insurrection

This was a tragic day for stability and peace. It was a massive victory for a movement that’s been agitating civil war for years. This is what the boogaloos and QAnons have been salivating over. The symbolism of taking Capitol Hill can’t be understated, and it’s going to fuel the growth of this insurrection tenfold in the coming months.

A lot of my rage today has been directed at the police. Watching them treat these terrorists so gently, seeing white supremacists walk home freely, unharmed, hand-in-hand with the police – it’s beyond infuriating after so many days and nights watching cops brutalize innocent people. But I also feel confusion, because today was the first day I wanted the cops to do their fucking jobs and put a stop to a violent mob threatening the security of our whole country.

My anger turns to fear as I think about the future. No one has the answers. No one knows the way out. The police are just a symptom. So is Trump. Yes, absolutely, impeach and arrest him before he nukes us into the stone age, but he could keel over tomorrow and the course of our country won’t change. That’s not despair or cynicism, it’s a goddamn fact. Too many people believe in false realities – wholeheartedly and without a shred of doubt – and they’re willing to die for these beliefs.

Our way of knowing is broken. We have no methods for reaching consensus. We have no ability to bridge gaps, to reach hearts and minds. Stuck in the time loop of each day’s scroll, it becomes harder to remember more than a few day’s events. A year of quarantine has pushed us ever further into our individual holes, accelerating the radicalization that seems to develop whenever we’re physically isolated but joined together on our digital islands of personal fixation. America is not special in this phenomenon.

Until we find a way to make sense of this insanely complicated world we’ve built around ourselves, it’s going to get worse.

stimulus

It’s stimulus time, which means it’s time to put the call out for donations again.

If you are financially able – which is to say, you’re not having trouble paying your bills, rent, and putting food on the table – please consider donating your stimulus. If you make too much to receive a stimulus, then set aside $600 (or more!) to donate. A lot of people have spent most of 2020 unemployed, and this stimulus is basically a joke compared to a year without work.

Start by making sure your friends and family are okay. Asking about other people’s financial situation can be sensitive – something I learned in 2020 is that many people are very reluctant to ask for or accept help, even when they’re at rock bottom. Here’s a few tips for navigating these conversations:

1. Give unconditionally and respect their privacy: don’t ask for specifics about their situation. Don’t ask what they need the money for.

2. Make it easy for them to accept help by removing power dynamics: don’t make it a loan, don’t expect anything in return. Owing debts to friends is a terrible feeling and can ruin relationships. 3. Turn it into an expression of love: tell people why you care about them enough to support them in this way. Make their fucking day.

If you don’t know anyone personally that needs help, then look after your local community. Restaurants, bars, clubs, music venues and event spaces have been asking for help all year. Google “<your city/neighborhood> mutual aid” and there’s a good chance you’ll see a variety of local organizations providing many kinds of aid in your neighborhood. The two biggest issues right now are homelessness and hunger, and money towards housing and feeding people is extremely “efficient” in terms of impact. If you want to see what your money does, they’ve all got newsletters and instagram accounts with regular updates. Here are three NYC-based orgs I can strongly recommend:

– Bed Stuy Strong does amazing work – food and PPE distribution, community cleanup, internet access, basically everything they can do to improve equity. Their guiding principles are an excellent, thoughtful read. https://bedstuystrong.com/

– Bushwick Ayuda Mutua is the same thing but for Bushwick. They’re doing reachouts in Maria Hernandez park all the time, and prioritize the hispanic community in Bushwick. https://bushwickayudamutua.com/

– Food Bank NYC is the most impactful org dollar-for-dollar in getting food to people in the city. There’s been record numbers of food insecure people this year and $20 is enough to supply 100 meals. https://www.foodbanknyc.org/

Then, if you’ve given to your friends and community, consider larger organizations. You can’t give to every cause in need, so I recommend focusing on areas you feel strongly about. What are the problems that keep you up at night or suck you in whenever you’re scrolling the feed? For me, I care about drugs, prisons, journalism, and technology, so I’ve been donating to these orgs:

– The Marshall Project provides the best investigate journalism for criminal justice in the country, and they offer a platform for incarcerated people to share their stories. https://www.themarshallproject.org/

– ProPublica focuses almost exclusively on deep investigate reporting, which are high quality and laser-focused on meaningful, relevant problems. https://www.propublica.org/

– Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is currently running the largest research study for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, which is a huge step towards decriminalization. https://maps.org/

There’s the classics, too – Planned Parenthood, ACLU – but for me, giving to large orgs is a draining exercise. You mostly get spam in the mail in return, which feels gross. But I do believe in their work.With any organization, it’s strongly recommended you set up recurring donations rather than donating a lump sum. This makes their budgeting process significantly easier and enables them to think more long-term about their work.

Whatever you do, please donate as much as you can. Find the people and causes you care about most, and make their day.

colonizer

this is probably the first year where i’ve spent significant time thinking critically about Thanksgiving. it’s not that I never knew the history – the genocide, the exploitation, the theft – but the nature of the holiday always felt apolitical to me. it’s just about gathering around food. what could be more harmless? lots of countries have fall harvest celebrations, after all.

this feeling was tied up in the idea that these sins are in the distant past. the damage is done. we can learn about the history, but it won’t change anything. it sucks, but what are you gonna do?

a turning point in my thinking here came through understanding a simple idea: many indigenous people reject the label “Native American” – because they were here before it was called America. the name itself erases their history. i learned how many Mexican and Mexican-American people are indigenous to these lands. here we have this endless conflict over “illegal immigration” – all over land we evicted them from, then we criminalized them for coming back to earn pennies per hour working our farms to fuel our ritual holiday food waste.

from there, i began to understand that this isn’t ancient history. theft of land continues, perhaps most visible through the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone Pipeline. today, right now, the virus is ravaging tribal communities that have been intentionally underserved by our government. the same engines of betrayal and murder are operating today, just as they were 500 years ago.

