it happened before the new operation even began. That anyone brown or liberal/leftist or gender non-conforming or otherwise vulnerable retreats from public life and public view so that MAGA can believe we’re all just vaguely, unaccountably, finally, miraculously, gone.
If they can’t see us, we don’t exist, which is the goal. Just like the masks and their raging, apoplectic insistence that not only would they not wear them, no one else could either—if they didn’t have to see other people wearing masks, they could pretend there was no pandemic. No world-shattering event changing everything in unknown and frightening ways that their perfect idol, Mr. Only I Can Fix It, couldn’t handle even a little. Not just pretend, believe. Not just believe, know. And just gone is perfect for them. Most conservatives still feel a little twinge at the idea of full-on death camps for 49.7% of the country (and counting!). Not a large twinge. But a twinge. Alligator Alcatraz was a threat of death if you tried to escape, but they could tell themselves it was only a regular prison in Florida; then they made it a joke because it had to be a joke for them to cope with not actually believing it was only a regular prison in Florida.
But if they just don’t ever see us again they don’t have to think about it, they can just enjoy the New Recipe America: Oops All Whites edition and imagine that it all happened naturally so they’re still awesome people being awesome awesomely.
There’s too many of us Wrong Sorts to full-on snatch us one by one off the streets just yet. But if fear can take back the streets for white assholes, then they get what they want anyway.
They can pretend we’re gone. Not just pretend, believe. Not just believe, know. Snakes their shit-smeared saint drove into the sea.
And yes, with the fear and the contraction there was and is organization, too. Protests even in subzero temperatures. A local strike Friday. I barely remember the last time anything else was posted on any of the local sites, forums, subreddits, servers, etc I follow. There have been rallies and events and food delivery volunteers and spotters. There have been businesses refusing to serve ICE agents. There have been helpers, helping, and trying to do more. The laser-focus of it, even before that poor fucking man tried to help a lady up, both gives me hope and makes me indescribably sad. I wish this focus and putting aside of all other differences could happen at any time other than the direst hours. I wish I didn’t know it’s going to vanish as soon as people feel like it’s over, which is why Bovino got punted and Noem might have to sit in the naughty chair or whatever the fuck Trump is doing instead of firing everyone on Twitter this time, so that people can feel like it’s over and stop making conservatives uncomfy by not wanting to be murdered.
And for the record, absolutely none of this in Maine is about immigration. We’re 46/50 for immigrant population numbers, the literal lowest-crime state in the union, the most elderly, 9th least populous. We share a border with Canada and way more of us are native French speakers than anyone realizes. We’re a blue state that almost always gives an electoral vote to Republicans—and one they often need to make their bloodmath work. It’s not even about white supremacy primarily, except in the sense that this is all about white supremacy: except for sometimes when it’s Vermont, Maine is the whitest state in America. Portland itself has a somewhat sizable Somali community and a fair number of asylum seekers, but Portland Maine is a tiny fucking place. Even if you include all the outlying towns. Hell, even if you include Lewiston. “Somewhat sizable” means a blip on an even medium-sized city’s fact-sheet. And it’s January, this city is quiet and frozen and half-closed down even on the weekends.
This is about terrorizing people under the assumption that such a small city will not stand up for its own folk—and pathetically, about how much Donald Trump hates our governor, a lady named Janet Mills most of the state doesn’t even seem to like all that much. But Janet said no when President Trunchbull told her to ban all two trans athletes from playing high school sports, then tried to remove funding for lunches and education generally, and she still said no, so he hates this state he knows nothing about.
It’s started to get weird in recent days. ICE agents have gone a step further than “uniforms are a liberal plot” to trying to “blend in” with the most laughably stereotyped idea of what a Mainer wears you’ve ever seen in your life. Yes, indeed, it is a state of 1.3 million Brawny Paper Towel Mascots. With Arkansas accents. Bro is that beard even real? I’ve seen better beards on Drag Race.
And since this is all very depressing, please take a break to feel a deep sense of cheer watching two of these fuck-ass bubs get drummed out of a bar in the Old Port because when the massive storm came, ICE agents went out on the town to kick up their heels and enjoy the Portland nightlife.
It’s been quieter since two feet of snow blanketed everything. I guess ICE takes snow days, too. Poor babies need rest from all that Call of Duty cosplay id-fluffing. But I do think it’s intentional, that this is all being done in the extreme cold, even if the Walmart SS can’t handle it. In the off-season when there is emptiness to work with. When people are easy to corner without the tourist crowds. To control the response. To limit the number of people able to protest. Minnesota and Maine are two frigid states. And I think smaller places like mine are being raided very deliberately, stress-tested, chest-checked, while attention is focused on Minneapolis because other ICE news can’t break through the roar. So here, and I assume elsewhere, ICE feels it still has impunity.
Minnesota casts a long shadow, and in such shadows devils will play.
No one’s been murdered here yet, that we know of, but I shouldn’t fucking have to write that sentence at all, should I? Just like Mainers shouldn’t have to volunteer to deliver food to people of color because they’re afraid to leave their fucking homes.
