...no, really?

••• ISSUE #2 PREVIEW ••• COMING JULY 1, 2022

Written by Amy Huang and @xyai

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but it doesn’t serve my interests. how does it serve my interests?

heaven gaia spring/summer 2021 couture

Legendary

ok so yesterday i read jon ronson’s amazing book “so you’ve been publicly shamed”, and aside from being a great book with a lot of good insight on current internet callout culture, there was one specific part that i can’t stop thinking about.

it’s when he’s discussing one of the many cases of people who were publicly shamed he mentions through the book. the person in question is a woman who took a picture flipping off a monument to veterans and who then became the target of a massive harrassment campaign that got her fired as a result. 

because the picture lives on on google, the woman is in constant fear of losing any future job she might get, or of meeting new people in general. so jon puts her in touch with a company that’s dedicated to cleaning up people’s reputations online. what they do is basically to create a vast amount of online content about that person, so that the news of whatever they did that haunts them is pushed back to page 2 of google results, which, of course, very few people actually look.

the thing is that, in order to create this content, they need information about her, and so they start asking her the most inane things she might be into - like cats, disney or pop music. and then jon hits you, the reader, with this:

and this just… really hit a key point about this culture that i feel is rarely ever discussed. contrapoints briefly touched on it on her video about cancelling, when she talks about the contradiction between fans wanting creators to be “authentic” while also dragging them to hell for the slightest misstep, but she doesn’t really go in depth about it.

one video that does go in depth about it is pschyirl’s video on jenna marbles, “Why The End of Jenna Marbles Is The End of Authenticity”. it’s a great video that i highly recommend, and it basically points out how our current way of engaging with media disincourages creators to be remotely authentic, because authenticity requires being a human being, and part of being a human being is making mistakes.

and just… to me that just hits so deeply, and i think it goes way beyond social media platforms like youtube. there’s this contradictory demand that public figures “use their platforms” to raise awareness for important causes, while also holding the ones that frequently do to impossible standarts (jameela jamil immediately comes to mind). the safest way to be a public figure in 2020 is to be as silent as possible.

and this is often thought of as just a left problem, and don’t get me wrong, the “cancellation” aspect does tend to be left-wing leaning, but massive online mobs come from the right as well. and they also benefit from the essentialist discourse the left constantly clings to. in an essentialist world where creators are harshly judged as people by the media they make, it’s a lot easier, for example, to turn “cuties’s way of dealing with the sexualitization of children is not perfect and merrits critique” into “the director of cuties IS a literal pedophile”. the accusations are spearheaded by right wing people who are working on bad faith, but the essentialized version reaches the entire internet, and no one bothers to question it, and suddenly a female director who made a movie partially based on her own experiences growing up has to delete all her social media because of the harrassment she’s getting.

the message this sends to creators is to stay away from controversial subjects, even if those subjects happen to be relevant to you personally. it teaches artists to not take risks. and i can’t help but find it very, very sad.

This is how I feel very often. There are particular things you’re not allowed to wonder about. So much so that people like terfs and even fucking NAZIS recruit by going, “were you wondering about this until people shut you up? In our club you’re allowed to wonder about it.”

i hate the term “spinal fluid” it conjures up horrible imagery in my mind

(lightly taps a spigot i have attached to my spinal column) come get y’all juice

We’ve never met and I hope it stays that way

this is the most powerful reply ive ever received 

court jester sucking the king silly right there on his throne, in full view of the guards

His stupid little hat jingling away

the king develops a pavlovian response to jingling bells

This is the reason why I'm still in this post apocalyptic site, nowhere else we have this level of unhinged, unmarketable interaction. No corps, no social celebs, only pure chaos.

it’s the year 2080. the expressions “the horse has left the hospital” and “between a crematorium and a dildo store” have fully entered the lexicon even though barely anyone remembers where they originated. one day the kids who live in the Amazon Temperate Habitat Bubble next door ask me what was between the proverbial crematorium and dildo store in the first place. i rip off my Amazoxygen® Ventilator and gasp, “the fucking horse” and immediately die from the polluted air in my probably-covid-ravaged lungs. haunted by these cryptic last words, the kids bury themselves in the ancient runes of the Internet Archive until they find the meme that unlocks it all. the horse was one of the last presidents of the late american empire, a lynchpin in the slow disintegration of the union. suddenly, a drone flies directly through the window. “forbidden word detected: ‘union’,” it says, gearing up its Amazon Brainbuster Electric Reinforcement System. they run

Resurfacing from a long (SO LONG, SORRY) hiatus to share the fundraising campaign of a very good friend of mine! She started a small non-profit called the Immigrant History Initiative that works directly on issues of race, immigration, and social justice, with a focus on eradicating xenophobia by centering the voices & stories of immigrant communities.

The mission of this nonprofit is so close to my heart. I grew up in one of the whitest parts of America as a second-gen Asian immigrant, and I virtually *never* saw faces like mine in textbooks (except maybe as anonymous victims). I didn’t know Asian Americans had a history in the United States from before the 1900s, and maybe because of that, I felt like I didn’t have a claim on this country as my own. 

Immigrant History Initiative creates tangible resources to bring the histories of communities of color into the classroom, to kids like me who really needed it. It’s run by a team of volunteers, and both co-founders still aren’t taking a salary because they’re putting all the money back into the org. If you have some money to spare this holiday season, please consider giving to them! It will go a long way <3 And if not, please consider reblogging!

DONATE HERE

I know the folks who run this org and they’re doing good work around anti-racist education. If you have funds to spare, consider donating!

this winter is going to be very hard.

I keep seeing people nervously joking about april to september being nothing more than a black space and as someone who has been studying trauma for as long I have— don’t let it be. go back. look at the pictures you took on your phone, read old journal entries, if you don’t have them, use this last bit of summer to document beautiful moments, moments you were proud of, moments that comforted you, and start to build at least the beginnings of a kindhearted story about how you handled the spring and summer of 2020. that simple framework of a story is the scaffolding you’ll use for your future recovery, it is invaluable. let it be a black space if it wants to but scatter a few campfires in there for your own sake.

This is solid advice - depression makes you view life as an empty expanse and ruins your memory. Give yourself tools to argue with it - make sure you know it's a lie. If you let what the depression says be "true" it will only get its claws in deeper.

*ships m/f couples but in an un-mistakably bisexual way*

me writing fictional couples: oh wow…. the tenderness, the devotion, the romance

me irl:

One time my rabbi told us, “imagine you had a box with a little bit of god in it. What would you do with the box?”

So we were like ?? “We’d protect it and keep it nice and clean and polished” and he was like “your body’s that box. Stop eating markers”

Every time I come across this post the last sentence smacks me in the face