meanwhile, indigenous culture decorates the landscape around us. our streets, parks, cities, counties, and states use tribal names and language with no understanding of their meaning. i was born near the Natchez Trace, but never learned anything about the Natchez tribe. i grew up next to Cayuga lake, but for all of Ithaca’s woke trappings i never learned one iota of Cayuga or Seneca history. Brooklyn was once Lenape territory, but i’d never even heard that name until early this year. you can see what indigineous territories you occupy through this map: https://native-land.ca/

all of this is an area where i’m woefully unlearned. i’m working through the discomfort of accepting that i’m a settler, descended from settlers, and that is inextricable from my identity as a white American. i have much, much more to learn.

it’s hard. i still feel myself getting defensive when i listen and hear the raw anger of indigenous folks. it often feels hopeless and depressing the more i learn, but we call it work for a reason. it’s not fun. but it’s necessary.

old-fashioned

something that’s always tripping me up when I want to spend less time on social media is that i don’t want to lose sight of my friends. it’s nice to see your faces and a bit of what you’re up to. i’m lucky to know amazing artists and writers and organizers and meme curators whose work graces my feed once in a while.

but that’s like 10% of the experience here.

social media is a perpetual nightmare machine, endlessly zooming into our collective anxiety because that’s the most effective way to hold our attention and keep us posting. we have to get away from platforms so aggressively invested in our self-destruction.

divesting from these spaces means exploring other mediums of communication.the other day i grabbed a paper and pen to scribble a note for a friend, and found myself with a grotesque bit of relief: this paper wouldn’t be scanned for advertising opportunities. it was safe and purely personal. i knew who i was writing for: not some pseudo-random algo-mixture of 500 acquaintances, but exactly one person.

so.

if you would like to receive a real-live handwritten paper letter, stamped and sent via the USPS, send me your address. i will write about whatever i can think of and maybe you’ll feel inspired to write back, or maybe not. i don’t mind.

if you would like to send me a letter, i am happy to give you my address. i will promise to write you back.

if you’re thinking “that sounds neat but i don’t really know this guy so that would be weird”, that’s okay. give it a shot! what else you gonna do in quarantine?

biden my tongue

now that the voting’s over, i can finally stop biting my tongue and rag on what a garbage candidate Biden has been.

as we transition into this fresh hell where we play footsie with a coup, i simply could not imagine a campaign i feel less compelled to rally behind. they are empty vessels, an utterly bleak and soulless vision for the future of society.

this campaign was literally saved by trump’s relentless incompetence with covid. that’s what it took to squeeze Joe hair-sniffin’, shoot-em-in-the-leg, you-aint-black, you-know-the-thing Biden through on the narrowest of margins: a global goddamn pandemic.

the democratic party is pushing the limits of my pragmatism. this shit isn’t working.

another check-in

Time for another covid check-in.

Daily case rates are spiking, and not just in the US. Today, the EU surpassed our daily new case rate. At the current rate of increase, active caseloads both here and abroad will have exceeded all previous records. We’re in for a hard winter. (https://www.nytimes.com/…/coronavirus-cases-us-surge.html)

THE BAD NEWS: we have a long road ahead of us.

– Reinfection is possible, although seemingly unlikely. We know there is some immunity, but reinfection has been documented among individuals with healthy immune systems. There’s still little information on how long post infection immunity/resistance may last. ANTIBODIES ARE NOT A VACCINE.

– There are consistent reports of lasting side-effects – most commonly mental confusion and physical fatigue. There appear to be significant increases in the risk of stroke or other heart disease during and after infection. (https://www.sciencemag.org/…/brain-fog-heart-damage…)

– The CDC and WHO both appear to be suffering from heavy political influence, which makes it less likely that we’re going to get a coordinated governmental response and makes it harder to find trustworthy data. (https://www.propublica.org/art…/inside-the-fall-of-the-cdc)

– Vaccines are coming, but as of right now it looks like they will be expensive and limited in quantity. There are insane logistical challenges to distributing these. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byW1GExQB84)

THE GOOD NEWS: we are not powerless.

– Masks work. They work so good. There are so many case studies where every unmasked person in a room was infected, while the masked people were not. Wear a mask. (https://www.bloomberg.com/…/this-starbucks-in-south…)

– Outdoors is safe. Period. The only caveat here is AIRFLOW – if fresh air can’t easily move through the space, then it’s less safe and you better wear a mask.

– There are 2 ways to make indoors safer: open windows and air filtration. Open windows are hard to do in the winter, but for short visits or higher risk scenarios, it’s an option. Common air filters are cheap and effective. (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/why-arent-we…/614737)

– There’s a magic number for time spent indoors: 15 minutes. There are few known superspreader events associated with sub-15 minutes spent indoors. By adding masks, distancing, air filters or open windows, and low exertion, then significantly more time can be safely spent indoors. (https://www.npr.org/…/coronavirus-faq-whats-the-deal…)

– Surfaces aren’t the main concern. Keep washing your hands of course, but you don’t need to be sanitizing every five minutes. (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/scourge-hygiene…/614599/)

– Kids seem to be mostly unaffected and aren’t superspreaders. This is especially true for K-6. The main concern is protecting staff. (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/schools-arent…/616669/)

– Fatality rates are dropping and hospital stays are shortening. Generally speaking, doctors know how to treat this.