But they do. And I do. And one of these days I probably won’t be able to write that sentence anymore because people here will be dead, too. Please don’t be fooled by Trump backpedalling or punting a Greg for the masses. It means nothing and he doesn’t care. At this point, I shouldn’t have to type that sentence, either. But I do. Trump backpedals when and only when he feels his personal popularity wobble. But none of this is going to stop, not in Minnesota or Maine or anywhere else. If there was even the most wavering diaphanous gleam of a chance this was a real breaking point with change in tow, you’d know the names of Alex Pretti’s killers by now.
I haven’t known what to say because I don’t know how to make it sound like this is all going to be okay, and I really do try very hard to find a way to say that about most things, even if I don’t believe it. Especially if I don’t.
I can say vote in the midterms, but they’re a lifetime away. I can say be a helper, protest, strike if you can. And it’s true. But if I have to dig deep for something to make it better I don’t have a lot in the tank. “State actors in masks abducting and murdering citizens of that state in public with impunity and explicit cheerleading from all corners of leadership” is one of the few things everyone can point to and say fascism, but Trump’s approval rating is still 36%. And it’s not like Good or Pretti were the first, they’re just graphically on video, then graphically lied about instantly by a government that’s supposed to know you can’t just announce guilt and innocence from the White House Press Room, and in Alex Pretti, these ghouls finally managed to stumble on the legendary “perfect victim” that even GOP Joe can’t quite find a way to laugh about—but they’re working on it.
I have two bits of optimism. Maybe.
The first is that Trump does backpedal when he feels his personal popularity wobble. Always. And it wobbles when people are angry enough, loud enough, often enough, and in enough numbers to break through the algorithmic silo and start rolling up critical mass. As much as I Grandma on about how posting on the internet feels like making a difference but doesn’t…it can when the President is a fragile little fucking makeup-caked engagement-farming influencer who can’t psychologically bear his follower count going down by even one digit. This administration does outrageous things to find out where the boundaries are, like kids pushing against the pieces to find the soft one that will give. So there has to be push-back, or they’ll just light the boundary on fire. And here in the FUCKING UPSIDE DOWN, Trump actually seems to care more about online fury than real-world protests. This specific dictator is uniquely vulnerable to internet bullying tactics, which might be his only silver lining.
So say something. You have to say something. Even if it’s not very different than what everyone else is saying. Say it often. Say it everywhere. Say it loud.
If you stay loud, you don’t have to get loud.
The other one is just the pool of lava I dissociate into regularly. I find myself drifting off and thinking more and more about The Oklo Reactor these days, all the things the fact of its existence made me feel, all its majesty and strangeness and the messy weird burning garbage we all are because of it. I think about it all the time now. Maybe I keep trying to think big, to think in terms of historical eras and massive currents of time and energy, because if you think big enough, this too will pass. Into a molten inferno of agony, maybe, but pass.
But still, I just haven’t known what to say. I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been having the same that’s fascism, they’re fascists, they want fascism/shut up stupid lib it’s not like they’re disappearing people on the streets you’re crazy the only fascism is if I have to be nice to people who aren’t me conversation my entire adult life. Seeing the same disingenuous smirk on the same satisfied, untroubled faces as they raise their opera glasses and/or Oakleys to view pain they believe will never touch them as entertainment and personal validation. In some morally corkscrewed sense, as their own salvation. Oh, now it’s bad? Cool. Still won’t vote for anyone but these exact people who love doing this and love telling you how much more of it they’ll do. Great. So no change, then.
Do you know what the word fascism means? I don’t mean the political system, I don’t mean the endless bad-faith internet arguments over whether this or that act of insane clown political malevolence is technically fascistic or not when it didn’t take place in Germany in the 30s. I mean where the word itself comes from. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
It comes from the word fasces. That’s Latin for this:
It’s a bundle of rods that either did or did not have an axe stuck through the middle of it. It was carried before magistrates to symbolize the unity of the state (the bundle), the ability of the state to punish its citizens (rods), and the presence of the axe was meant to wordlessly that the state has invested this particular magistrate with the authority to execute you with no cause but the passing judgment of their own whims.
It’s not a technicality. It’s not a warning. It’s not a neat little political science definition. We are here. They are here. And the fear they bring does half their job before you ever see them. Which doesn’t mean they don’t love the other half. That fasces is what ICE carries before them into your city and mine.
You might not be able to see it, but they feel it in their hands, and oh, how they exult in its weight.
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This week on my podcast, I read “Code is a liability (not an asset),” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the bad ideas behind the drive to replace programmers with chatbots.
Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn’t even wear down.
I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What’s property? Well, let’s use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone’s 1753 treatise:
“Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”
The printer is yours. It’s your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe.
But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you’re using HP ink, and if it suspects that you’ve bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying “If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too.” That would be a weird law, given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing.
But because HP puts an “access control” in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink.
Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company’s shareholders.
Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!
Enshittification wasn’t an accident. It also wasn’t inevitable. This isn’t the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history.
Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us.
And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of “felony contempt of business-model,” where it’s literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn’t want that).
We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.
In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There’s plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there’s also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.
