Kier Here: Recent Episodes
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What happens to authenticity when our lives become profiles for constant viewing?
Mentioned in this video:
- You and Your Profile, by Hans Georg-Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio
- White Noise, by Don DeLillo
- The Lies that Bind, by Kwame Anthony Appiah
- Racecraft: Why Theory Podcast
- SEA / GARDEN: Future Ecologies Podcast
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Email us at recoveringanarchist@gmail.com
Get ’s The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy here.
Watch a chapter-by-chapter reading here.
Subscribe here.
Email us at recoveringanarchist@gmail.com
Recent Interviews & DiscussionsMy latest interview was with writer and critic , where we discussed the violence I experienced at the Toronto G20, anti-capitalist struggle more broadly, and the effects of identitarianism within the left.
Strange ExilesEpisode 34: Kier Adrian Gray - Beyond Identity PoliticsEpisode 34 is a conversation with former activist Kier Adrian Gray, author of the Substack blog Recovering Anarchist, an essay series and podcast that explores ideology, morality and social norms on the left…Listen now3 months ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · Bram E. Gieben and Kier Adrian GrayBefore that, I had an excellent conversation with painter and theorist Tyler Murphy about faith, ideology, and spiritual/existential crisis.
In this discussion, I explore the neoliberal portrayal of female sexuality in the film Babygirl with , and of .
This is the talk I gave at the conference in Boise, Idaho last October, now titled You Must First Change Yourself: Is the Self-Care Left Abandoning Collective Action?
Here, and I discuss what it was like to speak at a conference where working-class autodidacts sat on panels beside accomplished academics.
This was my first conversation with and , just as we were getting to know each other, and I was deciding to make the trip to Boise.
Reading GroupEveryone should read The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy by to better contextualize the recent re-election of Donald Trump. You can watch a chapter-by-chapter reading with in-depth discussions here.
From the ArchivesThis panel was a part of the podcast tour, and took place at the Wise Hall in Vancouver on May Day 2023. It also featured , one of my favourite writers.
Before the tour began, and interviewed me about my time in the social justice subculture.
Fucking CancelledExperience, Strength and Hope with Kier Adrian Gray: Building A Life to Move IntoIn Episode 44, we're joined by friend of the pod Kier Adrian Gray, a writer and recovering social justice kid based in Vancouver. We discuss the trials and tribulations of being an anarchist in Montreal, the effects of toxic social justice world on mental health, how to get out of the Nexus, and what to do once you're out…Listen now2 years ago · 4 likes · Fucking Cancelled, Kier Adrian Gray, Clementine Morrigan, and Jay LesoleilAs always, thanks for reading and listening! More soon.Subscribe now
November 2009: I wouldn’t say I went to San Francisco to have my first lesbian experience, but I was open to the possibility.The bus ride from Vancouver was 30 hours. Back then, I could handle sitting up for that long—took a perverse kind of pride in it, even. I wrote poetry in my tiny notebook and watched as the landscape shifted. Eventually, I got curious about the guy in a basketball jersey sitting next to me.
Paolo was a soft-spoken man who was heading back to Oakland after visiting his kid and his ex in Vancouver. It was hard to live so far away from them, he told me, but he was determined to stay in their lives.
When the bus stopped in Sacramento for a couple of hours, Paolo and I went out in search of lunch but came back empty-handed; it was Thanksgiving weekend, and the city was a ghost town. We picked oranges from a tree on the grounds of the California legislature and ate them on a park bench.
Paolo shook his thick, dark hair out of a tight French braid that fell to his waist and ran his hands along his scalp. I rebraided it for him before we got back on the bus, muscle memory from my years as a Scottish dancer guiding my fingers over and under, gathering his hair into even bunches, holding the right amount of tension for braid to sit flat against his scalp.
When we said goodbye at the San Francisco bus depot, he gave me his number, saying he’d love to show me around his hometown. Paolo: I should’ve called you.
It was verging on evening by then, and the rain was pouring down in frigid sheets. I hoisted my pack onto my back and started walking to the Mission. In my notebook I had the address of a hotel that advertised an incredible deal on their website: $22 a night! But when I arrived, my wool coat soaked through, the front desk clerk told me that was the rate for sharing a room with three other people, and I had to supply those people myself. Not knowing what else to do, I paid $100 for a room of my own and made my way up the stairs.
The room was small, and its window looked out on a column of windows to other rooms. I’d never seen that before, a window that looked not out, but into, another part of the building. I fell asleep easily, relieved to be horizontal at last.
When morning came, it was time to find somewhere else to stay—another couple of nights at this hotel would wipe me right out. My upbringing had drilled into me the virtue of frugality, and so I had only brought what I’d needed for the (unfortunately imaginary) $22-a-night room, plus enough of a food budget to keep from starving. Having blown $100 of that on my first night was not great. Walked around the neighbourhood, willing my soggy coat to dry, I found a brightly painted hostel nearby. Its dorms were $25 per night and I moved in right away.
I headed to the grocery store next, full of dread, wondering how I could stretch what I had left. But America, the nation of innovation, came to my rescue: I found peanut butter and jelly, swirled together, in one very cheap jar. I bought that with a loaf of bread, and mentally prepared myself to eat my least favourite sandwich for every meal. Eventually I discovered a newly opened Cuban restaurant down the street with a $6 plate of beans and rice, so I went there when I felt like splurging.
One of the glorious features of my new hostel was a complimentary continental breakfast—how fancy that sounded! I soon discovered that this meant a cup of coffee or tea and one pastry, which was closely surveilled by a front desk clerk who would’ve made an excellent prison guard. As the days wore on, however, I gained her trust, and developed ways to conceal an extra muffin or three as I darted back up the stairs to the dorms.
Breakfast is where I met Freddie Mercury. This young man was relocating to San Francisco from Las Vegas, where he’d worked as an impersonator. But this man was no ordinary impersonator: he lived as Freddie 24/7. He had the pencil moustache, the unplaceable accent, and the flamboyant sense of style. If I ever knew his real name, it’s long since faded from my memory, because everyone at the hostel called him Freddie.
We met while trying to explain butch and femme to a sweet but clueless straight man. He’d guessed that I, in my button-up collared shirt, conductor’s cap and bare face, was femme, and Freddie and I shared a grin that cemented our bond.
One day, Freddie announced at breakfast that he was going out to look for work, and I joined him. We walked along the streets of the Mission, Freddie flouncing into every store with a bohemian vibe. When we got hungry, he treated me to sushi. He helped me try and figure out where to cash the traveler’s cheque that my mother had insisted was the safest way for me to travel with money. After several bank tellers looked at me as if I were a confused medieval peasant, Freddie’s firm charm got the job done.
The hostel had an eclectic cast of characters—there was the freckled guy in baggy clothes who was looking for a fresh start after a stint in a Florida jail; there were the two men from France who, bored of American, were napping away the days until their flight back home. There was a sweet, shy guy from Peru who smoked me up on the roof of the hostel, a roof which transformed into a wall-shaking night club right about when one might want to go to sleep (perhaps explaining the hostel’s cheap prices.)
When the Peruvian guy left for home, along with a bag of weed, he gave me two white crystals and a stone frog pendant. When Freddie saw them, he whipped a chain, some wire and a pair of needle-nosed pliers out of his gigantic faux snakeskin purse and fashioned me a necklace on the spot. Freddie, baby, if you’re out there: call me. I owe you one.
One of my first days in San Francisco, I saw a poster for a protest against climate change. It was happening outside of a bank downtown, and I showed up for it. I’d never protested in a foreign country before and didn’t want to get deported or banned, so I asked the group’s legal liaison whether it was safe for me to participate in blocking the bank’s doors. She assured me I’d be fine. The action went ahead as planned, and it was only later that I found out that a) everyone at the other set of doors had been arrested and b) getting arrested could’ve gotten me deported and banned from the country for years. I said a silent thank you to lady luck.
There was a local cyclist at the protest who claimed he could bring me to the best burrito in town. We made our way to an unassuming place with flickering fluorescent lights, and I got the one he suggested, which is when I discovered I’m just not that into burritos. Still, I tried to be cheerful about it, since I was there with this restaurant’s Number One Fan. After we ate, we wandered along the waterfront, and I remarked on how built up everything was. There were hardly any trees or parks to be seen; the water in the bay was bright with rainbow ribbons of oil. The cyclist warned me that Vancouver would one day look like this too if we weren’t careful. Industry and progress had a way of crowding out the birds and the bees.
Speaking of those guys, out of nowhere, the cyclist wrapped his arms around my waist and leaned in for a kiss; well, technically he leaned up, because I was significantly taller than him. I rifled through our day together in my mind, trying to figure out when I’d given him the wrong idea. Was it simply that I’d agreed to hang out with him? He picked up on my surprise and said goodbye pretty quickly after.
In Vancouver, I used public transportation to get wherever I needed to go. In San Francisco, however, the bus did not have the same mix of white and blue collar workers, youth and seniors. Everyone on the bus seemed to be in the middle of a crisis; there was a lot of yelling and cussing and jostling.
A man one seat ahead of me was pouring pure poison into his girlfriend’s ear. While he was distracted, I asked the woman if she needed help. I could get off the bus with her and find somewhere for her to stay. She shook her head no—a couple of stops later, the boyfriend dragged her off the bus by her arm.
The time had come to check out the infamous People’s Park in Berkeley. I’d brought my notebook and was scribbling away, when a shadow crossed the page. I looked up to see a man with thick dreadlocks, bright baggy clothing and a wide grin across his face.
“Hi, I’m Fabian,” he said. ”What’s your name?”
I introduced myself and he invited me to share a joint with him and his friends. We all got along easily and they asked me what I was doing that night. I didn’t have any plans, but there were a lot of things I couldn’t do because I was under America’s drinking age.
One of Fabian’s friends perked up: Jordan wore a tie-dye hoodie with his thick bushy hair tied back in a bun. “I’m DJing a show tonight—we can get you in the back.” Finally, a way in!
I arrived early to the address they’d given me. It was a labyrinthine house, large and winding enough that three DJ booths played completely different music with no clashing sound. As I wandered around, I found nooks and lofts and short, tiny rooms with doors where you wouldn’t expect them. I found out later that this house had originally been a brothel.
The DJ from the park was playing psytrance, which basically sounds like you’re in a sci-fi action sequence (think pew-pew). The music was quick and jarring. I danced close to the stage, expressing my gratitude for the party invite, but once I felt that I’d paid my dues, I went in search of a stage that was more to my taste.
One of the rooms was vibrating with bass, the music a mix of hip hop and dubstep. I’d never heard this combination up in Canada, and it made for easy dancing. A woman with kandi up her arms approached me: I could see the MDMA she was on from the way her jaw moved. Her eyes were two pools, wide and deep and open. She told me I was cute. I blushed, told her she was too, and ran away.
As the sun came up and people started filtering out, I found Fabian, and we regrouped with his friends in his RV. The morning was serene, breathing slow between our sweaty bodies. Out of nowhere, Fabian looked around and asked us if we wanted to go in on a bunch of acid together. Everyone nodded their heads. Fabian looked at Jordan and asked if his parents needed help on their ranch. Jordan shrugged and nodded noncommittally.
“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Fabian said. “We’re going to head down to this olive ranch, work a couple of days, and then we’ll pool our earnings to buy a sheet of acid.”
This sounded like a perfectly good and reasonable plan in our delirious, exhausted, post-rave glow, so Fabian hopped into the driver’s seat, and we took off for Salinas, California. The hum of the engine and the soft bumps in the road soon put me to sleep; I woke up as the van pulled to a stop.
We tumbled out and took a look around, rubbing our eyes. The dry, dusty brown land felt worlds away from the fog and rain of San Francisco. Gnarled olive trees twisted their way out of the ground, and I was delighted to discover that tumbleweeds are a real thing.
It was when Jordan led us to the building where we’d be sleeping that I realized I was on a dude ranch. There were rows of beds along each wall of this giant room, and the walls were covered in a western mural that included rugged cowboys, dopey cows, and flirtatious horses, all framed with rope. There was a foosball table and a pool table, with a stack of cowboy cutouts in the corner. It was all covered in a fine layer of dust.
We headed into the main house to get our assignments for the day from Jordan’s mom. When we walked into her kitchen, I couldn’t believe my eyes: every single surface was covered with food, and so was every cupboard, along with a gigantic double fridge. She asked us right away if we’d eaten, and without waiting for an answer, started passing us boxes and bags of food. As we munched, she told us we’d come too late in the day to pick olives, because they couldn’t be handled in the heat without bursting. Instead, she assigned us to various maintenance jobs. As the only woman in the group, it was my assignment to sweep and vacuum the floors of her house.
I worked thoroughly and methodically, as I suspected I would be done my tasks long before the others. Plus, that kitchen was paradise after my PB&J-and-muffin diet, so I took an above-average number of snack breaks.
At the end of the day, she paid us in cash for our work, which we all handed over to Fabian before piling into his RV and heading back to the city. I parted ways with the group and headed back to the hostel—we gave each other hugs, like lifelong friends, and promised to see each other soon.
Back at the hostel, I met my new roommate, Ophelia: a woman from Portland, Oregon who was here by herself for vacation. I told her about my People’s Park adventure, and she wanted to check it out for herself, so we made plans to head back there together.
By 11am the next day, Ophelia and I, too cheap to take the subway, were standing by an onramp to the Bay Bridge with a cardboard sign that said “good karma” beside a poorly drawn thumbs. We waited for ages, cars whizzing right by us, until someone finally took pity on us, dropping us off right in downtown Berkeley. We decided to get some coffee, and believe it or not, we found Fabian in the café we picked. He introduced us to his friend, Nora, and her deep brown eyes locked with mine. An invisible spark leapt between us.
Nora told us she was planning to go to a hot tub that night, one that was in a private backyard. You had to know someone who knew someone to get in because the door had an electronic lock that required a code. It was a silent, clothing-optional space, and men could only attend if accompanied by women.
This sounded bizarre and possibly totally made up, so Ophelia and I were in. Nora joined us as we went to People’s Park, and we picked up a handful of strangers along the way who wanted to join in on the hot tub. There was a man covered in silver paint who swirled a very long stick, a laid-back older gentleman whose beige linen outfit wrinkled around his armpits and knees, and a neurotic young backpacker who gave us all acid.