Get your flu shot, please.

tech working

my brain has been spinning off in so many different directions this last month. i desperately want to write it out, but somehow the only thing i can seem to focus on are these software engineering thinkpieces where i spew jargon about niche technical errata.

never once in my life have i had this happen. i don’t know why i’m writing these things, it just feels autonomic or subconscious, like some kind of self-defense mechanism in the face of huge, ominous portents.

compared to anything else i’ve written, i’ve never cared this little about how they’re received. which is not to say that i don’t care (because i can’t not care a ~bit~), but it doesn’t bother me whether anyone reads these things. they’re so disposable.

it’s especially weird because six months ago i was looking for ways out of tech. i’ve been pretty well convinced for a while now that software and the internet has done way more harm than good. this feeling grows day by day, but lately i find myself drawn back in to technology. i spent four days straight watching talks from dev conferences, and since then engineering videos have returned to my daily media diet. just loading my brain up with the minutiae of servers and databases. i feel like a pacifist studying howitzers.

maybe it’s all a way to take a break from bad news. but there’s this voice in my head that keeps reminding me that this is kinda what i’m good at. not that it’s my only skill, but i’ve been living and breathing computers since my earliest memories. i’ve been getting paid for tech work since i was 15. maybe i shouldn’t throw that away at a time when software is wreaking havoc on the world.

it’s not as if i know know what to do with this knowledge, though. i find myself embroiled in very basic philosophical questions. how do i have the best impact? where should i focus my efforts? and for the first time i’m seriously wondering if i should just aim to make more money so i can pour it into the people and places and ideas i believe in.

i don’t have any love for money, i hate the idea of chasing after it as an end. but right now, today, what will feed and house and heal so many people can be bought with money. i honestly do not know how to change our government, its laws, its institutions, or its economy. i don’t see many other people that seem to know how, either. but maybe i can at least shift resources?

then another part of my brain kicks in and laughs at me for this capitalist indoctrination i’ve succumb to. that’s exactly what ~they~ want me to do, compromise my labor in the pursuit of currency. i’m fooling myself if i think i can morally justify this machiavellian pursuit of social justice. another voice chimes in to say we’re in a goddamn culture war and money is what buys the ads that keep ben shapiro’s fascist garbage pouring across everyone’s screens.

my head aches.

looking forward

a bit of a raw one for you today.

whenever I check right-wing twitter or news, it feels like an alternate reality. police brutality doesn’t exist; but if it does exist, it’s always justified. covid isn’t real; but if it is real, 150,000 deaths is nbd. systemic racism is a myth, but also every non-white culture is morally and intellectually inferior.

meanwhile, in my personal feeds every day: brand new footage of police beating the shit out of innocent people; fundraisers for people trying to avoid homelessness; teachers begging not to re-open schools because they don’t want to die; karen going apeshit at the grocery store when asked to wear a mask.

we, as a country, can’t even agree that putting on a mask is the right move. it’s the simplest possible action, a mild interference into our daily lives backed by mountains of evidence – and this, too, is just another battleground. what hope does this leave for the deep, systemic change that’s needed? how can we possibly reckon with our country’s foundational wrongdoing?

in early June, after the protests had been going a few weeks, a coworker asked me “when this would all be over” and i laughed. i told them it was probably going to get worse. at the time, i was just thinking about the material conditions ahead: institutional gridlock, unemployment, evictions, degradation of core infrastructure. that was before the feds attacked Portland, and it wasn’t even on my radar that paramilitary troops would be agitating for riots in multiple cities.

it feels so so hyperbolic to write this out, but it’s hard to see how we avoid a civil war. because that’s what happens if we can’t agree on the most basic tenets of humanity, right? that’s what happens when they send wannabe soldiers to quell demands for justice, right? what’s the alternative? what part of the last 20 years in american history suggests that we’re going to successfully navigate towards a peaceful resolution in this disagreement over our way of life?

people keep saying they can’t wait for 2020 to be over, and all i’m thinking is: what the flying fuck are you looking forward to in 2021?

slacktivism

Even if you’re not an activist, there are many ways you can be subtly supportive on social media.

You can make space for the conversation by posting less. Many people will only see a handful of posts each day – what will those be? Will your post be helpful or informative? Will it draw attention to those in need? Or will it be lifting yourself up? Be conscientious about how you consume space.

You can lift up other voices. The way the algorithm works is pretty simple: comments, likes, and shares all increase a post’s visibility, pushing it to the top of everyone’s feed. If you find good information or perspectives, help spread that message. Encourage the people creating and sharing helpful content. Be generous.

You can ignore toxic contributions. The best thing you can do when you encounter an awful take on social media is just to keep scrolling. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all track how long you look at individual posts – it’s one of their measurements of engagement. Don’t comment, don’t add an angry react – any response from you will increase that post’s visibility for all of that person’s followers. If you feel it’s important to respond, do it through DMs. Be cautious of how you spend your energy.

The movement is still going very strong, even if it’s not on the front page of the news. Minor victories have been achieved, but there’s so much farther to go. To succeed, we have to be thoughtful and strategic.

work-appropriate

I’d like to share something I wrote for work today, after the head of HR warned me that abolition is too politically charged to discuss in the workplace:

In the last two weeks, I have personally witnessed acts of extreme violence. I was just a few feet away when two NYPD cars drove into a crowd, running several people over. I watched as a line of police charged into a group of peaceful protesters, grabbing and beating protestors and bystanders alike as they fled. Many of my friends have been pepper sprayed, tear gassed, and arrested during legal, peaceful protests here in NYC, as well as other cities around the country. These are facts. This isn’t just something I saw on the news. I experienced it.

Part of why we’re seeing such widespread and prolonged protests is because millions around the country have also just had this experience for the first time. But the truth is that this kind of violence has been the constant experience of Black Americans for centuries. This is a fact, and it is the reality we’re seeking to change when we affirm that Black Lives Matter. It is deeply uncomfortable to face, and most certainly inconvenient for the workplace.

I recognize the importance of the workplace as a safe space. We’re here to work, and many people of all political persuasions see the workplace as a refuge amidst the instability of the world around us. It can be a place to focus on something less contentious than the deluge of anxiety and bad news we find elsewhere. But I don’t believe we can ignore this moment and maintain a clean conscience.

To disallow conversation about the movement that is currently sweeping across this country is to protect the status quo of overwhelming discrimination and segregation throughout our society. Yes, these are fraught and challenging conversations to have. I recognize that some members of our staff may have loved ones that are police officers who currently feel threatened by this movement and these ideas. But part of how we got here was our unwillingness to have these difficult exchanges – with family, friends, and yes – even coworkers.