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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a cyberbullying seminar for parents. Two police inspectors and a psycho-pedagogists specialized in these matters came to explain to about fifty parents what online or offline bullying is, how it thrives, and which laws and structures are available in Italy to deal with it.
Among other things, those experts mentioned several times how phones and social media actually alter the brain of children and teenagers.
On one hand, the meeting was great. It was thought provoking, and concretely informative. All the speakers know their stuff, and all pointed out, gently but clearly, that it’s parents, not schools, the first agents who must educate kids about these matters.
On the other hand, I found the meeting really frustrating. With all respect for those experts, there were several moments when they really felt like Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers. I say so because they:
started from, and never questioned, the same wrong, 100% wrong, unacceptable equation that (besides and before AI of course) Big Tech desperately needs us believe for its own survival: Internet = social media = smartphone
said that smartphones are inherently neutral, “what matters is to use them well”
the worst part: they spoke for more than one hour of the dangers of social media, getting closer and closer to the one real issue and its really easy solution, without ever calling it out.
That is, three experts speaking for more than one hour about the dangers of cyberbullying and social media for kids never questioned that what, 80%? of those problems - would just disappear if kids younger than, say, 14 years old had no personal smartphone. Does it happen in other countries too?
I have already explained here and here why personal smartphones for kids aren’t neutral at all, and why banning them (by parents, not governments!) is the only solution for certain problems that could ever work in the real world. That seminar, plus a rising trend of late 2025, confirmed to me that certain things are never repeated enough.
The trend I refer to, which may be even more dangerous in the long run, consists of laws like the one recently approved in Australia, which mandates that children must be at least 16 years old to create a social media account.
“Australia has just taken one of the most important steps yet in the global effort to protect children online. Beginning today... This reform finally corrects two major mistakes made in the early days of the internet: the United States (and then much of the world) set the age of “internet adulthood” to 13, and companies were given no responsibility to verify age at all. As long as a child could type “13,” companies could treat them like adults.
“Australia is the first country to correct those mistakes. Under the new policy, children under age 16 can still watch videos, read posts, and look things up online. What changes is that some of the largest companies on earth can no longer form business relationships with young children or use their personal data to keep them hooked on feeds, likes, and alerts. The policy will reduce the social pressure on kids, give parents back their authority, and help restore a healthier childhood. It may feel like a challenge at first, but it will quickly become the new normal.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Here is the truth about that law, and any other law like it: there is no need whatsoever for such a policy to protect children while leaving them free to “watch videos, read posts, and look things up online”:
children can - and should - do all those things on desktop or laptop computers, that will never be so addictive and uncontrollable as smartphones for the simple, non-circumventable reason that they can’t be carried around all the time.
In practice, no matter how sincere and well-intentioned they may be, in the long run any law like that one in Australia is only going to:
strenghten the concept that the only way to communicate digitally is through top-down, centralized social media, that is through structures that both states and for-profit corporations can easily watch, censor, shut down and generally use to influence public opinion
be actually used to enforce and legitimate more online censorship
de-legitimate parents, depriving them of the responsibility to deploy the only policy that would really work: no smartphones before 14/15 years old
be a Ruby Goldberg machine, born from some combination of ignorance of how the Internet works, and unwillingness to conceive the really simple solutions
fail anyway, because, besides being uselessly complicated and expensive, defining social media (that is, the environments in which the law should be applied) is more difficult than it sounds
Parent trying to clean his mouth with the table equivalent of age-limit laws for social media. Source: Wikipedia
Haidt says we “know social media can harm children”, and he’s right, but what about any instant messaging app with support for read receipts and image attachments? Even if it never collected and share any user data, any app like that would still be usable, by design, for cyberbullying, sexting, body shaming and so on.
If, quoting Haidt again, “The goal is to shift the environment so children are not pressured into digital spaces they don’t want, simply to avoid being left out”, laws that require a minimum age to be on “social media” work in the wrong way, in the wrong places, at the wrong level and for no good enough reason.
I’m not saying that age limits for using certain digital services shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that without age limits for smartphones any law mandating age limits would be half useless, half harmful.
Minimum age limits should be enforced above all for smartphones because it’s them, not software, that makes “social media” and “internet” impossible to monitor and regulate, and because physical devices are infinitely easier to keep away from children, at hugely smaller costs, than software apps usable 24/7 on something that, for all practical purposes, ends up attached to a child body like a Matrix plug.
Parent, giving his 11-year old son a new smartphone for Christmas. Source: Reddit.
“But social media and smartphones CAN be good for children, I know a child who...”
No. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m sick of “success” stories that, instead of being acknowledged as rare exceptions, are used as alibis to make and keep almost all the other kids dumber or more stressed than they could be.
Can social media and smartphones as they are today be actually good, and worth the parental effort that’s necessary to make a child handle them? Yes, but only for children in one of these two really rare conditions:
children who suffer from some concrete, serious malaise or disability for which nobody, from states to parents, could implement an authentic solution (if such children were many more than one in a thousands, it would almost surely be proof that real solutions that would work much better than social media are needed as soon as possible)
children born to that one one in a thousand families in which parents actually have the astonishingly rare combination of money, time, real digital competence and will to make themselves (not schools or laws) effective mentors, for years, of using intrinsically addictive social media
But I MUST be always in touch with my children. It’s for their safety!
