Tara McMullin

What’s more, art is no longer semblance. It fuses with reality.

The need for romantic love is thus imagined as so deeply entrenched in the structures of feminine subjectivity that women desire nothing so much as to be safely ensconced in the institutions, marriage and family, that will secure it. As de Beauvoir describes the woman in search of love and marriage, “she chooses to want her enslavement so ardently... See more

And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit knowledge in action.

Willfulness can create all sorts of personal suffering because, at the end of the day, we don’t have control over all sorts of things, and certainly not over other people. Some walls are meant to be broken down or scaled, but others are clear signals to attempt a different tact.

What sorts of signals are we ignoring when we hit those concrete... See more

Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt.

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

Homelessness is about more than lacking a base that offers protection from the elements and material security. It’s about lacking an integrated identity, a “home” persona that is contained and shaped by, and active within, the home as a psychological boundary.