Thank you for reading.

duped

Last night I got duped into a PR stunt for the NYPD.

It started with a large crowd of at least 3000, and we marched well into the night. The mood was positive and peaceful, but everyone was prepared for the worst from the NYPD. They’ve been brutalizing protesters, bystanders, and essential workers at night with impunity, and many of us fully expected to be arrested. We all know the curfew is just a blank check to let the NYPD to criminalize everyone.

As the crowd thinned out, a young Black man in a beret was leading the chants with his megaphone – he seemed to be the organizer. The usual shouts of “How do you spell racist // N-Y-P-D” were replaced with more generic messages about unity and peace, and then “N-Y-P-D // raise your first”. A police sergeant started walking along the side with us; I figured he was just keeping tabs on us. A full news crew materialized.

Around 11:00, the man in the beret informed us that the police would be “allowing us to disperse”. He’d made a deal that if we went home at 11:30, no one would be arrested. Again, unusual, but we were down to just a few hundred and we were tiring out. No need to force a confrontation, I guess.

He lead us through wall of riot police, who stepped aside to let us through. We stopped at an intersection and kneeled, surrounded by a hundred police in riot gear. He gave us a speech about ending racism and started to give out his Instagram handle before the crowd shouted him down. We were flanked by camera crews. They let us go, but I heard reports of some people being detained anyways.

When I got home, I started diving in. His social media didn’t show any evidence of political activism. He’s a model and influencer from Arizona, working for a PR agency specializing in “street teams”. He’s been interviewed by three major news networks in two days. There’s a post on his Instagram from yesterday asking if he can borrow a beret (now deleted). Other people on twitter dug up a public Facebook post where he’s defending Trump.

I’m sharing this story because it’s part of the learning process. I’m new to protesting, and as good as my intentions are, if I’m not careful I can end up contributing to the enemy. This was also the first of my four protests this week which had any “major” news coverage, on a day where there were literally hundreds throughout the city. Millions took to the streets this weekend.

Be critical. Be cautious. Pay attention to the organizers and their goals. As we switch into marathon mode after one hell of a sprint, we have to maintain focus and protect each other. We will defund and dismantle the NYPD.

moral debt

There’s a common misunderstanding about white supremacy, that it primarily describes the beliefs and goals of radical hate groups – people that are easily identified as racists. This focuses on the extremes, making it easy to compartmentalize the problem onto a few bad actors. This is a form of distancing that seeks to absolve individuals from responsibility.

The largest vectors of white supremacy are not neo-nazis: it is the institutions we engage with every day. There is a whiteness built into our technology, government, academia, business, and media that persists across generations. The law itself is encoded with white values. White culture propagates itself through the language and mannerisms we enforce in daily interactions. The ubiquity of this whiteness gives it that most powerful status: the default, the normal, the expected.

The police are, if nothing else, enforcers of the status quo. Their obscenities are an accurate reflection of American attitudes and priorities. We can micromanage the details of their job as much as we please – body cameras, bias training, civilian oversight – but they will remain a mirror of our institutions. Eliminating police brutality without addressing white supremacy is not possible.

When we talk about confronting systemic racism, we must understand that this doesn’t mean weeding out individual racists until we’re left with something wholesome, as though they are unexpected outliers. No, it is the system itself that perpetuates oppression, because that is the foundation of our country. We have created elaborate buffers that disguise this discrimination through mountains of bureaucracy and economic segregation. The benefits of privilege are now constant and invisible, encouraging many middle-class whites to believe white supremacy is not relevant to their daily life.

As a white person, I inherited a moral debt from my ancestors. I didn’t create these institutions, but I am nonetheless complicit. Understanding the existence of my privilege is not sufficient: I have a duty to pursue a better way of life for my community. It’s my job to aggressively expand my definition of community to include more than just those who look and sound like me. It’s my responsibility to become intimately acquainted with the struggles of others, so that I can dissolve my hegemonic assumptions about what is best for everyone.

crumbling

gotta get some bummer thoughts out.

i don’t know what i should be feeling. there’s relief that we got through the first wave, happiness for warm air and sunshine. but there were a lot of sirens yesterday and it’s hard not to feel paranoid about that. i don’t want to go back to hearing sirens every 20 minutes throughout the entire day. during the peak, it was non-stop, one after the other, day after day.

it’s a an odd thing, because normally you don’t notice the sirens in new york. but you never knew what they’re for – a heart attack, a bike accident – it could be anything. this time you knew exactly what all of those sirens meant. and every one of them stings.

there’s the constant frustration of not knowing what’s happening around the country. are daily cases increasing? deaths? hospitalizations? the dashboards i used to check daily are no longer accurate – our reporting infrastructure is broken, and some states are intentionally misreporting (if they’re even collecting the data). the US has no trustworthy authorities. the CDC has bungled basic guidelines too many times. it’s every state for themselves out there.

even the “established” sources of information feel woefully irrelevant now. it’s not that i doubt their facts, but their editorial strategy is just so ineffective. it’s brutal to read the NYT and Wapo as they flail impotently, whinging about Trump while clinging to this failed idea that journalism should be objective and impartial. to me, their entire brand is summed up by one of their senior editors proclaiming without the slightest hint of irony that he doesn’t vote because that would compromise his journalistic integrity.

i burned out on doing my own research, which involved digging through twitter to find quality takes from epidemiologists and statisticians and journalists watching other countries. it just takes so much work to find qualified experts with well-formed opinions on each new problem. once i hit the brick wall of “nobody seems to know if antibody tests are worth anything” i ran out of gas.

it’s no wonder that conspiracy theories are exploding right now. we don’t have a shared source of truth. it’s been decades since we had that, i guess, but now that illusion has faded, so people are inventing their own truths.

the intense daily sadness of early quarantine has faded. now, it’s just the throbbing ache of living in a crumbling country.

day 40

Been trying hard to keep it constructive on social media, but on day 40, I must vent.