If you still religiously believe smartphones for children are necessary because children must be in continuous contact with their parents, please...
Wake Up, already! You and every other generation before you since Pleistocene grew up well enough without electronic tags, and any mental problem surely wasn’t due to lack of such tags. Your kids - and their mental health needs - are no different. If you really, really believe they should be always reachable in real time, burden them with a camera-less dumbphone instead: that’s all the reachability needed to make you feel safe, with none of the dangers and temptations for your kids.
The solution is really simple. It isn’t used yet only because it does require almost every parent to acknowledge that, 100% in good faith, they did the dumbest, self-harming thing by giving smartphones to their children years before it would have made more good than harm. But it’s simple.
Let’s make laws like that one in Australia useless. Let’s save both parents and states lots of money. Let’s make life harder for wannabe censors.
Let’s progress to giving smartphones to children as socially acceptable as giving kids a packet of cigarettes, that is something that will make both those kids and every other kid breathing around them sick.
It’s much simpler than any other solution, much more effective, and it’s possible. Any time someone tells you it’s impossible, remember them there was a time, well within our living memory, where this:
Note: The way this Substack works is that every public post has a follow-up for paid subscribers only to hold the overflow: things I ran out of room or relevance to say or, usually, thoughts too spicy to not have some kind of barrier between random click-bys and telling me I’m full of shit.
This is the follow-up to Schrodinger’s Democracy: Why Isn’t Anyone Doing Anything? There wasn’t room, but also if one more person tells me I’m an ableist asshole for calling Trump a narcissist (he is) I’m going to hurl myself into the cold embrace of the depthless sea.
Well…it was paywalled. But since yesterday, several people contacted me to tell them how much this piece affected them and how much they wish could be widely read, that they felt it was important for others to read.
So I’ve unlocked it. Because I hope that’s true. That it’s important enough to help.
But…times are pretty tight around here, which is why subscriptions are a thing at all, so though it’s free and free to share, consider supporting me here, on Patreon, or through my tip jar anyway maybe.
Remember way back in 2016, before the election, when there was some leftover Scrooge-ember of warmth still innocently traipsing around the place and making jokes about elections could feel somewhat cozy and not like punching a baby, then guffawing in its face about how it has no future and never will? When Tom Hanks went on SNL and did a monologue as America’s Dad giving us a concerned talk about what we’re doing with our life?
That one.
Well, this is that. Only I’m not America’s Mom by any means. No one is, because America hates the absolute bunting out of anyone who even vibes like she wants to be our Mom.
I’m not even America’s drunk auntie. No, at best, I’m your weird out-of-town cousin no one really invites to things who talks too much and makes everything awkward by caring way too much and too bluntly about shit that’s not my business. And I’m not really talking to America, but to individual Americans, my fellow Americans, even. Except that I don’t think this vast pain really stops at our borders. It’d be nice if it did, in a way.
But when you’re in real trouble, I’m the black sheep cousin who’ll take you to a bottomless-booze brunch and lay out what that man is doing to you.
Welcome to the Girl What the Fuck Bar and Grill. Have a seat right over there, cousin. In the smoking section because we all already have the same cancer, so what difference does it make?
Hey, sweetheart. Order whatever you want. It’s on me. I just want to talk.
How are you feeling these days? Not great? Yeah, I get that. Not great in a weirdly specific way that, when you wake up and look around every single day, it really seems like everyone is also weirdly, specifically, feeling?
For quite a few years now? Say, just to pull a random number, nine or ten?
Have you, for example, felt, oh, I don’t know, overall kind of frozen and numb? That is, when you’re not completely emotionally unregulated with anger or pain or frustration or panic even though, before all this, you’d gotten pretty good at regulating those things?
Felt like you were walking on eggshells all the time? Paranoid? Anxious? Suspicious? Had trouble trusting others or believing they actually care for you? Really struggled to let your guard down at all?
Have you had memory problems? Like, with things that didn’t even happen that long ago, but are suddenly hard to recall at all? Brain fog? Confused all the time, unable to focus, concentrate, even on things you used to enjoy? Have you had trouble with your perception of time? Felt like you were just drifting through the days without really experiencing them, let alone relishing them? Felt distant from your own life, like you’re not the main character of your own story?
Hypersensitive to criticism but also feeling like you’ll never be good enough to actually feel okay, or even deserve to? Finding it tough to make decisions, even small ones? Replaced your sense of self-worth with being brutally hard on yourself and becoming convinced that even trying is hopeless? Felt isolated, lonely, lost? Maybe a little self-destructive, nihilistic, lashing out? Or hypervigilant, unable to not expect the worst? Deteriorating health for unclear reasons? Overspending what you don’t really have or clinging to every penny when you don’t really have to? Unsure of what’s real and what’s not? Have you felt like you need to apologize for your own existence, or had trouble feeling safe even when there’s no direct, imminent danger? Have work and relationships, even hobbies and ostensible fun, become difficult to manage or give much energy to? Maybe constantly felt like you’re not doing enough even though you’re objectively at your limit?