Next, we stopped at a dilapidated mansion where Nora had friends. The front room was painted a bright pink-red and the inhabitants were dressed like exiled aristocrats still catching their breath, in ratty fur coats and long strands of pearls. White powder was brought out and cut into lines on the coffee table, but I abstained. One drug in my system seemed like enough.
Just when it seemed like this hot tub really was imaginary, we arrived at its gate. Nora put in the passcode and we filed in after her, shedding our clothes as we did. The hot tub was underneath a porch in the backyard, and a breeze danced the steam off the surface of the water. One by one, we slipped in, emitting sounds without words as the scalding hot water reached our skin.
A joint was passed around but again I abstained; the one time I’d mixed weed and alcohol, I’d gotten such bad dry mouth that I’d felt as though my tongue was crumbling into dust and clogging up my throat. I didn’t want to find out how weed and acid coexisted in my system.
By the time we were sufficiently cooked and putting our clothes back on, it was late. Surprising everyone, Nora invited the whole crew back to her place to sleep, and that’s exactly what we did, all six of us tetrising around one another so we could fit into her modestly sized bedroom.
Just as I was settling in, however, Nora motioned for me to join her in her bed, and soon, her tongue was warm in my mouth. Fireworks exploded in my mind: after so many years of yearning to touch a woman, here I was. People shifted around us, trying to find a good sleeping position. The backpacker fiddled with the straps on his backpack all night long. As things heated up between Nora and I, the linen guy whispered, “this is really beautiful. Is it okay if I watch?” Nora roared “NO!” and he shrugged, turned to face the wall, and fell asleep. My mouth found its way between her legs, and Nora bucked and moaned until her whole body shuddered and fell still.
Slipping off to the bathroom, I thought about a friend’s warning never to look into a mirror on acid: she’d seen her skin melting down her face. But I took a chance, and was relieved to see my regular old face looking back at me, cheeks aglow, hair still mussed from Nora’s grasp. It was on the inside that everything had changed.
Climbing back into bed, I found Nora weaving a future for us. We would move to Vermont, get a little cottage in the woods, and grow tomatoes. We would watch the leaves turn in the fall, keep each other warm in front of the wood stove, raise a red-haired son. All this spooled out as I held her, my body flooding with joy.
Back at the hostel, my bus ticket home was gone. Reasoning I’d simply misplaced it, I tore my pack apart over and over, opening each and every pocket and pouch and searching under the mattress and the bed. Eventually I had to face the truth: my night in Berkeley had cost me my ticket home.
I was staying in a dorm room with a rotating cast of 12; trying to hunt down the culprit would have been impossible. Embarrassed, I got on the phone with my mum, choking back tears as I explained what had happened. My cash was nearly gone and, thanks to a book I’d read about the dangers of RFID chips, I didn’t own a credit card. After a couple of calls with Greyhound, she arranged for a ticket to be waiting for me at the bus depot.
This pushed my leaving date back by a day, and I was unprepared to pay for an extra night at the hostel. So, after reassuring the concierge that I would pay for my extra night when I checked out, I awoke at dawn, quietly gathered my things, and used a back exit I’d discovered. I wonder if my passport picture remains taped to the hostel’s office wall, THIEF scrawled in thick black marker under my face.
Fabian and I met one last time before I headed home. He told me that the silver guy with the stick had attacked a stranger at the park and was sitting in jail. He also apologized for not getting me the acid I’d paid for in time. In hindsight, this was a blessing in disguise, because I absolutely would have tried to sneak it across the border in a water bottle. Fabian’s tardiness was all that saved me from myself.
Nora and I messaged back and forth once I was back home, spilling secrets, making confessions, dreaming of our next encounter. One day, an email to her bounced back, and that was that.
Nora, if you’re reading this: meet me in Vermont.
I'm working to build a career writing essays that explore agency, transcendence, sacrifice, and belonging—without relying on tired platitudes.
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I finally quit Instagram last month. There were many contributing factors—its incompatibility with long form writing, the passive-aggressive engagement norms, a constantly fluctuating algorithm—but the nail in the coffin was that I no longer wanted to tell people what to do.
Back when I was experimenting with various types of text posts on Instagram, there was one that was far-and-away the most popular: advice. Directives. How to’s. All the better if it sounded psychological, and could mimic the experience of receiving guidance from a friend. People would save, send and share these posts like nothing else.
I never knew whether such posts were favoured by the algorithm, or whether it was the individuals using the app who yearned to be told what to do, or both, but the result was the same: declaring myself an authority was clearly the way to build an empire on Instagram.
The only problem was that I didn’t like telling people what to do. Online psycho-babble has always struck me as an impossible genre: how do you offer advice that applies to everyone who reads it? In order to avoid giving some people really bad advice by accident, most influencers stick to meaningless platitudes. This allows them to take advantage of the Barnum Effect, which is a psychological phenomenon relied upon by psychics, astrologers and personality test writers, wherein people interpret statements broad enough to apply to almost anyone as highly personal. This doesn’t just make social media advice popular: it also turns those who give it into authority figures in the eyes of their audience.
The therapist-influencer also takes advantage of this effect, with one key difference: there is no illusion that their posts contain personalized advice. And yet, that can still be the emotional experience of the follower. The para-social bond that forms as a result can feel a lot like friendship on the receiving end, even when the influencer will never (and can never) know every follower. For people feeling lonely, alienated or misunderstood, this can be a comforting salve. A temporary and unreliable salve, perhaps, but a salve nonetheless.
I should know, due to my brief career as an astrologer. Over the course of my adult life, many friends had encouraged me to go into the helping professions, convinced I would make a great therapist or social worker. This idea repelled me, because getting overly involved in the emotional problems of my friends was a compulsion of mine that was often detrimental to myself and others. Astrology felt like a medium for encouraging people through emphasizing strengths and possibilities, without getting too serious or intimate. I was pretty good at it, too, but the moment I realized I didn’t actually believe that the cosmos affected personalities and world events, it felt dishonest to continue, and I closed up shop.
So I’d done my fair share of doling out pseudo-therapeutic advice, and was aware of how meaningful this could be for people. However, the risks of claiming such a role were starting to make themselves known. My posts had followers messaging me with their personal problems, asking for advice. One person wanted to write me an entire document outlining the conflict they’d had with someone who followed me (I’d never met, followed, or corresponded with either of them). I even had someone ask me for nutrition tips, a topic I’d never claimed to know anything about. It was clear that I was becoming an authority figure in the minds of a certain followers, which led them to think I was uniquely positioned to help them with their problems. This worried me.
I have favourite writers, just like everyone else, and I imagine them to be smart, thoughtful and insightful to a degree that can probably only be sustained from afar. Reading their work makes me feel close to them, a sensation which cannot possibly be mutual, and there are moments where I feel that they have something important figured out that I do not. This causes me to imagine that, if I were them, certain problems in my life would be easy to solve, or wouldn’t exist in the first place.
And yet: time and time again, meeting my heroes has shown me that they are just as flawed and uncertain as I am. We are all truly just bumbling through life, trying not to knock too many things over. If a reader has held a writer in impossibly high esteem, this discovery can feel like a disappointment—or worse, a betrayal. So these open-hearted appeals perturbed me, not due to anything pathological on the part of the sender, but because I knew I could never live up to the imaginary version of myself that they had formed through reading my work.
Even more disturbing to me was how easy—not to mention lucrative—it would be to step onto the pedestal these followers were offering me, by declaring myself an expert in the lives of strangers. I could fashion my online persona into a mirror, encouraging readers to project onto me, feel close to me, helped by me, which could develop into a powerful urge to support me.
On Instagram, the path of least resistance is to become a guru.
It’s baked right into the app: one does not have friends, but followers. It is much more laborious to counter this tendency, to continually knock myself off the pedestal, and to resist the incentives to step back onto it. Some find my refusal off-putting: they do not want their projections—whether positive or negative—to be interrupted with a vulgar reminder that I am a real person.
Over time, I watched other writers start charging for private conversations, hosting retreats, and promoting private support communities. These were all ways to create alternative income streams to complement what they made from their writing. In other words: they were monetizing their online personas, their attention and their wisdom. It wasn’t quite consulting, or therapy, or spiritual healing; it was a new hybrid, somewhere in between friendship-for-pay and sage-for-hire. It was not clear to me whether these writers had always wanted to be gurus or whether they were simply responding to economic pressures and incentives, but either way, it seemed they were no longer looking for readers so much as acolytes.
This didn’t sit right with me. At first I wondered if I was simply behind the times—early career writers are, now more than ever before, encouraged a.k.a. pressured to continuously engage with their readers—or if I was jealous that I didn’t have the influence to pull off such a move. But when I pictured myself at a quiet retreat centre deep in the woods, surrounded by people eager for my help with their issues, I didn’t feel peace or satisfaction—I felt sick. Something would have to go very wrong for me to find myself there.
Earning respect through my work as a writer and theorist is one thing; claiming to hold the answers to the personal and existential problems of those who read my work, quite another.
The latter sounds a bit too much like worship.
Building a writing career wasn’t always like this. Not that doing so was ever a walk in the park, but between the disappearance of stable writing jobs, the declining freelance rates, the shrinking book advances, and the endless supply of free writing on the internet, which has resulted in people perceiving writing as less valuable and therefore expecting free content, it’s become nearly impossible for new writers today to avoid social media altogether, barring wealth or fame (in truth, I only felt I could leave Instagram once Substack Notes started gaining momentum).
Back in the mid 2000’s when such platforms first became popular, it was a common belief that they would have a democratizing effect, empowering citizen journalism by allowing ordinary people to publish work that challenged the carefully crafted narratives of the powerful. Whether reporters, poets or novelists, writers no longer needed to win over a gatekeeper to get their work in front of people: they could appeal directly to readers. Everyone would have their opportunity.
Such hope wasn’t entirely fanciful: many writers, in varying stages of their careers, gained massive traction as early adopters of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In fact, many of today’s top earning Substack writers got their big break during what I consider to be the golden age of social media, between the mid 2000s and the mid 2010s. It was not a Sisyphean task to grow a large, dedicated readership for a blog that you hosted on your own personal website, large enough to launch a career. Literary agents and magazine editors (remember magazines?) would regularly browse social media sites and the blogosphere, looking for new writers to sign or publish.
Such stories, however, have become increasingly rare, and the techno-optimism of this earlier time now sounds tragically naïve (unless you are Elon Musk). It’s become clear that governments, security agencies, tech giants and companies trying to sell you stuff are the real beneficiaries of these platforms, not Scrappy Little Nobodies.
But why does tweeting your way to a book deal sound delusional now? Well, the social media of ten years ago is not the social media of today: text-based content has been replaced by visual content, long form has been replaced by short form, organic reach has been destroyed by prioritizing ad sales, and external links have been suppressed into oblivion by platforms who never want us to leave.
In the golden age, a user’s feed was simply and solely populated with content from the people they’d chosen to follow, listed in reverse chronological order. You had full control over your feed, and would see everything from everyone you followed, including links to their blog, their website, or the latest article they’d written for a digital publication. This led to high-quality engagement: pieces spread organically through online word-of-mouth, meaning people would discover new work through their friends. Organic virality was a real thing that happened to unknown writers publishing in long form on their own websites (young people will just have to trust me on this).
The factor most responsible for the death of social media’s ability to launch writing careers was the introduction of the algorithmic feed. There is now a mysterious, invisible calculator deciding what you see. You will not be shown the vast majority of posts by the people you’ve followed. Instead, your feed will mostly contain advertisements and “suggested posts”. Every person you follow is competing with every other person you follow to make it into your feed, but the rules of the games can only be guessed at. You do not have control over your feed: the way you interact with content is only one of many factors determining what you see in the app.
This makes it nearly impossible to grow a readership the old-fashioned way, by slowly and steadily publishing high-quality work for readers who share it when so moved. Building an audience has become much more confusing, random and unpredictable. We suddenly need social media experts to guide us through the process, and even they are forced to infer algorithmic changes by scrying their own fluctuating analytics.
And then there’s that minor issue where a platform can permanently shutter your account, at any time, without explanation, an avenue for appeal, nor any ability to reach your following ever again.
This may be a rare, if devastating, event, but algorithmic paranoia affects us all. If my post flops, is it because my readers didn’t like it, or because the algorithm didn't even show it to them? Why would the algorithm hide it? How can I adjust my next post to avoid this? Will anybody see my next post if I publish it too quickly after the suppressed one? Or maybe it wasn’t suppressed at all—what if I just posted it when everyone was watching the hockey game?
There is no end to the questions, and they are unanswerable, because the black box responds to no one. This means that we are always at risk of wildly under- or overestimating algorithmic power, with no ability to detect when this is happening.
Are you having fun? I’m having fun.
But why is every writer suddenly trying to lowkey build a cult?
- There’s the fact that publishers now anticipate that writers pitching their first book already have a large online readership.
- There’s the expectation that writers engage continuously with their readers, lest they be seen as arrogant, neglectful or out-of-touch (I saw this sentiment in a Substack Note just the other day).
- There’s the cost-of-living crisis, which increases the pressure on early career writers to get more money flowing sooner.
- And let’s be honest: while being a member of a cult seems cruddy, being the leader has some obvious perks, no?
But if there is one ingredient even more crucial to social media—and by extension writing career—success than authority, it is authenticity. Some influencers even subvert the expectation of authority by instead leaning into authenticity and curating a raw, vulnerable relatability, which of course becomes its own type of authority, reminiscent of how Joe Rogan’s lack of recognition in mainstream media makes him more credible to his audience, but more feminine and progressive-coded.
Digital profiles live and die by authenticity: people defend their speech and behaviour by appealing to authenticity, and those seeking to demolish someone invariably accuse them of being inauthentic.
Nothing captures this quite like the apology video genre. Our tragic hero will appear dishevelled, with unkempt hair and a bare face. The video often begins with a forced sigh, and may contain crying. They will choose a plain, homey background and hide symbols of wealth. Natural light is strongly preferred.
These stylistic choices are an attempt to make the video seem spontaneous and the influencer appear honest and relatable. Vulnerability is key, as an apology’s reception weighs largely on whether it is deemed to be authentic, which the viewership wants to gauge for themselves. It is not uncommon for there to be a second apology after the first one is declared by the public to be insincere.