Today, I am a bowl of cold noodles. I’m disintegrating into a gelatinous goo of frustration. I am one-tenth of a human being. I’ve been holding my breath for so long. Just keep holding. And holding. And holding. Because that’s all there is to do. There’s no choice in the matter.

Some days, I can see the silver linings. The possibilities for change. The ways this can push us to be better, to grow, to adapt. I take solace in knowing we’re all in this together. It’s cool to feel like we’re all on this same wavelength. That doesn’t happen very often, you know? It makes for a sense of oneness, even if it’s kinda dark.

I know that these are moods. That some days, I will wake up with a tendency to see one more than the other. There’s a good chance I’ll wake up tomorrow or the next day and feel a little better, for no particular reason.

Today, I’m missing the music more than ever. I miss being sweaty. I miss the stupidly loud sound systems, the sticky smell of the fog, the sweet taste of mate, the acidic sting of cigarette smoke. I miss looking across the dance floor, recognizing the silhouette of a good friend and feeling that little spark of excitement as we greet each other.

I miss browsing the events on FB and RA to try and pick out what I’d go to this weekend. I miss the “ooh” moment of skimming IG stories when I see a good flyer and looking up the event to RSVP. I miss waking up on Saturday and Sunday morning to review the posts and see how other parties turned out.

I miss leaving the dance floor at midnight to go outside and complain about all the normies, then sticking it out til 5am when things really get good. I miss rolling my eyes at the drunk bro who’s stepped on my feet three times in the last fifteen minutes. I miss making up an excuse to leave a boring conversation and I’d kill just to get overcharged for a bottle of warm water.

I’m tired of the sirens. I’m tired of thinking about the future and wondering what’s waiting for us there. I’m tired of shitty video calls with all their compression artifacts and lag and asking fifty times every day if you could please repeat that. I’m exhausted with our government – not just the white house, mind you – and I’m so unbelievably tired of being scared for the well-being of my friends.

Thanks for listening. This was cathartic to write.

P.S. If you need help with groceries or bills, please message me. I will help you, no questions asked.

tech privilege

Gainfully employed friends in tech: let us talk. Heart-to-heart.

You’re working from home full-time now. Maybe you were doing that from time to time anyways, so the quarantine hasn’t disrupted your work too much. You’re feeling the same perilous anxieties and mortal frustrations as everyone else, but when it’s all said and done: your job is safe and stable (for now). You’re still pulling in six figures. Your paycheck hasn’t changed.

You, my dear friend in tech – the programmer, the designer, the product manager – you are the beneficiary of some of the mightiest privilege on earth right now. You already had it pretty good, as far as jobs in America go. Paid time off, a dubious collection of “options”, health insurance, cute little vegan snacks in the office kitchen. Now, you don’t have to go outside to earn your living. You are among the least exposed people to the disease, and this change demanded nothing permanent from your way of life.

Your community needs your help. Whatever that community is, there are people in it that are struggling. They lost their jobs and they’ve only got enough savings to last through the next month or two. The government is not going to help. Those paltry $1200 checks? Fuck knows when they’ll arrive. The unemployment office is a shitshow; people are calling thousands of times a day and can’t get through. 17 million people are calling at the same time. America has no safety net.

You need to be giving. You need to be giving generously and repeatedly. A few bucks here and there is not going to cut it. People need to fucking eat. Think about how much it costs to eat for a day and multiply that by 30. Find the people and the causes you care about and make their fucking day.

checking in, again

Time for another check-in.

First up: we need to accept that this is not going to be over in a month. Unless we develop an affordable, effective, mass-producible vaccine within the next 6 months, it’s going to run its course through the entire globe. During that time, we’ll have to continue social distancing. We may get some relief during the summer as we enjoy sunlight and fresh air, but it’ll be waiting for us again in the fall and winter.

If you haven’t already, talk to your parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles – anyone in your life over the age of 50 must be distancing themselves – ideally self-quarantined. Make it clear that this is not something to be trifled with.

As the World Health Organization adviser Bruce Aylward clarified last week, a ‘mild’ case of COVID-19 is not equivalent to a mild cold. Expect it to be much worse: fever and coughing, sometimes pneumonia—anything short of requiring oxygen. ‘Severe’ cases require supplemental oxygen, sometimes via a breathing tube and a ventilator. ‘Critical’ cases involve ‘respiratory failure or multi-organ failure.’

James Hamblin at The Atlantic

We must adopt a collectivist mindset. It’s not about what you or I want, but what WE need. This is an opportunity for our country to grow. Overnight, millions are facing unemployment – in a matter of days and weeks, they will not be able to pay rent or buy food. How will we take care of them? GoFundMe and Patreon are not going to cut it this time. We have to take care of each other. No one left behind.

As the social scientist Arthur Frank reminds us in The Wounded Storyteller, the body in illness is not a ‘monad’—meaning a unit of one—although our entire health-care system is built on this notion: the individual hospital beds, the sense of isolation. Rather, it is inherently “dyadic,” because the body is never not in relation to others, especially in cases of contagious illness. The sick body is always in dialogue with the medical system, with spouses, and so on. Research showing that diabetic patients with empathetic doctors have better outcomes than those with brusque doctors, for example, highlights the material and corporeal reality of Frank’s point: The body is a social encounter, not just a vessel for our hyper-individualism.

Megan O’Rourke at The Atlantic

Look at how China, Korea, and Taiwan have handled this: mass mobilization. All hands on deck. Strong central planning. Can you imagine doing that here?

But change is afoot. Millions are working from home for the first time – potentially changing the workplace forever. Personally, I found remote work to be very empowering and returned a lot of control over my life away from my employers. This could be a huge power shift back to workers and communities.

There will be silver linings throughout this disaster. We have to find them and use this opportunity to make our country a place worth living. Look at what’s happening already: mandatory paid sick leave! The first bump to unemployment in years! Think of how much more we can do. Now is the time to strike.