Everyone I even know of is feeling some or all of those things. Most everyone I hear about, even statistically, is going through it to that exact tune.
Funny, that.
Because it’s not long COVID. (Okay it might also be long COVID.) Those are all symptoms of having suffered or currently suffering narcissistic abuse.
I came across an article about recovering from a narcissistic relationship and how difficult it can be to stop feeling like a fucking husk all the time (of course, I really don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking from experience or reading such articles because of said experience or know anything at all about this sort of thing. I’m just talking shit on the internet about topics I’m utterly ignorant about like we all do don’t worry about it), or to escape the cycle of behaviors that used to be necessary to survive but are just bonkers maladaptive when your world isn’t being ruled by an insane clown who hates you for breathing.
I mean, it’s not subtle. The President of the United States goes on TV every day and tells more than half of the nation we’re worthless, evil, horrible, at fault for everything he does, lazy, stupid, weak, ugly, and that all we deserve is suffering. Then he tells us how great he is. Then back to how the rest of us shouldn’t, and have no right to, exist here.
And I thought: Well, shit, all of us are doing those things and feeling that way. All the time. That’s a bullet point dissection of That Thing Everyone’s Been Suffering and Trying to Talk About. That suffering we usually chalk up to cost of living, working too much, COVID, AI, the modern world, enshittification, the wrong timeline, pick your cause, it’s the Great Malaise.
Because Donald Trump and his Skeletor-horde of dipshit cryptids, but mostly Donald “The Mule” Trump, have subjected all of us to the cycle of narcissistic abuse for a fucking decade, and that shit sucks the life out of you. It takes what you were and sticks it in a blender to puree so your abuser can gulp it down and take whatever power you had left. It makes you forget what joy even was, or if it was. Your brain literally gets so overclocked with fear and shame and confusion and constantly strategizing and re-strategizing some kind of methodology that would stop what’s happening that it can’t handle anything else. It can no longer fully brain, because its functions have been permanently epoxied into fight/flight/fawn mode.
And it doesn’t stop when you get out. It can actually get worse. It can stay worse for a long time, because your abuser re-wired your consciousness to serve his or her needs. And, oh, America, honey, baby, it’s vanishingly rare for a victim of narcissistic abuse not to go back to their tormentor at least once.
Sigh. Nailed it. I’m still mad at you, though, don’t get it twisted.
We really thought we’d made it out in 2020. We danced in the fucking streets like an 80s music video about humanity coming together to rock. We were sure we were safe. That we knew better now. That we’d see the signs next time. We wouldn’t let ourselves be hurt like that again. We’d learned. We’d grown. We’d escaped.
But we’d been rewired. Rewired to serve the needs of a sadist who was no longer in charge, whose needs were suddenly gone. We’d beaten him, but we hadn’t beaten ourselves. We hadn’t beaten the vacuum left when he went, not in power, but in needs to serve—and America simply doesn’t and never has known how lean into the same work and devotion to serve our own needs the way we lean into serving the needs of cruel authority figures.
It’s not completely our fault. Our own parents never taught us any better.
Oh my god, Chuckers, I can’t breathe. It’s simple amazing how little blame we get for the state of the world! Yes, yes, go on, everyone, truly it’s all the fault of our dirtbag kid!
As we stepped out from his control in the early 20s, we could see and understand and correctly place the blame on Trump and some few of his flying monkeys for their actions, but none of us had any real interest in looking, long, hard, or otherwise, at our own enabling, our appeasement, our willingness to isolate and self-mutilate for the sake of either his approval or at least a brief reprieve from his rage, at our complicity in our own torture. We thought we’d just go right back to Life Before Him, but the problem with that is the Paradox of Narcissistic Aftermath: the people we were then were already gone, but the problems his full technicolor surround-sound 24/7 drama-inferno distracted us from were still sitting there, unsolved. Worse than that, his entrance into our lives had already been greased by a deep, unspoken desire to avoid solving those exact problems, a longing to be distracted from them.
In 2020? 2021? 2022, 23, 24? We figured we’d dealt with the problem. We didn’t even try; frankly, we didn’t much want to even start, to deal with what we’d allowed ourselves to become to survive him. Of course, never just him, but everyone who came before him to lay the groundwork for us to accept his cruelty. Which, you know, not for nothing, is called grooming.
We couldn’t shake all the habits we’d formed just to get through each grueling, stupid, impossible day. Doomscrolling was always millions upon millions of people anxiously checking in on their abusive parent/spouse/orange overlord’s mood every morning to see if we’d be able to have a semi-rational, not even good, just neutral day, relatively free of pain-hurricanes and pride-buckling disasters he spun up out of thin, wholly unnecessary air to feel a little more alive watching us scramble to contain the damage. We didn’t just let, but actively shoveled blame onto our own side for anything that went wrong because it was never safe to blame our unbalanced, unpredictable bully—because after so many years of being blamed, blaming ourselves and never him became an ingrained habit.