Most posts, of course, are not apology videos, but these videos help us understand what today’s online audience demands from their public figures: honesty, relatability, and vulnerability. These qualities incentivize influencers to build an intimacy with their audience, to lead their audience to believe that they have access to the actual human being. This encourages writers to create consultant-coach-healer-friend offers, and primes audiences to buy them.
But this raises an important question: can authenticity be consciously created? Everyone who’s ever filmed themselves crying has had to pause and set up a camera in order to capture their spontaneous release of emotion. A digital profile and a living, breathing, eating, shitting, snoring human being can never fully align.
We live under the knife. We must constantly perform authenticity, which means we will constantly fail to provide authenticity, which will result in constant accusations of being inauthentic, which cause us to act differently, in an attempt to get authenticity right next time.
These platforms, and the attention they offer, demand from us the impossible, and in trying to square that circle, some of us make strange choices. Maybe the real question is: why aren’t you building a cult?
This essay is not sponsored by Substack, and this site is not immune from the forces that have enshittified so many other platforms. But it’s getting a couple of crucial things right: writers own their subscriber list, and can take it with them if they leave. Substack gets paid when its writers get paid, which has led to significant and ongoing improvements over the four years I’ve been publishing here.
From what I’ve seen lately, Notes prioritizes relevance over immediacy, so that well-received articles circulate for a long time, readers actually see the writers they subscribe to in their feed, and writers feel less pressure to be note-writing automatons. The overall vibe of conversations on Notes is less reactive and more reflective than other places.
And for the first time, I saw a Note soliciting pitches for a print magazine, which struck me as a harbinger of exciting things to come.
Perhaps Substack is having a golden moment, and my compliments will not age well. But I can genuinely say I am happy to be here, and I selfishly hope we can stretch this moment into an era of our very own.
I’ve crafted an odd project for myself: I want to encourage people to think for themselves. I want to show through example that taking intellectual risks can be worth it. I want to make it possible for people to imagine who they are outside of the culture wars, and to re-discover their curiosity for the world around them.
And yet—perhaps it’s a lingering speck of anarchist within me—I don’t want to tell people what to do.
Is this contradictory? Am I deluding myself? Is what I’m doing even worse, because at least other people are being transparent about their desire for authority while I remain steeped in denial?
Honestly, I don’t know. I end the essay there and lean into a humble anti-expert brand, or I could list some unattractive things about myself and aim for relatable. I could, through negation, convey that I’m incredibly brave for breaking the fourth wall in this essay, and go all in on derring-do!
What I do know is that staying silent on the para-social merely allows me to implement it to my own advantage while feigning naïveté, and I’d rather leave that shtick to others. I want to earn your readership through my essays, not through creating an illusion. I lay no claim to purity or superiority here: I’m just as entangled in this strange new world as you are. But I do want to make this much clear: I intend to write (not consult, not coach, not heal) for a living.
My hope is that, if writers continue to experiment within this digital realm, some will eventually blaze a trail for writers who don’t want to spend their career telling readers what to do, nor toadying to them: writers who want to write for a living, not because they are stubborn or conceited or rude, but because their deepest calling takes form in the words they write in solitude, and their truest gift to the world is surrendering to nothing but their pen.
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My friend Cara and I made it to the U.S. border around 1pm this past Saturday, breakfast sandwiches in hand. We lucked out, getting a friendly border guard, and passed through without trouble. In Olympia, we stopped for snacks and vapes, ogling the cornucopia of vibrant, hypernormal food and accidentally buying “sparkling water” that turned out to be pop. We tried to get all the Canada supremacy snark out of our system before going any further… I’m not proud of it, but there are only so many national pastimes, and I’m not much of an ice skater.
The drive was beautiful: sun, trees and sky kept us company as Cara remembered how to drive standard on the fly (and made it through Seattle traffic without stalling once, despite my temperamental clutch!)
We were halfway to Portland when we realized, in a roadside MacDonald’s, that it was inauguration weekend. I was stunned that I could forget such a monumental event; eight years ago, I’d thought the sky was falling. Were we fools heading into the headquarters of the resistance? Would we be surrounded by righteous fires and overturned cop cars?
Well, no. That’s not what happened this time. Things seemed rather ordinary when we finally pulled in that night.
TUCON pals & emerging theorists Evan Wellington & Sean Mittelstaedt.On Sunday, after some ice cream and the obligatory trip to Powell’s, I met up with Evan and Sean, two friends I made at the conference in Boise last October.
I hadn’t known what to expect when I’d gone, but the conference was a heady mix of working-class autodidacts and burnt out academics who came together in a DIY space to put on a theory conference, completely independent of a university. Spending a week in this environment relit a fire within me, and getting another little taste of that over tacos in Portland was a real treat. (Sean just launched a Substack, by the way! Check out his first post: Parasitism, Capital and My Unconscious.)
Then it was time for WORDVOM, an art party slash birthday party slash fundraiser for the Independent Publishing Resource Center! The event featured zines, comics and prints from artists Bebe Montoya, Cooklin, Alden Wild, and Krystal Pérez, accompanied by the vinyl-spinning DJ Barbarella. There were also various word games set up at tables throughout the venue, which is all I ever want at a social event.
You know those parties where it’s super awkward and no one’s really talking to each other, and you don’t know if it’s because people are anxious or everybody hates you? Well, this was the opposite of that. The people who showed up were so dang friendly and created a lovely vibe. One person found out about the event from my Substack Note, which made me very happy, and also very shy! Shoutout to sweeties Rosemary, Ryan, Bree and Vee.
Palling around with singer/zinester/birthday babe Bebe Montoya.Bebe was easy to spot from the moment I walked in the door: it wasn’t just the feathered pink cowboy hat or the banana purse (although those certainly didn’t hurt), it was also this inviting presence bopping around, making sure everyone was taken care of and having a good time.
Bebe is also a literal rockstar, in case you hadn’t heard:
In honour of Bebe’s birthday, I brought a can of maple syrup from back east, which she was Very Stoked On. To my surprise, Alden chimed in to say some Portlandians are tapping bigleaf maples for beer-related reasons! Who knew? I have a hunch that at least one person in Portland is doing literally anything you can think of. There’s probably a social club where you knit winter socks for bees.
The chats went on late into the night, migrating to a bar down the street once WORDVOM was over. We sat at a table right beside a rack filled with vintage clothing, and I must say, I highly recommend watching drunk people try on outfits while you eat a grilled cheese sandwich. We were even consulted on a couple of the bolder outfits. These days, I almost always say: go for it.
After packing up Monday morning—although I don’t normally believe in capital punishment, it may be our only choice for AirBnb hosts with 9am checkouts—I tried not to be the biggest grump in the world while we snagged some pastries and hit up Arch’s bookstore (the first time I’ve seen an entire Lacan section in a bookstore).
On our way back north, we made sure to stop at Sleater-Kinney Road. It was as wonderfully ordinary as I’d imagined all those times I’d driven past: a gas station, an apartment block, a beautiful walking path that probably wasn’t there in 1994. The sky was blue, but the cloudy, coastal mood still hung around the edges.
After dinner in Seattle, it was time for the last leg of the drive, and we stopped to fuel up one last time. When Cara’s Canadian credit card gave us a hard time, a stranger put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter to cover our gas; he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So I’m back home, safe and snug, mourning the loss of almond joys. But I’ve got this roll of pictures to remind me that there are good people wherever you go, and I’m lucky enough to call some of them my friends.
Cara’s that friend who will drop everything to come on a last-minute road trip.P.S. If you’re curious about the 2023 event in Portland that I mentioned in the video, you can find the talk I gave here:
Bebe Montoya read an incredible piece from this zine that night—I highly recommend it.
xox
kier
Discussion ThreadHave you ever found yourself questioning something you once strongly believed? Maybe it’s an idea, a principle, or even a paradigm that shaped how you saw yourself and the world.
What sparked your doubts, and how has the process of questioning felt for you?
If you’re not sure what to share, consider this:
- What’s helped you navigate moments of doubt or change in the past?
- How do you stay open to new perspectives while holding on to what matters most?
I’ll be reading and responding over the next couple of hours—looking forward to engaging with your thoughts!
Read through the comments and find one that resonates with you or challenges your perspective. Reply with your thoughts, a follow-up question, or a related experience to keep the conversation going.
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The very first person I told about my new pronouns was my roommate, a punk vegan chef, in our crowded Montréal apartment in 2011. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, wringing my hands in my lap. The sun, dappled by the trees outside, spilled through the windows onto the wooden floor. I watched the dancing motes of dust like my life depended on it.
“I think I might be non binary.”
My roommate visibly relaxed, clearly predicting much worse news. He clapped me on the back and affirmed what I’d said.
“How do I know, though, if I’m really non binary? I don’t want to appropriate an identity that’s not mine to claim.”
“I don’t think you should worry about that,” my roommate said. “If you feel that you are non binary, then you are.”
I considered him an expert on such matters, since he was a trans-masculine person with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies. He was the first trans person I’d ever been close to, and he was patient in teaching me how to respect him and people like him, despite how many times I put my foot in my mouth. I looked up to this person. We shared an emotional intimacy often reserved for lovers, although we never touched, (except for one accidental NYE champagne kiss we both pretended never happened).
When I later heard him refer to me as “they” to our friends, my cheeks flushed: I glowed with an inner pride and a sense of belonging.
As a young queer person, my social circles were filled with people who’d been shamed and rejected for their desires, or for failing to correctly perform their gender. Our choirs, dodgeball leagues, dance parties, and potlucks were places where we could feel normal, where our differences were not only okay, but maybe even hot.
Coming from a high school where only two people from my graduating class of 360 were out of the closet, I revelled in this newfound freedom. No longer would I let suburban hairdressers tell me how ugly I would be with short hair. We were creating our own looks, our own trends, and we didn’t need the world to understand. In fact, I relished how unwanted male attention withered away as I strove for a more masculine look.
I began binding my chest, getting haircuts at the barber, and considering a testosterone prescription. This uncanny feeling I’d had for so long at girls-only sleepovers and change rooms—that I did not belong, that I was not a real woman, that I would be exposed and tossed out—finally had an explanation: I simply wasn’t a woman. I was something else, something liminal, in-between, something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Embracing this ambiguity, declaring myself as an oddity, as outside and beyond the whole mess of gender, was comforting. It felt a lot like home.
Before I went to the gender clinic for the first time, I’d asked a friend of mine to coach me on what to say—and what not to say— to the doctor in order to get testosterone. I didn’t fabricate anything, but I was strategic in what I shared, because my goal was not to discover whether gender dysphoria was an accurate diagnosis for me. I’d already diagnosed myself, and was not open to the possibility that I was wrong. My only goal was to do what I needed to in order to get the prescription.
My childhood was sprinkled with evidence of masculinity from a young age: I went to school as a moustachioed Robin Hood for Halloween in grade two. I always ended up playing the boyfriend in make-believe games with my friends. I cut my hair short several times in high school, despite dire warnings from the aforementioned hairdresser.
And yet, I insisted on wearing a thrifted flower girl dress to the first day of kindergarten. I loved beading, sparkly gel pens, and not playing sports. I often lamented that my last name was gray, instead of pink or purple.
Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t say that I was ever gender dysphoric. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recoil. Nudity and sex were not distressing to me, not in any special sense. I’d never dissociated from my body the way I’d heard some trans friends describe. And although I’d always had this out-of-place feeling in girl’s and women’s spaces, it is no longer clear to me that the best explanation for this is gender dysphoria.
While I was grappling with all of this, the definition of trans was morphing: lines were blurring. People were starting to say you didn’t need to have dysphoria to be trans—perhaps you simply experienced gender euphoria when you dressed in a gender nonconforming way. It was becoming unpopular and old-fashioned to think of transition as a linear change from one gender to its opposite, entailing a specific set of medical treatments.
I remember discussions about micro-dosing hormones to achieve an ambiguous presentation, and how you could always stop taking them, so it wasn’t a big deal to experiment. Some people spoke of gender-affirming medical treatments as if they were simply another type of body modification, like piercings or tattoos.
In this environment, it was easy for my discomfort in women’s spaces and my flirtations with masculinity to combine with a vague yet ordinary twenties misery into a shape that looked a lot like gender dysphoria.
You may be wondering whether I feel that I was convinced by my social circle to pursue this, and the answer is no. As young and dumb as we all were, my friends were thoughtful, kind, and understanding people. I don’t think the occasional digs at cis people caused me to go on hormones: remember, as a non binary person, I was already exempted from this dreaded category, even without physically transitioning. We were all very into body positivity, so we did our best to offer support and affirmation to each other in our current forms.
That being said, the queer world is not free from social influence. As I alluded to earlier, it’s incredible to go from being an undateable third wheel along for the ride with your straight friends, to finding a place where your strangeness is considered beautiful. It was a revelation that I had options other than continually failing at femininity. I loved the swishy twinks, the handsome dykes, the buff ravers, the vintage femmes and the goth t-girls swirling around each other at queer dance parties. I still do.
But every subculture has its beauty standards, and the queer beauty standard is often reacting against what’s considered to be the heterosexual mainstream. So the more ambiguous, the more androgynous, the louder, the stranger, the better. Queers purposefully make themselves unappealing to straight people, and find it hot when others do the same. I’m not saying that queers are ugly, because beauty standards are arbitrary and ever-changing, and besides, rejecting them can lead to fascinating aesthetic innovations. What I’m saying is that many queers intentionally choose to look ugly, just as many punks choose to look poor. Fuzz on the upper lip, a mysterious vocal pitch, a statuesque figure in a dress, curves clad in menswear: there were various ways to turn heads at the potluck.
While people aren’t pressuring each other, queer beauty standards do make gendered body modifications more appealing. Moreover, many queer people go out of their way to encourage and affirm gender nonconformity in others to try and counteract the harassment and disdain that so often accompanies it.
Transition didn’t work out very well for me: I developed ulnar nerve entrapment from binding my chest, became psychotic after skipping a single dose of testosterone, and was experiencing too much chronic pain to seriously consider surgery. At a certain point, it became clear that physical transition was neither possible nor advisable for me.
