But intelligence, popularly taken to mean devious cleverness or maybe just privilege, has never been synonymous with moral goodness, and we should no longer blindly celebrate people for so low and ambiguous a bar as “changing the world.”

Gamergate revealed a group of people who had allowed themselves to be shaped by the rubrics of their marketing demographic and were not about to give up that ready-made identity; who had come to conflate being a man and consuming in a manly way; who policed their friends’ and brothers’ performance of masculinity, judging others using the criteria

Indeed, a person is free to buy an AR-15 but is not free from the fear of mass shootings. We are not free from the excesses of the superrich, even when they are hoarding resources and destroying the environment. They are free—and many of them think they should be free from criticism, too—because they earned it with their wealth. Freedom is not a

Yes, my adolescence was marked by apocalyptic thinking, since right after this hyped-up milestone for the Gregorian calendar, we descended into a decade of militarism, patriotic paranoia, Evangelical fervor, and cultural barrenness. That was also the decade the winters started getting shorter. I saw it with my own eyes. No snow until January.

A more precise term for this phenomenon is “postfeminism,” a philosophy co-opting certain elements of more radical feminist politics, like freedom of choice, but using them to reinforce traditional gender roles and other oppressive hierarchies.

The neoliberal public health apparatus maintains a moralistic emphasis on prevention, particularly of obesity, casting health as something individuals owe to society—that they should, if necessary, spend all their time and money on. It also frames health as purely a result of individual choices rather than social circumstances.

It was inevitable that I would grow up with warped ideas about my body, sex, and power, shaped as they were by an atmosphere of both conservative Christian backlash and gonzo exhibitionism, which colluded to create a culture of violent sexual obsession with teenage girls.

Maybe I’m being dramatic, but consider that the pro bono labor you unwittingly put into Enumerating yourself, collaborating on a massive data aggregation project with millions of other users, has perfected the technology corporations needed to further subjugate their most vulnerable workers.

The most basic lesson of social change is that we will not dismantle power by collaborating with it, and yet we need to learn it again and again.