And we couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop feeling like nothing mattered, like everyone was just waiting for a vulnerable moment to let their mask fall and show they’d always hated us. Resource-guarding, snapping at everything, snarling, backed into a corner that was suddenly open air—but still felt like the walls closing in. Couldn’t remember how to socialize or build things or function in public because we’d been forbidden to for so long. Couldn’t stop instinctively centering him in every conversation, every news story, looking for his opinion, anticipating his plans, speculating about his reactions to every little thing. Lashing out at ourselves, our friends, our rebound relationship. Blaming ourselves—of course it was always our fault, we are stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse, he said so all the time. After long enough, the human heart just starts to nod along to the beat. And then the beat becomes a truth we don’t know how to reject anymore. Stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse. Oh, we Democrats brought it on ourselves, didn’t we? Look what we made him do.
And then, well, once we were out, once we had a moment to dance in the sun and take a breath of our own, he didn’t seem so scary anymore. Still horrible, still a monster, but it’s not like we’re getting back together so it’s sort of okay to laugh at his jokes again, right? He looks so successful on social media! PRETTY FUCKING CLEARLY a whole lot of people started remembering the “good" times, forgetting the fear and pain he put us through because that’s what the hurt brain does for us. It’s gross and fucked up to admit that the fight/flight/fawn years at least had energy to them. Adrenaline, cortisol, these are incredibly damaging stress hormones to have rocketing through your system long-term, but in the moment, they do make you feel…purposeful. Energized. In motion. Sharp and clear.
Distracted from all those other problems, at least. Problems that are a lot harder to solve than ditching one bad man.
And as we went into withdrawal from those constant stress-chemicals and the corresponding dopamine and seratonin that compensate when you either do something that feels like it met the moment (you know, like posting about it online) or at least get a pause from the madness, we started looking around for somewhere to get our fix again. Someone to hurt us so we can get back to the oblivion of a familiar pattern of pain.
Our friends don’t look like friends anymore. We only see faults. That’s what love is, right, finding fault and lashing out? That’s what our bodies learned. And this new guy/girl we’re with is boring, he/she doesn’t activate our burnt-out receptors, and he/she seems to genuinely like us so he’s worthless. Or he’s a secret demon vampire because that’s all we deserve.
And then Narcissus comes waltzing back, looking for his supply again. Which had to be us, now. All of us. After he’d gotten four years drinking from the firehose, nothing else would do. Even, maybe especially, if you’ve dealt with real narcissists in real life, it’s hard to even get your head around one so utterly definitional of the disorder that their basic maintenance dose of narcissistic supply is the entire planet’s attention.
In the myth of Narcissus, we are not Echo, begging for love, to be heard. We are simply the water in which he sees himself reflected forever.
And that beast was fucking thirsty by 2024.
It’s hard for anyone left of President Snow to characterize Trump’s behavior from 20-24 as lovebombing, but that’s what it was, just like 15-16, when he was pretending to be cool with the gays and the minorities and the ladies and everyone the GOP wants to drop-kick into a black hole. Whatever else is specifically wrong with that guy, he’s also such a pure, limit-break narcissist that those two periods are his mask-on good behavior. Before he had to pretend to be some kind of fun to some kind of person, he was just openly partnering with Jeffrey Epstein to run child beauty pageants and raping with impunity, and that’s just what we know about so far. Not screaming into a camera every single day that every liberal needs to die is, in fact, Trump and his party being charming on a first date.
What mask? This is my real face.
But I said he’s done it to all of us several paragraphs ago. Because his followers have really been stuck in the classic cycle. Lovebomb/Idealization—Devaluation—Discard. Sometimes all of them in a single day.
And I suppose I can force my Empathy Hat on long enough to say that must be a real mindfuck. It’s probably understandable, from a certain point of view, that so many of them have given up and bellyflopped into pure fiction and insanity. When you’re being gaslit about basic facts every day, the mind starts to fall apart. It truly can’t tell the difference between real and His Perception of Real anymore, because this huge person in their life keeps telling them what they know happened, didn’t, and what they know didn’t happen, did. Where else was there left to go but disconnection from reality? Where was there to put all that confusion, shame, fear, disappointment? The narcissistic cycle is impressively fine-tuned to scramble your logical processors and squeeze out your sense of selfhood so it can be replaced with a sense of his selfhood.
He promises them the moon, tells them he loves them, acts like a funny, cool (what they think is cool), successful guy who’s gonna give them the life they always wanted. Or acts like a victim so he’ll be pitied and babied and fussed over as the most harmed person in the world or history and also multiverse (there’s the covert-type, and while everyone armchair diagnoses him as malignant, to me he’s clearly a c-c-c-combo of all three NPD presentations) or slaloms back and forth, often in one sentence. Then he turns around and tells them they’re dumb overdramatic fuck-ups he doesn’t give a shit about and they keep cheering because they’re still hung up on the rush of the first part, waiting for that time to come back, that guy, that feeling of belonging and release and possibility. So it must be a joke! He’s just joking. He loves us really, that’s just what he’s like, you wouldn’t understand our relationship, it’s so special, so unique. You don’t understand him like we do. That’s just his sense of humor, we don’t mind. He doesn’t mean it.
Some of us fight. Some of us flee. Some of us fawn.