This put me in a rather unique situation, given the subculture I was in: I had to come to terms with my body as it was. This was a daunting prospect. Binding really had boosted my confidence, and I liked the lower voice my time on testosterone had given me. I’d spent years by this point trying to make myself gender-ambiguous in public, and building friendships based in part on that shared experience. I still had a strong aversion to being perceived as female, even though I’d never passed for anything else in the larger world.
For the next number of years, I tried to work with the idea that non binary was a feeling, a mindset, a spirit, which did not require me to adjust my appearance at all. I could wear lipstick and a dress and still correct people on my pronouns. I did stop calling myself trans, because that was too much even for me. But I still held to the belief that I was something other than male or female, outside and beyond the gender binary that ensnared so many unthinking others.
I told myself that I was a clever interloper who gave brilliant and convincing performances as woman.
Using they/them pronouns was never easy. Being an early adopter, I’d lost track of the awkward conversations I’d had, trying to explain them to people who remained utterly baffled. These experiences developed into a baseline unease in social situations, especially ones involving either new people or those with whom I’d already had The Talk. Most excruciating was to be inadvertently misgendered by someone who loved me—someone who should “know better”. It caused strife and tension in many relationships with relatives, normie friends, and those in older generations.
It also caused a sort of detachment when I was at school or work. After a couple of attempts to come out as non binary brought me nothing but embarrassment and regret, I stopped sharing my pronouns in such places, which left me feeling as though I was hiding a crucial part of myself from my colleagues. It caused a distance: I never felt close to anyone, nor did I believe anyone really knew me.
When I’d first taken on these pronouns in 2011, I’d thought that I was joining a cultural vanguard: my friends and I would sally forth to educate the world, which would eventually agree to our demands. It was only a matter of time until non binary pronouns were widely understood and used without fuss—we just had to blaze the trail.
As the years went by, however, what I saw was a lot more complicated than that. Sure, many more queer people adopted they/them pronouns, they became widely discussed in the mainstream press, public figures were coming out as non binary, and pronouns-in-bio became increasingly common in white collar workplaces.
On the other hand, there was also fierce resistance. Pronouns worked their way into punchlines for many standup comedians, and the scrutinizing of gender nonconforming people seemed to be getting worse, not better. Non binary became associated with an emerging archetype within leftist politics, the social justice warrior, who was widely mocked for its excesses. Reforming the culture was a much more daunting task than I’d initially thought it would be.
One day, I realized that it was no longer clear to me which was causing my strife and discomfort: my gender, or my non binary identity. And so I started experimenting.
First, I stopped telling new people I met to use they/them for me, and examined my reaction to being referred to as a woman. This helped me recognize that, 99 times out of 100, no one was trying to insult or disrespect me—in fact, the occasional miss’s and ma’ams were earnest attempts at the opposite. When I stopped constantly bracing for the impact of being misgendered, it didn’t seem to hurt as much when it happened. I gradually became much more relaxed and spontaneous in social settings: my social anxiety faded away.
Working as a clerk at a hospital was transformative for me, because in such a multicultural work setting, everyone was at risk of putting their foot in their mouth. I found myself both on the giving and receiving end of such moments, despite my best intentions, and my colleagues consistently offered me grace before refocusing on the task at hand: taking care of our patients. My pronouns paled in importance compared to the medical emergencies that surrounded me.
My newfound freedom was palpable: I began to feel as though I could talk to anyone and tolerate surprises that might arise. I spent less time in the mirror, adjusting how shirts fell across my chest. I felt more present in the world, more attuned to my interests and hobbies as my self-consciousness decreased.
During this time, I thought a lot about all of the masculine women that had come before me, and how they were perfectly beautiful just the way they were. Perhaps I could follow in their footsteps, and hold it down for the tomboys still growing up.
Looking back now, I can see that my presentation has always fluctuated between masculine and feminine, ever since that flower girl/Robin Hood days. I don’t believe this will ever stop, and I no longer think it needs to.
Hear me out: maybe the best way to understand they/them pronouns, within the context of a pluralistic democracy, is as a subcultural norm, a way for LGBT people to show respect for one another within our community. That sense of belonging I felt when I first found queer spaces was profound, and if using gender-neutral pronouns gives someone that gift, I am all for it.
But I do wonder if we are setting people up for hardship when we tell them that they should hope for, expect, or insist on they/them pronouns being used by everyone they encounter, and that they will be emotionally injured every time this fails to happen. In my thirteen years, misgendering was rarely malicious, and yet it still fed into a wounded identity and a suspicious worldview.
To be clear: I still use other people’s preferred pronouns, and I recommend that you do too. Most simply, it’s a gesture of respect.
And I don’t expect that people who actually suffer from gender dysphoria can simply do what I described in this essay and feel better: the very fact that my life improved after dropping my chosen pronouns is evidence that I never had gender dysphoria to begin with.
No, I am writing this for people like my younger self, for anyone on a precipice, who doesn’t quite fit in where they are supposed to, and may not yet realize that this anguish is the cost of being human. It is, to some degree, felt by everyone. So before reaching for a fix, consider the possibility that nothing in you is broken.
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Dearest reader,
I’m excited to share that I will be speaking at the conference in Boise, Idaho on Thursday, October 24th. The focus of my talk will be Digital Rituals of Authenticity & I’ll be leaving substantial time for discussion.
This conference has an incredible mix of theorists, both self-taught and university-based, who are breaking new ground on a wide variety of topics:
- Human Futures
- Post-Marxism, the Professional Managerial Class, and the Left
- Critique of Libidinal Economy, Zizek, and Lacan
- Film and Critical Media Theory
- Education and Theorizing the Underground
- Critical Doxology Theory
- The Political Question and the Question of the Left
I will be there in person and, if you’re within travelling distance of Boise, I’d highly suggest you come! The conference can also be attended virtually via livestream. A ticket for the whole weekend is $20 USD/$28 CAD, which you can purchase here.
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A great way to get a taste for the personalities and topics you can expect at the conference is to check out this marathon livestream hosted last month (I come in at 08:03:10).
Here’s a longer description of my talk:
In Order To Change the World, You Must First Film an Apology: Are digital rituals of authenticity anti-political?Many theorists have examined the effects of social media on political engagement. While increased social isolation and growing institutional distrust have been widely discussed, there is much work to be done in examining not just the content of political engagement online, but the form.
I hypothesise that rituals of authenticity, which have emerged within today’s privatised digital commons, allow for the closely surveilled and sequestered release of political sentiment in an individualised and depoliticised manner that defuses and prevents the potential for mass collaboration on universal solutions.
Rather than a lecture, the majority of my time slot will be a discussion about these rituals of authenticity, their political potential or lack thereof, what a digital communication platform that disincentivises such rituals would look like, and what possibilities may emerge therein.
This talk is my very first step in a long-term research project about the contemporary notion of authenticity and its role in our social and political lives.
And, in case you’ve been wondering, Recovering Anarchist will be returning to a regular publishing schedule in January 2025. I’ve been reading and thinking up a storm during my hiatus & I can’t wait to get back here and pick up where we left off!
Until then,
Kier
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Dear reader;
In late 2022 and early 2023, I wrote the first draft of my memoir about coming of age among anarchists in Vancouver and Montréal. Once I finished it, I put it in a drawer for a very long time. To my way of thinking, editing requires fresh eyes: if you can stay away long enough to forget your work, you’ll gain a valuable new perspective upon returning. Well, the time has come to fetch the manuscript from the drawer and write the second draft.
Me last spring, in joyful disbelief about completing this manuscript.Last fall, I tried to edit the manuscript while continuing to publish this newsletter, but pretty quickly I realized that would result in doing both things poorly, so I will be taking three months off from this newsletter to devote my full attention to the manuscript.
Come August, this newsletter will relaunch with a new name and a new look, while staying true to its mission: examining the unintended consequences of social movements. I’ll also be going through the reader survey results in the interim, so if you’d like to help shape the future of Kier Here, please add your thoughts:
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I am glad you’re here, and I hope that one day you’ll be able to find a book of mine on a shelf near you. If that is to happen before my silver hairs outnumber the brown ones, I’d better get back to it!
And if you discover this newsletter while I’m on hiatus, here’s where I’d suggest you start:
Wishing you a happy and healthy spring and summer,
Kier
PS: I will still be checking my email periodically at kier.adrian.gray@gmail.com, so you can contact me there if you have a time-sensitive request.
What do SJWs and Mormons have in common? How can you support a loved one who’s self-destructing through politics? Are paywalls contributing to the spread of low quality news? Plus: an update on the show!
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
The Right Looks for Converts; the Left Looks for Traitors
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My Year of Grief and Cancellation
Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
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Vaudeville actor Thomas Duray, J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, 1918After publishing my essay about my life as an anarchist a few weeks ago, I got a message from a stranger on Instagram that read: “I’m trying to decide if you’re secretly a centrist.” I told her that I had a whole pile of essays and podcast episodes where I openly shared my politics, but she told me she wouldn’t read anything of mine until she decided whether we were sufficiently politically aligned (which seemed a tad cart-before-the-horse to me). Her evidence that I was a centrist stemmed from the fact that I was reading geographer David Harvey’s companion to the great centrist classic: Capital, by Karl Marx. According to her, Harvey is—GASP—a social democrat. I told her that inferring the totality of my politics from one book that I am reading is a type of puritan thinking that I do not recommend (if only she knew how much more treacherous my reading list gets!), which she did not appreciate hearing. Resisting the overwhelming urge to wish her luck with the internal purges, I ended our conversation.
It was a striking interaction because I felt like I was talking to a decade-younger me. I remember well that, back then, I would only befriend people whose politics were identical to mine, and I would only read authors who were devoted to social justice politics. Proud of my diligence, I would google the name of every author I came across, alongside the word “problematic”, to make sure they hadn’t been ostracized over a subcultural infraction. I believed that my political beliefs were so clearly and self-evidently true that it was a waste of my time to read anything that challenged them in the slightest. Besides, I didn’t want to support—or be seen as supporting—bad people, and in social justice world, reading or mentioning a wrongthinking author could be interpreted as an endorsement. Guilt by association was felling people’s reputations left and right, and I desperately wanted to avoid such a fate.
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At a Vancouver event last spring, hosted by and of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, artist suggested that the left could stand to have a bit more fun: why were we stuck eating carrots and hummus while the right wing cheers’d with champagne and smoked salmon? There was a time when leftists were rebels who embraced the risqué. When did we become so subdued, so easily upset, so supportive of censorship and frightened by viewpoint diversity? How come the left feels more like a passive aggressive, power-tripping HR department than a coherent political movement?
I’ve lost track of the number of times that a reader has told me they have a friend who would benefit greatly from reading my writing, but that they’re too nervous to send it because of the potential for backlash. I understand this—the younger me would have revelled in cancelling the current me—but it also haunts me, that the people who most need to think critically about social justice culture are the least likely to do so.
That woman who messaged me on Instagram has undoubtedly put my name on her personal naughty list. She may even pop up in the future, perhaps at a moment when I’m experiencing some modicum of success, to share her troubling discovery of my true nature. And if she does, I guarantee you she’ll have convinced herself that tearing me down publicly is a righteous political act. She may also grow tired of her own rigidity and come to a less anti-intellectual, anti-nuance, anti-solidarity perspective in time, and I truly hope she does, because seeing enemies everywhere is an excellent way to sabotage a successful leftist mass movement.
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Is “anarchist” more than a Twitter bio buzzword? What would happen if we actually abolished the police? Is Google paying the price for dampening the open exchange of ideas?
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When I was twenty, I moved to Montréal, a city 4500 km from my hometown outside of Vancouver, BC. Pretty quickly I fell into a group of friends who were activists like me, and we biked around the city, attending writers’ talks and documentary screenings, climbing into dumpsters to salvage food, and participating in various protests and demonstrations. I hung from the top of a tripod to block the front doors of a bank that financed Alberta’s tar sands; we blockaded a highway with our bicycles to protest a proposed pipeline; we travelled to Ottawa a couple of times, once to show solidarity with the Barriere Lake Algonquin First Nation and once for a Free Palestine rally. We made shoplifting into a sport, cooked vegan food for homeless people under the banner of Food Not Bombs, and sang labour songs to the thrum of an acoustic guitar. Before long I discovered that my new friends were anarchists, and I started to wonder if I was one, too.
Before leaving Vancouver, I’d found myself disillusioned after my employer, Greenpeace, published a press release congratulating Coca Cola for using green refrigeration technology at the 2010 Olympics. Not only had Greenpeace avoided saying anything about the significant environmental damage caused by the construction of Olympics facilities, but Coca Cola had been embroiled in controversy not too long before that for contaminating drinking water in Kerala, India. In this context, Greenpeace’s endorsement of Coca Cola felt unprincipled, to say the least, and I started to question the merits of the organization and the nonprofit model in general.
This created the perfect context for me to absorb the anarchist argument. I picked up a book called Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, which defines anarchism thusly:
“‘Anarchism’ is often wrongly identified as chaos, disorganization, and destruction. It is a type of socialism, and is against capitalism and landlordism, but it is also a libertarian type of socialism. For anarchism, individual freedom and individuality are extremely important, and are best developed in a context of democracy and equality. Individuals, however, are divided into classes based on exploitation and power under present-day systems of capitalism and landlordism. To end this situation it is necessary to engage in class struggle and revolution, creating a free socialist society based on common ownership, self-management, democratic planning from below, and production for need, not profit. Only such a social order makes personal freedom possible.”
Right as I started exploring these ideas, activists across the country were preparing to converge on Toronto for the G20, an event hosted by our Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper that would encourage visiting nations to slash public services in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the subsequent bailouts of the banks. The air at the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair was buzzing with anticipation less than a month before the summit; I looked around at the sea of black-clothed, pierced, stick-n-poked attendees and felt a warm glow of belonging.
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The G20 was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since: the downtown core was transformed into a militarized zone for the weekend, with droves of police stopping and searching people at random, and dragging anyone they deemed suspicious from public buses and trains. A fleet of burgundy and navy blue mini-vans filled with plainclothes officers roamed in circles, snatching people from the streets and speeding off. On the last day of the weekend summit, I was shot by a police officer with rubber bullets, shoved into the pavement, arrested and charged with obstructing a peace officer (we protestors were in retreat when I was shot, and the charge was later dropped). Nearly every friend who attended the G20 with me was either arrested, injured by police, or both. From threatening rape to groping to executing midnight raids and beating activists in alleyways, the police did not exercise restraint.