Lastly: squash the conspiracy theories! So far I’ve already seen:
* The CIA engineered it to tank China’s economy (more popular a month ago, for obvious reasons)
* Democrats did it to win the election
* Trump did it to close the borders

I can’t wait to hear more. The truth is not hard to find: it came from a Chinese “wet” market where many types of wild animals are kept in extremely poor conditions. This video does a good job explaining this (as well as the origin of SARS) without xenophobia.

checking in

Time for a coronavirus check-in.

I don’t talk about work much, but my job is in health care. I build software that serves particularly frail elderly folks – in other words, the most vulnerable population in the coming pandemic. I am NOT an expert, but I do work with a variety of people whose job it is to stay informed. As this thing spreads, so will misinformation and confusion, and the best defense against panic is preparation. So I want to share the information I’ve seen so far.

This is happening. Over the course of this pandemic, somewhere between 40 and 70% of us will be infected. Many of us will not show symptoms, and many more will not experience any serious harm. It’s the ~10% who do experience major complications that we must be concerned for. That’s the elderly (or even middle-aged), folks with respiratory problems, immune-compromised, or anyone that’s already sick with another disease (see this).

What matters is the rate of infection. Yes, we’re all going to get it – but if those infections are spread out across months and years rather than days and weeks, far fewer people will die. Good personal hygiene (washing your hands, not touching your face, coughing into your elbow) isn’t just to protect yourself: it’s to protect others and slow the spread (see this).

Quarantine is the best protective measure. Current estimates suggest that the infectible area is within 6 feet: basically, if you’re sharing air (mask or otherwise), you’re at risk. Duration of exposure increases risk. Think about the cruise ships: most of those people never touched each other, but they all got infected together (see this).

Don’t buy masks. Sorry, but health care workers need them far, far more than you do. Production capacity is far below demand, and it’ll remain there for many weeks or months. Their main virtue for the general public is to stop you from touching your face anyways and there’s other ways to accomplish that.

Our health care system is going to be overloaded. It’s a treatable disease, but up to 10% of cases require a lengthy hospital stay. We’re going to run out of hospital beds and ventilators – optimistic estimates place this around late May. We’re going to run out of masks and other protective gear to keep health care workers from getting sick. When this happens, far more than just the infected will begin to suffer. (see this and this).

Nobody knows how bad this will get, but the prognosis is grim. The solution is not to panic, but it’s not to continue business as usual, either. We need to enthusiastically support strong, decisive responses: canceling events, closing schools, mandatory remote work, and self-quarantines. This means we need to be thinking about the members of our community that will suffer when people stay indoors. Anyone working paycheck-to-paycheck, whose jobs are in the service industry, whose businesses depend on putting lots of people in small rooms. They’re going to be hurting.

China got through the first wave by instituting some of the strictest quarantines modern society has ever seen (see this piece for a great perspective from Wuhan). But they – like Japan and South Korea – also already have a strong culture supporting this response.

We don’t have this on any level. Our health care system intentionally leaves many people without access to care. Our government doesn’t have the power to institute serious or swift reform. Our culture and habits around hygiene are under-developed. Half of our media is committed to framing this as a hoax because the president decided this, too, should be a political battleground, goddamn his miserable soul.

But it’s also an opportunity to grow as a society. It’s kind of inspiring, in a weird way, to see that we’re still capable of reacting to bad news, to see people take this problem seriously in a time of numbness amidst bad news. Our individualistic ways are going to cost us, in the coming months. Maybe we’ll learn some of the behaviors and values we need to tackle other societal challenges, like climate change. Who knows.

techade

Exactly ten years ago, I quit my first office job. I was a sys admin (the IT guy) for this hilariously dysfunctional company – the sort of business that stayed afloat only because it had cornered the market on an obscure machine that big manufacturers were willing to pay silly piles of cash for.

I found the job on craigslist. My interview was to get their emails working again because they’d gotten a virus that was sending out ads for homeopathic pills from their servers, so they’d been blacklisted as spam by Microsoft. I didn’t know what I was doing but I wore a belt clip for my blackberry and that meant something in those days, dammit.

Everything about it was comically toxic. The lead engineer left in the middle of a Tuesday and sent an email a week later to let everyone that he was kayaking for a month. The secretary was desperate to get fired; she would intentionally fuck up in the most obvious ways possible, but the CEO refused to give her the satisfaction of receiving unemployment checks. He was a shrill, anxiety-inducing person by default. He relished in the chance to berate his underlings, and his shrieking carried through the whole building. It was the kind of office where you’d walk in and hear someone crying, and you knew he was in today.

One day the internet cut out in the conference rooms. To find out where the cables had been run, I met with the architect of the building. His office was in the loading bay, where he could chain smoke through 3 packs a day. While we pored over blueprints of the building he told me how the magic of marriage died after the first time he saw his wife taking a shit.

My boss had a remarkable ability not to absorb the chaos around him. In his little bits of free time, he’d teach me how to run scripts or crimp cables. He ate pasta salad for lunch every day while he watched Greek, a show about frat culture. He told me he used to compete in professional beer pong competitions.

I lasted about 4 months. It was Christmas Eve and I was on the phone with our internet provider trying to restore service (again). The CEO rushed up to me in a panic, demanding that I show him how to delete voice mails on his new iPhone so that his inbox wasn’t full any more. I tried explaining I was fixing the company-wide internet outage, but he was uninterested. Something about juggling those two tasks broke my brain, and I never showed up again. I told my boss I was going back to school. I didn’t, but I wanted to, because I was terrified of falling into a future where I’m stuck. Cornered into eating shit from bad people.

Work is a lot better, these days. But I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it means to work in technology this last year. And I’m not happy with it. This is the first in a series of meanderings on that.

impeachment

I wish I could be excited about impeachment.

It’s not that it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s purely symbolic – and that’s what it is, I’m afraid – shaming the world’s most visible bigot is a worthwhile exercise. It signals to the world that much of our country rejects what he represents. And there’s at least some temporary satisfaction in watching him squirm.