Then he gets elected and starts eating their faces for breakfast every day, telling them he fucking loves eating faces, but complaining about the taste of theirs already. On Day One, so to speak.
But he’s good at this, if nothing else. Whenever his malevolence gets close to actually breaking the spell and losing them, he goes right back to lovey-dovey language, writing checks and subsidies, even drug rescheduling because an unexpected present goes really far with people starved for something that feels real. Or, more often, he opts to do some mean horrible bit of anti-social sadism, just the way he knows they like it. Just like the old days, when they were courting.
And round and round it goes.
Conservatives feel the malaise, too. It’s just a different flavor, because they’re the golden child, and the rest of us are the scapegoat.
Here, have a laugh with a pretty genius while you take that one in.
The fact is, it’s completely fucking exhausting. Ennervating. Stultifying. To spend a decade—A FUCKING DECADE—in a world where every single conversation involves him, every personal choice has to take his judgment and eventual reaction into account (I know couples, gay and straight, who chose not to have children because they couldn’t be sure of their own rights in Trump’s world, let alone those children’s. Human beings do not exist who would have otherwise, just because he might react badly). Every time you tune into any kind of media it will orient itself around him or the effects of his deeds like the protagonist in a comic book movie, to the point that no one has to specify to what the pronoun him refers anymore. This fucking guy ate a whole pronoun! That used to belong to half the species!
The gravity of that, once it’s weighed on you for years, is so hard to escape. And harder still to cope with not having that weight crushing down on you while still bulging with the muscles you built to carry it. Still needing to feed that new bulk.
Of course, when someone does slide back into a nuclear-blast site of a relationship with an abuser like this, they pretty quickly remember why they left.
Oh yeah, I forgot! This sucks.
But now they’re stuck right back at the beginning of the labyrinth with a different 80s guy with weird hair saying fear me love me do as I say. And it feels so much more overwhelming to leave all over again, to do all that work you already did, to dig yourself out when you just watched yourself fuck up all that progress like the piece of shit he always said you were. So much more impossible to get out from under it, especially when the friends and family who supported your exit the first time are a lot less sympathetic the second time around. Or maybe it seems so much more possible the good times will return, since he was just acting like he cared again. All depending on what “good times” means to you, I suppose. Plus it’s far more embarrassing to admit you went back to the guy who hurt you and used you than it was to just get fooled once by a guy who’s quite good at fooling people.
But he didn’t learn to appreciate his position in your life and treat you better. He learned exactly what you’d accept from him without consequence. So the second time is always unfathomably worse.
Obviously, many of us did not choose to go back.
I mean…sort of.
We definitely chose not to commit to our new political relationship. The media, which is just made of people in the end, all the more so since journalism has been outsourced to literally everyone with a pulse, chose to express apoplectic anger at anyone else displaying even the mildest versions of Trump’s river of toxic sludge. Everybody on the left chose to inflict a lot of the abuse Trump shat down our necks on Biden, Harris, and their administration—plus also just a lot of people on our own side, over any disagreement on anything at all. Good lord, we canceled anyone who got any traction or influence as soon as humanly possible, and it was only ever somewhat assisted by bots and bad actors.
Which is…wait for it…also one of those symptoms of having suffered narcissistic abuse. Becoming hypercritical, but also hypersensitive to criticism. Blowing small disagreements way out of proportion and over-reacting, then finding oneself unable to back down because your literal physical endocrine system learned backing down does nothing to stop the attacks, it just shows weakness and weaklings get fucking eaten. These are usually behaviors learned from the abuser, because imitating someone with power over us, subconsciously, can feel like a logical way to get some power back, or at least appease the creature who loves only himself by appearing more like him. Doesn’t work, but it feels like it might.
That, and once you start feeling like nothing you do matters anymore, well, nothing you do matters anymore.
And once it came time to reject old patterns and move on with our lives, to show that we’d done the work, it turns out a huge number of us didn’t really have any energy left for that, or even protecting ourselves or our loved ones. Or doing anything. Voting for a regular politician regularly, but not in a way that felt like being a paladin in a life or death battle against MegaSauron, didn’t light up our adrenaline pathways or flood them with sweet fulfilled dopamine.
I guess sometimes, when you’ve been asked to be the only one doing the right thing for years, being selfish can feel like the morally right thing to do. And doing nothing feels even more right, because nothing matters, you’re so tired, and you don’t even know how to go back to normal life without a monster in it. You can barely remember how that worked, so now, the monstrous feels familiar but you feel like a stranger, and you really, really need therapy about that, but group therapy for a couple of hundred million is tough to put together and you don’t want to even think about the co-pay.
I guess that day was November 4, 2024, huh, America?
We’re all suffering the way children of narcissistic parents, spouses of narcissist, employees, anyone who has to live a huge portion of their lives connected to someone who requires all the oxygen in any room to even begin to exist, suffer. And we continue to hurt ourselves and each other because we’ve been taught by example that the ability to hurt is a valid measure of personal freedom—which is a whole nine-ring circus of fucked-up. But humans just want to feel safe, and rarely do, so they’ll take anything. That’s what narcissists want, too, it’s just that whatever happened to them when they were kids to break them this specific way means they can only start to feel safe when others are powerless and devoted only to them.