This encounter with uni-directional violence targeting not only rioters but also peaceful protestors—and even regular people who had the misfortune of walking down the street at the wrong time—shook me deeply. A hatred for the state and its monopoly on violence was no longer abstract to me. I felt that I’d had my rose-coloured glasses ripped from my face and was finally seeing the world for what it was: a sinister place riddled with violence and injustice. Although my physical wounds healed quickly, my existential wounds did not: I became paranoid, fearful and hostile. I did not conceive of the G20 as a horrible yet anomalous event—rather it revealed deep truths about the government and its armed enforcers.
I came by my paranoia honestly: in the aftermath of the summit, we discovered that police had been staking out activists prior to the G20, and that undercover cops had infiltrated activist groups and lived among its members for over a year prior in some cases. I personally knew someone who was sentenced to 13 months in prison, based on information attained through infiltration and surveillance. The policing apparatus has long been known to be hostile to leftist social movements, but trust me when I say they reserve a heightened level of wrath for anarchists.
My friends and I doubled down on “security culture”, which was meant to minimize the chances of having our communications intercepted by police. It included using an encrypted email service run by an anarchist collective, taking out our cell phone batteries when discussing anything sensitive, covering our faces at protests, and maintaining a code of silence against the police. The most famous and visible expression of anarchist security culture is the Black Bloc, a protest tactic where a group of people wear black clothing head to toe in order to blend in with each other and avoid being personally identified while committing potentially illegal forms of protest.
There were two loose factions of anarchists among the people I knew: insurrectionary anarchists and mass anarchists. Insurrectionary anarchists believed in forming a revolutionary vanguard that would carry out armed actions known as “propaganda of the deed” that would shock the public out of their complacency, and inspire them to join a spontaneous revolution. They rejected all hierarchy and formal organization as authoritarian, and were hostile to reforms, because they believed that reforms decreased the likelihood of total revolution. Insurrectionary anarchists tended to organize within affinity groups, which were small autonomous cells that would carry out clandestine and often anonymous actions. Sabotaging machinery, destroying property, inciting riots, blockading ports and railways, and fighting police in the streets were some of their chosen activities (although I should say that not everyone who participates in these actions is an insurrectionary anarchist).
Mass anarchists (also known as syndicalists) believed in the power of mass movements, and in building them by engaging people around basic material issues such as wages or working conditions. Syndicalists believed their role in such movements was to push them to become more revolutionary in order to create drastic change that could never be achieved through electoral politics. The mass anarchists I knew were involved in grassroots organizations and coalitions. They were often nurses, social workers or frontline staff who worked directly with people experiencing poverty or addiction. Others were involved in arts programming or food security. They valued being approachable, relatable and welcoming to new people who had an interest in community organizing. These were the people who organized a country-wide network of free therapy and legal support for G20 activists who were grappling with its aftermath.
I always considered myself a syndicalist. I dreamt of workplaces that were collectively owned by the workers (I suppose I still do). I enjoyed organizing with groups that were building structures outside of the mainstream. For example, fourteen years before the founding of Substack, a small group of leftist Canadian journalists founded a publication called The Dominion (which later expanded into a network of media co-ops in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and Halifax) that was funded directly by readers so reporters would be free of advertiser influence.
Over the years, intersectionality became increasingly important. People’s identities started to carry more weight than their ideas, their dedication or their work ethic. Everyone’s language was under the microscope, as was how loudly or quietly they talked, how often they talked, and how much deference they showed to people who claimed to be more marginalized than them. It almost became a game to shoot down each other’s ideas by finding ever-more obscure reasons to call an idea racist, sexist or ableist. Bringing up class would almost guarantee an accusation of white supremacy or settler-colonial thinking. More and more, I found myself in groups that were unable to accomplish much of anything. The hostility towards hierarchy meant people with zero activist experience held the same sway as seasoned organizers. Since we made decisions through consensus, every single person had to agree on an action before it would be carried out, which proved nearly impossible. Even if we reached internal agreement, a certain flavour of activist would rush to call the event problematic and denounce it as soon as it was announced.
I ended up taking a long break from activism, and I went through a period of time where I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be political anymore. Maybe that part of my life was over. I explored my spiritual side, went back to school, and fell in love with my partner. I felt such dread when I thought about my time as an activist. I even had moments where I wondered if I was drifting to the right.
But eventually, the burnout eased, and my love for politics kicked back in. I spent a couple of years reorienting myself, trying to gain some clarity on where it had all gone sideways. I realized that I still believed in the economic goals of leftist struggle, but I now saw the identity competitions, the fixation on language, and the hostility towards structure as impediments to those goals.
What ultimately caused me to stop considering myself an anarchist was an interview with Amber A’Lee Frost on the Jacobin YouTube channel, where she talked about how the state will always be unmatched in both its resources and its logistical ability to distribute those resources. The biggest anarchist mutual aid project in the world will never come close. So if we truly care about improving the material conditions of people’s lives, our energy is much better spent pushing the government to improve that distribution rather than trying to patch those holes with mutual aid. (I’m paraphrasing—hear Amber for yourself here.)
A switch flipped for me when I heard that. As much as I’d been enamoured with anarchism, its goals always seemed fuzzy. What would happen if we pulled off a revolution, something that seemed impossible in contemporary Canada? What would stop the army from crushing us? How would we implement our vision of decentralized, local power? How would we handle regional power grabs? What economic reforms reflected our vision? Which countries would be willing to do business with us?
Since becoming an anarchist, I’d watched the brutal authoritarian backlash following the Arab Spring, and the failure of the consensus-based Occupy movement to achieve any lasting reforms. I’d become aware of the byzantine Greek debt crisis and the crippling effects of the US embargo against Cuba. No movement happens in a vacuum, and when one is up against something as powerful as a state or a global economic order, the most likely outcome is getting crushed. Particularly in Canada, where our standard of living is quite high, it’s hard to imagine people rolling the dice on an insurgent regime. Anarchism suddenly seemed like a futile approach to social change.
And so I quit. I began to value pragmatic material improvements over revolutionary fomentation. I realized that many of the changes that would most improve people’s lives are rather boring, and that the people on the bullhorns are often missing the point. It became clear that a commitment to structurelessness and an obsession with identity were hindering the left’s ability to organize the masses.
I still hold some ambivalence towards adopting the handle “recovering anarchist” because, even though it describes me accurately, I didn’t want to come across as completely dismissive of the long tradition of anarchist theory and action. It shaped my young adulthood, and it has provided me with a dedication to autonomy and a healthy skepticism towards authority that I will always carry with me. We need anarchists to point out the hypocrisies of the powerful; we need their direct action skills in moments of crisis.
But I’ve hung up my black uniform, and I have no regrets. I don’t want to scuffle with the cops anymore, or carry out secret, illegal actions. My goals today are much less romantic, but they’re also more achievable. I’ve chosen the mundane task of building capacity on the left over waiting for a revolution whose day may never come.
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What are the pitfalls of the consent discourse? Are leftists ignoring a way to end the abortion wars? Did George Floyd protesters create any lasting change?
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
The Limits of Consent
Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me)
How Abortion Became ‘the Defund the Police of the GOP’
Alabama Governor Signs Bill To Protect IVF Treatments Into Law
David French on Abortion
Things Fell Apart, S1 E1
List of police reforms related to the George Floyd protests
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The vaudeville team of Vernon Clayton and Carl Fletcher, J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, 1922The MeToo movement cast a list of experiences I’d had into a stark new light when I was 27 years old. In some cases, it became clear that I’d been sexually harassed—when I’d had my ass groped at work at sixteen, or when this guy threatened to rape me at our friend’s birthday party. It might sound crazy to younger people who don’t remember a pre-MeToo world, but although I found those events upsetting, it never occurred to me to tell anyone what had happened, or to seek any sort of justice. For better or for worse, at the time I understood them as annoying side effects of being a woman.
There were other experiences, however, that were much more ambiguous: finding out that, unbeknownst to me, a hangout with a coworker was actually a date; being pushed against a wall and kissed unexpectedly; being a bit too drunk to read body language well, but backing off as soon as the lack of interest became clear. Were these violations, or even assaults? Or were these better understood as the awkward fumblings of young people exploring their desires?
MeToo provided important language and concepts to identify and discourage coercive and/or deceitful attempts at intimacy, but it was a rather blunt instrument, and the language of harrassment and abuse didn’t provide much insight into understanding encounters that were awkward, uncomfortable or regretful, but which both people had agreed to in the moment. It’s also of limited use when everyone involved in a sexual encounter is committed to a mutually pleasurable experience, but for some reason it doesn’t go well.
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This is where consent comes into play. Consent was not a topic that was covered in my high school sex ed class—I didn’t hear about the concept in any capacity until I was in my early twenties and got involved in the queer scene. I wanted to make sure the person I was with was enjoying themselves, so at first I applied verbal consent quite literally, asking permission at every step. This turned out to be hopelessly unhot—and let me tell you, lesbian encounters can be tentative enough without this added layer—so over the years I made adjustments: discussing desires outside of the act itself and trying to do so in an alluring rather than a bureaucratic manner, getting to know each other’s body language, building enough trust so we could be frank with one another, and figuring out how to say “not like that” in a way that redirected rather than stopped things entirely.
Verbal consent is an imperfect tool that requires a healthy interpersonal dynamic to work well, which on its own is not a particularly original idea. But beyond that, I think there are several ideas within consent culture that deserve critique:
There needs to be an “enthusiastic yes”.There are so many reasons why someone might express genuine desire in a less intense way: they may feel shy when being direct about their desires; they may express uncertainty while trying something new; they may want to do something that’s not their favourite because of how much their partner will enjoy it; they may be tired from working or parenting but they still want to get it on; they may just find sex to be awkward before it becomes pleasurable; they may get off on being bratty or initially withholding.
When a “yes” is less than enthusiastic, it’s a good idea to double check and give the other person an opening to change their mind. But a shy, timid, tentative, quiet, monotonous, or nervous yes is not a no! Attempting, or being expected, to mind read is unreasonable—we are responsible for saying how we feel, and for trusting that others are doing the same. It’s not reasonable to require everyone to say yes in the exact same way. If your partner’s yes is nuzzling their face into your armpit, so be it.
Every type of interaction requires consent.Did you hear about the Australian club that implemented a rule that you needed to seek verbal permission before looking at someone from afar, at risk of having the police called? This is an extreme example that drew widespread ridicule; however, it does illuminate the legitimate concern that we are running the risk of outlawing flirting. Not in the legal sense of course, but in terms of social norms. What if people come to feel harassed simply for having someone express interest in them? What about coming on too strongly or quickly during a date? It might sound like I’m being alarmist here, but it seems that many people have come to experience awkward attempts at flirtation as harassment, even if it is done in a social setting, and even if the person backs off as soon as they receive a no. These new norms have the potential to turn dating into even more of a minefield, and to make it even more unlikely for people to meet someone in person. We need to retain a tolerance for respectful inquiries—keyword respectful—even when they are unwelcome.
Consent prevents harm.Consent can reduce the chance of a painful encounter, but it cannot eliminate it. Hurt does not only arise from violent, malevolent or reckless encounters. Everyone involved can try their best and it can still end in frustration, disappointment or regret. Treating consent as a cure-all can cause people experiencing difficult emotions after sex to decide they must have been violated; something must have been done to them, when perhaps they didn’t communicate well, or they were sexually incompatible, or they didn’t feel cared for in the way they wanted. Giving young people the impression that they can have a completely satisfying sex life without any complicated or hard feelings if they only implement consent is a false promise. Intimacy without risk does not exist.
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Consent discourse has given us an important set of tools to improve our sex lives, but we should be free to discuss its limitations. Sex always has, and always will have, the potential to be fun, boring, exciting, disappointing, satisfying, and mysterious. A crucial part of being an adult is embracing this mess.
Jason Myles is the host of the podcast THIS IS REVOLUTION, a musician (Bitter Lake, La Fin Absolute du Monde) and a dad that resides in Mexico. We corresponded about his new mini book, I WAS A TEENAGE ANARCHIST.
Your book weaves a story of punk and hardcore, and its relationship to political shifts from the Reagan/Thatcher era until now. You say that the circumstances created by those leaders were “in many ways the perfect catalyst for punk’s musical moment”. Why do you think the early musical revolt against neoliberalism expressed itself through nihilism, and what effect do you think nihilism has had on the contemporary left?
I think there is a lot of nihilism left over from the hippies, and the bloated nature of the 70s rock with its laser light shows, and self indulgent solos left a lot to be desired for a generation of kids who weren’t going to be Peter Frampton, Genesis or Yes, you know? Also, we have to keep in mind the social safety net was becoming more non-existent for this new generation, especially in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Oakland, and New York. Regan instituted university fees in California, so there’s now a cost to higher education. These young people are entering into a time of neoliberalization and deindustrialization, so they are understanding that the life their parents had, which is expected of them, isn't what they want, and it might actually be out of reach for them.
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As far as the left goes, or what’s left of it at this point had either died, been incarcerated, indoctrinated themselves into capitalism or retreated to academia. The left of the 20s and 30s, a left entrenched in the working class, by the time it becomes the “New Left” of the 60s has dislodged itself from the working class because they felt they (the working class) were too “reactionary”. So, really where was the “left” in the late 70s early 80s to attempt these young sonic radicals?
If you look at the early days of hardcore punk it’s all over the place, it’s socialist, fascist, anarchist, it’s just a series of images becoming an identity for many. What was its message? F you? It wasn’t “together we can defeat the capitalist imperialism nation '' What was the unifying message of hardcore punk, or punk in general other than “No Future”?
So, when we talk about this current political moment, I like to use pop culture as a way to make it easier (and more fun) to understand. If you think about the post hardcore 90s that’s dominated by “Grunge”, Nirvana embodies all the sonic and visual aesthetics of hardcore music that came before it, but changes the name of the genre, and it becomes palatable for a mass audience in a way bands like Circle Jerks and Black Flag could never be a generation before. But “grunge” like hardcore before wasn’t about mass movements. It blows up in the Clinton era, which for many Americans is a reprieve from the 12 previous years of GOP domination of Reagan and Bush, Sr.