But in terms of changing our political fortunes, it’s cosmically irrelevant.

This process isn’t going to make him less popular. It will play into the endless fantasy that he’s a victim of the deep state. When the senate inevitably fails to convict him, he’ll hoist it up as a trophy of exoneration at his rallies. His supporters will celebrate and feel further emboldened in their fever dream of white supremacy.

Everything about the impeachment process assumes we still live in a functioning democracy. But we don’t. The architecture of our government and electoral process is fundamentally flawed. Our constitution is woefully broken. Our checks and balances turn out to be laughably flimsy, built on an assumption of good faith participation. That hasn’t been true for decades.

These last four years, my whole mindset about politics has transformed. I no longer believe in incremental change or moderation as a path to a better country. Those are the tools of a civil society seeking to balance the valid needs and wants of many different groups. We’re way past that.

We need massive, sweeping reform. We need a constitution that reflects the concerns of the modern era, written by better people than rich, white slave-owners. A bill of rights that reflects a holistic morality and a genuine guarantee for a decent life.

I’ve tried to avoid letting my thoughts stray into this kind of naive idealism. But if the foundation is garbage, we have to fix that first. Trump isn’t an anomaly. He’s the symptom of a disease that America has always had, the inevitable product of our inhumane systems of law.

Impeachment feels good for a day, but the cancer remains untreated.

calling

around 7am i sat down for a rest. a stranger turned around and started chatting me up as we shared a cigarette. then they launched into a fifteen-minute monologue.

about me.

they said that they saw me everywhere this year and that i was usually alone. they could never imagine going out without their friends, but it gave them hope just knowing that i could do it. they said they saw a passion so strong it made them want to find something in life they loved as much as i loved dancing. they said whenever they saw me on the dance floor, they saw the party.

i hesitate to share this because i’m not trying to flaunt anything. the dance floor is not about ego.

but encouragement like this tells me that what i’m trying to do matters to at least a few people out there. that my efforts are not in vain. because i don’t just dance for myself. i’ve done that a hundred times over already. often, now, i’m dancing for the party, to loosen up the crowd and set the vibe. for the local DJ that needs to know they’re worthy even if they didn’t pack the house tonight. for my friends, to keep their energy up and make them feel safe.

i just passed two years since my first rave in Brooklyn (Black Hole’s 1-year anniversary). i remember the fear and anticipation of going out in those days – not knowing what to expect, being completely alone thirty, forty, fifty nights over. but i knew i loved the music, and i knew i wanted to be a part of these experiences. i let my ears guide me.

i still feel like a loner sometimes. i wish i were better at making conversation; i kick myself at all the missed opportunities where i can’t think of something to say and miss out on a chance to get to know an acquaintance better.

the more i learn about our community, the more i see its imperfections and injustices. but my love for this continues to grow. i feel more strongly than ever that this is where most of my energy in life is going to be spent. i love this music. i love the people. i love these environments. i’ve never felt more fulfilled and more alive than on the dance floor at sunrise.

if there’s such a thing as a calling in life, this is it.

unfollowed

today i unfollowed the last (vocally) conservative friend i have left on fb.

it took me this long because he was symbolic of a certain possibility i once believed in. that one day, there would be a moment i could intervene, to make a difference, to reach across the aisle. but over the last four years, i’ve watched him gradually embrace every single pillar of bigotry and self-destruction in modern conservative ideology.

i thought about unfollowing him so many times before. when he started spamming the transphobic pseudoscience. when he discovered that most wretched factory of ignorant hot takes, the Babylon Bee. when he found his way into evangelicalism and suddenly fetuses were a top priority. after every mass shooting, he would instantly transform into a human rights activist for Chicago and Philadelphia, deploying the latest gun violence whataboutisms hot off the Breitbart / Washington Examiner / Fox News presses.

over and over i told myself, i can’t look away. i don’t want to be naive. i need to know what’s happening over there.

but i can’t do it anymore. i’ve thrown in the towel. i’m done.

if there’s one thing that turning 30 has clarified for me, it’s that i gotta pick my battles. i only have so much time, so much energy. death’s knocking at the door. every moment i waste staring in shock and horror at his lunacy is time taken away from myself and my community. it does not better me, and social media is not a platform for changing hearts and minds.

this also mirrors a larger shift for me in the last year. i’ve stopped my daily reading of the Washington Post and NYT – not because i distrust their reporting, but because the daily news cycle seems to be an overwhelming source of toxicity for everyone on the planet. i try to keep most of my news and political reading to long-form essays (n+1 is the best nonfiction periodical in the country right now) and investigative journalism (shoutout to ProPublica, Southern Poverty Law Center, and The Marshall Project). obviously i can’t avoid lots of daily news since i’m on social media every day, but i no longer seek it out. it’s been a good change.

today, what tipped me over the edge was this Toni Morrison quote. i’ll be totally honest here: i’d literally never heard of this woman before. yes, i am an unread heathen. but it’s a great quote.

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

there will always be one more thing.

i’ve reached a point where i no longer wish to ever argue with people. i will continue to make arguments. i’ll be critical, offer insight, and make observations. i’ll keep writing. i’m going to live the best possible life i can, one that demonstrates the harmony and euphoria that’s only made possible when you’re a decent fucking human being to everyone around you.

but i’m not going to hash it out with some fool that cannot see the racism coursing through his every action. that energy will be saved for the people in my life that need it.

educating

i met a guy from saudi arabia the other night. he came up to me at the end because i was dancing my ass off and said i looked like someone who knew what this was all about. he was brand new to the dance scene and had all sorts of questions about how to find events, how to behave, and what the culture is about.

he struck me as someone that brought some problematic attitudes and behaviors into the space that night. he mentioned he didn’t tip the bartenders. he asked if he ought to bribe the bouncers because he didn’t bring any women with him. his impression of the scene was clearly built around the most toxic aspects of mainstream clubs and festivals.

