Where has all the weirdness gone?
Communities of Not
On the strange hostility that grows in communities built around abstinence.
The sad decline of effective altruism
A once wholesome and inspiring movement has become entangled with cults and has lost years chasing dead-end ideas
Reality Roundtable #19 — Dark Triad Personality Traits: How Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism Impact Our Cultures & Social Systems - The Great Simplification
Psychopathy is often portrayed as a rare and distant phenomenon – something confined to movie villains or prison cells. Yet when psychopathy is combined with narcissism and Machiavellianism to form what psychologists call the Dark Triad, its impact becomes far more immediate. Individuals with these traits can wield disproportionate influence over our culture, institutions, and daily lives. What goes on inside their minds, and how do they shape the world around us?
How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
This crowd-curated digital movement is one of the most pertinent and explicit reactions to our particular slice of dystopian late capitalism.
A Queer and Feminist Defense of Being Anonymous Online
From the earliest days of digital communities, online abuse has been connected to anonymity. While concerns around the impact of anonymity, particularly for women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, is legitimate, this paper argues that a flat rejection of digital anonymity is problematic, foreclosing certain forms of queer and feminist praxis. To make this case, I turn to the platform politics of Craigslist. Using Craigslist as a case study, I discuss the persistent stigma attached to online anonymity, before addressing specific tactics of online anonymity associated with queer and feminist values of privacy and mutual aid. Drawing on accounts of Craigslist users who saw anonymity as a protective form of control over their personal information, I outline ways in which anonymity is not solely an enabler for misogyny and homophobia, and can instead (or rather, also) be a subversive tool for self-expression and intimacy.
A Queer and Feminist Defense of Being Anonymous Online
From the earliest days of digital communities, online abuse has been connected to anonymity. While concerns around the impact of anonymity, particularly for women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, is legitimate, this paper argues that a flat rejection of digital anonymity is problematic, foreclosing certain forms of queer and feminist praxis. To make this case, I turn to the platform politics of Craigslist. Using Craigslist as a case study, I discuss the persistent stigma attached to online anonymity, before addressing specific tactics of online anonymity associated with queer and feminist values of privacy and mutual aid. Drawing on accounts of Craigslist users who saw anonymity as a protective form of control over their personal information, I outline ways in which anonymity is not solely an enabler for misogyny and homophobia, and can instead (or rather, also) be a subversive tool for self-expression and intimacy.
Fascist femboys, autogynephilia, and flattering narratives
Among those who believe [autogynephilia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard'stranssexualismtypology) is real and the primary explanation for many or mo...
Illegal, Immoral, and Mood-Altering
How Facebook and OkCupid Broke the Law When They Experimented on Users
Against the Couple-Form | LIES Journal
Libidinal flows cut through the social world. Amorous and sexual relations do not exist in some domain safely taped off from the rest of society. Rather they are constituent elements of nearly every aspect of social life. Desire flows and circulates amongst places of employment, intellectual debates, political organizing, artistic circles, playgrounds, and cemeteries. The elderly patient grabs at the breast of a nurse hunched over him. A governmental official strips his newly hired intern down to her leopard print thong during an important briefing in his office. The incarcerated man holds his hand up to the glass of the visiting booth, attempting to touch his wife after twenty years of their bodily separation. These flows of libidinal desire operate within and amongst broader social mechanisms, such that they help animate the dynamics of economic and political life. Often a locus of politics, desire permeates the so-called ‘public’ terrain.
Out of Sight; Out of Mind - Ewan’s Blog
Disability did not become fashionable. Disabled people became harder to ignore.
Is Bluesky's "Decentralization" Real? – The Empty Promise of DIDs and the Path to a WordPress-Style Ecosystem - Nightflight
Making Sense of Modern Pornography
While the Internet has made porn ubiquitous, it has also thrown the industry into severe decline.
A History of Turning Away
What does it mean, truly, to turn away from something?