Clinton isn’t a savior but is an extension of the Republican neoliberal project, yet people like Toni Morrison are touting Clinton as the “1st Black President”. Tough on crime laws and an expansion of the police state really got ramped up in the 1994 Crime Bill, financial deregulation that leads to some short term financial gains are the glory days for many Americans. No income home purchase loans, home values growing due to lower interest rates, and the expansion of the suburbs. Liberty and McMansions for all. Long live the mall.
1994 is a pivotal year for me, and it not only marks the death of Cobain, but it’s also the year that his “Grunge” contemporaries break big as well. This is no longer counter cultural rebel music, this is mainstream mall music. While the Seattle sound is reaching its Zenith, Green Day drops their major label debut, Dookie, and “Pop Punk” is born. It’s not fighting “the man”, it’s sad and mad at mom and dad. Equipt with the iconography of what many conceive of punk, they are much more easy to digest and create copy cats like Blink 182 and and all the nasally, sarcastically childish clones. Traveling festival tours are born to sell sugary energy drinks to kids, punk and hardcore is now your soundtrack to corporate consumption with the veneer of hardcore authenticity.
So what becomes of a burgeoning left that came of age in the era of commodified dissent? You get a kind of neoliberal leftism.
When you wrote about how punk music differed greatly from the protest music before it, in that the earlier music protesting the Vietnam war called for unity, it reminded me that back when I was a punk, my friends were quite hostile towards anything organized. I was volunteering with a service sector union at the time, and that was severely uncool of me, but it was also over a decade ago. Have you seen a shift over the years in whether punks are willing to engage in more organized forms of protest and change-making?
I can’t speak for all punks, so I won’t. I will simply say that the punk/hardcore culture is pretty individualistic. When all you want to do is say “no” to society, then someone with a tangible job organizing with a union is going to seem “uncool”. The working class is still “reactionary”. That being said, I won’t discount what we’re seeing with Starbucks unions, young people are understanding labor power, the 2010s saw more protests globally than ever, and we can’t forget 2020 and the George Floyd protests.
So do punks want to organize for change? What that “change” is supposed to look like I don’t know?
I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area and the West Oakland Punks with Lunch feed the homeless people in that area and distribute clean needles and more. But can that model work to any sort of scale beyond what they’re doing? I don’t know? I also don’t pretend to know their end goal in the project, but I’ve always respected them, and groups like Food Not Bombs.
It’s hard not to see authenticity and individualism, which were once punk values, as fully appropriated and redirected by neoliberal consumerism. In 2024, is it still countercultural to hold these values?
Is it still countercultural to be a part of the cultures of authenticity and deconstruction? Hmm, I would no. I would also say that these values as you put plague this current iteration of the left. Leftism is your lifestyle brand and it makes you unique. You don’t have to do anything to attempt to build socialism other than say you’re a socialist, and you now have to perform purity tests on anyone that wants to be part of your club or scene. That's what it feels like, a scene. Do we really want the left to look like the girls in the movie Heathers? Hahaha
A question that kept coming up for me while reading your book was whether it is possible for a group to be both a force for social change and commercially successful. I remember feeling a similar tension when working with a very small grassroots group: our lack of budget kept us pure, in a sense, because no one had any influence over us, but it also massively limited our impact. Do you see this striving for integrity to be necessary, misguided, or something else altogether?
Hmm..
The reality of trying to do big shit with no funding can keep you pure, but what happens when the money comes? I’m a firm believer that integrity is something you have or you don’t. Do you or message change with the money? It can, sure. If there is no real political movement or project you’re a part of then what do you become when the money comes? The better question is, what if money was always the goal? What if you just wanted to be some sort of ethical capitalist and just call yourself a socialist? Remember the “trained Marxists” of BLM? I always wanted to know what a trained Marxist was like. Is it like a ninja? Is the training like a 80s Rocky movie training montage?
Seriously, you have to be honest with what your project is. People are going to project onto that project what they believe it is, but YOU know what you want to do. Again, using BLM as an example, do you think they were corrupted by the money? Or was the money always the goal? Did they have good intentions? What were those intentions? What was the project beyond “awareness raising?” Can you convince yourself that is enough when the money comes in?
I don’t think that money is always the end of your project, there’s just no money in leftist projects. So funding is extremely important and hard to come by beyond trying to crowdfund, which sometimes just isn’t enough.
Think about all these goddamn podcasts. When you’re people funded (patreon, superchats through YouTube) you’re beholden to the crowd. If you want more subscribers or patrons you will bend to the dictates of the audience, for better or for worse. I struggle with my show because I refuse to simply cater to what gets engagement. These shows can be a Roarshach test for the viewer where they see and hear what they want to see and hear. If you didn’t wrap your message in the proper rhetoric you can lose subs and patrons. It's a stressful rollercoaster, that would be MUCH LESS STRESSFUL if my show had outside funding. Hahaha! But it doesn’t so I just keep doing my thang. But there is no leftist media project that has the audience of the programming you see on the right because it just doesn’t get the funding.
As far as non profits go, those are necessarily leftist projects, but they can be helpful.
You talk about how Reagan’s re-election really put a damper on the upswell of protest music that had marked his early tenure. Do you think leftists are doomed to make our best art under conditions of rage and dissent?
Ha! Yeah, that’s what people think, but what great music or art came out of the 20 years in Afghanistan? What music did we get during Trump? I was living in West Oakland in a music rehearsal/recording studio during that 2016 election. I’ll never forget, one of the guys in the studio looked at me and said, “Well, we’re gonna get some great music for the next 4 years!” Did we?
We’re so atomized as a society and hyper categorized musically, were artists really trying to make great art or just make good money? American Idiot and Hamilton are viewed by the same audiences. Our dissent is easily commodifiable because for many, their political perspectives are simply lifestyle brands. From Blue Lives Matter bootleg Punisher T-shirts to Karl Marx cell phone cases. Do we really care about political moments and creating great art, or consuming great art, or do we just create for consumption? I don’t know?
Rage Against the Machine is Rand Paul’s favorite band, now they’re in the Rock n’ Roll hall of fame. Everyone has their own soundtrack to rebellion that we listen to in our portable jukeboxes through wireless earbuds. Our personal rebellion theme music.
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I WAS A TEENAGE ANARCHIST is available now. I’d also recommend Jason’s recent piece for Sublation magazine Same As It Ever Was: The Illusion of American Political Discourse in America.
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Why are leftists allergic to good news? Is there one simple way to fix the internet’s problems? How is Canada’s proposed Online Harms Bill a threat to free speech?
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
The Trouble With the Guilt Economy
The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything
Long-Awaited Online Harms Bill Proposes Higher Sentences for Spreading Hate Online
Shawna: A Life on the Sex Offender Registry
CCLA Urges Substantial Amendments to the Online Harms Act
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John Pento, 14 years old, Daniel and Angelo Pento, 7 years old, selling newspapers, Hartford, Connecticut, by Lewis Hine, March 1909People share the most fascinating stories with me about their experiences in social justice world. There was the black woman who claimed she was harmed by someone saying they didn’t like Beyonce’s music, and who demanded “reparations” for the damage. There’s the wealthy and politically connected individual who lists nine different ways they’re oppressed in their Instagram bio, including their STI. And then there are the tales of my own derangement, such as when I continued to send money to two exes who no longer spoke to me, while I was making the equivalent of minimum wage.
Outsiders to this culture find such behaviour absurd, and, now that I’ve left, so do I. But there is an internal logic that runs through all of these stories, and it is the social commodification of marginality: the more claims you can make that you are oppressed, the more valuable and worth supporting you become to your peers. The series of exchanges, financial and otherwise, that such claims provoke, make up the guilt economy.
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Before this all spiralled out of control, at its core there was a pretty simple idea: oppressed groups, such as women and people of colour, have historically experienced powerlessness, and in order to rectify that, they should now be given power. In certain cases, that’s quite reasonable—for example, by extending the vote to women and non-property-holding men.
But when the same logic is applied at the interpersonal level, and it becomes the sole metric by which to decide who is right and who is wrong in any given situation, things are bound to get a little weird.
First of all, it encourages people to identify very strongly with the worst things that have ever happened to them and the most tragic parts of their family history. Social justice warriors feel compelled to comb through their lives and ancestry to try and identify events of victimization, and to place those events at the centre of their identity. For example, writer has talked about how, when she was in the social justice subculture, she believed that her issues with food stemmed from the Irish potato famine that her ancestors lived through.
It has also resulted in group identities being stretched beyond recognition: you’ve got white-passing people of colour, asexuals who love having sex, and non-dysphoric people who dress and identify with their birth sex who consider themselves trans. Disability has become a catch-all term for any physical or mental ailment of any magnitude, and autism may or may not count, depending on who you’re talking to. There are also new categories of marginality being invented: one may suffer from a lack of nice privilege, for example, or oppress through “proximity to whiteness” even if they’re brown.
People in this mindset are often stuck interpreting every uncomfortable, awkward or disappointing experience through the lens of oppression. I once read about a legacy Ivy League student who was working at an internship, and who got offended when she was asked to tidy up a conference room because she was convinced it was due to her race (and because, perhaps more importantly, she had no idea what interns do).
I remember thinking I was having trouble getting hired for being visibly queer until a friend of mine said it was probably actually my blue hair—but the funny thing is, for me at that time, there was no difference between the two. My sexuality and my hair were one and the same: if you disliked my hair, you were clearly a homophobe.
The more skilled you become at building a narrative out of your life and experiences that casts you as the tragic yet noble underdog, the higher you’ll rise in the guilt economy. If someone has a question about your story, tell them they’re harassing a marginalized person. If someone doesn’t understand that, tell them it’s not your job to educate them. If someone comes to your defence, tell them to pay you for the emotional labour of posting about yourself.
I can tell you from experience: this is a miserable life to lead. I do not recommend it. If you experience a lucky break or a piece of good news, you must come up with a story for why, after all your many hardships, you deserve it, because happiness is suspect. So is success, which is why it must be hidden, lest it undermine your marginal reputation.
It would be a mistake to understand my sending money to exes as a purely selfless act. It upheld the image I had of myself as a long-suffering, much-sacrificing Good Person. It made me feel superior. I’m sure that person insisting on Beyonce reparations experienced flashes of righteous mirth. I know that that rich person publicly advertising their STI thinks they’re taking a brave stand against stigma.
By this point, perhaps I sound a bit callous: surely there must be some degree of real suffering underneath these deranged attempts to belong, and yes, there absolutely is. I think that most people with a healthy upbringing, good mental health and a solid understanding of their place in the world would probably back away slowly from a subculture such as this.
It is reasonable to hold compassion for people who are stuck in its grip, but that doesn’t mean we should entertain their theatrics. Nothing good is produced by the guilt economy. It is simply a competition to become the most wretched, the most downtrodden, the most underdogged of them all. It accuses people of egregious indifference while simultaneously exploiting their generosity.
The only way out is to divest. Stop using identity to win arguments. Stop turning compassion into a competition. Stop interpreting every tiny interpersonal conflict through the binary of oppressor and oppressed. Stop trauma dumping on people you’ve just met. Stop sensationalizing pain, your own included.
This will allow each of us to reclaim our dignity, our privacy and our complexity, and to build bonds over common interests and goals. This approach may not present quite as many opportunities for high-flying feats of emotional derring-do, but I’ve got a hunch that most of us would rather not live in a never-ending soap opera.
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Why is a Canadian university student commuting by plane? How do accusations of social justice-related harm spin out of control? Why do leftists shun detransitioners?
A note to our listeners: we are working on improving the quality of our audio—thanks for your patience.
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
UBC Student Commutes From Calgary
How To Spot a Crybully
As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.
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Sirronje, vaudeville entertainer, J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, 1908Since a local organization is currently under attack from false allegations of a social justice nature, crybullies have been on my mind, and it’s come to my attention that not everyone knows what the term means.
Although autocorrect has not caught up, “crybully” was added to Dictionary.com in 2019, and has also made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as well as the Collins Dictionary. The latter has my favourite definition:
A person who presents himself or herself as a victim of injustice in order to intimidate and manipulate others.
It has become largely taboo in leftist spaces to question accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. The primacy of lived experience creates a mythology wherein white people are incapable of evaluating incidents of racism, men are incapable of evaluating incidents of sexism, etc, and attempting to do so is, in and of itself, an act of oppression.
Now, perhaps if every single person had perfect self-knowledge, we all shared the same definition of oppression, and there were never any complicating factors such as mental illness or ulterior motives, this system could work.
But that’s not the world we live in. We are each complicated and flawed people who have various motivations impacting our behaviour, including ones that we’re not aware of, or that we deny. Simply put, we are not always the best judge of the situations we find ourselves in. If we were, there’d be no need for therapists, conflict mediation or courts.
Within the world of social justice and leftism more broadly, the concept of the crybully brings our attention to people who make accusations of harm, which are often either false or greatly exaggerated, as a smokescreen for mistreating others. This often takes the form of accusing an individual or an organization of an identity-related harm, and attempting to isolate them and deprive them of support. In any other world, this would be called a smear campaign.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that there are real instances of racism, sexism etc, and in fact I believe that being able to spot those who are crying wolf will allow us to refocus on incidents of true injustice that require our attention.
It is not in the best interest of social justice or progress to allow people with malevolent intent to wreak havoc in our communities and personal lives.
So, without further ado…
Here’s how to spot a crybully:-the claims they make are extremely vague and employ inflammatory language to disguise the lack of substance-if the claims are specific, they are so incredibly egregious that people will say “who would lie about such a thing?”-their claims are completely out of character for the accused person or organization-they often refuse to communicate directly with the accused or a neutral third party-they reject any apology as insincere and any practical solution offered as somehow lacking-they do not provide the accused with any reasonable way to resolve the situation; it seems they will only be happy if the organization is shuttered or the individual is shunned-their social life is a revolving door, as their relationships are volatile, unstable and short-lived-they may have a habit of requesting financial support in tandem with the accusations they make-they have a pattern of making public accusations, or executing whisper campaigns, against people/organizations with whom they have disagreement, and which could’ve been resolved interpersonallyThis last point is particularly important: it’s difficult to judge whether someone is a crybully over a single incident. It gets much clearer as their accusations pile up.