so i spent the next hour explaining everything i could. i walked him through tipping culture – that you never, ever withhold tips just because someone wasn’t nice enough to you. that you don’t come to bossa (or any rave, for that matter) to be waited on – you’re there for the music and the company, not to be served. i explained that weekends can be rough for the staff because there’s so many tourists and visitors that don’t know the culture or the norms. that when people aren’t friendly, it’s not always about him.

he asked me if there was a lot of racism in the scene. he spent some time living in north carolina and told me about all the places that treated him poorly because he’s arab. he asked if he would ever be turned away or charged extra because of his ethnicity.

i said that yes, sometimes there is racism here. but he’d never be turned away from a party because of the color of his skin. at least, not the places i go.

i told him that the soul of techno and house is multicultural. that part of what we love and cherish about this scene is how many different kinds of people it draws in. that it’s something we celebrate and encourage as much as we can. this seemed to blow his goddamn mind.

i don’t always have the energy or patience to educate people. sometimes i go out and i just wish everyone knew the fucking rules and they’d stop causing problems. but other nights, i live for those opportunities to educate. to show people how to be.

rut

an unsorted thought dump.

there’ve been a lot more homeless folks near my office in the last month. i suppose it’s because it’s warm out now. the dystopia of it is impossible for the brain to resolve. you tune it out, because that’s the only choice. but sometimes the smell is overwhelming. or sometimes you’re face-to-face with someone’s bare ass cheeks as you walk up the stairs from the subway. how many times this week will i wonder if that person sprawled on the ground is asleep or dead? oops, better not be late for standup.

on the subway home today i was surrounded by six (6) people that were all scrolling through instagram. people don’t smile when they’re looking at social media. they don’t laugh or cry. it reminds of that trance-like zombie state i remember feeling when i watched tv as a kid. maybe they do feel things and they’re afraid to let it slip because it’s the subway. or maybe they’re just tired and trying to zone out for a minute because they had a hard day and they’ve earned it. i should post this thought for someone else to scroll through on their commute tomorrow morning.

whenever i see someone open spotify on their phone i want to ask them what they’re listening to. but i know that would be grossly uncouth. it is federal law not to speak to anyone with headphones in. still, i wish we had norms for sharing and openness.

things can change, things will change. but damn if it isn’t hard to see how that’s gonna happen from our current vantage point. it feels like the whole world’s in a rut, and we’re all just waiting for climate change to stir the pot a little harder.

joe biden fucking sucks.

performative

let us now whisper softly about PERFORMATIVE WOKENESS and MORAL FASHION

as we strive to hold society accountable, to raise the bar for behavior among our peers, to spread awareness of injustices past and present, we should recognize the ways in which our communication is working against these goals and opening itself up to malignant subversion.

social media strongly favors a certain kind of tone and attitude. we see it everywhere with the news, where controversy and bombastic headlines are what garner the modern currency of likes, shares, and comments. but this same trend exists beyond The Media or The Politicians, all the way down to the individual.

for anyone whose aspirations are tied to exposure – especially artists – there are strong incentives to be loud and angry every day of the week. social media is a grind, a rat race to stay relevant in people’s minds, to be remembered and noticed as often as possible. rage is one of the easiest emotions to squeeze into the 140 character limit.

activism is now integral to our brands, how we sell ourselves to the world. it becomes an act that can be performed at will, replicated by anyone who shares the right links with a sufficient number of upset emoji and a dash of the latest trend in favorable buzzwords.

take a more innocuous example: the environmental apocalypse formerly known as plastic straws, an injustice born for the current climate. a trite micro-optimization wherein, overnight, everyone demanded that restaurants and bars abandon this morally bankrupt practice as though it contributed anything meaningful to global trends in plastic waste. it shifted the responsibility for environmental justice away from corporations and governments onto the individual. as if we could make a dent in climate change by minorly inconveniencing ourselves at dinner.

this is how i’ve come to see a lot of the policing around the margins of individual social graces and language. while we bicker about which words to use, a battalion of megawealthy capitalist neofascists are hard at work cementing the prison industrial complex, immigration detention, and the socio-economic segregation of health care & education into the fabric of our society. and they don’t give a flying fuck about your wokeness.

yes, absolutely, we should strive every single goddamn day to deconstruct our words and behaviors to understand how we’re perpetuating the misogyny and racism passed down from our ancestors, to resist the ambient bigotry that permeates our culture and history. the work to self-analyze and critique our thoughts and actions is necessary and useful for growth.

but when we focus exclusively on presentation, on the look and feel and sound of moral behavior rather than the substance and meaning and motive, we miss the bigger picture, and we open ourselves to manipulation.

link rot

let us talk about my favorite topic: LINK ROT also known as MYSPACE LOST 12 YEARS OF MUSIC HISTORY AND THERE’S NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

history and documentation is something i care about, because it’s crazy how quickly people start making shit up when there’s nobody to say otherwise.

then history starts repeating itself and everyone’s like “omg how could we let this happen” and the handful of people that were there from the beginning are in the back shaking their heads like “we tried to tell you but the proof was in a bedroom track from 2006” and now we’ll never know who invented deep electro dumpwave.

SERIOUSLY though link rot matters. the half-life of a link, depending on which citation you pick from wikipedia (haha i’m not doing more footwork here, get real), is roughly two years, meaning half of all links on the internet go dark every two years. you can see this in action all over the place, just go back in time on your facebook feed and click on links you shared a year, two years, three years ago. a lot of them will be gone and there’s no way to find them again.

the internet is a place of constant movement and upheaval, and this trend only gets worse as we centralize onto social networks that have no reason to fart a single concern towards the preservation or documentation of what is very literally our history and culture.

if you care about something, DOCUMENT IT, bring it into physical form, into the real world, transform it into new mediums. don’t trust facebook or instagram or twitter to preserve any of your genius or the beautiful interactions you have with friends and strangers. never trust these behemoths farther than you can throw them. take the preservation of your identity and your culture into YOUR HANDS.