After all, if you’re the only one with power and everyone is desperate to please you, you won’t be abandoned. Won’t be hurt. Can’t be invisible as you always feared, always knew you were to the people with power over you.
Ugh. This Empathy Hat is itchy.
To the dark side of the brain, the animal instinct side, Trump seems mighty safe. Even from bullets. Even from the law. Seems like the only person with agency anymore. So people either cling to him in hopes that safety and freedom rubs off, or dwell in a daze of unhappiness and hopelessness, helplessness and anxiety, a forever Now in which no long-term plans even feel possible because our brains know a new trauma is gonna hit in the next minute.
He could die tomorrow and it would take years upon years for our brains to not know that, if they ever did.
I can’t even tell you how often I use this gif these days. It is, in fact, not great out there!
Now, we can’t you-go-girl our way out of this, at least not for a few years, if the Nothing allows elections ever again. And even if the regime ends, we will 100% go through all these stages and symptoms and malaises and reactionary behaviors all over again trying to figure out a way to recover without actually working on ourselves at all. In some ways, I hope Gavin Newsom does pull it off, because I don’t like him that much, so I kind of feel fine letting him take on the chin the absolute level of misplaced hate and anger we’re definitely going to aim at the next Democrat with any power because we couldn’t aim it at the shitheel who actually hurt us. He seems good for it.
The only thing that’s actually going to get your groove, back, America? I hate to say it and you hate to hear it, but darling, you’ve got to believe in yourself. You’ve got to get your pride back. I’m not talking about patriotism or military parade bullshit or singing I’m Proud to Be an American with a trembling lip. Because fucking barf.
But a whole lot of people, for a whole lot of decades, have poured a whole lot of energy into convincing everyone of every party in this country that America itself is worth nothing, not even standing up for. That we’re bad, either for a legacy of hatred and violence or a legacy of not enough hatred and violence, either way, we’re corrupt garbage, we’ve always been corrupt garbage, so we deserve what we get. That we could never be or do any good, we are completely unredeemable and disgusting, that we should never have existed, that no part of our system or anyone in it has the smallest merit.
If no one believes in the system, if no one, for a moment, will stand up for the system, the system crumbles. It’s crumbling now.
And yeah, we’ve been bad. A lot. We’ve done some heinous fuckery to ourselves and to others. I’m not saying history didn’t happen. I’m not that white. Nor am I blind or an idiot. So everything I’m about to say is actually quite hard for me, because I, too have spent most of my life laughing at the idea of the promise of America. Quoting George Carlin, being cynical, hating most things about this place I was born.
But it doesn’t work.
A country that thinks itself incapable of virtue will utterly gorge itself on vice.
People who believe they deserve nothing will allow anything to be done to them, through them, with them, and in their name. And the people who yell loudest about how much they deserve are always the ones terrified to their marrow that they don’t deserve anything at all, even a single crumb of grace. The phrase America Sucks knows no political side. And if it sucks, why not burn it down? Does it matter that much who’s holding the match?
And that’s how these leeches slither in. On a road slicked for them by apathy, self-loathing, and masochism.
If you convince anyone they are wrong and bad, incompetent, monstrous and undeserving to the core, you teach them it’s okay to act as though that’s true. That it’s okay if they’re treated as though it’s true. You remove their ability to believe they can change or grow or become anything but more rot from a rotten root.
And that’s what a narcissist ultimately does. They leave you feeling like a husk because they used you as one. As the vessel they needed to pour all their own self-hatred and pain and fear and insecurity and loneliness and darkness so they didn’t have to own it or process it, so they could say you were the bad one all along and walk free.
We have to find a way to stand up for ourselves, to reject what is, admittedly, horrendous, but claim what has been good and what could be good again or anew. To start imagining new shapes tomorrow could take and reject the patterns we’re stuck in. To not just react, but act. To remember that an immigrant is a guest, and one of the most ancient rules of civilization is we do not harm guests. To remember that difference is just reality, no two of anything are the same and cannot be. To defend each other, stand for something, say no to the void. To redefine the promise of America and genuinely give a shit about it, about ourselves, about how we treat ourselves, what we’re willing to accept.
To make our escape plans and bide our time. Like so many trapped souls have had to do on the individual level. We must do it on a mass scale.
Something like national self-care. Not a spa day, but self-care nonetheless. Because we haven’t been taking care of ourselves. We let ourselves get sick, we let ourselves get hurt, we let ourselves suffer and starve. We let ourselves hurt others, because we stopped believing it was in us to stop. We’ve let everything that we used to care so much about slide. We have to remember, not who we are, which is a mess, but who we wanted to be. Once upon a time.
And until we do, there will never be an end to the men and women who want us hopeless, who want us frozen and numb and confused, who want us scrambling for their regard, who want us bone-tired from working to keep them happy, whose highest goal is to walk on our backs so their precious feet need never touch the ground.
Baby, honey, America, Americans, humans, Earthlings, I love you. You’re better than that. You do deserve better.
Someday, I hope you believe that as much as I do.
As much as I’m trying to believe it. Really fucking hard. Every day.
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