Tara McMullin

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to... See more

This is, for many of us, the dream: unfettered commitment to externalizing our innards without concern for any gaze but our own. Reclaiming one’s time, you could say. But it requires nothing short of a battle.

Anything that we playbook becomes more legible to AI.

So we must burn the playbooks .

This is the real Butlerian Jihad, not destroying the machines, but destroying the playbooks that would turn us into machines.

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the machine process them in alien and opaque ways.

We need a politics of time that would enable more people to have time to do work that gives them satisfaction and to participate in real leisure, in the ancient Greek sense, rather than just snatch moments of relief. A progressive politics of time would also combat two frightening trends – the spread of the ‘panopticon state’ and ‘banopticon state’... See more

Status and Relatedness are stress/reward triggers and Attachment is a core human need. The exclusive "we" may reward Status for the ingroup members, but it threatens Status for the outgroup – especially those that want to belong. For outgroup members, the exclusive "we" meddles with the sense of Relatedness and creates insecure Attachment. Those... See more

There is a big difference between “We want to get this strike settled for the good of the US economy” and “We support the workers.”

Savior Complex is a slyly simplistic title.