I would also say that someone needs to exhibit many of these characteristics to be considered a crybully, because survivors of real abuse may check off a number of these boxes. For example, some abusers are extremely charming, and when a survivor comes forward, people are disinclined to believe them because the accusations seem so out of character. That alone should not undermine the survivor’s claims.
Now, in the last week I’ve spoken to some people who consider themselves former crybullies. I myself have used social justice language in manipulative ways to control other people in the past. I strongly believe in the ability to change.
But there are people who don’t seem to have any genuine desire or motivation to work on their interpersonal and conflict resolution skills, and/or who exhibit no change in behaviour over time. In fact, they seem to derive a type of gratification, pleasure or validation from successfully turning a community of people against their target. There is no earnest attempt to repair relationships or to improve organizations—simply an impulse to destroy anyone who does not entertain their every whim.
I don’t believe in turning around and trying to ruin the lives of people who behave this way—that would only perpetuate such behaviour. We do, however, have a right to protect our beloved friends and community organizations against spurious and malicious accusations, and being able to spot a crybully will help us do so.
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Can polyamorous and monogamous people successfully date each other? What percentage of single people who’ve tried polyamory would do it again? What do polyamorists avoid talking about? What are polyamorists really like? Are polyamorists all wealthy white people? Plus: we discuss the ideological trappings of polyamory.
A note to our listeners: this week’s audio quality is lower than usual, as is Kier’s video quality (Liam looks as sharp as usual). Apologies! We’re working to correct both issues.
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
Polyamory’s Superiority Complex
Desire, Familiarity, and Engagement in Polyamory
Who Really Practices Polyamory?
Demographic Comparisons of American Individuals in Polyamorous and Monogamous Relationships
The Futile Search for Purity
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Lovers led by Seagods on Triumph, by Albrecht Altdorfer, c. 1520/1525When polyamorists are the butt of a joke, the premise is often that polyamorists believe themselves to be superior to the dull-eyed, monogamous masses, and as much as we may hate to admit it, there’s a grain of truth to this. There seems to be more serious interest in polyamory now than at any other time in the last thirteen years I’ve been practicing it, but before everyone dives into the deep end, I feel obligated to provide a fair warning.
Many people who practice polyamory speak of it in exalted terms, implying or claiming outright that polyamory is politically and morally superior to monogamy. They see monogamy as unnatural, a practice dictated by societal overlords that is at odds with natural human sexuality. Some even see monogamous people as emotionally or socially weaker, because they believe everyone would be polyamorous if it weren’t for their various fears and inhibitions. There are polyamorists who believe they represent the next evolutionary step toward sexual liberation. It’s probably obvious by now that I am not one of them.
It shouldn’t be surprising that polyamorists conceive of their choices in political and moral terms, since the modern iteration of their practices can be traced back to utopian communities of the 1800s, such as Brook Farm in Massachusetts, the Oneida community in New York State, and the Nashoba community in Tennessee. Although each commune had its own unique mission, a common thread was the notion that free love was a crucial part of changing the world for the better.
Many utopian communes founded in the 19th century were influenced by transcendentalism, a philosophical, spiritual and literary movement that believed in the importance of personal freedom, the power of insight rather than logic, and the ability to have spiritual experiences in daily life. Such beliefs would later influence New Thought, which would in turn influence the New Age and its kaleidoscopic, do-it-yourself, buffet-style approach to spirituality.
Echos of the transcendentalists can be heard when polyamorists claim their right to practice so long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, when they emphasize the importance of not suppressing natural desire, and when they understand their lifestyle to be reflective of the better world they want to build.
It’s not altogether surprising, then, that some proponents seem to be touting polyamory as a relational cure-all. Imagine if you didn’t have to choose between a life partner and sexual exploration. Imagine if you could transcend insecurity and jealousy. Imagine if you could always say yes to your desires. It sounds pretty tempting, doesn’t it? It almost sounds like a way to opt out of heartbreak.
In the same way that the most thorough consent checklist in the world can’t guarantee a good sexual experience—unless you have a checklist kink, it may even lower the likelihood—the most thoughtful polyamorist cannot communicate their way out of hurting people’s feelings, failing to meet their partners’ expectations, or making difficult choices. Polyamory is romanticised as a get-out-of-love-jail-free card, and I hate to break it to you, but it’s not.
Now, obviously I believe polyamory works for some of us, or I would’ve stopped a long time ago. Polyamory has enriched my life in a number of ways, and I have seen it do the same for friends. Many LGBT people have strained relationships with their families (especially people my age and older), and polyamory is one of the ways that we build our own families and networks of support.
Most people, however, prefer monogamy—in a 2021 research study, only one in nine people had been in a polyamorous relationship, and only one in six people wanted to try one. I have very rarely seen a couple successfully make the transition from monogamous to polyamorous. Why? Polyamory must be chosen by everyone involved. If someone feels pressured into opening up their marriage, resentment will eat away at the foundation of the relationship. It really only works if both people develop a sincere desire to date other people.
Polyamory cannot save a failing relationship, nor can it eliminate the possibility of cheating (which in a polyamorous context refers to violating a mutual agreement that has been made). If a person in a monogamous relationship feels the need to be polyamorous, chances are they will have to break up with their current partner, because most people who are in monogamous relationships want to continue to be.
Polyamory is a lot of work. It entails a lot of negotiation, communication and scheduling. It requires agreements but also the flexibility to revise those agreements. There is sacrifice and compromise involved—there are painful choices to be made. For some of us, it remains the right choice, a practice that aligns with the lives we want to live. I have no regrets as a polyamorist, although as a fallible human being, I have a number. This essay was not written to convince anyone into or out of polyamory; on the contrary, it’s impossible to convince someone to be polyamorous. The practice is only ever successful when everyone involved has actively chosen it, and keeps choosing it, over and over again.
There is no way to avoid the fact that joy and pain are intertwined in human relationships, no matter how badly we may want to. Moralising desire can only ever provide the illusion of control. All we can do is be honest about what we want, and do our best to live up to our commitments in ever-changing lives as we hurtle toward a future none of us can foresee.
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How do social justice witches hallucinate without drugs? What’s Russia’s latest propaganda tactic in its war on Ukraine? Is building AI like raising a child? Should Ivy League schools exist? Plus: the New York Times opinion section goes full-on conspiracy theorist.
A note to our listeners: we had a recording mishap this week, so the audio quality is lower than usual. Our apologies—by the next episode, it should be back to normal.
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
The Futile Search for Purity
Fake Taylor Swift Quotes Are Being Used to Spread Anti-Ukraine Propaganda
Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do
I Finally Figured Out Who ChatGPT Reminds Me Of
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta
Let’s Seize This Opportunity to Destroy Harvard!
The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal
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A Strong Breeze, Flying Clouds, Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, 1863I never thought I would relate to people who’d left fundamentalist religions. I grew up atheist, with a mother who was loyal to science and a dad who kept his spiritual beliefs to himself. I experienced a lot less pressure to conform to gendered expectations than other girls, and after watching my parents’ marriage implode, I wasn’t sure I’d ever tie the knot. My parents encouraged to pursue my interests rather than fulfil familial expectations.
Three of my four grandparents died in a short span of time when I was ten and eleven years old, and despite the lack of theology in my household, I still developed the sense that they were watching me from above. I remember feeling that I was letting them down, that I wasn’t behaving well enough in the private moments I shared with only them. I sometimes thought ill of others; I cut corners on my chores; I liked the Victoria’s Secret catalogue stashed under my bed a little too much. I felt so exposed; I didn’t have it in me to be the grandkid they deserved. I’m sure my parents would’ve nipped this in the bud if I’d confided in them, but I didn’t. I lived with this secret burden for a long time, before my mind gradually moved on to other things.
As a young adult, I threw myself into activism. I wanted to save the world and believed that such a goal was realistic. I would start volunteering for a group all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed before gradually becoming disillusioned and jumping ship. I was frustrated that all of these groups would eventually betray their values by agreeing to what seemed to me to be egregious compromises. Rather than realizing that the world was much more complicated than I thought, the cycle of hope and disappointment continued, over and over again. There were times were I felt like I was getting closer to The One True Path I was supposed to be on, and others where I felt hopelessly lost. What was most consistent was the feeling that I was always falling short, just as I had with my invisible, sky-bound grandparents.
This search for purity haunted all of my decisions. When I considered going to university, I was horrified by the morbid beginnings of psychology and the racial ignorance of early anthropology. I searched and searched for a field untainted by bad ideas, certain that it had to be out there somewhere, but coming up empty-handed. I chose not to go to school at all.
When I fell ill at 22, my suspicion of authority combined with my embrace of the naturalistic fallacy led me away from conventional treatments and toward approaches that felt holistic and rooted in ancient traditions unsullied by modernity.
I didn’t bother to learn that yoga’s claim to an unbroken lineage was a Hindu-nationalist myth, that the term Traditional Chinese Medicine was coined by party propagandists in the mid-20th century, or that Wicca fabricated an ancient lineage, as was common of occult groups at the time.
The common thread that ran through all of this restless seeking was a search for purity. I was a germaphobe toward ideas: I feared contamination of my moral/political/spiritual sense of self. I wanted to live a life untainted by the complexity of the world, a life free of compromise where I would never have to agree to disagree. If I could just align myself with what was Right and Good, I wouldn’t have to answer to the consequences of my actions, because they would always be justified.
Putting this all together, it’s not surprising that I fell into the most fundamentalist wing of the social justice subculture. I wanted to outsource my integrity; I wanted an infallible framework I could use for all my future decisions. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t fall into a capital-c cult, because I was an excellent candidate: I thought of myself as a free thinker and yet I craved relinquishing control.
I remember when I realized that maintaining my mental health was not compatible with altered states, which included not just substance-induced ones but also spiritual trances conjured through ritual. It was crushing to stop looking for loopholes and to resign myself to living in the mundane world. But it was also a relief to give up chasing something more powerful, more real, more vivid than my actual life.
Likewise, there’s comfort in ending a search for purity. Although it’s sad to admit that no group, no course of study, no treatment, no path through life will be fully aligned with my values, knowing this frees me to try and see the world as it actually is. Opposing viewpoints are no longer to be avoided; genuine curiosity becomes an asset, not a flaw. I can get my hands dirty, knowing that no one is glaring down at me from above.
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Should we welcome or dread 15 minute cities? Where will the culture wars break out next? What is our stance on Palestine? Plus: we share our favourite books and movies, and crown 2023’s word of the year.
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
My Year in Ten Books (2023)
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An erotic, dreamlike novel that reads like a memoir.Hazel Jane Plante does a lot of worldbuilding for someone who’s not writing speculative fiction. She brings her fictional world to life by sprinkling in vivid descriptions of the art and music that inform and inspire her protagonist, Tracy St. Cyr. When I caught myself googling the fictional to see ifthey really existed, I was reminded of my ten-year-old self mounting a broomstick after reading Harry Potter to see if I could fly. In both cases I knew better but I felt compelled to check, just in case. If you’re looking for an intimate and searching story of music, love and heartbreak, written with candour and clarity, this book is for you.
A deep dive into the life of a malevolent impersonator.My guilty pleasure is true crime, but I’m not always in the mood for something gory and brutal. In fact, the criminals I find most compelling are those who play with people’s hearts and minds and wield incredible control over their lives, sometimes without ever meeting them in person. The person at the centre of this book confounds his victims by creating webs of fabricated people that communicate with them and vouch for one another. When the authorities get involved, they have a hard time believing that one single person could be behind such an operation. If you’re a true crime aficionado who thinks you’ve seen it all, I recommend you give this one a try.
A who’s who of New Age quacks & the damage they wreak.At the beginning of the pandemic, many people were shocked to watch their liberal hippie friends and relatives disappear down the 5G-QAnon rabbit hole. But for the hosts of the Conspirituality podcast, who were intimately familiar with the magical thinking common in these communities, the development was not so surprising. Their book lays out exactly what makes New Age people so vulnerable to conspiracy theories and bad pseudoscience, and profiles the big names who’ve been profiting off this phenomenon. If you think that kooky beliefs about the curative power of essential oils are bizarre but ultimately harmless, I encourage you to read this book.
Illuminating the alt-right’s exploitation of leftist failures.People have been confusing leftist intellectual Naomi Klein and (formerly) liberal feminist Naomi Wolf for a very long time now, and although it was always a source of frustration for Klein, the matter became more disturbing when Wolf began comparing covid restrictions to the Holocaust and appearing regularly on Tucker Carlson’s and Steve Bannon’s shows. It was almost as if Wolf became Klein’s mirror opposite: they both spoke about social issues, sometimes even the same issue, but whereas Klein’s perspective was informed by extensive research, Wolf was content to make wild and unsubstantiated accusations. Klein uses this as a jumping-off point to examine how, when the left refuses to acknowledge or address a social issue, the conspiratorial right is well-positioned to step in and provide answers.
A searing look at the tension between academia & activism.This is the book that most profoundly affected my thinking this year. At different times over the course of her career, Dreger has found herself an activist, railing against the indifference of the academic medical establishment, and an academic under fire from activists, who fear the implications of her research. This gives her a unique perspective in regards to what should be done when scientific findings do not fit comfortably into the political moment in which they are published.
An unsettling short story collection full of misfits & creeps.The characters populating Moshfegh’s collection have one thing in common: they are deeply unlikeable. This struck me as quite refreshing at a time when literalists are holding fiction under siege. These stories speak to a morbid curiosity shared by many: why do some people keep digging themselves into a deeper hole? In some ways these stories read as anti-fables—they contain no lesson. But they are a powerful reminder of the darker impulses we each pretend to not possess.
A system to improve writing, using the science of learning.This book suggests that effective note-taking is both rarely practiced and crucial to the writing process. Ahrens introduces a writing technique called the Zettelkasten method, which is based on an index-card system that German sociologist Niklas Luhmann credited for his prolific publication record. The goal is to reinforce learning and understanding through the process of writing original notes and finding connections between them, creating an external resource that becomes more and more useful over time, and which makes it simple to create first drafts. Ahrens focuses on the educational research that supports the Zettelkasten method, and the book is lacking in concrete examples. Those, however, are abundant online, and are more easily understood with the theoretical foundation that this book provides.
