Sublime

Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

Here Kelly was borrowing a classic leftist technique: the demand for disavowal. If a given politician or a given political stance attracts the “wrong” type of audience, it’s presented as “problematic” on its face. This is the sophisticated version of saying the utterly unsophisticated “If he’s fer it, I’m agin’ it.” In a democracy every person’s vo

Putting humans back in the loop in certain capacities, such as through middleware, is potentially transformative. So is scaling back the algorithms. It’s probably time to get rid of wholly automated trends features. Gaming them is a key element in creating majority illusions, projecting false consensus, and driving abuse toward Main Characters.

Clinton’s treatment suggested a much larger cultural ill, one that had less to do with the specifics of her personality and more to do with the enduring structures of patriarchy—structures that had bearing on more than just the woman standing on the stage asking you to vote for her. It was one thing to dislike Clinton. It was quite another to ignor