An intimate look at the pitfalls and possibilities of grief.I first read this book a decade ago, and it survived many bookshelf purges in order to jump out at me again this summer. This book tells the story of a young woman who’s just lost her mother, and the events that follow. Yoshimoto has this way of infusing the mundanities of daily life with a supernatural, otherworldly quality. This book was Yoshimoto’s debut novel and was a sensation in Japan when it was first published in 1988. Simultaneously comforting and unsettling, I’ve never read anything quite like it.
A lyrical account of love across borders and languages.This was a spontaneous pick at the library, and not something that I would normally gravitate towards. But under the skilled guidance of Guo, a simple premise leads to a vibrant depiction of the act of loving: the never-ending attempts to understand another and to be understood, and to discover what it is to be in the world together. If you’re looking for a book that is touching without devolving into sentimentality, that is rich with description and reflection, here it is.
A delightfully odd novel of sprawling ambition.Although I’d been attracted to this book and its simple cover a number of times before, it wasn’t until I was nursing a broken heart that I finally bought it. Heti bucks the convention of contemporary novelists to zoom in tight on their subject; she begins, for example, with an original creation myth of humankind. We then follow a woman from birth until death in the context of this cosmology. Readers with a philosophical or spiritual bent will find much to appreciate in Pure Colour.
Last but not least, this list would be incomplete without How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by , which I review here:
What did you read this year that entertained you, or provided you with a fresh perspective? Do the rest of us a favour by sharing below:
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Does Canada exploit its international students? Are economic forces converging to benefit low wage workers? What's the connection between the opiate epidemic and the housing crisis?
If you’d like to skip to a particular segment, you can find chapters on Youtube and Apple Podcasts.
Why I Don't Believe in Allyship
A Response to Kier Gray's "Why I Don't Believe in Allyship"
What if Diversity Training Is Doing More Harm Than Good?
Why labor unions make people less racist
Canada’s Open Secret: International Students Are Here To Be Exploited
Welcome to a Golden Age for Workers
After Black Lives Matter by Cedric Johnson
Why the Opioid Crisis Is Rooted in the Housing Crisis
TrueAnon William T Vollmann Interview: Grief Is A Witch-Hag (Part 1)
The Crime of the Century
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
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G20 Toronto 2010 Protest Clowns by Chris Huggins
For an in-depth discussion of this essay, check out Hot Take Think Tank episode seven.
In my early twenties, I found connection, support and meaning in the social justice subculture. Identity was paramount in this world—it was not uncommon to declare our gender, race, sexuality, religion, health issues and more when introducing ourselves. We did this because “lived experience” was the currency of the subculture: experiencing oppression granted a person expertise on that -ism (racism, sexism etc), whereas privilege meant you were permanently and constitutionally incapable of understanding the corresponding oppression. This logic extended to who could voice an opinion on a topic. For example, a white person was not supposed to develop their own understanding of racism; we were expected to defer to people of colour, which often meant black people specifically, and which was always limited to people who proselytized an identitarian worldview.
If you just ignore the people of the identity group that don’t agree with the perspective you’ve already developed, then all you’ve really gained is the ability to use someone else’s identity as a smokescreen for you own politics.
-Olúfémi Táiwò, The Dig Podcast
Allyship was a crucial concept in this world. It was the idea that privileged people should follow the leadership of the oppressed in the fight for liberation. It sounded very reasonable to me when I first heard it, and for many years I worked diligently to fill this role in regards to race. I followed directives without evaluating whether or not they aligned with my values. I nodded along whenever someone said white people were predisposed toward violence. I told myself that discomfort meant growth, and so I maintained friendships and relationships where insults and exclusion were commonplace. I would scrutinize the language and behaviour of other white people and quote POC identitarians like scripture. I voraciously backed up any claim of racism, even ones that I privately found iffy.
In other matters, I was the one in power. My gender and sexuality gave me free rein to treat straight men with contempt, condescension and hostility. I could tell them what to do and then insult them if they didn’t follow my orders. Such power was thrilling; I got a rush from having so much influence over other people (or at least thinking I did). To be frank, I expected nothing less than total submission from my “allies”, and they risked reputational damage if they crossed me.
I never called this vengeance. My comrades and I thought we were evening the score: passing the mic to people who had been powerless for so long. But as time passed, it was clear that we weren’t getting any closer to distributing power more evenly. What we’d done was invert the social hierarchy and place new people at the top. Weaknesses became strengths; sources of stigma became sources of pride. Within our small subculture, the powerless became the powerful. However, saying this out loud was a great way to get shunned.
Over time, who could speak on what became even more contentious. Being gay wasn’t enough to speak on gay issues because you might not be able to speak to the intersections with racism or transphobia. Power seemed to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, and the longer your list of oppressions grew, the likelier you were to come out on top. In secret people started to joke about the oppression olympics, but no one would say anything publicly when the gold medallists misbehaved or mistreated people. Doing so would put a target on your back.
I remember a friend of mine telling me that the QTPOC (queer trans people of colour) scene in our city was shrinking and shrinking as people were kicked out one by one for various transgressions. She seemed worried that, before long, there would be no one left.
This all feels like a long time ago now. Since leaving this subculture, I’ve corresponded with a lot of people who have one foot in and one foot out. They find the social norms bizarre and unhealthy, but they still care deeply about injustice and they want to be a force for progressive change in society. I relate to this. There are plenty of real material inequalities that require our attention, and being able to sort them out from boy-who-cried-wolf situations will allow us to direct our activism more effectively. All claims of homophobia, sexism, racism or ableism are not equally urgent, significant or true, and the allyship model forbids us from acknowledging this.
Thankfully, there’s an alternative: good old fashioned solidarity. Solidarity requires us to treat one another as equals. Solidarity asks us to draw our own conclusions. It recognizes how much common ground there is to be found if we look for it, and how much we need each other if we are to create significant and lasting change. It does not make one group of people subservient to another in the name of justice. It calls for integrity and honesty, and acknowledges that we do our best work in the context of mutual respect.
If we want to build a mass left coalition that has any chance of winning concessions for regular people, we can’t keep our mouths shut when we witness power tripping, and we certainly can’t pretend that being mistreated is some sort of deserved karmic revenge that we need to accept. It’s time to revive the civil rights movement concept of judging people not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
Sometimes I think that the extreme fervour of my former scene is due to how young most of us were. But as I age, I realize that not everyone grows out of such behaviour. Some people will use whatever tools they have at their disposal to try and control the people around them and to punish those who resist; those in social justice land will do so with the language of oppression and the white cisheteropatriarchy. I think we owe it to our movements to recognize when this is happening, and to stop excusing and rewarding such behaviour.
The left has a long history of internal purges that has undermined its efforts. We are capable of learning from our mistakes and creating a progressive mass movement that is inviting, rigorous and effective. Solidarity is not magic—it cannot conjure such a movement out of thin air. But it can be the foundation, the even ground, where we come together to build.
(P.S. Can you tell which clown is 20-year-old me? Make your guess in a comment!)
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Das Kranke Kind (The Sick Child), 1918 by Lovis CorinthWhen I was 22 years old, I became chronically ill, and I’ve been varying levels of sick ever since. At 33, I’ve climbed my way back to a reasonable simulacrum of healthy. I still take as many medications as your grandmother and spend most of my time at home, but I am up and about during the day, able to take care of myself and my pets and complete the various tasks that need doing. I can even exercise now, which took three years of rehabilitation. Compared to when I spent most of my day sleeping, and found showering and food preparation painful and exhausting, I’m doing great. And giving up my spoonie identity played a significant role in my recovery.
Let’s back up. At 22, my wrists began tingling. I went to the doctor and then flaked out on the physio she suggested, figuring things would go away on their own. Instead, within a couple of years, the pain had spread up my arms, into my shoulders and neck, down my back, then into every joint and limb in my body. Eventually it became excruciating to use my hands, sit, stand, or walk for any significant length of time. I had to quit school, and working was out of the question. I finally found a doctor who could offer me a diagnosis, but my hope evaporated when I found out that treatment options were limited and the long term prognosis was poor. Over the years, I heard some variation of this again and again from various medical professionals: no cure, few effective treatments, unresponsive, et cetera. Thankfully this condition wasn’t going to kill me or shorten my life, so things could’ve been much worse. But I was more or less told by my medical team that I could expect a lifetime of pain and suffering. I was devastated.
During this time my life had gotten smaller and smaller, in the physical sense (I rarely left the house to go somewhere other than the doctor), but also in regards to my hopes for the future. It was hard to imagine what my life would look like in ten or twenty years. And so, like so many others, I turned to the online world in search of understanding and connection.
Sure enough, I found pockets of young people just like myself: those who were too disabled to participate fully in society. Some of them were creating a strange kind of glamour or mystique around their illnesses, posting photos of bejewelled canes and showing off how many pill bottles were on their night stand. It was a world where the sicker you were, and the more poetically you could describe your suffering, the more attention you would get. A lot of the posts centered around being tragically misunderstood: how the person’s suffering was so unique, their misery so specific, that no one really understood them. Everything people said to them, even if it was meant to be comforting or uplifting, was just further proof of this profound void between the spoonie and the world around them.
I related to a lot of this. It also fit into the rigid identitarian worldview I had at the time, which implicitly encouraged me to find ways to label myself as oppressed, since the more oppressed I was, the more clout I had within my subculture.
There was something noble about suffering, something that made me better than other people. And as a 22-year-old trapped in a body that was betraying me, I was going to take power where I could find it.
Being part of the spoonie community increased the hostility I felt for the able-bodied world. To be clear, there are massive improvements needed to make the built and natural worlds more accessible to more people, and I support those efforts. Disabled people who are unable to work often face devastating poverty—I co-organized a campaign to advocate raising disability and social assistance rates. Fighting material inequality is a worthy cause.
Truthfully though, a lot of the hostility I was expressing wasn’t aimed at government neglect or inadequate bylaws. It was directed at the people who cared about me most and were trying their best to understand what I was going through. The “us vs them” mentality was strong, and during this time it was as easy to offend me as asking me if I was feeling any better (because the nature of chronic illness is that it is permanent, so how dare you undermine my experience).
As you can imagine, I was not particularly fun to be around during this time, and so my social life took a major hit. Rather than wondering if I’d become more self-absorbed, defensive, or dismissive of other people’s needs and desires, I chalked it up to ableism on the part of my former friends.
Now, here’s the thing: I believe that illness does make one selfish and that there’s a utility to this. It often takes prolonged effort to attain a diagnosis for a chronic condition, which includes monitoring and recording symptoms very closely. Chronic illness is the body asking for attention, and it’s in our best interests to provide it. It can be hard to return from that period of introspection, however, especially if the symptoms never go away. But it’s also necessary, if one values mutually beneficial relationships.
One significant detail that many outside writers have missed is that spoonie culture has significant benefits for its members that go beyond validation and understanding. I was in a local spoonie group for many years, and I saw people buy each other groceries, deliver medical supplies, recommend specialists, and much more. It’s not just sick people complaining to one another; it was, in my experience, a real community in the sense of the material and physical support people were providing to one another, usually for free.
That being said, there was a topic that was taboo in these types of spaces: getting better. Many people such as myself had been given poor prognoses by their doctors. But it wasn’t just that they knew there was no cure for their conditions—many people didn’t think they could get better at all and took offence to anything that could be interpreted as contradicting that.
This is where the difference between having an illness and identifying with that illness comes into play. If you have an illness and you hear someone talking about how they recovered from it, or at least drastically improved their quality of life, chances are you’d want to hear about it (so long as they weren’t selling some seedy-looking course or supplement). But if you are that illness and someone else suggests it might be possible to lessen is effects, or to have a life that’s not consumed by it, you may react as though your very humanity is being questioned, your reality trivialized. And that’s the type of response I’ve seen in these groups to posts and comments about getting better.
I can sympathize with just how powerless chronically ill people feel. The research for many chronic conditions is terribly underfunded and the idea of an actual capital-C cure feels entirely out of reach. The inability of medical professionals to provide relief only compounds this helpless feeling. But staying mired in that feeling, and ignoring whatever amount of agency one does have, is a recipe for misery. Lifestyle changes, mental hygiene and healthy relationships can make a big difference for nearly everyone, and it’s not ableist to say so.
When I decided that, regardless of my poor prognosis, I was going to see if I could get better, the spoonie label no longer fit me. As I started to eat differently, to exercise, to improve my sleep hygiene, and to obsess less over my symptoms, I felt a distance grow between me and the noble sufferer I was in those groups. As I re-established hobbies, mended neglected friendships, and took a renewed interest in the world outside of myself, illness became less and less central to my sense of self.
I no longer consider chronic illness an identity. Doing so risks no longer treating it as a disease, something deserving of a cure, something whose devastation needs to be minimized. I once believed that being chronically ill meant I’d be mired in misery for the rest of my days. Thankfully, I closed that tab and moved on with my life.
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Dearest readers,
I am writing with a couple exciting pieces of news to share!
Thanks for reading Kier Here! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
First of all, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Clementine Morrigan and Jay Lesoleil on their podcast, Fucking Cancelled. You can listen below or wherever you get your podcasts:
Let me know what you think of the interview here:
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Secondly, I am joining Fucking Cancelled for two stops on their upcoming tour:
Buy tickets for the Portland show here.
Tickets for the Vancouver show are pay-what-you-can and will be available at the door.
Here are the rest of the tour dates with links to tickets.
Come on out for lively intellectual discussion of what the left is like and what we can do about it. I hope you’ll leave reinvigorated and with at least one new silly little crush!
You can find Kier Here on Instagram, Twitter, and lying on the floor with their bunnies.
Thanks for reading Kier Here! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Hello! I’m briefly breaking my hiatus because I miss our discussions. I’ve written a variety of questions for your consideration:
- How has your life changed since leaving the social justice subculture?
- If you’re still in it, what techniques do you have to think and speak for yourself within that world?
- If you never were in the subculture, what do you think caused you to steer clear?
- If you’re outside of the US, have you noticed an impact on how local organizations operate?
- What would you say to someone who is still mired in obsessive rumination and self-punishment?
- If you’ve written online about your experience in this subculture, please share a link with us.
Excited to read your thoughts!